“This is a threat to all of us” — Jeff McMahan (Oxford) interviewed about the Russian attack on Ukraine
Vibe. Mood. Energy. How did we all start speaking in New Age tropes? Blame social media vibe on line
Los Angeles Op-Ed: I Nearly Died From COVID. Now I’m Letting Go of the Fear., by David Lat (Original Jurisdiction):
Two years ago, I was in a hospital bed on the 15th floor of NYU Langone hospital in Manhattan, dying of COVID-19. A previously healthy, 44-year-old runner, I found myself impossibly weak, unable to walk five feet from my bed to the bathroom without a nurse’s help. I could barely breathe, even with the highest levels of supplemental oxygen. Eventually I wound up in the ICU, where I was placed on a ventilator.
Trying to shake our nation into taking the threat seriously, I shared my coronavirus ordeal with the world. I tweeted about it from the hospital; talked about it on the “Today” show, “The Rachel Maddow Show,” and “Nightline”; and wrote for multiple publications about my time on the ventilator, my painfully slow recovery, and my six-figure hospital bills (which I thankfully did not have to pay). I hoped that my story led others to do everything humanly possible to prevent contagion.
Today, COVID-19 is far less dangerous than it was two years ago, and I wonder: By telling my harrowing story, did I contribute to a climate of fear that we now find difficult to dispel? ...
With more than a thousand Americans still dying every day, the virus remains a serious threat. We need to get more people vaccinated and boosted. We need to protect the most vulnerable, including the elderly and the immunocompromised. We need to support healthcare workers suffering from burnout, depression and anxiety. We need to treat people enduring “long COVID,” as I did for more than a year. We need to remember and mourn the almost 1 million Americans, and more than 6 million people worldwide, who have lost their lives to this disease.
Here’s what we don’t need: more fear. Instead, let’s take a deep breath and move from a mindset of fear to a mindset of hope. After two long years, it’s hard to let go of being afraid, but let’s try. If we continue living in a perpetual state of anxiety and emergency, we are defeating only ourselves.
Human Rights and Disinformation Under the Trump Administration: The Commission on Unalienable Rights (2021). Blitt, Robert C., St. Louis University Law Journal, Vol. 66, 2021, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4046025 – “The former administration of Donald J. Trump shattered norms governing the responsibility to relay accurate, truthful information to the public. Whether regarding trivialities or vital issues of the day, the “Trump Doctrine” unleashed a global torrent of damaging misinformation and disinformation.
This penchant for falsehood and distortion did not spare U.S. human rights policy. The administration’s decision to establish a Commission on Unalienable Rights (COUR) represented a high-water mark in its campaign to subvert international human rights norms. After introducing key concepts relating to misinformation and disinformation, this article reviews the establishment of the COUR and the substance of its final report. Among other things, the COUR report prioritizes “unalienable rights” while dismissing other “lesser” or “newer” rights intended to protect vulnerable groups. Coupled with this hierarchical framing, the report aspires to freeze the substance of human rights as it was in 1948 and to invoke state sovereignty as a legitimate shield against international scrutiny of domestic human rights conditions.
With this background established, the Article explores how the COUR’s disinformation assault on the common political knowledge shared by democratic states operated to disrupt shared values while empowering authoritarian and illiberal actors. More damaging, this section also demonstrates how the administration compounded this disinformation fissure through its subsequent advocacy of selective elements of the COUR report for the purpose of prioritizing “religious liberty” at the expense of other rights, as well as the United States’ longstanding democratic alliances. The final section of this Article reasons that restoration of the United States’ vital leadership role in the international community is contingent on repairing its commitment to the promotion and protection of human rights both at home and abroad.
Despite the Biden administration’s swift, if perfunctory, repudiation of the COUR project, the Article concludes that an effective and durable rebuttal of its pernicious and lingering disinformation will demand more significant policy and educational change.”
About Artvee: “In the last few years, several major museums and libraries have instituted an open access policy by designating most or all of the public domain art in their collections with a creative commons license making them available for use for any purpose with no restrictions attached. We sort through and aggregate the best of these images in one location to make them easy to discover and download…”