Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items matching "options" in title, tags, annotations or url

Group items matching
in title, tags, annotations or url

Sort By: Relevance | Date Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
15More

This war will be a total failure, FSB whistleblower says | News | The Times - 0 views

www.thetimes.co.uk/...b-whistleblower-says-wl2gtdl9m FSB russia war failture ukraine whistleblower crisis
shared by Javier E on 07 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • Spies in Russia’s infamous security apparatus were kept in the dark about President Putin’s plan to invade Ukraine, according to a whistleblower who described the war as a “total failure” that could be compared only to the collapse of Nazi Germany.
  • A report thought to be by an analyst in the FSB, the successor agency to the KGB, said that the Russian dead could already number 10,000. The Russian defence ministry has acknowledged the deaths of only 498 of its soldiers in Ukraine.
  • The report said the FSB was being blamed for the failure of the invasion but had been given no warning of it and was unprepared to deal with the effects of crippling sanctions.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • The whistleblower added that no one in the government knew the true figure of the dead because “we have lost contact with major divisions”.
  • FSB officers had been ordered to assess the effects of western sanctions, they said, but were told that it was a hypothetical box-ticking exercise. “You have to write the analysis in a way that makes Russia the victor . . . otherwise you get questioned for not doing good work,” they wrote. “Suddenly it happens and everything comes down to your completely groundless analysis.
  • “[We are] acting intuitively, on emotion . . . our stakes will have to be raised ever higher with the hope that suddenly something might come through for us.
  • “By and large, though, Russia has no way out. There are no options for a possible victory, only defeat.”
  • The letter said that Ramzan Kadyrov, the Chechen leader and an ally of Putin, was on the verge of outright conflict with the Russians after his “hit squad”, sent to kill President Zelensky, was destroyed by Ukrainian forces.
  • Even if Zelensky were killed, the report said, Russia would have no hope of occupying Ukraine. “Even with minimum resistance from the Ukrainians we’d need over 500,000 people, not including supply and logistics workers.”
  • The analyst said that the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service, was trying to “dig up dirt” to claim that Ukraine had built nuclear weapons, a pretext for a pre-emptive strike.
  • The 2,000-word document was published by Vladimir Osechkin, a Russian human rights activist who runs the anti-corruption website Gulagu.net.
  • Christo Grozev, an expert on the Russian security services, said he had shown the letter to two FSB officers, both of whom had had “no doubt it was written by a colleague”.
  • The war, the writer said, had been given a “provisional deadline” of June because by then the Russian economy will have collapsed. “I have hardly slept at all recently, working all hours, in a brain-fog,” they wrote. “Maybe it’s from overwork, but I feel like I am in a surreal world. Pandora’s Box has been opened.”
  • The author said they could not rule out international conflict and that they were expecting “some f***ing adviser to convince the leadership” to send an ultimatum to the West threatening war if sanctions were not lifted.
  • “What if the West refuses?” they wrote. “In that instance I won’t exclude that we will be pulled into a real international conflict, just like Hitler in 1939.” Elsewhere in the letter they said: “Our position is like Germany in 1943-44 — but that’s our starting position.”
19More

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
shared by criscimagnael on 07 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • 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.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • 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.”
22More

China under pressure, a debate | Financial Times - 0 views

www.ft.com/...16-c72c-4579-99da-676aacd48d37 china situation analysis history crisis policy politics economics
shared by Javier E on 24 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • Despite the $300bn mega-bankruptcy of Evergrande, the risk of an immediate 2008-style crisis in China is slight.
  • let us linger over the significance of this point. What China is doing is, after all, staggering. By means of its “three red lines” credit policy, it is stopping in its tracks a gigantic real estate boom. China’s real estate sector, created from scratch since the reforms of 1998, is currently valued at $55tn. That is the most rapid accumulation of wealth in history. It is the financial reflection of the surge in China’s urban population by more than 480mn in a matter of decades.
  • Throughout the history of modern capitalism real estate booms have been associated with credit creation and, as the work of Òscar Jordà, Moritz Schularick and Alan M. Taylor has shown, with major financial crises.
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • if we are agreed that Beijing looks set to stop the largest property boom in history without unleashing a systemic financial crisis, it is doing something truly remarkable. It is setting a new standard in economic policy.
  • Is this perhaps what policy looks like if it actually takes financial stability seriously? And if we look in the mirror, why aren’t we applauding more loudly?
  • Add to real estate the other domestic factor roiling the Chinese financial markets: Beijing’s remarkable humbling of China’s platform businesses, the second-largest cluster of big tech in the world. That too is without equivalent anywhere else.
  • Beijing’s aim is to ensure that gambling on big tech no longer produces monopolistic rents. Again, as a long-term policy aim, can one really disagree with that?
  • we have two dramatic and deliberate policy-induced shocks of the type for which there is no precedent in the West. Both inflict short-term pain with a view to longer-term social, economic and financial stability.
  • Ultimately political economy determines the conditions for long-run growth. So if you had to bet on a regime, which might actually have what it takes to break a political economy impasse, to humble vested interests and make a “big play” on structural change, which would it be? The United States, the EU or Xi’s China?
  • Beijing’s challenge right now is to manage the fall out from the two most dramatic development policies the world has ever seen, the one-child policy and China’s urbanisation, plus the historic challenge of big tech — less a problem specific to China than the local manifestation of what Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism”.
  • no, Xi’s regime has not yet presented a fully convincing substitute plan. But, as Michael Pettis has forcefully argued, China has options. There is an entire range of policies that Beijing could put in place to substitute for the debt-fuelled infrastructure and housing boom.
  • demography is normally treated as a natural parameter for economic activity. But in China’s case the astonishing fact is that the sudden ageing of its workforce is also a policy-induced challenge. It is a legacy of the one-child policy — the most gigantic and coercive intervention in human reproduction ever undertaken.
  • China needs to spend heavily on renewable energy and power distribution to break its dependence on coal. If it needs more housing, it should be affordable. All of this would generate more balanced growth. 5 per cent? Perhaps not, but certainly healthier and more sustainable.
  • If it has not so far pursued an alternative growth model in a more determined fashion, some of the blame no doubt falls on the prejudices of the Beijing policy elite. But even more significant are surely the entrenched interests of the infrastructure-construction-local government-credit machine, in other words the kind of political economy factors that generally inhibit the implementation of good policy.
  • The problem is only too familiar in the West. In Europe and the US too, such interest group combinations hobble the search for new growth models. In the United States they put in doubt the possibility of the energy transition, the possibility of providing a healthcare system that is fit for purpose and any initiative on trade policy that involves widening market access.
  • First and foremost China needs a welfare state befitting of its economic development.
  • On balance, if you want to be part of history-making economic transformation, China is still the place to be. But it is undeniably shifting gear. And thanks to developments both inside and outside the country, investors will have to reckon with a much more complex picture of opportunity and risk. You are going to need to pick smart and follow the politics and geopolitics closely.
  • If on the other hand you want to invest in the green energy transition — the one big vision of economic development that the world has come up with right now — you simply have to have exposure to China, whether directly or indirectly by way of suppliers to China’s green energy sector. China is where the grand battle over the future of the climate is going to be fought. It will be a huge driver of innovation, capital accumulation and profit, the influence of which will be felt around the world.
  • it is one key area that both the Biden administration and the EU would like to “silo off” from other areas of conflict with China.
  • I worry that we may be too focused on the medium-term. Given the news out of Hong Kong and mainland China, Covid may yet come back to bite us.
  • Here too China is boxed in by its own success. It has successfully pursued a no-Covid policy, but due to the failing of the rest of the world, it has been left to do so in “one country”.
  • Until China finds some way to contain the risks, this is a story to watch. A dramatic Omicron surge across China would upend the entire narrative of the last two years, which is framed by Beijing success in containing the first wave.
3More

FDA expected to OK additional Covid-19 booster shots for adults over 50 next week - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html CNN.com history
shared by lilyrashkind on 26 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is expected to follow soon after with what's known as a permissive recommendation, which means that the shots will not be officially recommended but may be given to people who want them, said a source who spoke to CNN on the condition of anonymity since they had not been given permission to discuss the details with reporters.
  • "There are solid data from Israel for age 60+ (the only group reported on to date) for enhanced protection (vs severe illness) out to 3 months compared with 3 doses. It is reasonable to extend that and provide it as an option, since the 3rd dose has pronounced benefit in age 50+," Topol wrote in an email to CNN.
  • Dr. Eric Rubin, editor in chief of The New England Journal of Medicine who sits on the FDA's VRBPAC, said he hadn't yet seen enough data on fourth doses to make a determination about whether they are needed for anyone beyond those who are already recommended to get them -- adults who are severely immune deficient."The only data that I've seen has been for participants followed for just a few weeks. The most important information is going to be how well a fourth dose protects highly vulnerable people against serious disease and death, and I don't know when that will be available," Rubin said in an email to CNN. Rubin said the FDA might have access to that data, but he had not seen it yet.
9More

In India, a U.S. partner, Modi's base is inundated with anti-U.S. commentary on Ukraine... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...india-russia-ukraine-media ukraine india foreign policy perception attitudes us
shared by Javier E on 29 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • Indian TV anchors have long been critical of U.S. foreign policy
  • the criticism has also become more pointed since the election of Biden, a Democrat who is seen as more vocal about India’s alleged human rights issues compared with former president Donald Trump. Stephen K. Bannon, the former Trump adviser, has appeared on shows including Shivshankar’s India Upfront, Pande noted, but prominent Democrats are less often seen.
  • The U.S. government and media, Pande said, “are viewed as outside liberal forces that should mind their own business.”
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • With the Ukraine war entering its second month, few Indian newspapers and mainstream commentators have bluntly questioned the government’s decision to refrain from condemning Russia, except Subramanian Swamy, a senior member of Modi’s BJP who sometimes criticizes his own party’s foreign policy.
  • This week, Swamy wrote an unusual op-ed in the Hindu newspaper condemning India’s neutrality as “tragic” and urging his government not to “crawl for the goodwill of Russia.” Even if the Indian right felt a “growing resentment” about liberal American lecturing on everything from the government’s promotion of Hinduism to its Ukraine policy, it was India’s duty to side with the West, Swamy said in an interview. “Whether we like the Russians or not, invading a sovereign nation in the 21st century in a 19th-century-style war is outrageous,”
  • This month on IndiaTV, a pro-government Hindi-language channel, the celebrity astrologer Acharya Indu Prakash presented an hour-long Ukraine special in which he predicted 96 percent good fortune for Biden and 99 percent for Putin. The likelihood of nuclear war, he calculated, stood at 37 percent.
  • After interpreting the divine probabilities, Prakash analyzed the earthly politics at play.
  • The invasion “was the last resort for Mr. Putin, he was left with no options,” Prakash told viewers. “Even now, attempts are being made to create this narrative that Putin is engaging in a bad war.”
  • Putin was acting with restraint even in the face of NATO expansionism, Prakash said. “Russia gave Ukraine warnings, Russia provided a safe humanitarian corridor for evacuation, Russia observed cease-fires and Russia tried its best to act with humanity,” he said. “This is what the movement of the planets say.”
5More

Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz Spars With Democrats at Senate Hearing - The New Yo... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tz-starbucks-union-senate.html starbucks Democratic party senate unions economics politics
shared by Javier E on 30 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, a former chief executive, said it was “somewhat rich that you’re being grilled by people who have never had the opportunity to create a single job.” He suggested that while a union might be necessary at companies “that are not good employers,” that was not the case at Starbucks.
  • Democrats’ response came at two levels of elevation. First, they said the company was excluding unionized stores from the benefits that Starbucks had introduced since the union campaign began, such as faster accrual of sick leave and a credit-card tipping option for customers, showing that its commitment to such benefits was tenuous.
  • More broadly, Democrats argued that unions acted as a corrective to a basic power imbalance between workers and management. A company might treat workers generously under one chief executive, then harshly under another. Only a union can ensure that the favorable treatment persists
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • in illustrating how far the politics of labor have changed in Washington in recent decades, there was perhaps no better bellwether than Senator John Hickenlooper of Colorado, a former business owner and self-described “extreme moderate.”
  • Mr. Hickenlooper conducted himself more respectfully and deferentially than most of his Democratic colleagues, applauding Mr. Schultz for “creating one of the most successful brands in American history” and declaring that “you know more about economics than I will ever know.” But in his questioning he aligned himself squarely with his party, pointing out that the rise of inequality in recent decades had coincided with the weakening of unions.
21More

Regular Old Intelligence is Sufficient--Even Lovely - 0 views

billmckibben.substack.com/...old-intelligence-is-sufficient ai control why benefits evaluation human crisis
shared by Javier E on 02 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • Ezra Klein, has done some of the most dedicated reporting on the topic since he moved to the Bay Area a few years ago, talking with many of the people creating this new technology.
  • one is that the people building these systems have only a limited sense of what’s actually happening inside the black box—the bot is doing endless calculations instantaneously, but not in a way even their inventors can actually follow
  • an obvious question, one Klein has asked: “’If you think calamity so possible, why do this at all?
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • second, the people inventing them think they are potentially incredibly dangerous: ten percent of them, in fact, think they might extinguish the human species. They don’t know exactly how, but think Sorcerer’s Apprentice (or google ‘paper clip maximizer.’)
  • One pundit after another explains that an AI program called Deep Mind worked far faster than scientists doing experiments to uncover the basic structure of all the different proteins, which will allow quicker drug development. It’s regarded as ipso facto better because it’s faster, and hence—implicitly—worth taking the risks that come with AI.
  • That is, it seems to me, a dumb answer from smart people—the answer not of people who have thought hard about ethics or even outcomes, but the answer that would be supplied by a kind of cultist.
  • (Probably the kind with stock options).
  • it does go, fairly neatly, with the default modern assumption that if we can do something we should do it, which is what I want to talk about. The question that I think very few have bothered to answer is, why?
  • But why? The sun won’t blow up for a few billion years, meaning that if we don’t manage to drive ourselves to extinction, we’ve got all the time in the world. If it takes a generation or two for normal intelligence to come up with the structure of all the proteins, some people may die because a drug isn’t developed in time for their particular disease, but erring on the side of avoiding extinction seems mathematically sound
  • Allowing that we’re already good enough—indeed that our limitations are intrinsic to us, define us, and make us human—should guide us towards trying to shut down this technology before it does deep damage.
  • The other challenge that people cite, over and over again, to justify running the risks of AI is to “combat climate change,
  • As it happens, regular old intelligence has already give us most of what we need: engineers have cut the cost of solar power and windpower and the batteries to store the energy they produce so dramatically that they’re now the cheapest power on earth
  • We don’t actually need artificial intelligence in this case; we need natural compassion, so that we work with the necessary speed to deploy these technologies.
  • Beyond those, the cases become trivial, or worse
  • All of this is a way of saying something we don’t say as often as we should: humans are good enough. We don’t require improvement. We can solve the challenges we face, as humans.
  • It may take us longer than if we can employ some “new form of intelligence,” but slow and steady is the whole point of the race.
  • Unless, of course, you’re trying to make money, in which case “first-mover advantage” is the point
  • I find they often answer from something that sounds like the A.I.’s perspective. Many — not all, but enough that I feel comfortable in this characterization — feel that they have a responsibility to usher this new form of intelligence into the world.”
  • here’s the thing: pausing, slowing down, stopping calls on the one human gift shared by no other creature, and perhaps by no machine. We are the animal that can, if we want to, decide not to do something we’re capable of doing.
  • n individual terms, that ability forms the core of our ethical and religious systems; in societal terms it’s been crucial as technology has developed over the last century. We’ve, so far, reined in nuclear and biological weapons, designer babies, and a few other maximally dangerous new inventions
  • It’s time to say do it again, and fast—faster than the next iteration of this tech.
17More

Google Devising Radical Search Changes to Beat Back AI Rivals - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...google-search-engine-ai.html AI google rivalry development commercial
shared by Javier E on 17 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • Google’s employees were shocked when they learned in March that the South Korean consumer electronics giant Samsung was considering replacing Google with Microsoft’s Bing as the default search engine on its devices.
  • Google’s reaction to the Samsung threat was “panic,” according to internal messages reviewed by The New York Times. An estimated $3 billion in annual revenue was at stake with the Samsung contract. An additional $20 billion is tied to a similar Apple contract that will be up for renewal this year.
  • A.I. competitors like the new Bing are quickly becoming the most serious threat to Google’s search business in 25 years, and in response, Google is racing to build an all-new search engine powered by the technology. It is also upgrading the existing one with A.I. features, according to internal documents reviewed by The Times.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • Google has been worried about A.I.-powered competitors since OpenAI, a San Francisco start-up that is working with Microsoft, demonstrated a chatbot called ChatGPT in November. About two weeks later, Google created a task force in its search division to start building A.I. products,
  • Modernizing its search engine has become an obsession at Google, and the planned changes could put new A.I. technology in phones and homes all over the world.
  • Magi would keep ads in the mix of search results. Search queries that could lead to a financial transaction, such as buying shoes or booking a flight, for example, would still feature ads on their results pages.
  • Google has been doing A.I. research for years. Its DeepMind lab in London is considered one of the best A.I. research centers in the world, and the company has been a pioneer with A.I. projects, such as self-driving cars and the so-called large language models that are used in the development of chatbots. In recent years, Google has used large language models to improve the quality of its search results, but held off on fully adopting A.I. because it has been prone to generating false and biased statements.
  • Now the priority is winning control of the industry’s next big thing. Last month, Google released its own chatbot, Bard, but the technology received mixed reviews.
  • The system would learn what users want to know based on what they’re searching when they begin using it. And it would offer lists of preselected options for objects to buy, information to research and other information. It would also be more conversational — a bit like chatting with a helpful person.
  • The Samsung threat represented the first potential crack in Google’s seemingly impregnable search business, which was worth $162 billion last year.
  • Last week, Google invited some employees to test Magi’s features, and it has encouraged them to ask the search engine follow-up questions to judge its ability to hold a conversation. Google is expected to release the tools to the public next month and add more features in the fall, according to the planning document.
  • The company plans to initially release the features to a maximum of one million people. That number should progressively increase to 30 million by the end of the year. The features will be available exclusively in the United States.
  • Google has also explored efforts to let people use Google Earth’s mapping technology with help from A.I. and search for music through a conversation with a chatbot
  • A tool called GIFI would use A.I. to generate images in Google Image results.
  • Tivoli Tutor, would teach users a new language through open-ended A.I. text conversations.
  • Yet another product, Searchalong, would let users ask a chatbot questions while surfing the web through Google’s Chrome browser. People might ask the chatbot for activities near an Airbnb rental, for example, and the A.I. would scan the page and the rest of the internet for a response.
  • “If we are the leading search engine and this is a new attribute, a new feature, a new characteristic of search engines, we want to make sure that we’re in this race as well,”
7More

How a Polyamorous Mom Had 'a Big Sexual Adventure' and Found Herself - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...r-more-book-open-marriage.html polyamory sex marriage culture
shared by Javier E on 15 Jan 24 - No Cached
  • “More,” which Doubleday will release on Jan. 16, is landing at a moment when polyamory is drifting from the margins to the mainstream. About a third of Americans surveyed in a YouGov poll in February of 2023 said they preferred some form of non-monogamy in relationships.
  • Recent titles include memoirs like the journalist Rachel Krantz’s 2022 book “Open: An Uncensored Memoir of Love, Liberation, and Non-Monogamy,” and self-help and inspirational books like “The Anxious Person’s Guide to Non-Monogamy,” “The Polyamory Paradox” and “A Polyamory Devotional,” which has 365 daily reflections for the polyamorous.
  • Winter concedes that polyamory could be exhausting — particularly when she had to balance it with marriage, child care and working as an 8th grade English teacher.“I did not sleep very much,”
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Opening the marriage wasn’t just about doing whatever — and whoever — she wanted, she said. She had to cast off internalized sexism and her tendency to put others’ needs before her own, issues she worked through in therapy. What began as sexual thrill-seeking led unexpectedly to self-discovery.
  • “I thought non-monogamy was going to be all about the sex,” she said. “I thought I was going on a big sexual adventure, and it was going to be super exciting. And it was, until it wasn’t.”
  • Eventually, Winter swore off men who were cheating and began seeing people who were also in open relationships, a demographic that became easier to find when online dating services added non-monogamous to their menus. Even then, options were limited.
  • Winter and her husband struggled with when and how to tell their sons about their arrangement, and wanted to wait until their children were mature enough to handle it. That plan failed when their oldest son, then 13, saw his dad’s online dating profile on his laptop, and texted his mother in a panic, asking if they were in an open marriage. Her youngest son found out in a similar way a few years ago, when he was 14, she said.
21More

Opinion | How Covid Changed America in 2020 - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...vid-2020-recovery-society.html pandemic history crisis culture cause trust solidarity policy loneliness cooperation
shared by Javier E on 31 Jan 24 - No Cached
  • It’s only now becoming clear how little we understood what the United States experienced during that unforgettable year and how deeply it shaped us
  • I’ve come to think of our current condition as a kind of long Covid, a social disease that intensified a range of chronic problems and instilled the belief that the institutions we’d been taught to rely on are unworthy of our trust
  • On a wide range of outcomes, including many that were less visible at the time, this country fared much worse during the Covid pandemic than comparable nations did. Distrust, division and disorganized leadership contributed to the scale of our negative health outcomes.
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • As for our continuing distress, the standard explanation is a uniquely American loneliness. The surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, declared it an epidemic in its own right.
  • The truth, however, is there’s no good evidence that Americans are lonelier than ever
  • a major recent poll shows that older Americans are now significantly less lonely than they were three years ago; a recent peer-reviewed study reports that middle-aged Americans describe themselves as less lonely than they were 20 years ag
  • Loneliness is more pervasive among younger Americans, but there too, the rates have also plummeted since 2020
  • Logically, we should be feeling better. Why can’t we shake this thing?
  • loneliness was never the core problem. It was, rather, the sense among so many different people that they’d been left to navigate the crisis on their own. How do you balance all the competing demands of health, money, sanity?
  • The answer was always the same: Figure it out.
  • while other countries built trust and solidarity, America — both during and after 2020 — left millions to fend for themselves.
  • For millions of Americans, distrust feels like the most rational state.
  • The very different people I spoke with that year all had one thing in common: a feeling that in the wake of Covid, all the larger institutions they had been taught to trust had failed them. At the most precarious times in their lives, they found there was no system in place to help.
  • four years later, the situation is, if anything, worse.
  • Nursing homes across the country, where poor labor conditions were linked to higher Covid mortality levels, remain understaffed, leaving old, frail residents more vulnerable than they should be. Hunger and food insecurity remain wrenching emergencies.
  • Students haven’t fully returned to school. Congress passed the Child Poverty Reduction Act of 2021, one of the most effective antipoverty measures in decades. Then a year later, Congress ended it, pushing some five million young people back down into extreme financial need.
  • When everything was uncertain and everyone’s future was on the line, we walked right up to the precipice of a moral breakthrough, and then we turned back.
  • Look at the way we all accustomed ourselves to the term “essential worker,” an ostensible term of respect that instead condemned people to work in manifestly dangerous conditions. The adoption of that term made visible something we now cannot unsee: In the United States the people we rely on most to keep our world functioning are the people we treated as disposable.
  • we might call the bigger problem structural isolation: abandoned by employers, deprived of shared purpose, denied care. The combined effect sent a strong message that individual lives weren’t worth as much anymore.
  • People treated one another accordingly. We all remember the viral videos of people screaming at one another in supermarkets and on public transportation. Violent crime spiked. Even reckless driving surged — but it happened only in the United States.
  • The reasons for that American exceptionalism become only more urgent in an election year, when, as in a public health crisis, presidents can try to bring people together or try to turn them against one another.
16More

Germany's Far-Right AfD Is Worse Than the Rest of Europe's Populists - 0 views

foreignpolicy.com/...-europe-remigration-immigrants and germany far right europe
shared by Javier E on 06 Feb 24 - No Cached
  • Founded in 2013, the AfD isn’t brand new, nor is its provocative, thinly veiled racism and Islamophobia. But over the course of the past five years—and in the face of damning revelations last week about a secret meeting that took place in November—it has radicalized dramatically. The AfD is now more extreme than many fellow far-right parties across Europe, such as the Sweden Democrats, the Finns Party, and the Dutch Party for Freedom, among others.
  • Germany’s foremost expert on the subject, sociologist Wilhelm Heitmeyer, said the AfD now stands for an “authoritarian national radicalism,” namely, an ideology that propagates a hierarchically ordered, ethnically homogeneous society overseen by a strong-arm state. What’s particularly radical, he said, is the party’s communication with and mobilization of misanthropic groups that rain violence on select minorities
  • Its victims are refugees, foreign nationals, Jews, Muslims, and LGBTQ+ people.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Research published in the weekly Der Spiegel shows that the AfD, a party started by nationally minded economists who advocated a return to the Deutsche mark as the national currency, now uses language nearly identical to that of the defunct National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD), a small, virulently xenophobic, and openly neo-Nazi party that ran in German elections for decades but never managed to win seats in the Bundestag.
  • “They have major ideological overlaps. The AfD measures up to the NPD [of 2012] in almost all areas, even if the AfD appears more moderate in its party program.”
  • Documents attributed to both parties employ reactionary terminology, some of it straight from Nazi Germany, such as Umvolkung (population replacement) and Volkstod (death of the German nation), as well as Stimmvieh (voting cattle) for voters of opposing parties and Passdeutschen (foreign nationals holding German passports). And like the NPD, Spiegel reported in another study, the AfD maintains close links with violent militants.
  • this radicalism, which in the past had turned Germans off, has now lifted the AfD to new heights: It is polling at 22 percent support nationwide, second only to the Christian Democrats, and well over 30 percent in several states, making it the number one political force there in advance of autumn elections.
  • The current outburst of popular indignation at the AfD, echoed by all of the other major political parties, comes on the heels of an investigative exposé that found that at a clandestine meeting in November, ranking AfD personalities met with known neo-Nazis and wealthy financiers to hammer out plans for the forced deportation of foreign nationals and even foreign-born German citizens.
  • The extremists congregated at a hotel near Potsdam to design what they called a “remigration master plan” to forcibly repatriate millions of people. Shocked observers drew parallels to the 1942 Wannsee Conference, held not far from Potsdam, at which the Nazis coordinated their plan to deport and murder the entire Jewish population of Europe.
  • While some AfD politicos have tried to distance the party from the Potsdam meeting, others endorsed its purpose. “Remigration is not a secret plan, but a promise. … and there’s no better way to put it,” announced Hans-Christoph Berndt, the AfD point person in the Brandenburg state parliament, on Jan. 17.
  • they confirm the diagnosis of many experts that the AfD, under the leadership of its most extreme figures—particularly Björn Höcke, a member of the Thuringia legislature—has outpaced other European far-right parties in its radicalism. “The current AfD wouldn’t find a place in the ranks of the Sweden Democrats and most of the other more moderate far-right parties among the European Conservatives and Reformists faction in the European Parliament,”
  • She explained that like the AfD, the Sweden Democrats, the Finns Party (formerly the True Finns), and the Danish People’s Party are opposed to immigration and favor law-and-order states. But the Nordic rightists’ experiences in office pushed them to adapt to mainstream norms and policy options. (The Sweden Democrats are currently an informal supporter of the Swedish ruling coalition; the Finns are a coalition member in Finland; and the DPP acted as a support party to a conservative Danish government between 2001 and 2011, as well as from 2015 to 2019.)
  • The radicalized AfD, Jungar said, in contrast to these parties, actively courts militants, trades in antisemitic tropes, and toys with the proposition of Germany exiting NATO and the European Union
  • Moreover, AfD politicians have stood against adoption rights for same-sex couples, the inclusion of disabled kids in schools, and the legality of abortion. “These positions simply wouldn’t stand a chance in Sweden,”
  • “The FPO under Kickl has moved further to the right. It is now indistinguishable from the right-wingers in the AfD,” he argued. “They want people who they think don’t belong here out of Austria. They don’t want to gas them yet, but they want to strip people of their citizenship. They want to cut people’s social benefits to such an extent that their livelihoods are destroyed. That is essentially the program of parties like the AfD and the FPO. They harbor fantasies ranging from populist to fascist.
  • “By stacking the courts and clamping down on opposition forces, these parties gradually undermined the democratic order,” Opratko said. “This is the AfD’s model. It’s what they want to do.”
14More

Opinion | The Question of Transgender Care - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nsgender-care-cass-report.html epistemic bubble evidence ethic belief trans debate humility
shared by Javier E on 19 Apr 24 - No Cached
  • Doctors and researchers have proposed various theories to try to explain these trends. One is that greater social acceptance of trans people has enabled people to seek these therapies. Another is that teenagers are being influenced by the popularity of searching and experimenting around identity. A third is that the rise of teen mental health issues may be contributing to gender dysphoria.
  • Some activists and medical practitioners on the left have come to see the surge in requests for medical transitioning as a piece of the new civil rights issue of our time — offering recognition to people of all gender identities.
  • Transition through medical interventions was embraced by providers in the United States and Europe after a pair of small Dutch studies showed that such treatment improved patients’ well-being
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • a 2022 Reuters investigation found that some American clinics were quite aggressive with treatment: None of the 18 U.S. clinics that Reuters looked at performed long assessments on their patients, and some prescribed puberty blockers on the first visit.
  • As Cass writes in her report, “The toxicity of the debate is exceptional.” She continues, “There are few other areas of health care where professionals are so afraid to openly discuss their views, where people are vilified on social media and where name-calling echoes the worst bullying behavior.”
  • The report’s greatest strength is its epistemic humility. Cass is continually asking, “What do we really know?” She is carefully examining the various studies — which are high quality, which are not. She is down in the academic weeds.
  • he notes that the quality of the research in this field is poor. The current treatments are “built on shaky foundations,” she writes in The BMJ. Practitioners have raced ahead with therapies when we don’t know what the effects will be. As Cass tells The BMJ, “I can’t think of another area of pediatric care where we give young people a potentially irreversible treatment and have no idea what happens to them in adulthood.”
  • Our natural human tendency is to be too confident in our knowledge, too quick to ignore contrary evidence. But these days it has become acceptable to luxuriate in those epistemic shortcomings, not to struggle against them. See, for example, the modern Republican Party.
  • In 1877 a British philosopher and mathematician named William Kingdon Clifford published an essay called “The Ethics of Belief.” In it he argued that if a shipowner ignored evidence that his craft had problems and sent the ship to sea having convinced himself it was safe, then of course we would blame him if the ship went down and all aboard were lost. To have a belief is to bear responsibility, and one thus has a moral responsibility to dig arduously into the evidence, avoid ideological thinking and take into account self-serving biases.
  • “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence,” Clifford wrote
  • A belief, he continued, is a public possession. If too many people believe things without evidence, “the danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery.”
  • Since the Trump years, this habit of not consulting the evidence has become the underlying crisis in so many realms. People segregate into intellectually cohesive teams, which are always dumber than intellectually diverse teams. Issues are settled by intimidation, not evidence
  • her core conclusion is this: “For most young people, a medical pathway will not be the best way to manage their gender-related distress.” She realizes that this conclusion will not please many of the young people she has come to know, but this is where the evidence has taken her.
  • She writes in her report, “The option to provide masculinizing/feminizing hormones from age 16 is available, but the review would recommend extreme caution.
19More

In Silicon Valley, You Can Be Worth Billions and It's Not Enough - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...olsheimin-insider-trading.html silicon valley enough rich wealth insider trading cheating ethics
shared by Javier E on 23 Apr 24 - No Cached
  • He got a phone call about the imminent sale of a tech company and allegedly traded on the confidential information, according to charges filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The profit for a few minutes of work: $415,726.
  • rarely has anyone traded his reputation for seemingly so little reward. For Mr. Bechtolsheim, $415,726 was equivalent to a quarter rolling behind the couch. He was ranked No. 124 on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index last week, with an estimated fortune of $16 billion.
  • Last month, Mr. Bechtolsheim, 68, settled the insider trading charges without admitting wrongdoing. He agreed to pay a fine of more than $900,000 and will not serve as an officer or director of a public company for five years.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • Nothing in his background seems to have brought him to this troubling point. Mr. Bechtolsheim was one of those who gave Silicon Valley its reputation as an engineer’s paradise, a place where getting rich was just something that happened by accident.
  • “He cared so much about making great technology that he would buy a house, not furnish it and sleep on a futon,” said Scott McNealy, who joined with Mr. Bechtolsheim four decades ago to create Sun Microsystems, a maker of computer workstations and servers that was a longtime tech powerhouse. “Money was not how he measured himself.”
  • researchers who analyze trading data say corporate executives broadly profit from confidential information. These executives try to avoid traditional insider trading restrictions by buying shares in economically linked firms, a phenomenon called “shadow trading.”
  • “There appears to be significant profits being made from shadow trading,” said Mihir N. Mehta, an assistant professor of accounting at the University of Michigan and an author of a 2021 study in The Accounting Review that found “robust evidence” of the behavior. “The people doing it have a sense of entitlement or maybe just think, ‘I’m invincible.’”
  • He went to Stanford as a Ph.D. student in the mid-1970s and got to know the then-small programming community around the university. In the early 1980s, he, along with Mr. McNealy, Vinod Khosla and Bill Joy, started Sun Microsystems as an outgrowth of a Stanford project. When Sun initially raised money, Mr. Bechtolsheim put his entire life savings — about $100,000 — into the company.
  • “You could end up losing all your money,” he was warned by the venture capitalists financing Sun. His response: “I see zero risk here.”
  • An impromptu demonstration was hastily arranged for 8 a.m., which Mr. Bechtolsheim cut short. He had seen enough, and besides, he had to get to the office. He gave them a check, and the deal was sealed, Mr. Levy wrote, “with as little fanfare as if he were grabbing a latte on the way to work.
  • Mr. Page and Mr. Brin couldn’t deposit Mr. Bechtolsheim’s check for a month because Google did not have a bank account. When Google went public in 2004, that $100,000 investment was worth at least $1 billion.
  • It wasn’t the money that made the story famous, however. It was the way it confirmed one of Silicon Valley’s most cherished beliefs about itself: that its genius is so blindingly obvious, questions are superfluous.
  • The dot-com boom was a disorienting period for longtime Valley leaders whose interest in money was muted. Mr. Bechtolsheim’s Sun colleague Mr. Joy left Silicon Valley.
  • “There’s so much money around, it’s clouding a lot of people’s ethics,” Mr. Joy said in a 1999 oral history
  • Mr. Bechtolsheim didn’t leave. In 2008, he co-founded Arista, a Silicon Valley computer networking company that went public and now has 4,000 employees and a stock market value of $100 billion.
  • Mr. Bechtolsheim was chair of Arista’s board when an executive from another company called in 2019, according to the S.E.C. Arista and the other company, which was not named in court documents, had a history of sharing confidential information under nondisclosure agreements.
  • immediately after hanging up, the government said, he bought Acacia option contracts in the accounts of a close relative and a colleague. The next day, the deal was announced. Acacia shares jumped 35 percent.
  • Arista’s code of conduct states that “employees who possess material, nonpublic information gained through their work at Arista may not trade in Arista securities or the securities of another company to which the information pertains.”
  • Mr. Levy, the “In the Plex” author, said there were plenty of legal ways to make money in Silicon Valley. “Someone who is regarded as an influential funder and is very well connected gets nearly unlimited opportunities to make very desirable early investments,”
26More

Hannah Arendt would not qualify for the Hannah Arendt prize in Germany today | Samantha... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...masha-gessen-israel-gaza-essay Arendt prize anti-Semitism irony law
shared by Javier E on 07 Apr 24 - No Cached
  • The Foundation, which is affiliated with the German Green party, founded the prize not to honor Arendt but to “honor individuals who identify critical and unseen aspects of current political events and who are not afraid to enter the public realm by representing their opinion in controversial political discussions”, withdrew its support, causing the city of Bremen to withdraw its support, leading to an initial cancellation
  • The Foundation said Gessen’s comparison was “unacceptable”, but has since backtracked and has now said that they stand behind the award.
  • The comparison is not a one-to-one argument, but rather a barometer for urging individuals – and countries – to think about their support for Israe
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • The comparison from Gessen’s essay, which caused such uproar, closely echoes a passage from Arendt’s correspondence written from Jerusalem in 1955 to her husband Heinrich Blücher, which is far more damning:
  • “The galut-and-ghetto mentality is in full bloom. And the idiocy is right in front of everyone’s eyes: Here in Jerusalem I can barely go for a walk, because I might turn the wrong corner and find myself ‘abroad’, ie, in Arab territory. Essentially it’s the same everywhere. On top of that, they treat the Arabs, those still here, in a way that in itself would be enough to rally the whole world against Israel.”
  • Within the culture of German memory politics the Holocaust is treated as singular; it is understood as a historical exception
  • his exception-to-history mentality has the effect of placing the Holocaust outside of history altogether, which allows the German government to espo
  • By making the comparison between a Nazi-occupied ghetto and Gaza before 7 October, Gessen is making a political argument meant to invoke historical memory and draw attention to concepts like genocide, crimes against humanity and “never again”, which emerged out of the second world war.
  • For Arendt, the political emancipation of the bourgeoisie was the cornerstone of the modern nation-state, in which political laws were governed by the private interests of businessmen who had found it necessary to take over the apparatus of the state in order to deploy the military in their colonial ventures
  • In exile in Paris from 1933 until she was interned in 1940, she worked to help Jewish youth escape to Palestine and even went there in 1935 with Youth Aliyah.
  • he said she only wanted to do Jewish work to help the Jewish people, because her mother had taught her that when one is attacked as a Jew one must fight back as a Jew
  • She was attacked at the conference for calling for a rejection of Ben-Gurion’s vision
  • in 1948, she joined Albert Einstein and Sidney Hook among others in signing a letter published in the New York Times to protest against Menachem Begin’s visit to America, comparing his “Freedom” party “to the organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist Parties”.
  • Hannah Arendt would not qualify for the Hannah Arendt prize. She would be cancelled in Germany today for her political position on Israel and opinions about contemporary Zionism, which she remained critical of from 1942 until her death in 1975
  • while antisemitism as an ideology was central to the organization of the masses, it was not the only political factor at play in her account.
  • Arendt was critical of the nation-state of Israel from its founding, in part because she was worried that the state would exhibit the worst tendencies of the European nation-state
  • It was this co-option of the nation, and transformation of the nation into a nation-state by private economic interests that lay at the heart of her understanding. And what she emphasized – and was criticized for – was the argument that antisemitism was being used politically by the nation-state in order to further its political and economic interests.
  • Of course Eichmann had been antisemitic, she argued, but his hatred of the Jewish people was not his primary motivation. Instead, she argued it was his commonplace hubris that made him want to ascend the ranks of the Third Reich
  • She argued that this was the banality of evil, and defined the banality of evil as the inability to imagine the world from the perspective of another
  • All of which is to say, it is necessary that we as human beings be able to imagine the world from the perspective of another to prevent evil from happening, and to stand up to evil when we are confronted with it
  • right now Germany’s resolution forbids it
  • This moral obligation to compare means two things: that Germany is not allowed to continue to treat the Jewish people or Jewish history as an exception to the rule in order to justify their political support of Israel; and that all people have a right to exist freely everywhere, regardless of where they appeared in the world by chance of birth
  • The question she wrote in her notebook as she thought about how Germany should remember the war was this: “Is there a way of thinking that is not tyrannical?”
  • What Arendt meant by banality, arguing that it was the inability to imagine the world from the perspective of another, was that people had gone along with the radical shift in moral norms overnight that transformed “Thou shalt not kill” into “Thou shalt kill”, without questioning
  • Moral complexity is necessary in the face of evil
  • Perhaps the greatest irony of reality today is that the rhetoric of Germany’s “antiantisemitism” is being used to justify the mass slaughter of Palestinian people, while having the effect of actually increasing antisemitism and making Jewish people less safe everywhere.
10More

China Feels Boxed In by the U.S. but Has Few Ways to Push Back - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...china-us-biden-japan.html china US foreign policy rivalry
shared by Javier E on 13 Apr 24 - No Cached
  • President Biden’s effort to build American security alliances in China’s backyard is likely to reinforce the Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s view that Washington is leading an all-out campaign of “containment, encirclement and suppression” of his country. And there is not much Mr. Xi can do about it.
  • To China, Mr. Biden’s campaign looks nothing short of a reprise of the Cold War, when the world was split into opposing blocs. In this view, Beijing is being hemmed in by U.S. allies and partners, in a cordon stretching over the seas on China’s eastern coast from Japan to the Philippines, along its disputed Himalayan border with India, and even across the vast Pacific Ocean to a string of tiny, but strategic, island nations.
  • The summit ended with agreements to hold more naval and coast guard joint exercises, and pledges of new infrastructure investment and technology cooperation. It builds on a groundbreaking defense pact made at Camp David last August between Mr. Biden and the leaders of Japan and South Korea, as well as on plans unveiled last year to work with Australia and Britain to develop and deploy nuclear-powered attack submarines.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • “China is clearly alarmed by these developments,” said Jingdong Yuan, director of the China and Asia Security Program at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. “Chinese interpretations would be that the U.S. and its allies have clearly decided that China needs to be contained.”
  • aside from pointed words and the perfunctory maritime patrol, Beijing’s options to push back against U.S. pressure appear limited, analysts said, especially as China contends with slowing economic growth and mounting trade frictions.
  • Whether Mr. Biden’s strategy succeeds in deterring China in the long run remains to be seen. Nationalists in China view American alliances as fragile and subject to the whims of each U.S. presidential election. Then there’s Mr. Xi, who perceives the West to be in structural decline, and China’s ascendance as Asia’s dominant power to be inevitable.
  • “The Americans should not think so highly of themselves. They could not solve Afghanistan or Ukraine,” said Zheng Yongnian, an influential political scientist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s campus in Shenzhen. He said that China still hoped to resolve its disputes peacefully. “The reason we are not touching the Philippines is not that we are afraid of the United States.”
  • Beijing’s room to maneuver against Washington is limited by its struggling economy, which has been hit by a property crisis and a cratering of foreign investment. China has been increasing exports, but that has already caused friction with countries concerned about a flood of cheap Chinese goods.
  • The broader American pressure campaign may also be nudging China to avoid escalating tensions further. Despite its differences with the United States, China is engaging in talks between the countries’ leaders and senior officials. Relations with some neighbors, such as Australia, are slowly thawing. Analysts have noted that Beijing has also avoided escalating its military presence around Taiwan in recent months, despite the island’s election of a leader the Communist Party loathes.
  • “They are definitely being more cautious and demonstrating a willingness to engage,” Ja Ian Chong, an associate professor of political science at the National University of Singapore, said of Beijing. “They are realizing there are actual risks to letting frictions escalate. We just haven’t seen any substantive compromises yet.”
8More

Republicans begin to target Putin 'apologists' in their midst - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...t-putin-apologists-their-midst gop option trump support
shared by Javier E on 17 Feb 24 - No Cached
  • The thing about the Republican Party is that it’s not so much that it likes Putin or even thinks he’s an okay guy. Polling last year showed fewer than 1 in 10 Republicans had a favorable view of Putin or trusted him to do the right thing on the world stage, and Republicans said 76 percent to 16 percent that Putin is a war criminal. These are not in line with Carlson’s professed worldview.
  • Another poll I keep coming back to comes from Vanderbilt University last year. Even a year into Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, it showed a majority of MAGA Republicans (52 percent) said Putin was a better president than Joe Biden.
  • Shortly after it was revealed in late 2016 that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump, an Economist/YouGov poll showed a sharp increase in favorable GOP views of Putin. Suddenly, 37 percent had a favorable view, and 47 percent had an unfavorable one. Just 14 percent had a “very” unfavorable view of him.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Early 2017 Gallup data echoed this. It showed 32 percent of Republicans suddenly liked the man who had just interfered in an American election.
  • But a significant and influential segment of the party has demonstrated a tendency toward a brand of moral relativism and even authoritarianism that creates an opening for giving Putin a pass.
  • Maybe these Republicans just disliked Biden that much, or maybe they saw something admirable in Putin’s strongman mystique (a sentiment Trump has spent years cultivating). It certainly wouldn’t be the only evidence of Trump supporters flirting with the merits of authoritarianism.
  • Regardless, the data show how, when these loud voices on the right project softness on Putin or his invasion of Ukraine, there’s a willingness to hear that out — even if the base doesn’t actually like Putin. Influential voices on the right have spent years creating a permission structure for shrugging at things like Navalny’s death (see: Jamal Khashoggi).
  • there’s been little in the way of a desire to fight back against these noisy and influential forces — in part because that would entail going against the most powerful Republican and the onetime most influential conservative commentator.
18More

I Am Sorry But Joe Biden Crushed It in Michigan - 0 views

plus.thebulwark.com/...am-sorry-but-joe-biden-crushed politics US extremism moral certitude certainty ambiguity dilemma liberalism conservatism
shared by Javier E on 02 Mar 24 - No Cached
  • Damon Linker has the most thoughtful meditation I’ve read on Aaron Bushnell, the airman who set himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy this weekend.
  • before we get to that, I want to put in front of you Linker’s definition of small-l liberalism:
  • I’m fully committed to the liberal project of domesticating and taming the most intense political passions, ultimately channeling them into representative political institutions, where they are forced to reach accommodation and compromise with contrary views held by other members of the polity.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • Linker’s description of Bushnell’s options and actions is measured and not without some respect:
  • Damon hops off the bus at the same point I do: Bushnell displayed a tremendous amount of courage, yes. But this was mated to an absolute moral certainty.
  • Every society needs both, because that is how we conserve our achievements while still working toward a more perfect order.
  • [Bushnell’s] choice of that word to describe Israel means he followed the “anti-colonial left” in viewing the interminable conflict in and around the Jewish state through the lens of Western imperialism across the “global south.” Viewed in this way, Israelis are rapacious oppressors, exploiters, unjustly stealing from the Palestinians, occupying their land, not just in the territories of the West Bank that are occupied under international law but likely in its entirety. That’s certainly how Hamas views the situation, with an added overlay of Islamist theofascism.
  • What would it be like, I wonder, to live in a world so morally simple, so neat and tidy, so devoid of tragic clashes, so orderly, with its heroes and villains, its Children of Light and its Children of Darkness? I really wouldn’t know. Because the world I inhabit is one permeated by ambiguity and people with mixed motives who are often (usually?) torn between competing moral considerations and imperatives, not a world divided between the absolutely good and the absolutely evil. The line between good and evil doesn’t run between East and West, or North and South, or white and black, or Israel and Palestine. It runs right through every human heart. Or at least most hearts.
  • This is where liberalism and conservatism meet, in the most elemental sense. The conservative impulse is to be suspicious of change because you are aware that things can always get worse, that systems are often too complex to be understood, that tail risk rules the world. The liberal impulse is to believe that agency is precious, that the world can be improved, that progress is both possible and desirable.
  • Linker notes that Bushnell referred to Israelis as “colonizers”:
  • Every governing system needs both, because that is how we channel passions out of the street and into political institutions.
  • And every person needs both, because that is how we avoid the epistemic certainty that can drive us to extremes of exuberance or despair.
  • The war in Gaza is a textbook example of the dangers of epistemic certainty, because it is too complicated, freighted with too much history, and too full of horrors to fit neatly on one side of the ledger or the other.
  • The 10/7 attack was an act of unconstrained barbarism that made it impossible for Israel to coexist with Hamas. Or at least: I am not aware of any proposed remedy that would have made coexistence possible without Israel becoming a fully militarized, illiberal state.
  • The Israeli response has at times violated the rules of war—sometimes of its own volition and sometimes because Hamas’s strategy has been to position assets in such a manner as to result in the deaths of as many Palestinian civilians as possible.
  • The suffering of the Palestinian people is real and of a magnitude that is almost impossible to comprehend.
  • And yet, the war continues because Hamas has no interest in a ceasefire. “We are not interested in engaging with what’s been floated, because it does not fulfill our demands,” one Hamas official told the media yesterday.
  • The world is messy. Life is messy. Often in ways which break the human heart. The project of liberal society, which requires equal measures of liberalism and conservatism, is to manage this messiness as well as possible.
18More

AI scientist Ray Kurzweil: 'We are going to expand intelligence a millionfold by 2045' ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...e-ai-the-singularity-is-nearer ai kurzweil predictions evaluation 2024
shared by Javier E on 29 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • American computer scientist and techno-optimist Ray Kurzweil is a long-serving authority on artificial intelligence (AI). His bestselling 2005 book, The Singularity Is Near, sparked imaginations with sci-fi like predictions that computers would reach human-level intelligence by 2029 and that we would merge with computers and become superhuman around 2045, which he called “the Singularity”. Now, nearly 20 years on, Kurzweil, 76, has a sequel, The Singularity Is Nearer
  • no longer seem so wacky.
  • Your 2029 and 2045 projections haven’t changed…I have stayed consistent. So 2029, both for human-level intelligence and for artificial general intelligence (AGI) – which is a little bit different. Human-level intelligence generally means AI that has reached the ability of the most skilled humans in a particular domain and by 2029 that will be achieved in most respects. (There may be a few years of transition beyond 2029 where AI has not surpassed the top humans in a few key skills like writing Oscar-winning screenplays or generating deep new philosophical insights, though it will.) AGI means AI that can do everything that any human can do, but to a superior level. AGI sounds more difficult, but it’s coming at the same time.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • Why write this book? The Singularity Is Near talked about the future, but 20 years ago, when people didn’t know what AI was. It was clear to me what would happen, but it wasn’t clear to everybody. Now AI is dominating the conversation. It is time to take a look again both at the progress we’ve made – large language models (LLMs) are quite delightful to use – and the coming breakthroughs.
  • It is hard to imagine what this would be like, but it doesn’t sound very appealing… Think of it like having your phone, but in your brain. If you ask a question your brain will be able to go out to the cloud for an answer similar to the way you do on your phone now – only it will be instant, there won’t be any input or output issues, and you won’t realise it has been done (the answer will just appear). People do say “I don’t want that”: they thought they didn’t want phones either!
  • The most important driver is the exponential growth in the amount of computing power for the price in constant dollars. We are doubling price-performance every 15 months. LLMs just began to work two years ago because of the increase in computation.
  • What’s missing currently to bring AI to where you are predicting it will be in 2029? One is more computing power – and that’s coming. That will enable improvements in contextual memory, common sense reasoning and social interaction, which are all areas where deficiencies remain
  • LLM hallucinations [where they create nonsensical or inaccurate outputs] will become much less of a problem, certainly by 2029 – they already happen much less than they did two years ago. The issue occurs because they don’t have the answer, and they don’t know that. They look for the best thing, which might be wrong or not appropriate. As AI gets smarter, it will be able to understand its own knowledge more precisely and accurately report to humans when it doesn’t know.
  • What exactly is the Singularity? Today, we have one brain size which we can’t go beyond to get smarter. But the cloud is getting smarter and it is growing really without bounds. The Singularity, which is a metaphor borrowed from physics, will occur when we merge our brain with the cloud. We’re going to be a combination of our natural intelligence and our cybernetic intelligence and it’s all going to be rolled into one. Making it possible will be brain-computer interfaces which ultimately will be nanobots – robots the size of molecules – that will go noninvasively into our brains through the capillaries. We are going to expand intelligence a millionfold by 2045 and it is going to deepen our awareness and consciousness.
  • Why should we believe your dates? I’m really the only person that predicted the tremendous AI interest that we’re seeing today. In 1999 people thought that would take a century or more. I said 30 years and look what we have.
  • I have a chapter on perils. I’ve been involved with trying to find the best way to move forward and I helped to develop the Asilomar AI Principles [a 2017 non-legally binding set of guidelines for responsible AI development]
  • All the major companies are putting more effort into making sure their systems are safe and align with human values than they are into creating new advances, which is positive.
  • Not everyone is likely to be able to afford the technology of the future you envisage. Does technological inequality worry you? Being wealthy allows you to afford these technologies at an early point, but also one where they don’t work very well. When [mobile] phones were new they were very expensive and also did a terrible job. They had access to very little information and didn’t talk to the cloud. Now they are very affordable and extremely useful. About three quarters of people in the world have one. So it’s going to be the same thing here: this issue goes away over time.
  • The book looks in detail at AI’s job-killing potential. Should we be worried? Yes, and no. Certain types of jobs will be automated and people will be affected. But new capabilities also create new jobs. A job like “social media influencer” didn’t make sense, even 10 years ago. Today we have more jobs than we’ve ever had and US average personal income per hours worked is 10 times what it was 100 years ago adjusted to today’s dollars. Universal basic income will start in the 2030s, which will help cushion the harms of job disruptions. It won’t be adequate at that point but over time it will become so.
  • Everything is progressing exponentially: not only computing power but our understanding of biology and our ability to engineer at far smaller scales. In the early 2030s we can expect to reach longevity escape velocity where every year of life we lose through ageing we get back from scientific progress. And as we move past that we’ll actually get back more years.
  • What is your own plan for immortality? My first plan is to stay alive, therefore reaching longevity escape velocity. I take about 80 pills a day to help keep me healthy. Cryogenic freezing is the fallback. I’m also intending to create a replicant of myself [an afterlife AI avatar], which is an option I think we’ll all have in the late 2020s
  • I did something like that with my father, collecting everything that he had written in his life, and it was a little bit like talking to him. [My replicant] will be able to draw on more material and so represent my personality more faithfully.
  • What should we be doing now to best prepare for the future? It is not going to be us versus AI: AI is going inside ourselves. It will allow us to create new things that weren’t feasible before. It’ll be a pretty fantastic future.
31More

Opinion | Why Boys Today Struggle With Human Connection - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...boys-parenting-loneliness.html boys human connection culture crisis psychology emotion loneliness
shared by Javier E on 07 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • By the time he left Discord a year or so later, he’d had about 200 calls with different people, both men and women, who spoke of contemplating suicide.
  • But it was the boys who seemed the most desperately lonely and isolated. On the site, he said, he found “a lot more unhealthy men than unhealthy women.” He added: “With men, there is a huge thing about mental health and shame because you’re not supposed to be weak. You’re not supposed to be broken.” A male mental-health crisis was flying under the radar.
  • I have come to believe the conditions of modern boyhood amount to a perfect storm for loneliness
  • ...28 more annotations...
  • All the old deficiencies and blind spots of male socialization are still in circulation — the same mass failure to teach boys relational skills and emotional intelligence, the same rigid masculinity norms and social prohibitions that push them away from intimacy and emotionality.
  • in many ways this environment has apparently had the opposite effect — it has shut them down even further.
  • The micro-generation that was just hitting puberty as the #MeToo movement exploded in 2017 is now of college (and voting) age. They have lived their whole adolescence not just in the digital era, with a glorious array of virtual options to avoid the angst of real-world socializing, but also in the shadow of a wider cultural reckoning around toxic masculinity.
  • We have spent the past half-decade wrestling with ideas of gender and privilege, attempting to challenge the old stereotypes and power structures. These conversations should have been an opportunity to throw out the old pressures and norms of manhood, and to help boys and men be more emotionally open and engaged.
  • in screen-addicted, culture war-torn America, we have also added new ones.
  • For many progressives, weary from a pileup of male misconduct, the refusal to engage with men’s feelings has now become almost a point of principle
  • For every right-wing tough guy urging his crying son to “man up,” there’s a voice from the left telling him that to express his concerns is to take airtime away from a woman or someone more marginalized
  • In many cases, the same people who are urging boys and men to become more emotionally expressive are also taking a moral stand against hearing how they actually feel
  • For many boys, it can seem as though their emotions get dismissed by both sides. This political isolation has combined with existing masculine norms to push a worrying number of boys into a kind of resentful, semi-politicized reclusion.
  • Over a quarter of men under 30 say they have no close friends
  • Teenage boys now spend two hours less a week socializing than girls and they also spend about seven hours more per week than their female peers on screens.
  • my own research has fed my fears.
  • the same theme came up over and over for boys who on the face of it had little else in common. They were lonely.
  • almost all of them had the nagging sense that something important was missing in those friendships. They found it almost impossible to talk to their male peers about anything intimate or express vulnerability.
  • One teenager described his social circle, a group of boys who had been best friends since kindergarten, as a “very unsupportive support system.” Another revealed that he could recall only one emotionally open conversation with a male friend in his life, and that even his twin brother had not seen him cry in years
  • they felt unable to articulate this pain or seek help, because of a fear that, because they were boys, no one would listen.
  • As one 20-year-old put it, “If a man voices any concern, they get deflected with all of their so-called privileges.” He added: “They’d be like, ‘Whatever. Women have suffered more than you, so you have no right to complain.’”
  • Almost without exception, the boys I talked to craved closer, more emotionally open relationships, but had neither the skills nor the social permission to change the story.
  • Perhaps it’s not surprising that boys don’t know how to listen and engage with their friends’ emotions on any deeper level; after all, no one really engages with theirs.
  • in a sexist society, male opinions hold outsized value. But the world — including their own parents — has less time for their feelings.
  • One study from 2014 showed that parents were more likely to use emotional words when talking with their 4-year-old daughters than those speaking to their 4-year-old sons.
  • A more recent study comparing fathers of boys with fathers of girls found that fathers of boys were less attentively engaged with their boys, spent less time talking about their son’s sad feelings and instead were more likely to roughhouse with them. They even used subtly different vocabularies when talking with boys, with fewer feelings-centered words, and more competition and winning-focused language.
  • Spend any time in the manosphere, and it’s easy to start to hate men and boys. The extreme misogyny, the gleeful hate speech, the violent threats and thrum of menace make it hard to summon much sympathy for male concerns, and easy to forget the ways that patriarchy harms them, too.
  • in the grip of the culture wars, caring about boys has become subtly coded as a right-wing cause,
  • Men have had way more than their fair share of our concern already, the reasoning goes, and now it’s time for them to pipe down
  • But for boys, privilege and harm intertwine in complex ways — male socialization is a strangely destructive blend of indulgence and neglect. Under patriarchy, boys and men get everything, except the thing that’s most worth having: human connection.
  • The prescription for creating a generation of healthier, more socially and emotionally competent men is the same in the wider political discourse as it is in our own homes — to approach boys generously rather than punitively
  • We need to acknowledge boys’ feelings, to talk with our sons in the same way we do our daughters, to hear them and empathize rather than dismiss or minimize, and engage with them as fully emotional beings.
« First ‹ Previous 521 - 539 of 539
Showing 20▼ items per page