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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 months ago

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Academic economists get big payouts when they help monopolists beat antitrust

After 40 years of rampant corporate crime, there's a new sheriff in town: Jonathan Kanter was appointed by Biden to run the DOJ Antitrust Divisoon, and he's overseen 170 "significant antitrust actions" in the past 2.5 years, culminating in a court case where Google was ruled to be an illegal monopolist:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/07/revealed-preferences/#extinguish-v-improve

Kanter's work is both extraordinary and par for the course. As Kanter said in a recent keynote for the Fordham Law Competition Law Institute’s 51st Annual Conference on International Antitrust Law and Policy, we're witnessing an epochal, global resurgence of antitrust:

https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/assistant-attorney-general-jonathan-kanter-delivers-remarks-fordham-competition-law-0

Kanter's incredible enforcement track record isn't just part of a national trend – his colleagues in the FTC, CFPB and other agencies have also been pursuing an antitrust agenda not seen in generations – but also a worldwide trend. Antitrust enforcers in Canada, the UK, the EU, South Korea, Australia, Japan and even China are all taking aim at smashing corporate monopolies. Not only are they racking up impressive victories against these giant corporations, they're stealing the companies' swagger. After all, the point of enforcement isn't just to punish wrongdoing, but also to deter wrongdoing by others.

Until recently, companies hurled themselves into illegal schemes (mergers, predatory pricing, tying, refusals to deal, etc) without fear or hesitation. Now, many of these habitual offenders are breaking the habit, giving up before they've even tried. Take Wiz, a startup that turned down Google's record-shattering $23b buyout offer, understanding that the attempt would draw more antitrust scrutiny than it was worth:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/wiz-turns-down-23-billion-022926296.html

As welcome as this antitrust renaissance is, it prompts an important question: why didn't we enforce antitrust law for the 40 years between Reagan and Biden?

That's what Kanter addresses the majority of his remarks to. The short answer is: crooked academic economists took bribes from monopolists and would-be monopolists to falsify their research on the impacts of monopolists, and made millions (literally – one guy made over $100m at this) testifying that monopolies were good and efficient.

After all, governments aren't just there to enforce rules – they have to make the rules first, and do to that, they need to understand how the world works, so they can understand how to fix the places where it's broken. That's where experts come in, filling regulators' dockets and juries' ears with truthful, factual testimony about their research. Experts can still be wrong, of course, but when the system works well, they're only wrong by accident.

The system doesn't work well. Back in the 1950s, the tobacco industry was threatened by the growing scientific consensus that smoking caused cancer. Industry scientists confirmed this finding. In response, the industry paid statisticians, doctors and scientists to produce deceptive research reports and testimony about the tobacco/cancer link.

The point of this work wasn't necessarily to convince people that tobacco was safe – rather, it was to create the sense that the safety of tobacco was a fundamentally unanswerable question. "Experts disagree," and you're not qualified to figure out who's right and who's wrong, so just stop trying to figure it out and light up.

In other words, Big Tobacco's cancer denial playbook wasn't so much an attack on "the truth" as it was an attack on epistemology – the system by which we figure out what is true and what isn't. The tactic was devastatingly effective. Not only did it allow the tobacco giants to kill millions of people with impunity, it allowed them to reap billions of dollars by doing so.

Since then, epistemology has been under sustained assault. By the 1970s, Big Oil knew that its products would render the Earth unfit for human habitation, and they hired the same companies that had abetted Big Tobacco's mass murder to provide cover for their own slow-motion, planetary scale killing spree.

Time and again, big business has used assaults on epistemology to provide cover for unthinkable crimes. This has given rise to today's epistemological crisis, in which we don't merely disagree about what is true, but (far more importantly) disagree about how the truth can be known:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/25/black-boxes/#when-you-know-you-know

Ask a conspiratorialist why they believe in Qanon or Hatians in Springfield eating pets, and you'll get an extremely vibes-based answer – fundamentally, they believe it because it feels true. As the old saying goes, you can't reason someone out of a belief they didn't reason their way into.

This assault on reason itself is at the core of Kanter's critique. He starts off by listing three cases in which academic economists allowed themselves to be corrupted by the monopolies they studied:

George Mason University tricked an international antitrust enforcer into attending a training seminar that they believed to be affiliated with the US government. It was actually sponsored by the very companies that enforcer was scrutnizing, and featured a parade of "experts" who asserted that these companies were great, actually.

An academic from GMU – which receives substantial tech industry funding – signed an amicus brief opposing an enforcement action against their funders. The academic also presented a defense of these funders to the OECD, all while posing as a neutral academic and not disclosing their funding sources.

An ex-GMU economist, Joshua Wright, submitted a study defending Qualcomm against the FTC, without disclosing that he'd been paid to do so. Wright has elevated undisclosed conflicts of interest to an art form:

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/law/google-lawyer-secret-weapon-joshua-wright-c98d5a31

Kanter is at pains to point out that these three examples aren't exceptional. The economics profession – whose core tenet is "incentive matter" – has made it standard practice for individual researchers and their academic institutions to take massive sums from giant corporations. Incredibly, they insist that this has nothing to do with their support of monopolies as "efficient."

Academic centers often serve as money-laundries for monopolist funders; researchers can evade disclosure requirements when they publish in journals or testify in court, saying only that they work for some esteemed university, without noting that the university is utterly dependent on money from the companies they're defending.

Now, Kanter is a lawyer, not an academic, and that means that his job is to advocate for positions, and he's at pains to say that he's got nothing but respect for ideological advocacy. What he's objecting to is partisan advocacy dressed up as impartial expertise.

For Kanter, mixing advocacy with expertise doesn't create expert advocacy – it obliterates expertise, as least when it comes to making good policy. This mixing has created a "crisis of expertise…a pervasive breakdown in the distinction between expertise and advocacy in competition policy."

The point of an independent academia, enshrined in the American Association of University Professors' charter, is to "advance knowledge by the unrestricted research and unfettered discussion of impartial investigators." We need an independent academy, because "to be of use to the legislator or the administrator, [an academic] must enjoy their complete confidence in the disinterestedness of [his or her] conclusions."

It's hard to overstate just how much money economists can make by defending monopolies. Writing for The American Prospect, Robert Kuttner gives the rate at $1,000/hour. Monopoly's top defenders make unimaginable sums, like U Chicago's Dennis Carlton, who's brought in over $100m in consulting fees:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-09-24-economists-as-apologists/

The hidden cost of all of this is epistemological consensus. As Tim Harford writes in his 2021 book The Data Detective, the truth can be known through research and peer-review:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/04/how-to-truth/#harford

But when experts deliberately seek to undermine the idea of expertise, they cast laypeople into an epistemological void. We know these questions are important, but we can't trust our corrupted expert institutions. That leaves us with urgent questions – and no answers. That's a terrifying state to be in, and it makes you easy pickings for authoritarian grifters and conspiratorial swindlers.

Seen in this light, Kanter's antitrust work is even more important. In attacking corporate power itself, he is going after the machine that funds this nihilism-inducing corruption machine.

This week, Tor Books published SPILL, a new, free LITTLE BROTHER novella about oil pipelines and indigenous landback!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/25/epistemological-chaos/#incentives-matter

Image: Ron Cogswell (modified) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:George.Mason.University.Arlington.Campus.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

#pluralistic

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gaypornvideoswebsite · 7 months ago

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mcgill is hosting congress (the largest academic social sciences conference in canada) this summer and the students have just set up an encampment there. as it has continued to be, mcgill and montreal will be a very vital space for organized uprising in canada.

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feminist-space · 5 months ago

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"Just weeks before the implosion of AllHere, an education technology company that had been showered with cash from venture capitalists and featured in glowing profiles by the business press, America’s second-largest school district was warned about problems with AllHere’s product.

As the eight-year-old startup rolled out Los Angeles Unified School District’s flashy new AI-driven chatbot — an animated sun named “Ed” that AllHere was hired to build for $6 million — a former company executive was sending emails to the district and others that Ed’s workings violated bedrock student data privacy principles.

Those emails were sent shortly before The 74 first reported last week that AllHere, with $12 million in investor capital, was in serious straits. A June 14 statement on the company’s website revealed a majority of its employees had been furloughed due to its “current financial position.” Company founder and CEO Joanna Smith-Griffin, a spokesperson for the Los Angeles district said, was no longer on the job.

Smith-Griffin and L.A. Superintendent Alberto Carvalho went on the road together this spring to unveil Ed at a series of high-profile ed tech conferences, with the schools chief dubbing it the nation’s first “personal assistant” for students and leaning hard into LAUSD’s place in the K-12 AI vanguard. He called Ed’s ability to know students “unprecedented in American public education” at the ASU+GSV conference in April.

Through an algorithm that analyzes troves of student information from multiple sources, the chatbot was designed to offer tailored responses to questions like “what grade does my child have in math?” The tool relies on vast amounts of students’ data, including their academic performance and special education accommodations, to function.

Meanwhile, Chris Whiteley, a former senior director of software engineering at AllHere who was laid off in April, had become a whistleblower. He told district officials, its independent inspector general’s office and state education officials that the tool processed student records in ways that likely ran afoul of L.A. Unified’s own data privacy rules and put sensitive information at risk of getting hacked. None of the agencies ever responded, Whiteley told The 74.

...

In order to provide individualized prompts on details like student attendance and demographics, the tool connects to several data sources, according to the contract, including Welligent, an online tool used to track students’ special education services. The document notes that Ed also interfaces with the Whole Child Integrated Data stored on Snowflake, a cloud storage company. Launched in 2019, the Whole Child platform serves as a central repository for LAUSD student data designed to streamline data analysis to help educators monitor students’ progress and personalize instruction.

Whiteley told officials the app included students’ personally identifiable information in all chatbot prompts, even in those where the data weren’t relevant. Prompts containing students’ personal information were also shared with other third-party companies unnecessarily, Whiteley alleges, and were processed on offshore servers. Seven out of eight Ed chatbot requests, he said, are sent to places like Japan, Sweden, the United Kingdom, France, Switzerland, Australia and Canada.

Taken together, he argued the company’s practices ran afoul of data minimization principles, a standard cybersecurity practice that maintains that apps should collect and process the least amount of personal information necessary to accomplish a specific task. Playing fast and loose with the data, he said, unnecessarily exposed students’ information to potential cyberattacks and data breaches and, in cases where the data were processed overseas, could subject it to foreign governments’ data access and surveillance rules.

Chatbot source code that Whiteley shared with The 74 outlines how prompts are processed on foreign servers by a Microsoft AI service that integrates with ChatGPT. The LAUSD chatbot is directed to serve as a “friendly, concise customer support agent” that replies “using simple language a third grader could understand.” When querying the simple prompt “Hello,” the chatbot provided the student’s grades, progress toward graduation and other personal information.

AllHere’s critical flaw, Whiteley said, is that senior executives “didn’t understand how to protect data.”

...

Earlier in the month, a second threat actor known as Satanic Cloud claimed it had access to tens of thousands of L.A. students’ sensitive information and had posted it for sale on Breach Forums for $1,000. In 2022, the district was victim to a massive ransomware attack that exposed reams of sensitive data, including thousands of students’ psychological evaluations, to the dark web.

With AllHere’s fate uncertain, Whiteley blasted the company’s leadership and protocols.

“Personally identifiable information should be considered acid in a company and you should only touch it if you have to because acid is dangerous,” he told The 74. “The errors that were made were so egregious around PII, you should not be in education if you don’t think PII is acid.”

Read the full article here:

https://www.the74million.org/article/whistleblower-l-a-schools-chatbot-misused-student-data-as-tech-co-crumbled/

#data breach #lausd #la school system #tech bro ai being reckless with personal data as usual #anti ai

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eretzyisrael · 22 days ago

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by Jonah Fried

B’nai Brith Canada is astounded and appalled by the University of Toronto’s refusal to acknowledge its concerns on behalf of the Jewish community about a pair of problematic events scheduled to take place on campus next week.

“We were disappointed, to put it mildly, by the U of T’s response to a letter we sent last week,” said Richard Robertson, B’nai Brith Canada’s Director of Research and Advocacy. “In the wake of the antisemitism that proliferated at the encampment last summer, U of T committed to securing its campus and creating an environment that is safe for all students. The response we received from the university dismissed our valid concerns and did not even express a hint of compassion for Jewish students, who are concerned that the two events next week will further escalate tensions and incite hatred on campus.”

The first of the two planned events is a Nov. 7 appearance by Francesca Albanese, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the “Occupied Palestinian Territories.” Albanese has repeatedly legitimized the acts of terrorist organizations, including violence against Israeli civilians.

On Nov. 8, anti-Israel radicals intend to host a so-called “Anti-Zionist Ideas Conference.” The panel is set to include Nasser Abourahme, who has described Zionism as “colonialism” and, in doing so, rejects the Jewish people’s ancestral ties to the Land of Israel. Other participants include Daniel Boyarin, who advocates for a no-state solution to the conflict in Israel, effectively calling for the destruction of the world’s only Jewish State.

In response to B’nai Brith’s letter, which cited concerns for the security and well-being of the Jewish community, a spokesperson for U of T President Meric Gertler wrote that the school “does not take positions on contentious social, political or other issues apart from those directly pertaining to higher education and academic research.” The University did not offer any proactive assurances or commitments to mitigate the issues B’nai Brith raised on behalf of Jewish students, faculty and staff.

“Even if U of T feels it cannot stop the events from taking place, it could have done more to acknowledge the bona fide concerns of its Jewish community,” Robertson said. “It could have offered to increase security on campus or committed to monitoring the events for incidents of hate speech or misinformation. Instead, the administration seems disinterested in the impact the events will have on the Jewish members of its community.

“U of T appears to have wiped its hands of the matter, and that is extremely difficult to accept.”

#u of t #university of toronto #b'nai brith #francesca albanese #meric gertler #anti-zionist ideas conference

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rjzimmerman · 3 months ago

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Excerpt from this article from Jacobin:

In Canada, false environmental claims are now illegal. Under legislation passed in June, companies may be penalized for making representations to the public about their products’ ability to mitigate climate change without being based on an “adequate and proper test.” It was a success for environmental groups who spent a year and half working on the antigreenwashing law.

The legislation is just one moment in a much wider “disinformation turn” in the climate movement: the US Congress has been holding high-profile hearings with titles like “Denial, Disinformation, and Doublespeak: Big Oil’s Evolving Efforts to Avoid Accountability for Climate Change.” Academics are convening conferences on “climate obstruction” with multiple days of deep dives from the network of scholars that meticulously track corporate climate misinformation. Environmental NGOs are making disinformation databases with lists of individuals and scientists and leading programs on climate disinformation. And think tanks that work on disinformation are now moving into climate, with reports like the Center for Countering Digital Hate’s The New Climate Denial.

Disinformation is a curious focus for the climate movement at this moment, however, at least from a US standpoint. This is because we actually have some funds for climate action on the ground. The 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill and 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) unleashed a trillion dollars to use to address the climate crisis. But much of the public is unaware of this massive investment — and local governments, tribes, and organizations often struggle to navigate accessing the new funding.

These material victories would make it the perfect time for a climate movement to focus on things like explaining to people what heat pumps are, campaigning to expedite transmission lines, and helping communities understand the labyrinth of federal funding. Indeed, many regional government organizations, municipal planners, and volunteer committees who work on climate action have their hands full with these activities. They are engaged with the ground game of mitigation and adaptation.

Yet the nationwide connective tissue and broader narrative about climate action feels absent. If there is a role for “climate intellectuals” — for the online climate commentariat, the journalists and national NGO leaders who tell us the story of climate action — it would be to focus on the new opportunities for action on the ground, and knit together those people in Peoria or Altoona who are trying to talk to people about resilience, connecting them in a broader story that fuels their motivation. Instead, the intellectual wing of the climate movement has decided to wage an information war focused on uncovering what Big Oil knew and policing speech.

Given that funding and public attention is limited, this climate-disinformation obsession is a missed opportunity and a strategic dead-end — part of a larger liberal tendency to make disinformation a bogeyman we can blame for our major political problems.

#climate disinformation

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justinspoliticalcorner · 3 months ago

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Rebecca Crosby at Popular Information:

Major corporations, including Mastercard, Meta, and Coca-Cola, are quietly sponsoring a Canadian conference headlined by Christopher Rufo, a far-right activist and crusader against diversity initiatives. Many of these same companies, however, champion diversity in their public communications. Rufo is listed as a featured speaker for the Canada Strong and Free Regional Networking Conference 2024, which will be held in Alberta, Canada on September 21. The event, which was first highlighted by DeSmog, is billed as an “enriching exploration of conservatism in Canada.” On X, the organization promoted the event using a photo of Rufo with the text, “Fighting the left and wokism.”

Rufo has been credited with creating the hysteria around Critical Race Theory (CRT) in educational settings. In 2020, Rufo appeared on Tucker Carlson’s former show on Fox News and called on Trump to end CRT training. Within days, the Trump administration released a memo outlining a ban on diversity training in the government, and Trump issued the executive order shortly after.

When it became clear that CRT is a complex legal theory that is not taught in K-12 schools, Rufo shifted his attention to lambasting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Rufo appeared with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) as DeSantis signed the Stop W.O.K.E. Act, which limits workplace conversations about diversity and race. (That aspect of the law has been enjoined by a federal court as unconstitutional.) Rufo has also been a leader in the crusade to ban discussion of LGBTQ issues in schools. On X, Rufo insinuated that people were attempting to indoctrinate pre-kindergarten students with information about “gender transitioning, exotic pronouns, and simplified Queer Theory.” Rufo has also said that “parents have good reason” to be concerned about “‘grooming’ in public schools.”

In 2023, Rufo was appointed by DeSantis to the board of trustees at the New College of Florida as part of a right-wing takeover of the liberal arts college. In his newsletter, Rufo bragged that New College was “the first public university in America to begin rolling back the encroachment of gender ideology and queer theory on its academic offerings.” In an interview with the New York Times, Rufo said that New College previously enrolled too many women, which turned it into “a social justice ghetto.” On X, in response to pictures of dozens of books at the college being thrown away, Rufo said, “We abolished the gender studies program. Now we’re throwing out the trash.” Companies who claim to support diversity are sponsoring the upcoming event promoting Rufo and his ideological agenda. Mastercard, for example, prides itself on being one of the leaders for DEI initiatives among major corporations. Mastercard’s website states that “[d]iversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) are what set Mastercard apart by making us more adaptable, more innovative and more creative.” Mastercard says that DEI “makes us better” and is “part of our core values and underpins everything we do.”

Why are major corporations sponsoring an “anti-woke” conference in Red Deer, Alberta, Canada featuring right-wing paranoiac Christopher Rufo.

Rufo helped foment the manufactured crusade against “CRT” in K-12 schools, LGBTQ+ inclusion policies, and DEI in businesses.

#Christopher Rufo #Christopher F. Rufo #Canada Strong and Free Regional Networking Conference #Critical Race Theory #Anti LGBTQ+ Extremism #LGBTQ+#DEI #Diversity Equity and Inclusion #Canada

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 1 year ago

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By: Malcolm Clark

Published: Jul 18, 2023

The LGBT movement is beginning to behave more like a religious cult than a human-rights lobby. It’s not just the Salem-like witch hunts it pursues against its critics. It’s also its flight from reason and its embrace of magical thinking.

This irrationalism is best illustrated by its recent embrace of the term ‘two-spirit’ (often shortened to ‘2S’), which in North America has been added to the lobby’s ever-growing acronym, meaning we are now expected to refer to – take a deep breath – the ‘2SLGBTQQIA+ community’.

The term two-spirit was first formally endorsed at a conference of Native American gay activists in 1990 in Winnipeg in Canada. It is a catch-all term to cover over 150 different words used by the various Indian tribes to describe what we think of today as gay, trans or various forms of gender-bending, such as cross-dressing. Two-spirit people, the conference declared, combine the masculine and the feminine spirits in one.

From the start, the whole exercise reeked of mystical hooey. Myra Laramee, the woman who proposed the term in 1990, said it had been given to her by ancestor spirits who appeared to her in a dream. The spirits, she said, had both male and female faces.

Incredibly, three decades on, there are now celebrities and politicians who endorse the concept or even identify as two-spirit. The term has found its way into one of Joe Biden’s presidential proclamations and is a constant feature of Canadian premier Justin Trudeau’s doe-eyed bleating about ‘2SLGBTQQIA+ rights’.

The term’s success is no doubt due in part to white guilt. There is a tendency to associate anything Native American with a lost wisdom that is beyond whitey’s comprehension. Ever since Marlon Brando sent ‘Apache’ activist Sacheen Littlefeather to collect his Oscar in 1973, nothing has signalled ethical superiority as much as someone wearing a feather headdress.

The problem is that too many will believe almost any old guff they are told about Native Americans. This is an open invitation to fakery. Ms Littlefeather, for example, may have built a career as a symbol of Native American womanhood. But after her death last year, she was exposed as a member of one of the fastest growing tribes in North America: the Pretendians. Her real name was Marie Louise Cruz. She was born to a white mother and a Mexican father, and her supposed Indian heritage had just been made up.

Much of the fashionable two-spirit shtick is just as fake. For one thing, it’s presented as an acknowledgment of the respect Indian tribes allegedly showed individuals who were gender non-conforming. Yet many of the words that two-spirit effectively replaces are derogatory terms.

In truth, there was a startling range of attitudes to the ‘two-spirited’ among the more than 500 separate indigenous Native American tribes. Certain tribes may have been relaxed about, say, effeminate men. Others were not. In his history of homosexuality, The Construction of Homosexuality (1998), David Greenberg points out that those who are now being called ‘two spirit’ were ridiculed by the Papago, held in contempt by the Choctaws, disliked by the Cocopa, treated by the Seven Nations with ‘the most sovereign contempt’ and “derided” by the Sioux. In the case of the Yuma, who lived in what is now Colorado, the two-spirited were sometimes treated as rape objects for the young men of the tribe.

The contradictions and incoherence of the two-spirit label may be explained by an uncomfortable fact. The two-spirit project was shaped from day one by complete mumbo-jumbo. The 1990 conference that adopted the term was inspired by a seminal book, Living the Spirit: A Gay Indian Anthology, published two years earlier. Its essays were compiled and edited by a young white academic called Will Roscoe. He was the historical adviser to the conference. And his work on gay people in Indian cultural history – a niche genre in the 1980s – had become the received wisdom on the subject.

Roscoe’s work had an unlikely origin story of its own. In 1979, he joined over 200 other naked gay men in the Arizona desert for an event dubbed the ‘Spiritual Conference for Radical Faeries’. It was here where he met Harry Hay, the man who would become his spiritual mentor and whose biography he would go on to write. The event was Hay’s brainchild and was driven by his conviction that gay men’s lives had become spiritually empty and dominated by shallow consumerism. For three days, Roscoe and the other men sought spiritual renewal in meditation, singing and classes in Native American dancing. There were also classes in auto-fellatio, lest anyone doubt this was a gay men’s event.

To say Hay, who died in 2002, was eccentric is to radically understate his weirdness. For one thing, he was a vocal supporter of paedophilia. As such, he once took a sandwich board to a Pride march proclaiming ‘NAMBLA walks with me’, in reference to the paedophilia-advocacy group, the North American Man / Boy Love Association. Hay also believed that gay men were a distinct third gender who had been gifted shamanic powers. According to Hay, these powers were recognised and revered by pre-Christian peoples, from Ancient Greece to, you guessed it, the indigenous tribes of North America.

For years, Hay had been experimenting with sweat lodges and dressing up in Indian garb in ways that would now be criticised as cultural appropriation. Despite this, Roscoe took Hay’s incoherent thesis – that gender-bending and spiritual enlightenment go hand in hand – and turned it into a piece of Native American history.

Unsurprisingly, given its provenance, Roscoe’s work is full of holes and lazy assumptions. To prove that two-spirit people combine the feminine and masculine spirits, Roscoe searched for evidence of gender non-conforming behaviour among the Indian tribes. The problem was that he had to mainly rely on the accounts of white settlers who had little understanding of Native cultures. And even when he didn’t rely on those sources, Roscoe still jumped to the wrong conclusions.

Take, for example, the case of Running Eagle, ‘the virgin woman warrior’ of the Blackfeet tribe, whom Roscoe was the first to label as two-spirit. As a girl, she rebelled against the usual girl chores and insisted on being taught how to hunt and fight. She became a noted warrior and declared she would never marry a man or submit to one.

Of course, none of this really means that Running Eagle was two-spirit, or that the tribe she hailed from was made up of LGBT pioneers. It merely shows that the Blackfeet were smart and adaptable enough to recognise martial talent in a girl and were able to make good use of a remarkable individual. Nevertheless, Roscoe’s description of her has become gospel and Running Eagle is now endlessly cited as an example of a two-spirit.

This is a mind-numbingly reductive approach. It’s based on the presumption that what we think of as feminine and masculine traits are fixed and stable across time and cultures. It dictates that no Native American man or woman who ever breaks a gender taboo or fails to conform to expectations can be anything but two-spirit. This is gender policing on steroids.

The two-spirit term also does Native American cultures a deep disservice. It assumes that 500 different tribes were both homogenous and static. As journalist Mary Annette Pember, herself Ojibwe, argues, it also erases ‘distinct cultural and language differences that Native peoples hold crucial to their identity’.

In some ways, it is entirely unsurprising that the wayward ‘2SLGBTQQIA+’ movement has fastened on to two-spirit, an invented term with a bogus pedigree. Far from paying tribute to Native American cultures in all their richness, it exploits them to make a cheap political point. Harry Hay and his fellow auto-fellators would be proud.

"Two spirit" is a great way of fabricating an interesting identity when you don't have one. And you can scream at people as "bigots," but without the guilt of lying about your great-grandparents being descendants of Sacagawea.

The fake mysticism goes along neatly with the notion of disembodied sexed thetans ("gender identity") which become trapped between worlds in the wrong meat bodies.

#Malcolm Clark #two spirit #pretendians #native american #native american culture #noble savage #narcissism #narcissistic personality disorder #2SLGBTQ #gender ideology #queer theory #cultural appropriation #religion is a mental illness

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psalm22-6 · 2 years ago

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What May Possibly Be the Worst Les Mis Fanfiction of All Time aka the Legal Scholars AU

Look, if Mr. Justice Gilles Renaud reads this, I am sorry, but I read his 90 page book and each page was filled with some new horror. First of all, “Mr. Justice” is not his first name; Mr. Justice is apparently what you call a judge in Canada. And he is an actual judge, which kind of frightens, but does not surprise me. He is also a legal scholar and this book was published by a scholarly press, the Sandstone Academic Press in Melbourne.

This is the book’s premise:

The reader is invited to participate in an unprecedented educational conference, held at Deakin Law School [in Australia], hosted by the publishers of the International Journal of Punishment and Sentencing [also real, also based out of Australia] to which are invited Jean Valjean, Fantine, Javert and Bishop "Welcome" as guest lecturers. Each in turn, and at times together, will address a plenary session of criminologists, lawyers, judges, probation officers, politicians, and others vitally interested in the reform of sentencing law. Drawing upon their lives, as penned by Hugo, and upon a surprisingly well-developed knowledge of academic writings, they will debate the merits of current penology as defined in the widest sense, and in so doing, will confront contemporary views on themes such as the mitigation arising from social deprivation, the merits of criminalizing prostitution, the need to maintain prisons while radically enhancing the methods of re-integrating former detainees into the community, and the scope to be accorded rehabilitation in selecting a fit and fair sanction, among other issues. [emphasis mine]

Look, I don’t hate the premise but I promise this conference is going to be a wild ride. So, please head over to the registration booth, sign in and pick up your swag bag, then stop by the lobby for some light refreshments, and head into the first event of the day:

That’s right, Fantine will be leading the first session, and it will be chaired by Professor D. E. Nine of Harvard University (I do not think this is a real person, I think this is the first of the many OCs who are attending the conference). Professor Nine introduces Fantine to the audience. (In this introduction Cosette is spelled both correctly and incorrectly in the same sentence). You will be happy to know that Fantine strode to the podium "with a confident air." Apparently she has had a lot of time to study the law since she died (Canadian law, that is.) Fantine uses a projector to show the audience her notes on the Canadian penal code and argues that Bamatabois's attack constitutes sexual assault.

"It is plausible for me to suggest that Mr. Bamatabois would be found guilty of a sexual assault as his verbal attacks coupled with his physical attack made it plain that he was assaulting me, a prostitute, by reason of my being one, coupled with the fact that I was unattractive in his eyes."

According to Fantine, Bamatabois could receive a maximum prison sentence of 18 months. However, she says, a person convicted of placing bets on behalf of others may be imprisoned for up to two years. Using a laser pointer, Fantine gives other examples of criminalized behavior that received harsher penalties than sexual assault, "to illustrate that certain values are given pre-eminence over those of the sexual integrity of men, women and children."

After taking questions from the audience, Fantine concludes by saying "The point of my presentation this morning is to urge you to return to your home jurisdictions and to search out for these types of unequal penalty schemes and to seek legislative amendments in order that the violations of the personal integrity of our brothers and sisters be penalized with greater objective severity than gaming offenses." I'm not a legal scholar (unlike Fantine), I'm just trying to summarize a book so I'm not going to offer commentary on the ideas she presents here. Let's just go to the next session.

Professor Sacha Trofimenkoff of the School of Criminology at Saint Mary's University chaired this lecture and entertained the audience by name-dropping famous Australian judges. Some members of the audience were running late and came to the lecture hall directly from the airport.

Bishop Myriel, or Bishop Welcome as he is introduced by Professor Trofimenkoff, "began his presentation in almost too soft a voice, apparently ill at ease at having to discuss his private affairs." Although he describes Hugo's account of his own life as "relatively unimportant passages," he cites his life story as evidence that humans can change for the better at any point in time, which he wants to see reflected in sentencing guidelines.

"Sadly," Myriel says, "the evidence seems to suggest that many more offenders pursue the opposite journey and come to adopt anti-social behaviors or attitudes, as was the case of our beloved Fantine." (Kind of a rude thing to say about his colleague.)

Myriel gives many examples of books on the topic at hand and then "hesitated, fearful that his listeners were growing disinterested, but he realized the silence that marked the room was evidence of rapt attention."

The bishop was about to end the first part of his lecture when he said "May I add a few words, which I wish to do as a result of a pointer I received from an American friend who suggests that I must always complete a speech with a humorous comment." The comment is not important, I just want to point out that apparently, Myriel has an American friend.

The conversation turns to war criminals (?!), Dr. Trofimenkoff quotes Hamlets and the session is over (for now).

During the recess, the Bishop receives many requests to speak at different schools. Upon returning to the podium, he introduces several books on the topic of restorative justice, arguing that the communities from which criminals originate (side eye at the idea that there aren't criminals in other communities that aren't being hyper-policied) and the communities to which they return need to be invested in. Although he is very modest and therefore hesitant to share about himself, he gives as an example the city of Briancon, a community in his bishopric where there hasn't been a murder in 100 years, as well as the improvements made to Montreuil-sur-Mer by Jean Valjean. I know this doesn't seem that bad, and I am going to skip over Fantine's small group discussion on the subject of the unintended consequences of sentencing (except to say that she is a very skilled facilitator) and jump straight to:

The report on this small group session begins with a note on “concerns surrounding reliability of information.” I was expecting this to be about Javert’s reliability but instead, it was about the reliability of character witnesses who often exaggerate (for better or for worse) an offender’s qualities. As an example of unreliable information, Javert cites rumors which were spread about Bishop Myriel, as well as Fantine. Although there was a rumor that Fantine had abandoned her child, “ ‘the truth,’ noted Javert, who was always scrupulously punctilious as to the facts, although often blinded by class issues, ‘the truth is that Fantine had not abandoned her child, far from it!’ ” He urges sentencing judges not to rush to conclusions, saying: “in effect, most questions may be ‘flipped’ or stopped on their head, and one ought not to leap to judgment,” which is funny coming from a man who jumped off a bridge in order to avoid critical thinking.

The next morning, Javert kicked off the second day of the conference with his plenary session.

“Good morning, Ladies and Gentlemen," intoned the career police officer whom Hugo had described initially as a Spartan, a monk, a pitiless individual lying in wait, possessed of a ferocious honest, ‘Brutus in Vidocq.’ Of course, he was no such thing as we well know given his subsequent suicide, the only means he knew to justify his decision not to arrest Valjean. [No, I did not know that about him.] "As you are all liberals who despise the prison system and libertarians who hate justice and retribution, I need not mince words in addressing you. I am a firm believer in populist law and order, in just deserts, indeed, in punishment for the sake of punishment . . ." Needless to say, he had gained the rapt attention of all those present. [Is he negging the audience?]

He explained the circumstances of his birth and his career in the police. He said “I owe my liberty and my freedom to the very existence of a jail system. . .Custody of some serves the liberty of all!” (Now do you see why I hate this?)

Javert took a sip of water (“disdaining the juices and other beverages”) while the audience thought about his words. Before he could continue he was interrupted by Professor Simon Segovia of the University of Seville, who quoted Hemingway and stated that “Prisons harm those they seek to improve.” In response, Javert emotionally revealed his strict moral code, as a result of which he “led a life of privation, isolation, abnegation, chastity, with never a diversion” (and thereby sidestepped Professor Segovia’s question).

Another professor (“who looked on at him with a mixture of frank puzzlement and understated bemusement”) asked him to comment on the case of Paul Crump (sidenote, you may be familiar with this name if you are a fan of Phil Ochs).

“What say you respecting the tremendous strides that felon achieved when given access to books?”. . . “What would you have me say,’ sneered Javert, “I have never stated that prison ought not to assist offenders, quite to the contrary. . .the fact that so many prisons represent abject failures in respect of their foundational purpose is no justification for demolishing them, however. In fact, it might be said that there is a better advocate of the. . . utility of prison. . .in our midst’s. . .and that is Jean Valjean himself.”

That's right. The room was silent except for some whispers and the sound of pens on paper. Everyone in the audience disapproved of what Javert had said except one man, “the former forçât [sic] Valjean” who “began his comments with a whispered 'Bravo!' " He came up to the podium and continued:

Javert has said out loud what I have long believed. Indeed, prison did elevate my base instincts somewhat in that I did receive a form of education that was far superior to what I had obtained in my childhood. Further, I did learn discipline in the prison setting . . . In addition, I did acquire a grudging sense of respect for the justice that was meted out in that place.

After taking a drink and “whispering to those around him that being over two hundred years old meant that he should take his time in completing his assignment,” he said:

My old foe and friend is quite correct . . . it was just that I be jailed for my crime . . . It is important for me to acknowledge publicly, once again for the sake of emphasis, although this may affront certain liberal-minded reformers, that I was able to acquire the rudiments of an education while in prison . . . and I might well have done far better had I applied myself.

I'm sorry for putting the whole quote in bold but I can't help it. Jean Valjean says actually prisons are good! Then, in support of that idea, a South African student, Kagiso Nankudhu, (again, this is a fictional character) gives the example of anti-Apartheid political prisoners who studied while imprisoned.

Overall though, Valjean’s claim that there is no “new punitiveness,” and that the idea is just political rhetoric, did not go over well with the audience. He did concede, however, that Canada seemed to be heading in the right direction. (Really??) Javert closed the session by quoting Nelson Mandela.

At the 1 o’clock plenary session, Professor Saku Maki of Helsinki University introduced Valjean thus:

Jean Valjean is the universal symbol for English-speaking lawyers and criminologists of the impoverished individual who became an offender only by reason of the State having offended against him . . . I will now invite him to explain in his own words how he feels about this popular image of Valjean as the victim, and never as the victimizer.

In short, Valjean has come to the conclusion that the theft of bread was “extreme and blameworthy,” that he should have just asked for the bread, and that, even though there were starving children involved, he should have waited to earn enough money because it is very rare for someone to die of hunger. (So what is the point of this whole "debate" if you are just going to change the character's beliefs from the book?)

Then Valjean turned the mic over to Professor Reed Johnson of the University of Ottawa, “a genial, ruddy-faced middle-aged individual whose nickname among the student body is ‘Guinness’” (another one of the author’s OCs), who lectured on the question “is it relevant to the selection of a fit sentence that an offender has known but sadness in life?” He cites Eponine and Azelma as examples of abused children who grow up to have a life of crime and speculates that Valjean’s nephews probably became criminals as well. This went on for some time until it was Javert’s turn to speak. Javert stated that he disagreed with Victor Hugo’s assertation that “the faults of women, of children, of the feeble, the indigent, and the ignorant, are the fault of the husbands, the fathers, the masters, the strong, the rich, and the wise.” (So why write a book about the law and Victor Hugo if you don't like what he has to say about the law?) Jean Valjean knew that the audience would want to debate the ideas discussed but to avoid that, he invited Bishop Myriel to provide some closing comments. (Why frame this as a debate if the characters try to avoid a debate!?)

On Wednesday, Jean Valjean recounted the whole story of his 19 years in prison and said:

Having reflected long and hard on my further crimes, and the foolishness of my behavior, I wish to state to you that my friend Javert cannot be faulted for his belief that each of the individual sentences was proportionate to my misconduct, that the total penalty in each case was fairly estimated, and that the gradation of the penalties was not ill-advised.

He asserts that the harsh penalty for his second escape attempt, in which he hit a guard, was warranted, in order to protect “those who hold such dangerous occupations, be they police officers, prosecutors, judges, probation officers, social workers engaged with offenders, etc.,” even though he admits that it is unclear whether punishing attacks against prison guards prevent further attacks. In fact, he admits that “it is the retribution visited upon the prisoners during periodic assertions of naked force by prison staff. . . .that serves to deter future acts of aggression and not the workings of an organized scheme of penalties.”

If I may say, the worst of it is now over (but not entirely done.) At one o’clock, the Bishop led a small group discussion. Recalling the example of a woman in Les Miserables who was manipulated by the police into denouncing her lover for a crime punishable by death, the Bishop said “I am familiar with the words of Robert Reiner, ‘To fight crime the police must themselves resort to tactics which appear to mirror those of their foes, using violence and guile for just ends’, but I am not about to commend such tactics.” Well thank god.

Unfortunately, Fantine’s small group discussion at 3 was not well attended.

I do not doubt that many of you might be surprised that a literary figure such as me, who lived in the Napoleonic period, might be so vitally concerned with the welfare of animals, but such is the case, given Hugo’s own intense respect for all forms of life.

One participant, “Ms. Rita Joe, who was pursuing her doctoral studies at the Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore but who was a member of the Dene Nation and who was grown up in the Yukon Territory of Canada,” contributed to the conversation by quoting Jack London. This seriously short session was the last one on Wednesday.

Thursday was the last day of the conference and in the opening session, Fantine set out to argue that “it is a crime for society to make criminals and offenders out of women, and men, who sell their bodies for money. . .and I do not think that I will need to address you at length in order to demonstrate [my thesis’s] essential validity.” And indeed, she did not address the crowd for long at all, all she did was quote her own story at length. These last few chapters do not feel fleshed out.

Finally, it was time for the last plenary session. The Bishop delivered some closing words about reacclimating to life outside of prison. However, it was Javert who had the final word. He quoted (and no, I am not kidding) David Llyod George, who said, with regard to the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, “our function is to guide the path of reform and all trail-blazing is fraught with risk.”

#les miserables #other adaptations #my research #cursed content #fans through the ages

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tarysande · 1 year ago

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Can I ask, how does one go about becoming an editor? Like, where do you apply for jobs?? What kinda training do you do?? Are there companies that hire out editors to writers? Im just so confused about it. Ive always been interested in editing, and am considering doing it as a job

Editing is a weird career.

Really, I started as a writer. Like, when I was eleven. In jr. high and high school, I was in a writing critique group and I wrote a lot. I graduated from university with a degree in theatre, film, and creative writing. I was often the person my friends came to when they needed help with a paper (or the correct placement of a semicolon). I've been involved in fandom since I was about 17, and I was very fortunate to fall in with a group of excellent writers who were also excellent betas and editors. I learned a TON from them without realizing how much I was learning.

I started editing by accident, really. Sometimes, that's how it happens. I mostly got gigs here and there through friends or word of mouth. About ten years ago, I got more serious about it. I worked for companies that paid horribly. Then I did an editing test for a company that paid less horribly, and they hired me. After a couple of years editing countless academic papers, ESL academic papers, novels, emails, business documents, etc., I decided to branch out on my own (mostly so I could work on more fiction; I was burned out on academic papers).

I joined Editors Canada, started volunteering with them, got a lot more experience, and took a few continuing ed courses to gauge where my skills were at and to determine if I needed to upgrade my education. I decided I didn't need to do that, because I already knew the things I was being taught.

I read a lot of books on editing, writing, and craft. I familiarized myself with the Chicago Manual of Style, APA, MLA, and a couple of other style guides. I learned the differences in spelling, punctuation, and style between US, UK, and Canadian English. I went to webinars, conferences, and courses (all the major editing associations offer these, usually cheaper or free for members; they are a great way to determine what kinds of editing you actually LIKE). I learned the difference between rules and preferences, and when to apply them to a text.

I work freelance, which means I have my own business as a sole proprietor. I'm a contractor with a couple of companies who sometimes send work my way, but most of my clients are individual writers planning to either self-publish or polish their work before seeking traditional publication via the agent/tradpub route.

Freelancing has many perks but is not particularly secure. Especially if you're American and need an employer to provide health insurance, or if you're single and don't have another income to lean on when contracts are scarce. These days, most of my work comes via referrals, my website, or the listing I have in the Editors Canada directory. I follow a couple of editing-related Facebook groups; I've learned a lot there, and I've also picked up the occasional client. A couple of people have found me through LinkedIn. A couple of people have found me through here!

I've never worked in-house for a publisher--mostly because having control over how many hours I work and when I work them is my top priority. In-house is a whole different ballgame; I know a bit about it from my peers, but I don't have firsthand experience to pass on. These jobs are supposedly more secure--and they tend to be salaried, with benefits, etc.

"Editing" is a GIANT umbrella term. There are SO many types of editing out there. People tend to think of book publishing first, but that's only one avenue. There are also different kinds of editors who tackle different types of problems. I've done enough of everything to recognize that I am much happier when I'm working on big picture stuff--coaching, developmental editing, manuscript critique. Others specialize in the nitty gritty mechanical details that make proofreading or copy editing a better fit.

Right now, the bulk of my work life is actually spent ghostwriting. The client's business-materials editor posted that his client was looking for someone to help with characterization in a novel. I ended up winning that contract. He came to me with one monster book. I helped him realize it needed to be at least a trilogy, and now he has plans for a ten-book series--and I'm helping write it. But I got the job because of the work I've done on the development side of editing--and because I've spent SO MUCH TIME learning about characterization (via acting, fandom/writing fanfic, reading, etc.). So. It all feeds into the same place.

The tl;dr is that my experience has been a bizarre mix of being in the right place at the right time, ongoing professional development, and learning the value of volunteering with an association. If I were starting down this career path right now, I'd probably do an editing certificate (there are many out there, depending on country). I'd definitely join an association sooner (even as a student member) and volunteer.

Actually, the ultimate tl;dr is ... this industry IS CONFUSING. So, don't feel bad about being confused. It's actually probably about eight different kinds of job wearing a trench-coat and pretending it's something called "Editing."

#on editing #editing #on ghostwriting #publishing #on publishing

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scifrey · 4 months ago

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3 titles, 13 years, and 20+ drafts later, the book is DONE and available for pre-order.

It's WILD to think that I first came up with the idea for this book in 2008 on a trip to the UK to present a paper on #DoctorWho and Canada at the Whoniversal Appeal Academic conference in Cardiff University. I didn't start working on it right away, because I was writing my MA thesis AND finishing my first novel (which would eventually become my debut "Triptych"). But it was percolating the whole time. Once "Triptych" was published, I dove into "First Impressions" as my sophomore offering--another time travel romance, this time clothed as a Historical instead of SciFi. Second books are, I think, a lot harder to write than first books, because it's the first time you're writing a book specifically because you intent to sell it, which puts a lot of market pressure and outside opinions on it. I struggled and I struggled hard with this one (hence the 13 years!).

BUT my little book and I finally got to a place where we're the best versions of ourselves. The hard work was worth it.

#j.m. frey #jmfrey #time and tide #time travel #sapphic #bisexual #romance #historical #creative writing #am writing #writing community #writing #author

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laegolas · 5 months ago

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I think the biggest culture shock I (an Australian) have experienced during this international academic conference (in Canada) is that I forgot about the amount of respect given to titles.

Back home, most academics will introduce themselves with their first name and expect you to call them by it. One of my supervisors got promoted to Associate Professor, but he's still [Nickname], even to the undergrads. If you're Australian, and you try to force someone to use your title, you're seen as a bit uppity - a symptom of tall poppy syndrome I'm sure. If you introduce yourself with a name, we assume that's what you'd like to be called. If we like you enough, we may even bestow a nickname upon you.

But spending time around the other postgrads, they all call their supervisors, or anyone with a title "Doctor ...", "Professor ...", even if they have a close, positive relationship. Meanwhile I defaulted to the name they introduced themselves with - which explains why some of them thought I had already received my PhD. And I truly don't mean to be rude, or disrespect the title. It's these little things that mean, even if you speak the same language, you do not come from the same culture.

#academia #i really shouldve known better im a fucking sociologist for gods sake lmao #extremely funny moment tho that made me realise this was that the “grandfather”/founder of this particular field was there #and he's a fellow aussie. so of course I used the name he introduced himself with and he was fine with it #but the other students all thought I had a close relationship with him

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wutbju · 7 months ago

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Bible Conference in 1968 was strange:

The annual Spring Bible Conference is one of the outstanding features of the year at Bob Jones University. Running for eight days, the conference brings to the campus outstanding, orthodox Bible teachers, pastors and evangelists. All regular academic work is suspended for the conference which takes the place of a spring vacation.

This year's conference was considered one of the school's best. More off-campus guests were present than for any other event in the school's history.

Services were held in the 3,000-seat Rodeheaver Auditorium, and overflow crowds watched the services via closed-circuit television in the 1,000-seat Concert Center. For most of the sessions it was necessary to use a third auditorium the War Memorial Chapel, which has a seating capacity of about 700+.

Guest speakers at the conference included Dr. Robert T. Ketcham, national consultant (retired), General Association of Regular Baptist Churches, Chicago, Ill.; Dr. Ian R. K. Paisley, pastor of Raven hill Free Presbyterian Church, Belfast, Ireland, moderator of Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster, editor of "The Revivalist," "Protestant Telegraph." Also, Dr. Charles S. Poling, pastor of the Church of All Christian Faiths, Phoenix, Ariz.; Dr. Glen Schunk of Greenville, evangelist; and Dr. H. C. Slade, pastor of Jarvis Street Baptist Church, Toronto, Canada.

The next Bible Conference will be March 30-April 7, 1968. Among the speakers scheduled are Dr. G. Archer Weniger, pastor of the Foothill Boulevard Baptist Church of Oakland, Calif; Dr. Noel Smith, editor of the Baptist Bible Tribune," Springfield, Mo.; Dr. Bob Wells, pastor of the Central Baptist Church of Anaheim, Calif.; Rev. John Balyo, pastor of the Cedar Hill Baptist Church of Cleveland Heights, Ohio; and John Stormer, author of' "None Dare Call It Treason."

John Stormer was an anti-communist speaker.

And then a WBJU story:

WBJU, the student-manned carrier-current radio station, is now in its second year of operation. Located in the radio television wing of the Fine Arts Building, the fully equipped radio station is designed to be heard in the eight student dormitories.

Though staffed entirely by radio students, the station's operations are supervised by Robert Pratt, chairman of the division of speech and head of the department of radio and television, and other members of the radio-television faculty.

According to Mr. Pratt, the carrier-current station serves as a "laboratory training unit for students who have dedicated themselves to using broadcasting as a Christian ministry." He said that the station also endeavors to supplement the listening interests of the student body.

The university grants the bachelor of arts degree in radio and television and the bachelor of science degree in broadcast engineering. WBJU is in addition to the commercial stations operated by Bob Jones University -- WMUU and WMUU-FM in Greenville and WAVO and WAVO-FM in the Atlanta, Ga., area.

#Bob Jones University #1967 #Greenville News #YeahTHATGreenville #Advertisement #Anniversary #Bible Conference #BJUBC1968 #WBJU #WAVO #WMUU

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sparklecryptid · 7 months ago

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Okay, I've had my tea, I have two of the sources I've used in my term essay up and I have Opinions on this from a library perspective on why anyone can check out anything at anytime and why a lot of libraries dont have a restricted section.

Credentials: I'm going into my second year of a library and information science diploma (NOT A MASTERS) program at a canadian university. by the time i am done the diploma I will be a certified library tech.

Note: This is all from a Canadian library perspective as that is where I live and am being educated. Sources at end.

Okay so, first off, I want to state that I generally agree with all that is pointed out above but I did want to add a library perspective on this and talk about why some books might be moved and why they might not be moved depending on the library.

under a cut because long post is long

Libraries have a mandate that callings for providing access to information to everyone. Regardless of class, race, housing status you have a right to access the material in a library. That is the core belief at the centre of most public and academic libraries. We provide access to ALL THE INFORMATION for people. (1)(2)(3)

Yes.

All of the information. All of it. Even if it's been disproven, even if it's misinformation or disinformation or just hateful, if a patron can find it we provide access to it and do not restrict what is being taken out. This of course causes issues where the public is concerned. I went to a conference in March where the speaker I listened to said that the most challenged books in Canada are books with either unflattering racial depictions or books that many believe spew hateful content. The content on our shelves is there so it is accessible. It does not matter if the library worker or the head librarian agrees with them or not, our job is to provide access to the information.

Which of course leads to Problems. Because people have a right to be angry about what is on our shelves, because people might gasp and be shocked at what we keep on our shelves. And we understand the outrage! We do! A lot of us protest and cringe when we see certain books on our shelves or in a display because we don't agree with the 'information' the book presents.

But we can't remove it because if we did so we would be censoring our own collection. We can't remove it because we would be going against our mandate for freedom of expression and access to information for all regardless of what that information is.

The library - as many argue - is supposed to be a neutral avenue of information access! We should not be told what to allow on our shelves and what not to allow on our shelves! We cannot restrict access because if we restrict access to one thing then we might think it's okay to restrict access to other things and where does it stop?

They have a point about censorship being a slippery slope, but at the same time as a queer afronative person, it is disturbing to see things on the shelf that portray my people in racist ways. It is disturbing to see materials that call me wrong or evil but I can't do anything about that because it's my job to make sure people have access to all the information! Even if I disagree with the information! We can't let our personal beliefs influence what is on the shelves!

This is why there is an ongoing discussion in library land about where the library should stand (4) and how we should deal with the idea that the library itself - while we like to think of it as a safe space for all - might not be seen as such because of the materials we keep on our shelves (5). The library likes to think of itself as neutral and as providing access to all the things for everyone but it also has to contend with the fact that if it keeps that neutrality it will be alienating members of the very community it serves.

It's literally an entire ongoing discussion in library land right now. And no one has an answer on what to do!

Anyway, that's why anyone can check out anything at anytime as long as they have a library card.

Here are my sources:

https://cfla-fcab.ca/en/guidelines-and-position-papers/statement-on-intellectual-freedom-and-libraries/

2. https://www.ifla.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/assets/faife/statements/iflastat-en.pdf

3. http://cfla-fcab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Code-of-ethics.pdf

4. https://journals.ala.org/index.php/jifp/article/view/7826/11173

5. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09610006231160795

“Authors should not be ALLOWED to write about–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative

“This book should be taken off of shelves for featuring–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative

“Schools shouldn’t teach this book in class because–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative

“Nobody actually likes or wants to read classics because they’re–” you are an anti-intellectual and an idiot

“I only read YA fantasy books because every classic novel or work of literary fiction is problematic and features–” you are an anti-intellectual and you are robbing yourself of the full richness of the human experience.

#moose talks #thats gonna be my tag for rants #anyway #its an ENTIRE THING in library land right now #about whether the library can afford to mantain 'neutrality' on the info it provides

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theafricatimes · 1 day ago

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Currently, Pavel Gerasimov is the owner of a PG CSP company that provides corporate service within a GCC region, ranging from company registration to court litigation.

The initial phase of starting a business is crucial. Professional guidance can ensure the right activity for any company, from completing legal formalities, and navigating complex regulations.

Pavel Gerasimov adds, “The need for expert assistance is growing with the increasing number of entrepreneurs and investors. That’s why more individuals and companies are turning to corporate service providers like PG. We offer expert advice and a one-stop solution. From company formation to ongoing operations, our team provides comprehensive support every step of the way. You can ask us anything, and our experienced professionals will share their knowledge to guide you through the process.

At PG CSP, we prioritize transparency, cost savings, and efficiency. Unlike providers with hidden fees, we offer customized packages with upfront pricing and clear communication. Enjoy end-to-end support, seamless navigation, and peace of mind as we handle every detail. Our tailored solutions meet your specific needs, allowing you to focus on your business goals while we expertly manage the process.”

On Being A Successful Leader

An effective leader can play a pivotal role in the success of a business. Pavel’s company currently has a market share of about 10% in Dubai. Pavel Gerasimov believes that great leadership occurs if one can excel at communicating. And, they need to be adept at planning, problem-solving, and delegating, alongside being capable of navigating any challenges that arise.

Exceptional leaders have some intangible X-factor that sets them apart. For Pavel Gerasimov , several traits explain this difference. But first and foremost, it is about authenticity- instead of being one’s best self, most people lead with a pseudo-representative persona, which will inspire distrust and discomfort in followers. He adds, “Again, leaders need to be better than average in having the self-awareness to create conditions for their success. Curiosity, adopting an ‘outside-in’ perspective, aligns with being open to external stakeholder viewpoints. Analytical ability to break down complex issues and find new, sometimes innovative solutions, is critical. For leaders, it is critical in this fast-changing landscape, quite frankly, driven by emerging technology and the changing expectations of stakeholders.”

Being creative and leveraging the diversity of thought will allow leaders to tap into this adjacent possibility and generate groundbreaking ideas. Effective leaders have also to negotiate their way through ambiguity. They take on a systems mindset to reconcile conflicting priorities. The quality of resilience is also key: knowing the situations are fluid and taking the right time to recalculate when things do not work out as planned. At the final moment, empathy is what stands out in establishing relationships, trust, and an emotional bond with team members. “You need to be able to step into the shoes of your team members, understand what matters to them, what their priorities are, and identify common ground,” says Pavel.

Furthermore, developing emotional intelligence gives a deeper appreciation of the complex challenges others are working through, and helps the leader foster a more supportive and nurturing environment. All these qualities enable leaders to inspire, motivate, and drive performance in this increasingly fast-changing business environment.

Words Of Wisdom For Beginners

Addressing the beginners, Pavel Gerasimov says, “Learn to get on with people you wouldn’t go to lunch with. You don’t have to be best friends but you need to be polite. When someone says something insulting, treat it as intel, not gospel. Form your own opinions about the people you meet. If a colleague is gossiping about you about another colleague, they will be gossiping about you to someone else. Remember, don’t attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence or a genuine mistake.”

Source Url: www.theafricatimes.com/meet-pavel-gerasimov

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