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anniina03

Ocean Explorers Made History Far Before Christopher Columbus | Time - 0 views

time.com/...an-exploration-beyond-columbus

culture history economics

shared by anniina03 on 23 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • One of humanity’s greatest achievements has been mastering routes across the world’s oceans.
  • Customs have been decisively altered by the movement of ships across the oceans. No one drank tea in medieval Europe, but once contact had been made with the tea-drinking Chinese, tea became the obsession of millions of people from Sweden to the United States
  • We tend to think that the opening of the oceans was the work of the great explorers, especially the 15th century pioneers who edged their way through uncharted waters to southern Africa, the Indian Ocean and the spice lands of the Indies. These were sailors such as Christopher Columbus, who chanced upon unsuspected lands that blocked the expected sea route from Europe to China and Japan. But while these men did give the Age of Discovery its name, they didn’t start the exploration of the world’s oceans
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  • Already around 2500 BC, merchants were setting out from what is now Iraq, the seat of the ancient Sumerian civilization, carrying silver ingots to India
  • En route, they acquired copper from Oman and brought precious objects such as carnelian and lapis lazuli from India. Accumulating and re-investing profits, they were the first capitalists. The Indian Ocean became one of the great channels of trade between nations. Greek merchants from Egypt exploited the monsoon winds to ensure a swift passage to south India.
  • The Chinese emperors tended to discourage uncontrolled trade, though prohibitions often did more to provoke traders into finding ways around the rules. Early compasses were used for feng shui, not navigation. But in the 12th century AD, when the coasts of China were open to the world, Hangzhou was at the peak of its prosperity.
  • in the open Pacific, hundreds of scattered islands from Hawaii to Easter Island were settled over many centuries — the Polynesians only reached New Zealand around AD 1300. Even without written records, the Polynesians transmitted exact knowledge of how to sail these apparently boundless waters from generation to generation.
  • By 1500 AD, the Portuguese had begun to show interest in what the Atlantic might offer. That interest had resulted in the settlement of uninhabited islands including Madeira, which began to export phenomenal quantities of sugar.
  • When European sailors — from Portugal, Spain, Holland, England, Denmark and France — entered the Pacific and the Indian Ocean starting in the 16th century, they found a lively maritime world that they could never truly dominate. They still depended on the resources and supply lines of the inhabitants of the lands they visited, even as they created routes across the entire globe
  • Since then, the oceans have only continued to tie the world together — most dramatically when new routes were literally carved out, with the building of the Suez Canal in the 19th century and the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914. The first goods to pass through the Panama Canal consisted of a cargo of tinned pineapples from Hawaii. The Pacific and the Atlantic were more closely tied together than ever before.
  • In the 21st century, however, new factors have changed entirely the way goods are carried across the seas, even though over 90% of world trade is carried on ships
  • Business is conducted on a scale that utterly dwarfs that of even 20 years ago, transforming a familiar world. And yet, through trade and cultural exchange, the seas continue to connect even the most distant lands.
Javier E

'Think of your family': China threatens European citizens over Xinjiang protests | Worl... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...itizens-over-xinjiang-protests

china xinjiang repression

shared by Javier E on 17 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • In interviews with more than two dozen Uighurs living across Europe and the United States, tales of threats across the world are the rule, not the exception. Uighurs living in Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, and France all complained of similar threats against family members back in Xinjiang, and some were asked to spy for China.
  • Emet, originally from Aksu in Xinjiang, has lived in Germany for over two decades and is a naturalised citizen. He does volunteer work for the World Uyghur Congress and is a part-time imam in his community. He has never told his family about his activism, hoping the omission would protect them.
  • Beyond discouraging activism, Chinese officials have also tried to recruit Uighurs living abroad to spy on others in their community, asking for photos of private gatherings, names, phone numbers, addresses and licence plate numbers. Some are recruited when they go to Chinese diplomatic missions in Europe to request documents, and others are contacted by security agents over WeChat, a popular Chinese messaging app. Emet’s number is likely to have been leaked to Chinese security agents this way
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  • “The biggest mistake European Union countries make is that once they allow China to get away with something, that emboldens Beijing,” he said. “China has systematic strategies in place and the threats to Uighurs in exile show that. Europe needs its own unified strategy to stand up to China and respond to these threats.”
Javier E

Opinion | Liberals Do Not Want to Destroy the Family - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...barr-liberals-family.html

liberalism conservatism despair anomie values crisis culture politics

shared by Javier E on 28 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • It is critical to bear in mind that the U.S. has a less generous social safety net than almost all of the other advanced countries to which we compare ourselves: Canada, the UK, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, etc. And yet we have higher rates of nonwork among prime-age men and women, and much worse socio-demographic outcomes: family stability, investment in children, educational attainment, life expectancy, rates of violent death, etc. It defies logic to assert that the relatively stingy U.S. social safety net has somehow lured the U.S. public into licentiousness and social decline whereas the much more comprehensive social safety nets in other wealthy democracies has failed to do so.
  • The white working class constituency that would seem to be most immune to the appeal of the cultural left — the very constituency that has moved more decisively than any other to the right — is now succumbing to the centrifugal, even anarchic, forces denounced by Barr and other social conservatives, while more liberal constituencies are moving in the opposite, more socially coherent, rule-following, direction.
  • now we are in a new social paradigm that has normalized nonmarital childbearing and child rearing among certain segments of the population, and it will take more than economic improvement to restore the stable two-parent family in the communities it which that norm has been steadily eroding.
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  • Autor, Kearney and others whose work I will go on to discuss offer analyses and explanations of contemporary social dislocation that serve to reveal the oversimplification and the striking omissions in the work of social conservatives, who often fail, to give one crucial example, to account for the impact of mass incarceration.
  • Many factors have contributed to the income stagnation in the bottom tiers and the overall increasing inequality in the United States. Paramount among these are changes in the economy that have placed a greater premium on college-educated workers, advances in technology and the offshoring of manufacturing jobs to lower-wage countries. One can hardly understand the impact of these dynamic contributing structural factors to our rising inequality by focusing almost exclusively on so-called changes in the values of the American population
  • We need to address the underlying premise that there is a rise in social disorder. That claim does not hold up to scrutiny, in both the long and short term. In the United States and many other parts of the world, the last two decades have seen a remarkable decline in many of the most visible signs of social disorder.
  • You can see that many of these improvements in the quality of life have coincided with the creation of the modern liberal welfare state and many of place that enjoy the least social disorder are, in fact, places with leftist political systems that provide for social welfare.
  • Uniquely among major socioeconomic groups, the white working class decreased in absolute numbers and population share in recent decades. At the same time, the five measures of well-being we tracked all deteriorated for the white working class relative to the overall population. The shares of all income earned and wealth owned by the white working class fell even faster than their population share.
  • the white working class — the segment of the population with the weakest ties to, if not outright animosity toward, liberalism, feminism and other liberation movements — has, in recent years, experienced the strongest trends toward social decay.
  • While five decades ago, many on the left denounced the 1965 Moynihan Report, “The Negro Family: The Case For National Action” for “blaming the victim” because of its description of rising numbers of nonmarital births in the black community, there has been a striking reversal in favor of the report in the academic and liberal policymaking community.
  • “The broad-based decline that is unique to the white working class may be due in part to the group’s loss over time of advantages it once enjoyed relative to those of nonwhite working classes,”
  • These included more years of education and plentiful high-paying jobs available in white working class communities. And, as the explicit discrimination minorities faced in the workplace has diminished, so has the advantage that it had given the white working class.
  • While in absolute terms the white working class — those without college degrees, in pollster shorthand — have higher levels of marriage and cohabitation, homeownership and self-reported health ratings than members of the black working class, the trends are downward for whites and upward for African-Americans.
  • The most telling critique of the claims of social conservatives is that their single-minded focus on the destructive forces of liberalism offers a facile (and erroneous) answer to developments that do not fit simple categories of good and evil
  • Some people believe that humans are born good and are only later corrupted by society. They emphasize the importance of a society that collectively helps each individual achieve their inherent potential. Others believe that individuals are inherently flawed, often ill-disciplined, weak-willed, and capable of evil as well as good. They emphasize the importance of social structures that help people, in the words of Edmund Burke, “to put chains upon their appetites.”
  • Under current conditions of stark political polarization, these two sides are at loggerheads. Sawhill argues that:What a functioning and tolerant politics would permit is a negotiated settlement of this dispute. We would devise institutions and norms but also laws and practices that bring out, in Lincoln’s famous words, the “better angels of our nature.”
  • the willingness to accommodate the opposition — an essential step toward compromise and reconciliation — appears modestly stronger on the left than the right.
  • . In an email, she wrote:My read of the evidence is that the declining economic position of less educated men (both in a relative and absolute sense) has probably been a key driver of the breakdown of the two-parent family among less educated populations for many decades.
  • Similarly, “The Moynihan Report Revisited: Lessons and Reflections after Four Decades,” edited by two liberal scholars, Douglas S. Massey and Robert J. Sampson, sociologists at Princeton and Harvard, found that the trends toward family breakdown documented in the report “have only grown worse, not only for blacks, but for whites and Hispanics as well.” The authors were sharply critical of the attacks on Moynihan from the left that had appeared when the report was first published.
  • Patrick Deneen, whose book received near unanimous praise from conservative critics, defines the “culture war” that has characterized recent decades, and which seems to grow more virulent daily, in implacable terms: “Democracy, in fact, cannot ultimately function in a liberal regime.”
  • Barr, in turn, argues thatin the Framers’ view, free government was only suitable and sustainable for a religious people — a people who recognized that there was a transcendent moral order antecedent to both the state and man-made law and who had the discipline to control themselves according to those enduring principles.
  • The secular left, in Barr’s view, is at war with what he views as a decent America:This is not decay; it is organized destruction. Secularists, and their allies among the “progressives,” have marshaled all the force of mass communications, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and academia in an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values.
  • The reality is that Barr is not only selling traditional values to conservative voters, some of whom are genuinely starved for them, he is also marketing apocalyptic hogwash because, for his boss to get re-elected, Trump’s supporters must continue to believe that liberals and the Democratic Party are the embodiment of evil, determined to destroy the American way of life.
  • “Democracy, in fact, cannot ultimately function in a liberal regime.”
Javier E

G.D.P. Doesn't Measure Happiness - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-doesnt-measure-happiness.html

US economic performance measure GDP happiness goal national education history

shared by Javier E on 09 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • “happiness is, in the end, a much more complicated concept than income. Yet it is also a laudable and much more ambitious policy objective.”
  • it’s a challenge to set criteria for measuring happiness. However, in a conversation, she told me she did not see it as an insurmountable one: “It doesn’t have to be perfect; after all, it took us decades to agree upon what to include in G.D.P. and it is still far from a perfect metric.”
  • there remains the issue of being No. 1. Many of us have lived our lives in a country that has thought itself the world’s most powerful and successful. But with the United States economy in a frustrating stall as China rises, it seems that period is coming to an end. We are suffering a national identity crisis, and politicians are competing with one another to win favor by assuring a return to old familiar ways.
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  • On each of these lists, the top performers were heavily concentrated in Northern Europe, Australia and Canada with strong showings in East Asian countries from Japan to Singapore. It is no accident that there is a heavy overlap between the top performing countries and those that also outperform the United States in terms of educational performance
  • When Newsweek ranked the “world’s best countries” based on measures of health, education and politics, the United States ranked 11th. In the 2011 Quality of Life Index by Nation Ranking, the United States was 31st. Similarly, in recent rankings of the world’s most livable cities, the Economist Intelligence Unit has the top American entry at No. 29, Mercer’s Quality of Living Survey has the first United States entry at No. 31 and Monocle magazine showed only 3 United States cities in the top 25.
  • providing the basics to ensure a high quality of life is not a formula for excess or the kind of economic calamities befalling parts of Europe today. For example, many of the countries that top quality-of-life lists, like Sweden, Luxembourg, Denmark, the Netherlands and Norway, all rank high in lists of fiscally responsible nations — well ahead of the United States, which ranks 28th on the Sovereign Fiscal Responsibility Index.
  • Nearly all the world’s quality-of-life leaders are also countries that spend more on infrastructure than the United States does. In addition, almost all are more environmentally conscious and offer more comprehensive social safety nets and national health care to their citizens.
  • at the same time, countries that could hardly hope to outperform the world in any category are far ahead of us when it comes to things that matter more to people
  • some of the metrics we rate as most important, like G.D.P., stock indices or trade data, are so deeply flawed as to be irrelevant or worse, dangerous distractions
  • As a country we have consistently relied on indicators that keep us focused on the interests of business, financial institutions or the defense industry whereas equity, quality of life and even social mobility metrics are played down.
  • in the midst of the Great Depression, Congress, showing a great deal more intellectual curiosity than it does today, commissioned a group of economists led by a future Nobel Prize winner named Simon Kuznets to better measure economic activity.
  • Not only were they aware that the statistic they devised ignored many types of economic activity — from the work of housewives to illegal enterprises — they also knew their number did not assess the social benefits of what they were tracking.
  • Kuznets warned of this: “The welfare of a nation can, therefore, scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income” like the one they created. That hasn’t stopped us from making this misleading number perhaps the most influential statistic in the world.
  • Americans use G.D.P. in discussions about how well we are doing. It’s at the heart of discussions of whether we are in a recession or not, ahead or falling behind.
  • Yet, when China “passes” us, it will remain for the most part a very poor country racked with social problems.
  • A country, for example, that overemphasizes G.D.P. growth and market performance is likely to focus policies on the big drivers of those — corporations and financial institutions — even when, as during the recent past, there has been little correlation between the performance of big businesses or elites and that of most people.
  • Even John Locke, who famously enumerated our fundamental rights as being to life, liberty and property, qualified this by asserting that people should appropriate only what they could use, leaving “enough and as good” for others.
  • Thomas Jefferson later consciously replaced the right to property with a right to “the pursuit of happiness.” And happiness has become the watchword for those seeking different measures that might better guide governments.
  • maturing societies can offer many benefits to their citizens that are unavailable to most in the rapidly growing world — the products of rich educational and cultural resources, capable institutions, stability and prosperity.
  • We, as a developed nation, are unlikely to grow at the rapid pace of emerging powers (the United States is currently ranked 127th in real G.D.P. growth rate)
Javier E

Opinion | What New Science Techniques Tell Us About Ancient Women Warriors - The New Yo... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...women-hunter-leader.html

human origins archaeology

shared by Javier E on 03 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • researchers re-examined evidence from 107 other graves in the Americas from roughly the same period. They were startled to discover that out of 26 graves with hunter tools, 10 belonged to women
  • the findings indicate that “women have always been able to hunt and have in fact hunted.” The new data calls into question an influential dogma in the field of archaeology. Nicknamed “man the hunter,” this is the notion that men and women in ancient societies had strictly defined roles: Men hunted, and women gathered. Now, this theory may be crumbling.
  • scientists re-examined the remains of a 10th-century Viking warrior excavated in Sweden at the end of the 19th century by Hjalmar Stolpe, an archaeologist. The skeleton had been regally buried at the top of a hill, with a sword, two shields, arrows and two horses.
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  • it wasn’t until 2017, when a group of Swedish archaeologists and geneticists extracted DNA from the remains, that the sex of the warrior indeed proved to be female.
  • In archaeology, as the researchers admitted, we can’t always know why a community buried someone with particular objects. And one female warrior does not mean that many women were leaders, just as the reign of Queen Elizabeth I was not part of a larger feminist movement.
  • These findings don’t reveal an ancient matriarchy. But neither do they reaffirm the idea of societies in which men dominate completely. What they indicate is a lot more mundane and relatable: Some women were warriors and leaders; many weren’t. There was inequality, but it wasn’t absolute, and there were a lot of shifts over time.
Javier E

Schoolchildren Seem Unlikely to Fuel Coronavirus Surges, Scientists Say - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...onavirus-schools-children.html

pandemic schools infection research

shared by Javier E on 23 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • The trends for older children are much harder to discern. But over all, they suggest a greater chance for infections to spread without careful measures in place.
  • Sweden, often cited as a model for having schools operate throughout the pandemic, kept schools open for children under 16, but with small class sizes and physical distancing. According to one recent study, opening elementary schools had limited impact on parents, but teachers in schools with older children had double the rate of infections compared with those who taught remotely.
  • In Israel, crowded high school classrooms seeded outbreaks, prompting the health ministry to release a report this week calling children superspreaders
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  • And in the United States, some high school reopenings have been disastrous, like those of a Georgia school shamed for unmasked students in its hallways and a high school in Utah where infections flared to 90 cases within two weeks.
  • “Most of the transmission, when we see it, is occurring in carpools, during travel leagues, maybe in a locker room, or parties and gatherings that people have on the weekend,” he said.
  • “You’ve assumed that by closing schools, that’s going to negate the problem,” but informal settings that are less regulated may sow more infections
  • The data from Britain suggests, however, that clusters even among older children may not always lead to infections at home. Random testing in schools there showed sharp increases in infections among children older than 11, but the spikes did not seem to translate to a rise in adult cases.
  • “Children are not being prioritized, and they’re missing out on all the positive things about going to school,” Dr. Jenkins said. “I don’t understand why we’re not as a community getting together and deciding that schools need to be a priority and making them as safe as we can.”
  • Despite the gathering research, Boston on Wednesday decided to close schools even as restaurants, casinos and gyms remain open.
Javier E

The World's Major Military and Economic Powers Find Happiness Elusive | History News Ne... - 0 views

hnn.us/175179

happiness military war comparison international economy

shared by Javier E on 09 May 20 - No Cached
  • What are we to think, then, when we find that the world’s major military powers, which are also among the world’s richest nations, are failing badly when it comes to enhancing public happiness?
  • According to the most credible study of military expenditures (with figures drawn from 2018), three out of the top four military spenders, in rank order, are the United States, China, and India.
  • Ranked by total wealth, the United States is 1st, China 2nd, India 5th, and Russia 11th.  If ranked by their number of billionaires, the United States is 1st, China 2nd, India 4th, and Russia 5th.
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  • Furthermore, Russia has the world’s largest nuclear arsenal and fifth largest army.  Therefore, Russia is usually considered one of the world’s top four military powers.
  • Based on how happy the citizens of 156 countries perceived themselves to be, the report concluded that, when it came to happiness, the United States ranked 18th, Russia 73rd, China 94th, and India 144th among nations
  • between 2012 and 2020 its happiness ranking dropped from 11th to 18th place among the nations of the world
  • great military and economic power does not guarantee a country’s happiness.  Indeed, it might even undermine happiness
  • spending on military ventures diverts resources away from civilian needs, while wars create death and destruction.
  • Economic inequality has certainly caused significant discontent within these nations, and the rise of “the billionaire class” has exacerbated it.  
  • these countries’ emphasis on consumerism and materialism has created desires that cannot always be satisfied by the acquisition of products or wealth.
  • nations that placed in the top ten on the 2020 happiness scale.  Ranked in order, they are Finland, Denmark, Switzerland, Iceland, Norway, Netherlands, Sweden, New Zealand, Austria, and Luxembourg.
  • None is a major military or economic power, and none is today fighting a war. 
  • What they also have in common, the World Happiness Report observes, is a “well-functioning democracy, generous and effective social welfare benefits, low levels of crime and corruption, and satisfied citizens who feel free and trust each other and governmental institutions.”
Javier E

The triumph of experience over hope - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-91d7-cf4423d47683_story.html

hope experience pandemic

shared by Javier E on 13 May 20 - No Cached
  • For about a month, I was hopeful that we could achieve a “South Korea solution.” Unfortunately, it’s become clear that we’ve failed
  • I have written previously about the peculiar inability of American governmental institutions to do things that seem to work abroad.
  • The countries that survived SARS had a playbook ready to haul out when the next epidemic hit
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  • The countries that SARS bypassed also relied on experience, in a way, but that experience had taught them to hope that pandemics were something peculiar to Asia or Africa or other places where Everything Is Different. Running that playbook against this coronavirus turned out to be disastrous.
  • America’s outbreak thus far hasn’t been unusually bad. With about 250 deaths per million citizens, we’re solidly in the middle of the pack.
  • The United States is underperforming Germany and Canada but roughly on par with Switzerland, and we’re doing significantly better than France, Italy, Spain, Sweden and Britain.
  • there are countries that learned from the experience of others, notably Germany. Like us, Germany is large and rich and has a bustling trade with China. Moreover, Germany’s political framework also gives local governments significant autonomy. Yet Germany’s death rate is only about a third of ours, and declining, while the United States seems stuck on a high plateau.
  • In fact, death rates are declining sharply in most of the countries I mentioned, except for Canada and the United States.
  • It’s understandable if a country that hasn’t weathered a serious pandemic in a century needed to learn what to do from hard experience. But it’s starting to look like we still haven’t, and won’t, unless that experience gets harder still.
Javier E

The Coronavirus Could End American Exceptionalism - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...611605

learning trends history crisis pandemic international

shared by Javier E on 21 May 20 - No Cached
  • many American politicians, especially those on the right, have in recent years paradoxically doubled down on American exceptionalism (we have a president who ran on an “America first” platform, after all) even as American power has declined relative to other countries’.
  • This kind of insularity might have been “relatively harmless when America bestrode the world like a colossus, but it’s dangerous when the country faces a raft of global challenges from China, to climate, to COVID-19,” Dominic Tierney, a political-science professor at Swarthmore College
  • It has also failed to develop proper contact-tracing systems, as other nations have, and to meaningfully flatten the curve outside New York.
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  • Today, in the case of COVID-19, “all states face the same essential threat, and each government’s response is a kind of laboratory experiment,” Tierney said.
  • “The United States had the advantage of being struck relatively late by the virus, and this gave [us] a priceless chance to copy best practices and avoid the mistakes of others,” he noted.
  • When China began confining millions of people to their homes in January, the U.S. government should have gotten the message that the Chinese were grappling with a grave threat to the wider world, the Yale sociologist and physician Nicholas Christakis told me in March.
  • We lost six weeks” in the United States to prepare—“to build ventilators, get protective equipment, organize our ICUs, get tests ready, prepare the public for what was going to happen so that our economy didn’t tank as badly. None of this was done adequately by our leaders.”
  • By one estimate, from the epidemiologists Britta L. Jewell and Nicholas P. Jewell, if social-distancing policies had been implemented just two weeks earlier in March, 90 percent of the cumulative coronavirus deaths in the United States during the first wave of the pandemic might have been prevented.
  • Rather than using diagnostic tests that the World Health Organization had distributed to other countries early in the global outbreak, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention insisted on developing its own, only to botch the rollout of those tests.
  • Even now, as a number of countries have swum feverishly toward safer ground, the United States has spent the past couple of months of near-nationwide lockdown merely treading water. It has yet to roll out robust testing across the country
  • Pandemics are, in fact, particularly ripe moments for cross-cultural learning
  • as a senator, Romney is urging the U.S. government to follow South Korea’s lead and “learn from those countries that were successful” in dealing with their outbreaks. Conservatives are championing Sweden’s laissez-faire approach as a blueprint for how to mitigate public-health damage while preserving freedom and the economy.
  • As an example of ideas the United States could borrow from other countries, Tierney cited the fact that 750,000 people in Britain, which would be equivalent to nearly 4 million Americans, responded to the British government’s request to enlist in a “volunteer army” to help deliver food to vulnerable populations and provide other assistance.
  • A number of countries that have had more success against the coronavirus have demonstrated greater open-mindedness about learning from their peers. Taiwanese officials are watching Iceland’s mass-testing efforts, while the German government is explicitly modeling its response after South Korea’s “trace, test, and treat” campaign.
  • “Things have moved so quickly that there hasn't been much time for considered lesson-drawing,” he noted. Some countries were slow to institute strict lockdowns, despite witnessing the horrifying spread of the virus in Italy, while others “embraced approaches that broke with the broader consensus,” including “Sweden’s proposal
  • New Zealand’s record of learning
  • His colleague at the University of Otago, Michael Baker, told me that as a government adviser on the nation’s coronavirus taskforce, he was personally very influenced by a February 2020 WHO-China Joint Mission report, which suggested that the pandemic could be contained, and led him to advocate for New Zealand’s current strategy of eliminating the virus entirely from the country.
  • Yet Wilson added that New Zealand has lagged behind Asian countries in encouraging mass mask wearing, in rigorously quarantining incoming travelers, and in using digital technologies for contact tracing
  • In the United States too, even before the virus hit, attitudes toward learning from other countries were beginning to change
  • “The No. 1 place to live out the American Dream right now is Denmark,” Pete Buttigieg stated during one debate.
  • Amid all this, Trump has exhibited more hubris than humility. The president has repeatedly claimed that the United States is leading the world in testing, which in part is an unflattering reflection of the U.S. outbreak’s huge scale and also is not true on a per-capita basis
  • with the exception of the U.S. Paycheck Protection Program, “most of our economic-policy response has ignored useful lessons from abroad, explaining why our unemployment rate is skyrocketing above those in many other affected countries.”
  • Kelemen noted that the coronavirus crisis has led to a surge in interest among the American public and U.S. policy makers in harvesting lessons from other countries, most evident in the fact that everyone is following “the comparative charts of how countries are doing over time on infection rates or changes in year-on-year death counts.
Javier E

Why Britain Failed Its Coronavirus Test - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...615166

uk pandemic failure response

shared by Javier E on 14 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • Britain has not been alone in its failure to prevent mass casualties—almost every country on the Continent suffered appalling losses—but one cannot avoid the grim reality spelled out in the numbers: If almost all countries failed, then Britain failed more than most.
  • The raw figures are grim. Britain has the worst overall COVID-19 death toll in Europe, with more than 46,000 dead according to official figures, while also suffering the Continent’s second-worst “excess death” tally per capita, more than double that in France and eight times higher than Germany’s
  • The British government as a whole made poorer decisions, based on poorer advice, founded on poorer evidence, supplied by poorer testing, with the inevitable consequence that it achieved poorer results than almost any of its peers. It failed in its preparation, its diagnosis, and its treatment.
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  • In the past two decades, the list of British calamities, policy misjudgments, and forecasting failures has been eye-watering: the disaster of Iraq, the botched Libyan intervention in 2011, the near miss of Scottish independence in 2014, the woeful handling of Britain’s divorce from the European Union from 2016 onward
  • What emerges is a picture of a country whose systemic weaknesses were exposed with appalling brutality, a country that believed it was stronger than it was, and that paid the price for failures that have built up for years
  • The most difficult question about all this is also the simplest: Why?
  • The human immune system actually has two parts. There is, as Cummings correctly identifies, the adaptive part. But there is also an innate part, preprogrammed as the first line of defense against infectious disease. Humans need both. The same is true of a state and its government, said those I spoke with—many of whom were sympathetic to Cummings’s diagnosis. Without a functioning structure, the responsive antibodies of the government and its agencies cannot learn on the job. When the pandemic hit, both parts of Britain’s immune system were found wanting.
  • Britain’s pandemic story is not all bad. The NHS is almost universally seen as having risen to the challenge; the University of Oxford is leading the race to develop the first coronavirus vaccine for international distribution, backed with timely and significant government cash; new hospitals were built and treatments discovered with extraordinary speed; the welfare system did not collapse, despite the enormous pressure it suddenly faced; and a national economic safety net was rolled out quickly.
  • One influential U.K. government official told me that although individual mistakes always happen in a fast-moving crisis, and had clearly taken place in Britain’s response to COVID-19, it was impossible to escape the conclusion that Britain was simply not ready. As Ian Boyd, a professor and member of SAGE, put it: “The reality is, there has been a major systemic failure.”
  • “It’s obvious that the British state was not prepared for” the pandemic, this official told me. “But, even worse, many parts of the state thought they were prepared, which is significantly more dangerous.”
  • When the crisis came, too much of Britain’s core infrastructure simply failed, according to senior officials and experts involved in the pandemic response
  • Like much of the Western world, Britain had prepared for an influenza pandemic, whereas places that were hit early—Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan—had readied themselves for the type of respiratory illness that COVID-19 proved to be.
  • The consequences may be serious and long term, but the most immediately tragic effect was that creating space in hospitals appears to have been prioritized over shielding Britain’s elderly, many of whom were moved to care homes, part of what Britain calls the social-care sector, where the disease then spread. Some 25,000 patients were discharged into these care homes between March 17 and April 16, many without a requirement that they secure a negative coronavirus test beforehand.
  • There was a bit too much exceptionalism about how brilliant British science was at the start of this outbreak, which ended up with a blind spot about what was happening in Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, where we just weren’t looking closely enough, and they turned out to be the best in the world at tackling the coronavirus,” a former British cabinet minister told me.
  • The focus on influenza pandemics and the lack of a tracing system were compounded by a shortfall in testing capacity.
  • Johnson’s strategy throughout was one that his hero Winston Churchill raged against during the First World War, when he concluded that generals had been given too much power by politicians. In the Second World War, Churchill, by then prime minister and defense secretary, argued that “at the summit, true politics and strategy are one.” Johnson did not take this approach, succumbing—as his detractors would have it—to fatalistic management rather than bold leadership, empowering the generals rather than taking responsibility himself
  • “It was a mixture of poor advice and fatalism on behalf of the experts,” one former colleague of Johnson’s told me, “and complacency and boosterism on behalf of the PM.”
  • What it all adds up to, then, is a sobering reality: Institutional weaknesses of state capacity and advice were not corrected by political judgment, and political weaknesses were not corrected by institutional strength. The system was hardwired for a crisis that did not come, and could not adapt quickly enough to the one that did.
  • Britain’s NHS has come to represent the country itself, its sense of identity and what it stands for. Set up in 1948, it became known as the first universal health-care system of any major country in the world (although in reality New Zealand got there first). Its creation, three years after victory in the Second World War, was a high-water mark in the country’s power and prestige—a time when it was a global leader, an exception.
  • Every developed country in the world, apart from the United States, has a universal health-care system, many of which produce better results than the NHS.
  • Yet from its beginnings, the NHS has occupied a unique hold on British life. It is routinely among the most trusted institutions in the country. Its key tenet—that all Britons will have access to health care, free at the point of service—symbolizes an aspirational egalitarianism that, even as inequality has risen since the Margaret Thatcher era, remains at the core of British identity.
  • In asking the country to rally to the NHS’s defense, Johnson was triggering its sense of self, its sense of pride and national unity—its sense of exceptionalism.
  • Before the coronavirus, the NHS was already under considerable financial pressure. Waiting times for appointments were rising, and the country had one of the lowest levels of spare intensive-care capacity in Europe. In 2017, Simon Stevens, the NHS’s chief executive, compared the situation to the time of the health sevice’s founding decades prior: an “economy in disarray, the end of empire, a nation negotiating its place in the world.”
  • When the pandemic hit, then, Britain was not the strong, successful, resilient country it imagined, but a poorly governed and fragile one. The truth is, Britain was sick before it caught the coronavirus.
  • In effect, Britain was rigorously building capacity to help the NHS cope, but releasing potentially infected elderly, and vulnerable, patients in the process. By late June, more than 19,000 people had died in care homes from COVID-19. Separate excess-death data suggest that the figure may be considerably higher
  • Britain failed to foresee the dangers of such an extraordinary rush to create hospital capacity, a shift that was necessary only because of years of underfunding and decades of missed opportunities to bridge the divide between the NHS and retirement homes, which other countries, such as Germany, had found the political will to do.
  • Ultimately, the scandal is a consequence of a political culture that has proved unable to confront and address long-term problems, even when they are well known.
  • other health systems, such as Germany’s, which is better funded and decentralized, performed better than Britain’s. Those I spoke with who either are in Germany or know about Germany’s success told me there was an element of luck about the disparity with Britain. Germany had a greater industrial base to produce medical testing and personal protective equipment, and those who returned to Germany with the virus from abroad were often younger and healthier, meaning the initial strain on its health system was less.
  • However, this overlooks core structural issues—resulting from political choices in each country—that meant that Germany proved more resilient when the crisis came, whether because of the funding formula for its health system, which allows individuals more latitude to top up their coverage with private contributions, or its decentralized nature, which meant that separate regions and hospitals were better able to respond to local outbreaks and build their own testing network.
  • Also unlike Britain, which has ducked the problem of reforming elderly care, Germany created a system in 1995 that everyone pays into, avoids catastrophic costs, and has cross-party support.
  • A second, related revelation of the crisis—which also exposed the failure of the British state—is that underneath the apparent simplicity of the NHS’s single national model lies an engine of bewildering complexity, whose lines of responsibility, control, and accountability are unintelligible to voters and even to most politicians.
  • Britain, I was told, has found a way to be simultaneously overcentralized and weak at its center. The pandemic revealed the British state’s inability to manage the nation’s health:
  • Since at least the 1970s, growing inequality between comparatively rich southeast England (including London) and the rest of the country has spurred all parties to pledge to “rebalance the economy” and make it less reliant on the capital. Yet large parts remain poorer than the European average. According to official EU figures, Britain has five regions with a per capita gross domestic product of less than $25,000. France, Germany, Ireland, Austria, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden have none
  • If Britain were part of the United States, it would be anywhere from the third- to the eighth-poorest state, depending on the measure.
  • Britain’s performance in this crisis has been so bad, it is damaging the country’s reputation, both at home and abroad.
  • Inside Downing Street, officials believe that the lessons of the pandemic apply far beyond the immediate confines of elderly care and coronavirus testing, taking in Britain’s long-term economic failures and general governance, as well as what they regard as its ineffective foreign policy and diplomacy.
  • the scale of the task itself is enormous. “We need a complete revamp of our government structure because it’s not fit for purpose anymore,” Boyd told me. “I just don’t know if we really understand our weakness.”
  • In practice, does Johnson have the confidence to match his diagnosis of Britain’s ills, given the timidity of his approach during the pandemic? The nagging worry among even Johnson’s supporters in Parliament is that although he may campaign as a Ronald Reagan, he might govern as a Silvio Berlusconi, failing to solve the structural problems he has identified.
  • This is not a story of pessimistic fatalism, of inevitable decline. Britain was able to partially reverse a previous slump in the 1980s, and Germany, seen as a European laggard in the ‘90s, is now the West’s obvious success story. One of the strengths of the Westminster parliamentary system is that it occasionally produces governments—like Johnson’s—with real power to effect change, should they try to enact it.
  • It has been overtaken by many of its rivals, whether in terms of health provision or economic resilience, but does not seem to realize it. And once the pandemic passes, the problems Britain faces will remain: how to sustain institutions so that they bind the country together, not pull it apart; how to remain prosperous in the 21st century’s globalized economy; how to promote its interests and values; how to pay for the ever-increasing costs of an aging population.
  • “The really important question,” Boyd said, “is whether the state, in its current form, is structurally capable of delivering on the big-picture items that are coming, whether pandemics or climate change or anything else.”
katherineharron

Saudi Arabia urged to release women's rights activists by European envoys - CNN - 0 views

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

human rights

shared by katherineharron on 30 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Seven European human rights ambassadors criticized Saudi Arabia on Sunday over the continued detention of at least five women's rights activists
  • Hathloul appeared in a Saudi court on Wednesday, as her trial was scheduled to start after 900 days in pre-trial detention.
  • The case of another women's rights activist, Samar Badawi, has also been referred to the special court
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  • "We remain deeply concerned by the continued detention of at least five women's right activists in Saudi Arabia. We regret that the cases of Loujain Al-Hathloul and Samar Badawi have now been referred to the Special Criminal Court for terrorism and national security cases," human rights ambassadors for the UK, Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Estonia, Luxembourg and Finland said in a statement.
  • "We join the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Special Rapporteurs and Treaty Bodies in reiterating our call for the release of all political detainees, including the women's rights activists."CNN has reached out to the Saudi government for a response. 
  • The court she appeared in on Wednesday said it would investigate Hathloul's allegations of torture in prison, according to the family's statement
  • Hathloul, 31, was jailed in May 2018 during a sweep that targeted prominent opponents of the kingdom's former law barring women from driving.
  • "Peaceful activism, and advocating for women's rights is not a crime. Human rights defenders can be a strong partner for governments in addressing concerns within society," the ambassadors said.
  • "This is yet another sign that Saudi Arabia's claims of reform on human rights are a farce," Maalouf said. 
  • Chairman of US House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff called on Saturday for Hathloul's immediate release, saying on Twitter she had "endured torture and abuse for over 2 years while detained." 
  • the US Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs said it was "concerned" by reports that the cases of Hathloul and Badawi had been transferred to the terrorism court. 
  • "Activism on behalf of (women's) rights is not a crime. Also troubled by allegations of abuse against them & a lack of transparency/access to the trials," the bureau's press office wrote on Twitter. 
katherineharron

What Europe fears most about the US election (opinion) - CNN - 0 views

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election

shared by katherineharron on 30 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Europe, but particularly France and Germany -- the two motor nations of the continent -- are holding their collective breath for the outcome of Tuesday's American presidential election.
  • the trans-Atlantic relationship, the very nature of the Atlantic alliance, which has preserved the peace in Europe for three-quarters of a century, hangs in the balance.
  • there is a dawning recognition in both nations that some elements of a decades-long trans-Atlantic partnership may be all but irrevocably lost
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  • There is considerable uncertainty both in Paris and Berlin as to just how much the United States can be trusted any more. "Donald Trump has not fallen down from the sky out of nowhere," Jana Puglierin, head of the German office of the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) told me in a Zoom conversation from Berlin. "He has not taken half of the American population hostage and kind of brainwashed them. So there is a reason why he is there, and the reason remains even after he leaves."
  • Even more immediate and frightening for Europe than the US elections is the sudden resurgence of coronavirus infection for which the United States has been of little help and certainly no model for containment.
  • With France counting more than 270,000 new cases in the last week, President Emmanuel Macron told the French people in a nationwide address Wednesday evening that a second nationwide lockdown was coming Friday for a nation already approaching paralysis. Germany, too, headed for a second partial shutdown.
  • the increasingly intransigent belief that the will of the American electorate is so unpredictable
  • The ECFR found, in a continent-wide survey, that even if Joe Biden were elected, voters in France and Germany believe Europe should "maintain good relations with the US, [but] prepare for disengagement."
  • Should Trump win, however, voters in Belgium, Sweden, Austria and Croatia also believe preparation for disengagement would be necessary.
  • he French are still hoping for a more realistic military perspective from a Biden victory.
  • Yet Biden has pledged to leave residual forces in some key countries, particularly Iraq, to maintain stability and prevent the rise of terrorist groups that could be threats to American interests. "I think we need special ops capacity to coordinate with our allies," Biden told Stars and Stripes last month.
  • Leaders of both nations want the United States to rejoin the Paris Climate Accord and the Iran nuclear agreement (JCPOA), as well as the World Health Organization and assume a joint role in the battle against Covid-19 and the development of vaccines and treatments.
Javier E

Collapsing Levels of Trust Are Devastating America - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...616581

politics history crisis culture US trust anomie polarization progressive progress

shared by Javier E on 19 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • American history is driven by periodic moments of moral convulsion
  • Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington noticed that these convulsions seem to hit the United States every 60 years or so: the Revolutionary period of the 1760s and ’70s; the Jacksonian uprising of the 1820s and ’30s; the Progressive Era, which began in the 1890s; and the social-protest movements of the 1960s and early ’70s
  • A highly moralistic generation appears on the scene. It uses new modes of communication to seize control of the national conversation. Groups formerly outside of power rise up and take over the system. These are moments of agitation and excitement, frenzy and accusation, mobilization and passion.
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  • In 1981, Huntington predicted that the next moral convulsion would hit America around the second or third decade of the 21st century—that is, right about now.
  • Trump is the final instrument of this crisis, but the conditions that brought him to power and make him so dangerous at this moment were decades in the making, and those conditions will not disappear if he is defeated.
  • Social trust is a measure of the moral quality of a society—of whether the people and institutions in it are trustworthy, whether they keep their promises and work for the common g
  • When people in a society lose faith or trust in their institutions and in each other, the nation collapses.
  • This is an account of how, over the past few decades, America became a more untrustworthy society
  • under the stresses of 2020, American institutions and the American social order crumbled and were revealed as more untrustworthy still
  • We had a chance, in crisis, to pull together as a nation and build trust. We did not. That has left us a broken, alienated society caught in a distrust doom loop.
  • The Baby Boomers grew up in the 1950s and ’60s, an era of family stability, widespread prosperity, and cultural cohesion. The mindset they embraced in the late ’60s and have embodied ever since was all about rebelling against authority, unshackling from institutions, and celebrating freedom, individualism, and liberation.
  • The emerging generations today enjoy none of that sense of security. They grew up in a world in which institutions failed, financial systems collapsed, and families were fragile. Children can now expect to have a lower quality of life than their parents, the pandemic rages, climate change looms, and social media is vicious. Their worldview is predicated on threat, not safety.
  • Thus the values of the Millennial and Gen Z generations that will dominate in the years ahead are the opposite of Boomer values: not liberation, but security; not freedom, but equality; not individualism, but the safety of the collective; not sink-or-swim meritocracy, but promotion on the basis of social justice
  • A new culture is dawning. The Age of Precarity is here.
  • I’ve spent my career rebutting the idea that America is in decline, but the events of these past six years, and especially of 2020, have made clear that we live in a broken nation. The cancer of distrust has spread to every vital organ.
  • Those were the days of triumphant globalization. Communism was falling. Apartheid was ending. The Arab-Israeli dispute was calming down. Europe was unifying. China was prospering. In the United States, a moderate Republican president, George H. W. Bush, gave way to the first Baby Boomer president, a moderate Democrat, Bill Clinton.
  • The stench of national decline is in the air. A political, social, and moral order is dissolving. America will only remain whole if we can build a new order in its place.
  • The American economy grew nicely. The racial wealth gap narrowed. All the great systems of society seemed to be working: capitalism, democracy, pluralism, diversity, globalization. It seemed, as Francis Fukuyama wrote in his famous “The End of History?” essay for The National Interest, “an unabashed victory for economic and political liberalism.”
  • Nations with low social trust—like Brazil, Morocco, and Zimbabwe—have struggling economies.
  • We think of the 1960s as the classic Boomer decade, but the false summer of the 1990s was the high-water mark of that ethos
  • The first great theme of that era was convergence. Walls were coming down. Everybody was coming together.
  • The second theme was the triumph of classical liberalism. Liberalism was not just a philosophy—it was a spirit and a zeitgeist, a faith that individual freedom would blossom in a loosely networked democratic capitalist world. Enterprise and creativity would be unleashed. America was the great embodiment and champion of this liberation.
  • The third theme was individualism. Society flourished when individuals were liberated from the shackles of society and the state, when they had the freedom to be true to themselves.
  • For his 2001 book, Moral Freedom, the political scientist Alan Wolfe interviewed a wide array of Americans. The moral culture he described was no longer based on mainline Protestantism, as it had been for generations
  • Instead, Americans, from urban bobos to suburban evangelicals, were living in a state of what he called moral freedom: the belief that life is best when each individual finds his or her own morality—inevitable in a society that insists on individual freedom.
  • moral freedom, like the other dominant values of the time, contained within it a core assumption: If everybody does their own thing, then everything will work out for everybody.
  • This was an ideology of maximum freedom and minimum sacrifice.
  • It all looks naive now. We were naive about what the globalized economy would do to the working class, naive to think the internet would bring us together, naive to think the global mixing of people would breed harmony, naive to think the privileged wouldn’t pull up the ladders of opportunity behind them
  • Over the 20 years after I sat with Kosieva, it all began to unravel. The global financial crisis had hit, the Middle East was being ripped apart by fanatics. On May 15, 2011, street revolts broke out in Spain, led by the self-declared Indignados—“the outraged.” “They don’t represent us!” they railed as an insult to the Spanish establishment. It would turn out to be the cry of a decade.
  • Millennials and members of Gen Z have grown up in the age of that disappointment, knowing nothing else. In the U.S. and elsewhere, this has produced a crisis of faith, across society but especially among the young. It has produced a crisis of trust.
  • Social trust is a generalized faith in the people of your community. It consists of smaller faiths. It begins with the assumption that we are interdependent, our destinies linked. It continues with the assumption that we share the same moral values. We share a sense of what is the right thing to do in different situations
  • gh-trust societies have what Fukuyama calls spontaneous sociability. People are able to organize more quickly, initiate action, and sacrifice for the common good.
  • When you look at research on social trust, you find all sorts of virtuous feedback loops. Trust produces good outcomes, which then produce more trust. In high-trust societies, corruption is lower and entrepreneurship is catalyzed.
  • Higher-trust nations have lower economic inequality, because people feel connected to each other and are willing to support a more generous welfare state.
  • People in high-trust societies are more civically engaged. Nations that score high in social trust—like the Netherlands, Sweden, China, and Australia—have rapidly growing or developed economies.
  • Renewal is hard to imagine. Destruction is everywhere, and construction difficult to see.
  • As the ethicist Sissela Bok once put it, “Whatever matters to human beings, trust is the atmosphere in which it thrives.”
  • During most of the 20th century, through depression and wars, Americans expressed high faith in their institutions
  • In 1964, for example, 77 percent of Americans said they trusted the federal government to do the right thing most or all of the time.
  • By 1994, only one in five Americans said they trusted government to do the right thing.
  • Then came the Iraq War and the financial crisis and the election of Donald Trump. Institutional trust levels remained pathetically low. What changed was the rise of a large group of people who were actively and poi
  • sonously alienated—who were not only distrustful but explosively distrustful. Explosive distrust is not just an absence of trust or a sense of detached alienation—it is an aggressive animosity and an urge to destroy. Explosive distrust is the belief that those who disagree with you are not just wrong but illegitimate
  • In 1997, 64 percent of Americans had a great or good deal of trust in the political competence of their fellow citizens; today only a third of Americans feel that way.
  • In most societies, interpersonal trust is stable over the decades. But for some—like Denmark, where about 75 percent say the people around them are trustworthy, and the Netherlands, where two-thirds say so—the numbers have actually risen.
  • In America, interpersonal trust is in catastrophic decline. In 2014, according to the General Social Survey conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago, only 30.3 percent of Americans agreed that “most people can be trusted,”
  • Today, a majority of Americans say they don’t trust other people when they first meet them.
  • There’s evidence to suggest that marital infidelity, academic cheating, and animal cruelty are all on the rise in America, but it’s hard to directly measure the overall moral condition of society—how honest people are, and how faithful.
  • Trust is the ratio between the number of people who betray you and the number of people who remain faithful to you. It’s not clear that there is more betrayal in America than there used to be—but there are certainly fewer faithful supports around people than there used to be.
  • Hundreds of books and studies on declining social capital and collapsing family structure demonstrate this. In the age of disappointment, people are less likely to be surrounded by faithful networks of people they can trust.
  • Black Americans have high trust in other Black Americans; it’s the wider society they don’t trust, for good and obvious reasons
  • As Vallier puts it, trust levels are a reflection of the moral condition of a nation at any given time.
  • high national trust is a collective moral achievement.
  • High national distrust is a sign that people have earned the right to be suspicious. Trust isn’t a virtue—it’s a measure of other people’s virtue.
  • Unsurprisingly, the groups with the lowest social trust in America are among the most marginalized.
  • Black Americans have been one of the most ill-treated groups in American history; their distrust is earned distrust
  • In 2018, 37.3 percent of white Americans felt that most people can be trusted, according to the General Social Survey, but only 15.3 percent of Black Americans felt the same.
  • People become trusting when the world around them is trustworthy. When they are surrounded by people who live up to their commitments. When they experience their country as a fair place.
  • In 2002, 43 percent of Black Americans were very or somewhat satisfied with the way Black people are treated in the U.S. By 2018, only 18 percent felt that way, according to Gallup.
  • The second disenfranchised low-trust group includes the lower-middle class and the working poor.
  • this group makes up about 40 percent of the country.
  • “They are driven by the insecurity of their place in society and in the economy,” he says. They are distrustful of technology and are much more likely to buy into conspiracy theories. “They’re often convinced by stories that someone is trying to trick them, that the world is against them,”
  • the third marginalized group that scores extremely high on social distrust: young adults. These are people who grew up in the age of disappointment. It’s the only world they know.
  • In 2012, 40 percent of Baby Boomers believed that most people can be trusted, as did 31 percent of members of Generation X. In contrast, only 19 percent of Millennials said most people can be trusted
  • Seventy-three percent of adults under 30 believe that “most of the time, people just look out for themselves,” according to a Pew survey from 2018. Seventy-one percent of those young adults say that most people “would try to take advantage of you if they got a chance.
  • A mere 10 percent of Gen Zers trust politicians to do the right thing.
  • Only 35 percent of young people, versus 67 percent of old people, believe that Americans respect the rights of people who are not like them.
  • Fewer than a third of Millennials say America is the greatest country in the world, compared to 64 percent of members of the Silent Generation.
  • “values and behavior are shaped by the degree to which survival is secure.” In the age of disappointment, our sense of safety went away
  • Some of this is physical insecurity: school shootings, terrorist attacks, police brutality, and overprotective parenting at home
  • the true insecurity is financial, social, and emotional.
  • By the time the Baby Boomers hit a median age of 35, their generation owned 21 percent of the nation’s wealth
  • First, financial insecurity
  • As of last year, Millennials—who will hit an average age of 35 in three years—owned just 3.2 percent of the nation’s wealth.
  • Next, emotional insecurity:
  • fewer children growing up in married two-parent households, more single-parent households, more depression, and higher suicide rates.
  • Then, identity insecurity.
  • All the traits that were once assigned to you by your community, you must now determine on your own: your identity, your morality, your gender, your vocation, your purpose, and the place of your belonging. Self-creation becomes a major anxiety-inducing act of young adulthood.
  • liquid modernity
  • Finally, social insecurity.
  • n the age of social media our “sociometers”—the antennae we use to measure how other people are seeing us—are up and on high alert all the time. Am I liked? Am I affirmed?
  • Danger is ever present. “For many people, it is impossible to think without simultaneously thinking about what other people would think about what you’re thinking,” the educator Fredrik deBoer has written. “This is exhausting and deeply unsatisfying. As long as your self-conception is tied up in your perception of other people’s conception of you, you will never be free to occupy a personality with confidence; you’re always at the mercy of the next person’s dim opinion of you and your whole deal.”
  • In this world, nothing seems safe; everything feels like chaos.
  • Distrust sows distrust. It produces the spiritual state that Emile Durkheim called anomie, a feeling of being disconnected from society, a feeling that the whole game is illegitimate, that you are invisible and not valued, a feeling that the only person you can really trust is yourself.
  • People plagued by distrust can start to see threats that aren’t there; they become risk averse
  • Americans take fewer risks and are much less entrepreneurial than they used to be. In 2014, the rate of business start-ups hit a nearly 40-year low. Since the early 1970s, the rate at which people move across state lines each year has dropped by 56 percent
  • People lose faith in experts. They lose faith in truth, in the flow of information that is the basis of modern society. “A world of truth is a world of trust, and vice versa,”
  • In periods of distrust, you get surges of populism; populism is the ideology of those who feel betrayed
  • People are drawn to leaders who use the language of menace and threat, who tell group-versus-group power narratives. You also get a lot more political extremism. People seek closed, rigid ideological systems that give them a sense of security.
  • fanaticism is a response to existential anxiety. When people feel naked and alone, they revert to tribe. Their radius of trust shrinks, and they only trust their own kind.
  • When many Americans see Trump’s distrust, they see a man who looks at the world as they do.
  • By February 2020, America was a land mired in distrust. Then the plague arrived.
  • From the start, the pandemic has hit the American mind with sledgehammer force. Anxiety and depression have spiked. In April, Gallup recorded a record drop in self-reported well-being, as the share of Americans who said they were thriving fell to the same low point as during the Great Recession
  • These kinds of drops tend to produce social upheavals. A similar drop was seen in Tunisian well-being just before the street protests that led to the Arab Spring.
  • The emotional crisis seems to have hit low-trust groups the hardest
  • “low trusters” were more nervous during the early months of the pandemic, more likely to have trouble sleeping, more likely to feel depressed, less likely to say the public authorities were responding well to the pandemic
  • Eighty-one percent of Americans under 30 reported feeling anxious, depressed, lonely, or hopeless at least one day in the previous week, compared to 48 percent of adults 60 and over.
  • Americans looked to their governing institutions to keep them safe. And nearly every one of their institutions betrayed them
  • The president downplayed the crisis, and his administration was a daily disaster area
  • The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention produced faulty tests, failed to provide up-to-date data on infections and deaths, and didn’t provide a trustworthy voice for a scared public.
  • The Food and Drug Administration wouldn’t allow private labs to produce their own tests without a lengthy approval process.
  • In nations that ranked high on the World Values Survey measure of interpersonal trust—like China, Australia, and most of the Nordic states—leaders were able to mobilize quickly, come up with a plan, and count on citizens to comply with the new rules.
  • In low-trust nations—like Mexico, Spain, and Brazil—there was less planning, less compliance, less collective action, and more death.
  • Countries that fell somewhere in the middle—including the U.S., Germany, and Japan—had a mixed record depending on the quality of their leadership.
  • South Korea, where more than 65 percent of people say they trust government when it comes to health care, was able to build a successful test-and-trace regime. In America, where only 31 percent of Republicans and 44 percent of Democrats say the government should be able to use cellphone data to track compliance with experts’ coronavirus social-contact guidelines, such a system was never really implemented.
  • For decades, researchers have been warning about institutional decay. Institutions get caught up in one of those negative feedback loops that are so common in a world of mistrust. They become ineffective and lose legitimacy. People who lose faith in them tend not to fund them. Talented people don’t go to work for them. They become more ineffective still.
  • On the right, this anti-institutional bias has manifested itself as hatred of government; an unwillingness to defer to expertise, authority, and basic science; and a reluctance to fund the civic infrastructure of society, such as a decent public health system
  • On the left, distrust of institutional authority has manifested as a series of checks on power that have given many small actors the power to stop common plans, producing what Fukuyama calls a vetocracy
  • In 2020, American institutions groaned and sputtered. Academics wrote up plan after plan and lobbed them onto the internet. Few of them went anywhere. America had lost the ability to build new civic structures to respond to ongoing crises like climate change, opioid addiction, and pandemics, or to reform existing ones.
  • In a lower-trust era like today, Levin told me, “there is a greater instinct to say, ‘They’re failing us.’ We see ourselves as outsiders to the systems—an outsider mentality that’s hard to get out of.”
  • Americans haven’t just lost faith in institutions; they’ve come to loathe them, even to think that they are evil
  • 55 percent of Americans believe that the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 was created in a lab and 59 percent believe that the U.S. government is concealing the true number of deaths
  • Half of all Fox News viewers believe that Bill Gates is plotting a mass-vaccination campaign so he can track people.
  • This spring, nearly a third of Americans were convinced that it was probably or definitely true that a vaccine existed but was being withheld by the government.
  • institutions like the law, the government, the police, and even the family don’t merely serve social functions, Levin said; they form the individuals who work and live within them. The institutions provide rules to live by, standards of excellence to live up to, social roles to fulfill.
  • By 2020, people had stopped seeing institutions as places they entered to be morally formed,
  • Instead, they see institutions as stages on which they can perform, can display their splendid selves.
  • People run for Congress not so they can legislate, but so they can get on TV. People work in companies so they can build their personal brand.
  • The result is a world in which institutions not only fail to serve their social function and keep us safe, they also fail to form trustworthy people. The rot in our structures spreads to a rot in ourselves.
  • The Failure of Society
  • The coronavirus has confronted America with a social dilemma. A social dilemma, the University of Pennsylvania scholar Cristina Bicchieri notes, is “a situation in which each group member gets a higher outcome if she pursues her individual self-interest, but everyone in the group is better off if all group members further the common interest.”
  • Social distancing is a social dilemma. Many low-risk individuals have been asked to endure some large pain (unemployment, bankruptcy) and some small inconvenience (mask wearing) for the sake of the common good. If they could make and keep this moral commitment to each other in the short term, the curve would be crushed, and in the long run we’d all be better off. It is the ultimate test of American trustworthiness.
  • While pretending to be rigorous, people relaxed and started going out. It was like watching somebody gradually give up on a diet. There wasn’t a big moment of capitulation, just an extra chocolate bar here, a bagel there, a scoop of ice cream before bed
  • in reality this was a mass moral failure of Republicans and Democrats and independents alike. This was a failure of social solidarity, a failure to look out for each other.
  • Alexis de Tocqueville discussed a concept called the social body. Americans were clearly individualistic, he observed, but they shared common ideas and common values, and could, when needed, produce common action. They could form a social body.
  • Over time, those common values eroded, and were replaced by a value system that put personal freedom above every other value
  • When Americans were confronted with the extremely hard task of locking down for months without any of the collective resources that would have made it easier—habits of deference to group needs; a dense network of community bonds to help hold each other accountable; a history of trust that if you do the right thing, others will too; preexisting patterns of cooperation; a sense of shame if you deviate from the group—they couldn’t do it. America failed.
  • The Crack-up
  • This wasn’t just a political and social crisis, it was also an emotional trauma.
  • The week before George Floyd was killed, the National Center for Health Statistics released data showing that a third of all Americans were showing signs of clinical anxiety or depression. By early June, after Floyd’s death, the percentage of Black Americans showing clinical signs of depression and anxiety disorders had jumped from 36 to 41 percent
  • By late June, American national pride was lower than at any time since Gallup started measuring, in 2001
  • In another poll, 71 percent of Americans said they were angry about the state of the country, and just 17 percent said they were proud.
  • By late June, it was clear that America was enduring a full-bore crisis of legitimacy, an epidemic of alienation, and a loss of faith in the existing order.
  • The most alienated, anarchic actors in society—antifa, the Proud Boys, QAnon—seemed to be driving events. The distrust doom loop was now at hand.
  • The Age of Precarity
  • Cultures are collective responses to common problems. But when reality changes, culture takes a few years, and a moral convulsion, to completely shake off the old norms and values.
  • The culture that is emerging, and which will dominate American life over the next decades, is a response to a prevailing sense of threat.
  • This new culture values security over liberation, equality over freedom, the collective over the individual.
  • From risk to security.
  • we’ve entered an age of precarity in which every political or social movement has an opportunity pole and a risk pole. In the opportunity mentality, risk is embraced because of the upside possibilities. In the risk mindset, security is embraced because people need protection from downside dangers
  • In this period of convulsion, almost every party and movement has moved from its opportunity pole to its risk pole.
  • From achievement to equality
  • In the new culture we are entering, that meritocratic system looks more and more like a ruthless sorting system that excludes the vast majority of people, rendering their life precarious and second class, while pushing the “winners” into a relentless go-go lifestyle that leaves them exhausted and unhappy
  • Equality becomes the great social and political goal. Any disparity—racial, economic, meritocratic—comes to seem hateful.
  • From self to society
  • If we’ve lived through an age of the isolated self, people in the emerging culture see embedded selves. Socialists see individuals embedded in their class group. Right-wing populists see individuals as embedded pieces of a national identity group. Left-wing critical theorists see individuals embedded in their racial, ethnic, gender, or sexual-orientation identity group.
  • The cultural mantra shifts from “Don’t label me!” to “My label is who I am.”
  • From global to local
  • When there is massive distrust of central institutions, people shift power to local institutions, where trust is higher. Power flows away from Washington to cities and states.
  • From liberalism to activism
  • enlightenment liberalism, which was a long effort to reduce the role of passions in politics and increase the role of reason. Politics was seen as a competition between partial truths.
  • Liberalism is ill-suited for an age of precarity. It demands that we live with a lot of ambiguity, which is hard when the atmosphere already feels unsafe. Furthermore, it is thin. It offers an open-ended process of discovery when what people hunger for is justice and moral certainty.
  • liberalism’s niceties come to seem like a cover that oppressors use to mask and maintain their systems of oppression. Public life isn’t an exchange of ideas; it’s a conflict of groups engaged in a vicious death struggle
  • The cultural shifts we are witnessing offer more safety to the individual at the cost of clannishness within society. People are embedded more in communities and groups, but in an age of distrust, groups look at each other warily, angrily, viciously.
  • The shift toward a more communal viewpoint is potentially a wonderful thing, but it leads to cold civil war unless there is a renaissance of trust. There’s no avoiding the core problem. Unless we can find a way to rebuild trust, the nation does not function.
  • How to Rebuild Trust
  • Historians have more to offer, because they can cite examples of nations that have gone from pervasive social decay to relative social health. The two most germane to our situation are Great Britain between 1830 and 1848 and the United States between 1895 and 1914.
  • In both periods, a highly individualistic and amoral culture was replaced by a more communal and moralistic one.
  • But there was a crucial difference between those eras and our own, at least so far. In both cases, moral convulsion led to frenetic action.
  • As Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett note in their forthcoming book, The Upswing, the American civic revival that began in the 1870s produced a stunning array of new organizations: the United Way, the NAACP, the Boy Scouts, the Forest Service, the Federal Reserve System, 4-H clubs, the Sierra Club, the settlement-house movement, the compulsory-education movement, the American Bar Association, the American Legion, the ACLU, and on and on
  • After the civic revivals, both nations witnessed frenetic political reform. During the 1830s, Britain passed the Reform Act, which widened the franchise; the Factory Act, which regulated workplaces; and the Municipal Corporations Act, which reformed local government.
  • The Progressive Era in America saw an avalanche of reform: civil-service reform; food and drug regulation; the Sherman Act, which battled the trusts; the secret ballot; and so on. Civic life became profoundly moralistic, but political life became profoundly pragmatic and anti-ideological. Pragmatism and social-science expertise were valued.
  • Can America in the 2020s turn itself around the way the America of the 1890s, or the Britain of the 1830s, did? Can we create a civic renaissance and a legislative revolution?
  • I see no scenario in which we return to being the nation we were in 1965, with a cohesive national ethos, a clear national establishment, trusted central institutions, and a pop-culture landscape in which people overwhelmingly watch the same shows and talked about the same things.
  • The age of distrust has smashed the converging America and the converging globe—that great dream of the 1990s—and has left us with the reality that our only plausible future is decentralized pluralism.
  • The key to making decentralized pluralism work still comes down to one question: Do we have the energy to build new organizations that address our problems, the way the Brits did in the 1830s and Americans did in the 1890s?
  • social trust is built within organizations in which people are bound together to do joint work, in which they struggle together long enough for trust to gradually develop, in which they develop shared understandings of what is expected of each other, in which they are enmeshed in rules and standards of behavior that keep them trustworthy when their commitments might otherwise falter.
  • Over the past 60 years, we have given up on the Rotary Club and the American Legion and other civic organizations and replaced them with Twitter and Instagram. Ultimately, our ability to rebuild trust depends on our ability to join and stick to organizations.
  • Whether we emerge from this transition stronger depends on our ability, from the bottom up and the top down, to build organizations targeted at our many problems. If history is any guide, this will be the work not of months, but of one or two decades.
  • For centuries, America was the greatest success story on earth, a nation of steady progress, dazzling achievement, and growing international power. That story threatens to end on our watch, crushed by the collapse of our institutions and the implosion of social trust
  • But trust can be rebuilt through the accumulation of small heroic acts—by the outrageous gesture of extending vulnerability in a world that is mean, by proffering faith in other people when that faith may not be returned. Sometimes trust blooms when somebody holds you against all logic, when you expected to be dropped.
  • By David Brooks
Javier E

What if we had done nothing about Covid? | News | The Sunday Times - 0 views

www.thetimes.co.uk/...emic-omicron-variant-m7x7dq7zj

UK strategy pandemic response effects analysis

shared by Javier E on 01 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • There is an inevitability about Covid that suggests the world cannot escape widespread infection: the question becomes when those infections happen. “The only value of reducing the spread of Covid is if the peak would overwhelm health or other services,” Hunter said, “or if you expect better treatments, or a vaccine to come along in the future.”
  • It is, in truth, too early to assess Britain’s pandemic response. Many may look back and wish we had done an Australia, locking down for most of the first year until vaccines were readily available, keeping excess deaths to a minimum — but there would have been a huge cost to the economy, mental health and civil obedience.
  • Others will wish we had done a Sweden, mainly relying on voluntary measures in place of legal restrictions, but accepting a higher death toll than our neighbours.
woodlu

Corruption is getting worse in many poor countries | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...g-worse-in-many-poor-countries

politics culture history policy

shared by woodlu on 27 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • the NGO scores countries from 0 to 100 based on perceptions of corruption in the public sector, with 100 indicating a squeaky clean record. In the latest ranking, released on January 25th, almost 70% of countries score below 50.
  • Poor countries tend to do worse than rich ones, partly because poverty makes corruption worse and partly because corruption makes poverty worse.
  • Some high-scoring democracies showed “significant deterioration” over the past year too—so much so that America dropped out of the 25 least corrupt countries for the first time.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • But the biggest drops were in countries whose governments muffled the press and suppressed civil liberties under the cover of covid-19 prevention.
  • Belarus has dropped by six points since 2020, when a rigged election saw Alexander Lukashenko become president. The killing of human-rights defenders under Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and the strangling of the free press in Nicaragua and Venezuela, contributed to low scores.
  • Countries usually move by only a point or two from one year to the next, if at all. But regime change can prompt faster improvement: Armenia’s score has risen by 14 points since 2017.
  • Poor countries, especially those in Africa, the Middle East and Asia, are singled out for the bad behaviour of their governments. Yet companies based in rich countries often facilitate corruption abroad.
  • Some countries at least enforce anti-bribery laws. Britain and Switzerland are among the “active” enforcers while Germany, Norway and Sweden are “moderate” ones, according to Transparency International.
kennyn-77

How people globally see racial, ethnic discrimination in the U.S. | Pew Research Center - 0 views

www.pewresearch.org/...-u-s-than-in-their-own-society

USA worldwide survey pew discrimination

shared by kennyn-77 on 02 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • A median of 89% across the 16 non-U.S. publics surveyed describe racial and ethnic discrimination in the U.S. as a somewhat or very serious problem.
  • That includes at least nine-in-ten who take this position in New Zealand, South Korea, Canada, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden.
  • For example, among Spaniards, 69% of those under age 30 think racial and ethnic discrimination in their own society is a serious problem, compared with 44% of those ages 65 and older.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • In the U.S., for example, 80% of women say discrimination against people based on their race or ethnicity is a somewhat or very serious problem, compared with 68% of men.
  • The ideological gap on this question is widest in the U.S. itself: 92% of those on the left (liberals, in common U.S. parlance) say racial and ethnic discrimination is a serious problem, compared with 47% of those on the right (conservatives), a difference of 45 points. The next-largest ideological gap is in Australia, where 80% of those on the left and 50% of those on the right hold the view that discrimination is a serious problem in Australia. In general, people on the ideological left are also more likely than those on the right to say discrimination in the U.S. is a serious problem.
  • In Taiwan, for example, 95% of those with at least a postsecondary degree describe discrimination as a serious problem in the U.S., compared with 77% of those with less than a postsecondary degree.
sidneybelleroche

Blinken and Russia's Lavrov meet amid tensions over Ukraine - CNNPolitics - 0 views

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

shared by sidneybelleroche on 02 Dec 21 - No Cached
  • US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov met Thursday in Stockholm, Sweden, amid growing concern among Western powers that Russia is seeking to destabilize Ukraine.
  • Speaking during the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) summit in Stockholm, Lavrov warned that NATO's expansion into the East would affect "fundamental interests" of Russian security.
  • He stressed that although Russia does "not want any conflicts" with NATO over Ukraine, it maintains the "right to choose ways to ensure its legitimate security interests."
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  • The United States, meanwhile, warned again that there would be "serious consequences" if Russia engages to "pursue confrontation" with Ukraine.
  • Despite the accusations the two officials recognized the importance of dialogue
  • calling on Russia to abide by the Minsk peace agreements hammered out in 2015 between Russia, Ukraine, France and Germany.
  • Blinken criticized Russia's adherence to the Helsinki Final Act, a multilateral agreement dating back to 1975, saying that the country "continues to violate the Helsinki principles and repeatedly obstructs the work of this organization."
  • Blinken told summit attendees that the US holds "deep concerns about Russia's plans for renewed aggression against Ukraine."
  • Blinken also held a bilateral meeting Thursday with the Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dymtro Kuleba, at which the top US diplomat reiterated Washington's "unwavering commitment to Ukraine's territorial integrity, sovereignty and its independence."
  • The OSCE summit comes on the heels of a meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Latvia that was dominated by concerns over recent events in Belarus and Russia's intentions in Ukraine.
  • The US and NATO say Russia is increasing the number of combat troops near its border with Ukraine.
  • The Kremlin has repeatedly denied that Russia plans to invade Ukraine
  • sees NATO support for the country as a threat on Russia's western border.
  • Putin said NATO military expansion close to Russian borders and deploying missile systems in Ukraine would be crossing a "red line" for Russia.
Javier E

The End of German Exceptionalism - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...674786

germany 2023 crisis politics economics history and

shared by Javier E on 23 Jul 23 - No Cached
  • what happens in an “economy in search of a political raison d’être,” as the historian Werner Abelshauser once described the postwar Federal Republic, if its GDP suddenly stops growing? We are about to find out.
  • Germany’s economy is running out of steam, and not only because of COVID or because Russian President Vladimir Putin has turned off the gas tap.
  • A recent poll shows that, notwithstanding this radical program, only 57 percent of Germans now say that they could never imagine voting for the AfD
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • Together with—and perhaps because of—its economic malaise, the country is living through a political earthquake. Germany’s wealth, its exemplary parliamentary democracy, and its big efforts to confront its Nazi history are no longer keeping nativist parties at bay.
  • Outside the EU, “made in Germany” goods struggle to find new clients. Exports to China have been roughly flat since mid-2015 and may even start to drop, as President Xi Jinping has made clear that he wants to make his country less dependent on European industry
  • The Federal Republic is the only big Euro member whose economy has not yet fully recovered to pre-pandemic levels. In fact, German GDP has roughly stagnated since 2019. And German manufacturing is the main problem: Industrial output lags pre-pandemic levels by some 5 percent.
  • The reason Germany ceased to be Europe’s growth engine has less to do with Russian energy than with changing circumstances in the export markets where the country’s industrial champions once flourished
  • In the 2000s, former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder slashed unemployment benefits and created a low-wage sector to help German exporters increase their market shares across Europe. Since then, many other European countries, including France and Italy, have made reforms to cut labor costs themselves, and Germany faces tougher competition in its biggest export market and has been running a trade deficit in goods with other EU members since 2020.
  • We are living through the end of German exceptionalism. The country’s economy is fragile, and the rise of the AfD makes its politics as unpredictable as those of Austria or Italy. In short, Germany is joining the European mainstream. And that means that trouble is ahead.
  • German car exports to China were down 24 percent in the first three months of 2023 compared with the same period in 2022
  • The U.S. is Germany’s second-largest market after the EU, accounting for 8.9 percent of its exports, but to top off Germany’s troubles, Washington is becoming more protectionist under Joe Biden.
  • The obvious solution is for Germany to spend more. Greater investment could raise productivity in a country where the railways have the worst delays among major European countries and cellphone and internet connectivity are underfunded
  • Investment could boost demand, and liberalizing policies could rebalance the economy toward services.
  • But a dogma of balanced budgets and debt avoidance remains deeply anchored among German politicians and voters.
  • Now Germany, whose effort to confront its Nazi history seemed to inoculate its politicians from having to deal with a large far-right party, is also falling prey to populism and nationalism.
  • ore and more governments across Europe are led by right-wing parties: in Italy, Sweden, Finland, and soon possibly Spain. In all of these countries, the center-right no longer has qualms about working with the far-right.
  • the penny has not yet dropped. Germany’s political elite hasn’t been moved to take the risky step of running up debts and liberalizing at the same time. But until it does, the country’s economy will likely lag European growth. And if the economy ceases to serve as a source of national pride, political forces may thrive by brandishing more nativist concepts of German identity.
  • The AfD’s rise to 20 percent in the polls—twice what it commanded in the 2021 parliamentary elections—has many causes. The party’s bastion is the formerly Communist east, where authoritarian attitudes and resentment of traditional parties feed off of feelings of having been the losers in Germany’s reunification
  • But something broader is going on. For Germans, the hallmark of good government is “Ruhe und Ordnung,” calm and order. The three parties in Scholz’s ruling coalition—the center-left SPD, the Greens, and the pro-business FDP—squabble over everything
  • The party has also benefited from a backlash against Germany’s progressive agenda on climate and migration
  • Despite the country’s reputation abroad as a climate champion, in a poll of seven European countries, Germans were the least willing among Europeans to switch to electric cars, cut meat consumption, or spend out of their own pockets to renovate their houses to save the climate.
  • As for migration, racist views are ingrained in Germany’s formerly Communist east
  • But the AfD has also been able to mobilize an anti-immigration electorate in big, rich, formerly West German states, such as Bavaria, the land of Siemens and Weisswurst, and Baden-Württemberg
  • the CDU will need to decide whether it will continue marginalizing the far-right or start working with it instead. The AfD is leading the polls in Thuringia and polling a strong second in Saxony
  • ermany is joining the European mainstream, with its political class struggling to counter rising far-right support and an economy that is no longer best-in-class. The two things that made postwar Germany unique in Europe are no more
  • the rise of the AfD is pushing Berlin to become an unreliable partner in Europe. The CDU was once the champion of Schengen, the EU’s policy to allow for passport-less travel across the continent. The party’s leader, Merz, clearly concerned about covering his right flank, has now called for reintroducing passport checks at Germany’s borders with other EU members, such as Czechia, in order to turn away migrants.
  • As the AfD criticizes the “reckless” spending of the Scholz government, the FDP and the chancellor are doubling down on spending cuts. Germany is becoming less willing to spend for itself and the EU.
  • The AfD may one day accede to national government, but it cannot do so on its own. To work in a coalition, the party will almost certainly have to compromise on its most radical policy propositions, such as closing the U.S. military base in Ramstein. But even with the AfD merely exerting pressure on German politics, the EU must sooner or later face an adjustment—to a future in which Germany is no longer an economic and political anchor so much as a source of instability.
woodlu

A war in Ukraine could have global consequences | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...could-have-global-consequences

politics history crisis

shared by woodlu on 27 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • A full Russian invasion would be Europe’s biggest war since the 1940s, and the first toppling since then of a democratically elected European government by a foreign invader.
  • Russians would not only suffer casualties, especially during a long-running insurgency, but also cause the death of untold Ukrainians—fellow Slavs, with whom many have family ties.
  • War would affect the prices of other commodities, too. Oil is already spiking. Russia is the world’s largest exporter of wheat, with Ukraine close behind. Russia is a big source of metals: in today’s tight markets even a small shock could send commodity prices upwards.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • Europe faces the prospect of Russia throttling the flow of piped gas. Even in the absence of a cut-off, it was expected to spend $1trn on energy in 2022, twice as much as in 2019.
  • Russia would also suffer heavy sanctions. Its banks would be harshly penalised and its economy deprived of crucial American high-tech components.
  • Sanctions might be lighter, but they would still be painful. Russia’s decoupling from the West would still accelerate. Moreover, if the government in Kyiv remained independent, it would only redouble its efforts to join the West.
  • And the subjugation of Ukraine would come at a strategic cost to Russia. Every country in its shadow would revise its security calculations. NATO would reinforce the defences of its eastern members. Sweden and Finland might join the alliance.
  • For Mr Putin, the economic consequences of war would be survivable, at least in the short term. His central bank has $600bn in reserves—more than enough to weather sanctions. But the political gains in Ukraine could easily be overwhelmed by setbacks at home which, as Mr Putin knows better than anyone, is where his fate will ultimately be determined.
  • Perhaps, then, he will start with a less ambitious invasion. However, a limited war could claim many lives and be hard to contain.
  • Perhaps Mr Putin is planning a full-scale invasion, with Russian forces thrusting deep into Ukraine to seize the capital, Kyiv, and overthrow the government. Or he may seek to annex more territory in eastern Ukraine, carving out a corridor linking Russia with Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula Mr Putin grabbed in 2014. Then again, he may want a small war, in which Russia “saves” Kremlin-backed separatists in Donbas, an eastern region of Ukraine, from supposed Ukrainian atrocities—and, at the same time, degrades Ukraine’s armed forces.
  • The global order has long been buttressed by the norm that countries do not redraw other countries’ borders by force of arms. When Iraq seized Kuwait in 1990 an international coalition led by America kicked it out.
  • if he seizes a bigger slice of Ukraine, it is hard to see him suddenly concluding that the time has come to make peace with NATO.
  • More likely, he would push on, helped by the newly established presence of Russian troops in Belarus to probe NATO’s collective-security pact, under which an attack on one member is an attack on all.
  • Not only would he relish the chance to hollow out America’s commitments to Europe, but he has also come to rely on demonising an enemy abroad to justify his harsh rule at home.
  • The likelihood of China invading Taiwan would surely rise. The regimes in Iran and Syria would conclude they are freer to use violence with impunity. If might is right, more of the world’s disputed borders would be fought over.
  • West should respond in three ways: deter, keep talking and prepare. To deter Mr Putin, Western powers—especially Germany—should stop equivocating, present a united front and make clear that they are willing to pay the price for imposing sanctions on Russia and also to support those Ukrainians who are ready to resist an occupying army.
  • Meanwhile, diplomats should keep talking, looking for common ground on, say, arms control and pressing for a face-saving climbdown that Mr Putin and his captive media would be free to spin however they wish.
  • And Europe should prepare for the next crisis by making clear that its energy transition will cut its dependence on Russian gas by using storage, diversification and nuclear power.
  • Russia would benefit from better, closer, peaceful relations with the West. Such ties would be available if Mr Putin didn’t behave so abominably. Only he benefits from discord, since he can tell Russians they are under siege and need a strongman to defend them. But even the wiliest strongman can miscalculate. Invading Ukraine could ultimately prove Mr Putin’s undoing, if it turns into a bloody quagmire or makes Russians poorer, angrier and more eager for change.
peterconnelly

Two maps show NATO's growth and Russia's isolation since 1990 - 0 views

www.cnbc.com/...wing-isolation-since-1990.html

maps russia isolation nato

shared by peterconnelly on 04 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Russia has become increasingly isolated from the rest of Europe over the last 30 years, and maps of the continent illustrate just how drastic the change has been.
  • Russia first attacked Ukraine in 2014, after a civilian uprising ejected a pro-Russia leader from the country. Ukraine sought military training and assistance from Western countries afterward but had not been admitted to NATO.
  • Countries in NATO are bound by treaty to defend each other. Like Ukraine, Finland shares a long border with Russia.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Though Sweden and Finland want to join their Nordic
  • neighbors in NATO,
  • admission
  • could take many months or be blocked entirely.
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