Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items matching "defender" in title, tags, annotations or url

Group items matching
in title, tags, annotations or url

Sort By: Relevance | Date Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Javier E

The Fog of War - Wikipedia - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/...The_Fog_of_War

fog war wikipedia McNamara lessons

shared by Javier E on 13 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • Lesson #1: Empathize with your enemy.
  • Lesson #2: Rationality alone will not save us.
  • McNamara emphasizes that it was luck that prevented nuclear war—rational individuals like Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro came close to destroying themselves and each other.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Lesson #5: Proportionality should be a guideline in war.
  • McNamara talks about the proportions of cities destroyed in Japan by the US before the dropping of the nuclear bomb, comparing the destroyed Japanese cities to similarly-sized cities in the US: Tokyo, roughly the size of New York City, was 51% destroyed; Toyama, the size of Chattanooga, was 99% destroyed; Nagoya, the size of Los Angeles, was 40% destroyed; Osaka, the size of Chicago, was 35% destroyed; Kobe, the size of Baltimore, was 55% destroyed; etc. He says LeMay once said that, had the United States lost the war, they would have been tried for war crimes, and agrees with this assessment.
  • Lesson #7: Belief and seeing are both often wrong. McNamara affirms Morris' framing of lesson 7 in relation to the Gulf of Tonkin incident: "We see what we want to believe."
  • Lesson #8: Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning. McNamara says that, even though the United States is the strongest nation in the world, it should never use that power unilaterally: "if we can't persuade nations with comparable values of the merit of our cause, we better reexamine our reasoning."
  • We, the richest nation in the world, have failed in our responsibility to our own poor and to the disadvantaged across the world to help them advance their welfare in the most fundamental terms of nutrition, literacy, health and employment.
  • we are not omniscient. If we cannot persuade other nations with similar interests and similar values of the merits of the proposed use of that power, we should not proceed unilaterally except in the unlikely requirement to defend directly the continental U.S., Alaska and Hawaii.
  • War is a blunt instrument by which to settle disputes between or within nations, and economic sanctions are rarely effective. Therefore, we should build a system of jurisprudence based on the International Court—that the U.S. has refused to support—which would hold individuals responsible for crimes against humanity.
  • If we are to deal effectively with terrorists across the globe, we must develop a sense of empathy—I don't mean "sympathy," but rather "understanding"—to counter their attacks on us and the Western World.
  • We underestimated the power of nationalism to motivate a people to fight and die for their beliefs and values.
  • Our misjudgments of friend and foe, alike, reflected our profound ignorance of the history, culture, and politics of the people in the area, and the personalities and habits of their leaders.
  • We failed then—and have since—to recognize the limitations of modern, high-technology military equipment, forces, and doctrine. We failed, as well, to adapt our military tactics to the task of winning the hearts and minds of people from a totally different culture.
  • We did not recognize that neither our people nor our leaders are omniscient. Our judgment of what is in another people's or country's best interest should be put to the test of open discussion in international forums. We do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our image or as we choose.
  • We did not hold to the principle that U.S. military action … should be carried out only in conjunction with multinational forces supported fully (and not merely cosmetically) by the international community.
Javier E

In Israel, Christie Says Trump Ducked Mideast Progress and Fueled Bigotry - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ris-christie-israel-hamas.html

trump mideast israel evaluation progress bigotry

shared by Javier E on 13 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey who is challenging Donald J. Trump for the Republican presidential nomination, said Mr. Trump’s rhetoric of intolerance — as evident today as it was during his presidency — had fueled the surge of bigotry confronting Jews and Muslims after Hamas’s brutal Oct. 7 attack on Israel and the fierce Israeli response in Gaza.
  • And Mr. Trump’s lopsided adherence to the wishes of Israel’s right-wing government, while widely praised in Republican circles, secured only the “low-hanging fruit” of Middle Eastern diplomacy during his presidency, Mr. Christie said, denigrating one of Mr. Trump’s chief foreign policy accomplishments.
  • He argued that Mr. Trump’s lack of “intellectual curiosity” and foreign policy ambition had led his administration to give up the pursuit of a more elusive peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Mr. Christie’s criticism of the former president’s Middle East record is significant. The peace agreements struck by Israel with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco, collectively known as the Abraham Accords, are widely seen as perhaps Mr. Trump’s most important diplomatic accomplishment. And Republicans have offered high praise for decisions like moving the United States Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv.
  • Mr. Christie offered higher praise for Mr. Biden’s handling of the Israel-Gaza crisis, including his Oct. 18 visit to Israel, where he met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
  • He accused Mr. Trump of cynicism in his handling of the once broadly bipartisan U.S.-Israel relationship and held him responsible for fractures over Israel within the Democratic Party.
  • Mr. Christie was quick to say that he did not blame Mr. Trump for the bloody hostilities in Israel. The timing of Hamas’s attack reflected larger geopolitical dynamics with Iran, Russia and China, he said.
  • He wholeheartedly embraced every policy pressed by Israel’s conservative government, including moving the embassy, recognizing Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights, withdrawing from Mr. Obama’s deal with Iran to temper its nuclear ambitions and pursuing regional peace agreements between Israel and the Persian Gulf states that isolated Palestinians and marginalized their demands for political autonomy.
  • Mr. Christie argued that Democratic voters, in turn, had reflexively opposed anything embraced so wholeheartedly by Mr. Trump, including by electing representatives to Congress like Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, whom they saw as fierce opponents of Mr. Trump. Those new lawmakers on the Democratic left then opened an anti-Israel wing of the Democratic Party that is straining the U.S.-Israel alliance.
  • Meanwhile, he said, the cause of Israeli-Palestinian peace, once considered the holy grail of presidential diplomacy, was all but forgotten.
  • Mr. Christie said that President Barack Obama’s policies had been perceived as favoring Israel’s enemies and that Mr. Trump had seized the political opening that presented:
  • “I don’t think he was equipped to deal in a foreign policy way with a very difficult, if not impossible, issue, right? And I don’t think he has any ambition,” Mr. Christie said. “I think he was looking for what would be relatively direct and easy scores because his view always was political.”
  • Before arriving in Israel, he spoke of the difficult balancing act between the vital need for Israel to defend its territory and its people and concerns about the growing backlash around the globe.
  • “We’ve been there after 9/11,” he said. “We understand the visceral need and the practical need to retaliate and degrade Hamas.
  • “But don’t have exclusively a near-term view,” he advised. “And that’s tricky for somebody like Netanyahu and the political position he’s in at the moment, because, you know, there’s certainly going to be a reckoning whenever the war is considered concluded, as to how Israel got there in the first place.”
  • “Ultimately, it’s in Israel’s best interest and the world’s best interest. But I think the actions that Hamas took on Oct. 7 has made that resolution significantly more difficult and more long-term. And I think that’s one of the real shames of their actions,”
  • “I don’t think Trump’s an antisemite,” even though he has routinely espoused stereotypes of Jews, Mr. Christie said. But, he added, Mr. Trump’s “intolerance of everybody” is “what’s contributed to” the surging bigotry.
  • “He says what he says, without regard to the fact that he’s perceived as a leader and that his words matter,” Mr. Christie said. The bigots “think you’re giving them permission be a bigot,” he added, “and that’s even worse than them thinking you are one.”
  • “I think he’s a guy of the 1960s from Queens, New York, with certain attitudes that he probably learned from his parents,” Mr. Christie said.
  • But he was less sympathetic about the bigotries that he said Mr. Trump had unleashed.“His rhetoric contributes to it,” he said. “By his rhetoric, I mean, his intolerance of everybody. Everybody hears that dog whistle a different way.”
Javier E

Naomi Klein on wellness culture: 'We really are alive on the knife's edge' | Well actually | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...iew-wellness-culture-far-right

wellness culture fitness polycrisis response solidarity fascism hierarchy body beauty

shared by Javier E on 15 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • Why wellness became a seedbed for the far-right is one of several subjects that Naomi Klein explores in her latest book, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World.
  • She observed that people working in the field of bodily care seemed particularly drawn to anti-vax, anti-mask, “plandemic” beliefs. The Center for Countering Digital Hate’s report on the Disinformation Dozen – a list of 12 people responsible for circulating the bulk of anti-vax content online – was populated by a chiropractor, three osteopaths, and essential oil sellers, as well Christine Northrup, the former OB-GYN turned Oprah-endorsed celebrity doctor who claimed the virus was part of a deep state depopulation plot, and Kelly Brogan, the “holistic psychiatrist” and new age panic preacher.
  • some of this crossover made economic sense: for people working with bodies, social distancing often meant the loss of their livelihoods, and these “grievances set the stage for many wellness workers to see sinister plots in everything having to do with the virus”.
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • I saw these gym protests as a similar idea: my body is my temple. What I’m doing here is my protection; I’m keeping myself strong. I’m building up my immune system, my body is my force field against whatever is coming.
  • The parts of listening to Bannon that were most destabilizing were when I heard him saying things that sounded like the left, and when I heard him saying things that I agreed with in part – not in whole, but where I saw that kernel of truth and I realized how effective it was going to be in the mix and match with what I see as a fascist project that he’s engaged in.
  • I expect Steve Bannon to be monstrous on immigration, on gender. I expect that from him. It’s when he’s talking about corporate control of the media and saying things that are true about big tech that I start to get queasy and ask, wait a minute, why is he saying more about this than a lot of people on the liberal side of the spectrum? Have we ceded this territory?
  • This point seems central. The mirror world isn’t devoid of truth. Instead, it’s destabilizing because elements of truth are there, but warped.
  • Absolutely. And the destabilizing piece is not simply that they’re saying something true. It’s when you realize people [on the left] have stopped saying that true thing. That’s when you realize that it has power.
  • If we were building multiracial, intergenerational social movements that were really rooted in confronting corporate power, then they could say whatever they want and it wouldn’t really bother me. But we’re talking about it less, and the more [conspiracists] talk about it, the more reticent we become. So it’s a dialectic that makes me queasy.
  • Ehrenreich has a completely different theory, which I think is much more plausible, which is this is the 1980s: people are in the wreckage of the failures of these huge social movements in the ‘60s and ‘70s. There had been this glimpse of collective power that a lot of people really thought was going to change the world, and suddenly they’re living through Thatcherism and Reaganism. And there is this turn towards the self, towards the body as the site of control.
  • Kneeling before the temple of the body also has fascist roots. Historically, certain ideals of human fitness were a way to communicate the value of citizens.Whenever you are working within a system of a hierarchy of humans and bodies, then you’re in fascism territory. I think that it made perfect sense that Nazis were body obsessives who fetishized the natural and the hyperfit form and genes.
  • There is a connection between certain kinds of new age ideas and health fads and the fascist project
  • After the second world war, a lot of people in the world of wellness ran in the opposite direction. But there are some ways in which they are natural affinities and they’re finding each other again
  • there is a way the quest for wellness and hyper fitness becomes obsessive.
  • But the spread of misinformation across wellness culture was likely attributable to more complex factors, including the limits of conventional medicine and the areas of health that are understudied or dismissed.
  • Ehrenreich is trying to understand why this exploded in the 1980s. The whole aerobics craze, the whole jogging craze. You know, how does somebody like Jerry Rubin, a member of the Yippies, turn into a health evangelist in the 1980s?
  • in lots of ways this is what Naomi Wolf was trying to understand in the Beauty Myth. Why was there so much more of a focus in the 1980s on personal appearance? She makes the case that beauty became a third shift for women: there was the work shift, there was the home shift, and on top of that, women were now also expected to look like professional beauties.
  • Barbara Ehrenreich wrote about this really beautifully in her book about wellness culture, where she talks about the silence of the gyms. This is a collective space, right? Why aren’t people chitchatting? But often gyms are very silent and she speculates that maybe it’s because people are talking to someone, it’s just not the other people in the gym, it’s somebody in their head. They’re trying to tame their body into being another kind of body, a perfected body.
  • Then you have all of these entrepreneurial wellness figures who come in and say, individuals must take charge of their own bodies as their primary sites of influence, control and competitive edge.
  • the flip side of the idea that your competitive edge is your body is that the people who don’t have bodies as fit or strong as yours somehow did something wrong or are less deserving of access, less deserving even of life.
  • And that is unfortunately all too compatible with far-right notions of natural hierarchies, genetic superiority and disposable people.
  • We should be compassionate with ourselves in terms of why we look away. There are lots of ways of distracting oneself from unbearable realities. Conspiracy theories are a kind of distraction. So is hyper fitness, this turn towards the self.
  • The compassion comes in where we acknowledge that there’s a reason why it is so hard to look at the reality of what has been unveiled by these overlapping crises – you could call it a polycrisis: of the pandemic, climate change, massive racial and economic inequality, realizing that your country was founded on a lie, that the national narratives that you grew up on left out huge parts in the story.
  • All of this is hard to bear.
  • Because we live in a hyper-individualist culture, we try to bear it on our own and we should not be surprised that we’re cracking under the weight of that, because we can’t bear it alone.
  • the weight of our historical moment. We really are alive on the knife’s edge of whether or not this earth is going to be habitable for our species. That is not something that we can handle just on our own.
  • So we need to reach towards each other. That’s really tricky work. It’s a lot easier to come together and agree on things that are not working and things that are bad than it is to come together and develop a horizon of how things could be better.
  • Things could be beautiful, things could be livable. There could be a world where everyone belongs. But I don’t think we can bear the reality of our moment unless we can imagine something else.
Javier E

Italy's Giorgia Meloni Visits Tolkien Exhibition in Rome - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tolkien-exhibition-meloni.html

italy art exhibition rome tolkien

shared by Javier E on 18 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • “I found the exhibition very beautiful,” Giorgia Meloni, the prime minister, said after her personal tour of “Tolkien: Man, Professor, Author.” “As a person who knows the issue pretty well, I found many things I didn’t know.”
  • for Ms. Meloni and others who grew up in a post-Fascist universe that could not publicly look to the recent Italian past for heroes, Tolkien’s adventures — tales of warriors, invading armies and everyday folk defending their homelands — supplied a safe space to articulate their worldview. They dressed in character. They sang along with the extremist folk band Fellowship of the Ring at jamborees of right-wing youth called Camp Hobbit.
  • that esoteric subculture has followed her up to Italy’s temples of high art
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • He has said Tolkien was a major literary figure who deserved a major show marking the 50th anniversary of his death. Ms. Meloni’s critics have instead characterized the exhibit, which she called “a beautiful page of culture,” as a right-wing counteroffensive in the country’s culture wars.
  • “Ask around who knows the names of the nine companions of the ring, see who responds,” he said, naming all nine. He added that when it came to Tolkien, “the right chose him as its go-to author.”
  • The show was intended to transmit that tradition, said members of the youth wing of Ms. Meloni’s far-right Brothers of Italy party, who were there, too.
  • “It’s an inheritance,” said Andrea Paramano, a 21-year-old member, as he stood with his friends around models of the Shire and epic battles with Balrog, the fire monster. “It gets passed down. The respect of the tradition ——”
  • Mr. Obama was quoted in the exhibit as saying he had moved on from the Hardy Boys to “‘The Lord of the Rings’ and ‘The Hobbit’ and stuff like that,” and that they “weren’t just adventure stories, but they were also stories that taught me about social problems.”
  • Mr. Martini was delighted that the works he loved, of mythical battles and ghouls, had finally been recognized as great art. The political overlay, he said, was “only an Italian problem.”
Javier E

Opinion | With War Raging, Colleges Confront a Crisis of Their Own Making - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...alestine-college-campuses.html

education university challenge customer model amusement academic freedom fragility coddle safety

shared by Javier E on 27 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • Students, meanwhile, have blasted those administrators for saying too much or too little. They’ve complained about feeling stranded.
  • The tense situation largely reflects the intense differences of opinion with which many onlookers, including students, interpret and react to the rival claims and enduring bloodshed in the Middle East. But it tells another story, too: one about the evolution of higher education over the past quarter-century, the promises that schools increasingly make to their students and the expectations that arise from that.
  • Many students now turn to the colleges they attend for much more than intellectual stimulation. They look for emotional affirmation. They seek an acknowledgment of their wounds along with the engagement of their minds
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Also, college students aren’t full-fledged grown-ups. They do need guidance, and they benefit from it.
  • “The campus protests of the late 1960s sought in part to dismantle the in loco parentis role that colleges and universities had held in American life. But the past two decades have been shaped by a reversal of that, as institutions have sought to reconstruct this role in response to what students and parents paying enormous sums for their education have seemed to want.”
  • For us professors, the surrogate-parent paradigm means regular emails and other reminders from administrators that we should be taking our students’ temperatures, watching for glimmers of distress, intervening proactively and fashioning accommodations, especially if there has been some potentially discomfiting global, national or local news event
  • where does reasonable consideration end and unreasonable coddling begin? And what do validation and comfort have to do with learning?
  • Arguably, everything. If you’re not mentally healthy, you’ll be harder pressed to do the reading, writing and critical thinking at the core of college work
  • many schools have encouraged that mind-set, casting themselves as stewards of students’ welfare, guarantors of their safety, places of refuge, precincts of healing.
  • But are we responsibly preparing them for the world after college — and for the independence, toughness, resourcefulness and resilience it will almost surely demand of them — when we too easily dole out A’s, too readily grant extensions, too gingerly deliver critiques, and too quickly wonder and sound alarms about any disturbance in the atmosphere?
  • We keep witnessing episodes of students taking their colleges to task in ways that smack of entitlement and fragility and are out of bounds
  • Hamline’s president, Fayneese Miller, defended that sequence of events by saying that to not weigh academic freedom against a “debt to the traditions, beliefs and views of students” is a “privileged reaction.”
  • That’s a troubling assertion, as Tom Nichols wrote in The Atlantic: “If you don’t want your traditions, beliefs or views challenged, then don’t come to a university, at least not to study anything in the humanities or the social sciences.”
  • The school is a merchant, a kind of department store, or so a student could easily assume, based on the come-ons from affluent colleges competing with one another for applicants. They peddle tantalizing dining options, themed living arrangements, diverse amusements. They assign students the role of discerning customers. And the customer is always right.
  • But in an educational environment, that credo is all wrong, because learning means occasionally being provoked, frequently being unsettled and regularly being yanked outside of your comfort zone,
  • most students can handle that dislocation — if they’re properly prepped for it, if they’re made to understand its benefits. We shortchange them when we sell them short
Javier E

Opinion | 'Killers of the Flower Moon' Is Coming to Theaters, But Being Erased from Classrooms - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...wer-moon-oklahoma-history.html

murder American Indian rich tribe Oklahoma movie Scorsese oil racism

shared by Javier E on 22 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • Numerous other Osage had died suspiciously — the cause of death often cloaked behind alcoholic poisoning or wasting illness or as simply unknown. Despite evidence that the victims had been murdered for their oil money, the cases were never properly investigated. Moreover, they could not be linked to the same killer caught by the bureau. The history of the Reign of Terror was less a question of who did it than who didn’t do it.
  • It was about a widespread culture of killing. It was about prominent white citizens who paid for killings, doctors who administered poisons, morticians who ignored evidence of bullet wounds, lawmen and prosecutors who were on the take and many others who remained complicit in their silence — all because they were profiting from what they referred to openly as the “Indian business.” The real death toll was undoubtedly higher than 24. One bureau agent admitted: “There are so many of these murder cases. There are hundreds and hundreds.”
  • The Osage had these events seared in their memories. Yet most Americans had excised even the bureau’s sanitized account from their consciences. Like the Tulsa Race Massacre, which occurred during the same period, the Osage Reign of Terror was generally not taught in schools, even in Oklahoma
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • even now, as their stories are being dramatized in a movie and shown in theaters across the country, there is a campaign in Oklahoma — this time with legislation — to deter the history from being taught in schools.
  • The movement to suppress elements of American history extends well beyond Oklahoma. According to an analysis by The Washington Post, more than two dozen states have adopted laws that make it easier to remove books from school libraries and to prevent certain teaching on race, gender and sexuality
  • In 2023, PEN America, which defends freedom of speech, reported that book bans in U.S. public school classrooms and libraries had surged 33 percent over the previous school year, with more than 3,000 recorded removals; among them are classics by the Nobel laureate Toni Morrison (banned in 30 school districts) and Margaret Atwood (banned in 34). School curriculums are being revised to mask discomfiting truths — so much so that in Florida students will now be taught that some African Americans benefited from slavery because it gave them “skills.”
Javier E

China has built a global network of ports critical to trade - Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...hina-ports-trade-military-navy

china network ports trade control sea routes

shared by Javier E on 07 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • A decade ago, Chinese President Xi Jinping launched the Maritime Silk Road, the oceanic component of his flagship Belt and Road Initiative aimed at improving China’s access to world markets by investing in transportation infrastructure
  • China has already secured a significant stake in a network of global ports that are central to world trade and freedom of navigation. Although the stated goal of the investments was commercial, the United States and its allies have grown increasingly concerned about the potential military implications.
  • Xi has frequently talked of his ambition to turn China into a “maritime superpower.” The port network offers a glimpse into the reach of those ambitions.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • A decade later, China owns or operates ports and terminals at nearly 100 locations in over 50 countries, spanning every ocean and every continent. Many are located along some of the world’s most strategic waterways.
  • The majority of the investments have been made by companies owned by the Chinese government, effectively making Beijing and the Chinese Communist Party the biggest operator of the ports that lie at the heart of global supply chains.
  • But the investments go beyond that. They give Beijing a window into the business dealings of competitors and could be used to help China defend its supply routes, spy on U.S. military movements and potentially engage U.S. shipping, according to analysts
  • Strait of HormuzLeaked U.S. intelligence documents earlier this year suggested that China has revived an effort to establish military facilities at the United Arab Emirates port of Khalifa in the Persian Gulf, by the crucial Strait of Hormuz and just 50 miles away from an important U.S. military base.
  • Beijing is decades away from matching the U.S. military presence worldwide, but China has the biggest and fastest-growing navy in the world, and increasingly it is venturing beyond the shores of eastern Asia.
  • From having no naval presence in the Indian Ocean two decades ago, for instance, China now maintains six to eight warships in the region at any given time
  • A route for some major shipping lanes and global ports, the Indian Ocean was an early priority for China. About 80 percent of China’s trade crosses the ocean, including almost all of its oil. China’s port investments seem designed to protect the route. Beijing, for instance, has secured a 99-year lease at the port of Hambantota in Sri Lanka, giving it an important foothold on the busy shipping lane between Asia and the West.
  • In late 2015, China acknowledged it was building a military base adjacent to the Chinese-operated port of Djibouti. The African base was officially opened in 2017, only six miles away from a U.S. military base in the country. Located at the narrow entrance to the Red Sea, Djibouti is on one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, where about 10 percent of global oil exports and 20 percent of commercial goods pass through the narrow strait to and from the Suez Canal.
  • Persian Gulf and Red SeaChina’s interest in these port locations goes beyond purely commercial concerns, U.S. officials say. Many are located at strategic chokepoints with high shipping traffic. At these locations, sea routes are narrow and ships are potentially vulnerable.
  • DjiboutiChina has already established one military facility adjoining a commercial port operation, in Djibouti, at the mouth of the Red Sea. U.S. officials say there are indications that it is scouting for more.
  • Suez CanalBeijing has also been growing its influence in ports on Egypt’s Suez Canal, a vital human-built waterway that provides a shortcut from Asia to Europe. Earlier this year, Chinese shipping companies announced investments in terminals at the ports of Ain Sokhna and Alexandria
  • EuropeChina already controls or has major investments in more than 20 European ports, giving it significant sway over the continent’s supply routes. Many serve as vital logistics and transshipment points for NATO and the U.S. Navy. “It’s a significant national and economic security concern,”
  • Logink portsOne way in which China has secured a commanding position is through a little-known software system called Logink, a digital logistics platform owned by the Chinese government. So far, at least 24 ports worldwide, including Rotterdam and Hamburg, have adopted the Logink system.
  • Logink potentially gives China access to vast quantities of normally proprietary information on the movements, management and pricing of goods moving around the world. The U.S. Transportation Department issued an advisory in August warning U.S. companies and agencies to avoid interacting with the system because of the risk of espionage and cyberattack.
  • The AmericasThe original Maritime Silk Road, as laid out in Chinese documents, focused on three main routes. The plan has expanded to include the Atlantic and the Americas. Latin America is one of the fastest-growing destinations for Chinese port investments. China manages ports at both ends of the Panama Canal. It is building from scratch a $3 billion megaport at Chancay in Peru that will transform trade between China and Latin America, enabling the world’s largest shipping containers to dock on the continent for the first time.
  • The United States is still the world’s biggest military power, with about 750 bases overseas. China, with only one, is a long way from matching U.S. naval power, said Stephen Watts of the Rand Corp. “The implications of these far-flung bases have been overblown,” he said. “China would be easily overcome in these small outposts if it came to a shooting match.”
  • But China’s port network presents a different kind of challenge to U.S. security interests, separate from the threat of war, said Isaac Kardon of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. China is now the world’s premier commercial maritime power, and its strategic hold over the world’s supply routes could be used to interdict or restrict U.S. trade, troop movements and freedom of navigation in a range of different ways. “It’s an asymmetrical threat,”
Javier E

Opinion | Israel Is In Real Danger For Three Reasons - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...israel-hamas-war.html

israel netanyahu danger reasons

shared by Javier E on 09 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • the Israel of Oct. 7 is an Israel that I’ve never been to before. They were right. It is a place in which Israelis have never lived before, a nation that Israeli generals have never had to protect before, an ally that America has never had to defend before
  • I now understand why so much has changed. It is crystal clear to me that Israel is in real danger — more danger than at any time since its War of Independence in 1948.
  • it’s for three key reasons:
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • First, Israel is facing threats from a set of enemies who combine medieval theocratic worldviews with 21st century weaponry — and are no longer organized as small bands of militiamen, but as modern armies with brigades, battalions, cyber capabilities, long-range rockets, drones and technical support.
  • my third, deep concern.
  • But Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza entails urban, house-to-house fighting that creates thousands of civilian casualties — innocent men, women and children
  • But President Biden can only sustainably generate the support Israel needs if Israel is ready to engage in some kind of a wartime diplomatic initiative directed at the Palestinians in the West Bank — and hopefully in a post-Hamas Gaza — that indicates Israel will discuss some kind of two-state solutions if Palestinian officials can get their political house unified and in order.
  • The second danger I see is that the only conceivable way that Israel can generate the legitimacy, resources, time and allies to fight such a difficult war with so many enemies is if it has unwavering partners abroad, led by the United States.
  • Netanyahu’s message to the world remains, in effect: “Help us defeat Hamas in Gaza, while we work to expand settlements, annex the West Bank and build a Jewish supremacist state there.”
  • Worse, I am stunned at the degree to which that leader, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, continues to put the interests of holding on to the support of his far-right base
  • Israel has the worst leader in its history, maybe in all of Jewish history — who has no will or ability to produce such an initiative.
  • This kind of chilling exuberance — Israel was built so that such a thing could never happen — explains the homemade sign I saw on a sidewalk while driving through the French Hill Jewish neighborhood of Jerusalem the other day: “It’s either us or them.’’
  • After being slammed by the public for digitally stabbing his army and intelligence chiefs in the back in the middle of a war, Netanyahu published a new tweet. “I was wrong,” he wrote, adding that “the things I said following the press conference should not have been said, and I apologize for that. I fully support the heads of [Israel’s] security services.”
  • As a result, there is a conviction in the army that they must demonstrate to the entire neighborhood — to Hezbollah in Lebanon, to the Houthis in Yemen, to the Islamic militias in Iraq to the Hamas and other fighters in the West Bank — that they will stop at nothing to re-establish the security of their borders
  • it wants to show that no one can out-crazy Israel to drive them from this region — even if the Israeli military has to defy the U.S. and even if they do not have any solid plan for governing Gaza the morning after the war.
  • “Israel cannot accept such an active threat on its borders. The whole idea of people living side by side in the Middle East was jeopardized by Hamas.”
  • This conflict is now back to its most biblical and primordial roots. This seems to be a time of eyes for eyes and teeth for teeth. The morning-after policy thinking will have to wait for the mourning after.
  • So, Netanyahu is saying that seven million Jews are going to indefinitely control the lives of five million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza
  • while offering them no political horizon, nothing, by way of statehood one day on any demilitarized conditions.
  • Early on the morning of Oct. 29, as the Israeli Army was just moving into Gaza, Netanyahu tweeted and then deleted a social media post in which he blamed Israel’s defense and intelligence establishment for failing to anticipate Hamas’s surprise attack.
  • The euphoric rampage of Oct. 7 that killed some 1,400 soldiers and civilians has not only hardened Israeli hearts toward the suffering of Gaza civilians. It has also inflicted a deep sense of humiliation and guilt on the Israeli Army and defense establishment, for having failed in their most basic mission of protecting the country’s borders.
  • the damage was done. How much do you suppose those military leaders trust what Netanyahu will say if the Gaza campaign stalls? What real leader would behave that way at the start of a war of survival?
  • Netanyahu and his far-right zealots have taken Israel on multiple flights of fancy in the last year: dividing the country and the army over the fraudulent judicial reform, bankrupting its future with massive investments in religious schools that teach no math and in West Bank Jewish settlements that teach no pluralism — while building up Hamas, which would never be a partner for peace, and tearing down the Palestinian Authority, the only possible partner for peace.
  • “When you go to the front, you are overwhelmed by the power of what we lost.”
Javier E

Opinion | U.S. Military Aid Is Killing Civilians in Gaza - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-military-aid-war-israel.html

US israel policy Palestine

shared by Javier E on 18 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • The United States currently provides Israel with at least $3.8 billion in annual military assistance, the most to any country per year, with the recent exception of Ukraine. High levels of assistance date back roughly to the 1970s and reflect a longstanding American bargain with Israel of security for peace — the notion that the more secure Israel feels, the more concessions it will be able to make to the Palestinians.
  • Since the mid-1990s, the United States has also been a major sponsor of the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority Security Forces, providing training and equipment on the theory that as the Palestinians stand up, the Israelis can stand down.
  • In both cases, the rationale for U.S. security assistance is fatally flawed.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • On the Israeli side, blind U.S. security guarantees have not provided a path to peace. Instead, they have provided Israel with the reassurance that it can engage in increasingly destructive efforts, such as the expansion of illegal settlements in the West Bank, without any real consequences.
  • At the same time, Israel has become a global leader in weapons exports and boasts one of the most technologically sophisticated militaries in the world. All of these factors have created a sense among Israeli policymakers that they can indefinitely contain — physically and politically — the Palestinian question.
  • Nowhere is this more apparent than in the recent efforts, driven by the United States, first under the Trump administration and continuing under President Biden, to pursue normalization between Israel and the Arab world. While in many ways this normalization is long overdue, it has been premised on the notion that economic incentives — and a shared regional security interest in deterring malign Iranian influence — can integrate Israel, indefinite occupation and all, into the Arab world.
  • This premise has been shattered — likely intentionally on Hamas’s part — by the Gaza conflict and its rapid recentering of the Palestinian cause on a global stage.
  • As civilian deaths in Gaza and the West Bank continue to mount, it is clear any sort of Saudi normalization agreement with Israel that does not also include substantive progress on a political solution for the Palestinian cause will be difficult to advance.
  • Under the Leahy laws, the United States is prohibited from providing security assistance to any unit that is credibly accused of having committed a gross violation of human rights. Unlike almost all other recipients, which are vetted along these lines before they receive assistance, for Israel the process is reversed: The assistance is provided, and the United States then waits to receive reports of violations, assessing their credibility through a process known as the Israel Leahy vetting forum, which includes consultation with the government of Israel.
  • To date, the forum has never come to consensus that any Israeli security force unit or soldier has committed a gross violation of human rights — despite the findings of international human rights organizations
  • the U.S. failure to impose accountability on Israel for such violations may provide Israel with a sense of impunity, increasing the likelihood of gross violations of human rights (including those committed by settlers against Palestinian civilians) and further breaking the trust between Israel and Palestinians that would be needed for any sort of lasting peace.
  • Working on the ground with the authority, I saw how the major focus of U.S. efforts was to prove to the Israel Defense Forces that their Palestinian counterparts could be trusted to take on the mission of securing Israel
  • Palestinian intelligence officials would be provided with target information by Israel, and Palestinian forces would be expected to take on missions previously conducted by the Israel Defense Forces to detain those targets. This effort not only undermined Palestinian support for the authority but also failed to convince the Israelis, who saw any Palestinian courts’ (correct) refusal to hold Palestinian detainees without due process as proof of a revolving door in the system.
  • Even worse, in 2008 and ’09, when Israel’s Operation Cast Lead, which resulted in over 1,300 Palestinian deaths in Gaza, sparked protests in the West Bank, it was the Palestinian Authority Security Forces that physically stood between demonstrators and the Israel Defense Forces. From my balcony in Ramallah, I saw this as a proof of success and reported as much to Washington at the time. In hindsight, it was perhaps the death knell for the legitimacy of the Palestinian Authority in the eyes of its people.
  • If the United States is to continue to employ military and security assistance as a tool of its engagement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (and there are good arguments why it should not), it must change its approach significantly. One way to do this would be simply by applying the laws and policies that it applies to every other country in the world: There is no point in having leverage that could pressure Israel to cease actions that undermine peace if we refuse to even consider using it
  • The United States could also start conditioning its military assistance to Israel (as it does for many other recipients) on certain verifiable political conditions being met. In Israel’s case, these may include a halt to or dismantling of settlement infrastructure in the West Bank.
  • Another thing the U.S. might do is consider reframing its security assistance on the Palestinian side to reinforce, rather than undermine, the legitimacy of the Palestinian Authority
  • Doing so would require structuring assistance in a way that enables Palestinian society control over its own security forces. It would also require the recognition of Palestinian statehood
  • I resigned from my job because I do not believe that U.S. arms should be provided in a situation if we know they are more likely than not — in the words of the Biden administration’s own guiding policy — to lead to or to aggravate the risk of human rights violations, including widespread civilian harm and death.
Javier E

Steven Pinker's five-point plan to save Harvard from itself - 0 views

www.bostonglobe.com/...versities-harvard-claudine-gay

plan university free speech academic freedom institutional neutrality non-violent viewpoint diversity DEI culture politics history policy

shared by Javier E on 12 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • The fury was white-hot. Harvard is now the place where using the wrong pronoun is a hanging offense but calling for another Holocaust depends on context. Gay was excoriated not only by conservative politicians but by liberal alumni, donors, and faculty, by pundits across the spectrum, even by a White House spokesperson and by the second gentleman of the United States. Petitions demanding her resignation have circulated in Congress, X, and factions of the Harvard community, and at the time of this writing, a prediction market is posting 1.2:1 odds that she will be ousted by the end of the year.
  • I don’t believe that firing Gay is the appropriate response to the fiasco. It wasn’t just Gay who fumbled the genocide question but two other elite university presidents — Sally Kornbluth of MIT (my former employer) and Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, who resigned following her testimony — which suggests that the problem with Gay’s performance betrays a deeper problem in American universities.
  • Gay interpreted the question not at face value but as pertaining to whether Harvard students who had brandished slogans like “Globalize the intifada” and “From the river to the sea,” which many people interpret as tantamount to a call for genocide, could be prosecuted under Harvard’s policies. Though the slogans are simplistic and reprehensible, they are not calls for genocide in so many words. So even if a university could punish direct calls for genocide as some form of harassment, it might justifiably choose not to prosecute students for an interpretation of their words they did not intend.
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • Nor can a university with a commitment to academic freedom prohibit all calls for political violence. That would require it to punish, say, students who express support for the invasion of Gaza knowing that it must result in the deaths of thousands of civilians. Thus Gay was correct in saying that students’ political slogans are not punishable by Harvard’s rules on harassment and bullying unless they cross over into intimidation, personal threats, or direct incitement of violence.
  • Gay was correct yet again in replying to Stefanik’s insistent demand, “What action has been taken against students who are harassing Jews on campus?” by noting that no action can be taken until an investigation has been completed. Harvard should not mete out summary justice like the Queen of Hearts in “Alice in Wonderland”: Sentence first, verdict afterward.
  • The real problem with Gay’s testimony was that she could not clearly and credibly invoke those principles because they either have never been explicitly adopted by Harvard or they have been flagrantly flouted in the past (as Stefanik was quick to point out)
  • Harvard has persecuted scholars who said there are two sexes, or who signed an amicus brief taking the conservative side in a Supreme Court deliberation. It has retracted acceptances from students who were outed by jealous peers for having used racist trash talk on social media when they were teens. Harvard’s subzero FIRE rating reveals many other punishments of politically incorrect peccadillos.
  • Institutional neutrality. A university does not need a foreign policy, and it does not need to issue pronouncements on the controversies and events of the day. It is a forum for debate, not a protagonist in debates. When a university takes a public stand, it either puts words in the mouths of faculty and students who can speak for themselves or unfairly pits them against their own employer.
  • In the wake of this debacle, the natural defense mechanism of a modern university is to expand the category of forbidden speech to include antisemitism (and as night follows day, Islamophobia). Bad idea
  • Deplorable speech should be refuted, not criminalized. Outlawing hate speech would only result in students calling anything they didn’t want to hear “hate speech.” Even the apparent no-brainer of prohibiting calls for genocide would backfire. Trans activists would say that opponents of transgender women in women’s sports were advocating genocide, and Palestinian activists would use the ban to keep Israeli officials from speaking on campus.
  • For universities to have a leg to stand on when they try to stand on principle, they must embark on a long-term plan to undo the damage they have inflicted on themselves. This requires five commitments.
  • Free speech. Universities should adopt a clear and conspicuous policy on academic freedom. It might start with the First Amendment, which binds public universities and which has been refined over the decades with carefully justified exceptions.
  • Since universities are institutions with a mission of research and education, they are also entitled to controls on speech that are necessary to fulfill that mission. These include standards of quality and relevance: You can’t teach anything you want at Harvard, just like you can’t publish anything you want in The Boston Globe. And it includes an environment conducive to learning.
  • So for the president of Harvard to suddenly come out as a born-again free-speech absolutist, disapproving of what genocidaires say but defending to the death their right to say it, struck onlookers as disingenuous or worse.
  • The events of this autumn also show that university pronouncements are an invitation to rancor and distraction. Inevitably there will be constituencies who feel a statement is too strong, too weak, too late, or wrongheaded.
  • Nonviolence.
  • Universities should not indulge acts of vandalism, trespassing, and extortion. Free speech does not include a heckler’s veto, which blocks the speech of others. These goon tactics also violate the deepest value of a university, which is that opinions are advanced by reason and persuasion, not by force
  • Viewpoint diversity. Universities have become intellectual and political monocultures. Seventy-seven percent of the professors in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences describe themselves as liberal, and fewer than 3 percent as conservative. Many university programs have been monopolized by extreme ideologies, such as the conspiracy theory that the world’s problems are the deliberate designs of a white heterosexual male colonialist oppressor class.
  • Vast regions in the landscape of ideas are no-go zones, and dissenting ideas are greeted with incomprehension, outrage, and censorship.
  • The entrenchment of dogma is a hazard of policies that hire and promote on the say-so of faculty backed by peer evaluations. Though intended to protect departments from outside interference, the policies can devolve into a network of like-minded cronies conferring prestige on each other. Universities should incentivize departments to diversify their ideologies, and they should find ways of opening up their programs to sanity checks from the world outside.
  • Disempowering DEI. Many of the assaults on academic freedom (not to mention common sense) come from a burgeoning bureaucracy that calls itself diversity, equity, and inclusion while enforcing a uniformity of opinion, a hierarchy of victim groups, and the exclusion of freethinkers. Often hastily appointed by deans as expiation for some gaffe or outrage, these officers stealthily implement policies that were never approved in faculty deliberations or by university leaders willing to take responsibility for them.
  • An infamous example is the freshman training sessions that terrify students with warnings of all the ways they can be racist (such as asking, “Where are you from?”). Another is the mandatory diversity statements for job applicants, which purge the next generation of scholars of anyone who isn’t a woke ideologue or a skilled liar. And since overt bigotry is in fact rare in elite universities, bureaucrats whose job depends on rooting out instances of it are incentivized to hone their Rorschach skills to discern ever-more-subtle forms of “systemic” or “implicit” bias.
  • Universities should stanch the flood of DEI officials, expose their policies to the light of day, and repeal the ones that cannot be publicly justified.
  • A fivefold way of free speech, institutional neutrality, nonviolence, viewpoint diversity, and DEI disempowerment will not be a quick fix for universities. But it’s necessary to reverse their tanking credibility and better than the alternatives of firing the coach or deepening the hole they have dug for themselves.
Javier E

Opinion | Why guilt shouldn't be the basis for climate change policy - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...equity-guilt-legitimate-policy

climate justice responsibility international history politics policy

shared by Javier E on 16 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • Countries agreed to “transition away” from fossil fuels
  • who should transition first? What should determine each nation’s ambition? These efforts will be expensive. Who should pick up the tab?
  • The “Global Stocktake” from Dubai, like statements from earlier conclaves, got around these questions with the standard diplomatese:
  • ...28 more annotations...
  • Countries’ commitments should reflect “equity and the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities in the light of different national circumstances and in the context of sustainable development and efforts to eradicate poverty.”
  • It’s indisputable that poor nations should be allowed to develop and to eradicate poverty. Countries, obviously, can contribute to the global effort only to the extent of their capabilities
  • equity brings up a different, more slippery matter. What’s the just allocation of responsibility? What’s fair?
  • Countries, it turns out, have rather different takes on this question, potentially complicating efforts to make progress against climate change.
  • Consider the intended “nationally determined contributions” to battle climate change that various countries announced after the climate summit in Paris in 2015
  • One interesting study examined the notions of justice underpinning each national proposal. They were all over the map.
  • Critically, none of those experts considered the consequences of applying their logic to all countries across the board.
  • The aggregate notions of fairness did not add up to a solution. The countries that claimed responsibility for a small share of global emissions actually accounted for about a quarter of the total. Countries with per capita emissions ranging from 0.5 tons of carbon dioxide to 25 tons of CO2, roughly five times the global average, used this variable to justify modest plans.
  • The idea of an equitable and just distribution of responsibility might seem essential to achieve the shared goal of preventing a climate catastrophe
  • I can’t put precise odds on members of Congress accepting that the United States must bear one-fourth of the worldwide burden to cut greenhouse gas emissions because of the actions of long-dead Americans who had no idea they were causing damage. But the probability is quite low.
  • It seems only fair that countries such as the United States, which accounts for about a quarter of the greenhouse gases emitted by humanity since before the Industrial Revolution, should bear a much bigger share of the burden than, say, Brazil, which accounts for only 1 percent of historical emissions.
  • The United States, moreover, is quite rich and was made that way largely thanks to abundant and cheap fossil fuel.
  • Yet parsing how equity is to be achieved can get complicated
  • Should the goal be to equalize emissions per person, which today tilt heavily toward rich countries? (The United States emits some 18 tons per person; for India, the number is less than 3.
  • Or should we first cut emissions associated with the production of luxury goods and services that are mostly consumed in rich countries? Shouldn’t the emissions from producing the made-in-China toy you bought on Amazon accrue to the United States, where it is being played with?
  • They are in tension with the strategies championed by most rich countries, which are more sympathetic to the idea that historical emissions should be grandfathered in — not counted against them — and that they should be reduced in the future wherever reducing them is cheapest, which happens to be mostly in the developing world.
  • Many countries cannot afford the necessary mitigation pathways, either because they don’t have the resources to finance the new technologies needed to abandon fossil fuels, or because the resources they have are best deployed toward, say, buying air conditioning units or otherwise raising the standard of living.
  • There are essential truths that the world must acknowledge:
  • These countries are likely to face the gravest risks from climate change — whether measured in devastated crops, destroyed communities or people’s lives. Rich nations owe it to the world to ensure that resources and technologies are available for sufficient mitigation, adaptation and disaster relief
  • — not because they emitted a lot of greenhouse gases in the past, but because the task of preventing climate change and limiting its damage cannot be avoided, and they can afford it.
  • Many defended the fairness of their offer by pointing out that they accounted for a “small share” of global greenhouse gas emissions; others referred to their low per capita emissions. Many based their arguments on their vulnerability to climate change.
  • Consider the political ramifications of some climate justice arguments.
  • And that’s even without pointing out that China, today, emits more than double the amount of greenhouse gases the United States does.
  • Or consider how one research paper apportioned the remaining emissions budget — the greenhouse gases that can still be emitted in the future without breaching the warming ceiling (which in this estimate was set at 2 degrees Celsius)
  • It calculated nations’ responsibility for emissions starting only in 1992, when the world became aware of climate change, and assumed that each citizen of the world is entitled to the same budget since then. On this basis, it concluded that the United States would be entitled to 4.4 percent of the remainder, less than a fifth of its historic share.
  • That is fair. But it is also only 50 billion tons, or roughly nine years’ worth of emissions, at the nation’s current rate. I can’t imagine an administration that agreed to this surviving for long
  • The argument from guilt — built on the assumption that rich nations’ past development and emissions have incurred a moral debt to the rest of the world — will likely short-circuit the best case for action.
  • Better to draw on a different moral principle: to expect results from nations according to their capabilities and to assist them according to their needs. That frame could allow the job to get done.
Javier E

Pro-China YouTube Network Used A.I. to Malign U.S., Report Finds - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...na-youtube-disinformation.html

youtube network disinformation China subversion AI

shared by Javier E on 16 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • The 10-minute post was one of more than 4,500 videos in an unusually large network of YouTube channels spreading pro-China and anti-U.S. narratives, according to a report this week from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute
  • ome of the videos used artificially generated avatars or voice-overs, making the campaign the first influence operation known to the institute to pair A.I. voices with video essays.
  • The campaign’s goal, according to the report, was clear: to influence global opinion in favor of China and against the United States.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • The videos promoted narratives that Chinese technology was superior to America’s, that the United States was doomed to economic collapse, and that China and Russia were responsible geopolitical players. Some of the clips fawned over Chinese companies like Huawei and denigrated American companies like Apple.
  • Content from at least 30 channels in the network drew nearly 120 million views and 730,000 subscribers since last year, along with occasional ads from Western companies
  • Disinformation — such as the false claim that some Southeast Asian nations had adopted the Chinese yuan as their own currency — was common. The videos were often able to quickly react to current events
  • he coordinated campaign might be “one of the most successful influence operations related to China ever witnessed on social media.”
  • Historically, its influence operations have focused on defending the Communist Party government and its policies on issues like the persecution of Uyghurs or the fate of Taiwan
  • Efforts to push pro-China messaging have proliferated in recent years, but have featured largely low-quality content that attracted limited engagement or failed to sustain meaningful audiences
  • “This campaign actually leverages artificial intelligence, which gives it the ability to create persuasive threat content at scale at a very limited cost compared to previous campaigns we’ve seen,”
  • YouTube said in a statement that its teams work around the clock to protect its community, adding that “we have invested heavily in robust systems to proactively detect coordinated influence operations.” The company said it welcomed research efforts and that it had shut down several of the channels mentioned in the report for violating the platform’s policies.
  • China began targeting the United States more directly amid the mass pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong in 2019 and continuing with the Covid-19 pandemic, echoing longstanding Russian efforts to discredit American leadership and influence at home and aboard.
  • Over the summer, researchers at Microsoft and other companies unearthed evidence of inauthentic accounts that China employed to falsely accuse the United States of using energy weapons to ignite the deadly wildfires in Hawaii in August.
  • Meta announced last month that it removed 4,789 Facebook accounts from China that were impersonating Americans to debate political issues, warning that the campaign appeared to be laying the groundwork for interference in the 2024 presidential elections.
  • It was the fifth network with ties to China that Meta had detected this year, the most of any other country.
  • The advent of artificial technology seems to have drawn special interest from Beijing. Ms. Keast of the Australian institute said that disinformation peddlers were increasingly using easily accessible video editing and A.I. programs to create large volumes of convincing content.
  • She said that the network of pro-China YouTube channels most likely fed English-language scripts into readily available online text-to-video software or other programs that require no technical expertise and can produce clips within minutes. Such programs often allow users to select A.I.-generated voice narration and customize the gender, accent and tone of voice.
  • In 39 of the videos, Ms. Keast found at least 10 artificially generated avatars advertised by a British A.I. company
  • she also discovered what may be the first example in an influence operation of a digital avatar created by a Chinese company — a woman in a red dress named Yanni.
  • The scale of the pro-China network is probably even larger, according to the report. Similar channels appeared to target Indonesian and French people. Three separate channels posted videos about chip production that used similar thumbnail images and the same title translated into English, French and Spanish.
Javier E

Transcript: Ezra Klein Interviews Nimrod Novik - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...n-interviews-nimrod-novik.html

israel klein interview transcript strategy

shared by Javier E on 27 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • for years now, a group of hundreds of former senior defense and diplomatic officials in Israel have been saying this is a catastrophe — that it is a catastrophe for Israeli security, a catastrophe for Israeli democracy, a catastrophe for Israelis’ international standing, and a catastrophe for Israel’s soul. Their warnings seem quite prescient now.
  • they’ve argued there was another way. There was a huge amount Israel could do on its own and should have been doing, that if Israel is not going to tip into a kind of single state that it did not want and could not ultimately defend, that the conditions had to be created now for something else to emerge in the future.
  • One of the people working on that project was Nimrod Novik. He’s my guest today. Novik was a top aide to Shimon Peres when Peres was prime minister and vice premier. In that role, Novik was involved in all manner of negotiations with the Palestinians, with the Arab world, with the international community. He’s on the executive committee of Commanders for Israel’s Security, which is a group I mentioned a minute ago. And he’s an Israel fellow at the Israel Policy Forum.
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • NIMROD NOVIK: The group that worked on it, called Commanders for Israel’s Security, it’s over 500 Israeli retired generals, as well as their equivalents from the Mossad, Shin Bet Security, National Security Council, the entire Israeli security establishment. And we formed a team. We felt that Israeli policy was far too reactive and far too conservative for the good of the country, national security, short and long-term.
  • We had not anticipated the trauma of Oct. 7, but we certainly anticipated things getting from bad to worse, unless Israel changes course.
  • we came up with a plan that suggested even though a two-state solution, as you said, is not on this side of the horizon, but given that eventually, it’s the only solution that we believe serves Israel’s security and well-being long-term, as a strong Jewish democracy, we mapped out what can and should be done in the coming two, three years to reverse the slide towards the disaster of a one-state solution.
  • NIMROD NOVIK: There were primarily two governing concepts, if you will, of the Israeli policy. Again, calling it policy is giving it more credit than deserved. Israeli government have been reluctant to determine the end game of our relationship with the Palestinians. Where do we want to see ourselves and them two years, five years, 50 years from now? No decision has been made since the Oslo era.
  • As a result, what we’ve seen was a policy based on insisting on separating the Gaza Strip, ruled by Hamas from the West Bank, ruled sort of by the Palestinian Authority. Separation was one principle
  • And the other one was dubbed status quo, even though it was an illusion, because nothing was static about it. As a matter of fact, creeping annexation has been accelerating under various governments.
  • The more territory was taken by settlements, the more extreme settlers were conducting violent raids into Palestinian civil populations. The more the Palestinian Authority, internally defective, becoming more and more authoritarian, more and more detached from its own constituents, less responsive, less capable of governance, losing control over large swaths of West Bank territory, forcing the I.D.F. to enter more and more
  • It was a slide into a state where the Palestinian Authority would cease to function as the promise of the nucleus of a Palestinian state.
  • If we look at it today, it’s already perhaps the municipal government of the city of Ramallah, rather than of the West Bank, and weakening the Palestinian Authority by choking it financially. By not allowing it to demonstrate to its people that it is the vehicle that will bring them one day to their aspiration of statehood, on the one hand, and making sure that Hamas controls Gaza, the two tracks spelled disaster.
  • So I must confess, we had not anticipated that the disaster will look the way it did on Oct. 7, but we certainly realized that the policy in Gaza of rounds of violence every year, every two years, every 18 months, and buying off relative tranquility by funding Hamas through the auspices of Qatar, allowing it to arm and rearm, the inherent contradictions in the policy were quite apparent
  • There’s a right-wing one-state solution. I think when you mentioned the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, I think if you read things he has written in the past, he is looking for a one-state solution. He wants to crush Palestinian dreams of statehood and repress Palestinians sufficiently that they stop believing they can ever have anything better and eventually content themselves to Israeli rule and live quietly within that in order to gain better lives.
  • NIMROD NOVIK: I’ll put it bluntly. I believe that a two-state solution is inevitable, not because we wish it and not because it’s nice, not because Palestinians deserve self-determination — which they do, but that’s not a historic imperative. I believe that the two-state solution is inevitable because these two people are not going to live happily ever after under one roof.
  • For that to happen, for the two people to stay in one state, one of two things have to happen. Either Israelis will agree to grant Palestinian equal rights in that one state and therefore become a minority, or at least, a slim majority in our own country, and that’s never going to happen. Israelis are not going to agree to be less than the overwhelming majority in our own country.
  • Or Palestinians will agree forever to forgo equal rights, which I suspect is as unreasonable expectation as the other. So we will separate.
  • NIMROD NOVIK: Civil separation with overall security control — continued security control until a two-state agreement ushers in alternative security arrangements, is a concept that basically suggests reversing the creeping annexation, which is no longer creeping. It’s now galloping.
  • So the idea is to start reversing the slide towards one-state reality in the opposite direction, of reducing the friction between the two populations, increasing the capacity of the P.A. to perform, while maintaining the overall security controlled by Israel until a deal is struck.
  • You often hear when you talk to people in Israel about different paths that could be taken. Well, we don’t have anybody to negotiate with. The Palestinian Authority doesn’t have credibility. Hamas wants our destruction
  • And a core premise of the report is that there are things Israel can do unilaterally, that it doesn’t need a partner to do things that will make the situation better from its perspective and create conditions maybe for deals in the future. So tell me what is in Israel’s power here. What would you actually recommend to do tangibly?
  • NIMROD NOVIK: It’s not a genetic deformation of the Palestinians that they cannot govern themselves. This is nonsense. We had a period after the second intifada, the years 2007, 2008, where the Palestinian Authority, there was a prime minister by the name of Salam Fayyad. First, he was finance minister, later on prime minister, who revitalized the Palestinian Authority in a dramatic way. The authority was on the rise. People were proud in it, its own population. They could have won elections at that point.
  • And then Netanyahu was elected in 2009. Now, obviously, we are the strongest party. We hold most of the cards by far. And when we decide that we are going to choke the Palestinian Authority, the Palestinian Authority will choke
  • Now the second trend that happened was that Mahmoud Abbas, President Abbas, known as Abu Mazen, the early Abu Mazen was a very different person than the late one with whom we are dealing today. He became increasingly nondemocratic, authoritarian, autocratic, paranoid, removing from his vicinity and from position of power all the best and brightest that were working during that era
  • . Things went from bad to worse, Israel doing its share in weakening the P.A. and the P.A. leadership became more claustrophobic. All these can change.
  • At the moment, the West Bank is a Swiss cheese. It’s 169 islands of Palestinian-controlled areas surrounded each by Israeli-controlled territory. So we wanted to reduce that by half so that contiguity will have a security, law and order, and economic well-being effect.
  • We suggested a host of economic measures that enable the Palestinian Authority to deliver for the people, which is the opposite of what’s happening now, when our minister of finance is choking the Palestinian Authority by withholding funds that are theirs by the agreement Israel collects taxes for the Palestinian Authority, VAT and others. And we are supposed to automatically transfer them to the Palestinian Authority. It’s the main chunk of their budget.
criscimagnael

The Fall of the 'Sun King' of French TV, and the Myth of Seduction - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...too-patrick-poivre-darvor.html

shared by criscimagnael on 01 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Patrick Poivre d’Arvor, known as a great seducer, has been accused by more than 20 women of rape, sexual assault and harassment in France’s belated #MeToo reckoning.
  • France’s most trusted anchorman for decades, he used to draw millions in an evening news program that some likened to a religious communion. In an earlier time, he embodied an ideal of the French male — at ease with himself, a TV journalist and man of letters, a husband and a father who was also, unabashedly, a great seducer of women.
  • Patrick Poivre d’Arvor, nicknamed the Sun King of French TV,
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Angered, nearly 20 women appeared together this month in a TV studio for Mediapart, France’s leading investigative news site, with some recounting rapes or assaults that lasted minutes, carried out with barely a few words.
  • “He was called a Don Juan for years,” said Hélène Devynck, 55, a journalist who has accused Mr. Poivre d’Arvor of raping her at his home when she worked as one of his assistants in the early 1990s.
  • “His ego is destroying him,” said Cécile Delarue, 43, a journalist who has accused Mr. Poivre d’Arvor of engaging in sexual harassment when she worked with him two decades ago.
  • Mr. Poivre d’Arvor declined an interview request through Mr. Naepels, who said that at least one more woman could be included in the defamation suit.
  • According to the French news media, Mr. Poivre d’Arvor has been married for 50 years to the same woman, who has not commented publicly on the accusations.
  • On air, he appealed especially to a target audience of women under 50, Mr. Lévrier said.
  • He regularly invited young women to watch his live broadcasts before leading them to his private office, where several of the women say he assaulted them. He also pressed young female employees for sex, or sexually harassed them, according to former employees, including Ms. Devynck, the former assistant.
  • “I knew that, at the time, if I complained, he was the seducer and so I was the whore — I couldn’t say anything because of his power and the support he had,” said Ms. Devynck, who went on to a successful career at other channels.
  • “I’m of a generation that was raised with the idea that women and men were equal, and that it was through work that I would gain freedom — my mother told me often,” Ms. Delarue said. “But this man just saw me as a fresh piece of meat.”
  • A famous letter written by Catherine Deneuve and other prominent Frenchwomen denounced #MeToo as “puritanism” and defended “the freedom to importune” as part of French “gallantry.” Traditional French feminism — and its fierce rejection of #MeToo as an American aberration — was a “trap” that led women to believe that they could be free without worrying about sexual violence, Ms. Devynck said.
  • “His image was so powerful that people kept saying it’s not possible, he’s such a seducer, she should have been flattered,” Ms. de Blasi, 33, recalled. “I kept reading, ‘French charm, gallantry and seduction,’ when it wasn’t about that at all.”
  • “Little jokes about not wearing a décolleté, makeup or a skirt,” she recalled.
  • The great seducer is “such a part of our collective imagination,” she said. “And the problem is that part of French society still believes in it, or at least believed in it.”
lilyrashkind

Russia Says U.S. 'Adding Fuel to the Fire' by Sending Rockets to Ukraine | World News | US News - 0 views

www.usnews.com/...nced-arms-shipments-to-ukraine

russia

shared by lilyrashkind on 01 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • LONDON (Reuters) - Russia on Wednesday sharply criticised a U.S. decision to supply advanced rocket systems and munitions to Ukraine, warning of an increased risk of direct confrontation with Washington.Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters: "We believe that the United States is purposefully and diligently adding fuel to the fire."
  • U.S. President Joe Biden has agreed to provide Ukraine with advanced rocket systems that can strike with precision at long-range Russian targets as part of a new U.S. package to help Kyiv defend itself in the three-month-old war that began with Russia's Feb. 24 invasion.Washington agreed to supply the rockets, which are capable of hitting targets as far away as 80 km (50 miles), after Ukraine gave "assurances" they will not use the missiles to strike inside Russia itself, senior U.S. officials said.
  • Ukrainian officials have been asking allies for longer-range missile systems that can fire a barrage of rockets hundreds of miles away, in the hopes of turning the tide of the war.U.S. President Joe Biden wrote in an opinion piece in the New York Times: "We have moved quickly to send Ukraine a significant amount of weaponry and ammunition so that it can fight on the battlefield and be in the strongest possible position at the negotiating table."Earlier, state news agency RIA Novosti quoted Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov as saying, when asked about the prospect of a direct confrontation between the United States and Russia: "Any arms shipments that continue, that are on the rise, increase the risks of such a development."
peterconnelly

The U.S. is sending Ukraine advanced rocket systems to battle Russia. Here's why that matters. - 0 views

www.nbcnews.com/...long-range-firepower-rcna31016

ukraine u s

shared by peterconnelly on 01 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Russia is advancing in the east behind a barrage of artillery that has strained Ukrainian defenses and Western unity over support for a protracted war.
  • President Joe Biden announced Wednesday that the U.S. would be sending Ukraine the high mobility artillery rocket system, or HIMARS. "This new package will arm them with new capabilities and advanced weaponry, including HIMARS with battlefield munitions, to defend their territory from Russian advances," he said in a statement.
  • He said that combined with their targeting capacity aided by commercial drones and counter battery radars, the systems would provide a “distinct qualitative and quantitative improvement” to Ukraine’s combat capability.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • MLRS missiles typically have a range of up to 40 miles, and can be equipped with GPS-guided missiles.
  • However they are unlikely to arrive in time to save swaths of the country's east from being battered and overrun.
  • saying Wednesday that Russian forces now control around 80 percent of the ruined city.
  • “The combination of artillery barrage, airstrikes and missile strikes is what we expected from Russia from the beginning of the war and they are grinding the Ukrainians down,” said William Alberque
  • “This is an active artillery war. A war in which you need long-range firepower," the official said. “This war is about shooting and moving. Who can shoot the longest and fastest wins.”
  • Biden on Monday told reporters that the U.S. would not “send to Ukraine rocket systems that can strike into Russia." A senior administration official said Ukraine has agreed not to use them to launch rockets into Russia.
  • Moscow's messaging over the long-range weapons systems showed it "knows exactly how to play on the West's doubts and fear of a direct NATO-Russia confrontation,"
  • “But each day the West hesitates is a day Russian artillery rules the battlefield. Russian advances are preceded by massive fire. Each city lost by Ukraine is a city leveled to the ground, making each retreat even more painful,” Horowitz said.
Javier E

March 2020: How the Fed Averted Economic Disaster - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-economic-disaster-11645199788

fed pandemic monetary policy emergency history crisis us economics

shared by Javier E on 20 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • Over the week of March 16, markets experienced an enormous shock to what investors refer to as liquidity, a catchall term for the cost of quickly converting an asset into cash.
  • Mr. Powell bluntly directed his colleagues to move as fast as possible.
  • They devised unparalleled emergency-lending backstops to stem an incipient financial panic that threatened to exacerbate the unfolding economic and public-health emergencies.
  • ...37 more annotations...
  • They were offering nearly unlimited cheap debt to keep the wheels of finance turning, and when that didn’t help, the Fed began purchasing massive quantities of government debt outright.
  • Investors dumped whatever they could, including ostensibly “risk-free” U.S. Treasury securities. As a global dash for dollars unfolded, Treasurys were no longer serving as the market’s traditional shock absorbers, amplifying extreme turmoil on Wall Street.
  • By week’s end, the Dow had plunged more than 10,000 points since mid-February as investors struggled to get their arms around what a halt to global commerce would mean for businesses that would soon have no revenue.
  • “It was sheer, unadulterated panic, of a magnitude that was far worse than in 2008 and 2009. Far worse,”
  • The idea of shutting down markets was especially discouraging: “It was a profoundly un-American thing to contemplate, to just shut everything down, and almost fatalistic—that we’re not going to get out of this.”
  • nearly two years later, most agree that the Fed’s actions helped to save the economy from going into a pandemic-induced tailspin.
  • “My thought was—I remember this very clearly—‘O.K. We have a four-or-five-day chance to really get our act together and get ahead of this. We’re gonna try to get ahead of this,’” Mr. Powell recalled later. “And we were going to do that by just announcing a ton of stuff on Monday morning.”
  • It worked. The Fed’s pledges to backstop an array of lending, announced on Monday, March 23, would unleash a torrent of private borrowing based on the mere promise of central bank action—together with a massive assist by Congress, which authorized hundreds of billions of dollars that would cover any losses.
  • If the hardest-hit companies like Carnival, with its fleet of 104 ships docked indefinitely, could raise money in capital markets, who couldn’t?
  • on April 9, where he shed an earlier reluctance to express an opinion about government spending policies, which are set by elected officials and not the Fed. He spoke in unusually moral terms. “All of us are affected,” he said. “But the burdens are falling most heavily on those least able to carry them…. They didn’t cause this. Their business isn’t closed because of anything they did wrong. This is what the great fiscal power of the United States is for—to protect these people as best we can from the hardships they are facing.”
  • They were extraordinary words from a Fed chair who during earlier, hot-button policy debates said the central bank needed to “stay in its lane” and avoid providing specific advice.
  • To avoid a widening rift between the market haves (who had been given access to Fed backstops) and the market have-nots (who had been left out because their debt was deemed too risky), Mr. Powell had supported a decision to extend the Fed’s lending to include companies that were being downgraded to “junk” status in the days after it agreed to backstop their bonds.
  • Most controversially, Mr. Powell recommended that the Fed purchase investment vehicles known as exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, that invest in junk debt. He and his colleagues feared that these “high-yield” bonds might buckle, creating a wave of bankruptcies that would cause long-term scarring in the economy.
  • Mr. Powell decided that it was better to err on the side of doing too much than not doing enough.
  • , Paul Singer, who runs the hedge-fund firm Elliott Management, warned that the Fed was sowing the seeds of a bigger crisis by absolving markets of any discipline. “Sadly, when people (including those who should know better) do something stupid and reckless and are not punished,” he wrote, “it is human nature that, far from thinking that they were lucky to have gotten away with something, they are encouraged to keep doing the stupid thing.”
  • The breathtaking speed with which the Fed moved and with which Wall Street rallied after the Fed’s announcements infuriated Dennis Kelleher, a former corporate lawyer and high-ranking Senate aide who runs Better Markets, an advocacy group lobbying for tighter financial regulations.
  • This is a ridiculous discussion no matter how heartfelt Powell is about ‘we can’t pick winners and losers’—to which my answer is, ‘So instead you just make them all winners?’”
  • “Literally, not only has no one in finance lost money, but they’ve all made more money than they could have dreamed,” said Mr. Kelleher. “It just can’t be the case that the only thing the Fed can do is open the fire hydrants wide for everybody
  • Mr. Powell later defended his decision to purchase ETFs that had invested in junk debt. “We wanted to find a surgical way to get in and support that market because it’s a huge market, and it’s a lot of people’s jobs… What were we supposed to do? Just let them die and lose all those jobs?” he said. “If that’s the biggest mistake we made, stipulating it as a mistake, I’m fine with that. It wasn’t time to be making finely crafted judgments,” Mr. Powell said. He hesitated for a moment before concluding. “Do I regret it? I don’t—not really.”
  • “We didn’t know there was a vaccine coming. The pandemic is just raging. And we don’t have a plan,” said Mr. Powell. “Nobody in the world has a plan. And in hindsight, the worry was, ‘What if we can’t really fully open the economy for a long time because the pandemic is just out there killing people?’”
  • Mr. Powell never saw this as a particularly likely outcome, “but it was around the edges of the conversation, and we were very eager to do everything we could to avoid that outcome,”
  • The Fed’s initial response in 2020 received mostly high marks—a notable contrast with the populist ire that greeted Wall Street bailouts following the 2008 financial crisis. North Carolina Rep. Patrick McHenry, the top Republican on the House Financial Services Committee, gave Mr. Powell an “A-plus for 2020,” he said. “On a one-to-10 scale? It was an 11. He gets the highest, highest marks, and deserves them. The Fed as an institution deserves them.”
  • The pandemic was the most severe disruption of the U.S. economy since the Great Depression. Economists, financial-market professionals and historians are only beginning to wrestle with the implications of the aggressive response by fiscal and monetary policy makers.
  • Altogether, Congress approved nearly $5.9 trillion in spending in 2020 and 2021. Adjusted for inflation, that compares with approximately $1.8 trillion in 2008 and 2009.
  • By late 2021, it was clear that many private-sector forecasters and economists at the Fed had misjudged both the speed of the recovery and the ways in which the crisis had upset the economy’s equilibrium. Washington soon faced a different problem. Disoriented supply chains and strong demand—boosted by government stimulus—had produced inflation running above 7%.
  • because the pandemic shock was akin to a natural disaster, it allowed Mr. Powell and the Fed to sidestep concerns about moral hazard—that is, the possibility that their policies would encourage people to take greater risks knowing that they were protected against larger losses. If a future crisis is caused instead by greed or carelessness, the Fed would have to take such concerns more seriously.
  • The high inflation that followed in 2021 might have been worse if the U.S. had seen more widespread bankruptcies or permanent job losses in the early months of the pandemic.
  • an additional burst of stimulus spending in 2021, as vaccines hastened the reopening of the economy, raised the risk that monetary and fiscal policy together would flood the economy with money and further fuel inflation.
  • The surge in federal borrowing since 2020 creates other risks. It is manageable for now but could become very expensive if the Fed has to lift interest rates aggressively to cool the economy and reduce high inflation.
  • The Congressional Budget Office forecast in December 2020 that if rates rose by just 0.1 percentage point more than projected in each year of the decade, debt-service costs in 2030 would rise by $235 billion—more than the Pentagon had requested to spend in 2022 on the Navy.
  • its low-rate policies have coincided with—and critics say it has contributed to—a longer-running widening of wealth inequality.
  • In 2008, household wealth fell by $8 trillion. It rose by $13.5 trillion in 2020, and in the process, spotlighted the unequal distribution of wealth-building assets such as houses and stocks.
  • Without heavy spending from Washington, focused on the needs of the least well-off, these disparities might have attracted more negative scrutiny.
  • Finally, the Fed is a technocratic body that can move quickly because it operates under few political constraints. Turning to it as the first line of defense in this and future crises could compromise its institutional independence.
  • Step one, he said, was to get in the fight and try to win. Figuring out how to exit would be a better problem to have, because it would mean they had succeeded.
  • “We have a recovery that looks completely unlike other recoveries that we’ve had because we’ve put so much support behind the recovery,” Mr. Powell said last month. “Was it too much? I’m going to leave that to the historians.”
  • The final verdict on the 2020 crisis response may turn on whether Mr. Powell is able to bring inflation under control without a painful recession—either as sharp price increases from 2021 reverse on their own accord, as officials initially anticipated, or because the Fed cools down the economy by raising interest rates.
Javier E

We're All Ukrainians Now - The French Press - 0 views

frenchpress.thedispatch.com/...were-all-ukrainians-now

patriotism home nationalism history crisis ukraine arrogance superiority imperialism NATO defense

shared by Javier E on 20 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • As we confront the crisis in Ukraine, it helps us understand patriotism itself—how a healthy patriotism extends our sphere of concern, and how an unhealthy nationalism restricts us and narrows our focus, leaving us often indifferent to the suffering of others. 
  • there is also a serious geopolitical challenge unfolding in Europe and a deep moral injury threatening Ukraine. And it demands our attention as well, and not just in strategic terms.
  • The moral dimension should weigh on us all. Indeed, moral injuries can cut the deepest and leave the most bitter legacies. Moral concern can and should bind us together, out of empathy for profound loss. 
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • In his book The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis outlines the ways in which citizens should love their nations.
  • healthy patriotism is rooted in this deep and natural sense of home, it rebukes any sense of chauvinism or xenophobia. “In any mind which has a pennyworth of imagination it produces a good attitude towards foreigners,” Lewis says, “How can I love my home without coming to realise that other men, no less rightly, love theirs.” 
  • “As the family offers us the first step beyond self-love,” writes Lewis, “so this offers us the first step beyond family selfishness.” 
  • Critically, love of country rooted in love of home “is not in the least aggressive.” It “asks only to be let alone.” That’s not to say that it’s pacifistic, but “it becomes militant only to protect what it loves.” 
  • he uses a key word—“home.” He compares the love of your country to the “love of home, of the place we grew up in or the places, perhaps many, which have been our homes; and of all places fairly near these and fairly like them; love of old acquaintances, of familiar sights, sounds and smells.” 
  • Because
  • It is this sense of peace and place that echoes in the prophet Micah’s words: “Everyone will sit under their own vine and under their own fig tree, and no one will make them afraid.”
  • No one claims that Ukraine is a perfect country.
  • , it is “not in the least aggressive.” It “asks only to be let alone.” As a nation that has endured its own aggressive attacks, how can we not empathize? How can we not do what we reasonably can to deter Russian aggression and help Ukrainians defend themselves?
  • But this moment should cast our existing obligations in a different light, reaffirming their immense value.
  • In fact, it is our understanding of the value of our national home—and the deeply destabilizing and violent pain of the loss of others’ national homes—that leads to the network of defensive alliances that has maintained great power peace for so long.
  • NATO is not “American imperialism.” Our defensive alliances in Asia aren’t the result of “imperial overreach.” To continue the comparison to home, a defensive alliance is akin to a neighborhood watch, where neighbors look after and protect each other.
  • It is no coincidence, however, that the unhealthy nationalism of the modern incarnation of America First does seek to repeat those past mistakes
  • the reason isn’t just tactical or strategic, it’s philosophical—rooted in temptations and vices that Lewis warns against in the Four Loves. 
  • Essentially, the warning is against a sense of superiority—about both the past and present. As Lewis said, a love of country can lead to a “particular attitude to our country’s past” that has “not quite such good credentials as the sheer love of home.” 
  • “The actual history of every country is full of shabby and even shameful doings … The heroic stories,” Lewis writes, “if taken to be typical, give a false impression of it
  • Why is that dangerous? Why is it so important to understand history in full?
  • At worst we can hold the “firm, even prosaic belief that our own nation, in sober fact, has long been, and still is markedly superior to all others.” This belief “can produce asses that kick and bite.” “On the lunatic fringe,” Lewis warned, “It may shade off into that popular Racialism which Christianity and science equally forbid.”
  • Interestingly enough, the sense of superiority can create the same outcome as the sense of national self-loathing you sometimes see on far-left and far-right.
  • The chauvinist has no concern beyond our borders. The angry critic says we have no right to demonstrate concern, so long as we are still so flawed
  • the result is similar—an insular people, focused on themselves.
  • A criminal regime is on the verge of kicking down the door of a national home, and our nation should stand with the innocent, with those who wish to be left alone. We are all Ukrainians now. 
sidneybelleroche

Live updates: Ukraine-Russia crisis - 0 views

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

crisis

shared by sidneybelleroche on 22 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • German Chancellor Olaf Scholz stopped the progression of the controversial Nord Stream 2 pipeline following Moscow’s actions in eastern Ukraine. The pipeline, which would have increased European reliance on energy from Russia, has been a major source of contention in Europe and the United States for years. Without undergoing the certification or approval process, the pipeline cannot start running. 
  • Prime Minister Boris Johnson has unveiled the "first tranche" of British sanctions on Russia, condemning Vladimir Putin's Ukraine aggression.
  • The European Commission proposed sanctions to EU members states and placed a particular emphasis that would mirror sanctions taken in Crimea after the 2014 annexation by Moscow.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Sources say US and European officials have been in intense discussions over the several past hours over how to proceed with additional sanctions against Russia.
  • Monday's sanctions were cautious in nature and Tuesday's sanctions are expected to go further but it will not be the full blow that the US has previewed, pending "further actions" by Russia.
  • President Recep Tayyip Erdogan denounced Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to recognize breakaway eastern Ukrainian territories, calling it “unacceptable," and saying it is contrary to the Minsk Agreements.
  • China's Foreign Ministry evaded more than a dozen questions on Ukraine in its daily briefing on Tuesday. In his responses, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin reiterated that any country’s “legitimate security concerns should be respected” and urged all parties to "exercise restraint.” Beijing is navigating a complex position as it attempts to balance deepening ties with Moscow with its practiced foreign policy of staunchly defending state sovereignty.
woodlu

A war in Ukraine could have global consequences | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...could-have-global-consequences

politics history crisis

shared by woodlu on 27 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • A full Russian invasion would be Europe’s biggest war since the 1940s, and the first toppling since then of a democratically elected European government by a foreign invader.
  • Russians would not only suffer casualties, especially during a long-running insurgency, but also cause the death of untold Ukrainians—fellow Slavs, with whom many have family ties.
  • War would affect the prices of other commodities, too. Oil is already spiking. Russia is the world’s largest exporter of wheat, with Ukraine close behind. Russia is a big source of metals: in today’s tight markets even a small shock could send commodity prices upwards.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • Europe faces the prospect of Russia throttling the flow of piped gas. Even in the absence of a cut-off, it was expected to spend $1trn on energy in 2022, twice as much as in 2019.
  • Russia would also suffer heavy sanctions. Its banks would be harshly penalised and its economy deprived of crucial American high-tech components.
  • Sanctions might be lighter, but they would still be painful. Russia’s decoupling from the West would still accelerate. Moreover, if the government in Kyiv remained independent, it would only redouble its efforts to join the West.
  • And the subjugation of Ukraine would come at a strategic cost to Russia. Every country in its shadow would revise its security calculations. NATO would reinforce the defences of its eastern members. Sweden and Finland might join the alliance.
  • For Mr Putin, the economic consequences of war would be survivable, at least in the short term. His central bank has $600bn in reserves—more than enough to weather sanctions. But the political gains in Ukraine could easily be overwhelmed by setbacks at home which, as Mr Putin knows better than anyone, is where his fate will ultimately be determined.
  • Perhaps, then, he will start with a less ambitious invasion. However, a limited war could claim many lives and be hard to contain.
  • Perhaps Mr Putin is planning a full-scale invasion, with Russian forces thrusting deep into Ukraine to seize the capital, Kyiv, and overthrow the government. Or he may seek to annex more territory in eastern Ukraine, carving out a corridor linking Russia with Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula Mr Putin grabbed in 2014. Then again, he may want a small war, in which Russia “saves” Kremlin-backed separatists in Donbas, an eastern region of Ukraine, from supposed Ukrainian atrocities—and, at the same time, degrades Ukraine’s armed forces.
  • The global order has long been buttressed by the norm that countries do not redraw other countries’ borders by force of arms. When Iraq seized Kuwait in 1990 an international coalition led by America kicked it out.
  • if he seizes a bigger slice of Ukraine, it is hard to see him suddenly concluding that the time has come to make peace with NATO.
  • More likely, he would push on, helped by the newly established presence of Russian troops in Belarus to probe NATO’s collective-security pact, under which an attack on one member is an attack on all.
  • Not only would he relish the chance to hollow out America’s commitments to Europe, but he has also come to rely on demonising an enemy abroad to justify his harsh rule at home.
  • The likelihood of China invading Taiwan would surely rise. The regimes in Iran and Syria would conclude they are freer to use violence with impunity. If might is right, more of the world’s disputed borders would be fought over.
  • West should respond in three ways: deter, keep talking and prepare. To deter Mr Putin, Western powers—especially Germany—should stop equivocating, present a united front and make clear that they are willing to pay the price for imposing sanctions on Russia and also to support those Ukrainians who are ready to resist an occupying army.
  • Meanwhile, diplomats should keep talking, looking for common ground on, say, arms control and pressing for a face-saving climbdown that Mr Putin and his captive media would be free to spin however they wish.
  • And Europe should prepare for the next crisis by making clear that its energy transition will cut its dependence on Russian gas by using storage, diversification and nuclear power.
  • Russia would benefit from better, closer, peaceful relations with the West. Such ties would be available if Mr Putin didn’t behave so abominably. Only he benefits from discord, since he can tell Russians they are under siege and need a strongman to defend them. But even the wiliest strongman can miscalculate. Invading Ukraine could ultimately prove Mr Putin’s undoing, if it turns into a bloody quagmire or makes Russians poorer, angrier and more eager for change.
« First ‹ Previous 981 - 1000 of 1036 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page