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Javier E

Fact-based impeachment can't penetrate the pro-Trump Web - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-87f7-f2e91143c60d_story.html

social media youtube fox news trump crisis polarization

shared by Javier E on 14 Dec 19 - No Cached
  • the defense mounted by Trump’s allies made perfect sense to those following live on social media, in groups sealed off from general scrutiny, where facts are established by volume, and confirmation comes from likes.
  • The echo chambers that take hold on social media reach beyond the effects of media coverage partial to the president, which he promotes to counter fact-based reporting.
  • The effect of social media is to jack up the tenor of everything,” said Carl Cameron, who spent more than two decades as a reporter for Fox News before leaving in 2017.
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  • “There’s a statement made by a witness, or an interaction with a lawmaker, and users are able to put together a counternarrative in real time.”
  • Cameron described the live comment streams as laboratories of right-wing talking points, most likely to attract viewers who already share a certain bias. These viewers are unlikely to change their minds, and thus shift opinion polling on impeachment, which has remained relatively stable.
  • Social media once held out promise to connect the world. But in a polarized climate, the firmest bonds appear to be forming among those who already share the same views, allowing partisans to choose not simply their own coverage but the community with which they process it. Self-selected information nourishes identity, experts said, reducing politics to entertainment and blood sport.
  • the Democratic approach rests on more traditional means of persuasion. What committee leaders described as a solemn process, compelled by the president’s own admissions and propelled by “ample facts,” Trump and his congressional allies decried as a charade.
  • But the talking points are then exported through other channels, he added, and eventually reach persuadable voters. Social media, he said, does not just echo but serves as an “amplifier, with powerful cross-pollination on the different platforms, until the talk eventually reaches the office water cooler or coffee machine, or the Thanksgiving table.”
  • “The more social media allows for those kinds of communities that make you feel like you’re part of a group that you aren’t physically in, it can give you the illusion that your opinions are more widely held than they really are,”
  • “That’s a powerful feeling, to be part of a community watching and interpreting something in the same way.”
  • Discussions about the hearing also appeared on YouTube, where live streams similarly became flooded with conspiracy theories and racist vitriol
  • The sort of news consumption enabled by the tech giants remains a largely unstudied phenomenon
  • The phenomenon bears some relationship to talk radio, she said, which allows listeners to call in and share their observations — and to feel as though they’re part of the coverage.
  • That sense of participation became pronounced over the last few weeks, as the watch parties turned into cheering sections for Republican lawmakers who delivered especially impassioned rebuttals for the president
Javier E

The Challenge of Moral Education | Issue 84 | Philosophy Now - 0 views

philosophynow.org/...e_Challenge_of_Moral_Education

moral education philosophy learning teaching history culture ethics

shared by Javier E on 21 May 19 - No Cached
  • we can consider ways in which education could offer our young people opportunities to learn better values, and live them.
  • In the nineteenth century one of the prime functions of public education was to prepare a moral citizen. Basic Christian values were integrated into the curriculum, and taught as truths alongside reading, writing and arithmetic. With the pluralization of cultures in Western society, the decrease in a shared Christian tradition and the spreading of the postmodern notion that values are perspectival, this function of education was gradually phased out.
  • Over the past fifty years a number of approaches to moral education have been tried, with varying success
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  • Values Education was introduced as a way to help young people think about their values in a completely non-judgmental way. Scenarios involving value choices were discussed, but to avoid any hint of indoctrination or imposition of any one set of values onto children, the ultimate conclusion was always that ‘there are no right or wrong answers’. This institutionalized a relativistic stance, leading some students to consider racial prejudice or cheating on exams as the same kind of choice as one’s choice of career.
  • n the 1970s-80s, the psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg developed a theory of the stages of moral development which was adopted as a blueprint for a new kind of moral education. Kohlberg’s theory suggested that a characteristic of those individuals who have reached the higher levels of moral development is their ability to deal well with dilemmas. Inspired by this, educators present dilemmas in which the leading character has to make a choice between two good (or two bad) values, and they encourage the young people to discuss reasons why the character should do X or Y. This would promote the moral thinking of participants, thereby encouraging their moral development and ultimately translating into moral behavior. However, this approach framed everything as a dilemma, a choice between two rights or two wrongs. It also tended to over-intellectualize the nature of moral decision-making
  • the most recent (but perhaps also the most classical) innovation in moral education is Character Education. Building on Aristotelian notions of virtue and the educational approach of the ancient Greeks, Thomas Lickona and others have crafted a popular model in which such virtues as honesty, courage, integrity, and generosity are taught to students from kindergarten through high school by modeling, didactic stories, and programs rewarding good behavior, such as ‘school citizen of the month’.
  • Character Education aims to give students enough knowledge of what virtues and vices entail to act virtuously and discourage vice in daily life. It offers a vast improvement over the absence of value talk in the classroom
  • it is still problematic. Even Aristotle admitted that acting virtuously is not a matter of simply knowing the virtues. The trick comes in the application – doing the right thing at the right time in the right way. This is not easily achieved, and defies simple instruction
  • As Plato also pointed out in his dialogue The Meno, moral education is not the same kind of education as education in mathematics or history, where the ultimate goal is acquiring knowledge. We need to practice and apply virtues, and in doing so, we run up against the messiness of life. Is it always so clear what constitutes respect, courage, honesty, or how we demonstrate a virtue in action?
  • The approaches known as ‘philosophy for children’ (P4C) and ‘philosophy with children’ (PwC) offer a powerful alternative mode
  • Philosophy for/with children is not instruction in the ideas of the great philosophers; nor is it debates on the major ethical issues of our times. While it does not teach a particular set of values, it is not Values Clarification, which examines the beliefs of people but refuses to judge them
  • The methods and materials of philosophy ‘for’ and ‘with’ children differ dramatically, but its teachers and philosophers share a vision that philosophy is for everyone, including children. They believe that it can help anyone acquire critical reasoning skills, and build communities of inquiry in which we can practice the intellectual and moral virtues as we learn to negotiate across differences
  • A distinctive feature of the P4C/PwC approach is the ownership of the conversation by the young people themselves. By setting their own agenda, they actively engage in thinking and talking about the issues and ideas that matter to them, and not what matters to the teacher or the adults in their lives.
  • good thinking is nurtured. The facilitator’s role is that of a Socratic gadfly, challenging the participants to put forward their own ideas, but also enabling the testing of these ideas by communal scrutiny. Some ideas are better grounded than others, and the community’s goal is to discover what those ideas and grounds are, even as it remains open to revisiting and revising an idea that has been put aside. This means that ethical thinking is open-ended but not relativistic.
  • For individuals who see morality as black and white, this can be unsettling. Some adults worry that if we present these sorts of complicated notions to children, especially young children, we will confuse them, or leave them apathetic to morality. But this has not proven to be the case. Children rarely abandon the values of their families, unless those values turn out to be unsatisfactory in serious ways
  • The PwC movement is founded on the assumption that there are better and worse ways of thinking and acting, even if there may not be one single best way. This assumption is necessary for the enterprise of seeking better ways of thinking and living to be meaningful and genuine
johnsonel7

'Believe women' is being cheapened to score political points. That will backfire | Jess... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...lizabeth-warren-bernie-sanders

politics US Warren Sanders

shared by johnsonel7 on 17 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • It’s a familiar scenario. An exchange occurs in private. Only the two figures involved – a man and a woman – know what truly transpired. But once they leave that room and start to tell their version of events, the man is given the benefit of the doubt and the woman faces intense scrutiny and skepticism.
  • This is the basic set-up for any number of high-profile cases, stories of rapists and other sexual offenders evading legal prosecution or other consequences for years as their accusers were painted as gold diggers, political operatives, and compulsive liars
  • But “believe women” is getting thrown around by political strategists and official opinion-havers to support the Elizabeth Warren’s claim that Bernie Sanders told her, in a private meeting with no witnesses and no evidentiary support, that a woman could not win the presidency in 2020. This is not only a grotesque distortion of what “believe women” is supposed to mean, it undermines the good work the phrase’s use was doing.
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  • The goal is to put the offense on a higher level than one of just lying. That way, if the Sanders campaign decides to point to all of the lies Warren has told throughout her career – that her father was a janitor, that she is Native American – her lies won’t matter as much because she’s just electioneering while his lies are rooted in misogyny. It’s a trick that still works for Hillary Clinton, who has repeatedly complained about the lack of support Sanders gave to her campaign, despite all of the evidence to the contrary. (Clinton, after losing the primary to Obama in 2008, appeared at two rallies with Obama and did 10 solo campaign appearances to help him get elected. Sanders, after losing the primary to Clinton in 2016, did three events with Clinton and 37 solo events.)
  • Early accusers of Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein were deemed golddiggers, looking for an easy settlement to shut them up. Even when there’s some form of evidence, such as when photographs show Donald Trump with E Jean Carroll, who accused him of rape, even while he insists he doesn’t know her, supporters are still willing to take his word for it.
anniina03

Germany Investigates 3 Suspected of Spying for China - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...germany-china-spying.html

politics history culture Policy

shared by anniina03 on 17 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • German authorities raided the homes and offices of three people suspected of spying for the Chinese government, officials said on Thursday, giving no details about their identities or the nature of the alleged espionage.
  • The raid comes amid an intensifying debate in Berlin over the country’s relationship with Huawei, the Chinese technology giant that Washington says is being used for espionage by Beijing.On Thursday, Chancellor Angela Merkel met with senior lawmakers in her party as part of continuing efforts to resolve a dispute over whether to allow Huawei to help build the country’s 5G next-generation mobile network.
  • Germany has been concerned about the threat posed by Chinese hackers seeking to steal information from the country’s companies, research facilities and ministries. But if sufficient evidence is found in the current case, it would be one of the first in years involving old-fashioned human espionage.
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  • The Chinese intelligence service is also involved in the inquiry, Mr. Schmitt said.
  • China is one of Germany’s most important trading partners, and the two countries collaborate on international issues like climate change and hold regular government-level discussions.But the relationship has come under scrutiny since the Chinese acquired several German technology companies in 2016. The next year, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency accused China of using LinkedIn and other social media sites to infiltrate the government in Berlin, a charge that Beijing denied.A year ago, Poland arrested two people, including a Chinese employee of Huawei, and charged them with spying for Beijing.
delgadool

We Can't Afford to Ignore Lev Parnas's Explosive Claims - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...605065

shared by delgadool on 19 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Some of Parnas’s claims here deserve particular scrutiny, especially those not backed by documentary evidence.
  • His testimony was self-interested: He both had reasons to exact personal revenge on Trump, and hoped that his cooperation might induce authorities to lighten his sentence. All of this was true, but Cohen (like Parnas) brought documents to back up his claims, and his testimony has largely been substantiated since.
  • the defense is troubling even if true. If Cohen and Parnas are such obvious villains, how is it that they came to be close to the president, putatively working as part of his legal teams? The same question applies to any number of other criminals, con men, and charlatans we’ve come to know over the past four years as Trump associates.
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  • In the absence of their testimony, the search for truth has had to depend on uncomfortable encounters with the likes of Lev Parnas. His claims can’t be believed at anything near face value. Yet they also cannot be dismissed out of hand, for the stakes are too high
Javier E

The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rivacy-facial-recognition.html

privacy surveillance face recognition

shared by Javier E on 19 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Tech companies capable of releasing such a tool have refrained from doing so; in 2011, Google’s chairman at the time said it was the one technology the company had held back because it could be used “in a very bad way.” Some large cities, including San Francisco, have barred police from using facial recognition technology.
  • without public scrutiny, more than 600 law enforcement agencies have started using Clearview in the past year
  • The computer code underlying its app, analyzed by The New York Times, includes programming language to pair it with augmented-reality glasses; users would potentially be able to identify every person they saw. The tool could identify activists at a protest or an attractive stranger on the subway, revealing not just their names but where they lived, what they did and whom they knew.
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  • it’s not just law enforcement: Clearview has also licensed the app to at least a handful of companies for security purposes.
  • “The weaponization possibilities of this are endless,” said Eric Goldman, co-director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University. “Imagine a rogue law enforcement officer who wants to stalk potential romantic partners, or a foreign government using this to dig up secrets about people to blackmail them or throw them in jail.”
  • While the company was dodging me, it was also monitoring me. At my request, a number of police officers had run my photo through the Clearview app. They soon received phone calls from company representatives asking if they were talking to the media — a sign that Clearview has the ability and, in this case, the appetite to monitor whom law enforcement is searching for.
  • The company eventually started answering my questions, saying that its earlier silence was typical of an early-stage start-up in stealth mode. Mr. Ton-That acknowledged designing a prototype for use with augmented-reality glasses but said the company had no plans to release it.
  • In addition to Mr. Ton-That, Clearview was founded by Richard Schwartz — who was an aide to Rudolph W. Giuliani when he was mayor of New York — and backed financially by Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist behind Facebook and Palantir.
  • “I’ve come to the conclusion that because information constantly increases, there’s never going to be privacy,” Mr. Scalzo said. “Laws have to determine what’s legal, but you can’t ban technology. Sure, that might lead to a dystopian future or something, but you can’t ban it.”
  • “In 2017, Peter gave a talented young founder $200,000, which two years later converted to equity in Clearview AI,” said Jeremiah Hall, Mr. Thiel’s spokesman. “That was Peter’s only contribution; he is not involved in the company.”
  • He began in 2016 by recruiting a couple of engineers. One helped design a program that can automatically collect images of people’s faces from across the internet, such as employment sites, news sites, educational sites, and social networks including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and even Venmo
  • Representatives of those companies said their policies prohibit such scraping, and Twitter said it explicitly banned use of its data for facial recognition
  • Another engineer was hired to perfect a facial recognition algorithm that was derived from academic papers. The result: a system that uses what Mr. Ton-That described as a “state-of-the-art neural net” to convert all the images into mathematical formulas, or vectors, based on facial geometry — like how far apart a person’s eyes are
  • Clearview created a vast directory that clustered all the photos with similar vectors into “neighborhoods.”
  • When a user uploads a photo of a face into Clearview’s system, it converts the face into a vector and then shows all the scraped photos stored in that vector’s neighborhood — along with the links to the sites from which those images came.
  • Mr. Schwartz paid for server costs and basic expenses, but the operation was bare bones; everyone worked from home. “I was living on credit card debt,” Mr. Ton-That said. “Plus, I was a Bitcoin believer, so I had some of those.”
  • The company soon changed its name to Clearview AI and began marketing to law enforcement. That was when the company got its first round of funding from outside investors: Mr. Thiel and Kirenaga Partners
  • Mr. Schwartz and Mr. Ton-That met in 2016 at a book event at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. Mr. Schwartz, now 61, had amassed an impressive Rolodex working for Mr. Giuliani in the 1990s and serving as the editorial page editor of The New York Daily News in the early 2000s. The two soon decided to go into the facial recognition business together: Mr. Ton-That would build the app, and Mr. Schwartz would use his contacts to drum up commercial interest.
  • They immediately got a match: The man appeared in a video that someone had posted on social media, and his name was included in a caption on the video. “He did not have a driver’s license and hadn’t been arrested as an adult, so he wasn’t in government databases,”
  • The man was arrested and charged; Mr. Cohen said he probably wouldn’t have been identified without the ability to search social media for his face. The Indiana State Police became Clearview’s first paying customer, according to the company
  • Clearview deployed current and former Republican officials to approach police forces, offering free trials and annual licenses for as little as $2,000. Mr. Schwartz tapped his political connections to help make government officials aware of the tool
  • The company’s most effective sales technique was offering 30-day free trials to officers, who then encouraged their acquisition departments to sign up and praised the tool to officers from other police departments at conferences and online, according to the company and documents provided by police departments in response to public-record requests. Mr. Ton-That finally had his viral hit.
  • Photos “could be covertly taken with telephoto lens and input into the software, without ‘burning’ the surveillance operation,” the detective wrote in the email, provided to The Times by two researchers,
  • Sergeant Ferrara found Clearview’s app superior, he said. Its nationwide database of images is much larger, and unlike FACES, Clearview’s algorithm doesn’t require photos of people looking straight at the camera.
  • “With Clearview, you can use photos that aren’t perfect,” Sergeant Ferrara said. “A person can be wearing a hat or glasses, or it can be a profile shot or partial view of their face.”
  • Mr. Ton-That said the tool does not always work. Most of the photos in Clearview’s database are taken at eye level. Much of the material that the police upload is from surveillance cameras mounted on ceilings or high on walls.
  • Despite that, the company said, its tool finds matches up to 75 percent of the time. But it is unclear how often the tool delivers false matches, because it has not been tested by an independent party
  • One reason that Clearview is catching on is that its service is unique. That’s because Facebook and other social media sites prohibit people from scraping users’ images — Clearview is violating the sites’ terms of service.
  • Some law enforcement officials said they didn’t realize the photos they uploaded were being sent to and stored on Clearview’s servers. Clearview tries to pre-empt concerns with an F.A.Q. document given to would-be clients that says its customer-support employees won’t look at the photos that the police upload.
  • Mr. Clement, now a partner at Kirkland & Ellis, wrote that the authorities don’t have to tell defendants that they were identified via Clearview, as long as it isn’t the sole basis for getting a warrant to arrest them.
  • Because the police upload photos of people they’re trying to identify, Clearview possesses a growing database of individuals who have attracted attention from law enforcement. The company also has the ability to manipulate the results that the police see.
  • After the company realized I was asking officers to run my photo through the app, my face was flagged by Clearview’s systems and for a while showed no matches. When asked about this, Mr. Ton-That laughed and called it a “software bug.”
  • “It’s creepy what they’re doing, but there will be many more of these companies. There is no monopoly on math,” said Al Gidari, a privacy professor at Stanford Law School. “Absent a very strong federal privacy law, we’re all screwed.”
  • But if your profile has already been scraped, it is too late. The company keeps all the images it has scraped even if they are later deleted or taken down, though Mr. Ton-That said the company was working on a tool that would let people request that images be removed if they had been taken down from the website of origin
  • Woodrow Hartzog, a professor of law and computer science at Northeastern University in Boston, sees Clearview as the latest proof that facial recognition should be banned in the United States.
  • We’ve relied on industry efforts to self-police and not embrace such a risky technology, but now those dams are breaking because there is so much money on the table,”
  • “I don’t see a future where we harness the benefits of face recognition technology without the crippling abuse of the surveillance that comes with it. The only way to stop it is to ban it.”
  • Mr. Ton-That said he was reluctant. “There’s always going to be a community of bad people who will misuse it,” he said.
  • Even if Clearview doesn’t make its app publicly available, a copycat company might, now that the taboo is broken. Searching someone by face could become as easy as Googling a name
  • Someone walking down the street would be immediately identifiable — and his or her home address would be only a few clicks away. It would herald the end of public anonymity.
anonymous

Russia labels veteran rights activist, four others, media 'foreign agents' | Reuters - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...a-foreign-agents-idUSKBN2921ED

russia humanrights

shared by anonymous on 28 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • Russia’s Ministry of Justice added five people, including veteran rights activist Lev Ponomaryov, to its list of media “foreign agents”
  • a law in 2012 allowing it to label foreign-funded non-governmental organisations and rights groups it viewed as engaged in political activity as “foreign agents”
  • “foreign agent” media outlets and independent journalists and bloggers
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  • open to abuse and has been used to stifle dissent and harass civil society groups.
  • Rights groups and other organisations designated by the justice ministry as foreign agents can be subjected to spot checks and face bureaucratic scrutiny.
  • he was surprised that he, as a non-journalist, had been named
yehbru

Opinion: Covid-19 has revealed just how vulnerable we are to biosecurity threats - CNN - 0 views

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

Biosecurity Politics International Terrorism Threats WHO Pandemic Covid19

shared by yehbru on 02 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The field of biosecurity -- aimed at keeping nations safe from natural or human-made pathogens -- has long been eclipsed by cybersecurity and counterterrorism
  • Covid-19, which is often compared to the flu pandemic of 1918, has been called a once-in-a-generation event. But the outbreak of MERS and SARS in recent years shows just how frequent emerging diseases can occur.
  • A significant increase in biological containment facilities over the last 30 years also poses a grave risk. There are now more than 50 facilities around the world that are categorized as "Level 4" labs, which contain the deadliest pathogens and require the highest level of safety, and thousands more are designated "Level 3" facilities that contain infectious agents or toxins that may cause potentially lethal infection. While it is highly unlikely that Covid-19 emerged from a laboratory in Wuhan, the pandemic has raised the specter of a possible leak or act of bioterrorism. Containment facilities are an Achilles heel in biosecurity, and these labs, along with those who work there, should be subject to greater international scrutiny.
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  • We must not ignore the threat of bad actors gaining access to these dangerous pathogens, which are the ultimate terror weapons, due to their potentially massive impact
  • In Germany, security services interdicted vast amounts of the toxin ricin, which, authorities said, a couple was planning to use in a biological attack in 2018
  • Instead of looking to weaponize a highly virulent pathogen like anthrax -- the spore-forming bacterium which was infamously mailed out to media outlets and politicians in a bio attack in 2001, killing five people and injuring 17 more -- bad actors are now likely considering the efficacy of a less virulent but highly transmissible pathogen like SARS-CoV-2, which has brought the world to its knees in the last year. This pathogen has shown that transmissibility -- rather than toxicity -- is a major factor when it comes to mass disruption.
  • When it comes to policies that are already in place, there is the Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention (BTWC), a multilateral treaty that went into effect in 1975, which prohibits the development, production, acquisition and stockpiling of biological agents and toxins and any related delivery systems that have "no justification for prophylactic, protective or other peaceful purposes."
  • However, it is poorly funded in comparison to other treaties like the Chemical Weapons Convention, and does not have a corresponding body like the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to police it.
  • The World Health Organization could also implement an early warning system to predict pandemics, showing its progress around the globe.
  • MCMs are products such as vaccines, biologics and pharmaceutical drugs that can diagnose, protect or treat the effects of a naturally occurring new disease or biological attack. In the future, it may be more cost effective to pay the pharmaceutical industry ahead of time to produce treatments and vaccines rather than wait for a pandemic to develop.
  • The pandemic has also underscored the importance of manufacturing and stockpiling medical gear including personal protective equipment to avoid logjams in the supply chain and a reliance on other countries like China for these critical supplies. Providing accurate and accessible information to the public is also key; propaganda and disinformation must not be taken lightly.
  • Going forward, we should treat biosecurity threats with the same urgency in the 21st century as world leaders approached atomic bombs in the 20th century.
  • A first step would be for the UN Security Council to fund and enforce the Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention.
rerobinson03

As Election Day Arrives, Trump Shifts Between Combativeness and Grievance - The New Yor... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-campaign.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • President Trump arrives at Election Day on Tuesday toggling between confidence and exasperation, bravado and grievance, and marinating in frustration that he is trailing Joseph R. Biden Jr., whom he considers an unworthy opponent.
  • Trailing in most polls, Mr. Trump has careened through a marathon series of rallies in the last week, trying to tear down Mr. Biden and energize his supporters, but also fixated on crowd size and targeting perceived enemies like the news media and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the federal government’s infectious disease expert whom he suggested on Sunday he might try to dismiss after the election.
  • At every turn, the president has railed that the voting system is rigged against him and has threatened to sue when the election is over, in an obvious bid to undermine an electoral process strained by the coronavirus pandemic
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  • and perhaps the hope that everything will work out for him in the end, the way it did four years ago when he surprised himself, his advisers and the world by winning the White House.
  • But by enclosing himself in the thin bubble of his own worldview, Mr. Trump may have further severed himself from the political realities of a country in crisis. And that, in turn, has helped enable Mr. Trump to wage a campaign offering no central message, no clear agenda for a second term and no answer to the woes of the pandemic.
  • Beyond the capital, though, some Republicans insist that Mr. Trump can again defy the odds, and that a devoted base will fuel a traditional G.O.P. surge in Election Day voters.
  • Seldom far from Mr. Trump’s thoughts, however, is the possibility of defeat — and the potential consequences of being ejected from the White House.
  • In unguarded moments, Mr. Trump has for weeks told advisers that he expects to face intensifying scrutiny from prosecutors if he loses. He is concerned not only about existing investigations in New York, but the potential for new federal probes as well, according to people who have spoken with him.
  • Mr. Trump’s advisers do continue to believe he has a realistic chance of besting Mr. Biden, but they concede it would take a last-minute breakthrough in one of the Great Lakes states where he is currently trailing.
  • The president himself has done little to strengthen his chances in the final days of the race.
  • He has frequently used his speeches to deliver long diatribes against Mr. Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, even though some Trump advisers believe the whole subject is a sideshow in the midst of a public-health disaster. But Trump associates say he simply enjoys attacking the Biden family.
  • What confounds some Republicans is how little Mr. Trump is discussing last month’s confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court; some G.O.P. senators have made that achievement a centerpiece of their campaigns.
tsainten

TikTok Deal Exposes a Security Gap, and a Missing China Strategy - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...k-trump-national-security.html

China politics policy culture

shared by tsainten on 21 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • The United States wants to have it all. It seeks to reap the benefits of a global internet yet limit its citizens to made-in America products, ensuring that the data that flows through American networks is “clean.”
  • the State Department has begun what it calls “the clean network initiative,” making sure that data is not tainted by adversaries, starting with China.
  • On Capitol Hill, the China problem many politicians still fume about is cheap Chinese goods, ignoring the fact that China’s labor is no longer inexpensive.
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  • And the same algorithm that picks your next dance video could, in the future, pick a political video. (There is already more than a whiff of political content on the app.)
  • Trump has achieved his objective: preventing Chinese engineers, perhaps under the influence of the state, from manipulating the code in ways that could censor, or manipulate, what American users see.
  • Attorney General William P. Barr has already called for greater scrutiny — and perhaps abolition — of any such app that does not allow the United States a legal “back door.”
  • defeats the original intent of the internet. And that was to create a global communications network, unrestrained by national borders.
Javier E

Opinion | The Rotting of the Republican Mind - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...republican-disinformation.html

gop paranoia conspiracy theory polarization divergence epistemic crisis politics history culture

shared by Javier E on 27 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • In a recent Monmouth University survey, 77 percent of Trump backers said Joe Biden had won the presidential election because of fraud. Many of these same people think climate change is not real. Many of these same people believe they don’t need to listen to scientific experts on how to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.
  • We live in a country in epistemological crisis, in which much of the Republican Party has become detached from reality
  • Many people point to the interne
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  • Why would the internet have corrupted Republicans so much more than Democrats, the global right more than the global left?
  • My analysis begins with a remarkable essay that Jonathan Rauch wrote for National Affairs in 2018 called “The Constitution of Knowledge.” Rauch pointed out that every society has an epistemic regime, a marketplace of ideas where people collectively hammer out what’s real.
  • In 1972, people without college degrees were nearly as happy as those with college degrees. Now those without a degree are far more unhappy about their lives.
  • This ecosystem, Rauch wrote, operates as a funnel. It allows a wide volume of ideas to get floated, but only a narrow group of ideas survive collective scrutiny.
  • We let alt-truth talk,” Rauch said, “but we don’t let it write textbooks, receive tenure, bypass peer review, set the research agenda, dominate the front pages, give expert testimony or dictate the flow of public dollars.”
  • While these cities have been prospering, places where fewer people have college degrees have been spiraling down: flatter incomes, decimated families, dissolved communities.
  • In democratic, nontheocratic societies, this regime is a decentralized ecosystem of academics, clergy members, teachers, journalists and others who disagree about a lot but agree on a shared system of rules for weighing evidence and building knowledge.
  • In the fervor of this enmity, millions of people have come to detest those who populate the epistemic regime, who are so distant, who appear to have it so easy, who have such different values, who can be so condescending.
  • Millions not only distrust everything the “fake news” people say, but also the so-called rules they use to say them.
  • People in this precarious state are going to demand stories that will both explain their distrust back to them and also enclose them within a safe community of believers.
  • The evangelists of distrust, from Donald Trump to Alex Jones to the followers of QAnon, rose up to give them those stories and provide that community.
  • conspiracy theories have become the most effective community bonding mechanisms of the 21st century.
  • For those awash in anxiety and alienation, who feel that everything is spinning out of control, conspiracy theories are extremely effective emotional tools
  • For those in low status groups, they provide a sense of superiority: I possess important information most people do not have
  • For those who feel powerless, they provide agency: I have the power to reject “experts” and expose hidden cabals
  • If I imagine my foes are completely malevolent, then I can use any tactic I want.
  • Under Trump, the Republican identity is defined not by a set of policy beliefs but by a paranoid mind-set
  • He and his media allies simply ignore the rules of the epistemic regime and have set up a rival trolling regime. The internet is an ideal medium for untested information to get around traditional gatekeepers, but it is an accelerant of the paranoia, not its source.
  • The only solution is to reduce the distrust and anxiety that is the seedbed of this thinking.
  • That can only be done first by contact, reducing the social chasm between the members of the epistemic regime and those who feel so alienated from it
  • second, it can be done by policy, by making life more secure for those without a college degree.
  • Rebuilding trust is, obviously, the work of a generation.
Javier E

Opinion | It's 2022. What Does Life Look Like? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...navirus-economy-two-years.html

pandemic effects

shared by Javier E on 12 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • It’s 2022, and the coronavirus has at long last been defeated. After a miserable year-and-a-half, alternating between lockdowns and new outbreaks, life can finally begin returning to normal.
  • But it will not be the old normal. It will be a new world, with a reshaped economy, much as war and depression reordered life for previous generations.
  • Thousands of stores and companies that were vulnerable before the virus arrived have disappeared. Dozens of colleges are shutting down, in the first wave of closures in the history of American higher education. People have also changed long-held patterns of behavior: Outdoor socializing is in, business trips are out.
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • the pandemic increasingly looks like one of the defining events of our time. The best-case scenarios are now out of reach
  • Editors’ Picks
  • if a vaccine remains out of reach for years, the long-term changes could be truly profound. Any industry that depends on close human contact would be at risk.
  • Large swaths of the cruise-ship and theme-park industries might go away. So could many movie theaters and minor-league baseball teams. The long-predicted demise of the traditional department store would finally come to pass. Thousands of restaurants would be wiped out
  • In this scenario, a vaccine will arrive sometime in 2021. Until then, the world will endure waves of sickness, death and uncertainty.
  • is a loss of the gains we’ve made over the past 20 years in the access for first-generation and minority students.”
  • “It’s only when the tide goes out,” Warren Buffett likes to say, “that you learn who’s been swimming naked.”
  • Local newspapers will be one casualty. They were already struggling
  • Traditional department stores are another example. In recent years, they have lost significant business to online retailers and quietly lost even more to big-box stores
  • If they do, they will create spillover victims — the hundreds of malls that rely on department stores for rent and foot traffic
  • enrollment and tuition revenue are likely to drop sharply, creating existential crises for many less selective private colleges and smaller public universities.
  • “The biggest danger that we face as a sector
  • It could easily be the most important global experience since World War II and the Great Depression
  • for many white-collar workers, the remote-work experiment shows no sign of ending — a trend that could depress the commercial real-estate market and business travel long after a vaccine is available.
  • Consolidation, in turn, tends to increase income and wealth inequality, in part because the largest companies are run by highly paid executives, typically based in major metro areas, and the companies’ stock is disproportionately owned by the affluent.
  • “My basic fear,” Heather Boushey, a leading progressive economist, said, “is that it leads to a rule by the oligarchs.”
  • “Even Republicans — younger Republicans — have recognized that the center of gravity is shifting on the relationship between the state and the market.” The virus, he added, “will only accelerate that.”
  • That agenda is shaping up to have two defining features
  • The first is reducing inequality — through higher taxes on the rich, greater scrutiny of big companies, new efforts to reduce racial injustice and more investments and programs for the middle class and poor, including health care, education and paid leave
  • The second is acting on climate change, which could cause even more global misery than the coronavirus. “Climate change cannot be solved by the private sector,”
  • while Mr. Obama’s team had only a couple of months to plan for taking office amid a national crisis, Mr. Biden’s team would have almost a year. “There is a whole vision that I think is ready,” Ms. Boushey added. “And there is a lot more runway.”
  • If there is a single lesson of the current era of American politics, it’s that change can happen more quickly than we imagined.
leilamulveny

Oracle Deal With TikTok to Undergo U.S. National Security Review - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...al-security-review-11600097811

politics us trump policy

shared by leilamulveny on 15 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • leilamulveny on 15 Sep 20
     
    President Trump signed an executive order implementing a 45-day deadline for an American company to purchase Tik Tok's US operatives. Current arrangements are with the business software provider - Oracle (currently lags behind behind Amazon and Microsoft in terms of "cloud" leaders) For Oracle the Arrangement could give a jolt to the Silicon Valley stalwart's efforts to transform its staid database business into a major player in cloud computing. However, this deal could draw scrutiny in Beijing as both governments have disrupted negations over Tik Tok's fate in recent weeks. A month ago China imposed export restrictions on the kind of AI algorithms that underpin Tik Tok. The Chinese government is calling this deal an abuse of power under the pretext of national security. Overall, I found this article appealing to our current discussions in the GP course because it represents different perspectives on the issue of President Trump's executive order (a new method to develop different ways to think). Also, this unit is dedicated to how politics relates to oneself and I think that this issue hits close to home for many high school students.
Javier E

Down the 1619 Project's Memory Hole - Quillette - 0 views

quillette.com/...-the-1619-projects-memory-hole

1619 NYT history politics culture US American idea

shared by Javier E on 21 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • The history of the American Revolution isn’t the only thing the New York Times is revising through its 1619 Project. The “paper of record” has also taken to quietly altering the published text of the project itself after one of its claims came under intense criticism.
  • The original opening text stated: The 1619 project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative. [emphasis added]
  • For several months after the 1619 Project first launched, its creator and organizer Nikole Hannah-Jones doubled down on the claim. “I argue that 1619 is our true founding,” she tweeted the week after the project launched
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • The passage, and in particular its description of the year 1619 as “our true founding,” quickly became a flashpoint for controversy around the project. Critics on both the Left and Right took issue with the paper’s declared intention of displacing 1776 with the alternative date—a point that was also emphasized in the magazine feature’s graphics, showing the date of American independence crossed out and replaced by the date of the first slave ship’s arrival in Jamestown, Virginia.
  • Rather than address this controversy directly, the Times—it now appears—decided to send it down the memory hole—the euphemized term for selectively editing inconvenient passages out of old newspaper reports in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984
  • Other details of the project soon came under scrutiny, revealing both errors of fact and dubious interpretations of evidence in other essays, such as Matthew Desmond’s 1619 Project piece attempting to connect American capitalism with slavery.
  • Finally back in March, a historian who the Times recruited to fact-check Hannah-Jones’s essay revealed that she had warned the paper against publishing its claims about the motives of the American Revolution on account of their weak evidence. The 1619 Project’s editors ignored the advice.
  • the passage came to symbolize the Times’s blurring of historical analysis with editorial hyperbole. The announced intention of reframing the country’s origin date struck many readers across the political spectrum as an implicit repudiation of the American revolution and its underlying principles.
  • But something changed as the historical controversies around the 1619 Project intensified in late 2019 and early 2020. A group of five distinguished historians took issue with Hannah-Jones’s lead essay, focusing on its historically unsupported claim that protecting slavery was a primary motive of the American revolutionaries when they broke away from Britain in 1776
  • Without announcement or correction, the newspaper quietly edited out the offending passage such that it now reads:
  • The 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.
  • Discovery of this edit came about earlier this week when Nikole Hannah-Jones went on CNN to deny that she had ever sought to displace 1776 with a new founding date of 1619. She repeated the point in a now-deleted tweet: “The #1619Project does not argue that 1619 was our true founding. We know this nation marks its founding at 1776.” It was not the first time that Hannah-Jones had tried to alter her self-depiction of the project’s aims on account of the controversial line
  • But this time the brazen rewriting of her own arguments proved too much. Hannah-Jones’s readers scoured her own Twitter feed and public statements over the previous year, unearthing multiple instances where she had in fact announced an intention to displace 1776 with 1619.
  • The foremost piece of evidence against Hannah-Jones’s spin, of course, came from the opening passage of from the Times’s own website where it originally announced its aim “to reframe the country’s history” around the year “1619 as our true founding.” When readers returned to that website to cite the line however, they discovered to their surprise that it was no longer there.
  • It wasn’t the only edit that the newspaper made to further conceal its previous denigration of 1776. Prompted by the discovery of the first deletion, Twitter users noticed another suspicious change to the project’s text. The print edition of the 1619 Project from August 2019 contained an introductory passage reading:
  • In August of 1619, a ship appeared on this horizon, near Point Comfort, a coastal port in the British colony of Virginia. It carried more than 20 enslaved Africans, who were sold to the colonists. America was not yet America, but this was the moment it began.
  • The website version of the 1619 Project now reads: In August of 1619, a ship appeared on this horizon, near Point Comfort, a coastal port in the English colony of Virginia. It carried more than 20 enslaved Africans, who were sold to the colonists. No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed.
tsainten

Justice Dept to File Antitrust Lawsuit Against Google - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...google-antitrust.html

politics google lawsuit economics Culture policy us

shared by tsainten on 20 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • The Justice Department accused Google of maintaining an illegal monopoly over search and search advertising in a lawsuit filed on Tuesday, the government’s most significant legal challenge to a tech company’s market power in a generation.
  • llegally maintaining its monopoly over search through several exclusive business contracts and agreements that lock out competition.
  • Google’s payment of billions of dollars to Apple to place the Google search engine as the default for iPhones.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • The suit reflects the pushback against the power of the nation’s largest corporations, and especially technology giants like Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple. Conservatives like President Trump and liberals like Senator Elizabeth Warren have been highly critical of the concentration of power in a handful of tech behemoths.
  • set off a cascade of other antitrust lawsuits
  • A victory for the government could remake one of America’s most recognizable companies and the internet economy that it has helped define since it was founded by two Stanford University graduate students in 1998.
  • The company says it has strong competition in the search market, with more people finding information on sites like Amazon. It says its services have been a boon for small businesses.
  • The lawsuit comes two weeks after Democratic lawmakers on the House Judiciary Committee released a sprawling report on the tech giants that accused Google of controlling a monopoly over online search and the ads that come up when users enter a query.
  • It controls 90 percent of the market for online searches, according to one estimate.
  • Google last faced serious scrutiny from an American antitrust regulator nearly a decade ago, when the Federal Trade Commission investigated whether it had abused its power over the search market. The agency’s staff recommended bringing charges against the company, according to a memo reported on by The Wall Street Journal. But the agency’s five commissioners voted in 2013 not to bring a case.
  • European Union has brought three antitrust cases against Google in recent years, focused on its search engine, advertising business and Android mobile operating system. Regulators in Britain and Australia are examining the digital advertising market, in inquiries that could ultimately implicate the company.
leilamulveny

Where Trump and Biden Stand on the Middle East - WSJ - 1 views

www.wsj.com/...on-the-middle-east-11603371604

trump biden middle east wsj politics policy

shared by leilamulveny on 22 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • If Mr. Trump wins re-election, he may find his closeness with Riyadh insufficient to persuade Saudi King Salman to take the bold and domestically controversial step of establishing full diplomatic relations with Israel, former officials and Middle East analysts said.
  • The former vice president has promised tougher scrutiny of Saudi Arabia’s human-rights record and Yemen war, which also could limit his leverage with the kingdom, the analysts added
  • Mr. Trump has voiced hope a new agreement might be negotiated if he is re-elected.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Forging Middle East peace has been a perennial goal for U.S. presidents, leading to historic breakthroughs such as the 1978 Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, but also repeated failures to break through entrenched positions, particularly between Israel and the Palestinians.
  • Mr. Biden has said he would return to the 2015 agreement if Iran comes back into compliance with its limits, and would then try to negotiate longer-term and more stringent constraints on Tehran’s nuclear program
  • the importance of maintaining Israel’s military edge, limiting U.S. troop deployments to the region and cultivating efforts to foster ties between Israel and its neighbors.
  • backing a two-state solution along widely internationally accepted parameters and opposing any Israeli efforts to annex territory and build settlements.
  • While maintaining strong support for Israel, he would also seek to rebuild ties with the Palestinians.
Javier E

Broken News for Broken Britain - Persuasion - 0 views

www.persuasion.community/...broken-news-for-broken-britain

objectivity reporting media bbc UK right-wing facts

shared by Javier E on 17 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • The emergence of U.S.-style combative right-wing news formats represents the encroachment of the culture war into every facet of British public life. No area can be spared. No space is maintained for neutrality, or objectivity, or non-partisan conversation. Everything becomes a tribal dogfight.
  • This is one of the key qualities of the nationalist movements sweeping the globe. They eradicate the notion of shared facts, a shared reality in which individuals assess arguments independently. The objective world is mutilated along tribal lines, where new information is to be assessed not by its validity but whether it is useful to one’s identity.
  • Where neutral sources of news vanish, truth fades into irrelevance. The government amasses more power than it could secure through propaganda alone: the power to escape scrutiny, to never be held to account, to no longer care about the veracity of its claims
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Some of the last bastions of objective reporting in Britain are shaking. The world of shared-facts is crumbling away. The sacred role of impartial broadcasting in British public life is teetering on the edge.
katherineharron

Trump: New details on Capitol insurrection are devastating indictment - CNNPolitics - 0 views

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

trump

shared by katherineharron on 11 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • Impeachment prosecutors took senators on a wrenching journey inside the horror of the US Capitol insurrection, making a devastating case that Donald Trump had plotted, incited and celebrated a vile crime against the United States.
  • Surveillance footage depicted then-Vice President Mike Pence being hustled away with rioters calling for him to be hanged only yards away. A police officer screamed in pain, trapped between a door and an invading crowd. In a horrific scene, Trump supporter Ashli Babbitt tried to climb through a window smashed by rioters before falling back, shot dead by a Capitol Police officer.
  • The stunningly powerful presentation painted the most complete narrative yet of the assault on the Congress as it met to certify Joe Biden's election win on January 6.Read MoreTheir explicit and unsettling case made clear that the terror inside the corridors of power was even more frightening than it had first appeared. It's now apparent that only good luck, and the bravery of police, prevented senior members of Congress injured or killed.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • The managers built a methodical case, juxtaposing Trump's inflammatory behavior over months with the frightful looting and violence inside the Capitol to make a cause-and-effect argument of the ex-President's culpability.They showed how Trump had set out to undermine the election in the minds of his supporters weeks before votes were cast and demonstrated how his lies about fraud had acted like a fuse on the primed fury of his supporters after he lost.
  • Of course, impeachment is a political process, not a judicial one, so even the most compelling evidence will have little impact if jurors -- the 100 senators -- have already made up their minds. And most GOP members of the chamber want to avoid falling afoul of Trump's personality cult, after spending four years abetting his abuses of power in the most unchained presidency in history.
  • "Donald Trump sent them here on this mission," said Virgin Islands Del. Stacey Plaskett, one of the impeachment managers
  • "President Trump put a target on their backs and his mob broke into the Capitol to hunt them down," Plaskett said.One of her colleagues, Rep. Joe Neguse of Colorado, handled the evidence on how Trump had rebuffed calls, even from Republicans, to intervene in his role as President to protect another branch of government under assault.
  • And the House prosecutors laid out timelines that showed how the President had done nothing to stop the insurrection of a mob he referred to as "special people."
  • One video showed Sen. Mitt Romney, a Utah Republican, being saved from running into the mob by Capitol Police Office Eugene Goodman, who has previously been hailed as a hero for directing rioters away from the Senate chamber.
  • As the only Republican senator to vote to convict Trump in his first impeachment trial, Romney would have been in mortal danger had he encountered the Trump mob. Another video showed now-Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, hurriedly reversing course with his security detail and running from the crowd.
  • Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, one of the Republicans seen as a possible vote to convict Trump, remarked on how the evidence brought home the "total awareness of that, the enormity of this, this threat, not just to us as people, as lawmakers, but the threat to the institution and what Congress represents. It's disturbing. Greatly disturbing."
  • Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana was rebuked by his own state party for voting on Tuesday to allow the trial to proceed on constitutional grounds.
  • And Sen. Roy Blunt, who unlike Cassidy faces reelection in 2024, appeared to be among those searching for a way to justify a vote to spare Trump -- the first-ever twice-impeached President
  • "Well, you know, you have a summer where people all over the country are doing similar kinds of things. I don't know what the other side will show from Seattle and Portland and other places, but you're going to see similar kinds of tragedies there as well," Blunt said, drawing a comparison that stands up to serious scrutiny only in the fevered swamps of conservative media.
  • "Because hypocrisy is pretty large for these people, standing up to, you know, rioters when they came to my house, Susan Collins' house, I think this is a very hypocritical presentation by the House," Graham said.
  • Many Republican senators are adopting the questionable argument that it is not constitutional to try a president who was impeached while he was in office, once he has reverted to being a private citizen after his term ends.
  • "The question before all of you in this trial: Is this America?" the Maryland Democrat asked the senators seated in a chamber that was a crime scene on January 6."Can our country and our democracy ever be the same if we don't hold accountable the person responsible for inciting the violent attack against our country?"
  • But so far, senators have heard only one side of the story and fair legal process requires the ex-President to have a robust defense.
  • But their widely criticized and confusing opening statements on Tuesday, which infuriated the former President, did not suggest they have the evidentiary case or presentational skills of the House managers.
Javier E

The Declaration Under Siege - The Bulwark - 0 views

thebulwark.com/the-declaration-under-siege

rights human declaration American idea relativism natural law natural rights

shared by Javier E on 05 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • Margaret Thatcher explained the stark difference between American and European political traditions with elegant economy. The Iron Lady said that European nations were made by history but the United States was made by philosophy.
  • Last month, the State Department issued a thoughtful and carefully reasoned report on that quintessentially American philosophy, and the unique nation that came into existence to conserve and champion it
  • The report explores the cause of natural law and natural rights, as articulated by the Declaration of Independence (as well as the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights). In this theory, rights inhere in human individuals at birth, which is why we call them natural. “The sacred rights of mankind,” wrote Alexander Hamilton, “are written, as with a sun beam, in the whole volume of human nature.”
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Thus government does not create rights, nor does it dispense them. It merely recognizes and respects them. As George Will likes to say, the most important word in the Declaration of Independence is secure: “[T]o secure these rights, governments are instituted among men.”
  • The assumption of natural rights and government’s limited role to secure those rights, the bedrock premise of American political thought, finds itself widely embattled today. It is under pressure on university campuses and in the prestige media, and even challenged by self-professed advocates of human rights
  • The United States was from its beginning a republic “dedicated” to certain self-evident truths, foremost among them that “all men are created equal.
  • These founding principles of equal rights and human freedom—America’s public philosophy—contain what Will (in his bracing tome The Conservative Sensibility) calls “an epistemological assertion” that important political truths are not merely knowable but known.
  • In the world of 1776, the truths held to be self-evident by America’s founders were ferociously contested by kings and monarchs who claimed a divine right
  • Today, although despots still contest America’s great epistemological assertion, the problem in the West is closer to the opposite: everyone claims the truth is known, but with the crucial stipulation that no one’s truth is better or worse than anyone else’s.
  • Tom Nichols has written deftly about this phenomenon. “It is a new Declaration of Independence: no longer do we hold these truths to be self-evident, we hold all truths to be self-evident, even the ones that aren’t true. All things are knowable and every opinion on any subject is as good as any other.”
  • Thus does the American Founders’ assertion of truth, and its implication that not all claims to truth are equally valid, comes off as “judgmental” to modern ears
  • A central aim of progressivism has been to blur the distinction between what have been called “negative rights” (those that, like the Bill of Rights, protect life and liberty) and “positive rights” (those that obligate the government to provide certain services in pursuit of equality). This project brings concentrated focus on economic and social rights rather than fundamental political freedoms, and this ever-widening circle of rights has brought the older, limited system of rights under scrutiny.
  • If their expansive vision of rights is accepted as legitimate, it would bring the older vision—with its ironclad protections for free speech, and its ideals of a colorblind society, rational discourse, and the scientific method—into disrepute. These classical liberal ideals self-evidently clash with newly asserted rights, since they have already begun to be curtailed to make way for them.
  • The commission assails the left’s elastic conception of rights on the logic that Frederick the Great would recognize: “to defend everything is to defend nothing.” It argues that this proliferation of elective rights for certain groups (some of which are good in and of themselves) endangers the essential liberties of all.
  • Modern politics, built on progressive foundations, assumes that natural rights constitute an incomplete and therefore inadequate body of rights.
brookegoodman

Trump tweets threat that 'looting' will lead to 'shooting.' Twitter put a warning label... - 0 views

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

US trump

shared by brookegoodman on 31 May 20 - No Cached
  • New York (CNN Business)Twitter says President Donald Trump and the White House's official Twitter (TWTR) account have violated its rule against glorifying violence and has affixed a warning label to tweets on both, marking the first time such action has been taken against the accounts.
  • The company's move risked escalating tensions with the White House during an already tense week. Trump signed an executive order that purported to address "censorship" by Twitter and other social media companies, following Twitter's earlier decision to affix fact-check type labels to two of his misleading posts about mail-in voting ballots.
  • A spokesperson for Twitter said the decision was made by teams within the company and CEO Jack Dorsey was informed of the plan before Trump's tweet was labeled.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • As cable news networks carried images of fires and destructive protests in Minneapolis, the president tweeted at 12:53 a.m. ET: "these THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won't let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!"
  • Less than two-and-a-half hours later, Twitter took action. "This Tweet violates our policies regarding the glorification of violence based on the historical context of the last line, its connection to violence, and the risk it could inspire similar actions today," the company said.
  • Facebook came under scrutiny last year for saying it would not fact-check politicians' posts.
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