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cartergramiak

Opinion | We Want a 'New Normal.' It's Not in the Forecast. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rmal-climate-catastrophes.html

Culture US trump Politics history crisis

shared by cartergramiak on 25 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Now it’s a ghostly quiet. Social distancing rules mean that even at max capacity, it still only has a tiny fraction of its usual clientele. Standing in that empty pub, haunted by the sense of what we were missing, I felt an ache for “normal” as acute as any homesickness I ever felt — even when I served in the Army in Iraq. I still feel the twinge every time I put on my mask. I want our normal lives back.
  • More alarming, recent observed increases in atmospheric methane, a greenhouse gas more than 80 times stronger than carbon dioxide over the short term, are so large that if they continue they could effectively overwhelm the pledged emissions reductions in the Paris Agreement, even if those reductions were actually happening. Which they’re not.
  • I remember last March, in the first throes of the pandemic, when normal was upended. Everything shut down. We hoarded toilet paper and pasta. Fear gripped the nation.
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  • Now, as a new administration takes office and we look ahead to life after both Covid and Donald Trump, we need to face the fact that the world we live in is changing into something else, and that coping with the consequences of global warming demands immediate, widespread, radical action.
Javier E

The Nuts of August - 0 views

mailchi.mp/...the-nuts-of-august

extremism trump politics corruption Russia collusion

shared by Javier E on 19 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • Meanwhile, the Republican-run Senate Intelligence Committee released a nearly 1,000 page long report documenting the extent of the Trump campaign's connections with Russia. It is remarkable because it is a bipartisan report and many of the details are new.
  • The report strongly suggests that Trump lied to the special prosecutors about his Wikileaks conversations with Roger Stone, and lays out "an extensive web of contacts between Trump campaign advisers and Kremlin officials and other Russians, including at least one intelligence officer and others tied to the country’s spy services."  The report includes this dazzling detail:
  • Kremlin-directed operatives opened champagne when Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016... “We uncorked a tiny bottle of champagne ... took one gulp each and looked into each other’s eyes .... We uttered almost in unison: ‘We made America great,’” one operative at the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency said in the message obtained by the Republican-led committee.
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  • None of this is likely to make much difference, since everyone is already locked in on Russiagate, but it reminds us of a central reality of 2020: We know who Donald Trump is.
  • Trump's biggest scandals -- his fawning servility to Russia, his attempts to blackmail the Ukrainians into helping his campaign, his relentless self-enrichment schemes --- have all played out in real-time for everyone to see. I can't remember who said it, but with Trump there may be some secrets left, but there are no mysteries.
  • I think this goes to the heart of the differences between Never Trump and the anti-anti-Trumpers. The question is how to think of Trump: as a somewhat unsavory conservative with ghastly manners, or as someone who is fundamentally dangerous -- and therefore off the normal axis of right/ left politics
  • Under intense pressure, Trump's postmaster general seems to be backing down from his plans to "reform" the postal service before the election. But a lot of damage has already been done, especially to the public's confidence in mail-in voting, which may have been the point all along. 
Javier E

Opinion | U.S. Military Aid Is Killing Civilians in Gaza - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-military-aid-war-israel.html

US israel policy Palestine

shared by Javier E on 18 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • The United States currently provides Israel with at least $3.8 billion in annual military assistance, the most to any country per year, with the recent exception of Ukraine. High levels of assistance date back roughly to the 1970s and reflect a longstanding American bargain with Israel of security for peace — the notion that the more secure Israel feels, the more concessions it will be able to make to the Palestinians.
  • Since the mid-1990s, the United States has also been a major sponsor of the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority Security Forces, providing training and equipment on the theory that as the Palestinians stand up, the Israelis can stand down.
  • In both cases, the rationale for U.S. security assistance is fatally flawed.
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  • On the Israeli side, blind U.S. security guarantees have not provided a path to peace. Instead, they have provided Israel with the reassurance that it can engage in increasingly destructive efforts, such as the expansion of illegal settlements in the West Bank, without any real consequences.
  • At the same time, Israel has become a global leader in weapons exports and boasts one of the most technologically sophisticated militaries in the world. All of these factors have created a sense among Israeli policymakers that they can indefinitely contain — physically and politically — the Palestinian question.
  • Nowhere is this more apparent than in the recent efforts, driven by the United States, first under the Trump administration and continuing under President Biden, to pursue normalization between Israel and the Arab world. While in many ways this normalization is long overdue, it has been premised on the notion that economic incentives — and a shared regional security interest in deterring malign Iranian influence — can integrate Israel, indefinite occupation and all, into the Arab world.
  • This premise has been shattered — likely intentionally on Hamas’s part — by the Gaza conflict and its rapid recentering of the Palestinian cause on a global stage.
  • As civilian deaths in Gaza and the West Bank continue to mount, it is clear any sort of Saudi normalization agreement with Israel that does not also include substantive progress on a political solution for the Palestinian cause will be difficult to advance.
  • Under the Leahy laws, the United States is prohibited from providing security assistance to any unit that is credibly accused of having committed a gross violation of human rights. Unlike almost all other recipients, which are vetted along these lines before they receive assistance, for Israel the process is reversed: The assistance is provided, and the United States then waits to receive reports of violations, assessing their credibility through a process known as the Israel Leahy vetting forum, which includes consultation with the government of Israel.
  • To date, the forum has never come to consensus that any Israeli security force unit or soldier has committed a gross violation of human rights — despite the findings of international human rights organizations
  • the U.S. failure to impose accountability on Israel for such violations may provide Israel with a sense of impunity, increasing the likelihood of gross violations of human rights (including those committed by settlers against Palestinian civilians) and further breaking the trust between Israel and Palestinians that would be needed for any sort of lasting peace.
  • Working on the ground with the authority, I saw how the major focus of U.S. efforts was to prove to the Israel Defense Forces that their Palestinian counterparts could be trusted to take on the mission of securing Israel
  • Palestinian intelligence officials would be provided with target information by Israel, and Palestinian forces would be expected to take on missions previously conducted by the Israel Defense Forces to detain those targets. This effort not only undermined Palestinian support for the authority but also failed to convince the Israelis, who saw any Palestinian courts’ (correct) refusal to hold Palestinian detainees without due process as proof of a revolving door in the system.
  • Even worse, in 2008 and ’09, when Israel’s Operation Cast Lead, which resulted in over 1,300 Palestinian deaths in Gaza, sparked protests in the West Bank, it was the Palestinian Authority Security Forces that physically stood between demonstrators and the Israel Defense Forces. From my balcony in Ramallah, I saw this as a proof of success and reported as much to Washington at the time. In hindsight, it was perhaps the death knell for the legitimacy of the Palestinian Authority in the eyes of its people.
  • If the United States is to continue to employ military and security assistance as a tool of its engagement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (and there are good arguments why it should not), it must change its approach significantly. One way to do this would be simply by applying the laws and policies that it applies to every other country in the world: There is no point in having leverage that could pressure Israel to cease actions that undermine peace if we refuse to even consider using it
  • The United States could also start conditioning its military assistance to Israel (as it does for many other recipients) on certain verifiable political conditions being met. In Israel’s case, these may include a halt to or dismantling of settlement infrastructure in the West Bank.
  • Another thing the U.S. might do is consider reframing its security assistance on the Palestinian side to reinforce, rather than undermine, the legitimacy of the Palestinian Authority
  • Doing so would require structuring assistance in a way that enables Palestinian society control over its own security forces. It would also require the recognition of Palestinian statehood
  • I resigned from my job because I do not believe that U.S. arms should be provided in a situation if we know they are more likely than not — in the words of the Biden administration’s own guiding policy — to lead to or to aggravate the risk of human rights violations, including widespread civilian harm and death.
Javier E

Jonathan Haidt on the 'National Crisis' of Gen Z - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...lity-gap-childhood-11672401345

social media psychology research education crisis culture Gen Z mental health defense creativity

shared by Javier E on 03 Jan 23 - No Cached
  • he has in mind the younger cohort, Generation Z, usually defined as those born between 1997 and 2012. “When you look at Americans born after 1995,” Mr. Haidt says, “what you find is that they have extraordinarily high rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, suicide and fragility.” There has “never been a generation this depressed, anxious and fragile.”
  • He attributes this to the combination of social media and a culture that emphasizes victimhood
  • Social media is Mr. Haidt’s present obsession. He’s working on two books that address its harmful impact on American society: “Kids in Space: Why Teen Mental Health Is Collapsing” and “Life After Babel: Adapting to a World We Can No Longer Share.
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  • What happened in 2012, when the oldest Gen-Z babies were in their middle teens? That was the year Facebook acquired Instagram and young people flocked to the latter site. It was also “the beginning of the selfie era.”
  • Mr. Haidt’s research, confirmed by that of others, shows that depression rates started to rise “all of a sudden” around 2013, “especially for teen girls,” but “it’s only Gen Z, not the older generations.” If you’d stopped collecting data in 2011, he says, you’d see little change from previous years. “By 2015 it’s an epidemic.” (His data are available in an open-source document.)
  • Mr. Haidt imagines “literally launching our children into outer space” and letting their bodies grow there: “They would come out deformed and broken. Their limbs wouldn’t be right. You can’t physically grow up in outer space. Human bodies can’t do that.” Yet “we basically do that to them socially. We launched them into outer space around the year 2012,” he says, “and then we expect that they will grow up normally without having normal human experiences.”
  • Social media and selfies hit a generation that had led an overprotected childhood, in which the age at which children were allowed outside on their own by parents had risen from the norm of previous generations, 7 or 8, to between 10 and 12.
  • That meant the first social-media generation was one of “weakened kids” who “hadn’t practiced the skills of adulthood in a low-stakes environment” with other children. They were deprived of “the normal toughening, the normal strengthening, the normal anti-fragility.
  • Now, their childhood “is largely just through the phone. They no longer even hang out together.” Teenagers even drive less than earlier generations did.
  • Mr. Haidt especially worries about girls. By 2020 more than 25% of female teenagers had “a major depression.” The comparable number for boys was just under 9%.
  • The comparable numbers for millennials at the same age registered at half the Gen-Z rate: about 13% for girls and 5% for boys. “Kids are on their devices all the time,”
  • Most girls, by contrast, are drawn to “visual platforms,” Instagram and TikTok in particular. “Those are about display and performance. You post your perfect life, and then you flip through the photos of other girls who have a more perfect life, and you feel depressed.
  • He calls this phenomenon “compare and despair” and says: “It seems social because you’re communicating with people. But it’s performative. You don’t actually get social relationships. You get weak, fake social links.”
  • Mr. Haidt says he has no antipathy toward the young, and he calls millennials “amazing.”
  • To illustrate his point about Gen Z, Mr. Haidt challenges people to name young people today who are “really changing the world, who are doing big things that have an impact beyond their closed ecosystem.”
  • He can think of only two, neither of them American: Greta Thunberg, 19, the Swedish climate militant, and Malala Yousafzai, 25, the Pakistani advocate for female education
  • I’m predicting that they will be less effective, less impactful, than previous generations.” Why? “You should always keep your eye on whether people are in ‘discover mode’ or ‘defend mode.’ ” In the former mode, you seize opportunities to be creative. In the latter, “you’re not creative, you’re not future-thinking, you’re focused on threats in the present.”
  • University students who matriculated starting in 2014 or so have arrived on campus in defend mode: “Here they are in the safest, most welcoming, most inclusive, most antiracist places on the planet, but many of them were acting like they were entering some sort of dystopian, threatening, immoral world.”
  • 56% of liberal women 18 to 29 responded affirmatively to the question: Has a doctor or other healthcare provider ever told you that you have a mental health condition? “Some of that,” Mr. Haidt says, “has to be just self-presentational,” meaning imagined.
  • This new ideology . . . valorizes victimhood. And if your sub-community motivates you to say you have an anxiety disorder, how is this going to affect you for the rest of your life?” He answers his own question: “You’re not going to take chances, you’re going to ask for accommodations, you’re going to play it safe, you’re not going to swing for the fences, you’re not going to start your own company.”
  • Whereas millennial women are doing well, “Gen-Z women, because they’re so anxious, are going to be less successful than Gen-Z men—and that’s saying a lot, because Gen-Z men are messed up, too.”
  • The problem, he says, is distinct to the U.S. and other English-speaking developed countries: “You don’t find it as much in Europe, and hardly at all in Asia.” Ideas that are “nurtured around American issues of race and gender spread instantly to the U.K. and Canada. But they don’t necessarily spread to France and Germany, China and Japan.”
  • something I hear from a lot of managers, that it’s very difficult to supervise their Gen-Z employees, that it’s very difficult to give them feedback.” That makes it hard for them to advance professionally by learning to do their jobs better.
  • “this could severely damage American capitalism.” When managers are “afraid to speak up honestly because they’ll be shamed on Twitter or Slack, then that organization becomes stupid.” Mr. Haidt says he’s “seen a lot of this, beginning in American universities in 2015. They all got stupid in the same way. They all implemented policies that backfire.”
  • Mr. Haidt, who describes himself as “a classical liberal like John Stuart Mill,” also laments the impact of social media on political discourse
  • “Social media is incompatible with liberal democracy because it has moved conversation, and interaction, into the center of the Colosseum. We’re not there to talk to each other. We’re there to perform” before spectators who “want blood.”
  • Is there a solution? “I’d raise the age of Internet adulthood to 16,” he says—“and enforce it.”
  • By contrast, “life went onto phone-based apps 10 years ago, and the protections we have for children are zero, absolutely zero.” The damage to Generation Z from social media “so vastly exceeds the damage from Covid that we’re going to have to act.”
  • Gen Z, he says, “is not in denial. They recognize that this app-based life is really bad for them.” He reports that they wish they had childhoods more like those of their parents, in which they could play outside and have adventur
Javier E

I told conservatives to work for Trump. One talk with his team changed my mind. - The W... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...6-977a-1030f822fc35_story.html

trump transition resentment presidency

shared by Javier E on 16 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • Trump was not a normal candidate, the transition is not a normal transition, and this will probably not be a normal administration. The president-elect is surrounding himself with mediocrities whose chief qualification seems to be unquestioning loyalty.
  • By all accounts, his ignorance, and that of his entourage, about the executive branch is fathomless.
  • In the best of times, government service carries with it the danger of compromising your principles. Here, though, we may be in for something much worse.
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  • One bad boss can be endured. A gaggle of them will poison all decision-making. They will turn on each other. No band of brothers this: rather the permanent campaign as waged by triumphalist rabble-rousers and demagogues, abetted by people out of their depth and unfit for the jobs they will hold, gripped by grievance, resentment and lurking insecurity. Their mistakes — because there will be mistakes — will be exceptional.
  • Nemesis pursues and punishes all administrations, but this one will get a double dose. Until it can acquire some measure of humility about what it knows, and a degree of magnanimity to those who have opposed it, it will smash into crises and failures. With the disarray of its transition team, in a way, it already has.
  • My bottom line: Conservative political types should not volunteer to serve in this administration, at least for now. They would probably have to make excuses for things that are inexcusable and defend people who are indefensible.
  • At the very least, they should wait to see who gets the top jobs. Until then, let the Trump team fill the deputy assistant secretary and assistant secretary jobs with civil servants, retired military officers and diplomats, or the large supply of loyal or obsequious second-raters who will be eager to serve. The administration may shake itself out in a year or two and reach out to others who have been worried about Trump. Or maybe not.
  • Do what you can do in other venues, and remember that this too will pass, and some day a more normal kind of administration will either emerge or replace this one.
Javier E

Russell Brand on revolution: "We no longer have the luxury of tradition" - 0 views

www.newstatesman.com/...russell-brand-on-revolution

revolution activism conservativism crisis politics spiritual

shared by Javier E on 29 Nov 13 - No Cached
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  • The right has all the advantages, just as the devil has all the best tunes. Conservatism appeals to our selfishness and fear, our desire and self-interest; they neatly nurture and then harvest the inherent and incubating individualism. I imagine that neurologically the pathway travelled by a fearful or selfish impulse is more expedient and well travelled than the route of the altruistic pang. In simple terms of circuitry I suspect it is easier to connect these selfish inclinations.
  • This natural, neurological tendency has been overstimulated and acculturated. Materialism and individualism do in moderation make sense.
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  • Biomechanically we are individuals, clearly. On the most obvious frequency of our known sensorial reality we are independent anatomical units. So we must take care of ourselves. But with our individual survival ensured there is little satisfaction to be gained by enthroning and enshrining ourselves as individuals.
  • For me the solution has to be primarily spiritual and secondarily political.
  • By spiritual I mean the acknowledgement that our connection to one another and the planet must be prioritised. Buckminster Fuller outlines what ought be our collective objectives succinctly: “to make the world work for 100 per cent of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous co-operation without ecological offence or the disadvantage of anyone”. This maxim is the very essence of “easier said than done” as it implies the dismantling of our entire socio-economic machinery. By teatime.
  • The price of privilege is poverty. David Cameron said in his conference speech that profit is “not a dirty word”. Profit is the most profane word we have. In its pursuit we have forgotten that while individual interests are being met, we as a whole are being annihilated. The reality, when not fragmented through the corrupting lens of elitism, is we are all on one planet.
  • Suffering of this magnitude affects us all. We have become prisoners of comfort in the absence of meaning. A people without a unifying myth. Joseph Campbell, the comparative mythologist, says our global problems are all due to the lack of relevant myths.
Javier E

Is Donald Trump a Fascist? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...stanley-how-fascism-works.html

trump fascist fascism

shared by Javier E on 18 Sep 18 - No Cached
  • By placing Trump in transnational and transhistorical perspective, Stanley sees patterns that others mis
  • He notes the apparent paradox that Trump — like many fascist politicians — rode to power in part by attacking government “corruption,” yet practices it even more brazenly himself. The explanation, Stanley suggests, lies in what fascists actually mean by the term. “Corruption, to the fascist politician,” he argues, “is really about the corruption of purity rather than of law. Officially, the fascist politician’s denunciations of corruption sound like a denunciation of political corruption. But such talk is intended to evoke corruption in the sense of the usurpation of traditional order.
  • Stanley’s comparative perspective is particularly effective in illustrating how fascists use fears of sexual violence. He notes that fascist politicians, who portray themselves as defenders of a pure, mythic, patriarchal past, frequently play on fears that alien groups pose a sexual threat. Segregationists used the specter of black rape to justify lynchings. After World War I, Germans “promulgated racial fantasies of mass rape of white women” by African soldiers serving among the French occupying forces, fantasies embraced in the United States by the renascent Ku Klux Klan. Nearly half a century later, the wave of Middle Eastern migrants entering Germany has spawned another sexual terror, which has again crossed the Atlantic, and become a staple of pro-Trump platforms like Breitbart.
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  • links fascism to economic inequality, and he quotes Hannah Arendt, who argued that fascism flourishes when individuals are “atomized.” He explains that Hitler denounced labor unions because he feared they might create solidarity among racially and religiously diverse workers. And he shows that the “right to work” movement that today seeks to cripple unions in the United States has its roots in an effort by Southern business elites to divide black and white workers in the 1940s
  • Even the reader who finds much to admire in Stanley’s book may still wonder why he employs the term “fascist” so freely. In his epilogue, Stanley offers an answer. Citing a 2017 study in the journal Cognition, he observes that “judgments of normality are affected both by what people think is statistically normal and what they think is ideally normal.”
  • Thus, if American politicians routinely associate Latino immigrants with murder and rape, Americans may grow less outraged by such accusations simply because they occur so often
  • By calling Trump a “fascist” — a word that strikes many Americans as alien and extreme — Stanley is trying to spark public alarm. He doesn’t want Americans to respond to Trump’s racist, authoritarian offensives by moving their moral goal posts. The greater danger, he suggests, isn’t hyperbole, it’s normalization. And 20 months into Trump’s presidency, the evidence is mounting that he’s right.
runlai_jiang

In Texas-sized congressional primaries, most GOP candidates run toward Trump - The Wash... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...8-9de1-147dd2df3829_story.html

politics Conservatism Texas

shared by runlai_jiang on 04 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • In Texas-sized congressional primaries, most GOP candidates run toward Trump
  • In several crowded Texas congressional primaries Tuesday, Republican candidates have decided that the best way to stand out is to stand squarely in Trump’s shadow — a campaign strategy that has been only slightly scrambled last week by the president’s sudden embrace of gun control and protectionist tariffs.
  • Isaac’s “Make America Like Texas” message is calibrated to couple Trump’s charisma to the more traditional Lone Star brand of small-government conservatism: “When I talk to people that move to Texas, I say, ‘Welcome to Texas, vote accordingly,’ because it’s not a mistake,” he said. “Our model works
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  • “There’s been resistance even from our own party on helping him out, and they don’t want to elect somebody in this district that’s going to be a hindrance.”
  • Stovall said in an interview that he is unique in squarely backing Trump even before he won the Republican nomination in 2016 — bucking, among others, the state’s dominant figure in national GOP politics, Sen. Ted Cruz.
  • Smith, who is retiring after 16 terms, has not made an endorsement in the race. “Half of them I’ve never heard of before,” he said in an interview, adding that Trump remains popular among his constituents: “They appreciate what the president has done. They appreciate the tax cut, and they appreciate the president’s efforts to enforce immigration laws.”
  • Having a unique message, he said, is less of a factor: “Of the real contenders, there just hasn’t been a lot of distance from Trump on any real issues.” Cruz’s shadow looms over the 21st district primary thanks to his aggressive backing of Chip Roy, a former top aide to Cruz and other high-profile Texas officials.
oliviaodon

It's Not That Hard To Avoid Normalizing Nazis - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...548090

hitler nazis

shared by oliviaodon on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • Why is it that, in America in 2017, the question of how not to normalize Nazis provokes heated debate? Is there a way to discuss the everyday life of fascists without normalizing? Although there are no quick and easy rules to follow, there are lessons—plenty of them—to be gleaned from history. The most powerful lessons emerge from the press coverage of the Third Reich, especially the soft-focus profiles of Adolf Hitler published in the 1930s. These stories set the journalistic gold standard for how not to write about Nazis.
  • Above all, Alltagsgeschichte exposes the complexity of human agency. To shed light on the choices people make—why one person might condone or participate in hateful acts, while another resists—historians consider the impact of specific social ties, institutions, and living and working environments.
  • From 1935 to 1939, The New York Times ran four stories on Hitler’s homes. On August 20, 1939, the paper published a glowing account by British journalist Hedwig Mauer Simpson of Hitler’s private life on the Obersalzberg. Ignoring the German troops massing on the Polish border, Simpson described the Führer’s beautiful rooms and domestic routine as well as providing details about the ripeness of the tomatoes on his table and his love of gooseberry pie. It was all so ordinary.
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  • But the appeal of Hitler-at-home stories went beyond curiosity about how the other half lives. In fact, their representation of the German leader as a “good man,” whose simple tastes and joys were not that different from ordinary men’s and women’s, reassured readers at a politically unsettled time, when another global war seemed to be approaching. The gracious host depicted in these puff pieces was never interrupted with rude questions about concentration camps. Nazi propagandists insisted that Hitler’s homes existed outside the sphere of politics, and the journalists that covered them largely obliged this view.
  • When the war ended, the fascination with Hitler’s homes continued.
Javier E

George Conway: Trump Is Unfit for Office - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...599128

trump sociopath narcissism impeachment

shared by Javier E on 05 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Behavior like this is unusual, a point that journalists across the political spectrum have made. “This is not normal,” Megan McArdle wrote in late August. “And I don’t mean that as in, ‘Trump is violating the shibboleths of the Washington establishment.’ I mean that as in, ‘This is not normal for a functioning adult.’” James Fallows observed, also in August, that Trump is having “episodes of what would be called outright lunacy, if they occurred in any other setting,” and that if he “were in virtually any other position of responsibility, action would already be under way to remove him from that role.”
  • Simply put, Trump’s ingrained and extreme behavioral characteristics make it impossible for him to carry out the duties of the presidency in the way the Constitution requires. To see why first requires a look at what the Constitution demands of a president, and then an examination of how Trump’s behavioral characteristics preclude his ability to fulfill those demands.
  • These two disorders just happen to be the ones that have most commonly been ascribed to Trump by mental-health professionals over the past four years. Of these two disorders, the more commonly discussed when it comes to Trump is narcissistic personality disorder, or NPD—pathological narcissism
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  • “Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity,” might suffice for someone to be elected to the governorship of a state, but not the presidency. Election would “require other talents, and a different kind of merit,” to gain “the esteem and confidence of the whole Union,” or enough of it to win the presidency. As a result, there would be “a constant probability of seeing the station filled by characters pre-eminent for ability and virtue.” This was the Framers’ goal in designing the system that would make “the choice of the person to whom so important a trust was to be confided.”
  • In a nutshell, while carrying out his official duties, a president has to put the country, not himself, first; he must faithfully follow and enforce the law; and he must act with the utmost care in doing all that.
  • can Trump do all that? Does his personality allow him to? Answering those questions doesn’t require mental-health expertise, nor does it really require a diagnosis. You can make the argument for Trump’s unfitness without assessing his mental health: Like James Fallows, for example, you could just ask whether Trump would have been allowed to retain any other job in light of his bizarre conduct
  • More than a diagnosis, what truly matters, as Lincoln’s case shows, is the president’s behavioral characteristics and personality traits. And understanding how people behave and think is not the sole province of professionals; we all do it every day, with family members, co-workers, and others.
  • its criteria for personality disorders—they don’t require a person to lie on a couch and confess his or her innermost thoughts. They turn on how a person behaves in the wild, so to speak.
  • Donald Trump, as president of the United States, is probably the most observable and observed person in the world. I’ve personally met and spoken with him only a few times, but anyone who knows him will tell you that Trump, in a way, has no facade: What you see of him publicly is what you get all the time, although you may get more of it in private
  • accounts of a person’s behavior from laypeople who observe him might be more accurate than information from a clinical interview, and that this is especially true when considering two personality disorders in particular—what the DSM calls narcissistic personality disorder and antisocial personality disorde
  • Though the Constitution’s drafters could hardly have foreseen how the system would evolve, they certainly knew the kind of person they wanted it to produce. “The process of election affords a moral certainty,” Hamilton wrote, “that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.
  • it touches directly upon whether Trump has the capacity to put anyone’s interests—including the country’s and the Constitution’s—above his own.
  • A certain amount of narcissism is healthy, and helpful—it brings with it confidence, optimism, and boldness. Someone with more than an average amount of narcissism may be called a narcissist. Many politicians, and many celebrities, could be considered narcissists
  • “Pathological narcissism begins when people become so addicted to feeling special that, just like with any drug, they’ll do anything to get their ‘high,’ including lie, steal, cheat, betray, and even hurt those closest to them,”
  • The “fundamental life goal” of an extreme narcissist “is to promote the greatness of the self, for all to see,
  • To many mental-health professionals, Donald Trump provides a perfect example of such extreme, pathological narcissism: One clinical psychologist told Vanity Fair that he considers Trump such a “classic” pathological narcissist that he is actually “archiving video clips of him to use in workshops because there’s no better example”
  • The goal of a diagnosis is to help a clinician guide treatment. The question facing the public is very different: Does the president of the United States exhibit a consistent pattern of behavior that suggests he is incapable of properly discharging the duties of his office?
  • Even Trump’s own allies recognize the degree of his narcissism. When he launched racist attacks on four congresswomen of color, Senator Lindsey Graham explained, “That’s just the way he is. It’s more narcissism than anything else.” So, too, do skeptics of assigning a clinical diagnosis. “No one is denying,” Frances told Rolling Stone, “that he is as narcissistic an individual as one is ever likely to encounter.” The president’s exceptional narcissism is his defining characteristic—and understanding that is crucial to evaluating his fitness for office
  • The DSM-5 describes its conception of pathological narcissism this way: “The essential feature of narcissistic personality disorder is a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and lack of empathy that begins by early adulthood and is present in a variety of contexts.”
  • The diagnostic criteria offer a useful framework for understanding the most remarkable features of Donald Trump’s personality, and of his presidency. (1) Exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements?
  • (2) Preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance
  • (3) Believes that he or she is “special” and unique and should only associate with other special or high-status people?
  • Trump claims to be an expert—the world’s greatest—in anything and everything. As one video mash-up shows, Trump has at various times claimed—in all seriousness—that no one knows more than he does about: taxes, income, construction, campaign finance, drones, technology, infrastructure, work visas, the Islamic State, “things” generally, environmental-impact statements, Facebook, renewable energy, polls, courts, steelworkers, golf, banks, trade, nuclear weapons, tax law, lawsuits, currency devaluation, money, “the system,” debt, and politicians.
  • (4) Requires excessive admiration? Last Thanksgiving, Trump was asked what he was most thankful for. His answer: himself, of course. A number of years ago, he made a video for Forbes in which he interviewed two of his children. The interview topic: how great they thought Donald Trump wa
  • (5) A sense of entitlement? (9) Arrogant, haughty behaviors? Trump is the man who, on the infamous Access Hollywood tape, said, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything you want”—including grabbing women by their genitals. He’s the man who also once said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”
  • (8) Envious of others? Here’s a man so unable to stand the praise received by a respected war hero and statesman, Senator John McCain, that he has continued to attack McCain months after McCain’s death;
  • (6) Interpersonally exploitative? Just watch the Access Hollywood tape, or ask any of the hundreds of contractors and employees Trump the businessman allegedly stiffed, or speak with any of the two dozen women who have accused Trump of sexual misconduct, sexual assault, or rape.
  • Finally, (7) Lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings or needs of others? One of the most striking aspects of Trump’s personality is his utter and complete lack of empathy
  • The notorious lawyer and fixer Roy Cohn, who once counseled Trump, said that “Donald pisses ice water,” and indeed, examples of Trump’s utter lack of normal human empathy abound.
  • “It made no sense, Priebus realized, unless you understood … ‘The president has zero psychological ability to recognize empathy or pity in any way.’
  • Experts haven’t suggested that Trump is psychotic, but many have contended that his narcissism and sociopathy are so inordinate that he fits the bill for “malignant narcissism.” Malignant narcissism isn’t recognized as an official diagnosis; it’s a descriptive term coined by the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, and expanded upon by another psychoanalyst, Otto Kernberg, to refer to an extreme mix of narcissism and sociopathy, with a degree of paranoia and sadism mixed in
  • A second disorder also frequently ascribed to Trump by professionals is sociopathy—what the DSM-5 calls antisocial personality disorder
  • Central to sociopathy is a complete lack of empathy—along with “an absence of guilt.” Sociopaths engage in “intentional manipulation, and controlling or even sadistically harming others for personal power or gratification. People with sociopathic traits have a flaw in the basic nature of human beings … They are lacking an essential part of being human.” For its part, the DSM-5 states that the “essential feature of antisocial personality disorder is a pervasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others that begins in childhood or early adolescence and continues into adulthood.”
  • Trump’s sociopathic characteristics sufficiently intertwine with his narcissistic ones that they deserve mention here. These include, to quote the DSM-5, “deceitfulness, as indicated by repeated lying, use of aliases, or conning others.” Trump’s deceitfulness—his lying—has become the stuff of legend; journalists track his “false and misleading claims” as president by the thousands upon thousands.
  • Other criteria for antisocial personality disorder include “failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors, as indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest”; “impulsivity or failure to plan ahead”; and “lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another.
  • As for impulsivity, that essentially describes what gets him into trouble most: It was his “impulsiveness—actually, total recklessness”—that came close to destroying him in the 1980s
  • And lack of remorse? That’s a hallmark of sociopathy, and goes hand in hand with a lack of human conscience. In a narcissistic sociopath, it’s intertwined with a lack of empathy. Trump hardly ever shows remorse, or apologizes, for anything. The one exception: With his presidential candidacy on the line in early October
  • In a way, Trump’s sociopathic tendencies are simply an extension of his extreme narcissism
  • articular, “They change reality to suit themselves in their own mind.” Although Trump “lies because of his sociopathic tendencies,” telling falsehoods to fool others, Dodes argues, he also lies to himself, to protect himself from narcissistic injury. And so Donald Trump has lied about his net worth, the size of the crowd at his inauguration, and supposed voter fraud in the 2016 election.
  • The latter kind of lying, Dodes says, “is in a way more serious,” because it can indicate “a loose grip on reality”—and it may well tell us where Trump is headed in the face of impeachment hearings. Lying to prevent narcissistic injury can metastasize to a more significant loss of touch with reality
  • What kind of human being, let alone politician, would engage in such unempathetic, self-centered behavior while memorializing such horrible tragedies? Only the most narcissistic person imaginable—or a person whose narcissism would be difficult to imagine if we hadn’t seen it ourselves. The evidence of Trump’s narcissism is overwhelming—indeed, it would be a gargantuan task to try to marshal all of it, especially as it mounts each and every day.
  • In the view of some in the mental-health community, such as John Gartner, Trump “exhibits all four” components of malignant narcissism: “narcissism, paranoia, antisocial personality and sadism.”
  • Mental-health professionals have raised a variety of other concerns about Trump’s mental state; the last worth specifically mentioning here is the possibility that, apart from any personality disorder, he may be suffering cognitive decline.
  • His “mental state,” according to Justin A. Frank, a former clinical professor of psychiatry and physician who wrote a book about Trump’s psychology, “include[s] so many psychic afflictions” that a “working knowledge of psychiatric disorders is essential to understanding Trump.” Indeed, as Gartner puts it: “There are a lot of things wrong with him—and, together, they are a scary witch’s brew.”
  • when you line up what the Framers expected of a president with all that we know about Donald Trump, his unfitness becomes obvious. The question is whether he can possibly act as a public fiduciary for the nation’s highest public trust. To borrow from the Harvard Law Review article, can he follow the “proscriptions against profit, bad faith, and self-dealing,” manifest “a strong concern about avoiding ultra vires action” (that is, action exceeding the president’s legal authority), and maintain “a duty of diligence and carefulness”? Given that Trump displays the extreme behavioral characteristics of a pathological narcissist, a sociopath, or a malignant narcissist—take your pick—it’s clear that he can’t.
  • To act as a fiduciary requires you to put someone else’s interests above your own, and Trump’s personality makes it impossible for him to do that. No president before him, at least in recent memory, has ever displayed such obsessive self-regard
  • Indeed, Trump’s view of his presidential powers can only be described as profoundly narcissistic, and his narcissism has compelled him to disregard the Framers’ vision of his constitutional duties in every respect
  • Trump’s incapacity affects all manner of subjects addressed by the presidency, but can be seen most acutely in foreign affairs and national security.
  • All in all, Trump sought to impede and end a significant counterintelligence and criminal investigation—one of crucial importance to the nation—and did so for his own personal reasons. He did precisely the opposite of what his duties require. Indeed, he has shown utter contempt for his duties to the nation
  • hat constitutional mechanisms exist for dealing with a president who cannot or does not comply with his duties, and how should they take the president’s mental and behavioral characteristics into account?
  • it turns out that impeachment is a more practical mechanism
  • It’s also an appropriate mechanism, because the constitutional magic words (other than Treason and Bribery) that form the basis of an impeachment charge—high Crimes and Misdemeanors, found in Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution—mean something other than, and more than, offenses in the criminal-statute books. High Crimes and Misdemeanors is a legal term of art, one that historically referred to breaches of duties—fiduciary duties—by public officeholders. In other words, the question of what constitutes an impeachable offense for a president coincides precisely with whether the president can execute his office in the faithful manner that the Constitution requires.
  • One of the most compelling arguments about the meaning of those words is that the Framers, in Article II’s command that a president faithfully execute his office, imposed upon him fiduciary obligations. As the constitutional historian Robert Natelson explained in the Federalist Society Review, the “founding generation [understood] ‘high … Misdemeanors’ to mean ‘breach of fiduciary duty.’
  • Eighteenth-century lawyers instead used terms such as breach of trust—which describes the same thing. “Parliamentary articles of impeachment explicitly and repetitively described the accused conduct as a breach of trust,” Natelson argues, and 18th-century British legal commentators explained how impeachment for “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” was warranted for all sorts of noncriminal violations that were, in essence, fiduciary breaches.
  • why the discussion of Morris’s suggestion was so brief—the drafters knew what the words historically meant, because, as a House Judiciary Committee report noted in 1974, “at the time of the Constitutional Convention the phrase ‘high Crimes and Misdemeanors’ had been in use for over 400 years in impeachment proceedings in Parliament
  • Certainly Alexander Hamilton knew by the time he penned “Federalist No. 65,” in which he explained that impeachment was for “those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust.
  • What constitutes such an abuse or violation of trust is up to Congress to decide: First the House decides to bring impeachment charges, and then the Senate decides whether to convict on those charges. The process of impeachment by the House and removal by trial in the Senate is thus, in some ways, akin to indictment by a grand jury and trial by a petit jury
  • As Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz explain in their recent book on impeachment, “the Constitution explicitly states that Congress may not end a presidency unless the president has committed an impeachable offense. But nowhere does the Constitution state or otherwise imply that Congress must remove a president whenever that standard is met … In other words, it allows Congress to exercise judgment.”
  • As Tribe and Matz argue, that judgment presents a “heavy burden,” and demands that Congress be “context-sensitive,” and achieve “an understanding of all relevant facts.” A president might breach his trust to the nation once in some small, inconsequential way and never repeat the misbehavior, and Congress could reasonably decide that the game is not worth the candle.
  • In short, now that the House of Representatives has embarked on an impeachment inquiry, one of the most important judgments it must make is whether any identified breaches of duty are likely to be repeated. And if a Senate trial comes to pass, that issue would become central as well to the decision to remove the president from office. That’s when Trump’s behavioral and psychological characteristics should—must—come into pla
  • there’s another reason as well. The people have a right to know, and a need to see. Many people have watched all of Trump’s behavior, and they’ve drawn the obvious conclusion. They know something’s wrong, just as football fans knew that the downed quarterback had shattered his leg. Others have changed the channel, or looked away, or chosen to deny what they’ve seen. But if Congress does its job and presents the evidence, those who are in denial won’t be able to ignore the problem any longer.
Javier E

'We can't go back to normal': how will coronavirus change the world? | World news | The... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ge-from-the-coronavirus-crisis

history culture politics

shared by Javier E on 17 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • Every day brings news of developments that, as recently as February, would have felt impossible – the work of years, not mere days.
  • disasters and emergencies do not just throw light on the world as it is. They also rip open the fabric of normality. Through the hole that opens up, we glimpse possibilities of other worlds
  • he pessimistic view is that a crisis makes bad things worse.
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  • “In a rational world, we would be ramping up production of basic essential supplies – test kits, masks, respirators – not only for our own use, but for poorer countries, too. Because it’s all one battle. But it’s not necessarily a rational world. So there could be a lot of demonisation and calls for isolation. Which will mean more deaths and more suffering worldwide.”
  • prior to 9/11, the US government had been in the process of developing serious regulations designed to give web users real choice about how their personal information was and wasn’t used. “In the course of a few days,” Zuboff says, “the concern shifted from ‘How do we regulate these companies that are violating privacy norms and rights’ to ‘How do we nurture and protect these companies so they can collect data for us?’”
  • “People have a hard time remembering privacy rights when they’re trying to deal with something like a pandemic,” says Vasuki Shastry, a Chatham House fellow who studies the interplay of technology and democracy. “Once a system gets scaled up, it can be very difficult to scale it back down. And then maybe it takes on other uses.”
  • The US Department of Justice has, since the outbreak began, filed a request with Congress for a new rule that would allow judges to suspend courtroom proceedings in emergencies, creating the possibility of people being jailed without ever being able to formally object.
  • In a 2008 report on the legal aspects of pandemic response, prompted by the increase in pandemic flu outbreaks, a team of historians and medical ethicists assembled by the American Civil Liberties Union bemoaned a common tendency – resurgent, in their view, since 9/11 – for government to address public health problems using mindsets more appropriate to tracking down criminals.
  • here’s another school of thought that looks at crisis and sees glimmers of possibility
  • “Ideas that used to be seen as leftwing seem more reasonable to more people. There’s room for change that there wasn’t beforehand. It’s an opening.”
  • Covid-19 has revealed the political status quo to be broken. Long before anyone had heard of the new coronavirus, people died of diseases we knew how to prevent and treat. People lived precarious lives in societies awash with wealth. Experts told us about catastrophic threats on the horizon, including pandemics, and we did next to nothing to prepare for them
  • At the same time, the drastic measures governments have taken in recent weeks testify to just how much power the state does have – the extent of what government can accomplish (and quickly!) when it realises it must act boldly or risk being seen as fundamentally illegitimate. As Pankaj Mishra recently wrote: “It has taken a disaster for the state to assume its original responsibility to protect citizens.”
  • For years, in mainstream politics the conventional line – on everything from healthcare to basic living expenses such as housing – has been that even if the world has its problems, expansive government intervention is not a feasible solution
  • Instead, we have been told that what works best are “marketplace” solutions, which give large roles to corporations motivated not by outdated notions like “the public good” but by a desire to make a profit
  • From this perspective, the task today is not to fight the virus in order to return to business as usual, because business as usual was already a disaster. The goal, instead, is to fight the virus – and in doing so transform business as usual into something more humane and secure.
  • disasters opened up human reserves of improvisation, solidarity and resolve, pockets of purpose and joy, even in the midst of loss and pain
  • In her 2007 book, The Shock Doctrine, the Canadian writer Naomi Klein laid out a dark account of crisis politics. In Klein’s view, there is always Disaster 1 – the earthquake, the storm, the military conflict, the economic slump – and Disaster 2 – the bad things that people with power subsequently get up to, such as ramming through extreme economic reforms or gobbling up post-crisis opportunities for self-enrichment, while the rest of us are too dazed to notice
  • Both address crisis not in terms of what inevitably – or “naturally” – happens as they unfold, but in terms of choices that people make along the way. And both were well-timed to contribute to the political conversations taking shape in the rubble of the financial crash
  • We may not quite all be “in it together” – as always, the poor are hit worse – but there is more truth to the idea than there ever was in the wake of 2008.
  • In this, the optimists believe, there is hope that we might begin to see the world differently.
  • Maybe we can view our problems as shared, and society as more than just a mass of individuals competing against each other for wealth and standing. Maybe, in short, we can understand that the logic of the market should not dominate as many spheres of human existence as we currently allow it to.
  • in the years since publishing The Shock Doctrine, Klein has made climate change her central focus, framing it as the paradigmatic emergency that must be wrenched from the clutches of fossil-fuel profiteers and their enablers in government.
  • the two problems have suggestive similarities. Both will require unusual levels of global cooperation. Both demand changes in behaviour today in the name of reducing suffering tomorrow. Both problems were long predicted with great certainty by scientists, and have been neglected by governments unable to see beyond the next fiscal quarter’s growth statistics
  • both will require governments to take drastic action and banish the logic of the marketplace from certain realms of human activity, while simultaneously embracing public investment.
  • “What is possible politically is fundamentally different when lots of people get into emergency mode – when they fundamentally accept that there’s danger, and that if we want to be safe we need to do everything we can. And it’s been interesting to see that theory validated by the response to the coronavirus
  • Now the challenge is to keep emergency mode activated about climate, where the dangers are orders of magnitude greater. We can’t think we’re going to go ‘back to normal’, because things weren’t normal.”
  • Most people do not feel they or their loved ones could die from the climate crisis this month, and so emergency mode is harder to activate and sustain
  • Alongside these hopeful signs, a far less heartening story is unfolding, which fits Klein’s “shock doctrine” framework. Disaster 1: Covid-19. Disaster 2: the dismantling of even the meagre existing rules designed to protect the environment
  • advocacy groups funded by the plastics industry have launched a public relations blitz on behalf of single-use plastic bags, spreading the unproven claim that the virus is less likely to stick to plastic than to the cloth fabric of reusable bags.
  • On 26 March, following lobbying from the energy industry, the US Environmental Protection Agency announced that, in recognition of the pandemic’s effects on the workforce, it will not punish violations of pollution regulations so long as companies can link those violations to the pandemic. China’s environmental ministry has started waiving inspections that assess the environmental impact of industrial facilitie
  • “It’s good that we’re entering emergency mode about the pandemic,” she said. “But unless we also do it for climate … ” She didn’t finish the sentence.
  • We need to learn to be scared together, to agree on what we’re terrified about.” Only then, she said, would governments be forced to act.
  • The historian Philip Mirowski, author of Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown, warns against complacency. “The left thought it was so obvious to everyone that the crisis revealed the utter bankruptcy of a certain way of looking at the economy,” he told me. “And it wasn’t obvious to everyone, and the left lost.”
  • How do we prevent the world from going back to a version of the way it was before Covid-19, with the virus vanquished but all of the old ongoing disasters still unfolding?
  • “The political outcome of the epidemic,” said Mike Davis, “will, like all political outcomes, be decided by struggle, by battles over interpretation, by pointing out what causes problems and what solves them. And we need to get that analysis out in the world any way we can.”
  • the past few weeks have exposed the fact that the biggest things can always change, at any minute. This simple truth, both destabilising and liberating, is easy to forget. We’re not watching a movie: we’re writing one, together, until the end
Javier E

What Doctors on the Front Lines Wish They'd Known a Month Ago - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...new-york-coronavirus.html

Covid-19 treatment

shared by Javier E on 14 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • Doctors, if you could go back in time, what would you tell yourselves in early March?
  • “What we thought we knew, we don’t know,
  • For the disease that drives this pandemic, certain ironclad emergency medical practices have dissolved almost overnight.
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  • The biggest change: Instead of quickly sedating people who had shockingly low levels of oxygen and then putting them on mechanical ventilators, many doctors are now keeping patients conscious, having them roll over in bed, recline in chairs and continue to breathe on their own — with additional oxygen — for as long as possible.
  • The idea is to get them off their backs and thereby make more lung available.
  • Other doctors are rejiggering CPAP breathing machines, normally used to help people with sleep apnea, or they have hacked together valves and filters.
  • Then there is the space needed inside of buildings and people’s heads. In an instant, soaring atrium lobbies and cafeterias became hospital wards
  • rarely-used telemedicine technology has suddenly taken off, and doctors are holding virtual bedside conferences with scattered family members
  • The number of intubations in New York State has declined to 21 new ones a day, from about 300 per day at the end of March
  • “I’m confident that we will have a lot of answers in months,”
  • People who need breathing tubes, which connect to mechanical ventilators that assist or take over respiration, are rarely in any shape to be on the phone because the level of oxygen in their blood has declined precipitously.If conscious, they are often incoherent and are about to be sedated so they do not gag on the tubes. It is a drastic step.
  • Yet many Covid-19 patients remain alert, even when their oxygen has sharply fallen, for reasons health care workers can only guess.
  • Some patients, by taking oxygen and rolling onto their sides or on their bellies, have quickly returned to normal levels. The tactic is called proning.
  • Dr. Nicholas Caputo followed 50 patients who arrived with low oxygen levels between 69 and 85 percent (95 is normal). After five minutes of proning, they had improved to a mean of 94 percent. Over the next 24 hours, nearly three-quarters were able to avoid intubation;
  • No one knows yet if this will be a lasting remedy, Dr. Caputo said, but if he could go back to early March, he would advise himself and others: “Don’t jump to intubation.”
  • not enough time has passed to say if their improvisations will hold up,
  • One reason is that contrary to expectations, a number of doctors at New York hospitals believe intubation is helping fewer people with Covid-19 than other respiratory illnesses and that longer stays on the mechanical ventilators lead to other serious complications
  • “Intubated patients with Covid lung disease are doing very poorly, and while this may be the disease and not the mechanical ventilation, most of us believe that intubation is to be avoided until unequivocally required,”
  • This shift has lightened the load on nursing staffs and the rest of the hospital. “You put a tube into somebody,” Dr. Levitan said, “and the amount of work required not to kill that person goes up by a factor of 100,” creating a cascade that slows down laboratory results, X-rays and other care.
  • “Obesity is clearly a critical risk factor.”
  • The first patient to rest on it arrived with oxygen saturation in the 40s, breathing rapidly and with an abnormally fast heartbeat, he said. After the patient was given oxygen through a nasal cannula — clear plastic tubes that fit into the nostrils — Dr. Levitan helped her to lay face down on the massage table. The oxygen level in her blood climbed to the mid-90s, he said, her pulse slowed to under 100 and she was breathing at a more normal pace. “She slept for two hours,” he said.
  • For heavier patients, Dr. Levitan advocates combining breathing support from a CPAP machine or regular oxygen with comfortable positioning on a pregnancy massage mattress
  • doctors in the region have started sharing on medical grapevines what it has been like to re-engineer, on the fly, their health care systems, their practice of medicine, their personal lives.
malonema1

London Mayor Sadiq Khan Wants Trump's State Visit to Britain Canceled | National News |... - 0 views

www.usnews.com/...tate-visit-to-britain-canceled

trump US UK London attack crisis

shared by malonema1 on 10 Jun 17 - No Cached
  • London Mayor Wants Trump State Visit Canceled The U.S. president criticized the mayor on Twitter following the London Bridge terror attack.
  • London Mayor Sadiq Khan has again signaled he thinks government officials should rescind U.S. President Donald Trump's invitation for a state visit to Britain later this year. "I don't think we should roll out the red carpet to the president of the U.S.A. in the circumstances where his policies go against everything we stand for," Khan told Britain's Channel 4 News on Monday. Khan and Trump have been at odds in the wake of Saturday's London Bridge truck-and-knife terror attack that left seven people dead and dozens injured. [RELATED: Police Identify All 3 London Attackers] Trump on Sunday took to Twitter to criticize Khan's response to the attack, in which the London mayor said citizens shouldn't be alarmed by seeing more law enforcement on the streets. "At least 7 dead and 48 wounded in terror attack and Mayor of London says there is 'no reason to be alarmed!'" Trump tweeted.ADVERTISING Khan's office initially said the mayor was ignoring Trump's comments, calling the tweet "ill-informed" and accusing Trump of purposefully taking the mayor's remarks out of context. And Trump again lashed out.
Javier E

Covid Prescription: Get the Vaccine, Wait a Month, Return to Normal - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...h-return-to-normal-11615401516

vaccine effects consequences pandemic

shared by Javier E on 12 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • the CDC finally started telling vaccinated people that they can have normal interactions with other vaccinated people—but only in highly limited circumstances. Given the impressive effectiveness of the vaccine, that should have been immediately obvious by applying scientific inference and common sense.
  • Parts of the new guidelines are absurdly restrictive.
  • the CDC didn’t withdraw its advice to avoid air travel after vaccination. A year of prevaccine experience has demonstrated that airplanes aren’t a source of spread. A study conducted for the defense department found that commercial planes have HEPA filtration and airflow that exceed the standards of a hospital operating room.
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  • An unpublished study conducted by the Israeli Health Ministry and Pfizer showed that vaccination reduced transmission by 89% to 94% and almost totally prevented hospitalization and death, according to press reports. Immunity kicks in fully about four weeks after the first vaccine dose, and then you are essentially bulletproof.
  • On a positive note, the CDC did say that fully vaccinated people who are asymptomatic don’t need to be tested.
  • that obvious recommendation should have come two months ago, before wasting so many tests on people who have high levels of circulating antibodies from vaccination.
  • self-harm among kids increased as much as 300% last year in some parts of the country
  • The CDC highlights the vaccines’ stunning success but is ridiculously cautious about its implications. Public-health officials focus myopically on transmission risk while all but ignoring the broader health crisis stemming from isolation. The CDC acknowledges “potential” risks of isolation, but doesn’t go into details.
  • Separating family members was excessive and cruel, driven by narrow thinking that focused singularly on reducing viral transmission risk, heedless of the harm to the quality of human life.
  • As people yearn to be with their loved ones and rebuild communities, we shouldn’t repeat that mistake. We cannot exaggerate the public-health threat, as we did with hospital visitation rules, and keep crushing the human spirit with overly restrictive policies for vaccinated Americans.
  • Loneliness has become a public-health crisis. In pre-Covid times, it was estimated that 20% of American’s struggled with loneliness, a figure that has surely multiplied faster than research has been able to measure
  • n its guidance the CDC says the risks of infection in vaccinated people “cannot be completely eliminated.” True, we don’t have conclusive data that guarantees vaccination reduces risk to zero. We never will. We are operating in the realm of medical discretion based on the best available data, as practicing physicians have always done
  • I too will invoke “common sense” to answer the big question so many are asking: What am I allowed to do after I’ve been vaccinated? Once a month has passed after your first shot, go back to normal.
brickol

Mulvaney's twin admissions put Trump at the center of emoluments and Ukraine controvers... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...9-b648-76bcf86eb67e_story.html

trump politics Ukraine

shared by brickol on 19 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Trump did, in fact, withhold aid to Ukraine because he wanted the government there to investigate Democrats.
  • White House acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney turned the press briefing room into a sort of confession chamber, openly admitting to several acts that could deepen the legal predicament for the president. Trump is facing an impeachment inquiry into whether he has abused his office for personal and political gain.
  • In admitting that Trump had personally intervened to award a multimillion-dollar summit to his own company, and that the president had also used taxpayer money as leverage to push a Ukrainian investigation into Democrats, Mulvaney embraced a classic Trumpian tactic: saying the quiet — and potentially illegal — part out loud.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • In a statement late Thursday, Mulvaney denied the quid pro quo he had previously defended as appropriate and normal.
  • he described why Trump had intervened over the summer to block nearly $400 million in aid Congress had appropriated for Ukraine.
  • Mulvaney first said the president blocked the aid because he was concerned about corruption in Ukraine and the lack of European support for the country.
  • The reference to the hacked Democratic National Committee’s email server elevated a Trump-backed conspiracy theory that Ukraine was involved in election interference in 2016, something U.S. intelligence officials have repeatedly attributed to Russia.
  • In admitting that Trump had linked politics with his Ukraine policy, Mulvaney said that critics were simply overreacting.“I have news for everybody: Get over it,” he said. “There is going to be political influence in foreign policy.”
  • “If the White House was withholding aid in regards to the cooperation of any investigation at the Department of Justice, that is news to us,” a Justice Department official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to contradict the acting White House chief of staff.
  • Whipple said Mulvaney’s strategy has been to try to normalize Trump’s un­or­tho­dox behavior by making the “insane” seem commonplace.“Trump’s actions are not defendable so the response is ‘Let’s just act like this is normal,’ ” he said. “There’s nothing normal about it.”
  • Several State Department officials have told congressional investigators they objected to Trump’s push to give his personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, a central role in Ukraine policy.
katherineharron

US Coronavirus: A top official says hospitalizations and deaths will keep climbing as C... - 0 views

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

covid

shared by katherineharron on 19 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • An end to the Covid-19 pandemic may be in sight with more good news on vaccine candidates, but for now "this will get worse," a top US official said Wednesday.
  • "We have had one million cases documented over the past week, our rate of rise is higher than it even was in the summer, we have hospitalizations going up 25% week over week,"
  • "There are so many more cases that we have, that deaths are going up."
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • Infection numbers in Massachusetts are eight times what they were on Labor Day and hospitalizations have quadrupled.
  • In Illinois, the virus is now the third leading cause of death behind heart disease and cancer.
  • More than 250,000 Americans have so far died of the virus -- a higher death toll than any other country -- and a forecast by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention projects that number could rise up to 298,000 by December 12.
  • "It's all about absolute adherence to wearing a mask, avoiding crowds, and yes, we can keep the economy open but we're going to have to diminish indoor places like indoor dining and restaurants."
  • Only one US state, Hawaii, is showing a decrease in new cases greater than 10% compared to the previous week. Five others -- Idaho, North Dakota, Iowa, Illinois and Arkansas -- are holding steady, while the remaining 44 states are showing increases in new cases greater than at least 10% compared to the week prior.
  • the 7-day average of new cases is at its highest ever: 161,165 cases a day. That's up 27% compared to last week.
  • "Virtual gatherings remain the safest way to bring friends and family together from distant points. Outdoor settings can reduce the risks of gatherings with people outside of your household," the group said, also highlighting the importance of face coverings.
  • New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy told CNN he wanted people to stay with their immediate family on Thanksgiving and to keep gatherings small -- "not just for next Thursday ... but for the next couple of months."
  • "This is not a normal year, it's not a normal Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas, New Year's. Folks have got to stay small, stay within the bubble of their own loved ones, and if we do that, that will be a down payment on a back-to-normal holiday season next year."
  • There were 79,410 hospitalizations reported on Wednesday, a record high for the United States, according to the Covid Tracking Project. The country is now averaging 72,120 hospitalizations over the last 7 days -- a 19.76% increase compared to last week.
  • "As a health care provider we are on 250 days of having a Covid patient in our ICU right now,"
  • "So every day, you walk into work, someone is super sick, someone is potentially dying that day."
  • "On a normal day, I don't have people dying every day," she said, adding that first week she had three people die in one day -- two of them, from Covid-19.
  • Students in the country's largest school district are transitioning to remote learning on Thursday following the closure of New York City schools. The decision came after the city's test infection rate reached 3%, a threshold Mayor Bill de Blasio said would trigger such a closure.
  • Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear also announced new measures that will go into effect Friday, including limiting social gatherings to a maximum of two people from no more than two households, and prohibiting indoor service for restaurants and bars. And starting Monday, schools should begin remote learning, the governor said.
  • In Minnesota, the governor said the state is at a "breaking point" and announced a four-week dial back that will "help prevent more families from losing a loved one and ensure our hospitals can treat those who fall ill."
  • "As hospitals near the crisis of turning away new patients, continuing as things are is simply not sustainable," Gov. Tim Walz said.
  • A final analysis of the Phase 3 trial of Pfizer's Covid-19 vaccine shows it was 95% effective in preventing infections, even in older adults and caused no serious safety concerns, the company said Wednesday. It said it will seek a US Food and Drug Administration emergency use authorization "within days."
  • The Pfizer analysis came just days after a separate vaccine maker, Moderna, released early data showing its vaccine was about 95% effective.
  • Distribution is expected to begin within 24 hours after a vaccine receives the green light, according to Gen. Gustave Perna, who is helping oversee Operation Warp Speed.
  • "We'll be more ready next week, and if the vaccine is available, we have to go with what we have. We may not be perfect, but every day we're more prepared than we were the day before," he added.
saberal

Morocco Joins List of Arab Nations to Begin Normalizing Relations With Israel - The New... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...israel-morocco-trump.html

politics US history policy

shared by saberal on 10 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • Morocco follows Bahrain, Sudan and the United Arab Emirates in setting aside generations of hostilities toward the Jewish state, part of a major foreign policy effort of the Trump administration.
  • WASHINGTON — The White House said on Thursday that Morocco had agreed to begin normalizing relations with Israel, becoming the fourth Arab state this fall to do so and advancing a major foreign goal for President Trump as he nears the end of his administration.
  • Both Mr. Trump and Mr. Netanyahu made the so-called Abraham Accords — normalized relations between Israel and Muslim states that long have been aligned with the cause of the Palestinians — a focus of their respective campaigns to hold onto power.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • He said more than one million Israelis are descended from those who originally lived in Morocco.
  • The United Nations and much of the rest of the world refused to affirm Morocco’s claim over the area, and the United States had supported a 1991 cease-fire between the kingdom and the Western Sahara’s pro-independence Polisario Front.
  • After a border incident last month, the Polisario declared war on Morocco, shattering a three-decade cease-fire and threatening a full-blown military conflict in the disputed desert territory in northwest Africa.
  • The deal is likely to be highly popular in Israel,
  • By contrast, Sudan has stopped short of declaring full and normalized relations with Israel and recently threatened to withdraw from the agreement if Congress does not give it immunity from terrorism lawsuits that families of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks want to bring against the country for harboring Osama bin Laden years before the attacks.
Javier E

Jan. 6th and 'Why We Did It' - by Tim Miller - The Triad - 0 views

thetriad.thebulwark.com/...jan-6th-and-why-we-did-it

conspirators conformism compromise crisis politics history trump

shared by Javier E on 24 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • There was no fraud. They all knew there was no fraud. They all heard Gabriel Sterling’s plea to stop the madness before someone got hurt. And they all knew that in a few weeks Donald Trump would be gone, whether he believed it or not.So the most common rationale presented for sucking up to him—maintaining proximity to power—was moot!And yet, despite all that, we can fit the Republican politicos who actively resisted Trump’s cuckoo coup plot into a single homeroom.Why?
  • the most common rationale presented for sucking up to him—maintaining proximity to power—was moot!
  • despite all that, we can fit the Republican politicos who actively resisted Trump’s cuckoo coup plot into a single homeroom.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • they felt trapped. So they made a disastrous calculation and decided that the only way to win these two Senate seats was to humor the dangerous president for a little while longer.
  • From their perspective, the violence that Sterling had warned about was hypothetical—merely empty threats. Meanwhile, they perceived the threat to Mitch McConnell’s Senate majority to be very real if their candidates didn’t support Trump’s batshit plot.
  • The result? David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler became the only two major-party candidates since the Civil War to run campaigns promising that they would help overturn a legitimate election if they got to Washington.
  • And all of their advisers all agreed that this was the best of the bad options.That’s how quickly it happens. That’s how people like Clarence and all the good ol’ boy consultants on “Team Normal” sacrifice their integrity out of ambition and loyalty to a team . . . in only a few weeks.
  • That’s how quickly it happens. That’s how people like Clarence and all the good ol’ boy consultants on “Team Normal” sacrifice their integrity out of ambition and loyalty to a team . . . in only a few weeks.
  • Team Normal went about their business and convinced themselves that doing so was just the latest little sacrifice required by their career. That the bad actors were somewhere out there. On Team Crazy.
  • And so when the GOP political class was faced with the hardship of a mob demanding they follow the orders of a madman who wanted to undermine our democracy, they began telling themselves a story in which it was not their responsibility to put their own heads on the chopping block.
  • People prefer to tell themselves stories that are convenient. We prefer stories in which the hardship was out of our hands. Where we did the best we could given the circumstances. Stories that center the trauma we overcame rather than the sacrifice we avoided.
  • But inside, they knew that what they were doing was, at best, an icky part of doing business—and at worst, it amounted to direct support for a horror that their kids and grandkids will read about in their history books.
  • So they made a speech on the Senate floor to ease the feeling of guilt. Or tossed a few bucks into Raffensperger’s campaign kitty. Or flattered themselves with daydreams about how next time they’ll take down the real bad guys.
  • Or tossed a few bucks into Raffensperger’s campaign kitty. Or flattered themselves with daydreams about how next time they’ll take down the real bad guys.
  • But we all know they’ll just get in line again.
  • Their mental contortions are not solely to blame for the precipice on which we sit. It’s true that there were more directly implicated evildoers—the Jeffrey Clarks who tried to seize the throne when the moment presented itself.But without the enablers, the evildoers would have had no opportunity to execute their plot.
  • Understanding why the “normals” did what they did is crucial if we want any of them to be shaken free from their cozy complacence. If we are going to avoid the next threat to our democracy, we will need these functionaries to tell themselves a story where they are responsible for getting us out of the hardship. Or, even better, a story where they can be the heroes.
Javier E

Coalition Governing Could Be Britain's New Normal Despite Liberal Democrats' Troubles -... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...iberal-democrats-troubles.html

coalition UK politics government

shared by Javier E on 14 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Britain’s first formal coalition since World War II has functioned surprisingly well, navigating policy differences, putting in place austerity measures and now presiding over modest economic growth.
  • With rigid party allegiances breaking down, voters seem relaxed about the idea of a coalition, even if they tell pollsters they do not much like the current one. “Most people appear to accept that it could become the new normal,”
  • “If this coalition has worked — and I think the British people think that it has — I think it will make other coalitions more likely,” Mr. Ashdown said. “I can think of no greater constitutional change than to move Britain permanently away from single-party electoral dictatorship in government.”
Javier E

What's Wrong With 'All Lives Matter'? - NYTimes.com - 1 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...ts-wrong-with-all-lives-matter

white supremacy white privilege dignity racism culture

shared by Javier E on 14 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • what we see is that some lives matter more than others, that some lives matter so much that they need to be protected at all costs, and that other lives matter less, or not at all. And when that becomes the situation, then the lives that do not matter so much, or do not matter at all, can be killed or lost, can be exposed to conditions of destitution, and there is no concern, or even worse, that is regarded as the way it is supposed to be
  • we have to remember that under slavery black lives were considered only a fraction of a human life, so the prevailing way of valuing lives assumed that some lives mattered more
  • when and where did black lives ever really get free of coercive force? One reason the chant “Black Lives Matter” is so important is that it states the obvious but the obvious has not yet been historically realized. So it is a statement of outrage and a demand for equality, for the right to live free of constraint, but also a chant that links the history of slavery, of debt peonage, segregation, and a prison system geared toward the containment, neutralization and degradation of black lives,
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • We can see the videos and know what is obviously true, but it is also obviously true that police and the juries that support them obviously do not see what is obvious, or do not wish to see.
  • we cannot name all the black men and women whose lives are snuffed out all because a police officer perceives a threat, sees the threat in the person, sees the person as pure threat. Perceived as a threat even when unarmed or completely physically subdued, or lying in the ground, as Rodney King clearly was, or coming back home from a party on the train and having the audacity to say to a policeman that he was not doing anything wrong and should not be detained: Oscar Grant.
  • also a police system that more and more easily and often can take away a black life in a flash all because some officer perceives a threat.
  • The perception is then ratified as a public perception at which point we not only must insist on the dignity of black lives, but name the racism that has become ratified as public perception.
  • to make that universal formulation concrete, to make that into a living formulation, one that truly extends to all people, we have to foreground those lives that are not mattering now, to mark that exclusion, and militate against it. Achieving that universal, “all lives matter,” is a struggle
  • it is not just that black lives matter, though that must be said again and again. It is also that stand-your-ground and racist killings are becoming increasingly normalized, which is why intelligent forms of collective outrage have become obligatory.
  • At least in these cases that have galvanized the nation and the world in protest, we all see the twisted logic that results in the exoneration of the police who take away the lives of unarmed black men and women. And why is that the case? It is not because what the police and their lawyers present as their thinking in the midst of the situation is very reasonable. No, it is because that form of thinking is becoming more “reasonable” all the time. In other words, every time a grand jury or a police review board accepts this form of reasoning, they ratify the idea that blacks are a population against which society must be defended, and that the police defend themselves and (white) society, when they preemptively shoot unarmed black men in public space.
  • What has led us to this place? J.B.: Racism has complex origins, and it is important that we learn the history of racism to know what has led us to this terrible place. But racism is also reproduced in the present, in the prison system, new forms of population control, increasing economic inequality that affects people of color disproportionately.
  • I’ve heard that some white people have held signs that read “All Lives Matter.” J.B.: When some people rejoin with “All Lives Matter” they misunderstand the problem, but not because their message is untrue. It is true that all lives matter, but it is equally true that not all lives are understood to matter which is precisely why it is most important to name the lives that have not mattered, and are struggling to matter in the way they deserve.
  • we cannot have a race-blind approach to the questions: which lives matter? Or, which lives are worth valuing? If we jump too quickly to the universal formulation, “all lives matter,” then we miss the fact that black people have not yet been included in the idea of “all lives.”
  • So the police see a threat when there is no gun to see, or someone is subdued and crying out for his life, when they are moving away or cannot move. These figures are perceived as threats even when they do not threaten, when they have no weapon, and the video footage that shows precisely this is taken to be a ratification of the police’s perception
  • whiteness is figured as a young virgin whose future husband is white — this characterization ratifies the sentiments that oppose miscegenation and defend norms or racial purity. But whose sexuality is imperiled in this scene? After all, black women and girls were the ones who were raped, humiliated and disposed of under conditions of slavery, and it was black families who were forcibly destroyed: black kinship was not recognized as kinship that matters
  • women of color, and black feminists in particular, have struggled for years against being the sexual property of either white male power or black masculinity, against poverty, and against the prison industry, so there are many reasons it is necessary to define racism in ways that acknowledge the specific forms it takes against men, women, and transgendered people of color.
  • there are white people who may be very convinced that they are not racist, but that does not necessarily mean that they have examined, or worked though, how whiteness organizes their lives, values, the institutions they support, how they are implicated in ways of talking, seeing, and doing that constantly and tacitly discriminate. Undoing whiteness has to be difficult work, but it starts, I think, with humility, with learning history, with white people learning how the history of racism persists in the everyday vicissitudes of the present, even as some of us may think we are “beyond” such a history, or
  • It is difficult and ongoing work, calling on an ethical disposition and political solidarity that risks error in the practice of solidarity.
  • It is probably important and satisfying as well to let one’s whiteness recede by joining in acts of solidarity with all those who oppose racism.
  • ut just as certain kinds of violence and inequality get established as “normal” through the proceedings that exonerate police of the lethal use of force against unarmed black people, so whiteness, or rather its claim to privilege, can be disestablished over time
  • it is probably an error, in my view, for white people to become paralyzed with guilt and self-scrutiny. The point is rather to consider those ways of valuing and devaluing life that govern our own thinking and acting, understanding the social and historical reach of those ways of valuing.
  • Whiteness is not an abstraction; its claim to dominance is fortified through daily acts which may not seem racist at all precisely because they are considered “normal.”
  • There are many ways to do this, in the street, the office, the home, and in the media. Only through such an ever-growing cross-racial struggle against racism can we begin to achieve a sense of all the lives that really do matter.
  • This week’s conversation is with Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor in the department of comparative literature and the program of critical theory at the University of California, Berkeley.
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