Category Archives: Viva!

Muslim Detention Camps Are Like ‘Boarding Schools,’ Chinese Official Says

Like Trump’s Camps – gulp – that bad! Officials also said that the indoctrination camps for Uighurs and other Muslims across Xinjiang had not held one million inmates, as reported, and that their numbers would shrink.

Impeaching Trump Would Be Purely Symbolic, And There’s No Reason To Think It Would be Effective Symbolism

Pelosi is getting some criticism for stating the obvious:

I’m not for impeachment. This is news. I’m going to give you some news right now because I haven’t said this to any press person before. But since you asked, and I’ve been thinking about this: Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path, because it divides the country. And he’s just not worth it.

Note here that Pelosi isn’t saying that Trump shouldn’t be impeached, per se, but that there’s no point in impeaching him if he can’t plausibly be removed from office. Which is correct:

  • If Trump can’t be convicted in the Senate, impeachment is purely a question of symbolic politics. What would it accomplish? What end would it serve?
  • Trump is already unpopular. Open-ended investigations are an excellent way of making him even less popular while informing the public. Republicans were able to severely damage Hillary Clinton with a bunch of investigations that were just snipe hunts, as opposed to serious investigations of many scandals any one of which would have destroyed the typical political career.
  • Impeachment proceedings would definitely mobilize Trump’s supporters plus some wavering Republicans. On the other hand, “impeachment” in the common vernacular tends to be conflated with “impeachment and removal.” Impeachment proceedings therefore set up expectations among a lot of Trump opponents that won’t be fulfilled. How does an impeachment that can’t even get a simple majority (let alone the necessary supermajority) in the Senate, with inevitable “Views differ about partisan witch hunt” and “Democrats, the only party with any causal impact on American politics, fail to remove Trump because they’re failures” coverage, mobilize Trump’s opponents?
  • Yes, yes, Watergate, Things Escalated Quickly, we know. The fact that Republicans turned on Nixon in an era in which major environmental legislation could pass 366-11 in the House and 74-0 in the Senate is about as relevant to how things would play out in 2019 as the mastery of radio communications is to modern presidential campaigning.

The only considerations of impeaching Trump with no hope of removal are political, and there’s every reason to think that the downside far exceeds the upside.

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House Republicans propose poisoning Net Neutrality bill with Article-13-like liability

Last week, House Democrats introduced the Save the Internet Act, to enact the Net Neutrality protections favored by 83% of Americans; in response, Rep Greg Walden (R-OR, @repgregwalden, +1 (541) 776-4646) has proposed legislation rescinding Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, “the most important law protecting internet speech”, which says that online services are not required to pro-actively censor user postings that might contain illegal speech — a vital protection that made it possible for sites like this one to have comment sections, and also enabled sites like Youtube and Snapchat to accept photos and videos from the public.

Section 230 was dealt a terrible blow last year with the passage of SESTA/FOSTA, which imposes a duty on service providers to ensure that users are not engaged in the sex trade; this has made life much more dangerous for sex workers, endangered positive depictions of human sexuality, and subjected Tumblr users to algorithmic censorship at mass scale, with predictable results.

But as bad as SESTA/FOSTA was, Walden’s proposal would be much, much worse. Eliminating Section 230 protection for wider classes of bad speech would make every public utterance subject to extremely broad, error-prone algorithmic censorship, while cementing the dominance of today’s digital monopolists, because only the largest tech companies would be able to afford to run these buggy algorithms.

This is a Made-in-America version of Europe’s Article 13, a measure so unpopular that the petition against it is now the most popular petition in human history. It’s more proof that the Republicans want to subject the vast majority of us to deeply unpopular ideas that only a tiny minority of mostly very rich people like.

New Zealand doctors move clinics outside in bid to stop measles’ spread

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Vaccinations taking place in car parks to reduce risk of infectious disease being transmitted in crowded clinics

Doctors are treating unimmunised New Zealanders in carparks and outdoor areas in an attempt to reduce the spread of measles, as the number of confirmed cases of the contagious disease rose to 25.

A severe measles outbreak, described as the worst “in years” continues to spread in the Canterbury region of the South Island, with health authorities saying 100,000 people need to be urgently vaccinated, and more cases of the highly infectious illness are expected in the coming days and weeks.

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