white America’s habit of needlessly calling the police on black people is not just a Starbucks culture problem. It’s an American culture problem
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Calling the police on black people isn't a Starbucks problem. It's an America problem. ... - 0 views
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Black people in this country have long known that disturbing white Americans in white spaces can mean death.
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“In the early decades of the 20th century,” author Isabel Wilkerson noted in the New York Times, “a caste system ruled the South with such repression that every four days an African-American was lynched for some perceived breach or mundane accusation — having stolen 75 cents or made off with a mule.” Indeed, between 1877 and 1950, almost 4,000 black people died this way, mostly in Southern states.
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What the Starbucks incident has in common with the lynchings of the past — as well as the police brutality and mass incarceration of the present — is the basic fact that black people in America can be physically eliminated at any time, in any place, for little reason — whether that means being kicked out of stores, suspended from school, priced out of their neighborhoods, locked up in jail or put in the grave.
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Johnson proposes a legal remedy. “You can get arrested for pulling a fire alarm, making fake bomb threats and making false claims of an alien invasion — why not a false police report that results in death?” he wrote. “We should be pushing for prosecution against these callers just as much as the cops who pull the trigger.”
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how can we up the social and legal costs for people who make life-threatening decisions by calling the police on peaceful black people?
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To echo pop singer Solange Knowles, the fundamental question I am asking white America is: “Where can we be free? Where can we be safe? Where can we be black?
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Tech Billionaires Want to Destroy the Universe - The Atlantic - 0 views
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“Many people in Silicon Valley have become obsessed with the simulation hypothesis, the argument that what we experience as reality is in fact fabricated in a computer; two tech billionaires have gone so far as to secretly engage scientists to work on breaking us out of the simulation.”
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Ignore for a moment any objections you might have to the simulation hypothesis, and everything impractical about the idea that we could somehow break out of reality, and think about what these people are trying to do.
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The two billionaires (Elon Musk is a prime suspect) are convinced that they’ll emerge out of this drab illusion into a more shining reality, lit by a brighter and more beautiful star. But for the rest of us the experience would be very different—you lose your home, you lose your family, you lose your life and your body and everything around you
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Every summer we watch dozens of villains plotting to blow up the entire universe, but the motivations are always hazy. Why, exactly, does the baddie want to destroy everything again? Now we know.
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It’s not just Elon Musk, who stated that ‘there’s a one in a billion chance we’re living in base reality,’ who believes this—in an extraordinary piece of hedge-betting, the Bank of America has judiciously announced that the probability that waking life is just an illusion is, oh, about fifty-fifty
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Tech products no longer feel like something offered to the public, but something imposed: The great visionary looks at the way everyone is doing something, and decides, single-handedly, to change it.
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once social reality is the exclusive property of a few geegaw-tinkerers, why shouldn’t physical reality be next? With Google’s Calico seeking hedge-fund investment for human immortality and the Transformative Technology Lab hoping to externalize human consciousness, the tech industry is moving into territory once cordoned off for the occult. Why shouldn’t the fate of the entire cosmos be in the hands of programmers hiding from the California sun, to keep or destroy as they wish?
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Unsurprisingly, nobody bothered to ask us whether we want the end of the world or not; they’re just setting about trying to do it. Silicon Valley works by solving problems that hadn’t heretofore existed; its culture is pathologically fixated on the notion of ‘disruption.’
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Its real antecedents are the Gnostics, an early Christian sect who believed that the physical universe was the creation of the demiurge, Samael or Ialdaboath, sometimes figured as a snake with the head of a lion, a blind and stupid god who creates his false world in imperfect imitation of the real Creator. This world is a distorted mirror, an image; in other words, a kind of software.
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Kabbalist mysticists, Descartes with his deceiving demon, and Zhuangzi in his butterfly dream have all questioned the reality of their sense-experiences, but this isn’t a private, solipsistic hallucination; in the simulation hypothesis, reality is a prison for all of us
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there’s always been the lingering suspicion that our reality is somehow unreal—it’s just that what we once thought about in terms of dreams and magic, cosmic minds or whispering devils, is now expressed through boring old computers, that piece of clunky hardware that waits predatory on your desk every morning to code the finest details of your life.
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The Gnostics were often accused by other early Christians of Satanism, and they might have had a point: Many identified the jealous, petty, prurient God of the Old Testament with the Demiurge, while sects such as the Ophites revered the serpent in the Garden of Eden as the first to offer knowledge to humanity, freeing them from their first cage
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In his book, Baudrillard also talks about virtual realities and deceptive images, but his point isn’t that they have clouded our perception of the reality beyond. The present system of social images is so vast and all-encompassing that it’s produced a total reality for itself; it only lies when it has us thinking that there’s something else behind the façade. Baudrillard, always something of an overgrown child, loved to refer to Disneyland: As he pointed out, it’s in no way a fake—when you leave its gates, you return to an America that’s just one giant Disneyland, a copy without an original, from coast to coast
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‘The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none.
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Digital and cinematic media actively construct our experience of reality. The world of film stars and theme parks, social media and supermarket shelves designed to look like something out of an old-time grocery—this is the one we live in. Our Silicon Valley Satanists have made a very questionable assumption: What if there’s nowhere to break out into?
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the virtual is also real. Why is a universe composed of software necessarily any less real than one composed of matter? Computer simulation is of course only a metaphor, a new-ish way of describing what was once expressed in oneiric or theological terms. They can’t really mean that our universe was built in something similar to the machine you’re using to read these words right now;
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simulation is a process independent of whatever divine or technological apparatus is used to achieve it. The real argument is that, by some unknown mechanism, what we see is only a function of what really exists. But we’ve known since Kant that our sense-perception can never give us a full account of the material world; all this can be said of any conceivable reality
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Outside the simulation hypothesis there are scientists who propose that our universe is a single black hole, with what we perceive as matter being a hologram emerging from a two-dimensional ring of information along its event horizon; there are mathematical Platonists who, following Max Tegmark, consider the world to be a set of abstract mathematical objects, of which physical objects are a crude epiphenomenon. If matter doesn’t ‘really’ exist, there’s no need for anything to be rooted anywhere; we might live suspended in a looping chain of simulations and appearances that coils back on itself and never has to touch the ground
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Elon Musk and his co-religionists aren’t actually blinded by artifice; they’re fixated on a strange and outdated notion that somewhere, there has to be a concrete reality—they’ve just decided that it’s not this one
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What’s far more worrying is the fact that the people who want to destroy the only world we really have are also the people increasingly in charge of it.
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How Russia Hacked America-And Why It Will Happen Again - The Atlantic - The Atlantic - 0 views
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During the 2016 presidential campaign, Russian hackers attacked the U.S. on two fronts: the psychological and the technical. Hackers used classic propaganda techniques to influence American voters, bought thousands of social media ads to propagate fake news, and broke into Democratic party email servers to steal information. And it won't be the last time. Russian-backed psychological cyber warfare will only get better, and its methods more sophisticated.
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Stop Talking about 'Norms' - Talking Points Memo - 0 views
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By talking so much about “norms” and the violation of “norms” we’re confusing the situation and even confusing ourselves.
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“Norms” aren’t laws for a reason. They are like bumpers on the roads of our civic and political life which are there to keep people of basically good faith from crossing lines they shouldn’t cross. They can also be warning posts so others can see when someone is either going down a bad path or needs to be brought back into line.
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One reason that “norms” aren’t laws is that sometimes new or unique sets of facts create situations in which they do not or cannot or should not apply.
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But the problem with almost everything President Trump is doing today is not that he’s violating norms. The problem is that he is abusing his presidential powers to cover up his crimes and his associates’ crimes. Full stop.
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The norms are just the orange rubber cones he knocked over when he drove out of his lane and headed for the crowded sidewalk.
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These are not ‘conflicts of interest’. A ‘conflict of interest’ is a case in which the nature of a situation makes it impossible for a person to separate their personal interests from their public responsibilities (or to appear to do so)
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We have an increasingly open effort to make vast sums of money with the presidency. It’s happening in front of our eyes, albeit not quite as visibly as the coverup.
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for more than a year, President Trump has continued a nonstop effort to cover up his and his associates’ crimes
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obstruction of justice statutes universally do not require proof of an underlying crime. You’re not allowed to stymie or obstruct a lawful criminal investigation. Full stop. The effort to do so generally speaks for itself in creating a presumption of guilt.
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As is often the case with Presidents, this goes beyond mere statutes: the point is the substance of obstructing justice which the President is not only clearly doing now but has been doing more or less openly for more than a year.
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The other problem with “norms” – perhaps the really critical one – is that they can easily sound like some precious bureaucratic niceties which simply aren’t that important
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Again, we’re confusing the issue. It’s not norms. The President is trying to obstruct and stymie and hamstring a lawful investigation into his own crimes and those of his associates: by repeatedly lying, firing and threatening to fire people, intervening in law enforcement decisions in his own interest, fabricating fake stories to impede the investigation.
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Andrew Sullivan: How Boris Johnson Could Still Get a Brexit - 0 views
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It seems to me that one thing our culture has lost is a space for “existential reckoning.” Perhaps its polar opposite is being Very Online.
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forcing us into such a reckoning is what religion and brutal reality once did for many: It challenged us to assess ourselves fully, to see ourselves under the eyes of eternity, to live with the knowledge of death under a cloud of unknowing. This perspective was reinforced by modes of pre-secular thought as well as by the lived experience in previous generations of existential danger, illness, hunger, and death.
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In a secular world of previously unimaginable comfort and long lives, we rarely get to access the existential fear and dread that counterintuitively can lead to serenity and perspective. Maybe in modernity, psychedelics are therefore the best alternative to traditional religion, and may begin to replace or supplement its function, as our disenchantment blocks our access to the faith of the past.
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I’ve never been more aware of the presence of God than when I have taken psilocybin. And the God it unveils is a loving one, at peace with us — the God I was taught to believe in. You can become aware of the need for love and forgiveness, as your barriers to feeling and knowing slowly give way to acceptance of what is, and unity with it
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this can be terrifying. Human consciousness is often terrifying: “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me,” as Pascal once said.
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But for people approaching death, or enduring depression, or lost in addiction, access to these deeper truths can also provide real spiritual sustenance, and uplift.
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It isn’t that the chemicals force you to feel one way; it is that they allow you to feel more deeply what you already know but hide from yourself, and this knowledge can lead to a change in your life.
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Those of you who voted Democrat in the last election may have been under the impression that this would prevent new funding for Trump’s wall. But in our current neo-monarchy, your vote doesn’t really count. The Congress, it turns out, only has the power of the purse when the president doesn’t declare a fake national emergency to steal it
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The entire national emergency shtick is a relatively recent one (the National Emergencies Act was passed in 1976), and it exists because norms have always dictated that a president would be responsible enough not to abuse it
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Senator Mike Lee’s Article One Act strikes me as a shrewd response. It allows a president to declare a national emergency, but specifies that after one month, the emergency expires unless the Congress renews it by a simple majority. Right now, the Congress can only cancel an emergency declaration with a veto-proof two-thirds majority.
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shared by cdavistinnell on 08 Nov 17
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Why Relying on China to Stop North Korea May Not Work - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...na-xi-jinping-north-korea.html
North Korea South United States China Nuclear Warfare Oil
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Speaking in South Korea earlier Wednesday, Mr. Trump made an impassioned call for China and other countries to pull together to confront the North, which he described as a sinister regime that starved and terrorized its people — a tragic failed experiment in the “laboratory of history.”
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Since Mr. Trump first played host to Mr. Xi at his Florida estate last April, he has said he is counting on Mr. Xi to do the right thing with North Korea, alternately praising and prodding the Chinese leader about enforcing tougher United Nations sanctions.
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To his frustration, however, Mr. Xi has stopped short of targeting Mr. Kim with unilateral sanctions that would threaten his regime, send refugees into China and raise the possibility of a Korean Peninsula under control of the South, a close American ally.
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At the start of this trip, Trump administration officials denied the president was willing to make concessions on trade in the hope of extracting what was needed on North Korea. But the president is also not calling on China to make any significant moves to open its markets, preferring to put the spotlight on big-ticket deals for American companies.
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Officials in Beijing and Washington point out that China has taken some measurable steps on North Korea. After the North’s accelerating nuclear tests and intercontinental ballistic missile launches, China approved tougher sanctions at the United Nations.It has agreed to sever banking ties, end joint-venture companies with North Korea and limit the export of diesel fuel. China shut down North Korea’s coal imports earlier this year.
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For China, North Korea remains a valuable buffer against the possibility of a united Korean Peninsula that would probably be capitalist, democratic and allied with the United States, said Evans J. R. Revere, a former State Department official who dealt with Northeast Asia.
How G.O.P. Leaders Came to View Climate Change as Fake Science - The New York Times - 0 views
Facebook could tell us how Russia interfered in our elections. Why won't it? - The Wash... - 0 views
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Trump attacks San Juan mayor over hurricane response - CNNPolitics - 0 views
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President Donald Trump launched a Twitter attack Saturday morning on San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz for "poor leadership ability," saying she and others in Puerto Rico "want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort."
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The President again praised the federal government's response on the island, which is grappling with the devastating impact of Hurricane Maria, saying the 10,000 federal workers there were doing a "fantastic job."
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"This is the time to show our 'true colors,'" she wrote. "We cannot be distracted by anything else."
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The Trump administration has repeatedly lauded the federal government's response to Maria, despite criticism from some that the administration has not been as engaged in the recovery efforts to this storm as he was for the recent hurricanes that battered Texas and Florida.
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"Fake News CNN and NBC are going out of their way to disparage our great First Responders as a way to 'get Trump,'" he tweeted. "Not fair to FR or effort!"
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The Cost of Trump's Attacks on the FBI - The Atlantic - 0 views
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In July, I had dinner with a friend who has worked as a lawyer in the Justice Department for decades. My friend bemoaned the recent tweets by the president of the United States that called into question the integrity of the Justice Department. Why isn’t Attorney General Jeff Sessions “looking into Crooked Hillarys crimes & Russia relations?,” asked President Trump in one such (ungrammatical) tweet. And why didn’t Sessions “replace Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, a Comey friend who was in charge of Clinton investigation?
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The critique of these tweets is now familiar. They violate norms of law-enforcement independence from presidential influence. Their proximate aim is to discredit the Justice Department and FBI, probably in order to delegitimize it as the investigation of Robert Mueller gets ever closer to the president. And they appear to be part of an effort to weaken public confidence in American institutions more generally—not just DOJ, but also the “so-called” courts, the “fake news” media, the supposedly lying, incompetent intelligence community, and others.
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Trump’s assault on executive branch departments and employees is crippling these cultures of commitment. I know this from talking to several Justice Department friends, including the one with whom I dined last summer. I see it in stories about how the State Department’s ranks are thinning fast. And it stands to reason that employees throughout the government feel the same way. It is hard to work for a president who attacks you weekly if not daily; who calls into public doubt your independence and integrity; and who shames you with his persistent shamelessness, deceit, and ignorance. The president is succeeding not just in diminishing the reputation of these institutions before the nation, but also in wrecking their aspirations within.
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But in performing this calculus, the leaders of the Justice Department should candidly consider the large costs of their silence. When they do not speak out against the president’s attacks on their institutions and the rule of law, they signal to their employees and the world that they are indefeasibly beholden to the president, or that they do not care. The failure to protect and defend the department engenders anger, suffering, and resentment by the men and women they are charged with leading. It also contributes to a sense of delegitimization within the department, and thus stokes the morale crisis. These are not consequences that any leader should ever tolerate.
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Trump Attacks Impeachment Inquiry and Accuses a Witness of Lying - The New York Times - 0 views
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in his own administration, after a week of damaging public hearings.
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Mr. Holmes told impeachment investigators that he had overheard the president ask the ambassador, Gordon D. Sondland, about Ukrainian investigations into his political rivals, a consequential detail in the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry.
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“I guarantee you that never took place,” Mr. Trump said. He added that he barely knew Mr. Sondland, a wealthy hotelier from Oregon who contributed $1 million to Mr. Trump’s inaugural committee. In his own testimony, Mr. Sondland corroborated Mr. Holmes’s account.
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“sick puppy,” a “corrupt politician” and the first witness he would want to call in a Senate impeachment trial.
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Democratic-led House would impeach Mr. Trump,
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Mr. Trump also said he knows the identity of the anonymous whistle-blower whose complaint prompted the impeachment inquiry — and asserted that the details in the complaint were “fake.”
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Mr. Trump also said the Obama administration spied on his campaign, an accusation leveled without evidence on Twitter in the early days of his administration. “They tried to overthrow the presidency. This is a disgrace.”
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like the investigations into former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son, Hunter Biden.
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Trump poll: Republicans said Trump is greater than Lincoln in changed GOP - The Washing... - 0 views
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“Lincoln devoted his second term to uniting people rather than feeding red meat to a small base of people,” Holzer said. “Today, the party is more devoted to the accumulation of wealth and restrictions on voting rights."
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Another obvious difference is the Lincoln-era Republican Party’s support of immigration. In his last State of the Union address, Lincoln featured a proposal to pay foreigners to come to the United States so the workforce would increase.
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“Lincoln was a pro-tariff man, and Trump is sporadically in favor of tariffs as a punitive weapon,” he said, adding that tariffs were not punitive for Lincoln. Then, tariffs were the major source of income.
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“It was not a party of privilege or white supremacy. Those dubious honors belonged to the Democratic Party,” he said, which remained predominantly in the Southern states until the 1960s civil rights movement, when a major political realignment occurred.
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Six weeks before his death, Lincoln addressed a crowd outside the Capitol, prepared to begin his second term in office. The country was emerging from the worst crisis in American history — a war that had killed hundreds of thousands and divided the North and South.He concluded the address, saying: “With malice toward none, with charity for all.”
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In that polarized moment, Holzer said, Lincoln didn’t blame fake news and enemies of the people. He emphasized humility, talked openly about his flaws and used a brilliance of language not to punish and humiliate but to inspire.
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shared by Javier E on 27 May 19
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Opinion | Why Fiction Trumps Truth - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...why-fiction-trumps-truth.html
truth fiction power politics history scholars fanaticism culture
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sticking with the truth is the best strategy for gaining power. Unfortunately, this is just a comforting myth
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In fact, truth and power have a far more complicated relationship, because in human society, power means two very different things.
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On the one hand, power means having the ability to manipulate objective realities: to hunt animals, to construct bridges, to cure diseases, to build atom bombs. This kind of power is closely tied to truth.
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On the other hand, power also means having the ability to manipulate human beliefs, thereby getting lots of people to cooperate effectively.
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large-scale cooperation depends on believing common stories. But these stories need not be true. You can unite millions of people by making them believe in completely fictional stories about God, about race or about economics.
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The dual nature of power and truth results in the curious fact that we humans know many more truths than any other animal, but we also believe in much more nonsense
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When it comes to uniting people around a common story, fiction actually enjoys three inherent advantages over the truth. First, whereas the truth is universal, fictions tend to be local. Consequently if we want to distinguish our tribe from foreigners, a fictional story will serve as a far better identity marker
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The second huge advantage of fiction over truth has to do with the handicap principle, which says that reliable signals must be costly to the signaler
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If political loyalty is signaled by believing a true story, anyone can fake it. But believing ridiculous and outlandish stories exacts greater cost, and is therefore a better signal of loyalty.
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Third, and most important, the truth is often painful and disturbing. Hence if you stick to unalloyed reality, few people will follow you
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What’s true of the Nazis is true of many other fanatical groups in history. It is sobering to realize that the Scientific Revolution began in the most fanatical culture in the world. Europe in the days of Columbus, Copernicus and Newton had one of the highest concentrations of religious extremists in history, and the lowest level of tolerance.
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The ability to compartmentalize rationality probably has a lot to do with the structure of our brain. Different parts of the brain are responsible for different modes of thinking. Humans can subconsciously deactivate and reactivate those parts of the brain that are crucial for skeptical thinking
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Even if we need to pay some price for deactivating our rational faculties, the advantages of increased social cohesion are often so big that fictional stories routinely triumph over the truth in human history.
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The most powerful scholarly establishments in history — whether of Christian priests, Confucian mandarins or Communist ideologues — placed unity above truth. That’s why they were so powerful.
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Opinion: What a journalist's jailing for heroic Covid coverage exposes about China - CNN - 0 views
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a Chinese court had sentenced journalist Zhang Zhan, 37, to four years in jail for "picking quarrels and provoking trouble." This follows the government indictment, which accused her of "publishing large amounts of fake information."
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Zhang's real crime: to report factually on the ground at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, at its then epicenter, Wuhan, in video dispatches that challenged the government's official narrative. And then to stubbornly defy the Chinese government by insisting on her innocence.
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Arrested in May, Zhang went on a hunger strike during her detention, according to Amnesty International. In response, prison authorities have restrained her and forced nutrients into her.
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Zhang, a lawyer by training, went to Wuhan on her own accord. Her reports consisted of talking to ordinary people about what they thought and posting the accounts on Twitter and YouTube.
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Yes, sure, she also criticized the government response to the pandemic -- harshly, in fact. But in jail, with a lawyer's sensibility, she has repeatedly denied reporting false news and insisted Chinese law gives her the right to report.
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Article 35 of China's constitution states: "Citizens of the People's Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration." During her trial, Zhang insisted that people's speech should not be censored.
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On December 1, China held 47 journalists in prison, including Zhang, the most of any other nation, according to an annual prison census conducted by the CPJ.
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Some, like Huang Qi, a pioneer of human rights reporting, are repeat offenders, have suffered from medical neglect and seen their lawyers forced to resign or even disbarred
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For all these reasons, Zhang's trial and conviction are about much more than one person running afoul of China's ruling Communist Party. It shows that Chinese citizens can still muster the courage to defy the Communist Party.
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Foreign governments dealing with China cannot ignore this reality, and they must insist that China end its repeated and gross violations of the human rights of its own people, including its journalists.
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To Trump, 'the Polls That Matter' Point to Victory. The Rest Are 'Fake.' - The New York... - 0 views
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The president’s blinkered view has created something of an alternate universe, one not governed by polling averages or independent analysis but by declarative statements that, at times, feel as if they are coming out of nowhere.
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The Trump campaign has spent years and presumably millions of dollars engaging white voters without college educations who are eligible to vote but did not vote in 2016. There are almost 1.5 million such potential voters in Michigan and more than two million in Pennsylvania.
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It has been a hallmark of Mr. Trump’s public commentary since the first time he ran for president that he treats polling as rigged against him if it isn’t favorable for him.
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That is not quite true: Though many state polls proved very wrong in 2016, the national polls that projected Hillary Clinton narrowly winning the most votes were close to the mark, and many polling outfits did make modifications, weighting, for instance, for educational backgrounds.
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Robert Blizzard, a Republican pollster with Public Opinion Strategies, said that incumbents usually ended up “on Election Day with a ballot share that is within a point or two of their October job approval score.”
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This month, Mr. Trump proclaimed on Twitter that he was “winning BIG in all of the polls that matter.”
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Beyond the polling, the fundamentals shaping the electorate, like the economy and the record-breaking coronavirus surge, are “increasingly ominous” for Mr. Trump, said Liam Donovan, a veteran Republican strategist.
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One of the murkiest issues is modeling for which voters will turn out during a pandemic and an economic downturn.
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Mr. Kushner has held up Mr. Oczkowski’s analyses, which cut against public polling and suggest votes will break Mr. Trump’s way in the final days of the campaign, people who have heard the comments said.
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Mr. Parscale, who had worked fairly closely with the R.N.C., had envisioned continuous robust television ad spending through the year. Since he stepped aside, the Trump campaign, which has far less money than advisers had once anticipated, has slashed its television spending
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The R.N.C. turnout models vary by state, but in some scenarios, it shows Mr. Trump performing worse than he does in the campaign’s own polls, two people briefed on the numbers said.
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shared by Javier E on 20 Sep 20
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Tyranny of the minority - The Triad - 0 views
thetriad.thebulwark.com/...tyranny-of-the-minority
legitimacy us tyranny minority government politics history crisis culture optimism
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Anyone who has ever written about politics and has used the shorthand “democracy” for our system of government has received a lovely reader email reminding us that yes, America is a rEpUbLiC, not a democracy
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And yes, dear reader, that is true. But a healthy and successful republic requires the faith and trust and consent of the governed. If, in large enough numbers, they believe the game is rigged or unfair the system begins to break down
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For better (in most cases) or worse, our democratic republic over the last 250 or so years has inched more towards the democratic because it’s what the people demanded.
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I want you to step back and look at our republic through the eyes of a 21 year old who lives in a median American city and who wasn’t educated about our infallible nation by the new Patriotic Common Core Curriculum.
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They were born in 1999. Two of the three presidents in their lifetime were elected by minority vote. The only one who was twice elected with a majority vote was denied the opportunity to nominate a Supreme Court justice based on some quite shaky arcana and phony rule-making that they think was largely political bullshit
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The president they know the best has a complete disregard for the law or political norms, received about 3 million fewer votes than his opponent, had the help of a foreign enemy, was impeached for soliciting illicit foreign help again and not removed from office. After all that, he did exactly the thing that his party said the black president who had actually received a majority vote couldn’t do in an election year.
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Pretty much every person this 21 year old knows is looking for a job in one of the dynamic largely democratic cities where all the growth is in the country but most of these enclaves have minimal national political power and their vote is irrelevant. In the Senate, the Republicans hold a majority of the seats representing states that make up a minority of the country
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Nate Silver tells them that for Joe Biden to be assured to win the electoral college he needs to win the popular vote by about 5 points. 5 points!
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So, I recognize things are cyclical and there are hypothetical political realignments that could benefit the Democrats. And, yes, I recognize and support our system of checks and balances. But we need to balance that structure against a body politic that believes they are represented or else they are either going to restructure it or burn the whole thing down.
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as a general matter at the time I believed 2015 was probably the best or one of the best years in human history and that 2035 would probably be even better.
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I found that everyone else pretty much landed in the same place. Whether it was the increasing view that we have lost the rope on the climate catastrophe, or that our political system was faltering, or that some of our biggest tech innovators are actually doing more harm to society than good, or that the country poised to supplant us in global dominance is an evil and repressive regime or some combination of it all… There was just this sense that something has shifted, that we have crossed a threshold and maybe our best days are actually behind us.
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I was thinking about your comments on The Next Level about the conservative movement. I know you're still trying to figure out "what happened" because I've also been trying to figure out what happened and how I didn't see it.
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I am not sure how much "fault" there is, but I think a big problem was that a large part of the conservative base thought that [conservative elites] were dog whistling when we were on the level.
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Conservatives three decades ago talked about Western Civilization and Great Books. In retrospect, it's amazing to me to think that people really thought the conservative base was interested in things like Aristotle or Shakespeare or Beethoven. (I was very naive.)
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We talked about “markets” and the wisdom of the masses—and then a plague hits and people scoff at basic safety measures.
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We said “personal responsibility”—and they heard that African Americans were poor because they deserved it.
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If I had to do it over again, I am not sure I would have figured out the problem any faster. I would not have imagined that so many people were faking it. It wasn't an intellectual error so much as being a poor judge of character.
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But all along it turned out that we were deeply sentimental in wanting to believe that “like-minded” people cared about the same things we did, for the same reasons.
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Why Protests in Nigeria Are Aimed at SARS, a Notorious Police Unit - The New York Times - 0 views
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Africa’s most populous country and biggest oil producer has been convulsed by protests that started with anger over police brutality and have now broadened, drawing worldwide attention.
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Tens of thousands of Nigerians have been demonstrating for weeks against a notoriously brutal and corrupt police agency, the Special Anti-Robbery Squad — a show of popular anger, fueled by longstanding grievances over corruption and lack of accountability, that posed the biggest challenge to the government in years.
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Commonly known as SARS, the Special Anti-Robbery Squad was created in 1984 in response to an epidemic of violent crime including robberies, carjackings and kidnappings. While it was credited with having reduced brazen lawlessness in its initial years, the police unit was later accused of evolving into the same problem it had been designed to stop: a criminal enterprise that acts with impunity.
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soldiers fired on crowds of protesters, inflaming Nigerians who were already concerned about police use of violence against the demonstrators.
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The catalyst seemed to be an Oct. 3 video that appeared to show the unprovoked killing of a man by black-clad SARS officers in Ughelli, a town in southern Delta state. Nigerian officials said the video, which was widely shared over social media, was fake and arrested the person who took it — inciting even more anger.Demonstrations erupted in Lagos, the nation’s biggest city, and elsewhere around the country, driven by calls from people — many of them young — demanding that the government dismantle SARS.
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President Muhammadu Buhari, seeing that the protests were serious and spreading, agreed on Oct. 12 to disband SARS, calling his decision “only the first step in our commitment to extensive police reform in order to ensure that the primary duty of the police and other law enforcement agencies remains the protection of lives and livelihood of our people.”
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The anger of the protesters seems to have only increased — especially after the deadly suppression of a peaceful demonstration in Lagos on Tuesday, compounded by a 24-hour curfew decree and the deployment of Nigeria’s military forces to quell further demonstrations.
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The movement bears striking similarities to demonstrations in the United States this year amid the outcry over police brutality after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. But Mr. Devermont said an important difference is that the Nigerian protesters are not demanding a defunding of the police — if anything, he said, they want more resources devoted to helping improve policing in their country.
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The Untraveled High Road of Humility, and a President Laid Low - The New York Times - 0 views
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“Going well, I think!” President Trump tweeted late Friday. Of all the confusing, confounding and contradictory words that have been spun out of the White House in recent days, that two-word caveat — “I think” — was instantly seized upon by the president’s allies and adversaries alike.
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He is hardly the first to suggest this. “Those who travel the high road of humility in Washington, D.C., are not bothered by heavy traffic,” said the former Senator Alan Simpson, Republican of Wyoming, in a 2018 eulogy for President George Bush. It is a familiar adage around the capital, if rarely heeded.
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And why would Mr. Trump take a ride in the presidential S.U.V. so he could wave to supporters near the hospital? He did this on Sunday afternoon, which seemingly placed his Secret Service detail at risk of infection, as many pointed out.
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Be humble, in other words, or try to fake it.That of course has never been Mr. Trump’s way. Self-doubt is for “losers.” Humility invites vulnerability. The approach has made him, depending on where you stand, an inspiring leader or an insufferable know-it-all and con man. It has made him immensely wealthy, or lent the impression of such.
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The capital might contain the most powerful people in the world, but there is humility in remembering that their future and the nation’s rests elsewhere — with voters, laws and fate.