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anniina03

Murder Suspect Whose Case Sparked Hong Kong Protests Is Free | Time - 0 views

time.com/...urder-suspect-extradition-chan

politics culture

shared by anniina03 on 23 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • The suspect whose murder case was used as justification to introduce an extradition bill that triggered months of protest in Kong Kong was released from a Hong Kong prison on Wednesday morning, amid a diplomatic row with Taiwan over what to do with him next.
  • Speaking outside the prison, where he had been serving a sentence on money laundering charges, Chan Tong-kai, 20, bowed and apologized to the people of Hong Kong and the victim’s family.
  • His release has sparked a dispute between Hong Kong and Taiwan on how to handle his surrender.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • At stake is the hugely sensitive issue of Taiwan’s status. Beijing regards the island as a renegade province; self-governing Taiwan sees itself as a sovereign nation.
  • If Hong Kong were to allow Taiwanese law enforcement officials to land and take custody of Chan, it could be seen as a de facto extradition agreement with a foreign power, and thus a tacit recognition that Taiwan is not part of the ‘One China’ that Beijing insists it is.
  • A series of peaceful mass marches beginning in June morphed into frequent, violent protests, with protesters now calling for greater political freedom and repudiating Beijing’s sovereignty over the former British colony. The extradition bill is expected to be formally withdrawn by the city’s legislature on Wednesday.
blairca

Climate Crisis Weekly: Fossil fuel giants' smoking gun, more - Electrek - 0 views

electrek.co/...fuel-companies-bees-jane-fonda

climate crisis fossil fuel trump policy

shared by blairca on 26 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • called on health professionals to engage in non-violent social protest against the climate crisis. He called it “the most existential crisis facing the human species.”
  • air pollution as a result of fossil fuels kills more people than smoking.
  • The UK is currently consulting on whether all new homes with parking spaces should have mandatory electric car charge points. The country wants to ban the sale of fossil-fueled cars after 2040.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The British government will issue green (literally, the color green) license plates to EVs. This is to encourage drivers to buy zero-emissions cars in order to combat the climate crisis.
  • European parliament has vetoed legislation that would weaken the protection of bee colonies from harmful pesticides.
  • A new report from researchers at Carnegie Mellon University asserts that 9,700 additional premature deaths occurred in the US between 2016 and 2018 as a result of pollution.
  • PM2.5 comes from human industry such as coal, oil, and gas, and construction dust. It also comes from forest fires.
  • PM2.5 kills people by causing respiratory and cardiac problems.
  • the election of climate-change denier Donald Trump in 2016 coincides with this unfortunate turnaround after years of declining particulate matter during the Obama administration from 2009-2016.
blythewallick

'Get Over It'? Why Political Influence in Foreign Policy Matters - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...-inquiry-foreign-meddling.html

politics US history trump policy GOP

shared by blythewallick on 21 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • A July 25 call between President Trump and the president of Ukraine is the basis for an impeachment inquiry into whether Mr. Trump withheld American military aid until Ukrainian officials investigated former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son, Hunter.
  • “Many countries are rivals of ours and of our democratic system,” Mr. Potter said. He listed as two chief examples China and Russia, countries that Mr. Trump has publicly suggested could help him achieve his political aims. “In some cases, they’re going to want policies that help them and therefore hurt us. In other cases, though, they just want us to fail.”
  • Are protections against this kind of thing in place? Yes. The ability of a foreign nation to gain access and influence over America’s democratic process has been a concern since the early days of the republic.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Mr. Trump has denied any explicit quid pro quo — a favor or advantage granted or expected in return for something — in his call with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky. He has repeatedly referred to it as a “perfect” conversation.
  • So what’s the problem?At its most basic level, asking another government for help — whether a quid pro quo existed or not — means that Mr. Trump would find himself indebted to another country.
  • Isn’t this business as usual?No. Both Republican and Democratic presidential administrations have resisted the idea of enlisting help from foreign powers for political advantage.
  • Is this illegal?Asking a foreigner for aid in an American political campaign is illegal, which Ellen L. Weintraub, the head of the Federal Election Commission, has made clear.
  • The Central Intelligence Agency helped overthrow elected leaders in Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s and backed violent coups in several other countries in the 1960s. It plotted assassinations and supported brutal anti-Communist governments in Latin America, Africa and Asia. The C.I.A. has planted misinformation and, at times, used cash as a way to achieve foreign policy aims.
  • “We often consider ourselves and hold ourselves out as an example of how other countries should conduct themselves,” Mr. Potter said. “When we have internal battles or things have gone wrong here, it is much harder to do that.”
  • Has this happened in previous U.S. elections? Sort of.The only impeachment involving foreign policy came in the case of a senator, William Blount, who was accused in 1797 of scheming to transfer parts of Florida and the Louisiana Territory to Britain. The House impeached Blount, but he fled Washington. The Senate opted to expel him rather than convict him at trial.
  • remystewart on 21 Oct 19
     
    This article talks about Trump's call with the president of Ukraine which has become the basis of Trumps' impeachment inquiry. This article, talks about the White House chief of staff and how he is investigating the theory that it was Ukraine not Russia who hacked the Democratic Party emails in 2016 which would show that Trump was elected in 2016 without the help of Russia. The Cheif of Staff speaks on how there will always be a big political influence on foreign policy. The negatives of other countries getting involved in our elections start on the basis of other countries' ideals and morals compared to ours. The author, Katie Rogers, states that this has "sort of" happened before in the US but not to this extent. She believes that we as a country need to put a lot of effort into political influence on foreign policy before the next election.
brickol

Trump lashes out at Kamala Harris after senator protests criminal justice award | US news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...e-criminal-justice-award-forum

politics us trump

shared by brickol on 26 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • After Kamala Harris pulled out of a South Carolina criminal justice forum because its organizer gave Donald Trump an award, the president duly lashed out.
  • The California senator trails the frontrunners in the Democratic primary, despite a strong performance in the first debate. She is still in the top five in polling averages and has qualified for the next contest, in Georgia in November.
  • Her campaign said on Friday she would skip the 20/20 Bipartisan Justice Center event at Benedict College in Columbia, a historically black college, in objection to the group’s decision to give Trump its Bipartisan Justice Award, which she received in 2016 with the Republican South Carolina senator Tim Scott.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Harris also complained that only a handful of Benedict students were given tickets for Trump’s appearance. Most seats were occupied by administration officials and Trump supporters.
  • Trump received the award for the First Step Act, which has allowed thousands of non-violent offenders to gain early release from federal prison.
  • The First Step Act was greeted as a bipartisan success but it is not without its critics among campaigners and even those who supported it.
  • Factcheckers have said Trump’s regular claim about African American unemployment being at its lowest point ever is, at least under modern methodology, accurate – up to a point.
  • Harris had been among 10 Democrats expected to attend the forum at Benedict College.
  • Mayor Steve Benjamin told the Associated Press he was working with college officials to coordinate what was now being called the Collegiate Bipartisan Presidential Forum. The original organisers said they would still have a role.
  • Cory Booker said on Twitter: “Donald Trump was given a platform unchecked for close to an hour. The Bipartisan Justice Center allowed him to create some illusion of support from this community when, in fact, he excluded it.”
liamhudgings

Protests Rock Spain's Catalonia Region But Residents Are Divided Over Independence : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...s-are-divided-over-independenc

crisis politics Spain policy culture

shared by liamhudgings on 20 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Peaceful marches, a general strike and violent unrest have convulsed Catalonia, in northeastern Spain, this week after a group of Catalan leaders received long prison sentences.
  • Critics of the independence drive often point to Spain's 1978 constitution, which says Spain is "indivisible" but it gives Catalonia some administrative and legal powers as an "autonomous community."
  • These momentous events were a painful chapter for many Spaniards who reject Catalonia's claim to sovereign statehood, but also for the many Catalans who watched Spanish authorities aggressively block voters, arrest the referendum organizers and ultimately take full control of the regional government.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • "If they convict us to 100 years for going to the polls for self-determination, then the response is clear: Self-determination should be put back on the ballot," he said to Catalan parliament on Thursday.
  • "In essence, the whole process of the Catalan independence movement has been a massive mobilization to do civil disobedience against the Spanish state," says Jannessari.
  • "It's a very outdated crime to happen in a Western democracy in the 21st century," Jannessari says. "Based on the interpretation of the Spanish law, yes, it's illegal to hold a referendum on independence of a region. But they could've used other offenses to convict them."
Javier E

The flawed case for American nationalism - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...awed-case-american-nationalism

nationalism american trump

shared by Javier E on 03 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • “The Case for Nationalism” is not really a Trump book, Lowry writes, though it was, he admits, “occasioned by him.” Lowry says he became interested in the subject after the president’s inaugural address and now wishes to acknowledge the “power and legitimacy” of Trumpian nationalism
  • his brief for nationalism can be vague, facile and inconsistent, built on a selective reading of argument and history.
  • Nowhere are those shortcomings more evident than in his sanitized interpretation of the nationalism emanating from the White House.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • Trump’s nationalism involves the adoption of immigration and trade policies “with our own interests foremost in mind,” he writes. America should protect itself “with the utmost vigilance” from external threats. And finally, Lowry asserts, “our country, not any other nation or international body or alliance, should always come first.”
  • Lowry is disdainful of the notion that America is an idea, one based on those self-evident truths of the Declaration. No, he counters: “America is a nation, whose sovereignty and borders are dear to it, whose history and culture are an indispensable glue, whose interests guide her actions (or should).”
  • Lowry distances himself from the unsavory aspects of nationalism by defining them away
  • The role of nationalism in bloody European conflicts? No big deal. “When Europe went off the rails in the early twentieth century, nationalism as such didn’t cause its crash so much as social Darwinism, militarism, and the cult of charismatic leadership,”
  • Fascism may “appeal to nationalistic sentiment,” he admits, but it is a “distinct phenomenon.” Racism can “infect” nationalism, he acknowledges, but they are not the same thing. He frequently resorts to this slippery formulation, suggesting that because two things are not synonymous, none should dare point out their links.
  • He worries that the country is too divided over individual and group recognition to embrace a truly national identity. But if unity is your overriding concern, why promote a vision of the nation so heavy on exclusion?
  • Inherently. Intrinsically. Inevitably. Those words seem to add authority to Lowry’s statements but actually leave them hollow. Just because nationalism isn’t always racist or violent or militaristic, that hardly offers license to disregard how it often stokes those sentiments
  • He quickly dismisses dissenting views as “nonsense” or “foolish” or “frankly absurd.” Nationalism cannot be bad because Lowry has defined it as good, rendering “The Case for Nationalism” a book-length study in begging the question.
  • the founding is reinterpreted as a nationalist project in which ideas and ideals mattered far less than the specific “religio-cultural attributes” of those who came here.
  • He concludes that the civil-rights movement succeeded because it had “such ready access to our national identity and made such a compelling appeal to it,” sidestepping how the movement had to appeal precisely to the nation’s professed ideals to show the hypocrisy of its practices.
  • while Lowry defends nationalism as the “opposite” of the quest for dominion over people and territories, he looks back approvingly on America’s westward expansion. “It was a stupendous boon to our nation, to our people, to our interests, to our wealth, and to our power,” he writes, despite some “regrettable” treatment of Native Americans. Lowry stresses that American Indians weren’t “the peace-loving innocents of contemporary popular imagination.”
  • Lowry, who says he finds little “practical distinction” between patriotism and nationalism, does not leave space to quote the distinction Lepore makes in her book. “Nationalists pretend their aims are instead protection and unity and that their motivation is patriotism,” she writes. “This is a lie. Patriotism is animated by love, nationalism by hatred.”
  • Lowry decries as a “smear” the notion that “nationalism inevitably leads to fascism or other forms of authoritarianism.”
  • Lowry trashes intellectuals on the left and corporate and political leaders holding anti-nationalist views as not just misguided or wrong, but as treasonous.
  • “The Case for Nationalism” seems part of a larger effort on the right to create an after-the-fact framework for Trumpism, to contort the president’s utterances and impulses into a coherent worldview that can outlast him
  • It risks turning conservatism into an ever more exclusionary and yet malleable concept, with limited appeal and even more limited principles.
Javier E

Mary O'Grady: The End of Bolivian Democracy - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...748704888404574549741582508178

bolivia populism democracy

shared by Javier E on 12 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • Mr. Morales has been fortifying his narco-dictatorship.
  • A dictatorship that fosters the production and distribution of cocaine is not apt to enjoy a positive international image. But when that same government cloaks itself in the language of social justice, with a special emphasis on the enfranchisement of indigenous people, it wins world-wide acclaim. This is Bolivia, which in two weeks will hold elections for president and both houses of congress. The government of President Evo Morales will spin the event as a great moment in South American democracy. In fact, it will mark the official end of what's left of Bolivian liberty after four years of Morales rule.
  • He will pull off his power grab thanks to a policy of terror against his adversaries.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • in 2003, Bolivia had an elected president in Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada. Hard-left radicals didn't like it when Mr. Sánchez de Lozada proposed the export of liquefied natural gas via Chile. They launched violent protests and blocked the nation's highways. Their objectives to bring down the government coincided with the goals of the coca growers' movement, which was led by Mr. Morales. It joined in the uprising.
  • When the president decided to use the army to escort supply trucks, clashes ensued. Mr. Sánchez de Lozada decided to leave the country as a way of defusing the violence, and the U.S. State Department told him that if he did not resign before doing so, it would cut off foreign aid. The president complied, providing, under duress, a legal patina for an illegal coup.
  • The terrorism had worked and there was nary a peep of protest from the international community. So it was used again to force the resignation of Mr. Sánchez de Lozada's successor and the president of the senate. That meant new elections had to be called. Mr. Morales ran and won.
  • Upon taking office in 2006, Mr. Morales began using his office to persecute officials of previous governments. Some were jailed, others fled. He made sweeping changes to the judiciary and the electoral council. Any time there was an opposition challenge, his street thugs or his judges put a stop to it
Javier E

Across China, the clocks are striking thirteen. The people of Hong Kong hear it. - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-b0fc-62cc38411ebb_story.html

china repression liberty hong kong politics

shared by Javier E on 27 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • China’s communist government is increasingly brazen about creating a massive surveillance state, in which millions of cameras track every person’s whereabouts, every purchase is recorded in state databanks, every keystroke on the strictly controlled Chinese Internet is scrutinized. Powered by facial recognition software and other tools of artificial intelligence, this tireless web of watchers aims to control all that is done and said — even thought — inside the rapidly rising superpower.
  • Citizens of Hong Kong see clearly what Beijing is up to. When a new bill was announced this year that would permit accused criminals to be extradited from the city into the clutches of the regime — on whatever manufactured charges the government might invent — an uprising began that continues to gain steam. On Sunday, pro-democracy voters turned out in record numbers to oust communists from their local district councils.
  • The regime of Xi Jinping had wagered that Hong Kong’s wealthy majority would be content to trade human rights for cold, hard cash in the form of business as usual in the high-rise office suites. Instead, despite the near-daily protests and violent clashes that have sent the city into a recession, they cast their ballots for more disruption. Why? Because they hear the clocks striking thirteen
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Not only has the attempted overreach roused the people of Hong Kong; their example will be noted in Shanghai, Shenzhen and even Beijing itself. Moreover, years of progress toward the party’s cherished goal of the reabsorption of Taiwan has been derailed. Everywhere, people who might have resigned themselves to dictatorship now realize that liberty has more support than they had dared to hope.
  • “one document explicitly states that the purpose of the pervasive digital surveillance is ‘to prevent problems before they happen’ — in other words, to calculate who might rebel and detain them before they have a chance.”
  • “There’s no other place in the world where a computer can send you to an internment camp.”
Javier E

Opinion | Liberals Do Not Want to Destroy the Family - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...barr-liberals-family.html

liberalism conservatism despair anomie values crisis culture politics

shared by Javier E on 28 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • It is critical to bear in mind that the U.S. has a less generous social safety net than almost all of the other advanced countries to which we compare ourselves: Canada, the UK, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, etc. And yet we have higher rates of nonwork among prime-age men and women, and much worse socio-demographic outcomes: family stability, investment in children, educational attainment, life expectancy, rates of violent death, etc. It defies logic to assert that the relatively stingy U.S. social safety net has somehow lured the U.S. public into licentiousness and social decline whereas the much more comprehensive social safety nets in other wealthy democracies has failed to do so.
  • The white working class constituency that would seem to be most immune to the appeal of the cultural left — the very constituency that has moved more decisively than any other to the right — is now succumbing to the centrifugal, even anarchic, forces denounced by Barr and other social conservatives, while more liberal constituencies are moving in the opposite, more socially coherent, rule-following, direction.
  • now we are in a new social paradigm that has normalized nonmarital childbearing and child rearing among certain segments of the population, and it will take more than economic improvement to restore the stable two-parent family in the communities it which that norm has been steadily eroding.
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • Autor, Kearney and others whose work I will go on to discuss offer analyses and explanations of contemporary social dislocation that serve to reveal the oversimplification and the striking omissions in the work of social conservatives, who often fail, to give one crucial example, to account for the impact of mass incarceration.
  • Many factors have contributed to the income stagnation in the bottom tiers and the overall increasing inequality in the United States. Paramount among these are changes in the economy that have placed a greater premium on college-educated workers, advances in technology and the offshoring of manufacturing jobs to lower-wage countries. One can hardly understand the impact of these dynamic contributing structural factors to our rising inequality by focusing almost exclusively on so-called changes in the values of the American population
  • We need to address the underlying premise that there is a rise in social disorder. That claim does not hold up to scrutiny, in both the long and short term. In the United States and many other parts of the world, the last two decades have seen a remarkable decline in many of the most visible signs of social disorder.
  • You can see that many of these improvements in the quality of life have coincided with the creation of the modern liberal welfare state and many of place that enjoy the least social disorder are, in fact, places with leftist political systems that provide for social welfare.
  • Uniquely among major socioeconomic groups, the white working class decreased in absolute numbers and population share in recent decades. At the same time, the five measures of well-being we tracked all deteriorated for the white working class relative to the overall population. The shares of all income earned and wealth owned by the white working class fell even faster than their population share.
  • the white working class — the segment of the population with the weakest ties to, if not outright animosity toward, liberalism, feminism and other liberation movements — has, in recent years, experienced the strongest trends toward social decay.
  • While five decades ago, many on the left denounced the 1965 Moynihan Report, “The Negro Family: The Case For National Action” for “blaming the victim” because of its description of rising numbers of nonmarital births in the black community, there has been a striking reversal in favor of the report in the academic and liberal policymaking community.
  • “The broad-based decline that is unique to the white working class may be due in part to the group’s loss over time of advantages it once enjoyed relative to those of nonwhite working classes,”
  • These included more years of education and plentiful high-paying jobs available in white working class communities. And, as the explicit discrimination minorities faced in the workplace has diminished, so has the advantage that it had given the white working class.
  • . In an email, she wrote:My read of the evidence is that the declining economic position of less educated men (both in a relative and absolute sense) has probably been a key driver of the breakdown of the two-parent family among less educated populations for many decades.
  • The most telling critique of the claims of social conservatives is that their single-minded focus on the destructive forces of liberalism offers a facile (and erroneous) answer to developments that do not fit simple categories of good and evil
  • Some people believe that humans are born good and are only later corrupted by society. They emphasize the importance of a society that collectively helps each individual achieve their inherent potential. Others believe that individuals are inherently flawed, often ill-disciplined, weak-willed, and capable of evil as well as good. They emphasize the importance of social structures that help people, in the words of Edmund Burke, “to put chains upon their appetites.”
  • Under current conditions of stark political polarization, these two sides are at loggerheads. Sawhill argues that:What a functioning and tolerant politics would permit is a negotiated settlement of this dispute. We would devise institutions and norms but also laws and practices that bring out, in Lincoln’s famous words, the “better angels of our nature.”
  • the willingness to accommodate the opposition — an essential step toward compromise and reconciliation — appears modestly stronger on the left than the right.
  • While in absolute terms the white working class — those without college degrees, in pollster shorthand — have higher levels of marriage and cohabitation, homeownership and self-reported health ratings than members of the black working class, the trends are downward for whites and upward for African-Americans.
  • Similarly, “The Moynihan Report Revisited: Lessons and Reflections after Four Decades,” edited by two liberal scholars, Douglas S. Massey and Robert J. Sampson, sociologists at Princeton and Harvard, found that the trends toward family breakdown documented in the report “have only grown worse, not only for blacks, but for whites and Hispanics as well.” The authors were sharply critical of the attacks on Moynihan from the left that had appeared when the report was first published.
  • Patrick Deneen, whose book received near unanimous praise from conservative critics, defines the “culture war” that has characterized recent decades, and which seems to grow more virulent daily, in implacable terms: “Democracy, in fact, cannot ultimately function in a liberal regime.”
  • Barr, in turn, argues thatin the Framers’ view, free government was only suitable and sustainable for a religious people — a people who recognized that there was a transcendent moral order antecedent to both the state and man-made law and who had the discipline to control themselves according to those enduring principles.
  • The reality is that Barr is not only selling traditional values to conservative voters, some of whom are genuinely starved for them, he is also marketing apocalyptic hogwash because, for his boss to get re-elected, Trump’s supporters must continue to believe that liberals and the Democratic Party are the embodiment of evil, determined to destroy the American way of life.
  • The secular left, in Barr’s view, is at war with what he views as a decent America:This is not decay; it is organized destruction. Secularists, and their allies among the “progressives,” have marshaled all the force of mass communications, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and academia in an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values.
  • “Democracy, in fact, cannot ultimately function in a liberal regime.”
johnsonel7

China Demands Trump Veto Hong Kong Human Rights Bill | Time - 0 views

time.com/...hong-kong-bill-veto-china

china trump politics economics

shared by johnsonel7 on 21 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • China on Thursday demanded President Donald Trump veto legislation aimed at supporting human rights in Hong Kong and renewed a threat to take “strong countermeasures” if the bills become law.
  • Foreign Minister Wang Yi joined in the criticism, telling visiting former U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen that the legislation constituted an act of interference in China’s internal affairs and ignored violent acts committed by protesters.
  • The House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved the bills Wednesday, a day after the Senate passed them on voice votes. The bills now go to the White House for Trump’s signature, and the White House signaled that he would sign the measure.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • “Time and again, police officers meted out violence prior to and during arrests, even when the individual had been restrained or detained. The use of force was therefore clearly excessive, violating international human rights law,” said Nicholas Bequelin, the group’s regional direct for East and South East Asia.
Javier E

Why Changing The Way We See The Civil War Will Help Us Preserve Our Country | Talking Points Memo - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...il-war-revolution-constitution

civil war historiography history revolution Founding

shared by Javier E on 27 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • Once the most popular name in the North was The War of the Rebellion, but to white Southerners that name made it too clear who was at fault. By the late 19th and early 20th century, as white Southerners and Northerners looked for ways to paper over some of the past, forget the overthrow of Reconstruction, and adjust to a reunited nation based on segregation and disfranchisement of the former slaves, the name the Civil War became popular as a way of covering up all the messiness and confusion of the conflict.
  • It wasn’t just a Brothers’ War or a family feud or a restorative war to save the Union, as the name Civil War implies. It was also something bigger than that: It was a revolution that deserved to stand next to the revolutions in England and Haiti and maybe even France. Like those revolutions, it was fought to remake the world, not just to determine who was in charge. And like those revolutions, it did not stay within the old boundaries of law and constitution but instead relied upon blunt, violent tools — military rule and occupation — to force through changes that the leaders could not accomplish by normal means.
  • The name the Civil War covered up the messiness in American history; many great historians have tried to uncover the full story through the language of revolution but they haven’t been able to convince the public or even other social scientists. But if we think of the Civil War as a revolution, we have to face some challenging ideas: that the system set up by the Founders faltered, that the country could not be saved by normal means, that slavery could not be killed by the typical procedures or laws and congressional debate
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The Constitution could not prevent civil war, and it could not end slavery. Therefore, Republicans reluctantly and temporarily abandoned some of their faith in the Constitution to save the country and to end slavery. They broke constitutional norms, relied on military rule, added states, and threatened to dismantle the Supreme Court because they did not believe they could end slavery within the Constitution as it was.
  • As architects of a country that failed, the First American Republic, the First Founders might shimmer as warnings or ideals but not as guides. Americans might have to shed the sense that the Founders possess answers to our current predicaments or blame for our situation. They might retain their glamor — like José Martí in Cuba, Miguel Hidalgo in Mexico, even Toussaint-Louverture in Haiti — as emblems of romantic struggles that do not quite speak to the present political conditions. We might see their work the way the French see the First, Second, Third, or Fourth Republics, as important preludes but also as relics who, having used up their magic, can safely be held and examined. Voices of the past, not oracles of the future.
anonymous

Jacqueline Woodson on Africa, America and Slavery's Fierce Undertow - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-trade-jacqueline-woodson.html

history

shared by anonymous on 16 Dec 19 - No Cached
  • Four hundred years have passed since captured Africans were forced across these waves on their way to bondage in the New World and now, standing at the edge of this violent water, startled by my own anxiety, I feel something deep and old and terrifying.
  • Four hundred years have passed since captured Africans were forced across these waves on their way to bondage in the New World
  • In its efforts to bring the African diaspora together, Ghana’s leaders are also hoping to make amends for the complicity of Africans in selling their own people into what would become the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • we knew the trip would reveal more of what we already knew — that Africans, including children, were sometimes kept for months in dungeons, until enough were gathered to pack the hold of a slave ship. That some of the captured Africans died in confinement while others died during the Middle Passage, the longest leg of the triangular journey between Europe, Africa and the Americas.
  • Its many caves still showed signs of the Shai people of the Ga-Adangbe ethnic group, some of Ghana’s earliest inhabitants.
  • “the door of no return” at Ghana’s oldest European structure, Elmina Castle. The drive from Ghana’s capital to the town of Elmina took about three hours.The massive stone castle, built in 1482 by the Portuguese and captured by the Dutch in 1637, is among dozens of colonial slave forts that remain along the Ghanaian coast. While many forts have been turned into prisons, government offices, guesthouses, or simply left abandoned, Elmina Castle and another infamous fortress, Cape Coast Castle, see thousands of tourists annually.
  • we listened somberly while our guide broke down our ancestors’ harrowing journey — the hundreds of captured people packed into these small, still fetid spaces. The shackled women brought out into the courtyards so the Dutch governor from his balcony could choose the woman he wanted to rape that day. The chosen woman getting washed and brought to him. We heard the stories of resisters being shackled in the courtyard for days beneath a brutal sun, sent to solitary confinement or killed. Above them in the opulent quarters of the castle, which housed a sanctuary for white missionaries and a church, Dutch officers enjoyed lavish meals and ocean views.
  • AS TRUE AS AN UNDERTOW, I feel the water pulling me back across it, taking me to where it took my ancestors centuries ago. To a land as foreign to them as the African chiefs who offered brown bodies over for weapons, brass and cotton. As foreign as the white captors who raped, brutalized and enslaved those same bodies. I feel the pull of the history that brought me here. And the history that took me away.
anniina03

Boeing 737 Plane Crash in Iran Prompts Conflicting Statements - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...lane-crash-boeing-ukraine.html

politics culture crisis

shared by anniina03 on 08 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • A Ukrainian airliner carrying at least 176 people crashed shortly after takeoff from Tehran on Wednesday, killing everyone on board. It was unclear what caused the disaster, but the aircraft, a Boeing 737-800, went down amid an escalating, violent conflict between the United States and Iran.
  • Though the evidence remained sketchy, aviation experts said that what was known indicated that the plane could have been attacked.
  • Experts say that is an extremely rare sequence of events, even in a catastrophic accident — and all the more unexpected in a relatively new plane, built in 2016, of a model with a very good safety record.
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  • “Planes just don’t blow up in mid air,” said Richard Aboulafia, vice president for analysis at Teal Group, an aviation consulting firm. “It doesn’t work like that.”
  • Iranian news organizations tied to the government referred to technical problems with the plane, but they did not elaborate or cite evidence.
  • An airliner should be able to fly even if one engine fails. An “uncontained” engine failure, in which parts of the engine disintegrate, can spray shrapnel that damages and even destroys the plane, but such events are rare.
  • After the crash, Ukraine’s embassy in Iran initially issued a statement ruling out terrorism or a rocket attack as a cause of the crash. But the statement was later removed from the embassy’s website and replaced by one saying it was too early to draw any conclusions.
  • After an accident, the “black boxes” are often sent to the plane’s maker for analysis, but Iran would not send the flight data recorders to Boeing, an American company, Mr. Abedzadeh said in an interview with Mehr. “We will not give the black box to the manufacturer and the Americans,” Mehr quoted him as saying.
  • President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said he had ordered the prosecutor general to open a criminal investigation into the crash and that the country’s entire civil aviation fleet would be checked.
  • On Tuesday, the Federal Aviation Administration barred American airliners from flying over Iran, citing a risk that commercial planes would be mistaken for military aircraft. Several non-American carriers rerouted flights on Wednesday to avoid Iraq and Iran, according to Flightradar24.
  • The airline said it was canceling flights to Tehran indefinitely and promised a full investigation into the causes of the crash, involving officials from Ukraine, Iran and Boeing.
  • The airline began in the 1990s as newly independent Ukraine’s state flag carrier but was subsequently privatized. Its website calls the business a “public private entity.”
Javier E

Rep Eric Swalwell | We Must Hold Trump Accountable For Embracing Anti-Semitism - The Forward - 0 views

forward.com/...untable-for-spreading-hate-for

trump anti-Semitism demonization extremism

shared by Javier E on 01 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • ate is on the rise in America, oozing like poison into our national dialogue — and even into our government’s official business. It’s on all of us to call it out, and tone it down.
  • FBI data shows hate crimes reached a 16-year high in 2018.
  • This isn’t happening in a vacuum. It’s happening as President Donald Trump and his allies dabble in hate-baiting propaganda. From refusing to unconditionally condemn the 2017 neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville to accusing American Jewish Democrats of disloyalty, President Trump has tacitly or explicitly empowered extremism in ways not seen in generations.
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  • Soros in particular has been the target of vicious hate, despite his tireless work to free Eastern Europeans from Soviet subjugation, save countless lives in Sarajevo during Yugoslavia’s civil war, and provide scholarships to black South Africans during the height of apartheid. This type of work should be lauded, yet Trump and his enablers are quick to cast Soros in the leading role of an imaginary plot to dominate global affairs.
  • “This is the longest-running anti-Semitic trope that we have in history, and the trope against Mr. Soros, George Soros, was also created for political purposes,” Hill noted. “It’s an absolute outrage.”
  • Simply put, Trump and his allies are so eager to double down on divisive politics that they will embrace anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Driving people at society’s fringes to believe that Jews are somehow detrimental to the nation helps pave the way to violent acts such as the mass shootings at synagogues in Pittsburgh in 2018 and Poway, California in 2019.
  • It starts with toning down the rhetoric, condemning any dog-whistling as dead wrong, and not only remembering but emphasizing that we’re all Americans, even as we navigate the difficult waters of impeachment. Protecting and defending the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, is expressly at odds with letting hate infiltrate our politics.
  • We respect and protect our neighbors and we reject prejudice. That’s not a partisan thing to do; it’s the human thing, the right thing to do.
brickol

India citizenship law: 100,0000 attend Hyderabad protest | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...rotest-against-citizenship-law

politics culture Policy

shared by brickol on 04 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • More than 100,000 protesters have taken part in a peaceful march in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, chanting slogans against Narendra Modi’s new citizenship law.
  • organised by an umbrella group of Muslim and civil society organisations
  • More than 40% of Hyderabad’s estimated population of nearly 7 million people are Muslims.
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  • Indian government has faced weeks of acrimonious and, at times, violent protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which was passed by Modi’s government in December.
  • The Hyderabad protesters held placards with slogans including “withdraw CAA immediately”, and “India’s only religion is secularism”.
  • the protest remained peaceful, and estimated that more than 100,000 people were in attendance
  • The new law eases the path for non-Muslim minorities from the neighbouring Muslim-majority nations of Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan to gain Indian citizenship. But, if combined with a proposed national register of citizens, critics of the CAA fear it will discriminate against minority Muslims in India and chip away at India’s secular constitution.
  • Modi’s government maintains the new law is necessary to help minorities facing persecution in Muslim-majority nations, and it has called the pan-India protests politically motivated.
  • Protests against the CAA also went ahead in several other Indian cities on Saturday, with hundreds turning out in cities in the southern state of Karnataka.
Javier E

American Jewish voters still despise Trump - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...jews-still-despise-trump

american jews trump

shared by Javier E on 25 May 19 - No Cached
  • like most Americans, they don’t rank foreign policy at or near the top of their concerns. In fact, for Jews, Israel ranks dead last in their list of concerns. We can speculate whether that is a function of the current Israeli government; a sense that Israel is a robust and successful nation that does not require our constant attention; a widening rift between Israel and diaspora Jewry; or whether, just as with every other group of Americans, Jewish Americans’ domestic concerns that affect their lives swamp issues related to foreign affairs.
  • Nearly three-quarters (73 percent) say Jews in the United States are less secure compared to two years ago. A majority (59 percent) think President Trump is at least partially responsible for recent targeted attacks on synagogues, and a plurality (38 percent) have concerns that President Trump is encouraging violent ultra-right extremists. A broad majority (71 percent) disapprove of President Trump’s handling of anti-Semitism, including a 54 percent majority who strongly disapprove.
  • Should we be surprised that the friend (Trump) of their enemy (white nationalism) is their enemy? The president denies that their enemy is even a threat and therefore earns their enmity. Trump’s replacement rhetoric (the United States is “full”), his blood-and-soil nationalism and his contempt for the rule of law strike at the heart of Jews’ worries about their safety and security in a multiethnic society. Their ancestors left places such as Russia so as not to be at the whim of anti-Semitic autocrats; the United States was supposed to be their refuge.
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  • First, what Trump is doing for Israel for domestic consumption is not aimed at nor impressing American Jews. It is aimed, as is everything, at securing his right-wing base, which is disproportionately white and evangelical.
  • the far left’s dual loyalty and other anti-Semitic tropes (e.g. controlling the U.S. government by political money) are morally disgraceful and ludicrously misdirected at Jewish Americans. For better or worse, American Jews aren’t motivated by Israel. They are, however, greatly offended by anti-Semitism, whether it comes from the right or left, and will expect both political parties to drum out anti-Semites.
anonymous

Don't Call Donald Trump a Fascist - 0 views

foreignpolicy.com/...-trump-fascist-nazi-right-wing

shared by anonymous on 16 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • “Every age has its own fascism,” the Italian writer Primo Levi warned in a 1974 essay.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 16 Jan 20
       
      In some way, one could say that their leader has some kind of fascist characteristics
  • “There are many ways of reaching [fascism],” Levi noted, “not just through the terror of police intimidation, but by denying and distorting information, by undermining systems of justice, by paralyzing the education system, and by spreading in a myriad subtle ways nostalgia for a world where order reigned, and where the security of a privileged few depends on the forced labor and the forced silence of the many.”
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 16 Jan 20
       
      Summarizing some of the key points we studied in the last unit. But, gives the other side of not only using violence to create dominance
  • First, they almost always have at least some validity. And second, they are almost always accompanied by enormous blind spots, often glancing past what was most salient about historical fascism—namely, its violent methods and revolutionary aims.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 16 Jan 20
       
      These 'blind spots,' would never work in regards to the US. There is too much security, and too many people who would catch this quick. We can't relate this to Italy because the structure of everything was so different back then.
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  • The problem is that most of these traits exist on a sliding scale and are open to some degree of subjective interpretation
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 16 Jan 20
       
      All 14 points have wiggle room. In some ways one could consider themselves 'fascist' for what they believe in
katherineharron

Trump wants Apple to unlock the Pensacola shooter's iPhones. Here's why it won't - CNN - 0 views

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

shared by katherineharron on 16 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • President Donald Trump just slammed Apple for refusing to allow the US government access to the iPhones "used by killers, drug dealers and other violent criminal elements."
  • Trump's tweet came hours after Apple declined requests from US Attorney General William Barr and the FBI to unlock two iPhones believed to have been used by a 21-year-old man who killed three sailors in a shooting last month at a Pensacola, Florida, Air Force base.
  • Apple's commitment to protecting the privacy of its users is well known. The iPhone maker has hammered on privacy as a marketing pitch in recent years, with CEO Tim Cook repeatedly calling privacy a fundamental human right. Cook told CNN in 2018 that he wants governments around the world to restrict how much data companies can collect from their customers.
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  • "We have always maintained there is no such thing as a backdoor just for the good guys. Backdoors can also be exploited by those who threaten our national security and the data security of our customers," Apple added. "Today, law enforcement has access to more data than ever before in history, so Americans do not have to choose between weakening encryption and solving investigations. We feel strongly encryption is vital to protecting our country and our users' data."
  • Facebook has faced a similar tussle on the other side of the world, squaring off against India's government over its mobile messaging service, WhatsApp. India — the company's biggest market with 400 million-plus WhatsApp users — demanded in 2018 that Facebook add the ability to track individual messages after a series of lynchings tied to viral hoax forwards.
  • WhatsApp has repeatedly refused, saying encryption is fundamental to its private nature. "We will not weaken the privacy protections WhatsApp provides," a spokesperson said at the time.
anniina03

Mikhail Mishustin: What we know about Russia's new prime minister - CNN - 0 views

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

politics economics

shared by anniina03 on 17 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • He may not even have had an English-language Wikipedia page on Wednesday morning, but former tax official Mikhail Mishustin is now Russian prime minister.Russia's lower house of parliament, the State Duma, confirmed Mishustin's new role Thursday amid a major political shakeup.
  • Prior to his appointment, Mishustin served as the head of the Federal Tax Service, where he forged a reputation as a skilled technocrat who successfully reformed the country's fiscal system.
  • Mishustin is largely unknown to the Russian public and had previously showed little political ambition.
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  • Mishustin's appointment comes after previous prime minister Dmitry Medvedev, along with the entire Russian government, resigned Wednesday to clear the way for reforms that could potentially extend Putin's grip on power after his presidential term ends in 2024.
  • Putin has proposed constitutional amendments that would effectively strengthen the powers of the prime minister and parliament at the expense of the presidency -- weakening his successor in the process -- but the exact machinations behind the plan remain unclear.
  • "Mishustin -- this is digitalization, clarity, modern professionalism, decency, the elimination of barriers to legitimate activity, innovative solutions, openness to world technology while taking care of proper sovereignty ... hostility to violent power methods -- in short, everything that we need right now,"
anniina03

Bangladesh Says Once-Submerged Island Now Ready for Rohingya | Time - 0 views

time.com/...r-rohingya-refugees-relocation

politics culture Crisis

shared by anniina03 on 20 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • A Bangladeshi island regularly submerged by monsoon rains is ready to house 100,000 Rohingya refugees, but no date has been announced to relocate people from the crowded and squalid camps where they’ve lived for years, officials said Thursday.
  • The island is built to accommodate 100,000 people, just a fraction of the million Rohingya Muslims who have fled waves of violent persecution in their native Myanmar.
  • International aid agencies and the United Nations have vehemently opposed the relocation plan since it was first proposed in 2015, expressing fear that a big storm could overwhelm the island and endanger thousands of lives.
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  • most Rohingya are unwilling to return to Myanmar due to safety concerns. Government officials didn’t have an estimate of how many refugees would be willing to be relocated to the island.
  • Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has repeatedly told the U.N. and other international partners that her administration will consult them before making a final decision on the relocation, and that no refugees will be forced to move. Bangladesh attempted to start sending refugees back to Myanmar under a bilateral framework last November, but no one was willing to go. The Rohingya are not recognized as citizens in Myanmar, rendering them stateless, and face other forms of state-sanctioned discrimination.
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