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Opinion | Ultra-Orthodox Jews' Greatest Strength Has Become Their Greatest Weakness - T... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...orthodox-jews-coronavirus.html pandemic policy religion
shared by aleija on 29 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • In Israel and the U.S., this isolated community is thriving. The coronavirus pandemic has shown why this may be its biggest problem.
  • Some of the schools refused, and the governor threatened as a consequence to withhold state funding.
  • At about the same time in Israel, a rabbi commanded his followers to open ultra-Orthodox schools, in defiance of government shutdown orders. Israel’s health minister warned these schools that they could face “heavy fines.”
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  • I will also state that I see much to admire in the ultra-Orthodox way of life: the sense of community and mutual responsibility, the emphasis on study, the devotion to tradition. And yet, I also feel an urgent need to advise ultra-Orthodox Jews to adapt to a new reality, one in which ultra-Orthodoxy’s great success — its ability to thrive in a modern world — has become its great challenge.
  • Ultra-Orthodox Judaism today is based on strict adherence to Jewish law, a highly conservative worldview and a rejection of many components of the modern world (from evolutionary science to television), with the aim of erecting a shield against secularization and assimilation.
  • eventy years ago, with the destruction of most ultra-Orthodox communities in Europe in the Holocaust, some assumed that the end of this branch of Judaism was near. However, with stubbornness and sophistication, high birthrates and social cohesion, ultra-Orthodox communities are growing and thriving.
  • Socially, Haredi neighborhoods and towns tend to be less than hospitable to outsiders, and as the neighborhoods expand, clashes with neighbors are common. So these communities are gradually becoming harder to ignore. And the pandemic might be the ultimate demonstration of the emerging problem. In Jerusalem and New York, where these Jews live in great and fast-growing numbers, a puzzled public begins to feel these communities have become too independent.
  • But the disobedience of a strong community — particularly one that could affect the health of the larger public — is more difficult to defend.
  • If Americans become hostile to the community, the consequences could be even graver. Anti-Semitism, already on the rise, feeds on fear and suspicion.
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With Many Colleges Closed, Will Students Turn Out To Vote? : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...lege-students-turn-out-to-vote politics US trump voting election pandemic students
shared by carolinehayter on 30 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Despite a legacy of low turnout, college students — and young people in general — could be a decisive voting bloc in this election. Already, nearly 5 million Americans, ages 18 to 29, have cast early votes, a far higher number than at this point in 2016.
  • College students more than doubled their rate of voting between the 2014 and 2018 midterm elections, according to research from Tufts University.
  • In the 2016 presidential election, 48% of college students voted. Experts predict that percentage will grow this year. A poll on Monday from Harvard University's Institute of Politics found that 63% of 18- to 29-year-olds said they would "definitely" vote in the election. In 2016, that number was 47%.
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  • "No matter who you're voting for, you should express your civic duty and vote
  • If Rosenow and many of her college-age peers turn out, they could have an important impact: Young people make up 37% of eligible voters, according to census data analyzed by the Brookings Institution.
  • And in some states, the number of college students can affect a tight race: The state university system in Wisconsin enrolls about 170,000 students, and in 2016, Hillary Clinton lost that state by 22,177 votes.
  • The unknown variable, of course, is the coronavirus pandemic and how it has disrupted the academic year. More than 40% of U.S. colleges are fully or primarily online for the fall semester, and that could have a big impact on turnout,
  • campus closures, plus the attempts to suppress the college vote by limiting polling places, could dampen the growth in voting rates researchers were expecting.
  • While total registration of young people has exceeded 2016 levels, in more than a dozen states registration among first-time voters — 18- and 19-year-olds — is lower than in 2016.
  • That doesn't surprise Rosenow at the University of Rochester. "COVID changed our whole mindset in terms of getting out the vote and trying to get students to register," she says. Usually her organization sets up tables in common spaces or on the quad, "and then I just pretty much scream at other students to get them to vote."
  • Rosenow says there's been a lot of confusion about mail-in voting since students live all over the country and the process can be hard to navigate.
  • But Thomas is still optimistic: College students thrive on social media, she notes, and have become adept at creating communities online.
  • Following protests this summer, Thomas also expects that many young voters are fired up: "Activism is so high right now that it may actually be counteracting some of the downside of COVID," she says, "This generation really cares, and if they can be told the many reasons why they do need to vote, I think they will."
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How Joe Biden Outmaneuvered Donald Trump On Climate | Time - 0 views

time.com/...biden-trump-energy-climate US trump election policy politics climate
shared by clairemann on 30 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • President Donald Trump thought he had hit the jackpot during the final presidential debate when his opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, declared that he would “transition away from the oil industry.”
  • “He’s going to destroy the oil industry. Will you remember that, Texas? Will you remember that, Pennsylvania?”
  • say his reaction points to a fundamental misunderstanding, not just of the electorate’s shifting views on climate change, but of how profoundly the issue has already shaped the presidential race
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  • the 2020 election is the first in history where climate change has played a pivotal role in a major candidate’s campaign, even if the issue wasn’t always in the headlines.
  • For the last two years, Trump has repeatedly played to his base with various rejections of climate science. The Biden campaign, in contrast, has used the issue to carefully build a broad coalition.
  • A landmark climate report in the final months of 2018 sparked a global awakening on the issue and, in the U.S., the Sunrise Movement pressed politicians on the topic in high-profile protests.
  • Last summer, Biden introduced his first full-throated plan, which proposed a $1.7 trillion federal outlay over ten years to tackle climate change.
  • Biden’s all-in strategy on climate may have already paid dividends: analysts say the youth vote has surged in early voting.
  • Biden leaned in rather than back down. Two-thirds of Americans support aggressive action on climate change, according to a Pew Research poll released in June, one of many showing heightened voter concern over the issue.
  • a growing group of Americans rank the issue among their top concerns and cite it as a motivating factor in their political engagement.
  • To activate these voters, Biden created a handful of task forces and committees to address the issue. Climate change played a key role in a “unity task force” composed of Biden and Sanders supporters. Meanwhile, Biden convened a separate “advisory council” made up of high-profile environmental, labor and environmental justice leaders as well as climate activists to develop a common-ground plan.
  • Historically, candidates track to the center to appear more palatable for a general election audience. Widespread voter concern over the spread of COVID-19 also could have bumped the issue from Biden’s agenda.
  • In recent years, young people have been the most vocal activists calling for action on climate change, and Biden allies saw taking a vocal stance on the issue as a strategic move to push young people, who often stay home on Election Day, to the polls.
  • the campaign framed the $2 trillion program as an opportunity to create jobs, invest in protecting communities of color and decarbonize the economy. “It was not that they went off in a room and came up with it,”
  • “If you go out and talk to most young people in America right now, the issue at the top of their list is going to be climate change.”
  • “They asked us questions—policy questions, personal questions: what are you dealing with? What are you hearing?” says Justin Onwenu, a community organizer at the Sierra Club in Michigan and a member of the DNC’s platform committee. “I think that went a long way.”
  • “I’m the first person I’m aware of that went to every major labor union in the country and got them to sign on to my climate change plan,” Biden said on Pod Save America on Oct. 24. The move to engage unions almost served a prebuttal of the Trump campaign’s primary climate talking point: that addressing the global warming would be too expensive and cost jobs.
  • In recent years, Trump’s climate policy has largely consisted of rolling back regulations and aiding fossil fuel companies, policies that remain deeply unpopular with American voters. This cycle, the campaign’s message — which was sometimes disrupted by off-the-cuff remarks from Trump — has shifted the focus slightly, asserting not that climate change isn’t real, but that addressing it would be too costly.
  • “Joe Biden has even admitted that he will be an anti-energy president,” said Rick Perry, a former Texas governor and President Trump’s first energy secretary on a call of journalists. “Biden’s radical proposal to eliminate oil and gas and coal from the US power grid by 2035 will have a devastating consequence on workers and families.”
  • Trump’s messaging may resonate in some parts of Pennsylvania where the fracking industry employs some 25,000 and indirectly supports many more jobs. Trump has hammered home the talking point in messaging in the state, including TV ads running there.
  • Biden clarified that move would be gradual and not be completed during his time as president. He would, instead, end subsidies for fossil fuels. At the same time, he reiterated his promise to create more jobs in clean industry.
  • There’s a sense among the activists and strategists who have spent months if not years plotting how to engage voters on climate that the acknowledgement of the oil industry’s long-term decline may not have struck the chord that it would have even a few years ago.
  • “I think [Biden] has been on the defensive a bit,” on fracking, said Michael Catanzaro, a former energy and environmental policy advisor in the Trump White House, before the debate. “But I think it’s actually working for him… he’s talking to union voters. He’s using his blue collar roots to push back pretty hard.”
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Yes, Texas Could Go Blue This Year | Time - 0 views

time.com/...texas-blue-biden-trump US politics election trump gop Texas
shared by clairemann on 30 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • The outcome of the 2020 Presidential election is more uncertain than any in modern history—and nowhere is that uncertainty on better display than in Texas, a state that could very well go Democratic for the first time since 1976.
  • “If I were to guess, I would say 10-15% who vote in a Republican primary aren’t true Republicans,” Ryan says, adding that the percentage might be a notch higher for Democratic primaries, particularly in more partisan areas where the primary is functionally the general election.
  • (to quote Frank Drake, the founder of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, that’s “a wonderful way to organize our ignorance).
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  • The polls in Texas are all over the place, ranging from a 7-point margin for U.S. President Donald Trump, who won the state by 9 percentage points in 2016, to a four-point Biden victory.
  • Turnout in Texas this year will greatly surpass any previous cycle. In 2016, just shy of 9 million Texans cast a vote for president, amounting to 51.4% of the voting-eligible population, according to the United States Election Project.
  • Many more voters are expected to turn out on Nov. 3. A recent University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll found that 75% of respondents consider it safe to vote in person on Election Day, though there’s a rift along party lines: 57% of Democrats said they felt safe compared to 91% of Republicans, suggesting Trump voters are more likely than Biden voters to vote in person.
  • “significantly different electorate than in 2016,” says Joshua Blank, research director at the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. Nationwide, the conventional wisdom that higher turnout benefits Democrats does not hold up when one considers President Trump’s core base
  • As of Wednesday, early voters with a history of voting in a Republican primary outpaced those who voted in Democratic primaries by 6 points, though the largest percentage voted in neither.
  • More to the point, those on the ballot for state races, Blank says, form an organic field operation across the state, armed with their own volunteers and knowledge of their districts that a statewide or national campaign could never generate from scratch.
  • “They’re only afraid of extremely high turnout.” Meanwhile, he says that Democrats have long held that Texas “is not a Republican state. It is a non-voting state.”
  • This is a particularly common misconception regarding eligible Hispanic voters, plenty of whom, polling by Blank’s organization and others suggests, are generally supportive of the Republican Party.
  • There is a strong possibility that Democrats will retake the Texas House of Representatives this year, which Republicans have controlled—along with the Texas Senate and governorship—since 2003.
  • the Texas Democratic Party has widened the front in terms of slating better candidates. For more than a decade, Blank says, the Party was “catch as catch can” in terms of finding viable candidates for district races, a process that restarted every cycle, with many seats going uncontested
  • “If you’re a candidate who loses narrowly but runs again, it gives you a lot more parity with the Republican incumbent,” Blank says.
  • Arguably the more relevant question is: how many Texans who otherwise would not have voted are excited about local candidates, and are thus more likely to vote and perhaps boost Biden?
  • both shifted Texas from leaning or tilting Republican to a genuine toss up, while the University of Virginia’s Larry Sabato places it in “Leans Republican,” just one category to the right.
  • Whether that’s enough to make a difference is, of course, ultimately unknowable before the election. When I asked Sabato why he was keeping Texas in the “Leans Republican” category, he said that “I’ve been hearing every four years that Texas is going Democratic, and it never happens.”
  • Austin Q. Sarker-Young on 31 Oct 20
     
    Dear Claire, While I appreciate the optimism, I think the Democratic Party has cried victory too early this year, and claiming that Texas could go blue simply reinforces this. The Democratic Party seems to have gone a little too far on the offensive, much in the same way as they did in 2016, and this could have disastrous results for the cause of Joe Biden. As for your evidence, I do not trust Larry Sabato, since his prediction given right before election night in 2016 was WILDLY wrong (Clinton 322 - Trump 216). In that prediction, linked here (https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/our-final-2016-picks/), he predicted that Wisconsin was a "Likely D" and said "Lean D" for the myriad swing states that we all know went for Trump that year. When it comes to Sabato's 2020 predictions, linked here (https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/2020-president/), a great many of the states he marks as toss-up or lean Democrat went Republican in 2016. We also all remember the "Blue Wave" disappointment of 2018 that took the House but failed to take the Senate. Considering all this, I have reason to be quite skeptical of what pollsters say. And my opinion? I cannot have one yet. As of today, and probably even at the end of election day on November 3, the final winner of the election is unknowable.
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Western Roman Empire - Ancient History Encyclopedia - 0 views

www.ancient.eu/Western_Roman_Empire
shared by rerobinson03 on 31 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • The Western Roman Empire is the modern-day term for the western half of the Roman Empire after it was divided in two by the emperor Diocletian (r. 284-305 CE) in c. 285/286 CE.
  • At its height (c. 117 CE), the Roman Empire stretched from Italy through Europe to the British Isles, across North Africa, down through Egypt and up into Mesopotamia and across Anatolia.
  • Soon after coming to power, Diocletian made a fellow-officer named Maximian (r. 285/286-305 CE) his co-emperor and, in doing so, divided the empire into halves with the Eastern Empire’s capital at Byzantium (later Constantinople) and the Western Empire governed from Milan (with Rome as a “ceremonial” or symbolic capital).
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  • The Eastern Empire flourished while the Western Empire struggled and finally fell c. 476 CE.
  • it became the foundation of the Holy Roman Empire (962-1806 CE) - seen as a revival of the values and order of the Roman Empire at its height - first under the reign of Charlemagne
  • The Holy Roman Empire steadily lost cohesion and authority as an outmoded institution incapable of governing in a modern age, becoming increasingly corrupt and ineffectual, until it was finally dissolved in 1806 CE.
  • The Roman Empire was founded by the first emperor Augustus (r. 27 BCE-14 CE) and steadily grew in power through the reigns of the Five Good Emperors
  • After Commodus was assassinated, Rome experienced a year of confusion (known as The Year of the Five Emperors) during which five different men took power and were deposed until Septimius Severus (r. 193-211 CE) founded the Severan Dynasty and restored order.
  • In 235 CE, the emperor Alexander Severus (r. 222-235 CE) was assassinated by his own troops who felt he was not acting in their best interests. This plunged Rome into the era known as the Crisis of the Third Century (also the Imperial Crisis, 235-284 CE) during which 20 emperors would come and go in almost 50 years,
  • Charlemagne became the preeminent Christian champion of his time, extending his empire while at the same time launching crusades against the Muslim Saracens as he had previously done against the pagan Saxons (through the Saxon Wars of 772-804 CE).
  • After the division, Diocletian instituted his tetrarchy – rule of four – whereby the empire was further divided between four men who ruled their own distinct sections.
  • Under the reign of Constantine the Great (324-337 CE), the empire as a whole flourished but it was never as cohesive as it had been under the Five Good Emperors. The Eastern Empire established lucrative trade and prospered while the Western Empire struggled and, since the two sections tended to view the other as competition, they worked as separate entities who shared a common bond but served their own interests.
  • At the Battle of Adrianople in 378 CE, the Eastern Emperor Valens (r. 364-378 CE) was defeated by Fritigern (d. c. 380 CE) of the Goths and many historians agree that this marks the beginning of the end of the Roman Empire.
  • This is not at all to claim that Theodosius I’s reign led to the end of the Western Roman Empire. There is no single cause for the decline and fall of Rome. A steady deterioration in power and prestige had been ongoing prior to the Roman defeat at Adrianople and all these challenges and pressures culminated in the deposition of the emperor Romulus Augustulus (r. 475-476 CE) by the Germanic king Odoacer on 4 September 476 CE, prior to Adrianople.
  • While c. 476 CE is the traditionally accepted date for the end of the Western Roman Empire, that entity did continue on under the rule of Odoacer
  • By this time, most Lombards had assimilated with the people of Italy and the neighboring Franks and Charlemagne’s victory simply accelerated this process. Christianity was now the dominant religion of Europe and, since it had been legitimized and spread under Roman rule, there were many Christians who refused to let the concept of the Roman Empire disappear.
  • Charlemagne of the Franks was proclaimed Western Roman Emperor in 800 CE by Pope Leo III and entrusted with protecting and perpetuating the Christian message.
  • When Diocletian came to power, he restored order and divided the empire’s rule between himself in the east and Maximian in the west.
  • Charlemagne set the foundation for the new empire but, as with many powerful and effective rulers, his successors could not maintain his same level of efficiency and the realm fell apart. It was reunited by Otto I of Germany who had followed Charlemagne’s example of the path to power through crusades against non-Christians (in this case, the Magyars).
  • Otto I then continued the policies of maintaining a Christian nation following Charlemagne’s example throughout his reign and set the standard for those who would follow him. The Holy Roman Empire continued to see itself in this role as an entity championing Christian truth through warfare until, in a steady decline involving political intrigue, corruption, almost incessant war, and constant internal strife, it was dissolved in 1806 CE.
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How Are Americans Catching the Virus? Increasingly, 'They Have No Idea' - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-transmission-everywhere.html
shared by rerobinson03 on 01 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • That outbreak was extinguished months ago, and these days, when he heads into City Hall, the situation is far more nebulous. The virus has spread all over town.
  • As the coronavirus soars across the country, charting a single-day record of 99,155 new cases on Friday and surpassing nine million cases nationwide, tracing the path of the pandemic in the United States is no longer simply challenging. It has become nearly impossible.
  • Now, there are so many cases, in so many places, that many people are coming to a frightening conclusion: They have no idea where the virus is spreading.
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  • But as cases skyrocket again in many states, many health officials have conceded that interviewing patients and dutifully calling each contact will not be enough to slow the outbreak. “Contact tracing is not going to save us,” said Dr. Ogechika Alozie, chief medical officer at Del Sol Medical Center in El Paso, where hospitalizations in the county have soared by more than 400 percent and officials issued a new order for residents to stay at home.
  • Uncovering the path of transmission from person to person, known as contact tracing, is seen as a key tool for containing the spread of the coronavirus.
  • Infections are rising in 41 states, the country is recording an average of more than 79,000 new cases each day, and more Americans say they feel left to do their own lonely detective work.
  • The problem, of course, is that failing to fully track the virus makes it much harder to get a sense of where the virus is flourishing, and how to get ahead of new outbreaks.
  • In some places, overwhelmed health officials have abandoned any pretense of keeping up.
  • Now, though, any sense of control has vanished. Active cases of Covid-19 have quadrupled since the beginning of October to 912 in Grand Forks County, and about half the people contacted by the health department say they are not sure how they became infected.
  • In earlier, quieter periods of the pandemic, the virus spread with some degree of certainty. In all but the hardest-hit cities, people could ask a common question — “Where did you get it?” — and often find tangible answers.
  • A popular college bar in East Lansing, Mich., Harper’s Restaurant and Brewpub, became a hot spot this summer after dozens of people piled into the bar, drinking, dancing and crowding close together. At least 192 people — 146 people at the bar and 46 people with ties to those at the bar — were infected. Afterward, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer shut down indoor dining in bars in parts of the state.
  • Heidi Stevens is among the newly infected who considers her case a mystery. As a columnist at The Chicago Tribune, Ms. Stevens works from home. Her children attend school online. She wears a mask when she goes for a run, and she has not had a haircut since January.So when she got a precautionary test a few weeks ago, with the hopes of inviting friends over to have cake for her daughter’s 15th birthday, Ms. Stevens was shocked to learn she was positive.
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A Broken Health System Is a Threat to Freedom - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...616898 health care universal tyranny authoritarian US trump crisis policy pandemic inequality
shared by Javier E on 01 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • the United States is not a normal democracy. Untreated illness and uncertain care fill our politics with unnecessary fear and rage. Our president pushes this logic by offering insecurity instead of security as the aim of politics
  • This is not inefficiency or neglect. It is a pattern evident all across the Trump administration: Governing is not about problems to be solved, but emergencies to be magnified.
  • Health care is always political, but the politics can confirm or deny democratic norms and practices. A democratic country that handles a pandemic well generates trust in government, and even national pride. If care is not universal, then the political equation, especially during a pandemic, is entirely different.
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  • When citizens cannot imagine security, politics becomes the distribution of insecurity, the allocation of fears and anxieties that push us away from an idea of common citizenship and toward authoritarianism. What is lethal for Americans is also lethal for our democracy.
  • I am an American historian who has seen the pandemic from both sides of the Atlantic, and who has just written a book about health care in the United States. When journalists from other countries ask me why so many Americans have died during the coronavirus pandemic, they phrase the question actively: “What have Americans done to bring about such needless mayhem?” And that is the right way to think about our COVID-19 policy. It is not a blundering, but a bludgeoning.
  • In other rich nations, it is easier to see a doctor and harder to die than in the United States. As I write these lines, I am sick in Austria. That means that if I call a doctor, I see her the same day, get tests right away, fill out no forms, and pay no fees. Without worries about access to care, I am a freer person. On the scale of a whole society, the gain in liberty is extraordinary. 
  • Lost to us are the political consequences: If we take for granted radical inequality and repeated emergencies in the realm of health, we are primed for authoritarianism in the realm of life.
  • Our babies and their mothers die at rates that Europeans find unbelievable. American Millennials will likely pay more for health care yet die younger than their parents and grandparents did. Life expectancy peaked here in 2014, even as it continues to rise elsewhere.
  • Americans pay twice as much per capita for health care as the citizens of peer countries do, for the privilege of dying years younger.
  • Many of us, by some calculations nearly half, simply avoid care because it seems unaffordable.
  • Those of us with insurance think about how good our insurance is, and where it will get us. Those of us who get access believe that we deserve it. It does not occur to us that the less-bad access we have is worse than what everyone has in countries with universal health care.
  • Too many of us take for granted that health and freedom are somehow in contradiction—and so we exclude our own bodies from our notion of rights. We treat as normal a system of commercial medicine in which decisions about life and death are made on the basis of profit.
  • ur sense that suffering is normal is also racial
  • Many white Americans regard their own suffering as virtuous, while maintaining that public health care would only be abused by Black people and immigrants. In other words, suffering is normal so long as others suffer more
  • In the health-care debate in the United States, proposals to extend coverage to all are decried as government overreach, socialism, even outright tyranny. But the lack of health security is what makes Americans vulnerable to demagogues and authoritarians.
  • Racial inequality brings unnecessary death. It also brings a sentiment that an authoritarian leader can exploit: Namely, that those who suffer the most are themselves at fault. When racism is a preexisting condition, the disproportionate death rates of Americans of color during a pandemic seem normal.
  • America’s only hope of stopping the COVID-19 pandemic was to do so at the outset. Such efforts have been mounted before. Under George W. Bush, the number of SARS cases in the U.S. was limited, and no one died. In 2014, the Obama administration took the fight against Ebola to West Africa, a prudent step that was normal then but that seems like science fiction now.
  • Before the novel coronavirus arrived in the U.S., the Trump administration dismantled the institutions that were responsible for early warning and early action
  • By telling Americans in February what they wanted to hear about the virus—that it was not serious, that it would disappear, that everyone could get a test—Trump ensured that death would be widespread.
  • By failing to institute a regime of testing, he made it normal for us to follow our own guesswork and emotions rather than dealing with facts.
  • The Trump administration announced a kind of new federalism, in which governors would have to show their loyalty to get federal assistance, and in which the Democratic ones would be blamed regardless of what happened
  • The bluster shrouded the basic decision, which was not to launch a federal response to the pandemic. No nationwide lockdown, no national testing initiative, no national contact-tracing initiative, no nationwide signaling on wearing masks and washing hands. This set the United States apart from every other comparable country.
  • After first blaming Democrats for not doing enough, Trump switched to blaming them for doing too much.
  • This is America’s basic problem: Health care is not a promise for all, but rather an expectation of the rich that they will do relatively better than the poor, and of white people that they will do relatively better than Black people
  • Suffering can seem meaningful if it affirms this basic order, even if that suffering is one’s own
  • Yet a democracy can become suffused with suffering, to the point where many voters do not even expect that policy might help them or loved ones stay well
  • An aspiring authoritarian such as Trump knows what to do: provide the emotional jolts of pleasure that distract from the general decline. “Winning” is no longer about gaining something for oneself, such as a healthier or longer life, but about taking pleasure in the suffering of others. This is a sensibility—the strong survive; the weak get what they deserve—that favors authoritarianism over democracy.
  • In this election, Americans face a choice not between individuals, but between regimes: between tyranny and a republic as forms of government, and between suffering and happiness as its aims. If Trump is defeated, our democracy should be reinforced by universal health care. Health and freedom collapse together, and they can be recovered together. We would be much freer as a people if we accorded ourselves health care as a right.
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Health care: Here are 7 Trump measures that Biden will likely overturn - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html biden
shared by katherineharron on 16 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • When it comes to health policy, President Donald Trump made it his mission to undo many measures his predecessor put in place.
  • In their four years in office, the Trump administration made sweeping changes that affected the Affordable Care Act, Medicaid, abortion and transgender rights, in many cases reversing the efforts of the Obama administration.
  • Biden's health officials will likely be active, as well, but it will take time for all their actions to take effect.
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  • "They don't have a massive eraser pen. They've got to go through the rule-making process," said Allison Orris, a former Obama administration official and counsel with Manatt Health, a professional services firm. "They are going to have to think about what comes first, second and third and be realistic about timing."
  • Plus, the Biden administration may opt to keep and continue several Trump administration efforts, including shifting to value-based care, rather than paying doctors for every visit and procedure, and increasing access to telehealth,
  • The two administrations also share common views on some measures to lower drug pricing, including basing Medicare payments on the cost of prescription medications in other countries and importing drugs from abroad. But Trump officials have not actually put these proposals in place.
  • While Trump focused on dismantling the Affordable Care Act, Biden will emphasize expanding the law and access to health coverage.
  • The Trump administration took the historic step in early 2018 of allowing states to require certain Medicaid recipients to work in order to receive benefits. Eight states have received approval, seven have pending requests and four had their waivers set aside in court, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
  • Biden's Health and Human Services secretary would be able to unwind the approvals, but it is a complicated task, said Joan Alker, executive director of the Center for Children and Families at Georgetown University. The secretary would have to determine whether to withdraw permission for the entire waiver or just certain features.
  • Several of these waivers included other provisions that could make it harder for low-income Americans to retain Medicaid coverage, such as lockouts for non-payment of premiums.
  • The Trump administration reinstated the measure -- which had previously impacted only family planning assistance -- in 2017 by presidential memorandum and extended it to all applicable US global health funding under the "Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance."
  • "The short-term plans have important symbolic significance because they restrict coverage to people with pre-existing conditions, which was a prominent political issue in the campaign," said Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation.
  • In its first year in office, the Trump administration slashed funds to promote Obamacare open enrollment and to assist consumers with selecting plans by 90% and 84%, respectively.
  • The Biden administration is expected to reverse all these measures to curtail Obamacare.
  • Biden has promised to revoke the Trump administration rule barring federally funded health care providers in the Title X family planning program from referring patients for abortions.
  • Biden has vowed to reverse the so-called Mexico City Policy, a ban on funding for foreign nonprofits that perform or promote abortions, which Trump reinstated and expanded during his tenure.
  • One executive order Trump repeatedly points to is expanding short-term health plans, which typically have lower premiums, but provide less comprehensive coverage and don't have to adhere to the Affordable Care Act's protections for people with pre-existing conditions.
  • The Biden administration is also expected to reinstitute a directive that states cannot bar Medicaid funds from going to qualified providers that separately provide abortions, such as Planned Parenthood.
  • Trump also signed a bill in 2017 allowing states to withhold federal money from organizations that provide abortion services, including Planned Parenthood.
  • The Trump administration has been particularly hostile toward transgender Americans. Among its most criticized moves was an effort earlier this year to rollback an Obama-era regulation prohibiting discrimination in health care against patients who are transgender.
  • Biden's LGBTQ policy plan also says he will work to expand funding for mental health services for LGBTQ Americans and that his administration plans to automatically enroll low-income LGBTQ people in the public option, once it's created, if they live in rural areas in states that didn't expand Medicaid.
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Biden-Harris administration: Here's who could serve in top roles - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html biden
shared by katherineharron on 17 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • President-elect Joe Biden is set to announce who will serve in top roles in his administration in the coming days and weeks.
  • Ron Klain, one of his most trusted campaign advisers, will serve as his incoming chief of staff. And Jen O'Malley Dillon, Biden's campaign manager, and Rep. Cedric Richmond of Louisiana, a co-chair of Biden's transition team and presidential campaign, will serve in top roles in the White House.
  • Each of Biden's Cabinet nominees will need to be confirmed by the US Senate, which is currently controlled by Republicans. Two runoff elections in Georgia on January 5 could determine which party controls the chamber and impact the Cabinet confirmation process.
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  • The Cabinet includes the vice president and the heads of 15 executive departments
  • Klain served as Biden's chief of staff in the Obama White House and was also a senior aide to the President.
  • Klain has been a top debate preparation adviser to Biden, Obama, Bill Clinton, Gore, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton.
  • O'Malley Dillon will join Biden's incoming administration as a deputy White House chief of staff. O'Malley Dillon was Biden's presidential campaign manager and has served numerous other political campaigns -- including former Rep. Beto O'Rourke's failed 2020 presidential primary campaign and both of Barack Obama's presidential campaigns.
  • Richmond is expected to leave Congress to join Biden's White House staff in a senior role.
  • Rice served in the Obama administration as UN ambassador and national security adviser.
  • A longtime Biden ally, Coons was one of the first members of Congress to endorse the former vice president when he declared his 2020 presidential candidacy.
  • Rice at one point was thought to be the clear choice to succeed Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, but in 2012 withdrew her name from consideration to avoid a bitter Senate confirmation battle.
  • Blinken served in the Obama administration as the deputy secretary of state, assistant to the president and principal deputy national security adviser.
  • During the Clinton administration, Blinken served as a member of the National Security Council staff at the White House, and held roles as the special assistant to the president, senior director for European affairs, and senior director for speechwriting and then strategic planning. He was Clinton's chief foreign policy speechwriter
  • Yates was fired by Trump from her role as acting attorney general.
  • Throughout his Senate career, Coons has been known for working across the aisle and forging strong relationships with high-profile Republicans who shared common interests.
  • Brainard currently serves as a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
  • Brainard was the US representative to the G-20 Finance Deputies and G-7 Deputies and was a member of the Financial Stability Board. During the Clinton administration, Brainard served as the deputy national economic adviser and deputy assistant to the President.
  • Raskin was the deputy secretary of the US Department of the Treasury during the Obama administration. She was previously a governor of the Federal Reserve Board.
  • Outside of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Raskin, a former deputy secretary at the department, would be the top choice for most progressives.
  • Rice was one of a handful of women on Biden's shortlist for a running mate.
  • During the mid-1990's, she served as principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and threat reduction, as well as deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy
  • Mayorkas was deputy secretary of Homeland Security during the Obama administration, and served as the director of the Department of Homeland Security's United States Citizenship and Immigration Services
  • Monaco played a critical role in Biden's vice presidential selection committee, and served as Homeland Security and counterterrorism advisor to Obama.
  • Jones is the junior United States Senator from Alabama. He lost his reelection bid earlier this month to Republican Tommy Tuberville.
  • Jones was also involved in the prosecution of Eric Rudolph, whose 1998 attack on a Birmingham abortion clinic killed an off-duty police officer.
  • If chosen and confirmed, Flournoy would be the first female secretary of defense.
  • Yates had been appointed by Obama and was set to serve until Trump's nominee for attorney general was confirmed.
  • Haaland is a congresswoman from New Mexico, and is one of the first Native American women to serve in Congress. Biden has said he wants an administration that looks like the country. Haaland, the vice chair of the House Natural Resources Committee, would be the first Native American Cabinet secretary if she were to get an offer and accept it.
  • Yang is an entrepreneur and former 2020 Democratic presidential candidate. He rose from obscurity to become a highly-visible candidate, and his supporters are sometimes referred to as the "Yang Gang." His presidential campaign was centered around the idea of universal basic income, and providing every US citizen with $1,000 a month, or $12,000 a year.
  • Nelson is the international president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA. She cemented her image as a rising star of the labor movement during a prolonged government shutdown that stretched from December 2018 to January 2019.
  • Sanders is reaching out to potential supporters in labor to ask for their support as he mounts a campaign for the job. But he is viewed as a long shot and so far has received mix reactions from labor leaders.
  • Walsh is AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka's pick for the job, a big endorsement in what could soon turn into a contentious debate between moderate Democrats and progressives, who will favor Sen. Bernie Sanders or Michigan Rep. Andy Levin
  • Levin is a popular progressive who is also growing his base of support with labor leaders, including at the Communications Workers of America.
  • But he also has credibility with climate activists for having helped create Michigan's Green Jobs Initiative.
  • Murthy, a doctor of internal medicine, is the co-chair of Biden's coronavirus advisory board
  • Bottoms is the mayor of Atlanta and is a rising star of the Democratic Party. Bottoms stepped into the national spotlight when she denounced vandalism in her city as "chaos" after demonstrations over the death of George Floyd, a Black man who was killed by police in Minneapolis. Bottoms is a former judge and city council member.
  • Weingarten is the president of the American Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO and has long pushed for education reform
  • Inslee is the governor of Washington state, and previously served in the US House of Representatives.
  • Buttigieg is the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and a former 2020 Democratic presidential candidate. Buttigieg's presidential bid was historic -- he was the first out gay man to launch a competitive campaign for president, and he broke barriers by becoming the first gay candidate to earn primary delegates for a major party's presidential nomination.
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Georgia secretary of state says Lindsey Graham implied he should try to throw away ball... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html georgia
shared by katherineharron on 17 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger stood firm Monday on his account that Sen. Lindsey Graham had hinted that he should try to discard some ballots in Georgia, where a recount is underway after the state went for President-elect Joe Biden in the presidential election.
  • "He asked if the ballots could be matched back to the voters," Raffensperger told CNN's Wolf Blitzer on "The Situation Room" Monday evening.
  • I got the sense it implied that then you could throw those out for any, if you look at the counties with the highest frequent error of signatures
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  • "It was just an implication of, 'Look hard and see how many ballots you could throw out.' "
  • Graham had cast doubt on Georgia's signature-matching law in a conversation on Friday, and had also floated the possibility that biased poll workers could have counted ballots with inconsistent signatures.
  • There has been no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, and fraudulently altering a federal election vote tally is a federal crime.
  • Graham denied Raffensperger's claim on Monday, telling CNN that he had said he wanted to understand the process for verifying the signatures on mail-in ballots
  • Asked if he was trying to pressure the secretary of state to toss legal ballots, Graham said, "That's ridiculous."
  • "What I'm trying to find out was how do you verify signatures on mail-in ballots in these states that are the center of attention? So like when you mail in a ballot, you got to have some way to verify that the signature on the envelope actually matches the person who requested the ballot," Graham said
  • "So they expanded mail-in voting, and how you verify the signatures to me is the big issue
  • Raffensperger told Blitzer that Georgia's election systems already require signature matches when voters request mail ballots and when completed ballots are returned to election systems. He also said the online absentee portal has a photo ID.
  • "We feel confident the election officials did their job," he said.
  • On Friday, CNN projected that Biden will win Georgia and its 16 electoral votes. Unofficial results put Biden ahead of Trump by about 14,000 votes, or about 0.3 percentage point.
  • due to the tight margin, state officials decided to use the preplanned audit process to recount every ballot in the presidential race.
  • At least six small counties in Georgia have finished their presidential recounts without finding any discrepancies.
  • A seventh county, Floyd, reported that 2,600 uncounted ballots had been found during their recount -- the ballots hadn't been scanned when the county tallied its early vote. An investigation is underway but human error has been deemed responsible.
  • Experts say it would be nearly impossible for Trump to overcome his 14,000-vote deficit in a recount.
  • "We want to make sure this vote is very accurate. We understand the national importance of this, and we're in the process of doing it," he told Blitzer on Monday. "The counters will be done by the 18th and we will certify this by the 20th."
  • Raffensperger, among other things, defended the integrity of absentee ballots, signature verification, and the vote counting machines
  • Raffensperger responded that his team "secured and strengthened absentee ballots for the first time since 2005" by outlawing absentee ballot harvesting and also addressed the "disinformation about signature match," writing that "GBI trained elections officials match your signature twice before any vote is cast."
  • He also posted links to news articles debunking Trump's tweets, including one alleging the Dominion voting software used in Georgia for the presidential election "deleted" and "switched" millions of votes
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Opinion | Why the 2020 Election Makes It Hard to Be Optimistic About the Future - The N... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...coronavirus-climate.html climate change pandemic crisis culture politics US GOP history Policy
shared by Javier E on 17 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • And the big winners were the coronavirus and, quite possibly, catastrophic climate change.
  • By defeating Donald Trump, Joe Biden pulled us back from the brink of authoritarian rule.
  • Deaths from Covid-19 tend to run around three weeks behind new cases; given the exponential growth in cases since the early fall, which hasn’t slowed at all, this means that we may be looking at a daily death toll in the thousands by the end of the year.
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  • And their approach, in case you missed it, has been denial and a refusal to take even the most basic, low-cost precautions — like requiring that people wear masks in public.The epidemiological consequences of this cynical irresponsibility will be ghastly. I’m not sure how many people realize just how terrible this winter is going to be.
  • Awful as the pandemic outlook is, however, what worries me more is what our failed response says about prospects for dealing with a much bigger issue, one that poses an existential threat to civilization: climate change.
  • Right-wingers always claim that taking climate seriously would doom the economy, but the truth is that at this point the economics of climate action look remarkably benign
  • This indirectness made many of us pessimistic about the prospects for climate action. But Covid-19 suggests that we weren’t pessimistic enough.
  • After all, the consequences of irresponsible behavior during a pandemic are vastly more obvious and immediate than the costs of climate inaction. Gather a bunch of unmasked people indoors — say, in the Trump White House — and you’re likely to see a spike in infections just a few weeks later. This spike will take place in your own neighborhood, quite possibly affecting people you know.
  • Yet what we see instead is widespread refusal to acknowledge the risks, accusations that cheap, common-sense rules like wearing masks constitute “tyranny,” and violent threats against public officials.
  • But even though the 2020 election wasn’t about climate, it was to some degree about the pandemic — and the results make it hard to be optimistic about the future.
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Angela Merkel's message to Joe Biden - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...le-in-america-november-10-intl merkel biden trump US politics Policy
shared by carolinehayter on 20 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Angela Merkel's faith in America was deeply shaken when Donald Trump won the US presidency in 2016.
  • The German Chancellor who grew up behind the Iron Curtain was quicker than most to perceive his threat to the kind of US global leadership that has traditionally underwritten European security. Had Hillary Clinton won in 2016, Merkel may well have opted not to run for a fourth term. But she would not retire with Trump in the White House, seeing him as a peril to the West, its common values and security architecture like NATO.
  • A sense of relief four years later pulsed through her congratulatory message
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  • "We Germans and Europeans understand that we must take on more responsibilities in this partnership in the 21st century. America remains our most important ally, but it rightfully expects more effort from us to guarantee our own security and to defend our values around the world," Merkel said.
  • Her greeting envisages America returning as an assertive global leader to tackle the "major challenges of our time" like climate change, the pandemic, terrorism, trade and the economy, "side by side" with Europe.
  • "Joe Biden brings with him decades of experience in domestic and foreign policy. He knows Germany and Europe well,"
  • The "Chancellor of the Free World" does not plan to run for reelection again. That could leave Biden as one of the last active politicians whose worldviews were shaped by the Cold War.
  • Not enough strategic thinking has been done so far on either side of the Atlantic on how to evolve the world's most effective alliance for the 21st century, especially with the US increasingly looking to China as its most important foreign policy issue.
  • The end of Trump's "America First" nationalism buys the West a little time to accelerate that thinking.
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Coronavirus Deaths Pass One Million Worldwide - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...covid-1-million-deaths.html coronavirus crisis
shared by mariedhorne on 01 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • In the 10 months since a mysterious pneumonia began striking residents of Wuhan, China, Covid-19 has killed more than one million people worldwide as of Monday — an agonizing toll compiled from official counts, yet one that far understates how many have really died. It may already have overtaken tuberculosis and hepatitis as the world’s deadliest infectious disease, and unlike all the other contenders, it is still growing fast.
  • Places like China, Germany, South Korea and New Zealand have shown that it is possible to slow the pandemic enough to limit infections and deaths while still reopening businesses and schools.
  • No one or two or three factors are the key. “It’s all an ecosystem. It all works together,” said Martha Nelson, a scientist at the National Institutes of Health who specializes in epidemics and viral genetics, and who studies Covid-19.
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  • Masks turned out to be more helpful than Western experts had predicted. Social distancing on an unheard-of scale has been more feasible and effective than anticipated. The difference in danger between an outdoor gathering and an indoor one is greater than expected.
  • It remains unclear how the virus mutates, or how fast, which makes it impossible to predict how long a possible vaccine might work. More broadly, the pandemic has exposed how little scientists know about coronaviruses, even those that cause the common cold, and especially those that circulate in bats and other animals.
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Donald Trump's Legacy of Lies - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...617255 legacy crisis history culture politics US Trump
shared by Javier E on 10 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • How did half the country—practical, hands-on, self-reliant Americans, still balancing family budgets and following complex repair manuals—slip into such cognitive decline when it came to politics?
  • Blaming ignorance or stupidity would be a mistake. You have to summon an act of will, a certain energy and imagination, to replace truth with the authority of a con man like Trump
  • Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, describes the susceptibility to propaganda of the atomized modern masses, “obsessed by a desire to escape from reality because in their essential homelessness they can no longer bear its accidental, incomprehensible aspects.”
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  • They seek refuge in “a man-made pattern of relative consistency” that bears little relation to reality
  • his followers abandoned common sense and found their guide to the world in him. Defeat won’t change that.
  • Trump damaged the rest of us, too. He got as far as he did by appealing to the perennial hostility of popular masses toward elites.
  • Monopoly of public policy by experts—trade negotiators, government bureaucrats, think tankers, professors, journalists—helped create the populist backlash that empowered Trump
  • His reign of lies drove educated Americans to place their faith, and even their identity, all the more certainly in experts, who didn’t always deserve i
  • The war between populists and experts relieved both sides of the democratic imperative to persuade. The standoff turned them into caricatures.
  • Trump’s legacy includes an extremist Republican Party that tries to hold on to power by flagrantly undemocratic means, and an opposition pushed toward its own version of extremism.
  • Many of his policies can be reversed or mitigated. It will be much harder to clear our minds of his lies and restore the shared understanding of reality—the agreement, however inconvenient, that A is A and not B—on which a democracy depends.
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American Elites Still Don't Understand COVID-19 - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...617368 pandemic response culture elite rules
shared by Javier E on 12 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • ut simply, COVID-19 is mostly a talking disease—one that could be brought to heel with universal mask wearing, a national campaign that emphasizes quiet in public spaces, and harsh laws about indoor gatherings.
  • None of this is breaking news. We’ve known most of it for a while. In the spring, a raft of CDC studies—from a Chinese restaurant, a Korean call center, and an American choir practice—made it clear that talking, laughing, and singing in close quarters for many hours is the perfect storm for a super-spreader event.
  • - If these aerosolized particles spread easily in unventilated indoor spaces … we should shut down and bail out indoor businesses that naturally invite crowding and talking, such as bars.
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  • If viral aerosols from talking are the most common vector of COVID-19 transmission … we should encourage universal mask wearing, social distancing among people from different households, and quiet in public spaces.
  • - If a large number of infected people will be asymptomatic … we should invest early in a mass-testing apparatus to quickly identify silent carriers.
  • - If symptomatic individuals don’t just talk but also often cough and sneeze … we should create a national quarantine system to separate them from their families and a contact-tracing system to identify potentially infected individuals and ask them to isolate.
  • - If, no matter how well we respond, this pandemic is going to last for a while … we should encourage people to reclaim normalcy by spending as much time outside as possible, while still stressing the importance of mask usage and social distancing when gathering with those outside of one’s household.
  • To be fair to American leaders, or at least inclusive of non-American incompetence, it’s not just the U.S. where elites have made a mockery of their authority.
  • The World Health Organization took months to declare that the coronavirus was airborne in the first place.
  • after 500 years, a couple of scientific revolutions, scores of medical discoveries, and dozens of vaccines—not to mention nine months of 21st-century plague—too many American leaders are still practicing the equivalent of legislative bloodletting, as they oversee scientifically unsound and poorly explained laws that are immiserating the populations they’ve sworn to protect.
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Here's what we know about Pfizer's vaccine - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html covid
shared by katherineharron on 13 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • A US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory committee has voted to recommend the Pfizer and BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine for people 16 and older a day after the US Food and Drug Administration issued emergency use authorization (EUA) for the vaccine.
  • CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield must accept the committee's recommendation before the vaccine can be administered. But on Sunday morning, the first shipments had left a Pfizer plant in Michigan, bound for all 50 states.
  • Once the CDC accepts the recommendation, vaccinations can begin.
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  • This CDC advisory group had previously recommended that health care workers and residents of long-term care facilities should be the first to receive a vaccine when it receives EUA. The first shipments of the vaccine will be limited, so states will have to prioritize who should receive the vaccine first.
  • Keeping doctors and nurses healthy will be important for the continuing fight against the virus, which will stretch on for months, even after a vaccine is authorized. But Romero said that first group includes other people working in health care institutions, like those who deliver food and perform housekeeping.
  • Residents of long-term care facilities like nursing homes also need the protection. So far, they account for about 40% of coronavirus deaths in the US.
  • "I would project by the time you get to April, it will be ... 'open season,' in the sense of anyone, even the non-high priority groups could get vaccinated," Fauci said.
  • "We'll be in facilities that day in states that choose to begin as soon as possible," spokesman Ethan Slavin said.
  • The FDA is set to make a decision on a separate vaccine candidate by Moderna in the coming days
  • it's possible that 20 million people could get vaccinated in the next several weeks
  • Phase 1a would be followed by Phases 1b and 1c, which could include essential workers at high risk of infection, other emergency personnel and people with underlying conditions who are at a higher risk of Covid-19 complications and death.
  • Army Gen. Gustave Perna, chief operating officer of the federal government vaccine initiative Operation Warp Speed, previously said he believed vaccine administration will be able to begin vaccinations within 96 hours of authorization.
  • In the meantime, it's important that people continue to wear masks and social distance. JUST WATCHEDDr. Fauci explains importance of vaccine approval processReplayMore Videos ...MUST WATCH Play</
  • It's important to note, however, that Pfizer's vaccine requires two doses administered several weeks apart to reach 95% efficacy. So 100 million doses would vaccinate half the number of people.
  • Azar said earlier this month that 6.4 million doses of Pfizer vaccine would be allocated for shipment the first week. The initial shipment would include half of the doses, followed by the second half three weeks later.
  • Slaoui said he believes most doses will be injected within three to four days, but after that, "I think it will take a week."
  • The first shipments of the vaccine departed a Pfizer plant in Michigan on Sunday morning. A total of 189 boxes of vials are expected to arrive in all 50 states Monday. Another 3,900 vials are expected to ship later Sunday to US territories. Another 400 boxes packed with about 390,000 vials are expected to ship Monday and arrive at their destinations on Tuesday.
  • The vaccines will then be flown across the country, and the Federal Aviation Administration has said its air traffic controllers will prioritize flights carrying the vaccines.
  • But Pfizer's vaccine needs to be stored at incredibly cold temperatures, making the logistics of delivery even more complicated.
  • According to a briefing document released by the FDA's vaccine advisory committee, the most common side effects were reactions at the point of injection on the body, fatigue, headache, muscle pain, chills, joint pain and fever.
  • Health authorities in the UK, where the vaccine roll out began earlier this week, said Wednesday that people with "significant history of allergic reactions" should not receive the vaccine. The advice came after two health care workers "responded adversely" following their shots.
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A Catholic Tribute to Lord Sacks | Sohrab Ahmari | First Things - 0 views

www.firstthings.com/...catholic-tribute-to-lord-sacks reason religion hellenization philosophy Catholic synthesis history crisis culture
shared by Javier E on 14 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • The West, according to an account beloved by Catholics, rose out of a providential encounter between reason and revelation in antiquity. Though occasioned by conquest, the encounter yielded an authentic synthesis: between a Greek rationality in search of the deepest origin of reality and a Jewish God professed to be just that, the very ground of being (cf. Ex 3:14). Later, that same God identified himself even more starkly and intimately with reason (cf. Jn 1:1).
  • Tragically, the story goes on, this synthesis eventually lost its supremacy in the West, owing foremost to opponents inside the Church determined to distill a “purer” faith, unmottled by “worldly” philosophy. The result was a stingy account of reason that excluded things divine and paved the way for a narrowly scientistic rationality
  • Today, we are the victims of this dis-integration, a process of Christian de-Hellenization centuries in the making.
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  • The late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, who died last month, utterly rejected this account of faith and reason.&nbsp;
  • The God of the Hebrew Bible, he believed, was never the God of the Academy to begin with. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is neither the unmoved mover nor the ground of being, but a historical God, who has put himself in dialogue and relationship with one people, the Jews.
  • little about him could be deduced by processes of reason. He is best known, rather, through the moral revolution heralded by Abrahamic faith: Judaism first, followed by Christianity and Islam.
  • De-Hellenization was thus no skin off the back of biblical faith, rightly understood. For, in this telling, the faith of the Jews, including Jesus, had always sat uneasily with the “faith” of Plato and Aristotle.
  • The synthesis between the two collapsed once its Greek metaphysical structure gave way to the battering ram of modern science.
  • The God of the Bible, Sacks contended, was lost in the bargain of Saint Paul’s ambition to spread his newfound faith to the Greco-Roman sphere. More to the point, God was lost in translation. The Greek language, with its left-to-right script, per Sacks, tends toward abstraction and universalization, whereas Hebrew is fundamentally a “right-brained” language, tending toward narrative and particularity.
  • The result was that the West received an abstract, theoretical version of a supremely narrativistic deity.
  • The Hebrew Bible, Sacks believed, has no “theory” of being itself, of natural law or of political regimes.
  • Sacks was, in truth, a pure anti-metaphysicist. In his 2011 book,&nbsp;The Great Partnership: Science, Religion and the Search for Meaning, he declared:&nbsp;“We cannot prove that life is meaningful and that God exists.”
  • he was thrilled by his atheist teachers’ demolition of the classical proofs for God, which he’d always considered a kind of cheap sleight of hand.
  • “Neither can we prove that love is better than hate, altruism than selfishness, forgiveness than the desire for revenge.” All of these statements are a matter of “interpretation,” rather than of “explanation,” and all interpretations are beyond proof or falsification.
  • The quest for ultimate meaning, he argued, falls into the same territory as “ethics, aesthetics and metaphysics”—and “in none of these three disciplines can anything of consequence be proved.”
  • Ethics, aesthetics, and metaphysics are great “repositories of human wisdom,” to be sure, but they simply don’t belong in “the same universe of discourse” as science.
  • If we distinguish the two discourses, neither need threaten the other: The one (science) explains the world by “taking things apart,” as Sacks put it; the other (religion) puts them back together via interpretation and moral formation.
  • For many Catholic intellectuals, not least Benedict XVI, restoring religion to its rightful place in human affairs involves undoing the philosophical mistakes of nominalism and of the Reformation, which the pope emeritus singled out for criticism in his much-misunderstood 2006 Regensburg Lecture.
  • We must dilate reason’s scope, Benedict thought, so that “reasoning” might again include more than merely observing phenomena and identifying their efficient material causes. Sacks did not think faith and reason could be reunited in this way.
  • But shouldn't we try? I seek ultimate meaning, yes, but I want that meaning to be true in a way that satisfies reason’s demands. And there lies the disagreement, I think, between “Regensburg Catholics,” if you will, and the various de-Hellenizing strands of contemporary religious thought.
  • despite rejecting almost in toto the Church’s account of faith and reason, Sacks nevertheless credited it for the fundamental humaneness of Western civilization.
  • More than that, the rabbi blamed the mass horrors of modernity on the narrow and arrogant rationalism that supplanted the old synthesis.
  • “Outside religion,” he wrote, there is no secure base for the unconditional source of worth that in the West has come from the idea that we are each in God’s image.
  • Though many have tried to create a secular substitute, none has ultimately succeeded. None has stood firm under pressure. That has been demonstrated four times in the modern world, when an attempt was made to create a social order on secular lines: the French Revolution, Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany and Communist China. When there is a bonfire of sanctities, lives are lost.
  • As a student of Jewish history, Sacks knew well that the old synthesis of faith and reason wasn’t always a guarantee against unreason when it came to the treatment of Jews within Christendom. Nevertheless, he was far more wary of the merciless abstractions of the post-Enlightenment era
  • Sacks, to be clear, was no counter-Enlightenment thinker. And he paid gracious tribute to the modern scientific enterprise as an almost-miraculous instance of human cooperation with divine creativity.
  • Nevertheless, he insisted, the Enlightenment ideology, with its tendency to apply the methods of scientific inquiry to all of life, “dehumanize[d] human beings.” Its universalist “reason” detested particularity, not least the stubborn particularity of the Jewish people
  • Moreover, it targeted for demolition, in the name of humanity and reason, “the local, the church, the neighborhood, the community, even the family, the things that make us different, attached.”
  • Sacks saw similar dangers at work in today’s market liberalism: “a loss of belief in the dignity and sanctity of life”; “the loss of the politics of covenant, the idea that society is a place where we undertake collective responsibility for the common good”; “a loss of morality”; “the loss of marriage”; and the loss of “the possibility of a meaningful life.” In short, the technocratic dystopia we are stumbling into.
  • Except, Sacks rightly insisted, we don’t have to, provided we can make room in our lives and societies for “the still-small voice that the Bible tells us is the voice of God”:
  • Sacks felt that divine voice couldn’t be definitively reasoned about, certainly not in the way that, say, Benedict XVI called for. Yet the rabbi’s own public presence—supremely learned yet humble and unfailingly charitable, even to his most vicious secularist opponents—was and will remain an enduring testament to the reasonableness of faith.&nbsp;
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The Dictionary Definition of 'Racism' Has to Change - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...613324 definition racism language dictionary culture
shared by Javier E on 15 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • the Merriam-Webster dictionary has, up to now, given us what we might consider the 1.0 definition of racism, the one we would cite for the curious child. That is, what used to be referred to as prejudiced: “a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.”
  • For example, many people would say that the fact that, on average, black students do not perform as highly on standardized tests as white students means that the tests are racist, in that they disadvantage black students.
  • For example, one might say that societal racism is to blame for neighborhoods with decaying infrastructure, because white flight lowered tax revenues.
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  • These terms have naturally often been shortened to just racism, such that the word has acquired a 2.0 definition. Merriam-Webster captures this as well, noting that racism can mean “a political or social system founded on racism.”
  • Mitchum noted that racism “is a system of advantage based on skin color.”Here, the focus of the definition is less on attitudes than results: The societal disparities between white people and others are themselves referred to as racism, as a kind of shorthand for the attitudinal racism creating the disparities
  • This 3.0 definition of the word is now quite influential, such that the best-selling author and Atlantic contributor Ibram X. Kendi calls all race-based societal disparities racism that ought to be battled. It is a usage of racism that one often acquires in college classes in the social sciences, and that is fundamental to modern discussions of race and racism.
  • in my idealized English, people would be prejudiced while a society would exhibit racism.
  • itchum was frustrated by people telling her, in debates about racism, that her 3.0 definition was erroneous given that it wasn’t “what’s in the dictionary.” Her frustration was justified. She wasn’t creating her own definition of the word—it is shared by legions of people, especially educated ones, across our nation.
  • Dictionaries can lag behind societal developments, and the idea that a “word” indisputably “means” what dictionaries say is simply sloppy. Words’ meanings change inevitably and constantly
  • Sexist replaced chauvinist around the same time racist did prejudiced, and for the same reason—potent terms need refreshment, especially when heavily used. This is why, more and more, white supremacy is easing out racism. It was only a matter of time, and dictionaries should be on notice.
  • Racist was, initially, potentially applicable to alternate interpretations. Is the racist someone who is of a certain race? Or a supporter of people of other races? Or someone calling attention to the existence of different races? Or is racist something that refers to a policy? That latter direction is where things wen
  • Since the 1960s, however, racism has often been used in terms such as societal racism and institutional racism, referring to structures of society that disadvantage people of subordinated races because of the collective effect of bigoted attitudes.
  • To extend a word’s definition from a personal quality to a society is, in itself, hardly unusual. The progression of racism 1.0 to racism 2.0 follows a line of metaphorical reasoning common as far back as the Greek philosophers treating societies as individuals in macrocosm. The conceptual step between a healthy person and a healthy society is a short one, as is that between a racist person and a racist society.
  • The 3.0 usage implies that calling racial disparities “racism” is natural because it is indisputable that racial disparities stem from bias-infused barriers.
  • If I had it my way—which I won’t—we would allow that racism now refers to a societal state, and revive prejudice to refer to attitudinal bias.
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Should Youth Come First in Coronavirus Care? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-ethics-rationing-elderly.html
shared by anonymous on 15 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • Larry Churchill considered what he would do if the pandemic caused medical shortages. Should he, a 75-year-old, direct care to younger people before him if he got sick?
  • Some policies adopted by states or health care systems to allocate medical resources — equipment, drugs, critical care and intensive-care beds — specifically make age part of the equation.
  • He does not believe that older people are less deserving of care, nor would he want his personal philosophy to become public policy, he said; other older adults will reach different conclusions.
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  • Professional associations like the American Geriatrics Society and advocacy groups like Justice in Aging have focused more on the opposite possibility: They want to prevent older and disabled people from being arbitrarily sent to the rear of the line.
  • “Our ability as physicians to prognosticate is generally poor, particularly in the heat of the moment,”
  • In March, the Office of Civil Rights reaffirmed that the Affordable Care Act and other federal statutes prohibit discrimination, in health facilities receiving federal funds, on the basis of age, disability and other characteristics.
  • “It’s akin to the person who runs into a burning building or gives up the last seat on the lifeboat,” said Dr. Andrea Kittrell, an otolaryngologist in Lynchburg, Va., who created the organization in March. “There are those people who are selfless and generous and value other people’s lives as much or more than their own.”
  • Successful programs like Experience Corps also point to a common criticism of the fair innings philosophy: The last innings of the game can be among the most significant.
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Review of Robert Putnam's &quot;The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How... - 0 views

hnn.us/178481 upswing history progressive racial justice culture
shared by Javier E on 15 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • Putnam refers to Upswing as a “an exercise in macrohistory,” which “inevitably involves the simplification of complex stories.” And a “simplification” it may be, but then so too are almost all history books, for they attempt to describe or analyze in mere fallible words an immensely complex reality.
  • Putnam begins Chapter 1 by examining what Alexis de Tocqueville observed in the 1830s about the American ability to balance individual liberty with the common good. He then looks ahead to the decades of the post-Civil War Gilded Age, when the USA “was startlingly similar to today. Inequality, political polarization, social dislocation, and cultural narcissism prevailed—all accompanied, as they are now, by unprecedented technological advances, prosperity, and material well-being.”
  • Figure 1.1, the first of many charts, is labeled “Economic, Political, Social, And Cultural Trends, 1895–2015.” Each of the trend lines indicates if the country was moving toward 1) “greater or lesser economic equality?” 2) “greater or lesser comity and compromise in politics?” 3) “greater or lesser cohesion in social life?” 4) “greater or lesser altruism in cultural values?” Answers to all four: 1890s to 1960s = “greater”; 1970s to present = “lesser.”
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  • Putnam concludes that during the Progressive Era (1890-c. 1910) “the institutional, social, and cultural seeds” of what he labels the “Great Convergence” were sown. Out of those seeds emerged more than six decades (up until the late 1960s) of “imperfect but steady upward progress toward greater economic equality, more cooperation in the public square, a stronger social fabric, and a growing culture of solidarity,”
  • “then suddenly and unexpectedly . . . the Great Convergence was reversed in a dramatic U-turn, to be followed by a half century of Great Divergence.”
  • the USA “entered the Sixties in an increasingly ‘we’ mode—with communes, shared values, and accelerating efforts toward racial and economic equality—and we left the Sixties in an increasingly ‘I’ mode—focused on ‘rights,’ culture wars, and what would be almost instantly dubbed the ‘Me Decade’ of the 1970s.”
  • Each Upswing chapter from 2 through 5 is devoted to a separate field--economics, politics, society, or culture. And each deals with the trends from the 1890s, when the Progressive Age began, up to the present era.
  • the “we” of the Great Convergence was often meant for white males more than for all Americans.
  • Although Putnam discusses many historical explanations for the transformation beginning in the late 1960s, like the backlash against the gains of African Americans and women, he is wise enough to realize that major historical occurrences, like the transformation considered here, almost always have innumerable causes.
  • It was then, in reaction to a “Gilded Age” similar to our own, that the turn toward a more cooperative, less self-centered society began
  • describes the Progressivism of the that time as a diverse movement “to limit the socially destructive effects of morally unhindered capitalism, to extract from those [capitalist] markets the tasks they had demonstrably bungled
  • “Communitarian sentiment,” he declares, “was at the heart of the Progressive mood. Teddy Roosevelt, Jane Addams, and other progressives were explicit in rejecting ‘individualism,’
  • The 1920s, with its three consecutive Republican presidents, slowed down the growth of communitarianism.
  • with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and World War II, it renewed itself until it began in the late 1960s to reverse itself
  • some of the accomplishments of the Progressive Era: “the secret ballot; the direct primary system; the popular election of senators; . . . women’s suffrage; new forms of municipal administration; the federal income tax; the Federal Reserve System; protective labor laws; the minimum wage; antitrust statutes; protected public lands and resources; food and drug regulation; sanitation infrastructure; public utilities;
  • a vast proliferation of civic and voluntary societies; new advocacy organizations such as labor unions, the ACLU, and the NAACP; the widespread provision of free public high schools; and even the spread of public parks, libraries, and playgrounds all owe their origins to the efforts of a diverse array of Progressive reformers.”
  • “Progressivism . . . was not confined to the Progressive Party but affected in a striking way all the major and minor parties and the whole tone of political life. . . . It was a rather widespread and remarkably good-natured effort of the greater part of society to achieve some not very clearly specified self-reformation.”
  • To make his point that Progressivism was primarily a “bottom up” movement involving countless citizen reformers, he provides brief biographical sketches on some of them such as Frances Perkins (b. 1880), Paul Harris (b. 1868), Ida B. Wells (b. 1862), and Tom Johnson (b. 1854).
  • Generalizing about the Progressive movement, Putnam writes it “was, first and foremost, a moral awakening.”
  • Aided in part by the religious thinking of the Social Gospel thinkers, “Americans from all walks of life began to repudiate the self-centered, hyper-individualist creed of the Gilded Age.”
  • The movement was also pragmatic, not ideological, for “true innovation requires openness to experimentation that is not premised upon ideological beliefs.
  • Putnam believes that Progressives came to realize that “to succeed they would have to compromise—to find a way to put private property, personal liberty, and economic growth on more equal footing with communitarian ideals
  • These lessons regarding moral urgency, pragmatism, and compromise are ones that Putnam thinks modern reformers need to apply.
  • he does not yet “see a truly nonpartisan movement” bringing “issue-specific efforts together in a compelling citizen-driven call for large-scale reform.” Nor does he see “a broader vision for the future of America.”
  • we should, Putnam insists, learn from what they did wrong. Most significantly, they failed to make the “we” they stressed inclusive enough, paying insufficient attention to gender and racial discrimination.
  • “The question we face today is not whether we can or should turn back the tide of history, but whether we can resurrect the earlier communitarian virtues in a way that does not reverse the progress we’ve made in terms of individual liberties. Both values are American, and we require a balance and integration of both.”
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