Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items tagged travelers

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
10More

A new low for global democracy | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...a-new-low-for-global-democracy politics history
shared by woodlu on 10 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • LOBAL DEMOCRACY continued its precipitous decline in 2021, according to the latest edition of the Democracy Index from our sister company, EIU.
  • The global score fell from 5.37 to a new low of 5.28 out of ten. The only equivalent drop since 2006 was in 2010 after the global financial crisis.
  • For the second year in a row, the pandemic was the biggest source of strain on democratic freedom around the world.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • North America fared only slightly better. Despite riots in the Capitol and attempts by the departing president Donald Trump to overturn the election results, the inauguration of Joe Biden proceeded smoothly and America’s democracy score only fell by 0.07 points.
  • Pedro Castillo’s narrow victory in Peru in June was contested for weeks by his opponent, Keiko Fujimori, and the Nicaraguan poll in November was a sham. Chile was downgraded to a “flawed democracy” partly because of low voter turnout in its deeply polarised elections, and Haiti is still in political crisis after the assassination of the president, Jovenel Moïse.
  • Through lockdowns and travel restrictions, civil liberties were again suspended in both developed democracies and authoritarian regimes.
  • Canada suffered a far bigger setback, of 0.37 points. Again, pandemic restrictions were the main cause of frustration and disaffection. According to the World Value Survey, which is used in some of the quantitative sections of the EIU’s survey, just 10.4% of Canadians felt that they had “a great deal” of freedom of choice and control. More alarming, 13.5% expressed a preference for military rule.
  • The fall in Canada’s index score reflected popular disaffection with the status quo and a turn to non-democratic alternatives.
  • The trucker blockade in Ottawa may presage more political upheaval. But the biggest challenge to the Western model of democracy over the coming years will come from China
  • After four decades of rapid growth it is the world’s second-biggest economy; within a decade the EIU forecasts that it will overtake America. If China’s absence from Mr Biden’s recent Summit for Democracy is anything to go by, the West is not looking to engage it. China’s response to being snubbed was to declare the state of American democracy “disastrous”.
9More

Russia's Looming Economic Collapse - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...623330 russia collapse sanctions crisis history ukraine
shared by Javier E on 03 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • The first battlefield is geographic
  • The war in Ukraine is being fought on two battlefields
  • The second battlefield is made up not of physical particles, but rather of relationships—contracts and promises between nations, banks, companies, and individuals. This is the economic arena.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • the United States and several major European countries have declared a series of financial penalties and sanctions against Russia that are without modern precedent for a major economy. These policies are triggering a financial catastrophe in Russia.
  • Only 12 countries in the world have more total exports. Russia trades oil, gas, and coal to much of Europe and wheat to the Middle East and Africa.
  • The sanctions imposed so far amount to a kind of siege of a country that depends on access to global markets.
  • The country is sealed off—from Western trade, Western travel, and (apart from energy exports) most Western business.
  • Tajikistan, a small Central Asian country north of Afghanistan, relies on remittances from Russia for more than 20 percent of its GDP. That means if workers in Russia stop sending money to their families in Tajikistan, that country’s economy could nose-dive into a depression.
  • Economic crises can spark political revolutions, and Tajikistan shares a border with China’s westernmost province, Xinjiang. Russia’s crisis could, then, become a Central Asian economic crisis, which could become a Chinese political problem. What happens in Russia will not stay in Russia.
24More

Taliban Renege on Promise to Open Afghan Girls' Schools - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tan-girls-schools-taliban.html
shared by criscimagnael on 25 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • The schools were supposed to reopen this week, and the reversal could threaten aid because international officials had made girls’ education a condition for greater assistance.
  • Under the Taliban’s first rule, from 1996 to 2001, the group barred women and girls from school and most employment.
  • The news was crushing to the over one million high school-aged girls who had been raised in an era of opportunity for women before the Taliban seized power in August last year — and who had woken up thrilled to be returning to classes on Wednesday.
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • One 12th-grade student in Kabul said the decision had stamped out her last bit of hope that she could achieve her dream of becoming a lawyer.
  • “Education was the only way to give us some hope in these times of despair, and it was the only right we hoped for, and it has been taken away,” the student, Zahra Rohani, 15, said.
  • On Monday, the Ministry of Education had announced that all schools, including girls’ high schools, would reopen on Wednesday at the start of the spring semester. The following day, a Ministry of Education spokesman released a video congratulating all students on the return to class.
  • Mehrin Ekhtiari, a 15-year-old student in 10th grade, said she and her classmates were shocked when a teacher announced the news to the classroom on Wednesday morning.
  • “My hope was revived after eight months of waiting,” she said, adding later that the announcement had “dashed all my dreams.”
  • In recent months, the Taliban had also come under mounting pressure to permit girls to attend high school from international donors, aid from which has helped keep Afghanistan from plunging further into a humanitarian catastrophe set off by the collapse of the former government and Western sanctions that crippled the country’s banking system.
  • . He attributed the decision to a lack of a religious uniform for girls and the lack of female teachers for girls, among other issues.
  • Many principals and teachers said they only received the new instructions from the ministry after students had already arrived for classes Wednesday.
  • The move came a little more than a week before a pledging conference where the United Nations had hoped donor countries would commit millions of dollars in badly needed aid, as Afghanistan grapples with an economic collapse that has left over half of the population without sufficient food to eat. It is unclear whether donors will be willing to contribute following the Taliban’s abrupt reversal on the key commitment of girl’s education.
  • The Taliban on Wednesday abruptly reversed their decision to allow girls’ high schools to reopen this week, saying that they would remain closed until officials draw up a plan for them to reopen in accordance with Islamic law.
  • When schools reopened in September for grades seven through 12, Taliban officials told only male students to report for their studies, saying that girls would be allowed to return after security improved and enough female teachers could be found to keep classes fully segregated by sex.
  • Later, Taliban officials insisted that Afghan girls and women would be able to go back to school in March, and many Western officials seized on that promise as a deadline that would have repercussions for the Taliban’s efforts to eventually secure international recognition and the lifting of at least some sanctions.
  • “I’m deeply troubled by multiple reports that the Taliban are not allowing girls above grade 6 to return to school,” tweeted Ian McCary, the chief of mission for U.S. Embassy Kabul, currently operating out of Doha, Qatar. “This is very disappointing & contradicts many Taliban assurances & statements.”
  • At one girls’ private high school in Kabul, more female students had arrived for classes Wednesday morning compared to previous years, the school’s principal said in an interview.
  • “They came to my office, crying,” said the principal,
  • The decision “doesn’t make sense at all, and it has no logic,” the principal added, noting that the new government has had over seven months to design a new uniform and address the teacher shortage.
  • Since seizing power, the Taliban have been reckoning with the need for consistent policies while struggling to tread a delicate line that satisfies their more moderate members, their hard-line base and the international community.
  • The sudden reversal on the girls’ secondary schools seemed to validate existing concerns among Western donors that, despite assurances, they are dealing with much the same Taliban as the 1990s.
  • “The Taliban have been solidifying their position and becoming hard-line on a lot of issues,” Mr. Bahiss said.
  • In recent months, the new government has issued restrictions on local media and cracked down on peaceful protests. Taliban officials have also issued new restrictions on women, including a ban on traveling farther than 45 miles in a taxi unless they are accompanied by a male chaperone.
  • “You can’t exercise your other rights if you can’t leave your house to attend your job or attend education classes,” Ms. Barr said. “It’s a really alarming sign of what may be to come, it’s likely to herald further crackdowns on women.”
10More

U.S. announces new Russian sanctions, plans to admit thousands of Ukrainian refugees - 0 views

www.nbcnews.com/...ramp-pressure-russia-rcna21201 politics us russian
shared by lilyrashkind on 25 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • BRUSSELS — The United States announced a package of new sanctions against Russia and further aid for Ukrainian refugees as President Joe Biden looked to rally the leaders of some of the world’s most powerful democracies to increase their efforts to help Ukraine in a series of high-stakes meetings.
  • with a focus on those who are most vulnerable. The administration is also prepared to offer more than $1 billion in additional funding toward humanitarian assistance and $11 billion over the next five years to address worldwide food security threats after the disruptions to the Russian and the Ukrainian agricultural industries.
  • While the U.S. announced new efforts around sanctions and refugees, it made no new military commitments — despite pleas from Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • But Ukrainians never thought that the alliance and the allies were different."Zelenskyy told NATO that his country still needs more military equipment, specifically tanks and fighter jets, and chided them for not establishing a no-fly zone.
  • Biden has committed $2 billion in military assistance to Ukraine since the start of his presidency, including an $800 million military package last week.
  • The NATO summit was followed by a meeting with leaders of the Group of Seven leading industrial nations and an address to European Union leaders, the White House said.
  • The U.S. also said that international organizations and multilateral corporations should no longer conduct their activities with Russia in a business-as-usual manner, the second official said. “Our purpose here is to methodically remove the benefits and privileges Russia once enjoyed as a participant in the international economic order,” the official said.The new sanctions include 328 Duma members; Herman Gref, the head of Russia’s largest financial institution Sberbank and a Putin adviser since the 1990s; member of the Russian elite Gennady Timchenko, his companies and his family members; 17 board members of the Russian financial institution Sovcombank; and 48 large Russian defense state-owned enterprises
  • As the biggest conflict in Europe since World War II enters its second month, the discussions here could be among the most consequential of Biden’s presidency. When Biden was asked as he was leaving the White House for Brussels how likely he thought the threat of chemical warfare was, he said, “I think it’s a real threat.”  
  • “We are united in condemning the Kremlin’s unprovoked aggression and in our support for Ukraine sovereignty and integrity," NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said ahead of the meeting. The group would also discuss efforts to strengthen the military alliance's defenses in the short and the long term, he said.
  • Biden plans to travel to Poland on Friday to offer support as it deals with millions of refugees who are fleeing the conflict and to thank U.S. troops stationed there.
5More

Biden says he'd be 'very fortunate' to face Trump in 2024 - 0 views

nypost.com/...ortunate-to-face-trump-in-2024 biden trump us politics
shared by lilyrashkind on 25 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • President Biden said Thursday he would welcome a 2024 rematch against former President Donald Trump while insisting that European leaders have confidence in his leadership.
  • Trump is openly teasing a potential 2024 bid and has blamed Biden for mismanaging relations with Russia — pointing out that Russian President Vladimir Putin didn’t invade neighboring nations while he was in charge.
  • As president, Trump ruffled feathers among US allies in Europe by insisting they spend more money on their own defense and by weighing a drawdown of US troops from Germany. Ironically, six NATO members responded to the Russian invasion by increasing their defense budgets.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • “He was asked what he thought. He said they are very good people on both sides. And that’s when I decided I wasn’t going to be quiet any longer,” Biden said of Trump’s response to the violence in Charlottesville. The president, eschewing the historical norm of avoiding domestic political commentary while traveling abroad, proceeded to claim that even US news outlets that oppose him know of his commitment to do “the right thing.”
  • The president added, “The first G7 meeting I attended, like the one I did today, was in Great Britain. And I sat down and I said, ‘America’s back.’ And one of my counterparts, colleagues, who is a head of state, said, ‘For how long? For how long?’ And so I don’t blame, I don’t criticize anybody for asking that question.”
27More

Utah bans transgender athletes in girls sports : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...sgender-athletes-veto-override politics us
shared by lilyrashkind on 26 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • SALT LAKE CITY — Utah lawmakers voted Friday to override GOP Gov. Spencer Cox's veto of legislation banning transgender youth athletes from playing on girls teams — a move that comes amid a nationwide culture war over transgender issues. Before the veto, the ban received support from a majority of Utah lawmakers, but fell short of the two-thirds needed to override it. Its sponsors on Friday successfully flipped 10 Republicans in the House and five in the Senate who had previously voted against the proposal.
  • Salt Lake City is set to host the NBA All-Star game in February 2023. League spokesman Mike Bass has said the league is "working closely" with the Jazz on the matter.
  • I cannot support this bill. I cannot support the veto override and if it costs me my seat so be it. I will do the right thing, as I always do," said Republican Sen. Daniel Thatcher. With the override of Cox's veto, Utah becomes the 12th state to enact some sort of ban on transgender kids in school sports. The state's law takes effect July 1.
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • Leaders in the deeply conservative Utah say they need the law to protect women's sports. As cultural shifts raise LGBTQ visibility, the lawmakers argue that, without their intervention, more transgender athletes with apparent physical advantages could eventually dominate the field and change the nature of women's sports.
  • he team is also partially owned by NBA all-star Dwyane Wade, who has a transgender daughter.
  • The looming threat of a lawsuit worries school districts and the Utah High School Athletic Association, which has said it lacks the funds to defend the policy in court. Later Friday, lawmakers are expected to change the bill so state money would cover legal fees.
  • The group Visit Salt Lake, which hosts conferences, shows and events, said the override could cost the state $50 million in lost revenue. The Utah-based DNA-testing genealogy giant Ancestry.com also urged the Legislature to find another way. The American Principles Project is confident that states with bans won't face boycotts like North Carolina did after limiting public restrooms transgender people could use. It focused on legislation in populous, economic juggernaut states like Texas and Florida that would be harder to boycott, Schilling said.
  • Friday's deliberations came after more than a year of debate and negotiation between social conservatives and LGBTQ advocates. Republican sponsor Rep. Kera Birkeland worked with Cox and civil rights activists at Equality Utah before introducing legislation that would require transgender student-athletes to go before a government-appointed commission.
  • The proposal, although framed as a compromise, failed to gain traction on either side. LGBTQ advocates took issue with Republican politicians appointing commission members and evaluation criteria that included body measurements such as hip-to-knee ratio.
  • But the ban won support from a vocal conservative base that has particular sway in Utah's state primary season. Even with primaries looming, however, some Republicans stood with Cox to reject the ban.
  • Ready for more bad infectious diseases news? There's an outbreak of bird flu making its way into U.S. poultry flocks. If the virus continues to spread, it could affect poultry prices — already higher amid widespread inflation. The price of chicken breasts this week averaged $3.63 per pound at U.S. supermarkets — up from $3.01 a week earlier and $2.42 at this time last year, the Agriculture Department says.
  • The latest data from the USDA show 59 confirmed sites of avian flu across commercial and backyard flocks in 17 states since the start of the year. That figure includes chickens, turkey and other poultry. The USDA identified a case of avian flu in a wild bird in mid-January, the first detection of the virus in wild birds in the U.S. since 2016. Wild birds can spread the virus to commercial and backyard flocks. By Feb. 9, the virus had been identified in a commercial flock in Indiana.
  • The last major avian flu outbreak in the U.S. was from December 2014 to June 2015, when more than 50 million chickens and turkeys either died from highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) or were destroyed to stop its spread.
  • Whether the 2022 avian flu will affect the price of eggs and poultry depends on how widespread it becomes, says Ron Kean, a poultry science expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Animal and Dairy Sciences. "In 2015, we did see quite an increase in egg prices," Kean told Wisconsin Public Radio. "The chicken meat wasn't severely affected at that time. We did see quite a loss in turkeys, so turkey prices went up. So, we'll see. If a lot of farms contract this, then we could see some real increases in price."
  • For producers who suspect their flock may be affected by avian flu, the USDA has a guide to the warning signs, including a sudden increase in bird deaths, lack of energy and appetite, and a decrease in egg production. If a flock is found to be infected by bird flu, the USDA moves quickly — within 24 hours — to assist producers to destroy the flock and prevent the virus from spreading.
  • A new Virginia state law prohibiting mask mandates in public schools does not apply to 12 students with disabilities whose parents challenged the law, a federal judge has ruled. Last month, the parents of 12 students across Virginia asked the court to halt enforcement of the law, saying it violated their rights under the federal American with Disabilities Act. The law, signed by newly elected Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin, went into effect March 1; it gives parents a say over whether their children should wear masks in school.
  • The group of parents have children whose health conditions range from cystic fibrosis to asthma that put them at heightened risk for COVID-19.
  • The American Civil Liberties Union, which was one of several legal organizations that filed on behalf of the plaintiffs, said the injunction served as a "blueprint."
  • In a statement, Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares said the ruling affirms that "parents have the right to make choices for their children."
  • When Judge Katanji Brown Jackson entered the Senate chamber this week to face questions on her readiness to join the Supreme Court, she did so as the first Black woman in the nation's history to be nominated to that position. For many Black law students and professionals, including a group of 150 who traveled from across the country to watch the historic hearing, Jackson's rise to likely associate justice gives a message of profound hope for what they too might one day be able to accomplish.
  • Dudley was one of 100 law students selected nationwide to attend a series of events and watch parties for Jackson's nomination, hosted by the progressive organization, Demand Justice. The group also included 50 public defenders — a nod to Jackson's own background in that field. "I see a lot of myself in her. I see a lot of my friends in her, and I wanted to be there to support," Dudley said, calling Jackson "overly qualified to sit on the Supreme Court."
  • The cohort of legal professionals cheered on Jackson as she faced questions from Republicans about her past cases, particularly those relating to child sex abuse, and on what school of thought she would bring to determining the constitutionality of high-profile cases. Republicans had vowed to oppose President Joe Biden's nominees to the court, and when news of Justice Stephen Breyer's imminent retirement broke, the GOP quickly mobilized to attack potential nominees who might replace the longtime liberal justice on the bench.
  • Particularly, some sentencing decisions in child pornography cases drew GOP fire. But Jackson's measured responses throughout the three days of questioning solidified the support of many onlookers, who reveled in what it would mean to have a Black woman sit on the bench for the first time in the court's 233-year history. "The fact of the matter is that I'm the father of three black girls, right? And to be able to tell them that finally, someone who is Black — female nonetheless — is finally on the precipice of a mountain that has never been climbed before by any other Black woman, is huge," said Edrius Stagg, a third-year law student at Southern University Law Center in Baton Rouge.
  • Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia — whose break from Democrats on a number of politically fraught votes had worried some as to whether he would support Biden's nominee — announced on Friday he would vote in favor of Jackson's confirmation, all but assuring her path to join the bench.
  • For some, the optics of seeing Jackson — a Black woman — defend her credentials to a group of largely white, predominantly male detractors, was a familiar scene. It has played out, students said, in workplaces the world over and across the socioeconomic spectrum.
  • Booker called the attacks on Jackson's record "dangerous" and "disingenuous," noting the complexities of cases that had been boiled down to their basest points in order to damage Jackson's image.
  • "I'm not gonna let my joy be stolen," he continued. "Because I know, you and I, we appreciate something that we get that a lot of my colleagues don't." And while Jackson's opponents peppered her with politically polarizing questions, her supporters grew even more convinced that Jackson was qualified for the job. "To see her hold her composure and just answer the questions just to the best of her capabilities was just really great to see," said Jasmine McMillion, a third-year law student at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University College of Law.
10More

Biden says Putin 'cannot remain in power' - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html us
shared by lilyrashkind on 26 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • Warsaw, Poland (CNN)President Joe Biden declared forcefully Saturday that Russian President Vladimir Putin should no longer remain in power, an unabashed challenge that came at the very end of a swing through Europe meant to reinforce Western unity.
  • Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov responded to Biden, saying, "This is not to be decided by Mr. Biden. It should only be a choice of the people of the Russian Federation."In his speech, which drew a sharp line between liberal democracies and the type of autocracy Putin oversees, Biden warned of a long fight ahead."In this battle we need to be clear-eyed. This battle will not be won in days, or months, either," he said.
  • Biden, standing along NATO's eastern edge, in Poland, issued a stern warning during his speech, telling Putin: "Don't even think about moving on one single inch of NATO territory." He said the US was committed to the collective protection obligations laid out in NATO's charter "with the full force of our collective power."
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Biden opened his address saying that Ukraine is now a front line battle in the fight between autocracy and democracy, casting Russia's invasion of its neighbor as part of the decades-long battle that has played out between the West and the Kremlin."My message to the people of Ukraine is ... we stand with you. Period," said Biden.
  • "America's ability to meet its role in other parts of the world rests upon a united Europe and a secure Europe," Biden said Saturday as he met with Polish President Andrzej Duda in Warsaw. "We have learned from sad experiences in two world wars, when we've stayed out of and not been involved in stability in Europe, it always comes back to haunt the United States."Biden's comments came during the final day of a last-minute trip to Europe aimed at synchronizing how Western allies address Russia's aggression against Ukraine. Biden and Duda spent a lengthy stretch in a one-on-one meeting before beginning an expanded session with aides. Biden said he raised the world war comparisons during the private meeting.
  • Biden met with chef José Andrés and other volunteers in Warsaw Saturday at a food distribution site for Andrés' World Center Kitchen, the nonprofit devoted to providing meals in the wake of disasters. Biden met with some of the volunteers, some from Europe and some from the United States."God love ya," the President could be heard saying to them and asking if he could help them.
  • As it got underway, Kuleba described an arduous journey from Kyiv to Warsaw that included a train and three hours in a car."It's like flying from Kyiv to Washington with a connecting flight in Istanbul," Kuleba said. "The good thing is that since the beginning of the war I've learned how to sleep under any conditions. So I slept on the train, I slept in the car."
  • Ukraine has been pressuring the US and NATO to increase the military assistance they are providing to Ukraine, including calls from President Volodymyr Zelensky to establish a no-fly zone.After talks in Brussels this week, during which Zelensky appeared virtually, it did not appear NATO members had warmed to the idea. Biden has said becoming more directly involved in the conflict could usher in World War III.That left Ukraine's leaders dismayed. "We are very disappointed, in all honesty. We expect more bravery. Expected some bold decisions. The alliance has taken decisions as if there's no war," said Andriy Yermak, head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, in a live interview with the Atlantic
  • The President's comments are a sharp contrast from the "America First" foreign policy of former President Donald Trump, who called NATO "obsolete" before he came into office and often questioned the value of American alliances with European nations. Trump's time in office was marked by his spats with foreign leaders and the often-contentious nature of his dealings with traditional American allies in Europe and across the globe.
  • The Polish President added that Biden's visit "demonstrates a huge support and also a big significance attached by the United States to the stability and world peace, to reinstating the peace where difficult situations are happening in places where somebody resorts to acts of aggression against other democratic and free nations -- as it is happening today against Ukraine where the Russian aggression, unfortunately, happening for a month now is effect."This story has been updated with additional developments on Saturday.
19More

Why Conservative Parts of the U.S. Are So Angry - YES! Magazine - 0 views

www.yesmagazine.org/...can-conservative-america-angry conservative white resentment demographics gop county politics crisis
shared by Javier E on 31 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • Racially and politically, Antlers is typical of much of rural Oklahoma, a state forged from the 19th century territory set aside for Native American tribes forcibly removed from other parts of the United States. Antlers is now 75% White and 22% Native American or mixed race, but with very few Latino, Asian, or Black residents. In 2020, Antlers and its county, Pushmataha—which supported former President Bill Clinton in 1996 and even Jimmy Carter over Ronald Reagan in 1980—voted for Republicans, 85% to the Democrats’ 14%, up from an 80% share for Republicans in 2016, 54% in 2000, and 34% in 1996.
  • Antlers’ social statistics are beyond alarming. Nearly one-third of its residents live in poverty. The median household income, $25,223, is less than half Oklahoma’s $55,557, which in turn is well below the national median of $74,099 in January 2022.
  • The best-off ethnic group in Antlers is Native Americans (median household income, $35,700; 48% with education beyond high school; 25% living in poverty)
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • That’s still well below the national median, but the conditions of the White population are dismal: a median household income of $24,800, only 41% with any post-high school education, and 30% living in poverty.
  • In a growing nationwide trend, the median household incomes of people of color, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, now exceed those of White people in nearly 200 of the 1,500 Republican-trifecta counties—those in which the party controls the governor’s office and both legislative chambers of state government (see Figure 1)
  • In the most telling statistics, White people in Antlers are nearly twice as likely to die by guns as Native Americans (see Figure 2). Compared with Whites nationally, Antlers Whites suffer excessive death rates from drugs and alcohol (1.3 times the national average), suicide (1.5 times), all violent deaths (1.8 times), homicide (2.5 times), and gunfire (2.6 times).
  • When I was growing up in Antlers 60 years ago and visited it 20 years ago, my family’s old block consisted of well-kept middle-class homes fronting yards for chickens and horses. On my latest visit in January 2022, I found the houses all boarded up or blowing open in the wind (see photo at top). There are hundreds of abandoned dwellings with collapsing roofs and walls and junk-filled empty lots alongside barely intact, yet still occupied, houses.
  • Antlers is not all devastation, however. It sports a gleaming Choctaw-built travel center financed by casino revenues, which are also invested in local Native Americans’ well-being.
  • Across America, the partisan gap in gross domestic product per capita is also huge and growing: $77,900 in Democratic-voting areas, compared with $46,600 in Republican-voting areas
  • 444 Republican counties have a GDP per capita of under $30,000, and 10 times as many people live in those counties than in the seven similarly low-GDP Democratic counties.
  • Whites in about 40% of all Republican counties lost income over the past two decades. And Trump’s administration was no help to his base. During his presidency, the overall Democrat–Republican GDP per capita gap widened by another $1,800.
  • For the largest urbanized states, the three with Democratic control of all branches of government (California, New York, and Illinois) had GDPs per capita vastly higher than the three biggest Republican-controlled states (Texas, Florida, and Ohio).
  • The right-wing canard that hardworking White people subsidize welfare-grubbing cities is backward. Democrat-voting counties, with 60% of America’s population, generate 67% of the nation’s personal income, 70% of the nation’s GDP, 71% of federal taxes, 73% of charitable contributions, and 75% of state and local taxes.
  • Mirroring Antlers, White Republican America also suffers violent death rates, including from suicide, homicide, firearms, and drunken driving crashes, far higher than Whites in Democratic America and higher than non-White people everywhere.
  • To top it off, Republican-governed Americans are substantially more likely to die from COVID-19.
  • As the death gap between Republican and Democratic areas widens over time, the life expectancy for Whites in Republican-voting areas (77.6 years) is now three years shorter than that of Whites in Democratic areas (80.6 years), shorter than those of Asians and Latino people everywhere, and only a few months longer than Black and Native Americans in Democratic areas.
  • That White people are falling behind across key economic, health, and safety indexes is not due to victimization by immigrants and liberal conspiracies, however, but to victimization by other Whites and self-inflicted alcoholism, drug overdose, and suicide.
  • Aside from the problem that Republican members of congress (and two recalcitrant Democrats) have sabotaged beneficial initiatives, former President Barack Obama already tried that. From 2010 to 2016, the Obama administration’s economic recovery measures fostered millions of new jobs and thousands of dollars in real median income growth for Whites in urban and most rural areas alike, reversing the recession under Republican George W. Bush’s presidency.
  • Is the solution to undividing America massive federal programs to improve Republican America’s struggling economies and troubled social conditions, then?
40More

If We Knew Then What We Know Now About Covid, What Would We Have Done Differently? - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...covid-lessons-learned-9dd5566f politics us history crisis culture policy trump pandemic response
shared by Javier E on 12 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • A small cadre of aerosol scientists had a different theory. They suspected that Covid-19 was transmitted not so much by droplets but by smaller infectious aerosol particles that could travel on air currents way farther than 6 feet and linger in the air for hours. Some of the aerosol particles, they believed, were small enough to penetrate the cloth masks widely used at the time.
  • For much of 2020, doctors and public-health officials thought the virus was transmitted through droplets emitted from one person’s mouth and touched or inhaled by another person nearby. We were advised to stay at least 6 feet away from each other to avoid the droplets
  • The group had a hard time getting public-health officials to embrace their theory. For one thing, many of them were engineers, not doctors.
  • ...37 more annotations...
  • “My first and biggest wish is that we had known early that Covid-19 was airborne,”
  • , “Once you’ve realized that, it informs an entirely different strategy for protection.” Masking, ventilation and air cleaning become key, as well as avoiding high-risk encounters with strangers, he says.
  • Instead of washing our produce and wearing hand-sewn cloth masks, we could have made sure to avoid superspreader events and worn more-effective N95 masks or their equivalent. “We could have made more of an effort to develop and distribute N95s to everyone,” says Dr. Volckens. “We could have had an Operation Warp Speed for masks.”
  • We didn’t realize how important clear, straight talk would be to maintaining public trust. If we had, we could have explained the biological nature of a virus and warned that Covid-19 would change in unpredictable ways.  
  • In the face of a pandemic, he says, the public needs an early basic and blunt lesson in virology
  • “The science is really important, but if you don’t get the trust and communication right, it can only take you so far,”
  • and mutates, and since we’ve never seen this particular virus before, we will need to take unprecedented actions and we will make mistakes, he says.
  • Since the public wasn’t prepared, “people weren’t able to pivot when the knowledge changed,”
  • By the time the vaccines became available, public trust had been eroded by myriad contradictory messages—about the usefulness of masks, the ways in which the virus could be spread, and whether the virus would have an end date.
  • , the absence of a single, trusted source of clear information meant that many people gave up on trying to stay current or dismissed the different points of advice as partisan and untrustworthy.
  • We didn’t know how difficult it would be to get the basic data needed to make good public-health and medical decisions. If we’d had the data, we could have more effectively allocated scarce resources
  • For much of the pandemic, doctors, epidemiologists, and state and local governments had no way to find out in real time how many people were contracting Covid-19, getting hospitalized and dying
  • Doctors didn’t know what medicines worked. Governors and mayors didn’t have the information they needed to know whether to require masks. School officials lacked the information needed to know whether it was safe to open schools.
  • people didn’t know whether it was OK to visit elderly relatives or go to a dinner party.
  • just months before the outbreak of the pandemic, the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists released a white paper detailing the urgent need to modernize the nation’s public-health system still reliant on manual data collection methods—paper records, phone calls, spreadsheets and faxes.
  • While the U.K. and Israel were collecting and disseminating Covid case data promptly, in the U.S. the CDC couldn’t. It didn’t have a centralized health-data collection system like those countries did, but rather relied on voluntary reporting by underfunded state and local public-health systems and hospitals.
  • doctors and scientists say they had to depend on information from Israel, the U.K. and South Africa to understand the nature of new variants and the effectiveness of treatments and vaccines. They relied heavily on private data collection efforts such as a dashboard at Johns Hopkins University’s Coronavirus Resource Center that tallied cases, deaths and vaccine rates globally.
  • With good data, Dr. Ranney says, she could have better managed staffing and taken steps to alleviate the strain on doctors and nurses by arranging child care for them.
  • To solve the data problem, Dr. Ranney says, we need to build a public-health system that can collect and disseminate data and acts like an electrical grid. The power company sees a storm coming and lines up repair crews.
  • If we’d known how damaging lockdowns would be to mental health, physical health and the economy, we could have taken a more strategic approach to closing businesses and keeping people at home.
  • t many doctors say they were crucial at the start of the pandemic to give doctors and hospitals a chance to figure out how to accommodate and treat the avalanche of very sick patients.
  • The measures reduced deaths, according to many studies—but at a steep cost.
  • The lockdowns didn’t have to be so harmful, some scientists say. They could have been more carefully tailored to protect the most vulnerable, such as those in nursing homes and retirement communities, and to minimize widespread disruption.
  • Lockdowns could, during Covid-19 surges, close places such as bars and restaurants where the virus is most likely to spread, while allowing other businesses to stay open with safety precautions like masking and ventilation in place.  
  • If England’s March 23, 2020, lockdown had begun one week earlier, the measure would have nearly halved the estimated 48,600 deaths in the first wave of England’s pandemic
  • If the lockdown had begun a week later, deaths in the same period would have more than doubled
  • The key isn’t to have the lockdowns last a long time, but that they are deployed earlier,
  • It is possible to avoid lockdowns altogether. Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong—all countries experienced at handling disease outbreaks such as SARS in 2003 and MERS—avoided lockdowns by widespread masking, tracking the spread of the virus through testing and contact tracing and quarantining infected individuals.
  • Had we known that even a mild case of Covid-19 could result in long Covid and other serious chronic health problems, we might have calculated our own personal risk differently and taken more care.
  • Early in the pandemic, public-health officials were clear: The people at increased risk for severe Covid-19 illness were older, immunocompromised, had chronic kidney disease, Type 2 diabetes or serious heart conditions
  • t had the unfortunate effect of giving a false sense of security to people who weren’t in those high-risk categories. Once case rates dropped, vaccines became available and fear of the virus wore off, many people let their guard down, ditching masks, spending time in crowded indoor places.
  • it has become clear that even people with mild cases of Covid-19 can develop long-term serious and debilitating diseases. Long Covid, whose symptoms include months of persistent fatigue, shortness of breath, muscle aches and brain fog, hasn’t been the virus’s only nasty surprise
  • In February 2022, a study found that, for at least a year, people who had Covid-19 had a substantially increased risk of heart disease—even people who were younger and had not been hospitalized
  • respiratory conditions.
  • Some scientists now suspect that Covid-19 might be capable of affecting nearly every organ system in the body. It may play a role in the activation of dormant viruses and latent autoimmune conditions people didn’t know they had
  •  A blood test, he says, would tell people if they are at higher risk of long Covid and whether they should have antivirals on hand to take right away should they contract Covid-19.
  • If the risks of long Covid had been known, would people have reacted differently, especially given the confusion over masks and lockdowns and variants? Perhaps. At the least, many people might not have assumed they were out of the woods just because they didn’t have any of the risk factors.
11More

At the China-Russia Border, the Xi-Putin Partnership Shows Signs of Fraying - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-russia-china-ukraine-5c588831 china russia relationship partnership tension
shared by Javier E on 20 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • The meeting in Moscow this week between Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin is expected to showcase what they have declared a partnership with “no limits” between their countries. Beneath the surface are economic, political, cultural and historical divisions that undercut the relationship.
  • Russia seeks to disrupt the international order, including through military action. The International Criminal Court last week issued an arrest warrant against Mr. Putin for war crimes. China, which reached its economic stature through the status quo, seeks changes that further its interests, complicating the binational collaboration,
  • In many ways, the Chinese and Russian economies are highly complementary. Russia exports natural resources China needs to power its industrial economy. China sells goods that Russian consumers want. On the energy front in particular, Chinese purchases of oil and gas since the invasion of Ukraine have helped Russia weather Western sanctions.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • China-Russia relations are far from a “monolithic bloc,” Zhao Long, a scholar at China’s Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, wrote in a recent paper. “In Beijing’s vision, it never should become one.”
  • One exhibit depicts the killing of thousands of Chinese in the region by Russians in 1900. Over a loudspeaker, a narrator concludes that Russia-China relations were today peaceful, but that China must remain vigilant. “We can never forget this history,” the narrator said. “If you lag behind, you will get beaten.”  
  • A long and sometimes violent history between Russia and China has left a legacy of distrust. A museum in Heihe is dedicated to what it depicts as centuries of aggressions by Russian soldiers against the Chinese
  • Mr. Xi’s language during his Moscow visit will be closely parsed by Western officials and security analysts seeking to understand China’s intentions for Russia. The frayed ends of China-Russia economic ties are, by contrast, out in the open.
  • Another newly opened bridge, in Heihe, had been highly touted in Chinese state media. It didn’t appear last week to be an economic boon. On the China side of the bridge, two Russian truck drivers, hauling what appeared to be metal shelving, idled near a customs checkpoint. Trucks traveling from China to Russia crossed the bridge at a rate of roughly one every five minutes and even less frequently in the other direction.
  • Before the invasion of Ukraine, most China-Russia trade was settled in U.S. dollars or Euros, an arrangement upended by Western sanctions. Chinese companies now struggle to get paid. One survey by local central-bank officials of Chinese companies that trade with Russia found that after the invasion of Ukraine, 60% of them had suspended operations or were barely scraping by because of logistical and financial hurdles from the sanctions.
  • Russia’s growing dependency on the yuan makes Russia more vulnerable to Chinese actions should relations between the two countries falter
  • “Russian leaders like to emphasize the unprecedented strategic cooperation between the two countries,” Ms. Prokopenko wrote in February for the website of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Yet in reality, this cooperation makes Moscow increasingly dependent on Beijing.” 
18More

How Sunak may succeed in stopping the boats - 0 views

www.thetimes.co.uk/...n-stopping-the-boats-d9hwpzll9 immigration control policy history uk
shared by Javier E on 30 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • After all, much as its backbenchers huff and puff, even Labour has admitted an important principle: there is a limit to the number of refugees this country can accept.
  • In parliament on Monday, the shadow immigration minister, Stephen Kinnock, said explicitly that “safe and legal routes” for immigration must be “capped” and “based on prioritisation”
  • With an estimated 32.5 million refugees in the world, this ought to be a statement of the obvious
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • yet it is one the government’s opponents are always reluctant to admit because its logical corollary is that there will always be an incentive for those not included under the cap to try their luck in the Channel — unless they perceive a high risk of deportation. You cannot stop the boats while taking in the passengers.
  • Sunak’s policy, despite its logic, faces a tortuous road ahead. To ministers’ surprise, they won their case on the Rwanda scheme in British courts last year, only to have the first flight blocked in the middle of the night by an ECHR judge.
  • Yet as the home secretary recently suggested, the government still believes it can get its way. The ECHR, despite its reputation for inflexible and expansionist application of human rights law, can be expedient when its institutional reach is under threat
  • In 2012, for example, after an unmanageable surge of cases that provoked European governments’ wrath, the ECHR agreed to limit itself to intervening only where it believed national courts had not done their jobs properly. Its caseload quickly shrank.
  • With the UK outside the EU and therefore able to leave the ECHR with relative ease, the court’s survival instinct has kicked in. Its officials are said to have been taken aback by the hostility to its Rwanda injunction last June and are in a mood to compromise to avoid the risk of losing the UK altogether
  • Even assuming the legislation takes full effect, it may not work. Migrant arrivals are expected to reach 65,000 this year. The asylum backlog stands at 166,000 and counting, hotels are full to bursting and the government hasn’t yet sent a single person to Rwanda, which in turn hasn’t built the capacity to house more than 200. No wonder most think the policy is doomed.
  • Between the prospect of being deported, housed in unappealing lodgings such as barges and RAF bases rather than hotels, and caught by the French, who are being given large sums of money to step up their coastal policing, the government is hoping it can make trying to cross the Channel sufficiently unattractive
  • There has been a sharp drop in the number of Albanians arriving on our beaches since the government signed a co-operation agreement with Tirana, stepped up deportations and publicised both.
  • evidence from Canada in 2016, where a publicity campaign highlighting the deportation of failed asylum seekers from Hungary led to a dramatic drop in arrivals.
  • It all depends on what’s required to deter people from crossing. The aim, after all, isn’t to run a constant, high-volume travel service to Kigali, but to stop people from getting on boats in the first place. This may already be working
  • This leaves the final piece, which is the expansion of “safe and legal routes” to the UK. It has taken months of awkward media interviews, select committee hearings and the threat of a backbench rebellion, but the government has finally accepted it needs a better system for taking in legitimate refugees.
  • One way is a broader, Ukraine-style scheme, so households can bring in refugees if they agree to take them in
  • Another is to allow for more extended family reunifications for refugees who have relatives here
  • And another would be to expand the practice of assessing and accepting people at UN camps, like the Syrian resettlement scheme
  • After years of ineffectual government under Theresa May and Boris Johnson, we have become used to the idea that ministers never have any ability or intention of keeping their promises
70More

The Closing of the American Mind: A Summary - 0 views

theclosingoftheamericanmind.com closing american mind summary culture politics history crisis
shared by Javier E on 02 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • Preface
  • “No teacher can doubt that his real task is to assist his pupil to fulfill human nature against all the deforming forces of convention and prejudice.” p. 20
  • A liberal education is one that helps students to ask themselves and answer the question, “what is man?… In our chronic lack of certainty, this comes down to knowing the alternative answers [to that question] and thinking about them.” p. 21
  • ...67 more annotations...
  • Introduction: Our Virtue
  • “There is one thing that a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative…. Relativism is necessary to openness; and this is the virtue, the only virtue, which all primary education for more than fifty years has dedicated itself to inculcating.” p. 25
  • Democratic education…wants and needs to produce men and women [who are] supportive of a democratic regime.” p. 26
  • The historical assumption of the human sciences was (and remains) that an objective human nature exists and can be discovered—if not by reason itself, then at least by empirical science guided by reason. Science was a method to allow us to rise beyond the prejudices of our culture in order to discover the truths of human nature. It was a mechanism for opening our minds, an instrument of openness. p. 37-38
  • Liberalism has always tended towards increased freedom—i.e., decreased regulation. But “it was possible to expand the space exempt from legitimate social and political regulation only by contracting the claims to moral and political knowledge…. It begins to appear that full freedom can be attained only when there is no such knowledge at all…[and] of course the result is that…the argument justifying freedom disappears, and…all beliefs begin to have an attenuated character.” p. 28
  • Modern education is concerned mainly with correcting ethnocentrism—showing students that their preferences are merely accidents of their culture and that no single culture is better than any other. The roots of this movement are found in the problems (racism, mistreatment) that arose due to the multicultural nature of American life. p. 29-30
  • The Founders envisioned a society where individuals were bound together by their belief in and adherence to the rights of the Constitution. Minority factions were seen as a bad thing, detracting from social cohesiveness. p. 31
  • However, the provision of equal rights did not guarantee equal treatment, and minority groups suffered. This caused them to retreat into their minority identities and oppose the majority—indeed, “much of the intellectual machinery of twentieth-century American political thought and social science was constructed for the purpose of making an assault on [the] majority…. The very idea of a majority—now understood to be selfish interest—is done away with in order to protect the minorities.” p. 32-35
  • However, its ideas about what this means have changed over time, starting with a faith in the human rights of the U.S. Constitution, but ultimately changing to (now) mean “openness,” i.e., relativism. p. 26-27
  • “Historicism and cultural relativism actually are a means to avoid testing our own prejudices and asking, for example, whether men are really equal or whether that opinion is a democratic prejudice.” p. 40
  • Today, “the human sciences want to make us culture-beings with the instruments [science and reason] that were invented to liberate us from culture…: cultural relativism, historicism, the fact-value distinction—are the suicide of science. Culture, hence closedness, reigns supreme. Openness to closedness is what we teach.” p. 38-39
  • Yet the dogmatic modern assumption is that human nature does not exist, that our ways of being are culturally determined, that our minds are inherently constrained—“closed”—by cultural influences. p. 38
  • “There are two types of openness, the openness of indifference…and the openness that invites us to the quest for knowledge and certitude.” p. 41
  • The openness of indifference advocates the removal of all requirements in education—why should students learn languages or philosophy? But the reality is that, “to be open to knowing, there are certain types of things one must know which most people don’t want to bother to learn and which appear boring and irrelevant…true openness means closedness to all the charms that make us comfortable with the present.” p. 41
  • The Clean Slate
  • On the surface, Americans seems to lack a true culture or set of traditions. But most of them grew up with a shared knowledge of the Bible and the Declaration of Independence, and “contrary to much contemporary wisdom, the United States has one of the longest uninterrupted political [and intellectual] traditions of any nation in the world.” And this tradition is not confused or counterbalanced by a history of monarchy or aristocracy. p. 52-55
  • So we have a culture in which to root education, but we have begun to undermine it. The idealism of the American founding has been explained away as mythical, selfishly-motivated, and racist. And so our culture has been devalued. p. 55-56
  • Religion, too, has been explained away, but this has left us without a standpoint from which to understand our experience as humans. Parents “have nothing to give their children in the way of a vision of the world.” p. 56-57
  • “As it now stands, students have powerful images of what the perfect body is and pursue it incessantly. But deprived of literary guidance, they no longer have any image of a perfect soul, and hence do not long to have one. They do not even imagine that there is such a thing.” p. 67
  • Books
  • “I have begun to wonder whether the experience of the greatest texts from early childhood is not a prerequisite for a concern throughout life for them and for lesser but important literature. The soul’s longing…may well require encouragement at the outset.” p. 62
  • Literature is critical because it presents to young people the range of possibilities of human types—both good and bad. p. 62-64
  • But students are less and less exposed to literature, and as a result, “they have only pop psychology to tell them what people are like, and the range of their motives…. [Therefore,] people become more alike, for want of knowing they can be otherwise. What poor substitutes for real diversity are the wild rainbows of dyed hair and other external differences that tell the observer nothing about what is inside.” p. 64
  • Without exposure to literature, students usually resort to the movies. But movies do not provide the “distance from the contemporary” that students need, and so this only reinforces the belief that the here and now is all there is. p. 64
  • The loss of literature has also meant the loss of heroes. In a “perversion of the democratic principle,” this lack is almost admired, since being oneself is the supposed goal. But whether or not it is seen as desirable, students invariably seek role models. And without literature, they only have those around them (and in the media) to emulate. p. 66-67
  • “Nobody believes that the old books do, or even could, contain the truth…. Tradition has become superfluous.” p. 58
  • We are left with a culture filled with “the intense, changing, crude and immediate, which Tocqueville warned us would be the character of democratic art…. In short, life is made into a nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy. This description may seem exaggerated, but only because some would prefer to regard it as such.” p. 74-75
  • Relationships
  • “In short, after the war, while America was sending out its blue jeans to unite the young of all nations, a concrete form of democratic universalism that has had liberalizing effects on many enslaved nations, it was importing a clothing of German fabrication for its souls, which clashed with all that and cast doubt on the Americanization of the world on which we had embarked, thinking it was good and in conformity with the rights of man
  • “This indeterminate or open-ended future and the lack of a binding past mean that the souls of young people are in a condition like that of the first men in the state of nature—spiritually unclad, unconnected, isolated, with no inherited or unconditional connection with anything or anyone…. Why are we surprised that such unfurnished persons should be preoccupied principally with themselves?” p. 87-88
  • “The one eccentric element in this portrait, the one failure…is the relation between blacks and whites.” Although black students are present on campuses, they “have, by and large, proved indigestible.” p. 91
  • the Black Power movement arrived and the universities conceded to identity politics, which took the form of Black-themed courses, quotas, and an unwillingness to fail black students. p. 94-95
  • “The black student who wants to be just a student and to avoid allegiance to the black group has to pay a terrific price, because he is judged negatively by his black peers and because his behavior is atypical in the eyes of whites. White students have silently and unconsciously adjusted to a group presence of blacks, and they must readjust for a black who does not define himself by the group.” Affirmative action cements this dynamic. p. 95-96
  • The restructuring of the family requires that men subdue their masculine character. “And it is indeed possible to soften men. But to make them ‘care’ is another thing, and the project must inevitably fail…. The old moral order, however imperfect it may have been, at least moved towards the virtues by way of the passions. If men were self-concerned, that order tried to expand the scope of self-concern to include others [i.e., his wife and children], rather than commanding men to cease being concerned with themselves.” p. 129
  • “I am not arguing here that the old family arrangements were good or that we should go back to them. I am only insisting that we not cloud our vision to such an extent that we believe that there are viable substitutes for them just because we want or need them.” p. 130
  • “All of our reforms have helped strip the teeth of our gears, which can therefore no longer mesh. They spin idly, side by side, unable to set the social machine in motion.” p. 131
  • Modern students are lacking the longing that is critical for a full enjoyment of life. They are complacent. And the universities do not see themselves as providing for such a longing. p. 134-136
  • The German Connection
  • Value relativism is the modern replacement for traditional morality, and “constitutes a change in our view of things moral and political as great as the one that took place when Christianity replaced Greek and Roman paganism.” p. 141
  • Value relativism has sunk so far into the American consciousness that its vocabulary has become colloquial: we talk about ‘charisma,’ ‘life-style,’ ‘commitment,’ ‘identity,’ etc. “Although they, and the things to which they refer, would have been incomprehensible to our fathers, not to speak of our Founding Fathers.” p. 147
  • Students today are largely apathetic about any concerns outside of themselves. There isn’t any malice in this self-centeredness; but it has become so entrenched in American culture that it isn’t even recognized as unusual. p. 82-86
  • “We chose [to import] a system of thought that, like some wines, does not travel; we chose a way of looking at things that could never be ours and had its starting point dislike of us and our goals.” p. 153
  • The question isn’t even asked whether the German doctrine of value-creation is contrary to democratic and egalitarian ideals; but it certainly seems to leave room for their opposites and perhaps promote them—i.e., value relativism seems to allow for fascism. p. 154
  • The Self
  • Although a precise definition remains elusive, “the self is the modern substitute for the soul.” p. 173
  • Man used to strive for fulfillment by taming his bodily desires in order to live virtuously. But this changed after Machiavelli (and Hobbes after him) suggested that instead we ignore virtue and follow our desires, which find their root in the state of nature. p. 174-175
  • Following their advice, “our desire becomes a kind of oracle we consult; it is the last word, while in the past it was the questionable and dangerous part of us.” p. 175
  • Locke then replaced the virtuous man with the rationally selfish one. “Beneath his selfishness, of course, lies an expectation that it conduces more to the good of others than does moralism.” p. 175-176
  • “All higher purposiveness in nature, which might have been consulted by men’s reason and used to limit human passion, has disappeared.” p. 176
  • That reason “is unable to rule in culture or in soul…constitutes a crisis of the West…[whose] regimes are founded on reason.” Previous regimes relied on religion, but Enlightenment undermined religion. p. 196
  • Psychology came to us “in order to treat the parts of man which had been so long neglected by liberal society…. Modern psychology has this in common with what was always a popular opinion, fathered by Machiavelli—that selfishness is somehow good. Man is self, and the self must be selfish. What is new is that we are told to look more deeply into the self, that we assumed too easily that we know it and have access to it.” p. 178
  • Prior to this, it was only God who was dignified—not man. And God was dignified in his freedom, his ability to create. If man was to be elevated, he, too, must be free; he, too, must be able to create. p. 180
  • And so, following Rousseau and our dissatisfaction with the Enlightenment, we have elevated creativity above reason as the ultimate virtue, and the artist replaced the philosopher and scientist at the admired human type. p. 181-182
  • Yet those who praise creativity don’t realize why. They admire it without seeing that it is the result of Romantic thought absorbed into democratic public opinion. And it has influenced the whole political spectrum, from Left to Right. p. 181-182
  • The Germans (Nietzsche and Weber) recognized as early as 1919 that the scientific spirit was dead, that reason cannot establish values. But Americans (naïvely, and largely unknowingly) still held onto the rationalist dream, written as they were into our political foundations. p. 194-195
  • When those ideas came to the U.S. (via Weber), “a very dark view of the future was superimposed on our incorrigible optimism. We are children playing with adult toys.” p. 195
  • “The psychology of the self has succeeded so well that it is now the instinct of most of us to turn for a cure for our ills back within ourselves rather than to the nature of things.” p. 179
  • Rousseau and others recognized this. “The very idea of culture was a way of preserving something like religion without talking about it.” But Nietzsche saw this was impossible. p. 196-197
  • We are left with no religion, but we still have religious impulses. p. 197
  • “The disenchantment of God and nature necessitated a new description of good and evil. To adapt a formula of Plato about the gods, we do not love a thing because it is good, it is good because we love it. It [became] our decision to esteem that makes something estimable.” p. 197
  • “Since values are not rational…they must be imposed.” Will, or commitment, is the primary virtue; it is the equivalent of (what used to be) faith. “Nietzsche was not a fascist; but this project inspired fascist rhetoric, which looked to the revitalization of old cultures or the foundation of new ones, as opposed to the rational, rootless cosmopolitanism of the revolutions of the Left.” p. 201-202
  • Nietzsche was a cultural relativist. This meant he anticipated war, because wars are inevitable when values are imposed and unrooted in truth or anything objective. p. 202
  • “Just over the horizon, when Weber wrote, lay Hitler…. He was the mad, horrible parody of the charismatic leader—the demagogue—hoped for by Weber.” Weber was not looking for something so extreme, but “when one ventures out into the vast spaces opened up by Nietzsche, it is hard to set limits.” p. 213-214
  • “Hitler did not cause a rethinking of the politics here or in Europe. All to the contrary—it was while we were fighting him that the thought that had preceded him in Europe conquered here.” And it remains dominant. p. 214
  • The language of values implies that the religious is the source of everything political, social, and personal. It has been facilitated by a softening and blurring of the idea of religion and “the sacred,” which are no longer seen as dangerous.
  • “As an image of our current intellectual condition, I keep being reminded of the newsreel pictures of Frenchmen splashing happily in the water at the seashore, enjoying the paid annual vacations legislated by Leon Blum’s Popular Front government. It was 1936, the same year Hitler was permitted to occupy the Rhineland. All our big causes amount to that kind of vacation.” p. 239
  • This is our educational crisis and opportunity. Western rationalism has culminated in a rejection of reason. Is this result necessary?” p. 240
2More

How Did Sam Bankman-Fried Get Bail? - by Ken White - 0 views

www.serioustrouble.show/...did-sam-bankman-fried-get-bail bail us justice system
shared by Javier E on 24 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • The federal bail system’s presumption of release makes it better and more humane than most state systems
  • But you can still see the impact of wealth. First, because Sam Bankman-Fried broke the law by (allegedly) stealing billions of dollars instead of by being paid a hundred bucks to transport half a key of black tar heroin, there was no presumption he should be detained. That reflects society’s values. Moreover, rich people are more easily able to satisfy elaborate bail conditions. They have stable families in whose homes they can live, their families can post substantial home equity, they can afford the cost of home monitoring, they can afford to travel back and forth from home to court, they have rich friends who will sign bonds pledging money. Poor people don’t have those things, and so the magistrate judge finds that no combination of conditions — that is, no combination of conditions that this defendant can meet — will assure they won’t be a flight risk or a danger.
30More

Opinion | Let's Imagine We Knew Exactly How the Pandemic Started - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...covid-lab-leak-theory.html pandemic origins ambiguity debate politics
shared by Javier E on 13 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • To some, it all sounds like noise. “Whether Covid came accidentally from a lab in Wuhan or a seafood market is almost beside the point,” Edward Luce wrote in The Financial Times last month,
  • This has always struck me as an exceedingly strange perspective. Perhaps it is a truism to say that the events that brought about the deaths of perhaps 20 million people around the world and the jagged disruption of many billions of other lives are of enormous consequence and that dismissing the matter of its cause as simply a “blame game” is a form of not just historical but moral incuriosity.
  • It is consequential as long as it remains unresolved, as well. That’s because our collective uncertainty about the origin of the pandemic has itself shaped the way we’ve come to think about what we’ve all just lived through, the way we responded in the first place and the way the pandemic has played out, often weaponized, in geopolitics.
  • ...27 more annotations...
  • Three years since its start we are still more likely to see the pandemic in partisan rather than world-historical terms. And the grandly tragic story of the pandemic takes on a profoundly different shape and color depending on the nature of its first act.
  • In a world where a natural origin was confirmed beyond all doubt, we might look back and narrate the pandemic as one particular kind of story: a morality tale showcasing the incomplete triumph of modern civilization and the enduring threats from nature, and highlighting the way that, whatever we might have told ourselves in 2019 or 2009 about the fortress of the wealthy world, pandemic disease remained a humbling civilization-scale challenge no nation had very good answers for.
  • in a world where a lab-leak origin had been confirmed instead, we would probably find ourselves telling a very different set of stories — primarily about humanity’s Icarian hubris, or perhaps about scientists’ Faustian indifference to the downside risks of new research, or the way in which very human impulses to cover up mistakes and wrongdoing might have compounded those mistakes to disastrous global effect.
  • It would have been, “We brought this on ourselves.” Or perhaps, if we were feeling xenophobic rather than humbly human, “They brought this on us,”
  • the pandemic would probably have joined nuclear weapons as a conventional illustration of the dark side of human knowledge, perhaps even surpassed them — 20 million dead is nothing to trifle with, after all, though it remains less than the overall death toll of World War II or even the Great Leap Forward.
  • the horror would also offer a silver lining: If human action was responsible for this pandemic, then in theory, human action could prevent the next one as well.
  • if the figures are even mostly reliable, they reflect a remarkable indifference on the part of the country to the source of a once-in-a-century disease disaster
  • It is as though we’ve decided both that the pandemic was “man-made” and that its emergence was a kind of inevitability we can’t do much about.
  • a definitive confirmation of a lab origin probably would not mean that responsibility lay in any simplistic way with China. But that isn’t to say the case wouldn’t have been made, probably in a variety of forms — calls for “reparations,” demands for global provision of free vaccines — that would only have contributed additional antagonism and resentment to the world stage, further polarizing the great-power landscape.
  • It would be as though following a catastrophic earthquake, we didn’t bother to sort out whether it had been caused by local fracking but instead argued endlessly about the imperfections of disaster response
  • as we piece together a working history of the past few years, you might hope we’d grow more focused on nailing the story down.
  • it seems likely to me that in the very earliest days of 2020, with cases exploding in China but not yet elsewhere, knowing that the disease was a result of gain-of-function research and had escaped from a lab probably would have produced an even more significant wave of global fear
  • n a world where neither narrative has been confirmed, and where pandemic origins are governed by an epistemological fog, I worry we have begun to collate the two stories in a somewhat paradoxical and self-defeating way
  • presumably, many fewer people contemplating the initial news would’ve assumed that the outbreak would be largely limited to Asia, as previous outbreaks had been; public health messengers in places like the United States probably would not have so casually reassuring; and even more dramatic circuit-breaking responses like a monthlong international travel ban might’ve been instituted quite quickly
  • As the pandemic wore on, I suspect that effect would have lingered beyond the initial panic. At first, it might’ve been harder to decide that the virus was just something to live with if we knew simultaneously that it was something introduced to the world in error.
  • And later, when the vaccines arrived, I suspect there might have been considerably less resistance to them, particularly on the American right, where anxiety and xenophobia might have trumped public-health skepticism and legacy anti-vaccine sentiment
  • the opposite counterfactual is just as illuminating
  • The question and its unresolvability have mattered enormously for geopolitics,
  • it is hard to think “superbug” and not panic.
  • The disease and global response may well have accelerated our “new Cold War,” as Luce writes, but it is hard to imagine an alternate history where a known lab-leak origin didn’t move the world there much faster.
  • On the other hand, the natural logic of a confirmed zoonotic origin would probably have been to push nations of the world closer together into networks of collaboration and cooperation
  • the direction of change would have most likely been toward more integration rather than less. After all, this is to some degree what happened in the wake of the initial outbreaks of SARS and MERS and the Ebola outbreaks of the past decade.
  • Instead, the geopolitics remain unsteady, which is to say, a bit jagged
  • The United States can weaponize a narrative about lab origin — as China hawks in both the Trump and Biden administrations have repeatedly done — without worrying too much about providing real proof or suffering concrete backlash.
  • And China can stonewall origin investigations by citing sovereignty rights and a smoke screen story about the disease originating in frozen food shipped in from abroad without paying much of an international price for the intransigence or bad-faith argumentation, either.
  • each has carried forward a gripe that needn’t be substantiated in order to be deployed.
  • ambiguity also offers plausible deniability, which means that without considerably more Chinese transparency and cooperation, those pushing both stories will find themselves still making only probabilistic cases. We’re probably going to be living with that uncertainty, in a political and social world shaped by it, for the foreseeable future
56More

Opinion | America, China and a Crisis of Trust - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...hina-america-relationship.html china america crisis rivalry culture politics history
shared by Javier E on 16 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • some eye-popping new realities about what’s really eating away at U.S.-China relations.
  • The new, new thing has a lot to do with the increasingly important role that trust, and its absence, plays in international relations, now that so many goods and services that the United States and China sell to one another are digital, and therefore dual use — meaning they can be both a weapon and a tool.
  • In the last 23 years America has built exactly one sort-of-high-speed rail line, the Acela, serving 15 stops between Washington, D.C., and Boston. Think about that: 900 to 15.
  • ...53 more annotations...
  • it is easy to forget how much we have in common as people. I can’t think of any major nation after the United States with more of a Protestant work ethic and naturally capitalist population than China.
  • These days, it is extremely difficult for a visiting columnist to get anyone — a senior official or a Starbucks barista — to speak on the record. It was not that way a decade ago.
  • The Communist Party’s hold is also a product of all the hard work and savings of the Chinese people, which have enabled the party and the state to build world-class infrastructure and public goods that make life for China’s middle and lower classes steadily better.
  • Beijing and Shanghai, in particular, have become very livable cities, with the air pollution largely erased and lots of new, walkable green spaces.
  • some 900 cities and towns in China are now served by high-speed rail, which makes travel to even remote communities incredibly cheap, easy and comfortable
  • Just when trust has become more important than ever between the U.S. and China, it also has become scarcer than ever. Bad trend.
  • China’s stability is a product of both an increasingly pervasive police state and a government that has steadily raised standards of living. It’s a regime that takes both absolute control and relentless nation-building seriously.
  • For an American to fly from New York’s Kennedy Airport into Beijing Capital International Airport today is to fly from an overcrowded bus terminal to a Disney-like Tomorrowland.
  • China got an early jump on A.I. in two realms — facial recognition technology and health records — because there are virtually no privacy restrictions on the government’s ability to build huge data sets for machine learning algorithms to find patterns.
  • “ChatGPT is prompting some people to ask if the U.S. is rising again, like in the 1990s,”
  • “I understand your feeling: You have been in the first place for a century, and now China is rising, and we have the potential to become the first — and that is not easy for you,” Hu said to me. But “you should not try to stop China’s development. You can’t contain China in the end. We are quite smart. And very diligent. We work very hard. And we have 1.4 billion people.”
  • Before the Trump presidency, he added: “We never thought China-U.S. relations would ever become so bad. Now we gradually accept the situation, and most Chinese people think there is no hope for better relations. We think the relationship will be worse and worse and hope that war will not break out between our two countries.”
  • A lot of people hesitated when I asked. Indeed, many would answer with some version of “I’m not sure, I just know that it’s THEIR fault.”
  • t was repeated conversations like these that got me started asking American, Chinese and Taiwanese investors, analysts and officials a question that has been nagging at me for a while: What exactly are America and China fighting about?
  • the real answer is so much deeper and more complex than just the usual one-word response — “Taiwan” — or the usual three-word response — “autocracy versus democracy.”
  • Let me try to peel back the layers. The erosion in U.S.-China relations is a result of something old and obvious — a traditional great-power rivalry between an incumbent power (us) and a rising power (China) — but with lots of new twists
  • One of the twists, though, is that this standard-issue great-power rivalry is occurring between nations that have become as economically intertwined as the strands of a DNA molecule. As a result, neither China nor America has ever had a rival quite like the other.
  • in modern times, China, like America, has never had to deal with a true economic and military peer with which it was also totally intertwined through trade and investment.
  • Another new twist, and a reason it’s hard to define exactly what we’re fighting about, has a lot to do with how this elusive issue of trust and the absence of it have suddenly assumed much greater importance in international affairs.
  • This is a byproduct of our new technological ecosystem in which more and more devices and services that we both use and trade are driven by microchips and software, and connected through data centers in the cloud and high-speed internet
  • so many more things became “dual use.” That is, technologies that can easily be converted from civilian tools to military weapons, or vice versa.
  • no one country or company can own the whole supply chain. You need the best from everywhere, and that supply chain is so tightly intertwined that each company has to trust the others intimately.
  • when we install the ability to sense, digitize, connect, process, learn, share and act into more and more things — from your GPS-enabled phone to your car to your toaster to your favorite app — they all become dual use, either weapons or tools depending on who controls the software running them and who owns the data that they spin off.
  • As long as most of what China sold us was shallow goods, we did not care as much about its political system — doubly so because it seemed for a while as if China was slowly but steadily becoming more and more integrated with the world and slightly more open and transparent every year. So, it was both easy and convenient to set aside some of our worries about the dark sides of its political system.
  • when you want to sell us ‘deep goods’ — goods that are dual use and will go deep into our homes, bedrooms, industries, chatbots and urban infrastructure — we don’t have enough trust to buy them. So, we are going to ban Huawei and instead pay more to buy our 5G telecom systems from Scandinavian companies we do trust: Ericsson and Nokia.”
  • as we’ve seen in Ukraine, a smartphone can be used by Grandma to call the grandkids or to call a Ukrainian rocket-launching unit and give it the GPS coordinates of a Russian tank in her backyard.
  • So today, the country or countries that can make the fastest, most powerful and most energy efficient microchips can make the biggest A.I. computers and dominate in economics and military affairs.
  • As more and more products and services became digitized and electrified, the microchips that powered everything became the new oil. What crude oil was to powering 19th- and 20th-century economies, microchips are for powering 21st-century economies.
  • When you ask them what is the secret that enables TSMC to make 90 percent of the world’s most advanced logic chips — while China, which speaks the same language and shares the same recent cultural history, makes zero — their answer is simple: “trust.”
  • TSMC is a semiconductor foundry, meaning it takes the designs of the most advanced computer companies in the world — Apple, Qualcomm, Nvidia, AMD and others — and turns the designs into chips that perform different processing functions
  • TSMC makes two solemn oaths to its customers: TSMC will never compete against them by designing its own chips and it will never share the designs of one of its customers with another.
  • “Our business is to serve multiple competitive clients,” Kevin Zhang, senior vice president for business development at TSMC, explained to me. “We are committed not to compete with any of them, and internally our people who serve customer A will never leak their information to customer C.”
  • But by working with so many trusted partners, TSMC leverages the partners’ steadily more complex designs to make itself better — and the better it gets, the more advanced designs it can master for its customers. This not only requires incredibly tight collaboration between TSMC and its customers, but also between TSMC and its roughly 1,000 critical local and global suppliers.
  • As the physics of chip making gets more and more extreme, “the investment from customers is getting bigger and bigger, so they have to work with us more closely to make sure they harvest as much [computing power] as they can. They have to trust you.”
  • China also has a foundry, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, which is partly state-owned. But guess what? Because no global chip designers trust SMIC with their most advanced designs, it is at least a decade behind TSMC.
  • It’s for these reasons that the erosion in U.S.-China relations goes beyond our increasingly sharp disagreements over Taiwan. It is rooted in the fact that just when trust, and its absence, became much bigger factors in international affairs and commerce, China changed its trajectory. It made itself a less trusted partner right when the most important technology for the 21st century — semiconductors — required unprecedented degrees of trust to manufacture and more and more devices and services became deep and dual use.
  • when American trade officials said: “Hey, you need to live up to your W.T.O. commitments to restrict state-funding of industries,” China basically said: “Why should we live by your interpretation of the rules? We are now big enough to make our own interpretations. We’re too big; you’re too late.”
  • Combined with China’s failure to come clean on what it knew about the origins of Covid-19, its crackdown on democratic freedoms in Hong Kong and on the Uyghur Muslim minority in Xinjiang, its aggressive moves to lay claim to the South China Sea, its increasing saber rattling toward Taiwan, its cozying up to Vladimir Putin (despite his savaging of Ukraine), Xi’s moves toward making himself president for life, his kneecapping of China’s own tech entrepreneurs, his tighter restrictions on speech and the occasional abduction of a leading Chinese businessman — all of these added up to one very big thing: Whatever trust that China had built up with the West since the late 1970s evaporated at the exact moment in history when trust, and shared values, became more important than ever in a world of deep, dual-use products driven by software, connectivity and microchips.
  • it started to matter a lot more to Western nations generally and the United States in particular that this rising power — which we were now selling to or buying from all sorts of dual-use digital devices or apps — was authoritarian.
  • eijing, for its part, argues that as China became a stronger global competitor to America — in deep goods like Huawei 5G — the United States simply could not handle it and decided to use its control over advanced semiconductor manufacturing and other high-tech exports from America, as well as from our allies, to ensure China always remained in our rearview mirror
  • Beijing came up with a new strategy, called “dual circulation.” It said: We will use state-led investments to make everything we possibly can at home, to become independent of the world. And we will use our manufacturing prowess to make the world dependent on our exports.
  • Chinese officials also argue that a lot of American politicians — led by Trump but echoed by many in Congress — suddenly seemed to find it very convenient to put the blame for economic troubles in the U.S.’s middle class not on any educational deficiencies, or a poor work ethic, or automation or the 2008 looting by financial elites, and the crisis that followed, but on China’s exports to the United States.
  • As Beijing sees it, China not only became America’s go-to boogeyman, but in their frenzy to blame Beijing for everything, members of Congress started to more recklessly promote Taiwan’s independence.
  • Xi told President Biden at their summit in Bali in November, in essence: I will not be the president of China who loses Taiwan. If you force my hand, there will be war. You don’t understand how important this is to the Chinese people. You’re playing with fire.
  • at some level Chinese officials now understand that, as a result of their own aggressive actions in recent years on all the fronts I’ve listed, they have frightened both the world and their own innovators at precisely the wrong time.
  • I don’t buy the argument that we are destined for war. I believe that we are doomed to compete with each other, doomed to cooperate with each other and doomed to find some way to balance the two. Otherwise we are both going to have a very bad 21st century.
  • I have to say, though, Americans and Chinese remind me of Israelis and Palestinians in one respect: They are both expert at aggravating the other’s deepest insecurities.
  • China’s Communist Party is now convinced that America wants to bring it down, which some U.S. politicians are actually no longer shy about suggesting. So, Beijing is ready to crawl into bed with Putin, a war criminal, if that is what it takes to keep the Americans at bay.
  • Americans are now worried that Communist China, which got rich by taking advantage of a global market shaped by American rules, will use its newfound market power to unilaterally change those rules entirely to its advantage. So we’ve decided to focus our waning strength vis-à-vis Beijing on ensuring the Chinese will always be a decade behind us on microchips.
  • I don’t know what is sufficient to reverse these trends, but I think I know what is necessary.
  • If it is not the goal of U.S. foreign policy to topple the Communist regime in China, the United States needs to make that crystal clear, because I found a lot more people than ever before in Beijing think otherwise.
  • As for China, it can tell itself all it wants that it has not taken a U-turn in recent years. But no one is buying it. China will never realize its full potential — in a hyper-connected, digitized, deep, dual-use, semiconductor-powered world — unless it understands that establishing and maintaining trust is now the single most important competitive advantage any country or company can have. And Beijing is failing in that endeavor.
  • In his splendid biography of the great American statesman George Shultz, Philip Taubman quotes one of Shultz’s cardinal rules of diplomacy and life: “Trust is the coin of the realm.”
80More

Ozempic or Bust - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...678211 obesity treatment culture history policy health
shared by Javier E on 09 May 24 - No Cached
  • June 2024 Issue
  • Explore
  • it is impossible to know, in the first few years of any novel intervention, whether its success will last.
  • ...77 more annotations...
  • The ordinary fixes—the kind that draw on people’s will, and require eating less and moving more—rarely have a large or lasting effect. Indeed, America itself has suffered through a long, maddening history of failed attempts to change its habits on a national scale: a yo-yo diet of well-intentioned treatments, policies, and other social interventions that only ever lead us back to where we started
  • Through it all, obesity rates keep going up; the diabetes epidemic keeps worsening.
  • The most recent miracle, for Barb as well as for the nation, has come in the form of injectable drugs. In early 2021, the Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk published a clinical trial showing remarkable results for semaglutide, now sold under the trade names Wegovy and Ozempic.
  • Patients in the study who’d had injections of the drug lost, on average, close to 15 percent of their body weight—more than had ever been achieved with any other drug in a study of that size. Wadden knew immediately that this would be “an incredible revolution in the treatment of obesity.”
  • Many more drugs are now racing through development: survodutide, pemvidutide, retatrutide. (Among specialists, that last one has produced the most excitement: An early trial found an average weight loss of 24 percent in one group of participants.
  • In the United States, an estimated 189 million adults are classified as having obesity or being overweight
  • The drugs don’t work for everyone. Their major side effects—nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea—can be too intense for many patients. Others don’t end up losing any weight
  • For the time being, just 25 percent of private insurers offer the relevant coverage, and the cost of treatment—about $1,000 a month—has been prohibitive for many Americans.
  • The drugs have already been approved not just for people with diabetes or obesity, but for anyone who has a BMI of more than 27 and an associated health condition, such as high blood pressure or cholesterol. By those criteria, more than 140 million American adults already qualify
  • if this story goes the way it’s gone for other “risk factor” drugs such as statins and antihypertensives, then the threshold for prescriptions will be lowered over time, inching further toward the weight range we now describe as “normal.”
  • How you view that prospect will depend on your attitudes about obesity, and your tolerance for risk
  • The first GLP-1 drug to receive FDA approval, exenatide, has been used as a diabetes treatment for more than 20 years. No long-term harms have been identified—but then again, that drug’s long-term effects have been studied carefully only across a span of seven years
  • the data so far look very good. “These are now being used, literally, in hundreds of thousands of people across the world,” she told me, and although some studies have suggested that GLP-1 drugs may cause inflammation of the pancreas, or even tumor growth, these concerns have not borne out.
  • adolescents are injecting newer versions of these drugs, and may continue to do so every week for 50 years or more. What might happen over all that time?
  • “All of us, in the back of our minds, always wonder, Will something show up?  ” Although no serious problems have yet emerged, she said, “you wonder, and you worry.”
  • in light of what we’ve been through, it’s hard to see what other choices still remain. For 40 years, we’ve tried to curb the spread of obesity and its related ailments, and for 40 years, we’ve failed. We don’t know how to fix the problem. We don’t even understand what’s really causing it. Now, again, we have a new approach. This time around, the fix had better work.
  • The fen-phen revolution arrived at a crucial turning point for Wadden’s field, and indeed for his career. By then he’d spent almost 15 years at the leading edge of research into dietary interventions, seeing how much weight a person might lose through careful cutting of their calories.
  • But that sort of diet science—and the diet culture that it helped support—had lately come into a state of ruin. Americans were fatter than they’d ever been, and they were giving up on losing weight. According to one industry group, the total number of dieters in the country declined by more than 25 percent from 1986 to 1991.
  • Rejecting diet culture became something of a feminist cause. “A growing number of women are joining in an anti-diet movement,” The New York Times reported in 1992. “They are forming support groups and ceasing to diet with a resolve similar to that of secretaries who 20 years ago stopped getting coffee for their bosses.
  • Now Wadden and other obesity researchers were reaching a consensus that behavioral interventions might produce in the very best scenario an average lasting weight loss of just 5 to 10 percent
  • National surveys completed in 1994 showed that the adult obesity rate had surged by more than half since 1980, while the proportion of children classified as overweight had doubled. The need for weight control in America had never seemed so great, even as the chances of achieving it were never perceived to be so small.
  • Wadden wasn’t terribly concerned, because no one in his study had reported any heart symptoms. But ultrasounds revealed that nearly one-third of them had some degree of leakage in their heart valves. His “cure for obesity” was in fact a source of harm.
  • In December 1994, the Times ran an editorial on what was understood to be a pivotal discovery: A genetic basis for obesity had finally been found. Researchers at Rockefeller University were investigating a molecule, later named leptin, that gets secreted from fat cells and travels to the brain, and that causes feelings of satiety. Lab mice with mutations in the leptin gene—importantly, a gene also found in humans—overeat until they’re three times the size of other mice. “The finding holds out the dazzling hope,”
  • In April 1996, the doctors recommended yes: Dexfenfluramine was approved—and became an instant blockbuster. Patients received prescriptions by the hundreds of thousands every month. Sketchy wellness clinics—call toll-free, 1-888-4FEN-FEN—helped meet demand. Then, as now, experts voiced concerns about access. Then, as now, they worried that people who didn’t really need the drugs were lining up to take them. By the end of the year, sales of “fen” alone had surpassed $300 million.
  • It was nothing less than an awakening, for doctors and their patients alike. Now a patient could be treated for excess weight in the same way they might be treated for diabetes or hypertension—with a drug they’d have to take for the rest of their life.
  • the article heralded a “new understanding of obesity as a chronic disease rather than a failure of willpower.”
  • News had just come out that, at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, two dozen women taking fen-phen—including six who were, like Barb, in their 30s—had developed cardiac conditions. A few had needed surgery, and on the operating table, doctors discovered that their heart valves were covered with a waxy plaque.
  • Americans had been prescribed regular fenfluramine since 1973, and the newer drug, dexfenfluramine, had been available in France since 1985. Experts took comfort in this history. Using language that is familiar from today’s assurances regarding semaglutide and other GLP-1 drugs, they pointed out that millions were already on the medication. “It is highly unlikely that there is anything significant in toxicity to the drug that hasn’t been picked up with this kind of experience,” an FDA official named James Bilstad would later say in a Time cover story headlined “The Hot New Diet Pill.
  • “I know I can’t get any more,” she told Williams. “I have to use up what I have. And then I don’t know what I’m going to do after that. That’s the problem—and that is what scares me to death.” Telling people to lose weight the “natural way,” she told another guest, who was suggesting that people with obesity need only go on low-carb diets, is like “asking a person with a thyroid condition to just stop their medication.”
  • She’d gone off the fen-phen and had rapidly regained weight. “The voices returned and came back in a furor I’d never heard before,” Barb later wrote on her blog. “It was as if they were so angry at being silenced for so long, they were going to tell me 19 months’ worth of what they wanted me to hear. I was forced to listen. And I ate. And I ate. And ate.”
  • For Barb, rapid weight loss has brought on a different metaphysical confusion. When she looks in the mirror, she sometimes sees her shape as it was two years ago. In certain corners of the internet, this is known as “phantom fat syndrome,” but Barb dislikes that term. She thinks it should be called “body integration syndrome,” stemming from a disconnect between your “larger-body memory” and “smaller-body reality.
  • In 2003, the U.S. surgeon general declared obesity “the terror within, a threat that is every bit as real to America as the weapons of mass destruction”; a few months later, Eric Finkelstein, an economist who studies the social costs of obesity, put out an influential paper finding that excess weight was associated with up to $79 billion in health-care spending in 1998, of which roughly half was paid by Medicare and Medicaid. (Later he’d conclude that the number had nearly doubled in a decade.
  • In 2004, Finkelstein attended an Action on Obesity summit hosted by the Mayo Clinic, at which numerous social interventions were proposed, including calorie labeling in workplace cafeterias and mandatory gym class for children of all grades.
  • he message at their core, that soda was a form of poison like tobacco, spread. In San Francisco and New York, public-service campaigns showed images of soda bottles pouring out a stream of glistening, blood-streaked fat. Michelle Obama led an effort to depict water—plain old water—as something “cool” to drink.
  • Soon, the federal government took up many of the ideas that Brownell had helped popularize. Barack Obama had promised while campaigning for president that if America’s obesity trends could be reversed, the Medicare system alone would save “a trillion dollars.” By fighting fat, he implied, his ambitious plan for health-care reform would pay for itself. Once he was in office, his administration pulled every policy lever it could.
  • Michelle Obama helped guide these efforts, working with marketing experts to develop ways of nudging kids toward better diets and pledging to eliminate “food deserts,” or neighborhoods that lacked convenient access to healthy, affordable food. She was relentless in her public messaging; she planted an organic garden at the White House and promoted her signature “Let’s Move!” campaign around the country.
  • An all-out war on soda would come to stand in for these broad efforts. Nutrition studies found that half of all Americans were drinking sugar-sweetened beverages every day, and that consumption of these accounted for one-third of the added sugar in adults’ diets. Studies turned up links between people’s soft-drink consumption and their risks for type 2 diabetes and obesity. A new strand of research hinted that “liquid calories” in particular were dangerous to health.
  • when their field lost faith in low-calorie diets as a source of lasting weight loss, the two friends went in opposite directions. Wadden looked for ways to fix a person’s chemistry, so he turned to pharmaceuticals. Brownell had come to see obesity as a product of our toxic food environment: He meant to fix the world to which a person’s chemistry responded, so he started getting into policy.
  • The social engineering worked. Slowly but surely, Americans’ lamented lifestyle began to shift. From 2001 to 2018, added-sugar intake dropped by about one-fifth among children, teens, and young adults. From the late 1970s through the early 2000s, the obesity rate among American children had roughly tripled; then, suddenly, it flattened out.
  • although the obesity rate among adults was still increasing, its climb seemed slower than before. Americans’ long-standing tendency to eat ever-bigger portions also seemed to be abating.
  • sugary drinks—liquid candy, pretty much—were always going to be a soft target for the nanny state. Fixing the food environment in deeper ways proved much harder. “The tobacco playbook pretty much only works for soda, because that’s the closest analogy we have as a food item,
  • that tobacco playbook doesn’t work to increase consumption of fruits and vegetables, he said. It doesn’t work to increase consumption of beans. It doesn’t work to make people eat more nuts or seeds or extra-virgin olive oil.
  • Careful research in the past decade has shown that many of the Obama-era social fixes did little to alter behavior or improve our health. Putting calorie labels on menus seemed to prompt at most a small decline in the amount of food people ate. Employer-based wellness programs (which are still offered by 80 percent of large companies) were shown to have zero tangible effects. Health-care spending, in general, kept going up.
  • From the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s, the proportion of adults who said they’d experienced discrimination on account of their height or weight increased by two-thirds, going up to 12 percent. Puhl and others started citing evidence that this form of discrimination wasn’t merely a source of psychic harm, but also of obesity itself. Studies found that the experience of weight discrimination is associated with overeating, and with the risk of weight gain over time.
  • obesity rates resumed their ascent. Today, 20 percent of American children have obesity. For all the policy nudges and the sensible revisions to nutrition standards, food companies remain as unfettered as they were in the 1990s, Kelly Brownell told me. “Is there anything the industry can’t do now that it was doing then?” he asked. “The answer really is no. And so we have a very predictable set of outcomes.”
  • she started to rebound. The openings into her gastric pouch—the section of her stomach that wasn’t bypassed—stretched back to something like their former size. And Barb found ways to “eat around” the surgery, as doctors say, by taking food throughout the day in smaller portions
  • Bariatric surgeries can be highly effective for some people and nearly useless for others. Long-term studies have found that 30 percent of those who receive the same procedure Barb did regain at least one-quarter of what they lost within two years of reaching their weight nadir; more than half regain that much within five years.
  • if the effects of Barb’s surgery were quickly wearing off, its side effects were not: She now had iron, calcium, and B12 deficiencies resulting from the changes to her gut. She looked into getting a revision of the surgery—a redo, more or less—but insurance wouldn’t cover it
  • She found that every health concern she brought to doctors might be taken as a referendum, in some way, on her body size. “If I stubbed my toe or whatever, they’d just say ‘Lose weight.’ ” She began to notice all the times she’d be in a waiting room and find that every chair had arms. She realized that if she was having a surgical procedure, she’d need to buy herself a plus-size gown—or else submit to being covered with a bedsheet when the nurses realized that nothing else would fit.
  • Barb grew angrier and more direct about her needs—You’ll have to find me a different chair, she started saying to receptionists. Many others shared her rage. Activists had long decried the cruel treatment of people with obesity: The National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance had existed, for example, in one form or another, since 1969; the Council on Size & Weight Discrimination had been incorporated in 1991. But in the early 2000s, the ideas behind this movement began to wend their way deeper into academia, and they soon gained some purchase with the public.
  • “Our public-health efforts to address obesity have failed,” Eric Finkelstein, the economist, told me.
  • Others attacked the very premise of a “healthy weight”: People do not have any fundamental need, they argued, morally or medically, to strive for smaller bodies as an end in itself. They called for resistance to the ideology of anti-fatness, with its profit-making arms in health care and consumer goods. The Association for Size Diversity and Health formed in 2003; a year later, dozens of scholars working on weight-related topics joined together to create the academic field of fat studies.
  • As the size-diversity movement grew, its values were taken up—or co-opted—by Big Business. Dove had recently launched its “Campaign for Real Beauty,” which included plus-size women. (Ad Age later named it the best ad campaign of the 21st century.) People started talking about “fat shaming” as something to avoid
  • By 2001, Bacon, who uses they/them pronouns, had received their Ph.D. and finished a rough draft of a book, Health at Every Size, which drew inspiration from a broader movement by that name among health-care practitioners
  • But something shifted in the ensuing years. In 2007, Bacon got a different response, and the book was published. Health at Every Size became a point of entry for a generation of young activists and, for a time, helped shape Americans’ understanding of obesity.
  • Some experts were rethinking their advice on food and diet. At UC Davis, a physiologist named Lindo Bacon who had struggled to overcome an eating disorder had been studying the effects of “intuitive eating,” which aims to promote healthy, sustainable behavior without fixating on what you weigh or how you look
  • The heightened sensitivity started showing up in survey data, too. In 2010, fewer than half of U.S. adults expressed support for giving people with obesity the same legal protections from discrimination offered to people with disabilities. In 2015, that rate had risen to three-quarters.
  • In Bacon’s view, the 2000s and 2010s were glory years. “People came together and they realized that they’re not alone, and they can start to be critical of the ideas that they’ve been taught,” Bacon told me. “We were on this marvelous path of gaining more credibility for the whole Health at Every Size movement, and more awareness.”
  • that sense of unity proved short-lived; the movement soon began to splinter. Black women have the highest rates of obesity, and disproportionately high rates of associated health conditions. Yet according to Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity-medicine physician at Harvard Medical School, Black patients with obesity get lower-quality care than white patients with obesity.
  • That system was exactly what Bacon and the Health at Every Size movement had set out to reform. The problem, as they saw it, was not so much that Black people lacked access to obesity medicine, but that, as Bacon and the Black sociologist Sabrina Strings argued in a 2020 article, Black women have been “specifically targeted” for weight loss, which Bacon and Strings saw as a form of racism
  • But members of the fat-acceptance movement pointed out that their own most visible leaders, including Bacon, were overwhelmingly white. “White female dietitians have helped steal and monetize the body positive movement,” Marquisele Mercedes, a Black activist and public-health Ph.D. student, wrote in September 2020. “And I’m sick of it.”
  • Tensions over who had the standing to speak, and on which topics, boiled over. In 2022, following allegations that Bacon had been exploitative and condescending toward Black colleagues, the Association for Size Diversity and Health expelled them from its ranks and barred them from attending its events.
  • As the movement succumbed to in-fighting, its momentum with the public stalled. If attitudes about fatness among the general public had changed during the 2000s and 2010s, it was only to a point. The idea that some people can indeed be “fit but fat,” though backed up by research, has always been a tough sell.
  • Although Americans had become less inclined to say they valued thinness, measures of their implicit attitudes seemed fairly stable. Outside of a few cities such as San Francisco and Madison, Wisconsin, new body-size-discrimination laws were never passed.
  • In the meantime, thinness was coming back into fashion
  • In the spring of 2022, Kim Kardashian—whose “curvy” physique has been a media and popular obsession—boasted about crash-dieting in advance of the Met Gala. A year later, the model and influencer Felicity Hayward warned Vogue Business that “plus-size representation has gone backwards.” In March of this year, the singer Lizzo, whose body pride has long been central to her public persona, told The New York Times that she’s been trying to lose weight. “I’m not going to lie and say I love my body every day,” she said.
  • Among the many other dramatic effects of the GLP-1 drugs, they may well have released a store of pent-up social pressure to lose weight.
  • If ever there was a time to debate that impulse, and to question its origins and effects, it would be now. But Puhl told me that no one can even agree on which words are inoffensive. The medical field still uses obesity, as a description of a diagnosable disease. But many activists despise that phrase—some spell it with an asterisk in place of the e—and propose instead to reclaim fat.
  • Everyone seems to agree on the most important, central fact: that we should be doing everything we can to limit weight stigma. But that hasn’t been enough to stop the arguing.
  • Things feel surreal these days to just about anyone who has spent years thinking about obesity. At 71, after more than four decades in the field, Thomas Wadden now works part-time, seeing patients just a few days a week. But the arrival of the GLP-1 drugs has kept him hanging on for a few more years, he said. “It’s too much of an exciting period to leave obesity research right now.”
  • When everyone is on semaglutide or tirzepatide, will the soft-drink companies—Brownell’s nemeses for so many years—feel as if a burden has been lifted? “My guess is the food industry is probably really happy to see these drugs come along,” he said. They’ll find a way to reach the people who are taking GLP‑1s, with foods and beverages in smaller portions, maybe. At the same time, the pressures to cut back on where and how they sell their products will abate.
  • the triumph in obesity treatment only highlights the abiding mystery of why Americans are still getting fatter, even now
  • Perhaps one can lay the blame on “ultraprocessed” foods, he said. Maybe it’s a related problem with our microbiomes. Or it could be that obesity, once it takes hold within a population, tends to reproduce itself through interactions between a mother and a fetus. Others have pointed to increasing screen time, how much sleep we get, which chemicals are in the products that we use, and which pills we happen to take for our many other maladies.
  • “The GLP-1s are just a perfect example of how poorly we understand obesity,” Mozaffarian told me. “Any explanation of why they cause weight loss is all post-hoc hand-waving now, because we have no idea. We have no idea why they really work and people are losing weight.”
  • The new drugs—and the “new understanding of obesity” that they have supposedly occasioned—could end up changing people’s attitudes toward body size. But in what ways
  • When the American Medical Association declared obesity a disease in 2013, Rebecca Puhl told me, some thought “it might reduce stigma, because it was putting more emphasis on the uncontrollable factors that contribute to obesity.” Others guessed that it would do the opposite, because no one likes to be “diseased.”
  • why wasn’t there another kind of nagging voice that wouldn’t stop—a sense of worry over what the future holds? And if she wasn’t worried for herself, then what about for Meghann or for Tristan, who are barely in their 40s? Wouldn’t they be on these drugs for another 40 years, or even longer? But Barb said she wasn’t worried—not at all. “The technology is so much better now.” If any problems come up, the scientists will find solutions.
5More

Percival Everett Can't Say What His Novels Mean | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...percival-everett-profile music history jazz culture
shared by Javier E on 26 Mar 24 - No Cached
  • The more I read Everett’s work, the more my thoughts turned to jazz. “It is the player who, by improvising, makes jazz,” Bernstein said. “He uses the popular song as a kind of dummy to hang his notes on. He dresses it up in his own way and it comes out an original.”
  • A jazz player may reference sheet music, but the resulting performance—animated by intuition and impulse—exceeds the descriptive capacities of the language it draws from.
  • Everett is not the first to reimagine Huck and Jim’s coupling, which other artists have interpreted as romantic or paternal. But he is perhaps the first to try to invert it. In “James,” Huck is Jim’s shameful appendage, the object of Jim’s resentful affection. He is the secret Jim can’t give up, the wedge that cleaves Jim’s family
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • James Baldwin compared it to the talking drum, used to convey messages across distances that the human voice can’t travel: “It is a music which creates, as what we call History cannot sum up the courage to do, the response to that absolutely universal question: Who am I? What am I doing here?”
  • it’s difficult not to read “James” as a corrective of Everett’s previous works, if not of its source material. For Jim’s predecessors, freedom requires abstraction: the problem is other people. But Jim’s understanding of freedom is literal. He knows that his happiness depends upon the emancipation of his family. At first, he wields a pencil, but then he exchanges it for a gun.
9More

How Boeing Favored Speed Over Quality for the 737 Max - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ng-quality-problems-speed.html boeing quality
shared by Javier E on 28 Mar 24 - No Cached
  • After the Max 8 crashes, Boeing and its regulators focused most on the cause of those accidents: flawed design and software. Yet some current and former employees say problems with manufacturing quality were also apparent to them at the time and should have been to executives and regulators as well.
  • Davin Fischer, a former mechanic in Renton, who also spoke to the Seattle TV station KIRO 7, said he noticed a cultural shift starting around 2017, when the company introduced the Max.
  • “They were trying to get the plane rate up and then just kept crunching, crunching and crunching to go faster, faster, faster,” he said.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • When the pandemic took hold in early 2020, air travel plummeted, and many aviation executives believed it would take years for passengers to return in large numbers. Boeing began to cut jobs and encouraged workers to take buyouts or retire early. It ultimately lost about 19,000 employees companywide — including some with decades of experience.
  • Current and former Boeing employees, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to reporters and feared retaliation, offered examples of how quality has suffered over the years. Many said they still respected the company and its employees and wanted Boeing to succeed.
  • “For years, we prioritized the movement of the airplane through the factory over getting it done right, and that’s got to change,” Brian West, the company’s chief financial officer, said at an investor conference last week.
  • In late 2022, Boeing lost veteran engineers who retired to lock in bigger monthly pension payments, which were tied to interest rates, according to the union that represents them,
  • “We warned Boeing that it was going to lose a mountain of expertise, and we proposed some workarounds, but the company blew us off,” Ray Goforth, executive director of the union, said in a statement, adding that he thought the company used the retirements as an opportunity to cut costs by replacing veteran workers with “lower-paid entry-level engineers and technical workers.”
  • the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers union, which represents more than 30,000 Boeing employees, said the average tenure of its members had dropped sharply in recent years. The proportion of its members who have less than six years of experience has roughly doubled to 50 percent from 25 percent before the pandemic.
17More

Opinion | Administrators Will Be the End of Us - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...american-life-bureaucracy.html bureaucracy administration populism culture history crisis
shared by Javier E on 19 Jan 24 - No Cached
  • I looked into the growing bureaucratization of American life. It’s not only that growing bureaucracies cost a lot of money; they also enervate American society. They redistribute power from workers to rule makers, and in so doing sap initiative, discretion, creativity and drive.
  • . Over a third of all health care costs go to administration. As the health care expert David Himmelstein put it in 2020, “The average American is paying more than $2,000 a year for useless bureaucracy.”
  • The growth of bureaucracy costs America over $3 trillion in lost economic output every year, Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini estimated in 2016 in The Harvard Business Review
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • 17 percent of G.D.P.
  • there is now one administrator or manager for every 4.7 employees, doing things like designing anti-harassment trainings, writing corporate mission statements, collecting data and managing “systems.”
  • This situation is especially grave in higher education. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology now has almost eight times as many nonfaculty employees as faculty employees
  • The general job of administrators, who are invariably good and well-meaning people, is to supervise and control, and they gain power and job security by hiring more people to work for them to create more supervision and control
  • As Philip K. Howard has been arguing for years, good organizations give people discretion to do what is right. But the trend in public and private sector organizations has been to write rules that rob people of the power of discretion
  • Their power is similar to what Annie Lowrey of The Atlantic has called the “time tax.” If you’ve ever fought a health care, corporate or university bureaucracy, you quickly realize you don’t have the time for it, so you give up
  • kids’ activities, from travel sports to recess, are supervised, and rules dominate. Parents are afraid their kids might be harmed, but as Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff have argued, by being overprotective, parents make their kids more fragile and more vulnerable to harm.
  • High school students design their lives to fit the metrics that college admissions officers require. And what traits are selective schools looking for? They’re looking for students who are willing to conform to the formulas the gatekeepers devise.
  • t Stanford is apparently now tamed. I invite you to read Ginevra Davis’s essay “Stanford’s War on Social Life” in Palladium, which won a vaunted Sidney Award in 2022 and details how university administrators cracked down on student initiatives to make everything boring, supervised and safe.
  • Mark Edmundson teaches literature at the University of Virginia. The annual self-evaluations he had to submit used to be one page. Now he has to fill out about 15 electronic pages of bureaucratese that include demonstrating how his work advances D.E.I., to make sure his every waking moment conforms to the reigning ideology.
  • the whole administrative apparatus comes with an implied view of human nature. People are weak, fragile, vulnerable and kind of stupid. They need administrators to run their lives
  • The result is the soft despotism that Tocqueville warned us about centuries ago, a power that “is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild.”
  • this kind of power is now centerless. Presidents and executives don’t run companies, universities or nations. Power is now held by everyone who issues work surveys and annual reports, the people who create H.R. trainings and collect data
  • Trumpian populism is about many things, but one of them is this: working-class people rebelling against administrators. It is about people who want to lead lives of freedom, creativity and vitality, who find themselves working at jobs, sending their kids to schools and visiting hospitals, where they confront “an immense and tutelary power” (Tocqueville’s words) that is out to diminish them.
29More

Opinion | Yes, Nikki Haley, the Civil War Was About Slavery - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...haley-civil-war-slavery.html civil war US slavery causes economics politics history
shared by Javier E on 03 Jan 24 - No Cached
  • Of course the Civil War was about slavery, and everyone knew it at the time. No, Nikki Haley, it wasn’t about states’ rights, except to the extent that Southern states were trying to force Northern states to help maintain slavery
  • it may be worth delving a bit deeper into the background here. Why did slavery exist in the first place? Why was it confined to only part of the United States? And why were slaveholders willing to start a war to defend the institution, even though abolitionism was still a fairly small movement and they faced no imminent risk of losing their chattels?
  • The American system of chattel slavery wasn’t motivated primarily by racism, but by greed. Slaveholders were racists, and they used racism both to justify their behavior and to make the enslavement of millions more sustainable, but it was the money and the inhumane greed that drove the racist system.
  • ...26 more annotations...
  • there’s little reason to enserf or enslave a worker (not quite the same thing, but let’s leave that aside) if labor is abundant and land is scarce, so that the amount that worker could earn if he ran away barely exceeds the cost of subsistence.
  • But if land becomes abundant and labor scarce, the ruling class will want to pin workers in place, so they can forcibly extract the difference between the value of what workers can produce — strictly speaking, their marginal product — and the cost of keeping them alive.
  • Yet serfdom wasn’t reimposed, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear. One thought, however, is that holding people captive in order to steal the fruits of their labor isn’t easy.
  • In fact, the real historical puzzle is why high wages didn’t always lead to widespread slavery or serfdom
  • serfdom in the West had more or less withered away by around 1300, because Western Europe was overpopulated given the technologies of the time, which in turn meant that landowners didn’t need to worry that their tenants and workers would leave in search of lower rents or higher wages.
  • But the Black Death caused populations to crash and wages to soar. In fact, for a while, real wages in Britain reached a level they wouldn’t regain until around 1870:
  • Labor was scarce in pre-Civil War America, so free workers earned high wages by European standards. Here are some estimates of real wages in several countries as a percentage of U.S. levels on the eve of the Civil War:
  • Indeed, slaveholders and their defenders lashed out at anyone who even suggested that slavery was a bad thing. As Abraham Lincoln said in his Cooper Union address, the slave interest in effect demanded that Northerners “cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right.”
  • Notice that Australia — another land-abundant, labor-scarce nation — more or less matched America; elsewhere, workers earned much less.
  • Landowners, of course, didn’t want to pay high wages. In the early days of colonial settlement, many Europeans came as indentured servants — in effect, temporary serfs
  • landowners quickly turned to African slaves, who offered two advantages to their exploiters: Because they looked different from white settlers, they found it hard to escape, and they received less sympathy from poor whites who might otherwise have realized that they had many interests in common. Of course, white southerners also saw slaves as property, not people, and so the value of slaves factored into the balance sheet of this greed-driven system.
  • again, the dynamic was one in which greedy slaveholders used and perpetuated racism to sustain their reign of exploitation and terror.
  • Because U.S. slavery was race-based, however, there was a limited supply of slaves, and it turned out that slaves made more for their masters in Southern agriculture than in other occupations or places
  • Black people in the North were sold down the river to Southern planters who were willing to pay more for them, so slavery became an institution peculiar to one part of the country.
  • As such, slaves became a hugely important financial asset to their owners. Estimates of the market value of slaves before the Civil War vary widely, but they were clearly worth much more than the land they cultivated, and may well have accounted for the majority of Southern wealth.
  • Inevitably, slaveholders became staunch defenders of the system underlying their wealth
  • Hence the rise of serfdom as Russia expanded east, and the rise of slavery as Europe colonized the New World.
  • But Northerners wouldn’t do that. There were relatively few Americans pushing for national abolition, but Northern states, one by one, abolished slavery in their own territories
  • This wasn’t as noble an act as it might have been if they had been confiscating slaveholders’ property, rather than in effect waiting until the slaves had been sold. Still, it’s to voters’ credit that they did find slavery repugnant.
  • And this posed a problem for the South
  • Anyone who believes or pretends to believe that the Civil War was about states’ rights should read Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs, which point out that the truth was almost the opposite. In his conclusion, Grant noted that maintaining slavery was difficult when much of the nation consisted of free states, so the slave states in effect demanded control over free-state policies.
  • This should sound familiar. Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, states that have banned abortion have grown increasingly frantic over the ability of women to travel to states where abortion rights remain; it’s obvious that the right will eventually impose a national abortion ban if it can.
  • For a long time, the South actually did manage to exercise that kind of national control. But industrialization gradually shifted the balance of power within the United States away from the South to the North:
  • So did immigration, with very few immigrants moving to slave states.And the war happened because the increasingly empowered people of the North, as Grant wrote, “were not willing to play the role of police for the South” in protecting slavery.
  • So yes, the Civil War was about slavery — an institution that existed solely to enrich some men by depriving others of their freedom
  • And there’s no excuse for anyone who pretends that there was anything noble or even defensible about the South’s cause: The Civil War was fought to defend an utterly vile institution.
« First ‹ Previous 881 - 900 of 903 Next ›
Showing 20▼ items per page