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the differing sociologies of the two parties.

White Christian conservatives are the dominant force in the Republican party and have been for decades. Not everyone in the GOP is white, Christian and conservative of course. But if you’re in the GOP you’re in their house. And what they say goes. Those folks know what they want

The Democratic party, on the contrary, is a coalition of fairly disparate groups: white liberals, African-Americans, left-wing progressives, Hispanics, the LBGTQ community, organized labor, women, immigrants.

[Hanania] expressed support for eugenics and the forced sterilization of “low IQ” people, who he argued were most often Black. He opposed “miscegenation” and “race-mixing.” And once, while arguing that Black people cannot govern themselves, he cited the neo-Nazi author of “The Turner Diaries,” the infamous novel that celebrates a future race war.

He still makes explicitly racist statements and arguments, now under his own name. “I don’t have much hope that we’ll solve crime in any meaningful way,” he wrote on the platform formerly known as Twitter earlier this year. “It would require a revolution in our culture or form of government. We need more policing, incarceration, and surveillance of black people. Blacks won’t appreciate it, whites don’t have the stomach for it.”

Responding to the killing of a homeless Black man on the New York City subway, Hanania wrote, “These people are animals, whether they’re harassing people in subways or walking around in suits.”

According to “fourth turning” proponents, American history goes through recurring cycles. Each one, which lasts about 80 to 100 years, consists of four generation-long seasons, or “turnings.” The winter season is a time of upheaval and reconstruction — a fourth turning.

The theory first appeared in “The Fourth Turning,” a work of pop political science that has had a cult following more or less since it was published in 1997. In the last few years of political turmoil, the book and its ideas have bubbled into the mainstream.

According to “The Fourth Turning,” previous crisis periods include the American Revolution, the Civil War and World War II. America entered its latest fourth turning in the mid-2000s. It will culminate in a crisis sometime in the 2020s — i.e., now.

X gives Musk everything he ever wanted: attention, praise, sycophancy, nonsense presented as news reporting, hostility to non-right-wing ideas or arguments, money. Who, he figures, could want anything more?

the national culture has moved in a very different direction – because of earlier things the Tories did.

First, Brexit. A Right-wing victory that will benefit the Left in the long-run. Why? Because it taps into collectivist themes of sovereignty, identity and community. Because promises were made to spend more and defend workers from migrant competition. And because the Tories won a landslide off it that included parts of Britain that traditionally vote Labour, compelling Boris to adopt a populist programme for government out of the Disraeli playbook

Then Covid hit. The Tories could have taken a mighty risk and told us to wash our hands and go about our business, but instead they adopted a kind of war communism and ran the country from Whitehall

“I traced a throughline: from Sandy Hook to Pizzagate to QAnon to Charlottesville and the coronavirus myths to the election lie that brought violence to the Capitol on January 6th,” she told Vox earlier this year. “I started to understand how individuals, for reasons of ideology or social status, tribalism, or for profit, were willing to reject established truths, and how once they’d done that, it was incredibly difficult to persuade them otherwise.”

She describes the 2012 mass shooting in Newtown, CT as “a foundational moment in the world of misinformation and disinformation that we now live in.”

the NYT’s Elizabeth Williamson about her book, Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth, which was recently named one of the best books of 2022 by Publishers Weekly.

The scientists at the bench discovered that the money markets would not only punish left-wing experiments in changing the balance between states and markets, but they were also sensitive to experiments that pushed too far to the right. A cowed Ms. Truss apologized, and Mr. Kwarteng’s successor has reversed almost all of the planned cuts and limited the term for energy supports.

The mini-budget subjected the entire economy to experimental treatment. This was put in explicit terms in a celebratory post by a Tory journalist and think tanker claiming that Ms. Truss and Mr. Kwarteng had been “incubated” by the Institute of Economic Affairs in their early years and “Britain is now their laboratory.”

ince the 1970s, the world of think tanks had embraced a framing of the world in terms of discrete spaces that could become what they called laboratories for new policies

the idea of tikkun olam was utilized in very specific situations in order to avert particular unintended consequences.

Traditional rules were adjusted so as to prevent certain undesirable outcomes.  This has nothing to do with the popular notion of tikkun olam — “social justice” to “repair” the world.

Rather, tikkun olam as discussed in the Talmud relates to individual actions in selected circumstances — and adjustments in the rules to avoid potentially perverse results for the community. 

“Programming will be obsolete,” Matt Welsh, a former engineer at Google and Apple, predicted recently. Welsh now runs an A.I. start-up, but his prediction, while perhaps self-serving, doesn’t sound implausible:

I believe the conventional idea of “writing a program” is headed for extinction, and indeed, for all but very specialized applications, most software, as we know it, will be replaced by A.I. systems that are trained rather than programmed. In situations where one needs a “simple” program … those programs will, themselves, be generated by an A.I. rather than coded by hand.

there’s also a way in which A.I. could mark the beginning of a new kind of programming — one that doesn’t require us to learn code but instead transforms human-language instructions into software. An A.I. “doesn’t care how you program it — it will try to understand what you mean,” Jensen Huang, the chief executive of the chip-making company Nvidia, said in a speech this week at the Computex conference in Taiwan. He added: “We have closed the digital divide. Everyone is a programmer now — you just have to say something to the computer.”

mainstream platforms learned their lesson, accepting that they should intervene aggressively in more and more cases when users post content that might cause social harm.

During the wildfires in the American West in September, Facebook and Twitter took down false claims about their cause, even though the platforms had not done the same when large parts of Australia were engulfed in flames at the start of the year

Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube cracked down on QAnon, a sprawling, incoherent, and constantly evolving conspiracy theory, even though its borders are hard to delineate.

YASNOHORODKA, Ukraine (Reuters) - Standing amid the charred remains of a roadside hotel on a major highway near Kyiv, Isa Akayev explained what drove him to build his Muslim volunteer unit and fight for Ukraine.

Many Tatars opposed Moscow's annexation of Crimea, which had followed the overthrow of a pro-Kremlin Ukrainian president amid mass street protests.Their suspicion of Moscow has deep roots. Soviet dictator Josef Stalin ordered the mass deportation of Crimea's Tatars - Akayev’s grandparents among them - in 1944, accusing them of collaboration with Nazi Germany.They were only allowed to return with their descendants in the 1980s - as Akayev did from Uzbekistan in 1989 - and many welcomed the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union as a liberation.

become a fully-fledged unit of Ukraine's army.Dozens of other volunteer battalions sprang up in 2014 and began helping Ukraine's unprepared regular army to fight in the Donbas. They included two Chechen units, a Georgian one, and several with a right-wing nationalist ethos. Some have since disarmed while others have joined the regular army.Russia has been scathing about such units. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on the eve of the war that providing shoulder-held anti-aircraft missiles to former volunteer battalions was evidence of a "militaristic psychosis".A Ukrainian presidential envoy said in March that such volunteer battalions now numbered more than 100. Ukraine's government celebrates them as heroes, celebrating their exploits on an annual volunteers' day.

About $38 billion earmarked for Poland from a coronavirus recovery fund had been blocked over judicial disputes. But relations with the bloc improved over Poland’s strong stance against Russia.

In a major concession to the Polish government, the European Union’s executive arm on Wednesday opened the door for the disbursement of billions of dollars in aid to Poland that had been blocked during a standoff over judicial independence in the country.

“The approval of this plan is linked to clear commitments by Poland on the independence of the judiciary, which will need to be fulfilled before any actual payment can be made,”

Third Wave Antiracism exploits modern Americans’ fear of being thought racist, using this to promulgate an obsessive, self-involved, totalitarian and unnecessary kind of cultural reprogramming.

The problem is that on matters of societal procedure and priorities, the adherents of this religion—true to the very nature of religion—cannot be reasoned with. They are, in this, medievals with lattes.

We need not wonder what the basic objections will be: Third Wave Antiracism isn’t really a religion; I am oversimplifying; I shouldn’t write this without being a theologian; it is a religion but it’s a good one; and so on

North Korea on Saturday launched a ballistic missile toward the sea off its east coast, its second missile test in a week, South Korean defense officials said.

The missile, launched at ​8:48 a.m. from Sunan, near Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, flew 1​68 miles to the east, reaching an altitude of 3​4​8 miles, the South’s military said. No further details were immediately released, but the data ​was similar to the data collected when North Korea last conducted a missile test on Sunday​.

its state media released aerial photos of the Korean Peninsula that it said had been taken by a camera mounted on the rocket.

Racially and politically, Antlers is typical of much of rural Oklahoma, a state forged from the 19th century territory set aside for Native American tribes forcibly removed from other parts of the United States. Antlers is now 75% White and 22% Native American or mixed race, but with very few Latino, Asian, or Black residents. In 2020, Antlers and its county, Pushmataha—which supported former President Bill Clinton in 1996 and even Jimmy Carter over Ronald Reagan in 1980—voted for Republicans, 85% to the Democrats’ 14%, up from an 80% share for Republicans in 2016, 54% in 2000, and 34% in 1996.

Antlers’ social statistics are beyond alarming. Nearly one-third of its residents live in poverty. The median household income, $25,223, is less than half Oklahoma’s $55,557, which in turn is well below the national median of $74,099 in January 2022.

The best-off ethnic group in Antlers is Native Americans (median household income, $35,700; 48% with education beyond high school; 25% living in poverty)

What her book set out to defend is an intellectual tradition, admittedly ill-choate, that stands for reason, the ennobling potential of education, and the centrality of the “human dimension of life,” as opposed to systems and abstract theories.

ut in the intervening months, advanced chatbots descended; so did the possibility that they might soon imperil the whole of that enterprise. Automation stands poised to displace the production of essays and scholarly inquiry. It’s suddenly plausible to imagine that freethinking, that tradition of poking and prodding at all fixed ideas and institutions, will drift into obsolescence, because an oracular machine will instantly spit back answers to life’s questions with an aura of scientific authority.

Progressives in the academy have bludgeoned humanism’s fundamental precepts. Gone is the old motto “I am human, and consider nothing human alien to me,” replaced by the fetishization of “lived experience.

University officials and administrators all declined interviews. But Dr. Miller, the school’s president, defended the decision in a statement.“To look upon an image of the Prophet Muhammad, for many Muslims, is against their faith,” Dr. Miller’s statement said, adding, “It was important that our Muslim students, as well as all other students, feel safe, supported and respected both in and out of our classrooms.”

In a December interview with the school newspaper, the student who complained to the administration, Aram Wedatalla, described being blindsided by the image.

There are, however, a range of beliefs. Some Muslims distinguish between respectful depictions and mocking caricatures, while others do not subscribe to the restriction at all.