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clairemann

Sinema Says She Will Not Support Changing Filibuster - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...sinema-voting-rights-bill.html

us politics voting senate fillabuster

shared by clairemann on 13 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • Senator Kyrsten Sinema, Democrat of Arizona, declared that she would not support undermining the Senate filibuster to enact new laws under any circumstances.
  • she believed that a unilateral Democratic move to weaken the filibuster would only foster growing political division.
  • “These bills help treat the symptoms of the disease, but they do not fully address the disease itself,”
    • clairemann
      clairemann on 13 Jan 22
       
      is she being too idealistic?
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Ms. Sinema has been under pressure from her colleagues to drop her opposition to a rules change, but her refusal to reverse course appeared to doom the bills in the Senate.
  • the House approved the new measure on a party-line vote of 220 to 203 after a heated partisan debate in which lawmakers clashed over the state of election laws across the country.
  • Democrats said the legislation was urgently needed to offset efforts taking hold in Republican-led states to make it more difficult to vote after Democratic gains in the 2020 elections and former President Donald J. Trump’s false claim that the vote was stolen.
    • clairemann
      clairemann on 13 Jan 22
       
      the legislation is reactionary - could it backfire when the senate become R?
  • “There are people who don’t want you to vote and they are using every tool in the toolbox to make it harder,”
  • Democrats of “hijacking” the space agency measure to push through legislation that they said represented federal intrusion into state voting operations to give an unfair advantage to Democratic candidates.
kennyn-77

House, Mostly Along Party Lines, Censures Gosar for Violent Video - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...paul-gosar-video.html

new york times censure house republican

shared by kennyn-77 on 18 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • A bitterly divided U.S. House of Representatives voted narrowly on Wednesday to censure Representative Paul Gosar, Republican of Arizona, for posting an animated video that depicted him killing a Democratic congresswoman and assaulting President Biden.
  • The vote was 223 to 207, with just two Republicans, Representatives Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, joining Democrats in favor. One other Republican, Representative David Joyce of Ohio, voted “present.”
  • They said the rapid move to pass a censure resolution exposed the Democrats’ true agenda: silencing conservatives by branding them as instigators of violence.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • “When a member uses his or her national platform to encourage violence, tragically, people listen,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California said, adding that “depictions of violence can foment actual violence, as witnessed by this chamber on Jan. 6, 2021.”
  • “There’s an old definition of abuse of power: rules for thee but not for me,” Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the Republican leader, said, repeating the phrase over and over. Going through a litany of House Democrats who have offended Republicans, he warned that every one of them might soon be serving — and potentially penalized — under the rules of a Republican-led House.
  • The last time the House censured one of its members, the vote capped months of humiliating headlines over tax evasion, self-dealing and other ethical lapses that had blemished the reputation of one of Congress’s most powerful and colorful characters, Representative Charles B. Rangel, Democrat of New York. Ms. Pelosi herself read out that rebuke, which passed overwhelmingly with the support of many Democrats.
  • e posting online of a crudely edited video drawn from a popular anime series — and more sinister. In his video, Mr. Gosar is depicted slashing the neck of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, amid imagery of violence meted out against hordes of refugees and migrants.
  • Mr. Gosar showed no remorse.
  • And many warned that a Republican majority — which could come as soon as 2023 — would not hesitate to take advantage of the precedents set by Democrats.
  • “They are really setting an ugly precedent, and the bad news for Democrats is that we’re going to take back the House and we’re going to hold the majority,” Ms. Greene said.
  • Not only does Mr. Gosar’s character kill Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s, and swing swords at one with the face of Mr. Biden, but the makers of the video also include images of refugees and migrants making their way into the United States only to be repelled by brutal force.
  • Mr. Gosar has not apologized for posting the video, downplaying it as “symbolic” and privately blaming staff aides for circulating it.
  • “I don’t think this should be an issue about party, about partisan politics,” Ms. Cheney said. “If a Democrat had done this, that would require censure as well.”
  • Censure fell out of favor, and the bar for it was raised considerably, in the 20th century. In 1978, Representative Charles C. Diggs was censured after he was convicted on 11 counts of mail fraud and 18 counts of false statements in a payroll fraud investigation. On one day in 1983, Representatives Gerry E. Studds and Daniel B. Crane were both censured for having sex with 17-year-old congressional pages, criminal offenses that would likely warrant a far more dramatic response today.
sidneybelleroche

Andrew Yang is 'breaking up' with the Democratic Party and is now an independent - CNNP... - 0 views

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

shared by sidneybelleroche on 04 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • Andrew Yang, who unsuccessfully sought the 2020 presidential nomination and New York mayoralty this year as a Democrat, said Monday he is "breaking up" with the Democratic Party and has registered as an independent.
  • "I changed my voting registration from 'Democrat' to 'Independent' today. It was a strangely emotional experience," Yang wrote
  • "Breaking up with the Democratic Party feels like the right thing to do because I believe I can have a greater impact this way."
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Yang, 46, wrote there had been "an odd fit" between him and the party, expressing that he was not "very ideological" but "practical" and that making partisan arguments "particularly expressing what I often see as performative sentiment -- is sometimes uncomfortable for me."
  • "I've seen politicians publicly eviscerate each other and then act collegial or friendly backstage a few minutes later. A lot of it is theatre," Yang said. "Perhaps it's the nature of my upbringing, but I'm actually more comfortable trying to fix the system than being a part of it."Read More
  • "Many politicians seem to be playing to their base rather than trying to persuade those in the middle," he wrote.
Javier E

How America's Realtors Repurposed Freedom to Defend Segregation - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...620709

freedom ideology libertarian realtors choice discrimination history culture politics policy

shared by Javier E on 30 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • Conservatives in America have, in recent months, used the idea of freedom to argue against wearing masks, oppose vaccine mandates, and justify storming the Capitol. They routinely refer to themselves as “freedom-loving Americans.” Freedom, as a cause, today belongs almost entirely to the right.
  • The right to be treated equally, to not be discriminated against, to choose where to live, was not part of American freedom but a special privilege.
  • The conservative use of the idea of absolute freedom, of freedom as your personal property, to shift American politics to the right came shortly after King’s speech, and indeed was a direct reaction to his argument that one’s own freedom depended on everyone else’s
  • ...41 more annotations...
  • conservative activists and business leaders designed an opposite idea of American freedom to protect their own interests
  • Realtors had big incentives for maintaining segregation. Having invented it in the early 1900s as a marketing tool for selling homes, they had made segregation central to their business practices. They created racial covenants to exclude members of minority groups from new developments, existing neighborhoods, and entire cities and shaped federal redlining maps, all premised on the idea that anyone selling to minority families was destroying the future of all the neighbors.
  • Despite the Supreme Court outlawing court enforcement of racial covenants in 1948, Realtors used racial steering—such as lying to minority prospective buyers that a home had just been sold and controlling newspaper real-estate listings—so effectively that by the early ’60s, Black Americans were excluded from 98 percent of new homes and 95 percent of neighborhoods.
  • in asking voters to constitutionally authorize residential discrimination in Proposition 14, Realtors had a fundamental problem. How, at the height of the civil-rights movement, could they publicly campaign for sanctioning discrimination in California?
  • Victory would depend, realized Spike Wilson, the president of the California Real Estate Association, on convincing the large majority of white voters—who did not want to see themselves as racially prejudiced in any way—that the Realtors were campaigning not for discrimination but for American freedom.
  • Realtors would need to secretly and systematically redefine American freedom as the freedom to discriminate—to challenge the idea at the heart of the civil-rights movement itself.
  • the national Realtors’ organization created a secret action kit to oppose fair housing everywhere.
  • The kit’s detailed scripts instructed Realtors to “focus on freedom” and avoid “discussion of emotionally charged subjects,” such as “inferiority of races.”
  • Freedom, the kit explained, meant each owner’s right to discriminate, and Realtors were in favor of “freedom for all”: the equal rights of all owners to choose whom to sell to. Realtors claimed that they, unlike civil-rights advocates, were color-blind.
  • Wilson drafted a Property Owners’ Bill of Rights that Realtors advertised in newspapers nationwide, emphasizing owners’ absolute right to dispose of their property—never mentioning anyone’s right to buy or rent a home in the first place
  • This was not always the case. In the early 1960s, civil-rights activists invoked freedom as the purpose of their struggle. Martin Luther King Jr. used the word equality once at the March on Washington, but he used the word freedom 20 times.
  • Realtors thus made government the enemy, not minority groups
  • Thus, the more disparate the issues on which this idea of freedom was invoked—abortion, guns, public schools, gender rights, campaign finance, climate change—the more powerful the message became.
  • By making state bureaucrats the enemy, Realtors could be on the side of the underdog, the individual owner. Proposition 14, Realtors claimed, was not about race but about “the rights of the individual.”
  • To discriminate simply means to choose, Realtors insisted. Freedom of choice required the right to discriminate.
  • To be in favor of Proposition 14, to limit where millions of fellow Americans could live, did not mean that you were prejudiced but that you believed in individual freedom.
  • Wilson cited Abraham Lincoln: “We are involved in a great battle for liberty and freedom. We have prepared a final resting place for the drive to destroy individual freedom.”
  • King’s terms evoked his speech at the March on Washington, but he was now defending shared freedom not against southern diehards but against northern salesmen promoting color-blind “freedom of choice.”
  • Proposition 14’s sweeping passage stunned politicians in both parties. The Realtors’ victory was overwhelming, with 65 percent of the total votes in favor, including 75 percent of the white vote and 80 percent of the white union vote.
  • Color-blind freedom meant that government must be oblivious to, must forever allow, organized private discrimination.
  • Reagan and other conservatives saw that the Realtors had zeroed in on something extremely powerful—something whose full force would not be limited to housing segregation but could be used on virtually any issue.
  • Realtors had shown how conservatives could succeed. If this idea of freedom could triumph in California, it could work anywhere.
  • though Realtors have disavowed their past arguments, the vision of freedom they created has had lasting effects on American politics as a whole.
  • This vision of freedom proved so enduring because it solved three structural problems for American conservatism.
  • First, Realtors used the language of individual freedom, of libertarianism, to justify its seeming opposite, community conformity.
  • Here was a way to unite the two separate and competing strands of conservatism, to link libertarians and social conservatives in defense of American freedom—and create the way many, if not most, Americans understand freedom today.
  • Reagan, running for governor, adopted the Realtors’ cause and their message as his own: “If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house, he has a right to do so.”
  • a unifying idea: freedom of choice.
  • Second, by defining as freedom what government seemed to be taking away from “ordinary Americans,” Realtors helped create a polarizing, transcendent view of what was at stake in our politics
  • This picture of government taking away your rights would provide a compelling reason, far beyond economics, for millions of union members, Catholics, and white Americans who had long been part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s coalition to see, in issue after issue, why they should define themselves as conservatives.
  • Timeliest of all, the Realtors’ redefinition of freedom offered a common ideology for something new in modern America: a national conservative political party
  • The Realtors’ color-blind freedom, which had proved so successful in California, could unite southerners, working-class northern Democrats, and conservative and moderate Republicans in a new national majority party—one very different from the Republican Party whose congressmen had voted 80 percent in favor of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts.
  • Over time, the internal dynamics of a national conservative party would only push it further and further toward those who most ardently embraced the Realtors’ vision of freedom as the only meaning of American freedom. This dynamic has produced today’s Republican Party.
  • Republican politicians now view every issue through this single lens: that American freedom means placing one’s own absolute rights over those of others.
  • To go against that credo, to view freedom as belonging to the country itself and, as such, to everyone equally, threatens the party’s most basic tenet.
  • This idea of freedom is based on a technique that the Realtors perfected. They identified a single, narrow, obscure right, an owner’s right to choose a buyer—which Realtors themselves had restricted for decades with racial covenants—as American freedom itself.
  • Elevating as absolute a right rarely mentioned before, so government cannot limit it or protect the rights of others, became the model for the conservative movement
  • The concept can be and has been used regarding virtually any issue.
  • Everything that is not one of these carefully selected rights becomes, by definition, a privilege that government cannot protect, no matter how fundamental.
  • Since January 6, two-thirds of Republicans—more than 40 percent of all Americans—now see voting not as a basic right, an essential part of our freedom, but as a privilege for those who deserve it.
  • This picture of freedom has a purpose: to effectively prioritize the freedoms of certain Americans over the freedoms of others—without directly saying so
Javier E

Opinion | How Economists Missed the Big Disinflation - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...sinflation-interest-rates.html

fed inflation recession economist bias pessimism 2023

shared by Javier E on 16 Aug 23 - No Cached
  • it’s not clear to me that economists who had predicted that getting inflation under control — it’s down a lot, although not all the way — would require years of very high unemployment are engaging in a similar reckoning. They should. In particular, they should ask themselves whether inflation pessimism was in part caused by a form of bias that has had negative effects on a lot of economic policymaking — not partisan bias, but the urge to sound serious by calling for hard choices and sacrifice.
  • let me talk about what went wrong with so many recent economic predictions.
  • mainstream predictions about inflation and unemployment made late last year — economic projections by the Federal Reserve and by professional forecasters surveyed by the Philadelphia Fed. Perhaps surprisingly, both more or less correctly predicted the inflation decline we’re actually seeing.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Both forecasts, however, assumed that disinflation would require a substantial rise in unemployment. The professional forecasters predicted 4.4 percent unemployment by the fourth quarter, the Fed 4.6 percent. Since the actual unemployment rate in July was only 3.5 percent, to meet those predictions would require that the economy fall off a cliff starting just about now — and there are no signs that this is happening.
  • Getting inflation down, a chorus of economists insisted, would require much bigger increases in unemployment. Most famously, Larry Summers declared that we would need something like two years of 7.5 percent unemployment to get inflation down to 2 percent, but others offered broadly similar if less extreme diagnoses.
  • I’m still seeing a lot of excuses — two, in particular
  • One is the claim that much of the progress against inflation is in some sense illusory, that underlying inflation is still well above 4 percent
  • the preponderance of the evidence — plus the results of hands-free algorithms that use a consistent procedure to extract the signal from the noise — suggests underlying inflation around 3 percent and dropping.
  • The other is the claim that disinflation pessimists were simply applying standard economic models, so that the fault lay in the models, not themselves.
  • that’s simply not true. Standard models say that disinflation is very costly if persistent high inflation has become entrenched in expectations.
  • inflation pessimists really need to do what inflation optimists did a year ago, and ask how they got it so wrong, effectively calling for policies that would have put millions out of work.
  • it wasn’t partisanship; America’s right has become so divorced from empirical reality that it has played no role in this debate
  • What I do suspect, however, is that some very good economists got caught up in a version of the Very Serious People problem of the 2010s, in which the desire to seem hardheaded led many elite voices to obsess over budget deficits when they should have been focused on inadequate job creation.
  • The good news is that while the Fed did, in effect, try to engineer a recession to control inflation, it didn’t succeed: Despite rising interest rates, the economy just kept chugging along. Why that happened is another question. But pessimists really need to grapple with the fact that disinflation happened anyway.
Javier E

The Trump Indictment Puts the GOP on Trial - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...674813

trump indictment 2023 atlantic stakes GOP response

shared by Javier E on 02 Aug 23 - No Cached
  • The GOP made its Faustian bargain years ago. Early in Trump’s presidency there was a transmutation; his brutal style of politics, his lies and conspiracy theories, and his corruption, which were once tolerated, became celebrated.
  • The base of the Republican Party fell in love with the Trump Show—with his “owning the libs” and willingness to validate conservatives’ grievances and resentments, his chaos-creating ways, and his capacity to shatter norms and channel hatreds. To his supporters, Trump is entertaining and cathartic, a “fighter,” a middle finger to an establishment they revile. Every criticism of him, every legal action taken against him, provides them with one more reason to rally around him. The stronger the evidence against him, the deeper their devotion to him and the more intense their rage at those who call him out
  • It never came, because most Republicans—some cynical, some too afraid to speak out, some cultlike in their devotion to Trump—decided early on to reject any evidence that would discomfort them, that would call into question their partisan loyalties, that would cause them to have serious second thoughts. Most of all, they decided to reject any evidence showing that their opponents were right about Trump and they were wrong. They decided that the awful things Trump has done can’t be true because they don’t want them to be true. This is their political a priori.
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  • It doesn’t matter to these Republicans that their assertions have no basis in fact; for them, words have no intrinsic meaning. A party that once portrayed itself as a fierce critic of relativism and a fierce defender of objective truth now delights in debasing words in order to gain and maintain political power. Theirs is the ethic of Thrasymachus, the cynical Sophist in Plato’s Republic who believes that might makes right and that injustice is better than justice.
  • The effect is to sow distrust in our legal institutions. That’s the point. Delegitimize them. Shatter confidence in institutions and sources of authority that can hold liars and lawbreakers accountable. Manipulate people into doubting what is true. As James Poniewozik of The New York Times has put it, if Trump and his allies succeed in convincing his supporters that there is no truth, then they will be left to conclude that “you should just follow your gut & your tribe.” You can get away with a lot if you can make up your own facts. Donald Trump has gotten away with a lot, at least until now.
  • The trials of Donald Trump will deepen the divides in a country already brimming with political hate. The more threatened he feels, the more he will advocate political violence. We saw what he did when he was losing his presidency; imagine what he’ll do when he’s losing his freedom.
  • Here’s something we should prepare for: If Donald Trump thinks he’s going down, he’s going to try to burn down our institutions. He will mobilize his MAGA base, his Republican enablers, and the right-wing media to unleash yet more lies and conspiracy theories. He will portray himself as a martyr who is being persecuted for the sake of his supporters. He will claim that his legal troubles prove that the system is corrupt, and not him. Trump and his supporters will try to tamper with witnesses, intimidate jurors, and threaten public officials. And he will try to cause enough confusion, disorientation, discord, fear, and even violence to escape accountability yet again.
  • Donald Trump has already deeply wounded our nation. He’s perfectly willing to break it. It’s up to us to keep him from succeeding.
Javier E

Opinion | Tucker Carlson Was Both More and Less Important Than You Think - The New York... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tucker-carlson-trump-fox.html

trumpism culture trump politics history fox news

shared by Javier E on 28 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • To understand the importance and unimportance of Tucker Carlson, it’s necessary to rewind the clock all the way back to the period just after Donald Trump won the 2016 election
  • We knew who Donald Trump was, but we didn’t know what Trumpism would be.
  • Trump could be contained. He could be channeled. His political appointees would keep him sane.
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • Carlson was a key in answering the question; he helped drive the G.O.P. to be just as cruel, just as dishonest and sometimes even more populist than Donald Trump himself.
  • Initially, there were good reasons for confusion about Trump and the G.O.P. During the campaign, he was all over the map ideologically
  • And if personnel is policy, then it was difficult to define his early administration as well
  • Moreover, many of his early moves were straight out of the standard Republican playbook
  • When Trump was elected, friends and colleagues told me that his populism could be moderated and his cruelty and dishonesty were aberrations.
  • It was not to be, and not just because of the sheer force of Trump’s personality. Carlson played an important role.
  • He helped mold the G.O.P. in his race-obsessed, conspiracy-addled image, helped perpetuate a culture of cruel and punitive Republican communication and helped build an infrastructure of new-right voices who copy his substance and style.
  • He was known, however, as an opportunist. And for enterprising and dishonest members of the infotainment right, the Trump era was a cornucopia of opportunity. Trump’s ideological incoherence wasn’t a problem. It was a vacuum that could be filled with ideas that identified and fed his resentments.
  • In fact, Trumpism was never truly about ideas. It was a vague amalgam of Trump’s ethics, attitudes and grievances — and Carlson imitated them, adopted them and broadcast them to his millions of viewers.
  • Carlson put the lie to the idea that Trump’s cruelty was an aberration, that it was somehow alien to the Republican character, to be tolerated only because the greater good of defeating Clinton had demanded it. In Trump’s cruelty, there was again, opportunity. There were millions who would thrill to his most crude and personal attacks.
  • On Tucker’s program truth was optional, insults were mandatory, and racism was all but explicit.
  • The narrative was consistent: “They” were after “you.” “They” were lying to “you.” And “they” were terrible, horrible people.
  • it’s typical of both Trump and Tucker: invent a partisan grievance, mislead the audience and cap off the conversation with a direct insult.
  • Tucker’s influence went beyond substance and style. He gave a platform to a number of the Trump right’s most notorious and most fringe voices
  • We knew Trump was more populist, more dishonest and more cruel than the typical Republican. But we did not know whether the G.O.P. would become more like the man or if the man would become more like the G.O.P.
  • If all that is true, then what could possibly be unimportant about Carlson? The fact is that at the end of the day, he was not bigger than Fox. The secret of Tucker’s fame is that it was always rooted far more in his Fox News time slot than in his (or his ideas’) inherent appea
  • while Carlson’s ratings were impressive, they were comparable to those of his predecessor Bill O’Reilly. Which raises the question: To what extent was Tucker popular and influential because of his distinct voice, and to what extent was it because he occupied the most coveted time slot on the most popular cable news channel in the United States?
  • I’ve written before about the network’s singular place in the culture of red America. Without the power of Fox, Carlson’s ability to influence the right will likely be permanently diminished.
Javier E

DeSantis's Revolutionary Defense of the Classics - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...eo-caesar-great-books-275268d9

western civilization canon Great Books leftist west black professor culture crisis history education

shared by Javier E on 08 Jun 23 - No Cached
  • Gov. Ron DeSantis just gave a welcome boost to the classical-education movement
  • This move will likely be portrayed, wrongly, as partisan and conservative. But the greatest works of civilization have always been about spurring—not preventing—radical change
  • They teach us about the revolutionary ideas of the past and help us better understand the present. The richest ideas of what it means to be human are those that have stood the test of time.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Many of the seminal works of literature, history, philosophy, science and theology were revolutionary in their respective ages
  • Like revolutionary ideas today, the ideas of yesterday were provocative and, in many cases, much more consequential
  • Revolutionary figures of the past give us insight into the present and allow for reflection on the consequences of their choices
  • That’s one of the virtues of the classics: They are a means of considering what is true without invoking the blind partisanship that encourages thoughtless action
  • There is nothing we need more today than the cultivation of reason and understanding.
  • Education based on values, logic and discipline isn’t Republican—it’s timeless
Javier E

Biden's Climate Law Is Ending 40 Years of Hands-off Government - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...671183

IRA industrial policy climate response energy climate change history crisis economics

shared by Javier E on 19 Aug 22 - No Cached
  • It is no exaggeration to say that his signature immediately severed the history of climate change in America into two eras. Before the IRA, climate campaigners spent decades trying and failing to get a climate bill through the Senate. After it, the federal government will spend $374 billion on clean energy and climate resilience over the next 10 years. The bill is estimated to reduce the country’s greenhouse-gas emissions by about 40 percent below their all-time high, getting the country two-thirds of the way to meeting its 2030 goal under the Paris Agreement.
  • Far less attention has been paid to the ideas that animate the IRA.
  • , the IRA makes a particularly interesting and all-encompassing wager—a bet relevant to anyone who plans to buy or sell something in the U.S. in the next decade, or who plans to trade with an American company, or who relies on American military power
  • ...36 more annotations...
  • Every law embodies a particular hypothesis about how the world works, a hope that if you pull on levers A and B, then outcomes C and D will result
  • Democrats hope to create an economy where the government doesn’t just help Americans buy green technologies; it also helps nurture the industries that produce that technology.
  • The idea is this: The era of passive, hands-off government is over. The laws embrace an approach to governing the economy that scholars call “industrial policy,” a catch-all name for a wide array of tools and tactics that all assume the government can help new domestic industries get started, grow, and reach massive scale.
  • If “this country used to make things,” as the saying goes, and if it wants to make things again, then the government needs to help it. And if the country believes that certain industries bestow a strategic advantage, then it needs to protect them against foreign interference.
  • From its founding to the 1970s, the country had an economic doctrine that was defined by its pragmatism and the willingness of its government to find new areas of growth.
  • It’s more like a toolbox of different approaches that act in concert to help push technologies to grow and reach commercial scale. The IRA and the two other new laws prefer four tools in particular.
  • “Yes, there was an ‘invisible hand,’” Stephen Cohen and Brad DeLong write in their history of the topic, Concrete Economics. “But the invisible hand was repeatedly lifted at the elbow by the government, and placed in a new position from where it could go on to perform its magic.”
  • That pragmatism faded in the 1980s, when industrial policy became scorned as one more instance of Big Government coming in to pick so-called winners and losers.
  • The two other large bills passed by this Congress—the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law and the CHIPS and Science Act—make down payments on the future as well; both laws, notably, were passed by bipartisan majorities.
  • it is in the IRA that these general commitments become specific, and therefore transformative.
  • Since the 1980s, when Congress has wanted to spur technological progress, it has usually thrown money exclusively at R&D. We have had a science policy, not an industrial policy
  • inextricable from that turn is Washington’s consuming anxiety over China’s rise—and China has embraced industrial policy.
  • although not a single Republican voted for the IRA, its wager is not especially partisan or even ideological.
  • the demonstration project. A demonstration project helps a technology that has previously existed only in the lab get out in the real world for the first time
  • supply-push policies. As the name suggests, these tools “push” on the supply side of an industry by underwriting new factories or assuring that those factories have access to cheap inputs to make things.
  • demand-pull policies, which create a market for whatever is coming out of those new factories. The government can “pull” on demand by buying those products itself or by subsidizing them for consumers.
  • protective policies, meant to insulate industries—especially new ones that are still growing—from foreign interference
  • Although both parties have moved to embrace industrial policy, Democrats are clearly ahead of their Republican colleagues. You can see it in their policy: While the bipartisan infrastructure law sets up lots of demonstration projects, and the CHIPS Act adopts some supply-push and protectionist theory, only the IRA uses all four tools.
  • In order to stop climate change, experts believe, the United States must do three things: clean up its power grid, replacing coal and gas power plants with zero-carbon sources; electrify everything it can, swapping fossil-fueled vehicles and boilers with electric vehicles and heat pumps; and mop up the rest, mitigating carbon pollution from impossible-to-electrify industrial activities. The IRA aims to nurture every industry needed to realize that vision.
  • Hydrogen and carbon removal are going to benefit from nearly every tool the government has. The bipartisan infrastructure law will spend more than $11 billion on hydrogen and carbon-removal “hubs,” huge demonstration projects
  • These hubs will also foster geographic concentration, the economic idea that when you put lots of people working on the same problem near one another, they solve it faster. You can see such clustering at work in San Francisco’s tech industry, and also in China, which now creates hubs for virtually every activity that it wants to dominate globally—even soccer.
  • Then the IRA will take over and deploy some good ol’ supply push and demand pull. It includes new programs to underwrite new hydrogen factories; on the demand side, a powerful new tax credit will pay companies for every kilogram of low-carbon hydrogen that they produce
  • Another tax credit will boost the demand of carbon removal by paying firms a $180 bounty for trapping a ton of carbon dioxide and pumping it undergroun
  • Today, not only does China make most batteries worldwide; it alone makes the tools that make the batteries, Nathan Iyer, an analyst at RMI, a nonpartisan energy think tank, told me. This extreme geographic concentration—which afflicts not only the battery industry but also the solar-panel industry—could slow down the energy transition and make it more expensive
  • the new tax credit is also supply-minded, arguably even protectionist. Under the new scheme, very few electric cars and trucks will immediately qualify for that full $7,500 subsidy; it will go only toward vehicles whose batteries are primarily made in North America and where a certain percentage of minerals are mined and processed in the U.S. or one of its allies. Will these policies accelerate the shift to EVs? Well, no, not immediately. But the idea is that by boosting domestic production of EVs, batteries will become cheaper and more abundant—and the U.S. will avoid subsidizing one of China’s growth industries.
  • Right now, next to no solar panels are made in the U.S., even though the technology was invented here. The IRA endeavors to change that by—you guessed it—a mix of supply-push, demand-pull, and protectionist policies. Under the law, the government will underwrite new factories to make every subcomponent of the solar supply chain; then it will pay those factories for every item that they produce
  • “It’s realistic that within four to five years, [U.S. solar manufacturers] could completely meet domestic demand for solar,” Scott Moskowitz, the head of public affairs for the solar manufacturer Q CELLS, told me.
  • In each of these industries, you’ll notice that the government isn’t only subsidizing factories; it is actually paying them to operate. That choice, which is central to the IRA’s approach, is “really defending against the mistakes of the 2009 bill,” Iyer told me. In its stimulus bill passed during the Great Recession, the Obama administration tried to do green industrial policy, underwriting new solar-panel factories across the country. But then Chinese firms began exporting cheap solar panels by the millions, saturating domestic demand and leaving those sparkly new factories idle
  • So many other industries will also be touched by these laws. There’s a new program to nurture a low-carbon aviation-fuel industry in the U.S. (Long-distance jet travel is one of those climate problems that nobody knows how to solve yet.)
  • the revelation of the IRA is that decarbonizing the United States may require re-industrializing it. A net-zero America may have more refineries, more factories, and more goods production than a fossil-fueled America—while also having cheaper cars, healthier air, and fewer natural disasters. And once the U.S. gets there, then it can keep going: It can set an example for the world that a populous, affluent country can reduce its emissions while enjoying all the trappings of modernity,
  • There are a slew of policies meant to grow and decarbonize the U.S. industrial sector; every tax credit pays out a bonus if you use U.S.-made steel, cement, or concrete. “You would need thousands and thousands of words to capture the industries that will be transformed by this,” Josh Freed, the climate and energy leader at Third Way, a center-left think tank, told me.
  • Five EVs were sold in China last year for every one EV sold in the United States; that larger domestic market will provide a significant economy of scale when Chinese EV makers begin exporting their cars abroad. For that reason and others, many people in China are “deeply skeptical” that the U.S. can catch up with its lead,
  • We are about to have a huge new set of vested interests who want the economy to be clean and benefit from that. We’ve literally never had that before,” Freed told me.
  • “This is going to change everything,” he said
  • that is the IRA’s biggest idea, its biggest hypothesis: that America can improve its standard of living and preserve its global preeminence while ruthlessly eliminating carbon pollution; that climate change, actually, doesn’t change everything, and that in fact it can be addressed by changing as little as possible.
  • This hypothesis has already proved itself out in one important way, which is that the IRA passed, and the previous 30 years of climate proposals did not. Now comes the real test.
Javier E

An Unholy Alliance Between Ye, Musk, and Trump - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...671816

social media musk trump oligarchs ego grievance conflict free speech tech

shared by Javier E on 22 Oct 22 - No Cached
  • Musk, Trump, and Ye are after something different: They are all obsessed with setting the rules of public spaces.
  • An understandable consensus began to form on the political left that large social networks, but especially Facebook, helped Trump rise to power. The reasons were multifaceted: algorithms that gave a natural advantage to the most shameless users, helpful marketing tools that the campaign made good use of, a confusing tangle of foreign interference (the efficacy of which has always been tough to suss out), and a basic attentional architecture that helps polarize and pit Americans against one another (no foreign help required).
  • The misinformation industrial complex—a loosely knit network of researchers, academics, journalists, and even government entities—coalesced around this moment. Different phases of the backlash homed in on bots, content moderation, and, after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, data privacy
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  • the broad theme was clear: Social-media platforms are the main communication tools of the 21st century, and they matter.
  • With Trump at the center, the techlash morphed into a culture war with a clear partisan split. One could frame the position from the left as: We do not want these platforms to give a natural advantage to the most shameless and awful people who stoke resentment and fear to gain power
  • On the right, it might sound more like: We must preserve the power of the platforms to let outsiders have a natural advantage (by stoking fear and resentment to gain power).
  • They embrace a shallow posture of free-speech maximalism—the very kind that some social-media-platform founders first espoused, before watching their sites become overrun with harassment, spam, and other hateful garbage that drives away both users and advertisers
  • Crucially, both camps resent the power of the technology platforms and believe the companies have a negative influence on our discourse and politics by either censoring too much or not doing enough to protect users and our political discourse.
  • one outcome of the techlash has been an incredibly facile public understanding of content moderation and a whole lot of culture warring.
  • the political world realized that platforms and content-recommendation engines decide which cultural objects get amplified. The left found this troubling, whereas the right found it to be an exciting prospect and something to leverage, exploit, and manipulate via the courts
  • Each one casts himself as an antidote to a heavy-handed, censorious social-media apparatus that is either captured by progressive ideology or merely pressured into submission by it. But none of them has any understanding of thorny First Amendment or content-moderation issues.
  • Musk and Ye aren’t so much buying into the right’s overly simplistic Big Tech culture war as they are hijacking it for their own purposes; Trump, meanwhile, is mostly just mad
  • for those who can hit the mark without getting banned, social media is a force multiplier for cultural and political relevance and a way around gatekeeping media.
  • Musk, Ye, and Trump rely on their ability to pick up their phones, go direct, and say whatever they wan
  • the moment they butt up against rules or consequences, they begin to howl about persecution and unfair treatment. The idea of being treated similarly to the rest of a platform’s user base
  • is so galling to these men that they declare the entire system to be broken.
  • they also demonstrate how being the Main Character of popular and political culture can totally warp perspective. They’re so blinded by their own outlying experiences across social media that, in most cases, they hardly know what it is they’re buying
  • These are projects motivated entirely by grievance and conflict. And so they are destined to amplify grievance and conflict
Javier E

Opinion | If Democrats Win Back the House, They Will Have John Roberts to Thank - The N... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...lligan-voting-rights-2024.html

scotus opinion voting

shared by Javier E on 14 Jun 23 - No Cached
  • Milligan, Wasserman continued, “could reverberate across the Deep South leading to the creation of new Black-majority, strongly Democratic seats in multiple states
  • If Democrats can gain five seats, it will critically affect the balance of power in Washington.
  • Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a law professor at Harvard and an expert on election law, wrote by email that Milligan is significant both substantively and politically:First, it means that Section 2 remains fully operative as a bulwark against racial vote dilution; second, it signals to conservative lower courts that they need to rule in favor of plaintiffs on facts like those in Milligan; third, it takes off the table arguments that Section 2 must be narrowly construed to avoid constitutional problems; and fourth, if Section 2 is constitutional, so should be other laws targeting racial disparities.
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  • it comes at a time when “a confluence of at least four political and technological developments will make its practical effect significant.”
  • First, technological advances, as used in the Milligan case, make it easier to find new V.R.A. districts that can be reasonably configured.
  • Third, the private bar has become extremely well resourced to pursue these cases.
  • Second, minority-preferred candidates can win with lower minority voting-age populations (falling from estimates as high as 65 percent in the 1990s to below 45 percent now), which means more minority voters are available to create additional V.R.A. districts.
  • Fourth, the debates over partisan gerrymandering in the last decade brought many new strong social scientists into this area, in which expert analysis of maps and voting patterns plays a critical role.
  • John Roberts’s majority opinion is particularly important because it rejects the argument that race-based remedial districting is unconstitutional:Alabama further argues that, even if the Fifteenth Amendment authorizes the effects test of section 2, that Amendment does not authorize race-based redistricting as a remedy for section 2 violations. But for the last four decades, this Court and the lower federal courts have repeatedly applied the effects test of section 2 as interpreted in Gingles and, under certain circumstances, have authorized race-based redistricting as a remedy for state districting maps that violate section 2.In that context, Roberts continued, “we are not persuaded by Alabama’s arguments that section 2 as interpreted in Gingles exceeds the remedial authority of Congress.”
  • My best guess is that Roberts and Kavanaugh thought it best to proceed cautiously and bide their time. The court as an institution can only take so many bombshells at a time. The issue will come back to the court soon enough.
  • But, Tribe continued, “Allen v. Milligan remains highly significant as an essential reminder that the court doesn’t exist in an isolation booth, unaffected by public reactions to its decisions that venture too far from the mainstream of legal and social thought.”
  • Roberts and Kavanaugh, in Tribe’s view, chose not to press the case against race-based redistricting in part because of “the controversy unleashed by the court in its shattering abortion ruling in Dobbs last June, coupled with other unrestrained shocks to the system delivered by the court in the landmark cases involving guns and climate change, and aggravated by the ethical stench swirling about the court as a result of improprieties.”
  • These developments, Tribe continued, “almost certainly had an impact, however subconscious, on the chief justice and on Justice Kavanaugh, who has increasingly sought to distance himself from the hard right.”
Javier E

Book review of Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Life in War, Law, and Ideas by Stephen Budiansk... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...9-adf3-f70f78c156e8_story.html

biography review Holmes war life ideas book books read

shared by Javier E on 28 Jul 22 - No Cached
  • At the beginning of the 20th century, Holmes was lionized as the greatest legal thinker of his time by progressives who celebrated his dissenting opinions arguing for the protection of free speech and the upholding of economic regulations.
  • Christian theologians and conservative political activists denounced Holmes’s moral relativism in insisting that law could be separated from God’s will.
  • Holmes has been out of fashion among both conservative originalists and progressive living-constitutionalists, who dislike his rejection of the idea that the Constitution contains absolute principles that can be invoked to protect minorities against mob rule.
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  • Stephen Budiansky sets out to revive Holmes’s reputation and relevance as a model of intellectual humility for our polarized age
  • Holmes learned from his service in the Civil War that moralism leads to intolerance — “when you know that you know, persecution comes easy,”
  • More than most judges, Holmes managed to set aside his prejudices and partisan loyalties because of his philosophical skepticism about the impossibility of ever being confident that one is right. “To have doubted one’s own first principles,” as he put it, “is a mark of a civilized man.”
  • This philosophical skepticism led him to uphold most laws against constitutional challenges; as he put it in his most famous dissenting opinion, “A constitution is not intended to embody a particular economic theory . . . it is made for people of fundamentally differing views.”
  • Holmes achieved both ambitions, writing a book, “The Common Law,” that revolutionized legal thinking by arguing that judges made policy rather than simply applying the law, and that rather than embodying absolute moral principles, law reflected changing social norms.
  • Holmes took from his service in the Army, which Budiansky describes in vivid detail, the idea that fighting for ideals was senseless; as Louis Menand famously wrote, the war “made him lose his belief in beliefs.”
  • “I don’t care to boss my neighbors and to require them to want something different from what they do,” he told Harold Laski, “even when, as frequently, I think their wishes more or less suicidal.”
  • Holmes came to believe that life is a struggle and the only thing that can redeem it is ceaseless hard work — mastery of a subject, a discipline or a job for its own sake, without being able to control the result.
  • The subject Holmes chose to master was law, and he worked harder at it than anyone else of his generation
  • He told a cousin that he had resolved to write a classic work on the law before the age of 40 and that he hoped after that to become a Supreme Court justice
  • The same philosophical skepticism, however, eventually persuaded him to write some of the greatest defenses of free speech of his time, on the grounds that a functioning democracy needs broad tolerance for what he famously called “the thought we hate.”
  • This view, which conservatives today denounce as sociological jurisprudence, led Holmes to a constitutional philosophy not of judicial activism but of radical judicial restraint.
  • A constitution, he wrote, “is a frame of government for men of opposite opinions and for the future, and therefore [we should] not hastily import into it our own views, or unexpressed limitations derived merely from the practices of the past.”
  • He followed the same philosophy on the U.S. Supreme Court, asking not whether the Constitution specifically authorized the federal or state governments to act but whether it specifically forbade them from doing so
  • He rejected the idea of the conservative textualists and originalists of his day, who argued that the Constitution should be strictly enforced according to its original public meaning. In his view, they were simply substituting their own political preferences and ascribing them to the Constitution’s framers.
  • Holmes’s radical devotion to judicial restraint led him to vote to uphold not only progressive economic legislation but also some of the most illiberal laws of his day, including mandatory-sterilization laws and laws disenfranchising African American voters in the Jim Crow South.
  • he was not indifferent to all violations of constitutional rights. In 1914, he began to write the dissents that would define his judicial legacy, and they included cases where Holmes was outraged by what he viewed as clear violations of the rule of law by racist mobs.
  • While Brandeis emphasized his faith that truth would emerge from thoughtful deliberation, Holmes emphasized what Budiansky calls “the importance of tolerance for opposing views, not just as a bedrock foundation of democracy but as a reflection of fundamental skepticism about certainty.”
  • “Certitude is not the test of certainty,” Holmes wrote in developing his mature view on free speech. “We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.”
  • The most inspiring sign of Holmes’s intellectual humility was that, throughout his long life, from his 20s through his 90s, he never stopped cultivating his faculties of reason and set aside time every day for learning.
  • At age 21, he began keeping a list of every book he read for pleasure and self-improvement. At the time of his death, the range was inspiring — more than 4,000 books, ranging from philosophy, sociology, religion, economics and science to murder mysteries. In the course of reading more than a book a week, he had a rule that a book had to be finished once started, no matter how arduous.
  • at a time when progressives and conservatives alike are so sure of their own premises that America is more polarized than at any time since the Civil War, the “skeptical humility,” as Budiansky puts it, that Holmes took from the war seems more elusive, and more urgently needed, than ever.
Javier E

The War in Ukraine Is Dividing Lifelong Friends - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...670547

friendship polarization partisan disagreement ukraine war

shared by Javier E on 18 Jul 22 - No Cached
  • Ultimately, even the friends who want to stay connected will have to grapple with this question: How do you move forward when you cannot agree upon the same reality?
Javier E

Is Anything Still True? On the Internet, No One Knows Anymore - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-true-on-the-internet-89843150

truth trust fake misinformation authenticity social media AI deepfake generative propaganda crisis

shared by Javier E on 11 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • Creating and disseminating convincing propaganda used to require the resources of a state. Now all it takes is a smartphone.
  • Generative artificial intelligence is now capable of creating fake pictures, clones of our voices, and even videos depicting and distorting world events. The result: From our personal circles to the political circuses, everyone must now question whether what they see and hear is true.
  • exposure to AI-generated fakes can make us question the authenticity of everything we see. Real images and real recordings can be dismissed as fake. 
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  • “When you show people deepfakes and generative AI, a lot of times they come out of the experiment saying, ‘I just don’t trust anything anymore,’” says David Rand, a professor at MIT Sloan who studies the creation, spread and impact of misinformation.
  • The signs that an image is AI-generated are easy to miss for a user simply scrolling past, who has an instant to decide whether to like or boost a post on social media. And as generative AI continues to improve, it’s likely that such signs will be harder to spot in the future.
  • The combination of easily-generated fake content and the suspicion that anything might be fake allows people to choose what they want to believe, adds DiResta, leading to what she calls “bespoke realities.”
  • Examples of misleading content created by generative AI are not hard to come by, especially on social media
  • This problem, which has grown more acute in the age of generative AI, is known as the “liar’s dividend,
  • People’s attention is already limited, and the way social media works—encouraging us to gorge on content, while quickly deciding whether or not to share it—leaves us precious little capacity to determine whether or not something is true
  • “What our work suggests is that most regular people do not want to share false things—the problem is they are not paying attention,”
  • are now using its existence as a pretext to dismiss accurate information
  • The rapid adoption of many different AI tools means that we are now forced to question everything that we are exposed to in any medium, from our immediate communities to the geopolitical, said Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley who
  • If the crisis of authenticity were limited to social media, we might be able to take solace in communication with those closest to us. But even those interactions are now potentially rife with AI-generated fakes.
  • what sounds like a call from a grandchild requesting bail money may be scammers who have scraped recordings of the grandchild’s voice from social media to dupe a grandparent into sending money.
  • companies like Alphabet, the parent company of Google, are trying to spin the altering of personal images as a good thing. 
  • With its latest Pixel phone, the company unveiled a suite of new and upgraded tools that can automatically replace a person’s face in one image with their face from another, or quickly remove someone from a photo entirely.
  • Joseph Stalin, who was fond of erasing people he didn’t like from official photos, would have loved this technology.
  • In Google’s defense, it is adding a record of whether an image was altered to data attached to it. But such metadata is only accessible in the original photo and some copies, and is easy enough to strip out.
  • in the course of a lawsuit over the death of a man using Tesla’s “full self-driving” system, Elon Musk’s lawyers responded to video evidence of Musk making claims about this software by suggesting that the proliferation of “deepfakes” of Musk was grounds to dismiss such evidence. They advanced that argument even though the clip of Musk was verifiably real
  • To put our current moment in historical context, he notes that the PC revolution made it easy to store and replicate information, the internet made it easy to publish it, the mobile revolution made it easier than ever to access and spread, and the rise of AI has made creating misinformation a cinch. And each revolution arrived faster than the one before it.
  • Not everyone agrees that arming the public with easy access to AI will exacerbate our current difficulties with misinformation. The primary argument of such experts is that there is already vastly more misinformation on the internet than a person can consume, so throwing more into the mix won’t make things worse.
  • it’s not exactly reassuring, especially given that trust in institutions is already at one of the lowest points in the past 70 years, according to the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, and polarization—a measure of how much we distrust one another—is at a high point.
  • “What happens when we have eroded trust in media, government, and experts?” says Farid. “If you don’t trust me and I don’t trust you, how do we respond to pandemics, or climate change, or have fair and open elections? This is how authoritarianism arises—when you erode trust in institutions.”
Javier E

Why Trump's Drastic Plan to Slash the Government Could Succeed - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...ernment-could-succeed-6828ccbe

trump government plan

shared by Javier E on 31 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • In campaign speeches and statements, the former president has promised to eliminate the independence of key federal agencies, reduce protections for civil servants, deny citizenship to tens of thousands of people born in the U.S. and wrest control of some authority over spending from Congress. If implemented, those measures and others Trump has proposed would amount to the most sweeping overhaul of the government in modern times, legal scholars said.
  • Trump’s agenda mirrors the longstanding priorities of prominent conservative groups, which have been working behind the scenes to revamp every corner of the government, agency by agency. The goal, conservative leaders said, isn’t only to shrink the size of the government, but also to snuff out perceived opposition to the president’s agenda within the bureaucratic ranks.
  • “I would hope this is a seminal moment to crush the deep state and the administrative state that has operated with its own set of agendas for a long time,”
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  • In practical terms, that means weakening measures first put in place in the 19th century that turned federal employment from a partisan spoils system into a professional workforce, and setting aside federal laws intended to insulate some areas of policy-making and enforcement from political interference.
  • Underpinning the effort is what is called the unitary executive principle, which draws from a constitutional clause that vests “the executive power” in the president. Conservative leaders argue that the clause gives the president virtually unchecked authority over the executive branch.
  • Conservative justices have signaled support for the unitary executive principle and repeatedly espoused skepticism of federal agencies, signaling they could have sympathy for Trump’s contention that the federal bureaucracy must be reined in. 
  • f he wins in 2024, Trump would find a friendlier court than the one that sometimes frustrated him. Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s third pick for the high court, was seated just months before Trump left office, expanding its conservative majority and reducing the sway of Chief Justice John Roberts, who had joined the then four-member liberal bloc in finding Trump officials cut legal corners in trying to alter the census and cancel the DACA program.
  • Still, hurdles remain. There were occasions when each of Trump’s Supreme Court appointees joined with liberals or Roberts against conservative objectives.
  • Lawmakers of both parties, protective of their own power, would likely object to efforts by Trump to reassert what is known as the impoundment authority and allow a president to refuse to spend money appropriated by Congress. And former Trump administration officials say his focus can drift from one
  • some people who know him expressed concern that an emboldened Trump could push the limits of the law far beyond what he did in his first term, and would surround himself with advisers who are unwilling to resist his impulses. 
  • “I’m sympathetic to some of the initiatives that are being considered,” said Barr, who has been critical of the former president. “My concern generally is that the president is very imprudent and very excessive in anything he does, and therefore will end up doing things that end up actually curtailing executive power, rather than expanding it.”
  • the Supreme Court could be more open to the president taking more control over independent agencies and limiting protections for civil servants. 
  • “It’s hard to predict how far [the Supreme Court] would go. But I think there’s less judicial restraint and there’s more willingness to allow what were once seen as extreme or fringe constitutional arguments on the right to be entertained,” said Shalev Roisman, a University of Arizona law professor.
  • Trump advisers would seek greater power to hire and fire career federal employees so they can select who carries out presidential policies throughout the government. In 2020, Trump issued an executive order that could have stripped thousands of federal employees of civil service protections and removed competitive exams as a hiring criterion. President Biden rescinded that order, but Trump advisers are planning to resurrect it. 
  • Although the Supreme Court’s conservative majority holds a robust view of the unitary executive theory, it is unlikely there are sufficient votes to fully scrap the merit-based employment that has been part of the federal firmament for 140 years. But the president does have authority to manage the civil service system, and Trump could find a court open to expanding the class of employees that can be hired and fired at the White House’s discretion.
  • Trump advisers also are considering a broader challenge to Supreme Court precedent, hoping to win new authority to replace members of independent commissions at will—a step some justices have signaled they might consider. 
  • Conservative officials involved in the discussions reject the notion that Trump is trying to hoard unchecked authority, arguing that they want to revert to a vision of the presidency outlined in the Constitution. In their view, agencies essentially are extensions of the president and their employees serve at his pleasure. In a second Trump term, Vought said, “the bureaucracy would care more about what the president thinks and what his agenda is.”
  • Biden has ramped up his criticism of Trump, homing in on the former president’s efforts to expand his power. “This MAGA threat is the threat to the brick and mortar of our democratic institutions,”
  • The origins of conservatives’ efforts date back to 1982, when then-President Ronald Reagan established a commission to improve government efficiency, assembling more than 100 private-sector figures with the mandate to “drain the swamp” in Washington. The group, known as the Grace Commission, released a 47-volume report with more than 2,400 recommendations, including proposals to rethink protections for government workers.
  • Many of the recommendations were never implemented.
  • “It’s been hard to make progress on this front,” said ​​Veronique de Rugy, a senior research fellow at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center. “At its core, the incentives within government are for more spending, more growth, more intervention.”
Javier E

A Tale of Two Moralities - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...14krugman.html

discourse morality public conservatism liberalism welfare state politics

shared by Javier E on 14 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • the great divide in our politics isn’t really about pragmatic issues, about which policies work best; it’s about differences in those very moral imaginations Mr. Obama urges us to expand, about divergent beliefs over what constitutes justice.
  • the real challenge we face is not how to resolve our differences — something that won’t happen any time soon — but how to keep the expression of those differences within bounds.
  • The other side believes that people have a right to keep what they earn, and that taxing them to support others, no matter how needy, amounts to theft. That’s what lies behind the modern right’s fondness for violent rhetoric: many activists on the right really do see taxes and regulation as tyrannical impositions on their liberty.
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  • One side of American politics considers the modern welfare state — a private-enterprise economy, but one in which society’s winners are taxed to pay for a social safety net — morally superior to the capitalism red in tooth and claw we had before the New Deal. It’s only right, this side believes, for the affluent to help the less fortunate.
  • This deep divide in American political morality — for that’s what it amounts to — is a relatively recent development. Commentators who pine for the days of civility and bipartisanship are, whether they realize it or not, pining for the days when the Republican Party accepted the legitimacy of the welfare state, and was even willing to contemplate expanding it.
  • we have, for the most part, managed to agree on certain ground rules in the abortion controversy: it’s acceptable to express your opinion and to criticize the other side, but it’s not acceptable either to engage in violence or to encourage others to do so. What we need now is an extension of those ground rules to the wider national debate.
  • When people talk about partisan differences, they often seem to be implying that these differences are petty, matters that could be resolved with a bit of good will. But what we’re talking about here is a fundamental disagreement about the proper role of government.
  • Today’s G.O.P. sees much of what the modern federal government does as illegitimate; today’s Democratic Party does not
  • This deep divide in American political morality — for that’s what it amounts to — is a relatively recent development.
  • There’s no middle ground between these views. One side saw health reform, with its subsidized extension of coverage to the uninsured, as fulfilling a moral imperative: wealthy nations, it believed, have an obligation to provide all their citizens with essential care
  • The other side saw the same reform as a moral outrage, an assault on the right of Americans to spend their money as they choose.
  • We need to have leaders of both parties — or Mr. Obama alone if necessary — declare that both violence and any language hinting at the acceptability of violence are out of bounds. We all want reconciliation, but the road to that goal begins with an agreement that our differences will be settled by the rule of law.
Javier E

What's Left for Tech? - Freddie deBoer - 0 views

freddiedeboer.substack.com/...whats-left-for-tech

progress innovation invention transformation tech

shared by Javier E on 26 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • I gave a talk to a class at Northeastern University earlier this month, concerning technology, journalism, and the cultural professions. The students were bright and inquisitive, though they also reflected the current dynamic in higher ed overall - three quarters of the students who showed up were women, and the men who were there almost all sat moodily in the back and didn’t engage at all while their female peers took notes and asked questions. I know there’s a lot of criticism of the “crisis for boys” narrative, but it’s often hard not to believe in it.
  • we’re actually living in a period of serious technological stagnation - that despite our vague assumption that we’re entitled to constant remarkable scientific progress, humanity has been living with real and valuable but decidedly small-scale technological growth for the past 50 or 60 or 70 years, after a hundred or so years of incredible growth from 1860ish to 1960ish, give or take a decade or two on either side
  • I will recommend Robert J. Gordon’s The Rise & Fall of American Growth for an exhaustive academic (and primarily economic) argument to this effect. Gordon persuasively demonstrates that from the mid-19th to mid-20th century, humanity leveraged several unique advancements that had remarkably outsized consequences for how we live and changed our basic existence in a way that never happened before and hasn’t since. Principal among these advances were the process of refining fossil fuels and using them to power all manner of devices and vehicles, the ability to harness electricity and use it to safely provide energy to homes (which practically speaking required the first development), and a revolution in medicine that came from the confluence of long-overdue acceptance of germ theory and basic hygienic principles, the discovery and refinement of antibiotics, and the modernization of vaccines.
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  • The complication that Gordon and other internet-skeptical researchers like Ha-Joon Chang have introduced is to question just how meaningful those digital technologies have been for a) economic growth and b) the daily experience of human life. It can be hard for people who stare at their phones all day to consider the possibility that digital technology just isn’t that important. But ask yourself: if you were forced to live either without your iPhone or without indoor plumbing, could you really choose the latter?
  • Certainly the improvements in medical care in the past half-century feel very important to me as someone living now, and one saved life has immensely emotional and practical importance for many people. What’s more, advances in communication sciences and computer technology genuinely have been revolutionary; going from the Apple II to the iPhone in 30 years is remarkable.
  • we can always debate what constitutes major or revolutionary change
  • Why is Apple going so hard on TITANIUM? Well, where else does smartphone development have to go?
  • continued improvements in worldwide mortality in the past 75 years have been a matter of spreading existing treatments and practices to the developing world, rather than the result of new science.
  • When you got your first smartphone, and you thought about what the future would hold, were your first thoughts about more durable casing? I doubt it. I know mine weren’t.
  • The question is, who in 2023 ever says to themselves “smartphone cameras just aren’t good enough”?
  • The elephant in the room, obviously, is AI.
  • The processors will get faster. They’ll add more RAM. They’ll generally have more power. But for what? To run what? To do what? To run the games that we were once told would replace our PlayStation and Xbox games, but didn’t?
  • Smartphone development has been a good object lesson in the reality that cool ideas aren’t always practical or worthwhile
  • There were, in those breathless early days, a lot of talk about how people simply wouldn’t own laptops anymore, how your phone would do everything. But it turns out that, for one thing, the keyboard remains an input device of unparalleled convenience and versatility.
  • We developed this technology for typewriters and terminals and desktops, it Just Works, and there’s no reason to try and “disrupt” it
  • Instead of one device to rule them all, we developed a norm of syncing across devices and cloud storage, which works well. (I always thought it was pretty funny, and very cynical, how Apple went from calling the iPhone an everything device to later marketing the iPad and iWatch.) In other words, we developed a software solution rather than a hardware one
  • I will always give it up to Google Maps and portable GPS technology; that’s genuinely life-altering, probably the best argument for smartphones as a transformative technology. But let me ask you, honestly: do you still go out looking for apps, with the assumption that you’re going to find something that really changes your life in a significant way?
  • some people are big VR partisans. I’m deeply skeptical. The brutal failures of Meta’s new “metaverse” is just one new example of a decades-long resistance to the technology among consumers
  • maybe I just don’t want VR to become popular, given the potential ugly social consequences. If you thought we had an incel problem now….
  • And as impressive as some new development in medicine has been, there’s no question that in simple terms of reducing preventable deaths, the advances seen from 1900 to 1950 dwarf those seen since. To a rem
  • It’s not artificial intelligence. It thinks nothing like a human thinks. There is no reason whatsoever to believe that it has evolved sentience or consciousness. There is nothing at present that these systems can do that human being simply can’t. But they can potentially do some things in the world of bits faster and cheaper than human beings, and that might have some meaningful consequences. But there is no reasonable, responsible claim to be made that these systems are imminent threats to conventional human life as currently lived, whether for good or for bad. IMO.
  • Let’s mutually agree to consider immediate plausible human technological progress outside of AI or “AI.” What’s coming? What’s plausible?
  • The most consequential will be our efforts to address climate change, and we have the potential to radically change how we generate electricity, although electrifying heating and transportation are going to be harder than many seem to think, while solar and wind power have greater ecological costs than people want to admit. But, yes, that’s potentially very very meaningful
  • It’s another example of how technological growth will still leave us with continuity rather than with meaningful change.
  • I kept thinking was, privatizing space… to do what? A manned Mars mission might happen in my lifetime, which is cool. But a Mars colony is a distant dream
  • This is why I say we live in the Big Normal, the Big Boring, the Forever Now. We are tragic people: we were born just too late to experience the greatest flowering of human development the world has ever seen. We do, however, enjoy the rather hefty consolation prize that we get to live with the affordances of that period, such as not dying of smallpox.
  • I think we all need to learn to appreciate what we have now, in the world as it exists, at the time in which we actually live. Frankly, I don’t think we have any other choice.
Javier E

What Universities Have Done to Themselves - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...ring-dei-woke-history-abf4901b

university education trends history culture politics historiography

shared by Javier E on 15 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • of universities. America’s top colleges are no longer seen as bastions of excellence but partisan outfits.” They should “abandon this long misadventure into politics . . . and rebuild their reputations as centers of research and learning.”
  • This was a realistic and straightforward assessment of where the universities are and what they should do. It would be helpful if all on the sane left would drop their relative silence, rise up and end the misadventure.
  • I have been reading Edmund Wilson’s 1940 classic, “To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History.” It famously offers a portrait of the groundbreaking French historian Jules Michelet (1798-1874), a father of modern historiography. The whole section reads like a tribute to the idea of learning, of understanding, of telling. It is not too much to say it is a kind of paean to the idea of the university.
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  • The idea of this man—a true scholar who attempts to find the honest truth—seems inapplicable to the current moment. And the reason is the three words he uses—“in good faith”—to define how the historian must act. In the DEI/woke regime, the good faith of the scholar is sacrificed to political fashion.
  • In going all in on the regime, those who run the universities negate their own worth. Faculty and professors, administrators and department heads lower their own standing. Because they are not now seen as people of the mind, of the intellect, but as mere operatives, enforcers. They thus give up their place of respect in the public imagination.
  • Regular people used to imagine what a university looks like—rows of gleaming books, learned professors, an air of honest inquiry. That isn’t now a picture the public can see. Now it’s something else, less impressive, less moving. Less important to our continuance as a people.
  • The elites who run our elite colleges are killing their own status.
  • They are also lowering the esteem in which college graduates are held. Your primary job as a student is taking in. You read, learn, connect this event with that, apply your imagination, empathize, judge. It is a spacious act—it takes time to absorb, reflect, feel—which is why you’re given four whole years to do it.
  • But if the public senses that few are studying like independent scholars in there, not enough are absorbing the expertise of their field, that they’ve merely been instructed to internalize a particular worldview and parrot it back . . .
  • Well, if that’s the case, who needs them? Is it even worth having them around in the office?
Javier E

The Arrow in America's Heart - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...america-grief-life.html

culture death violence acceptance

shared by Javier E on 31 May 22 - No Cached
  • But all these questions miss the point, the Buddha tells his disciple. What is important is pulling out that poison arrow, and tending to the wound.
  • “We need to be moved by the pain of all of the suffering. But it is important that we are not paralyzed by it,” Ms. Han said. “It makes us value life because we understand life is very precious, life is very brief, it can be extinguished in a single instant.”
  • Recent days have revealed an arrow lodged deep in the heart of America. It was exposed in the slaughter of 19 elementary school children and two teachers in Uvalde, and when a gunman steeped in white supremacist ideology killed 10 people at a Buffalo supermarket. The United States is a nation that has learned to live with mass shooting after mass shooting.
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  • More than one million people have died from Covid, a once unimaginable figure
  • An increase in drug deaths, combined with Covid, has led overall life expectancy in America to decline to a degree not seen since World War II.
  • Police killings of unarmed Black men continue long past vows for reform.
  • “You can’t underestimate the need for belonging,” she said. When something terrible happens, people want to connect with their “in-group,” she said, where they feel they belong, which can push people further into partisan camps.
  • Rabbi Mychal B. Springer, the manager of clinical pastoral education at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, has found herself returning to an ancient Jewish writing in the Mishnah, which says that when God began creating, God created a single person.
  • “The teaching is, each person is so precious that the whole world is contained in that person, and we have to honor that person completely and fully,” she said. “If a single person dies, the whole world dies, and if a single person is saved, then the whole world is saved.”
  • We can only value life if we are willing to truly grieve, to truly face the reality of suffering
  • “It’s not that we don’t care. We’ve reached the limit of how much we can cry and hurt,” she said. “And yet we have to. We have to value each life as a whole world, and be willing to cry for what it means that that whole world has been lost.”
  • The mountain of calamities, and the paralysis over how to overcome it, points to a nation struggling over some fundamental questions: Has our tolerance as a country for such horror grown, dusting off after one event before moving on to the next? How much value do we place in a single human life?
  • Valuing life and working for healing means going outside of one’s self, and one’s own group, she said.
  • “This will require collective action,” she said. “And part of the problem is we are very divided right now.”
  • American culture often prizes individual liberty above collective needs. But ultimately humans are born to care about others and to not turn away,
  • “Human beings are born for meaning,” she said. “We have very, very large souls. We are born for generosity, we are born for compassion.”
  • What is standing in the way of a proper valuation of life, she said, is “our very, very disordered relationship with death.”
  • n the United States, denial of death has reached an extreme form, she said, where many focus on themselves to avoid the fear of death.
  • That fear cuts through “all tendrils of conscience, and common good, and capacity to act together,” she said, “because in the final analysis we have become animals saving our own skin, the way we seem to save our own skin is repression and dissociation.”
  • The United States is an outlier in the level of gun violence it tolerates. The rate and severity of mass shootings is without parallel in the world outside conflict zones.America has “a love affair with violence,”
  • Violence is an almost a normal part of life in the United States, she said, and valuing life takes consistently asking how am I committed to nonviolence today? It also means giving some things up, she said — many people think of themselves as nonviolent, but consume violence in entertainment.
  • “The question that should scare us is, what will it take to make us collectively bring about this change?
  • “Maybe this is our life’s work,” she said. “Maybe this is our work as humans.”
  • “But when I slow down I realize there is something alive in our culture that has harmed those people,” she said. “Whatever that something is, it is harming all of us, we are all vulnerable to it, it wields some sort of influence upon us, no matter who we are.”
Javier E

'Be thankful you don't have our poison': US pollster Frank Luntz's warning to UK | US p... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...erview-pollster-us-uk-politics

poison pollster warning politics crisis culture trump gop division polarization

shared by Javier E on 28 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • The 59-year-old, well known from countless media appearances and for running focus groups that provide an insight into America’s political psyche, has also now chosen a less partisan path.
  • Having once worked for rightwing Republicans such as Pat Buchanan, Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani, he no longer hesitates to condemn Donald Trump’s pernicious influence or fears the conservative media backlash.
  • You all have proven that there’s still a desire for substance in politics, not just slogans and soundbites, and thank God you haven’t completely embraced American politics because your elections are of substance rather than style.
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  • Last year he went to the UK for a month and ended up staying nearly eight, finding an antidote to American’s poison.
  • “I still haven’t fully recovered from my stroke, and what goes on in this country, I couldn’t talk about it. I got in the middle of it. Tucker Carlson [a host on Fox News] was killing me every fucking night.”
  • also invited UK journalists to disseminate a warning: don’t let British politics become as polarised and debased as the American system.
  • “You still like each other, you still respect each other, you still value public debate: your democracy is still functioning,”
  • “Ours has seized up and I don’t know how to get ours flowing again. Be thankful that you don’t have our poison … I’m very afraid of the American system being hopelessly damaged.”
  • “If I didn’t die, I’m not afraid any more, so you will hear me criticise people I never would have criticised two years ago. What are they going to do to me? It can’t be any worse than what I’ve been through and, when you become more fearless, it makes life easier to navigate.”
  • “I know that you guys are critical of the UK in recent times for being too American in your elections. You’re not. We are becoming more and more superficial. You are still substantial.”
  • Later he plays a video clip of one of his US focus groups descending into angry shouting and recriminations, a glimpse of a society that seems to be falling apart. He comments: “The worst of the worst. This is my warning to you. This is shit. This is a disaster and it will come to you if you let it happen.”
  • Today, after the catharsis of his stroke, Luntz finds plenty of blame to go around. He casts a harsh light on the media, social media and his own younger self. In an infamous 2003 memo, for example, he advised George W Bush’s Republican party to abandon the phrase “global warming” in favour of “climate change” because it is “less frightening”
  • “Biden does not understand the hopes and dreams of the average American,” says the messaging expert, who remains on the centre-right. “He does not empathise with them. His team is ideological rather than emotional and so he’s missing all this. It’s how people feel even more than how they think; feeling is a deeper emotion and Biden is not connecting to them at all.
  • Luntz argues that he overpromised. “He created unrealistic expectations. He’s a very arrogant human being and very flawed and the combination of flaws and arrogance is a really unhealthy cocktail.”
  • Wasn’t Biden supposed to be Mr Empathy? “There’s nothing about him that screams empathy. There’s everything about him that screams someone who’s already made up their mind.”
  • He identifies six issues that will determine voters’ choices: crime, immigration, shortages, prices, education and the January 6 insurrection. “Democrats have a huge problem on five out of the six.”
  • “Boris Johnson has written more books than Donald Trump has read. Boris is the real Trump. He understands the hopes and dreams of the public. He gets the historic context. He can wax poetically about 2,000 years ago, 200 years ago and two years ago. Trump could not do that.
  • The Great Rethink. It is a study of America voters’ attitudes and disillusionment with their leaders. “The only thing we agree on is that politicians suck,” Luntz says. “If you’re American, this is a very depressing time right now.”
  • nother offers some words to use (I am your voice, accountability, fact-based) and words to lose (agenda, I’m listening, transparency).
  • Luntz argues that even in a polarised society such as America, every parent asks the same question: will my child/grandchild be happy
  • Perhaps rather optimistically, he urges politicians to focus on children as “the great unifier”
  • “If you want to bring people together, you do it over their children. You guys are divided on just about everything; this crushes that divide. This brings people together and it’s not been done before.
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