#(it was the same just a poll instead of a declarative statement.)

[gendzl]

I put a few yards of bookcloth in my online cart before backpedaling really really quickly. again. I simply cannot bring myself to spend that much money on shipping. I can't do it!!! it feels so unreasonable.

I just ordered HeatnBond lite and a bunch of acid-free tissue paper, and I'm going to try making bookcloth myself with fabric I already own.

[quaranmine]

Sorry for putting this in your asks but you're absolutely right about the poll thing. I honestly just wish the poll would be deleted at this point, even if there would be some possible backlash from that as well-- I don't understand why op would include jellie if they clearly did not want her to win and had particular intentions going into this (expecting a "democratic" show from Tumblr sure is... something) but regardless there's so much bad energy around the whole thing (and this happens with basically every single poll I've seen on Tumblr, mcyt involved or not) and it's just so disappointing all around. The poll was made with bad faith, I don't understand why people are still paying attention to it. Nothing can be gained from this, if Jellie wins everyone who already is unreasonable will just be even more petty about it. It's a bad look for both sides, even if I do completely sympathize with everyone who's mad about the disgusting statements by op. It sucks.

I think you're explaining a lot of my same thoughts very well now. I was worried on the last poll (semi final or whatever) that this might go down badly, which is the same thought I have any time something vaguely mcyt-related ends up in a poll, but it went fine so I naively thought this one would be fine too. I was wrong...yikes, it's bad. Like you said, it's bad energy surrounding the whole thing. I don't care anymore about Jellie winning because it's such a negative experience, not a genuine friendly win. If she does win, everybody who voted for nefarious anglerfish is just going to be super mad about it. If she doesn't win, people are also going to be mean about it. It's just a cacaphony of people arguing and being mean to each other at this point. OP's comments upset me too but it just genuinely isnt worth it to Keep Talking About It. They get it. They got it thousands of notes ago. We're just dogpiling and talking in circles at this point and being obnoxious about it.

I'm also worried it might breach tumblr and Scar will somehow hear about. I think it would hurt him to see people say nasty things about Jellie AND hurt him to see his own fans acting nasty on his (unasked for) behalf. Whereas if everyone would just drop the issue we could all move on instead of getting into a frenzy over a simple cat poll. I think it should probably be deleted too. Either call it right now with nefarious anglerfish as the winner, declare co-winners, or just forget about it completely—I don't care what options gets chosen but I do think it's a bad idea to stretch this situation for another 5 days. Maybe everyone will lose interest by then.

[crimechannels]

By • Olalekan Fagbade Presidency attacks Peter Obi over Comments on Supreme Court judgement Mr Bayo Onanuga, Special Adviser to the President on Information and Strategy, on Monday urged the Labour Party (LP) Presidential candidate, Peter Obi, to “prove his belief in Nigeria.” In a statement titled: “Peter Obi should find better vocation instead of casting aspersions on the Judiciary”, Onanuga also admonished Obi to find another worthwhile vocation to engage his time henceforth. “If Mr Peter Obi truly believes in Nigeria, the time to prove it is now when all men and women of goodwill are rallying support for President Bola Tinubu in his determination to lead a new era of prosperity, inclusive governance and economic growth. “Our admonition to Obi is to find another worthwhile vocation to engage his time henceforth, having been rejected by majority of Nigerians who didn’t consider him qualified to lead our country. “Nigerians rejected Peter Obi and his demagoguery at the poll because he posed present and future danger to the peace, progress and stability of our country,” Onanuga said. The presidential aide said Obi’s antecedents as Governor of Anambra for eight years didn’t inspire any confidence as someone capable of running a country like Nigeria. According to him, no tangible records of achievement in the state he governed recommended him for the Presidency of Nigeria. “The LP presidential candidate in the last election, Mr Peter Obi, addressed a press conference, just like Atiku Abubakar, where he cast aspersions on the Supreme Court. “He also attacked the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) for not declaring him the winner of the February 25, 2023 election. “We are at a loss as to how the copy-cat Obi and his faction of Labour Party convinced themselves they won an election in which they came a distant third.” He expressed surprise at the grand delusion that made Obi believe he could have won a national election where he ran the most hateful, divisive and polarising campaign that pitted Christians against Muslims. “His campaign also tried to pit ethnic groups against each other in a multi-ethnic and multi-religious society like Nigeria. Such grand delusion should be a matter for deeper examination.” “At the press conference where he tried, in vain, to gaslight Nigerians with false claims and innuendos, Mr Obi contradicted himself. “Here was a beneficiary of judicial pronouncements in the past now castigating the same court because its judgment did not go his way.” Onanuga said Obi claimed the Supreme Court Justices didn’t consider public opinion in delivering what has been applauded as a most profound judgment in an election appeal. “Incidentally, the LP candidate presented the most watery and unreasonable petition before any court in the history of electoral cases in Nigeria. “He made false allegations of rigging and other electoral malpractices yet could not produce any evidence to back up his claims at both the court of first instance and at the apex court. “In a failed effort to mobilise and retain the support of his supporters, Obi gave them a forlorn hope that he won the election and would prove it before the courts. “Throughout the trial, his lawyers didn’t present any alternative results different from the results INEC uploaded on the IReV portal and the ones signed by all party agents from the 176,000 polling units. “We wonder how the LP candidate expected the courts to do justice on the basis of rumours, lies and false narratives by sponsored partisans and fanatical members of his ‘Obidient Movement’ “We expected the LP candidate to know that the supreme court or any other court does not give judgment based on public opinion and mob sentiments.” The presidential aide noted that judicial pronouncements are based on evidence, precedents and the rule of law. “Having admitted that the supreme court ruling brought an end to litigation and any challenge to Tinubu as the validly

elected leader of Nigeria, Obi should have congratulated Tinubu for his victory and pledged his support, in the spirit of statesmanship. “But instead, he brought up extraneous matters that he thought the apex court should have considered to declare him the winner. “In our view, the drowning Obi, just like Atiku, was merely attempting to hold on to a straw in raking up new allegations, which exist only in his imagination and that of his hordes of supporters. ” Onanuga, therefore, enjoined Obi and his party to play the role of the opposition and start preparing for another shot at the presidency in 2027. “We hope by then he would campaign on issues and not whip up religious and ethnic sentiments as he did in the last campaign,” he said. (NAN)

[jerseydeanne]

William is quietly winning the battle of the royal brothers - Their responses to Bashir revelations are as different as they are as people, but we knew they would be

It must frustrate Prince Harry that his own popularity has become so obviously inversely proportional to his brother’s. They had a highly competitive relationship before Harry and Meghan decided to throw a grenade under the Queen and the Royal family in favour of earning Kardashian cash in the US. It often appeared that a large part of the Sussexes’ beef with the monarchy was that they constantly felt in the Cambridges’ shadow. Yet their bid to seek “financial independence” in California has cast them completely in the shade in the minds of the majority of Brits, many of whom would prefer it if they disappeared from view altogether. The more they have accused the “racist” Royal family of “total neglect”, the more they have succeeded in encouraging the British public to throw their support behind the institution – as shown by a YouGov poll last week finding six in 10 people want them to be stripped of their titles or to stop using them. The better William and Kate perform, the worse Harry and Meghan look for breaking up the Fab Four in the first place. The Yanks might not see it like this, but we do because, unlike naive Americans prone to endless psychobabble, we were never under any illusions about the dysfunctionality at the heart of the Royal family (or any family, for that matter). In his latest outpouring for his new Apple TV documentary series, Harry voiced his resentment at being told to “play the game” to make life easier in the House of Windsor. “I’ve got a hell of a lot of my mum in me,” he boasted. “The only way to free yourself and break out is to tell the truth. ”Yet, ironically, the one person in The Firm who “played the game” better than anyone else was Diana, Princess of Wales. That was until she took the disastrous decision to pour her heart out to deceitful Martin Bashir – albeit under what we now know were false pretences. By continuing to stoke the flames of publicity with his smug, self-pitying and at times, spiteful rhetoric, Harry shows he has actually learned nothing from his mother’s experience. For in trying to emulate her doe-eyed confessionals to speak his “truth”, he is repeating her mistake of squandering popularity for the sake of evening the score. While there’s no doubting Harry’s noble intentions in wanting to raise awareness of mental health issues – let’s make no mistake here, like Diana deciding to air her dirty linen on the BBC, this is a man out for vengeance. With his team of officious LA-based PRs and unwillingness to appear on any platform that actually offers a right of reply to the people he trashes, he’s hypocritically playing his own, one-sided games. Exactly like his mother at her lowest ebb, Harry seems to think the world is out to get him. Yet far from it being personal, there is a word for what has happened to him over the years. It’s called “life”. While he was a 12-year-old walking behind his mother’s coffin in 1997, there were literally hundreds and thousands of other children also coming to terms with the loss of a parent. Around the same time, I was a teenager, scraping my alcoholic mother off the pavement. As any therapist worth their salt will tell him – you can either hold onto the past and let it dictate your future, or let go and truly “find your freedom”. William has had to endure exactly the same fate as Harry. In fact, as the elder brother and “heir” rather than “spare” it has arguably been even more difficult for him. As his dignified statement on Thursday night made clear, he vividly remembers “the fear, paranoia and isolation” of his mother’s final years. It was his shoulder upon which she cried about the breakdown of her marriage. It was he who promised her, after she lost the HRH style, that he would “give it back to you one day when I am king. ”As the child of divorced parents myself, I know all too well that while every child is adversely affected, the oldest is often at the coalface, shouldering most of the burden. Despite this, and having to come to terms with being tethered to a life mapped out at birth,

William

has borrowed from the best of his mother’s playbook. He has resolved to serve others, rather than himself. Instead of growing up to resent the rules of the game, he has used them to his advantage, realising – as all the best royals do – that it is never really about “them”, but about “us”. Unlike Harry, who has misinterpreted the Queen’s “never complain, never explain” mantra as a gagging clause – William has used it as it was intended, as a protection order to ensure the lines between the professional and the personal do not become too blurred. Like the mute button on Twitter, he has silenced his critics not by taking them on, but keeping calm and carrying on regardless. And in stark contrast to his brother, William has shown he understands the press as well as Diana did. By actually reading the newspapers (rather than obsessing over the online comments like Harry), the second-in-line to the throne has come to the sensible conclusion that the media, while imperfect, can be used as a considerable force for good. While his brother was using Lord Dyson’s report as a stick with which to once again beat the tabloid press, William was mature enough to acknowledge that if it wasn’t for the newspapers, Bashir would have got away with his rogue reporting for even longer. “Public service broadcasting and a free press have never been more important,” he magnanimously declared. Harry’s nonsense claim that “practices like these – and even worse – are still widespread today” only serves to highlight just how unqualified he is to act as referee on matters as serious as the First Amendment, which he described as “bonkers” on a recent podcast. Both these royal brothers are playing a game – but only one of them is winning.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/05/21/william-quietly-winning-battle-royal-brothers/

[causeiwanttoandican]

The Telegraph - Camilla Tominey

William is quietly winning the battle of the royal brothers

Their responses to Bashir revelations are as different as they are as people, but we knew they would be

Camilla Tominey21 May 2021 • 8:00pm

It must frustrate Prince Harry that his own popularity has become so obviously inversely proportional to his brother’s. They had a highly competitive relationship before Harry and Meghan decided to throw a grenade under the Queen and the Royal family in favour of earning Kardashian cash in the US. It often appeared that a large part of the Sussexes’ beef with the monarchy was that they constantly felt in the Cambridges’ shadow.

Yet their bid to seek “financial independence” in California has cast them completely in the shade in the minds of the majority of Brits, many of whom would prefer it if they disappeared from view altogether.

The more they have accused the “racist” Royal family of “total neglect”, the more they have succeeded in encouraging the British public to throw their support behind the institution – as shown by a YouGov poll last week finding six in 10 people want them to be stripped of their titles or to stop using them.

The better William and Kate perform, the worse Harry and Meghan look for breaking up the Fab Four in the first place. The Yanks might not see it like this, but we do because, unlike naive Americans prone to endless psychobabble, we were never under any illusions about the dysfunctionality at the heart of the Royal family (or any family, for that matter).

In his latest outpouring for his new Apple TV documentary series, Harry voiced his resentment at being told to “play the game” to make life easier in the House of Windsor.

“I’ve got a hell of a lot of my mum in me,” he boasted. “The only way to free yourself and break out is to tell the truth.”

Yet, ironically, the one person in The Firm who “played the game” better than anyone else was Diana, Princess of Wales. That was until she took the disastrous decision to pour her heart out to deceitful Martin Bashir – albeit under what we now know were false pretences.

By continuing to stoke the flames of publicity with his smug, self-pitying and at times, spiteful rhetoric, Harry shows he has actually learned nothing from his mother’s experience.

For in trying to emulate her doe-eyed confessionals to speak his “truth”, he is repeating her mistake of squandering popularity for the sake of evening the score. While there’s no doubting Harry’s noble intentions in wanting to raise awareness of mental health issues – let’s make no mistake here, like Diana deciding to air her dirty linen on the BBC, this is a man out for vengeance.

With his team of officious LA-based PRs and unwillingness to appear on any platform that actually offers a right of reply to the people he trashes, he’s hypocritically playing his own, one-sided games.

Exactly like his mother at her lowest ebb, Harry seems to think the world is out to get him.

Yet far from it being personal, there is a word for what has happened to him over the years. It’s called “life”.

While he was a 12-year-old walking behind his mother’s coffin in 1997, there were literally hundreds and thousands of other children also coming to terms with the loss of a parent.

Around the same time, I was a teenager, scraping my alcoholic mother off the pavement. As any therapist worth their salt will tell him – you can either hold onto the past and let it dictate your future, or let go and truly “find your freedom”.

William has had to endure exactly the same fate as Harry. In fact, as the elder brother and “heir” rather than “spare” it has arguably been even more difficult for him.

As his dignified statement on Thursday night made clear, he vividly remembers “the fear, paranoia and isolation” of his mother’s final years. It was his shoulder upon which she cried about the breakdown of her marriage.

It was he who promised her, after she lost the HRH style, that he would “give it back to you one day when I am king.”

As the child of divorced parents myself, I know all too well that while every child is adversely affected, the oldest is often at the coalface, shouldering most of the burden.

Despite this, and having to come to terms with being tethered to a life mapped out at birth, William has borrowed from the best of his mother’s playbook.

He has resolved to serve others, rather than himself. Instead of growing up to resent the rules of the game, he has used them to his advantage, realising – as all the best royals do – that it is never really about “them”, but about “us”.

Unlike Harry, who has misinterpreted the Queen’s “never complain, never explain” mantra as a gagging clause – William has used it as it was intended, as a protection order to ensure the lines between the professional and the personal do not become too blurred.

Like the mute button on Twitter, he has silenced his critics not by taking them on, but keeping calm and carrying on regardless. And in stark contrast to his brother, William has shown he understands the press as well as Diana did.

By actually reading the newspapers (rather than obsessing over the online comments like Harry), the second-in-line to the throne has come to the sensible conclusion that the media, while imperfect, can be used as a considerable force for good.

While his brother was using Lord Dyson’s report as a stick with which to once again beat the tabloid press, William was mature enough to acknowledge that if it wasn’t for the newspapers, Bashir would have got away with his rogue reporting for even longer.

“Public service broadcasting and a free press have never been more important,” he magnanimously declared. Harry’s nonsense claim that “practices like these – and even worse – are still widespread today” only serves to highlight just how unqualified he is to act as referee on matters as serious as the First Amendment, which he described as “bonkers” on a recent podcast.

Both these royal brothers are playing a game – but only one of them is winning.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

November 20, 2020

Heather Cox Richardson

The news today remains Trump’s unprecedented attempt to steal an election in which voters chose his opponents, Democratic candidate Joe Biden and his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris, by close to 6 million votes, so far. A close second to that news is that the leadership of the Republican Party is not standing up to the president, but is instead seemingly willing to let him burn down the country to stay in office.

Never before in our history has a president who has lost by such a convincing amount tried to claw out a win by gaming the system. Biden has not only won the popular vote by more than any challenger of an incumbent since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s win in 1932, but also has won crucial states by large margins. He is ahead by more than 80,000 votes in Pennsylvania, almost 160,000 votes in Michigan, and between 11,000 and 34,000 each in Georgia, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Nevada.

And yet, only two Senate Republicans—Mitt Romney (R-UT) and Ben Sasse (R-NE)-- have called Trump out for refusing to accept the results of the election. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has simply said he is willing to let the process play out. In the House, only two Republicans have said they oppose Trump’s attempt to steal the election. Kay Granger (R-TX) and Fred Upton (R-MI) said there is no evidence of fraud and it is time to move on.

State leaders, though, have refused to do Trump’s bidding. Today, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, certified Georgia’s vote for Biden. Also today, two top Republicans in the Michigan legislature, whom Trump had invited to the White House apparently to enlist their help in overturning the vote in their state, issued a statement about what happened in their meeting with the president.

Michigan Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey and Michigan Speaker of the House Lee Chatfield said they used their time with the president to press him for more money to help Michigan fight the coronavirus, which continues to rage across the country.

As for the election, they said “We have not yet been made aware of any information that would change the outcome of the election in Michigan and as legislative leaders, we will follow the law and follow the normal process regarding Michigan’s electors…. Michigan’s certification process should be a deliberate process free from threats and intimidation. Allegations of fraudulent behavior should be taken seriously, thoroughly investigated, and if proven, prosecuted to the full extent of the law. And the candidates who win the most votes win elections and Michigan’s electoral votes.”

Central to Trump’s argument is that Democrats have cheated, even though his own former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Christopher Krebs, said the election was “the most secure in American history,” and “there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” Krebs was the first director of CISA, an independent agency established within the Department of Homeland Security in 2018, and he worked hard to protect the election from foreign intervention despite the fact the president appeared to be angling for just such intervention.

Krebs’s defense of the security of our elections led to Trump firing him—by tweet—with Trump falsely asserting: “[t]he recent statement by Chris Krebs on the security of the 2020 Election was highly inaccurate, in that there were massive improprieties and fraud - including dead people voting, Poll Watchers not allowed into polling locations, ‘glitches’ in the voting machines which changed votes from Trump to Biden, late voting, and many more.”

Trump’s attempt to throw out Democratic votes and lay claim to victory in an election that he lost by quite a lot is the culmination of a generation of Republican rhetoric claiming that Democratic votes are illegitimate.

Beginning in 1986, Republican operatives began to talk about cutting down Black voting under a “ballot integrity” initiative in hopes that would depress Democratic votes. They bitterly opposed the Democrats’ expansion of voter registration in 1993 under the “Motor Voter” law, which permitted voter registration at certain state offices. By 1994, losing Republican candidates insisted that their Democratic opponents had won only through “voter fraud,” although voter fraud remains so exceedingly rare as to be virtually non-existent. They fought for voter ID laws that tended to disfranchise Democrats, and immediately after the landmark 2013 Shelby v. Holder decision in which the Supreme Court gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Republican state officials introduced voter ID laws and bills restricting voter registration.

In addition to suppressing Democratic votes, recent Republican leaders also took the manipulative system of gerrymandering to new extremes in order to make sure Democrats could not win power. In 2010, party operatives raised money from corporate donors to make sure that state legislatures would be controlled by Republicans that year, as states redistricted for the following decade. After 2010, Republican controlled the key states of Florida, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Ohio, and Michigan, as well as other, smaller states, and they redrew congressional maps using precise computer models. In the 2012 election, Democrats won the White House decisively, the Senate easily, and won a majority of 1.4 million votes for House candidates. But Republicans came away with a 33-seat majority in the House of Representatives.

Gerrymandering meant that Republicans did not have to attract moderate voters. Instead, Republican candidates had to worry about challenges from further right. Over time, they became more and more extreme. At the same time, without competition, they fielded increasingly weak candidates, who doubled down on inflammatory rhetoric rather than advancing viable policies.

Increasingly, Republicans insisted that Democrats were anti-American “socialists,” a theme Trump picked up and ran with in his 2020 construction of his opponents as “radical left” extremists who would destroy the country. Trump said "I'm not just running against Biden — Sleepy Joe — I'm running against the corrupt media, the big tech giants, the Washington swamp. And the Democrat Party is a part of all of them — every single one of them. They flood your communities with criminal aliens, drugs and crime, while they live behind beautiful gated compounds." When the Democrats won, Trump promptly insisted that Democrats had cheated.

Aside from the outcome of this particular election, this attempt of Republican leaders to delegitimize the Democratic Party is an assault on our democracy. Here’s why:

Democracy requires at least two healthy political parties, so there is always an organized opposition to the party in power. Having a party that stands in opposition to those in power does two things: it enables people to disagree with current leadership while staying loyal to the nation, and it provides a means for oversight of the people running the government.

Until the early 1700s, in Europe, the monarch was the state. Either you were loyal to the king, or you were a traitor. Gradually, though, the British political thinkers from whom Americans drew their inspiration began to object to the policies of the British monarchy while remaining loyal to the government. They developed the idea of a loyal opposition. This was an important development in political thought, because it meant that a person could be loyal to the country (and keep his head firmly on his shoulders) while criticizing government policies.

It also meant that the people in power would have oversight to keep them on the straight and narrow. There’s nothing like opponents watching you for any potential scandal to keep corruption to a minimum.

During the establishment of the early American republic, the Framers of the Constitution briefly imagined that since the colonists had thrown off the king they would no longer need an opposition. But almost immediately—as early as President George Washington’s administration—men who disagreed with Washington’s policies organized their own party under Thomas Jefferson to oppose those in power. Jeffersonians offered to voters an alternative set of policies, and a way to put them into practice without overthrowing the government itself. This recognition of a loyal opposition was key to more than 200 years of peaceful transfers of power.…

until now.

Trump is rejecting the idea that Democrats can legally win an election. As this crisis drags on, more and more of his followers are echoing his insistence that the Democrats could not possibly win except by cheating. There is no evidence to support this claim. Trump’s lawyers have repeatedly admitted as much in court. It is rather a rejection of the possibility that Democrats can legitimately govern.

Our democracy depends on our ability both to criticize our government and to believe that we can legitimately elect a different set of leaders to advance different policies. If we lose the concept of a loyal opposition, we must all declare allegiance to the king.

—-

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[arcticdementor]

I’ve been keeping an eye on Europe lately, and on France in particular. As I’ve tried to articulate here previously, the era of general upheaval underway is hardly a phenomenon limited to the United States. Instead, propelled everywhere by the same fundamental forces, it appears to be playing out in a more or less similar fashion all across the Western world, and perhaps beyond. In this regard France serves as an especially instructive example, as recent events have served to highlight in striking fashion.

In short, recent national controversy over a pair of open letters directed to the government by a collection of retired and active-duty military officers has not only spawned a month of political controversy in France, but revealed deeper dynamics at work in the country that may help provide a clearer picture of what’s happening everywhere.

On April 21, twenty retired French generals published an open letter to President Emmanuel Macron and the French government in the right-wing magazine Valeurs Actuelles (Today’s Values) denouncing “the disintegration that is affecting our country,” and explaining they were speaking out because “the hour is late, France is in peril, and many mortal dangers threaten her.”

…

Initially, the letter was dismissed as mere “eccentric nationalist nostalgia by octogenarian retirees,” as the British Financial Times put it, and the government appeared content to ignore it. The then head of France’s General Directorate for Internal Security, Patrick Calvar, had already warned that France was “on the edge of a civil war” as early as 2016, so this kind of thing was old news. But that changed as soon as Marine Le Pen – the leader of the right-wing Rassemblement National (National Rally) party who polls show is likely to again be Macron’s top rival in presidential elections next year – endorsed the letter, saying “it was the duty of all French patriots, wherever they are from, to rise up to restore – and indeed save – the country.”

Public conversation in France turned to politicization of the armed forces and whether the letter’s final lines were a call for a military coup d'état (the fact that the letter was published on the 60th anniversary of a failed generals’ putsch against President Charles de Gaulle in 1961 providing evidence for this in the view of many). General François Lecointre, armed forces chief of staff, stated that while “at first I said to myself that it wasn’t very significant,” at least 18 active military personnel had been found to have been among the more than 1,500 people who also signed the letter. “That I cannot accept,” he said, because “the neutrality of the armed forces is essential.” They would all be punished, while any of the generals still in the reserves would be forced into full retirement as part of “an exceptional measure, that we will launch immediately at the request of the defense minister.” Still, the government’s ministers emphasized that the signatories were nothing more than an isolated and irrelevant minority in the military.

But soon enough, on May 10, a second letter appeared, again published in Valeurs Actuelles, this time by more than 2,000 serving soldiers writing in support of the first letter’s retired generals, accusing the government of having sullied their reputations when “their only fault is to love their country and to mourn its visible decline.”  

…

The second letter, this time open to the public to sign, attracted (as of the end of last week) more than 287,000 signatures.

Again came exasperated reactions from many ministers and observers. But what is most remarkable, in my view, is how little enthusiasm most seemed to have for challenging the basic premises of the letters: that France is in a state of growing fracture and even dissolution. Instead, the focus of controversy was once again on the military taking a political position.

…

But perhaps my favorite example was that of (retired) General Jérôme Pellistrandi, chief editor at the magazine Revue Défense Nationale, who prefaced his otherwise sharp criticism of the outspoken soldiers with: “Everyone agrees that society is breaking up, it’s a known fact, but…”

What was going on here? Since when do government officials reflexively agree that their country is falling apart? Well, it turns out that a rather shockingly high proportion of the French public seems to agree with the sentiments the letters expressed. The following chart, created from the results of a Harris Interactive opinion poll taken April 29, after the first letter, is in my view one of the most striking statements about the political mood in a Western country that you’re likely to see for some time:

…

So, to break this down, not only do 58% of the French public agree with the first letter’s sentiments about the country facing disintegration, but so do nearly half of Macron’s own governing party, the centrist En Marche. Awkward. Nor are those sentiments limited to any one part of the political spectrum, even if the right is more sympathetic overall. Far-left party leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon may have quickly declared that the “mutinous and cowardly” soldiers who signed the letter would all be purged from the army if he were elected, but 43% of his party seem to share their concerns.

But that’s not even the whole of it – an amazing 74% of poll respondents said they thought French society was collapsing, while no less than 45% agreed that France “will soon have a civil war.”

…

And, in short, both countries are clearly facing at least one of the defining characteristics of the Upheaval: the collapse of any agreed upon and consistently accepted authority. It is notable that, in both countries (at least until recently) there is only one institution that still garners relatively widespread respect: the military. (And French generals aren’t the only ones trying to capitalize on this with controversial open letters.)

Second, there is the key detail – almost entirely skipped over in the English-language press in favor of focusing on the anti-immigration angle, as far as I’ve seen – of the “anti-racism,” “decolonialism,” and “communitarianism” decried in the two letters as contributing to national dissolution. This is rather unmistakably a reference to the amalgamated, zealously anti-traditional and anti-liberal ideology of the “New Faith” – alternately referred to as Anti-Racism, the Social Justice movement, Critical Theory, identity politics, neo-Marxism, or Wokeness, among other synonymous infamies – that I’ve previously identified as one of the key revolutionary dynamics of our present era.

Let me repeat this proposition again: no revolution has ever remained contained by national borders. The New Faith is a trans-national ideological movement, which can no more remain confined to the United States than it remained confined within the American academy where it matured (it was arguably born in, well… France). And it is more than capable of rapidly adapting itself to and flourishing within whatever national context it penetrates. But, wherever it goes, it’s just as disruptive to the foundations of social and political order.

…

Finally, what’s striking about the situation in France is that every driving factor appears set to only get worse. The COVID-19 pandemic has only accelerated the divide between rich and poor; Europe’s economic recovery has been shaky; the ideology of the New Faith is likely to prove more difficult for the French to combat than they expect (the foundation of the established order having been hollowed out over a very long period of time); and the identitarian culture war is likely to only heat up, especially with elections approaching in which Le Pen appears to have a decent chance of actually winning (an outcome that could accelerate political and cultural fracturing, as Donald Trump’s election did in the United States).

…

It is notable that every one of these trends, including climate-induced migration, is featured in the U.S. Intelligence Community’s rather ominous recent report evaluating where the world is headed over the next five years, which I’ve written on previously. (Several readers have written to me to criticize my lack of discussion of climate change as a factor in both that post and my essay introducing the Upheaval – well fair enough, though I am uncertain about how much the climate issue has actually driven the turmoil we’re already seeing so far today, as opposed to what we may see in the future.)

France thus seems set to function as an ahead-of-the-curve epicenter for the Upheaval in Europe. No wonder the French are so pessimistic…

[phroyd]

WASHINGTON — President Trump has selected Judge Amy Coney Barrett, the favorite candidate of conservatives, to succeed Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and will try to force Senate confirmation before Election Day in a move that would significantly alter the ideological makeup of the Supreme Court for years.

Mr. Trump plans to announce on Saturday that she is his choice, according to six people close to the process who asked not to be identified disclosing the decision in advance.

As they often do, aides cautioned that Mr. Trump sometimes upends his own plans. But he is not known to have interviewed any other candidates and came away from two days of meetings with Judge Barrett this week impressed with a jurist he was told would be a female Antonin Scalia, referring to the justice she once clerked for.

“I haven’t said it was her, but she is outstanding,” Mr. Trump told reporters who asked about Judge Barrett’s imminent nomination at Joint Base Andrews outside Washington after returning Friday evening from a trip to Florida and Georgia.

The president’s political advisers hope the selection will energize his conservative political base in the thick of an election campaign in which he has for months been trailing former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., his Democratic challenger. But it could also rouse liberal voters afraid that her confirmation could spell the end of Roe v. Wade, the decision legalizing abortion, as well as other rulings popular with the political left and center.

The nomination will kick off an extraordinary scramble by Senate Republicans to confirm her for the court in the 38 days before the election on Nov. 3, a scenario unlike any in American history. While other justices have been approved in presidential election years, none has been voted on after July. Four years ago, Senate Republicans refused to even consider President Barack Obama’s nomination to replace Justice Scalia with Judge Merrick B. Garland, announced 237 days before Election Day, on the grounds that it should be left to whoever was chosen as the next president.

In picking Judge Barrett, a conservative and a hero to the anti-abortion movement, Mr. Trump could hardly have found a more polar opposite to Justice Ginsburg, a pioneering champion of women’s rights and leader of the liberal wing of the court. The appointment would shift the center of gravity on the bench considerably to the right, giving conservatives six of the nine seats and potentially insulating them even against defections by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who on a handful of occasions has sided with liberal justices.

Mr. Trump made clear this week that he wanted to rush his nominee through the Senate by Election Day to ensure that he would have a decisive fifth justice on his side in case any disputes from the vote reached the high court, as he expected to happen. The president has repeatedly made baseless claims that the Democrats are trying to steal the election and appears poised to challenge any result of the balloting that does not declare him the winner.

Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, has enough votes to push through Judge Barrett’s nomination if he can make the tight time frame work. Republicans are looking at holding hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee the week of Oct. 16 and a floor vote by late October.

Democrats have expressed outrage at the rush and accused Republicans of rank hypocrisy given their treatment of Judge Garland, but they have few options for slowing the nomination, much less stopping it. Instead, they have focused on making Republicans pay at the ballot box and debated ways to counteract Mr. Trump’s influence on the court if they win the election.

Mr. Trump met with Judge Barrett at the White House on Monday and Tuesday and was said to like her personally. While he said he had a list of five finalists, he never interviewed anyone else for the job and passed over Judge Barbara Lagoa of the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, who appealed to campaign advisers in particular because of her Cuban-American heritage and roots in Florida, a critical battleground state in the presidential contest.

Despite Mr. Trump’s penchant for drama and the intrigue that surrounded his first two picks for seats on the Supreme Court, the selection process since Justice Ginsburg died last Friday has been fairly low-key and surprisingly predictable. The president has long signaled that he expected to put Judge Barrett on the court and has been quoted telling confidants in 2018 that he was “saving her for Ginsburg.”

If confirmed, Judge Barrett would become the 115th justice in the nation’s history and the fifth woman ever to serve on the Supreme Court. At 48, she would be the youngest member of the current court as well its sixth Catholic. And she would become Mr. Trump’s third appointee on the court, more than any other president has installed in a first term since Richard M. Nixon had four, joining Justices Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh.

Judge Barrett graduated from Notre Dame Law School and later joined the faculty. She clerked for Justice Scalia and shares his constitutional views. She is described as a textualist who interprets the law based on its plain words rather than seeking to understand the legislative purpose and an originalist who applies the Constitution as it was understood by those who drafted and ratified it.

She has been a judge for only three years, appointed by Mr. Trump to the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in 2017. Her confirmation hearing produced fireworks when Democratic senators questioned her public statements and Catholicism. That made her an instant celebrity among religious conservatives, who saw her as a victim of bias on the basis of her faith.

Judge Barrett and her husband, Jesse Barrett, a former federal prosecutor, are reported to be members of a small and relatively obscure Christian group called the People of Praise. The group grew out of the Catholic charismatic renewal movement that began in the late 1960s and adopted Pentecostal practices like speaking in tongues, belief in prophecy and divine healing. The couple have seven children, all under 20, including two adopted from Haiti and a young son with Down syndrome.

In a 2006 speech to Notre Dame graduates, she spoke of the law as a higher calling. “If you can keep in mind that your fundamental purpose in life is not to be a lawyer, but to know, love and serve God, you truly will be a different kind of lawyer,” she said.

But during her 2017 confirmation hearing, she affirmed that she would keep her personal views separate from her duties as a judge. “If you’re asking whether I take my faith seriously and I’m a faithful Catholic, I am,” she told senators. “Although I would stress that my personal church affiliation or my religious belief would not bear in the discharge of my duties as a judge.” She was confirmed on a 55-to-43 vote, largely along party lines.

As a law professor, Judge Barrett was a member of Faculty for Life, an anti-abortion group, and wrote skeptically about precedent in Supreme Court rulings, which both sides in the abortion debate took to mean she would be open to revisiting Roe v. Wade.

“I tend to agree with those who say that a justice’s duty is to the Constitution and that it is thus more legitimate for her to enforce her best understanding of the Constitution rather than a precedent she thinks clearly in conflict with it,” she wrote in a Texas Law Review article in 2013.

She later criticized Chief Justice Roberts for his opinion preserving Mr. Obama’s Affordable Care Act, saying he went beyond the plausible meaning of the law. As an appellate judge, she joined an opinion arguing on behalf of an Indiana law banning abortions sought solely because of the sex or disability of a fetus, disagreeing with fellow judges who struck it down as unconstitutional.

Conservative and liberal interest groups did not wait for Mr. Trump’s announcement to open the battle over Judge Barrett’s confirmation. Each side prepared multimillion-dollar campaigns to introduce her to the public and frame the debate to come in the Senate, with an eye on the November contest.

Several polls over the past week have shown that most Americans, including many Republicans, believe the next justice should be selected by the winner of the November election, not by Mr. Trump in the meantime.

A survey released Friday by The Washington Post and ABC News suggested the fight may drive Democrats even more than Republicans to the polls. About 64 percent of Mr. Biden’s supporters told pollsters that the vacancy made it “more important” that the Democrat win the election, while just 37 percent of Mr. Trump’s supporters said the same for him.

Phroyd

[emptymanuscript]

(CNN Business)--If President Trump comes out and prematurely claims victory on Election Night, what will television networks and social media websites do? The scenario -- undemocratic and unthinkable in the past but a very real possibility with Trump seeking to stay in power -- is causing media and tech executives to debate potential responses

https://www.fark.com/goto/11007245/www.cnn.com/2020/11/02/media/tv-networks-election-night-victory/index.html%3Futm_source%3Dfark%26utm

As much as Fox News and Breitbart style propaganda gives me the red hot rage fury, this propaganda gives me the cold seething anger fury.

Because this is propaganda. Insidious, difficult to catch propaganda, that most people, even Breitbart loyalists would just let fly. The left will say yes, Trump is unprecedented. The right will say this is evil and trying to portray Trump as bad. And both sides will ignore the actual propaganda statement that CNN just issued on behalf of itself, Fox, and all the rest of journalism as a whole that this scenario was “unthinkable in the past.”

Bullshit.

That scenario literally happened in 2000. Fox did it instead of Bush Jr. but that absolutely did happen. The election was a tossup and everyone was calling it as a toss up until Fox declared Bush the winner. At which point, to not be scooped, everyone else called for Bush as well. And because AT THAT TIME is was unthinkable, Gore assumed they knew what they were talking about and and conceded. When it then quickly became clear that the result was not in fact clear, he took it back. And the disaster rolled on. In the years that have followed, it has become clear that if Gore had refused to concede for another 24 hours he would have won without the recount and all the other troubles. It was close but not that close, he won the popular election by enough that he would have won the electoral college. But even he admitted by the time what actually happened got going he wouldn’t have been able to govern because the numbers were less important than the perception.

There were a lot of thoughts and prayers, I’m sorry: “soul searching,” well there were pundits talking about soul searching anyway. Because the media realized what happened. They had picked the president. Not the voters. Unthinkable and undemocratic. And everybody but Fox vowed to do better.

Fast forward to right now and it is still undemocratic. But to portray it as unthinkable is straight out pardoning themselves retroactively for the crime they already committed. For institutions like CNN, it was the equivalent of manslaughter. I think it is a completely fair conclusion that they had zero intention to do any of it. They just didn’t want to lose the ratings. It’s not a good reason but it is extremely different than what was most likely Fox’s murder one version. Fox absolutely knew what everyone else knew, absolutely favored Bush over Gore, and just when the poll results started to tip toward Gore instead of way too close to even dream of calling, Roger Ailes and George W. Bush’s cousin who was in charge of election coverage for Fox (not at all a conflict of interest), decided that Fox should announce Bush had won. It is not possible to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that they were trying to shift the election results but the circumstantial evidence is pretty good. Which is why they get hot anger and CNN gets cold anger from me. Fox tries to commit crimes. CNN tries to escape culpability.

And that’s exactly what this tiny, little, insignificant phrase is doing. It’s escaping culpability. It’s escaping culpability in a way that everyone will brush over and have an easy time agreeing with, while it cements itself in thought that that is the way it really is. When nothing could be further from the truth. CNN has had 20 years, 20 YEARS!, to wrestle with this problem. To figure out what to do, to come to terms with the role it played, to institute reforms to make sure they are equipped to handle this. And the truth is, they probably spent a work week worth’s of effort and called it good enough. Until the problem came up again this year.

The real reason I favor reading 538 instead of most other news outlets for numbers and election results is because if you actually READ the stuff instead of just snatching the headlines and quotes is because they’re the only institution I know of that actually does grapple with this problem regularly and with vigor. They are it. This year, with the problem come round again, they made a special page just to try and specifically explicate that you CANNOT call an election before the votes are actually counted. Everything they do is an estimation with variables and margins of error. Because they actually see it as their job to give information, and make sense of that information, instead of just following some narrative.

I love Nate Silver’s currently favored explanation of it being like roiling a die. Right now, it’s 1d10. Being as I played a whole lot of Vampire the Masquerade, and other WoD rpgs, that works real well for me. I know the feel of a d10. I know how it feels to crit fail and roll that 1 even though the odds are that I shouldn’t. I had one game where I rolled 7 critical fails in a row. Which was ok because I was GMing and not a player but it happens. That Trump is unlikely to win doesn’t mean he can’t win. You can always crit fail. When you’re only rolling 1d10 the chances aren’t even that low. And if you play a lot of any rpg, you know that. This metaphor is new because 538 is very aware of the problems from the 2016 election and has actually gone the extra mile to make sure they fix what wasn’t even their mistake.

Because I remember my friends (we were all political junkies) apologizing to me because I was actually deep reading 538 and kept worrying that Trump was going to win, while they were all, nah. They have always been good about stating that what they are dealing with are probabilities and uncertainties, it’s just that people don’t like that. They want answers and narratives.

Which is often where the real propaganda happens. It’s not the pretty posters I love. It’s the grand statements from the bully pulpit. The propaganda that digs deep is the plain language of “factualness.” What is stated so that it cannot be disagreed with in a way that the audience will just accept it and move on. Until it is simply part of how we all think because it’s not an elephant you have to swallow whole, it’s the poison fed to you one mL at a time until you’re inured to it and then it is a part of you and then you’re spitting it out on others. One mL at a time.

That Trump will do anything he has to to win is not unthinkable. We’ve known that for years. Longer than he has president. That he is a liar is the same. That he does not care for the rule of law is the same. That the right wing media will aid and abet him in all that is not unthinkable because we have watched it unfold. That elections can be shifted by the judicious use of media is well known. As undemocratic as all of this may be, the idea that it is unthinkable is just a way to say either A) we weren’t paying attention or B) it’s not our fault.

CNN shouldn’t be allowed to say either of those things.

/rant

[newstfionline]

Thursday, October 15, 2020

Teen well-being (The Atlantic) Teens who participated in a 1,523 respondent survey between May and July this year were assessed for various mental well-being measures including life satisfaction, happiness, depression symptoms and loneliness. Their responses were then compared to the results of the same survey in 2018, and much to the surprise of the researchers, the teens were pretty much on par, and the percentage of teens depressed or lonely was lower in 2020 than in 2018. This is not to say that teens escaped the malaise that gripped the nation, far from it: 63 percent were concerned about catching the virus, 27 percent said a parent lost their job, 29 percent knew someone who caught the virus. No, the reason for the shift is that those considerable sources of anxiety were compensated for by the fact that teens were finally sleeping the correct amount of time: in 2018, just 55 percent of teens slept seven or more hours a night, and this year 84 percent slept seven or more hours a night while school was in session.

Cruise ship dismantling booms after pandemic (Reuters) Business is booming at a sea dock in western Turkey, where five hulking cruise ships are being dismantled for scrap metal sales after the COVID-19 pandemic all but destroyed the industry, the head of a ship recyclers’ group said on Friday. Cruise ships were home to the some of the earliest clusters of COVID-19 as the pandemic spread globally early this year. In March, U.S. authorities issued a no-sail order for all cruise ships that remains in place. On Friday, dozens of workers stripped walls, windows, floors and railings from several vessels in the dock in Aliaga, a town 45 km north of Izmir on Turkey’s west coast. Three more ships are set to join those already being dismantled. Before the pandemic, Turkey’s ship-breaking yards typically handled cargo and container ships, Kamil Onal, chairman of a ship recycling industrialists’ association, told Reuters. “But after the pandemic, cruise ships changed course towards Aliaga in a very significant way,” he said of the town.

Europe tightens rules as virus surges (AP) Governments across Europe are ratcheting up restrictions to try to beat back a resurgence of the coronavirus that has sent new confirmed infections on the continent to their highest weekly level since the start of the pandemic. The World Health Organization said Tuesday there were more than 700,000 new COVID-19 cases reported in Europe last week, a jump of 34% from the previous week. Britain, France, Russia and Spain accounted for more than half of the new infections. Italy and France are restricting parties and putting limits on restaurants and bars. The Netherlands went further and ordered the closing of all bars and restaurants, And to discourage partying at home, it banned the sale of alcohol after 8 p.m. The Czech Republic is closing all schools until Nov. 2, while Latvia is ordering teenagers to switch to distance learning for a week. And Britain unveiled a three-tiered system for deciding what restrictions to impose, based on how severe the outbreak is in certain areas. Those moves reflect a new approach to containing the virus among governments wary of hurting already fragile economies. Officials are eager to avoid the total lockdowns they imposed in the spring that resulted in heavy job losses. Instead, they are relying on a patchwork of regional or targeted restrictions that have sometimes caused confusion and frustration by those affected. The U.N. health agency appeared to support the new approach, with WHO spokesman Tarik Jasarevic saying lockdowns should be a “last resort.”

With winter on the way and windows open, Europe’s students prepare for the cold (Washington Post) With winter on its way and coronavirus guidelines advising teachers to keep classroom windows open, students across Northern Europe are preparing for the chill by packing blankets in their school bags and layering up in warm clothing. There is increasingly a consensus among experts that good ventilation is one of the best ways to prevent the virus from spreading. Anthony Costello, a former director at the World Health Organization, said last month that children “can survive a bit of cold, and they’re going to have to, because ventilation is so important.” With temperatures in Germany frequently dropping to freezing, children in the city of Bochum are bracing for a crisp learning environment as officials advise teachers to open the windows for fresh air every 20 minutes. Children have been told to bring blankets and wrap up. Although some schools struggle with the advice that the cold air needs to be brought in, schools in Denmark and other Nordic education systems are taking lessons—and young students—outside. More than half of about 200 Norwegian schools surveyed in a poll by researchers Ulrich Dettweiler and Gabriele Lauterbach last month said they were holding more classes outdoors—a move some already had planned on that was further propelled by the pandemic.

Belarusian crisis escalates (Foreign Policy) Belarusian opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya has demanded that President Aleksandr Lukashenko resign by Oct. 25 or face nationwide strikes. “[On] Oct. 26, all enterprises will begin a strike,” she said in a statement, “all roads will be blocked, state-owned stores will no longer have any sales.” Tikhanovskaya is hugely popular among protesters but fled to Lithuania in the aftermath of the controversial Aug. 9 election, which saw Lukashenko win by a landslide amid allegations of electoral fraud. Tikhanovskaya’s ultimatum is part of a wider escalation of tensions between Lukashenko and anti-government protesters. On Monday, the government authorized police to use lethal force against protesters after the ninth consecutive Sunday of massive protests in the capital of Minsk.

For Nagorno-Karabakh’s Dueling Sides, Living Together Is ‘Impossible’ (NYT) Armenians and Azerbaijanis lived side by side in the Soviet days, until conflict over the disputed mountain territory called Nagorno-Karabakh exploded in the late 1980s into riots, expulsions and a yearslong war. The violence left personal wounds festering for decades, as stubborn as the tan and gray stone ruins of Azerbaijani villages still scattered in the Armenian countryside. In the last two weeks, those unhealed scars have erupted into a modern-day conflagration of trench warfare, drone strikes and artillery bombardments. More than 500 Armenian soldiers have died, along with scores of civilians and an unknown number of Azerbaijanis. A cease-fire brokered in Moscow over the weekend has failed to hold, and President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan has threatened a further escalation of his offensive. For the region’s populace, the war is a continuation of on-off strife over both territory and history, with roots going back more than a century. The days when the Soviet Union kept a lid on such conflicts, and Azerbaijanis and Armenians mostly lived together in peace, feel like an irrevocably lost world. “Each wants to say that he is the master of this land,” said one refugee who left Azerbaijan in 1989. “To live together is, put simply, impossible.”

China’s Xi lays out plan to build Shenzhen into global rival to troubled Hong Kong (Washington Post) Chinese leader Xi Jinping announced plans to make Shenzhen an international trade hub and talent center, setting up the mainland metropolis as a business alternative to its politically troubled neighbor, Hong Kong. In a speech on Wednesday, Xi called for Shenzhen to take the lead in developing high-value innovative industries and drawing international talent. He said Shenzhen will develop its finance sector and international trade capabilities—which are Hong Kong’s economic strengths. The top-level support for Shenzhen was a clear message for Hong Kong, which lies just across a river from Shenzhen, said Victor Gao, a chair professor at China’s Soochow University and a former Foreign Ministry official. “If you do not have stability, if you are caught up in revolution, or great turmoil, or anarchy, then you will lose out on whatever advantages and resources you may have previously had,” Gao said. “Then your economic development will reverse course.” Hong Kong, which was supposed to enjoy self-governance in most of its affairs until 2047, has become a thorn in Beijing’s side because of large-scale public protests against China’s tightening control.

Japan’s navy adapts to the digital generation (Times of London) Japan’s navy is to launch a new, scaled down warship to compensate for a drop in recruitment among young people who cannot tolerate long periods at sea without access to their smartphones. The 30FFM frigate is designed for a crew of about 90 sailors, half that of the older vessels. The smaller crews reflect the crisis in recruitment faced by the Maritime Self-Defense Forces. The navy is struggling to fulfill its recruitment quotas, and in 2018 reached only 60 per cent of its target. In that year, it raised the upper age limit for recruits from 26 to 32. It has also taken steps to overcome the principal disincentive to would-be sailors—enforced isolation from the outside world. Sailors can now send emails from their mobile phones and have limited wireless internet access.

Thailand declares emergency after unprecedented protest (AP) Thai authorities declared a strict new state of emergency for the capital on Thursday, a day after a student-led protest against the country’s traditional establishment saw an extraordinary moment in which demonstrators heckled a royal motorcade. After the pre-dawn declaration, riot police moved in to clear out demonstrators who after a day of rallies and confrontation had gathered outside Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha’s office to push their demands, which include the former general’s stepping down, constitutional changes and reform of the monarchy. The protest Wednesday in Bangkok’s historic district, not far from glittering temples and royal palaces, was the third major gathering by student-led activists who have been pushing the boundaries of what is considered acceptable—and legal—language by publicly questioning the role of Thailand’s monarchy in the nation’s power structure.

Southeast Asia flood deaths near 40 as new storm approaches (Reuters) Nearly 40 people have died in Vietnam and Cambodia and scores more were missing, including rescuers, due to prolonged heavy rain and flash flooding as tropical storm Nangka edged towards the Vietnamese coast on Tuesday. Heavy rains since early October have caused deadly floods and landslides in several provinces in central Vietnam and displaced thousands of people in western Cambodia, officials and state media said. The floods are expected to worsen over the coming days, with tropical storm Nangka forecast to dump more rain as it makes landfall in Vietnam on Wednesday.

Coronavirus lockdown 2.0 deepens divisions in Israel (AP) When Israel went into lockdown last spring, Jerusalem pub owner Leon Shvartz moved quickly to save his business—shifting to a delivery and takeaway model that kept him afloat throughout the summer. Then came the second lockdown. With restaurants and shops shuttered again, Shvartz’s business is struggling to survive. He has laid off 16 of his 17 employees. By contrast, Israeli software maker Bizzabo, which operates in the hard-hit conference-management sector, quickly reinvented itself last spring by offering “virtual events.” It has more than doubled its sales and is expanding its workforce. Such tales of boom and bust reflect Israel’s growing “digital divide.” Even before the pandemic, Israel had one of the largest income gaps and poverty rates among developed economies, with a few high earners, mostly in the lucrative high-tech sector, while many Israelis barely get by as civil servants, in service industries or as small business owners. Those gaps have widened as the second nationwide lockdown, imposed last month, dealt a new blow to an economy already hit hard by the first round of restrictions. The fallout from the pandemic has also deepened long-simmering divisions among Israeli Jews, pitting a largely secular majority against a powerful ultra-Orthodox minority.

[berniesrevolution]

In May 2016, at a conference for Germany’s left-wing Die Linke party, Torten für Menschenfeinde (“Pies for Misanthropes”) struck again. Sneaking up the side of the conference hall, a member of the anti-fascist organization threw a piece of cake at Sahra Wagenknecht, a prominent Die Linke member in the Bundestag. It was a direct hit: Wagenknecht’s face was covered in chocolate frosting, a streak of whipped cream extending from ear to ear.

Torten für Menschenfeinde targeted Wagenknecht for her vocal position against an open-border policy for Germany. Earlier that year, she challenged Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to accept more than 1 million refugees, arguing that Germany should impose limits on entry and deport those who abused German “hospitality.” The cake attack—which followed a cream-pie offensive against a member of the far-right Alternative for Germany—isolated Wagenknecht in her party, which had otherwise pledged support for Merkel’s policy.

Nearly three years later, however, Wagenknecht and her views on migration have gone mainstream, in Germany and across Europe. In September 2018, Wagenknecht and her husband, Oskar Lafontaine, founded Aufstehen (“Rise Up”), a political movement combining left-wing economic policy with exclusionary social protections. The movement has garnered over 170,000 members since its official launch; according to a recent poll, more than a third of German voters “could see themselves” supporting Wagenknecht’s initiative.

“I am tired of surrendering the streets to the [anti-Islam movement] Pegida and the Alternative for Germany,” Wagenknecht said at the launch event. Onstage, she was joined by allies in Germany’s Green Party and the Social Democratic Party. “As many followers of the political left as possible should join,” several Social Democratic politicians wrote in a joint statement.

By founding Aufstehen, Wagenknecht became a member of the new vanguard of left politics in Europe. In France, Jean-Luc Mélenchon leads La France Insoumise, a left-populist movement that has been critical of mass migration. “I’ve never been in favor of freedom of arrival,” Mélenchon has said, claiming that migrants “are stealing the bread” of French workers. He is now the most popular politician on the French left, widely considered the face of the opposition to President Emmanuel Macron and a championof the Yellow Vest movement.

In the United Kingdom, Jeremy Corbyn leads the Labour Party and offers a radical vision of socialist transformation. And yet, although he was a vocal advocate for migrant rights during his tenure at Westminster, Corbyn has expressed deep skepticism about open borders as the party’s leader. “Labour is not wedded to freedom of movement for EU citizens as a point of principle,” Corbyn said, committing Labour to a policy of “reasonable management” based on “our economic needs.”

The rise of these left-nationalist leaders marks a momentous turn against free movement in Europe, where it has long been accepted as a basic right of citizenship.

Forget The Communist Manifesto’s refrain that “the working men have no country”; the new face of the European left takes a radically different view. Free movement is, to quote Wagenknecht, “the opposite of what is left-wing”: It encourages exploitation, erodes community, and denies popular sovereignty. To advocate open borders, in this view, is to oppose the interests of the working class.

By popularizing this argument, these new movements are not just challenging migration policy in Europe; they are redefining the boundaries of left politics in a dangerous, and inopportune, direction. Over the next few decades, global migration is set to explode: By 2100, up to 1 million migrants will be applying to enter the European Union each year.

Right-wing populists have already begun their assault on migrants: In Italy, Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini has called for “mass cleaning,” while Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has proposed that recent arrivals should be sent “back to Africa.” As left-nationalist movements charge ahead in the polls, it is not immediately clear who will challenge their pessimistic view of migration and fight for the right to free movement.

In April 1870, Karl Marx wrote a letter to two German migrants in New York City, imploring them to “pay particular attention” to what he called “the Irish question.”

“I have come to the conclusion,” Marx wrote, “that the decisive blow against the English ruling classes cannot be delivered in England but only in Ireland.” For Marx, Ireland would play a decisive role because of its mass emigration—the Mexico of its time. “Ireland constantly sends her own surplus to the English labor market, and thus forces down wages and lowers the material and moral position of the English working class,” Marx continued. “It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power.”

In the century and a half since, Marx’s letter has become a key reference point for the left critique of free movement. The passage is cited as evidence of a fundamental tension between the traditional goals of the left—equality, solidarity, working-class power—and a policy of open borders. “Karl Marx identified that fact a long time ago,” announced Len McCluskey, general secretary of Britain’s Unite the Union and a close ally of Jeremy Corbyn, in 2016.

But critics of free movement often neglect to mention Marx’s conclusions: “Given this state of affairs,” he wrote, “if the working class wishes to continue its struggle with some chance of success, the national organizations must become international.”

Marx’s analysis of mass migration did not lead him to advocate harder borders. Instead, it made him support international mobilization to protect workers’ rights in a world of free movement.

After all, Marx himself was a triple émigré: He fled Prussia to Paris, faced exile from Paris to Brussels, and—after a brief incarceration by the Belgian authorities—found his way to London. And he was hardly a model immigrant: Poor, sick, and a notorious procrastinator, Marx was much more of a scrounger than a striver, leeching off the largesse of Friedrich Engels.

As such, Marx had little sympathy for the “ordinary English worker,” who “hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standards of life.” The solution to the Irish question was not to bow to these prejudices, he argued, but to dissolve the antagonism between the various camps of the working class. “A coalition of German workers with the Irish workers—and of course also with the English and American workers who are prepared to accede to it—is the greatest achievement you could bring about now,” he advised.

Following Marx, the concept of left internationalism came to be associated with support for free movement on both ethical and strategic grounds. Ethically, open borders gave equal opportunity to workers of all nationalities. More important, the movement of people across borders created new opportunities for a coordinated challenge to capitalism. Internationalists like Marx supported free movement for the same reasons they supported free trade: It hastened the pace of history and heightened capitalism’s contradictions.

“There can be no doubt that dire poverty alone compels people to abandon their native land, and that the capitalists exploit the immigrant workers in the most shameless manner,” wrote Vladimir Lenin in 1913. “But only reactionaries can shut their eyes to the progressive significance of this modern migration of nations…. Capitalism is drawing the masses of the working people of the whole world…breaking down national barriers and prejudices, uniting workers from all countries.”

Back in Lenin’s day, a very similar debate over the merits of migration was roiling through the European left. But while the pessimistic view of Wagenknecht and other left nationalists has now taken hold in many parts of the continent, Lenin’s, at the time, prevailed.

At the 1907 Congress of the Second International in Stuttgart, Germany, leaders of the Socialist Party of America introduced a resolution to end “the willful importation of cheap foreign labor.” Morris Hillquit, a founder of the party, argued that migrants from Asia—the “yellow races,” unlike those from Europe—amounted to a “pool of unconscious strikebreakers.” The convention rejected the resolution: “The congress does not seek a remedy to the potentially impending consequences for the workers from immigration and emigration in any economic or political exclusionary rules, because these are fruitless and reactionary by nature.”

Lenin would never forget the incident. In a 1915 letter to the Socialist Propaganda League of America, he called out the American socialists for their efforts to restrict Chinese and Japanese migration. “We think that one can not be internationalist and be at the same time in favor of such restrictions,” he wrote. “Such socialists are in reality jingoes.”

By the time of Lenin’s letter, of course, Europe’s great powers had been whipped into a frenzy of nationalist violence. In the First World War, British soldiers sang “Rule, Britannia,” the Germans sang “Deutschlandlied,” and they all marched to their deaths. Even the Social Democratic Party of Germany—a key player in the Second International—voted in favor of the war. Citing the need for national self-defense, large swaths of the European left abandoned the cause of open borders.

But by the end of the next world war—which left another 80 million people dead and 60 million more displaced—support for free movement had moved from the margins of the left into the heart of the postwar political establishment. When the United Nations convened in Paris to draft its Declaration of Human Rights in November 1948, the committee consideredmobility a matter of “vital importance.” “Freedom of movement was the sacred right of every human being,” commented the representative from Chile. “The world belongs to all mankind,” added the representative from Haiti.

(Continue Reading)

[binamsblog]

Political impasse and a new Begining

Binam Ranapaheli

Darjeeling is going to the Loksabha Polls on May 18 2019. The election fever has seriously hit the floors of Darjeeling Hills. All the major political parties have set their own blitzkrieg. This election is going to be very different than the other elections which Darjeeling has witnessed till to date. In the past elections, the contest used to be one sided and the results were predictable. The national party with whom the ruling party of the hills forge an alliance used to defeat the other party candidates with a huge margin. 105 days of illogical strike, economic slowdown, fragmentation of G.J.M.M(Gorkha Janmukti Morcha ) and identity crisis are the parameters that will decide the the elections output.

Gorkha Nationalism and The Power Paradox:

The anti-incumbency factor of G.N.L.F(Gorkha National Liberation Front) and the identity crisis sentiments dethroned the G.N.L.F supremo Subhash Ghising resulting the emergence of Bimal Gurung as the undisputed leader of the Gorkhas. People of the hills overwhelmingly supported his ideas and his apple polished rhetoric. The Gorkhaland movement spearheaded by him touched the pinnacle in a very short span of time. The pomposity of the movement cannot be simply measured in terms of engineered vocabulary(Gorkhaland vayena vane goli nidhar MA Thokchu) and artificial sentence instead is measured by the output. The formation of GTA(Gorkhaland Territorial Administration or can be said as the output of the statehood movement (led by Gurung) dwindled down the aspiration of the Common people. The GTA agreement signed at the cost of martyrs (sibchu Incident) and the post of Chief Executive of GTA projected him as a man of questionable character. No sooner or later he became the victim of Power Paradox. The opposition parties also had to follow his diktats. The right to freedom of expression(Art.19) was seriously violated even not allowing the media to criticise his idea(shutdown of HPC kalimpong). It is often said that Democracy does not thrives in a small place.,in the form of democracy autocracy will prevail. To criticise him was not only an offence but used to be treated as the horrendous act. Gorkha Nationalism ,the feelings and the sentiments that bind all the Indian Gorkhas was misinterpreted and falsely propagated just for his political gains. To criticise him was to be an anti-Gorkha(some still thinks) and a traitor. The concept of Gorkhaland has emerged from the feeling of oneness and the Gorkha nationalism, rather than by the head to head collision of power paradox and egocentric desires.

Directionless Movement :

The Movement that started due to the forceful imposition of the Bengali language again turned into a massive statehood Movement. Strikes were declared and The leader who was spearheading the movement(however the cause is not statehood but the auditing of GTA funds) absconded. The innocent people of the hill who protesting on the roads have had to face the wrath of the State Govt. The movement got a different shape due to the emancipation of the Gorkhas residing in every corner of the world. The reality is very hard to digest, the people who were providing an impetus to the people of Darjeeling hills from outside knew very less about the ground realities. Disorderness and tranquility destroyed the livelihood of the common people . Tea Garden workers whose economic status is very low suffered very badly. The Central Govt. refrained from the main scene and allowed it to become a rigmarole. Split of GJMM. In the absence of Gurung ,Binay Tamang ( Asst.General Secretary) took the leadership and spearheaded the movement. The sufferings of the people, deviation of the central Govt. Rate of increase of the martyrs mounted enormous pressure on the leadership of Tamang. The State Govt. on a plea submitted by the G.N.L.F party for the reinstoration of peace in the hills called an all party meeting (hills). The state Govt. is very rigid and adamant regarding the division of Bengal. Binay Tamang led the delegation as Gurung was still under the hibernation and was slapped with many non-bailable charges including Ant-national or waging war against the state. The outcome of the meeting with the state executive was prudent. On the advice of Gurung ,Binay Tamang called off the strike. People were against this decision. The wrath of the common people were visible in the social media, electronic media,etc. Bimal Gurung in accordance of the people's deviation from his orientation bounced back of his statement and shifted the onus on Tamang. The State Govt. In order to bring normalcy in the hills resumed GTA with some changes. Binay Tamang was chosen as the administrator to carry on the developmental activities in the hills and bring back peace and prosperity .

Pseudo-chauvinism :

Binay Tamang led GJMM received the support of the people. All the major leaders who were close to Gurung also equivocally supported his candidature. The political sense of the common people in the hills has been hypnotised by the so called pseudo-chauvinists. People should understand and believe in the pragmatic sequence. It should not make any difference whom so ever will administrate G.T.A Gorkhaland resides in the heart of every Indian Gurkha's,it doesn't changes with the color of the flags. Inorder to grasp the power and fulfill self desires Gorkhaland should not be used. The addition equation of the GJMM(Bimal) and GNLF Who were the political rivals once has really exposed the underbelly of both leaders(Bimal G and Man G). Again same rhetoric is reverberating in the eardrums of the people. Now it is up-to the people to decide. The upcoming election is not a war between the gorkha and antigorkha forces, instead it's a well planned strategy to fool the common people in the name of Gorkhaland and regain the power from Tamang's led GJMM.

Jai Gorkha

Vandemataram

[96thdayofrage]

The American Malady

King worried out loud about the fate of American troops forced to participate in this corrupt enterprise. “Before long, they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese,” King said, “and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor.”

King called for an immediate end to the bombing, the removal of American troops, and — to thunderous applause — support and encouragement for conscientious objectors in the United States.

In the final section of the speech, King laid out an even more damning indictment. Vietnam, he argued, was “but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit.” As King put it, “such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam.”

The Vietnam War was part of a pattern of military intervention “on the wrong side of the world revolution,” King told the audience. The war was fought on behalf of protecting investments in Guatemala, for example, he said. While the world was moving toward revolution, the United States was “antirevolutionary.”

In order to “get on the right side of the world revolution,” King said, the United States must “must undergo a radical revolution of values.” Instead of being driven to war to protect profits, American society must prioritize people, King said.

“True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar,” King argued. “It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.” Making that change would require a fundamental reorientation of the “giant triplets” of American society:

We must rapidly begin, we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

The Backlash

King got the response he expected. “What is that goddamn nigger preacher doing to me?” President Johnson fumed in the Oval Office when he learned of the content of King’s Riverside address.

The president wasn’t the only one to see King’s speech as outrageous. King’s staff had warned that speaking out would cause donations from Northern liberals to decline. Opinion polls conducted just prior to King’s death one year later indicated that 72 percent of white people and 55 percent of black people disapproved of his opposition to Vietnam.

This sentiment was no doubt influenced by the avalanche of media criticism that King endured.

The day after the Riverside speech, an estimated 168 newspapers attacked King.

The Washington Post called the Riverside speech a “grave injury” to the civil rights movement: “[King] has diminished his usefulness to his cause, to his country, and to his people.” The New York Times called it a “wasteful and self-defeating” foray into foreign policy, “a fusing of two public problems that are distinct and separate,” which did a “disservice” to both.

Time, Newsweek, and US News and World Report all came out against King. Time ran an article called “Confusing the Cause” that called King a “drawling bumpkin, so ignorant that he had not read a newspaper in years, who had wandered out of his native haunts and away from his natural calling.”

Apart from SNCC, the major civil rights leaders and organizations refused to stand by King. The organization he founded a decade before, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, issued a statement disassociating itself from King’s remarks. Roy Wilkins of the NAACP said that “civil rights groups do not have enough information on Vietnam, or on foreign policy, to make it their cause.”

In May, King compared himself to socialist leader Eugene Debs who went to prison for opposing World War I. Depressed and attacked from all sides, he cried frequently.

King’s Powerful Commitment

At the height of his influence, King was constantly writing and giving speeches — at a pace of nearly three thousand words a day by one estimate.

Most of his speeches were dynamic, improvisational riffs that combined familiar themes and set pieces in unique ways as needed. His final speech — known by the iconic phrase “I’ve been to the mountaintop” — given on April 3, 1968, the night before he was assassinated, is a good example. His address at the 1963 March on Washington is known by the refrain of a section he added spontaneously — “I have a dream” — and has a more radical content than is often acknowledged.

But the Riverside address is different. It was written out several days in advance, and King followed the text nearly word for word. Knowing it would invite controversy and counterattack, King wanted to be precise and not be misquoted.

“Beyond Vietnam” therefore represents some of King’s most radical ideas in carefully crafted prose. It has much to teach new generations about a historical icon, held up to so much official esteem, who actually offered a greater challenge to the status quo than is commonly understood.

To quote another radical activist who gave an important speech in the month of April:

During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice . . . After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them . . . while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance.

Those are the words of the Russian revolutionary Lenin, who suffered a distorted canonization in very different circumstances.

Martin Luther King –who in life was wiretapped, hounded, imprisoned, slandered, and ultimately assassinated — has been canonized in contemporary US society in order to rob his ideas of their substance.

This isn’t just about King as an individual, but about the movement he represents — the long black freedom struggle in the United States. The Riverside Church speech represents the dangerous potential of the black freedom struggle to pull apart the whole fabric of American capitalism.

Tragically, half a century after “Beyond Vietnam,” America is still the greatest purveyor of violence in the world, and the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism haven’t been conquered. In fact, they seem to be the guiding principles of the current administration.

While the political elite certainly hasn’t undergone the kind of revolution of values that King argued for, there is considerable evidence that large sections — perhaps even a majority of the population — is moving in that direction. The most popular politician in the United States today is a democratic socialist, and calls to restructure the American edifice so that it no longer produces beggars make sense to more and more people.

Martin Luther King’s urgent plea at the end of “Beyond Vietnam” is as relevant today as it was fifty years ago:

Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores, and thereby speed the day when “every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low; the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain.”

[gordonwilliamsweb]

Censorship or Misinformation? DeSantis and YouTube Spar Over Covid Roundtable Takedown.

In early April, YouTube took down a video featuring Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and a group of controversial scientists at a March 18 coronavirus roundtable. The online video platform, owned by Google, cited as its rationale that the video contained false statements about the efficacy of children’s mask-wearing.

This story also ran on PolitiFact. It can be republished for free.

The decision has drawn public blowback on social media and from DeSantis himself.

DeSantis held another public roundtable on April 12 (which is currently available on YouTube), along with three of the same scientists who participated in the March 18 session, during which he blasted YouTube for taking down the earlier video, calling the action “censorship.”

He said Google and YouTube have not acted as “repositories of truth and scientific inquiry” throughout the covid pandemic but instead as “enforcers of a narrative.”

“What we’re witnessing is Orwellian,” DeSantis said. ‘It’s a Big Tech corporate media collusion.”

And when polled by DeSantis during the second roundtable, the scientists defended the video, saying it should have been left up so that it could contribute to scientific debate. We checked with DeSantis’ office for more information and were referred to an April 12 press release, which summarized the events of the day’s roundtable.

In an emailed statement, a YouTube spokesperson pointed to the platform’s policies on medical misinformation about covid: “We removed this video because it included content that contradicts the consensus of local and global health authorities regarding the efficacy of masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19. We allow videos that otherwise violate our policies to remain on the platform if they contain sufficient educational, documentary, scientific, or artistic context. Our policies apply to everyone, and focus on content regardless of the speaker or channel.”

The video, though no longer on that platform, can still be viewed on The Florida Channel, a website that posts recordings of Florida governmental proceedings.

So who exactly are these scientific panelists and what was said during the roundtable? And have social media companies ramped up efforts to crack down on medical misinformation recently?

Let’s break it down.

DeSantis’ Panel Reflected Controversial Herd Immunity Movement

The scientists who spoke at DeSantis’ roundtable and gave their opinions about masks and lockdowns were Dr. Scott Atlas of Stanford University, Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University.

Three of the scientists, Gupta, Bhattacharya and Kulldorff, were the primary authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, a contentious document that circulated in October. In it, the scientists argued that lockdowns should end, most people should resume their daily lives and only the most vulnerable should take precautions against covid. The document asserted that members of the public who resumed normal lives would then build up their immunity to covid through exposure to natural infection.

The Great Barrington Declaration received immediate criticism from scientists, including the top U.S. health official, Dr. Anthony Fauci; World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus; and the United Kingdom’s health secretary, Matt Hancock.

Atlas was part of President Donald Trump’s White House covid team and was reported to have promoted herd immunity views to the former president. After the reports about Atlas, Trump and his press team later walked back the idea that the White House was considering any type of herd immunity strategy to combat the pandemic.

Atlas’ tenure at the White House was also dogged by other controversies, including Twitter removing one of his tweets because it contained false information about face masks, and his urging of Michigan residents to go against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s public health recommendations. Atlas stepped down from the White House team in December.

The Panel’s Factual Mistake and Why YouTube Took It Down 

During DeSantis’ almost two-hour March 18 covid roundtable, the governor and the scientists discussed a range of topics, including the efficacy of lockdowns and face masks for children.

According to YouTube, the video was removed because it violated the company’s policy on medical misinformation. YouTube says it doesn’t allow content that poses a serious risk of egregious harm, such as videos that contradict the consensus of local and global health authorities regarding the efficacy of masks.

The clips YouTube cited as violating its medical misinformation policy involved specific instances in which DeSantis and the scientists said face masks were not necessary for children — statements the platform said were contrary to recommendations from U.S. public health authorities. Here are the specific clips in the format provided by YouTube:

“Dr. Gupta mentioned about, you know, not putting masks on kids that’s not effective, not necessary. Uh, Martin, do you agree in school there’s no need for them to be wearing face masks?” — Gov. DeSantis

“Uh, children should not wear face masks, no. They don’t need it for their own protection and they don’t need it for protecting other people either.” — Kulldorff

“… and I think it is developmentally inappropriate and it just doesn’t help on the disease spread. I think it’s absolutely not the right thing to do. … I think [the data] is a little bit, uh, clearer because we’ve had a year of experience. If we went back a year, a lot of the experts would say that wearing masks for the general public is not evidence-based.” — Dr. Bhattacharya

“There’s no scientific rationale or logic to have children wear masks in schools.” — Dr. Atlas

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that children 2 years old and older wear masks. The agency also recommends that children wear masks in schools, child care settings and any environment when they are around people who don’t live in their home.

“We know children of all ages are at risk for being infected with SARS-CoV-2 and are capable of transmitting the virus. This is particularly true of older children, especially middle-school and high-school aged kids,” Josh Michaud, associate director of global health policy at KFF, wrote in an email. “We also know that masking, when employed widely and effectively, helps reduce the risk of transmission of the virus.”

Studies back this up.

The CDC published a study in February showing that different types of masks block cough particles and double-masking is the most effective at doing so. Another experiment from that study showed that a person in a mask emits fewer aerosol particles that can be passed on to an unmasked person. A multitude of reports also show, generally, that mask-wearing is effective at reducing the risk of spreading or catching other respiratory diseases.

Other studies have shown that children carry almost as much coronavirus in their upper-respiratory tract as adults, despite often having no or mild symptoms. And it is possible for children to pass the virus on to adults.

Also, multiple studies of schools that reopened in fall 2020 and had high compliance with mask-wearing have been shown to have low numbers of covid transmission. And the American Academy of Pediatrics said mask-wearing will not make it more difficult for children to breathe, nor will it interfere with a child’s lung development.

Are Tech Companies Actually Increasing Their Crackdowns?

DeSantis’ protests regarding the removal of his roundtable from YouTube echo those of Trump, who railed against tech companies and their policies during his presidency.

Trump was eventually de-platformed from other online entities such as Twitter and Facebook, among others, following the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Conservatives have since complained they’re being censored on social media platforms.

After the YouTube video removal, DeSantis used the opportunity to promote censorship bills that are moving through his state’s legislature and would prevent social media companies from blocking politicians from their platforms in Florida. (State attempts to regulate social media companies will face constitutional hurdles, including First Amendment protections, the Tampa Bay Times reported.)

Social media platforms including YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter have introduced covid misinformation policies since the pandemic started, and even updated those policies in the past couple of months to take a harder line in removing posts and notifying users. However, the companies state that they aren’t targeting certain users when removing content, but rather anyone who spreads misinformation.

According to data shared by YouTube in March, the company has removed more than 800,000 videos containing coronavirus misinformation since February of last year. Facebook reported in February that the company and its sister platform, Instagram, had removed more than 1 million pieces of covid misinformation in the last three months of 2020. And last month, Twitter said it had removed more than 8,400 tweets and challenged 11.5 million accounts since the implementation of the covid guidance.

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

USE OUR CONTENT

This story can be republished for free (details).

Censorship or Misinformation? DeSantis and YouTube Spar Over Covid Roundtable Takedown. published first on https://nootropicspowdersupplier.tumblr.com/

[arcticdementor]

U.S. public health experts increasingly urge the reopening of schools, and yet much of the country still seems unable to do so. This is the most visible and, perhaps, most tragic consequence of the toxic environment surrounding discussions of how to respond to the pandemic that has been driven by a technocratic elite harboring a dim view of the public’s role in important discussions. Yet it is not the failure of the public, but rather of these self-appointed guardians of public discourse to glimpse their own shortcomings, that has crippled our national debate.

The simple, elite explanation for all our problems during the pandemic has been that the public failed to trust the experts and didn’t “follow the science.” This, they argue, is the result of tolerating too much skepticism, which is an ordinary feature of scientific debate. Instead, elites have openly embraced the notion that the public is better served by exaggeration, downplaying uncertainty, or even deception (such as in official estimates of herd immunity).

This disdain for healthy skepticism, a normal part of functioning science and democracy, is corrosive to public trust and impedes the accumulation of knowledge. A climate of overconfidence makes it both more likely that we will adopt bad policy and harder to fix our missteps. Reversals of conventional wisdom are, for better or worse, inevitable in science. We have had many reversals of official positions on COVID-19—from the usefulness of masks to which medications work to guidance about school openings—and will likely see more as evidence continues to come in. The problem is that our current climate locks us into polarized mindsets, which makes it harder to recategorize “misinformation” that winds up being correct.

…

Central to the elite claim is that they “follow the science,” a mantra that falsely suggests all science is settled, and implies that science alone should decide complex public policy tradeoffs. When we drive out uncertainty and debate, and falsely or prematurely declare consensus or that a decision is “settled,” we make it more likely that the mistaken policy will be widely adopted in its most extreme form. We also make it far less likely that research will be done to evaluate whether a given policy decision was correct.

America’s schoolchildren have been one of the primary victims of this toxic climate. Today, scientific consensus, including Dr. Anthony Fauci and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, increasingly favors reopening schools, whose closures were more severe and more unfair in the U.S. than in almost any other country. A growing chorus holds that our early, flawed decision to impose sweeping, extended closures of public schools was a mistake all along.

Worse, our patchwork of closures has not been tied to the local prevalence of the pandemic. These closures reflect polarized politics, not public health. Studies have repeatedly concluded that there was no relationship between reopening decisions and COVID-19 case counts. Instead, it appeared to be based on whether the locals were pro- or anti-Trump; schools in Democratic-leaning locations were more likely to close. Partly as a result, school closures also demonstrate a strong racial gap, with white students more likely to have the option of in-person schooling than Black or brown students. Meanwhile, nearly all private schools—95%, by one count—stayed open for in-person learning, compared with 40% for public schools in the fall. As others have noted, many of the most vocal advocates for school closures have in fact had their own children in private school all along, just one of the many ways elites bought their way out of pandemic restrictions.

Many opponents of reopening questioned the motives of those advocating it, rather than their actual arguments. Supporters of reopening were labeled “conservative,” or more commonly, “Trumpian,” an ad hominem attack that has a corrosive impact within the liberal orthodoxy of academia. Those who paid the price for this kind of self-righteous name-calling and politically driven accusation were children.

Warning signs of this toxic climate emerged as early as March 2020, when Jeff Flier, the former dean of Harvard Medical School, and Vinay Prasad, a well-known commentator on evidence-based medicine, first published a piece expressing alarm that scientists with dissenting views were being “demonized” and subjected to ad hominem attacks. In what suggests an unprecedented moment within scientific discourse, concerns about incivility have been repeated again and again in editorials in top medical journals, calling attention to silencing caused by a “climate of fear” and “personal attacks.” These attacks distorted scientific communication: Some chose to cast their public statements to fit partisan narratives, while other scientists stayed silent so as not to be accused of “Trumpian” motives.

In contemporary discourse, labels like “right wing,” “Trumper,” and “anti-science” are sticky, and often terminal, in elite institutions, regardless of their veracity. By contrast, you can rarely if ever go wrong parroting the partisan consensus, even when it causes widespread damage to the actual human beings in whose name the consensus claims to speak. It is very difficult to defend a reasonable position about school reopening when one is being accused of murderous intent, or playing “Russian roulette” with respect to children or teachers.

…

Blaming teachers unions has now become commonplace among people who want to reopen schools, including progressives who normally defend them. Yet in many ways, the inflexible positions of teachers unions are a symptom of elite overconfidence, and a year of doom and gloom with little counterbalance. This has resulted in locked-in positions that are tough to unwind: Even if union leadership believes the science has changed, how does it admit to its members that it had been wrong all along?

Although misinformation can be a problem, the elite mentality toward it during the pandemic has been far too simplistic. The line between misinformation and views one disagrees with is, in many cases that matter, a hard one to draw. There are some views that clearly deserve little audience—those that deny the existence of COVID-19, or that believe vaccines contain 5G chips. But it’s often hard or impossible to make a clear distinction. The WHO, for instance, continues to express strong concerns about mask wearing for children between the ages of 2 and 5, while the CDC recommends masks starting at age 2. Which position constitutes “misinformation”—and who decides?

Tech companies have, indeed, censored some ludicrous content. But at the same time, they have repeatedly labeled posts by prominent scientists on complex issues as false or misleading, which even scientists who disagree with the underlying positions have pointed out is a dangerous, unaccountable form of censorship. Misusing the accusation of misinformation has now become a common tactic for scientists to express disagreement. Some regularly quoted scientists who oppose school reopening have taken to repeatedly terming anyone they disagree with “ignorant and sociopathic” or purveyors of “dangerous misinformation.” The result is that an important term has devolved into meaningless, partisan name-calling intended to shut down necessary debate while stigmatizing one’s opponents.

As a result, many Americans have an overexaggerated view of certain aspects of the pandemic. One of these may well bear on school reopenings: According to polling, Americans massively overestimate the number of children who have died from the disease. Per the CDC, in the United States, children represent less than 0.1% of total pandemic-related deaths. While each individual death is a tragedy, the statistics remind us of a crucial, well-established feature of this virus: It is far less risky for children, with Americans above age 65 constituting 81% of the share of deaths.

In the same polling, Americans also massively overestimate the likelihood that a COVID-19 infection will lead to hospitalization. Forty-one percent of Democrats hold the completely implausible view that more than half of infections result in hospitalization. Ironically, despite the widespread assumption that Republicans underplay the disease, 26% of Republicans get the rate of hospitalization correct, compared with 10% of Democrats, according to the same study.

Marking all pandemic-related questions off-limits except to “science” has clearly confused many people about who can contribute to the debate and how. For instance, it has been commonplace to suggest that Emily Oster, an early data-driven advocate for school reopenings, should not be listened to in these debates because she is an economist, not a “public health expert.” Yet Oster’s published work and expertise is actually mostly in public health policy, which is an interdisciplinary field. And the truth is that mainstream scientific discourse displays a much wider range of views than the public is led to believe.

The point is not about whether any particular scientist is right. Rather, it is simply not a healthy sign when good-faith discussion and uncertainty within the scientific community are labeled in media articles as a “dangerous distraction” or the result, as other scientists have charged, of a “hidden agenda.” Aside from driving out debate, this miscalibration is precisely what leads to an incredulous public unable to make sense of contradictory public health guidance. It leaves us in an epistemic vacuum where no one appears trustworthy.

Some may reassure themselves that this is a temporary phenomenon, the result either of the high stakes drama of the pandemic, or a unique result of Trump’s presidency. Unfortunately, we think this is rooted in a much deeper syndrome: technocratic elites who disdain the public, and who believe their access to greater expertise entitles them to decide important issues themselves.

[phroyd]

Katharine Hayhoe is a professor and director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University. She is a lead author on volumes one and two of the fourth national climate assessment. November 30

The Fourth National Climate Assessment — the work of 13 federal agencies and more than 350 scientists, including me — is clear: The Earth is warming faster than at any time in human history, and we’re the ones causing it. Climate change is already affecting people, and the more carbon we produce, the more dangerous the effects over the coming century. Nevertheless, many people continue to believe and propagate some misleading myths. Here are the five I hear most frequently.

MYTH NO. 1  Climate scientists are init for the money.

When the second volume of the National Climate Assessment was released on Nov. 23, Rick Santorum, a Republican former senator from Pennsylvania, took to CNN to proclaim that climate scientists “are driven by the money that they receive.” Former House majority leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) appeared on the network the next day declaring the report to be “made by scientists that get paid to further the politics of global warming.”

I was one of the report’s authors. How much did I earn for the hundreds of hours I spent on it? Nothing. Nearly every day, climate scientists are accused of venality. Our other purported sins include fabricating data, selling out to “big green” — which supposedly tethers our grant money to doom-and-gloom findings — and fanning the flames of hysteria to further our nefarious agenda.

The reality is that nearly every climate scientist could make at least the same amount of money — and often much more — in a different field, including the oil industry. And the money we do receive in grants doesn’t go into our pockets. A $1.1 million grant from the National Science Foundation provided me with a mere $37,000 a year, all of which went to paying for the proposed work, including a graduate researcher, a computer and publication fees. (In summer, I do some climate-focused consulting with cities and water districts to cover my salary when I’m not teaching.) Santorum, meanwhile, receives a substantial income from serving as a consultant to Consol Energy, a coal company; and according to OpenSecrets.org, DeLay has received nearly $740,000 from the oil and gas industry.

MYTH NO. 2  The climate has changed before. It's just a natural cycle.

Last fall, when the first volume of the National Climate Assessment was released, White House spokesman Raj Shah responded that “the climate has changed and is always changing.” President Trump himself has embraced this position,claiming that the climate “will change back again.” This line is a popular one with people who dismiss climate change by maintaining that we’ve had ice ages before, as well as warm periods, and so the warming we’re seeing now is just what the Earth has always done.

But we can look at the natural factors that affect the climate. First, over the past few decades, energy from the sun has been going down , not up, so if changes in the sun’s energy drove our temperature, we should be getting cooler, not warmer.

Others argue that we’re getting warmer because we’re recovering from the last ice age. But ice ages — and the warm periods in between — are caused by the Earth’s orbital cycles, and according to those cycles, the next event on our geologic calendar is another ice age, not more warming.

We can also rule out volcanoes, which do produce heat-trapping gases, but less than 1 percent of the CO2 that humans produce. And big eruptions, when they happen, cool the Earth instead of warming it. In other words, the climate change we’re experiencing now definitely isn’t natural.

MYTH NO. 3  Climate scientists are split on whether it's real.

We often hear that climate scientists are split 50-50 when it comes to whether global warming is occurring. “Each side has their scientists,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told Politico in 2014. Trump echoed that rhetoric on “60 Minutes” this October, telling Lesley Stahl, “We have scientists that disagree” with human-caused global warming.

In reality, more than 97 percent of climate scientists agree thatglobal warming is happening and that humans are causing it. At least 18 scientific societies in the United States, from the American Geophysical Union to the American Medical Association, have issued official statements on climate change. And it’s been more than 50 years since U.S. scientists first raised the alarm about the dangers of climate change with the president — at the time, Lyndon B. Johnson. The public confusion has been manufactured by industry interests and ideologues to muddy the waters.

MYTH NO. 4  Climate change won't affect me.

We often think the most widespread myth is that the science isn’t real. But according to public opinion polls by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication , the most prevalent misconception — one that the majority of us have bought into — is that climate change just doesn’t matter to us. While 70 percent of American adults agree that climate change is happening, only 40 percent of those surveyed believe it will harm them personally. Sure, it’ll hurt polar bears, and maybe people who live on low-lying islands in the South Pacific. But the world has warmed by just 1 degree Celsius, or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, since 1900. What’s the big deal?

Climate change is a threat multiplier that touches everything, from our health to our economy to our coasts to our infrastructure. It makes heat waves stronger, heavy precipitation events more frequent and hurricanes more intense, and it nearly doubles the area burned by wildfires . It supercharges natural disasters like Hurricane Harvey and the Camp Fire, as those suffering the effects of these events know firsthand. Climate change is no longer a distant issue in space or time: It’s affecting us, today, in the places where we live.

MYTH NO. 5  It's cold outside — global warming can't be real.

Whenever a cold snap brings out our winter parkas, there’s a politician or pundit saying, Global warming? Global cooling, more like! Trump has done so repeatedly, tweeting just before Thanksgiving, “Brutal and Extended Cold Blast could shatter ALL RECORDS — Whatever happened to Global Warming?” In 2015, Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.) brought a snowball to the Senate floor in an attempt to reject the reality of climate change.

But cold weather doesn’t rebut the data that shows the planet is warming over climate time scales. Think of it this way: Weather is like your mood, and climate is like your personality. Weather is what occurs in a certain place at a certain time. Climate is the long-term average of weather over decades. The fact it was cold and snowy one day last week? That’s weather. Global warming or not, cold days still occur, particularly in winter. But since 2000, we’re seeing far more new hot-temperature records than cold ones. In fact, in 2017, we saw more than 10,000 cold-temperature records broken at weather stations across the United States. And more than 36,000 high-temperature records were broken the same year.

Phroyd