while older generations have always looked down on younger kids or talked about things “back in their day,” she and other teens believe older people are actively hurting young people
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'OK Boomer' Marks the End of Friendly Generational Relations - The New York Times - 0 views
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“Everybody in Gen Z is affected by the choices of the boomers, that they made and are still making,” she said. “Those choices are hurting us and our future. Everyone in my generation can relate to that experience and we’re all really frustrated by it.”
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“Essentials are more expensive than ever before, we pay 50 percent of our income to rent, no one has health insurance,”
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“Previous generations have left Generation Z with the short end of the stick. You see this on both the left, right, up down and sideways.” Mr. Citarella added: “The merch is proof of how much the sentiment resonates with people.”
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Rising inequality, unaffordable college tuition, political polarization exacerbated by the internet, and the climate crisis all fuel anti-boomer sentiment.
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“There’s not much I can personally do to restore the environment, which was harmed due to corporate greed of older generations. There’s not much I can personally do to undo political corruption, or fix Congress so it’s not mostly old white men boomers who don’t represent the majority of generations.”
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Teens say “ok boomer" is the perfect response because it’s blasé but cutting. It’s the digital equivalent of an eye roll.
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In the end, boomer is just a state of mind. Mr. Williams said anyone can be a boomer — with the right attitude. “You don’t like change, you don’t understand new things especially related to technology, you don’t understand equality,” he said. “Being a boomer is just having that attitude, it can apply to whoever is bitter toward change.”
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Andrew Sullivan: Questions About Youth Gender Transitions - 0 views
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Take the biggest actual social change, hailed by liberals, of the last couple of decades: marriage equality. We did not spend our time calling out homophobia, attacking the churches, or describing our opponents as “deplorable.”
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I can’t tell you how many times I debated religious fundamentalists, while never disparaging them. I produced an anthology of the best arguments on both sides.
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We made our case carefully; we engaged the other side respectfully; we lobbied state legislatures; more and more gay people told their stories; brilliant lawyers fought various cases, beginning with failure until achieving success at the Supreme Court.
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But if you avoid actual argument and resort to slurs, cancel culture, and ever more polarizing rhetoric, you’ll lose.
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Obama is right about the complexity of people. Attack people for their “whiteness,” accuse people of sexual crimes without any proof or certainty, disparage all criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic, cast every point against gay marriage as bigotry — and you’ll definitely make waves, and be cheered on by your own tribe. But bringing about change? Sometimes I think this kind of activism — damning them while not talking to them — actually prevents change.
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shared by Javier E on 28 Nov 19
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Opinion | Liberals Do Not Want to Destroy the Family - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...barr-liberals-family.html
liberalism conservatism despair anomie values crisis culture politics
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It is critical to bear in mind that the U.S. has a less generous social safety net than almost all of the other advanced countries to which we compare ourselves: Canada, the UK, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, etc. And yet we have higher rates of nonwork among prime-age men and women, and much worse socio-demographic outcomes: family stability, investment in children, educational attainment, life expectancy, rates of violent death, etc. It defies logic to assert that the relatively stingy U.S. social safety net has somehow lured the U.S. public into licentiousness and social decline whereas the much more comprehensive social safety nets in other wealthy democracies has failed to do so.
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The white working class constituency that would seem to be most immune to the appeal of the cultural left — the very constituency that has moved more decisively than any other to the right — is now succumbing to the centrifugal, even anarchic, forces denounced by Barr and other social conservatives, while more liberal constituencies are moving in the opposite, more socially coherent, rule-following, direction.
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now we are in a new social paradigm that has normalized nonmarital childbearing and child rearing among certain segments of the population, and it will take more than economic improvement to restore the stable two-parent family in the communities it which that norm has been steadily eroding.
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Autor, Kearney and others whose work I will go on to discuss offer analyses and explanations of contemporary social dislocation that serve to reveal the oversimplification and the striking omissions in the work of social conservatives, who often fail, to give one crucial example, to account for the impact of mass incarceration.
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Many factors have contributed to the income stagnation in the bottom tiers and the overall increasing inequality in the United States. Paramount among these are changes in the economy that have placed a greater premium on college-educated workers, advances in technology and the offshoring of manufacturing jobs to lower-wage countries. One can hardly understand the impact of these dynamic contributing structural factors to our rising inequality by focusing almost exclusively on so-called changes in the values of the American population
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We need to address the underlying premise that there is a rise in social disorder. That claim does not hold up to scrutiny, in both the long and short term. In the United States and many other parts of the world, the last two decades have seen a remarkable decline in many of the most visible signs of social disorder.
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You can see that many of these improvements in the quality of life have coincided with the creation of the modern liberal welfare state and many of place that enjoy the least social disorder are, in fact, places with leftist political systems that provide for social welfare.
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Uniquely among major socioeconomic groups, the white working class decreased in absolute numbers and population share in recent decades. At the same time, the five measures of well-being we tracked all deteriorated for the white working class relative to the overall population. The shares of all income earned and wealth owned by the white working class fell even faster than their population share.
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the white working class — the segment of the population with the weakest ties to, if not outright animosity toward, liberalism, feminism and other liberation movements — has, in recent years, experienced the strongest trends toward social decay.
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While five decades ago, many on the left denounced the 1965 Moynihan Report, “The Negro Family: The Case For National Action” for “blaming the victim” because of its description of rising numbers of nonmarital births in the black community, there has been a striking reversal in favor of the report in the academic and liberal policymaking community.
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“The broad-based decline that is unique to the white working class may be due in part to the group’s loss over time of advantages it once enjoyed relative to those of nonwhite working classes,”
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These included more years of education and plentiful high-paying jobs available in white working class communities. And, as the explicit discrimination minorities faced in the workplace has diminished, so has the advantage that it had given the white working class.
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While in absolute terms the white working class — those without college degrees, in pollster shorthand — have higher levels of marriage and cohabitation, homeownership and self-reported health ratings than members of the black working class, the trends are downward for whites and upward for African-Americans.
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The most telling critique of the claims of social conservatives is that their single-minded focus on the destructive forces of liberalism offers a facile (and erroneous) answer to developments that do not fit simple categories of good and evil
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Some people believe that humans are born good and are only later corrupted by society. They emphasize the importance of a society that collectively helps each individual achieve their inherent potential. Others believe that individuals are inherently flawed, often ill-disciplined, weak-willed, and capable of evil as well as good. They emphasize the importance of social structures that help people, in the words of Edmund Burke, “to put chains upon their appetites.”
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Under current conditions of stark political polarization, these two sides are at loggerheads. Sawhill argues that:What a functioning and tolerant politics would permit is a negotiated settlement of this dispute. We would devise institutions and norms but also laws and practices that bring out, in Lincoln’s famous words, the “better angels of our nature.”
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the willingness to accommodate the opposition — an essential step toward compromise and reconciliation — appears modestly stronger on the left than the right.
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. In an email, she wrote:My read of the evidence is that the declining economic position of less educated men (both in a relative and absolute sense) has probably been a key driver of the breakdown of the two-parent family among less educated populations for many decades.
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Similarly, “The Moynihan Report Revisited: Lessons and Reflections after Four Decades,” edited by two liberal scholars, Douglas S. Massey and Robert J. Sampson, sociologists at Princeton and Harvard, found that the trends toward family breakdown documented in the report “have only grown worse, not only for blacks, but for whites and Hispanics as well.” The authors were sharply critical of the attacks on Moynihan from the left that had appeared when the report was first published.
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Patrick Deneen, whose book received near unanimous praise from conservative critics, defines the “culture war” that has characterized recent decades, and which seems to grow more virulent daily, in implacable terms: “Democracy, in fact, cannot ultimately function in a liberal regime.”
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Barr, in turn, argues thatin the Framers’ view, free government was only suitable and sustainable for a religious people — a people who recognized that there was a transcendent moral order antecedent to both the state and man-made law and who had the discipline to control themselves according to those enduring principles.
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The secular left, in Barr’s view, is at war with what he views as a decent America:This is not decay; it is organized destruction. Secularists, and their allies among the “progressives,” have marshaled all the force of mass communications, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and academia in an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values.
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The reality is that Barr is not only selling traditional values to conservative voters, some of whom are genuinely starved for them, he is also marketing apocalyptic hogwash because, for his boss to get re-elected, Trump’s supporters must continue to believe that liberals and the Democratic Party are the embodiment of evil, determined to destroy the American way of life.
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Why It's So Difficult to Buy Contacts in the U.S. - The Atlantic - 0 views
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a fact that has puzzled me ever since I moved to the United States a dozen years ago. In every other country in which I’ve lived—Germany and Britain, France and Italy—it is far easier to buy glasses or contact lenses than it is here. In those countries, as in Peru, you can simply walk into an optician’s and ask a store employee to give you an eye test, likely free of charge. If you already know your strength, you can just tell them what you want. You can also buy contact lenses from the closest drugstore without having to talk to a single soul—no doctor’s prescription necessary.
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why does the United States require people who want to purchase something as simple as a curved piece of plastic to get a prescription, preceded by a costly medical exam?
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On the one hand, some number of Americans who visit an optometrist to get a new prescription will indeed discover that they have a serious condition that requires immediate care. On the other hand, it is likely that a much greater number keep wearing glasses that are too weak—or won’t wear glasses at all—because they want to avoid the cost, time, or stress of a visit to a doctor.
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the added cost of having to see an optometrist presumably stops many Americans from accessing the corrective lenses they need to improve their vision. Is the desirability of an eye exam performed by a medical professional a sufficient reason to prevent Americans who would rather not—or cannot—visit an optometrist from buying glasses and contacts?
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it’s reasonable to assume that it has an adverse impact on many people, especially underprivileged Americans—those who don’t have insurance, have little cash, or lack the social or financial capital to navigate our country’s byzantine medical system.
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many people have a financial interest in this burdensome system. If Americans no longer needed to book appointments with optometrists to buy glasses or contacts, many optometrists would see their salaries cut, and some might go out of business altogether.
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I stood firm, and later went online to order perfectly fine glasses and contact lenses at a fraction of the price. But how many customers give in to heavy-handed sales tactics?
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When I last went to an eye exam at a storefront optician in the United States, for example, the staff gave me the hard sell on glasses that would have cost hundreds of dollars, as well as on contact lenses that were much more expensive than identical ones sold by online retailers. Thankfully, I knew that two laws, one passed in 1997 and the other in 2003—which had, incidentally, been loudly opposed by the AOA—gave me the right to demand a copy of my prescription.
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Optometrists are also a source of revenue for opticians, from large chains like Specsavers to independent stores in malls and town centers across the United States. Since they often work on-site, they have an incentive to nudge their patients to buy the products on hand.
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Democrats who care about the well-being of the socioeconomically disadvantaged—and are worried about the health disparities between different ethnic groups—should be outraged by the unreasonable burden the situation places on underprivileged Americans.
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Republicans who believe in the free market should look on this red tape as an unnecessary intrusion on free enterprise
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Even in times of extreme polarization and a deeply broken Congress, this is one piece of sensible legislation that should be able to command bipartisan support
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Malls are dying. The thriving ones are spending millions to reinvent themselves. - The ... - 0 views
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In their heyday, they were monuments to consumerism that doubled as cultural touchstone, inspiring films like “Mallrats” and board games like Mall Madness. But in the past decade, as shopping dollars migrated online and a parade of well-known retailers toppled, the malls that didn’t evolve fast enough stumbled into a devastating cycle of dwindling traffic, lower sales and disappearing storefronts. One in four U.S. malls is expected to close by 2022, according to a 2017 report by Credit Suisse.
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Those that are thriving are spending millions reinventing themselves as integrated lifestyle hubs — adding yoga studios, medical clinics and microbreweries — populated with more upscale shops. But such targeted investments are often coming at the expense of mall operators’ lower-tier properties — and analysts say the divide between rich malls and poor malls is widening.
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“There is an accelerating polarization between the ‘best’ and the ‘rest,' ” said Neil Saunders, managing director of research firm GlobalData Retail. “Newer, nicer malls have become magnets for consumers, pulling them away from struggling properties."
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“Traditionally we kept our shopping separate from our living from our recreation,” said Amanda Nicholson, a professor of retail practice at Syracuse University. “That’s not what the world wants anymore. Malls need to be more creative about getting people outside their homes — it can’t just be stores, stores and more stores."
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These days, the most successful malls tend to be dominated by brands that appeal to higher earners, like Nordstrom, Apple and Lululemon, as well as up-and-comers like Untuckit and Peloton. They also tend to have invested heavily in restaurants, spas and specialty gyms that keep customers coming back, week after week, even if they’re doing more of their shopping online, Saunders said.
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“Everybody talks about the future of retail and the future of entertainment, and how you merge the two,” Don Ghermezian, president of Triple Five Group, said last month. “There really isn’t a center on the planet that has done it to the degree that we’ve done in here.”
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The nation’s first shopping center opened in Edina, Minn., in 1956. Renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright was unimpressed, as it had “all the evils of the village street and none of its charm.
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“There was an explosion of one-level malls with four anchor stores, a dreary food court and a carousel in the middle,” said Nicholson of Syracuse. “Developers realized they could put a large, flat building in the middle of a field and quickly make money — so for decades, in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, that’s what they did.
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China diversifying FX reserves, assets to counter US dollar exposure - 0 views
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China is heavily exposed to the U.S. dollar, but now, with the risk of “decoupling,” Beijing is silently diversifying its reserves to reduce its dependence on the world’s largest reserve currency, analysts say.
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Beijing will therefore manage its risk by diversifying its foreign exchange reserves into other currencies, ANZ predicted, as well as build up its “shadow reserves.”
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“Diversifying its currency holdings, in a way is very much in line with the recent political moves of the Xi administration to focus on China’s trade relationships beyond just the United States. China and, more broadly, the Asian region is still highly exposed to movements in the US dollar,” Hsiao said.
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The U.S. dollar is currently the world’s “reserve currency” — about 58% of all foreign exchange reserves in the world are in U.S. dollars, according to the IMF, and about 40% of the world’s debt is denominated in dollars.
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“The global financial system is highly U.S. dollar-centric and the larger economies, including China and the euro area, have been keen to move to a multi-polar reserve currency world,”
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shared by Javier E on 19 Nov 19
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Trump spurs a Wild West of continuously worsening political rhetoric - The Washington Post - 0 views
www.washingtonpost.com/...a-97ac-a7ccc8dd1ebc_story.html
character consequences morality partisan polarization ethics principles values relativism truth honor
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The Fox News/talk radio machine — part mob, part cult, part business racket — has come up against a variety of honorable, respected professionals, trying to testify honestly about the abuse of power
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Fox News is no longer content to spout pro-Trump propaganda. It must destroy Trump’s opponents, even if they are honorable people. Especially if they are honorable people. The goal is not to dispute their testimony — which, on the facts, seems indisputable — but to discredit them as witnesses and as human beings.
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Partisan extremes in the United States have become entirely consequentialist in their ethics. The overriding goal may be the end of Roe v. Wade — or its preservation. It may be passage of gun control legislation — or protection of the Second Amendment. In each case, the objective — always measured in saved lives — means everything.
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But if the objective means everything, then how do we judge the character of leaders or the morality of political methods? If ending Roe, for example, is really all that matters, wouldn’t a corrupt or lying politician who opposes Roe always be better than the ideological alternative?
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Why should we care? Because democracy is hard to sustain in the absence of certain values. Self-government requires ethical hierarchy — a belief that honor is better than dishonor, fairness is better than exploitation and truth is superior to lies
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American freedom is not based on relativism; it is based on the belief that the dignity of human beings is a knowable, universal truth. And the success of that principle is demonstrated in the way we treat each other.
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There are categorical commitments to respect and truthfulness that can’t be subordinated to partisan outcomes.
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Trump poll: Republicans said Trump is greater than Lincoln in changed GOP - The Washing... - 0 views
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“Lincoln devoted his second term to uniting people rather than feeding red meat to a small base of people,” Holzer said. “Today, the party is more devoted to the accumulation of wealth and restrictions on voting rights."
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Another obvious difference is the Lincoln-era Republican Party’s support of immigration. In his last State of the Union address, Lincoln featured a proposal to pay foreigners to come to the United States so the workforce would increase.
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“Lincoln was a pro-tariff man, and Trump is sporadically in favor of tariffs as a punitive weapon,” he said, adding that tariffs were not punitive for Lincoln. Then, tariffs were the major source of income.
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“It was not a party of privilege or white supremacy. Those dubious honors belonged to the Democratic Party,” he said, which remained predominantly in the Southern states until the 1960s civil rights movement, when a major political realignment occurred.
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Six weeks before his death, Lincoln addressed a crowd outside the Capitol, prepared to begin his second term in office. The country was emerging from the worst crisis in American history — a war that had killed hundreds of thousands and divided the North and South.He concluded the address, saying: “With malice toward none, with charity for all.”
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In that polarized moment, Holzer said, Lincoln didn’t blame fake news and enemies of the people. He emphasized humility, talked openly about his flaws and used a brilliance of language not to punish and humiliate but to inspire.
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Andrew Sullivan: Boris Johnson's Winning Formula - 0 views
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he moved the party sharply left on austerity, spending on public services, tax cuts for the working poor, and a higher minimum wage. He outflanked the far right on Brexit and shamelessly echoed the left on economic policy.
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This is Trumpism without Trump. A conservative future without an ineffective and polarizing nutjob at the heart of it.
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Unlike Trump, he will stop E.U. mass migration, and pass a new immigration system, based on the Australian model. Unlike Trump, he will focus tax cuts on the working poor, not the decadent rich.
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“One Nation Conservatism.” That was Disraeli’s reformist conservatism of the 19th century, a somewhat protectionist, supremely patriotic alliance between the conservative elites and the ordinary man and woman
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A Fragile Balance in Iran | JSTOR Daily - 0 views
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In the fervor of a 1978 social revolution against the Shah and his neocolonial relationship with the United States and Europe, a group of Shi’i clerics won the upper hand and created the world’s only current theocracy.
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Most American political reporting on the Islamic Republic, therefore, simplifies Iranian politics to a struggle between “moderates” or “reformists” and “hardliners.”
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The recent victories in Syria in favor of the Iran- and Russia-backed forces of President Bashar Al-Assad as well as the end to UN sanctions on Iran have the potential to aggrandize newer groups in the military, state, and business elites.
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But without democratic oversight, the influx of European business and investment after sanctions has the potential both to increase corruption in state enterprises and to polarize inequality within the upper and middle classes.
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The clerics, however, were mostly conservative and sympathetic to the sanctity of property ownership. They dismantled working class organizations and reversed nationalizations. Led by individuals like Rafsanjani, their policies ultimately empowered the middle class bazaari merchants and mid-sized entrepreneurs.
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Shortly after the death of founding Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Mansour Moaddel examined the socioeconomic counterrevolution that occurred in the late 1980s against peasant and worker movements for social change unleashed starting in 1978. The revolution shattered the control of western corporations and their foreign agents. Appealing to religious revolutionary ideology, farmers seized land from their landlords and workers organized to support better conditions and nationalizing industries.
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Even if President-Elect Trump does not significantly alter the status quo in U.S. and Western diplomacy with Iran, many countervailing factors prevent such a simplification of Iranian politics. Many large Islamic charitable organizations exercise considerable economic and political power semi-independently from state institutions.
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Factionalism continues to fire ideological rhetoric, discouraging diplomacy and foreign business engagement in Iran.
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Opinion | Who Killed the Knapp Family? - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...deaths-despair-poverty.html
American dream despair working class culture crisis jobs responsibility welfare state drugs
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Suicides are at their highest rate since World War II; one child in seven is living with a parent suffering from substance abuse; a baby is born every 15 minutes after prenatal exposure to opioids; America is slipping as a great power.
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We have deep structural problems that have been a half century in the making, under both political parties, and that are often transmitted from generation to generation.
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Deaton and the economist Anne Case, who is also his wife, coined the term “deaths of despair” to describe the surge of mortality from alcohol, drugs and suicide.
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“The meaningfulness of the working-class life seems to have evaporated,” Angus Deaton, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, told us. “The economy just seems to have stopped delivering for these people.”
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Only in America has life expectancy now fallen three years in a row, for the first time in a century, because of “deaths of despair.”
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“I’m a capitalist, and even I think capitalism is broken,” says Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater, the world’s largest hedge fund.
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The suffering was invisible to affluent Americans, but the consequences are now evident to all: The survivors mostly voted for Trump, some in hopes that he would rescue them
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The stock market is near record highs, but working-class Americans (often defined as those without college degrees) continue to struggle. If you’re only a high school graduate, or worse, a dropout, work no longer pays.
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If the federal minimum wage in 1968 had kept up with inflation and productivity, it would now be $22 an hour. Instead, it’s $7.25.
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we would return to the Kristof family farm in Yamhill and see a humanitarian crisis unfolding in a community we loved — and a similar unraveling was happening in towns across the country. This was not one town’s problem, but a crisis in the American system.
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Even in this presidential campaign, the unraveling of working-class communities receives little attention. There is talk about the middle class, but very little about the working class
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One consequence is that the bottom end of America’s labor force is not very productive, in ways that reduce our country’s competitiveness
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“We have to stop being obsessed over impeachment and start actually digging in and solving the problems that got Donald Trump elected in the first place,”
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the situation is worsening, because families have imploded under the pressure of drug and alcohol abuse, and children are growing up in desperate circumstances
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In the 1970s and ’80s it was common to hear derogatory suggestions that the forces ripping apart African-American communities were rooted in “black culture.” The idea was that “deadbeat dads,” self-destructive drug abuse and family breakdown were the fundamental causes, and that all people needed to do was show “personal responsibility.
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A Harvard sociologist, William Julius Wilson, countered that the true underlying problem was lost jobs, and he turned out to be right. When good jobs left white towns like Yamhill a couple of decades later because of globalization and automation, the same pathologies unfolded there.
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Men in particular felt the loss not only of income but also of dignity that accompanied a good job. Lonely and troubled, they self-medicated with alcohol or drugs, and they accumulated criminal records that left them less employable and less marriageable.
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The United States wrested power from labor and gave it to business, and it suppressed wages and cut taxes rather than invest in human capital, as our peer countries did.
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The kids on the No. 6 bus rode into a cataclysm as working-class communities disintegrated across America because of lost jobs, broken families, gloom — and failed policies.
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Americans also bought into a misconceived “personal responsibility” narrative that blamed people for being poor.
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It’s true, of course, that personal responsibility matters: People we spoke to often acknowledged engaging in self-destructive behaviors.
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But when you can predict wretched outcomes based on the ZIP code where a child is born, the problem is not bad choices the infant is making.
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If we’re going to obsess about personal responsibility, let’s also have a conversation about social responsibility.
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Both political parties embraced mass incarceration and the war on drugs, which was particularly devastating for black Americans, and ignored an education system that often consigned the poor — especially children of color — to failing schools
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Since 1988, American schools have become increasingly segregated by race, and kids in poor districts perform on average four grade levels behind those in rich districts.
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Yet it’s not hopeless. America is polarized with ferocious arguments about social issues, but we should be able to agree on what doesn’t work: neglect and underinvestment in children. Here’s what does work.
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ob training and retraining give people dignity as well as an economic lifeline. Such jobs programs are common in other countries.
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For instance, autoworkers were laid off during the 2008-9 economic crisis both in Detroit and across the Canadian border in nearby Windsor, Ontario. As the scholar Victor Tan Chen has showed, the two countries responded differently
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The United States focused on money, providing extended unemployment benefits. Canada emphasized job retraining, rapidly steering workers into new jobs in fields like health care, and Canadian workers also did not have to worry about losing health insurance.
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The focus on job placement meant that Canadian workers were ushered more quickly back into workaday society and thus today seem less entangled in drugs and family breakdown.
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Another successful strategy is investing not just in prisons but also in human capital to keep people out of prisons.
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We attended a thrilling graduation in Tulsa, Okla., for 17 women completing an impressive local drug treatment program called Women in Recovery.
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The graduates had an average of 15 years of addiction each, and all were on probation after committing crimes. Yet they had quit drugs and started jobs
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Women in Recovery has a recidivism rate after three years of only 4 percent, and consequently has saved Oklahoma $70 million in prison spending,
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Bravo for philanthropy, but the United States would never build interstate highways through volunteers and donations, and we can’t build a national preschool program or a national drug recovery program with private money.
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For individuals trying to break an addiction, a first step is to face up to the problem — and that’s what America should do as well
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Grooming Young Conservatives in the Trump Era - The Atlantic - 0 views
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At Princeton, however, conservative-leaning students and professors are mostly insulated from the day-to-day tumult. They’re more interested in a bigger question: What should conservatism—and America—look like moving forward?
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Elite conservative circles at these universities tend to focus on great books and big ideas, on statesmanship and lofty principles. Nothing could be further from the culture of American politics at the national level today, driven as it is by tribalism and thirst for the blood of political enemies.
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Even something so basic as collegiality can seem quaint these days. Although American politics have always been ugly and divisive, elite manners and sensibilities at least superficially governed how political life was conducted. The art of persuasion was at the very least afforded lip service. Not so much anymore.
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the leaders of this microcosm are doubling down on one of the oldest theories of politics: that ideas have the power to shape the direction of the country.
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At least at Princeton, students and their mentors are betting that romantic ideals such as collegiality and intellectual rigor have not totally lost their relevance in the Trump era
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The campus is largely apolitical or vaguely liberal, students told me, but George has carved out a mini-kingdom for right-leaning academics and students, who have gone on to hold all sorts of influential positions.
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The students and professors who move in Princeton’s conservative worlds have a diverse range of political views: They are pro-Trump and anti-Trump, stalwart supporters of the Republican Party and politically homeless wanderers with conservative leanings. I talked with students who like some of what Trump is doing, but for the most part, they were hesitant to go full MAGA.
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they seem to share a vision of how politics should be done, prizing respectful debate, principled arguments, and guidance from thinkers such as John Locke and Alexis de Tocqueville. It’s an ethos focused, above all, on civility and erudition.
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issues such as impeachment have gone all but unmentioned among his friends and peers. “We are just debating the way we see the world and how it should be,” Rajasekar said. Conversations about politics at restaurants and bars are always cordial and respectful, he added. “We place a high premium on that kind of collegiality.”
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students at Princeton who lean to the right have helped build a robust suite of conservative groups, most prominently the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, an expansive academic center overseen by the prominent scholar Robert P. George.
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“We have a motto for students in the Madison Program—it’s on some of the swag we hand out,” he said. “It’s ‘Think deeply, think critically, and think for yourself.’
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George, a long-respected figure in the conservative political world, has been a vocal critic of Trump since before the 2016 election. As a result, unlike in prior Republican administrations, he has largely remained on the sidelines of polic
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he’s committed to his vision of what the conservative movement, and American politics, can look like. “I have a kind of faith in the power of clear, coherent, deep thinking to produce good citizens and good people,” he said.
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Idealism is dead at Princeton,” Christian Schmidt, a senior who has been involved in nearly every conservative organization on campus, told me over apple cider at a local coffee shop. “The primary emotion, I think, on Princeton’s campus is apathy. Or apathy fused with resignation
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Other students said they don’t see a clear place for themselves in conservative politics, no matter how engaged they might be in the world of conservative ideas.
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Most of the people I spoke with described feeling welcome to share their ideas on Princeton’s campus—a number of students and faculty specifically mentioned that the school’s president, Christopher Eisgruber, has made a point of creating space for diverse viewpoints
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At least at Princeton, there seems to be hope. “We have gotten over these moments, these eruptions of no confidence,” said Allen Guelzo, a historian of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, during the conversation with George and other professors. “And I think we will get over this as well.”
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In this cloistered bastion, the work of grooming conservative elites will continue. “If I were the last man on Earth to believe this stuff,” George said, “I would still believe I’ve got the best product to sell.”
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Trump, Like Obama, Seeks Change in Iran. But He Differs in How to Do It. - The New York... - 0 views
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But as Mr. Pompeo and other Trump administration officials know full well, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the generals who guard his power in Tehran will never shape their foreign policy to the United States’ liking. What Mr. Pompeo implied was less a change in Iran’s behavior than a change in its leadership.
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“We support the Iranian people and their courageous struggle for freedom,” Mr. Trump said at a rally Tuesday night in Milwaukee, referring to recent antigovernment protests in the country.His approach is a contrast to the one pursued for years by the United States during the Obama administration, which, along with Europe, tested the possibility that Iran could be coaxed, not pressured, into a new era.
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Conservatives called Mr. Obama’s vision doomed from the start, and have argued that the relief from economic sanctions Iran won in exchange for limits on its nuclear program only funded more Iranian aggression in the Middle East and beyond. Nor did Iranian politics show much sign of moderating, despite conciliatory talk from Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani and its American-educated foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif. Now the Trump administration is testing an alternate approach, having abandoned the nuclear deal and adopted its “maximum pressure” posture.
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Administration officials are especially bullish about that strategy in recent days, as Iran’s government contends with renewed protests and absorbs the killing of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani. And in an ominous turn for Tehran this week, Britain, France and Germany formally accused Iran of violating the 2015 nuclear deal, after months of effectively looking the other way at increased Iranian nuclear activity.
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The administration’s current approach “contrasts in an almost perfectly polarized fashion” with Mr. Obama’s, Ms. Maloney said. That strategy, which began with Mr. Trump’s May 2018 abandonment of the nuclear deal and was followed by punishing sanctions on Iran’s financial system and oil exports, “rests on the idea that Iran only responds to really tough pressure.”Ms. Maloney and other analysts say that, like Mr. Obama’s effort at outreach, Mr. Trump’s strangulation approach may also be stymied by an Iranian government that has resisted 40 years of alternating American efforts to reshape or replace it.
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Mr. Trump and his top officials insist that is not their goal — especially not through the use of force. “We do not seek war, we do not seek nation-building, we do not seek regime change,” the president said in remarks this month. It is clear, however, that administration officials hope to undermine the Iranian government. Early in Mr. Trump’s presidency, a memo that circulated in his White House written by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a hawkish Washington think tank, suggested “a strategy of coerced democratization” for Iran.
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How misinformation overwhelmed our democracy - Vox - 0 views
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We live in a media ecosystem that overwhelms people with information. Some of that information is accurate, some of it is bogus, and much of it is intentionally misleading. The result is a polity that has increasingly given up on finding out the truth.
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The issue for many people isn’t exactly a denial of truth as such. It’s more a growing weariness over the process of finding the truth at all.
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What we’re facing is a new form of propaganda that wasn’t really possible until the digital age. And it works not by creating a consensus around any particular narrative but by muddying the waters so that consensus isn’t achievable.
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For most of recent history, the goal of propaganda was to reinforce a consistent narrative. But zone-flooding takes a different approach: It seeks to disorient audiences with an avalanche of competing stories.
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Yet CNN and MSNBC have shown zero hesitation in giving her a platform to lie because they see their job as giving government officials — even ones who lie — a platform.
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And we know that false claims, if they’re repeated enough, become more plausible the more often they’re shared, something psychologists have called the “illusory truth” effect. Our brains, it turns out, tend to associate repetition with truthfulness. Some interesting new research, moreover, found that the more people encounter information the more likely they are to feel justified in spreading it, whether it’s true or not.
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It’s worth noting that this polarization is asymmetric. The left overwhelmingly receives its news from organizations like the New York Times, the Washington Post, or cable news networks like MSNBC or CNN. Some of the reporting is surely biased, and probably biased in favor of liberals, but it’s still (mostly) anchored to basic journalistic ethics.
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The fact is, Trump did what Democrats have accused him of doing. We know, with absolute certainty, that the president tried to get a foreign government to investigate a family member of one of his political rivals
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The way impeachment has played out underscores just how the new media ecosystem is a problem for our democracy.
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Trump can dictate an entire news cycle with a few unhinged tweets or an absurd press conference. The media cycle is easily commandeered by misinformation, innuendo, and outrageous content. These are problems because of the norms that govern journalism and because the political economy of media makes it very hard to ignore or dispel bullshit stories. This is at the root of our nihilism problem, and a solution is nowhere in sight.
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As is often the case, the diagnosis is much easier than the cure. But liberal democracy cannot function without a shared understanding of reality. As long as the zone is flooded with shit, that shared understanding is impossible.
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Biden and Buttigieg hope to take advantage of impeachment absense of Warren, Sanders an... - 0 views
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More than half of the five top-polling candidates competing in the Iowa Democratic caucuses are preparing to close out the campaign exactly where they never hoped to be — 1,000 miles away on the floor of the U.S. Senate, acting as jurors in the impeachment trial of President Trump.
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Buttigieg’s campaign has argued that staying out of the polarized impeachment conversation will bolster his pitch as the candidate who can mollify partisan tensions and disrupt the traditional Washington ways of doing things.
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Biden’s campaign has recently pivoted to embrace its complicated presence, arguing that the president’s alleged efforts to find disparaging information on the Biden family in Ukraine is a reflection of the candidate’s strength, not evidence of a potential weakness.
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But Democrats, including the presidential contenders, continue to argue for the Senate to accept the testimony of new witnesses, a precedent that was followed in 1999. The vote to hear witness testimony that year led to a five-day break to take depositions, another day to prepare and present evidence, and seven more days of trial on the Senate floor.
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shared by Javier E on 23 Dec 20
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Engaging With Trump's Die-Hard Supporters Isn't Productive - The Atlantic - 0 views
www.theatlantic.com/...617449
politics Trump history US engagement supporters understanding polarization
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ordinary people worn out by the dramas and lies of the past four years have a right to refuse to take Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters seriously. To reject further debate with people whose views are completely incoherent is not only understandable, but sensible.
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I am not talking about all 74 million people who voted for Trump. Some voters may well have supported Trump in both 2016 and 2020 with a sense of hesitancy, perhaps focused on a single issue, such as abortion, or because they were making a raw and self-interested calculation about taxes.
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Instead, I am talking about the people who are giving Trump their full-throated support to the very end, even as he mulls a military coup; the people who buy weird paintings of Trump crossing the Delaware, or who believe that Trump is an agent of Jesus Christ, or who think that Trump is fighting a blood-drinking ring of pedophiles. These supporters have gone far beyond political loyalty and have succumbed to a kind of mass delusion.
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Rather, I am arguing for silence. The Trump loyalists who still cling to conspiracy theories and who remain part of a cult of personality should be deprived of the attention they seek, shunned for their antidemocratic lunacy, and then outvoted at the ballot box.
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Perhaps most important, much of our own sense of well-being will be lost if we continue to engage with people who believe that millions of votes were falsified from coast to coast, that the military should move into the swing states and hold new elections, or even that thousands of Chinese troops were bombed into submission on the border of Maine.
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No content anchors it; no program or policy comes from it. No motivating ideology stands behind it, unless we think of general grievance and a hatred of cultural and intellectual elites as an “idea.
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when views are incoherent and beliefs are rooted in fantasies, compromise is impossible. Further engagement is not only unwarranted, but it can also become counterproductive.
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We already understand: Trump tapped into traditions of ethnic and regional grievances and social resentments that are present in every democracy and wedded them to bizarre theories and conspiracies.
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Ordinary people should tune out the noise. No one needs to think one more minute about why a woman from New York would speed along in her car while ranting into her phone about stolen elections when she ought to have been watching the road.
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And the media have a particular obligation to end their fascination with these Trump voters. We don’t need yet another pilgrimage to diners and gas stations to hear from people whose only sources of information are cable-news hosts plumping fantasies about Venezuelan voting machines.
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the rest of us no longer need to participate in long chin-pulling exercises about “what they really want” or why they cannot grasp reality.
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@_FloridaMan Beguiles With the Hapless and Harebrained - The New York Times - 0 views
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His style is deceptively simple. Nearly every Twitter message begins “Florida Man.” What follows, though, is almost always a pile of trouble
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Now I think there are people who actually aspire to Florida Man-ness,” said Dave Barry, who celebrates Florida’s brand of madness in his popular columns and best-selling books. “It’s like the big leagues. It’s the Broadway for idiots.”
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But is the Florida Man who Accidentally Shoots Himself With Stun Gun While Trying to Rob the Radio Shack He Also Works At truly more wacky than, let’s say, an Arkansas Man or New Jersey Man?
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Longtime observers insist that he is.Take the Florida Man whose surgically amputated leg was found in a hospital Dumpster. “The leg has a name on it,” said the best-selling author and Miami Herald columnist Carl Hiaasen, who has wisely peopled his novels with fictitious(ish) Florida Men. “If this is New Jersey, the leg does not have a name on it. In Miami, the leg has a name on it, and it’s the name of the person who owns the leg.”
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“There is always an extra twist of weirdness at the end of the Florida story,” Mr. Hiaasen said. “Weird stories happen everywhere, but they usually come to a logical conclusion. There is always one more shoe that drops in Florida.”
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And there is so much more of it in Florida, he added. “It’s not just shooting fish in a barrel,” Mr. Hiaasen said, “but shooting mutated, deranged, slow-moving fish.”
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why Florida breeds or inspires its own brand of crime and criminals. He said it is partly the polarized nature of the state — very poor to very rich, very liberal to very conservative
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It is partly the state’s cavorting culture — South Beach, spring break, half-naked people, late-night clubs
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And it is partly the legions of immigrants from Cuba, South America, Central America and Haiti who sometimes import their old-country vendettas. “Where else do you get retired torturers from Argentina?”
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California’s kumbaya vibe is absent here, and so is Texas’ ideological fervor. With so many transplants, allegiances lie elsewhere
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“As they say,” Mr. Corben remarked, “Los Angeles is where you go when you want to be somebody. New York is where you go when you are somebody. Miami is where you go when you want to be somebody else.”