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Javier E

Our Elites Still Don't Get It - The New York Times - 0 views

  • John Bowlby is the father of attachment theory, which explains how humans are formed by relationships early in life, and are given the tools to go out and lead their lives
  • “All of us, from cradle to grave, are happiest when life is organized as a series of excursions, long or short, from the secure base provided by our attachment figures.”
  • The relationships that form you are mostly things you didn’t choose: your family, hometown, ethnic group, religion, nation and genes.
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  • The things you do with your life are mostly chosen: your job, spouse and hobbies.
  • At our foundation, we were a society with strong covenantal attachments — to family, community, creed and faith. Then on top of them we built democracy and capitalism that celebrated liberty and individual rights.
  • The deep covenantal institutions gave people the capacity to use their freedom well. The liberal institutions gave them that freedom.
  • This delicate balance — liberal institutions built atop illiberal ones — is now giving way. The big social movements of the past half century were about maximizing freedom of choice. Right-wingers wanted to maximize economic choice and left-wingers lifestyle choice. Anything that smacked of restraint came to seem like a bad thing to be eliminated.
  • We’ll call this worldview — which is all freedom and no covenant — naked liberalism
  • The problem with naked liberalism is that it relies on individuals it cannot create.
  • Naked liberals of right and left assume that if you give people freedom they will use it to care for their neighbors, to have civil conversations, to form opinions after examining the evidence. But if you weaken family, faith, community and any sense of national obligation, where is that social, emotional and moral formation supposed to come from? How will the virtuous habits form?
  • Naked liberalism has made our society an unsteady tree. The branches of individual rights are sprawling, but the roots of common obligation are withering away.
  • Freedom without covenant becomes selfishness. And that’s what we see at the top of society, in our politics and the financial crisis
  • First, they will identify themselves according to race. They will become the racial essentialists you see on left and right
  • And that’s what we see at the bottom of society — frayed communities, broken families, opiate addiction.
  • Freedom without a unifying national narrative becomes distrust, polarization and permanent political war.
  • covenantal attachments they become fragile. Moreover, if you rob people of their good covenantal attachments, they will grab bad ones.
  • Freedom without connection becomes alienation.
  • Then they resort to tribalism. This is what Donald Trump provides. As Mark S. Weiner writes on the Niskanen Center’s blog, Trump is constantly making friend/enemy distinctions, exploiting liberalism’s thin conception of community and creating toxic communities based on in-group/out-group rivalry.
  • Trump offers people cultural solutions to their alienation problem. As history clearly demonstrates, people will prefer fascism to isolation, authoritarianism to moral anarchy.
  • If we are going to have a decent society we’re going to have to save liberalism from itself. We’re going to have to restore and re-enchant the covenantal relationships that are the foundation for the whole deal. The crucial battleground is cultural and prepolitical.
  • In my experience, most people under 40 get this. They sense the social and moral void at the core and that change has to come at the communal, emotional and moral level.
  • Many public intellectuals were trained in the social sciences and take the choosing individual as their mental starting point. They have trouble thinking about our shared social and moral formative institutions and how such institutions could be reconstituted.
  • Congressional Republicans think a successful tax bill will thwart populism. Mainstream Democrats think the alienation problem will go away if we redistribute the crumbs a bit more widely.
  • History is full of examples of nations that built new national narratives, revived family life, restored community bonds and shared moral culture: Britain in the early 19th century, Germany after World War II, America in the Progressive Era. The first step in launching our own revival is understanding that the problem is down in the roots.
Javier E

Trump: White Nationalist or in his Second Childhood - A Response - Talking Points Memo - 0 views

  • the shift of the Republican base to the right that now makes the move to the center terribly risky.
  • Another way to say it is that Republicans moving to the center now means becoming something close to right wing social democrats. It would mean, for example, saying that okay we are going to fix Obamacare by reworking the exchanges and actually doing something about prescription drug prices. And we will revive U.S. manufacturing by building on Obama’s advanced manufacturing institutes. We will fight opioid addiction with a dramatic increase in drug treatment spending. Moreover funding these programs means that we actually have to raise some taxes so we are going to introduce a VAT. In short, they pretty much have to go all the way to being Eisenhower Republicans.
  • Now, of course, that is what we want to happen because if the competition is to see which party is better at devising government programs that will help solve social and economic programs, it would make it possible for the Dems to move left. But I think that conservative parties only make this kind of Christian Democratic turn when the threat from the electoral left is already very strong—and we haven’t reached that point
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  • So this gets us to Trump. The nature of the Republican coalition keeps him from moving to the center.
  • essentially, I think, because Ryan and McConnell said that they were against anything that involved a significant budgetary commitment. So all they can do is some smoke and mirrors type of privatizing effort. So basically Trump has nothing to offer the base of white, high school educated voters. He cannot protect their health care or their retirement and he cannot get them jobs.
  • So what is left? Racism and hostility to immigrants.
  • I think the link to personality is through bullying. Here, I think Josh Marshall is right about the dominance politics—he operates by demeaning others with name calling and threats.
  • The resort to racist rhetoric is just another type of bullying that comes completely naturally to him and it is basically impersonal.
  • So this is his elective affinity with the Klan and the Neo-Nazis. If he condemns them unequivocally, he is embracing the political correctness that says that you are not allowed to demean entire groups based on prejudicial stereotypes. But then he wouldn’t be able to say that Mexicans are rapists and Muslims are terrorists.
  • In short, even with Bannon gone, he does not really have a choice but to double down on racism—it is all he has got.
Javier E

What Obama Could Teach Trump About Charlottesville - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Donald Trump, who was then an improbable but officially declared candidate for the presidency, tweeted, “When will President Obama issue the words RADICAL ISLAMIC TERRORISM? He can’t say it, and unless he will, the problem will not be solved!”
  • Trump, when presented with the chance to denounce, in plain, direct language, individuals who could fairly be described as “white supremacist terrorists,” or with some other equivalent formulation, instead resorted to euphemism and moral equivalence.
  • Obama’s critics argued throughout his presidency that his unwillingness to embrace the incantatory rhetoric of civilizational struggle—his reluctance to cast such groups as al-Qaeda and ISIS as vanguards of an all-encompassing ideological and theological challenge to the West—meant that, at the very least, he misunderstood the nature of the threat, or, more malignantly, that he understood the nature of the threat but was, through omission, declaring a kind of neutrality in the conflict between the United States and its principal adversary.
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  • Obama, over the eight years he served as president, ordered the killings of more Muslim terrorists, in more Muslim countries, than any of his predecessors. On this subject, he spoke so softly he could barely be heard, but he carried a lethal stick. His goal was to eradicate Muslim terrorists without alienating the great mass of Muslims unsympathetic to the theology and tactics of those terrorists.
  • Refracting this conflict through the prism of a “clash of civilizations” of the sort imagined by the late political scientist Samuel Huntington would do no one any good. “I do not persuade peaceful, tolerant Muslims to engage in that debate if I’m not sensitive to their concern that they are being tagged with a broad brush,” Obama said.
  • It is up to the worldwide community of Muslims, Obama believed, to shape the Muslim future. It was not the job of the president of the United States to insert himself unnecessarily into this debate, by using rhetoric that would be polarizing and dangerous.
  • Trump is now refusing to speak plainly about the nature of a particular terrorist threat, a sin he continually ascribed to his predecessor.
  • the struggle in Charlottesville is a struggle within our own civilization, within Trump’s own civilization. It is precisely at moments like this that an American president should speak up directly on behalf of the American creed, on behalf of Americans who reject tribalism and seek pluralism, on behalf of the idea that blood-and-soil nationalism is antithetical to the American idea itself
maxwellokolo

These Days, Business Travel By Trump's Sons Is Costly And Complicated - 0 views

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    In early January, Eric Trump took a trip to Uruguay to check progress on an unfinished Trump tower. About a month later, he was in the Dominican Republic, seeing whether an earlier resort project could be revived. He joined his brother, Donald Jr., a couple of weeks later at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a Trump-branded golf course in Dubai.
maxwellokolo

ISIS claims Manila casino attack despite police denial - 0 views

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    ISIS has claimed responsibility for an attack Friday at a casino in the Philippine capital that left 37 people dead; however, police continue to deny what happened was terror-related.
Javier E

For Me To Win, You Have to Lose - Talking Points Memo - 0 views

  • Both abroad and with Congress we can see clearly what should have been clear in advance: President Trump has no idea how to negotiate international accords or treaties or how to pass laws. These require building coalitions and trust because you’ll need to work with the same actors again in the future. You also need to build coalitions of people or nations each of whom think they have something to gain from the effort. As Nocera noted in that column about the golf resort swindle, Trump’s idea of business is basically cheating. That doesn’t necessarily mean breaking the law, though Trump does plenty of that. It means making money by trickery and hard dealing in which the other party usually ends up screwed.
  • Those just aren’t the skills that end up being effective for a President. But that’s all Trump knows. That’s why we currently have what amounts to governance via chaos and outburst. Trump doesn’t know how to be President.
anonymous

Hawaii gets tourism surge as coronavirus rules loosen up - 0 views

  • Tourists are traveling to Hawaii in larger numbers than officials anticipated, and many are wandering around Waikiki without masks, despite a statewide mandate to wear them in public.
  • Hawaii’s “Safe Travels” program reported that about 28,000 people flew into and throughout the islands on Saturday, the highest number of travelers in a single day since the pandemic began, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser reported Monday.
  • In October, state officials launched a pre-travel testing program that allowed visitors to sidestep quarantine rules. But travel remained sluggish until the second week in March, when spring break tourists started arriving in the islands.
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  • “We haven’t seen travel demand for Hawaii this strong for over a year,” Richards said. “I thought we would have a U-shaped recovery; it’s V-shaped. January and February were terrible, but we’ve gone from zero to 150 mph in two weeks.”
  • Visitors said rules in their home states are different than those in place in Hawaii.“We carry our masks around and if we walk into an establishment we’ll wear one, and if people look like they’re uncomfortable with us around, we’ll put one on. But otherwise, like I said where we come from, people are really not required to wear them,” Wisconsin visitor Larry Dopke said.
  • Some lawmakers expressed concern about a possible backlash from residents.“I think we’re all going to have to be prepared for a potential surge in tourism,” said Hawaii state Rep. Scott Saiki, a Democrat. “I think we have to be prepared because the public may have a response to a sudden surge.”
  • “Pushing back against tourism is the same thing as telling your neighbor they shouldn’t have a job,” said Carl Bonham, executive director of the University of Hawaii’s Economic Research Organization.
  • The island of Kauai has additional measures that will be in place until April 5. All visitors to Kauai must either spend three days on another island or quarantine at a county-approved resort for three days and then get second, post-arrival tests.
  • Tim Sakahara, a spokesman for Honolulu Mayor Rick Blangiardi, said in an email that the city recently put up banners throughout Waikiki reminding people to wear masks and remain socially distanced. “These banners provide a tool to help Honolulu Police officers do their jobs in gaining compliance with COVID-19 rules,” Sakahara said. “The majority of residents and visitors are compliant with the rule or are cooperative when informed of it.”
clairemann

'Power for Power': North Korea Returns to a Show of Force - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Pyongyang’s recent ballistic missiles test indicated that the country is once again resorting to a show of force, raising tensions to gain leverage with Washington.
  • It swore that the Biden administration would pay a “price,” accused it of raising “a stink” on the Korean Peninsula and called Washington’s effort to open a channel of communication a “trick,” vowing to deal with the United States “power for power.”
  • On Thursday it delivered its latest warning by launching two short-range ballistic missiles off its east coast — the first such test by the country in a year and its first significant provocation against the United States under President Biden.
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  • “North Korea uses weapons tests strategically, both to make needed improvements to its weapons and to garner global attention,”
  • As the policy review continues — and the possibility that the Biden administration will abandon the summit diplomacy of President Donald J. Trump grows — North Korea appears to be “returning to a familiar pattern of using provocations to raise tensions,” Ms. Lee said.
  • “This latest North Korean missile launch is most likely a reaction to U.S. President Joe Biden’s downplaying and seeming to laugh off their weekend missile tests,” said Harry J. Kazianis, senior director of Korean studies at the National Interest in Washington. “The Kim regime, just like during the Trump years, will react to even the slightest of what they feel are any sort of loss of face or disparaging comments coming out of Washington.”
  • On Friday, after a North Korean businessman was extradited from Malaysia to face trial in an American court on charges of money laundering and violating international sanctions, North Korea warned that Washington would pay “a due price.”
  • “North Korea believes that if the United States tries to impose sanctions, China will provide cover for it,” he said.
ethanshilling

Opinion | I Survived 18 Years in Solitary Confinement - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Mr. Manuel is an author, activist and poet. When he was 14 years old, he was sentenced to life in prison with no parole and spent 18 years in solitary confinement. His forthcoming memoir, “My Time Will Come,” details these experiences.
  • As a 15-year-old, I was condemned to long-term solitary confinement in the Florida prison system, which ultimately lasted for 18 consecutive years. From 1992 to 2010. From age 15 to 33. From the end of the George H.W. Bush administration to the beginnings of the Obama era.
  • For 18 years I didn’t have a window in my room to distract myself from the intensity of my confinement. I wasn’t permitted to talk to my fellow prisoners or even to myself. I didn’t have healthy, nutritious food; I was given just enough to not die.
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  • In the summer of 1990, shortly after finishing seventh grade, I was directed by a few older kids to commit a robbery. During the botched attempt, I shot a woman. She suffered serious injuries to her jaw and mouth but survived.
  • For this I was arrested and charged as an adult with armed robbery and attempted murder.
  • I was thrown into solitary confinement the day I arrived at the Reception and Medical Center, a state prison in Lake Butler, Fla., because of my young age.
  • But a year and a half later, at age 15, I was put back into solitary confinement after being written up for a few minor infractions.
  • Florida has different levels of solitary confinement; I spent the majority of that time in one of the most restrictive. Nearly two decades caged in a roughly 7-by-10-foot room passed before I was rotated between the general population area and solitary for six more years.
  • Researchers have long concluded that solitary confinement causes post-traumatic stress disorder and impairs prisoners’ ability to adjust to society long after they leave their cell.
  • Yet the practice, even for minors, is still common in the United States, and efforts to end it have been spotty
  • More aggressive change is needed in state prison systems. Today, dozens of states still have little to no legislation prohibiting juvenile solitary confinement.
  • I also witnessed the human consequences of the harshness of solitary firsthand: Some people would resort to cutting their stomachs open with a razor and sticking a plastic spork inside their intestines just so they could spend a week in the comfort of a hospital room with a television.
  • I served 18 consecutive years in isolation because each minor disciplinary infraction — like having a magazine that had another prisoner’s name on the mailing label — added an additional six months to my time in solitary confinement.
  • It is difficult to know the exact number of children in solitary confinement today. The Liman Center at Yale Law School estimated that 61,000 Americans (adults and children) were in solitary confinement in the fall of 2017.
  • No matter the count, I witnessed too many people lose their minds while isolated. They’d involuntarily cross a line and simply never return to sanity.
  • Solitary confinement is cruel and unusual punishment, something prohibited by the Eighth Amendment, yet prisons continue to practice it.
  • When it comes to children, elimination is the only moral option. And if ending solitary confinement for adults isn’t politically viable, public officials should at least limit the length of confinement to 15 days or fewer, in compliance with the U.N. standards.
  • In the meantime, prisoners in Florida like Darryl Streeter, inmate No. 514988, are forced to spend their lives in long-term isolation. He recently told me by phone that he’s been in solitary confinement for 24 consecutive years.
  • As I try to reintegrate into society, small things often awaken painful memories from solitary. Sometimes relationships feel constraining.
  • I will face PTSD and challenges big and small for the rest of my life because of what I was subjected to. Some things I’ve grown accustomed to. Some things I haven’t. And some things I never will — most of all, that this country can treat human beings, especially children, as cruelly as I was treated.
rerobinson03

Opinion | We've Spent Over a Decade Researching Guns in America. This Is What We Learne... - 0 views

  • Gun violence did not go away during 2020. Gun homicides jumped 25 percent from the year before, apparently fueled in part by a rise in intimate-partner violence. Some people have approached the possibility of becoming a victim of violence, including anti-Asian hate crime, with what could be characterized as an act of anticipatory trauma: purchasing a firearm. This isn’t unprecedented. Americans have long turned to firearms as both a last (if not first) resort for addressing uncertainty, precarity and insecurity in a country that largely lacks a collective social safety net.
  • This trauma has a broad toll, unevenly borne. More than 240,000 students (including a disproportionate number of Black students) have experienced gun violence at school since the 1999 Columbine shooting, while socioeconomically underserved communities of color disproportionately bear the brunt of gun violence. Black boys and young men ages 15 to 34 are more than 20 times more likely to die of gun homicide than their white counterparts.
  • Many people recognized that the lull in mass public shootings during 2020 brought on by the pandemic response would eventually end. The violence that we have seen in the past two weeks in the Atlanta area and Boulder points us to a different kind of gun debate — one that recognizes the cyclical nature of gun trauma while also recognizing that many gun policies are also counterproductive. Policies that purport to end the trauma of gun violence by increasing the punitive surveillance of individuals with mental illness, increasing police presence and surveillance of students at schools or bringing more people into contact with the criminal justice system may ultimately create more, if different, trauma.
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  • Approaching guns from the perspective of trauma will require some imagination — and some courage. In the days and weeks to come, we will be tempted to double down on our usual agendas and party lines. We should embrace evidence-based policies to reduce gun violence. But we can’t stop there. Addressing gun violence in the spaces where we live our lives — our grocery stores, our workplaces, our schools, our streets and our homes — requires addressing the damage gun trauma inflicts on our souls, retooling our familiar agendas, letting go of partisanship and remembering that we share a basic vulnerability as humans that can unite us or, if we choose, divide us further.
delgadool

Biden Seeks Help on Border From Mexican President - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Mr. López Obrador won the admiration of President Donald J. Trump for cooperating with his hard-line immigration agenda, and the Mexican president praised Mr. Trump during a call with Mr. Biden, then the president-elect, in December.
  • Mr. Biden is now hoping that Mr. López Obrador will become a partner in preventing another cycle of out-of-control migration from Central America, but that he will do so without resorting to the full range of policies Mr. Trump embraced.
  • Mr. López Obrador recently called for a new guest worker program for Mexicans and Central Americans in the United States, although Mr. Biden’s press secretary said on Monday the move would require legislation from Congress.
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  • “The United States and Mexico are stronger when we stand together,” Mr. Biden said at the beginning of a virtual meeting with the Mexican president, while acknowledging that the countries have not been “perfect” neighbors. He said that during the Obama administration, “we looked at Mexico as an equal — you are equal.”
  • The conversation came after a tumultuous start between the two leaders
  • “What you do in Mexico and how you succeed affects the rest of the hemisphere,” Mr. Biden told him.
  • Mr. Biden is not using the rule to expel unaccompanied migrant children, a practice that under Mr. Trump caused families to scramble to find Central American children and violated a diplomatic agreement with Mexico. I
  • Mr. Biden has made immigration one of his top legislative and diplomatic priorities, moving quickly to raise Trump-era limits on refugees who can be allowed into the United States and calling on Congress to pass a far-reaching bill that would give a path to citizenship to 11 million undocumented immigrants already living in the country.
  • The Biden administration has also formed a task force to unite parents separated from their children under Mr. Trump’s family separations policy
  • Republicans have already signaled that they intend to seize on Mr. Biden’s reversals of his predecessor’s immigration policies as a cornerstone in their efforts to take back Congress in 2022 and recapture the White House two years later.
  • While Mr. Biden is unwinding the Migrant Protection Protocols program that forced migrants to wait in Mexico for an adjudication in their asylum cases, he has kept another Trump-era rule in place that empowers border agents to swiftly expel migrants and turn them over to Mexican authorities.
  • But even as Mr. Biden seeks to unwind those policies, Mr. Mayorkas acknowledged that the United States continued to rely, for now, on a measure at the heart of Mr. Trump’s approach: a public health rule that requires border agents to quickly deport border crossers to Mexico without a chance to request asylum.
  • Despite the emergency rule, border agents have for weeks released a limited number of families into communities in South Texas because of a change in Mexican law that has been the subject of internal discussions between Mexican and American government officials in recent weeks, according to a senior administration official.
  • At the same time, pandemic restrictions remain in place on nonessential travelers who have long stimulated the local economy along the border, he said.
anonymous

'Chaotic' Virginia Beach Shootings Leave 2 Dead, At Least 8 Others Wounded : NPR - 0 views

  • Two people are dead and at least eight others were wounded after multiple shootings near the oceanfront in Virginia Beach, Va., on Friday night.
  • Police officials say officers were on patrol in the city's resort area when they heard multiple gunshots at 11:22 p.m., according to a statement on Saturday. When they arrived to the scene, they found several victims suffering from gunshot wounds.
  • One woman died at the scene and at least eight people were transported to hospitals for their injuries. Authorities said the injuries ranged from "serious to life-threatening."
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  • One Virginia Beach police officer was also taken to a hospital for "minor injuries." The department's homicide unit is investigating what happened, but police say there are no suspects as of yet.
  • Authorities said an officer-involved shooting also took place on Saturday — just a few blocks from the shooting near the waterfront.
  • Department officials said a male suspect in this shooting died at the scene. Authorities said they believe the second shooting was related to the first, but did not provide details on how they are connected. The officer involved in the shooting has been placed on administrative leave pending an investigation, which police called standard procedure.
  • In addition to the shootings, a police officer was struck by a car and taken to the hospital with none life-threatening injuries.
  • The shootings in Virginia Beach follow mass shootings in the Atlanta area and in Boulder, Colo., this month, in which 18 people were killed in total. The Virginia Beach community also experienced a mass shooting in 2019, when a man killed 12 people and injured several others at a municipal building.
carolinehayter

Gab: hack gives unprecedented look into platform used by far right | The far right | Th... - 0 views

  • 61A data breach at the fringe social media site Gab has for the first time offered a picture of the user base and inner workings of a platform that has been opaque about its operation.
  • The user lists appear to mark 500 accounts, including neo-Nazis, QAnon influencers, cryptocurrency advocates and conspiracy theorists, as investors. They also appear to give an overview of verified users of the platform, including prominent rightwing commentators and activists. And they mark hundreds of active users on the site as “automated”, appearing to indicate administrators knew the accounts were bots but let them continue on the platform regardless.
  • showing the entrepreneur seeking direct feedback on site design from a member of a group that promotes a “spiderweb of rightwing internet conspiracy theories with antisemitic and anti-LGBTQ elements”, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
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  • On Monday, the platform went dark after a hacker took over the accounts of 178 users, including Torba and the Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene.
  • Gab, a Twitter-like website promoted by Torba as a bastion of free speech, has long been a forum of last resort for extremists and conspiracy theorists who have been banned on other online platforms. It attained worldwide notoriety in 2018 when a user, Robert Bowers, wrote on the site that he was “going in”, shortly before allegedly entering the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and killing eleven people.
  • The leaked files contained what appears to be a database of over 4.1 million registered users on the site and tags identifying subscribers as “investors”, “verified” users and “pro” users.
  • The 2017 share offering, for example, required a minimum investment of $199.10, and rewarded investors who contributed a greater amount with “perks”. Users who invested $200 could display a “Gab investor badge” on the site. The badges corresponded with a tag in the database, which allowed investors to be looked at in detail.
  • Some of the people associated with investors’ accounts had high-profile jobs and public roles, while spewing hate and extremist beliefs online.
  • The data breach also appears to offer some insight into users tagged as “verified” by Gab, which according to the platform’s own explanation means that they have completed a verification process that includes matching their display name to a government ID.
  • And it appears to include a list of users registered as “pros”, which allows users to access additional features and a badge at a price starting at $99 year. The database indicates over 18,000 users had paid to be pro users at the time of the breach. Nearly 4,000 users were flagged as donors to Gab’s repeated attempts to attract voluntary gifts from users.
  • Direct messages included in the leak appear to show close communication between Torba and a major QAnon influencer who is labeled a Gab investor, seemingly reinforcing the CEO’s public efforts to make Gab a home for adherents to the QAnon conspiracy theory, which helped fuel the 6 January attack on the nation’s Capitol.
  • According to Wired, the data exposed in the apparent hack was sourced by a hacker who had found a security vulnerability in the site.
  • “Gab was negligent at best and malicious at worst” in its approach to security, she added. “It is hard to envision a scenario where a company cared less about user data than this one.”
Javier E

Thieves of experience: On the rise of surveillance capitalism - 0 views

  • n the choices we make as consumers and private citizens, we have always traded some of our autonomy to gain other rewards. Many people, it seems clear, experience surveillance capitalism less as a prison, where their agency is restricted in a noxious way, than as an all-inclusive resort, where their agency is restricted in a pleasing way
  • Zuboff makes a convincing case that this is a short-sighted and dangerous view — that the bargain we’ve struck with the internet giants is a Faustian one
  • but her case would have been stronger still had she more fully addressed the benefits side of the ledger.
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  • there’s a piece missing. While Zuboff’s assessment of the costs that people incur under surveillance capitalism is exhaustive, she largely ignores the benefits people receive in return — convenience, customization, savings, entertainment, social connection, and so on
  • hat the industries of the future will seek to manufacture is the self.
  • Behavior modification is the thread that ties today’s search engines, social networks, and smartphone trackers to tomorrow’s facial-recognition systems, emotion-detection sensors, and artificial-intelligence bots.
  • All of Facebook’s information wrangling and algorithmic fine-tuning, she writes, “is aimed at solving one problem: how and when to intervene in the state of play that is your daily life in order to modify your behavior and thus sharply increase the predictability of your actions now, soon, and later.”
  • “The goal of everything we do is to change people’s actual behavior at scale,” a top Silicon Valley data scientist told her in an interview. “We can test how actionable our cues are for them and how profitable certain behaviors are for us.”
  • This goal, she suggests, is not limited to Facebook. It is coming to guide much of the economy, as financial and social power shifts to the surveillance capitalists
  • Combining rich information on individuals’ behavioral triggers with the ability to deliver precisely tailored and timed messages turns out to be a recipe for behavior modification on an unprecedented scale.
  • it was Facebook, with its incredibly detailed data on people’s social lives, that grasped digital media’s full potential for behavior modification. By using what it called its “social graph” to map the intentions, desires, and interactions of literally billions of individuals, it saw that it could turn its network into a worldwide Skinner box, employing psychological triggers and rewards to program not only what people see but how they react.
  • spying on the populace is not the end game. The real prize lies in figuring out ways to use the data to shape how people think and act. “The best way to predict the future is to invent it,” the computer scientist Alan Kay once observed. And the best way to predict behavior is to script it.
  • competition for personal data intensified. It was no longer enough to monitor people online; making better predictions required that surveillance be extended into homes, stores, schools, workplaces, and the public squares of cities and towns. Much of the recent innovation in the tech industry has entailed the creation of products and services designed to vacuum up data from every corner of our lives
  • “The typical complaint is that privacy is eroded, but that is misleading,” Zuboff writes. “In the larger societal pattern, privacy is not eroded but redistributed . . . . Instead of people having the rights to decide how and what they will disclose, these rights are concentrated within the domain of surveillance capitalism.” The transfer of decision rights is also a transfer of autonomy and agency, from the citizen to the corporation.
  • What we lose under this regime is something more fundamental than privacy. It’s the right to make our own decisions about privacy — to draw our own lines between those aspects of our lives we are comfortable sharing and those we are not
  • Other possible ways of organizing online markets, such as through paid subscriptions for apps and services, never even got a chance to be tested.
  • Online surveillance came to be viewed as normal and even necessary by politicians, government bureaucrats, and the general public
  • Google and other Silicon Valley companies benefited directly from the government’s new stress on digital surveillance. They earned millions through contracts to share their data collection and analysis techniques with the National Security Agenc
  • As much as the dot-com crash, the horrors of 9/11 set the stage for the rise of surveillance capitalism. Zuboff notes that, in 2000, members of the Federal Trade Commission, frustrated by internet companies’ lack of progress in adopting privacy protections, began formulating legislation to secure people’s control over their online information and severely restrict the companies’ ability to collect and store it. It seemed obvious to the regulators that ownership of personal data should by default lie in the hands of private citizens, not corporations.
  • The 9/11 attacks changed the calculus. The centralized collection and analysis of online data, on a vast scale, came to be seen as essential to national security. “The privacy provisions debated just months earlier vanished from the conversation more or less overnight,”
carolinehayter

Polls find most Republicans say 2020 election was stolen and roughly one-quarter embrac... - 0 views

  • About one-quarter of Republicans, 23%, agree with a set of conspiratorial beliefs linked to the QAnon movement, according to a PRRI report released Thursday. These believers said they mostly or completely agreed that "the government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation," that "there is a storm coming soon that will sweep away the elites in power and restore the rightful leaders," and, finally, that "because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country."
  • A majority of Republicans, 56%, say they believe that the 2020 election was the result of illegal voting or election rigging, per an Ipsos/Reuters poll released last week, with about 6 in 10 agreeing with the statement that "the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump."
  • Attempting to quantify the precise share of the public who subscribe to a particular theory is often challenging -- the depth and intensity of people's beliefs vary, making it rarely as simple as a yes or no question. That's especially true in the case of QAnon, which the PRRI report describes as a "loosely connected belief system" that "involves a constantly evolving web of schemes."
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  • While fully embracing QAnon talking points remains a minority position within the GOP, denying the legitimacy of the 2020 election has become the mainstream position inside the party.Read More
  • Beyond partisanship, belief in QAnon conspiracy theories is also strongly associated with consumption of far-right media, the report finds.
  • Republicans also say, 54% to 30%, that they agree with the myth that the January 6 riot at the US Capitol "was led by violent left-wing protestors trying to make Trump look bad."
  • In a new Quinnipiac survey, 74% of Republicans say that "too much is being made of the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6th and it is time to move on," compared with just 18% who say that it was an "attack on democracy that should never be forgotten."
  • A 64% majority of registered voters, including similar shares in both parties, think that political divisions pose a major threat to the United States, per a new Fox News poll.
saberal

Lock him up! Why is repeat offender Donald Trump still a free man? | Simon Tisdall | Th... - 0 views

  • A sudden fall from power always comes hard. King Alfred was reduced to skulking in a Somerset bog. A distraught Napoleon talked to coffee bushes on St Helena. Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia hung around the haberdashery department of Jolly’s in Bath. Uganda’s Idi Amin plotted bloody revenge from a Novotel in Jeddah. Only Alfred the Great made a successful comeback.
  • The fact he is not, and has not been charged with anything, is a genuine puzzle – some might say a scandal, even a conspiracy. Trump’s actual and potential criminal rap sheet long predates the Capitol siege. It includes alleged abuses of power, obstruction of justice, fraud, tax evasion, Russian money-laundering, election tampering, conflicts of interest, hush-money bribes, assassination – and a lot of lies.
  • Letitia James, New York’s attorney-general, last week confirmed a criminal investigation into alleged wrongdoing by Trump’s business empire. This inquiry is running in tandem with another criminal investigation into the Trump Organisation by the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus Vance. Alleged false accounting and tax irregularities appear to be the main focus.
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  • Trump’s well-attested attempts to induce Georgia state officials to manipulate November’s election count in his favour were a crime, Fulton County prosecutors suggest. If so, why the delay? Charge him! Add to the rap sheet allegations of the ex-president corruptly channelling US taxpayer and foreign funds into his hotel and resort businesses.
  • It’s truly strange that in a land of laws, Trump still walks free, strutting around his fancy-pants golf course, holding $250,000 a head fundraisers, evading justice, encouraging sedition, and daily blogging divisive bile about a stolen election. The Big Kahuna peddles the Big Lie. What other self-respecting country would allow it?
saberal

UN urges Biden to end Title 42 restrictions that allow for migrant removals due to COVI... - 0 views

  • The United Nations is urging the Biden administration to "swiftly" end the Title 42 public health restrictions, which were implemented during the Trump administration in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic -- and allow for the quick expulsion of migrants who come to the border.
  • While the Biden administration has rolled back a number of Trump-era border protections, it has kept Title 42 largely in place -- although crucially it is not removing unaccompanied children and some migrant families. Critics have claimed that has encouraged more children and families to make the dangerous trek to the border.
  • "I encourage the US administration to continue its work to strengthen its asylum system and diversify safe pathways so asylum-seekers are not forced to resort to dangerous crossings facilitated by smugglers," he said.
aidenborst

Chamber of Commerce: Worker shortage can't be solved without ramping up immigration - CNN - 0 views

  • As businesses grapple with record-high job openings, the US Chamber of Commerce is loudly calling on Washington to allow more foreign workers to legally enter the country.
  • Neil Bradley, chief policy officer at the Chamber of Commerce, told CNN Business that the worker shortage can't be solved in the long run without ramping up immigration.
  • "We've never seen a situation this broad-based across the country where businesses are having to turn down work because they simply can't find the workers to do it," Bradley said. "This crisis is not going to go away."
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  • Economists have long warned that the aging US population means the nation will need to rely on a steady influx of foreign workers to meet demand. Yet Washington has repeatedly failed to reach a deal on immigration reform. And the Trump administration repeatedly put up obstacles to legal immigration, including restrictions imposed in 2020 that cited the pandemic's impact on the jobs market.
  • "Immigration was completely upended by the pandemic," said Bradley. "Go to any resort town in America. Where you would normally have individuals on temporary J-1 visas, they are nonexistent."
  • "The survivability of your business comes down to how lucky you are in the lottery," Bradley said.
  • "But labor supply will be a longer run issue, just like before the pandemic," Zandi said. "There are reasons to believe it will be a bigger problem post-pandemic because immigration is a shadow of what it was."
  • "The [Biden] administration deserves a lot of credit for taking that step," Bradley said. "They are operating within the limits of where the current law exists."
  • Beyond immigration reform, the Chamber told CNN Business it will urge states to use American Rescue Plan funding to help parents struggling with the high cost of childcare.
  • "There is no question the disruption of in-person schooling and childcare has reduced the number of caregivers, principally women, who are in the workforce and able to work," Bradley said.
  • Arizona announced plans on May 13 to use funds from the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan to assist working parents with childcare costs. The state said it will provide three months of childcare assistance to people making $52,000 or less who return to work after collecting unemployment benefits. The initiative is part of Arizona's decision to end the $300 enhanced unemployment benefit.
  • "The president deserves credit for identifying a lot of important problems that we need to discuss with the American Families Plan," Bradley said, specifically citing the affordability and accessibility of childcare. /* dynamic basic css */ .AR_36.ob-widget .ob-widget-items-container {margin:0;padding:0;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob-widget-items-container .ob-clearfix {display:block;width:100%;float:none;clear:both;height:0px;line-height:0px;font-size:0px;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob-widget-items-container.ob-multi-row {padding-top: 2%;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob-dynamic-rec-container {position:relative;margin:0;padding;0;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob-dynamic-rec-link, .AR_36.ob-widget .ob-dynamic-rec-link:hover {text-decoration:none;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob-rec-image-container .ob-video-icon-container {position:absolute;left:0;height:50%;width:100%;text-align:center;top:25%;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob-rec-image-container .ob-video-icon {display:inline-block;height:100%;float:none;opacity:0.7;transition: opacity 500ms;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob-rec-image-container .ob-video-icon:hover {opacity:1;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob-rec-image-container .ob-rec-rtb-image {background-color:white;background-position:center;background-repeat:no-repeat;width:100%;position:absolute;top:0;bottom:0;left:0;right:0;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob-rec-image-container .ob-rec-rtb-image.ob-lazy-bgimg{background:none!important;}.AR_36.ob-widget .ob_what{direction:ltr;clear:both;padding:5px 10px 0px;} .AR_36 .ob_what a:after {content: "";vertical-align:super;;;background-image: url('https://widgets.outbrain.com/images/widgetIcons/achoice.svg');background-size:75% 75%;width:12px;height:12px;padding-left:4px;display:inline-block;background-repeat:no-repeat;background-position:right center;border-left:1px solid #999;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_what a{color:#757575;font-size:11px;font-family:arial;text-decoration: none;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_what.ob-hover:hover a{text-decoration: underline;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_amelia, .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_amelia_covid, .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_logo, .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_feed_logo, .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_sfeed_logo, .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_text_logo{vertical-align:baseline !important;display:inline-block;vertical-align:text-bottom;padding:0px 5px;box-sizing:content-box;-moz-box-sizing:content-box;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_amelia{background:url('https://widgets.outbrain.com/images/widgetIcons/ob_logo_16x16.png') no-repeat center top;width:16px;height:16px;margin-bottom:-2px;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_amelia_covid{width:auto;height:16px;max-height:16px;margin-bottom:-2px;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_logo{background:url('https://widgets.outbrain.com/images/widgetIcons/ob_logo_67x12.png') no-repeat center top;width:67px;height:12px;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_text_logo{background:url('https://widgets.outbrain.com/images/widgetIcons/ob_text_logo_67x22.png') no-repeat center top;width:67px;height:22px;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_feed_logo{background:url('https://widgets.outbrain.com/images/widgetIcons/ob_feed_logo.png') no-repeat center top;width:86px;height:23px;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_sfeed_logo{background:url('https://widgets.outbrain.com/images/widgetIcons/ob_smartFeedLogo.min.svg') no-repeat center top;width:140px;height:21px;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_sphere_logo{background:url('https://widgets.outbrain.com/images/widgetIcons/ob_sphere.svg') no-repeat center top;width:93px;height:27px;vertical-align:baseline!important;display:inline-block;vertical-align:text-bottom;padding:0px 0px;box-sizing:content-box;-moz-box-sizing:content-box;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box;} @media only screen and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 2),(min-resolution: 192dpi) { .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_amelia{background:url('https://widgets.outbrain.com/images/widgetIcons/ob_logo_16x16@2x.png') no-repeat center top;width:16px;height:16px;margin-bottom:-2px; 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ethanshilling

Turkey's Looming Lockdown Prompts a Rush to Stock Up - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The streets of Istanbul were abuzz, the grocery stores packed, the seaside promenades crowded — but it was not the bustle of an ordinary spring Thursday. People were flocking to take advantage of the last day before a new lockdown takes hold, the strictest in Turkey since the pandemic began.
  • The country’s heath minister, Fahrettin Koca, has said that more contagious variants of the virus are partly to blame for the accelerating spread. Critics say the government relaxed too soon in March, before the country had made much progress with vaccination.
  • Turkey has fully vaccinated only about 11 percent of its people so far — 8.8 million out of a population of 83 million — using mainly the CoronaVac vaccine developed in China and the Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine.
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  • For weeks, scientists have been calling for a total lockdown to stem the surge, but President Recep Tayyip Erdogan held off, mainly for economic reasons. He changed course after a cabinet meeting on Monday, and announced a new three-week lockdown to take effect Thursday evening and last through the end of Ramadan.
  • The announcement prompted a rush to stock up on groceries, alcohol and other supplies for the lockdown, which will include Eid al-Fitr, the three-day festival to mark the end of Ramadan. And many city dwellers hurried to reach rural hometowns or holiday resorts while travel was still allowed.
  • The lockdown will land hardest on the many Turks who depend on informal day work. A single mother with five small children in Istanbul who collects and sells paper said her family can eat only on days when she can work.
  • “I really don’t know what to do,” she said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid jeopardizing her welfare payments from the government. “I wish the state would give me a job.”
rerobinson03

'I Have No Money for Food': Among the Young, Hunger Is Rising - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Her stomach rumbled with hunger, she said, as she headed for a student-run food bank near the Bastille, where she joined a snaking line with 500 young people waiting for handouts.Ms. Chéreau, 19, a university student, ran out of savings in September after the pandemic ended the babysitting and restaurant jobs she had relied on. By October, she had resorted to eating one meal a day, and said she had lost 20 pounds.
  • As the pandemic begins its second year, humanitarian organizations in Europe are warning of an alarming rise in food insecurity among young people, following a steady stream of campus closings, job cuts and layoffs in their families. A growing share are facing hunger and mounting financial and psychological strain, deepening disparities for the most vulnerable populations.
  • In France, Europe’s second-largest economy, half of young adults now have limited or uncertain access to food.
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  • While the government subsidizes campus meals, it doesn’t provide food pantries. As the cost of staying fed grows insurmountable for students with little or no income, university administrators have turned to aid groups for help fighting hunger.
  • Aided by the Paris mayor’s office and the Red Cross, they negotiated donations from supermarkets and food companies like Danone. Now, 250 student volunteers organize pasta, cereal, baguettes, milk, soda, vegetables and sanitary items to give to 1,000 students a week — though the need is five times greater, said Ulysse Guttmann-Faure, a law student and a founder of the group. Students go online to reserve a place in the line.
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