16 January 2017
Quartz: The experts agree: Donald Trump’s election makes the end of humanity slightly more likely
And in the mind of US president-elect Donald Trump? His intentions truly are secret, and our lack of certainty about them means his election makes it more likely that humanity will perish in a catastrophic event of some kind. That’s according to Seth Baum, the executive director of the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute, one of a handful of think-tanks around the world dedicated to the “existential risks” to mankind—in essence, to saving the human race from destroying itself.
Writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists—keeper of the Doomsday Clock, which was created in 1947 to illustrate how close we are to perishing in nuclear war—Baum said Trump’s “tendency toward erratic behavior, combined with a mix of difficult geopolitical challenges ahead, mean the probability of a nuclear launch order will be unusually high.” [...]
Amid the discussion of what it means that almost 63 million Americans voted for a man who has shown a lack of respect for democratic norms, such as hinting at “rigged” elections and vowing to jail his opponent, Baum also fears the possibility of an authoritarian, dictatorial United States of America under Trump. This has been a growing concern among many liberals as the election loomed—The New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick, wrote after Trump’s election (paywall), “Fascism is not our future—it cannot be; we cannot allow it to be so—but this is surely the way fascism can begin.” [...]
In the case of Oppenheimer’s deadly invention, the only thing that could stop Trump from launching a nuclear missile is a key person in the chain of command refusing to follow the order. That was what happened in the case of Vasili Arkhipov at the height of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, or Stanislav Petrov, who was the duty officer in a bunker near Moscow in 1983 when his computer falsely told him that the US had just launched four nukes at the Soviet Union. Petrov ignored the alarm.
Salon: Americans overwhelmingly support Bernie Sanders’ economic policies — so how’d we end up here?
On other issues, a similar story presents itself. Public Policy Polling (PPP) has found that the vast majority (88 percent) of voters in Florida, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — four crucial swing states, three of which went to Trump this fall — oppose cutting Social Security benefits, while a majority (68 percent) oppose privatizing Social Security. Similarly, 67 percent of Americans support requiring high-income earners to pay the payroll tax for all of their income (the cap is currently $118,500), according to a Gallup poll. America’s two other major social programs, Medicare and Medicaid, are also widely supported by Americans, and the vast majority oppose any spending cuts to either. In fact, more Americans support cutting the national defense budget than Medicare or Medicaid. [...]
One answer that usually comes to mind is the culture war. The modern political era can be traced back to the 1960s, when various liberation movements — from Civil Rights and gay liberation to second-wave feminism and the anti-war movement — emerged to combat different injustices, including white supremacy, gender inequality, homophobia and American imperialism. These progressive movements rapidly changed America’s cultural and political landscape, and triggered a reactionary movement that author Thomas Frank called “the great backlash” in his 2004 book “What’s the Matter with Kansas?”. [...]
This is only part of the story, of course. While a culturally divided populace has no doubt benefited America’s power elite, the rightward economic shift was primarily a result of corporate America and other monied interests successfully infiltrating Washington with an army of lobbyists and flooding the political system with big money (an interesting backstory to this is told in the book “Winner-Take-All Politics”).
The New York Times: Lessons From Russia: Verify Everything, Don’t Publish Rumors
The president-elect was repeating something that he’d said for months, and that appears to reflect his perception of reality: News outlets are his adversaries, and the only way to win against them is to use a bigger megaphone. Mr. Trump’s war with the news media is fundamentally different from the tension between most other American politicians and journalists. Mr. Trump (much like Mr. Putin) thrives on cacophony, in an environment of ever-shifting realities that makes other people feel disoriented and helpless.
In the past, Mr. Trump’s fights with the news media have generally concerned journalists’ factual reporting that has conflicted with the fog that surrounds Mr. Trump’s view of reality. Mr. Trump, in turn, has sought to drown out facts with denials and attacks. But this time was different: A reporter was asking him to speculate about something that the reporter himself seemed to think was probably false. Mr. Trump’s version of reality got a boost: There was no such thing as truth, only a battle of opinions proffered by different actors, each of whom strives to be loudest. [...]
I have been here before. As Mr. Putin consolidated power in Russia, it became more and more difficult for journalists to report facts. We lost access to many institutions, while others became progressively less trustworthy. With the president often lying or obfuscating and with all of the government brought under the control of the executive branch, we could no longer look to the courts, the police or other state institutions to learn or corroborate facts — if we could get anyone to talk to us or give us documents at all. Reality became squishy.
Salon: I was the kid at the pro-life rally: My long road to understanding “my body, my choice”
When it comes to abortion, both sides rarely speak the same language, and this is especially true at pro-life rallies. I doubt the pro-life signs my mother and the other adults carried did anything to persuade the counter-protesters. And as far as I was concerned, the pro-choice signs may as well have been written in ancient hieroglyphics. “Keep your laws off my body!” and “My body, my choice!” meant nothing to me.
In my paradigm, the theological was personal. To quote a Bible verse I had to memorize as a preteen: “You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies.” My body didn’t belong to me. In fact, it seemed to belong to everyone except me — God, my future husband, and even my father, who was charged with protecting my purity. My body belonged to men. [...]
It wouldn’t have ultimately mattered, but I almost wish that the pro-choice signs I saw as a kid would’ve had a message directed at me: “You own your body.” I couldn’t begin to understand “My body, my choice” because I didn’t know anyone owned their body, least of all me. If I had been able to comprehend that I had autonomy over my body, it would’ve naturally followed that so did everyone else. But when even something as private as masturbation was banned because it would diminish the value of God and Future Husband’s property, it was impossible for me to comprehend the idea of anyone being able to exercise personal choice when it came to abortion.
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