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Javier E

Unless the government changes tack, the UK's lockdown will have been for nothing | Devi Sridhar | Opinion | The Guardian - 0 views

  • Governments have three choices in how they respond. The first and most difficult path is to contain the virus through a programme of mass testing, contact tracing and isolating. This requires a huge effort: building a large infrastructure to monitor cases of the virus and identify hotspots, ensuring this system runs efficiently, providing adequate PPE to everyone who needs it, and deploying border controls to vet who is entering the country.
  • The second path is far simpler. It involves slowing the spread of the virus by using timed cycles of lockdown and release, with the government issuing guidance on how much social distancing is required. But the side effects of this path are very costly: it risks wrecking the economy, straining health and social care systems, and creating social unrest
  • The third and easiest path available to governments is simply to do nothing. The virus sweeps across the population, the economy remains open and whoever makes it through is lucky to still be alive.
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  • It’s almost impossible to decipher which path the UK government has chosen.
  • Without these measures in place, the past seven weeks of lockdown will have been completely pointless. As quarantine measures are lifted, the virus will continue to spread, the number of daily cases will rise and a second peak will become inevitable
  • this debate misses a more fundamental point: containment (the first path) is the best strategy for public health, the economy and society. The decision in early March to shift from containing to mitigating the virus was disastrous on all three of these fronts
  • Now, the key challenge facing the government is to replace this lockdown with a package of public health interventions involving mass testing, surveillance and real-time data to identify clusters of the virus and quarantine those who are infected.
  • The confusion turns on an internal struggle between two opposing camps. The first seems to think the government should attempt to get over the worst of the pandemic by allowing the virus to spread through the population, albeit at a slower pace to ease the strain on the NHS, and by creating more hospital and mortuary capacity to cope with a spike in deaths. The second camp wants to drive down the number of coronavirus cases and reduce the rate of infection – or R – to as close to zero as possible. It recognises the uniquely dangerous nature of this virus, and the emerging evidence that it can cause long-term health complications in survivors and that immunity may only be temporary.
  • Everyone agrees that we need to get out of the lockdown as soon as possible, but doing so will require massive investment in public health infrastructure. Countries such as South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, New Zealand and Australia have already built this capacity
  • why has the government made such little progress in building the public health infrastructure necessary to control the virus and ease the lockdown? You could be forgiven for thinking that the lockdown was simply a way to reassure the public that the government was “doing something”. We need to be asking: what measures has the government put in place to ensure we’re in a better position to release the lockdown and prevent a second wave?
  • Everyone wants to know when the lockdown will end and life will go back to “normal”. The better question to ask is how we ease lockdown measures in the coming months and years while preventing a second wave of infections and keeping R well below one
  • There are a number of endings to this story. First, an accessible and affordable vaccine could become available within the next 18 months; second, the government could embark on a resource-intensive and gruelling campaign to eliminate the virus, particularly if emerging data proves coronavirus is as dangerous as diseases such as smallpox and polio; or third, antiviral therapies could become available to treat Covid-19 that make it a mild illness, so the population would gradually and safely build up natural herd immunity.
  • on our current path we seem destined for a disastrous ending. Lifting lockdown without the public health infrastructure in place to contain the virus will allow Covid-19 to spread through the population unchecked. The result could be a Darwinian culling of the elderly and vulnerable, and an individual gamble for those exposed to the virus. This should be avoided at all costs.
Javier E

The triumph of experience over hope - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • For about a month, I was hopeful that we could achieve a “South Korea solution.” Unfortunately, it’s become clear that we’ve failed
  • I have written previously about the peculiar inability of American governmental institutions to do things that seem to work abroad.
  • The countries that survived SARS had a playbook ready to haul out when the next epidemic hit
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  • The countries that SARS bypassed also relied on experience, in a way, but that experience had taught them to hope that pandemics were something peculiar to Asia or Africa or other places where Everything Is Different. Running that playbook against this coronavirus turned out to be disastrous.
  • America’s outbreak thus far hasn’t been unusually bad. With about 250 deaths per million citizens, we’re solidly in the middle of the pack.
  • The United States is underperforming Germany and Canada but roughly on par with Switzerland, and we’re doing significantly better than France, Italy, Spain, Sweden and Britain.
  • there are countries that learned from the experience of others, notably Germany. Like us, Germany is large and rich and has a bustling trade with China. Moreover, Germany’s political framework also gives local governments significant autonomy. Yet Germany’s death rate is only about a third of ours, and declining, while the United States seems stuck on a high plateau.
  • In fact, death rates are declining sharply in most of the countries I mentioned, except for Canada and the United States.
  • It’s understandable if a country that hasn’t weathered a serious pandemic in a century needed to learn what to do from hard experience. But it’s starting to look like we still haven’t, and won’t, unless that experience gets harder still.
Javier E

Why Uber's business model is doomed | Employment | The Guardian - 0 views

  • The truth is that Uber and Lyft exist largely as the embodiments of Wall Street-funded bets on automation, which have failed to come to fruition. These companies are trying to survive legal challenges to their illegal hiring practices, while waiting for driverless-car technologies to improve. The advent of the autonomous car would allow Uber and Lyft to fire their drivers.
  • Having already acquired a position of dominance with the rideshare market, these companies would then reap major monopoly profits. There is simply no world in which paying drivers a living wage would become part of Uber and Lyft’s long-term business plans.
  • Only in a world where more profitable opportunities for investment are sorely lacking can such wild bets on far-flung futuristic technologies become massive multinational companies. Corporations and wealthy individuals have accumulated huge sums of money and cannot figure out where to put it because returns on investments are extremely low
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  • The flip side of falling rates of business investment is a slackening pace of economic growth, which economists have termed “secular stagnation.” It’s this decades-long slowdown that has generated the insecure labour force on which Uber and Lyft rely.
  • This fight for workers’ rights is grounded in a growing recognition that the expansion of the digital economy does not simply reflect the triumph of an unstoppable technological change. Behind Silicon Valley rhetoric, much of what appears to be technological innovation turns out to be a means of circumventing legal regulations, including minimum wage laws
  • That governments turned a blind eye to Uber and Lyft’s misbehaviour for so long is no surprise. Governments are complicit in making workers more vulnerable. Facing persistently slow economic growth and high rates of unemployment, governments have spent decades trying to coax companies to invest by making it easier to deny workers’ benefits and to avoid paying taxes.
  • By misclassifying its workers, Uber avoided paying hundreds of millions of dollars into US state unemployment insurance schemes. Yet during the Covid-19 economic crisis, Uber lobbied the federal government to step in and pay its drivers’ unemployment benefits anyway.
  • High rates of economic growth in the mid-20th century – the reference point for any politics that seeks to restore economic growth in the present – were premised on a historically exceptional period. The restoration of stable international trade following two world wars made possible the largest growth of economic productive capacity in human history, not just in Europe and the United States, but worldwide
  • By the 1970s, rapid expansion had given way to worsening global overcapacity, resulting in rising competition and falling rates of investment in internationally traded goods. People were left scrambling for work in the growing service sector, where the potential for labour productivity growth, and hence economic growth, is significantly lower.
  • Capitalist economies have been able to extend security to widening circles of workers only in periods of rapid economic growth, when low rates of unemployment made it possible for more and more workers to demand better wages and working conditions.
  • this bid to restore conditions of rapid economic growth, much like supply-side and trickle-down solutions that failed to produce generalised prosperity, was a failure. The Covid crisis has only made economic prospects less auspicious.
  • People need security that is not tied to their job. The pandemic has revealed this imperative more than ever before. In a world that is as wealthy as ours, and given the technologies we have already produced – even without the realisation of the dreams of automation – everyone should have access to food, energy, housing and healthcare
  • The owners of Uber and Lyft know that their business is predicated on a world in which they get to make the key decisions that shape our futures, without our input. The world of work is going to have to be democratised. They are just delaying what should be inevitable.
Javier E

Trump and Johnson aren't replaying the 1930s - but it's just as frightening | George Monbiot | Opinion | The Guardian - 0 views

  • anger that should be directed at billionaires is instead directed by them. Facing inequality and exclusion, poor wages and insecure jobs, people are persuaded by the newspapers billionaires own and the parties they fund to unleash their fury on immigrants, Muslims, the EU and other “alien” forces.
  • From the White House, his Manhattan tower and his Florida resort, Donald Trump tweets furiously against “elites”. Dominic Cummings hones the same message as he moves between his townhouse in Islington, with its library and tapestry room, and his family estate in Durham. Clearly, they don’t mean political or economic elites. They mean intellectuals: the students, teachers, professors and independent thinkers who oppose their policies. Anti-intellectualism is a resurgent force in politics.
  • Myths of national greatness and decline abound. Make America Great Again and Take Back Control propose a glorious homecoming to an imagined golden age. Conservatives and Republicans invoke a rich mythology of family life and patriarchal values. Large numbers of people in the United Kingdom regret the loss of empire.
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  • Extravagant buffoons, building their power base through the visual media, displace the wooden technocrats who once dominated political life. Debate gives way to symbols, slogans and sensation. Political parties that once tolerated a degree of pluralism succumb to cults of personality.
  • Politicians and political advisers behave with impunity. During the impeachment hearings, Trump’s lawyer argued, in effect, that the president is the nation, and his interests are inseparable from the national interest.
  • Trump shamelessly endorses nativism and white supremacy. Powerful politicians, such as the Republican congressman Steve King, talk of defending “western civilisation” against “subjugation” by its “enemies”. Minorities are disenfranchised. Immigrants are herded into detention centres.
  • Political structures still stand, but they are hollowed out, as power migrates into unaccountable, undemocratic spheres: conservative fundraising dinners, US political action committees, offshore trade tribunals, tax havens and secrecy regimes.
  • The bodies supposed to hold power to account, such as the Electoral Commission and the BBC, are attacked, disciplined and cowed. Politicians and newspapers launch lurid attacks against parliament, the judiciaryand the civil service.
  • Political lying becomes so rife that voters lose the ability to distinguish fact from fiction. Conspiracy theories proliferate, distracting attention from the real ways in which our rights and freedoms are eroded
  • With every unpunished outrage against integrity in public life, trust in the system corrodes. The ideal of democracy as a shared civic project gives way to a politics of dominance and submission.
  • All these phenomena were preconditions for – or facilitators of – the rise of European fascism during the first half of the 20th century. I find myself asking a question I thought we would never have to ask again. Is the resurgence of fascism a real prospect, on either side of the Atlantic?
  • It is easier to define as a political method. While its stated aims may vary wildly, the means by which it has sought to grab and build power are broadly consistent. But I think it’s fair to say that though the new politics have some strong similarities to fascism, they are not the same thing.
  • Trump’s politics and Johnson’s have some characteristics that were peculiar to fascism, such as their constant excitation and mobilisation of their base through polarisation, their culture wars, their promiscuous lying, their fabrication of enemies and their rhetoric of betrayal
  • But there are crucial differences. Far from valorising and courting young people, they appeal mostly to older voters. Neither relies on paramilitary terror
  • Neither government seems interested in using warfare as a political tool.
  • Trump and Johnson preach scarcely regulated individualism: almost the opposite of the fascist doctrine of total subordination to the state.
  • Last century’s fascism thrived on economic collapse and mass unemployment. We are nowhere near the conditions of the Great Depression, though both countries now face a major slump in which millions could lose their jobs and homes.
  • Not all the differences are reassuring. Micro-targeting on social media, peer-to-peer texting and now the possibility of deepfake videos allow today’s politicians to confuse and misdirect people, to bombard us with lies and conspiracy theories, to destroy trust and create alternative realities more quickly and effectively than any tools 20th-century dictators had at their disposal.
  • this isn’t fascism. It is something else, something we have not yet named. But we should fear it and resist it as if it were.
cartergramiak

Opinion | Republicans Can't Handle the Truth - The New York Times - 0 views

  • President Trump’s continuing attempts to overturn an election he lost decisively more than a month ago is, like so much of what he’s done in office, shocking but not surprising.
  • According to a survey by The Washington Post, only 27 Republican members of Congress are willing to say that Joe Biden won. Despite the complete lack of evidence of significant fraud, two-thirds of self-identified Republicans said in a Reuters/Ipsos poll that the election was rigged.
  • Most obviously, Republican refusal to accept the election results follows months of refusal to acknowledge the dangers of the coronavirus, even as Covid-19 has become the nation’s leading cause of death, and even as a startling number of people in Trump’s orbit have been infected.
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  • As far as I can tell, however, no prominent Republican was willing to admit that the party’s apocalyptic warnings had been proved false, let alone talk about why they were wrong. Nor, of course, did Republicans make any effort to come up with a better health plan. (It has been almost 11 years since Obamacare was signed into law, and we’re still waiting.) Instead, party leaders simply pretended that the promised catastrophe had, in fact, materialized.
  • The thing is, Republican rejection of reality didn’t start in 2020, or even with the Trump era. Climate change denial — including claims that global warming is a hoax perpetrated by an international cabal of scientists — has been a badge of partisan identity for many years. Crazy conspiracy theories about the Clintons were mainstream on the right through much of the 1990s.Gift Subscriptions to The Times, Cooking and Games. Starting at $25.And one half-forgotten episode in particular seems to me to have foreshadowed much of what we’re seeing right now: Republican reactions to the mostly successful introduction of Obamacare.
  • And the G.O.P.’s previous history of dealing with inconvenient reality gives us a pretty good idea about when the party will accept Joe Biden as the legitimate winner of the 2020 election — namely, never.
Javier E

Why So Many Men Stuck With Trump In 2020 | FiveThirtyEight - 0 views

  • the COVID-19 pandemic may have played a large role in exacerbating gender divisions in the electorate. This split wasn’t enough for Trump to win this time, of course, but his attitude toward the coronavirus crisis may actually have been a bonus for some men, which could present a real challenge for Biden moving forward.
  • Overall, most Americans consistently disapproved of the way Trump handled the pandemic, but the AEI poll found one notable exception — men who identify as “completely masculine.”1
  • a majority (52 percent) of men who identified as completely masculine on the survey agreed that the Trump administration has a strategy on COVID-19
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  • When broken out by how masculine or feminine they identified themselves, completely masculine men were the only group where the majority (60 percent) said they had voted for Trump.
  • research conducted before the election found that these men, or men who fall into a similar category, were less likely to wear masks in the first place or take other precautions to stop the spread of COVID-19, including social distancing.
  • this conclusion lines up with a broader tendency among men to take fewer health precautions period — like wearing seat belts or going to the doctor regularly. Cassino said that traditional stereotypes around masculinity encourage men to shake off vulnerability, such as hiding a fear of illness and instead projecting strength
  • . “Reaffirming that you are traditionally masculine is itself a political statement today — a way to push back on changes to the way society is organized,” he said.
  • this reflects the extent to which Americans’ views about gender roles have become intertwined with their partisan identity,
  • “COVID-19 makes men focus more on their masculine identity than they otherwise would have, because they feel this pressure to say and demonstrate, ‘Yeah, this big scary medical crisis is happening, but it’s not going to affect me,’” Cassino said.
  • Republican men who identified as completely masculine were somewhat more likely than less-masculine Republican men to approve of the way Trump has handled the pandemic, although the difference wasn’t necessarily all that huge (79 percent compared with 69 percent).
  • One possible explanation is that the threat of business closures or other restrictions on the economy may have been alarming especially to men who identify as completely masculine. “Because employment and working is so central to American masculinity, job loss is seen as a threat to masculinity,”
  • by actively seizing on the spread of COVID-19 as an opportunity to emphasize his own brand of hypermasculinity and portray his opponent as weak and ineffective, Trump may have crafted a tailor-made pitch for men whose own sense of masculinity was threatened by the pandemic.
katherineharron

Opinion: What's really motivating Democrats in North Carolina - CNN - 0 views

  • As the nation draws closer to the 2020 election, the conversations that I'm having now remind me of the surge of energy and purpose that I witnessed in 2016. North Carolina voters, particularly Democrats, are motivated by the change that they've created and by the work that still needs to be done.
  • quality and well-funded public schools, expansion of Medicaid -- long overdue in our state -- to cover roughly 500,000 currently uninsured people, and a reckoning with the racism that has permeated our gerrymandered districts and the fabric of our everyday lives.
  • She quickly got busy mobilizing her community around the inequities she saw in the public school system and among the children she adored. These inequities included a lack of resources for teachers and students and a targeted effort that many say would effectively resegregate schools based on race and income, primarily through actions proposed by the state's Joint Legislative Study Committee
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  • Public education has been further weakened by gerrymandering in our state.
  • After witnessing this, James Gailliard, pastor of Word Tabernacle in Rocky Mount, began gathering signatures to literally write himself into the political process by running for the General Assembly in 2016. He told me that he wanted to "make a dent in that system."
  • Gerrymandering -- in which the party in power controls the drawing of electoral districts, tailoring them to its advantage -- has long been an issue in this state. In 2018, Republicans held the majority of North Carolina's congressional and legislative seats, despite winning less than half of the vote. Recent wins in state court could yield two or more Democratic congressional seats next month, which would increase the party's holdings to at least five of 13 districts.
  • . "Basically, they drew in every Black precinct in Rocky Mount and stuck in House District 7, along with every Black precinct in Franklin County. They left the rest of the population in District 25."
  • The Covid-19 pandemic has further exposed the vulnerability of many of our residents who do not have access to adequate health care, survive in substandard living conditions and now navigate joblessness without a full, just federal stimulus relief package. Many already were not making ends meet before the crisis. According to the US Census, the median household income in Wilson is under $43,000, and poverty is 21%.
  • However, hope is on the horizon here. The increased engagement I have witnessed this year from Wilson to Washington, DC, has helped me put that November morning four years ago into perspective.
carolinehayter

This one tweak to our voting system could change everything (opinion) - CNN - 0 views

  • Next week brings yet another highly charged election, described by many as the "most important of our lives," with the future of the country feeling very much at stake.
  • But after an ugly, divisive and anxiety-inducing campaign season, Americans are also looking to the future and asking big questions: What comes next? How do we begin our political healing? And how do we restore our collective political voice, without being drowned out by those who shout loudest?
  • The answer is that we need to update our electoral system -- and ranked-choice voting is a promising way forward.
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  • t is harder to understand how our political system became so broken, and so distant from the concerns of everyday Americans. But if we want a better future, we must not only assess the character of the people in our political system, but also the rules under which they operate.
  • Alaska and Massachusetts
  • Voters there will be deciding whether they want to conduct their future elections under new ranked-choice voting rules. Though this might seem like a wonky change in process, it is actually a profound step toward a more positive, problem-solving style of politics.
  • Ranked-choice voting -- which already exists for state primary, congressional and presidential elections in Maine and a number of large cities in local elections -- is a small tweak to existing voting rules. Under current plurality voting, your ballot offers a list of candidates, but you can only choose one. Most people choose a Democrat or a Republican, because these are the only two parties most people believe have a shot of winning, and so anything else is just a wasted vote, or worse, a spoiler vote that winds up helping the candidate you absolutely don't want.
  • Any vote cast as a message of protest -- such as one for a third party candidate -- comes at a very high cost. And yet, more and more Americans are dissatisfied with and feel unrepresented by the two major parties.
  • Ranked-choice voting offers a way out and a way forward. Under ranked-choice voting, you rank the candidates in order of preference.
  • If Massachusetts and Alaska both adopt ranked-choice voting, expect more states to give a closer look to upgrading their voting systems, too.
  • Consider a progressive Democratic voter in 2020 who is less than enthusiastic about Joe Biden, but despises Donald Trump. This voter will almost certainly support Joe Biden. But under ranked-choice voting she could also choose a more progressive candidate as her first choice pick, and if that candidate is eliminated, her vote could transfer to her second-choice pick, Joe Biden. She can express her genuine preference, without wasting her vote.
  • Though Biden faces no meaningful third party challengers in 2020, Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign faced a challenge from Green Party candidate Jill Stein, and Al Gore's 2000 campaign faced a challenge from Ralph Nader.
  • And yet, those third-party candidacies also represented something important -- a way for Americans dissatisfied with the two major parties to offer new ideas and different visions.
  • Under ranked-choice voting, more of these new ideas would enter the political conversation. Third parties and independents would no longer be spoilers. Voters could better express their preferences, and send a clearer message. Political leaders would be forced to take note.
  • Politicians would also be driven to campaign differently, too. Under our current plurality rules, campaigns often play the "lesser of two evils" game, filling the airwaves with negative campaigning that casts the opposing candidate and party as dangerous, extreme and radical, encouraging voters to fear and loathe the other party.
  • This negative campaigning only works when there is no threat of a third party vote. But there is no phrase "lesser of three evils." Under ranked-choice voting, the incentives push candidates to build broader coalitions. A "base first" strategy only works with plurality voting.
  • If no candidate gets a majority of first choice votes, the election becomes a runoff, with candidates eliminated from the bottom up.As candidates are eliminated, no vote is wasted. It is simply transferred to the voters' next choice until one candidate gets an actual majority of all the votes cast. Requiring candidates to win with a majority of the votes rather than a plurality is hardly a radical idea!
  • And they should. Ranked-choice voting is simply a better way to vote. It gives everyone more choice and more voice. And it encourages candidates to build coalitions and broaden their appeal, instead of pushing division and hatred. If we are going to come together as a nation after this election, we need a voting system that encourages compromise. We need ranked-choice voting.
Javier E

A Broken Health System Is a Threat to Freedom - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • the United States is not a normal democracy. Untreated illness and uncertain care fill our politics with unnecessary fear and rage. Our president pushes this logic by offering insecurity instead of security as the aim of politics
  • This is not inefficiency or neglect. It is a pattern evident all across the Trump administration: Governing is not about problems to be solved, but emergencies to be magnified.
  • Health care is always political, but the politics can confirm or deny democratic norms and practices. A democratic country that handles a pandemic well generates trust in government, and even national pride. If care is not universal, then the political equation, especially during a pandemic, is entirely different.
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  • When citizens cannot imagine security, politics becomes the distribution of insecurity, the allocation of fears and anxieties that push us away from an idea of common citizenship and toward authoritarianism. What is lethal for Americans is also lethal for our democracy.
  • I am an American historian who has seen the pandemic from both sides of the Atlantic, and who has just written a book about health care in the United States. When journalists from other countries ask me why so many Americans have died during the coronavirus pandemic, they phrase the question actively: “What have Americans done to bring about such needless mayhem?” And that is the right way to think about our COVID-19 policy. It is not a blundering, but a bludgeoning.
  • In other rich nations, it is easier to see a doctor and harder to die than in the United States. As I write these lines, I am sick in Austria. That means that if I call a doctor, I see her the same day, get tests right away, fill out no forms, and pay no fees. Without worries about access to care, I am a freer person. On the scale of a whole society, the gain in liberty is extraordinary. 
  • Lost to us are the political consequences: If we take for granted radical inequality and repeated emergencies in the realm of health, we are primed for authoritarianism in the realm of life.
  • Our babies and their mothers die at rates that Europeans find unbelievable. American Millennials will likely pay more for health care yet die younger than their parents and grandparents did. Life expectancy peaked here in 2014, even as it continues to rise elsewhere.
  • Americans pay twice as much per capita for health care as the citizens of peer countries do, for the privilege of dying years younger.
  • Many of us, by some calculations nearly half, simply avoid care because it seems unaffordable.
  • Those of us with insurance think about how good our insurance is, and where it will get us. Those of us who get access believe that we deserve it. It does not occur to us that the less-bad access we have is worse than what everyone has in countries with universal health care.
  • Too many of us take for granted that health and freedom are somehow in contradiction—and so we exclude our own bodies from our notion of rights. We treat as normal a system of commercial medicine in which decisions about life and death are made on the basis of profit.
  • In the health-care debate in the United States, proposals to extend coverage to all are decried as government overreach, socialism, even outright tyranny. But the lack of health security is what makes Americans vulnerable to demagogues and authoritarians.
  • Many white Americans regard their own suffering as virtuous, while maintaining that public health care would only be abused by Black people and immigrants. In other words, suffering is normal so long as others suffer more
  • ur sense that suffering is normal is also racial
  • Racial inequality brings unnecessary death. It also brings a sentiment that an authoritarian leader can exploit: Namely, that those who suffer the most are themselves at fault. When racism is a preexisting condition, the disproportionate death rates of Americans of color during a pandemic seem normal.
  • America’s only hope of stopping the COVID-19 pandemic was to do so at the outset. Such efforts have been mounted before. Under George W. Bush, the number of SARS cases in the U.S. was limited, and no one died. In 2014, the Obama administration took the fight against Ebola to West Africa, a prudent step that was normal then but that seems like science fiction now.
  • Before the novel coronavirus arrived in the U.S., the Trump administration dismantled the institutions that were responsible for early warning and early action
  • By telling Americans in February what they wanted to hear about the virus—that it was not serious, that it would disappear, that everyone could get a test—Trump ensured that death would be widespread.
  • By failing to institute a regime of testing, he made it normal for us to follow our own guesswork and emotions rather than dealing with facts.
  • The Trump administration announced a kind of new federalism, in which governors would have to show their loyalty to get federal assistance, and in which the Democratic ones would be blamed regardless of what happened
  • The bluster shrouded the basic decision, which was not to launch a federal response to the pandemic. No nationwide lockdown, no national testing initiative, no national contact-tracing initiative, no nationwide signaling on wearing masks and washing hands. This set the United States apart from every other comparable country.
  • After first blaming Democrats for not doing enough, Trump switched to blaming them for doing too much.
  • This is America’s basic problem: Health care is not a promise for all, but rather an expectation of the rich that they will do relatively better than the poor, and of white people that they will do relatively better than Black people
  • Suffering can seem meaningful if it affirms this basic order, even if that suffering is one’s own
  • Yet a democracy can become suffused with suffering, to the point where many voters do not even expect that policy might help them or loved ones stay well
  • An aspiring authoritarian such as Trump knows what to do: provide the emotional jolts of pleasure that distract from the general decline. “Winning” is no longer about gaining something for oneself, such as a healthier or longer life, but about taking pleasure in the suffering of others. This is a sensibility—the strong survive; the weak get what they deserve—that favors authoritarianism over democracy.
  • In this election, Americans face a choice not between individuals, but between regimes: between tyranny and a republic as forms of government, and between suffering and happiness as its aims. If Trump is defeated, our democracy should be reinforced by universal health care. Health and freedom collapse together, and they can be recovered together. We would be much freer as a people if we accorded ourselves health care as a right.
clairemann

Supreme Court to decide if states can ignore constitution | The Sacramento Bee - 0 views

  • The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments Monday in two cases challenging a Texas law that prohibits abortions after the sixth week of pregnancy. The stakes in these cases are great not only for the future of Roe v. Wade but also for the ability of states to violate the U.S. Constitution.
  • The result has been widespread closures of abortion clinics in Texas, even though women in the U.S. have a constitutional right to abortion.
  • Texas argues that the only way to challenge the law would be for a doctor to violate it and argue, as a defense, that the law is unconstitutional. In light of the uncertain fate of Roe v. Wade, doctors in Texas understandably don’t want to risk civil liability by violating the law.
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  • The court has repeatedly said people don’t need to violate a law in order to challenge its constitutionality.
  • If no one can bring a suit challenging a state law authorizing civil suits, then states can adopt laws creating liability for the exercise of any constitutional right. As a consequence, states could, for example, adopt a law authorizing suits against those performing same-sex weddings, even though there’s a constitutional right to marriage equality.
  • Therefore, the issue of whether to overrule Roe v. Wade is not directly before the court on Monday. The two cases to be argued that day are both about who, if anyone, can challenge a state law that authorizes civil suits for exercising a constitutional right.
  • The two cases to be heard by the court on Monday thus raise the question of whether a state can adopt an unconstitutional law and immunize it from being enjoined by any court.
  • It’s hard to overstate the significance of what will be argued next week, which is ultimately about whether a state can flout the Constitution. If no one can sue to enjoin an unconstitutional law, what is left of the supremacy of the Constitution and the rule of law?
Javier E

How Abercrombie & Fitch went from proudly exclusionary to surprisingly inclusive - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • One of the most important realizations she made was that Abercrombie needed to graduate from high school and target a new consumer — the young millennial. Horowitz wanted Abercrombie to be the place to shop for everything you’d throw in a carry-on for an ideal four days away. (You may notice A&F is not selling anything to wear to the office.)
  • Horowitz also prioritized the unsexy but critical work of just making the clothes nicer. The company invested in better fabrics, zippers and buttons. They expanded sizing; women’s denim now comes in sizes 23-37, extra-short to long.
  • And when it came to jeans — one of the products Abercrombie was best known for back in the day, and the item that can turn a doubter into a devotee — they went into research and development mode with a focus on fit. For Curve Love, the goal was twofold: eliminate the waist gap in jeans that are snug in the hips, and come up with a fabric with enough stretch to flatter without sacrificing the “design character” that makes jeans feel like denim and not leggings.
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  • “Right now it’s about belonging to the community within the brand,” said Horowitz. “Before it was [about] fitting in. And there is a very, very big difference between belonging and fitting in. We no longer want people to change who they are just to fit in to be part of the brand. We want you to belong to the brand as you are.”
  • Abercrombie’s brand evolution mirrors the evolving sensibilities of the customers it hopes to dress. Inaccessibility is out; inclusivity is in.
  • Shoppers are no longer reliant on brands’ choice of models and marketing but can see for themselves what people just like them are wearing and what real people think of their clothes.
  • “TikTok has democratized the haul video, the outfit video,” said Rebecca Jennings, a Vox senior correspondent covering Internet culture. “If you were posting that on YouTube or Instagram, you would’ve had to build an audience and already be a content creator. But on TikTok, anyone can do that … [so] we’re seeing a lot more regular people’s clothing. It can spread fashion trends really, really fast.”
  • “We are owning it,” Corey Robinson, senior vice president of design and merchandising at Abercrombie, said of company’s past. “Because we wouldn’t have made these changes without it … And people are seeing that we’re changing, just like they change.”
Javier E

The Thread Vibes Are Off - by Anne Helen Petersen - 0 views

  • The way people post on Twitter is different from the way people post on LinkedIn which is different than how people post Facebook which is different from the way people post on Instagram, no matter how much Facebook keeps telling you to cross-post your IG stories
  • Some people whose job relies on onlineness (like me) have to refine their voices, their ways of being, across several platforms. But most normal people have found their lane — the medium that fits their message — and have stuck with it.
  • People post where they feel public speech “belongs.”
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  • For some, the only speech they feel should be truly public should also be “professional.” Hence: LinkedIn, where the only associated image is a professional headshot, and the only conversations are those related to work.
  • The Facebook of the 2010s was for broadcasting ideological stances under your real name and fighting with your close and extended community about them; now it’s (largely) about finding advice (and fighting about advice) in affinity groups (often) composed of people you’ve never met.
  • Twitter is where you could publicly (if often anonymously) fight, troll, dunk, harass, joke, and generally speak without consequence; it’s also where the mundane status update/life musing (once the foundation of Facebook) could live peacefully.
  • On TikTok, you don’t reshare memes, you use them as the soundtrack to your reimagining, even if that reimagining is just “what if I do the same dance, only with my slightly dorky parents?
  • Which is how some people really would like to navigate the public sphere: with total freedom and total impunity
  • On the flip side, Twitter was where you spoke with your real (verified) name — and with great, algorithm-assisted importance. You could amass clout simply by rephrasing others’ scoops in your own words, declaring opinions as facts, or just declaring. If Twitter was gendered masculine — which it certainly was, and is arguably even more so now — it was only because all of those behaviors are as well.
  • Tiktok is for monologues, for expertise, for timing and performance. It’s without pretense.
  • It rewards the esoteric, the visually witty, the mimetic — even more than Twitter.
  • Twitter was for publicly observing — through the scroll, but also by tweeting, retweeting, quote tweeting — while remaining effectively invisible, a reply-guy amongst reply-guys, a troll amongst trolls.
  • Like YouTube, far fewer people are posting than consuming, which means that most people aren’t speaking at all.
  • And then there’s Instagram. People think Instagram is for extroverts, for people who want to broadcast every bit of their lives, but most Instagram users I know are shy — at least with public words. Instagram is where parents post pictures of their kids with the caption “these guys right here” or a picture of their dog with “a very good boy.”
  • The text doesn’t matter; the photo speaks loudest. Each post becomes overdetermined, especially when so readily viewed within the context of the greater grid
  • The more you understand your value as the sum of your visual parts, the more addictive, essential, and anxiety-producing Instagram becomes.
  • That emphasis on aesthetic perfection is part of what feminizes Instagram — but it’s also what makes it the most natural home for brands, celebrities, and influencers.
  • a static image can communicate a whole lifestyle — and brands have had decades of practice honing the practice in magazine ads and catalogs.
  • And what is an influencer if not a conduit for brands? What is a celebrity if not a conduit for their own constellation of brands?
  • If LinkedIn is the place where you can pretend that your whole life and personality is “business,” then Instagram is where you can pretend it’s all some form of leisure — or at least fun
  • A “fun” work trip, a “fun” behind-the-scenes shot, a brand doing the very hard work of trying to get you to click through and make a purchase with images that are fun fun fun.
  • Instagram is serious and sincere (see: the success of the social justice slideshow) and almost never ironic — maybe because static visual irony is pretty hard to pull off.
  • Instagram is a great place to post an announcement and feel celebrated or consoled but not feel like you have to respond to people
  • The conversation is easier to both control and ignore; of all the social networks, it most closely resembles the fawning broadcast style of the fan magazine, only the celebs control the final edit, not the magazine publisher
  • Celebrities initially glommed to Twitte
  • But its utility gradually faded: part of the problem was harassment, but part of it was context collapse, and the way it allowed words to travel across the platform and out of the celebrity’s control.
  • Instagram was just so much simpler, the communication so clearly in the celebrity wheelhouse. There is very little context collapse on Instagram — it’s all curation and control. As such, you can look interesting but say very little.
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