A leading Asian studies expert is weighing in on how the U.S. can diminish the threat China poses to Taiwan, even as tensions between the two countries remain high.
"I think the first thing we need to do is clear a backlog of arms sales to Taiwan. We sell Taiwan advanced military hardware, and a number of important platforms that the Taiwanese have purchased have been backlogged, and this has been going on for years now," says Jeff Smith, director of The Heritage Foundation's Asian Studies Center. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
"The second thing we need to do, I think, is help the Taiwanese to develop even better deterrence strategies and denial strategies and acquisitions," Smith says. "What can we do? What are the most effective military platforms that Taiwan could purchase and use in order to deny China if it decides to launch an invasion or at least to hold out long enough for the cavalry?" It's widely though that the U.S.—and possibly others, including Australia and Japan—would intervene in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
Smith joins today's episode of "The Daily Signal Podcast" to discuss how the Chinese government has infiltrated our lives; The Heritage Foundation's newly released report "Winning the New Cold War: A Plan for Countering China”; and the U.S. fentanyl crisis.
Paris Marx is joined by Kate Wagner to discuss the goals behind Saudi Arabia’s architectural megaprojects, the incentives for major architects to work on projects for despotic regimes, and how architecture’s relationship to tech is driven by profits and PR.
Kate Wagner is an architecture critic and journalist. She’s also the creator of McMansion Hell. Follow Kate on Twitter at @mcmansionhell.
Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.
The intensifying political division and violence in our country is concerning — but it’s not unique. And few know that better than Tim Phillips. For 30 years, his organization Beyond Conflict has been bringing people from opposing sides of violent divides together to find common ground. He shares insights from their research into human psychology that could hold keys for overcoming violent division, along with lessons from Northern Ireland, South Africa and beyond to help us fight polarization here at home.
SHOW ACTIONS
Internally Reflect - Try the 90-Second Rule
Think about a time when you strongly disagreed with someone about a political or ideological issue, and notice where you felt that tension or frustration in your body. The next time you’re in that situation: try the 90 second rule — created by Harvard researcher Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, who found it takes 90 seconds for an emotion to pass. Before engaging in a debate or discussion that gets your blood boiling, take 90 seconds to do absolutely nothing: wait to exchange words, step away from your phone — whatever it takes to give you that minute and a half of simply not-that-debate.
Publicly Participate - Invest in building real relationships
Move conversations offline and invest in building real relationships with people across the aisle in your community. Try engaging with organizations setting up opportunities for Americans to come together, and navigate our divides at the local level, such as One America Movement, Civic Genius, Make America Dinner Again, and Living Room Conversations.
SHOW NOTES
Read Tim’s article about what neuroscience can teach us about gun culture in America.
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How To Citizen is hosted by Baratunde Thurston. He’s also host and executive producer of the PBS series, America Outdoors as well as a founding partner and writer at Puck. You can find him all over the internet.
CREDITS
How To Citizen with Baratunde is a production of iHeartRadio Podcasts and Rowhome Productions. Our Executive Producers are Baratunde Thurston and Elizabeth Stewart. Allie Graham is our Lead Producer and Danya AbdelHameid is our Associate Producer. Alex Lewis is our Managing Producer. John Myers is our Executive Editor. Original Music by Andrew Eapen and Blue Dot Sessions. Our Audience Engagement Fellows are Jasmine Lewis and Gabby Rodriguez. Special thanks to Joelle Smith from iHeartRadio and Layla Bina. Additional thanks to our citizen voices Andrea B., Debra, Ina P., Mary P., Damon W., and Allison M.
Two weeks after Roe v. Wade was overturned, Lauren Hall found out the baby she was carrying had a fatal condition: her head and skull weren’t properly developing. Texas’s three overlapping bans on abortion forced her to fly to Washington to terminate the unviable pregnancy. With the Center for Reproductive Rights, she’s now one of five plaintiffs suing the state, so no one else will have to go through what she did.
Guest: Lauren Hall, plaintiff suing the state of Texas over its abortion bans.
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We are joined by Abeba Birhane — Senior Fellow in Trustworthy AI at the Mozilla Foundation — for a critical discussion about the release of GPT-4 and OpenAI. We also get into the excellent work that Abeba and colleagues have done mapping the specific values encoded into, and the surveillance pipeline that influences, the vast majority of AI/ML research.
••• Abeba’s twitter: https://twitter.com/Abebab
••• Abeba’s paper – The Values Encoded in Machine Learning Research https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3531146.3533083
Stuff we referenced
••• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says AI will reshape society, acknowledges risks: 'A little bit scared of this' https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/openai-ceo-sam-altman-ai-reshape-society-acknowledges/story?id=97897122
••• GPT-4 Technical Report https://cdn.openai.com/papers/gpt-4.pdf
••• Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4 https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12712
••• The Sparks of AGI? Or the End of Science? https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/the-sparks-of-agi-or-the-end-of-science
••• GPT-4 and professional benchmarks: the wrong answer to the wrong question https://aisnakeoil.substack.com/p/gpt-4-and-professional-benchmarks
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Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (www.twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (www.twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (www.twitter.com/braunestahl)
Imposter Syndrome and Other Confessions of Alejandra Kim follows a Korean-Argentinian teen's journey to understanding who she is. Through the comfort of her multicultural home in Queens to the hallways of her ultra-woke, elite prep school in Manhattan, Alejandra grapples with academics, the politics of school lunch, and even a microaggression from her own teacher. As author Patricia Park tells Here & Now's Robin Young, it's a story about how quickly the world is changing – and how conversations about race are or aren't keeping up.
