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Donald Kagan, Leading Historian of Ancient Greece, Dies at 89 - The New York Times - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 23 Aug 21 - No Cached
  • He saw baseball as a Homeric allegory, one in which a hero — the batter — ventures from home and must overcome unforeseen challenges in order to return. That view set up one of his most celebrated articles: a withering review in The Public Interest of the columnist George Will’s book “Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball” (1990).
  • Professor Kagan received a National Humanities Medal in 2002. Three years later he delivered the annual Jefferson Lecture,
  • he praised the study of history but warned that it was succumbing to the influence of postmodern relativism.
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  • He sounded a similar alarm in his final lecture at Yale, in 2013. Liberal education, he said, was failing to provide students with a common set of values and the tools to make sense of the world.
  • “I find a kind of cultural void and ignorance of the past, a sense of rootlessness and aimlessness, as though not only the students but the whole world was born yesterday,”
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Opinion | If It's Not Critical Race Theory, It's Critical Race Theory-lite - The New Yo... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...critical-race-theory.html CRT race theory racism Culture politics US gop
shared by Javier E on 10 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • clear advances in attitudes about race in recent years:
  • A 2020 Monmouth University poll found that 76 percent — including 71 percent of white respondents — considered racial and ethnic discrimination in this country a “big problem,” compared with just 51 percent who said the same in 2015.
  • Gallup found that from 1958 to 2021, approval of marriage between white and Black people has gone from 4 percent to 94 percent
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  • A July Reuters-Ipsos poll found that 78 percent “support teaching high school students about the impacts of slavery” and 73 percent support teaching high school students about the impacts of racism.
  • If critical race theory isn’t being taught to children — and in a technical sense, it isn’t — then it’s hardly illogical to suppose that some other concern may be afoot.
  • The problem lies in the name “critical race theory.” It’s a no-brainer that the legal doctrine developed decades ago by scholars such as the Harvard Law professor Derrick Bell and the Columbia University and U.C.L.A. law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw is not being taught to tots.
  • today, this isn’t what most voters mean when they object to critical race theory, and to participate in this debate as if otherwise is quibbling at best, and a smoke screen at worst.
  • consider the cultural critic Helen Pluckrose’s — fair, I think — summary of the original body of critical race theory work:C.R.T. is not just talking about historical and contemporary racism with a view to overcoming it — something that all approaches to addressing racism do — but a set of core beliefs that racism is ordinary and/or permanent; that white supremacy is everywhere; that white people don’t oppose racism unless it suits them; that there is a unique voice of color that just so happens to be the one that agrees with C.R.T.; that lived experience and story-telling are primary ways of revealing racism; that liberalism and the civil rights movement approach are bad; and that working for social justice means using the critical theories of race set out above.
  • this “critical” approach has trickled down, in broad outline, into the philosophy of education-school pedagogy and administration — call it C.R.T.-lite or, if you prefer, C.R.T. Jr. — and from there migrated into the methods used by graduates of those education programs into the way they wind up running schools.
  • Under this approach, what alarms many parents and other observers is that kids will absorb the idea that it is enlightened to see white people as potential oppressors and Black people as perpetual victims of an inherently oppressive system. That it is therefore appropriate to ascribe certain traits to races, rather than individuals, and that education must “center” the battle against power differentials between groups
  • An implication some educators draw from these tenets is that various expectations of some of their students, based on what are generally thought to be ordinary mainstream assumptions, are instead onerous stipulations from an oppressive white-centric view.
  • Hence an idea that it is white to be on time, arrive at precise answers and reason from A to B, rather than holistically, etc. Again, this is not what decades-old critical race theory scholarship proposed, but yes, the idea is descended from original C.R.T.’s fundamental propositions about white supremacy.
  • these guidelines, apparently sanctioned by state departments of education, contradict the notion that concepts derived from critical race theory — or are, at least, C.R.T.-lite — is nowhere near our schools, that the C.R.T.-in-schools debate “isn’t real,” merely a fiction designed to cloak racism.
  • In some cases, evidence of C.R.T.-lite is easier to spot at various private schools.
  • Some of those who say that critical race theory isn’t being taught in schools may not be aware of these developments. Others most likely are, and suppose that they are healthy, that this is indeed how education should be.
  • That’s a respectable stance, but one ought not harbor it in disbelief that any intelligent, morally concerned person could feel differently
  • One can ardently support that students learn about racism and its legacies in a way that doesn’t crowd out obvious lessons about the history of undeniable racial progress. One can do that while questioning whether students should be immersed in a broader perspective that offers overbroad, clumsy and, frankly, insulting portraits of what is inherently white and what is Black, Latino, Asian American or Native American, and fosters — even if unintentional — a sense of opposition between the groups in question.
  • The horror of slavery, the hypocrisy of Jim Crow, the terror of lynching, the devastating loss of life and property in Tulsa and in other massacres — no student should get through, roughly, middle school ignorant of these things, and anyone who thinks that is “politics” needs to join the rest of us in the 21st century.
  • But the insistence that parents opposed to what is being called critical race theory are rising against a mere fantasy and simply enjoying a coded way of fostering denial about race is facile
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No, America is Not Experiencing a Version of China's Cultural Revolution - by Nicholas ... - 0 views

grossman.arcdigital.media/...-america-is-not-experiencing-a Cultural Revolution woke liberalism free speech Culture politics
shared by Javier E on 06 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • The first institution Maoists captured was not the academy, it was the state. The seeds of the Cultural Revolution were not in the academy, but in the perceived weakness of the communist party in China, and Mao’s position within the party, after the failures of the Great Leap Forward. Maoists took over the state first, and 17 years later launched a campaign to force cultural change in the academy and elsewhere.
  • Cultural power, and related concepts like “privilege,” aren’t nothing, but they’re vaguer and less impactful than the state, which can credibility threaten, authorize, excuse, and utilize force.
  • State-backed violence made the Cultural Revolution, and if you think the social justice movement is similar, you misunderstand it.
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  • Terrorism, public health, and police violence are all life-and-death issues, and all involve the state, so they’re more consequential than the criticism, shunning, and loss of professional opportunities associated with cancel culture. But that doesn’t mean the latter isn’t a problem.
  • We can, and should, care about more than one thing at a time, and many things that aren’t the worst problem deserve attention.
  • Nevertheless, it’s important to assess problems accurately.
  • Michael Hobbes calls all this worrying about wokeness a “moral panic.” That’s a term some use online to wave away serious concerns, but Hobbes uses it the way sociologist Stanley Cohen did in the 1970s, as a phenomenon where something becomes “defined as a threat to societal values and interests” based on media accounts that “exaggerate the seriousness, extent, typicality and/or inevitability of harm.”
  • The point here is not that stranger abductions never happened, but that they didn’t happen nearly as much as the media, concerned parents, and lawmakers thought. And because stranger kidnappings were not a national crisis, but treated as one, the “solution” made things worse.
  • Along similar lines, Hobbes argues that anti-woke alarm-bell-ringing relies on a relatively small number of oft-repeated anecdotes. Some don’t stand up to scrutiny, and some of those that do are low-stakes. The resulting moral panic fuels, among other things, a wave of red state legislation aimed at banning “critical race theory” that uses vague language and effectively cracks down on teaching about racism in American history.
  • For that, we should look to data, and here again the problem looks smaller than anti-woke liberals make it out to be
  • In the universe of cancel culture cases, I find more incidents concerning than Hobbes and fewer concerning than Young, but “this one incident wasn’t actually bad” vs. “yes it really was” doesn’t answer the question about size and scope. It doesn’t tell us what, if anything, society should do about it.
  • In Liberal Currents, Adam Gurri cites the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which documented 426 “targeting incidents involving scholars at public and private American institutions of higher education” since 2015 and 492 “disinvitation attempts” since 1998
  • The organization Canceled People lists 217 cases of “cancellation” since 1991, while the National Association of Scholars (NAS) lists 194 cancellations in academia since 2004 (plus two in the 20th century).
  • Based on these numbers, Gurri concludes, “If any other problem in social life was occurring at this frequency and at this scale, we would consider it effectively solved.”
  • There are nearly 4,000 colleges and universities in the United States. U.S. News’ 2021 rankings of the best schools lists 1,452. Using that smaller number and NAS’s figure of 194 academic cancellations since 2004, the chance of a college or university experiencing a cancellation in a given year is less than 0.8 percent.
  • There are some concerning cases in the NAS database too, in which professors were fired for actions that should be covered under a basic principle of academic freedom — for example, reading aloud a Mark Twain passage that included a racial slur, even after giving students advance notice — so this isn’t a total non-issue. But the number of low stakes and relatively unobjectionable cases means the risk is lower than 0.8 percent (and it’s even lower than that, since NAS includes Canada and my denominator is ranked schools in the United States).
  • Similarly, FIRE classifies about 30 percent of the attempted disinvitations in its database as from the right. About 60 percent are from the left — the other 10 percent N/A — so if you want to argue that the left does this more, you’ve got some evidence. But still, the number of cases from the left is lower than the total. And more than half of FIRE’s attempted disinvitations did not result in anyone getting disinvited.
  • Using U.S. News’ ranked schools as the denominator, the chance of left-wing protestors trying to get a speaker disinvited at a college or university in a given year is about 0.5 percent. The chance of an actual disinvitation is less than 0.25 percent. And that’s in the entire school. To put this in perspective, my political science department alone hosts speakers most weeks of the semester.
  • Two things jump out here:
  • Bari Weiss and Anne Applebaum both cite a Cato study purporting to show this effect:
  • even if we assume these databases capture a fraction of actual instances — which would be surprising, given the media attention on this topic, but even so — the data does not show an illiberal left-wing movement in control of academia.
  • The number agreeing that the political climate prevents them from saying things they believe ranges from 42% to 77%, which is high across political views. That suggests self-censorship is, to a significant degree, a factor of the political, cultural, and technological environment, rather than caused by any particular ideology.
  • Conservatives report self-censoring more than liberals do.
  • The same study shows that the biggest increase in self-censorship from 2017 to 2020 was among strong liberals (+12), while strong conservatives increased the least (+1).
  • If this data told a story of ascendent Maoists suppressing conservative speech, it would probably be the opposite, with the left becoming more confident of expressing their views — on race, gender, etc. — while the right becomes disproportionately more fearful. Culture warriors fixate on wokeness, but when asked about the political climate, many Americans likely thought about Trumpism
  • Nevertheless, this data does show conservatives are more likely to say the political climate prevents them from expressing their beliefs. But what it doesn’t show is which beliefs or why.
  • Self-censoring can be a problem, but also not. The adage “do not discuss politics or religion in general company” goes back to at least 1879. If someone today is too scared to say “Robin DiAngelo’s conception of ‘white fragility’ does not stand up to logical scrutiny,” that’s bad. If they’re too scared to shout racial slurs at minorities, that isn’t. A lot depends on the content of the speech.
  • When I was a teenager in the 1990s, anti-gay slurs were common insults among boys, and tough-guy talk in movies. Now it’s a lot less common, one of the things pushed out of polite society, like the n-word, Holocaust denial, and sexual harassment. I think that’s a positive.
  • Another problem with the anti-woke interpretation of the Cato study is media constantly tells conservatives they’re under dire threat.
  • Fox News, including Tucker Carlson (the most-watched show on basic cable), Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino (frequently among the most-shared on Facebook), and other right-wing outlets devote tons of coverage to cancel culture, riling up conservatives with hyperbolic claims that people are coming for them
  • Anti-woke liberals in prestigious mainstream outlets tell them it’s the Cultural Revolution
  • Then a survey asks if the political climate prevents them from saying what they believe, and, primed by media, they say yes.
  • With so many writers on the anti-woke beat, it’s not especially plausible that we’re missing many cases of transgender servers getting people canceled for using the wrong pronoun in coffee shops to the point that everyone who isn’t fully comfortable with the terminology should live in fear. By overstating the threat of cancellation and the power of woke activists, anti-woke liberals are chilling speech they aim to protect.
  • a requirement to both-sides the Holocaust is a plausible read of the legal text. It’s an unsurprising result of empowering the state to suppress ideas in an environment with bad faith culture warriors, such as Chris Rufo and James Lindsay, advocating state censorship and deliberately stoking panic to get it.
  • Texas, Florida, and other states trying to suppress unwanted ideas in both K-12 and higher ed isn’t the Cultural Revolution either — no state-sanctioned mass violence here — but it’s coming from government, making it a bigger threat to speech and academic freedom.
  • To put this in perspective, antiracist guru Ibram X. Kendi has called for an “anti-racist Constitutional amendment,” which would “make unconstitutional racial inequity over a certain threshold, as well as racist ideas by public officials,” and establish a Department of Anti-Racism to enforce it. It’s a terrible proposal that would repeal the First Amendment and get the state heavily involved in policing speech (which, even if well-intentioned, comes with serious risks of abuse).
  • It also doesn’t stand the slightest chance of happening.
  • It’s fair to characterize this article as anti-anti-woke. And I usually don’t like anti-anti- arguments, especially anti-anti-Trump (because it’s effectively pro). But in this case I’m doing it because I reject the binary.
  • American politics is often binary.
  • Culture is not. It’s an ever-changing mishmash, with a large variety of influential participants
  • There have been unmistakable changes in American culture — Western culture, really — regarding race and gender, but there are way more than two sides to that. You don’t have to be woke or anti-woke. It’s not a political campaign or a war. You can think all sorts of things, mixing and matching from these ideas and others.
  • I won’t say “this is trivial” nor “this stuff is great,” because I don’t think either. At least not if “this” means uncompromising Maoists seeking domination.
  • I think that’s bad, but it’s not especially common. It’s not fiction — I’m online a lot, I have feet in both media and academia, I’ve seen it too — but, importantly, it’s not in control
  • I think government censorship is inherently more concerning than private censorship, and that we can’t sufficiently counter the push for state idea-suppression without countering the overstated fears that rationalize it.
  • I think a lot of the private censorship problem can be addressed by executives and administrators — the ones who actually have power over businesses and universities — showing a bit of spine. Don’t fold at the first sign of protest. Take some time to look into it yourself, and make a judgment call on whether discipline is merited and necessary. Often, the activist mob will move on in a few days anyway.
  • I think that, with so much of the conversation focusing on extremes, people often miss when administrators do this.
  • I think violence is physical, and that while speech can be quite harmful, it’s better to think of these two things as categorically different than to insist harmful speech is literally violence.
  • at a baseline, treating people as equals means respecting who they say they are. The vast majority are not edge cases like a competitive athlete, but regular people trying to live their lives. Let them use the bathroom in peace.
  • I think the argument that racism and other forms of bigotry operate at a systemic or institutional, in addition to individual, level is insightful, intuitive, and empirically supported. We can improve people’s lives by taking that into account when crafting laws, policies, and practices.
  • I think identity and societal structures shape people’s lives (whether they want it to or not) but they’re far from the only factors. Treating them as the only, or even predominant, factor essentializes more than it empowers.
  • I think transgender and non-binary people have a convincing case for equality. I don’t think that points to clear answers on every question—what’s the point of gender segregated sports?
  • I think free association is an essential value too. Which inherently includes the right of disassociation.
  • I think these situations often fall into a gray area, and businesses should be able to make their own judgment calls about personnel, since companies have a reasonable interest in protecting their brand.
  • I think free speech is an essential value, not just at the legal level, but culturally as well. I think people who would scrap it, from crusading antiracists to social conservatives pining for Viktor Orban’s Hungary, have a naively utopian sense of how that would go (both in general and for them specifically). Getting the state involved in speech suppression is a bad idea.
  • I think America’s founding was a big step forward for government and individual liberty, and early America was a deeply racist, bigoted place that needed Amendments (13-15; 19), Civil Rights Acts, and landmark court cases to become a liberal democracy. I don’t think it’s hard to hold both of those in your head at the same time.
  • I think students learning the unvarnished truth about America’s racist past is good, and that teaching students they are personally responsible for the sins of the past is not.
  • I think synthesis of these cultural forces is both desirable and possible. Way more people think both that bigotry is bad and individual freedom is good than online arguments lead you to believe.
  • I don’t think the sides are as far apart as they think.
  • I think we should disaggregate cancel culture and left-wing identity politics. Cancellation should be understood as an internet phenomenon.
  • If it ever was just something the left does, it isn’t anymore.
  • I think a lot of us could agree that social media mobbing and professional media attention on minor incidents is wrong, especially as part of a campaign to get someone fired. In general, disproportionally severe social and professional sanctions is a problem, no matter the alleged cause.
  • I think most anti-woke liberals really do want to defend free speech and academic freedom. But I don’t think their panic-stoking hyperbole is helping.
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The Scary Future of the American Right - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...620746 right-wing conservatism gop radical politics history crisis Culture trump
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  • The movement has three distinctive strains. First, the people over 50 who have been hanging around conservative circles for decades but who have recently been radicalized by the current left.
  • The second strain is made up of mid-career politicians and operatives who are learning to adapt to the age of populist rage:
  • people like Ted Cruz (Princeton, Harvard), J. D. Vance (Yale Law), and Josh Hawley (Stanford and Yale).
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  • The third and largest strain is the young. They grew up in the era of Facebook and MSNBC and identity politics. They went to colleges smothered by progressive sermonizing. And they reacted by running in the other direction
  • I couldn’t quite suppress the disturbing voice in my head saying, “If you were 22, maybe you’d be here too.”
  • Conservatives have always inveighed against the cultural elite—the media, the universities, Hollywood. But in the Information Age, the purveyors of culture are now corporate titans.
  • The national conservatives thus describe a world in which the corporate elite, the media elite, the political elite, and the academic elite have all coagulated into one axis of evil, dominating every institution and controlling the channels of thought.
  • At the heart of this blue oligarchy are the great masters of surveillance capitalism, the Big Tech czars who decide in secret what ideas get promoted, what stories get suppressed
  • In the NatCon worldview, the profiteers of surveillance capitalism see all and control all
  • “Big Business is not our ally,” Marco Rubio argued. “They are eager culture warriors who use the language of wokeness to cover free-market capitalism.”
  • The “entire phalanx of Big Business has gone hard left,” Cruz said. “We’ve seen Big Business, the Fortune 500, becoming the economic enforcers of the hard left. Name five Fortune 500 CEOs who are even remotely right of center.”
  • The idea that the left controls absolutely everything—from your smartphone to the money supply to your third grader’s curriculum—explains the apocalyptic tone
  • “We are confronted now by a systematic effort to dismantle our society, our traditions, our economy, and our way of life,” said Rubio.
  • The first great project of the national conservatives is to man the barricades in the culture war. These people have certainly done their homework when it comes to cultural Marxism—how the left has learned to dominate culture and how the right now needs to copy their techniques
  • The first interesting debate among the NatCons is philosophical: Should we fight to preserve the classical-liberal order or is it necessary to abandon it?
  • Some of the speakers at the conference were in fact classical liberals, who believe in free speech, intellectual debate, and neutral government
  • Glenn Loury gave an impassioned speech against cancel culture, the illiberal left, and the hyper-racialized group consciousness that divides people into opposing racial camps.
  • But others argued that this sort of liberalism is a luxury we cannot afford. The country is under assault from a Marxist oligarchy that wants to impose its own pseudo-religious doctrine.
  • If you try to repulse that with pallid liberalism, with weak calls for free speech and tolerance, you’ll end up getting run over by those who possess fanatical zeal, economic power, and cultural might.
  • Yoram Hazony, the chief intellectual architect of national conservatism, is an Orthodox Jew who went to Princeton before moving to Israel. He argues that you can’t have a society that embraces government neutrality and tries to relegate values to the private sphere.
  • If conservatives want to stand up to the pseudo-religion of wokeism, they have to put traditional religion at the center of their political project.
  • Another Israeli political philosopher at the conference, Ofir Haivry, argued that Americans shouldn’t delude themselves into thinking that a nation is built out of high-minded liberal abstractions, like the Bill of Rights. A nation is, instead, a cultural tradition, a common language, a set of rituals and beliefs, and a religious order—a collective cultural identity.
  • For his part, Hazony argued that the American cultural identity is Christian—and has to be if it is not going to succumb to the woke onslaught. If 80 percent of Americans are Christian, Hazony reasoned, then Christian values should dominate.
  • The problem in America, Hazony continued, is that LGBTQ activists today, like American Jews in the 1950s, are trying to expel Christianity from the public square.
  • Hazony said. “Above all else we’ve got to get God and scripture back in the schools.”
  • Another interesting debate among the NatCons is political and economic.
  • Conservatives have got the culture-war act down. Trump was a culture-war president with almost no policy arm attached. The question conservatives at the conference were asking was how to move beyond owning the libs to effecting actual change.
  • Christopher Rufo, the architect of this year’s school-board-meeting protests against critical race theory, argued that conservatives had erred when they tried to slowly gain power in elite cultural institutions.
  • Instead, Rufo argued, they should rally the masses to get state legislatures to pass laws embracing their values. That’s essentially what’s now happening across red America.
  • My old friend Rod Dreher of The American Conservative argued that because the left controls the commanding heights of the culture and the economy, the only institution the right has a shot at influencing is the state.
  • “We need to quit being satisfied with owning the libs, and save our country,” Dreher said. “We need to unapologetically embrace the use of state power.”
  • The culture war merges with the economic-class war—and a new right emerges in which an intellectual cadre, the national conservatives, rallies the proletarian masses against the cultural/corporate elites.
  • This is national conservatism pursued to its logical conclusion: using state power to break up and humble the big corporations and to push back against coastal cultural values.
  • Orbán, in Dreher’s view, understands the civilizational stakes of the culture war; he has, for instance, used the power of the state to limit how much transgenderism can be taught to children in schools. “Our team talks incessantly about how horrible wokeness is,” Dreher said at the conference. “Orbán actually does something about it.”
  • Trump’s devastation of the old order produced a grand struggle on the right to build a new one on Trumpian populist lines.
  • They are wrong, too, to think there is a wokeist Anschluss taking over all the institutions of American life.
  • Furthermore, if Hazony thinks America is about to return to Christian dominance, he’s living in 1956.
  • there is something extremely off-putting about the NatCon public pose. In person, as I say, I find many of them charming, warm, and friendly. But their public posture is dominated by the psychology of threat and menace. If there was one expression of sympathy, kindness, or grace uttered from the podium in Orlando, I did not hear it. But I did hear callousness, invocations of combat, and whiffs of brutality.
  • One big thing the NatCons are right about is that in the Information Age, the cultural and corporate elites have merged.
  • Right-wing parties around the world are gradually becoming working-class parties that stand against the economic interests and cultural preferences of the highly educated.
  • Left-wing parties are now rooted in the rich metro areas and are more and more becoming an unsteady alliance between young AOC left-populists and Google.
  • NatCons are also probably right that conservatism is going to get a lot more statist.
  • Marco Rubio countered by, in effect, arguing that you can’t rally cultural populists if you are not also going to do something for them economically. Cultural populism leads to economic populism.
  • Over the past few decades there have been various efforts to replace the Reagan Paradigm: the national-greatness conservatism of John McCain; the compassionate conservatism of George W. Bush; the Reformicon conservatism of the D.C. think tanks in the 21st century
  • the Trumpian onslaught succeeded where these movements have so far fizzled because Trump understood better than they did the coalescence of the new American cultural/corporate elite and the potency of populist anger against it.
  • the alarming future of the American right: the fusing of the culture war and the class war into one epic Marxist Götterdämmerung.
  • the disconcerting reality is that America’s rarified NatCon World is just one piece of a larger illiberal populist revolt that is strong and rising.
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Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...omsday-prep-for-the-super-rich doomsday Collapse rich prepper history crisis Culture politics
shared by Javier E on 22 Sep 21 - No Cached
  • as the Presidential campaign exposed increasingly toxic divisions in America, Antonio García Martínez, a forty-year-old former Facebook product manager living in San Francisco, bought five wooded acres on an island in the Pacific Northwest and brought in generators, solar panels, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. “When society loses a healthy founding myth, it descends into chaos,” he told me. The author of “Chaos Monkeys,” an acerbic Silicon Valley memoir, García Martínez wanted a refuge that would be far from cities but not entirely isolated. “All these dudes think that one guy alone could somehow withstand the roving mob,” he said. “No, you’re going to need to form a local militia. You just need so many things to actually ride out the apocalypse.” Once he started telling peers in the Bay Area about his “little island project,” they came “out of the woodwork” to describe their own preparations, he said. “I think people who are particularly attuned to the levers by which society actually works understand that we are skating on really thin cultural ice right now.”
  • In private Facebook groups, wealthy survivalists swap tips on gas masks, bunkers, and locations safe from the effects of climate change. One member, the head of an investment firm, told me, “I keep a helicopter gassed up all the time, and I have an underground bunker with an air-filtration system.” He said that his preparations probably put him at the “extreme” end among his peers. But he added, “A lot of my friends do the guns and the motorcycles and the gold coins. That’s not too rare anymore.”
  • Tim Chang, a forty-four-year-old managing director at Mayfield Fund, a venture-capital firm, told me, “There’s a bunch of us in the Valley. We meet up and have these financial-hacking dinners and talk about backup plans people are doing. It runs the gamut from a lot of people stocking up on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, to figuring out how to get second passports if they need it, to having vacation homes in other countries that could be escape havens.” He said, “I’ll be candid: I’m stockpiling now on real estate to generate passive income but also to have havens to go to.” He and his wife, who is in technology, keep a set of bags packed for themselves and their four-year-old daughter. He told me, “I kind of have this terror scenario: ‘Oh, my God, if there is a civil war or a giant earthquake that cleaves off part of California, we want to be ready.’ ”
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  • When Marvin Liao, a former Yahoo executive who is now a partner at 500 Startups, a venture-capital firm, considered his preparations, he decided that his caches of water and food were not enough. “What if someone comes and takes this?” he asked me. To protect his wife and daughter, he said, “I don’t have guns, but I have a lot of other weaponry. I took classes in archery.”
  • Over the years, Huffman has become increasingly concerned about basic American political stability and the risk of large-scale unrest. He said, “Some sort of institutional collapse, then you just lose shipping—that sort of stuff.” (Prepper blogs call such a scenario W.R.O.L., “without rule of law.”) Huffman has come to believe that contemporary life rests on a fragile consensus. “I think, to some degree, we all collectively take it on faith that our country works, that our currency is valuable, the peaceful transfer of power—that all of these things that we hold dear work because we believe they work. While I do believe they’re quite resilient, and we’ve been through a lot, certainly we’re going to go through a lot more.”
  • Justin Kan heard the first inklings of survivalism among his peers. Kan co-founded Twitch, a gaming network that was later sold to Amazon for nearly a billion dollars. “Some of my friends were, like, ‘The breakdown of society is imminent. We should stockpile food,’ ” he said. “I tried to. But then we got a couple of bags of rice and five cans of tomatoes. We would have been dead if there was actually a real problem.” I asked Kan what his prepping friends had in common. “Lots of money and resources,” he said. “What are the other things I can worry about and prepare for? It’s like insurance.”
  • Long before the financial crisis became front-page news, early signs appeared in user comments on Reddit. “People were starting to whisper about mortgages. They were worried about student debt. They were worried about debt in general. There was a lot of, ‘This is too good to be true. This doesn’t smell right.’ ” He added, “There’s probably some false positives in there as well, but, in general, I think we’re a pretty good gauge of public sentiment. When we’re talking about a faith-based collapse, you’re going to start to see the chips in the foundation on social media first.”
  • How did a preoccupation with the apocalypse come to flourish in Silicon Valley, a place known, to the point of cliché, for unstinting confidence in its ability to change the world for the better?Those impulses are not as contradictory as they seem. Technology rewards the ability to imagine wildly different futures,
  • “When you do that, it’s pretty common that you take things ad infinitum, and that leads you to utopias and dystopias,” he said. It can inspire radical optimism—such as the cryonics movement, which calls for freezing bodies at death in the hope that science will one day revive them—or bleak scenarios.
  • In 2012, National Geographic Channel launched “Doomsday Preppers,” a reality show featuring a series of Americans bracing for what they called S.H.T.F. (when the “shit hits the fan”). The première drew more than four million viewers, and, by the end of the first season, it was the most popular show in the channel’s history.
  • A survey commissioned by National Geographic found that forty per cent of Americans believed that stocking up on supplies or building a bomb shelter was a wiser investment than a 401(k).
  • Johnson wishes that the wealthy would adopt a greater “spirit of stewardship,” an openness to policy change that could include, for instance, a more aggressive tax on inheritance. “Twenty-five hedge-fund managers make more money than all of the kindergarten teachers in America combined,” he said. “Being one of those twenty-five doesn’t feel good. I think they’ve developed a heightened sensitivity.”
  • In an e-mail, Wong told me, “Most people just assume improbable events don’t happen, but technical people tend to view risk very mathematically.” He continued, “The tech preppers do not necessarily think a collapse is likely. They consider it a remote event, but one with a very severe downside, so, given how much money they have, spending a fraction of their net worth to hedge against this . . . is a logical thing to do.”
  • I asked Hoffman to estimate what share of fellow Silicon Valley billionaires have acquired some level of “apocalypse insurance,” in the form of a hideaway in the U.S. or abroad. “I would guess fifty-plus per cent,” he said, “but that’s parallel with the decision to buy a vacation home. Human motivation is complex, and I think people can say, ‘I now have a safety blanket for this thing that scares me
  • In building Reddit, a community of thousands of discussion threads, into one of the most frequently visited sites in the world, Huffman has grown aware of the way that technology alters our relations with one another, for better and for worse. He has witnessed how social media can magnify public fear. “It’s easier for people to panic when they’re together,” he said, pointing out that “the Internet has made it easier for people to be together,” yet it also alerts people to emerging risks.
  • “I’ve heard this theme from a bunch of people,” Hoffman said. “Is the country going to turn against the wealthy? Is it going to turn against technological innovation? Is it going to turn into civil disorder?”
  • The C.E.O. of another large tech company told me, “It’s still not at the point where industry insiders would turn to each other with a straight face and ask what their plans are for some apocalyptic event.” He went on, “But, having said that, I actually think it’s logically rational and appropriately conservative.”
  • “Our food supply is dependent on G.P.S., logistics, and weather forecasting,” he said, “and those systems are generally dependent on the Internet, and the Internet is dependent on D.N.S.”—the system that manages domain names. “Go risk factor by risk factor by risk factor, acknowledging that there are many you don’t even know about, and you ask, ‘What’s the chance of this breaking in the next decade?’ Or invert it: ‘What’s the chance that nothing breaks in fifty years?’ ”
  • “Anyone who’s in this community knows people who are worried that America is heading toward something like the Russian Revolution,” he told me recently.
  • “People know the only real answer is, Fix the problem,” he said. “It’s a reason most of them give a lot of money to good causes.” At the same time, though, they invest in the mechanics of escape. He recalled a dinner in New York City after 9/11 and the bursting of the dot-com bubble: “A group of centi-millionaires and a couple of billionaires were working through end-of-America scenarios and talking about what they’d do. Most said they’ll fire up their planes and take their families to Western ranches or homes in other countries.”
  • By January, 2015, Johnson was sounding the alarm: the tensions produced by acute income inequality were becoming so pronounced that some of the world’s wealthiest people were taking steps to protect themselves. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Johnson told the audience, “I know hedge-fund managers all over the world who are buying airstrips and farms in places like New Zealand because they think they need a getaway.”
  • many worry that, as artificial intelligence takes away a growing share of jobs, there will be a backlash against Silicon Valley, America’s second-highest concentration of wealth.
  • The gap is widening further. In December, the National Bureau of Economic Research published a new analysis, by the economists Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman, which found that half of American adults have been “completely shut off from economic growth since the 1970s.” Approximately a hundred and seventeen million people earn, on average, the same income that they did in 1980, while the typical income for the top one per cent has nearly tripled.
  • r the silo and finished construction in December, 2012, at a cost of nearly twenty million dollars. He created twelve private apartments: full-floor units were advertised at three million dollars; a half-floor was half the price. He has sold every unit, except one for himself, he said
  • Johnson said, “If we had a more equal distribution of income, and much more money and energy going into public school systems, parks and recreation, the arts, and health care, it could take an awful lot of sting out of society. We’ve largely dismantled those things.”
  • “Why do people who are envied for being so powerful appear to be so afraid?” Johnson asked. “What does that really tell us about our system?” He added, “It’s a very odd thing. You’re basically seeing that the people who’ve been the best at reading the tea leaves—the ones with the most resources, because that’s how they made their money—are now the ones most preparing to pull the rip cord and jump out of the plane.”
  • The movement received another boost from the George W. Bush Administration’s mishandling of Hurricane Katrina. Neil Strauss, a former Times reporter, who chronicled his turn to prepping in his book “Emergency,” told me, “We see New Orleans, where our government knows a disaster is happening, and is powerless to save its own citizens.”
  • Tyler Allen, a real-estate developer in Lake Mary, Florida, who told me that he paid three million dollars for one of Hall’s condos. Allen said he worries that America faces a future of “social conflict” and government efforts to deceive the public. He suspects that the Ebola virus was allowed to enter the country in order to weaken the population. When I asked how friends usually respond to his ideas, he said, “The natural reaction that you get most of the time is for them to laugh, because it scares them.” But, he added, “my credibility has gone through the roof. Ten years ago, this just seemed crazy that all this was going to happen: the social unrest and the cultural divide in the country, the race-baiting and the hate-mongering.”
  • d G. Mitchell, Jr., a professor emeritus at Oregon State University, who spent twelve years studying survivalism, said, “During the Reagan era, we heard, for the first time in my life, and I’m seventy-four years old, from the highest authorities in the land that government has failed you, the collective institutional ways of solving problems and understanding society are no good. People said, ‘O.K., it’s flawed. What do I do now?’ ”
  • That gap is comparable to the gap between average incomes in the U.S. and the Democratic Republic of Congo,
  • If a silo in Kansas is not remote or private enough, there is another option. In the first seven days after Donald Trump’s election, 13,401 Americans registered with New Zealand’s immigration authorities, the first official step toward seeking residency—more than seventeen times the usual rate. The New Zealand Herald reported the surge beneath the headline “Trump Apocalypse.”
  • In fact, the influx had begun well before Trump’s victory. In the first ten months of 2016, foreigners bought nearly fourteen hundred square miles of land in New Zealand, more than quadruple what they bought in the same period the previous year
  • Much as Switzerland once drew Americans with the promise of secrecy, and Uruguay tempted them with private banks, New Zealand offers security and distance. In the past six years, nearly a thousand foreigners have acquired residency there under programs that mandate certain types of investment of at least a million dollars.
  • The difference between New Zealand and the U.S., to a large extent, is that people who disagree with each other can still talk to each other about it here. It’s a tiny little place, and there’s no anonymity. People have to actually have a degree of civility.”
  • Jack Matthews, an American who is the chairman of MediaWorks, a large New Zealand broadcaster, told me, “I think, in the back of people’s minds, frankly, is that, if the world really goes to shit, New Zealand is a First World country, completely self-sufficient, if necessary—energy, water, food. Life would deteriorate, but it would not collapse.”
  • Top to bottom, the island chain runs roughly the distance between Maine and Florida, with half the population of New York City
  • In a recent World Bank report, New Zealand had supplanted Singapore as the best country in the world to do business.
  • “Kiwis used to talk about the ‘tyranny of distance,’ ” Wall said, as we crossed town in his Mercedes convertible. “Now the tyranny of distance is our greatest asset.”
  • American clients have also sought strategic advice. “They’re asking, ‘Where in New Zealand is not going to be long-term affected by rising sea levels?’ ”
  • In particular, the attention of American survivalists has generated resentment. In a discussion about New Zealand on the Modern Survivalist, a prepper Web site, a commentator wrote, “Yanks, get this in your heads. Aotearoa NZ is not your little last resort safe haven.”
  • An American hedge-fund manager in his forties—tall, tanned, athletic—recently bought two houses in New Zealand and acquired local residency. He agreed to tell me about his thinking, if I would not publish his name. Brought up on the East Coast, he said, over coffee, that he expects America to face at least a decade of political turmoil, including racial tension, polarization, and a rapidly aging population. “The country has turned into the New York area, the California area, and then everyone else is wildly different in the middle,” he said. He worries that the economy will suffer if Washington scrambles to fund Social Security and Medicare for people who need it. “Do you default on that obligation? Or do you print more money to give to them? What does that do to the value of the dollar? It’s not a next-year problem, but it’s not fifty years away, either.”
  • He said, “This is no longer about a handful of freaks worried about the world ending.” He laughed, and added, “Unless I’m one of those freaks.”
  • Fear of disaster is healthy if it spurs action to prevent it. But élite survivalism is not a step toward prevention; it is an act of withdrawal.
  • Philanthropy in America is still three times as large, as a share of G.D.P., as philanthropy in the next closest country, the United Kingdom. But it is now accompanied by a gesture of surrender, a quiet disinvestment by some of America’s most successful and powerful people. Faced with evidence of frailty in the American project, in the institutions and norms from which they have benefitted, some are permitting themselves to imagine failure. It is a gilded despair.
  • As Huffman, of Reddit, observed, our technologies have made us more alert to risk, but have also made us more panicky; they facilitate the tribal temptation to cocoon, to seclude ourselves from opponents, and to fortify ourselves against our fears, instead of attacking the sources of them. Justin Kan, the technology investor who had made a halfhearted effort to stock up on food, recalled a recent phone call from a friend at a hedge fund. “He was telling me we should buy land in New Zealand as a backup. He’s, like, ‘What’s the percentage chance that Trump is actually a fascist dictator? Maybe it’s low, but the expected value of having an escape hatch is pretty high.’ 
  • As Americans withdraw into smaller circles of experience, we jeopardize the “larger circle of empathy,” he said, the search for solutions to shared problems. “The easy question is, How do I protect me and mine? The more interesting question is, What if civilization actually manages continuity as well as it has managed it for the past few centuries? What do we do if it just keeps on chugging?”
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A Slow-Motion Climate Disaster: The Spread of Barren Land - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...limate-change-barren-land.html climate brazil policy
shared by lucieperloff on 03 Dec 21 - No Cached
  • But on a recent day, with temperatures approaching 100 degrees, the river had run dry, the crops would not grow and the family’s 30 remaining cattle were quickly consuming the last pool of water.
  • Scientists agree with her grandfather. Much of Brazil’s vast northeast is, in effect, turning into a desert — a process called desertification that is worsening across the planet.
  • But local residents, faced with harsh economic realities, have also made short-term decisions to get by — like clearing trees for livestock and extracting clay for the region’s tile industry — that have carried long-term consequences.
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  • Satellite images and field tests show that 13 percent of the land has already lost its fertility, while nearly the rest of the region is at risk.
  • Brazil’s northeast, the world’s most densely populated drylands, with roughly 53 million people, is among the most at risk.
  • Instead, higher temperatures and less rain combine with deforestation and overfarming to leave the soil parched, lifeless and nearly devoid of nutrients, unable to support crops or even grass to feed livestock.
  • Those entrepreneurs began paying landowners for their mud, and in a few years, dozens of ceramics plants employed hundreds of people.
  • Increasing deforestation in Brazil has alarmed officials around the world because it threatens the Amazon rain forest’s ability to pull carbon from the atmosphere.
  • At his small plant recently, a few dozen laborers laid out thousands of tiles to dry in the midday sun.
  • Factories make the tiles by mixing water with clay, and then firing the result in a wood-burning oven. All those ingredients — water, wood and clay — are in short supply here.
  • The operation consumes 60 to 75 cubic meters of wood a week, or enough to fill five large dump trucks.
  • That can have a devastating effect. The soil and clay they extract is crucial for retaining a proper balance of nutrients and moisture in the surrounding land.
  • In 2010, during another difficult dry season, Mr. Dantas said his family almost ran out of money. To feed themselves and their cattle, they decided to cash in on their mud.
  • But in 2010, instead of planting, the family watched four men with shovels excavate and haul away the soil. It took them three months. They paid about $3,500 for the clay.
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Putin's Challenge To The American Right - 0 views

andrewsullivan.substack.com/...tins-challenge-to-the-american putin right-wing authoritarian invasion nostalgia sullivan
shared by Javier E on 12 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • It’s not so much Putin’s trashing of international law, his unhinged rehashing of post-Soviet grievances, his next-level Covid paranoia, the foul murders of his opponents, or his brazen embrace of shelling hospitals that has so deepened the damage to the Putin brand among the West’s new Russophiles. These atrocities and madnesses they have long found ways to live with
  • No, it’s Putin’s failure — thus far — to actually win the war he started that’s so damning. It’s one thing for a dictator to be deemed cruel; and quite another — and far more dangerous — thing for him to be seen as incompetent.
  • “They’re gonna keep peace all right.” Think of the depth of the cynical callousness that has to lie behind such a smirk. Notice that for Trump, Putin is not just a thug but a smart one, and the possibility of his brutal incursion into a sovereign neighbor state was, in Trump’s mind, “wonderful.” And cheap: “He’s taking over a country for $2 worth of sanctions. I’d say that’s pretty smart.”
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  • With Trump, evil is always better when it’s also a bargain.
  • Until as recently as January this year, “62 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents considered Vladimir Putin a stronger leader than Joe Biden.” That’s the primrose path down which the GOP led its supporters — seeing Putin as a more legitimate president than Biden.
  • Steve Bannon summed it up: “Putin ain’t woke. He’s anti-woke.”
  • over the years, this drumbeat of love for the Russian dictator shifted the views of many grassroots Republicans. In the wake of Trump’s personal infatuation with Putin, the murderer’s favorability among Republicans jumped from 10 percent in 2014 to 37 percent by December 2016.
  • For besieged social conservatives and Christianists in America, Putin loomed like some phantasm of strange hope.
  • The last two weeks, to put it mildly, have pummeled this narrative. It’s happened in a couple of ways. The first is that there really is no legitimate defense — even at CPAC, the fetid armpit of the Trump right — of sending troops and tanks into a neighboring country to teach it a lesson in submission to Mother Russia
  • If you’re Bannon, you can still try and wing it, but the sheer sight of bombed hospitals, murdered children, homeless seniors, and mortar explosions in residential neighborhoods tends to shape public opinion overnight.
  • Secondly, and perhaps most important, Putin is failing. He looks weak. The visual of a vast, stalled, vulnerable convoy of trucks on its way — or not — to Kyiv is now a metaphor for Putin’s presidency.
  • Putin has also done something no US president has been able to do in decades: rally Europe around NATO, get NATO countries to re-arm (finally), and give them a new and pointed mission: the deterrence of Russia
  • Putin’s blunder has revealed, in fact, that the West has a unique new weapon in the history of global warfare that can end wars almost before they begin: an economic kill-switch. The vast and complex set of financial, economic, and travel sanctions that the West unveiled this past fortnight and is imposing on Russia — effectively removing it from international banking and most international trade — is something no country can survive for very long.
  • if the EU is able to ramp up nuclear power (as France and Britain are), allow more fracking, and keep its investment in renewables surging, Russia’s entire carbon-based economy will have an expiration date attached to it.
  • None of this was supposed to happen. The West wasn’t supposed to unite this expeditiously; the EU wasn’t expected to find a new and confident voice; Russia’s access to global finance wasn’t supposed to be severed overnight; and a senile American president wasn’t supposed to corral a massive coalition to marginalize and isolate Russia on the global stage.
  • “Everything the [far right] wanted to perceive as decadent and weak has proven strong and brave; everything they wanted to represent as fearsome and powerful has revealed itself as brutal and stupid
  • so a president recently celebrated as a mastermind on the world stage has allowed his ancient fantasies of imperial glory to kick-start his own country’s economic and social collapse. Putin emerges from this as neither smart nor strong; he is, in fact, dumb and increasingly weak.
  • That’s why he’s a useful insight into what reactionism actually is. It’s not really a politics; it’s a mood. It’s not really about the problems of the present; it’s about living in an imagined past, and believing that you alone can restore it by some mystical rhetorical magic.
  • It’s about “subscribing to a worldview that combines Orthodox Christian mysticism, anti-American conspiracy theories and hedonism.
  • Trump longs for the 1950s in America — just as Putin longs for the USSR of the same period
  • Wrapped up in nationalism, provoked by left-extremism, corralled by skillful demagogues, this longing can be a path to power. It can bring tyrants into office. But it cannot work in practice — because the world is different now. We live in 2022. America will never have the cultural and relative demographic homogeneity of the 1950s again. Never.
  • “White nationalism” in the most ethnically diverse democracy in human history is a kind of insanity — perpetuated by woke leftists and sad rightists. No wall, no president, no new immigration policy, no mass deportations, no book-bannings and no neo-Nazi rallies will bring it back. It’s gone.
  • globalization as a whole will not be undone. And because it will not be undone, exclusion from it will effectively remove any country from great power status in the foreseeable future. And so Putin has had his bluff called as well. If the sanctions hold, the danger from Russia henceforth will come from desperation, not ambition.
  • d this is often the risk of reactionary movements. The backlash they provoke can be lethal to their cause.
  • If Trudeau tried to freeze the bank accounts of political opponents, the West has chosen to cut an entire country off from global finance — to precipitate its collapse. The scale of this organized global cabal and the immensity of its power should alarm anyone. Putin’s hyper-nationalism has actually generated the most potent globalist power grab since the Cold War. And made it look reasonable.
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As a Crisis Hotline Grows, So Do Fears It Won't Be Ready - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...hotline-mental-health-988.html
shared by criscimagnael on 14 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline — the number posted on student identification cards, atop Google search results and in warning labels on television shows — is about to get a major reboot, casting it as the 911 for mental health.
  • starting in July will have its own three-digit number, 988, and operators who will not only counsel callers but eventually be equipped to dispatch specially trained responders.
  • But there are growing concerns that the 24-hour hotline, already straining to meet demand, will not be able to deliver on the promises of the overhaul unless states supplement the federal money with significant funds for staffing, according to interviews and government reports.
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  • But after the number changes to 988 — a shift that involves upgrading telecom infrastructure and bringing more call centers online — use of the hotline is expected to grow exponentially over the next few years. (The current number is 800-273-8255.)
  • The only call center in South Carolina, for instance, until recently operated out of an old, dark basement, near a boiler room. The last remaining one in Louisiana has struggled to keep up with an influx of calls after another center closed and its replacement went offline during the pandemic. Minnesota and Wyoming have had periods with no centers at all. When local centers cannot pick up, calls are pushed to national backup centers, where counselors are less likely to be familiar with local resources and wait times can be too long for people in crisis.
  • As a teenager, she made dozens of late-night calls to the Lifeline. A volunteer named Chris, who worked the late shift, usually would pick up and talk her to safety. But during the last several years, she has found it increasingly difficult to reach a counselor. Several times, she said, she hung up and harmed herself.
  • A woman from Michigan, who said she waited twice for over an hour before hanging up, likened the experiences to calling airline customer service — except that she was seeking suggestions on “not killing myself.” A teenager from Mississippi recounted calling three times one night without getting through, and then overdosing.
  • For 988, such fees could also help pay for mobile response teams that can be dispatched to people in crisis, as well as for specialized triage centers — both significant, and costly, elements of what advocates see as a watershed opportunity to recast the delivery of mental health care.
  • “Our concern is very much about whether there will be someone to answer that call when someone is in crisis,” said Hannah Wesolowski, chief advocacy officer for the National Alliance on Mental Illness.
  • “There are thousands of users — many of whom may be in suicidal crisis — who seek assistance and are unable to get the lifesaving help they deserve,” the report said.
  • Paying for 988, and what comes with it, has emerged as a contentious issue for states. Some lawmakers are wary of adding what they see as a new tax. Others think 988 is redundant with other resources. And telecommunications lobbyists, while broadly supportive of 988, have pushed back on some proposed fees.
  • “It is just like the United States Congress, though, to send us something like this” — with instructions that “you are going to fund it,” he said.
  • “With all due respect, 988 is going to save the taxpayers a whole lot of money,” he said.
  • “The crisis centers are like, ‘You don’t get any of those other things if people aren’t here to answer the phone,’” said Ms. Battle, director of access at the Harris Center, which provides services for mental health issues and developmental disabilities.
  • One goal of 988 is to eventually answer 95 percent of all incoming calls within 20 seconds. The data analysis showed that only two states had Lifeline answer rates above 95 percent in the fourth quarter of last year. Thirty-three states had more than 15 percent of their calls abandoned.
  • “People call in their most dire state of need.”
  • West Virginia’s lone call center answering the Lifeline, First Choice Services, also answers more than 15 other numbers, including ones for gambling, tobacco and drug and alcohol addiction, most with volume rising during the pandemic.
  • “We have a very real fear that without funding our program in a substantial way,” she said, “our West Virginia callers will suddenly be facing what has been a problem nationally.”
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Finding a Way Out of the War in Ukraine Proves Elusive - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...russia-ukraine-us-endgame.html
shared by criscimagnael on 14 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • The United States accurately predicted the start of the war in Ukraine, sounding the alarm that an invasion was imminent despite Moscow’s denials and Europe’s skepticism. Predicting how it might end is proving far more difficult.
  • At the Pentagon, there are models of a slogging conflict that brings more needless death and destruction to a nascent European democracy, and others in which Mr. Putin settles for what some believe was his original objective: seizing a broad swath of the south and east, connecting Russia by land to Crimea, which he annexed in 2014.
  • And there is a more terrifying endgame, in which NATO nations get sucked more directly into the conflict, by accident or design.
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  • In interviews with senior American and European officials in recent days, there is a consensus on one point: Just as the last two weeks revealed that Russia’s vaunted military faltered in its invasion plan, the next two or three may reveal whether Ukraine can survive as a state, and negotiate an end to the war.
  • And there is the possibility that Mr. Putin, angered by the slowness of his offensive in Ukraine, may reach for other weapons: chemical, biological, nuclear and cyber.
  • Mr. Sullivan said that Russia would suffer “severe consequences” if it used chemical weapons, without specifying what those would be.
  • Quietly, the White House and the senior American military leadership have been modeling how they would respond to a series of escalations, including major cyberattacks on American financial institutions and the use of a tactical or “battlefield” nuclear weapon by Mr. Putin to signal to the rest of the world that he would brook no interference as he moves to crush Ukraine.
  • Even with Ukrainians begging for more offensive weapons and American intervention, Mr. Biden has stuck to his determination that he will not directly engage the forces of a nuclear-armed superpower.
  • The idea that we’re going to send in offensive equipment,” Mr. Biden said in Philadelphia to the House Democratic Caucus on Friday, “and have planes and tanks and trains going in with American pilots and American crews, just understand — and don’t kid yourself, no matter what you all say — that’s called ‘World War III.’ OK? Let’s get it straight here.”
  • A French government account of a call to Mr. Putin on Saturday by Mr. Macron and Mr. Scholz termed it “disappointing with Putin’s insincerity: He is determined to continue the war.”
  • no evidence from the conversations so far that Mr. Putin has changed course; he remains “intent on destroying Ukraine.”
  • Despite his military’s logistical problems, Mr. Putin appears intent on intensifying his campaign and laying siege to Kyiv, the capital; Kharkiv, the country’s second-largest city; and other Ukrainian urban centers.
  • “I think Putin is angry and frustrated right now,” Mr. Burns said. He is likely to “try to grind down the Ukrainian military with no regard for civilian casualties,” he added.
  • Mr. Putin has demonstrated in past conflicts in Syria and Chechnya a willingness not only to bomb heavily populated areas but also to use civilian casualties as leverage against his enemies. Senior U.S. officials said the coming weeks could see a long, drawn-out fight with thousands of casualties on both sides, as well as among the roughly 1.5 million citizens remaining in the city.
  • “It will come at a very high price in Russian blood,” said retired Adm. James G. Stavridis, the former supreme allied commander for Europe. That high cost, he added, could cause Mr. Putin to destroy the city with an onslaught of missiles, artillery and bombs — “continuing a swath of war crimes unlike any we have seen in the 21st century.”
  • Russian forces are still subjecting Mariupol to siege and bombardment, but are close to securing that strategic southern port city and, with it, a land bridge from Crimea in the south to the Donbas region in the east that has been controlled by Russian-backed separatists since 2014.
  • And if Russia can seize Odessa, a pivotal Black Sea port city, and perhaps the remaining Ukrainian coast to the southeast, it would deprive Ukraine of important access to the sea.
  • “The most probable endgame, sadly, is a partition of Ukraine,” said Mr. Stavridis, pointing to the outcome of the Balkan wars in the 1990s as a model. “Putin would take the southeast of the country, and the ethnic Russians would gravitate there. The rest of the nation, overwhelmingly Ukrainian, would continue as a sovereign state.”
  • The fear now is that the war could expand.The more the fighting moves west, the more likely it is that an errant missile lands in NATO territory, or the Russians take down a NATO aircraft.
  • So far there are none of the procedures in place that American and Russian pilots use over Syria, for example, to prevent accidental conflict. And Mr. Putin has twice issued thinly veiled reminders of his nuclear capabilities, reminding the world that if the conflict does not go his way he has far larger, and far more fearsome, weapons to call into play.
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Why Did So Many People Stop Going to Church? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...674843 christian culture requirement life demand elevation
shared by Javier E on 31 Jul 23 - No Cached
  • Forty million Americans have stopped attending church in the past 25 years. That’s something like 12 percent of the population, and it represents the largest concentrated change in church attendance in American history
  • This change is also bad news for America as a whole: Participation in a religious community generally correlates with better health outcomes and longer life, higher financial generosity, and more stable families
  • A new book, written by Jim Davis, a pastor at an evangelical church in Orlando, and Michael Graham, a writer with the Gospel Coalition, draws on surveys of more than 7,000 Americans by the political scientists Ryan Burge and Paul Djupe, attempting to explain why people have left churches—or “dechurched,
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  • an intriguing possibility: What if the problem isn’t that churches are asking too much of their members, but that they aren’t asking nearly enough?
  • The Great Dechurching finds that religious abuse and more general moral corruption in churches have driven people away
  • But Davis and Graham also find that a much larger share of those who have left church have done so for more banal reasons. The book suggests that the defining problem driving out most people who leave is … just how American life works in the 21st century.
  • Contemporary America simply isn’t set up to promote mutuality, care, or common life. Rather, it is designed to maximize individual accomplishment as defined by professional and financial success
  • Such a system leaves precious little time or energy for forms of community that don’t contribute to one’s own professional life or, as one ages, the professional prospects of one’s children
  • Workism reigns in America, and because of it, community in America, religious community included, is a math problem that doesn’t add up.
  • for most Americans who were once a part of churches but have since left, the process of leaving was gradual, and in many cases they didn’t realize it was even happening until it already had. It’s less like jumping off a cliff and more like driving down a slope, eventually realizing that you can no longer see the place you started from.
  • a typical evangelical dechurcher: a 30-something woman who grew up in a suburban megachurch, was heavily invested in a campus ministry while in college, then after graduating moved into a full-time job and began attending a young-adults group in a local church. In her 20s, she meets a guy who is less religiously engaged, they get married, and, at some point early in their marriage, after their first or second child is born, they stop going to church. Maybe the baby isn’t sleeping well
  • In other cases, a person might be entering mid-career, working a high-stress job requiring a 60- or 70-hour workweek. Add to that 15 hours of commute time, and suddenly something like two-thirds of their waking hours in the week are already accounted for. And so when a friend invites them to a Sunday-morning brunch, they probably want to go to church, but they also want to see that friend, because they haven’t been able to see them for months. The friend wins out.
  • After a few weeks of either scenario, the thought of going to church on Sunday carries a certain mental burden with it—you might want to go, but you also dread the inevitable questions about where you have been.
  • The underlying challenge for many is that their lives are stretched like a rubber band about to snap—and church attendance ends up feeling like an item on a checklist that’s already too long.
  • In theory, the Christian Church could be an antidote to all that. What is more needed in our time than a community marked by sincere love, sharing what they have from each according to their ability and to each according to their need, eating together regularly, generously serving neighbors, and living lives of quiet virtue and prayer
  • A healthy church can be a safety net
  • Perhaps more important, it reminds people that their identity is not in their job or how much money they make; they are children of God, loved and protected and infinitely valuable.
  • But a vibrant, life-giving church requires more, not less, time and energy from its members. It asks people to prioritize one another over our career, to prioritize prayer and time reading scripture over accomplishment.
  • If people are already leaving—especially if they are leaving because they feel too busy and burned out to attend church regularly—why would they want to be part of a church that asks so much of them?
  • The problem in front of us is not that we have a healthy, sustainable society that doesn’t have room for church. The problem is that many Americans have adopted a way of life that has left us lonely, anxious, and uncertain of how to live in community with other people.
  • The tragedy of American churches is that they have been so caught up in this same world that we now find they have nothing to offer these suffering people that can’t be more easily found somewhere else
  • American churches have too often been content to function as a kind of vaguely spiritual NGO, an organization of detached individuals who meet together for religious services that inspire them, provide practical life advice, or offer positive emotional experiences
  • Too often it has not been a community that through its preaching and living bears witness to another way to live.
  • The theologian Stanley Hauerwas captured the problem well when he said that “pastoral care has become obsessed with the personal wounds of people in advanced industrial societies who have discovered that their lives lack meaning.” The difficulty is that many of the wounds and aches provoked by our current order aren’t of a sort that can be managed or life-hacked away. They are resolved only by changing one’s life, by becoming a radically different sort of person belonging to a radically different sort of community.
  • this community was thriving not because it found ways to scale down what it asked of its members but because it found a way to scale up what they provided to one another
  • Their way of living frees them from the treadmill of workism. Work, in this community, is judged not by the money it generates but by the people it serves. In a workist culture that believes dignity is grounded in accomplishment, simply reclaiming this alternative form of dignity becomes a radical act.
  • In the Gospels, Jesus tells his first disciples to leave their old way of life behind, going so far as abandoning their plow or fishing nets where they are and, if necessary, even leaving behind their parents. A church that doesn’t expect at least this much from one another isn’t really a church in the way Jesus spoke about it
  • , it also is likely a church that won’t survive the challenges facing us today.
  • The great dechurching could be the beginning of a new moment for churches, a moment marked less by aspiration to respectability and success, with less focus on individuals aligning themselves with American values and assumptions
  • Churches could model better, truer sorts of communities, ones in which the hungry are fed, the weak are lifted up, and the proud are cast down
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What Oppenheimer really knew about an atomic bomb ending the world - The Washington Post - 0 views

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  • In a chilling, existential, bizarrely comic moment, the new movie “Oppenheimer” revives an old question: Did Manhattan Project scientists think there was even a minute possibility that detonating the first atomic bomb on the remote plains of New Mexico could destroy the world?
  • physicists knew it wouldn’t, long before the Trinity test on July 16, 1945, at the Alamogordo Bombing Range, about 210 miles south of the secret Los Alamos, N.M., laboratory.
  • “This thing has been blown out of proportion over the years,” said Richard Rhodes, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Making of the Atomic Bomb.” The question on the scientists’ minds before the test, he said, “wasn’t, ‘Is it going to blow up the world?’ It was, ‘Is it going to work at all?’”
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  • In the movie, one scene has J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the laboratory, seeking to reassure his boss, Gen. Leslie Groves, on the eve of the test. Upon investigation, Oppenheimer tells him, physicists have concluded that the chances the test detonation will destroy the world are “near zero.” Realizing the news has alarmed, not reassured, the general, Oppenheimer asks, “What do you want from theory alone?”“Zero would be nice,” the general replies.
  • no physicists or historians interviewed for this story recalled coming across any mention of such a conversation between Oppenheimer and the general in the historical record.
  • Still, the discussions and calculations persisted long after the Trinity test. In 1946, three Manhattan project scientists, including Teller, who would later become known as the father of the hydrogen bomb, wrote a report concluding that the explosive force of the first atomic bomb wasn’t even close to what would be required to trigger a planet-destroying chain reaction in air. The report was not declassified until 1973.
  • At a conference in the summer of 1942, almost a full year before Los Alamos opened, physicist Edward Teller raised the possibility of atomic bombs igniting Earth’s oceans or atmosphere. According to Rhodes’s account, Hans Bethe, who headed the theoretical division at Los Alamos, “didn’t believe it from the first minute” but nonetheless performed the calculations convincing the other physicists that such a disaster was not a reasonable possibility.
  • “I don’t think any physicists seriously worried about it,” said John Preskill, a professor of theoretical physics at California Institute of Technology.
  • “Did the actual exchange happen at that moment? No, I don’t think so,” said Alex Wellerstein, an associate professor at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J., and author of the 2021 book, “Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States.”“But were there discussions like that? I believe so,” he added.
  • A 1979 study by scientists at the University of California’s Lawrence Livermore Laboratory examined the question of whether a nuclear explosion might trigger a runaway reaction in the atmosphere or oceans. In page after page of mathematical equations, the scientists described a complex set of factors that made atmospheric ignition effectively impossible.
  • As outlandish as the notion was to many scientists, the nuclear research organization CERN felt obliged to deal with the fear, noting on its website that “some theories suggest that the formation of tiny ‘quantum’ black holes may be possible. The observation of such an event would be thrilling in terms of our understanding of the Universe; and would be perfectly safe.”
  • Dudley’s essay also recounted a story that on the day of the test, “as zero hour approached” Gen. Groves was annoyed to find Manhattan Project physicist and Nobel Prize winner Enrico Fermi making bets with colleagues about whether the bomb would ignite the atmosphere, “and, if so, whether it would destroy only New Mexico ― or the entire world.” (Some experts have suggested Fermi’s actions may have been more of a joke, or an example of gallows humor.)
  • Fascination with this doomsday scenario may stem, at least in part, from a misunderstanding of what physicists mean when they say “near zero.” The branch of physics known as quantum mechanics, which deals with matter and light at the atomic and subatomic scale, does not rule out any possibilities.
  • For example, if a boy tosses a rubber ball at a brick wall, there is an exceedingly remote — but still valid — possibility that instead of watching the ball bounce back, he could see it pass through the wall.
  • Aditi Verma, an assistant professor of nuclear engineering and radiological sciences at the University of Michigan, put it this way: “What a physicist means by ‘near zero’ would be zero to an engineer.”
  • In the 2000s, scientists encountered a similar problem of terminology as they prepared to generate high-speed particle collisions at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. Talk surfaced that the activity might generate a black hole that would devour Earth.
  • Probably the easiest to grasp is the fact that, even under the harshest scenarios, far more energy would be lost in the explosion than gained, wiping out any chance to sustain a chain reaction.
  • In other words, any black hole created by the collider would be far too small to pose any risk to the planet.Scientists say such disaster scenarios are sometimes the price of crossing new thresholds of discovery.
  • “You don’t often talk in certainties,” he said. “You talk in probabilities. If you haven’t done the experiment, you are hesitant to say ‘This is impossible. It will never happen.’ … It was good to think it through.”
  • Rhodes added that he hopes the “Oppenheimer” movie will not lead people to doubt the scientists on the Manhattan Project.“They knew what they were doing,” he said. “They were not feeling around in the dark.”
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I Was Wrong About Trigger Warnings - The Atlantic - 0 views

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  • Trigger warnings migrated from feminist websites and blogs to college campuses and progressive groups. Often, they seemed more about emphasizing the upsetting nature of certain topics than about accommodating people who had experienced traumatic events. By 2013, they had become so pervasive—and so controversial—that Slate declared it “The Year of the Trigger Warning.”
  • he issue only got more complicated from there. Around 2016, Richard Friedman, who ran the student mental-health program at Cornell for 22 years, started seeing the number of people seeking help each year increase by 10 or 15 percent. “Not just that,” he told me, “but the way young people were talking about upsetting events changed.
  • He described “this sense of being harmed by things that were unfamiliar and uncomfortable. The language that was being used seemed inflated relative to the actual harm that could be done. I mean, I was surprised—people were very upset about things that we would never have thought would be dangerous.” Some students, for instance, complained about lecturers who’d made comments they disliked, or teachers whose beliefs contradicted their personal values.
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  • Friedman worried that students also saw themselves as fragile, and seemed to believe that coming into contact with offensive or challenging information was psychologically detrimental. In asking for more robust warnings about potentially upsetting classroom material, the students seemed to be saying: This could hurt us, and this institution owes us protection from distress.
  • My own doubts about all of this came, ironically, from reporting on trauma. I’ve interviewed women around the world about the worst things human beings do to one another. I started to notice a concerning dissonance between what researchers understand about trauma and resilience, and the ways in which the concepts were being wielded in progressive institutions. And I began to question my own role in all of it.
  • as the mental health of adolescent girls and college students crumbles, and as activist organizations, including feminist ones, find themselves repeatedly embroiled in internecine debates over power and language, a question nags: In giving greater weight to claims of individual hurt and victimization, have we inadvertently raised a generation that has fewer tools to manage hardship and transform adversity into agency?
  • Since my days as a feminist blogger, mental health among teenagers has plummeted. From 2007 to 2019, the suicide rate for children ages 10 to 14 tripled; for girls in that age group, it nearly quadrupled. A 2021 CDC report found that 57 percent of female high-school students reported “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness,” up from 36 percent in 2011. Though the pandemic undoubtedly contributed to a crash in adolescent mental health, the downturn began well before COVID hit.
  • Part of the issue may be a social-media ecosystem that lets teens live within a bubble of like-minded peers and tends to privilege the loudest, most aggrieved voices; this kind of insularity can encourage teenagers to understand distressing experiences as traumatizing. “I think it’s easier for them to artificially curate environments that are comfortable,” Shaili Jain, a physician and PTSD specialist, told me. “And I think that is backfiring. Because then when they’re in a situation where they’re not comfortable, it feels really alarming to them.”
  • The CDC study suggests that, over the past decade, bullying among high schoolers has actually decreased in certain respects. Today’s teenagers are also less likely to drink or use illicit drugs than they were 10 years ago. And even before pandemic-relief funds slashed the child-poverty rate, the percentage of children living in poverty fell precipitously after 2012. American public high schoolers are more likely to graduate than at any other time in our country’s history, and girls are significantly more likely to graduate than boys.
  • So what has changed for the worse for teenage girls since roughly 2010? The forces behind their deteriorating mental health are opaque and complex, but one big shift has been a decline in the time teenagers spend with their friends in person, dipping by 11 hours a week—a decline that began before the pandemic, but was badly exacerbated by it
  • Since 2014, the proportion of teens with smartphones has risen by 22 percent, and the proportion who say they use the internet “almost constantly” has doubled
  • this idea—that to develop resilience, we must tough out hard situations—places a heavier burden on some people than others.
  • Applying the language of trauma to an event changes the way we process it. That may be a good thing, allowing a person to face a moment that truly cleaved their life into a before and an after, and to seek help and begin healing. Or it may amplify feelings of helplessness and hopelessness, elevating those feelings above a sense of competence and control.
  • “We have this saying in the mental-health world: ‘Perception is reality,’ ” Jain said. “So if someone is adamant that they felt something was traumatizing, that is their reality, and there’s probably going to be mental-health consequences of that.”
  • Martin Seligman, the director of the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania, has spent the past 50 years researching resilience. One study he co-authored looked at the U.S. Army, to see if there was a way to predict PTSD. Unsurprisingly, he and his fellow researchers found a link to the severity of the combat to which soldiers were exposed
  • But the preexisting disposition that soldiers brought to their battlefield experiences also mattered. “If you’re a catastrophizer, in the worst 10 or 20 percent, you’re more than three times as likely to come down with PTSD if you face severe combat,” Seligman told me. “And this is true at every level of severity of combat—the percentage goes down, but it’s still about twice as high, even with mild combat or no obvious combat.”
  • In other words, a person’s sense of themselves as either capable of persevering through hardship or unable to manage it can be self-fulfilling. “To the extent we overcome and cope with the adversities and traumas in our life, we develop more mastery, more resilience, more ability to fend off bad events in the future,”
  • Teenage girls report troublingly high rates of sexual violence and bullying, as well as concern for their own physical safety at school. But it’s not clear that their material circumstances have taken a plunge steep enough to explain their mental-health decline
  • soldiers who experienced severe trauma could not only survive, but actually turn their suffering into a source of strength. “About as many people who showed PTSD showed something called post-traumatic growth, which means they have an awful time during the event, but a year later they’re stronger physically and psychologically than they were to begin with,” he said. But that empowering message has yet to take hold in society.
  • what would be a more productive way to approach adversity
  • physical exercise. “It’s like any form of strength training,” he told me. “People have no hesitation about going to the gym and suffering, you know, muscle pain in the service of being stronger and looking a way that they want to look. And they wake up the next day and they say, ‘Oh my God, that’s so painful. I’m so achy.’ That’s not traumatic. And yet when you bring that to the emotional world, it’s suddenly very adverse.”
  • “But conversely, to the extent that we have an ideology or a belief that when traumatic events occur, we are the helpless victims of them—that feeds on itself.”
  • he exercise metaphor rankled Michael Ungar, the director of the Resilience Research Centre at Dalhousie University, in Halifax, Canada. “Chronic exposure to a stressor like racism, misogyny, being constantly stigmatized or excluded, ableism—all of those factors do wear us down; they make us more susceptible to feelings that will be very overwhelming,” he told me. There are, after all, only so many times a person can convince themselves that they can persevere when it feels like everyone around them is telling them the opposite.
  • “the resiliency trap.” Black women in particular, she told me, have long been praised for their toughness and perseverance, but individual resiliency can’t solve structural problems
  • From Dent’s perspective, young people aren’t rejecting the concept of inner strength; they are rejecting the demand that they navigate systemic injustice with individual grit alone. When they talk about harm and trauma, they aren’t exhibiting weakness; they’re saying, Yes, I am vulnerable, and that’s human.
  • patients are being more “transparent about what they need to feel comfortable, to feel safe, to feel valued in this world,” she said. “Is that a bad thing?”
  • Most of the experts I spoke with were careful to distinguish between an individual student asking a professor for a specific accommodation to help them manage a past trauma, and a cultural inclination to avoid challenging or upsetting situations entirely
  • Thriving requires working through discomfort and hardship. But creating the conditions where that kind of resilience is possible is as much a collective responsibility as an individual one.
  • to replace our culture of trauma with a culture of resilience, we’ll have to relearn how to support one another—something we’ve lost as our society has moved toward viewing “wellness” as an individual pursuit, a state of mind accessed via self-work.
  • “If everything is traumatic and we have no capacity to cope with these moments, what does that say about our capacity to cope when something more extreme happens?”
  • “Resilience is partly about putting in place the resources for the next stressor.” Those resources have to be both internal and external
  • Social change is necessary if we want to improve well-being, but social change becomes possible only if our movements are made up of people who believe that the adversities they have faced are surmountable, that injustice does not have to be permanent, that the world can change for the better, and that they have the ability to make that change.
  • we need to provide material aid to meet basic needs. We need to repair broken community ties so fewer among us feel like they’re struggling alone. And we need to encourage the cultivation of a sense of purpose beyond the self. We also know what stands in the way of resilience: avoiding difficult ideas and imperfect people, catastrophizing, isolating ourselves inside our own heads.
  • In my interviews with women who have experienced sexual violence, I try not to put the traumatic event at the center of our conversations. My aim instead is to learn as much as I can about them as people—their families, their work, their interests, what makes them happy, and where they feel the most themselves. And I always end our conversations by asking them to reflect on how far they’ve come, and what they are proudest of.
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The average doctor in the U.S. makes $350,000 a year. Why? - The Washington Post - 0 views

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  • The average U.S. physician earns $350,000 a year. Top doctors pull in 10 times that.
  • The figures are nigh-on unimpeachable. They come from a working paper, newly updated, that analyzes more than 10 million tax records from 965,000 physicians over 13 years. The talented economist-authors also went to extreme lengths to protect filers’ privacy, as is standard for this type of research.
  • By accounting for all streams of income, they revealed that doctors make more than anyone thought — and more than any other occupation we’ve measured. In the prime earning years of 40 to 55, the average physician made $405,000 in 2017 — almost all of it (94 percent) from wages
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  • Doctors in the top 10 percent averaged $1.3 million
  • And those in the top 1 percent averaged an astounding $4 million, though most of that (85 percent) came from business income or capital gains.
  • In certain specialties, doctors see substantially more in their peak earning years: Neurosurgeons (about $920,000), orthopedic surgeons ($789,000) and radiation oncologists ($709,000) all did especially well for themselves. Specialty incomes cover 2005 to 2017 and are expressed in 2017 dollars.
  • family-practice physicians made around $230,000 a year. General practice ($225,000) and preventive-medicine ($224,000) doctors earned even less — though that’s still enough to put them at the top of the heap among all U.S. earners.
  • “There is this sense of, well, if you show that physician incomes put them at the top of the income distribution, then you’re somehow implying that they’re instead going into medicine because they want to make money. And that narrative is uncomfortable to people.”
  • why did those figures ruffle so many physician feathers?
  • “You can want to help people and you can simultaneously want to earn money and have a nicer lifestyle and demand compensation for long hours and long training. That’s totally normal behavior in the labor market.”
  • Yale University economist Jason Abaluck notes that when he asks the doctors and future doctors in his health economics classes why they earn so much, answers revolve around the brutal training required to enter the profession. “Until they finish their residency, they’re working an enormous number of hours and their lifestyle is not the lifestyle of a rich person,” Abaluck told us.
  • why do physicians make that much?
  • On average, doctors — much like anyone else — behave in ways that just happen to drive up their income. For example, the economists found that graduates from the top medical schools, who can presumably write their own ticket to any field they want, tend to choose those that pay the most.
  • “Our analysis shows that certainly physicians respond to earnings when choosing specialties,” Polyakova told us. “And there’s nothing wrong with that, in my opinion.
  • “In general, U.S. physicians are making about 50 percent more than German physicians and about more than twice as much as U.K. physicians,
  • Grover said the widest gaps were “really driven by surgeons and a handful of procedural specialties,” doctors who perform procedures with clear outcomes, rather than preventing disease or treating chronic condition
  • “we’re not about prevention, you know?” he said, noting that his own PhD is in public health. “I wish it was different, but it ain’t!”
  • The United States has fewer doctors per person than 27 out of 31 member countries tracked by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
  • In 1970, based on a slightly different measure that’s been tracked for longer, America had more licensed physicians per person than all but two of the 10 countries for which we have data. What caused the collapse?
  • the United States has far fewer residency slots than qualified med school graduates, which means thousands of qualified future physicians are annually shut out of the residency pipeline, denied their chosen career and stuck with no way to pay back those quarter-million-dollar loans.
  • “I’d like to see an in-depth analysis of the effect of the government capping the number of residency spots and how it’s created an artificial ‘physician shortage’ even though we have thousands of talented and graduated doctors that can’t practice due to not enough residency spots,”
  • Such an analysis would begin with a deeply influential 1980 report,
  • That report, by a federal advisory committee tasked with ensuring the nation had neither too few nor too many doctors, concluded that America was barreling toward a massive physician surplus. It came out just before President Ronald Reagan took office, and the new administration seemed only too eager to cut back on federal spending on doctor-training systems.
  • ssociation of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), a coalition of MD-granting medical schools and affiliated teaching hospitals, slammed the brakes on a long expansion. From 1980 to around 2004, the number of medical grads flatlined, even as the American population rose 29 percent.
  • Federal support for residencies was also ratcheted down, making it expensive or impossible for hospitals to provide enough slots for all the medical school graduates hitting the market each year. That effort peaked with the 1997 Balanced Budget Act which, among other things, froze funding for residencies — partially under the flawed assumption that HMOs would forever reduce the need for medical care in America, Orr writes. That freeze has yet to fully unwind.
  • or decades, many policymakers believed more doctors caused higher medical spending. Orr says that’s partly true, but “the early studies failed to differentiate between increased availability of valuable medical services and unnecessary treatment and services.”
  • “In reality, the greater utilization in places with more doctors represented greater availability, both in terms of expanded access to primary care and an ever-growing array of new and more advanced medical services,” he writes. “The impact of physician supply on levels of excessive treatment appears to be either small or nonexistent.”
  • “People have a narrative that physician earnings is one of the main drivers of high health-care costs in the U.S.,” Polyakova told us. “It is kind of hard to support this narrative if ultimately physicians earn less than 10 percent of national health-care expenditures.”
  • Polyakova and her collaborators find doctor pay consumes only 8.6 percent of overall health spending. It grew a bit faster than inflation over the time period studied, but much slower than overall health-care costs.
  • Regardless, the dramatic limits on medical school enrollment and residencies enjoyed strong support from the AAMC and the AMA. We were surprised to hear both organizations now sound the alarm about a doctor shortage. MD-granting medical schools started expanding again in 2005.
  • it’s because states have responded to the shortage by empowering nurse practitioners and physician assistants to perform tasks that once were the sole province of physicians. Over the past 20 years, the number of registered nurses grew almost twice as quickly as the number of doctors, and the number of physician assistants grew almost three times as rapidly, our analysis showed.
  • While there still aren’t enough residency positions, we’re getting more thanks in part to recent federal spending bills that will fund 1,200 more slots over the next few years.
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The Beekeepers Who Don't Want You to Buy More Bees - The New York Times - 0 views

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  • he and other beekeepers, as well as a broad variety of leading conservationists, have come to a very different conclusion: The craze for honey bees now presents a genuine ecological challenge. Not just in Slovenia, but around the world.
  • “If you overcrowd any space with honey bees, there is a competition for natural resources, and since bees have the largest numbers, they push out other pollinators, which actually harms biodiversity,” he said, after a recent visit to the B&B bees. “I would say that the best thing you could do for honey bees right now is not take up beekeeping.”
  • The number of beehives around the world has risen by nearly 26 percent in the last decade, to 102 million from 81 million.
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  • The notion has spurred a boom in beekeeping, most notably among corporations eager to demonstrate their green bona fides.
  • A malady originally dubbed disappearing disease had been afflicting honey bees for decades. In the fall of 2006, an American beekeeper named Dave Hackenberg checked on his 400 hives and found that in many, most of the worker bees had disappeared. Other beekeepers started to report that they were losing upward of 90 percent of their colonies. The phenomenon was renamed colony collapse disorder. The cause remains unclear, but experts tend to blame pesticides, an invasive parasite, a reduction in forageable habitat and climate change. An alarm was sounded, and “save the bees” became a rallying cry.
  • “There are now more honey bees on the planet than there have ever been in human history.”
  • there is a widespread and now deeply rooted belief that the global population of honey bees has been running dangerously low for more than a decade.
  • Still, the save-the-bees narrative persists. Its longevity stems from confusion about what kind of bees actually need to be rescued. There are more than 20,000 species of wild bees in the world, and many people don’t realize they exist. That’s because they don’t produce honey and live all but invisibly, in ground nests and cavities like hollow tree trunks. But they are indispensable pollinators of plants, flowers and crops.
  • Researchers have found that many species of wild bees are, in fact, declining. So trying to save them makes eminent sense. But hobbyists and corporations, not to mention luminaries like Beyoncé and Queen Camilla, are drawn only to the seven or so species of honey bees — the one group supported by a multibillion-dollar agribusiness and that doesn’t need the help.
  • Hives are now getting installed at what beekeeping association leaders say is a record pace. As with the B&B Hotel, they are typically motivated by an impulse to do something positive for the environment that is also highly visible — an apiary form of greenwashing
  • New York City has a similar problem, says Andrew Coté, president of the New York City Beekeepers Association. In February, MoMA asked him to install the hives it recently showed off. He declined.“The population is already overwhelming the finite floral resources,” he said. “We don’t need more honey bees here.”
  • Today, hives are so ubiquitous in some places, especially urban areas, that the amount of honey each yields is dropping. Slovenia now produces less honey than it did 15 years ago, according to government figures, even though it has more than doubled the number of hives in the country. That’s because there is not enough nectar to go around, said Matjaz Levicar, a Slovenian beekeeping instructor, and honey bees are consuming it to survive rather than turning it into honey.
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German Businesses Bet Big on China, and They're Starting to Worry - The New York Times - 0 views

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  • Long a linchpin of Chinese trade in Europe, Germany is increasingly caught in the diplomatic tussle between the world’s two largest economies — wooed by China but urged by Washington to move further away from Beijing
  • These companies provide the majority of Germany’s economic output, according to some studies. They employ 60 percent of its workers, and make up 99 percent of its private sector — a higher percentage than in any industrialized nation in the world.
  • These companies, known in German as the “Mittelstand,” are struggling to create a model for the future, as the country’s socioeconomic order begins to falter under the weight of stalled modernization and ruptures in global politics.
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  • Some executives like Mr. Haeusgen are embracing transformation, testing new strategies and markets. Other businesses, however, are wary of abandoning a model that for decades enabled Germany to thrive but defied change.
  • Hawe’s handling of international affairs is not just a concern for its 2,700 employees. The economies of some German towns depend on it.
  • In Kaufbeuren, a brightly painted Bavarian town nestled below the Alps, Hawe is a top employer. In the tiny village of Sachsenkam, 60 miles to the west, Hawe provides 250 jobs — the next largest employer is the local brewery, with a staff of 17.
  • “It’s like we were successful for too long,” said Stefan Bosse, the mayor of Kaufbeuren, who is keen to attract other businesses to diversify the employers his town relies on. “Now, gradually, we see: ‘Uh oh — this is not a given. This can also be endangered.’
  • The archetypal Mittelstand company is based in a rural German town, making a piece of equipment few have heard of, but that is crucial for goods worldwide — like a screw needed for every airplane or passenger car.
  • The government, too, has a poor record in shedding outdated practices — like its labyrinth, paperwork-based bureaucracy. In 2017, it vowed by 2022 to digitalize its 575 most used services, like company registrations. A year past that deadline, said Mr. Bianchi, only 22 percent of those services are online.
  • “The German business model, particularly Mittelstand, is being extremely good at doing one thing: Slowly but steadily perfecting one product,” said Mathias Bianchi, spokesman for the German Mittelstand Association. “Because that worked so well for years, they had no need to adapt to changes. But now, they need to adjust to the new economic reality.”
  • Even as the tech revolution and climate change added strain in recent decades, Germany’s model plodded profitably along.
  • But the pillars it relied on to do that — cheap Russian natural gas and the Chinese market — are collapsing.
  • Staking out a socioeconomic transformation for the country, pledged by Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s coalition government, has become a source of national anxiety.
  • Like its population, Germany’s business owners and entrepreneurs are aging — the average Mittelstand association member is 55.
  • Some are resistant to adapting to new technologies and cling to a loyalty-based system that created lifetime employees — and customers
  • How Hawe and other midsize German companies navigate these new global forces will be critical to the country’s future prosperity. Though Germany’s 20th century success as the economic powerhouse of Europe is often seen through its biggest brands — like Volkswagen, Mercedes and Siemens — it is small and medium enterprises that are the backbone of its economy.
  • Such failures makes businesses wary of transformation plans the government says will be costly now, but will make Germany a diversified, digitized and climate neutral economy.
  • Over half the companies polled did not want to expand in Germany, and a quarter were considering relocating.
  • Marita Riesner, inspecting parts, said her heating costs spiked to 740 euros ($803) a month from 120 euros ($130). She and her neighbors are growing vegetable gardens to ease the pain of inflation as the country dips into recession.
  • “I was a very positive thinker before,” she said. “But these days, I’m sweating it. It seems a lot is going wrong.”
  • Should geopolitical events disrupt business with China, Mr. Haeusgen said, the consequences could eliminate more than half of Hawe’s jobs in Kaufbeuren. Currently, he said, 20 percent of Hawe’s business comes from China.
  • Some business groups raised alarm in recent years over Germany’s vast exposure to China — before the risks were taken seriously by former chancellor Angela Merkel’s government, which had heavily encouraged German-Chinese trade.
  • Today, some policymakers privately worry that an event like a Chinese attack on Taiwan would be an inescapable disaster for Germany’s economy. The government is now pushing “de-risking” by finding alternatives to trade with China.
  • The new socioeconomic model for Germany may be less about erecting pillars than managing an ever more intricate, international juggling act.
  • German officials say their strategy will maintain ties to China, but will counterbalance that by strengthening relationships with other nations, like India or Vietnam
  • The Mittelstand is doing the same: Hawe is investing heavily in India, where it plans to build a new plant, and other companies are looking to North America.
  • “It used to be that we made a majority of sales with three customers from China,” he said. “Now we have many, many smaller customers scattered all over the globe.
  • Instead of making a few parts at a huge scale, as cheaply as possible, Hawe must make a wide variety of parts for an array of customers, as quickly as possible.
  • But major brands like Volkswagen and BASF insist that China, as the world’s second-largest economy, is too important a market to give up. Such German-based multinationals are responsible for a 20 percent rise in foreign direct investment in China this year.
  • “Being able to live with and manage uncertainty and to handle complexity becomes, in my opinion, a core strength,” Mr. Haeusgen said. “The way my grandpa did it won’t work today.”
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The Steep Cost of Ron DeSantis's Vaccine Turnabout - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ron-desantis-covid.html Florida vaccine pandemic policy effects politics us history
shared by Javier E on 23 Jul 23 - No Cached
  • While Florida was an early leader in the share of over-65 residents who were vaccinated, it had fallen to the middle of the pack by the end of July 2021. When it came to younger residents, Florida lagged behind the national average in every age group.
  • That left the state particularly vulnerable when the Delta variant hit that month. Floridians died at a higher rate, adjusted for age, than residents of almost any other state during the Delta wave, according to the Times analysis. With less than 7 percent of the nation’s population, Florida accounted for 14 percent of deaths between the start of July and the end of October.
  • Of the 23,000 Floridians who died, 9,000 were younger than 65. Despite the governor’s insistence at the time that “our entire vulnerable population has basically been vaccinated,” a vast majority of the 23,000 were either unvaccinated or had not yet completed the two-dose regimen.
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  • A high vaccination rate was especially important in Florida, which trails only Maine in the share of residents 65 and older. By the end of July, Florida had vaccinated about 60 percent of adults, just shy of the national average
  • Had it reached a vaccination rate of 74 percent — the average for five New England states at the time — it could have prevented more than 16,000 deaths and more than 61,000 hospitalizations that summer, according to a study published in the medical journal The Lancet.
  • in Florida, unlike the nation as a whole — and states like New York and California that Mr. DeSantis likes to single out — most people who died from Covid died after vaccines became available to all adults, not before.
  • Mr. DeSantis and his aides have said that his opposition was to mandates, not to the vaccinations themselves. They say the governor only questioned the efficacy of the shots once it became evident that they did not necessarily prevent infection — which prompted him to criticize experts and the federal government.
  • The governor had early success in following his instincts. In 2020, the state supplied its nearly 4,000 long-term care homes with Covid tests and isolated Covid patients, avoiding New York’s mistake of releasing Covid patients from hospitals to nursing homes where they infected others. Florida’s death rate in the pandemic’s first year, adjusted for age, was lower than all but 10 other states’.
  • Florida was also one of only four states to require schools to hold in-person classes in the fall of 2020, a move that Mr. DeSantis has said defied the nation’s public health experts
  • In fact, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, a federal infectious disease expert on former President Donald J. Trump’s task force, said repeatedly that summer and fall that schools could open safely with the right precautions. Nonetheless, facing strong opposition from teachers’ unions, nearly three-fourths of the nation’s 100 largest school districts offered only remote learning that fall.
  • At the same time, though, the governor was embracing more extreme views, including those of Dr. Scott W. Atla
  • Both he and Dr. Bhattacharya argued that people who were not at risk of severe consequences should not face Covid restrictions. If they were infected, they would develop natural immunity, which would eventually build up in the population and cause the virus to fade away, they said.
  • Many public health experts were alarmed by this strategy, which was articulated in a document known as the Great Barrington Declaration. They said it would be impossible to ring-fence the vulnerable, or even to clearly communicate to the public who they were. Besides older Americans, as many as 41 million younger adults were considered to be at high risk of severe disease if infected because of underlying medical conditions like obesity.
  • Dr. Atlas, however, argued that the virus was not dangerous to an overwhelming majority of Americans. Both he and Dr. Bhattacharya said the Covid death rate for everyone under 70 was very low. Dr. Atlas claimed that children had “virtually zero” risk of death.
  • As of this summer, more than 345,000 Americans under 70 have died of the virus, and more than 3.5 million have been hospitalized
  • The disease has killed nearly 2,300 children and adolescents, and nearly 200,000 have been hospitalized.
  • Mr. DeSantis gave him a platform at a series of public events in Florida at the end of the summer of 2020. He would go on to echo Dr. Atlas’s views, sometimes in modified form, throughout the pandemic.
  • Mr. DeSantis subsequently promoted the shots in 27 counties. Florida offered the vaccine to everyone 65 and older, an eligibility system simpler than an early one recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and adopted by many states, that prioritized essential workers and those over 75.
  • But his enthusiasm for shots waned fast, tracking the growing hostility toward them among the party’s conservative activists. In late February, when Mr. DeSantis hosted a gathering of such activists for the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, he boasted that Florida was an “oasis of freedom” in a nation led by misguided health authorities.
  • By the time all adults became eligible for the vaccines in April of that year, Mr. DeSantis was rarely promoting them.
  • “Some are choosing not to take it, which is fine,” he said in March, at a 100-minute public event on Covid in which he did not once urge people to get vaccinated. In dozens of appearances on Fox News in the first half of 2021, he was carefully neutral about shots, except for those over 65.
  • “Younger people are just simply at very little risk for this,”
  • A few months later, he told Fox News that he had concluded early on that Covid “was something that was risky for elderly people,” but that it posed minimal risks for people “who were in reasonably good health, who were, say, under 50.”
  • The data-driven governor also turned away from Covid case data.
  • In May 2021, Florida closed its 27 state-run testing centers. The next month, on orders from the governor’s office, the Health Department halted daily reports on infections and deaths, switching to weekly reports that drew less attention.
  • Both polls and political events showed that Republicans were not as excited as Democrats about the shots. At an Alabama political rally that August, Mr. Trump recommended the vaccine — and was booed. When a reporter asked Mr. DeSantis later that year if he had gotten a booster shot, he responded that he had gotten “the normal shot.”
  • After the highly contagious Delta variant began spreading in Florida that summer, Mr. DeSantis insisted that his approach had worked. Younger adults were driving the surge but “they’re not getting really sick from it or anything,” he said, adding: “They will develop immunity as a result of those infections.”
  • But they were getting sick. And vaccinations, which Mr. DeSantis suddenly began recommending again in late July, took weeks to confer protection
  • With hospitalizations rising, he began a campaign to offer monoclonal antibody treatments — a triage response to the pandemic’s frightening resurgence.
  • The drug cost vastly more than shots and required more medical staff to administer. Within about six weeks, the state had administered more than 90,000 treatments and probably kept 5,000 people out of the hospital, Dr. Rivkees said.
  • Mr. DeSantis accused the media in early August of “lying” about Covid patients’ flooding hospitals. Two weeks later, Mary C. Mayhew, head of the Florida Hospital Association, said: “There can be no question that many Florida hospitals are stretched to their absolute limits.”
  • “Our patients are younger and sicker,” Mr. Smith wrote. Of 17 patients on ventilators in intensive care on Aug. 13, 2021, more than half were younger than 55. Only one was vaccinated.
  • “People say that the decision about vaccination is a personal one and it doesn’t affect anyone else,” Mr. Smith wrote. “Tell that to the kids who lost their mom.”
  • When shots became available last year for children under 5, Florida did not preorder them because, Mr. DeSantis said, he did not consider them “appropriate.” Florida’s vaccination rates are well below the national average for children under 5. The state also trails in booster shots.
  • After Dr. Ladapo issued misleading claims about the risks of Covid shots for young men, the heads of the C.D.C. and the Food and Drug Administration sent a scathing four-page rebuttal. Such misinformation “puts people at risk of death or serious illness,” they said.
  • While the pandemic waned, leaving more than 80,000 Floridians and 1.13 million Americans dead, the governor continued to push policies that kept him at the vanguard of the anti-vaccine and anti-mandate conversation. A new state law, signed by Mr. DeSantis in May, bans government agencies, businesses and schools from requiring Covid testing, vaccination or mask wearing.
  • “Everything involving Covid — I think there needs to be major, major accountability,” he said in Iowa this month. “Because if there’s not, if you don’t have a reckoning, they are going to do it again.”
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Opinion | Striking new data about young voters should alarm Trump and the GOP - The Was... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...e-trump-harvard-youth-poll-gop Gen Z young voters attitudes
shared by Javier E on 26 Jul 23 - No Cached
  • Here’s a chart showing how opinion among 18-to-29-year-olds has shifted on those issues, according to data that the Harvard Youth Poll crunched at my request:
  • numbers — which come from the Harvard Youth Poll of 18-to-29-year-olds released each spring — all suggest that today’s young voters are substantially more progressive on these issues than young voters were even five or 10 years ago. Sizable majorities now reject the idea that same-sex relationships are morally wrong (53 percent), support stricter gun laws (63 percent) and want government to provide basic necessities (62 percent).
  • support for government doing more to curb climate change soared to 57 percent in 2020 before subsiding to 50 percent this yea
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  • That small dip may reflect preoccupation with economic doldrums unleashed by covid-19
  • While that 50 percent could be higher, the issue has seen a 21-point shift, and the polling question asks if respondents want action on climate “even at the expense of economic growth.”
  • while 54 percent of young voters believed in 2010 that abortion should be legal in most or all cases, that’s up to 69 percent this year.
  • Demographer William Frey and his colleagues calculate that by the 2036 presidential race, Gen Z will represent 35 percent of eligible voters. “They’re growing up in a 21st century America that’s far more diverse, inclusive and globally connected than the 1950s and 1960s America of the GOP base,” Frey told me. “They’re going to shun the Republican Party as they get older.”
  • There are major caveats. President Biden’s approval among young people remains stubbornly low
  • There’s some evidence that the young voters who elected Barack Obama have become somewhat more conservative as they’ve aged, which could happen again
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Half of NYC Households Can't Afford to Live Here, Report Finds - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...affordable-housing-nyc.html nyc cost of living housing
shared by Javier E on 25 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • A full half of the city’s households did not have enough money to comfortably hold down an apartment, access sufficient food and basic health care, and get around, the report said
  • Public officials have been particularly alarmed by a significant drop in public school enrollment, which accelerated during the worst of the pandemic and is driven in part by Black families leaving the city over concerns about the cost of living
  • The study found that New Yorkers are even worse off than after the nadir of the pandemic. The groups’ 2021 report found that just over a third of city households could not keep up with the cost of living at the time, a figure that has since risen
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  • Households in all five boroughs needed to be pulling in at least $100,000 to afford housing, food and transportation, and to have a shot at being able to plan for the future
  • In southern Manhattan, home to some of the most expensive ZIP codes in the country, families with two adults and two children needed to make at least $150,000 combined
  • The actual median household income in the city was hovering around $70,000
  • a considerable majority of households that could not keep up with the cost of living — 80 percent — had at least one working adult, and more than half of New Yorkers who could not make ends meet had a college degree or some college credit, if not a graduate degree.
  • The affordability crisis is particularly urgent for nonwhite New Yorkers, the study found. Latino, Black and immigrant New Yorkers were bearing the brunt of the affordability crisis, and residents of the central Bronx had the highest rates of economic instability.
  • And more than 85 percent of households where single mothers were taking care of young children were unable to keep up with the cost of living
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Opinion | Will DeSantis Destroy Conservatism as We Know It? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...is-conservatism-gop-trump.html conservatism conservative national trumpism politics culture policy
shared by Javier E on 26 May 23 - No Cached
  • What is a conservative? It’s a hard question to answer, and it gets harder each day.
  • Since the second half of the 20th century, conservatism as an ideology has been largely synonymous with something called “fusionism,” an alliance between social conservatives and economic libertarians. In the Cold War era, the additional commitment to a strong national defense resulted in what was often called the “th
  • Under this formulation, the G.O.P. perceived itself as a party united more by ideology than by identity
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  • Trump, by contrast, correctly perceived that the party was not — or was no longer — primarily an ideological party. It was more clearly defined by what it was against than what it was for.
  • the ideological definition of Trumpism became something else entirely: a full-spectrum political and cultural opposition to the left, however it might be defined.
  • This transformation was also tied to a change in the way that Republicans perceive government. Fusionists such as me read the Declaration of Independence and reaffirm that governments are instituted for the purpose of securing our “unalienable rights.” Thus, the protection of liberty is an indispensable aspect of American government.
  • whom DeSantis attacks is ultimately less important than how he does it. Republicans, after all, have long fought the left, but DeSantis does it differently, in part by abandoning fusionist commitments to free speech and limited government.
  • the obvious alarm. Any government strong enough to reward friends and punish enemies is also strong enough to do the reverse,
  • the nationalist conservative movement that Trump has helped bring center stage has different priorities. In its view, the right should — to cite the words of David Azerrad, a professor at Hillsdale College — use the power of government to “reward friends and punish enemies (within the confines of the rule of law).”
  • There’s at least one key difference. Trump fights for himself above all else. His political impulses are selfish, sub-ideological and subject to revision at a moment’s notice
  • DeSantis is likewise ambitious, but his political commitments have an underlying consistency that extends beyond that ambition: He fights the left. When you understand that distinction between the two men, you understand the course of the race so far and its likely shape going forward.
  • DeSantis, a keynote speaker at the 2022 National Conservatism Conference and the ultimate example of fight club conservatism. His primary victory would signal that the transformation of conservatism since 2016 wasn’t a mere interruption of Republican ideology — one in which Republicans would return to fusionism once Trump leaves the scene — but rather the harbinger of more permanent change.
  • Why the flip-flops? Because support for vaccines and for Ukraine are now seen in populist right circles as “coding left” or — equally unacceptable — as positions of the “regime” or the “uniparty” or the “establishment.”
  • , I disagree with DeSantis on many things, but I see Trump as an entirely different order of threat — one who is demonstrably willing to help precipitate mob violence to sustain his hold on power. So should someone like me quiet his critique of DeSantis in the interest of defeating Trump?
  • I say no. I believe we can walk and chew gum at the same time, opposing Trump while upholding a vision of state power that limits its ability to “reward friends and punish enemies” so that all Americans enjoy the same rights to speak, regardless of their view of the government.
  • Moreover, suspicion of state power should extend beyond the protection of civil liberties. Conservatives have long raised proper concerns about the ability of the government to achieve the economic or cultural outcomes it desires when it institutes sweeping, large-scale government programs. And this concern is not exclusive to conservatives.
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