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Javier E

'It's very troubling': alarm grows over Covid-19 spike among young Americans | US news ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ung-people-america-coronavirus

youth pandemic

shared by Javier E on 02 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • Snyder says he has seen an “explosion” in cases among 20-44 year-olds.
  • Some of those, he said, are coming in severely ill – requiring oxygen, intubation and ventilators. “We even had people in that age group die, unfortunately. So it’s very troubling and it’s very difficult to watch young people die from this disease. It’s horrible.”
  • On Friday, vice-president Mike Pence said half of new cases in the US in recent weeks were adults under 35.
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  • Factors thought to have contributed to the surge in cases amongst younger people include graduation parties, mixed public messaging, higher risk tolerance and bars.
  • Between late March and late June, Ellingson said the mean age of new cases in the state dropped from 51 to 38. She puts the change down to a combination of factors including businesses reopening, the end of the stay-at-home order and a general “quarantine fatigue”.
  • When we look at accounts of super-spreading events we see some common themes: people indoors and in close proximity, doing things like eating, drinking, singing, or exercising.”
  • Mary Jo Trepka, professor and chair of the department of epidemiology at Florida International University, said the median age of recent cases in the state has been in the 30s. On June 23 it was 33, currently it’s 37.
  • Trepka said the true number of cases is likely to be even higher because data undercounts younger people who are more likely to be asymptomatic or only have mild symptoms.
  • “Because of the very nature of being at a bar is a social function, it’s much less likely that you’re going to see social distancing be observed there and people, as they drink alcohol, they may talk louder, they may yell, cheer, sing and scream.
  • There was, he added, “a lot of pent-up desire to interact and to go to bars and do things that they couldn’t do for the last couple of months and that’s what you’re seeing – basically like everybody turning 21 all of a sudden”.
Javier E

Trump and Johnson aren't replaying the 1930s - but it's just as frightening | George Mo... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ohnson-fascism-us-uk-rightwing

fascism authoritarian crisis trump culture politics 1930s 2020s

shared by Javier E on 02 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • anger that should be directed at billionaires is instead directed by them. Facing inequality and exclusion, poor wages and insecure jobs, people are persuaded by the newspapers billionaires own and the parties they fund to unleash their fury on immigrants, Muslims, the EU and other “alien” forces.
  • From the White House, his Manhattan tower and his Florida resort, Donald Trump tweets furiously against “elites”. Dominic Cummings hones the same message as he moves between his townhouse in Islington, with its library and tapestry room, and his family estate in Durham. Clearly, they don’t mean political or economic elites. They mean intellectuals: the students, teachers, professors and independent thinkers who oppose their policies. Anti-intellectualism is a resurgent force in politics.
  • Myths of national greatness and decline abound. Make America Great Again and Take Back Control propose a glorious homecoming to an imagined golden age. Conservatives and Republicans invoke a rich mythology of family life and patriarchal values. Large numbers of people in the United Kingdom regret the loss of empire.
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  • Extravagant buffoons, building their power base through the visual media, displace the wooden technocrats who once dominated political life. Debate gives way to symbols, slogans and sensation. Political parties that once tolerated a degree of pluralism succumb to cults of personality.
  • Politicians and political advisers behave with impunity. During the impeachment hearings, Trump’s lawyer argued, in effect, that the president is the nation, and his interests are inseparable from the national interest.
  • Trump shamelessly endorses nativism and white supremacy. Powerful politicians, such as the Republican congressman Steve King, talk of defending “western civilisation” against “subjugation” by its “enemies”. Minorities are disenfranchised. Immigrants are herded into detention centres.
  • Political structures still stand, but they are hollowed out, as power migrates into unaccountable, undemocratic spheres: conservative fundraising dinners, US political action committees, offshore trade tribunals, tax havens and secrecy regimes.
  • The bodies supposed to hold power to account, such as the Electoral Commission and the BBC, are attacked, disciplined and cowed. Politicians and newspapers launch lurid attacks against parliament, the judiciaryand the civil service.
  • Political lying becomes so rife that voters lose the ability to distinguish fact from fiction. Conspiracy theories proliferate, distracting attention from the real ways in which our rights and freedoms are eroded
  • With every unpunished outrage against integrity in public life, trust in the system corrodes. The ideal of democracy as a shared civic project gives way to a politics of dominance and submission.
  • All these phenomena were preconditions for – or facilitators of – the rise of European fascism during the first half of the 20th century. I find myself asking a question I thought we would never have to ask again. Is the resurgence of fascism a real prospect, on either side of the Atlantic?
  • It is easier to define as a political method. While its stated aims may vary wildly, the means by which it has sought to grab and build power are broadly consistent. But I think it’s fair to say that though the new politics have some strong similarities to fascism, they are not the same thing.
  • Trump’s politics and Johnson’s have some characteristics that were peculiar to fascism, such as their constant excitation and mobilisation of their base through polarisation, their culture wars, their promiscuous lying, their fabrication of enemies and their rhetoric of betrayal
  • But there are crucial differences. Far from valorising and courting young people, they appeal mostly to older voters. Neither relies on paramilitary terror
  • Neither government seems interested in using warfare as a political tool.
  • Trump and Johnson preach scarcely regulated individualism: almost the opposite of the fascist doctrine of total subordination to the state.
  • Last century’s fascism thrived on economic collapse and mass unemployment. We are nowhere near the conditions of the Great Depression, though both countries now face a major slump in which millions could lose their jobs and homes.
  • Not all the differences are reassuring. Micro-targeting on social media, peer-to-peer texting and now the possibility of deepfake videos allow today’s politicians to confuse and misdirect people, to bombard us with lies and conspiracy theories, to destroy trust and create alternative realities more quickly and effectively than any tools 20th-century dictators had at their disposal.
  • this isn’t fascism. It is something else, something we have not yet named. But we should fear it and resist it as if it were.
Javier E

Opinion | The Coronavirus and America's Humiliation - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...coronavirus-july-4.html

humiliation spiritual crisis culture politics history

shared by Javier E on 03 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • it wasn’t only because of Donald Trump that Americans never really locked down, and then started moving around again in late April.
  • this was a Republican failure, but it was also a collective failure, and it follows a few decades of collective failures
  • On the day Trump leaves office, we’ll still have a younger generation with worse life prospects than their parents had faced. We’ll still have a cultural elite that knows little about people in red America and daily sends the message that they are illegitimate. We’ll still have yawning inequalities, residential segregation, crumbling social capital, a crisis in family formation.
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  • What’s the core problem? Damon Linker is on to a piece of it: “It amounts to a refusal on the part of lots of Americans to think in terms of the social whole — of what’s best for the community, of the common or public good. Each of us thinks we know what’s best for ourselves.”
  • this individualism, atomism and selfishness is downstream from a deeper crisis of legitimacy. In 1970, in a moment like our own, Irving Kristol wrote, “In the same way as men cannot for long tolerate a sense of spiritual meaninglessness in their individual lives, so they cannot for long accept a society in which power, privilege, and property are not distributed according to some morally meaningful criteria.”
  • A lot of people look around at the conditions of this country — how Black Americans are treated, how communities are collapsing, how Washington doesn’t work — and none of it makes sense. None of it inspires faith, confidence
  • if you don’t have a fierce sense of belonging to each other, you’re not going to sacrifice for the common good.
  • We’re confronted with a succession of wicked problems and it turns out we’re not even capable of putting on a friggin’ mask.
  • I had hopes that the crisis would bring us together, but it’s made everything harder and worse. And now I worry less about populism or radical wokeness than about a pervasive loss of national faith.
Javier E

Hard Times in the Red Dot - The American Interest - 0 views

www.the-american-interest.com/...hard-times-in-the-red-dot

us collapse history trump politics disaster exceptionalism Singapore

shared by Javier E on 03 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • Deaths per million in Singapore equal about 4; the comparable U.S. figure, as of June 15, is 356.
  • traits with cultural roots planted deep from experience that run through all of East Asia to one degree or another. Unlike most Americans, East Asians retain some imagination for tragedy, and that inculcates a capacity for stoicism that can be summoned when needed.
  • Stoicism here wears off faster now, along with any vestigial passion for politics, in rough proportion to the burgeoning in recent decades of affluence and a culture of conspicuous consumption
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  • it wears off faster among the young and energetic than among the older, more world-weary but also more patient
  • Middle-class Singaporean families often refer to themselves nowadays as the “sandwich generation,” by which they mean that between needing to care for elderly parents and spending heavily on tuition or tutoring and uniforms for school-age children, they have little left to spend on themselves
  • There are more than 10,000 cases, and numbers are rising fast. More than 800 cases were registered in just five and a half days this past week, more than the previous all-time record for a full week.
  • The Singaporean system lacks an open-ended entitlement akin to the U.S. Social Security system. It uses a market-based system with much to commend it, but it isn’t perfect. The system is designed to rely in part on multigenerational families taking care of the elderly, so as is the case everywhere, when a family doesn’t cohere well for one reason or another, its elderly members often suffer most.
  • with the coming of Singapore’s second monsoon season, the island is suffering the worst bout of dengue fever infections in more than a decade.
  • Few realize that military power can do more than either compel or deter. Most of the time most military power in the hands of a status quo actor like the United States neither compels nor deters; it “merely” reassures, except that over time there is nothing mere about it
  • He proceeded to explain that the U.S. effort in Vietnam had already bought the new nations of Southeast Asia shelter from communist onslaught for three to four precious years.
  • LKY’s son, current Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, repeated the same conclusion in a recent Foreign Affairs essay. He added that ever since the Vietnam War era, regardless of the end of the Cold War and dramatic changes in China, the U.S. role in East Asia has been both benign—he did not say error-free—and stabilizing.
  • More than that, U.S. support for an expanding free-trade accented global economic order has enabled Singapore to surf the crest of burgeoning economic growth in Asia, becoming the most successful transshipment platform in history. It has enabled Singapore to benefit from several major technological developments—containerization is a good example—that have revolutionized international trade in manufactures
  • No country in the world has benefited more than Singapore from U.S. postwar grand strategy, except perhaps China. Which is an interesting observation, often made here, in its own right.
  • The most important of these reasons—and, I’ve learned, the hardest one for foreigners to understand—is that the Protestant/Enlightenment DNA baked indelibly into the American personality requires a belief in the nation’s exceptionalist virtue to justify an activist role abroad
  • Singapore has ridden the great whale of Asian advancement in a sea of American-guaranteed tranquility.
  • Singapore’s approach to dealing with China has been one of strategic hedging. There is no getting around the need to cooperate economically and functionally with China, for Chinese influence permeates the entire region. Do a simple thought experiment: Even if Singaporeans determined to avoid China, how could they avoid the emanations of Chinese relations with and influence on Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Japan, and Korea? Impossible.
  • Singapore’s close relationship with the United States needs to be seen as similarly enmeshed with the greater web of U.S. relationships in littoral Asia, as well as with India and the Middle East. It is misleading, therefore, to define the issue as one of Singapore’s confidence, or lack thereof, that the United States will come to Singapore’s aid and defense en extremis.
  • The utility of the U.S. role vis-à-vis China is mainly one of regional balancing that indirectly benefits Singaporean security.
  • Singapore’s hedging strategy, which reflects a similar disposition throughout Southeast Asia with variations here and there, only works within certain ranges of enabling reality. It doesn’t work if American power or will wanes too much, and it doesn’t work if the broader Sino-American regional balance collapses into glaring enmity and major-power conflict.
  • Over the past dozen years the worry has been too much American waning, less of capability than of strategic attention, competence, and will. Now, over the past year or two, the worry has shifted to anxiety over potential system collapse into conflict and even outright war.
  • It’s no fun being a sentient ping pong ball between two behemoths with stinging paddles, so they join together in ASEAN hoping that this will deflect such incentives. It won’t, but people do what they can when they cannot do what they like.
  • the flat-out truth: The United States is in the process of doing something no other great power in modern history has ever done. It is knowingly and voluntarily abdicating its global role and responsibilities
  • One Lee Kuan Yew vignette sums up the matter. In the autumn of 1968, at a dinner in his honor at Harvard, the Prime Minister had to sit through a litany of complaints from leading scholars about President Johnson’s disastrously escalatory war policies in Vietnam. When they were through, no doubt expecting sympathy from an Asian leader, LKY, never one to bite his tongue, turned on his hosts and announced: “You make me sick.”
  • The recessional began already at the end of the George W. Bush Administration, set roots during the eight years of the Obama presidency, and became a bitter, relentless, tactless, and barely shy of mad obsession during the Trump presidency.
  • the strategy itself is unlikely to be revivified for several reasons.
  • It is troubled within, so is internally directed for reasons good and otherwise. Thus distracted from the rest of the world in a Hamlet-like act sure to last at least a decade, it is unlikely ever to return in full to the disinterested, active, and constructive role it pioneered for itself after World War II.
  • When, for justifiable reasons or not, the nation loses its moral self-respect, it cannot lift its chin to look confidently upon the world, or bring itself to ask the world to look upon America as a worthy model, let alone a leader.
  • That fact that most Americans today also increasingly see expansive international engagement as too expensive, too dangerous, too complex to understand, and unhelpful either to the “main street” American economy or to rock-bottom American security, is relevant too
  • the disappearance of a single “evil” adversary in Soviet communism, the advent of near-permanent economic anxiety punctuated by the 2008-9 Great Recession—whatever numbers the stock market puts up—and the sclerotic polarization of American politics have left most Americans with little bandwidth for foreign policy narratives.
  • Few listen to any member of our tenured political class with the gumption to argue that U.S. internationalism remains in the national interest. In any event, few try, and even fewer manage to make any sense when they do.
  • In that context, pleas from thoughtful observers that we must find a mean between trying to do too much and doing too little are likely to be wasted. No thoughtful, moderate approach to any public policy question can get an actionable hearing these days.
  • what has happened to “the America I knew and so admired” that its people could elect a man like Donald Trump President? How could a great country deteriorate so quickly from apparent competence, lucidity of mind, and cautious self-confidence into utterly debilitating spasms of apparent self-destruction?
  • The political culture as a whole has become a centrism incinerator, an immoderation generator, a shuddering dynamo of shallow intellectual impetuosity of every description.
  • in the wake of the George Floyd unrest one side thinks a slogan—“law and order”—that is mighty close to a dogwhistle for “shoot people of color” can make it all better, while the other side advocates defunding or abolishing the police, for all the good that would do struggling inner-city underclass neighborhoods.
  • To any normal person these are brazenly unserious propositions, yet they suck up nearly all the oxygen the U.S. media has the inclination to report about. The optic once it reaches Singapore, 9,650 miles away, is one of raving derangement.
  • Drop any policy proposal into any of the great lava flows of contemporary American irrationality and any sane center it may possess will boil away into nothingness in a matter of seconds
  • It’s hard for many to let go of hoary assurances about American benignity, constancy, and sound judgment
  • It is a little like trying to peel a beloved but thoroughly battered toy out of the hands of a four-year old. They want to hold onto it, even though at some level they know it’s time to loosen their grip.
  • Since then the mendacious narcissism of Donald Trump, the eager acquiescence to it of nearly the entire Republican Party, and its deadly metathesis in the COVID-19 and George Floyd contexts, have changed their questions. They no longer ask how this man could have become President. Now they ask where is the bottom of this sputtering cacophonous mess? They ask what will happen before and then on and after November 3
  • Singapore’s good fortune in recent decades is by no means entirely an accident of its ambient geostrategic surroundings, but it owes much to those surroundings. While Singaporeans were honing the arts of good government, saving and investing in the country, educating and inventing value-added jobs for themselves, all the while keeping intercommunal relations inclined toward greater tolerance and harmony, the world was cooperating mightily with their ambitions. At the business end of that world was the United States
  • The U.S. grand strategy of providing security goods to the global commons sheltered Singapore’s efforts in more ways than one over the years
  • In 1965, when Singapore was thrust into independence from the Malaysian union, a more fraught environment could barely have been imagined. Indonesia was going crazy in the year of living dangerously, and the konfrontasi spilled over violently onto Singapore’s streets, layering on the raw feelings of race riots here in 1964. Communist Chinese infiltration of every trade union movement in the region was a fact of life, not to exclude shards of Singapore’s, and the Cultural Revolution was at full froth in China. So when U.S. Marines hit the beach at Da Nang in February 1965 the independence-generation leadership here counted it as a blessing.
  • this is exactly the problem now: Those massively benign trends are at risk of inanition, if not reversal.
  • While China is no longer either Marxist or crazy, as it was during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, it is still Leninist, as its recent summary arrogation of Hong Kong’s negotiated special status shows. It has meanwhile grown mighty economically, advanced technologically at surprising speed, and has taken to investing grandly in its military capabilities. Its diplomacy has become more assertive, some would even say arrogant, as its Wolf Warrior nationalism has grown
  • The downward economic inflection of the pandemic has exacerbated pre-existing economic strains
brookegoodman

George Floyd: protests and unrest coast to coast as US cities impose curfews | US news ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...s-saturday-curfews-minneapolis

US crisis culture

shared by brookegoodman on 31 May 20 - No Cached
  • Tense protests over the death of George Floyd and other police killings of black men spread across the US on Saturday night as mayors around the country imposed curfews and several governors called in the national guard amid scenes of violence, injuries and unrest.
  • Governors of six states, including Minnesota, where Floyd died on Monday, called out national guard troops. Many cities including Atlanta, Los Angeles, Louisville, Columbia, Denver, Portland, Milwaukee and Columbus, imposed curfews in anticipation of a restless night ahead.
  • Saturday’s demonstrations had started early but as the night drew on sporadic violence broke out again, seeing businesses torched, police cars set on fire and protesters injured and arrested.
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  • Near Union Square, in the heart of Manhattan, a police vehicle was on fire, sending plumes of black smoke into the air. In Brooklyn, protesters and police clashed for hours in Flatbush. In Los Angeles, a police post was burned in a shopping mall while nearby shops were looted. In Nashville, Tennessee, a historic courthouse was set on fire and in Salt Lake City, Utah, vehicles were burned and a man with a bow and arrow was arrested after he aimed it at protesters.
  • Social media posts showed flames and thick black smoke billowing from a fire in downtown Philadelphia, where an earlier peaceful protest ended with cars being set ablaze, and law enforcement vehicles came under attack in and Chicago.
  • The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Joe Biden, struck a different tone, calling protests against police brutality “right and necessary” but urging an end to violence. “The act of protesting should never be allowed to overshadow the reason we protest,” he said in a statement.
  • “We will not tolerate actions like these against New York City police officers,” the city’s police department said in a tweet announcing the arrest of “multiple people” for throwing molotov cocktails at police vehicles. The US attorney’s office subsequently announced that it had filed federal charges against three people over the incidents.
  • Numerous media outlets, including CNN, Reuters and MSNBC, reported that their staff covering protests in the city had been hit by rubber bullets fired at them. Media outlets and journalists in numerous cities reported being targeted by police with chemical agents or less-lethal rounds, and several reporters were arrested.
  • “The memory of George Floyd is being dishonored by rioters, looters and anarchists,” Trump said, speaking at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center after watching the launch of the historic SpaceX mission.
  • George Floyd’s brother, Philonise, said on Saturday he had briefly spoken to Trump about the death of his brother. “It was so fast. He didn’t give me the opportunity to even speak. It was hard. I was trying to talk to him but he just kept like pushing me off like, ‘I don’t want to hear what you’re talking about,’” Philonise told MSNBC.
  • In Atlanta, people set a police car ablaze and broke windows at CNN’s headquarters. In Oakland, San Jose and Los Angeles, protesters blocked highways and police fired teargas. In Louisville, Kentucky, police fired projectiles at a reporter and her cameraman during a live shot. Protests over police brutality and the death of George Floyd ignited once again on Friday, as Minneapolis faced another night of chaos and demonstrators clashed with police in cities across the US.
  • You’ve read more than 70 articles in the last six months. We believe every one of us deserves equal access to fact-based news and analysis. We’ve decided to keep Guardian journalism free for all readers, regardless of where they live or what they can afford to pay. This is made possible thanks to the support we receive from readers across America in all 50 states.
Javier E

Opinion | Coronavirus Reopenings as a Marshmallow Test for Society - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...eopening-marshmallow-test.html

partisan extremism polarization pandemic ideology unity politics crisis culture

shared by Javier E on 10 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • At this point, there have been enough international success stories in dealing with the coronavirus to leave us with a clear sense of what beating the pandemic takes. First, you have to impose strict social distancing long enough to reduce the number of infected people to a small fraction of the population. Then you have to implement a regime of testing, tracing and isolating: quickly identifying any new outbreak, finding everyone exposed and quarantining them until the danger is past.
  • This strategy is workable. South Korea has done it. New Zealand has done it.
  • you have to be strict and you have to be patient, staying the course until the pandemic is over, not giving in to the temptation to return to normal life while the virus is still widespread. So it is, as I said, a kind of marshmallow test
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  • America’s impatience, its unwillingness to do what it takes to deal with a threat that can’t be beaten with threats of violence, runs much deeper than one man.
  • It doesn’t help that Republicans are ideologically opposed to government safety-net programs, which are what make the economic consequences of social distancing tolerable
  • Nor does it help that even low-cost measures to limit the spread of Covid-19, above all wearing face masks (which mainly protect other people), have been caught up in our culture wars.
  • America in 2020, it seems, is too disunited, with too many people in the grip of ideology and partisanship, to deal effectively with a pandemic. We have the knowledge, we have the resources, but we don’t have the will.
Javier E

The Cure May Be Deadlier Than the Disease. Much Deadlier. | History News Network - 0 views

hnn.us/175087

history expertise public health great depression economic effects pandemic response strategies

shared by Javier E on 16 May 20 - No Cached
  • In the midst of the COVID-19 epidemic, we are being urged by governments and the media to “trust the experts” – that is, public health officials
  • historians are experts too. Of course our expertise is different, but what it tells us, and what we should communicate to the public, is that “trusting the experts” isn’t nearly as simple as it may seem.
  • By definition, experts know much more about a given subject than the rest of us: that’s their great strength. But experts can also suffer from tunnel vision: though they know  their own specialties, they may fail to look left or right and see the larger contexts, consequences, or costs of their actions
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  • The single-minded mission of a public health expert is to stop the spread of disease, which is of course an important priority. But if he is not trained in history or economics, he may not realize how relevant these bodies of knowledge are to the general health of society, and he may not appreciate the full costs of drastic public health measures.
  • Never in history has an economic catastrophe descended so swiftly.  “The speed and magnitude of the labor market’s decline is unprecedented,”
  • Dr. Fauci dismisses the loss of 10 million jobs as merely “inconvenient”, and says “I just don’t understand” why all 50 states are not locking down their citizens -- perhaps because he does not understand how terrible the last depression was.
  • Extrapolating from Brenner’s estimates, political scientist Toby Rogers calculates that even a 5 percent increase in unemployment over 5 years (the Great Depression lasted more than a decade) would kill nearly 300,000 Americans
  • Historically, economic prosperity tends to make human beings tolerant and peace-loving, whereas sharp economic reverses impel us to grab resources from others, persecute scapegoats, surrender to despots, and wage war.
  • we tend to overlook the darker side of the New Deal. To take just one example which isn’t much taught in our classes, the US government deported as many as 1.8 million Mexican-Americans to Mexico, though the majority were US citizens. The exact numbers are debated, but in any case they were far greater than the Japanese-Americans interned during the Second World War (120,000) or the American Indians removed from their land by Andrew Jackson (80,000). Begun under the Hoover administration, the deportations continued under Roosevelt, with the aim of saving jobs for Americans (as long as they weren’t Mexican-Americans). 
  • the actual casualties of the Second World War were still greater: 70 to 85 million dead, two-thirds of them civilians, most if not all of them ultimately the result of the Great Depression. Without that trigger, there would have probably been no global war and no Holocaust
  • even mild recessions can kill. Drawing on American health statistics from 1940 to 1973, he calculated that a one percent rise in unemployment over six years produced 36,887 excess deaths, mainly from cardiovascular disease, suicide, homicide, and cirrhosi
  • The Great Depression gave rise to tyranny, aggression, and mass murder throughout the world
  • If unemployment reaches 20 percent, as some economists are predicting, the result would be almost a million deaths in the United States alone, far more than any plausible estimate of COVID casualties.
  • If you question whether the measures taken against coronavirus today will kill democracy, the answer is that they are already killing democracy.
  • In Africa, government security forces have been brutalizing and in some cases killing citizens to enforce lockdowns. Throughout the Third World there are hundreds of millions living on a subsistence level, and for them lockdowns can mean starvation:
  • Lockdowns now look increasingly like an epidemiological Maginot Line, a flatfooted static defense that rules out more aggressive and innovative tactics
Javier E

The Predicate Is Fear - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...616009

trump crisis politics loyalty

shared by Javier E on 05 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • it helps to understand the predicate embraced by many Trump supporters: If Joseph R. Biden Jr. wins the presidency, America dies.
  • it allows Trump and his followers to tolerate and justify pretty much anything in order to win. And “anything” turns out to be quite a lot.
  • This is just the latest installment in a four-year record of shame, indecency, incompetence, and malfeasance. And yet, for tens of millions of Trump’s supporters, none of it matters. None of it even breaks through. At this point, it appears, Donald Trump really could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose his voters.
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  • in the minds of Trump’s supporters lingers the belief that a Biden presidency would usher in a reign of terror. Many of them simply have to believe that. Justifying their fealty to a man who is so obviously a moral wreck requires them to turn Joe Biden and the Democratic Party into an existential threat
  • As Amy Chua, the author of Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations, has argued, the tribal instinct is not just to belong, but also to exclude and to attack. “When groups feel threatened,” Chua writes, “they retreat into tribalism. They close ranks and become more insular, more defensive, more punitive, more us-versus-them.”
  • “Motivation conditions cognition,”
  • Trump is given carte blanche by his supporters because they perceive him as their protector, transforming his ruthlessness from a vice into a virtue.
  • That works both ways. Fear strengthens tribalistic instincts, and tribalistic instincts amplify fear. Nothing bonds a group more tightly than a common enemy that is perceived as a mortal threat.
  • But if you do succeed in keeping the topic on Trump, they often twist themselves into knots in order to defend him, and in some cases they simply deny reality.
  • Many shift the topic immediately back to Democrats, because offering a vigorous moral defense of Donald Trump isn’t an easy task. It’s like asking people to stare directly into the sun; they might do it for an instant, but then they look away
  • Very few Trump supporters I know are able to offer an honest appraisal of the man. To do so creates too much cognitive dissonance.
  • They are similarly unable to admit they are defending an ethic that is at odds with what they have long championed. They have accepted, excused, and applauded Trump’s behavior and tactics, allowing his ends to justify his means. In important respects, this is antithetical to a virtue ethic.
  • As the conservative writer David French has put it, with Donald Trump and his supporters we are seeing “negative partisanship in its near-pure form, and it’s the best way to explain Trump’s current appeal to the Republican party.” His ideology is almost entirely beside the point, according to French: “His identity matters more, and his identity is clear—the Republican champion against the hated Democratic foe.”
  • if there is a line Donald Trump could cross that would forfeit the loyalty of his core supporters—including, and in some respects especially, white evangelical Christians—I can’t imagine what it would be. And that is a rather depressing thing to admit.
Javier E

What Can History Tell Us About the World After Trump? - 0 views

www.foreignaffairs.com/...history-which-past-prologue

crisis history individual pandemic 21st century 20th century patterns war dictatorship

shared by Javier E on 06 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • U.S. President Donald Trump largely ignores the past or tends to get it wrong.
  • Whenever he leaves office, in early 2021, 2025, or sometime in between, the world will be in a worse state than it was in 2016. China has become more assertive and even aggressive. Russia, under its president for life, Vladimir Putin, carries on brazenly as a rogue state, destabilizing its neighbors and waging a covert war against democracies through cyberattacks and assassinations. In Brazil, Hungary, the Philippines, and Saudi Arabia, a new crop of strongman rulers has emerged. The world is struggling to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic and is just coming to appreciate the magnitude of its economic and social fallout. Looming over everything is climate change.
  • Will the coming decades bring a new Cold War, with China cast as the Soviet Union and the rest of the world picking sides or trying to find a middle ground? Humanity survived the original Cold War in part because each side’s massive nuclear arsenal deterred the other from starting a hot war and in part because the West and the Soviet bloc got used to dealing with each other over time, like partners in a long and unhappy relationship, and created a legal framework with frequent consultation and confidence-building measures. In the decades ahead, perhaps China and the United States can likewise work out their own tense but lasting peace
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  • Today’s unstable world, however, looks more like that of the 1910s or the 1930s, when social and economic unrest were widespread and multiple powerful players crowded the international scene, some bent on upending the existing order. Just as China is challenging the United States today, the rising powers of Germany, Japan, and the United States threatened the hegemonic power of the British Empire in the 1910s. Meanwhile, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to an economic downturn reminiscent of the Great Depression of the 1930s.
  • The history of the first half of the twentieth century demonstrates all too vividly that unchecked or unmoderated tensions can lead to extremism at home and conflict abroad. It also shows that at times of heightened tension, accidents can set off explosions like a spark in a powder keg, especially if countries in those moments of crisis lack wise and capable leadership.
  • If the administration that succeeds Trump’s wants to repair the damaged world and rebuild a stable international order, it ought to use history—not as a judge but as a wise adviser.
  • WARNING SIGNS
  • A knowledge of history offers insurance against sudden shocks. World wars and great depressions do not come out of the clear blue sky; they happen because previous restraints on bad behavior have weakened
  • In the nineteenth century, enough European powers—in particular the five great ones, Austria, France, Prussia, Russia, and the United Kingdom—came to believe that unprovoked aggression should not be tolerated, and Europe enjoyed more peace than at any other time in its troubled history until after 1945
  • Further hastening the breakdown of the international order is how states are increasingly resorting to confrontational politics, in substance as well as in style.
  • Their motives are as old as states themselves: ambition and greed, ideologies and emotions, or just fear of what the other side might be intending
  • Today, decades of “patriotic education” in China’s schools have fostered a highly nationalist younger generation that expects its government to assert itself in the world.
  • Public rhetoric matters, too, because it can create the anticipation of, even a longing for, confrontation and can stir up forces that leaders cannot control.
  • Defusing tensions is possible, but it requires leadership aided by patient diplomacy, confidence building, and compromise.
  • Lately, however, some historians have begun to see that interwar decade in a different light—as a time of real progress toward a strong international order.
  • Unfortunately, compromise does not always play well to domestic audiences or elites who see their honor and status tied up with that of their country. But capable leaders can overcome those obstacles. Kennedy and Khrushchev overruled their militaries, which were urging war on them; they chose, at considerable risk, to work with each other, thus sparing the world a nuclear war.
  • Trump, too, has left a highly personal mark on global politics. In the long debate among historians and international relations experts over which matters most—great impersonal forces or specific leaders—his presidency surely adds weight to the latter.
  • His character traits, life experiences, and ambitions, combined with the considerable power the president can exert over foreign policy, have shaped much of U.S. foreign policy over the last nearly four years, just as Putin’s memories of the humiliation and disappearance of the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War have fed his determination to make Russia count again on the world stage. It still matters that both men happen to lead large and powerful countries.
  • When Germany fell into the clutches of Adolf Hitler, in contrast, he was able to start a world war.
  • THE NOT-SO-GOLDEN AGE
  • In relatively stable times, the world can endure problematic leaders without lasting damage. It is when a number of disruptive factors come together that those wielding power can bring on the perfect storm
  • By 1914, confrontation had become the preferred option for all the players, with the exception of the United Kingdom, which still hoped to prevent or at least stay out of a general European war.
  • Although they might not have realized it, many Europeans were psychologically prepared for war. An exaggerated respect for their own militaries and the widespread influence of social Darwinism encouraged a belief that war was a noble and necessary part of a nation’s struggle for survival. 
  • The only chance of preventing a local conflict from becoming a continent-wide conflagration lay with the civilian leaders who would ultimately decide whether or not to sign the mobilization orders. But those nominally in charge were unfit to bear that responsibility.
  • In the last days of peace, in July and early August 1914, the task of keeping Europe out of conflict weighed increasingly on a few men, above all Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, and Emperor Franz Josef of Austria-Hungary. Each proved unable to withstand the pressure from those who urged war.
  • THE MISUNDERSTOOD DECADE
  • With the benefit of hindsight, historians have often considered the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 to be a failure and the 1920s a mere prelude to the inevitable rise of the dictators and the descent into World War II.
  • Preparing for conflict—or even appearing to do so—pushes the other side toward a confrontational stance of its own. Scenarios sketched out as possibilities in more peaceful times become probabilities, and leaders find that their freedom to maneuver is shrinking.
  • The establishment in 1920 of his brainchild, the League of Nations, was a significant step, even without U.S. membership: it created an international body to provide collective security for its members and with the power to use sanctions, even including war, against aggressors
  • Overall, the 1920s were a time of cooperation, not confrontation, in international relations. For the most part, the leaders of the major powers, the Soviet Union excepted, supported a peaceful international order.
  • The promise of the 1920s was cut short by the Great Depression.
  • Citizens lost faith in the ability of their leaders to cope with the crisis. What was more ominous, they often lost faith in capitalism and democracy. The result was the growth of extremist parties on both the right and the left.
  • The catastrophe that followed showed yet again how important the individual can be in the wielding of power. Hitler had clear goals—to break what he called “the chains” of the Treaty of Versailles and make Germany and “the Aryan race” dominant in Europe, if not the world—and he was determined to achieve them at whatever cost.
  • The military, delighted by the increases in defense spending and beguiled by Hitler’s promises of glory and territorial expansion, tamely went along. In Italy, Mussolini, who had long dreamed of a second Roman Empire, abandoned his earlier caution. On the other side of the world, Japan’s new rulers were also thinking in terms of national glory and building a Greater Japan through conquest.
  • Preoccupied with their own problems, the leaders of the remaining democracies were slow to realize the developing threat to world order and slow to take action
  • This time, war was the result not of reckless brinkmanship or weak governments but of powerful leaders deliberately seeking confrontation. Those who might have opposed them, such as the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, chose instead to appease them in the hope that war could be avoided. By failing to act in the face of repeated violations of treaties and international law, the leaders of the democracies allowed the international order to break.
  • OMINOUS ECHOES
  • Led by Roosevelt, statesmen in the Allied countries were determined to learn from this mistake. Even as the war raged, they enunciated the principles and planned the institutions for a new and better world order.
  • Three-quarters of a century later, however, that order is looking dangerously creaky. The COVID-19 pandemic has damaged the world’s economy and set back international cooperation.
  • Tensions are building up as they did before the two world wars, with intensifying great-power rivalries and with regional conflicts, such as the recent skirmishes between China and India, that threaten to draw in other players.
  • Meanwhile, the pandemic will shake publics’ faith in their countries’ institutions, just as the Great Depression did.
  • Norms that once seemed inviolable, including those against aggression and conquest, have been breached. Russia seized Crimea by force in 2014, and the Trump administration last year gave the United States’ blessing to Israel’s de facto annexation of the Golan Heights and may well recognize the threatened annexation of large parts of the West Bank that Israel conquered in 1967.
  • Will others follow the example set by Russia and Israel, as happened in the 1910s and the 1930s?
  • Russia continues to meddle wherever it can, and Putin dreams of destroying the EU
  • U.S.-Chinese relations are increasingly adversarial, with continued spats over trade, advanced technology, and strategic influence, and both sides are developing scenarios for a possible war. The two countries’ rhetoric has grown more bellicose, too. China’s “Wolf Warrior” diplomats, so named by Chinese officials after a popular movie series, excoriate those who dare to criticize or oppose Beijing, and American officials respond in kind.
  • How the world copes will depend on the strength of its institutions and, at crucial moments, on leadership. Weak and indecisive leaders may allow bad situations to get worse, as they did in 1914. Determined and ruthless ones can create wars, as they did in 1939. Wise and brave ones may guide the world through the storms. Let us hope the last group has read some history.
Javier E

The Tyranny of the Majority Is a Real Thing - The Triad - 0 views

thetriad.thebulwark.com/...e-tyranny-of-the-majority-is-a

tyranny majority liberalism democracy

shared by Javier E on 10 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • I want to—God forgive me—defend Mike Lee.Lee sent out a bunch of not-especially-nuanced tweets about America not being a democracy and about democracy being less important than liberty, peace, and prosperity.
  • Lee is right.
  • Let’s start at the 30,000 foot view: Why democracy? As regular readers know I am . . . clear-eyed . . . about the collective wisdom of the great and good American people. I mean, just take a look around.
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  • That said, the truism is true: Democracy is the least-worst form of government
  • But the form of government is only a means to an end. And the end result that we want is, roughly speaking, liberalism.
  • By which I don’t mean AOC-Green New Deal political liberalism, but cultural liberalism: peace, liberty, mutual toleration—basically the goods Mike Lee laid out.
  • “Democracy” is not always conducive to these good
  • The results of the democratic election in Germany in July of 1932 were not great for liberalism
  • So the system the Founders devised was engineered to try to balance out the rights of both the majority and the minority.
  • Is it okay for 50.1 percent of the people to change the tax code? Yes.
  • Is it okay for 50.1 percent of the people to create an entirely new social welfare program that fundamentally changes the relationship of the citizenry to the government? No.
  • nd by “not okay” I mean “likely to cause long-term harm to the body politic.”
  • changes in reasonably short fashion—but that big changes take time and require much larger majorities.This is a good thing!
  • Because you’re not in the majority for forever.
  • Our system was designed so that a small-d democratic majority could govern our society, rather than a tiny minority (the British monarchy). But it was also designed with one eye on the perils of rank majoritarianism and a desire to protect the minority, too.
Javier E

Opinion | Rod Rosenstein Was Just Doing His Job - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...enstein-family-separation.html

conformity trump politics us government

shared by Javier E on 16 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Rosenstein’s complicity in this machine was ugly, but it was by no means unique. Top officials at the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, and Health and Human Services all played a role. They were all sowing chaos, inflicting cruelty and causing unfathomable trauma at the behest of a small, vicious cadre up top
  • his argument was this: The jail time for these misdemeanors was usually a matter of days. So why were these parents not being reunited with their children afterward? “What became clear,” he told me, “is that they never had any intention of reuniting them until the parent gave up and was deported, if ever.”
  • The federal judge in San Diego agreed, saying the government’s behavior “shocks the conscience,” that the separation policy violated due process and that all separated families had to be reunited within 30 days.
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  • what galls Gelernt now, after seeing the Times report about the inspector general’s investigation, is that his suspicions were right all along: Separating families was the objective of the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy, not a byproduct. The children were the targets of the policy, not collateral damage. “We need to take away children,” Sessions reportedly told the local U.S. attorneys.
  • When the number of immigrants surged at the border in 2014, President Barack Obama responded by building more detention facilities and holding families indefinitely — though still together — and faced a legal backlash.
  • But Trump’s policy was something altogether different. It was child abuse, plain and simple. “That’s why it’s so chilling,” Gelernt told me. “D.O.J. officials apparently declined to exempt even cases with a baby.
  • note what Rosenstein did not deny: That he refused his U.S. attorneys permission to automatically exempt undocumented immigrants with young children from prosecution.
  • what we have lately learned about Rosenstein is that he is a very canny political operator. He has a gift for threading needles that even a tailor would envy.
  • While serving in the Trump Justice Department, for instance, he wrote a memo recommending the removal of James Comey as the head of the F.B.I., and he later defended his boss, William Barr, after he misled the public about the results of the Mueller investigation
  • But he also had the presence of mind to appoint Robert S. Mueller in the first place — and, though he has denied it, to question Trump’s own presence of mind. (It has been reported that he suggested secretly recording Trump’s ravings in order to expose him as unfit to lead.)
  • when it was Rosenstein’s turn, he did nothing to stop government-orchestrated cruelty. Instead, he simply did his job.
anonymous

Opinion | The Coronavirus Has Laid Bare the Inequality of America's Health Care - The N... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...id-inequality-health-care.html

crisis politics pandemic

shared by anonymous on 25 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • The notion of price control is anathema to health care companies. It threatens their basic business model, in which the government grants them approvals and patents, pays whatever they ask, and works hand in hand with them as they deliver the worst health outcomes at the highest costs in the rich world.
  • The American health care industry is not good at promoting health, but it excels at taking money from all of us for its benefit. It is an engine of inequality.
  • the virus also provides an opportunity for systemic change. The United States spends more than any other nation on health care, and yet we have the lowest life expectancy among rich countries. And although perhaps no system can prepare for such an event, we were no better prepared for the pandemic than countries that spend far less.
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  • One way or another, everyone pays for health care. It accounts for about 18 percent of G.D.P. — nearly $11,000 per person. Individuals directly pay about a quarter, the federal and state governments pay nearly half, and most of the rest is paid by employers.
  • Many Americans think their health insurance is a gift from their employers — a “benefit” bestowed on lucky workers by benevolent corporations. It would be more accurate to think of employer-provided health insurance as a tax.
  • Rising health care costs account for much of the half-century decline in the earnings of men without a college degree, and contribute to the decline in the number of less-skilled jobs.
  • Employer-based health insurance is a wrecking ball, destroying the labor market for less-educated workers and contributing to the rise in “deaths of despair.”
  • We face a looming trillion-dollar federal deficit caused almost entirely by the rising costs of Medicaid and Medicare, even without the recent coronavirus relief bill.
  • Rising costs are an untenable burden on our government, too. States’ payments for Medicaid have risen from 20.5 percent of their spending in 2008 to 28.9 percent in 2019. To meet those rising costs, states have cut their financing for roads, bridges and state universities. Without those crucial investments, the path to success for many Americans is cut off
  • Every year, the United States spends $1 trillion more than is needed for high quality care.
  • executives at hospitals, medical device makers and pharmaceutical companies, and some physicians, are very well paid.
  • American doctors control access to their profession through a system that limits medical school admissions and the entry of doctors trained abroad — an imbalance that was clear even before the pandemic
  • Hospitals, many of them classified as nonprofits, have consolidated, with monopolies over health care in many cities, and they have used that monopoly power to raise prices
  • These are all strategies that lawmakers and regulators could put a stop to, if they choose.
  • The health care industry has armored itself, employing five lobbyists for each elected member of Congress. But public anger has been building — over drug prices, co-payments, surprise medical bills — and now, over the fragility of our health care system, which has been laid bare by the pandemic
  • A single-payer system is just one possibility. There are many systems in wealthy countries to choose from, with and without insurance companies, with and without government-run hospitals. But all have two key characteristics: universal coverage — ideally from birth — and cost control.
  • In the United States, public funding is likely to play a significant role in any treatments or vaccines that are eventually developed for Covid-19. Americans should demand that they be available at a reasonable price to everyone — not in the sole interest of drug companies.
  • We are believers in free-market capitalism, but health care is not something it can deliver in a socially tolerable way.
  • They choose not to. And so we Americans have too few doctors, too few beds and too few ventilators — but lots of income for providers
  • America is a rich country that can afford a world-class health care system. We should be spending a lot of money on care and on new drugs. But we need to spend to save lives and reduce sickness, not on expensive, income-generating procedures that do little to improve health. Or worst of all, on enriching pharma companies that feed the opioid epidemic.
  • Medical device manufacturers have also consolidated, in some cases using a “catch and kill” strategy to swallow up nimbler start-ups and keep the prices of their products high.
  • Ambulance services and emergency departments that don’t accept insurance have become favorites of private equity investors because of their high profits
  • Britain, for example, has the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, which vets drugs, devices and procedures for their benefit relative to cost
  • At the very least, America must stop financing health care through employer-based insurance, which encourages some people to work but it eliminates jobs for less-skilled workers
  • Our system takes from the poor and working class to generate wealth for the already wealthy.
  • passed a coronavirus bill including $3.1 billion to develop and produce drugs and vaccines.
  • The industry might emerge as a superhero of the war against Covid-19, like the Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain during World War II.
  • illions have lost their paychecks and their insurance
anonymous

France warns citizens to be cautious as anger seethes in Muslim world over cartoons | R... - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...ld-over-cartoons-idUSKBN27C1IA

france iran saudiarabia tension religion

shared by anonymous on 27 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • France warned its citizens in several Muslim-majority countries to take extra security precautions on Tuesday as anger surged over cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad, and the head of Russia’s Chechnya region said Paris was pushing people towards terrorism.
  • But in a sign that some countries want to limit the fallout, Saudi Arabia - while condemning the cartoons - held back from echoing calls in other parts of the Muslim world for a boycott of French products.
  • The French government, backed by many citizens, saw the beheading as an attack on freedom of speech, and said they would defend the right to display the cartoons.
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  • France’s foreign ministry on Tuesday issued safety advice to French citizens in Indonesia, Turkey, Bangladesh, Iraq and Mauritania, advising them to exercise caution. They should stay away from any protests over the cartoons and avoid any public gatherings.
  • You are forcing people into terrorism, pushing people towards it, not leaving them any choice, creating the conditions for the growth of extremism in young people’s heads
  • We won’t be intimidated and we put on notice those who sow hatred
  • , which in Kadyrov’s case, is unacceptable.”
  • Calls for a boycott of French goods were trending over the weekend on social media in Saudi Arabia, but officials have not backed them, favouring a measured approach.
  • A Saudi foreign ministry official said on Tuesday the Gulf state condemns all acts of terrorism, an apparent reference to Paty’s killing.
  • Freedom of expression and culture should be a beacon of respect, tolerance and peace that rejects practices and acts which generate hatred
  • that is negative and goes beyond what is acceptable
clairemann

Young Adults Less Likely to Take COVID-19 Prevention Actions | Time - 0 views

time.com/...mask-wearing-age-breakdown

crisis Culture policy US COVID

shared by clairemann on 30 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • According to the agency’s analysis of the survey results, older respondents are more likely to take certain actions or refrain from certain activities in order to mitigate the chances of spreading and contracting COVID-19.
  • As shown in the below chart, which captures the situation in June, 38% of 18-to-29 year olds engaged in all six behaviors, while 53% of people age 60 and older did the same.
  • “they might be more concerned about COVID-19, based on their higher risk for severe illness compared with that of younger adults.”
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  • engaged in at least four behaviors over the survey time period, and only 6% from the entire sample reported one or fewer behaviors.
  • Only face mask use increased, going from 78% in April to 89% in June. The other prevention measures declined marginally, except avoiding restaurants, which stayed flat.
  • The lower prevalence of mitigation behaviors in younger adults “might contribute to the high incidence of confirmed COVID-19 cases” among that group, the CDC notes.
  • U.S. While this group is less likely to suffer severe illness from COVID-19, it isn’t out of the question.
  • Additionally, young people’s risk tolerance for COVID-19, and their decisions to forego social health measures, affects not just their peers but also their older and more vulnerable neighbors.
  • “protect persons of all ages by preventing the spread of SARS-CoV-2.” That should be reason enough to step up.
Javier E

Why Matthew Yglesias Left Vox - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...617102

cancel culture censorship woke progressive media culture politics

shared by Javier E on 14 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Yglesias explained why pushing back against the “dominant sensibility” in digital journalism is important to him. He said he believes that certain voguish positions are substantively wrong—for instance, abolishing or defunding police—and that such arguments, as well as rhetorical fights over terms like Latinx, alienate many people from progressive politics and the Democratic Party.
  • there’s a dynamic where there’s media people who really elevated the profile of [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] and a couple of other members way above their actual numerical standing.”
  • “The people making the media are young college graduates in big cities, and that kind of politics makes a lot of sense to them,” he said. “And we keep seeing that older people, and working-class people of all races and ethnicities, just don’t share that entire worldview. It’s important to me to be in a position to step outside that dynamic …
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  • One trend that exacerbated that challenge: colleagues in media treating the expression of allegedly problematic ideas as if they were a human-resources issue. Earlier this year, for instance, after Yglesias signed a group letter published in Harper’s magazine objecting to cancel culture, one of his colleagues, Emily VanDerWerff, told Vox editors that his signature made her feel “less safe at Vox.”
  • I asked Yglesias if that matter in any way motivated his departure. “Something we’ve seen in a lot of organizations is increasing sensitivity about language and what people say,” he told me. “It’s a damaging trend in the media in particular because it is an industry that’s about ideas, and if you treat disagreement as a source of harm or personal safety, then it’s very challenging to do good work.”
  • an experiment that the Harvard social scientist Cass Sunstein conducted in two different communities in Colorado: left-leaning Boulder and right-leaning Colorado Springs. Residents in each community were gathered into small groups to discuss their views on three controversial topics: climate change, same-sex marriage, and affirmative action. Afterward, participants were asked to report on the opinions of their discussion group as well as their own views on the subjects. In both communities, gathering into groups composed of mostly like-minded people to discuss controversial subjects made individuals more settled and extreme in their views.
  • “Liberals, in Boulder, became distinctly more liberal on all three issues. Conservatives, in Colorado Springs, become distinctly more conservative on all three issues,” Sunstein wrote of his experiment. “Deliberation much decreased diversity among liberals; it also much decreased diversity among conservatives. After deliberation, members of nearly all groups showed, in their post-deliberation statements, far more uniformity than they did before deliberation.”
  • Compelling evidence points to a big cost associated with ideological bubbles, I argued: They make us more confident that we know everything, more set and extreme in our views, more prone to groupthink, more vulnerable to fallacies, and less circumspect.
  • The New York Times, New York, The Intercept, Vox, Slate, The New Republic, and other outlets are today less ideologically diverse in their staff and less tolerant of contentious challenges to the dominant viewpoint of college-educated progressives than they have been in the recent past. I fear that in the short term, Americans will encounter less rigorous and more polarizing journalism. In the long term, a dearth of ideological diversity risks consequences we cannot fully anticipate.
Javier E

Opinion | Me, Tucker Carlson and the danger to democracy posed by false allegations - T... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...acy-posed-by-false-allegations

'false accusation' democracy sycophant

shared by Javier E on 15 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Mutual toleration involves accepting the legitimacy of one’s opponents, as long as they play by the constitutional rules
  • Institutional forbearance means refusing to exercise the full extent of a legal right if it’s the morally wrong thing to do or violates the spirit of the law.
  • leading figures on the right have openly abandoned the obvious standard that those who bring allegations should also bring evidence. This is not a recent development.
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  • But Ziblatt and Levitsky missed another important norm: Don’t make unsubstantiated allegations or false accusations.
  • rtunately.In ancient Greece, Athenian democrats understood that establishing social sanctions against false accusations — and avoiding situations in which people are being asked to prove a negative — was one of the most important pillars of maintaining a healthy democratic culture.
  • For this reason, they reserved one of their most bitter epithets for people who trafficked in false accusations. They were “sycophants,”
  • Sycophants were the lowest of the low because they took the best of democracy — the rule of law, process and procedure — and sought to turn it against itself in order to incapacitate opponents and secure power.
anonymous

U.S. Will Not Punish Olympic Athletes for Peaceful Protests - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...us-olympic-protests.html

shared by anonymous on 11 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • The U.S. committee’s announcement was made in conjunction with a formal recommendation from a council led by American athletes that asked the I.O.C. to change its policy, known as Rule 50, while working on justice causes.
  • “It is critical to state unequivocally that human rights are not political, and peaceful calls for equity and equality must not be confused with divisive demonstrations,” Sarah Hirshland, chief executive of the U.S.O.P.C.
  • Rule 50 of the Olympic Charter prohibits individuals from demonstrating or displaying “political, religious or racial propaganda” around Olympic sites during the Games.
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  • at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City, when the American sprinters John Carlos and Tommie Smith were expelled from the Games for raising their fists on the medals podium during the playing of the U.S. national anthem.
  • For now, the change in policy from the U.S.O.P.C. does not mean that American athletes will be free to protest at the Summer Olympics in Tokyo next year without the threat of punishment.
  • In practice, the I.O.C. has historically called on individual organizing committees to dole out punishments for violations.
  • Because the U.S. is a big market and a big national Olympic committee, “it does make a difference in terms of what the discourse is going to be at the I.O.C. around this issue,”
  • The U.S.O.P.C.’s split from the I.O.C. on this rule comes at a delicate time, with the Olympics set to take place in Los Angeles in 2028.
  • “As long as they do it respectfully, with due deference that there will be other athletes on that podium with them, I am not going to get sleepless nights on this.”
  • The I.O.C. clarified its rule last January, specifying that kneeling or raising a fist during a medal ceremony was a form of demonstration that would not be tolerated.
  • “When you specify kneeling and you talk about fists when you’re defining what protest can and can’t be, you’re saying you don’t want Black athletes to come,” Moushaumi Robinson, a gold medalist in track and field who leads the Team U.S.A.
  • “Once the clock is at double zero, once the race finishes, the three individuals or three teams, they own that time, and it is their time to express or not express, to do or not do, to stand or not stand, in that moment that they’ve earned.”
kennyn-77

Why China Is the World's Last 'Zero Covid' Holdout - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...china-zero-covid-virus.html

china pandemic policy covid lockdown

shared by kennyn-77 on 28 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • Since then, China has locked down a city of 4 million, as well as several smaller cities and parts of Beijing, to contain a fresh outbreak that has infected more than 240 people in at least 11 provinces and regions. The authorities have shuttered schools and tourist sites. Government websites have detailed every movement of the unlucky couple and their sprawling web of contacts, including what time they checked into hotels and on which floors of restaurants they sat.
  • China has reported fewer than 5,000 deaths since the pandemic began
  • Its thriving exports have helped to keep the economy afloat. The ruling Communist Party’s tight grip on power enables lockdowns and testing to be carried out with astonishing efficiency. Beijing is set to host the Winter Olympics in February.
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  • But the policy has also, increasingly, made China an outlier. The rest of the world is reopening, including New Zealand and Australia, which also once embraced zero tolerance. China is now the only country still chasing full eradication of the virus.
  • Xi Jinping, China’s leader, has repeatedly pointed to the country’s success in containment as proof of the superiority of its governance model
  • China may find itself increasingly isolated, diplomatically and economically, at a time when global public opinion is hardening against it.
  • the Chinese Communist Party’s very hold on power seemed to hinge on its ability to control the virus. Its initial attempts to cover up the outbreak in Wuhan gave rise to a stunning outpouring of public anger. Images of overwhelmed hospitals and patients begging for help flooded the Chinese internet.
  • China’s strict lockdowns and mass testing campaigns, once criticized as heavy handed, became models for other countries.
  • When Zhang Wenhong, a prominent infectious disease expert from Shanghai, suggested this summer that China learn to live with the virus, he was attacked viciously online as a lackey of foreigners. A former Chinese health minister called such a mindset reckless.
  • Australia, which was home to the world’s longest lockdown, is scrapping quarantine requirements for vaccinated residents returning from overseas. New Zealand formally abandoned its quest for zero this month. Singapore is offering quarantine-free travel to vaccinated tourists from Germany, the United States, France and several other countries
  • There are also more practical reasons for China’s hesitation. Medical resources are highly concentrated in big cities, and more remote areas could quickly be overwhelmed by an uptick in cases, said Zhang Jun, an urban studies scholar at the City University of Hong Kong.
  • In addition, though China has achieved a relatively high full inoculation rate, at 75 percent of its population, questions have emerged about the efficacy of its homegrown vaccines.
  • And, at least for now, the elimination strategy appears to enjoy public support. While residents in locked-down areas have complained about seemingly arbitrary or overly harsh restrictions on social media, travel is relatively unconstrained in areas without cases. Wealthy consumers have poured money into luxury goods and fancy cars since they’re not spending on trips abroad.
Javier E

Trumpism Has Entered Its Final Form - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...619891

radicalization GOP ethics addiction extremism amigdala conspiracy theory politics trump crisis Culture

shared by Javier E on 26 Aug 21 - No Cached
  • His actions were viewed as so shocking and norm-shattering that he couldn’t be ignored. In today’s Republican Party, however, Trump is becoming what was once unthinkable—conventional, unexceptional, even something of an establishment figure.
  • Trump looks rather ordinary. He wants credit for the vaccines that were developed during his administration, which mark a genuine medical milestone, but in some quarters of today’s Republican Party, that makes Trump suspect, too closely aligned with the hated Anthony Fauci, a dumbass.
  • For more than half a decade, the Republican base—MAGA world—has been fed a constant diet of outrageous lies and conspiracy theories, not just by Trump but also by his allies in the party and the right-wing media ecosystem. Negative emotions such as fear, rage, and resentment have been constantly stirred up. Over time, transgressive behaviors became chic; “owning the libs” became the name of the game. What mattered was hating the right people.
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  • he MAGA brain was rewired. The psychologist Daniel Goleman refers to “amygdala hijack,” an intense emotional reaction that’s dramatically disproportionate to the situation. When a person has been triggered, their emotions take over, and they see the world through a distorted lens.
  • For many, Trump’s behaviors were initially a bug; eventually, they became a feature. Republicans ignored his corruptions and reveled in his cruelty. They entered Trump’s hall of mirrors, and they rather enjoyed it.
  • To better understand what’s happening in the GOP, think of a person with addiction who over time develops a tolerance; as a result, they need more potent and more frequent doses of the drug to get their desired high. And sometimes even that isn’t enough. They might turn to a more potent drug, which offers a more intense experience and a longer-lasting high, but at the price of considerably more danger.
  • What was seen as shocking in 2017 is now anodyne. The ethical lines that existed then turned out to have been drawn in sand. When you cross into territory devoid of moral axioms or epistemic standards—the kind of world you would find in a Turgenev novel—things can get very ugly, very quickly.
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