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Javier E

David Attenborough: polluting planet may become as reviled as slavery | Television & ra... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...le-give-me-hope-on-environment

slavery consciousness crisis global warming

shared by Javier E on 09 Jul 19 - No Cached
  • The attitude of young people towards tackling the environmental crisis is “a source of great hope”, David Attenborough has told MP
  • he predicted that polluting the planet would soon provoke as much abhorrence as slavery.
  • the naturalist and TV presenter said radical action was required.
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  • “We cannot be radical enough in dealing with the issues that face us at the moment. The question is: what is practically possible? How can we take the electorate with us in dealing with these things?
  • “I’m OK, and all of us here are OK, because we don’t face the problems that are coming. But the problems in the next 30 years are really major problems that are going to cause social unrest, and great changes in the way that we live, and what we eat. It’s going to happen.”
  • “There was a time in the 19th century when it was perfectly acceptable for civilised human beings to think that it was morally acceptable to actually own another human being for a slave. And somehow or other, in the space of 20 or 30 years, the public perception of that totally transformed.
  • “I suspect that we are right now in the beginning of a big change. Young people in particular are the stimulus that’s bringing it about
  • “People are understanding that to chuck plastic into the ocean is an insult. To have the nerve to say: ‘This is our rubbish. We’ll give you money and you can spread it on your land instead of ours, in the far east,’ is intolerable. And for some reason or other young people understand that. And that’s a source of great hope to me.”
  • Attenborough said he nonetheless never set out to be a campaigner: “I’m not by nature a propagandist. I started making natural history programmes because I thought there was nothing I would prefer to see more than the beauty of the natural world. And I would love to just go on doing that. That’s what I enjoy.
Javier E

The Boomers Are to Blame for Aging America - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...592336

boomers aging generation politics history crisis

shared by Javier E on 25 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • Even as cultural values are in rapid flux, political institutions seem frozen in time. The average U.S. state constitution is more than 100 years old. We are in the third-longest period without a constitutional amendment in American history
  • what’s to blame for this institutional aging?
  • One possibility is simply that Americans got older. The average American was 32 years old in 2000, and 37 in 2018.
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  • it’s not just aging. In a variety of different areas, the Baby Boom generation created, advanced, or preserved policies that made American institutions less dynamic
  • most zoning was intended to protect property values for homeowners, or to exclude certain racial g
  • Stricter zoning rules began to be implemented in many places in the 1940s and 1950s as suburbanization began. But then things got worse in the 1960s to 1980s
  • These decades, when the political power of the Baby Boomer generation was rapidly rising, saw a sharp escalation in land-use rules.
  • There’s debate about why this is: Some researchers say the end of formal segregation may have pushed some voters to look for informal methods of enforcing segregation. Others suggest that a change in financial returns to different classes of investment caused homeowners to become more protective of their asset values.
  • Even as the American population has doubled since the 1940s, it has gotten more and more legally challenging to build houses. The result is that younger Americans are locked out of suitable housing. And as I’ve argued previously, when young people have to rent or live in more crowded housing, they tend to postpone the major personal events marking transformation into settled adulthood, such as marriage and childbearing.
  • hey also made new rules restricting young people’s employment. Laws and rules requiring workers to have special licenses, degrees, or certificates to work have proliferated over the past few decades. And while much of this rise came before Boomers were politically active, instead of reversing the trend, they extended it.
  • even as higher education gets more expensive, the actual economic returns to a university degree are about flat. People who are more educated make more money than people with less education, but overall, most educational groups are just treading water
  • the actual enforcement mechanism for this norm is explicitly generational: older employers setting standards for younger job applicants.
  • these developments are part of a wider social trend toward increasing control and regulation across all walks of lif
  • graph tracking the rise in paperwork needed to start a new business, or the length of census questionnaires, or the length of the federal code, or virtually any measure of administrative or regulatory complexity would show the same basic trend
  • most glaring example of this growth in regulation and control is also the easiest one to pin on Baby Boomers: the incredible rise in incarceration rates
  • It’s understandable that, faced with a wave of crime, Baby Boomers might want to respond with a law-enforcement crackdown. But the scale of the response was disproportionate. The rush to respond to a social ill with control, with extra rules and procedures, with the commanding power of the state, has been typical of American policy making in the postwar period, and especially since the 1970s
  • Even young Americans today who are free from prison are nonetheless in bondage to debt—sometimes their own debt, in the form of rapidly growing student loans or personal and credit-card loans. But on a larger scale, the problems of entitlements, pensions, Social Security, Medicare, and federal, state, and local debt are becoming more severe all the time
  • Below, I show a reasonable projection of the share of national income that will have to be spent paying for these obligations in the future if there is no substantial restructuring of liabilitie
  • Making these payments will require fiscal austerity, through either higher taxes or lower alternative spending. Younger Americans will bear the burdens of the Baby Boomer generation, whether in smaller take-home pay or more potholes and worse schools.
  • Baby Boomers are living longer even as the workers who pay for their pensions are dying from an epidemic of drug overdose, suicide, car accidents, and violence
  • there is cause for hope. If the problem is too many senseless rules, then the solution is obvious. Strict licensure standards can be repealed. Minimum lot sizes can be reduced. Building-height ceilings can be raised. Nonviolent prisoners can have their sentences commuted. Even thorny problems such as cost control in universities can be addressed through caps on non-instructional spending
Javier E

Jill Lepore On Why We Need a New American National Story - 0 views

www.foreignaffairs.com/...canism-nationalism-jill-lepore

american national story historiography history US nationalism

shared by Javier E on 12 Jul 19 - No Cached
  • Degler, a gentle and quietly heroic man, accused his colleagues of nothing short of dereliction of duty: appalled by nationalism, they had abandoned the study of the nation.
  • “If we historians fail to provide a nationally defined history, others less critical and less informed will take over the job for us.”
  • historians seemed to believe that if they stopped studying it, it would die sooner: starved, neglected, and abandoned.
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  • Nation-states, when they form, imagine a past. That, at least in part, accounts for why modern historical writing arose with the nation-state.
  • For more than a century, the nation-state was the central object of historical inquiry.
  • studying American history meant studying the American nation. As the historian John Higham put it, “From the middle of the nineteenth century until the 1960s, the nation was the grand subject of American history.”
  • “A history in common is fundamental to sustaining the affiliation that constitutes national subjects,” the historian Thomas Bender once observed. “Nations are, among other things, a collective agreement, partly coerced, to affirm a common history as the basis for a shared future.”
  • in the 1970s, studying the nation fell out of favor in the American historical profession. Most historians started looking at either smaller or bigger things, investigating the experiences and cultures of social groups or taking the broad vantage promised by global history
  • The endurance of nationalism proves that there’s never any shortage of blackguards willing to prop up people’s sense of themselves and their destiny with a tissue of myths and prophecies, prejudices and hatreds, or to empty out old rubbish bags full of festering resentments and calls to violence.
  • When historians abandon the study of the nation, when scholars stop trying to write a common history for a people, nationalism doesn’t die. Instead, it eats liberalism. 
  • is there any option other than to try to craft a new American history—one that could foster a new Americanism? 
  • o review: a nation is a people with common origins, and a state is a political community governed by laws.
  • A nation-state is a political community governed by laws that unites a people with a supposedly common ancestry.
  • These Truths, “Very often, histories of nation-states are little more than myths that hide the seams that stitch the nation to the state.”
  • Not until the 1840s, when European nations were swept up in what has been called “the age of nationalities,” did Americans come to think of themselves as belonging to a nation, with a destiny
  • the state-nation, which arises when the state is formed before the development of any sense of national consciousness. The United States might be seen as a, perhaps the only, spectacular example of the latter”
  • Bancroft’s ten-volume History of the United States, From the Discovery of the American Continent, was published between 1834 and 1874.
  • An architect of manifest destiny, Bancroft wrote his history in an attempt to make the United States’ founding appear inevitable, its growth inexorable, and its history ancient. De-emphasizing its British inheritance, he celebrated the United States as a pluralistic and cosmopolitan nation, with ancestors all over the world:
  • Nineteenth-century nationalism was liberal, a product of the Enlightenment. It rested on an analogy between the individual and the collective
  • “The concept of national self-determination—transferring the ideal of liberty from the individual to the organic collectivity—was raised as the banner of liberalism.” 
  • Nineteenth-century Americans understood the nation-state within the context of an emerging set of ideas about human rights: namely, that the power of the state guaranteed everyone eligible for citizenship the same set of irrevocable political rights.
  • The American Civil War was a struggle over two competing ideas of the nation-state. This struggle has never ended; it has just moved around
  • Southerners were nationalists, too. It’s just that their nationalism was what would now be termed “illiberal” or “ethnic,” as opposed to the Northerners’ liberal or civic nationalism.
  • much of U.S. history has been a battle between them. 
  • “Ours is the government of the white man,” the American statesman John C. Calhoun declared in 1848, arguing against admitting Mexicans as citizens of the United States. “This Government was made by our fathers on the white basis,” the American politician Stephen Douglas said in 1858. “It was made by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever.” 
  • In 1861, the Confederacy’s newly elected vice president, Alexander Stephens, delivered a speech in Savannah in which he explained that the ideas that lay behind the U.S. Constitution “rested upon the assumption of the equality of races”—here ceding Lincoln’s argument—but that “our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery is his natural and moral condition.”
  • the battle between liberal and illiberal nationalism raged on, especially during the debates over the 14th and 15th Amendments, which marked a second founding of the United States on terms set by liberal ideas about the rights of citizens and the powers of nation-states—namely, birthright citizenship, equal rights, universal (male) suffrage, and legal protections for noncitizens
  • For Douglass, progress could only come in this new form of a nation, the composite nation. “We shall spread the network of our science and civilization over all who seek their shelter, whether from Asia, Africa, or the Isles of the sea,” he said, and “all shall here bow to the same law, speak the same language, support the same Government, enjoy the same liberty, vibrate with the same national enthusiasm, and seek the same national ends.”
  • that effort had been betrayed by white Northerners and white Southerners who patched the United States back together by inventing a myth that the war was not a fight over slavery at all but merely a struggle between the nation and the states. “We fell under the leadership of those who would compromise with truth in the past in order to make peace in the present,” Du Bois wrote bitterly.
  • Nationalism was taking a turn, away from liberalism and toward illiberalism, including in Germany
  • That “placed the question of the ‘nation,’ and the citizen’s feelings towards whatever he regarded as his ‘nation,’ ‘nationality’ or other centre of loyalty, at the top of the political agenda.”
  • began in the United States in the 1880s, with the rise of Jim Crow laws, and with a regime of immigration restriction, starting with the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first federal law restricting immigration, which was passed in 1882. Both betrayed the promises and constitutional guarantees made by the 14th and 15th Amendments.
  • the white men who delivered speeches at the annual meetings of the American Historical Association during those years had little interest in discussing racial segregation, the disenfranchisement of black men, or immigration restriction
  • All offered national histories that left out the origins and endurance of racial inequality.
  • the uglier and more illiberal nationalism got, the more liberals became convinced of the impossibility of liberal nationalism
  • The last, best single-volume popular history of the United States written in the twentieth century was Degler’s 1959 book, Out of Our Past: The Forces That Shaped Modern America: a stunning, sweeping account that, greatly influenced by Du Bois, placed race, slavery, segregation, and civil rights at the center of the story, alongside liberty, rights, revolution, freedom, and equality. Astonishingly, it was Degler’s first book.
  • hatred for nationalism drove American historians away from it in the second half of the twentieth century.
  • with the coming of the Vietnam War, American historians stopped studying the nation-state in part out of a fear of complicity with atrocities of U.S. foreign policy and regimes of political oppression at home.
  • Bender observed in Rethinking American History in a Global Age in 2002. “Only recently,” he continued, “and because of the uncertain status of the nation-state has it been recognized that history as a professional discipline is part of its own substantive narrative and not at all sufficiently self-conscious about the implications of that circularity.” Since then, historians have only become more self-conscious, to the point of paralysis
  • If nationalism was a pathology, the thinking went, the writing of national histories was one of its symptoms, just another form of mythmaking
  • Beginning in the 1960s, women and people of color entered the historical profession and wrote new, rich, revolutionary histories, asking different questions and drawing different conclusions
  • a lot of historians in the United States had begun advocating a kind of historical cosmopolitanism, writing global rather than national history
  • Michael Walzer grimly announced that “the tribes have returned.” They had never left. They’d only become harder for historians to see, because they weren’t really looking anymore. 
  • Writing national history creates plenty of problems. But not writing national history creates more problems, and these problems are worse.
  • What would a new Americanism and a new American history look like? They might look rather a lot like the composite nationalism imagined by Douglass and the clear-eyed histories written by Du Bois
  • A nation born in contradiction will forever fight over the meaning of its history. But that doesn’t mean history is meaningless, or that anyone can afford to sit out the fight.
  • “The history of the United States at the present time does not seek to answer any significant questions,” Degler told his audience some three decades ago. If American historians don’t start asking and answering those sorts of questions, other people will, he warned
Javier E

Andrew Sullivan: Biden Can Make the Moral Case Against Trump - 0 views

nymag.com/...-moral-case-against-trump.html

election 2010 candidates

shared by Javier E on 09 Aug 19 - No Cached
  • Next year will not be a midterm election, after all. It will be a referendum on Trump — as it has to be, and as Trump will insist it be
  • the central task of the Democratic candidate will be not just to explain how dangerous Trump’s rhetoric and behavior is, but how un-American it is, and how a second term could leave behind an unutterably altered America. One term and the stain, however dark, might fade in time. Two terms and it marks us forever.
  • Biden made this moral case. And he did it with feeling, and a wounded sense of patriotism. He invoked previous presidents, including Republicans, who knew how insidiously evil white supremacy is and wouldn’t give any quarter to it. He reminded us that in politics, words are acts, and they have consequences when uttered by a national leader: “The words of a president … can move markets. They can send our brave men and women to war. They can bring peace. They can calm a nation in turmoil. They can console and confront and comfort in times of tragedy … They can appeal to the better angels of our nature. But they can also unleash the deepest, darkest forces in this nation.” And this, Biden argues, is what Trump has done: tap that dark psychic force, in an act of malignant and nihilist narcissism.
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  • he went further and explained why America, at its best, is an inversion of that twisted racial identitarianism: “What this president doesn’t understand is that unlike every other nation on earth, we’re unable to define what constitutes ‘American’ by religion, by ethnicity, or by tribe; you can’t do it. America is an idea. An idea stronger than any army, bigger than any ocean, more powerful than any dictator or tyrant. It gives hope to the most desperate people on earth.”
  • more importantly, Biden was able to express all this with authority. The speech was a defense of American decency against an indecent commander-in-chief — and it echoed loudly because Biden is, so evidently, a decent human
  • for 25 minutes or so this week, I felt as if I were living in America again, the America I love and chose to live in, a deeply flawed America, to be sure, marked forever by slavery’s stain, and racism’s endurance, but an America that, at its heart, is a decent country, full of decent people.
  • decency is the heart of his candidacy. And voting for Joe Biden feels like voting for some things we’ve lost and have one last chance to regain. Normalcy, generosity, civility, experience — and a reminder that, in this current darkness, Trump does not define America.
  • “Currently, 66 percent of the public says ‘it would be too risky to give U.S. presidents more power to deal directly with many of the country’s problems.’ About three-in-ten adults (29 percent) offer the contrasting opinion that ‘problems could be dealt with more effectively if U.S. presidents didn’t have to worry so much about Congress or the courts.’”
  • Three in ten is not a terrible place to start if you want to become an American autocrat
  • here’s one demographic in particular that is even more fertile territory: “The share of conservative Republicans who say that presidents could deal with problems more effectively if they ‘didn’t have to worry so much about Congress or the courts’ has doubled since March 2018. Today, about half of conservative Republicans (52 percent) hold this view, compared with 26 percent a year ago.
  • Brits now favor expanding security over freedom by 65 to 35 percent.
  • “Across all dimensions, support for security was highest among groups that the Conservative Party now relies on most heavily for its voters: older age groups, pensioners, white voters, and those with lower levels of education.” If you wonder why the Tory Party has shifted away from Thatcherite liberalism to more statist authoritarianism, this is a clue. If they didn’t, they’d disappear
  • “British politics is undergoing a sea change and it is for security, not freedom. Most voters are not freedom fighters who want more rampant individualism, a small state and lower taxes. They want well-funded public services, security for their family, and a strong community in the place in which they live.”
  • “66 percent of 25-34 year olds favor ‘strong leaders who do not have to bother with Parliament’ and 26 percent believe democracy is a bad way to run the country.”
Javier E

Germany Has Some Revolutionary Ideas, and They're Working - 0 views

www.nationalgeographic.com/...ny-renewable-energy-revolution

germany climate change energy policy revolutionary ecological culture

shared by Javier E on 14 Sep 19 - No Cached
  • Last year about 27 percent of its electricity came from renewable sources such as wind and solar power, three times what it got a decade ago and more than twice what the United States gets today.
  • Germany, the world’s fourth largest economy, has promised some of the most aggressive emission cuts—by 2020, a 40 percent cut from 1990 levels, and by 2050, at least 80 percent.
  • The energiewende will take much longer and will involve every single German—more than 1.5 million of them, nearly 2 percent of the population, are selling electricity to the grid right now
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  • “It’s a project for a generation; it’s going to take till 2040 or 2050, and it’s hard,” said Gerd Rosenkranz, a former journalist at Der Spiegel who’s now an analyst at Agora Energiewende, a Berlin think tank. “It’s making electricity more expensive for individual consumers. And still, if you ask people in a poll, Do you want the energiewende? then 90 percent say yes.”
  • The Germans have an origin myth: It says they came from the dark and impenetrable heart of the forest
  • . The forest became the place where Germans go to restore their souls—a habit that predisposed them to care about the environment.
  • So in the late 1970s, when fossil fuel emissions were blamed for killing German forests with acid rain, the outrage was nationwide. The oil embargo of 1973 had already made Germans, who have very little oil and gas of their own, think about energy. The threat ofwaldsterben, or forest death, made them think harder.
  • I came away thinking there would have been no energiewende at all without antinuclear sentiment—the fear of meltdown is a much more powerful and immediate motive than the fear of slowly rising temperatures and seas.
  • energy researcher Volker Quaschning put it this way: “Nuclear power affects me personally. Climate change affects my kids. That’s the difference.”
  • NG STAFF; EVAN APP
  • Demonstrators in the 1970s and ’80s were protesting not just nuclear reactors but plans to deploy American nuclear missiles in West Germany. The two didn’t seem separable. When the German Green Party was founded in 1980, pacifism and opposition to nuclear power were both central tenets.
  • Chernobyl was a watershed.
  • The environmental movement’s biggest mistake has been to say, ‘Do less. Tighten your belts. Consume less,’ ” Fell said. “People associate that with a lower quality of life. ‘Do things differently, with cheap, renewable electricity’—that’s the message.”
  • It was 1990, the year Germany was officially reunified—and while the country was preoccupied with that monumental task, a bill boosting the energiewende made its way through the Bundestag without much public notice. Just two pages long, it enshrined a crucial principle: Producers of renewable electricity had the right to feed into the grid, and utilities had to pay them a “feed-in tariff.” Wind turbines began to sprout in the windy north.
  • The biogas, the solar panels that cover many roofs, and especially the wind turbines allow Wildpoldsried to produce nearly five times as much electricity as it consumes.
  • In a recent essay William Nordhaus, a Yale economist who has spent decades studying the problem of addressing climate change, identified what he considers its essence: free riders. Because it’s a global problem, and doing something is costly, every country has an incentive to do nothing and hope that others will act. While most countries have been free riders, Germany has behaved differently: It has ridden out ahead. And in so doing, it has made the journey easier for the rest of us.
  • Fell’s law, then, helped drive down the cost of solar and wind, making them competitive in many regions with fossil fuels. One sign of that: Germany’s tariff for large new solar facilities has fallen from 50 euro cents a kilowatt-hour to less than 10. “We’ve created a completely new situation in 15 years
  • Germans paid for this success not through taxes but through a renewable-energy surcharge on their electricity bills. This year the surcharge is 6.17 euro cents per kilowatt-hour, which for the average customer amounts to about 18 euros a month—a hardship for some
  • The German economy as a whole devotes about as much of its gross national product to electricity as it did in 1991.
  • Ideally, to reduce emissions, Germany should replace lignite with gas. But as renewables have flooded the grid, something else has happened: On the wholesale market where contracts to deliver electricity are bought and sold, the price of electricity has plummeted, such that gas-fired power plants and sometimes even plants burning hard coal are priced out of the market.
  • Old lignite-fired power plants are rattling along at full steam, 24/7, while modern gas-fired plants with half the emissions are standing idle.
  • “Of course we have to find a track to get rid of our coal—it’s very obvious,” said Jochen Flasbarth, state secretary in the environment ministry. “But it’s quite difficult. We are not a very resource-rich country, and the one resource we have is lignite.”
  • Vattenfall formally inaugurated its first German North Sea wind park, an 80-turbine project called DanTysk that lies some 50 miles offshore. The ceremony in a Hamburg ballroom was a happy occasion for the city of Munich too. Its municipal utility, Stadtwerke München, owns 49 percent of the project. As a result Munich now produces enough renewable electricity to supply its households, subway, and tram lines. By 2025 it plans to meet all of its demand with renewables.
  • Last spring Gabriel proposed a special emissions levy on old, inefficient coal plants; he soon had 15,000 miners and power plant workers, encouraged by their employers, demonstrating outside his ministry. In July the government backed down. Instead of taxing the utilities, it said it would pay them to shut down a few coal plants—achieving only half the planned emissions savings. For the energiewende to succeed, Germany will have to do much more.
  • The government’s goal is to have a million electric cars on the road by 2020; so far there are about 40,000. The basic problem is that the cars are still too expensive for most Germans, and the government hasn’t offered serious incentives to buy them—it hasn’t done for transportation what Fell’s law did for electricity.
  • “The strategy has always been to modernize old buildings in such a way that they use almost no energy and cover what they do use with renewables,” said Matthias Sandrock, a researcher at the Hamburg Institute. “That’s the strategy, but it’s not working. A lot is being done, but not enough.”
  • All over Germany, old buildings are being wrapped in six inches of foam insulation and refitted with modern windows. Low-interest loans from the bank that helped rebuild the war-torn west with Marshall Plan funds pay for many projects. Just one percent of the stock is being renovated every year, though
  • For all buildings to be nearly climate neutral by 2050—the official goal—the rate would need to double at least.
  • here’s the thing about the Germans: They knew the energiewende was never going to be a walk in the forest, and yet they set out on it. What can we learn from them? We can’t transplant their desire to reject nuclear power. We can’t appropriate their experience of two great nation-changing projects—rebuilding their country when it seemed impossible, 70 years ago, and reunifying their country when it seemed forever divided, 25 years ago. But we can be inspired to think that the energiewende might be possible for other countries too.
  • At the peak of the boom, in 2012, 7.6 gigawatts of PV panels were installed in Germany in a single year—the equivalent, when the sun is shining, of seven nuclear plants. A German solar-panel industry blossomed, until it was undercut by lower-cost manufacturers in China—which took the boom worldwide
  • Curtailing its use is made harder by the fact that Germany’s big utilities have been losing money lately—because of the energiewende, they say; because of their failure to adapt to the energiewende, say their critics. E.ON, the largest utility, which owns Grafenrheinfeld and many other plants, declared a loss of more than three billion euros last year.
  • “The utilities in Germany had one strategy,” Flasbarth said, “and that was to defend their track—nuclear plus fossil. They didn’t have a strategy B.”
  • In a conference room, Olaf Adermann, asset manager for Vattenfall’s lignite operations, explained that Vattenfall and other utilities had never expected renewables to take off so fast. Even with the looming shutdown of more nuclear reactors, Germany has too much generating capacity.
brickol

The missing six weeks: how Trump failed the biggest test of his life | US news | The Gu... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...us-politics-us-health-disaster

COVID-19 us trump

shared by brickol on 28 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • When the definitive history of the coronavirus pandemic is written, the date 20 January 2020 is certain to feature prominently. It was on that day that a 35-year-old man in Washington state, recently returned from visiting family in Wuhan in China, became the first person in the US to be diagnosed with the virus.
  • In the two months since that fateful day, the responses to coronavirus displayed by the US and South Korea have been polar opposites.
  • One country acted swiftly and aggressively to detect and isolate the virus, and by doing so has largely contained the crisis. The other country dithered and procrastinated, became mired in chaos and confusion, was distracted by the individual whims of its leader, and is now confronted by a health emergency of daunting proportions.
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  • Within a week of its first confirmed case, South Korea’s disease control agency had summoned 20 private companies to the medical equivalent of a war-planning summit and told them to develop a test for the virus at lightning speed. A week after that, the first diagnostic test was approved and went into battle, identifying infected individuals who could then be quarantined to halt the advance of the disease.
  • Some 357,896 tests later, the country has more or less won the coronavirus war. On Friday only 91 new cases were reported in a country of more than 50 million.
  • The US response tells a different story. Two days after the first diagnosis in Washington state, Donald Trump went on air on CNBC and bragged: “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming from China. It’s going to be just fine.”
  • Though the decision to allow private and state labs to provide testing has increased the flow of test kits, the US remains starkly behind South Korea, which has conducted more than five times as many tests per capita. That makes predicting where the next hotspot will pop up after New York and New Orleans almost impossible.
  • Today, 86,012 cases have been confirmed across the US, pushing the nation to the top of the world’s coronavirus league table – above even China.
  • Most worryingly, the curve of cases continues to rise precipitously, with no sign of the plateau that has spared South Korea.
  • Jeremy Konyndyk, who led the US government’s response to international disasters at USAid from 2013 to 2017, frames the past six weeks in strikingly similar terms. He told the Guardian: “We are witnessing in the United States one of the greatest failures of basic governance and basic leadership in modern times.”
  • If Trump’s travel ban did nothing else, it staved off to some degree the advent of the virus in the US, buying a little time. Which makes the lack of decisive action all the more curious.
  • It was not until 29 February, more than a month after the Journal article and almost six weeks after the first case of coronavirus was confirmed in the country that the Trump administration put that advice into practice. Laboratories and hospitals would finally be allowed to conduct their own Covid-19 tests to speed up the process.
  • In the absence of sufficient test kits, the US Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) initially kept a tight rein on testing, creating a bottleneck. “I believe the CDC was caught flat-footed,” was how the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, put it on 7 March. “They’re slowing down the state.”The CDC’s botched rollout of testing was the first indication that the Trump administration was faltering as the health emergency gathered pace. Behind the scenes, deep flaws in the way federal agencies had come to operate under Trump were being exposed.
  • In 2018 the pandemic unit in the national security council – which was tasked to prepare for health emergencies precisely like the current one – was disbanded. “Eliminating the office has contributed to the federal government’s sluggish domestic response,” Beth Cameron, senior director of the office at the time it was broken up, wrote in the Washington Post.
  • It was hardly a morale-boosting gesture when Trump proposed a 16% cut in CDC funding on 10 February – 11 days after the World Health Organization had declared a public health emergency over Covid-19.
  • The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which regulates the diagnostic tests and will control any new treatments for coronavirus, has also shown vulnerabilities. The agency recently indicated that it was looking into the possibility of prescribing the malaria drug chloroquine for coronavirus sufferers, even though there is no evidence it would work and some indication it could have serious side-effects.
  • As the former senior official put it: “We have the FDA bowing to political pressure and making decisions completely counter to modern science.”
  • Trump has designated himself a “wartime president”. But if the title bears any validity, his military tactics have been highly unconventional. He has exacerbated the problems encountered by federal agencies by playing musical chairs at the top of the coronavirus force.
  • The president began by creating on 29 January a special coronavirus taskforce, then gave Vice-President Mike Pence the job, who promptly appointed Deborah Birx “coronavirus response coordinator”, before the federal emergency agency Fema began taking charge of key areas, with Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, creating a shadow team that increasingly appears to be calling the shots.“There’s no point of responsibility,” the former senior official told the Guardian. “It keeps shifting. Nobody owns the problem.”
  • So it has transpired. In the wake of the testing disaster has come the personal protective equipment (PPE) disaster, the hospital bed disaster, and now the ventilator disaster.Ventilators, literal life preservers, are in dire short supply across the country. When governors begged Trump to unleash the full might of the US government on this critical problem, he gave his answer on 16 March.In a phrase that will stand beside 20 January 2020 as one of the most revelatory moments of the history of coronavirus, he said: “Respirators, ventilators, all of the equipment – try getting it yourselves.”
  • In the absence of a strong federal response, a patchwork of efforts has sprouted all across the country. State governors are doing their own thing. Cities, even individual hospitals, are coping as best they can.
nrashkind

Donald Trump Is a Menace to Public Health - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...608449

shared by nrashkind on 29 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • The autocratic political culture that has propped up the Trump administration has left the nation entirely unprepared for an economic and public-health calamity.
  • The president of the United States is a menace to public health
  • I don’t mean that I disagree with him on policy, although I do
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • What I am referring to is the fact that, soon after the coronavirus outbreak emerged in China, the rest of the world began to regard it as a threat to public health, while Trump has seen it as a public-relations problem
  • Trump’s primary method of dealing with public-relations problems is to exert the full force of the authoritarian cult of personality that surrounds him to deny that a problem even exists.
  • Neither the tide of pestilence sweeping the nation nor the economic calamity that will follow was inevitable
  • Trump’s first public remarks on the coronavirus came during an interview with the CNBC reporter Joe Kernen on January 22
  • Kernen asked, “Are there worries about a pandemic at this point?” To which Trump replied, “No. Not at all. And—we’re—we have it totally under control
  • Except Trump was not preparing
  • He was consciously contradicting his administration’s own public-health officials at the time.
  • Nor were the president’s dismissals of the dangers posed by the coronavirus an attempt to buy time for the federal government to appropriately respond.
  • Medical workers are running out of face masks and gloves. The United States does not have enough ventilators for critically ill patients who need them. States lack sufficient testing capacity to measure the scale of the outbreak. Emergency rooms are overwhelmed. Hospitals are running out of beds. The president is tweeting praise of himself.
  • In the meantime, doctors, nurses, and EMTs are getting sick
annabelteague02

Trump and the Trillion Trees - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...newsletter-trillion-trees.html

trump trees new york times

shared by annabelteague02 on 28 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • he lauded American production of oil and gas, both fossil fuels that generate emissions of planet-warming carbon dioxide.
    • annabelteague02
      annabelteague02 on 28 Feb 20
       
      i don't get why he lauds it.... i get acknowledging that it is a necessary production and our society needs it, but i don't understand why our production of the two substances needs to be lauded for any reason other than making a statement
  • Republican climate advocates said they weren’t surprised that Mr. Trump sidestepped direct mention of global warming.
    • annabelteague02
      annabelteague02 on 28 Feb 20
       
      seems likely that he knows it is a problem that needs to be addressed, but doesn't want to lose supporters from people who don't believe in climate change or don't want to have to deal with it
  • electoral math
    • annabelteague02
      annabelteague02 on 28 Feb 20
       
      like trying to gain support for the upcoming election?
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • “would require a lot more than policies to promote ever greater use of oil, gas and coal — leavened by some trees.”
    • annabelteague02
      annabelteague02 on 28 Feb 20
       
      planting more trees seems like a reactionary way to make the problem less damaging, and not a way to actually improve the issue
  • he didn’t mention the problem it was created to address: climate change.
Javier E

The coronavirus isn't another Hurricane Katrina. It's worse. - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-acca-80c22bbee96f_story.html

hurricane pandemic emergency federal government

shared by Javier E on 10 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • the United States again faces a circumstance in which the problem may be larger than the institutions that normally deal with it.
  • Public health is mainly the responsibility of states and localities. Americans may think the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is leading a national response to the coronavirus. It isn’t. The CDC has a weak role in setting and implementing policy, and it is not sufficiently staffed to do the job people think it is doing.
  • The working group headed by Vice President Pence — while needed and helpful — only has the power of cajoling. In a public health emergency, there is no national coordinating function.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • some problems have a scope — say, fighting a war or constructing a national highway system — that overwhelms the theory of local control.
  • As America moves to the mitigation stage of the outbreak, social distancing measures — such as closing schools, ending mass gatherings and restricting travel — are the next line of defense. But the problem with such measures is that they tend to be imposed too late and/or lifted too early. And the current implementation of social distancing by states and localities can best be called spotty.
  • Dangerously and absurdly, political leaders have been using the low number of confirmed cases as the evidence of success when it is actually a measure of our blindness.
  • if sickness begins to come in a sudden rush, it will swamp the health-care system, leading to shortages of masks, hospital beds, ventilators and personnel (as it has in northern Italy).
  • “The glaring risk today,” as J. Stephen Morrison of the Center for Strategic and International Studies told me, “is that the elderly and those with fragile health suffer extreme illness but are unable to access life-sustaining care and die in large numbers.”
Javier E

You Cannot Fix the Economy Until You Fix the Pandemic. - 0 views

mailchi.mp/...omy-until-you-fix-the-pandemic

pandemic economy strategy

shared by Javier E on 24 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Here is the crux of the argument as charitably as I can put it: The economic pain which is here already is real. More is coming. If you lift all of the health restrictions, maybe you get some dead people. But maybe not. And if you don't lift them, you know you're getting massive economic dislocations, for sure.
  • Here is the problem with the argument that it's time to restart the economy: It assumes that all we have to do is flip a switch and then we'll be able to go back in time.
  • We can't. Because we live in a new world. The old reality—and by old, I mean the reality as of December 2019—is gone. The idea of going back to it isn't a plan. It's a fantasy
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Here is the plain fact: You cannot reconstruct the economy until COVID-19 is under control. Period. Full-stop.
  • There a number of milestones that need to be passed before we can seriously begin rebuilding the economy: (1) We need to have a clear epidemiological picture of the scope of infection and transmission rates. (2) The healthcare system needs to be in a place where it has the resources to manage the demand load. (3) We need to have the capacity to rapidly test (and immediately process) an hugely elastic number of people.
  • Once those tasks have been met, we can start to slowly rebuild. To attempt to "restart" the economy before they have been met will give us the worst of both worlds: An out-of-control pandemic plus a ravaged, non-functional economy.
  • imagine how the economy would function with large numbers of Americans hospitalized; with many others sick; with people afraid for the lives of their loved ones; with some large percentage of children pulled from school; with workers calling out sick for fear of infecting their workplaces; with international travel severely curtailed; with supply chain disruptions across the globe; with demand—especially international demand—decimated.
  • is 500-some deaths worrisome? I mean, sure, in the sense that every life is precious. But that number isn't what's really scary: What's scary is the curve and were that projects out to 8 days, or 16 days, or 32 days from now
  • To believe that you can have a robust—or even functional—economy with a pandemic raging in the background is a fantasy. And it's a dangerous fantasy, because acting on that belief will cause both more death and more economic pain.
  • As of this morning, we have only 46,481 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the U.S. and 593 deaths
  • the problem is not the number of cases. It's the rate of increase:
  • That puts us as 40,000 new cases per day in eight days' time, with a total addition of somewhere in the neighborhood of 180,000 news cases during that period.
  • Until the new case curve begins to flatten we can't have any sense of what the steady-state looks like.
  • I've been banging on about this for weeks now, but I want to hammer it again: Where we are today doesn't matter. 
  • If this is what your case distribution looks like, then you can safely assume that the virus has achieved break-out and is basically everywhere. The places without positive results are most likely just places where tests haven't been available yet.
  • Until you have control over these curves, any attempt to "restart" the economy will fail because the underlying economic problem—a global pandemic which has the United States in its grip
andrespardo

'We can lose this election': what top Democrats fear could go wrong in 2020 | US news |... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ats-on-factors-losing-election

politics US election trump

shared by andrespardo on 07 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • Donald Trump has a huge campaign war chest and a vast, aggressive digital operation. And the US economy has shown stubborn resilience throughout the president’s three years in office, keeping unemployment levels low and stock markets high.
  • hat’s the overall sentiment of Democrats based on interviews with over a dozen senior party figures – including ex-mayors and former governors – and top strategists during a chaotic month in the Democratic primary leading up to the Iowa caucuses.
  • Bernie Sanders surging in Iowa, to the chagrin of centrist Democratic leaders who hoped a candidate like former vice-president Joe Biden or even the young and charismatic former South Bend, Indiana, mayor Pete Buttigieg might score an early win.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • “I’m still very bullish on 2020. I think Trump’s going to have a very difficult time winning re-election,” said the former Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe.
  • Money money money!
  • “I think someone who’s not worried about the money is crazy. Trump’s sitting on $100m right now and we’re nowhere close to having a nominee and they will be able to raise money but we’re still so fractured,”
  • “I don’t think it’s going to be hard to raise all the money you need but that early advantage is not inconsequential given that this is coming down to a few voters in a few states,” Emanuel said.
  • $20m on more than 218,000 Facebook ads. And Democrats have noticed.
  • Incumbency
  • But Trump is a divisive figure, to put it mildly. Democrats point to their gains in suburban districts across the country and flipping seven governor’s mansions in the 2018 midterm elections. They see that as a herald of Democratic competitiveness in Republican-leaning parts of the country. Democratic strategists hope fatigue from seemingly daily national crises will see reluctant moderates and swing voters vote Trump out of office.
  • Emanuel said the deciding issues will be the key aspects of the economy versus a set of issues Democrats have run and won on in recent years.
  • The most persistent source of Democratic handwringing is a traditional aspect of any presidential cycle: the months-long primary where fellow candidates turn on each other. After months of relatively respectful campaigning, the knives are finally coming out just before the first vote in Iowa next week.
  • Running out of money – and a brokered convention?
  • Democrats worry a long, bloody primary could advantage Trump. It could also drain Democrats’ resources.
  • ppealing to swing voters A persistent fear throughout the Democratic primary has been picking a viable nominee. The 2020 Democratic primary has been full of ideological and policy debates over Medicare for All, immigration, a Green New Deal and whether a veteran or young charismatic leader can beat Trump.
  • “The thing that concerns me the absolute most right now is Bernie being the nominee,” a veteran Democratic strategist with ties to multiple candidates said.
  • The veteran Democratic strategist pointed to questions about where Warren stands on healthcare and Medicare for All. “I think Warren’s a problem. I think any candidate who would lose the healthcare debate to Trump is a problem. I think her stance is a problem. I think a lot of what’s ailing her is correctable. I think it’s not correctable with Bernie and he has no desire to correct it.”
johnsonel7

My Europe: Illegal garbage dumps reflect EU′s east-west divide | Opinion | DW... - 0 views

www.dw.com/...a-52480168

europe waste opinion politics

shared by johnsonel7 on 23 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • Romania and Bulgaria have a major garbage problem. In January this year, the European Commission threatened to take legal action against the former for failing to properly recycle municipal waste since 2014. Revelations about the garbage problem caused a political earthquake in Romania, with environmental minister Emil Dimitrov being arrested and police launching investigations in numerous cities. Everything came to light when Italian police, which had uncovered illegal garbage exports to both countries by mafia-affiliated figures, tipped off Romanian and Bulgarian authorities about the practice
  • In Romania and Bulgaria, less than 10% of national waste is recycled.
  • . Each year, some 100,000 tons of toxic polyvinyl chloride (PVC) waste are incinerated in Romania, for example
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • countless illegal rubbish dumps across the country. The waste, which was imported from abroad, was never recycled as the companies paid to do so failed to live up to their side of the bargain. Over the past ten years, rubbish imports to Bulgaria have risen twentyfold! And some journalists have reported that at times, waste is simply dumped under bridges or along motorways and then set alight.
  • In Romania and Bulgaria, just like in Italy, the waste disposal business is controlled by shady figures. High-ranking politicians are involved, corruption is rife, and environmentalists are vilified as radicals who are supposedly paid by western competitors to slow down the country's economic development.
  • The garbage crisis also has a symbolic dimension in that many eastern Europeans feel like second-class citizens on the continent.
  • Today, eastern Europe's garbage problem hurts the pride of people in Romania and Bulgaria — but also in Poland, Ukraine and Russia. They feel as if the rest of Europe, and even some developing countries, are using their countries as veritable garbage dumps.
  • The globalization of waste disposal illustrates how capital accumulates in wealthy parts of the world, while waste accumulates in the poor regions. Bulgaria's environmental minister Dimitrov has now attempted to slow down this process by closed several border crossing to waste imports. But critics have lamented that this breaches EU regulations, and pointed out that while waste disposal is a lucrative business it is also important for environmental reasons. How can Romania and Bulgaria be prevented from importing waste that harms their peoples' health just to make a quick buck? EU regulations and fines alone will not suffice. For years now, rubbish has been piling up in both countries — but many just seem to just shrug their shoulders and accept the status quo.
anonymous

Trump's problem isn't with athletes being political. It's with athletes speaking out ag... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...es-speaking-out-against-racism

trump athletes NFL opinion culture politics

shared by anonymous on 25 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • Trump’s problem isn’t with athletes being political. It’s with athletes speaking out against racism.
  • Despite President Trump's harsh words about NFL players protesting racism, there's one thing you aren't likely to hear him say: “Stay in your lane.”
  • Trump respects — even invites — athletes to weigh in on political matters, as long as they are pro-Trump policies.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • “This has nothing to do with race or anything else,” Trump said Sunday. “This has to do with respect for our country, and respect for our flag.” He tweeted the same refrain Monday morning.
  • Surveys have shown cultural changes in the United States provoke anxiety and discomfort in many Trump supporters. And one of the things Trump is able to do so effectively is tap into the discomfort of those who value yesteryear.
  • Trump, whose “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan is rooted in nostalgia for many people, is fighting for a piece of American culture that many of his supporters believe is at risk of being taken from them.
Javier E

The Economy Isn't Broken - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-economy-isnt-broken.html

economy productivity inequality populism moderate politics

shared by Javier E on 17 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • In a well-functioning economy, workers are rewarded for their productivity. As output, jobs and hours worked rise, so does income. Over the past two years, that seems to be exactly what’s happening.
  • The evidence from the past two years strongly supports those who have argued all along that income has not decoupled from productivity.
  • The problem of the middle-class squeeze, in short, may not be with how the fruits of productivity are distributed, but the fact that there isn’t much productivity growth at all. It’s not that a rising tide doesn’t lift all boats; it’s that the tide is not rising fast enough.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • during this recovery we’ve endured a historically low labor productivity growth rate of 1.1 percent. By some estimates if productivity increases had kept pace with the mid-20th-century norm, l median incomes would be $40,000 higher than they are today.
  • . If productivity is the problem, we need more dynamism, not less, more openness, not less, more growth-oriented policies, not more dirigiste and redistributive ones.
  • There are a few things government can do to help boost productivity: Increase market competition with more antitrust enforcement and fewer licensing regulations; admit more skilled immigrants; invest more in human capital; deregulate urban land usage back to the 2008 levels; introduce more market incentives into the low productivity sectors, like health care and education; fund more research into promising technologies like new energy storage systems.
  • if productivity is the problem, what we actually need is a resurgence of the moderates. The moderate-left policies of Barack Obama must have had something to do with the middle-income gains of the last two years.
  • Right now moderates are in retreat. The populist extremes are on the march. But the fact is they are basing their economic and political agendas on a story that is fundamentally untrue.
Javier E

Can Our Democracy Survive Tribalism? - 0 views

nymag.com/...mocracy-survive-tribalism.html

democracy moderation openness tribal tribe Trump politics crisis

shared by Javier E on 27 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • we don’t really have to wonder what it’s like to live in a tribal society anymore, do we? Because we already do. Over the past couple of decades in America, the enduring, complicated divides of ideology, geography, party, class, religion, and race have mutated into something deeper, simpler to map, and therefore much more ominous. I don’t just mean the rise of political polarization (although that’s how it often expresses itself), nor the rise of political violence (the domestic terrorism of the late 1960s and ’70s was far worse), nor even this country’s ancient black-white racial conflict (though its potency endures).
  • I mean a new and compounding combination of all these differences into two coherent tribes, eerily balanced in political power, fighting not just to advance their own side but to provoke, condemn, and defeat the other.
  • I mean two tribes whose mutual incomprehension and loathing can drown out their love of country, each of whom scans current events almost entirely to see if they advance not so much their country’s interests but their own. I mean two tribes where one contains most racial minorities and the other is disproportionately white; where one tribe lives on the coasts and in the cities and the other is scattered across a rural and exurban expanse; where one tribe holds on to traditional faith and the other is increasingly contemptuous of religion altogether; where one is viscerally nationalist and the other’s outlook is increasingly global; where each dominates a major political party; and, most dangerously, where both are growing in intensity as they move further apart.
  • ...60 more annotations...
  • The project of American democracy — to live beyond such tribal identities, to construct a society based on the individual, to see ourselves as citizens of a people’s republic, to place religion off-limits, and even in recent years to embrace a multiracial and post-religious society — was always an extremely precarious endeavor. It rested, from the beginning, on an 18th-century hope that deep divides can be bridged by a culture of compromise, and that emotion can be defeated by reason.
  • Tribalism, it’s always worth remembering, is not one aspect of human experience. It’s the default human experience. It comes more naturally to us than any other way of life. For the overwhelming majority of our time on this planet, the tribe was the only form of human society. We lived for tens of thousands of years in compact, largely egalitarian groups of around 50 people or more, connected to each other by genetics and language, usually unwritten.
  • Tribal cohesion was essential to survival, and our first religions emerged for precisely this purpose.
  • Religion therefore fused with communal identity and purpose, it was integral to keeping the enterprise afloat, and the idea of people within a tribe believing in different gods was incomprehensible. Such heretics would be killed.
  • we became a deeply cooperative species — but primarily with our own kind. The notion of living alongside people who do not look like us and treating them as our fellows was meaningless for most of human history.
  • Successful modern democracies do not abolish this feeling; they co-opt it. Healthy tribalism endures in civil society in benign and overlapping ways.
  • in our neighborhood and community; in our ethnic and social identities and their rituals; among our fellow enthusiasts
  • most critically, there is the Über-tribe that constitutes the nation-state, a megatribe that unites a country around shared national rituals, symbols, music, history, mythology, and events, that forms the core unit of belonging that makes a national democracy possible.
  • Tribalism only destabilizes a democracy when it calcifies into something bigger and more intense than our smaller, multiple loyalties; when it rivals our attachment to the nation as a whole; and when it turns rival tribes into enemies. And the most significant fact about American tribalism today is that all three of these characteristics now apply to our political parties, corrupting and even threatening our system of government.
  • If I were to identify one profound flaw in the founding of America, it would be its avoidance of our tribal nature
  • The founders were suspicious of political parties altogether — but parties defined by race and religion and class and geography? I doubt they’d believe a republic could survive that, and they couldn’t and didn’t foresee it. In fact, as they conceived of a new society that would protect the individual rights of all humanity, they explicitly excluded a second tribe among them: African-American slaves
  • But it did happen here, on a fault line that closely resembles today’s tribal boundary.
  • in the first half of the 20th century, with immigration sharply curtailed after 1924, the world wars acted as great unifiers and integrators. Our political parties became less polarized by race, as the FDR Democrats managed to attract more black voters as well as ethnic and southern whites. By 1956, nearly 40 percent of black voters still backed the GOP.
  • The re-racialization of our parties began with Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign in 1964, when the GOP lost almost all of the black vote. It accelerated under Nixon’s “southern strategy” in the wake of the civil-rights revolution. By Reagan’s reelection, the two parties began to cohere again into the Civil War pattern, and had simply swapped places.
  • The greatest threat to a politician today therefore is less a candidate from the opposing party than a more ideologically extreme primary opponent. The incentives for cross-tribal compromise have been eviscerated, and those for tribal extremism reinforced.
  • When it actually came to undoing the reform earlier this year, the GOP had precious little intellectual capital to fall back on, no alternative way to keep millions insured, no history of explaining to voters outside their own tribe what principles they were even trying to apply.
  • Add to this the great intellectual sorting of America, in which, for generations, mass college education sifted countless gifted young people from the heartland and deposited them in increasingly left-liberal universities and thereafter the major cities, from which they never returned, and then the shifting of our economy to favor the college-educated, which only deepened the urban-rural divide.
  • The myths that helped us unite as a nation began to fray. We once had a widely accepted narrative of our origins, shared icons that defined us, and a common pseudo-ethnicity — “whiteness” — into which new immigrants were encouraged to assimilate.
  • we should be clear-eyed about the consequence. We can no longer think of the Puritans without acknowledging the genocide that followed them; we cannot celebrate our Founding Fathers without seeing that slavery undergirded the society they constructed; we must tear down our Confederate statues and relitigate our oldest rifts. Even the national anthem now divides those who stand from those who kneel. We dismantled many of our myths, but have not yet formed new ones to replace them.
  • The result of all this is that a lopsided 69 percent of white Christians now vote Republican, while the Democrats get only 31. In the last decade, the gap in Christian identification between Democrats and Republicans has increased by 50 percent. In 2004, 44 percent of Latinos voted Republican for president; in 2016, 29 percent did. Forty-three percent of Asian-Americans voted Republican in 2004; in 2016, 29 percent did. Since 2004, the most populous urban counties have also swung decisively toward the Democrats, in both blue and red states, while rural counties have shifted sharply to the GOP
  • When three core components of a tribal identity — race, religion, and geography — define your political parties, you’re in serious trouble.
  • Some countries where tribal cleavages spawned by ethnic and linguistic differences have long existed understand this and have constructed systems of government designed to ameliorate the consequences
  • There is no neutral presidency here, and so when a rank tribalist wins the office and governs almost entirely in the interests of the hardest core of his base, half the country understandably feels as if it were under siege. Our two-party, winner-take-all system only works when both parties are trying to appeal to the same constituencies on a variety of issues.
  • Our undemocratic electoral structure exacerbates things. Donald Trump won 46 percent of the vote, attracting 3 million fewer voters than his opponent, but secured 56 percent of the Electoral College. Republicans won 44 percent of the vote in the Senate seats up for reelection last year, but 65 percent of the seats. To have one tribe dominate another is one thing; to have the tribe that gained fewer votes govern the rest — and be the head of state — is testing political stability.
  • Slowly our political culture becomes one in which the two parties see themselves not as participating in a process of moving the country forward, sometimes by tilting to the right and sometimes to the left, as circumstances permit, alternating in power, compromising when in opposition, moderating when in government — but one where the goal is always the obliteration of the other party by securing a permanent majority, in an unending process of construction and demolition.
  • And so by 2017, 41 percent of Republicans and 38 percent of Democrats said they disagreed not just with their opponents’ political views but with their values and goals beyond politics as well.
  • 61 percent of Trump supporters say there’s nothing he could do to make them change their minds about him; 57 percent of his opponents say the same thing. Nothing he could do.
  • When criticized by a member of a rival tribe, a tribalist will not reflect on his own actions or assumptions but instantly point to the same flaw in his enemy.
  • By the 2000 election, we were introduced to the red-blue map, though by then we could already recognize the two tribes it identified as they fought to a national draw. Choosing a president under those circumstances caused a constitutional crisis, one the Supreme Court resolved at the expense of losing much of its nonpartisan, nontribal authority.
  • In America, the intellectual elites, far from being a key rational bloc resisting this, have succumbed. The intellectual right and the academic left have long since dispensed with the idea of a mutual exchange of ideas.
  • Conservatism thrived in America when it was dedicated to criticizing liberalism’s failures, engaging with it empirically, and offering practical alternatives to the same problems. It has since withered into an intellectual movement that does little but talk to itself and guard its ideological boundaries.
  • among tribal conservatives, the Iraq War remained a taboo topic when it wasn’t still regarded as a smashing success, tax cuts were still the solution to every economic woe, free trade was all benefit and no cost, and so on. Health care was perhaps the most obvious example of this intellectual closure. Republican opposition to the Affordable Care Act was immediate and total. Even though the essential contours of the policy had been honed at the Heritage Foundation, even though a Republican governor had pioneered it in Massachusetts, and even though that governor became the Republican nominee in 2012, the anathematization of it defined the GOP for seven years.
  • the now near-ubiquitous trend of “whataboutism,” as any glance at a comments section or a cable slugfest will reveal. The Soviets perfected this in the Cold War, deflecting from their horrific Gulags by pointing, for example, to racial strife in the U.S. It tells you a lot about our time that a tactic once honed in a global power struggle between two nations now occurs within one.
  • George Orwell famously defined this mind-set as identifying yourself with a movement, “placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interests.” It’s typified, he noted, by self-contradiction and indifference to reality
  • As for indifference to reality, today’s Republicans cannot accept that human-produced carbon is destroying the planet, and today’s Democrats must believe that different outcomes for men and women in society are entirely a function of sexism. Even now, Democrats cannot say the words illegal immigrants or concede that affirmative action means discriminating against people because of their race. Republicans cannot own the fact that big tax cuts have not trickled down, or that President Bush authorized the brutal torture of prisoners, thereby unequivocally committing war crimes.
  • Orwell again: “There is no crime, absolutely none, that cannot be condoned when ‘our’ side commits it. Even if one does not deny that the crime has happened, even if one knows that it is exactly the same crime as one has condemned in some other case … still one cannot feel that it is wrong.” That is as good a summary of tribalism as you can get, that it substitutes a feeling — a really satisfying one — for an argument.
  • When a party leader in a liberal democracy proposes a shift in direction, there is usually an internal debate. It can go on for years. When a tribal leader does so, the tribe immediately jumps on command. And so the Republicans went from free trade to protectionism, and from internationalism to nationalism, almost overnight
  • And then there is the stance of white Evangelicals, a pillar of the red tribe. Among their persistent concerns has long been the decline of traditional marriage, the coarsening of public discourse, and the centrality of personal virtue to the conduct of public office.
  • In the 1990s, they assailed Bill Clinton as the font of decadence; then they lionized George W. Bush, who promised to return what they often called “dignity” to the Oval Office. And yet when a black Democrat with exemplary personal morality, impeccable public civility, a man devoted to his wife and children and a model for African-American fathers, entered the White House, they treated him as a threat to civilization
  • And when they encountered a foulmouthed pagan who bragged of grabbing women by the pussy, used the tabloids to humiliate his wife, married three times, boasted about the hotness of his own daughter, touted the size of his own dick in a presidential debate, and spoke of avoiding STDs as his personal Vietnam, they gave him more monolithic support than any candidate since Reagan, including born-again Bush and squeaky-clean Romney.
  • In 2011, a poll found that only 30 percent of white Evangelicals believed that private immorality was irrelevant for public life. This month, the same poll found that the number had skyrocketed to 72 percent.
  • Total immersion within one’s tribe also leads to increasingly extreme ideas. The word “hate,” for example, has now become a one-stop replacement for a whole spectrum of varying, milder emotions involved with bias toward others:
  • Or take the current promiscuous use of the term “white supremacist.” We used to know what that meant. It meant advocates and practitioners of slavery, believers in the right of white people to rule over all others, subscribers to a theory of a master race, Jim Crow supporters, George Wallace voters.
  • But it is now routinely used on the left to mean, simply, racism in a multicultural America, in which European-Americans are a fast-evaporating ethnic majority.
  • Liberals should be able to understand this by reading any conservative online journalism and encountering the term “the left.” It represents a large, amorphous blob of malevolent human beings, with no variation among them, no reasonable ideas, nothing identifiably human at all
  • It’s not easy to be optimistic with Trump as president. And given his malignant narcissism, despotic instincts, absence of empathy, and constant incitement of racial and xenophobic hatred, it’s extremely hard not to be tribal in return. There is no divide he doesn’t want to deepen, no conflict he doesn’t want to start or intensify. How on earth can we not “resist”?
  • In 2015, did any of us anticipate that neo-Nazis would be openly parading with torches on a college campus or that antifa activists would be proudly extolling violence as the only serious response to the Trump era?
  • In fact, the person best positioned to get us out of this tribal trap would be … well … bear with me … Trump. The model would be Bill Clinton, the first president to meet our newly configured divide. Clinton leveraged the loyalty of Democrats thrilled to regain the White House in order to triangulate toward centrist compromises with the GOP. You can argue about the merits of the results, but he was able to govern, to move legislation forward, to reform welfare, reduce crime, turn the deficit into a surplus, survive impeachment, and end his term a popular president.
  • The Democrats are now, surprisingly, confronting a choice many thought they would only face in a best-case-scenario midterm election, and their political calculus is suddenly much more complicated than pure resistance. Might the best interest of the country be served by working with Trump? And if they do win the House in 2018, should they seek to destroy Trump’s presidency, much like GOP leaders in Congress chose to do with Obama? Should they try to end it through impeachment, as the GOP attempted with Bill Clinton? Or could they try to moderate the tribal divide?
  • if the Democrats try to impeach a president who has no interest in the stability or integrity of our liberal democracy, and if his base sees it, as they will, as an Establishment attempt at nullifying their vote, are we really prepared to handle the civil unrest and constitutional crisis that would almost certainly follow?
  • Tribalism is not a static force. It feeds on itself. It appeals on a gut level and evokes emotions that are not easily controlled and usually spiral toward real conflict. And there is no sign that the deeper forces that have accelerated this — globalization, social atomization, secularization, media polarization, ever more multiculturalism — will weaken
  • But we should not delude ourselves that this is all a Trump problem.
  • As utopian as it sounds, I truly believe all of us have to at least try to change the culture from the ground up. There are two ideas that might be of help, it seems to me. The first is individuality.
  • I mean valuing the unique human being — distinct from any group identity, quirky, full of character and contradictions, skeptical, rebellious, immune to being labeled or bludgeoned into a broader tribal grouping. This cultural antidote to tribalism, left and right, is still here in America and ready to be rediscovered
  • I may be an extreme case, but we all are nonconformist to some degree. Nurturing your difference or dissent from your own group is difficult; appreciating the individuality of those in other tribes is even harder. It takes effort and imagination, openness to dissent, even an occasional embrace of blasphemy.
  • we also need mutual forgiveness. It doesn’t matter if you believe, as I do, that the right bears the bulk of the historical blame. No tribal conflict has ever been unwound without magnanimity. Yitzhak Rabin had it, but it was not enough. Nelson Mandela had it, and it was
  • But this requires, of course, first recognizing our own tribal thinking. So much of our debates are now an easy either/or rather than a complicated both/and. In our tribal certainties, we often distort what we actually believe in the quiet of our hearts, and fail to see what aspects of truth the other tribe may grasp.
  • Not all resistance to mass immigration or multiculturalism is mere racism or bigotry; and not every complaint about racism and sexism is baseless. Many older white Americans are not so much full of hate as full of fear.
  • The actual solutions to our problems are to be found in the current no-man’s-land that lies between the two tribes. Reentering it with empiricism and moderation to find different compromises for different issues is the only way out of our increasingly dangerous impasse.
  • All of this runs deeply against the grain. It’s counterintuitive. It’s emotionally unpleasant. It fights against our very DNA. Compared with bathing in the affirming balm of a tribe, it’s deeply unsatisfying. But no one ever claimed that living in a republic was going to be easy — if we really want to keep it.
Javier E

Bob Corker on Trump's biggest problem: The 'castration' of Rex Tillerson - The Washingt... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...7-be94-fabb0f1e9ffb_story.html

trump foreign policy korea diplomacy

shared by Javier E on 14 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • “You cannot publicly castrate your own secretary of state without giving yourself that binary choice,” Corker told me in a phone interview Friday. “The tweets — yes, you raise tension in the region [and] it’s very irresponsible. But it’s the first part” — the “castration” of Tillerson — “that I am most exercised about.”
  • as Corker sees it, Tillerson has been instrumental in opening a path away from confrontation with North Korea through quiet diplomacy with China.
  • “The greatest diplomatic activities we have are with China, and the most important, and they have come a long, long way,” Corker said. “Some of the things we are talking about are phenomenal.”
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  • The problem, he suggested, is Trump’s tweets and other statements implying that there is no deal to be made with North Korea and that Tillerson “is wasting his time,” as one tweet put it. Such comments are causing the Chinese to back away from what has been an incipient willingness to bring serious pressure to bear on Pyongyang.
  • “When you jack the legs out from under your chief diplomat, you cause all that to fall apart,” Corker said. “Us working with [Beijing] effectively is the key to not getting to a binary choice. When you publicly castrate your secretary of state, you take that off the table.”
  • In context, Corker’s assertion that “we could be heading towards World War III” was a more pungent way of conveying Trump’s undermining of diplomacy. Trump “isn’t necessarily a warmonger,” he told the New York Times. The point was that the combination of exaggerated statements and the undercutting of Tillerson could corner the White House.
knudsenlu

A civil rights 'emergency': justice, clean air and water in the age of Trump | US news ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...al-justice-in-the-age-of-trump

civil rights justice trump news Crisis

shared by knudsenlu on 21 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • The Trump administration’s dismantling of environmental regulations has intensified a growing civil rights battle over the deadly burden of pollution on minorities and low-income people.
  • Black, Latino and disadvantaged people have long been disproportionately afflicted by toxins from industrial plants, cars, hazardous housing conditions and other sources.
  • Senator Cory Booker, a Democrat from New Jersey, recently said: “Civil rights have to include, fundamentally, the right to breathe your air, plant tomatoes in your soil. Civil rights is the right to drink your wate
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  • “I left the EPA because of the proposals to roll back legislation that will have direct impacts on local communities,” he said. “Ten months in, they have yet to move forward any action to help communities be healthier. People in Puerto Rico are drinking toxic water. Unfortunately, so far, I’ve been proved right in my decision to leave. I wanted them to prove me wrong.”
  • The Trump administration has targeted dozens of regulations it says have stymied economic growth. It has moved to axe an Obama-era plan to reduce emissions from coal-fired power plants, delayed new standards to cut toxic fumes from vehicles and dropped a proposed ban on a pesticide linked to developmental delays in children.
  • But Ali said there was little evidence the agency is focused on vulnerable communities, claiming it is a “particular slap in the face” that the EPA wants to cut funding for anti-lead programs given that the largely black city of Flint, Michigan, continues to suffer from lead-tainted water, three years after the scandal was exposed.
  • “I became an environmentalist, I have to be candid with you, not because of the effects of global warming some time in the future,” said Booker, a former mayor of Newark, New Jersey, at a time when the city was experiencing its own problems with lead contamination of drinking water. “I became an environmentalist because I saw horrific examples of environmental injustice and how it was hurting my community in every single way.”
  • One in three Latinos live in areas that violate federal standards for ozone, a pollutant that causes smog and is linked to an array of health problems. The thousands of abandoned mines that dot the western US have left a legacy of soil and water contamination that blights native American tribes, such as the Navajo nation.
  • Nearly seven in 10 African Americans live within 30 miles of a coal-fired power plant, compared with 56% of whites. Once the coal is burned, its ash, which can damage the nervous system and cause cancers if ingested or inhaled, is dumped in about 1,400 sites around the US – 70% of which are situated in low-income communities.
Javier E

How to protect against fake 'facts' - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...7-81bc-c55a220c8cbe_story.html

fake news fact-checking fact information informed citizenry

shared by Javier E on 24 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • Amid the slithering mess of problems that emerged in 2017, the one that bothers me most is that people don’t seem to know what’s true anymore. “Facts” this year got put in quotation marks.
  • If we aren’t sure what’s true, how can we act to make things better? If we don’t know where we are on the map, how do we know which way to move? Democracy assumes a well-informed citizenry that argues about solutions — not about facts.
  • We can all choose our favorite examples of America’s increasing difficulty in agreeing about evidence: the disdain for science among climate-change skeptics; the refusal to believe allegations about people we like, and the overeagerness to denounce those we don’t like; the way in which political polarization has spread into every area of our common life
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  • What should thoughtful people do about this overarching problem? Part of the answer lies with my profession, the news business. We need to work harder to make sure that we’re unbiased truth-tellers, not a series of echo chambers
  • Journalists also need new tools. We can’t always vet every fact.
  • So here’s an offbeat proposal: Just as the provenance of a work of art is established by art historians and auction houses, we need technological tools that will help confirm the provenance of facts.
  • The Internet giants such as Google and Facebook should be tuning their systems to establish the provenance of fact. I’d like to see them using machine learning to interrogate supposed facts to establish where they’ve been — how they first surfaced, and how they were passed from user to user.
  • If there are gaps in provenance — an unexplained missing link in the chain of evidence, or signs of misattribution — then those anomalies should be flagged automatically.
  • In this fact-provenance scheme, I hope we’d be able to trace information back to the source and detect evidence of manipulation. News organizations whose track record is shown to be reliable would get weighted positively by the digital system
  • People could still base their decisions on dubious, unverified “facts,” just as a collector can still buy a painting whose provenance is suspect. But there would at least be fair warning.
  • We speak often of the “marketplace of ideas,” in the expectation that markets operate rationally and efficiently
  • In this framing, consumers assume that most markets aren’t rigged, and that tainted or unsafe products have been screened. That’s obviously a complicated problem when the commodity is information
  • the First Amendment lets us promote ideas without rating their safety. But the First Amendment doesn’t protect fraud or libel.
  • We live in an information ecosystem. If it becomes polluted, all the creatures that depend on that ecosystem are at risk. We say that sunlight is the best disinfectant. But that’s true only when the sun shines brightly.
tsainten

Our Criminal Legal System: Plagued by Problems and Ripe for Reform - 0 views

www.americanbar.org/...our-criminal-legal-system

US

shared by tsainten on 23 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • it is the criminal justice system.”
  • Despite its pervasiveness, we actually know surprisingly little about how plea bargaining works in practice. We do not know what percentage of criminal cases have plea offers at the arraignment, the first formal appearance in court. We do not know what percentage of criminal cases plead out early in the case or on the eve of trial. We do not know how frequently prosecutors threaten to add charges or enhancements if the defendant does not take the plea deal – although we know this does happen. We do not even know what percentage of cases plead out to the same charges that were originally filed, compared to lesser charges. We don’t know how often, or how, judges get involved in the plea bargaining process.
  • The lack of transparency also affects the implementation of any reform efforts. Without data showing what is actually happening in plea bargaining – how offers are given and countered; the timing and communication of offers; who gets offers and for what; and so forth, providing judicial o
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  • 3,000 problem-solving courts have been established nationwide, including drug courts (which make up 44% of all problem-solving courts) and mental health courts (which account for 11% of the total).
rerobinson03

Opinion | Why America Can't Fix Its Gun Violence Crisis - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...us-gun-violence.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 24 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • We know what causes America’s gun violence problem. Why can’t we seem to do anything about it? Here are some of the most popular and persuasive explanations.
  • It was a statement that exemplified a common strain of thought among gun control proponents, one that casts the N.R.A. as the sine qua non of our national deadlock on the issue. As my colleague Nicholas Kristof has explained, the N.R.A. used to be a more moderate organization: It favored tighter gun laws in the 1920s and 1930s, and as recently as the 1960s supported — albeit more grudgingly — some limits on guns.
  • he different stories Americans tell themselves about the roots of gun violence preclude shared understanding: As long as they disagree about the cause of the problem, they will disagree about how to fix it. “Given the significant proportion of citizens who own guns,” the authors conclude, “the prospect for policy changes that address gun‐related causes of mass shootings is unlikely.”
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  • Already a counter-majoritarian institution, the Senate was made even more so by the rise of the modern filibuster in the 20th century, which allows a minority to block majority-supported legislation. That means most substantive legislation must get 60 votes in the Senate to pass — often an exceedingly difficult threshold to reach.
  • In the minds of many gun control proponents, American life has become — or perhaps always was — a zero-sum game in which one party’s freedom to exist in peace has lost out to another’s prerogative to kill. In this view, mass death is simply the cost gun owners are willing to inflict on the country for the right to bear arms.
  • “The N.R.A. is powerful for precisely the reason most potent progressive organizations are powerful,” David French has written in National Review. “Like those progressive counterparts, the N.R.A. is an effective part of a larger community, and it is effective precisely because it persuasively expresses the will of its members and allies.” In his view, the N.R.A. does not manipulate people into supporting gun rights; rather, it reflects and channels the desires of people who already do
  • Gun control proponents often argue that the Second Amendment was meant to protect the right of state militias, not individuals, to bear arms. This interpretation is disputed by gun rights proponents, but not exclusively: The historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, who favors the Second Amendment’s repeal, has argued that it was expressly designed to enshrine not only the right but also the obligation of individual colonial settlers to violently appropriate Native land and to control Black populations, both free and enslaved.
  • This interpretive turn has led to calls for the Second Amendment’s repeal, including from the retired justice John Paul Stevens. Justice Stevens was one of the four dissenters in the Heller case, whose ruling he believed could be overturned only with a new constitutional amendment that voided the second. Doing so, he wrote in The Times in 2018, “would be simple and would do more to weaken the N.R.A.’s ability to stymie legislative debate and block constructive gun control legislation than any other available option.”
  • But none of them — not universal background checks, not red flag laws, not even a ban on assault-style weapons — would confront the core issue: America simply has too many guns.That is the view of Mr. Lopez, who contends that stamping out gun violence would require a Green New Deal-size plan that offers solutions at the scale of the problem. “If the key difference between America and other countries is how many more guns the U.S. has, then something has to be done to quickly reduce the number of firearms here,” he writes. “It could mean banning more types of guns — perhaps all semiautomatic weapons or all handguns — and coupling that with an Australian-style mandatory buyback program, which the research supports.”
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