Group items tagged

Why were partisans so oblivious to the escalating tensions that were tearing America apart? Why were they so confident that the solution to American polarization was domination and not accommodation? 

The answer was clear. For decades, winners and losers alike spun virtually every American election as the sign of things to come, the harbinger of a permanent victory (or permanent defeat). You don’t even have to be that old to see the recent pattern. The thrill of Democratic victory in 1992 turned into the agony of defeat in 1994, then the thrill of victory again in 1996

Then Obama won in 2008. But for Republicans, that was an aberration—a fluke caused by the housing crash and an unpopular war. The real majority came to the polls in Tea Party 2010. But wait: Obama won again in 2012, and suddenly all the momentum was on the side of the “coalition of the ascendant.” Remember that phrase? It signaled permanent Republican doom—the alleged party of white people couldn’t possibly keep winning in a nation that was growing more diverse by the year, could it?

They itched to rectify a military balance that was tipped in favour of the US. The Cuban revolutionaries also approved. Nobody, however, asked Khrushchev what would happen if the Americans discovered the missiles en route to Cuba, before they were ready, or if they reacted violently to them once they were installed. There was no “plan B”.

This failure was compounded by sloppy Soviet planning. The head of the Strategic Missile Force, Marshal Sergei Biryuzov, promised Khrushchev that Americans would not discover Soviet missiles because palm trees would cover them. One expert, who knew Cuba’s vegetation better, wanted to object, only to have his superior press on his foot under the table, to make him shut up. The tradition of telling bosses what they wanted to hear while sweeping awkward realities under the rug is not Soviet-Russian monopoly. Yet tradition truly flourished under the Soviets, and warped their decision-making, even in life-and-death situations.

There is a whole library of excellent books by US historians on the Cuban missile crisis. Innumerable conferences, seminars and “games” have taken place in an attempt to learn the lessons. No wonder that Biden, his people and the US military no longer share the Kennedy-era “gung-ho” approach to nuclear war. On the contrary, they are extremely careful and attentive to the slightest dangers of escalation in Ukraine. And they are determined that a taboo on the use of nuclear weapons should be maintained.

I believe that most of us are willing to broaden our understanding of our country’s history to look at both the best and the worst. But we often can’t—not for intellectual reasons but because of unrecognized psychological ones. Understanding those psychological roadblocks is a formidable challenge. But it’s crucial to do so if we want to get past them.

Let’s begin with the four reasons our minds sometimes make it hard to have a more honest, nuanced view of our history.

First, our minds tend to play down our wrongdoing from the past.

The decline is accelerating: Teen births fell 20 percent in the 1990s, 28 percent in the 2000s and 55 percent in the 2010s. Three decades ago, a quarter of 15-year-old girls became mothers before turning 20, according to Child Trends estimates, including nearly half of those who were Black or Hispanic. Today, just 6 percent of 15-year-old girls become teen mothers.

The reasons teen births have fallen are only partly understood. Contraceptive use has grown and shifted to more reliable methods, and adolescent sex has declined. Civic campaigns, welfare restrictions and messaging from popular culture may have played roles.

But with progress so broad and sustained, many researchers argue the change reflects something more fundamental: a growing sense of possibility among disadvantaged young women, whose earnings and education have grown faster than their male counterparts.

For more than a year, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made a point of stoking fears about China. He’s told U.S. lawmakers that China “steals” American technology and played up nationalist concerns about threats from Chinese-owned rival TikTok.

Meta has a growing problem: The social media service wants to transform itself into a powerhouse in hardware, and it makes virtually all of it in China.So the company is racing to get out.

Facebook has hit walls, say three people familiar with the discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal conversations.

To some, it all sounds like noise. “Whether Covid came accidentally from a lab in Wuhan or a seafood market is almost beside the point,” Edward Luce wrote in The Financial Times last month,

This has always struck me as an exceedingly strange perspective. Perhaps it is a truism to say that the events that brought about the deaths of perhaps 20 million people around the world and the jagged disruption of many billions of other lives are of enormous consequence and that dismissing the matter of its cause as simply a “blame game” is a form of not just historical but moral incuriosity.

It is consequential as long as it remains unresolved, as well. That’s because our collective uncertainty about the origin of the pandemic has itself shaped the way we’ve come to think about what we’ve all just lived through, the way we responded in the first place and the way the pandemic has played out, often weaponized, in geopolitics.

When civilizations promote parity along one axis, they tend to lapse back toward hierarchy along another. Legal equality may be offset by widening economic rifts, as in Western democracies today; the expansion of the franchise to a larger segment of the male population may be accompanied by the fervent demonization of women or non-natives, as in ancient Athens; movements for justice may prompt reactionary backlash, as in France after the 1789 revolution.

At a time when equality is widely lauded as an uncomplicated good, McMahon’s sweeping if occasionally schematic study provides a thought-provoking reminder of its pitfalls

All too often, equality within a group is premised on the exclusion of those outside it.

D.E.I. Short for “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” the term — like the related progressive concepts of wokeness and critical race theory — used to have an agreed-upon meaning but has now been essentially redefined on the populist right. In that world, D.E.I. has become yet another catchall boogeyman, a stand-in not just for actual policies or practices designed to increase diversity, but also a scapegoat for unrelated crises.

the immense backlash from parts of the right against almost any diversity initiative is a sign of the extent to which millions of white Americans are content with their vastly disproportionate share of national wealth and power.

Outside the reactionary right, there is a cohort of Americans, on both right and left, who want to eradicate illegal discrimination and remedy the effects of centuries of American injustice yet also have grave concerns about the way in which some D.E.I. efforts are undermining American constitutional values, especially on college campuses.

there is one explanation that seems almost too simplistic: that “Americans just work harder”,

The numbers do in fact bear out this assertion—a rare case of national stereotypes being empirically provable

On average Americans work 1,811 hours per year, according to data from the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries. That is 15% more than in the EU, where the average is 1,571 hours

in doing the hard work of spelling out what a Rawlsian program might look like in practice, Chandler ends up illustrating why liberalism has elicited such frustration from its many critics in the first place.

Rawls’s theory was premised on the thought experiment of the “original position,” in which individuals would design a just society from behind a “veil of ignorance.” People couldn’t know whether they would be born rich or poor, gay or straight, Black or white — and so, like the child cutting the cake who doesn’t get to choose the first slice, each would be motivated to realize a society that would be accepted as fair even by the most vulnerable.

This is liberalism grounded in reciprocity rather than selfishness or altruism. According to Rawls’s “difference principle,” inequalities would be permitted only as long as they promoted the interests of the least advantaged.

“Within Reason: A Liberal Public Health for an Illiberal Time,” Sandro Galea, the dean of the Boston University School of Public Health, looks to his own field to explain the animating forces behind some of those disputes.

Despite remarkable successes, Galea argues, public health succumbed to a disturbing strain of illiberalism during the pandemic. This not only worsened the impact of the pandemic; it also destabilized public health institutions in ways that will serve us poorly when the next crisis comes.

: If Americans have come to distrust public health advice, what role may public health officials have played in fostering that distrust?

Of course the Civil War was about slavery, and everyone knew it at the time. No, Nikki Haley, it wasn’t about states’ rights, except to the extent that Southern states were trying to force Northern states to help maintain slavery

it may be worth delving a bit deeper into the background here. Why did slavery exist in the first place? Why was it confined to only part of the United States? And why were slaveholders willing to start a war to defend the institution, even though abolitionism was still a fairly small movement and they faced no imminent risk of losing their chattels?

The American system of chattel slavery wasn’t motivated primarily by racism, but by greed. Slaveholders were racists, and they used racism both to justify their behavior and to make the enslavement of millions more sustainable, but it was the money and the inhumane greed that drove the racist system.

we can’t (as in, are unable to in real-world terms) censor far-right content online because of the basic reality of modern communications technology. The internet makes the transmission of information, no matter how ugly or shocking or secret, functionally impossible to stop. Digital infrastructure is spread out across the globe, including in regimes that do not play ball with American legal or corporate mandates, and there’s plenty of server racks out there in the world buzzing along that are inaccessible to even the most dedicated hall monitors

, it happens that I am one of those free speech absolutists, yes, but that is very explicitly not what the piece argues - it’s precisely an argument that whether we should censor is entirely moot, because we can’t. The technological impediments to cutting off the flow of information (at least that which is not tightly controlled at the supply-side) are now existential.

This is a reality people have to accept, even if - especially if - they think that reality is corrosive and ugly. I suspect it’s a similar story with all of this horrible AI “deepfake” celebrity porn.

If there isn’t an inner me experiencing my thoughts, feelings and the things I see and hear, what is going on

‘What’s happening in the brain is there are many competing streams of content running in competition and they’re fighting for influence. The one that temporarily wins is king of the mountain, that’s what we can remember, what we can talk about, what we can report and what plays a dominant role in guiding our behaviour – those are the contents of consciousness.’

Those acquainted with the workings of large language models, the technology behind ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, will recognise a similarity in Dennett’s description of consciousness and the architecture of generative AI: parallel processing streams producing outputs that compete for salience.

All six said that Lavender had played a central role in the war, processing masses of data to rapidly identify potential “junior” operatives to target. Four of the sources said that, at one stage early in the war, Lavender listed as many as 37,000 Palestinian men who had been linked by the AI system to Hamas or PIJ.

The health ministry in the Hamas-run territory says 32,000 Palestinians have been killed in the conflict in the past six months. UN data shows that in the first month of the war alone, 1,340 families suffered multiple losses, with 312 families losing more than 10 members.

Several of the sources described how, for certain categories of targets, the IDF applied pre-authorised allowances for the estimated number of civilians who could be killed before a strike was authorised.

The Foundation, which is affiliated with the German Green party, founded the prize not to honor Arendt but to “honor individuals who identify critical and unseen aspects of current political events and who are not afraid to enter the public realm by representing their opinion in controversial political discussions”, withdrew its support, causing the city of Bremen to withdraw its support, leading to an initial cancellation

The Foundation said Gessen’s comparison was “unacceptable”, but has since backtracked and has now said that they stand behind the award.

The comparison is not a one-to-one argument, but rather a barometer for urging individuals – and countries – to think about their support for Israe

Bernanke’s 80-page assessment, the result of more than seven months’ work, is the most comprehensive independent analysis of a big central bank’s performance since an inflationary crisis hit the world economy in early 2022. He offers a dozen recommendations for change at the Bank, the strongest of which is for the MPC to begin publishing “alternative scenarios” that show how its inflation forecasts stand up in extreme situations, for example in the face of an energy price shock.

The review lays bare how the Bank and its international peers all failed to model the impact of the huge energy price shock that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, the disruption in global trade during the pandemic after 2020 and how workers and companies would respond to significant price changes.

In choosing Bernanke, one of the most respected central bankers of his generation, to lead the review, the Bank has ensured that his findings will be difficult to ignore. The former Fed chairman carried out more than 60 face-to-face interviews with Bank staff and market participants and sat in on the MPC’s November 2023 forecasting round to assess where the Bank’s forecasts and communication were failing short, from the use of computer models to the role played by “human judgment”.

Both the Soviet Union and United States conducted high-altitude nuclear detonation (HAND) tests in the 1950s and 1960s, including the U.S. Starfish Prime test in 1962 when the United States detonated a 1.4 megaton warhead atop a Thor missile 250 miles above the Earth. The explosion created an electromagnetic pulse that spread through the atmosphere, frying electronics on land hundreds of miles away from the test, causing electrical surges on airplanes and in power grids, and disrupting radio communications. The boosted nuclear radiation in space accumulated on satellites in orbit, damaging or destroying one-third of them.

Nor is it new for Russia to violate nuclear arms control agreements. In recent years, Russia has violated the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, suspended its participation in the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, and de-ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Backing out of arms control commitments is part of Russia’s modus operandi.

What appears unprecedented now is that Russia could be working toward deploying nuclear weapons on satellites, which are constantly orbiting the Earth, to be detonated at times and locations of Moscow’s choosing.

Business types and some economists may talk glowingly about the virtues of “creative destruction,” but the process can be devastating, economically and socially, for those who find themselves on the destruction side of the equation. This is especially true when technological change undermines not just individual workers but also whole communities.

It’s a big part of what has happened to rural America.

This process and its effects are laid out in devastating, terrifying and baffling detail in “White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy,” a new book by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman