The Long Read

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Re: The Long Read

Post by Svartalf » Thu Jul 09, 2020 8:28 pm

frag; on the way to the new posts, I stumbled on rum's, and I miss him, bad.
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Re: The Long Read

Post by L'Emmerdeur » Thu Jul 16, 2020 8:07 am

Aye, and many others long past review.


Here's a look at the contrast between anti-war military veterans in the US and the chickenhawk culture of the Trumpists.

'Undercover Patriots: Trump, Tulsa, and the Rise of Military Dissent'
It was June 20th and we antiwar vets had traveled all the way to Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the midst of a pandemic to protest President Trump’s latest folly, an election 2020 rally where he was to parade his goods and pretend all was well with this country.

We never planned to go inside the cavernous arena where that rally was to be held. I was part of our impromptu reconnaissance team that called an audible at the last moment. We suddenly decided to infiltrate not just the perimeter of that Tulsa rally, but the BOK Center itself. That meant I got a long, close look at the MAGA crowd there in what turned out to be a more than half-empty arena.

Our boots-on-the-ground coalition of two national antiwar veteran organizations -- About Face and Veterans for Peace (VFP) -- had thrown together a rather risky direct action event in coordination with the local activists who invited us.

We planned to climb the three main flagpoles around that center and replace an Old Glory, an Oklahoma state flag, and a Tulsa one with Black Lives-themed banners. Only on arrival, we found ourselves stymied by an eleventh-hour change in the security picture: new gates and unexpected police deployments. Hopping metal barriers and penetrating a sizable line of cops and National Guardsmen seemed to ensure a fruitless trip to jail, so into the under-attended indoor rally we went, to -- successfully it turned out -- find a backdoor route to those flagpoles.

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Re: The Long Read

Post by Animavore » Sun Aug 09, 2020 1:30 pm

The Unraveling of America.

Anthropologist Wade Davis on how COVID-19 signals the end of the American era
 
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/p ... dlg98jgkl4
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Re: The Long Read

Post by Brian Peacock » Sun Aug 23, 2020 7:16 am

Repressive Tolerance
Herbert Marcuse, 1965
THIS essay examines the idea of tolerance in our advanced industrial society. The conclusion reached is that the realization of the objective of tolerance would call for intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or suppressed. In other words, today tolerance appears again as what it was in its origins, at the beginning of the modern period—a partisan goal, a subversive liberating notion and practice. Conversely, what is proclaimed and practiced as tolerance today, is in many of its most effective manifestations serving the cause of oppression.

The author is fully aware that, at present, no power, no authority, no government exists which would translate liberating tolerance into practice, but he believes that it is the task and duty of the intellectual to recall and preserve historical possibilities which seem to have become utopian possibilities—that it is his task to break the concreteness of oppression in order to open the mental space in which this society can be recognized as what it is and does.

Tolerance is an end in itself. The elimination of violence, and the reduction of suppression to the extent required for protecting man and animals from cruelty and aggression are preconditions for the creation of a humane society. Such a society does not yet exist; progress toward it is perhaps more than before arrested by violence and suppression on a global scale. As deterrents against nuclear war, as police action against subversion, as technical aid in the fight against imperialism and communism, as methods of pacification in neo-colonial massacres, violence and suppression are promulgated, practiced, and defended by democratic and authoritarian governments alike, and the people subjected to these governments are educated to sustain such practices as necessary for the preservation of the status quo. Tolerance is extended to policies, conditions, and modes of behavior which should not be tolerated because they are impeding, if not destroying, the chances of creating an existence without fear and misery...

continue...
Builds on Popper's Paradox of Intolerance, 1945, and relates it to the condition of US society at the time of publication.

Read time: c.45mins.
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Re: The Long Read

Post by L'Emmerdeur » Sun Sep 06, 2020 5:52 am

I considered resisting the inclination to describe this story as 'Kafkaesque,' but it seems inescapable. A first person narration by a young woman who worked in the US consulate at Juarez, which is the Mexican city sharing the border with the US city of El Paso.

Her life and work entailed fairly frequent border crossings, and US Customs and Border Protection officers made a practice of giving her extra scrutiny and interrogation. For example, repeatedly asking if she actually owned her car, despite the fact that her car was registered with the system as part of her 'trusted traveller' ID, she carried a diplomatic passport, and had obtained a frequent traveller pre-clearance as well.

It's reassuring to know that US Customs and Border Protection has investigated her allegations and found no evidence to support them.

'I Was a U.S. Diplomat. Customs and Border Protection Only Cared That I Was Black.'
If you’re working at the State Department, like I was, and traffic isn’t bad, your trip across the border usually just takes a few minutes. The border between Juarez and El Paso has two lanes set aside for “trusted travelers,” people who travel frequently into and out of the country and who’ve been vetted in advance by the U.S. government. This group, which includes business travelers and diplomats, carry a pass known as a SENTRI card, issued by CBP, which is supposed to allow “expedited clearance for pre-approved, low-risk travelers upon arrival in the United States.” You’re directed to special lanes and hold your card up to a camera a few feet in front of a booth manned by CBP officers. Most of the time the officers wave through travelers using SENTRI cards, so the whole process takes just a few seconds. But if the officers have questions about the identity of the travelers, or any other suspicion, they can flag them off to the side for additional questioning and searches, including putting the car through an X-ray machine.

This is called “secondary inspection,” and sometimes being picked out for secondary inspection is just arbitrary, like a random check by the Transportation Security Agency at an airport. It's rare for U.S. consular officers to be regularly pulled over; in addition to having a SENTRI card, we carry diplomatic passports. Some of my fellow diplomats have told me they had not once been pulled into secondary inspection after living in Juarez for years. One told me he was always greeted with, “Welcome home to America, sir.”

But in the time I'd lived in Juarez — less than one month — I'd already been flagged for secondary inspection four times. This would be the fifth.

[Continues]

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Re: The Long Read

Post by JimC » Sun Sep 06, 2020 6:07 am

Yeah, but 42 told us that there is zero racism in America...
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Re: The Long Read

Post by L'Emmerdeur » Sun Sep 06, 2020 6:35 am

:hehe: He crossed my mind at some point as I read the piece, and yes I think we'd be treated to some more of that. He'd give a nuanced version of denial, of course, but I think he'd point to the internal investigation by the CBP, and make light of her story as well as questioning her veracity.

Just think of the months of sneering at Black Lives Matter he's spared us by his continued absence. :td:

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Re: The Long Read

Post by pErvinalia » Sun Sep 06, 2020 11:01 am

I expect if Trump wins we'll have Cunt and 42 back here rubbing our noses in it.
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Re: The Long Read

Post by JimC » Sun Sep 06, 2020 8:59 pm

They may make a brief visit, I suppose... :tea:
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Re: The Long Read

Post by laklak » Sun Sep 06, 2020 9:45 pm

If I had a fucking diplomatic passport I'd have his tiny little ICE agent balls on a fucking bracelet.
Yeah well that's just, like, your opinion, man.

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Re: The Long Read

Post by Sean Hayden » Sun Sep 27, 2020 3:55 pm

LOL Something Matters

We’ve been told that facts have lost their power, that debunking lies only makes them stronger, and that the internet divides us. Don’t believe any of it.
...
As I poked around these and other studies, I began to feel a sort of boomerang effect vis-à-vis my thinking about boomerangs: Somehow the published evidence was making me less convinced of the soundness of the theory. What if this field of research, like so many others in the social sciences, had been tilted toward producing false positive results?

For decades now, it’s been commonplace for scientists to run studies with insufficient sample sizes or to dig around in datasets with lots of different tools, hoping they might turn up a finding of statistical significance. It’s clear that this approach can gin up phantom signals from a bunch of noise. But it’s worse than that: When researchers go out hunting subtle, true effects with imprecise experiments, their standard ways of testing for significance may exaggerate their findings, or even flip them in the wrong direction. Statistician (and Slate contributor) Andrew Gelman calls this latter research hazard a “type-S” error: one that leads a scientist to assert, with confidence, a relationship that is actually inverse to the truth. When a scientist makes a type-S error, she doesn’t end up with a false positive result so much as an “anti-positive” one; she’s turned the real effect upside down. If she were studying, say, the effect of passing out flyers at a public pool, she might end up thinking that telling people not to litter makes them litter more, instead of less.
https://slate.com/health-and-science/20 ... ve-it.html

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Re: The Long Read

Post by Sean Hayden » Sun Dec 11, 2022 1:21 pm

How an enterprising doctor, an elite university, and negligent public officials turned a city prison system into the largest human research factory in America.
https://quillette.com/2022/12/10/the-ph ... ments/amp/

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