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Javier E

Is there a neo-Nazi storm brewing in Trump country? | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...neo-nazis-america-donald-trump

alt-right nazi party nativism trump politics culture

shared by Javier E on 04 Jun 17 - No Cached
  • Members of the “alt-right”, a mixed group of racists, nationalists, antisemites and misogynists, understand that many news stories are built on a framework of conflict and outrage, fueled by the power of a shocking image or the lure of a supposedly telling contrast. “The media’s dependence on social media, analytics and metrics, sensationalism, novelty over newsworthiness, and clickbait makes them vulnerable,”
  • People who have had personal run-ins with Heimbach – who have experienced him in action – say the media should not simply ignore his activities. Instead of glamorizing them or portraying them as cartoonish monsters, scrutiny should attempt to reveal their impact.
  • The Kentucky neo-Nazi summit in April attracted about 150 people, about 75 of them members of the Traditionalist Worker party.
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  • Heimbach claims that his party has 600 dues-paying members nationwide. They do not call themselves Nazis. Heimbach said the term Nazi is a slur, and that he draws inspiration from many fascist and national socialist regimes, not just Germany’s.
  • Ryan Lenz, an analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks American hate groups, sees no justification for his argument. It is fair to label Heimbach a Nazi because he is an avowed national socialist, Holocaust denier and antisemite.
  • “In this context, Nazi is not a slur. It’s not an attack. It’s an accurate description,” he said.
  • “Most of these people are malignant contrarians who have a lot of loyalty and trust issues,”
  • Jonathan Munshaw, who covered Heimbach’s early tactics for the Towson student newspaper, said he only ever verified one Towson student who was part of the White Student Union: Heimbach himself. But students on campus truly believed that the group was much bigger, Munshaw said – and they were terrified.
  • At a campus town hall meeting, Evans recalled, Heimbach had said: “I am going to bleed this university white.”
  • “It sent shockwaves through the campus,” Evans said. As a result of Heimbach’s activism, he thought attendance at campus events dropped. People didn’t want to leave their rooms.
  • Evans countered Heimbach’s views publicly – and, as a result, he was featured on white supremacist websites, one of which dubbed him a “black supremacist”.
  • Evans said he had received a death threat at his college graduation, and walked across the stage fearing that he would be shot in front of his mother and his girlfriend.
  • It was the perfect recipe for a television segment: the white supremacist, the black students arguing against him. “It was an easy story,”
  • In interviews and speeches to other neo-Nazis, Heimbach is less circumspect, quoting Goebbels and speaking fondly of Mussolini.
  • Heimbach serves as a lynchpin between the scattered groups of the radical right – the one who can build connections with “the working-class skinhead movement and the upper-class academic racists”, said Lenz, who has been interviewing Heimbach periodically since he graduated from college.
  • His argument, Lenz said, is: we’re all compatriots in nationalism, and therefore we should stand together, whether we believe in the Holocaust or not.
  • Heimbach had only been a white nationalist in college. But supporters of his White Student Union responded by sending him books in the mail that helped shift his views about the Holocaust. “At the end of the day,” he said, “you end up at national socialism.”
  • Lenz said he does not know how Heimbach, who says he is forced to work low-paying jobs, can afford to travel constantly across the country and fly to Europe every year to meet with far-right groups. He said Heimbach had denied having a wealthy patron who funded the trips. Heimbach said he paid for the trips himself, with some contribution from his party
  • By the month before Trump’s election, Heimbach had shifted gears and developed a new message discipline “capable of spinning answers to questions like someone who had spent years in a spin room”
  • Trump was Heimbach’s dream come true. In early 2016, Heimbach had described the presidential candidate as the “gateway drug” to outright white nationalism.
  • “I don’t think I ever even heard him say the word white,” she said. Instead, it was: “‘People are coming in, close the border, and they’re taking our jobs and our communities’ – it was very dog whistle-y.
  • When the protester’s group finally raised their banners toward the end of Trump’s speech, Heimbach’s group immediately rushed them, not just to tear down their anti-Trump banner but also to punch them, several protesters alleged in a lawsuit. The onslaught “was so intense and violent” that the protester, who was in the back, said she was overwhelmed.
  • The protester said Heimbach and his group had insinuated their way into the middle of the crowd, and when a moment of tension arrived they suddenly turned violent, and other men around them mirrored their behavior, shouting, pushing, furious. Trump, from the stage, had called: “Get ’em out!”
  • American neo-Nazis look at Golden Dawn’s rise and take hope. Heimbach has met with far-right nationalists across Europe, he said, including three visits with Golden Dawn over the past three years.
  • Heimbach can put on a show of moderation. He doesn’t think everyone should have to live in a white ethno-state. That’s just his preference. He doesn’t hate other races. He just thinks that black Americans have, on average, a “lower future time orientation”.
  • But Trump’s rise to power has encouraged the extremists to try to bridge their divides. Neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan leaders were jubilant over an openly xenophobic, politically incorrect presidential candidate who promised to stop illegal immigration and enact a Muslim ban – and they have pursued news coverage, attracting headlines and staging dramatic photos
  • He is a Holocaust denier, believing that the systematic murder of 6 million European Jews by the Nazi regime did not happen, that it’s all a “Bolshevik conspiracy”. He has expressed sympathy for the racist killer Dylann Roof and praised white supremacist Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik.
  • Real Christianity, he said, is “patriarchal, homophobic, racist and antisemitic”. He laughed. “I see that as a good thing.”
  • Heimbach lives in Paoli, Indiana, with his wife and son; his fellow party leader, Matt Parrott; and Jason, the young white nationalist who moved from New York City to join him and who now edits his video projects and produces white nationalist music. Three other white families who support their views have moved to Paoli to join them, Heimbach said – two from northern Indiana, one from Virginia. They try to get together weekly for board game nights and home-brewed mead. They play Risk – “of course, the battle of world domination” – and Cards Against Humanity.
  • “My parents didn’t exactly know what I was thinking or up to. I think in modern America, [there are] a tremendous amount of parents who would be horrified and scandalized with what their young sons and daughters are reading on white nationalist forums or reading on the Daily Stormer,” he said.
  • “My folks said that they didn’t raise me like this, that they didn’t approve of this and that I had to make a choice, if I was going to do this or choose my family. And I said to them, this is choosing my family, because I want my siblings and their grandchildren to have a future. They didn’t understand.”
  • Heimbach’s speech was well received. But as the night went on, the divide between the traditional neo-Nazi groups and the new, internet-savvy “alt-right” began to show. The speeches grew so dull, despite the periodic Nazi salutes and chants of white power, that most of the younger extremists melted away into the dark, leaving a smaller and smaller audience to listen to old Nazis drone on.
  • In the political analysis of Trump voters, neo-Nazi advocates like Heimbach and some on the left tend to agree: Trump voters are a white identity movement, motivated to vote for him at least in part by outright racism, a claim Trump supporters vehemently reject.
  • The locals in Pikeville greeted the influx with outrage and shock. Outside a Pikeville tattoo parlor the day before the neo-Nazis were coming to town, a group of local men expressed disgust at the agenda and concern that the event would discourage students of different races from coming to the local university.
  • Both women were increasingly angry that Heimbach had chosen to come to Kentucky to spread his message. “He’s targeting us,” Wooton said, “because he thinks that we’re stupid.” “And he’s wrong about that,” Porter said.
brookegoodman

Industrial Revolution: Definitions, Causes & Inventions - HISTORY - 0 views

www.history.com/...industrial-revolution

history

shared by brookegoodman on 19 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • The Industrial Revolution marked a period of development in the latter half of the 18th century that transformed largely rural, agrarian societies in Europe and America into industrialized, urban ones. 
  • Fueled by the game-changing use of steam power, the Industrial Revolution began in Britain and spread to the rest of the world, including the United States, by the 1830s and ‘40s. Modern historians often refer to this period as the First Industrial Revolution, to set it apart from a second period of industrialization that took place from the late 19th to early 20th centuries and saw rapid advances in the steel, electric and automobile industries. 
  • Starting in the mid-18th century, innovations like the flying shuttle, the spinning jenny, the water frame and the power loom made weaving cloth and spinning yarn and thread much easier. Producing cloth became faster and required less time and far less human labor.
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  • An icon of the Industrial Revolution broke onto the scene in the early 1700s, when Thomas Newcomen designed the prototype for the first modern steam engine. Called the “atmospheric steam engine,” Newcomen’s invention was originally applied to power the machines used to pump water out of mine shafts. 
  • Just as steam engines needed coal, steam power allowed miners to go deeper and extract more of this relatively cheap energy source. The demand for coal skyrocketed throughout the Industrial Revolution and beyond, as it would be needed to run not only the factories used to produce manufactured goods, but also the railroads and steamships used for transporting them.
  • In the early 1800s, Richard Trevithick debuted a steam-powered locomotive, and in 1830 similar locomotives started transporting freight (and passengers) between the industrial hubs of Manchester and Liverpool. By that time, steam-powered boats and ships were already in wide use, carrying goods along Britain’s rivers and canals as well as across the Atlantic.
  • The latter part of the Industrial Revolution also saw key advances in communication methods, as people increasingly saw the need to communicate efficiently over long distances. In 1837, British inventors William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone patented the first commercial telegraphy system, even as Samuel Morse and other inventors worked on their own versions in the United States. Cooke and Wheatstone’s system would be used for railroad signalling, as the speed of the new trains had created a need for more sophisticated means of communication.
  • Though many people in Britain had begun moving to the cities from rural areas before the Industrial Revolution, this process accelerated dramatically with industrialization, as the rise of large factories turned smaller towns into major cities over the span of decades. This rapid urbanization brought significant challenges, as overcrowded cities suffered from pollution, inadequate sanitation and a lack of clean drinking water.
  • The beginning of industrialization in the United States is usually pegged to the opening of a textile mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in 1793 by the recent English immigrant Samuel Slater. Slater had worked at one of the mills opened by Richard Arkwright (inventor of the water frame) mills, and despite laws prohibiting the emigration of textile workers, he brought Arkwright’s designs across the Atlantic. He later built several other cotton mills in New England, and became known as the “Father of the American Industrial Revolution.”
  • By the end of the 19th century, with the so-called Second Industrial Revolution underway, the United States would also transition from a largely agrarian society to an increasingly urbanized one, with all the attendant problems. By the mid-19th century, industrialization was well-established throughout the western part of Europe and America’s northeastern region. By the early 20th century, the U.S. had become the world’s leading industrial nation.
pier-paolo

Industrial Revolution | Definition, History, Dates, Summary, & Facts | Britannica - 0 views

www.britannica.com/...Industrial-Revolution

shared by pier-paolo on 04 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Industrial Revolution, in modern history, the process of change from an agrarian and handicraft economy to one dominated by industry and machine manufacturing.
  • This process began in Britain in the 18th century and from there spread to other parts of the world.
  • The technological changes included the following: (1) the use of new basic materials, chiefly iron and steel, (2) the use of new energy sources, including both fuels and motive power, such as coal, the steam engine, electricity, petroleum, and the internal-combustion engine, (3) the invention of new machines, such as the spinning jenny and the power loom that permitted increased production with a smaller expenditure of human energy,
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  • (4) a new organization of work known as the factory system, which entailed increased division of labour and specialization of function, (5) important developments in transportation and communication, including the steam locomotive, steamship, automobile, airplane, telegraph, and radio, and (6) the increasing application of science to industry.
  • (1) agricultural improvements that made possible the provision of food for a larger nonagricultural population, (2) economic changes that resulted in a wider distribution of wealth, the decline of land as a source of wealth in the face of rising industrial production, and increased international trade,
  • (3) political changes reflecting the shift in economic power, as well as new state policies corresponding to the needs of an industrialized society, (4) sweeping social changes, including the growth of cities, the development of working-class movements, and the emergence of new patterns of authority, and (5) cultural transformations of a broad order. Workers acquired new and distinctive skills, and their relation to their tasks shifted; instead of being craftsmen working with hand tools,
  • or Belgium. While B
  • ritain was establishing its industrial leadership, France was immersed in its Revolution, and the uncertain political situation discouraged large investments in industrial innovations.
Javier E

Eastman Spins Wild Tales Of Jan. 6 As A Trap Sprung By Media And FBI | Talking Points Memo - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...a-trap-sprung-by-media-and-fbi

right-wing lawyer insurrection

shared by Javier E on 28 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • John Eastman is sure having trouble keeping his story straight. A week ago, the ex-Trump legal adviser, whose legal memo laid out a path for Mike Pence to thwart the 2020 Electoral College certification, went to great lengths to downplay and minimize his memo.
  • In new video released Wednesday, Eastman took on a more conspiratorial cast, wildly claiming that the Jan. 6 insurrection was a “setup.”
  • “The Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys had not just wallflowers sitting on the side of the organization, but people instigating within the association, FBI plants,” Eastman told the activists. “It was a setup. And unfortunately our guys walked into the trap.”
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  • In the latest video, Eastman cited a debunked right-wing conspiracy theory that an “antifa guy” had been paid thousands of dollars by CNN to break into the Capitol for footage of the siege. In reality, the FBI Director Chris Wray has said there is no evidence that antifa (a broad term for anti-fascism that isn’t identified as a solid group) was involved in the Capitol attack, nor is there evidence that CNN or any other outlet paid anyone to ransack the Capitol.
  • The undercover activists Eastman spoke to came from The Undercurrent. They had also filmed the lawyer bragging about the memo at the same event despite him publicly insisting that he thought the legal reasoning in the document was bunk.
grayton downing

North Korea Puts Bright Face on China Visit, Despite Tensions - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...north-korea-china.html

north korea china us

shared by grayton downing on 25 May 13 - No Cached
  • North Korea gave a positive spin Saturday to the visit of its special envoy to China but made no mention of China’s push for the North to resume negotiations
  • Vice Marshal Choe Ryong-hae, was at odds with portrayals in China’s state-run media,
  • Kim Jong-un, whose belligerent behavior has annoyed China, sent a personal letter to Mr. Xi that referred to the deep friendship between the two allies that “cannot be exchanged for anything.”
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  • In the wake of the visit, China might make some humanitarian gestures, like increasing food aid
Javier E

Devoted to Politics, MSNBC Slips on Breaking News - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...bc-slips-on-breaking-news.html

news television bias

shared by Javier E on 03 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • breaking news is not really what MSNBC does. “We’re not the place for that,” said Phil Griffin, the channel’s president, in reference to covering breaking events as CNN does. “Our brand is not that.”
  • MSNBC began to commit itself to presenting a liberal spin on political coverage in the middle of the last decade, partly because it had not found success in previous models (like trying to be a news channel for younger viewers) and mostly because it had one host, Keith Olbermann, whose ratings were exploding based on his outspoken criticisms of the Bush administration and the conservative voices on Fox News.
  • CNN has never made ideologically impassioned shows the basis of its appeal. Instead, it has thrived when its potent brand identity, the channel for breaking news, has come into play.
draneka

Pro-Lifers Are Going to the Women's March on Washington - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...513104

shared by draneka on 16 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • These Pro-Lifers Are Headed to the Women’s March on Washington
  • Perhaps the Women’s March on Washington is a sign that feminism is changing, too, ever so slightly: a first gathering of a truly “intersectional” movement which makes room for women with diverse convictions, including a moral opposition to abortion.
  • Some pro-lifers say they’ll protest. A delegation from Students for Life of America will be there to march against the influence of “the abortion industry” in the women’s movement
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  • Many pro-life women felt just as outraged as pro-choice women about Donald Trump’s conduct and comments, including the revelation that he once bragged about groping women without their permission.
  • the organizers say pro-lifers will be welcome to march on January 21st.
  • With roughly a week to go before the march, organizers also released a set of “unity principles,” and one of them is “open access to safe, legal, affordable abortion and birth control for all people.”
  • Destiny Herndon-De La Rosa, the Texas-based president of a group called New Wave Feminists. “I get that he applied this pro-life label, but I don’t know very many people who genuinely believe he’s pro-life.”
  • A small group of marchers associated with the pro-life publication Life Matters Journal will be there to support “this actual affirmation of peace and human rights, not just for women, but for all people of any or no gender, ethnicity, religion, immigration status, age, or disability,
  • Some groups seem more interested in spinning up controversy than actually participating, though. Students for Life of America has invited hundreds of women to attend on Facebook, proclaiming that “we will not sit by as Planned Parenthood, our nation’s abortion Goliath and a sponsor of this march, betrays women into thinking abortion is their only choice.”
  • The Women’s March, in all its grassroots chaos, might be a feminist space where they’re actually welcome—or, at least, where they can inconspicuously march along with everyone else
Javier E

Covering politics in a "post-truth" America | Brookings Institution - 0 views

www.brookings.edu/...litics-in-a-post-truth-america

post-truth politics journalism media fake news crisis culture

shared by Javier E on 10 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • The media scandal of 2016 isn’t so much about what reporters failed to tell the American public; it’s about what they did report on, and the fact that it didn’t seem to matter.
  • Facebook and Snapchat and the other social media sites should rightfully be doing a lot of soul-searching about their role as the most efficient distribution network for conspiracy theories, hatred, and outright falsehoods ever invented.
  • I’ve been obsessively looking back over our coverage, too, trying to figure out what we missed along the way to the upset of the century
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  • (An early conclusion: while we were late to understand how angry white voters were, a perhaps even more serious lapse was in failing to recognize how many disaffected Democrats there were who would stay home rather than support their party’s flawed candidate.)
  • Stories that would have killed any other politician—truly worrisome revelations about everything from the federal taxes Trump dodged to the charitable donations he lied about, the women he insulted and allegedly assaulted, and the mob ties that have long dogged him—did not stop Trump from thriving in this election year
  • the Oxford Dictionaries announced that “post-truth” had been chosen as the 2016 word of the year, defining it as a condition “in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”
  • Meantime, Trump personally blacklisted news organizations like Politico and The Washington Post when they published articles he didn’t like during the campaign, has openly mused about rolling back press freedoms enshrined by the U.S. Supreme Court, and has now named Stephen Bannon, until recently the executive chairman of Breitbart—a right-wing fringe website with a penchant for conspiracy theories and anti-Semitic tropes—to serve as one of his top White House advisers.
  • none of this has any modern precedent. And what makes it unique has nothing to do with the outcome of the election. This time, the victor was a right-wing demagogue; next time, it may be a left-wing populist who learns the lessons of Trump’s win.
  • This is no mere academic argument. The election of 2016 showed us that Americans are increasingly choosing to live in a cloud of like-minded spin, surrounded by the partisan political hackery and fake news that poisons their Facebook feeds.
  • To help us understand it all, there were choices, but not that many: three TV networks that mattered, ABC, CBS, and NBC; two papers for serious journalism, The New York Times and The Washington Post; and two giant-circulation weekly newsmagazines, Time and Newsweek. That, plus whatever was your local daily newspaper, pretty much constituted the news.
  • Whether it was Walter Cronkite or The New York Times, they preached journalistic “objectivity” and spoke with authority when they pronounced on the day’s developments—but not always with the depth and expertise that real competition or deep specialization might have provided. They were great—but they were generalists.
  • Eventually, I came to think of the major media outlets of that era as something very similar to the big suburban shopping malls we flocked to in the age of shoulder pads and supply-side economics: We could choose among Kmart and Macy’s and Saks Fifth Avenue as our budgets and tastes allowed, but in the end the media were all essentially department stores, selling us sports and stock tables and foreign news alongside our politics, whether we wanted them or not. It may not have been a monopoly, but it was something pretty close.
  • This was still journalism in the scarcity era, and it affected everything from what stories we wrote to how fast we could produce them. Presidents could launch global thermonuclear war with the Russians in a matter of minutes, but news from the American hinterlands often took weeks to reach their sleepy capital. Even information within that capital was virtually unobtainable without a major investment of time and effort. Want to know how much a campaign was raising and spending from the new special-interest PACs that had proliferated? Prepare to spend a day holed up at the Federal Election Commission’s headquarters down on E Street across from the hulking concrete FBI building, and be sure to bring a bunch of quarters for the copy machine.
  • I am writing this in the immediate, shocking aftermath of a 2016 presidential election in which the Pew Research Center found that a higher percentage of Americans got their information about the campaign from late-night TV comedy shows than from a national newspaper. Don Graham sold the Post three years ago and though its online audience has been skyrocketing with new investments from Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, it will never be what it was in the ‘80s. That same Pew survey reported that a mere 2 percent of Americans today turned to such newspapers as the “most helpful” guides to the presidential campaign.
  • In 2013, Mark Leibovich wrote a bestselling book called This Town about the party-hopping, lobbyist-enabling nexus between Washington journalists and the political world they cover. A key character was Politico’s Mike Allen, whose morning email newsletter “Playbook” had become a Washington ritual, offering all the news and tidbits a power player might want to read before breakfast—and Politico’s most successful ad franchise to boot. In many ways, even that world of just a few years ago now seems quaint: the notion that anyone could be a single, once-a-day town crier in This Town (or any other) has been utterly exploded by the move to Twitter, Facebook, and all the rest. We are living, as Mark put it to me recently, “in a 24-hour scrolling version of what ‘Playbook’ was.”
  • These days, Politico has a newsroom of 200-odd journalists, a glossy award-winning magazine, dozens of daily email newsletters, and 16 subscription policy verticals. It’s a major player in coverage not only of Capitol Hill but many other key parts of the capital, and some months during this election year we had well over 30 million unique visitors to our website, a far cry from the controlled congressional circulation of 35,000 that I remember Roll Call touting in our long-ago sales materials.
  • I remained convinced that reporting would hold its value, especially as our other advantages—like access to information and the expensive means to distribute it—dwindled. It was all well and good to root for your political team, but when it mattered to your business (or the country, for that matter), I reasoned, you wouldn’t want cheerleading but real reporting about real facts. Besides, the new tools might be coming at us with dizzying speed—remember when that radical new video app Meerkat was going to change absolutely everything about how we cover elections?—but we would still need reporters to find a way inside Washington’s closed doors and back rooms, to figure out what was happening when the cameras weren’t rolling.
  • And if the world was suffering from information overload—well, so much the better for us editors; we would be all the more needed to figure out what to listen to amid the noise.
  • Trump turned out to be more correct than we editors were: the more relevant point of the Access Hollywood tape was not about the censure Trump would now face but the political reality that he, like Bill Clinton, could survive this—or perhaps any scandal. Yes, we were wrong about the Access Hollywood tape, and so much else.
  • Fake news is thriving In the final three months of the presidential campaign, the 20 top-performing fake election news stories generated more engagement on Facebook than the top stories from major news outlets such as The New York Times.
  • , we journalists were still able to cover the public theater of politics while spending more of our time, resources, and mental energy on really original reporting, on digging up stories you couldn’t read anywhere else. Between Trump’s long and checkered business past, his habit of serial lying, his voluminous and contradictory tweets, and his revision of even his own biography, there was lots to work with. No one can say that Trump was elected without the press telling us all about his checkered past.
  • politics was NEVER more choose-your-own-adventure than in 2016, when entire news ecosystems for partisans existed wholly outside the reach of those who at least aim for truth
  • Pew found that nearly 50 percent of self-described conservatives now rely on a single news source, Fox, for political information they trust.
  • As for the liberals, they trust only that they should never watch Fox, and have MSNBC and Media Matters and the remnants of the big boys to confirm their biases.
  • And then there are the conspiracy-peddling Breitbarts and the overtly fake-news outlets of this overwhelming new world; untethered from even the pretense of fact-based reporting, their version of the campaign got more traffic on Facebook in the race’s final weeks than all the traditional news outlets combined.
  • When we assigned a team of reporters at Politico during the primary season to listen to every single word of Trump’s speeches, we found that he offered a lie, half-truth, or outright exaggeration approximately once every five minutes—for an entire week. And it didn’t hinder him in the least from winning the Republican presidential nomination.
  • when we repeated the exercise this fall, in the midst of the general election campaign, Trump had progressed to fibs of various magnitudes just about once every three minutes!
  • By the time Trump in September issued his half-hearted disavowal of the Obama “birther” whopper he had done so much to create and perpetuate, one national survey found that only 1 in 4 Republicans was sure that Obama was born in the U.S., and various polls found that somewhere between a quarter and a half of Republicans believed he’s Muslim. So not only did Trump think he was entitled to his own facts, so did his supporters. It didn’t stop them at all from voting for him.
  • in part, it’s not just because they disagree with the facts as reporters have presented them but because there’s so damn many reporters, and from such a wide array of outlets, that it’s often impossible to evaluate their standards and practices, biases and preconceptions. Even we journalists are increasingly overwhelmed.
  • 2016 suggests a different outcome: We’ve achieved a lot more transparency in today’s Washington—without the accountability that was supposed to come with it.
  • So much terrific reporting and writing and digging over the years and … Trump? What happened to consequences? Reporting that matters? Sunlight, they used to tell us, was the best disinfectant for what ails our politics.
Javier E

Republicans have more excuses than scruples - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ave-more-excuses-than-scruples

GOP politics trump

shared by Javier E on 26 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • , the reaction of the vast majority of Republicans is to hide or spin for Trump
  • The excuses for not objecting when he does egregious things include (these are real examples uttered by one or more Republicans on the Hill, operatives, advisers, etc.):
  • He’s not president yet.
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  • Maybe he’ll do the right thing (e.g. divest)
  • But we need to get tax reform and repeal Obamacare
  • If we criticize, he won’t listen to us later.
  • He doesn’t mean what he says.
  • He’s not going to get involved in specifics anyway
  • He’s hiring good people.
  • We cannot do anything.
  • We find Trump’s post-election behavior to be entirely predictable — not normal or acceptable, but inevitable given his personality and temperamental and intellectual shortcomings.
  • Republicans’ capitulation is far quicker and more complete than we imagined, we admit. Chalk it up to fear of Trump and his voters, to the unquenchable thirst for influence and power and to humans’ ability to convince themselves of practically anything.
  • one can only cringe at conservative “leaders” prostrating themselves before Trump. House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), with unctuousness approaching Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) levels, exclaimed: “I’m impressed with how Donald Trump handles himself. I’m impressed with how magnanimous he is. I’m impressed with just his demeanor, his temperament.”
  • giving an ovation to highly problematic nominees such as Rex W. Tillerson, Goldman Sachs tycoons or an erratic personality such as Flynn or hiding under the covers while Trump tramples on the Constitution does the country a disservice and does not help Trump to improve his powers of discernment.
  • The public is much more discriminating. According to a Politico/Morning Consult poll, for example, 79 percent think it is very or somewhat important for Trump to remove himself from business operations and by a 45 to 27 percent margin they think he should sell off all or some of his businesses. By a 60 to 21 percent margin they think he shouldn’t have business interests or holdings in foreign countries. In other words, there is no public pressure to discard all independent judgment in deference to the president-elect.
Javier E

All the excuses Republicans make for Donald Trump's racism. - 1 views

www.slate.com/...for_donald_trump_s_racism.html

gop trump conservatism crisis

shared by Javier E on 11 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • When you add up these excuses, what you see is a party full of lawyers and spin doctors defending the indefensible. They’re not rationalizing racism. What they’re rationalizing is holding their party together even if that means supporting a racist.
  • To protect this man, Republicans have discarded every principle. The party of conservatism celebrates disruption. Absolutists who insist that their presidential nominee treat the unborn as equals require no such commitment to Mexican Americans. Moralists who spent the Clinton administration preaching about character treat persistent race baiting as a matter of communications strategy. Some Republicans discount Trump’s slurs as old news while others discount them because he’s a nice man who otherwise never talks that way.
  • Party leaders agonize over the nominee’s commitment to entitlement cuts but treat racism as a detail. Politicians who brag about saying “radical Islamic terrorist” get cute about the meaning of “racist.” The chairman of the committee investigating Hillary Clinton becomes a permissive subjectivist. A senator who ran for president opposing his own immigration bill develops a deep commitment to his promise to support Trump. The Senate leader who set out to thwart a newly elected president in 2009 suddenly preaches the primacy of the people’s will.
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  • In the end, it’s about power and priorities. In today’s GOP, it’s more important to keep Merrick Garland off the Supreme Court than it is to protect the country from a president who would ban Muslims. It’s better to elect a man who targets federal judges based on ethnicity than to elect a woman who gave paid speeches to Wall Street. It’s better to stand with David Duke’s candidate than to divide “the right-of-center world.” The party of Lincoln has become the party that just wants to win.
Javier E

What It Was Like to Compete Against Roger Ailes and Fox News - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-roger-ailes-and-fox-news.html

media news fox news culture truth politics

shared by Javier E on 23 Jul 16 - No Cached
  • Mr. Ailes would pick one or two “hot” stories, add numerous live guests and stick to that story throughout the day.
  • Many cable viewers, it turned out, were not interested in television news’s bread and butter — a diverse newscast of multiple dispassionate stories — no matter how important. Despite what they might tell pollsters, viewers were clearly looking for a great yarn, and Mr. Ailes knew how to spin one.
  • Mr. Ailes was equally adept at knowing what not to cover. It was around this time that the American public was becoming increasingly disillusioned, even despondent over the war in Iraq. So while MSNBC and CNN were focusing on the challenges and failures of the war, Fox covered the story far less often, and when they did so, in a far more sanguine way, highlighting successes from the field.
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  • That was both political and practical. Political because obviously they didn’t want to be seen as piling on President George W. Bush; practical because it wasn’t nearly as depressing.
  • Just as important, Mr. Ailes encouraged his hosts to let their personalities and patriotism show through in their coverage. “I” was a typical refrain. “We” and “us” often referred to the United States (something that most mainstream media entities dropped during the 1960s).
  • Media critics, amateur and professional, could, and did, assail him and his on-air talent, especially Bill O’Reilly. In response, Fox News would simply ignore them or hit back harder, on the air or through its relentless public relations department. There were no objective norms, no establishment rules, no journalistic sanctity. Just Roger’s rules.
  • even today, every cable network is, in many ways, a Roger Ailes production. The search for hosts with “something to say,” the talking heads, the talking head butting, the over-the-top breaking news graphics, the invocations of “America,” the saturation coverage of events — all of it was either created or fully exploited by Fox News.
Javier E

The Great Divorce - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...brooks-the-great-divorce.html

class US upper class lower-class trends cultural conservative

shared by Javier E on 01 Feb 12 - Cached
  • His story starts in 1963. There was a gap between rich and poor then, but it wasn’t that big.
  • Since then,
  • America has polarized. The word “class” doesn’t even capture the divide Murray describes. You might say the country has bifurcated into different social tribes, with a tenuous common culture linking them.
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  • Roughly 7 percent of the white kids in the upper tribe are born out of wedlock, compared with roughly 45 percent of the kids in the lower tribe. In the upper tribe, nearly every man aged 30 to 49 is in the labor force. In the lower tribe, men in their prime working ages have been steadily dropping out of the labor force, in good times and bad. People in the lower tribe are much less likely to get married, less likely to go to church, less likely to be active in their communities, more likely to watch TV excessively, more likely to be obese.
  • anonymous on 01 Feb 12
     
    "The truth is, members of the upper tribe have made themselves phenomenally productive. They may mimic bohemian manners, but they have returned to 1950s traditionalist values and practices. They have low divorce rates, arduous work ethics and strict codes to regulate their kids. Members of the lower tribe work hard and dream big, but are more removed from traditional bourgeois norms. They live in disorganized, postmodern neighborhoods in which it is much harder to be self-disciplined and productive" (Haner). A gripping fresh look on the classes of today. I enjoyed reading about this spin on the topic of cultural corruption on behalf of the socially elite. I also liked how Haner brought up the time-old conflicting views of Democrats and Republicans. Haner is able to easily criticize both sides- unlike most of us, as we tend to automatically focus our energy on the recycled ideas of past party members.
Javier E

The Great Disconnect - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-great-disconnect.html

conservativism Obama Wilsonian progressive historical

shared by Javier E on 28 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • A sense of proportion, once the conservative virtue, is considered treasonous on the right today
  • how large a stake conservatives have in convincing themselves and voters that Reagan failed. Think about it: if they conceded ideological victory they would have to confront the more prosaic reasons that entitlements, deficits and regulations continue to grow in Republican and Democratic administrations alike. They would be forced to devise a new, forward-looking agenda to benefit even their own constituencies, like ensuring that American business can draw on an educated, healthy work force; can rely on modern public infrastructure; and can count on stable, transparent financial markets. And they would have to articulate a conservative vision for those welfare state programs that are likely to remain with us, like disability insurance, food stamps and Head Start.
  • Conservatives have always been great storytellers; it is their fatal weakness. They love casting their eyes back to the past to avoid seeing what lies right under their noses. The story always involves some expulsion from Eden, whether by the hippies of the 1960s, or the suffragists, or the wretched refuse of the shtetls, or the French Revolution, or the Enlightenment, or Luther, or Machiavelli or the sack of Rome.
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  • For some years now the Claremont Institute has been promoting the idea that Wilson was a kind of double agent, whipping the Huns in World War I while surreptitiously introducing the Hegelian bacillus into the American water supply and turning us into zombie-slaves of an elite-run progressivist State.
  • Yes, the hydra-headed Progressive movement, resisting varied but real economic threats to democratic self-­government, did extend the jurisprudential limits of government activity in ways that were wise and sometimes not so wise. Yes, the New Deal did convince Americans that citizens are not road kill and that government can legitimately protect public welfare and basic human dignity. And yes, the Great Society’s liberal architects vastly overreached and overpromised, destroying the public’s confidence in active government and threatening the solid achievements of the New Deal and the Progressive Era.
  • Reagan did in fact restore (then overinflate) America’s self-confidence, and he did bequeath to Republicans a clear ideological alternative to Progressivism. But he also transformed American liberalism. As an author named Barack Obama once wrote, Reagan “put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it.” By delegitimizing Great Society liberalism and emphasizing growth, he forced the Democratic Party back toward the center, making the more moderate presidencies of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama possible. Reagan won the war of ideas, as everyone knows. Except conservatives.
  • Conservatives need a psychological specialist, someone at the level of the great Jewish sage and sometime physician Maimonides. In the late 12th century Maimonides received a letter from a group of rabbis in Marseille who had worked themselves into a frenzy over astrological predictions of the End Times. His prescription — I translate loosely from the Hebrew — was, Get a grip!
  • the right’s rage against Obama, which has seeped out into the general public, has very little to do with anything the president has or hasn’t done. It’s really directed against the historical process they believe has made America what it is today. The conservative mind, a repository of fresh ideas just two decades ago, is now little more than a click-click slide projector holding a tray of apocalyptic images of modern life that keeps spinning around, raising the viewer’s fever with every rotation.
  • the conservatives have also spooked themselves. They now really believe the apocalyptic tale they’ve spun, and have placed mild-mannered Barack Obama at the center of it.
  • Kesler admits that “Obama is at pains to be, and to be seen as, a strong family man, a responsible husband and father urging responsibility on others, a patriot, a model of pre-’60s, subliminally anti-’60s, sobriety.” But that’s just a disguise. In fact, he’s the “latest embodiment of the visionary prophet-statesman” of the Progressives, someone who “sees himself engaged in an epic struggle” whose success will mean “the Swedenization of America.”
  • what is Kesler’s evidence for these extravagant claims? He hasn’t any. Early in the book he writes that Obama came to office planning “bold, systemic changes to energy policy, environmental regulation, taxation, foreign policy” — though he never describes these plans and in fact never mentions them again. He carefully avoids Obama’s moderate record
  • By now conservative intellectuals and media hacks have realized that it’s much easier to run a permanent counterrevolution out of their plush think-tank offices and television studios than to reflect seriously, do homework and cut a deal. All they have to do is spook their troops into believing that the Progressive Idea is still on the march and that they are setting out to meet it at Armageddon.
  • more than a few of our fellow citizens are loathing themselves blind over Barack Obama. Why?
  • Whenever conservatives talk to me about Barack Obama, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else. But what exactly? The anger, the suspicion, the freestyle fantasizing have no perceptible object in the space-time continuum that centrist Democrats like me inhabit. What are we missing? Seen from our perspective, the country elected a moderate and cautious straight shooter committed to getting things right and giving the United States its self-­respect back after the Bush-Cheney years.
  • Kesler’s history of Progressivism doesn’t involve real public figures making real choices about real policies under real constraints in real time. It follows the determined historical journey of the Progressive Idea in words, from the New Freedom platform of Wilson’s first campaign, down through the New Deal speeches of Franklin Roosevelt (who spoke German as a child), then to Lyndon Johnson’s announcements of the War on Poverty and the Great Society. Once that rhetorical lineage is established, he then tries to show how the Idea spread out into American culture at large, bringing with it existentialist self-absorption, moral relativism and passivity in the face of the new administrative state, so that by the midcentury we nearly became Europeans (only fatter)
Javier E

Pressure Builds to Finish Volcker Rule on Wall St. Oversight - NYTimes.com - 0 views

dealbook.nytimes.com/...cker-rule-on-wall-st-oversight

Wall Street regulation

shared by Javier E on 18 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • rom the outset, the Volcker Rule was the product of compromise. The Obama administration declined to favor legislation forcing banks to spin off their turbulent Wall Street operations from their deposit-taking businesses. At the same time, it did not want regulated banks, which enjoy deposit insurance and other forms of government support, trading for their own profit. That business, known as proprietary trading, had long been a lucrative, albeit risky, business for Wall Street banks.
  • Paul A. Volcker, a former chairman of the Federal Reserve who served as an adviser to President Obama, urged that Dodd-Frank outlaw proprietary trading. And over the objections of Wall Street, the administration inserted into Dodd-Frank what became known as the Volcker Rule.
  • The rule, however, does not ban types of trading that are thought to be part of a bank’s basic business. Banks can still buy stocks and bonds for their clients — a practice called market making — and place trades that are meant to hedge their risks.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • For regulators, the headache comes with finding practical ways to distinguish proprietary trading from the more legitimate practices. If they wrote the exemptions for market making and hedging too loosely, the banks might find loopholes. If they made them too strict, banks might not be able to engage in activities that Congress had said were permissible.
  • The final version is expected to contain a provision that requires bank chief executives to attest that they are not doing proprietary trading, officials say,  a victory for the rule’s supporters. The tougher version of this provision would have a chief executive make this certification in the bank’s public securities filings, which are audited and are expected to have a high degree of accuracy. A more modest version would have the executive attest to a bank’s board of directors.
  • The Volcker Rule also addresses traders’ compensation. The final wording is likely to require that traders engaged in market making and hedging not be paid on the basis of simply how much money their units made. Instead, the risks involved in taking positions would also have to be considered.
  • ince the Volcker Rule was first proposed in 2011, regulators have had to contend with a fierce lobbying campaign by the banks. But that effort lost momentum last year, after JPMorgan’s trading debacle revealed that its traders were placing enormous speculative bets under the guise of hedging.
Javier E

The Rise of the Drone Master: Pop Culture Recasts Obama - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ities-of-obama-presidency.html

obama presidency morality culture arts

shared by Javier E on 30 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • the most common artistic themes revolve around the surveillance and privacy issues.
  • “Where you have a black president but deeply racist policies are continuing like in the prison population, you have a lot of artists who are deeply interested in these contradictions,”
  • . Artists have focused particularly on the N.S.A. spying revelations disclosed by Edward J. Snowden and the president’s “kill list” of terrorists targeted by drones.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • a virtual arts festival of films, books, plays, comics, television shows and paintings have been using as their underlying narratives the sometimes grim reality of Mr. Obama’s presidency.
Javier E

How Ted Cruz Gave Away The GOP's Muslim Strategy - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...d-cruz-ben-carson-muslim-obama

politics obama muslim election 2016

shared by Javier E on 23 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • both Carson and now Cruz are referencing the widespread belief amongst conservatives that Obama is secretly a Muslim but is concealing his true beliefs for nefarious reasons, possibly to impose sharia law on the nation. (Any day now.) The last public poll on this belief showed that 86 percent of Republicans are warm to it, with 54 percent believing that Obama is a Muslim and 32 percent saying they are unsure. Only 14 percent of Republicans correctly describe Obama’s religion as Christian.
  • In other words, the belief that Obama is a Muslim is an entrenched “fact” on the right, much like the belief that global warming is a hoax or Planned Parenthood is a for-profit company that makes its money selling fetal parts. Carson and Cruz aren’t really talking about a hypothetical Muslim president in some future world. This is all a coded way to talk about Obama.
  • No one is going to come right out and accuse Obama of being a foreign invader—or maybe just a secret Muslim—who comes to ruin Mom and apple pie, because they want to be taken seriously by the mainstream media. So they just talk in coded language
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  • This sort of thing also happens to send liberals spinning, since there’s no good way to respond. If you point out that this is just a new way to propagate the lie that Obama is a secret Muslim, you fear giving credence to the idea that there’s anything wrong with being a Muslim in the first place. But if you start by arguing that the anti-Muslim-in-office position is bigoted and unconstitutional, you fear reinforcing the idea that Obama is, indeed, a secret Muslim. After all, why are we debating this thing if it’s not an imminent issue in the real world?
Javier E

Recent Elections Missed the Biggest Challenge of All - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-world-is-fast.html

politics US crisis globalization climate change automation culture

shared by Javier E on 06 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • What would we have discussed if we’d had a serious election? How about the biggest challenge we’re facing today: The resilience of our workers, environment and institutions.
  • Because: The world is fast. The three biggest forces on the planet — the market, Mother Nature and Moore’s Law — are all surging, really fast, at the same time.
  • Moore’s Law, the theory that the speed and power of microchips will double every two years, is, as Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson posit in their book, “The Second Machine Age,” so relentlessly increasing the power of software, computers and robots that they’re now replacing many more traditional white- and blue-collar jobs, while spinning off new ones
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The market, i.e., globalization, is tying economies more tightly together than ever before, making our workers, investors and markets much more interdependent and exposed to global trends, without walls to protect them.
  • the rapid growth of carbon in our atmosphere and environmental degradation and deforestation because of population growth on earth — the only home we have — are destabilizing Mother Nature’s ecosystems faster.
  • n sum, we’re in the middle of three “climate changes” at once: one digital, one ecological, one geo-economical. That’s why strong states are being stressed, weak ones are blowing up and Americans are feeling anxious that no one has a quick fix to ease their anxiety. And they’re right.
  • The only fix involves big, hard things that can only be built together over time: resilient infrastructure, affordable health care, more start-ups and lifelong learning opportunities for new jobs, immigration policies that attract talent, sustainable environments, manageable debt and governing institutions adapted to the new speed.
  • we’re not going to respond to the big global issues until they hit the economy. It’s hard to imagine a stronger example than a city of 20 million people running out of water. Yet despite the clear threat, the main response is ‘we hope it rains.’ Why such denial? Because the implications of acceptance are so significant, and we know in our hearts there’s no going back once you end denial. It would demand that the country face up to the urgency of reversing rather than slowing deforestation” and “the need to prepare the country for the risks that a changing climate presents.”
jlessner

Iran Agrees to Nuclear Limits, but Key Issues Are Unresolved - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...iran-nuclear-talks.html

iran limits politics US history policy obama

shared by jlessner on 02 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • Iran and European nations said here tonight that they had reached a surprisingly specific and comprehensive general understanding about next steps in limiting Tehran’s nuclear program, but officials said that some important issues needed to be resolved before a final agreement in June that would allow the Obama administration to assert it has cut off all of Iran’s pathways to a nuclear weapon.
  • According to European officials, roughly 5,000 centrifuges will remain spinning enriched uranium at the main nuclear site at Natanz, about half the number currently running.
Javier E

Palin wasn't "drunk" and her Trump speech wasn't "stupid": She's playing right into the... - 0 views

www.salon.com/...of_twisted_republican_politics

discourse argumentation speech rhetoric populism culture logic evidence

shared by Javier E on 22 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Traditionally, a political speech is an argument. It has a thesis, which is backed up with examples and organized in a coherent structure so that it has, or at least feels like it has, a logical flow to it
  • Palin isn’t trying to make an argument. That’s not her strong suit, and that’s not what audiences want from her. Her speech was more impressionistic than argumentative. She was there to push buttons and arouse passions, not get people thinking.
  • Palin understands, probably better than anyone besides Donald Trump, how thinking is the enemy of the conservative populist mission. What she wants is to make you feel, to have those feelings of bitterness and misplaced entitlement wash over the crowds until they are screaming for more blood. In this, she succeeded.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Palin understands what other Republicans are just beginning to get, which is that the conservative base is an audience that is post-argument. Conservatism of the 21st century is an ideology built on sand. Its arguments fall apart upon the briefest of examination and the supposed “evidence” for their beliefs are mostly lies and self-delusions.
  • Sticking with the argument and evidence-based structure in the era of climate change denialism and creationism is a fool’s game and Palin knows it. Better instead to focus strictly on emotions and tribal identity, eschewing not just argument but even structuring your speeches to resemble arguments.
  • other Republicans are quickly following on her heels. During the sixth Republican debate, for instance, there was a noticeable scramble away from trying to make actual policy claims and promises, especially with regards to foreign policy, and an embrace of this content-free imagistic language.
  • Cruz riles people up, because riling people up is good, because they enjoy being riled up, and Obama fails at the task of riling you up (because he doesn’t want to rile you up over a non-issue like this, of course).
  • To be clear, emotion is not always or even usually the enemy of logic. In the traditional political speech, audiences are encouraged to tie their emotions to argument. You are angry, here is the solution. You want hope, these policies will provide it
  • But Palin, by eliding the argument-based structure of traditional speeches, is getting past this altogether. Anger is turned into hate is turned into more anger, until it spins off, completely unmoored from any considerations like “why” or “how.” Her innovation helps Republicans get over the logic and evidence problems that plague them. And so we can expect her methods to become more, not less prevalent over time.
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