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Javier E

The Scary Future of the American Right - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...620746

right-wing conservatism gop radical politics history crisis Culture trump

shared by Javier E on 19 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • The movement has three distinctive strains. First, the people over 50 who have been hanging around conservative circles for decades but who have recently been radicalized by the current left.
  • The second strain is made up of mid-career politicians and operatives who are learning to adapt to the age of populist rage:
  • people like Ted Cruz (Princeton, Harvard), J. D. Vance (Yale Law), and Josh Hawley (Stanford and Yale).
  • ...44 more annotations...
  • The third and largest strain is the young. They grew up in the era of Facebook and MSNBC and identity politics. They went to colleges smothered by progressive sermonizing. And they reacted by running in the other direction
  • I couldn’t quite suppress the disturbing voice in my head saying, “If you were 22, maybe you’d be here too.”
  • Conservatives have always inveighed against the cultural elite—the media, the universities, Hollywood. But in the Information Age, the purveyors of culture are now corporate titans.
  • The national conservatives thus describe a world in which the corporate elite, the media elite, the political elite, and the academic elite have all coagulated into one axis of evil, dominating every institution and controlling the channels of thought.
  • At the heart of this blue oligarchy are the great masters of surveillance capitalism, the Big Tech czars who decide in secret what ideas get promoted, what stories get suppressed
  • In the NatCon worldview, the profiteers of surveillance capitalism see all and control all
  • “Big Business is not our ally,” Marco Rubio argued. “They are eager culture warriors who use the language of wokeness to cover free-market capitalism.”
  • The “entire phalanx of Big Business has gone hard left,” Cruz said. “We’ve seen Big Business, the Fortune 500, becoming the economic enforcers of the hard left. Name five Fortune 500 CEOs who are even remotely right of center.”
  • The idea that the left controls absolutely everything—from your smartphone to the money supply to your third grader’s curriculum—explains the apocalyptic tone
  • “We are confronted now by a systematic effort to dismantle our society, our traditions, our economy, and our way of life,” said Rubio.
  • The first great project of the national conservatives is to man the barricades in the culture war. These people have certainly done their homework when it comes to cultural Marxism—how the left has learned to dominate culture and how the right now needs to copy their techniques
  • The first interesting debate among the NatCons is philosophical: Should we fight to preserve the classical-liberal order or is it necessary to abandon it?
  • Some of the speakers at the conference were in fact classical liberals, who believe in free speech, intellectual debate, and neutral government
  • If conservatives want to stand up to the pseudo-religion of wokeism, they have to put traditional religion at the center of their political project.
  • But others argued that this sort of liberalism is a luxury we cannot afford. The country is under assault from a Marxist oligarchy that wants to impose its own pseudo-religious doctrine.
  • If you try to repulse that with pallid liberalism, with weak calls for free speech and tolerance, you’ll end up getting run over by those who possess fanatical zeal, economic power, and cultural might.
  • Yoram Hazony, the chief intellectual architect of national conservatism, is an Orthodox Jew who went to Princeton before moving to Israel. He argues that you can’t have a society that embraces government neutrality and tries to relegate values to the private sphere.
  • Glenn Loury gave an impassioned speech against cancel culture, the illiberal left, and the hyper-racialized group consciousness that divides people into opposing racial camps.
  • Another Israeli political philosopher at the conference, Ofir Haivry, argued that Americans shouldn’t delude themselves into thinking that a nation is built out of high-minded liberal abstractions, like the Bill of Rights. A nation is, instead, a cultural tradition, a common language, a set of rituals and beliefs, and a religious order—a collective cultural identity.
  • For his part, Hazony argued that the American cultural identity is Christian—and has to be if it is not going to succumb to the woke onslaught. If 80 percent of Americans are Christian, Hazony reasoned, then Christian values should dominate.
  • Orbán, in Dreher’s view, understands the civilizational stakes of the culture war; he has, for instance, used the power of the state to limit how much transgenderism can be taught to children in schools. “Our team talks incessantly about how horrible wokeness is,” Dreher said at the conference. “Orbán actually does something about it.”
  • Hazony said. “Above all else we’ve got to get God and scripture back in the schools.”
  • Another interesting debate among the NatCons is political and economic.
  • Conservatives have got the culture-war act down. Trump was a culture-war president with almost no policy arm attached. The question conservatives at the conference were asking was how to move beyond owning the libs to effecting actual change.
  • Christopher Rufo, the architect of this year’s school-board-meeting protests against critical race theory, argued that conservatives had erred when they tried to slowly gain power in elite cultural institutions.
  • Instead, Rufo argued, they should rally the masses to get state legislatures to pass laws embracing their values. That’s essentially what’s now happening across red America.
  • My old friend Rod Dreher of The American Conservative argued that because the left controls the commanding heights of the culture and the economy, the only institution the right has a shot at influencing is the state.
  • “We need to quit being satisfied with owning the libs, and save our country,” Dreher said. “We need to unapologetically embrace the use of state power.”
  • The culture war merges with the economic-class war—and a new right emerges in which an intellectual cadre, the national conservatives, rallies the proletarian masses against the cultural/corporate elites.
  • This is national conservatism pursued to its logical conclusion: using state power to break up and humble the big corporations and to push back against coastal cultural values.
  • The problem in America, Hazony continued, is that LGBTQ activists today, like American Jews in the 1950s, are trying to expel Christianity from the public square.
  • Trump’s devastation of the old order produced a grand struggle on the right to build a new one on Trumpian populist lines.
  • They are wrong, too, to think there is a wokeist Anschluss taking over all the institutions of American life.
  • Furthermore, if Hazony thinks America is about to return to Christian dominance, he’s living in 1956.
  • there is something extremely off-putting about the NatCon public pose. In person, as I say, I find many of them charming, warm, and friendly. But their public posture is dominated by the psychology of threat and menace. If there was one expression of sympathy, kindness, or grace uttered from the podium in Orlando, I did not hear it. But I did hear callousness, invocations of combat, and whiffs of brutality.
  • One big thing the NatCons are right about is that in the Information Age, the cultural and corporate elites have merged.
  • Right-wing parties around the world are gradually becoming working-class parties that stand against the economic interests and cultural preferences of the highly educated.
  • Left-wing parties are now rooted in the rich metro areas and are more and more becoming an unsteady alliance between young AOC left-populists and Google.
  • NatCons are also probably right that conservatism is going to get a lot more statist.
  • Marco Rubio countered by, in effect, arguing that you can’t rally cultural populists if you are not also going to do something for them economically. Cultural populism leads to economic populism.
  • Over the past few decades there have been various efforts to replace the Reagan Paradigm: the national-greatness conservatism of John McCain; the compassionate conservatism of George W. Bush; the Reformicon conservatism of the D.C. think tanks in the 21st century
  • the Trumpian onslaught succeeded where these movements have so far fizzled because Trump understood better than they did the coalescence of the new American cultural/corporate elite and the potency of populist anger against it.
  • the alarming future of the American right: the fusing of the culture war and the class war into one epic Marxist Götterdämmerung.
  • the disconcerting reality is that America’s rarified NatCon World is just one piece of a larger illiberal populist revolt that is strong and rising.
woodlu

In Xinjiang, officials are trying to stamp out Uyghur identity | The Economist - 2 views

www.economist.com/...21805768

politics crisis Culture

shared by woodlu on 21 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • They worry that it may fuel separatist yearnings in the far-western region. But in 2014, as the authorities stepped up their campaign to crush terrorism there, the government still tolerated displays of pride in Uyghur culture
  • after the death of Mao Zedong, Uyghur culture was allowed to flourish, as long as it avoided any hint of support for a separate Uyghur state. Uyghur writers produced poems and songs filled with universally familiar themes such as love and loss, but also conveying pride in their identity
  • But it fell victim to a security clampdown, launched in response to sporadic attacks by Uyghurs on Chinese belonging to the ethnic-Han majority.
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  • of the show’s stars have disappeared into a vast new gulag in which more than 1m people, most of them Uyghurs, have been locked up.
  • Officials say the camps offer “vocational education” to help Uyghurs find better jobs and to curb their “extremist” tendencies.
  • shown no more sign of extremism than simply being devout Muslims.
  • their crime has been to show too much enthusiasm for Uyghur culture, not necessarily just Islam.
  • Uyghur groups in the West reckon the four are among nearly 400 intellectuals and cultural figures who have been detained in the new camps, sent to regular prisons or who have otherwise disappeared since the clampdown began.
  • Others associated with Uyghur culture have been paraded on state television praising the virtues of the Communist Party or singing patriotic songs.
  • In September 2014 Ilham Tohti, a revered academic with moderate political views, was sentenced to life in prison for separatism.
  • Mr Tohti had maintained a website that hosted writing by Uyghur intellectuals on social and cultural issues.
  • conforming to a stereotype endorsed by the party such as smiling Uyghurs wearing brightly coloured traditional costume, dancing in public squares and singing, often in Mandarin
  • Uyghurs in exile have been waging a parallel campaign to keep their culture alive
  • There are still underground artists in Xinjiang, she says. As repression has tightened, their works have become increasingly suffused with lament and despair.
  • Mr Tursun’s writings and links with other cultural personalities in Xinjiang may have led to his detention in 2018 and his reported jail term of 16 years.
  • But displays of loyalty to the party are no longer enough to keep people safe.
  • It includes fawning lyrics such as: “You put light into the hearts of the people.” Uyghurs in exile were dismayed to hear a much-loved performer crooning for the regime.
  • It returned last year, with changes. Introducing the new series, the host made approving remarks about building socialism in Xinjiang and loving the party.
  • In the show’s early days, this would have been “unimaginable”, says Elise Anderson of the Uyghur Human Rights Project in Washington, an American ethnomusicologist who competed in the inaugural series of “The Voice of the Silk Road” in 2014.
Javier E

U.S. officials misled the public about the war in Afghanistan, confidential documents r... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...tan-war-confidential-documents

Afghanistan war politics history us crisis policy

shared by Javier E on 22 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • In the interviews, more than 400 insiders offered unrestrained criticism of what went wrong in Afghanistan and how the United States became mired in nearly two decades of warfare. With a bluntness rarely expressed in public, the interviews lay bare pent-up complaints, frustrations and confessions, along with second-guessing and backbiting.
  • Since 2001, more than 775,000 U.S. troops have deployed to Afghanistan, many repeatedly. Of those, 2,300 died there and 20,589 were wounded in action, according to Defense Department figures.
  • They underscore how three presidents — George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump — and their military commanders have been unable to deliver on their promises to prevail in Afghanistan.
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  • With most speaking on the assumption that their remarks would not become public, U.S. officials acknowledged that their warfighting strategies were fatally flawed and that Washington wasted enormous sums of money trying to remake Afghanistan into a modern nation.
  • The interviews also highlight the U.S. government’s botched attempts to curtail runaway corruption, build a competent Afghan army and police force, and put a dent in Afghanistan’s thriving opium trade.
  • Since 2001, the Defense Department, State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development have spent or appropriated between $934 billion and $978 billion
  • Those figures do not include money spent by other agencies such as the CIA and the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is responsible for medical care for wounded veterans.
  • Several of those interviewed described explicit and sustained efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public. They said it was common at military headquarters in Kabul — and at the White House — to distort statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case.
  • SIGAR departed from its usual mission of performing audits and launched a side venture. Titled “Lessons Learned,” the $11 million project was meant to diagnose policy failures in Afghanistan so the United States would not repeat the mistakes the next time it invaded a country or tried to rebuild a shattered one.
  • the reports, written in dense bureaucratic prose and focused on an alphabet soup of government initiatives, left out the harshest and most frank criticisms from the interviews.
  • “We found the stabilization strategy and the programs used to achieve it were not properly tailored to the Afghan context, and successes in stabilizing Afghan districts rarely lasted longer than the physical presence of coalition troops and civilians,” read the introduction to one report released in May 2018.
  • To augment the Lessons Learned interviews, The Post obtained hundreds of pages of previously classified memos about the Afghan war that were dictated by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld between 2001 and 2006.
  • Together, the SIGAR interviews and the Rumsfeld memos pertaining to Afghanistan constitute a secret history of the war and an unsparing appraisal of 18 years of conflict.
  • With their forthright descriptions of how the United States became stuck in a faraway war, as well as the government's determination to conceal them from the public, the Lessons Learned interviews broadly resemble the Pentagon Papers, the Defense Department's top-secret history of the Vietnam War.
  • running throughout are torrents of criticism that refute the official narrative of the war, from its earliest days through the start of the Trump administration.
  • At the outset, for instance, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan had a clear, stated objective — to retaliate against al-Qaeda and prevent a repeat of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
  • Yet the interviews show that as the war dragged on, the goals and mission kept changing and a lack of faith in the U.S. strategy took root inside the Pentagon, the White House and the State Department.
  • Fundamental disagreements went unresolved. Some U.S. officials wanted to use the war to turn Afghanistan into a democracy. Others wanted to transform Afghan culture and elevate women’s rights. Still others wanted to reshape the regional balance of power among Pakistan, India, Iran and Russia.
  • The Lessons Learned interviews also reveal how U.S. military commanders struggled to articulate who they were fighting, let alone why.
  • Was al-Qaeda the enemy, or the Taliban? Was Pakistan a friend or an adversary? What about the Islamic State and the bewildering array of foreign jihadists, let alone the warlords on the CIA’s payroll? According to the documents, the U.S. government never settled on an answer.
  • As a result, in the field, U.S. troops often couldn’t tell friend from foe.
  • The United States has allocated more than $133 billion to build up Afghanistan — more than it spent, adjusted for inflation, to revive the whole of Western Europe with the Marshall Plan after World War II.
  • As commanders in chief, Bush, Obama and Trump all promised the public the same thing. They would avoid falling into the trap of "nation-building" in Afghanistan.
  • U.S. officials tried to create — from scratch — a democratic government in Kabul modeled after their own in Washington. It was a foreign concept to the Afghans, who were accustomed to tribalism, monarchism, communism and Islamic law.
  • During the peak of the fighting, from 2009 to 2012, U.S. lawmakers and military commanders believed the more they spent on schools, bridges, canals and other civil-works projects, the faster security would improve. Aid workers told government interviewers it was a colossal misjudgment, akin to pumping kerosene on a dying campfire just to keep the flame alive.
  • One unnamed executive with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) guessed that 90 percent of what they spent was overkill: “We lost objectivity. We were given money, told to spend it and we did, without reason.”Lessons Learned interview | 10/7/2016Tap to view full document
  • The gusher of aid that Washington spent on Afghanistan also gave rise to historic levels of corruption.
  • In public, U.S. officials insisted they had no tolerance for graft. But in the Lessons Learned interviews, they admitted the U.S. government looked the other way while Afghan power brokers — allies of Washington — plundered with impunity.
  • Christopher Kolenda, an Army colonel who deployed to Afghanistan several times and advised three U.S. generals in charge of the war, said that the Afghan government led by President Hamid Karzai had “self-organized into a kleptocracy”Christopher Kolenda | Lessons Learned interview | 4/5/2016Tap to view full document by 2006 — and that U.S. officials failed to recognize the lethal threat it posed to their strategy.
  • By allowing corruption to fester, U.S. officials told interviewers, they helped destroy the popular legitimacy of the wobbly Afghan government they were fighting to prop up. With judges and police chiefs and bureaucrats extorting bribes, many Afghans soured on democracy and turned to the Taliban to enforce order.
  • None expressed confidence that the Afghan army and police could ever fend off, much less defeat, the Taliban on their own. More than 60,000 members of Afghan security forces have been killed, a casualty rate that U.S. commanders have called unsustainable.
  • In the Lessons Learned interviews, however, U.S. military trainers described the Afghan security forces as incompetent, unmotivated and rife with deserters. They also accused Afghan commanders of pocketing salaries — paid by U.S. taxpayers — for tens of thousands of “ghost soldiers.”
  • an army and national police force that can defend the country without foreign help.
  • Year after year, U.S. generals have said in public they are making steady progress on the central plank of their strategy: to train a robust Afgh
  • From the beginning, Washington never really figured out how to incorporate a war on drugs into its war against al-Qaeda. By 2006, U.S. officials feared that narco-traffickers had become stronger than the Afghan government and that money from the drug trade was powering the insurgency
  • throughout the Afghan war, documents show that U.S. military officials have resorted to an old tactic from Vietnam — manipulating public opinion. In news conferences and other public appearances, those in charge of the war have followed the same talking points for 18 years. No matter how the war is going — and especially when it is going badly — they emphasize how they are making progress.
  • Two months later, Marin Strmecki, a civilian adviser to Rumsfeld, gave the Pentagon chief a classified, 40-page report loaded with more bad news. It said “enormous popular discontent is building” against the Afghan government because of its corruption and incompetence. It also said that the Taliban was growing stronger, thanks to support from Pakistan, a U.S. ally.
  • Since then, U.S. generals have almost always preached that the war is progressing well, no matter the reality on the battlefield.
  • he Lessons Learned interviews contain numerous admissions that the government routinely touted statistics that officials knew were distorted, spurious or downright false
  • A person identified only as a senior National Security Council official said there was constant pressure from the Obama White House and Pentagon to produce figures to show the troop surge of 2009 to 2011 was working, despite hard evidence to the contrary.
  • Even when casualty counts and other figures looked bad, the senior NSC official said, the White House and Pentagon would spin them to the point of absurdity. Suicide bombings in Kabul were portrayed as a sign of the Taliban’s desperation, that the insurgents were too weak to engage in direct combat. Meanwhile, a rise in U.S. troop deaths was cited as proof that American forces were taking the fight to the enemy.
  • “And this went on and on for two reasons,” the senior NSC official said, “to make everyone involved look good, and to make it look like the troops and resources were having the kind of effect where removing them would cause the country to deteriorate.”
Javier E

Putin's War in Ukraine Shatters an Illusion in Russia - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...putin-ukraine-russia.html

putin war russia ukraine illusion totalitarian repression

shared by Javier E on 11 Apr 22 - No Cached
  • Moscow had blossomed into a beautiful, European city, full of meticulously planted parks, bike lanes and parking spaces. Income for the average Russian had risen significantly over the course of the previous decade.
  • At the same time, its political system was drifting ever closer to authoritarianism.
  • By the summer of 2015, his successor, President Vladimir V. Putin, had seemingly made Russia bright and prosperous. The political system he built was increasingly restrictive, but many had learned to live with it.
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  • Many Russian liberals had gone to work for nonprofits and local governments, throwing themselves into community building — making their cities better places to live. A protest movement in 2011 and 2012 had failed, and people were looking for other ways to shape their country. Big politics were hopeless, the thinking went, but one could make a real difference in small acts.
  • There was another side to this bargain: Mr. Putin was seemingly constrained, as well. Political action may have been forbidden, but there was tolerance when it came to other things, for example religion, culture and many forms of expression. His own calculus for the system to run smoothly meant he had to make some room for society.
  • Greg Yudin, a professor of political philosophy at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences, argues it was the political opposition’s success, which began to accelerate in 2018 and 2019, that tipped Mr. Putin toward war.
  • I began to wonder whether Russia was always going to end up here, and we just failed to see it. So I called Yevgeniya Albats, a Russian journalist who had warned of the dangers of a K.G.B. resurgence as early as the 1990s
  • She said 2008 was a turning point, the moment Mr. Putin divorced the West, even invaded another country, and the West barely noticed.
  • “For Putin, it was a clear sign,” she said by telephone last month, “that he can do whatever he wants. And that’s exactly what he started doing. He behaved extremely rationally. He just realized that you don’t care.”
  • “People have a metaphor. They say, ‘We were trying to make some cosmetic changes to our faces, when the cancer was growing and growing in our stomachs.’”
  • “The best comparison is Germany in 1939,” he said. “What kind of democratic movement would you expect there? This is the same. People are basically right now trying to save their lives.”
  • about two-thirds of people nationwide approve of Mr. Putin’s actions in Ukraine.
  • “It is a less-educated, older part of the population, mainly living in rural areas or in small and medium-sized cities, where the population is poorer and more dependent on power,” he said, referring to those who rely on public funds like pensions and state jobs. “They also receive their whole construction of reality exclusively from television.”
  • “if you look at 20 years of our research since Putin came to power, then the peaks of support for Putin and his popularity have always coincided with military campaigns.”
  • Now the bargain is broken, the illusion has shattered. And the country has been pitched into a new phase. But what is it?
  • Mr. Yudin argues that Russia is moving out of authoritarianism — where political passivity and civic disengagement are key features — into totalitarianism, which relies on mass mobilization, terror and homogeneity of beliefs. He believes Mr. Putin is on the brink, but may hesitate to make the shift.
  • “In a totalitarian system, you have to release free energy to start terror,” he said. Mr. Putin, he said, “is a control freak, used to micromanagement.”
  • if the Russian state starts to fail, either through a collapse of Russia’s economy or a complete military defeat in Ukraine, “unleashing terror will be the only way for him to save himself.”
  • Which is why the current situation is so dangerous, for Ukraine and for people in Russia opposed Mr. Putin.
  • “Putin is so convinced that he cannot afford to lose, that he will escalate,” Professor Yudin said. “He has staked everything on it.”
Javier E

Chartbook #110: Being There - Last Call At The Hotel Imperial - 0 views

adamtooze.substack.com/...book-110-being-there-last-call

interwar crisis intellectual moral liberal culture politics

shared by Javier E on 11 Apr 22 - No Cached
  • There was also a hard political lesson. Thompson had witnessed the fall of the Weimar Republic close up, but what really moved here was the destruction of Austrian social democracy in 1934.
  • When, later, the guns were turned against Vienna Social Democrats, and destroyed the only society I have seen since the war which seemed to promise evolution toward a more decent, humane, and worthy existence in which the past was integrated with the future, real fear overcame me, and now never leaves me. In one place only I had seen a New Deal singularly intelligent, remarkably tolerant, and amazingly successful. It was destroyed precisely because it was insufficiently ruthless, insufficiently brutal. “Victory” (I saw) requires force to sustain victory. I had wanted victory, and peace.
  • In his classic text, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origina and Spread of Nationalism, Benedict Anderson explained how in the late 18th and early 19th century, the genres of the novel and the newspaper had helped enroll their readers in a new communal understanding of time.
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  • a temporal frame defined by religion and monarchical sovereignty was replaced by a new perception of continuous, but eventful historical time. Individuals came to understand themselves as belonging to communities that progressed through history as quasi-organic wholes, in which individual mortality was subsumed in a collective immortality. No one could escape the collective story but it was also the ultimate source of meaning.
  • Nineteenth-century certainties were blown apart by the explosion of violence and of economic crisis unleashed by World War I, which threw visions of regular historical development into question. At the same time the nexus of individual and collectivity was also disturbed by the putting into question of individual subjectivity by the widespread popularity of notions derived from Freudian psychoanalysis and a fundamental renegotiation of gender roles, sexual desire and identities.
  • The whirlwind of the individual and collective was all the more destabilizing for the fact that individual men had suddenly come to take on a larger than life importance in world history
  • liberals or conservatives (had not, AT) devoted much attention to the transformative power of the individual leader.
  • In the final pages of Personal History, Sheean brings Rayna back to life as his guide, conceding to her the argument they left unfinished in 1927, the anniversary year of the revolution.
  • They were the ones fomenting the world crisis: it was happening within them and through them. When the fate of the world hinged upon a handful of men, personal pathologies became the stuff of geopolitics. The correspondents needed a new way of thinking about the role of the individual.
  • by the early 1930s, when Knick and John feuded in a Vienna café, it was clear that the “authority of personality,” as Hitler put it, mattered more than it ever had in their lifetimes. 9 One couldn’t account for what was happening otherwise. The individual leader, as Knick wrote, now counted for “nearly everything.”
  • John Gunther in particular developed an overarching theory of history shocked into motion by the happenstance of individual personality. As Cohen suggests there is an interesting contrast between Gunther’s understanding of history and that being developed at the time by anthropologists like Margaret Mead that also centered on questions of character.
  • Mead and her colleagues were trying to understand the workings of national character: why – say – the Germans submitted willingly to dictatorship or the Americans demonstrated a stubborn, wary, independence. Such “culture-cracking,” they believed, could be marshalled to defuse international rivalries, or to win a war. Their analysis, like John’s, was indebted to a sort of Freudianism, requiring the investigation of child-rearing practices and generational friction
  • As John Gunther saw it, individual personality had jolted history into a new gear. He was making an argument about accident rather than deeply ingrained patterns of culture.
  • the point is well taken. One of the great challenges of comprehending interwar history is how to craft a general narrative of history if it depends on individual personalities to this degree.
  • “I’m no revolutionary”, he imagines himself protesting. “I can’t remake the machine ..”. To which she replies: “You don’t have to! All you have to do is to talk sense, and think sense, if you can. … Everybody isn’t born with an obligation to act. … But if you see it straight, that’s the thing: see what’s happening, has happened, will happen - and if you ever manage to do a stroke of work in your life, make it fit in. … if you are in the right place. Find it and stick to it: a solid place, with a view.”
  • Then, as Sheean imagines Rayna continuing: “If you want to relate your own life to its time and space, the particular to the general, the part to the whole, the only way you can do it is by understanding the struggle in world terms … to see things as straight as you can and put them into words that won’t falsify them. That’s programme enough for one life, and if you can ever do it, you’ll have acquired the relationship you want between the one life you’ve got and the many of which it’s a part.”
  • For me Last Call reads as a brilliantly illuminating examination of the excitement and the peril of thinking and writing in medias res. How was one to cope with the forces of world history sweeping through the living room, Sheean’s long-suffering wife Dinah Forbes-Robertson was moved to wonder after his breakdown during the Spanish civil war. And as global geopolitics, pandemics, inter-generational stresses, technological change, economic crises, urban crisis, and the renegotiation of gender roles and sexuality continue to upheave our lives, those questions are still with us today.
  • Read through the lens offered by Deborah Cohen’s Last Call, Sheean, Thompson et al appear as our precursors, our predecessors and our contemporaries in navigating polycrisis.
Javier E

The American retirement system is built for the rich - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...tirement-ira-inequality-budget

retirement system rich wealth IRA benefits inequality politics history policy tax tax shelter

shared by Javier E on 24 Apr 22 - No Cached
  • While loudly and proudly proclaiming that their goal is to nurture nest eggs for the working class, lawmakers have constructed a complex of tax shelters for the well-to-do. The lopsided result is that as of 2019, nearly 29,000 taxpayers had amassed “mega-IRAs” — individual retirement accounts with balances of $5 million or more — while half of American households had no retirement accounts at all.
  • according to the Congressional Budget Office, the top 10th of households reap a larger share of the income tax subsidy for retirement savings than the bottom 80 percent.
  • It’s working out just fine for the financial institutions that manage assets in IRAs and 401(k)s. The combined amount in those vehicles reached $21.6 trillion at the end of 2021 — up fivefold since 2000 — and the more money that pours in, the more that managers collect in fees
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  • University of Virginia law professor Michael Doran — who held tax policy roles at the Treasury Department under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush — calls the current state of affairs “the great American retirement fraud.”
  • Secure 2.0 would take the fraud to a new level: Its congressional supporters have engaged in Enron-style accounting gimmicks to mask the bill’s effects on deficit
  • from the outset, IRAs were a generous gift to the upper class. At the time, very few low- and middle-income individuals could afford to stash $1,500 in a retirement account each year — median income for U.S. households was $11,100 in 1974 — so the people taking full advantage of the new IRAs tended to be relatively rich
  • since the benefit was structured as a deduction, it was worth more to taxpayers in higher income brackets.
  • In the nearly half-century since, Congress has continually expanded the amount that individuals can pour into tax-deferred savings accounts.
  • Now, the JCT estimates that 401(k)s and other similar defined-contribution plans cost the federal government $200 billion per year.
  • individuals can contribute up to $6,000 per year to an IRA ($7,000 if age 50 or older), plus $20,500 to a 401(k) ($27,000 for 50-year-olds and up), with their employers potentially chipping in to bring the 401(k) total to $61,000 ($67,500 for the over-50 set).
  • In 2018, the most recent year for which data is available, 58 percent of taxpayers with wage income made no contribution to 401(k)-style plans, and less than 4 percent bumped up against the contribution cap.
  • As of 2020, approximately 63 percent of U.S. households had no such accounts.
  • I calculated that an individual who made the maximum 401(k) contributions since 1990, investing exclusively in an S&P 500 index fund, would have more than $7 million in her account today.
  • When JCT released data last summer showing that 28,615 taxpayers had accumulated $5 million or more in IRAs, lawmakers cried foul. Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.), who as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee is the top tax writer in the House, lamented the “exploitation” of IRAs. “IRAs are intended to help Americans achieve long-term financial security, not to enable those who already have extraordinary wealth to avoid paying their fair share in taxes,”
  • (The very largest IRAs, like PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel’s reported $5 billion account, result from a different loophole: the ability of founders and early-stage investors to stuff IRAs with start-up stock
  • Forbes revealed more than a decade ago that Thiel and another PayPal co-founder were using their IRAs to shelter entrepreneurial earnings; the Government Accountability Office flagged the IRA-stuffing phenomenon in 2014; and rather than clamping down, lawmakers from both parties sat on their hands.)
  • The Secure 2.0 bill, sponsored by Neal, doubles down on the inequities of the status quo. It will inevitably result in even more of the mega-IRAs that Neal and other Democrats decry.
  • Under current law, taxpayers must begin to take withdrawals from their 401(k)s and traditional IRAs at age 72. (It had been 70½ before Secure 1.0, signed into law by President Donald Trump in 2019, raised the age by a year and a half.
  • Secure 2.0 would bump that up to age 75. The change would mean that taxpayers with supersize IRAs could enjoy three extra years of tax-free growth before they needed to take money out
  • Lower-income retirees wouldn’t benefit because they don’t have the luxury of holding off on withdrawals, which they need to cover living expenses.
  • Another provision would lift the cap on 401(k) catch-up contributions at ages 62, 63 and 64 from $6,500 to $10,000. Factoring in employer matching contributions, that would raise the maximum 401(k) inflow to $71,000 per year.
  • if lawmakers were genuinely concerned about retirement security for people who need it, they wouldn’t start by aiding taxpayers who can afford to save more each year than most Americans earn. The higher limit on catch-up contributions will simply allow high-income taxpayers to race further ahead.
  • The top-weighted benefits of Secure 2.0 might be tolerable if they were offset by other tax increases on the rich — if this were all just moving money from one deep pocket to another. But the items audaciously labeled as “revenue provisions” in the bill generate revenue as real as Monopoly money.
  • The Rothification provisions in Secure 2.0 bring $35 billion of revenue into the 10-year window — ostensibly offsetting the cost of the bill’s giveaways — but the $35 billion is pure make-believe: It comes at the expense of an equivalent amount of revenue down the road.
  • If lawmakers from either party were truly concerned about the plight of low-income retirees, they would focus on strengthening Social Security, which actually provides a safety net for older people, rather than adding more deficit-financed bells and whistles to retirement accounts for the rich.
woodlu

Why Russia has never accepted Ukrainian independence | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...ccepted-ukrainian-independence

politics history crisis

shared by woodlu on 26 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • Yeltsin did not just want what Mr Kravchuk had achieved in Ukraine for economic reasons. Independence would, he felt, be crucial to consolidating his power and pursuing liberal democracy. And Ukraine—never, until the 19th century, a well-defined territory, and home to various ethnic enclaves and deep cultural divides—becoming an independent unitary state within its Soviet borders set a precedent for Russia to define itself the same way, and refuse independence to restive territories such as Chechnya.
  • That was why the Russian republic was one of the first three polities in the world to recognise it as an independent state.
  • if a world in which Ukraine, Russia and indeed Belarus were completely independent from the Soviet Union was attractive, one in which they were not tied to each other in some other way was very troubling to a Russian like Yeltsin.
  • ...37 more annotations...
  • It was not just that Ukraine was the second-most-populous and economically powerful of the remaining republics, its industries tightly integrated with Russia’s. Nor was it the question of what was to happen to the nuclear forces stationed there but still notionally under the command of Soviet authorities in Moscow. It went deeper.
  • The need to let the Baltic states go was clear—and when they left the Soviet Union in 1990, Solzhenitsyn, Yeltsin and most of Russia rallied against revanchist attempts to keep them in. Much the same was true of Central Asia and the Caucasus; they were colonies. Belarus and Ukraine were part of the metropolitan core. The bonds which tied “Little Russians” (ie Ukrainians), “Great Russians” and Belarusians together, Solzhenitsyn argued, must be defended by all means short of war.
  • For centuries Ukraine had anchored Russia’s identity. As the centre of the storied medieval confederation known as Kyivan Rus, which stretched from the White Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south, Kyiv was seen as the cradle of Russian and Belarusian culture and the font of their Orthodox faith.
  • Being united with Ukraine was fundamental to Russia’s feeling of itself as European.
  • Instead the shooting down of planes, along with the violation of Ukrainian sovereignty, the seizure of Crimea, the reassertion that the legacy of Kyivian Rus meant the nations must be shackled together and the reversion of Belarus to dictatorship—that all came later, a sequence of events which led, 30 Decembers later, to 70,000 or more Russian troops on the border of Ukraine and, in a ghastly sideshow, thousands of Middle Eastern refugees stuck in the Belovezh forest itself. The once seemingly settled question of post-Soviet relations between the three nations has once again become an overriding geopolitical concern.
  • The agreement reached, in draft form, at 4am on Sunday morning achieved those aims with a rather neat piece of casuistry. For Russia simply to have followed Ukraine into independence would have left moot the question of the Soviet Union’s residual powers. So instead they abolished the union itself.
  • The Soviet Union had been formed, in 1922, through a joint declaration by four Soviet republics—the Transcaucasian republic and the three represented at Viskuli. With the Transcaucasian republic long since dismembered, the presidents dissolved by fiat what their forebears had bound together. In its place they put a Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS)—Mr Kravchuk would not allow any use of the word “union”—with few clearly defined powers which any post-Soviet state would be welcome to join. There was to be no special relationship between the Slavic three.
  • The importance of Ukraine was not an abstract matter to him. Like Solzhenitsyn, he was the child of a Ukrainian mother and a Russian father. He grew up singing Ukrainian songs and reading Gogol, who reimagined his native country’s folk magic as rich poetry after moving to St Petersburg. The Soviet Union had meant that Mr Gorbachev and others like him, whatever their parentage, could partake in both identities.
  • disassembling a multi-ethnic empire of 250m people was still a subject of huge trepidation. As Solzhenitsyn had written in “Rebuilding Russia”, “The clock of communism has stopped chiming. But its concrete edifice has not yet crumbled. And we must take care not to be crushed beneath its rubble instead of gaining liberty.” The fact that in that rubble, if rubble there was to be, there would be the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, spread between four separate countries (the three Slavic ones and Kazakhstan), frightened statesmen around the world.
  • “the Kyivan myth of origins…became the cornerstone of Muscovy’s ideology as the polity evolved from a Mongol dependency to a sovereign state and then an empire.” Russian empire required Ukraine; and Russia had no history other than one of empire. The idea of Kyiv as just the capital of a neighbouring country was unimaginable to Russians.
  • When, as the economy worsened, Mr Gorbachev went to President George Bush for $10bn-15bn, Bush’s top concern was the nuclear threat. The same worry had led him to oppose Ukraine’s secession in a speech given just before the August coup. “Do you realise what you’ve done?” Mr Gorbachev demanded of Mr Shushkevich. “Once Bush finds out about this, what then?”
  • Yeltsin was overcome by a sense of lightness and freedom. “In signing this agreement,” he later recalled, “Russia was choosing a different path, a path of internal development rather than an imperial one…She was throwing off the traditional image of ‘potentate of half the world’, of armed conflict with Western civilisation, and the role of policeman in the resolution of ethnic conflicts. The last hour of the Soviet empire was chiming.” Maybe the convoluted interdependency of Russia and Ukraine did not matter as much as people thought; maybe democratic nationhood was enough. Maybe the problem had been a failure of imagination.
  • His foreign supporters stood by him too, and the following year a security agreement saw America, Britain and Russia guarantee respect for Ukraine’s integrity within its existing borders—which is to say, including Crimea—in exchange for its giving up the nuclear weapons it had inherited from the Soviet Union. Ukraine was grateful; the West saw further evidence of a transition towards a liberal, democratic Russian state.
  • Yeltsin’s unburdened moment among the trees had been that of a man who did not want to, and did not have to, rule an empire. He consciously rejected not just the Soviet Union’s ideology and central planning, but also the tools of statecraft that had held it together—repression and lies. To him, the market economy was a condition for freedom, not a substitute for it. His successor, Vladimir Putin, also embraced capitalism. But he saw no need for it to bring freedom with it, and had no problem with a state run through repression and lies. He thus reversed Yeltsin’s democratic project and, though not at first territorially imperialist himself, took the country down the other side of Brzezinski’s fork. It is that which puts Russia and its Slavic neighbours in such a parlous position today.
  • But when pollsters asked people what they expected of their incoming president, reducing this corruption was not their highest priority. The standing of the state was. Russians wanted a strong state and one respected abroad. As Mr Putin’s successful manifesto put it,
  • “A strong state is not an anomaly to fight against. Society desires the restoration of the guiding, organising role of the state.” When, shortly after his election, Mr Putin restored the Soviet anthem, it was not as a symbol of reverting to central planning or rebuilding an empire. It was a signal that the strong state was back. State power did not mean the rule of law or a climate of fairness. It did not have, or need, an ideology. But it did have to take on some of the “geopolitical reality” that the meeting in Viskuli had stripped from the Soviet Union.
  • The strong state which provided an effective cover for kleptocracy in Mr Putin’s Russia was not an option for Mr Kuchma’s similarly oligarchic Ukraine. It had no real history as a state, let alone a strong one. Its national myth was one of Cossacks riding free. So in Ukraine the stealing was instead dressed up in terms of growing into that distinctive national identity. The essence of the argument was simple. As Mr Kuchma put it in a book published in 2003, “Ukraine is not Russia”.
  • And the West, spooked by the increased belligerence Russia had shown in Georgia, was taking a keen interest in Ukraine. The EU offered the country an association agreement which would allow Ukrainians to enjoy the benefits of a deep and comprehensive free-trade agreement and free travel across Europe.
  • Mr Kuchma could have used force against them; Mr Putin encouraged him to do so. But various considerations, including Western opprobrium, argued against it.
  • Perhaps most fundamental was his sense that, as a Ukrainian president, he could not thus divide the Ukrainian nation. He stayed his hand and allowed a second vote. Viktor Yushchenko, pro-Western and Ukrainian-speaking, beat Viktor Yanukovych, a corrupt thug from Donbas (the easternmost part of the country and, save Crimea, the most ethnically Russian) who had claimed victory the first time round. The “Orange revolution”, as the protest came to be known, was a serious setback for Mr Putin—all the more so when a similar uprising in Georgia, the Rose revolution, put another pro-Western state on his borders.
  • Mr Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012 came at a time when the global financial crisis had choked the Russian economy.
  • The degree to which Ukraine was not Russia became clearer, though, in 2004, when a rigged presidential election saw hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians protesting in the streets.
  • A year earlier a group of economists had told Mr Putin that a customs union with Ukraine would be a smart move. What was more, such a deal would preclude Ukraine’s association with the EU. Pursuing it was thus a way for Mr Putin to achieve three things at once: push back against the West; give Russia a victory that would prove its importance; and help the economy.
  • Mr Yanukovych did not want to be Russia’s vassal. Nor did he share western Europe’s values—especially when applied to matters of anti-corruption. But eventually he had to choose a side. At a secret meeting in Moscow in November 2013, as European leaders were preparing to sign their agreement with Ukraine, he was promised a $15bn credit line with $3bn paid up front. He ditched the European deal. And at 4am on November 30th his goons bludgeoned a few dozen students protesting against his betrayal in Kyiv’s Independence Square, known as Maidan.
  • This was far worse, for Mr Putin, than the Orange revolution. Ukraine had made geopolitical reality, to coin a phrase, of the independence it had claimed two decades before. Its demands for dignity resonated with Russia’s middle class and some of its elite, making it a genuinely dangerous example. So Mr Putin annexed Crimea and started a war in Donbas.
  • According to Russian state media, Mr Putin was not undermining a revolution against a corrupt regime quite like his own; he was protecting the Russian people and language from extermination at the hands of western Ukrainian fascists. The relevance to Russia of the issues that had led to what was being called in Ukraine “the revolution of dignity” was thus obscured
  • the annexation was supported by nearly 90% of the Russian population.
  • tract published in both Russian, Ukrainian and English in July 2021, Mr Putin described how the inheritors of “Ancient Rus” had been torn apart by hostile powers and treacherous elites, and how Ukraine had been turned from being “not Russia” into an anti-Russia, an entity fundamentally incompatible with Russia’s goals.
  • All baloney. Mr Putin did not attack Ukraine in order to honour or recreate an empire, whether Russian or Soviet. He attacked it to protect his own rule; the history is window-dressing. At the same time, following Brzezinski, for Russia to be something other than a democracy it has to at least be able to think of itself as an empire. And in Russia, empire requires Ukraine—now more deeply opposed to union with Russia than ever before.
  • “The Russian state, with its severe and inflexible interior, survived exclusively because of its tireless expansion beyond its borders. It has long lost the knowledge [of]—how to survive otherwise.”
  • The only way Russia can escape chaos, he argued, is to export it to a neighbouring country.
  • What he did not say was that Mr Putin’s export of chaos, and violence, to that end has severed the ties between the Slavic nations and their peoples in a way which the collapse of the Soviet empire did not.
  • Ukraine is not a province, or a colony; it is a beleaguered nation in a messy, perilous process of self-realisation. Belarus, for its part, is a grim illustration of how “severe and inflexible” things have to get in order to stop such aspirations welling up. Mr Lukashenko has met a nationalist resurgence with ever more brutal and well-orchestrated repression—a bloody irony given that he helped start it.
  • Like Ukraine, Belarus had no real history of statehood; all that Mr Lukashenko had given it since 1994 was a rough approximation of its Soviet past, fascism with Stalinist trappings. But the idea of something better had taken hold.
  • But change is afoot; it can be seen in the way that demography increasingly trumps regional allegiance. Even in the east nearly 60% of those born since 1991 see their future as in the EU—countrywide, the figure is 75%. All told 90% want Ukraine to stay independent, and nearly 80% are optimistic about its future.
  • That is why Alexei Navalny was first poisoned and is now jailed. As the leader of the opposition to Mr Putin he has championed the idea of Russia not as an empire but as a civic nation: a state for the people. It is why Russia has recently become much more repressive. It is why Mr Putin cannot tolerate a true peace on his borders.
  • Unlike Ukrainians and Belarusians, Russians cannot separate themselves from Russia, so they have to change it from within. They cannot do that in a forest retreat, or with a few phone calls. But only through such change will they become truly independent of the Soviet Union.
sidneybelleroche

Jon Gruden Resigns as Raiders HC After Racist, Sexist, Anti-Gay Emails | Bleacher Repor... - 0 views

bleacherreport.com/...after-racist-homophobic-emails

sports

shared by sidneybelleroche on 12 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • Gruden announced his resignation in a statement Monday night after emails uncovered from his past included racist, anti-gay and misogynistic language
  • Suzy Kolber of ESPN (via Adam Schefter of ESPN) reported assistant head coach and special teams coach Rich Bisaccia will be the interim head coach
  • Gruden "denounced the emergence of women as referees, the drafting of a gay player and the tolerance of players protesting during the playing of the national anthem."
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  • He also "exchanged emails with [former Washington Football Team president Bruce Allen] and other men that included photos of women wearing only bikini bottoms, including one photo of two Washington team cheerleaders."
  • He also used racist tropes to describe NFLPA executive director DeMaurice Smith.
  • Gruden's tenure offered more bad than good.
  • the 2018 campaign that included trading away Khalil Mack and Amari Cooper, things started to turn for the better in recent years, as the Raiders became more competitive.
criscimagnael

In a First, Man Receives a Heart From a Genetically Altered Pig - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rt-transplant-pig-bennett.html

shared by criscimagnael on 12 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • A 57-year-old man with life-threatening heart disease has received a heart from a genetically modified pig, a groundbreaking procedure that offers hope to hundreds of thousands of patients with failing organs.
  • “This is a watershed event,” said Dr. David Klassen, the chief medical officer of the United Network for Organ Sharing and a transplant physician. “Doors are starting to open that will lead, I believe, to major changes in how we treat organ failure.”
  • It creates the pulse, it creates the pressure, it is his heart,
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • It’s working and it looks normal. We are thrilled, but we don’t know what tomorrow will bring us. This has never been done before
  • Last year, some 41,354 Americans received a transplanted organ, more than half of them receiving kidneys,
  • But there is an acute shortage of organs, and about a dozen people on the lists die each day. Some 3,817 Americans received human donor hearts last year as replacements, more than ever before, but the potential demand is still higher.
  • Researchers hope procedures like this will usher in a new era in medicine in the future when replacement organs are no longer in short supply for the more than half a million Americans who are waiting for kidneys and other organs.
  • He is also being monitored for infections, including porcine retrovirus, a pig virus that may be transmitted to humans, although the risk is considered low.
  • But he added that there were many hurdles to overcome before such a procedure could be broadly applied, noting that rejection of organs occurs even when a well-matched human donor kidney is transplanted.
  • It takes a long time to mature a therapy like this.”
  • Mr. Bennett decided to gamble on the experimental treatment because he would have died without a new heart, had exhausted other treatments and was too sick to qualify for a human donor heart, family members and doctors said.
  • Mr. Bennett is still connected to a heart-lung bypass machine, which was keeping him alive before the operation, but that is not unusual for a new heart transplant recipient, experts said.
  • The new heart is functioning and already doing most of the work, and his doctors said he could be taken off the machine on Tuesday. Mr. Bennett is being closely monitored for signs that his body is rejecting the new organ, but the first 48 hours, which are critical, passed without incident.
  • It is the first successful transplant of a pig’s heart into a human being. The eight-hour operation took place in Baltimore on Friday, and the patient, David Bennett Sr. of Maryland, was doing well on Monday, according to surgeons at the University of Maryland Medical Center.
  • Xenotransplantation, the process of grafting or transplanting organs or tissues from animals to humans, has a long history. Efforts to use the blood and skin of animals go back hundreds of years.
  • In the 1960s, chimpanzee kidneys were transplanted into some human patients, but the longest a recipient lived was nine months.
  • In 1983, a baboon heart was transplanted into an infant known as Baby Fae, but she died 20 days later.
  • Two newer technologies — gene editing and cloning — have yielded genetically altered pig organs less likely to be rejected by humans.
  • the time to carry out better screening for infectious diseases, and the possibility of a new organ at the time that the patient needs it.
  • The heart transplanted into Mr. Bennett came from a genetically altered pig provided by Revivicor, a regenerative medicine company based in Blacksburg, Va.
  • The pig had 10 genetic modifications. Four genes were knocked out, or inactivated, including one that encodes a molecule that causes an aggressive human rejection response.
  • A growth gene was also inactivated to prevent the pig’s heart from continuing to grow after it was implanted,
  • In addition, six human genes were inserted into the genome of the donor pig — modifications designed to make the porcine organs more tolerable to the human immune system.
  • The team used a new experimental drug developed in part by Dr. Mohiuddin and made by Kiniksa Pharmaceuticals to suppress the immune system and prevent rejection.
  • “The anatomy was a little squirrelly, and we had a few moments of ‘uh-oh’ and had to do some clever plastic surgery to make everything fit,”
  • “the heart fired right up” and “the animal heart began to squeeze.”
  • He said his father had had a pig’s valve inserted about a decade ago, and he thought his father might be confused. But after a while, Mr. Bennett said, “I realized, ‘Man, he is telling the truth and not going crazy. And he could be the first ever.’”
jaxredd10

Khazar | Origin, History, Religion, & Facts | Britannica - 0 views

www.britannica.com/Khazar

shared by jaxredd10 on 04 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Khazar, member of a confederation of Turkic-speaking tribes that in the late 6th century ce established a major commercial empire covering the southeastern section of modern European Russia.
  • the Khazars were originally located in the northern Caucasus region and were part of the western Turkic empire (in Turkistan)
  • y the beginning of the 7th century, the Khazars had become independent of the Turkic empire to the east.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Although basically Turkic, the Khazar state bore little resemblance to the other Turkic empires of central Eurasia. It was headed by a secluded supreme ruler of semireligious character called a khagan—who wielded little real power—and by tribal chieftains, each known as a beg.
  • The state’s military organization also seems to have lacked the forcefulness of those of the greater Turkic-Mongol empires. The Khazars seem to have been more inclined to a sedentary way of life, building towns and fortresses, tilling the soil, and planting gardens and vineyards.
  • Whatever the case may be, religious tolerance was practiced in the Khazar empire, and paganism continued to flourish among the population.
  • The prominence and influence of the Khazar state was reflected in its close relations with the Byzantine emperors: Justinian II (704) and Constantine V (732) each had a Khazar wife. The main source of revenue for the empire stemmed from commerce and particularly from Khazar control of the east-west trade route that linked the Far East with Byzantium and the north-south route linking the Arab empire with northern Slavic lands.
  • Despite the relatively high level of Khazar civilization and the wealth of data about the Khazars that is preserved in Byzantine and Arab sources, not a single line of the Khazar language has survived.
Javier E

Putin is risking a Kremlin coup, says ex-Russian minister | News | The Times - 0 views

www.thetimes.co.uk/...-ex-russian-minister-70vvtnmkz

putin rationality goals

shared by Javier E on 12 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • As analysts ponder the state of Putin’s mental health, Kozyrev, 70, caused a stir this week with a declaration on Twitter that he considered the president’s war calculus rational. “It’s horrific but it’s not irrational,” he wrote. “To understand why the invasion was rational for Putin, we have to step into his shoes.”
  • Through the president’s lens, there was a need to bring western-leaning Ukraine back into the Kremlin fold since the Maidan Uprising of 2014 that ousted its pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych. However, of the money that Putin thought had gone into his military, billions of roubles was plundered. And the narrative around the West’s state of weakness was propaganda spread among Russia’s ruling elite,
  • Putin miscalculated, “but that doesn’t make him insane. Simply wrong and immoral”. Kozyrev told The Times: “Even if he takes Kyiv with a couple of other cities, it leads nowhere. This war is unwinnable for Putin because he fights against the people.”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The 1979-1989 Soviet-Afghan war should have been a valuable lesson, he said. “It also started with an invasion and looked like the Soviets were winning. But after that, the West provided assets like Stinger missiles and then it became evident that the ground war started to fall apart . . . the Soviet Union had to evacuate its forces and was defeated,” Kozyrev said. “That was a heavy blow to Soviet stability. My prediction is the same for Russia now . . . the probably very dramatic outcome, like the Soviet Union, of collapse.”
  • For Putin to have nuclear intentions, he would need to be suicidal, a prospect that Kozyrev scoffs at. For all his hard-man posturing, the president has family, friends and too much of a liking for beautiful women and fine wine to press the nuclear button, he believes. “He’s just a kind of guy able to be brazen and he has more risk tolerance and that’s the problem with the West.”
Javier E

The Trump Indictment Puts the GOP on Trial - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...674813

trump indictment 2023 atlantic stakes GOP response

shared by Javier E on 02 Aug 23 - No Cached
  • The GOP made its Faustian bargain years ago. Early in Trump’s presidency there was a transmutation; his brutal style of politics, his lies and conspiracy theories, and his corruption, which were once tolerated, became celebrated.
  • The effect is to sow distrust in our legal institutions. That’s the point. Delegitimize them. Shatter confidence in institutions and sources of authority that can hold liars and lawbreakers accountable. Manipulate people into doubting what is true. As James Poniewozik of The New York Times has put it, if Trump and his allies succeed in convincing his supporters that there is no truth, then they will be left to conclude that “you should just follow your gut & your tribe.” You can get away with a lot if you can make up your own facts. Donald Trump has gotten away with a lot, at least until now.
  • It never came, because most Republicans—some cynical, some too afraid to speak out, some cultlike in their devotion to Trump—decided early on to reject any evidence that would discomfort them, that would call into question their partisan loyalties, that would cause them to have serious second thoughts. Most of all, they decided to reject any evidence showing that their opponents were right about Trump and they were wrong. They decided that the awful things Trump has done can’t be true because they don’t want them to be true. This is their political a priori.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • It doesn’t matter to these Republicans that their assertions have no basis in fact; for them, words have no intrinsic meaning. A party that once portrayed itself as a fierce critic of relativism and a fierce defender of objective truth now delights in debasing words in order to gain and maintain political power. Theirs is the ethic of Thrasymachus, the cynical Sophist in Plato’s Republic who believes that might makes right and that injustice is better than justice.
  • The base of the Republican Party fell in love with the Trump Show—with his “owning the libs” and willingness to validate conservatives’ grievances and resentments, his chaos-creating ways, and his capacity to shatter norms and channel hatreds. To his supporters, Trump is entertaining and cathartic, a “fighter,” a middle finger to an establishment they revile. Every criticism of him, every legal action taken against him, provides them with one more reason to rally around him. The stronger the evidence against him, the deeper their devotion to him and the more intense their rage at those who call him out
  • The trials of Donald Trump will deepen the divides in a country already brimming with political hate. The more threatened he feels, the more he will advocate political violence. We saw what he did when he was losing his presidency; imagine what he’ll do when he’s losing his freedom.
  • Here’s something we should prepare for: If Donald Trump thinks he’s going down, he’s going to try to burn down our institutions. He will mobilize his MAGA base, his Republican enablers, and the right-wing media to unleash yet more lies and conspiracy theories. He will portray himself as a martyr who is being persecuted for the sake of his supporters. He will claim that his legal troubles prove that the system is corrupt, and not him. Trump and his supporters will try to tamper with witnesses, intimidate jurors, and threaten public officials. And he will try to cause enough confusion, disorientation, discord, fear, and even violence to escape accountability yet again.
  • Donald Trump has already deeply wounded our nation. He’s perfectly willing to break it. It’s up to us to keep him from succeeding.
Javier E

Is Holocaust Education Making Anti-Semitism Worse? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...673488

holocaust education anti-Semitism culture history crisis

shared by Javier E on 25 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • Explore
  • The recent rise in American anti-Semitism is well documented. I could fill pages with FBI hate-crime statistics, or with a list of violent attacks from the past six years or even the past six months, or with the growing gallery of American public figures saying vile things about Jews. Or I could share stories you probably haven’t heard, such as one about a threatened attack on a Jewish school in Ohio in March 2022—where the would-be perpetrator was the school’s own security guard. But none of that would capture the vague sense of dread one encounters these days in the Jewish community, a dread unprecedented in my lifetime.
  • What I didn’t expect was the torrent of private stories I received from American Jew
  • ...137 more annotations...
  • well-meaning people everywhere from statehouses to your local middle school have responded to this surging anti-Semitism by doubling down on Holocaust education. Before 2016, only seven states required Holocaust education in schools. In the past seven years, 18 more have passed Holocaust-education mandates
  • These casual stories sickened me in their volume and their similarity, a catalog of small degradations. At a time when many people in other minority groups have become bold in publicizing the tiniest of slights, these American Jews instead expressed deep shame in sharing these stories with me, feeling that they had no right to complain. After all, as many of them told me, it wasn’t the Holocaust.
  • These people talked about bosses and colleagues who repeatedly ridiculed them with anti-Semitic “jokes,” friends who turned on them when they mentioned a son’s bar mitzvah or a trip to Israel, romantic partners who openly mocked their traditions, classmates who defaced their dorm rooms and pilloried them online, teachers and neighbors who parroted conspiratorial lies. I was surprised to learn how many people were getting pennies thrown at them in 21st-century Americ
  • the blood libel, which would later be repurposed as a key part of the QAnon conspiracy theory. This craze wasn’t caused by one-party control over printing presses, but by the lie’s popularity
  • I have come to the disturbing conclusion that Holocaust education is incapable of addressing contemporary anti-Semitism. In fact, in the total absence of any education about Jews alive today, teaching about the Holocaust might even be making anti-Semitism worse.
  • The Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center is a victim of its own success. When I arrived on a weekday morning to join a field trip from a local Catholic middle school, the museum was having a light day, with only 160 students visiting
  • the docent established that the ’30s featured media beyond town criers, and that one-party control over such media helped spread propaganda. “If radio’s controlled by a certain party, you have to question that,” she said. “Back then, they didn’t.”
  • I wondered about that premise. Historians have pointed out that it doesn’t make sense to assume that people in previous eras were simply stupider than we are, and I doubted that 2020s Americans could outsmart 1930s Germans in detecting media bias. Propaganda has been used to incite violent anti-Semitism since ancient times, and only rarely because of one-party control.
  • The Nazi project was about murdering Jews, but also about erasing Jewish civilization. The museum’s valiant effort to teach students that Jews were “just like everyone else,” after Jews have spent 3,000 years deliberately not being like everyone else, felt like another erasur
  • I was starting to see how isolating the Holocaust from the rest of Jewish history made it hard for even the best educators to upload this irrational reality into seventh-grade brains.
  • the docent began by saying, “Let’s establish facts. Is Judaism a religion or a nationality?
  • My stomach sank. The question betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of Jewish identity—Jews predate the concepts of both religion and nationality. Jews are members of a type of social group that was common in the ancient Near East but is uncommon in the West today: a joinable tribal group with a shared history, homeland, and culture, of which a nonuniversalizing religion is but one feature
  • Millions of Jews identify as secular, which would be illogical if Judaism were merely a religion. But every non-Jewish society has tried to force Jews into whatever identity boxes it knows best—which is itself a quiet act of domination.
  • “Religion, right,” the docent affirmed. (Later, in the gallery about Kristallnacht, she pointed out how Jews had been persecuted for having the “wrong religion,” which would have surprised the many Jewish converts to Christianity who wound up murdered. I know the docent knew this; she later told me she had abbreviated things to hustle our group to the museum’s boxcar.)
  • The docent motioned toward the prewar gallery’s photos showing Jewish school groups and family outings, and asked how the students would describe their subjects’ lives, based on the pictures.“Normal,” a girl said.“Normal, perfect,” the docent said. “They paid taxes, they fought in the wars—all of a sudden, things changed.”
  • the museum had made a conscious decision not to focus on the long history of anti-Semitism that preceded the Holocaust, and made it possible. To be fair, adequately covering this topic would have required an additional museum
  • The bedrock assumption that has endured for nearly half a century is that learning about the Holocaust inoculates people against anti-Semitism. But it doesn’t
  • Then there was the word normal. More than 80 percent of Jewish Holocaust victims spoke Yiddish, a 1,000-year-old European Jewish language spoken around the world, with its own schools, books, newspapers, theaters, political organizations, advertising, and film industry. On a continent where language was tightly tied to territory, this was hardly “normal.” Traditional Jewish practices—which include extremely detailed rules governing food and clothing and 100 gratitude blessings recited each day—were not “normal” either.
  • the idea of sudden change—referring to not merely the Nazi takeover, but the shift from a welcoming society to an unwelcoming one—was also reinforced by survivors in videos around the museum
  • Teaching children that one shouldn’t hate Jews, because Jews are “normal,” only underlines the problem: If someone doesn’t meet your version of “normal,” then it’s fine to hate them.
  • When I asked about worst practices in Holocaust education, Szany had many to share, which turned out to be widely agreed-upon among American Holocaust educators.
  • First on the list: “simulations.” Apparently some teachers need to be told not to make students role-play Nazis versus Jews in class, or not to put masking tape on the floor in the exact dimensions of a boxcar in order to cram 200 students into i
  • Szany also condemned Holocaust fiction such as the international best seller The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, an exceedingly popular work of ahistorical Christian-savior schlock
  • She didn’t feel that Anne Frank’s diary was a good choice either, because it’s “not a story of the Holocaust”—it offers little information about most Jews’ experiences of persecution, and ends before the author’s capture and murder.
  • Other officially failed techniques include showing students gruesome images, and prompting self-flattery by asking “What would you have done?
  • Yet another bad idea is counting objects. This was the conceit of a widely viewed 2004 documentary called Paper Clips, in which non-Jewish Tennessee schoolchildren, struggling to grasp the magnitude of 6 million murdered Jews, represented those Jews by collecting millions of paper clips
  • it is demeaning to represent Jewish people as office supplies.
  • Best practices, Szany explained, are the opposite: focusing on individual stories, hearing from survivors and victims in their own words. The Illinois museum tries to “rescue the individuals from the violence,
  • In the language I often encountered in Holocaust-education resources, people who lived through the Holocaust were neatly categorized as “perpetrators,” “victims,” “bystanders,” or “upstanders.” Jewish resisters, though, were rarely classified as “upstanders.
  • I felt as I often had with actual Holocaust survivors I’d known when I was younger: frustrated as they answered questions I hadn’t asked, and vaguely insulted as they treated me like an annoyance to be managed. (I bridged this divide once I learned Yiddish in my 20s, and came to share with them a vast vocabulary of not only words, but people, places, stories, ideas—a way of thinking and being that contained not a few horrific years but centuries of hard-won vitality and resilience
  • Szany at last explained to me what the dead Elster couldn’t: The woman who sheltered his sister took only girls because it was too easy for people to confirm that the boys were Jews.
  • I realized that I wouldn’t have wanted to hear this answer from Elster. I did not want to make this thoughtful man sit onstage and discuss his own circumcision with an audience of non-Jewish teenagers. The idea felt just as dehumanizing as pulling down a boy’s pants to reveal a reality of embodied Judaism that, both here and in that barn, had been drained of any meaning beyond persecution
  • Here I am in a boxcar, I thought, and tried to make it feel real. I spun my head to take in the immersive scene, which swung around me as though I were on a rocking ship. I felt dizzy and disoriented, purely physical feelings that distracted me. Did this not count as a simulation
  • I had visited Auschwitz in actual reality, years ago. With my headset on, I tried to summon the emotional intensity I remembered feeling then. But I couldn’t, because all of the things that had made it powerful were missing. When I was there, I was touching things, smelling things, sifting soil between my fingers that the guide said contained human bone ash, feeling comforted as I recited the mourner’s prayer, the kaddish, with others, the ancient words an undertow of paradox and praise: May the great Name be blessed, forever and ever and ever
  • Students at the Skokie museum can visit an area called the Take a Stand Center, which opens with a bright display of modern and contemporary “upstanders,” including activists such as the Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai and the athlete Carli Lloyd. Szany had told me that educators “wanted more resources” to connect “the history of the Holocaust to lessons of today.” (I heard this again and again elsewhere too.) As far as I could discern, almost nobody in this gallery was Jewish.
  • As Szany ran a private demo of the technology for me, I asked how visitors react to it. “They’re more comfortable with the holograms than the real survivors,” Szany said. “Because they know they won’t be judged.”
  • t the post-Holocaust activists featured in this gallery were nearly all people who had stood up for their own group. Only Jews, the unspoken assumption went, were not supposed to stand up for themselves.
  • Visitors were asked to “take the pledge” by posting notes on a wall (“I pledge to protect the Earth!” “I pledge to be KIND!”)
  • It was all so earnest that for the first time since entering the museum, I felt something like hope. Then I noticed it: “Steps for Organizing a Demonstration.” The Nazis in Skokie, like their predecessors, had known how to organize a demonstration. They hadn’t been afraid to be unpopular. They’d taken a stand.
  • I left the museum haunted by the uncomfortable truth that the structures of a democratic society could not really prevent, and could even empower, dangerous, irrational rage. Something of that rage haunted me too.
  • the more I thought about it, the less obvious it seemed. What were students being taught to “take a stand” for? How could anyone, especially young people with little sense of proportion, connect the murder of 6 million Jews to today without landing in a swamp of Holocaust trivialization, like the COVID-protocol protesters who’d pinned Jewish stars to their shirt and carried posters of Anne Frank?
  • weren’t they and others like them doing exactly what Holocaust educators claimed they wanted people to do?
  • The 2019 law was inspired by a changing reality in Washington and around the country. In recent years, Kennedy said, she’s received more and more messages about anti-Semitic vandalism and harassment in schools. For example, she told me, “someone calls and says, ‘There’s a swastika drawn in the bathroom.’ ”
  • Maybe not, Kennedy admitted. “What frightens me is that small acts of anti-Semitism are becoming very normalized,” she said. “We’re getting used to it. That keeps me up at night.”“Sadly, I don’t think we can fix this,” Regelbrugge said. “But we’re gonna die trying.”
  • Almost every city where I spoke with Holocaust-museum educators, whether by phone or in person, had also been the site of a violent anti-Semitic attack in the years since these museums had opened
  • I was struck by how minimally these attacks were discussed in the educational materials shared by the museums.
  • In fact, with the exception of Kennedy and Regelbrugge, no one I spoke with mentioned these anti-Semitic attacks at all.
  • The failure to address contemporary anti-Semitism in most of American Holocaust education is, in a sense, by design
  • the story of the (mostly non-Jewish) teachers in Massachusetts and New Jersey who created the country’s first Holocaust curricula, in the ’70s. The point was to teach morality in a secular society. “Everyone in education, regardless of ethnicity, could agree that Nazism was evil and that the Jews were innocent victims,” Fallace wrote, explaining the topic’s appeal. “Thus, teachers used the Holocaust to activate the moral reasoning of their students”—to teach them to be good people.
  • The idea that Holocaust education can somehow serve as a stand-in for public moral education has not left us. And because of its obviously laudable goals, objecting to it feels like clubbing a baby seal. Who wouldn’t want to teach kids to be empathetic?
  • by this logic, shouldn’t Holocaust education, because of its moral content alone, automatically inoculate people against anti-Semitism?
  • Apparently not. “Essentially the moral lessons that the Holocaust is often used to teach reflect much the same values that were being taught in schools before the Holocaust,”
  • (Germans in the ’30s, after all, were familiar with the Torah’s commandment, repeated in the Christian Bible, to love their neighbors.) This fact undermines nearly everything Holocaust education is trying to accomplish, and reveals the roots of its failure.
  • One problem with using the Holocaust as a morality play is exactly its appeal: It flatters everyone. We can all congratulate ourselves for not committing mass murder.
  • This approach excuses current anti-Semitism by defining anti-Semitism as genocide in the past
  • When anti-Semitism is reduced to the Holocaust, anything short of murdering 6 million Jews—like, say, ramming somebody with a shopping cart, or taunting kids at school, or shooting up a Jewish nonprofit, or hounding Jews out of entire countries—seems minor by comparison.
  • If we teach that the Holocaust happened because people weren’t nice enough—that they failed to appreciate that humans are all the same, for instance, or to build a just society—we create the self-congratulatory space where anti-Semitism grow
  • One can believe that humans are all the same while being virulently anti-Semitic, because according to anti-Semites, Jews, with their millennia-old insistence on being different from their neighbors, are the obstacle to humans all being the same
  • One can believe in creating a just society while being virulently anti-Semitic, because according to anti-Semites, Jews, with their imagined power and privilege, are the obstacle to a just society
  • To inoculate people against the myth that humans have to erase their differences in order to get along, and the related myth that Jews, because they have refused to erase their differences, are supervillains, one would have to acknowledge that these myths exist
  • To really shatter them, one would have to actually explain the content of Jewish identity, instead of lazily claiming that Jews are just like everyone else.
  • one of several major Holocaust-curriculum providers, told me about the “terrible Jew jokes” she’d heard from her own students in Virginia. “They don’t necessarily know where they come from or even really why they’re saying them,” Goss said. “Many kids understand not to say the N-word, but they would say, ‘Don’t be such a Jew.’ ”
  • There’s a decline in history education at the same time that there’s a rise in social media,”
  • “We’ve done studies with our partners at Holocaust centers that show that students are coming in with questions about whether the Holocaust was an actual event. That wasn’t true 20 years ago.”
  • Goss believes that one of the reasons for the lack of stigma around anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and jokes is baked into the universal-morality approach to Holocaust education. “The Holocaust is not a good way to teach about ‘bullying,’ 
  • Echoes & Reflections’ lesson plans do address newer versions of anti-Semitism, including the contemporary demonization of Israel’s existence—as opposed to criticism of Israeli policies—and its manifestation in aggression against Jews. Other Holocaust-curriculum providers also have material on contemporary anti-Semitism.
  • providers rarely explain or explore who Jews are today—and their raison d’être remains Holocaust education.
  • Many teachers had told me that their classrooms “come alive” when they teach about the Holocaust
  • Holocaust-education materials are just plain better than those on most other historical topics. All of the major Holocaust-education providers offer lessons that teachers can easily adapt for different grade levels and subject areas. Instead of lecturing and memorization, they use participation-based methods such as group work, hands-on activities, and “learner driven” projects.
  • A 2019 Pew Research Center survey found a correlation between “warm” feelings about Jews and knowledge about the Holocaust—but the respondents who said they knew a Jewish person also tended to be more knowledgeable about the Holocaust, providing a more obvious source for their feelings
  • In 2020, Echoes & Reflections published a commissioned study of 1,500 college students, comparing students who had been exposed to Holocaust education in high school with those who hadn’t. The published summary shows that those who had studied the Holocaust were more likely to tolerate diverse viewpoints, and more likely to privately support victims of bullying scenarios, which is undoubtedly good news. It did not, however, show a significant difference in respondents’ willingness to defend victims publicly, and students who’d received Holocaust education were less likely to be civically engaged—in other words, to be an “upstander.”
  • These studies puzzled me. As Goss told me, the Holocaust was not about bullying—so why was the Echoes study measuring that? More important, why were none of these studies examining awareness of anti-Semitism, whether past or present?
  • One major study addressing this topic was conducted in England, where a national Holocaust-education mandate has been in place for more than 20 years. In 2016, researchers at University College London’s Centre for Holocaust Education published a survey of more than 8,000 English secondary-school students, including 244 whom they interviewed at length.
  • The study’s most disturbing finding was that even among those who studied the Holocaust, there was “a very common struggle among many students to credibly explain why Jews were targeted” in the Holocaust—that is, to cite anti-Semitism
  • “many students appeared to regard [Jews’] existence as problematic and a key cause of Nazi victimisation.” In other words, students blamed the Holocaust on the Jews
  • This result resembles that of a large 2020 survey of American Millennials and Gen Zers, in which 11 percent of respondents believed that Jews caused the Holocaust. The state with the highest percentage of respondents believing this—an eye-popping 19 percent—was New York, which has mandated Holocaust education since the 1990s.
  • Worse, in the English study, “a significant number of students appeared to tacitly accept some of the egregious claims once circulated by Nazi propaganda,” instead of recognizing them as anti-Semitic myths.
  • One typical student told researchers, “Is it because like they were kind of rich, so maybe they thought that that was kind of in some way evil, like the money didn’t belong to them[;] it belonged to the Germans and the Jewish people had kind of taken that away from them?
  • Another was even more blunt: “The Germans, when they saw the Jews were better off than them, kind of, I don’t know, it kind of pissed them off a bit.” Hitler’s speeches were more eloquent in making similar points.
  • One of the teachers I met was Benjamin Vollmer, a veteran conference participant who has spent years building his school’s Holocaust-education program. He teaches eighth-grade English in Venus, Texas, a rural community with 5,700 residents; his school is majority Hispanic, and most students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. When I asked him why he focuses on the Holocaust, his initial answer was simple: “It meets the TEKS.”
  • The TEKS are the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, an elaborate list of state educational requirements that drive standardized testing
  • it became apparent that Holocaust education was something much bigger for his students: a rare access point to a wider world. Venus is about 30 miles from Dallas, but Vollmer’s annual Holocaust-museum field trip is the first time that many of his students ever leave their town.
  • “It’s become part of the school culture,” Vollmer said. “In eighth grade, they walk in, and the first thing they ask is, ‘When are we going to learn about the Holocaust?’
  • Vollmer is not Jewish—and, as is common for Holocaust educators, he has never had a Jewish student. (Jews are 2.4 percent of the U.S. adult population, according to a 2020 Pew survey.) Why not focus on something more relevant to his students, I asked him, like the history of immigration or the civil-rights movement?
  • I hadn’t yet appreciated that the absence of Jews was precisely the appeal.“Some topics have been so politicized that it’s too hard to teach them,” Vollmer told me. “Making it more historical takes away some of the barriers to talking about it.”
  • Wouldn’t the civil-rights movement, I asked, be just as historical for his students?He paused, thinking it through. “You have to build a level of rapport in your class before you have the trust to explore your own history,” he finally said.
  • “The Holocaust happened long ago, and we’re not responsible for it,” she said. “Anything happening in our world today, the wool comes down over our eyes.” Her colleague attending the conference with her, a high-school teacher who also wouldn’t share her name, had tried to take her mostly Hispanic students to a virtual-reality experience called Carne y Arena, which follows migrants attempting to illegally cross the U.S.-Mexico border. Her administrators refused, claiming that it would traumatize students. But they still learn about the Holocaust.
  • Student discomfort has been a legal issue in Texas. The state’s House Bill 3979, passed in 2021, is one of many “anti-critical-race-theory” laws that conservative state legislators have introduced since 2020. The bill forbade teachers from causing students “discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual’s race or sex,” and also demanded that teachers introduce “diverse and contending perspectives” when teaching “controversial” topics, “without giving deference to any one perspective.
  • These vaguely worded laws stand awkwardly beside a 2019 state law mandating Holocaust education for Texas students at all grade levels during an annual Holocaust Remembrance Week
  • the administrator who’d made the viral remarks in Southlake is a strong proponent of Holocaust education, but was acknowledging a reality in that school district. Every year, the administrator had told Higgins, some parents in her district object to their children reading the Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night—because it isn’t their “belief” that the Holocaust happened.
  • In one model lesson at the conference, participants examined a speech by the Nazi official Heinrich Himmler about the need to murder Jews, alongside a speech by the Hebrew poet and ghetto fighter Abba Kovner encouraging a ghetto uprising. I only later realized that this lesson plan quite elegantly satisfied the House bill’s requirement of providing “contending perspectives.”
  • The next day, I asked the instructor if that was an unspoken goal of her lesson plan. With visible hesitation, she said that teaching in Texas can be like “walking the tightrope.” This way, she added, “you’re basing your perspectives on primary texts and not debating with Holocaust deniers.” Less than an hour later, a senior museum employee pulled me aside to tell me that I wasn’t allowed to interview the staff.
  • Many of the visiting educators at the conference declined to talk with me, even anonymously; nearly all who did spoke guardedly. The teachers I met, most of whom were white Christian women, did not seem to be of any uniform political bent. But virtually all of them were frustrated by what administrators and parents were demanding of them.
  • Two local middle-school teachers told me that many parents insist on seeing reading lists. Parents “wanting to keep their kid in a bubble,” one of them said, has been “the huge stumbling block.”
  • “It is healthy to begin this study by talking about anti-Semitism, humanizing the victims, sticking to primary sources, and remaining as neutral as possible.”
  • Wasn’t “remaining as neutral as possible” exactly the opposite of being an upstander?
  • In trying to remain neutral, some teachers seemed to want to seek out the Holocaust’s bright side—and ask dead Jews about i
  • We watched a brief introduction about Glauben’s childhood and early adolescence in the Warsaw Ghetto and in numerous camps. When the dead man appeared, one teacher asked, “Was there any joy or happiness in this ordeal? Moments of joy in the camps?”
  • These experiences, hardly unusual for Jewish victims, were not the work of a faceless killing machine. Instead they reveal a gleeful and imaginative sadism. For perpetrators, this was fun. Asking this dead man about “joy” seemed like a fundamental misunderstanding of the Holocaust. There was plenty of joy, just on the Nazi side.
  • In the educational resources I explored, I did not encounter any discussions of sadism—the joy derived from humiliating people, the dopamine hit from landing a laugh at someone else’s expense, the self-righteous high from blaming one’s problems on others—even though this, rather than the fragility of democracy or the passivity of bystanders, is a major origin point of all anti-Semitism
  • To anyone who has spent 10 seconds online, that sadism is familiar, and its source is familiar too: the fear of being small, and the desire to feel big by making others feel small instead.
  • Nazis were, among other things, edgelords, in it for the laughs. So, for that matter, were the rest of history’s anti-Semites, then and now. For Americans today, isn’t this the most relevant insight of all?
  • “People say we’ve learned from the Holocaust. No, we didn’t learn a damn thing,”
  • “People glom on to this idea of the upstander,” she said. “Kids walk away with the sense that there were a lot of upstanders, and they think, Yes, I can do it too.”
  • The problem with presenting the less inspiring reality, she suggested, is how parents or administrators might react. “If you teach historical anti-Semitism, you have to teach contemporary anti-Semitism. A lot of teachers are fearful, because if you try to connect it to today, parents are going to call, or administrators are going to call, and say you’re pushing an agenda.”
  • But weren’t teachers supposed to “push an agenda” to stop hatred? Wasn’t that the entire hope of those survivors who built museums and lobbied for mandates and turned themselves into holograms?
  • I asked Klett why no one seemed to be teaching anything about Jewish culture. If the whole point of Holocaust education is to “humanize” those who were “dehumanized,” why do most teachers introduce students to Jews only when Jews are headed for a mass grave? “There’s a real fear of teaching about Judaism,” she confided. “Especially if the teacher is Jewish.”
  • Teachers who taught about industrialized mass murder were scared of teaching about … Judaism? Why?
  • “Because the teachers are afraid that the parents are going to say that they’re pushing their religion on the kids.”
  • “Survivors have told me, ‘Thank you for teaching this. They’ll listen to you because you’re not Jewish,’ ” she said. “Which is weird.”
  • perhaps we could be honest and just say “There is no point in teaching any of this”—because anti-Semitism is so ingrained in our world that even when discussing the murders of 6 million Jews, it would be “pushing an agenda” to tell people not to hate them, or to tell anyone what it actually means to be Jewish
  • The Dallas Museum was the only one I visited that opened with an explanation of who Jews are. Its exhibition began with brief videos about Abraham and Moses—limiting Jewish identity to a “religion” familiar to non-Jews, but it was better than nothing. The museum also debunked the false charge that the Jews—rather than the Romans—killed Jesus, and explained the Jews’ refusal to convert to other faiths. It even had a panel or two about contemporary Dallas Jewish life. Even so, a docent there told me that one question students ask is “Are any Jews still alive today?”
  • American Holocaust education, in this museum and nearly everywhere else, never ends with Jews alive today. Instead it ends by segueing to other genocides, or to other minorities’ suffering
  • But when one reaches the end of the exhibition on American slavery at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, in Washington, D.C., one does not then enter an exhibition highlighting the enslavement of other groups throughout world history, or a room full of interactive touchscreens about human trafficking today, asking that visitors become “upstanders” in fighting i
  • That approach would be an insult to Black history, ignoring Black people’s current experiences while turning their past oppression into nothing but a symbol for something else, something that actually matters.
  • It is dehumanizing to be treated as a symbol. It is even more dehumanizing to be treated as a warning.
  • How should we teach children about anti-Semitism?
  • Decoster began her conference workshop by introducing “vocabulary must-knows.” At the top of her list: anti-Semitism.
  • “If you don’t explain the ism,” she cautioned the teachers in the room, “you will need to explain to the kids ‘Why the Jews?’ Students are going to see Nazis as aliens who bring with them anti-Semitism when they come to power in ’33, and they take it back away at the end of the Holocaust in 1945.”
  • She asked the teachers, “What’s the first example of the persecution of the Jews in history?”
  • “Think ancient Egypt,” Decoster said. “Does this sound familiar to any of you?”“They’re enslaved by the Egyptian pharaoh,” a teacher said
  • I wasn’t sure that the biblical Exodus narrative exactly qualified as “history,” but it quickly became clear that wasn’t Decoster’s point. “Why does the pharaoh pick on the Jews?” she asked. “Because they had one God.”
  • I was stunned. Rarely in my journey through American Holocaust education did I hear anyone mention a Jewish belief.
  • “The Jews worship one God, and that’s their moral structure. Egyptian society has multiple gods whose authority goes to the pharaoh. When things go wrong, you can see how Jews as outsiders were perceived by the pharaoh as the threat.”
  • This unexpected understanding of Jewish belief revealed a profound insight about Judaism: Its rejection of idolatry is identical to its rejection of tyranny. I could see how that might make people uncomfortable.
  • Decoster moved on to a snazzy infographic of a wheel divided in thirds, each explaining a component of anti-Semitism
  • “Racial Antisemitism = False belief that Jews are a race and a threat to other races,”
  • Anti-Judaism = Hatred of Jews as a religious group,”
  • then “Anti-Jewish Conspiracy Theory = False belief that Jews want to control and overtake the world.” The third part, the conspiracy theory, was what distinguished anti-Semitism from other bigotries. It allowed closed-minded people to congratulate themselves for being open-minded—for “doing their own research,” for “punching up,” for “speaking truth to power,” while actually just spreading lies.
  • Wolfson clarified for his audience what this centuries-long demonization of Jews actually means, citing the scholar David Patterson, who has written: “In the end, the antisemite’s claim is not that all Jews are evil, but rather that all evil is Jewish.”
  • Wolfson told the teachers that it was important that “anti-Semitism should not be your students’ first introduction to Jews and Judaism.” He said this almost as an aside, just before presenting the pig-excrement image. “If you’re teaching about anti-Semitism before you teach about the content of Jewish identity, you’re doing it wrong.
  • this—introducing students to Judaism by way of anti-Semitism—was exactly what they were doing. The same could be said, I realized, for nearly all of American Holocaust education.
  • The Holocaust educators I met across America were all obsessed with building empathy, a quality that relies on finding commonalities between ourselves and others.
  • a more effective way to address anti-Semitism might lie in cultivating a completely different quality, one that happens to be the key to education itself: curiosity. Why use Jews as a means to teach people that we’re all the same, when the demand that Jews be just like their neighbors is exactly what embedded the mental virus of anti-Semitism in the Western mind in the first place? Why not instead encourage inquiry about the diversity, to borrow a de rigueur word, of the human experience?
  • I want a hologram of the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks telling people about what he called “the dignity of difference.”
  • I want to mandate this for every student in this fractured and siloed America, even if it makes them much, much more uncomfortable than seeing piles of dead Jews doe
  • There is no empathy without curiosity, no respect without knowledge, no other way to learn what Jews first taught the world: love your neighbor
Javier E

Opinion | Tucker Carlson Was Both More and Less Important Than You Think - The New York... - 0 views

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  • To understand the importance and unimportance of Tucker Carlson, it’s necessary to rewind the clock all the way back to the period just after Donald Trump won the 2016 election
  • We knew who Donald Trump was, but we didn’t know what Trumpism would be.
  • Trump could be contained. He could be channeled. His political appointees would keep him sane.
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • Carlson was a key in answering the question; he helped drive the G.O.P. to be just as cruel, just as dishonest and sometimes even more populist than Donald Trump himself.
  • Initially, there were good reasons for confusion about Trump and the G.O.P. During the campaign, he was all over the map ideologically
  • And if personnel is policy, then it was difficult to define his early administration as well
  • Moreover, many of his early moves were straight out of the standard Republican playbook
  • When Trump was elected, friends and colleagues told me that his populism could be moderated and his cruelty and dishonesty were aberrations.
  • It was not to be, and not just because of the sheer force of Trump’s personality. Carlson played an important role.
  • He helped mold the G.O.P. in his race-obsessed, conspiracy-addled image, helped perpetuate a culture of cruel and punitive Republican communication and helped build an infrastructure of new-right voices who copy his substance and style.
  • He was known, however, as an opportunist. And for enterprising and dishonest members of the infotainment right, the Trump era was a cornucopia of opportunity. Trump’s ideological incoherence wasn’t a problem. It was a vacuum that could be filled with ideas that identified and fed his resentments.
  • In fact, Trumpism was never truly about ideas. It was a vague amalgam of Trump’s ethics, attitudes and grievances — and Carlson imitated them, adopted them and broadcast them to his millions of viewers.
  • Carlson put the lie to the idea that Trump’s cruelty was an aberration, that it was somehow alien to the Republican character, to be tolerated only because the greater good of defeating Clinton had demanded it. In Trump’s cruelty, there was again, opportunity. There were millions who would thrill to his most crude and personal attacks.
  • On Tucker’s program truth was optional, insults were mandatory, and racism was all but explicit.
  • The narrative was consistent: “They” were after “you.” “They” were lying to “you.” And “they” were terrible, horrible people.
  • it’s typical of both Trump and Tucker: invent a partisan grievance, mislead the audience and cap off the conversation with a direct insult.
  • Tucker’s influence went beyond substance and style. He gave a platform to a number of the Trump right’s most notorious and most fringe voices
  • We knew Trump was more populist, more dishonest and more cruel than the typical Republican. But we did not know whether the G.O.P. would become more like the man or if the man would become more like the G.O.P.
  • If all that is true, then what could possibly be unimportant about Carlson? The fact is that at the end of the day, he was not bigger than Fox. The secret of Tucker’s fame is that it was always rooted far more in his Fox News time slot than in his (or his ideas’) inherent appea
  • while Carlson’s ratings were impressive, they were comparable to those of his predecessor Bill O’Reilly. Which raises the question: To what extent was Tucker popular and influential because of his distinct voice, and to what extent was it because he occupied the most coveted time slot on the most popular cable news channel in the United States?
  • I’ve written before about the network’s singular place in the culture of red America. Without the power of Fox, Carlson’s ability to influence the right will likely be permanently diminished.
Javier E

The Patriot: How Mark Milley Held the Line - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...675375

patriot military civilian relations culture politics trump crisis

shared by Javier E on 24 Sep 23 - No Cached
  • In The Divider, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser write that Milley believed that Trump was “shameful,” and “complicit” in the January 6 attack. They also reported that Milley feared that Trump’s “ ‘Hitler-like’ embrace of the big lie about the election would prompt the president to seek out a ‘Reichstag moment.’ ”
  • A plain reading of the record shows that in the chaotic period before and after the 2020 election, Milley did as much as, or more than, any other American to defend the constitutional order, to prevent the military from being deployed against the American people, and to forestall the eruption of wars with America’s nuclear-armed adversaries
  • Along the way, Milley deflected Trump’s exhortations to have the U.S. military ignore, and even on occasion commit, war crimes
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  • In the American system, it is the voters, the courts, and Congress that are meant to serve as checks on a president’s behavior, not the generals. Civilians provide direction, funding, and oversight; the military then follows lawful orders.
  • “As chairman, you swear to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, but what if the commander in chief is undermining the Constitution?” McMaster said to me.
  • “General Milley has done an extraordinary job under the most extraordinary of circumstances,” Gates said. “I’ve worked for eight presidents, and not even Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon in their angriest moments would have considered doing or saying some of the things that were said between the election and January 6.
  • Trump called Gallagher a hero and said he didn’t understand why he was being punished.“Because he slit the throat of a wounded prisoner,” Milley said.“The guy was going to die anyway,” Trump said.
  • Milley answered, “Mr. President, we have military ethics and laws about what happens in battle. We can’t do that kind of thing. It’s a war crime.” Trump answered that he didn’t understand “the big deal.” He went on, “You guys”—meaning combat soldiers—“are all just killers. What’s the difference?”
  • There’s a little bit of a ‘There but for the grace of God go I’ feeling in all of this. What happened to Gallagher can happen to many human beings.” Milley told me about a book given to him by a friend, Aviv Kochavi, a former chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces. The book, by an American academic named Christopher Browning, is called Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland.
  • “It’s a great book,” Milley said. “It’s about these average police officers from Hamburg who get drafted, become a police battalion that follows the Wehrmacht into Poland, and wind up slaughtering Jews and committing genocide. They just devolve into barbaric acts. It’s about moral degradation.”
  • During Milley’s time in the Trump administration, the disagreements and misunderstandings between the Pentagon and the White House all seemed to follow the same pattern: The president—who was incapable of understanding or unwilling to understand the aspirations and rules that guide the military—would continually try to politicize an apolitical institution.
  • The image of a general in combat fatigues walking with a president who has a well-known affection for the Insurrection Act—the 1807 law that allows presidents to deploy the military to put down domestic riots and rebellions—caused consternation and anger across the senior-officer ranks, and among retired military leaders.
  • According to Esper, Trump desperately wanted a violent response to the protesters, asking, “Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?” When I raised this with Milley, he explained, somewhat obliquely, how he would manage the president’s eruptions.“It was a rhetorical question,” Milley explained. “ ‘Can’t you just shoot them in the legs?’ ”“He never actually ordered you to shoot anyone in the legs?” I asked.“Right. This could be interpreted many, many different ways,” he said.
  • Milley and others around Trump used different methods to handle the unstable president. “You can judge my success or failure on this, but I always tried to use persuasion with the president, not undermine or go around him or slow-roll,” Milley told me. “I would present my argument to him. The president makes decisions, and if the president ordered us to do X, Y, or Z and it was legal, we would do it. If it’s not legal, it’s my job to say it’s illegal, and here’s why it’s illegal. I would emphasize cost and risk of the various courses of action. My job, then and now, is to let the president know what the course of action could be, let them know what the cost is, what the risks and benefits are. And then make a recommendation. That’s what I’ve done under both presidents.”
  • He went on to say, “President Trump never ordered me to tell the military to do something illegal. He never did that. I think that’s an important point.”
  • For his part, General Chiarelli concluded that his friend had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Quoting Peter Feaver, an academic expert on civil-military relations, Chiarelli said, “You have to judge Mark like you judge Olympic divers—by the difficulty of the dive.”
  • That summer, Milley visited Chiarelli in Washington State and, over breakfast, described what he thought was coming next. “It was unbelievable. This is August 2, and he laid out in specific detail what his concerns were between August and Inauguration Day. He identified one of his biggest concerns as January 6,” the day the Senate was to meet to certify the election. “It was almost like a crystal ball.”
  • Chiarelli said that Milley told him it was possible, based on his observations of the president and his advisers, that they would not accept an Election Day loss. Specifically, Milley worried that Trump would trigger a war—an “October surprise”­—to create chaotic conditions in the lead-up to the election. Chiarelli mentioned the continuous skirmishes inside the White House between those who were seeking to attack Iran, ostensibly over its nuclear program, and those, like Milley, who could not justify a large-scale preemptive strike.
  • In the crucial period after his road-to-Damascus conversion, Milley set several goals for himself: keep the U.S. out of reckless, unnecessary wars overseas; maintain the military’s integrity, and his own; and prevent the administration from using the military against the American people. He told uniformed and civilian officials that the military would play no part in any attempt by Trump to illegally remain in office.
  • The desire on the part of Trump and his loyalists to utilize the Insurrection Act was unabating. Stephen Miller, the Trump adviser whom Milley is said to have called “Rasputin,” was vociferous on this point. Less than a week after George Floyd was murdered, Miller told Trump in an Oval Office meeting, “Mr. President, they are burning America down. Antifa, Black Lives Matter—they’re burning it down. You have an insurrection on your hands. Barbarians are at the gate.”
  • According to Woodward and Costa in Peril, Milley responded, “Shut the fuck up, Steve.” Then he turned to Trump. “Mr. President, they are not burning it down.”
  • In the weeks before the election, Milley was a dervish of activity. He spent much of his time talking with American allies and adversaries, all worried about the stability of the United States. In what would become his most discussed move, first reported by Woodward and Costa, he called Chinese General Li Zuocheng, his People’s Liberation Army counterpart, on October 30, after receiving intelligence that China believed Trump was going to order an attack
  • “General Li, I want to assure you that the American government is stable and everything is going to be okay,” Milley said, according to Peril. “We are not going to attack or conduct any kinetic operations against you. General Li, you and I have known each other for now five years. If we’re going to attack, I’m going to call you ahead of time. It’s not going to be a surprise … If there was a war or some kind of kinetic action between the United States and China, there’s going to be a buildup, just like there has been always in history.”
  • Milley later told the Senate Armed Services Committee that this call, and a second one two days after the January 6 insurrection, represented an attempt to “deconflict military actions, manage crisis, and prevent war between great powers that are armed with the world’s most deadliest weapons.”
  • Milley also spoke with lawmakers and media figures in the days leading up to the election, promising that the military would play no role in its outcome. In a call on the Saturday before Election Day, Milley told news anchors including George Stephan­opoulos, Lester Holt, and Norah O’Donnell that the military’s role was to protect democracy, not undermine it.
  • “The context was ‘We know how fraught things are, and we have a sense of what might happen, and we’re not going to let Trump do it,’ ” Stephanopoulos told me. “He was saying that the military was there to serve the country, and it was clear by implication that the military was not going to be part of a coup.” It seemed, Stephanopoulos said, that Milley was “desperately trying not to politicize the military.
  • “The motto of the United States Army for over 200 years, since 14 June 1775 … has been ‘This we will defend,’ ” Milley said. “And the ‘this’ refers to the Constitution and to protect the liberty of the American people. You see, we are unique among armies. We are unique among militaries. We do not take an oath to a king or queen, a tyrant or dictator. We do not take an oath to an individual. No, we do not take an oath to a country, a tribe, or religion. We take an oath to the Constitution … We will never turn our back on our duty to protect and defend the idea that is America, the Constitution of the United States, against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”
  • He closed with words from Thomas Paine: “These are times that try men’s souls. And the summer soldier and the sunshine Patriot will in this crisis shrink from the service of their country. But he who stands by it deserves the love of man and woman. For tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered.”
  • “World War II ended with the establishment of the rules-based international order. People often ridicule it—they call it ‘globalism’ and so on—but in fact, in my view, World War II was fought in order to establish a better peace,” Milley told me. “We the Americans are the primary authors of the basic rules of the road—and these rules are under stress, and they’re fraying at the edges. That’s why Ukraine is so important. President Putin has made a mockery of those rules. He’s making a mockery of everything. He has assaulted the very first principle of the United Nations, which is that you can’t tolerate wars of aggression and you can’t allow large countries to attack small countries by military means. He is making a direct frontal assault on the rules that were written in 1945.”
  • “It is incumbent upon all of us in positions of leadership to do the very best to maintain a sense of global stability,” Milley told me. “If we don’t, we’re going to pay the butcher’s bill. It will be horrific, worse than World War I, worse than World War II.”
  • If Trump is reelected president, there will be no Espers or Milleys in his administration. Nor will there be any officials of the stature and independence of John Kelly, H. R. McMaster, or James Mattis. Trump and his allies have already threatened officials they see as disloyal with imprisonment, and there is little reason to imagine that he would not attempt to carry out his threats.
Javier E

New survey finds antisemitic views are widespread in America - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-anti-defamation-league-survey

anti-Semitism us survey

shared by Javier E on 12 Jan 23 - No Cached
  • The survey shows “antisemitism in its classical fascist form is emerging again in American society, where Jews are too secretive and powerful, working against interests of others, not sharing values, exploiting — the classic conspiratorial tropes,”
  • The study uses a new version of surveys the ADL has been doing in America since the 1960s in order to get at the specific nature of antisemitism, and what makes it different from other types of hate. Its new metric is centered on affirming or rejecting 14 statements, including whether Jews: “have too much control and influence on Wall Street,” “are more willing than others to use shady practices to get what they want,” or are “so shrewd that other people do not have a fair chance.”
  • Almost 4 in 10 Americans believe it’s mostly or somewhat true that “Jews are more loyal to Israel than to America,”
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  • It is difficult to assess whether antisemitic views have increased over time, given changes in the survey’s response options as well as how respondents were sampled.
  • Williams and some experts who helped review the study noted that it shows the views of Americans under 30 and those of Americans over 30 are very similar. Of Americans ages 18 to 30, 18 percent said six or more of the statements were true, while among those 31 and older, 20 percent did. Of younger Americans, 39 percent believed two to five statements, while among the older group, 41 percent did.
  • “It used to be that older Americans harbored more antisemitic views. The hypothesis was that antisemitism declined in the 1990s, the 2000s, because there was this new generation of more tolerant people. It shows younger people are much closer now to what older people think. My hypothesis is there is a cultural shift, fed maybe by technology and social media. The gap is disappearing,
  • in 2013, Pew convened a dozen or more top experts on American Judaism for a survey and asked about their priorities and what areas needed more information and attention. The consensus at the time was that antisemitism was at a historic low in the United States and that, while it still existed, it wasn’t a pressing concern. When Pew talked to experts in 2020, their attitudes were “a complete sea change. They told us antisemitism is a very pressing issue and we need to devote a lot of attention to understanding it.”
  • The vast majority of U.S. Jews told Pew in 2020 that antisemitism had increased in the past five years, and a slim majority said they personally feel less safe.
Javier E

There Is No Remaining Christian Case for Trump - 0 views

frenchpress.thedispatch.com/...is-no-remaining-christian-case

lesser of two evils psychology bias culture trump influence politics christian

shared by Javier E on 24 Jul 22 - No Cached
  • here’s an argument that was morally serious, especially in both general elections—if one candidate is going to win, shouldn’t you vote for the one you believe in good faith will do the least harm to the nation, even if that person has profound flaws? 
  • This was the “lesser evil” or “hold your nose and vote” position. There are people I respect who made this choice both times, and they did so without once rationalizing Donald Trump’s lies or minimizing his sins. 
  • we have to understand human nature.
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  • precious few people want to be part of a movement that’s merely “less evil.” They don’t want to be or do anything evil at all. They want to be proud of their president. They want to be proud of their movement.
  • while it might be easy to reconcile a one-time action (like a vote) as less evil, it becomes far more difficult when your political affiliation is part of your identity. 
  • Many millions of Republicans aren’t just Republicans on Election Day, they’re Republicans every day. And Donald Trump placed every-day Republicans in a constant dilemma. Did you point it out when he did evil things? Or did you mainly remain silent, trusting in the notion that no matter how bad Trump was, his opponents were worse?
  • even worse, did the tension between Trump’s actions and your own morality grow so great that you started to redefine morality itself?
  • How many people made the migration from supporting Trump in spite of his character to supporting him because of who he was? I can think of countless folks, in both public and private life. 
  • That’s what discipling looks like.
  • Ted Cruz says his pronouns are “kiss my ass’ not just because he corrupted himself for Trump but because the crowd is corrupt as well. The same analysis goes for Josh Hawley’s refusal to apologize for his fist salute or his election challenge. He is morally corrupt. That cheering crowd is morally corrupt. 
  • Why? Because they’ve absorbed the lessons Trump taught. Fight the left with profane anger. Never apologize.
  • In 1998, the Southern Baptist Convention passed one of the most prescient and important resolutions in the denomination’s history. Its Resolution on Moral Character of Public Officials
  • First, he’s the undeniable front-runner for the 2024 GOP nomination, and there are reports he might even announce his candidacy before the 2022 midterms.
  • Second, the January 6 Committee is doing an extraordinary job using the words of Trump’s own officials to fully expose to anyone who has eyes to see and ears to hear that Trump corruptly and likely criminally engineered an American coup.
  • Third, Axios reported this week on potential Trump plans for a second term, including a radical civil service reform that could lead to the government being stocked not with thousands of Trumpist officials, but with tens of thousands—discipled by Trump, imitating Trump, devoted to Trump. 
  • We should expect Trump to fill the government with his most loyal servants, and the January 6 hearings have taught us that loyalty to Trump sometimes requires lawlessness.
  • hy write about Trump and Christianity again? Three reasons.
  • “Tolerance of serious wrong by leaders sears the conscience of the culture, spawns unrestrained immorality and lawlessness in the society, and surely results in God’s judgment.”
  • Over the weeks, the months, and the years, when the price of calling out actual evil—even an alleged lesser evil—is ostracization and alienation, then it’s often only a matter of time before your mind turns “lesser evil” into “not evil at all.” 
  • There is no binary choice. Republican Christians can say to Trump, right now, that there is no case for him over other Republicans—men or women who can choose better judges than Democrats, pursue better policies than Democrats, and defeat Joe Biden without resorting to lies and conspiracy theories and without corrupting the conscience of the church.
  • American Christian political leaders behave in public more like Trump than like Christ. American Christian families are torn apart by MAGA members who behave—the instant the topic turns to politics—more like Trump than like Christ.
  • They’d been discipled by Trump.
Javier E

The Age of Distracti-pression - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...n-depression-anxiety-adhd.html

depression anxiety stimulants history culture pandemic

shared by Javier E on 16 Aug 22 - No Cached
  • First, the broad strokes: In 2019, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that 15.8 percent of American adults took prescription pills for mental health.
  • We are depressed, anxious, tired and distracted. What’s new is this: Almost a quarter of Americans over the age of 18 are now medicated for one or more of these conditions.
  • according to data provided to The Times by Express Scripts, a pharmacy benefits manager, prescriptions across three categories of mental health medications — depression, anxiety and A.D.H.D. — have all risen since the pandemic began. But they have done so unevenly, telling a different story for each age group and each class of medication.
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  • Antidepressants continue to be the most commonly prescribed of these medications in the United States, and their use has become only more widespread since the pandemic began, with an 8.7 percent rate of increase from 2019 to 2021, compared with 7.9 percent from 2017 to 2019
  • At the same time, life in the digital age means that people expect immediacy: immediate replies, immediate delivery, immediate improvement. “We have no tolerance for slow change,” he said. “But many of the problems we are faced with demand slow change.”
  • For this same 13- to 19-year-old bracket, in the first two years of the pandemic, there was a 17.3 percent change in anxiety medications. It had been a 9.3 percent rate of change between 2017 and 2019
  • Part of the uptick could be explained by the fact that, stuck at home, people finally had time to seek out the health care they had been delaying. But patients seeking help are doing so against a backdrop of isolation, restriction, uncertainty and grief.
  • Since 2017, there has been a 41 percent increase in antidepressant use for the teenagers
  • “The 1950s and ’60s were widely framed as the age of anxiety,” said Anne Harrington, the author of “Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness” and a historian of science at Harvard. “And the ’80s and ’90s became the age of depression. And yet it’s unclear that people’s symptoms actually changed.”
  • Prozac was developed to answer what was then the prevalent theory of depression: that it was caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, specifically too little serotonin. Prozac and similar drugs are called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, meaning they block the reabsorption of serotonin in the brain.
  • “Prozac was on ‘Nightline’ when you went to sleep and on the ‘Today’ show when you woke up.” Within the first two years of Prozac’s existence, 650,000 prescriptions were written for it per month.
  • Prozac, and its cousins like Zoloft and Lexapro — given out to treat depression but also anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder and other disorders — are now a banal sight in American medicine cabinets,
  • “I think the reason doctors are more blasé about prescribing these medicines is that they’ve now been around for a long time and they can prescribe them without getting into trouble,”
  • t there’s one more reason, too, he thinks: our growing “intolerance” for “more mild levels of depression and neurosis.”
  • the writer P.E. Moskowitz, echoing a longstanding concern of some prominent skeptics, points out that antidepressants are much more difficult to get off than advertised and that the chemical-imbalance theory of depression on which it all rests has never been proved.
Javier E

Western approach to Ukraine is delusional - 0 views

www.thetimes.co.uk/...kraine-is-delusional-l2qx7q6zs

ukraine long-term policy

shared by Javier E on 23 Jun 23 - No Cached
  • Henry Kissinger has changed his long-held view that Ukraine cannot join Nato, and we may need to do likewise. Today, both the US and Germany oppose such a step. But the one certainty about ending this struggle is that Ukraine must be given cast-iron security guarantees. It may not be unthinkable — perhaps after years more killing — to trade Ukrainian Nato membership for tolerance of continued Russian tenure of Crimea.
  • Gideon Rose, a notably hawkish fellow of the US Council on Foreign Relations, wrote recently: “It took defeat in two world wars before Germany got the message that aggression didn’t pay. It might take defeat . . . in a second Cold War for Russia to learn the same lesson. Until then, the wall must be guarded.” I hope Rose is too gloomy, but fear he is not.
Javier E

'There was all sorts of toxic behaviour': Timnit Gebru on her sacking by Google, AI's d... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...s-dangers-and-big-techs-biases

AI critic danger social

shared by Javier E on 22 May 23 - No Cached
  • t feels like a gold rush,” says Timnit Gebru. “In fact, it is a gold rush. And a lot of the people who are making money are not the people actually in the midst of it. But it’s humans who decide whether all this should be done or not. We should remember that we have the agency to do that.”
  • something that the frenzied conversation about AI misses out: the fact that many of its systems may well be built on a huge mess of biases, inequalities and imbalances of power.
  • As the co-leader of Google’s small ethical AI team, Gebru was one of the authors of an academic paper that warned about the kind of AI that is increasingly built into our lives, taking internet searches and user recommendations to apparently new levels of sophistication and threatening to master such human talents as writing, composing music and analysing images
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  • The clear danger, the paper said, is that such supposed “intelligence” is based on huge data sets that “overrepresent hegemonic viewpoints and encode biases potentially damaging to marginalised populations”. Put more bluntly, AI threatens to deepen the dominance of a way of thinking that is white, male, comparatively affluent and focused on the US and Europe.
  • What all this told her, she says, is that big tech is consumed by a drive to develop AI and “you don’t want someone like me who’s going to get in your way. I think it made it really clear that unless there is external pressure to do something different, companies are not just going to self-regulate. We need regulation and we need something better than just a profit motive.”
  • one particularly howling irony: the fact that an industry brimming with people who espouse liberal, self-consciously progressive opinions so often seems to push the world in the opposite direction.
  • Gebru began to specialise in cutting-edge AI, pioneering a system that showed how data about particular neighbourhoods’ patterns of car ownership highlighted differences bound up with ethnicity, crime figures, voting behaviour and income levels. In retrospect, this kind of work might look like the bedrock of techniques that could blur into automated surveillance and law enforcement, but Gebru admits that “none of those bells went off in my head … that connection of issues of technology with diversity and oppression came later”.
  • The next year, Gebru made a point of counting other black attenders at the same event. She found that, among 8,500 delegates, there were only six people of colour. In response, she put up a Facebook post that now seems prescient: “I’m not worried about machines taking over the world; I’m worried about groupthink, insularity and arrogance in the AI community.”
  • When Gebru arrived, Google employees were loudly opposing the company’s role in Project Maven, which used AI to analyse surveillance footage captured by military drones (Google ended its involvement in 2018). Two months later, staff took part in a huge walkout over claims of systemic racism, sexual harassment and gender inequality. Gebru says she was aware of “a lot of tolerance of harassment and all sorts of toxic behaviour”.
  • She and her colleagues prided themselves on how diverse their small operation was, as well as the things they brought to the company’s attention, which included issues to do with Google’s ownership of YouTube
  • A colleague from Morocco raised the alarm about a popular YouTube channel in that country called Chouf TV, “which was basically operated by the government’s intelligence arm and they were using it to harass journalists and dissidents. YouTube had done nothing about it.” (Google says that it “would need to review the content to understand whether it violates our policies. But, in general, our harassment policies strictly prohibit content that threatens individuals,
  • in 2020, Gebru, Mitchell and two colleagues wrote the paper that would lead to Gebru’s departure. It was titled On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots. Its key contention was about AI centred on so-called large language models: the kind of systems – such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s newly launched PaLM 2 – that, crudely speaking, feast on vast amounts of data to perform sophisticated tasks and generate content.
  • Gebru and her co-authors had an even graver concern: that trawling the online world risks reproducing its worst aspects, from hate speech to points of view that exclude marginalised people and places. “In accepting large amounts of web text as ‘representative’ of ‘all’ of humanity, we risk perpetuating dominant viewpoints, increasing power imbalances and further reifying inequality,” they wrote.
  • When the paper was submitted for internal review, Gebru was quickly contacted by one of Google’s vice-presidents. At first, she says, non-specific objections were expressed, such as that she and her colleagues had been too “negative” about AI. Then, Google asked Gebru either to withdraw the paper, or remove her and her colleagues’ names from it.
  • After her departure, Gebru founded Dair, the Distributed AI Research Institute, to which she now devotes her working time. “We have people in the US and the EU, and in Africa,” she says. “We have social scientists, computer scientists, engineers, refugee advocates, labour organisers, activists … it’s a mix of people.”
  • Running alongside this is a quest to push beyond the tendency of the tech industry and the media to focus attention on worries about AI taking over the planet and wiping out humanity while questions about what the technology does, and who it benefits and damages, remain unheard.
  • “That conversation ascribes agency to a tool rather than the humans building the tool,” she says. “That means you can aggregate responsibility: ‘It’s not me that’s the problem. It’s the tool. It’s super-powerful. We don’t know what it’s going to do.’ Well, no – it’s you that’s the problem. You’re building something with certain characteristics for your profit. That’s extremely distracting, and it takes the attention away from real harms and things that we need to do. Right now.”
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