1,094 Matching Annotations
  1. Mar 2021
    1. Democrat Chicago to allow the economy to open up less than a week after Biden's inauguration...it's all planned to make Biden appear successful! Democrats allowed millions of people to suffer and lose businesses all for their own greed and power!

      Links to: https://chicago.suntimes.com/coronavirus/2021/1/23/22245873/chicago-bars-restaurants-reopen-pritzker-coronavirus-illinois-suburban-cook-county

    1. System architects: equivalents to architecture and planning for a world of knowledge and data Both government and business need new skills to do this work well. At present the capabilities described in this paper are divided up. Parts sit within data teams; others in knowledge management, product development, research, policy analysis or strategy teams, or in the various professions dotted around government, from economists to statisticians. In governments, for example, the main emphasis of digital teams in recent years has been very much on service design and delivery, not intelligence. This may be one reason why some aspects of government intelligence appear to have declined in recent years – notably the organisation of memory.57 What we need is a skill set analogous to architects. Good architects learn to think in multiple ways – combining engineering, aesthetics, attention to place and politics. Their work necessitates linking awareness of building materials, planning contexts, psychology and design. Architecture sits alongside urban planning which was also created as an integrative discipline, combining awareness of physical design with finance, strategy and law. So we have two very well-developed integrative skills for the material world. But there is very little comparable for the intangibles of data, knowledge and intelligence. What’s needed now is a profession with skills straddling engineering, data and social science – who are adept at understanding, designing and improving intelligent systems that are transparent and self-aware58. Some should also specialise in processes that engage stakeholders in the task of systems mapping and design, and make the most of collective intelligence. As with architecture and urban planning supply and demand need to evolve in tandem, with governments and other funders seeking to recruit ‘systems architects’ or ‘intelligence architects’ while universities put in place new courses to develop them.
    1. As well as the discussion about what is really meant by a ‘domain of one’s own‘

      Societies have been inexorably been moving toward interdependence. More and more people specialize and sub-specialize into smaller fragments of the work that we do. As a result, we become more interdependent on the work of others to underpin our own. This makes the worry about renting a domain seem somewhat disingenuous, particularly when we can reasonably rely on the underlying structures to work to keep our domains in place.

      Perhaps re-framing this idea may be worthwhile. While it may seem that we own our bodies (at least in modern liberal democracies, for the moment), a large portion of our bodies are comprised of bacteria which are simultaneously both separate and a part of us and who we are. The symbiosis between people and their bacteria has been going on so long and generally so consistently we don't realize that the interdependence even exists anymore. No one walks around talking about how they're renting their bacteria.

      Eventually we'll get to a point where our interdependence on domain registrars and hosts becomes the same sort of symbiotic interdependence.

      Another useful analogy is to look at our interdependence on all the other pieces in our lives which we don't own or directly control, but which still allow us to live and exist.

      People only tend to notice the major breakdowns of these bits of our interdependence. Recently there has been a lot of political turmoil and strife in the United States because politicians have become more self-centered and focused on their own needs, wants, and desire for power that they aren't serving the majority of people. When our representatives don't do their best work at representing their constituencies, major breakdowns in our interdependence occur. We need to be able to rely on scientists to do their best work to inform politicians who we need to be able to trust to do their best work to improve our lives and the general welfare. When the breakdown happens it creates issues to the individual bodies that make up the society as well as the body of the society itself.

      Who's renting who in this scenario?

  2. Feb 2021
    1. Those who are responsible for upholding this system profess to want to fight crime, but they do so by destroying communities.

      This is an obviously emotional appeal that would affect anyone in the audience since most everyone has a sense of community somewhere. This statement also boldly shades those who uphold the system; including judges, cops, lawyers, and politicians.

    1. He is seriously concerned – as many of us are – about the destructive repercussions of identity politics, the censorship of dissenting opinion, and the rewriting of American history.

      A lot of inflammatory dog whistle rhetoric here (not to mention the poor use of en dashes posing as em dashes).

      He calls out destructive repercussions of identity politics, but fails to notice that everyone wants to feel safe in their identity, not just cis-gendered white male Republicans.

      He calls out censorship of dissenting opinion while writing on his own website. When did the government censor his opinions or any other opinions? Republicans are so pro-corporation and pro-enterprise, but then get upset when those same great companies enforce basic social norms?

      And then, in the same breath: "rewriting American history?!" Perhaps we just taking a more nuanced perspective of the actual truths? Maybe we're hearing the stories and perspectives of those who's dissenting opinions have been not only been censored out of the media, but never allowed in for almost 250 years?

    1. UK is with EU. (2021, January 18). ..The reason we are in this third lockdown is because of the anti lockdowners like Lord Sumption ..We are going in circles, countries who have done well controlled the virus and now have an economic recovery ..And every life matters #GMB @devisridhar speaking truth to power https://t.co/U3BBV0uUSb [Tweet]. @ukiswitheu. https://twitter.com/ukiswitheu/status/1351089812799950850

    1. Depending on the politics it might either mean that the implementation can no longer be changed, because that would break your code, or that your code is very fragile and keeps breaking on every upgrade or change of the underlying implementation.

      not quite sure how this is politics, but interesting example

    1. Sharpe claims that Englishmen “were able to…constitute themselves as political agents” by reading, whether or not they read about state affairs; for politics was “a type of consciousness” and the psyche “a text of politics.” “The Civil War itself became a contested text.” So reading was everything: “We are what we read.”

      The argument here is that much of the English Civil War was waged in reading and writing. Compare this with today's similar political civil war between the right and the left, but it is being waged in social media instead in sound bites, video clips, tweets, which encourage visceral gut reactions instead of longer and better thought out arguments and well tempered reactions.

      Instead of moving forward on the axis of thought and rationality, we're descending instead into the primordial and visceral reactions of our "reptilian brains."

  3. Jan 2021
  4. Dec 2020
    1. I saw him and was astounded. 33I loved him as a woman, 34falling upon him in embrace. 35I took him and made him 36my brother.” 37The mother of Gilgamish she that knows all things 38[said unto Gilgamish:—] ................................... [213] COL. II 1that he may join with thee in endeavor.” 2(Thus) Gilgamish solves (his) dream. 3Enkidu sitting before the hierodule

      In the time period the translation, you can tell that they had just begun to create labels on relationships, people etc to understand what they were feeling or to just recognize different people. In the text chosen, there are many different area's in the highlighted portion and throughout the text, where Gilgamesh uses labels which created for a clear story. It is however conflicting because of the translators and them maybe having included different sections so that the story makes sense. Nonetheless, when he said that he loved him like he would a woman, that shows how the language at the time was advanced, closer to the current 21st century, enough to realize that Gilgamesh had romantic feelings for Enkidu. Also with the piece when the translators described him as sitting near the hierodule. The slave, prostitute (both) was able to be identified no matter of the gender. Looking back at the time, it is still demeaning when thinking in our 21st century mindset and what we consider normal. However looking back, it is interesting to see how advanced the ancient Iraq civilization operated. It is also amazing seeing where the women of this country came from as in today's world the women now being able to be involved with the government, they are making it a mission so Iraqi women know their rights (Calabrese, John, et al).

      CC BY-SA

      Calabrese, John, et al. “Constitutional and Legal Rights of Iraqi Women.” Middle East Institute, 8 Dec. 2020, mei.edu/publications/constitutional-and-legal-rights-iraqi-women.

    1. For those awash in anxiety and alienation, who feel that everything is spinning out of control, conspiracy theories are extremely effective emotional tools. For those in low status groups, they provide a sense of superiority: I possess important information most people do not have. For those who feel powerless, they provide agency: I have the power to reject “experts” and expose hidden cabals. As Cass Sunstein of Harvard Law School points out, they provide liberation: If I imagine my foes are completely malevolent, then I can use any tactic I want.

      Underlying emotional drivers of Trump supporters, conspiracy theorists, and Republican psychology

    2. You can’t argue people out of paranoia. If you try to point out factual errors, you only entrench false belief. The only solution is to reduce the distrust and anxiety that is the seedbed of this thinking. That can only be done first by contact, reducing the social chasm between the members of the epistemic regime and those who feel so alienated from it. And second, it can be done by policy, by making life more secure for those without a college degree.

      Solutions to divided political landscape -- it can't be done head-on just by winning arguments through logic -- but instead will require community work, personal relationships, and educational policies

    1. The last several years, Mr. Obama says, have made it clear that “the normative glue that holds us together — a lot of those common expectations and values have weakened, have frayed in ways that de Tocqueville anticipated” and that “atomization and loneliness and the loss of community” have made our democracy vulnerable.

      Drivers of the current state of democracy and psychology of America.

      A view that is very similar to David Brooks'.

    1. There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

      Not just in the US but increasingly seen around the world as part of the anti-intellectualism associated with the Wokeness.

  5. Nov 2020
  6. Oct 2020
    1. John Glubb and Avoiding the Fate of Empires

      John Glubb was an English Army officer who created a theory called the "Fate of Empires", which catalogues the typical rise and fall of hegemonic orders and attempts to explain why they fall. He wanted to understand where the North Atlantic European Hegemonic Order is in its cycle, in the hopes that we could avoid making the same mistakes as those before us.

      This is the typical cycle of empires:

      1. Age of Pioneers

      A small and insignificant nation on takes over its more powerful neighbors. This new nation is driven by a need to grow and improve, to become the power they took over. This phase is characterized by an optimistic sense of improvisation and initiative.

      1. The Age of Commerce

      The new empire has a lot of new territory, which is safer due to recent military successes. This sets the stage for economic growth. The conquering class benefits from the merchants but aren't motivated solely by material gains.

      1. Age of Affluence

      The ruling class look for ways to spend their new-found wealth, and because they still feel an idealistic sense of noble nationalism, they spend their money on large-scale civic and building projects and invest in art and culture.

      1. The Age of Intellect

      Gradually this material success corrodes the values of the ruling class and material wealth replaces nationalism as the primary virtue. This phase is characterized by a defensiveness and the need to protect what they have. Wall building comes at this phase.

      Often seen as a golden age, this is the phase that often comes before its downfall.

      1. The Age of Decadence

      The ruling class is completely disengaged from the issues of the state and are focussed almost completely on sport, entertainment, and personal gain.

    1. Produc într-adevăr alegerile un guvern legitim și responsabil? Alegerile produc un câștigător și un învins. Iar învinsul este neconsolat. Realitatea este că trebuie să inversăm ordinea. Nu politica e prima; ci e de fapt ultima. Politica devine mai facilă pe măsură ce deceniul trece, dacă o construim pe un fundament de securitate și creștere economică. Refacerea prosperității. 
    1. For the past four years, I’ve followed a group of steelworkers in Indiana — men and women, Black and white — who had worked at a factory that moved to Mexico. I watched them agonize about whether to train their Mexican replacements, or stand with their union and refuse. I watched them grieve the plant like a parent. I followed them as they applied for new jobs, some of which paid half as much as they made before.A machinist named Tim carried his steelworker union card in his wallet for years after the factory closed, just to remind himself who he was. Tim grew up in a union household. His dad had been an autoworker; his grandfather, a coal miner.“We always voted Democrat because they looked after the little man,” Tim told me. “My father went to his grave and I can guarantee you he never voted for a Republican.”Tim had such faith in Democrats that he didn’t worry when President Bill Clinton pushed the North American Free Trade Agreement over the finish line in 1993. Nor did he worry when Mr. Clinton normalized trade with China in 2000. But then the factory where Tim worked moved to Shanghai. And the next one moved to Mexico.Editors’ PicksA Korean Store Owner. A Black Employee. A Tense Neighborhood.The Problem of Free Speech in an Age of Disinformation5 Things to Avoid on Prime DayAdvertisementContinue reading the main storyBy the time I met Tim, he loathed the Clintons and the Democratic Party. Democrats had gotten in bed with the corporations, while no one was looking. Tim felt betrayed, and politically abandoned — until Mr. Trump came along.

      By the time I met Tim, he loathed the Clintons and the Democratic Party. Democrats had gotten in bed with the corporations, while no one was looking. Tim felt betrayed, and politically abandoned — until Mr. Trump came along.

      +1

    1. Historians and political scientists see the matter differently today. Kennedy’s own vote counters later conceded that he lost 59 out of 70 white precincts in Gary. While Kennedy’s internal polls showed him faring better than might be expected among former supporters of George Wallace’s bid for the Democratic nomination four years earlier, he nevertheless struggled to retain working-class, white ethnic voters and relied instead on robust turnout in minority neighborhoods for his electoral cushion.

      Democrats were already on the trajectory of losing blue-collar whites by the end of the 60s.

    1. When people do inexplicable things, it’s always tempting to project qualities onto them that would offer a more innocuous explanation of their behavior than bad judgment, fecklessness, or stupidity. And this particular bias has infected contemporary political analysis with a virulence that rivals Ebola. Even when the subject’s motives are as transparent as Donald Trump’s, there will always be a class of pundit who insists that Trump is playing 3-D chess, when, as one anonymous staffer put it, “more often than not he’s just eating the pieces.” 
    1. Most previous explanations had focussed on explaining how someone’s beliefs might be altered in the moment.

      Knowing a little of what is coming in advance here, I can't help but thinking: How can this riot theory potentially be used to influence politics and/or political campaigns? It could be particularly effective to get people "riled up" just before a particular election to create a political riot of sorts and thereby influence the outcome.

      Facebook has done several social experiments with elections in showing that their friends and family voted and thereby affecting other potential voters. When done in a way that targets people of particular political beliefs to increase turn out, one is given a means of drastically influencing elections. In some sense, this is an example of this "Riot Theory".

    1. The prevalent practice of damaging images of the human form—and the anxiety surrounding the desecration—dates to the beginnings of Egyptian history. Intentionally damaged mummies from the prehistoric period, for example, speak to a “very basic cultural belief that damaging the image damages the person represented,” Bleiberg said. Likewise, how-to hieroglyphics provided instructions for warriors about to enter battle: Make a wax effigy of the enemy, then destroy it. Series of texts describe the anxiety of your own image becoming damaged, and pharaohs regularly issued decrees with terrible punishments for anyone who would dare threaten their likeness.
    2. “Imagery in public space is a reflection of who has the power to tell the story of what happened and what should be remembered,” Bleiberg said. “We are witnessing the empowerment of many groups of people with different opinions of what the proper narrative is.” Perhaps we can learn from the pharaohs; how we choose to rewrite our national stories might just take a few acts of iconoclasm.
    1. Publishers are eager to please state policymakers of both parties, during a challenging time for the business. Schools are transitioning to digital materials. And with the ease of internet research, many teachers say they prefer to curate their own primary-source materials online.

      Here's where OER textbooks might help to make some change. If free materials with less input from politicians and more input from educators were available. But then this pushes the onus down to a different level with different political aspirations. I have to think that taking the politicization of these decisions at a state level would have to help.

  7. moodle.southwestern.edu moodle.southwestern.edu
  8. moodle.southwestern.edu moodle.southwestern.edu
    1. The challenges before us—the worst public health crisis in a century, the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, the worst period of global upheaval in a generation, the urgent global crisis posed by climate change, the intolerable racial injustice that still stains the fabric of our nation—will test America’s character like never before.

      I know that we are making history but it doesn't exactly feel like it. The election feels like a joke. There is a stark difference between what came out of Roosevelt's mouth and either of the presidential candidates mouth's. Now it is a matter of choosing the lesser of two evils than a heroic leader to help our country achieve greatness.

  9. Sep 2020
    1. “We’re changing federalism from the idea of shared expertise in different policy areas into partisan stakes in the ground that are meant to obstruct opponents,” Robertson says.

      This is so true with the Trump Administrations "Alternative Facts" it is as though we will soon be living in the dystopian novel Brave New World.

    2. “The coronavirus response is actually sort of a perfect measuring stick of our transition to our contemporary, very polarized model of federalism.”

      I want to reference the Netflix documentary Social Dilemma. The documentary says that the reason politics has become so polarized is because of social media. Everyone is operating off of a different set of facts.

    1. Facebook ignored or was slow to act on evidence that fake accounts on its platform have been undermining elections and political affairs around the world, according to an explosive memo sent by a recently fired Facebook employee and obtained by BuzzFeed News.The 6,600-word memo, written by former Facebook data scientist Sophie Zhang, is filled with concrete examples of heads of government and political parties in Azerbaijan and Honduras using fake accounts or misrepresenting themselves to sway public opinion. In countries including India, Ukraine, Spain, Brazil, Bolivia, and Ecuador, she found evidence of coordinated campaigns of varying sizes to boost or hinder political candidates or outcomes, though she did not always conclude who was behind them.
    1. It could create incentives for action by conditioning a portion of funds going to states in any future relief packages on states’ adherence to the measures

      Why did this not happen? I feel like it isn’t the federalist system in general that are failing us— it’s the leaders of the system. Why did congress not make a playbook and create incentives for states to follow them? This reminds me of how the drinking age became 21 in every state from the funding of the highways.

    2. Lacking strong federal leadership to guide a uniform response, the United States quickly fulfilled the World Health Organization’s prediction that it would become the new epicenter of Covid-19.

      I wonder if a democrat was in office when covid hit if we would have stronger federal leadership. Would we have been in a state of emergency if someone who believed in the facts of science wasn’t in office? I have trouble believing that there is nothing the president could have done to prevent covid from getting this out of hand.

    3. subject to constitutionally protected individual rights such as due process, equal protection, and freedom of travel and association

      I didn’t know that it is within our rights to travel and associate with whomever we choose. I wouldn’t think the government would be able to control who would be able to leave their house or hang out with who anyway. I guess this shows how right the article about uninformed citizens we read last week is right.

    1. This super-sketchy experiment had one final phase, how-ever: reconciliation. After successive scenarios were deployed where the Rattlers and the Eagles had common goals (unblock-ing a shared water supply, repairing a truck, etc.) they grew closer, even splitting drinks at the end (malts, come on people). In our work, we may not call them Rattlers and Eagles. Instead, we may call them IT and Legal and Marketing. Or “weird-code-name product-team one” versus “weird-code-name product-team two”. But if organizations incentivize based on scarcity and self-interest, we might as well just call it what it is, a scaled version of the Robbers Cave experiment. And to mitigate the siloing and combat ingroup bias, we’ll have to consider following a different approach.

      How can we do this for the democrats and the republicans?

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  10. Aug 2020
    1. the doctrine that all endowments are national property, which the government may and ought to control; but not, as I should once have done, condemning endowments in themselves, and proposing that they should be taken to pay off the national debt.

      What is meant by “endowment” here?

    1. The first step is to abandon the business model of education. States need to be willing to reverse the endless budget cuts that have left universities so reliant on stratospheric tuition. Any new funds, however, need to be flagged for instructional budgets and conditioned on tenure-track hires, not more rock-climbing walls, further adjunctification, or empty-chair administrators.
    1. Larry Kudlow expects large economic recovery numbers in 3rd and 4th quarter

      What is the value of predictions from someone wrong every single time? Since April 2018, Larry Kudlow was wrong on all his predictions regarding economics and other issues that he somehow thought was necessary to comment on. If he would be reciting chicken pie recipes in Esperanto would be a better contribution to the viewers and his career. That would be very bad for him if he would be the Director of the National Economic Council. Thank God he is not.

    1. DeSantis is the state version of Donald Trump. It's only a state wide range of stupidity celebration. He is not on Mount Rushmore level of moron-ism like the orange president.

      He is more like on Robert Lee small town square statue level...but, never than less, he now, holds then decision of living and dying. To much power to anyone, imagine for an anencephalic?

      DeSantis, do you know what a body count is?

    1. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (UK), since 1922 comprises four countries: England, Scotland, and Wales (which collectively make up Great Britain) and Northern Ireland[1][2] (which is variously described as a country, province, or region).

      A country that contains 4 countries. It's almost a paradox. It never ceases to amuse me.

  11. Jul 2020
    1. “Essentially a friend of mine is head of procurement for NHS London. He has really struggled to get stuff to people in the right timeframe. So essentially what we decided to do was set up a little company and become sales agents for people in the UK who have got stock. And then essentially we would help in linking up the supply chains that are massively disastrous at the moment.”

      essentially

    2. Singleton said he disclosed his business to superiors in the NHS, in accordance with the rules, and was told there was “unlikely to be a conflict”.

      I can see 3 different explanations for this response:

      • He offered a cut of the profits to the superiors
      • He was unclear / lied about what exactly the business was about
      • The superiors are incompetent
  12. Jun 2020
    1. they had already sent hundreds of thousands of people to this country to spread that virus

      Hard to say if they explicitly "sent" these people to spread the virus. I do agree that it is heinous that they didn't disclose information about the virus for the first month or so, and that might've been on purpose

  13. May 2020
    1. Hartman, T. K., Stocks, T. V. A., McKay, R., Gibson Miller, J., Levita, L., Martinez, A. P., Mason, L., McBride, O., Murphy, J., Shevlin, M., bennett, kate m, & Bentall, R. (2020). The Authoritarian Dynamic During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Effects on Nationalism and Anti-Immigrant Sentiment [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/4tcv5

    1. The UK voted to leave the European Union in a referendum on 23 June 2016 (and ceased to be a member state on 31 January 2020). This withdrawal from the EU makes the Republic of Ireland–United Kingdom border on the island of Ireland an external border of the European Union.[36] However, the Irish and UK governments and the President of the European Council have stated that they do not wish for a hard border in Ireland, taking into account the historical and social "sensitivities" that permeate the island.[37] In September 2016 the British Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, David Davis, stated that the UK government would not seek a return to a "hard border" between the UK and Republic of Ireland
    1. Jersey is not part of the United Kingdom,[15] and has an international identity separate from that of the UK,[16] but the UK is constitutionally responsible for the defence of Jersey.[17] The definition of United Kingdom in the British Nationality Act 1981 is interpreted as including the UK and the Islands together.[18]The European Commission confirmed in a written reply to the European Parliament in 2003[19] that Jersey was within the Union as a European Territory for whose external relationships the UK is responsible. Jersey was not fully part of the European Union but had a special relationship with it, notably being treated as within the European Community for the purposes of free trade in goods.
  14. Apr 2020
    1. If paralysis ended once you walked out of the Capitol, we wouldn’t have a housing crisis. We’d have better social insurance infrastructure. We’d have better infrastructure, period. But it doesn’t. Report Advertisement To put the question simply: Why is Penn Station, the flagship rail station in New York City, such a dump? Why can’t the richest city in the richest nation in the world have, at the very least, a train station with seating, some nice restaurants, working elevators, and an absence of human waste falling through the ceiling? Marc Dunkelman spent years cataloging the many failures to revamp Penn Station, a number of which came complete with hefty doses of federal funding. Each time, the story was the same: Plenty of people who wanted to build, and plenty of money with which to build, but too many people with vetoes who simply didn’t want the building to happen.

      "vetocracy"

    1. On October 18, 1948, the flag of the Arab Revlot was adopted by the Palestinian government and the Arab League. The current version, with it’s altered stripe order, was adopted in 1964 by the Palestine Liberation Organization under Yassir Arafat and then in 1988, as the official flag of the State of Palestine (unless you don’t recognize Palestine, that is).
    1. In early 2009, on her first trip to Asia as Barack Obama’s secretary of state, Hillary Clinton thanked Chinese policymakers for their “confidence in United States Treasuries” amid the global financial meltdown, adding that human-rights disagreements shouldn’t “interfere” with crisis-fighting efforts.Then, suddenly, relations started going downhill. China grew more assertive as President Hu Jintao came to the end of his term, moving to assert claims to disputed territory in the South China Sea and the Sea of Japan over strenuous American objections. It was also becoming much more confident in the superiority of its economic model, which had come through the crisis relatively unscathed. When Biden visited Beijing in August 2011—shortly after S&P’s Global Ratings downgraded the U.S.’s credit rating—then-Premier Wen Jiabao gave him a mini-lecture on the importance of fiscal prudence, according to a person familiar with the exchange. Wen, the person said, also delivered a thinly veiled threat, saying he hoped China wouldn’t need to find an alternative to parking its wealth in U.S. bonds. Biden replied that Wen’s government was welcome to sell its holdings—plenty of global investors would be happy to buy them. No one, the person recalled Biden saying, had ever won by betting against the U.S. economy.

      WOW

    1. Anachronisms of the Constitution + consequences of an aging democracy => a legislature/politics built for "show"

      In a provocative June 2018 essay in Commentary, the political scientist Yuval Levin posited that 231 years on, Congress had acquired a problem James Madison never anticipated: a reluctance to compete with the other two branches of government in the exercise of power. Partisanship, he concluded, had displaced ambition to legislate. Senators and representatives, he wrote, now “see themselves as players in a larger political ecosystem the point of which is not legislating or governing but rather engaging in a kind of performative outrage for a partisan audience.” Levin didn’t put it this way, but he seemed to be suggesting that Congress had grown decadent, like fin de siècle Vienna, but without the solace of Sacher tortes.

      The U.S. doesn’t have a Politburo, but if you calculate the median age of the president, the speaker of the House, the majority leader of the Senate, and the three Democrats leading in the presidential polls for 2020, the median age is … uh … 77.

      None of this means a septuagenarian can’t function effectively as a political leader. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell are 79 and 77, respectively, and by all reports they’re operating at peak mental capacity. But to affirm that not all elderly people are impaired cognitively is very different from affirming that none is.

      Wisdom may be more valuable in the digital age than ever before, because the velocity of information and normative judgments on social media, cable news and elsewhere constantly threatens to make glib idiots of us all.

      But here’s the rub: The aging of America’s ruling class does not automatically increase its experience level. In presidential politics, notes Brookings Institution senior fellow Jonathan Rauch, political experience, which “used to be a selling point,” has “become a liability. Voters and the public have come to see experience as inauthenticity.”

      In a November 2015 Atlantic article, Rauch plotted experience level for presidential candidates from 1960 to 2012. His graph showed a clear increase in experience level among the losers and a corresponding decrease among the winners. Gerald Ford lost to Jimmy Carter. George H.W. Bush won with more political experience than Michael Dukakis, but four years later lost to Bill Clinton, who had less. John McCain lost to Barack Obama, who’d been in national politics a mere four years.

      Donald Trump, who is 73, entered the Oval Office with no political experience at all. The single greatest mental compensation that age provides was therefore unavailable to the oldest president in American history.

      Old people really like to vote. In 2016, for instance, 71 percent of eligible elderly voters reported to the Census that they voted. For other age cohorts, the turnout percentages were 67 percent (aged 45-64), 59 percent (aged 30-44) and 46 percent (aged 18-29).

      You often hear older Americans complain that the younger generation, with its fixation on social media, can’t distinguish between fact and opinion, making it difficult for them to apply the critical thinking necessary to consume news and be responsible citizens. A 2018 Pew survey found that Americans do indeed experience great difficulty telling these two things apart: Given five factual statements and five statements of opinion, a majority of Americans couldn’t identify them properly.

      But younger Americans actually scored better on this test than older ones. Thirty-two percent of 18-49 year-olds were able to identify all five factual statements, and 44 percent were able to identify all five statements of opinion. Among the over-50 cohort, only 20 percent identified all five factual statements correctly, and only 26 percent did the same with the statements of opinion.

      The list of the Constitution’s anachronisms and ambiguities is long.

      Article One says Congress may “regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States,” phrasing that strictly limited the regulation of private business at the federal level until the New Deal, when the Supreme Court reversed itself and concluded the federal government’s power to regulate private business was pretty vast. Had the Founders grasped that the modern economy would all but eliminate purely local commerce—and that it could, unchecked, alter the very climate of planet earth—they might have had more to say on the subject. As things stand, the powers of the regulatory state are the subject of endless legal combat.

      Article Two says you must be a “natural born Citizen” to be president, which excludes for no apparent reason Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jennifer Granholm, who previously governed two of the nation’s most populous states. The racist “birther” movement that challenged the legality of Barack Obama’s presidency (and that ushered Donald Trump onto the national political stage) wouldn’t have been possible without Article Two.

      Article Two also established that presidents be elected through the Electoral College, an antique mechanism borrowed from the Holy Roman Empire that twice during the past two decades delivered the presidency to the popular-vote loser. Some people have a problem with that.

      The Second Amendment frames the right to bear arms within the context of “well-regulated” state militias that no longer exist, an ambiguity that the Supreme Court interpreted in 2008 to mean the Constitution protected the right to bear arms, after holding for the preceding seven decades that it did not. Had the Founders known the extent to which the nation would tear itself apart over the regulation of firearms more deadly than they ever imagined, they might have laid down a few broad parameters.

      And so on. None of this would matter much if our government were more amenable to reconsidering first principles, but that’s getting harder, too. The Constitution can be amended, and it has been, 27 times. But growing political polarization in recent years has made that difficult. Only two constitutional amendments were ratified during the past half-century (one giving 18-year-olds the right to vote and another, more anodyne amendment that makes it a little harder for Congress to give itself a raise).

  15. Mar 2020
    1. Political Polarization

      And important: the role media plays in political polarization. On this topic, I've found works from the Pew useful, like "U.S. Media Polarization and the 2020 Election: A Nation Divided":

      "As the U.S. enters a heated 2020 presidential election year, a new Pew Research Center report finds that Republicans and Democrats place their trust in two nearly inverse news media environments."

      Also useful are works from Data & Society like "Media, Technology, Politics: six new pieces on the networked public sphere"

      "Although many people are anxious to understand how much influence old and new media had over the US presidential election, the reality is that we will never know comprehensively. We can, though, seek to understand how different cultural and technical factors are shaping the contemporary information landscape."

  16. Feb 2020
    1. an O’Byrne,assistant professor of education at the College of Charleston, wrote, “Power and money ultimately influence decisions made by democratic bodies. With growing unrest,citizens can use social media and current/new digital tools to make themselves heard. Ultimately this will be pushed back again by existing powerholders and nothing may ultimately change. The existing powerholders will continue to exert their influence, and citizens will be left to continue to voice their opinions by shouting into the cyberverse.”

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    Annotators

    1. Declaration of Independence

      We have the right to petition the government for redress of grievances

      That seems impractical these days with our government so big.

      We don't even write to our representatives in Congress. Why not? Maybe most of us don't think it would do any good.

      But if we don't stand up for our rights, they will gradually be taken away.

      Where is our militant faith? We're afraid of it being called hate speech.

      "Bigotry disguised as religious liberty is still bigotry"

      Republicanism is a country without a king. Protestantism is a church without a Pope.

      Pope Francis

      Jesuits

      Protestantism is [religious] racism Well, I don't want to be a racist. I better not speak up. Affects free speech.

      Sunday sacredness is the mark of Catholic church's authority.

      "Ecumenism is not optional"

      The persecution from Catholic Church will return again renewed

  17. Jan 2020