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Javier E

The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (Hainish Cycle Book 5) (Ursula K. Le Guin) - 0 views

DIIGO_FILE_HOME/7ui9/4bb11954c3f3388cdb74b4e243e8f2db

book notes book science fiction utopianism idealism

shared by Javier E on 18 Dec 18 - No Cached
  • instead of merely looking at it from outside. He took on two seminars and an open lecture course. No teaching was requested of him, but he had asked if he could teach, and the administrators had arranged the seminars. The open class was neither his idea nor theirs. A delegation of students came and asked him to give it. He consented at once. This was how courses were organized in Anarresti learning centers by student demand, or on the teacher’s initiative, or by students and teachers together. When he found that the administrators were upset, he laughed. “Do they expect students not to be anarchists?” he said. “What else can the young be? When you are on the bottom, you must organize from the bottom up!” He had no intention of being administered out of the course—he had fought this kind of battle before—and because he communicated his firmness to the students, they held firm. To avoid unpleasant publicity, the Rectors of the University gave in, and Shevek began his course to a first-cay audience of two thousand. Attendance soon dropped. He stuck to physics, never going off into the personal or the political, and it was physics on a pretty advanced level. But several hundred students continued to come. Some came out of mere curiosity, to see the man from the Moon; others were drawn by Shevek’s personality, by the glimpses of the man and the libertarian which they could catch from his words even when they could not follow his mathematics. And a surprising number of them were capable of following both the philosophy and the mathematics. They were superbly trained, these students. Their minds were fine, keen, ready. When they weren’t working, they rested. They were not blunted and distracted by a dozen other obligations. They never fell asleep in class because they were tired from having worked on rotational duty the day before. Their society maintained them in complete freedom from want, distractions, and cares. What they were free to do, however, was another question. It appeared to Shevek that their freedom from obligation was in exact proportion to their lack of freedom of initiative. He was appalled by the examination system, when it was explained to him; he could not imagine a greater deterrent to the natural wish to learn than this pattern of cramming in information and disgorging it at demand. At first he refused to give any tests or grades, but this upset the University administrators so badly that, not wishing to be discourteous to his hosts, he gave in. He asked his students to write a paper on any problem in physics that interested them, and told them that he would give them all the highest mark, so that the bureaucrats would have something to write on their forms and lists. To his surprise a good many students came to him to complain. They wanted him to set the problems, to ask the right questions; they did not want to think about questions, but to write down the answers they had learned. And some of them objected strongly to his giving everyone the same mark. How could the diligent students be distinguished from the dull ones? What was the good in working hard? If no competitive distinctions were to be made, one might as well do nothing. “Well, of course,” Shevek said, troubled. “If you do not want to do the work, you should not do it.” The boys went away unappeased, but polite. They were pleasant boys, with frank and civil manners. Shevek’s readings in Urrasti history led him to decide that they were, in fact, though the word was seldom used these days, aristocrats. In feudal times the aristocracy had sent their sons to university, conferring superiority on the institution. Nowadays it was the other way round: the university conferred superiority on the man. They told Shevek with pride that the competition for scholarships to Ieu Eun was stiffer every year, proving the essential democracy of the institution. He said, “You put another lock on the door and call it democracy.” He liked his polite, intelligent students, but he felt no great warmth towards any of them. They were planning careers as academic or industrial scientists, and what they learned from him was to them a means to that end, success in their careers. They either had, or denied the importance of, anything else he might have offered them.
  • Shevek touched her, silver arm with his silver hand, marveling at the warmth of the touch in that cool light. “If you can see a thing whole,” he said, “it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives. . . . But close up, a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.”
  • instead of merely looking at it from outside. He took on two seminars and an open lecture course. No teaching was requested of him, but he had asked if he could teach, and the administrators had arranged the seminars. The open class was neither his idea nor theirs. A delegation of students came and asked him to give it. He consented at once. This was how courses were organized in Anarresti learning centers by student demand, or on the teacher’s initiative, or by students and teachers together. When he found that the administrators were upset, he laughed. “Do they expect students not to be anarchists?” he said. “What else can the young be? When you are on the bottom, you must organize from the bottom up!” He had no intention of being administered out of the course—he had fought this kind of battle before—and because he communicated his firmness to the students, they held firm. To avoid unpleasant publicity, the Rectors of the University gave in, and Shevek began his course to a first-cay audience of two thousand. Attendance soon dropped. He stuck to physics, never going off into the personal or the political, and it was physics on a pretty advanced level. But several hundred students continued to come. Some came out of mere curiosity, to see the man from the Moon; others were drawn by Shevek’s personality, by the glimpses of the man and the libertarian which they could catch from his words even when they could not follow his mathematics. And a surprising number of them were capable of following both the philosophy and the mathematics. They were superbly trained, these students. Their minds were fine, keen, ready. When they weren’t working, they rested. They were not blunted and distracted by a dozen other obligations. They never fell asleep in class because they were tired from having worked on rotational duty the day before. Their society maintained them in complete freedom from want, distractions, and cares. What they were free to do, however, was another question. It appeared to Shevek that their freedom from obligation was in exact proportion to their lack of freedom of initiative. He was appalled by the examination system, when it was explained to him; he could not imagine a greater deterrent to the natural wish to learn than this pattern of cramming in information and disgorging it at demand. At first he refused to give any tests or grades, but this upset the University administrators so badly that, not wishing to be discourteous to his hosts, he gave in. He asked his students to write a paper on any problem in physics that interested them, and told them that he would give them all the highest mark, so that the bureaucrats would have something to write on their forms and lists. To his surprise a good many students came to him to complain. They wanted him to set the problems, to ask the right questions; they did not want to think about questions, but to write down the answers they had learned. And some of them objected strongly to his giving…
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • He found himself, therefore, with no duties at all beyond the preparation of his three classes; the rest of his time was all his own. He had not been in a situation like this since his early twenties, his first years at the Institute in Abbenay. Since those years his social and personal life had got more and more complicated and demanding. He had been not only a physicist but also a partner, a father, an Odonian, and finally a social reformer. As such, he had not been sheltered, and had expected no shelter, from whatever cares and responsibilities came to him. He had not been free from anything: only free to do anything. Here, it was the other way around. Like all the students and professors, he had nothing to do but his intellectual work, literally nothing. The beds were made for them, the rooms were swept for them, the routine of the college was managed for them, the way was made plain for them.
  • she was not a temporal physicist. She saw time naïvely as a road laid out. You walked ahead, and you got somewhere. If you were lucky, you got somewhere worth getting to. But when Shevek took her metaphor and recast it in his terms, explaining that, unless the past and the future were made part of the present by memory and intention, there was, in human terms, no road, nowhere to go, she nodded before he was half done. “Exactly,” she said. “That’s what I was doing these last four years. It isn’t all luck. Just partly.”
  • Shevek touched her, silver arm with his silver hand, marveling at the warmth of the touch in that cool light. “If you can see a thing whole,” he said, “it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives. . . . But close up, a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.”
  • all. Odo wrote: “A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skillful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well—this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection, and of sociality as a whole.” There was an undercurrent of joy, in that sense, in Abbenay that summer. There was a lightheartedness at work however hard the work, a
  • Fulfillment, Shevek thought, is a function of time. The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal. The variety seeking of the spectator, the thrill hunter, the sexually promiscuous, always ends in the same place. It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell. Outside the locked room is the landscape of time, in which the spirit may, with luck and courage, construct the fragile, makeshift, improbable roads and cities of fidelity: a landscape inhabitable by human beings. It is not until an act occurs within the landscape of the past and the future that it is a human act. Loyalty, which asserts the continuity of past and future, binding time into a whole, is the root of human strength; there is no good to be done without it. So, looking back on the last four years, Shevek saw them not as wasted, but as part of the edifice that he and Takver were building with their lives. The thing about working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts.
Javier E

Racial Divisions Exist Among Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...583267

American idea race diversity identity survey politics

shared by Javier E on 21 Feb 19 - No Cached
  • Contra Barack Obama, there is a white America and a black America. There are also varying versions of Latino and Hispanic Americas across different regions of the country. There are robust, enduring differences in belief across races and communities about just what America’s identity should be and how politics are experienced, and they in turn create the political reality of the countr
  • these differences might be structural, informed by the basic fact of human geography, a geography itself built on the fact of American apartheid.
  • The PRRI/Atlantic poll, a random survey of slightly more than 1,000 people taken in December, reveals major differences among racial groups on some of the basic questions about what makes America America, and what makes Americans so
  • ...26 more annotations...
  • Other polls also show black voters increasingly concerned about racism. White voters might be moving in the other direction, and philosophically seem to be deprioritizing the importance of diversity in favor of an embrace of capitalism, nationalism, and individual liberty
  • The majority of black and Hispanic people do think that speaking English is at least a somewhat important component of Americanness, but almost a tenth of both groups think it’s not important at al
  • black and Hispanic respondents are much more likely than whites to say that belief in God is a very important component of a specific American identity.
  • Seventy-six percent of white people and 74 percent of Hispanics think that civil liberties such as freedom of speech are very important pieces of American identity, while only 61 percent of black respondents feel so
  • More than half of black respondents think that a belief in capitalism isn’t a very important part of that identity, while good majorities of both white and Hispanic people think that it’s either somewhat important or very important
  • Forty-five percent of Hispanic respondents said that racial, ethnic, and religious diversity make the country much stronger, compared with 32 percent of whites
  • white respondents are most likely to say that diversity makes the country weaker, or to be ambivalent about the idea of diversity altogether.
  • the small but influential sliver of black conservatives who identify as Republican appears to be diminishing, as the increasing influence of Trumpism and the alt-right of the modern GOP have made the Republican Party more and more openly hostile to black voters.
  • Latino voters have increasingly made opposing the GOP agenda a top political priority in the age of President Donald Trump
  • 40 percent of Hispanic respondents think that a potential citizenship question would be used for checking individuals’ immigration status as opposed to counting the population. Black respondents, on the other hand, are the least likely to buy the stated rationale for the question, and only 17 percent believe that it will be used for the sole purpose of counting the population
  • The profiles of the Republican and Democratic parties have shifted accordingl
  • In the 2018 midterm elections, Democrats elected one of the most racially diverse incoming classes of legislators since Reconstruction, and a diverse field of potential presidential contenders revolves around a multifaceted policy debate that’s heavily influenced by progressive ideas
  • Republicans have had to shape their party around explicit appeals to white voters and their anxieties, and have had to build an electoral strategy that can promote low overall turnout and stoke white grievances
  • In short, Democrats have cultivated an image as the party of racial and cultural pluralism, while Republicans have rejected pluralism as a viable strategy.
  • Majorities of both white and Hispanic respondents also favor the minimum-wage increase, but not at the numbers or with the fervor of black people
  • black and Hispanic respondents are also much more likely to strongly favor stricter gun-control laws than whites
  • black respondents are the most likely racial group to support providing pathways to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants currently living in the United States.
  • Six percent of black people and 7 percent of Hispanic people reported that they or someone else in their household did not have the proper voter identification the last time they went to vote, a small proportion but one much higher than the 1 percent of white respondents who said they’d had similar problems.
  • Nineteen percent of black people and 14 percent of Hispanic people said they’d had to wait in long lines, as opposed to 9 percent of whites
  • they come after a 2018 midterm election in which claims of voter suppression and major civil-rights lawsuits came to define elections in places such as Georgia, Kansas, and North Dakota.
  • A strong majority of white respondents—59 percent—think that speaking English is a very important part of being American.
  • These numbers track with the Census Bureau’s recent approximation that more than 600,000 households would fail to complete the census because of the question
  • these results from PRRI and The Atlantic shed new light on fundamental questions
  • They illustrate that the so-called demographic destiny of America is one that would look radically different should the country become majority nonwhite sometime in the next 20 or 30 years. The data indicate that white, black, and Hispanic voters have markedly divergent ideas on what exactly makes the American identity, and they also indicate that these differences are enforced and entrenched via spatial and social segregation
  • the data also cast some doubt on the political prospects of that demographic destiny. They show that black and Hispanic voters are more likely to be carved out of the political process, and that those efforts are perhaps aided by the existing regime of segregation
  • they show that the competing visions of America, as separated by race and region, are indeed competing, and that they are the chessboard upon which all politics is played.
Javier E

The Census Case Is About White Man's Government - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...590977

census case supreme court white supremacy

shared by Javier E on 05 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • Roberts didn’t call the Voting Rights Act a “racial entitlement.” Rather, he insisted that while he agreed with the law’s intentions—“any discrimination in voting is too much,” he wrote—close federal oversight of local election laws to prevent discrimination was no longer warranted. “Things have changed dramatically,” Roberts concluded. Shortly thereafter, Republican-controlled states moved as quickly as possible to impose restrictions on voting targeted at minority communities, as if determined to make Roberts look a fool or a liar.
  • The disparate approaches taken by two of the Court’s conservatives to the Voting Rights Act reflect the right’s dueling impulses toward civil-rights laws.
  • Where Scalia rejected the very effort to guarantee black people the same right to cast a ballot as white people as a “racial entitlement,” Roberts insisted that he agreed with the law’s underlying premises, but that the statute now did more harm than good.
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  • Lingering beneath the surface was a defining question for the American right: Does it agree with Roberts that “any discrimination in voting is too much”? Or with Scalia, who saw ensuring equal participation in the polity as a black “racial entitlement”?
  • Empirical studies of the impact of adding the question have determined that it would result in a dramatic undercount of Latinos and immigrants—exactly contrary to one of the Donald Trump administration’s stated rationales, that it would provide a more accurate count.
  • Scalia didn’t quite have it right: The fundamental question for American democracy since the founding has indeed been whether it is a “racial entitlement,” but only because of those who have tried for centuries to ensure that white people alone are entitled to it.
  • The Trump administration, and by extension, the conservative masses, are already on board
  • In other words, long before Trump was even elected, Republican Party insiders were plotting to increase white political power at the expense of people of color. After Trump was elected, they implemented this plan by insisting that their actual goal was the protection of minority voting rights. As with the Voting Rights Act, there was the real reason and the stated reason, the truth and the pretext. The nationalism, and the delusion.
  • Trumpism merely traveled a few stops down the road from where the Republican Party leadership had been. The risk with Trump was not that the GOP would become a vehicle for the preservation of white political and cultural hegemony; it was that he would discredit that project by making its agenda explicit, by saying, as Scalia did, the quiet part loud.
  • The census case does not hinge on whether the citizenship question is discriminatory. Rather, as a matter of administrative law, the executive branch must follow certain procedures before making decisions. The Trump administration’s blatant dishonesty settles the question of whether it followed procedure definitively: It did not.
  • The census case is not ultimately about administrative procedure; it is, more fundamentally, about whether the Trump administration can use the federal government for the explicit purpose of increasing white political power.
  • recent revelations in the census case will force the Roberts Court to decide whether America is a nation for all of its citizens, or a white man’s republic.
  • Even before William F. Buckley declared in 1957 that “the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically,” the modern conservative movement has struggled to reconcile the ethno-nationalism that moves masses of its voters with the pluralism embodied in the notion that all persons are created equ
malonema1

FACT CHECK: Has Citizenship Been A Standard Census Question? : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...een-a-standard-census-question

US culture policy

shared by malonema1 on 01 May 18 - No Cached
  • After a controversial decision by the Department of Commerce to add a question about U.S. citizenship to the 2020 census, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders defended the move as nothing out of the ordinary.
  • In 1970, the Census Bureau began sending around two questionnaires: a short-form questionnaire to gather basic population information and a long form that asked detailed questions about everything from household income to plumbing. The short form went to most households in America. The long form was sent to a much smaller sample of households, 1 in 6. Most people didn't get it.
  • The state of California has already sued to block the addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 census, and New York's state attorney general has announced plans for a multistate lawsuit. The concern expressed by states with large undocumented immigrant populations is that asking about citizenship will scare people off, forms won't get filled out and the count won't be accurate, affecting federal funding and the number of congressional seats. (The Census Bureau is legally required to keep answers confidential, even from the FBI and other government entities. That means it isn't allowed to release data identifying an individual. But federal agencies and researchers can request census information on specific population groups.)
  • malonema1 on 01 May 18
     
    " "
anonymous

Justice Barrett Joins Supreme Court Arguments For The First Time : NPR - 1 views

www.npr.org/...t-arguments-for-the-first-time

shared by anonymous on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • she asked questions in turn in a set of cases that presented difficult procedural questions but no headlines.
  • Barrett could well be forgiven for bowing out of the court's work last week, with six days to prep before her Monday debut.
  • Barrett's choice to forgo participating last week meant she did not vote in two significant cases decided by the court in opinions released Monday.
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • even if his role in leading the protest onto the highway was negligent, it couldn't make him personally liable for the actions of an individual whose only association to him was attendance at the protest.
  • On Monday, the Supreme Court threw out the suit for now, declaring that the 5th Circuit's interpretation of state law "is too uncertain a premise on which to address" the question currently at issue.
  • any reasonable officer should have realized that Taylor's conditions of confinement offended the Constitution,
  • whether Louisiana would permit such a suit.
  • In a second case — involving cruel and unusual punishment of a prisoner — the justices also repudiated a 5th Circuit decision.
  • the prison officers responsible for this treatment could not be sued because the law "wasn't clearly established" that "prisoners "couldn't be housed in cells teaming with human waste" "for only six days." Thus, the 5th Circuit granted the officers qualified immunity from being sued.
  • The constitutional question — namely whether such a suit violated the First Amendment guarantee of free speech — is only raised if Louisiana law in fact permits such a suit in the first place,
  • The telephone format allows each justice only a few minutes to ask questions so there was no way to compare Barrett's questioning with other newbies in recent years.
  • New Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett heard her first oral arguments at the Supreme Court on Monday. Participating by phone with the other justices
  • Barrett could well be forgiven for bowing out of the court's work last week, with six days to prep before her Monday debut. But Chief Justice John Roberts also had just six days to prepare in 2005
  • Barrett's choice to forgo participating last week meant she did not vote in two significant cases decided by the court in opinions released Monday.
  • In an important First Amendment case involving a Black Lives Matter protest, the court sided with activist DeRay Mckesson in his effort to avoid a lawsuit by a police officer who was severely injured by an unknown assailant.
  • On Monday, the Supreme Court threw out the suit for now, declaring that the 5th Circuit's interpretation of state law "is too uncertain a premise on which to address"
  • Acknowledging these "exceptional circumstances," the high court, in essence, then asked the Louisiana Supreme Court to decide what the state law actually is — in short, whether Louisiana would permit such a suit.
  • This one involved a Texas state prisoner, Trent Taylor, who alleged that for six days in 2013 he was held in what the court called "shockingly unsanitary cells."
  • Taylor did not eat or drink for nearly four days. Correctional officers then moved Taylor to a second, frigidly cold cell, which was equipped with only a clogged drain in the floor to dispose of bodily wastes.
  • Because the cell lacked a bunk, and because Taylor was confined without clothing, he was left to sleep naked in sewage."
  • the Supreme Court noted that the 5th Circuit "properly held that such conditions ... violate the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment."
  • went on to say that the prison officers responsible for this treatment could not be sued because the law "wasn't clearly established" that "prisoners "couldn't be housed in cells teaming with human waste" "for only six days."
Javier E

Book review - The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity | The Inquisitive Biolo... - 0 views

inquisitivebiologist.com/...hing-a-new-history-of-humanity

book review history big history anthropology archaeology inequality slavery

shared by Javier E on 02 Oct 22 - No Cached
  • Every few years, it seems, there is a new bestselling Big History book. And not infrequently, they have rather grandiose titles.
  • , I hope to convince you why I think this book will stand the test of time better.
  • First, rather than one author’s pet theory, The Dawn of Everything is the brainchild of two outspoken writers: anthropologist David Graeber (a figurehead in the Occupy Wall Street movement and author of e.g. Bullshit Jobs) and archaeologist David Wengrow (author of e.g. What Makes Civilization?). I expect a large part of their decade-long collaboration consisted of shooting holes in each other’s arguments
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • ather than yet another history book telling you how humanity got here, they take their respective disciplines to task for dealing in myths.
  • this thought-provoking book is armed to the teeth with fascinating ideas and interpretations that go against mainstream thinking
  • Colonisation exposed us to new ideas that shocked and confused us. Graeber & Wengrow focus on the French coming into contact with Native Americans in Canada, and in particular on Wendat Confederacy philosopher–statesman Kandiaronk as an example of European traders, missionaries, and intellectuals debating with, and being criticized by indigenous people. Historians have downplayed how much these encounters shaped Enlightenment ideas.
  • Its legacy, shaped via several iterations, is the modern textbook narrative: hunter-gathering was replaced by pastoralism and then farming; the agricultural revolution resulted in larger populations producing material surpluses; these allowed for specialist occupations but also needed bureaucracies to share and administer them to everyone; and this top-down control led to today’s nation states. Ta-daa!
  • And cities did not automatically imply social stratification. The Dawn of Everything fascinates with its numerous examples of large settlements without ruling classes, such as Ukrainian mega-sites, the Harappan civilization, or Mexican city-states.
  • ake agriculture. Rather than humans enthusiastically entering into what Harari in Sapiens called a Faustian bargain with crops, there were many pathways and responses
  • Experiments show that plant domestication could have been achieved in as little as 20–30 years, so the fact that cereal domestication here took some 3,000 years questions the notion of an agricultural “revolution”. Lastly, this book includes many examples of areas where agriculture was purposefully rejected. Designating such times and places as “pre-agricultural” is misleading, write the authors, they were anti-agricultural.
  • The idea that agriculture led to large states similarly needs revision
  • correlation is not causation, and some 15–20 additional centres of domestication have since been identified that followed different paths. Some cities have previously remained hidden in the sediments of ancient river deltas until revealed by modern remote-sensing technology.
  • “extensive agriculture may thus have been an outcome, not a cause, of urbanization”
  • this simplistic tale of progress ignores and downplays that there was nothing linear or inevitable about where we have ended up.
  • These instead relied on collective decision-making through assemblies or councils, which questions some of the assumptions of evolutionary psychology about scale: that larger human groups require complex (i.e. hierarchical) systems to organize them.
  • e what is staring them in the face
  • humans have always been very capable of consciously experimenting with different social arrangements. And—this is rarely acknowledged—they did so on a seasonal basis, spending e.g. part of the year settled in large communal groups under a leader, and another part as small, independently roving bands.
  • Throughout, Graeber & Wengrow convincingly argue that the only thing we can say about our ancestors is that “there is no single pattern. The only consistent phenomenon is the very fact of alteration […] If human beings, through most of our history, have moved back and forth fluidly between different social arrangements […] maybe the real question should be ‘how did we get stuck?
  • Next to criticism, the authors put out some interesting ideas of their own, of which I want to quickly highlight two.
  • The first is that some of the observed variations in social arrangements resulted from schismogenesis. Anthropologist Gregory Bateson coined this term in the 1930s to describe how people define themselves against or in opposition to others, adopting behaviours and attitudes that are different.
  • The second idea is that states can be described in terms of three elementary forms of domination: control of violence, control of information, and individual charisma, which express themselves as sovereignty, administration, and competitive politics.
  • Our current states combine these three, and thus we have state-endorsed violence in the form of law enforcement and armies, bureaucracy, and the popularity contests we call elections in some countries, and monarchs, oligarchs, or tyrants in other countries. But looking at history, there is no reason why this should be and the authors provide examples of societies that showed only one or two such forms of control
  • Asking which past society most resembles today’s is the wrong question to ask. It risks slipping into an exercise in retrofitting, “which makes us scour the ancient world for embryonic versions of our modern nation states”
  • I have left unmentioned several other topics: the overlooked role of women, the legacy of Rousseau’s and Hobbes’s ideas, the origins of inequality and the flawed assumptions hiding behind that question
  • There are so many historical details and delights hiding between these covers that I was thoroughly enthralle
  • If you have any interest in big history, archaeology, or anthropology, this book is indispensable. I am confident that the questions and critiques raised here will remain relevant for a long time to come.
  • I was particularly impressed by the in-depth critique by worbsintowords on his YouTube channel What is Politics? of (so far) five videos
julia rhodes

Analyses - The Debate Over How To Deal With North Korea | Kim's Nuclear Gamble | FRONTL... - 0 views

www.pbs.org/...debate.html

debate north korea kim pbs US politics history bush policy economic culture

shared by julia rhodes on 26 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • It was a playing field on which we were expected to pay the North Koreans not to do dangerous things, and that is not a sound basis for a policy.
  • When Bush won the presidency, talks [with North Korea] ceased immediately. The criticism that comes from the Clinton camp is that there was no continuity in policy.
  • I honestly don't see how, looking back, the architects of that agreement can hold the Bush administration culpable for behavior that, in retrospect, should make us reconsider whether the original Framework Agreement was a sensible idea.
    • julia rhodes
      julia rhodes on 26 Feb 13
       
      hmm
  • ...34 more annotations...
  • The criticism of the Bush administration would be that it, in all of this tough talk and rebuffing the Sunshine Policy, that they have failed to get to the negotiating table and that things have only gotten worse.
  • It is the policy of the government of North Korea, in my judgment, to use its capacity to do harm to elicit support from those who might be harmed by actions they would agree not to take
  • The Sunshine Policy, we now know, involves a lot less sunshine, a lot less light than heat -- massive payments, as I understand it -- in order to stage meetings that have political ramifications within South Korea, without any significant movement by the North Koreans in any direction that's any way helpful. So the Sunshine Policy has simply not succeeded. It's a failure.
    • julia rhodes
      julia rhodes on 26 Feb 13
       
      Every prison camp escapee urges governments to not give anything to North Korea
  • Well, just a much more zero-sum view of the world. ...
  • But the situation is quite different here, in that a strike on Yongbyon is likely to produce another Korean War, with hundreds of thousands, if not over a million, people dead.Well, we don't know whether it would produce another Korean War. But that's a risk.
  • I think that we had a different view of what the 21st century could be like, with much more of a sense, from our perspective, of trying to have an interdependent world, looking at solving regional conflicts, having strength in alliances, operating within some kind of a sense that we were part of the international community and not outside of it. And I just think that basically many of them, saw the world quite differently.
  • The so-called "Perry approach" was focused primarily on WMD -- did not embrace changes in the conventional force alignment, or did not embrace human rights issues.
    • julia rhodes
      julia rhodes on 26 Feb 13
       
      NOOO!
  • because what we are insisting on is that the regional powers get more involved.
  • Now, this is a tough issue because there's no question that the Chinese should be interested in whether there's a nuclear Korean peninsula, and I know that one of the things the administration wants to do is to get the Chinese to take more responsibility for this.
  • what should happen is that the North Koreans should freeze whatever they're doing, and we should freeze whatever military buildup and various things we're doing in the area in order to negotiate something new, which would be beyond the Agreed Framework.
  • The Bush administration is saying we shouldn't have to give them anything. They're violating the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, they're in defiance of the world. They should be held to task; that appeasement leads to more aggressive behavior.
  • It's not a concession. ... I think that I would not give concessions. There's no reason to. What you do is that you have various quid pro quos in any agreement, but if you decide up front that just having the direct talks is a concession, you're pretty much stuck. That's the problem.
  • I completely disagree because I believe that it is essential to see whether there's a way to have some agreements. We talked to Stalin, we talked to Mao, we talked to Khrushchev, and Brezhnev. We made agreements. I don't consider talking appeasement
  • They wanted that reiterated. As far as I know, we have no hostile intent towards North Korea. Why would it have been such a big deal just to reiterate that? It's things like that where this administration has kind of dug its heels in and said anything that we did vis-a-vis North Korea is appeasement.
  • A concession, at least to me, is if one side concedes and the other doesn't. I mean, I think that there are ways that there are things we want, and there are things that they want.
  • Why are we doing in Iraq what we're not trying to do in North Korea?
  • I think that's an exaggeration. The clear policy of our government is that we find nuclear weapons in North Korea to be unacceptable and intolerable. Nobody wants nuclear weapons in North Korea. So why not talk to them?
  • I believe the [Agreed Framework] would have been more effective if other players had been more directly involved.
  • They just want to talk to the United States.Well, do we have to give them what they want all the time?
  • I was surprised. I'm not surprised some people in the administration thought that. I'm surprised they'd take that policy approach to North Korea. I thought it was counterproductive.
  • t may be therapeutic for us to to talk that way, but does not accomplish our objectives, and does not enhance our security. Indeed, as it's turning out, I think it's putting it in some danger
  • I think it's quite possible that the North Koreans have already decided that they're going to become a declared nuclear state and that no amount of dialogue will stop them from that.
  • The world is running out of time.
  • For us to strike militarily at North Korea, given the risk that we would be incurring for South Korea, would be one of the most immoral acts conceivable. So we are left then, with only the option of engaging with them.
  • But, yes, it's extortion, and we're rewarding bad behavior. But much of diplomacy is rewarding bad behavior. You're trying to figure out how you can stop the worst of the behavior at the lowest-possible price
  • I think they've not accomplished much that's good.
  • preemptive war, preventive war -- kind of runs up against its match in the Korean peninsula?
  • One of the lines of debate in pursuing Korean policy is whether our focus should be on nonproliferation or whether our focus should be on regional stability. These are two different ways of looking at the North Korean problem.
  • And that's the whole problem with one, the axis of evil concept and two, the doctrine, if it is a doctrine, of preemptive deterrence. That there are some things that you can't preemptively deter. And North Korea I think is a classic example. ...
    • julia rhodes
      julia rhodes on 26 Feb 13
       
      EXACTLY!
  • I think the North Koreans are truly concerned about their security.
  • I think they're worried about the survival of their regime, independent of what we would do, because they know that they are in deep trouble, in terms of their economy.
  • Those who criticize the deal because they cheated on it, I think are not understanding the nature of international politics. We have done deals with people who we expected might well cheat. And indeed, the Soviet Union cheated on all kinds of deals, massively in the biological weapons convention. You look at the deal and say
  • And if it worked, I'd have no problem with it. There's nothing wrong with the rhetoric. The problem is, it hasn't.
  • "We don't talk to these rogue regimes," and feel good about that, people may die because you failed to deal with this in an effective way, in a diplomatic way. It is not a concession, in my view, to the North Koreans to pay for performance on their part. You can call it a concession. You can call it appeasement. It is dealing with the problem as it is. It is preferable to me than the use of force.
Javier E

How Donald Trump Could Build an Autocracy in the U.S. - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...513872

autocracy trump politics

shared by Javier E on 09 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • Everything imagined above—and everything described below—is possible only if many people other than Donald Trump agree to permit it. It can all be stopped, if individual citizens and public officials make the right choices. The story told here, like that told by Charles Dickens’s Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, is a story not of things that will be, but of things that may be. Other paths remain open. It is up to Americans to decide which one the country will follow.
  • What is spreading today is repressive kleptocracy, led by rulers motivated by greed rather than by the deranged idealism of Hitler or Stalin or Mao. Such rulers rely less on terror and more on rule-twisting, the manipulation of information, and the co-optation of elites.
  • the American system is also perforated by vulnerabilities no less dangerous for being so familiar. Supreme among those vulnerabilities is reliance on the personal qualities of the man or woman who wields the awesome powers of the presidency.
  • ...51 more annotations...
  • The president of the United States, on the other hand, is restrained first and foremost by his own ethics and public spirit. What happens if somebody comes to the high office lacking those qualities?
  • Donald Trump, however, represents something much more radical. A president who plausibly owes his office at least in part to a clandestine intervention by a hostile foreign intelligence service? Who uses the bully pulpit to target individual critics? Who creates blind trusts that are not blind, invites his children to commingle private and public business, and somehow gets the unhappy members of his own political party either to endorse his choices or shrug them off? If this were happening in Honduras, we’d know what to call it. It’s happening here instead, and so we are baffled.
  • As politics has become polarized, Congress has increasingly become a check only on presidents of the opposite party. Recent presidents enjoying a same-party majority in Congress—Barack Obama in 2009 and 2010, George W. Bush from 2003 through 2006—usually got their way.
  • Trump has scant interest in congressional Republicans’ ideas, does not share their ideology, and cares little for their fate. He can—and would—break faith with them in an instant to further his own interests. Yet here they are, on the verge of achieving everything they have hoped to achieve for years, if not decades. They owe this chance solely to Trump’s ability to deliver a crucial margin of votes in a handful of states—Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—which has provided a party that cannot win the national popular vote a fleeting opportunity to act as a decisive national majority.
  • What excites Trump is his approval rating, his wealth, his power. The day could come when those ends would be better served by jettisoning the institutional Republican Party in favor of an ad hoc populist coalition, joining nationalism to generous social spending—a mix that’s worked well for authoritarians in places like Poland.
  • A scandal involving the president could likewise wreck everything that Republican congressional leaders have waited years to accomplish. However deftly they manage everything else, they cannot prevent such a scandal. But there is one thing they can do: their utmost not to find out about it.
  • Ryan has learned his prudence the hard way. Following the airing of Trump’s past comments, caught on tape, about his forceful sexual advances on women, Ryan said he’d no longer campaign for Trump. Ryan’s net favorability rating among Republicans dropped by 28 points in less than 10 days. Once unassailable in the party, he suddenly found himself disliked by 45 percent of Republicans.
  • Ambition will counteract ambition only until ambition discovers that conformity serves its goals better. At that time, Congress, the body expected to check presidential power, may become the president’s most potent enabler.
  • Discipline within the congressional ranks will be strictly enforced not only by the party leadership and party donors, but also by the overwhelming influence of Fox News.
  • Fox learned its lesson: Trump sells; critical coverage does not. Since the election, the network has awarded Kelly’s former 9 p.m. time slot to Tucker Carlson, who is positioning himself as a Trump enthusiast in the Hannity mold.
  • Gingrich said: The president “has, frankly, the power of the pardon. It is a totally open power, and he could simply say, ‘Look, I want them to be my advisers. I pardon them if anybody finds them to have behaved against the rules. Period.’ And technically, under the Constitution, he has that level of authority.”
  • In 2009, in the run-up to the Tea Party insurgency, South Carolina’s Bob Inglis crossed Fox, criticizing Glenn Beck and telling people at a town-hall meeting that they should turn his show off. He was drowned out by booing, and the following year, he lost his primary with only 29 percent of the vote, a crushing repudiation for an incumbent untouched by any scandal.
  • Fox is reinforced by a carrier fleet of supplementary institutions: super pacs, think tanks, and conservative web and social-media presences, which now include such former pariahs as Breitbart and Alex Jones. So long as the carrier fleet coheres—and unless public opinion turns sharply against the president—oversight of Trump by the Republican congressional majority will very likely be cautious, conditional, and limited.
  • His immediate priority seems likely to be to use the presidency to enrich himself. But as he does so, he will need to protect himself from legal risk. Being Trump, he will also inevitably wish to inflict payback on his critics. Construction of an apparatus of impunity and revenge will begin haphazardly and opportunistically. But it will accelerate. It will have to.
  • By filling the media space with bizarre inventions and brazen denials, purveyors of fake news hope to mobilize potential supporters with righteous wrath—and to demoralize potential opponents by nurturing the idea that everybody lies and nothing matters
  • The United States may be a nation of laws, but the proper functioning of the law depends upon the competence and integrity of those charged with executing it. A president determined to thwart the law in order to protect himself and those in his circle has many means to do so.
  • The powers of appointment and removal are another. The president appoints and can remove the commissioner of the IRS. He appoints and can remove the inspectors general who oversee the internal workings of the Cabinet departments and major agencies. He appoints and can remove the 93 U.S. attorneys, who have the power to initiate and to end federal prosecutions. He appoints and can remove the attorney general, the deputy attorney general, and the head of the criminal division at the Department of Justice.
  • Republicans in Congress have long advocated reforms to expedite the firing of underperforming civil servants. In the abstract, there’s much to recommend this idea. If reform is dramatic and happens in the next two years, however, the balance of power between the political and the professional elements of the federal government will shift, decisively, at precisely the moment when the political elements are most aggressive. The intelligence agencies in particular would likely find themselves exposed to retribution from a president enraged at them for reporting on Russia’s aid to his election campaign.
  • The McDonnells had been convicted on a combined 20 counts.
  • The Supreme Court objected, however, that the lower courts had interpreted federal anticorruption law too broadly. The relevant statute applied only to “official acts.” The Court defined such acts very strictly, and held that “setting up a meeting, talking to another official, or organizing an event—without more—does not fit that definition of an ‘official act.’ ”
  • Trump is poised to mingle business and government with an audacity and on a scale more reminiscent of a leader in a post-Soviet republic than anything ever before seen in the United States.
  • Trump will try hard during his presidency to create an atmosphere of personal munificence, in which graft does not matter, because rules and institutions do not matter. He will want to associate economic benefit with personal favor. He will create personal constituencies, and implicate other people in his corruption.
  • You would never know from Trump’s words that the average number of felonious killings of police during the Obama administration’s tenure was almost one-third lower than it was in the early 1990s, a decline that tracked with the general fall in violent crime that has so blessed American society. There had been a rise in killings of police in 2014 and 2015 from the all-time low in 2013—but only back to the 2012 level. Not every year will be the best on record.
  • A mistaken belief that crime is spiraling out of control—that terrorists roam at large in America and that police are regularly gunned down—represents a considerable political asset for Donald Trump. Seventy-eight percent of Trump voters believed that crime had worsened during the Obama years.
  • From the point of view of the typical Republican member of Congress, Fox remains all-powerful: the single most important source of visibility and affirmation with the voters whom a Republican politician cares about
  • Civil unrest will not be a problem for the Trump presidency. It will be a resource. Trump will likely want not to repress it, but to publicize it—and the conservative entertainment-outrage complex will eagerly assist him
  • Immigration protesters marching with Mexican flags; Black Lives Matter demonstrators bearing antipolice slogans—these are the images of the opposition that Trump will wish his supporters to see. The more offensively the protesters behave, the more pleased Trump will be.
  • If there is harsh law enforcement by the Trump administration, it will benefit the president not to the extent that it quashes unrest, but to the extent that it enflames more of it, ratifying the apocalyptic vision that haunted his speech at the convention.
  • In the early days of the Trump transition, Nic Dawes, a journalist who has worked in South Africa, delivered an ominous warning to the American media about what to expect. “Get used to being stigmatized as ‘opposition,’ ” he wrote. “The basic idea is simple: to delegitimize accountability journalism by framing it as partisan.”
  • Mostly, however, modern strongmen seek merely to discredit journalism as an institution, by denying that such a thing as independent judgment can exist. All reporting serves an agenda. There is no truth, only competing attempts to grab power.
  • In true police states, surveillance and repression sustain the power of the authorities. But that’s not how power is gained and sustained in backsliding democracies. Polarization, not persecution, enables the modern illiberal regime.
  • A would-be kleptocrat is actually better served by spreading cynicism than by deceiving followers with false beliefs: Believers can be disillusioned; people who expect to hear only lies can hardly complain when a lie is exposed.
  • The inculcation of cynicism breaks down the distinction between those forms of media that try their imperfect best to report the truth, and those that purvey falsehoods for reasons of profit or ideology. The New York Times becomes the equivalent of Russia’s RT; The Washington Post of Breitbart; NPR of Infowars.
  • Trump had not a smidgen of evidence beyond his own bruised feelings and internet flotsam from flagrantly unreliable sources. Yet once the president-elect lent his prestige to the crazy claim, it became fact for many people. A survey by YouGov found that by December 1, 43 percent of Republicans accepted the claim that millions of people had voted illegally in 2016.
  • A clear untruth had suddenly become a contested possibility. When CNN’s Jeff Zeleny correctly reported on November 28 that Trump’s tweet was baseless, Fox’s Sean Hannity accused Zeleny of media bias—and then proceeded to urge the incoming Trump administration to take a new tack with the White House press corps, and to punish reporters like Zeleny.
  • the whipping-up of potentially violent Twitter mobs against media critics is already a standard method of Trump’s governance.
  • I’ve talked with well-funded Trump supporters who speak of recruiting a troll army explicitly modeled on those used by Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Russia’s Putin to take control of the social-media space, intimidating some critics and overwhelming others through a blizzard of doubt-casting and misinformation.
  • he and his team are serving notice that a new era in government-media relations is coming, an era in which all criticism is by definition oppositional—and all critics are to be treated as enemies.
  • “Lying is the message,” she wrote. “It’s not just that both Putin and Trump lie, it is that they lie in the same way and for the same purpose: blatantly, to assert power over truth itself.”
  • lurid mass movements of the 20th century—communist, fascist, and other—have bequeathed to our imaginations an outdated image of what 21st-century authoritarianism might look like.
  • In a society where few people walk to work, why mobilize young men in matching shirts to command the streets? If you’re seeking to domineer and bully, you want your storm troopers to go online, where the more important traffic is. Demagogues need no longer stand erect for hours orating into a radio microphone. Tweet lies from a smartphone instead.
  • “Populist-fueled democratic backsliding is difficult to counter,” wrote the political scientists Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Erica Frantz late last year. “Because it is subtle and incremental, there is no single moment that triggers widespread resistance or creates a focal point around which an opposition can coalesce … Piecemeal democratic erosion, therefore, typically provokes only fragmented resistance.”
  • If people retreat into private life, if critics grow quieter, if cynicism becomes endemic, the corruption will slowly become more brazen, the intimidation of opponents stronger. Laws intended to ensure accountability or prevent graft or protect civil liberties will be weakened.
  • If the president uses his office to grab billions for himself and his family, his supporters will feel empowered to take millions. If he successfully exerts power to punish enemies, his successors will emulate his methods.
  • If citizens learn that success in business or in public service depends on the favor of the president and his ruling clique, then it’s not only American politics that will change. The economy will be corrupted too, and with it the larger cultur
  • A culture that has accepted that graft is the norm, that rules don’t matter as much as relationships with those in power, and that people can be punished for speech and acts that remain theoretically legal—such a culture is not easily reoriented back to constitutionalism, freedom, and public integrity.
  • The oft-debated question “Is Donald Trump a fascist?” is not easy to answer. There are certainly fascistic elements to him: the subdivision of society into categories of friend and foe; the boastful virility and the delight in violence; the vision of life as a struggle for dominance that only some can win, and that others must lose.
  • He is so pathetically needy, so shamelessly self-interested, so fitful and distracted. Fascism fetishizes hardihood, sacrifice, and struggle—concepts not often associated with Trump.
  • Perhaps the better question about Trump is not “What is he?” but “What will he do to us?”
  • By all early indications, the Trump presidency will corrode public integrity and the rule of law—and also do untold damage to American global leadership, the Western alliance, and democratic norms around the world
  • The damage has already begun, and it will not be soon or easily undone. Yet exactly how much damage is allowed to be done is an open question—the most important near-term question in American politics. It is also an intensely personal one, for its answer will be determined by the answer to another question: What will you do?
Javier E

The Dark Power of Fraternities - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...357580

fraternity university

shared by Javier E on 22 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • College fraternities—by which term of art I refer to the formerly all-white, now nominally integrated men’s “general” or “social” fraternities, and not the several other types of fraternities on American campuses (religious, ethnic, academic)—are as old, almost, as the republic.
  • While the system has produced its share of poets, aesthetes, and Henry James scholars, it is far more famous for its success in the powerhouse fraternity fields of business, law, and politics. An astonishing number of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, congressmen and male senators, and American presidents have belonged to fraternities
  • They also have a long, dark history of violence against their own members and visitors to their houses, which makes them in many respects at odds with the core mission of college itself.
  • ...62 more annotations...
  • A recent series of articles on fraternities by Bloomberg News’s David Glovin and John Hechinger notes that since 2005, more than 60 people—the majority of them students—have died in incidents linked to fraternities, a sobering number in itself, but one that is dwarfed by the numbers of serious injuries, assaults, and sexual crimes that regularly take place in these houses.
  • I have spent most of the past year looking deeply into the questions posed by these lawsuits, and more generally into the particular nature of fraternity life on the modern American campus
  • to answer the vexing question “why don’t colleges just get rid of their bad fraternities?”—the system, and its individual frats, have only grown in power and influence. Indeed, in many substantive ways, fraternities are now mightier than the colleges and universities that host them.
  • The entire multibillion-dollar, 2,000-campus American college system
  • the Kappa Alpha Society. Word of the group spread, and a new kind of college institution was founded, and with it a brand-new notion: that going to college could include some pleasure. It was the American age of societies, and this new type fit right in.
  • every moment of the experience is sweetened by the general understanding that with each kegger and rager, each lazy afternoon spent snoozing on the quad (a forgotten highlighter slowly drying out on the open pages of Introduction to Economics, a Coke Zero sweating beside it), they are actively engaged in the most significant act of self-improvement available to an American young person: college!
  • There are many thousands of American undergraduates whose economic futures (and those of their parents) would be far brighter if they knocked off some of their general-education requirements online, or at the local community college—for pennies on the dollar—before entering the Weimar Republic of traditional-college pricing. But college education, like weddings and funerals, tends to prompt irrational financial decision making,
  • depends overwhelmingly for its very existence on one resource: an ever-renewing supply of fee-paying undergraduates. It could never attract hundreds of thousands of them each year—many of them woefully unprepared for the experience, a staggering number (some 40 percent) destined never to get a degree, more than 60 percent of them saddled with student loans that they very well may carry with them to their deathbeds—if the experience were not accurately marketed as a blast.
  • When colleges tried to shut them down, fraternities asserted that any threat to men’s membership in the clubs constituted an infringement of their right to freedom of association. It was, at best, a legally delicate argument, but it was a symbolically potent one, and it has withstood through the years. The powerful and well-funded political-action committee that represents fraternities in Washington has fought successfully to ensure that freedom-of-association language is included in all higher-education reauthorization legislation, thus “disallowing public Universities the ability to ban fraternities.”
  • While the fraternities continued to exert their independence from the colleges with which they were affiliated, these same colleges started to develop an increasingly bedeviling kind of interdependence with the accursed societies
  • the fraternities involved themselves very deeply in the business of student housing, which provided tremendous financial savings to their host institutions, and allowed them to expand the number of students they could admit. Today, one in eight American students at four-year colleges lives in a Greek house
  • fraternities tie alumni to their colleges in a powerful and lucrative way. At least one study has affirmed what had long been assumed: that fraternity men tend to be generous to their alma maters. Furthermore, fraternities provide colleges with unlimited social programming of a kind that is highly attractive to legions of potential students
  • It is true that fraternity lawsuits tend to involve at least one, and often more, of the four horsemen of the student-life apocalypse, a set of factors that exist far beyond frat row
  • the binge-drinking epidemic, which anyone outside the problem has a hard time grasping as serious (everyone drinks in college!) and which anyone with knowledge of the current situation understands as a lurid and complicated disaster
  • The second is the issue of sexual assault of female undergraduates by their male peers, a subject of urgent importance but one that remains stubbornly difficult even to quantify
  • The third is the growing pervasiveness of violent hazing on campus
  • But it’s impossible to examine particular types of campus calamity and not find that a large number of them cluster at fraternity houses
  • the fourth is the fact that Boomers, who in their own days destroyed the doctrine of in loco parentis so that they could party in blissful, unsupervised freedom, have grown up into the helicopter parents of today
  • during the period of time under consideration, serious falls from fraternity houses on the two Palouse campuses far outnumbered those from other types of student residences, including privately owned apartments occupied by students. I began to view Amanda Andaverde’s situation in a new light.
  • Why are so many colleges allowing students to live and party in such unsafe locations? And why do the lawsuits against fraternities for this kind of serious injury and death—so predictable and so preventable—have such a hard time getting traction? The answers lie in the recent history of fraternities and the colleges and universities that host them.
  • This question is perhaps most elegantly expressed in the subtitle of Robert D. Bickel and Peter F. Lake’s authoritative 1999 book on the subject, The Rights and Responsibilities of the Modern University: Who Assumes the Risks of College Life?
  • The answer to this question has been steadily evolving ever since the 1960s, when dramatic changes took place on American campuses, changes that affected both a university’s ability to control student behavior and the status of fraternities in the undergraduate firmament. During this period of student unrest, the fraternities—long the unquestioned leaders in the area of sabotaging or ignoring the patriarchal control of school administrators—became the exact opposite: representatives of the very status quo the new activists sought to overthrow. Suddenly their beer bashes and sorority mixers, their panty raids and obsession with the big game, seemed impossibly reactionary when compared with the mind-altering drugs being sampled in off-campus apartments where sexual liberation was being born and the Little Red Book proved, if nothing else, a fantastic coaster for a leaky bong.
  • American colleges began to regard their students not as dependents whose private lives they must shape and monitor, but as adult consumers whose contract was solely for an education, not an upbringing. The doctrine of in loco parentis was abolished at school after school.
  • Through it all, fraternities—for so long the repositories of the most outrageous behavior—moldered, all but forgotten.
  • Animal House, released in 1978, at once predicted and to no small extent occasioned the roaring return of fraternity life that began in the early ’80s and that gave birth to today’s vital Greek scene
  • In this newly forming culture, the drugs and personal liberation of the ’60s would be paired with the self-serving materialism of the ’80s, all of which made partying for its own sake—and not as a philosophical adjunct to solving some complicated problem in Southeast Asia—a righteous activity for the pampered young collegian. Fraternity life was reborn with a vengeance.
  • These new members and their countless guests brought with them hard drugs, new and ever-developing sexual attitudes, and a stunningly high tolerance for squalor
  • Adult supervision was nowhere to be found. Colleges had little authority to intervene in what took place in the personal lives of its students visiting private property. Fraternities, eager to provide their members with the independence that is at the heart of the system—and responsive to members’ wish for the same level of freedom that non-Greek students enjoyed—had largely gotten rid of the live-in resident advisers who had once provided some sort of check on the brothers
  • , in 1984 Congress passed the National Minimum Drinking Age Act, with the ultimate result of raising the legal drinking age to 21 in all 50 states. This change moved college partying away from bars and college-sponsored events and toward private houses—an ideal situation for fraternities
  • lawsuits began to pour in.
  • Liability insurance became both ruinously expensive and increasingly difficult to obtain. The insurance industry ranked American fraternities as the sixth-worst insurance risk in the country—just ahead of toxic-waste-removal companies.
  • For fraternities to survive, they needed to do four separate but related things: take the task of acquiring insurance out of the hands of the local chapters and place it in the hands of the vast national organizations; develop procedures and policies that would transfer as much of their liability as possible to outside parties; find new and creative means of protecting their massive assets from juries; and—perhaps most important of all—find a way of indemnifying the national and local organizations from the dangerous and illegal behavior of some of their undergraduate members.
  • comprising a set of realities you should absolutely understand in detail if your son ever decides to join a fraternity.
  • you may think you belong to Tau Kappa Epsilon or Sigma Nu or Delta Tau Delta—but if you find yourself a part of life-changing litigation involving one of those outfits, what you really belong to is FIPG, because its risk-management policy (and your adherence to or violation of it) will determine your fate far more than the vows you made during your initiation ritual
  • the need to manage or transfer risk presented by alcohol is perhaps the most important factor in protecting the system’s longevity. Any plaintiff’s attorney worth his salt knows how to use relevant social-host and dramshop laws against a fraternity; to avoid this kind of liability, the fraternity needs to establish that the young men being charged were not acting within the scope of their status as fraternity members. Once they violated their frat’s alcohol policy, they parted company with the frat.
  • there are actually only two FIPG-approved means of serving drinks at a frat party. The first is to hire a third-party vendor who will sell drinks and to whom some liability—most significant, that of checking whether drinkers are of legal age—will be transferred. The second and far more common is to have a BYO event, in which the liability for each bottle of alcohol resides solely in the person who brought it.
  • these policies make it possible for fraternities to be the one industry in the country in which every aspect of serving alcohol can be monitored and managed by people who are legally too young to drink it.
  • But when the inevitable catastrophes do happen, that policy can come to seem more like a cynical hoax than a real-world solution to a serious problem.
  • Thanks in part to the guest/witness list, Larry can be cut loose, both from the expensive insurance he was required to help pay for (by dint of his dues) as a precondition of membership, and from any legal defense paid for by the organization. What will happen to Larry now?
  • “I’ve recovered millions and millions of dollars from homeowners’ policies,” a top fraternal plaintiff’s attorney told me. For that is how many of the claims against boys who violate the strict policies are paid: from their parents’ homeowners’ insurance
  • , the Fraternal Information and Programming Group’s chillingly comprehensive crisis-management plan was included in its manual for many years
  • the plan serves a dual purpose, at once benevolent and mercenary. The benevolent part is accomplished by the clear directive that injured parties are to receive immediate medical attention, and that all fraternity brothers who come into contact with the relevant emergency workers are to be completely forthright
  • “Until proven otherwise,” Fierberg told me in April of fraternities, “they all are very risky organizations for young people to be involved in.” He maintains that fraternities “are part of an industry that has tremendous risk and a tremendous history of rape, serious injury, and death, and the vast majority share common risk-management policies that are fundamentally flawed. Most of them are awash in alcohol. And most if not all of them are bereft of any meaningful adult supervision.”
  • the interests of the national organization and the individual members cleave sharply as this crisis-management plan is followed. Those questionnaires and honest accounts—submitted gratefully to the grown-ups who have arrived, the brothers believe, to help them—may return to haunt many of the brothers, providing possible cause for separating them from the fraternity, dropping them from the fraternity’s insurance, laying the blame on them as individuals and not on the fraternity as the sponsoring organization.
  • So here is the essential question: In the matter of these disasters, are fraternities acting in an ethical manner, requiring good behavior from their members and punishing them soundly for bad or even horrific decisions? Or are they keeping a cool distance from the mayhem, knowing full well that misbehavior occurs with regularity (“most events take place at night”) and doing nothing about it until the inevitable tragedy occurs, at which point they cajole members into incriminating themselves via a crisis-management plan presented as being in their favor?
  • I have had long and wide-ranging conversations with both men, in which each put forth his perspective on the situation.
  • the young men who typically rush so gratefully into the open arms of the representatives from their beloved national—an outfit to which they have pledged eternal allegiance—would be far better served by not talking to them at all, by walking away from the chapter house as quickly as possible and calling a lawyer.
  • The fraternity system, he argues, is “the largest industry in this country directly involved in the provision of alcohol to underage people.” The crisis-management plans reveal that in “the foreseeable future” there may be “the death or serious injury” of a healthy young person at a fraternity function.
  • His belief is that what’s tarnishing the reputation of the fraternities is the bad behavior of a very few members, who ignore all the risk-management training that is requisite for membership, who flout policies that could not be any more clear, and who are shocked when the response from the home office is not to help them cover their asses but to ensure that—perhaps for the first time in their lives—they are held 100 percent accountable for their actions.
  • The fraternity system, he argues, is “the largest industry in this country directly involved in the provision of alcohol to underage people.” The crisis-management plans reveal that in “the foreseeable future” there may be “the death or serious injury” of a healthy young person at a fraternity function.
  • His belief is that what’s tarnishing the reputation of the fraternities is the bad behavior of a very few members, who ignore all the risk-management training that is requisite for membership, who flout policies that could not be any more clear, and who are shocked when the response from the home office is not to help them cover their asses but to ensure that—perhaps for the first time in their lives—they are held 100 percent accountable for their actions.
  • Unspoken but inherent in this larger philosophy is the idea that it is in a young man’s nature to court danger and to behave in a foolhardy manner; the fraternity experience is intended to help tame the baser passions, to channel protean energies into productive endeavors such as service, sport, and career preparation.
  • In a sense, Fierberg, Smithhisler, and the powerful forces they each represent operate as a check and balance on the system. Personal-injury lawsuits bring the hated media attention and potential financial losses that motivate fraternities to improve. It would be a neat, almost a perfect, system, if the people wandering into it were not young, healthy college students with everything to lose.
  • In a sense, Fierberg, Smithhisler, and the powerful forces they each represent operate as a check and balance on the system. Personal-injury lawsuits bring the hated media attention and potential financial losses that motivate fraternities to improve. It would be a neat, almost a perfect, system, if the people wandering into it were not young, healthy college students with everything to lose.
  • Wesleyan is one of those places that has by now become so hard to get into that the mere fact of attendance is testament, in most cases, to a level of high-school preparation—combined with sheer academic ability—that exists among students at only a handful of top colleges in this country and that is almost without historical precedent.
  • Wesleyan is one of those places that has by now become so hard to get into that the mere fact of attendance is testament, in most cases, to a level of high-school preparation—combined with sheer academic ability—that exists among students at only a handful of top colleges in this country and that is almost without historical precedent.
  • This January, after publishing a withering series of reports on fraternity malfeasance, the editors of Bloomberg.com published an editorial with a surprising headline: “Abolish Fraternities.” It compared colleges and universities to companies, and fraternities to units that “don’t fit into their business model, fail to yield an adequate return or cause reputational harm.”
  • A college or university can choose, as Wesleyan did, to end its formal relationship with a troublesome fraternity, but—if that fiasco proves anything—keeping a fraternity at arm’s length can be more devastating to a university and its students than keeping it in the fold.
  • A college or university can choose, as Wesleyan did, to end its formal relationship with a troublesome fraternity, but—if that fiasco proves anything—keeping a fraternity at arm’s length can be more devastating to a university and its students than keeping it in the fold.
  • there is a Grand Canyon–size chasm between the official risk-management policies of the fraternities and the way life is actually lived in countless dangerous chapters.
  • When there is a common denominator among hundreds of such injuries and deaths, one that exists across all kinds of campuses, from private to public, prestigious to obscure, then it is more than newsworthy: it begins to approach a national scandal.
  • When there is a common denominator among hundreds of such injuries and deaths, one that exists across all kinds of campuses, from private to public, prestigious to obscure, then it is more than newsworthy: it begins to approach a national scandal.
Javier E

For Apple, a Search for a Moral High Ground in a Heated Debate - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...learly-defined-boundaries.html

apple privacy corporate responsibility cybersecurity

shared by Javier E on 23 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Aside from the thicket of legal issues raised by the case, does Apple have a moral obligation to help the government learn more about the attack? Or does it have a moral obligation to protect its customers’ privacy? Or how about its shareholders? And which of these should take precedence?
  • Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, has long spoken about running his company based on certain values. He has used his position to advocate gay rights, for example, and pushed the company to be more “green,” once going so far as to tell a shareholder who questioned the return on investment of taking such stances, “If you want me to do things only for R.O.I. reasons, you should get out of this stock.”
  • The debate over Apple’s stance is just the latest in a series of questions about corporate patriotism. In recent years, questions have been directed at companies that renounce their United States citizenship to move to a country with a lower tax rate. Others, including Apple, have faced questions about tax strategies to shelter income abroad. And companies’ social responsibility programs, say for clean energy or water efficiency, have been scrutinized
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Behind Mr. Cook’s worry is a separate, perhaps even more immediate threat: the possibility that if Apple were to comply with the court’s order, other governments might follow suit and require Apple to give them access for their own investigative purposes
  • If Apple refused the request of, say, the Chinese government, it would risk being barred from doing business in China, its second-largest
  • And then there’s the possibility that if Apple were to build special software for the F.B.I., it could fall into the wrong hands, leading to even greater privacy and safety concerns.
  • Maybe that means Apple should work with law enforcement to train officials so they have a better ability to rapidly retrieve information legally? (After all, law enforcement had a chance to gain access to the iPhone in question had they taken certain steps early on.) Or maybe the president should create a commission to study the issue, bringing together people from Silicon Valley and law enforcement to create agreed-upon rules of the road. Or, perhaps new legislation is required.
  • “This has become, ladies and gentlemen, the Wild West of technology,” the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., said last Thursday, citing at least 175 iPhones that his office cannot gain access to, and arguing that it should be able to do so. “Apple and Google are their own sheriffs. There are no rules.”
  • Ultimately, it appears that both sides have left little room for compromise. “Tim Cook and lawyer Ted Olson have draped their argument in one of moral absolutism — but there is a hierarchy of moral reasoning they miss,” said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld
  • if this broader controversy is ever going to be solved for the long term, there has to be an opportunity to reach a consensus in the middle.
  • “What does it mean to say that ‘business’ has responsibilities?” Mr. Friedman wrote in The New York Times Magazine in 1970. Citing his book “Capitalism and Freedom,” he wrote, “There is one and only one social responsibility of business — to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.”
  • “That tension should not be resolved by corporations that sell stuff for a living,” he said. “It also should not be resolved by the F.B.I., which investigates for a living. It should be resolved by the American people deciding how we want to govern ourselves in a world we have never seen before.”
proudsa

Ted Cruz: Attacks From Trump And McCain Reflect An Establishment In 'Full Panic Mode' - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...-mode_568f10ace4b0c8beacf68193

shared by proudsa on 09 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • he thinks John McCain questioning his citizenship is an indication that the political establishment is in "full panic mode,"
    • proudsa
      proudsa on 09 Jan 16
       
      Throughout history, governments that have started from a place of panic and frenzy soon end up in chaos.
  • "Everybody knows John McCain is going to endorse Marco Rubio."
  • . In an interview with a Phoenix CBS affiliate on Wednesday, McCain said questions raised by GOP front-runner Donald Trump over Cruz's eligibility are plausible.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • "I think there is a question," McCain explained in the interview. "I'm not a constitutional scholar on that, but I think it's worth looking into. I don't think it's illegitimate to look into."
  • Cruz says he anticipates Rubio will get an endorsement from McCain, which is why McCain brought up his birthplace as a potential stumbling block.
  • "Their foreign policies are almost identical. Their immigration policies are identical," Cruz continued. "So it's no surprise that people who are supporting other candidates in this race are going to jump on the silly attacks that occur as we get closer and closer to this election."
  • "It was a very wise move that Ted Cruz renounced his Canadian citizenship,"
  • "No, it's not going to happen," Cruz said. "I won't be taking legal advice anytime soon from Donald Trump.
  • "This is the silly season of politics," Cruz said. "Three weeks ago every Republican was talking about Donald Trump. Today, just about every Republican in the field is attacking me."
  • joking that members of the press will be "checking themselves into therapy" after he becomes president.
  • "With all due respect to our friends in the news media, elections are not won in newsrooms in Manhattan and D.C.," Cruz said to dozens of assembled media outlets on Thursday afternoon. "They are won talking to voters one on one. Answering their questions, their hard questions, not through a whole army of press surrogates who protect a candidate."
oliviaodon

Japan's Endless Search for Modernity - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...549536

japan

shared by oliviaodon on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • Since the morning of January 3, 1868, Japan has struggled to answer one question: What does it mean to be modern and Japanese? It was on that date that a group of mid-level samurai and imperial courtiers announced the formation of a new government to be ruled by the 16-year old Meiji emperor, thus ending two-and-a-half centuries of control by the Tokugawa samurai family.
  • several generations of growth and development have not erased the feeling that Japan remains in the midst of a transformation pitting tradition against modernity.
  • Perhaps even more so today, 25 years since their economy cratered, Japanese people question what kind of society they want, how much to incorporate Western concepts of individualism, how much capitalist disruption to permit, and how to deal with the threat posed by hostile foreign countries—the same questions unleashed by the events of 1868.
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  • The Meiji Restoration upended centuries of domestic stability that began in 1600, following a century of civil war.
  • By the late 19th century, this carefully calibrated system was coming apart. Under the Tokugawas, Japan developed a thriving domestic economy. But over time, merchants gained the upper hand, and many samurai, who received their pay in rice, found themselves impoverished by the shift to a cash-based economy.
  • Into this fervid environment sailed the American Commodore Matthew Perry, who was dispatched to Japan in 1853 to compel it to allow U.S. ships to land at Japanese ports.
  • In these early post-feudal years, Japanese thinkers struggled to locate their country in a world that had suddenly and dramatically expanded.
  • Not surprisingly, it was Japan’s urban areas that most readily embraced  modernity. The elite did its best to midwife a competitive industrial economy, while simultaneously preventing real political liberalization.
  • Yet a slow move towards greater political participation was inevitable, presaged by the growth of parties and the slow expansion of male-only suffrage
  • All this disrupted Japan’s social, economic, and political fabric. The Meiji legal codes limited individual rights and treated persons as subordinate parts of legal family units, while the demise of the feudal economic system led to the rise of rural landlords, who effectively kept large swathes of the populace as tenant farmers. The government captured religion, creating a centralized State-Shinto apparatus that glorified the emperor and subordinated his subjects to a mission civilisatrice that pulled the rest of Asia into a Japanese-dominated modernity.
  • The end of World War II and the retribution visited upon Japanese militarists unleashed a second wave of socioeconomic and political dislocation. The triumphant Americans, occupying the islands for seven years after the war, enforced universal suffrage and breathed new life into a socialist movement that had been suppressed before the war. They ensured universal education for females as well as males. The Meiji law codes were rewritten to place the individual, not the family, as the central unit of society, and the great landlords were dispossessed of their rural holdings, allowing tenant farmers to buy land. Perhaps most significantly, the emperor was stripped of his semi-divinity, and allowed to continue only as a constitutional figurehead. While arguments about whether the Americans went too far in restraining the Japanese elite persist, the extraordinary liberation that took place in the post-war years is undeniable.
  • Considerable uncertainty over national and individual identity in Japan was subordinated to the project of post-war rebuilding. The country soon became the engine for the new Asian workshop of the world and its second-largest economy by the late 1970s. Yet all that collapsed in 1989, when the asset-price bubble burst, sending Japan into a generation-long stagnation from which it has yet to recover. Now surpassed by China in size, strength, and influence, Japan again finds itself facing nations more powerful than itself and questioning where it goes from here. Its unprecedented demographic decline raises questions about how it will keep its economy going, not to mention how the state will pay for its generous entitlement programs, which cost over $1 trillion in 2016, or how it will defend itself or exercise influence abroad.
  • While remaining a largely culturally conservative nation, Japan’s commitment to democracy, the rule of law, gender equality, and the like, places it firmly in the camp of liberal nations.
  • Abe’s recent economic, political, and security efforts, are gambles that Tokyo can help provide some of the public goods that shape how a liberal, open international system is supposed to work, but to which Japan largely abstained from for 70 years after World War II. Viewed in light of the Meiji-era renovation, Japan seems once again to be trying utilize global norms to carve out a leading role abroad.Combined with his economic reforms at home, Abe appears to be betting on an alchemic reaction that transmutes Japan’s inherent insularity and domestic inefficiencies into a revitalized society, renewed national strength, and a recovered influence abroad. One hundred fifty years on from the Meiji Restoration, the renovation of Japan continues, as does the search for its modern identity.
Javier E

The Avalon Project : Hossbach Memorandum - 0 views

avalon.law.yale.edu/...hossbach.asp

germany hossbach history WWII

shared by Javier E on 02 Mar 18 - Cached
  • The question for Germany ran: where could she achieve the greatest gain at the lowest cost.
  • German policy had to reckon with two hate-inspired antagonists, Britain and France, to whom a German colossus in the center of Europe was a thorn in the flesh
  • Germany's problem could only be solved by means of force and this was never without attendant risk.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • If one accepts as the basis of the following exposition the resort to force with its attendant risks, then there remain still to be answered the questions "when" and "how." In this matter there were three cases [Falle] to be dealt with:
  • Case 1: Period 1943-1945. After this date only a change for the worse, from our point of view, could be expected.
  • Our relative strength would decrease in relation to the rearmament which would by then have been carried out by the rest of the world. If we did not act by 1943-45' any year could, in consequence of a lack of reserves, produce the food crisis, to cope with which the necessary foreign exchange was not available, and this must be regarded as a "waning point of the regime." Besides, the world was expecting our attack and was increasing its counter-measures from year to year. It was while the rest of the world was still preparing its defenses [sich abriegele] that we were obliged to take the offensive.
  • The necessity for action before 1943-45 would arise in cases 2 and 3.
  • Case 2: If internal strife in France should develop into such a domestic crisis as to absorb the French Army completely and render it incapable of use for war against Germany, then the time for action against the Czechs had come.
  • For the improvement of our politico-military position our first objective, in the event of our being embroiled in war, must be to overthrow Czechoslovakia and Austria simultaneously in order to remove the threat to our flank in any possible operation against the West.
  • Actually, the Fuehrer believed that almost certainly Britain, and probably France as well, had already tacitly written off the Czechs and were reconciled to the fact that this question could be cleared up in due course by Germany. Difficulties connected with the Empire, and the prospect of being once more entangled in a protracted European war, were decisive considerations for Britain against participation in a war against Germany. Britain's attitude would certainly not be without influence on that of France. An attack by France without British support, and with the prospect of the offensive being brought to a standstill on our western fortifications, was hardly probable.
  • The incorporation of these two States with Germany meant, from the politico-military point of view, a substantial advantage because it would mean shorter and better frontiers, the freeing of forces for other purposes, and the possibility of creating new units up to a level of about 12 divisions, that is, 1 new division per million inhabitants.
  • Italy was not expected to object to the elimination of the Czechs, but it was impossible at the moment to estimate what her attitude on the Austrian question would be; that depended essentially upon whether the Duce were still alive
  • The degree of surprise and the swiftness of our action were decisive factors for Poland's attitude. Poland -with Russia at her rear will have little inclination to engage in war against a victorious Germany.
  • In the light of past experience, the Fuehrer did not see any early end to the hostilities in Spain
  • from the German point of view; rather were we interested in a continuance of the war and in the keeping up of the tension in the Mediterranean.
  • As our interest lay more in the prolongation of the war in Spain, it must be the immediate aim of our policy to strengthen Italy's rear with a view to her remaining in the Balearics.
  • If Germany made use of this war to settle the Czech and Austrian questions, it was to be assumed that Britain -herself at war with Italy- would decide not to act against Germany. Without British support, a warlike action by France against Germany was not to be expected.
Javier E

The important question isn't when the government is going to lift restrictions. It's th... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-9040-68981f488eed_story.html

government restrictions pandemic strategies response contact tracing

shared by Javier E on 15 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • Unfortunately, we’re not trying to make it to a particular date, but to an unknown day when the coronavirus is under control. So the only answer a responsible policymaker can offer at this point is “We’ll reopen when it’s safe.”
  • Why we’ll lift the restrictions is clear: We’ll do it because the virus can be controlled by less-stringent means. Which brings us to the how: We’ll relax when, in addition to mask-wearing and scrupulous hand-washing, three new conditions are met.
  • Technological solutions, such as apps that detect when another phone is near yours, can help. But we’ll have to build and staff a whole new public health infrastructure to track people down and notify them about exposure.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • When the number of new cases has fallen, and we have the tools to keep it low, we can start to gradually lift restrictions — for example, allowing restaurants to reopen at half their normal capacity, or reopening schools but keeping kids to a single teacher in a single classroom. This will have to happen in fits and starts, relaxing some restrictions, carefully watching for signs of outbreaks and tightening up again where necessary.
  • What you wanted me to tell you was that in a few weeks, at most, you could go back to your old life. But the government didn’t take your old life; the virus did. The government can’t give it back, except by containing covid-19.
  • the important question is not “When is the government going to lift the restrictions?” but “When is the government going to have the testing and tracing infrastructure that can let us go about our lives without being afraid?”
  • a third question might be even more important: “How can I help the government do what it needs to?”
  • wo answers to that question: “By supporting politicians who propose solutions instead of days on the calendar” and “By staying close to home now, without complaining or cheating even a little, so that we can all knock R0 down to size as quickly as possible.”
katherineharron

NBC News staffers fire back at Trump, call his attack on reporter 'outrageous' and 'abs... - 0 views

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

shared by katherineharron on 22 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Staffers at NBC News are outraged (and a bit confused) after President Trump viciously attacked their network's White House correspondent, Peter Alexander, at Friday's coronavirus briefing. Alexander, if you didn't see, asked Trump what he would say to Americans who are frightened amid the coronavirus pandemic. Instead of answering, Trump responded by rejecting the question ("nasty"), attacking Alexander ("terrible"), and assailing NBC News' parent company Comcast ("Con-Cast").
  • Other NBC News staffers expressed a similar sentiment. "It's absolutely nuts he was attacked for asking a legitimate question," one NBC News reporter told me. "Extremely bizarre," said another. "It was a totally fair question with an obviously accurate premise. The reaction made no sense." Yet another staffer told me, "It's unsettling when these acts happen, but we continue to do our work."
  • On his show, Jake Tapper looked straight into the camera and delivered a serious, pointed set of remarks to Trump. Tapper noted that Trump spent months belittling the threat of the virus and "only recently acknowledged the gravity of the crisis." He pointed out that Alexander's question would have been "easy for any other politician."
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • On Friday morning Andy Lack announced that Larry Edgeworth died Thursday after testing positive for Covid-19. Edgeworth was a veteran audio technician. He is survived by his wife Crystal and two sons. Lack said the network is "doing everything we can to support his family during this very difficult time."
  • Former W.H. press secretary Sean Spicer made a surprise appearance Friday in the briefing room. Spicer, who now hosts a Newsmax show, "appeared to become the first former White House press secretary to question the President that they once served from the briefing room," CNN's Betsy Klein and Caroline Kelly reported.
Javier E

Everybody lies: how Google search reveals our darkest secrets | Technology | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...crets-seth-stephens-davidowitz

google search social media research statistics

shared by Javier E on 09 Jul 17 - No Cached
  • Many people underreport embarrassing behaviours and thoughts on surveys. They want to look good, even though most surveys are anonymous. This is called social desirability bias.
  • An important paper in 1950 provided powerful evidence of how surveys can fall victim to such bias. Researchers collected data, from official sources, on the residents of Denver: what percentage of them voted, gave to charity, and owned a library card. They then surveyed the residents to see if the percentages would match. The results were, at the time, shocking. What the residents reported to the surveys was very different from the data the researchers had gathered
  • Then there’s that odd habit we sometimes have of lying to ourselves. Lying to oneself may explain why so many people say they are above average. How big is this problem? More than 40% of one company’s engineers said they are in the top 5%. More than 90% of college professors say they do above-average work. One-quarter of high school seniors think they are in the top 1% in their ability to get along with other people. If you are deluding yourself, you can’t be honest in a survey.
  • ...51 more annotations...
  • on sensitive topics, every survey method will elicit substantial misreporting. People have no incentive to tell surveys the truth.
  • How, therefore, can we learn what our fellow humans are really thinking and doing? Big data
  • Think of Google searches. Remember the conditions that make people more honest. Online? Check. Alone? Check. No person administering a survey? Check.
  • I am now convinced that Google searches are the most important dataset ever collected on the human psyche.
  • How many American men are gay? This is a regular question in sexuality research. Yet it has been among the toughest questions for social scientists to answer. Psychologists no longer believe Alfred Kinsey’s famous estimate – based on surveys that oversampled prisoners and prostitutes – that 10% of American men are gay. Representative surveys now tell us about 2% to 3% are
  • About 2.5% of male Facebook users who list a gender of interest say they are interested in men; that corresponds roughly with what the surveys indicate.
  • There is clearly some mobility – from Oklahoma City to San Francisco, for example. But I estimate that men moving to someplace more open-minded can explain less than half of the difference in the openly gay population in tolerant versus intolerant states.
  • If mobility cannot fully explain why some states have so many more openly gay men, the closet must be playing a big role. Which brings us back to Google
  • about 5% of male porn searches are for gay-male porn. Overall, there are more gay porn searches in tolerant states compared with intolerant states.
  • one consequence of my estimate is clear: an awful lot of men in the United States, particularly in intolerant states, are still in the closet. They don’t reveal their sexual preferences on Facebook. They don’t admit it on surveys. And, in many cases, they may even be married to women.
  • It turns out that wives suspect their husbands of being gay rather frequently. They demonstrate that suspicion in the surprisingly common search: “Is my husband gay?” The word “gay” is 10% more likely to complete searches that begin “Is my husband...” than the second-place word, “cheating”. It is eight times more common than “an alcoholic” and 10 times more common than “depressed”.
  • On Google, there are 16 times more complaints about a spouse not wanting sex than about a married partner not being willing to talk. There are five-and-a-half times more complaints about an unmarried partner not wanting sex than an unmarried partner refusing to text back.
  • Google data also suggests a reason people may be avoiding sex so frequently: enormous anxiety, with much of it misplaced. Start with men’s anxieties. It isn’t news that men worry about how well endowed they are, but the degree of this worry is rather profound. Men Google more questions about their sexual organ than any other body par
  • Men conduct more searches for how to make their penises bigger than how to tune a guitar, make an omelette, or change a tyre. Men’s top Googled concern about steroids isn’t whether they may damage their health but whether taking them might diminish the size of their penis. Men’s top Googled question related to how their body or mind would change as they aged was whether their penis would get smaller.
  • Do women care about penis size? Rarely, according to Google searches. For every search women make about a partner’s phallus, men make roughly 170 searches about their own
  • Men’s second most common sex question is how to make their sexual encounters longer. Once again, the insecurities of men do not appear to match the concerns of women. There are roughly the same number of searches asking how to make a boyfriend climax more quickly as climax more slowly.
  • while it’s true that overall interest in personal appearance skews female, it’s not as lopsided as stereotypes would suggest. According to my analysis of Google AdWords, which measures the websites people visit, interest in beauty and fitness is 42% male, weight loss is 33% male, and cosmetic surgery is 39% male
  • you could call it progress that many people today feel they will be judged if they admit they judge other people based on their ethnicity, sexual orientation, or religion. But many Americans still do. You can see this on Google
  • African Americans are the only group that faces a “rude” stereotype
  • Nearly every group is a victim of a “stupid” stereotype; the only two that are not: Jews and Muslims.
  • The “evil” stereotype is applied to Jews, Muslims, and gay people but not black people, Mexicans, Asians, and Christians.
  • Muslims are the only group stereotyped as terrorists.
  • minutes after the media first reported one of the shooters’ Muslim-sounding names, a disturbing number of Californians decided what they wanted to do with Muslims: kill them. The top Google search in California with the word “Muslims” in it at the time was “kill Muslims”
  • In the days following the San Bernardino attack, for every American concerned with “Islamophobia”, another was searching for “kill Muslims”. While hate searches were approximately 20% of all searches about Muslims before the attack, more than half of all search volume about Muslims became hateful in the hours that followed it. And this minute-by-minute search data can tell us how difficult it can be to calm this rage.
  • Obama’s speech, in other words, was judged a major success. But was it?
  • In his speech, the president said: “It is the responsibility of all Americans – of every faith – to reject discrimination.” But searches calling Muslims “terrorists”, “bad”, “violent”, and “evil” doubled during and shortly after the speech.
  • Obama also said: “It is our responsibility to reject religious tests on who we admit into this country.” But negative searches about Syrian refugees, a mostly Muslim group then desperately looking for a safe haven, rose 60%, while searches asking how to help Syrian refugees dropped 35%
  • Obama asked Americans to “not forget that freedom is more powerful than fear”. Yet searches for “kill Muslims” tripled during his speech. In fact, just about every negative search we could think to test regarding Muslims shot up during and after Obama’s speech, and just about every positive search we could think to test declined.
  • new data from the internet, offering digital truth serum, suggested that the speech actually backfired in its main goal. Instead of calming the angry mob, as everybody thought he was doing, the internet data tells us that Obama actually inflamed it.
  • Searches for “nigger jokes” are 17 times more common than searches for “kike jokes”, “gook jokes”, “spic jokes”, “chink jokes”, and “fag jokes” combined. When are these searches most common? Whenever African Americans are in the news.
  • Any theory of racism has to explain a big puzzle in America. On the one hand, the overwhelming majority of black Americans think they suffer from prejudice – and they have ample evidence of discrimination in police stops, job interviews, and jury decisions. On the other hand, very few white Americans will admit to being racist. The dominant explanation among political scientists recently has been that this is due, in large part, to widespread implicit prejudice. White Americans may mean well, this theory goes, but they have a subconscious bias, which influences their treatment of black Americans.
  • There is, though, an alternative explanation for the discrimination that African Americans feel and whites deny: hidden explicit racism. Suppose there is a reasonably widespread conscious racism of which people are very much aware but to which they won’t confess – certainly not in a survey
  • That’s what the search data seems to be saying.
  • this gender bias is not grounded in reality. About 28% of girls are overweight, while 35% of boys are. Even though scales measure more overweight boys than girls, parents see – or worry about – overweight girls much more frequently than overweight boys. Parents are also one-and-a-half times more likely to ask whether their daughter is beautiful than whether their son is handsome.
  • And then there is the phenomenon of Donald Trump’s candidacy. When Nate Silver, the polling guru, looked for the geographic variable that correlated most strongly with support in the 2016 Republican primary for Trump, he found it in the map of racism I had developed.
  • The primary explanation for discrimination against African Americans today is not the fact that the people who agree to participate in lab experiments make subconscious associations between negative words and black people; it is the fact that millions of white Americans continue to do things like search for “nigger jokes”
  • , I was able to use Google searches to find evidence of implicit prejudice against another segment of the population: young girls. And who, might you ask, would be harbouring bias against girls? Their parents.
  • Prior to the Google data, we didn’t have a convincing measure of this virulent animus. Now we do. We are, therefore, in a position to see what it explains. It explains why Obama’s vote totals in 2008 and 2012 were depressed in many regions. It also correlates with the black-white wage gap, as a team of economists recently reported. The areas that I had found make the most racist searches underpay black people.
  • Perhaps young boys are more likely than young girls to use big words or show objective signs of giftedness? Nope. If anything, it’s the opposite. At young ages, girls have consistently been shown to have larger vocabularies and use more complex sentences. In American schools, girls are 9% more likely than boys to be in gifted programmes. Despite all this, parents looking around the dinner table appear to see more gifted boys than girls.
  • What then are parents’ overriding concerns regarding their daughters? Primarily, anything related to appearance.
  • Parents are about twice as likely to ask how to get their daughters to lose weight as they are to ask how to get their sons to do the same
  • Parents are two-and-a-half times more likely to ask “Is my son gifted?” than “Is my daughter gifted?”
  • I did not find a significant relationship between any of these biases and the political or cultural makeup of a state. It would seem this bias against girls is more widespread and deeply ingrained than we’d care to believe.
  • Let’s return to Obama’s speech about Islamophobia. Recall that every time he argued that people should respect Muslims more, the people he was trying to reach became more enraged. Google searches, however, reveal that there was one line that did trigger the type of response Obama might have wanted. He said: “Muslim Americans are our friends and our neighbours, our co-workers, our sports heroes and, yes, they are our men and women in uniform, who are willing to die in defence of our country.”
  • When we lecture angry people, the search data implies that their fury can grow. But subtly provoking people’s curiosity, giving new information, and offering new images of the group that is stoking their rage may turn their thoughts in different, more positive directions.
  • What’s your background?I’d describe myself as a data scientist, but my PhD is in economics. When I was doing my PhD, in 2012, I found this tool called Google Trends that tells you what people are searching, and where, and I became obsessed with it.
  • What would your search records reveal about you?They could definitely tell I’m a hypochondriac because I’m waking up in the middle of the night doing Google searches about my health. There are definitely things about me that you could figure out. When making claims about a topic, it’s better to do it on aggregate, but I think you can figure out a lot, if not everything, about an individual by what they’re searching on Google.
  • All this data I’m talking about is public
  • Does it change your view of human nature? Are we darker and stranger creatures than you realised?Yeah. I think I had a dark view of human nature to begin with, and I think now it’s gotten even darker. I think the degree to which people are self-absorbed is pretty shocking
  • When Trump became president, all my friends said how anxious they were, they couldn’t sleep because they’re so concerned about immigrants and the Muslim ban. But from the data you can see that in liberal parts of the country there wasn’t a rise in anxiety when Trump was elected. When people were waking up at 3am in a cold sweat, their searches were about their job, their health, their relationship – they’re not concerned about the Muslim ban or global warming.
  • Was the Google search data telling you that Trump was going to win?I did see that Trump was going to win. You saw clearly that African American turnout was going to be way down, because in cities with 95% black people there was a collapse in searches for voting information. That was a big reason Hillary Clinton did so much worse than the polls suggested.
cartergramiak

Opinion | What Can You Do Once You're Vaccinated? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...coronavirus-vaccine-risks.html

economics politics Culture pandemic

shared by cartergramiak on 30 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Americans have entered a new phase of the pandemic where a large part of the U.S. population is vaccinated and most is not. That leads to a big question: What can you do after you’re fully vaccinated? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently issued new guidelines, and other experts have weighed in with their thoughts.
  • These questions do not take into account every possible factor relating to risk of infection, but they’re a place to start. How long an activity is and how ventilated the space will be play the biggest roles in safety. Even if you don’t know the ventilation system used in an indoor space, you can see if there’s an attempt to increase it, such as opening doors and windows.
  • New C.D.C data suggests that the authorized Covid-19 vaccines reduce the risk of getting and spreading the coronavirus. There is still a small chance after vaccination that you can get the virus and spread it.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Young children cannot receive the vaccines yet, but they also are less likely to require hospitalization or die from Covid-19, unless they have an underlying condition or are high risk. They can still spread the virus, though. People with immune-compromising conditions (like cancer, H.I.V., organ transplants, etc.) can receive the vaccines, but scientists don’t yet know how well the vaccines protect them.
  • All the vaccines authorized by the F.D.A. have been found to fully protect you from death from Covid-19, and they nearly completely protect you from severe disease and hospitalization. Still, the risk of infection is not zero.
Javier E

What Makes a True Conservative - The Atlantic - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...594889

conservative columnist culture politics

shared by Javier E on 29 Jul 19 - No Cached
  • The Conservative Sensibility, a thoughtful, elegant reflection on American conservatism and the Founders’ political thought.
  • By “sensibility,” Will has in mind less than an agenda but more than an attitude. A sensibility is, he argues, a way of seeing.
  • how to think through complex social problems.
  • ...45 more annotations...
  • Will’s 1983 book, Statecraft as Soulcraft, had a significant intellectual impact on me. He questioned the Founders’ faith that moral balance and national cohesiveness will be supplied by the government’s doing little more than encouraging the free operation of “opposite and rival interests.”
  • when a political regime establishes, through laws and courts and customs and other matters, a particular political economy, it is establishing, it is choosing the kind of people that would live under that regime,”
  • The Conservative Sensibility suggests something else: that we should be attending more to the machinery of government and that government should be far less concerned about inculcating virtue in the citizenr
  • “It turns out that Madison was smarter than I am.” When he argued that America was ill-founded because insufficient attention was given to soulcraft, he explained, he hadn’t fully appreciated that the Founders were indeed arguing about statecraft as soulcraft—that a government really can inculcate virtue.
  • America was “ill-founded,” he wrote, because there was not enough attention to what he termed “the sociology of virtue.” Government needed to take a greater role in shaping the moral character of its citizens
  • He argues in The Conservative Sensibility that capitalism doesn't just make us better off; it makes us better by enforcing such virtues as thrift, industriousness, and the deferral of gratification.
  • long story short: I did not appreciate the extent to which Madisonian liberty with Hamiltonian energy is soulcraft.”
  • Will has claimed that Trump has done more lasting damage than Richard Nixon did during the Watergate scandal because, in Will’s words, “you can't un-ring the bell. You can't unsay what he has now said is acceptable discourse in the United States.
  • he hoped Trump supporters are right—but he’s pretty sure they are wrong when they say that what Trump is doing to our culture, our politics and our civic discourse is ephemeral.
  • Will argues that Trump’s agenda, to the degree it pleases conservatives, is what any Republican president would have done. “So the question is what does Trump bring that's distinctive?” Will said. “And it's all vulgarity, coarsening, semi-criminality.
  • asking about the concrete, tangible harm of Trump’s conduct.“The answer is in the terms themselves,” Will replied. “The norms, that is, what are normal and what are normative, cease to be normal. And cease to be normative.
  • “It’s amazing to me how fast, and we saw this in the 20th century in a number of ways, how fast something could go from unthinkable to thinkable to action,”
  • “And it doesn’t seem to me it’s going to be easy to just snap back as if this didn’t happen. It happened. And he got away with it. And he became president. And there will be emulators.”
  • Those who may have forgotten are now being reminded that government has a vital role in the cultivation and sustenance—or in the degradation and destruction—of political cultures. Which brings us back to Statecraft as Soulcraft.
  • “mankind is not just matter, not just a machine with an appetitive ghost in it. We are not what we eat. We are, to some extent, what we and our leaders—the emblematic figures of our polity—say we are.”
  • “What I’d like progressives to take away from the book is a reconsideration of their dilemma,
  • in 1964, when I cast my first presidential vote for Barry Goldwater, to whose memory the book is dedicated, 77 percent of the American people said they trusted the government to do the right thing all the time or almost all the time. Today it's 17 percent—and that 60-point evaporation of government prestige has accompanied a 60-fold increase in government pretensions.
  • their entire agenda depends on strong government and strong government depends on public confidence in the government.”
  • “What I'd like conservatives to take away from this book,” Will added, “is the sense of the enormous intellectual pedigree behind conservatism from Madison to Lincoln to Hayek and the rest.” Will said conservatives need to answer the question: What does conservatism want to conservative?
  • The most important of all revolutions, Edmund Burke said, is a “revolution in sentiment, manners and moral opinion.”
  • what we think Trump supporters either don’t understand or deny, is the destructive revolution in manners and mores that Donald Trump is ushering in, the enormous cultural and social blast radius of his presidency. Through his promiscuous lying and assault on demonstrable truths, his cruelty and crudity, his coarseness, bullying and dehumanization of his opponents, and his lawlessness and conspiracy-mongering—the whole corrupt, packaged deal—he has brought us into dark new realms.
  • Will, who earned his Ph.D. in politics at Princeton and later taught political philosophy
  • hen I probed Will on what has gone wrong with the American right, he mentioned the anti-intellectualism that inevitably comes with populism, which he called “the obverse of conservatism.”
  • “Populism is a direct translation of popular passions into governments through a strong executive. Someone who might say something like, ‘Only I can fix it.
  • Will argued that James Madison understood the need to “filter and refine and deflect and slow public opinion through institutions. To make it more refined, to produce what Madison called, in one of his phrases that I’m particularly fond of, ‘mitigated democracy.’
  • what would most concern the Founders about contemporary politics. “Political leaders today seem to feel that their vocation is to arouse passions,” he told me, “not to temper and deflect and moderate them.
  • Will has claimed that Trump has done more lasting damage than Richard Nixon did during the Watergate scandal because, in Will’s words, “you can’t un-ring the bell. You can’t unsay what he has now said is acceptable discourse in the United States.”
  • Will replied that he hoped Trump supporters are right—but he’s pretty sure they are wrong when they say that what Trump is doing to our culture, our politics, and our civic discourse is ephemeral.
  • Will argues that Trump’s agenda, to the degree it pleases conservatives, is what any Republican president would have done. “So the question is, What does Trump bring that’s distinctive?” Will said. “And it’s all vulgarity, coarsening, semi-criminality.”
  • Trump’s supporters on the right “misunderstand the importance of culture, the viscosity of culture, and I think they are not conservatives, because they don’t understand this,”
  • Donald Trump promised when he ran for president that he would overturn our norms, Will has said, and that’s one promise he’s kept.
  • All of us, including Will, have to deal with the fact that we are now confronted with a head of government who is systematically assaulting our ideals and virtues
  • “To revitalize politics and strengthen government, we need to talk about talk. We need a new, respectful rhetoric—respectful, that is, of the better angels of mankind’s nature.
  • And their dilemma is this: In 1964, when I cast my first presidential vote for Barry Goldwater, to whose memory the book is dedicated, 77 percent of the American people said they trusted the government to do the right thing all the time or almost all the time. Today, it’s 17 percent—and that 60-point evaporation of government prestige has accompanied a 60-fold increase in government pretensions.
  • I would think my progressive friends would be alarmed by this, because their entire agenda depends on strong government, and strong government depends on public confidence in the government.”
  • Will said conservatives need to answer the question, What does conservatism want to conserve?
  • For Will, the answer is the American founding, by which he has in mind three things: the doctrine of natural rights, understood as rights essential to the flourishing of creatures with our natures; a belief in human nature, meaning we are more than creatures who absorb whatever culture we’re situated in; and a government architecture, principally the separation of powers, that is essential to making good on what he refers to as the most crucial verb in the Declaration of Independence.
  • What conservatives like Will and me believe, and what we think Trump supporters either don’t understand or deny, is the destructive revolution in manners and mores that Donald Trump is ushering in
  • Through his promiscuous lying and assault on demonstrable truths, his cruelty and crudity, his coarseness, bullying ,and dehumanization of his opponents, and his lawlessness and conspiracy-mongering—the whole corrupt, packaged deal—he has brought us into dark new realms.
  • There was a time when Republicans and conservatives more generally insisted that culture was upstream of politics and in many respects more important than politics; that leaders needed to take great care in cultivating and validating standards of decency, honor, and integrity; and that a president who destroyed rather than defended cultural norms and high standards would do grave injury to America.
  • now Republicans are willing to sacrifice soul and culture for the sake of promised policy victories.
  • “If the great columnists got a single sentence in the history books,” I asked Will, “what would you want to say about your contribution?”
  • “It would be to convince people that politics is both fun and dignifies—that it has a great and stately jurisdiction, because and to the extent that it is a politics of ideas. Period.
  • “The American nation’s finest political career derived from Lincoln’s refusal to allow his country to be seduced into thinking of itself in an unworthy way,”
  • the civic virtues that Madison and the other Founders believed were essential for a free republic to survive “must be willed. It is folly to will an end but neglect to will the means to the end. The presuppositions of our polity must be supplied, politically.”
Javier E

Opinion | How Racist Is Trump's Republican Party? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-republicans-racism.html

racism definition survey analysis gop trump

shared by Javier E on 02 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • Nonetheless, Stevens’s forthcoming book, “It Was All A Lie,” makes the case that President Trump is the natural outcome of a long chain of events going back to the 1964 election when Barry Goldwater ran for president as an opponent of the Civil Right Act passed earlier that year.
  • “I have no one to blame but myself,” he declares on the first page. “What I missed was one simple reality: it was all a lie.”
  • What were the lies? That the Republican Party “espoused a core set of values: character counts, personal responsibility, strong on Russia, the national debt actually mattered, immigration made America great, a big-tent party.”And what is the truth? The Republican Party is “just a white grievance party.”
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • Race, Stevens writes,has defined the modern Republican Party. After Goldwater carried only southern states and received a record low of 7 percent of the black vote, the party faced a basic choice: do what was necessary to appeal to more nonwhite voters, or build a party to win with white voters. It chose the latter, and when most successfully executed, a race-based strategy was the foundation of many of the Republican Party’s biggest victories, from Nixon to Trump.
  • In fact, Stevens told me, “race is the original sin of the modern Republican Party:”With Trump, the Party has grown comfortable as a white grievance party. Is that racist? Yes, I think it is. Are 63 million plus people who supported Trump racist? No, absolutely not. But to support Trump is to make peace with white grievance and hate.
  • Stevens’s comment demonstrates the difficulty many analysts have pinning down the meaning of racism and the distinction — if there is one — between being a racist and voting for a racist
  • To further examine this complexity, I questioned a range of experts.
  • Ashley Jardina, a political scientist at Duke and the author of “White Identity Politics,” put it this way:The use of these terms is complicated, messy, and without consensus. There are a number of important distinctions we can make. We think of ‘racial prejudice’ as an individual-level sense of hostility, animus, set of negative stereotypes, or other negative attitudes that one person has toward members of a group by way of their race. We refer to a person as racist when they have some degree of racial prejudice. For most Americans, this is generally what they think of when they hear the term racism or racist. A racist is a person who uses racial slurs directed at racial out-groups and thinks their own racial group is superior.
  • Davis argues that the debate has become clouded, that even though individual and group motives may not be racist, the outcomes achieved can be identical to the ones that racists would seek:My overall point is that we have forgotten what racism means. In doing so, we have focused attention on bigots and white nationalists and not held ordinary citizens accountable for beliefs that achieve the same ends.
  • Chloe Thurston, in turn, cited as specific examplesPresident Trump’s or Steve King’s comments about certain types of immigrants being unassimilable or not sufficiently American and suggesting that other (e.g. white) immigrants do not have those characteristics.
  • While both Trump and King, an anti-immigrant congressman from Iowa, “balk at the label ‘racist,’ she continued, “it is descriptively accurate and necessary from the standpoint of keeping track of the role and uses of racism in American society and politics.”
  • Like Davis, Thurston sought to address “the more difficult question” of “when it is legitimate to use that label for everyday behaviors.”Her answer:People can participate in and perpetuate racist systems without necessarily subscribing to those beliefs. People can recognize something they participate in or contribute to as racist but decide it’s not disqualifying. And people can design racist policies and systems. These are distinctive manifestations of racism but not all of them require us to know whether a person is expressly motivated by racism.
  • here are huge racial, partisan, gender and religious differences: whites say Trump is not racist 50-46; blacks say he is racist 80-11; Democrats 86-9 say yes, Republicans 91-8 say no; men 55-41 say no, women 59-36 say yes; white evangelicals say no 76-21, Catholics 50-48 say no; the unaffiliated say yes, 63-30.
  • Kam notes that she worries “about excessive use of these labels” because describing someone or some action as racist “can easily escalate conflict beyond the point of return.”
  • Eric Kaufmann voiced similar caution, noting that racism and racist are highly charged words, the deployment of which can in some cases prove damaging to liberals and the left. He cited the “unwillingness to talk about immigration for fear of being labeled racist,” giving free rein to populists who do address immigration “and thus get elected. Trump’s election is exhibit A.”
  • In addition, according to Kaufmann, thefear of being labeled racist may be pushing left parties toward immigration policies, or policies on affirmative action, reparations, etc., that make them unelectable. Finally, overuse of the word “racist” may lead to a “cry wolf” effect whereby real racists can hide due to exhaustion of public with norm over-policing.
  • None of the examples I cited, in Kaufmann’s view, “are racist” unless it could be explicitly demonstrated “in a survey that those espousing the policies were mainly motivated by racism.” If not, he said, the “principle of charity should apply.”
  • many whites see accusations of racism as disingenuous. They believe that Democrats in particular “play the race card” by calling people or beliefs racist as a political strategy, rather than as a sincere effort to combat racism.There is, in fact, a huge partisan divide over what is considered racist and what is not.
  • Three Harvard political scientists — Meredith Dost, Enos and Jennifer L. Hochschild — conducted a survey in September 2017 that asked 2,296 American adults to rank, on a five point scale ranging from racist to not racist, 10 statements. These statements included “wanting to wave the Confederate flag,” “saying immigrants commit too many crimes,” “agreeing that welfare recipients should have to take a job to receive benefits,” and “voting for Donald Trump.”
  • As the accompanying chart shows, the gulf between Democrats and Republicans was 20 percentage points or more on seven out of ten questions. At the extreme, 82 percent of “strong Republicans” said it was “not racist” to vote for Trump, compared with 22 percent of “strong Democrats.” who said it was, a 60-point difference.
  • With the 2020 election approaching, one of the most relevant questions before the electorate is whether voters agree with Stuart Stevens on whether Donald Trump is a racist.
  • The answer to that question, according to a July 2019 Quinnipiac University national poll, is that 51 percent say Trump is a racist; 45 percent say he is not.
  • Because of the wide variety of possible motivations, Kam wrote in her email, she “would hesitate to label an action as ‘racist’ — unless racial considerations seem to be the only or the massively determinative consideration at play, based upon statistical modeling or carefully calibrated experiments.”
  • What this boils down to is that racism is detected, determined and observed through partisan and ideological lenses.
  • Is the modern Republican Party built on race prejudice, otherwise known as racism?
anonymous

An Early Virus Stock Sell-Off - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ocks-trump-administration.html

politics pandemic economics

shared by anonymous on 15 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • President Trump was fully aware of how severe the coronavirus was back in February, even as he was publicly downplaying it.
  • Short everything.
  • declining to answer a question from Senator Cory Booker — and others from various Democrats — on whether it was “wrong to separate children from their parents to deter immigrants from coming to the United States.”
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • avoided answering a question from Senator Kamala Harris, the Democrats’ vice-presidential nominee, on whether she believed the scientific consensus on man-made climate change. Barrett called that question “a very contentious matter of public debate,”
  • uestioning her, Graham invited the judge to give a preview of how she might rule to save — not overturn — the Affordable Care Act.
  • Her willingness to answer in the affirmative, and to get into theoretical details around a possible ruling, stood in stark contrast to her tight-lipped responses to questions from many Democrats, including Booker.
  • Biden’s campaign has flatly rejected the report, which Facebook and Twitter viewed as so dubious that they limited access to the article.
  • NBC will host a town hall event with Trump at 8 p.m.
  • The two candidates had been scheduled to face off in a debate tonight until Trump withdrew last week,
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