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Unconscious bias training is 'nonsense', says outgoing race relations chair | Race | Th... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-outgoing-race-relations-chair unconscious bias training institutional systemic racism racism UK history
shared by Javier E on 25 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • The outgoing chair of the Institute of Race Relations has decried the widespread use of “nonsense” unconscious bias training, claiming it is an obvious sidestepping of tackling racial injustice.
  • In a wide-ranging interview, the sociologist and cultural activist said he was proud of the role that his institute had played in putting institutional racism on the national agenda several decades ago, but was dismayed at the rise of terms such as unconscious bias.
  • “We made arguments to the state even when we’re on platforms alongside them saying this was nonsense. It’s racism we want to talk about, it’s systemic behaviour we want to talk about, institutionalised racism we want to talk about, not unconscious bias or racial awareness,”
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  • “It’s the stuff that kills that we want to talk about, the stuff that stunts lives that we want to talk about, the stuff that deforms lives that we want to talk about.”
  • The outgoing chair pointed to the increasing concern of a school-to-prison pipeline in the UK, where young minority ethnic children excluded from schools are forced into pupil referral units where they are groomed by criminal gangs – a clear example of systemic racism, he claims.
  • “To talk about unconscious biases is an obvious sidestepping of the matter. And it’s also wanting to let people off,” Prescod said.
  • The institute “insistently” talked about institutional racism then, but was in the minority and faced significant opposition, Prescod said. “In the end, it stuck because we then had the Macpherson report amongst others using a term which was not invented by them, but by communities of resistance.”
  • : “Ambalavaner Sivanandan [former director of IRR] and we at the institute were taking our cue from what the communities of resistance were saying. Institutionalised racism was not invented in the academy. It’s not invented by the politicians, it comes off the ground.
  • “It comes out of slow realisation where you start with one case that shows you injustice and after a while you pull that out and you realise that you’re looking at a whole string of things that tell you there’s something more than simply a wrongdoer in this situation.”
  • Prescod was not surprised at the government’s recent decision to drop crucial reform commitments made after the Windrush scandal. “This is not unlike what happened after the Macpherson report, which says very clearly institutionalised racism exists. And this is not just in the police. Any number of institutions have been looked at in this kind of way
  • When asked what he felt was the most significant change in Britain in terms of race, Prescod turned to a lyric from the British jazz band Sons of Kemet: “Don’t wanna take my country back, mate. I wanna take my country forward.” He said he finds it powerful black youth have claimed the country as their own.
  • “We now have populations here who are not thinking of themselves from some other place or going to some other place, but here, and are aware of their history of struggle. When Sons of Kemet says something like ‘we want to take our country forward’, notice all the words in the phrase.” He believes it shows a significant cultural shift of “new generations [of black Britons] born here, belonging here, speaking with a different kind of authority”.
  • Prescod said while there was no room for “triumphalism” when looking at racial progress, he was leaving his position with some hope. “There is always resistance. It’s only too clear. If you look at any situation in which somebody starts to be down-pressed, you will realise that there is somebody who is saying: get off my back, get off my throat. We don’t simply curl up.”
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The world has become a toxic prison - and a volcanic winter lurks on the horizon | The ... - 0 views

www.spectator.co.uk/...ic-winter-lurks-on-the-horizon environment history crisis culture global
shared by Javier E on 26 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • Peter Frankopan’s story of our relationship to the world across all planetary space and human time is necessarily vast – 660 pages of text, with footnotes relegated to 212 pages online – in which the grand cycle is enacted again and again
  • The stability and good weather of the 18th century had allowed Qing, Mughal, Bourbon and Hanoverian regimes all to thrive, but China and India, more settled and less anxiously aggressive than Europe, did not take off in the way that the Continent’s empires did.
  • From the very beginning, human beings have been actors in their own drama and responsible for large parts of their fate. Elasticity and inventiveness always win. Rigidity always fails, and so, for example, when the Qing dynasty began to collapse in late 18th-century China, beset by climate-induced crop failures, hunger and massive popular discontent, the contemporary administration in Japan, experiencing the same physical conditions, survived with no such difficulty.
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  • Riding the waves of mutability has always been possible if the frame of mind in government and society is adequately supple and responsive. Reliance on ancient nostrums, and expectations that old solutions will remain good enough, are almost inevitably fatal.
  • Civilisations that become dependent on large, widespread and complex supply networks and reciprocal markets usually generate their own fragilities. If one part of such a network fails, the effects cascade in a series of chain reactions through all apparently powerful participants in the system
  • The end of the Bronze Age c.1200 BC, perhaps triggered by drought in Anatolia, may have precipitated one such domino collapse, as the Hittite empire, the Mycenaeans, the Mesopotamian states and Pharaonic Egypt all either fell apart or shrank to an unrecognisable impotence.
  • Volcanoes are the unexpected killers. Their spewing of ash into an atmosphere whose winds distribute it around the globe has repeatedly destroyed summers, devastated crops, induced famines and collapsed societies
  • In his hands, the triumph of the West, with the unconscionable horrors of the Atlantic slave trade at its heart, takes on the appearance of an alarming fusion of Faust and Midas. For centuries, Europeans felt they could do no wrong. They could use the world, its people and beauties. They could transform it as they wished, shifting its plants, animals and populations where they wanted, and there would be no consequences. Or at least, as in those two myths of the cult of ‘entitlement’ – a word Frankopan repeatedly uses of the transforming empires – the consequences were hidden from the perpetrators.
  • His story of destruction over the past two centuries is one of arrogant myopia which led in the 20th century to ‘a sequence of catastrophes unparalleled both in human history and in that of the natural world. The suffering of the past 100 years has been by far the greatest in recorded history in terms of its scale and its horror’.
  • The assumption that man must conquer nature was allied to the capital and industrialised capacity to bring it about. Humanity became its own climate. Its own actions created the world in which it lived
  • The value of this book is as an act of deep understanding, recognising not only scientifically but culturally and philosophically that we are epiphenomena – not dominators of the Earth but products of it
  • Bleakly and soberingly, Frankopan recognises from the long line of precedents that the prospects are for a world of war and suffering. The destructive changes are already ‘baked in’. Success does not breed success, he says, but more often than not ‘sows the seeds of ruin’.
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Ukraine Is the West's War Now - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-is-the-wests-war-now-5d468bdb ukraine war history west crisis policy us europe
shared by Javier E on 27 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • A year later, the war in Ukraine has become, to a large extent, the West’s own. True, no American or NATO soldiers are fighting and dying on Ukrainian soil. But the U.S., its European allies and Canada have now sent some $120 billion in weapons and other aid to Ukraine, with new, more advanced military supplies on the way. If this monumental effort fails to thwart President Vladimir Putin’s ambitions, the setback would not only undermine American credibility on the world stage but also raise difficult questions about the future of the Western alliance.
  • “In many ways, we’re all-in, and we’re all-in because the realization has dawned in Europe that showing weakness to President Putin, showing no response to his atrocities, only invites him to go further and further,” said Sjoerd Sjoerdsma, a Dutch politician and member of parliament. “We have also realized that it is not only the safety and security of Ukraine that is at stake but also our own.”
  • The Russian military’s mixture of unexpected ineptitude and shocking cruelty has pulled the U.S. and allies deeper and deeper into the conflict. With one self-imposed constraint falling after another, Western goals have gradually moved from preventing the obliteration of Ukraine to supporting its military victory over Russia.
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  • It’s a more ambitious commitment that carries much higher risks—but also strategic rewards—for the Western alliance.
  • “Nobody thought the Russians would start a medieval war in the 21st century,” said Sen. James Risch, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “This conflict is going to change the face of Europe as much as World War II did.”
  • In Asia, the Middle East and elsewhere, the West’s geopolitical adversaries are calculating whether the U.S. and its allies have the stamina and cohesion to defend the rules-based international order that has benefited the West for decades.
  • In particular, the future of Taiwan and the South China Sea is closely linked to the West’s record in Ukraine.
  • “If Putin wins in Ukraine, the message to him and other authoritarian leaders will be that they can use force to get what they want. This will make the world more dangerous and us more vulnerable.”
  • The Munich conference capped several weeks in which the U.S. and its allies have dramatically expanded the scope of their military aid, an indication that Mr. Putin’s expectation that the West will eventually tire of helping Ukraine hasn’t materialized just yet
  • Both sides believe they can win on the battlefield, and little room exists for peace negotiations. Ukraine is preparing offensives to regain the roughly 18% of its territory still occupied by Moscow, including the Crimea peninsula and parts of the eastern Donbas region that Mr. Putin seized in 2014. Russia has declared four Ukrainian regions, none of which it fully controls, to be its own sovereign territory and seeks, at the very least, to conquer those lands. Mr. Putin, in a speech on Tuesday, indicated that his aspirations remain much broader, referring to Russia’s “historical territories that are now called Ukraine.”
  • A year into Europe’s bloodiest conflict since World War II, Ukraine’s own military industries have been shattered by Russian missile strikes, and its reserves of Soviet-vintage weapons are running out. By now, Kyiv can keep fighting only as long as Western assistance continues apace
  • “The next months will be very critical. If, say, another Ukrainian offensive fails, if it becomes the public narrative that it’s going to be a stalemate, support in the West might drop—perhaps not substantially, but some of the politicians will see the writing on the wall,
  • “In diplomacy, morality is part of the public narrative, but rarely part of the real decision-making process. But Ukraine’s case was one of the examples in history when you can argue that sympathy based on moral arguments was a game changer,”
  • “Some governments acted the way they did not merely based on their practical considerations but under enormous pressure of their public opinion. And that public opinion was based on moral compassion for the victim of the aggression.”
  • Mr. Putin has tried to counter the Ukrainian message by appealing to fear. On the first morning of the war, he alluded to nuclear weapons to deter the West from helping Ukraine.
  • “Putin is threatening Armageddon, and the Russians are doing it all the time, sometimes in oblique ways and sometimes in a more direct way,
  • “But when you actually poke at that and provide weapons gradually over time, there hasn’t been the catastrophic response that Putin promised.”
  • “boiling the frog.” As the U.S. began to introduce new weapons systems, it did so slowly and, initially, in limited numbers. None of these individual decisions were of sufficient scope to provoke a dramatic escalation by Moscow. But over the past 12 months, the cumulative effect of these new weapons has transformed the balance of power on the battlefield and enabled a string of strategic Ukrainian victories.
  • “If you look at the arc of Western involvement, no one would have predicted where we are now six months ago, and the same goes for six months before that. It’s a crisis response that has evolved into a policy—a policy that, probably, no one would have prescribed at the outset,” said Samuel Charap, a senior political scientist at Rand Corp. who has urged caution on arming Ukraine
  • “The West is also the frog that is boiling itself. With each incremental increase in assistance, qualitative or quantitative, we become accustomed to that being normal, and the next one doesn’t seem so extreme,”
  • “There is a dynamic here where we become desensitized to what is going on. We are in a bit of a slow-moving spiral that shows no signs of letting up.”
  • In 2014, after Mr. Putin annexed Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula and triggered a bloody war in the eastern Donbas region, covertly sending troops and heavy weapons across the border, the American and European response was limited to sanctions that only marginally affected Russia’s economy.
  • Back in 1991, President George H.W. Bush viewed Ukraine’s desire for freedom as a dangerous nuisance. That year, just months before the Soviet Union’s collapse, he delivered to the Ukrainian parliament his infamous “Chicken Kiev” speech, urging Ukrainians to abandon “suicidal nationalism” and permanently remain under the Kremlin’s rule.
  • Other analysts and policy makers argue that the true danger lies in excessive caution over accelerating Western military involvement. “We have been slow in delivering certain capabilities. We keep climbing the stairs, but it goes through a tortuous process, and in the meantime Ukrainians are dying,” said ret. Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, a former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe. “It has taken the Pentagon a long time to come to the realization that Ukraine can win, and will win, especially if we give them what they need. There has been all too much defeatist hand-wringing.”
  • At the time, President Barack Obama resisted calls to help Ukraine militarily as he sought Mr. Putin’s cooperation on his presidency’s main foreign-policy priority, the nuclear deal with Iran
  • Ukraine, Mr. Obama said in an interview with the Atlantic in 2016, “is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do.” All the evidence of the past 50 years, he added, suggested that Russian (and Chinese) decision-making wouldn’t be influenced by “talking tough or engaging in some military action.”
  • Mr. Biden, speaking in front of U.S., Polish and Ukrainian flags to a cheering crowd in Warsaw on Tuesday, had a different message. “Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia,” he pledged. “Appetites of the autocrat cannot be appeased. They must be opposed.”
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Can Biden Avert a Crisis With North Korea? - The New York Times - 0 views

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shared by kennyn-77 on 28 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • After North Korea ushered in the new year with four sets of ballistic missile tests this month, the Biden administration turned to a well-thumbed page in the Washington playbook: It called for more United Nations sanctions.
  • China and Russia blocked the proposal last week in the U.N. Security Council. And Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea, appears unfazed by the threat of more U.N. and Treasury Department sanctions — he fired off two cruise missiles on Tuesday and two more ballistic missiles on Thursday, for a total of six weapons tests this month, equal to the number for all of last year.
  • “No amount of sanctions could create the pressures that Covid created in the last two years. Yet, do we see North Korea begging and saying, ‘Take our weapons and give us some aid?’ The North Koreans will eat grass.”
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  • Mr. Biden appeared content to keep North Korea on the back burner, even though President Barack Obama told Mr. Trump in November 2016 that North Korea should be Washington’s top national security priority. Mr. Biden has yet to name a candidate to be ambassador to South Korea. The special envoy for North Korea, Sung Kim, is a veteran diplomat who has dealt with these issues before, but he is doing the job part-time — he is also ambassador to Indonesia.
  • North Korean scientists have obviously been working on the weapons program, which is central to Pyongyang’s propaganda and Mr. Kim’s main leverage in negotiations with the United States and other nations. The more weapons Mr. Kim has and the more powerful they are, the greater his stature both inside and outside North Korea.
  • Siegfried Hecker, a nuclear scientist at Stanford University who has visited North Korea, estimated the country very likely has enough nuclear material for about 45 warheads, an increase of about 20 since the end of the Obama administration. He also gave an upper-end number of 60.
  • But the leaders of those two East Asian nations are divided in their approach and remain embroiled in bitter disputes over separate issues of history and war. Japanese officials are critical of Mr. Moon’s North Korea policy. In November, Wendy Sherman, the deputy secretary of state and an experienced negotiator on North Korea and Iran, hosted a meeting with her South Korean and Japanese counterparts in Washington, but long-running hostilities resulted in an awkward news conference.
  • One of the biggest dilemmas is how to work with China to curb North Korea’s weapons program. The Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, and his colleagues are balancing various goals: They want to end the disruption caused by Mr. Kim’s weapons while also seeking to avoid a failed state on their border or Pyongyang growing close to Washington or Seoul.
  • China is by far North Korea’s biggest trading partner. Although it has approved of U.N. sanctions on occasion, it and Russia began asking in 2019 for partial relief of the Obama- and Trump-era sanctions. For a period, it was enforcing those sanctions, but then it began helping North Korea circumvent them as Beijing-Washington relations deteriorated.
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Our Nation Cannot Censor Its Way Back to Cultural Health - 0 views

frenchpress.thedispatch.com/...e-nation-cannot-censor-its-way free speech freedom cancel culture censorship education tyranny culture politics
shared by Javier E on 06 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • The Supreme Court could not be more clear about the special importance of the First Amendment in the university setting. Cohn quotes these famous words from Sweezy v. New Hampshire:
  • The essentiality of freedom in the community of American universities is almost self-evident. No one should underestimate the vital role in a democracy that is played by those who guide and train our youth. To impose any strait jacket upon the intellectual leaders in our colleges and universities would imperil the future of our Nation. No field of education is so thoroughly comprehended by man that new discoveries cannot yet be made. Particularly is that true in the social sciences, where few, if any, principles are accepted as absolutes. Scholarship cannot flourish in an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust. Teachers and students must always remain free to inquire, to study and to evaluate, to gain new maturity and understanding; otherwise, our civilization will stagnate and die.
  • Yet even when a state agency can regulate the expression of ideas, should it? After all, most cancel culture incidents don’t implicate the First Amendment either. Employers can fire you for your speech. Social media can block any of us from access to their platforms. But in law as in culture, the question of “can” is separate from the question of “should.”
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  • For example, a school board can remove the book Maus from its eighth-grade curriculum (because of profanity and mouse nudity), but should it? A school board can remove To Kill a Mockingbird (for alleged racial insensitivity) from a required reading list, but should it? 
  • In Board of Education v. Pico, a 1982 Supreme Court case that cast doubt on the ability of public schools to ban library books on the basis of their ideas alone, the court’s plurality described a purpose of public education as preparing “individuals for participation as citizens," and as vehicles for "inculcating fundamental values necessary to the maintenance of a democratic political system.”
  • Systematically suppressing ideas in public education does not help our students learn liberty, nor does it prepare them for pluralism. It teaches them to seek protection from ideas and that the method for engaging with difference is through domination. 
  • Our nation is a diverse pluralistic constitutional republic, and as James Madison noted in Federalist No. 10, we cannot respond to the inevitable rise of competing factions by suppressing liberty, tempting as that always is. Madison was shrewd and realistic enough to recognize that liberty empowers factions. As he put it, “Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires.”
  • At the same time, however, “it could not be less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency.”
  • I mounted a Christian defense of American classical liberalism, and I made the case that–while no system of government is perfect–American classical liberalism does possess two cardinal virtues. Its protections of liberty recognize both the dignity and the imperfection of man. 
  • And few liberties encompass both that dignity and imperfection more than the right to speak. The violation of that right–the deprivation of that dignity–can inflict a profound moral injury on a citizen and it can help perpetuate profound injustices in society and government. As Douglass noted, free speech is the “dread of tyrants.”
  • Moreover, as John Stuart Mill’s argument for free speech demonstrates, free speech rests on a foundation of humility.
  • Summarizing Mill, Greg articulates “three possibilities in any given argument:
  • You are wrong, in which case freedom of speech is essential to allow people to correct you.
  • You are partially correct, in which case you need free speech and contrary viewpoints to help you get a more precise understanding of what the truth really is.
  • You are 100% correct, in which unlikely event you still need people to argue with you, to try to contradict you, and to try to prove you wrong. Why? Because if you never have to defend your points of view, there is a very good chance you don’t really understand them, and that you hold them the same way you would hold a prejudice or superstition. It’s only through arguing with contrary viewpoints that you come to understand why what you believe is true.
  • In short, I value free speech, not so much because I’m right and you need to hear from me, but rather because I’m very often wrong and need to hear from you. Free speech rests upon a foundation of human fallibility.
  • As American animosity rises, we simply cannot censor our way to social peace or unity. We can, however, violate the social compact, disrupt the founding logic of our republic, and deprive American students and American citizens of the exchange of ideas and of the liberty that has indeed caused, as Douglass prophesied, “thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers, founded in injustice and wrong” to tremble in the face of righteous challenge.
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Opinion | Britain's Conservatives Enabled Boris Johnson. How Much Will It Cost Them? - ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ris-johnson-conservatives.html tory strategy identify analysis demagogue UK 2022 politics history conservative crisis culture
shared by Javier E on 07 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • he has been like Mr. Trump in his readiness to bend rules, and bend the truth, to gain and hold power; and like Mr. Trump in his almost mystical connection with voters who had previously thought themselves shunned by the political establishment.
  • The great weakness is that when the leader fails, or is exposed as fallible, everything fails
  • For decades under successive leaders, as different as Margaret Thatcher, Mrs. May or Mr. Cameron, theirs had been a self-confident party, based on support for business and the projection of a strong security identity abroad. Conservatives were hostile to high taxation and an overmighty state.
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  • Brexit, the arrival into the fold of so many former Labour voters, and the Johnson style of government has shaken all of this up.
  • One former minister under Mr. Johnson told me last week that he thought the Tories were becoming more like Labour under the socialist leader Harold Wilson of the 1960s and ’70s. So, are they the high spending, pugnaciously patriotic party of Mr. Johnson and his new voters; a party of fiscal rectitude and small government … or what?
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Opinion | Freedom is a Bad Defense For Ugly Behavior - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...crimination-racism-sexism.html freedom right-wing interpretation culture politics history
shared by Javier E on 05 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • Each of these actions used the language of freedom to justify anti-democratic politics. These, then, are what I call “ugly freedoms”: used to block the teaching of certain ideas, diminish employees’ ability to have power in the workplace and undermine public health.
  • They manifest, instead, a particular interpretation of freedom that is not expansive, but exclusionary and coercive.
  • there is a long history of ugly freedoms in this country.
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  • From the start of the American experiment the language of freedom applied only to a privileged few.
  • At the time of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, only 2 percent of the city’s population were qualified to vote.
  • overtake freedom’s meaning entirely, harnessing freedom solely to projects of exclusion, privilege and harm.
  • In the 20th century, racial segregation was justified as the freedom of white people to control public space and make their own business choices.
  • It is true the language of freedom was central to emancipation, suffrage and democratic movements of all kinds, but it has also justified violence and discrimination.
  • more and more laws, caucuses, rallies and hard-right movements use the language of freedom as a cudgel to erode democratic governance and civil rights; these laws expand the creep of authoritarianism.
  • Slave codes allowed white property owners to possess Black humans — creating what the historian Tyler Stovall called “white freedom,” the “belief (and practice) that freedom is central to white racial identity, and that only white people can or should be free.” This freedom for the white master extended to torture, rape and lifelong control over the humans he (or she) owned.
  • The ugly freedoms in American politics today increasingly justify minority rule, prejudice and anti-democratic governance. If we don’t push back against their growing popularity, we will have ceded what freedom means to those who support monopolistic rule and furthered the country’s downward slide toward authoritarianism.
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What Spotify and the 'Audio Industry' Are Doing to Musicians - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...621503 audio industry music internet history culture crisis
shared by Javier E on 09 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • At its best, Spotify is an elegant tool—a conduit between artist and art and listener. But at its worst, it’s a bad actor in a worse industry that historically treats artists miserably
  • Even though the small number of streaming services have access to almost every bit of music that’s ever been recorded, and even though they strike near-monopolistic deals with near-monopolistic major labels, there isn’t quite enough money for anyone to make a good profit on streaming music. Too many middlemen take their share, and there’s a limit to how much people are willing to pay for music now that the internet exists.
  • The biggest tech companies have other ways to make money: Apple sold music by the song before starting a streaming service but always generated most of its earnings off hardware; Google has a seemingly infinite array of mysterious revenue sources.
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  • Spotify doesn’t have those things to turn to. So it’s been turning to podcasts. Besides enticing new subscribers with Spotify-branded podcasts—Rogan and Gimlet Media at the forefront of these—Spotify gets a new place to run ads. The podcast-advertising ecosystem is still lush enough to support additional harvesting. Spotify is betting that what used to be known as the music industry is in fact dead but that maybe the company can make money in the “audio industry.” But that shift involves decisions that disappoint even people jaded by years of experience with the recording business.
  • In the context of the devaluation of so many artists’ work, the backing of Rogan feels like a particularly nihilistic move. Spotify didn’t sign him for his talent or care at all about his impact—good or ill—on the world; with a heartless, almost video-game sensibility, they signed him to take market share from Apple and Google
  • Complaints against bloodless businessmen are hardly new. But what’s happening in music today feels less like individual acts of exploitation and more like the razing of an ecosystem.
  • When Rogan announced his signing, he emphasized that Spotify would have no creative control over his podcast. He was agreeing to a licensing deal, but he wouldn’t be an employee. “It will be the exact same show,” Rogan claimed
  • His comments fell somewhere between the gentle vibe of “Look, man, they’re offering me $100 million, so, uh, what am I supposed to do?” and a more aggressive “Spotify doesn’t own me, man. They are renting me for a certain period of time for $100 million—that’s different.” It’s infuriating that Rogan’s podcast has the trappings of counterculture while finding itself in such particular proximity to money and tech power. But I don’t know that, if I were Rogan, I would do much different.
  • Others in the “audio industry” face more discouraging trends. I suspect that the big record companies would dissolve if they weren’t still making so much money off the music of the 20th century.
  • I knew a lot of bands in the early 2000s whose members could quit their day job for a few years and make a living on relatively small amounts of record sales coupled with touring
  • Today, fewer artists are crossing the bar of being able to live purely off making and performing music. A lot of artists are failing to find a place in an “audio industry” that ever more efficiently mines smaller veins for what little cash can be extracted, or in a broader entertainment industry that has more in common with Marvel-movie spectacle than any particular sort of artistry.
  • My deep dread, though, is that this ability to tune out and focus on art becomes an aristocratic luxury; that a lack of money for music means a lack of money for musicians; that new ways of doing business are destroying the possibility of a creative middle class.
  • Solidarity is a tempting response to technological change, but my tired brain just can’t see the mechanism for it in this era. I honestly feel like a master sock weaver at the start of the industrial revolution. People will still get their socks, maybe worse than the ones before. And in the end, technology will plow us over.
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A new low for global democracy | The Economist - 0 views

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shared by woodlu on 10 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • LOBAL DEMOCRACY continued its precipitous decline in 2021, according to the latest edition of the Democracy Index from our sister company, EIU.
  • The global score fell from 5.37 to a new low of 5.28 out of ten. The only equivalent drop since 2006 was in 2010 after the global financial crisis.
  • For the second year in a row, the pandemic was the biggest source of strain on democratic freedom around the world.
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  • North America fared only slightly better. Despite riots in the Capitol and attempts by the departing president Donald Trump to overturn the election results, the inauguration of Joe Biden proceeded smoothly and America’s democracy score only fell by 0.07 points.
  • Pedro Castillo’s narrow victory in Peru in June was contested for weeks by his opponent, Keiko Fujimori, and the Nicaraguan poll in November was a sham. Chile was downgraded to a “flawed democracy” partly because of low voter turnout in its deeply polarised elections, and Haiti is still in political crisis after the assassination of the president, Jovenel Moïse.
  • Through lockdowns and travel restrictions, civil liberties were again suspended in both developed democracies and authoritarian regimes.
  • Canada suffered a far bigger setback, of 0.37 points. Again, pandemic restrictions were the main cause of frustration and disaffection. According to the World Value Survey, which is used in some of the quantitative sections of the EIU’s survey, just 10.4% of Canadians felt that they had “a great deal” of freedom of choice and control. More alarming, 13.5% expressed a preference for military rule.
  • The fall in Canada’s index score reflected popular disaffection with the status quo and a turn to non-democratic alternatives.
  • The trucker blockade in Ottawa may presage more political upheaval. But the biggest challenge to the Western model of democracy over the coming years will come from China
  • After four decades of rapid growth it is the world’s second-biggest economy; within a decade the EIU forecasts that it will overtake America. If China’s absence from Mr Biden’s recent Summit for Democracy is anything to go by, the West is not looking to engage it. China’s response to being snubbed was to declare the state of American democracy “disastrous”.
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South Africa's Ramaphosa pledges fundamental economic reform | Reuters - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...t-grow-jobs-economy-2022-02-10
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  • South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said on Thursday his country needed fundamental change to revive economic growth, by tackling corruption and the endemic poverty, inequality and unemployment deepened by chronic power cuts and COVID-19.
  • To boost growth, the president said South Africa will start auctioning its high frequency digital spectrum within a month, seen as critical for cheaper data costs.
  • Bereft of the jobs needed to lift millions out of poverty, South Africa has struggled to reverse the economic inequities that are the main legacy of white minority rule.
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  • He also said the domestic cannabis industry had the potential to create 130,000 jobs and increase export revenues.
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Opinion | Putin, in his feral cunning, is Bismarckian, with a dash of Lord Nelson - The... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...kraine-invasion-is-bismarckian putin historical parallel bismarck nelson self-determination
shared by Javier E on 23 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • Vladimir Putin is emulating Bismarck, who used three quickly decisive wars — against Denmark in 1864, Austria in 1866 and France in 1870 — to create a unified modern Germany from what had been a loose confederation of states
  • By acquiring land, some German-speaking populations and an aura of national vitality, Bismarck’s wars of national creation stoked cohesion.
  • If Putin succeeds in reducing Ukraine to satellite status, and in inducing NATO to restrict its membership and operations to parameters he negotiates, he might, like Bismarck, consider other wars — actual, hybrid, cyber. The Baltic nations — Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, all NATO nations — should worry.
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  • In Putin’s plan to dismember Ukraine by embracing self-determination for ethnic Russian separatists, he, like Hitler in 1938, is exploiting careless rhetoric that ignores the fact that ethnicities do not tidily coincide with national boundaries.
  • Lansing, who called Wilson “a phrase-maker par excellence,” warned that “certain phrases” of Wilson’s “have not been thought out.” The “undigested” phrase “self-determination” is “simply loaded with dynamite.” Nevertheless, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Churchill in their Atlantic Charter of August 1941 affirmed the right of self-determination for all “peoples,” which the United Nations Charter also affirms.
  • This phrase can be used to sanitize the dismemberment of Ukraine — and some other nations (see above: the Baltics). And perhaps can reduce nations supposedly supporting Ukraine to paralytic dithering about whether sanctions, or which sanctions, are an appropriate response to an aggression wielding a Wilsonian concept.
  • Much of Putin’s geopolitics consists of doing whatever opposes U.S. policy. Call this the Nelson Rule. Before the Battle of Trafalgar, Lord Nelson, meeting with some of his officers, reportedly picked up a fire poker and said, “It matters not at all in what way I lay this poker on the floor. But if Bonaparte should say it must be placed in this direction, we must instantly insist upon its being laid in some other one.” Regarding the United States, Putin is Nelsonian.
  • raw power lubricated by audacious lying is Bismarckian. In July 1870, the French ambassador to Prussia asked King William of Prussia for certain assurances, which the king declined to give. Bismarck edited a telegram describing this conversation to make the episode resemble an exchange of insults. Passions boiled in both countries, and France declared war, which Bismarck wanted because he correctly thought war would complete the welding of the German states into a muscular nation.
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COVID Is More Like Smoking Than the Flu - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...622819 pandemic flu smosing analogy analysis
shared by Javier E on 23 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • The “new normal” will arrive when we acknowledge that COVID’s risks have become more in line with those of smoking cigarettes—and that many COVID deaths, like many smoking-related deaths, could be prevented with a single intervention.
  • The pandemic’s greatest source of danger has transformed from a pathogen into a behavior. Choosing not to get vaccinated against COVID is, right now, a modifiable health risk on par with smoking, which kills more than 400,000 people each year in the United States.
  • if COVID continues to account for a few hundred thousand American deaths every year—“a realistic worst-case scenario,” he calls it—that would wipe out all of the life-expectancy gains we’ve accrued from the past two decades’ worth of smoking-prevention efforts.
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  • The COVID vaccines are, without exaggeration, among the safest and most effective therapies in all of modern medicine. An unvaccinated adult is an astonishing 68 times more likely to die from COVID than a boosted one
  • Yet widespread vaccine hesitancy in the United States has caused more than 163,000 preventable deaths and counting
  • Even in absolute numbers, America’s unvaccinated and current-smoker populations seem to match up rather well: Right now, the CDC pegs them at 13 percent and 14 percent of all U.S. adults, respectively, and both groups are likely to be poorer and less educated.
  • Countries such as Denmark and Sweden have already declared themselves broken up with COVID. They are confidently doing so not because the virus is no longer circulating or because they’ve achieved mythical herd immunity from natural infection; they’ve simply inoculated enough people.
  • data suggest that most of the unvaccinated hold that status voluntarily at this point
  • The same arguments apply to tobacco: Smokers are 15 to 30 times more likely to develop lung cancer. Quitting the habit is akin to receiving a staggeringly powerful medicine, one that wipes out most of this excess risk.
  • If everyone who is eligible were triply vaccinated, our health-care system would be functioning normally again.
  • With a vaccination timeline that stretches over years, our patience for restrictions, especially on the already vaccinated, will be very limited. But there is middle ground. We haven’t banned tobacco outright—in fact, most states protect smokers from job discrimination—but we have embarked on a permanent, society-wide campaign of disincentivizing its use.
  • We should neither expect that every stubbornly unvaccinated person will get jabbed before next winter nor despair that none of them will ever change their mind. Let’s accept instead that we may make headway slowly, and with considerable effort
  • Long-term actions for COVID might include charging the unvaccinated a premium on their health insurance, just as we do for smokers, or distributing frightening health warnings about the perils of remaining uninoculated
  • And once the political furor dies down, COVID shots will probably be added to the lists of required vaccinations for many more schools and workplaces.
  • nother aspect of where we’re headed with COVID. Tobacco is lethal enough that we are willing to restrict smokers’ personal freedoms—but only to a degree. As deadly as COVID is, some people won’t get vaccinated, no matter what, and both the vaccinated and unvaccinated will spread disease to others.
  • anti-COVID actions, much like anti-smoking policies, will be limited not by their effectiveness but by the degree to which they are politically palatable.
  • Without greater vaccination, living with COVID could mean enduring a yearly death toll that is an order of magnitude higher than the one from flu.
  • this, too, might come to feel like its own sort of ending. Endemic tobacco use causes hundreds of thousands of casualties, year after year after year, while fierce public-health efforts to reduce its toll continue in the background. Yet tobacco doesn’t really feel like a catastrophe for the average person.
  • Losing a year or two from average life expectancy only bumps us back to where we were in … 2000.
  • We still care for smokers when they get sick, of course, and we reduce harm whenever possible. The health-care system makes $225 billion every year for doing so—paid out of all of our tax dollars and insurance premiums
  • Hospitals have a well-honed talent for transforming any terrible situation into a marketable “center of excellence.”
  • But we shouldn’t forget the most important reason that the coronavirus isn’t like the flu: We’ve never had vaccines this effective in the midst of prior influenza outbreaks, which means we didn’t have a simple, clear approach to saving quite so many lives. Compassionate conversations, community outreach, insurance surcharges, even mandates—I’ll take them all. Now is not the time to quit.
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Barr Rebukes Trump as 'Off the Rails' in New Memoir - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...bill-barr-trump-january-6.html memoir trump justice DOJ history politics crisis
shared by Javier E on 28 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • Former Attorney General William P. Barr writes in a new memoir that former President Donald J. Trump’s “self-indulgence and lack of self-control” cost him the 2020 election and says “the absurd lengths to which he took his ‘stolen election’ claim led to the rioting on Capitol Hill.”
  • In the book, “One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General,” Mr. Barr also urges his fellow Republicans to pick someone else as the party’s nominee for the 2024 election, calling the prospect of another presidential run by Mr. Trump “dismaying.”
  • “Donald Trump has shown he has neither the temperament nor persuasive powers to provide the kind of positive leadership that is needed,”
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  • Mr. Trump “lost his grip” after the election, he writes.
  • “He stopped listening to his advisers, became manic and unreasonable, and was off the rails,” Mr. Barr writes. “He surrounded himself with sycophants, including many whack jobs from outside the government, who fed him a steady diet of comforting but unsupported conspiracy theories.”
  • Mr. Barr also denounces the inquiry by the F.B.I. and then the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, into links between Russia and Trump campaign aides in 2016. He writes that “the matter that really required investigation” was “how did the phony Russiagate scandal get going, and why did the F.B.I. leadership handle the matter in such an inexplicable and heavy-handed way?”
  • On the scandal that led to Mr. Trump’s first impeachment, in which Mr. Trump withheld aid to Ukraine as leverage to try to get Ukraine’s president to announce an investigation into Joseph R. Biden Jr., Mr. Barr was scathing.
  • He calls it “another mess — this one self-inflicted and the result of abject stupidity,” a “harebrained gambit” and “idiotic beyond belief.” But while Mr. Barr describes the conversation Mr. Trump had with Ukraine’s president on the topic as “unseemly and injudicious,” he maintains that it did not rise to a “criminal offense.”
  • His book expands on that theme, going through specific “fact-free claims of fraud” that Mr. Trump has put forward and explaining why the Justice Department found them baseless. He lists several reasons, for example, that claims about purportedly hacked Dominion voting machines were “absolute nonsense” and “meaningless twaddle.”“The election was not ‘stolen,’” Mr. Barr writes. “Trump lost it.”
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6 takeaways from the Texas primaries | CNN Politics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html politics
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  • Texas is set for a heavyweight match-up between Abbott, a prolific fundraiser with a $50 million war chest, and O’Rourke, the former Democratic congressman who has been his party’s only hope at winning statewide in recent years.
  • Abbott, who is seeking a third term, was always the favorite to win his party’s nomination despite far-right criticism of his handling of the coronavirus pandemic in its early days. But he spent $15 million to be sure of it, fending off former Florida congressman and Texas Republican Party chairman Allen West and former state Sen. Don Huffines.
  • O’Rourke, meanwhile, is seeking office for the third time in five years. His near-miss in the 2018 race against Republican Sen. Ted Cruz ignited Texas Democrats’ hopes that the state, with a diverse and growing population and suburbs that have moved leftward, would soon become a battleground.
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  • Texas Attorney General Paxton was unable to reach the 50% support he needed to avoid a runoff, and will face a head-to-head match-up with a member of the state’s best-known political family.
  • The efforts to oust him center on his legal troubles: Paxton has been under indictment since 2015 on securities fraud charges, and is being investigated by the FBI after former aides accused him of abusing the power of his office to help a political donor.
  • Progressives did have one victory to celebrate Tuesday night: Greg Casar, a former Austin city councilman, was projected to win the 35th Congressional District primary outright, avoiding a runoff.
  • he most competitive US House race in Texas this year could come in the 15th District, a South Texas district that stretches from towns east of San Antonio to the Rio Grande Valley.
  • Republican Monica De La Cruz, who came within 3 percentage points of defeating Democratic Rep. Vicente Gonzalez in 2020, will win the Republican nomination, CNN projected. Gonzalez, meanwhile, is running in the neighboring 34th District.
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Why Americans Are Uniting in Support of Ukraine - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...623875 ukraine honor crisis culture
shared by Javier E on 03 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • what is happening right now in Ukraine—a nation being mauled by a brutal regime yet still willing to stand and to fight—is proof that honor and courage matter. They can stir hearts in powerful ways, shaking them out of complacency and even cynicism.
  • what drove support for Ukraine were the human virtues being displayed in a terrible human drama.
  • It was seeing ordinary people—including the young and the elderly—act in extraordinary ways to defend the country they love, against overwhelming odds. It was seeing people do the right thing at the risk of death when nearly every instinct within them must have been screaming: Do what you have to do to survive, even if survival, though not dishonorable, is less honorable.
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  • “For it is only the love of honor that never grows old,” Pericles said after the first battles of the Peloponnesian War, “and honor it is, not gain, as some would have it, that rejoices the heart of age and helplessness.”
  • the people and the president of Ukraine have shown that love of honor never grows old, even to a world that is sometimes indifferent, weary, and cynica
  • “Today you, Ukrainians, are a symbol of invincibility,” Zelensky told his people today. “A symbol that people in any country can become the best people on Earth at any moment.”
  • God bless them.
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North Korea Launches Ballistic Missile, South Korea Says - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...orth-korea-missile-launch.html
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  • North Korea on Saturday launched a ballistic missile toward the sea off its east coast, its second missile test in a week, South Korean defense officials said.
  • The missile, launched at ​8:48 a.m. from Sunan, near Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, flew 1​68 miles to the east, reaching an altitude of 3​4​8 miles, the South’s military said. No further details were immediately released, but the data ​was similar to the data collected when North Korea last conducted a missile test on Sunday​.
  • its state media released aerial photos of the Korean Peninsula that it said had been taken by a camera mounted on the rocket.
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  • North Korea conducted seven missile tests in January, more than in all of 2021. ​It refrained from weapons tests ​for most of February, possibly out of deference to China, its neighbor and only major ally, which was hosting the Winter Olympics in Beijing.
  • ​The resumption of North Korean weapon tests comes as the Biden administration is focused on the crisis in Ukraine, and as South Korea is in the midst of a presidential campaign. South Korea goes to the polls on Wednesday to elect the replacement for President Moon Jae-in, whose single five-year term ends in May.
  • North Korea has often been accused of attempting military provocations to influence elections in the South. Prof. Lee recalled that in December 2012, just a week before the South Korean presidential election, North Korea launched a rocket under the pretext of putting a satellite into orbit.
  • Since the North does not want a hawkish right-wing leader to take power in the South, it will refrain from attempting a major military provocation before the election, said Cheong Seong-chang, director of the Center for North Korean Studies at the Sejong Institute in South Korea.
  • But once the election is over, it will likely step up weapons tests to celebrate the 110th birthday of Kim Il-sung, the North Korean founder and grandfather of the current leader, Kim Jong-un, Mr. Cheong said. The senior Kim’s birthday is April 15.
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Xi and Putin's 'No Limits' Bond Leaves China Few Options on Ukraine - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...putin-ukraine-china-xi.html
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  • They had just finalized a statement declaring their vision of a new international order with Moscow and Beijing at its core, untethered from American power.
  • Over dinner, according to China’s official readout, they discussed “major hot-spot issues of mutual concern.”
  • Publicly, Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin had vowed that their countries’ friendship had “no limits.” The Chinese leader also declared that there would be “no wavering” in their partnership, and he added his weight to Mr. Putin’s accusations of Western betrayal in Europe.
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  • The implications for China extend beyond Ukraine, and even Europe.
  • “He’s damned if he did know, and damned if he didn’t,” Paul Haenle, a former director for China on the National Security Council, said of whether Mr. Xi had been aware of Russia’s plans to invade. “If he did know and he didn’t tell people, he’s complicit; if he wasn’t told by Putin, it’s an affront.”
  • In any case, the invasion evidently surprised many in Beijing’s establishment
  • Mr. Xi’s statement with Mr. Putin on Feb. 4 endorsed a Russian security proposal that would exclude Ukraine from joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
  • Even so, as Mr. Putin became determined to reverse Ukraine’s turn to Western security protections, Chinese officials began to echo Russian arguments. Beijing also saw a growing threat from American-led military blocs.
  • “Putin may have done this anyway, but also it was unquestionably an enabling backdrop that was provided by the joint statement, the visit and Xi’s association with all of these things,”
  • “He owns that relationship with Putin,” Mr. Haenle said. “If you’re suggesting in the Chinese system right now that it was not smart to get that close to Russia, you’re in effect criticizing the leader.”
  • For decades it sought to build ties with Russia while also keeping Ukraine close.
  • Over the past years, as growing numbers of Ukrainians supported joining NATO, Chinese diplomats did not raise objections with Kyiv, said Sergiy Gerasymchuk, an analyst with Ukrainian Prism, a foreign policy research organization in Kyiv.
  • For both leaders, their partnership was an answer to Mr. Biden’s effort to forge an “alliance of democracies.”
  • Before and shortly after the invasion, Beijing sounded sympathetic to Moscow’s security demands, mocking Western warnings of war and accusing the United States of goading Russia. Over the past two weeks, though, China has sought to edge slightly away from Russia. It has softened its tone, expressing grief over civilian casualties. It has cast itself as an impartial party, calling for peace talks and for the war to stop as soon as possible.
  • Beijing had its own complaints with NATO, rooted in the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, Serbia, during NATO’s war in 1999 to protect a breakaway region, Kosovo. Those suspicions deepened when NATO in 2021 began to describe China as an emerging challenge to the alliance.
  • n Feb. 23, a foreign ministry spokeswoman, Hua Chunying, accused Washington of “manufacturing panic.”
  • Chinese officials tweaked their calls to heed Russia’s security, stressing that “any country’s legitimate security concerns should be respected.” They still did not use the word “invasion,” but have acknowledged a “conflict between Ukraine and Russia.”
  • “Many decision makers in China began to perceive relations in black and white: either you are a Chinese ally or an American one,”
  • “They still want to remain sort of neutral, but they bitterly failed.”
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Sir Adam Roberts rebuffs the view that the West is principally responsible for the cris... - 0 views

www.economist.com/...ible-for-the-crisis-in-ukraine crisis ukraine responsibility causes international relations
shared by Javier E on 24 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • e prone to manage their mutual relations with deep rivalry and a high risk of war
  • One conclusion that follows from his world-view is that states are bound to take seriously the concept of “spheres of influence”, an old-fashioned term for a phenomenon that is still very much alive. However much spheres of influence may challenge the idea of the sovereign equality of states, they have by no means disappeared in international relations.
  • Take the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. In demanding the withdrawal of Soviet nuclear-armed missiles from Cuba, America was, in effect, defending the Monroe Doctrine of 1823.
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  • There is no dispute now that Mr Putin wants to defend Russia’s sphere of influence. Right at the start of his speech on February 24th, as his forces invaded Ukraine, he criticised the “expansion of the NATO bloc to the east, bringing its military infrastructure closer to Russian borders”
  • However, for Professor Mearsheimer to reduce the causes of Russia's invasion to the Bucharest declaration is simplistic and wrong.
  • For a start, there were some obvious frustrations, fears and mistakes.
  • The continuing American strategic partnership with Ukraine, which Professor Mearsheimer mentions, may indeed have played a part
  • Ukrainian defiance in response to Russia’s huge military exercise on its border last year would have been hard for Mr Putin to tolerate. A successful and democratic Ukraine undermines the Russian leader’s own authoritarianism at home.
  • there was a faulty understanding of the situation on the ground: both America in Iraq and Russia in Ukraine have launched wars on terrible “intelligence”.
  • there are three other factors that help to explain the current crisis in Ukraine.
  • the break-up of empires is often messy and traumatic. Often foreign military intervention of some kind follows. The end of European colonial empires, and the collapse of the Soviet and Yugoslav empires in the 1990s, forced new or re-constituted states to make fateful decisions. Is citizenship based on ethnicity or simply residence? Should kin living outside the state have a right to citizenship? What frontiers does the state have? What friends and allies? What constitution? What language
  • Both Georgia and Ukraine faced many if not all of these quandaries in the 1990s—and faced them long before the question of NATO membership arose.
  • Second, the existence of nuclear weapons outside of Russia necessitated a degree of Western involvement in security matters. An array of nuclear weapons remained in Ukraine
  • The breakdown of the Budapest Memorandum left Ukraine in an awkward situation. It was unable to trust Russia’s word, but also had reason to doubt Western security guarantees. The idea of full-blooded membership of NATO appeared increasingly attractive but not necessarily more attainable.
  • The third factor is colour revolutions—the popular revolutions that occurred in many countries in the former Soviet Union in recent decades. They must have reminded Mr Putin of the movements in eastern Europe in 1989 that precipitated the collapse of one communist regime after another.
  • It suits Mr Putin to treat civil resistance movements as parts of a grand international conspiracy. I have been studying such movements for more than 50 years. In that time all kinds of accusations have been made that such movements are the pawns of outside forces. There is little evidence to support such theories.
  • Throughout his analysis Professor Mearsheimer pays remarkably little attention to the ideals and political desires of people in countries that have experienced “people power” revolutions.
  • These factors suggest that the 2008 proposal to expand NATO to include Georgia and Ukraine is just one among many developments that have made the current crisis so acute
  • It is arguable, indeed likely, that the NATO expansion proposal made matters worse, as may some other Western actions, but to assert that “the West is principally responsible for the Ukrainian crisis” goes too far.
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