Month: January 2017

Eliot A. Cohen Responds to Donald Trump’s First Week – The Atlantic

For the community of conservative thinkers and experts, and more importantly, conservative politicians, this is a testing time. Either you stand up for your principles and for what you know is decent behavior, or you go down, if not now, then years from now, as a coward or opportunist. Your reputation will never recover, nor should it.

all can dedicate themselves to restoring the qualities upon which this republic, like all republics depends: on reverence for the truth; on a sober patriotism grounded in duty, moderation, respect for law, commitment to tradition, knowledge of our history, and open-mindedness.

Source: Eliot A. Cohen Responds to Donald Trump’s First Week – The Atlantic

Syneidesis, a billionaires’ club run by William Doll, wants to stop Donald Trump’s anti-globalization agenda — Quartz

For starters, there is the question whether Trump’s accusations are legitimate. Is globalization truly to blame for the ills that he decried during the election?

For decades, scholars have discerned patterns in the long arc of events. Big, sprawling history appears to move in cycles, at turns reinforcing and at others annihilating the existing way.

if the story of 2016 is one of a cycle turning—which seems to be the case—it’s understandable that scholars, journalists and other observers have been rushing to give the doomed epoch a name. Figuring out what precise cycle has ended has proved to be much harder than it seems it should be, but doing so is crucial if you care about what comes next

on a scale from negative to plus 100, investments can be gauged for fairness to labor, capacity to strengthen strategic geopolitical relations, and their potential to sustain surrounding jobs and markets after a deal has run its course

“I don’t think globalization is the real issue. The real issue is automation and artificial intelligence,” Ted Goertzel, a professor at Rutgers University

If automation is the genuine, hidden source of the anger in rust belts everywhere, worse is on its way—far worse.

For democracy to work, an unconditional requirement is a hard-and-fast societal insistence on the truth: Facts have to matter, and those who demonstrate a light regard for them or outright lie must face scorn.

American leaders could not lie, and they had to stand up to power that did. This fanaticism about truthfulness is why the world more or less knows what went down in Iraq over the years. It is ultimately why Edward Snowden and Julian Assange are consequential people—because revelations about NSA spying, global diplomacy and hidden wealth are facts, and not someone’s fevered imagination.

Source: Syneidesis, a billionaires’ club run by William Doll, wants to stop Donald Trump’s anti-globalization agenda — Quartz

Google AMP is Not a Good Thing

We’re talking about an all-powerful ad company that’s looking to explicitly break the peer-to-peer model between creator and consumer, for the singular purpose of increasing profits.

Will it make pages load faster? Sure. But we can fix that in lots of ways over time. You don’t break the peer-to-peer model of the internet because it’s annoying and in need of optimization.

Source: Google AMP is Not a Good Thing by Daniel Miessler

A New Era of Mass Surveillance is Emerging Across Europe | Just Security

In recent months, and in the wake of a series of terrorist attacks across Europe, Germany, France and the United Kingdom — Europe’s biggest superpowers — have passed laws granting their surveillance agencies virtually unfettered power to conduct bulk interception of communications across Europe and beyond, with limited to no effective oversight or procedural safeguards from abuse.

Source: A New Era of Mass Surveillance is Emerging Across Europe | Just Security

 

“If an intelligence law is not well-conceived and rational, it could easily become a formidable weapon of repression. An intelligence law should not only protect citizens against terrorism, but also against the State. We in France are doing neither. There is a total absence of control in this law.”

— Marc Trévidic, former chief terrorism investigator for the French judicial system

Self-segregation: how a personalized world is dividing Americans | Technology | The Guardian

Most people aren’t looking to self-segregate, but they do it anyway in an age of military privatization and social media on college campuses

The US can only function as a healthy democracy if we find a way to diversify our social connections, if we find a way to weave together a strong social fabric that bridges ties across difference. Right now, we are moving in the opposite direction with serious consequences.

By and large, the American public wants to have strong connections across divisions. They see the value in it, politically and socially. But they’re not going to work for it. And given the option, they’re going to renew their license remotely, try to get out of jury duty, and use available data to seek out housing and schools that are filled with people like them.

If we want to develop a healthy democracy, we need a diverse and highly connected social fabric. This requires creating contexts in which the American public voluntarily struggles with the challenges of diversity to build bonds that will last a lifetime.

Source: Self-segregation: how a personalized world is dividing Americans | Technology | The Guardian