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Capitol riots: Police describe a 'medieval battle' - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-us-canada-55679623 Capitalpolice Riots
shared by xaviermcelderry on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Michael Fanone, a 40-year-old DC plainclothes narcotics detective who was told to wear his uniform that day, rushed to the West Terrace of the Capitol where he took turns holding back the crowd, and resting to rinse his face of the the chemical irritants that that crowd was spraying on police.
  • "We weren't battling 50 or 60 rioters in this tunnel," the MPD (Metropolitan Police Department of District of Columbia) veteran told the Washington Post. "We were battling 15,000 people. It looked like a medieval battle scene."
  • Robert Glover, the commander on scene for MPD, declared a riot at 13:50 local time, nearly two hours after Trump's speech at the White House where he instructed his followers to go to the Capitol.He quickly told officers to retake the inauguration bleachers, to stop the crowd from raining down heavy objects on officers from above.
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  • On Friday, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi announced General Russel Honoré would be leading an immediate investigation of the Capitol's security infrastructure.Video footage has also emerged showing an officer taking a selfie with a rioter inside the Capitol. Some officers reportedly gave directions to rioters telling them how to get to the offices of Democratic lawmakers.
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Opinion: Capitol riot a stunning reminder of America's policing crisis - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html trump
shared by katherineharron on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • When DC Metropolitan Police officer Michael Fanone collapsed on the ground after he was repeatedly Tasered by Trump supporters who had stormed the US Capitol on January 6, his attackers started stripping him of his ammunition, police radio and badge.
  • "Kill him with his own gun." That was one of many, many incriminating comments the insurgent mob shouted for the world to hear that day. Another was: "We were invited here. We were invited by the President of the United States."
  • Jacob Chansley, the so-called "QAnon Shaman" who was arrested and charged in connection with the riot, later told the FBI, according to a complaint, that "he came as a part of a group effort, with other 'patriots' from Arizona, at the request of the President that all 'patriots' come to D.C. on January 6, 2021."
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  • Clearly, the rioters of January 6 believed they had been "invited" to the Capitol to stop Congress from the constitutionally mandated counting of electoral ballots in a desperate attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
  • two Capitol Police officers have been suspended and at least 10 others are under investigation for their behavior during the riot.
  • In 2017, Trump endorsed police brutality, telling officers on Long Island, "When you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon, you just seen them thrown in, rough. I said: 'Please don't be too nice.'
  • In a March 13, 2019 interview, Trump told Breitbart News, "I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump — I have the tough people..."
  • Throughout the last five years, President Donald Trump has embraced the police and repeatedly called himself the "president of law and order," even though he consistently defied this both through his words and actions.
  • Trump supporters said so themselves when they chanted "Traitors!" at the police. One woman in a Trump 2020 sweatshirt said, "You should be on our side."
  • Despite the "Blue Lives Matter" flags many carried, they turned on Fanone, attacked Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick, who died from his injuries, and injured more than 50 other officers.
  • Sworn police officers are beholden to no president or other official. They get their authority from the Constitution.
  • they need more than legal authority. They need legitimacy
  • Even though the government may give police officers the legal rights to carry out their duties to enforce the law, they lose their credibility when the community no longer see them as trustworthy.
  • Those police officers, police leaders and police unions who have reciprocated the corrupt embrace of a lawless president have betrayed not only the public trust but the trust of their brothers and sisters in uniform.
  • The killings of George Floyd and too many other unarmed, Black Americans, have already created a crisis in policing. This has been exacerbated by Trump, who has politicized his support for the police while chipping away at our institutions and undermining our faith in government as a whole.
  • For many people, police officers are the government. When you are in enough trouble to dial 911, it isn't the president, Congress or the Supreme Court that comes running. It is a cop.
  • Any attempts to fix this crisis will require reestablishing trust between the police and the community they serve.
  • We in law enforcement must work to repair our reputation, both in the eyes of the public and among ourselves
  • President Biden must have the courage to go beyond police reforms, and push for a reimagining of law enforcement. He must task government and the nation with answering this radical yet basic question: What do we want from our police?
  • President Barack Obama's Task Force on 21st Century Policing, on which I served, has given Biden much to build on. It painted a picture of policing, in which officers should be professional, accountable, transparent and self-monitoring in order to learn from any mistakes.
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The Cost of Trump's Aid Freeze in the Trenches of Ukraine's War - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ukraine-war-impeachment.html politics trump crisis
shared by anniina03 on 25 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Lt. Ivan Molchanets peeked over a parapet of sand bags at the front line of the war in Ukraine. Next to him was an empty helmet propped up to trick snipers, already perforated with multiple holes.In other spots, his soldiers stuff straw into empty uniforms to make dummies, and put logs on their shoulders to make it look like they are carrying American antitank missiles — as a scare tactic.“This is just the situation here,” he said, shrugging as he held the government’s position. “The enemy is very close.”
  • the war in Ukraine has killed 13,000 people, put a large part of the country under Russia’s control and dragged on for five years almost forgotten by the outside world — until it became a backdrop to the impeachment inquiry of President Trump now unfolding in Washington.
  • Ukraine, politically disorganized and militarily weak, has relied heavily on the United States in its struggle with Russian-backed separatists. But the White House abruptly suspended nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine in July and only restored it last month after a bipartisan uproar in Congress.
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  • Ukrainian soldiers here at the front line were jolted by the suspension, too. While the aid was restored in time to prevent any military setbacks, it took a heavy psychological toll, they said, striking at their confidence that their backers in Washington stood solidly behind their fight to keep Russia at bay.
  • Ukraine has fought back with repeated appeals for aid, diplomatic pressure, Western sanctions against Russia — and with an army that is holding on by its fingernails.
  • Both sides use heavy artillery, but the only piece of American military aid at the position was a much-prized infrared spotting scope for night fighting. Soldiers also carry American tourniquets in their medical kits, used to stanch bleeding.
  • “Our allies help us, but the hard and dirty work we do ourselves,” Lieutenant Molchanets said.Even the most sophisticated weapons the United States offers are of little use here — at least, not in the way they are intended.
  • In 2018, the Trump administration authorized sales to Ukraine of a shoulder-fired anti-tank missile called the Javelin, reversing an Obama administration policy of supplying only non-lethal aid.
  • The Trump administration provided the missiles on the condition that they not be used in the war, Ukrainian officials and American diplomats have said, lest they provoke Russia to slip more powerful weaponry to the separatists.
  • The American military aid suspension hurt Ukraine in another way as well, Ukrainian officials said: It signaled their weakness, just as they were trying to project strength in negotiations with the Russians and needed solid backing from Washington.Since taking office in May, Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has wanted the United States to take a more active role in pressuring Russia to withdraw its forces from eastern Ukraine — which the Kremlin does not even acknowledge are there — and accept a peace deal to end the conflict.
  • Mr. Trump has also showed a clear desire for a peace deal on Ukraine, part of his longstanding effort to remove an issue that has driven a wedge between Russia and the West, and has made his cozy relations with Russian President Vladimir V. Putin harder to defend.
  • But Mr. Trump has not pressed Russia and sided with Ukraine in the negotiations in the way Mr. Zelensky has urged. To the contrary, at a news conference in New York last month, Mr. Trump backed away from Mr. Zelensky and his troubles in the war, telling the Ukrainian leader, “I really hope you and President Putin get together and can solve your problem.”
  • Mr. Zelensky wants to move the Ukrainian front line back — from a few hundred yards away from the separatists to about 1,000 yards in several locations, including around the town of Zolote, the site of Lieutenant Molchanets’s position.Separatist forces are also supposed to pull back in these areas, to put both sides out of sniper range and reduce skirmishing, paving the way for settlement talks.The problem in the town Zolote — and what has set off protests here and in Kiev — is that pulling back will leave some neighborhoods in front of the army’s new trenches, exposing them to the enemy side.
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Trump's military meddling fuels growing tension with leadership | US news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...chard-spencer-edward-gallagher trump military tension leadership
shared by Javier E on 01 Dec 19 - No Cached
  • “Most people in the military and other national security institutions will find it deeply upsetting. You don’t grow up in military service without a healthy respect for the way military justice operates,” she added.
  • Trump - who never served in the military, and avoided Vietnam by claiming to have “bone spurs” – has claimed greater expertise that his commanders, and has fired off orders on Twitter with little or no consultation. In early October, he ordered all US troops out of Syria, having been persuaded to take that course of action by Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, only to command his forces back in little more than two weeks later, to “secure the oil”.
  • He diverted nearly $13bn in military construction projects and thousands of troops to help build his long-promised wall on the southern border. He abruptly cut off year-long negotiations with the Taliban in September, but declared them back on during his Thanksgiving visit to Afghanistan. There was no apparent shift in underlying circumstances in either case.
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  • Trump is fond of talking about “my military”, but the claim is less true with every passing month. Veterans still support him in significantly greater numbers than the general population, but he no longer has a lead among active duty service members, who are fairly evenly split between approval and disapproval.
  • “By intervening, Trump is creating circumstances where the men and women in uniform are being asked to take sides between the superior officers and the president,” Mulligan said. “It makes you wonder: is nothing sacred? Sadly, the answer is no.”
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Trump plan to reveal true health care costs spurs fight with hospitals and insurers - T... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-a659-7d69641c6ff7_story.html health care trump competition transparency rules regulation oligopoly
shared by Javier E on 08 Dec 19 - No Cached
  • t should tell you everything you need to know that insurers and hospitals have joined together to oppose new rules proposed by the Trump administration last month that would require them to disclose the prices they now negotiate in secret. Their fear is that disclosure will confirm what many have long suspected: that the biggest insurers and hospitals already have the power to raise hospital prices and insurance premiums, increasing their profits and making it easier to drive smaller hospitals and insurers from the marketplace.
  • In today’s market for medical care, the cost for an MRI or a hip replacement at the most expensive hospital in one region can be three times the cost at the least expensive hospital somewhere else. Even within regional markets, the prices paid to the most expensive provider can be twice as much as the least expensive. And within the same hospital, the price for an uninsured patient can be five or seven times what is charged for a patient covered by the largest private insurer.
  • There are various reasons for this “price dispersion,” as economists call it, but surely one is that prices are treated as trade secrets. The only time most patients find out the price is after the treatment has been delivered — and even then it often requires an accounting degree to figure it out
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  • In just about every other consumer market you can think of, the Internet, by making prices instantly available and comparable, has resulted in prices that are lower, more uniform and more closely tied to costs. But in health care, where pricing remains opaque, prices are rising faster than inflation, faster than costs and faster than the incomes of the people paying for it
  • The new rules would require hospitals (and the doctors whose practices are owned by hospitals) to publish, in an easy-to-use format, their minimum and maximum rates for 300 common services, along with the amount the hospital is willing to accept from someone without insurance. The aim is to make it easier for uninsured patients, or insured patients with co-payments and deductibles, to shop around for the best value.
  • More controversial, however, is a second rule that would require health insurers to create an interactive website that would tell customers what their out-of-pocket cost would be for a service at any provider, whether in network or out, as well as the price it has negotiated for that service with in-network providers. The effect would be to let every hospital and insurer know the rates negotiated between every other hospital and insurer — rates that under current contracts must be kept secret.
  • Within minutes of these regulations being announced, the hospitals and the health insurers announced their opposition, warning the rules would result in higher prices for consumers
  • Their argument is that if negotiated rates were made transparent, then the hospitals offering the deepest discounts would feel compelled to stop doing so out of fear that they would be forced to offer similar discounts to all insurers. In highly consolidated hospital markets — which at this point describes two-thirds of the country — there is also concern that allowing hospitals to share price information would make it easier for them to tacitly collude and keep price competition to a minimum.
  • major hospital chains and insurance already have a pretty good sense where they stand relative to their competitors in terms of pricing. A number of firms — including one owned by United Healthcare, the nation’s largest insurer — already gather and analyze pricing data and sell it to both hospitals and insurers. The only parties who are really in the dark are the consumers and employers who ultimately pay the bills.
  • if it is true that transparency will lead the lowest-price hospitals to raise their bids, then logically it should be also true that it will lead the insurers now paying the highest prices to demand better deals. Given that the market for health insurance is now as consolidated as the market for hospital services, the possibility of collusion is high on both sides.
  • Indeed, if transparency has any effect on prices, the most likely outcome is to eliminate the outliers at both the top and bottom of the price range, reducing the enormous variations in prices. And to the degree that transparency causes average prices to move in any direction, the more likely direction is down, not up
  • Such a positive outcome is suggested from experience in New Hampshire, the first state to establish a website listing how much customers of different insurance plans would be charged at different hospitals and labs for medical imaging such as X-rays, CT scans and MRIs. Zach Brown, an economist at the University of Michigan, found that the cost of imaging declined by an average of 4 percent for insurers and 5 percent for consumers, rising to 11 percent after five years.
  • Statewide, the range between the highest and lowest negotiated prices shrunk by 15 percent.
  • In today’s highly consolidated health-care markets, the goal for hospitals and insurers isn’t so much to lower costs as to shift costs onto someone else. When dominant insurers use their market power to extract lower prices from hospitals, the hospitals’ natural response is to try to extract higher payments from smaller insurers to cover their costs and meet their profit targets.
  • As this cost-shifting plays itself out, small insurers and small hospitals find themselves squeezed as they are forced to pay more and charge less.
  • The dirty little secret is that neither side in these hospital-insurer negotiations really wants to drive down prices. What matters to either side is not what price they pay or receive in an absolute sense — in general, both hospitals and insurers profit more when prices and premiums are high. The thing they really care about is whether they are getting a better price than their competitors
  • The reason insurers and hospitals are prepared to use whatever legal muscle they have to fight price transparency is the same reason pharmaceutical companies and pharmacy benefit managers fought a similar proposal by the Trump administration on drug pricing — because it would expose this con game.
  • Given the anti-regulatory tilt of the federal courts, the inevitable legal challenge is likely to succeed. Which means the only way Americans are likely to get genuine price competition in health care is if transparency rules are written into law by a Congress not captured by business interests and free-market ideology.
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Ten Things Every American Student Should Know About Our Army in World War II.pdf - 0 views

diigo.com/0ghpa8 WWII mobilization
shared by Javier E on 12 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • When the European war began in earnest on September 1, 1939, with the German invasion of Poland, the U.S. Army ranked seventeenth among armies of the world in size and combat power, just behind Romania. It numbered 190,000 soldiers. (It would grow to 8.3 million in 1945, a 44-fold increase.
  • At the time of Pearl Harbor, in December 1941, only one American division was on a full war footing.
  • Obviously a lot happened to get from an army of 190,000 to an army of almost 8.5 million. A total of 16 million Americans served in uniform in WWII; virtually every family had someone in harm’s way, virtually every American had an emotional investment in our Army.
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  • Some American coastal defense guns had not been test fired in 20 years, and the Army lacked enough antiaircraft guns to protect even a single American city. The senior British military officer in Washington told London that American forces “are more unready for war than it is possible to imagine.”
  • The United States built 3.5 million private cars in 1941; for the rest of the war, we built 139. Instead, in 1943 alone, we built 86,000 planes, 45,000 tanks, and 648,000 trucks.
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How Impeachment Will Force Senators Off the Campaign Trail - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...atic-senators-impeachment.html politics US trump Policy
shared by anniina03 on 15 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • It’s the fourth quarter. The game is close. And you are benched. That could sum up the frustrations of four senators — two of them front-runners for the Democratic presidential nomination — who will be duty bound to leave the campaign trail next week to sit in judgment of President Trump.
  • With members of the Senate serving as official jurors who will determine Mr. Trump’s guilt or innocence, three participants in Tuesday’s debate, Amy Klobuchar, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, must head back to Washington in the midst of the campaign.
  • During a rally in Iowa last week, Mr. Sanders, a leading contender as well, complained about the interruption, but also emphasized duty. Editors’ PicksThe Sex Scene Evolves for the #MeToo EraTech Bro Uniform Meets Margaret Thatcher. Disruption Ensues.The Cookbooks You Need for 2020, as Selected by ChefsAdvertisementContinue reading the main story“Between you and me I’d rather be here in Iowa, but I have a constitutional responsibility, which I accept as a United States senator, to be a juror in Trump’s impeachment trial,” he said. “So I’ll be there.”
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  • “Having your competitors stuck in Washington, literally in their seat, while you’re hitting the campaign trail? Well, that seems like a pretty good advantage to me,” Mr. Cornyn said on the Senate floor. Mr. Biden, though, pointed out during the debate that his family had also suffered as a result of the allegations that led to Mr. Trump’s impeachment.
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President Trump confirms July 4 fireworks at Mt. Rushmore - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html
shared by katherineharron on 16 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • President Donald Trump said Wednesday this year's Independence Day will feature a fireworks display atop Mount Rushmore, an event he would "try" to attend.
  • In May 2019, South Dakota Republican Gov. Kristi Noem initially announced that the state and the Department of Interior had struck a deal to have the fireworks return to Mt. Rushmore beginning with the 2020 Independence Day celebration. The fireworks had been discontinued in 2009 due to concerns of a wildfire hazard in forests adjacent to the monument. Noem said advancements in pyrotechnics and a strengthened forest led to the decision to have the fireworks return to the site.
  • Brushing aside what he said were dubious environmental concerns that had previously prevented fireworks at the South Dakota landmark, Trump said he'd secured this year's show easily.Read More"What can burn? It's stone. Nobody knew why," Trump said of the concerns over the environment.
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  • "I called up our people and in 15 minutes got it approved and we will have the first fireworks display at Mount Rushmore, and I will try and get out there if I can," Trump said on Wednesday, amid a signing ceremony for an initial US-China trade deal.
  • In 2018, Trump unsuccessfully pursued holding a military parade on Veterans Day in Washington in honor of the 100th anniversary of the armistice that ended the First World War. The Defense Department postponed the parade, which was supposed to involve US troops in period uniforms as well as US military aircraft but no heavy vehicles like tanks in order to prevent damage to infrastructure.
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How Hard Is It to Quit Coal? For Germany, 18 Years and $44 Billion - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rmany-coal-climate-change.html politics US history Crisis culture economics
shared by anniina03 on 17 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Germany announced on Thursday that it would spend $44.5 billion to quit coal — but not for another 18 years, by 2038.
  • The move shows how expensive it is to stop burning the world’s dirtiest fossil fuel, despite a broad consensus that keeping coal in the ground is vital to averting a climate crisis, and how politically complicated it is.
  • Germany doesn’t have shale gas, as the United States does, which has led to the rapid decline of coal use in America, despite President Trump’s support for coal. Germany also faces intense opposition to nuclear power. After the Fukushima disaster in 2011, that opposition prompted the government to start shutting down the country’s nuclear plants, a transition that should be complete by 2022.
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  • “Germany, one of the strongest and most successful industry nations in the world, is taking huge steps toward leaving the fossil fuel era,” Finance Minister Olaf Scholz said at a news conference in Berlin.
  • Environmental organizations criticized the government plan for being too slow and for not expanding renewable energy sources quickly enough. “The majority of the necessary reductions are being pushed to the end of the 2020s,” said Christoph Bals, policy director for the environmental group Germanwatch.
  • Renewable energy is getting cheaper. Private investors are shying away from new projects. There is far greater awareness of the deadly particulate matter pollution that comes out of coal-fired power plants.Editors’ PicksA Meticulous Account of Trump’s Tenure Reads Like a Comic Horror StoryTech Bro Uniform Meets Margaret Thatcher. Disruption Ensues.Olivia Palermo Got a Lot Out of That InternshipAdvertisementContinue reading the main storyYet coal remains ascendant in some parts of the world, in part because it has been the go-to fuel for so long, it employs millions of people globally, and because the industry often enjoys robust political backing.
  • Eastern European countries, particularly Poland and the Czech Republic, still rely heavily on coal. The European Union this week created a €100 billion fund to aid their transition to cleaner fuels.
  • The Asia-Pacific is where coal continues to grow. China, which consumes half of the world’s coal, continues to build more coal plants at home and abroad. According to the International Energy Agency, China’s domestic coal demand is projected to keep growing for at least the next two years, before it levels off. China’s coal expansion puts its own climate targets at risk
  • And even as it reels from wildfires made more intense by climate change, Australia, one of the world’s biggest coal exporters, is digging for more, encouraged in part by the growing Asian market. Among the most contentious projects is a new $2 billion coal mine in the country’s northeast.
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The Personality Traits that Led to Napoleon Bonaparte's Epic Downfall - HISTORY - 0 views

www.history.com/...all-reasons-personality-traits history
shared by brookegoodman on 19 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Napoleon Bonaparte’s rise and fall are one of the most spectacular in recorded history. The French general and statesman turned self-appointed emperor revolutionized the nation’s military, legal and educational institutions. But after some of his most audacious expansionist campaigns failed, he was forced to abdicate and was ultimately exiled in disgrace.
  • A close look behind the heroic portraits and beneath the gorgeous uniforms reveals some surprising things about the great little man. (He was small.) Perhaps most striking? The number of complexes he suffered from, including class inferiority, money insecurity, intellectual envy, sexual anxiety, social awkwardness and, not surprisingly, a persistent hypersensitivity to criticism. Taken in whole, these traits drove his stark ambition, undermined his grandiose endeavors—and ultimately crippled his historic legacy.
  • He became brutally aware of social barriers when, at the age of nine, he left home and entered the military academy at Brienne in northern France. His foreign origins, atrocious French (he had grown up speaking a Corsican Italian patois) and dubious noble status laid him open to the taunts of his schoolmates.
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  • He welcomed the outbreak of the French Revolution in July 1789, when he was a month short of his 20th birthday—not just because he was a republican, but also because by removing class barriers it opened up new prospects politically and personally. But when he found himself in revolutionary Paris five years later, 26-year-old general Napoleon faced an alarming world governed by two things he had never had much experience of: money and sex.
  • The lure of making money briefly eclipsed his military ambitions as he speculated on buying and selling the properties of émigré or guillotined nobles, and importing often-smuggled luxuries such as coffee, sugar and silk stockings. Although his dislike of what he called “men of business” never left him, neither did his determination never to be short of ready cash. When he came to power he always had with him a cassette of gold coins. He also saw money as the key to achieving the goals he set himself, creating new institutions and building public works.
  • While he was on the retreat from Moscow, a group of generals tried to seize power by announcing he had been killed in battle. The plot failed, but it revealed to Napoleon that his whole edifice of imperial glory had feet of clay. On hearing of his death, nobody reacted as they would have had he been a real monarch—by saying ‘the Emperor is dead, long live the Emperor’ and proclaiming his son’s accession to the throne.
  • As appalled as he was by Josephine’s promiscuity, Napoleon was entranced by her supposedly aristocratic background. He would be even more excited by that of his second wife, the Austrian archduchess Marie-Louise. As she was a great-niece of the late Marie-Antoinette, he would refer to his ‘uncle’ king Louis XVI and reveled in the fact that his father-in-law was the Emperor of Austria.
  • He continued to build on this image so successfully that he could turn a less-than-glorious episode in Egypt into the stuff of legend and persuade many in France that he was the predestined savior of the nation. This enabled him to seize power and begin rebuilding France from the ruins of the Revolution.
  • While he was destroying the might of Austria, Russia and Prussia by his spectacular victories at Ulm, Austerlitz, Jena and Friedland, he received reports from Paris that people were longing for an end to the fighting so they could get on with their lives. By then, his extraordinary luck, leading from triumph to triumph, had begun to make him believe his own propaganda, that he was the darling of destiny. Yet the aura of glory could not mask an underlying frailty.
  • His sexual insecurity and distrust of women only deepened his unwillingness or inability to engage with others, hampering his diplomatic relations, which he saw as showdowns in which he had to be seen to win. He could never see that a judicious concession might win him greater advantages; had he prolonged the peace of Amiens by allowing Britain to keep Malta in 1803, for example, he could have used the respite to reinforce his position, rebuild France’s economy and his navy.
  • He went on fighting a battle that was long lost, desperate for a resounding victory he believed might redeem what, for all the bluster, was his irredeemably low self-esteem. Ironically, it was only after he had lost his throne and was even denied the courtesy of being addressed as a monarch by his British jailers on the island of Saint Helena, that he managed to recover this and project an image of grandeur in defeat that still fascinates people today.
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Police used pepper spray to break up a North Carolina march to a polling place - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html election
shared by katherineharron on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Law enforcement officers used pepper spray on Saturday to break up a march to a polling place in Graham, North Carolina, a decision that has drawn criticism from the state's governor and civil rights groups.
  • aw enforcement pepper sprayed the ground to disperse the crowd in at least two instances -- first, after marchers did not move out of the road following a moment of silence, and again after an officer was "assaulted" and the event deemed "unsafe and unlawful."
  • the event's organizers and other attendees have said they did nothing to warrant the response,
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  • "I and our organization, marchers, demonstrators and potential voters left here sunken, sad, traumatized, obstructed and distracted from our intention to lead people all the way to the polls," said the march organizer,
  • "Let me tell you something: We were beaten, but we will not be broken," he added.
  • Video published by the Raleigh News & Observer appears to show demonstrators and law enforcement scuffling over sound equipment outside the Alamance County Courthouse. Alamance County sheriff's deputies wearing gray uniforms soon deploy pepper spray, and at least one deputy is seen spraying a man in the face. Others spray toward demonstrators' feet.
  • Lt. Sisk said Sunday officers allowed the march to pause for about 8 minutes and 40 seconds, but after 9 minutes marchers were told to clear the road.
  • "They started arresting people before our rally began,"
  • The Alamance County Sheriff's Office said it made arrests at the demonstration, citing "violations of the permit" Drumwright obtained to hold the rally.
  • "As a result, after violations of the permit, along with disorderly conduct by participants leading to arrests, the protest was deemed an unlawful assembly and participants were asked to leave."
  • The rally was scheduled from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. ET starting from Wayman's Chapel AME church, with an expected stop at the Confederate Monument at Court Square, before ending at a polling place on Elm Street, according to the flyer for the event.
  • At least eight people were arrested during the rally on various charges,
  • After five minutes, several people remained and officers again pepper sprayed the ground, authorities said.
  • Later, a Graham officer was assaulted, Sisk said, and the rally was deemed unsafe and unlawful and law enforcement officers dispersed the crowd.
  • "At no time during this event did any member of the Graham Police Department directly spray any participant in the march with chemical irritants,"
  • Sisk called the irritant a "pepper fogger" similar to OC spray, commonly referred to as pepper spray
  • "they suffered the same effects" of the pepper spray.
  • Sisk disputed that the march was "scheduled to go to the polls," saying the event was meant to stop at the courthouse where a rally would be held.
  • "We need the public to understand that we made every effort to coordinate with the planner of this event to ensure that it was successful," Sisk said, alleging it was organizers' intent to block the road, but authorities aimed to ensure safety of both demonstrators and others in downtown Graham.
  • the "peaceful protests" became violent "because law enforcement tried to take the sound equipment," he tweeted.
  • Rain Bennett, another attendee, told CNN that demonstrators stopped at Court Square for an eight-minute moment of silence for George Floyd following the march, and that "police presence was there and they had no problem with that."
  • "Everybody is coughing and kind of running away," he said, adding that it was "really confusing because it'd been fine."
  • The incident was criticized by a number of officials and civil rights groups, including the Lawyer's Committee for Civil Rights, the NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina, whose executive director likened it to "voter intimidation."
  • North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper shared the Raleigh News & Observer's article about the march on Twitter and called the incident "unacceptable."
  • "This is extremely concerning, and we need to get to the bottom of it," he said.
  • North Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Wayne Goodwin issued a statement condemning the actions of law enforcement, calling them "completely unwarranted police hostility and voter suppression."
  • "We thought there would be tons of people coming in after this event," Peppler told CNN. "We had extra people come on hand because the idea of this was that this gathering would end at the polls, but they broke it up over there at the courthouse before they ever got here."
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National Guard Readies for Election Day Deployment - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...national-guard-election.html
shared by rerobinson03 on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • This year has brought a barrage of emergencies across the country that have required the National Guard — the coronavirus pandemic, hurricanes, wildfires and a wave of street protests.
  • Communities are bracing for protest regardless of the election’s outcome. If demonstrations turn violent and overwhelm the local police, governors will almost certainly call out their states’ National Guard.
  • Under federal law, it is the Guard, not active-duty military, that can enforce order on domestic soil.
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  • States are already on alert for violence. On Monday, Gov. Charlie Baker of Massachusetts ordered 1,000 members of the National Guard to be on standby in case of turmoil following Tuesday’s election.
  • Hundreds of National Guard troops already have been called up in non-law-enforcement roles, to assist states where the ranks of poll workers have been depleted by the coronavirus pandemic.
  • But in a year that is anything but normal, with the electorate sharply polarized, the president warning supporters of a stolen election, and gun sales through the roof, states are bracing for violence that may overwhelm local law enforcement and bring uniformed military troops into the streets.
  • Legal experts say the election may complicate the response because the president has broad discretion to sidestep legal restrictions by declaring an insurrection, which would allow him not only to take control of state National Guard troops, but also to deploy the Army or Marines.
  • But at the same time Mr. Trump threatened to deploy active-duty troops, Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper and Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, argued against such a move to control the wave of protests in American cities, including Washington, at least at that time
  • Mr. Esper said at a Pentagon news conference that deploying active-duty forces in a domestic law enforcement role “should only be used as a matter of last resort and only in the most urgent and dire of situations.”
  • Governors have mobilized Guard forces frequently in recent months to respond to protests over violent policing, as well as hurricanes and wildfires. In June, during the height of the protests, about 86,000 Guard troops were deployed in domestic missions.
  • While federal law bars using federal troops, that restriction can be lifted by the president under the Insurrection Act, which allows the president to send in armed forces if he decides local authorities are not enforcing the laws of the United States.
  • The Insurrection Act could complicate the response to civil unrest, Ms. VanLandingham said, because mayors and governors have no say in what is classified as insurrection, so troops could be sent in even if local authorities do not think they are needed.
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How the Black Vote Became a Political Monolith - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...black-vote.html vote black history politics culture racism
shared by Javier E on 21 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • The conservative pundit Pat Buchanan, the Georgia state representative Vernon Jones and others have recently resurfaced the old and ugly allegation that Black people are trapped on the Democratic “plantation,” dociles practicing a politics of grievance and gratuity that makes them beholden to the party.
  • From 1964 to 2008, according to a report by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, an average of 88 percent of Black votes went to the Democratic Party’s presidential nominees, a number that increased to 93 percent in the last three presidential elections
  • as my family experience demonstrates, a monolithic Black electorate does not mean uniform Black politics.
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  • Surveys routinely show that Black Americans are scattered across the ideological spectrum despite overwhelmingly voting for Democrats. Gallup data for last year showed that just over two in five Black Americans identify as moderate and that roughly a quarter each identify as liberal or conservative
  • An enduring unity at the ballot box is not confirmation that Black voters hold the same views on every contested issue, but rather that they hold the same view on the one most consequential issue: racial equality.
  • The existence of the Black electoral monolith is evidence of a critical defect not in Black America, but in the American practice of democracy. That defect is the space our two-party system makes for racial intolerance and the appetite our electoral politics has for the exploitation of racial polarization — to which the electoral solidarity of Black voters is an immune response.
  • To be Black in America has often meant to act in political solidarity with other Black people. Sometimes those politics have been formal and electoral, sometimes they have been of protest and revolt. But they have always, by necessity, been existential and utilitarian.
  • A recognition that achieving racial equality required a strong government fueled Black progressivism, which demanded anti-lynching federal legislation; eradication of the poll tax and other barriers to voting; and expansion of quality public education
  • The ratification of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments codified freedmen’s participation in the electoral process at a time when upward of 90 percent of Black Americans lived in the Southern states, constituting actual or near majorities in more than a few.
  • This was the Black monolith’s forceful debut. In a thriving democracy, one aligned to the nation’s professed values, a competition for these new voters would have ensued. The monolith would have dissipated as individual Black voters sought out their ideological compatriots instead of being compelled to band against segregation and racial violence.
  • In the first century of American politics, the word “compromise” — Three-Fifths, Missouri, 1850, 1877 — was often a euphemism for prying natural and constitutional rights from Black Americans’ grip.
  • These political arrangements underscored the paradox that plagued Black America from the outset: The same federalist government charged with the delivery and defense of constitutional rights was often the means of denying them. On matters of race, the state was at once dangerously unreliable and positively indispensable.
  • The contours of Black politics were shaped by this quandary. The lack of faith in American democracy’s ability to do what was right undergirded Black conservatism, producing economic philosophies like Booker T. Washington’s bootstrapping self-determination; social efforts toward civic acceptance like the respectability politics of the Black church; and separatist politics like the early iterations of black nationalism.
  • When Black men were first enfranchised after the end of the Civil War, they faced a partisan politics reduced to one stark choice: Side with those who would extend more rights of citizenship to Black people or with those who would deny them.
  • Truman’s decision to sign executive orders desegregating the military and the federal work force was an electoral broadside constructed, in part, to help win over the support of northern Black voters.
  • The Democrats’ and Republicans’ national platforms in this period often addressed civil rights in nearly equal measure, and sometimes Republicans were more progressive on the question.
  • President Dwight Eisenhower declared in the 1950s that racial segregation harmed the nation’s security interests.
  • Richard Nixon held positions on civil rights similar to John F. Kennedy’s during the 1960 presidential campaign, and won nearly a third of the Black vote that yea
  • Stumping for Nixon in 1960, Senator Barry Goldwater, the Arizona Republican, declared that “there’s hardly enough difference between Republican conservatives and the Southern Democrats to put a piece of paper between.” When Goldwater became the 1964 Republican presidential nominee and voiced his opposition to the Civil Rights Act, Black voters bunched themselves into the Democratic Party for good, supporting Lyndon Johnson at a rate comparable with Barack Obama’s nearly a half-century later.
  • Within a decade, white Southern Democrats were responding favorably to the appeals of the Republican Party. Richard Nixon’s “law and order” refrain and Ronald Reagan’s renewed call for “states’ rights” were racialized, implicitly communicating opposition to progressive policies like busing and tapping into anxieties about a rapidly integrating society.
  • With explicitly racist appeals now socially taboo, symbolic and ostensibly colorblind gestures made the transition easier by reframing the race question as one about free-market principles, personal responsibility and government nonintervention.
  • Racial segregation could be achieved without openly championing it; the social hierarchy maintained without evangelizing it. American voters, Black and white alike, got the message.
  • The result was that racial polarization was now less a product of partisan philosophies about the personhood or citizenship of Black Americans and more a fact of partisan identity — and a political instrument to hold and wield power.
  • This was a subtle but profound shift, and a dangerous one. As the University of Maryland professor Lilliana Mason writes in her 2018 book, “Uncivil Agreement,” “Partisan, ideological, religious and racial identities have, in recent decades, moved into strong alignment, or have become ‘sorted,’” such that partisan attacks can become race-based, personal and unmoored from policy disputes.
  • Partisan energy accordingly is hardly ever expended in an earnest competition for Black voters but rather in determining whether they can vote, tilting the axis of the issue away from the exercise of the franchise to access to it.
  • Racial identity has now become fully entangled with partisanship: The Republican Party is attracting more white voters while people of color are massing in the Democratic Party.
  • Not only does race now split the parties more cleanly than ever, but the racial gap exacerbates partisan polarization.
  • In “Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop,” the political scientist Lee Drutman notes that the modern American two-party system so consecrates competition that party leaders are more incentivized to disparage the other side as extreme and un-American than to compromise.
  • Deliberation is the lifeblood of a healthy democracy. A people that does not seriously deliberate about its nation and its leaders is a people ill suited to the task of providing the consent from which government derives its power.
  • For Black voters, agency and political freedom are luxuries they have never fully enjoyed.
  • It didn’t have to be this way. There have been moments in history in which better leaders and better people would have competed for Black America’s increasing electoral power instead of organizing against it.
  • or a nation deeply divided on race relations, the easy and more politically expedient strategy has always won out.
  • For our democracy to reach its final form, the answer cannot be that one party has tried to answer the call — it must be that each party does so and without penalty.
  • A young John Lewis made this argument in 1963 at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial. In his impassioned speech, he channeled the frustrations of Black America and excoriated the nation’s partisan democracy for posturing on race relations instead of taking revolutionary action to realize the promise of America.
  • “Where is the political party that will make it unnecessary to march on Washington? Where is the political party that will make it unnecessary to march in the streets of Birmingham?”
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Former San Francisco Police Officer Charged In 2017 Killing Of Black Man : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...de-prosecution-of-a-police-off police Policy politics
shared by carolinehayter on 24 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin announced his office has filed five charges, including voluntary and involuntary manslaughter, against a former police officer who shot and killed a Black man suspected of carjacking a California Lottery minivan three years ago.
  • "As far as we are aware, this is the first-ever time that the San Francisco District Attorney's office has filed homicide charges against a law enforcement officer for a homicide while on duty,"
  • formally charged with voluntary manslaughter, involuntary manslaughter, assault with a semiautomatic firearm, assault by a police officer and discharge of a firearm with gross negligence.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • called the charges "historic" and vowed to apply the law evenly "no matter what the color of your skin....or whether you wear a uniform to work."
  • "For far too long we have seen the failure of our legal system to hold police accountable for violence committed against the very members of the public that they have sworn to serve and protect,"
  • the case was in its earliest stages
  • Prosecutors do not consider him a flight risk and are not seeking a pre-trial detention of the former officer.
  • An attorney representing the O'Neil family told the station they were bracing for an extended legal battle, but also said, in their opinion, it was "obvious" a crime had been committed against O'Neil.
  • "Officer Samayoa pointed his gun and shot Mr. O'Neil through the passenger side window of the patrol car, killing Mr. O'Neil," the district attorney's office said in a statement. "Mr. O'Neil had no weapon on him. His cause of death was determined to be a homicide."
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Harper's Scarlet Letter. Matthew Yglesias, free speech, and… | by Berny Belve... - 0 views

arcdigital.media/rs-scarlet-letter-f7e29846fdbf cancel culture analysis censorship
shared by Javier E on 15 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • Many of us didn’t see, and still don’t see, how Yglesias’s signing of the letter is supposed to increase the likelihood that VanDerWerff suffers harm. This is VanDerWerff’s most significant complaint against Yglesias
  • because it comes in the form of a worry over personal safety, rather than as an intellectual challenge to the letter’s contents, this has the effect of preempting critical engagement with VanDerWerff’s response, since disagreement with her no longer seems morally appropriate.
  • this is my second point — disagreement with her no longer seems logically appropriate, since what’s been offered is not so much a counterpoint to the Harper’s letter but something less cognitive, less vulnerable to the forms and checks of reason and argument
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  • This is the element that those of us who agree with the Harper’s letter find most frustrating. We think the debate over where the discourse’s parameters should be (which is what the Harper’s letter is fundamentally about), and, more specifically, the debate over sex and gender identity that J. K. Rowling and her critics have been engaging in, are and should continue to be intellectually in bounds.
  • It’s no surprise that, when a move like that is made, the only thing the internet can produce in response is a torrential downpour of replyrage.
  • The move has the effect of disarming a would-be critic’s capacity to engage in counterargument.
  • We now have a case in which affirming the importance of intellectual openness is met with severe professional discomfort. A journalist has accused her colleague of inflicting harm, complicating her job, selfishly disvaluing her person, violating their shared employer’s aims, and more.
  • I don’t think it’s credible to suggest Yglesias’s signing of the letter complicates his employer’s ability to “build a more diverse and more thoughtful workplace.” If anything, the opposite is true — for Vox not to have a single staffer sign the letter harms its ability to do so. Diversity and thoughtfulness require … diversity and thoughtfulness, not uniformity and groupthink.
  • he reality is that the clinching move here is not an argument
  • Rather, it’s an assertion without supporting evidence that the letter’s contents are so damaging that, by signing it, you increase the likelihood that trans colleagues incur harm.
  • There is no support offered for this claim. There is no attempt to connect the letter’s contents, or the act of agreeing with the letter’s contents, to the incidence of harms experienced by trans people now. No attempt to chart out how the letter might lead to harms in the future.
  • the connection between signing a letter about discourse values and a colleague subsequently being more vulnerable to harm does need the dots connected. That can’t merely be asserted and the matter closed.
  • But the suggestion that taking the contrary position literally endangers those on the opposing side has a clinching effect — the debate can’t continue. It is shut down because of safety concerns.
  • (7) VanDerWerff claimed the letter contains “many dog whistles toward anti-trans positions.”
  • It’s about the letter itself. It’s a claim about the letter’s subtext.
  • It follows that, on some occasions, our “cancel culture totally exists!/cancel culture is totally nonexistent!” back-and-forths are really just disguised ways of saying “I think this view should continue to be debated!/I think this view should not be up for discussion!”
  • I understand it but I disagree with it. Because Rowling was not the only person who signed it — there were over 150 others, including some trans people, and including many who disagree with Rowling’s stance on trans issues.
  • In any event, I disagree with the characterization that the letter, either explicitly or implicitly, is “anti-trans.” Some people obviously think some of the signatories are “anti-trans,” but that doesn’t tell us much except that those signatories’ critics find their views deeply morally troubling.
  • Here is a brief account of what I take cancel culture to be
  • I take cancel culture to be person-variable, or community-variable, in the sense that what counts as an act of cancellation differs from person to person, or community to community, based on certain underlying beliefs. What beliefs are those?
  • I think we see a targeting as a cancellation when the person who is in the crosshairs is there for views we think should continue to be seen as discourse legitimate
  • Blake Neff, a longtime senior writer for Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News, was fired when his relentlessly racist and sexist online comments under a pseudonym came to light. Is this a cancellation? This one isn’t hard at all. It’s manifestly not.None of us think his views on black people or women are discourse legitimate.
  • But David Shor, who was fired for tweeting research findings that were taken to suggest the post-Floyd riots could harm Democratic electoral interests, does count as an act of cancellation. The protests’ effects on the political prospects of Biden unseating Trump is absolutely a live question. It follows that someone who gets fired, as a data analyst, for tweeting about it constitutes a prima facie case of cancellation.
  • This is also what explains why a standard skeptical response to asserting the existence of “cancel culture” is to counteranalyze it as “people merely being held accountable.”
  • How does this connect with the letter? I understand how, in seeing Rowling’s name next to the letter, a critic of Rowling’s stance on sex and gender could believe Rowling’s involvement shapes, in a very real way, the semantic content of the letter beyond what its linguistic elements strictly and independently suggest.
  • A harder thing to pin down is when exactly reputational damage, rather than employment status, counts as “cancel culture.”
  • is tough when the name itself, “cancel,” is a success term. If someone has not actually been canceled, then how can their targeting be called a cancellation? It makes intuitive sense to require a cancellation to involve a genuine canceling.
  • I want to move away from this understanding of it because, often times, the outcomes are predicated on arbitrary factors like whether the target is independently wealthy, or how amenable their boss is to outspokenness, or how fearful their university is of lawsuits, or any number of other luck-based factors that take us away from the supposedly inappropriate actions.
  • Rowling is impervious to cancellation, but that doesn’t mean the manner in which her critics have engaged her is meaningfully different than the way others who have had their livelihoods impacted have been engaged. Gillian Philip, a bestselling children’s author, was sacked from a group-publishing collective for tweeting #IStandWithJKRowling.
  • It’s a style of challenge that assumes the wrongness of the views and moves directly to affixing a culturally odious label, seeking a deplatforming or shrinking of the offender’s channels, or outright firing. It’s not the sort of challenge where evidence of the offending view’s wrongness is brought forward and an invitation to respond is either explicitly or implicitly offered.
  • Again, there are many occasions where I’d move straight to no-platforming. I would never publish Richard Spencer. I said, above, that Neff’s firing was absolutely the right call.
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America's Enduring Caste System - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...isabel-wilkerson-caste.html caste us class inequality white privilege racial hierarchy system
shared by Javier E on 09 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • We in this country are like homeowners who inherited a house on a piece of land that is beautiful on the outside but whose soil is unstable loam and rock, heaving and contracting over generations, cracks patched but the deeper ruptures waved away for decades, centuries even.
  • Not one of us was here when this house was built. Our immediate ancestors may have had nothing to do with it, but here we are, the current occupants of a property with stress cracks and bowed walls and fissures in the foundation. We are the heirs to whatever is right or wrong with it. We did not erect the uneven pillars or joists, but they are ours to deal with now.
  • And any further deterioration is, in fact, on our hands.
  • ...42 more annotations...
  • Many people may rightly say: “I had nothing to do with how this all started. I have nothing to do with the sins of the past. My ancestors never attacked Indigenous people, never owned slaves.” And yes
  • Live with it long enough, and the unthinkable becomes normal. Exposed over the generations, we learn to believe that the incomprehensible is the way that life is supposed to be.
  • Like other old houses, America has an unseen skeleton: its caste system, which is as central to its operation as are the studs and joists that we cannot see in the physical buildings we call home.
  • Caste is the infrastructure of our divisions. It is the architecture of human hierarchy, the subconscious code of instructions for maintaining, in our case, a 400-year-old social order.
  • Throughout human history, three caste systems have stood out. The lingering, millenniums-long caste system of India. The tragically accelerated, chilling and officially vanquished caste system of Nazi Germany. And the shape-shifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid in the United States. Each version relied on stigmatizing those deemed inferior to justify the dehumanization necessary to keep the lowest-ranked people at the bottom and to rationalize the protocols of enforcement.
  • Race does the heavy lifting for a caste system that demands a means of human division. If we have been trained to see humans in the language of race, then caste is the underlying grammar that we encode as children
  • We may mention “race,” referring to people as Black or white or Latino or Asian or Indigenous, when what lies beneath each label is centuries of history and assigning of assumptions and values to physical features in a structure of human hierarchy.
  • What people look like, or rather, the race they have been assigned or are perceived to belong to, is the visible cue to their caste. It is the historic flashcard to the public of how they are to be treated, where they are expected to live
  • in recent decades, we have learned from the human genome that all human beings are 99.9 percent the same. “Race is a social concept, not a scientific one,” said J. Craig Venter, the genomics expert who ran Celera Genomics when the initial sequencing was completed in 2000. “We all evolved in the last 100,000 years from the small number of tribes that migrated out of Africa and colonized the world.
  • Which means that an entire racial caste system, the catalyst of hatreds and civil war, was built on what the anthropologist Ashley Montagu called “an arbitrary and superficial selection of traits,” derived from a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands of genes that make up a human being
  • “The idea of race,” Montagu wrote, “was, in fact, the deliberate creation of an exploiting class seeking to maintain and defend its privileges against what was profitably regarded as an inferior social caste.”
  • Caste is the bones, race the skin. Race is what we can see, the physical traits that have been given arbitrary meaning and become shorthand for who a person is. Caste is the powerful infrastructure that holds each group in its place.
  • Caste is rigid and deep; race is fluid and superficial, subject to periodic redefinition to meet the needs of the dominant caste in what is now the United States
  • While the requirements to qualify as white have changed over the centuries, the fact of a dominant caste has remained constant from its inception — whoever fit the definition of white, at whatever point in history, was granted the legal rights and privileges of the dominant caste.
  • Thus we are all born into a silent war game, centuries old, enlisted in teams not of our own choosing. The side to which we are assigned in the American system of categorizing people is proclaimed by the team uniform that each caste wears, signaling our presumed worth and potential.
  • he said to himself, “Yes, I am an untouchable, and every Negro in the United States of America is an untouchable.” In that moment, he realized that the Land of the Free had imposed a caste system not unlike the caste system of India and that he had lived under that system all his life.
  • One afternoon, King and his wife journeyed to the southern tip of the country, to the city then known as Trivandrum in the state of Kerala, and visited with high school students whose families had been untouchables. The principal made the introduction.“Young people,” he said, “I would like to present to you a fellow untouchable from the United States of America.”
  • Social scientists often define racism as the combination of racial bias and systemic power, seeing racism, like sexism, as primarily the action of people or systems with personal or group power over another person or group with less power
  • over time, racism has often been reduced to a feeling, a character flaw, conflated with prejudice, connected to whether one is a good person or not. It has come to mean overt and declared hatred of a person or group because of the race ascribed to them, a perspective few would ever own up to
  • Who is racist in a society where someone can refuse to rent to people of color, arrest brown immigrants en masse or display a Confederate flag but not be “certified” as a racist unless he or she confesses to it or is caught using derogatory signage or slurs?
  • With no universally agreed-upon definition, we might see racism as a continuum rather than an absolute. We might release ourselves of the purity test of whether someone is or is not racist and exchange that mind-set for one that sees people as existing on a scale based on the toxins they have absorbed from the polluted and inescapable air of social instruction we receive from childhood.
  • Caste is the granting or withholding of respect, status, honor, attention, privileges, resources, benefit of the doubt and human kindness to someone on the basis of their perceived rank or standing in the hierarchy.
  • Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred; it is not necessarily personal. It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things.
  • Any action or institution that mocks, harms, assumes or attaches inferiority or stereotype on the basis of the social construct of race can be considered racism
  • Because caste and race are interwoven in America, it can be hard to separate the two
  • Any action or structure that seeks to limit, hold back or put someone in a defined ranking, seeks to keep someone in their place by elevating or denigrating that person on the basis of their perceived category, can be seen as casteism.
  • Casteism is the investment in keeping the hierarchy as it is in order to maintain your own ranking, advantage or privilege or to elevate yourself above others or keep others beneath you
  • What race and its precursor, racism, do extraordinarily well is to confuse and distract from the underlying structural and more powerful Sith lord of caste. Like the cast on a broken arm, like the cast in a play, a caste system holds everyone in a fixed place.
  • For this reason, many people — including those we might see as good and kind people — could be casteist, meaning invested in keeping the hierarchy as it is or content to do nothing to change it, but not racist in the classical sense
  • Actual racists, actual haters, would by definition be casteist, as their hatred demands that those they perceive as beneath them know and keep their place in the hierarchy.
  • Caste, along with its faithful servant race, is an X-factor in most any American equation, and any answer one might ever come up with to address our current challenges is flawed without it.
  • Race and caste are not the cause of and do not account for every poor outcome or unpleasant encounter. But caste becomes a factor, to whatever infinitesimal degree, in interactions and decisions across gender, ethnicity, race, immigrant status, sexual orientation, age or religion that have consequences in our everyday lives
  • The younger country, the United States, would become the most powerful democracy on Earth. The older country, India, would become the largest.
  • as if operating from the same instruction manual translated to fit their distinctive cultures, both countries adopted similar methods of maintaining rigid lines of demarcation and protocols.
  • The American system was founded as a primarily two-tiered hierarchy with its contours defined by the uppermost group, those identified as white, and by the subordinated group, those identified as Black, with immigrants from outside Europe forming blurred middle castes that sought to adjust themselves within a bipolar structure, and Native Americans largely exiled outside it.
  • The Indian caste system, by contrast, is an elaborate fretwork of thousands of subcastes, or jatis, correlated to region and village, which fall under the four main varnas — the Brahmin, the Kshatriya, the Vaishya, the Shudra and the excluded fifth, the Dalits. It is further complicated by non-Hindus — including Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs and Christians — who are outside the original caste system but have incorporated themselves into the workings of the country, at times in the face of resistance and attack, and may or may not have informal rankings among themselves and in relation to the varnas.
  • African-Americans, throughout most of their time in this land, were relegated to the dirtiest, most demeaning and least desirable jobs by definition. After enslavement and well into the 20th century, they were primarily restricted to the role of sharecroppers and servants — domestics, lawn boys, chauffeurs and janitors. The most that those who managed to get an education could hope for was to teach, minister to, attend to the health needs of or bury other subordinate-caste people.
  • the caste lines in America may have at one time appeared even starker than those in India. In 1890, “85 percent of Black men and 96 percent of Black women were employed in just two occupational categories,” wrote the sociologist Stephen Steinberg, “agriculture and domestic or personal service.”
  • So, too, with groups trained to believe in their inherent sovereignty. “The essence of this overestimation of one’s own position and the hate for all who differ from it is narcissism,” wrote Erich Fromm, a leading psychoanalyst and social theorist of the 20th century. “He is nothing,” Fromm wrote, “but if he can identify with his nation, or can transfer his personal narcissism to the nation, then he is everything.”
  • “Narcissus could not conceive that he was in love with his own reflection,” wrote the Harvard clinical psychologist Elsa Ronningstam in her 2005 book, “Identifying and Understanding the Narcissistic Personality.” “He was caught in an illusion.”
  • The political theorist Takamichi Sakurai, in his 2018 examination of Western and Eastern perspectives on the topic, and channeling Fromm, wrote bluntly: “Group narcissism leads people to fascism.” He went on, “An extreme form of group narcissism means malignant narcissism, which gives to rise to a fanatical fascist politics, an extreme racialism and so on.”
  • “The survival of a group,” Fromm wrote, “depends to some extent on the fact that its members consider its importance as great as or greater than that of their own lives.”Thus, when under threat, they are willing to sacrifice themselves and their ideals for the survival of the group from which they draw their self-esteem.
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US coronavirus: America is at a crossroads in this pandemic as Covid-19 deaths near 500... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html covid
shared by katherineharron on 22 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • On the brink of a devastating milestone -- 500,000 US Covid-19 deaths -- the US is at a crossroads in the course of this pandemic.
  • And while vaccinations slowly increase, some Americans say they won't get a Covid-19 vaccine -- hurting the chances of herd immunity and hindering a return to normal life.
  • More than 43.6 million Americans have received at least one dose of their two-dose vaccines, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. close dialogCovid-19Your local resource.Set your location and log in to find local resources and information on Covid-19 in your area.Please enter aboveSet Locationclose dialog/* effects for .bx-campaign-1191325 *//* custom css .bx-campaign-1191325 *//* custom css from creative 50769 */.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-row-validation .bx-input {border-color: white !important;border-width: 1px !important;background-color: white !important;box-shadow: 0px 2px 8px 1px rgba(0,0,0,0.12) !important;}.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-row-validation .bx-vtext { color: #e53841 !important; font-size: 11px !important; position: absolute !important; bottom: -1.8em !important;} @media screen and (max-width:736px) { .bx-custom.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-row-validation .bx-vtext {font-size: 10px !important; }}.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1191325 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  • ...15 more annotations...
  • About 18.8 million have been fully vaccinated. That's about 5.7% of the US population -- far less than the estimated 70% to 85% of Americans who would need to be immune to reach herd immunity.
  • To speed up vaccinations, some experts have suggested delaying second vaccine doses to get more first doses into people's arms.
  • Both vaccines on the US market -- developed by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna -- require two doses, the second of which are intended to be administered 21 days and 28 days after the first, respectively.
  • Nationwide, the rates of new Covid-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths are declining.The number of patients hospitalized with Covid-19 has fallen for the 40th day in a row, according to the COVID Tracking Project.
  • Fauci hopes that doesn't happen, he said, adding it's "possible" people may be wearing masks in 2022.
  • And daily new cases have dropped 23% over the same time period, according to Johns Hopkins. (But testing is also down by 17%, according to the COVID Tracking Project.)
  • About 1,700 cases of variant strains first spotted in the UK, South Africa and Brazil have been reported in the US, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
  • Experts with the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation said over the weekend that while the B.1.1.7 strain likely accounts for less than 20% of current infections in the US, that number will likely soar to 80% by late April.
  • "Managing the epidemic in the next four months depends critically on scaling up vaccination, trying to increase the fraction of adults willing to be vaccinated above three-quarters, and strongly encouraging continued mask use and avoiding situations where transmission is likely, such as indoor dining, going to bars, or indoor gatherings with individuals outside the household," the team wrote.
  • "With new, more contagious variants of the virus circulating throughout the U.S., now is not the time to let your guard down and scale back on the measures that we know will work to prevent further illness and deaths -- wearing masks, practicing physical distancing, and washing hands," a joint statement said.
  • Daily deaths have declined 24% this past week compared to the previous week
  • "I do think we're looking at some new normals. I think the handshake, for example, is probably going away," she said."I do think masks in the cough/cold/flu season in the winter months would make a lot of sense. That clearly, really insulated the Southeast Asian countries from some of the worst of this, understanding the importance of wearing masks."
  • "It's estimated that about 70% of Americans must be vaccinated before we get to herd immunity through vaccination," CNN medical analyst Dr. Leana Wen said. "That's the point where enough people have the immune protection that the virus won't spread anymore."
  • "The evidence was pretty compelling by last March or April that uniform wearing of masks would reduce transmission of this disease," National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins told Axios on HBO on Sunday.
  • "A mask is nothing more than a life-saving medical device, and yet it got categorized in all sorts of other ways that were not factual, not scientific and frankly, dangerous," he added. "And I think you can make a case that tens of thousands of people died as a result."
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The Reconciliation Must Be Televised - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-moment-racism-tv.html reconciliation BLM response
shared by Javier E on 30 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • This Moment of historic holding to account, of looking inward, deserves a commensurate, totalizing event that explains what is being reckoned with, demanded and hoped for, an experience that rubs between its fingers the earth upon which all those toppled monuments had so brazenly stood. The Moment warrants a depth of conversation the United States has never had. It demands truth and reconciliation.
  • In 1968, in the wake of the racial conflagrations roiling American cities during the mid- to late 1960s, Gov. Otto Kerner Jr. of Illinois presented the findings of his so-called riot commission, whose politically moderate and racially uniform makeup (two of its members were Black; there was one woman) was strategically cast for ho-hum results. What it delivered to President Lyndon B. Johnson was, instead, shockingly, comprehensively grim. The United States, the commission concluded, is a hopelessly divided nation that has locked its Black citizens in impoverishment and swallowed the key, that good white folks were out-to-lunch and therefore as culpable as the white supremacists were malignant.
  • When it was published as a book early in ’68, the report became a best seller. But it ought to have been part of a one-two punch. Part two should have been a televised, multipart presentation of the commission’s intensive effort: its conclusions, considerable field work and still-bracing historical contextualizing put before the public, alongside the disgruntled, despondent, enraged, hurt Black Americans whose circumstances swell the report. The country watched the cities burn but never met the human beings who lived in them.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • A truth and reconciliation event in 2020 would help make up for 150 years of missed opportunities. It should be broadcast live and streamed the way impeachments and inaugurations are; the way certain trials are. That would require more than just ABC’s audacity, however backhanded. It would need CBS’s, NBC’s and Fox’s; CNN’s, BET’s and the Weather Channel’s. It would demand the platforms of Netflix, HBO, Disney+, Hulu and Amazon. There would be no escaping this thing, since there is no escape in the daily lives of many Americans.
  • The production, however, is merely the second hurdle to clear. The first would be convincing executives that it’s worth doing in the first place. Here’s what to say about that: The entertainment industry itself has more than a century of harm to atone for and ameliorate. Any company that believes the solution to “systemic racism” is “The Help” shouldn’t mind a surrender of its airwaves.
  • Slavery, however, wouldn’t be the subject of this televised reckoning. Racism would. A crucial chunk of a truth and reconciliation broadcast would use the work of scholars and thinkers like Matthew Desmond, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Isabel Wilkerson and Richard Rothstein to enumerate the means by which the country has prospered from the theft of land and the strategic denial of housing.
  • This Moment didn’t come cheaply. It should not be squandered. It should be nationally witnessed and absorbed. Truth and reconciliation is a death and a birth, accordingly arduous, tense, procedural, affirming, painful. The outcome feels secondary to the process. The ritual is the benefit. The Moment demands that we summon the courage to put ourselves through it. At last.
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Will Herman Cain's Death Change Republican Views on the Virus and Masks? - The New York... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rman-cain-gop-coronavirus.html liberty gop values response pandemic crisis politics culture
shared by Javier E on 31 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • With a uniformity that has defied rising death tolls in their own backyards, Republicans at the federal, state and local levels have adopted a similar tone of skepticism and defiance, rejecting the advice of public health officials and deferring instead to principles they said were equally important: conservative values of economic freedom and personal liberty.
  • From Arizona to Texas, as infection rates soared and hospital beds filled up, Republican governors stood in the way of local governments that wanted to do more. They overruled city mask mandates, arguing that it amounted to a form of government overreach. They said that requiring businesses to close or limit their capacity would strangle the economy and save few lives.
19More

Body Bags and Enemy Lists: How Far-Right Police Officers and Ex-Soldiers Planned for 'D... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...germany-nazi-infiltration.html neo-Nazi germany
shared by Javier E on 02 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • Neo-Nazi groups and other extremists call it Day X — a mythical moment when Germany’s social order collapses, requiring committed far-right extremists, in their telling, to save themselves and rescue the nation.
  • Today Day X preppers are drawing serious people with serious skills and ambition. Increasingly, the German authorities consider the scenario a pretext for domestic terrorism by far-right plotters or even for a takeover of the government.
  • “I fear we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg,” said Dirk Friedriszik, a lawmaker in the northeastern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, where Nordkreuz was founded. “It isn’t just the KSK. The real worry is: These cells are everywhere. In the army, in the police, in reservist units.”
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • the obstacles to prosecuting such cases more aggressively point to another problem making the German authorities increasingly anxious: Infiltration of the very institutions, like the police, that are supposed to be doing the investigating.
  • In July the police chief of the western state of Hesse resigned after police computers had been repeatedly accessed for confidential information that was then used by neo-Nazis in death threats. It was in Hesse that a well-known neo-Nazi assassinated a regional politician last summer in a case that woke many Germans to the threat of far-right terrorism.
  • The region where they live is nestled between the former Iron Curtain and the Polish border. Members had grown up in the former East Germany.
  • There were two criteria for joining, Mr. Moll recalled: “The right skills and the right attitude.”Mr. Gross and another police officer in the group were members of what was then an emerging far-right party, the Alternative for Germany, now the third largest force in the national Parliament. At least two others in the group had visited the Thule Seminar, an organization whose leaders had a portrait of Hitler on their wall and preach white supremacy.
  • Over time, Nordkreuz members recalled, their group morphed into a close-knit brotherhood with a shared ambition that would come to dominate their lives: preparing for Day X.
  • The group identified a “safe house,” where members would decamp with their families on Day X: a former Communist vacation village deep in the woods.
  • “This movement has its fingertips in lots of places,” he said. “All this talk of Day X can seem like pure fantasy. But if you look closer, you can see how quickly it turns into serious planning — and plotting.”
  • “Under Communism, everything was scarce,’’ Mr. Moll explained. ‘‘You had to get creative getting things through certain channels. You could not rely on things being in the supermarket. You could say we’re used to prepping.’’
  • “The scenario was that something bad would happen,” Mr. Gross told me. “We asked ourselves, what did we want to prepare for? And we decided that if we were going to do this, we would go all the way.”
  • But at least one member of the group portrays a more ominous story.“People were to be gathered and murdered,” Horst Schelski told investigators in 2017, according to transcripts of his statement shared with The New York Times.
  • Jan Henrik H. was described by other members as particularly fervent and hateful. On his birthdays, he held a shooting contest on a field behind his house in Rostock, a nearby city on Germany’s northern coast, Nordkreuz members recalled.The winner got a trophy named for Mehmet Turgut, a Turkish street vendor killed in Rostock in 2004 by the National Socialist Underground, a far-right terrorist group.
  • As they drank coffee at the truck stop, Jan Henrik H. turned the conversation to “the people in the file,” who he said were “harmful” to the state and needed to be “done away with,” Mr. Schelski later told the police.Jan Henrik H. wanted advice on how best to transport their captives once they had been rounded up. He asked Mr. Schelski, a major in the state reservist unit, how they could get them past any checkpoints that might be created in a time of unrest. Would uniforms help? Army trucks?
  • “They showed me a handmade sketch of my home,” Mr. Böhringer said. “‘Do you recognize this?’ they had asked.”“It was the exact same sketch that those officers had made in my home,” he said.“I had to swallow pretty hard,” he recalled. “The very people who said they wanted to protect me then passed this on to people who wanted to harm me.”“They didn’t just want to survive Day X, they wanted to kill their enemies,” he said. “It was concrete, what they were planning.”
  • Chancellor Angela Merkel belongs “in the dock,” he said. The multicultural cities in western Germany are “the caliphate.” The best way to escape creeping migration was to move to the East German countryside, “where people are still called Schmidt, Schneider and Müller.”A copy of Compact, a prominent far-right magazine, with President Trump’s face on the cover, lay on a shelf. A selection of the president’s speeches had been translated into German in the issue. “I like Trump,” Mr. Gross said.
  • As far back as 2009, some fellow police officers had voiced concerns about Mr. Gross’s far-right views, noting that he had brought books about the Nazis to work. But no one intervened, and he was even groomed for promotion.“There is no danger from the far right,” he insisted. “I don’t know a single neo-Nazi.”Soldiers and police officers are “frustrated,” he told me the third time we met, ticking off complaints about migrants, crime and the mainstream media. He likens the coverage of coronavirus to the censored state broadcaster during Communism. Instead, he says, he has a YouTube subscription to RT, the Russian state-controlled channel and other alternative media.In that parallel universe of disinformation, he learns that the government is secretly flying in refugees after midnight. That coronavirus is a ploy to deprive citizens of their rights. That Ms. Merkel works for what he calls the “deep state.”“The deep state is global,” Mr. Gross said. “It’s big capital, the big banks, Bill Gates.”
  • He still expects Day X, sooner or later. Riots linked to an economic meltdown. Or a blackout, because the German government is shuttering coal plants.Nordkreuz members never told me, nor the authorities, the location of the disused vacation village that was their safe house for Day X.The safe house is still active, said Mr. Gross, who at the height of Nordkreuz’s planning had boasted to a fellow member that his network contained 2,000 like-minded people in Germany and beyond.“The network is still there,” he said.
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