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in title, tags, annotations or urlOpinion | At the Waco Rally and Beyond, Trump's Movement Now Commands Him - The New York Times - 0 views
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virtually every speaker at Trump’s marathon rally. One after another, they looked at a seething, conspiracy-addled crowd and indulged, fed, and stoked every element of their furious worldview. I didn’t see a single true leader on Trump’s stage, not even Trump himself. I saw a collection of followers, each vying for the affection of the real power in Waco, the coddled populist mob.
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To understand the social and political dynamic on the modern right, you have to understand how millions of Americans became inoculated against the truth
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every time Trump faced pushback, he and his allies called critics “elitist” or “fake news” or “weak” or “cowards.” It was much easier to say the Trump skeptics had “Trump derangement syndrome,” or were “just establishment stooges,” than to engage with substantive critique
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Keir Starmer: Trans rights can't override women's rights - 0 views
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after seeing the political turmoil that engulfed Nicola Sturgeon’s final days as Scottish first minister, Starmer is keen to clarify both his personal and his party’s position on the subject.
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Speaking about Sturgeon’s gender recognition bill, which proposed self-identification for those wishing to change their legal gender, Starmer says: “The lesson from Scotland is that if you can’t take the public with you on a journey of reform, then you’re probably not on the right journey. And that’s why I think that collectively there ought to be a reset in Scotland.”
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It sounds like a marked change of tone from the Labour leader, whose party prevaricated over the issue only weeks ago by first whipping its MSPs to vote for the gender bill in Holyrood, then asking MPs in Westminster to abstain when the government exercised its veto over the legislation.
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The Closing of the American Mind: A Summary - 0 views
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Preface
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“No teacher can doubt that his real task is to assist his pupil to fulfill human nature against all the deforming forces of convention and prejudice.” p. 20
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A liberal education is one that helps students to ask themselves and answer the question, “what is man?… In our chronic lack of certainty, this comes down to knowing the alternative answers [to that question] and thinking about them.” p. 21
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Is Humanism a Real Philosophy? - The Atlantic - 0 views
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What her book set out to defend is an intellectual tradition, admittedly ill-choate, that stands for reason, the ennobling potential of education, and the centrality of the “human dimension of life,” as opposed to systems and abstract theories.
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ut in the intervening months, advanced chatbots descended; so did the possibility that they might soon imperil the whole of that enterprise. Automation stands poised to displace the production of essays and scholarly inquiry. It’s suddenly plausible to imagine that freethinking, that tradition of poking and prodding at all fixed ideas and institutions, will drift into obsolescence, because an oracular machine will instantly spit back answers to life’s questions with an aura of scientific authority.
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Progressives in the academy have bludgeoned humanism’s fundamental precepts. Gone is the old motto “I am human, and consider nothing human alien to me,” replaced by the fetishization of “lived experience.
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The Liberal Maverick Fighting Race-Based Affirmative Action - The New York Times - 0 views
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The paper inspired him to write his influential 1996 book, “The Remedy,” which developed his theory that affirmative action had set back race relations by becoming a source of racial antagonism.
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“If you want working-class white people to vote their race, there’s probably no better way to do it than to give explicitly racial preferences in deciding who gets ahead in life,” he said. “If you want working-class whites to vote their class, you would try to remind them that they have a lot in common with working-class Black and Hispanic people.”
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Today, as in the mid-1990s, polls show that a majority of people oppose race-conscious college admissions, even as they support racial diversity. Public opinion may not always be right, Mr. Kahlenberg said, but surely it should be considered when developing public policy.
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What Does Peter Thiel Want? - Persuasion - 0 views
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Of the many wealthy donors working to shape the future of the Republican Party, none has inspired greater fascination, confusion, and anxiety than billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel.
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Thiel’s current outlook may well make him a danger to American democracy. But assessing the precise nature of that threat requires coming to terms with his ultimate aims—which have little to do with politics at all.
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Thiel and others point out that when we lift our gaze from our phones and related consumer products to the wider vistas of human endeavor—breakthroughs in medicine, the development of new energy sources, advances in the speed and ease of transportation, and the exploration of space—progress has indeed slowed to a crawl.
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The new tech worldview | The Economist - 0 views
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Sam Altman is almost supine
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the 37-year-old entrepreneur looks about as laid-back as someone with a galloping mind ever could. Yet the ceo of OpenAi, a startup reportedly valued at nearly $20bn whose mission is to make artificial intelligence a force for good, is not one for light conversation
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Joe Lonsdale, 40, is nothing like Mr Altman. He’s sitting in the heart of Silicon Valley, dressed in linen with his hair slicked back. The tech investor and entrepreneur, who has helped create four unicorns plus Palantir, a data-analytics firm worth around $15bn that works with soldiers and spooks
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A Hamline Adjunct Showed a Painting of the Prophet Muhammad. She Lost Her Job. - The New York Times - 0 views
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University officials and administrators all declined interviews. But Dr. Miller, the school’s president, defended the decision in a statement.“To look upon an image of the Prophet Muhammad, for many Muslims, is against their faith,” Dr. Miller’s statement said, adding, “It was important that our Muslim students, as well as all other students, feel safe, supported and respected both in and out of our classrooms.”
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In a December interview with the school newspaper, the student who complained to the administration, Aram Wedatalla, described being blindsided by the image.
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There are, however, a range of beliefs. Some Muslims distinguish between respectful depictions and mocking caricatures, while others do not subscribe to the restriction at all.
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The End of the Silicon Valley Myth - The Atlantic - 0 views
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These companies, launched with promises to connect the world, to think different, to make information free to all, to democratize technology, have spent much of the past decade making the sorts of moves that large corporations trying to grow ever larger have historically made—embracing profit over safety, market expansion over product integrity, and rent seeking over innovation—but at much greater scale, speed, and impact. Now, ruled by monopolies, marred by toxicity, and overly reliant on precarious labor, Silicon Valley looks like it’s finally run hard up into its limits.
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They’re failing utterly to create the futures they’ve long advertised, or even to maintain the versions they were able to muster. Having scaled to immense size, they’re unable or unwilling to manage the digital communities they’ve built
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They’re paralyzed when it comes to product development and reduced to monopolistic practices such as charging rents and copying or buying up smaller competitors
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Their Mothers Were Teenagers. They Didn't Want That for Themselves. - The New York Times - 0 views
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The decline is accelerating: Teen births fell 20 percent in the 1990s, 28 percent in the 2000s and 55 percent in the 2010s. Three decades ago, a quarter of 15-year-old girls became mothers before turning 20, according to Child Trends estimates, including nearly half of those who were Black or Hispanic. Today, just 6 percent of 15-year-old girls become teen mothers.
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The reasons teen births have fallen are only partly understood. Contraceptive use has grown and shifted to more reliable methods, and adolescent sex has declined. Civic campaigns, welfare restrictions and messaging from popular culture may have played roles.
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But with progress so broad and sustained, many researchers argue the change reflects something more fundamental: a growing sense of possibility among disadvantaged young women, whose earnings and education have grown faster than their male counterparts.
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Opinion | America, China and a Crisis of Trust - The New York Times - 0 views
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some eye-popping new realities about what’s really eating away at U.S.-China relations.
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The new, new thing has a lot to do with the increasingly important role that trust, and its absence, plays in international relations, now that so many goods and services that the United States and China sell to one another are digital, and therefore dual use — meaning they can be both a weapon and a tool.
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In the last 23 years America has built exactly one sort-of-high-speed rail line, the Acela, serving 15 stops between Washington, D.C., and Boston. Think about that: 900 to 15.
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Millennials Are Doing Just Fine - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Millennials, as a group, are not broke—they are, in fact, thriving economically. That wasn’t true a decade ago, and prosperity within the generation today is not evenly shared. But since the mid-2010s, Millennials on the whole have made a breathtaking financial comeback.
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he belief that Millennials have been excluded from the implicit promises that America makes to its people—a house for most, middle-class security, a better life than your parents had—remains predominant in society and, to go by surveys and the tenor of social media, among Millennials themselves.
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That prompts a question with implications for the cultural and political future of the United States, a country premised, to a large extent, on the idea of material progress: What if the American dream is still alive, but no one believes it to be?
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The Density Divide and the Southernification of Rural America - 0 views
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As those contrasts have faded, so have these distinct regional, rural identities. Everywhere it’s the same cloying pop country, the same aggressively oversized Ford F-150s, the same tumbledown Wal-Marts and Dollar Generals, the same eagle-heavy fashion, the same confused, aggrieved air of relentless material decline. Even the accents are more and more the same, trending toward a generalized Larry the Cable Guy twang.
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America’s increasingly placeless, homogenous white rural culture isn’t a blend of all our various regional cultures. Rural Iowans and Minnesotans sound more like rural Missourians than the reverse.
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Many large metropolitan areas grew faster over the past decade than the Bureau had previously projected, with eight of the nation's ten largest cities showing an increased growth rate compared to the 2000 to 2010 period. At the same time, most of rural America shrank in absolute as well as relative terms. A majority—52 percent—of the nation's counties actually reported a smaller raw population in 2020 than they had in 2010.
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Opinion | The Greatest Threat Posed by Trump - The New York Times - 0 views
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the problem I’m most concerned about isn’t the political melee; it’s the ongoing cultural transformation of red America, a transformation that a second Trump term could well render unstoppable.
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t the most enduring legacy of a second Trump term could well be the conviction on the part of millions of Americans that Trumpism isn’t just a temporary political expediency, but the model for Republican political success and — still worse — the way that God wants Christian believers to practice politics.
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Already we can see the changes in individual character. In December, I wrote about the moral devolution of Rudy Giuliani and of the other MAGA men and women who have populated the highest echelons of the Trump movement
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How Bad Are Ultraprocessed Foods, Really? - The New York Times - 0 views
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scientists have found associations between UPFs and a range of health conditions, including heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, obesity, gastrointestinal diseases and depression, as well as earlier death.
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That’s concerning, experts say, since ultraprocessed foods have become a major part of people’s diets worldwide. They account for 67 percent of the calories consumed by children and teenagers in the United States
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What are ultraprocessed foods, exactly? And how strong is the evidence that they’re harmful? We asked experts to answer these
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Opinion | The Deification of Donald Trump Poses Some Interesting Questions - The New York Times - 0 views
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The video, along with Eric Trump’s claim that his father “literally saved Christianity” and the image Donald Trump reposted on Truth Social of Jesus sitting next to him in court, raises a question:
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Does Trump believe that he is God’s messenger, or are his direct and indirect claims to have a special relationship with God a cynical ploy to win evangelical votes?
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“Over the years since, there has been a growing chorus of voices saying Trump is the defender of Christians and Christianity. Trump says this himself all the time, ‘When they come after me, they’re really coming after you.’”
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Science is revealing why American politics are so intensely polarized - The Washington Post - 0 views
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One theme emerges in much of the research: Our politics tend be more emotional now. Policy preferences are increasingly likely to be entangled with a visceral dislike of the opposition. The newly embraced academic term for this is “affective polarization.”
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“It’s feelings based,” said Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University and author of “Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity.” “It’s polarization that’s based on our feelings for each other, not based on extremely divergent policy preferences.”
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The tendency to form tightly knit groups has roots in evolution, according to experts in political psychology. Humans evolved in a challenging world of limited resources in which survival required cooperation — and identifying the rivals, the competitors for those resources.
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Opinion | Yes, Nikki Haley, the Civil War Was About Slavery - The New York Times - 0 views
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Of course the Civil War was about slavery, and everyone knew it at the time. No, Nikki Haley, it wasn’t about states’ rights, except to the extent that Southern states were trying to force Northern states to help maintain slavery
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it may be worth delving a bit deeper into the background here. Why did slavery exist in the first place? Why was it confined to only part of the United States? And why were slaveholders willing to start a war to defend the institution, even though abolitionism was still a fairly small movement and they faced no imminent risk of losing their chattels?
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The American system of chattel slavery wasn’t motivated primarily by racism, but by greed. Slaveholders were racists, and they used racism both to justify their behavior and to make the enslavement of millions more sustainable, but it was the money and the inhumane greed that drove the racist system.
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Opinion | How Covid Changed America in 2020 - The New York Times - 0 views
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It’s only now becoming clear how little we understood what the United States experienced during that unforgettable year and how deeply it shaped us
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I’ve come to think of our current condition as a kind of long Covid, a social disease that intensified a range of chronic problems and instilled the belief that the institutions we’d been taught to rely on are unworthy of our trust
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On a wide range of outcomes, including many that were less visible at the time, this country fared much worse during the Covid pandemic than comparable nations did. Distrust, division and disorganized leadership contributed to the scale of our negative health outcomes.
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