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Javier E

This is what a 'multipolar' world looks like. It's chaos | The Spectator - 0 views

  • The Hamas terror attack has triggered war in Gaza, a geopolitical crisis and now – from Sydney to New York City – outbursts of street-level anti-Semitism in the West. Unless it de-escalates quickly, it looks like a strategic turning point both for Palestinian nationalism and Israel
  • though I am no expert on the region, I can throw some concreteness into the current battle of abstractions.
  • But the international community has a right to demand proportionality, restraint, respect for international law, and condemn breaches of it. President Biden last night was right to emphasise the need for lawfulness.
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  • Let’s start with the obvious: Israel has a right to defend itself, rescue the hostages, arrest and prosecute Hamas and engage in lawful armed combat with its enemy.
  • People claiming the Hamas attack is the ‘violence of the oppressed’ are deluded. Hamas rules Gaza like a mafia state: its operatives walk around neighbourhoods in twos, dressed in dark suits, prying into people’s business. They run the place on a mixture of terror, public service provision and the kudos of their fighters.
  • They are feared but there is widespread disrespect for them, especially among secular and nationalist sections of the population.
  • Paradoxically, the western ‘anti-imperialists’ trying to apologise for the terror attack, and the Israeli right calling for retribution against civilians, both need to identify Hamas with the Palestinian population of Gaza in order to justify violence. But there is no basis for doing so.
  • The fact that a violent action takes place in the context of a wider oppression does not make it either (a) just (b) lawful under international law or c) effective in pursuit of social justice.
  • In this case, Hamas’s act of terror looks set to achieve the opposite.
  • What does Hamas want?
  • Hamas has offered a truce and asked for negotiations, stating that it has ‘achieved its objective’. If so, it’s logical to conclude that the immediate objective was to demonstrate proof-of-concept of an unstoppable pogromist terror. Do as we ask or we do this again, might be a fair summary.
  • The wider aim, according to numerous experts, is to force Hamas and Iran back into the power-broking process in the Middle East region, paralysing Saudi-Israeli rapprochement.
  • The firm view of the Islamic Republic is that the governments that are gambling on normalizing relations with the Zionist regime will suffer losses. Defeat awaits them…Today, the situation of the Zionist regime is not a situation that encourages closeness to it. They [other governments] should not make this mistake. The usurper [Zionist] regime is coming to an end.
  • Hamas could only achieve the aim of ending Saudi-Israeli rapprochement with an attack designed to trigger massive retribution, risking a regional all-out war.
  • there’s a line in Khamenei’s 3 October speech that, in retrospect looks explanatory: Thus, [the Zionists] are filled with grudge. They are filled with anger! Of course, the Quran exclaims: “Say, “die of your rage!” (3:119). That’s right. Be angry, and die of your rage. And this will happen. They are dying. With God’s help, this matter of ‘die of your rage’ is happening now as regards the Zionist regime.
  • ‘Die of your rage’ might actually be a good summary of what Hamas intends Israel to now do.
  • Enraged by the barbarity of the attacks, Israel unleashes unprecedented collective punishment against Gaza, triggering both Hezbollah and West Bank militants to join in the fight; this in turn prompts a wave of anti-Semitic demonstrations in western cities, and draws the USA into a regional quagmire, testing the limits of American support for Israel
  • Meanwhile combat losses, and retribution over the complete failure of Netanyahu’s strategy of ‘managing’ the conflict, raise political divisions in Israeli society to the point where its democracy fails.
  • In a context where both Russia and China have complex hybrid destabilisation operations going on in western democracies, and where the Brics+ project is pursuing the active decomposition of the rules-based order, this objective does not look as mad as at first sight.
  • the ‘multipolar world’ turns out not to be one of peaceful coexistence, but characterised by extreme conflicts and genocide.
  • In pursuit of systemic competition Beijing and Moscow are scraping at every open wound in the body geopolitic
  • it’s what you get when you purposefully dismantle an international order based on treaties and explicit rules. And where elites in Russia, the USA, Brasil and parts of Europe are openly experimenting with ethno-nationalist politics.
  • Chaos, then, is a feature of multipolarity, not a bug.
  • Israel has signalled its military objective is to destroy Hamas. From my experience in Gaza I would say: that is possible.
  • But be in no doubt. It will need a sustained urban combat operation, a long-term military occupation, massive loss of civilian life, an existential refugee crisis in Sinai, and the diversion of US-supplied ammunition and resources from Ukraine.
  • Attempting it with a largely conscript/reservist army, full of recently mobilised and enraged soldiers? Again it’s worth remembering Khamenei’s exhortation to Israelis to ‘die of your rage’.
  • The very impossibility of all these outcomes shows why we need an internationally mediated peace, alongside a functional two-state solution, which allows the people of Gaza to live in peace, exercise democracy and travel across borders.
  • not only will liberal sympathy for Israel evaporate, but the Muslim minorities in some Western countries will be radicalised.
  • Typically, from my experience, combat in Gaza takes the following form. There is a street with children playing at one end; in the middle it is eerily deserted; at the other end is the IDF and above is an IDF drone. But there is no front line. The mujahedeen are in tunnels, popping up to take sniper shots or lay IEDs at night, and only committing ATGMs once a vehicle comes into view. The only front line is, for most of the time, between the IDF and Palestinian civilians.
  • Both sides risk miscalculating. Hamas does not care what happens to Palestinian civilians in Gaza, many of whom hate Hamas.
  • But there is a danger of miscalculation for Israel too. Netanyahu’s far-right government completely missed the threat, actively stoked tensions in the West Bank and Al Aqsa, and could easily now double down on a self-destructive course.
  • Ultimately, you cannot hold two million people in an open air prison without a gaoler to keep order. If Hamas can’t do it, the IDF will have to be a permanent occupation force, or it will have to install the PA, or the UN will have to send a stabilisation force.
  • Danger of miscalculation
  • The Brics+ ideology
  • The Gaza crisis is the latest example of how the Russian/Chinese ‘multipolar world’ project works in practice. It doesn’t matter whether there is a chain of command that goes Moscow→Tehran→Hamas. There is a chain of understanding – seize every opportunity to militarise all conflict; exploit every unexpected breakthrough; make all violence symbolic; weaponise the information space and push conflict into the heartlands of ‘imperialism’.
  • the Brics+ ideology. Its central tenets are that a multipolar world is better than the charter system; that universalism and international law are over; that the West no longer has the right to use the structures of international governance to normalise concepts like democracy or human rights; and that everything that disorganises the rules-based order is progressive, even when carried out by reactionary political forces.
  • Arab nationalism no longer looks like the dominant ideology on the demonstrations we’ve seen in Sydney, London and NYC. Alongside it there’s a mixture of Islamism plus the ‘decolonisation’ agenda of postmodernist academia.
  • For the past two years, during the Ukraine war, this incipient red-brown ideology has been mostly contained:
  • with this conflict there is now a danger that the masses turn up, and are corralled into this emergent fusion of far-left/far-right politics.
  • I’ve spent the period post-2016 trying to equip the democratic left to defeat this ideology. It’s not about being ‘anti-woke’, or apologising for colonialism: it means teaching people that a cocktail of anti-humanism, anti-universalism and anti-rationality is a route to excusing the totalitarian states in Russia and China, and – now – the genocidal actions of their proxies.
  • A case study of this is the statement issued by 31 Harvard student groups saying they ‘hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all the unfolding violence’ – just hours after the Hamas attack began.
  • the global left is rapidly splitting into irreconcilable camps – as Edward Thompson recognised it would, under the influence of post-structuralism in the 1970s.
  • The logical implication is that Palestinians have no agency whatsoever. That Hamas murders civilians because Israel has ‘structured’ Palestinian reality to make that inevitable. For people presumably wedded to ‘decolonising’ the curriculum, it is a shockingly colonialist premise.
  • The logic is that Israel is responsible for everything Hamas does because its violence has ‘structured every aspect of Palestinian existence’ since the Nakba.
  • There are many civilisations, and none is superior or inferior to another. They are equal since each civilisation represents a unique expression of its own culture, traditions, and the aspirations of its people.
  • In a way, what Putin preaches is an ‘intersectionality of the peoples’: identity politics raised from the level of the individual to the level of the ethnic group.
  • And it turns out anti-Enlightenment leftism makes it pretty easy to converge with that view. The common assumptions are disdain for universalism, scorn for international law and human rights, repudiation of the Enlightenment (and thus liberalism, social democracy, humanistic Marxism and anarchism) and worship of any totalitarian government that delivers economic development.
  • This is the modern incarnation of Stalinism, and – to the surprise of nobody who has studied actual Stalinism – it has no problem seeing fascists like Hamas as the ‘agent of progress’.
  • we need to understand how closely this hyper-deterministic and anti-universal world view maps onto the ideology presented, for example, by Putin at Valdai last week. For Putin there is no single human civilisation, only civilisations, which must be rooted in ethnicity establish their co-existence through the survival of the fittest:
  • One camp, he said, is a theology. The other a tradition of active reason. The first repudiates liberalism and universalism. The second recognises its debt to liberalism and wants to make universalism consistent
  • The first claims international law is a sham; the second knows that, though the institutions of the rules-based order are flawed, they are better than chaos.
  • that you can stand with the Israeli people under attack while simultaneously standing up for the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination.
  • Those flaunting their joy at the murder of Israeli civilians need to understand the licence this creates in the minds of rightwing ethno-nationalists in our own society. What Hamas did to the kids of Kfar Azar, the far right wants to do to you.
Javier E

In Veterans Day Speech, Trump Promises to 'Root Out' the Left - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Using incendiary and dehumanizing language to refer to his opponents, Mr. Trump vowed to “root out” what he called “the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”
  • “The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within,” Mr. Trump said Saturday
  • Mr. Trump accused Democrats and President Biden of trying to roll back his efforts to expand veteran access to health care, causing soaring inflation, pushing the country to the brink of World War III, endangering the troops in Afghanistan and of lying and rigging elections.
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  • “I want this trial to be seen by everybody in the world,” Mr. Trump said to a cheering crowd, referring to his federal election trial in Washington. “The prosecution wishes to continue this travesty in darkness, and I want sunlight.”
  • As he has before, Mr. Trump again called for executing drug dealers, praising China for making drug trafficking a capital offense. But in New Hampshire, a state where the opioid crisis has hit particularly hard, he turned to an informal straw poll to strengthen his case.
  • “Let’s have a vote,” Mr. Trump said to the crowd. “Who would be in favor of the death penalty — now, wait, don’t go yet — knowing that it will solve the problem?”
  • Mr. Trump also repeated lies, falsehoods, exaggerations and half-truths that he has told routinely on a number of subjects, including on gas prices, U.S. energy independence, election fraud and the 2020 elections.“I’m a very proud election denier,”
  • And he complimented President Xi Jinping of China, of whom he said, “He’s like Central Casting. There’s nobody in Hollywood that can play the role of President Xi — the look, the strength, the voice.”
Javier E

Yes, Germany supports Israel - but not uncritically, and not for the reasons you think ... - 0 views

  • When the hard right, the left and an autocrat (who denies Turkey’s genocide of the Armenians) combine forces, you know there is something wrong. Let’s be clear: German politicians do not need to wrestle free of history to navigate the debate on the Gaza war. It is a myth that Germany is uncritical in its support of the Israeli government.
  • Germans had been told they were “surrounded by friends”, as Helmut Kohl put it. They woke up ill-equipped to face a world of sworn enemies. Russia pulverised decades of German Ostpolitik when it attacked Ukraine, and with it the European postwar order.
  • There was never any love lost between either the Merkel or Scholz governments and Benjamin Netanyahu. Angela Merkel knew he was working with Donald Trump to kill off the nuclear deal with Iran behind her back. And that he was lying about his acceptance of two states. Nobody involved with the Middle East dossier in Berlin trusts Netanyahu
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  • So what accounts for the dogged support Berlin extends to Israel in its war against Hamas? You must look beyond immediate crisis. Germany’s foreign policy establishment has suffered a deep shock, indeed the second one, after last year’s realisation that Russia could not be appeased by diplomatic overtures, pipeline deals and “change through trade”
  • When Israel used excessive violence in earlier Gaza wars, Germany raised public concerns. Berlin has constantly criticised the expansion of settlements. More than a decade ago, the then foreign minister, Sigmar Gabriel, called the situation in Hebron (in the occupied West Bank) “apartheid”. Berlin has supported the Palestinian Authority with over €1bn, and is among the top donors to Unwra, the UN relief agency for Palestinian refugees.
  • Similarly, Germany had pushed for diplomacy to deal with Iran’s nuclear and regional ambitions.
  • Then the Gazan member of Iran’s axis of resistance attacked Israel on 7 October. The Jewish state is trapped in a pincer movement between Hamas and Hezbollah – and the possibility of a wider war. This is an existential crisis for Israel.
  • The cornerstones of Germany’s foreign policy have crumbled. Engagement with Russia and Iran has failed. This is the view from Berlin: these two powers must be stopped, and that includes the destruction of Hamas. This is the reason for Germany’s staunch support of Israel’s war against Hamas, notwithstanding the deep distrust of Netanyahu – and the wish to see him gone as soon as hostilities end.
Javier E

Opinion | The Secret of America's Economic Success - The New York Times - 0 views

  • there was widespread concern that the pandemic would leave lasting economic scars. After all, the 2008 financial crisis was followed by a weak recovery that left real gross domestic product in many countries far below the pre-crisis trend even a decade later. Indeed, as we approach Covid’s four-year mark, many of the world’s economies remain well short of full recovery.
  • But not the United States. Not only have we had the strongest recovery in the advanced world, but the International Monetary Fund’s latest World Economic Outlook also points out that American growth since 2019 has actually exceeded pre-Covid projections.
  • let’s take a moment to celebrate this good economic news — and try to figure out what went right with the U.S. economy.
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  • Part of the answer, to be fair, is luck. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine caused a major energy shock in Europe, which had come to rely on imports of Russian natural gas. America, which exports gas, was much less affected.
  • What about inflation? When you use comparable measures, America also has the lowest inflation rate among major economies.
  • It’s true that one recent poll found that a majority of Americans and 60 percent of Republicans say that unemployment is near a 50-year high. But it’s actually near its lowest level since the 1960s.
  • A second, probably more important factor was that the United States pursued aggressively expansionary fiscal policy
  • Many economists were extremely critical, warning that this spending would fuel inflation, which it probably did for a while. But inflation has subsided, while “Big Fiscal” helped the economy get to full employment — arguably the first time we’ve had truly full employment in decades.
  • A strong job market may in turn have had major long-term benefits, by drawing previously marginalized Americans into the work force.
  • the percentage of U.S. adults in their prime working years participating in the labor force is now at its highest level in 20 years. One number I find especially striking is labor force participation by Americans with a disability, which has soared.
  • One last thing: When Covid struck, all advanced countries took strong measures to limit economic hardship, but they took different approaches. European governments generally paid employers to keep workers on their payrolls, even if they were temporarily idle. America, for the most part, let layoffs happen but protected workers with expanded unemployment benefits.
  • There was a case for each approach. Europe’s approach helped keep workers connected to their old jobs; the U.S. approach created more flexibility, making it easier for workers to move to different jobs if the post-Covid economy turned out to look quite different from the economy before the pandemic.
  • is clear: We have been remarkably successful, even if nobody will believe it.
Javier E

Opinion | 'The problem is the human heart. It's not guns.' How Johnson is right! - The ... - 0 views

  • The problem is the human heart. Gun violence is an unchangeable, immutable fact of the human condition. That is why it is localized so strongly to this country and this time period. This is not a problem with a solution. It is the price you pay for being human. This is not unique to the United States, although you see it only here
  • Maybe it’s something to do with the water. Not laws, though; as we know from our efforts to impose vicious lawsuits and increasingly draconian restrictions against anyone who seeks an abortion, it is pointless to legislate about a problem
  • Some things, you are just born with and must accept; guns are one of them.
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  • The problem is never guns. The problem is abortions. (“When you break up the nuclear family, when you tell a generation of people that life has no value, no meaning, then you do wind up with school shooters.”)
  • The problem is not guns; it is teaching evolution. It is the theories of Charles Darwin! “Because we’ve taught a whole generation — a couple of generations now — of Americans, that there’s no right or wrong, that it’s about survival of the fittest, and [that] you evolve from the primordial slime. Why is that life of any sacred value? Because there’s nobody sacred to whom it’s owed.”
  • But the problem is never the gun. Hearts stop all the time, for myriad reasons. They are vulnerable to poverty and despair and anxiety, and the United States has all of those in ample supply.
  • Obviously the problem is the human heart. The human heart cannot stand the strain of living in the United States (a nice place, were it not for the nagging suspicion that any time you gather in a public place you might be gruesomely murdered with a gun). The human heart was not built for this low whine of anxious terror.
  • The problem is not guns. It’s not weapons. We have to protect ourselves. (From what, Mike? From what?) We must have our guns, to protect ourselves. (Then what are we arming the police like this for? Why are they laden with all this military-grade equipment, if protecting myself is not something I’m supposed to be outsourcing to them?)
  • The problem is the human heart. It breaks a little bit each time we see another mass shooting. If only they were a harder target. That is the problem. That so many hearts are aching for something to change, for a framework of laws that does not accept gun violence as inevitable.
Javier E

Tube protest was a mistake, admit leading Extinction Rebellion members | Extinction Reb... - 0 views

  • Senior figures in Extinction Rebellion (XR) admit it was a mistake to target London’s public transport network at rush hour, a move that has split opinion within the movement.
  • At the end of the two-week global “uprising”, members of the movement’s political circle announced that it needed to learn from the angry scenes at Canning Town tube station last Thursday when commuters dragged protesters from the roof of an underground train and set upon them
  • British Transport Police confirmed it was also investigating and looking to acquire evidence against a number of commuters who appeared to embark on a vigilante-style attack on one of the Canning Town protesters.
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  • a member of XR’s political circle, said: “There is absolutely no shrinking away from the fact that we have got to learn from what happened around the Tube, most especially within our own internal decision making.
  • “Obviously we did not get that right. People have given up their jobs to join XR, for them to be so upset and so dismayed by the action is an absolute pointer to us that we have to look again at how we make those decisions.”
  • Among the provisional plans is a move away from the fortnight of disruption that is scheduled to take place twice a year
  • Lunnon said: “There is a really fine line for XR and it is something we are having to learn. Nobody has launched a peaceful rebellion against a government before in this country. But we do have to consider how the rebellion is going to move forward.”
Javier E

A Cruel Summer at Cornell - Tablet Magazine - 0 views

  • Reading through TASP’s website, I was seduced by its promises—a thoughtful community, where, for once, I’d be surrounded by free-thinking academics and learning from leaders whom I deeply admired.
  • Like Carlos told us on the very first day, we didn’t know what was best for us. Not because we were working to decide for ourselves, but because someone else already knew. TASP was no longer a democratic experiment—it had morphed into a factory for totalitarian instincts, and it operated like an oligarchy.
  • “If I could give you one piece of advice,” he said, “make sure you befriend someone who is entirely different from you. As many people as you can. Talk to them about everything you disagree on—you’ll only be better for it.”
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  • To me, that letter wasn’t just an invitation to a fancy summer program—it was an invitation into an educational world that I thought would change my life.
  • it wasn’t the differences between us that posed the biggest challenge to our unity; it was the constant reminders from above of those differences, all the ways we were hierarchically organized or comparatively privileged or fundamentally limited in our views. We were challenged to transcend those limitations and build the foundations of a community, but for that you need good faith, which was in short supply.
  • The other problem was that TASP lacked all the mechanisms of a functioning democracy. We had been cherry-picked to represent diversity, but actually the point was for all of us to arrive at the same conclusions—men talked too much, the world was fraught with microaggressions, dodgeball was bad, and eggs were worse. There was no framework for disagreement, no space for ideological detours, no home for structural challenges to the so-called intentional community we lived in.
  • Nobody wanted to deal with the key annoyance of democracy—learning to tolerate our differences.
  • It’s only now that I recognize that the truth of this statement—after all, what 17-year-old knows what’s best for them—served to justify the anti-democratic reality of a space contemptuous of every experience except for those of “oppressed groups,” as determined by the factota. It is equally alarming to see that the so-called leaders of my teenage years are now actively remaking a space once devoted to self-exploration and communal understanding in their own intellectual self-image, as a place where questioning and self-determination are being eliminated in favor of received truth.
  • In 2022, the Telluride Association announced that they were discontinuing TASP and expanding TASS, the equivalent program for sophomores, into a program with two focus areas—“Critical Black Studies” and “Anti-Oppressive Studies.”
  • Students would no longer live all together, like we did, according to Nunn’s vision. Instead, the “Critical Black Studies” community would live and study separately, creating an entirely Black space. Afternoons and evenings were no longer reserved for things like Nerf wars or eating entire jars of sprinkles, which were the activities that allowed our diverse group to come together, and which I remember much more vividly than all my seminar readings combined. Instead, the students would participate in anti-racism workshops created by the factota. It was this new program that became the “anti-racist Hell” that Vincent Lloyd lamented in his article.
  • It was easy for me to sympathize with Lloyd, who spent his summer battling with one factota, Keisha, who found him “triggering” and his readings “insufficiently radical,” was frustrated by his insistence on unspooling complex racial ideas in the slow seminar format rather than holding straightforward lectures, and frequently intervened when his discussions caused TASPers “harm.”
  • By the end of his tenure, he was summoned into an empty classroom by the students, who read their allegations about his behavior—and demands that he change his teaching—from sheets of paper. Every word coming out of their mouths was clearly pulled from conversations with Keisha. A white girl referred to her factota in her remarks: “Keisha speaks for me. She says everything I think better than I ever could.”
  • I remember being an eager-to-please high schooler on the first day of TASP, sitting in a circle with big aspirations but very little knowledge of the world, wanting so badly to be accepted in an elite space I assumed would give me all the answers, if I could only absorb the guiding principle: You don’t know what’s best for you.
  • My mom dropped me off at the local Panera, where the interviewer was already sitting in a booth reading a novel when I arrived. He was an older professor who still conducted interviews because he’d had such a transformative experience at TASP. He explained that he came to the seminar as a committed far-left radical, but he struck up an unlikely friendship with a staunch conservative and William F. Buckley devotee, with whom he disagreed about, and argued fervently over, everything. Proudly, he told me that the two men remained friends to this day.
  • The final rule was relayed by Carlos. With a stern look on his face, he explained that while these rules might seem daunting, all the factota had done this before, and there was one mantra in particular that guided them through their time. The girl next to me opened a notebook and poised her pen eagerly over the page. “During your six weeks here, you should always remember … you don’t know what’s best for you.” He intoned this mantra with such gravitas that the room briefly fell into silence.
  • TASPers were tasked with governing ourselves through nightly house meetings, bylaw votes, and a complex web of committees regulating everything from kitchen duty to leisure. Our community would be “semi-monastic,” meaning that we were “strongly, strongly encouraged” to limit our contact with the outside world in favor of “turning inward” and “engaging in communal reflection.” To ensure that we learned as much as possible from our peers, there was a ban on “exclusive relationships” of all platonic shades, which would be enforced through assigned seating, periodic roommate switches, minimum group-outing sizes, and good-old-fashioned cockblocking.
  • Discerning observers will note that doing what “necessity indicates” is a mandate dependent entirely on the values and whims of its executioners. In the case of TASP, necessity apparently indicated living in accordance with not only the Nunnian ideals but also the standards of our factota, most of whom couldn’t yet legally drink but had absolute moral authority over who could take up space, who could express their politics, and who deserved to be there at all. TASP was their world; we were just figuring out how to live in it.
  • The factota had various tactics to combat these relationships, from sober one-on-one interventions to interrupting group hangs to, notably, a roommate-switch halfway through the program because people were getting too close. This switch was aimed in no small part at Mark, who had been paired with a fellow sporty private-school guy in a cavernous room on the second floor. They bonded instantly, and their room would house all kinds of semi-exclusive hangs, from playlist-making to the occasional horny game of “Never Have I Ever.”
  • Accordingly, the factota disapproved of our friendship. Kaitlyn felt strongest about limiting his presence in my life and often pulled me aside to warn me against Mark, deeming his influence to be restrictive. She’d accost me to relay a supposedly insufferable remark he’d made during seminar or shoot me pointed stares whenever someone mentioned male entitlement during a house meeting, ignoring my protests that I found it difficult to distance myself from a naturally occurring friendship, and in fact enjoyed chatting with someone so different from myself. Wasn’t that supposed to be the point of TASP, anyway?
  • Instead, she made it a personal project to interrupt our conversations, wedge herself in between us at dinner, and skew our committee assignments so we couldn’t so much as wash dishes at the same time.
  • As a white guy studying classics at a high school with a five-figure price tag, Mark regularly landed in the crosshairs of our Sunday night conversations, receiving frequent reminders to “check his privilege” when he cited too much rarefied literature in class conversations and to “cede his time” to minorities or women during house discussions.
lilyrashkind

Uvalde: US to review police response to Texas school shooting - BBC News - 0 views

  • A mass shooting is defined as an incident in which four or more people are shot or killed, excluding the shooter. White House officials say Mr Biden is unlikely to offer specific policy proposals or seek to issue an executive order in the coming weeks to avoid interfering with delicate negotiations between Senate Democrats and Republicans. The president's visit comes days after 18-year-old Salvador Ramos shot his grandmother, and then opened fire on a classroom of fourth-graders with a legally acquired AR-15 style assault rifle.
  • San Antonio resident Eduardo Messa said: "I mean, we have age limits for things like cigarettes and alcohol, why not for guns, you know, this is just... this kind of massacre that occurred this week is just so heart-breaking and sad."
  • The senior officer on the scene decided to wait until the school janitor arrived with the keys because they thought that either "no kids were at risk" by then, or "no-one was living anymore".
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  • ban on assault weapons while attending the funeral of Ruth Whitfield, an 86-year-old killed in a mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, on 14 May. The attack at a supermarket in a predominantly black neighbourhood is believed to have been racially motivated. The teenaged suspect had also legally bought an AR-15-style weapon.
  • "He can't bring her back. He can't bring none of them back and nobody can," she told the BBC earlier on Sunday.
lilyrashkind

Sara Menker Warns About Fallout of Rising Food Insecurity | Time - 0 views

  • ara Menker runs a private company, Gro Intelligence, that uses data and AI to make predictions about climate change and food security, but when she appeared before the U.N. Security Council on May 19, she sounded more like an advocate. Gro’s data has found that, because of rising food prices around the world, 400 million people have become food insecure in the last 5 months alone. (Food insecurity, as Gro defines it, means people living on $3.59 a day or less.)
  • Menker, 39, who was chosen as one of TIME’s Most Influential People in 2021, was born in Ethiopia, attended college at Mount Holyoke, worked as a commodities trader on Wall Street, and left to start Gro to use technology to tackle challenges like hunger and climate change. Today, Gro works with governments and big food companies, analyzing hundreds of trillions of data points from satellites, governments, and private sources, to forecast the supply of agricultural products globally.
  • In recent months, as the war in Ukraine raged on, Gro’s systems started flagging problems that were putting a growing number of people at risk of going hungry. Some were worsened by the war, but many others have been building for longer, caused by the actions of other governments banning exports or imposing tariffs. Menker talked to TIME shortly after briefing the U.N.
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  • All of them are driven by different things, but I break it down into five major crises happening, any one of them on their own would actually be considered large. The five combined are truly unprecedented.
  • Your second is climate. Wheat growing regions of the world are facing the worst drought they’ve ever faced combined for the last 20 years. And so climate shocks just keep getting in the way of production and productivity. Think of those two things as sort of inputs.
  • If the war ends, that is better than where we’re sitting today. But there’s also a lot of infrastructure that’s been destroyed during the war. So you have to rebuild that and it’s not like you go back to the volumes you are at right away.
  • The fourth is record low inventories of grains in general. If you look at government agency estimates, we have about 33% of annual consumption needs sitting in inventory around the world. We just need to move it around. Our data tells us that that number is closer to 20%, which is only 10 weeks of global inventory left. And that’s a really big deal.
  • Climate disruption leads to a lack of predictability and stability of our food supplies. It just throws my mind off when last year we were writing about how North Dakota was suffering from a record drought and so its corn and soybean yields were going to drop and they did— by like, 24%. This week we’re writing about how it’s too wet there and farmers can’t plant. That’s climate change, this lack of predictability, this lack of stability itself that makes our food systems very, very fragile.
  • So, we are a private company, but we work with financial institutions, we work with very big and very small companies. We also work with governments to help them think about food security. I started Gro to avoid something like this. I wish people would have paid attention to us when we were ringing alarm bells in 2017. Because it’s always about preventative medicine versus ending up in the ER.
  • Re-examining what trading in agriculture looks like is a very big part of it. There’s no version of a country that actually has any and all natural resources it needs in one place. You can’t grow everything you need in a country. You actually need the world to function in a particular way, but the world became more isolationist in the last five years—not more connected—as politics and policy came into play. And so that itself has damaged diversification of trading partnerships.
  • And if you looked at domestic prices in that country, and you look at it in all the different cities, prices weren’t going up, they were going down, which is not a signal for when you’re short of anything. So we put that together and the ban was removed.
  • You’ll see it manifests itself in many, many different ways. I keep seeing headlines of Netflix losing subscribers. Netflix is losing subscribers because the average price of a grocery basket in America is two times the price it was in April 2020. Something’s gonna give—you’re going to buy fewer shoes—and that’s why I said it will manifest itself in completely unrelated industries as well.
  • Nobody. There are countries who are net exporters who are obviously making more money. American farmers are certainly making more money as a result of it. Is America as a country benefiting? Absolutely not, because the economic shocks are global. We live in a very globally intertwined financial system, period.
Javier E

March 2020: How the Fed Averted Economic Disaster - WSJ - 0 views

  • Over the week of March 16, markets experienced an enormous shock to what investors refer to as liquidity, a catchall term for the cost of quickly converting an asset into cash.
  • Mr. Powell bluntly directed his colleagues to move as fast as possible.
  • They devised unparalleled emergency-lending backstops to stem an incipient financial panic that threatened to exacerbate the unfolding economic and public-health emergencies.
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  • They were offering nearly unlimited cheap debt to keep the wheels of finance turning, and when that didn’t help, the Fed began purchasing massive quantities of government debt outright.
  • Investors dumped whatever they could, including ostensibly “risk-free” U.S. Treasury securities. As a global dash for dollars unfolded, Treasurys were no longer serving as the market’s traditional shock absorbers, amplifying extreme turmoil on Wall Street.
  • By week’s end, the Dow had plunged more than 10,000 points since mid-February as investors struggled to get their arms around what a halt to global commerce would mean for businesses that would soon have no revenue.
  • “It was sheer, unadulterated panic, of a magnitude that was far worse than in 2008 and 2009. Far worse,”
  • The idea of shutting down markets was especially discouraging: “It was a profoundly un-American thing to contemplate, to just shut everything down, and almost fatalistic—that we’re not going to get out of this.”
  • nearly two years later, most agree that the Fed’s actions helped to save the economy from going into a pandemic-induced tailspin.
  • “My thought was—I remember this very clearly—‘O.K. We have a four-or-five-day chance to really get our act together and get ahead of this. We’re gonna try to get ahead of this,’” Mr. Powell recalled later. “And we were going to do that by just announcing a ton of stuff on Monday morning.”
  • It worked. The Fed’s pledges to backstop an array of lending, announced on Monday, March 23, would unleash a torrent of private borrowing based on the mere promise of central bank action—together with a massive assist by Congress, which authorized hundreds of billions of dollars that would cover any losses.
  • If the hardest-hit companies like Carnival, with its fleet of 104 ships docked indefinitely, could raise money in capital markets, who couldn’t?
  • on April 9, where he shed an earlier reluctance to express an opinion about government spending policies, which are set by elected officials and not the Fed. He spoke in unusually moral terms. “All of us are affected,” he said. “But the burdens are falling most heavily on those least able to carry them…. They didn’t cause this. Their business isn’t closed because of anything they did wrong. This is what the great fiscal power of the United States is for—to protect these people as best we can from the hardships they are facing.”
  • They were extraordinary words from a Fed chair who during earlier, hot-button policy debates said the central bank needed to “stay in its lane” and avoid providing specific advice.
  • To avoid a widening rift between the market haves (who had been given access to Fed backstops) and the market have-nots (who had been left out because their debt was deemed too risky), Mr. Powell had supported a decision to extend the Fed’s lending to include companies that were being downgraded to “junk” status in the days after it agreed to backstop their bonds.
  • Most controversially, Mr. Powell recommended that the Fed purchase investment vehicles known as exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, that invest in junk debt. He and his colleagues feared that these “high-yield” bonds might buckle, creating a wave of bankruptcies that would cause long-term scarring in the economy.
  • Mr. Powell decided that it was better to err on the side of doing too much than not doing enough.
  • , Paul Singer, who runs the hedge-fund firm Elliott Management, warned that the Fed was sowing the seeds of a bigger crisis by absolving markets of any discipline. “Sadly, when people (including those who should know better) do something stupid and reckless and are not punished,” he wrote, “it is human nature that, far from thinking that they were lucky to have gotten away with something, they are encouraged to keep doing the stupid thing.”
  • The breathtaking speed with which the Fed moved and with which Wall Street rallied after the Fed’s announcements infuriated Dennis Kelleher, a former corporate lawyer and high-ranking Senate aide who runs Better Markets, an advocacy group lobbying for tighter financial regulations.
  • This is a ridiculous discussion no matter how heartfelt Powell is about ‘we can’t pick winners and losers’—to which my answer is, ‘So instead you just make them all winners?’”
  • “Literally, not only has no one in finance lost money, but they’ve all made more money than they could have dreamed,” said Mr. Kelleher. “It just can’t be the case that the only thing the Fed can do is open the fire hydrants wide for everybody
  • Mr. Powell later defended his decision to purchase ETFs that had invested in junk debt. “We wanted to find a surgical way to get in and support that market because it’s a huge market, and it’s a lot of people’s jobs… What were we supposed to do? Just let them die and lose all those jobs?” he said. “If that’s the biggest mistake we made, stipulating it as a mistake, I’m fine with that. It wasn’t time to be making finely crafted judgments,” Mr. Powell said. He hesitated for a moment before concluding. “Do I regret it? I don’t—not really.”
  • “We didn’t know there was a vaccine coming. The pandemic is just raging. And we don’t have a plan,” said Mr. Powell. “Nobody in the world has a plan. And in hindsight, the worry was, ‘What if we can’t really fully open the economy for a long time because the pandemic is just out there killing people?’”
  • Mr. Powell never saw this as a particularly likely outcome, “but it was around the edges of the conversation, and we were very eager to do everything we could to avoid that outcome,”
  • The Fed’s initial response in 2020 received mostly high marks—a notable contrast with the populist ire that greeted Wall Street bailouts following the 2008 financial crisis. North Carolina Rep. Patrick McHenry, the top Republican on the House Financial Services Committee, gave Mr. Powell an “A-plus for 2020,” he said. “On a one-to-10 scale? It was an 11. He gets the highest, highest marks, and deserves them. The Fed as an institution deserves them.”
  • The pandemic was the most severe disruption of the U.S. economy since the Great Depression. Economists, financial-market professionals and historians are only beginning to wrestle with the implications of the aggressive response by fiscal and monetary policy makers.
  • Altogether, Congress approved nearly $5.9 trillion in spending in 2020 and 2021. Adjusted for inflation, that compares with approximately $1.8 trillion in 2008 and 2009.
  • By late 2021, it was clear that many private-sector forecasters and economists at the Fed had misjudged both the speed of the recovery and the ways in which the crisis had upset the economy’s equilibrium. Washington soon faced a different problem. Disoriented supply chains and strong demand—boosted by government stimulus—had produced inflation running above 7%.
  • because the pandemic shock was akin to a natural disaster, it allowed Mr. Powell and the Fed to sidestep concerns about moral hazard—that is, the possibility that their policies would encourage people to take greater risks knowing that they were protected against larger losses. If a future crisis is caused instead by greed or carelessness, the Fed would have to take such concerns more seriously.
  • The high inflation that followed in 2021 might have been worse if the U.S. had seen more widespread bankruptcies or permanent job losses in the early months of the pandemic.
  • an additional burst of stimulus spending in 2021, as vaccines hastened the reopening of the economy, raised the risk that monetary and fiscal policy together would flood the economy with money and further fuel inflation.
  • The surge in federal borrowing since 2020 creates other risks. It is manageable for now but could become very expensive if the Fed has to lift interest rates aggressively to cool the economy and reduce high inflation.
  • The Congressional Budget Office forecast in December 2020 that if rates rose by just 0.1 percentage point more than projected in each year of the decade, debt-service costs in 2030 would rise by $235 billion—more than the Pentagon had requested to spend in 2022 on the Navy.
  • its low-rate policies have coincided with—and critics say it has contributed to—a longer-running widening of wealth inequality.
  • In 2008, household wealth fell by $8 trillion. It rose by $13.5 trillion in 2020, and in the process, spotlighted the unequal distribution of wealth-building assets such as houses and stocks.
  • Without heavy spending from Washington, focused on the needs of the least well-off, these disparities might have attracted more negative scrutiny.
  • Finally, the Fed is a technocratic body that can move quickly because it operates under few political constraints. Turning to it as the first line of defense in this and future crises could compromise its institutional independence.
  • Step one, he said, was to get in the fight and try to win. Figuring out how to exit would be a better problem to have, because it would mean they had succeeded.
  • “We have a recovery that looks completely unlike other recoveries that we’ve had because we’ve put so much support behind the recovery,” Mr. Powell said last month. “Was it too much? I’m going to leave that to the historians.”
  • The final verdict on the 2020 crisis response may turn on whether Mr. Powell is able to bring inflation under control without a painful recession—either as sharp price increases from 2021 reverse on their own accord, as officials initially anticipated, or because the Fed cools down the economy by raising interest rates.
Javier E

Germany isn't turning its back on NATO. It only looks that way. - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • What some commentators abroad see as appeasement, cowardice and the triumph of economic interests over security concerns, many Germans see as a grown-up, sensible and conciliatory approach to foreign policy. (A recent poll found that 59 percent of Germans supported the decision not to send arms to Kyiv.) Germans view themselves as enlightened, having moved beyond power politics, the national interest and militarism.
  • The idea of deterrence, or of the military being an element of geopolitical power needed for strong diplomacy, is foreign to most German citizens.
  • y she is referring to. They read the 20th century, and 1933-1945 in particular, as a lesson in the evils of geopolitics and militarism, and they internalized the post-1989 “end of history” narrative better than anyone else.
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  • In a debate about the Russia-NATO standoff carried by my local German radio station, the dominant view was that de-escalation and diplomacy are what’s needed, with one listener commenting, “I am against weapons in general,” and another warning that nobody should talk about war since, “If you talk about something, it becomes possible.”
  • After the end of the Cold War, Germany spent decades insulated from the harsh world of power politics; most Germans believed that countries were converging toward a system that marginalized military power and favored economic power and legal proceedings. Now that great power competition and military conflicts are back, Germany does not know what to do.
  • Many decision-makers and voters in Germany remain deeply committed to the hope that all conflicts can be solved through dialogue under international law and international organizations such as the United Nations — as if all conflict resulted from misunderstandings instead of competing interests.
  • In a 2020 poll, only 24 percent of Germans said they considered that under some circumstances war could sometimes be necessary to achieve justice, while over 51 percent said war is never necessary.
  • Nonetheless, an increasing number of Germans are beginning to argue that one might also draw a different lesson from history — such as that it is not a good idea to try to appease aggressors.
Javier E

Covid at Home: Why Only Some People Test Positive - The New York Times - 0 views

  • On the day my daughter first tested positive, my 11-year-old son announced that he wasn’t feeling well and began developing classic coronavirus symptoms: headache, fatigue, sore throat, runny nose. My husband followed two days later with a sore throat and stuffy nose. Yet despite testing daily for seven days straight, my husband and son never tested positive for Covid-19 — including on PCR tests administered on my son’s fifth day of symptoms, and my husband’s third. (And yes, we did some throat swabs, too.)
  • I called experts in immunology, microbiology and virology to get their take.
  • And this rapid response changes everything about what happens next.
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  • One of the first questions experts asked me was whether my family was vaccinated. Yes, I said: My husband and I are vaccinated and boosted, and our kids are vaccinated but not yet boosted. This is a relevant question because, if you’re exposed to the virus that causes Covid-19, “your immune system kicks into action a lot faster if you’re vaccinated versus not vaccinated,”
  • If my husband and son never tested positive, why did they feel sick? Even if a vaccinated person doesn’t have much virus in their body, they can still have powerful Covid symptoms
  • Because the virus doesn’t replicate as quickly in vaccinated people, they may be less likely to test positive for Covid-19 after coronavirus exposure, because their immune system “keeps the viral load below the level of detection,”
  • It’s possible, then, that my husband and son did catch Covid-19, but their vaccinated immune systems fended off the infection so well that they never had enough viral proteins in their nose or throat to test positive. And their continual negative tests probably meant that they were never that contagious
  • First, the swift immune reaction slows the rate of viral reproduction and spread. “This is what the vaccines are there for — to educate your immune system so that it gets a jump on the invaders before they are able to replicate out of control,”
  • That’s because many illness symptoms — fever, malaise, runny nose, fatigue — are actually caused by the immune system’s response to the virus, rather than the virus itself
  • And as for why I felt fine, Dr. Morrison said that perhaps my immune system fought off the incoming virus so quickly that I didn’t even have a chance to feel sick. “It sounds to me like you were definitely exposed,”
  • maybe I had high levels of vaccine antibodies or immune cells called T cells that were able to kill the invading virus before it had a chance to alert the parts of my immune system that would incite symptoms.
  • All this said, nobody really knows what happened to me, my son or my husband. When it comes to understanding how Covid-19 affects the body, “there are so many open questions,”
  • people can have different experiences for many different reasons. For instance, Dr. Andino said, it’s possible that the virus was replicating in parts of my husband’s or my son’s body that the tests didn’t reach
  • Research suggests that the coronavirus can replicate in the pancreas, heart, brain, kidneys and other organs, although vaccination may reduce the chance that the virus spreads outside the respiratory system.
  • Dr. Andino said that he and his colleagues have been conducting studies in which they follow and repeatedly test entire households after one person in the home tests positive for Covid-19. “What we see is exactly what you described — that some people in the household don’t test positive,”
Javier E

The New York Times' trans coverage is under fire. The paper needs to listen | Arwa Mahd... - 0 views

  • I’ve got a feeling the poor alien might get the impression that every third person in the US is trans – rather than 0.5% of the population. They (I assume aliens are nonbinary) might get the impression that nobody is allowed to say the word “woman” any more and we are all being forced at gunpoint to say “uterus-havers”. They might get the impression that women’s sports have been completely taken over by trans women. They might believe that millions of children are being mutilated by doctors in the name of gender-affirming care because of the all-powerful trans lobby. They might come away thinking that JK Rowling is not a multi-multi-multi-millionaire with endless resources at her disposal but a marginalized victim who needs brave Times columnists to come to her defense.
  • “In the past eight months the Times has now published more than 15,000 words’ worth of front-page stories asking whether care and support for young trans people might be going too far or too fast”. Those, to reiterate, are newspaper front-page stories. As Popula notes, that number “doesn’t include the 11,000 or so words the New York Times Magazine devoted to a laboriously evenhanded story about disagreements over the standards of care for trans youth; or the 3,000 words of the front-page story … on whether trans women athletes are unfairly ruining the competition for other women; or the 1,200 words of the front-page story … on how trans interests are banning the word “woman” from abortion-rights discourse.”
  • This letter, addressed to the paper’s associate managing editor for standards, accused the Times of treating gender diversity “with an eerily familiar mix of pseudoscience and euphemistic, charged language, while publishing reporting on trans children that omits relevant information about its sources”. That relevant information being that some of those sources have affiliations with far-right groups. That “charged language” being phrases like “patient zero” to describe a transgender young person seeking gender-affirming care, “a phrase that vilifies transness as a disease to be feared”.
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  • The second letter was signed by more than 100 LGBTQ+ and civil rights groups, including Glaad and the Human Rights Campaign. It expressed support for the contributor letter and accused the Times of platforming “fringe theories” and “dangerous inaccuracies”. It noted that while the Times has produced responsible coverage of trans people, “those articles are not getting front-page placement or sent to app users via push notification like the irresponsible pieces are”. And it observed that rightwing politicians have been using the Times’s coverage of trans issues to justify criminalizing gender-affirming care.
  • Charlie Stadtlander, the Times’ director of external communication, put out a statement stating that the organization pursues “independent reporting on transgender issues that include profiling groundbreakers in the movement, challenges and prejudice faced by the community, and how society is grappling with debates about care”. While that was all very diplomatic, the executive editor, Joe Kahn, and opinion editor, Kathleen Kingsbury, sent around a rather more pointed newsroom memo condemning the letters on Thursday.
  • “It is not unusual for outside groups to critique our coverage or to rally supporters to seek to influence our journalism,” Kahn wrote in the memo. “In this case, however, members of our staff and contributors to The Times joined the effort … We do not welcome, and will not tolerate, participation by Times journalists in protests organized by advocacy groups or attacks on colleagues on social media and other public forums.”
  • Here’s the thing: there is no clear-cut line between advocacy and journalism. All media organizations have a perspective about the world and filter their output (which will, of course, strive to be fairly reported) through that perspective. To pretend otherwise is dishonest. Like it or not, the Times is involved in advocacy. It just needs to step back for a moment and think about who it’s advocating for.
Javier E

Dispute Within Art Critics Group Over Diversity Reveals a Widening Rift - The New York ... - 0 views

  • The need for change in museums was pointed out in the 2022 Burns Halperin Report, published by Artnet News in December, that analyzed more than a decade of data from over 30 cultural institutions. It found that just 11 percent of acquisitions at U.S. museums were by female artists and only 2.2 percent were by Black American artists
  • Julia Halperin, one of the study’s organizers, who recently left her position as Artnet’s executive editor, said that the industry has an asymmetric approach to diversity. “The pool of artists is diversifying somewhat, but the pool of staff critics has not,” she said.
  • the matter of diversity in criticism is compounded by the fact that opportunities for all critics have been diminished.
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  • While most editors recognize the importance of criticism in helping readers decipher contemporary art, and the multibillion-dollar industry it has created, venues for such writing are shrinking. Over the years, newspapers including The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Miami Herald have trimmed critics’ jobs.
  • In December, the Penske Media Corporation announced that it had acquired Artforum, a contemporary art journal, and was bringing the title under the same ownership as its two competitors, ARTnews and Art in America. Its sister publication, Bookforum, was not acquired and ceased operations. Through the pandemic, other outlets have shuttered, including popular blogs run by SFMOMA and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis as well as smaller magazines called Astra and Elephant.
  • (National newspapers with art critics on staff include The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post. )
  • David Velasco, editor in chief of Artforum, said in an interview that he hoped the magazine’s acquisition would improve the publication’s financial picture. The magazine runs nearly 700 reviews a year, Velasco said; about half of those run online and pay $50 for roughly 250 words. “Nobody I know who knows about art does it for the money,” Velasco said, “but I would love to arrive at a point where people could.”
  • Noah Dillon, who was on the AICA-USA board until he resigned last year, has been reluctant to recommend that anyone follow his path to become a critic. Not that they could. The graduate program in art writing that he attended at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan also closed during the pandemic.
  • “It’s crazy that the ideal job nowadays is producing catalog essays for galleries, which are basically just sales pitches,” Dillon said in a phone interview. “Critical thinking about art is not valued financially.”
  • Large galleries — including Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, and Pace Gallery — now produce their own publications with interviews and articles sometimes written by the same freelance critics who simultaneously moonlight as curators and marketers. Within its membership, AICA-USA has a number of writers who belong to all three categories.
  • According to Lilly Wei, a longtime AICA-USA board member who recently resigned, the group explored different ways of protecting writers in the industry. There were unrealized plans of turning the organization into a union; others hoped to create a permanent emergency fund to keep financially struggling critics afloat. She said the organization has instead canceled initiatives, including an awards program for the best exhibitions across the country.
  • “It just came down to not having enough money,” said Terence Trouillot, a senior editor at Frieze, a contemporary art magazine . He spent nearly three years on the AICA-USA board, resigning in 2022. He said that initiatives to re-energize the group “were just moving too slowly.”
  • The organization has yearly dues of $115 and provides free access to many museums. But some members complained that the fee was too expensive for young critics, yet not enough to support significant programming.
  • Efforts to revive AICA-USA are continuing. In January, Jasmine Amussen joined the organization’s board to help rethink the meaning of criticism for a younger generation.
  • Amussen, 33, is the editor of Burnaway, which focuses on criticism in the American South and often features young Black artists. (The magazine started in 2008 in response to layoffs at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s culture section and now runs as a nonprofit with four full-time employees and a budget that mostly consists of grants.)
Javier E

Why the Nineties rocked - UnHerd - 0 views

  • Travel back in time to a magic lost world called the 1990s, a world free of 9/11, communism, Covid and an internet that turned nasty on us.
  • All scores were settled and the rest of history was going to be a trip to Walmart followed by an Olive Garden dinner followed by nonprocreative sex.
  • In some ways the 1990s were too good to last. By 1998, daily life began feeling like visiting a department store to buy a shirt and realising your Visa card is likely to be declined, and the darkness of the early nineties began to re-emerge. In 2000 the Spice Girls, who may as well have been named The AntiKurt, disbanded and, when tech crashed later that year, a lot of people lost a lot of money — but nobody, to be honest, was the least bit surprised. And then came 9/11.
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  • The western world kept a buzz going for twelve years, and that’s an accomplishment. It must also be said that the 1990s weren’t squandered, because even in the dark years they were fun. They weren’t complicated.
  • the 1990s make great nostalgia bait: simpler politics, plus great music, plus cool fashion cues. And maybe we can create another halcyon bubble again one day!
  • The generation that came of age in the 1990s, now well into middle age, have a lot of happy memories of a sort that may never be possible to have again. At the moment any possibility of collective joy seems about as realistic as a Miss America contestant trying to wish world peace into existence
  • n the 1990s we still had the future, a place that you could travel to, that would be cool when you got there, like Australia or the South Pole. Right now we merely have a future, and a murky one at that, and it’s probably more like Kenosha, Wisconsin than Sydney.
  • I remember doing a book tour and ending up on a local AM radio station’s podium at the grand opening of Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota on 11 August 1992. It was full of Americans in alpha consumption mode, eating ice cream, faces beaming, walking around in unselfconscious bliss. The local radio jock said to me, “You must think all of this is pretty silly”. He motioned towards the crowd and then to a rollercoaster directly beside us that came screeching at our heads every 95 seconds.
  • But I said, “No. In a century people are going to look back on right now as a sort of magic era, a charmed time of peace and prosperity and freedom from fear, as something that can never happen again, no matter how much they wish it would”.
Javier E

Katie Duke struggles to navigate advocating for nurses and working as one - The Washing... - 0 views

  • Nurses don’t dispute that patients deserve compassion and respect, but many feel that their roles are misunderstood and their expertise undervalued; as Duke repeatedly told me, people don’t respect nurses like they do doctors. As a result, nurses are leaving hospitals in droves. And they’re establishing new careers, not just in health care but as creatives and entrepreneurs.
  • Duke argues that nurses are especially fed up and burned out. And yet, as caretakers, nobody expects them to put their physical and emotional well-being first. But that’s starting to change. Once a lone voice, Duke is now a representative one.
  • Nurses make up the nation’s largest body of health-care workers, with three times as many RNs as physicians
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  • They also died of covid at higher rates than other health-care workers, and they experience high rates of burnout, “an occupational syndrome characterized by a high degree of emotional exhaustion and depersonalization, and a low sense of personal accomplishment at work,” according to the World Health Organization
  • high stress and anxiety are the “antecedents” to burnout. But you know you’ve hit the nadir when you become emotionally detached from your work. “It’s almost like a loss of meaning,” she said.
  • Before the pandemic, between a third and half of nurses and physicians already reported symptoms of burnout. A covid impact study published in March 2022 by the American Nurses Foundation found this number had risen to 60 percent among acute-care nurses. “Reports of feeling betrayed, undervalued, and unsupported have risen,
  • Miller said nurses are experiencing “collective trauma,” a conclusion she reached by studying their social media usage through the pandemic
  • In April 2020, Miller said the public was “exalting nurses as these superheroes and angels,” while nurses themselves were tweeting about “the horrible working conditions, enormous amount of death without any break … being mentally and completely worn down and exhausted.”
  • Miller and Groves also found a fivefold increase in references to quitting between the 2020 study and the 2021 study. “Our profession will never be the same,” Miller told me. “If you talked to any nurse who worked bedside through the pandemic, that’s what they’ll tell you.” From this, she says, has grown a desire to be heard. “We feel emboldened. We’re not as willing to be silent anymore.”
  • then, in late February 2013, Duke was abruptly fired. She’d posted a photo on Instagram showing an ER where hospital staff had just saved the life of a man hit by a subway train. It looked like a hurricane had blown through. There were no people in the photo, but Duke titled the post, “Man vs. 6 train.” She told me she wanted to showcase “the amazing things doctors and nurses do to save lives … the f---ing real deal.”
  • Duke says her superiors called her an “amazing nurse and team member” before they told her that “it was time to move on.” Her director handed her a printout of the Instagram post. According to Duke, he acknowledged that she hadn’t violated HIPAA or any hospital policies but said she’d been insensitive and unprofessional. She was escorted out of the building by security. When the episode aired, it showed Duke crying on the sidewalk outside the hospital.
  • She’d reposted the photo, with permission, from a male doctor’s Instagram account. He faced no repercussions. She now admits her caption was rather “cold” — especially compared with the doctor’s, “After the trauma.” In hindsight, she said, she might have been more sensitive. Maybe not even posted the photo at all. And yet this frustrates her. Why shouldn’t the public see nursing culture for what it really is? Man vs. 6 Train. “That’s ER speak,” she told me. “We say ‘head injury in room five.’ We don’t say ‘Mr. Smith in room five. We talk and think by mechanism of injury.”
  • But this is at odds with the romanticized image of the nurturing nurse — which hospitals often want to project. In some cases, nurses are explicitly told not to be forthright with their patients. “I know nurses in oncology who are not allowed to say to a patient and their family, ‘This will be the fourth clinical trial, but we all know your family member is dying,”
  • “The most frequent question is, ‘Katie, I have to get out of the hospital, but I don’t know what else to do.’” Her advice: “You have to create your own definition of what being a nursing professional means to you.” She has a ready list of alternative jobs, including “med spa” owner, educational consultant and YouTuber.
Javier E

Ukraine Is the West's War Now - WSJ - 0 views

  • A year later, the war in Ukraine has become, to a large extent, the West’s own. True, no American or NATO soldiers are fighting and dying on Ukrainian soil. But the U.S., its European allies and Canada have now sent some $120 billion in weapons and other aid to Ukraine, with new, more advanced military supplies on the way. If this monumental effort fails to thwart President Vladimir Putin’s ambitions, the setback would not only undermine American credibility on the world stage but also raise difficult questions about the future of the Western alliance.
  • “In many ways, we’re all-in, and we’re all-in because the realization has dawned in Europe that showing weakness to President Putin, showing no response to his atrocities, only invites him to go further and further,” said Sjoerd Sjoerdsma, a Dutch politician and member of parliament. “We have also realized that it is not only the safety and security of Ukraine that is at stake but also our own.”
  • The Russian military’s mixture of unexpected ineptitude and shocking cruelty has pulled the U.S. and allies deeper and deeper into the conflict. With one self-imposed constraint falling after another, Western goals have gradually moved from preventing the obliteration of Ukraine to supporting its military victory over Russia.
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  • It’s a more ambitious commitment that carries much higher risks—but also strategic rewards—for the Western alliance.
  • “Nobody thought the Russians would start a medieval war in the 21st century,” said Sen. James Risch, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “This conflict is going to change the face of Europe as much as World War II did.”
  • In Asia, the Middle East and elsewhere, the West’s geopolitical adversaries are calculating whether the U.S. and its allies have the stamina and cohesion to defend the rules-based international order that has benefited the West for decades.
  • In particular, the future of Taiwan and the South China Sea is closely linked to the West’s record in Ukraine.
  • “If Putin wins in Ukraine, the message to him and other authoritarian leaders will be that they can use force to get what they want. This will make the world more dangerous and us more vulnerable.”
  • The Munich conference capped several weeks in which the U.S. and its allies have dramatically expanded the scope of their military aid, an indication that Mr. Putin’s expectation that the West will eventually tire of helping Ukraine hasn’t materialized just yet
  • Both sides believe they can win on the battlefield, and little room exists for peace negotiations. Ukraine is preparing offensives to regain the roughly 18% of its territory still occupied by Moscow, including the Crimea peninsula and parts of the eastern Donbas region that Mr. Putin seized in 2014. Russia has declared four Ukrainian regions, none of which it fully controls, to be its own sovereign territory and seeks, at the very least, to conquer those lands. Mr. Putin, in a speech on Tuesday, indicated that his aspirations remain much broader, referring to Russia’s “historical territories that are now called Ukraine.”
  • A year into Europe’s bloodiest conflict since World War II, Ukraine’s own military industries have been shattered by Russian missile strikes, and its reserves of Soviet-vintage weapons are running out. By now, Kyiv can keep fighting only as long as Western assistance continues apace
  • “The next months will be very critical. If, say, another Ukrainian offensive fails, if it becomes the public narrative that it’s going to be a stalemate, support in the West might drop—perhaps not substantially, but some of the politicians will see the writing on the wall,
  • “In diplomacy, morality is part of the public narrative, but rarely part of the real decision-making process. But Ukraine’s case was one of the examples in history when you can argue that sympathy based on moral arguments was a game changer,”
  • “Some governments acted the way they did not merely based on their practical considerations but under enormous pressure of their public opinion. And that public opinion was based on moral compassion for the victim of the aggression.”
  • Mr. Putin has tried to counter the Ukrainian message by appealing to fear. On the first morning of the war, he alluded to nuclear weapons to deter the West from helping Ukraine.
  • “Putin is threatening Armageddon, and the Russians are doing it all the time, sometimes in oblique ways and sometimes in a more direct way,
  • “But when you actually poke at that and provide weapons gradually over time, there hasn’t been the catastrophic response that Putin promised.”
  • “boiling the frog.” As the U.S. began to introduce new weapons systems, it did so slowly and, initially, in limited numbers. None of these individual decisions were of sufficient scope to provoke a dramatic escalation by Moscow. But over the past 12 months, the cumulative effect of these new weapons has transformed the balance of power on the battlefield and enabled a string of strategic Ukrainian victories.
  • “If you look at the arc of Western involvement, no one would have predicted where we are now six months ago, and the same goes for six months before that. It’s a crisis response that has evolved into a policy—a policy that, probably, no one would have prescribed at the outset,” said Samuel Charap, a senior political scientist at Rand Corp. who has urged caution on arming Ukraine
  • “The West is also the frog that is boiling itself. With each incremental increase in assistance, qualitative or quantitative, we become accustomed to that being normal, and the next one doesn’t seem so extreme,”
  • “There is a dynamic here where we become desensitized to what is going on. We are in a bit of a slow-moving spiral that shows no signs of letting up.”
  • In 2014, after Mr. Putin annexed Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula and triggered a bloody war in the eastern Donbas region, covertly sending troops and heavy weapons across the border, the American and European response was limited to sanctions that only marginally affected Russia’s economy.
  • Back in 1991, President George H.W. Bush viewed Ukraine’s desire for freedom as a dangerous nuisance. That year, just months before the Soviet Union’s collapse, he delivered to the Ukrainian parliament his infamous “Chicken Kiev” speech, urging Ukrainians to abandon “suicidal nationalism” and permanently remain under the Kremlin’s rule.
  • Other analysts and policy makers argue that the true danger lies in excessive caution over accelerating Western military involvement. “We have been slow in delivering certain capabilities. We keep climbing the stairs, but it goes through a tortuous process, and in the meantime Ukrainians are dying,” said ret. Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, a former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe. “It has taken the Pentagon a long time to come to the realization that Ukraine can win, and will win, especially if we give them what they need. There has been all too much defeatist hand-wringing.”
  • At the time, President Barack Obama resisted calls to help Ukraine militarily as he sought Mr. Putin’s cooperation on his presidency’s main foreign-policy priority, the nuclear deal with Iran
  • Ukraine, Mr. Obama said in an interview with the Atlantic in 2016, “is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do.” All the evidence of the past 50 years, he added, suggested that Russian (and Chinese) decision-making wouldn’t be influenced by “talking tough or engaging in some military action.”
  • Mr. Biden, speaking in front of U.S., Polish and Ukrainian flags to a cheering crowd in Warsaw on Tuesday, had a different message. “Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia,” he pledged. “Appetites of the autocrat cannot be appeased. They must be opposed.”
Javier E

Opinion | Mixing Barstool Conservatives and Social Conservatives Is Warping the G.O.P. ... - 0 views

  • Some conservatives seem to have decided that winning over a new constituency — one that hates rules and ordinances and loves hot people and cool ideas and sex, sex and ideally more sex — is worth changing what it means to be a conservative in the first place.
  • A hornier conservative movement might be more electorally successful, but it will run headfirst into a wall of longstanding conservative policy commitments — to end abortion, eliminate pornography and reinforce the “nuclear family.” Goals that are, at the very least, not very horny.
  • Being a horny bro is not terribly unusual, or even bad. In fact, I’d argue that many men fall in this category — heterosexual men who think that liking sex and sexiness are generally good, uncomplicated things, and think that people who tell them that sex or sexiness is bad or sinful or problematic should be mocked or ignored.
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  • Under the philosophical construct of horny bro-dom, the idea is that abortion isn’t good or bad, but it is an act that a woman wishes to commit, and nobody should tell anybody else what to do, or what not to do. In fact, in 1992, then-Gov. Bill Clinton (a noted horny bro) said
  • Barstool conservatives are “people who, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, accept pornography, homosexuality, drug use, legalized gambling, and whatever Gamergate was about.” But what they do not accept, ever, is being told what to do, whether by “hectoring, schoolmarmish” politicians and media or by the federal government
  • “This attitude is ‘liberal’ in that it regards sexual license as an unalloyed good, and treats any kind of social or religious conservatism as a dead letter. But at the same time it wants to rebel and lash out against the strictures it feels that feminism and political correctness have placed on male liberty, male rights.”
  • The debate that Mr. Hefner and Mr. Buckley had about politics in the 1960s has become a defining question for the conservative movement: whether conservatism is a project intended to get people to do something (even things they do not wish to do) or to protect people from being told what to do.
  • This has created peril for traditional Republicans. Attempting to come across as the “cool mom” of political persuasions — do whatever you want, just do it at home, and ideally, do it in a way that owns the teetotaling libs — is not the natural affect of movement conservatives.
Javier E

How Elon Musk spoiled the dream of 'Full Self-Driving' - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • They said Musk’s erratic leadership style also played a role, forcing them to work at a breakneck pace to develop the technology and to push it out to the public before it was ready. Some said they are worried that, even today, the software is not safe to be used on public roads. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
  • “The system was only progressing very slowly internally” but “the public wanted a product in their hands,” said John Bernal, a former Tesla test operator who worked in its Autopilot department. He was fired in February 2022 when the company alleged improper use of the technology after he had posted videos of Full Self-Driving in action
  • “Elon keeps tweeting, ‘Oh we’re almost there, we’re almost there,’” Bernal said. But “internally, we’re nowhere close, so now we have to work harder and harder and harder.” The team has also bled members in recent months, including senior executives.
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  • “No one believed me that working for Elon was the way it was until they saw how he operated Twitter,” Bernal said, calling Twitter “just the tip of the iceberg on how he operates Tesla.”
  • In April 2019, at a showcase dubbed “Autonomy Investor Day,” Musk made perhaps his boldest prediction as Tesla’s chief executive. “By the middle of next year, we’ll have over a million Tesla cars on the road with full self-driving hardware,” Musk told a roomful of investors. The software updates automatically over the air, and Full Self-Driving would be so reliable, he said, the driver “could go to sleep.”
  • Investors were sold. The following year, Tesla’s stock price soared, making it the most valuable automaker and helping Musk become the world’s richest person
  • To deliver on his promise, Musk assembled a star team of engineers willing to work long hours and problem solve deep into the night. Musk would test the latest software on his own car, then he and other executives would compile “fix-it” requests for their engineers.
  • Those patchwork fixes gave the illusion of relentless progress but masked the lack of a coherent development strategy, former employees said. While competitors such as Alphabet-owned Waymo adopted strict testing protocols that limited where self-driving software could operate, Tesla eventually pushed Full Self-Driving out to 360,000 owners — who paid up to $15,000 to be eligible for the features — and let them activate it at their own discretion.
  • Tesla’s philosophy is simple: The more data (in this case driving) the artificial intelligence guiding the car is exposed to, the faster it learns. But that crude model also means there is a lighter safety net. Tesla has chosen to effectively allow the software to learn on its own, developing sensibilities akin to a brain via technology dubbed “neural nets” with fewer rules, the former employees said. While this has the potential to speed the process, it boils down to essentially a trial and error method of training.
  • Radar originally played a major role in the design of the Tesla vehicles and software, supplementing the cameras by offering a reality check of what was around, particularly if vision might be obscured. Tesla also used ultrasonic sensors, shorter-range devices that detect obstructions within inches of the car. (The company announced last year it was eliminating those as well.)
  • Even with radar, Teslas were less sophisticated than the lidar and radar-equipped cars of competitors.“One of the key advantages of lidar is that it will never fail to see a train or truck, even if it doesn’t know what it is,” said Brad Templeton, a longtime self-driving car developer and consultant who worked on Google’s self-driving car. “It knows there is an object in front and the vehicle can stop without knowing more than that.”
  • Toward the end of 2020, Autopilot employees turned on their computers to find in-house workplace monitoring software installed, former employees said. It monitored keystrokes and mouse clicks, and kept track of their image labeling. If the mouse did not move for a period of time, a timer started — and employees could be reprimanded, up to being fired, for periods of inactivity, the former employees said.
  • Some of the people who spoke with The Post said that approach has introduced risks. “I just knew that putting that software out in the streets would not be safe,” said a former Tesla Autopilot engineer who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. “You can’t predict what the car’s going to do.”
  • Some of the people who spoke with The Post attributed Tesla’s sudden uptick in “phantom braking” reports — where the cars aggressively slow down from high speeds — to the lack of radar. The Post analyzed data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to show incidences surged last year, prompting a federal regulatory investigation.
  • The data showed reports of “phantom braking” rose to 107 complaints over three months, compared to only 34 in the preceding 22 months. After The Post highlighted the problem in a news report, NHTSA received about 250 complaints of the issue in a two-week period. The agency opened an investigation after, it said, it received 354 complaints of the problem spanning a period of nine months.
  • “It’s not the sole reason they’re having [trouble] but it’s big a part of it,” said Missy Cummings, a former senior safety adviser for NHTSA, who has criticized the company’s approach and recused herself on matters related to Tesla. “The radar helped detect objects in the forward field. [For] computer vision which is rife with errors, it serves as a sensor fusion way to check if there is a problem.”
  • Musk, as the chief tester, also asked for frequent bug fixes to the software, requiring engineers to go in and adjust code. “Nobody comes up with a good idea while being chased by a tiger,” a former senior executive recalled an engineer on the project telling him
  • Musk’s resistance to suggestions led to a culture of deference, former employees said. Tesla fired employees who pushed back on his approach. The company was also pushing out so many updates to its software that in late 2021, NHTSA publicly admonished Tesla for issuing fixes without a formal recall notice.
  • Tesla engineers have been burning out, quitting and looking for opportunities elsewhere. Andrej Karpathy, Tesla’s director of artificial intelligence, took a months-long sabbatical last year before leaving Tesla and taking a position this year at OpenAI, the company behind language-modeling software ChatGPT.
  • One of the former employees said that he left for Waymo. “They weren’t really wondering if their car’s going to run the stop sign,” the engineer said. “They’re just focusing on making the whole thing achievable in the long term, as opposed to hurrying it up.”
Javier E

The Closing of the American Mind: A Summary - 0 views

  • Preface
  • “No teacher can doubt that his real task is to assist his pupil to fulfill human nature against all the deforming forces of convention and prejudice.” p. 20
  • A liberal education is one that helps students to ask themselves and answer the question, “what is man?… In our chronic lack of certainty, this comes down to knowing the alternative answers [to that question] and thinking about them.” p. 21
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  • Introduction: Our Virtue
  • “There is one thing that a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative…. Relativism is necessary to openness; and this is the virtue, the only virtue, which all primary education for more than fifty years has dedicated itself to inculcating.” p. 25
  • Democratic education…wants and needs to produce men and women [who are] supportive of a democratic regime.” p. 26
  • The historical assumption of the human sciences was (and remains) that an objective human nature exists and can be discovered—if not by reason itself, then at least by empirical science guided by reason. Science was a method to allow us to rise beyond the prejudices of our culture in order to discover the truths of human nature. It was a mechanism for opening our minds, an instrument of openness. p. 37-38
  • Liberalism has always tended towards increased freedom—i.e., decreased regulation. But “it was possible to expand the space exempt from legitimate social and political regulation only by contracting the claims to moral and political knowledge…. It begins to appear that full freedom can be attained only when there is no such knowledge at all…[and] of course the result is that…the argument justifying freedom disappears, and…all beliefs begin to have an attenuated character.” p. 28
  • Modern education is concerned mainly with correcting ethnocentrism—showing students that their preferences are merely accidents of their culture and that no single culture is better than any other. The roots of this movement are found in the problems (racism, mistreatment) that arose due to the multicultural nature of American life. p. 29-30
  • The Founders envisioned a society where individuals were bound together by their belief in and adherence to the rights of the Constitution. Minority factions were seen as a bad thing, detracting from social cohesiveness. p. 31
  • However, the provision of equal rights did not guarantee equal treatment, and minority groups suffered. This caused them to retreat into their minority identities and oppose the majority—indeed, “much of the intellectual machinery of twentieth-century American political thought and social science was constructed for the purpose of making an assault on [the] majority…. The very idea of a majority—now understood to be selfish interest—is done away with in order to protect the minorities.” p. 32-35
  • However, its ideas about what this means have changed over time, starting with a faith in the human rights of the U.S. Constitution, but ultimately changing to (now) mean “openness,” i.e., relativism. p. 26-27
  • “Historicism and cultural relativism actually are a means to avoid testing our own prejudices and asking, for example, whether men are really equal or whether that opinion is a democratic prejudice.” p. 40
  • Today, “the human sciences want to make us culture-beings with the instruments [science and reason] that were invented to liberate us from culture…: cultural relativism, historicism, the fact-value distinction—are the suicide of science. Culture, hence closedness, reigns supreme. Openness to closedness is what we teach.” p. 38-39
  • Yet the dogmatic modern assumption is that human nature does not exist, that our ways of being are culturally determined, that our minds are inherently constrained—“closed”—by cultural influences. p. 38
  • “There are two types of openness, the openness of indifference…and the openness that invites us to the quest for knowledge and certitude.” p. 41
  • The openness of indifference advocates the removal of all requirements in education—why should students learn languages or philosophy? But the reality is that, “to be open to knowing, there are certain types of things one must know which most people don’t want to bother to learn and which appear boring and irrelevant…true openness means closedness to all the charms that make us comfortable with the present.” p. 41
  • The Clean Slate
  • On the surface, Americans seems to lack a true culture or set of traditions. But most of them grew up with a shared knowledge of the Bible and the Declaration of Independence, and “contrary to much contemporary wisdom, the United States has one of the longest uninterrupted political [and intellectual] traditions of any nation in the world.” And this tradition is not confused or counterbalanced by a history of monarchy or aristocracy. p. 52-55
  • So we have a culture in which to root education, but we have begun to undermine it. The idealism of the American founding has been explained away as mythical, selfishly-motivated, and racist. And so our culture has been devalued. p. 55-56
  • Religion, too, has been explained away, but this has left us without a standpoint from which to understand our experience as humans. Parents “have nothing to give their children in the way of a vision of the world.” p. 56-57
  • “As it now stands, students have powerful images of what the perfect body is and pursue it incessantly. But deprived of literary guidance, they no longer have any image of a perfect soul, and hence do not long to have one. They do not even imagine that there is such a thing.” p. 67
  • Books
  • “I have begun to wonder whether the experience of the greatest texts from early childhood is not a prerequisite for a concern throughout life for them and for lesser but important literature. The soul’s longing…may well require encouragement at the outset.” p. 62
  • Literature is critical because it presents to young people the range of possibilities of human types—both good and bad. p. 62-64
  • But students are less and less exposed to literature, and as a result, “they have only pop psychology to tell them what people are like, and the range of their motives…. [Therefore,] people become more alike, for want of knowing they can be otherwise. What poor substitutes for real diversity are the wild rainbows of dyed hair and other external differences that tell the observer nothing about what is inside.” p. 64
  • Without exposure to literature, students usually resort to the movies. But movies do not provide the “distance from the contemporary” that students need, and so this only reinforces the belief that the here and now is all there is. p. 64
  • The loss of literature has also meant the loss of heroes. In a “perversion of the democratic principle,” this lack is almost admired, since being oneself is the supposed goal. But whether or not it is seen as desirable, students invariably seek role models. And without literature, they only have those around them (and in the media) to emulate. p. 66-67
  • “Nobody believes that the old books do, or even could, contain the truth…. Tradition has become superfluous.” p. 58
  • We are left with a culture filled with “the intense, changing, crude and immediate, which Tocqueville warned us would be the character of democratic art…. In short, life is made into a nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy. This description may seem exaggerated, but only because some would prefer to regard it as such.” p. 74-75
  • Relationships
  • “In short, after the war, while America was sending out its blue jeans to unite the young of all nations, a concrete form of democratic universalism that has had liberalizing effects on many enslaved nations, it was importing a clothing of German fabrication for its souls, which clashed with all that and cast doubt on the Americanization of the world on which we had embarked, thinking it was good and in conformity with the rights of man
  • “This indeterminate or open-ended future and the lack of a binding past mean that the souls of young people are in a condition like that of the first men in the state of nature—spiritually unclad, unconnected, isolated, with no inherited or unconditional connection with anything or anyone…. Why are we surprised that such unfurnished persons should be preoccupied principally with themselves?” p. 87-88
  • “The one eccentric element in this portrait, the one failure…is the relation between blacks and whites.” Although black students are present on campuses, they “have, by and large, proved indigestible.” p. 91
  • the Black Power movement arrived and the universities conceded to identity politics, which took the form of Black-themed courses, quotas, and an unwillingness to fail black students. p. 94-95
  • “The black student who wants to be just a student and to avoid allegiance to the black group has to pay a terrific price, because he is judged negatively by his black peers and because his behavior is atypical in the eyes of whites. White students have silently and unconsciously adjusted to a group presence of blacks, and they must readjust for a black who does not define himself by the group.” Affirmative action cements this dynamic. p. 95-96
  • The restructuring of the family requires that men subdue their masculine character. “And it is indeed possible to soften men. But to make them ‘care’ is another thing, and the project must inevitably fail…. The old moral order, however imperfect it may have been, at least moved towards the virtues by way of the passions. If men were self-concerned, that order tried to expand the scope of self-concern to include others [i.e., his wife and children], rather than commanding men to cease being concerned with themselves.” p. 129
  • “I am not arguing here that the old family arrangements were good or that we should go back to them. I am only insisting that we not cloud our vision to such an extent that we believe that there are viable substitutes for them just because we want or need them.” p. 130
  • “All of our reforms have helped strip the teeth of our gears, which can therefore no longer mesh. They spin idly, side by side, unable to set the social machine in motion.” p. 131
  • Modern students are lacking the longing that is critical for a full enjoyment of life. They are complacent. And the universities do not see themselves as providing for such a longing. p. 134-136
  • The German Connection
  • Value relativism is the modern replacement for traditional morality, and “constitutes a change in our view of things moral and political as great as the one that took place when Christianity replaced Greek and Roman paganism.” p. 141
  • Value relativism has sunk so far into the American consciousness that its vocabulary has become colloquial: we talk about ‘charisma,’ ‘life-style,’ ‘commitment,’ ‘identity,’ etc. “Although they, and the things to which they refer, would have been incomprehensible to our fathers, not to speak of our Founding Fathers.” p. 147
  • Students today are largely apathetic about any concerns outside of themselves. There isn’t any malice in this self-centeredness; but it has become so entrenched in American culture that it isn’t even recognized as unusual. p. 82-86
  • “We chose [to import] a system of thought that, like some wines, does not travel; we chose a way of looking at things that could never be ours and had its starting point dislike of us and our goals.” p. 153
  • The question isn’t even asked whether the German doctrine of value-creation is contrary to democratic and egalitarian ideals; but it certainly seems to leave room for their opposites and perhaps promote them—i.e., value relativism seems to allow for fascism. p. 154
  • The Self
  • Although a precise definition remains elusive, “the self is the modern substitute for the soul.” p. 173
  • Man used to strive for fulfillment by taming his bodily desires in order to live virtuously. But this changed after Machiavelli (and Hobbes after him) suggested that instead we ignore virtue and follow our desires, which find their root in the state of nature. p. 174-175
  • Following their advice, “our desire becomes a kind of oracle we consult; it is the last word, while in the past it was the questionable and dangerous part of us.” p. 175
  • Locke then replaced the virtuous man with the rationally selfish one. “Beneath his selfishness, of course, lies an expectation that it conduces more to the good of others than does moralism.” p. 175-176
  • “All higher purposiveness in nature, which might have been consulted by men’s reason and used to limit human passion, has disappeared.” p. 176
  • That reason “is unable to rule in culture or in soul…constitutes a crisis of the West…[whose] regimes are founded on reason.” Previous regimes relied on religion, but Enlightenment undermined religion. p. 196
  • Psychology came to us “in order to treat the parts of man which had been so long neglected by liberal society…. Modern psychology has this in common with what was always a popular opinion, fathered by Machiavelli—that selfishness is somehow good. Man is self, and the self must be selfish. What is new is that we are told to look more deeply into the self, that we assumed too easily that we know it and have access to it.” p. 178
  • Prior to this, it was only God who was dignified—not man. And God was dignified in his freedom, his ability to create. If man was to be elevated, he, too, must be free; he, too, must be able to create. p. 180
  • And so, following Rousseau and our dissatisfaction with the Enlightenment, we have elevated creativity above reason as the ultimate virtue, and the artist replaced the philosopher and scientist at the admired human type. p. 181-182
  • Yet those who praise creativity don’t realize why. They admire it without seeing that it is the result of Romantic thought absorbed into democratic public opinion. And it has influenced the whole political spectrum, from Left to Right. p. 181-182
  • The Germans (Nietzsche and Weber) recognized as early as 1919 that the scientific spirit was dead, that reason cannot establish values. But Americans (naïvely, and largely unknowingly) still held onto the rationalist dream, written as they were into our political foundations. p. 194-195
  • When those ideas came to the U.S. (via Weber), “a very dark view of the future was superimposed on our incorrigible optimism. We are children playing with adult toys.” p. 195
  • “The psychology of the self has succeeded so well that it is now the instinct of most of us to turn for a cure for our ills back within ourselves rather than to the nature of things.” p. 179
  • Rousseau and others recognized this. “The very idea of culture was a way of preserving something like religion without talking about it.” But Nietzsche saw this was impossible. p. 196-197
  • We are left with no religion, but we still have religious impulses. p. 197
  • “The disenchantment of God and nature necessitated a new description of good and evil. To adapt a formula of Plato about the gods, we do not love a thing because it is good, it is good because we love it. It [became] our decision to esteem that makes something estimable.” p. 197
  • “Since values are not rational…they must be imposed.” Will, or commitment, is the primary virtue; it is the equivalent of (what used to be) faith. “Nietzsche was not a fascist; but this project inspired fascist rhetoric, which looked to the revitalization of old cultures or the foundation of new ones, as opposed to the rational, rootless cosmopolitanism of the revolutions of the Left.” p. 201-202
  • Nietzsche was a cultural relativist. This meant he anticipated war, because wars are inevitable when values are imposed and unrooted in truth or anything objective. p. 202
  • “Just over the horizon, when Weber wrote, lay Hitler…. He was the mad, horrible parody of the charismatic leader—the demagogue—hoped for by Weber.” Weber was not looking for something so extreme, but “when one ventures out into the vast spaces opened up by Nietzsche, it is hard to set limits.” p. 213-214
  • “Hitler did not cause a rethinking of the politics here or in Europe. All to the contrary—it was while we were fighting him that the thought that had preceded him in Europe conquered here.” And it remains dominant. p. 214
  • The language of values implies that the religious is the source of everything political, social, and personal. It has been facilitated by a softening and blurring of the idea of religion and “the sacred,” which are no longer seen as dangerous.
  • “As an image of our current intellectual condition, I keep being reminded of the newsreel pictures of Frenchmen splashing happily in the water at the seashore, enjoying the paid annual vacations legislated by Leon Blum’s Popular Front government. It was 1936, the same year Hitler was permitted to occupy the Rhineland. All our big causes amount to that kind of vacation.” p. 239
  • This is our educational crisis and opportunity. Western rationalism has culminated in a rejection of reason. Is this result necessary?” p. 240
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