Monthly Archives: May 2021

FREEDOMBy Sebastian Junger

Sebastian Junger embedded with a U.S. Army platoon in eastern Afghanistan in 2007 and 2008, and to judge from his work, he has been trying to find his way home ever since. He made two documentaries about the deployment, the terrific Restrepo and its sequel, Korengal, and wrote a book, War (2010). Then he turned his focus to the weirdness of returning to the United States, both for soldiers and for war reporters, in a third documentary, The Last Patrol, and laid out his passionate, counterintuitive ideas about post-traumatic stress disorder in a small but wide-ranging book, Tribe (2016). The problem, he argued, wasnt old-fashioned shell shock in many cases; it wasnt medical at all, but existential a loss of purpose. The brotherhood of combat forged a deep emotional connectedness that an atomized, uncomprehending America could not sustain.

Freedom, Jungers latest book, begins in the middle of a mysterious pilgrimage: The country opened up west of Harrisburg and suddenly we could drink from streams and build fires without getting caught and sleep pretty much anywhere we wanted. Wed walked the railroad tracks from Washington to Baltimore to Philly and then turned west at the Main Line and made Amish country by winter. These lines have a lovely roll, the tone is heroic they made Amish country by winter. But basic information is withheld, or only obliquely shared much, much later. Who are the members of this westbound party? What is their purpose? We are never told.

But for those who have seen The Last Patrol, which was released in 2014, things are clearer. Its about the same trek. Jungers companions, at least initially, are two of the soldiers from his time in Afghanistan, a Spanish photojournalist and war reporter, and a hulking black dog named Daisy. People speak, joke, have names; you see them walking, camping, playing with the dog. They talk to people they meet. Junger makes an effort to frame their project a 300-mile conversation about war and why its so hard to come home which is more or less what happens in the film. Thats not what happens in the book. Here, we pass through countryside, nearly all of it in south-central Pennsylvania, and dont hear a word from anyone till the second half. Freedom has a different purpose, a frame far less explicit.

Afghanistan is scarcely mentioned, although the hikers, who are walking along the tracks illegally, do seem easily spooked. Theyre irrationally afraid of passing trains. They camp in defensive formation. I kept a knife in my boots, which were loosely laced so I could just drop my feet into them and run, Junger writes. That never becomes necessary. In fact, virtually nothing happens outside the authors head.

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What Does Freedom Really Mean? - The New York Times

The problem of the 20th century, W.E.B. DuBois wrote in 1903, is the problem of the color line. The problem of the 20th century turned out to be totalitarian ideologies, which killed scores of millions of people. The killing was baked into the ideology. Mass murder seemed to be a necessity of the centurys Big Ideas.

The problem of the 21st century, you might say, is the problem of the narrative line. If you study the manner in which the 20th centurys color line morphed into the 21st centurys narrative line, you may grasp an aspect of the struggle for power todayfor the soul of America, as the parsons of the left like to say.

It isnt that the complaints of black Americans werent or arent valid. But common sense tends to be a casualty of political story lines. When DuBois published his statement about the color line, Jim Crow ruled in much of the country. It certainly was the law in Georgia, where blacks didnt dare try to vote and where white men rode around in sheets and terrorized the countryside. The South in those days was, for blacks, totalitarian indeed.

Yet more than 100 years later, in a decisively changed America, President Biden annulled the interval between 1903 and 2021 and pronounced Georgias new voting law to be Jim Crow on steroids. It was demagogic nonsense. The Georgia voting law bore no more resemblance to Jim Crow than Mr. Biden bears, let us say, to Neil Kinnock.

But in the 21st century, the country has been all but lost to the politics of whoppers. Its always Saturday morning in America now, and the TV is always playing cartoons. Donald Trump has a genius for the form. Since November, his big story line has been that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

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Can Freedom Survive the Narratives? - The Wall Street Journal

A new state-by-state analysis, looking hypothetically at when residents across the country are relieved of tax responsibilities within a calendar year, placed New York at the bottom of the 2021 rankings.

The Tax Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based public policy think tank, released its annual report on each states so-called tax freedom day.

Examining tax policies and other data, Tax Foundation researchers report New York residents reached their responsibilities in 123 days, setting the states would-be day of freedom at May 3. By comparison, top performer Alaska reached its tax freedom day within 84 days, or March 25.

In the analysis, Tax Foundation researchers dinged New York in a number of metrics, including the states business tax climate index, where it placed No. 48, edging out California and New Jersey.

Speaking to the rationale and methodology of the index, Tax Foundation staffers Jared Walczak and Janelle Cammenga said it is designed to show how well states structure their tax systems and provides a road map for improvement.

They add, The states in the bottom 10 tend to have a number of afflictions in common: complex, non-neutral taxes, with comparatively high rates.

New Yorks low ranking this year mirrored the status of many other northeastern states. New Jersey was right behind New York in the ranking, coming in No. 49 and reaching its tax freedom day on April 30. Connecticut, meanwhile, reached tax freedom on April 25, ranking the state No. 46.

This years bottom-basement ranking in New York prompted a response from state Assembly Minority Leader Will Barclay, R-Fulton, who recently wrote a legislative column on the issue.

In the writing, Barclay said he is concerned New Yorks out-migration trend will continue in the years ahead.

These ranking represent real problems, and the effects are startling, Barclay said. The most recent round of Census data confirmed what we had suspected for a while that ongoing population loss will cost us a seat in Congress. This diminishes our representation and influence in the federal government.

Barclay in the column also took aim at New Yorks recently adopted $212 billion budget for the new fiscal year, which includes such new policies as new, permanent taxes on high-earners and corporate tax increases.

If New York is going to reverse the massive out-migration it has experienced in recent years, these rankings are going to need to improve, plain and sample, Barclay said.

By contrast, Gov. Andrew Cuomo has continued to express optimism in New Yorks post-pandemic rebound. On May 11, for example, he announced a campaign, Reimagine, Rebuild, Renew, which features contributions from such celebrities as Robert DeNiro, Whoopi Goldberg and Billy Joel and highlights efforts toward economic recovery.

With more New Yorkers getting vaccinated every day, its time to turn the page, rebuild our states economy and look forward to a new economic future for New York, Cuomo said of the multimedia campaign.

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New York last state to achieve tax freedom this year: Analysis - Washington Examiner

AMID the demands of Brexit and Covid-19, the government has found time to develop new laws and regulations on statues in galleries and teaching materials in schools, on demonstrations and boycotts, on the intellectual life of universities.

Conservatives present these issues as fronts in a culture war against the enemies of freedom and haters of British culture.

In reality, they are not so much to do with freedom as with power. The government aims to create a new political order, more centralised, even less pluralistic.

Refusing to be distracted by the noise about free speech and ancient liberties, we should take a hard look at the system they want to bring into being.

The Tories opponents in the culture war are many. Teachers, museum workers, academics, local councils; those who think black lives matter, those who support Extinction Rebellion or hold a vigil on Clapham Common.

Conservatives are not only seeking to attack their ideas but to regulate and legislate so as to deprive them of a voice, influence and the capacity to make decisions about matters central to their work and life.

The world is in turmoil; social movements have inspired fundamental arguments about our societys roots in slavery, about the justice of the way it is organised and the compatibility of its carbon-based economy with human survival.

Conservatives direct public institutions not to engage with these questions. If they do so they risk closure, redundancy, McCarthyite denunciation, prosecution.

Last autumn, museums and galleries were told that if they wanted to keep their funding, they should not think about decolonising their collections.

Teachers were warned that they should not under any circumstances use teaching materials produced by organisations that have a publicly stated desire to abolish or overthrow democracy, capitalism or to end free and fair elections.

Schools were told by the Minister for Equalities that partisan teaching about racism was illegal.

Education Secretary Gavin Williamson wrote to universities to tell them that they should adopt the much-contested IHRA definition of anti-semitism or face financial penalty.

This year the war has got hotter. Hottest of all around the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill which enables the police and the Home Secretary to decide where, when and how citizens are allowed to protest.

But there are other hotspots as well. In the House of Commons, Conservative MPs have named individual academics whom they think should be dismissed for their scepticism about the accusations of anti-semitism in Labour. (In the words of Jonathan Gullis MP, We need to start sacking people They need to go.)

The Bill to promote freedom of speech in universities will establish a new apparatus of controls including, it seems, the power to charge students the costs of policing protest that is intended to chill political argument and activity.

Local councils are targeted, too, especially those that do not want to invest their funds in repressive states; there will be legislation to stop public bodies from imposing their own approach or views about international relations, through preventing boycott, divestment or sanctions campaigns against foreign countries.

No end is in sight to measures like these. The reservoir of fear and grievance from which they draw is deep.

It supplies something central to the identity of Conservatism, the belief that the party stands for principles of freedom against the encroachments of the state and the threats of the mob, and that it possesses the wisdom to know when reservations about state action must be set aside in the face of the greater dangers presented by what Edmund Burke memorably called the swinish multitude.

These are the principles evoked by Boris Johnson when he claims that his new law will protect and bolster universities, the historic centres of free thinking and ideas.

There are other ways of looking at modern Conservatism. It is not a party that is in anything but a rhetorical sense against the state.

On the contrary, it is constantly seeking to develop the state in new ways, eliminating any friction between the programme of Conservatism and the work of public institutions.

At the same time, it works to create a climate in which the concerns of the mob are delegitimised and the armoury of repressive measures can be restocked.

The sociologist Max Weber wrote of the state as an entity that claimed a monopoly over the legitimate use of force.

The Conservative state is moving towards additional goals: a monopoly over the practical development of public policy at every point and at every level where it does not converge with its programme; a tight control over public expressions of dissent.

Freedom is too important a word to leave to Conservatives. The Tories opponents would be stronger if they could fill it with a different meaning.

When Jeremy Corbyn joined last year the Commons debate on Black History Month, he spoke of the need for students to have the space and opportunity to learn the popular history of this country. Corbyns metaphor is a strong and useable one.

Conservatisms project is precisely to close down spaces of experiment, reflection and challenge, to locate the power to produce and authorise knowledge in just a few places.

The fight to open up their political and intellectual enclosures, in the name of a freedom which helps develop, not repress, our societys capacity to change, is a vital one.

Ken Jones is emeritus professor of education at Goldsmiths.

The Threat to Free Speech and How to Defend It is on Thursday May 20 at 7pm, with speakers Salma Yaqoob, Lowkey, Helen Steel, Naomi Wimborne Idrissi and John Rees and chaired by Bernard Regan. Register at bit.ly/defend_free_speech.

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'Freedom' is too important to be left to the Tories - Morning Star Online

Freedom of the press is a quintessential part of our democracy.

In 1892, journalist and civil rights leader Ida B. Wells investigated and reported on lynchings in the South, making data on racial discrimination and lynching accessible to the public for the first time in the U.S., which led to the publishing of her 1895 piece called, The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States.

Fast forward 100 years: Bob Woodward and Carl Berstein of the Washington Post uncovered former President Richard Nixons attempted cover-up of the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters. The investigation led to Nixons resignation and the expansion of Congressional power.

And in 2016, Marisa Kwiatkowski, Mark Alesia and Tim Evans of the IndyStar investigated USA Gymnastics failure to report sexual assault cases, which led to the conviction of serial rapist and sex offender Larry Nassar who has been sentenced to life in prison.

But from laying off entire photo staffs to hedge fund buyouts to political leaders inciting distrust in reporters at large, the news industry has never been more vulnerable, especially in the wake of Covid-19.

According to Jacob Nelson, assistant professor at Arizona State Universitys Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, news organizations are mere shells of what they once were, which underscores the economic strain and oftentimes lack of quality in the news we see today.

Because news organizations are so strapped for cash, theyve had to cut back in really serious ways, Nelson said. So, were seeing a lot less coverage than we ever did before. And were seeing difficult decisions being made, such as which beats do newsrooms get rid of? Which stories can we afford to not tell? And that means communities are not getting the coverage that they deserve.

The economic strain on newsrooms comes from the evolution of the news business. But the rate that the business is evolving is too fast for publishers to keep up.

Tim Franklin, senior associate dean of Northwestern Universitys Medill School of Journalism, said the news business model is completely broken because digital ad revenue once allotted to news publishers has shifted over to monoliths such as Google and Facebook. This has cost newsrooms their financial stability as well as their readership since the dawn of the digital age.

According to a 2020 Pew Research Center data analysis, newspaper advertising revenue fell from $37.8 billion in 2008 to $14.3 billion in 2018, and the circulation of U.S. daily newspapers the number of copies distributed on an average day both digital and print has declined by 8 percent.

As publications lose money from the redistribution of digital ad revenue, readers and newsrooms disappear with it.

According to a University of North Carolina study on the increasing number of news deserts an uncovered geographical area that has few or no news outlets and receives little coverage nearly one in five U.S. newspapers have closed, leaving hundreds of journalists unemployed and dozens of communities forgotten.

Some argue the news industry is dying, but it can be saved if with appropriate, effective action.

In order to ensure the news industrys survival, Franklin said its up to publishers to reshape their news business model in favor of monetizing the news; this way, newsrooms can refocus news gathering back on community trust-building and engagement.

I think the key for all news organizations these days is transparency, Franklin said. To be open and honest with the public about the news reporting, about errors that are committed, about, in some cases, the process of how stories were gathered in a way gives the public trust. But if youre not transparent and youre not engaged with your community or your audience, thats where trust really erodes.

Franklin said the news business model is completely shattered, and its time newsrooms reinvent their approach to ensure they stay afloat.

Here are some of the ways newsrooms can help protect our freedom of the press.

According to Josh Stearns, the program director of Democracy Fund an independent foundation which aims to improve the democratic process in the U.S. there are three easy steps the average news consumer can take to play a role in protecting their right to information.

By easing the news industrys financial strain through support from the average citizen to the billionaires, it can help newsrooms focus on other key issues. From improving the quality of the content produced to interacting with communities to dismantling systemic racism and patriarchal structures in the industry, monetary aid can help newsrooms get back to the original mission of the job to find, report and defend the truth with excellence and integrity.

According to Chicago Sun-Times high school sports editor Michael OBrien, he used to have what he called an army of reporters covering the high school sports beat. He estimated 46 full-timers, 60 freelancers and 30 photographers.

But in 2014, when the Sun-Times suburban newspapers were sold to the Chicago Tribune, OBrien said one day he came into the office and his colleagues were packing up and saying goodbye. Now, OBrien is the only full-time high school sports reporter for the publication.

Because so many of his coworkers left or faced layoffs, it forced OBrien to focus on readership. And he said the numbers were striking.

90 percent of our traffic was boys basketball and football, OBrien said. And it was an incredible amount of money that we were spending on things like track and soccer and all the other stuff, and even baseball didnt have any kind of an audience. So it just became really clear when youre looking at those numbers [and] what was left what we would do.

Now, hundreds of young women and men in the Chicago area are being excluded and denied equal news coverage in their own hometown because football and high school boys basketball is more in-demand, and the newsroom saves money by not having as many reporters covering the breadth of high school sports.

For me, I think the most disappointing part of it was the numbers kind of held up in the readers response, OBrien said. There was no outcry.

Smaller newsrooms that are more up-and-coming and free of decades of institutional baggage such as Block Club Chicago and City Bureau have the money and the people to make strides to ensure more communities especially those that are underrepresented and disenfranchised are covered by journalists with consistent attention.

Even though Block Club Chicagos headquarters is located in the Loop, reporters are placed by the publication to cover specific Chicago neighborhoods, which allows communities to have a relationship with reporters.

City Bureaus director of growth strategy Andrew Herrera said journalists priorities need to lie in transparency and building community trust through their reporting.

People are beginning to feel the absence of good media, Herrera said. The hope and the optimism is that we can push back against this kind of oppressive, monolithic, corporate-driven media culture where theres only a set number of approved perspectives, and we can find our voice again [sic] around shared interests and around shared beliefs.

When it comes to saving the industry, journalists are the first line of defense.

Last summer, a special team of editors from the Wall Street Journal completed an audit of what the publication is doing right and getting wrong. They called it The Content Review.

Addressing issues such as news gathering strategies to institutional racism in journalism, Wall Street Journals special team created a blueprint for how the paper should remake itself to ensure its future, but most people in the newsroom havent yet seen the report and its content hasnt been completely addressed by higher-ups.

Journalists are listening to the public and themselves and trying to make meaningful change. But running things up the flagpole in a system in shambles makes it harder for newsrooms to evolve quickly.

According to Wall Street Journal assistant managing editor for talent Sarah Rabil, the future of quality, fair and accessible news coverage is in the hands of budding reporters.

I get to spend a lot of time with student journalists, a lot of time with interns, and it makes me increasingly optimistic about the future of journalism, Rabil said. I think the fact that this generation also cares about the policies of newsrooms, the practices, their peers and that relationship, that also gives me a lot of hope.

Ensuring the survival of the news industry starts with the publishers. But it depends on everyone. Between publishers bargaining with Google and Facebook and consumers donating to their local news outlet, everyone can play a role in creating and demanding access to quality news now and for the future.

Its an unalienable right, after all.

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Freedom of the press comes at a cost. But who's going to foot the bill? - The Depaulia

Issued on: 17/05/2021 - 14:49Modified: 17/05/2021 - 14:51

In this edition we speak to best-selling French author Marc Levy. In the last 25 years, he has sold more than 50 million books and his work hasbeen translated into49 languages. He's just come out with volume two of his novel "The Twilightof the Beasts", published in French. The author tells us more about this techno-thriller articulated around nine "grey hat" hackers who are fighting to preserve freedom. He also tells us why he's so critical of social media networks.

Meanwhile,Tech 24 has been following the Energy Observer's progress since its debut in 2017. In this edition, we tell you how thehydrogen-powered vessel is sailing around the world, promoting an ecological transition. Our correspondents in California bring us the latest after it dropped anchor in the port of Long Beach for its first American stopover.

And in Test 24, we tell you how the French startup Lactips is helping rid seas of traditional plastics with an innovative, high-quality and 100 percentbio-based and biodegradable material.

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Tech 24 - 'The Twilight of the Beasts': A techno-thriller to preserve freedom - FRANCE 24