Skip to main content

Home/ Groups/ History Readings
Rss Feed
Sort By: Most Recent | Popular Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Javier E

Opinion | How We've Lost Our Moorings as a Society - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-civility-society.html

guardrails society evolution context culture crisis trump politics

shared by Javier E on 30 May 24 - No Cached
  • To my mind, one of the saddest things that has happened to America in my lifetime is how much we’ve lost so many of our mangroves. They are endangered everywhere today — but not just in nature.
  • Our society itself has lost so many of its social, normative and political mangroves as well — all those things that used to filter toxic behaviors, buffer political extremism and nurture healthy communities and trusted institutions for young people to grow up in and which hold our society together.
  • You see, shame used to be a mangrove
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • That shame mangrove has been completely uprooted by Trump.
  • The reason people felt ashamed is that they felt fidelity to certain norms — so their cheeks would turn red when they knew they had fallen short
  • He keeps pushing our system to its breaking point, flooding the zone with lies so that the people trust only him and the truth is only what he says it is. In nature, as in society, when you lose your mangroves, you get flooding with lots of mud.
  • People in high places doing shameful things is hardly new in American politics and business. What is new, Seidman argued, “is so many people doing it so conspicuously and with such impunity: ‘My words were perfect,’ ‘I’d do it again.’ That is what erodes norms — that and making everyone else feel like suckers for following them.”
  • Nothing is more corrosive to a vibrant democracy and healthy communities, added Seidman, than “when leaders with formal authority behave without moral authority.
  • Without leaders who, through their example and decisions, safeguard our norms and celebrate them and affirm them and reinforce them, the words on paper — the Bill of Rights, the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence — will never unite us.”
  • . Trump wants to destroy our social and legal mangroves and leave us in a broken ethical ecosystem, because he and people like him best thrive in a broken system.
  • in the kind of normless world we have entered where societal, institutional and leadership norms are being eroded,” Seidman said to me, “no one has to feel shame anymore because no norm has been violated.”
  • Responsibility, especially among those who have taken oaths of office — another vital mangrove — has also experienced serious destruction.
  • It’s not that the people in these communities have changed. It’s that if that’s what you are being fed, day in and day out, then you’re going to come to every conversation with a certain set of predispositions that are really hard to break through.”
  • Your sense of responsibility to appear above partisan politics to uphold the integrity of the court’s rulings would not allow it.
  • Civil discourse and engaging with those with whom you disagree — instead of immediately calling for them to be fired — also used to be a mangrove.
  • when moral arousal manifests as moral outrage — and immediate demands for firings — “it can result in a vicious cycle of moral outrage being met with equal outrage, as opposed to a virtuous cycle of dialogue and the hard work of forging real understanding.”
  • In November 2022, the Heterodox Academy, a nonprofit advocacy group, surveyed 1,564 full-time college students ages 18 to 24. The group found that nearly three in five students (59 percent) hesitate to speak about controversial topics like religion, politics, race, sexual orientation and gender for fear of negative backlashes by classmates.
  • Locally owned small-town newspapers used to be a mangrove buffering the worst of our national politics. A healthy local newspaper is less likely to go too far to one extreme or another, because its owners and editors live in the community and they know that for their local ecosystem to thrive, they need to preserve and nurture healthy interdependencies
  • in 2023, the loss of local newspapers accelerated to an average of 2.5 per week, “leaving more than 200 counties as ‘news deserts’ and meaning that more than half of all U.S. counties now have limited access to reliable local news and information.”
  • As in nature, it leaves the local ecosystem with fewer healthy interdependencies, making it more vulnerable to invasive species and disease — or, in society, diseased ideas.
  • It used to be that if you had the incredible privilege of serving as U.S. Supreme Court justice, in your wildest dreams you would never have an American flag hanging upside down
  • we have gone from you’re not supposed to say “hell” on the radio to a nation that is now being permanently exposed to for-profit systems of political and psychological manipulation (and throw in Russia and China stoking the fires today as well), so people are not just divided, but being divided. Yes, keeping Americans morally outraged is big business at home now and war by other means by our geopolitical rivals.
  • More than ever, we are living in the “never-ending storm” that Seidman described to me back in 2016, in which moral distinctions, context and perspective — all the things that enable people and politicians to make good judgments — get blown away.
  • Blown away — that is exactly what happens to the plants, animals and people in an ecosystem that loses its mangroves.
Javier E

Opinion | How to Force Justices Alito and Thomas to Recuse Themselves in the Jan. 6 Cas... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...thomas-recuse-trump-jan-6.html

Scotus impartiality constitution

shared by Javier E on 29 May 24 - No Cached
  • The U.S. Department of Justice — including the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, an appointed U.S. special counsel and the solicitor general, all of whom were involved in different ways in the criminal prosecutions underlying these cases and are opposing Mr. Trump’s constitutional and statutory claims — can petition the other seven justices to require Justices Alito and Thomas to recuse themselves not as a matter of grace but as a matter of law.
  • The Justice Department and Attorney General Merrick Garland can invoke two powerful textual authorities for this motion: the Constitution of the United States, specifically the due process clause, and the federal statute mandating judicial disqualification for questionable impartiality, 28 U.S.C. Section 455.
Javier E

Revealed: Israeli spy chief 'threatened' ICC prosecutor over war crimes inquiry | Israe... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-prosecutor-war-crimes-inquiry

spy chief icc prosecutor war crimes inquiry israel mossad trump history politics UN

shared by Javier E on 28 May 24 - No Cached
  • The diplomatic efforts were part of a coordinated effort by the governments of Netanyahu and Donald Trump in the US to place public and private pressure on the prosecutor and her staff.Between 2019 and 2020, in an unprecedented decision, the Trump administration imposed visa restrictions and sanctions on the chief prosecutor. The move was in retaliation to Bensouda’s pursuit of a separate investigation into war crimes in Afghanistan, allegedly committed by the Taliban and both Afghan and US military personnel.However, Mike Pompeo, then US secretary of state, linked the sanctions package to the Palestine case. “It’s clear the ICC is only putting Israel in [its] crosshairs for nakedly political purposes,” he said.
Javier E

The Authoritarian Grip on Working-Class Men - 0 views

jamestraub.substack.com/...-authoritarian-grip-on-working

masculinity toxic history culture crisis

shared by Javier E on 27 May 24 - No Cached
  • as Rachel Kleinfeld of the Carnegie Endowment  points out, working-class American men “are much more likely to be politically apathetic” than they are to be active authoritarians. “They look for belonging, purpose, and advice, and find a mix of grifters, political hacks and violent extremists who lead them down an ugly road.” That’s the manhood problem.
  • Donald Trump has a special genius for intuiting the dark, unspoken things that people want and need
  • He understands that the era when American men looked to Gary Cooper or Jimmy Stewart–men who protected, sacrificed, stood tall in the saddle–is over
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • ask, as both Kleinfeld and Reeves do, how we can reduce the demand for illiberalism and violence by helping working-class men find a place in an increasingly feminized society.
  • We often wonder whether the cause of our illiberal tilt is economic or cultural--a loss of financial security and hope for the future, or a wrenching change in identity, demography and values. The problem of manhood lies at the intersection of these two domains, for working-class men have lost both economic standing and social status.
  • Identity is not simply a dependent variable of economic standing. Men went to matter–as men. If that need is not satisfied by work, it has to be satisfied elsewhere. There must be alternatives to the manosphere. 
  • Everyone, of course, needs virtuous purpose in order to lead a full life, but American working-class men have lost so many traditional sources of selfless action that they have become especially vulnerable to the call of the selfish jerk. Where, then, do you find virtuous purpose? In volunteer work, for example, or in programs of national service. Organizations like Big Brothers can do every bit as much for the big brother as for the little one. 
  • Volunteerism no doubt sounds like a naive prescription in a world hellbent on self-aggrandizement. But the idea of “service,” and its emotional satisfaction, pervaded American life so long as the mainline Protestant churches flourished, which is to say until a generation or two ago.
  • People need to feel needed; and helping those who need you is a source of great joy. Is it really impossible to restore the idea that a man is not only a strong, stoical creature who can throw a football through a tire but one who seeks opportunities to serve others?
Javier E

(3) Chartbook 285: Cal-Tex - How Bidenomics is shaping America's multi-speed energy tra... - 0 views

adamtooze.substack.com/...ook-285-cal-tex-how-bidenomics

transition power generation politics policy

shared by Javier E on 27 May 24 - No Cached
  • If the Texas solar boom, the biggest in the USA, has little to do with Bidenomics, are we exaggerating the impact of Bidenomics? Rather than the shiny new tax incentives is it more general factors such as the plunging cost of PVs driving the renewable surge in the USA. Or, if policy is indeed the key, are state-level measures in Texas making the difference? Or, is this unfair to the IRA? Are its main effects still to come? Will it pile-on a boom that is already underway?
  • What did I learn?
  • First, when we compare the US renewable energy trajectory with the global picture, there is little reason to believe that Bidenomics has, so far, produced an exceptional US trajectory.
  • ...29 more annotations...
  • Everywhere, new investment in green energy generation is being propelled by general concern for the climate, shifting corporate and household demand, the plunging prices for solar and batteries triggered by Chinese policy, and a combination of national and regional interventions
  • How different would we expect this data to look without the IRA?
  • The most useful overview of these modeling efforts that I have been able to find is by Bistline et al “Power sector impacts of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022” in Environmental Research Letters November 2023. If anyone has a better source, please let me know.
  • The top panel shows the historical trajectory of US generating capacity from 1980 to 2021. The second half of the graphic shows how 11 different models predict that the US electricity system might be expected to develop up to 2035, with and without IRA.
  • all the models expect the trends of the 2010s to continue through to the 2030s which means that solar, wind and battery storage dominate America’s energy future. Even without the IRA, the low carbon share of electricity generation will likely rise to 50-55% by 2035. Bidenomics bumps that to 70-80 percent.
  • The question is: “How does the renewable surge of 2022-2024, compare to the model-based expectations, with and without the IRA?”
  • The answer is either, “so so”, or, more charitably, it is “too early to tell”. In broad terms the current rate of expansion is slightly above the rate the models predict without the provision of additional Bidenomics incentives. But what is also clear is that the current rate of expansion, is far short of the long-run pace that should be expected from the IRA
  • At this point, defenders of the IRA interject that the IRA has only just come into effect. Cash from the IRA is only beginning to flow. And in an environment of higher costs for renewable energy equipment and higher interest rates, cash matters.
  • As Yakov Feygin put it: “Maybe the pithiest way to put it is that there are pre-IRA trends and outside IRA trends, but IRA has served to rapidly compress the timeframes for installation in a lot of technologies. So five years has turned into two, for example.”
  • So, to judge the impact of the IRA to date, the real question is not what has been built in 2022 and 2023, but what is in the pipeline.
  • Advised by JP Morgan, sophisticated global players like Ørsted are optimizing their use of both the production and investment tax credits offered by the IRA to launch large new renewable schemes. Of course, correlation is not the same as causation
  • Where the IRA is perhaps doing its most important work may be in incentivizing the middle bracket of projects where green momentum is less certain.
  • According to Utility Drive: “The 10 largest U.S. developers plan to build 110,364 MW of new wind and solar projects over the next five years, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence, but the majority of these projects remain in early stages of development. Just 15% of planned wind and solar projects are under construction, and 13% are considered to be in advanced stages of development, … ”
  • The states that I have highlighted in red stand out either for their unusually low existing level of renewable power capacity or their lack of current momentum.
  • Along with Texas, the pipelines for the PJM, MISO and Southeast regions (which includes Florida) look particularly healthy.
  • The relatively modest California numbers should not be a surprise. As Yakov Feygin and others pointed out, what is needed in California is not more raw generating capacity, but more battery storage. And that is what we are seeing in the data.
  • The numbers would be even larger if it were not for the truly surreal logjam in California’s system for authorizing interconnections. According to Hamilton/Brookings data the volume of hybrid solar and batter capacity in the queue for approval is 6.5 times the capacity currently operating in the state. In other words there is an entire energy transition waiting to happen when the overloaded managerial processes of the system catch up
  • Texas’s less bureaucratic system seems to be one of its key advantages in the extremely rapid roll-out of solar.
  • though it may be true that globally speaking the United States as a whole is a laggard in renewable energy development,
  • If California (with an economy roughly comparable to that of Germany at current exchange rates) and Texas (with an economy roughly the size of Italy’s) were countries, they would be #3 and #5 in the world in solar capacity per capita.
  • the obvious question is, which are the laggards in the US energy system.
  • So there is a lot to get excited about, at, what we are learning to call, the “meso”-level of the economy (more on this in a future post).
  • What the state-level data reveal is that there are a significant number of large states in the USA where solar and wind energy have barely made any impact. Pennsylvania, for instance
  • The relative levels of sunshine between US states is irrelevant. As the global solar atlas shows, the entire United States has far better solar potential than North West Europe. If you can grow corn and tobbaco, you can do utility-scale solar. The fact that Arizona is not a solar giant is mind boggling.
  • Texas is both big and truly remarkable. California already is a world leader in renewable energy. Meanwhile, the majority of the US electricity system presents a very different picture. There is a huge distance to be traveled and the pace of solar build-out is unremarkable.
  • This is where national level incentives like the IRA must prove themselves
  • And these local battles in America matter. Given the extremely high per capita energy consumption in the USA, greening state-level energy systems is significant at the global level. It does not compare to the super-sized levels of emissions in China, but it matters.
  • Indonesia’s total installed electricity generating capacity is rated at 81 GW. As far as immediate impact on the global carbon balance is concerned, cleaning up the power systems of Pennsylvania and Illinois would make an even bigger impact.
  • A key test of Biden-era climate and industrial policy will be whether it can untie the local political economy of fossil fuels, which, across many regions of the United States still stands in the way of a green energy transition that now has all the force of economics and technological advantage on its side.
Javier E

Trump Killed Not Just the Libertarian Party But Maybe the Libertarian Movement Too - 0 views

www.theunpopulist.net/...illed-not-just-the-libertarian

libertarian movement party politics history culture crisis trump

shared by Javier E on 25 May 24 - No Cached
  • Though libertarianism as a political philosophy will continue, there is no longer anything resembling a coherent libertarian movement in American politics. That’s because the movement still bearing its name is no longer recognizably libertarian in any meaningful sense of the term. Nor can it still claim to be a political movement, which implies an association organized around not just a consistent set of ideas but a distinct political identity
  • For over a decade now, since Trump has dominated the national stage, longstanding disagreements have boiled over into a complete schism. There are those who have effectively become adjuncts of MAGA, and some who have gone firmly in the opposite direction, while others took a stance more akin to anti-anti-Trump voices who neither endorse nor firmly oppose the former president but train their ire toward those opposing Trump.
  • requires tracing internal libertarian disputes that began long before the rise of Trump. In some ways, they are a microcosm of similar developments in the American intellectual landscape writ large
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • In his 2007 history of the movement, Radicals for Capitalism, Brian Doherty identifies five key figures who most shaped the nascent ideology and its organized advocacy: author Ayn Rand, and economists Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Murray Rothbard
  • With one exception, all paired radical free-market and smaller government views with liberal tolerance and cosmopolitanism on social issues. None were religious, and Rand and Mises were both avowedly irreligious. Friedman and Hayek both trended more moderate and pragmatic, and also achieved the highest degree of mainstream intellectual recognitio
  • It was in Rothbard that the divergence began which today has culminated in the Libertarian Party’s convention transforming into a literal Trump rally
  • He was in many ways the most radical—an avowed anarchist—and the most marginal
  • he was also the most involved in creating a self-consciously libertarian movement and many of its institutions. In this he was aided by his skills as a prolific polemicist.
  • From the start, Trump’s brand of illiberal populism had more than a passing resemblance to Rothbard’s paleo strategy—minus, as many classical liberal critics had long predicted, any meaningful moves to actually shrink government
  • By accommodating and embracing conservative culture warriors, even including avowed white supremacists, Rothbard believed he was forming the basis of a political coalition to demolish modern big government
  • it included an open embrace of police brutality, fuming about the need to “dispense instant punishment” to “bums,” while railing against efforts to undo America’s white supremacist past. Later, opposition to immigration became one of the paleo posture’s signature issues.
  • Across the loose constellation of libertarian think tanks, advocacy organizations, and electoral efforts in both the L.P. and the GOP, the embrace or rejection of Rothbard’s “paleo” idea was a source of perennial tension. Rothbard himself was involved for a time in both the Libertarian Party and the Cato Institute, co-founding the latter before being acrimoniously ejected after a few years.
  • the other end of the movement came to embrace the view of libertarianism as fundamentally an extension of the larger liberal tradition, continuous with a classical liberal political philosophy rather than a socially conservative one.
  • Free markets and limited government were still a big part of the picture, but in service to a vision of a dynamic and pluralistic free society.
  • As much as each held a dim view of the other, both continued to work under the “libertarian” label.
  • As he outlined in a 1992 essay, “Right Wing Populism: A Strategy for the Paleo Movement,” paleolibertarianism was an explicit alliance between small-government radicalism and the extremist far-right.
  • it still embodied the burn-it-all-down reactionary ethos that saw tearing down established institutions as a necessary first step, even if that required an unrestrained autocrat
  • After the deadly 2017 neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, the then party leadership denounced the “blood and soil” rhetoric. But to the Rothbardians, this smacked of unacceptable wokeness. Within a few days, the Mises Caucus—named more for the ideas exhibited by the think-tank than the actual economist—was founded. Over the next few years, this group began launching hostile takeovers of state parties and then the national party. As they did so, the party increasingly adopted rhetoric that sounded more like the tiki-torch brigade than one committed to individual liberty.
  • The two camps within the movement—the cosmopolitan and the paleo—already strained to nearly the breaking point, went through the inevitable rupture. A number of differences and disagreements fueled the split, but most central was the divide into MAGA-friendly and anti-Trump sympathies.
  • It is no longer possible to ignore the conflict of visions about what kind of society freedom was supposed to yield. One in which private bigotry and established hierarchies were allowed free rein? Or an open and all-embracing one where different people and lifestyles disapproved by the traditional order could flourish?
  • The only way the libertarian movement’s demise could bring down libertarianism as a political-philosophical framework is if one expected the ideas themselves to disappear. Happily, a robust conviction of the centrality of individual liberty—or of the need to fight a tyrannical state—is in no danger of fully fading away.
Javier E

Nikki Haley Surrendered, but Not Her Voters - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...678461

voters trump biden campaign 2024 issues

shared by Javier E on 24 May 24 - No Cached
  • Pollsters suggest that about two-thirds of Haley voters preferred Joe Biden to Trump. Do the math, and that’s two-thirds of one-fifth of all Republicans. That’s not a lot of people in total. But it may be more than the margin of national victory in 2024
  • Polls in swing states that find that young voters and voters of color are drifting away from Biden also find that older and more conservative white voters are sticking with him. Older, more conservative, and white are not exactly synonymous with “anti-Trump Republican”—but the categories do considerably overlap.
  • Donald Trump campaigns as if he can return to the presidency with the votes of only his most zealous supporters, those who believe his lies about the election of 2020. Joe Biden understands that elections are decided not by the most zealous voters, but by the most conflicted: those who dislike the other fellow just that crucially decisive increment more than they dislike you
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • From the point of view of Trump-skeptical Republicans, this election is no more about Joe Biden than a fire in a children’s hospital is about the fire extinguisher. They don’t think, Gee, I wish this extinguisher were newer, so I’ll let the children burn to death. They think, I hope there’s still an ounce or two of flame-retardant foam left in this old thing—and if there is, I’ll be damn grateful for it.
Javier E

There Is Literally Nothing Trump Can Say That Will Stop Republicans from Voting for Him... - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...epublicans-from-voting-for-him

trump GOP cult personality cult politics

shared by Javier E on 24 May 24 - No Cached
  • These days, you’re more likely to find Trump’s words in one of Biden’s campaign ads than in anything put out by his many G.O.P. cheerleaders. Trump’s crazy quotes generate support for Democrats; Republicans like Haley just cringe and change the subject.
  • It was, of course, exactly because of this phenomenon that far too many failed to take seriously Trump’s reckless incitements after he refused to accept the results of the 2020 election.
  • If anything, he’s getting even more of a pass in this election. Little that he has said or done seems to have made any appreciable impact on an increasingly amnesiac electorate, even as the things he says or does get ever more unbelievable.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • As a result, Trump’s threats of revenge and retribution have become the background noise of the election year—it’s just more blah-blah-blah from a master of it
  • CREW, a good-government group in Washington, D.C., which reviewed more than thirteen thousand of Trump’s Truth Social posts for a report released this week.
  • They found that Trump had threatened to unleash the powers of the federal government on Biden twenty-five times in the past two years. Other targets against whom Trump called for vengeance included senators, judges, and members of Biden’s family. “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!”—a blunt Trump social-media post from last year cited in the report
  • yet Congress, even when it was under full Democratic control in the first two years of Biden’s Presidency, has failed to pass measures that might insulate the Justice Department and other parts of the executive branch from efforts to politicize it during a second Trump term, such as reforming the Insurrection Act to make it harder to deploy the military on U.S. soil or passing legislation to make it more difficult for the White House to interfere in federal law-enforcement investigations.
Javier E

Some Silicon Valley VCs Are Becoming More Conservative - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...valley-conservative-trump.html

silicon valley politics support GOP Trump VC

shared by Javier E on 24 May 24 - No Cached
  • The circle of Republican donors in the nation’s tech capital has long been limited to a few tech executives such as Scott McNealy, a founder of Sun Microsystems; Meg Whitman, a former chief executive of eBay; Carly Fiorina, a former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard; Larry Ellison, the executive chairman of Oracle; and Doug Leone, a former managing partner of Sequoia Capital.
  • But mostly, the tech industry cultivated close ties with Democrats. Al Gore, the former Democratic vice president, joined the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins in 2007. Over the next decade, tech companies including Airbnb, Google, Uber and Apple eagerly hired former members of the Obama administration.
  • During that time, Democrats moved further to the left and demonized successful people who made a lot of money, further alienating some tech leaders, said Bradley Tusk, a venture capital investor and political strategist who supports Mr. Biden.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • after Mr. Trump won the election that year, the world seemed to blame tech companies for his victory. The resulting “techlash” against Facebook and others caused some industry leaders to reassess their political views, a trend that continued through the social and political turmoil of the pandemic.
  • The start-up industry has also been in a downturn since 2022, with higher interest rates sending capital fleeing from risky bets and a dismal market for initial public offerings crimping opportunities for investors to cash in on their valuable investments.
  • Some investors said they were frustrated that his pick for chair of the Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan, has aggressively moved to block acquisitions, one of the main ways venture capitalists make money. They said they were also unhappy that Mr. Biden’s pick for head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, had been hostile to cryptocurrency companies.
  • Last month, Mr. Sacks, Mr. Thiel, Elon Musk and other prominent investors attended an “anti-Biden” dinner in Hollywood, where attendees discussed fund-raising and ways to oppose Democrats,
  • Some also said they disliked Mr. Biden’s proposal in March to raise taxes, including a 25 percent “billionaire tax” on certain holdings that could include start-up stock, as well as a higher tax rate on profits from successful investments.
  • “If you keep telling someone over and over that they’re evil, they’re eventually not going to like that,” he said. “I see that in venture capital.”
  • Some tech investors are also fuming over how Mr. Biden has handled foreign affairs and other issues.
  • Mr. Andreessen, a founder of Andreessen Horowitz, a prominent Silicon Valley venture firm, said in a recent podcast that “there are real issues with the Biden administration.” Under Mr. Trump, he said, the S.E.C. and F.T.C. would be headed by “very different kinds of people.” But a Trump presidency would not necessarily be a “clean win” either, he added.
  • Mr. Sacks said at the tech conference last week that he thought such taxes could kill the start-up industry’s system of offering stock options to founders and employees. “It’s a good reason for Silicon Valley to think really hard about who it wants to vote for,” he said.
  • “Tech, venture capital and Silicon Valley are looking at the current state of affairs and saying, ‘I’m not happy with either of those options,’” he said. “‘I can no longer count on Democrats to support tech issues, and I can no longer count on Republicans to support business issues.’”
  • Ben Horowitz, a founder of Andreessen Horowitz, wrote in a blog post last year that the firm would back any politician who supported “an optimistic technology-enabled future” and oppose any who did not. Andreessen Horowitz has donated $22 million to Fairshake, a political action group focused on supporting crypto-friendly lawmakers.
  • Venture investors are also networking with lawmakers in Washington at events like the Hill & Valley conference in March, organized by Jacob Helberg, an adviser to Palantir, a tech company co-founded by Mr. Thiel. At that event, tech executives and investors lobbied lawmakers against A.I. regulations and asked for more government spending to support the technology’s development in the United States.
  • This month, Mr. Helberg, who is married to Mr. Rabois, donated $1 million to the Trump campaign
Javier E

Sex-positive feminism had its moment - and now it has been replaced by voluntary celiba... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...sober-4b-sex-positive-feminism

feminism celibacy sex culture

shared by Javier E on 22 May 24 - No Cached
  • The campaign – which Fast Company described as “eyebrow-raising”, “controversial” and “tone-deaf” – did not land well. Some critics pointed out that celibacy can be a response to trauma. Others noted that abstaining from sex might be a smart move in a post-Roe US, where one accident could mean you are forced by repressive laws to give birth to a child you are not ready for and can’t possibly afford.
  • The actor Julia Fox was similarly unimpressed. “2.5 years of celibacy and never been better tbh,” she commented on a post about Bumble. Fox hasn’t talked much about her celibacy but last year she told Elle magazine that she just wanted to be left alone and was sick of men. “I feel like knowingly engaging in a heterosexual relationship, you are signing yourself up for an unhealthy dynamic,” she mused.
  • a fascinating change in culture. Sex-positive feminism, which was all about unapologetically celebrating female sexuality, has been on the way out for a few years now, and this feels like its final death knell
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • some sort of correction was probably due. Sex-positive feminism went from “hey, women shouldn’t feel ashamed about enjoying sex” to “it’s feminist to enjoy being choked while having lots of casual sex” alarmingly quickly.
  • What was meant to liberate women turned into a repackaging of the patriarchy. “It feels like we were tricked into exploiting ourselves,” one twentysomething told BuzzFeed, summing up the general vibe.
  • A new passion for celibacy among young women feels like a natural way of putting that chapter of feminism to bed.
Javier E

OpenAI Just Gave Away the Entire Game - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...678446

AI arrogance copyright history

shared by Javier E on 22 May 24 - No Cached
  • If you’re looking to understand the philosophy that underpins Silicon Valley’s latest gold rush, look no further than OpenAI’s Scarlett Johansson debacle.
  • the situation is also a tidy microcosm of the raw deal at the center of generative AI, a technology that is built off data scraped from the internet, generally without the consent of creators or copyright owners. Multiple artists and publishers, including The New York Times, have sued AI companies for this reason, but the tech firms remain unchastened, prevaricating when asked point-blank about the provenance of their training data.
  • At the core of these deflections is an implication: The hypothetical superintelligence they are building is too big, too world-changing, too important for prosaic concerns such as copyright and attribution. The Johansson scandal is merely a reminder of AI’s manifest-destiny philosophy: This is happening, whether you like it or not.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Altman and OpenAI have been candid on this front. The end goal of OpenAI has always been to build a so-called artificial general intelligence, or AGI, that would, in their imagining, alter the course of human history forever, ushering in an unthinkable revolution of productivity and prosperity—a utopian world where jobs disappear, replaced by some form of universal basic income, and humanity experiences quantum leaps in science and medicine. (Or, the machines cause life on Earth as we know it to end.) The stakes, in this hypothetical, are unimaginably high—all the more reason for OpenAI to accelerate progress by any means necessary.
  • As with other grand projects of the 20th century, the voting public had a voice in both the aims and the execution of the Apollo missions. Altman made it clear that we’re no longer in that world. Rather than waiting around for it to return, or devoting his energies to making sure that it does, he is going full throttle forward in our present reality.
  • Part of Altman’s reasoning, he told Andersen, is that AI development is a geopolitical race against autocracies like China. “If you are a person of a liberal-democratic country, it is better for you to cheer on the success of OpenAI” rather than that of “authoritarian governments,” he said. He noted that, in an ideal world, AI should be a product of nations. But in this world, Altman seems to view his company as akin to its own nation-state.
  • In response to one question about AGI rendering jobs obsolete, Jeff Wu, an engineer for the company, confessed, “It’s kind of deeply unfair that, you know, a group of people can just build AI and take everyone’s jobs away, and in some sense, there’s nothing you can do to stop them right now.” He added, “I don’t know. Raise awareness, get governments to care, get other people to care. Yeah. Or join us and have one of the few remaining jobs. I don’t know; it’s rough.”
  • Wu’s colleague Daniel Kokotajlo jumped in with the justification. “To add to that,” he said, “AGI is going to create tremendous wealth. And if that wealth is distributed—even if it’s not equitably distributed, but the closer it is to equitable distribution, it’s going to make everyone incredibly wealthy.”
  • This is the unvarnished logic of OpenAI. It is cold, rationalist, and paternalistic. That such a small group of people should be anointed to build a civilization-changing technology is inherently unfair, they note. And yet they will carry on because they have both a vision for the future and the means to try to bring it to fruition
  • Wu’s proposition, which he offers with a resigned shrug in the video, is telling: You can try to fight this, but you can’t stop it. Your best bet is to get on board.
Javier E

Infected blood inquiry: Another state failure - will things ever change? - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...c1997z82gdro

state failure candor duty truth bureaucracy UK scandal blood Ireland culture history

shared by Javier E on 21 May 24 - No Cached
  • Blame spread, accountability avoided.And the net result was year after year of stasis, the initial injustice made all the worse by a collective unwillingness to acknowledge it, let alone address it.
  • Mr, now Lord, Cameron said the government was “deeply sorry” after a public inquiry unequivocally blamed the British Army for one of the most controversial days in Northern Ireland's history, when 13 civil rights marchers were shot dead and 15 others were wounded.For 38 years, so many had waited for those words.Obfuscation, delay and denials until finally the truth emerged.
  • So you can be secretary of state, of all things, and still be misled?“It’s incredible. Most serious questions should be asked of Whitehall departments
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The big question, then, is how do you bring about widespread, deep-seated cultural change within the organs of government and institutions connected to it?
  • Can you legislate to change a culture?
  • Sir Brian Langstaff, the report author, thinks you might be able to – or at least make a start.
  • He suggests there should be a so-called duty of candour demanded in law for civil servants and others.It would then become a legal obligation to speak up, rather than a cultural expectation to shut up.Whistleblowing would be mandatory.But will it happen, and will it make any difference?
Javier E

Toxic Political Culture Has Even Some Slovaks Calling Country 'a Black Hole.' - The New... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...vakia-politics-black-hole.html

slovakia authoritarian attitudes west liberal democracy violence politics history crisis culture

shared by Javier E on 20 May 24 - No Cached
  • Of all the countries in Central and Eastern Europe that shook off communist rule in 1989, Slovakia has the highest proportion of citizens who view liberal democracy as a threat to their identity and values — 43 percent compared with 15 percent in the neighboring Czech Republic
  • Support for Russia has declined sharply since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but 27 percent of Slovaks see it as key strategic partner, the highest level in the region.
  • many of its people — particularly those living outside big cities — feel left behind and resentful, Mr. Meseznikov said, and are “more vulnerable than elsewhere to conspiracy theories and narratives that liberal democracy is a menace.”
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • The picture is much the same in many other formerly communist countrie
  • Slovakia’s politics are particularly poisonous, swamped by wild conspiracy theories and bile.
  • The foundations of this were laid in the 1990s when Mr. Meciar formed what is still one of the country’s two main political blocs: an alliance of right-wing nationalists, business cronies and anti-establishment leftists. All thrived on denouncing their centrist and liberal opponents as enemies willing to sell out the country’s interests to the West
  • “Meciar was a pioneer,” he said. “He was a typical representative of national populism with an authoritarian approach, and so is Fico.”
  • On the day Mr. Fico was shot, Parliament was meeting to endorse an overhaul of public television to purge what his governing party views as unfair bias in favor of political opponents, a reprise of efforts in the 1990s by Mr. Meciar to mute media critics.
  • The legislation was part of a raft of measures that the European Commission in February said risked doing “irreparable damage” to the rule of law. These include measures to limit corruption investigations and impose what critics denounced as Russian-style restrictions on nongovernmental organizations. The government opposes military aid to Ukraine and L.G.B.T.Q. rights, is often at odds with the European Union and, like Mr. Orban, favors friendly relations with Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia.
  • In the run-up to the election last September that returned Mr. Fico, a fixture of Slovak politics for more than two decades, to power, he and his allies took an increasingly hostile stance toward the United States and Ukraine, combined with sympathetic words for Russia.
  • Their statements often recalled a remark by Mr. Meciar, who, resisting demands in the 1990s that he must change his ways if Slovakia wanted to join the European Union, held up Russia as an alternative haven: “if they don’t want us in the West, we’ll go East.”
  • But, he added, “the frames that the society and its elites use to interpret the conflict remain the same: a choice between a Western path and being something of a bridge between the East and the West, as well as a choice between liberal democracy and illiberal, authoritarian government.”
  • Andrej Danko, the leader of the party, which is now part of the new coalition government formed by Mr. Fico after the September election, said that the attempt to assassinate Mr. Fico represented the “start of a political war” between the country’s two opposing camps.
  • Iveta Radicova, a sociologist opposed to Mr. Fico who is a former prime minister, said Slovakia’s woes were part of a wider crisis with roots that extend far beyond its early stumbles under Mr. Meciar.
  • “Many democracies are headed toward the black hole,” as countries from Hungary in the East to the Netherlands in the West succumb to the appeal of national populism, she said. “This shift is happening everywhere.”
Javier E

Dave Ramsey Tells Millions What to Do With Their Money. People Under 40 Say He's Wrong.... - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...nder-40-say-hes-wrong-56733630

financial advice advisor austerity discipline Gen Z money learning trends culture

shared by Javier E on 19 May 24 - No Cached
  • Ramsey, the well-known and intensely followed 63-year-old conservative Christian radio host, has 4.4 million Instagram followers, 1.9 million TikTok followers and legions more who listen to his radio shows and podcasts.
  • His message is brutal and direct: Avoid debt at all costs. Pay for everything in cash. Embrace frugality.
  • Plenty of 20- and 30-year-olds are pushing back, largely on TikTok. The hashtag #daveramseywouldntapprove, for instance, has 66.8 million views. Many say they don’t want to eat rice and beans every night—a popular Ramsey trope—or hold down multiple jobs to pay off loans. They also say Ramsey is out of touch with their reality.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • Rising inflation has led to surging prices for groceries, cars and many essentials. The cost of a college education has skyrocketed in two decades, with the average student debt for federal loans at $37,000, according to the Education Department. Overall debts for Americans in their 30s jumped 27% from late 2019 to early 2023—steeper than for any other age group.
  • home prices have risen considerably, while wages haven’t kept pace.
  • “What Dave Ramsey really misses is any kind of social context,” says Morgan Sanner, a
  • She began paying off $48,000 in student loans (a Ramsey do) and also took out a loan to buy a 2016 Honda (a Ramsey don’t). Her rationale was that it was safer to pay extra for a more reliable car than a junker she could buy with cash. S
  • he feels these sorts of real-life decisions don’t factor into his advice.
  • When she saw a comment from Ramsey online about how people receiving pandemic stimulus payments were “pretty much screwed already,” Israel felt it came across as shaming people. The pandemic shutdowns ended a decadelong economic expansion for Black Americans, a disproportionate number of whom lost their jobs and relied on those checks.
  • “Moralizing financial decisions is very damaging to marginalized groups,” says Israel, who is Black.
  • Many young adults scratch their heads over his advice that people should let their credit scores dwindle and die.
  • People need a good credit score, says Mandy Phillips, a 39-year-old residential mortgage loan originator in Redding, Calif. She uses TikTok and other social media to educate millennials and Gen Z about home buying. Scores are vital when applying for mortgages and rentals.
  • She also takes issue with Ramsey’s advice to only obtain a home loan if you can take out a 15-year fixed-rate mortgage with a down payment of at least 10%. Few younger buyers can pay the large monthly bills of shorter-term mortgages.
  • “That may have worked years ago in the ’80s and ’90s, but that’s not something that is achievable for the average American,” Phillips says.
  • Housing is a particularly hot-button topic. He advises people to only buy a house with their lawfully wedded spouse. Yet many young adults are pooling their finances with partners, friends or roommates to buy their first homes. 
  • Ramsey is perhaps best known for advocating a “debt snowball method”: People with multiple loans pay off the smallest balances first, regardless of interest rate. As you knock out each loan, he says, the money you have to put toward larger debt snowballs. Seeing small wins motivates people to keep going, he says.Conventional economic theory would be to pay off the highest-interest loans first, says James Choi, a finance professor at the Yale School of Management, who has studied the advice of popular finance gurus.
  • Ramsey’s save-not-spend message sounds logical, young adults say. It’s his all-or-nothing approach that doesn’t work for them.
  • Kate Hindman, a 31-year-old administrative assistant in Pasadena, Calif., who has taken an anti-Ramsey stance on TikTok, ended up with $30,000 in credit-card debt after she and her husband faced income-reducing job changes. They’ve since turned it into a consolidation loan with an 8% interest rate and pay about $1,200 a month.
  • She wonders if the debt aversion is generational. Perhaps younger people are less willing to make huge sacrifices to be debt-free. Maybe carrying some amount of debt forever is a new normal.
Javier E

Opinion | I was a Republican Partisan. It Altered the Way I Saw the World. - The New Yo... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...lican-partisan-world-view.html

partisan epistemic bubble polarization credulity culture history politics

shared by Javier E on 18 May 24 - No Cached
  • I remember when supporters of Operation Iraqi Freedom constantly hyped good news from the battlefield and minimized bad news — right until the bad news became so overwhelming
  • Before Bush changed tactics and reinforced American troops during the surge in 2007 and 2008, it sometimes felt disloyal in Republican circles to criticize the course of the war.
  • Could we have changed our military tactics sooner if we had been able to see the battlefield more clearly? Did paradigm blindness — the unwillingness or inability to accept challenges to our core ways of making sense of the world — inhibit our ability to see obvious truths?
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • the red-blue divide is perhaps less illuminating than the gap between engaged and disengaged Americans, in which an exhausted majority encounters the highly polarized activist wings of both parties and shrinks back from the fray
  • The wings aren’t changing each other’s minds — hard-core Democrats aren’t going to persuade hard-core Republicans — but they’re also not reaching sufficient numbers of persuadable voters to break America’s partisan deadlock.
  • In 2020, when I was doing research for my book about the growing danger of partisan division, I began to learn more about what extreme partisanship does not only to our hearts but also to our minds.
  • It can deeply and profoundly distort the way we view the world. We become so emotionally and spiritually invested in the outcome of a political contest that we can inadvertently become disconnected from reality.
  • Our heart connects with our mind in such a way that the heart demands that the mind conform to its deepest desires
  • When a partisan encounters negative information, it can often trigger the emotional equivalent of a fight-or-flight response. This applies not just to negative arguments but also to negative facts. To deal with the emotional response, we seek different arguments and alternative facts.
  • If you are a true partisan, you essentially become an unpaid lawyer for your side. Every “good” fact that bolsters your argument is magnified. Every “bad” fact is minimized or rationalized.
  • When partisanship reaches its worst point, every positive claim about your side is automatically believed, and every negative allegation is automatically disbelieved.
  • allegations of wrongdoing directed at your side are treated as acts of aggression — proof that “they” are trying to destroy “us.”
  • You see this reality most plainly in the daily Republican theatrics surrounding Trump’s criminal indictments. Rather than wrestle seriously with the profoundly troubling claims against him, they treat the criminal cases as proof of Democratic perfidy. They believe every claim against Hunter and Joe Biden and not a single claim against Trump.
  • ask why people are checking out, and one reason is that partisans make it so very difficult to engage.
  • The problem is most pronounced (and often overtly threatening) on the MAGA right, but it’s endemic to our partisan wings
  • as partisanship deepens, partisan subcultures can get increasingly weird. They become so convinced of the us-versus-them dynamic that they’ll eventually believe virtually anything, as long as it’s a claim against the other side.
  • If decades of partisanship have persuaded you that your opponents are evil, have no morals and want to destroy the country, then why wouldn’t they hack voting machines or recruit a pop star as a government asset?
  • I have some rules to help temper my worst partisan impulses.
  • Expose yourself to the best of the other side’s point of view — including the best essays, podcasts and books.
  • when you encounter a new idea, learn about it from its proponents before you read its opponents.
  • when you encounter bad news about a cause that you hold dear — whether it’s a presidential campaign, an international conflict or even a claim against a person you admire, take a close and careful look at the evidence
Javier E

Suddenly There Aren't Enough Babies. The Whole World Is Alarmed. - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-global-decline-cause-ddaf8be2

population demographic revolution decline global response

shared by Javier E on 14 May 24 - No Cached
  • The world is at a startling demographic milestone. Sometime soon, the global fertility rate will drop below the point needed to keep population constant. It may have already happened.
  • Fertility is falling almost everywhere, for women across all levels of income, education and labor-force participation.
  • Governments have rolled out programs to stop the decline—but so far they’ve barely made a dent.
  • ...49 more annotations...
  • It’s dropping in developing countries, too. India surpassed China as the most populous country last year, yet its fertility is now below replacement.
  • “The demographic winter is coming,”
  • Smaller populations come with diminished global clout, raising questions in the U.S., China and Russia about their long-term standings as superpowers.
  • Some demographers think the world’s population could start shrinking within four decades—one of the few times it’s happened in history.
  • A year ago Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida declared that the collapse of the country’s birthrate left it “standing on the verge of whether we can continue to function as a society.”
  • Had fertility stayed near 2.1, where it stood in 2007, the U.S. would have welcomed an estimated 10.6 million more babies since
  • In 2017, when the global fertility rate—a snapshot of how many babies a woman is expected to have over her lifetime—was 2.5, the United Nations thought it would slip to 2.4 in the late 2020s. Yet by 2021, the U.N. concluded, it was already down to 2.3—close to what demographers consider the global replacement rate of about 2.2
  • He has found that national birth registries are typically reporting births 10% to 20% below what the U.N. projected.
  • China reported 9 million births last year, 16% less than projected in the U.N.’s central scenario. In the U.S., 3.59 million babies were born last year, 4% less than the U.N. projected. In other countries, the undershoot is even larger: Egypt reported 17% fewer births last year. In 2022, Kenya reported 18% fewer.
  • In 2017 the U.N. projected world population, then 7.6 billion, would keep climbing to 11.2 billion in 2100. By 2022 it had lowered and brought forward the peak to 10.4 billion in the 2080s. That, too, is likely out of date
  • the University of Washington now thinks it will peak around 9.5 billion in 2061 then start declining. 
  • The falling birthrates come with huge implications for the way people live, how economies grow and the standings of the world’s superpowers.
  • In the U.S., a short-lived pandemic baby boomlet has reversed. The total fertility rate fell to 1.62 last year, according to provisional government figures, the lowest on record.
  • In 2017, when the fertility rate was 1.8, the Census Bureau projected it would converge over the long run to 2.0. It has since revised that down to 1.5. “It has snuck up on us,”
  • Historians refer to the decline in fertility that began in the 18th century in industrializing countries as the demographic transition. As lifespans lengthened and more children survived to adulthood, the impetus for bearing more children declined. As women became better educated and joined the workforce, they delayed marriage and childbirth, resulting in fewer children. 
  • Some demographers see this as part of a “second demographic transition,” a societywide reorientation toward individualism that puts less emphasis on marriage and parenthood, and makes fewer or no children more acceptable. 
  • In research published in 2021, the University of Maryland’s Kearney and two co-authors looked for possible explanations for the continued drop. They found that state-level differences in parental abortion notification laws, unemployment, Medicaid availability, housing costs, contraceptive usage, religiosity, child-care costs and student debt could explain almost none of the decline
  • “We suspect that this shift reflects broad societal changes that are hard to measure or quantify,” they conclude.
  • while raising children is no more expensive than before, parents’ preferences and perceived constraints have changed
  • “If people have a preference for spending time building a career, on leisure, relationships outside the home, that’s more likely to come in conflict with childbearing.” 
  • Once a low fertility cycle kicks in, it effectively resets a society’s norms and is thus hard to break, said Jackson. “The fewer children you see your colleagues and peers and neighbors having, it changes the whole social climate,”
  • Fertility is below replacement in India even though the country is still poor and many women don’t work—factors that usually sustain fertility.
  • Urbanization and the internet have given even women in traditional male-dominated villages a glimpse of societies where fewer children and a higher quality of life are the norm. “People are plugged into the global culture,
  • mothers and fathers, especially those that are highly educated, spend more time with their children than in the past. “The intensity of parenting is a constraint,”
  • Sub-Saharan Africa once appeared resistant to the global slide in fertility, but that too is changing. The share of all women of reproductive age using modern contraception grew from 17% in 2012 to 23% in 2022
  • Jose Rimon, a professor of public health at Johns Hopkins University, credits that to a push by national leaders in Africa which, he predicted, would drive fertility down faster than the U.N. projects. 
  • Mae Mariyam Thomas, 38, who lives in Mumbai and runs an audio production company, said she’s opted against having children because she never felt the tug of motherhood. She sees peers struggling to meet the right person, getting married later and, in some instances, divorcing before they have kids. At least three of her friends have frozen their eggs,
  • Danielle Vermeer grew up third in a family of four children on Chicago’s North Side, where her neighborhood was filled with Catholics of Italian, Irish and Polish descent and half her close friends had as many siblings as her or more.
  • Her Italian-American father was one of four children who produced 14 grandchildren. Now her parents have five grandchildren, including Vermeer’s two children, ages 4 and 7.
  • The 35-year-old, who is the co-founder of a fashion thrifting app, said that before setting out to have children, she consulted dozens of other couples and her Catholic church and read at least eight books on the subject, including one by Pope Paul VI. She and her husband settled on two as the right number.“The act of bringing a child into this world is an incredible responsibility,” she said.
  • Perhaps no country has been trying longer than Japan. After fertility fell to 1.5 in the early 1990s, the government rolled out a succession of plans that included parental leave and subsidized child care. Fertility kept falling.
  • In 2005, Kuniko Inoguchi was appointed the country’s first minister responsible for gender equality and birthrate. The main obstacle, she declared, was money: People couldn’t afford to get married or have children. Japan made hospital maternity care free and introduced a stipend paid upon birth of the child. 
  • Japan’s fertility rate climbed from 1.26 in 2005 to 1.45 in 2015. But then it started declining again, and in 2022 was back to 1.26.
  • This year, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida rolled out yet another program to increase births that extends monthly allowances to all children under 18 regardless of income, free college for families with three children, and fully paid parental leave.
  • noguchi, now a member of parliament’s upper house, said the constraint on would-be parents is no longer money, but time. She has pressed the government and businesses to adopt a four-day workweek
  • If you’re a government official or manager of a big corporation, you should not worry over questions of salary now, but that in 20 years time you will have no customers, no clients, no applicants to the Self-Defense Forces.”
  • Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has pushed one of Europe’s most ambitious natality agendas. Last year he expanded tax benefits for mothers so that women under the age of 30 who have a child are exempt from paying personal income tax for life. That’s on top of housing and child-care subsidies as well as generous maternity leaves. 
  • Hungary’s fertility rate, though still well below replacement, has risen since 2010. But the Vienna Institute of Demography attributed this primarily to women delaying childbirth because of a debt crisis that hit around 2010. Adjusted for that, fertility has risen only slightly, it concluded.
  • The usual prescription in advanced countries is more immigration, but that has two problems.
  • With no reversal in birthrates in sight, the attendant economic pressures are intensifying. Since the pandemic, labor shortages have become endemic throughout developed countries. That will only worsen in coming years as the postcrisis fall in birthrates yields an ever-shrinking inflow of young workers, placing more strain on healthcare and retirement systems.
  • worsening demographics could make this a second consecutive “lost decade” for global economic growth.
  • The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation found little evidence that pronatalist policies lead to sustained rebounds in fertility. A woman may get pregnant sooner to capture a baby bonus, researchers say, but likely won’t have more kids over the course of her lifetime.
  • As more countries confront stagnant population, immigration between them is a zero-sum gam
  • Historically, host countries have sought skilled migrants who enter through formal, legal channels, but recent inflows have been predominantly unskilled migrants often entering illegally and claiming asylum.
  • High levels of immigration have also historically aroused political resistance,
  • Many of the leaders keenest to raise birthrates are most resistant to immigratio
  • As birthrates fall, more regions and communities experience depopulation, with consequences ranging from closed schools to stagnant property values. Less selective colleges will soon struggle to fill classrooms because of the plunge in birthrates that began in 2007, said Fernández-Villaverde. Vance said rural hospitals can’t stay open because of the falling local population.
  • An economy with fewer children will struggle to finance pensions and healthcare for growing ranks of elderly. South Korea’s national pension fund, one of the world’s largest, is on track to be depleted by 2055
  • There’s been little public pressure to act, said Sok Chul Hong, an economist at Seoul National University. “The elderly are not very interested in pension reform, and the youth are apathetic towards politics,” he said. “It is truly an ironic situation.”
Javier E

Opinion | Biden's Approval Is Low, Except Compared With Everyone Else's - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...biden-approval.html

biden approval comparative leaders european politics pandemic economics

shared by Javier E on 14 May 24 - No Cached
  • Q. What do you call someone who speaks only one language?A. An American.
  • in general, Americans’ lack of language skills is less important than their insularity, their relative unfamiliarity with what happens and how things work in other nations.
  • Other countries, especially wealthy ones that more or less match the United States in technological development and general ability to get things done, are a sort of mirror that helps us see ourselves more clearly. Yet many Americans, even supposedly knowledgeable commentators, often seem unaware of both the ways other nations are similar to us and the ways they are different.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • how many are aware that President Biden is among the more popular — well, less unpopular — leaders in the Western world?
  • First, let’s talk about some other international comparisons that seem relevant to the current situation.
  • But public perception of our economic performance is strongly colored by rising prices. Inflation — the rate at which prices are rising — has subsided a lot, but prices haven’t and won’t come down
  • No matter what we did, many people were going to die — but the death toll was affected by politics, perhaps especially by the way vaccines became a front in the culture war. And America had a really bad pandemic, even compared with its peers. U.S. life expectancy was already lagging behind comparable countries’ by 2019, but the gap widened after Covid-19 struck.
  • On the other hand, the U.S. economy experienced an exceptionally strong bounce back from the pandemic recession. Even after adjusting for inflation, U.S. gross domestic product per capita is up 7 percent since the eve of the pandemic, greatly exceeding growth in other major wealthy economies
  • This would seem on the face of it to say something good about Biden’s economic policies.
  • Although we hear politicians on the campaign trail trying to make hay with the old Reagan-era question — Are you better off than you were four years ago? — there’s a lot of amnesia about what was actually happening in 2020, namely a deadly, terrifying pandemic
  • there have been huge recriminations against policymakers, both the Biden administration and the Federal Reserve, either for supposedly causing the bout of inflation or at any rate failing to prevent it.
  • the similarities between the wealthiest nations are more revealing than their differences.
  • Inflation surged almost everywhere after the pandemic. And if you take care to compare “apples to Äpfel” — to use the same consumer price measures — inflation has been remarkably similar in different countries.
  • Since the eve of the pandemic, the Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices has risen 19.6 percent in the United States and 19.8 percent in the euro area.
  • This strongly suggests that pandemic-related disruptions, rather than national policies, were inflation’s main driver.
  • Still, inflation rankles voters. Even when income growth exceeds inflation, as it has in the United States, people tend to feel that they earned their higher wages only to have them snatched away by higher prices
  • this is probably the most important reason that, according to tracking polls conducted by Morning Consult, every single leader of a Group of 7 nation is underwater, with more voters disapproving than approving of their leadership.
  • So who’s the winner of this unpopularity contest? Who has the least bad net approval? The answer is Joe Biden, with Giorgia Meloni of Italy a close second. The other Group of 7 leaders are even more unpopular
  • this has political consequences
  • every political analysis that says the fault for Biden’s low approval lies with the president and his campaign — that he’s too old (although that narrative, after suddenly peaking, mostly faded away after his State of the Union address) or is out of touch with the concerns of “real” Americans — needs to explain why he’s doing less badly than his foreign peers.
Javier E

Biden Needs to Learn From the Democrats' Disaster in '68 - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...ocrats-disaster-in-68-9024144a

1960s demonstration Democratic party liberal candidate biden politics

shared by Javier E on 12 May 24 - No Cached
  • The conventional wisdom of 1968 was that Humphrey lost to Nixon because he couldn’t find the courage to break with Johnson on a war that a majority of Americans had come to oppose.
  • That’s almost certainly wrong: Disaffected liberals ultimately came back, but disaffected blue-collar voters, who largely supported the war and abhorred the chaos in the streets, defected to Nixon or to George Wallace. (A Harris Poll found that two-thirds of respondents supported the Chicago cops’ tactics.)
  • The shrunken Democratic base that emerged from the election is very much the one the party relies on today: Blacks and well-educated white liberals.
Javier E

Opinion | The Limits of Moralism in Israel and Gaza - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...oreign-policy-israel-gaza.html

israel gaza moral clarity tragedy dilemma freedom tolerance lesser of two evils balance absolutism

shared by Javier E on 12 May 24 - No Cached
  • Foreign policy can make a mockery of moral certitude. You’re trying to master a landscape of anarchy policed by violence, where ideological differences make American polarization look like genial neighborliness, where even a superpower’s ability to impose its will dissolves with distance, where any grand project requires alliances with tyranny and worse.
  • This seems clear when you consider the dilemmas of the past
  • It’s why the “good war” of World War II involved a partnership with a monster in Moscow and the subjection of half of Europe to totalitarian oppression.
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • It’s why the “bad war” of Vietnam was only escaped at the cost of betraying the South Vietnamese and making a deal with yet another monster in Beijing.
  • The alternative is a form of argument in which essential aspects of the world, being inconvenient to moral absolutism, simply disappear.
  • A “realist” foreign policy can slide from describing power to excusing depredations.
  • But seeing statecraft as a tragic balancing of evils is still essential, especially amid the kind of moral fervor that attends a conflict like Israel’s war in Gaza.
  • But in active controversies the tragic vision can seem like a cold way of looking at the world. Lean into it too hard, and you get accused of ignoring injustice or recapitulating the indifference that gave cover to past atrocities.
  • The difficulty is that liberal “freedom” is on offer almost nowhere in the Middle East, certainly not in Gaza under Hamas’s rule, and the most challenging “otherness of beliefs” in this situation are the beliefs that motivated the massacres of Oct. 7.
  • a hype around Israeli moral failures — it's not enough for a war that yields so many casualties to be unjust, if it’s wrong it must be genocide — that ends up suppressing the harsh implications of a simple call for peace.
  • A representative passage, from Pankaj Mishra in The London Review of Books, describes many protesters as “motivated by the simple wish to uphold the ideals that seemed so universally desirable after 1945: respect for freedom, tolerance for the otherness of beliefs and ways of life; solidarity with human suffering; and a sense of moral responsibility for the weak and persecuted.”
  • No doubt many campus protesters have these motivations.
  • The alternative articulated by, for instance, Mitt Romney — “We stand by allies, we don’t second-guess them” — is not a serious policy for a hegemon balancing its global obligations
  • For example, reading the apologia for pro-Palestinian protests from certain left-wing intellectuals, you have a sense of both elision and exaggeration
  • seem untroubled by this fact, and perfectly comfortable with supporting not just peaceful negotiation but a revolutionary struggle led by Islamist fanatics.
  • Which yields the moral dilemma the protests don’t acknowledge: Ending the war on the terms they want could grant a major strategic victory to the regional alliance dedicated to the murder of Israelis and their expulsion from the Middle East.
  • Maybe the Gaza war is unjust enough, and Israeli goals unachievable enough, that there’s no alternative to vindicating Hamas’s blood-soaked strategy
  • you have to be honest about what you’re endorsing: a brutal weighing-out of evils, not any sort of triumph for “universally desirable” ideals.
  • Then a similar point applies to supporters of the Israeli war, for whom moral considerations — the evil of Hamas, the historical suffering of the Jewish people, the special American relationship with Israel — are invoked as an argument-ender in an inflexible way
  • We are constantly urged to “stand with Israel” when it’s unclear if Israel knows what it’s doing.
  • Joe Biden’s administration is chastised for betrayal when it tries to influence Israel’s warmaking, even though the Israeli government’s decisions before and since Oct. 7 do not inspire great confidence.
  • Biden’s specific attempts to micromanage the conflict may be misguided or hamfisted
  • But it’s not misguided for America, an imperium dealing with multiplying threats, to decline to write a blank check for a war being waged without a clear plan for victory or for peace.
  • Another difficulty is that some instigators of the protests
  • In each case, you have a desire that mirrors the impulse of the left-wing intellectuals — to make foreign policy easy by condensing everything to a single moral judgment. But the problems of the world cannot be so easily reduced.
  • Being cold-eyed and tragic-minded does not mean abandoning morality. But it means recognizing that often nobody is simply right, no single approach is morally obvious, and no strategy is clean.
‹ Previous 21 - 40 of 21123 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page
Join this group