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Javier E

Breaking Silence, Richard Fuld Speaks on Love, Putin and 'Rocky' - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ce-since-lehmans-collapse.html

wall street great recession inequality government crisis policy

shared by Javier E on 29 May 15 - No Cached
  • Explaining the origins of the financial crisis, Mr. Fuld avoided any mention of investment banks’ eagerness to issue subprime mortgages. (Lehman had an enormous portfolio of subprime loans.)“It’s not just one single thing,” Mr. Fuld said. “It’s all these things taken together. I refer to it as the perfect storm.”
  • At the root of the crisis, in his view, was the government’s push for homeownership. At the same time, hedge funds, private equity firms and sovereign wealth firms grew rapidly, supercharging the global financial system and driving up equity values, balance sheets, the volume of financial products and the need for financing, he said.“There was very little regulation or market supervision
  • Then in 2007, the Fed raised interest rates, essentially ending the housing boom it had encouraged, Mr. Fuld said.“The increased rates led to increased mortgage rates and payments, a huge number of residential foreclosures,” he said. “Banks wrote down and sold assets.”In the wake of this, companies began cutting costs and jobs, Mr. Fuld said, and it became “a self-fulfilling economic loop.”
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  • “I know you don’t want to hear this from me, but the wealthy are getting wealthier, and again, the belly of America is getting hurt,” he said. “Look, I’m a hard-core capitalist. But let’s be fair — capitalism only works if it starts at the top and filters down. If it doesn’t get down, we’re going to lose.”
  • “Taken together, they are fraying the fabric of our system,” he said.And once again, he pointed the finger at Washington, prompting the crowd to cheer
  • Mr. Fuld also quickly offered three data points that he suggested made it clear that Lehman could have survived, had the Fed not forced it to fail: “When Lehman was mandated into bankruptcy, we said our equity capital was $28 billion. Second, we had a Tier 1 capital ratio of 11 percent. Third, Lehman had unencumbered collateral of $127 billion.”
  • “It’s very easy to look back. As they said, hindsight is 20/20. There is no ‘if’ or ‘woulda coulda shoulda,’ ” he said. “You can only make a decision at any specific time with the best information that you think you have.”Going further, Mr. Fuld insisted that he could have saved the firm: “Lehman Brothers at the point of 2008 was not a bankrupt company.”
  • Asked what he could have done differently, he avoided answering directly, and instead said, “I think I missed the violence of the market and how it spread from one asset class to the next. Did we do everything we could? Did we fall prey to some other agendas? I’ll leave it at that.”
  • In the end, Mr. Fuld seemed hung up on the fate of his own firm, not the broader crisis that its bankruptcy helped ignite.
knudsenlu

'It's being done to intimidate us': Israeli anti-occupation groups face crackdown | Wor... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...cupation-groups-face-crackdown

Israel Palestine occupation news government

shared by knudsenlu on 25 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Israeli MPs will this week consider two initiatives that critics say are aimed at shutting down one of the country’s most high-profile anti-occupation groups, Breaking the Silence, which records the testimonies of Israeli soldiers operating in Palestinian territories.
  • ehuda Shaul, a co-founder of Breaking the Silence, and Avner Gvaryahu, the group’s director, say they are not surprised by the latest efforts against them. “After 50 years, the occupation [of Palestinian territories] has become normalised,” said Shaul. “The only thing left fighting it is civil society groups.”
  • “The worst problems began after 2015 and the election of Israel’s most rightwing ever government,” said Shaul. He said that as a result, dissent had increasingly become concentrated among a handful of NGOs.
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  • Levin has said the election in the US of Donald Trump, whose administration has rarely criticised the Netanyahu government, has made the proposed legislation easier to promote.
  • criticised
  • Gvaryahu and Shaul are bullish in the face of the assault but others in the Israeli human rights community are less sanguine about what they see as its implications for freedom of speech in Israel and the ability of NGOs to operate.
  • Our interest is not in legal avenues but in the moral framework of 50 years of occupation,” he said. “Everything we publish has to be screened by the Israeli military censor. That is important because the censor views potential prosecution [of Israeli soldiers] as a security issue. And it is still approved.”
Javier E

Students Protest Intro Humanities Course at Reed - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...544682

humanities campus protest radicals free speech

shared by Javier E on 03 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • Of the 25 demands issued by RAR that day, the largest section was devoted to reforming Humanities 110.
  • outrage has been increasingly common in the course, Humanities 110, over the past 13 months. On September 26, 2016, the newly formed RAR organized a boycott of all classes in response to a Facebook post from the actor Isaiah Washington
  • A required year-long course for freshmen, Hum 110 consists of lectures that everyone attends and small break-out classes “where students learn how to discuss, debate, and defend their readings.” It’s the heart of the academic experience at Reed, which ranks second for future Ph.D.s in the humanities and fourth in all subjects.
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  • As Professor Peter Steinberger details in a 2011 piece for Reed magazine, “What Hum 110 Is All About,” the course is intended to train students whose “primary goal” is “to engage in original, open-ended, critical inquiry.”
  • But for RAR, Hum 110 is all about oppression. “We believe that the first lesson that freshmen should learn about Hum 110 is that it perpetuates white supremacy—by centering ‘whiteness’ as the only required class at Reed,” according to a RAR statement delivered to all new freshmen
  • The texts that make up the Hum 110 syllabus—from the ancient Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, Persia, and Egypt regions—are “Eurocentric,” “Caucasoid,” and thus “oppressive,” RAR leaders have stated. Hum 110 “feels like a cruel test for students of color,” one leader remarked on public radio. “It traumatized my peers.”
  • Reed is home to the most liberal student body of any college, according to The Princeton Review. It’s also ranked the second most-studious—a rigor inculcated in Hum 110.
  • A major crisis for Reed College started when RAR put those core qualities—social justice and academic study—on a collision course.
  • Beginning on boycott day, RAR protested every single Hum lecture that school year.
  • A Hum protest is visually striking: Up to several dozen RAR supporters position themselves alongside the professor and quietly hold signs reading “We demand space for students of color,” “We cannot be erased,” “Fuck Hum 110,” “Stop silencing black and brown voices; the rest of society is already standing on their necks,” and so on. The signs are often accompanied by photos of black Americans killed by police.
  • One of the first Hum professors to request that RAR not occupy the classroom was Lucía Martínez Valdivia, who said her preexisting PTSD would make it difficult to face protesters. In an open letter, RAR offered sympathy to Martínez Valdivia but then accused her of being anti-black, discriminating against those with disabilities, and engaging in gaslighting—without specifying those charges. When someone asked for specifics, a RAR leader replied, “Asking for people to display their trauma so that you feel sufficiently satisfied is a form of violence.”
  • But another RAR member did offer a specific via Facebook: “The​ ​appropriation​ ​of​ ​AAVE [African American Vernacular English]​ ​on​ ​her​ ​shirt​ ​during​ ​lecture:​ ​‘Poetry​ ​is​ ​lit’ ​is​ ​a​ ​form​ ​of​ ​anti-blackness.”
  • During Martínez Valdivia’s lecture on Sappho, protesters sat together in the seats wearing all black; they confronted her after class, with at least one of them yelling at the professor about her past trauma, bringing her to tears. “I am intimidated by these students,” Martínez Valdivia later wrote, noting she is “scared to teach courses on race, gender, or sexuality, or even texts that bring these issues up in any way—and I am a gay mixed-race woman.” Such fear, she revealed in an op-ed for The Washington Post, prompted some of her colleagues— “including people of color, immigrants, and those without tenure”—to avoid lecturing altogether.
  • what about the majority of students not in RAR? I spoke with a few dozen of them to get an understanding of what campus was like last year, and a clear pattern emerged: intimidation, stigma, and silence when it came to discussing Hum 110, or racial politics in general.
  • Raphael, the founder of the Political Dissidents Club, warned incoming students over Facebook that “Reed’s culture can be stifling/suffocating and narrow minded.”
  • The most popular public forum at Reed is Facebook, where social tribes coalesce and where the most emotive and partisan views get the most attention. “Facebook conversations at Reed bring out the extreme aspects of political discourse on campus,” said Yuta, a sophomore who recently co-founded a student group, The Thinkery, “dedicated to critical and open discussion.”
  • In mid-April, when students were studying for finals, a RAR leader grew frustrated that more supporters weren’t showing up to protest Hum 110. In a post viewable only to Reed students, the leader let loose: To all the white & able(mentally/physically) who don’t come to sit-ins(ever, anymore, rarely): all i got is shade for you. [... If] you ain’t with me, then I will accept that you are against me. There’s 6 hums left, I best be seein all u phony ass white allies show-up. […] How you gonna be makin all ur white supremacy messes & not help clean-up your own community by coming and sitting for a frickin hour & still claim that you ain’t a laughin at a lynchin kinda white.
  • Nonwhite students weren’t spared; a group of them agreed to “like” Patrick’s comment in a show of support. A RAR member demanded those “non-black pocs [people of color]” explain themselves, calling them “anti-black pos [pieces of shit].”
  • As tensions continued to mount, one student decided to create an online forum to debate Hum 110. Laura, a U.S. Army veteran who served twice in Afghanistan, named the Facebook page “Reed Discusses Hum 110.” But it seemed like people didn’t want to engage publicly:
  • Another student wrote to Laura in a private message, “I'm coming into this as a ‘POC’ but I disagree with everything [RAR has been] saying for a long time [and] it feels as if it isn't safe for anyone to express anything that goes against what they're saying.”
  • Laura could relate—her father “immigrated from Syria and was brown”—so she stood in front of Hum 110 just before class to distribute an anonymous survey to gauge opinions about the protests, an implicit rebuke to RAR. Laura, who lives in the neighboring city of Beaverton, said she saw this move as risky. “I would’ve rethought what I did had I lived on campus,” she said.
  • If Facebook is no place to debate Hum 110, what about the printed page? Not so much: During the entire 2016–17 school year, not a single op-ed or even a quote critical of RAR’s methods—let alone goals—was published in the student newspaper, according to a review of archived issues. The only thing that comes close?
  • The student magazine, The Grail, did publish a fair amount of dissent over RAR—but almost all anonymously
  • This school year, students are ditching anonymity and standing up to RAR in public—and almost all of them are freshmen of color
  • The pushback from freshmen first came over Facebook. “To interrupt a lecture in a classroom setting is in serious violation of academic freedom and is just unthoughtful and wrong,” wrote a student from China named Sicheng, who distributed a letter of dissent against RAR. Another student, Isabel, ridiculed the group for its “unsolicited emotional theater.
  • I met the student who shot the video. A sophomore from India, he serves as a mentor for international students. (He asked not to be identified by name.) “A lot of them told me how disappointed they were—that they traveled such a long distance to come to this school, and worked so hard to get to this school, and their first lecture was canceled,” he said. He also recalled the mood last year for many students of color like himself: “There was very much a standard opinion you had to have [about RAR], otherwise people would look at you funny, and some people would say stuff to you—a lot of people were called ‘race traitors.
  • Another student from India, Jagannath, responded to the canceled lecture by organizing a freshmen-only meeting on the quad. “For us to rise out of this culture of private concerns, hatred, and fear, we need to find a way to think, speak, and act together,” he wrote in a mass email. Jagannath told me that upperclassmen warned him he was “very crazy” to hold a public meeting, but it was a huge success; about 150 freshmen showed up, and by all accounts, their debate over Hum 110 was civil and constructive. In the absence of Facebook and protest signs, the freshmen were taking back their class.
  • In the intervening year, the Reed administration had met many of RAR’s demands, including new hires in the Office of Inclusive Community, fast-tracking the reevaluation of the Hum 110 syllabus that traditionally happens every 10 years, and arranging a long series of “6 by 6 meetings”—six RAR students and six Hum professors—to solicit ideas for that syllabus. (Those meetings ended when RAR members stopped coming; they complained of being “forced to sit in hours of fruitless meetings listening to full-grown adults cry about Aristotle.”)
  • the more accommodation that’s been made, the more disruptive the protests have become—and the more heightened the rhetoric. “Black lives matter” was the common chant at last year’s boycott. This year’s? “No cops, no KKK, no racist U.S.A.” RAR increasingly claims those cops will be unleashed on them—or, in their words, Hum professors are “entertaining threatening violence on our bodies.”
  • Rollo later told me that RAR “had a beautiful opportunity to address police violence” but squandered it with extreme rhetoric. “Identity politics is divisive,” he insisted. As far as Hum 110, “I like to do my own interpreting,” and he resents RAR “playing the race card on ancient Egyptian culture.
  • Reed is just one college—and a small one at that. But the freshman revolt against RAR could be a blueprint for other campuses. If the “most liberal student body” in the country can reject divisive racial rhetoric and come together to debate a diversity of views, others could follow.
Javier E

Quote by Lawrence Ferlinghetti: "Pity the nation whose people are sheep, and who..." - 0 views

www.goodreads.com/...-are-sheep-and-whose-shepherds

us trump history culture politics poetry

shared by Javier E on 20 May 19 - No Cached
  • Javier E on 20 May 19
     
    "Pity the nation whose people are sheep, and whose shepherds mislead them. Pity the nation whose leaders are liars, whose sages are silenced, and whose bigots haunt the airwaves. Pity the nation that raises not its voice, except to praise conquerors and acclaim the bully as hero and aims to rule the world with force and by torture. Pity the nation that knows no other language but its own and no other culture but its own. Pity the nation whose breath is money and sleeps the sleep of the too well fed. Pity the nation - oh, pity the people who allow their rights to erode and their freedoms to be washed away. My country, tears of thee, sweet land of liberty." ― Lawrence Ferlinghetti
knudsenlu

How the resurgence of white supremacy in the US sparked a war over free speech | News |... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ee-speech-aclu-charlottesville

white supremacy free speech US culture trump

shared by knudsenlu on 01 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • ate last summer, the American Civil Liberties Union faced a mounting crisis over its most celebrated cause, which many consider the lifeblood of democracy: freedom of speech. For nearly a century, the ACLU has been the standard-bearer of civil liberties in the US, second only to the government in shaping Americans’ basic rights. Although the organisation has been at the vanguard of many of the country’s most hard-fought legal battles – desegregation, reproductive rights, gay marriage – the argument among its staff last summer, over whether to continue representing white supremacists in free-speech cases, was more intense than anything the organisation had seen before.
  • Since its founding in 1920, the ACLU has helped make the US home to arguably the most freewheeling, unregulated public discourse in the world. And it has done this partly by defending, in the courts of law and public opinion, the speech rights of racists and fascists. The ACLU asserts that laws guaranteeing freedom of speech must embrace everybody (think the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis) if they’re going to protect anybody (think organised labour, anti-war protesters and Black Lives Matter). “The same laws or regulations used to silence bigots can be used to silence you,” its website explains.
  • Last fall, the ACLU’s president, Susan Herman, told the organisation’s national leadership conference: “We need to consider whether some of our timeworn maxims – the antidote to bad speech is more speech, the marketplace of ideas will result in the best arguments winning out – still ring true in an era when white supremacists have a friend in the White House.” She later added: “If we at the ACLU cannot figure out how to bridge our different experiences, and work together and do the critical work we need to do, what hope is there for the rest of the country?”
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  • here are strong arguments for far-reaching free speech rights, but a number of fictions have also helped to preserve the American orthodoxy. One is that free speech as we know it today was born fully formed in 1791, with the first amendment to the US constitution: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” (I copied those 45 words out of a handy edition of the constitution, published by the ACLU, which fits snugly in the back pocket of my jeans.)
Javier E

Opinion | Turkey's Crackdown on Academics Represses History Once Again - The New York T... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...urkey-crackdown-academics.html

turkey academics history repression

shared by Javier E on 08 Jul 19 - No Cached
  • How do gaps in history happen? Ms. Altinay pointed to the four critical moments identified by the prominent Haitian scholar and anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot in his book, “Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History”
  • “The moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives); and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance).”
  • Academics are crucial in each of these steps, from recording primary sources through putting narratives into historical context. Without them, this process remains incomplete.
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  • Mr. Erdogan himself seemed to recognize this. Six years ago, when the country was closest to peace talks with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K., after three decades of bitter conflict that had already cost 40,000 lives, he called on prominent academics to help facilitate the process, and appointed a committee of “wise people.”
  • prominent academics, intellectuals and artists who traveled the country, hosting panels and town halls to convince a bitterly polarized nation that peace not only was important, but also possible.
  • Then came the failed coup attempt of 2016. Academic activism on sensitive subjects like the Armenian and Kurdish issues quickly flipped from an act of social progression to near treason, and the Turkish government issued decrees that removed more than 5,800 academics and shuttered over a hundred universities. One wave of dismissals nearly gutted Ankara University’s departments of law and of political science.
  • Nowhere is the silence more profound than in Turkey’s Kurdish region. During an offensive launched in 2015, the Turkish government shuttered cultural sites, multilingual schools and longstanding civil society organizations like the Kurdish Institute in Istanbul
  • This spring, nearly 200 of the Academics for Peace cases were concluded. All ended in sentences of one to three years in prison. Most of the sentences were suspended, but three dozen of them — including Ms. Altinay’s — were not.
Javier E

Donald Trump Is Not Well - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...597640

mental illness trump crisis

shared by Javier E on 12 Sep 19 - No Cached
  • “I don’t oppose Mr. Trump because I think he’s going to lose to Hillary Clinton,” I told Ben from Purcellville, Virginia. “I think he will, but as I said, he may well win. My opposition to him is based on something completely different, which is, first, I think he is temperamentally unfit to be president. I think he’s erratic, I think he’s unprincipled, I think he’s unstable, and I think that he has a personality disorder; I think he’s obsessive. And at the end of the day, having served in the White House for seven years in three administrations and worked for three presidents, one closely, and read a lot of history, I think the main requirement for president of the United States … is temperament, and disposition … whether you have wisdom and judgment and prudence.”
  • Donald Trump’s disordered personality—his unhealthy patterns of thinking, functioning, and behaving—has become the defining characteristic of his presidency. It manifests itself in multiple ways: his extreme narcissism; his addiction to lying about things large and small, including his finances and bullying and silencing those who could expose them; his detachment from reality, including denying things he said even when there is video evidence to the contrary; his affinity for conspiracy theories; his demand for total loyalty from others while showing none to others; and his self-aggrandizement and petty cheating.
  • It’s said that speculating on Trump’s mental health is inappropriate and unwise, especially for those who are not formally trained in the field of psychiatry or psychology.
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  • It might also take some of the edge off the hatred many people feel for Trump. Seeing him for what he is—a terribly damaged soul, a broken man, a person with a disordered mind—should not lessen our revulsion at how Trump mistreats others, at his cruelty and dehumanizing actions.
  • Even now, almost a thousand days into his presidency, the latest Trump outrage elicits shock and disbelief in people. The reaction is, “Can you believe he said that and did this?”To which my response is, “Why are you surprised?” It’s a shock only if the assumption is that we’re dealing with a psychologically normal human being. We’re not. Trump is profoundly compromised, acting just as you would imagine a person with a disordered personality would. Many Americans haven’t yet come to terms with the fact that we elected as president a man who is deeply damaged, an emotional misfit
  • n analogy may be helpful here. If smoke is coming out from under the hood of your car, if you notice puddles of oil under it, if the engine is overheating and you smell burning oil, you don’t have to be a car mechanic to know that something is wrong with your car.
  • above all, accepting the truth about Trump’s mental state will cause us to take more seriously than we have our democratic duty, which is to prevent a psychologically and morally unfit person from becoming president.
Javier E

A chilling study shows how hostile college students are toward free speech - The Washin... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...7-9083-fbfddf6804c2_story.html

free speech campus student attitudes culture

shared by Javier E on 19 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • A fifth of undergrads now say it’s acceptable to use physical force to silence a speaker who makes “offensive and hurtful statements.”
  • when students were asked whether the First Amendment protects “hate speech,” 4 in 10 said no.
  • Speech promoting hatred — or at least, speech perceived as promoting hatred — may be abhorrent, but it is nonetheless constitutionally protected.
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  • Women are more likely than men to believe hate speech is not constitutionally protected (49 percent vs. 38 percent, respectively).
  • Students were asked whether the First Amendment requires that an offensive speaker at a public university be matched with one with an opposing view. Here, 6 in 10 (mistakenly) said that, yes, the First Amendment requires balance.
  • many of Villasenor’s results — like those from other data sources — show that the right is also astonishingly open to shutting down speech.
  • Astonishingly, half said that snuffing out upsetting speech — rather than, presumably, rebutting or even ignoring it — would be appropriate. Democrats were more likely than Republicans to find this response acceptable (62 percent to 39 percent), and men were more likely than women (57 percent to 47 percent). Even so, sizable shares of all groups agreed.
  • Respondents were also asked if it would be acceptable for a student group to use violence to prevent that same controversial speaker from talking. Here, 19 percent said yes.
  • Men, however, were three times as likely as women to endorse using physical force to silence controversial views (30 percent of men vs. 10 percent of women).
  • Let’s say a public university hosts a “very controversial speaker,” one “known for making offensive and hurtful statements.” Would it be acceptable for a student group to disrupt the speech “by loudly and repeatedly shouting so that the audience cannot hear the speaker”?
  • Other data suggest that freshmen are arriving on campus with more intolerant attitudes toward free speech than their predecessors did, and that Americans of all ages have become strikingly hostile toward basic civil and political liberties.
Javier E

The real reason working-class whites continue to support Trump - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ites-continue-to-support-trump

working class white despair trump crisis culture

shared by Javier E on 06 Jun 17 - No Cached
  • “So much of Donald Trump’s politics is symbolic,” Gest explained. “They’re symbolic in the sense that this is what people want to hear and if it doesn’t get done, it’s almost beside the point because he’s elevating the prerogatives of his constituents to the national stage after having been relegated to the fringes of American politics for decades.”
  • “The sense of having a voice suddenly, after feeling voiceless for so long is powerful. It’s not in their cultural interests to vote against him, no matter how little he has delivered to actually help them in any kind of material way.”
  • Working-class whites feel not only voiceless, but also silenced, especially in matters involving race. “The way they understood racism is different from the way we understand racism,” said Gest. “For them, racism has become an instrument of silence. It is a way of invalidating people. By saying someone is a racist, it means they cease to matter.
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  • “So, when people said to me, ‘Now, I’m not a racist but …,’ what they were actually saying to me was, ‘Listen to what I’m about to tell you, and don’t dismiss me.’ ”
  • That doesn’t mean race doesn’t play a major role for the white working class. “Much of white working-class politics has been to create distinction with a group that they thought they were above,” Gest told me. “So much of American history has been white voters seeking to reinstate ways to subordinate people of ethno-religious and ethno-racial difference.”
  • While Gest says that both Republicans and Democrats have exploited these voters, he sees a way forward. “The only way of addressing their plight is a form of political hospice care,” he said. “These are communities that are on the paths to death. And the question is: How can we make that as comfortable as possible?”
anonymous

After silence strike, Myanmar protests again met with force - 0 views

apnews.com/...e342227852ff579fd8ccdd8e79aef9

shared by anonymous on 25 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Protesters against last month’s military takeover in Myanmar returned to the streets in large numbers Thursday, a day after staging a “silence strike” in which people were urged to stay home and businesses to close for the day.
  • Social media accounts and local news outlets reported violent attacks on demonstrators in Hpa-an, the capital of the southeastern Karen state, as well as the eastern Shan state’s capital of Taunggyi and Mon state’s capital of Mawlamyine, also in the southeast.
  • The military’s Feb. 1 seizure of power ousted the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi, whose party won a landslide election victory last November. It put the brakes on the Southeast Asian nation’s return to democracy that began when Suu Kyi’s party took office in 2016 for its first term, after more than five decades of military rule
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  • in addition to firing rubber bullets at the demonstrators.ADVERTISEMENTAccording to Democratic Voice of Burma, a broadcast and online news service, two young men were shot and seriously wounded in Hpa-an.Other protests proceeded peacefully, including in Mandalay and on a smaller scale in Yangon, the two largest cities.
  • It says 2,906 people have been arrested, charged or sentenced at one point in connection with resisting the coup, with most remaining detained.Kanbawza Tai News, an online news service based in Taunggyi, reported that four of its staff, including its publisher and its editor, were detained Wednesday night. It said the home of the editor was raided and materials seized.
  • Thein Zaw, a journalist for The Associated Press who was arrested last month while covering an anti-coup protest, was released Wednesday. The judge in his case announced during a hearing that all charges against him were dropped because he was doing his job at the time of his arrest.
  • On Wednesday, more than 600 protesters were released from Yangon’s Insein Prison, where Thein Zaw had also been held — a rare conciliatory gesture by the ruling military.A Polish freelance journalist, Robert Bociaga, said Wednesday he’d also been freed but was being expelled from Myanmar.
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.
brickol

Twitter political ad ban could silence climate activists, warns Warren | Technology | T... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ate-activists-elizabeth-warren

us climate

shared by brickol on 06 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • Twitter’s plan to ban all political advertising risked muzzling climate activists while giving polluters free rein to promote themselves, the US presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren said.
  • Twitter’s new ad policy will allow fossil fuel companies to buy ads defending themselves and spreading misleading info but won’t allow organisations fighting the climate crisis to buy ads holding those companies accountable,
  • The company’s chief executive, Jack Dorsey, had taken a sideswipe at Facebook, tweeting: “It’s not credible for us to say ‘we’re working hard to stop people from gaming our systems to spread misleading info, but if someone pays us to target and force people to see their political ad … well … they can say whatever they want’.”
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  • the company was considering extending the ban beyond political advertising to “issue ads”. Gadde said the company was considering outlawing “ads that advocate for or against legislative issues of national importance (such as climate change, healthcare, immigration, national security and taxes)”.
  • “[Her point] is one of the key issues many miss about banning political ads on any platform. You can’t ban these ads without significantly inhibiting the ability of activists, labour groups and organisers to make their cases too.”
leilamulveny

Twitter Bans President Trump's Personal Account Permanently - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...of-president-trump-11610148903

trump wsj Culture crisis

shared by leilamulveny on 09 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • citing the risk of further incitement of violence and closing off one of his main communication tools following the attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of his followers.
  • pressure on the platforms to do more to prevent additional violence.
  • Twitter had initially suspended Mr. Trump from posting on a temporary basis that Wednesday night, saying his tweets had violated its policies. The social-media company allowed him to resume posting on Thursday. Facebook Inc., FB -0.44% which temporarily suspended Mr. Trump’s account after the riot, said Thursday that it would extend that action indefinitely—and at least through the end of Mr. Trump’s term. Many critics of the president had called on Twitter to take more severe action as well.
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  • “Twitter employees have coordinated with the Democrats and the Radical Left in removing my account from their platform, to silence me — and YOU, the 75,000,000 great patriots who voted for me,” the posts said. They added: “We have been negotiating with various other sites, and will have a big announcement soon, while we also look at the possibilities of building out our own platform in the near future. We will not be SILENCED!”
  • Twitter removed those new tweets from the @POTUS account soon after they were posted, saying the move was consistent with its policy against using other accounts to try to evade a suspension. “For government accounts, such as @POTUS and @WhiteHouse, we will not suspend those accounts permanently but will take action to limit their use,” a Twitter representative said.
  • Twitter and Facebook’s actions to shut off two of the largest megaphones Mr. Trump has relied on for years to communicate with the public highlights the difficult position social-media platforms face in regulating controversial content on their platforms.
  • Mr. Trump had more than 88 million followers on Twitter and more than 35 million on Facebook.
  • Google said it acted because of “continued posting in the Parler app that seeks to incite ongoing violence in the U.S.,” which violated its requirements for sufficient moderation of egregious content for apps it distributes.
  • “In light of this ongoing and urgent public safety threat, we are suspending the app’s listings from the Play Store until it addresses these issues,” a Google representative said.
  • Mr. Trump had tweeted three times since regaining account access Thursday. In his first post, he tweeted a video condemning the violence at the Capitol and acknowledging that a new administration would be inaugurated Jan. 20, without specifically naming Mr. Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris.
  • They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”
  • Mr. Trump won more than 74 million votes, seven million less than Joe Biden received.
  • “These two Tweets must be read in the context of broader events in the country and the ways in which the President’s statements can be mobilized by different audiences, including to incite violence, as well as in the context of the pattern of behavior from this account in recent weeks.”
  • Twitter earlier Friday shut off the accounts of Michael Flynn, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, and Sidney Powell, a lawyer who worked alongside Mr. Trump’s legal team. The company also said Friday that it suspended several accounts associated with the far-right conspiracy group QAnon for violating its policy on coordinated harmful activity.
  • “the world’s largest social media companies finally do the right thing and deplatform the inciter-in-chief before another person is killed or another cherished piece of our democracy is violated.”
saberal

Stripped of Twitter, Trump Faces a New Challenge: How to Command Attention - The New Yo... - 0 views

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

politics US trump crisis

shared by saberal on 11 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Mr. Trump became a celebrity through television, but Twitter had given him a singular outlet for expressing himself as he is, unfiltered by the norms of the presidency.
  • But as his campaign played out and his presidency began, Donald J. Trump, the master of the small screen, evolved gradually into a different character, @realdonaldtrump, whose itchy Twitter finger became many things at once: an agenda-setter for the day’s coverage, a weapon against his rivals, a way of firing aides and cabinet secretaries, a grenade he could throw at Republican lawmakers who had crossed him and reporters whose coverage he hated, a window into his psyche, and most of all, an unfiltered pipeline to his supporters.
  • his Twitter account yanked away from him permanently, President Trump faces the challenge, for both his remaining days in the White House and in a post-presidency, of how to thrust himself into the conversation on his own terms.
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  • ultimately telling people he was fine without it. He maintained that being “silenced” would infuriate his supporters.
  • Over the years of his presidency, as controversies and investigations of his conduct began to grow, television became a less reliable safe space. Broadcast networks, pressured to be more aggressive in their approach to him and his aides, asked tougher questions. With the exception of Fox News,
  • Mr. Trump’s White House aides said he loved tweeting and then watching the chyrons on cable news channels quickly change in response. For a septuagenarian whose closest allies and aides say often exhibits the emotional development of a preteen, and for whom attention has been a narcotic, the instant gratification of his tweets was hard to match.Advisers insisted that they were still exploring the possibility of another platform where the president could speak his mind without filter.
  • Jason Miller, a Trump senior adviser, said that if Mr. Trump did give such an address, it would force television networks to make a difficult choice: whether to follow Twitter in silencing the president or allowing him to speak to the American people.“I would say to many members of the media: Be careful what you wish for,” Mr. Miller said.
katherineharron

Police used pepper spray to break up a North Carolina march to a polling place - CNN - 0 views

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

election

shared by katherineharron on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Law enforcement officers used pepper spray on Saturday to break up a march to a polling place in Graham, North Carolina, a decision that has drawn criticism from the state's governor and civil rights groups.
  • aw enforcement pepper sprayed the ground to disperse the crowd in at least two instances -- first, after marchers did not move out of the road following a moment of silence, and again after an officer was "assaulted" and the event deemed "unsafe and unlawful."
  • the event's organizers and other attendees have said they did nothing to warrant the response,
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  • "I and our organization, marchers, demonstrators and potential voters left here sunken, sad, traumatized, obstructed and distracted from our intention to lead people all the way to the polls," said the march organizer,
  • "Let me tell you something: We were beaten, but we will not be broken," he added.
  • Video published by the Raleigh News & Observer appears to show demonstrators and law enforcement scuffling over sound equipment outside the Alamance County Courthouse. Alamance County sheriff's deputies wearing gray uniforms soon deploy pepper spray, and at least one deputy is seen spraying a man in the face. Others spray toward demonstrators' feet.
  • Lt. Sisk said Sunday officers allowed the march to pause for about 8 minutes and 40 seconds, but after 9 minutes marchers were told to clear the road.
  • "They started arresting people before our rally began,"
  • The Alamance County Sheriff's Office said it made arrests at the demonstration, citing "violations of the permit" Drumwright obtained to hold the rally.
  • "As a result, after violations of the permit, along with disorderly conduct by participants leading to arrests, the protest was deemed an unlawful assembly and participants were asked to leave."
  • The rally was scheduled from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. ET starting from Wayman's Chapel AME church, with an expected stop at the Confederate Monument at Court Square, before ending at a polling place on Elm Street, according to the flyer for the event.
  • At least eight people were arrested during the rally on various charges,
  • Later, a Graham officer was assaulted, Sisk said, and the rally was deemed unsafe and unlawful and law enforcement officers dispersed the crowd.
  • After five minutes, several people remained and officers again pepper sprayed the ground, authorities said.
  • "At no time during this event did any member of the Graham Police Department directly spray any participant in the march with chemical irritants,"
  • Sisk called the irritant a "pepper fogger" similar to OC spray, commonly referred to as pepper spray
  • "they suffered the same effects" of the pepper spray.
  • Sisk disputed that the march was "scheduled to go to the polls," saying the event was meant to stop at the courthouse where a rally would be held.
  • "We need the public to understand that we made every effort to coordinate with the planner of this event to ensure that it was successful," Sisk said, alleging it was organizers' intent to block the road, but authorities aimed to ensure safety of both demonstrators and others in downtown Graham.
  • the "peaceful protests" became violent "because law enforcement tried to take the sound equipment," he tweeted.
  • Rain Bennett, another attendee, told CNN that demonstrators stopped at Court Square for an eight-minute moment of silence for George Floyd following the march, and that "police presence was there and they had no problem with that."
  • "Everybody is coughing and kind of running away," he said, adding that it was "really confusing because it'd been fine."
  • The incident was criticized by a number of officials and civil rights groups, including the Lawyer's Committee for Civil Rights, the NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina, whose executive director likened it to "voter intimidation."
  • North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper shared the Raleigh News & Observer's article about the march on Twitter and called the incident "unacceptable."
  • "This is extremely concerning, and we need to get to the bottom of it," he said.
  • North Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Wayne Goodwin issued a statement condemning the actions of law enforcement, calling them "completely unwarranted police hostility and voter suppression."
  • "We thought there would be tons of people coming in after this event," Peppler told CNN. "We had extra people come on hand because the idea of this was that this gathering would end at the polls, but they broke it up over there at the courthouse before they ever got here."
Javier E

The boos at the NFL opener show what many in white America think of equality | Sport | ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...s-moment-of-unity-nfl-football

whitelash anti-racism nfl culture politics

shared by Javier E on 11 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • from that day on, any semblance of taking a knee – and standing in unity with the movement started by Kaepernick – has been rejected by much of white America
  • right before kickoff, players from both teams met at midfield and linked arms for what was billed as a “Moment Of Unity” following the performance of the Star-Spangled Banner and Lift Every Voice and Sing, commonly known as the Black national anthem. (The Texans had stayed in the locker room for both songs.)
  • These messages do not denigrate the military. They do not attack white people (in fact they were endorsed by white players on both teams). They do not tell people who to vote for. They do not call for the flag to be burned. They just call for simple goals, reasonable to any right-thinking person, no matter what their race or political persuasion
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  • Seven phrases developed by players on both teams – including star quarterbacks Deshaun Watson and Patrick Mahomes – were displayed on the scoreboard at Arrowhead Stadium: We support equality We must end racism We believe in justice for all We must end police brutality We choose unconditional love We believe Black lives matter It takes all of us
  • And, yet, boos were heard from the crowd so loud they could be heard on television as football fans around the world watched in amazement.
  • Why were they booing? This should have been a moment embraced by all regardless of color, race, religion, nationality, tax bracket or political affiliation.
  • It was a time to show Americans can put their differences aside and come together to watch the great US pastime of NFL football. But the fans in the crowd who booed obviously weren’t on board with that plan.
  • Are racism and police brutality so inherently American that when you protest against them, people think you are actually protesting against America?
  • Said Houston star defensive end JJ Watt, who is white: “I mean the booing during that moment was unfortunate. I don’t fully understand that. There was no flag involved. There was nothing involved other than two teams coming together to show unity.”
  • the message the fans who booed sent last night was crystal clear: for all the attention paid to the racism and police brutality endemic to America, there are plenty of people who are more than happy for things to stay exactly as they are.
nrashkind

After long silence, Mattis denounces Trump and military response to crisis - Reuters - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...sponse-to-crisis-idUSKBN23A3IH

shared by nrashkind on 04 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • After long refusing to explicitly criticize a sitting president, former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis accused President Donald Trump on Wednesday of trying to divide America and roundly denounced a militarization of the U.S. response to civil unrest.
  • The remarks by Mattis, an influential retired Marine general who resigned over policy differences in 2018, are the strongest to date by a former Pentagon leader over Trump’s response to the killing of George Floyd, an African-American, while in Minneapolis police custody.
  • “Instead he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort.
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  • Trump has turned to militaristic rhetoric in the wake of Floyd’s killing by a white police officer, who knelt on his neck for almost nine minutes in Minneapolis last week.
  • Trump responded by Twitter by calling Mattis “the world’s most overrated General!”
  • “I didn’t like his “leadership” style or much else about him, and many others agree. Glad he is gone!” Trump wrote.
  • COMPARISON TO BATTLE AGAINST NAZIS
  • As he called for unity, Mattis even drew a comparison to the U.S. war against Nazi Germany, saying U.S. troops were reminded before the Normandy invasion: ‘The Nazi slogan for destroying us ... was ‘Divide and Conquer.’ Our American answer is ‘In Union there is Strength.’”
  • He criticized use of the word “battlespace” by Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Army General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to describe protest sites in the United States. Esper, Mattis’ successor in the job, has said he regretted using that wording.
  • “We must reject any thinking of our cities as a ‘battlespace,’” Mattis wrote.
Javier E

Nine Days in Wuhan, the Ground Zero of the Coronavirus Pandemic | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...ro-of-the-coronavirus-pandemic

china pandemic politics policy censorship origins

shared by Javier E on 10 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • By now, with worldwide infections at thirty-five million and counting, and with near-total silence on the part of the Chinese government, the market has become a kind of petri dish for the imagination.
  • One common Chinese conspiracy theory claims that the U.S. Army deliberately seeded the virus during the 2019 Military World Games, which were held in Wuhan that October. On the other side of the world, a number of Americans believe that the virus was released, whether accidentally or otherwise, from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, whose research includes work on coronaviruses.
  • There’s no evidence to support these theories, and even the prevalent animal-market connection is unclear. There weren’t many wildlife dealers in the market—about a dozen stalls, according to most published reports—and Wuhan natives have little appetite for exotic animals.
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  • There are three hundred and twenty-one testing locations in the city, and the system is so extensive that in June, when Beijing suffered an outbreak, Wuhan hospitals sent seventy-two staffers to the capital to help with tests.
  • When Wuhan was sealed, the strategy of isolation was replicated throughout the city. Housing compounds were closed and monitored by neighborhood committees, with residents going out only for necessities.
  • Toward the end of the first month, the guidelines were tightened further, until virtually all goods were delivered. On February 17th, Fang Fang wrote, “Everyone is now required to remain inside their homes at all times.”
  • Meanwhile, approximately ten thousand contact tracers were working in the city, in order to cut off chains of infection, and hospitals were developing large-scale testing systems. But isolation remained crucial: patients were isolated; suspected exposures were isolated; medical workers were isolated.
  • Zhang said the experience of working through the pandemic had left him calmer and more patient. He drove more carefully now; he wasn’t in such a rush.
  • I often asked Wuhan residents how they had been personally changed by the spring, and there was no standard response. Some expressed less trust in government information; others said they had increased faith in the national leadership.
  • Wuhan had most recently reported a locally transmitted symptomatic case on May 18th. It’s the most thoroughly tested city in China: at the end of May, in part to boost confidence, the government tried to test every resident, a total of eleven million.
  • I never met a cabdriver who had been swab-tested less than twice, and a couple had been tested five times. Most of the cabbies had no relatives or friends who had been infected; swabbing was simply required by the city and by their cab companies.
  • “I tend to take a charitable view of countries that are at the beginning stage of epidemics,” Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told me, in a phone conversation. According to her, it’s unrealistic to expect that any country could have stopped this particular virus at its source. “I’ve always believed that this thing was going to spread,” she said
  • The physician who handled testing told me that, on average, his hospital still recorded one positive for every forty thousand exams. Most of these positives were repeat patients: after having been infected during the initial run of the virus, they recovered fully, and then for some reason, months later, showed evidence of the virus again. So far, most of the positives had been asymptomatic, and the physician saw no indication that the virus was spreading in the city.
  • In town, there were few propaganda signs about the epidemic, and Wuhan newspapers ran upbeat headlines every morning (Yangtze Daily, August 29th, front page: “STUDENTS DO NOT HAVE TO WEAR MASKS IN SCHOOLS”). Movie theatres were open; restaurants and bars had no seating restrictions. At the Hanyang Renxinghui Mall, I saw barefaced kids playing in what may have been one of the last fully functioning ball pits on earth, a sight that seemed worthy of other headlines (“CHILDREN DO NOT HAVE TO WEAR MASKS IN WUHAN BALL PITS”).
  • Across town, colleges and universities were in the process of bringing back more than a million students. Wuhan has the second-highest number of students of any city in China, after Guangzhou.
  • Wuhan memories remained fresh, and the materials of documentation were also close at hand. People sometimes handed over manuscripts, and they took out their phones and pulled up photographs and messages from January and February. But I wondered how much of this material would dissipate over time.
  • In town, I met two Chinese journalists in their twenties who were visiting from out of town. They had been posted during the period of the sealed city: back then, anybody sent to cover events in Wuhan had to stay for the long haul.
  • One was a director of streaming media whom I’ll call Han, and he had found that government-run outlets generally wanted footage that emphasized the victory over the disease, not the suffering of Wuhan residents. Han hoped that eventually he’d find other ways to use the material. “It will be in the hard drive,” he said, tapping his camera.
  • After that, Yin reported on a number of issues that couldn’t be published or completed, and she often talked with scientists and officials who didn’t want to say too much. “One person said, ‘Ten years later, if the climate has changed, I’ll tell you my story,’ ” Yin told me. “He knew that he would be judged by history.” She continued, “These people are inside the system, but they also know that they are inside history.”
  • Such fare is much more popular in Guangdong, in the far south. It’s possible that the disease arrived from somewhere else and then spread in the wet, cool conditions of the fish stalls. A few Wuhan residents told me that a considerable amount of their seafood comes from Guangdong, and they suggested that perhaps a southerner had unwittingly imported the disease,
  • When I spoke with scientists outside China, they weren’t focussed on the government’s early missteps
  • In time, we will learn more, but the delay is important to the Communist Party. It handles history the same way that it handles the pandemic—a period of isolation is crucial. Throughout the Communist era, there have been many moments of quarantined history: the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the massacre around Tiananmen Square. In every case, an initial silencing has been followed by sporadic outbreaks of leaked information. Wuhan will eventually follow the same pattern, but for the time being many memories will remain in the sealed city.
  • Wafaa El-Sadr, the director of ICAP, a global-health center at Columbia University, pointed out that Chinese scientists had quickly sequenced the virus’s genome, which was made available to researchers worldwide on January 11th. “I honestly think that they had a horrific situation in Wuhan and they were able to contain it,” she said. “There were mistakes early on, but they did act, and they shared fast.”
  • For much of El-Sadr’s career, she has worked on issues related to AIDS in the United States, Africa, and elsewhere. After years of research, scientists eventually came to the consensus that H.I.V. most likely started through the bushmeat trade—the first human was probably infected after coming into contact with a primate or primate meat.
  • El-Sadr views the coronavirus as another inevitable outcome of people’s encroachment on the natural world. “We are now living through two concomitant massive pandemics that are the result of spillover from animal to human hosts, the H.I.V. and the COVID pandemics,” she wrote to me, in an e-mail. “Never in history has humanity experienced something along this scale and scope.”
  • There’s a tendency to believe that we would know the source of the coronavirus if the Chinese had been more forthcoming, or if they hadn’t cleaned out the Huanan market before stalls and animals could be studied properly.
  • Yiwu He, the chief innovation officer at the University of Hong Kong, told me that the C.N.B.G. vaccine has already been given to a number of Chinese government officials, under an emergency-use approval granted by the authorities. “I know a few government officials personally, and they told me that they took the vaccine,” he said, in a phone conversation. He thought that the total number was probably around a hundred. “It’s middle-level officials,” he said. “Vice-ministers, mayors, vice-mayors.”
  • Daszak believes the virus probably circulated for weeks before the Wuhan outbreak, and he doubts that the city was the source. “There are bats in Wuhan, but it was the wrong time of year,” he told me. “It was winter, and bats are not out as much.”
  • His research has indicated that, across Southeast Asia, more than a million people each year are infected by bat coronaviruses. Some individuals trap, deal, or raise animals that might serve as intermediary hosts. “But generally it’s people who live near bat caves,”
  • Daszak said that he had always thought that such an outbreak was most likely to occur in Kunming or Guangzhou, southern cities that are close to many bat caves and that also have an intensive wildlife trade.
  • He thinks that Chinese scientists are probably now searching hospital freezers for lab samples of people who died of pneumonia shortly before the outbreak. “You would take those samples and look for the virus,” he said. “They’ll find something eventually. These things just don’t happen overnight; it requires a lot of work. We’ve seen this repeatedly with every disease. It turns out that it was already trickling through the population.”
  • Daszak is the president of EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit research organization based in New York. EcoHealth has become the target of conspiracy theorists, including some who claim that the virus was man-made. Daszak and many prominent virologists say that anything created in a lab would show clear signs of manipulation.
  • There’s also speculation that the outbreak started when researchers accidentally released a coronavirus they were studying at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But there’s no evidence of a leak, or even that the institute has ever studied a virus that could cause a COVID-19 outbreak.
  • “Scientists in China are under incredible pressure to publish,” Daszak said. “It really drives openness and transparency.”
  • He has spent a good deal of time in Wuhan, and co-authored more than a dozen papers with Chinese colleagues. “If we had found a virus that infected human cells and spread within a cell culture, we would have put the information out there,” he said. “In sixteen years, I’ve never come across the slightest hint of subterfuge. They’ve never hidden data. I’ve never had a situation where one lab person tells me one thing and the other says something else. If you were doing things that you didn’t want people to know about, why would you invite foreigners into the lab?”
  • In April, President Trump told reporters that the U.S. should stop funding research connected to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Shortly after Trump’s comments, the National Institutes of Health cancelled a $3.7-million grant to EcoHealth, which had been studying how bat coronaviruses are transmitted to people.
  • I asked Daszak why, if he has such faith in the openness of his Wuhan colleagues, the Chinese government has been so closed about other aspects of the outbreak. He said that science is one thing, and politics something else; he thinks that officials were embarrassed about the early mistakes, and in response they simply shut down all information.
  • At the beginning of July, China National Biotec Group, a subsidiary of a state-owned pharmaceutical company called Sinopharm, completed construction of a vaccine-manufacturing plant in Wuhan. The project began while the city was still sealed. “That’s the politically correct thing to do,” a Shanghai-based biotech entrepreneur told me. “To show the world that the heroic people of Wuhan have come back.”
  • But Peter Daszak, a British disease ecologist who has collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology for sixteen years on research on bat coronaviruses, told me that it’s typical to fail to gather good data from the site of an initial outbreak. Once people get sick, local authorities inevitably focus on the public-health emergency. “You send in the human doctors, not the veterinarians,” he said, in a phone conversation. “And the doctors’ response is to clean out the market. They want to stop the infections.”
  • Pharmaceutical executives have also been expected to lead the way, like the construction manager who donned P.P.E. in order to escort his workers into the patient ward. “Every senior executive at Sinopharm and C.N.B.G. has been vaccinated,” He said. “Including the C.E.O. of Sinopharm, the chairman of the board, every vice-president—everyone.” The Chinese press has reported that vaccinations have also been administered to hundreds of thousands of citizens in high-risk areas around the world.
  • In the West, China’s image has been badly damaged by the pandemic and by other recent events. The country has tightened political crackdowns in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, and, in May, after Australia called for an investigation into the origins of the virus, China responded furiously, placing new tariffs and restrictions on Australian goods ranging from barley to beef.
  • But He believes that the situation is fluid. “All of these feelings can turn around quickly,” he told me. “I think that once China has a vaccine, and if they can help other countries, it can make a huge difference.”
  • There’s also a competitive element. “China wants to beat America,” He said. He believes that the C.N.B.G. vaccine will receive some level of approval for public use by the end of October. “Chinese officials are thinking that Donald Trump might approve a U.S. vaccine before the election,” he said. “So their goal is to have a vaccine approved before that.”
  • No matter how quickly the Chinese develop a vaccine, or how effectively they have handled the pandemic since January, it’s unlikely to make Westerners forget the mistakes and misinformation during the pandemic’s earliest phase.
  • Some of this is due to a cultural difference—the Chinese response to errors is often to look forward, not back. On January 31st, Fang Fang commented in her diary, “The Chinese people have never been fond of admitting their own mistakes, nor do they have a very strong sense of repentance.” It’s often hard for them to understand why this quality is so frustrating for Westerners. In this regard, the pandemic is truly a mirror—it doesn’t allow the Chinese to look out and see themselves through the eyes of others.
  • The pandemic illuminates both the weaknesses and the strengths of the Chinese system, as well as the relationship between the government and the people. They know each other well: officials never felt the need to tell citizens exactly what happened in Wuhan, but they understood that American-level casualties would have been shocking—given China’s population, the tally would have been more than a million and counting.
  • In order to avoid death on that scale, the government also knew that people would be willing to accept strict lockdowns and contribute their own efforts toward fighting the virus.
  • In turn, citizens were skilled at reading their government. People often held two apparently contradictory ideas: that the Party lied about some things but gave good guidance about others. More often than not, citizens could discern the difference. During the pandemic, it was striking that, when the Chinese indulged in conspiracy theories, these ideas rarely resulted in personally risky behavior, as they often did in the U.S.
  • Perhaps the Chinese have been inoculated by decades of censorship and misinformation: in such an environment, people develop strong instincts for self-preservation, and they don’t seem as disoriented by social media as many Americans are.
  • Early in the year, I corresponded by WeChat with a Wuhan pharmacist who worked in a hospital where many were infected. On February 26th, he expressed anger about the early coverup. “My personal opinion is that the government has always been careless and suppressed dissent,” he wrote. “Because of this, they lost a golden opportunity to control the virus.”
  • In Wuhan, we met a few times, and during one of our conversations I showed him what he had written in February. I asked what he would do now if he found himself in Li Wenliang’s position, aware of an outbreak of some unknown disease. Would he post a warning online? Contact a health official? Alert a journalist?The pharmacist thought for a moment. “I would tell my close friends in person,” he said. “But I wouldn’t put anything online. Nothing in writing.”
  • I asked if such an event would turn out differently now.“It would be the same,” he said. “It’s a problem with the system.”
  • He explained that, with an authoritarian government, local officials are afraid of alarming superiors, which makes them inclined to cover things up. But, once higher-level leaders finally grasp the truth, they can act quickly and effectively.
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