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yehbru

Uyghurs in China: What Biden should do about China's atrocities (opinion) - CNN - 0 views

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

politics China US Biden Uighurs International

shared by yehbru on 07 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • China has since banned BBC World News from airing in the country and denied the abuse, telling CNN that "it is strictly forbidden to insult and abuse trainees in any way."
  • But the women's accounts add to a record that includes reports of forced abortions and sterilizations, high-tech surveillance, and Uyghur children being separated from their parents.
  • Either the United States and the world will finally go beyond tepid criticism and respond with real action, or we can forget about values, universal rights, and international law.
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  • A clear and consistent position from the US would allow for a whole-of-government response and ensure the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act and Section 307 of the Tariff Act are fully enforced. These laws sanction parties involved in human rights abuses, identify where goods produced with forced labor are entering the US supply chain, and bans their import.
  • Biden raised his concerns over the oppression of the Uyghurs which, while a good step, was insufficient when not backed by uniform US policy. What's needed is a comprehensive strategy that holds China accountable for its human rights abuses against the Uyghurs and prioritizes ending violence.
  • While former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo rightly declared the crimes against the Uyghurs a genocide, the Trump administration's approach to China and to human rights more broadly was spotty and inconsistent at best.
  • In addition, a cross-agency response should focus in particular on allegations of gender-based violence perpetrated against Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Biden has already established a White House Gender Policy Council and has made clear that he plans to engage with the UN's Women, Peace, and Security agenda (neglected by the Trump administration) to put gender equality and freedom from gender-based violence at the heart of US diplomacy.
  • Too often in the past, hosting the Olympics has allowed authoritarian regimes to peddle propaganda and gain legitimacy -- from the Nazis in 1936 to the Soviets in 1980 to the Chinese Communist Party in 2008 and Vladimir Putin's Russia in 2014. In response to China's oppression of Uyghur communities and other human rights abuses, over 180 human rights groups and international legislators are calling for the 2022 Winter Olympics to be moved from Beijing or boycotted altogether.
Javier E

Corporations Are Not Friends, People - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...618561

corporations GOP Politics alllane]]]ce policy trump history

shared by Javier E on 12 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • Corporations are people, my friend,” Romney replied. He was jeered in the crowd, and jeered even more by Democrats afterward. “I don’t care how many times you try to explain it,” Barack Obama said on the stump. “Corporations aren’t people. People are people.”
  • In arguing that companies should absolutely continue to donate money to politicians, but also that they should stay out of politics,
  • What these politicians are expressing is the fury of people who thought they had a deal, and have learned that they don’t, at least not on the old terms. The old arrangement was simple: The fiscally conservative wing of the Republican Party would push for lighter regulation, lower corporate taxes, and lower taxes on the high earners who ran corporations. In return, the corporations would cut generous checks to Republicans and remain circumspectly quiet about the culture-war issues that the social-conservative wing of the party cared about.
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  • McConnell embraced the tortured position that money, and only money, is speech—and that actual speech is not speech.  
  • The Kentuckian argued that money was speech, and limitations on donations—even requirements to disclose—infringed on free speech.
  • life—the peaceful transfer of power comes to mind—it is a casualty of the Trump era. In the early half of his presidency, Donald Trump pursued some projects that solidified the traditional bond between the GOP and business, such as slashing taxes, but also others that divided the old allies, including protectionist policies on trade and personally intervening to bully companies.
  • Last year, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, usually a stalwart supporter of Republicans, endorsed some Democrats, and it forcefully condemned Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
  • Meanwhile, a decades-long consensus that publicly held that companies should, above all, do whatever they could to maximize short-term shareholder value began to soften. In 2019, the Business Roundtable, a leading trade association, released new guidance that said corporations should “push for an economy that serves all Americans,” in Chairman Jamie Dimon’s words, by investing in communities and employees, dealing ethically with suppliers, and considering longer-term returns.
  • Now with voting laws at the center of national politics, corporations are speaking out. MLB moved the All-Star Game, Coca-Cola and Delta blasted the Georgia law, and other executives have objected to the law and other bills under consideration elsewhere. To critics, this is riskily divisive. Echoing a famous Michael Jordan line, McConnell complained that Republicans drink Coke and fly too.
  • But these companies are responsive to many groups, and just because their stances don’t directly affect revenue and profits, that doesn’t mean these aren’t business decisions. Corporations are balancing the demands of shareholders, customers, and employees, as well as the positions of their own executives,
  • Companies may also calculate that the long-term costs of being on the wrong side of social-justice issues, or the wrong side of an ascendant liberal, diverse population, outweigh the short-term risks of Republican backlash and boycotts.
  • In short, what McConnell calls “blackmail” is just free enterprise at work. These companies may or may not be acting in their long-term best interests—corporations make mistaken bets about the future all the time—but they are acting rationally.
  • The minority leader is realizing that the deal Republicans had with big corporations wasn’t personal; it was just business. A tax break can buy you a lot of things, but it doesn’t buy love.
  • In taking these stances on big social issues, these corporations are acting in a majoritarian manner. But no one should conclude that they are progressive. Even as big business enters into a temporary alliance with Democrats on voting rights, many of its captains are fighting back against the plan President Joe Biden announced Wednesday to raise corporate tax rates.
  • American government would probably be healthier if more politicians asked—for whatever reason—why they are so willing to accept corporations’ arguments on taxes, regulation, and antitrust. Corporations may be people, my friends. But corporations are not friends, people.
Javier E

Why We're Freaking Out About Substack - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ck-newsletter-competition.html

newsletter media substack publishing

shared by Javier E on 14 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • he new media economy promises both to make some writers rich and to turn others into the content-creation equivalent of Uber drivers, even as journalists turn increasingly to labor unions to level out pay scales.
  • This new direct-to-consumer media also means that battles over the boundaries of acceptable views and the ensuing arguments about “cancel culture” — for instance, in New York Magazine’s firing of Andrew Sullivan — are no longer the kind of devastating career blows they once were.
  • Though Substack paid advances to a few dozen writers, most are simply making money from readers. That includes most of the top figures on the platform, who make seven-figure sums from more than 10,000 paying subscribers — among them Mr. Sullivan, the liberal historian Heather Cox Richardson, and the confrontational libertarian Glenn Greenwald.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • This new ability of individuals to make a living directly from their audiences isn’t just transforming journalism. It’s also been the case for adult performers on OnlyFans, musicians on Patreon, B-list celebrities on Cameo. In Hollywood, too, power has migrated toward talent, whether it’s marquee showrunners or actors. This power shift is a major headache for big institutions, from The New York Times to record labels.
  • Substack’s thesis is, in part, that media companies underpay their most prominent writers. So far, that seems to be bearing out.
  • many of the writers who took advances now regret doing so: They would have made more money by simply collecting subscription revenue, and paying Substack 10 percent, than making the more complex deals with money up front.
  • The former Vox writer Matthew Yglesias calculated that taking the advance wound up costing him nearly $400,000 in subscription revenue paid to Substack
  • One of the writers who left Substack over transgender issues, Jude Doyle, argued that its system of advances amounted to a kind of editorial policy. But the analogy to a media company isn’t clear.
  • Grace Lavery said she wanted Substack to be more aggressive about stopping harassment, but said she didn’t think threats to boycott the email service over writers she disagrees with made political sense.
  • “Boycotting Substack because of Jesse Singal would be like Boycotting a paper company” over a writer who has books printed on their paper, she said.
  • The real threat is competing platforms with a different model. The most technically powerful of those is probably Ghost, which allows writers to send and charge for newsletters, with monthly fees starting at $9.
  • While Substack is backed by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Ghost has Wikipedia vibes: It is open-source software developed by a nonprofit.
  • it’s easy to leave. Unlike on Facebook or Twitter, Substack writers can simply take their email lists and direct connections to their readers with them.
  • Ghost represents an even purer departure from legacy media. More than half of the sites on the platform simply run the software off their own servers.
  • Mr. Sullivan, who said he saw Substack as his tech platform, not his publisher, has begun deliberately promoting smaller writers in an “In the Stacks” section and said he was interested in figuring out how to bundle subscriptions.
  • This week, eight writers who cover tech, media and culture — Mr. Warzel, Mr. Newton, Anne Helen Petersen, Nick Quah, Eric Newcomer, Delia Cai, Ryan Broderick and Kim Zetter — are starting a “virtual newsroom” called Sidechannel on Discord, a platform for text and voice conversations
  • “We’re coming out of this era where platforms own people, and moving into this era where people own platforms,” he said. “We have to prove to the writers we’re delivering enough value to them to keep them happy and help them succeed.”
  • my informal survey of Substack writers found that most are fond of the company and plan to stick around for now — but not out of the sense of loyalty, shared mission or deep identification that used to run through media companies.
  • “Taking V.C. money does not create in me a sense of obligation,”
aleija

Opinion | Anti-Zionism Isn't Anti-Semitism? Someone Didn't Get the Memo. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nti-zionism-anti-semitism.html

opinion politics history

shared by aleija on 26 May 21 - No Cached
  • Not the people who, waving Palestinian flags and chanting “Death to Jews,” according to a witness, assaulted Jewish diners at a Los Angeles sushi restaurant. Not the people who threw fireworks in New York’s diamond district. Not the people who brutally beat up a man wearing a yarmulke in Times Square. Not the people who drove through London slurring Jews and yelling, “Rape their daughters.” Not the people who gathered outside a synagogue in Germany shouting slurs. Not the people who, at a protest in Brussels, chanted, “Jews, remember Khaybar. The army of Muhammad is returning.”
  • Apparently, these hashtags count as legitimate political speech at Twitter, a company whose objections to bigotry are otherwise so strong that it once banned a Canadian feminist for the sin of tweeting remarks about transgender women like “men aren’t women.”
  • It’s a curious silence. In the land of inclusiveness, Jews are denied inclusion.
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  • But if there’s been a massive online campaign of progressive allyship with Jews, I’ve missed it. If corporate executives have sent out workplace memos expressing concern for the safety of Jewish employees, I’ve missed it. If academic associations have issued public letters denouncing the use of anti-Semitic tropes by pro-Palestinian activists, I’ve missed them.
  • It is especially despicable when Israel is singled out in ways that apply to no other country. To take just one example, when was the last time you heard of a campus demonstration or a call for boycotts and divestment in response to Turkey’s 47-year occupation of northern Cyprus or its routine bombardment, using American-made jets, of Kurdish militants in Iraq?
  • But, again, this doesn’t go far enough. The accusations made against Israel — stealing Palestinian land (despite the fact that Israel vacated the territory from which it was subsequently attacked) and wanton violence against Palestinian civilians, particularly children (despite the fact that Israel regularly warned its targets to vacate buildings before targeting them) — can’t help but make me think of ancient libels about Jewish greed and bloodlust.
  • This ought to be whistling loudly in the ears of progressives who claim to be horrified by every form of prejudice. Instead, they have indulged an anti-Israel movement that keeps descending into the crudest forms of anti-Semitism.
  • Progressives will have to come to their own reckoning about what to do about the burgeoning anti-Semitism in their midst. As for Jews, they should take the events of the last few days less as an outrage than as an omen.
mattrenz16

Opinion: Naomi Osaka's courageous choice - CNN - 0 views

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

shared by mattrenz16 on 02 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Twenty-three-year-old tennis player and four-time Grand Slam singles champion Naomi Osaka stunned the tennis community this week by dropping out of the in-progress French Open, one of the year's major tournaments, announcing on social media that she will "take some time away from the court."
  • That is why forcing her to choose between her mental health and a few media sound bites was entirely unnecessary. We don't need to hear from her to appreciate her skill on the court. We do not need to drive her out of her career in order to punish her for failing to perform.
  • In attempting to force her hand, they essentially forced her out. Enter email to sign up for the CNN Opinion newsletter. "close dialog"Get CNN Opinion's newsletter for the latest thoughts and analysis on today's news.Please enter aboveSign me upBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Thanks for Subscribing!Continue ReadingBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy."close dialog"/* effects for .bx-campaign-1376914 *//* custom css .bx-campaign-1376914 *//* custom css from creative 52220 */.bxc.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-row-image-logo img { height: 42px;}@media screen and (max-width:736px) { .bxc.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-row-image-logo img { height: 35px;}}/*Validation border*/.bxc.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-row-validation .bx-input { border-color: #B50000; /*Specify border color*/ border-width: 1px; box-shadow: none; background-color: transparent; color: #B50000; /*Specify text color*/}/* rendered styles .bx-campaign-1376914 */.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative:before {min-height: 220px;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative {border-color: #c1c1c1;border-style: solid;background-size: contain;background-color: white;border-width: 1px 0;border-radius: 0;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative:before {min-height: 200px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative> *:first-child {width: 780px;vertical-align: middle;padding: 10px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative> *:first-child {width: 340px;padding: 20px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914.bx-active-step-1 .bx-close {stroke: rgb(193, 193, 193);stroke-width: 2px;width: 24px;height: 24px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914.bx-active-step-1 .bx-close {width: 30px;height: 30px;padding: 0 0 10px 10px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-group-1376914-y4M7jyO {width: 660px;text-align: left;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-group-1376914-y4M7jyO {text-align: center;width: 315px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-element-1376914-tVcUlRZ {padding: 0;width: auto;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-element-1376914-tVcUlRZ> *:first-child {background-color: transparent;background-size: contain;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-group-1376914-BpRQ7DR {width: 660px;text-align: left;padding: 25px 0 15px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-group-1376914-BpRQ7DR {width: 310px;padding: 15px 0 15px;text-align: center;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-element-1376914-oUX5Jvf {width: 100%;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-element-1376914-oUX5Jvf {width: auto;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-element-1376914-oUX5Jvf> *:first-child {font-family: CNN Business,CNN,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,Arial,Utkal,sans-serif;font-weight: 400;font-size: 24px;line-height: 1.1em;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-element-1376914-oUX5Jvf> *:first-child {font-size: 16px;padding: 6px 0 0;line-height: 1.2;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-group-1376914-PZ8dLrW {width: 660px;padding: 0;min-width: 550px;text-align: left;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campa
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • But Open organizers didn't stop there, issuing a news release threatening to expel her from the tournament if she kept it up.
  • And so, she quit. Read More
  • Her decision was surprising, but not entirely out of the blue. Earlier, Osaka had announced that she would be opting out of the tournament's "mandatory" media interviews, citing mental health concerns, including a history of depression.
  • Osaka first came into the spotlight at the 2018 US Open when her historic win against Serena Williams received boos from a crowd convinced that Williams was unfairly targeted by the umpire. What should have been an extraordinarily joyous occasion, her first major victory and the event that catapulted her into public recognition, was instead one that made her cry, both immediately following the match and when she went to collect her trophy. ESPN declared that "Naomi Osaka was denied her magic moment."
  • Simply put, it's because the world has unrealistic expectations of celebrities and athletes. We believe the public nature of their fame entitles us access to their private lives. In several recent interviews, such as one with podcaster Dax Shepard, Prince Harry has talked openly of his own mental health struggles and of the pressures he and his wife, Meghan Markle, have felt as objects of media fascination, pressures so severe that Markle thought of suicide.
  • Many of her fellow athletes agreed with her decision. Steph Curry tweeted, "you shouldn't ever have to make a decision like this -- but so damn impressive taking the high road when the powers that be don't protect their own. major respect @naomiosaka." Martina Navratilova tweeted her support of Osaka, noting that "as athletes we are taught to take care of our body, and perhaps the mental & emotional aspect gets short shrift. This is about more than doing or not doing a press conference." Serena Williams offered her support, too.
  • Some tennis players, of course -- including Rafael Nadal and Sofia Kenin -- have come out to say that speaking to reporters is part of the job. But just because something has been part of the job needn't mean it should be, or that it should be for everyone. Osaka didn't just decide she didn't feel like giving interviews. She was forced to make a choice, and she chose herself. That takes courage, courage that is a shame she had to muster at all. Because in the end, the tennis world has lost a great, at least for now -- a point that deserves much more attention.
aidenborst

Capitol riots unleashed long-term danger, experts warn - CNN - 0 views

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

Politics US trump crisis Culture policy GOP extremist Biden inauguration security riot

shared by aidenborst on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The US Capitol is surrounded by fences and troops amid fear the January 6 riots could spark violence this weekend and leading up to Wednesday's inauguration. But experts worry the real threat may be what the attack unleashed for the long term.
  • "The plots of tomorrow are literally being hatched right now," Oren Segal, vice president of the Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism, told CNN.
  • They're also worried that the numbers of potentially violent extremists are growing. Social media giants banned President Donald Trump and others over fears their posts would continue to spark violence, which the experts said has led to a sympathetic and growing audience at risk of radicalization.
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  • "Our moderators are reviewing an increased number of reports related to public posts with calls to violence, which are expressly forbidden by our Terms of Service," Telegram spokesperson Remi Vaughn told CNN in a statement on Wednesday. Vaughn added: "We welcome peaceful discussion and peaceful protests, but routinely remove publicly available content that contains direct calls to violence."
  • In public and private chats there are common messages about plotting to "take back America" or rallying together against supposed censorship, according to Angelo Carusone, president and CEO of Media Matters for America. Carusone and his team have been tracking extremist language and posting in a variety of media landscapes.
  • "The FBI cannot open an investigation without a threat of violence or alleged criminal activity. However, when that language does turn to a call for violence or criminal activity, the FBI is able to undertake investigative activity," the agency said.
  • "It is more and more important to know where they're going, especially if they're moving even further and further behind the veil," Carusone said. "If you lose track of them entirely, you lose that that information pipeline, you lose the ability to identify those indicators, which means it's harder to prevent harm."
  • In many messaging apps and boards, some are calling for a boycott of events this weekend and the inauguration. Michael Edison Hayden, the Southern Poverty Law Center senior investigative reporter and spokesperson, says high-profile names and podcasters Mike Peinovich and Nick Fuentes have told their followers not to go to rallies. The ADL says that White supremacist Peinovich, known as Mike Enoch, and the far-right Fuentes have been rallying voices of discontent for years.
  • Segal said extremists might move cautiously in coming days, from both paranoia and knowing they're being watched.
  • "It's not before inauguration that we need to be concerned about them trying to spark another civil war -- it's after," Segal told CNN.
  • Trump was very much a part of that, too. He repeatedly criticized Gov. Gretchen Whitmer about her Covid-19 restrictions before and after the news of the plot against her.
  • Experts note that at the protests against her moves, there too was a cross-pollination of people who showed up -- self-declared militia members, anarchists, those with anti-government beliefs and anti-vaxxers.
  • Carusone says this is just the beginning of the country heading "into a buzzsaw" due to divisiveness, extremist actions and political rhetoric. "Trump has gift-wrapped the narrative for the next four years," Segal explains.
  • "All of those new people being brought into these communities creates new opportunity for expanding the ranks," Carusone said. "There's going to be a lot of new people ... organized and exposed to a set of prescriptions that ultimately bring us back to the same place ... leading up to the attack on the Capitol. "Except in this case, it'll be more of them."
Javier E

Ibram X. Kendi, Prophet of Anti-racism | National Review - 0 views

www.nationalreview.com/...x-kendi-prophet-of-anti-racism

anti-racism racism activism politics history Culture

shared by Javier E on 23 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Kendi now has four books at or near the top of the best-seller lists, including Stamped from the Beginning, which is a history of American racism that won the National Book Award in 2016, and two books on racism for younger readers. Racism is Kendi’s thing. His newest, How to Be an Antiracist, reappeared at the top of the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list this summer
  • Boston University announced it would offer Kendi, 38, the most prestigious tenured chair at its disposal, making him only the second holder of the Andrew W. Mellon Professorship in the Humanities.
  • The chair has been vacant since the death of the novelist and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel four years ago.
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  • The “antiracism” of which Kendi is the most trusted exponent is not just a new name for an old precept. It is the political doctrine behind the street demonstrations, “cancelings,” Twitter attacks, boycotts, statue topplings, and self-denunciations that have come together in a national movement
  • His parents moved to Manassas, Va., where he attended Stonewall Jackson High School. He won an oratory contest for a Bill Cosby–style exhortation calling on blacks to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, a performance that (on one hand) he remembers with shame but that (on the other) he begins the book with.
  • the anti-racism movement has grown to the point where Ibram X. Kendi can be said, for better or for worse, to be changing the country.
  • Kendi’s devout parents were drawn through their churches into political activism in the 1970s
  • Anti-racists assume that the American system of politics, economics, and policing has been corrupted by racial prejudice, that such prejudice explains the entire difference in socioeconomic status between blacks and others, that the status quo must be fought and beaten, and that anyone not actively engaged in this system-changing work is a collaborator with racism, and therefore himself a legitimate target for attack.
  • His mentor in Philadelphia was Molefi Kete Asante, notorious at the dawn of political correctness a generation ago as the author of Afrocentricity (1980), which stressed that, long before the high point of Greek culture, Egyptians, who lived in Africa, were building the Pyramids.
  • “What other people call racial microaggressions I call racist abuse,” he writes. “And I call the zero-tolerance policies preventing and punishing these abusers what they are: antiracist.”
  • the autobiographical parts of this book show him to be tentative, even anguished, about identity
  • Asante’s goals were polemical as much as scholarly. “The rejection of European particularism as universal is the first stage of our coming intellectual struggle,” he taught Kendi
  • The defining question is whether the discrimination is creating equity or inequity. If discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist. If discrimination is creating inequity, then it is racist. . .
  • As a prose stylist, Kendi is clear, direct, and even witty.
  • we must understand what Kendi means by “racism” in the first place.
  • “Racism is a marriage of racist policies and racist ideas that produces and normalizes racial inequities.”
  • it uses the concept of racism to define the concept of racism. It will seem less strange, and more powerful, when examined through the lens of academic race theory.
  • As the Minnesota legal theorist Alan David Freeman noted in his landmark 1978 essay “Legitimizing Racial Discrimination through Antidiscrimination Law,” the beneficiaries of a racist system (Freeman calls them “perpetrators”) are likely to view its dismantling as an ethical challenge. Getting over such a system means adopting an attitude of fairness and treating everyone the same.
  • The historic victims of that system, however, have a different perspective. They look at the system as having taken from them concrete things that were theirs by right — above all, jobs, money, and housing. They will not consider the problem fixed until those deprivations have been remedied
  • He wants not pious talk but the actual policies that will redistribute the advantages, the stuff, that whites have undeservingly acquired. “What if instead of a feelings advocacy,” he asks at one point, “we had an outcome advocacy that put equitable outcomes before our guilt and anguish?”
  • ideas about race and racism are central to Kendi’s system of thought, and you will understand why when you focus on its one truly original element: His “antiracism” is not a doctrine of nondiscrimination. In fact, it is not even anti-racist, as that term is commonly understood.
  • He does not even pay lip service to neutral treatment
  • If practical equality for blacks is the imperative, discriminating on their behalf is going to be necessary
  • Kendi has done a bit of everything. He is an ideological everyman of race consciousness, his life a Bunyanesque pilgrimage from the Valley of Assimilation to the Mountains of Intersectionality.
  • The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination. 
  • It is why this book really is as “bold” as reviewers say it is, and why the judges who in 2016 gave Kendi the National Book Award were right to say he “turns our ideas of the term ‘racism’ upside-down.”
  • Kendi has decided that the two approaches to civil rights described by Freeman are not simply different perspectives on the same issue; they are mutually incompatible — one must destroy the other. “There is no neutrality in the racism struggle,” he insists. The old view of the perpetrators — that everything will be well as long as we treat people with equality, neutrality, and respect — is no longer just a different approach to the problem. It is illegitimate. It is a “racist” obstruction.
  • To oppose reparations for slavery (or to have no opinion on the matter) is racist.
  • To allude to color blindness or talk of a “post-racial society,” to back religious freedom or voter-ID laws . . . these are racist things, too. Even the overarching vision that rallied white liberals to civil rights — the belief that blacks could, and should, assimilate into American society — becomes morally suspect
  • Assimilation, Kendi announces at the start of his second chapter, expresses “the racist idea that a racial group is culturally or behaviorally inferior.” The idea is racist, Kendi reasons, because it is assumed the out-group would be improved by joining the in-group.
  • Also racist are those intellectuals and politicians whose explanations lessen in any way the weight of white racism among the causes of inequality:
  • Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer, naturally, for their ideas on black family structure in Beyond the Melting Pot (1963)
  • Ihad to forsake the suasionist bred into me, of researching and educating for the sake of changing minds,” Kendi writes. “I had to start researching and educating to change policy.” Something similar is inscribed on Karl Marx’s gravestone in Highgate Cemetery in London. It is the credo of an activist, not a scholar
  • Kendi grants that blacks, too, can be racist, but we must understand the grudging sense in which he concedes this
  • He believes blacks can collaborate with the structures of white racism, as turncoats, agents, and enforcers
  • When Kendi opposes “racism,” he means only the treatment of blacks by European-descended peoples since the Age of Discovery, especially under the American system of slavery and Jim Crow.
  • But the racism itself is always white, no matter what the color of the person practicing it
  • He explicitly does not mean that he considers it wrong to discriminate by race in any abstract ethical sense.
  • On the contrary: He is carrying out the de-universalization of Western values that his mentor Asante urged.
  • But also Oscar Lewis, once considered the hippest of radical anthropologists, for describing a “culture of poverty” in La Vida (1966) and other books.
  • In African-American studies departments you can address racial problems in an atmosphere of esprit de corps and ideological unanimity.
  • their very isolation has turned them into mighty bases for consciousness-raising, dogma construction, and political organizing
  • It is from these hives of like-minded activists that the country’s human-resources departments have been staffed.
  • Those who are confident that Kendi’s argument is something they can take or leave probably do not understand what civil-rights law has become
  • The word “racist” is a powerful disciplinary tool; whoever controls its deployment can bend others to his will
  • it has become clear that corporations fear the word “racism” so much that they will betray their employees and permit their lives to be destroyed rather than risk being accused of it.
  • All this requires is a few redefinitions, and here the law appears to be on Kendi’s side. With its Bostock decision this spring, the Supreme Court went into the business of policing transphobia,
  • In Kendi’s book — which, it bears repeating, has been for much of this summer the best-selling nonfiction book in the United States — the line between white supremacists and climate-change deniers, between white supremacists and opponents of Obamacare, is hard to draw or discern
  • It is difficult to imagine a reform more likely to drive American ethnic (and other) groups apart than the much-discussed project of defunding, or even abolishing, urban police forces
  • The same can be said for the wave of iconoclasm. Satisfying though it may be to throw ropes around a monument of Andrew or Stonewall Jackson and pull it down on one wild night, the effect is to add a grievance to American history, not remove one
  • In light of these unintended consequences, one assertion of Kendi, mentioned earlier, is particularly troubling, because even a skeptical reader will need to pause over the author’s point. This is Kendi’s dismissal of assimilation — the belief that blacks can “join” American society on equal terms — as racist. “While segregationist ideas suggest a racial group is permanently inferior,” Kendi writes, “assimilationist ideas suggest a racial group is temporarily inferior.”
  • . For a couple of decades after the passage of civil-rights legislation, such black socioeconomic inequality as remained could be wished away by well-meaning people of all persuasions, whether quota Democrats or enterprise-zone Republicans
  • the persistence of this inequality through two whole generations puts those promises in a different light. The difference between “temporary” and “permanent” disadvantage looks like a rhetorical one. The dream, as Langston Hughes put it, has been deferred. A radical temptation arises.
  • Kendi, terrible simplificateur that he is, has picked up the gauntlet. As he sees it, there are only two explanations for this delay: Either you believe the problem is with blacks, unable to make it in a system that has been designed fairly for everyone, or you believe the problem is with whites, who have designed an unfair system that keeps blacks down.
Javier E

Chinese youth - Young Chinese are both patriotic and socially progressive | Special report | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...iotic-and-socially-progressive

youth progressive china history politics Culture pandemic

shared by Javier E on 23 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • More than half of Chinese in their 20s express a desire to start their own business. Others will climb up the ranks of the ruling Communist Party
  • How they understand their country’s past and what they ask of its future are essential to understand how they might one day lead China.
  • Youth often stands for trendsetting and rebellion. In China, the young must navigate an authoritarian state and a bruisingly competitive education system. This is when big life decisions are made and adult identities formed.
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  • Without siblings, they shoulder alone the full weight of their parents’ (and grandparents’) expectations: to excel at school, secure a stable job, marry and have children, all before the age of 30.
  • Newlyweds hit a ten-year low in 2019. Women in Shanghai marry on average at 29, later than Americans and a jump of six years in a decade
  • The jiulinghou are China’s best-educated cohort yet. Last year the country churned out a record 9m graduates.
  • A pay cheque is no longer enough; young people want a sense of purpose. As labour-intensive manufacturing winds down, young migrants from the countryside are taking up gigs that give them more freedom in the booming informal sector.
  • In China this cohort has a generational identity: the jiulinghou, or “post-90s”, a shorthand term for those born between 1990 and 1999. They number 188m—more than the combined populations of Australia, Britain and Germany.
  • Despite pervasive censorship, they use China’s online networks to promote such causes as feminism, environmentalism and nationalism.
  • When they feel insulted by foreign entities, be they K-pop bands or America’s National Basketball Association, millions clamour online for consumer boycotts that cow even mighty multinationals. Patriotic sentiment has long been strong. But increasingly youths do not question the regime’s claim that loving country and party are one and the same.
  • The jiulinghou are seen as apolitical, except in their naive and brash patriotism; concerned with getting ahead, but only to buy the latest iPhone. Many see them as materialistic and entitled, a generation of “little emperors” doted on by their parents.
  • This does not always describe the jiulinghou.
  • “We are the jiulinghou,” the message read. “We are certainly not brain-dead!...In fact, we are passionate, we are rising and we are ready to take on responsibility.”
  • young people speak out for social causes. Many join volunteer groups or donate to charity. No generation has been more vocal in its support of LGBT and women’s rights. Students have backed factory workers trying to unionise, and staged silent street protests about climate change.
  • Young people do not intend to challenge the legitimacy of the ruling Communist Party. Their social liberalism has grown even as support for the party rises
  • The jiulinghou are comfortable with a rising, assertive China. The party knows how to play on this. It has hammered home that China stopped the spread of covid-19 within its borders as the West bungled its response. Spin doctors have not had to exert themselves on the calamitous failings of Donald Trump’s presidency. More overseas Chinese students are returning home, disillusioned with the West. Young pride feeds off a new worldly confidence.
  • China divides its generations by decades. The qilinghou (post-70s) are defined by childhoods after Mao’s death in 1976. The balinghou (post-80s) grew up as China reformed and opened to the world under Deng Xiaoping. It is often now argued that generations change every five years, or even every three—the talk is already of the linglinghou, most of whom are still in school. To speak of millennials, whose definition in the West is those born between 1981 and 1996, is to shoehorn four Chinese generations into one.
  • The gap is easy to grasp if you ask parents to recall their 20s. They mention jobs allocated by the party through their danwei, a government-controlled work unit.
  • The lives of jiulinghou share two features. One is that they began after the pro-democracy protests of 1989. The state relentlessly scrubs from the internet any reference to the bloody suppression of the Tiananmen protests.
  • The second feature is that those born since 1991 spent their late teens with Mr Xi in power. They might be called Generation Xi
  • Students take obligatory courses on Marxism, nationalism and the doctrines of Mao; last year “Xi Jinping Thought” was added. This affects how they see the world. A survey in 2019 by China Youth Daily, a state organ, found that three in four of those born after 1995 think China is “not perfect, but always improving”.
  • Yet not every young Chinese holds rosy views of the party. In Hong Kong, young protesters fighting for Western freedoms have made clear their fury at their erosion by the Beijing government. Tibetan and Uyghur youths seethe in silence as brutal state-led campaigns erase their cultures and languages
katherineharron

Trump departs Washington a pariah as his era in power ends - CNNPolitics - 0 views

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

trump

shared by katherineharron on 20 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Donald Trump's era in Washington is over.
  • The President, addled and mostly friendless, will end his time in the capital a few hours early to spare himself the humiliation of watching his successor be sworn in.
  • He departs a city under militarized fortification meant to prevent a repeat of the riot he incited earlier this month. He leaves office with more than 400,000 Americans dead from a virus he chose to downplay or ignore.
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  • Trump's departure amounts to a blissful lifting of a four-year pall on American life and the end to a tortured stretch of misconduct and indignities
  • At least some of the 74 million Americans who voted for Trump in November are sad to see him go. Scores of them attempted an insurrection at the US Capitol this month to prevent it from happening at all. The less violent view him as a transformative President whose arrival heralded an end to political correctness and whose exit marks a return to special treatment for immigrants, gays and minorities.
  • In his final days, Trump has been surrounded by a shrinking circle of associates, many of them decades younger. Old friends who used to speak with him regularly said they can no longer reach him
  • The violent mob attack on the citadel of American democracy capped a presidency built upon disregard for democratic norms, antagonizing government institutions and willful ignorance of the far right's violent and racist tendencies.
  • There is no evidence the President has reckoned with the consequences of his actions; the opposite appears to be true. He came to regret a concession video he had recorded at the urging of his family and advisers, who told him he was seriously close to being removed from office.
  • Freshly impeached for a second time, this time with support from a few Republicans, Trump ends his term with the lowest approval rating of his tenure. Republicans remain divided on whether he represents the future of their party.
  • One thing Trump's presidency undoubtedly accomplished: revealing in stark fashion the racist, hate-filled, violent undercurrents of American society that many had chosen previously to ignore. It became impossible to overlook as Trump's presidency concluded with violent riots of White nationalists and neo-Nazis at the Capitol.
  • Ten Republicans voted for his impeachment in the most bipartisan impeachment vote in history.
  • They appeared to reconcile, but other senior Republicans began breaking with the President, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Rep. Liz Cheney, the No. 3 House Republican.
  • He even had a falling-out with his vice president, Mike Pence, whose characteristic fealty was severed after he heard nothing from Trump while mobs appeared to be hunting him during the insurrection attempt
  • Instead of attending his successor's inauguration, Trump is departing the White House early to attend a military-style sendoff at Joint Base Andrews. He balked at the idea of leaving Washington an ex-president and did not particularly relish the thought of requesting use of the presidential aircraft from Biden
  • Special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Trump's ties to Russia proved an immense distraction that preoccupied both the President and his White House. It resulted in the convictions of several Trump associates, many of whom he pardoned.
  • Trump enters his post-presidency facing swirling legal matters and with the fate of his business empire in doubt.
  • Without some of the protections afforded him by the presidency, Trump will become vulnerable to multiple investigations looking into possible fraud in his financial business dealings as a private citizen.
  • Even as he exits the White House, there is little question that Trump's shadow will cloud the capital for the foreseeable future. The matter of his impeachment still lingers in the Senate, which will begin a trial after Biden is sworn in. And Trump's influence on his party's direction going forward will amount to a reckoning for conservatives, who now must decide whether theirs is the party of a president who incited an insurrection on his way out of office.
  • Trump has left the Republican Party in civil war.
  • Trump has amassed hundreds of millions of dollars in a leadership PAC formed after the election that he will be able to use for future political activity, including boosting candidates. There are few restrictions on how the money can be used.
  • But since then, officials have cast doubt on his intentions, suggesting instead he was more interested in keeping the potential 2024 GOP field in limbo rather than seriously contemplating another run.
  • The results of Trump's presidency are not particularly mixed. While there have been some achievements -- a reshaped Supreme Court, a dismantled regulatory state and the brokering of diplomatic achievements in the Middle East -- Trump's overarching legacy is one of division and rancor capped by the catastrophic events of January 6, when he had 14 days left in his term.
  • "This is more work than in my previous life," he told Reuters 100 days into the job. "I thought it would be easier."
  • Trump had spent his previous decades cultivating a public profile as a savvy businessman and larger-than-life New York City mogul, despite a succession of bankruptcies and collapses. His second act as a reality television star with a penchant for race-baiting conspiracies (such as questioning President Barack Obama's birthplace) led into his third act as president, and along with it an eye toward artifice and spectacle.
  • Trump is the first president in 150 years to stage such a boycott. While Pence will attend Biden's swearing-in, other members of Trump's family, including wife Melania and daughter Ivanka, will be absent.
  • Instead of rising to the difficulties, Trump amended the job to fit his own liking. He mostly skipped reading lengthy intelligence documents, preferring in-person briefings that on some occasions left out important information about which Trump would later claim ignorance.
  • Most tragically, Trump showed little interest in leading the nation through the coronavirus pandemic, self-styling himself a "wartime leader" for a few days before reverting to downplaying the crisis and eventually pretending it did not exist
  • . A fateful invitation to attend Bastille Day in Paris in 2017 turned Trump on to the thrills of a military parade, which he unsuccessfully lobbied for in Washington for another three years.
anniina03

Clashes With Police Cut Short Hong Kong Protest | Time - 0 views

time.com/...hater-garden-hong-kong-clashes

politics Crisis culture

shared by anniina03 on 20 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Clashes broke out between protesters and police in Hong Kong on Sunday, cutting short a rally after thousands had gathered at a park to call for electoral reforms and a boycott of the Chinese Communist Party. Police fired tear gas near the park, known as Chater Garden, after some protesters attacked men whom they believed to be plainclothes officers, in a return to the violence that has roiled the Chinese territory off and on for months.
  • “We want real universal suffrage,” the protesters chanted. “Disband the police force, free Hong Kong!”
  • Frictions between democracy-minded Hong Kongers and the Communist Party-ruled central government in Beijing came to a head last June, when proposed extradition legislation sparked months of mass demonstrations.
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  • The bill — which would have allowed Hong Kong residents to be sent to mainland China to stand trial — has been withdrawn, but the protests have continued for more than seven months, centered around demands for voting rights and an independent inquiry into police conduct.
  • The months of unrest have sent the financial hub’s economy reeling, as shops have shuttered during clashes and tourists have stayed away. Hong Kong police gave approval for Sunday’s rally, but not for a march that organizers had also planned. The march didn’t happen, and the protest was curtailed by clashes after police ordered an end to the rally hours before the pre-approved finishing time.
  • Several young protesters were handcuffed outside the park, as officers made arrests and conducted searches into the evening. One man who refused to be searched retreated into a public restroom that was promptly surrounded by riot police.
aidenborst

Opinion: A company in Brazil made a controversial move to fight racism. Other CEOs should try it - CNN - 0 views

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

Politics US history crisis Culture policy injustice race positive-controversy

shared by aidenborst on 04 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Although she's not a household name in the United States, billionaire Luiza Trajano, the richest woman in Brazil, might very well become one soon if her radical new model to confront structural racism takes hold.
  • Its coveted trainee program, long considered a major stepping stone into Brazil's corporate world, will now only admit Black Brazilians into its ranks in an effort to upend a system that oftentimes sidelines Brazilians of African heritage from rising up the corporate ladder.
  • The Magalu announcement quickly reverberated across the Brazilian media landscape. It was a bold move, no doubt, but not one without blowback; there have been calls across social media for a boycott of the company's stores.
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  • Of course, such a move in the United States would immediately run afoul of long-established laws stemming from Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which set up the EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) to adjudicate race-based hiring, firing and promotional grievances. Seminal cases such as Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971), McDonnell Douglas Corp. v. Green (1973) and Hazelwood School District v. United States (1977), among many others, served to advance the legal structure through which American companies now deal with matters of race and equity in the workplace
  • Over time, these lawsuits gave EEO policies more teeth by defining a legal framework for ensuring workplace protections. They also forced companies to rewrite or get rid of unfair employment policies and practices.
  • However, the cruel irony of America's efforts to curb workplace discrimination is that once Title VII forcibly removed race from the hiring equation, it immediately became that much harder to enact programs to address systemic racism in ways that might be beneficial, which is why our country's long attempts at promoting affirmative action programs ultimately failed.
  • No matter how we got here, the current system is clearly not working; White males still account for the majority of executive positions. Among the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, only 1% are Black.
  • What if growing up in a low-income, single-parent household, instead of being seen as an impediment to climbing the social ladder, positioned high-potential young teens for corporate-sponsored talent development programs that would support them from junior high, through high school and college and into the sponsor's corporate ranks? Such a program executed at scale would invariably lift up disadvantaged White youths as well, but that would be a feature, not a bug, making the entire initiative less controversial.
  • CEOs should start by stripping down America's foundational myth of meritocracy -- the notion that one's ability to get ahead in life is solely a function of the combined strength of their efforts and abilities -- and approach corporate recruiting from a new angle.
  • Several corporate programs, such as Starbucks' College Achievement Plan, have taken steps to make higher education more accessible for employees, but fall short of addressing the social, environmental and economic vectors that impinge upon disadvantaged youths.
  • America has a diversity problem, and our largest corporations need to embrace bold new models about how to accelerate social and racial justice within their ranks.
  • Despite the controversy around the decision, the Trajanos are not wavering. "We want to see more Black Brazilians in positions of leadership in Magalu; this diversity will make us a better company, capable of delivering a better return to our shareholders," Frederico Trajano wrote in a recent article.
  • "Today the racial make-up of Brazil is over 50% Black and Brown -- it basically looks like what the United States is projected to look like by 2050," observed Frederico Trajano in a recent Zoom interview with me. "American CEOs of large companies would be well-served by looking at what we are doing down here in Brazil on many fronts, including how to ensure that a company's leadership team better reflects the public it serves."
  • Here in the United States, Americans just elected the first woman of color, Kamala Harris, herself the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, as vice president
  • American CEOs should look south, and take their cues on racial justice from a bold businesswoman and her son from Brazil.
hannahcarter11

Black Lives Matter: Supreme Court throws out case against activist - 0 views

www.usatoday.com/...5888878002

supreme court activist Black Lives Matter history

shared by hannahcarter11 on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • The Black Lives Matter movement got a favorable ruling Monday from the Supreme Court.
  • The justices tossed out a federal appeals court decision that allowed a Black Lives Matter protest organizer to be sued by a police officer injured by an unknown assailant
  • The officer, who suffered injuries to his brain, jaw and teeth, also sued Black Lives Matter. That was tossed out on the theory that BLM is a social movement and cannot be sued.
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  • The Supreme Court, in an unsigned opinion, said that appeals court should not have reached its ruling, based on free speech rights, without a clear understanding of Louisiana law
  • David Cole, the ACLU's legal director, had said allowing the appeals court decision to stand "would have a tremendous chilling effect on the First Amendment right to protest."
  • lawyers for the injured police officer had argued that reversing the appeals court decision "would encourage negligent, unpeaceful, and illegal behavior at the expense of others and, in particular, would expose law enforcement officers to serious harm."
  • The Supreme Court's most significant precedent also involved a protest organized by Black leaders. It ruled unanimously in 1982 that the NAACP was not liable for damages caused by a boycott of white merchants in Mississippi because its role was nonviolent.
clairemann

Amy Coney Barrett takes oath as a Supreme Court justice - 0 views

www.usatoday.com/...6041415002

Politics us trump gop election SCOTUS

shared by clairemann on 27 Oct 20 - No Cached
  •  Trump rushed back from the campaign trail in Pennsylvania for aceremony on the South Lawn of the White House in the midst of a global pandemic.
  • a month earlier the federal appeals court judge from Indiana was introduced in a crowded settingthat contributed to the spread of COVID-19, both at the White House and in the Senate.
  • Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., called Barrett "a woman of unparalleled ability and temperament."
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  • Barrett tried to distance herself and the judiciary from the politics swirling around her nomination and the presidential election.“It is the job of a judge to resist her policy preferences. It would be a dereliction of duty for her to give in to them," she said.
    • clairemann
      clairemann on 27 Oct 20
       
      she says all the right things, but as I hung on her every word as I watched the words do not match the actons.
  • Barrett will become the fifth woman ever to serve on the high court, succeeding the late liberal Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
    • clairemann
      clairemann on 27 Oct 20
       
      absolutely devastating
  • "is one of our nation’s most brilliant legal scholars.”
    • clairemann
      clairemann on 27 Oct 20
       
      blatantly incorrect, no origionilist or textualist truly understands the function of the constitution in America.
  • Barrett will become the fifth woman ever to serve on the high court, succeeding the late liberal Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
  • Petitions challenging voting procedures in Pennsylvania and North Carolina are pending before the high court, which ruled 5-3 along ideological lines Monday night against extending Wisconsin's deadline for absentee ballots.
  • It represents the culmination of conservatives' decades-long project to win control of the Supreme Court, perhaps for decades to come.
  • Democrats immediately cited McConnell's 2016 refusal to act on Obama's nominee as reason to delay action until after the election, to no avail.
  • All 12 Republicans voted to send her nomination to the Senate floor; all 10 Democrats boycotted the vote. 
  • “The American people will never forget this blatant act of bad faith," Schumer said. "It will go down as one of the darkest days in the 231-year history of the United States Senate.”
    • clairemann
      clairemann on 27 Oct 20
       
      couldn't be more true.
aleija

Big Tech Continues Its Surge Ahead of the Rest of the Economy - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ok-amazon-google-earnings.html

US history technology pandemic

shared by aleija on 30 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • While the rest of the U.S. economy languished earlier this year, the tech industry’s biggest companies seemed immune to the downturn, surging as the country worked, learned and shopped from home.
  • Combined, the four companies reported a quarterly net profit of $38 billion.
  • Amazon reported record sales, and an almost 200 percent rise in profits, as the pandemic accelerated the transition to online shopping. Despite a boycott of its advertising over the summer, Facebook had another blockbuster quarter.
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  • On Tuesday, Microsoft, Amazon’s closest competitor in cloud computing, also reported its most profitable quarter, growing 30 percent from a year earlier.
  • That slow return to health is also providing momentum to companies that suffered early in the pandemic
  • Twitter’s stock dropped about 14 percent in after-hours trading on Thursday
  • Sales were $96.1 billion, up 37 percent from a year earlier, and profits rose to $6.3 billion.
  • Amazon said sales could reach $121 billion in the fourth quarter because of the confluence of Prime Day, the holiday shopping season and the turn to online spending.
  • Apple’s services segment, which includes revenues from the App Store and offerings like Apple Music, increased 16 percent to $14.5 billion. Sales rose 46 percent for iPads, 29 percent for Mac computers and 21 percent for wearables.
Javier E

Opinion | Biden and Climate Change Have Reshaped the Middle East - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...iddle-east-climate-change.html

biden climate change Mideast change climate interdependence crisis history politics

shared by Javier E on 27 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • omething is in the air that is powerfully resetting the pieces on the Middle East chess board — pieces that had been frozen in place for years. The biggest force shifting them was Biden’s decision to pull out of Afghanistan and tell the region: “You’re home alone. If you’re looking for us, we’ll be in the Straits of Taiwan. Write often. Send oil. Bye.”
  • a second factor is intensifying the pressure of America’s leaving: Mother Nature, manifesting herself in heat waves, droughts, demographic stresses, long-term falling oil prices and rising Covid-19 cases.
  • this shift will force every leader to focus more on building ecological resilience to gain legitimacy instead of gaining it through resistance to enemies near and far.
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  • we are firmly in a transition from a Middle East shaped by great powers to a Middle East shaped by Mother Nature.
  • We are just at the start of this paradigm shift from resistance to resilience, as this region starts to become too hot, too populated and too water-starved to sustain any quality of life.
  • et’s go back to Biden. He was dead right: America’s presence in Afghanistan and tacit security guarantees around the region were both stabilizing and enabling a lot of bad behavior — boycotts, occupations, reckless adventures and brutal interventions.
  • President Barack Obama’s pullback from the region and President Donald Trump’s refusal to retaliate against Iran — after it sent a wave of drones to attack a key Saudi oil facility in 2019 — were the warning signs that America had grown weary of intervening and refereeing in the Middle East’s sectarian wars. Biden just made it official.
  • “The U.S. is not pulling out entirely, but it is pulling back, and all of its Sunni Arab partners are now acting to protect themselves — and to stabilize the region — in an era when the U.S. will no longer be dominant there,”
  • “But the U.S. will still be needed to deter Iran, should it develop a nuclear capability — and to defuse other conflicts.”
  • just as we once supplanted the Soviets as the dominant shaper in the region, Mother Nature is now supplanting America as the dominant force.
  • In Mother Nature’s Middle East, leaders will be judged not by how much they resist one another or great powers, but by how much resilience they build for their people and nations at a time when the world will be phasing out fossil fuels, at a time when all the Arab-Muslim states have booming populations under the age of 30 and at a time of intensifying climate change.
  • The United Nations recently reported that Afghanistan has been hit with the worst drought in more than 30 years. It is crushing farmers, pushing up food prices and putting 18.8 million Afghans — nearly half of the population — into food insecurity. Over to you, Mr. Taliban: You broke it, you own it.
  • there may be a day, very soon, where the United States will need to return to active Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy — not based on land for peace, but sun and fresh water for peace. EcoPeace Middle East, an alliance of Israeli, Palestinian and Jordanian environmentalists, recently put forward just such a strategy called the “Green Blue Deal.”
  • How would it work? Jordan, with its vast desert areas, has the comparative advantage to produce large amounts of cheap solar electricity to meet its own needs and also to sell to the Israeli and Palestinian grids to “generate the electricity for desalination plants that could provide all three parties abundant fresh water,”
  • All the parties there are ecologically interdependent, but they have unhealthy interdependencies rather than healthy ones. America could become the trusted mediator who forges healthy interdependencies
Javier E

Opinion | Transcript: Ezra Klein Interviews Brandon Terry - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-interviews-brandon-terry.html

MLK thought political emotion non-violent love interview transcript klein history culture crisis politics

shared by Javier E on 01 Aug 23 - No Cached
  • BRANDON TERRY: Well, there’s this puzzle when we think about somebody like Martin Luther King Jr. And it’s that on the one hand, we have a national holiday devoted to him, an imposing monument on the hallowed space of the National Mall; he’s invoked in all manner of political speeches from across the political spectrum, probably the most famous African American of the 20th century.
  • But at the same time, if you ask even really well-educated people, they often don’t know that he’d written five major books, that he’s a systematic theologian with sustained interest in political philosophy who’s written lots and lots of things, incisive things, on some of the most pressing political and ethical matters.
  • King wants to say something different, I think. He wants to say that we are both of these things. We are a society with what he called the congenital deformity of racism — that it’s shot through many of our deepest institutions and structural arrangements, and because it has not been redressed on the scale that it would have to be to achieve true justice, it festers. It’s a rot. It’s a challenge that every generation is called on to pick up and try to do better than their forebears.
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  • I’ve described it as a romantic narrative, one that’s about unities in the process of becoming, a calling together of Americans to transcend racial division and come together in a unifying way, a more perfect union, as a transcendence of essential American goodness over transitory American evils.
  • when we tell the story that way, unfortunately, not only is it mythic, but it trains us to treat King as the kind of person who’s not doing any original political thinking. What he’s doing is calling us to be true to who we always already were
  • And when you treat him like that, the thing that becomes most interesting about him is not his thought. It’s not the way he challenged us to think about violence. It’s not the way he challenges us to think about segregation, both de facto and de jure. It’s not how he challenges us to think about economic justice.
  • The thing that’s interesting about him starts to be his rhetoric or his tactics, the way in which he pushes people or frames arguments to call us to be true to who we always already were. That’s a real problem because it evades the most incisive, challenging and generative contributions that his public philosophy makes for our era.
  • it gets conscripted into a story that’s ultimately affirming about the adequacy of our constitutional order, the trajectory of our institutions, the essential goodness of our national character. You often hear politicians use this rhetoric of, this is not who we are.
  • it’s partly related to how we tell the story of the civil rights movement and particularly, how we tell King’s role in the civil rights movement.
  • There’s a way in which the philosophy of nonviolence gets painted, even in King’s time, as a kind of extreme, purist pacifism. And part of that is the connection with Gandhi, although I think it’s a radical misunderstanding of Gandhi, as well.
  • it’s a way of imagining the commitment to nonviolence as related to passivity, as related to the performance of suffering for pity. These are things that King never endures. For him, the idea of passive resistance was a misnomer. He helped coin the phrase “direct action” — he and other members of the civil-rights generation — that nonviolence is aggressive.
  • It’s an aggressive attack on injustice, an aggressive form of noncooperation with domination. It’s about trying to wedge yourself into the machinery of domination, to prevent its adequate functioning, to try to force or coerce your fellow citizens to stop and take stock of what kind of injustices are being unfurled in their name.
  • And it does so on the presumption that politics involves coercion, especially for King, who had a pretty tragic sense of human nature, that politics is going to involve confrontation with great evil, that it’s not a Pollyannaish view about what we’re all capable of if we just turn our eye toward God in the right way.
  • We’re owe it to them to live with evil. And we always are going to be called to confront it. We just need to do it in ways that won’t unleash a further chain of social evil and bitterness and revenge and retaliation. And King thought nonviolence was the only weapon that could cut and heal at the same time.
  • So when you hear King talk about love, when you hear King talk about nonviolence, these things actually require not just an enormous discipline around the acceptance of suffering, as if it’s some kind of passive practice, but they require really creative, dedicated thinking around how exactly to push and prod your neighbors into addressing the forms of injustice that structure the polity and how to do it in a way that doesn’t leave a perpetual midnight of bitterness when the conflict is done.
  • He says that the really interesting question, however, is how to organize a sustained, successful challenge to structural injustice. And for King, that requires something that blends militant resistance and a higher-order ethical practice that can point the way toward peaceful reconciliation over the long term.
  • Gandhi has this line where he says, if you can’t practice nonviolence, it quote, “retaliation or resistance unto death is the second best, though a long way off from the first. Cowardice is impotence, worse than violence.” So this idea that if you can’t be nonviolent, it’s better to be violent than to be a coward, doing nothing — I think gets at something important. Can you help unpack that?
  • to raise the question of strategy, as if we can evaluate means without some kind of ethical reflection or without some kind of underlying ethical commitments, for King, is already a confusion. He thinks that the ends are prefigured in any means.
  • Gandhi, in “Hind Swaraj,” has this great passage where he talks about how could come to acquire a piece of property. You could buy it. You could steal it. You could kill somebody in pursuit of it. You could ask for it as a gift.At the end of the day, you still have the same property. But the thing, itself, has changed. In one scenario, it’s a piece of stolen property. It’s a theft. In another, it’s a gift, which is different than something you’ve purchased.
  • So in the course of acquiring the thing, even though the thing is the same, the means have transformed it in a really, really important way. And King wants to say something similar — that in all political practice, the ends are prefigured in the means
  • nonviolence has to be — if it’s going to be true nonviolence for King — informed by a philosophy of love that really wants and desires and wills goodwill for the enemy at present and is committed, at the fundamental level, to going on together in peace, going on together, sharing the polity in perpetuity.
  • I think for King, imperative to nonviolent resistance turns, in large part, on the question of your own dignity and self-respect. So it is a justice question. He’s concerned with structural justice as a matter of the kinds of arrangements that prevail in the larger American society. That’s obviously true.
  • So there’s the person or group you’re in conversation or conflict with. I’m a liberal, and I’m arguing with a conservative. And I think that’s the most common target to think about: How do I beat or convince this person or group on the other side?
  • Then there’s the broader community polity — the voters, of the country, people who are bystanders, maybe interested, maybe not, but a broader community that is in some way watching or can be brought in to watch. And then there’s you, the person taking the action, and how it affects you and your group to take a particular action.
  • something that seems present in King’s thought is much, much, much, much more concern and focus than I think most political thinkers have today on how political action affects you, the person taking it, and affects the broader community that might be watching it
  • — that ends up with you being turned away from the good and toward things like hatred, resentment, violence, which he thinks, ultimately, will corrode your soul and take you further away from flourishing.
  • But he’s also concerned with how you relate to your own sense of equality, equal standing, worth, as he would say, somebodiness, we might say dignity — he also says that a lot — and that for King, to acquiesce in the face of oppression and domination, without protest, is to abdicate your own self-respect and dignity.
  • for him, dignity also required a certain kind of excellence of character, a certain kind of comportment and practice toward others.
  • So it is about trying to defend your dignity, defend yourself respect against insult and humiliation, oppression. But it’s also about doing so in a way that doesn’t degrade your character in the long term, that doesn’t cause you to end up being turned away from the good, which, again, for him, is going to be a religiously-inflected category
  • When you think about somebody’s political philosophy or their theory of political action, you can maybe think of there being a couple agents they’re thinking about.
  • It has fallen out of favor to say that there are certain ways of acting, politically, that are better and worse, from a virtue perspective, because it often is seen not as really a question of you and your relationship to some baseline or ideal but is some kind of concession you’re making to people who don’t deserve
  • I am a person who believes those questions are still legitimate, that they can’t all be reduced to strategy or will to power or psychic drives. I think that there’s something like an ethical life that requires us to argue about it and requires us to think really hard about how we discipline ourselves to achieve it.
  • Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, wrote a phenomenal book, many years ago, called “Righteous Discontent.” And that’s what introduces the phrase, “the politics of respectability.” It’s a study of turn of the century Black Baptist women and their organizing efforts through the church.
  • It’s this idea that, in confronting a system of social stigma, the response that you need to have to it is to try to adjust your behavior, comportment, your self fashioning, in line with the dominant norms so that you can, over time, undermine the stigma and become a full participant in society.
  • there are all sorts of questions, legitimate questions, that are raised against that. Are we losing something valuable about alternative forms of life, about alternative cultural practices, when we take the existing, dominant norms as unassailable or something to aspire to?
  • what’s really fascinating is that he talks a lot about how he sympathizes with all those criticisms. He agrees with them
  • here’s the other part of Evelyn Higginbotham’s formulation — there’s a deeper question, one with thousands of years of moral reflection built up into it, which is about virtue ethics — that there are some things that people are appealing to you about that aren’t about their effect in the polity that aren’t about trying to manipulate white, racial attitudes. They’re about your own flourishing and character. They’re deep questions about how to live a good life, how to achieve excellence and the crafting of your soul.
  • as King would say, our reason sometimes can become subordinate to our passions. It can just be a legitimizing power or rationalizing power to the point where we lose track of what we really want to achieve, the kind of character we really want to have.
  • And for King, many of the appeals he made in that vocabulary are really about that. They’re really about virtue. They’re really about what hatred does to your life, what anger does to your life, what violence does to your life
  • there is a question for him, at the core of his life, which is, what makes this worth doing? That’s a virtue question. It’s not just a strategic or tactical one, in the narrow sense.
  • he describes nonviolence, I think really importantly, as also being about a nonviolence of spirit.
  • the example that he often gives is about humiliation — that there’s a way in which the desire to humiliate others, to diminish their status in front of other people for your own pleasure, the desire to subject them to standards of evaluation that they probably themselves don’t hold or don’t understand, in order to enable mockery. There’s a way in which, if we’re reflexive about where that desire comes from, we will find that it comes from a place that’s irrational, indefensible and, likely, cruel, and that if we were to imagine a way of life built around those feelings, those desires, those practices, it would be one that would make it really hard for us to have healthy social ties, stable institutions, flourishing social relationships.
  • So part of what he’s up to is asking us, at all times, to be self-reflexive about the desires and needs and fantasies that drive us in politics
  • the concession.
  • So what nonviolence does is, it builds in a check on those kinds of rationalizations, those kinds of emotional drives, by teaching us to avoid forms of humiliation and forms of physical violence that make it hard to come back from. So that’s the first point.
  • The second point — and it goes more to your sense of revenge and retaliation — is again, forcing us to acknowledge the legitimacy of anger.
  • He uses the phrase, “legitimate anger” in the late ’60s — but to be reflective about it and understand that, even in a case where someone kills a loved one of yours, revenge, violence, retaliation, that doesn’t bring back the loved one that you’ve lost.
  • The only thing that can do that is a kind of forward-looking, constructive practice of politics and social ethics.
  • so what he’s trying to do is raise the question of, can we channel our legitimate rage, our legitimate anger, into a practice that allows us to maintain our self respect?
  • here’s this man who is both making this public argument and trying to get people to follow him in it and put themselves at risk over it, and is also living it himself, and talks about this unbelievably difficult thing, which is not feel righteous anger, but to not feel hatred, to internally reflect the world you want externally.
  • he does falter. He does fail. And I think when we read biographies of King, when you read the last parts of David Garrow’s biography, when you read Cornel West’s essay, from “To Shape a New World,” which talks a lot about the despair at the end of King’s life, if you watch HBO’S great documentary, “King in the Wilderness,” you see a person faltering and failing under the pressure.
  • He’s not able, for example, to bring himself to a kind of reconciliation with Malcolm X
  • How imaginable is King’s philosophy, is this practice, without his deep Christianity, without a belief in redemption, in salvation, in the possibility of a next life?
  • I think King, himself, thinks that the practice of nonviolent politics does the kind of work that you’re describing. And I think he would be worried about the fact that, in our time, so much of these questions about the management of emotion, the building of character, has become a privatized practice.
  • So I think he does think that that’s one way that this really does happen. And we have lots of evidence from the Civil Rights Movement, personal testimony, and personal reflection, where this seems to be the case.
  • the last thing I’ll say is that in order to do that work, in order to do some of the work you’re describing, he also is building an alternative community
  • So one way that I read that famous final speech, “I’ve seen the promised land” — there’s obviously a prophetic reading of it, but there’s also one where he’s describing the prefiguration of the promised land in the kind of politics and social life he’s participated in over his career, that the promised land is seen in the union politics in Memphis, it’s seen in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, gathering to do Mississippi Freedom Summer. It’s seen in the people walking for 350-plus days in Montgomery, Alabama, and banding together to help each other out, that is the promised land.
  • And when you are in a community that’s constantly talking with each other and lifting each other up and engaging in practices like song, prayer, other communal rituals, to try to affirm this alternative set of ethical and political commitments against the whole rest of the culture, that’s the only way it can be done, is that you have to have an alternative form of social life that can sustain you in that work. The private practice isn’t going to do it.
  • When you look at the principles of nonviolence on Stanford’s King Institute, I think a bunch of them would be familiar to people. You can resist evil without resorting to violence. You seek to win the friendship and understanding of the opponent, not to humiliate.
  • He thinks that we learn a lot about how to love other people by confronting them in public, by forcing ourselves into uncomfortable situations where we have to endure the look of the other, back and forth, where we train ourselves to extend these interactions of contentious politics until they can alter or change the people that we’ve put our bodies in close contact with on the field of politics.
  • I go back to the sermon he gave — and it’s collected in “Strength to Love,” and it’s called shattered dreams — where he confronts a problem that is all over the Black tradition, which is that the struggle we’re engaged in has gone on, in some form or another, for hundreds of years. At the moments of its greatest promise, you can look over the course of history and see, just years later, we find ourselves in situations that are unimaginably awful.
  • King is not naive. He’s a student of history. He’s somebody who asks himself hard questions like this. And he gives two different kinds of answers. And one is the answer that you’ve mentioned here, which is a theological answer. It’s conventional theodicy story, that look, at the end of the day, God is at work in the world. And God is on the side of justice.
  • There’s another way that he goes at it, however. And for me, I read it as rooted in a different kind of project, one that combines what used to be called philosophical anthropology, which is just a way of saying philosophical reflections on what kind of beings we are. It’s rooted in that, and it’s rooted in politics. And I think those things can find lots of overlapping consensus from people outside of the Christian tradition.
  • What you have to be committed to, in the last instance, is that evil is not the totality of who we are as persons, that people have the capacity, emotionally and rationally, to reflect on their life plans, their practices, their commitments, and change them, maybe not all of them, maybe not all at once, but that those things can be changed, and that politics is really a field where contingency is the key word, that although there are structural constraints and everything can’t be done at every moment, that the unprecedented, the new, the unexpected, happens in this realm.
  • And the only way that we can confirm that nothing new will happen, that oppression will last forever, that the future bears no hope, is if we don’t act. That’s the only way we can confirm that it’s true for all time, is by failing to act in pursuit of justice.
  • that’s King’s view, I think. And to me, that’s the persuasive one, that in our action, we might be able to see some measure of justice from a complicated, complex swirl of contingencies, and to move the ball forward — we will inevitably fail — but to look back on that failure with maturity and try to do better the next time.
  • How do you think about the question of the weaponization of nonviolence and then the applicability of its principles to the powerful and to what they might, we might, the state might learn from it.
  • there were many people — Harold Cruse famously wrote this, but others even closer to King — who said, you’re not the leader of Vietnam. You’re the leader of the African American civil rights movement. You should not speak out on this war because you’ll lose your relationship with Johnson.
  • King says that the people who are advising him in this way, they just don’t know him, his commitment or his calling. They don’t understand that if he’s going to raise his voice against violence in Watts or Detroit, that he’s got to raise it against what he called, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” his own government.
  • for him, the question was really one about militarism and the way that gets imagined as this hardheaded, realistic, hyper-rational response to international disputes and social problems abroad, when in actuality, if we take stock of what he called the casualties of war, the spiritual ones and the material ones, we would realize that most of the violence we engage in at the foreign-policy level is counterproductive. It’s created more problems and more harms than it ever has seemed to solve.
  • This is one of the powerful interventions that you see in Lionel McPherson’s essay, in “To Shape a New World.” It’s just this idea that this is about hardheaded realism is mythic. King says it’s about an immature image that we are nurturing for ourselves, that we’re trying to shore up this idea of ourselves as some kind of crusading hero or all-powerful world power, while not taking stock of all of the things about our freedoms, about our way of life, about our connectedness as a society, about our social divisions, that war has exacerbated, not to mention the violence that’s prosecuted abroad.
  • And he says similar things about domestic policy, the ways in which our politics toward poor families, single-parent households, is punitive for reasons that aren’t justified, that our response to what he calls “the derivative crimes of the ghetto” are wildly out of proportion and unjust compared to how we treat the systematic crimes of exploitation, segregation, disenfranchisement, that structure much of ghetto life.
  • So I’m in total agreement with Coates on that question
  • it just seems — I don’t want to call it axiomatic, but a repeated d that the more willing you become to use violence as a state, the more it corrupts you, and the more violent you become as a state, and to some degree, the more violent the people you are policing, the people you are occupying, become.
  • I’m not a pacifist. I don’t believe you can fully eradicate violence. But we don’t weigh how violent we make others, in our actions, very well, and then how violent we become in response, how much we enter into that escalatory dynamic.
  • But then the other thing is this question of this broader community, of changing hearts, of changing minds, of acting upon people, not through punishment, but through our belief that they can alter. And I’d be curious to hear you reflect on that question of community a little bit, because I think one of the central debates of our time is who’s actually in the community.
  • What would it mean to have a bit more of King’s view, of trying to create community at the center of what the state is attempting to do, as it fashions and helps govern the country?
  • BRANDON TERRY: So one underappreciated feature from King’s famous Riverside Church speech against Vietnam, is he goes on this whole riff about America lacking maturity. And it’s a weird thing to have in a foreign-policy speech. You’re used to — you’re a policy person. You don’t usually hear the word “maturity” bandied about in these kinds of debates.
  • But what he’s getting at is that something really tightly linked to violence, that violence always exceeds the original justification you have for it. It’s not precise. It’s not able to be easily targeted, as we think. It spirals out. It produces retaliation. And then we retaliate again.
  • And all the while, it’s expanding its justifications to the point of absurdity. And King describes that as adding cynicism to the process of death. And he says that maturity is one of the only ways out here, that the maturity to be able to stand up and say, we were wrong, we want to make amends, we want to repair evils committed in our name, those are questions that are essentially nonstarters in American politics right now, certainly about foreign policy, but even in some places in domestic policy.
  • that feature of King’s thinking is something that I always want to draw attention to because I think it’s something we ignore. So that’s the first point I want to make.
  • The second thing — and this is also really deeply-seeded in that Vietnam speech — one of the reasons that people hated it so much — he was attacked in The New York Times, basically every editorial page in the country — one of the reasons people hated that speech so much is that he spent so much time expressing solidarity and sympathy with Ho Chi Minh and the North Vietnamese forces.
  • How could you express sympathy or some kind of solidarity with the enemy? And it’s very instructive, how King went about it. He wasn’t one of these people — you’ve seen these images of people waving the North Vietnamese flag at counterculture protests. It wasn’t like that.
  • It was him really spending a lot of time meditating on the reasons why we had ended up in this conflict, narrating the whole history of our failure to support Ho Chi Minh and the struggle against French colonialism, against Chinese colonialism, and how that had led to the situation we were in by 1967. King is narrating this history. He’s also trying to get people to think about what it must feel like to be on the ground in Vietnam and witness these bombings, witnessed this imposition of terror.
  • And he’s doing that because at bottom, he’s inspired by a vision really rooted in a parable the Good Samaritan, from the Bible, that everyone is our neighbor, that there are no sectional loyalties that should eviscerate our moral obligations to others, our obligation to show them respect, to go on in community with them, and that most of what goes on in foreign policy and particularly war making, is a bad-faith evasion of the fact that we’re all interconnected.
  • he understood that there’s a fundamental interconnectedness amongst humanity at the ethical level and at the material, structural level, and that war making is an evasion of that fact. We’re going to have to live together. So the chief question that should organize it is, how can we do so in peace?
  • He has a line where he says, quote, “the dignity of the individual will flourish when the decisions concerning his life are in his own hands, when he has the assurance that his income is stable and certain and when he knows that he has a means to seek self-improvement. Personal conflicts between husband, wife and children will diminish when the unjust measurement of human worth, on a scale of dollars, is eliminated.” Tell me a bit about the spiritual and psychological dimensions of King’s economic philosophy and organizing.
  • BRANDON TERRY: Well, for King, the question of poverty and the question of economic inequality are both questions of dignity and democracy, and the questions of dignity because when you live without the adequate means to really enjoy the fair value of your basic rights, when you live in a society — and this is a really important point for King — when you live in a society of profound affluence, like the United States, and you live in severe poverty, it expresses a kind of contempt from your fellow citizens about your standing as an equal member of the polity.
  • So separate from the plain, material fact of hunger or health care, there’s this additional spiritual concern with the way in which living with nothing, living on a lonely island amidst an ocean of prosperity, as he would put it, diminishes your dignity.
  • then another piece — this is bridging of the dignity and democracy question — is that when people don’t have a say in the core, vital interest of their life, when they have no decision-making power over the processes which determine how their life is going to go, that too is a diminishment of their dignity. And King, who was operating in a long tradition of social democracy, wants to expand democratic practices to the broader economic realm.
  • Without expanding democracy into that economic realm, for King, we’re both making a mockery of democracy and we’re diminishing the dignity of citizens who live in search of a real standing as free and equal.
  • as somebody who spends a lot of my time in debates about economic policy, I think it is fair to say that the ends of economics are taken as the economy, typically. People hopefully shouldn’t starve. But a lot of debates about what we should do, even for the poor, become these recursive, well, how can they better participate in the economy and how are they going to be able to invest in themselves and how they’ll be economic opportunity for their children.
  • And the idea that the economy is subservient to the community, that the point of the economy is the community, that it should be measured— our policy should be measured by what they do for democratic participation, for the dignity of individuals, is pretty lost. If anything, I see it more now, on the post-liberal right, as people call it, than I even do among mainline Democrats.
  • it has fallen out of favor as a way to frame and think about these conversations.
  • BRANDON TERRY: Yeah, I think it’s rooted in some really complicated things. I think there’s a kind of liberal anxiety about speaking forthrightly about the fact that living in areas of severe, concentrated disadvantage and racial segregation that we call ghettos, diminishes the dignity of the people who live there.
  • That feels uncomfortable for people to say forthrightly, in the way that King would.
  • so we try to get around it by speaking about opportunity and the wealth gap and unemployment statistics. But really what people are feeling is an existential assault on dignity.
  • one way to read that book is to say that she’s telling a tragic story about the loss of a particular ideal that guided great society politics. And that’s the principle of maximum feasible participation.
  • That was a really social-democratic idea, this idea that, well, we need to empower all sorts of people to participate in policy making and democratic deliberation, and that part of where people will find self-respect and dignity is through engagement in politics and their community
  • I think it gets to something that is very present, towards the end of King’s life, which is his sense that there is something important for the civil rights movement in the labor movement. And unions, on some level, they are mechanisms of democracy. One of the most important functions they have is workplace democracy
  • King is, in this tradition, in many ways inspired by a mentor of his. And one of the most important figures in American history but one of the most severely neglected was A. Philip Randolph, the great labor leader, former organizer of the Pullman Porters, the architect of both the March on Washington that gets canceled, which was going to target the Roosevelt administration during World War II, and the 1963 famous March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
  • they’ve got a certain set of commitments. So one is the idea that because most African Americans are working class or poor, anything that advances the interests of working-class people and their ability to exercise democratic control over the economy is going to advance the interests of African Americans.
  • for King labor unions are also, as you described, important laboratories of democracy. So they’re one of the few places where people from all walks of life can get together, deliberate about strategy, deliberate about social ends, social goods, put money behind things that they value, that aren’t only their own material interest.
  • today, of course, there’s this ongoing — always is this ongoing argument — of should you have race-based politics or is that unusable, doesn’t work, creates too much backlash? Or you should have class-based politics that are looking for commonalities, and because you’ve had so much economic disadvantage for Black Americans, that’ll work through the mechanism of class just fine.
  • BRANDON TERRY: So King often invokes the philosopher Hegel, because he’s constantly describing his mode of thinking as a dialectical one, where he’s trying to reconcile seeming opposites and produce a new synthesis, which helps you transcend certain intractable problems.
  • Now as a reading of Hegel, that has much to be desired. But as a description of Martin Luther King’s thought, I think that’s always a good way to understand what he’s up to. And so I think what he’s always trying to do is transcend that opposition.
  • there’s a way in which we sometimes will say class-based politics works to lift African Americans because they’re disproportionately poor. And what’s tricky about that is that it doesn’t really theorize what to do about the African American middle class and the African American elite.
  • So a thing that King was thinking a lot about when he wrote “Stride Toward Freedom” and the Montgomery bus boycott, is there are areas where racial solidarity is going to be really effective and probably indispensable.
  • where questions of anti-Black racism emerge, where questions of racial humiliation, stigma that really affects the larger group, things that all Black people feel vulnerable to, those are going to be areas — like the segregation laws on the buses — those are going to be areas where you actually can generate a lot of racial solidarity and do a lot of important work with it, especially as a defensive posture.
  • When you start to get into questions of political economy, however, you have to be careful because the appeal of racial solidarity can actually obscure the fact that Black people don’t all share the same material interest in lots of ways.
  • King’s primary principle always is, is that he’s dedicated to the group that William Julius Wilson called the truly disadvantaged, the least of these, that at the end of the day, he’s going to give everything to the people who are in the most desperate situation, the poor. And that’s going to guide his politics.
  • where that is enabled by a race-based solidarity, so in questions of policing, perhaps, or questions of social stigma and media discourse, that’s where he’ll turn. But in other cases, I think he’d really be trying to experiment with a form of politics that empowers the poor to take leadership on their ow
  • How does being more aware of the distinctions he drew and the decisions he made help you look at some of the paths we should be walking down today and are not, in these conversations, or are walking down and shouldn’t be?
  • n order for us to understand why so many African Americans are located in the realm of the most disadvantaged, in the strata of the most disadvantaged, you have to understand the history of racial domination in this country. You have to understand the persistence of racial discrimination, especially in labor markets. And you have to understand the ways that racial ideology allows us to obscure the nature of our economy.
  • So the most classic example is that structural unemployment gets reframed, in part by racism, as questions of laziness or pathology or criminality instead of as a feature of the economy as such. So King always talks about the critique of racism as part of the diagnosis of the disease in order to cure it.
  • So even in the privileging the least well off and being concerned with poor people of all races, he wants to say that the critique of racism helps us see through the kinds of blindnesses that obscure the nature of our economy and the commonalities across race and the things that we need to address the questions of economic justice precisely
  • The second thing is that, in his critique of Black power, one of the things he says is that he worries that Black power gives priority to the question of race in a way that confuses our analysis of social reality. So what does he mean by that?
  • if you think that all Black disadvantage is primarily about anti-Black racism, you can start to miss the fact that there are broader economic dislocations that need to be addressed, that there are structural features of the American constitutional order, the ways in which municipal boundaries are structured, ways that funding decisions are made, that aren’t primarily driven by racial animus, that need to be addressed.
  • You can lose sight of those things and start to think that the real battle is in something like a totality of anti-Black racial ideology that can be battled in Hollywood movies and comic books and school curricula and legislation and political rhetoric
  • it’s not to say that those things don’t exist. It’s just to say that there’s a confusion about what’s going to make the biggest impact in improving the life circumstances of the least well off.
  • King really calls us to constantly be very precise about what the causal mechanisms are for Black disadvantage and to not be confused by the fact that there’s discrimination and injustice and cruelty in these other realms but which might not have as much causal impact as some of these other things.
  • King was very adamant that Black pride, that a concern with representation, that thinking in expansive ways about how do you affirm the somebodiness of Black youth, that those things are really, really important and that they’re not to be dismissed.
  • So it is a question of justice if people in Hollywood just constantly demean or diminish the talent of nonwhite actors. That is a question of justice. It’s just that we have to be honest about what the import of those struggles will be for the broader group. And the only way we can do that is by being attentive to the class differences within the group.
  • there’s a way in which — and King diagnoses this very incisively — there’s a way in which some genres of Black nationalism are so pessimistic about the possibility for multiracial democracy in the United States, for any kind of Black flourishing in the United States that they essentially foreclose real interest in political organizing and social movements
  • But the energy they still managed to generate — the outrage, the sentiment, the sociality — they find their outlet, instead, in a practice of humiliation, counter humiliation. So that there may not be hope that we can actually change the country, but at the very least, we can enjoy a feeling of retaliation, a kind of self-respecting sense of resistance, by engaging in a practice of trying to humiliate our opponents in the public spher
  • there’s a titillation to that. There’s a catharsis in watching someone — at that point, it would have been called stick it to whitey. Now it would be stick it to the libs or own the libs.
  • this is a significant amount of people that could cause real damage in the places where they don’t face many countervailing forms of power. And they can exercise a much more toxic impact on the broader state of American politics in a time where the media environment is way more fragmented
  • I see those elements. And I think that we need more people operating, in the kind of mode that King did, in his critique of Black power, to try to turn people away from their understandable feelings of hostility and resentment, toward more productive forms of political engagement.
  • the word, “emotion,” which is a neglected part of politics, maybe of King’s thought in particular is that he understood — I think he understood part of the goal of politics and political action as creating a particular structure of political emotion.
  • , what structure of emotion, of political emotion, we’re actually living in.
  • BRANDON TERRY: My mentor and friend, Karuna Mantena, at Columbia, political theorist, a brilliant political theorist working on a book on Gandhi — I learned this from her, thinking a lot about how nonviolence is a kind of realism, in part because it doesn’t engage in of fiction that politics is operating on, in the model of rational discussion. It takes very, very, very seriously the problem of emotion.
  • for King, thinking about the history of racial oppression in America, they’re key emotions that you have to think about. One of the most important ones is fear
  • If that fear is a longstanding, deeply-structuring feature of American culture and political life, if it’s something that animates our comedy movies, our stand-up routines, our political discourse, you can’t operate as if it’s not there. You have to do things that will somehow disarm, disrupt, dispel those fears, in order to make progress on the political questions you want to pursue. That was one of King’s deepest, deepest commitments.
  • He’s thinking a lot about anger, which we’ve talked at great length about. And one of the disappointments I’ve had with radical politics in the present, as sympathetic as I am to most of the aims, is that I just don’t think the emotion question has been adequately considered
  • people often defend their politics as like, King was unpopular. And the things we’re saying are unpopular. So we’re operating in that tradition.
  • it’s not enough to just say, I’ve started a conversation, I’ve provoked something toxic in the culture. He’s not trying to do that, necessarily. He’s trying to elicit reactions that bring forward certain emotions but not let those emotions unravel the society itself. He’s trying to channel them into other forms of political affect that are much more congenial to reconciliation and justice.
  • what we’ve unfortunately ended up with is that the sophistication of mobilization strategists, the depth of the polarization, has made anger the principal affect of American politics at this moment.
  • a King-inspired political philosophy, both at the state level and the activist level, has to do, is think about how do we transform the recalcitrant nature of today’s political anger and channel it into forms of constructive politics that might point toward a more just future and that might dissolve the forms of anger that are illegitimate and ill founded, in part, by doing the kind of work sometimes described as a moral jujitsu, turning those affects against themselves, in part, to try to transform them into something different.
  • maybe it’ll be easier to use myself as an example, here.
  • When I started out in blogging and political writing and journalism, particularly blogging, I think I thought a lot about politics in terms of winning and losing, and in my corner of it, winning and losing intellectually, that I was involved in political arguments, and arguments could be won or lost in front of some kind of audience.
  • One is having been in a lot of arguments. And I think I’m a reasonably good arguer. And so I’ve done, by my own likes, well, and then noticed it didn’t have it all the effect I wanted it to have, which is, if anything, it usually — if you really beat somebody in an argument and they feel humiliated, they go further into views they already held
  • And two things have begun to corrode, for me, that sense
  • so you lose by winning.
  • then the second is, particularly in the Trump era, the sense that if you met something awful with an equal and opposite energetic force, that in some weird way, you just added energy to what was now an awful system and conversation.
  • What do you do to not create a sense that this is a right conversation to be having? And I don’t the answers to it. And I’m not saying like I’ve ascended to some higher plane and don’t argue or any of that. I have all the same intuitions and senses I’ve always had.
  • that’s why I find King so interesting and challenging in this way, because it’s just really, really, really different to ask the question, how do I reshape the emotional politics and the emotional structure of myself, of the people I’m in conflict with and then of the people who are bystanders or watchers of that conflict, for the better
  • It’s just a really different goal to be targeting, and just unimaginably harder than, can I come up with an argument that I think is a winning argument.
  • I think you see it — when he’s assassinated, the leading figures of the Black-Power generation, they’re heartbroken. They mourn his loss. They grieve for him, in part because — and you can read any of these memoirs, particularly Stokely Carmichael’s — they felt like he never — that even when he disagreed with them, he loved them, and not just because they were friendly, but because he loved in the sense that he always invoked, of agape love, that he wanted goodwill for them, and that his arguments weren’t from a place of trying to humiliate them or embarrass them or expose them as ridiculous.
  • He wanted to affirm their right to make the arguments they were making, to affirm their intelligence and judgment and to enter into their mind, to try to reconstruct a position with sympathy, but then show why it falls short for the sake of goals that he was forthright about, about justice, about reconciliation, about love
  • we are in a moment of extraordinary cynicism. And cynicism can take advantage of your intellectual honesty, your practice of agape love. But I think that’s in the short term.
  • In my better moments, I’m of the view that the only way to start to turn the tide against the cynicism that has so corroded and corrupted our political culture is to try to have these demonstrations of humility and authenticity that cause us to put ourselves at some risk, the way that King did
  • So always our final question: What are three books you would recommend to the audience? And if I can put one spin on that, you mentioned the many books King wrote. If people want to start with one thing he actually wrote to read, one book, which one should they start with?
  • I think you get the best sense of his mature thought from his 1967 book, “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community,” which is still our question. So I would definitely recommend that. I also really love “A Trumpet of Conscience,” his Canadian Broadcasting Corporation lectures that were published posthumously.
  • I really strongly recommend Peniel Joseph’s, “The Sword and the Shield.” It’s a dual biography of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. I reviewed it for The New York Review of Books and think really highly of it. It’s a great meditation on the ways they influenced each other. And it gives you a good sense of the broader intellectual milieu of the period.
  • I also really like Jeanne Theoharis’s “A More Beautiful and Terrible History.” I think for people coming to the study of the civil rights movement for the first time are kind of curious about why some of the things that I’ve said don’t sound familiar to them. She writes, in a really accessible and intelligent way, about some of the myths, that structure, how that history is taught and popularly conveyed. We have a lot of agreements there.
  • And then a where do we go from here question, I want to recommend my colleague, Tommie Shelby’s book, “Dark Ghettos,” which is a King-inspired philosophical reflection on the deep structure of ghetto poverty and what it requires of us, as a society, to do to redress it. It’s a book that’s very demanding on how far we’ve fallen short and questions of justice that pertain to the kind of neighborhoods that we grew up in and around.
Javier E

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

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

party Democratic party israel Palestine politics

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

Beijing's Winter Olympics symbolise a world divided | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...pics-symbolise-a-world-divided

politics history pandemic

shared by woodlu on 04 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • No leader of a big Western power will attend the games. The pandemic has provided some with an excuse for staying away. But the main reason is the scale of the repression that Xi Jinping has unleashed since he took power in 2012.
  • In Xinjiang Mr Xi has sent about 1m people, mostly ethnic Uyghurs, to camps to “cure” them of “extremism”—a euphemism for stamping out their culture and Muslim faith.
  • Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, does not share their scruples. As tensions mount over Ukraine, he will enjoy the limelight as the most important guest and Mr Xi’s “best friend”.
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  • The West worried about China then, too. The country had been waging a fierce campaign to crush unrest in Tibet following widespread protests there. Human-rights groups were calling for boycotts. But many Western officials still believed that engaging with China might nudge it towards acceptance of the Western-led global order, or at least help tame the rise of anti-Western nationalism.
  • Mr Xi has fuelled an ugly nationalism and clearly wants a China-centric order. The motto he has chosen for the winter games alludes to this. It is shorthand for one of his favourite catchphrases, about building a “community with a shared future for mankind”.
  • That means a world in which countries co-operate with China regardless of its politics. Many in the West abhor the idea.
  • State media suggest that the opening ceremony is unlikely to be such a full-throated celebration of China’s greatness as was seen at the launch of the games in 2008, when thousands of costumed troops took part in grandiose performances.
  • No foreign visitors, other than invited guests, have been let into China to watch the games. Tickets are not being sold to people in the country. Fearful of recent outbreaks of covid-19, the government says it will “organise” people to attend.
  • They may clap, but not shout. The athletes, their support staff and journalists are being kept in a “closed loop”, isolated from the local community. Dozens of them are testing positive.
  • Protections make sense when admitting 30,000 foreigners into a country that lacks a highly effective vaccine (because it has not approved foreign jabs), and whose population has acquired no immunity from infections.
  • But they also show how far China is diverging from the rest of the world in its handling of the pandemic. China is excoriating other countries trying to co-exist with the virus for failing to protect human lives. It sees its zero-covid approach as proof of its own system’s superiority.
Javier E

Opinion | The Wisdom and Prophecy of Jimmy Carter's 'Malaise' Speech - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...mmy-carter-malaise-speech.html

wisdom prophecy carter president presidency speech malaise culture crisis history politics us

shared by Javier E on 24 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • Carter had canceled vacation plans and spent more than a week cloistered at Camp David, where he met with a “steady stream of visitors” who shared their hopes and fears about a nation in distress, most immediately thanks to another in a series of energy crises.
  • Carter, however, discerned a deeper problem. America had a wounded heart. The president believed it suffered from a “crisis of the spirit.”
  • the best word to describe the speech would have been “pastoral.” A faithful Christian president applied the lessons he’d so plainly learned from years of Bible study and countless hours in church. Don’t look at the surface of a problem. Don’t be afraid to tell hard truths. Be humble, but also call the people to a higher purpose.
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  • The resulting address was heartfelt. It was eloquent. Yet it helped sink his presidency.
  • “For the first time in the history of our country a majority of our people believe that the next five years will be worse than the past five years,”
  • By 1979, this country had experienced a recent string of traumatic political assassinations, urban riots that dwarfed the summer riots of 2020 in scale and intensity, campus unrest that makes the current controversies over “wokeness” look civil and quaint, the defeat in Vietnam, and the deep political corruption of Richard Nixon. At the same time, inflation rates dwarfed what we experience today.
  • Carter took a step back. With his trademark understated warmth, he described his own period of reflection. He’d taken the time to listen to others, he shared what he heard, and then he spoke words that resonate today. “The symptoms of this crisis of the American spirit are all around us,” he said, and he described symptoms that mirror our current reality.
  • Read the speech now, and you’ll see its truth and its depth. But, ironically, it’s an address better suited to our time than to its own. Jimmy Carter’s greatest speech was delivered four decades too soon.
  • There was more. “As you know,” he told viewers, “there is a growing disrespect for government and for churches and for schools, the news media, and other institutions.”
  • We were sure that ours was a nation of the ballot, not the bullet, until the murders of John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. We were taught that our armies were always invincible and our causes were always just, only to suffer the agony of Vietnam. We respected the presidency as a place of honor until the shock of Watergate.
  • Carter’s central insight was that even if the country’s political branches could deliver peace and prosperity, they could not deliver community and belonging. Our nation depends on pre-political commitments to each other, and in the absence of those pre-political commitments, the American experiment is ultimately in jeopardy.
  • we’re not familiar with speeches that ask the American people to reflect on their own role in a national crisis. Carter called for his audience to look in the mirror:
  • In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns.
  • Carter correctly described a country of mutual, interlocking responsibilities between the government and the people. Yet he was ultimately unable to deliver the results that matched his pastoral message.
  • the speech was successful, at first. His approval rating shot up a remarkable 11 points. Then came chaos — some of it Carter’s fault, some of it not. Days after the speech, he demanded the resignation of his entire cabinet. (He ultimately fired five.) It was a move that communicated confusion more than conviction.
  • The failed rescue was a hinge moment in history. It’s hard to imagine the morale boost had it succeeded, and we know the crushing disappointment when it failed. Had the Army’s Delta Force paraded down New York’s “Canyon of Heroes” with the liberated hostages, it would have probably transformed the public’s perception of the president. But just as presidents own military victories, they also own defeats.
  • The story of the next 10 years, moreover, cast Carter’s address in a different light. The nation went from defeat to victory: Inflation broke, the economy roared, and in 1991 the same military that was humiliated in the sands of Iran triumphed
  • The history was written. Carter was wrong. There wasn’t a crisis of confidence. There was no malaise. There was instead a failure of leadership. Better, or at least luckier, leaders revived a broken nation.
  • Yet with every passing year, the deeper truths of Carter’s speech become more apparent. His insights become more salient. A speech that couldn’t precisely diagnose the maladies of 1979 more accurately describes the challenges of 2023. The trends he saw emerging two generations ago now bear their poisonous fruit in our body politic.
  • last year a record 58 percent of Americans told NBC News pollsters that our nation’s best years are behind it.)
  • In 1979, Carter spoke of our civil liberties as secure. They’re more secure now.
  • We’re free, prosperous and strong to a degree we couldn’t imagine then. Yet we’re tearing each other apart now.
  • We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I’ve warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility.
  • With these words, Carter raised the question, what is our freedom for, exactly? While we want to better ourselves and our families, we cannot become self-regarding. We have obligations to each other. We have obligations to our community. The best exercise of freedom is in service to others.
  • Yet one of the stories of our time is the abuse of liberty, including the use of our freedoms — whether it’s to boycott, condemn or shame — to try to narrow the marketplace of ideas, to deprive dissenters of their reputations and their livelihoods.
  • as Carter noted, our huge wealth cannot heal the holes in our hearts, because “consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.”
  • there’s another word: prophetic. His words were not the clarion call necessary for his time, but they are words for this time. As Jimmy Carter spends his last days on this earth, we should remember his call for community, and thank a very good man for living his values, serving his neighbors, and reminding us of the true source of strength for the nation he loved.
  • On July 15, 1979, President Jimmy Carter emerged from days of isolation to deliver the most important and memorable address of his life
  • The speech was among the most unusual in presidential history. The word that has clung to it, “malaise,” was a word that didn’t even appear in the text.
Javier E

China Declared Its Russia Friendship Had 'No Limits.' It's Having Second Thoughts. - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-putin-ukraine-war-11646279098

china russia friendship axis politics

shared by Javier E on 05 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • Western nations including the U.S., the U.K. and Canada were laying the groundwork for a diplomatic boycott of the Games over China’s human-rights record. The Biden administration was about to kick off a Summit for Democracy in early December that sought to establish a clear alternative to Beijing’s autocratic rule.
  • Those moves infuriated Beijing and drove its decision-making, say the officials and advisers, who are familiar with the process leading to the Feb. 4 declaration.
  • One of Mr. Xi’s objectives was to lay out an ideological foundation for the partnership between China and Russia, those people said. To that end, the Chinese ambassador to Washington teamed up with his Russian counterpart in publishing an unusual joint opinion piece in late November in the magazine of the Center for the National Interest
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  • The two argued that democracy “can be realized in multiple ways” and isn’t the prerogative of any one country or group of countries. It called China “a whole-process, socialist democracy” and said democracy was the fundamental principle of Russia’s “democratic federative law-governed state.”
  • The Feb. 4 joint statement said both countries “have profound democratic traditions rooted in a thousand years of development,
  • It was Beijing that suggested including that the two countries’ friendship has “no limits”—wording read with apprehension in the West—according to the officials and advisers. The intention was less a declaration China would stand by Russia in case of war than a strong message to the U.S. about the resolve the two have in confronting what they see as increased American threats, the people said.
  • “China’s eagerness to present a strong alignment with Russia to counter the U.S. caused it to miss all the signs and to go in a dangerous direction,” said Yun Sun, director of the China program at the Stimson Center, a Washington think tank focused on promoting peace and security.
  • Beijing has refrained from coming to Moscow’s aid in a significant way. China is taking steps to buy Russian farm and energy products. But it is complying with the more damaging financial sanctions the U.S. has imposed on Russia, for fear of losing access to the dollar-dominated global trading system, say some Chinese bankers. They say their default position is to comply with the sanctions unless higher-ups tell them otherwise.
  • “We believe they chose not to weigh in in advance.”
  • “It’s undeniable that right now, China is occupying an awkward nexus in which they’re trying to sustain their deep and fundamental relationship with Russia,”
  • China’s ambiguous stance on the Russia-Ukraine war will likely speed up moves by countries from the U.K. and Australia to Japan to guard against Beijing,
  • a planned summit between China and the EU for April, if it isn’t canceled, is now likely to be dominated by discussions of China’s position on Ukraine.
  • Beijing’s most difficult contortions are on territorial sovereignty. China has built its foreign policy around the principle that a country’s territory is inviolable and its internal affairs should be free from interference by others.
  • China’s commitment to that principle seemingly would force it to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, something it has refrained from doing. Its policy statements have called for dialogue to resolve the crisis, avoiding the word invasion. Meanwhile, Western officials worry that Russia’s actions based on the argument that Ukraine is historically a part of Russia could embolden China to step up its own long-stated goal to bring Taiwan into its fold.
  • Since rising to power in late 2012, Mr. Xi has made himself the dominant force in China’s foreign policy and put emphasis on what he calls “big-power diplomacy”—a marked change from the relatively unassuming foreign-policy agendas of previous Chinese leaders that featured compromise and focused on building up ties with the U.S.
  • Today, despite Chinese state media’s pro-Russia rhetoric, some advisers privately question whether the partnership could cut China off from Western technologies and other resources and hurt its development, according to the foreign-policy advisers. After all, they have noted in private discussions, it is China’s opening to the U.S. and its allies that has propelled enormous Chinese growth in the past four decades.
  • China and Russia’s shared interest in confronting the U.S. has helped drive their relationship to its closest point since early in the Cold War. Part of that is due to the personal ties between Messrs. Xi and Putin, authoritarians who have visions of restoring their countries to past glory, even if in China’s case that past was centuries ago.
  • Sergey Radchenko, an international-relations professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, pointed to instances where Mr. Putin would be deliberately late for meetings with foreign dignitaries. On one occasion, he brought out his dog to a meeting with then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel who, Mr. Putin knew, was terrified of dogs.
  • “He would never let himself do anything like that to Xi,” Mr. Radchenko said. “He’s extremely respectful to Xi because he sees a close relationship with China as one of Russia’s most valuable political assets.”
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