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Javier E

Only the Global-Health Emergency Has Ended - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...673976

pandemic emergency crisis policy history politics

shared by Javier E on 06 May 23 - No Cached
  • ending the emergency doesn’t mean that the world has fully addressed the problems that made this an emergency. Global vaccine distribution remains wildly inequitable, leaving many people susceptible to the virus’s worst effects; deaths are still concentrated among those most vulnerable; the virus’s evolutionary and transmission patterns are far from predictable or seasonal
  • Instead, efforts to mitigate the virus have only gotten laxer. Most individuals are no longer masking, testing, or staying up to date on their shots; on community scales, the public goods that once seemed essential—ventilation, sick leave, equitable access to insurance and health care—have already faded from most discours
  • Both a PHEIC and a pandemic tend to involve the rapid and international spread of a dangerous disease, and the two typically do go hand in hand. But no set-in-stone rules delineate when either starts or ends.
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  • Those criteria aren’t perfect. Given how the virus has evolved, even, say, an 85 percent vaccination rate probably wouldn’t have squelched the virus in a way public-health experts were envisioning in 2021 (and wouldn’t have absolved us of booster maintenance). And even if the death toll slipped below 100 deaths a day, the virus’s chronic effects would still pose an immense threat
  • “I’m not sure we ever set any goals at all” to designate when we’d have the virus beat, Céline Gounder, an infectious-disease physician at NYU and an editor-at-large for public health at Kaiser Family Foundation Health News, told me. And if they had been, we probably still would not have met them: Two years out, we certainly have not.
  • Now, ending the emergency is less an epidemiological decision than a political one: Our tolerance for these dangers has grown to the extent that most people are doing their best to look away from the remaining risk, and will continue to until the virus forces us to turn back.
  • Should another SARS-CoV-2 variant sweep the world or develop resistance to Paxlovid, “we don’t have much in the way of a plan,” he said.
  • If and when the virus troubles us again, our lack of preparedness will be a reflection of America’s classically reactive approach to public health. Even amid a years-long emergency declaration that spanned national and international scales, we squandered the opportunity “to make the system more resilient to the next crisis,”
  • individuals are still largely being asked to fend for themselves—which means that as this emergency declaration ends, we are setting ourselves up for another to inevitably come, and hit us just as hard.
  • “Public interest is very binary—it’s either an emergency or it’s not,” says Saskia Popescu, an infection-prevention expert at George Mason University. With the PHEIC now gone, the world has officially toggled itself to “not.”
Javier E

Xi Jinping's Favorite Television Shows - The Bulwark - 0 views

www.thebulwark.com/ings-favorite-television-shows

china propaganda TV culture politics history

shared by Javier E on 04 Aug 22 - No Cached
  • After several decades of getting it “right,” why does China now seem to insist on getting it “wrong?”
  • a single-party system meets with widespread, almost universal, scorn in the United States and elsewhere. And so, from the Western point of view, because it lacks legitimacy it must be kept in power via nationalist cheerleading, government media control, and a massive repressive apparatus.
  • Print
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  • What if a segment of the population actually supported, or at least tolerated, the CCP? And even if that segment involved both myth and fact, it behooves the CCP to keep the myth alive.
  • How does the CCP garner popular support in an information era? How does a dictatorship explain to its population that its unchallenged rule is wise, just, and socially beneficial?
  • All of this takes place against a backdrop of family and social developments in which we can explore household dynamics, dating habits, and professional aspirations—all within social norms for those honest party members and seemingly violated by those who are not so honest.
  • watch the television series Renmin de Mingyi (“In the Name of the People”), publicly available with English subtitles.
  • In the Name of the People is a primetime drama about a local prosecutor’s efforts to root out corruption in a modern-day, though fictional, Chinese city. Beyond the anti-corruption narrative, the series also goes into local CCP politics as some of the leaders are (you guessed it) corrupt and others are simply bureaucratic time-servers, guarding their own privileges and status without actually helping the people they purport to serve.
  • the series boasts one of Xi’s other main themes, “common prosperity,” a somewhat elastic term that usually means the benefits of prosperity should be shared throughout all segments of society.
  • The historical tools used to generate support such as mass rallies and large-scale hectoring no longer work with a more educated and communications-oriented citizenry.
  • So we see government officials pondering if they can ever find a date (being the workaholics that they are), or discussing housework with their spouses, or sharing kitchen duties, or reviewing school work with their child.
  • the central themes are quite clear: The party has brought historical prosperity to the community and there are a few bad apples who are unfairly trying to benefit from this wealth. There are also various sluggards and mediocrities who have no capacity for improvement or sense of public responsibilities.
  • The show makes clear that the vast majority of party members and government officials are dedicated souls who work to improve peoples’ lives. And in the end, virtue triumphs, the party triumphs, China triumphs, and most (not all) of the personal issues are resolved as well.
  • The show’s version of the CCP eagerly and uncynically supports Chinese culture: The same union leader from the wildcat strike also writes and publishes poetry. Calligraphy is as prized as specialty teas. And all of this is told in a lively style, similar to the Hollywood fare Americans might watch.
  • n the Name of the People was first broadcast in 2017 as a lead-up to the last Communist Party Congress, China’s most important decision-making gathering, held every five years. The show’s launch was a huge hit, achieving the highest broadcast ratings of any show in a decade.
  • Within a month, the first episode had been seen over 350 million times and just one of the streaming platforms, iQIYI, reported a total of 5.9 billion views for the show’s 55 episodes.
  • All of this must come as good news for the prosecutors featured so favorably in the series—for their real-life parent government body, the Supreme People’s Protectorate, commissioned and provided financing for the show.
  • At a minimum, these shows illustrate a stronger self-awareness in the CCP and considerable improvement in communication strategy.
  • Most important, it provides direction to current party members. Indeed, in some cities viewing was made obligatory and the basis for “study sessions” for party cadres
  • Second, the enormous public success of the series and acknowledging deficiencies of the party allows the party to control the criticism without ever addressing the fundamental question of whether a one-party system is intrinsically susceptible to corruption or poor performance.
  • As communication specialists like to say, There is already a conversation taking place about your brand—the only question is whether you will lead the conversation. The CCP is leading in its communications strategy and making it as easy as possible for Chinese citizens to support Xi.
  • it is not difficult to see that in this area, as in many others, China is breaking with tactics from the past and is playing its cards increasingly well. Whether the CCP can renew itself, reestablish that social contract, and live up to its television image is another question.
Javier E

Opinion | In Nagorno-Karabakh, We Just Saw What the World Is About to Become - The New ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...no-karabakh-russia-turkey.html

decline superpower emboldened regional powers turkey iran india USSR russia

shared by Javier E on 09 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • despite appearances, the conflict is not a Samuel Huntington-style clash of civilizations. Instead, in its emboldening of traditional regional powers like Turkey, scrambling for geopolitical spoils after the retreat of superpowers, it’s a harbinger of the coming world disorder.
  • In the chaotic aftermath of Soviet collapse, the Armenians undertook to defend Nagorno-Karabakh by force. Instead of poetic intellectuals, the wartime generation of Armenian leaders became militia commanders. They proved earthier and, soon, brazenly corrupt. Defending the country became their sole means of legitimacy, ruling out the concessions that peace would require. By 1994 the Armenians, mobilizing around the traumatic memories of genocide, succeeded in expelling scores of Azeris from the enclave. Last month, Azerbaijan got more than even.
  • In that project, it had a powerful backer: Turkey. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a master of vertiginous visions, has already tried Islamic liberalism, joining Europe, leading the Arab revolts, challenging Israel and negotiating peace in Ukraine. He now has another dream: opening a geopolitical corridor from Europe through Central Asia, all the way to China. This is the “Zangezur corridor,” a 25-mile-long strip of land to be carved through Armenia as part of a peace deal imposed at gunpoint.
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  • Surprisingly, Iran is not happy with Azerbaijan’s victory. As openly as the Iranians ever do, they’ve threatened to use force against any changes to the borders of Armenia. Iran, a millenniums-old civilization central to a whole continent, cannot tolerate being walled off behind a chain of Turkish dependencies. India, similarly, is on Armenia’s side and has been sending a regular supply of weapons. One spur for such support, no doubt, is Pakistan’s joining the Azeri-Turkish alliance. In the jargon of American lawyers, this opens a whole new can of worms.
  • Then there’s Russia, whose absence from the denouement in Nagorno-Karabakh was striking. Even after the 1990s, Moscow still remained by far the biggest supplier of weapons to both Armenia and Azerbaijan. Their economies and societies, above all the elites and their corruption networks, were until very recently molded together. What we are seeing now, as both nations slip out of Russia’s orbit, might be the second round of Soviet collapse.
  • Once again, Armenia started the shift. In spring 2018 a tremendously hopeful uprising, reminiscent of 1989 in Central Europe, forced the post-communist elites to surrender power. Vladimir Putin was visibly displeased to meet Nikol Pashinyan, the anticorruption journalist and street rebel elected Armenia’s premier by an overwhelming majority. Mr. Pashinyan admittedly had neither political team nor experience; he is learning statesmanship on the job, often at great expense to his nation. Yet he managed to significantly reduce corruption, helping to unlock the legendary entrepreneurship of Armenians. Amid all the grim news, the Armenian economy, led by the I.T. sector, is registering impressive growth.
  • History has a habit of serving the same lessons with changed variables. In 1988, it was the dreamer Gorbachev stumbling over Nagorno-Karabakh that unwittingly shattered the world order. Today, Mr. Putin could become the second, much darker incarnation of the Kremlin aggrandizer going awry on all fronts. The consequences — from emboldening international aggression to reanimating the West under the banner of NATO — will be profound. As events in Nagorno-Karabakh show, the fragile post-Cold War order is giving way to something else entirely.
  • The Caucasus might seem strange and distant. Yet it might prove the wedge that turns the fortunes of world order. Trieste, Smyrna, Sarajevo, Danzig and Crimea were all such places. Let us not have to relearn history at the cost of yet another ethnic cleansing
Javier E

Among the Disrupted - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...among-the-disrupted.html

humanism tech technocracy universalism posthumanism culture history crisis

shared by Javier E on 19 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • even as technologism, which is not the same as technology, asserts itself over more and more precincts of human life, so too does scientism, which is not the same as science.
  • The notion that the nonmaterial dimensions of life must be explained in terms of the material dimensions, and that nonscientific understandings must be translated into scientific understandings if they are to qualify as knowledge, is increasingly popular inside and outside the university,
  • The contrary insistence that the glories of art and thought are not evolutionary adaptations, or that the mind is not the brain, or that love is not just biology’s bait for sex, now amounts to a kind of heresy.
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  • So, too, does the view that the strongest defense of the humanities lies not in the appeal to their utility — that literature majors may find good jobs, that theaters may economically revitalize neighborhoods
  • — but rather in the appeal to their defiantly nonutilitarian character, so that individuals can know more than how things work, and develop their powers of discernment and judgment, their competence in matters of truth and goodness and beauty, to equip themselves adequately for the choices and the crucibles of private and public life.
  • We are not becoming transhumanists, obviously. We are too singular for the Singularity. But are we becoming posthumanists?
  • In American culture right now, as I say, the worldview that is ascendant may be described as posthumanism.
  • The posthumanism of the 1970s and 1980s was more insular, an academic affair of “theory,” an insurgency of professors; our posthumanism is a way of life, a social fate.
  • In “The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933-1973,” the gifted essayist Mark Greif, who reveals himself to be also a skillful historian of ideas, charts the history of the 20th-century reckonings with the definition of “man.
  • Here is his conclusion: “Anytime your inquiries lead you to say, ‘At this moment we must ask and decide who we fundamentally are, our solution and salvation must lie in a new picture of ourselves and humanity, this is our profound responsibility and a new opportunity’ — just stop.” Greif seems not to realize that his own book is a lasting monument to precisely such inquiry, and to its grandeur
  • “Answer, rather, the practical matters,” he counsels, in accordance with the current pragmatist orthodoxy. “Find the immediate actions necessary to achieve an aim.” But before an aim is achieved, should it not be justified? And the activity of justification may require a “picture of ourselves.” Don’t just stop. Think harder. Get it right.
  • Greif’s book is a prehistory of our predicament, of our own “crisis of man.” (The “man” is archaic, the “crisis” is not.) It recognizes that the intellectual history of modernity may be written in part as the epic tale of a series of rebellions against humanism
  • Who has not felt superior to humanism? It is the cheapest target of all: Humanism is sentimental, flabby, bourgeois, hypocritical, complacent, middlebrow, liberal, sanctimonious, constricting and often an alibi for power
  • what is humanism? For a start, humanism is not the antithesis of religion, as Pope Francis is exquisitely demonstrating
  • The worldview takes many forms: a philosophical claim about the centrality of humankind to the universe, and about the irreducibility of the human difference to any aspect of our animality
  • And posthumanism? It elects to understand the world in terms of impersonal forces and structures, and to deny the importance, and even the legitimacy, of human agency.
  • a methodological claim about the most illuminating way to explain history and human affairs, and about the essential inability of the natural sciences to offer a satisfactory explanation; a moral claim about the priority, and the universal nature, of certain values, not least tolerance and compassion
  • There have been humane posthumanists and there have been inhumane humanists. But the inhumanity of humanists may be refuted on the basis of their own worldview
  • the condemnation of cruelty toward “man the machine,” to borrow the old but enduring notion of an 18th-century French materialist, requires the importation of another framework of judgment. The same is true about universalism, which every critic of humanism has arraigned for its failure to live up to the promise of a perfect inclusiveness
  • there has never been a universalism that did not exclude. Yet the same is plainly the case about every particularism, which is nothing but a doctrine of exclusion; and the correction of particularism, the extension of its concept and its care, cannot be accomplished in its own name. It requires an idea from outside, an idea external to itself, a universalistic idea, a humanistic idea.
  • Asking universalism to keep faith with its own principles is a perennial activity of moral life. Asking particularism to keep faith with its own principles is asking for trouble.
  • there is no more urgent task for American intellectuals and writers than to think critically about the salience, even the tyranny, of technology in individual and collective life
  • Here is a humanist proposition for the age of Google: The processing of information is not the highest aim to which the human spirit can aspire, and neither is competitiveness in a global economy. The character of our society cannot be determined by engineers.
  • “Our very mastery seems to escape our mastery,” Michel Serres has anxiously remarked. “How can we dominate our domination; how can we master our own mastery?”
  • universal accessibility is not the end of the story, it is the beginning. The humanistic methods that were practiced before digitalization will be even more urgent after digitalization, because we will need help in navigating the unprecedented welter
  • Searches for keywords will not provide contexts for keywords. Patterns that are revealed by searches will not identify their own causes and reasons
  • The new order will not relieve us of the old burdens, and the old pleasures, of erudition and interpretation.
  • Is all this — is humanism — sentimental? But sentimentality is not always a counterfeit emotion. Sometimes sentiment is warranted by reality.
  • The persistence of humanism through the centuries, in the face of formidable intellectual and social obstacles, has been owed to the truth of its representations of our complexly beating hearts, and to the guidance that it has offered, in its variegated and conflicting versions, for a soulful and sensitive existence
  • a complacent humanist is a humanist who has not read his books closely, since they teach disquiet and difficulty. In a society rife with theories and practices that flatten and shrink and chill the human subject, the humanist is the dissenter.
Javier E

Two Young Democratic Stars Collide Over Israel and Their Party's Future - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...aoc-torres-israel-gaza.html

party Democratic party israel Palestine politics

shared by Javier E on 11 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • t is a struggle not so much over traditional levers of power in Washington, but over who will shape the minds of a younger, diverse generation of voters that will soon steer the relationship to one of America’s closest allies.
  • As wartime passions splinter the left, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, whose boosters envision her eventually running for the presidency, is laboring to hold together a consequential but delicate coalition that has pushed the Democratic Party leftward on climate, policing and economics. Mr. Torres, talked about as a future senator or governor, appears intent on using the moment to smash that left-wing movement apart.
  • “What you are seeing here is really a question of vision for the future of the Democratic Party. Is it going to be the Ritchie Torres version or the A.O.C. version?”
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  • Though Ms. Ocasio-Cortez struggled early on to articulate her views on the Middle East and has never visited the region, the 34-year-old congresswoman has come to embody that generational shift.
  • She uses terms like “apartheid” and “oppression,” loathed by Israel’s defenders, to describe the treatment of Palestinians. Last week, she called the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the most powerful pro-Israel lobby and one of Mr. Torres’s top campaign donors, “racist and bigoted.”
  • “This is pursuing a proven and failed strategy,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said in a recent radio interview. “So why do it, why kill kids, why put people in danger, why perpetuate these cycles when we’ve done it so many times, and it’s never kept us safe?”
  • Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, who did not agree to an interview, met in Washington last month with the families of Jewish hostages kidnapped by Hamas. She has repeatedly condemned the group and supports a two-state solution shunned by some on the left. And at a time when many liberal Jews feel they are being abandoned by the left, she has warned about “disgusting and unacceptable” antisemitism in a post to 8.4 million Instagram followers, saying, “No movement of integrity should tolerate it.”
  • “You can see how hard Alexandria is trying to listen compassionately across the lines of this conflict,” said Brad Lander, the left-leaning New York City comptroller who is the highest-ranking Jewish city official. “I’m not saying anyone is doing it perfectly, but there is a difference between trying and not trying.”
  • Mr. Torres has reserved special vitriol for the Democratic Socialists of America, the small but influential leftist group that has pushed for boycotts of Israel and counts Ms. Ocasio-Cortez as a member. In an interview, he said that the D.S.A. was trying to infiltrate the Democratic Party “to impose the ideological litmus tests on Israel” and “cleanse” those who disagree with them. He said he was on a “publicly stated mission” to undermine it.
  • “I do worry that the next generation is increasingly indoctrinated with anti-Israel hate so virulent that it renders them indifferent to the coldblooded murder of Jews in Israel,”
  • His views are no surprise to those who watched Mr. Torres, a proud college dropout and defender of public housing, evolve from left-aligned political upstart to more traditional Democratic congressman
  • It was his first trip abroad, and Mr. Torres said witnessing both the fragility of the frontier and Tel Aviv’s openness to gay life left him with “profound empathy” for Israel and a commitment to a two-state solution.
Javier E

At risk: 10 ways the changing climate is creating a health emergency | Global developme... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-is-wrecking-peoples-lives-acc

health effects climate change

shared by Javier E on 16 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • 1. Floods and disease
  • As life becomes less tolerable for humans, animals and plants, things will get easier for disease-causing organisms. More than half of all known diseases have been made worse by the climate crisis
  • A warming world makes outbreaks of water-borne diseases such as cholera, dysentery, hepatitis A, typhoid and polio more likely.
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  • World Health Organization data published in September showed there were twice as many cholera cases in 2022 than in 2021. Outbreaks were recorded in countries where cholera had been under control for years, including Yemen and Lebanon.
  • 2. Mosquitoes on the march
  • Rising temperatures and frequent floods also unlock new places where disease-carrying insects thrive. The mosquitoes that carry the viruses that cause dengue fever and mala
  • Nor is the disease confined to developing countries. There are fears that it is spreading in southern Europe, partly owing to the warm weather. More than 8 billion people could be at risk of malaria and dengue fever by 2080, scientists have warned.
  • 3. Human-animal contact
  • Many existing diseases will get more dangerous, but new illnesses could also emerge as people are increasingly forced into areas where there is wildlife. Diseases can jump from animals to humans. These diseases, such as Ebola, avian flu and Sars, are called “zoonoses” and they make up the majority of new illnesses.
  • Scientists have found that the climate crisis is helping to circulate diseases between species that previously did not encounter each other. As the planet heats up, many animal species are forced to move into new areas to find suitable conditions.
  • It has been estimated that zoonoses are responsible for as many as 2.5bn cases of human illness and 2.7m human deaths worldwide each year, and that animals have played a major part in nearly every major disease outbreak since 1970.
  • 4. Severe weather events
  • Although governments are getting better at preparing for severe weather events, nine out of 10 deaths linked to weather disasters since 1970 happened in small island nations and developing countries in Africa, Asia and South America.
  • 5. The air that we breathe
  • Outside air pollution has been linked to numerous cancers and diseases and is estimated to be responsible for more than 4m premature deaths globally each year.
  • Changing weather patterns are expected to make this already bad situation worse as more dust, rain and wildfire smoke are added to the mix. Children are especially likely to get sick from air pollution because their brains, lungs and other organs are still developing.
  • 6. The psychological cost
  • Environmental deterioration has a knock-on effect on the economic and social systems that keep society productive and happy, setting in motion a downward spiral of psychological hardship.
  • If crops are destroyed during extreme weather events, children may get less nutritious food, the consumption of which is linked to psychological conditions such as anxiety and depression.
  • When people can’t get the help they need, they may self-medicate with alcohol or drugs, which in turn makes them more likely to engage in risky behaviour (such as unprotected sex) that could result in infections such as HIV, or illnesses that can result from spending time in crowded places, such as tuberculosis.
  • In 2021, scientists studying evidence of a potential link between heat exposure and mental health found a 2.2% increase in mental health-related mortality per 1C rise in temperature.
  • 7. Salty water and perilous pregnancies
  • Drinking water is becoming saltier. One reason for this is that sea levels are rising, so there is more sea water flowing into rivers and other sources of fresh water during floods and tropical storms.
  • Taking in too much salt can lead to high blood pressure (hypertension). Over time, this condition damages the body’s veins, arteries and major organs (including the brain, heart, kidneys and eyes) since they’re working so much harder overall.
  • Hypertension is doubly dangerous for pregnant women and their babies
  • 8. Food insecurity
  • More frequent and severe droughts and floods make it harder to grow the grains, fruit and vegetables that people need to eat to stay healthy. Small island states in the Caribbean, Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Ocean bear the brunt of the effects of the crisis, in part because most people live close to sea level.
  • As a result, people who live in one of the 39 small island nations are the most likely to die from one of the four main NCDs: cancer, diabetes, heart disease and lung disease.
  • 9. The stress of extreme heat
  • The scorching temperatures this year broke records in Europe, China and North America. Heat is one of the most dangerous effects of the climate crisis and the top cause of weather-related deaths in the U
  • When it gets too hot, the body’s temperature rises faster than it can cool itself down, less blood flows to other organs, and the kidneys have to work harder. This puts strain on the heart and can lead to organ failure. Heatstroke is the most serious heat-related illness.
  • In particular, people whose jobs require long hours of physical labour in the sun face an increased risk of kidney disease as temperatures rise, research suggests. Repeated instances of heat stress can lead to permanent damage and chronic kidney disease.
  • In June, the Guardian revealed how young migrant workers were returning to Nepal with chronic kidney disease after working in extreme heat conditions in the Gulf and Malaysia. “One factor highlighted again and again is heat. Prolonged exposure to h
  • 10. Millions on the move
  • It’s hard to predict exactly how many people will be on the move because of the climate crisis, but extreme weather events are likely to make conditions worse for the more than 100 million displaced people around the world.
  • If nothing changes, the number of people who need humanitarian aid to recover from floods, storms and droughts could double by 2050,
  • That means more than 200 million people will need aid annually. The displacement of millions of people also means cramped and often unsanitary living. For example, more than 900,000 Rohingya refugees live in makeshift shelters in Bangladesh, often built on unstable ground that’s prone to landslides.
Javier E

Opinion | We Should Have Known So Much About Covid From the Start - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...vid-pandemic-michael-mina.html

covid summary overview lessons history policy pandemic culture

shared by Javier E on 11 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • I spoke to Mina about what seeing Covid as a textbook virus tells us about the nature of the pandemic off-ramp — and about everything else we should’ve known about the disease from the outset.
  • you can get exposed or you can get vaccinated. But either way, we have to keep building our immune system up, as babies do. That takes years to do. And I think it’s going to be a few more years at least.
  • And in the meantime?We’ve seen a dramatic reduction in mortality. We’ve even seen, I’d say, a dramatic decline in rates of serious long Covid per infection.
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  • But I do think it’s going to be a while before this virus becomes completely normal. And I’ve never been convinced that this current generation of elderly people will ever get to a place where it is completely normal. If you’re 65 or 75 or even older — it’s really hard to teach an immune system new tricks if you’re that age
  • And so while we may see excess mortality in the elderly decline somewhat, I don’t think we’ll see it ever disappear for this generation who was already old when the pandemic hit. Many will never develop that robust, long-term immunological memory we would want to see — and which happens naturally to someone who’s been exposed hundreds of times since they were a little baby.
  • There’s a similar story with measles. There is no routine later-life sequelae, like shingles, for measles. But what we do see is that, in measles outbreaks today, there are some people who were vaccinated who get it anyway. Maybe 5 to 15 percent of cases are not immunologically naïve people, but vaccinated people.
  • Is it really the case that, as babies, we are fighting off those viruses hundreds of times?The short answer is yeah. We start seeing viruses when we’re 2 months old, when we’re a month old. And a lot of these viruses we’ve seen literally tens, if not hundreds of times for some people by the time we’re adults. People tend to think that immunity is binary — you’re either immune or you’re not. That couldn’t be farther from the truth. It’s a gradient, and your protection gets stronger the more times you see a virus.
  • We used to think we just had this spectacular immune response when we first encountered the virus at, say, age 6, and that the immune response lasted until we were 70. But actually what we were seeing was the effect of an immune system being retrained every time it came into contact with the virus after the initial infection — at 6, and 7, and 8, and so on. Every time your friend got chickenpox, or your neighbor, you got a massive boost. You were re-upping your immune response and diversifying your immunological tools — potentially multiple times a year, a kind of natural booster.
  • But now, in America, kids get chickenpox vaccines. So you don’t have kids in America getting chickenpox today, and never will. But that means that older Americans, who did get it as kids, are not being exposed again — certainly not multiple times each year. And it turns out that, in the absence of routine re-exposures, that first exposure alone isn’t nearly as good at driving lifelong immunity and warding off shingles until your immune system begins to fall apart in old age — it can last until you’re in your 30s, for example but not until your 70s.
  • With Covid, when it infects you, it can land in your upper respiratory tract and it just start replicating right there. Immediately, it’s present and replicating in your lungs and in your nose. And that alone elicits enough of an immune response to cause us to feel really crappy and even cause us to feel disease.
  • But we could have just set the narrative better at the beginning: Look, you might get sick again, but your risk of landing in the hospital is going to be really low, and if you get a booster, you might still get sick again, but your risk of landing in the hospital is going to be even lower. That’s something I think humans can deal with, and I think the public could have understood it.
  • But it’s why we don’t see the severe disease as much, with a second exposure or an exposure after vaccination: For most people, it’s not getting into the heart and the liver and stuff nearly as easily.
  • But it doesn’t have to. It’s still causing symptomatic disease. And maybe mucosal vaccines could stop this, but without them we’re likely to continue seeing infections and even symptomatic infections.
  • through most of 2020 and into 2021, though. Back then, I think the conventional wisdom was that a single exposure — through infection or vaccination — would be the end of the pandemic for you. If this is basic virology and immunology, how did we get that so wrong?
  • The short answer is that epidemiologists are not immunologists and immunologists are not virologists and virologists are not epidemiologists. And, in general, physicians don’t know anything about the details.
  • But this failure had some pretty concrete impacts. When reinfections first began popping up, people were surprised, they were scared, and then, to some degree, they lost trust in vaccines. And the people they were turning to for guidance — not only did they not warn us about that, they were slow to acknowledge it, as well.
  • It had dramatic impacts and ripple effects that will last for years to limit our ability to get populations properly vaccinated.
  • the worst thing we can do during a pandemic is set inappropriately high expectations. These vaccines are incredible, they’ve had an enormously positive impact on mortality, but they were never going to end the pandemic.
  • And now, there’s a huge number of people questioning, do these vaccines even do anything?
  • For babies born today, though, I really think they’re not going to view Covid as any different than other viruses. By the time they are 20, it will be like any other virus to them. Because their immune systems will have grown up with it.
  • Instead, we set society up for failure, since people feel like the government failed everyone, that biology failed us, and that this was a crazy virus that has broken all the rules of our immune system, when it’s just doing what we’ve always known it would do.
  • How do you wish we had messaged things differently? What would it have meant to communicate early and clearly that Covid was a textbook virus, as you say?I think the biggest thing would have been just to say, we understand the enemy.
  • To say that this is a textbook virus, it doesn’t mean that it’s not killing people. Objectively, it’s still killing more people than any other infectious disease
  • What it means is that we could’ve taken action based on what we knew, rather than waiting around to prove everything and publish papers in Nature and Science talking about things we already knew.
  • We could have prepared for November and December of 2020 and then for November and December of 2021. But everyone kept saying, we don’t know if it’s going to come back. We knew it was going to come back and it makes me want to cry to think about it. We did nothing and hundreds of thousands of people died. We didn’t prepare nursing homes because we all got to the summer of 2020 and we said, cross our fingers.
  • We knew how tests worked. We knew about serial testing and why it was important for a public health approach. We knew that vaccines could have really good impacts once they were around. And if you were looking through the correct lens, we even knew that they weren’t going to stop transmission.
  • We didn’t have to live in a world where we were flying blind. We could have lived in a world where we’re knowledgeable. But instead, we chose almost across the board to will ourselves into this state of fear and anxiety.
  • And that really started in the earliest days. Almost the first experience I had was a lot like that movie with Jennifer Lawrence —Don’t Look Up.
  • none of this was complicated. You just had to ask a simple question: what would happen if you took away all immunity from an adult? Well, once you control for no immunity, adults are going to get very, very sick.
  • Of course, by and large, babies didn’t get very sick from this disease.Babies are immunologically naïve, but they are also resilient. A virus can tear up a baby, but a baby can repair its tissue so fast. Adults don’t have that. It’s just like a baby getting a cut. They’ll heal really quick
  • An adult getting a cut — you go by age, and every decade of age that you are, it’s going to take exponentially longer for that wound to heal. Eventually get to 80 or 90 and the wound can’t even heal. In the immunology world, this is called “tolerance.”
  • why are all these organ systems getting damaged when other viruses don’t seem to do that? It’s natural to think, it’s Covid — this is a weird disease. But it’s much more a story about immunity and how it develops than about the virus or the disease. None of our organ systems had any immune defenses around to help them out. And I think that the majority of post-acute sequelae and multi-organ complications and long Covid — they are not the result of the virus being a crazy different virus, but are a result of this virus replicating in an environment where there were such absent or exceedingly low defenses.
  • Is it the same whenever we encounter a virus for the first time?Think about travelers. Travelers get way more sick from a local disease than people who grew up with that virus. If you get malaria as a traveler, you’re much more likely to get really sick. You don’t see everyone in Nicaragua taking chloroquine every day. But you definitely see travelers taking it, because malaria can be deadly for adults.
  • What about, not severity, but post-acute complications — do we have long malaria? Do we have liver complications from dengue?
  • The really hard part of answering that question is there’s just not enough data on the frequency of long-term effects, because nothing like this has ever happened at such scale. It’s like everyone in Europe and North America suddenly traveled to a country where malaria was endemic.
  • Or think about H.I.V. It essentially kills your immune system, and once the immune barriers are down, other viruses that used to infect humans would get into tissues that we didn’t like them to get into. If there wasn’t such a clear signal of a loss of CD-4 T cells to explain it, people might still be scratching their heads and going, man, I wonder why all these patients are getting fungal infections. Well, there’s a virus there that’s depleting their immune system.
  • Covid is absolutely waking the world up to this — to the fact that there are really weird long-term sequelae to viruses when they infect organ systems that would normally be protected. And I think we’re going to find that more and more cancers are being attributed to viral infections.
  • It wasn’t that long ago that we first learned that most cases of cervical cancer were caused by H.P.V. — I think the 1980s. And now we have a vaccine for H.P.V. and rates of cervical cancer have fallen by two-thirds.
  • what about incidence? We’ve talked at a few points about how important it is to think about all of these questions in terms of the scale. What is the right scale for thinking about future long Covid, for instance, or other post-acute sequelae?
  • I think the absolute risk, per infection, is going down and down and down. That’s just true.
  • he U.K.’s Office of National Statistics, which shows a much lower risk of developing long Covid now, from reinfection, than from an initial infection earlier in the pandemic.
  • the worst is definitely behind us, which is a good thing, especially for people who worry that the problems will keep building and a lot of people — or even everyone — will get long Covid symptoms. I don’t think there’s a world where we’re looking at the babies of today dealing with long Covid at any meaningful scale.
  • a lot of the fear right now comes from the worst cases, and there’s a lot of worst cases. Even one of the people that I know well, I know in their mind they’re worried that they’ll never recover, but I think objectively they are recovering slowly. It might not be an eight month course. It might be a year and a half. But they will get better. Most of us will.
Javier E

Opinion | The Reactionary Futurism of Marc Andreessen - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ssen-reactionary-futurism.html

futurism accelerations trust silicon valley polarization AI market fundamentalism energy effective hero entrepreneur growth technology technocracy reactionary reaction aggression

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  • “I consider Mark and Elon to be role models to children in their embrace of fighting,” Andreessen writes.
  • Modern American society, at least in the big cities, is turning on law enforcement and tolerating crime, so you need combat skills to protect your loved ones. We are also fat and depressed, and learning to fight might help on both counts. In conclusion, “if it was good enough for Heracles and Theseus, it’s good enough for us.”
  • what caught my eye was the veneration of the virile aggression of the Greeks, the call to rediscover the ways of the ancients. A list of things that were good enough for the Greeks but not good enough for us would run long: Slavery, pederasty and bloodletting come to mind
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  • This is what connects figures as disparate as Jordan Peterson and J.D. Vance and Peter Thiel and Donald Trump. These are the ideas that unite both the mainstream and the weirder figures of the so-called postliberal right, from Patrick Deneen to the writer Bronze Age Pervert.
  • I think the Republican Party’s collapse into incoherence reflects the fact that much of the modern right is reactionary, not conservative
  • As Paul Valéry, the French poet, once said, “Ancient Greece is the most beautiful invention of the modern age.” To treat Andreessen’s essay as an argument misses the point. It’s a vibe. And the vibe is reactionary.
  • It’s a coalition obsessed with where we went wrong: the weakness, the political correctness, the liberalism, the trigger warnings, the smug elites. It’s a coalition that believes we were once hard and have become soft; worse, we have come to lionize softness and punish hardness.
  • The story of the reactionary follows a template across time and place. It “begins with a happy, well-ordered state where people who know their place live in harmony and submit to tradition and their God,” Mark Lilla writes in his 2016 book, “The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction.”
  • He continues:Then alien ideas promoted by intellectuals — writers, journalists, professors — challenge this harmony, and the will to maintain order weakens at the top. (The betrayal of elites is the linchpin of every reactionary story.) A false consciousness soon descends on the society as a whole as it willingly, even joyfully, heads for destruction. Only those who have preserved memories of the old ways see what is happening. Whether the society reverses direction or rushes to its doom depends entirely on their resistance.
  • The Silicon Valley cohort Andreessen belongs to has added a bit to this formula. In their story, the old way that is being lost is the appetite for risk and inequality and dominance that drives technology forward and betters human life. What the muscled ancients knew and what today’s flabby whingers have forgotten is that man must cultivate the strength and will to master nature, and other men, for the technological frontier to give way
  • Now Andreessen has distilled the whole ideology to a procession of stark bullet points in his latest missive, the buzzy, bizarre “Techno-Optimist Manifesto.”
  • it’s the pairing of the reactionary’s sodden take on modern society with the futurist’s starry imagining of the bright tomorrow. So call it what it is: reactionary futurism
  • Andreessen’s argument is simple: Technology is good. Very good. Those who stand in its way are bad.
  • “The Enemy.” The list is long, ranging from “anti-greatness” to “statism” to “corruption” to “the ivory tower” to “cartels” to “bureaucracy” to “socialism” to “abstract theories” to anyone “disconnected from the real world … playing God with everyone else’s lives”
  • So who is it, exactly, who extinguishes the dancing star within the human soul?
  • Our present society has been subjected to a mass demoralization campaign for six decades — against technology and against life — under varying names like “existential risk,” “sustainability,” “E.S.G.,” “sustainable development goals,” “social responsibility,” “stakeholder capitalism,” “precautionary principle,” “trust and safety,” “tech ethics,” “risk management,” “degrowth,” “the limits of growth.”
  • The enemy, in other words, is anything or anyone who might seek to yoke technology to social goals or structures
  • For years, I’ve been arguing for politics to take technology more seriously, to see new inventions as no less necessary than social insurance and tax policy in bringing about a worthier world. Too often, we debate only how to divvy up what we already have. We have lost the habit of imagining what we could have; we are too timid in deploying the coordinated genius and muscle of society
  • I’ve been digging into the history of where and when we lost faith in technology and, more broadly, growth. At the core of that story is an inability to manage, admit or even see when technologies or policies go awry
  • The turn toward a less-is-more politics came in the 1970s, when the consequences of reckless growth became unignorable
  • Did we, in some cases, overcorrect? Absolutely. But the only reason we can even debate whether we overcorrected is because we corrected: The Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act and a slew of other bills and regulations did exactly what they promised.
  • It is telling that Andreessen groups sustainability and degrowth into the same bucket of antagonists
  • Degrowth is largely, though not wholly, skeptical of technological solutions to our problems
  • But the politics of sustainability — as evidenced in legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act — have settled into another place entirely: a commitment to solving our hardest environmental problems by driving technology forward, by investing and deploying clean energy infrastructure at a scale unlike anything the government has done since the 1950s.
  • Andreessen focuses at some length on the nuclear future he believes we’ve been denied —
  • but curiously ignores the stunning advances in solar and wind and battery power that public policy has delivered.
  • He yearns for a kind of person, not just a kind of technology. “We believe in ambition, aggression, persistence, relentlessness — strength,” he writes, italics included. “We believe in merit and achievement. We believe in bravery, in courage.”
  • There are ways in which these virtues have become undervalued, in which the left, in particular, has a dysfunctional relationship with individual achievement and entrepreneurial élan.
  • Andreessen’s ideas trace an odd, meme-based philosophy that has flourished in some corners of the internet known as effective accelerationism
  • “Effective accelerationism aims to follow the ‘will of the universe’: leaning into the thermodynamic bias towards futures with greater and smarter civilizations that are more effective at finding/extracting free energy from the universe,”
  • “E/acc has no particular allegiance to the biological substrate for intelligence and life, in contrast to transhumanism.” OK!
  • Take Andreessen’s naming of trust and safety teams as among his enemies.
  • That, in a way, is my core disagreement with Andreessen. Reactionary futurism is accelerationist in affect but deccelerationist in practice
  • How has that worked out? A new analysis by Similarweb found that traffic to twitter.com fell in the United States by 19 percent from September 2022 to September 2023 and traffic on mobile devices fell by almost 18 percent. Indications are that advertising revenue on the platform is collapsing.
  • Andreessen spends much of his manifesto venerating the version of markets that you hear in the first few weeks of Econ 101, before the professor begins complicating the picture with all those annoying market failures
  • Throughout his essay, Andreessen is at pains to attack those who might slow the development of artificial intelligence in the name of safety, but nothing would do more to freeze progress in A.I. than a disaster caused by its reckless deployment
  • It is hard to read Andreessen’s manifesto, with its chopped-up paragraphs and its blunt jabs of thought delivered for maximum engagement and polarization, and not feel that Andreessen now reflects the medium in which he has made his home: X. He doesn’t just write in the way the medium rewards. He increasingly seems to think in its house style, too.
  • One reason I left Twitter long ago is that I noticed that it was a kind of machine for destroying trust. It binds you to the like-minded but cuts you from those with whom you have even modest disagreements
  • There is a reason that Twitter’s rise was conducive to politics of revolution and reaction rather than of liberalism and conservatism. If you are there too often, seeing the side of humanity it serves up, it is easy to come to think that everything must be burned down.
  • Musk purchased Twitter (in an acquisition that Andreessen Horowitz helped finance) and gutted its trust and safety teams. The result has been a profusion of chaos, disinformation and division on his platform
  • Treating so much of society with such withering contempt will not speed up a better future. It will turn people against the politics and policies of growth, just as it did before. Trust is the most essential technology of all.
Javier E

How Climate Change Is Changing Therapy - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...climate-anxiety-therapy.html

climate change therapy mental health adaptation role psychology response history

shared by Javier E on 22 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • Andrew Bryant can still remember when he thought of climate change as primarily a problem of the future. When he heard or read about troubling impacts, he found himself setting them in 2080, a year that, not so coincidentally, would be a century after his own birth. The changing climate, and all the challenges it would bring, were “scary and sad,” he said recently, “but so far in the future that I’d be safe.”
  • That was back when things were different, in the long-ago world of 2014 or so. The Pacific Northwest, where Bryant is a clinical social worker and psychotherapist treating patients in private practice in Seattle, is a largely affluent place that was once considered a potential refuge from climate disruption
  • “We’re lucky to be buffered by wealth and location,” Bryant said. “We are lucky to have the opportunity to look away.”
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  • starting in the mid-2010s, those beloved blue skies began to disappear. First, the smoke came in occasional bursts, from wildfires in Canada or California or Siberia, and blew away when the wind changed direction. Within a few summers, though, it was coming in thicker, from more directions at once, and lasting longer.
  • Sometimes there were weeks when you were advised not to open your windows or exercise outside. Sometimes there were long stretches where you weren’t supposed to breathe the outside air at all.
  • Now lots of Bryant’s clients wanted to talk about climate change. They wanted to talk about how strange and disorienting and scary this new reality felt, about what the future might be like and how they might face it, about how to deal with all the strong feelings — helplessness, rage, depression, guilt — being stirred up inside them.
  • As a therapist, Bryant found himself unsure how to respond
  • while his clinical education offered lots of training in, say, substance abuse or family therapy, there was nothing about environmental crisis, or how to treat patients whose mental health was affected by it
  • Bryant immersed himself in the subject, joining and founding associations of climate-concerned therapists
  • eventually started a website, Climate & Mind, to serve as a sort of clearing house for other therapists searching for resources. Instead, the site became an unexpected window into the experience of would-be patients: Bryant found himself receiving messages from people around the world who stumbled across it while looking for help.
  • Over and over, he read the same story, of potential patients who’d gone looking for someone to talk to about climate change and other environmental crises, only to be told that they were overreacting — that their concern, and not the climate, was what was out of whack and in need of treatment.
  • “You come in and talk about how anxious you are that fossil-fuel companies continue to pump CO2 into the air, and your therapist says, ‘So, tell me about your mother.’”
  • In many of the messages, people asked Bryant for referrals to climate-focused therapists in Houston or Canada or Taiwan, wherever it was the writer lived.
  • his practice had shifted to reflect a new reality of climate psychology. His clients didn’t just bring up the changing climate incidentally, or during disconcerting local reminders; rather, many were activists or scientists or people who specifically sought out Bryant because of their concerns about the climate crisis.
  • could now turn to resources like the list maintained by the Climate Psychology Alliance North America, which contains more than 100 psychotherapists around the country who are what the organization calls “climate aware.”
  • But treating those fears also stirred up lots of complicated questions that no one was quite sure how to answer. The traditional focus of his field, Bryant said, could be oversimplified as “fixing the individual”: treating patients as separate entities working on their personal growth
  • It had been a challenging few years, Bryant told me when I first called to talk about his work. There were some ways in which climate fears were a natural fit in the therapy room, and he believed the field had coalesced around some answers that felt clear and useful
  • Climate change, by contrast, was a species-wide problem, a profound and constant reminder of how deeply intertwined we all are in complex systems — atmospheric, biospheric, economic — that are much bigger than us. It sometimes felt like a direct challenge to old therapeutic paradigms — and perhaps a chance to replace them with something better.
  • In one of climate psychology’s founding papers, published in 2011, Susan Clayton and Thomas J. Doherty posited that climate change would have “significant negative effects on mental health and well-being.” They described three broad types of possible impacts: the acute trauma of living through climate disasters; the corroding fear of a collapsing future; and the psychosocial decay that could damage the fabric of communities dealing with disruptive changes
  • All of these, they wrote, would make the climate crisis “as much a psychological and social phenomenon as a matter of biodiversity and geophysics.”
  • Many of these predictions have since been borne out
  • Studies have found rates of PTSD spiking in the wake of disasters, and in 2017 the American Psychological Association defined “ecoanxiety” as “a chronic fear of environmental doom.”
  • Climate-driven migration is on the rise, and so are stories of xenophobia and community mistrust.
  • According to a 2022 survey by Yale and George Mason University, a majority of Americans report that they spend time worrying about climate change.
  • Many say it has led to symptoms of depression or anxiety; more than a quarter make an active effort not to think about it.
  • There was little or no attention to the fact that living through, or helping to cause, a collapse of nature can also be mentally harmful.
  • In June, the Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine published a paper cautioning that the world at large was facing “a psychological condition of ‘systemic uncertainty,’” in which “difficult emotions arise not only from experiencing the ecological loss itself,” but also from the fact that our lives are inescapably embedded in systems that keep on making those losses worse.
  • Climate change, in other words, surrounds us with constant reminders of “ethical dilemmas and deep social criticism of modern society. In its essence, climate crisis questions the relationship of humans with nature and the meaning of being human in the Anthropocene.”
  • This is not an easy way to live.
  • Living within a context that is obviously unhealthful, he wrote, is painful: “a dimly intuited ‘fall’ from which we spend our lives trying to recover, a guilt we can never quite grasp or expiate” — a feeling of loss or dislocation whose true origins we look for, but often fail to see. This confusion leaves us feeling even worse.
  • When Barbara Easterlin first started studying environmental psychology 30 years ago, she told me, the focus of study was on ways in which cultivating a relationship with nature can be good for mental health
  • A poll by the American Psychiatric Association in the same year found that nearly half of Americans think climate change is already harming the nation’s mental health.
  • the field is still so new that it does not yet have evidence-tested treatments or standards of practice. Therapists sometimes feel as if they are finding the path as they go.
  • Rebecca Weston, a licensed clinical social worker practicing in New York and a co-president of the CPA-NA, told me that when she treats anxiety disorders, her goal is often to help the patient understand how much of their fear is internally produced — out of proportion to the reality they’re facing
  • climate anxiety is a different challenge, because people worried about climate change and environmental breakdown are often having the opposite experience: Their worries are rational and evidence-based, but they feel isolated and frustrated because they’re living in a society that tends to dismiss them.
  • One of the emerging tenets of climate psychology is that counselors should validate their clients’ climate-related emotions as reasonable, not pathological
  • it does mean validating that feelings like grief and fear and shame aren’t a form of sickness, but, as Weston put it, “are actually rational responses to a world that’s very scary and very uncertain and very dangerous for people
  • In the words of a handbook on climate psychology, “Paying heed to what is happening in our communities and across the globe is a healthier response than turning away in denial or disavowal.”
  • But this, too, raises difficult questions. “How much do we normalize people to the system we’re in?” Weston asked. “And is that the definition of health?
  • Or is the definition of health resisting the things that are making us so unhappy? That’s the profound tension within our field.”
  • “It seems to shift all the time, the sort of content and material that people are bringing in,” Alexandra Woollacott, a psychotherapist in Seattle, told the group. Sometimes it was a pervasive anxiety about the future, or trauma responses to fires or smoke or heat; other times, clients, especially young ones, wanted to vent their “sort of righteous anger and sense of betrayal” at the various powers that had built and maintained a society that was so destructive.
  • “I’m so glad that we have each other to process this,” she said, “because we’re humans living through this, too. I have my own trauma responses to it, I have my own grief process around it, I have my own fury at government and oil companies, and I think I don’t want to burden my clients with my own emotional response to it.”
  • In a field that has long emphasized boundaries, discouraging therapists from bringing their own issues or experiences into the therapy room, climate therapy offers a particular challenge: Separation can be harder when the problems at hand affect therapist and client alike
  • Some therapists I spoke to were worried about navigating the breakdown of barriers, while others had embraced it. “There is no place on the planet that won’t eventually be impacted, where client and therapist won’t be in it together,” a family therapist wrote in a CPA-NA newsletter. “Most therapists I know have become more vulnerable and self-disclosing in their practice.”
  • “If you look at or consider typical theoretical framings of something like post-traumatic growth, which is the understanding of this idea that people can sort of grow and become stronger and better after a traumatic event,” she said, then the climate crisis poses a dilemma because “there is no afterwards, right? There is no resolution anytime in our lifetimes to this crisis that we nonetheless have to build the capacities to face and to endure and to hopefully engage.”
  • many of her patients are also disconnected from the natural world, which means that they struggle to process or even recognize the grief and alienation that comes from living in a society that treats nature as other, a resource to be used and discarded.
  • “How,” she asked, “do you think about resilience apart from resolution?”
  • she believed this framing reflected and reinforced a bias inherent in a field that has long been most accessible to, and practiced by, the privileged. It was hardly new in the world, after all, to face the collapse of your entire way of life and still find ways to keep going.
  • Torres said that she sometimes takes her therapy sessions outside or asks patients to remember their earliest and deepest connections with animals or plants or places. She believes it will help if they learn to think of themselves “as rooted beings that aren’t just simply living in the human overlay on the environment.” It was valuable to recognize, she said, that “we are part of the land” and suffer when it suffers.
  • Torres described introducing her clients to methods — mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotion regulation — to help them manage acute feelings of stress or panic and to avoid the brittleness of burnout.
  • She also encourages them to narrativize the problem, including themselves as agents of change inside stories about how they came to be in this situation, and how they might make it different.
  • then she encourages them to find a community of other people who care about the same problems, with whom they could connect outside the therapy room. As Woollacott said earlier: “People who share your values. People who are committed to not looking away.”
  • Dwyer told the group that she had been thinking more about psychological adaptation as a form of climate mitigation
  • Therapy, she said, could be a way to steward human energy and creative capacities at a time when they’re most needed.
  • It was hard, Bryant told me when we first spoke, to do this sort of work without finding yourself asking bigger questions — namely, what was therapy actually about?
  • Many of the therapists I talked to spoke of their role not as “fixing” a patient’s problem or responding to a pathology, but simply giving their patients the tools to name and explore their most difficult emotions, to sit with painful feelings without instantly running away from them
  • many of the methods in their traditional tool kits continue to be useful in climate psychology. Anxiety and hopelessness and anger are all familiar territory, after all, with long histories of well-studied treatments.
  • They focused on trying to help patients develop coping skills and find meaning amid destabilization, to still see themselves as having agency and choice.
  • Weston, the therapist in New York, has had patients who struggle to be in a world that surrounds them with waste and trash, who experience panic because they can never find a place free of reminders of their society’s destruction
  • eston said, that she has trouble with the repeated refrain that therapist and patient experiencing the same losses and dreads at the same time constituted a major departure from traditional therapeutic practice
  • “I’m so excited by what you’re bringing in,” Woollacott replied. “I’m doing psychoanalytic training at the moment, and we study attachment theory” — how the stability of early emotional bonds affects future relationships and feelings of well-being. “But nowhere in the literature does it talk about our attachment to the land.”
  • Lately, Bryant told me, he’s been most excited about the work that happens outside the therapy room: places where groups of people gather to talk about their feelings and the future they’re facing
  • It was at such a meeting — a community event where people were brainstorming ways to adapt to climate chaos — that Weston, realizing she had concrete skills to offer, was inspired to rework her practice to focus on the challenge. She remembers finding the gathering empowering and energizing in a way she hadn’t experienced before. In such settings, it was automatic that people would feel embraced instead of isolated, natural that the conversation would start moving away from the individual and toward collective experiences and ideas.
  • There was no fully separate space, to be mended on its own. There was only a shared and broken world, and a community united in loving it.
Javier E

Opinion | The Worst Scandal in American Higher Education Isn't in the Ivy League - The ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...versity-scandal-education.html

christian corruption Paul scandal Liberty university

shared by Javier E on 22 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • I’d argue that the moral collapse at Liberty University in Virginia may well be the most consequential education scandal in the United States, not simply because the details themselves are shocking and appalling, but because Liberty’s misconduct both symbolizes and contributes to the crisis engulfing Christian America. It embodies a cultural and political approach that turns Christian theology on its head.
  • Last week, Fox News reported that Liberty is facing the possibility of an “unprecedented” $37.5 million fine from the U.S. Department of Education
  • While Liberty’s fine is not yet set, the contents of a leaked education department report — first reported by Susan Svrluga in The Washington Post — leave little doubt as to why it may be this large.
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  • The report, as Svrluga writes, “paints a picture of a university that discouraged people from reporting crimes, underreported the claims it received and, meanwhile, marketed its Virginia campus as one of the safest in the country.” The details are grim. According to the report, “Liberty failed to warn the campus community about gas leaks, bomb threats and people credibly accused of repeated acts of sexual violence — including a senior administrator and an athlete.”
  • A campus safety consultant told Svrluga, “This is the single most blistering Clery report I have ever read. Ever.”
  • I’ve been following (and covering) Liberty’s moral collapse for years, and the list of scandals and lawsuits plaguing the school is extraordinarily long. The best known of these is the saga of Jerry Falwell Jr. Falwell, the former president and son of the school’s founder, resigned amid allegations of sexual misconduct involving himself, his wife and a pool boy turned business associate named Giancarlo Granda.
  • Why? Because he realized the health of the church wasn’t up to the state, nor was it dependent on the church’s nonbelieving neighbors.
  • Paul demonstrates ferocious anger at the church’s internal sin, but says this about those outside the congregation: “What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? God will judge those outside. ‘Expel the wicked person from among you.’”
  • Yet as we witness systemic misconduct unfold at institution after institution after institution, often without any real accountability, we can understand that many members of the church have gotten Paul’s equation exactly backward. They are remarkably tolerant of even the most wayward, dishonest and cruel individuals and institutions in American Christianity. At the same time, they approach those outside with a degree of anger and ferocity that’s profoundly contributing to American polarization.
  • Under this moral construct, internal critique is perceived as a threat, a way of weakening American evangelicalism. It’s seen as contributing to external hostility and possibly even the rapid secularization of American life that’s now underway. But Paul would scoff at such a notion. One of the church’s greatest apostles didn’t hold back from critiquing a church that faced far greater cultural or political headwinds — including brutal and deadly persecution at the hands of the Roman state — than the average evangelical can possibly imagine.
  • Falwell is nationally prominent in part because he was one of Donald Trump’s earliest and most enthusiastic evangelical supporters. Falwell sued the school, the school sued Falwell, and in September Falwell filed a scorching amended complaint, claiming that other high-ranking Liberty officers and board members had committed acts of sexual and financial misconduct yet were permitted to retain their positions
  • Liberty University is consequential not just because it’s an academic superpower in Christian America, but also because it’s a symbol of a key reality of evangelical life — we have met the enemy of American Christianity, and it is us.
Javier E

Opinion | Why Did So Many Economists Get Disinflation Wrong? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ists-disinflation-economy.html

economists inflation 2022 economics policy

shared by Javier E on 08 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • The Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, a conference held twice a year, is America’s premier forum for relating academic research to “the most urgent economic challenges of the day.” The lead presentation at the September 2022 conference was a paper by Laurence Ball, Daniel Leigh and Prachi Mishra on inflation. And its conclusions were dismal. Harvard’s Jason Furman, one of the assigned discussants, wrote an opinion piece calling it “the scariest economics paper of 2022,” suggesting that to get inflation down to 2 percent “we may need to tolerate unemployment of 6.5 percent for two years.”
  • My question instead is why so many economists got the inflation outlook so wrong.
  • Unemployment is still near a 50-year low, yet here’s what happened to the Federal Reserve’s preferred measure of underlying inflation, the personal consumption expenditures deflator excluding food and energy (try saying that five times fast):
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  • But when economists talk about inflation, they mean the rate at which prices are increasing, not their absolute level.
  • The first is: what disinflation? Prices are still a lot higher than they were three years ago.
  • let me deal with two complaints I often get when I talk about disinflation.
  • If you want a measure that’s closer to how people currently spend their money, you want the Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices.
  • The second complaint I constantly hear involves assertions that the supposed fall in inflation is fake, because economists exclude the prices of the things real people actually buy.
  • this is almost exactly wrong. The U.S. Consumer Price Index contains a lot of stuff people do not, in fact, actually buy. As we’ve discussed before in this newsletter, a quarter of the index is “owners’ equivalent rent,” an estimate of what homeowners would be paying if they were renting their houses.
  • trying to get the overall level of prices back to what it was before an inflationary shock, as opposed to stabilizing them, is almost always a bad idea.
  • The bottom line is that disinflation is real — indeed, spectacular.
  • Are we all the way back to 2 percent inflation? Probably not, although there’s a real angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin feel to the debate over the right measure of underlying inflation, and even over what that term really means
  • ut we’ve gotten most of the way there, without a recession or even a large rise in unemployment.
  • So why were many economists so pessimistic last fall?
  • what strikes me about the dire inflation predictions of summer and fall 2022 is their non sequiturness (non sequituritality?)
  • The Biden fiscal stimulus of early 2021 was very large, so it made sense to worry about excessive spending driving prices up. Predictions that inflation would remain stubbornly high, however, didn’t draw at all on the same logic; instead, pessimists came up with new, completely unrelated justifications for their pessimism.
  • these arguments for persistent inflation weren’t just unrelated to the original case for inflation; they were also unrelated to each other — almost as if economists were looking for reasons to be pessimistic.
  • I’d like to see some hard thinking about how so many of my colleagues got this story so wrong, and maybe even a bit of introspection about their motivations.
Javier E

A Cruel Summer at Cornell - Tablet Magazine - 0 views

www.tabletmag.com/...a-cruel-summer-at-cornell

telluride summer cornell program experience teaching learning culture

shared by Javier E on 27 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • Reading through TASP’s website, I was seduced by its promises—a thoughtful community, where, for once, I’d be surrounded by free-thinking academics and learning from leaders whom I deeply admired.
  • Like Carlos told us on the very first day, we didn’t know what was best for us. Not because we were working to decide for ourselves, but because someone else already knew. TASP was no longer a democratic experiment—it had morphed into a factory for totalitarian instincts, and it operated like an oligarchy.
  • “If I could give you one piece of advice,” he said, “make sure you befriend someone who is entirely different from you. As many people as you can. Talk to them about everything you disagree on—you’ll only be better for it.”
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  • To me, that letter wasn’t just an invitation to a fancy summer program—it was an invitation into an educational world that I thought would change my life.
  • it wasn’t the differences between us that posed the biggest challenge to our unity; it was the constant reminders from above of those differences, all the ways we were hierarchically organized or comparatively privileged or fundamentally limited in our views. We were challenged to transcend those limitations and build the foundations of a community, but for that you need good faith, which was in short supply.
  • The other problem was that TASP lacked all the mechanisms of a functioning democracy. We had been cherry-picked to represent diversity, but actually the point was for all of us to arrive at the same conclusions—men talked too much, the world was fraught with microaggressions, dodgeball was bad, and eggs were worse. There was no framework for disagreement, no space for ideological detours, no home for structural challenges to the so-called intentional community we lived in.
  • Nobody wanted to deal with the key annoyance of democracy—learning to tolerate our differences.
  • It’s only now that I recognize that the truth of this statement—after all, what 17-year-old knows what’s best for them—served to justify the anti-democratic reality of a space contemptuous of every experience except for those of “oppressed groups,” as determined by the factota. It is equally alarming to see that the so-called leaders of my teenage years are now actively remaking a space once devoted to self-exploration and communal understanding in their own intellectual self-image, as a place where questioning and self-determination are being eliminated in favor of received truth.
  • In 2022, the Telluride Association announced that they were discontinuing TASP and expanding TASS, the equivalent program for sophomores, into a program with two focus areas—“Critical Black Studies” and “Anti-Oppressive Studies.”
  • Students would no longer live all together, like we did, according to Nunn’s vision. Instead, the “Critical Black Studies” community would live and study separately, creating an entirely Black space. Afternoons and evenings were no longer reserved for things like Nerf wars or eating entire jars of sprinkles, which were the activities that allowed our diverse group to come together, and which I remember much more vividly than all my seminar readings combined. Instead, the students would participate in anti-racism workshops created by the factota. It was this new program that became the “anti-racist Hell” that Vincent Lloyd lamented in his article.
  • It was easy for me to sympathize with Lloyd, who spent his summer battling with one factota, Keisha, who found him “triggering” and his readings “insufficiently radical,” was frustrated by his insistence on unspooling complex racial ideas in the slow seminar format rather than holding straightforward lectures, and frequently intervened when his discussions caused TASPers “harm.”
  • By the end of his tenure, he was summoned into an empty classroom by the students, who read their allegations about his behavior—and demands that he change his teaching—from sheets of paper. Every word coming out of their mouths was clearly pulled from conversations with Keisha. A white girl referred to her factota in her remarks: “Keisha speaks for me. She says everything I think better than I ever could.”
  • I remember being an eager-to-please high schooler on the first day of TASP, sitting in a circle with big aspirations but very little knowledge of the world, wanting so badly to be accepted in an elite space I assumed would give me all the answers, if I could only absorb the guiding principle: You don’t know what’s best for you.
  • My mom dropped me off at the local Panera, where the interviewer was already sitting in a booth reading a novel when I arrived. He was an older professor who still conducted interviews because he’d had such a transformative experience at TASP. He explained that he came to the seminar as a committed far-left radical, but he struck up an unlikely friendship with a staunch conservative and William F. Buckley devotee, with whom he disagreed about, and argued fervently over, everything. Proudly, he told me that the two men remained friends to this day.
  • The final rule was relayed by Carlos. With a stern look on his face, he explained that while these rules might seem daunting, all the factota had done this before, and there was one mantra in particular that guided them through their time. The girl next to me opened a notebook and poised her pen eagerly over the page. “During your six weeks here, you should always remember … you don’t know what’s best for you.” He intoned this mantra with such gravitas that the room briefly fell into silence.
  • TASPers were tasked with governing ourselves through nightly house meetings, bylaw votes, and a complex web of committees regulating everything from kitchen duty to leisure. Our community would be “semi-monastic,” meaning that we were “strongly, strongly encouraged” to limit our contact with the outside world in favor of “turning inward” and “engaging in communal reflection.” To ensure that we learned as much as possible from our peers, there was a ban on “exclusive relationships” of all platonic shades, which would be enforced through assigned seating, periodic roommate switches, minimum group-outing sizes, and good-old-fashioned cockblocking.
  • Discerning observers will note that doing what “necessity indicates” is a mandate dependent entirely on the values and whims of its executioners. In the case of TASP, necessity apparently indicated living in accordance with not only the Nunnian ideals but also the standards of our factota, most of whom couldn’t yet legally drink but had absolute moral authority over who could take up space, who could express their politics, and who deserved to be there at all. TASP was their world; we were just figuring out how to live in it.
  • The factota had various tactics to combat these relationships, from sober one-on-one interventions to interrupting group hangs to, notably, a roommate-switch halfway through the program because people were getting too close. This switch was aimed in no small part at Mark, who had been paired with a fellow sporty private-school guy in a cavernous room on the second floor. They bonded instantly, and their room would house all kinds of semi-exclusive hangs, from playlist-making to the occasional horny game of “Never Have I Ever.”
  • Accordingly, the factota disapproved of our friendship. Kaitlyn felt strongest about limiting his presence in my life and often pulled me aside to warn me against Mark, deeming his influence to be restrictive. She’d accost me to relay a supposedly insufferable remark he’d made during seminar or shoot me pointed stares whenever someone mentioned male entitlement during a house meeting, ignoring my protests that I found it difficult to distance myself from a naturally occurring friendship, and in fact enjoyed chatting with someone so different from myself. Wasn’t that supposed to be the point of TASP, anyway?
  • Instead, she made it a personal project to interrupt our conversations, wedge herself in between us at dinner, and skew our committee assignments so we couldn’t so much as wash dishes at the same time.
  • As a white guy studying classics at a high school with a five-figure price tag, Mark regularly landed in the crosshairs of our Sunday night conversations, receiving frequent reminders to “check his privilege” when he cited too much rarefied literature in class conversations and to “cede his time” to minorities or women during house discussions.
criscimagnael

China Orders Investigation Into Children's Textbooks - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...china-children-textbooks.html

shared by criscimagnael on 01 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • A little boy pulling up a girl’s dress. Another grabbing a classmate from behind, his hands across her chest. Bulges protruding from male students’ pants. Suspiciously pro-American images.
  • The illustrations can be found in a Chinese state-run publisher’s mathematics textbooks for elementary school students — books that have been used for years. They set off a furor in China after they were flagged on social media last week by angry commenters as crude, sexualized and anti-China.
  • “The problems identified will be rectified immediately, and those responsible for violations of disciplines and regulations will be severely held accountable,” the ministry said on Monday. “There will be zero tolerance.”
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  • Universities have been ordered to emphasize the study of Marxism and the writings of China’s top leader, Xi Jinping. In 2015, Yuan Guiren, China’s education minister, ordered a closer examination of foreign textbooks and said that those that promote Western values should be banned from classrooms.
  • He called not just for corrections and apologies, but also for an investigation and for those responsible to be held accountable.
  • “Primary school textbooks are the foundation of the country and the nation, and an important guarantee for the formation of children’s outlook on life and values,” he wrote. “It is impossible to overstate their importance.”
  • The illustrations were approved in 2013 for students in first to sixth grades, the reports said. Just how the problematic drawings evaded scrutiny all these years is unclear. Some social media users highlighted the images last week, prompting parents and educators to voice their outrage.
  • Some of the drawings are odd or silly, like children sticking out their tongues. But others show children appearing to grope classmates on a playground. Another showed a schoolgirl with her underwear exposed as she played a game. Many critics said the drawings made the children look ugly, with wide-set, droopy eyes.
  • Others argued that the schoolbooks also had anti-China messages, such as an incorrectly rendered Chinese flag. Still some found allegedly pro-foreign images, like a boy flying in a biplane similar to Japanese and American planes. Some even pointed to images of children wearing clothes with what looked like stars and stripes in the colors of the American flag.
  • There is no small thing when it comes to children; it affects our future.”
  • “We have carried out serious reflection, and feel deep self-blame and guilt, and hereby express our deepest apologies,” it said, adding that it would find a new team of illustrators to redraw the math textbooks.
criscimagnael

Shanghai Reopens After Nearly 2-Month Covid Lockdown - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ghai-covid-lockdown-eases.html

shared by criscimagnael on 01 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • As Shanghai eased one of the longest, toughest lockdowns anywhere since the pandemic began, many of its 25 million residents celebrated being free to move around. The reopening on Wednesday came after Shanghai’s two-month siege against Covid had set off public anger over shortages of food and medicine as well as the harsh enforcement of quarantine rules.
  • For now at least, that anger gave way to relief after the government wound back many restrictions. During the day, people — all wearing masks — basked in the novelty of previously mundane pleasures like meeting friends and relatives, strolling in parks, and driving through streets that had been largely empty since early April. Hairdressers were, as in many cities freed from lockdowns, busy. Subway lines were open but quiet.
  • The uncertainty and anxiety about the future could impede Shanghai’s — and China’s — recovery. Officials have been cautiously lifting some restrictions on residents and selected companies since midway through May.
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  • With daily infections now falling to low double digits, the government has launched an urgent effort to revive factories, companies and supply lines vital to China’s sagging economy. On Tuesday, Shanghai recorded 15 infections.
  • Over 10 million students in Chinese universities, many in Shanghai, are about to graduate and enter the job market.
  • Despite the easing, hundreds of thousands of Shanghai residents remain locked in their housing compounds because of recent infections in their areas. Under China’s stringent rules, being in the vicinity of a confirmed infection is enough to land someone in a quarantine facility.
  • Mr. Xi and other Chinese officials maintain that their zero-tolerance strategy has spared the country the millions of deaths that the virus has inflicted in the United States, Europe and other richer countries. China has officially recorded 5,226 deaths from Covid, though the real number is probably higher, because China typically classifies Covid-related deaths more narrowly than many other countries. Shanghai has counted 588 deaths from the recent outbreak.
lilyrashkind

Southern California water restrictions start today as drought worsens - 0 views

www.cnbc.com/...-start-today-amid-drought.html

water restrictions drought US

shared by lilyrashkind on 02 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Sweeping restrictions on outdoor water use go into effect on Wednesday for more than 6 million residents in Southern California as officials work to conserve water during a severe drought.The conservation rules, among the strictest ever imposed in the state, were set by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, one of the largest water distributors in the country.
  • The megadrought in the U.S. West has produced the driest two decades in the region in at least 1,200 years. Conditions are likely to continue through 2022 and could persist for years. Researchers publishing in the journal Nature Climate Change have estimated that 42% of the drought’s severity is attributable to human-caused climate change.
  • During the state’s drought from 2012 to 2016, former Gov. Jerry Brown ordered a mandatory 25% cutback in water use, during which many residents responded by switching to drought-tolerant landscaping.Gov. Gavin Newsom has not imposed such mandatory restrictions, but requested last year that residents curb household water consumption by 15%. Officials also have urged people to use recycled water for outside projects, take shorter showers and only run dishwashers and washing machines when full.
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  • “Californians made significant changes since the last drought, but we have seen an uptick in water use, especially as we enter the summer months,” Newsom said in a statement. “We all have to be more thoughtful about how to make every drop count.”
jaxredd10

Ottoman Empire - WWI, Decline & Definition - HISTORY - 0 views

www.history.com/...ottoman-empire

shared by jaxredd10 on 25 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • The Ottoman Empire was one of the mightiest and longest-lasting dynasties in world history.
  • The chief leader, known as the Sultan, was given absolute religious and political authority over his people.
  • Osman I, a leader of the Turkish tribes in Anatolia, founded the Ottoman Empire around 1299. The term “Ottoman” is derived from Osman’s name, which was “Uthman” in Arabic.
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  • In 1453, Mehmed II the Conqueror led the Ottoman Turks in seizing the ancient city of Constantinople, the Byzantine Empire’s capital. This put an end to 1,000-year reign of the Byzantine Empire.
  • Sultan Mehmed renamed the city Istanbul, meaning “the city of Islam” and made it the new capital of the Ottoman Empire.
  • By 1517, Bayezid’s son, Selim I, brought Syria, Arabia, Palestine, and Egypt under Ottoman control.
  • The Ottoman Empire reached its peak between 1520 and 1566, during the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent
  • The Ottomans were known for their achievements in art, science and medicine.
  • Some of the most popular forms of art included calligraphy, painting, poetry, textiles and carpet weaving, ceramics and music.
  • The Ottomans learned and practiced advanced mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, physics, geography and chemistry.
  • At the start of World War I, the Ottoman Empire was already in decline. The Ottoman Turks entered the war in 1914 on the side of the Central Powers (including Germany and Austria-Hungary) and were defeated in 1918.
  • The threat of assassination was always a concern for a Sultan. He relocated every night as a safety measure.
  • the millet system, a community structure that gave minority groups a limited amount of power to control their own affairs while still under Ottoman rule.
  • The devshirme system lasted until the end of the 17th century.
  • Starting in the 1600s, the Ottoman Empire began to lose its economic and military dominance to Europe.
  • n 1878, the Congress of Berlin declared the independence of Romania, Serbia and Bulgaria.During the Balkan Wars, which took place in 1912 and 1913, the Ottoman Empire lost nearly all their territories in Europe.
  • Under Sultan Selim, a new policy emerged, which included fratricide, or the murder of brothers.
  • In 1915, Turkish leaders made a plan to massacre Armenians living the Ottoman Empire. Most scholars believe that about 1.5 million Armenians were killed.
  • After ruling for more than 600 years, the Ottoman Turks are often remembered for their powerful military, ethnic diversity, artistic ventures, religious tolerance and architectural marvels.
  • The mighty empire’s influence is still very much alive in the present-day Turkish Republic, a modern, mostly secular nation thought of by many scholars as a continuation of the Ottoman Empire.
Javier E

Opinion | Russia's War in Ukraine: This Is How World War III Begins - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...sia-ukraine-world-war-iii.html

russia war ukraine response invasion

shared by Javier E on 16 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • World War II didn’t so much begin as it gathered, like water rising until it breaches a dam. We, too, have been living through years of rising waters, though it took Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for much of the world to notice.
  • did Putin have any reason to think, before Feb. 24, that he wouldn’t be able to get away with his invasion?
  • He didn’t. Contrary to the claim that Putin’s behavior is a result of Western provocation — like refusing to absolutely rule out eventual NATO membership for Ukraine — the West has mainly spent 22 years placating Putin through a long cycle of resets and wrist slaps.
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  • The Biden administration now faces the question of whether it wants to bring this cycle to an end.
  • the administration continues to operate under a series of potentially catastrophic illusions.
  • Refusing to impose a no-fly zone in Ukraine may be justified because it exceeds the risks NATO countries are prepared to tolerate. But the idea that doing so could start World War III ignores history and telegraphs weakness
  • Americans squared off with Soviet pilots operating under Chinese or North Korean cover in the Korean War without blowing up the world. And our vocal aversion to confrontation is an invitation, not a deterrent, to Russian escalation.
  • Bottom line: Expect him to double down. If he uses chemical weapons, as Bashar al-Assad did, or deploys a battlefield nuclear weapon, in keeping with longstanding Russian military doctrine, does he lose more than he gains? The question answers itself.
  • He wins swiftly. He terrifies the West. He consolidates power. He suffers consequences only marginally graver than the ones already inflicted. And his fellow travelers in Beijing, Tehran and Pyongyang take note.
  • How does the next world war begin? The same way the last one did.
peterconnelly

Facebook bans death threats on Russia leader Putin despite Ukraine war - 0 views

www.cnbc.com/...putin-despite-ukraine-war.html

facebook russia putin ukraine

shared by peterconnelly on 04 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Meta Platforms, the parent company of social media giants Facebook and Instagram, clarified Monday that users cannot make posts calling for the assassination of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin or other heads of state.
  • Meta also said that a previously reported temporary easing of its hate speech policy only applies to allowing posts by users in Ukraine making threats to the attacking forces and “only in the context of speech regarding the Russian military invasion of Ukraine.”
  • Reuters also reported Thursday that Facebook was allowing calls for violence against Russian soldiers in those three countries and several others in Eastern Europe, the Baltics and western Asia.
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  • The clarification comes after Russia opened a criminal inquiry into Meta on Friday because of the change in its hate speech policy
  • “I want to be crystal clear: Our policies are focused on protecting people’s rights to speech as an expression of self-defense in reaction to a military invasion of their country,” he wrote.
  • “The fact is, if we applied our standard content policies without any adjustments we would now be removing content from ordinary Ukrainians expressing their resistance and fury at the invading military forces, which would rightly be viewed as unacceptable. 
  • We will not tolerate Russophobia or any kind of discrimination, harassment or violence towards Russians on our platform.”
Javier E

The New York Times' trans coverage is under fire. The paper needs to listen | Arwa Mahd... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...es-trans-coverage-open-letters

trans debate nyt

shared by Javier E on 20 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • I’ve got a feeling the poor alien might get the impression that every third person in the US is trans – rather than 0.5% of the population. They (I assume aliens are nonbinary) might get the impression that nobody is allowed to say the word “woman” any more and we are all being forced at gunpoint to say “uterus-havers”. They might get the impression that women’s sports have been completely taken over by trans women. They might believe that millions of children are being mutilated by doctors in the name of gender-affirming care because of the all-powerful trans lobby. They might come away thinking that JK Rowling is not a multi-multi-multi-millionaire with endless resources at her disposal but a marginalized victim who needs brave Times columnists to come to her defense.
  • “In the past eight months the Times has now published more than 15,000 words’ worth of front-page stories asking whether care and support for young trans people might be going too far or too fast”. Those, to reiterate, are newspaper front-page stories. As Popula notes, that number “doesn’t include the 11,000 or so words the New York Times Magazine devoted to a laboriously evenhanded story about disagreements over the standards of care for trans youth; or the 3,000 words of the front-page story … on whether trans women athletes are unfairly ruining the competition for other women; or the 1,200 words of the front-page story … on how trans interests are banning the word “woman” from abortion-rights discourse.”
  • This letter, addressed to the paper’s associate managing editor for standards, accused the Times of treating gender diversity “with an eerily familiar mix of pseudoscience and euphemistic, charged language, while publishing reporting on trans children that omits relevant information about its sources”. That relevant information being that some of those sources have affiliations with far-right groups. That “charged language” being phrases like “patient zero” to describe a transgender young person seeking gender-affirming care, “a phrase that vilifies transness as a disease to be feared”.
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  • The second letter was signed by more than 100 LGBTQ+ and civil rights groups, including Glaad and the Human Rights Campaign. It expressed support for the contributor letter and accused the Times of platforming “fringe theories” and “dangerous inaccuracies”. It noted that while the Times has produced responsible coverage of trans people, “those articles are not getting front-page placement or sent to app users via push notification like the irresponsible pieces are”. And it observed that rightwing politicians have been using the Times’s coverage of trans issues to justify criminalizing gender-affirming care.
  • Charlie Stadtlander, the Times’ director of external communication, put out a statement stating that the organization pursues “independent reporting on transgender issues that include profiling groundbreakers in the movement, challenges and prejudice faced by the community, and how society is grappling with debates about care”. While that was all very diplomatic, the executive editor, Joe Kahn, and opinion editor, Kathleen Kingsbury, sent around a rather more pointed newsroom memo condemning the letters on Thursday.
  • “It is not unusual for outside groups to critique our coverage or to rally supporters to seek to influence our journalism,” Kahn wrote in the memo. “In this case, however, members of our staff and contributors to The Times joined the effort … We do not welcome, and will not tolerate, participation by Times journalists in protests organized by advocacy groups or attacks on colleagues on social media and other public forums.”
  • Here’s the thing: there is no clear-cut line between advocacy and journalism. All media organizations have a perspective about the world and filter their output (which will, of course, strive to be fairly reported) through that perspective. To pretend otherwise is dishonest. Like it or not, the Times is involved in advocacy. It just needs to step back for a moment and think about who it’s advocating for.
Javier E

Schools to blame for boys idolising Andrew Tate, says sacked teacher | News | The Times - 0 views

www.thetimes.co.uk/...-says-sacked-teacher-3d9ctgznb

toxic masculinity teacher uk chivalry

shared by Javier E on 25 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • The rise of the influencer Andrew Tate has vindicated the decision to show Eton College pupils a controversial video on masculinity, according to the master who was sacked for doing so.
  • It also stated that “male aggression is a biological fact” and aired concerns about women competing in sports against transgender women.
  • “I think Tate is a symptom of what’s currently going wrong regarding the teaching of boys in schools,” Knowland said from his home in Stowmarket, Suffolk.
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  • “In a properly functioning education system, that’s giving them really robust messaging about what it means to be a man, they would have antibodies to fight off the sick messaging that Tate is giving. All they see is the guy who’s got a Bugatti and joking about telling women to make him a sandwich.
  • “When teachers try to explain why Tate isn’t someone to look up to, the teenage boys ask them, ‘Well, what colour is your Bugatti?’
  • “The premise needs to be attacked directly, which is that ‘no, money isn’t the main index of masculinity’. Otherwise, we would all just be looking up to gangsters and criminals.”
  • Knowland, who teaches English and has forged a career as an online tutor, was sacked in 2020 after refusing to take down a video he made for his students called The Patriarchy Paradox, which repeated claims that women would revert to a primitive life without men.
  • Knowland believes the issues he was seeking to address in the lecture, which is still on his YouTube channel and has had 255,000 views, have only increased since his sacking.
  • The Teaching Regulation Agency (TRA) decided to take no action against Knowland after an inquiry. Eton College has previously said that the ruling did not undermine its decision to dismiss him.
  • The school reported the lecture to the TRA, which considered charges of undermining tolerance and failing to safeguard students but closed the case with no further action. In a statement, the school said: “This does not mean that Mr Knowland did nothing wrong or that Eton was not entitled to dismiss him.”
  • He added: “I think the most interesting part about the lecture and what resonated with my supporters was my stress on chivalry and the idea that a man’s strength should be put to the service of the weak and his family.
  • “Chivalry is the thing that we’re missing today and it’s become deformed and turned into machismo, which is masculinity without any sense of humility or meekness. I think this is what we need to return to. Some of the problems that Tate is addressing, things like men should be assertive, men should be competitive, men should be strong, etcetera, chivalry agrees with.
  • “But chivalry says, ‘Why do they need to be those things? Because it’s to serve the weak, not themselves.”
  • Knowland, 37, believes that Tate — who rose to infamy last year after videos of his diatribes led to him becoming the world’s most googled person — has tapped into a “malaise” among young men caused by the teaching of boys in schools.
  • As an example, last month Scotland had to pause movement of transgender prisoners after a row over whether a transgender female rapist should be imprisoned with biological women.
  • “For some, even saying that there are biological differences between men and women is offensive. That’s what my lecture said, that men are stronger,” Knowland added. “I don’t think that [women] should [compete in sport against transgender women]. I don’t think it’s safe.
  • The example I gave in the lecture [was] of the transgender fighter who fractured the woman’s skull, and could easily have killed her. I think there are good reasons why sporting bodies are moving towards and in some cases have already decided that there’s not going to be next events like that.”
  • During the Eton furore Simon Henderson, the head master of Eton, was criticised in some quarters for pursuing a “woke” culture at the school and his critics referred to him as “Trendy Hendy”. They pointed to pupils being asked to wear Black Lives Matter waistcoats and decolonising its curriculum as examples of the institution being captured by ideologues.
  • The content Knowland produces on his YouTube channel continues to be controversial. A recent video by the devout Catholic is entitled “Eight facts that killed evolution for me”.
  • “The lecture was addressing some very live issues at the time and it’s only got worse since then,” he said. “Women now feel that they haven’t got safe spaces to get undressed to go to a swimming pool. So those concepts in the lecture were hard hitting and provocative, because these are topics that are big ones that people have strong feelings about.”
  • While Knowland does not agree with the term transgender — “there are only two categories of sex, using the term transgender concedes too much ground” — he is alive to the issue of transphobic bullying. The issue has been in the spotlight this month after Brianna Ghey, a 16-year-old transgender girl, was stabbed to death in a park.
  • “People being subjected to transphobia is terrible,” he said. “People shouldn’t mistreat anybody just because they’ve got a mistaken idea that they are a woman. They need to be treated with compassion, not attacked or bullied.”
  • Knowland’s newfound career as an online tutor, as well as hosting a podcast, has eased some of the pressure he felt after his sacking. He said: “At Eton our family home was a benefit, so that was on my mind when I was leaving. I had to wait a couple of years after leaving to get a home because being self-employed, you have to get all the paperwork to get a mortgage.
  • “I’ve actually had parents get in touch because they supported me over what happened at Eton and wanted me to tutor their children.
  • “Losing my job was concerning but it gave me an insight into what it feels for someone to be cancelled. Fear is such a powerful weapon to stop people believing what they’re passionate about.
  • “People feel they can’t say anything, because consequences are going to be too severe, but now I’ve been through it I’ve actually found it freeing.”
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