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Fresh Unrest In Northern Ireland Sparks Comparisons To 'The Troubles' : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...ks-comparisons-to-the-troubles politics Culture policy history
shared by carolinehayter on 08 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • The government of Northern Ireland is holding an emergency meeting on Thursday following days of unrest reminiscent of "The Troubles" that plagued the region for decades.
  • The latest violence in Belfast has erupted amid anger from Protestant unionists concerned they're being isolated from the United Kingdom and pushed into a union with the republic of Ireland due to post-Brexit trade rules.
  • a concrete barrier, known as the peace wall, that separates a Protestant neighborhood from a Catholic area.
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  • On Wednesday night, seven police officers were injured
  • "Last night was at a scale we haven't seen in Belfast or further afield in Northern Ireland for a number of years," Roberts said. In a tweet, the Police Federation for Northern Ireland called for calm, saying, "These are scenes we hoped had been confined to history."
  • The 1998 Good Friday Agreement set up a power-sharing arrangement between Protestants and Catholics. It largely ended 30 years of political violence in Northern Ireland among Irish republicans, British loyalists and U.K.-armed forces that resulted in the deaths of more than 3,000 people.
  • Since the U.K.'s departure from the European Union at the beginning of the year, Northern Ireland has experienced shortages on grocery shelves that have been blamed on red tape and delays caused by new post-Brexit checks at ports in Northern Ireland. As part of the Brexit agreement, the EU insisted on the checks in exchange for allowing a soft border between Northern Ireland and Ireland.
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A Hunger Strike in ICE Detention | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...hunger-strike-in-ice-detention politics US history Crisis
shared by anniina03 on 17 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • n June of 2018, Ajay Kumar, a thirty-two-year-old farmer with a thick beard and a soft voice, left Haryana, a state in northern India. He told me that political opponents had been intimidating him for being a loud and persistent activist and that they had eventually forced him to leave. His family pooled money, and he used it to fly to Ecuador, a country that he didn’t need a visa to enter. From there, he stole across the Colombian border, made his way through the rain forests of Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Honduras, and crossed into Mexico. He lost clothes, money, and, at one point, his shoes. He worried that he would be killed by gangs, or that he would die of drowning or dehydration. “We never know how, what, when, where we will die,” he told me recently. Two months after he left India, Kumar reached the U.S.-Mexico border, near Otay Mesa, California, and turned himself in to Border Patrol.
  • Kumar was one of nearly nine thousand Indians apprehended along the southern border of the U.S. in 2018—a remarkable rise from the year before, when roughly three thousand were apprehended. A decade ago, there were only ninety-nine.
  • Since Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party came to power, in 2014, there has been a rise in violence, threats, and intimidation against minorities and members of the political opposition in India. In the past few decades, the country’s economy has also undergone a rapid liberalization, and inequality has intensified.
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  • Over the past several months, the U.S. has been trying to stop Indian migrants before they even reach the border. Last week, Mexico deported more than three hundred Indian migrants who were waiting to cross into the U.S., under a deal with the Trump Administration to avoid tariffs on Mexican exports. In 2016, two anonymous ICE officials described to Buzzfeed the agency’s unofficial policy toward Indian asylum seekers: “Keep them out. If you catch them, detain them.”
  • When Kumar reached California, he spent a few days in a packed cell, and then he and other asylum seekers were put on buses and planes—with chains around their hands, feet, and stomach, “as if we were some criminals,” Kumar recalled
  • Kumar ended up in the Otero County Processing Center, an ICE facility managed by a private contractor, where he says his treatment worsened. The officers spoke to Kumar and other Indian asylum seekers in English and Spanish, and refused to provide translators (except when they filled out medical questionnaires), despite the fact that the migrants spoke only Punjabi and Hindi.
  • Force-feeding is painful and potentially harmful to patients, and organizations including the Red Cross, the American Medical Association, and the World Medical Association consider it medically unethical
  • But what made Kumar most upset was that he and the other migrants were subjected to “animal-like treatment”—foul language, aggression, and punitive responses to minor violations of the rules. “When they cursed at the Indians and treated them badly, I couldn’t stand seeing it, so I would speak out against them,” Kumar told me. “If I said something, they would put me in the SHU”—the Special Housing Unit, a euphemism for solitary confinement—“for fifteen days, ten days, by myself in a small room.” (ICE did not respond to my request for comment.)
  • Kumar and other Indian asylum seekers were vegetarian because of their religious beliefs, and the staff sometimes taunted them and made them wait until everyone else got food before they could eat.
  • In July, Kumar went on a hunger strike to protest his indefinite detention and looming deportation. “I decided if I am going to die, I’ll die here,” he told me. When the officers at Otero saw that Kumar had stopped eating and drinking, they sent him to solitary. A few days later, he could hear the officers putting others in SHU rooms near his. He couldn’t see or talk to them and only later learned that five other Indian men had also gone on hunger strike. He did not know what had sparked their protest, though the Otero staff considered him their ringleader, nonetheless. “I had one demand from the beginning,” he told me. “I just want my freedom. I didn’t ask for anything else.”
  • n mid-July, Kumar and three other hunger strikers were transferred to the El Paso Service Processing Center’s medical unit, in Texas, where Kumar was at times isolated from the others. ICE obtained a court authorization to force-feed them, a procedure that involves pushing a tube through a patient’s nose and down the esophagus. One of the migrants had just been treated for a nose infection, and, as ICE doctors placed the tube in his nostril, he began spitting blood and lost consciousness. According to Corchado, who also represented this detainee, the doctor administering the tubes told him, “End your hunger strike and we’ll stop this.” He ended the strike that night.
  • In March of this year, Kumar learned that an immigration judge had rejected his application for asylum, finding the evidence of persecution he had presented not credible, and had ordered his deportation. Kumar filed an appeal. While he waited, he requested to be released on bond, something he had been asking for since he was apprehended, but ICE refused. Though ICE uses punitive measures against detainees, people in immigration detention are officially being held for an administrative violation rather than for a criminal offense, which means that, except in special circumstances, there is no legal limit on how long they can be held.
  • In January, a group of Indian asylum seekers dubbed the “El Paso Nine” banded together in a collective hunger strike. A court gave authorization for them to be force-fed, but the feeding was stopped after two or three weeks in the face of mounting pressure from politicians, activists, and lawyers. Seven of the strikers were eventually deported, and two were released to await rulings on their cases. But forty-nine members of Congress signed a letter to the Department of Homeland Security demanding an investigation into the use of force-feeding by ICE.
  • Kumar was taken off the feeding tube after nearly a month and then persisted in his strike. His weight dropped, as did his blood pressure and heart rate. He started getting severe abdominal pains. “I was literally seeing him die in front of me,” Corchado told me.
  • On September 12th, the court allowed ICE to resume force-feeding Kumar. The judge wrote in his opinion that he couldn’t order ICE to release Kumar, but he scolded the government for not having given Kumar an independent doctor’s evaluation and for what the judge called its “penological” treatment of him.
  • At the end of his hunger strike, Kumar weighed a hundred and seven pounds. He left the El Paso facility on September 26th and is now staying with an immigration activist in Las Cruces, New Mexico. He is eating solid foods again, and gardening, and he recently enrolled in E.S.L. classes. But he can’t run like he used to, and he’s still regaining his vision after going partially blind from starvation. “I’m not fully recovered,” he told me, two weeks after his release. “There are some mental issues—I can’t remember everything. But I’m better than before.”
  • In September, the Board of Immigration Appeals agreed to remand Kumar’s asylum case back to the immigration judge, concluding that the initial ruling, which judged Kumar’s testimony to be not credible, was “clearly erroneous.” Kumar’s case will be heard again, in December, by the same judge. His odds are not great—more than forty-one per cent of Indian asylum seekers were ordered to be deported from the United States last year, and the percentage is likely to be even higher this year.
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Opinion: Trump is considering a move that would prolong Yemen's misery - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html Trump Yemen Civil War Politics United Nations Funding Supplies Terrorism
shared by yehbru on 02 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • In one of its final foreign policy acts before leaving office, the Trump administration is considering designating Yemen's Houthi movement as a foreign terrorist organization.
  • The move is part of President Donald Trump's and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's campaign to impose more sanctions on Iran and its allies in the Middle East—and to create new hurdles that would make it difficult for the incoming Joe Biden administration to resume negotiations with Tehran.
  • this designation could prolong Yemen's brutal civil war and drive millions of Yemenis into starvation
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  • Yemen is already facing what UNICEF calls the largest humanitarian crisis in the world, with around 80% of the population—more than 24 million people—needing food and other aid.
  • United Nations Secretary General António Guterres warned that Yemen was "in imminent danger of the worst famine the world has seen for decades." He added, "In the absence of immediate action, millions of lives may be lost."
  • Trump and his advisers blamed the war on Iran and its support for the Houthis, ignoring war crimes by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which could implicate US officials who continued to sell weapons to the two allies.
  • By March 2015, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, two of Washington's closest allies in the Arab world, intervened in the war with massive air strikes and a blockade of Houthi-controlled areas.
  • Since taking office in 2017, Trump has repeatedly claimed that he wants to end US involvement in foreign wars, especially in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.
  • If the Trump administration goes ahead with designating the Houthi rebels as terrorists, the UN and many international humanitarian groups likely would stop delivering aid to Houthi-held territory in Yemen for fear of running afoul of the United States
  • Despite international criticism and growing evidence of war crimes, Trump continued to support Saudi Arabia's crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, who is a major proponent of the Yemen war. In 2019, Trump used his veto power four times to prevent Congress from ending weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and its allies.
  • Designating the Houthis as a terrorist organization is likely to make the group more intransigent and to drive it closer to Iran.
  • Because of constraints imposed by the Houthis on humanitarian work, Washington has already cut nearly half of its assistance to Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen this year. In 2019, US aid amounted to more than $700 million.
  • The UN also decreased its food rations to millions of Yemenis because of reduced aid from the US and other donors. If the terrorism designation is finalized, Washington would immediately stop its remaining aid to Houthi-controlled parts of Yemen.
  • A terrorist designation would also have a ripple effect beyond hampering the work of UN and humanitarian groups: it would dissuade insurance, commercial shipping and trade firms from operating in Yemen because they would be afraid of violating US laws.
  • As a result, it would become far more difficult and expensive to ship crucial supplies into Yemen, which is almost entirely reliant on imported food. The threat of sanctions or US prosecution could also devastate shipments of medical aid and other supplies intended to shore up a healthcare system that has been devastated by years of war and, more recently, the coronavirus pandemic.
  • It's also unlikely to be a top priority of the new administration, which could be worried about being portrayed as "soft" on terrorism.
  • The full scope of suffering in Yemen has gone partly unnoticed because of an unreliable death toll.
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Why America's Institutions Are Failing - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...613078 institutions history crisis response pandemic CDC federal reserve FDA police
shared by Javier E on 16 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • “The government agencies we thought were keeping us safe and secure—the CDC, the FDA, the Police—have either failed or, worse, have been revealed to be active creators of danger and insecurity,” Alex Tabarrok, an economics professor at George Mason University, wrote on Twitter.
  • Why have America’s instruments of hard and soft power failed so spectacularly in 2020?
  • We are prepared for wars against states and militant groups, but not against stateless forces such as pandemics and climate change.
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  • our risk sensor is fixed to the anxieties and illusions of the 1900s
  • We’re arming and empowering the police like it’s 1990, when urban crime had reached historic highs. But violent-crime rates have fallen by more than 50 percent in almost every major American city in the past generation, while police still drape themselves in military gear and kill more than 1,000 people annually.
  • Too many police are instructed to believe that the 20th-century crime wave never ended.
  • Between the 1960s and the early 1990s, the violent-crime rate in many U.S. cities rose “to levels seen only in the most violent, war-torn nations of the developing world,”
  • As American cities became perceived as war zones, police responded by adopting a “warrior” mentality.
  • Then violent crime plunged by more than 70 percent from 1993 to 2018, according to data maintained by the Department of Justice. Although officers routinely face threats that most white-collar workers never will, cops are safer now than at any point in nearly 50 years.
  • The U.S. has about the same number of police officers per capita as, say, Australia; but adjusted for population, U.S. law enforcement kills 10 times more people.
  • The message is clear: Be a warrior, because it’s a war out there.
  • The warrior mentality encourages an adversarial approach in which officers needlessly escalate encounters.
  • calls the idealization of the warrior “the most problematic aspect of modern [police] policy.”
  • the CDC had waited “its entire existence for this moment,” but it was so unprepared to deal with COVID-19 that the group initially in charge of the response, the Division of Viral Diseases, had to cede responsibilities to the Influenza Division, despite the fact that COVID-19 is not caused by any kind of influenza virus
  • Police aren’t just trained to feel like warriors; many are armed for war
  • Over time, SWAT itself served as a gateway drug for police militarization, as equipment once reserved for special teams, such as AR-15 rifles, were made available to ordinary officers.
  • the War on Drugs has been roundly discredited as a trillion-dollar failure that incurs thousands of unnecessary deaths. But it has bequeathed us a world where police bearing semiautomatics are armed with the wrong tools for the actual job
  • “The world has changed dramatically since the most violent years of the 1990s, but police training trails lived experience,”
  • the U.S. mental-health crisis has been effectively outsourced to the streets, where police who aren’t trained as social workers or behavioral therapists must perform the ad hoc duties of both.
  • Rather than respond to the drastically changing nature of American life, our cities and counties use police as a civic Swiss Army knife to solve problems such as homelessness and mental-health emergencies that have little to do with police training.
  • the failures of American police are not unique, but rather a symptom of a broader breakdown in high-quality governance.
  • Before it stood for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC was founded as the Communicable Disease Center in the 1940s. Its original mission was to stop an epidemic. The organization’s first 400, Atlanta-based employees were tasked with arresting an outbreak of malaria in the Southeast
  • Today, the center’s 14,000 employees work “at the speed of science”—that is, slowly and deliberately—to understand an array of health issues, including cancer, obesity, and vaping.
  • its mission creep has transformed what was once a narrowly focused agency into a kaleidoscopic bureaucracy with no fast-twitch instinct for achieving its founding mission to protect Americans from an epidemic.
  • The CDC’s recent failures are well known, but worth repeating. It failed to keep track of early COVID-19 cases in part because of a leaden-footed reliance on fax machines and other outdated record-keeping technology. It failed to compile accurate case counts, forcing private actors—such as The Atlantic’s COVID Tracking Project—to fill the void. It failed its most basic coordination functions as an agency
  • Violent crime plays a minuscule role in the day of a modern officer, who spends most of his or her time driving around, taking ho-hum radio calls, and performing the tertiary duties of traffic patroller and mental-health counselor.
  • Most important, the CDC failed to manufacture basic testing equipment. Its initial test kits were contaminated and unusable, which allowed the disease to spread undetected throughout the U.S. for weeks.
  • Compare the situation in the U.S. with the one in East Asia, where several countries have navigated the pandemic far more deftly. China, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Vietnam all updated their infectious-disease protocols based on what they learned from 21st-century epidemics: SARS in 2003, H1N1 in 2009, and MERS in 2012. These countries quickly understood what artillery would be necessary to take on COVID-19, including masks, tests, tracing, and quarantine spaces. Yet the CDC—armed with an $8 billion budget and a global team of scientists and officials—was somehow unprepared to read from the playbook.
  • The FDA fumbled just as tragically. In January, Alex Greninger, a virologist at the University of Washington, was prepared to build an in-house coronavirus test
  • By the time Greninger was ready to set up his lab, the calendar had turned to March. Hundreds of thousands of Americans were sick, and the outbreak was uncontrollable.
  • the White House cannot be entirely blamed for the ponderous incompetence of what ought to be the greatest public-health system in the world.
  • Not every American institution is trapped in amber. For a perhaps surprising example of one that has adapted to 21st-century needs, take the Federal Reserve.
  • Ben Bernanke, the Fed chair during the Great Recession, used his expertise about the 1930s economy to avoid a similar collapse in financial markets in 2008. Today’s Fed chair, Jerome Powell, has gone even further, urging Congress and the Treasury to “think big” and add to our already-historic deficits.
  • the Federal Reserve has junked old shibboleths about inflation and deficit spending and embraced a policy that might have scandalized mainstream economists in the 1990s. Rejecting the status-quo bias that plagues so many institutions, this 106-year-old is still changing with the world.
  • what strikes me is that America’s safekeeping institutions have forgotten how to properly see the threats of the 21st century and move quickly to respond to them. Those who deny history may be doomed to repeat it. But those who deny the present are just doomed
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Opinion | America and the Coronavirus: 'A Colossal Failure of Leadership' - The New Yor... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...coronavirus-united-states.html us failure pandemic response leadership trump history policy
shared by Javier E on 25 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • One of the most lethal leadership failures in modern times unfolded in South Africa in the early 2000s as AIDS spread there under President Thabo Mbeki.Mbeki scorned science, embraced conspiracy theories, dithered as the disease spread and rejected lifesaving treatments. His denialism cost about 330,000 lives, a Harvard study found
  • “We’re unfortunately in the same place,” said Anne Rimoin, an epidemiologist at U.C.L.A. “Mbeki surrounded himself with sycophants and cost his country hundreds of thousands of lives by ignoring science, and we’re suffering the same fate.”
  • “I see it as a colossal failure of leadership,” said Larry Brilliant, a veteran epidemiologist who helped eliminate smallpox in the 1970s. “Of the more than 200,000 people who have died as of today, I don’t think that 50,000 would have died if it hadn’t been for the incompetence.”
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  • There’s plenty of blame to go around, involving Democrats as well as Republicans, but Trump in particular “recklessly squandered lives,” in the words of an unusual editorial this month in the New England Journal of Medicine. Death certificates may record the coronavirus as the cause of death, but in a larger sense vast numbers of Americans died because their government was incompetent.
  • As many Americans are dying every 10 days of Covid-19 as U.S. troops died during 19 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan
  • The paradox is that a year ago, the United States seemed particularly well positioned to handle this kind of crisis. A 324-page study by Johns Hopkins found last October that the United States was the country best prepared for a pandemic.
  • Then there’s an immeasurable cost in soft power as the United States is humbled before the world.
  • “It’s really sad to see the U.S. presidency fall from being the champion of global health to being the laughingstock of the world,”
  • in terms of destruction of American lives, treasure and well-being, this pandemic may be the greatest failure of governance in the United States since the Vietnam War.
  • the economists David Cutler and Lawrence Summers estimate that the economic cost of the pandemic in the United States will be $16 trillion, or about $125,000 per American household — far more than the median family’s net worth.
  • It’s true that the Obama administration did not do enough to refill the national stockpile with N95 masks, but Republicans in Congress wouldn’t provide even the modest sums that Obama requested for replenishment. And the Trump administration itself did nothing in its first three years to rebuild stockpiles.
  • The Obama administration updated this playbook and in the presidential transition in 2016, Obama aides cautioned the Trump administration that one of the big risks to national security was a contagion. Private experts repeated similar warnings. “Of all the things that could kill 10 million people or more, by far the most likely is an epidemic,” Bill Gates warned in 2015.
  • Credit for that goes to President George W. Bush, who in the summer of 2005 read an advance copy of “The Great Influenza,” a history of the 1918 flu pandemic. Shaken, Bush pushed aides to develop a strategy to prepare for another great contagion, and the result was an excellent 396-page playbook for managing such a health crisis.
  • Trump argues that no one could have anticipated the pandemic, but it’s what Bush warned about, what Obama aides tried to tell their successors about, and what Joe Biden referred to in a blunt tweet in October 2019 lamenting Trump’s cuts to health security programs and adding: “We are not prepared for a pandemic.”
  • When the health commission of Wuhan, China, announced on Dec. 31 that it had identified 27 cases of a puzzling pneumonia, Taiwan acted with lightning speed. Concerned that this might be an outbreak of SARS, Taiwan dispatched health inspectors to board flights arriving from Wuhan and screen passengers before allowing them to disembark. Anyone showing signs of ill health was quarantined.
  • If either China or the rest of the world had shown the same urgency, the pandemic might never have happened.
  • In hindsight, two points seem clear: First, China initially covered up the scale of the outbreak. Second, even so, the United States and other countries had enough information to act as Taiwan did. The first two countries to impose travel restrictions on China were North Korea and the Marshall Islands, neither of which had inside information.
  • That first half of January represents a huge missed opportunity for the world. If the United States, the World Health Organization and the world media had raised enough questions and pressed China, then perhaps the Chinese central government would have intervened in Wuhan earlier. And if Wuhan had been locked down just two weeks earlier, it’s conceivable that this entire global catastrophe could have been averted.
  • the C.D.C. devised a faulty test, and turf wars in the federal government prevented the use of other tests. South Korea, Germany and other countries quickly developed tests that did work, and these were distributed around the world. Sierra Leone in West Africa had effective tests before the United States did.
  • It’s true that local politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike, made disastrous decisions, as when Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City urged people in March to “get out on the town despite coronavirus.” But local officials erred in part because of the failure of testing: Without tests, they didn’t know what they faced.
  • t’s unfair to blame the testing catastrophe entirely on Trump, for the failures unfolded several pay grades below him. Partly that’s because Trump appointees, like Robert Redfield, director of the C.D.C., simply aren’t the A team.
  • In any case, presidents set priorities for lower officials. If Trump had pushed aides as hard to get accurate tests as he pushed to repel refugees and migrants, then America almost certainly would have had an effective test by the beginning of February and tens of thousands of lives would have been saved.
  • Still, testing isn’t essential if a country gets backup steps right. Japan is a densely populated country that did not test much and yet has only 2 percent as many deaths per capita as the United States. One reason is that Japanese have long embraced face masks, which Dr. Redfield has noted can be at least as effective as a vaccine in fighting the pandemic. A country doesn’t have to do everything, if it does some things right.
  • Trump’s missteps arose in part because he channeled an anti-intellectual current that runs deep in the United States, as he sidelined scientific experts and responded to the virus with a sunny optimism apparently meant to bolster the financial markets.
  • Yet in retrospect, Trump did almost everything wrong. He discouraged mask wearing. The administration never rolled out contact tracing, missed opportunities to isolate the infected and exposed, didn’t adequately protect nursing homes, issued advice that confused the issues more than clarified them, and handed responsibilities to states and localities that were unprepared to act.
  • The false reassurances and dithering were deadly. One study found that if the United States had simply imposed the same lockdowns just two weeks earlier, 83 percent of the deaths in the early months could have been prevented.
  • A basic principle of public health is the primacy of accurate communications based on the best science. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who holds a doctorate in physics, is the global champion of that approach
  • Trump was the opposite, sowing confusion and conspiracy theories; a Cornell study found that “the President of the United States was likely the largest driver of the Covid-19 misinformation.”
  • A conservative commentariat echoed Trump in downplaying the virus and deriding efforts to stay safe.
  • A University of Chicago study found that watching the Sean Hannity program correlated to less social distancing, so watching Fox News may well have been lethal to some of its fans.
  • Americans have often pointed to the Soviet Union as a place where ideology trumped science, with disastrous results. Stalin backed Trofim Lysenko, an agricultural pseudoscientist who was an ardent Communist but scorned genetics — and whose zealous incompetence helped cause famines in the Soviet Union. Later, in the 1980s, Soviet leaders were troubled by data showing falling life expectancy — so they banned the publication of mortality statistics
  • It was in the same spirit that Trump opposed testing for the coronavirus in the hope of holding down the number of reported cases.
  • Most striking, Trump still has never developed a comprehensive plan to fight Covid-19. His “strategy” was to downplay the virus and resist business closures, in an effort to keep the economy roaring — his best argument for re-election.
  • This failed. The best way to protect the economy was to control the virus, not to ignore it, and the spread of Covid-19 caused economic dislocations that devastated even homes where no one was infected.
  • Eight million Americans have slipped into poverty since May, a Columbia University study found, and about one in seven households with children have reported to the census that they didn’t have enough food to eat in the last seven days.
  • More than 40 percent of adults reported in June that they were struggling with mental health, and 13 percent have begun or increased substance abuse, a C.D.C. study found
  • More than one-quarter of young adults said they have seriously contemplated suicide
  • So in what is arguably the richest country in the history of the world, political malpractice has resulted in a pandemic of infectious disease followed by pandemics of poverty, mental illness, addiction and hunger.
  • The rejection of science has also exacerbated polarization and tribalism
  • An old school friend shared this conspiracy theory on Facebook:Create a VIRUS to scare people. Place them in quarantine. Count the number of dead every second of every day in every news headline. Close all businesses …. Mask people. Dehumanize them. Close temples and churches …. Empty the prisons because of the virus and fill the streets with criminals. Send in Antifa to vandalize property as if they are freedom fighters. Undermine the law. Loot …. And, in an election year, have Democrats blame all of it on the President. If you love America, our Constitution, and the Rule of Law, get ready to fight for them.
  • During World War II, American soldiers died at a rate of 9,200 a month, less than one-third the pace of deaths from this pandemic, but the United States responded with a massive mobilization
  • Yet today we can’t even churn out enough face masks; a poll of nurses in late July and early August found that one-third lacked enough N95 masks
  • Trump and his allies have even argued against mobilization. “Don’t be afraid of Covid,” Trump tweeted this month. “Don’t let it dominate your life.”
  • It didn’t have to be this way. If the U.S. had worked harder and held the per capita mortality rate down to the level of, say, Germany, we could have saved more than 170,000 lives
  • And if the U.S. had responded urgently and deftly enough to achieve Taiwan’s death rate, fewer than 100 Americans would have died from the virus.
  • “It is a slaughter,” Dr. William Foege, a legendary epidemiologist who once ran the C.D.C., wrote to Dr. Redfield. Dr. Foege predicted that public health textbooks would study America’s response to Covid-19 not as a model of A-plus work but as an example of what not to do.
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Opinion | The New World Order That President Biden Will Inherit - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...y-international-relations.html US culture history Policy biden politics
shared by cartergramiak on 16 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • President-elect Joe Biden has signaled that he will move swiftly to restore dignity to the badly sullied image of the United States; respect for the professionals of America’s diplomatic, intelligence and military services; and a more predictable, nuanced and sympathetic approach to foreign relations.
  • At the same time, he will seek ways to revive the nuclear deal with Iran, and agree with Russia to extend the New START treaty on limiting strategic nuclear arms. Hopefully, Mr. Biden will terminate American support for Saudi Arabia’s terrible war in Yemen.
  • These are all welcome signs of America’s imminent return to a role in the world that better reflects our historical values.
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  • Whatever hold President Vladimir Putin may have had on Mr. Trump almost never translated into a lifting of sanctions, and Democrats are not likely to seek a reset with Russia. Mr. Trump’s bromance with Kim Jong-un did little to change the U.S. stance on North Korea. Mr. Trump’s approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was decidedly one-sided, yet there had been no movement toward a two-state settlement in the years before Mr. Trump became president, and there is little indication that any such movement is imminent no matter who’s in the White House — or where the U.S. Embassy is.
  • In short, the world is not what it was in 2016, nor can it go back to the status quo ante. China is considerably more assertive, and countering Beijing’s aggressions while recognizing its legitimate demands and seeking its help in containing North Korea or reducing carbon emissions will require creative new approaches. So will dealing with a right-wing president in Brazil or a tenacious dictator in Venezuela, or negotiating further nuclear arms reductions with Russia while maintaining sanctions, or trying to placate Israel and several Gulf Arab states while reviving a deal with their archenemy Iran.
  • Simply abandoning Mr. Trump’s approach is immeasurably important for America and the world. The strength of the United States has always derived as much from the soft power of its democracy, freedoms and values as from its battleships and drones. That strength is multiplied by America’s alliances among democracies in the East and West.
  • President-elect Biden has signaled that he intends to lead America back into the international arena, and whatever their qualms or doubts, America’s friends and allies should not wait to join forces in tackling the business of the day — a global pandemic and the future of the planet, to name just two items on the agenda.
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Opinion | Putin Can't Escape History - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-russian-military-ukraine.html history crisis policy putin russia authoritarian
shared by Javier E on 11 Nov 22 - No Cached
  • Yegor Gaidar, the wunderkind who shaped the first post-Communist reforms in Russia, mulled on this cyclical pattern in an article in the newspaper Izvestia in 1994, wondering — as did many in Russia and in the West at the time — whether the pattern would repeat itself after the collapse of the Soviet Union. “Russia’s race for a place in the civilized world recalls Achilles’ chase after the tortoise,” Gaidar wrote. “Through superhuman effort, Russia would manage to catch up and overtake, especially in military technology. Yet the world would unnoticeably but steadily move on, and again after disgraceful and tortuous setbacks the country would regroup for a leap and make another lurch, and everything would be repeated.”
  • Nearly 30 years later, Vladimir Putin’s ruthless efforts to reconstitute a Great Russia by brute force, in the process mauling Ukraine with shocking cruelty and weakening his own country for decades to come, appear to be falling into Gaidar’s pattern
  • Mr. Putin’s strongest pitch, that “losing” Ukraine represents a humiliating demotion of Russia the superpower, still resonates among people who were raised on the Soviet ethos, in which empire was a far stronger bond than nationalism.
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  • Before the announcement of the recent mass conscription, which was followed by the declaration of martial law in Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine, about 30 percent of Russians who were asked by a pro-Kremlin pollster to describe the predominant mood of people around them said they were anxious. Since the decree, that number has risen to 69 percent.
  • as the invasion has dragged on, Mr. Putin has had to shout “Wolf!” ever more stridently.
  • With little experience of democracy, Russians have traditionally been content to entrust their government to a strong “khoziayin,” or master, so long as he provides stability and seems to know what he’s doing. But if that contract is violated, as Russia’s greatest poet, Alexander Pushkin, warned in a quote every Russia knows by heart, “God save us from seeing a Russian revolt, senseless and merciless.”
  • He has drawn liberally on his rewriting of Russian history and culture — as he did again in the Valdai speech, citing, among others, Solzhenitsyn and Dostoyevsky — to claim a spiritual superiority over a West he sees as decadent and decaying. Never mind that these two writers were both repressed by the state, Soviet and czarist, and that Russia is widely perceived as a kleptocracy.
  • There is no soft power in this equation, no appreciation of reasons Ukraine might be more attracted to Europe than to Russia, but only spheres of control parceled out according to rules of conquest and control that the West rejected after World War II. The longings of the Ukrainians have no part in this; Russia’s — Mr. Putin’s — mission is to return to Russia what is Russia’s by right of might
  • it is becoming evident that Mr. Putin, increasingly isolated during the Covid pandemic, was led to believe by his sycophantic lieutenants that a quick invasion would promptly topple the Kyiv government and herd Ukraine back into the fold, and that the West was too far gone to do anything about it.
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Don't Buy the Mitt Romney Martyr Theory - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...671725 gop history crisis culture politics us radicalization
shared by Javier E on 16 Oct 22 - No Cached
  • Ever since Donald Trump won the Republican nomination for president in 2016, an industry of rationalization and justification has thrived. The theme is clear: Look what you made us do. The argument is simple: Democratic unfairness and media bias radicalized Republicans to such an extent that they turned to Trump in understandable outrage. Republicans had been bullied, so they turned to a bully of their own.
  • has been, in fact, a Mitt Romney radicalization process.
  • It isn’t rooted in Republican anger on behalf of Romney but in Republican anger against Romney, and over time that anger has grown to be not just against Romney the man but also against the values he represents.
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  • in hindsight, the real Romney radicalization is far more clear. You could see the seeds planted during the 2012 Republican primary. On January 19, two days before South Carolina primary voters cast their ballot, Newt Gingrich had a moment during the GOP primary debate.
  • Surely, heavily evangelical voters in a key Republican stronghold would be concerned about Gingrich’s scandals? No, they were far angrier at media outlets than they were at any Republican hypocrisy.
  • Gingrich went on to win the South Carolina primary in a “landslide” powered by evangelicals. It was the only time in primary history that South Carolina voters failed to vote for the eventual GOP nominee. But South Carolina voters weren’t out of step; rather they were ahead of their time. They forecast the Republican break with character in favor of a man who would “fight.”
  • To understand the emotional and psychological aftermath of Romney’s loss, one has to look at the cultural break between the GOP establishment—which commissioned an “autopsy” of the party in 2012 that called for greater efforts at inclusion—and a grassroots base that was convinced that it had been hoodwinked by party leaders into supporting the “safe” candidate.
  • And so the Republican establishment and the Republican base moved apart, with one side completely convinced that Romney lost because he was perhaps, if anything, too harsh (especially when it came to immigration) and the other convinced that he lost because he was too soft.
  • When Trump won, the base had its proof of concept. Fighting worked, and not even Trump’s loss—along with the loss of the House and the Senate in four short years—has truly disrupted that conclusion. And why would it? Many millions still don’t believe he lost.
  • The Mitt Romney martyr theory thus suffers from a fatal defect. It presumes that large numbers of Republicans weren’t radicalized before Romney’s rough treatment. In truth, they already hated Democrats and the media, and when Romney lost, their message to the Republican establishment in 2016 was just as clear as it was in South Carolina in 2012. No more nice guys. The “character” that mattered was a commitment to punching the left right in the mouth.
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Deep in Vatican Archives, Scholar Discovers 'Flabbergasting' Secrets - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ory-secrets-david-kertzer.html
shared by criscimagnael on 02 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • David Kertzer has spent decades excavating the Vatican’s hidden history, with his work winning a Pulitzer and capturing Hollywood’s attention. A new book examines Pope Pius XII’s role in the Holocaust.
  • Over the last few decades, Mr. Kertzer has turned the inquisitive tables on the church. Using the Vatican’s own archives, the soft-spoken Brown University professor and trustee at the American Academy in Rome has become arguably the most effective excavator of the Vatican’s hidden sins, especially those leading up to and during World War II.
  • The son of a rabbi who participated in the liberation of Rome as an Army chaplain, Mr. Kertzer grew up in a home that had taken in a foster child whose family was murdered in Auschwitz.
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  • “Part of what I hope to accomplish,” Mr. Kertzer said, “is to show how important a role Pius XII played.”
  • Mr. Kertzer makes the case that Pius XII’s overriding dread of Communism, his belief that the Axis powers would win the war, and his desire to protect the church’s interests all motivated him to avoid offending Hitler and Mussolini, whose ambassadors had worked to put him on the throne. The pope was also worried, the book shows, that opposing the Führer would alienate millions of German Catholics.
  • The book further reveals that a German prince and fervent Nazi acted as a secret back channel between Pius XII and Hitler, and that the pope’s top Vatican adviser on Jewish issues urged him in a letter not to protest a Fascist order to arrest and send to concentration camps most of Italy’s Jews.
  • “A more open protest would not have saved a single Jew but killed even more,” Michael Hesemann, who considers Pius XII a champion of Jews, wrote in response to the evidence revealed by Mr. Kertzer, whom he called “heavily biased.”
  • Mr. Kertzer argues that the unearthed documents paint a more nuanced picture of Pius XII, showing him as neither the antisemitic monster often called “Hitler’s Pope” nor a hero.
  • On Oct. 16, 1943, Nazis rounded up more than a thousand of them throughout the city, including hundreds in the Jewish ghetto, now a tourist attraction where crowds feast on Jewish-style artichokes near a church where Jews were once forced to attend conversion sermons.
  • “They didn’t want to offend the pope,” Mr. Kertzer said. His book shows that Pius XII’s top aides only interceded with the German ambassador to free “non-Aryan Catholics.” About 250 were released. More than a thousand were murdered in Auschwitz.
  • One U.S. soldier, a Jew from Rome who had emigrated to America when Mussolini introduced Italy’s racial laws, asked Rabbi Kertzer if he could make an announcement to see if his mother had survived the war. The rabbi positioned the soldier at his side, and when the services started, a cry broke out and the G.I.’s mother rushed up to embrace her son.
  • At Brown University, his organizing against the Vietnam War nearly got him kicked out, and landed him in a jail cell with Norman Mailer. He stayed in school and became enamored with anthropology and with Susan Dana, a religion major from Maine.
  • In the early 1990s, an Italian history professor told him about Edgardo Mortara, a 6-year-old child of Jewish parents in Bologna. In 1858, the church Inquisitor ordered the boy seized because a Christian servant girl had possibly, and secretly, had him baptized, and so he could not remain in a Jewish family.
  • Since then, Vatican archivists recognize and, sometimes, encourage him.
  • “Perhaps even they’re happy that some outsider is able to bring this to light because it’s awkward, perhaps, for some of them to do so,” he said.
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Opinion | How China Keeps Putting Off Its 'Lehman Moment' - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...banking-evergrande-crisis.html china crisis economics politics
shared by Javier E on 27 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • In 2008, the U.S. Federal Reserve and Treasury Department also stepped in during the subprime lending crisis to coordinate the restructuring of troubled institutions. But creditor and investor rights and the political risks of bailing out banks limited what American regulators can do; arrangements were reached only after hard bargaining with banks and investment houses. In China, financial institutions have to do what the government tells them.
  • The government’s hand is everywhere. The most fundamental asset in China — land — is owned or controlled by the state. The value of China’s currency, the renminbi, is government-managed and regulators are widely believed to intervene in trading on the country’s stock markets.
  • Most of China’s biggest and most powerful companies, including all of its major banks, are state-owned, and executives are usually members of the Communist Party, which controls top-level corporate appointments.
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  • Even healthy and influential private companies can be ordered to undergo painful restructuring or curtail certain business operations
  • When nearly every renminbi borrowed is domestic — lent by a Chinese creditor to a Chinese borrower — it gives regulators a degree of control over debt problems that their Western counterparts can only dream of.
  • Even the makeup of China’s high debt levels has a silver lining for regulators. China’s aggregate ratio of debt to gross domestic product was almost 300 percent (or around $52 trillion) in September 2022, compared to 257 percent for the United States.
  • But less than 5 percent of China’s debt is external, amounting to $2.5 trillion, one-tenth of the U.S. level.
  • Ultimately, all of this serves the party’s absolute priority of maintaining social stability; there is zero tolerance for financial distress or major corporate failures that could trigger street demonstrations
  • instead of introducing reforms to establish a healthy market-based economy in which inefficient businesses are allowed to fail, China’s Evergrande-style fixes — while defusing short-term crises — reward irresponsible behavior and perpetuate the excessive borrowing and wasteful use of funding that leads to recurring financial distress.
  • Soft landings may become harder to achieve. China faces perhaps its greatest array of economic challenges since it began reopening to the outside world in the late 1970s: high debt, an ailing real estate sector, a long-term economic slowdown, rising unemployment, an aging and shrinking population and worsening trade and diplomatic relations with the United States.
  • There is a very real risk that China could suffer the same fate as Japan, which is still struggling to emerge from an extended period of economic stagnation that began in the 1990s. Japan’s troubles were caused, in part, by a burst real estate bubble and financial-sector problems similar to what China is now facing.
  • China’s regulatory troubleshooters have proven the financial doomsayers wrong again and again. But their biggest test may yet lie ahead.
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Opinion | Blue Lives Matter and How the Thin Blue Line Came to Jan. 6 - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...thin-blue-line-capitol.html blue pollice flag BLM
shared by Javier E on 05 Jan 24 - No Cached
  • a now-familiar variant of the American flag: white stars on a black field, with alternating black and white stripes, except for the stripe immediately beneath the union, which is blue.
  • as a political totem it is undeniably powerful. A merger of the American flag with a symbol representing the police, the thin blue line flag has become a potent statement in its own right.
  • First introduced in the 2010s, it quickly became the dominant popular symbol of the police, flown in pride, solidarity, memoriam, defiance. It was something more than that, too. Beyond a marker of professional affiliation, it was a symbol of personal identity, one that was not restricted to members of law enforcement — one that could even, eventually, be used against them.
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  • But it starts an ocean away, during the Crimean War, 169 years ago.
  • Almost as soon as the phrase was coined, its definition was broadened to become shorthand for the British military more generally, particularly its courage in the face of long odds or superior numbers.
  • “Between the law-abiding elements of society and the criminals that prey upon them,” Mr. Parker said, “stands a thin blue line of defense — your police officer.” The police, in his vision, weren’t just protecting public safety; they were combating the decline of Western civilization, the rise of Communism, the moral laxity of postwar America, the decay of the nuclear family, and so on.
  • Like other mash-ups of identity flags with the American flag, the thin blue line flag is a rallying point for a marginalized identity, a way to lay claim to the American birthright, a demand for long-denied respect
  • Mr. Parker’s vision went beyond policing as a profession. In 1965, he told a civil rights commission investigating the Watts riots that “the police of this country, in my opinion, are the most downtrodden, oppressed, dislocated minority in America.” This belief, a half-century later, would animate an identity politics that blurred the blue line.
  • Blue Lives Matter is not just an expression of support and solidarity for the police, but a response to and rejection of Black Lives Matter. It suggests that it is not Black people whose lives are undervalued by society, but police officers.
  • Blue Lives Matter is a movement that belies the simplicity of its name: It can certainly mean that the police deserve respect for doing a critical and dangerous job. But it can also mean that overzealous racial politics have inverted the criminal justice system, punishing the peacekeepers, coddling the criminals and turning those who carry a badge into the most embattled and victimized group in the nation. Blue Lives Matter transformed policing into a tribal affiliation.
  • As the L.G.B.T. American flag does, it exploits a visual pun, but much less playfully: The blue line divides America against itself.
  • The thin blue line would become the dominant metaphor for the police. In 1981, President Ronald Reagan said the thin blue line held back “a jungle which threatens to reclaim this clearing we call civilization”; in 1993, President Bill Clinton called it “nothing less than our buffer against chaos, against the worst impulses of this society.”
  • This blossoming identity was an opportunity for any politician bold enough to take it. While trust in the police was dropping among Black and Hispanic Americans, it actually was rising for white Americans
  • Donald Trump was particularly well suited to take advantage of the rise of policing as identity politics. His entrance onto the political scene in the 1980s was his call for the reinstatement of the death penalty and less oversight of police.
  • The Trump campaign cast the Democrats as enemies of law and order who sought to incubate riots in American cities and chaos at the border.
  • Mr. Trump claimed that while the Democratic ticket stood with “rioters and vandals,” he stood with “the heroes of law enforcement.”
  • After Mr. Trump’s prophecy came true and the soft coup of representative democracy denied him a second term, when his supporters rallied for one last stand on the grassy field in front of the Capitol, it was inevitable that they would see themselves as bearing the mantle of law and order, a thin blue line smashing through a thin blue line.
  • In the aftermath of Jan. 6, when the nation saw that flag held aloft by the rioters who attacked the Metropolitan Police officer Michael Fanone (he says they literally beat him with it), the thin blue line flag has become increasingly controversial among police officers. In 2023, the Los Angeles Police Department banned its public display on the job. In an email explaining his decision to his officers, Chief Michel Moore lamented that “extremist groups” had “hijacked” the flag.
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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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
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  • Early 2017 Gallup data echoed this. It showed 32 percent of Republicans suddenly liked the man who had just interfered in an American election.
  • 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.
  • 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.
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