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Javier E

Doorbell cameras on Amazon, Walmart and Temu aren't safe - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...it-privacy-amazon-walmart-temu

home security digital

shared by Javier E on 02 Mar 24 - No Cached
  • Video doorbells are supposed to help keep your home safe from strangers. Thanks to poor software security, however, they could be letting strangers in.
  • Researchers at Consumer Reports found vulnerabilities in popular video doorbells on major online retail sites including Amazon, Walmart and Temu, according to a report released Thursday. Hackers could use a companion app to take over the devices and view camera footage, the report found.
  • The doorbells were sold under a variety of brand names, mainly Eken and Tuck, on Amazon, Walmart, Sears, Shein and Temu. All the doorbells paired with the app Aiwit and were manufactured by the Chinese company Eken Group Ltd., Consumer Reports said. Some doorbells were also missing a registration code required by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
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  • This finding is the latest example of how tough it is to vet products we buy online. Buggy software in off-brand smart devices is a recurring problem
  • digital marketplaces such as Amazon have done little to rein in offending manufacturers. Combine that with sponsored search results and opaque labeling — Amazon repeatedly called the Eken doorbells an “Amazon’s Choice: Overall Pick” — and shoppers have little recourse to figure out which devices are safe.
  • Smaller brands churn out smart lightbulbs and speakers to compete with bigger companies, often cutting corners on security. Big brands, meanwhile, do a better job with security but create new privacy concerns — do we really want Amazon peeking into every corner of our homes? Efforts to label consumer tech with simple security facts have languished.
  • Meanwhile, large online marketplaces put unvetted gadgets in front of millions of shoppers. In January alone, Amazon sold 4,200 Eken doorbells under 11 product listings, according to Consumer Reports. Whether you’re shopping for smart home tech or a simple tank top, having to navigate a sea of unfamiliar brands and dubious product reviews is now common
Javier E

Opinion | The 100-Year Extinction Panic Is Back, Right on Schedule - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-doom-extinction-humanity.html

culture apocalypse 1920s panic extinction history reactionary

shared by Javier E on 26 Jan 24 - No Cached
  • The literary scholar Paul Saint-Amour has described the expectation of apocalypse — the sense that all history’s catastrophes and geopolitical traumas are leading us to “the prospect of an even more devastating futurity” — as the quintessential modern attitude. It’s visible everywhere in what has come to be known as the polycrisis.
  • Climate anxiety, of the sort expressed by that student, is driving new fields in psychology, experimental therapies and debates about what a recent New Yorker article called “the morality of having kids in a burning, drowning world.”
  • The conviction that the human species could be on its way out, extinguished by our own selfishness and violence, may well be the last bipartisan impulse.
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  • a major extinction panic happened 100 years ago, and the similarities are unnerving.
  • The 1920s were also a period when the public — traumatized by a recent pandemic, a devastating world war and startling technological developments — was gripped by the conviction that humanity might soon shuffle off this mortal coil.
  • It also helps us see how apocalyptic fears feed off the idea that people are inherently violent, self-interested and hierarchical and that survival is a zero-sum war over resources.
  • Either way, it’s a cynical view that encourages us to take our demise as a foregone conclusion.
  • What makes an extinction panic a panic is the conviction that humanity is flawed and beyond redemption, destined to die at its own hand, the tragic hero of a terrestrial pageant for whom only one final act is possible
  • What the history of prior extinction panics has to teach us is that this pessimism is both politically questionable and questionably productive. Our survival will depend on our ability to recognize and reject the nihilistic appraisals of humanity that inflect our fears for the future, both left and right.
  • As a scholar who researches the history of Western fears about human extinction, I’m often asked how I avoid sinking into despair. My answer is always that learning about the history of extinction panics is actually liberating, even a cause for optimism
  • Nearly every generation has thought its generation was to be the last, and yet the human species has persisted
  • As a character in Jeanette Winterson’s novel “The Stone Gods” says, “History is not a suicide note — it is a record of our survival.”
  • Contrary to the folk wisdom that insists the years immediately after World War I were a period of good times and exuberance, dark clouds often hung over the 1920s. The dread of impending disaster — from another world war, the supposed corruption of racial purity and the prospect of automated labor — saturated the period
  • The previous year saw the publication of the first of several installments of what many would come to consider his finest literary achievement, “The World Crisis,” a grim retrospective of World War I that laid out, as Churchill put it, the “milestones to Armageddon.
  • Bluntly titled “Shall We All Commit Suicide?,” the essay offered a dismal appraisal of humanity’s prospects. “Certain somber facts emerge solid, inexorable, like the shapes of mountains from drifting mist,” Churchill wrote. “Mankind has never been in this position before. Without having improved appreciably in virtue or enjoying wiser guidance, it has got into its hands for the first time the tools by which it can unfailingly accomplish its own extermination.”
  • The essay — with its declaration that “the story of the human race is war” and its dismay at “the march of science unfolding ever more appalling possibilities” — is filled with right-wing pathos and holds out little hope that mankind might possess the wisdom to outrun the reaper. This fatalistic assessment was shared by many, including those well to Churchill’s left.
  • “Are not we and they and all the race still just as much adrift in the current of circumstances as we were before 1914?” he wondered. Wells predicted that our inability to learn from the mistakes of the Great War would “carry our race on surely and inexorably to fresh wars, to shortages, hunger, miseries and social debacles, at last either to complete extinction or to a degradation beyond our present understanding.” Humanity, the don of sci-fi correctly surmised, was rushing headlong into a “scientific war” that would “make the biggest bombs of 1918 seem like little crackers.”
  • The pathbreaking biologist J.B.S. Haldane, another socialist, concurred with Wells’s view of warfare’s ultimate destination. In 1925, two decades before the Trinity test birthed an atomic sun over the New Mexico desert, Haldane, who experienced bombing firsthand during World War I, mused, “If we could utilize the forces which we now know to exist inside the atom, we should have such capacities for destruction that I do not know of any agency other than divine intervention which would save humanity from complete and peremptory annihilation.”
  • F.C.S. Schiller, a British philosopher and eugenicist, summarized the general intellectual atmosphere of the 1920s aptly: “Our best prophets are growing very anxious about our future. They are afraid we are getting to know too much and are likely to use our knowledge to commit suicide.”
  • Many of the same fears that keep A.I. engineers up at night — calibrating thinking machines to human values, concern that our growing reliance on technology might sap human ingenuity and even trepidation about a robot takeover — made their debut in the early 20th century.
  • The popular detective novelist R. Austin Freeman’s 1921 political treatise, “Social Decay and Regeneration,” warned that our reliance on new technologies was driving our species toward degradation and even annihilation
  • Extinction panics are, in both the literal and the vernacular senses, reactionary, animated by the elite’s anxiety about maintaining its privilege in the midst of societal change
  • There is a perverse comfort to dystopian thinking. The conviction that catastrophe is baked in relieves us of the moral obligation to act. But as the extinction panic of the 1920s shows us, action is possible, and these panics can recede
  • To whatever extent, then, that the diagnosis proved prophetic, it’s worth asking if it might have been at least partly self-fulfilling.
  • today’s problems are fundamentally new. So, too, must be our solutions
  • It is a tired observation that those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it. We live in a peculiar moment in which this wisdom is precisely inverted. Making it to the next century may well depend on learning from and repeating the tightrope walk — between technological progress and self-annihilation — that we have been doing for the past 100 years
  • We have gotten into the dangerous habit of outsourcing big issues — space exploration, clean energy, A.I. and the like — to private businesses and billionaires
  • That ideologically varied constellation of prominent figures shared a basic diagnosis of humanity and its prospects: that our species is fundamentally vicious and selfish and our destiny therefore bends inexorably toward self-destruction.
  • Less than a year after Churchill’s warning about the future of modern combat — “As for poison gas and chemical warfare,” he wrote, “only the first chapter has been written of a terrible book” — the 1925 Geneva Protocol was signed, an international agreement banning the use of chemical or biological weapons in combat. Despite the many horrors of World War II, chemical weapons were not deployed on European battlefields.
  • As for machine-age angst, there’s a lesson to learn there, too: Our panics are often puffed up, our predictions simply wrong
  • In 1928, H.G. Wells published a book titled “The Way the World Is Going,” with the modest subtitle “Guesses and Forecasts of the Years Ahead.” In the opening pages, he offered a summary of his age that could just as easily have been written about our turbulent 2020s. “Human life,” he wrote, “is different from what it has ever been before, and it is rapidly becoming more different.” He continued, “Perhaps never in the whole history of life before the present time, has there been a living species subjected to so fiercely urgent, many-sided and comprehensive a process of change as ours today. None at least that has survived. Transformation or extinction have been nature’s invariable alternatives. Ours is a species in an intense phase of transition.”
Javier E

Opinion | Bidencare Is a Really Big Deal - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-biden-obamacare.html

obamacare biden politics policy

shared by Javier E on 26 Jan 24 - No Cached
  • President Biden has made Obamacare an even bigger deal, in a way that is improving life for millions of Americans.
  • The Biden administration just announced that 21 million people have enrolled for coverage through the A.C.A.’s health insurance marketplaces, up from around 12 million on the eve of the pandemic. America still doesn’t have the universal coverage that is standard in other wealthy nations, but some states, including Massachusetts and New York, have gotten close.
  • And this gain, unlike some of the other good things happening, is all on Biden, who both restored aid to people seeking health coverage and enhanced a key aspect of the system.
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  • Biden, as part of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, largely resolved these problems, reducing maximum premium payments (net of subsidies) and eliminating the cliff at 400 percent. The result is to make health insurance coverage substantially more affordable, especially for middle-income Americans who previously earned too much to be eligible for subsidies. Hence the surge in marketplace enrollments.
Javier E

Opinion | What George Orwell Can Teach Us About Power and Language Today - The New York... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ell-language-antisemitism.html

orwell language corruption debasement culture history

shared by Javier E on 28 Jan 24 - No Cached
  • “The word Fascism,” he writes, “has now no meaning except insofar as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’”
  • He adds other exhausted words, including democracy, freedom and patriotic — convenient terms for establishing righteousness, easily melting into self-righteousness.
  • The writer is George Orwell, in his celebrated 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language.” Orwell contended that language had become corrupt and debased in his time, but the survival of his examples into the present contradicts him, suggesting that not only the problem but the very examples may be timeless.
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  • I showed that passage to an intelligent, well-educated person much younger than I am. He understood Orwell’s intention, but he confessed that he found the parody, with its colorless polysyllables, easier to understand — he might have said “more accessible” — than the plain words of the original. It felt better to him than the original.
  • Dilution of meaning is familiar in a way that can make us feel comfortable, or even worse, comfortably righteous
  • The reliably available terms of disapproval and approval, genocide and patriotism, antisemitism and democracy, convey large scale and importance, but sometimes while avoiding the heavy cost of paying actual attention.
  • The more important the word, the more its meaning may be a matter of degree, from not much to quite a lot. The attainment of meaning requires work. The more important the meaning, the harder the work.
Javier E

Opinion | I was a Republican Partisan. It Altered the Way I Saw the World. - The New Yo... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...lican-partisan-world-view.html

partisan epistemic bubble polarization credulity culture history politics

shared by Javier E on 18 May 24 - No Cached
  • I remember when supporters of Operation Iraqi Freedom constantly hyped good news from the battlefield and minimized bad news — right until the bad news became so overwhelming
  • Before Bush changed tactics and reinforced American troops during the surge in 2007 and 2008, it sometimes felt disloyal in Republican circles to criticize the course of the war.
  • Could we have changed our military tactics sooner if we had been able to see the battlefield more clearly? Did paradigm blindness — the unwillingness or inability to accept challenges to our core ways of making sense of the world — inhibit our ability to see obvious truths?
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  • the red-blue divide is perhaps less illuminating than the gap between engaged and disengaged Americans, in which an exhausted majority encounters the highly polarized activist wings of both parties and shrinks back from the fray
  • The wings aren’t changing each other’s minds — hard-core Democrats aren’t going to persuade hard-core Republicans — but they’re also not reaching sufficient numbers of persuadable voters to break America’s partisan deadlock.
  • In 2020, when I was doing research for my book about the growing danger of partisan division, I began to learn more about what extreme partisanship does not only to our hearts but also to our minds.
  • It can deeply and profoundly distort the way we view the world. We become so emotionally and spiritually invested in the outcome of a political contest that we can inadvertently become disconnected from reality.
  • Our heart connects with our mind in such a way that the heart demands that the mind conform to its deepest desires
  • When a partisan encounters negative information, it can often trigger the emotional equivalent of a fight-or-flight response. This applies not just to negative arguments but also to negative facts. To deal with the emotional response, we seek different arguments and alternative facts.
  • If you are a true partisan, you essentially become an unpaid lawyer for your side. Every “good” fact that bolsters your argument is magnified. Every “bad” fact is minimized or rationalized.
  • When partisanship reaches its worst point, every positive claim about your side is automatically believed, and every negative allegation is automatically disbelieved.
  • allegations of wrongdoing directed at your side are treated as acts of aggression — proof that “they” are trying to destroy “us.”
  • You see this reality most plainly in the daily Republican theatrics surrounding Trump’s criminal indictments. Rather than wrestle seriously with the profoundly troubling claims against him, they treat the criminal cases as proof of Democratic perfidy. They believe every claim against Hunter and Joe Biden and not a single claim against Trump.
  • ask why people are checking out, and one reason is that partisans make it so very difficult to engage.
  • The problem is most pronounced (and often overtly threatening) on the MAGA right, but it’s endemic to our partisan wings
  • as partisanship deepens, partisan subcultures can get increasingly weird. They become so convinced of the us-versus-them dynamic that they’ll eventually believe virtually anything, as long as it’s a claim against the other side.
  • If decades of partisanship have persuaded you that your opponents are evil, have no morals and want to destroy the country, then why wouldn’t they hack voting machines or recruit a pop star as a government asset?
  • I have some rules to help temper my worst partisan impulses.
  • Expose yourself to the best of the other side’s point of view — including the best essays, podcasts and books.
  • when you encounter a new idea, learn about it from its proponents before you read its opponents.
  • when you encounter bad news about a cause that you hold dear — whether it’s a presidential campaign, an international conflict or even a claim against a person you admire, take a close and careful look at the evidence
Javier E

Opinion | What Has Happened to My Party Haunts Me - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...mp-vance-republican-party.html

GOP trump politics history culture threat menace

shared by Javier E on 29 Jul 24 - No Cached
  • Jonathan Rauch, a scholar at the Brookings Institution and my sometime co-author, told me that to begin to understand what has happened, you have to understand the difference between a personal political machine and a traditional political machine.
  • Personal machines are different from party machines, Mr. Rauch added, because they’re inconsistent with democratic politics
  • Even a corrupt party machine maintains institutional interests separate from those of its leader. It rewards and punishes behavior based on the electoral interests of the party, prioritizing winning elections over personal loyalty to the boss. A party machine thus rewards followers by getting them elected and then sustaining them in office
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  • y contrast, a personal machine is willing to lose elections rather than share power with other leaders or factions. It puts the leader ahead of the party, and it would rather the party lose elections than the leader lose control.
  • The left is contemptuous of Mr. Trump, and since the Republican Party has implicitly become a party that stands for what the left despises, it has been very difficult to separate Republican voters from Mr. Trump in the name of any more positive vision or ideal. Mr. Levin put it this way: “The left isn’t going to hate anyone more than they hate Mr. Trump, so Republicans aren’t going to love anyone more than they love Mr. Trump.”
  • Yuval Levin of the American Enterprise Institute told me that as a practical matter, the Republican Party at this point should be understood as the anti-left party. “It understands itself defensively, as speaking for a coalition that is being abused, excluded, mistreated and pushed around by a left-leaning elite in American life,” he said. “Its sense of purpose is therefore fundamentally defensive. That means it is largely defined in opposition to its understanding of the left, more than it is defined by a specific policy vision of its own.”
  • “That opposition,” he added, “obviously gives shape to some assertive or constructive action, too, but the vision of America underlying that action is largely a function of Republicans think Democrats are trying to destroy.” JD Vance, Mr. Trump’s pick for vice president, told The American Conservative magazine in 2021, “I think our people hate the right people.” (
  • “Because a personal machine puts loyalty ahead of electability, it must resort to authoritarian and anti-democratic measures like coercion and intimidation to preserve its hold on the party,” Mr. Rauch said. “It may physically threaten those who do not play ball. And it will use propaganda and the party organization to build up the leader as the one and only true expression of the party. That’s why Trump’s Republican Party is a cult of personality.”
  • A third way to understand today’s Republican Party, something that grows more obvious with every passing day, is that it has become a populist rather than a conservative party. Th
  • when traditionally conservative views aren’t in alignment with populist views, it’s the traditionally conservative views that most often get jettisone
  • Mr. Trump tapped into the growing resentment of millions of voters. He was seen by them as their tribune. Unfortunately, he exploited their fears and did almost nothing to solve their problems. But that doesn’t seem to matter to them. It’s all about the posturing.
  • The Republican Party, rather than embracing the best aspects of populism, has taken on its vices: anti-intellectualism, anti-institutionalism and anti-elitism; feeding off negative emotions like anger, grievances and vengeance; and a propensity to believe and to spread conspiracy theories
  • Populism often looks for scapegoats, frequently blaming immigrants and those who are ethnically and culturally different. Populists are also historically attracted to demagogues and authoritarian personalities.
  • But the most worrisome feature that has defined the Republican Party during the Trump era is a relentless assault on reality, fused with lawlessness and the embrace of illiberalism.
  • The Republican Party once preached about the importance of standing for moral truths and standing against moral relativism; today it is, in important respects, nihilistic.
  • It’s hard and haunting to know that the political party to which I devoted a significant part of my life has become the greatest political threat to the country I love.
Javier E

My Teenage Son Thinks the World Is Falling Apart. I've Changed How I Talk to Him About It. - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...kids-world-parents-doom.html

response crisis

shared by Javier E on 12 Sep 24 - No Cached
  • I, by contrast, enjoyed a largely tragedy-free childhood. I grew up in the glow of the 1980s, going to the mall, listening to Men Without Hats on my Walkman and watching “MacGyver” on television. Oh, MacGyver! Is there anything in this world that can’t be fixed with duct tape, a Swiss Army Knife and a roguish smile? You get the idea. I believed, wholesale, in happy endings. As a parent, I offered my boys the same upbeat reassurances that my own parents offered me, when the Cold War was raging and Ronald Reagan was assuring us that it was “morning in America.”
  • To be sure, I worried about my kids, especially when they were little. In America, there is an entire industry that caters to such worries and offers endless fixes: car seats, covers for electric outlets, baby gates, window guards, corner protectors, toilet locks and anti-scalding devices for faucets. When my kids were young, I bought plenty of this stuff, partly because it made me feel like I was doing my job — like I was in control. The funny thing is, the older my kids got, the more I realized just how little control I had. My kids, of course, knew it, too.
  • My youngest son, Lucian, who is now 15, has a fatalistic streak. He recently observed to me, “The world is coming apart, isn’t it, Dad?” His proof, which was ample, included climate change, power outages, Ukraine, Gaza and the protests on the college campus near us. And he didn’t seem convinced that any of the world’s “supreme leaders,” as he called them, were doing an especially good job.
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  • “How much faith, in general, do you have in adults?” I asked him recently.“Not much,” he replied.“Have you always felt this way?” I asked.
  • “No, the world was better 10 years ago,” he said wistfully. “But, I never really thought about that kind of stuff when I was 5. Back then I just thought about what I was going to have for lunch.”
  • In one conversation, Lucian told me: “Dad, it’s not a matter of ‘if’ there will be nuclear war; it’s a matter of ‘when.’” He had this look in his eyes: a gleam of defiance, as if he were daring me — the resident optimist — to disagree.
  • I was at a loss for words because, truth be told, I had been inching my way toward that same terrifying realization. The only question was whether I was willing to offer him some grand reassurance that we both knew would be a lie.
  • Her mother and stepfather didn’t minimize the gravity of the situation. Their approach was to give the kids as much information as possible. Their goal, they later told me, was to “build trust” with their kids so that they could all respect and depend on one another
  • This vector of trust was tested, a year or so later, when her parents chose to hide subversive, underground newspapers in their apartment. They initially were vague with their children about what they were hiding, but later came clean. Their unity, it seemed, was predicated on truth.
  • This is still Kasia’s approach to life. She is all about the facts.
  • The truth is, Lucian is right. The world is coming apart. I see it from his perspective now. He has grown up in an age in which Covid closed schools, forest fires darkened the skies, hurricanes intensified and rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol. My instinct to minimize all of this was wrong. On some level, I just didn’t want to admit to my kids — or to myself — that I was powerless to protect them. This was, at heart, a lie that would only undermine their trust in me.
  • The real problem with my approach, however, is that I was robbing my kids of a sense of urgency, a sense that the situation, in much of the world, is dire and that it demands their attention
  • So I’ve embraced the Iron Curtain response: Yes the world is broken, which is why you need to fix it. Lucian’s response to this, of course, is: We didn’t break it. You did. Touché. He also reminds us: If you can’t fix things, what makes you think I can? And I can only reply: Maybe you can’t, but you still have to try.
Javier E

The Worst Cat Memes You've Ever Seen - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...679775

memes meanness trump right-wing

shared by Javier E on 11 Sep 24 - No Cached
  • Taken seriously, the content of these posts is deeply offensive and dehumanizing. But the people sharing them get to hide behind a thin veil of irony: They’re just some funny cats. If you’re offended, that’s your problem
  • Trump is well versed in this tactic—he routinely attempts to walk right up to the edge of plausible deniability. Consider, for example, the time he floated the idea of executing one of his top generals
  • this behavior has been called doing it “for the lulz.” As Adrian Chen chronicled in The Nation in 2014, lulz—a perversion of lol—justifies heinous behavior online. The term came out of the bowels of 4chan in the mid-aughts and typically means maniacally laughing at a victim. It has often been associated with jokes about topics such as the Holocaust, suicide, terrorism, and rape
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  • The lulz have always been a tool to obfuscate that an individual was being racist, sexist, or generally hateful
  • The endgame of prior for-the-lulz moments provides clues as to where the MAGA cat memes are headed. The casual misogyny that the trolls of 4chan espoused eventually culminated in cyberstalking and online harassment of women that was sometimes so pernicious, it drove them away from the internet altogether
Javier E

How the War on Terror Warped the American Left - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...679764

war terror progressive left US psychology culture

shared by Javier E on 11 Sep 24 - No Cached
  • Throttled by fear, America lost its mind. An overwhelming majority now agree on this point—a Pew poll in 2019 found that 62 percent of respondents thought the Iraq War was “not worth fighting” (even 64 percent of veterans concurred). So scarring were the failed attempts at nation building that strong isolationist strains run through both major American political parties today.
  • The War on Terror reinforced a paranoid style on the left that has stunted progressive politics, a Chomskyite turn that sees even the democratic socialism of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as too incremental.
  • If America is irredeemable, this thinking goes, then justice demands no less than a complete reboot of the country.
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  • a new book offers an exhaustive version of this story of fundamental depravity: Richard Beck’s Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life.
  • “The most important political story of the past two decades isn’t the intensifying conflict between Republicans and Democrats,” Beck, a writer at the literary magazine n+1, states near the end of his 500 pages, in what can be read as a summary of his book.
  • “It is the story of an empire, a world­-spanning political and economic system, that clawed its way to the top of the global power hierarchy and is now determined to imprison and kill as many people as it needs to in order to stay there.”
  • He looks at how the invasion of Afghanistan and then Iraq made SUVs and Iron Man and shows like 24 popular in the United States; how social media’s business interest in collecting personal data converged with the National Security Agency’s desire to do the same; how the number of mass shootings, articles of clothing we had to remove at airports, and anxieties (about Muslims and immigrants) increased. These close readings of the subtle and not-so-subtle ways that the war came home, even though the fighting itself was far away and mostly invisible to Americans, are the most successful parts of Homeland.
  • The sense of collective fear, the worry that another terrorist attack could—that it most likely would—happen again, shaped the American response, and explains so many of the pathological excesses. Fear makes you act irrationally, makes you more suspicious of your neighbor or even tolerant of torture if it gives you the illusion that you can walk into a public space without panicking.
  • it does explain what happened in psychological terms that are entirely human. These societal and political failures did not occur in a vacuum. They were a reaction to an event in which 2,977 people were killed before the eyes of everyone in the country.
  • Beck never acknowledges this fear as a universal response to terror. What he sees at work is specific to Americans, an enactment of a “national mythology” forged in the 17th century
  • follows a narrative thread back to the helplessness of the early European colonists as they faced a forbidding wilderness full of Native people who did not exactly want them there. As Beck recounts it, the shame and vulnerability, articulated in captivity narratives in which white women were stolen by American Indians, transformed into an embrace of righteous, no-holds-barred violence to bring back civilizational order—Daniel Boone, Natty Bumppo, Davy Crockett, and John Wayne became the stars
  • Beck finds potency in the Freudian concept of “repetition compulsion,” a desire to play out an original trauma, in this case expiating that 17th-century shame again and again, with violence
  • Americans, he argues, are hardwired by these mythologies: “They let Americans know what they should expect from life, how they should inhabit the world, and what they should do when the enemy (especially a nonwhite enemy) shows up at the front door.”
  • This is history as a skipping record. It leaves little room for ethical development over time, no place for correction. Aspects of “The 1619 Project” offered the same fatalism: a country stained with the birthmark of slavery as forever and always racist. The clear implication is that the only change possible is a revolutionary one that smashes the experiment and starts from scratch.
  • To understand the real motives behind the breadth of the global War on Terror, he turns from Freud to Marx. The world economy, with America at its center, has been slowing since the 1970s. This has led to a severe dearth of formal employment everywhere, but especially in places such as Africa and the Middle East, creating what Marx originally called “surplus populations,”
  • The central motivator for terrorism, according to Beck, is this: an economic grievance against a superpower that is unable to grow or spread the wealth but is also holding on to its position of dominance at all costs.
  • the War on Terror appears as an excuse to strengthen America’s grip on the world’s economy and beat back any of those surplus populations that might dare to object
  • The invasion happened, Beck writes, in order “to force Iraq to join the twenty-first-century capitalism club, to make it subject to the same incentives and rules and pressures that structured the economies of all the other countries that had accepted the fact of America’s global leadership.”
  • Elements of his interpretation have some explanatory power—the United States is losing its footing; declining growth and ballooning levels of income inequality are an enormous problem. But he also leaves out so much texture for fear of diluting a story that can have only one villain.
  • When Beck applies his fixed worldview to 2024, his blinkers become obvious. In Russia’s war to swallow Ukraine, he spares some sympathy for President Vladimir Putin, who must deal with an American government that has “lavished Ukraine with military aid while simultaneously looking to expand NATO’s membership.” That the Ukrainians themselves have asked for this help in order to preserve their sovereignty seems irrelevant to Beck
  • No such moderation applies when he turns to the Palestinians. Their enemy, Israel, is an extension of America in the region, a “snarling dog,” a “nation of settler colonialists” that is doing nothing more in Gaza than quenching its “bloodlust.” His analysis ends there; because Palestinians are “the contemporary world’s paradigmatic example of a surplus population,” no other interpretation is needed—nothing, for example, about Iran’s interests as expressed through its proxies, or Israelis’ own legitimate desire for safety, given those proxies’ eliminationist goals.
  • Where does someone like Richard Beck turn to for hope?
  • Not to electoral politics. He admits that he refused to vote in 2012, when Barack Obama was up for reelection. Obama had outlawed torture and was withdrawing from Iraq; in one of his first major foreign-policy acts as president, he had flown to Cairo to address the Muslim world. But Beck saw only a sleek veneer. The war was continuing more quietly—with drones—and Obama would not be holding any top Bush-administration officials accountable for their crimes. So Beck opted out.
  • But even though these movements took on deep structural issues—racism and income inequality—they were not radical enough, he now thinks, because both assumed the legitimacy of the American government, that the “system” itself could be reformed.
  • Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter felt like what he was looking for.
Javier E

Brandenburg is thriving, so why are voters lurching towards the hard right? - 0 views

www.thetimes.com/...r-germany-hard-right-9ql9p3str

afd germany young politics history culture crisis ddr

shared by Javier E on 20 Sep 24 - No Cached
  • As Gärtner describes it, even in his Gymnasium — a selective school whose pupils are on track for academic courses at university — radical right-wing ideology and rhetoric are not just normal but symbols of a kind of countercultural social status.
  • “It seems things are getting to the point where you could say that if you’re not far-right, you’re not cool these days,” he said. “So there are a lot of Mitläufer [hangers-on] — I’m deliberately using the term from the Nazi era — who are simply far-right because they think it is in some sense ‘cool’ and the far right stand for us.
  • “But really they have no idea what exactly they’re voting for and what [the AfD] really stands for. So it’s really bloody horrifying for me.”
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  • A number of polls suggest the AfD is now strongest in the Generation Z age bracket. In Thuringia it won 38 per cent of the vote among under-25s.
  • Nor is it a purely east German curiosity: one recent study of young adults across Germany found that the AfD was the most popular party, with about 22 per cent of the vote.
  • Plenty of voters remain dissatisfied. In Finsterwalde’s marketplace, where some of the mainstream parties have set up election stands, one 75-year-old woman who declined to give her name said she was outraged that eastern Germans who had paid into the system their whole lives were left with meagre pensions while immigrants received generous benefits from the state.
  • in the months before the Berlin Wall fell and saw the local unemployment rate rise as high as 25 per cent in the turbulent years that followed.
  • Today it is down to 8 per cent. The gap in per capita incomes with western Germany has shrunk from about 40 per cent to 10 per cent. On average each Brandenburg resident receives nearly €2,000 a year in fiscal transfers from the western side of the country.
  • Genilke leafs through a book that shows photographs of Finsterwalde as it was 40 years ago and as it is today: the town has been transmogrified. The roads, the schools and the nurseries have been almost entirely rebuilt. An open-cast coalmine has been converted into the third-largest solar farm in Germany.
  • This shift is hard to explain, especially as in macroeconomic terms there has never been a better time to be a Brandenburger.
  • In this town of 15,800 people there are precisely 867 asylum seekers and refugees. While there have been no incidents of violence, there have been isolated cases of theft and it is common to hear low-level grumbling about noisy or disruptive behaviour. “Sometimes you feel like a guest in your own country,” said one voter, who preferred to remain anonymous.
  • Overall, though, the progress since reunification has been impressive. “Thirty years ago we could never have dreamt we would have come this far,” said Genilke. “There has never been a better time in eastern Germany. Of course we still have problems. There’s no such thing as an ideal society. But we really have achieved a great deal.”
  • Knut Abraham, 58, a long-serving diplomat who is now the CDU MP for the local constituency, suggests one reason for the disillusionment of the young may be that they did not live through the toughest part of the economic transformation and can see only its shortcomings.
  • “I also think it has to do with identity,” he said. “The AfD disseminates an easily adaptable and comprehensible sense of national identity. And, of course, it is at the same time a protest and a rebellion against us.”
  • The culture of memory may be another factor. Socialist East Germany was an “anti-fascist” state by definition and did not encourage its citizens to do much soul-searching about how complicit they and their families had been in the crimes of the Nazi regime.
  • After the two Germanys were reunified in 1990, the west’s more self-flagellating traditions — the mandatory trips to concentration camps, the solemn schooling in the principles of liberal democracy — were transplanted into the east’s education system.
  • Gärtner said some of his fellow pupils had semi-openly sniggered during lessons about the Nazi period and one boy in the class below had deliberately shaved his head before a visit to a concentration camp in order to make his allegiance to the hard right visible.
  • He also described how the AfD had achieved near-total dominance over political discourse on TikTok, a social media platform used by more than 50 per cent of German teenagers. “Slowly you can begin to see the parallels with how Hitler gave the radio to his population back then as the Volksempfänger [people’s receiver],” Gärtner said.
Javier E

Book Review: 'Nexus,' by Yuval Noah Harari - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nexus-yuval-noah-harari.html

ai threats book review

shared by Javier E on 20 Sep 24 - No Cached
  • Really, what we have is two separate books, neither brief. The first 200 pages are indeed historical in their way. Unfortunately, this is a dizzying, all-in version of history that swerves unsatisfyingly
  • Harari’s thesis is that the difference between democracies and dictatorships lies in how they handle information. Dictatorships are more concerned with controlling data than with testing its truth value; democracies, by contrast, are transparent information networks in which citizens are able to evaluate and, if necessary, correct bad data.
  • They are more insidious, harder to see coming, but potentially existential. They include the catastrophic polarizing of discourse when social media algorithms designed to monopolize our attention feed us extreme, hateful material.
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  • Systems that are self-correcting — because they promote conversation and mutuality — are preferable to those that offer only blind, disenfranchised subservience.
  • The meat of “Nexus” is essentially an extended policy brief on A.I.: What are its risks, and what can be done?
  • The threats A.I. poses are not the ones that filmmakers visualize:
  • All of this is sort of obvious-interesting, while also being too vague — too open to objection and counterexample — to constitute a useful theory of information.
  • Or the outsourcing of human judgment — legal, financial or military decision-making — to an A.I. whose complexity becomes impenetrable to our own understanding.
  • Harari warns of a “Silicon Curtain” descending between us and the algorithms we have created, shutting us out of our own conversations — how we want to act, or interact, or govern ourselves.
  • None of these scenarios, however, is a given. Harari points to the problem of email spam
  • In 2015, Google was able to claim that its Gmail algorithm had a 99.9 percent success rate in blocking genuine spam. “When the tech giants set their hearts on designing better algorithms,” writes Harari, “they can usually do it.”
  • Parts of “Nexus” are wise and bold. They remind us that democratic societies still have the facilities to prevent A.I.’s most dangerous excesses, and that it must not be left to tech companies and their billionaire owners to regulate themselves.
Javier E

Stretchy dairy cheese now possible without cows, company says | Food | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ible-without-cows-company-says

dairy cheese synthetic vegan fermented food culture

shared by Javier E on 01 Oct 24 - No Cached
  • DairyX’s approach is a third route – precision fermentation. It is now scaling up its operation and aims to seek the regulatory approval needed for consumers to buy the product in 2027. If successful, the caseins could be used by cheese and yoghurt companies as a drop-in replacement for dairy milk, without changes to equipment or ingredients.
  • Other companies developing fermented caseins include New Culture in the US, which is focusing on mozzarella, and Australia’s Eden Brew, targeting cow-free milk, as well as All G Foods, Fooditive and Standing Ovation.
  • “People have been trying to take the cow out of making dairy since the late 1970s,” said Dr Arik Ryvkin, DairyX founder and chief executive. Early efforts used plant protein but about a decade ago biotechnology developments opened a new path, pioneered by the company Perfect Day, he said. “We now bring the last step in that line of evolution … helping dairy companies make the exact products consumers desire while helping cows live happier lives.”
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  • Ryvkin previously followed a vegan diet for 10 years, but became frustrated at being unable to include good cheese in what he ate: “So I slipped, and then decided to solve the problem for everyone.”
  • Many existing plant-based dairy products use additives, such as stabilisers, emulsifiers and thickeners, but still do not fully replicate the stretchiness and creaminess of regular dairy products. DairyX used engineered yeast strains to produce casein that is genetically identical to dairy proteins. But for these proteins to self-assemble into the tiny balls – called micelles – they also had to perfect the addition of other attached molecules which determine the properties of the protein
  • Dr Stella Child, at the Good Food Institute Europe, which supports alternative protein development, said: “Producing caseins that can self-assemble into micelles – while not the only method of developing these ‘building blocks of dairy’ – could help to bring affordable and attractive products to the market sooner by reducing production costs and eliminating the need for additives.”
  • The scientists tested and refined their research by coagulating the proteins in the same way as when making cheese. They have yet to taste the product, as this requires regulatory approval. Galit Kuznets, at DairyX, said. “Our casein also eliminates the need for hormones and antibiotics [used in cows] on dairy farms.”
  • The company is using evolutionary techniques to select for the yeast strains that produce the largest amount of proteins, aiming to make the product the same price as dairy casein. Price parity and taste are the key to future success, said Ryvkin.
  • Preliminary analysis indicates that climate-heating greenhouse gases from the production of DairyX’s fermented casein are 90% lower than for regular dairy if the leftover yeast mass is reused, potentially as food ingredients, or 50% lower if not. All precision fermentation products require far less land and water than their animal counterparts.
  • Other approaches to cow-free dairy proteins are being taken by companies such as Israel’s NewMoo, which is growing casein proteins in plant seeds, and New Zealand’s Daisy Lab, which is making “all yeast, no beast” whey powder.
Javier E

Opinion | This Is Why MAGA Loves JD Vance - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-vice-presidential-debate.html

maga vance politics US

shared by Javier E on 02 Oct 24 - No Cached
  • In choosing Vance and discarding Pence, Trump traded actual decency for a man who can simulate decency, and that’s exactly what Vance did on Tuesday night.
  • With those words and in that moment, Vance told MAGA: Don’t be fooled by my civility; when real power is on the line, I’m with Trump. He’s said so before. Just last month, he told the All-In podcast that he “would have asked the states to submit alternative slates of electors and let the country have the debate about what actually matters and what kind of an election that we had.”
  • There was nothing peaceful about the transfer of power from Trump to Joe Biden. Even the relative calm of Inauguration Day (which Trump skipped) was guaranteed only by a troop deployment that made any substantial disruption impossible.
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  • But he couldn’t keep it together for the entire evening. At the very end, the mask slipped. When pressed to say whether Trump lost in 2020, Vance said, “Obviously, Donald Trump and I think that there were problems in 2020,” and he had the gall to say, “It’s really rich for Democratic leaders to say that Donald Trump is a unique threat to democracy when he peacefully gave over power on Jan. 20, as we have done for 250 years in this country.”
  • No one should underestimate the importance of that moment. Earlier in the debate, Vance explicitly backed away from his previous anti-abortion positions. If abortion is no longer sacred for Republicans, we know who is: Trump. Vance will compromise on abortion, but he won’t waver from the Big Lie.
  • Even so, vice-presidential debates can still be instructive. And on Tuesday night, voters learned exactly why MAGA loves Vance so much. He’s a talented communicator. He has a compelling life story. He can make the ideological and policy case for Republican populism better than any other politician in America. And he’s no Mike Pence: He would wreck the Republic for Donald Trump.
Javier E

Opinion | That Voice on the Phone May Just Be A.I. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ai-voice-telemarketers.html

AI chatbot applications loneliness effects scenarios conversation culture crisis

shared by Javier E on 11 Oct 24 - No Cached
  • What I’ve learned is that interacting with A.I. voice agents will change how we interact with one another: who we trust, what we expect and what we need in our communications. A.I. voice agents are already infiltrating our world: calling us as telemarketers, taking our orders at fast-food drive-throughs, listening to our problems as A.I. therapists or — and this one really hits home, given my occupation — being employed as A.I. podcast hosts.
  • Voice agents have also been touted as a solution to the loneliness epidemic. But when I called a friend of mine and unleashed the A.I. version of me, he later offered the most succinct description of what the whole experience felt like: “It’s so lonely,” he lamented. That sense of loneliness — the base reality that, fundamentally, you are only talking to yourself — may be the most lasting result of all these A.I. conversations.
  • A.I. agents are already triggering an avalanche of synthetic conversation, as they are deployed as tireless, unflagging talkers, capable of endless invented chatter. As they improve, it will become increasingly difficult to distinguish these A.I. voice agents from humans and, even when you can identify them, you will still be forced to talk to them.
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  • the more simulated human conversation I heard, the more it left me craving the real thing: in-person connections with the people I care about, with all the quirks of a meandering human discussion
  • the upside may be that it forces us to appreciate the subtleties of personal interactions that many of us have come to devalue.
  • I witnessed A.I. voice agents strike up conversations with one another, which raised a Zen-like question: If one A.I. voice agent tries to scam another, is anyone’s time being wasted?
  • As I provided my A.I. voice agent with more information about me and my life, it evolved into a more credible impersonator of me. Armed with my biography, it attended work meetings on my behalf (off-camera, of course), conducted interviews in my place and even attempted to negotiate business deals. My clone was better at arranging meetings than closing deals, though it handled an important legal conversation with aplomb.
  • Along the way, I discovered its singular talent: a knack for endless untruthful riffing that no human can match.
  • I’m talking about a bottomless capacity for mundane small talk, combined with the imperative to make things up just to keep the conversation going.
  • Even when my voice agent did a good job masquerading as me, I found that for the people on the other end of the line, having out-loud conversations with A.I. clones upended their sense of reality.
  • Companies are poised to unleash these A.I. voice agents into our world. We humans need to decide how we will adjust to a world flooded with near-human voices
  • we could try and reject this technology, carving out no-clone spaces and refusing to patronize the companies that offer a pseudo-human experience instead of a real one.
  • If there’s one thing we don’t need, it’s more loneliness, which seems to be the one thing these A.I. voices reliably supply. Their arrival offers a chance to rethink how we use our own voices and to seek out more of the human interactions that they can never replace.
Javier E

Opinion | MAGA Turns Against the Constitution - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...maga-constitution-trump.html

constitution power liberty nationalism authoritarian right-wing tyranny class culture politics US history crisis GOP

shared by Javier E on 15 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • the problem of public ignorance and fake crises transcends politics. Profound pessimism about the state of the nation is empowering the radical, revolutionary politics that fuels extremists on the right and left.
  • now, for parts of MAGA, the Constitution itself is part of the crisis. If it doesn’t permit Trump to take control, then it must be swept aside.
  • Elements of this argument are now bubbling up across the reactionary, populist right
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  • Still others believe that the advent of civil rights laws created, in essence, a second Constitution entirely, one that privileges group identity over individual liberty.
  • Protestant Christian nationalists tend to have a higher regard for the American founding, but they believe it’s been corrupted. They claim that the 1787 Constitution is essentially dead, replaced by progressive power politics that have destroyed constitutional government.
  • Catholic post-liberals believe that liberal democracy itself is problematic. According to their critique, the Constitution’s emphasis on individual liberty “atomizes” American life and degrades the traditional institutions of church and family that sustain human flourishing.
  • The original Constitution and Bill of Rights, while a tremendous advance from the Articles of Confederation, suffered from a singular, near-fatal flaw. They protected Americans from federal tyranny, but they also left states free to oppress American citizens in the most horrific ways
  • if your ultimate aim is the destruction of your political enemies, then the Constitution does indeed stand in your way.
  • Right-wing constitutional critics do get one thing right: The 1787 Constitution is mostly gone, and America’s constitutional structure is substantially different from the way it was at the founding. But that’s a good thing
  • its guardrails against tyranny remain vital and relevant today.
  • Individual states ratified their own constitutions that often purported to protect individual liberty, at least for some citizens, but states were also often violently repressive and fundamentally authoritarian.
  • The criminal justice system could be its own special form of hell. Indigent criminal defendants lacked lawyers, prison conditions were often brutal at a level that would shock the modern conscience, and local law enforcement officers had no real constitutional constraints on their ability to search American citizens and seize their property.
  • Through much of American history, various American states protected slavery, enforced Jim Crow, suppressed voting rights, blocked free speech, and established state churches.
  • As a result, if you were traditionally part of the local ruling class — a white Protestant in the South, like me — you experienced much of American history as a kind of golden era of power and control.
  • The Civil War Amendments changed everything. The combination of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments ended slavery once and for all, extended the reach of the Bill of Rights to protect against government actions at every level, and expanded voting rights.
  • But all of this took time. The end of Reconstruction and the South’s “massive resistance” to desegregation delayed the quest for justice.
  • decades of litigation, activism and political reform have yielded a reality in which contemporary Americans enjoy greater protection for the most fundamental civil liberties than any generation that came before.
  • And those who believe that the civil rights movement impaired individual liberty have to reckon with the truth that Americans enjoy greater freedom from both discrimination and censorship than they did before the movement began.
  • So why are parts of the right so discontent? The answer lies in the difference between power and liberty
  • One of the most important stories of the last century — from the moment the Supreme Court applied the First Amendment to state power in 1925, until the present day — is the way in which white Protestants lost power but gained liberty. Many millions are unhappy with the exchange.
  • Consider the state of the law a century ago. Until the expansion of the Bill of Rights (called “incorporation”) to apply to the states, if you controlled your state and wanted to destroy your enemies, you could oppress them to a remarkable degree. You could deprive them of free speech, you could deprive them of due process, you could force them to pray and read state-approved versions of the Bible.
  • The argument that the Constitution is failing is just as mistaken as the argument that the economy is failing, but it’s politically and culturally more dangerous
  • Powerful people often experience their power as a kind of freedom. A king can feel perfectly free to do what he wants, for example, but that’s not the same thing as liberty.
  • Looked at properly, liberty is the doctrine that defies power. It’s liberty that enables us to exercise our rights.
  • Think of the difference between power and liberty like this — power gives the powerful freedom of action. Liberty, by contrast, protects your freedom of action from the powerful.
  • At their core, right-wing attacks on the modern Constitution are an attack on liberty for the sake of power.
  • An entire class of Americans looks back at decades past and has no memory (or pretends to have no memory) of marginalization and oppression. They could do what they wanted, when they wanted and to whom they wanted.
  • Now they don’t have that same control
  • Muslims, Sikhs, Jews, Buddhists and atheists all approach the public square with the same liberties. Drag queens have the same free speech rights as pastors, and many Americans are livid as a result.
  • when a movement starts to believe that America is in a state of economic crisis, criminal chaos and constitutional collapse, then you can start to see the seeds for revolutionary violence and profound political instability. They believe we live in desperate times, and they turn to desperate measures.
  • “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” So much American angst and anger right now is rooted in falsehoods. But the truth can indeed set us free from the rage that tempts American hearts toward tyranny.
Javier E

AI Has Become a Technology of Faith - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...678984

AI faith health OpenAI trust

shared by Javier E on 13 Jul 24 - No Cached
  • Altman told me that his decision to join Huffington stemmed partly from hearing from people who use ChatGPT to self-diagnose medical problems—a notion I found potentially alarming, given the technology’s propensity to return hallucinated information. (If physicians are frustrated by patients who rely on Google or Reddit, consider how they might feel about patients showing up in their offices stuck on made-up advice from a language model.)
  • I noted that it seemed unlikely to me that anyone besides ChatGPT power users would trust a chatbot in this way, that it was hard to imagine people sharing all their most intimate information with a computer program, potentially to be stored in perpetuity.
  • “I and many others in the field have been positively surprised about how willing people are to share very personal details with an LLM,” Altman told me. He said he’d recently been on Reddit reading testimonies of people who’d found success by confessing uncomfortable things to LLMs. “They knew it wasn’t a real person,” he said, “and they were willing to have this hard conversation that they couldn’t even talk to a friend about.”
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  • That willingness is not reassuring. For example, it is not far-fetched to imagine insurers wanting to get their hands on this type of medical information in order to hike premiums. Data brokers of all kinds will be similarly keen to obtain people’s real-time health-chat records. Altman made a point to say that this theoretical product would not trick people into sharing information.
  • . Neither Altman nor Huffington had an answer to my most basic question—What would the product actually look like? Would it be a smartwatch app, a chatbot? A Siri-like audio assistant?—but Huffington suggested that Thrive’s AI platform would be “available through every possible mode,” that “it could be through your workplace, like Microsoft Teams or Slack.
  • This led me to propose a hypothetical scenario in which a company collects this information and stores it inappropriately or uses it against employees. What safeguards might the company apply then? Altman’s rebuttal was philosophical. “Maybe society will decide there’s some version of AI privilege,” he said. “When you talk to a doctor or a lawyer, there’s medical privileges, legal privileges. There’s no current concept of that when you talk to an AI, but maybe there should be.”
  • So much seems to come down to: How much do you want to believe in a future mediated by intelligent machines that act like humans? And: Do you trust these people?
  • A fundamental question has loomed over the world of AI since the concept cohered in the 1950s: How do you talk about a technology whose most consequential effects are always just on the horizon, never in the present? Whatever is built today is judged partially on its own merits, but also—perhaps even more important—on what it might presage about what is coming next.
  • the models “just want to learn”—a quote attributed to the OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever that means, essentially, that if you throw enough money, computing power, and raw data into these networks, the models will become capable of making ever more impressive inferences. True believers argue that this is a path toward creating actual intelligence (many others strongly disagree). In this framework, the AI people become something like evangelists for a technology rooted in faith: Judge us not by what you see, but by what we imagine.
  • I found it outlandish to invoke America’s expensive, inequitable, and inarguably broken health-care infrastructure when hyping a for-profit product that is so nonexistent that its founders could not tell me whether it would be an app or not.
  • Thrive AI Health is profoundly emblematic of this AI moment precisely because it is nothing, yet it demands that we entertain it as something profound.
  • you don’t have to get apocalyptic to see the way that AI’s potential is always muddying people’s ability to evaluate its present. For the past two years, shortcomings in generative-AI products—hallucinations; slow, wonky interfaces; stilted prose; images that showed too many teeth or couldn’t render fingers; chatbots going rogue—have been dismissed by AI companies as kinks that will eventually be worked out
  • Faith is not a bad thing. We need faith as a powerful motivating force for progress and a way to expand our vision of what is possible. But faith, in the wrong context, is dangerous, especially when it is blind. An industry powered by blind faith seems particularly troubling.
  • The greatest trick of a faith-based industry is that it effortlessly and constantly moves the goal posts, resisting evaluation and sidestepping criticism. The promise of something glorious, just out of reach, continues to string unwitting people along. All while half-baked visions promise salvation that may never come.
Javier E

How 'Rural Studies' Is Thinking About the Heartland - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...studies-american-politics.html

rural studies US politics culture history economics community theory conservatism free trade' immigration discrimination

shared by Javier E on 17 Jul 24 - No Cached
  • “White Rural Rage,” by the journalist Paul Waldman and the political scientist Tom Schaller, is an unsparing assessment of small-town America. Rural residents, the authors argued, are more likely than city dwellers to excuse political violence, and they pose a threat to American democracy.
  • Several rural scholars whose research was included in the book immediately denounced it
  • Ms. Lunz Trujillo excoriated the book in an opinion piece for Newsweek as “a prime example of how intellectuals sow distrust by villainizing” people unlike them.
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  • this latest effort provoked a response that was swift and scathing and revealed something new: the existence of a tightknit group of scholars who are clamoring for more empathetic political analyses of rural Americans.
  • “We contribute to the further denigration of expertise when we say, ‘This is what the experts say about these rubes and bumpkins,’” said Mr. Jacobs, a co-author of “The Rural Voter.” “Who’s going to trust the experts when that’s what the experts have to say about you?”
  • There is an obvious reason for academics’ neglect of the political urban-rural divide until recently: It barely existed.
  • It’s only since the late 1990s that there has been a marked gap between rural and urban voting patterns in presidential elections, and it has widened ever since. In 2016, Mr. Trump won 59 percent of rural voters. Four years later, that climbed to 65 percent, according to Pew. And in the 2022 midterms, Republicans won 69 percent of the rural vote.
  • Even if that shift does hint that “rural” may now be its own kind of identity, it’s a cohort that’s hard to define.
  • The Census Bureau classifies any community as rural if it isn’t within an urban area, meaning it is not part of a densely settled area with 5,000 or more people or 2,000 or more housing units. (In the 2020 census, 20 percent of Americans were classified as rural.)
  • “I get frustrated especially when people talk about rural America as white America. In some states, it’s Latino America. In the Deep South, it’s Black America.”
  • Beyond these basic definitional problems, rural communities can be wildly different socially. “When you aggregate to the national level, you lose so much,”
  • Traditionally, political scientists argued that measuring the effects of place was just a proxy for looking at other parts of identity, like race or education. And because many did not come from rural areas, growing up rural didn’t tend to strike academics as a salient part of political identity.
  • Maybe because so few people fashioned themselves as “rural political experts” until recently, the few high-profile explanations for the rise of rural Republicanism were widely embraced by the chattering classes.
  • Thomas Frank in his best-selling 2004 book, “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” Mr. Frank, a historian, argued that the Republican focus on social issues, like abortion and guns, persuaded rural voters to put aside their economic interests and vote on cultural values rather than for candidates who supported unions and corporate regulation.
  • a handful of academics were so frustrated with the book that it inspired them to pursue their own research.
  • What rankled the experts who had read “White Rural Rage” was what they considered slapdash analysis. The authors build some arguments on polls with sample sizes as small as 167 rural people. The book is filled with critiques of rural Americans — their resistance to pluralism, their willingness to embrace conspiracies — that apply to many groups and that some scholars reject because they are not based on the long-term observation they say is needed to truly understand the political motives of any community.
  • Their reaction was hostility toward the very idea of government, so they supported politicians who promised to keep it out of their lives; Ms. Cramer called this “the politics of resentment.”
  • Ms. Cramer’s 2016 book, “The Politics of Resentment,” quickly became an anchor in the growing field of rural political studies. At least half a dozen academics credit her with foundational thinking for their research.
  • “A lot of the focus has been on ‘What’s wrong with those people?’” she said. “But most people studying what’s going on with rural political behavior are people with empathy for people who live in rural places. They aren’t discounting them as ignorant or uninformed. There’s more of an attempt to understand the way they’re seeing the world.”
  • When Mr. Jacobs decided this year to convene a group of 15 scholars for a conference called Rethinking Rural, he was struck by the flurry of excitement that greeted the invitations. “It was like the first time they’d been asked to the dance,”
  • Ms. Cramer came to a different understanding from Mr. Frank’s of why people voted the way they did: Rural Americans resented city dwellers. They believed that national and state governments had enriched urban areas at the expense of rural ones, taking note of all the road-building in Madison, for example, when they drove to sports games.
  • Mr. Jacobs, with the political scientist Dan Shea, conducted surveys of 10,000 rural voters, from Gambell, Alaska, to Lubec, Maine. The pair were struck by a commonality: Rural residents tend to focus less on their own economic circumstances and more on their community’s prosperity.
  • Even individuals who are thriving are attuned to whether their community as a whole is being left behind by economic changes like automation or the decline of coal.
  • That sense of “shared fate,” as the scholars put it, arises in part because rich and poor tend to cross paths often,
  • “If you go down my street in Vassalboro, the nicest house on the street is right across from the least nice house on the street,” Mr. Jacobs said. “Their kids go to the same school because there’s only one school.”
  • Such interconnectedness means that pollsters sometimes miss how rural voters are really feeling, he added. “It’s not enough to simply ask: Are you doing better than you were last year?
  • As millions left rural areas seeking economic opportunity, an appreciation formed for the businesspeople who stayed and tried to create jobs. That led to an outsize influence by local business leaders in the political realm, driving support for anti-union laws and tax policies generous to businesses.
  • Broadly, rural Americans see free trade and the rise of new technologies as hurting their communities while helping cities prosper
  • So the resentment they felt toward urbanites didn’t come out of nowhere.
  • “Rage and resentment are not interchangeable terms,” he wrote in Politico. “Rage implies irrationality, anger that is unjustified and out of proportion. You can’t talk to someone who is enraged. Resentment is rational, a reaction based on some sort of negative experience.”
  • And while resentment, like rage, doesn’t easily dissolve, he suggests that trying to understand where it comes from could start to build a bridge over that ever-widening urban-rural divide.
Javier E

The Normalization of the Exception - Homepage Christian Lammert - 0 views

www.christianlammert.com/...normalization-of-the-exception

polarization both-sides US evaluation right-wing left politics history culture

shared by Javier E on 17 Jul 24 - No Cached
  • There's now a disturbingly quick acceptance of the argument that "both sides are to blame." It was and remains the Republicans and Trump who have labeled the media as enemies of the people, politicians and refugees as vermin, and have spoken of bloodshed should Trump lose again in the next election. This discourse sharply contrasts with that of Democratic elites and Biden, who critique President Trump based on his policies (see Project 2025), labeling him a potential dictator and a threat to democracy. This critique remains within the bounds of normal political discourse and does not dehumanize political opponents or other demographic groups, as Trump's rhetoric frequently does. Such rhetoric has become "normal" and mainstream within the Republican Party but remains either non-existent or exceptionally rare among Democrats. This clearly indicates an asymmetric radicalization of our political discourse.
  • The ideological positioning of the two parties also reflects this asymmetry. Empirical analyses by notable U.S. political scientists show that the Republicans have moved significantly further to the right ideologically compared to the leftward shift of the Democrats. In certain segments, the ideological positions of MAGA representatives in Congress no longer fit within this spectrum, having departed from democratic norms.
  • Republicans have successfully shifted the discourse to place equal blame on both sides for polarization and radicalization, but this narrative does not reflect reality and must be addressed. It is the right-wing political spectrum and its associated media network that questions fundamental pillars of democracy and the rule of law. Similar challenges are not found within the left-wing political spectrum
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • What the Republicans denounce as Marxist or socialist would be considered moderate social democracy in Germany. Since the 1980s and 1990s, with figures like Pat Buchanan and Newt Gingrich, political radicalization has been a deliberate strategy to mobilize their voter base. Right-wing media significantly amplify this strategy. Without understanding this context, meaningful solutions to the problem cannot be found
  • Currently, it is the right that is mounting a fundamental assault on the system of checks and balances in the United States. They seek to greatly enhance the powers of the executive branch through the presidency, drastically reduce the size of the administration while ensuring loyalty to the president, expand presidential influence over the judiciary, and eliminate the independence of law enforcement and security agencies. These goals run counter to longstanding U.S. political traditions and the ideas of the Founding Fathers.
Javier E

Is the World Actually in Moral Decline? Researchers Study 'Hell in a Handbasket' Thinki... - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...line-study-psychology-8635c34b

moral decline study research culture pessimism human nature

shared by Javier E on 12 Aug 24 - No Cached
  • The researchers examined decades of studies, some dating as far back as the 1940s, measuring things like empathy, kindness, respect and generosity. They found that although people have been decrying a moral decline for generations, their behavior toward one another really hasn’t changed.
  • Yet when the researchers looked at actual behaviors over time, they found something different. Year after year, people reported that others do nice things for them. And they do nice things for others.
  • Mastroianni and a colleague, Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert, tried to assess whether people think morality is declining, and then whether it actually is. 
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • First, they examined research going back decades from 60 countries, asking people whether they thought others were less friendly, honest, kind or good than they used to be. The studies included approximately 575,000 participants.
  • Then they looked at research probing how people behave toward one another. The studies asked people whether, for instance, They had recently been treated with respect, done something nice for someone else or donated to charity. 
  • A remarkably consistent portion of people over the years—around 60%—have believed that people are less good now than they were in the past. They also have believed that the moral decline began in their lifetime.
  • Psychologists call this the Fading Affect Bias and say it makes life more tolerable by helping us defang our bad experiences over time and cherish the good ones.
  • They also consistently said that their own friends and family members behave better than ever. (Don’t be so surprised. “We ignore their flaws to sustain the relationships,” says Waterloo’s Eibach.)
  • Why do we believe that society is worse than it is? It’s partly the way our brains pay attention. We have a negativity bias. We pay much more attention to bad events or emotions than good ones. This is a survival instinct; we need to detect threats. 
  • “The strategy that keeps me vigilant on whether the lion is going to get me keeps me seeing threats everywhere,” says Julia DiGangi, a neuropsychologist in Chicago.
  • Memory might play a part, too. We often remember the past more fondly than is perhaps warranted. That is because the emotional power of a positive experience stays with us longer than the emotional power of a negative one.
  • “People think the world has gone to hell in a handbasket,” says Adam Mastroianni, an experimental psychologist and lead author on the study. “But as far as we can tell it’s just the same as it always was.” The title of the study: “The Illusion of Moral Decline.”
  • Getting older might change our perceptions, too. People often see the world as more dangerous and risky during life transitions such as becoming an adult or a parent,
  • “Being in a role of responsibility makes people hyper-responsive to misconduct,” says Waterloo’s Eibach, who conducted the research. “And we don’t realize that the world didn’t change—we did.”
  • There’s a danger to believing that people are getting worse when that’s not really true. That belief distracts us from real problems that need to be solved. It makes us susceptible to people in power who want us to believe the worst so they can claim to be the only one who can fix it. And it keeps us from connecting with each other.
  • “If we believe the worst in people, we treat them in terrible ways,” says Jamil Zaki, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, who has a book coming out on cynicism. “And then we bring out the worst in them.”
  • His advice: Fact-check your assumptions about others
  • Talk more about the positive things people do, a practice he calls “positive gossip.”
  • And take a leap of faith on someone: Ask a neighbor for help, give an employee more responsibility, talk to a stranger.
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