Toxic Political Culture Has Even Some Slovaks Calling Country 'a Black Hole.' - The New... - 0 views
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Of all the countries in Central and Eastern Europe that shook off communist rule in 1989, Slovakia has the highest proportion of citizens who view liberal democracy as a threat to their identity and values — 43 percent compared with 15 percent in the neighboring Czech Republic
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Support for Russia has declined sharply since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but 27 percent of Slovaks see it as key strategic partner, the highest level in the region.
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many of its people — particularly those living outside big cities — feel left behind and resentful, Mr. Meseznikov said, and are “more vulnerable than elsewhere to conspiracy theories and narratives that liberal democracy is a menace.”
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There Is Literally Nothing Trump Can Say That Will Stop Republicans from Voting for Him... - 0 views
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These days, you’re more likely to find Trump’s words in one of Biden’s campaign ads than in anything put out by his many G.O.P. cheerleaders. Trump’s crazy quotes generate support for Democrats; Republicans like Haley just cringe and change the subject.
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It was, of course, exactly because of this phenomenon that far too many failed to take seriously Trump’s reckless incitements after he refused to accept the results of the 2020 election.
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If anything, he’s getting even more of a pass in this election. Little that he has said or done seems to have made any appreciable impact on an increasingly amnesiac electorate, even as the things he says or does get ever more unbelievable.
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Stanford's top disinformation research group collapses under pressure - The Washington ... - 0 views
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The collapse of the five-year-old Observatory is the latest and largest of a series of setbacks to the community of researchers who try to detect propaganda and explain how false narratives are manufactured, gather momentum and become accepted by various groups
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It follows Harvard’s dismissal of misinformation expert Joan Donovan, who in a December whistleblower complaint alleged he university’s close and lucrative ties with Facebook parent Meta led the university to clamp down on her work, which was highly critical of the social media giant’s practices.
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Starbird said that while most academic studies of online manipulation look backward from much later, the Observatory’s “rapid analysis” helped people around the world understand what they were seeing on platforms as it happened.
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Abortion Rights Debate Shifts to Pregnancy and Fertility as Election Nears - The New Yo... - 0 views
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The public conversation about abortion has grown into one about the complexities of pregnancy and reproduction, as the consequences of bans have played out in the news. The question is no longer just whether you can get an abortion, but also, Can you get one if pregnancy complications put you in septic shock? Can you find an obstetrician when so many are leaving states with bans? If you miscarry, will the hospital send you home to bleed? Can you and your partner do in vitro fertilization?
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That shift helps explain why a record percentage of Americans are now declaring themselves single-issue voters on abortion rights — especially among Black voters, Democrats, women and those ages 18 to 29. Republican women are increasingly saying their party’s opposition to abortion is too extreme, and Democrats are running on the issue after years of running away from it.
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Tresa Undem, who has been polling people on abortion for 25 years, estimated that before the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case that overturned Roe, less than 15 percent of the public considered abortion personally relevant — women who could get pregnant and would choose an abortion.
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Kamala Harris and the Threat of a Woman's Laugh - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Women who laugh in public have historically been associated with a lack of social modesty, with hysteria, and even with madness. In insisting that Harris’s laugh is somehow a sign of psychological depravity or narcotic-induced lack of inhibitions, conservatives are doing their best to couple Harris in people’s subconscious with a specific reaction: disgust.
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As the philosopher Kate Manne notes in her 2017 book, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, disgust has long been the weapon of choice for conservatives faced with women who try to gain political power. Disgust, Manne writes, is “a moralizing influence that intensifies and even drives novel moral judgments—in some cases, powerfully. It turns out that even mild ‘pangs’ of disgust can cause some people to judge that someone is suspicious and up to no good, even when such judgments clearly have no rational basis
Opinion | How Long Will A.I.'s 'Slop' Era Last? - The New York Times - 0 views
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Sequoia Capital, calculated that investments in A.I. were running short of projected profits by a margin of at least several hundred billion dollars annually. (He called this “A.I.’s $600 billion question” and warned of “investment incineration.”)
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In a similarly bearish Goldman Sachs report, the firm’s head of global equity research estimated that the cost of A.I. infrastructure build-out over the next several years would reach $1 trillion. “Replacing low-wage jobs with tremendously costly technology is basically the polar opposite of the prior technology transitions I’ve witnessed,” he noted. “The crucial question is: What $1 trillion problem will A.I. solve?”
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that trillion-dollar A.I. expenditure, more than the United States spends annually on its military, and think: What exactly is that money going toward?
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Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI Co-Founder Who Helped Oust Sam Altman, Starts His Own Company - ... - 0 views
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The new start-up is called Safe Superintelligence. It aims to produce superintelligence — a machine that is more intelligent than humans — in a safe way, according to the company spokeswoman Lulu Cheng Meservey.
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Last year, Dr. Sutskever helped create what was called a Superalignment team inside OpenAI that aimed to ensure that future A.I. technologies would not do harm. Like others in the field, he had grown increasingly concerned that A.I. could become dangerous and perhaps even destroy humanity.
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Jan Leike, who ran the Superalignment team alongside Dr. Sutskever, has also resigned from OpenAI. He has since been hired by OpenAI’s competitor Anthropic, another company founded by former OpenAI researchers.
Israeli Military Says Hamas Can't Be Destroyed, Escalating Feud With Netanyahu - WSJ - 0 views
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A rift between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the country’s military leadership is spilling increasingly into the open after the armed forces’ top spokesman said Netanyahu’s aim of destroying Hamas in Gaza is unachievable.“The idea that we can destroy Hamas or make Hamas disappear is misleading to the public,” military spokesman Daniel Hagari told Israeli television on Wednesday.
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The exchange was an illustration of months of tensions between Netanyahu and the country’s military leadership, who argue that Hamas could only be defeated if Israel replaces it with another governing authority in Gaza. During more than eight months of war, the Israeli military has invaded swaths of the Gaza Strip, only to see Hamas reconstitute itself in areas when Israeli forces withdraw.“What we can do is grow something different, something to replace it,” Hagari said Wednesday. “The politicians will decide” who should replace Hamas, he said.
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The friction between Netanyahu and the military establishment had burst into public view earlier in the war. In May, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant delivered a speech calling on the government to decide who should replace Hamas in Gaza. The lack of a decision, he said, left Israel with only two choices: Hamas rule or a complete Israeli military takeover of the strip.
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It feels like the social order is crumbling in Germany | The Spectator - 0 views
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. The concept of irrational German angst has become a bit of a cliche over the years, but this time the threats to social cohesion feel very real
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a wave of aggression against politicians and activists. Last year alone there were 3,691 offences against officials and party representatives, 80 of which were violent
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This series of assaults on politicians and activists fuel wider fears around the state of Germany’s post-war order
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Opinion | The Pandemic Probably Started in a Lab. These 5 Key Points Explain Why. - The... - 0 views
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a growing volume of evidence — gleaned from public records released under the Freedom of Information Act, digital sleuthing through online databases, scientific papers analyzing the virus and its spread, and leaks from within the U.S. government — suggests that the pandemic most likely occurred because a virus escaped from a research lab in Wuhan, China.
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If so, it would be the most costly accident in the history of science.
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The SARS-like virus that caused the pandemic emerged in Wuhan, the city where the world’s foremost research lab for SARS-like viruses is located.
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The Rise and Fall of BNN Breaking, an AI-Generated News Outlet - The New York Times - 0 views
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His is just one of many complaints against BNN, a site based in Hong Kong that published numerous falsehoods during its short time online as a result of what appeared to be generative A.I. errors.
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During the two years that BNN was active, it had the veneer of a legitimate news service, claiming a worldwide roster of “seasoned” journalists and 10 million monthly visitors, surpassing the The Chicago Tribune’s self-reported audience. Prominent news organizations like The Washington Post, Politico and The Guardian linked to BNN’s stories
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Google News often surfaced them, too
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Opinion | Why Boys Today Struggle With Human Connection - The New York Times - 0 views
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By the time he left Discord a year or so later, he’d had about 200 calls with different people, both men and women, who spoke of contemplating suicide.
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But it was the boys who seemed the most desperately lonely and isolated. On the site, he said, he found “a lot more unhealthy men than unhealthy women.” He added: “With men, there is a huge thing about mental health and shame because you’re not supposed to be weak. You’re not supposed to be broken.” A male mental-health crisis was flying under the radar.
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I have come to believe the conditions of modern boyhood amount to a perfect storm for loneliness
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Opinion | Civil Liberties Make for Strange Bedfellows - The New York Times - 0 views
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where is the line between government persuasion and government coercion?
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In Justice Sotomayor’s words, “At the heart of the First Amendment’s Free Speech Clause is the recognition that viewpoint discrimination is uniquely harmful to a free and democratic society.”
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When the government can pick sides in an ideological debate and wield its power to suppress opposing views, then you’ve laid the foundation for authoritarianism. If free speech is the “dread of tyrants,” then censorship is one of the tyrant’s greatest weapons.
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French Lessons for Defeating Trump - The Atlantic - 0 views
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The lesson was clear: Centrists, liberals, and leftists took the credible threat of right-wing authoritarian rule seriously enough to act quickly and strategically. Behaving as though their country’s future was at stake, they reacted to new information in order to maximize success.
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No one spoke about personal loyalty to individual candidates. No one spoke about it being a given politician’s turn to be in office. No one said that it was too late to change the plan.
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The extreme deadline instead became a motivational boon, not unlike the way a capable basketball team may go on a scoring rampage as the clock runs out.
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French Lessons for Defeating Trump - The Atlantic - 0 views
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One of the major differences between France and America, it seems, is that the French have not been beaten into a state of learned helplessness by the possibility of right-wing extremism.
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The majority of French voters saw the National Rally as an existential threat to their values, and were alarmed and motivated enough to react. If Trump is in fact on the cusp of destroying American democracy, as so many have continually warned us, then Americans should respond to this crisis with a similar sense of pragmatism and urgency.
How 'Rural Studies' Is Thinking About the Heartland - The New York Times - 0 views
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“White Rural Rage,” by the journalist Paul Waldman and the political scientist Tom Schaller, is an unsparing assessment of small-town America. Rural residents, the authors argued, are more likely than city dwellers to excuse political violence, and they pose a threat to American democracy.
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Several rural scholars whose research was included in the book immediately denounced it
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Ms. Lunz Trujillo excoriated the book in an opinion piece for Newsweek as “a prime example of how intellectuals sow distrust by villainizing” people unlike them.
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The Normalization of the Exception - Homepage Christian Lammert - 0 views
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There's now a disturbingly quick acceptance of the argument that "both sides are to blame." It was and remains the Republicans and Trump who have labeled the media as enemies of the people, politicians and refugees as vermin, and have spoken of bloodshed should Trump lose again in the next election. This discourse sharply contrasts with that of Democratic elites and Biden, who critique President Trump based on his policies (see Project 2025), labeling him a potential dictator and a threat to democracy. This critique remains within the bounds of normal political discourse and does not dehumanize political opponents or other demographic groups, as Trump's rhetoric frequently does. Such rhetoric has become "normal" and mainstream within the Republican Party but remains either non-existent or exceptionally rare among Democrats. This clearly indicates an asymmetric radicalization of our political discourse.
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The ideological positioning of the two parties also reflects this asymmetry. Empirical analyses by notable U.S. political scientists show that the Republicans have moved significantly further to the right ideologically compared to the leftward shift of the Democrats. In certain segments, the ideological positions of MAGA representatives in Congress no longer fit within this spectrum, having departed from democratic norms.
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Republicans have successfully shifted the discourse to place equal blame on both sides for polarization and radicalization, but this narrative does not reflect reality and must be addressed. It is the right-wing political spectrum and its associated media network that questions fundamental pillars of democracy and the rule of law. Similar challenges are not found within the left-wing political spectrum
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Why Gen Z College Students Are Seeking Tech and Finance Jobs - The New York Times - 0 views
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Harvard, where, at a wood-paneled dining hall last year, two juniors explained how to assess a fellow undergraduate’s earning potential. It’s easy, they said, as we ate mussels, beets and sautéed chard: You can tell by who’s getting a bulge bracket internship.
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A bulge bracket bank, like Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase or Citi. The biggest, most prestigious global investment banks
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Not to be confused with M.B.B., which stands for three of the most prestigious management consulting firms: McKinsey, Bain and Boston Consulting Group.
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