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katyshannon

Turkey blames Kurdish militants for Ankara bomb, vows response in Syria and Iraq | Reuters - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...us-turkey-blast-idUSKCN0VQ25S

turkey ankara bomb response PKK YPG kurds syria iraq reuters crisis

shared by katyshannon on 18 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu blamed a Syrian Kurdish militia fighter working with Kurdish militants inside Turkey for a suicide car bombing that killed 28 people in the capital Ankara, and he vowed retaliation in both Syria and Iraq.
  • A car laden with explosives detonated next to military buses as they waited at traffic lights near Turkey's armed forces' headquarters, parliament and government buildings in the administrative heart of Ankara late on Wednesday.
  • Davutoglu said the attack was clear evidence that the YPG, a Syrian Kurdish militia that has been supported by the United States in the fight against Islamic State in northern Syria, was a terrorist organization and that Turkey, a NATO member, expected cooperation from its allies in combating the group.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • Within hours, Turkish warplanes bombed bases in northern Iraq of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has waged a three-decade insurgency against the Turkish state and which Davutoglu accused of collaborating in the car bombing.
  • Turkey's armed forces would continue their shelling of recent days of YPG positions in northern Syria, Davutoglu said, promising that those responsible would "pay the price".
  • President Tayyip Erdogan also said initial findings suggested the Syrian Kurdish militia and the PKK were behind the bombing and said that 14 people had been detained.
  • The co-leader of the YPG's political wing denied that the affiliated YPG perpetrated the Ankara bombing and said Turkey was using the attack to justify an escalation in fighting in northern Syria.
  • The attack was the latest in a series of bombings in the past year mostly blamed on Islamic State militants.
  • Turkey is getting dragged ever deeper into the war in neighboring Syria and is trying to contain some of the fiercest violence in decades in its predominantly Kurdish southeast.
  • The YPG militia, regarded by Ankara as a hostile insurgent force deeply linked to the PKK, has taken advantage in recent weeks of a major Syrian army offensive around the northern city of Aleppo, backed by Russian air strikes, to seize ground from Syrian rebels near the Turkish border.
  • Hundreds of Syrian rebels with weapons and vehicles have re-entered Syria from Turkey over the last week to reinforce insurgents fending off the Kurdish-led assault on Azaz, rebel sources said on Thursday.
  • The political arm of the YPG, denied involvement in the bombing, while a senior member of the PKK said he did not know who was responsible.
  • Turkey has said its shelling of YPG positions is a response, within its rules of engagement, to hostile fire coming across the border into Turkey, something Muslim also denied.
  • Turkey has been battling PKK militants in its own southeast, where a 2-1/2 year ceasefire collapsed last July and pitched the region into its worst bloodshed since the 1990s. Six soldiers were killed and one wounded on Thursday when a remote-controlled handmade bomb hit their vehicle, the military said.
  • Davutoglu named the suicide bomber as Salih Necar, born in 1992 and from the Hasakah region of northern Syria, and said he was a member of the YPG.
  • A senior security official said the alleged bomber had entered Turkey from Syria in July 2014, although he may have crossed the border illegally multiple times before that, and said he had contact with the PKK and Syrian intelligence.
  • Davutoglu also accused the Syrian government of a hand in the Ankara bombing and warned Russia, whose air strikes in northern Syria have helped the YPG to advance, against using the Kurdish militant group against Turkey.
  • Russian President Vladimir Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told a teleconference with reporters that the Kremlin condemned the bombing "in the strongest possible terms".
blaise_glowiak

Refugee crisis: Norway tells 5,500 foreigners who arrived on bikes to ride back across the border to Russia | Europe | News | The Independent - 0 views

www.independent.co.uk/...ss-the-border-to-a6812966.html

refugee crisis norway

shared by blaise_glowiak on 15 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • blaise_glowiak on 15 Jan 16
     
    Norway is preparing to send over 5,500 refugees who crossed into the country from Russia on bicycles last year back across the border by the same mode of transport. "We asked that the bikes which were left behind or claimed by the police to be gathered up for use by the foreigners who will be returned to Russia," Jan Erik Thomassen, a section head from Norway's National Police Directorate, said. "I can understand that it feels a bit awkward and odd." Norwegian authorities said they hope Russia will allow the refugees to re-enter its Russian territory by bus, which would reduce costs and provide safer passage for those making the journey. But Russia, which has remained hostile to refugees despite the influx of migrants into Europe last year, seems unlikely to comply.
maddieireland334

Iran Complies With Nuclear Deal; Sanctions Are Lifted - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tions-lifted-nuclear-deal.html

shared by maddieireland334 on 17 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • The United States and European nations lifted oil and financial sanctions on Iran and released roughly $100 billion of its assets after international inspectors concluded that the country had followed through on promises to dismantle large sections of its nuclear program.
  • Five Americans, including a Washington Post reporter, Jason Rezaian, were released by Iran hours before the nuclear accord was implemented.
  • Early on Sunday, a senior United States official confirmed that “our detained U.S. citizens have been released and that those who wished to depart Iran have left.”
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • “Iran has undertaken significant steps that many people — and I do mean many — doubted would ever come to pass,” Secretary of State John Kerry said Saturday evening at the headquarters of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which earlier issued a report detailing how Iran had shipped 98 percent of its fuel to Russia, dismantled more than 12,000 centrifuges so they could not enrich uranium, and poured cement into the core of a reactor designed to produce plutonium.
  • The release of the “unjustly detained” Americans, as Mr. Kerry put it, came at some cost: Seven Iranians, either convicted or charged with breaking American embargoes, were released in the prisoner swap, and 14 others were removed from international wanted lists.
  • They particularly object to the release of about $100 billion in frozen assets — mostly from past oil sales — that Iran will now control, and the end of American and European restrictions on trade that had been imposed as part of the American-led effort to stop the program.
  • In Tehran and Washington, political battles are still being fought over the merits and dangers of moving toward normal interchanges between two countries that have been avowed adversaries for more than three decades.
  • But Mr. Kerry suggested that the nuclear deal had broken the cycle of hostility, enabling the secret negotiations that led up to the hostage swap.
  • “Critics will continue to attack the deal for giving away too much to Tehran,” said R. Nicholas Burns, who started the sanctions against Iran that were lifted Saturday as the No. 3 official in the State Department during the George W. Bush administration.
  • A copy of the proposed sanction leaked three weeks ago, and the Obama administration pulled it back — perhaps to avoid torpedoing the prisoner swap and the completion of the nuclear deal. Negotiations to win the release of Mr. Rezaian, who had covered the nuclear talks before he was imprisoned on vague charges, were an open secret: Mr. Kerry often alluded to the fact that he was working on the issue behind the scenes.
  • Then, several weeks ago the Iranians leaked news that they were interested in a swap of their own citizens, which American officials said was an outrageous demand, because they had been indicted or convicted in a truly independent court system.
  • The result was two parallel races underway — one involving implementing the nuclear deal, the other to get the prisoner swap done while the moment was ripe.
  • For example, the United States and Iran were struggling late Saturday to define details of what kind of “advanced centrifuges” Iran will be able to develop nearly a decade from now — the kind of definitional difference that can undermine an accord.
  • The result was that Mr. Kerry and Mr. Zarif veered from the monumental significance of what they were accomplishing — an end to a decade of open hostility — to the minutiae of uranium enrichment.
  • But Iran has something it desperately needs: Billions in cash, at a time oil shipments have been cut by more than half because of the sanctions, and below $30-a-barrel prices mean huge cuts in national revenue.
  • senior American official said Saturday that Iran will be able to access about $50 billion of a reported $100 billion in holdings abroad, though others have used higher estimates. The official said Iran will likely need to keep much of those assets abroad to facilitate international trade.
  • The Obama administration on Saturday also removed 400 Iranians and others from its sanctions list and took other steps to lift selected restrictions on interactions with Iran
  • Under the new rules put in place, the United States will no longer sanction foreign individuals or firms for buying oil and gas from Iran. The American trade embargo remains in place, but the government will permit certain limited business activities with Iran, such as selling or purchasing Iranian food and carpets and American commercial aircraft and parts.
  • It is unclear what will happen after the passing of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has protected and often fueled the hardliners — but permitted these talks to go ahead.
Javier E

Opinion | Climate Denial Was the Crucible for Trumpism - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...climate-denial-trump-gop.html

climate change denial corruption moral decline culture politics

shared by Javier E on 04 Dec 18 - No Cached
  • Many observers seem baffled by Republican fealty to Donald Trump — the party’s willingness to back him on all fronts, even after severe defeats in the midterm elections. What kind of party would show such support for a leader who is not only evidently corrupt and seemingly in the pocket of foreign dictators, but also routinely denies facts and tries to criminalize anyone who points them out?
  • The answer is, the kind of the party that, long before Trump came on the scene, committed itself to denying the facts on climate change and criminalizing the scientists reporting those facts.
  • The G.O.P. wasn’t always an anti-environment, anti-science party. George H.W. Bush introduced the cap-and-trade program that largely controlled the problem of acid rain. As late as 2008, John McCain called for a similar program to limit emissions of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • But McCain’s party was already well along in the process of becoming what it is today — a party that is not only completely dominated by climate deniers, but is hostile to science in general, that demonizes and tries to destroy scientists who challenge its dogma.
  • Oh, and what is supposed to be motivating the thousands of scientists perpetrating this hoax?
  • Take Trump’s dismissal of all negative information about his actions and their consequences as either fake news invented by hostile media or the products of a sinister “deep state.” That kind of conspiracy theorizing has long been standard practice among climate deniers, who began calling the evidence for global warming — evidence that has convinced 97 percent of climate scientists — a “gigantic hoax” 15 years ago.
  • What was the evidence for this vast conspiracy? A lot of it rested on, you guessed it, hacked emails.
  • In fact, when you review the history of Republican climate denial, it looks a lot like Trumpism. Climate denial, you might say, was the crucible in which the essential elements of Trumpism were formed.
  • The truth is that most prominent climate deniers are basically paid to take that position, receiving large amounts of money from fossil-fuel companies.
  • But after the release of the recent National Climate Assessment detailing the damage we can expect from global warming, a parade of Republicans went on TV to declare that scientists were only saying these things “for the money.”
  • climate scientists have faced harassment and threats, up to and including death threats, for years. And they’ve also faced efforts by politicians to, in effect, criminalize their work
  • There are three important morals to this story.
  • First, if we fail to meet the challenge of climate change, with catastrophic results — which seems all too likely — it won’t be the result of an innocent failure to understand what was at stake. It will, instead, be a disaster brought on by corruption, willful ignorance, conspiracy theorizing and intimidation.
  • Second, that corruption isn’t a problem of “politicians” or the “political system.” It’s specifically a problem of the Republican Party
  • Third, we can now see climate denial as part of a broader moral rot. Donald Trump isn’t an aberration, he’s the culmination of where his party has been going for years. You could say that Trumpism is just the application of the depravity of climate denial to every aspect of politics.
  • And there’s no end to the depravity in sight.
Javier E

The Tories once had a radical fringe. Now it is the whole party | Aditya Chakrabortty | Opinion | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...y-government-brexit-extremists

tories radical party uk politics

shared by Javier E on 11 Apr 19 - No Cached
  • hey have shrunk into being the party of southern England. And even there, the hold is slipping. This January, a senior government minister told the Sun of a new rule, coined while out canvassing, that “If you knock on a door and they have books on their shelves, you can be pretty sure these days they’re not voting Tory.
  • Voting Tory is for one’s dotage, as health secretary Matt Hancock remarked this week, voting Tory is now “something people start to do when they get their winter fuel allowance”
  • May’s would-be replacements know that to stand a chance, they must sound as extreme as possible. Liz Truss was a remainer; now she garbles speeches about the supermarkets’ unpatriotic dearth of British cheese. Fellow former remainer Jeremy Hunt warned only last summer that leaving Europe without a deal would be “a mistake that we would regret for generations”;; today he jabs at Brussels like a mini-Francois
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • A three-time Conservative prime minister, Lord Salisbury, defined his party’s purpose as “hostility to radicalism, incessant, implacable hostility … The fear that radicalism may triumph is the only final cause that the Conservative party can plead for its own existence”
  • his party has today been hijacked by the radicals. It no longer has space for the Keynesianism of Rab Butler or the liberalism of Francis Pym. It is the home of the radical right. That defines the Brexit project; it is also the dying embers of Thatcherism.
Javier E

Donald Trump's Haiti & Africa Comments: Identity Politics at Their Worst | National Review - 0 views

www.nationalreview.com/...mments-identity-politics-worst

trump racism africa crisis politics culture conservatism

shared by Javier E on 13 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • he president of the United States should not, by word or deed, communicate that he is hostile to or disdainful of entire classes of the American population.
  • As president, his obligation remains the same: Make your case without demonizing whole groups of people.
  • This shouldn’t be difficult for conservatives to understand. It’s an argument they’ve been making against Democrats for the better part of a decade. It’s the argument against identity politics.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Among the terrible effects of negative polarization is the widespread perception — often created by presidents and presidential candidates themselves — that a president governs for the benefit of his constituents alone. Thus, in a very real way, voting becomes an act of self-defense
  • With all that in mind, how should a conservative react to President Trump’s alleged comments about immigration from “sh**hole” or “sh**house” countries?
  • First, if you’re spending your time defending the notion that some countries are truly bad places to live, you’re missing the point entirely
  • Trump wasn’t talking about which countries he’d most like to visit or retire to. He was talking about which countries’ immigrants should be most and least welcomed by the United States.
  • . From the opening moments of his presidential campaign, Trump has made sweeping, negative remarks about immigrants from third-world nations. Even when he qualifies those remarks (“They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people”) the qualification is weak.
  • Isn’t it reasonable for a Mexican American to assume that when Trump says Mexico is “forcing their most unwanted people into the United States,” he is expressing a negative personal perception of Mexican immigrants?
  • Moreover, time and again, Trump has engaged in actions and rhetoric that inflame broader racial tensions and betray possible racial bias.
  • One doesn’t even have to delve too deeply into Trump’s alleged comparison of Norway with the “sh**holes” of Africa to understand why a reasonable observer would believe that he has problems with entire classes of Americans, immigrants, and citizens of other nations.
  • it’s just as ridiculous for conservatives to pretend that the outrage over Trump’s comments truly centers around his assessment of Haiti and Africa when it clearly centers around his assessment of Haitians and Africans. His remarks came amid a discussion of immigration policy, after all.
  • At this point I simply can’t see how a conservative could look a concerned third-world immigrant (or descendent of a third-world immigrant) in the eye and assert that this president judges them fairly and without bias. The intellectual and rhetorical gymnastics necessary to justify not just Trump’s alleged comments yesterday but his entire history and record of transparent hostility to certain immigrants are getting embarrassing to watch
  • There are millions of Americans and lawful immigrants who hear comments like Trump’s and understand that he’s talking about them. Why shouldn’t they be angry? Why shouldn’t conservatives unite to ask the president to do and be better?
  • a president can make our political culture better, or he can make it worse. And Trump seems determined to make it worse.
manhefnawi

Francis the First of France: Le Roi Chevalier | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/...-first-france-le-roi-chevalier

Political France Francis I 1547

shared by manhefnawi on 16 May 18 - No Cached
  • This was the reputation acquired by Francis the First in his own time and reverently preserved by subsequent generations. His mother, Louise of Savoy, laid its foundation even before it was certain that he would inherit the throne of his second cousin, Louis XII. In 1504 she had a medallion engraved in honour of the ten-year-old Duke of Valois
  • While Francis I has been remembered as the chivalrous leader who sustained a long and unequal struggle against the Hapsburg Emperor, Charles V, he has also been described as the King of the Renaissance
  • There are, however, other aspects of Francis I that are less consistent with the popular impression. He was the autocrat who built upon the work of Louis XI in creating the despotism of the new monarchy.
  • ...41 more annotations...
  • He was the “most Christian King” who entered into an alliance with the enemy of Christendom. He was the destroyer of the integrity and tradition of the Gallican Church. He was the voluptuary who allowed his court to be divided into factions
  • His father, Charles of Angouleme, resembled his namesake and uncle, the graceful lyric poet, Charles of Orleans
  • The group accepted the easy guardianship at Amboise of Louis, Duke of Orléans, who two years later became King as Louis XII.
  • The adulation of his mother and sister shielded him from the hatred of Anne of Brittany. The Queen had borne Louise XII an only child, the Princess Claude, who was heiress of Brittany in her mother’s right
  • Francis was heir-presumptive to the French Crown. A marriage between Francis and Claude seemed a natural arrangement, which would prevent the alienation of the Duchy of Brittany from the French royal house. But the Queen was firmly opposed to it, and the marriage took place only after her death in 1514
  • the future of the heir-presumptive remained in doubt. In October 1514, Louis XII
  • married Mary of England, the sister of Henry VIII. Francis was less distressed than his mother
  • Bonnivet was made Admiral of France, and the long-vacant title of Constable was bestowed upon his cousin, Charles of Bourbon
  • The election of Charles V marked the beginning of a two-hundred-year conflict between the French monarchy and the Hapsburgs
  • In February 1516, the grandson of the Emperor, Charles of Austria, inherited the thrones of Aragon and Castile. Six months later, he recognized the French conquest of Milan. At this time there was no hostility between him and Francis I.
  • Political responsibilities were not neglected in the flush of military success.
  • opposed to a rival whose encircling dominions included Spain, the Netherlands, Germany and southern Italy, and whose strength was augmented by the wealth of the New World
  • The contrast between the ebullient King of the Renaissance and the melancholic Emperor has always attracted the attention of historians
  • The one reliving the ancient myths of the universal monarchy and the crusade against the infidel: the other replacing the symbolic attitudes of the past with the realistic values of the nation state
  • The two Kings were too much alike in age and temperament to allow common interests to still the spirit of mutual competition
  • Henry VIII, reading through the terms of a declaration, obligingly omitted his title of King of France
  • When hostilities began in the following year, the Tudor King, after making some show of mediation, aligned himself with the Emperor. The war went badly
  • For a year Francis I remained the captive of the Emperor in Madrid, while Louise of Savoy rallied national sentiment for the continuation of the war
  • The great-grandfather of the Emperor was Charles the Bold of Burgundy. It was as a Burgundian that Charles V claimed the lands that had been seized by Louis XI. The release of the King was not secured until a pledge had been given for the cession of Burgundy
  • The subsequent death of Catherine of Aragon removed the cause of English disagreement with the Emperor. In the last two wars of the reign Henry VIII reverted to the imperial alliance
  • In the course of the war, Bourbon was killed during the ferocious assault of his mutinous forces on Rome in May 1527
  • In the sack of Rome Henry VIII saw an opportunity to win the favour of Clement VII and obtain the annulment of his marriage with Catherine of Aragon. For several years he remained the ally of France
  • Even after the revelation of the marriage with Anne Boleyn, Francis pleaded the English case during his meeting with the Pope at Marseilles in October 1533
  • The King had never intended to observe the terms of the Treaty of Madrid. Fresh allies were found in Italy, notably Pope Clement VII
  • Turkish armies were threatening the eastern imperial marches. In his league with the Sultan Sulaiman he inaugurated one of the most enduring of French policies
  • a vast Turkish army had erupted into Hungary and overwhelmed the Emperor’s Hungarian allies
  • The infidel was regarded with mingled curiosity and horror
  • The Ottoman alliance appalled the conscience of Europe; but the King found it difficult to resist the temptation offered by the expeditions of Charles V to North Africa and the campaigns of his brother, Ferdinand, upon the Bohemian border
  • Although the King’s diplomacy with the Papacy, the Turk, England and the Princes of the Empire, contained many failures and much duplicity, it was pursued with a realism and a flexibility that offset his lack of strategic ability in war
  • By June 1538, when Paul III personally negotiated the truce of Nice, it appeared possible to achieve a genuine reconciliation
  • The significant campaigns of the future were not to be fought in Italy, but on the frontiers of France
  • The altered texture of French society in the first half of the sixteenth century was, in part, a response to the demands of the monarchy
  • Francis I never summoned a full Estates-General
  • In July 1527, in the presence of the King, the Parlement heard from the lips of secretary Robertet a statement so imperious and unequivocal that it represented an unprecedented declaration of monarchical absolutism. The King, like Louis XII before him, was called the father of his people; but, whereas Louis earned his patriarchal status through his benevolence, Francis claimed it as his right
  • His sister, Marguerite, now Queen of Navarre, was scarcely less influential
  • Factions long concealed within the court became more apparent after the death of the Dauphin in 1536
  • The plain and modest Queen Eleonore, sister of Charles V, whom the King had married five years after the death of Claude in 1525, became the centre of the pro-Hapsburg party at the court
  • He held the office once occupied by de Boisy and, finally, that which the traitor Bourbon had forfeited
  • the King’s death in 1547
  • In the last years of the reign the glories of the new monarchy seemed tarnished and outworn
  • bowed to the zealots of the Sorbonne and aped the gallant ways of his youth
Javier E

Opinion | The Audacity of Hate - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-anger-fear.html

polarization politics history trust partisan

shared by Javier E on 20 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • Karl Rove had a novel idea for how to organize President George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign.
  • He and the chief campaign strategist, Matthew Dowd, decided on a “base strategy.” They reallocated the bulk of the campaign’s media budget to focus on social conservatives instead of on moderates — a decision predicated on the fact that the swing, or persuadable, share of the electorate had shrunk from one in five voters to less than one in 10.
  • The result was a shift that year from a traditional centrist strategy to an emphasis on anger and fear, a shift that turned out to have profound long-term consequences.
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • American politics were irrevocably transformed, polarization strategies became institutionalized and the stage was set for the explicit racial and anti-immigrant themes dominating Donald Trump’s campaigns for election and re-election.
  • Three major events over the next 10 years bridged the gap between the White House campaign of George W. Bush and the White House campaign of Donald J. Trump.
  • The economic meltdown of 2007-9 devastated faith in the American economic system and in the nation’s elected leaders — especially the Republican establishment.
  • A second response to intensifying fears, however, was the emergence of the Tea Party, which mobilized racially and financially apprehensive whites who felt abandoned by the Republican leadership.
  • The Tea Party changed what it was permissible to debate openly in contemporary politics. Within a few years, it enabled Trump to further erode the norms of political combat and more openly instigate partisan conflict based on racial and ethnic antagonism.
  • Under Trump, coded rhetoric like Reagan’s “welfare queen” and Nixon’s “silent majority,” was — and is — no longer coded.
  • Sean Trende, an election analyst at RealClearPolitics, Vox reported, “offered a different diagnosis: Romney’s real problem was ‘missing’ white voters who didn’t show up to vote,” and Trende was proved right: As the 2016 primary battle progressed, “those voters” were “no longer missing.” Trump had found them.
  • More than anything, Trump intuitively understood how polarization, and with it, the intense hatred among legions of Republican voters of liberal elites and of the so-called meritocracy could be a powerful tool to win elections.
  • Partisan polarization has become hard-wired in the American political system and is likely to be with us for the foreseeable future. Our constitutional system is not well matched with our current party system. Partisan asymmetry makes it even worse. The GOP has radicalized into an anti-system party that does not accept the legitimacy of its opposition and enables a slide toward autocracy. Very dangerous times for American democracy.
  • It is an environment in which negative campaigning, on TV and on social media, has become the instrument of choice, not a tool, but the beating heart of political partisanship.
  • The rise in hostile views of the opposition candidate, the two authors argue, “is not primarily due to learning about real ideological positions of the candidates and the parties.” Instead, they write, the more likely explanation is that the effectiveness of these campaigns is in reminding “partisans about the negative traits of the out-party candidate, and positive traits of her own party.”
  • When you take today’s urban-rural divide, couple it with the most engaged citizens’ tendency to live in echo chambers, and add accelerants in the forms of identity politics and misinformation campaigns, you have a house waiting to go up in flames.
  • We identify three possible negative outcomes for democracy,”
  • The three negative outcomes, according to the authors, are gridlock; democratic erosion or collapse under new elites and dominant groups; and democratic erosion or collapse under old elites and dominant groups.
  • With few exceptions, political scientists are pessimistic about both the short- and long-term prospects for amelioration of hostile partisan division.
  • the most significant damage resulting from negative partisanship and polarization isthat the normal methods of accountability in a democratic society cease to apply. It used to be that people, regardless of party, believed government statistics about the employment rate and other metrics of progress and national well-being. Now, our interpretation of the basic facts of whether we are going in the right or wrong direction is dominated by whether expressing such an opinion is consistent with that which would advantage our tribe.
  • trust in the electoral process is now contingent on who wins. That is, losers will cry ‘fraud’ and consider the president illegitimate, even if the election is well-run. This is the kind of dynamic we see in the developing world and unstable democracies. It is a recipe for disaster.
  • it is more likely that that bygone era was the aberration and today’s hyperpolarization is what we should expect in equilibrium. In other words, we probably ought to accept the current state of affairs as the new normal.
anonymous

How a Black Lives Matter activist took the stage and got Trump supporters to listen at last weekend's DC rally - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...sten-at-last-weekends-dc-rally

trump rally US culture

shared by anonymous on 20 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • How a Black Lives Matter activist took the stage and got Trump supporters to listen at last weekend’s DC rally
  • Surrounded by a few hundred President Trump supporters at the Mother of All Rallies event, Newsome, the president of Black Lives Matter of Greater New York, had arrived with about half dozen of his fellow activists to make their voices heard and prepared to spend the night engaging in tense exchanges with people who he knew would not be receptive to his message.
  • For a brief interlude, Newsome was able to take the stage and speak to the Trump supporters and at least some in the crowd actually listened.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • a clip of Newsome’s speech posted on Facebook had garnered millions of views and thousands of comments applauding a rare instance of unity and civility in today’s toxic political climate.
  • After wading through the throng of mostly-white attendees, some of whom shouted hostile remarks,  and past a speaker who told those gathered to ignore the Black Lives Matter activists, Newsome was invited up on the the makeshift stage near the Washington Monument at the impromptu invitation of the event’s organizer, Tommy Hodges, who had to persuade some in the crowd to hear them out.
  • The result was an open dialogue between members of two seemingly opposing movements
  • “I expected hostility. I expected anger. I even expected the possibility of violence,” Newsome said Tuesday in a phone interview, “but the one thing I did not expect was an invitation to speak on that stage.”
  • Newsome concluded his speech by saying, “If we really want to make America great, we do it together.” And then the crowd cheered.
  • Afterward a few Trump supporters approached him and expressed their appreciation for his speech, including a Bikers for Trump member, who asked Newsome if he could pose for a photo with his grandson.
Javier E

Republican men are a central part of coronavirus vaccine resistance - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...coronavirus-vaccine-resistance

vaccine resistance gop demagogue fox news

shared by Javier E on 15 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The group most dependent on Fox News as a source of information is Republican men. Pew Research Center measured America’s media consumption habits last year and found that a third of Republican men cited Fox News as a major source of post-election news, with another 40 percent identifying the network as a minor source of information. That 72 percent was higher than other sources of information like CNN (37 percent), network television (62 percent, mostly as a minor source)
  • Why is Tucker Carlson so hostile to a plan to distribute a vaccine that, on Friday morning, his colleagues on “Fox & Friends” were complaining that Biden didn’t sufficiently credit to Donald Trump? Why are so many Republicans similarly skeptical?
  • It seems hard to extricate those views from Carlson’s obvious hostility to the idea that something presented as important by the government should therefore necessarily be treated as dubious.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • That sentiment is hardly new on the political right, and it’s one that Biden specifically tried to undercut in his speech. But on this issue, it’s also a sentiment that Fox News, Carlson and Trump all amplified repeatedly over the past 12 months. With the coronavirus pandemic raging and Trump seeking reelection, he and his allies sought to cast the spread of the virus and the burdensome efforts to contain it as the fault of other people, including Fauci.
mattrenz16

Israel-Palestinian Hostilities: Live Updates - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...israel-gaza-news

shared by mattrenz16 on 13 May 21 - No Cached
  • Clashes between Arab and Jewish mobs on the streets of Israeli cities gave way to warnings from Israeli leaders that the decades-old conflict could be careening toward a civil war. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the scenes of arson and violence as “anarchy” and appealed for an end to “lynchings.”
  • Israel carried out more airstrikes against Hamas targets in Gaza, where the death toll rose on Thursday to 83 people since the fighting began early this week, according to the Gaza health ministry. Palestinian militants fired volleys of rockets that reached far into Israel, where seven have died.
  • Palestinian leaders, however, said the talk of civil war was a distraction from what they see as the true cause of the unrest — police brutality against Palestinian protesters and provocative actions by right-wing Israeli settler groups.
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  • “The police shot an Arab demonstrators in Lod,” said Ahmed Tibi, the leader of the Ta’al party and a member of Israel’s Parliament, referring to the mixed Arab-Jewish city in Israel where some of the worst clashes occurred. “We don’t want bloodshed. We want to protest.”
  • In one seaside suburb south of Tel Aviv, dozens of Jewish extremists took turns beating and kicking a man presumed to be Arab, even as he lay motionless on the ground. To the north, in another coastal town, an Arab mob beat a man they thought was Jewish with sticks and rocks, leaving him in a critical condition. Nearby, an Arab mob nearly stabbed to death a man believed to be Jewish.
  • It is the first intense round of fighting since Israel normalized relations with several Arab countries, including the United Arab Emirates, a long-fought prize and a delicate balancing act.
  • The Aqsa raid might have been the spark for the current round of hostilities, but the fuel was years of anger from Israel’s Arab minority, who make up about 20 percent of the population. They have full citizenship, but rights advocates say they are victims of dozens of discriminatory regulations.
Javier E

America's current political moment might be so bad that it becomes good - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...9-8cf0-4cc99f74d127_story.html

tribalism modernism populism culture crisis politics

shared by Javier E on 27 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • “What if, to some significant extent, the increase in partisanship is not really about anything?” What if rival tribalisms are largely untethered from ideologies?
  • This is plausible. The angriest conservatives, or at least people brandishing this label, show no interest in what was, until recently, conservatism’s substance: limited government, balanced budgets, free trade, curbs in executive power, entitlement reform, collective security. Conservatives’ anger is eerily unrelated to the comprehensive apostasy from what was, three years ago, conservatism’s catechism.
  • Of course, this catechism had long been (in Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s formulation) avowed but not constraining: The conservative party did not allow professed beliefs to influence its behavior. So, on the right, a politics of passions unrelated to policy flooded into the vacuum of convictions unrelated to behavior.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Rauch’s thesis is that increased polarization has little to do with ideas and much to do with hostile feelings — “negative partisanship” — about others. “It’s not so much that we like our own party,” Rauch surmises, “as that we detest the other.”
  • Group solidarity based on shared detestations is fun, and because fun can trigger dopamine bursts in the brain, it can be addictive
  • “One of the most important characteristics of this ‘new’ form of polarization is that there is nothing new about it. Tribalism has been the prevalent mode of social organization for all but approximately the most recent 2% of years that humans have lived on the planet.”
  • All demagogues begin by rejecting Samuel Johnson’s wisdom: “How small, of all that human hearts endure, that part which laws or kings can cause or cure.”
  • Rauch says “humans were designed for life in small, homogeneous groups where change was slow and choices were few.”
  • both left and right, like scorpions in a bottle, are in diametrically opposed but symbiotic reactions against modernity — against an open society “founded on compromise, toleration, and impersonal rules and institutions.
  • “in education, elite universities frequently encourage students to burrow into their tribal identities rather than transcend them. In media, new technologies enable and monetize outrage and extremism.”
  • “The declining hold of organized religion . . . [has] displaced apocalyptic and redemptive impulses into politics, where they don’t belong.” Economic stagnation among the less educated provides opportunities for demagogues on the left (despising a never-popular minority: the wealthy) as well as the right.
  • Time was, the parties vetted candidates, “screening out incompetents, sociopaths, and those with no interest in governing.” Now, “the more parties weaken as institutions, whose members are united by loyalty to their organization, the more they strengthen as tribes, whose members are united by hostility to their enemy.”
johnsonel7

The crisis between the US and Iran is far from over - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

iran politics US trump

shared by johnsonel7 on 17 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • This new decade's consequential first weeks began with the United States openly targeting and killing a foreign military leader for the first time since World War II. They ended with the tragic, unintended cost of conflict -- Iran admitting it mistakenly shot down a Ukrainian passenger jet, killing all 176 people on board.
  • Ukraine is demanding a full investigation and compensation for the victims -- mostly Iranian, Canadian and Ukrainian -- who died when the airliner was shot out of the sky, hours after Iran launched a number of missiles at two bases housing US troops in Iraq.
  • In the meantime, the latest USA Today poll since these hostilities started, say Americans do not feel safer since Iran's top general was killed.The poll found that 55% of Americans say the killing of Soleimani makes the US less safe, while 57% oppose the threat of US airstrikes on Iran's cultural sites and 53% support Congress limiting Trump's ability to order military strikes. Elsewhere, anti-Americanism has soared around the world since Trump took office, according to new Pew research published Wednesday.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • President Donald Trump has announced a new raft of sanctions against Iran. He said in his address Wednesday that, "the US will immediately impose additional punishing economic sanctions ... these powerful sanctions will remain until Iran changes its behavior. In recent months alone, Iran has seized ships in international waters, fired an unprovoked strike on Saudi Arabia and shot down two American drones."
  • What message does that send to America's Gulf allies, like the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia who depend on the US's military umbrella? As a precaution, they are dialing down their hostility and dialing up their diplomatic overtures to Iran.
  • While America's allies -- and even its adversaries -- caution against starting another war in the Middle East, it is difficult to see where the opening for discussion, negotiation and a diplomatic solution is right now.
  • Whatever the administration's goal, the millions pouring onto the streets of Iran for four straight days of national mourning this week in the wake of Soleimani's killing, have demonstrated what Iranian Vice President for Women and Family Affairs Massoumeh Ebtekar told me: "This is a very clear indication of the response of the Iranian nation and the fact that the presence of the people, the huge crowds are staggering."And even for us -- we've been taking part in many of these marches and demonstrations from the beginning of the revolution -- this is something else. From one city to another city, it is a resurrection," she said."It's a revival of the Islamic Revolution," she added. "It's a revival of the Iranian nation."
Javier E

Opinion | 2020 Was the Year Reaganism Died - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...reagan-economy-covid.html

government activism intervention crisis politics policy

shared by Javier E on 30 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • 2020 was the year Reaganism died.
  • What I mean by Reaganism goes beyond voodoo economics, the claim that tax cuts have magical power and can solve all problems. After all, nobody believes in that claim aside from a handful of charlatans and cranks, plus the entire Republican Party.
  • No, I mean something broader — the belief that aid to those in need always backfires, that the only way to improve ordinary people’s lives is to make the rich richer and wait for the benefits to trickle down.
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  • there was no indication that helping the unemployed deterred workers from taking jobs when they became available
  • Reagan-style hostility to helping people in need also persisted. There were some politicians and economists who kept insisting, in the teeth of the evidence, that aid to unemployed workers was actually causing unemployment, by making workers unwilling to accept job offers.
  • Over all, however — and somewhat shockingly — U.S. economic policy actually responded fairly well to the real needs of a nation forced into lockdown by a deadly virus. Aid to the unemployed and business loans that were forgiven if they were used to maintain payrolls limited the suffering. Direct checks sent to most adults weren’t the best targeted policy ever, but they boosted personal incomes.
  • Ronald Reagan’s famous dictum that the most terrifying words in English are “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”
  • the employment surge from April to July, in which nine million Americans went back to work, took place while enhanced benefits were still in effect.
  • Interest rates stayed low, while inflation remained quiescent
  • The only problem was that it cut off help too soon. Extraordinary aid should have continued as long as the coronavirus was still rampant — a fact implicitly acknowledged by bipartisan willingness to enact a second rescue package
  • What we should have learned last spring is that adequately funded government programs can greatly reduce poverty. Why forget that lesson as soon as the pandemic is over?
  • Opposition to helping the unemployed and the poor was never evidence-based; it was always rooted in a mix of elitism and racial hostility. So we’ll still keep hearing about the miraculous power of tax cuts and the evils of the welfare state.
  • what we should fear most is a government that refuses to do its job.
ritschelsa

How the election affected society and communication across America - USC News - 0 views

news.usc.edu/...d-communication-across-america

shared by ritschelsa on 04 Nov 20 - No Cached
    • ritschelsa
      ritschelsa on 04 Nov 20
       
      Family dinners will be really awkward, especially if the new presidency specifically affects them as a POC, woman, or a member of the LGBTQIA+ community
  • was that social media, which was intended to help people connect with one another, instead has led to the emergence of echo chambers — social bubbles in which people only engage people with whom they agree while they avoid, block, disconnect or dismiss friends, relatives or contacts with different viewpoints.
    • ritschelsa
      ritschelsa on 04 Nov 20
       
      This kind of reminds me of cancel culture and how easy it is to metaphorically delete things/people from your life on social media
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • We impose our beliefs and our biases on social media to make these echo chambers.”
    • ritschelsa
      ritschelsa on 04 Nov 20
       
      Much of the news given to us through social media is heavily biased, thus creating widespread false information
  • people expressing anger about injustice either during or after the election are now very angry and hostile
    • ritschelsa
      ritschelsa on 04 Nov 20
       
      This is a major concern post-election, will citizens be facing hostility no matter who wins? I think there will be major civil turmoil regarding the election results
  • “Underneath most anger is fear,”
    • ritschelsa
      ritschelsa on 04 Nov 20
       
      I agree that most of the anger regarding this election is a product of the fear caused by the threat against people's rights
  • “The fact that another candidate can say such disgusting and vulgar things and still be elected — that’s very difficult to accept. There’s a double standard that comes across in this election.”
  • “The United States is so concerned with freedom of speech that we’re unwilling to impose sanctions on this, Dundes Renteln said. “There are consequences of that and we’re going to have to come to terms with how to protect civil liberties and civil rights.”
    • ritschelsa
      ritschelsa on 04 Nov 20
       
      There's so much controversy regarding citizen's rights right now and whether or not those rights are being respected
  • We have to try to be more educated. “Facebook is not to blame. We have to blame ourselves.”
katherineharron

Another Trump assault on science as fires and pandemic rage - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

trump

shared by katherineharron on 15 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • On a day when Democratic nominee Joe Biden branded him a "climate arsonist" and global warming burst to the center of the campaign, Trump again ditched research and data for his own wild hunches and odd theories about California's wildfires.
  • Trump abruptly shut down an official who warned that climate change was fueling the flames -- by saying the weather would soon start "getting cooler." Even by his own standards, it was one of the President's most shocking comments on global warming -- which he has previously referred to as a "hoax."
  • Trump continued to flout epidemiological guidelines by cramming people into indoor events that risked spreading Covid-19, exacerbating disbelief and extreme frustration among medical experts.
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  • For years, Trump has rejected the counsel of his own intelligence services and preferred propaganda from US adversary Russia. He pushed discredited therapies for Covid-19, such as hydroxychloroquine, that federal regulators spurned. His Environmental Protection Agency has sent a wrecking ball through regulations meant to save the planet. He withdrew from the Paris climate accord to accommodate his embrace of fossil fuel polluters and has overturned fuel efficiency standards for cars.
  • "It'll start getting cooler. You just watch," Trump responded."I wish science agreed with you," the official replied."I don't think science knows, actually," Trump said, closing the official down.
  • Trump's longtime hostility to mask wearing -- which scientific experts say is critical to slowing the spread of the virus -- was clearly rooted in hostility to what many of his supporters see as an infringement of individual rights.
  • "I find it abhorrent that political influences are trying and perhaps successfully inserting themselves into the CDC communications, which have always been a model of science-based rectitude, very, very rigorous,"
kaylynfreeman

The Land That Failed to Fail - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...china-rules.html

Politics US policy

shared by kaylynfreeman on 20 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • China now leads the world in the number of homeowners, internet users, college graduates and, by some counts, billionaires. Extreme poverty has fallen to less than 1 percent. An isolated, impoverished backwater has evolved into the most significant rival to the United States since the fall of the Soviet Union.
  • in Beijing the question these days is less how to catch up with the West than how to pull ahead — and how to do so in a new era of American hostility
  • The pattern is familiar to historians, a rising power challenging an established one, with a familiar complication: For decades, the United States encouraged and aided China’s rise, working with its leaders and its people to build the most important economic partnership in the world, one that has lifted both nations.
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  • During this time, eight American presidents assumed, or hoped, that China would eventually bend to what were considered the established rules of modernization: Prosperity would fuel popular demands for political freedom and bring China into the fold of democratic nations. Or the Chinese economy would falter under the weight of authoritarian rule and bureaucratic rot.
  • China’s Communist leaders have defied expectations again and again. They embraced capitalism even as they continued to call themselves Marxists. They used repression to maintain power but without stifling entrepreneurship or innovation. Surrounded by foes and rivals, they avoided war, with one brief exception, even as they fanned nationalist sentiment at home. And they presided over 40 years of uninterrupted growth, often with unorthodox policies the textbooks said would fail.
  • There is no simple explanation for how China’s leaders pulled this off. There was foresight and luck, skill and violent resolve, but perhaps most important was the fear — a sense of crisis among Mao’s successors that they never shook, and that intensified after the Tiananmen Square massacre and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
  • China’s Communists studied and obsessed over the fate of their old ideological allies in Moscow, determined to learn from their mistakes. They drew two lessons: The party needed to embrace “reform” to survive — but “reform” must never include democratization.
  • China has veered between these competing impulses ever since, between opening up and clamping down, between experimenting with change and resisting it, always pulling back before going too far in either direction for fear of running aground.
  • The careers of these men from Moganshan highlight an important aspect of China’s success: It turned its apparatchiks into capitalists.
  • Party leaders called this go-slow, experimental approach “crossing the river by feeling the stones” — allowing farmers to grow and sell their own crops, for example, while retaining state ownership of the land; lifting investment restrictions in “special economic zones,” while leaving them in place in the rest of the country; or introducing privatization by selling only minority stakes in state firms at first.
  • Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, tried to break the hold of these bureaucrats on the economy by opening up the political system. Decades later, Chinese officials still take classes on why that was a mistake. The party even produced a documentary series on the subject in 2006, distributing it on classified DVDs for officials at all levels to watch.
  • Afraid to open up politically but unwilling to stand still, the party found another way. It moved gradually and followed the pattern of the compromise at Moganshan, which left the planned economy intact while allowing a market economy to flourish and outgrow it.
  • American economists were skeptical. Market forces needed to be introduced quickly, they argued; otherwise, the bureaucracy would mobilize to block necessary changes. After a visit to China in 1988, the Nobel laureate Milton Friedman called the party’s strategy “an open invitation to corruption and inefficiency.”
  • The United States and Japan, both routinely vilified by party propagandists, became major trading partners and were important sources of aid, investment and expertise
  • At the same time, the party invested in education, expanding access to schools and universities, and all but eliminating illiteracy
  • mainland China now produces more graduates in science and engineering every year than the United States, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan combined.
  • In cities like Shanghai, Chinese schoolchildren outperform peers around the world. For many parents, though, even that is not enough. Because of new wealth, a traditional emphasis on education as a path to social mobility and the state’s hypercompetitive college entrance exam, most students also enroll in after-school tutoring programs — a market worth $125 billion, according to one study, or as much as half the government’s annual military budget.
  • party made changes after Mao’s death that fell short of free elections or independent courts yet were nevertheless significant
  • The party introduced term limits and mandatory retirement ages, for example, making it easier to flush out incompetent officials. And it revamped the internal report cards it used to evaluate local leaders for promotions and bonuses, focusing them almost exclusively on concrete economic targets.
  • These seemingly minor adjustments had an outsize impact, injecting a dose of accountability — and competition — into the political system, said Yuen Yuen Ang, a political scientist at the University of Michigan. “China created a unique hybrid,” she said, “an autocracy with democratic characteristics.”
  • They were rewarded with soaring tax revenues and opportunities to enrich their friends, their relatives and themselves. A wave of officials abandoned the state and went into business. Over time, the party elite amassed great wealth, which cemented its support for the privatization of much of the economy it once controlled.
  • The private sector now produces more than 60 percent of the nation’s economic output, employs over 80 percent of workers in cities and towns, and generates 90 percent of new jobs
  • the bureaucrats stay out of the way. “I basically don’t see them even once a year,” said James Ni, chairman and founder of Mlily, a mattress manufacturer in eastern China. “I’m creating jobs, generating tax revenue. Why should they bother me?”
  • even as he wraps himself in Deng’s legacy, Mr. Xi has set himself apart in an important way: Deng encouraged the party to seek help and expertise overseas, but Mr. Xi preaches self-reliance and warns of the threats posed by “hostile foreign forces.
  • China tapped into a wave of globalization sweeping the world and emerged as the world’s factory. China’s embrace of the internet, within limits, helped make it a leader in technology. And foreign advice helped China reshape its banks, build a legal system and create modern corporations.
  • It was a remarkable act of reinvention, one that eluded the Soviets. In both China and the Soviet Union, vast Stalinist bureaucracies had smothered economic growth, with officials who wielded unchecked power resisting change that threatened their privileges.
  • Mr. Lin was part of a torrent of investment from ethnic Chinese enclaves in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and beyond that washed over China — and gave it a leg up on other developing countries
  • The timing worked out for China, which opened up just as Taiwan was outgrowing its place in the global manufacturing chain. China benefited from Taiwan’s money, but also its managerial experience, technology and relationships with customers around the world. In effect, Taiwan jump-started capitalism in China and plugged it into the global economy.
  • Before long, the government in Taiwan began to worry about relying so much on its onetime enemy and tried to shift investment elsewhere. But the mainland was too cheap, too close and, with a common language and heritage, too familiar.
  • Now Taiwan finds itself increasingly dependent on a much more powerful China, which is pushing ever harder for unification, and the island’s future is uncertain
  • Many in Washington predicted that trade would bring political change. It did, but not in China. “Opening up” ended up strengthening the party’s hold on power rather than weakening it. The shock of China’s rise as an export colossus, however, was felt in factory towns around the world.
  • In the United States, economists say at least two million jobs disappeared as a result, many in districts that ended up voting for President Trump.
  • The pro-democracy movement in 1989 was the closest the party ever came to political liberalization after Mao’s death, and the crackdown that followed was the furthest it went in the other direction, toward repression and control. After the massacre, the economy stalled and retrenchment seemed certain. Yet three years later, Deng used a tour of southern China to wrestle the party back to “reform and opening up” once more. Many who had left the government, like Mr. Feng, suddenly found themselves leading the nation’s transformation from the outside, as its first generation of private entrepreneurs.
  • The fear is that Mr. Xi is attempting to rewrite the recipe behind China’s rise, replacing selective repression with something more severe.
  • The internet is an example of how it has benefited by striking a balance. The party let the nation go online with barely an inkling of what that might mean, then reaped the economic benefits while controlling the spread of information that could hurt it.
  • “The basic problem is, who is growth for?” said Mr. Xu, the retired official who wrote the Moganshan report. “We haven’t solved this problem.”
  • “The cost of censorship is quite limited compared to the great value created by the internet,” said Chen Tong, an industry pioneer. “We still get the information we need for economic progress.”
  • China is not the only country that has squared the demands of authoritarian rule with the needs of free markets. But it has done so for longer, at greater scale and with more convincing results than any other.
  • Washington is maneuvering to counter Beijing’s growing influence around the world, warning that a Chinese spending spree on global infrastructure comes with strings attached.
  • both left and right in America have portrayed China as the champion of an alternative global order, one that embraces autocratic values and undermines fair competition. It is a rare consensus for the United States, which is deeply divided about so much else, including how it has wielded power abroad in recent decades — and how it should do so now.
  • Mr. Xi, on the other hand, has shown no sign of abandoning what he calls “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” Some in his corner have been itching to take on the United States since the 2008 financial crisis and see the Trump administration’s policies as proof of what they have always suspected — that America is determined to keep China down.
  • there is also widespread anxiety over the new acrimony, because the United States has long inspired admiration and envy in China, and because of a gnawing sense that the party’s formula for success may be faltering.
  • Prosperity has brought rising expectations in China; the public wants more than just economic growth. It wants cleaner air, safer food and medicine, better health care and schools, less corruption and greater equality. The party is struggling to deliver, and tweaks to the report cards it uses to measure the performance of officials hardly seem enough.
  • Now, many companies assign hundreds of employees to censorship duties — and China has become a giant on the global internet landscape.
  • Mr. Xi himself has acknowledged that the party must adapt, declaring that the nation is entering a “new era” requiring new methods. But his prescription has largely been a throwback to repression, including vast internment camps targeting Muslim ethnic minorities. “Opening up” has been replaced by an outward push, with huge loans that critics describe as predatory and other efforts to gain influence — or interfere — in the politics of other countries. At home, experimentation is out while political orthodoxy and discipline are in.
  • n effect, Mr. Xi seems to believe that China has been so successful that the party can return to a more conventional authoritarian posture — and that to survive and surpass the United States it must
  • Certainly, the momentum is still with the party. Over the past four decades, economic growth in China has been 10 times faster than in the United States, and it is still more than twice as fast. The party appears to enjoy broad public support, and many around the world are convinced that Mr. Trump’s America is in retreat while China’s moment is just beginning
  • The world thought it could change China, and in many ways it has. But China’s success has been so spectacular that it has just as often changed the world — and the American understanding of how the world works.
  • There is no simple explanation for how China’s leaders pulled this off. There was foresight and luck, skill and violent resolve, but perhaps most important was the fear — a sense of crisis among Mao’s successors that they never shook, and that intensified after the Tiananmen Square massacre and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
  • But China had a strange advantage in battling bureaucratic resistance. The nation’s long economic boom followed one of the darkest chapters of its history, the Cultural Revolution, which decimated the party apparatus and left it in shambles. In effect, autocratic excess set the stage for Mao’s eventual successor, Deng Xiaoping, to lead the party in a radically more open direction.
  • In other words, he appears to have less use for the “opening up” part of Deng’s slogan.
  • Now Mr. Xi is steering the party toward repression again, tightening its grip on society, concentrating power in his own hands and setting himself up to rule for life by abolishing the presidential term limit. Will the party loosen up again, as it did a few years after Tiananmen, or is this a more permanent shift? If it is, what will it mean for the Chinese economic miracle?
  • The question now is whether it can sustain this model with the United States as an adversary rather than a partner.
  • kaylynfreeman on 08 Feb 21
     
    "In effect, Mr. Xi seems to believe that China has been so successful that the party can return to a more conventional authoritarian posture - and that to survive and surpass the United States it must. Certainly, the momentum is still with the party. Over the past four decades, economic growth in China has been 10 times faster than in the United States, and it is still more than twice as fast. The party appears to enjoy broad public support, and many around the world are convinced that Mr. Trump's America is in retreat while China's moment is just beginning"
Javier E

Opinion | An American Disaster Foretold - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...donald-trump-europe-china.html

europe foreign policy US international relations trump election

shared by Javier E on 29 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • “It’s lonely being a European today,” Delattre mused. Russia is hostile. China is hostile. Emerging powers view the postwar multilateral organizations which Europe prizes as relics of a world made by and for Western powers — and want to change them. As for the United States, it’s absent.
  • Increasingly, Europeans speak of the need for “containment” of the United States if Trump is re-elected, the term coined by the U.S. diplomat George Kennan to define America’s Cold War policy toward the Communist Soviet Union. That would be a shocking development, except that nothing is shocking any longer.
  • Not after Trump set the scene for a demolition of American democracy by saying on the convention’s opening day that “the only way they can take this election away from us is if this is a rigged election.”
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • I asked Ornstein, not prone to histrionics, how real the threat to American democracy is, at 67 days from the election. “If we are not at Defcon 1, we are pretty close,” he said, referring to the label used by the United States armed forces for the highest level of threat.
  • Europeans know how this goes. Viktor Orban, the rightist Hungarian prime minister, has established a template for the authoritarian system Trump would pursue if re-elected: neutralize an independent judiciary, demonize immigrants, claim the “people’s will” overrides constitutional checks and balances, curtail a free media, exalt a mythologized national heroism, and ultimately, like Orban or Vladimir Putin or Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, secure a form of autocratic rule that retains a veneer of democracy while skewing the contest sufficiently to ensure it can yield only one result.
  • Officials close to Biden are looking at several ominous scenarios: Trump claiming victory before the votes in battleground states are fully counted — a count that could take many days or even weeks given the likely number of absentee ballots
  • Trump, supported by Barr, who has claimed that foreign governments have produced counterfeit mail ballots, refusing to concede and challenging the validity of the mail-in voting tally
  • some attempt by Trump to use the armed forces to help him win
  • Trump contesting the outcome in one or more states, so that neither Biden nor Trump has the needed 270 electoral votes and the election is determined by Republican-majority delegations with one vote per state.
  • any of this could happen — and Europe will want to “contain” that America.
clairemann

Supreme Court: Why Brett Kavanaugh could pick the next president if the election comes down to the Court - Vox - 0 views

www.vox.com/...in-pennsylvania-north-carolina

SCOTUS US gop politics election

shared by clairemann on 30 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Here’s how grim the future of voting rights looks for both large-D Democrats and small-d democrats: the pivotal vote on the Supreme Court — the justice who is likely to decide all closely divided voting rights disputes in the near future — is Brett Kavanaugh.
  • credibly accused of attempting to sexually assault Christine Blasey Ford when they were in high school, denied the allegation then lashed out at Democrats who believed it disqualified him from serving on the nation’s highest court.
  • has staked out a position on voting rights that is less extreme than the views of many of his colleagues.
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • he intends to banish to the sunken place longstanding doctrines protecting the right to vote. But Kavanaugh, at the very least, rejects some parts of the nihilistic approach shared by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch.
  • her approach to constitutional questions resembles that of Thomas and Gorsuch. Chief Justice John Roberts, who is himself frequently hostile to voting rights law, has written that he thinks his conservative colleagues are going too far i
  • was most visible in Andino v. Middleton, a recent decision that reinstated a South Carolina law requiring absentee voters to have another person sign their ballot as a witness.
  • he did not embrace the extreme position of Justices Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch,
  • Kavanaugh handed down another opinion suggesting that, while he is not as hostile to voting rights as his most conservative colleagues, he still wants to make radical changes that would profoundly impact American democracy.
  • appears to be torn between a belief that well-established rules governing election disputes should be abandoned, and a competing understanding that it is unfair to disenfranchise voters who followed the rules that were in place at the time when those voters cast their ballots.
  • Purcell v. Gonzales (2006), a case which — at least according to Kavanaugh — established that “federal courts ordinarily should not alter state election rules in the period close to an election.”
  • “The Constitution ‘principally entrusts the safety and the health of the people to the politically accountable officials of the States,’” Kavanaugh wrote. Therefore, “it follows that a State legislature’s decision either to keep or to make changes to election rules to address COVID–19 ordinarily ‘should not be subject to second-guessing by an ‘unelected federal judiciary,’
  • Let state legislatures decide how elections will be conducted in each state, for better or for worse. And don’t intervene even if those decisions are likely to disenfranchise voters.
  • Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch took the extraordinary position that voters who failed to anticipate that the Supreme Court would change the rules after their unwitnessed ballot was already cast should have their ballots tossed out.
  • that the Supreme Court should take unprecedented steps to overrule state judges and other state officials who try to make it easier to vote. But he also did not join a recent opinion by Alito that suggested that the Court may step in after the election to toss out ballots
  • Democratic National Committee v. Wisconsin State Legislature, a case that determined that ballots that arrive after Election Day in Wisconsin shall not be counted, Kavanaugh pointed to a provision of the Constitution that provides that “the rules for Presidential elections are established by the States ‘in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.’”
  • “in accordance with the State’s prescriptions for lawmaking, which may include the referendum and the Governor’s veto.”
  • the Supreme Court of the United States has the final word on questions of federal law, but state supreme courts have the final say on questions of their own state’s law.
  • It could mean that a state governor cannot veto a state election law (because the governor is not the “legislature”). Or that a state constitution may not empower an independent commission to draw un-gerrymandered legislative maps (because the commission is not the “legislature”).
  • Kavanaugh appears to be largely indifferent to voting rights, and is willing to give state legislatures a great deal of leeway to disenfranchise voters.
  • On Wednesday night, the Supreme Court handed down orders in Republican Party of Pennsylvania v. Boockvar and Moore v. Circosta, which concern whether late-arriving ballots should be counted in Pennsylvania and North Carolina. In both cases, state officials — but not the state legislature — decided that ballots that are mailed before Election Day and that arrive during a brief window after the election should be counted.
  • but they didn’t exactly tell the GOP “no,” either. The Court denied the GOP’s request to order, in advance of the election, that late-arriving ballots will not be counted. But an ominous opinion by Alito suggests that the Court might revisit this question after the election.
  • Alito wrote in a concurring opinion in Republican Party, which was joined by Thomas and Gorsuch. Nevertheless, he added that the case “remains before us” and could be decided “under a shortened schedule” after the election takes place.
  • Voters, in other words, might mail their ballots close to Election Day, believing that they can rely on state officials and lower courts that have said that these ballots will be counted, only to have the Supreme Court change the rules after the election is over — and order these ballots tossed out.
  • But Kavanaugh hasn’t yet shown the same willingness to disenfranchise people who followed the rules — or, at least, who followed the rules that were in place when those voters cast their ballots.
  • It may be a Biden blowout, or a fair-and-square Trump win. But if it’s close, and if Pennsylvania or North Carolina is pivotal, these are the competing considerations that Kavanaugh, likely the swing vote, will be wrestling with.
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