446 Matching Annotations
  1. May 2021
  2. Apr 2021
    1. Céline Gounder, MD, ScM, FIDSA. (2021, April 14). With all due respect to @NateSilver538, he is not an expert on the psychology of vaccine confidence. He is a poll aggregator and political pundit. He is not an infectious disease specialist, epidemiologist, vaccinologist, virologist, immunologist, or behavioral scientist. Https://t.co/HBrI6zj9aa [Tweet]. @celinegounder. https://twitter.com/celinegounder/status/1382299663269761024

    1. Indians were not to be appeased—and certainly not brought into British public life.
      • Indians were kept from entering politics or public life
      • After the British gov take over in 1858, the British gov seeked to not only have direct control instead of a company's control, but also direct control instead of letting Indians have control
    2. India Company violated its treaty obligations
      • The East India Company used excuses to violate treaties and conquer more land
      • Ex: In 1856, the British took Nawab Wajid Ali Shah's territory on grounds that he was weak and immoral
    3. The government also decided to collect taxes directly from peasants, displacing the landed nobles as intermediaries.
      • British took taxes from peasants without letting Indian previous positions of power interfere
      • Peasants had to take out loans from moneylenders
      • Peasants who couldn't pay their loans would have to give up their land
    4. This was a new colonial order, but it was not stable.

      Along with peasants, other sectors of the Indian population were not happy with British rule:

      • Indian people who once had much power and property
      • Indian business people who lost a lot of power in the newly British economy
    5. the uprisings were local in scale and vision.
      • The many revolts that made up the 1857 Rebellion were usually for specific villages or small areas for the inhabitants there
    6. e petnte a government of his ow modeling it on the British administration.
      • The peasant Devi Singh made his own gov based on the British way of governing with a peasant army that went after the moneyloaners hated by peasants in debt
      • This may be evidence for the idea that the main sticking point for Indian peasants was the cultural and taxation policies of the British instead of the administrative part
    7. replacing East India Company rule by crown government in 1858,
      • The British government took over ruling India instead of the EIC in 1858
      • Perhaps the British government took over ruling India instead of the East India Company because after the uprising, ruling over colonial states was viewed as a more militant and political task than an economic one.
    8. In return, the Mughal emperor would receive a hefty annual pension.
      • People originally in power in colonized territories striking a deal with the colonizers for their benefit is a common pattern
    9. The East India Company’s Monopoly
      • The British started off trying to control just India's trade by setting trading posts on the ocean
      • Around the early 1800s, the East India Company conquered many areas in India and surrounding areas

      Economic control -> political, military control

    10. revenues in Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa and to trade free of duties throughout Mughal terri- tory.
      • The East India Company, as a for-profit, wanted to be able to do business without restrictions in India.
      • The best way to guarantee this was to gain political alliances (by paying the Mughal emperor to let them trade), then starting in the second half of the 1700s, control (by later actually conquering areas) of territories.
    11. During the first half of the nineteenth century the British rulers of India had dismantled most of the traditional powers of the nobility and the rights of peasants.

      The first half of the 1800s saw:

      • the disappearance of original Indian positions of power
      • the disappearance of original Indian state boundaries and sovereignties in 1848 by governor-general Lord Dalhousie
  3. Mar 2021
  4. Feb 2021
    1. ReconfigBehSci. (2021, January 18). Calling lawyers, historians, and political scientists. A thread on the value of life. I’m still stunned by Lord Sumption, ex-judge on UK’s Supreme Court, now anti-lockdown campaigner, publicly stating that the life of a woman with stage 4 bowel cancer was ‘less valuable’ 1/4 [Tweet]. @SciBeh. https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1351118909886312449

  5. Jan 2021
    1. In a more recent paper, Michelle Feng and Mason Porter used a new technique called persistent homology to detect political islands — geographical holes in one candidate’s support that serve as spots of support for the other candidate — in California during the 2016 presidential election.
  6. Dec 2020
    1. "There's no law," Rahad Naif said. "It's up to them. It's arbitrary."
    2. ICRC's decision to reduce its Baghdad staff, because of the bombing of its headquarters, may limit its ability to visit detention sites.

      rationalizing lack of agency as a consequence of resistance

    3. no response has been received

      has not yet been received, actors asking for a response

    1. Zak Stein, who is a contributor to the aforementioned book Metatheory for the 21st Century, is one of the strongest proponents of post-Integral metamodernism in terms of ‘social justice’ (a term that the IDW has helped nullify). In the Integral conference debate in 2015, the “weak argument” Stein proposes is that Integral should at least become more informed about what capitalism is. The “strong argument” is that Integral should be, at the very least, post-capitalist. Given that Integral was doing neither, the way people used terms like “green meme” and “second tier” became, Stein says, substitutions for actual thought.

      This is also kind of true of e.g. Buddhism and many other spiritual traditions: they don't have a very thought out socio-political vision. Instead they have an advanced form of the "personal is political". I suspect this is part intentional, part accidental. Getting involved in critiques of capitalism, at least at a detailed level, tends to get political quickly and getting political in general a) risks obsolescence (and being wrong) b) risks alienating potential participants c) risks being wrong (and dangerously wrong, e.g. being misused to justify, say, authoritarianism).

      All that said, I think this is a major lacunae both of Integral and spiritual traditions.

  7. Nov 2020
    1. Our advice to the press: Don’t seek professional safety through the even-handed, unfiltered presentation of opposing views. Which politician is telling the truth? Who is taking hostages, at what risks and to what ends?
    2. political scientists Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal, who have long tracked historical trends in political polarization, said their studies of congressional votes found that Republicans are now more conservative than they have been in more than a century. Their data show a dramatic uptick in polarization, mostly caused by the sharp rightward move of the GOP.
    3. And Mike Lofgren, a veteran Republican congressional staffer, wrote an anguished diatribe last year about why he was ending his career on the Hill after nearly three decades. “The Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe,” he wrote on the Truthout Web site.

      An interesting example with some inflamatory rhetoric, but coupled with his resignation which is all he has left...

  8. Oct 2020
    1. Trump’s online and email fundraising generated a record $239 million in small-dollar donations, far more than Hillary Clinton’s and more than two-thirds of his donation total, according to the nonpartisan Campaign Finance Institute. This made Trump competitive in a race where he was outspent nearly 2 to 1.

      Not to mention the free media he was getting from the mainstream media who covered the spectacle.

    2. More conspicuously, since Trump’s election, the RNC — at his campaign’s direction — has excluded critical “voter scores” on the president from the analytics it routinely provides to GOP candidates and committees nationwide, with the aim of electing down-ballot Republicans. Republican consultants say the Trump information is being withheld for two reasons: to discourage candidates from distancing themselves from the president, and to avoid embarrassing him with poor results that might leak. But they say its concealment harms other Republicans, forcing them to campaign without it or pay to get the information elsewhere.
    1. People claiming that Trump said nothing racist may not be exactly the sharpest knives in the drawer on questions of sociology, and Trump himself is, on that score, a plastic spoon.

      This could make a great political cartoon... a Republican drawer full of sharp knives and a pitiful Trump plastic spoon.

    1. “The textbook companies are not gearing their textbooks toward teachers; they’re gearing their textbooks toward states,” she said.

      And even at this they should be gearing them honestly and truthfully toward the students.

    1. Departmental communication was a one-sided process, with nodal institutions seeking sectoral information without looking to build climate capacity in the state or involving departments in the ideation process. As a result some recommendations do not seem grounded in what is politically or developmentally tenable.
    2. While senior state bureaucrats have been supportive of developing a plan, there is little evidence that they have championed adapting to or mitigating climate change as a cause, at either the political or bureaucratic levels.1
  9. Sep 2020
    1. a great many Americans now see the life-and-death decisions of the coronavirus as political choices rather than medical ones.

      I agree with this one on how Americans will typically wear a mask because it is one of the precautions but those who are more on the "I'll just follow what the president says" (political)side which is Trump thinking wearing a mask is not a necessity then others who may support him will think the same. Some but not all.

  10. Aug 2020
  11. Jul 2020
  12. Jun 2020
  13. May 2020
  14. Apr 2020
  15. Feb 2020
    1. When we talk about political media, we tend to cut a sharp line between the political elites who create the media and the audience that consumes it. But that’s a mistake. No one consumes more political, and politicized, media than political elites. This is part of the reason political media has an enormous effect on politics, even though only a small fraction of the country regularly consumes it.
    2. This is a damning result: The more political media you absorb, the more warped your perspective of the other side becomes.
  16. Jan 2020
    1. Calling out Uncle Bot’s past vote for Trump threatens his ego and encourages him to double down on his support for the president. Self-esteem is a fundamental human need. If you want people to change their opinion, bolster their ego and help them save face
    2. Fully explore the other person’s perspective before sharing your own to ensure you understand where they are coming from. As with all questions, follow-up inquiries should be nonjudgmental, open-ended and curious.
  17. Dec 2019
    1. WILLIAM GODWIN,

      William Godwin was Mary Godwin's father, the leading radical political philosopher of the Romantic period. A prolific writer, Godwin was known primarily for his political works, most notably Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on Morals and Happiness (1793), but also for the novel Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794) and the biography of his late wife Mary Wollstonecraft, Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798), an early example of biography.

    2. I am by birth a Genevese

      Born in Geneva, Switzerland, Victor is a potential hero insofar as he embodies the "republican" virtues of Europe's only country, much admired by the Shelleys, which did not have a hereditary monarchy. By making Geneva so central to the novel's cultural geography, Mary Shelley also designates the relation between Victor's ambition and Jean Jacques Rousseau's world-making ambition in Discourse on Inequality (1754) among other works.

    1. Madison’s design has proved durable. But what would happen to American democracy if, one day in the early 21st century, a technology appeared that—over the course of a decade—changed several fundamental parameters of social and political life? What if this technology greatly increased the amount of “mutual animosity” and the speed at which outrage spread? Might we witness the political equivalent of buildings collapsing, birds falling from the sky, and the Earth moving closer to the sun?

      Jonathan Haidt, you might have noticed, is a scholar that I admire very much. In this piece, his colleague Tobias Rose-Stockwell and he ask the following questions: Is social media a threat to our democracy? Let's read the following article together and think about their question together.

  18. Oct 2019
    1. This year's Miss Eastwood winner, 17-year-old PLC Pymble student Lucy Fang of Marsfield, said she would use the $1000 prize money from Yuhu Group to restart a local reading program for young children. She also gets to lead Saturday's Granny Smith Festival parade. "I'm so excited to use this opportunity to give back to my community," she said.

      By this stage you would have been lamenting this disastrous assignment.

      It started out an quick and easy regurgitation to help a mate that only needed a few omissions and some unbalanced assertions and some of the cheaper of the available background paragraphs.

      And now you were hearing this year's winner would reinvest her cash prize into a community initiative. It wasn't what you signed up for.

      Where was the sinister, evil ingredient to be included in one line to top off your pre-written story?

    1. Liberal and Conservative Representations of the Good Society: A (Social) Structural Topic Modeling Approach

      I chose this article, because it is timely, relevant, easy-to-follow (because it is intuitive), and innovative (using data sources, Twitter, and an innovative method, textual analysis). I hope you enjoy the reading. Please follow my annotations (comments + questions) and respond to the questions I pose. Try to answer them in your own words.

  19. Feb 2019
  20. Jan 2019
  21. Nov 2018
    1. Medical groups, managed care organizations, or, most commonly, hospitals often find it attractive to support hospitalist programs. If hospitalists improve quality, shorten lengths of stay, and decrease costs while satisfying patients and other providers, the return on these organizations' investments in hospitalist programs is highly favorable. Over time, it will be critical that professional fee reimbursement rates be adjusted so that a sustainable hospitalist workload creates sufficient income to support a full salary.
  22. Oct 2018
    1. Narratives that describe time as uniform and evolving throughout history towards more accelerated states have also been critiqued for theirpotential to reinforce social inequalities (Sharma 2014) and for justifyingthe appropriation of natural resources in unsustainable ways (Bastian 2012).

      This loosely couples with the degrowth discourses around steady state economies and possible political ecologies

    1. So the fact that we are so widely off the mark in our perception of how most people feel about political correctness should probably also make us rethink some of our other basic assumptions about the country.
    2. One obvious question is what people mean by “political correctness.” In the extended interviews and focus groups, participants made clear that they were concerned about their day-to-day ability to express themselves: They worry that a lack of familiarity with a topic, or an unthinking word choice, could lead to serious social sanctions for them. But since the survey question did not define political correctness for respondents, we cannot be sure what, exactly, the 80 percent of Americans who regard it as a problem have in mind.
    3. Political tribe—as defined by the authors—is an even better predictor of views on political correctness. Among devoted conservatives, 97 percent believe that political correctness is a problem. Among traditional liberals, 61 percent do. Progressive activists are the only group that strongly backs political correctness: Only 30 percent see it as a problem.
    4. On social media, the country seems to divide into two neat camps: Call them the woke and the resentful. Team Resentment is manned—pun very much intended—by people who are predominantly old and almost exclusively white. Team Woke is young, likely to be female, and predominantly black, brown, or Asian (though white “allies” do their dutiful part). These teams are roughly equal in number, and they disagree most vehemently, as well as most routinely, about the catchall known as political correctness.
  23. Sep 2018
    1. This won't be the first time that teens use Snapchat as a portal for political action.

      Teens feel that they are capable of voicing their opinions about certain things through Snapchat when they are afraid to speak up.

  24. Aug 2018
    1. At present, no more than 20 percent of its economy has been marketized, and most importantly it continues to be ruled by a self-appointed Communist party which has given no hint of wanting to devolve power.

      If Facebook were to continue to evolve at it's current rate and with it's potential power as well as political influence, I could see it attempting to work the way China does in a new political regime.

    2. Beginning with the famous third plenum of the Tenth Central Committee in 1978, the Chinese Communist party set about decollectivizing agriculture for the 800 million Chinese who still lived in the countryside. The role of the state in agriculture was reduced to that of a tax collector, while production of consumer goods was sharply increased in order to give peasants a taste of the universal homogenous state and thereby an incentive to work. The reform doubled Chinese grain output in only five years, and in the process created for Deng Xiaoping a solid political base from which he was able to extend the reform to other parts of the economy. Economic Statistics do not begin to describe the dynamism, initiative, and openness evident in China since the reform began.
    3. Hegel believed that history culminated in an absolute moment - a moment in which a final, rational form of society and state became victorious.

      and probably not a bad outcome in an earlier era that thought of things in terms of clockwork and lacked the ideas of quantum theory and its attendant uncertainties.

  25. Nov 2017
    1. U.S. faces a hard set of choices, in a context shadowed by conflicting imperatives and the agendas of other regional powers. One can understand the caution shown by the administration -- at least as much as the zeal of those who want the U.S. to be embroiled in the region once more.
    1. U.S., British, and other coalition forces quickly overwhelm the Iraqi Army, though elements loyal to Saddam Hussein who will form the core of a postwar insurgency fight on
    1. the events leading up to the 2003 invasion only go half way to explain why the US chose to launch this campaign, and in order to understand the complex and multidimensional factors contributing to the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq, one must go back further and examine pre 9/11 US policy. Likewise, the official and publically stated reasons for military action only go some way to explain the invasion, and one must look at the unofficial factors and goals which were determinants of equal importance.
    1. Americans believed that the initial decision to go to war in 2003 was the right one, and an even smaller number still supported the administration’s handling of the situation in Iraq.
    2. American opinions on the war sometimes crossed traditional party lines and doctrinal affiliation, with many to the right of the avowedly conservative Bush seeing the war as an act of reckless internationalism and some to the political left—appalled by the Baʿthist regime’s brutal human rights violations and its consistent aggression—giving grudging support to military action
  26. Oct 2017
    1. Nevertheless,manystudieshavefoundlittleevidencethatsociallyandeconomicallydisadvantagedgroupparticipationincreaseswhenpoliticsisconductedthroughtheInternet,whetherinwaysthatmimicofflineforms,suchaspetitions,ornewones,suchassocialmedia

      Hay un "remedo" de participación, que presupone que porque tenemos acceso a Internet estamos participando. La participación real debe estar asociada a modelos socioeconómicos que la hagan posible y la valoren más allá del extractivismo y la exclusión actual.

  27. Sep 2017
    1. Surman and Reilly (2003) focus on appropriation of networked technologies in a strategically, politically, and creatively innovative manner oriented toward social change. In this context of advocacy, effective technology appropriation includes strategic Internet use for collaboration, publishing, mobilization, and observation. Here, the delineation between the use and appropriation occurs when technology is adapted to reflect goals and culture. Camacho (2001) describes appropriation by civil society organizations at the pinnacle of a technology use ladder. In the middle of the ladder, organizations focus on adoption of conventional technology. Toward the bottom, organizations and individuals with constrained access or slow adoption rates lag behind and seek access to technology. At the pinnacle, however, pioneers and activists appropriate technology to promote causes, for instance, creating flash mobs through mass text messaging to instantaneously organize large groups of people for social protest

      Desde el comienzo, el Data Week ha estado preocupado por la perspectiva de transformación social en la apropiación tecnológica al estar vinculada con la creación de capacidad en la base, modificación de la infraestructura y la amplificación de voces ciudadanas frente a iniciativas privadas o públicas.

    2. This article frames appropriation as a political process.

      [...] ICTs provide unique flexibility for users to interact and re-invent. ICTs can be modified and re-programmed, whether the ability to modify is explicitly enabled through design or uncovered through hacking. Device producers, application designers, content creators, service providers, and end users can therefore engage in the creative appropriation process and insight into social, economic, and political impacts can be gained exploring appropriation modalities.

      Esto se puede conectar con la introducción respecto al caracter fluído, pero paradógico de las tecnologías digitales.

      Nótese acá la connotación de hacking en términos de apertura y reinterpretación.

    1. Successive waves of activists saw the Internet as a tool for transparency. The framing of openness shifted in meaning from information to data, weakening of mechanisms for accountability even as it opened up new forms of political participation. Drawing on a year of interviews and participant observation, I suggest civic data hacking can be framed as a form of data activism and advocacy: requesting, digesting, contributing to, modeling, and contesting data
  28. Jun 2017
    1. Like many people, I’ve thought 2016 was a surreal year; the Cubs won the World Series, Hillary Clinton went on television to warn people about white-supremacist memes, Elon Musk has landed rockets on ocean platforms and started an organization to develop Friendly AI.  Surreal, right? No. It’s real, not surreal. If reality looks weird, this means our stories about it are wrong. Did polls and newspapers and social media fail to see this election coming? Then those sources just took a hit in credibility. On a longer-term note, if you know there’s a replication crisis in scientific research, that should be shaking up your trust in published papers. There may be a crisis in politics. But before we can do anything sensible about that, we need to understand that there is a crisis in credence. If the world looks weird to you and me today, that is not a matter for rueful laughter, it is a sign that we are probably badly wrong about lots of things.
  29. May 2017
    1. It is a distressing and terrible thing to see that the head of Christendom, who boasts of being the vicar of Christ and the successor of St. Peter, lives in a worldly pomp that no king or emperor can equal, so that in him that calls himself most holy and most spiritual there is more worldliness than in the world itself.

      This quote is saying its a terrible thing that the Pope head of Christianity gloats to his people about being the right hand man to Christ and St. Peter. But the Pope is so concerned with power and being all mighty that he must continuously have the most power.