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Javier E

Goliath, Who Aspires to be David - Freddie deBoer - 0 views

freddiedeboer.substack.com/...goliaths-will-to-be-david

israel alone palestine zionism anti-Semitism democracy

shared by Javier E on 16 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • This meme conflates the modern state of Israel with the Jewish people, which is of course the central rhetorical move of contemporary Zionism
  • All of this is bound up with a flagrantly false concept of Zionism that people who know better allow to spread because it’s politically convenient. When I argue about these topics, I constantly encounter people who think that the history of the Jews simply is the history of Zionism - that since 70 AD, when the Romans destroyed the second temple, all of worldwide Jewry has been involved in an effort to rebuild a Jewish state in Palestine. This is totally, historically, factually false.
  • It simply is not the case that Zionism has been an assumed part of Jewish identity historically, anti-Zionist Jews have been common, and the modern Zionist project is less than 150 years old.
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • But, OK - let’s accept the conflation of the Israeli state with the Jewish people for now. The immediate question is, on what planet does Israel stand alone?
  • There is such a powerful urge among Israel’s defenders to make the country out to be an underdog, but there is absolutely no rational basis for doing so. Israel enjoys one of the most powerful and advanced militaries on earth. Despite the conflict, Israeli citizens are actually remarkably safe from violence compared to most of the countries on the globe
  • All of that would be jeopardized if Israel did in fact stand alone. But it doesn’t! Indeed, it’s hard to name nation states that enjoy more diplomatic protection than Israel.
  • The subhead of this piece for the Free Press (which is proving itself to be, let’s say, not particularly free when it comes to this issue) reads “after the worldwide celebration of our people’s slaughter, my hope for peace is dead.” What? Worldwide celebration? Because a few dozen dopey college kids held a few small rallies? As of four days ago, at least forty-four countries expressed support for Israel in this conflict. How many will officially express support for the people dying by the droves in Gaza? Even the establishment governments of the greater Middle East (almost universally corrupt, theocratic, or both) don’t offer any real support to Palestinians. How much more support do you need, exactly, before you stop pretending like everyone is out to get you?
  • When you say no one stands with Israel, what the fuck are you talking about? I cannot fathom how anyone, even the most dedicated Zionist and supporter of the Netanyahu government, could believe that Israel is the vulnerable party in this exchange.
  • If we define the left as broadly and loosely as possible, we can say that one thing the left has certainly accomplished this past half-century is to associate moral superiority with the underdog. This is by turns both deeply misguided and an expression of an essential truth
  • this folk morality, maybe righteous, maybe misguided, most likely both, has become the default ethical firmament of modern politics. Sometimes Israel’s defenders argue that being the more powerful force does not make you wrong; that’s true, but their hearts never appear to be in it. They seem to feel the tug of powerlessness, the desire to wear the sad but comfortable cloak of a refugee people, a natural and sympathetic impulse for a people still defined by the diaspora.
  • Every time the Israel-Palestine conflict heats up again, certain elements within the pro-Israel coalition use creepy rhetoric to insist that everyone must be fully committed to Israel, that siding against Israel should not be within the sphere of legitimate debate. This takes place against a backdrop where principled supporters of the Palestinians argue that there’s a chilling effect created by pro-Israel hardliners which squelches legitimate debate, and where anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists claim that Jews pull the strings behind the scenes. All this loose talk about what we must do and must say does nothing to rebut the former and just plays into the propaganda of the latter. I wish people would stop doing it.
  • I need make no grand loyalty statements because my views on this conflict have been plain for many years: the moral imperative is that we create total legal and political equality for all people in the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, as basic democratic principles demand, and that all people in that land enjoy safety and prosperity
  • The fact remains, though - and it is a fact, an objective fact, an empirical fact, no matter how mad it makes people - that Hamas has always been empowered by Israel’s violence and oppression. I’m sorry if this is hard to accept, but Palestine is a Chinese finger trap; the more Israel pulls away, the more tightly the conflict will grip the country.
  • Permanent statelessness and dispossession for the Palestinians will ensure violence for generations. Only freedom for Palestinians can bring peace, and that’s the most hardheaded, ruthlessly pragmatic point anyone can make about this horrid crisis.
  • And if Israel’s defenders feel put upon, othered, alone, it’s because Israel and Israel alone has the power to make Palestinians free. I’m sorry, but it’s not a moral principle that says that Israel must bear responsibility for achieving peace and freedom. It’s a purely pragmatic statement of the reality of Israel’s overwhelming power in the region. Choosing sides has nothing do with it.
  • Or, I suppose, you could go through with the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, as a disturbing number of people are calling for. I doubt the world would stop you; that’s the upside of being Goliath. But that would destroy whatever hope there is left for Israel as a democratic state, a symbol of human rights. And I think that if you love Israel, the idea of Israel, you should fight like hell to stop that from happening. Because afterwards you’ll never be the same again.
  • The only way out is through de-escalation and the only permanent de-escalation is through formal legal recognition of Palestinians in the territories as full citizens in a democratic system. This might come from the establishment of a Palestinian state, or it might come with the absorption of the territories into a secular state of Israel-Palestine that extends perfectly equal legal and political rights to all people within it, as liberal values require
  • Serwer is a guy who constantly demands that he and his allies be allowed to do politics on easy mode, but he’s just part of a broader communal rejection of basic self-definition and comprehensible terms for this political tendency.
  • If you ask these people, are you part of a social revolution?, they’ll loudly tell you yes! Yes they are! They’re going to shake society at its very foundations. Well, OK then -what do I call your movement? You reject every name that organically develops! I’ll use the name you pick, but you have to actually pick one.
  • The basic stance of the social justice set, for a long time now, has been that they are 100% exempt from ordinary politics. BlackLivesMatter proponents have spent a year and a half acting as though their demand for justice is so transcendently, obviously correct that they don’t have to care about politics.
  • Well, sooner or later, guys, you have to actually give a shit about what people who aren’t a part of your movement think. Sorry. That’s life. The universe is indifferent to your demand for justice, and will remain so until you bother to try to change minds.
  • Do politics. Think and speak strategically. Be disciplined. Work harder. And for fuck’s sake, give me a simple term to use to address you. Please? Because right now it sure looks like you don’t want to be named because you don’t want to be criticized.
  • Edit: I might not have underlined this point enough - I sincerely am asking for a better term and would happily use one if offered. If woke, political correctness, identity politics, etc, are inflammatory terms, I'd be happy to substitute something that's not. But surely something is happening in our politics, and we have to be able to talk about it. So I'm asking for a name.
Javier E

The Final Stage of Republican Grief - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...473970

demagogue gop 2016 politics

shared by Javier E on 16 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • The donors, for their part, are also starting to come around. “If Trump is the nominee, I think there would be a sufficient appetite to end the last eight years of the leftward direction and overregulated economy that the majority of donors will support him,” the veteran fundraiser Fred Malek told the Washington Post. Stan Hubbard, a billionaire from Minnesota, concurred, telling Politico, “I would kind of hold my nose doing it, but I would have to do it.”
  • For Trump to become acceptable to the party regulars, he will have to show he can act the part. “He’s got to do a number of things,” said Scott Reed, the chief political strategist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “He’s got to build a national campaign. He’s got to unite the party. He’s got to run a convention. He’s got to go up against the Clintons.” But the first three items on that list were things he could be taught or helped with
  • Trump, Reed believes, will grow into the role once the nomination is in his grasp. “It’s a big responsibility, and I think he will recognize that,” he said. “He’s going to recognize that being the nominee of the Republican Party is bigger than Donald Trump. I think he’s going to mature.” He added, “That’s not based on anything factual. I just think he’ll come to that conclusion.
Javier E

This madness will pass. Conservatives can't give up. - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...8-8bdd-cdb33a5eef83_story.html

conservatism gop compromise trump culture values

shared by Javier E on 30 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • Olsen sees this as an important but normal political moment, in which the policy views of populists and conservative intellectuals need to be reconciled on issues such as trade and immigration. An intellectual dialectic within the Republican coalition is straining to produce a new, more pro-worker synthesis — which Olsen himself has long advocated
  • But this raises the question: Is this a normal political moment?
  • If Trump were merely proposing a border wall and the more aggressive employment of tariffs, we would be engaged in a debate, not facing a schism.
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  • Trump’s policy proposals — the details of which Trump himself seems unconcerned and uninformed about — are symbolic expressions of a certain approach to politics.
  • The stated purpose of Trump’s border wall is to keep out a contagion of Mexican rapists and murderers. His argument is not taken from Heritage Foundation policy papers. He makes it by quoting the racist poem “The Snake,” which compares migrants to dangerous vermin. Trump proposes to ban migration from some Muslim-majority countries because Muslim refugees, as he sees it, are a Trojan-horse threat of terrorism. Trump’s policy ideas are incidental to his message of dehumanization.
  • So how do we split the political difference on this one? Shall we talk about Mexican migrants as rapists on every other day? Shall we provide rhetorical cover for alt-right bigots only on special occasions, such as after a racist rally and murder?
  • The point applies in other areas.
  • We have seen similar damage in the realm of values and norms. In the cultivation of anger and tribalism. In the use of language to inflame and demean. In the destruction of a common factual basis for politics, making policy compromise of the kind Olsen favors impossible.
  • What would fusion with this type of politics look like? Trump defines loyalty to conservatism as contempt for many of our neighbors
  • One might as well have proposed a fusion between popular sovereignty and Abraham Lincoln’s conception of inherent human rights. They were not a dialectic requiring a synthesis. They were alternatives demanding a choice.
Javier E

I filed one of the 83 dismissed misconduct complaints against Brett Kavanaugh. Here's w... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...9-88e3-989a3e456820_story.html

supreme court complaint illegal gop nomination

shared by Javier E on 31 Dec 18 - No Cached
  • I listened on Sept. 27 while Kavanaugh peppered two hours of Senate testimony with attacks against people and groups he associated with Democrats. Kavanaugh alleged (without factual basis) that he was the victim of a vast, secret, left-wing cabal, masterminded by senators such as Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and motivated by “revenge on behalf of the Clintons.” I was shocked to hear a Supreme Court nominee carry on like a crazed conspiracy theorist.
  • Turns out, there’s a rule against federal judges behaving like this. Congress passed the Judicial Conduct and Disability Act in 1980, and the rules under that act state that it’s misconduct for a federal judge to make “inappropriately partisan statements.” I may be retired, but I think I know an inappropriately partisan statement when I hear one.
  • The 10th Circuit Judicial Council finally announced its dismissal of the 83 complaints on Dec. 18, explaining its decision roughly as follows: (1) The 1980 act applies to circuit judges but not Supreme Court justices, (2) Kavanaugh was a D.C. Circuit Court judge during his confirmation hearings and when I filed my complaint, but (3) he’s a Supreme Court justice now. Evidently a circuit judge nominated to the Supreme Court can be held responsible for his partisan misconduct before the Senate, so long as the Senate fails to confirm the nominee. But if the nominee wins the approval of a partisan Senate, then his inappropriate partisanship is excused. This reasoning doesn’t make sense to me. It’s like saying we can prosecute a safecracker only if the safe proved to be empty.
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  • Granted, the 1980 act does not apply to the conduct of Supreme Court justices. But the act fails to say what to do when a judge engages in misconduct before becoming a Supreme Court justice. Here, the Judicial Council argued that Kavanaugh’s elevation to the Supreme Court was an “intervening event” under the 1980 act and its accompanying rules, and that “a misconduct proceeding can be concluded because of ‘intervening events.’ ”
  • Unfortunately, the Judicial Council truncated the relevant rule, which allows for a complaint to be dismissed if “intervening events render some or all of the allegations moot or make remedial action impossible.” Kavanaugh’s elevation to the Supreme Court did not render moot the questionable behavior that helped win him that seat. Nor is remedial action impossible now that Judge Kavanaugh is Justice Kavanaugh. Brett Kavanaugh can still issue the kind of full apology he has avoided up until now, and he can recuse himself from highly partisan cases (those with Trump as a party, for example).
  • In order to let Kavanaugh off the hook, the Judicial Council skipped around relevant commentary stating that “as long as the subject of a complaint performs judicial duties, a complaint alleging judicial conduct must be addressed.” Here, the Judicial Council interpreted “judicial duties” to refer only to duties of judges covered under the 1980 act — leading the council to the strained conclusion that a Supreme Court justice does not perform “judicial duties.” Instead of this tortured reasoning, I’d say we’ve appended yet another exception to the adage that no one is above the law.
Javier E

'A presidency of one': Key federal agencies increasingly compelled to benefit Trump - T... - 1 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...9-a331-2df12d56a80b_story.html

trump presidency

shared by Javier E on 02 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • “I’m not sure there are many, if any, left who view as their responsibility trying to help educate, moderate, enlighten and persuade — or even advise in many cases,” the former senior official said. “There’s a new ethos: This is a presidency of one.”
  • “It’s Trump unleashed, unchained, unhinged,” this official added. “He continues to go further and further and further, and now I don’t think there’s anybody telling him, ‘No.’ 
  • Sam Nunberg, a former Trump campaign adviser, said the president has long wanted to be the sole driver of his message, with everyone else playing supporting roles
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  • “He wants to be the one adjusting and taking the lead on where it goes, not adjusting to others,” Nunberg said. “It goes back to how he navigated network TV, the tabloids and business publicity. That’s his playbook.
  • Trump’s moves represent a fundamental reorientation of American democracy, said Timothy Snyder, a Yale history professor and author of “On Tyranny
  • “Rather than having the boring system we take for granted, where you have laws based on facts, instead you have a personality who makes up his own reality,” Snyder said. “At first, that reality is just confusing and seems to gum up the works, but after a while, the leader starts to draw people into that reality by making them defend it or making them prove it. This is what’s happening here.
  • The implicit day-to-day charge for many Trump advisers is simple, according to aides and other officials familiar with the president’s Cabinet and West Wing staff: Figure out how to handle or even polish Trump’s whims and statements, but do not have any illusion that you can temper his relentless personality, heavy consumption of cable news or thirst for political combat.
  • Acquiescence is central to survival. Trump has bonded with aides who take his running complaints about the “deep state” and “fake news” seriously, along with his embrace of people and positions outside of the mainstream
  • Barr’s role in the investigation into the Russia probe’s origins, which is being conducted by U.S. Attorney John Durham in Connecticut, is extraordinary in part because the probe seeks evidence of misconduct within his own Justice Department to support the conspiracy theory — embraced by Trump and advanced on Fox News — that the Russia inquiry was corrupt and predicated on undermining Trump.
  • Snyder said the investigation Trump sought and Barr is pursuing fits a pattern of behavior in which leaders try to disprove or undermine facts — in this case, the conclusion that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump win — with other investigations.
  • “The idea of investigating the investigation is that you cast doubt on the boring factual staff,” he said. “Even if you don’t win with your adventurous fiction, you also win if your adventurous fiction casts doubt on the boring facts.”
johnsonel7

Chinese social media censoring 'officially sanctioned facts' on coronavirus | World new... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...anctioned-facts-on-coronavirus

china coronavirus facts media

shared by johnsonel7 on 06 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Chinese social media censors blocked neutral information about the coronavirus outbreak when they targeted references to the outbreak on WeChat and other platforms, a report has found. Hundreds of keywords and keyword combinations, including “Wuhan seafood market” and “Sars variation” were censored in late December, as doctors sought to warn about the new virus.
  • Chinese social media platforms have come under greater pressure to censor content about the Covid-19 illness, which has killed 3,285 and infected more than 95,000. Critical discussion and investigative reports about the virus have been removed from social media sites and Chinese leaders have called for more control over online media to ensure social stability during the outbreak.
  • “Countering misinformation and uninformed speculation related to the epidemic may help keep public fear in check and remove information that would mislead people about how best to protect themselves. However, restricting general discussions and factual information has the opposite effect and limits public awareness and response.”
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  • The death of Li, who was seen as a whistleblower after he was accused of making false statements for warning colleagues of the virus, triggered significant anger and sympathy among Chinese internet users, with censors responding to mounting social media posts and hashtags critical of the government. References to Li accounted for 19 of the censored keyword combinations on WeChat.
Javier E

ROUGH TYPE | Nicholas Carr's blog - 0 views

www.roughtype.com

tech brain science knowledge memory distraction smartphone learning creativity reasoning problem-solving silicon valley elite

shared by Javier E on 12 Dec 17 - Cached
  • The smartphone has become a repository of the self, recording and dispensing the words, sounds and images that define what we think, what we experience and who we are. In a 2015 Gallup survey, more than half of iPhone owners said that they couldn’t imagine life without the device.
  • So what happens to our minds when we allow a single tool such dominion over our perception and cognition?
  •  Smartphones have become so entangled with our existence that, even when we’re not peering or pawing at them, they tug at our attention, diverting precious cognitive resources. Just suppressing the desire to check our phone, which we do routinely and subconsciously throughout the day, can debilitate our thinking.
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  • he has seen mounting evidence that using a smartphone, or even hearing one ring or vibrate, produces a welter of distractions that makes it harder to concentrate on a difficult problem or job. The division of attention impedes reasoning and performance.
  • Another 2015 study, appearing in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, showed that when people hear their phone ring but are unable to answer it, their blood pressure spikes, their pulse quickens, and their problem-solving skills decline.
  • The researchers recruited 520 undergraduates at UCSD and gave them two standard tests of intellectual acuity. One test gauged “available working-memory capacity,” a measure of how fully a person’s mind can focus on a particular task. The second assessed “fluid intelligence,” a person’s ability to interpret and solve an unfamiliar problem. The only variable in the experiment was the location of the subjects’ smartphones. Some of the students were asked to place their phones in front of them on their desks; others were told to stow their phones in their pockets or handbags; still others were required to leave their phones in a different room.
  • In both tests, the subjects whose phones were in view posted the worst scores, while those who left their phones in a different room did the best. The students who kept their phones in their pockets or bags came out in the middle. As the phone’s proximity increased, brainpower decreased.
  • In subsequent interviews, nearly all the participants said that their phones hadn’t been a distraction—that they hadn’t even thought about the devices during the experiment. They remained oblivious even as the phones disrupted their focus and thinking.
  • A second experiment conducted by the researchers produced similar results, while also revealing that the more heavily students relied on their phones in their everyday lives, the greater the cognitive penalty they suffered.
  • the “integration of smartphones into daily life” appears to cause a “brain drain” that can diminish such vital mental skills as “learning, logical reasoning, abstract thought, problem solving, and creativity.”
  • Imagine combining a mailbox, a newspaper, a TV, a radio, a photo album, a public library and a boisterous party attended by everyone you know, and then compressing them all into a single, small, radiant object. That is what a smartphone represents to us. No wonder we can’t take our minds off it.
  • They found that students who didn’t bring their phones to the classroom scored a full letter-grade higher on a test of the material presented than those who brought their phones. It didn’t matter whether the students who had their phones used them or not: All of them scored equally poorly.
  • A study of nearly a hundred secondary schools in the U.K., published last year in the journal Labour Economics, found that when schools ban smartphones, students’ examination scores go up substantially, with the weakest students benefiting the most.
  • Social skills and relationships seem to suffer as well.
  • Because smartphones serve as constant reminders of all the friends we could be chatting with electronically, they pull at our minds when we’re talking with people in person, leaving our conversations shallower and less satisfying.
  • In a 2013 study conducted at the University of Essex in England, 142 participants were divided into pairs and asked to converse in private for ten minutes. Half talked with a phone in the room, half without a phone present. The subjects were then given tests of affinity, trust and empathy. “The mere presence of mobile phones,” the researchers reported in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, “inhibited the development of interpersonal closeness and trust” and diminished “the extent to which individuals felt empathy and understanding from their partners.”
  • The evidence that our phones can get inside our heads so forcefully is unsettling. It suggests that our thoughts and feelings, far from being sequestered in our skulls, can be skewed by external forces we’re not even aware o
  • Not only do our phones shape our thoughts in deep and complicated ways, but the effects persist even when we aren’t using the devices. As the brain grows dependent on the technology, the research suggests, the intellect weakens.
  • even in the history of captivating media, the smartphone stands out. It is an attention magnet unlike any our minds have had to grapple with before. Because the phone is packed with so many forms of information and so many useful and entertaining functions, it acts as what Dr. Ward calls a “supernormal stimulus,” one that can “hijack” attention whenever it is part of our surroundings — and it is always part of our surroundings.
  •  Scientists have long known that the brain is a monitoring system as well as a thinking system. Its attention is drawn toward any object that is new, intriguing or otherwise striking — that has, in the psychological jargon, “salience.”
  • The irony of the smartphone is that the qualities that make it so appealing to us — its constant connection to the net, its multiplicity of apps, its responsiveness, its portability — are the very ones that give it such sway over our minds.
  • We need to give our minds more room to think. And that means putting some distance between ourselves and our phones.
  • Social media apps were designed to exploit “a vulnerability in human psychology,” former Facebook president Sean Parker said in a recent interview. “[We] understood this consciously. And we did it anyway.”
  • A quarter-century ago, when we first started going online, we took it on faith that the web would make us smarter: More information would breed sharper thinking. We now know it’s not that simple.
  • As strange as it might seem, people’s knowledge and understanding may actually dwindle as gadgets grant them easier access to online data stores
  • In a seminal 2011 study published in Science, a team of researchers — led by the Columbia University psychologist Betsy Sparrow and including the late Harvard memory expert Daniel Wegner — had a group of volunteers read forty brief, factual statements (such as “The space shuttle Columbia disintegrated during re-entry over Texas in Feb. 2003”) and then type the statements into a computer. Half the people were told that the machine would save what they typed; half were told that the statements would be erased.
  • Afterward, the researchers asked the subjects to write down as many of the statements as they could remember. Those who believed that the facts had been recorded in the computer demonstrated much weaker recall than those who assumed the facts wouldn’t be stored. Anticipating that information would be readily available in digital form seemed to reduce the mental effort that people made to remember it
  • The researchers dubbed this phenomenon the “Google effect” and noted its broad implications: “Because search engines are continually available to us, we may often be in a state of not feeling we need to encode the information internally. When we need it, we will look it up.”
  • as the pioneering psychologist and philosopher William James said in an 1892 lecture, “the art of remembering is the art of thinking.”
  • Only by encoding information in our biological memory can we weave the rich intellectual associations that form the essence of personal knowledge and give rise to critical and conceptual thinking. No matter how much information swirls around us, the less well-stocked our memory, the less we have to think with.
  • As Dr. Wegner and Dr. Ward explained in a 2013 Scientific American article, when people call up information through their devices, they often end up suffering from delusions of intelligence. They feel as though “their own mental capacities” had generated the information, not their devices. “The advent of the ‘information age’ seems to have created a generation of people who feel they know more than ever before,” the scholars concluded, even though “they may know ever less about the world around them.”
  • That insight sheds light on society’s current gullibility crisis, in which people are all too quick to credit lies and half-truths spread through social media. If your phone has sapped your powers of discernment, you’ll believe anything it tells you.
  • Data, the novelist and critic Cynthia Ozick once wrote, is “memory without history.” Her observation points to the problem with allowing smartphones to commandeer our brains
  • When we constrict our capacity for reasoning and recall or transfer those skills to a gadget, we sacrifice our ability to turn information into knowledge. We get the data but lose the meaning
  • Phone makers like Apple and Samsung and app writers like Facebook, Google and Snap design their products to consume as much of our attention as possible during every one of our waking hours
  • Harvard Business School professor emerita Shoshana Zuboff argues in her new book that the Valley’s wealth and power are predicated on an insidious, essentially pathological form of private enterprise—what she calls “surveillance capitalism.” Pioneered by Google, perfected by Facebook, and now spreading throughout the economy, surveillance capitalism uses human life as its raw material. Our everyday experiences, distilled into data, have become a privately-owned business asset used to predict and mold our behavior, whether we’re shopping or socializing, working or voting.
  • By reengineering the economy and society to their own benefit, Google and Facebook are perverting capitalism in a way that undermines personal freedom and corrodes democracy.
  • Under the Fordist model of mass production and consumption that prevailed for much of the twentieth century, industrial capitalism achieved a relatively benign balance among the contending interests of business owners, workers, and consumers. Enlightened executives understood that good pay and decent working conditions would ensure a prosperous middle class eager to buy the goods and services their companies produced. It was the product itself — made by workers, sold by companies, bought by consumers — that tied the interests of capitalism’s participants together. Economic and social equilibrium was negotiated through the product.
  • By removing the tangible product from the center of commerce, surveillance capitalism upsets the equilibrium. Whenever we use free apps and online services, it’s often said, we become the products, our attention harvested and sold to advertisers
  • this truism gets it wrong. Surveillance capitalism’s real products, vaporous but immensely valuable, are predictions about our future behavior — what we’ll look at, where we’ll go, what we’ll buy, what opinions we’ll hold — that internet companies derive from our personal data and sell to businesses, political operatives, and other bidders.
  • Unlike financial derivatives, which they in some ways resemble, these new data derivatives draw their value, parasite-like, from human experience.To the Googles and Facebooks of the world, we are neither the customer nor the product. We are the source of what Silicon Valley technologists call “data exhaust” — the informational byproducts of online activity that become the inputs to prediction algorithms
  • internet companies operate in what Zuboff terms “extreme structural independence from people.” When databases displace goods as the engine of the economy, our own interests, as consumers but also as citizens, cease to be part of the negotiation. We are no longer one of the forces guiding the market’s invisible hand. We are the objects of surveillance and control.
hannahcarter11

Alabama Trans Youth Dismayed By State's Effort To Block Medical Care : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...ates-banning-medical-treatment

alabama trans youth

shared by hannahcarter11 on 09 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • So Hall is watching with alarm as the Alabama legislature advances bills that would outlaw hormone treatment for him and other trans youth in the state.
  • Thinking of the bills' proponents, he says, "Why should some guy who has never met me ... why should he get to tell me what I can and can't do? Why does he get to decide what is right for people who just want to be happy?"
  • This year, state legislatures have proposed a record number of anti-transgender bills.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • Alabama is one of 20 states that have introduced bills that would prohibit gender-affirming medical care for trans youth.
  • Alabama's bill is one of the toughest. It would make it a felony to provide transition-related medical treatment, such as puberty blockers, hormones or surgery, to transgender minors.
  • Hall was assigned female at birth. But, he says, when he hit puberty around fifth grade, "That's when I started to fully get uncomfortable with, like, the way that I looked or the way that I felt. Like, in my head I looked a different way than I looked in the mirror."
  • This month, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a statement calling bills that prohibit trans medical care, or that ban trans girls from women's sports teams, "dangerous."
  • The Alabama legislation is called the Vulnerable Child Compassion and Protection Act.
  • It passed overwhelmingly in the state Senate, by a vote of 23-4, and could go before the full House as early as this week.
  • At a House health committee hearing this month, lawmakers heard an impassioned plea from Sgt. David Fuller with the Gadsden, Ala., police department, who is father to a transgender girl.
  • Those who treat transgender youth say remarks like these are not just factually wrong; they also stigmatize an already marginalized and vulnerable population.
  • The swift progress of the trans medical care ban through the Alabama legislature has caused anxiety for families like theirs.
  • She points out that in their Birmingham clinic, no minor child is making the decision for treatment on their own. There is a detailed informed-consent process, and the child, their parents and the entire medical team all have to agree on a treatment plan.
  • But if the Alabama bill becomes law, she and her medical team could be charged with class C felonies for prescribing puberty blockers or hormones.
  • That means they could face up to 10 years in prison.
  • LGBTQ advocacy groups are gearing up for immediate court challenges if any of the medical care bans bubbling up around the country become law.
  • For Hall, Alabama's legislation would deny something essential: the person he knows himself to be. And, he says, the notion that he's a "gender-confused child" who's just "going through a phase" causes real pain.
Javier E

Trump and the Failure of the Expert Class - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...f-the-expert-class-11611341116

trump failure elites experts class history presidency wsj assessment

shared by Javier E on 23 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • For conservatives, the case was exactly reversed: They had some major policy wins, but at the cost of frequent embarrassment and dismay at the president’s offensive behavior and self-defeating logorrhea.
  • The worst of his conduct took place after the 2020 election and seemed to fulfill progressive commentators’ allegation that Donald Trump was carrying out an “assault on democracy.” Mr. Trump’s refusal to accept defeat, culminating in demands that Vice President Mike Pence overturn a lawful election on no legal authority, occasioned a debacle that may haunt the Republican Party, and the country, for years.
  • lso during the 2016 campaign, an assemblage of top-tier academics, intellectuals and journalists warned that Mr. Trump’s candidacy signified a fascist threat. Timothy Snyder, a historian of Nazism at Yale, was among the most strident of these prophets. “Be calm when the unthinkable arrives,” he warned in a Facebook post shortly after the election. “When the terrorist attack comes, remember that all authorities at all times either await or plan such events in order to consolidate power. Think of the Reichstag fire.” Many experts stuck with the fascism theme after Mr. Trump’s election and throughout his presidency
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  • The great theme of the Trump years, the one historians will note a century from now, was the failure of America’s expert class. The people who were supposed to know what they were talking about, didn’t. 
  • When intellectuals and journalists of the left use the word “democracy,” they typically are not referring to elections and decision-making by popularly elected officials
  • For the left, “democracy” is another word for progressive policy aims, especially the widening of special political rights and welfare-state provisions to new constituencies. By that definition any Republican president is carrying out an “assault on democracy.”
  • Mr. Trump assaulted democracy in the ordinary sense of the word, but he did so only after the 2020 election. That effort was discreditable and disruptive, but it was also delusional and ineffective. It was not the assault the president’s expert-class critics had foreseen.
  • It took a 22-month investigation by a special counsel to establish an absence of evidence that Mr. Trump’s campaign had conspired with the Russians.
  • Reporters treated every turn of events as evidence of Mr. Trump’s unique evil.
  • Reports of his defeat, accurate though they were, meant little coming from news organizations that cared so much about discrediting him and so little about factual truth.
  • Meanwhile the administration pressed ahead with a diplomatic push to strike commercial and diplomatic deals between Israel and Arab states
  • political talking points aside, this much is apparent: No nation—or anyhow no nation that values individual liberty and isn’t an island—has managed even to slow the spread of Covid-19 without causing economic ruin and attendant disorder.
  • The Trump administration made its share of mistakes during the early stages of the pandemic, although its chief failing was the president’s lack of rhetorical clarity
  • By any set of criteria outside the self-contained system of public-health best practices, the lockdowns failed. They purchased minor slowdowns in the spread of the virus at the cost of punishing economic destruction, untold social dysfunction, and mind-blowing public debt. 
  • many parts of the country didn’t lock down, or did so only loosely and briefly, and managed to keep their hospitals running just fine.
  • Controlling the spread of Covid-19 in the U.S. was always going to be a messy business: Many infected people don’t get sick and have no compelling reason to burrow in their homes, and America is an unruly nation with a long tradition of nonconformity
  • The experts might have accounted for these realities. They might have realized that the measures prescribed by their textbooks—contact tracing, forced quarantines, shelter-in-place orders—were mostly unworkable in America. They didn’t.
  • If this was an attempted coup, it was a comically inept one. Hardly anyone in Mr. Trump’s own administration, including the vice president, wanted anything to do with it.  
  • The most regrettable part of this class failure is that, with rare exceptions, the experts themselves acknowledge no error. Nothing about the Trump years has occasioned soul-searching or self-criticism on their part
Javier E

Opinion | How to Destroy Truth - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...patriotism-misinformation.html

narrative US culture American idea history story

shared by Javier E on 02 Jul 21 - No Cached
  • Great nations thrive by constantly refreshing two great reservoirs of knowledge
  • The first contains the knowledge from the stories we tell about ourselves.
  • This is the knowledge of who we are as a people, how we got here, what long conflicts bind us together, what we find admirable and dishonorable, what kind of world we hope to build together.
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  • This kind of knowledge isn’t merely factual knowledge. It is a moral framework from which to see the world. Homer taught the ancient Greeks how to perceive their reality. Exodus teaches the Jews how to interpret their struggles and their journey.
  • This emotional and moral knowledge should give us a sense of identity, a sense of ideals to live up to and an appreciation of the values that matter most to us — equality or prosperity or freedom.
  • these are shared stories; this shared knowledge should help us discover a shared destiny and our shared affection for one another.
  • The second reservoir of knowledge is propositional knowledge.
  • This is the kind of knowledge we acquire through reason, logical proof and tight analysis. Some of this knowledge is empirical knowledge that can be established by carefully using evidence.
  • Some of this knowledge is contained in powerful ideas that can be debated: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
  • the acquisition of this kind of knowledge is also a collective process.
  • It’s not just a group of people commenting on each other’s internet posts. It’s a network of institutions — universities, courts, publishers, professional societies, media outlets — that have set up an interlocking set of procedures to hunt for error, weigh evidence and determine which propositions pass muster.
  • An individual may be dumb, Rauch notes, but the whole network is brilliant, so long as everybody in it adheres to certain rules: No one gets the final say (every proposition might be wrong). No claim to personal authority (who you are doesn’t determine the truth of what you say, the evidence does). No retreat to safety (you can’t ban an idea just because it makes you feel unsafe).
  • These are the same principles as those of the scientific method
  • The collapse of trust, the rise of animosity — these are emotional, not intellectual problems
  • The real problem is in our system of producing shared stories. If a country can’t tell narratives in which everybody finds an honorable place, then righteous rage will drive people toward tribal narratives that tear it apart.
  • But the core problem is our failure to understand what education is
  • Once you realize that people are primarily desiring creatures, not rational creatures, you realize that one of the great projects of schooling and culture is to educate the passions.
  • It is to help people learn to feel the proper kind of outrage at injustice, the proper form of reverence before sacrifice, the proper swelling of civic pride, the proper affection for our fellows.
  • This knowledge is conveyed not through facts but through emotional experiences — stories.
  • Over the past decades, we cut education in half. We focused on reason and critical thinking skills — the core of the second reservoir of knowledge.
  • The ability to tell complex stories about ourselves has atrophied. This is the ability to tell stories in which opposing characters can each possess pieces of the truth,
  • stories in which all characters are embedded in time, at one point in their process of growth, stories rooted in the complexity of real life and not the dogma of ideological abstraction.
  • Now as we watch state legislatures try to enforce what history gets taught and not taught, as we watch partisans introduce ideological curriculums, we see how debauched and brutalized our historical storytelling skills have become.
anniina03

Justice Dept. Is Said to Open Criminal Inquiry Into Its Own Russia Investigation - The ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...am-criminal-investigation.html

politics us history trump policy

shared by anniina03 on 25 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • For more than two years, President Trump has repeatedly attacked the Russia investigation, portraying it as a hoax and illegal even months after the special counsel closed it. Now, Mr. Trump’s own Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into how it all began.
  • The opening of a criminal investigation is likely to raise alarms that Mr. Trump is using the Justice Department to go after his perceived enemies. Mr. Trump fired James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director under whose watch agents opened the Russia inquiry, and has long assailed other top former law enforcement and intelligence officials as partisans who sought to block his election.
  • Mr. Trump has made clear that he sees the typically independent Justice Department as a tool to be wielded against his political enemies.
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  • However, “there must be an objective, factual basis for initiating the investigation; a mere hunch is insufficient,” according to Justice Department guidelines.
  • It was not clear what potential crime Mr. Durham is investigating, nor when the criminal investigation was prompted.
  • Mr. Trump is certain to see the criminal investigation as a vindication of the years he and his allies have spent trying to discredit the Russia investigation.
  • Federal investigators need only a “reasonable indication” that a crime has been committed to open an investigation, a much lower standard than the probable cause required to obtain search warrants.
  • House Democrats are examining in part whether his pressure on Ukraine to open investigations into theories about the 2016 election constituted an abuse of power.Sign Up for On Politics With Lisa LererA spotlight on the people reshaping our politics. A conversation with voters across the country. And a guiding hand through the endless news cycle, telling you what you really need to know.Sign Up* Captcha is incomplete. Please try again.Thank you for subscribingYou can also view our other newsletters or visit your account to opt out or manage email preferences.An error has occurred. Please try again later.You are already subscribed to this email.View all New York Times newsletters.The move also creates an unusual situation in which the Justice Department is conducting a criminal investigation into itself.
  • Mr. Barr expressed skepticism of the Russia investigation even before joining the Trump administration. Weeks after being sworn in this year, he said he intended to scrutinize how it started and used the term “spying” to describe investigators’ surveillance of Trump campaign advisers.
  • F.B.I. agents discovered the offer shortly after stolen Democratic emails were released, and the events, along with ties between other Trump advisers and Russia, set off fears that the Trump campaign was conspiring with Russia’s interference.
  • The C.I.A. did contribute heavily to the intelligence community’s assessment in early 2017 that Russia interfered in the 2016 election and tried to tip it in Mr. Trump’s favor, and law enforcement officials later used those findings to bolster their application for a wiretap on a Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page.
  • Mr. Mueller said that he had “insufficient evidence” to determine whether Mr. Trump or his aides engaged in a criminal conspiracy with the Russians but that the campaign welcomed the sabotage and expected to benefit from it.
  • Law enforcement officials suspected Mr. Page was the target of recruitment by the Russian government, which he has denied.Mr. Durham has also asked whether C.I.A. officials might have somehow tricked the F.B.I. into opening the Russia investigation. Mr. Durham has indicated he wants to interview former officials who ran the C.I.A. in 2016 but has yet to question either Mr. Brennan or James R. Clapper Jr., the former director of national intelligence. Mr. Trump has repeatedly attacked them as part of a vast conspiracy by the so-called deep state to stop him from winning the presidency.
  • Mr. Durham has delved before into the secret world of intelligence gathering during the Bush and Obama administrations. He was asked in 2008 to investigate why the C.I.A. destroyed tapes depicting detainees being tortured. The next year, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. appointed Mr. Durham to spearhead an investigation into the C.IA. abuses.
  • After nearly four years, Mr. Durham’s investigation ended with no charges against C.I.A. officers, including two directly involved in the deaths of two detainees, angering human rights activists.
Javier E

Were American Indians the Victims of Genocide? | History News Network - 0 views

hnn.us/7302

genocide Indian American Indian policy US historiography

shared by Javier E on 20 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • It is a firmly established fact that a mere 250,000 native Americans were still alive in the territory of the United States at the end of the 19th century
  • Still in scholarly contention, however, is the number of Indians alive at the time of first contact with Europeans.
  • The disparity in estimates is enormous. In 1928, the ethnologist James Mooney proposed a total count of 1,152,950 Indians in all tribal areas north of Mexico at the time of the European arrival. By 1987, in American Indian Holocaust and Survival, Russell Thornton was giving a figure of well over 5 million, nearly five times as high as Mooney’s, while Lenore Stiffarm and Phil Lane, Jr. suggested a total of 12 million. That figure rested in turn on the work of the anthropologist Henry Dobyns, who in 1983 had estimated the aboriginal population of North America as a whole at 18 million and of the present territory of the United States at about 10 million.
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  • About all this there is no essential disagreement. The most hideous enemy of native Americans was not the white man and his weaponry, concludes Alfred Crosby,"but the invisible killers which those men brought in their blood and breath." It is thought that between 75 to 90 percent of all Indian deaths resulted from these killers.
  • As an example of actual genocidal conditions, Stannard points to Franciscan missions in California as"furnaces of death."
  • The missionaries had a poor understanding of the causes of the diseases that afflicted their charges, and medically there was little they could do for them. By contrast, the Nazis knew exactly what was happening in the ghettos, and quite deliberately deprived the inmates of both food and medicine; unlike in Stannard’s"furnaces of death," the deaths that occurred there were meant to occur.
  • True, too, some colonists later welcomed the high mortality among Indians, seeing it as a sign of divine providence; that, however, does not alter the basic fact that Europeans did not come to the New World in order to infect the natives with deadly diseases.
  • But Chardon's journal manifestly does not suggest that the U.S. Army distributed infected blankets, instead blaming the epidemic on the inadvertent spread of disease by a ship's passenger. And as for the"100,000 fatalities," not only does Thornton fail to allege such obviously absurd numbers, but he too points to infected passengers on the steamboat St. Peter's as the cause. Another scholar, drawing on newly discovered source material, has also refuted the idea of a conspiracy to harm the Indians.
  • Similarly at odds with any such idea is the effort of the United States government at this time to vaccinate the native population. Smallpox vaccination, a procedure developed by the English country doctor Edward Jenner in 1796, was first ordered in 1801 by President Jefferson; the program continued in force for three decades, though its implementation was slowed both by the resistance of the Indians, who suspected a trick, and by lack of interest on the part of some officials. Still, as Thornton writes:"Vaccination of American Indians did eventually succeed in reducing mortality from smallpox."
  • To sum up, European settlers came to the New World for a variety of reasons, but the thought of infecting the Indians with deadly pathogens was not one of them. As for the charge that the U.S. government should itself be held responsible for the demographic disaster that overtook the American-Indian population, it is unsupported by evidence or legitimate argument.
  • Still, even if up to 90 percent of the reduction in Indian population was the result of disease, that leaves a sizable death toll caused by mistreatment and violence. Should some or all of these deaths be considered instances of genocide?
  • Despite the colonists' own resort to torture in order to extract confessions, the cruelty of these practices strengthened the belief that the natives were savages who deserved no quarter
  • A second famous example from the colonial period is King Philip’s War (1675-76).
  • The war was also merciless, on both sides. At its outset, a colonial council in Boston had declared"that none be Killed or Wounded that are Willing to surrender themselves into Custody."
  • But these rules were soon abandoned on the grounds that the Indians themselves, failing to adhere either to the laws of war or to the law of nature, would"skulk" behind trees, rocks, and bushes rather than appear openly to do" civilized" battle. Similarly creating a desire for retribution were the cruelties perpetrated by Indians when ambushing English troops or overrunning strongholds housing women and children.
  • Before long, both colonists and Indians were dismembering corpses and displaying body parts and heads on poles. (Nevertheless, Indians could not be killed with impunity. In the summer of 1676, four men were tried in Boston for the brutal murder of three squaws and three Indian children; all were found guilty and two were executed.)
  • In 1704, this was amended in the direction of"Christian practice" by means of a scale of rewards graduated by age and sex; bounty was proscribed in the case of children under the age of ten, subsequently raised to twelve (sixteen in Connecticut, fifteen in New Jersey). Here, too, genocidal intent was far from evident; the practices were justified on grounds of self-preservation and revenge, and in reprisal for the extensive scalping carried out by Indians.
  • As the United States expanded westward, such conflicts multiplied. So far had things progressed by 1784 that, according to one British traveler,"white Americans have the most rancorous antipathy to the whole race of Indians; and nothing is more common than to hear them talk of extirpating them totally from the face of the earth, men, women, and children."
  • To force the natives into submission, Generals Sherman and Sheridan, who for two decades after the Civil War commanded the Indian-fighting army units on the Plains, applied the same strategy they had used so successfully in their marches across Georgia and in the Shenandoah Valley. Unable to defeat the Indians on the open prairie, they pursued them to their winter camps, where numbing cold and heavy snows limited their mobility. There they destroyed the lodges and stores of food, a tactic that inevitably resulted in the deaths of women and children.
  • Genocide? These actions were almost certainly in conformity with the laws of war accepted at the time. The principles of limited war and of noncombatant immunity had been codified in Francis Lieber's General Order No. 100, issued for the Union Army on April 24, 1863. But the villages of warring Indians who refused to surrender were considered legitimate military objectives.
  • According to Article II of the convention, the crime of genocide consists of a series of acts" committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group as such" (emphases added). Practically all legal scholars accept the centrality of this clause.
  • During the deliberations over the convention, some argued for a clear specification of the reasons, or motives, for the destruction of a group. In the end, instead of a list of such motives, the issue was resolved by adding the words"as such"—i.e., the motive or reason for the destruction must be the ending of the group as a national, ethnic, racial, or religious entity. Evidence of such a motive, as one legal scholar put it,"will constitute an integral part of the proof of a genocidal plan, and therefore of genocidal intent."
  • The crucial role played by intentionality in the Genocide Convention means that under its terms the huge number of Indian deaths from epidemics cannot be considered genocide.
  • y contrast, some of the massacres in California, where both the perpetrators and their supporters openly acknowledged a desire to destroy the Indians as an ethnic entity, might indeed be regarded under the terms of the convention as exhibiting genocidal intent.
  • the convention does not address the question of what percentage of a group must be affected in order to qualify as genocide. As a benchmark, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia has suggested"a reasonably significant number, relative to the total of the group as a whole," adding that the actual or attempted destruction should also relate to"the factual opportunity of the accused to destroy a group in a specific geographic area within the sphere of his control, and not in relation to the entire population of the group in a wider geographic sense."
  • If this principle were adopted, an atrocity like the Sand Creek massacre, limited to one group in a specific single locality, might also be considered an act of genocide.
  • Applying today’s standards to events of the past raises still other questions, legal and moral alike. While history has no statute of limitations, our legal system rejects the idea of retroactivity (ex post facto laws).
  • No doubt, the 19th-century idea of America’s"manifest destiny" was in part a rationalization for acquisitiveness, but the resulting dispossession of the Indians was as unstoppable as other great population movements of the past. The U.S. government could not have prevented the westward movement even if it had wanted to.
  • Morally, even if we accept the idea of universal principles transcending particular cultures and periods, we must exercise caution in condemning, say, the conduct of war during America’s colonial period, which for the most part conformed to thenprevailing notions of right and wrong.
  • The real task, then, is to ascertain the context of a specific situation and the options it presented. Given circumstances, and the moral standards of the day, did the people on whose conduct we are sitting in judgment have a choice to act differently?
  • Finally, even if some episodes can be considered genocidal—that is, tending toward genocide—they certainly do not justify condemning an entire society
  • Guilt is personal, and for good reason the Genocide Convention provides that only"persons" can be charged with the crime, probably even ruling out legal proceedings against governments.
  • noncombatants incidentally and accidentally, not purposefully." As for the larger society, even if some elements in the white population, mainly in the West, at times advocated extermination, no official of the U.S. government ever seriously proposed it. Genocide was never American policy, nor was it the result of policy.
  • The violent collision between whites and America's native population was probably unavoidable.
  • To understand all is hardly to forgive all, but historical judgment, as the scholar Gordon Leff has correctly stressed,"must always be contextual: it is no more reprehensible for an age to have lacked our values than to have lacked forks."
  • In the end, the sad fate of America's Indians represents not a crime but a tragedy, involving an irreconcilable collision of cultures and values.
  • efforts of well-meaning people in both camps, there existed no good solution to this clash. The Indians were not prepared to give up the nomadic life of the hunter for the sedentary life of the farmer. The new Americans, convinced of their cultural and racial superiority, were unwilling to grant the original inhabitants of the continent the vast preserve of land required by the Indians’ way of life.
  • To fling the charge of genocide at an entire society serves neither the interests of the Indians nor those of history.
yehbru

Opinion: What a journalist's jailing for heroic Covid coverage exposes about China - CNN - 0 views

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

China reporting Covid freedom government politics

shared by yehbru on 02 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • a Chinese court had sentenced journalist Zhang Zhan, 37, to four years in jail for "picking quarrels and provoking trouble." This follows the government indictment, which accused her of "publishing large amounts of fake information."
  • Zhang's real crime: to report factually on the ground at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, at its then epicenter, Wuhan, in video dispatches that challenged the government's official narrative. And then to stubbornly defy the Chinese government by insisting on her innocence.
  • Arrested in May, Zhang went on a hunger strike during her detention, according to Amnesty International. In response, prison authorities have restrained her and forced nutrients into her.
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  • Zhang, a lawyer by training, went to Wuhan on her own accord. Her reports consisted of talking to ordinary people about what they thought and posting the accounts on Twitter and YouTube.
  • Yes, sure, she also criticized the government response to the pandemic -- harshly, in fact. But in jail, with a lawyer's sensibility, she has repeatedly denied reporting false news and insisted Chinese law gives her the right to report.
  • Article 35 of China's constitution states: "Citizens of the People's Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration." During her trial, Zhang insisted that people's speech should not be censored.
  • On December 1, China held 47 journalists in prison, including Zhang, the most of any other nation, according to an annual prison census conducted by the CPJ.
  • Others have reported on human rights abuses or labor unrest.
  • Some, like Huang Qi, a pioneer of human rights reporting, are repeat offenders, have suffered from medical neglect and seen their lawyers forced to resign or even disbarred
  • For all these reasons, Zhang's trial and conviction are about much more than one person running afoul of China's ruling Communist Party. It shows that Chinese citizens can still muster the courage to defy the Communist Party.
  • Foreign governments dealing with China cannot ignore this reality, and they must insist that China end its repeated and gross violations of the human rights of its own people, including its journalists.
katherineharron

US coronavirus: America is at a crossroads in this pandemic as Covid-19 deaths near 500... - 0 views

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

covid

shared by katherineharron on 22 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • On the brink of a devastating milestone -- 500,000 US Covid-19 deaths -- the US is at a crossroads in the course of this pandemic.
  • And while vaccinations slowly increase, some Americans say they won't get a Covid-19 vaccine -- hurting the chances of herd immunity and hindering a return to normal life.
  • More than 43.6 million Americans have received at least one dose of their two-dose vaccines, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. close dialogCovid-19Your local resource.Set your location and log in to find local resources and information on Covid-19 in your area.Please enter aboveSet Locationclose dialog/* effects for .bx-campaign-1191325 *//* custom css .bx-campaign-1191325 *//* custom css from creative 50769 */.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-row-validation .bx-input {border-color: white !important;border-width: 1px !important;background-color: white !important;box-shadow: 0px 2px 8px 1px rgba(0,0,0,0.12) !important;}.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-row-validation .bx-vtext { color: #e53841 !important; font-size: 11px !important; position: absolute !important; bottom: -1.8em !important;} @media screen and (max-width:736px) { .bx-custom.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-row-validation .bx-vtext {font-size: 10px !important; }}.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1191325 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  • ...15 more annotations...
  • About 18.8 million have been fully vaccinated. That's about 5.7% of the US population -- far less than the estimated 70% to 85% of Americans who would need to be immune to reach herd immunity.
  • To speed up vaccinations, some experts have suggested delaying second vaccine doses to get more first doses into people's arms.
  • Both vaccines on the US market -- developed by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna -- require two doses, the second of which are intended to be administered 21 days and 28 days after the first, respectively.
  • Nationwide, the rates of new Covid-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths are declining.The number of patients hospitalized with Covid-19 has fallen for the 40th day in a row, according to the COVID Tracking Project.
  • Fauci hopes that doesn't happen, he said, adding it's "possible" people may be wearing masks in 2022.
  • And daily new cases have dropped 23% over the same time period, according to Johns Hopkins. (But testing is also down by 17%, according to the COVID Tracking Project.)
  • Daily deaths have declined 24% this past week compared to the previous week
  • Experts with the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation said over the weekend that while the B.1.1.7 strain likely accounts for less than 20% of current infections in the US, that number will likely soar to 80% by late April.
  • "Managing the epidemic in the next four months depends critically on scaling up vaccination, trying to increase the fraction of adults willing to be vaccinated above three-quarters, and strongly encouraging continued mask use and avoiding situations where transmission is likely, such as indoor dining, going to bars, or indoor gatherings with individuals outside the household," the team wrote.
  • "With new, more contagious variants of the virus circulating throughout the U.S., now is not the time to let your guard down and scale back on the measures that we know will work to prevent further illness and deaths -- wearing masks, practicing physical distancing, and washing hands," a joint statement said.
  • About 1,700 cases of variant strains first spotted in the UK, South Africa and Brazil have been reported in the US, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
  • "I do think we're looking at some new normals. I think the handshake, for example, is probably going away," she said."I do think masks in the cough/cold/flu season in the winter months would make a lot of sense. That clearly, really insulated the Southeast Asian countries from some of the worst of this, understanding the importance of wearing masks."
  • "It's estimated that about 70% of Americans must be vaccinated before we get to herd immunity through vaccination," CNN medical analyst Dr. Leana Wen said. "That's the point where enough people have the immune protection that the virus won't spread anymore."
  • "The evidence was pretty compelling by last March or April that uniform wearing of masks would reduce transmission of this disease," National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins told Axios on HBO on Sunday.
  • "A mask is nothing more than a life-saving medical device, and yet it got categorized in all sorts of other ways that were not factual, not scientific and frankly, dangerous," he added. "And I think you can make a case that tens of thousands of people died as a result."
katherineharron

Trump's transition sabotage threatens Covid-19 vaccine rollout - CNNPolitics - 0 views

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shared by katherineharron on 17 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • President Donald Trump's refusal to coordinate with President-elect Joe Biden on the critical Covid-19 vaccine is bringing a staggering possibility into clearer view: that an outgoing US commander in chief is actively working to sabotage his successor.
  • Trump's denial of his election defeat, his lies about nonexistent mass coordinated voter fraud and his strangling of the rituals of transferring power between administrations are not just democracy-damaging aberrations.
  • they threaten to cause practical fallout that could damage Biden's incoming White House not just in a political sense.
  • ...26 more annotations...
  • Trump's obstruction will slow and complicate the delivery of the vaccine that brings the tantalizing prospect of a return to normal life amid stunning news from trials showing doses are effective in stopping more than 90% of coronavirus infections.
  • Attacks by the President and aides on governors stepping into his leadership vacuum as the pandemic rips across all 50 states mean the situation Biden will inherit will be worse than it needed to be.
  • The inoculation campaign will require a high level of public trust and will involve sharp ethical debates among officials about who should get the vaccine first.
  • The entire program could be damaged if it is politicized.
  • The distribution operation will be a massively complex and historic public vaccination effort targeting hundreds of millions of Americans
  • The victims of this neglect will be thousands of Americans whom health experts expect to die or get sick in the absence of a coordinated national response to the winter spike in infections and workers caught up in new restrictions imposed on business by local leaders trying to get the virus under control -- as well as the millions of schoolchildren who are already falling behind while classrooms remain shuttered
  • "More people may die if we don't coordinate," Biden warned bluntly
  • Biden does have a sense of urgency and new proposals, and he is calling for a coordinated national effort to mitigate the harrowing impact of the nationwide spike in infections.
  • CNN reported on Monday that Trump has no intention of abandoning his false attacks on the election to initiate an orderly transition process or to accept that Biden is the rightful next president.
  • Two weeks after the election, it remains surreal and extraordinary that the President is refusing to accept Biden's victory, which matched the 306 Electoral College votes that he himself stacked up in 2016.
  • consistently prioritized his own goals and gratification over a traditional view of the national interest.
  • Military commanders expect orders in the coming days from the commander in chief to begin significant drawdowns in Iraq and Afghanistan to be completed by January 15, CNN's Barbara Starr reported on Monday. If there are consequences from such a move -- like a collapse of the Afghan government under a Taliban resurgence -- it will be up to Biden to deal with the fallout.
  • There are also expectations that the President will take steps in foreign policy, including stiffened tariffs on China or strengthened sanctions on Iran, that will further trim the next White House's negotiating room.
  • The New York Times reported Monday that the President sought options to strike Iran after his "maximum pressure" policy failed to rein in its nuclear program.
  • Such action would make it almost impossible for Biden to revive the Obama administration's agreement with Tehran and international powers.
  • In recent years, presidents of both parties have prioritized a peaceful and effective transfer of power over personal political pique, recognizing their duty to secure the health, security and welfare of the American people.
  • Warm letters of welcome left in the Oval Office desk -- for instance, from President George H.W. Bush to Bill Clinton -- have become the norm.
  • The 44th President then ordered his team to make life as easy as possible for Trump's incoming White House -- a fact Michelle Obama recalled in a tartly worded Instagram post Monday: "I was hurt and disappointed -- but the votes had been counted and Donald Trump had won. ... My husband and I instructed our staffs to do what George and Laura Bush had done for us: run a respectful, seamless transition of power -- one of the hallmarks of American democracy."
  • Ironically, Trump's mood, characterized by wild tweets divorced from any factual anchor, is detracting from his administration's own undeniable achievement in shepherding the swift development of vaccines.
  • Moderna vaccine currently in trials is 94.5% effective against the coronavirus. This followed news that Pfizer's vaccine was more than 90% effective. The news brought the prospect of a return to normal life and economic activity in 2021.
  • One of Trump's few recent references to the worsening pandemic was a tweet on Monday in which he demanded that historians recognize his role in the vaccine breakthroughs.
  • Biden initially reacted with circumspection to the move, apparently eager not to further antagonize Trump as the President comes to terms with his dashed hopes of winning a second term. But increasingly, the President-elect is warning of the damage caused by the impasse and is highlighting the vaccine in particular.
  • "The sooner we have access to the administration's distribution plan, the sooner this transition would be smoothly moved forward,"
  • "Transitions are important, and if you don't have a smooth transition, you would not optimize whatever efforts you're doing right now," Fauci told CNN's Jim Sciutto on "Newsroom" Tuesday morning, comparing the task to a "relay race in which you're passing the baton and you don't want to slow down what you're doing, but you want the person to whom you're giving the baton to be running with it as opposed to stopping and starting all over again."
  • obstruction from the administration on the vaccine could have a serious impact on its eventual distribution.
  • "The Vice President clearly articulated a strategy for distributing the vaccines across the country," Brown said. "But the conversation was extremely disingenuous when we have a new administration coming in in a matter of weeks. There was no conversation about what the hand-off was going to be and how they were going to ensure that the Biden-Harris administration would be fully prepared and ready to accept the baton."
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