Activity tagged "extremism"

Posted:
The drumbeat of legal threats signals a potentially ominous trend for journalists during Trump’s second term in office. Litigation is costly and time-consuming. Most news organizations will look to settle rather than face months—more likely years—of discovery and depositions, plus significant legal fees.
“It is both conscious and unconscious. Journalists at smaller outlets know very well that the costs for their organization to defend themselves could mean bankruptcy. Even journalists at larger outlets don’t want to burden themselves or their employees with lawsuits. It puts another layer of influence into the journalistic process,” [Anne Champion] said.

Perhaps the CJR editors decided it went without saying, but it feels worth mentioning that — if Trump’s appointments go as planned — he will have the entire judicial branch to bring to bear on journalists, not just his wacky lawyer neighbor.

"Trump Threatens New York Times, Penguin Random House over Critical Coverage".
Lachlan Cartwright in Columbia Journalism Review.
Legal letter follows complaints aimed at CBS News, the Washington Post, and the Daily Beast. 
Read:
"Election Day".
Rusty Foster in Today on Trail. Published .
The trail isn’t just a path through the woods, it’s a society organized around some of the best and most characteristically American virtues: spontaneous helpfulness, neighborly concern for a stranger, collective work for the common good. These virtues aren’t restricted to the trail, I’ve seen them all over the country. I’ve lived in Massachusetts, Maine, Virginia, Washington, D.C., San Francisco. I’ve driven across the country several times. Everywhere, people are friendly. If you need help, someone will help you. I’m sure we can all think of exceptions, but they are exceptions—we’re famous around the world for our outgoing cheerfulness and willingness to drop everything to help someone we just met. These aren’t just “small town virtues.” I’ve watched half a dozen New Yorkers, all unknown to each other, convene an impromptu colloquy on a busy sidewalk to determine the optimum route for a lost tourist to reach his destination. In Union Station in D.C. I saw an elderly woman fall and cut her face, and a dozen passengers hurrying for their own trains stop to help her. Everywhere, as individuals, this is how Americans act. In Maine, there’s a lake camp just off the trail where the owner feeds hikers every morning. For $12, he’ll make you eggs, sausage, coffee, juice, and a stack of twelve pancakes, if you can eat them all. If you can’t eat them all he’ll give you a ziplock bag to take the leftovers. If you can’t pay, or don’t want to, he’ll feed you anyway. He has a fund of money from other hikers who’ve paid extra just for this purpose, but he says it never gets any smaller. He doesn’t do this for money. He doesn’t get anything out of it but extra work, along with a little company in the morning. He had a son in the military who died, but he doesn’t like to talk about it. When you go inside the camp building you pass a huge Trump 2024 flag hanging on the wall outside. It’s tempting to imagine that the person who would feed a group of strangers every morning just because they’re camped at his doorstep and hungry is somehow different than the person who would vote for concentration camps. But they’re the same person. We’re all the same people.  How can we reconcile living our lives with such openness, such abundant kindness, but governing ourselves with such fear and hate? I don’t know. It’s another clear, chilly day in America. I guess I’ll keep walking.
Read:
"One Practical Thing: Protect Information".
Heather Bryant in Heather Bryant — @HBCompass. Published .
The enemy of control is information. Book bans (historically book burning), data purges, the wiping of websites and logs are all common acts by those who seek to re-write and overwrite a history that does not support their actions. Knowledge, history, community discourse and our recorded narratives are all critical elements to a free and participatory society.
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Please do not record your abortions on the blockchain

I must once again urge you: please do not record your abortions on the blockchain.

There are a lot of very worried people right now, fearful of an impending regime that may well crack down on things like reproductive care, gender-affirming care, or the ability for immigrants to even continue to remain in the US. Some have suggested people get familiar with cryptocurrencies in the event they might have to circumvent an authoritarian state.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: in very bad situations, bad solutions can sometimes still be better than nothing. I make no secret of my views on the cryptocurrency industry, but I am the last to judge a person for using whatever means they have available to them to take care of themselves and others.

But please remember that most popular cryptocurrencies use public ledgers, where every transaction is visible to anyone who cares to look (no warrant required), where true anonymity is extremely challenging, and where tracing technology is getting only more sophisticated. Popular on-ramps like Coinbase and Gemini and other exchanges require customers to provide similar kinds of identification as banks, linking your future transactions to your real-life identity. (And many of these companies have thrown themselves wholeheartedly behind Trump, by the way, despite their “anti-authoritarian” claims). 

There are cryptocurrencies that are more anonymous than the bitcoins and ethereums of the world (privacycoins like Monero and Zcash for example), though there are still attempts to trace these types of tokens and you have to be knowledgeable and very cautious about how you use them so as not to inadvertently reveal your identity.

If you’re in a bad situation, do whatever it is you need to do. I’m certainly not going to judge you. But please be very cautious, and be highly skeptical of anyone who presents cryptocurrency as a magic solution to authoritarianism.

Further reading: “Abuse and harassment on the blockchain”, “Anonymous cryptocurrency wallets are not so simple”

Posted:
That's the whole purpose of the post-monopausal female in theory. Did your in-laws and particularly your mother-in-law show up in some huge way? She lived with us for a year. Right. So I didn't know the answer there. Right. No. So that's this weird unadvertised feature of marrying an Indian woman. Yeah. It's in some ways the most transgressive thing I've ever done against sort of the hyperneoliberal approach to work and family. My wife had this baby seven weeks before she started the clerkship. It was still not sleeping any more than an hour and a half in a given interval. And her mom just took a sabbatical. She's a biology professor in California. She took a sabbatical for a year and came and lived with us and took care of our kid for a year. Okay. So it was just one of these things where it's like this is what you do. So biology professor PhD. Yes. Drops what they're doing. Yeah. To immediately tend to the needs of a new mother with her infant. Painfully economically inefficient.. Can I just propose a really- Why didn't she just keep her job, give us part of the wages to pay somebody else to do it? Because that is the thing that the hyper liberalized economics wants you to do. The economic logic of always prioritizing paid wage labor over other forms of contributing society is to me, it's actually a consequence of a sort of fundamental liberalism that is to a ultimately going to unwind and collapse upon itself. abandonment of a sort of Aristotelian virtue politics for a hyper market I think it's the oriented way of thinking about what's good and what's desirable. If people are paying for it and it contributes to GDP and it makes the economic consumption numbers rise, then it's good. I think that entire sort of, to me, that's sort of the root of our political problem.

It's always the women who are expected to stop "prioritizing paid wage labor over other forms of contributing to a society". I wonder if anyone suggested to Vance that he should stop prioritizing paid wage labor over other forms of contributing to a society, and take a sabbatical from his investment job to care for their newborn while his wife did her clerkship. Or his father-in-law?

Also, it's pretty wild that Vance saw the options to be: 1) MIL leaves her professorship to be a live-in nanny; 2) MIL pays for their childcare. Vance was a principal at Mithril Capital and partner at the Revolution investment firm at the time. Meanwhile, Usha Vance would have been making (ballpark) $70-100k as a SCOTUS clerk, and would safely have been able to expect several hundred thousand dollars in signing bonuses alone the following year when she joined a law firm.

"JD Vance in 2020 agreed grandmothers raising children is 'whole purpose of the postmenopausal female'".
Clare Olson in Heartland Signal.
While appearing on "The Portal" podcast in April 2020, Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) agreed with host Eric Weinstein's claim that "postmenopausal females" exist just to help take care of children.