Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Red Flags
This post was originally published on this site
We begin today with Sabrina Tavernise of The New York Times writing about the shattering of the illusions about a country that she loves.
I lived in Russia for nine years, and began covering it for The New York Times in 2000, the year Mr. Putin was first elected. I spent lots of time telling people — in public writing and in my private life — that Russia might sometimes look bad, but that it had a lot of wonderful qualities, too.
But in the weeks since Russia invaded Ukraine, I have felt like I am watching someone I love lose their mind. Many of the Russian liberals who had turned to “small acts” are feeling a sense of shock and horror, too, said Alexandra Arkhipova, a Russian anthropologist.
“I see lots of posts and conversations saying these small deeds, it was a big mistake,” she said. “People have a metaphor. They say, ‘We were trying to make some cosmetic changes to our faces, when the cancer was growing and growing in our stomachs.”
I began to wonder whether Russia was always going to end up here, and we just failed to see it. So I called Yevgeniya Albats, a Russian journalist who had warned of the dangers of a K.G.B. resurgence as early as the 1990s. Ms. Albats kept staring into the glare of the idea that at certain points in history, everything is at stake in political thought and action. She had long argued that any bargain with Mr. Putin was an illusion.
Those “small acts” that Ms. Tavernise refers to are Russian liberals that decided to drop away from electoral politics after the failure of the 2012 protests against Putin and turned, instead to working with and for “nonprofits and local governments.”
Anton Troianovski, also of The New York Times, writes about the ever-deepening culture of person-to-person surveillance within Russia.
With President Vladimir V. Putin’s direct encouragement, Russians who support the war against Ukraine are starting to turn on the enemy within.
The episodes are not yet a mass phenomenon, but they illustrate the building paranoia and polarization in Russian society. Citizens are denouncing one another in an eerie echo of Stalin’s terror, spurred on by vicious official rhetoric from the state and enabled by far-reaching new laws that criminalize dissent.
There are reports of students turning in teachers and people telling on their neighbors and even the diners at the next table. In a mall in western Moscow, it was the “no to war” text displayed in a computer repair store and reported by a passer-by that got the store’s owner, Marat Grachev, detained by the police. In St. Petersburg, a local news outlet documented the furor over suspected pro-Western sympathies at the public library; it erupted after a library official mistook the image of a Soviet scholar on a poster for that of Mark Twain.
Oh, that sounds familiar.
David Masciotra of the Daily Beast laments the lack of national coverage of the trial of the Wolverine Watchmen who threatened to kidnap, rape, and assassinate Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.
The contemporary landscape features Donald Trump’s Jonestown-like personality cult, brazenly white nationalist Republican members of Congress, and right-wing pundits, like Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones, who sound like street-corner skinheads. As a consequence, it is hardly a surprise that threats of violence against public officials have become alarmingly routine.
In only a small sampling of districts, Reuters found 220 examples of death threats against school board members. Similarly, the Brennan Center for Justice reports that one in six election officials have received direct threats against themselves and their families since November 2020. Hopped up on their own “stop the steal” supply, right-wing activists have become vicious and devoted to the point that USA Today reports political intimidation might “jeopardize the 2022 midterms,” due to widespread resignation of election officials.[…]
Threats of violence against Whitmer did not begin with the unsuccessful plot, but with the storming of Michigan’s capitol building in Lansing in April of 2020. President Trump instructed lunatic supporters to “liberate Michigan,” and on cue, they obeyed his order—carrying firearms into the rotunda, surrounding police officers, and shouting for the deaths of Whitmer and other state officials in “protest” at COVID-19 restrictions against businesses. The same Wolverine Watchmen who would later discuss plans to assassinate Whitmer participated in the siege.
Susan J. Demas of Michigan Advance wonders how many LGBTQ children will have their lives destroyed by the Republicans.
While many stuffy legal scholars and political analysts sniffed that liberals were ridiculous to suggest that Obergefell would be overturned after former President Trump reshaped the court, it’s now almost a foregone conclusion. After all, the court has signaled its eagerness to wipe away 50 years of precedent on abortion rights with Roe v. Wade. And many Republicans, including all three Michigan attorney general candidates, are comfortable dumping the landmark Griswold v. Connecticut decision legalizing birth control.
But Republicans aren’t waiting for the Supreme Court to commence the great rollback on LGBTQ+ rights. One of their key 2022 election themes is using gay and trans kids as punching bags.
That includes Republicans like Michigan GOP Co-Chair Meshawn Maddock spreading bizarre memes falsely claiming schools are offering litter boxes to kids who “identify as cats.” That isn’t a thing, despite what your cranky uncle posted on Facebook, but it is a great way to stigmatize trans students.[…]
It’s almost as though the far-right is trying to redefine what it means to be a bad parent. You might think someone doing everything they can to ensure their children (and others) contract COVID makes them a poor candidate for being Mom of the Year. But Republicans are countering that really, the worst thing a parent can do is just have an LGBTQ+ kid.
Michelle L. Norris of The Washington Post grounds incoming Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation to the Supreme Court in a centuries-long history that Republicans would rather not be taught in schools.
Jackson was born in 1970, when the victories of the civil rights movement were beginning to manifest themselves in housing, employment, sports, education and entertainment. But racial divisions remained stark after decades of legally sanctioned segregation that followed 250 years of legal enslavement of Blacks.
Because neither the passage of laws nor the dismantling of racial codes erased the deeply ingrained narrative of racial inferiority. America had long been invested in the separation of races and, to be more specific, the automatic privilege that comes with White skin. The vestiges of slavery and segregation are still with us, and yet we find ourselves in a time when the party that so viciously opposed Jackson’s nomination wants to eviscerate the teachings and discussions of our nation’s racial history and focus instead on the progress America has made.
They argue that we should not dwell on all that old-timey stuff like chains and shackles, dogs and hoses, or white hoods and black bodies swinging from trees. Well, to understand and fully appreciate the progress we’ve made, you need more than a passing understanding of the dark places Americans dwelled within the sanction of law to keep bodies in bondage, to keep people oppressed, to keep human beings in a subjugated state that mocks the core tenets of our Constitution.
Monica L. Wang writes for the Boston Globe that investments in behavioral research are essential for public health.
Human behavior, such as the choice not to vaccinate (or worse, actively propagate misinformation designed to stoke unsubstantiated fear), is central to the nation’s most prevalent, obstinate conditions, including heart disease and obesity. To successfully improve health outcomes, reduce costly chronic disease management, and prevent infectious disease outbreaks, it is imperative to understand the link between what drives health behavior (our thoughts) and what catalyzes behavior change (our choices). And understanding the science of human behavior means investing in it. Unfortunately, social and behavioral health scientists remain the minuscule minority in the pool of externally funded scientific investigators.
Federal funding of social and behavioral science is about $2 billion, with the Department of Health and Human Services (primarily NIH) providing the lion’s share of investment. To put that number in context, the total research budget of NIH is over $40 billion. Widening the aperture to include investments in prevention and public health (of which behavioral research closely aligns), we find that the funding allocation is actually declining. In the two decades preceding the COVID-19 pandemic, preventive care spending by the government as a share of total national health expenditures dipped below 3 percent.
This should be deeply concerning to the public.
First, all roads of medical research inevitably require some form of behavior change on the part of individuals. From the life-saving to the banal, medical interventions require people to actually engage in choices or changes. This might mean making dietary changes, scheduling an appointment for a cancer screening, swapping out smoking for a nicotine patch, taking medication as directed, or opting to vaccinate. Short of widespread strategies such as adding fluoride to drinking water or mandating seatbelt use (which, notably, still requires human adherence), improving public health means that decision-makers in government and health care need to understand and apply the science of how to shift behavior at the population level.
Marc C. Johnson writes for Idaho’s Lewiston Tribune that disinformation has become the hallmark of this era.
Russian television, a veritable Fox News of lies and distortion and totally controlled by Putin, dishes a daily misinformation diet to people who have been lied to for so long that many have given up trying to ascertain the truth. While it would be foolish to put much faith in public opinion polling emanating from a country so thoroughly brainwashed, it appears most Russians, without ready access to independent reporting about the war, believe the lies pushed by the former KGB agent who is responsible for this madness.
Here’s how this disinformation reality connects to domestic politics, and the clear and present danger it presents to American democracy. For a decade or more, the politics of the United States have been swamped by a deluge of lies with much of the lying amplified by people in high places and by cynical and manipulative media figures. […]
The purpose of all this lying is, of course, to fuel grievance — make people mad — but also to confuse. Is there really a world-wide child sex abuse network, as QAnon has claimed? Did presidential election ballots disappear in Michigan? Was COVID-19 a Chinese communist plot?[…]
The disinformation — the lies — have become so prevalent that it is nearly impossible to keep track, and that is another aspect of what one-time Donald Trump “strategist” Steve Bannon infamously called “flooding the zone with s#@t.”
Mr. Johnson’s editorial is good from beginning to end.
Fact: The only politician more popular in Ukraine than Boris Johnson is Volodymyr Zelensky.
Part of the reason is that Britain trained much of the Ukrainian army even prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Elisa Braun and Maïa de La Baume of POLITICO Europe explain that part of the reason for the tightening polls in today’s French elections is that French President Emmanuel Macron spent too much time… being president and not enough time campaigning..
Observers say the president is in trouble because he’s pursued a strategy that has cast him too much as an above-the-fray father of the nation and global crisis manager — trying to mediate in the war in Ukraine, for example, rather than engage in the rough and tumble of a traditional campaign, when French voters want to hear directly from the candidates.
“In a way, the war suited him perfectly at first: We were going to have something in a form of non-campaign, with a president who had to show himself as supervising everything, as a protective father,” said Raphaël Llorca, a communications expert and author of a book entitled “The Macron Brand.”
“But the big mistake was to consider that this momentum would last until April,” Llorca said.[…]
By contrast, many experts say, Le Pen is coming across as a skilled communicator, who campaigned relentlessly in France’s heartlands and focused on everyday issues, above all the rising cost of living. “Le Pen did a proximity campaign, visiting a lot of small towns and villages,” said Mathieu Gallard, research director at polling firm Ipsos. “Her trips were not very much covered by the national press but had a big echo in local media.”
“She gave an impression of proximity, which is very important for French voters,” Gallard said.
Finally today, Secunder Kermani of BBC News explains some of the reasons why Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan lost a no-confidence vote in Pakistan’s Parliament yesterday.
Mr Khan has insisted his focus is on improving governance, and he has made some impressive expansions to the social welfare system, introducing a health insurance scheme in large parts of the country, for example.
However, in other areas he has faltered. His decision to appoint an inexperienced and underqualified political newcomer to a key position, chief minister of Punjab, the country’s most populous province, was widely ridiculed.
At a loss to explain why Mr Khan refused to replace his appointee, Usman Buzdar, despite overwhelming criticism, rumours spread that the prime minister’s wife, a spiritual guide of sorts, had warned him Mr Buzdar was a good omen and – if he were to be sacked – his entire government would collapse.
There were other challenges, too. The cost of living in Pakistan has been rocketing up, with sharp rises in food prices and the rupee falling against the dollar.
Imran Khan’s supporters blame global conditions, but public resentment against him has been rising. “The Sharifs might’ve filled themselves up, but at least they got work done,” has become a common grumble.
Everyone have a great day!