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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 2 years ago

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By: Tunku Varadarajan

Published: Dec 30, 2022

The phrase “generation gap” became popular in the late 1960s, as baby boomers were coming of age. To hear social psychologist Jonathan Haidt tell it, today’s generation gap has widened into a chasm. “We have a whole generation that’s doing terribly,” he says in an interview at his professorial office, book-lined and hushed, at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He calls it a “national crisis.”

At 59, Mr. Haidt is a young boomer, and he isn’t talking about millennials, some of whom are in their 40s by now. Rather, he has in mind the younger cohort, Generation Z, usually defined as those born between 1997 and 2012. “When you look at Americans born after 1995,” Mr. Haidt says, “what you find is that they have extraordinarily high rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, suicide and fragility.” There has “never been a generation this depressed, anxious and fragile.”

He attributes this to the combination of social media and a culture that emphasizes victimhood. The latter was the subject of his most recent book, “The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure” (2018), with co-author Greg Lukianoff. Social media is Mr. Haidt’s present obsession. He’s working on two books that address its harmful impact on American society: “Kids in Space: Why Teen Mental Health Is Collapsing” and “Life After Babel: Adapting to a World We Can No Longer Share.”

The former title is a metaphor. Mr. Haidt imagines “literally launching our children into outer space” and letting their bodies grow there: “They would come out deformed and broken. Their limbs wouldn’t be right. You can’t physically grow up in outer space. Human bodies can’t do that.” Yet “we basically do that to them socially. We launched them into outer space around the year 2012,” he says, “and then we expect that they will grow up normally without having normal human experiences.”

Mr. Haidt’s research, confirmed by that of others, shows that depression rates started to rise “all of a sudden” around 2013, “especially for teen girls,” but “it’s only Gen Z, not the older generations.” If you’d stopped collecting data in 2011, he says, you’d see little change from previous years. “By 2015 it’s an epidemic.” (His data are available in an open-source document.)

What happened in 2012, when the oldest Gen-Z babies were in their middle teens? That was the year Facebook acquired Instagram and young people flocked to the latter site. It was also “the beginning of the selfie era.” Apple’s iPhone 4, released in 2010, had the first front-facing camera, which was much improved in the iPhone 5, introduced two years later. Social media and selfies hit a generation that had led an overprotected childhood, in which the age at which children were allowed outside on their own by parents had risen from the norm of previous generations, 7 or 8, to between 10 and 12.

That meant the first social-media generation was one of “weakened kids” who “hadn’t practiced the skills of adulthood in a low-stakes environment” with other children. They were deprived of “the normal toughening, the normal strengthening, the normal anti-fragility.” Before 2010, teenagers had flip phones. “They’d text each other and say, ‘Let’s meet down at the mall.’ They would do things together.” Now, their childhood “is largely just through the phone. They no longer even hang out together.” Teenagers even drive less than earlier generations did.

Mr. Haidt especially worries about girls. By 2020 more than 25% of female teenagers had “a major depression.” The comparable number for boys was just under 9%. The comparable numbers for millennials at the same age registered at half the Gen-Z rate: about 13% for girls and 5% for boys. “Kids are on their devices all the time,” he says, but boys play videogames, often in groups: “Boys thrive if they have a group of boys competing against another group of boys.”

Most girls, by contrast, are drawn to “visual platforms,” Instagram and TikTok in particular. “Those are about display and performance. You post your perfect life, and then you flip through the photos of other girls who have a more perfect life, and you feel depressed.” He calls this phenomenon “compare and despair” and says: “It seems social because you’re communicating with people. But it’s performative. You don’t actually get social relationships. You get weak, fake social links.”

Mr. Haidt says he has no antipathy toward the young, and he calls millennials “amazing.” Older folks make fun of them, “but that’s the normal teasing across generations that you get going back to Plato.” To illustrate his point about Gen Z, Mr. Haidt challenges people to name young people today who are “really changing the world, who are doing big things that have an impact beyond their closed ecosystem.” He can think of only two, neither of them American: Greta Thunberg, 19, the Swedish climate militant, and Malala Yousafzai, 25, the Pakistani advocate for female education. By contrast, he says millennials remade the “entire world”—though not necessarily for the better. Mark Zuckerberg, born in 1984, founded Facebook when he was 20.

He concedes that his judgment of Gen Z may be premature: “It could be that you’ll see some impact in three or four years, by the time they’re 30. But I’m predicting that they will be less effective, less impactful, than previous generations.” Why? “You should always keep your eye on whether people are in ‘discover mode’ or ‘defend mode.’ ” In the former mode, you seize opportunities to be creative. In the latter, “you’re not creative, you’re not future-thinking, you’re focused on threats in the present.”

University students who matriculated starting in 2014 or so have arrived on campus in defend mode: “Here they are in the safest, most welcoming, most inclusive, most antiracist places on the planet, but many of them were acting like they were entering some sort of dystopian, threatening, immoral world.” Once they enter the workplace, they’re less innovative, less inclined to take risks, and that may “undermine American capitalism,” Mr. Haidt says.

He points to the work of the Manhattan Institute’s Zach Goldberg, who extrapolated from Pew Research Institute data and found that 56% of women 18 to 29 responded affirmatively to the question: Has a doctor or other healthcare provider ever told you that you have a mental health condition? “Some of that,” Mr. Haidt says, “has to be just self-presentational,” meaning imagined. “This is exactly part of the problem. This new ideology . . . valorizes victimhood. And if your sub-community motivates you to say you have an anxiety disorder, how is this going to affect you for the rest of your life?” He answers his own question: “You’re not going to take chances, you’re going to ask for accommodations, you’re going to play it safe, you’re not going to swing for the fences, you’re not going to start your own company.”

Mr. Haidt predicts that Gen-Z women will be much less successful than millennial ones. After observing young women who are now in their 20s, he worries that the “gender gap that’s been closing very rapidly in many fields over the last couple of decades might begin to widen in the 2030s.” Whereas millennial women are doing well, “Gen-Z women, because they’re so anxious, are going to be less successful than Gen-Z men—and that’s saying a lot, because Gen-Z men are messed up, too.”

The problem, he says, is distinct to the U.S. and other English-speaking developed countries: “You don’t find it as much in Europe, and hardly at all in Asia.” Ideas that are “nurtured around American issues of race and gender spread instantly to the U.K. and Canada. But they don’t necessarily spread to France and Germany, China and Japan.” Thus America’s “supply of young people who are not anxious or depressed will heavily depend on taking people who are not born in an English-speaking country.”

The anxiety and fragility at the youthful end of the American workforce is making the labor force troublesome to work with. “This is something I hear from a lot of managers, that it’s very difficult to supervise their Gen-Z employees, that it’s very difficult to give them feedback.” That makes it hard for them to advance professionally by learning to do their jobs better.

At the same time, social media promotes an organizational culture of fear. “If corporations become less effective because everyone’s afraid of Twitter, afraid of what will be said about them,” he says, “this could severely damage American capitalism.” When managers are “afraid to speak up honestly because they’ll be shamed on Twitter or Slack, then that organization becomes stupid.” Mr. Haidt says he’s “seen a lot of this, beginning in American universities in 2015. They all got stupid in the same way. They all implemented policies that backfire.”

Mr. Haidt, who describes himself as “a classical liberal like John Stuart Mill, ” also laments the impact of social media on political discourse: “Social media is incompatible with liberal democracy because it has moved conversation, and interaction, into the center of the Colosseum. We’re not there to talk to each other. We’re there to perform” before spectators who “want blood.”

Is there a solution? “I’d raise the age of Internet adulthood to 16,” he says—“and enforce it.” Thirteen-year-olds can legally sign up for social-media sites, and millions of much younger children use them. “They just lie about their birthdays. The Internet teaches them that all you have to do is lie and you can go anywhere. That’s what we’ve taught kids so far, and it has to stop.”

In the physical world, he observes, “we have more than a hundred years of making things safe for children. We require car seats and seat belts. We eliminated cigarette vending machines. We have fences around pools.” By contrast, “life went onto phone-based apps 10 years ago, and the protections we have for children are zero, absolutely zero.” The damage to Generation Z from social media “so vastly exceeds the damage from Covid that we’re going to have to act.”

There may be a glimmer of hope: Adolescents, he says, have an inkling of their own predicament. Mr. Haidt has addressed classes of seventh- and eighth-graders on the perils of social media. “I ask them, ‘Would you get off it on your own?’ Many are afraid to do that. But when I ask, ‘What if nobody could be on? Would that be better?’ they mostly say yes.”

Gen Z, he says, “is not in denial. They recognize that this app-based life is really bad for them.” He reports that they wish they had childhoods more like those of their parents, in which they could play outside and have adventures with their friends. They see the point of getting off social media, he insists: “So long as it’s not just targeting one child but everybody, I believe they’d be very supportive.”

#Jonathan Haidt #Tunku Varadarajan #generation gap #Gen Z #Generation Z #emotional fragility #fragility #social media #mental health #victimhood #victimhood culture #organizational stupidity #religion is a mental illness

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wellesleybooks · 5 years ago

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Two new and important books that chronicle September 11th reviewed by Tunku Varadarajan for the Wall Street Journal.

#9/11

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visto-usa-visti-stati-uniti · 2 years ago

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Tunku Varadarajan chiede di prendere di mira la brigata Hindutva ai sensi del Magnitsky Act #Tunku #Varadarajan #chiede #prendere #mira #brigata #Hindutva #sensi #del #Magnitsky #Act #vistoe1 #vistoe1 #vistousa #vistostaiuniti #vistoamerica #visto #immigrazione

Tunku Varadarajan chiede di prendere di mira la brigata Hindutva ai sensi del Magnitsky Act Tunku Varadarajan; credito fotografico: AEI Lo scrittore anglo-indiano afferma che “gli ideologi indiani/hindutva che invocano violenza religiosa, discriminazione o peggio” non dovrebbero “mai ottenere un visto per gli Stati Uniti”. Il Magnitsky Act è diventato brevemente una delle stringhe di ricerca più…

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itsfinancethings · 4 years ago

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New story in Politics from Time: Indian Americans Don’t Want Kamala Harris Pigeon-Holed. But They Don’t Want to See Her Biracial Heritage Erased Either

Rini Sampath didn’t always find it easy to embrace her South Asian roots. “When I was a kid, Indians were still the punchline on cartoon reruns,” says Sampath, 25, speaking from her home in San Diego, Calif. But when she was in middle school, her father introduced her to Kamala Harris, then San Francisco’s District Attorney. Fascinated by Harris’ backstory and biracial identity, Sampath followed the politician’s rise closely—from District Attorney to California Attorney General to U.S. Senator, and now Vice Presidential candidate. “As I watched her grow over the years and break many barriers, I grew up too,” Sampath says. “Inspired by her, I ran for, and won, the position of student body president at the University of Southern California.”

On Tuesday, Harris—born to a Jamaican father and an Indian mother—was announced as presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s vice-presidential pick, becoming the first Black woman and first person of Asian descent on a major party’s presidential ticket. But amid celebration surrounding the unprecedented level of representation Harris brings to the 2020 race, some worry that her South Asian heritage is being overlooked. Others say they don’t want the conversation around Harris’ candidacy as a biracial woman to ignore her past as a prosecutor, given the impact of the criminal justice system on Black and brown communities.

Despite Harris being open about her Indian heritage, popular framing has often excluded it: In 2016, Harris was frequently referred to as “the second black woman to be elected to the U.S. Senate,” with little mention of the fact that she was also the first Senator of South Asian descent. After the announcement that she would be Biden’s running mate, headlines were similarly over-simplified. “In the media, she is always announced as the ‘first Black woman’ to do something, and she is, but she is also biracial and that is never in the headlines as a one-liner,” says Moenika Chowdhury, 24, of New Jersey.

Some argue that, in today’s political landscape, Harris can represent either Black America or Asian America, but not both. “The Democrats are a party of ethnic hierarchies, in which smaller ethnicities—such as Indians—must efface themselves and wait their turn,” writes Tunku Varadarajan in The Wall Street Journal. As Varadarajan notes, the difference in Black and Asian American numbers in the electorate is stark: 30 million Black Americans are projected to be eligible voters in the 2020 election, compared to 11 million Asian American voters.

But this one-sidedness doesn’t have to be the case, says Neil Makhija, executive director at the Indian American political group IMPACT. Being Black and Indian American places Harris in a position to make “the connection between civil rights and immigration” more visible, says Makhija. “I really am excited for her to tell that story, which will also bridge together communities of color and help us understand how we’re interconnected.”

“It isn’t just that we want her to be an Asian American sister for us,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal told the Associated Press, explaining that Harris embodies “the experiences that so many immigrant communities have had, learning from the leadership of Black communities… So we want her to claim all of us and we will all claim her.”

Harris and her South Asian heritage

The interconnectivity Makhija points to goes back decades. The philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi, leader of the Indian Independence Movement, was at the core of Martin Luther King Jr.’s work amid the U.S. Civil Rights movement. King, who first learned about Gandhi in 1949 as a seminary student, read many of Gandhi’s writings and corresponded with the Indian leader’s disciples. King soon refined his own message of nonviolent resistance, inspired by the Gandhian principles he had studied. In 1959, the Civil Rights leader visited India to pay homage and learn more about his paragon. “To other countries I may go as a tourist, but to India I come as a pilgrim,” King said.

Amid waves of social change within America, 1964 saw the passing of the Civil Rights Act. Just a year later, the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act also became law—a route for many Indians to immigrate to the U.S. The connections between the civil rights movement and immigration are starting to become more apparent among Indian Americans, according to M.R. Rangaswami, founder of Indiaspora. “Everybody is realizing that the Civil Rights Act was the reason why the Immigration Act was then passed a year later,” says Rangaswami, “[and] that allowed Indians and people like my brother to immigrate to this country.”

Courtesy of Kamala HarrisKamala Harris with her younger sister, Maya, and their mother outside of their apartment on Milvia Street in Jan. 1970.

“My mother and father, they came from opposite sides of the world to arrive in America—one from India and the other from Jamaica—in search of a world-class education,” Harris said on Aug. 12 in her first campaign appearance as Biden’s running mate. “But what brought them together was the civil rights movement of the 1960s. And that’s how they met, as students in the streets of Oakland, marching and shouting for this thing called justice in a struggle that continues today.” Harris often cites her late mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, as a particular source of inspiration and drive, and has discussed how her mother was discriminated against for her accent and often sidelined for promotions.

You can’t know who @KamalaHarris is without knowing who our mother was. Missing her terribly, but know she and the ancestors are smiling today. #BidenHarris2020 pic.twitter.com/nmWVj90pkA

— Maya Harris (@mayaharris_) August 12, 2020

Still, “the primacy of Senator Harris’ identity as a Black woman is a real thing,” says Virinchi Sindhwani, 23, who worked at the Iowa Caucus as a Democratic field organizer. One reason for this overshadowing, according to Varun Nikore, President of the AAPI Victory Fund, could be that Americans just don’t know how to talk about biracial identities. “You don’t see it discussed much,” Nikore says, “but multiracial people are among the fastest-growing demographic categories in the United States.” According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the population of mixed-race individuals is projected to triple by 2060, making it the fastest-growing racial or ethnic group for the next several decades. And the Asian population is the next fastest-growing, projected to double in the same timeframe.

While Asian American voters make up about 5% of eligible U.S. voters, among that group Indian Americans hold one of the highest turnout rates. “But there’s still room to grow, and chances are that Harris’ presence will help boost turnout, especially among younger Indian American voters,” says Karthick Ramakrishnan, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Riverside and founder of AAPI Data.

For some voters, the racial representation Harris brings to the Democratic ticket doesn’t negate concerns they have over her past policy positions when it comes to underrepresented communities, including her record of defending California’s death penalty system and promoting heightened law enforcement surrounding marijuana. “At many points in my life, she’s been a role model for me. However, she has also been very problematic in regards to the prison industrial complex and prosecution,” says Zoee D’Costa, a medical student in New Jersey who identifies as Indian and Portuguese American.

As racial justice protests have swept the country this summer, D’Costa says she is troubled by Biden and Harris’ records dealing with Black communities. Nevertheless, she still plans on voting for a Biden-Harris ticket.

The complexities of biracial identities in politics

In California, where there’s a larger population of Black people than South Asian Americans, Harris “has built her political career sort of centering her Black identity,” says Sangay Mishra, assistant professor at Drew University and author of Desis Divided: The Political Lives of South Asian Americans. He believes this plays a large role in people not knowing about her South Asian heritage today, particularly those who aren’t South Asian. In more recent years, Harris has been more explicit about her Indian roots, a shift Mishra believes is reflective of how she has evolved and grappled with her identity throughout her life. “Her mother was very clear that she was Indian but she was Black also, and her Blackness was a big part of how she was seen by people,” says Mishra, also pointing to Harris’ decision to attend a historically Black college.

Mishra also notes that voters understand that a political figure needs to be popular among more than one ethnic group. “There is a tendency to claim a person as belonging only to one group… but I don’t think that either Black voters or South Asian voters are going to be that narrow in their thinking,” he says.

Mike Kepka—San Francisco Chronicle/Getty ImagesKamala Harris meets with supporters in front of the 24th street BART station while on the campaign trail with Cruz Bustamonte on Oct. 4, 2003. Harris was running for District Attorney in San Francisco.

For multiracial voters, the issue hits close to home. “Being biracial is such a personal experience,” says Chowdhury, who is of Indian and Russian descent. “You cannot judge it from the outside looking in.”

“The wording that needs to stop being thrown around are people debating if she is ‘Black enough’ or ‘Indian enough.’ When you are born biracial you completely own both ‘sides’ of your race. It is not a competition of percentages,” she says. Even more, being biracial is an identity in its own right, separate from the sum of its parts.

The bridging together of the two cultures that many are hoping Harris can represent is already happening in small ways. In the last few weeks, a new dance trend has spread on TikTok and beyond: the Wakhra Dougie. Set to a remix of “Teach Me How to Dougie” by Cali Swag District combined with “Wakhra Swag” by Navv Inder, the choreography blends the Dougie with Indian dance moves. After Harris was announced as Biden’s running mate, the Internet was quick to seize the opportunity—one TikTok creator sharing a video dressed as Harris and dancing the Wakhra Dougie with the caption, “Kamala Harris bringing the Black and Indian to the White House in Jan.”

Seeing themselves—and their lived experiences—in a candidate for perhaps the first time, many voters will be hoping for just that.

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plusorminuscongress · 4 years ago

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New story in Politics from Time: Indian Americans Don’t Want Kamala Harris Pigeon-Holed. But They Don’t Want to See Her Biracial Heritage Erased Either

Harris and her South Asian heritage

Courtesy of Kamala HarrisKamala Harris with her younger sister, Maya, and their mother outside of their apartment on Milvia Street in Jan. 1970.

You can’t know who @KamalaHarris is without knowing who our mother was. Missing her terribly, but know she and the ancestors are smiling today. #BidenHarris2020 pic.twitter.com/nmWVj90pkA

— Maya Harris (@mayaharris_) August 12, 2020

The complexities of biracial identities in politics

Seeing themselves—and their lived experiences—in a candidate for perhaps the first time, many voters will be hoping for just that.

By Anna Purna Kambhampaty on August 15, 2020 at 12:20PM

#Time #politics #PlusOrMinusCongress #±Congress #Indega±#IndegaPlusOrMinus #TimeMag #TimeMagazine

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goodbearblind · 7 years ago

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DIAN FOSSEY January 16th, 1932 – December 26th, 1985 WE SHOULD NEVER FORGET Commentary by Captain Paul Watson Twenty-nine year ago today Dian Fossey was murdered at her camp in Volcanoes National Park in Rwanda. She was 53. Fossey was one of the foremost primatologists in the world while she was alive and along with Jane Goodall and Birutė Galdikas, the group of the three most prominent prominent researchers on primates (Fossey on gorillas; Goodall on chimpanzees; and Galdikas on orangutans) sent by Louis Leakey to study great apes in their natural environments. On three occasions, Fossey wrote that she witnessed the aftermath of the capture of infant gorillas at the behest of the park conservators for zoos; since gorillas will fight to the death to protect their young, the kidnappings would often result in up to 10 adult gorillas' deaths. Through the Digit Fund, Fossey financed patrols to destroy poachers' traps in the Karisoke study area. In four months in 1979, the Fossey patrol consisting of four African staffers destroyed 987 poachers' traps in the research area's vicinity. The official Rwandan national park guards, consisting of 24 staffers, did not eradicate any poachers' traps during the same period. In the eastern portion of the park, not patrolled by Fossey, poachers virtually eradicated all the park's elephants for ivory and killed more than a dozen gorillas. Fossey helped in the arrest of several poachers, some of whom served long prison sentences. In 1978, Fossey attempted to prevent the export of two young gorillas, Coco and Pucker, from Rwanda to the zoo in Cologne, Germany. During the capture of the infants at the behest of the Cologne Zoo and Rwandan park conservator, 20 adult gorillas had been killed. The infant gorillas were given to Fossey by the park conservator of the Virunga Volcanoes for treatment of injuries suffered during their capture and captivity. With considerable effort, she restored them to some approximation of health. Over Fossey's objections, the gorillas were shipped to Cologne, where they lived nine years in captivity, both dying in the same month. She viewed the holding of animals in "prison" (zoos) for the entertainment of people as unethical. The killing of so many of her beloved Mountain Gorillas provoked Fossey to take bolder actions and to speak out loudly to those she knew were compromising with the poachers. While she was alive Fossey was severely criticized by many for her opposition to poaching. The WWF and National Geographic both cut off her funding because she refused to back off from her outspoken and physical opposition to poaching. According to Fossey's own letters, the Rwandan national park system, the World Wildlife Fund, African Wildlife Foundation, Fauna Preservation Society, the Mountain Gorilla Project and some of her former students tried to wrest control of the Karisoke research center from her for the purpose of tourism, by portraying her as unstable. In her last two years, Fossey did not lose a single gorilla to poachers. Meanwhile the Mountain Gorilla Project, which was supposed to patrol the Mount Sabyinyo area, covered up gorilla deaths caused by poaching and diseases transmitted through tourists. Despite this the public contributions for gorilla conservation went to these organizations and not to Fossey, although the public often believed their money would go to Fossey and this belief was encouraged by many of these same groups, some of whom blatantly exploited her name. As others became rich from her work. Fossey wrote that much of the money collected for Gorillas was instead put into tourism projects and as she put it "to pay the airfare of so-called conservationists who will never go on anti-poaching patrols in their life." Fossey described the differing two philosophies as her own "active conservation" or the international conservation groups' "theoretical conservation." This kind of corruption and disingenuous “conservation” has grown more and more prominent since her death as conservation has become a profitable business for many groups. In other words there are groups that do, and then, there are groups that do “mail-outs.” Today poaching continues to eradicate large numbers in Africa and threatens many species with extinction. The same method used to capture gorillas is now used in Taiji, Japan to capture dolphins with entire pods being wiped out to provide “specimens” for display in dolphinariums. One of the theoretical conservationists Dian Fossey had in mind would be British writer Tunku Varadarajan who wrote in The Wall Street Journal in 2002 that Fossey was a “colourful, controversial, and a racist alcoholic who regarded her gorillas as better than the African people who lived around them.” My own thought is that perhaps she did think exactly that, and if she did, it is because the mountain gorillas are indeed better than the African people who live around them. In fact they are better than all of humanity who lay waste to nature, war on each other and wage hatred towards our fellow humans and all other species. As for being an alcoholic, considering the death and misery she witnessed, I can well understand her turning to the bottle for solace. She was a great woman, an influential scientist and a courageous conservationist who sacrificed her life in the cause for which she fought so long and so valiantly for. I have been fortunate to have met Jane Goodall many times and I consider Birute Galdikas a longtime personal friend. I have always regretted that when I was working with elephant conservation work in East Africa that I did not visit Dian in Rwanda. What I do know is that what she did was inspiring. My friend, the late Farley Mowat wrote the book Virunga about Dian Fossey and confided in me many things about her that the public did not know, things about her past that fired the passion in her heart to do what she did and ultimately made her a legend and a symbol of resistance to human corruption and greed. A few hours before she was murdered she wrote the following words in her journal: “When you realize the value of all life, you dwell less on what is past and concentrate more on the preservation of the future.” Source: https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10215486632145749&id=1436957405

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thenewsedge · 5 years ago

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Tunku Varadarajan is executive editor at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is a contributing editor at POLITICO Europe. On December 12, the United Kingdom will conclude the tawdriest election in memory — which is saying a lot, given how inglorious the last one was in 2017. That election confirmed Theresa May as prime minister —…

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mikepatelatlanta-blog · 7 years ago

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Mike Patel Atlanta : Tunku Varadarajan article on the dominant presence of Indians in America's motel industry; notes that slightly more than 50 percent of all motels in US are now owned by people of Indian origin and that about 70 percent of Indian motel owners are called Patel .

#caste systems #Patel Motel Cartel #Mike Patel Atlanta

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tripstations · 6 years ago

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Hotel History: Asian American Hotel Owners Association

The Asian American Hotel Owners Association (AAHOA) is a trade association that represents hotel owners. As of 2018, AAHOA has approximately 18,000 members who incredibly own about half the 50,000 hotels in the United States. If you bear in mind that Indian Americans constitute less than one percent of Americas population, the conquest of this business niche is extraordinary. Furthermore, about 70% of all Indian hotel owners are named Patel, a surname that shows that they are members of a Gujarati Hindu subcaste.

How did this economic miracle come to pass? The first Indian motel owner in the United States is said to have been an illegal immigrant named Kanjibhai Desai who managed to buy the Goldfield Hotel in downtown San Francisco in the early 1940s.

Some twenty-six years later in 1949, another Asian American of Indian descent came to the United States from his home near the city of Surat during the first wave of legal immigration from India. Bhulabhai V. Patel picked apricots and grapes in Northern California and worked at various jobs until he saved enough to purchase the 108- room William Penn Hotel in San Francisco in 1960. By 1996, Bhulabhai owned nine properties in Northern California with his son, Raman and grandson Pramod. At the time, he was amazed by the rapid growth of the Indian American lodging community. “It started with one hotel”, he said, “Now we’ve got thousands.”

“Patel” means farmer or landowner in Gujarat where the Patels are the original and largest clan. In order to facilitate tax collections, the British delineated, reassigned and renamed some of them “Amin” (the farm managers) and others “Desai” (those who kept the books). It is said that the Patels have a commerce gene in their blood and the anecdotal evidence seems to bear this out.

In the mid-1970s, Patels from India, Africa and Asia began to emigrate to the United States where any immigrant willing to invest $40,000 in a business could apply for permanent residence, the first step to citizenship. There were limited opportunities for such an investment. Restaurants required the Hindu Gujaratis to handle meat, an uncomfortable activity. Furthermore, a restaurant required one-on-one interaction with guests, confusing for newly-arrived immigrants. But distressed roadside motels could be acquired outright for $40,000. In addition, the motel industry was slumping badly because of the oil embargo and the resultant nationwide shortage of gasoline.

One Patel pioneer reported that a motel “… is easy to run. You don’t need fluent English, just the will to work long hours. And, it’s a business that comes with a house- you don’t have to buy a separate house….”

The new owners brought their business expertise and their families to operate these motels. They instituted modern accounting techniques to monitor the all-important cash flow. Four times cash flow became the mantra of the Patels. If the distressed motel produced $10,000 per year in revenues and could be acquired for $40,000, it was profitable for a hard-working family.

They renovated and upgraded the rundown motels to improve cash flow, sold the properties and traded up to better motels. This was not without difficulties. Conventional insurance companies wouldn’t provide coverage because they believed these immigrant owners would burn down their motels. In those days, banks were unlikely to provide mortgages either. The Patels had to finance each other and self-insure their properties.

In a July 4, 1999 New York Times article, reporter Tunku Varadarajan wrote, “The first owners, in a manner consistent with many an emergent immigrant group, scrimped, went without, darned old socks and never took a holiday. They did this not merely to save money but also because thrift is part of a larger moral framework, one that regards all nonessential expenditure as wasteful and unattractive. It’s an attitude buttressed by a puritanical aversion to frills and frivolities, one that has its roots as much in the kind of Hinduism that the Patels practice as in their historical tradition as commercial perfectionists.”

They bought, renovated, operated and resold motels mostly along the interstate highways. Soon, the name “Patel” became synonymous with the hotel business. Patels own motels in cities all over the U.S., including Canton (Texas, Mississippi, Michigan and Ohio), Burlington (Vermont, Iowa and North Carolina), Athens (Georgia, Tennessee and Alabama), Plainview (New York and Ohio) and Longview (Texas and Washington).

Author Joel Millman writes in The Other Americans (Viking Books):

“Patels took a sleepy, mature industry and turned it upside down- offering consumers more choices while making the properties themselves more profitable. Motels that attracted billions in immigrant savings turned into real estate equity worth many billions more. That equity, managed by a new generation, is being leveraged into new businesses. Some are related to lodging (manufacturing motel supplies); some related to real estate (reclaiming derelict housing); some simply cash seeking an opportunity. The Patel-motel model is an example, like New York’s West Indian jitneys, of the way immigrant initiative expands the pie. And there is another lesson: as the economy shifts from manufacturing to services, the Patel-motel phenomenon demonstrates how franchising can turn an outsider into a mainstream player. The Gujarati model for motels might be copied by Latinos in landscaping, West Indians in homecare or Asians in clerical services. By operating a turnkey franchise as a family business, immigrants will help an endless stream of service providers grow.”

As investment and ownership expanded, the Patels were accused of a wide variety of crimes: arson, laundering stolen travel checks, circumventing immigration laws. In an unpleasant burst of xenophobia,Frequent Flyer magazine (Summer 1981) declared, “Foreign investment has come to the motel industry…..causing grave problems for American buyers and brokers. Those Americans in turn are grumbling about unfair, perhaps illegal business practices: there is even talk of conspiracy.” The magazine complained that the Patels had artificially boosted motel prices to induce a buying frenzy. The article concluded with an unmistakable racist remark, “Comments are passed about motels smelling like curry and dark hints about immigrants who hire Caucasians to work the front desk.” The article concluded, “The facts are that immigrants are playing hardball in the motel industry and maybe not strictly by the rule book.” The worst visible manifestation of such racism was a rash of “American Owned” banners displayed in certain hotels across the country. This hateful display was repeated in post- Sept 11 America.

In my article, “How American-Owned Can You Get,” (Lodging Hospitality, August 2002), I wrote,

“In post-Sept. 11 America, signs of patriotism are everywhere: flags, slogans, God Bless America and United We Stand posters. Unfortunately, this outpouring sometimes oversteps the boundaries of democracy and decent behavior. After all, true patriotism encompasses the best features of our founding documents, and the very best of America is reflected in its diversity. Conversely, the worst if reflected when any one group attempts to define “American” in their own image. Unfortunately, a few hotel owners have attempted to describe their own peculiar version of “American.” When at the end of 2002 the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City installed an entrance banner saying “an American-owned hotel,” the owners attempted to deflect criticism by explaining, “The issue of American-owned is basically not disparaging toward other hotels. We want to provide our guests with an American experience. We want people to know they are going to get an American experience. We are not really interested in what the other hotels are or what they are not.”

This explanation is as wrongheaded as it gets. What is an “American experience” in a country that prides itself on its cultural diversity? Is it only white bread, hot dogs and cola? Or does it encompass all the arts, music, dance, food, culture and activities that various nationalities and citizens bring to the American experience? How much more American can you get?”

Today AAHOA is the largest hotel owners association in the world. Its U.S. citizen members own one of every two hotels in the U.S. With billions of dollars in property assets and hundreds of thousands of employees, AAHOA-owned hotels are core contributors in virtually every community in the United States.

Excerpted from my book “Great American Hoteliers: Pioneers of the Hotel Industry” AuthorHouse 2009

The Roosevelt New Orleans Hotel (1893) is Encouraging Return of Stolen Items

Participants who return such items will be eligible to win a seven-night stay in one of the hotel’s lavish presidential suites, worth over $15,000. The Roosevelt plans to display the items in its lobby, as a record of the hotel’s history. The campaign called the “Historic Giveback Contest” has been launched to celebrate the hotel’s 125th birthday. Former guests have until July 1, 2019 to return items by dropping them off at the concierge desk or sending them in the mail, said General Manager Tod Chambers.

The author, Stanley Turkel, is a recognized authority and consultant in the hotel industry. He operates his hotel, hospitality and consulting practice specializing in asset management, operational audits and the effectiveness of hotel franchising agreements and litigation support assignments. Clients are hotel owners, investors, and lending institutions.

New Hotel Book Nearing Completion

It is entitled “Great American Hotel Architects” and tells the fascinating stories of Warren & Wetmore, Henry J. Hardenbergh, Schutze & Weaver, Mary Colter, Bruce Price, Mulliken & Moeller, McKim, Mead & White, Carrere & Hastings, Julia Morgan, Emery Roth and Trowbridge & Livingston.

Other Published Books:

Great American Hoteliers: Pioneers of the Hotel Industry (2009) • Built To Last: 100+ Year-Old Hotels in New York (2011) • Built To Last: 100+ Year-Old Hotels East of the Mississippi (2013) • Hotel Mavens: Lucius M. Boomer, George C. Boldt and Oscar of the Waldorf (2014) • Great American Hoteliers Volume 2: Pioneers of the Hotel Industry (2016) • Built To Last: 100+ Year-Old Hotels West of the Mississippi (2017)

Hotel Mavens Volume 2: Henry Morrison Flagler, Henry Bradley Plant, Carl Graham Fisher (2018)

All of these books can also be ordered from AuthorHouse, by visiting stanleyturkel.com and by clicking on the book’s title.

Travel News | eTurboNews

Original Article

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todaybreakingnews · 7 years ago

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Manhood in the Age of Trump - Wall Street Journal

Wall Street Journal

Manhood in the Age of Trump Wall Street Journal The author of 'Manliness' suggests the president's vulgar appeal may be the beginning of the end of the push for gender-neutrality. Manhood in the Age of Trump. Illustration: Ken Fallin. By. Tunku Varadarajan. March 30, 2018 5:02 p.m. ET. 803 COMMENTS ... The Trump administration's plan to make people disappearWashington Post WaPo: Left alone, Trump is now 'calling his own shots'CNN Donald Trump turns infrastructure event into monologue about Roseanne, Syria, Korea and moreUSA TODAY New York Times -Yahoo News -NBCNews.com -The Guardian all 1,026 news articles »

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#breaking news #news today #news headlines #world news #current news #headline news #recent news #Blog

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attredd · 4 years ago

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Have you seen that mountain of evidence that Derek Chauvin is a racist? Me neither.In that regard, I’m like the Wall Street Journal’s fearlessly fact-driven Jason Riley. Did some shred of racial animus motivate the since-fired Minneapolis police officer’s killing of George Floyd? For the moment, we have no proof of that -- just a racialist narrative built on the happenstance (no reason to believe it’s more than that right now) that Chauvin is white and Floyd was black.These days, alas, mere happenstance is enough to tear this nation asunder.As an old investigator, I am intrigued by the fact that Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison has refused to disclose police body-cam video of the moments leading up to Chauvin’s disturbing neck hold. Ditto the fact -- highlighted in my analyses of the charges filed against the arresting officers (here and here) -- that the state’s minute-by-minute recitation of probable cause omits whatever went on between Floyd and police inside the squad-car. Surely, if they helped the prosecution’s police-brutality allegations, those gaps in the complaint would have been filled.Similarly, the fact that Minnesota police procedures permitted the use of neck holds for suspects resisting arrest has disappeared from the reporting. No chatter permitted, either, about the facts that Floyd (a) had a significant criminal record (though no new charges in recent years), (b) was suspected of passing a small amount of counterfeit money at the time of his arrest, and (c) was high on fentanyl and methamphetamine -- a toxic combination whose ingestion was particularly dangerous for a person with his heart conditions.Silence on these matters is partially explained by the admirably widespread desire not to besmirch a tragic victim, as well as the Left’s more-narrow determination to martyr Floyd for purposes of their police-racism narrative. The subject is also verboten, though, because the police were inconveniently recorded discussing their fear that Floyd might be experiencing excited-delirium syndrome. When police suspect that dangerous condition, their training calls for restraining the arrestee until emergency medical personnel arrive.I’ve expressed my concern that the case against the former Minneapolis police is both overcharged and undercharged. Others have taken the overcharging argument further than I have -- and persuasively so (see this thoughtful, comprehensive analysis by Gavrilo David). None of this means the prosecution of the now-fired cops is illegitimate. To the contrary, it underscores the wisdom of the original charges, filed before the notoriously demagogic Ellison entered the fray. In them, prosecutors took pains to include a manslaughter charge along with depraved indifference murder. That is, the police were not trying to kill this man. His death, to which his own poor judgment contributed, resulted from police negligence, possibly severe enough to rise to recklessness. But to this moment, there is no reason to believe his death was intentional, much less a modern-day “lynching” motivated by racial animus.Yet the racism narrative is driving the nation to ruin.The defamation that police are institutionally racist because America is indelibly racist has opened a potentially unbridgeable chasm. It is abetted by two national character flaws. The first is our gravitation to political leaders capable only of making matters worse by their spitefulness and Manichean posturing.The second is our increasingly manifest conviction that we are not worth defending. We seem convinced that there is no positive case to be made for a society that idealizes liberty and the equal dignity of every person. For a society that does not pretend to be perfect, but that strives to be better. A society that confesses its sin and works toward redemption: spilling its blood to end slavery, fighting to end de jure racism, and rejecting racial discrimination as a socially acceptable attitude.If we do not believe we are worth preserving -- humbled by our flaws, yes, but duly proud of our virtues and our historic accomplishments -- we will not be preserved.This week’s farce on Capitol Hill was not a hopeful sign.I admire Senator Tim Scott. His life story, recently told in moving detail by the WSJ’s Tunku Varadarajan, is an inspiration. Yet his police-reform legislation was far from inspirational. Sure, it should have been debated. Democrats are cynical -- surprise! -- to block its consideration, the better to keep riding the racism wave they expect to make an anti-Trump tsunami by November (and, as usual, getting no small amount of help from the president). But the best you can say for Scott’s proposal was that it would do no real harm.Republicans had no intention of pushing back against the slander of institutional racism. They have no stomach for trumpeting the 30-year revolution in policing that, by dramatically driving down homicide and violent crime, has saved thousands of black lives. They would not rouse themselves to a defense of police forces that, reflective of their communities, boast high percentages of African-American officers and, in many major cities, of African-American leadership. No case was made that those black lives matter, too.Instead, Republicans accept the premise that the nation’s police forces are infected with racism and in desperate need of reform. The GOP won’t dictate to the states, as a bill passed by House Democrats’ would. But Republicans would use federal funding as the prod for state data-gathering on police uses of force. Given that policing is a state responsibility, and that the use of force is a necessary component of it, the only rational purpose of this federal scrutiny is the conceit that police violence is triggered by racism, not by the imperative of countering aggressive criminal behavior.You might think Congress would want to test that proposition before hamstringing police in a way that will inevitably endanger American communities. Nope.The Republican cravenness makes it that much easier for Democrats to go all the way with the narrative. The Democratic legislation has no chance of being enacted in law -- at least not until the Democrats retake the Senate and do away with the filibuster so President Biden can sign their grand designs into law. But “reforming” police by legislation is not the objective.The point is for the Biden Justice Department to pick up where the Obama Justice Department left off.As I pointed out at the time, the Obama Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division made a habit of slipstreaming behind race-tinged controversies, commencing investigations of state and local police departments. They would file lawsuits under a Clinton-era law that permits the Justice Department to sue municipalities based on any alleged “pattern or practice” that deprives people of their federal rights. States, cities, and towns cannot afford to go toe-to-toe with the Justice Department and its $30 billion annual budget. So they would settle by agreeing to consent decrees in which they’d be obliged to conform to Obama-prescribed policing -- in with police as social workers whose community “legitimacy” hinges on confessing their “implicit bias”; out with “broken windows.”The headline grabbers in the Democrats’ police-reform package were bans on chokeholds and no-knock warrants (the federal jurisdiction for such mandates remains mysterious), as well as the gutting of “qualified immunity,” which would make it easier to sue police. Less well noticed were the legislation’s data-gathering provisions. They are similar to Scott’s, except Democrats want more information about forcible police encounters, and they want that information broken down by race.The object of the game is patent. Using the hocus-pocus of “disparate impact” theory, Democrats will argue that the disproportionately high percentage of black males in forcible police incidents is conclusive evidence of racism. Such factors as disproportionately high incidence of criminal behavior, and the race (often black) of the responding police officers will be ignored (the individual’s race makes no difference, you see, if the institution is racist -- indeed, incorrigibly so). This distorted number crunching will make it even more prohibitive for states and their municipalities to challenge Justice Department lawsuits. They will concede and sign on the dotted line: “reform” by consent decree.That is how you project racism without proving racism. It is not hard for the side that relishes the battle, especially when the other side’s specialty is preemptive surrender.

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#Police ‘Reform’ and the Making of a Racism Narrative

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thisdaynews · 5 years ago

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12 people and things that ruined British politics

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/12-people-and-things-that-ruined-british-politics/

12 people and things that ruined British politics

Tunku Varadarajan is executive editor at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is a contributing editor at POLITICO Europe.

On December 12, the United Kingdom will conclude the tawdriest election in memory — which is saying a lot, given how inglorious the last one was in 2017.

That election confirmed Theresa May as prime minister — arguably Britain’s second-worst leader since Lord North, the man who lost America in the 18th century. (The worst PM since North is agreed to be David Cameron, for his decision to have a Brexit referendum in 2016, the results of which have poisoned British politics ever since.)

Looking at Boris Johnson, the prime minister, and at Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the opposition, one is hard-pressed to find in history a less edifying pair of party leaders in competition for No. 10 Downing Street.

How did we get here? What follows is a list of a dozen people, institutions or ideas that have turned British politics into an emetic farce.

1. Winston Churchill & Charles de Gaulle

Central Press/Getty Images

The toxic twins on whose bygone fumes Britain chokes today. Churchill’s cherished myth — of a people standing alone in the face of peril from the Continent — entrenched the view that Britain is at its best when on its own.

That imperious ingrate De Gaulle played his part by confirming to Britons that a European compact was a French project. Twice he vetoed Britain’s application to join the European Economic Community, in 1963 and 1967, delivering a resoundingnonto Harold Macmillan and his successor, Ted Heath.

“The French always betray you in the end,” Macmillan wrote in his diary after the first betrayal. Brexit is the much-delayed fruit of those inauspicious beginnings.

2. The National Health Service

Graeme Robertson/Getty Images

Created in 1948 by Aneurin “Nye” Bevan, minister of health in the postwar government of Clement Attlee, the NHS is as much a political shibboleth as it is an institution cherished for giving Britain a veneer of socioeconomic equality.

The NHS has not only distorted rational debate about health and social care, it has become the institution by which a delusional Britain sees itself as a cut above the United States, its free-market fellow traveler. Not surprisingly, politics in recent days has been dominated by fears that the NHS will unravel in any future trade deal with the U.S., as Donald Trump’s barbarians arrive to carve up this sacred cow.

3. Oxford University

William Edwards/AFP via Getty Images

Britain’s oldest — and most worldly — university is the womb of conservative anti-Europeanism.

The Oxford Campaign for an Independent Britain was hatched in 1990 in a High Street coffee shop — in opposition to the Maastricht Treaty, which turned the European Community into the European Union in 1992. Founder members included Tories (or ex-Tories) Jacob Rees-Mogg, Mark Reckless and Daniel Hannan, the primordial ideologues of Brexit long before the likes of Nigel Farage erupted on the scene.

Modern British politics might, in fact, be seen as an extended spat between Oxford adversaries. These include George Osborne (Cameron’s former No. 2 and would-be successor, now a newspaper editor, who encouraged the demented plan for a referendum); Rory Stewart (a prominent Remainer who ran against Boris, himself an Oxford man and former president of the Oxford Union Society); and Nicky Morgan (a Remainer and Cabinet minister). All of them were members of the Oxford Union and the Oxford University Conservative Association, whose diaper politics in the early 1990s foreshadowed national politics two decades later.

4. The U.K. Supreme Court

Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Had the Brexit referendum not bagged first place, the abolition of the Judicial Committee of the House of Lords and its replacement by a U.K. Supreme Court would be regarded as the worst political misjudgment by a modern British prime minister.

Created by Tony Blair and his former flatmate-cum-lord chancellor, Charles Falconer, in 2009, the court has an implicit mandate to wade into constitutional questions from which the House of Lords, by demure but wise convention, had always shied away.

Blair shredded centuries of legal and constitutional history with his curial “reform.” The consequences were evident in the court’s recent ruling, in which it found that Johnson’s decision to suspend parliament was unlawful because he didn’t provide adequate reasons for prorogation. This was a ruling without precedent on a matter that the old House of Lords would have regarded as beyond the scope of a court of law.

The court’s chief justice, Baroness Hale, is an unapologetic progressive in the Ruth Bader Ginsburg mold, and it will not be long before the U.K. court is beset by the same problems of partisanship that ail the Supreme Court in the U.S.

5. John Bercow

Hollie Adams/Getty Images

Among the institutional actors that abdicated their responsibility to remain neutral is John Bercow, the former speaker of the House of Commons. Bercow bears a good deal of the responsibility for a poisoned atmosphere in the House of Commons by abandoning his role as referee and, instead, choosing to become a partisan goal-scorer for the Remain side in the Brexit debate.

As speaker, he (with the help of some others in the House) twisted parliamentary conventions to block “no deal” as a position the prime minister could take, thus robbing the government of leverage in its negotiations with the EU. Immodest to a fault, his actions have enraged many voters and corroded popular trust in parliament.

6. ‘The Stalinists’

Will Oliver/EPA

A dark trio of Stalinists steers a course for Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. In 1976, Andrew Murray, a privately educated young Englishman, joined the British Communist Party. He associated himself with Straight Left, a monthly run by Seamus Milne, above, another posh young Englishman. Fellow Communists knew them as “super tankies” — not just pro-Soviet but Stalinist. Four decades later, they are two of the three people thought to be the inner sanctum around Corbyn, the other being the dauntingly leftist trade union leader Len McCluskey.

Together, they’ve brought Stalinist sectarianism to the running of the Labour Party, once a social-democratic Big Tent but now a body where power is hoarded in closed meetings and loyalty to the leader is all.

7. Anti-Semitism

Oli Scarff/AFP via Getty Images

Transparent anti-Semitism in the Labour Party has contributed to the ugliness of British politics since Corbyn became leader in 2015, when hard-left extremists joined the party in droves. “The vast majority of British Jews,” wrote the Jewish Chronicle in a recent front-page editorial, “consider Jeremy Corbyn to be an anti-Semite.” (The newspaper conducted a poll which found this majority to be 87 percent of all British Jews.)

Corbyn has not only refused to address the problem adequately, he has contributed to it by failing to dispel the belief that he is anti-Semitic himself. The Labour Party is also under investigation for anti-Semitism by the Equality and Human Rights Commission. Only one other party has been investigated by the EHRC for racism: the nakedly nativist British National Party.

8. Priti Patel

Pool photo by Hannah McKay/Getty Images

One of the more incongruous — her critics would say distasteful — sights in British politics this year has been that of Patel, Britain’s first home secretary of Indian origin, telling the Conservative Party conference that she will “end the free movement of people once and for all.”

Patel’s parents are Gujarati immigrants from Uganda who left a few years before Idi Amin stripped all Ugandan Asians of citizenship and expelled them from the country in 1972. Almost all of these refugees were taken in by Britain. Under the strict immigration rules Patel favors, her kith and kin would not have been able to resettle in the U.K. That irony notwithstanding, this Gujarati version of Norman Tebbit says that she, a “daughter of immigrants, needs no lectures from the north London metropolitan, liberal elite.”

9. Bien-Pensant Bubbles

Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the British media and educational elites reside in a bubble — or, better put, in a fortress that excludes the entry of inconvenient opinions.

The BBC has displayed a notably monolithic Remain bias, as has Channel 4. And if the print media offers a more varied ideological menu, it is counterbalanced by an enormous anti-Brexit prejudice in the academy — compounded by the modern tendency to favor senior editors with plum jobs as heads of colleges and universities (Will Hutton as principal of Hertford College, Oxford, is one example; Alan Rusbridger at Oxford’s Lady Margaret Hall another).

The bias in universities ranges from individual cases — such as that of A.C. Grayling, a philosopher driven mad by Brexit, who embodies the refusal of extremist Remainers to compromise with the will of the electorate — to entire faculties of EU law at universities. This last group of scholars is a bastion of inflexible Remainer resistance, making Brexit much harder than it otherwise would have been.

10. The Democratic Unionist Party

Charles McQuillan/Getty Images

This cohort need not detain us, for there is no subtlety or nuance to be explained. Adamant in their adherence to the Orange credo of No Surrender to the Irish backstop, these Ulster loyalists have exploited to the limit the “mathematics of the Commons” — to use the phrase of columnist Daniel Finkelstein.

“We have all been trying to find something in Brexit that can unite us,” Finkelstein wrote recently in the London Times. “I’m excited to say that I think I’ve found a contender: we can all agree that we have had enough of the Democratic Unionist Party.”

11. Ed Miliband

Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP via Getty Images

This is the man — only the second-best politician in his own family — who in 2015 led the Labour Party to its worst general election defeat since 1987. He had shifted the party well to the left, making it sweetly unnecessary for Corbyn, his successor, to have to make a case against centrism and compromise.

More helpful to Corbyn than Labour’s prevailing ideological current were its rules to elect the party leader, which Miliband had changed in 2014 to one-member-one-vote. Members of the public could vote for Corbyn on payment of a mere £3.

This led to a wave of what Trotskyists called “entryism” on the left — with new hardline Corbyn voters flooding the zone — and the rest is history. Labour became unelectable.

12. Michel Barnier & Sabine Weyand

John Thys/AFP via Getty Images

This is the EU’s Brexit negotiating team, a Frenchman and a German woman whom the Brits just could not budge. They’re on this list not because they are malign, but because theirs was a job superbly done. And if the result of their labors was great pain in Britain, it might be said that much of that pain resulted from the Brits shooting not merely their own foot, but also at each other.

UK NATIONAL PARLIAMENT ELECTION POLL OF POLLS

For more polling data from across Europe visitPOLITICOPoll of Polls.

#British #Foreign #Politics

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2shalabhsaxena · 3 years ago

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India has become a ridiculous, paranoid place https://t.co/hcU45h51l1

— Tunku Varadarajan (@tunkuv) Aug 19, 2021

#IFTTT #Twitter

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itsfinancethings · 4 years ago

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Harris and her South Asian heritage

Courtesy of Kamala HarrisKamala Harris with her younger sister, Maya, and their mother outside of their apartment on Milvia Street in Jan. 1970.

You can’t know who @KamalaHarris is without knowing who our mother was. Missing her terribly, but know she and the ancestors are smiling today. #BidenHarris2020 pic.twitter.com/nmWVj90pkA

— Maya Harris (@mayaharris_) August 12, 2020

The complexities of biracial identities in politics

Seeing themselves—and their lived experiences—in a candidate for perhaps the first time, many voters will be hoping for just that.

#IFTTT #Blogger

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kennethmjoyner · 5 years ago

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The First (or Second?) Legal Blog Turns 20 Today

Congratulations to Walter Olson, whose popular blog on reforming the American civil justice system, Overlawyered, turns 20 today.

The blog, which Olson notes is “often named the oldest law blog,” published its first post on July 1, 1999. I’m not sure about the “often named” part of his comment, but I do know that I once named Olson first in a post back in 2007, Who Was the First Legal Blogger?

The spur for my 2007 post was a Wall Street Journal article noting the 10th anniversary of the birth of blogging. While conceding that dating the first blog and first blogger are “imperfect exercises,” WSJ writer Tunku Varadarajan credited Jorn Barger, who started the site Robot Wisdom in July 1997 “to start my own webpage logging the best stuff I find as I surf.” The Oxford English Dictionary identified this as the root of the word “weblog,” which usage later shortened to “blog.”

If Wisdom was the first blogger, I wondered, who was the first legal blogger? I started this blog in November 2002, and I knew there were already a number of legal blogs ahead of me. In fact, I wrote a two-part column in December 2002 and January 2003 rounding up 62 of the “blawgs” then being written.

So I rummaged through the archives of the longest-running blogs that I knew of. Here were the birthdates I found, from youngest to oldest:

SCOTUSblog, Oct. 1, 2002.

Inter Alia started on Aug. 18, 2002.

Jottings by an Employer’s Lawyer, July 17, 2002.

TalkLeft, June 2002.

The Trademark Blog, May 18, 2002.

The Volokh Conspiracy appears to start on April 10, 2002.

The Shout, March 10, 2002.

Ernie the Attorney’s first post was March 2, 2002.

Bag and Baggage launched on Nov. 28, 2001.

Tins by Rick Klau launched on Sept. 11, 2001.

Instapundit’s archives start on Aug. 8, 2001.

Overlawyered launched on July 1, 1999.

Based on that, I awarded the title of first legal blog to Olson’s Overlawyered.

But then came Greg Siskind.

Siskind is an Internet pioneer who in 1994 launched Visalaw.com, the first immigration law firm website in the world. He also lays claim to being the first lawyer in the world with a blog, as I noted in a 2013 post, The First-Ever Law Blog (Reconsidered).

In May 1998, Siskind set up something that he did not call a blog, but that was structured like one. It was a web page he created to provide updates on legislative developments surrounding proposed changes in Congress to the H-1B visa category for professional workers. You can still see that page, courtesy of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

Like a blog, the page contained time-stamped entries, organized in reverse-chronological order, with the latest updates at the top. The first entry on the page is dated May 7, 1998, and the last is June 8, 1998, meaning the updates continued for roughly a month. Siskind once wrote that the page was extremely popular and in one day alone received more than 50,000 hits.

As Varadarajan said a decade ago in the Wall Street Journal, dating the first blog is an imperfect exercise. Yes, Siskind’s H-1B page had some of the attributes of a blog. But it was a temporary effort to track a specific issue. Olson’s, on the other hand, created Overlawyered as a blog and has continued religiously to maintain and update it ever since.

By the way, of the 12 early legal blogs I listed above, seven remain active. In addition to Overlawyered, you can still follow:

SCOTUSblog is alive and well and thriving.

TalkLeft, by Denver criminal defense lawyer Jeralyn E. Merritt, is still actively covering politics and crime.

The Trademark Blog, written by New York lawyer Martin Schwimmer, keeps covering IP law.

The Volokh Conspiracy is in residence at Reason.com, where it is as active as ever.

Ernie the Attorney has evolved from blogging lawyer to law-practice consultant, but he is still cranking out the content.

Instapundit is still putting out the punditry as actively as ever.

Five can still be accessed, but are no longer regularly updated:

Inter Alia remains up, but Tom Mighell’s last update was in April 2016.

Jottings by an Employer’s Lawyer is still accessible, but was last updated in April 2017.

The Shout can still be accessed, but author and civil liberties lawyer Jennifer Granick has not updated it since June 2013.

Bag and Baggage, by California lawyer and podcaster Denise Howell, had its last post on Jan. 28, 2013.

Tins author Rick Klau has moved on from the legal world to become a partner at Google Ventures. He has had only one post since 2015, a January 2019 review of his new Jaguar.

So congratulations to Walter Olson on his blog’s 20 birthday. Two decades in, and his blog is as vital and compelling as ever.

from Law and Politics https://www.lawsitesblog.com/2019/07/the-first-or-second-legal-blog-turns-20-today.html via http://www.rssmix.com/

#law #legal

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