Germany needs to stop messing around! - 0 views
Tucker Carlson and the Beer Hall Putz - 0 views
My Teenage Son Thinks the World Is Falling Apart. I've Changed How I Talk to Him About It. - 0 views
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I, by contrast, enjoyed a largely tragedy-free childhood. I grew up in the glow of the 1980s, going to the mall, listening to Men Without Hats on my Walkman and watching “MacGyver” on television. Oh, MacGyver! Is there anything in this world that can’t be fixed with duct tape, a Swiss Army Knife and a roguish smile? You get the idea. I believed, wholesale, in happy endings. As a parent, I offered my boys the same upbeat reassurances that my own parents offered me, when the Cold War was raging and Ronald Reagan was assuring us that it was “morning in America.”
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To be sure, I worried about my kids, especially when they were little. In America, there is an entire industry that caters to such worries and offers endless fixes: car seats, covers for electric outlets, baby gates, window guards, corner protectors, toilet locks and anti-scalding devices for faucets. When my kids were young, I bought plenty of this stuff, partly because it made me feel like I was doing my job — like I was in control. The funny thing is, the older my kids got, the more I realized just how little control I had. My kids, of course, knew it, too.
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My youngest son, Lucian, who is now 15, has a fatalistic streak. He recently observed to me, “The world is coming apart, isn’t it, Dad?” His proof, which was ample, included climate change, power outages, Ukraine, Gaza and the protests on the college campus near us. And he didn’t seem convinced that any of the world’s “supreme leaders,” as he called them, were doing an especially good job.
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untitled - 0 views
Opinion | MAGA Will Fall for Anything - The New York Times - 0 views
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JD Vance also jumped on the claim, with possibly the most destructive message. His role in the campaign is to try to apply Yale Law School polish to many of MAGA’s most demented conspiracies. He posted that he’s heard from constituents in Ohio who are worried about Haitian migrants abducting pets, but then he said, “It’s possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false.”
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And how did he suggest that his followers respond? By continuing to spread baseless claims. “Don’t let the crybabies in the media dissuade you, fellow patriots,” he wrote on X. “Keep the cat memes flowing.”
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Hear this long enough, and it seeps into your bones. You begin to develop a level of antipathy and distrust so profound that you are capable of believing just about anything about your opponents. After all, if Democrats are “demoncrats,” what won’t they do to attain power? If the immigrant community is full of rapists and drug dealers, how hard is it to imagine that they might kill and eat cats and dogs, never mind ducks?
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(1) Chartbook 313 Being realistic in the polycrisis? Or, does the West/global North kno... - 0 views
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The challenge of actually being in medias res as fully as possible, is what preoccupies me in recent books, shorter writing, this newsletter and the podcast.
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More simply this challenge can also be formulated in a series of snappy questions: Where are we? Do we know what planet we are actually on? Can we come back down to earth? Who is “we”? And, most urgently, the classic refrain: “What time is it?
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Do we know, do we really know how fast the clock is ticking and where we are on the timeline of history?
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Opinion | Harris Can Win on the Economy, but She Needs a Stronger Message - The New Yor... - 0 views
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she must emphasize that economic freedom, like other rights, protects what we value most against those who would take it away. She must show that her party will fight for workers and families, even at the cost of angering donors and making enemies in boardrooms
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Although Democrats see Mr. Trump as a chaotic bad boss in chief, many supporters see him as the real defender of economic security, decent jobs and a safe and orderly world. His call for tariffs on all imported goods and his promise to beat up on companies until they lower prices may be unrealistic, but they are concrete promises to shake up the system on behalf of ordinary people. That’s the kind of dramatic change so many people seem to want.
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As long as voters feel threatened and aggrieved in their everyday lives, the politics that gives voice to that feeling will have the advantage, even if it is reckless or ineffective.
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Opinion | Republican Science Denial Has Nasty Real-World Consequences - The New York Times - 0 views
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In April 2020, 14 percent reported to Pew Research that they had little or no faith that scientists would “act in the best interest of the public.” By October 2023, that figure had risen to 38 percent.
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Over the same period, the share of Democrats who voiced little or no confidence rose much less and from a smaller base line — to 13 percent from 9 percent.
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“Empirical data do not support the conclusion of a crisis of public trust in science,” Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, historians of science at Harvard and Caltech, write in their 2022 article “From Anti-Government to Anti-Science: Why Conservatives Have Turned Against Science.” But the data “do support the conclusion of a crisis of conservative trust in science.”
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Yuval Noah Harari's Apocalyptic Vision - The Atlantic - 0 views
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He shares with Jared Diamond, Steven Pinker, and Slavoj Žižek a zeal for theorizing widely, though he surpasses them in his taste for provocative simplifications.
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In medieval Europe, he explains, “Knowledge = Scriptures x Logic,” whereas after the scientific revolution, “Knowledge = Empirical Data x Mathematics.”
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Silicon Valley’s recent inventions invite galaxy-brain cogitation of the sort Harari is known for. The larger you feel the disruptions around you to be, the further back you reach for fitting analogies
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The Worst Cat Memes You've Ever Seen - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Taken seriously, the content of these posts is deeply offensive and dehumanizing. But the people sharing them get to hide behind a thin veil of irony: They’re just some funny cats. If you’re offended, that’s your problem
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Trump is well versed in this tactic—he routinely attempts to walk right up to the edge of plausible deniability. Consider, for example, the time he floated the idea of executing one of his top generals
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this behavior has been called doing it “for the lulz.” As Adrian Chen chronicled in The Nation in 2014, lulz—a perversion of lol—justifies heinous behavior online. The term came out of the bowels of 4chan in the mid-aughts and typically means maniacally laughing at a victim. It has often been associated with jokes about topics such as the Holocaust, suicide, terrorism, and rape
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The life of Sohrab Ahmari, a post-liberal thinker in search of the common good - Cathol... - 0 views
Teen Girls' Brains Aged Rapidly During Pandemic, Study Finds - The New York Times - 0 views
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measured cortical thinning, a process that starts in either late childhood or early adolescence, as the brain begins to prune redundant synapses and shrink its outer layer.
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Scans taken in 2021, after shutdowns started to lift, showed that both boys and girls had experienced rapid cortical thinning during that period
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the effect was far more notable in girls, whose thinning had accelerated, on average, by 4.2 years ahead of what was expected; the thinning in boys’ brains had accelerated 1.4 years ahead of what was expected.
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Opinion | Trump Is Nothing Without Republican Accomplices - The New York Times - 0 views
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Key members of France’s main conservative party, the Republican Federation, many of whom were inside the Parliament building that day, sympathized publicly with the rioters. Some praised the insurrectionists as heroes and patriots. Others dismissed the importance of the attack, denying that there had been an organized plot to overthrow the government.
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When a parliamentary commission was established to investigate the events of Feb. 6, Republican Federation leaders sabotaged the investigation at each step, blocking even modest efforts to hold the rioters to accoun
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Protected from prosecution, many of the insurrection’s organizers were able to continue their political careers. Some of the rioters went on to form the Victims of Feb. 6, a fraternity-like organization that later served as a recruitment channel for the Nazi-sympathizing Vichy government established in the wake of the 1940 German invasion.
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Vers l'écologie de guerre - Pierre Charbonnier - Éditions La Découverte - 0 views
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L'étrange hypothèse qui structure ce livre est que la seule chose plus dangereuse que la guerre pour la nature et le climat, c'est la paix
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Nous sommes en effet les héritiers d'une histoire intellectuelle et politique qui a constamment répété l'axiome selon lequel créer les conditions de la paix entre les hommes nécessitait d'exploiter la nature, d'échanger des ressources et de fournir à tous et toutes la prospérité suffisante. Dans cette logique, pour que jalousie, conflit et désir de guerre s'effacent, il fallait d'abord lutter contre la rareté des ressources naturelles. Il fallait aussi un langage universel à l'humanité, qui sera celui des sciences, des techniques, du développement.
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Ces idées, que l'on peut faire remonter au XVIIIe siècle, ont trouvé au milieu du XXe une concrétisation tout à fait frappante. Au lendemain de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, le développement des infrastructures fossiles a été jumelé à un discours pacifiste et universaliste qui entendait saper les causes de la guerre en libérant la productivité. Ainsi, la paix, ou l'équilibre des grandes puissances mis en place par les États-Unis, est en large partie un don des fossiles, notamment du pétrole.
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'The Demon of Unrest' Review: The Seeds of Civil War - WSJ - 0 views
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Mr. Larson promptly identifies the one and only cause of disunion: Southern slavery. Using vivid and harrowing examples of injustices small and great, the author contends that slavery’s intractability made it almost inevitable that the election of anyone but a pro-Southern Democrat in 1860—a “doughface” in the manner of James Buchanan and Franklin Pierce—would have triggered Southern states to secede and take up arms in rebellion.
Opinion | Yuval Harari: A.I. Threatens Democracy - The New York Times - 0 views
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Large-scale democracies became feasible only after the rise of modern information technologies like the newspaper, the telegraph and the radio. The fact that modern democracy has been built on top of modern information technologies means that any major change in the underlying technology is likely to result in a political upheaval.
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This partly explains the current worldwide crisis of democracy. In the United States, Democrats and Republicans can hardly agree on even the most basic facts, such as who won the 2020 presidential election
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In particular, algorithms tasked with maximizing user engagement discovered by experimenting on millions of human guinea pigs that if you press the greed, hate or fear button in the brain, you grab the attention of that human and keep that person glued to the screen.
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