#Digital Agenda 2023

[danneroni]

My PRIDE artwork from the past couple of years! 🏳️‍🌈👨‍❤️‍👨🌈✊💓

Some of these designs are still available to order if you'd like to support a trans queer artist! etsy.com/shop/danneroni 💗

[carnetist]

We are happy to introduce you the new 2023-2024 Digital Planner! Keep yourself organized with this hyperlinked planner that offers monthly and weekly views. Fan of free spaces and timetables? This planner is for you. With more than 24 additional templates, we have created this 190 pages planner with students and professionals in mind. We know everyone is different so we have given you more than 10 cover pages for you to use, change, and interchange. We are more than happy to be part of YOUR journey! Give it a look, see if you like it and if you have any questions please reach out!

CLICK HERE TO ACCESS THIS 2023 DIGITAL PLANNER

Happy planning,

Carnetist

[brie-draws]

☆ Oc-Tober Day 28: OC[s] Cosplaying ☆ Did a little lineup... Some of my 18782 OCs cosplaying as BlazBlue characters!! [Kaede is Makoto / Ayako is Noel / Naoto is Jin / Dr. Morioka is Relius]

[juain]

monthly and weekly planner,agenda semanal y mensual ,the perfect one to organize your time✨💕

[why-animals-do-the-thing]

average United States contains 1000s of pet tigers in backyards" factoid actualy [sic] just statistical error. average person has 0 tigers on property. Activist Georg, who lives the U.S. Capitol & makes up over 10,000 each day, has purposefully been spreading disinformation adn [sic] should not have been counted

I have a big mad today, folks. It's a really frustrating one, because years worth of work has been validated... but the reason for that fucking sucks.

For almost a decade, I've been trying to fact-check the claim that there "are 10,000 to 20,000 pet tigers/big cats in backyards in the United States." I talked to zoo, sanctuary, and private cat people; I looked at legislation, regulation, attack/death/escape incident rates; I read everything I could get my hands on. None of it made sense. None of it lined up. I couldn't find data supporting anything like the population of pet cats being alleged to exist. Some of you might remember the series I published on those findings from 2018 or so under the hashtag #CrouchingTigerHiddenData. I've continued to work on it in the six years since, including publishing a peer reviewed study that counted all the non-pet big cats in the US (because even though they're regulated, apparently nobody bothered to keep track of those either).

I spent years of my life obsessing over that statistic because it was being used to push for new federal legislation that, while well intentioned, contained language that would, and has, created real problems for ethical facilities that have big cats. I wrote a comprehensive - 35 page! - analysis of the issues with the then-current version of the Big Cat Public Safety Act in 2020. When the bill was first introduced to Congress in 2013, a lot of groups promoted it by fear mongering: there's so many pet tigers! they could be hidden around every corner! they could escape and attack you! they could come out of nowhere and eat your children!! Tiger King exposed the masses to the idea of "thousands of abused backyard big cats": as a result the messaging around the bill shifted to being welfare-focused, and the law passed in 2022.

The Big Cat Public Safety Act created a registry, and anyone who owned a private cat and wanted to keep it had to join. If they did, they could keep the animal until it passed, as long as they followed certain strictures (no getting more, no public contact, etc). Don’t register and get caught? Cat is seized and major punishment for you. Registering is therefore highly incentivized. That registry closed in June of 2023, and you can now get that registration data via a Freedom of Information Act request.

Guess how many pet big cats were registered in the whole country?

97.

Not tens of thousands. Not thousands. Not even triple digits. 97.

And that isn't even the right number! Ten USDA licensed facilities registered erroneously. That accounts for 55 of 97 animals. Which leaves us with 42 pet big cats, of all species, in the entire country.

Now, I know that not everyone may have registered. There's probably someone living deep in the woods somewhere with their illegal pet cougar, and there's been at least one random person in Texas arrested for trying to sell a cub since the law passed. But - and here's the big thing - even if there are ten times as many hidden cats than people who registered them - that's nowhere near ten thousand animals. Obviously, I had some questions.

Guess what? Turns out, this is because it was never real. That huge number never had data behind it, wasn't likely to be accurate, and the advocacy groups using that statistic to fearmonger and drive their agenda knew it... and didn't see a problem with that.

Allow me to introduce you to an article published last week.

This article is good. (Full disclose, I'm quoted in it). It's comprehensive and fairly written, and they did their due diligence reporting and fact-checking the piece. They talked to a lot of people on all sides of the story.

But thing that really gets me?

Multiple representatives from major advocacy organizations who worked on the Big Cat Publix Safety Act told the reporter that they knew the statistics they were quoting weren't real. And that they don't care. The end justifies the means, the good guys won over the bad guys, that's just how lobbying works after all. They're so blase about it, it makes my stomach hurt. Let me pull some excerpts from the quotes.

"Whatever the true number, nearly everyone in the debate acknowledges a disparity between the actual census and the figures cited by lawmakers. “The 20,000 number is not real,” said Bill Nimmo, founder of Tigers in America. (...) For his part, Nimmo at Tigers in America sees the exaggerated figure as part of the political process. Prior to the passage of the bill, he said, businesses that exhibited and bred big cats juiced the numbers, too. (...) “I’m not justifying the hyperbolic 20,000,” Nimmo said. “In the world of comparing hyperbole, the good guys won this one.”

"Michelle Sinnott, director and counsel for captive animal law enforcement at the PETA Foundation, emphasized that the law accomplished what it was set out to do. (...) Specific numbers are not what really matter, she said: “Whether there’s one big cat in a private home or whether there’s 10,000 big cats in a private home, the underlying problem of industry is still there.”"

I have no problem with a law ending the private ownership of big cats, and with ending cub petting practices. What I do have a problem with is that these organizations purposefully spread disinformation for years in order to push for it. By their own admission, they repeatedly and intentionally promoted false statistics within Congress. For a decade.

No wonder it never made sense. No wonder no matter where I looked, I couldn't figure out how any of these groups got those numbers, why there was never any data to back any of the claims up, why everything I learned seemed to actively contradict it. It was never real. These people decided the truth didn't matter. They knew they had no proof, couldn't verify their shocking numbers... and they decided that was fine, if it achieved the end they wanted.

So members of the public - probably like you, reading this - and legislators who care about big cats and want to see legislation exist to protect them? They got played, got fed false information through a TV show designed to tug at heartstrings, and it got a law through Congress that's causing real problems for ethical captive big cat management. The 20,000 pet cat number was too sexy - too much of a crisis - for anyone to want to look past it and check that the language of the law wouldn't mess things up up for good zoos and sanctuaries. Whoops! At least the "bad guys" lost, right? (The problems are covered somewhat in the article linked, and I'll go into more details in a future post. You can also read my analysis from 2020, linked up top.)

Now, I know. Something something something facts don't matter this much in our post-truth era, stop caring so much, that's just how politics work, etc. I’m sorry, but no. Absolutely not.

Laws that will impact the welfare of living animals must be crafted carefully, thoughtfully, and precisely in order to ensure they achieve their goals without accidental negative impacts. We have a duty of care to ensure that. And in this case, the law also impacts reservoir populations for critically endangered species! We can't get those back if we mess them up. So maybe, just maybe, if legislators hadn't been so focused on all those alleged pet cats, the bill could have been written narrowly and precisely.

But the minutiae of regulatory impacts aren't sexy, and tiger abuse and TV shows about terrible people are. We all got misled, and now we're here, and the animals in good facilities are already paying for it.

I don't have a conclusion. I'm just mad. The public deserves to know the truth about animal legislation they're voting for, and I hope we all call on our legislators in the future to be far more critical of the data they get fed.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The moral injury of having your work enshittified

This Monday (November 27), I'm appearing at the Toronto Metro Reference Library with Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen.

On November 29, I'm at NYC's Strand Books with my novel The Lost Cause, a solarpunk tale of hope and danger that Rebecca Solnit called "completely delightful."

This week, I wrote about how the Great Enshittening – in which all the digital services we rely on become unusable, extractive piles of shit – did not result from the decay of the morals of tech company leadership, but rather, from the collapse of the forces that discipline corporate wrongdoing:

https://locusmag.com/2023/11/commentary-by-cory-doctorow-dont-be-evil/

The failure to enforce competition law allowed a few companies to buy out their rivals, or sell goods below cost until their rivals collapsed, or bribe key parts of their supply chain not to allow rivals to participate:

https://www.engadget.com/google-reportedly-pays-apple-36-percent-of-ad-search-revenues-from-safari-191730783.html

The resulting concentration of the tech sector meant that the surviving firms were stupendously wealthy, and cozy enough that they could agree on a common legislative agenda. That regulatory capture has allowed tech companies to violate labor, privacy and consumer protection laws by arguing that the law doesn't apply when you use an app to violate it:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

But the regulatory capture isn't just about preventing regulation: it's also about creating regulation – laws that make it illegal to reverse-engineer, scrape, and otherwise mod, hack or reconfigure existing services to claw back value that has been taken away from users and business customers. This gives rise to Jay Freeman's perfectly named doctrine of "felony contempt of business-model," in which it is illegal to use your own property in ways that anger the shareholders of the company that sold it to you:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain

Undisciplined by the threat of competition, regulation, or unilateral modification by users, companies are free to enshittify their products. But what does that actually look like? I say that enshittification is always precipitated by a lost argument.

It starts when someone around a board-room table proposes doing something that's bad for users but good for the company. If the company faces the discipline of competition, regulation or self-help measures, then the workers who are disgusted by this course of action can say, "I think doing this would be gross, and what's more, it's going to make the company poorer," and so they win the argument.

But when you take away that discipline, the argument gets reduced to, "Don't do this because it would make me ashamed to work here, even though it will make the company richer." Money talks, bullshit walks. Let the enshittification begin!

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/22/who-wins-the-argument/#corporations-are-people-my-friend

But why do workers care at all? That's where phrases like "don't be evil" come into the picture. Until very recently, tech workers participated in one of history's tightest labor markets, in which multiple companies with gigantic war-chests bid on their labor. Even low-level employees routinely fielded calls from recruiters who dangled offers of higher salaries and larger stock grants if they would jump ship for a company's rival.

Employers built "campuses" filled with lavish perks: massages, sports facilities, daycare, gourmet cafeterias. They offered workers generous benefit packages, including exotic health benefits like having your eggs frozen so you could delay fertility while offsetting the risks normally associated with conceiving at a later age.

But all of this was a transparent ruse: the business-case for free meals, gyms, dry-cleaning, catering and massages was to keep workers at their laptops for 10, 12, or even 16 hours per day. That egg-freezing perk wasn't about helping workers plan their families: it was about thumbing the scales in favor of working through your entire twenties and thirties without taking any parental leave.

In other words, tech employers valued their employees as a means to an end: they wanted to get the best geeks on the payroll and then work them like government mules. The perks and pay weren't the result of comradeship between management and labor: they were the result of the discipline of competition for labor.

This wasn't really a secret, of course. Big Tech workers are split into two camps: blue badges (salaried employees) and green badges (contractors). Whenever there is a slack labor market for a specific job or skill, it is converted from a blue badge job to a green badge job. Green badges don't get the food or the massages or the kombucha. They don't get stock or daycare. They don't get to freeze their eggs. They also work long hours, but they are incentivized by the fear of poverty.

Tech giants went to great lengths to shield blue badges from green badges – at some Google campuses, these workforces actually used different entrances and worked in different facilities or on different floors. Sometimes, green badge working hours would be staggered so that the armies of ragged clickworkers would not be lined up to badge in when their social betters swanned off the luxury bus and into their airy adult kindergartens.

But Big Tech worked hard to convince those blue badges that they were truly valued. Companies hosted regular town halls where employees could ask impertinent questions of their CEOs. They maintained freewheeling internal social media sites where techies could rail against corporate foolishness and make Dilbert references.

And they came up with mottoes.

Apple told its employees it was a sound environmental steward that cared about privacy. Apple also deliberately turned old devices into e-waste by shredding them to ensure that they wouldn't be repaired and compete with new devices:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/22/vin-locking/#thought-differently

And even as they were blocking Facebook's surveillance tools, they quietly built their own nonconsensual mass surveillance program and lied to customers about it:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Facebook told employees they were on a "mission to connect every person in the world," but instead deliberately sowed discontent among its users and trapped them in silos that meant that anyone who left Facebook lost all their friends:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

And Google promised its employees that they would not "be evil" if they worked at Google. For many googlers, that mattered. They wanted to do something good with their lives, and they had a choice about who they would work for. What's more, they did make things that were good. At their high points, Google Maps, Google Mail, and of course, Google Search were incredible.

My own life was totally transformed by Maps: I have very poor spatial sense, need to actually stop and think to tell my right from my left, and I spent more of my life at least a little lost and often very lost. Google Maps is the cognitive prosthesis I needed to become someone who can go anywhere. I'm profoundly grateful to the people who built that service.

There's a name for phenomenon in which you care so much about your job that you endure poor conditions and abuse: it's called "vocational awe," as coined by Fobazi Ettarh:

https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/

Ettarh uses the term to apply to traditionally low-waged workers like librarians, teachers and nurses. In our book Chokepoint Capitalism, Rebecca Giblin and I talked about how it applies to artists and other creative workers, too:

https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

But vocational awe is also omnipresent in tech. The grandiose claims to be on a mission to make the world a better place are not just puffery – they're a vital means of motivating workers who can easily quit their jobs and find a new one to put in 16-hour days. The massages and kombucha and egg-freezing are not framed as perks, but as logistical supports, provided so that techies on an important mission can pursue a shared social goal without being distracted by their balky, inconvenient meatsuits.

Steve Jobs was a master of instilling vocational awe. He was full of aphorisms like "we're here to make a dent in the universe, otherwise why even be here?" Or his infamous line to John Sculley, whom he lured away from Pepsi: "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or come with me and change the world?"

Vocational awe cuts both ways. If your workforce actually believes in all that high-minded stuff, if they actually sacrifice their health, family lives and self-care to further the mission, they will defend it. That brings me back to enshittification, and the argument: "If we do this bad thing to the product I work on, it will make me hate myself."

The decline in market discipline for large tech companies has been accompanied by a decline in labor discipline, as the market for technical work grew less and less competitive. Since the dotcom collapse, the ability of tech giants to starve new entrants of market oxygen has shrunk techies' dreams.

Tech workers once dreamed of working for a big, unwieldy firm for a few years before setting out on their own to topple it with a startup. Then, the dream shrank: work for that big, clumsy firm for a few years, then do a fake startup that makes a fake product that is acquihired by your old employer, as an incredibly inefficient and roundabout way to get a raise and a bonus.

Then the dream shrank again: work for a big, ugly firm for life, but get those perks, the massages and the kombucha and the stock options and the gourmet cafeteria and the egg-freezing. Then it shrank again: work for Google for a while, but then get laid off along with 12,000 co-workers, just months after the company does a stock buyback that would cover all those salaries for the next 27 years:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/10/the-proletarianization-of-tech-workers/

Tech workers' power was fundamentally individual. In a tight labor market, tech workers could personally stand up to their bosses. They got "workplace democracy" by mouthing off at town hall meetings. They didn't have a union, and they thought they didn't need one. Of course, they did need one, because there were limits to individual power, even for the most in-demand workers, especially when it came to ghastly, long-running sexual abuse from high-ranking executives:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/technology/google-sexual-harassment-andy-rubin.html

Today, atomized tech workers who are ordered to enshittify the products they take pride in are losing the argument. Workers who put in long hours, missed funerals and school plays and little league games and anniversaries and family vacations are being ordered to flush that sacrifice down the toilet to grind out a few basis points towards a KPI.

It's a form of moral injury, and it's palpable in the first-person accounts of former workers who've exited these large firms or the entire field. The viral "Reflecting on 18 years at Google," written by Ian Hixie, vibrates with it:

https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373

Hixie describes the sense of mission he brought to his job, the workplace democracy he experienced as employees' views were both solicited and heeded. He describes the positive contributions he was able to make to a commons of technical standards that rippled out beyond Google – and then, he says, "Google's culture eroded":

Decisions went from being made for the benefit of users, to the benefit of Google, to the benefit of whoever was making the decision.

In other words, techies started losing the argument. Layoffs weakened worker power – not just to defend their own interest, but to defend the users interests. Worker power is always about more than workers – think of how the 2019 LA teachers' strike won greenspace for every school, a ban on immigration sweeps of students' parents at the school gates and other community benefits:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/23/a-collective-bargain/

Hixie attributes the changes to a change in leadership, but I respectfully disagree. Hixie points to the original shareholder letter from the Google founders, in which they informed investors contemplating their IPO that they were retaining a controlling interest in the company's governance so that they could ignore their shareholders' priorities in favor of a vision of Google as a positive force in the world:

https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/ipo-letter/

Hixie says that the leadership that succeeded the founders lost sight of this vision – but the whole point of that letter is that the founders never fully ceded control to subsequent executive teams. Yes, those executive teams were accountable to the shareholders, but the largest block of voting shares were retained by the founders.

I don't think the enshittification of Google was due to a change in leadership – I think it was due to a change in discipline, the discipline imposed by competition, regulation and the threat of self-help measures. Take ads: when Google had to contend with one-click adblocker installation, it had to constantly balance the risk of making users so fed up that they googled "how do I block ads?" and then never saw another ad ever again.

But once Google seized the majority of the mobile market, it was able to funnel users into apps, and reverse-engineering an app is a felony (felony contempt of business-model) under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a crime to install an ad-blocker.

And as Google acquired control over the browser market, it was likewise able to reduce the self-help measures available to browser users who found ads sufficiently obnoxious to trigger googling "how do I block ads?" The apotheosis of this is the yearslong campaign to block adblockers in Chrome, which the company has sworn it will finally do this coming June:

https://www.tumblr.com/tevruden/734352367416410112/you-have-until-june-to-dump-chrome

My contention here is not that Google's enshittification was precipitated by a change in personnel via the promotion of managers who have shitty ideas. Google's enshittification was precipitated by a change in discipline, as the negative consequences of heeding those shitty ideas were abolished thanks to monopoly.

This is bad news for people like me, who rely on services like Google Maps as cognitive prostheses. Elizabeth Laraki, one of the original Google Maps designers, has published a scorching critique of the latest GMaps design:

https://twitter.com/elizlaraki/status/1727351922254852182

Laraki calls out numerous enshittificatory design-choices that have left Maps screens covered in "crud" – multiple revenue-maximizing elements that come at the expense of usability, shifting value from users to Google.

What Laraki doesn't say is that these UI elements are auctioned off to merchants, which means that the business that gives Google the most money gets the greatest prominence in Maps, even if it's not the best merchant. That's a recurring motif in enshittified tech platforms, most notoriously Amazon, which makes $31b/year auctioning off top search placement to companies whose products aren't relevant enough to your query to command that position on their own:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/greedflation/#commissar-bezos

Enshittification begets enshittification. To succeed on Amazon, you must divert funds from product quality to auction placement, which means that the top results are the worst products:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens

The exception is searches for Apple products: Apple and Amazon have a cozy arrangement that means that searches for Apple products are a timewarp back to the pre-enshittification Amazon, when the company worried enough about losing your business to heed the employees who objected to sacrificing search quality as part of a merchant extortion racket:

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-gives-apple-special-treatment-while-others-suffer-junk-ads-2023-11

Not every tech worker is a tech bro, in other words. Many workers care deeply about making your life better. But the microeconomics of the boardroom in a monopolized tech sector rewards the worst people and continuously promotes them. Forget the Peter Principle: tech is ruled by the Sam Principle.

As OpenAI went through four CEOs in a single week, lots of commentators remarked on Sam Altman's rise and fall and rise, but I only found one commentator who really had Altman's number. Writing in Today in Tabs, Rusty Foster nailed Altman to the wall:

https://www.todayintabs.com/p/defective-accelerationism

Altman's history goes like this: first, he founded a useless startup that raised $30m, only to be acquired and shuttered. Then Altman got a job running Y Combinator, where he somehow failed at taking huge tranches of equity from "every Stanford dropout with an idea for software to replace something Mommy used to do." After that, he founded OpenAI, a company that he claims to believe presents an existential risk to the entire human risk – which he structured so incompetently that he was then forced out of it.

His reward for this string of farcical, mounting failures? He was put back in charge of the company he mis-structured despite his claimed belief that it will destroy the human race if not properly managed.

Altman's been around for a long time. He founded his startup in 2005. There've always been Sams – of both the Bankman-Fried varietal and the Altman genus – in tech. But they didn't get to run amok. They were disciplined by their competitors, regulators, users and workers. The collapse of competition led to an across-the-board collapse in all of those forms of discipline, revealing the executives for the mediocre sociopaths they always were, and exposing tech workers' vocational awe for the shabby trick it was from the start.

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/2023/11/25/moral-injury/#enshittification

[insanitysilver]

So you have this author.

He has a bunch of projects, sure. Starts his own indie publisher in spring 2017 to start getting them out there. Cool. Good hustle. The problem? One of his projects is the start of a seven-book LOTR fan fiction sequel series.

Fall 2017 - He writes the Tolkien estate asking for rights to publish it. His letters go unanswered. (The Tolkien estate is notoriously litigious and close-fisted with rights.) Undeterred, he keeps plugging along.

April 22, 2019 - He interviews his first beta reader on his indie pub's social media to drum up excitement.

Nov 7, 2019 - He gets a lawyer to ask the Estate for the rights more formally. They say no.

Nov 13, 2019 - The Tolkien estate and Amazon close their $250 mil rights deal on Amazon's upcoming LOTR prequel tv series.

Dec 24, 2019 - Author shows up at Tolkien's grandson's house on christmas eve, and "delivered [his 180k-word manuscript] in-person", including a letter with this line:

"I truly cannot imagine, anyone else alive in the world who is capable of taking the foundation your grandfather wrote and expanding upon it as beautifully and imaginatively as I have." That's a pretty big swing buddy!

Tolkien's grandson mails the manuscript back.

So, he publishes his book anyways.

Sept. 1, 2022 - His book hits the major digital storefronts Sept. 1, 2022. Amazon's LOTR prequel tv series? Also releases Sept. 1, 2022.

He sees some similarities. So what does he do?

April 14, 2023 - He sues the Tolkien estate, the Tolkien trust, Tolkien's grandson, Amazon, and Jeff Bezos himself for $250 million.

June 1, 2023 - The Tolkien trust sues him for copyright infringement right back.

Aug 25, 2023 - Having failed to prove the similarities between the tv show and his book, he loses the first case. (The proposed similarities seem tenuous to me too, but judge for yourself.) He can't sell Tolkien fic ever again. And he has to destroy all the physical copies of his book. And he has to pay their attorney fees. About $134,000.

Dec 14, 2023 - Also failing to prove his work was transformative enough, he loses the second case.

Now, I'm not going to shill for Amazon. US copyright extends 70 years past the death of the creator. That seems to serve corporate interests more than then public imo. If it were up to me, it'd be death + 30 & LOTR would've been public domain in 2003. Author guy could've followed his bliss, and clowning on him now really only serves Amazon's agenda.

But! The lesson here is: while the laws are what they are, if you're going to write fanfiction... literally do anything else but that.

Sources: 'The Tolkien Estate & Amazon Win ‘Lord Of The Rings’ Lawsuits' by Max Goldbart for Deadline.com Opening Complaint, Author v. Bezos Opening Complaint, Author v. Bezos, Attachment #2 Tolkien Trust v. Author, Judgement

[odinsblog]

Musk reactivated the accounts of Brazilian far-right politicians Carla Zambelli, Gustavo Gayer, and Nikolas Ferreira. Ferreira, a Bolsonaro supporter, openly questioned the security of Brazil’s electronic voting machines, even though he won his local legislative race.

“All of these names have been problematic for years on social media,” says Flora Rebello Arduini, campaign director at the nonprofit advocacy organization Ekō. “They've been pushing for the far-right and election misinformation for ages.”

When Musk purchased Twitter in 2022, later renaming it X, many activists in Brazil worried that he would abuse the platform to push his own agenda, Arduini says. “He has unprecedented broadcasting abilities. He is bullying a supreme court justice of a democratic country, and he is showing he will use all the resources he has available to push for whatever favors his personal opinions or his professional ambitions.”

Under Musk, X has become a haven for the far right and disinformation. After taking over, Musk offered amnesty to users who had been banned from the platform, including right-wing influencer Andrew Tate, who, along with his brother, was indicted in Romania on several charges including with rape and human trafficking in June 2023 (he has denied the allegations). Last month, one of Tate's representatives told the BBC that "they categorically reject all charges."

A 2023 study found that hate speech has increased on the platform under Musk’s leadership. The situation in Brazil is just the latest instance of Musk aligning himself with and platforming dangerous, far-right movements around the world, experts tell WIRED. "It's not about Twitter or Brazil. It's about a strategy from the global far right to overcome democracies and democratic institutions around the world," says Nina Santos, a digital democracy researcher at the Brazilian National Institute of Science & Technology who researches the Brazilian far right. “An opinion from an American billionaire should not count more than a democratic institution.”

This also comes as Brazil has continued working to understand and investigate the lead-up to January 8, 2023, when election-denying insurrectionists who refused to accept right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro’s defeat stormed Brazil’s legislature. The TSE, the country’s election court, is a special judicial body that investigates electoral crimes and is part of the mechanism for overseeing the country’s electoral processes overall. The court has been investigating the dissemination of fake news and disinformation that cast doubt on the country’s elections in the months and years leading up to the storming of the legislature on January 8, 2023. Both Arduini and Santos believe that the accounts Musk is refusing to remove are likely connected to the court’s inquiry.

“A life-and-death struggle recently took place in Brazil for the democratic rule of law and against a coup d'état, which is under investigation by this court in compliance with due legal process,” Luís Roberto Barroso, the president of the federal supreme court, said in a statement about Musk’s comments. “Nonconformity against the prevalence of democracy continues to manifest itself in the criminal exploitation of social networks.”

Santos also worries that Musk is setting a precedent that the far right will be protected and promoted on his platform, regardless of local laws or public opinion. “They are trying to use Brazil as a laboratory on how to interfere in local politics and local businesses,” she says. “They are making the case that their decision is more important than the national decision from a state democratic institution.”

Though Musk has claimed to be a free-speech advocate, and X’s public statement on the takedowns asserts that Brazilians are entitled to free speech, the platform’s application of these principles has been uneven at best. In February, on order of the Indian government, X blocked the accounts Hindutva Watch and the India Hate Lab in India, two US-based nonprofits that track incidents of religiously motivated violence perpetrated by supporters of the country’s right-wing government. A 2023 study from the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard found that X complied with more government takedown requests under Musk’s leadership than it had previously.

In March, X blocked the accounts of several prominent researchers and journalists after they identified a well-known neo-Nazi cartoonist, later changing its own terms of service to justify the decision.

—Elon Musk Is Platforming Far-Right Activists in Brazil

[betterthanburrow]

2023 Football Schedule - Instagram AU

(Bengals Quarterback! Joe Burrow x Digital Creator! OC)

liked by yourinstagram and 20,210 more users

Bengals: Cooked up something real good. Stay tuned.

📺: Tonight 8 pm | NFLNetwork

view all 1,500 comments

username1: i can’t wait any longer… ANNOUNCE THE SCHEDULE FOR THE SEASON!

username2: undefeated season incoming!!!

username3: WHO DEY NATION IS READY!

liked by joeyb_9 and 55,013 more users

yourinstagram: i’m impatiently waiting for The Benagals’ 2023 football season schedule to be posted!

view all 5,009 comments

CincyProblems: we’re impatiently waiting too…

username1: i’m impatiently waiting for you to drop the hair-care routine… i’m obsessed with your hair!!!!!

username2: 😍😍😍

yourbrother: you’re dating the QB? can’t you just ask him to show you the schedule?!

↳ yourinstagram: i asked him and he said no 😵‍💫

liked by yourinstagram and 55,013 more users

Bengals: Screen time is up, schedule is out 📲

Here’s to everyone who got nothing done at work today.

📺: Schedule Release l NFL Network

view all 19,900 comments

youtube: imma be on DND starting September 10th

username1: BRB buying tickets to all the games

username2: WHO DEY NATION! LET’S GO!

yourinstagram: AAAAAAAAA

liked by yourinstagram and 75, 295 more users

Bengals: This season’s agenda.

📺: Schedule Release l NFL Network

view all 30,013 comments

chido: 🧘🏿‍♂️

oh_thatsmike28: Can’t wait 😤

joeyb_9: 🔥🖤

camjuice5: 🥱

camsample: showtime

swervinirvin_: 😬😬😬

liked by 10,009 users

CincyProblems: Y/FN Y/LN (Joe Burrow’s girlfriend) Instagram Stories from today after the 2023 football schedule was announced!

view all 80,513 comments

username1: i want my future girlfriend to be just as excited for football season to start like Y/N!

username2: that was my reaction as well to seeing that our first game of the season is against the Browns 💀

username3: i just know Y/N and Joe gossip about the schedule after she calmed down from freaking out 😭

liked by yourinstagram and 99,135 more users

Bengals: Us patiently waiting for Sept. 10th

view all 15,069 comments

username1: the wait is too long 😩

username2: joe definitely was the type of kid to pick dandelions in the middle of a football game.

yourinstagram: you spelled impatiently wrong…

liked by yourbrother and 69,013 more users

yourinstagram: just updated my calendar schedule… i’m busy from September 10th until February 11th 🌀

view all 20,505 comments

joeyb_9: i hope you have space on your calendar schedule for your boyfriend?

↳ yourinstagram: i’ll always make space on my calendar schedule for you ☺️

Author’s Note:

i’m publishing this Instagram AU in honor of the upcoming football season starting in a few weeks!

if you have a Instagram AU request, please send the IG AU request to my Inbox and i’ll try to get the requested Instagram AU published as fast as i can!

thank you all for the love and support! 🤍

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Scholars in support of the Moraes Brazil decision against X

Here is the link, in Portuguese, here is part of a Claude translation:

We, the undersigned, wish to express our deep concern about the ongoing attacks by Big Tech companies and their allies against Brazil’s digital sovereignty. The Brazilian judiciary’s dispute with Elon Musk is just the latest example of a broader effort to restrict the ability of sovereign nations to define a digital development agenda free from the control of mega-corporations based in the United States. At the end of August, the Brazilian Supreme Federal Court banned the X platform from Brazilian cyberspace for failing to comply with court decisions that required the suspension of accounts that instigated right-wing extremists to participate in riots and occupy the Legislative, Judicial, and Governmental palaces on January 8, 2023. Subsequently, President Lula da Silva made clear the Brazilian government’s intention to seek digital independence: to reduce the country’s dependence on foreign entities for data, AI capabilities, and digital infrastructure, as well as to promote the development of local technological ecosystems. In line with these objectives, the Brazilian state also intends to force Big Tech to pay fair taxes, comply with local laws, and be held accountable for the social externalities of their business models, which often promote violence and inequality. These efforts have been met with attacks from the owner of X and right-wing leaders who complain about democracy and freedom of expression. But precisely because digital space lacks internationally and democratically decided regulatory agreements, large technology companies operate as rulers, deciding what should be moderated and what should be promoted on their platforms. Moreover, the X platform and other companies have begun to organize, along with their allies inside and outside the country, to undermine initiatives aimed at Brazil’s technological autonomy. More than a warning to Brazil, their actions send a worrying message to the world: that democratic countries seeking independence from Big Tech domination risk suffering disruptions to their democracies, with some Big Tech companies supporting far-right movements and parties.

Continue reading.

[fran-aka-mak]

art development !!

i started doing digital art in 2013 but the template starts at 2015 hehe

[[ template ]]

my essaying about my digital art journey below!!

2015 - i was very immersed in the soul eater community! i kept doing resbangs and making friends, and i love doing AUs, specifically soul & maka centric. this is the HTTYD AU where soul is the dragon!

2016 - yes this is Little Things PH's OCs that i did back in the day! i love their lil guys so much i had to make fanart. this was the art i gave to Ate in person!!

2017 - i drew a lot more pokemon this time ! idk why i didn't draw more of it digitally before. i had too much soul eater brainrot lmao. so i combined them! behold contestshipping x soma AU

2018 - this was the time when i got into K-pop! specifically Monsta X haha, i got more interested in doing fashion, especially for male characters~ (and i had to draw my beloved agenda, somakid)

2019 - my bias from MX, Minhyuk on a whale with Minggom! this was made for an artbook that was sent to him! i hope he got to see this along with my tiny message ;; i delved more into a new tiny chibi art style here

2020 - i drew way too much during this year and it led me to impossibly high standards for my art to this day //sobs. i redrew my Your Lie in April AU fanart and i really think i improved so much….. i went out of my comfort zone to really draw the background and the piano

2021 - genshin brainrot started here !! i was trying to find my style even more, and i love kokomi's color palette. i remember looking at 10x references and combining them into this specific pose in the fanart. i still think to this day this is one of my personal favorite art pieces of all time

2022 - another personal favorite art piece (and something my friend aura and a commissioner personally loved!), i was practicing on drawing men since i wasn't confident, but seeing how this turned out made me want to keep going ❤️

2023 - the latest maka & kid piece that i made! they are so precious to me. i love trying out new poses and dynamics, and i tried changing their outfits a bit more to highlight that i wanna try new fashion stuff ^^; i'd like to say it was a job well done ngl

2024 - and finally, a recent piece that i'm most proud of, and shows a lot of my art style (and i drew the background from scratch!). i redrew an old comic panel from a now discontinued comic, but i feel like i improved so much in terms of rendering, coloring, and anatomy!!

[mariacallous]

When Matt Williams founded a research center for the Anti-Defamation League in 2022, he vowed to “ruthlessly and systematically test” what the organization does. Antisemitism was on the rise, and he wanted the Center for Antisemitism Research to scientifically study what could work to stop it.

The creation of the center, he believed, represented an admission that one of the world’s most prominent voices against antisemitism had been operating with little evidence.

“I would go a step further and say the ADL wants to be a serious nonprofit, measured on our social return on investment, but by a lot of measures, we’ve not been doing well,” Williams said in an interview, citing spiking antisemitism, rising extremism and the erosion of democratic norms around the world. 

The ADL established the new center amid mounting pressure from funders and trustees, he added. “The level of tolerance for having no solutions is low right now,” Williams said. “Our Board of Trustees is very serious about ruthlessly holding us accountable to whether or not we’re solving the problems that we set out to solve.”

Here’s how the person recently elected as ADL’s board chair put it: “Flagging and monitoring and measuring antisemitism is important, but by itself will not reverse trends towards extremism, bias and radicalism in American or global society,” Nicole Mutchnik said in an email to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. 

Now, with a staff of nine and about 70 affiliated researchers at universities around the country, the research program overseen by Williams is starting to flex its scholarly might. It recently unveiled, for example, the first scientific study in decades that focuses on anti-Jewish discrimination in hiring.  

Previous studies by the center showed that antisemitic attitudes are more strongly correlated with conspiratorial beliefs than any other factor. So, now, it has partnered with a team of university researchers to examine whether correcting misinformation can make a difference.

“We’ve found that we have a better shot at reducing antisemitism by teaching people how to deal with misinformation and disinformation than we have with much of the anti-bias work that we’ve done previously,” Williams said. “Thinking of antisemitism as a digital literacy problem as opposed to a civil rights problem is a big change for ADL.” 

Alarm about antisemitism in recent years has driven a doubling of donations to the ADL, topping $100 million in 2022, the most recent year for which complete data is available. It has also sparked the creation of dozens of new organizations and initiatives, including some that are directly critical of the ADL’s approach or are trying to fill perceived gaps.

Many, including Bari Weiss, author of “How to Fight Antisemitism,” prescribe embracing Judaism and Jewish pride. Others are looking to tech for solutions. At least one group focuses on naming and shaming alleged antisemites online. Author Dara Horn says the answer lies in deemphasizing the Holocaust and educating the public about living Jews and their culture. Jewish communal organizations have also poured millions of dollars into physical security measures at schools, synagogues and other Jewish institutions.

The Biden administration in 2023 published a plan featuring hundreds of detailed recommendations, many of which are modeled on ADL’s platform. The plan proposes, for example, streamlined hate crime reporting at all levels of law enforcement and more accommodation for Jewish religious observance in the workplace. 

On the right, the Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther proposes a government crackdown on anti-Israel groups once Donald Trump returns to the White House.  Meanwhile, left-wing groups like Diaspora Alliance and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice say that effectively responding to antisemitism requires building solidarity with Palestinians and other groups they view as oppressed.

Even as viewpoints and tactics vary, there’s a consensus in the Jewish community that fighting antisemitism must mean more than sounding the alarm about the issue. As a result, the search for evidence-based solutions, grounded in social science research, is starting to gain traction. 

“We need to be moving more research resources into what’s working and what’s not working,” Holly Huffnagle, the U.S. director for combating antisemitism at the American Jewish Committee, said in an interview. “Many of us in the Jewish world are talking about this.”

Huffnagle said the AJC, considered a peer to the ADL in terms of size and legacy, doesn’t currently sponsor academic, peer-reviewed research, but that such a program could transform the work of her organization.  

“If we find that our interventions aren’t working we need to be comfortable and competent to move away from what we were doing in the past,” she said. “Do we have information about what’s actually changing hearts and minds?”

To help answer that question, a pair of political scientists specializing in a field they call “deep canvassing” are using a grant from the ADL to research what kinds of narratives about Jews, when presented to people, can be effective at reducing prejudice. The researchers, David Broockman from the University of California, Berkeley and Josh Kalla from Yale University, have previously demonstrated the effectiveness of the technique in the context of bias against transgender people. 

For their new study, the researchers made two-minute video clips featuring eight types of narratives about Jews and showed them over the internet to an audience of about 23,000 survey respondents. 

Watching all eight narrative types led to a drop in prejudice, but some had a much stronger effect than others. For example, bipartisanship — a video showing both Donald Trump and Joe Biden condemning antisemitism — proved more impactful than a video depicting a fictional Jewish character suffering, but far less impactful than a video that presented the suffering as the result of discrimination.

Another sign of the awakening underway is the spate of new university programs focused on the study of antisemitism. Gratz College, a Jewish institution for higher education in Philadelphia, now offers a master’s degree in the topic. New York University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Toronto have all made recent investments in the field of “antisemitism studies.”

Ayal Feinberg, a political scientist and the creator of the antisemitism master’s degree at Gratz, believes that many more such programs should have been in place long ago. What made the need suddenly apparent to many more people, he said, was the wave of anti-Israel protests and the spike in antisemitism in the United States after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel. 

“Post 10/7, many people in this space were caught with their pants down, and they’re rushing to invest in meaningful interventions that reduce antisemitism,” Feinberg said in an interview. “But those interventions don’t really exist because there hasn’t been a field that has been systematically devoted to developing them.”

As Feinberg, whose quantitative research is sponsored by the ADL’s new center, builds out the field through a dedicated discipline, there’s also a crop of professors from established academic areas such as economics, political science, and sociology who are newly interested in studying antisemitism.

The number of scholars has sharply increased and so has their caliber, according to Williams.  He gave the example of Dean Karlan, a prominent economics professor at Northwestern University and former chief economist of the United States Agency for International Development. 

“That’s the quality of research we’re getting as a partner nowadays, which frankly, is not what it would have been five or 10 years ago,” Williams said. 

The ADL’s sponsorship of individual academics comes amid a contentious time for the group’s relationship with institutions of higher education. As college campuses have become the epicenter of the activist movement seeking to end U.S. military aid to Israel and cast Israeli actions in Gaza as a genocide, the ADL has assertively involved itself in hot-button debates about where to draw the line on free speech. The group says it wants to protect Jewish students from harassment and threatening behavior from pro-Palestinian protests. As part of that mission, it’s been adversarial with universities, accusing administrators of failing to stand up to antisemitism and putting out a contentious “report card” grading schools on their response to it.

But through Williams and his team, the organization has also been trying to better understand what exactly is happening on campuses and why the situation there seems worse than in other contexts. An ADL-sponsored study by a University of California, Irvine professor concluded that increased antisemitism on campus is found where there are fewer allies on campus — and not necessarily where there are more antisemites or where there’s a campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine.  

“There’s more tacit allowance for antisemitism in public because there are fewer bystanders who are willing or disposed to intervene,” Williams said. “The perceived social cost of it is much lower than elsewhere and that’s more predictive for us than the presence of an SJP on campus.”

Any perceived gaps between ADL’s messaging and its research findings can leave Williams’ program — and scholars it partners with — vulnerable to questioning and criticism. That’s partly the reason that many observers are viewing what he’s doing as daring and risky, even if they are supportive. 

“There is a risk of blurring the line between advocacy and scholarship in a moment in which institutional credibility is low and society is very polarized and everything politicized,” said James Loeffler, a historian and the director of the Jewish studies program at Johns Hopkins University. “And then the research won’t be accepted — it will be seen as advancing a political point of view.”

Williams’ own career as a scholar might have gone in a different direction if he weren’t convinced of the pressing danger of recent antisemitism. 

He completed his doctoral training as a behavioral social scientist at Stanford University in 2012, and after working on various research projects he ended up at the Orthodox Union. As the largest kosher certification agency in the world, the Orthodox Union generates millions of dollars in revenue, most of which is allocated to charitable causes. Williams crafted a data-driven research program to help the organization spend those funds more impactfully. 

He had also long maintained an interest in the study of prejudice, which Williams traces in part to his uncommon family background: His paternal grandfather, a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, married a Sephardic Jewish woman from Morocco. 

In 2019 Williams, who grew up in an observant Jewish family in Atlanta and had always been aware of how his background set him apart, encountered data showing that Americans were becoming less tolerant of difference. Two recent events underscored this finding: neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville, Virginia, followed by the deadly attack the following year on Jewish worshippers in Pittsburgh.

After each of those events, the ADL sprung into action, tapping its roster of experts to explain the outbursts of violent antisemitism to the public. But in private conversations Williams was having with the group, one of the world’s most prominent organizations fighting hate and extremism was coming to a realization that would have been awkward to publicly acknowledge: It didn’t understand antisemitism or how to combat it nearly well enough. A new paradigm was needed. 

“We were under-resourced when it came to actually thinking about antisemitism,” Williams said. “The ADL had sort of become more of a civil rights organization, and we started, especially after Charlottesville, realizing we need more resources on antisemitism. And the person who hired me was sort of like, ‘It’s bizarre that we don’t have this.’”

That person was Adam Neufeld, ADL’s chief operating officer, who “saw the need to develop new theories of change and test them empirically,” Williams said.

When the Center for Antisemitism Research was launched about two-and-half years ago, the name alone was enough to pique the attention of historians who study antisemitism and American Jewish history. In the initial decades after World War II, American Jewish groups, including the ADL, invested heavily in academic research into the sources of antisemitism. 

“There was a sense back then that social science would be able to improve people’s lives — that humanity could be perfected by applying scientific research models to social problems,” said Pamela Nadell, a historian at American University and the author of the forthcoming book, “Antisemitism, an American Tradition.”

With the help of grants from Jewish groups, social psychologists, sociologists, and other scholars investigated how antisemitism was connected to totalitarianism, religion and other forms of racial and ethnic stereotyping. It was an organized attempt to understand the psyche of antisemites. 

To that end, the ADL commissioned public opinion research hoping to understand the nature of bias — whether it was correlated, for example, to age or education. 

Historians don’t really know why or when exactly the investment in such research ended, in part because the ADL has not yet made its archives especially accessible to scholars, at least compared to groups like the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, and B’nai B’rith International, which have either handed off materials to a library or created their own open repository, in some cases even digitizing large parts of their collections.

According to Williams, the ADL’s research program petered out by the 1980s because the threat of antisemitism was seen as declining. “Most people generally had positive attitudes about Jews, incident rates were – by most accounts – much lower, the clamoring for real, tangible solutions was less,” he said.

At the time in the United States, the older the average person, the more likely they were to have antisemitic attitudes. There was no stronger demographic correlation than that of age and antisemitism, and a 1992 ADL study noted “the steady influx of younger, more tolerant Americans into the adult population” as the main factor driving declining antisemitism since 1964. It almost seemed like the country was aging out of the problem.

By 2014, in Williams’ telling, the kind of intense antisemitism that was thought to belong to the past was rearing its head once again and, eventually, accelerating so much that the ADL needed to revisit its old strategy around social science research.

“I would say that the major distinction is that we’re working on interventions more than describing the phenomenon,” Williams said, comparing his generation to the researchers of the post-World War II boom. “But, also, you can’t really do one without the other. We do stand on their shoulders.”

In responding to a press inquiry from JTA, the head of the ADL rejected the idea that the ADL founded the Center for Antisemitism Research out of a new or reawakened commitment. 

“At ADL, we always have sought to ground our work in evidence and to shape our approaches based on research,” the group’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, said in a written response to a series of questions. “We have been tracking antisemitism for decades, measuring attitudes and tracking incidents, and the insights gleaned from this work has helped to inform and shape policies and programs.”

But Greenblatt also acknowledged that recent events are forcing deep changes in the ADL. 

��Nothing will ever be the same after 10/7,” he said. “And so, at ADL, it forced us to step back, look in the mirror and ask hard questions about how we reached this point — and what we are going to do differently in response.”

He continued, “In all honesty, I think every Jewish organization should be undertaking this kind of process in light of 10/7. For ADL, that meant taking a beat and examining our policies, evaluating our programs, endeavoring to measure the efficacy of our activities, and making hard decisions based on what we learn. The Center for Antisemitism Research has helped us to do this.”

The ADL’s introspection over the past few years has come amid growing criticism that mainstream approaches to fighting antisemitism aren’t working. And attacks on the ADL have come from both the right and the left. 

The right has tended to blame the ADL for being too soft on the pro-Palestinian movement or for getting distracted from its core mission of defending Jews by progressive ideas about race and identity. 

The ADL has also been affected by a distrust washing over society of legacy institutions, especially ones perceived by the right as having a left-wing bias. Founded in 2018, an organization called StopAntisemitism has positioned itself as a grassroots alternative to the establishment. Diving head first into the chaotic fray of social media, the group quickly amassed followers whom it sicced on a flurry of targets it accused of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel behavior. 

In some regards, the mainstream has shifted to the right when it comes to fighting antisemitism. When Kenneth Marcus and the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law began using aggressive legal tactics to fight antisemitism on college campuses years ago, many Jewish communal leaders rejected his efforts. Nowadays, they are far less likely to tell Marcus that his tactics are counterproductive or that he’s conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism — instead, they are starting to partner with him on lawsuits. 

Meanwhile, on the left, the ADL is often accused of caring about antisemitism mostly insofar as it can be used as a weapon for its pro-Israel advocacy. Rooted in the concept of intersectionality, the left argues that all forms of oppression are intertwined and therefore must be resisted in tandem. One result of that thinking is a critical focus on a certain type of rhetoric from the ADL — for example, when Greenblatt morally equated anti-Zionist groups with white supremacists or when he seemed to liken the Palestinian keffiyeh to the Nazi swastika, though he later clarified that he doesn’t think the keffiyeh is a hate symbol. 

A group that exemplifies this critique is the Diaspora Alliance, which says that Jewish fears are being exploited for pro-Israel purposes at the expense of democratic norms protecting civil society and free speech. Emma Saltzberg, the group’s U.S. strategic campaigns director and a critic of the ADL, accuses Greenblatt of engaging in rhetoric that often undermines what she sees as the valuable expertise of the organization’s technical staff. She anticipates the same dynamic with the ADL’s new research agenda. 

“I think it’s possible for good things to come out of research funded by actors with questionable political agendas,” Saltzberg said in an interview. “At the same time, Jonathan Greenblatt, ADL’s spokesperson and leader, has demonstrated consistent disregard for the organization’s own in-house experts, so academics who associate themselves with the organization do risk damage to their reputation as serious researchers.”

Williams defended Greenblatt, rejecting the notion that his public statements served to undermine the organization’s technical work. Williams said he works with a range of researchers who don’t agree with the ADL on everything and that he doesn’t lose sleep over people whose opposition to the group is intractable. He also said, however, that given how challenging Greenblatt’s job is, there’s always room for the ADL to improve.

“There’s absolutely work that we could do to acknowledge — just to give you one example — the reality that there are a lot of people who take up anti-Israel positions out of a real humanitarian commitment and dedication,” Williams said. “Acknowledge it, and at the same time present the evidence that many people are being hurt in ways that single them out as Jews because of presumed support, let alone overt support, for Israel.”

Williams’ work at ADL has only just begun, but he’s already reached one profound conclusion in the fight against antisemitism. 

“The big takeaway,” he said, “is that we can actually reduce it.”

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from Mother Jones:

The world’s 3,000 billionaires should pay a minimum 2 percent tax on their fast-growing wealth to raise about $313 billion a year for the global fight against poverty, inequality, and global heating, ministers from four leading economies have suggested.

In a sign of growing international support for a levy on the super-rich, Brazil, Germany, South Africa, and Spain say a 2 percent tax would reduce inequality and raise much-needed public funds after the economic shocks of the pandemic, the climate crisis and military conflicts in Europe and the Middle East.

They are calling for more countries to join their campaign, saying the annual sum raised would be enough to cover the estimated cost of damage caused by all of last year’s extreme weather events.

“It is time that the international community gets serious about tackling inequality and financing global public goods,” the ministers say in a Guardian comment piece. “One of the key instruments that governments have for promoting more equality is tax policy. Not only does it have the potential to increase the fiscal space governments have to invest in social protection, education, and climate protection. Designed in a progressive way, it also ensures that everyone in society contributes to the common good in line with their ability to pay. A fair share contribution enhances social welfare.”

Brazil chairs the G20 group of leading developed and developing countries and put a billionaire tax on the agenda at a meeting of finance ministers earlier this year.

The French economist Gabriel Zucman is now fleshing out the technical details of a plan that will again be discussed by the G20 in June. France has indicated support for a wealth tax and Brazil has been encouraged that the US, while not backing a global wealth tax, did not oppose it.

Zucman said: “Billionaires have the lowest effective tax rate of any social group. Having people with the highest ability to pay tax paying the least—I don’t think anybody supports that.”

Research from Oxfam published this year found that the boom in asset prices during and after the Covid pandemic meant billionaires were $3.3 trillion—or 34 percent—wealthier at the end of 2023 than they were in 2020. Meanwhile, a study from the World Bank showed that the pandemic had brought poverty reduction to a halt.

The opinion piece, signed by ministers from two of the largest European economies—Germany and Spain—and two of the largest emerging economies—Brazil and South Africa—claims a levy on the super-rich is a necessary third pillar to complement the negotiations on the taxation of the digital economy and the introduction earlier this year of a minimum corporate tax of 15 percent for multinationals.

“The tax could be designed as a minimum levy equivalent to 2 percent of the wealth of the super-rich. It would not apply to billionaires who already contribute a fair share in income taxes. Those, however, who manage to avoid paying income tax would be obliged to contribute more towards the common good,” the ministers say.

“Persisting loopholes in the system imply that high-net-worth individuals can minimize their income taxes. Global billionaires pay only the equivalent of up to 0.5 percent of their wealth in personal income tax. It is crucial to ensure that our tax systems provide certainty, sufficient revenues, and treat all of our citizens fairly.”

[beardedmrbean]

A White history teacher accused a California teachers union of discriminating against him on the basis of his skin color and called the move "disgusting."

Isaac Newman, a teacher in the Elk Grove School District, on Friday filed a federal lawsuit against his local National Education Association affiliate for allegedly violating his Title VII civil rights. The suit alleged that the Elk Grove Education Association formed a seat on its executive board that was only available to candidates of color, meaning Newman wasn't eligible.

"It's disgusting, and that's why I'm suing," he told Fox News Digital in an interview.

"My union barred me from a leadership position simply because of the color of my skin," he said, discussing the suit. "I'm prohibited from running for a leadership position simply because of my race. This kind of racial litmus test is illegal, and it's un-American, and that's why I'm taking them to court." 

In 2023, Elk Grove Education Association officials voted to create a "BIPOC At-Large" seat on its executive board, a position limited only to people who "self-identify" as "African American (Black), Native American, Alaska Native, Native Hawai’ian, Pacific Islander, Latino (including Puerto Rican), Asian, Arab, and Middle Eastern," according to the suit. 

"Plaintiff Isaac Newman is a white [EGEA] member who wants to run for union office to address the District’s recent adoption of what he believes to be aggressive and unnecessary Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) policies," reads the lawsuit, filed by The Fairness Center, a legal group focused on representing "those hurt by public-sector union officials."

The suit asked the court to "declare the BIPOC Position unlawful" and prevent the union "from creating any similar positions in the future where candidate eligibility is, in whole or in part, based on race." 

Newman said the alleged discrimination was "frightening," as was the prevalence of critical race theory in society's culture. 

"I'm actually really frightened for my children," he said, "when we look to a future where people are being taught [critical race theory]."

Newman believes that DEI ideology pushes hostile messages that focus on a person's skin color as opposed to their expertise and knowledge.

"The message there is that as a White teacher in a district that is very diverse, my students can't learn from me," he said. "It's abhorrent, and it's flatly wrong."

Newman told Fox News Digital that after disagreeing with the union pushing "aggressive" DEI agendas in the district, he decided to run for an executive seat to challenge the status quo. 

"I'm looking to see my district and union back away from this fantastically toxic ideology, back away from DEI and embrace merit and individuality," he said. "I'm hoping to see that other teachers, other people in similar organizations, will stand up." 

Newman said he was not alone in his opposition to DEI in school districts. 

"Most people who think like me are unwilling to speak up," he said. "There are a lot of teachers [who are silent], and it's not really a conservative or liberal thing."

"There are a lot of teachers who recognize that meritocracy, colorblindness are at the core of good teaching," Newman added. "What's shocking is in these DEI trainings, they actually call out colorblindness and meritocracy as racist myths. And of course, if you're dedicated to that, well, then you're going to have division, and you're going to have mediocrity." 

Fox News Digital reached out to the Elk Grove union for comment. 

"Teachers’ unions don’t get a pass from laws that prohibit racial discrimination," said Fairness Center President and general counsel Nathan McGrath. "The Civil Rights Act explicitly forbids unions from discriminating based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin and from segregating members based on these attributes." 

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Judd Legum and Rebecca Crosby at Popular information:

Eugene Ramirez, the lead anchor of Sinclair's national evening news broadcast, resigned in January over concerns about the accuracy and right-wing bias of the content he was required to present on air, three sources told Popular Information. The sources — one current and two former Sinclair employees — spoke to Popular Information on the condition of anonymity, citing concerns about the potential professional repercussions of speaking out about Sinclair's editorial processes. Ramirez's show, which continues to air with a new host, appears on at least 70 of the hundreds of local television affiliates owned by Sinclair.  One of the primary issues that prompted Ramirez's resignation was the requirement to include at least three stories produced by Sinclair's Rapid Response Team (RRT) on a nightly basis. Sinclair's RRT is a group of four reporters who work out of Sinclair's national headquarters in Maryland. The group's output is prodigious. A Popular Information review found that between January 1 and July 4 this year, the RRT published at least 775 stories.

Most of the RRT's stories are short and aggregate information from other sources. Sinclair publicly claims that the RRT and other components of its national newsgathering operation, known as The National Desk, provide a "comprehensive, commentary-free look of the most impactful news of the day." But a look at the RRT's stories over the course of the year shows that the group frequently produces pieces that have more in common with right-wing agitprop than journalism. 

[...] Many of the pieces produced by the RRT that do not explicitly mention Republicans or Democrats (or do so only in passing) still promote a right-wing agenda, highlighting stories that portray immigrants or LGBTQ people negatively. 

These are the stories that Ramirez was required to present each night. Sinclair's headquarters sent a list of four stories produced by the RRT to the team that produced the evening news broadcast. At least three had to be read on air. One current employee at Sinclair's headquarters described the RRT team as "the right-wing propaganda arm of the national digital operation." The RRT is run by Julian Baron, a 2021 graduate of Syracuse University. Despite having little professional experience (and none outside of Sinclair), Baron's title is "Chief of Staff for News." In that role, Baron serves as the right-hand man for Scott Livingston, Sinclair's Senior Vice President for News. 

The reporters on the RRT team who work under Baron are Jackson Walker, Ray Lewis, and Kristina Watrobski. Walker was hired by Sinclair less than two months after graduating from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in May 2023. Walker spent his college years writing for The College Fix, a national right-wing student publication. On X, Walker frequently highlights when his stories are circulated by Libs of TikTok, an anti-LGBTQ activist. Walker retweeted a post by Libs of TikTok that highlighted one of his articles and described the LGBTQ community as a "child mutilation cult." Lewis is a 2023 graduate of Rutgers University. Prior to joining Sinclair, he was an intern at the New York Post, a right-wing tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch. Watrobski is a 2020 graduate of SUNY Plattsburgh and previously worked for a Sinclair affiliate in Albany. Baron, according to three sources, has the authority to assign and publish RRT articles without any editorial oversight. In addition to appearing on the evening news broadcasts, RRT's articles are automatically syndicated to hundreds of local news outlets, where they are given the imprimatur of mainstream media brands, including NBC, ABC, and CBS. According to two of the sources who spoke to Popular Information, this frequently caused rancor among the news staff of Sinclair affiliates, who were concerned about the posting of biased or inaccurate content on their websites. 

Eugene Ramirez, the former lead anchor of the evening version of The National Desk, resigned this January over concerns about Sinclair’s right-wing biased and inaccurate content. The requirement of including at least three Rapid Response Team stories each night was one of Ramirez’s breaking points.