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Daily Archives: January 26, 2020
In the Information Economy, Value Is Decreasingly In The Numbers – Hellenic Shipping News Worldwide
Posted: January 26, 2020 at 11:49 pm
Is economic growth accelerating or slowing in the developed world?
On one extreme we have economist Robin Hanson, who has carefully quantified what the path to Ray Kurzweils predicted 2045 technological singularity would look like economically. As the domination of biotech, nanotech and artificial general intelligence rise over the next few decades, Hansons detailed analyses suggest the annual economic growth rate will reach 45% or more.
In another camp, we have economist Robert Gordon, who argues that electrification and the internal combustion engine provided a one-time boost to the world economy and that the various inventions rolled out since have been small potatoes. This skeptical view seems bolstered by the fairly lackluster effect of the internet and mobile telephony on conventional economic indicators up until today.
But the truth is that, in the information era, growth is decreasingly in the numbers.
Look at arXiv.org, where scientists in various disciplines routinely post their freshly written research papers. Sometimes this is a prelude to publishing the paper in a conventional journal or conference, but increasingly, its an alternative.
If a scientists goal is to disseminate their work to their colleagues in an orderly way, and to ensure their work persists in the memory of the scientific literature, then posting on arXiv.org is arguably better than publishing in a commercially run scientific journal. Anyone with an internet connection can read arXiv, whereas many journals and conference proceedings are available only to those with a developed-world university connection or a lot of money to spare (who really wants to pay $30 to download a PDF of a research paper they havent even read beyond the abstract, which may or may not actually be of interest?).
As one among a huge number of examples, the recent progress in deep learning technology for image, video, voice and language processing has been largely driven by the rapid posting of new algorithmic ideas and results to arXiv and the corresponding rapid posting of new open-source software code to Github.
How is the rise of arXiv and Github reflected in economic indicators? ArXiv has allowed the level of activity in the scientific community to increase without any commensurate increase in the revenue of the scientific publishing sector. The open-source software movement has allowed the level of activity in certain parts of the software world (operating systems and AI, as two major examples) to increase without commensurate increase in the revenue of software publishers.
Something similar has happened in the journalistic world with the rise of blogging. Activity has increased in some very real senses the amount of prose widely disseminated, the diversity of points of view widely shared, etc. but without commensurate increase in the revenue of journalistic publishers.
And the same sort of thing can be seen in the music world.
Whats happening here?
First, were seeing a shift from an economy of physical goods toward an economy of more abstract, informational goods. This is well known; it represents the movement of human society upward in some sort of economic Maslows Hierarchy.
Electrification and the internal combustion engine may well have been bigger leaps in the physical aspects of peoples lives than anything to happen since. But its because our physical lives have gotten so comfortable that we have shifted to pursuing improvement in more abstract informational domains.
Secondly, and less well understood at this point, were seeing a shift from a quantified to an unquantified exchange of value. This is where the economic analyses of both Hanson and Gordon fall short.
With arXiv, scientists are exchanging knowledge and ideas with each other directly without anyone needing to quantify the value of whats being shared or received. With Github, coders are exchanging software with each other directly (also without the need for quantification). And on Facebook, users are exchanging information with each other without need for quantification of value.
These modes of nonquantified value exchange interoperate with more traditional systems of quantified value exchange.
Papers on arXiv often are associated with software or hardware inventions, which are then conventionally monetized. Open-source AI code on Github is used to train models on proprietary datasets, which are then used to fuel commercial products that are licensed to end users for money (or commercial products like Facebook or Google that are offered as parts of more complex, partly nonquantified value exchanges). Data provided to Facebook is used to drive customization of Facebook ads, whose value to advertisers, based on user attention, is quantified and monetized.
But when such a significant percentage of the fundamental value exchange is nonquantified, just tracking the money flows doesnt meaningfully measure growth. And the situation will only exacerbate.
Professor Dirk Helbing has suggested that multidimensional qualified money (e.g., money that keeps track of various components, including social value, environmental value and so forth) may come to play a role in the economy of the future, allowing a richer sort of value accounting. Carbon credits and Fair Trade certifications are a step in this direction.
More radically, five years ago I introduced the notion of the offer network a community of parties that carry out economic exchange via the intersection of requests/offers of the form If someone does X for me, then I will do Y for someone (maybe a different someone). An offer-network economy is basically a giant matching engine that connects various parties with each other based on the compatibility of their request/offer pairs.
In an offer network, one gets scalable and systematic exchange of value without the need for quantification.
What the cases of arXiv, Github, Facebook and so many others show is that the information economy is becoming an offer network rather than a quantified economy.
This means we could well get to the singularity without ever seeing the 45% financial growth rates Hanson forecasts. What we might see instead is the quantified portion of the economy becoming exponentially smaller and economists becoming exponentially less relevant unless they develop radically new tools.Source: Forbes
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In the Information Economy, Value Is Decreasingly In The Numbers - Hellenic Shipping News Worldwide
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Safeguarding free speech from threats is important |Opinion – Hindustan Times
Posted: at 11:48 pm
When early drafts of the fundamental right to freedom of speech were put before the Constituent Assembly, members protested that the right was riddled with so many exceptions that the exceptions have eaten up the right altogether.
The framers of the Constitution drew from the example of the Irish Constitution by providing specific subjects on which the state could make law to restrict the freedom of speech. This was markedly different from the US Constitution, under which the freedom of speech was not mottled with exceptions, and was absolute, at least on the face of it.
There was a lively debate before the Constituent Assembly on what the permissible exceptions should be. Eventually, when the Constitution came into force on January 26 ,1950, the only grounds on which the fundamental right to freedom of speech and expression could be restricted were libel, slander, defamation, contempt of court or any other matter which offends against decency or morality or undermines the security of or tends to overthrow the state. Notable exceptions which found themselves in earlier drafts but got dropped in the end, were sedition, public order, class hatred and blasphemy.
Only a few months into the republic, the newly minted fundamental right to freedom of speech and expression under Article 19(1)(a) was put to test. The restrictions under Article 19(2) were invoked by three state governments to clamp down on select publications.
In Bihar, the government cracked down on a provocative political pamphlet. The high court rejected the states contention and that view was upheld by the Supreme Court in State of Bihar v Shailabala Devi.
In Madras, the state banned Crossroads, a communist weekly published by Romesh Thapar who was famously critical of many of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehrus policies. The Supreme Court struck down the ban and the law under which it was issued, holding that nothing short of a threat to overthrow the state could justify a restriction on the freedom of speech under Article 19(1) (a). A breach of order of a purely local significance could not meet the test. This was followed in Brij Bhushans case, where the court struck down a pre-censorship order on the Organiser, a weekly run by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.
Upset by the rulings, Nehru wrote to the then law minister BR Ambedkar, expressing a need to amend the Constitution to contain subversive activities. But on the floor of Parliament, Nehru justified the need for an amendment, not on a political ground but a moral one.
This was curious given that the occasion for the amendment was the three unfavourable rulings. Taking the moral high ground he said, It has become a matter of the deepest distress to me to see from day to day some of these news sheets which are full of vulgarity and indecency and falsehood day after day not injuring me or this House much , but poisoning the mind of the younger generation, degrading their mental integrity and moral standards.
In a speech which acquires special relevance in times of rampant and reckless fake news about seven decades later, he complained that from the way untruth is bandied about and falsehood thrown about it has become quite impossible to distinguish what is true and what is false.
The first amendment to the Constitution in 1951 expanded the exceptions to the freedom of speech to eight from what were originally four. Public order, security of the state, incitement to an offence and friendly relations with foreign states were the new insertions. One redeeming feature was that the subjects of restriction were prefixed with the word reasonable.
In 1963, a new ground was added: in the interests of the sovereignty and integrity of India. But despite the increased subjects of curtailment, seven decades of working the Constitution tell us that the enumeration of specific subjects in Article 19(2) on which the freedom of speech could be restricted, actually kept a check on excessive inroads into the freedom of speech. The addition of the word, reasonable helped to reign in the restrictions, even on the eight permissible grounds. Each restriction was required to meet the test of proportionality. The enumeration of restrictions, once condemned as eating up the right altogether, have emerged, somewhat paradoxically, as its protector.
In the landmark judgment Shreya Singhal v Union of India, comparing Article 19(1)(a) with its American counterpart, Justice Rohinton F Nariman held that while under the Indian Constitution, the right could be curtailed only on the eight grounds specified under Article 19(2), the American Constitution was not constrained by such limitations and the restrictions could travel beyond, so long as there was a clear and present danger to a competing right. The belief that the freedom of speech under the American Constitution was absolute was therefore, a misnomer.
Article 19(2) is organic enough to take care of challenges that might not have been envisaged so many years ago. At the forefront of civil liberties in recent times, is the right to privacy. Now recognised as a fundamental right, privacy concerns need to be balanced with the freedom of speech. Article 19(2) does not specifically mention privacy. But it does mention decency and morality as exceptions to free speech, and these exceptions are not limited to affording protection only against obscenity they are broad enough to make space for privacy, an important moral value in any decent civilised society.
In Kaushal Kishor v Union of India, the Supreme Court, usually a staunch and steadfast guardian of the freedom of speech from the early days of the republic, decided to refer to a bench of five judges the question of whether the freedom of speech could be curtailed on grounds beyond those specified in Article 19(2), and whether Article 21, which has been stretched to include everything from the right to sleep to the right to a toilet can be invoked to introduce further curbs on the freedom of speech.
While the right to life and personal liberty under Article 21 in its many resplendent avatars, is vital, so is the freedom of speech and expression. We, in India chose to adopt the Irish template and consciously departed from the American one. The framers of our Constitution were careful to minimise the restrictions in Article 19(2), while seeking to ensure that all the social values which need to be protected from reckless speech found place in Article 19(2). Articles 19(1)(a) and 19(2) strike a good balance between protecting both free speech and other competing rights. There are grave dangers in opening a back door for inroads into Article 19(1)(a), particularly through a right as elastic as Article 21. Article 19(2) draws a Laxman Rekha and it is important, in the interests of free speech to stay well within that threshold.
( Madhavi Goradia Divan is Additional Solicitor General of India)
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Safeguarding free speech from threats is important |Opinion - Hindustan Times
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The Exercise Of Free Thought In Hong Kong And At Home – Forbes
Posted: at 11:48 pm
Children can sense when things are amiss, even if they cant explain exactly why, and in that class, ... [+] there was a dreary and stifling atmosphere as we painted propaganda poster boards with long anti-communist slogans and images.
Recent years have posed serious challenges to liberal democracy. Democratic movements been stifled in countries like Russia and China as well as western countries where the rise of authoritarian regimes was, just a short time ago, unthinkable.
Whats the solution? For me, a robust liberal education is crucial, the bedrock of democracy.
To explain, until the age of fourteen, I lived in South Korea, in Seoul. Most of my memories from those early years are warm and genial: my older sister helping me style my hair with barrettes; eating persimmons after dinner in our dining room; birthday parties at my grandparents house across the Han River in Bu-am dong.
But, in those years, South Korea was far from the stable, liberal, and relatively wealthy democracy it is today, and there are less positive memories too. Among them, I recall sitting in school in a type of art and crafts time, making propaganda for the military-led government.
Children can sense when things are amiss, even if they cant explain exactly why, and in that class, there was a dreary and stifling atmosphere as we painted propaganda poster boards with long anti-communist slogans and images.
Looking back, my unease grew out of the education Id gotten at home. My father encouraged us kids to debate complex issues openly even at a young age. And even though the topics sometimes flew over our heads, my siblings and I gleaned from our father the importance and value of argument, free expression and open inquiry.
Ive been thinking a lot about my early experiences as Ive read about the protests in Hong Kong. I have been struck, in particular, by the role civics education has played in the conflict. Specifically, a course called Liberal Studies, which has been blamed for fueling the energy of the young protesters.
The course dates from 1992 when Hong Kong was still under British control. The course became compulsory in 2009, and many teachers argue that it raises awareness of social issues, supports civic engagement and promotes critical thinking. In the course, teachers are given free rein to facilitate discussions about difficult issues like the governments 1989 crackdown on protesters at Tienanmen Square.
Critics blame the course for the recent protests, and many have called for a complete elimination of the civics class. The Communist Partys newspaper, The Peoples Daily, has gone so far as to call Hong Kongs education system a disease and said teachers have treated the classroom as the sowing ground for a political perspective.
In response to the protests, some have called for more patriotic education that is, propaganda to instill more loyalty in Hong Kong students to mainland China. This has been the approach under president Xi Jinping in China, and mainland schools have recently redoubled efforts at ideological education.
Not surprisingly, I support the need for strong civics courses in Hong Kong. But just as important, I believe the battle over education in Hong Kong and China should be a lesson to us all because our freedoms depend on education. What we learn in school about free speech and open thought matters for the future of nations.
The course in Hong Kong shows the value of civics instruction that supports free speech and critical thinking. According to the New York Times, many students speak proudly about how liberal studies helped them understand the complex bill that set off the protests. The bill, which would have allowed extraditions to the mainland, has since been suspended but has not been formally withdrawn from legislative agendas.
Democracies are, of course, far from perfect, and too often democratic countries dont live up to their ideals. But the freedom to criticize those institutions and the opportunity to show how ideals have been betrayed is what makes progress possible.
Practically speaking, we need to do more to make education a tool for renewing democracy. This means a commitment to media literacy to ensure our students have the tools to seek out and analyze information. It also means a commitment to critical thinking, so that students can think through complicated topics and truly debate current events.
I was lucky. My father instilled the value of free expression and critical thinking in me during difficult times. Nations now need to do the same, and Hong Kong shows us the way.
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The Exercise Of Free Thought In Hong Kong And At Home - Forbes
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David Harsanyi: Happy anniversary to Citizens United | Columnists – The Union Leader
Posted: at 11:48 pm
TEN YEARS AGO, the Supreme Court overturned portions of a federal law that empowered government to dictate how Americans who were not connected to any candidates and political parties could practice their inherent right of free expression. It was one of the greatest free speech decisions in American history.
The case of Citizens United revolved around state efforts to ban a conservative nonprofit group from showing a critical documentary it produced of then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton right before the 2008 Democratic primary elections. At the time, the McCain-Feingold Act made it illegal for corporations and labor unions to engage in "electioneering communication" one month before a primary or two months before the general election.
Or, in other words, the law, written by politicians who function without restrictions on speech -- and applauded by much of a mass media that functions without restrictions on speech -- prohibited Americans from pooling their resources and engaging in the most vital form of expression at the most important time, in the days leading up to an election.
"By taking the right to speak from some and giving it to others," Justice Anthony Kennedy would write for the majority, "the Government deprives the disadvantaged person or class of the right to use speech to strive to establish worth, standing, and respect for the speaker's voice."
Right after the decision, President Barack Obama famously rebuked the Justices during his State of the Union for upholding the First Amendment, arguing that the Supreme Court had "reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests -- including foreign corporations -- to spend without limit in our elections."
Not a word of what he said was true.
First of all, the court hadn't overturned a century of law (though the age of the law bears absolutely no relevance to its constitutionality). Citizens United reversed portions of a law, less than a decade old, that forbade Americans from contributing as much as they wanted directly to the funding of speech. Corporations would still be banned from donating directly to candidates, as they had been since 1907.
Moreover, those corporations, typically unwilling to pick partisan sides for reasons of self-preservation, are still responsible for only a fraction of all political spending, averaging around 1% or less since 2010. Top 200 corporations spend almost nothing on campaigns.
Conversely, since 2010, there's been an explosion in grassroots political activism on both right and left. As Bradley A. Smith points out in The Wall Street Journal, small-dollar donors are more in demand than ever. Bernie Sanders lives on them, and Donald Trump raised more money from donors who gave less than $200 than any candidate in history.
Nothing in Citizens United, of course, made it legal for foreigners to participate in American elections. It is still illegal for anyone running for office to solicit, accept or receive help from foreign nationals.
Obama, like many progressives, would ratchet up the scaremongering over anonymous political speech. Over the past couple of decades, our political class has convinced large swaths of the electorate that private citizens have a civic responsibility to publicly attach their names to every political donation. They do not. As the often-cited 1995 Supreme Court ruling in McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission says: "Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority."
It is true, though, that since the Citizens United decision, streaming services have been able to produce and play documentaries about political candidates like Trump without answering to a government entity. Publishing companies, especially smaller ones, can now print books about political figures without being policed by the state. And you can contribute as much money you want to any independent group that shares your values. As it should be. The very notion that anyone should be restricted from airing his or her views is fundamentally un-American.
Then again, even if the floodgates had opened for "special interests" -- a euphemism for causes that Democrats dislike -- and even if there had been a massive spike in corporate spending on speech, and even if secretive corporate entities started producing documentaries that disparaged favored political candidates and released them days before an election, it still wouldn't matter.
The principle of free expression isn't contingent on correct outcomes, it is a free-standing, inherent right protected by the Constitution. That principle holds whether people of free will are too lazy or too gullible to resist alleged misinformation. The proper way to push back against rhetoric you don't like is to rebut it.
Or not. It should be up to you.
David Harsanyi is a senior writer at National Review and the author of the book "First Freedom: A Ride Through America's Enduring History With the Gun."
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Joe Biden’s bias comes through in trying to outwoke competition: Devine – New York Post
Posted: at 11:48 pm
Joe Biden doesnt sound very moderate when he says there is no room for compromise on transgender equality.
It is the civil rights issue of our time, he tweeted last week, elevating it above womens equality, racial equality, and even climate justice, an issue he once told us was an existential threat.
The tweet was rather baffling, other than as an exercise in identity pandering.
Maybe Biden thought he could win over a segment of the 0.3 percent transgender voters who are irate that Bernie Sanders accepted an endorsement from libertarian podcaster and pronoun purist Joe Rogan.
But, by trying to outwoke Sanders on gender fluidity, Biden is empowering a tyrannical micro-minority determined to overturn biological reality and crush dissent.
Exhibit A is Denver Post columnist Jon Caldara, fired for writing that there are only two sexes, identified by an XX or XY chromosome.
They is singular and up is down, wrote Caldara in a Jan. 7 column criticizing The Associated Press Stylebook, the language-usage bible for reporters, which has decreed that gender is no longer binary and that they can be used as a singular pronoun.
Two weeks later, he slammed a Colorado law which requires controversial sex-education content in schools.
Democrats dont want education transparency when it comes to their mandate to convince your kid that there are more than two sexes, even if its against your wishes, he wrote.
This was the last straw for his editors. After writing a weekly column for four years, he was shown the door.
Caldara is no social conservative. He supports-same sex marriage and doesnt like Donald Trump. But, like Rogan, he is a libertarian who objects to compelled speech and inaccurate pronouns.
So, it doesnt matter how the Denver Post tries to spin it, his firing is an attack on free speech by the very institution entrusted to defend it.
The paper has been opaque about its reasons, alluding only to disrespectful language in an editors note last week. But any fair reader of the statements of biological reality which Caldara reposted on social media would be hard pressed to find disrespect. Clearly, his editors thought his words were fine when they published them.
But the Denver Post is a shadow of its former self. Under the oppressive ownership of a hedge fund, it lacks the institutional courage required to stand against the transgender bullying which attacks any expression deviating from gender fluid orthodoxy.
The papers disintegrating backbone follows the decline of a free press all over the country, as Google and Facebook siphon away news revenue, and fake news muscles in.
Alden Global Capital took control of the Denver Post in 2010 and runs it through its subsidiary, Digital First Media, which has bought up some of the biggest newspaper chains in the country, including the McClatchy and Gannett organizations. It controls dozens of newspapers, from California to Massachusetts, and has stripped them to the bone.
Its no scoop to understand that hedge funds with an appetite for extracting remnant value from failing newspapers have no interest in freedom of speech or the constitutional value of the Fourth Estate, let alone the importance of objective truth.
And the last thing woke capital wants is to be targeted by transgender activists. No special interest group is more relentless in crushing dissent around the world, using character assassination as a weapon.
When you have no commitment to free speech, surrender to bullies is the logical path of least resistance.
This may also explain Joe Bidens trans-virtue signaling last week, to counter suspicions about his Catholic background and past cordiality toward Mike Pence.
But, if the leading moderate of the Democratic presidential field is promising to make transgender ideology his human-rights priority, we should understand what that means, for womens sports, for schools, for prisons, for the military, for language.
If there is to be no compromise on transgender rights, then the rights of women and girls will have to be sacrificed.
Does Biden not care, for instance, about the right of biological females to compete in team sports on a level playing field, rather than against transgender athletes with all the natural physiological advantages that come from being born male?
How about the right of girls to preserve their modesty in single-sex locker rooms? Or the right of students not to be confused in sex-ed classes by radical gender theory which disputes the biological reality of two sexes.
Like every other minority, transgender people should be protected from discrimination, as our laws demand. But if you take him at his word, what Biden is advocating is the forceful restructuring of society according to the irrational demands of a subsection of a tiny minority. Its no way to win an election.
Boys death avoidable
The twitter feed of Thomas Valvas mother makes for sinister reading now that we know her accusations of abuse ended with the 8-year-olds death allegedly at the hands of his cop father.
New York City police Officer Michael Valva and his fiance, Angela Pollina, have been charged with second-degree murder over the autistic boys death, after he was forced to sleep outside in in a freezing garage.
But if anyone had listened to the boys Polish-born mother, he might still be alive.
For two years, Justyna Zubko-Valva has been posting heartrending videos and credible evidence of harm to her three sons on twitter.
She even posted letters from teachers saying the boys were starving and filthy.
Why were her complaints to authorities unanswered? Something is very wrong with a child-welfare system which ignores a mothers fears.
Your excuses dont fool anyone, Eric
Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams doesnt fool anyone when he says his Martin Luther King Day rant about gentrification wasnt a racial slur against white people.
The crowd only started cheering when he said: Go back to Iowa! You go back to Ohio! New York City belongs to the people that was here and made New York City what it is.
It was a dog whistle about majority white states, and he disgraced his office when he chose to stoke division rather than promote healing at a time when New York is suffering from a plague of anti-Semitic attacks. Some perpetrators have tried to justify their hate crimes using the same excuse, that they are being alienated from old neighborhoods.
I tried to give Adams a chance last week to explain, but he dodged requests for an interview.
I never once mentioned race, he finally said in an e-mail through a spokesman yesterday.
Cleveland, Ohio, for example, is majority-black. I have always felt gentrification is not about race, but attitude.
Unconvincing from a wannabe mayor of this melting pot.
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Joe Biden's bias comes through in trying to outwoke competition: Devine - New York Post
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Bloomberg Vows Steadfast Commitment to US Aid for Israel – The New York Times
Posted: at 11:48 pm
NEW YORK Michael Bloomberg on Sunday made his case for the presidency to fellow Jewish Americans, vowing not to revisit U.S. aid to Israel -- an approach that contrasts Bloomberg with several of his Democratic rivals, including his only fellow Jewish candidate in the race, Bernie Sanders.
Bloomberg, at a speech announcing a coalition of Jewish American supporters in Florida, vowed he would never impose conditions on U.S. military aid to Israel if elected. Sanders and rivals Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg have all left open the option of leveraging that aid to dissuade the Israeli government from annexation and settlement expansions in the West Bank.
As president, I will always have Israel's back, said Bloomberg, who served three terms as mayor of New York.
It wasn't the only distinction Bloomberg drew with Sanders, a U.S. senator from Vermont. In a line that drew laughs from the audience, he said he was the only Jewish candidate in the race not looking to turn America into a kibbutz, referring to communal Jewish farming cooperatives. Sanders volunteered on a leftist kibbutz in the 1960s, and has championed a democratic socialism that Bloomberg opposes.
Bloomberg's wide-ranging speech touched on rising acts of violence against American Jews, criticism of President Donald Trump for withdrawing from the Iranian nuclear deal, a strong defense of Israel and the importance of protecting all marginalized groups from hatred and threats.
This time is a time of great anxiety in the Jewish community, both around the world, and here at home as ancient hatreds are given fresh currency with new technologies, he said. We are confronted by signs that we thought we would never see outside of old black-and-white newsreels: synagogues attacked, Jews murdered, Nazis marching brazenly and openly by torchlight.
But Bloomberg made only passing reference to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, saying he will not wait three years to release a peace plan for the region. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, embattled amid an indictment on corruption charges, and his political rival Benny Gantz were set to meet with Trump in Washington this week as the U.S. administration prepares to release its long-in-the-works Middle East peace plan.
Former Vice President Joe Biden, like Bloomberg, has already ruled out the idea of leveraging U.S. military aid to Israel, which has expanded settlements in the West Bank that the Trump administration recently decided to no longer consider a violation of international law. Every Democrat vying to challenge Trump supports an eventual two-state solution that allows Israelis and Palestinians to coexist peacefully in the region.
Bloombergs approach to rising anti-Semitism put him more squarely in line with the rest of the Democratic primary field. Like his rivals, the former mayor laid blame at Trumps feet for rising discriminatory episodes targeting Jews as well as other minority groups.
Anti-Semitism is the original conspiracy theory, Bloomberg said. And a world in which a president traffics in conspiracy theories is a world in which Jews are not safe.
Trump has faced criticism for invoking anti-Semitic tropes, such as his remark last year that Jewish Americans who voted Democratic were disloyal to their religion. Bloomberg accused Trump of trying to use Israel as a wedge issue for his own electoral purposes."
But in pairing his sharp criticism of Trump with an acknowledgment that there is no single answer for a recent rise in anti-Semitism, Bloomberg outlined what he described as discrimination against Jews on both the right and the left.
Trump signed an executive order last month that empowers the Education Department to pursue a broader swath of potential anti-Semitism complaints on college campuses. That order responds to concern about the discriminatory aftereffects of liberal pro-Palestinian organizing on campuses, but left-leaning Jewish American groups said it risks chilling legitimate criticism of the Israeli governments policies.
Bloomberg did not address Trumps order in his speech but his campaign indicated that, despite his commitment to fighting on-campus anti-Semitism, he shares the free speech concerns of the orders critics. The former mayor said Sunday that he would expand the Education Departments anti-bullying campaign so we can put an end to harassment in schools including on college campuses.
While Bloomberg's speech focused on threats to American Jews, he also criticized a rising tide of hated writ large, against black, Muslim and LGBTQ Americans as well as immigrants.
Leadership sets a tone. It is either inclusive or exclusive, divisive or uniting, incendiary or calming, he said. I choose inclusion. I choose tolerance. I choose America.
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Hillary Clinton: Mark Zuckerberg Has Authoritarian Views on Misinformation – The Atlantic
Posted: at 11:48 pm
Listening to Clinton, I was struck by how remarkably similar her account was to something Zuckerberg had once told me. Facts, Zuckerberg had suggested, are best derived from foraging many opinions, ideally from the billions of humans who use his publishing platform, so that each individual might cherry-pick what to believe. (Cherry-pick is my word, not his.) If journalisms mantra is Seek truth and report it, Facebooks might be Seek opinions and react to them. Its not about saying, Heres one view; heres the other side, Zuckerberg had said when Id asked him to reconcile the apparent contradiction between fact and opinion. You should decide where you want to be.
Hillary Clinton: American democracy is in crisis
I wrote at the time that Zuckerbergs interpretation was unsatisfying for one thing, and Trumpian for another. When I asked Clinton today whether she too sees a Trumpian quality in Zuckerbergs reasoning, she nodded. Its Trumpian, she said. Its authoritarian. (Facebook did not immediately provide a response to my request for comment from Zuckerberg.)
Clintons allusions to Zuckerberg as a world leader are fitting. I feel like youre negotiating with a foreign power sometimes, she said, referencing conversations shes had at the highest levels with Facebook. Hes immensely powerful, she told me. This is a global company that has huge influence in ways that were only beginning to understand.
Facebook is, in a sense, the worlds first technocratic nation-statea real-time experiment in connecting humans at massive and unprecedented scale, with a population of users that eclipses any actual nation, nearly as big as China and India combined. Its also an institution with gigantic levers at its disposal to affect the lives of its user-citizens. Facebook knows this. It has played with manipulating peoples emotions. It has trumpeted its ability to affect the outcome of an election. Theres good reason to believe, Clinton said, that Facebook is not just going to reelect Trump, but intend[s] to reelect Trump. We know for sure, at least, that Zuckerberg doesnt want Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts to be the president. In leaked audio of an internal Facebook meeting that emerged last fall, he referenced Warrens interest in regulating Facebook and said he would go to the mat and fight her.
Clinton seems to find the whole thing deeply unnerving. Zuckerberg has been somehow persuaded, she said, that its to his and Facebooks advantage not to cross Trump. Thats what I believe. And it just gives me a pit in my stomach.
Facebook often defends its equivocations about the truth by claiming that it must protect the free speech of its users. They have, in my view, contorted themselves into making arguments about freedom of speech and censorship, Clinton said, which they are hanging on to because its in their commercial interests. Of course, the right to free speech is about protecting citizens from government overreachand does not concern a persons use of corporate publishing platforms. Incidentally, Trump has similarly co-opted the meaning of free speech and truth for his own political and personal gain. If it makes Trump look good, its true; if it does not, then its fake news. Perhaps the logical extension of all this is as follows: Whats good for Trump is good for Facebook, and vice versa.
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Photo Flash: First Look At BE HERE NOW At Everyman Theatre – Broadway World
Posted: at 11:46 pm
Everyman Theatre continues its 2019/2020 season with Deborah Zoe Laufer's intricately calibrated production Be Here Now. Laufer also directs the production, which runs January 21 through February 16, 2020.
Bari (Beth Hylton*) has always been a bit of an angry, depressed misanthrope. Losing her job teaching nihilism in New York City to work at the local fulfillment center in her rural hometown upstate sends her into despair. But lately, her recurring headaches manifest bizarre, ecstatic, nearly religious experiences. They're changing her entire view on life. She's in love! She's almost...happy?!
When she finds out these headaches are also killing her, she must decide whether it's better to live a short, joyful life, or risk a lifetime of despair and misery. Through extremes of laughter, sorrow, pain, and love, Bari must ask herself what she's willing to do for love, and in the end... is it even worth it?
Rounding out the cast for the Everyman production are Katy Carkuff* as Patty Cooper, Shubhangi Kuchibhotla as Luanne Cooper, and Kyle Prue* as Mike Cooper.
Deborah Zoe Laufer's plays have been produced at Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Cleveland Playhouse, Geva Theatre Center, Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, Portland Stage, and The Humana Festival. Informed Consent, an Alfred P. Sloan/EST commission appeared at The Duke Theatre in NYC in 2015, a co-production of Primary Stages and EST. It was a NY Times Critics Pick. Her play End Days won The ATCA Steinberg citation and has received over 70 productions around the country as well as in Germany, Russia, and Australia. Other plays include Leveling Up, Out of Sterno, The Last Schwartz, Sirens, Meta, The Gulf of Westchester, Miniatures, and Fortune.
According to Everyman Theatre Artistic Director, Vincent M. Lancisi, "Be Here Now is a beautiful, funny play that recognizes the importance of laughing at ourselves and seizing the moment to find the joy in life. Playwright and director Deborah Zoe Laufer and this talented cast will make you laugh out loud and reminds us how precious life is. In my mind, it's the most profound romantic comedy in the theatre today."
Be Here Now had its world premiere at Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park in February 2018, and has since played in Boca Raton, FL at Theatre Lab, Aurora Theatre in Atlanta, and Shattered Globe in Chicago. Everyman Theatre marks the production's East Coast premiere.
Deborah Zoe Laufer's Be Here Now runs January 21 - February 16, 2020. Tickets ($10-69) are on sale now, online (everymantheatre.org), by phone (410.752.2208), or at the Everyman Theatre Box Office (315 W. Fayette Street, Baltimore, MD).
Photo Credit: Teresa Castracane
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Young Arabs Must Know the Truth About the HolocaustFor Their Own Good – The National Interest Online
Posted: at 11:46 pm
Monday is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. World dignitaries will gather together in Israel to mark the coinciding seventy-fifth anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp. As personal tragedy often brings people together, driving out the petty with the profound, so the memory of historic tragedy can do the same if we are determined to use it for good.
We must, therefore, renew our determination to educate all young people about the Nazi genocide of six million Jews, and of the murder of so many others amid a human catastrophe that took more than fifteen million lives in Europe alone between 1939 and 1945. We must do this because the memories and the lessons attached to those memories are fading.
Alas, the intricate texture of historical memory inevitably decays with the passage of time. What people see with their own eyes, and process with their own hearts, cannot possibly be as emotionally resonant to those who must learn about such events from after-the-fact testimonials. This is why we make extra efforts to preserve the memory of those events, like the Holocaust, that bear critical lessonsfor memory is the only tool we have to capture time.
It is not enough, however, to remember the Holocaust. We must remember it with special nuance because its lessons are not all obvious.
The Holocaust was something genuinely new in the annals of human evil. It represented the pairing of the methodology of the industrial revolution to the dark tradition of mass murder. It showed how technologized propaganda methods dehumanized other people so as to make actual acts of industrialized mass murder possible.
Remembering the Holocaust teaches us not only about evil but about the conditions that enable evil motives to seed evil deeds. At a time when the world is rushing madly ahead on a new wave of unprecedented technological change, we dare not lose the lessons that show us how to connect means and ends, motives and deeds.
The passage of time is not the only obstacle to memory. All historical memory is embedded in specific social contexts. Sometimes, too, historical memory is instrumentalized to serve the interests of the present. Jews do not remember the Holocaust the same way Germans do, or Poles or Russians or French. And what of the Arabs?
The Arabs are a special case. How can Arabs remember usefully an event that many were never taught the truth about to begin with?
For decades, millions of Arabs have lived under autocracies that have manipulated history to serve their appetites for power, and to hide the fact that their anti-colonialist nationalisms had once made many of them the fans of German war efforts. Many Arab historians have colluded in the falsification of Holocaust historyminimizing or outright denying itout of fear of social ostracism or punishment at the hands of authorities. The result is that entire chapters of history are missing from the programs that Arab governments teach their students.
Into the vacuum have poured the diatribes of religious extremists, spread in recent years through certain satellite television channels that are often protected if not supported by governments, that distort history as they spread hatred. In these diatribes, Palestinians and other Arabs are the only victims of history, as Jews and Israelis are predictably turned into Nazis. Young Arabs are told that the Nakba of 194748 was a wholly one-sided crime, while twisted lessons on the Holocaust depict the Jews as having been responsible for their own much-exaggerated difficulties.
In most of the world the Holocaust is fading from memory with the passage of time; but, in much of the Arab world, falsified memories of the Holocaust are, if anything, spreading. This is disastrous. Distortion of Holocaust history is being pressed into the service of a destructive and counterproductive political nihilism. It is nurturing a grievance culture that yields only self-loathing and paralysis. And it is separating the image of Arabs from that of all other civilized peoples, making them into an international embarrassment.
Arab youth must be taught the truth about the Holocaust, for its lessons are universal. Some of those lessons apply acutely to Arabs and Muslims right now because many Muslims are no safer today from bigotry and violence than were European Jews in 1939. Not to teach them about human-rights violations during World War II undermines their capacity to fully grasp the Rohingya tragedy, the building of concentration camps for Uighurs in Xinjiang, and the meaning of new anti-Muslim immigration restrictions in India.
The Holocaust can also teach todays Arab youth how to deal with fanaticism, through the stories of brave individuals in Nazi-occupied Europe who resisted the power of the crowd and risked their lives to save their Jewish neighbors. There is much to learn from examining the motivations and behavior of the perpetrators and collaborators, as well as passers-by, protesters, and heroes.
Learning real history, even of great tragedies, also shows that reconciliation, justice, and peace really are possible. No people have atoned more sincerely than the German people, who have sought persistently and sincerely to reconcile with their European neighbors and who acknowledge a special bond withand responsibility towardIsrael. Knowing this bears a truly precious lesson: Peace is achievable between Israel and the Arabs.
I am fortunate to be a Moroccan. Distortions of history thrive when counterevidence is unavailable, but the well-known history of Jewish-Muslim relations in Morocco over many centuries immunizes nearly all Moroccans against the sirens of calumny, hatred, and fanaticism. All of us know how King Mohammed V worked to protect Moroccan Jews during the war, and how he resisted de facto calls for the boycott and isolation of Israel after 1948. We know that King Mohammed VI recently visited the newly opened house of Moroccan-Jewish heritage Essaouira, and years ago resolved to raise awareness of the Holocaust in Morocco, both through his own historic statement and through a range of cultural and educational interventions.
On this anniversary, more Arabs must join in the cause of sharing the hard-won lessons of the Holocaust. These lessons belong to the world, and one of those lessons, stated as a question, stands out above all others: If we cannot empathize with the pain of other human beings, how much less human and less deserving of human kindness does that make us?
Ahmed Charai is a Moroccan publisher. He is on the board of directors for the Atlantic Council, an international counselor of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and a member of the Advisory Board of The Center for the National Interest in Washington and the Advisory Board of Gatestone Institute in New York.
Image: Reuters
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Ray Bradbury on War, Recycling, and Artificial Intelligence – JSTOR Daily
Posted: at 11:45 pm
One of the roles of science fiction is to provide readers with a glimpse of how the future could be. Ray Bradbury didnt get everything about the future right. We havent yet seen books and reading made illegal (as in his 1953 Fahrenheit 451), just as we havent yet discovered another planet ready for American colonizers (as in his 1950 The Martian Chronicles). And yet, the themes he explored in those booksmass media and censorship, colonization and environmental changeare more relevant than ever. Even in his lesser-known workssuch as the 1951 sci-fi collection, The Illustrated Man, Bradbury tackles a surprising array of issues that feel as if they were ripped from todays headlines.
Readers today will find in The Illustrated Man a fresh perspective that illuminates global issues like artificial intelligence and climate change. Bradbury also engages with the political and cultural challenges of migration: specifically, the crossing of the U.S.Mexico border, which has since received much attention with the dawn of the so-called Trump Era.
* * *
Theres a story in The Illustrated Man called The Highway, where Bradbury tells a tale about the beginning of an atomic war in the US. The war, however, is experienced through the eyes of a Mexican peasant, Hernando, who lives next to a highway in northern Mexico.
One day, Hernando glimpses a procession of hundreds of American tourists driving north to return to the US. They are heading home, that is, to join the fight in an upcoming atomic war. When the last car stops by Hernando, he sees a group of young Americans crying for help: their car needs water to continue their way back home. Right before they leave, the driver tells Hernandowho doesnt know why all the cars are driving so fast or why these young Americans are so desperatethat the end of the world has finally arrived. Hernando doesnt react to the young mans confession. The car leaves. Hernando goes back to his rural routine, but suddenly stops to wonder: What do they mean the World?
Here, Bradbury highlights the generational and cultural gap between the young Americans and the aging Hernando, who lives with his wife and works their land, recycling the automobile waste that travelers from north of the border leave behind. Its a harrowing scene, but also terrifically realistic: it illustrates not only the clashing of multiple incompatible worldviews, but shows how all such worldseven those seemingly distant from the centers of powerare threatened by contemporary global dangers. Its moments like these that ensure Bradburys relevance, even one hundred years after his birth.
* * *
Bradburys eye for contemporary troubles extends beyond the dangers of global disaster. In the prologue to The Illustrated Man, Bradbury introduces a character who has an existential problem: his torso is covered in living tattoos. Having the tattoos becomes a curse because the illustrations on his body acquire life of their own. The living illustrations unveil an ominous, even prophetic future for the person that looks at them. The Illustrated Man describes his curse:
So people fire me when my pictures move. They dont like it when violent things happen in my illustrations. Each illustration is a little story. If you watch them, in a few minutes they tell you a tale. In three hours of looking you could see eighteen or twenty stories acted right on my body, you could hear voices and think thoughts. Its all here, just waiting for you to look.
Unexpectedly, through this illustrated character, Bradbury highlights the possible dangers of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Today, there are fears that AI will permeate and disrupt the political organization of postmodern societies. For instance, AI can predict the affinities and choices of an individual based on the application of algorithms. What The Illustrated Man shows is the consequence of those predictions once revealed to ordinary people. The Illustrated Man, not without melancholy, says:
If Im with a woman, her picture comes there on my back, in an hour, and shows her whole lifehow shell live, how shell die, what shell look like when shes sixty. And if its a man, an hour later his pictures here on my back. It shows him falling off a cliff, or dying under a train. So Im fired again.
In his article If Planet Death Doesnt Get Us, an AI Superintelligence Most Certainly Will, Bryan Walsh suggests that if a super artificial intelligence becomes able to disregard human valueswhile also increasing its intelligencethen humanity might end up controlled by a nonhuman entity with a vision of the future that does not adhere to the crucial ethical issues that societies are facing today.
The Illustrated Man, as Bradbury formulated him, can be read as a metaphor for the intersection between human values (the jobless fate of the Illustrated Man) and a superintelligence that determines human life through visual representations of the future (the living, prophetic tattoos). Most importantly, Bradburys story doesnt prophesize the invention of this particular machine so much as it examines the ways in which humans would react to such an invention.
The fear that individuals will surrender their ethical compasses to technology is a constant specter in Bradburys stories. In The Illustrated Man, this fear is represented by the refusal of the characters to accept the futures that the illustrations predict for them. Bradburys Illustrated Man, and those around him, represent the ways that humans will struggle againstand violently rejectthe enigmatic directives of any intelligence beyond our own, even if (as Bradbury notes) the intelligence is speaking truthfully.
* * *
Where did Bradburys inspiration for these particular stories in The Illustrated Man come from? The clashes he foresaw in the futurequestions of AI and global catastrophe, atomic war and border crossingcame from his own forays into Mexico in 1945.
In fact, Bradbury himself experienced the traumatic effects of crossing the USMexico border. Between October and November of 1945, Bradbury and his friend Grant Beach traveled from Los Angelesacross southern Arizona, New Mexico, and Texasto Mexico City. On their way, they found swarms of locusts and other hardships familiar from news stories today. But what was most shocking and traumatic for Bradbury was that this trip into Mexico surprisingly challenged his own deeply-held, exotic ideas about Mexican people, which he had acquired while growing up in East Los Angeles.
While in Mexico City, Bradbury spent most of his time seeking the murals of Jos Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Diego Rivera. It is possible to suggest that Bradbury found inspiration for The Illustrated Man in these murals. The muralsperhaps what Bradbury saw as informative, or even prophetic, illustrationsrepresent past, present, and future Mexican society from a Marxist perspective, featuring people in motion with plenty of stories, colors, and historical clues (thus bringing to the audience a multilayered experience).
One of the most famous paintings by David Alfaro Siqueiros, Our Present Time, depicts a faceless man reaching with arms wide open to a space ahead of him, embracing an uncertain future. This is the very same fate of the Illustrated Man. Furthermore, many of the catastrophic themes that Bradbury engages with in The Illustrated Man are also present in these Mexican murals.
* * *
What future did Bradbury see for us? And did he embrace it? In The Fox and the Forest, included in The Illustrated Man, Bradbury sets his story explicitly in Mexico. The plot of the story is not complicated: William and Susan Travis are a married couple living in the year 2155.
That year is not a good time to be alive, since there is war, slavery, and a generalized social unhappiness. In order to escape from the apocalyptic 2155, the couple travel in time back to 1938 rural Mexico, where they believe that peace, simplicity, and happiness can be found. When it seems that they have been able to escape from their time, the 2155 police show up to take them back to the future, thus frustrating the couples escapade.
This narrative has a very pessimistic tone, evoking the nostalgia of older and happier times. Those from the future view our present as superior to their own time. Bradburys dark future, it seems, is unavoidableeven in our own present day.
* * *
More than 60 years ago, The Martian Chronicles (1950), Fahrenheit 451 (1953), and The Illustrated Man (1951) fascinated the young members of the generation growing up after the darkness of the Second World War, but before the new kinds of wars known to our own era. Now, as the 21st century unravelswith all of its challenges, technological dilemmas, and even proliferation of tattoosBradbury remains a fundamental figure of the sci-fi genre.
Bradbury had certainly not anticipated that by 2020 (like what Hernando does in The Highway) recycling was going to become a mainstream human endeavor, or that the USMexico border was going to catalyze many of the 21stcentury anxieties about global migration and demographic explosion. And yet, his stories seem to rhyme with our own era. Readers will keep finding in Bradburys tales about the future a contemporary interpretation of our everlasting fears about the end of the world, as well as a whisper of hope.
In the epilogue of The Illustrated Man, the narrator sees his own death in one of the living tattoos: it is the Illustrated Man that chokes him to death. The narrator decides to run away from this terrible fate. In this age of global catastrophe, who doesnt recognize the desire to run from such incontrovertible proofs of the worlds doom?
And yet, just like the world today, Bradbury too oscillated between utopia and dystopia. For as many people shown running from their prophesied demises, Bradbury shows young peoplelike those who Hernando couldnt understandcharging home to meet a near-certain death. Bradburys work, ultimately, is for them: those readers who believe that science fiction is an effective tool to illustrate how the worst consequences of todays global political decisions will be faced by future generations.
Young people are approaching an uncertain globalized future with plenty of possible outcomes, both dystopian and utopian. Nothing is simple: the technology that Walsh decries, the kind that the Illustrated Man fears, is even today becoming an effective tool for social mobilizations (lets think about the protests, from Hong Kong to Chile, organized through social media). Meanwhile, today, we know more than ever that any fight for the future will require the work and sacrifice of the whole world: not just car-driving Americans, but people like Hernando, too. Clearly, even Bradbury cant get everything right.
Perhaps, if Bradbury was alive today, he would ask young people: what role will you play, when my future comes crashing into your present?
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