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Chess in a black box: China's five most powerful people - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html politics US crisis policy China Communism National Congress Congress
shared by krystalxu on 10 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • The country is ruled by the Chinese Communist Party, in a one-party system, making whoever occupies the highest positions in the party among the most powerful.
  • Power isn't just held by the politicians either -- influential businessmen and entrepreneurs, the pioneers of China's economic rise, are also fighting for a seat at the table.
  • the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party on October 18,
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • Tencent's app, WeChat, is currently the largest and most commonly used messaging system in the world, with almost 1 billion users.
  • "He's regarded as being a sort of low-profile, not particularly interlinked or interconnected premier. He's got probably the worst job in China.
  • it's not a sort of political power. It's administrative power," he said.
  • "Power is about initiating, setting frameworks, setting the agenda. Well you can see people doing that, but Li Keqiang is more of an administrator."
  • The company's founder, Ma Huateng, is China's third richest man, according to Forbes, just behind Jack Ma and Dalian Wanda founder Wang Jianlin.
  • Ma, who is also known by his nickname "Pony," founded Tencent, the company which owns WeChat, in 1998 with his university classmates.
  • , Premier Li is number two in China's power structure, but his influence is far from assured.
  • It is those restrictions which make working in the world of China's internet so complex and potentially dangerous.
  • China's Great Firewall is rising higher than ever
  • "One challenge for tech titans like Ma in the coming years is whether they can keep on the good side of the authorities
  • Since then, Wang has grown to be a powerful, feared figure among Chinese officials.
  • Jack Ma is without a doubt one of China's most powerful people and possibly the country's most public face internationally next to President Xi.
  • As a result of Xi and Wang's crackdown, conspicuous spending and flaunting of wealth by officials has shrunk dramatically and as a result, Wang's political capital has continued to rise.
  • Wang's rise could be complicated by his age. He'll be 69 at the upcoming 19th Party Congress, meaning by custom he should retire.
  • he's the flamboyant and personable former English teacher who likes to dance to Michael Jackson tunes.
  • "He's been an essential lieutenant for Xi ... the president would be a weakened force without him at the top table," he said, placing Wang second
  • Ma, whose Chinese name is Ma Yun, is the executive chairman and founder of Alibaba,
  • Ma's peer on the China rich list, has had to abandon a series of major international deals after coming under scrutiny from Beijing.
  • Most people can't see the day after tomorrow."
  • China's president and, more importantly, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, analysts say Xi is already the country's most powerful leader since Paramount Leader Deng Xiaoping
  • Xi's power is only set to grow.
  • far more than his predecessors,
  • most recently Chen Min'er who was promoted as party secretary of Chongqing.
  • Guo Wengui, the US-based businessman and perennial thorn in the side of the Chinese Communist Party.
  • and the chess game itself goes on inside a highly impenetrable black box," he said.
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Britain needs a day of reckoning. Brexit will provide it | Nesrine Malik | Opinion | Th... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...britain-brexit uk brexit history politics crisis
shared by Javier E on 18 Feb 19 - No Cached
  • Brexit has revealed an unaddressed xenophobia – and the immigration system that stoked it – on the right and the left
  • It has laid bare our political class, squirming pathetically and uselessly under the micro-scrutiny of Brexit. To paraphrase Jeff Bezos, Brexit rolled over the log and we saw what crawled ou
  • The referendum aftermath has exposed an exceptionalism verging on delusion. It is no coincidence that Churchill’s legacy has become a matter of public debate. It is an argument that reflects Britain’s inner turmoil on whether it is uniquely apart from the rest of the world, or cannot thrive on its own. It is a soul-searching, long-overdue questioning of the conventional account of Britain’s history. Is the country especially endowed with that historical grit and determination that helped to vanquish its enemies in two world wars and run an empire; or is it a country that ran that empire by means of brutality, and only won those wars as part of an alliance
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  • Can we go it alone? Did we ever? Are we, as the heavily memed That Mitchell and Webb Look quote goes, the baddies?
  • it is, ironically, Britain’s global profile that has diminished its ability to focus on internal nation-building. “The British state is a machine for running and exploring the world,” he said. “It doesn’t work very well when it comes to the business of the modern nation.”
  • inally exposed is the unbridgeable gap, both economic and cultural, between centre and peripheries, between the winners and the losers. There is a double nihilism about Brexit. There are many who feel like they have nothing to lose from a no-deal scenario, while also savouring the prospect of trouble ahead. This is what happens when a country is fed a diet of crisis as glamorous film reel. You cannot fight this appetite for martyrdom with technical arguments about processing times at Dover: these perverse fantasies can only be vanquished by an actual crisis
  • From the beginning, Brexit created its own momentum. Once the question was asked – in or out? – all the grievances, justified or not, could be projected on it, with “in” being widely seen as a vote for the status quo. Within this frame, nothing else matters – not economic predictions, not warnings about medicines running out, nor threats of the need to stockpile foods. The remain campaign could not have done anything differently: it lost the moment the question was asked.
  • maybe, in the end, we will finally believe that immigration is necessary for an economy and an NHS to function, that the inequality between the south-east and the rest of Britain is unsustainable, that our political class is over-pedigreed and under-principled. We might even believe that other crises, such as climate change, are real, too.
  • Maybe, in the end, the country outside Europe will find its stride by confronting its issues rather than blaming them on others, and forging its own way. But there is only one way to find out. What a shame Brexit is that path
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Genoa Bridge Collapse Throws Harsh Light on Benettons' Highway Billions - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...italy-autostrade-benetton.html corruption italy
shared by Javier E on 06 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • The Benettons made occasional, bipartisan political donations but those did not explain the company’s influence. Autostrade could perform perfectly legal favors for politicians, like modernizing a stretch of local highway.
  • Several scholars say the skewed relationship resulted in a case of “regulatory capture,” the political scientists’ term for the situation when a watchdog bends to the interests of a company it is supposed to supervise.
  • When a center-left government took power in 2006, Autostrade’s contract came under scrutiny. The government blocked the company from selling itself to Abertis, a Spanish toll road operator, then signaled that Autostrade needed to be reined in
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  • “The problem was not the merger itself,” Antonio Di Pietro, then the minister of infrastructure and transport, said in a statement, “but concession rules that are too favorable toward the motorway operator, so much so that they led to the bad habit of automatic tariff hikes.”
  • The government approved a new law to encourage efficiency and lower tolls, except it never took effect. In 2008, the center-left government fell. The new conservative government of Silvio Berlusconi, a media tycoon, took power and amended the new law to stipulate annual increases in tolls right through to the end of the contract
  • Though it aided all of Italy’s toll road operators, Autostrade, the biggest, was the biggest beneficiary.
  • Beyond fixing blame for the bridge collapse, a central question of the Morandi tragedy is what happened to safety inspections. The answer is that the inspectors worked for Autostrade more than for the state.
  • For decades, Spea Engineering, a Milan-based company, has performed inspections on the bridge. If nominally independent, Spea is owned by Autostrade’s parent company, Atlantia, and Autostrade is also Spea’s largest customer. Spea’s offices in Rome and elsewhere are housed inside Autostrade.
  • One former bridge design engineer for Spea, Giulio Rambelli, described Autostrade’s control over Spea as “absolute.”“They even approve promotions inside of Spea,
  • Such potential conflicts are prohibited in other countries where Autostrade operates. In Chile, for instance, regulations block a private toll operator from hiring a company it owns to conduct inspections, according to Mariana Rocha, a spokeswoman at the country’s Ministry of Public Works.
  • Mr. Fonderico, the administrative law professor from Luiss Guido Carli University, said the ministry actually lacked the expertise to carry out its oversight role, particularly on a bridge as vexing as the Morandi. Over time, he said, the government behaved more like its first priority was cooperating with Autostrade, rather than regulating it.
  • Though the relationship between Autostrade and the government is now defined by pure hostility, a divorce is unlikely.The reason? If the company’s contract were terminated early, the state would need to pay Autostrade the remaining value of the contract, a sum that could exceed $17 billion.“The company would take the state to court,” Mr. Ponti said, “and it would win.”
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Gun Rights, 'Positive Good' and the Evolution of Mutually Assured Massacre - Talking Po... - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...n-of-mutually-assured-massacre gun rights positive evolution rationale evil psychology
shared by Javier E on 23 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • Of course no country – not in the midst of endemic civil violence or civil war – has ever tried having totally unrestricted access to any number of firearms and any amount of ammunition either. We’re already in uncharted territory.
  • The fact that Trump suggested this idea was entirely predictable. I would almost go as far as to say that it is the mainstream policy response from “gun rights” Republicans, which is to say almost all Republicans who are vocal on this issue.
  • But it goes back further still, more than a decade to a largely discredited and significantly disgraced “gun rights” economist named John Lott. Lott wrote some foundation studies that didn’t withstand serious scrutiny. He also got in trouble for creating fake online identities to praise his work
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  • What Lott did was apply a kind of crude game theory to the gun question – call it Mutually Assured Massacre.
  • if everyone is armed or any given person might be armed, you’re going to be a lot more cautious about going for your firearm and shooting someone. Because they might be armed too. They might shoot back.
  • we can only understand this development by looking back to an earlier period of American history, particularly the last two decades before the Civil War.
  • in practice, almost everything is wrong with this logic. It relies on an extremely crude version of economic rational action and an even cruder form of game theory. This is particularly the case when you realize that the fraught, angry situations where people impulsively kill other people are by definition not rational.
  • This doesn’t even get into situations like school shootings where the assailant usually intends to die in the massacre. It also doesn’t get into accidents, misunderstandings. I
  • the policy arguments from gun rights advocates mostly come back to John Lott: more guns in private hands means more safety. Same with open carry and a bunch of other parts of the “gun rights” agenda. It’s pervasive. It’s gospel.
  • In the abstract, where no humans actually exist, there’s actually a compelling logic to this
  • This spurred a basic rethinking of the matter for a simple reason based on human nature: no one wants to go into a critical argument with the basic assumption that you’re actually wrong. This was the spur for the so-called “positive good” theory of pro-slavery politics.
  • This began to change in the 1830s and 1840s as slavery came under more genuine and immediate threat. There was more anti-slavery agitation in the North. Great Britain had begun a process of gradual emancipation.
  • In the first decades of American history, there were many slaves and many slaveholders. But there were very few defenders of slavery per se. Virtually all respectable Southerners understood slavery as an evil, perhaps a necessary evil
  • simply, far from being a necessary evil or a flawed and unjust institution slaveholders’ ancestors had saddled them with, slavery was not only a good thing but the only foundation of a just society. It was right that Africans should be slaves and that whites should be their masters. Full stop
  • The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away.
  • Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the “storm came and the wind blew.”
  • Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.
  • In retrospect, this evolution seems inevitable. People can’t go to literal or figurative war with an ambivalent commitment. The need for a positive defense of slavery was critical.
  • The NRA wasn’t always against all gun restrictions. In the 1980s and 1990s, it didn’t oppose some very limited restrictions. That changed over the course of the 1990s, for a variety of reasons.
  • the main reason for this change is that as long as you recognize the basic reality that guns are dangerous, fighting even the most minimal kinds of restrictions is inherently difficult. You need to change the game. You need a theory that is coherent and in line with your goal.
  • Lott’s theory created a logic for that. The problem with massacres isn’t too many guns. It’s too few guns. Guns aren’t the problem. They’re the answer. It was the NRA’s ‘positive good’ argument, comparable to the one pro-slavery intellectuals devised in the 1850s.
  • if you look at the progression of gun regulation over the last twenty years, it is entirely in this direction. We not only have a dramatically higher number of guns in circulation today. We not only lack the limited protections from the 1990s. We have a whole movement making on-demand concealed carry the norm across much of the country. We also have more open carry laws. All public policy has moved toward more guns, not fewer and more freedom to bring them anywhere you want.
  • This was the movement Lott, with his error-riddled study, was trying to advance: maximizing the number of people carrying a concealed weapon in daily life.
  • Indeed, something called the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act of 2017 is on the verge of passage in Congress today. That would force states with tighter gun laws to honor the licenses of the most permissive ones. In other words, effectively nationalizing the right of anyone without a felony conviction or a recent mental health hospitalization to carry a loaded weapon whenever and wherever they want.
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Most Stressful Job on the Road: Not Driving an Autonomous Car - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...g-an-autonomous-car-1522000393 technology
shared by runlai_jiang on 26 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • The fatal crash last week in Tempe, Ariz., involving an Uber autonomous vehicle is bringing new scrutiny to both the quality of Uber’s technology for avoiding collision and the efficacy of its backup system of so-called safety drivers.
  • The company said the second operator wasn’t officially responsible for maintaining car safety, but some drivers said the two people in the vehicle relied on each other since an accident or traffic violation could cost them their jobs.
  • One former Uber driver said he couldn’t imagine driving alone because it was “stressful enough” monitoring the road to ensure the car doesn’t perform in dangerous or unexpected ways. Being additionally responsible for logging unusual activity, which Uber drivers may type into a device in their cars, would only increase that, he said.
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  • Still, other drivers said the job wasn’t overly difficult. “It’s about being alert, if you can’t be alert for a few straight hours then you’re not a very good driver,” a former Waymo test operator said. Video taken from inside the Uber vehicle, released by Tempe police, appears to show the vehicle heading straight into the pedestrian without slo
  • It is the second time in a year that Uber has ​temporarily halted testing following an accident involving one of its autonomous cars.
  • Uber began making the transition to using single test operators nearly three years after embarking on self-driving vehicle development. General Motors Co.’s Cruise Automation self-driving unit, which was founded in 2013, still has two test drivers in every car. Waymo—which has logged more than five million testing miles, by far the most of any company—began using one safety operator in many of its cars in 2015, about six years after its program began. Waymo now runs most vehicles without humans behind the wheel in the Phoenix area and plans to launch a commercial robot service later this year.
  • d under stress. California, where a lot of testing occurs, requires companies to disclose such “disengagements” of the autonomous technology, and unnecessary disengagements can interfere with learning and improving the technology.
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Is a Film About a Transgender Dancer Too 'Dangerous' to Watch? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...x-film-transgender-debate.html transgender dancer film
shared by Javier E on 06 Jan 19 - No Cached
  • “Girl” sounds like a film that transgender moviegoers might rally around. It depicts a teenage trans girl, Lara, raised by a single father who supports not only her dreams of becoming a ballerina but also her gender confirmation surgery. It’s set in Belgium, so much of Lara’s health care is paid for and her doctor and therapist are encouraging caregivers. And it’s a prize winner that is up for a best foreign-language Golden Globe on Sunday.
  • Yet “Girl,” which has been picked up by Netflix, faces a firestorm, one that pits the director, Lukas Dhont; the trans woman who inspired it, the dancer Nora Monsecour; and the film’s supporters against trans activists and others who consider its scrutiny of a trans character’s body so dangerous that they urge no one to see it
  • “Girl” asks a provocative question: Have we gotten to a place where a film can explore dark aspects of an individual trans character without feeling regressive? No one should have the burden of representing a class of people in a film; real people are complicated. But what happens when a movie is both art and a trigger?
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  • That’s the question behind the two main criticisms of “Girl.” One is that neither Dhont nor his co-writer, Angelo Tissens, nor the young actor who plays Lara, Victor Polster, are transgender
  • The other objection, the one that has prompted foes to label the film “traumatizing” and “sickening,” involves scenes near the end.
  • The outrage has played out ferociously online. The film critic Oliver Whitney wrote in The Hollywood Reporter that “Girl” is the “most dangerous movie about a trans character in years.” Whitney, who identifies as trans masculine, told me that seeing a trans girl mutilating herself suggests “it’s part of her survival, and that’s harmful.” He said he was most upset that the film “sends a damaging message to all audiences, but especially to trans folks suffering from dysphoria who may not have access to medical care or information about medical transitions.”
  • Three trans women who saw the film at a screening in Los Angeles said it was the film’s dark territory that made it compelling. Crystal Stull told me “Girl” was “the closest that cis people in society will ever get to understanding just how bad dysphoria can really get.
  • Ann Thomas, the founder of Transgender Talent, a talent listing service for trans people, chastised the campaign against it.“The message these arrogant trans activists are saying is that Nora doesn’t have the right to tell her story,” said Thomas, who also defended “Girl” in an opinion piece for The Advocate.
  • “We’re worried about harm reduction,” said Elena Rose Vera, the deputy executive director of Trans Lifeline, who has not seen the movie. “We just want to protect our community.”
  • Monsecour told me she hoped the trans community knew that “Girl” was a beginning, not an end.“I have a platform to speak with ‘Girl,’” she said. “Without ‘Girl,’ I wouldn’t have that. There’s a lot of work to do, but I’m confident that more trans people will tell their stories.”
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Too Radical for France, a Muslim Clergyman Faces Deportation - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...france-extremism-doudi.html france radical muslim Salafi
shared by Javier E on 06 Apr 18 - No Cached
  • Mr. Macron has already used his huge majority in Parliament to inscribe into law some government tactics — searches and seizures, house arrests, shutting down mosques — that had been applied before only as part of the state of emergency put in place after terrorist attacks in Paris killed 130 people in November 2015.
  • The case of Imam Doudi, 63, who was born in Algeria and is not a French citizen, is part of a high-profile effort by the Macron administration to intensify scrutiny of Muslim clerics and, in some cases, to deport them. Some analysts say that Mr. Macron is using it to display toughness, as European governments struggle for tools to battle radical Islam, and as he fends off political challenges from the far right.
  • “They want to make an example of him,” said Vincent Geisser, an Islam expert at the University of Aix-Marseille. “It’s got more to do with communicating firmness.”
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • The expulsion of Imam Doudi was recommended by the Marseille authorities under a French law regarding “deliberate acts tending to provoke discrimination, hatred and violence toward an individual or a group.”
  • Here and elsewhere in France, Salafism is increasingly seen as the enemy, a menacing way-station to terrorism. Five members of Imam Doudi’s flock left to fight jihad in Syria, the police say, though the imam denies knowing them.
  • His sermons are “exactly contrary to the values of the Republic,” said Marseille’s prefect of police, Olivier de Mazières, a terrorism specialist who has led the case against the cleric, in an interview in his office. “We think he’s preaching hatred, discrimination, violence.”
  • Scholars see a more ambiguous relationship between Salafism and jihad than the police do. “The source of radicalization is not Salafism,” Olivier Roy writes in the book “Jihad and Death. “There is a common matrix, but not a causal relationship.
  • “Scholars will tell you that Salafism does not lead to jihadism, sociologically,” he said. “You can get to jihadism without having passed through a Salafist mosque.”Those distinctions are being lost in a renewed wave of public anxiety in France, however.“We must forbid the spread of Salafism, because it’s the enemy,” the former prime minister Manuel Valls said in a radio interview last week.The newspaper Le Figaro said in a front-page editorial that “our country must launch a vast operation to eradicate Salafism.
  • While Imam Doudi acknowledges having once been a follower of Osama bin Laden and the radical Algerian leader Ali Belhadj, the preacher denied that he, or Salafism, was extremist.“Salafism is merely the reasonable middle ground between extremism and negligence. There are sects that pretend to be Salafist — Al Qaeda, Daesh — but are not,” Imam Doudi said. “These are extremists, and in our preaching we are opposed to them.”
  • “In the Quran, you’ll find verses justifying lapidation” — death by stoning — “and jihad,” Imam Doudi said. “Sooner or later, I’ll read them.”His lawyer, Nabil Boudi, supported the assertion. “It’s a formula you’ll hear in every sermon,” Mr. Boudi said. None of the phrases cited by the government explicitly justify terrorist attacks. Imam Doudi said he is resolutely against such assaults.
  • Mr. Geisser, the Islam expert, is among those who say that, if anything, Imam Doudi was known as a government stooge.“He was best known for having good relations with the security services,” Mr. Geisser said.“He thought that to collaborate was to be protected,” Mr. Geisser added. “He’s someone who stuck out his hand, and it ended up getting burned.”
  • “It could be dangerous for France,” said Fayçal Mansari, a mason, who called Imam Doudi “ a barrier” against Islamic radicals.“Very few people truly know Islam,” Mr. Mansari said. “If they get rid of a truly learned professor, people will find themselves disarmed.”
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Trump walks back sanctions against Russia, contradicting Nikki Haley - TODAY.com - 0 views

www.today.com/...-chuck-todd-says-1221829187930 trump politics US
shared by malonema1 on 01 May 18 - No Cached
  • Trump does deserve credit for North Korean talks, Chuck Todd says
  • Meet the Press Moderator joins Sunday TODAY’s Chuck Todd and says President Donald Trump deserves credit for helping create conditions to start talks of denuclearization with North Korea, but says some questions still loom. {"1222279235816":{"mpxId":"1222279235816","canonical_url":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","canonicalUrl":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","legacy_url":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","playerUrl":"https://www.today.com/offsite/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","ampPlayerUrl":"https://player.today.com/offsite/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","relatedLink":"","sentiment":"Neutral","shortUrl":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","description":"Jacob Cartwright, a truck driver in Oregon, accidentally plugged the wrong address into his GPS and wound up lost more than 100 miles out of his way. 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Scott Pruitt and the Trump White House's Serial Scandals - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...559055 US history politics trump
shared by malonema1 on 01 May 18 - No Cached
  • In the hierarchy of Donald Trump-era scandals, from the brazen to the boorish, pay raises in a low-level agency shouldn’t crack the top quartile. But on Thursday, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt managed to spin his hiring practices into a cobweb beyond his control—leaving some reporters to question whether a low-stakes snafu could now be the “end of the line.”
  • In his hearing before the House energy panel, Pruitt struggled to answer questions about salary hikes given to two of Pruitt’s closest aides. As The Atlantic first reported earlier this month, Pruitt bypassed the White House to give raises of 33 percent and 52 percent to Millan Hupp and Sarah Greenwalt, respectively, both of whom had worked for Pruitt while he was attorney general of Oklahoma. At the time, Pruitt denied any knowledge of the raises, telling Fox News’s Ed Henry that he didn’t know who on his staff had authorized them. Democratic lawmakers quickly questioned Pruitt’s account, prompting the agency’s inspector general to start digging. Pruitt has also been under scrutiny for leasing a condo from the wife of a lobbyist and for spending more than $40,000 for a soundproof booth around his office.
  • This story should be familiar. In some ways, the pay-raise debacle calls to mind Rob Porter, the ex-White House staff secretary who was fired after allegations of abusive relationships surfaced in the media. In a rapid-fire news cycle, the Porter scandal commanded weeks of attention. This was not because of a pile-on from the press; rather, it was because the White House continued to douse the issue with gasoline, with top aides changing their stories of what they knew and when.
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3 Lessons The White House Could Learn After The Downfall Of Another Trump Nominee : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...wnfall-of-another-trump-nomine US trump culture crisis
shared by malonema1 on 01 May 18 - No Cached
  • After the demise of yet another Trump administration nomination, it's worth taking a look at lessons learned. So far, the president has tried to blame Democrats as "obstructionists" for White House physician Ronny Jackson's downfall and described Jackson on Friday as an "American hero."
  • Trump has always managed by instinct and gut — not by orderly process. And for him, the chaos that ensues is just part of his brand. But it doesn't always result in a successful Cabinet confirmation or policies that can withstand judicial scrutiny. Turning to Rear Adm. Jackson to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs surprised many on the White House staff, just like Trump's decision to rush out the travel ban in his first week in office or to impulsively announce steel tariffs on U.S. allies.
  • Jackson and the president insist the allegations are false, but, in the end, neither was willing to fight them. After all, as Trump admitted, Jackson hadn't even asked for the job.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • "All I can tell you is we didn't initiate this discussion," Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., the ranking Democrat on the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee, told NPR's Ari Shapiro on Tuesday before Jackson withdrew his nomination. "This discussion came when we were notified by folks who work with Adm. Jackson, folks in the military."
  • Shulkin had clashed with other administration officials and says he was pushed out by people who wanted to privatize VA health care and allow big corporations to profit from treating veterans. Shulkin's critics say ethics problems did him in.
  • As if he were teasing the next episode of a reality TV show, though, he wouldn't give a name, saying only that it will be "somebody with political capabilities."
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Tibet and China: Early History - 0 views

www.thoughtco.com/tibet-and-china-history-195217 tibet china history complicated
shared by g-dragon on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • For at least 1500 years, the nation of Tibet has had a complex relationship with its large and powerful neighbor to the east, China. The political history of Tibet and China reveals that the relationship has not always been as one-sided as it now appears.
  • Indeed, as with China’s relations with the Mongols and the Japanese, the balance of power between China and Tibet has shifted back and forth over the centuries.
  • The first known interaction between the two states came in 640 A.D., when the Tibetan King Songtsan Gampo married the Princess Wencheng, a niece of the Tang Emperor Taizong. He also married a Nepalese princess.
  • ...53 more annotations...
  • Tibet and China signed a peace treaty in 821 or 822, which delineated the border between the two empires. The Tibetan Empire would concentrate on its Central Asian holdings for the next several decades, before splitting into several small, fractious kingdoms.
  • Canny politicians, the Tibetans befriended Genghis Khan just as the Mongol leader was conquering the known world in the early 13th century. As a result, though the Tibetans paid tribute to the Mongols after the Hordes had conquered China, they were allowed much greater autonomy than the other Mongol-conquered lands.
  • Over time, Tibet came to be considered one of the thirteen provinces of the Mongolian-ruled nation of Yuan China.
  • The Tibetans transmitted their Buddhist faith to the eastern Mongols; Kublai Khan himself studied Tibetan beliefs with the great teacher Drogon Chogyal Phagpa.
  • When the Mongols' Yuan Empire fell in 1368 to the ethnic-Han Chinese Ming, Tibet reasserted its independence and refused to pay tribute to the new Emperor.
  • After their lifetimes, the two men were called the First and Second Dalai Lamas. Their sect, the Gelug or "Yellow Hats," became the dominant form of Tibetan Buddhism.
  • The Third Dalai Lama, Sonam Gyatso (1543-1588), was the first to be so named during his life. He was responsible for converting the Mongols to Gelug Tibetan Buddhism, and it was the Mongol ruler Altan Khan who probably gave the title “Dalai Lama” to Sonam Gyatso.
  • The Fourth Dalai Lama, Yonten Gyatso (1589-1616), was a Mongolian prince and the grandson of Altan Khan.
  • During the 1630s, China was embroiled in power struggles between the Mongols, Han Chinese of the fading Ming Dynasty, and the Manchu people of north-eastern China (Manchuria). The Manchus would eventually defeat the Han in 1644, and establish China's final imperial dynasty, the Qing (1644-1912).
  • The Dalai Lama made a state visit to the Qing Dynasty's second Emperor, Shunzhi, in 1653. The two leaders greeted one another as equals; the Dalai Lama did not kowtow. Each man bestowed honors and titles upon the other, and the Dalai Lama was recognized as the spiritual authority of the Qing Empire.
  • The Imperial Army then defeated the rebels, but the Emperor recognized that he would have to rule through the Dalai Lama rather than directly. Day-to-day decisions would be made on the local level.
  • China took advantage of this period of instability in Tibet to seize the regions of Amdo and Kham, making them into the Chinese province of Qinghai in 1724.
  • Three years later, the Chinese and Tibetans signed a treaty that laid out the boundary line between the two nations. It would remain in force until 1910.
  • In 1788, the Regent of Nepal sent Gurkha forces to invade Tibet.The Qing Emperor responded in strength, and the Nepalese retreated.The Gurkhas returned three years later, plundering and destroying some famous Tibetan monasteries. The Chinese sent a force of 17,000 which, along with Tibetan troops, drove the Gurkhas out of Tibet and south to within 20 miles of Kathmandu.
  • The Simla Convention granted China secular control over "Inner Tibet," (also known as Qinghai Province) while recognizing the autonomy of "Outer Tibet" under the Dalai Lama's rule. Both China and Britain promised to "respect the territorial integrity of [Tibet], and abstain from interference in the administration of Outer Tibet."
  • Despite this sort of assistance from the Chinese Empire, the people of Tibet chafed under increasingly meddlesome Qing rule.
  • when the Eighth Dalai Lama died, and 1895, when the Thirteenth Dalai
  • none of the incumbent incarnations of the Dalai Lama lived to see their nineteenth birthdays
  • If the Chinese found a certain incarnation too hard to control, they would poison him. If the Tibetans thought an incarnation was controlled by the Chinese, then they would poison him themselves.
  • Throughout this period, Russia and Britain were engaged in the "Great Game," a struggle for influence and control in Central Asia.
  • Russia pushed south of its borders, seeking access to warm-water sea ports and a buffer zone between Russia proper and the advancing British. The British pushed northward from India, trying to expand their empire and protect the Raj, the "Crown Jewel of the British Empire," from the expansionist Russians.
  • Tibet was an important playing piece in this game.
  • the British in India concluded a trade and border treaty with Beijing concerning the boundary between Sikkim and Tibet.However, the Tibetans flatly rejected the treaty terms.
  • The British invaded Tibet in 1903 with 10,000 men, and took Lhasa the following year. Thereupon, they concluded another treaty with the Tibetans, as well as Chinese, Nepalese and Bhutanese representatives, which gave the British themselves some control over Tibet’s affairs.
  • The 13th Dalai Lama, Thubten Gyatso, fled the country in 1904 at the urging of his Russian disciple, Agvan Dorzhiev. He went first to Mongolia, then made his way to Beijing.
  • The Chinese declared that the Dalai Lama had been deposed as soon as he left Tibet, and claimed full sovereignty over not only Tibet but also Nepal and Bhutan. The Dalai Lama went to Beijing to discuss the situation with the Emperor Guangxu, but he flatly refused to kowtow to the Emperor.
  • He returned to Lhasa in 1909, disappointed by Chinese policies towards Tibet. China sent a force of 6,000 troops into Tibet, and the Dalai Lama fled to Darjeeling, India later that same year.
  • China's new revolutionary government issued a formal apology to the Dalai Lama for the Qing Dynasty's insults, and offered to reinstate him. Thubten Gyatso refused, stating that he had no interest in the Chinese offer.
  • He then issued a proclamation that was distributed across Tibet, rejecting Chinese control and stating that "We are a small, religious, and independent nation."The Dalai Lama took control of Tibet's internal and external governance in 1913, negotiating directly with foreign powers, and reforming Tibet's judicial, penal, and educational systems.
  • Representatives of Great Britain, China, and Tibet met in 1914 to negotiate a treaty marking out the boundary lines between India and its northern neighbors.
  • According to Tibet, the "priest/patron" relationship established at this time between the Dalai Lama and Qing China continued throughout the Qing Era, but it had no bearing on Tibet's status as an independent nation. China, naturally, disagrees.
  • China walked out of the conference without signing the treaty after Britain laid claim to the Tawang area of southern Tibet, which is now part of the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh. Tibet and Britain both signed the treaty.
  • As a result, China has never agreed to India's rights in northern Arunachal Pradesh (Tawang), and the two nations went to war over the area in 1962. The boundary dispute still has not been resolved.
  • China also claims sovereignty over all of Tibet, while the Tibetan government-in-exile points to the Chinese failure to sign the Simla Convention as proof that both Inner and Outer Tibet legally remain under the Dalai Lama's jurisdiction.
  • Soon, China would be too distracted to concern itself with the issue of Tibet.
  • China would see near-continuous civil war up to the Communist victory in 1949, and this era of conflict was exacerbated by the Japanese Occupation and World War II. Under such circumstances, the Chinese showed little interest in Tibet.The 13th Dalai Lama ruled independent Tibet in peace until his death in 1933.
  • Tenzin Gyatso, the current Dalai Lama, was taken to Lhasa in 1937 to begin training for his duties as the leader of Tibet. He would remain there until 1959, when the Chinese forced him into exile in India.
  • In 1950, the People's Liberation Army (PLA) of the newly-formed People's Republic of China invaded Tibet. With stability reestablished in Beijing for the first time in decades, Mao Zedong sought to assert China's right to rule over Tibet as well.
  • The PLA inflicted a swift and total defeat on Tibet's small army, and China drafted the "Seventeen Point Agreement" incorporating Tibet as an autonomous region of the People's Republic of China.Representatives of the Dalai Lama's government signed the agreement under protest, and the Tibetans repudiated the agreement nine years later.
  • On March 1, 1959, the Dalai Lama received an odd invitation to attend a theater performance at PLA headquarters near Lhasa.
  • The guards immediately publicized this rather ham-handed attempted abduction, and the following day an estimated crowd of 300,000 Tibetans surrounded Potala Palace to protect their leader.
  • Tibetan troops were able to secure a route for the Dalai Lama to escape into India on March 17. Actual fighting began on March 19, and lasted only two days before the Tibetan troops were defeated.
  • An estimated 800 artillery shells had pummeled Norbulingka, and Lhasa's three largest monasteries were essentially leveled. The Chinese rounded up thousands of monks, executing many of them. Monasteries and temples all over Lhasa were ransacked.
  • In the days after the 1959 Uprising, the Chinese government revoked most aspects of Tibet's autonomy, and initiated resettlement and land distribution across the country. The Dalai Lama has remained in exile ever since.
  • China's central government, in a bid to dilute the Tibetan population and provide jobs for Han Chinese, initiated a "Western China Development Program" in 1978.As many as 300,000 Han now live in Tibet, 2/3 of them in the capital city. The Tibetan population of Lhasa, in contrast, is only 100,000.Ethnic Chinese hold the vast majority of government posts.
  • On May 1, 1998, the Chinese officials at Drapchi Prison in Tibet ordered hundreds of prisoners, both criminals and political detainees, to participate in a Chinese flag-raising ceremony.Some of the prisoners began to shout anti-Chinese and pro-Dalai Lama slogans, and prison guards fired shots into the air before returning all the prisoners to their cells.
  • The prisoners were then severely beaten with belt buckles, rifle butts, and plastic batons, and some were put into solitary confinement for months at a time, according to one young nun who was released from the prison a year later.
  • Three days later, the prison administration decided to hold the flag-raising ceremony again.Once more, some of the prisoners began to shout slogans.Prison official reacted with even more brutality, and five nuns, three monks, and one male criminal were killed by the guards. One man was shot; the rest were beaten to death.
  • On March 10, 2008, Tibetans marked the 49th anniversary of the 1959 uprising by peacefully protesting for the release of imprisoned monks and nuns. Chinese police then broke up the protest with tear gas and gunfire.The protest resumed for several more days, finally turning into a riot. Tibetan anger was fueled by reports that imprisoned monks and nuns were being mistreated or killed in prison as a reaction to the street demonstrations.
  • China immediately cut off access to Tibet for foreign media and tourists.
  • The unrest came at a sensitive time for China, which was gearing up for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.The situation in Tibet caused increased international scrutiny of Beijing's entire human rights record, leading some foreign leaders to boycott the Olympic Opening Ceremonies. Olympic torch-bearers around the world were met by thousands of human rights protestors.
  • Tibet and China have had a long relationship, fraught with difficulty and change.At times, the two nations have worked closely together. At other times, they have been at war.
  • Today, the nation of Tibet does not exist; not one foreign government officially recognizes the Tibetan government-in-exile.
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The Antitrust Case Against Facebook, Google and Amazon - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...le-amazon-and-apple-1516121561 antitrust tech fb amazon apple microsoft network monopoly
shared by Javier E on 17 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • A growing number of critics think these tech giants need to be broken up or regulated as Standard Oil and AT&T once were.
  • antitrust regulators have a narrow test: Does their size leave consumers worse off?
  • By that standard, there isn’t a clear case for going after big tech—at least for now. They are driving down prices and rolling out new and often improved products and services every week.
  • ...29 more annotations...
  • That may not be true in the future: If market dominance means fewer competitors and less innovation, consumers will be worse off than if those companies had been restrained. “The impact on innovation can be the most important competitive effect” in an antitrust case
  • Yet Google’s monopoly means some features and prices that competitors offered never made it in front of customers. Yelp Inc., which in 2004 began aggregating detailed information and user reviews of local services, such as restaurants and stores, claims Google altered its search results to hurt Yelp and help its own competing service. While Yelp survived, it has retreated from Europe, and several similar local search services have faded.
  • When the federal government sued to break up Standard Oil, the Supreme Court acknowledged business acumen was important to the company’s early success, but concluded that was eventually supplanted by a single-minded determination to drive others out of the market.
  • Standard Oil and AT&T used trusts, regulations and patents to keep out or co-opt competitors. They were respected but unloved.
  • By contrast, Google and Facebook give away their main product, while Amazon undercuts traditional retailers so aggressively it may be holding down inflation. None enjoys a government-sanctioned monopoly; all invest prodigiously in new products.
  • All are among the public’s most loved brands, according to polls by Morning Consult.
  • Yet there are also important parallels. The monopolies of old and of today were built on proprietary technology and physical networks that drove down costs while locking in customers, erecting formidable barriers to entry.
  • . If they’re imposing a cost, it may not be what customers pay but the products they never see.
  • In a 2005 paper, Mr. Scherer found that Standard Oil was indeed a prolific generator of patents in its early years, but that slowed once it achieved dominance.
  • Amazon hasn’t yet reached the same market share as Google or Facebook but its position is arguably even more impregnable because it enjoys both physical and technological barriers to entry. Its roughly 75 fulfillment centers and state-of-the art logistics (including robots) put it closer, in time and space, to customers than any other online retailer.
  • “Just like people joined Facebook because everyone else was on Facebook, the biggest competitive advantage AT&T had was that it was interconnected,”
  • Early in the 20th century, AT&T began buying up local competitors and refusing to connect independent exchanges to its long-distance lines, arousing antitrust complaints. By the 1920s, it was allowed to become a monopoly in exchange for universal service in the communities it served. By 1939, the company carried more than 90% of calls.
  • After AT&T was broken up into separate local and long-distance companies in 1982, telecommunication innovation blossomed, spreading to digital switching, fiber optics, cellphones—and the internet.
  • when Google launched its own comparison business, Google Shopping, those sites found themselves dropping deeper into Google’s search results. They accused Google of changing its algorithm to favor its own results. The company responded that its algorithm was designed to give customers the results they want.
  • At that same hearing Jeffrey Katz, then the chief executive of Nextag, responded, “That is like saying move to Panama if you don’t like the tax rate in America. It’s a fake choice because no one has Google’s scope or capabilities and consumers won’t, don’t, and in fact can’t jump.”
  • In 2013 the U.S. Federal Trade Commission concluded that even if Google had hurt competitors, it was to serve consumers better, and declined to bring a case. Since then, comparison sites such as Nextag have largely faded.
  • The different outcomes hinge in part on different approaches. European regulators are more likely to see a shrinking pool of competitors as inherently bad for both competition and consumers. American regulators are more open to the possibility that it could be natural and benign.
  • Internet platforms have high fixed and minimal operating costs, which favors consolidation into a few deep-pocketed competitors. And the more customers a platform has, the more useful it is to each individual customer—the “network effect.”
  • But a platform that confers monopoly in one market can be leveraged to dominate another. Facebook’s existing user base enabled it to become the world’s largest photo-sharing site through its purchase of Instagram in 2012 and the largest instant-messaging provider through its purchase of WhatsApp in 2014. It is also muscling into virtual reality through its acquisition of Oculus VR in 2014 and anonymous polling with its purchase of TBH last year.
  • Once a company like Google or Facebook has critical mass, “the venture capital looks elsewhere,” says Roger McNamee of Elevation Partners, a technology-focused private-equity firm. “There’s no point taking on someone with a three or four years head start.”
  • “There should be hundreds of Yelps. There’s not. No one is pitching investors to build a service that relies on discovery through Facebook or Google to grow, because venture capitalists think it’s a poor bet.”
  • As the dominant platform for third-party online sales, Amazon also has access to data it can use to decide what products to sell itself. In 2016 Capitol Forum, a news service that investigates anticompetitive behavior, reported that when a shopper views an Amazon private-label clothing brand, the accompanying list of items labeled “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought,” is also dominated by Amazon’s private-label brands. This, it says, restricts competing sellers’ access to a prime marketing space
  • In the face of such accusations, the probability of regulatory action—for now—looks low, largely because U.S. regulators have a relatively high bar to clear: Do consumers suffer?
  • “We think consumer welfare is the right standard,” Bruce Hoffman, the FTC’s acting director of the bureau of competition, recently told a panel on antitrust law and innovation. “We have tried other standards. They were dismal failures.”
  • What would remedies look like? Since Big Tech owes its network effects to data, one often-proposed fix is to give users ownership of their own data: the “social graph” of connections on Facebook, or their search history on Google and Amazon. They could then take it to a competitor.
  • A more drastic remedy would be to block acquisitions of companies that might one day be a competing platform. British regulators let Facebook buy Instagram in part because Instagram didn’t sell ads, which they argued made them different businesses. In fact, Facebook used Instagram to engage users longer and thus sell more ads
  • Ben Thompson, wrote in his technology newsletter Stratechery. Building a network is “extremely difficult, but, once built, nearly impregnable. The only possible antidote is another network that draws away the one scarce resource: attention.” Thus, maintaining competition on the internet requires keeping “social networks in separate competitive companies.”
  • How sound are these premises? Google’s and Facebook’s access to that data and network effects might seem like an impregnable barrier, but the same appeared to be true of America Online’s membership, Yahoo ’s search engine and Apple’s iTunes store, note two economists, David Evans and Richard Schmalensee, in a recent paper. All saw their dominance recede in the face of disruptive competition.
  • It’s possible Microsoft might have become the dominant company in search and mobile without the scrutiny the federal antitrust case brought. Throughout history, entrepreneurs have often needed the government’s help to dislodge a monopolist—and may one day need it again.
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FBI's Andrew McCabe leaving deputy director job, will retire in March - The Washington ... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...8-b48c-b07fea957bd5_story.html fbi politics US trump director
shared by zareefkhan on 29 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe — a frequent target of President Trump’s ire dating to the 2016 presidential election — is stepping down as he nears the date in March when he can retire with full pension benefits
  • Trump responded to the revelation with a tweet, writing at the time, “90 days to go?!!!”
  • Technically, he will remain an FBI employee for the next several weeks, but he has left the deputy director position and is not expected back to work
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • McCabe, 49, rose quickly through the FBI’s ranks as a counterterrorism supervisor, playing a key role in reorganizing how the U.S. government interrogates international terrorism suspects
  • David Bowdich, a senior FBI official who led the agency’s response to the San Bernardino terrorist attack, is expected to serve as the next deputy director
  • McCabe ran the FBI for three turbulent months last year, until Christopher A. Wray took over as director.
  • Trump’s dislike of McCabe dates back to October 2016, when news stories revealed that McCabe’s wife had run as a Democrat for the Virginia legislature
  • In recent months, McCabe has been harshly criticized by congressional Republicans who challenge the FBI’s rationale for opening the Russia probe in July 2016.
  • Former attorney general Eric H. Holder Jr. called McCabe “a dedicated public servant who has served this country well.” Holder, a Democrat, denounced “bogus attacks on the FBI and DOJ to distract attention from a legitimate criminal inquiry.”
  • The political scrutiny surrounding McCabe intensified in December, when The Post reported that his senior adviser, Lisa Page, had been engaged in a romantic relationship with Peter Strzok, a senior FBI agent, and the two exchanged anti-Trump, pro-Clinton text messages while they we
  • re immersed in ongoing investigations about the two presidential candidates.
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Andrew Sullivan: Kanye West and the Question of Freedom - 0 views

nymag.com/...d-the-question-of-freedom.html race politics crisis culture freedom tribalism white liberal democracy education polarization
shared by Javier E on 13 May 18 - No Cached
  • in our current culture, it’s precisely the elites who seem to be driving tribal identity and thought, and doubling down on ideological and affectional polarization
  • “The more highly educated also tend to be more strongly identified along political lines.” He quoted from her book: Political knowledge tends to increase the effects of identity as more knowledgeable people have more informational ammunition to counter argue any stories they don’t like
  • Much of the growth in ideological consistency has come among better educated adults — including a striking rise in the share who have across-the-board liberal views, which is consistent with the growing share of postgraduates who identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party.”
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  • our elite debate has become far less focused on individual issues as such, and the complicated variety of positions, left, right and center, any thinking individual can take. It has become rather an elaborate and sophisticated version of “Which side are you on?”
  • An analysis of American National Election Studies data from 1964 to 2012 shows that education is related to decreases in interethnic/interracial prejudice, but also to increases in ideological (liberal vs. conservative) prejudice
  • But even this doesn’t capture the emotional intensity of it all, or the way it compounds over time
  • In their 2015 paper, “Losing Hurts: The Happiness Impact of Partisan Electoral Loss,” the authors found that the grief of Republican partisans after their party lost the presidential election in 2012 was twice that of “respondents with children” immediately after “the Newtown shootings” and “respondents living in Boston” after “the Boston Marathon bombings.”
  • That’s an intense emotion, and it’s that intensity, it seems to me, that is corroding the norms of liberal democracy
  • I find myself instinctually siding with the independent artist in these cases, perhaps because I’ve had to fight for my own individuality apart from my own various identities, most of my life. It wasn’t easy being the first openly gay editor of anything in Washington when I was in my 20s. But it was harder still to be someone not defined entirely by my group, to be a dissident within it, a pariah to many, even an oxymoron, because of my politics or my faith.
  • Friendly dissidents are no longer interesting or quirky; as the stakes appear to rise, they come to seem dangerous, even contagious
  • And before we even know it, we live in an atmosphere closer and closer to that of The Crucible, where politics merges into a new kind of religious warfare, dissent becomes heresy, and the response to a blasphemer among us is a righteous, metaphorical burning at the stake
  • I think that’s the real context for understanding why magazines and newspapers and websites of opinion are increasingly resistant to ideological diversity within their own universes
  • The dynamic here is deeply tribal. It’s an atmosphere in which the individual is always subordinate to the group, in which the “I” is allowed only when licensed by the “we.
  • Hence the somewhat hysterical reaction, for example, to Kanye West’s recent rhetorical antics. I’m not here to defend West. He may be a musical genius (I’m in no way qualified to judge) but he is certainly a jackass, and saying something like “slavery was a choice” is so foul and absurd it’s self-negating
  • And yet. There was something about the reaction that just didn’t sit right with me, something too easy, too dismissive of an individual artist’s right to say whatever he wants, to be accountable to no one but himself. It had a smack of raw tribalism to it, of collective disciplining, of the group owning the individual, and exacting its revenge for difference.
  • It has been made far, far worse by this president, a figure whose election was both a symptom and a cause of this collective emotional unraveling, where the frontal cortex is so flooded by tribal signals that compromise feels like treason, opponents feel like enemies, and demagogues feel like saviors
  • I’m not whining about this experience, just explaining why I tend to side reflexively with the individual when he is told he isn’t legit by the group. In that intimidating atmosphere, I’m with the dissenter, the loner, and the outlier.
  • I believed in an identity politics that would aim to leave identity behind, to achieve a citizenship without qualification.
  • I never believed that the gay rights movement was about liberating people to be gay; I believed it was about liberating people to be themselves, in all their complexity and uniqueness.
  • I bristle because, of course, Coates is not merely subjecting West to “expectation and scrutiny” which should apply to anyone and to which no one should object; he is subjecting West to anathematization, to expulsion from the ranks.
  • Just as a Puritan would suddenly exclaim that a heretic has been taken over by the Devil and must be expelled, so Coates denounces West for seeking something called “white freedom”: … freedom without consequence, freedom without criticism, freedom to be proud and ignorant; freedom to profit off a people in one moment and abandon them in the next; a Stand Your Ground freedom, freedom without responsibility, without hard memory; a Monticello without slavery, a Confederate freedom, the freedom of John C. Calhoun, not the freedom of Harriet Tubman, which calls you to risk your own; not the freedom of Nat Turner, which calls you to give even more, but a conqueror’s freedom, freedom of the strong built on antipathy or indifference to the weak, the freedom of rape buttons, pussy grabbers, and fuck you anyway, bitch; freedom of oil and invisible wars, the freedom of suburbs drawn with red lines, the white freedom of Calabasas.
  • Leave aside the fact that the passage above essentializes and generalizes “whiteness” as close to evil, a sentiment that applied to any other ethnicity would be immediately recognizable as raw bigotry.
  • Leave aside its emotional authenticity and rhetorical dazzle.
  • Notice rather that the surrender of the individual to the we is absolute.
  • That “we” he writes of doesn’t merely influence or inform or shape the individual artist; it “dictates” to him.
  • it’s at that point that I’d want to draw the line. Because it’s an important line, and without it, a liberal society is close to impossible.
  • I understand that the freedom enjoyed by a member of an unreflective majority is easier than the freedom of someone in a small minority, and nowhere in America is that truer than in the world of black and white.
  • But that my own freedom was harder to achieve doesn’t make it any less precious, or sacrosanct. I’d argue it actually makes it more vivid, more real, than it might be for someone who never questioned it.
  • And I am never going to concede it to “straightness,” the way Coates does to “whiteness.”
  • As an individual, I seek my own freedom, period. Being gay is integral to who I am, but it doesn’t define who I am. There is no gay freedom or straight freedom, no black freedom or white freedom; merely freedom, a common dream, a universalizing, individual experience.
  • “Liberation from the dictates of the we” is everyone’s birthright in America, and it is particularly so for anyone in the creative fields of music or writing.
  • A free artist owes nothing to anyone, especially his own tribe. And if you take the space away from him to be exactly what he wants to be, in all his contradictions and complexity, you are eradicating something critical to a free and healthy society.
  • Freedom, in this worldview, does not and cannot unite Americans of all races; neither can music. Because there is no category of simply human freedom possible in America, now or ever. There is only tribe. And the struggle against the other tribe. And this will never end.
  • And that, of course, is one of the most dangerous aspects of our elite political polarization: It maps onto the even-deeper tribalism of race, in an age when racial diversity is radically increasing, and when the racial balance of power is shifting under our feet.
  • That makes political tribalism even less resolvable and even more combustible.
  • It makes a liberal politics that rests on a common good close to impossible. It makes a liberal discourse not only unachievable but increasingly, in the hearts and minds of our very elites, immoral.
  • The promise of Obama — the integrating, reasoned, moderate promise of incremental progress — has become the depraved and toxic zero-sum culture of Trump.
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New flak for Hillary Clinton as she cautiously wades into the midterms | Fox News - 0 views

www.foxnews.com/...ously-wades-into-midterms.html US politics hilary trump
shared by anonymous on 01 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • The New York Times said yesterday that she "faces distrust on the left, where she is seen as an avatar of the Democratic establishment, and raw enmity on the right."
  • First, it's ridiculous that the former secretary of State is being criticized for not automatically backing the woman in New York's gubernatorial primary, even though Nixon is a long shot with zero political experience. Cuomo supported Clinton's presidential bid and ran HUD in her husband's administration, so of course she's backing him. Is there some rule that female politicians have to endorse every single woman who jumps into a race, unqualified or not?
  • In that address, Clinton took shots at Trump, though not by name, and said of the election in a slightly self-deprecating tone: "No, I'm not over it. I still think about the 2016 election. I still regret the mistakes I made."
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  • The Times piece says that Hillary Clinton is cautiously trying to reengage in the midterms, but that her husband has been "all but invisible" and "largely sidelined amid new scrutiny of his past misconduct with women." The #Me-Too era has caused even some liberal commentators to retroactively denounce Bill Clinton. Plus, insiders fear that he could go "wildly off message" in campaign settings.
  • Hillary Clinton has a right to speak out, of course, but she has so much baggage that much of her own party is wary of her. And the media, which always had testy relations with her, seem wedded to covering her as a figure from the past.
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Opinion | 'If You've Built a Chaos Factory, You Can't Dodge Responsibility for the Chao... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...azon-rekognition-tim-cook.html chaos responsibility tech complicity ethics tyranny policy crisis
shared by Javier E on 19 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • “Too many seem to think that good intentions excuse away harmful outcomes,” Mr. Cook told the assembled graduates of a school from which much of the modern internet has sprung. “If you’ve built a chaos factory, you can’t dodge responsibility for the chaos. Taking responsibility means having the courage to think things through.”
  • he made the case that possible abuses of the technology weren’t necessarily Amazon’s responsibility, because any tech tool can be turned into a weapon — even one as benign as email, which was used in the Sony hack a few years ago. “You could use a knife in a surreptitious way,” he said.
  • Tech’s ploy to assuage its growing chorus of detractors has been to beg for forgiveness over and over for making a mess, promise to follow laws once someone else figures out a way to manage the madness, and then hire an army of lobbyists to make sure those rules are not too onerous.
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  • Which is to say: We make, we break, you fix.
  • the release of this offering right in the midst of punishing scrutiny of how the company has bollixed its main platform is what one might call a gangster move. Not literally, fingers crossed.
  • Pointing out that companies like Amazon, Salesforce, Microsoft, Palantir and others have been supplying the immigration agencies with all kinds of software, devices and services, some of which may have been used to help separate children from their families, Mr. Ryan said he was perplexed as to why tech companies did not have more of an ethical conscience.
  • “I think that what the companies right now that are holding the power need to recognize is that the government could not do what it is doing now without them,” he said. The tech companies’ tools are making it possible, he suggested, to track immigrants with increasing expertise: “What we’ve seen is a scaling up and a quickening of the efficiency of this tyrannical operation.”
  • “If tech wants to walk hand in hand with our government in this experiment in tyranny,” Mr. Ryan told the crowd, “then go for it.”
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How 'Stealth' Consolidation Is Undermining Competition - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...mining-competition-11560954936 consolidation competition economy oligopoly
shared by Javier E on 20 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • Big tech and big mergers get the headlines, but the real monopoly problem is beneath the surface. In numerous industries and regions, competition has declined and corporate concentration risen through acquisitions often too small to draw the scrutiny of antitrust watchdogs.
  • The number of enforcement cases brought by the Justice Department’s antitrust division against alleged anticompetitive agreements and monopolistic behavior has plummeted in the past decade
  • he FTC, while continuing to challenge mergers resulting in just two to four competitors, has since the mid-2000s been less likely to challenge mergers that result in five to eight competitors.
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  • Until 2001, deals worth more than $15 million had to be reported to the antitrust authorities. That year, the threshold was raised and indexed to economic growth, and is now $90 million.
  • For transactions involving few tangible assets such as in technology and pharmaceutical startups, the threshold is $360 million.
  • after the 2001 changes, the number of merger notifications dropped 70% and the number of mergers that didn’t require notification jumped nearly 50%
  • 22% of markets for physicians are highly concentrated (according to federal guidelines), and they got that way mostly via acquisitions too small to be reported.
  • between 1997 and 2017 more than 4,000 acquisitions of kidney dialysis centers were proposed. About half were above the reporting threshold, and in 265 cases, the FTC required divestitures to resolve competition concerns
  • Among the half below the threshold, the FTC required just three divestitures. Two companies controlled about 31% of facilities in 1997. By 2016, two companies, DaVita Inc. and Fresenius Medical Care , controlled 77% of facilities
  • his preliminary results suggest the numbers of nurses per technician decline and patients per hemodialysis machine rise at facilities acquired in mergers below the reporting threshold. That, he said, could be evidence of reduced quality of care, though he acknowledged it could also reflect increased efficiency.
  • Before the change, around a third of merger investigations involved deals worth less than $50 million. After the change, the number of such deals investigated fell to close to zero.
  • pharmaceutical companies often halt development of competing drugs at startups they acquire, especially when the acquisition is just small enough to escape antitrust reporting requirements.
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Christchurch mosque killer's theories seeping into mainstream, report warns | World new... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-ideas-mainstream-social-media far right media violence social media memes
shared by Javier E on 07 Jul 19 - No Cached
  • Researchers have found that organised far-right networks are pushing a conspiracy known as the “great replacement” theory to the extent that references to it online have doubled in four years, with more than 1.5 million on Twitter alone, a total that is rising exponentially.
  • The theory emerged in France in 2014 and has become a dominant concept of the extreme right, focusing on a paranoia that white people are being wiped out through migration and violence. It received increased scrutiny after featuring in the manifesto of the gunman who killed 51 people in the Christchurch attacks in New Zealand in March.
  • Now the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a UK-based counter-extremist organisation, has found that the once-obscure ideology has moved into mainstream politics and is now referenced by figures including US president Donald Trump, Italian interior minister Matteo Salvini and Björn Höcke of the German Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).
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  • Despite its French origins, the ISD’s analysis has revealed that the theory is becoming more prevalent internationally, with English-speaking countries now accounting for 33% of online discussion.
  • She said that of the 10 most influential Twitter accounts propagating the ideology, eight were French. The other two were Trump’s account and the extreme-right site Defend Europa.
  • The study reveals that alternative social media platforms, image boards, fringe forums and encrypted chat channels are instrumental in diffusing influential ideologies that propagate hatred and violence. Far-right propagandists primarily use mainstream platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter as avenues to disseminate material to audiences, while fringe platforms remain safe havens for the initiated to radicalise further.
  • The new media ecosystem has been used, for instance, to promote the fear of a “white genocide”, a topic that is active across unregulated image-board threads on 8chan and 4chan, censorship-free discussion platforms such as Voat, ultra-libertarian social-media sites such as Gab and Minds, and closed-chat channels
  • Defined as a form of ethnic cleansing through the forced deportation of minority communities, the concept of “remigration” has been a particularly fevered subject. Since 2014, the volume of tweets featuring the word has surged, rising from 66,000 in 2014 to 150,000 in 2018.
  • Jacob Davey, co-author of the report at ISD, said: “Social media platforms are built to promote clickbait content to get more users liking, sharing and commenting. This research shows how the extreme right is exploiting this to boost hateful content in the form of memes, distorted statistics and pseudo-scientific studies.
  • “The far right is able to take ownership of the ‘grey zone’ around contentious issues like migration because politicians and society are less willing to take on the role of thought leaders in these areas for fear of public outcry and outrage,” said Ebner.
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Amazon Rain Forests Are on Fire, and Brazil Faces a Global Backlash - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...il-amazon-fires-bolsonaro.html amazon fire brazil forests
shared by Javier E on 23 Aug 19 - No Cached
  • RIO DE JANEIRO — As dozens of fires scorched large swaths of the Amazon, the Brazilian government on Thursday struggled to contain growing global outrage over its environmental policies, which have paved the way for runaway deforestation of the world’s largest rain forest.
  • The fires, many intentionally set, are spreading as Germany and Norway appear to be on the brink of shutting down a $1.2 billion conservation initiative for the Amazon.
  • “The ongoing forest fires in Brazil are deeply worrying,” the European Commission said in a statement on Thursday. “Forests are our lungs and life support systems.”
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  • Mr. Karipuna said loggers are striding into protected areas, emboldened by Mr. Bolsonaro’s views that the legal protections granted to indigenous lands are an unreasonable impediment to profiting from the Amazon’s resources.
  • “He empowered them, he told them to invade,” Mr. Karipuna said in a phone interview.
  • Brazil has strict environmental laws and regulations, but they are often violated with impunity. The vast majority of fines for breaking environmental laws go unpaid with little or no consequences.
  • fires had consumed 4.6 million acres of the Brazilian Amazon, a 62 percent increase compared to last year.
  • In recent months, as the Bolsonaro administration has questioned the usefulness of the Amazon Fund bankrolled by German and Norwegian taxpayers, leaders in those countries have come to consider abandoning it altogether.
  • The fund was started in 2008, when Brazil was making strides in curbing deforestation through an ambitious set of policies that included aggressive law enforcement and conservation efforts.
  • Last week the police in London arrested six activists from the Extinction Rebellion group who glued themselves to the windows of the Brazilian Embassy.
  • Jerônimo Goergen, a federal lawmaker from the so-called ruralist caucus, which champions industries seeking broader access to the Amazon, said he was deeply worried about Brazil’s reputation abroad as its approach to the environment has come under harsh scrutiny.“This creates a terrible image for Brazil,” he said. “The agricultural sector stands to suffer the most based on the way this debate is being framed.”
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'Stranded at sea': cruise ships around the world are adrift as ports turn them away | W... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...adrift-as-ports-turn-them-away COVID-19 us
shared by brickol on 27 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Ports around the globe are turning cruise ships away en mass amid the corona pandemic, leaving thousands of passengers stranded even as some make desperate pleas for help while sickness spreads aboard.
  • at least ten ships around the world – carrying nearly 10,000 passengers – are still stuck at sea after having been turned away from their destination ports in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic. Some of the ships are facing increasingly desperate medical situations, including one carrying hundreds of American, Canadian, Australian and British passengers, currently off the coast of Ecuador and seeking permission to dock in Florida.
  • Dramatic scenes of coronavirus-stricken cruises, such as the Grand Princess in California and the Diamond Princess in Japan, have become synonymous with the pandemic. The plight of those still adrift highlights how cruise ships have become a kind of pariah of the seas, as cities push back against becoming the next home for a potentially infected vessel.
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  • As of Thursday, the Guardian had identified five ships in the Americas that were unable to unload nearly 6,000 passengers. At least three other ships were having trouble off the coast of Australia, including one which sought urgent medical attention for an outbreak of respiratory illness. Two more ships were trying to get passengers to ports in Italy.
  • Holland America said this week it had dispatched support in the form of another cruise ship carrying 611 extra staff, supplies and coronavirus test kits to meet up with the Zaandam, and that the cruise line is looking for other alternative locations to disembark passengers.
  • Passengers who spoke with the Guardian describe being locked down in the cabins, with three daily meals left on the floor outside their doors. Meanwhile the number of people reporting influenza-like symptoms has almost tripled this week: 56 passengers and 89 crew members, passengers say the ship’s captain has told them. Four elderly passengers reportedly required oxygen.
  • The fast-moving nature of the virus has added to the confusion – when many passengers left for vacations in early March there were no cases of Covid-19 in South America, so they thought it would be safe to travel.
  • cases of cruise ships being turned away from ports as a result of coronavirus fears began as early as January and escalated in February, with passengers being quarantined on the Emerald Princess in Japan on 3 February.
  • “There is a level of greed on the part of these companies,” he said. “They want to make every penny – and they make money when people are on the ships.”Cruise ships are drawing increasing government scrutiny for not doing enough to protect their passengers during this pandemic.
  • Despite Donald Trump’s repeated vows to bail out the cruise ship industry, money for cruise companies was not a part of the $500bn in aid for large employers included in stimulus bill passed by Congress on Wednesday.
  • Meanwhile a report from the US Centers for Disease Control this week laid the blame on cruise ships for spreading the virus in the crucial early weeks of the outbreak, linking hundreds of cases to the Diamond Princess and Grand Princess.
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