Daily Archives: August 16, 2021

A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury.

John Stuart Mill

In my field of negotiation, the interests of the individual need to be balanced with the interests of others. A one-sided approach inevitably leads to division and enmity. A negotiation succeeds when the focus is on cooperation and on meeting joint interests, rather than on winning at the expense of others.

The COVID-19 virus has crashed into an American culture that in some quarters emphasizes rights over responsibilities, individualism over community, and suspicion over trust.

This has caused social upheaval and conflict between the interests of individuals and the interests of the larger community. Governments and health care providers are trying to mitigate the impact of the pandemic, while some individuals vigorously guard their rights, believing that their personal liberties are under threat.

Economist John Stuart Mill believed that an individuals freedom to govern himself is absolute, until it comes into conflict with the freedoms of others. In his work On Liberty, Mill describes what he calls The Harm Principle, which explores the limits of individual rights as they relate to the rights of others and the community as a whole.

As Americans, we cherish our freedoms. Our inspired Constitution protects the liberty our founders fought so hard to gain, including religious and political freedom. These rights were enshrined in the First Amendment and remain central to American democracy. As the pandemic has trampled on our daily lives, it is understandable that we would hold tightly to freedoms that are central to our American identity.

This spring it appeared that the COVID-19 virus was on the decline, and we would be back to normal by the fall; however, the emergence of the delta variant has caused infections to rise markedly. Epidemiologists now tell us that the virus will likely be with us for the long term, and it is our collective responsibility to minimize the harm it creates going forward.

The perceived threat of the virus has ebbed and flowed over the past 18 months, and its future undulations are unpredictable. Current challenges include protecting the unvaccinated, understanding the impact of breakthrough infections and decreasing the opportunities for viral mutations. A year from now, the COVID-19-related issues we will confront will likely be different than those we face now.

During the pandemic, many have used a focus on personal freedom to justify not getting vaccinated. In doing so they have inadvertently put others in harms way by increasing their exposure to the virus. Their live and let live attitude has led to a live and let die reality.

As Americans, we are being asked to balance defending our personal freedoms with making good choices on behalf of others, particularly those unable to be vaccinated or who are otherwise vulnerable.

Freedom has often been used more as a sword than as the shield our founders intended. We have weaponized freedom rather than use it to defend and protect. Ironically, this hyperfocus on individual freedom impedes our ability to together defend other important freedoms, such as those of our heath and economic well-being.

Most people have good intentions. Those who have chosen not to get vaccinated or wear masks arent intentionally trying to cause harm to others; nevertheless, in many cases they are doing just that. The number of new cases is more than double what it was a month ago, nearly twice what it was a year ago, and it is predicted to continue rising until a significant majority of us are vaccinated. Those who are dying are no longer just the elderly and infirm; many are in younger age groups.

When we value individual liberty above our moral obligations to one another, especially the most vulnerable, we arent able to get the virus under control and push forward toward collective prosperity. A healthy path forward is to balance rights and responsibilities and to be willing to make the small sacrifices patriotic citizenship requires.

The turbulence and disruptions caused by this virus have exacerbated our increasing cultural divides. Only when we use our freedom to make choices that strengthen our community will our physical, mental and economic health be restored. Mending our cultural divides will not only help us find our way through the pandemic; it will prepare us to meet the inevitable challenges that we will face together in the future.

Stan Christensen teaches negotiation at Stanford University and at Brigham Young University and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Visit link:

Is COVID-19 taking away freedom? We must balance the liberties of everyone | Opinion - Deseret News

ABOUT FOUR miles from where I live in Chicago is a nondescript office building where police take people to be held incommunicado and, according to press reports, tortured. The site is called Homan Square. It has long been notorious among activists and lawyers working on police brutality. It is, they say, a place where they take black and brown and poor kids who cant afford to hire private counsel while theyre in custody.

Homan Square came to national attention in 2015 when journalist Spencer Ackerman of the UK newspaper The Guardian published a detailed story about prolonged detention and violence against suspects at the facility.

Homan Square has since played an ambiguous role in the citys political life. In 2020, the Black Lives Matter movement called for its closure. At the same time, its specter likely enervates local democracy. Work by the political scientists Vesla Weaver and Amy Lerman has shown that police contact with Black and Latino communities, especially when it involves violence, doesnt just instill a fear of the state on the street. It also makes people less likely to vote or otherwise participate later in the political process. Homan Square may provoke activism on the street, but its shadow probably also blocks the ballot box.

I find Homan Square a useful place to start thinking about the ambivalent and complex meanings of the word freedom. In part, this is because its very literally close to home, but also because it presents a particularly gripping instance of the loss of freedom. Indeed, it seems intuitive to me, and I suspect to many, to say that freedom of an important sort is at stake in Homan Square. But what kind of freedom? And what variety of freedom is needed to resist a powerful and entrenched state institution that uses its powers in a coercive and destructive way? What sort of freedom must be constrained in the process?

The term freedom is the eponymous subject of historian Annelien de Dijns new book, Freedom: An Unruly History. Her core point is that concern about freedom against the state and so the Homan Squares of the world is both a recent and a disreputable invention. Instead, she maps out a long tradition of Western thinking, running back to ancient Greece, that construes freedom in terms of the ability to exercise control over the way you are governed. In this view, a state is free because of the way in which people participate in its rule, and in particular, if and only if they rule themselves. This is an idea of freedom partially captured in famous terms, such as the French liberal thinker Benjamin Constants liberty of the ancients and more ambiguously by Oxford don Isaiah Berlins baggy and discordant idea of positive liberty.

De Dijns story might readily be taken as an imaginative dilation of Constants phrase across history. She insists on a singular and linear genealogy. Her understanding of freedom starts from a contrast that the ancient Greek historian Herodotus drew between free Greeks and enslaved Persians. Her freedom then finds footing in the political practices of the Greek city-states, takes wing in the Roman Republic, and is recapitulated by the humanists Petrarch and Machiavelli during the Renaissance. Echoing John Pococks well-known account of a republican tradition in political thought (no relation to the present political party), her freedom then leaps over the channel to inspire English thinkers like James Harrington and from there somersaults into action through the Atlantic Revolutions of the late 18th century.

If you feel slightly breathless after those last few sentences, then you have a pretty good sense of how the books narrative feels. Historical figures flash by like sights from the top deck of the Big Apple tour bus. Now its Trajan! Eusebius! Augustine! Ambrose! And then Dewey! Roosevelt! Hayek! It is a certain tribute to de Dijns command as a writer that the book doesnt collapse into one-damn-thing-after-another-ism; its a close shave. It helps that she tacks sharply every once in a while from the history of ideas to political history. Yet when she does move from text to practice, her grip slips. Lumping together Sparta and Athens into a single category of democratic self-governing states, for example, is a touch odd, the kind of simplification only an economist could love. (Sparta, of course, was never really a democracy at all. The historian Xenophon called it a kingship. The Spartans themselves called it a eunomia, or a submission to the right kind of laws.)

Still, taken as a tour dhorizon of a selective, loosely linked chain of famous European and American thinkers, de Dijn offers good value for your money. All the stars are here, shuffling by to say their piece for or against democracy. Ironically, other recent intellectual histories, such as Margaret Jacobs The Secular Enlightenment and Jonathan Res Witcraft, make more room for lesser luminaries and ordinary punters. De Dijn is much less demotic, but no more democratic, in her choice of reading. Hers is a great man history with a vengeance.

But at the beginning of the 19th century, a dangerous betrayal awaits. In the wake of the Atlantic Revolutions, a new sense of freedom bursts onto the scene: freedom as a constraint upon the states actions. This idea of freedom is, were insistently told, but a cynical play by soulless Bourbon counterrevolutionaries and periwigged Regency Tories to hijack the noble idea of freedom. The celebration of this knock-off ideal was a chance to turn the knife back upon new-wrought democracies, still teething in their revolution crib.

For many, de Dijn observes, the Terror that followed the French Revolution was a turning point. The American Noah Webster (of dictionary fame), for example, went from understanding the problem of freedom in terms of free [i.e., democratic] government to focusing upon the difficulty of guarding against uncontrolled power. His dictionary would, against the historical grain that de Dijn celebrates, go on to define freedom as the right of citizens to go about their business in peace, security, and without molestation. Across the Atlantic, the same story unfurled. Mimicking his idol, Constant, the renowned French law professor douard de Laboulaye would write books such as The State and its Limits in celebration of the principle of laissez-faire, laissez-passez. Not far behind him is Hayek, with other neoliberal ghouls in tow.

Lest the reader feel any uncertainty about where their loyalties should rest, de Dijn makes plain that this later vision of freedom from the state is a disreputable, Johnny-come-lately notion. Pulling no punches, de Dijn calls it a battering ram aimed at toppling democracy. On this account, there is at least a whiff of false consciousness in the demands to close Homan Square and to end police brutality in all its sundry forms. Protesting the racist violence of the Chicago police, in this view, has nothing to do with freedom.

The main arc of de Dijns story is familiar not only because the thread from Athens to Florence to Philadelphia has already been drawn by Pocock (brilliantly) and many others (with more middling results). More importantly, her story is also familiar because it is, of all things, redolent of Star Wars: the old, good Republic, which endures for so long, comes a cropper because of the sinister, antidemocratic machinations of dark-hooded imperial types. It is a story of good, undone by a sinister evil along the way.

As much as I like Star Wars, its too pat a narrative arc. As de Dijns elision of Sparta into the celebratory story of Greek (really, mostly Athenian) democracy suggests, the amount of compression required to tell a story spanning centuries allows for dubious jump cuts. Concision demands choice, but she does not always give a candid explanation of why those choices were made. To construct her long tradition, de Dijn dwells on a couple of intervals in a handful of the Classical Greek polities. She has to cabin Socratic, Platonic, and Neoplatonic thought. And then she must leap to an idolization of the Roman Republic, before pole-vaulting over most of the Christian tradition to the Renaissance (1,000 years in a blink!). She then attends unctuously to Machiavellis admiration of the Roman Republic less so to his musky locker-room glee in the machismo of the armed civilian as the republics bastion. De Dijns is assuredly an imagined, actively constructed tradition. It is pieced together from fragments found hither and yon to serve a plainly presentist end.

Indeed, de Dijns book is very much of the moment. Casting stones on the idea of freedom against the state, and slighting Berlins negative rights, is much in vogue these days. Its maestro is Samuel Moyn, who has catalyzed a veritable cottage industry of attacks upon negative human rights. Helena Rosenblatts more subtle retelling of the liberal story also offers a fascinating juxtaposition of democracy and liberalism that de Dijn echoes in some of her chapters.

It is not just that one has to squint hard to see de Dijns long tradition. It is that when it comes into focus, it doesnt really seem like a single thing. What it meant for a Mediterranean city-state in 400 BCE to govern itself is very different from what self-government is in, say, post-Revolutionary France or the United States. The forms and constitutional mechanisms needed for effective self-government have changed radically as scale and technology mutate. As the polity scales up, shedding the Attic polities distaste for foreigners (metics) and slaves, new problems of managing difference arise. The Attic fondness for ostracizing citizens deemed errant voting them into 20-year exile isnt appetizing today. For good reason, the first democratic constitutions written at the end of the 18th century look nothing like democratic constitutions drafted at the end of the 20th century. The meaning of ruling oneself a phrase that de Dijn takes as self-evident thus has had radically different institutional implications as time has passed. A historical account of democratic freedom that suppresses all that variation is one with much to hide.

In her acknowledgments, de Dijn explains that the idea for the book was born while she was a postdoc at Berkeley in 2009. She had run into a bunch of protestors denouncing Barack Obama as on par with Hitler for his support of the Affordable Care Act. Reasonably enough, this struck her as ludicrous. Her account of freedom is an effort to redeem the word from idiots such as Samuel Fisher, one of the January 6 rioters who stormed the capitol building. The soi-disant dating coach posted a photo of himself, a rifle, and a shotgun with the caption, Cant wait to bring a liberal back to this freedom palace.

Of course, this is piffle. But that doesnt mean that every counterargument to it is correct. The tradition of freedom that de Dijn favors also has its fair share of meretricious rot. Take the Facebook group Stop the Steal, which became an early hub for President Trumps efforts to delegitimate the November 6 election. Stop the Steal took the idea of the peoples freedom to rule themselves and weaponized it against democracy. The enemies of self-rule do not come, as de Dijn seems to think, handily labeled as such. There are far better ways than hers to defend an understanding of freedom refracted through European traditions of social democracy against freedoms upstart American varietal.

Despite a summer of protests under the BLM banner, the Homan Square facility hums along. Protest has done tragically little. But little more has been achieved by the ordinary exercise of what de Dijn would call democratic freedom via the election of a new mayor trailing promises of reform. This should not be a surprise. Writing at the dawn of what de Dijn calls modern liberty, Constant suggested that the liberties of the ancients and the moderns should not be opposed; he urged his readers to learn to combine the two together. A history of the freedom that teaches us how to do that, against the riptide of a growing carceral state and powerful private capital that encases democratic bodies, would be something truly worthwhile. Alas, de Dijns book isnt it.

See the rest here:

Freedom's Just Another Word - lareviewofbooks

Team Encore has won the Battlegrounds Mobile India (BGMI) Freedom Face-off today. The competition, organized to celebrate Indias 75th Independence Day on Aug. 15, had a prize pool of Rs. 210,000 (approximately $2,829).

Sixteen teams composed of professional players and content creators competed across two matches on Erangel and Sanhok to determine the champions. While the first match on Erangel took place in a third-person perspective, the second match on Sanhok was in a first-person perspective, a rare occurrence in PUBG Mobile esports. There was also a pan fight and fistfight towards the end.

Encore placed third in the first match with seven kills and earned a chicken dinner in the second game to place first in the overall standings.Team Scout had a tremendous first game after picking up the win and 15 kills. They faltered in the second match, however, and only took four points to finish second in the overall standings.

The top three teams have earned a share of the prize pool. Team Encore will get Rs. 85,000 (about $1,145) while second-placed Team Scout will earn Rs. 40,000 (approximately $539). Team Jonathan, which came in third place, will pocket Rs. 25,000 (around $337). Here are the overall standings for the BGMI Freedom Face-off.

Team Encore got another victory in the panfight and will take home an additional Rs. 30,000 ($404) for it. Shreeman Legends, which came in the last position in the main event, took first place in the fistfight and turned their fortune around. They will also get Rs. 30,000 (approximately $404) for this win.

Read the original post:

Team Encore wins the BGMI Freedom Face-off - Dot Esports