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How Biden's Solidarity Emboldened a Liberal Push for Power in Alabama - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...mazon-union-alabama-biden.html Politics
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  • How Biden’s Solidarity Emboldened a Liberal Push for Power in Alabam
  • resident’s support for the rights of unionizing Amazon workers delighted political organizers in Alabama who are hoping to build long-term Democratic momentum in a
  • ike Foster, one of the lead organizers for the union, was less surprised. “We’ve been waiting on him,” he said.
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  • is words demonstrated a willingness to use his bully pulpit on behalf of communities that have often fallen outside the Democratic Party’s governing focus: working-class voters in Republican states, many of whom are Black. The message also elevated the national debate about the future of labor and unions, a cross-ideological issue on which Mr. Biden can uniquely find common cause with the progressive wing of his party even as many Democrats continue to shy away.
  • The task will be tougher in Alabama: The state is much more firmly Republican than its Southern neighbor, having ousted the incumbent Senator Doug Jones, a Democrat, by a healthy margin in 2020. The state has also not experienced the rapid demographic change that has made Georgia’s political transformation possible, and does not have its considerable numbers of college-educated suburban moderates.
  • Mr. Shakir said he had privately lobbied Ron Klain, the White House chief of staff, to persuade Mr. Biden to speak out. And in a sign of the potential kinship between Mr. Klain and the left on labor, Mr. Shakir said he believed the president would have chosen Mr. Sanders as labor secretary if the Senate had not been split 50-50, making confirmations more difficult.
  • Although labor leaders, local union activists and national progressive politicians uniformly support an Amazon union in Alabama, that feeling does not reflect the mood inside the warehouse itself. With less than a month to go in the union vote, the 5,800-worker warehouse is split among supporters of the union, strong dissenters and an apathetic center that is growing sick of the national attention.
  • Last week, in a media round table of anti-union warehouse workers hosted by Amazon, some said that Mr. Biden’s message had been unnecessary, and that they did not feel intimidated by the company. A spokeswoman for Amazon declined to directly comment on the president’s remarks.
  • Last year, when Amazon opened the warehouse to the praises of local elected officials, the company hailed its arrival as a sign of economic revival in a predominantly Black area. With the coronavirus pandemic raging, Amazon offered thousands of jobs at a minimum wage of at least $15 an hour, more than double the state’s minimum. Some hailed it as a godsend.
  • The legacy of union sensibilities in Alabama maybe don’t follow along partisan lines,” she said. “So regardless of the outcome, one of the things that we really did see over the course of the last three to four years was Democrats and progressive Democrats coming out of the woodwork. Waking up and realizing they weren’t the only person on the block in the retail workplace who has a progressive mind-set.”
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Opinion: Post-Trump, the need for fact checking isn't going away - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html factchecking Biden Trump tech culture crisis Policy US
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  • This week, we ask the question: What comes next for America and disinformation? The past four years have seen an alarming erosion in the public trust in news, coupled with a spread of conspiracy theories, junk science and outright falsehoods by none other than the President of the United States. With a new president elected, how does Joe Biden help steer the country back toward facts, science and truth? SE Cupp talks to CNN Senior Political Analyst John Avlon about all this and more in our CNN Digital video discussion, but first Avlon tackles the future of fact checking in a CNN Opinion op-ed.
  • That's because the disinformation ecosystem is still proliferating via social media and the hyper-partisan fragmentation of society. Trump is a symptom rather than its root cause. There is every reason to hope that the presence of a president who does not lie all the time will not exacerbate our divides on a daily basis. But it would be dangerously naïve to believe that the underlying infrastructure of hate news and fake news will be solved with a new president.
  • Let's start by recognizing reality. Fact checking Democrats this election cycle has offered a far less target rich environment. This is not because either party has a monopoly on virtue or vice, but because Democrats' falsehoods during their presidential debates have been comparatively pedestrian -- likely to focus on competing claims about calculating the 10-year cost of Medicare for All, or who wrote-what-gun control bill, or how many manufacturing jobs have been lost, or when a candidate really started supporting a raise in the minimum wage.
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  • The sheer velocity of Donald Trump's false and misleading statements -- along with the proliferation of disinformation on social media -- have demanded significant fact-checking to defend liberal democracy.
  • Reforms are necessary. As I've written before on CNN Opinion, "Social media and tech platforms have a responsibility not to run knowingly false advertisements or promote intentionally false stories. They must disclose who is paying for digital political ads and crack down on the spread of disinformation. The Honest Ads Act would require the same disclosures that are required on television and radio right now. This is a no brainer. The profit motive from hate news and fake news might be reduced by moving digital advertising toward attention metrics to measure and monetize reader engagement and loyalty, incentivizing quality over clickbait. But perhaps the single biggest reform would come from social media companies requiring that accounts verify they are real people, rather than bots that bully people and manipulate public opinion."
  • It would be a huge mistake to assume that simply because the velocity of lies from the White House is likely to decrease dramatically that the need for fact checks has expired. Instead, it has only transformed to a broader arena than a presidential beat. It's the part of news that people need most now, the tip of the spear that fights for the idea that everyone is entitled to their own opinion but not their own facts. This is necessary for a substantive, civil and fact-based debate, which is a precondition for a functioning, self-governing society. And that's why fact checking will remain a core responsibility for journalists in the future.
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Biden signs executive order expanding voting access - CNNPolitics - 0 views

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  • President Joe Biden signed an executive order Sunday expanding voting access in what the White House calls "an initial step" in its efforts to "protect the right to vote and ensure all eligible citizens can freely participate in the electoral process."
  • Congressional Democrats, meanwhile, have pushed measures in recent days to increase voting rights, including HR1 -- a sweeping ethics and election package that contains provisions expanding early and mail-in voting, restoring voting rights to former felons, and easing voter registration for eligible Americans.
  • Ahead of the signing, Biden spoke about the order during virtual remarks at the Martin and Coretta King Unity Breakfast, an annual event commemorating "Bloody Sunday," where African American demonstrators demanding the right to vote were brutally beaten by police while crossing Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama.
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  • Sunday's order directs the heads of all federal agencies to submit proposals for their respective agencies to promote voter registration and participation within 200 days, while assisting states in voter registration under the National Voter Registration Act.
  • "I also urge Congress to fully restore the Voting Rights Act, named in John Lewis' honor," he said, referring to the late Georgia congressman and civil rights icon who died last year.
  • "Every eligible voter should be able to vote and have that vote counted. If you have the best ideas, you have nothing to hide. Let the people vote," he said at the event.
  • Biden called HR1 "a landmark piece of legislation that is urgently needed to protect the right to vote, the integrity of our elections, and to repair and strengthen our democracy."
  • "For the federal agencies, many of them have footprints around the country, with offices that people, outside the context of a pandemic could walk in and seek particular services," the official told reporters Saturday. We want to make sure that we can maximize the use of that kind of walk-in service and have them be places where people can also register to vote -- the goal is to make registering to vote and voting access as easy as possible."
  • The executive order also expands voter access and registration efforts for communities often overlooked in outreach, including the disabled, military serving overseas and the incarcerated.
  • As of February, state legislators in 43 states had introduced more than 250 bills with restrictive voting provisions, according to a tally from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.
  • "The President doesn't have executive authority to prevent a state from taking that kind of action," they said. "That would require congressional action -- so this executive order uses all of the authority that the President has to be able to take steps necessary to make voter registration and voter access easy and straightforward for people, and it also uses the President's bully pulpit to send a message to all the states and to all voters about the importance of democracy."
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Opinion | Meghan, Harry and 'Dysfunctional' Families - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...meghan-harry-oprah.html politics
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  • “Thanks, Duchess Meghan and Prince Harry, for reminding us it is OK to have a dysfunctional family,” a reader writes. Other readers offer their reactions to the Oprah interview.
  • Watching Oprah’s interview with Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, I am even more certain of my long-held belief (after many years observing family dynamics and teaching university courses on the topic) that most families are dysfunctional. And that is not something to be embarrassed about.No matter how rich, prestigious or famous, all families have problems, estrangements and quarrels. There are awkward family weddings, unfriendings on social media, and in-laws who do not quite fit well into the family dynamic. There is even some bullying and gaslighting from time to time, as well as disrespecting elders.The difference is that most people try to hide the dysfunction and can do so since their lives are private, not public.So, thanks, Meghan and Prince Harry, for reminding us it is OK to have a dysfunctional family.Rebecca S. FahrlanderBellevue, Neb.
  • So, the media uber-celebrity thinks that interviewing the two escaped royal celebrities during a public health crisis is a good use of our attention. Aww, they were mean to me, says one of the two privileged spoiled brats. Why should I care? Why do you?
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Opinion | Don't Let QAnon Bully Congress - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...qanon-capitol-security.html opinion congress new york times Politics Trump US history
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  • Allowing the U.S. government to be held hostage by political extremists is unacceptable.
  • While this won’t surprise most people, it likely came as a shock to many QAnon followers. According to that movement’s expediently evolving lore, March 4 — the date on which U.S. presidents were inaugurated until the mid-1930s — was when Mr. Trump was to reclaim the presidency and resume his epic battle against Satan-worshiping, baby-eating Democrats and deep-state monsters.This drivel is absurd. It is also alarming. Violent extremists, obsessed with the symbolism of March 4, were for weeks nattering about a possible attack on Congress, according to law enforcement officials.On March 2, the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security issued a joint intelligence bulletin to law enforcement agencies, warning that militia extremists might be plotting to overrun the Capitol complex and “remove Democratic lawmakers.” The details of the possible plot were hazy, but the threat unnerved enough people that House leaders canceled Thursday’s session. The voting schedule was condensed, and lawmakers left town early for the weekend.Although March 4 came and went without a bloody coup attempt — that is, without another bloody coup attempt — damage was still done. Lawmakers abandoned their workplace out of fear of politically motivated violence. This not only disrupted the people’s business. It also sent a dangerous signal that Congress can be intimidated — that the state of American government is fragile.AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOf course the safety of lawmakers and other Capitol Hill workers must be a priority. But allowing the government to be held hostage by political extremists is unacceptable.The current security threat is not expected to dissipate any time soon. If anything, the intelligence community has cautioned that the Jan. 6 siege of the Capitol may have emboldened extremists. Having sacked the Capitol, the lunatic fringe is now dreaming of a bigger, bloodier encore.
  • Representative Matt Gaetz, the Florida delegation’s mini-Trump, is in full froth. “Pelosi hired a bigot to hunt MAGA,” he charged last month. Last Tuesday, Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee sent a letter to the speaker, arguing that General Honoré’s criticism of the police and lawmakers was “disqualifying.” On Thursday, Tucker Carlson told viewers: “Honoré is an unhinged partisan extremist. He’s nuttier than anyone affiliated with QAnon.”
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  • Of course the safety of lawmakers and other Capitol Hill workers must be a priority. But allowing the government to be held hostage by political extremists is unacceptable.
  • Trump toadies should not be allowed to turn this issue into a partisan game. Steps must be taken to safeguard the seat of government. Going forward, lawmakers cannot be seen as bowing to political thugs, their work upended whenever there is a semi-credible threat. That is not the American way.
  • March 4 was just one target. The acting chief of the Capitol Police, Yogananda Pittman, recently warned that extremists have been talking about possibly blowing up the Capitol during President Biden’s first address to a joint meeting of Congress, which has not yet been scheduled, with an eye toward killing “as many members as possible.”
  • On Monday, lawmakers were briefed on the findings of the security assessment that the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, requested in the wake of Jan. 6. Russel Honoré, a retired Army lieutenant general who led the task force, recommended a variety of permanent enhancements. These include beefing up the Capitol Police force, in terms of increased staffing, improved training, enhanced authority for its leadership and a new emphasis on intelligence work; creating a quick-reaction force to be on call 24-7 to handle imminent threats; installing a retractable fencing system; and adding protections for rank-and-file members of Congress at home and while they are traveling and back in their districts.
  • This drivel is absurd. It is also alarming. Violent extremists, obsessed with the symbolism of March 4, were for weeks nattering about a possible attack on Congress, according to law enforcement officials.
  • Last Thursday was not Donald Trump’s triumphant return to power after all.While this won’t surprise most people, it likely came as a shock to many QAnon followers. According to that movement’s expediently evolving lore, March 4 — the date on which U.S. presidents were inaugurated until the mid-1930s — was when Mr. Trump was to reclaim the presidency and resume his epic battle against Satan-worshiping, baby-eating Democrats and deep-state monsters.
  • This not only disrupted the people’s business. It also sent a dangerous signal that Congress can be intimidated — that the state of American government is fragile.
  • In the wake of Jan. 6, enhanced protections were put in place around Capitol Hill. There is an increased police presence along with thousands of National Guard troops. Last week, Chief Pittman requested that the Guard presence, originally set to expire Friday, be extended 60 days. (The Pentagon has yet to issue a final decision.) Inside the Capitol building, additional metal detectors have been installed. The grounds are ringed by security fencing. Lawmakers from both parties have complained that “the people’s house” now has the grim vibe of an armed camp — or a low-security prison.
  • Republicans, many of them desperate to downplay the Jan. 6 tragedy, are already attacking General Honoré as biased.
  • The general has not been shy about criticizing lawmakers and others he regards as having fed the postelection chaos, and he has suggested that some Capitol Police officers may have been complicit in allowing rioters into the building.
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Anti-Asian hate crimes increased by nearly 150% in 2020, mostly in N.Y. and L.A., new r... - 0 views

www.nbcnews.com/...rly-150-2020-mostly-n-n1260264 hate crimes culture
shared by mimiterranova on 12 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • he analysis released by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, this month examined hate crimes in 16 of America’s largest cities. It revealed that while such crimes in 2020 decreased overall by 7 percent, those targeting Asian people rose by nearly 150 percent.
  • What Trump did is that he weaponized it in a way,” Ramakrishnan said. “Trump's rhetoric helps set a certain narrative in place — and presidents have an outsized role in terms of shaping narrative. They don't call it a bully pulpit for nothing, and especially Trump, the way he frequently used Twitter as well as press conferences and off-the-cuff remarks to campaign rallies to frame the narrative in a particular way, it likely played a role.”
  • The analysis revealed a surge in cities such as New York, where anti-Asian hate crimes rose from three in 2019 to 28 in 2020, a 833 percent increase. Los Angeles and Boston also experienced notable rises, from seven to 15 and six to 14, respectively. Meanwhile, Washington, D.C., experienced a decline from six to three anti-Asian hate crimes. Chicago remained unchanged, with two crimes each year.
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  • The first spike in anti-Asian hate crimes occurred in March and April last year. However, it occurred alongside a rise in Covid-19 cases and ongoing negative associations of Asian Americans with the virus, the analysis noted.
  • A separate study revealed that the use of “China virus” language to refer to the coronavirus, particularly by GOP officials and conservative outlets, has already resulted in a shift in how many people in the U.S. perceive Asian Americans. The significant uptick in discriminatory coronavirus speech that occurred on March 8 — the day Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., tweeted about the “Wuhan virus,” which coincided with then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s interview the day before on "Fox and Friends" in which he referred to the "China virus" — was followed by a rapid reversal of a decadelong decline in anti-Asian bias.
  • "Many of these Chinatowns are in places that are low income and also suffering economically. So that might be one set of explanations as to why this phenomenon is taking this particular shape," he said. "On top of that, we live in an age of viral social media, and … especially the shock value of some of these videos increases awareness and maybe anxiety in the community.
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Corporations Are Not Friends, People - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...618561 corporations GOP Politics alllane]]]ce policy trump history
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  • Corporations are people, my friend,” Romney replied. He was jeered in the crowd, and jeered even more by Democrats afterward. “I don’t care how many times you try to explain it,” Barack Obama said on the stump. “Corporations aren’t people. People are people.”
  • In arguing that companies should absolutely continue to donate money to politicians, but also that they should stay out of politics,
  • What these politicians are expressing is the fury of people who thought they had a deal, and have learned that they don’t, at least not on the old terms. The old arrangement was simple: The fiscally conservative wing of the Republican Party would push for lighter regulation, lower corporate taxes, and lower taxes on the high earners who ran corporations. In return, the corporations would cut generous checks to Republicans and remain circumspectly quiet about the culture-war issues that the social-conservative wing of the party cared about.
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  • McConnell embraced the tortured position that money, and only money, is speech—and that actual speech is not speech.  
  • The Kentuckian argued that money was speech, and limitations on donations—even requirements to disclose—infringed on free speech.
  • life—the peaceful transfer of power comes to mind—it is a casualty of the Trump era. In the early half of his presidency, Donald Trump pursued some projects that solidified the traditional bond between the GOP and business, such as slashing taxes, but also others that divided the old allies, including protectionist policies on trade and personally intervening to bully companies.
  • Last year, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, usually a stalwart supporter of Republicans, endorsed some Democrats, and it forcefully condemned Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
  • Meanwhile, a decades-long consensus that publicly held that companies should, above all, do whatever they could to maximize short-term shareholder value began to soften. In 2019, the Business Roundtable, a leading trade association, released new guidance that said corporations should “push for an economy that serves all Americans,” in Chairman Jamie Dimon’s words, by investing in communities and employees, dealing ethically with suppliers, and considering longer-term returns.
  • Now with voting laws at the center of national politics, corporations are speaking out. MLB moved the All-Star Game, Coca-Cola and Delta blasted the Georgia law, and other executives have objected to the law and other bills under consideration elsewhere. To critics, this is riskily divisive. Echoing a famous Michael Jordan line, McConnell complained that Republicans drink Coke and fly too.
  • But these companies are responsive to many groups, and just because their stances don’t directly affect revenue and profits, that doesn’t mean these aren’t business decisions. Corporations are balancing the demands of shareholders, customers, and employees, as well as the positions of their own executives,
  • Companies may also calculate that the long-term costs of being on the wrong side of social-justice issues, or the wrong side of an ascendant liberal, diverse population, outweigh the short-term risks of Republican backlash and boycotts.
  • In short, what McConnell calls “blackmail” is just free enterprise at work. These companies may or may not be acting in their long-term best interests—corporations make mistaken bets about the future all the time—but they are acting rationally.
  • The minority leader is realizing that the deal Republicans had with big corporations wasn’t personal; it was just business. A tax break can buy you a lot of things, but it doesn’t buy love.
  • In taking these stances on big social issues, these corporations are acting in a majoritarian manner. But no one should conclude that they are progressive. Even as big business enters into a temporary alliance with Democrats on voting rights, many of its captains are fighting back against the plan President Joe Biden announced Wednesday to raise corporate tax rates.
  • American government would probably be healthier if more politicians asked—for whatever reason—why they are so willing to accept corporations’ arguments on taxes, regulation, and antitrust. Corporations may be people, my friends. But corporations are not friends, people.
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Opinion | Federal Money for Public Libraries - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...libraries-funding.html US Federal Money
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  • We strongly agree, and cite public libraries as the ultimate example: trusted, welcoming community and civic spaces offering education and opportunity for all. These beloved neighborhood institutions and their free and irreplaceable services, classes and programs will be central to our recovery.
  • Public libraries, the most democratic of institutions, have $26 billion in capital need nationwide; New York City libraries alone have $1.1 billion.
  • You document bullying behavior seemingly tolerated for decades. Underlings were too intimidated or fearful to call out Mr. Rudin publicly. The ultimate arbiter of justice in such cases should be the consumer of performing arts.
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  • Letters to this newspaper, as well as numerous commentaries elsewhere, have persuasively lauded the achievements of Joe Biden, Anthony Fauci and Nancy Pelosi on challenges ranging from public health to poverty. But another of their contributions to our culture deserves far more attention than it generally receives.
  • So I was surprised to read about the passing of skinny jeans, which have been around for most of my adult life. Discovering that they are no longer “cool” is like saying goodbye to a part of me (and to my millennial coolness).
  • While Ecclesiastes says “for everything there is a season,” I wish that the season of skinny jeans could have lasted a little longer. If I’d known that my favorite trousers would be going out of style, at least I could have worn them instead of my pandemic leggings for the past year!
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Can Biden Stay on the Sidelines of the Andrew Cuomo Saga? - The New York Times - 0 views

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  • President Biden has made only a passing comment on the crises that have engulfed Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, and he seems to be hoping to avoid getting pulled in any further.
  • Mr. Biden is one of the very few people in the nation with the potential to prevent a protracted standoff between an increasingly isolated Mr. Cuomo and the rest of the Democratic Party.
  • The governor and his allies have urged people to wait for the results of the investigations to buy time, in the hope of stabilizing Mr. Cuomo’s support.
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  • But a prolonged period of intraparty sparring over Mr. Cuomo’s future could be problematic for Mr. Biden. It threatens to distract from his early initiatives, including mass vaccination efforts and his party’s imperative to sell the public on the nearly $2 trillion stimulus package Mr. Biden signed into law last week.
  • On Tuesday, the White House will hold its weekly call on the coronavirus with the National Governors Association, which Mr. Cuomo typically leads as chairman of the group. Ms. Psaki said she expected Mr. Cuomo would join the call, adding, “We’ll leave that up to him.”
  • During the presidential campaign, Mr. Biden successfully avoided getting dragged into controversies that didn’t directly relate to him. But the bullying behavior Mr. Cuomo is accused of is contrary to the standard Mr. Biden has set for his own White House.
  • Still, the governor has flatly refused to contemplate resignation while questioning the motives of the women who have accused him of sexual harassment, invoking “cancel culture,”
  • When Mr. Biden in 2020 was accused of sexual assault by a woman who had worked in his Senate office decades earlier, he denied her allegation but did not impugn her motives. Mr. Cuomo has questioned the motivations of some of his accusers.
  • Still, support for Mr. Cuomo has eroded significantly from the highs of his coronavirus press briefings in the spring of 2020 — when he hit 71 percent approval — and even from February, when his approval among all voters was 56 percent in a Siena College poll.
  • “The state is about to be flush with Covid cash,” Mr. Sellers said. “Better days ahead for constituents. Hang on until you become everyone’s favorite bank.”
  • Some members of Congress and their aides were put off by a statement that the former senior member of the delegation, Representative Nita Lowey, of Westchester, had made in defense of Mr. Cuomo, according to a person familiar with the matter. The members had the sense that Ms. Lowey was inappropriately “instrumentalized” as a shield for Mr. Cuomo, the person said, adding that while it wasn’t the precipitating event for other members to speak out last Friday, it had left an impression.
  • Mr. Biden’s fondness for Mr. Cuomo does not necessarily extend to the staff level. The governor’s sharp-elbowed political operation has jabbed at many people in his path over the years.
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The Warped Vision of "Anti-Racism" - Persuasion - 0 views

www.persuasion.community/...e-warped-vision-of-anti-racism anti-racism woke Critical Theory
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  • What kind of monster doesn’t support “anti-racism”? Who would put themselves on the other side of “social justice”? How could you be opposed to the notion of “racial equity”?
  • what began as a collective yen for racial equality—long overdue in our nation—has devolved into something dangerous that is actually undermining its own noble goals.
  • as high-minded as these ideas sound, they mark a shift away from the values they purport to represent—equality before the law; the consent of the governed; even democracy itself—and toward the opposite, with people ranked by immutable characteristics and ruled by a tiny elite.
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  • Those who disagree—most crucially, millions of working-class Americans of all ethnicities—are excised from the public square.
  • The social-justice movement comes at the expense of justice; “anti-racism” ends up exacerbating racism.
  • How could this be? It’s difficult to stand against “social justice,” especially for those of us who are deeply concerned about inequality. We feel humility toward activists, writers and politicians who take up the language of racial justice, given how urgent the cause is.
  • The basis for today’s social-justice movement is a deep skepticism about liberal values like equality, justice and democracy. This is rooted in an academic discipline known as “critical race theory,” which takes elements from Hegel and Marx, along with postmodernists like Foucault and Derrida, to assemble a worldview that does not accept that equality can exist.
  • Napoleon Bonaparte, and he was taking a victory lap through a German university town after defeating the Prussian army, when he happened to ride past a German philosopher with writer’s block, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
  • a key element of his work became associated with the concept of mastery and domination, of one man exerting his will over others.
  • Society, culture and history were produced in the back and forth, or “dialectic,” between the powerful and the powerless—the master-slave dialectic, as Hegel’s pairing became known in subsequent iterations.
  • When Marx articulated his thesis of class conflict as the basis for all modern social existence, he was—in the view of Jean-Paul Sartre among others—expanding on the master-slave dialectic.
  • And if history progressed through a changing cast of masters and slaves for Hegel, or class struggle for Marx, for critical race theorists and their “anti-racism” inheritors, it’s white people and people of color in a binary that gives one side all the power and the other side none.
  • Over time, three other key ideas were grafted onto the master-slave dialectic:
  • false consciousness
  • a belief that the ideals of a society mean less than do the exceptions to those ideals
  • and a commitment to undermining the grand narratives that a society relies upon.
  • “False consciousness” was an attempt by Marxists to explain why the working class wasn’t buying into their worldview.
  • It turns out that working-class people are often conservative, a fact that has never ceased to bedevil and infuriate educated leftists trying to impose their desire for revolution. Instead of trying to understand the preferences of the working class, Marxists asserted that the poor workers were merely deluded, in the grip of a “false consciousness,” instead of a revolutionary one.
  • You can see the concept of false consciousness—and the condescension that is its hallmark—everywhere in critical race theory.
  • Its proponents classify people of color who don’t have radical views on race or who vote Republican as the handmaidens of white supremacy;
  • The idea of false consciousness is everywhere in the work of Robin DiAngelo, a prominent proponent of “anti-racist” ideology whose book White Fragility has sold close to a million copies. DiAngelo contends that white people who cry when accused of being racists actually prove their bigotry via these “weaponized tears,” which she deems “white racial bullying.”
  • If a society claims as its foundation a narrative that some members are excluded from, then the true meaning of that narrative is found in the exception, rather than the rule.
  • Postmodernist philosophers added to this a mistrust of the ideals that society claims to be built on:
  • postmodernists argued that the explicit mores of a culture have no objective value, but are instead a way for one group to benefit at the expense of another.
  • From this perspective, the Constitution isn’t a document that established the United States on principles of equality and freedom that the country failed to live up to.
  • Instead, the Constitution is a document fundamental to denying rights to those deemed ineligible, and justifying the ownership of enslaved persons.
  • Your symbol of freedom and equality is nothing more than a tool of repression, postmodernists argue. Failures, even at the margins, expose the hypocrisy of the whole, and define it as a lie.
  • You can see this at work in The New York Times Magazine’s Pulitzer-prize winning “The 1619 Project,” which marks the year that the first African slave was brought to American shores.
  • argued that, while history teaches 1776 as the year of our nation’s founding, we should consider whether “the country’s true birth date, the moment that our defining contradictions first came into the world, was in late August of 1619,” as the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Jake Silverstein, put it in an introduction.
  • It can’t be that America was founded on values like equality and liberty and democracy that it imperfectly embodied and has subsequently strived to correct.
  • It must be that the true founding was slavery, its true nature revealed by this failure.
  • This is why the social-justice movement cannot recognize the huge gains that have been made in this nation on the question of race; if there is even one instance of racism left in America, it is proof again of this true nature.
  • As with America, some on the left find it impossible to see Israel as a flawed nation imperfectly striving toward the ideals of its founding. The occupation of the Palestinians can’t be a disastrous injustice. It must be that Israel’s foundation is defined by this injustice, that “Zionism is racism.”
  • the real threat here is not just mangled logic. It’s the erasure of the possibility of equality, of a common humanity, that requires we treat each other as equals before God and before the law.
  • Today’s progressive left, whose ideas have become prevalent in much of the American establishment that is now repeating its incantations, simply does not believe equality is possible, instead differentiating people by how much power they supposedly have, with no common humanity to call upon.
  • since the social-justice movement recognizes only power, every one of its proposals is designed not to create a more equal society, but to transfer power from oppressors to oppressed—while allowing those designated as victims to maintain claim to the status of oppressed.
  • Race is immutable, so it doesn’t matter how much real power a person of color wields; their race means they will never be anything but oppressed.
  • You might be wondering why this view, which erases equality and cites oppression as the root of everything, has mainstream appeal
  • It seems to me that progressive elites, despite their pieties, don’t really want to live in a more equal society. They prefer the imperfect meritocracy we live under—the rule of the smart, the talented and the rich, most of whom traffic in the fiction that their status was earned.
  • progressives see themselves as compassionate. What they needed was a way to explain the inequality found in the meritocratic system they hold dear, a way that made them feel they were still on the side of the good without having to disrupt what is good for them.
  • This is not the way to a more equal society. We cannot right the wrongs of racial inequality—an urgent task—by erasing the ideal of equality
  • Nor can we allow the fact that equality has been unequally enforced throughout most of our history to provide an excuse to throw it away, and build a newly racialized America.
  • the clues are elsewhere. At first, one notices them like glitches in the matrix. Maybe you read an unorthodox remark on Twitter, and watch as its author is insulted in the cruelest terms by thousands of people, many with words like “social justice” or “diversity and inclusion” in their bios
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Trump's Ideas Flourish Among State and Local Republicans - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-republicans.html
shared by rerobinson03 on 15 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • As Mr. Trump prepares to exit the White House and face a second impeachment trial in the Senate, his ideas continue to exert a gravitational pull in Republican circles across the country. The falsehoods, white nationalism and baseless conspiracy theories he peddled for four years have become ingrained at the grass-roots level of the party, embraced by activists, local leaders and elected officials even as a handful of Republicans in Congress break with the president in the final hour.
  • An Axios-Ipsos poll released Thursday showed that a majority of Republicans support the president’s recent behavior and say he should be the Republican nominee in 2024.
  • Already, some from the Trump wing are threatening primary challenges to Republicans deemed insufficiently loyal to the president and fierce opposition to any Republican who works with the new Biden administration
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  • Tom Rice, a Republican from his state who had backed impeachment.
  • Last week’s breach of the Capitol appears to have presented that opportunity to Republicans who want to refocus the party around Mr. Trump’s policies, and dispense with the polarizing language and divisive actions that marked his four years in office.
  • No, Trump does not have any blame, but the Democrats certainly do, along with all the Republicans that follow with them,” said Billy Long, the Republican Party chairman in Bayfield County, Wis., who said he was planning to break away from the G.O.P. to start a local Trump-centric third party. “The Trump movement is not over; like Trump said himself, we are just getting started.”
  • Republican voters, too, have largely drawn a sharp distinction between the president and those who stormed the Capitol, with 80 percent saying they do not hold Mr. Trump responsible for the rioting and 73 percent saying he is protecting democracy, according to polling released by Quinnipiac University this week
  • Even if Mr. Trump fades from political life, losing his social media megaphone and bully pulpit, his supporters say his message will be carried forward by a party remade in his image and with strong structural support at all levels.
  • “The election was crooked and Republicans who could have done something did very little,” said Dave Wesener, the chairman of the Republican Party in Crawford County, Wis. “Those Republicans who have not been supportive I affectionately call RINOs. All RINOs should be primaried by conservatives.”
  • The siege at the Capitol last week has drawn an even brighter line dividing the party. State legislators from more than a dozen states attended the protest, with at least one facing criminal charges for breaching the Capitol as part of the riot. Meshawn Maddock, an activist who is poised to be the incoming Michigan Republican Party co-chairwoman, helped organize busloads of supporters from her state to travel to the Capitol. In the days after the violence, she joined a conservative online group where some participants openly discussed civil war and martial law.
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Xiaomi, CNOOC, Comac: Chinese companies slapped with new US restrictions - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html china trump US Politics economics
shared by zoegainer on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The Trump administration is inflicting even more damage on Chinese businesses — including smartphone maker Xiaomi — with just days to go before President-elect Joe Biden takes office.
  • The US Defense Department on Thursday added nine Chinese firms, including Xiaomi, to a list of companies the agency claims are owned or controlled by China's military. Businesses on the list are subject to harsh restrictions, including a ban on American investment.
  • The Defense Department said in a statement that it is "determined to highlight and counter" the relationship between China's military and firms that "appear to be civilian entities" but which support the military with advanced technology and expertise.Read MoreBeijing on Friday blasted the new restrictions as an abuse of power by the United States.
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  • "CNOOC acts as a bully for the People's Liberation Army to intimidate China's neighbors," said Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in a statement, referring to the country's military. His agency claimed that CNOOC has been harassing and threatening offshore oil and gas exploration in the South China Sea by other countries, such as Vietnam.Xiaomi denied it was owned or controlled by the Chinese military in a stock exchange filing. "The company confirms that it is not owned, controlled or affiliated with the Chinese military, and is not a 'Communist Chinese Military Company' defined under the [National Defense Authorization Act]," it said in the statement.
  • Before Thursday, the Pentagon had already added 35 Chinese companies to its military list, including chipmaker SMIC and tech firm Huawei. The Commerce Department has also imposed restrictions on many companies.
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Opinion: There's only one way to stop violent extremists - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html
shared by anonymous on 13 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Once a cohort or society builds a hateful mindset, the hatred takes on a life of its own. Extremist ideology not only hurts a society's enemies, but also eventually attacks from within and harms the society from which it originated.
  • Consider how the kingdom of Saudi Arabia disseminated the Wahhabi sect's fundamentalist attitudes against Jews and Christians at home and abroad. It helped to fund the madrassas that fostered the extreme perspectives that eventually contributed to the September 11th terror attacks on New York and Washington.
  • The great irony is that his unbridled hatred had also prompted him to attack the Saudi kingdom, too. Bin Laden's extremist hunger was such that even the Saudi Wahhabis who helped inculcate his all-consuming intolerance could no longer prove pious enough in his eyes.
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  • n Israel too, the government has taken limited action to shut down the behavior of the so-called "hilltop youth," extremist settlers who deem themselves highly religious despite not respecting the rabbis of the settlement.
  • Here in the United States, there are Republican legislators and anchors on Fox News who have willingly participated in race-baiting and birtherism for years, even before President Trump hijacked the Republican Party. Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has looked the other way for close to five years as Trump incites violence and sows mistrust in our system.
  • Then came the insurrection. Mobs of Trump supporters, hopped up on Trump's conspiracy theory of a stolen election and encouraged to go to the Capitol by the President himself, stormed and vandalized our nation's Capitol building.
  • It was the disturbing culmination of a months-long series of attempts by Trump to bully state officials into "finding" votes that would help him win the 2020 presidential election, as almost all Republican "leaders" stood by with stunning silence -- though elections officials in Georgia, headed by Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, stood up for truth against pressure from Trump.
  • When thinking turns extreme, there is little room for nuance or aberration from the narrow mindset deemed acceptable.
  • Trump and a small subgroup of his most radicalized and violent supporters, who include White supremacists and Neo-Nazis, are responsible for this dark chapter. Nothing can justify their sedition. But beyond this specific situation, it would be simplistic to believe that extreme ways of thinking reside exclusively within the right.
  • All extremes are bound together by their intolerance for "the other." The far-left's tendency to call others out and automatically cast judgment harms all of society by stifling the critical thinking, nuanced debate, and exchange of differing ideas that lead to progress -- the very progress for which progressives advocate.
  • When terrorists or violent extremists cross the line, the only recourse is to forcefully stop them and prosecute them to the full extent of the law. For society at large, independent thinking and even avoiding partisan fanaticism can be antidotes to unruly tribalism in the future. Embracing the middle space characterized by critical thinking and nuance gives us a pathway for avoiding absolutist and hateful thinking that preys on societies from both the outside and within.
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In the Republican Party, the post-Trump era lasted a week - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html trump
shared by katherineharron on 28 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Two roads diverged in American politics, and the Republican Party chose the one traveled by disgraced ex-President Donald Trump and QAnon conspiracy theorists.
  • Only a week after Trump left the White House, it's clear that his party is not ready to let him go. Extremists and Trumpists are on the rise, while lawmakers who condemned his aberrant conduct fight for their political careers. The anti-Trump wing -- represented by members of Congress such as Sens. Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Mitt Romney of Utah and Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger -- look like a small and outmaneuvered force.
  • This week's sorting will have significant implications for the GOP's positioning as it heads into the 2022 midterm elections,
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  • A jazzed turnout by the pro-Trump base is vital to GOP hopes of winning the House in the 2022 midterms. But there is also a chance that a flurry of fervently pro-Trump Senate candidates in swing states could damage the party's hopes of overturning the thin Democratic majority in the chamber.
  • In a key impeachment test vote this week, 45 GOP senators signaled that they plan for Trump to pay no price for inciting the most heinous assault by a president on the US government in history in the Capitol riot.
  • In another sign of the GOP's future course, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene was not censured by her party after CNN's KFile reported that she expressed supporting in recent years assassinations of Democratic leaders before she ran for Congress.
  • Greene, was rewarded with a plum committee assignment.
  • Remnants of the old GOP -- such as former George W. Bush aide Rob Portman -- who are unwilling to sign up to the unhinged populism that now drives the party of Lincoln have nowhere to go. The Ohio senator announced this week that he will not run for reelection.
  • But in Arkansas, former White House press secretary Sarah Sanders is wearing her wars with the Washington media in her dishonest tenure as a badge of honor to appeal to the fervidly pro-Trump base in a gubernatorial run.
  • And in Arizona, Oregon and Pennsylvania, anti-Trump Republicans such as Cindy McCain are being purged while Trump loyalists take prominent positions
  • Former Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who is now a CNN commentator, said on "The Situation Room" that the GOP needed to move swiftly against Greene and compared the failure of leaders to honor its values with the courage shown by detained Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny.
  • The warning cited the presidential transition "as well as other perceived grievances fueled by false narratives" as potential catalysts for uprisings. Those narratives were pushed for weeks by Trump and his Republican enablers in Washington and still find a home in sections of the conservative media.
  • The former President has long enjoyed elevated approval ratings in his party that have protected him from the consequences of his unconstitutional power grabs and failures among Republicans leaders he bullied for years.
  • Still, a CNN/SSRS poll published just before he left office, found however that 48% of Republicans wanted to move on from Trump while 47% hoped that he would continue to be regarded as the leader of the party.
  • Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, whose presidential dreams were crushed by the former reality star in 2016, was long seen as the poster boy for a new, more optimistic and inclusive GOP. A career trajectory that now has him standing strongly with Trump and branding impeachment as all about "vengeance from the radical left" is an apt personification of the transformation Trump wrought in the party. It may also have something to do with chatter about a possible primary challenge from Ivanka Trump.
  • Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was among the most distraught Republicans over the attack on his beloved US Senate incited by Trump in his effort to thwart the constitutional transfer of power to Biden.
  • Another key Republican figure, former US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, who expertly engineered her exit from Trump's administration with the ex-President's blessing, has walked back her tame earlier criticism of Trump after the insurrection.
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Madison's nightmare - Political theorists have been worrying about mob rule for 2,000 y... - 0 views

www.economist.com/...-about-mob-rule-for-2000-years democracy mob Plato aristotle political theory history revolution
shared by Javier E on 02 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • It is naive to assume that mobs will be confined to the “nice” side of the political spectrum; the left-wing kind by their nature generate the right-wing sort. It is doubly naive to expect that mobs will set limits; it is in their nature to run out of control
  • Political philosophers have been making these points for more than 2,000 years.
  • Even liberal thinkers worried that democracy might give rise to “mobocracy”. They argued that the will of the people needed to be restrained by a combination of constitutional intricacy (individual rights, and checks and balances) and civic culture. The wiser among them added that the decay of such restraints could transform democracy into mob rule.
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  • The first great work of political philosophy, Plato’s “Republic”, was, in part, a meditation on the evils of mob rule. Plato regarded democracy as little more than mob rule by another name—perhaps without the violence, at least at first, but with the same lack of impulse control.
  • He noted that democracies are hard-wired to test boundaries.
  • Plato also argued that democracies inevitably degenerate into anarchy, as the poor plunder the rich and profligacy produces bankruptcy.
  • Anarchy leads to the rule of tyrants: a bully can appeal to the mob’s worst instincts precisely because he is ruled by his own worst instincts
  • this changed with the French and American revolutions, which were based on contrasting approaches to mob rule.
  • Aristotle, Plato’s great pupil, distinguished between three legitimate forms of government: kingship, aristocracy and democracy. He argued that they each have their dark shadows: tyranny, oligarchy and mob rule
  • He then outlined the ways in which these virtuous forms of government evolve into their opposites: democracy becomes mob rule when the rich hog the society’s wealth
  • A more practical thinker than Plato, Aristotle argued that there were two ways of preventing democracy from degenerating into mobocracy: mix in elements of kingship and aristocracy to restrain the will of the people; and create a large middle class with a stake in stability.
  • Machiavelli speculated that clever princes might be able to profit from chaos if they could forge the mob into a battering-ram against a decaying regime
  • Mostly elites were content with demonisation
  • He is, as it were, the mob in the form of a single person
  • The French Revolution also produced a robust conservative critique of mob rule—first in Edmund Burke’s “Reflections on the Revolution in France
  • Samuel Huntington warned that “democratic overload”, with too many interest groups demanding too much from the state, would lead to democratic disillusionment as the state failed to live up to its ever-escalating promises.
  • Burke recognised that the mob has a collective psychology that makes it uniquely dangerous. It is a “monstrous medley of all conditions, tongues, and nations”. It relishes wild abandon—“horrid yells”, “shrilling screams” and the “unutterable abominations of the furies of hell”. It gets so carried away with its own righteous bloodlust that even normally decent people can be transformed into monsters.
  • He predicted that the revolution would end in the massacre of thousands (including the king, queen and priests) and the rise of a dictator who could restore law and order.
  • many changed their minds when they discovered that, far from unleashing man’s natural goodness, the revolution had set free his inner demons. Those who stuck with the revolution despite the guillotine and the Terror did so on two grounds: that the old regime was responsible for the violence because it created so much pent-up hatred; and that you cannot improve the world without bloodshed.
  • The American revolution succeeded where the French revolution and its progeny failed because it was based on a considered fear of “the confusion and intemperance of a multitude”.
  • “Federalist No. 55”, written by either James Madison or Alexander Hamilton, is particularly sharp on the way that ill-designed institutions can turn even sensible citizens into a baying crowd: “Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob”.
  • The Founding Fathers argued that democracy could avoid becoming mobocracy only if it was hedged with a series of restraints to control the power of the people.
  • Alexis de Tocqueville added his own worries about mob rule in “Democracy in America”. For him the constitution alone is not strong enough to save democracy from the mob. A vigorous civic culture rooted in self-governing communities (he was particularly keen on New England’s townships) and a self-reliant and educated population are also necessary
  • So too is a responsible elite that recognises that its first duty is to “educate democracy”
  • The 19th century saw the world’s ruling elites reconciling themselves to the fact that democracy was the wave of the future. How you dealt with this wave depended largely on your attitude to the mob.
  • Pessimists held that delay was the best way to avert the mob.
  • This sort of pessimism has been out of fashion for a long time. The second world war and the defeat of Nazism led to an era of democratic self-confidence, and the fall of the Berlin Wall to one of democratic euphoria.
  • But a few pessimists continued to warn that democracies might well degenerate into mob rule if they neglected the health of their political institutions and civic culture. Seymour Martin Lipset, an American sociologist, echoed Aristotle’s view that a healthy democracy requires broad-based prosperity.
  • Harvey Mansfield, a political philosopher, reiterated Tocqueville’s worry that civic decay might corrupt democracy
  • The cycle of mass protest followed by violence followed by dictatorship set a pattern for subsequent revolutions in Russia (1917), Cuba (1958) and elsewhere.
  • In recent years the pessimists have grown in number
  • The election of Mr Trump, a reality-TV star, raised profound questions about the health of America’s political regime. Can democracy survive if television channels make billions of dollars by peddling misinformation and partisanship?
  • Or if wealthy people can invest vast sums of money in the political process?
  • Or if society is polarised into a superclass and a demoralised proletariat? Recent events suggest that the answer is “no”.
  • The age of democratic naivety died on January 6th. It is time for an age of democratic sophistication
  • Democracies may well be the best safeguard against mob rule, as liberal democrats have been preaching for centuries. But they can be successful only if countries put the necessary effort into nurturing democratic institutions: guarding against too much inequality, ensuring that voters have access to objective information, taming money in politics and reinforcing checks and balances.
  • Otherwise the rule of the people will indeed become the rule of the mob, and the stable democratic order that flourished from the second world war onwards will look like a brief historical curiosity.
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Why parents need to stop pushing happiness on their kids - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...kids-happiness-emotions parenting parents happiness psychology meaning of life
shared by Javier E on 30 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • As a psychologist, I can’t help but wonder: Who in this world has ever gotten happy because someone else told them they have to be?
  • And worse, what if our culture’s incessant demands to be happy are actually making our kids miserable?
  • It seems counterintuitive, of course, but to be happy in the long run, we should more fully embrace the times when we’re not.
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  • this approach to emotional development neglects the full, complicated range of unhappy feelings that are just as valid a part of human life as happiness is — from sadness to frustration, from anger to fear, from guilt to disappointment, boredom or disgust.
  • Much research on well-being makes clear that Americans’ typical approaches to the pursuit of happiness is far from helpful to our kids. Anxiety and mental health problems in children and teens have been steadily increasing
  • In fact, the more we teach our kids to stay positive, at the expense of helping them accept occasional difficult feelings, the less we equip them with tools to manage such feelings when life inevitably gets hard
  • We tend to have a similar disdain for negative thoughts. Americans like to believe that our thoughts define us: that we need to control that running commentary, shape it and aggressively avoid the “bad” thoughts that supposedly doom us to unhappiness
  • Research into mindfulness and acceptance and commitment therapy reveals that it’s not negative thoughts that cause depression, anxiety, amotivation or any other mental rut we’re afraid of. It is when negative thoughts become sticky that we are more prone to those problems.
  • The more we fight with our thoughts, the more we give them the power to stick.
  • Being fixated on having only the “right” kind of thoughts breeds the cognitive rigidity that creates tunnel vision, locks us into unhelpful patterns, increases our risk of rumination, obsessions and compulsions, and decreases our ability to adapt to setbacks.
  • Commit to teaching and practicing the pause.
  • forced happiness, happiness as a sole goal without a deeper sense of meaning or purpose, or the pretense of happiness that stems from the expectation that anything less is toxic, can turn such “happiness” harmful in its own right.
  • If you can help your child develop meta-cognition — the ability to think about their thoughts and keep from getting stuck within them — and mindfulness, which helps them become a gentle, nonjudgmental observer of their thoughts and feelings, attuned in the moment to their experience, then you are giving them psychological tools to help them for a lifetime.
  • ADEncourage turning anxious thought patterns into characters.
  • What better time to begin teaching our kids that unhappiness has a rightful place in a full and — yes — truly happy life? It is often the difficult emotions that have the most to teach us about ourselves, and that give us the opportunity to find meaning and connect with others.
  • Encourage labeling distressing thoughts like “I’m having the thought no one likes me” rather than “No one likes me,” which helps your child separate from them.
  • a child with social anxiety may call their negative self-talk “The Stage-Fright Bully” and decide that it has nothing important to say — and that the show can go on.
  • Take the stance that feelings, even big ones, are always okay.
  • Emphasize that it’s how we handle emotions that matters most, and we can choose those actions mindfully
  • Teach your kids that their thoughts don’t define them. Encourage your children to observe their thoughts with curiosity rather than fear, in a nonjudgmental way rather than with shame.
  • teach them that the anger is okay, but we must think through our actions carefully, noticing our thoughts and bodily sensations without launching into autopilot.
  • Every time they fully engage with a feeling and choose functional behavior, they strengthen their emotional intelligence and make it more likely that that feeling won’t impel them toward unhealthy habits in the future.
  • Enlarge your vocabulary about emotions
  • From “I” statements (“I was sad when you said that to me” rather than “You are being mean!”) to encouraging your kids to write or draw their feelings in a journal, research shows that the mere act of labeling a feeling can help us feel more in control and allow it to pass more quickly.
  • Observe and adjust your own habits of talking about feelings.
  • Pay particular attention to the times you invalidate your child’s emotions or try to force a different internal reaction: “You’re okay,”
  • Instead, choose empathy: “Sounds like that’s really upsetting; let’s think about how we can work through this.”
  • Talk about true happiness as more than just pleasure or ease.
  • We all want our kids to be happy. But what they absorb about what that means is crucial. By opening them up to the idea of a sense of purpose, finding meaning in their life, or defining the values important to them, they will have a better understanding of how even challenging, difficult times can cultivate happiness.
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Slavery at Thomas Jefferson's University of Virginia: Students who beat and raped ensla... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...slaved-servants-historians-say slavery jefferson university virginia students culture
shared by Javier E on 06 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Last year, the university produced a 96-page report that concluded slavery was “in every way imaginable . . . central to the project of designing, funding, building, and maintaining the school.”
  • U-Va.’s efforts come as dozens of universities across the country undertake similar examinations — and as America marks the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in Jamestown. The dark milestone has spurred a reckoning with the awful reality of slavery and the myriad ways it shaped the nation.
  • Jefferson — who by then had served as both U.S. president and vice president — envisioned U-Va. as a breeding ground for the next generation of the country’s political elite, beneficiaries of his educational program molded in his image, Taylor said. Still, he wanted students to differentiate themselves in at least one important way: He wanted them to end slavery in America.
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  • “The central paradox at the heart of U-Va. is also the central paradox of the nation, the unresolved paradox of American liberty,” McInnis said. “How is it that the nation that defined the natural rights of humankind did so within a system that denied those same rights to millions of people?”
  • efferson insisted, the up-and-coming generation should fix the problem by “emancipating the enslaved and deporting them to Africa,” Taylor said
  • Instead, early U-Va. graduates became “leading voices in the pro-slavery movement, soldiers in the Confederate Army, and political leaders in the Confederate States of America,” McInnis wrote in “Educated in Tyranny.”
  • The vast majority of the student body — numbering between 100 and 150 people each year — hailed from wealthy, Southern slaveholding families. Plantation-owning parents clamored to send their sons to U-Va., lauded as a prestigious alternative to the Northern schools they feared as dangerous hotbeds of anti-slavery sentiment, according to Taylor.
  • Ultrarich Southerners were also some of the only Americans able to afford tuition at U-Va., then “the most expensive college” in the country, Taylor said.
  • “Jefferson physically designed a campus that internalized everything he had learned living on plantations,” McInnis said. “It is architecturally set up to be a landscape of slavery.”
  • Enslaved people also catered to students’ daily whims. “Every afternoon, an enslaved servant called on his assigned student,” Taylor wrote in “Thomas Jefferson’s Education.” The enslaved person then “[took] orders for errands on the grounds or in town.”
  • At U-Va. — as at every Southern university in America during this era — bullying the enslaved formed “part of daily existence,” McInnis said. It was also performance art, Taylor added: a way for rich young men to prove their mettle to their peers.
  • “The episodes we do know of, other students are watching and applauding,” Taylor said. “This was a whole generation of men who just behaved monstrously.”
  • There’s a broad understanding that 'slavery is bad, people got whipped,’ but there’s also an urge to compartmentalize it: ‘That was bad, but it’s over with, and we should focus on the good stuff like U-Va.’s cutting-edge education and science,’ ” he said.“We’re not trying to ruin people’s day — but if you want to understand society, you’ve got to understand how everything is woven together, the good with the bad.”
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An Envoy's Damning Account of Trump's Ukraine Pressure and Its Consequences - The New Y... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...mp-ukraine-william-taylor.html politics trump policy economics
shared by anniina03 on 23 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • William B. Taylor Jr., the top American diplomat in Ukraine, laid out in visceral terms the stakes of what he saw as an illegitimate scheme to pressure the Kiev government for political help by suspending American security aid.
  • Mr. Taylor described a president holding up $391 million in assistance for the clear purpose of forcing Ukraine to help incriminate Mr. Trump’s domestic rivals.
  • the Ukraine scandal also extends to matters of life and death, as well as geopolitics on a grand scale.
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  • “If Ukraine succeeds in breaking free of Russian influence, it is possible for Europe to be whole, free, democratic and at peace,”
  • Yet in the publicly released portion of his testimony, Mr. Taylor neither described any direct conversation with Mr. Trump himself nor made any reference to documents or recordings that would explicitly implicate the president. Instead, he provided a road map for investigators by quoting others around Mr. Trump describing his actions and statements.
  • “We must support Ukraine in its fight against its bullying neighbor,” he told House investigators. “Russian aggression cannot stand.”
  • He recalled being stunned to learn during a secure video conference call on July 18 that the aid to Ukraine had been delayed with no explanation other than that “the directive had come from the president to the chief of staff to” the Office of Management and Budget.
  • “I and others sat in astonishment,” he testified. “The Ukrainians were fighting the Russians and counted on not only the training and weapons, but also the assurance of U.S. support.”
  • 13,000 Ukrainians had been killed in the war, one or two a week. More Ukrainians would undoubtedly die without the U.S. military assistance.”
  • Mr. Sondland explained that Mr. Trump saw it through a transactional lens. “When a businessman is about to sign a check to someone who owes him something, he said, the businessman asks that person to pay up before signing the check,” Mr. Taylor said, quoting Mr. Sondland. Mr. Volker “used the same terms several days later.”
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Democrats take control of Virginia and claim win in Kentucky governor's race | US news ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...r-race-andy-beshear-matt-bevin trump Kentucky politics us
shared by brickol on 06 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • Democrats have won control of Virginia’s state legislature for the first time in a generation
  • The Democratic party prevailed in both the state house and senate in Virginia
  • In Kentucky, which Trump won by nearly 30 percentage points in the 2016 election, Andy Beshear – the Democratic challenger to unpopular incumbent governor Matt Bevin – declared victory as he was narrowly ahead of the Republican
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  • Tonight voters in Kentucky sent a message loud and clear for everyone to hear. It’s a message that says our elections don’t have to be about right versus left, they are still about right versus wrong,
  • Voters in suburban swaths of Kentucky and Virginia sided with Democrats, a trend that would complicate Trump’s path to re-election in 2020 if it holds. And the Democrats who made gains in Tuesday’s election did so by largely avoiding positions such as the government-run healthcare plan “Medicare for All” that have animated the party’s left flank in the Democratic presidential primary race.
  • Beshear declared himself the winner in Kentucky after securing 49.2% of the vote to Bevin’s 48.8%.
  • Bevin was elected in 2015 and had portrayed this election as a referendum on Trump, who stumped for the governor at a rally in Kentucky on Monday night and called Beshear “too liberal, too extreme and too dangerous”
  • A bullish Bevin had told the New York Times last month that he anticipated winning the election by between six and 10 points.
  • But while Trump won Kentucky with more than 60% of the vote in 2016 and remains popular in the state, with Republicans in other races there doing well on Tuesday, Bevin – who polls as one of America’s most unpopular governors – could not ride that popularity to victory.
  • Beshear, the state’s attorney general and the son of Kentucky’s last Democratic governor, made public education the cornerstone of his campaign, choosing a public high school assistant principal as his running mate and accusing Bevin of bullying schoolteachers who protested against proposed pension reforms.
  • Bevin, meanwhile, fought on broader, national and cultural issues, highlighting his relationship with Trump and his support for the second amendment, while touting himself as the “most pro-life” governor in America.
  • Kentucky’s race was one of several closely watched elections in states across the US on Tuesday. Republican Daniel Cameron made history in a resounding win in Kentucky’s election for attorney general, becoming the first African American to win the office.
  • Democrats have pledged that when they take power, they will pass an agenda that Republicans have blocked for years, including stricter gun laws, a higher minimum wage and ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment.
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Opinion: The Danger From Iran Didn't Die With Soleimani : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...-iran-didnt-die-with-soleimani US Policy gop Iran trump
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  • President Trump did not only kill Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani. He also killed a core principle that had long protected our people. For the last several decades, the United States agreed it would not assassinate foreign government officials.
  • That rule is now dead, and, with its demise, the president has handed a powerful precedent to Iran and other adversaries.
  • The American president essentially has said he can take out anyone, anywhere, for any reason. This will alter our adversaries' actions dramatically.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • While Tehran may have temporarily pulled its punches, we should all be very worried about the new risks we will confront in a world where senior government officials are considered fair game.
  • ehran can now attempt to justify a future assassination of one of our officials on the basis that they represented an "imminent threat" to Iran.
  • But even if Iranian leaders were demonstrating strategic restraint, it should not be mistaken for standing down. Iran has restarted its nuclear program and still has U.S. personnel squarely in its sights.
  • Iran was never going to mount a full-frontal assault in retaliation for the killing of one of its top commanders.
  • Instead, it has spent years building a specialization in asymmetric attacks, often through its wide network of proxies across the planet.
  • Perhaps the White House approach is best described as "bully them until they break." Based on my diplomatic experience, such strong-arm strategies don't work
  • What is it exactly that Trump expects Iran to do? The president said over the weekend he "couldn't care less if they negotiate."
  • Without a clear roadmap for how to move forward, there is a high probability we will find ourselves back on the cliffs overlooking a crisis in the coming months.
  • How can we avoid things getting out of hand and Iran developing nuclear weapons? First, forget about presidential summits, which haven't worked with North Korea.
  • It should make some clear, concrete demands for Iran to end support to proxies and protection of Iranians' fundamental rights.
  • How can we avoid the Soleimani strike boomeranging back against Americans serving abroad
  • Congress needs to do more than set stricter conditions for war. It ought to demand detailed answers for how we avoid it.
  • Trump ostensibly took out Soleimani to protect our people serving in the Middle East. He ended up putting them and many others in much greater danger.
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