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Javier E

Opinion | The Real Legacy of the 1970s - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...onomy-united-states-1970s.html

economics politics culture inflation 1970s supply-side deregulation taxes

shared by Javier E on 03 Feb 19 - No Cached
  • In most histories of how Americans became so polarized, the Great Inflation of the 1970s is given short shrift
  • Inflation was as pivotal a factor in our national crackup as Vietnam and Watergate
  • nflation changed how Americans thought about their economic relationships to their fellow citizens — which is to say, inflation and its associated economic traumas changed who we were as a people.
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • It also called into question the economic assumptions that had guided the country since World War II, opening the door for new assumptions that have governed us ever since.
  • Slowly, though, inflation entered the picture. It hit 5.7 percent in 1970, then 11 percent in 1974. Such sustained inflation was something that had never happened in stable postwar America. And it was punishing. For a family of modest means, a trip to the supermarket was now a walk over hot coals.
  • Even as Americans scrambled for return, they also sought to spend
  • the average family of 1936 was near poor. Everyone was in it together, and if Bill couldn’t find work, his neighbor would give him a head of cabbage, a slab of pork belly.
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  • But the Great Inflation, as the author Joe Nocera has noted, made most people feel they had to look out for themselves
  • Throw in wage stagnation, which began in the early ’70s, and deindustrialization of the great cities of the North
  • Inflation also produced the manic search for “yield” — it was no longer enough to save money; your money had to make money, turning every wage earner into a player in market rapaciousness
  • Total credit card balances began to explode.
  • The Great Inflation was an inflection point that changed us for the worse. This moment can be another such point, but one that will change us for the better.
  • Then along came Ronald Reagan. The great secret to his success was not his uncomplicated optimism or his instinct for seizing a moment. It was that he freed people of the responsibility of introspection, released them from the guilt in which liberalism seemed to want to make them wallow.
  • Americans became a more acquisitive — bluntly, a more selfish — people. The second change was far more profound.
  • John Maynard Keynes. His “demand side” theories — increase demand via public investment, even if it meant running a short-term deficit — guided the New Deal, the financing of the war and pretty much all policy thinking thereafter. And not just among Democrats: Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon were Keynesians.
  • There had been a group of economists, mostly at the University of Chicago and led by Milton Friedman, who dissented from Keynes. They argued against government intervention and for lower taxes and less regulation. As Keynesian principles promoted demand side, their theories promoted the opposite: supply side.
  • Inflation was Keynesianism’s Achilles’ heel, and the supply-siders aimed their arrow right at it. Reagan cut taxes significantly. Inflation ended (which was really the work of Paul Volcker, the chairman of the Federal Reserve). The economy boomed. Economic debate changed; even the way economics was taught changed.
  • And this, more or less, is where we’ve been ever since
  • walk down a street and ask 20 people a few questions about economic policy — I bet most will say that taxes must be kept low, even on rich people, and that we should let the market, not the government, decide on investments. Point to the hospital up the street and tell them that it wouldn’t even be there without the millions in federal dollars of various kinds it takes in every year, and they’ll mumble and shrug.
  • we have a long way to go. Dislodging 40-year-old assumptions is a huge job. The Democrats, for starters, have to develop and defend a plausible alternative theory of growth
  • But others have a responsibility here too — notably, our captains of commerce.
  • They will always be rich. But they have to decide what kind of country they want to be rich i
  • a 2006 Department of Labor study pegged the average household income of 1934-36 at $1,524. Adjust for inflation to 2018, that’s about $28,000, while the official poverty level for a family of four was $25,100
  • they can move moderate and maybe even conservative public opinion in a way that Democratic politicians, civic leaders and celebrities cannot.
  • A place of more and more tax cuts for them, where states keep slashing their higher-education spending and tuitions keep skyrocketing; where the best job opportunity in vast stretches of America is selling opioids; where many young people no longer believe in capitalism and record numbers of them would leave this country if they could?
  • Or a country more like the one they and their parents grew up in, where we invested in ourselves and where work produced a fair and livable wage?
knudsenlu

Steve Bannon tells French far-right 'history is on our side' | US news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...r-right-history-is-on-our-side

bannon national front conservatism france history politics

shared by knudsenlu on 12 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • Steve Bannon tells French far-right 'history is on our side' Former Trump adviser addresses Front National as Marine Le Pen attempts to relaunch her party
  • Donald Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon has told France’s far-right Front National that, “history is on our side and will bring us victory” in an address to the party’s conference.
  • At the two-day conference in the northern city of Lille, FN president Marine Le Pen’s is attempting to “re-found” her rightwing party, announcing a change of name – to be revealed on Sunday and validated by a members’ vote – to show the FN has come of age, shaken off its controversial past and is ready to govern.
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  • “Today’s politics cannot be summed up by the left-right divide. During the 2008 financial crisis, the governments and banks looked after themselves above all, they saved themselves and not the people.”
  • Jean-Marie Le Pen said: “It’s the big boss’s surprise. I think Bannon’s OK … but it’s not exactly the definition of de-demonising [the party] and it’s a bit of a paradox given that Steve Bannon was supposed to be Trump’s most radical adviser,” he said. “But who knows. She [Marine] may end up coming round to my way of thinking.”
  • “He has also been the architect of a victory, that of Donald Trump, on whom nobody would have bet, particularly European media and politicians. So he can explain how victory is possible and how to bring it about. I find it’s always interesting to hear from someone who has won an election.”
Javier E

'Both sides' of the climate change debate? How bad we think it is, and how bad it reall... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...it-is-and-how-bad-it-really-is

climate change denial science

shared by Javier E on 04 Aug 19 - No Cached
  • “Society’s combustion of fossil fuels and industrial processes like steelmaking and agriculture have released greenhouse gases at rates much faster than at any other time in the geological past.” To ram the message home he concluded: “The evidence is abundant: global warming is indisputable. The planet will survive. Many species may not.” Just ponder that: many species will not survive.
  • Just how lacking the LNP’s climate change policy is in anything approaching substance was revealed this week when its latest auction under the “emissions reduction fund” bought cuts equivalent to only 0.01% of Australia’s annual greenhouse gas pollution.
  • This week in the Monthly, ANU climate scientist Dr Joëlle Gergis wrote that, while in 2013 scientists had estimated that a doubling of CO2 levels from pre-industrial levels (which we’re on track to do by 2060) would lead to a temperature increase of between 1.5C to 4.5C, now as scientists continue to get more data, their models suggest the temperature increase is more likely to be between 2.8C and 5.8C.
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  • That’s scary because all efforts at the moment are assuming if we reduce emissions by 45% by 2030 we can limit warming to 1.5C. That might now be rather too optimistic
  • Add into the mix came further news this week that glaciers appear to be melting 10 to 100 times faster than expected.
  • OK, here’s both sides of the debate – for well over 40 years scientists have been researching and testing evidence that climate change is occurring due to CO2 emissions. They have found conclusive evidence that there is a link and that on the current path by 2100 global temperatures will likely reach 3C above pre-industrial levels.
  • The other side is that they have kept researching and testing the data, and sorry, they were wrong – it’s even worse than they thought.
Javier E

The Warped Vision of "Anti-Racism" - Persuasion - 0 views

www.persuasion.community/...e-warped-vision-of-anti-racism

anti-racism woke Critical Theory

shared by Javier E on 10 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • What kind of monster doesn’t support “anti-racism”? Who would put themselves on the other side of “social justice”? How could you be opposed to the notion of “racial equity”?
  • what began as a collective yen for racial equality—long overdue in our nation—has devolved into something dangerous that is actually undermining its own noble goals.
  • as high-minded as these ideas sound, they mark a shift away from the values they purport to represent—equality before the law; the consent of the governed; even democracy itself—and toward the opposite, with people ranked by immutable characteristics and ruled by a tiny elite.
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  • Those who disagree—most crucially, millions of working-class Americans of all ethnicities—are excised from the public square.
  • The social-justice movement comes at the expense of justice; “anti-racism” ends up exacerbating racism.
  • How could this be? It’s difficult to stand against “social justice,” especially for those of us who are deeply concerned about inequality. We feel humility toward activists, writers and politicians who take up the language of racial justice, given how urgent the cause is.
  • The basis for today’s social-justice movement is a deep skepticism about liberal values like equality, justice and democracy. This is rooted in an academic discipline known as “critical race theory,” which takes elements from Hegel and Marx, along with postmodernists like Foucault and Derrida, to assemble a worldview that does not accept that equality can exist.
  • Napoleon Bonaparte, and he was taking a victory lap through a German university town after defeating the Prussian army, when he happened to ride past a German philosopher with writer’s block, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
  • a key element of his work became associated with the concept of mastery and domination, of one man exerting his will over others.
  • Society, culture and history were produced in the back and forth, or “dialectic,” between the powerful and the powerless—the master-slave dialectic, as Hegel’s pairing became known in subsequent iterations.
  • When Marx articulated his thesis of class conflict as the basis for all modern social existence, he was—in the view of Jean-Paul Sartre among others—expanding on the master-slave dialectic.
  • And if history progressed through a changing cast of masters and slaves for Hegel, or class struggle for Marx, for critical race theorists and their “anti-racism” inheritors, it’s white people and people of color in a binary that gives one side all the power and the other side none.
  • Over time, three other key ideas were grafted onto the master-slave dialectic:
  • false consciousness
  • a belief that the ideals of a society mean less than do the exceptions to those ideals
  • and a commitment to undermining the grand narratives that a society relies upon.
  • “False consciousness” was an attempt by Marxists to explain why the working class wasn’t buying into their worldview.
  • It turns out that working-class people are often conservative, a fact that has never ceased to bedevil and infuriate educated leftists trying to impose their desire for revolution. Instead of trying to understand the preferences of the working class, Marxists asserted that the poor workers were merely deluded, in the grip of a “false consciousness,” instead of a revolutionary one.
  • You can see the concept of false consciousness—and the condescension that is its hallmark—everywhere in critical race theory.
  • Its proponents classify people of color who don’t have radical views on race or who vote Republican as the handmaidens of white supremacy;
  • The idea of false consciousness is everywhere in the work of Robin DiAngelo, a prominent proponent of “anti-racist” ideology whose book White Fragility has sold close to a million copies. DiAngelo contends that white people who cry when accused of being racists actually prove their bigotry via these “weaponized tears,” which she deems “white racial bullying.”
  • If a society claims as its foundation a narrative that some members are excluded from, then the true meaning of that narrative is found in the exception, rather than the rule.
  • Postmodernist philosophers added to this a mistrust of the ideals that society claims to be built on:
  • postmodernists argued that the explicit mores of a culture have no objective value, but are instead a way for one group to benefit at the expense of another.
  • From this perspective, the Constitution isn’t a document that established the United States on principles of equality and freedom that the country failed to live up to.
  • Instead, the Constitution is a document fundamental to denying rights to those deemed ineligible, and justifying the ownership of enslaved persons.
  • Your symbol of freedom and equality is nothing more than a tool of repression, postmodernists argue. Failures, even at the margins, expose the hypocrisy of the whole, and define it as a lie.
  • You can see this at work in The New York Times Magazine’s Pulitzer-prize winning “The 1619 Project,” which marks the year that the first African slave was brought to American shores.
  • argued that, while history teaches 1776 as the year of our nation’s founding, we should consider whether “the country’s true birth date, the moment that our defining contradictions first came into the world, was in late August of 1619,” as the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Jake Silverstein, put it in an introduction.
  • It can’t be that America was founded on values like equality and liberty and democracy that it imperfectly embodied and has subsequently strived to correct.
  • It must be that the true founding was slavery, its true nature revealed by this failure.
  • This is why the social-justice movement cannot recognize the huge gains that have been made in this nation on the question of race; if there is even one instance of racism left in America, it is proof again of this true nature.
  • As with America, some on the left find it impossible to see Israel as a flawed nation imperfectly striving toward the ideals of its founding. The occupation of the Palestinians can’t be a disastrous injustice. It must be that Israel’s foundation is defined by this injustice, that “Zionism is racism.”
  • the real threat here is not just mangled logic. It’s the erasure of the possibility of equality, of a common humanity, that requires we treat each other as equals before God and before the law.
  • Today’s progressive left, whose ideas have become prevalent in much of the American establishment that is now repeating its incantations, simply does not believe equality is possible, instead differentiating people by how much power they supposedly have, with no common humanity to call upon.
  • since the social-justice movement recognizes only power, every one of its proposals is designed not to create a more equal society, but to transfer power from oppressors to oppressed—while allowing those designated as victims to maintain claim to the status of oppressed.
  • Race is immutable, so it doesn’t matter how much real power a person of color wields; their race means they will never be anything but oppressed.
  • You might be wondering why this view, which erases equality and cites oppression as the root of everything, has mainstream appeal
  • It seems to me that progressive elites, despite their pieties, don’t really want to live in a more equal society. They prefer the imperfect meritocracy we live under—the rule of the smart, the talented and the rich, most of whom traffic in the fiction that their status was earned.
  • progressives see themselves as compassionate. What they needed was a way to explain the inequality found in the meritocratic system they hold dear, a way that made them feel they were still on the side of the good without having to disrupt what is good for them.
  • This is not the way to a more equal society. We cannot right the wrongs of racial inequality—an urgent task—by erasing the ideal of equality
  • Nor can we allow the fact that equality has been unequally enforced throughout most of our history to provide an excuse to throw it away, and build a newly racialized America.
  • the clues are elsewhere. At first, one notices them like glitches in the matrix. Maybe you read an unorthodox remark on Twitter, and watch as its author is insulted in the cruelest terms by thousands of people, many with words like “social justice” or “diversity and inclusion” in their bios
katherineharron

Something *very* important for our politics happened on Tuesday - CNNPolitics - 0 views

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

maryland

shared by katherineharron on 13 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • While the eyes of the world were focused on the impeachment efforts against President Donald Trump in Washington, DC, on Tuesday, Gov. Larry Hogan of neighboring Maryland did something extremely important in beginning the long process of unwinding our current political polarization.
  • The Republican governor announced that via executive order he had created an independent commission he will task with redrawing the state's congressional and legislative lines following the decennial reapportionment later this year.
  • "This commission is the first of its kind in the long history of our state," Hogan said in making the announcement. "Unlike the partisan, backdoor manner in which our state's political power brokers have conducted the state's redistricting process, we want to make sure that this time the people of Maryland are actually the ones drawing these lines—not the politicians or the party bosses."
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  • Only the most ardent political junkies closely follow the re-shuffling and re-drawing of legislative and congressional districts that follow the decennial census. (Guilty, your honor!)
  • In fact, like many things that the general public either knows nothing about or has a decided lack of interest in, how these lines are drawn and by whom has an outsized impact on the sort of government we have -- and what the motivations of our elected officials are.
  • For decades, the line-drawing process has fallen, in most states, to state legislators and governors. What that has meant, in the main, is that when Democrats control the state capitol and, therefore, the line-drawing process, they create districts that are as favorable as possible for their side.
  • The strategy of both sides has been simple: Pack as many of the opposition party's voters into as few districts in the state as possible while spreading out their own voters to make as many districts winnable for their side as they can. Innovations in redistricting software have made this slicing and dicing of people based on their party registration or past voting history an art form -- allowing the line-drawers to literally go street by street when it comes to crafting new districts.
  • Maps drawn over the past two decades -- by Democrats and Republicans -- in places like North Carolina, Texas and yes, Maryland -- have come under legal scrutiny for using political considerations as the sole motivator in creating legislative and congressional districts. Maps in which one party overreached have, occasionally, led to unpredictable results in which the party in power loses seats they expected to win because they tried to divide up their own voters among too many districts.
  • The vast majority of members of Congress, on both sides of the aisle, represent what we would call "safe" districts -- meaning that their only chance of losing their job would be in a primary, not a general election.
  • In 1956, for example, less than 6 in 10 House incumbents won with 60% of the vote or more, according to Vital Statistics on Congress. By 2002, the first election after the 2001 nationwide redistricting, 85% of all House incumbents seeking reelection won with 60% or higher. In 2014 and 2016, that number hovered in the mid-to-high 70s before dipping to just 63% in the tumultuous 2018 midterm election.
  • The practical, political effect of this trend is simple: Members of Congress have little reason to demonstrate their ability to work across the partisan aisle and every reason to be as partisan and ideological as possible in hopes of staving off any sort of primary challenge.
  • Independent or bipartisan commissions to redraw the maps in states -- as Hogan is trying to do in Maryland -- work to reorient the incentive structure for members by creating districts that are far more competitive between the two parties in general elections.
  • The state's congressional districts have regularly changed hands between the parties, with Republicans winning two previously-held Democratic seats in the 2020 election. And generally speaking, three of the four districts in the state -- the exception being the Republican-friendly 4th in western Iowa -- are extremely competitive every two years. Check out the winning percentages for four incoming members of Congress in the state: 62%, 49%, 50% and 51.3%. In the state's 2nd District, the Republican candidate leads the Democrat candidate by six -- SIX! -- votes.
  • While bipartisan -- and independent -- line-drawing commissions are on the rise in recent years, the majority of states in the country still rely on politicians to draw lines.
anniina03

The Cost of Trump's Aid Freeze in the Trenches of Ukraine's War - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ukraine-war-impeachment.html

politics trump crisis

shared by anniina03 on 25 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Lt. Ivan Molchanets peeked over a parapet of sand bags at the front line of the war in Ukraine. Next to him was an empty helmet propped up to trick snipers, already perforated with multiple holes.In other spots, his soldiers stuff straw into empty uniforms to make dummies, and put logs on their shoulders to make it look like they are carrying American antitank missiles — as a scare tactic.“This is just the situation here,” he said, shrugging as he held the government’s position. “The enemy is very close.”
  • the war in Ukraine has killed 13,000 people, put a large part of the country under Russia’s control and dragged on for five years almost forgotten by the outside world — until it became a backdrop to the impeachment inquiry of President Trump now unfolding in Washington.
  • Ukraine, politically disorganized and militarily weak, has relied heavily on the United States in its struggle with Russian-backed separatists. But the White House abruptly suspended nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine in July and only restored it last month after a bipartisan uproar in Congress.
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  • Ukrainian soldiers here at the front line were jolted by the suspension, too. While the aid was restored in time to prevent any military setbacks, it took a heavy psychological toll, they said, striking at their confidence that their backers in Washington stood solidly behind their fight to keep Russia at bay.
  • Ukraine has fought back with repeated appeals for aid, diplomatic pressure, Western sanctions against Russia — and with an army that is holding on by its fingernails.
  • Both sides use heavy artillery, but the only piece of American military aid at the position was a much-prized infrared spotting scope for night fighting. Soldiers also carry American tourniquets in their medical kits, used to stanch bleeding.
  • “Our allies help us, but the hard and dirty work we do ourselves,” Lieutenant Molchanets said.Even the most sophisticated weapons the United States offers are of little use here — at least, not in the way they are intended.
  • In 2018, the Trump administration authorized sales to Ukraine of a shoulder-fired anti-tank missile called the Javelin, reversing an Obama administration policy of supplying only non-lethal aid.
  • The Trump administration provided the missiles on the condition that they not be used in the war, Ukrainian officials and American diplomats have said, lest they provoke Russia to slip more powerful weaponry to the separatists.
  • The American military aid suspension hurt Ukraine in another way as well, Ukrainian officials said: It signaled their weakness, just as they were trying to project strength in negotiations with the Russians and needed solid backing from Washington.Since taking office in May, Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has wanted the United States to take a more active role in pressuring Russia to withdraw its forces from eastern Ukraine — which the Kremlin does not even acknowledge are there — and accept a peace deal to end the conflict.
  • Mr. Trump has also showed a clear desire for a peace deal on Ukraine, part of his longstanding effort to remove an issue that has driven a wedge between Russia and the West, and has made his cozy relations with Russian President Vladimir V. Putin harder to defend.
  • But Mr. Trump has not pressed Russia and sided with Ukraine in the negotiations in the way Mr. Zelensky has urged. To the contrary, at a news conference in New York last month, Mr. Trump backed away from Mr. Zelensky and his troubles in the war, telling the Ukrainian leader, “I really hope you and President Putin get together and can solve your problem.”
  • Mr. Zelensky wants to move the Ukrainian front line back — from a few hundred yards away from the separatists to about 1,000 yards in several locations, including around the town of Zolote, the site of Lieutenant Molchanets’s position.Separatist forces are also supposed to pull back in these areas, to put both sides out of sniper range and reduce skirmishing, paving the way for settlement talks.The problem in the town Zolote — and what has set off protests here and in Kiev — is that pulling back will leave some neighborhoods in front of the army’s new trenches, exposing them to the enemy side.
brickol

William Barr is on the right side of history | TheHill - 0 views

thehill.com/...s-on-the-right-side-of-history

us politics

shared by brickol on 25 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Attorney General William BarrWilliam Pelham BarrJustice Dept. to launch criminal investigation into its own Russia probe: report William Barr is on the right side of history Lawmakers come together to honor Cummings: 'One of the greats in our country's history' MORE’s recent speech on religious liberty delivered at Notre Dame University has stirred controversy in some circles
  • Those who find fault with Barr’s remarks demonstrate a profound deficit in their knowledge of America’s history and its core constitutional commitments.
  • RFRA was made necessary by a 1990 Supreme Court decision, which devalued the strength of the Free Exercise Clause in a case involving Native Americans and the sacramental use of peyote. But those of us who worked so hard to pass RFRA understood that the decision undermined every faith and broadly bolstered the power of government to interfere with the sincere exercise of religious belief.
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  • Nearly every faith group was on board, as were the American Civil Liberties Union and conservative Christians like me. We all embraced one view. The free exercise of religion was for every person of every faith.
  • The most controversial part of Barr’s presentation was his strong rebuke of the modern progressive movement and its increasingly shrill demand that all voices that dissent from its articles of belief be silenced, shamed and shunned.
  • His final words on this historic occasion were a ringing endorsement of Barr’s central thesis: “But let us never believe that the freedom of religion imposes on any of us some responsibility to run from our convictions. Let us instead respect one another’s faiths, fight to the death to preserve the right of every American to practice whatever convictions he or she has.”
  • Those who advocate silencing their opponents seem hell-bent on engulfing us in strife and increasingly heavy coercion to achieve their policy objectives. They call themselves the forces of tolerance, but they bear torches that have the stench of Smithfield rising from their flames.
rerobinson03

As Voting Ends, Battle Intensifies Over Which Ballots Will Count - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ction-day-ballot-counting.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • President Trump and his allies say they intend an aggressive challenge to how the votes are counted in key states, and Democrats are mobilizing to meet it.
  • Both sides expect Mr. Trump and his allies to try again to disqualify late-arriving ballots in the emerging center of the legal fight,
  • In the most aggressive moves to knock out registered votes in modern memory, Republicans have already sought to nullify ballots before they are counted in several states that could tip the balance of the Electoral College.
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  • in a year that has seen record levels of early voting and a huge surge in use of voting by mail, Republicans are gearing up to challenge ballots with missing signatures or unclear postmarks.
  • Mr. Trump in that moment said out loud what other Republicans have preferred to say quietly, which is that his best chance of holding onto power at this point may rest in a scorched-earth campaign to disqualify as many votes as possible for his Democratic opponent, Joseph R. Biden Jr.
  • After months of claiming that any election outcome other than a victory for him would have to have been “rigged,” the president used his final days on the campaign trail to cast doubt on the very process of tabulating the count, suggesting without any evidence that any votes counted after Tuesday, no matter how legal, must be suspect.
  • With the election coming to a close, the Trump and Biden campaigns, voting rights organizations and conservative groups are raising money and dispatching armies of lawyers for what could become a state-by-state, county-by-county legal battle over which ballots will ultimately be counted.
  • Tom Perez, the chairman of the Democratic Party, said Democrats were keeping careful track of all ballots that were being rejected in key swing states, under a strategy to get as many as possible fixed and reinstated now and seeking to force the reinstatement of the rest in postelection litigation if the closeness of the Electoral College count requires it.
  • A wild card for both sides is the posture the Justice Department will take in voting disputes under Attorney General William P. Barr. On Monday, the department announced it was sending civil rights division personnel to monitor voting at precincts across the country, including in key areas like Philadelphia, Miami, Detroit and Houston. That is standard operating procedure, but both sides were girding for possible breaks from protocol given Mr. Barr’s own statements about potential for fraud, which have echoed Mr. Trump’s.
  • The Republican efforts moved to an even more aggressive footing on Sunday, after Mr. Trump made clear his intention to challenge an unfavorable outcome through a focus in particular on the mail-in vote, which both sides expect will favor Mr. Biden.
  • The president has no legal authority to stop the count on Tuesday night, and even in normal election years, states often take days or even weeks before completing their tallies and certifying the outcome.
  • That situation has led Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s attorney general and a Democrat, to issue guidance that election officials should segregate any ballots that arrive after 8 p.m. Tuesday.
Javier E

When Everyone Is Right That Everyone Is Wrong - by David French - The French Press - 0 views

frenchpress.thedispatch.com/...veryone-is-right-that-everyone

equivalency both-sides cancel culture violence threats bipartisan

shared by Javier E on 03 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • Beginning back in 2016, just as I was beginning to be shocked and angry at Trump’s relentless rise, I made a very conscious change in my social media and reading habits. I intentionally tried to follow and read roughly equal numbers of thoughtful people on the left and the right. 
  • Note I said “thoughtful.” I try to follow the best of both sides. And it was a transformative experience. Time and again, I’d see different people write compellingly about different outrages, and the stories and takes were all true. The injustices they described were all real. 
  • Let’s take these two truths, for example. My good friends (and former colleagues) at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education have compiled a sobering list of 471 scholars who’ve faced threats of termination since 2015. 
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  • Here’s one partisan truth: “The left is responsible for 65 percent of attempted cancelations!”
  • Here’s another partisan truth: “The right is responsible for 60 percent of the physical threats!” 
  • Then, here’s the partisan argument: “Your problem is worse than my problem!” 
  • Online, this observation is called “both sides-ism,” and people hate it. They demand that you declare which side is worse, and then dedicate the lion’s share of your efforts to defeating the true threat. 
  • And those critics have a point. There are greater and lesser threats, and one of the hardest parts of my job is discerning the difference. Cancel culture is a long-term threat to America’s culture of free speech, but if Mike Pence had made a different choice on January 6, the entire republic could have faced an immediate, mortal threat. 
  • My friend Jonathan Rauch calls this distinction the difference between a heart attack and cancer. When a person is facing a heart attack, you focus your efforts on making it through the next hours and days. But that doesn’t mean you don’t also keep treating the cancer.
Javier E

'I was anxious at first': how Covid helped vaccine-sceptic Japan overcome its hesitancy... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...id-vaccine-hesitancy-immunised

japan pandemic Culture history policy vaccination

shared by Javier E on 15 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • Media hype over scares involving the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine in the 1990s and, more recently, with the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, helped turn Japan into one of the least vaccine-confident countries in the world, according to a 2020 Lancet study.
  • Less than 30% of people were confident that vaccines were safe, compared with at least 50% of Americans, the study said. A February poll by the Kyodo news agency found that 27.4% of respondents said they did not want to be vaccinated against Covid-19.
  • Most surprising, however, is the take-up among younger people, a cohort thought to be more influenced by anti-vax conspiracies and social media disinformation. The most recent data show that 5.4 million children aged 12-19 – or 60.7% of that age group – have received two doses.
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  • Japan’s complicated relationship with vaccines can be traced to successful class-action lawsuits brought against the health ministry by a small number of parents who claimed – without presenting evidence of a causal link – their children had experienced serious side-effects from the MMR vaccine in the 1990s.
  • “There was also an element of ‘negativity’ in spurring people to get vaccinated. People decided they should have the vaccine so they could tell other people that they were not a threat. It was a social courtesy, and to protect themselves, of course.”
  • Iwata has been critical of the government’s handling of the pandemic, but praised its approach to inoculations. “The Covid vaccination programme has been a great success,” he said. “I have never seen something implemented this pragmatically in the history of vaccinations in Japan.”
  • Initially, however, even government politicians and health experts were cautious about encouraging people to have the Covid jab. The turning point came in the summer, as Tokyo was preparing to host the 2020 Olympics in defiance of public opinion.
  • “Japanese bureaucrats are quite hesitant when it comes to advocating vaccines, however, particularly after the government lost lawsuits regarding side effects from the MMR vaccine,” he said.
  • The shift in attitudes is not limited to the Covid-19 vaccine. A panel on Friday said the health ministry should resume actively recommending the HPV vaccine – which is universally recognised as safe and effective – to teenage girls. Japan withdrew the recommendation – but kept the vaccine available free of charge – in 2013 after sensationalist media reports of alleged severe side-effects.
  • Although no causal link between the vaccine and side-effects was established, the rate of HPV inoculation fell from 70% in 2013 to less than 1%.
  • Sakikawa, who said she and almost all of her initially vaccine-hesitant friends were now fully jabbed, acknowledged that peer pressure had influenced their decision.
  • “There was definitely a feeling that we should have the vaccine, since everyone else seemed to be having it, and we promised we would meet up once we were double jabbed. Now it’s easier to go out and meet friends and do the all the things we couldn’t do before.”
Javier E

Winning Through Attrition - by Lawrence Freedman - 0 views

samf.substack.com/...winning-through-attrition

attrition ukraine russia 2022 analysis stalemate

shared by Javier E on 13 Aug 22 - No Cached
  • while wars of attrition may open with a stalemate and lack the dash and drama of those of manoeuvre they can still lead to victory. This may be because they create the conditions for a return to manoeuvre warfare or it may be because the losing side recognises that its position can only get worse and needs to find a way out
  • Moreover there are different ways of fighting an attritional war, and some strategies can be more effective than others.
  • The word ‘attrition’ derives from a Latin word for rubbing away which came to refer to repressing a vice
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  • its original – theological - English meaning as a lesser form of repentance that had a worldly instead of a spiritual motive, lacking the sincerity of true contrition
  • something second-best
  • Attrition was therefore established as a form of warfare to avoid, as second best to beating the enemy in a decisive battle. Exhausting an enemy through constant sniping, skirmishing and harassment took time, and increasingly made victory dependent less on the conduct of military operations and more on the underlying economic and social resilience of the nation. In addition, the process worked both ways. One’s own forces also faced attrition, turning war into a contest of endurance.
  • inflicting attrition on your opponent can be a sensible precursor to battle
  • Instead of rushing an attack, exploiting surprise, it might make more sense to opt for a more methodical approach, taking out enemy capabilities and undermining morale, before embarking on an offensive – what the Americans call ‘preparing the battlefield’.
  • In these circumstances, wider economic and social resilience will matter, as both sides try to produce more equipment and ammunition and find more personnel to make up losses. Once one side falters in this effort then they might lose as a result of unrest at home or a progressive inability to fight effectively
  • Attrition is not just a question of which side is suffering most but also who is best able to regenerate their combat capabilities.
  • we can note some of this war’s fundamental asymmetries that continue to shape its conduct:
  • First Russia has identified Ukraine’s dependence on external support as its greatest vulnerability and has been looking for ways to undermine this support, largely by aggravating the economic crises facing the West
  • Two conclusions emerge from these asymmetries
  • The second conclusion is that conditions on the ground should increasingly favour Ukraine because of the quality of the systems now entering service and the effectiveness with which they are being used
  • Ukraine is having to follow a strategy that works round its weaknesses while exploiting those of Russia. This was dubbed back in May as ‘corrosion’ by General Mick Ryan. Ukraine, he noted, has sought to hollow out ‘the Russian physical, moral, and intellectual capacity to fight and win in Ukraine, both on the battlefield, and in the global information environment.’
  • The problem with attrition is that it does not force a decision on the enemy. It works by persuading enemy forces and their political leadership that their position is untenable and likely to get worse. So long as they believe that they are only facing temporary difficulties and can turn the situation around, or at least must show that they have put up a decent fight before folding, then the war will continue
  • It is easy to understand why Ukraine feels that it has no choice but to carry on fighting and why it is now confident that it is slowly taking the initiative.
  • Moscow appears to wish to incorporate seized territory into Russia, for which they are preparing some dubious procedures that will impress nobody but themselves. Deep down for Moscow the war may now be all about denying NATO the satisfaction of a Ukrainian victory and saving Putin’s face
  • There is nonetheless something increasingly desperate about Russian rhetoric and behaviour. The Russian military position is deteriorating and the West’s backing for Ukraine has yet to slacken. The trends therefore favour Ukraine. At some Putin and his cronies will have to work out how long they can continue to pretend that they have a credible path to victory.
Javier E

Opinion | Israel, Gaza and What We Get Wrong - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...israel-gaza-facts.html

israel gaza crisis politics

shared by Javier E on 16 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • With the bilateral slaughter in the Middle East unleashing poisons that are worsening hatred worldwide
  • The second myth is that Palestinians can be put off indefinitely, strung along by Israel, the United States and other countries.
  • The first myth is that in the conflict in the Middle East there is right on one side and wrong on the other (even if people disagree about which is which).
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  • The tragedy of the Middle East is that this is a clash of right versus right. That does not excuse Hamas’s massacre and savagery or Israel’s leveling of entire neighborhoods in Gaza, but underlying the conflict are certain legitimate aspirations that deserve to be fulfilled.
  • Israelis deserve their country, forged by refugees in the shadow of the Holocaust, and they have built a high-tech economy that largely empowers women and respects gay people, while giving its Palestinian citizens more rights than most Arab nations give their citizens
  • Likewise, Palestinians deserve a country, freedom and dignity — and they shouldn’t be subjected to collective punishment
  • A great majority of those killed have been women and children, according to Gaza’s Hamas-controlled Health Ministry, and one gauge of the ferocity and indiscriminate nature of some airstrikes is that more than 100 United Nations staffers have been killed, which the U.N. says is more than in any conflict since its founding
  • Perhaps that’s because, as an Israeli military spokesman put it early in the conflict, “the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.”
  • If there is a path forward toward peace — whether in two states or one state — it will begin with all of us moving beyond stereotypes. Israelis are not the same as Netanyahu, and Palestinians are not the same as Hamas.
  • That was Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s strategy, his way of avoiding a Palestinian state, and it worked for a time — the way a pressure cooker works, until it explodes.
  • The third myth is found on both sides of the conflict and is approximately: It’s too bad we have to engage in this bloodshed, but the people on the other side understand only violence.
  • Hamas indeed understands only violence, and it has been brutal to Israelis and Palestinians alike — but Hamas and Palestinians are not the same, just as violent settlers in the West Bank do not represent all Israelis.
  • so far, I’m afraid that the ferocity and lack of precision in Israel’s attack has fulfilled Hamas’s goal of escalating the Palestinian issue and changing the Middle East dynamic
  • In that sense, Hamas may be winning.
  • Five weeks into this war, I don’t see evidence that Israel’s military has degraded Hamas in a significant way, but it has killed vast numbers of civilians, put the Palestinian struggle on top of the global agenda, dissipated the initial torrent of sympathy for Israel, prompted people around the globe to march for Palestine, distracted attention from kidnapped Israelis and ruptured any possibility soon of Israel’s normalizing relations with Saudi Arabia.
  • three myths inflaming the debate
  • I’m exasperated by people whose hearts bleed for only one side, or who say about the toll on the other: “It’s tragic, but ….” No “buts.” Unless you believe in human rights for Jews and for Palestinians, you don’t actually believe in human rights.
Javier E

I Thought I Was Saving Trans Kids. Now I'm Blowing the Whistle. - 0 views

www.thefp.com/...hought-i-was-saving-trans-kids

trans clinic abuse drug therapy gender dysphoria treatment

shared by Javier E on 11 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • Another disturbing aspect of the center was its lack of regard for the rights of parents—and the extent to which doctors saw themselves as more informed decision-makers over the fate of these children.
  • when there was a dispute between the parents, it seemed the center always took the side of the affirming parent.
  • no matter how much suffering or pain a child had endured, or how little treatment and love they had received, our doctors viewed gender transition—even with all the expense and hardship it entailed—as the solution.
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  • Besides teenage girls, another new group was referred to us: young people from the inpatient psychiatric unit, or the emergency department, of St. Louis Children’s Hospital. The mental health of these kids was deeply concerning—there were diagnoses like schizophrenia, PTSD, bipolar disorder, and more. Often they were already on a fistful of pharmaceuticals.
  • Being put on powerful doses of testosterone or estrogen—enough to try to trick your body into mimicking the opposite sex—-affects the rest of the body. I doubt that any parent who's ever consented to give their kid testosterone (a lifelong treatment) knows that they’re also possibly signing their kid up for blood pressure medication, cholesterol medication, and perhaps sleep apnea and diabetes. 
  • There are rare conditions in which babies are born with atypical genitalia—cases that call for sophisticated care and compassion. But clinics like the one where I worked are creating a whole cohort of kids with atypical genitals—and most of these teens haven’t even had sex yet. They had no idea who they were going to be as adults. Yet all it took for them to permanently transform themselves was one or two short conversations with a therapist.
  • Other girls were disturbed by the effects of testosterone on their clitoris, which enlarges and grows into what looks like a microphallus, or a tiny penis. I counseled one patient whose enlarged clitoris now extended below her vulva, and it chafed and rubbed painfully in her jeans. I advised her to get the kind of compression undergarments worn by biological men who dress to pass as female. At the end of the call I thought to myself, “Wow, we hurt this kid.”
  • How little patients understood what they were getting into was illustrated by a call we received at the center in 2020 from a 17-year-old biological female patient who was on testosterone. She said she was bleeding from the vagina. In less than an hour she had soaked through an extra heavy pad, her jeans, and a towel she had wrapped around her waist. The nurse at the center told her to go to the emergency room right away.
  • We found out later this girl had had intercourse, and because testosterone thins the vaginal tissues, her vaginal canal had ripped open. She had to be sedated and given surgery to repair the damage. She wasn’t the only vaginal laceration case we heard about.
  • Bicalutamide is a medication used to treat metastatic prostate cancer, and one of its side effects is that it feminizes the bodies of men who take it, including the appearance of breasts. The center prescribed this cancer drug as a puberty blocker and feminizing agent for boys. As with most cancer drugs, bicalutamide has a long list of side effects, and this patient experienced one of them: liver toxicity. He was sent to another unit of the hospital for evaluation and immediately taken off the drug. Afterward, his mother sent an electronic message to the Transgender Center saying that we were lucky her family was not the type to sue.
  • Here’s an example. On Friday, May 1, 2020, a colleague emailed me about a 15-year-old male patient: “Oh dear. I am concerned that [the patient] does not understand what Bicalutamide does.” I responded: “I don’t think that we start anything honestly right now.”
  • There are no reliable studies showing this. Indeed, the experiences of many of the center’s patients prove how false these assertions are. 
  • Many encounters with patients emphasized to me how little these young people understood the profound impacts changing gender would have on their bodies and minds. But the center downplayed the negative consequences, and emphasized the need for transition. As the center’s website said, “Left untreated, gender dysphoria has any number of consequences, from self-harm to suicide. But when you take away the gender dysphoria by allowing a child to be who he or she is, we’re noticing that goes away. The studies we have show these kids often wind up functioning psychosocially as well as or better than their peers.” 
  • When a female takes testosterone, the profound and permanent effects of the hormone can be seen in a matter of months. Voices drop, beards sprout, body fat is redistributed. Sexual interest explodes, aggression increases, and mood can be unpredictable. Our patients were told about some side effects, including sterility. But after working at the center, I came to believe that teenagers are simply not capable of fully grasping what it means to make the decision to become infertile while still a minor.
  • To begin transitioning, the girls needed a letter of support from a therapist—usually one we recommended—who they had to see only once or twice for the green light. To make it more efficient for the therapists, we offered them a template for how to write a letter in support of transition. The next stop was a single visit to the endocrinologist for a testosterone prescription. 
  • The doctors privately recognized these false self-diagnoses as a manifestation of social contagion. They even acknowledged that suicide has an element of social contagion. But when I said the clusters of girls streaming into our service looked as if their gender issues might be a manifestation of social contagion, the doctors said gender identity reflected something innate.
  • Frequently, our patients declared they had disorders that no one believed they had. We had patients who said they had Tourette syndrome (but they didn’t); that they had tic disorders (but they didn’t); that they had multiple personalities (but they didn’t).
  • The girls who came to us had many comorbidities: depression, anxiety, ADHD, eating disorders, obesity. Many were diagnosed with autism, or had autism-like symptoms. A report last year on a British pediatric transgender center found that about one-third of the patients referred there were on the autism spectrum.
  • This concerned me, but didn’t feel I was in the position to sound some kind of alarm back then. There was a team of about eight of us, and only one other person brought up the kinds of questions I had. Anyone who raised doubts ran the risk of being called a transphobe. 
  • I certainly saw this at the center. One of my jobs was to do intake for new patients and their families. When I started there were probably 10 such calls a month. When I left there were 50, and about 70 percent of the new patients were girls. Sometimes clusters of girls arrived from the same high school. 
  • Until 2015 or so, a very small number of these boys comprised the population of pediatric gender dysphoria cases. Then, across the Western world, there began to be a dramatic increase in a new population: Teenage girls, many with no previous history of gender distress, suddenly declared they were transgender and demanded immediate treatment with testosterone. 
  • Soon after my arrival at the Transgender Center, I was struck by the lack of formal protocols for treatment. The center’s physician co-directors were essentially the sole authority.
  • At first, the patient population was tipped toward what used to be the “traditional” instance of a child with gender dysphoria: a boy, often quite young, who wanted to present as—who wanted to be—a girl. 
  • During the four years I worked at the clinic as a case manager—I was responsible for patient intake and oversight—around a thousand distressed young people came through our doors. The majority of them received hormone prescriptions that can have life-altering consequences—including sterility. 
  • I left the clinic in November of last year because I could no longer participate in what was happening there. By the time I departed, I was certain that the way the American medical system is treating these patients is the opposite of the promise we make to “do no harm.” Instead, we are permanently harming the vulnerable patients in our care.
  • Today I am speaking out. I am doing so knowing how toxic the public conversation is around this highly contentious issue—and the ways that my testimony might be misused. I am doing so knowing that I am putting myself at serious personal and professional risk.
  • Almost everyone in my life advised me to keep my head down. But I cannot in good conscience do so. Because what is happening to scores of children is far more important than my comfort. And what is happening to them is morally and medically appalling.
  • For almost four years, I worked at The Washington University School of Medicine Division of Infectious Diseases with teens and young adults who were HIV positive. Many of them were trans or otherwise gender nonconforming, and I could relate: Through childhood and adolescence, I did a lot of gender questioning myself. I’m now married to a transman, and together we are raising my two biological children from a previous marriage and three foster children we hope to adopt. 
  • The center’s working assumption was that the earlier you treat kids with gender dysphoria, the more anguish you can prevent later on. This premise was shared by the center’s doctors and therapists. Given their expertise, I assumed that abundant evidence backed this consensus. 
  • All that led me to a job in 2018 as a case manager at The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children's Hospital, which had been established a year earlier. 
Javier E

Opinion | I was a Republican Partisan. It Altered the Way I Saw the World. - The New Yo... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...lican-partisan-world-view.html

partisan epistemic bubble polarization credulity culture history politics

shared by Javier E on 18 May 24 - No Cached
  • I remember when supporters of Operation Iraqi Freedom constantly hyped good news from the battlefield and minimized bad news — right until the bad news became so overwhelming
  • Before Bush changed tactics and reinforced American troops during the surge in 2007 and 2008, it sometimes felt disloyal in Republican circles to criticize the course of the war.
  • Could we have changed our military tactics sooner if we had been able to see the battlefield more clearly? Did paradigm blindness — the unwillingness or inability to accept challenges to our core ways of making sense of the world — inhibit our ability to see obvious truths?
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  • the red-blue divide is perhaps less illuminating than the gap between engaged and disengaged Americans, in which an exhausted majority encounters the highly polarized activist wings of both parties and shrinks back from the fray
  • The wings aren’t changing each other’s minds — hard-core Democrats aren’t going to persuade hard-core Republicans — but they’re also not reaching sufficient numbers of persuadable voters to break America’s partisan deadlock.
  • In 2020, when I was doing research for my book about the growing danger of partisan division, I began to learn more about what extreme partisanship does not only to our hearts but also to our minds.
  • It can deeply and profoundly distort the way we view the world. We become so emotionally and spiritually invested in the outcome of a political contest that we can inadvertently become disconnected from reality.
  • Our heart connects with our mind in such a way that the heart demands that the mind conform to its deepest desires
  • When a partisan encounters negative information, it can often trigger the emotional equivalent of a fight-or-flight response. This applies not just to negative arguments but also to negative facts. To deal with the emotional response, we seek different arguments and alternative facts.
  • If you are a true partisan, you essentially become an unpaid lawyer for your side. Every “good” fact that bolsters your argument is magnified. Every “bad” fact is minimized or rationalized.
  • When partisanship reaches its worst point, every positive claim about your side is automatically believed, and every negative allegation is automatically disbelieved.
  • allegations of wrongdoing directed at your side are treated as acts of aggression — proof that “they” are trying to destroy “us.”
  • You see this reality most plainly in the daily Republican theatrics surrounding Trump’s criminal indictments. Rather than wrestle seriously with the profoundly troubling claims against him, they treat the criminal cases as proof of Democratic perfidy. They believe every claim against Hunter and Joe Biden and not a single claim against Trump.
  • ask why people are checking out, and one reason is that partisans make it so very difficult to engage.
  • The problem is most pronounced (and often overtly threatening) on the MAGA right, but it’s endemic to our partisan wings
  • as partisanship deepens, partisan subcultures can get increasingly weird. They become so convinced of the us-versus-them dynamic that they’ll eventually believe virtually anything, as long as it’s a claim against the other side.
  • If decades of partisanship have persuaded you that your opponents are evil, have no morals and want to destroy the country, then why wouldn’t they hack voting machines or recruit a pop star as a government asset?
  • I have some rules to help temper my worst partisan impulses.
  • Expose yourself to the best of the other side’s point of view — including the best essays, podcasts and books.
  • when you encounter a new idea, learn about it from its proponents before you read its opponents.
  • when you encounter bad news about a cause that you hold dear — whether it’s a presidential campaign, an international conflict or even a claim against a person you admire, take a close and careful look at the evidence
Javier E

The Great Migration - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rooks-the-great-migration.html

inequality education university meritocracy upper class

shared by Javier E on 25 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • On the one side, there is the meritocracy, which widens inequality. On the other side, there is President Obama’s team of progressives, who are trying to mitigate inequality. The big question is: Which side is winning?
  • Smart high school students from rural Nebraska, small-town Ohio and urban Newark get to go to good universities. When they get there they often find a culture shock.
  • They’ve been raised in an atmosphere of social equality and now find themselves in a culture that emphasizes the relentless quest for distinction — to be more accomplished, more enlightened and more cutting edge. They may have been raised in a culture that emphasizes roots, but they go into a culture that emphasizes mobility — a multicultural cosmopolitanism that encourages you to go anywhere on your quest for self-fulfillment. They may have been raised among people who enter the rooms of the mighty with the nerves of a stranger, but they are now around people who enter the highest places with the confident sense they belong.
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  • But the system works. In the dorms, classrooms, summer internships and early jobs they learn how to behave the way successful people do in the highly educated hubs. There’s no economic reason to return home, and maybe it’s not even socially possible anymore.
  • The highly educated cluster around a few small nodes. Decade after decade, smart and educated people flock away from Merced, Calif., Yuma, Ariz., Flint, Mich., and Vineland, N.J. In those places, less than 15 percent of the residents have college degrees. They flock to Washington, Boston, San Jose, Raleigh-Durham and San Francisco. In those places, nearly 50 percent of the residents have college degrees.
  • the magnet places have positive ecologies that multiply innovation, creativity and wealth. The abandoned places have negative ecologies and fall further behind.
  • This sorting is self-reinforcing, and it seems to grow more unforgiving every year.
  • half of the jobs in university political science programs went to graduates of the top 11 schools. That is to say, if you have a Ph.D. from Harvard, Stanford, Princeton and so on, your odds of getting a job are very good. If you earned your degree from one of the other 100 degree-granting universities, your odds are not.
  • The first problem with the effort is that it’s like shooting a water gun into a waterfall
  • The second problem is the focus on income redistribution
  • The final problem is that, in an effort to reduce the economic concentration of power, the administration is concentrating political power in Washington
  • the liberal agenda is not very good at addressing the inequality problem it seeks to solve. The meritocracy is overwhelming the liberal project.
redavistinnell

Supreme Court sides with death row inmate in race discrimination case - CNNPolitics.com - 0 views

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

supreme court court sides death row inmate

shared by redavistinnell on 23 May 16 - No Cached
  • Supreme Court sides with death row inmate in racial discrimination case
  • The Supreme Court ruled Monday morning in favor of a death row inmate in a case concerning race discrimination in jury selection.
  • The jury that convicted him was all white. Twenty years after his sentence his attorneys obtained notes the prosecution team took while it was engaged in picking a jury, including marking potential jurors who were black had a "b" written by their name.
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  • The 7-1 decision comes as a welcome relief to critics who say racial discrimination in jury selection persists across the country some 30 years after the Supreme Court ruled potential jurors cannot be struck because of race.
  • Monday's ruling can provide "new life to these so-called Batson claims in the lower courts and the issue of racial bias in jury selection," said Steve Vladeck, CNN contributor and law professor at American University Washington College of Law, referring to the 1986 case Batson v. Kentucky.
  • "This discrimination became apparent only because we obtained the prosecution's notes which revealed their intent to discriminate. Usually that does not happen," said Foster's lead lawyer, Stephen Bright, from the Southern Center of Human Rights. "The practice of discriminating in striking juries continues in courtrooms across the country. Usually courts ignore patterns of race discrimination and accept false reasons for the strikes."
  • "The Court today invites state prisoners to go searching for new 'evidence' by demanding the files of the prosecutors who long ago convicted them . ...I cannot go along with that 'sort of sandbagging of state courts.' New evidence should not justify the relitigation of Batson claims,
  • Nearly 20 years after the conviction, through an open records request, Foster's lawyers obtained the notes the prosecution team took while it was engaged in the process of picking a jury.
  • "The prosecutors in this case came to court on the morning of jury selection determined to strike all the black prospective jurors," Bright said. "Blacks were taken out of the picture here, they were taken and dealt with separately."
  • One set of documents from the prosecution files shows that potential jurors who were black had a "B" written by their name and their names highlighted with a green pen. On some juror questionnaire sheets, the juror's race "black," "color" or "negro" was circled. One juror, Eddie Hood, was labeled "B #1. Others were labeled B#2, and B#3.
  • The Supreme Court's 1986 case held that once a defendant has produced enough evidence to raise an inference that the state impermissibly excluded a juror based on race, the state must come forward with a race-neutral explanation for the exclusion.
cjlee29

British Companies Avoid Taking Sides in the Debate Over an E.U. Exit - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ndum-companies-neutral-eu.html

shared by cjlee29 on 02 May 16 - No Cached
  • Within hours it had contacted his office, insisting that it was not funding either side in the debate, stating that it had no plans to do so and requesting that he correct his message.
  • ne that could have a big impact ahead of a British referendum on June 23 on whether to leave the bloc. Polls suggest the vote could be close.
  • Many British companies have a direct interest in staying
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  • Concerns about taking sides on this divisive issue are prompting a significant number of high-profile companies to lie low. They worry that expressing any opinion about staying in the bloc or leaving could lead to backlash from customers or shareholders who hold the opposing view, or even split their own boardrooms.
  • single market of around 500 million peopl
  • Yet so far, the voice of business has been less full-throated than many analysts expected.
  • There are legal constraints, too. Electoral law prevents companies from spending more than 10,000 pounds — the equivalent of about $15,000 — to influence the result during a referendum campaign, unless they formally register as advocates.
  • Mr. Woolfe said he hoped to organize social media campaigns challenging high-profile companies that have warned against British withdrawal
  • In Mr. Woolfe’s sights now are two airlines: EasyJet and Ryanair. Carolyn McCall, the chief executive of EasyJet
  • has promised to “bore everybody to death” by repeating a pro-European Union message.
  • But consumer power was a factor in Scotland, too. When Bill Munro, the founder of the tourism company Barrhead Travel, warned employees about possible economic effects of independence, critics targeted the company on social media.
  • The atmosphere is very different from the Scottish referendum
Javier E

The dark side of Dubai - Johann Hari - Commentators - The Independent - 0 views

www.independent.co.uk/...ark-side-of-dubai-1664368.html

dubai globalization economics politics slavery history

shared by Javier E on 26 Jul 12 - Cached
  • the secrets of Dubai are slowly seeping out. This is a city built from nothing in just a few wild decades on credit and ecocide, suppression and slavery. Dubai is a living metal metaphor for the neo-liberal globalised world that may be crashing – at last – into history.
  • There are three different Dubais, all swirling around each other. There are the expats, like Karen; there are the Emiratis, headed by Sheikh Mohammed; and then there is the foreign underclass who built the city, and are trapped here. They are hidden in plain view. You see them everywhere, in dirt-caked blue uniforms, being shouted at by their superiors, like a chain gang – but you are trained not to look. It is like a mantra: the Sheikh built the city. The Sheikh built the city. Workers? What workers?
  • Sahinal Monir, a slim 24-year-old from the deltas of Bangladesh. "To get you here, they tell you Dubai is heaven. Then you get here and realise it is hell," he says. Four years ago, an employment agent arrived in Sahinal's village in Southern Bangladesh. He told the men of the village that there was a place where they could earn 40,000 takka a month (£400) just for working nine-to-five on construction projects. It was a place where they would be given great accommodation, great food, and treated well. All they had to do was pay an up-front fee of 220,000 takka (£2,300) for the work visa – a fee they'd pay off in the first six months, easy. So Sahinal sold his family land, and took out a loan from the local lender, to head to this paradise. As soon as he arrived at Dubai airport, his passport was taken from him by his construction company. He has not seen it since. He was told brusquely that from now on he would be working 14-hour days in the desert heat – where western tourists are advised not to stay outside for even five minutes in summer, when it hits 55 degrees – for 500 dirhams a month (£90), less than a quarter of the wage he was promised. If you don't like it, the company told him, go home. "But how can I go home? You have my passport, and I have no money for the ticket," he said. "Well, then you'd better get to work," they replied.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • "There's a huge number of suicides in the camps and on the construction sites, but they're not reported. They're described as 'accidents'." Even then, their families aren't free: they simply inherit the debts. A Human Rights Watch study found there is a "cover-up of the true extent" of deaths from heat exhaustion, overwork and suicide, but the Indian consulate registered 971 deaths of their nationals in 2005 alone. After this figure was leaked, the consulates were told to stop counting.
  • Since the recession hit, they say, the electricity has been cut off in dozens of the camps, and the men have not been paid for months. Their companies have disappeared with their passports and their pay. "We have been robbed of everything. Even if somehow we get back to Bangladesh, the loan sharks will demand we repay our loans immediately, and when we can't, we'll be sent to prison." This is all supposed to be illegal. Employers are meant to pay on time, never take your passport, give you breaks in the heat – but I met nobody who said it happens. Not one. These men are conned into coming and trapped into staying, with the complicity of the Dubai authorities.
  • The work is "the worst in the world," he says. "You have to carry 50kg bricks and blocks of cement in the worst heat imaginable ... This heat – it is like nothing else. You sweat so much you can't pee, not for days or weeks. It's like all the liquid comes out through your skin and you stink. You become dizzy and sick but you aren't allowed to stop, except for an hour in the afternoon. You know if you drop anything or slip, you could die. If you take time off sick, your wages are docked, and you are trapped here even longer."
  • For Emiratis, this is a Santa Claus state, handing out goodies while it makes its money elsewhere: through renting out land to foreigners, soft taxes on them like business and airport charges, and the remaining dribble of oil. Most Emiratis, like Ahmed, work for the government, so they're cushioned from the credit crunch. "I haven't felt any effect at all, and nor have my friends," he says. "Your employment is secure. You will only be fired if you do something incredibly bad." The laws are currently being tightened, to make it even more impossible to sack an Emirati.
  • Sheikh Mohammed turned Dubai into Creditopolis, a city built entirely on debt. Dubai owes 107 percent of its entire GDP. It would be bust already, if the neighbouring oil-soaked state of Abu Dhabi hadn't pulled out its chequebook. Mohammed says this will constrict freedom even further. "Now Abu Dhabi calls the tunes – and they are much more conservative and restrictive than even Dubai. Freedom here will diminish every day." Already, new media laws have been drafted forbidding the press to report on anything that could "damage" Dubai or "its economy"
  • What we see now didn't occur in our wildest dreams. We never thought we could be such a success, a trendsetter, a model for other Arab countries. The people of Dubai are mighty proud of their city, and rightly so. And yet..." He shakes his head. "In our hearts, we fear we have built a modern city but we are losing it to all these expats." Adbulkhaleq says every Emirati of his generation lives with a "psychological trauma." Their hearts are divided – "between pride on one side, and fear on the other."
  • t is an open secret that once you hire a maid, you have absolute power over her. You take her passport – everyone does; you decide when to pay her, and when – if ever – she can take a break; and you decide who she talks to. She speaks no Arabic. She cannot escape.
  • heikh Maktoum built his showcase city in a place with no useable water. None. There is no surface water, very little acquifer, and among the lowest rainfall in the world. So Dubai drinks the sea. The Emirates' water is stripped of salt in vast desalination plants around the Gulf – making it the most expensive water on earth. It costs more than petrol to produce, and belches vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as it goes. It's the main reason why a resident of Dubai has the biggest average carbon footprint of any human being – more than double that of an American.
  • Dubai only has enough water to last us a week. There's almost no storage. We don't know what will happen if our supplies falter. It would be hard to survive." Global warming, he adds, makes the problem even worse. "We are building all these artificial islands, but if the sea level rises, they will be gone, and we will lose a lot. Developers keep saying it's all fine, they've taken it into consideration, but I'm not so sure."
  • The water quality got worse and worse. The guests started to spot raw sewage, condoms, and used sanitary towels floating in the sea. So the hotel ordered its own water analyses from a professional company. "They told us it was full of fecal matter and bacteria 'too numerous to count'. I had to start telling guests not to go in the water, and since they'd come on a beach holiday, as you can imagine, they were pretty pissed off." She began to make angry posts on the expat discussion forums – and people began to figure out what was happening. Dubai had expanded so fast its sewage treatment facilities couldn't keep up. The sewage disposal trucks had to queue for three or four days at the treatment plants – so instead, they were simply drilling open the manholes and dumping the untreated sewage down them, so it flowed straight to the sea.
  • She continued to complain – and started to receive anonymous phone calls. "Stop embarassing Dubai, or your visa will be cancelled and you're out," they said. She says: "The expats are terrified to talk about anything. One critical comment in the newspapers and they deport you. So what am I supposed to do? Now the water is worse than ever. People are getting really sick. Eye infections, ear infections, stomach infections, rashes. Look at it!" There is faeces floating on the beach, in the shadow of one of Dubai's most famous hotels.
  • Perhaps Dubai disturbed me so much, I am thinking, because here, the entire global supply chain is condensed. Many of my goods are made by semi-enslaved populations desperate for a chance 2,000 miles away; is the only difference that here, they are merely two miles away, and you sometimes get to glimpse their faces? Dubai is Market Fundamentalist Globalisation in One City.
Javier E

Our Cold Civil War Intensifies, Ctd « The Dish - 0 views

dish.andrewsullivan.com/...ld-civil-war-intensifies-ctd-3

polarization compromise gop democrat epistemic closure in-group exclusion politics

shared by Javier E on 25 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • Taken alone, it would appear both sides share equal blame for the present political paralysis as each shifts to their ideological poles.
  • while both sides may be guilty of running to their respective corners, one is clearly more liable for putting the kibosh on negotiation deal-making.
  • one gets more liberal, the more he or she wants elected officials who compromise.
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  • A consistently liberal position is fine if you’re prepared to meet the other side halfway – and vice-versa of course. In fact, sometimes a strong position can help facilitate a real deal.
  • polarization per se is not the current critical crisis – it’s a refusal to compromise, to reach out from one’s ideological end of the spectrum to meet in the middle (where most of us already are), and demanding that one’s representatives refuse to negotiate to get things done and better the country.
  • only the Republicans are carrying out a primary purification to fit their no-compromise dispositions.
  • it’s the GOP that is the outlier, and long has been.
  • Liberals and conservatives are coming to rely on different worldviews motivated by different interpretations of what “reality” is. The Republican party has clearly decided that the only path open to them is to further embrace the resentment exhibited in rural, displaced white voters – people whose concerns have been unconscionably ignored but who have directed their anger at an entirely inappropriate target. They see Obama as the enemy but they vote for the people who are their real enemies.
  • If you think about it point by point, it becomes even less sensible. The debt? That was a result of Bush’s unfunded wars, irresponsible tax cuts and his corporatist Medicare expansion (which was itself just a subsidy for drug companies). The recession? A logical endpoint of a decades-long abandonment of responsible financial regulation. Immigration? There have been no significant changes to our immigration law since 1986, when Saint Reagan pushed through a bill that provided legal status to many who were undocumented – and the right conveniently proceeded to forget that. Ditto with gun control, since Reagan supported the Brady Bill publicly, and that clearly must be erased from the record.
  • The left, by contrast, did not throw Democrats out of office for supporting the Bush tax cuts. It did not throw Democrats out of office for opposing cap-and-trade legislation, immigration reform, or for stonewalling Obamacare until the very last minute when Scott Brown’s surprise election made inaction untenable. The left complained about these realities but never pretended that the reality was any different than what it was; we had the best we could get and that while Obama has let us down on specific issues, he has been a wholly underappreciated president – and history will very likely vindicate him
Javier E

Understanding The Permanence Of Greater Israel « The Dish - 1 views

dish.andrewsullivan.com/...e-permanence-of-greater-israel

israel war netanyahu moral equivalence hamas

shared by Javier E on 01 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • Jeffrey Goldberg, has been busy pondering why Hamas has sent hundreds of rockets – with no fatalities – into Israel. He argues that it does this in order to kill Palestinians. It’s an arresting idea, and it helps perpetuate the notion that there are no depths to which these Islamist fanatics and war criminals will not sink.
  • nihilist and futile war crime is all that Hamas has really got left.
  • for all the talk of aggression on both sides, no serious equivalence in capabilities between Hamas and the IDF. The IDF has the firepower to level Gaza to the ground if it really wants to. Hamas, if it’s lucky, might get a rocket near a town or city. I suppose Israel’s reluctance just to raze Gaza for good and all is why John McCain marveled that in a war where one side has had more than 170 fatalities, 1,200 casualties, 80 percent of whom are civilians, and the other side has no fatalities and a handful of injuries, Israel has somehow practiced restraint. One wonders what no restraint would mean.
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  • as if to balance Hamas’s blame for every single death in the conflict, Goldblog feels the need to chide the Israeli prime minister for his “mistake” in having utter contempt for any two-state solution. “Mistake” is an interesting word to use. It implies a relatively minor slip-up, a miscalculation, a foolish divergence from sanity. But it is perfectly clear to anyone not always finding excuses for the Israeli government that Netanyahu wasn’t making a mistake. He was simply reiterating his longstanding view that Israel will never, ever allow a sovereign Palestinian state to co-exist as a neighbor. And unless you understand that, nothing he has done since taking office makes any sense at all. Everything he has said and done presupposes permanent Greater Israel. And he is not some outlier. Israel’s entire political center of gravity is now firmly where Netanyahu is. The rank failure of the peace process simply underlines this fact. As do half a million Jewish settlers and religious fanatics on the West Bank.
  • Despite protestations otherwise, possession of the West Bank has become a fundamental and existential part of the character of Israeli nationhood. Possession of the West Bank is not temporary, it is not contingent, and it is not an exception to the general rule of the character of Israeli nationhood. Occupation and settlement are as central to the Israeli nation, its politics and culture, as burritos, Hollywood, and Sunbelt conservatism are to American politics, culture, and national identity.
  • This is what really put Israel’s occupation and settlement of the West Bank in perspective for me: Israel has possessed the West Bank for almost precisely the same proportion of its national existence as the United States has possessed Texas and California. About seven-tenths
  • the United States would first have to become an existentially different nation before it would even consider peaceably permitting California and Texas to leave the union. Just so with Israel
  • Since the whole idea of a two-state solution is as dead as the infamous parrot, why on earth are Americans still pursuing it? I think because many want Israel to be other than what it plainly is. They understand that this project of a bi-national state with Jim Crow segregation and disenfranchisement is a horrible fate. Jeffrey is as eloquent on this today as he has ever been: If Netanyahu has convinced himself that a Palestinian state is an impossibility, then he has no choice but to accept the idea that the status quo eventually brings him to binationalism, either in its Jim Crow form—Palestinians absorbed into Israel, except without full voting rights—or its end-of-Israel-as-a-Jewish-state form, in which the two warring populations, Jewish and Arab, are combined into a single political entity, with chaos to predictably ensue. But this is clearly the reality. The Obama administration was the last hope for some kind of agreement, and the Israelis have told the president to go fuck himself on so many occasions the very thought of accommodation is preposterous. With the acceleration of the settlements, and the ever-rising racism and religious fundamentalism in Israel itself, this is what Israel now is.
  • It also helps distract from the fact that Hamas itself did not kill the three Israeli teens which was the casus belli for the latest Israeli swoop through the West Bank; that Netanyahu had called for generalized revenge in the wake of the killings, while concealing the fact that the teens had been murdered almost as soon as they had been captured; and that Israeli public hysteria, tapping into the Gilad-like trauma of captivity, then began to spawn increasingly ugly, sectarian and racist acts of revenge and brutality.
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