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Celerity

Celerity's Journal
Celerity's Journal
September 19, 2023

Benjamin Netanyahu and Elon Musk Meet, as Both Seek to Deflect Criticism



Mr. Netanyahu, the Israeli leader, flew to California, where he met with Mr. Musk, the owner of X, formerly Twitter. In a live broadcast, the men discussed antisemitism, Israel’s judicial crisis and artificial intelligence.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/18/world/middleeast/netanyahu-musk-meeting.html

https://archive.ph/O0tMW


Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, center, at a weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem this month.Credit...Pool photo by Ohad Zwigenberg

Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, and Elon Musk, the owner of X, the social media platform formerly called Twitter, have both faced intense scrutiny and criticism for most of the year. Mr. Netanyahu has been the target of a nine-month wave of mass protests against his deeply contentious effort to reduce the power of Israel’s Supreme Court. Mr. Musk has been accused, among other things, of tolerating and even encouraging a surge of antisemitic abuse on X.

On Monday morning, the two men sought to find a respite from those furors — in each other’s company. Mr. Netanyahu, beginning a weeklong trip to the United States, took a 15-hour overnight flight to California, where the men met at a factory for Tesla, Mr. Musk’s electric car company, and broadcast an unusual, hourlong conversation live on X that allowed them to deflect from their respective crises.

The discussion was jocular, if disjointed. At some points the two men were expressing mutual admiration, at others they were delving into the perils and opportunities of artificial intelligence. The conversation also allowed Mr. Musk to defend against accusations of antisemitism, and Mr. Netanyahu to give a positive spin to his judicial overhaul, which critics say has undermined Israel’s democracy by reducing oversight over the government. “Balance between the three branches of government — that’s what I’m trying to achieve, nothing more,” Mr. Netanyahu said. Turning to Mr. Musk, he added, “It’s not an easy thing to be maligned — I know you’ve never seen that, right?” “Me, maligned?" Mr. Musk said, laughing. “Never.”

For Mr. Netanyahu, an encounter with the world’s richest man — partly to promote tech investment in Israel — allowed him to dismiss claims that his judicial overhaul had put off investors and harmed Israel’s start-up ecosystem. “I have helped reform the Israeli economy from a semi-socialist economy to one of the most vibrant, free-market economies,” Mr. Netanyahu said. For Mr. Musk, the meeting with the leader of the world’s only Jewish state gave him a chance to deflect a barrage of criticism from American Jews who say he has allowed X to become a vessel for antisemitic hatred.

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September 19, 2023

Molly Jong-Fast: The Media Is Giving Us 2016 Flashbacks



After four indictments, two impeachments, and one insurrection, Donald Trump shouldn’t be covered like a conventional candidate. And yet.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/09/2024-election-media-donald-trump-joe-biden-2016

https://archive.ph/qgsn1



Seven years ago, a competent Democratic presidential candidate ran against someone who was largely considered to be a joke. Pundits and major media outlets criticized Hillary Clinton for being “overprepared” against Donald Trump while obsessing over a controversy stemming from her use of a private email server. The word “email” dominated the political discourse when there was plenty to say about Trump’s hostility toward democratic norms, his failed businesses, and his love of the Russian cutout WikiLeaks. Trump was treated as an amusing distraction and Clinton was treated as a fait accompli. But that was two impeachments, four indictments, one superseding indictment, and an armed insurrection ago. Surely, you’d think, the mainstream media has learned from its mistakes.

And boy, would you be wrong. On Sunday, in a rare, hour-plus sit-down with the former president, NBC’s Kristen Welker proved once again that interviewing the 45th president is an impossible task—even for a sharp journalist like her. Sure, she may have fact-checked Trump’s lies in real time and peppered him with well-deserved criticism. But, as we’ve repeatedly seen in the past, good-faith pushback does nothing to stop the ex-president’s falsehoods. Like the house in a casino, Trump always wins—and the mainstream media just keeps making bets, seemingly desperate to turn 2024 into 2016.

What is a bit different from the lead-up to 2016 is that Trump, despite his tumultuous absence from government, is now the de facto leader of the Republican Party. And for the most part, the GOP primary contest appears to be a pathetic competition for the vice presidency. (Chris Christie, at least, has the self-respect to openly condemn Trump.)

As for the Democrats, well, the party has an incumbent president—which, in a normal world, would mean no chance of a primary. However, some in the mainstream media have bemoaned the lack of challengers to Joe Biden, even while expressing uncertainty around the idea. Jonathan Chait, in a piece arguing that Biden should be primaried, admitted that “there are four examples of incumbent presidents facing serious primary challengers, and none of those presidents went on to win reelection.” And David Ignatius, in calling for Biden to drop out, conceded that “right now, there’s no clear alternative to Biden—no screamingly obvious replacement waiting in the wings.”

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September 19, 2023

Labor's Militant Creativity



Today on TAP: The UAW builds on a tactic—selective strikes—pioneered 30 years ago by the Flight Attendants.

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2023-09-18-labors-militant-creativity/



Many observers have been impressed with UAW President Shawn Fain’s astute strategy of using selective strikes, rather than calling all of his members off the job. The strategy has three significant tactical benefits. First, it conserves the strike fund, which would only last about 90 days if all workers were out. This in turn lets management know that the union can take a longer strike and increases the UAW’s bargaining leverage.

Second, it also allows the union to inflict the most damage for the least cost by taking advantage of supply chain vulnerabilities, as when a key parts supplier or a plant producing popular cars in short supply is shut down. Already, the shutdown of facilities that supply other facilities has led GM and Ford to temporarily shut down two assembly lines. (The companies are denying laid-off workers the partial pay they normally offer when idling plants, which the UAW has called a strategic attack. The union has guaranteed those workers some income.) And third, management not knowing which plant will be struck keeps the companies off-balance.

As it happens, this original idea is not quite original to the UAW. It was pioneered by the Association of Flight Attendants in 1993, in a strike against Alaska Airlines, where negotiations had been dragging on for three years in the face of huge company profits. The flight attendants named their strategy CHAOS, which stands for “Creating Havoc Around Our System.” They even trademarked the name. I write about this tactic in more detail in a forthcoming Prospect feature piece on the Flight Attendants. Here are the basics:

Because labor relations in the airlines are governed by the Railway Labor Act, the union can call intermittent mini-strikes, with no warning to management, designed to inflict maximum damage. If flight attendants walk off the job just as a flight is boarding, the entire system backs up, because of the airlines’ profit-maximizing strategy of getting rid of all of the system’s slack—no spare planes, no extra crews. The first CHAOS strike took place at Sea-Tac Airport in August 1993, when three flight attendants abruptly left an Alaska Airlines flight just as passengers began boarding. Three days later, attendants walked off the last Alaska flight out of Las Vegas. In September, AFA targeted five flights simultaneously in San Francisco.

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September 19, 2023

UAW Strikes Built the American Middle Class



Today’s strikers are seeking to renew the broadly shared prosperity that earlier UAW work stoppages created.

https://prospect.org/labor/2023-09-18-uaw-strikes-built-american-middle-class/



“Record corporate profits should be shared by record contracts for the UAW,” President Biden said on Friday as the United Auto Workers began their first-ever strike against all three legacy automakers. That was likely the most pro-union utterance an American president has ever made in support of striking workers, but it wasn’t quite the most consequential.

The most consequential pro-labor strike intervention by a presidential administration—not directly by the president himself, and not an utterance as such, but a finding—came amid the UAW’s 1945-1946 strike against General Motors. The head of the UAW’s 320,000-member GM division, then-union vice president Walter Reuther, was making demands of the company that no other strike in American history has made, before or since. Reuther was seeking a 30 percent raise for his members, whose wages hadn’t exactly thrived during the wage-price controls of World War II. That wasn’t what made the strike exceptional, of course. What did was that the demand for the raise was accompanied by a demand that the company not raise prices as it raised wages, because the UAW contended GM was so flush that it could afford the wage hike without having to raise the price of its cars.

And to verify that contention, Reuther had one other proposal: GM should “open its books” so that the public could see just how many millions the company had stocked away. Enter, at this point, the Truman administration. It appointed a fact-finding commission to determine just how much GM could actually afford. General Motors responded with apoplexy. No damn union, no damn government, was going to get a peek at its bank accounts. Undaunted, Truman’s fact finders assessed what evidence was available and released a statement saying that the company could raise its hourly wage by 19.5 cents (remember, we’re talking 1945 dollar values here) without having to raise its prices.



That was less than the GM strikers were demanding, but it still was a substantial raise. With that presidential blessing, Reuther said that the 19.5-cent raise was their target. Unfortunately, the one other union that represented GM workers—the United Electrical Workers (UE), which had 30,000 members under contract at GM—suddenly announced that it had been negotiating (secretly) with the company, and had settled for an 18.5-cent raise. As the Steelworkers and other industrial unions also began to settle for 18.5 cents, Reuther’s GM strikers, after peacefully picketing for 113 days, were compelled to settle for that, too.

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September 19, 2023

Timeline: Seven fatal shootings in ten days in Sweden

Sweden saw seven fatal shootings and at least one attempted shooting around Uppsala and Stockholm in the space of ten days, in what police chief Anders Thornberg has described as an 'unprecedented' wave of gang killings.

https://www.thelocal.se/20230915/timeline-six-fatal-gang-shootings-in-one-week-in-sweden/



Thursday, September 7th - fatal shooting

A woman in her 60s was shot in the Gränby area of Uppsala early on September 7th. According to Swedish media, the woman in question was the mother of a gang leader, and her murder may have been a revenge shooting after an attack on Foxtrot leader Rawa Majid, also known as “the Kurdish fox”, at his hideout in Istanbul, Turkey.

Sunday, September 10th - attempted shooting

Shots were fired at a building in the Stenhagen area of Uppsala. Rawa Majid's mother-in-law, who lives close by, told Expressen she is living in fear. Police believe the shots were meant for her, but the shooters got the wrong address.

Monday, September 11th - fatal shooting

The body of a thirteen-year-old boy who had been shot in the head was found in a small forested area in Haninge, south of Stockholm. The boy reportedly went missing the previous Friday, and police believe his body was dumped in the area after he was murdered. Police are keeping tight-lipped and have not released any details of who he is, or why he may have been murdered, although they did appear to link his death to gang crime in a statement. "What I can say is that we are dealing with an extremely serious suspected crime, more specifically the murder of a very young person," said Lisa dos Santos, prosecutor and leader of the preliminary investigation. "The fact that the the victim was so young is in itself terrible, and shows yet another dimension of the merciless, serious wave of violence. Now we are working to find out what has happened to this boy."

Tuesday, September 12th - fatal shooting

A 25-year-old was shot dead in the early hours of September 12th in the Sala backe area of Uppsala. He worked in the elderly care sector and had moved to Uppsala to study law. It appears shooters mistook him for the relative of a gang member. Uppsala police on Tuesday launched a so-called “special incident” in response to the spate of violence in Uppsala. Known as a särskild händelse in Swedish, a special incident can be launched to deal with a range of issues which the relevant police unit needs extra help with. It usually means that a temporary task force is set up to focus solely on the specified problem, and the chief of the task force is given powers to make decisions and allocate resources to the problem in question.

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September 18, 2023

What Kant can teach us about work



Freedom at work

There is always a demand for more jobs. But what makes a job good? For that, Immanuel Kant has an answer


https://aeon.co/essays/what-kant-can-teach-us-about-work-on-the-problem-with-jobs





Work is no longer working for us. Or, for most of us anyway. Citing lack of pay and promotion, more people are quitting their jobs now than at any time in the past 20 years. This is no surprise, considering that ‘real wages’ – the average hourly rate adjusted for inflation – for non-managers just three years ago was the same as it was in the early 1970s. At the same time, the increasing prominence of gig work has turned work from a steady ‘climb’ of the ladder into a precarious ‘hustle’. Of the growing number of people working through apps like Uber or Taskrabbit, nearly 70 per cent of them say that they do so on the side, supplementing a main income that is too low to provide for life’s necessities. Even young and upwardly mobile professionals must change jobs, rather than stay in them, in order to grow in their careers. Almost perversely, the loss of stable careers is branded as a benefit. Sarah Ellis and Helen Tupper, both career consultants, argue that we ought to embrace these ‘squiggly careers’ as a new, more ‘flexible’ norm.

Politicians claim that the solution to our work problems is ‘more jobs’. But simply increasing the number of bad jobs won’t help us avoid the problems of work. What we need, it seems, is not more work, but good work. But what exactly is good work? The United States Department of Labor identifies a ‘good job’ as one with fair hiring practices, comprehensive benefits, formal equality of opportunity, job security and a culture in which workers are valued. In a similar UK report on the modern labour market called ‘Good Work’ (2017), Matthew Taylor and his colleagues emphasise workplace rights and fair treatment, opportunities for promotion, and ‘good reward schemes’. Finally, the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights has two sections on work. They cite the free choice of employment and organisation, fair and equal pay, and sufficient leisure time as rights of workers.

What all three of these accounts have in common is that they focus on features of jobs – the agreement you make with your boss to perform labour – rather than on the labour itself. The fairness of your boss, the length of your contract, the growth of your career – these specify nothing about the quality of the labour you perform. And yet it is the labour itself that we spend all day doing. The most tedious and unpleasant work could still pay a high salary, but we might not want to call such work ‘good’. (Only a brief mention is made in the Taylor report – which totals more than 100 pages – of the idea that workers ought to have some autonomy in how they perform their job, or that work ought not be tedious or repetitive.) This is not to say that the extrinsic aspects of work like pay and benefits are unimportant; of course, a good job is one that pays enough. But what about work’s intrinsic goods? Is there anything about the process of working itself that we ought to include in our list of criteria, or should we all be content with a life of high-paying drudgery?



Philosophers try to answer this question by giving a definition of work. Since definitions tell us what is essential or intrinsic to a thing, a definition of work would tell us whether there is anything intrinsic to work that we want our good jobs to promote. The most common definition of work in Western thought, found in nearly every period with recorded writing on the subject, is that work is inherently disagreeable and instrumentally valuable. It is disagreeable because it is an expenditure of energy (contrast this with leisure), and it is instrumentally valuable because we care only about the products of our labour, not the process of labouring itself. On this view, work has little to recommend it, and we would do better to minimise our time spent doing it. A theory of work based on this definition would probably say that good jobs pay a lot (in exchange for work’s disagreeableness) and are performed for as little time as possible.

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September 18, 2023

Sweden's Second-Largest City Is a Big, Sustainable Playground

Going green put Gothenburg on the map, while top sights, prime eats, and icy cold plunges add to the appeal.

https://www.thrillist.com/travel/nation/gothenburg-sweden-city-guide



It’s hard to get more nautically charming than a cluster of Swedish islands in the summer. Neat white houses with terracotta roofs line a pier bobbing with boats. The ceiling of a nearby seafood shack is strewn with fishing nets, buoys, and anchors. A sauna floats in the ocean just a few feet from the shore, swaying gently in the breeze. And a small red house sits on top of the highest cliff, almost like a lighthouse overlooking clean beaches.

The beaches are, in fact, almost unusually clean. And the reason for this becomes apparent quickly. Håkan Karlsten, the owner of nearby Kajkanten Hotel, has briefly disappeared from the group of kayakers he leads, but quickly emerges around a hump of rocky shoreline, the front of his kayak strapped with a pile of trash. "Sorry!" he calls out as his powerful strokes easily catch him up to his hotel guests, "I saw some litter over there." Later, on a trail circling the edge of the island, Karlsten scoops up a used juice bottle lying beneath a bench. Picking up small bits of trash is something he—and many people on the island of Vrångö—do on the regular.

It’s not just the ground that’s clean—the air quality is crisp and water looks ready to pour into a glass. That’s because this archipelago surrounds Gothenburg, Sweden’s second-largest city. Ranked as the most sustainable destination on the planet by Global Destination Sustainability Index six times in a row, the west-coast city strives to be as green as possible and makes things easy for those who don’t want to rent a car. Tourists can easily take the scenic trams across the city (95% of which run on renewable energy), pedal down protected bike lanes using the city-wide bike-share system, and hop on a ferry to cruise around the islands. Some of the islands are also car-free, and hotel owners like Karlsten pick up guests and luggage from the ferry in golf carts.

In Gothenburg, you’ll also find initiatives working on developing energy from ocean waves, hotels powered by renewable energy, and many restaurants that go meatless during lunch time. Whether you stay on the surrounding islands or check out the center of Gothenburg, here’s what to do in the most sustainable city in the world.

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September 18, 2023

Cafe Kitsune Mixed by Fabich



Aug 12, 2020
Café Kitsuné Mix by Fabich is out now!
Check it out: https://kitsune.lnk.to/incafe

Fabich has selected and mixed a handful of stellar tracks to perfectly recreate the trendy and cozy atmosphere of Café Kitsuné.

Tracklist:

1. Tom Doolie & Cap Kendricks - Stay & Wander
2. James Vickery, SG Lewis - Pressure
3. Swaine Delgado - 308
4. SAINT WKND ft. Malou - Ridin’ Solo
5. LVTHER, Sedric Perry - Break
6. Dacey - Broccoli’s Keeper
7. MK.gee - You
8. Jarami - Aurora
9. Tim Ayre - I Want It (Lazy Wax Remix)
10. Mel Blue - Yesterday
11. Michelle - Not About Love
12. Kraak & Smaak ft. Parcels - Stumble (Blue Motel Remix)
13. Franc Moody - Terra Firma
14. Fabich, Jafunk & Pastel ft. Bambie Thug - Ecstasy
15. Young Franco, Pell - Juice
16. Moon Boots - Bimini Road
17. Yuksek - Do Beijo
18. Allen French - The Whistle Song



September 18, 2023

Donald Trump Wishes 'Liberal Jews' a Happy New Year by Accusing Them of Destroying America

The leading Republican presidential candidate took to Truth Social to joke that he is “the greatest Anti Semites of our time”

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/donald-trump-accuses-liberal-jews-of-destroying-america-israel-rosh-hashanah-1234826826/



DONALD TRUMP DECIDED to take time during Rosh Hashanah — the start of the Jewish High Holy days and the celebration of the New Year — to blame “liberal Jews” for voting to destroy America and Israel. “Just a quick reminder for liberal Jews who voted to destroy America & Israel because you believed in false narratives!,” he wrote on Truth Social on Sunday, presumably referring to the American Jewish support for Joe Biden in the 2020 election. “Let’s hope you learned from your mistake & make better choices moving forward!”



The leading Republican presidential candidate then shared what appeared to be a flyer boasting of Trump’s record on Israel and pro-Jewish causes. “Wake Up Sheep. What Nazi / Anti Semite ever did this for the Jewish people or Israel?” the flyer reads. The flyer goes on to crow about moving the American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem (“no other president had the balls to do it”) and endorsing “Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights” and “over settlements in Judea & Samaria” — also known as the West Bank.

The flyer also mentions Trump’s signing the “Never Again” Education Bill into law, which funds Holocaust awareness — which was praised by organizations, such as the Anti-Defamation League. “Clearly, one of the Greatest Anti Semites of our time!” the flyer jokes. Strangely, it neglects Trump’s notorious statement that neo-Nazi marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia were “very fine people.” Or his speech in front of prominent Republican Jews, telling them that they were manipulative money-grubbers. Or his dinner with Kanye West after the rapper tweeted that he was “going death con3 on JEWISH people.”

The time in between Rosh Hoshanah and Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, is when Jews are supposed to ask for forgiveness from those they may have hurt. Trump used this faithful, soul-searching time to make it about himself. It’s unlikely to have much impact; American Jews have traditionally voted overwhelmingly for Democrats — and 2024 looks to be a continuation of the trend. According to a poll by the Jewish Electoral Institute, which found among 800 Jewish voters, Biden leads Trump by 72 percent.

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September 17, 2023

Improve your relationships with the science of perspective-taking



Social psychology research is breaking down the process of perspective-taking and revealing ways to help us get along better

https://psyche.co/ideas/improve-your-relationships-with-the-science-of-perspective-taking



The acrimonious exchanges between overly invested parents and underpaid youth soccer referees are almost their own spectator sport. Acts of offensive shouting and name-calling are defended with imperious warnings and penalty cards. Neutral onlookers would swear that the arguing sides had witnessed completely different events. However ridiculous this game-day behaviour may seem, it epitomises why so many of our relationships go awry.

The inferences we draw about the thoughts, feelings and motivations of others are a core building block of our relationships, but these inferences require effort and can often be misguided. It’s easy to see the barriers that the opposing soccer factions face in taking each others’ perspectives. Parents’ track record of objectivity and rationality when it comes to their children is suspect at best. Mix in a competitive outcome, pride on both sides, and the refs’ tiring schedules, and it becomes easy to see why perspective-taking suffers.

As a social psychologist, I am convinced that understanding how people make inferences about others through their social perspective-taking attempts is key to improving relationships, whether we’re talking about soccer parents and referees, spouses, colleagues or political rivals. I’m not referring to increasing people’s empathy (experiencing parallel feelings when witnessing other people’s emotions). Rather, social perspective-taking is the process through which we infer what other people are experiencing. It’s our cognitive understanding of the mental worlds of others: their beliefs, and how they perceive the situation. By observing the structural weak spots in the social perspective-taking process and addressing them, I’m optimistic it should be possible to uncover new strategies for improving the relationships that matter most to us.

These insights are especially needed right now. Our relationship with our relationships sits at a historically awkward moment. Science tells us that relationships are more important than ever – the key ingredient to our happiness, as important to our health as not smoking. Researchers have found that people who lack robust relationships die younger on average. Yet newspapers remind us daily that we seem to be getting worse at forming and maintaining our interpersonal connections. Political divides make neighbours un-neighbourly; social media seems increasingly antisocial. Recently, the US surgeon general has even declared a ‘loneliness epidemic’… and he’s been saying that since before the pandemic.

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Gender: Female
Hometown: London
Home country: US/UK/Sweden
Current location: Stockholm, Sweden
Member since: Sun Jul 1, 2018, 06:25 PM
Number of posts: 47,843

About Celerity

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