If you aren't entertained and delighted by monkeys smoking, the GTFO of my timelinehttps://t.co/AvMYteq7ES
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) March 9, 2018
Growing outrage after a zoo visitor tossed a lit cigarette into an orangutan enclosure, prompting the ape to pick it up and smoke it. More than 1M people signed a petition to shut down the zoo after the incident. The zoo says it regrets that it happened. https://t.co/faEjTfg6yN pic.twitter.com/IbEGoYnUWq
— ABC News (@ABC) March 8, 2018
I spent 2 months getting the news mostly from print. It changed my life.— Farhad Manjoo: not really on here a lot now (@fmanjoo) March 7, 2018
I was better informed, less anxious, and I had tons of free time.
I distilled the experience into three Michael Pollan-esque lessons:
Get news. Not too quickly. Avoid social.https://t.co/09A1Q3vzBK
I first got news of the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., via an alert on my watch. Even though I had turned off news notifications months ago, the biggest news still somehow finds a way to slip through.I too have been limited my online and social news gathering. Not completely, but I've always favored news in hard-copy form. I especially like the more deliberative style of news reading you get, the morning paper with a cup of coffee.
But for much of the next 24 hours after that alert, I heard almost nothing about the shooting.
There was a lot I was glad to miss. For instance, I didn’t see the false claims — possibly amplified by propaganda bots — that the killer was a leftist, an anarchist, a member of ISIS and perhaps just one of multiple shooters. I missed the Fox News report tying him to Syrian resistance groups even before his name had been released. I also didn’t see the claim circulated by many news outlets (including The New York Times) as well as by Senator Bernie Sanders and other liberals on Twitter that the massacre had been the 18th school shooting of the year, which wasn’t true.
Instead, the day after the shooting, a friendly person I’ve never met dropped off three newspapers at my front door. That morning, I spent maybe 40 minutes poring over the horror of the shooting and a million other things the newspapers had to tell me.
Not only had I spent less time with the story than if I had followed along as it unfolded online, I was better informed, too. Because I had avoided the innocent mistakes — and the more malicious misdirection — that had pervaded the first hours after the shooting, my first experience of the news was an accurate account of the actual events of the day.
This has been my life for nearly two months. In January, after the breaking-newsiest year in recent memory, I decided to travel back in time. I turned off my digital news notifications, unplugged from Twitter and other social networks, and subscribed to home delivery of three print newspapers — The Times, The Wall Street Journal and my local paper, The San Francisco Chronicle — plus a weekly newsmagazine, The Economist.
I have spent most days since then getting the news mainly from print, though my self-imposed asceticism allowed for podcasts, email newsletters and long-form nonfiction (books and magazine articles). Basically, I was trying to slow-jam the news — I still wanted to be informed, but was looking to formats that prized depth and accuracy over speed.
It has been life changing. Turning off the buzzing breaking-news machine I carry in my pocket was like unshackling myself from a monster who had me on speed dial, always ready to break into my day with half-baked bulletins.
Now I am not just less anxious and less addicted to the news, I am more widely informed (though there are some blind spots). And I’m embarrassed about how much free time I have — in two months, I managed to read half a dozen books, took up pottery and (I think) became a more attentive husband and father.
Most of all, I realized my personal role as a consumer of news in our broken digital news environment...
Oscar Ratings Down, Eye All-Time Low In Early Estimates https://t.co/e3G3f1anvs pic.twitter.com/SCg42pqjHN
— Deadline Hollywood (@DEADLINE) March 5, 2018
THREE BILLBOARDS:https://t.co/6rUJDXFUQT
— unsavoryagents (@unsavoryagents) March 5, 2018
Italy election results highlight struggle to govern in Europe as populist forces rise https://t.co/qiBctn6YWS— Washington Post (@washingtonpost) March 5, 2018
BERLIN — After voters from the snowy peaks of the Alps to the sunny shores of Sicily delivered a verdict so fractured and mysterious it could take months to sort out, the banner headline Monday in the venerable daily La Stampa captured the state of a nation that’s left no one in charge: “Ungovernable Italy.”And the authors haven't even mentioned Austria yet, which has a "far-right" coalition now in power.
The same can increasingly be said for vast stretches of Europe.
Across the continent, a once-durable dichotomy is dissolving. Fueled by anger over immigration, a backlash against the European Union and resentment of an out-of-touch elite, anti-establishment parties are taking votes left, right and center from the traditional power players.
They generally aren’t winning enough support to govern. But they are claiming such a substantial share of the electorate that it has become all but impossible for the establishment to govern on its own. The result is a continent caught in a netherworld between a dying political order and a new one still taking root.
“This has been a post-ideological result, beyond the traditional left-right divide,” said Luigi Di Maio, whose populist Five Star Movement trounced its opponents to become Italy’s largest party on Monday.
Now the country has plunged into uncertainty.
“The traditional structures of political alignment in Europe are breaking down,” said Josef Janning, head of the Berlin office of the European Council on Foreign Relations. “It started in the smaller countries. But now we see that it’s happening everywhere.”
Even in Germany, the ultimate postwar symbol of staid political stability.
As Italians were voting Sunday, Germans were learning they would finally have a government, a record five months after they went to the polls.
The establishment had hung on. But just barely, and with no evident enthusiasm, either from the voters or from the centrist politicians who will continue to lead the country even as the public increasingly gravitates to the margins.
A similar phenomenon can be seen in countries from east to west, north to south. It took the Dutch 208 days to form an ideologically messy four-way coalition last year after an election in which 13 parties won seats in the parliament.
The Czechs still do not have a functioning government after voting in October yielded an unwieldy parliament populated by anti-immigrant hard-liners, pro-market liberals, communists, and loose alliance of libertarians, anarchists and coders known as the Pirates.
The fragmentation of European politics takes what had been seen as one of the continent’s great strengths and turns it on its head. Unlike the United States and Britain, where winners take all, continental Europe primarily use proportional systems in which the full spectrum of popular opinion is represented in office.
That worked fairly well when the major parties captured some 80 or 90 percent of the vote, as they did in countries across Europe for decades after World War II.
But lately, the major parties have been downsized.
In Germany, the so-called “grand coalition” won just 53 percent of the vote — hardly grand. In Italy, neither of the two traditionally dominant centrist parties cracked 20 percent. A grand coalition is not even mathematically possible.
The trend has become self-reinforcing.
What’s happening today is that certain ideas about gun rights, and maybe gun ownership itself, are being cast in the realm of the morally illegitimate and socially unacceptable https://t.co/2mXNbOi04X
— David Brooks (@nytdavidbrooks) March 2, 2018
I wonder if I’m wrong on the subject of guns. I started this latest round of the debate with the presumption that supporters of moderate gun restrictions are popularly strong but legislatively weak. Since Sandy Hook in 2012, more than two dozen states have passed gun laws and almost all of those laws have LOOSENED gun restrictions. Roughly 360 gun bills have been introduced in Congress, and they have all failed but one, which also loosened gun use.More.
The blunt fact is that Republicans control most legislatures. To get anything passed, I thought, it would be necessary to separate some Republicans from the absolutist N.R.A. position. To do that you have to depolarize the issue: show gun owners some respect, put red state figures at the head and make the gun discussion look more like the opioid discussion. The tribalists in this country have little interest in the opioid issue. As a result, a lot of pragmatic things are being done across partisan lines.
The people pushing for gun restrictions have basically done the exact opposite of what I thought was wise. Instead of depolarizing the issue they have massively polarized it. The students from Parkland are being assisted by all the usual hyper-polarizing left-wing groups: Planned Parenthood, Move On and the Women’s March. The rhetoric has been extreme. Marco Rubio has been likened to a mass murderer while the N.R.A. has been called a terrorist organization.
The early results would seem to completely vindicate my position. The Florida Legislature turned aside gun restrictions. New gun measures in Congress have been quickly shelved. Democrats are more likely to lose House and Senate seats in the key 2018 pro-gun states. The losing streak continues.
Yet I have to admit that something bigger is going on. It could be that progressives understood something I didn’t. It could be that you can win more important victories through an aggressive cultural crusade than you can through legislation. Progressives could be on the verge of delegitimizing their foes, on guns but also much else, rendering them untouchable for anybody who wants to stay in polite society. That would produce social changes far vaster than limiting assault rifles...
Trump's steel tariff shakes global trade order, EU group warns https://t.co/JO1TCv1tmm pic.twitter.com/zmlGrECGPM
— Bloomberg (@business) March 2, 2018
Open government isn’t just good government. It’s the public’s right.Click through to read the petition and the rest of the post.
In Florida, the Broward County Sheriff’s office and Broward County school district are fighting to keep exterior surveillance video from the day of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School hidden from view. As journalists and citizens who’ve waged uphill battles against secrecy well know, government agencies too often invoke broad disclosure exemptions in the name of protecting public safety when they’re really just trying to protect their own jobs.
Feckless Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel and media-luvin’ school Superintendent Robert Runcie are defendants in an open records lawsuit filed Tuesday by the South Florida Sun Sentinel, the Miami Herald and CNN.
Here is the lawsuit petition...
