#and so circumscribed by fear of rejection

[bestworstcase]

the first thing. the very first thing we see salem do besides the non-diegetic bookend monologues. is tell off watts for being mean to cinder. “watts, do you find such malignance necessary?”

and it isn’t just a passing remark, salem makes a whole thing of it. “then i see no reason for your cruelty towards young cinder,” effusive praise and then she turns back to watts and says, “so, i’m curious, to what ‘failures’ are you referring?”

well, watts says, the girl with the silver eyes. even without her new power, it should have been effortless—

—and salem shuts that down hard. “it is because of the maiden’s power.” it’s not cinder’s fault. “make no mistake, cinder: you hold the key to our victory. but your newfound strength brings with it a crippling weakness, which is why you will remain by my side as we continue your treatment.”

then, after salem gives her orders, cinder asks about ruby. watts scoffs; what about her, she’s cinder’s problem, not ours. but: “tyrian? spring can wait. find the girl that did this to cinder, and bring her to me.”

and scene. that’s our first real glimpse of who salem is, and it lays the foundations for everything that develops from this point with salem and cinder. 

before salem walks into the room it’s established that cinder is at the bottom of the pecking order. watts and tyrian gleefully pick on her; hazel doesn’t give a shit. and then salem enters and makes this deliberate, protracted point of not just “don’t be cruel to cinder” but she is at pains to demonstrate that cinder’s wellbeing is her first priority. salem is personally involved in treating her injuries. watts is taking over the haven operation so that cinder will have more time to heal. she pulls tyrian off the hunt for the spring maiden because cinder wants ruby dealt with, and salem again intends to deal with the matter herself. 

“it’s important not to lose sight of what drives us: love. justice… reverence. but the moment you put your desires before my own, they will be lost to you. this isn’t a threat; this is simply the truth. the path to your desires is only found through me.”

but for cinder fall, spring can wait.

cinder has always been the exception to every rule. salem put what cinder wanted ahead of her own agenda. salem effectively postponed haven to do cinder a favor, without a second of hesitation. salem spent all of V4-5 focused on cinder and what cinder wanted. 

her parting words before cinder leaves for haven are: “you will have the power i promised you when the time is right, but remember that it comes with a cost. if ruby rose has learned to harness her gift, you must take care to protect yours; there’s only so much i can do to aid you.”

<- “be careful.”

and then cinder is not careful. now consider this exchange:

SALEM: Emerald. I want you to tell me whose fault this was… Now. EMERALD: Ci-Cinder! We failed because of Cinder. SALEM: ……That’s right. I want you to understand that failure; I want you to understand why Cinder must be left to toil in her isolation until she redeems herself.  MERCURY: You mean… EMERALD: She’s alive!? WATTS: You’re joking. How could you know that?

ok. really think about this. 

salem is the only person in the room who knows cinder is alive. everybody else takes it as a given that she died at haven. “maybe cinder survived somehow?” is not a possibility on anybody’s radar.

emerald is on the brink of collapsing in abject grief because she believes cinder is dead. and then salem grabs her shoulder and is like “listen to me very closely, it is emotionally important to me that you understand why we will not be going to cinder’s aid. she MUST be left to TOIL ALONE. BY HERSELF. until she redeems herself. do you understand?”

and the entire inner circle is like excuse me

what do you mean cinder’s alive

how do you even know that

“NO FURTHER QUESTIONS.”

i just—hrgfjfk

“apropos of nothing, i am NOT sending you or cinder’s other little friend to her aid and i will NOT be altering my plans in any way to help her i am not going to lift a finger for her. until she redeems herself.”

the lady doth protest too much. 

for cinder fall, spring can wait. 

salem is projecting her own desire to rescue cinder from the haven mess onto emerald for the express purpose of shooting it down. watts asks how she could even know cinder survived and salem’s like >:( and changes the subject. 

“it’s important not to lose sight of what drives us. love—”

she goes through her whole little spiel about not putting what they want before what she wants and then, with her back turned to all of them, she glances out the window and the mask just crumbles. her shoulders hunch. she is acutely unhappy. “and so we must… press on.”

this song and dance is not for them. it’s for her. it is half of an argument salem is having with herself. 

“spring can wait; find the girl that did this to cinder, and bring her to me.” -> “but the moment you put your desires before my own, they will be lost to you.”

“you will have the power i promised you […] but remember that it comes with a cost. if ruby rose has learned to harness her gift, you must take care to protect yours; there is only so much i can do to aid you.” -> “the path to your desires is only found through me.”

✨salem✨ is the one who set the expectation that what cinder wanted took priority. salem told cinder to rely on herself first and salem second. she warned cinder repeatedly and explicitly that the power she promised to cinder would expose her to greater harm.

as far as salem knows, because watts certainly wouldn’t have painted a fair picture of why cinder made the choices she did, cinder didn’t heed that warning, fumbled haven, lost the lamp, and very nearly got herself killed in the process. 

and salem wants to throw her a lifeline. 

she doesn’t want to be wanting to throw cinder a lifeline but it is, obviously, a thought that crossed her mind often enough for her to feel the need to declare out loud that she is Not Going To Do It, No Matter How Much You Might Want Me To, Emerald.

“the sword under vacuo’s academy, shade—” and then hazel drops the bomb on her that ozma has the lamp and he’s taking it to atlas. watts and tyrian are rattled because oz might talk some sense into ironwood and spoil the plan. but salem?

salem isn’t thinking tactics or strategy. she is getting run over by the freight train of discovering she feels the same way about This Situation—cinder trying to get the lamp away from ozma alone—as she feels about her daughters.

and she cannot fucking do it. 

cinder must be left to toil in her isolation until she redeems herself (by recovering the lamp) -> what do you mean oz has the lamp -> never mind we’re all going to atlas right the fuck now. cinder can toil in isolation with the covert support of salem’s most formidable pair of agents while salem churns out a zillion grimm over the course of a few months ITS FINE. EVERYTHING IS FINE.

“she thinks; she wants. as if she’s done something to warrant me caring about either of those things.” i don’t care, she says, caringly.

but:

“your newfound strength brings with it a crippling weakness, which is why you will remain at my side while we continue your treatment.” -> “you will have the power i promised you when the time is right, but remember that it comes with a cost. if ruby rose has learned to harness her gift, you must take care to protect yours. there’s only so much i can do to aid you.” -> “i would like to think i’ve shown a great deal of patience during my many years walking remnant, but i do hate repeating myself. you will remain here. is that clear?”

it isn’t that she’s punishing cinder for the failure at haven.

cinder comes home from beacon maimed, salem keeps her at evernight for months and replaces the arm she lost with a grimm (<- symbolically, she gives cinder part of herself;  the arm ties them together and that goes both ways, salem knows she’s alive and cinder knows when she’s back; she makes cinder like herself). waits as long as she reasonably can before sending her to haven, with parting words that amount to be careful, i won’t be there to save you.

cinder gets clobbered at haven and barely survives, salem is at war with herself over it when hazel blindsides her with the bad news that ozma has the lamp and she panics.

salem drops everything to rush to atlas with overwhelming force and arrives to find cinder waiting for her not only in one piece but also in possession of the lamp; her eyes go fucking glossy for a second as an enormous amount of tension just melts away. and salem like? teases her? about her habit of bringing home strays. “hm! you certainly do like collecting assets,” fondly indulgent. oh you. like genuinely is is the one and only time salem has ever sounded like she’s having fun. 

…then cinder reveals that she tried for the staff, too, but the polendina girl “interfered” and became the winter maiden instead. (salem isn’t stupid she knows this is cinder-speak for “a girl who could beat me without magic is the winter maiden now.”) and cinder wants to turn right around and hunt her down? NO. ABSOLUTELY NOT. YOU ARE STAYING HERE.

the hammer drops because salem is scared. she resorts to cruelty in a desperate stab at clawing herself back from the ledge of Caring About Cinder; but salem is so, so, so painfully cognizant all the time of how mortal cinder is. she sent cinder to beacon and cinder came home missing her eye and half an arm. she sent cinder to haven and cinder almost didn’t come back at all, it’s a miracle she survived. and salem brought an incomprehensible number of grimm to atlas specifically to avoid round three of feeling terrified while cinder crawls through a meat grinder for her. and now cinders like BUT I WANT TO CRAWL THROUGH THE MEAT GRINDER!

“remember that [power] comes with a cost; if ruby rose has learned to harness her gift, you must take care to protect yours. there’s only so much i can do to aid you” -> “everything is already in motion; all you need to concern yourself with is your ability to act when i tell you to.”

she doesn’t have the nerve to say it or maybe she just doesn’t know how but she is trying to pull cinder out of the line of fire. this is not your game to win (this is not your fight) and just because you’re more valuable to me than a pawn (you are not just a pawn to me) and everything is already in motion (i will take care of it this time) and all you need to concern yourself with is your ability to act when i tell you (don’t worry just let me handle it).

if she can crack down and keep cinder under control with cruelty and intimidation then she doesn’t have to confront the feelings driving her decisions, but of course she can’t because she never had control over cinder in the first place; cinder is legitimately stunned when salem shuts her down in 8.1 because Salem Does Not Treat Her Like That.

so naturally cinder goes: well fuck you i do what i want. 

and almost fucking dies. 

again.

they hit amity in the middle of the night. it’s dawn in vacuo during the broadcast, vacuo is six hours ahead of atlas (2.3). cinder does not wake up until dawn. she is unconscious for six hours. six. hours. in a world where aura can fully heal a thoracic impalement in about fifteen minutes.

think about how badly cinder had to have been hurt for emerald—who loves cinder and is terrified of salem—to bring cinder back to the whale after they did exactly what salem directly ordered cinder not to do. think about the level of desperation necessary for emerald of all people to weigh the risk of salem’s fury against the severity of cinder’s injuries and decide she had to bring cinder to salem. 

“you chose to disobey my specific instructions, just to fail again. and… i’ve realized it’s all my fault. you’ve fought your whole life unwaveringly for what you want, and here i am holding you back, instead of lifting you up. you deserve so much more than i’ve given you.”

<- that is the sound of salem falling off the ledge.

like

as a manipulative tactic to get cinder under her thumb this is, quite plainly, not going to work, and cinder sees right through it, and salem knows that. by literally ✨rewarding✨ open defiance she accomplishes nothing except proving to cinder that when the chips are down, salem will blink first.

but. 

salem is not about getting cinder under her thumb. she wants the relics and she’s also been losing her gods-damned mind for months now because every time cinder leaves her sight for an extended period of time cinder has gotten smushed like a bug and the legion of grimm did not even slightly improve the situation. and the only way salem can think of to thread the needle between having her cake and eating it too is to go REBELLION IS OKAY. LET’S TRY THE BUDDY SYSTEM. 

the minute salem reconstitutes, she beelines to where cinder is. pretends not to notice cinder’s bald-faced lies. “you did well” and “our work here is done” and not interrupting and making a point to demonstrate that she listened to what cinder told her (“you said they used the staff; i assume you rid the world of their creation.”) and asking carefully non-threatening follow up questions (“what did you create?” as opposed to, like, what happened to watts). 

salem isn’t trying to put cinder on a leash. she’s twisting herself into knots in search of a way to move forward with her actual agenda without getting cinder killed, and her increasing desperation to keep cinder alive is not primarily motivated by strategic calculation; it’s emotional. 

her establishing character moment is salem Making a Statement to her own inner circle that cinder is more important than the plan. she says she’s going to leave cinder to ~toil in isolation~ and sticks to it for all of, like, two minutes before she finds out it would mean abandoning cinder to face ozma alone and just shatters. she is visibly relieved when cinder surprises her with the lamp and proceeds to make “you will not go hunting a girl who can definitely maul you” her hill to die on until cinder tries to actually die on it, whereupon salem snaps like a stretched rubber band back to “you can do whatever the hell you want just please for the love of fuck slow down and let me bend the odds as much in your favor as i can.” this woman is immortal and cinder is still shaving years off her lifespan. 

and this is going to keep happening until she can get her act together and say outright that she Cares About Cinder, because to cinder all of this just looks like salem yanking a leash to remind cinder she’s worthless. the second beacon arc is going to be hysterical. 

[carolinemillerbooks]

New Post has been published on Books by Caroline Miller

New Post has been published on https://www.booksbycarolinemiller.com/musings/the-rapture-and-the-inferno/

The Rapture And The Inferno

Some people can be fooled some of the time, but not all of the people can be fooled all of the time unless they want to be.  Evangelical Christians seem to be among the latter. They have every reason to doubt Donald Trump’s religious convictions.  The number of fraud cases he has lost should be a clue: Trump University, his charitable foundation, and the E. Jean Carroll rape charge. The 91 current criminal indictments ought to be a red flag, too. Nonetheless, if polls speak true, a majority of the religious right gives the former president their unwavering support. Why they put their faith in him is unfathomable. Until  2016 when he ran for President, he had little commerce with them and identified as a  Presbyterian.  Even now, what he seems to admire most about evangelicals is the ability of their pastors to squeeze vast sums of money from the flock. “They’re all hustlers,” Trump says of them, the highest form of praise a con man can give to someone he believes is in the trade. In private, however, his remarks are anything but flattering. Despite his duplicity, evangelical pastors struggle to create what amounts to a squared circle, allying themselves with a man whose shenanigans rival those of Bernie Madow.  Instead, they turn a blind eye to his conduct or choose to see him as a “flawed vessel of God’s will.” An equivocation like the last one is a confession.  They know they have made a Faustian bargain, but given their priorities, they have no choice.  Under Trump’s leadership, they hope to drag the United States into the past, a period when women had few rights and LGBTQ was no more than a set of alphabet letters. So far, aligning themselves with an “infidel” has had its rewards. Trump chose an evangelical as his 2016 Presidential running mate, and after winning the election, he filled his Cabinet with people like Mike Pompeo who believe in the Rapture. Then he gave them the jewel they sought most.   He appointed three Supreme Court judges who were happy to overturn Rove v. Wade and deny women sovereignty over their bodies. When opposites conspire with one another, outcomes are unpredictable.  Trump and the pastors have cobbled together a wide net meant to ensnare an army of true believers. They’ve forgotten, however, that the same net circumscribes their boundaries and failed to foresee how a changed environment would alter their flock. One pastor complains his parishioners have begun to reject Christ’s teachings, finding them to be too weak. They seem to prefer the strum and dang of their new savior, Donald Trump. He not only embodies righteousness but also promises revenge. No doubt the former president thrills to the roar of the crowd, but the stage upon which he struts is a narrow one. The audience that gathers at his feet comes not to praise him but to hear their worst instincts validated. Moderate the message to the slightest degree and will they boo, as they did when he urged them to get a Covid 19 vaccine. Trump and the pastors have come to realize that their suppliants are more to be feared than exhorted. No longer a disorganized band of malcontents, they swell with the promise of the coming Rapture. To be ready, they’ve formed themselves into mindless hammers and are prepared to crush anyone who fails to share their frenzy. Trump’s rhetoric has grown more violent in response to their bloodlust. They may hurry him along the path he has chosen, but these suppliants demand of him a never-ending cycle of extremes, a demand that may appall some of the unscrupulous pastors and ambitious politicians who have been dragged within his wake like Marley’s chains. Having pledged their troth to a flawed vessel, these former luminaries must tread in their master’s footsteps or lose all import. Surely, a  compact this perfidious begs for a circle in Dante’s hell.

[kushsen1952]

Must we remain a slave?

A very peculiar feature of our nature is that we prefer to remain confined within the limits of our own mental formations. Our ideas, beliefs, principles, and inferences, formed from various experiences at an individual level and imposed on us over the years by the social, political, and religious convictions at a collective level, become the most powerful governor of our lives. These formations constantly influence and determine our thoughts, feelings, and actions, although we may not be quite conscious about their working or existence. At times we become aware of them, especially when they contradict our self-interest, but even on such occasions they usually prevail upon our independent thinking. We hesitate to think liberally or act freely, mainly because of our old habitual way of thinking which has a very strong hold on us. We prefer to operate from a base of which the laws are known to us rather than try to tread on new grounds where the consequences are unknown. In a way, this resistance to things new originates from our ignorance, which causes in our mind a fear of the unknown. We suspect what we do not know and, curiously enough, reject a new idea even without caring to ascertain its values. Admitting a new concept into our thinking or living requires a certain amount of courage and a liberal mindset, which are not the most dominant traits of our nature.

This tendency of clinging to the known ground is not peculiar to the ordinary man pinned down to their day-to-day life who has no time to think beyond their struggle for existence but is quite common even for the learned and the elite. In their case though it usually takes a different form. While ordinary men accede to a stereotyped life primarily out of compulsions, the elites usually remain satisfied with an “average humanity” more by choice, mainly due to their intellectual vanity arising from receiving a decent education and a variety of other information from diverse sources, which they consider as knowledge. Having acquired high university degrees with certain intellectual activities they believe that they have become sufficiently wise which gives rise to intellectual pride. They refuse to believe that there can be any other way to improve the conditions of human life than what in their opinion is right for humanity. Their egos become so inflated with what can only be defined as ‘partial knowledge’ that they assert their views even in the fields in which they have no authority. They deny everything that contradicts their views, refusing even to consider or examine what they deny.

There are very few things more dangerous and detrimental to the progress of a man than this egoistic intellectual pride. This kind of self-appeasement constructs an impenetrable mental wall around an individual leaving very little chance for the light outside to enter through it. For only so can the half-light inside be protected and preserved—in its self-created obscurity and darkness. It is not that one is not aware of the flickering, dwindling nature of this half-light one is trying to protect, but what is most pathetic is that one still prefers to judge everything with its help. No wonder then that a self-contained intellectual cannot understand or accept a new idea, especially when it invalidates his own views. His intelligence circumscribed by his attachment to his half-knowledge and governed by his ego does not allow him to admit it. For, if the views that he holds so dear are proved wrong by the admission of a new idea, his own intellectual pride will get hurt and he will fall from his self-esteem. Consequently, he refuses to accept a higher idea, a greater truth for fear of losing his own identity as a knowledgeable intellectual. Not only the refusal but also a hostile rebuttal of greater ideas provides the best opportunity for the survival of his views that is so dear to him.

He, therefore, condemns all greater ideas not conforming to his own narrow views of things, although he does not know why they should be condemned. It is quite possible that he could have been enriched and profited by the very idea that he so emphatically rejected but this does not seem to bother him at all. He is satisfied as long as his own views prevail, no matter if he has to disregard and discredit a greater truth in the process which, ironically, makes him the sole loser in the bargain.

This is nothing but self-deception of the highest order but that is how most of the learned intellectuals prefer to live, with an illusion of knowledge—often so faulty and superficial that it explains nothing—with the help of which they try to solve the intricate problems of life and existence, understandably creating more confusion than before.

The human mind has only a very limited capacity and even this is further impaired by man’s pride and prejudices. Serving nothing else but one’s ego, whether of the individual or of a collective, is the sole preoccupation of man. A greater truth that may usher in a brighter future is squarely denied without the least inhibition at the altar of this all-pervading Master. The majority of the intelligent world seems to find such a coexistence or rather a meek submission perfectly acceptable.

Must we remain a slave and continue to serve this one master forever, denying the greater light?

[astrowithkaro]

Hi, love. Could you please add the 18th of july to your language of birthdays.

Thanks 🧿🪐✨

Language Of Birthdays: July 18 - Cancer

The Day Of Conviction

Those born on July 18 so clearly reflect the views of their group that they may find themselves spokespersons for those whose opinions they not only share but also come to shape. Social considerations are often in the forefront here, and whether those born on this day are actively political or not. they usually have a well-defined set of priorities and ethics that anchors their purpose in the world.

Because of their extreme receptivity and their power to effect changes, July 18 people make ideal candidates to represent anything from smaller groups (families, clubs or local societies) to larger entities (unions, political organizations or government bodies). Occasionally such people can become actual living symbols of the group they represent. As such they have the potential to become very powerful figures, as long as they keep the bond with their family, constituents or colleagues alive. If they should be cut off from this group, they may suffer great anxiety, go through a crisis and be forced to reexamine their values.

Those born on July 18 are generally forceful individuals. If they had the freedom, adventurousness or the inclination to step away from their group affiliations they would perhaps benefit from it, but given their nature, perhaps this is a moot point. Freedom of thought, action and choice are always circumscribed to some extent by the ethics of the group to which they belong and usually July 18 people make a contribution or express their creativity within such a framework. When the values or objectives of their group come into conflict with the laws of society which they consider unjust, those born on this day do not hesitate to attack the status quo aggressively or defend their group against domination or suppression. In this they are tireless and courageous.

The private lives of July 18 people may suffer terribly from their work. They must acknowledge that without spending sufficient time with their mate and/or children a satisfactory relationship is not likely to result. Many born on this day are adept at social interaction yet quite immature emotionally, and therefore problems will arise in their personal relation- ships. They may become quite dependent on the attention and affection they demand from those close to them, and extremely vulnerable and fearful if they are threatened with losing it. This may be further complicated if they do not wish to invest enough of themselves to satisfy their loved ones. Those born on July 18 must learn to be as strong in their private lives as they are in their public lives, and this cannot be accomplished on a strictly part-time basis.

Strengths:

Courageous

Committed

Agressive

Weaknesses:

Repressed

Tethered

Fixed

Advice

July 18 people have to deal with intense emotions and anger, as such feelings can have serious negative effects on their health if they are either severely repressed or violently expressed. One danger is that out of fear and a desire to appear rational, July 18 people will focus on their mental powers in order to push their feelings deep down inside them. An overabundance of either conscious control or uncontrolled emotion is harmful and any therapy that will help those born on this day find a healthy balance is recommended. Because of their great need for a happy home situation, emphasis on domestic comfort and sensuality as well as a wide variety of tasty food choices are particularly recommended. Moderate daily exercise should not be overlooked.

Don't lose yourself in your work

Get to know your emotions well and allow them easy expression

You are not always the center of every situation

Try to be emotionally honest in personal relationships

Don't be afraid of rejection

[one-divides-into-two]

The following theses summarize the general strategic orientation of the Maoist Communist Party – Orgnizing Committee after Kenosha:

i. The fight against white supremacy must take on a strategic priority. Recent events have demonstrated to the world at large what the black revolutionary movement and the agents of the settler-state apparatus have both recognized for decades: the oppression of the New Afrikan internal colony is the principal contradiction in the contemporary u.s.a. context. The intense repression of the black revolutionary movement – indeed, the construction of all new repressive apparatuses for this singular purpose – speaks to the fear which the old bourgeoisie rightly feels in the face of this national liberation struggle. Lenin, during the Third International, changed the course of the international communist movement by correcting its slogan, from the famous lines of the Manifesto (“Workers of the world, unite!”) to “Workers and oppressed peoples of the world, unite!” Communist unity with the struggle of oppressed peoples for their liberation is not solely on the basis of national liberation struggles’ ability to ‘detonate’ the broader class struggle, but because the anti-imperialist struggle is the leading force in the world revolutionary movement today. A communist movement which is unable to unite the worker’s struggle with the black revolutionary struggle on the basis of anti-imperialism is destined for the dustbin of history. The MCP-OC directs its cadres to unite wherever possible with formations which organize for black liberation, principally the New Afrikan Black Panther Party and the United Panther Movement.

ii. The spontaneous uprisings across the country, in response to repressive violence against black people, are circumscribed by the overall level of mass organization existing in a given city. The broad success of the state apparatus and its nonprofit wing in recuperating the energy of the George Floyd Rebellion into nonthreatening (and even counterrevolutionary) programs is a direct consequence of the absence of mass organizations capable of transforming the struggle for immediate demands into a political struggle for power. Even the most militant rebellion will be limited to achieving only minor concessions from the state without the presence of revolutionary leadership armed with a political program. The task of our cadres in this context is not only to recruit for their own organizations, such as our For the People programs, which is ultimately a secondary objective. Instead, we instruct local cells to work towards the construction of organizations composed of the masses themselves, leading alongside militants. Such organizations must be made capable of resisting recuperation through ongoing and explicit political education and two line struggle; they must be made with the objective of protracting the fight against the class enemy, organizing for concessions from the enemy and operating as a “school of war.” Ultimately, they must be united with other mass organizations into a front under communist leadership.

iii. The experience of Kenosha – in particular, the murder of two demonstrators by the brownshirt Kyle Rittenhouse – not only speaks to the truth of the old adage “cops and Klan go hand in hand,” but provides an implicit critique of the liberal “abolitionist” line. We cannot be fooled by the illusion that the racist violence of the state is an anomaly of “policing” or the “carceral state.” Such rhetoric disguises the real class character of the repressive apparatus and its structural role – the amelioration of class struggle to defend the rule of the owning class. The repression of black people as colonial violence plays a structurally necessary role in the maintenance of capitalist domination – this will never be conceded so long as the capitalist system and its state apparatus continue to exist. Whether through traditional police officers or fascist paramilitaries, Capital will always defend itself. Thus, the fight for abolition must be connected with the revolutionary struggle and the initiation of people’s war. We reject the rightist line demanding “police abolition” as a political reform.

iv. As repressive violence escalates, the communist movement must respond by preparing the masses to defend themselves and their gains by any means necessary. The construction of community self-defense organs under the command of the mass organizations is an urgent task for our militants.

v. The rejection of the ballot as a tool for political struggle is a tactical necessity, not a metaphysical principle. The broad masses have already demonstrated their distaste for the electoral sham carried out by the bourgeois class dictatorship and have never attended the polls in high numbers; the passive electoral boycott of the masses must be transformed into an active electoral boycott that rejects the whole capitalist state system. Particularly as the electoral terrain is offered up by the class enemy as a site of struggle for “social justice” in order to recuperate the creative energy of the masses unleashed by the current uprising, our cadres must agitate around the electoral boycott and fight for revolutionary struggle. Elections, no! People’s war, yes!

[mbti-notes]

I'm a female ENTJ. Do you have any wise words for ENTJ women struggling with the looming specter of the "woman box" and who experience or have legitimate fears of career and social consequences if they are wholly themselves around other people? I am experiencing major burnout and hits to my professional success because of this. (I'm working hard to burn the "woman box" down entirely, but this is a work in progress.)

“Wise” words? Maybe not. I’d love to write out a big girrrlll power speech for you but, in reality, it really comes down to personal choice. You have to reflect on: how much you believe in what you’re doing, how much you’re willing to give, how much you’re willing to fight, and how much you’re willing to sacrifice for perhaps somewhat intangible rewards down the road. Personal values are issues of morality, and morality can often be boiled down to a question like: What state of affairs allows you to feel content… able to feel like you’re being your best self, able to live with yourself, able to sleep peacefully at night? These are Ni and Fi related questions that perhaps an ENTJ might not think to dig really deep into.

Some women choose to play the game and “be like the boys” in order to succeed. Do they end up in a good place? It depends on how much they personally felt they’ve had to sacrifice along the way. E.g. If you feel like you can never be yourself and have to constantly suppress authentic self-expression, then the sacrifice might escalate and eventually become unbearable (and even psychologically damaging) down the road. But if you feel as though you can find other outlets for expressing yourself authentically, then perhaps work sacrifices are easier to brush off.

Some women choose to change the system and fight to make it better. Do they end up in a good place? It depends on whether they feel as though they’ve devoted too much of their time to the political fight vs the work they love. If the fight becomes all-consuming, then maybe it won’t end perfectly for you, though you might be successful at improving conditions for those who come after you, which is not a legacy to sneeze at. However, an abstract future legacy might not be enough to keep you motivated when you’re knee-deep in the most difficult and challenging moments.

Some women feel forced to choose between life vs work because they don’t see them as one in the same (as some ENTJs might). Do they end up in a good place? It’s a tradeoff. Perhaps you feel perfectly content with personal life but end up wondering what might’ve been. Perhaps you reach the apex of your career at middle age only to feel you totally missed out on living. Hindsight has its disadvantages.

Some work environments are more supportive than others, even within the same line of work, it really depends on the individuals involved and especially the tone that is set by management. Sometimes there’s something worth salvaging but sometimes you might have to admit that a particular work environment is beyond toxic and seek out greener pastures. If you believe it feasible, you can make your way into management so that you are the one who sets the tone.

Obviously, nobody can or should make these choices for you. Feminism is about equal opportunity, which relates to the freedom to pursue your happiness. You get the freedom to define what it means for you, as an individual, to be a woman in your workplace, and freedom comes with responsibility. After the women’s movement of the 70s (in the U.S.), some 80s women felt that they had to play the man’s game in order to forcefully grab the privileges that they had long been denied. But that turned out to be a trap of sorts because their mentality was still just as circumscribed by narrow patriarchal definitions of success. On the other end, some “radical” feminists decided that they wanted to reject masculinity and elevate femininity. This also turned out to be a trap of sorts because their mentality was still inextricably tied to the concept of oppression. To become truly oneself is impossible through conformity or rebellion because, either way, you define yourself superficially, always confined by your relationship to an oppressor. To be a true trailblazer is to leave prescribed definitions behind and discover something new about what it means to be fully human. I mention this point because, despite some social advances in understanding gender, there are still a lot of people trapping themselves in this concept the more they try to escape it.

The most important thing is that you reflect on all of the possibilities before deciding to devote your precious time and finite energy to anything: 1) consider the long term implications of whether your decisions ultimately lead you to a meaningful place in life (Ni), and 2) consider how important it is to you to stay true to yourself and what that ought to look like in your decision making (Fi). Just how much sacrifice is too much? It’s up to you to figure out the right measurement by weighing your options properly. If you put all of your eggs into the career basket but then it doesn’t turn out as you had hoped, what are you left with? Diversify. Extremes always beg to be rectified, so avoid them by trying to maintain a healthy balance between the different elements of your life. Balance is the unglamorous but tried-and-true key to lifelong psychological well-being.

[soulvomit]

Multigenerational households make sense economically, so it’s inevitable that we are returning to them. But... I have a lot of thoughts about how a lot of progressivism in the culture is rooted in people being able to strike out on their own and choose who they will be around, and I have a lot of fears (possibly ungrounded but possibly not) that if multigenerational households become the norm, it could be a death knell for progressive social values. Maybe it won’t, but I can see how it would happen. A LOT of civil rights and personal liberties that we take for granted exist because of people being able to get away from their oppressive, traditionalist, sexist/homophobic/and or religiously overbearing families. A lot of these rights exist because we can get away and forge our own identities and reject the mores of previous generations which are no longer working. But that tension may not exist in a culture that’s gone to multigenerational housing.  I have known 40 year olds who couldn’t live openly as gay people or EVER come out trans, for example, or EVER be open about rejecting the family religion, because of being stuck under the same roof with older, more conservative people who are resistant to social change. I know women who could never reject the upbringing of their sexist families, and pass that on to another generation, simply because they couldn’t get away from their family of origin, and because their social world ended up circumscribed by their family and its value system - i.e., you grow up in a strict religious institution that would reject you if they knew who you really were, you can’t get away from it, you can’t find “your people” whoever they may be. Also, not everyone gets along in a peer-chosen communal setting, particularly when groupthink enters the picture. I’m one of those people who would do terribly. Lots of people do.  It’s actually really scary to me that individual households are becoming so difficult to maintain.

[arcticdementor]

The heightened scrutiny of the political uses to which social media has been put is necessary and important. But it tends to miss a critical aspect of our situation. Much of the analysis tacitly assumes that our underlying political structures and values have remained relatively stable, that they will not fundamentally change — even if they must be defended against the usual illiberal suspects, who deploy digital media in their efforts to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. If only Zuck would take more aggressive measures to purge Facebook of fake news, and if only Jack would ban all the Nazis from Twitter, then all would be well and we could proceed with business as usual. Much like the proverbial generals who always fight the last war, however, we will be undone in our efforts to make sense of our moment and to respond productively if we don’t recognize that digital media is reconfiguring our politics at a more fundamental level.

The challenges we are facing are not merely the bad actors, whether they be foreign agents, big tech companies, or political extremists. We are in the middle of a deep transformation of our political culture, as digital technology is reshaping the human experience at both an individual and a social level. The Internet is not simply a tool with which we do politics well or badly; it has created a new environment that yields a different set of assumptions, principles, and habits from those that ordered American politics in the pre-digital age.

We are caught between two ages, as it were, and we are experiencing all of the attendant confusion, frustration, and exhaustion that such a liminal state involves. To borrow a line from the Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci, “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

…

We can borrow the basic structure of Augustine’s vision as a way of thinking about digital media and American political culture. Let us play, then, with the idea of a Digital City and an Analog City, and consider how the tension between the two shapes our moment. Our political culture has been hitherto formed predominantly by the Analog City, which reflected to varying degrees both the inheritance of print culture and the conditions created by electronic media. What we are now witnessing is the ascendancy of the Digital City, which is characterized primarily by the advent of ubiquitous Internet connectivity, no longer just at home or work but also on mobile technology. Of course, the analogy to Augustine’s two cities breaks down at a point — the Digital City is in most respects unlike the City of God, nor are we considering eternal destinies. The key parallel is that our participation in the public sphere is shaped largely by our loyalties to one or the other city and that we are witnessing the emerging dominance of one of them. Some of us have inhabited both the Analog City and the Digital City, while an increasing number of us have known only the Digital City.

It is useful to remember where exactly we are in the history of the Digital City. The Internet has been around for a half century, but the World Wide Web — the part of the Internet we access through web browsers — is about thirty years old. The transition to what was dubbed Web 2.0, which made participation more widely accessible, and connected what we then quaintly thought of as our “in real life” identity more closely to our online presence, began just over fifteen years ago. The transition to smartphones and tablets, which made digital media a constant presence in our lives and our default media environment, has occurred only over the last decade. In other words, only recently has the Digital City begun to manifest itself in the public spaces that have been hitherto ordered by the priorities and sensibilities of the Analog City. Before then, the consequences of digital media, although much discussed, remained superficial, which allowed us to believe that the future would be business as usual, only faster and better and more inclusive.

If two distinct communities now reside within the same political space, the conflicts that characterize this space will increasingly reflect the tensions between these two communities. When some phenomenon perplexes our pundit class, when our time-worn political concepts seem incapable of making sense of it, we may be witnessing just such a clash between the Digital and Analog cities.

…

The Digital City also shapes its citizens through its cultivation of habit and disposition. Online venues, whether social media platforms, messaging apps, or forums, are not simply places we go to express our political opinions; they are places where our political habits and sensibilities are formed. This formation includes how we speak. A platform’s distinctive moderation policies, reward systems, and other affordances structure our experience on the platform, how we express ourselves and encounter the expressions of others, how we modify our speech and demand that others modify theirs.

Free-speech maximalists, who believe that there should be no limits to what you can say regardless of how odious the opinions may be, are distressed by the alacrity with which some are prepared to call for the speech of others to be curtailed or circumscribed. But free-speech maximalism flourishes in print culture; in the Digital City it appears less desirable, for two reasons. First, print culture sustained the belief that, given a modicum of good sense and education among people, truth would triumph in the marketplace of ideas. Writing and reading are slow and deliberate, encouraging the belief that false ideas will eventually be rejected by anyone trained to think. Second, we experience the written word as an inert reality — it is the “dead letter,” it has lost the force and immediacy of the spoken word. Because writing is less volatile than speech, it makes freedom of expression seem relatively harmless.

But before we conceived of a word as a thing composed of markings on a surface, it was a living, effectual action. Words were not things; they did things. This, for example, is why people in print culture have a difficult time understanding why Isaac is unable simply to retract the blessing he has given to Jacob under false pretenses: The word is out and cannot be taken back. In the Digital City the word is reanimated, recovering from the written much of the vitality of the spoken word. Digital media reintegrates the word into a dynamic situation. The digital audience is not always visible, but it can be present with a degree of immediacy that is more like a face-to-face encounter than are print writing and reading. Discourse on digital media platforms, from comment boxes to social media, is infamously combative. Words are active, and any negative effects are not easily contained.

Moreover, digital plenitude no longer sustains the hope that the truth will win out in the marketplace of ideas. Information super-abundance renders implausible the traditional ideal of the citizen as well-informed, critical thinker. Instead, it fosters the desire for tools that give users the ability to selectively censor their feeds, and the instinct to rely on moderators to restrict speech so as to conform with their values.

…

In his account of the nature of secular society, Charles Taylor argues that an important part of the emergence of the modern age was the disenchantment of the world and the rise of what he describes as the “buffered self.” Unlike the old “porous self,” the new buffered self no longer perceives and believes in sources of meaning outside the human mind. This new self feels unperturbed by powers beyond its control. We might say that in the Digital City the self becomes in some ways “porous” once again. It is subject to powers that we perceive as impinging on us, powers now algorithmic rather than spiritual.

Taylor’s discussion of disenchantment begins with the question of meaning. In our disenchanted modern world, meaning arises only from minds, and the human mind is the only kind of mind there is. Nothing external to the human mind bears any meaning in itself. Moreover, there are no non-human agents, either made of matter or spirit. By contrast, in the enchanted world things and spirits have the “power of exogenously inducing or imposing meaning,” a meaning that is independent of the perceiver and that we may be forced to reckon with whether we would like to or not. Objects in the enchanted world can also have a causal power. These “charged” objects, Taylor explains, “have what we usually call ‘magic’ powers,” and they can be either benevolent or malevolent. They may bring blessing or trouble, cure or disease, rescue or danger. “Thus in the enchanted world,” Taylor writes, “charged things can impose meanings, and bring about physical outcomes proportionate to their meanings.” The vulnerable self sought refuge in a well-ordered society whose ritual life was designed to protect its members from malign forces. As Taylor explains, this is in part why heresy was so dangerous. The heretic was not only a source of intellectual error, he also compromised the security of the community by compromising its purity.

According to Taylor, the enchanted world “shows a perplexing absence of certain boundaries which seem to us essential.” In particular, “the boundary between mind and world is porous.” The “porous self” in an enchanted world is thus “vulnerable, to spirits, demons, cosmic forces. And along with this go certain fears which can grip it in certain circumstances.” By contrast, the “buffered self,” characteristic of the disenchanted world, is “invulnerable” and “master of the meanings of things for it.” It is also immune to the fears that may grip the porous self. The buffered self is sealed off from the world; its boundaries are less fuzzy; meaning resides neatly within its own mind; and it occupies a world of inert matter. It is autonomous and self-possessed, the ideal type of the modern individual.

Certain features of the self in an enchanted world are now reemerging in the Digital City. Digital technologies influence us and exert causal power over our affairs. In the Digital City, we are newly aware of operating within a field of inscrutable forces over which we have little to no control. Though these forces may be benevolent, they are just as often malevolent, undermining our efforts and derailing our projects. We often experience digital technologies as determining our weal and woe, acting upon us independently of our control and without our understanding. We are vulnerable, and our autonomy is compromised.

…

Like the City of God, the Digital City exists in no particular place and abides by its own rules of time. Digital communities emerge in shared time rather than in shared space; simultaneity is the coin of the realm. The Digital City orders the lives of its citizens in keeping with a perpetual present disassociated from both past and future, heightening a tendency already present in electronic mass media like television. Mass media audiences shared time, while smaller groups also shared spaces, gathering in front of the television, or by the radio, or in the theater. Mobile digital technology, however, has strained the link between presence and place, making it optional. We may now be in multiple places at once, here in my body, but there in speech or vision. The community to which I find myself most drawn may not exist in any one place, composed as it is of scattered kindred spirits brought together through digital technology.

The triumph of shared time and the demise of shared place in the Digital City changes the experience of social belonging. While the modern state is not going anywhere anytime soon, the relationship of citizens to the nation is evolving. Loyalty to the community that is the nation state, already detached to some degree from local communities, yields to the shifting loyalties of digital attachments.

…

When writing was introduced into oral cultures it was typically deployed in the service of institutions and bureaucracies. It sustained the memory of the tribe, group, or nation, not of the individual. As the means of writing (and later photography) were democratized, the individual was able to create and sustain personal rather than collective memories and thus construct and maintain an identity that achieved a measure of independence from the group. This is also one of the many ways private life through the modern period became valorized and public life demoted.

Pursuing this line of development into the age of digital media, a paradox comes into focus. We have never been able to document our lives so thoroughly as we now can with the help of digital tools, yet we feel that time is out of joint and that we’ve lost the thread of both our personal and collective histories. We appear to be both obsessive documenters of our experience, yet largely indifferent to or overwhelmed by the archives we create. We have ever more access to the past, but we are unable to bring it meaningfully to bear on the present.

This is not surprising. Plato identified similar dynamics when he offered his critique of writing in the Phaedrus: While writing would allow far more knowledge to be preserved and accessed, it would also relieve individuals of the burden of sustaining collective memory themselves. Like writing and print, our use of digital media ordinarily generates an archive (as well as a trail of data, often invisible to users but of great value to others). But although digital media appears to sustain memory, it is more like oral communication in its evanescence. The feed of our tweets and status updates recedes not as quickly and decisively as the spoken word, but with a similar effect. Under the guise of pervasive documentation, the architecture of digital platforms sanctions forgetting, while preoccupying us with instantaneity. It is not currently this era or this year, but rather this day or even this hour. To live on social media is to be sucked into a hyper-extended present, upon which the past only occasionally impinges.

…

The Digital City disabuses its citizens of a key myth that structured our shared political space: that modern institutions are neutral, that they enjoy a god’s-eye view of reality. The modern scientific enterprise, the press, the university, the justice system, the free market, the technological systems that ordered the modern world, even reason itself were understood as neutral instruments of the common good. In the Digital City, the neutrality of the common good, and so the very notion of the common good, are called into question. The clearest symptom of this may be the mounting challenges to the traditional liberal order and its key institutions, as well as the sudden and dramatic disrepute of the idea of centrism and political compromise.

In the Digital City, it is increasingly difficult to believe in the neutrality or objectivity of these institutions. This is not because arguments against the liberal order have won the day. Indeed, to believe as much would be to assume that the Analog City still rules. Rather, our trouble believing in neutrality is in part because of the new arrangement of social relations through digital media, which sustains the proliferation of niche identities and brings these into volatile proximity with one another. This new social order is hyper-pluralistic, a place of ceaseless and irresolvable conflict. Our identities take shape as we self-select into ever more narrow subcultures, and we are then drawn together in public forums lacking a sense of a greater whole to which we might all belong.

The effect is a deeper experience of plurality, without any countervailing centripetal forces. Sundered into multiplicity and without recourse to a common narrative thread, we are bereft of a view of the world held in common. Civility, consensus, and compromise take on the character of fantasies entertained by the naïve or foisted on the public by a self-interested elite.

…

We have focused on how digital media transforms the subjective experience of individuals. The political corollary is that it enables and empowers regimes of algorithmic governance, predictive analytics, and social credit. The profound erosion of trust in the Digital City leaves a vacuum, and we look to our tools to fill it. We seem set upon interlocking trajectories: of ever greater swaths of the human experience being computationally managed, and of intractable human subjects increasingly breaking down or revolting against these conditions.

[edisonashley]

Section 230 Protects Classifying Non-Competitive Software as a Threat–Asurvio v. Malwarebytes

photo by Anik Shrestha, https://ift.tt/2xRPnr1

Section 230(c)(2)(B) says that filtering software makers aren’t liable for their classification decisions. This proposition provides the legal foundation for the anti-threat software industry. However, those expectations were disrupted by the Ninth Circuit’s 2019 in Enigma v. Malwarebytes, which held that Section 230(c)(2)(B) didn’t apply when a plaintiff alleges that the filtering decision was motivated by anticompetitive animus. This amicus brief explains why the 9th Circuit’s ruling is bad for cybersecurity.

Today I’m blogging about what I believe is the first ruling applying Enigma to anti-threat software since the Ninth Circuit ruling. The defendant is the same (Malwarebytes); but this time the plaintiff is Asurvio, which used to be “PC Driver.” I blogged a prior ruling in this case last year. The district court judge shuts down the Section 230(c)(2)(B) workaround.

Section 230(c)(2)(B). In response to Malwarebytes’ motion to dismiss, the court says Asurvio doesn’t compete with Malwarebytes:

[Asurvio] is not a computer security software provider; it does not sell malware detection software designed to scan a computer and report PUPs. Rather, Asurvio sells driver update software. Asurvio’s software programs “work in real time in the background of the operating system to optimize processing and locate and install all missing and outdated software drivers.” Asurvio does not allege that its DRIVER SUPPORT or ACTIVE OPTIMIZATION programs provide any anti-spyware or anti-malware functionality as Malwarebytes does

Asurvio claimed it also provided anti-malware services. The court discounts these services because they are provided only via live technical support, not as a primary service. Asurvio also argued that both parties competed to help users improve their computers’ performance. The court rejects this too: “If the Court were to accept Asurvio’s argument, then any developer of performance optimizing software designed for “self-help” computer users could potentially plead around the broad immunity granted by section 230(c)(2)(B) and render the statutory immunity meaningless.”

Section 230(c)(1). Asurvio complained about critical third-party messages in Malwarebytes’ message boards. The court says that the complaint doesn’t connect the third parties to Malwarebytes, despite the users’ titles as “trusted advisor” and “expert.” Compare the Enigma v. Bleeping Computer opinion from 2016.

Others. The disparagement/Lanham Act claims fail because Malwarebytes’ classifications are not capable of being proven false. The tortious interference claim fails because Asurvio didn’t specify which contract was being interfered with.

Implications

The Enigma ruling sent shockwaves through the anti-threat vendor community because it disrupted a decade of settled legal doctrine. Though it’s logical to fear “anticompetitive” blocking, in reality we know it’s easy to allege anticompetitive blocking and quite hard to prove. So the Enigma ruling created the risk that many previously easy cases would become expensive and time-consuming, even if they were eventually unmeritorious.

This ruling partially assuages those fears. On a motion to dismiss, the court circumscribed the universe of competitors and rejected tendentious attempts to portray non-competitors as competitors. Both of these conclusions bode well for future Section 230(c)(2)(B). Still, this ruling doesn’t change the fact that many existing anti-threat software vendors are in fact sketchy and deserve to be filtered; yet anti-threat vendors will be skittish about calling out their sketchy competitors. This case also contributes towards building a new jurisprudence of competition internal to Section 230(c)(2)(B), an unwanted development given that we have an entire body of law (antitrust law) dedicated to that purpose.

Case citation: Asurvio LP v. Malwarebytes Inc., 2020 WL 1478345 (N.D. Cal. March 26, 2020)

The post Section 230 Protects Classifying Non-Competitive Software as a Threat–Asurvio v. Malwarebytes appeared first on Technology & Marketing Law Blog.

Section 230 Protects Classifying Non-Competitive Software as a Threat–Asurvio v. Malwarebytes published first on https://immigrationlawyerto.weebly.com/

[pearlpiineda]

Section 230 Protects Classifying Non-Competitive Software as a Threat–Asurvio v. Malwarebytes

photo by Anik Shrestha, https://ift.tt/2xRPnr1

Section 230(c)(2)(B) says that filtering software makers aren’t liable for their classification decisions. This proposition provides the legal foundation for the anti-threat software industry. However, those expectations were disrupted by the Ninth Circuit’s 2019 in Enigma v. Malwarebytes, which held that Section 230(c)(2)(B) didn’t apply when a plaintiff alleges that the filtering decision was motivated by anticompetitive animus. This amicus brief explains why the 9th Circuit’s ruling is bad for cybersecurity.

Today I’m blogging about what I believe is the first ruling applying Enigma to anti-threat software since the Ninth Circuit ruling. The defendant is the same (Malwarebytes); but this time the plaintiff is Asurvio, which used to be “PC Driver.” I blogged a prior ruling in this case last year. The district court judge shuts down the Section 230(c)(2)(B) workaround.

Section 230(c)(2)(B). In response to Malwarebytes’ motion to dismiss, the court says Asurvio doesn’t compete with Malwarebytes:

[Asurvio] is not a computer security software provider; it does not sell malware detection software designed to scan a computer and report PUPs. Rather, Asurvio sells driver update software. Asurvio’s software programs “work in real time in the background of the operating system to optimize processing and locate and install all missing and outdated software drivers.” Asurvio does not allege that its DRIVER SUPPORT or ACTIVE OPTIMIZATION programs provide any anti-spyware or anti-malware functionality as Malwarebytes does

Asurvio claimed it also provided anti-malware services. The court discounts these services because they are provided only via live technical support, not as a primary service. Asurvio also argued that both parties competed to help users improve their computers’ performance. The court rejects this too: “If the Court were to accept Asurvio’s argument, then any developer of performance optimizing software designed for “self-help” computer users could potentially plead around the broad immunity granted by section 230(c)(2)(B) and render the statutory immunity meaningless.”

Section 230(c)(1). Asurvio complained about critical third-party messages in Malwarebytes’ message boards. The court says that the complaint doesn’t connect the third parties to Malwarebytes, despite the users’ titles as “trusted advisor” and “expert.” Compare the Enigma v. Bleeping Computer opinion from 2016.

Others. The disparagement/Lanham Act claims fail because Malwarebytes’ classifications are not capable of being proven false. The tortious interference claim fails because Asurvio didn’t specify which contract was being interfered with.

Implications

The Enigma ruling sent shockwaves through the anti-threat vendor community because it disrupted a decade of settled legal doctrine. Though it’s logical to fear “anticompetitive” blocking, in reality we know it’s easy to allege anticompetitive blocking and quite hard to prove. So the Enigma ruling created the risk that many previously easy cases would become expensive and time-consuming, even if they were eventually unmeritorious.

This ruling partially assuages those fears. On a motion to dismiss, the court circumscribed the universe of competitors and rejected tendentious attempts to portray non-competitors as competitors. Both of these conclusions bode well for future Section 230(c)(2)(B). Still, this ruling doesn’t change the fact that many existing anti-threat software vendors are in fact sketchy and deserve to be filtered; yet anti-threat vendors will be skittish about calling out their sketchy competitors. This case also contributes towards building a new jurisprudence of competition internal to Section 230(c)(2)(B), an unwanted development given that we have an entire body of law (antitrust law) dedicated to that purpose.

Case citation: Asurvio LP v. Malwarebytes Inc., 2020 WL 1478345 (N.D. Cal. March 26, 2020)

The post Section 230 Protects Classifying Non-Competitive Software as a Threat–Asurvio v. Malwarebytes appeared first on Technology & Marketing Law Blog.

Section 230 Protects Classifying Non-Competitive Software as a Threat–Asurvio v. Malwarebytes published first on https://immigrationlawyerfirm.weebly.com/

[maxwellyjordan]

Symposium: Unfinished business — SCOTUS and the citizenship question

Erin Hustings is legislative counsel for the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Educational Fund.

When the Supreme Court reviews the Census Bureau’s proposed citizenship question, it will face the issue after extraordinary gaps in procedure. Because of deadlines for printing the census forms and other preparations, litigants have had to forgo appeals-court review and approach the justices without the benefit of the views of the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the 2nd and 9th Circuits.

Something else very important will be missing. In a case still awaiting the decision of Judge George Hazel of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, the plaintiffs have advanced a claim that the Supreme Court will not rule upon — that racial animus motivated the decision to add the question, and it therefore violates the Fifth and 14th Amendments’ equal protection guarantee.

Though district courts in New York and California did not rule on Fifth and 14th Amendment claims, they did reach conclusions about the intent behind the Census Bureau’s and Commerce Department’s actions. Most recently, Judge Richard Seeborg of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California found that Voting Rights Act enforcement was “nothing more than a pretext designed to provide cover for the Secretary’s unexplained desire to add the citizenship question to the Census.” Although he could see that the stated rationale did not hold up under scrutiny, Seeborg did not opine about the actual motivation of administration officials in pursuing addition of the question through delays and around barriers over the course of several months.

Nonetheless, the case of the citizenship question helps to illustrate the paramount importance of federal courts’ addressing motivation and assigning legal significance to unsupported, inexplicable decision-making by government officials and agencies.

There is no end in sight to administration actions and decisions that have disproportionately and negatively affected underrepresented communities, which have suffered the indignities of discrimination throughout American history. Observers can trace a pattern in the administration’s “Muslim Ban” in Executive Order 13769; the termination of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and Temporary Protected Status or Deferred Enforced Departure for Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, Hondurans, Haitians, Sudanese, Nepalis and Liberians; and the prohibition on transgender military servicemembers. The pattern is sustained in lower-profile activities including rescission of guidance on affirmative action, revocation of provisions requiring government contractors to pay women fairly, and direction to agencies to find ways to limit or eliminate liability based on disparate impact on a disfavored group. By repeatedly singling out religious, national-origin, gender, and racial and ethnic minorities for exclusion or pointed non-protection, the Trump administration has opened itself to charges of acting with unconstitutional discriminatory intent.

Such intent, however, is difficult for jurisprudence to define and circumscribe, and litigation of the issue in the past decade has yielded uneven results. For example, when a member of the Colorado Civil Rights Commission compared religious objections against baking a cake for a same-sex wedding to religious justifications of slavery and the Holocaust, the Supreme Court identified an impermissible hostility to religion in Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. However, the same Supreme Court rejected the argument that statements by President Donald Trump and his advisors about the administration’s “Muslim Ban” showed religious animus, in Trump v. Hawaii. Both decisions overturned contrary lower-court determinations.

In another example of disagreement over the meaning of evidence of intentional discrimination, Judge Nicholas Garaufis of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York rejected a motion to dismiss an equal protection claim regarding the termination of the DACA program, concluding that derogatory presidential statements about Latinos and Mexicans were “sufficiently racially charged, recurring, and troubling as to raise a plausible inference that the decision to end the DACA program was substantially motivated by discriminatory animus.” On the other hand, Judge Roger Titus of the district of Maryland wrote, in CASA de Maryland v. Department of Homeland Security, dismissing a similar equal protection claim at summary judgment, that the decision to terminate the program did not “target … a subset of the immigrant population, and … [was not] derived on a racial animus…The Court rejects Plaintiffs’ reliance on the President’s misguided, inconsistent, and occasionally irrational comments made to the media to establish an ulterior motive.”

Observers would hope that, if the Supreme Court had an equal protection claim against the census citizenship question before it, it would recognize and comment upon some hallmarks of intentional discrimination in this case. In so doing, the court could help clarify the legal import of the surprising official words and actions that have become an issue in litigation of so many diverse matters.

First, the decision to add a census citizenship question fits squarely within a pattern of actions that have intimidated the target at hand: immigrants of color. Resources spent on immigration enforcement have increased exponentially as safeguards and discretion have been dismantled. To cite one of many examples, in 2018, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions overturned longstanding immigration legal precedent to declare that people no longer qualified for asylum if they were fleeing domestic or gang violence that their home governments could not protect them from. Numerous decisions restraining immigration generally, and immigration from Latin America, Africa and Asia in particular, created a context of fear that experts in citizenship-question trials in New York, California and Maryland cited as a key reason for potentially serious harm from the question. Otherwise put, people are themselves strong proof that officials across administrative bodies are acting in consistent and repetitive ways – that is, with discriminatory intent – to single out immigrants of color for scrutiny, disapproval and prosecution. Certainly, immigrants of color have reasonably concluded that discrimination is occurring. The Census Bureau’s own 2018 focus groups, for example, yielded the observation that “even when presented with the Census Bureau’s promise of confidentiality, participants were suspicious that the promise would not be kept. Participants believed that the government will use and share individual-level rather than aggregate-level data.” One Spanish-speaking participant commented, “[Latinos will not participate] out of fear … [there] is practically a hunt [for us].”

Second, lies and obfuscation have pervaded the Commerce Department’s purported justification for its actions around the citizenship question. Appointed officials went to extraordinary lengths to conceal the details of the deliberations, which points strongly to the existence of embarrassing facts to hide, and discriminatory purpose is the most logical candidate. The records of the citizenship trials, and the decisions issued thus far, are rife with examples of deliberate less-than-truths. In one compelling, illustrative case, Commerce Department officials asked questions about the bureau’s initial analysis of the December 2017 letter requesting citizenship data. One of these queries sought information about the usual process for making changes to the decennial census questionnaire. Census Bureau Chief Scientist Dr. John Abowd and Acting Director Ron Jarmin subsequently testified that neither they nor, to their knowledge, any other Census Bureau employee had written or reviewed the answer as it appeared in the Commerce Department’s initial submission of documents for the record. Their testimony revealed that someone in a supervisory position had replaced the Census Bureau’s expert advice with substantially different information, then allowed the concocted answer to be presented as the work product of career census staff.

Third, official actions – like adoption of the citizenship question – that appear logically incomprehensible may only make sense in light of discriminatory intent. Courts can and should infer this intent when a pattern or practice reveals an inclination to single out disfavored populations, and when a decision that hurts a disfavored population has no other legitimate explanation. District courts appear to have found the justifications for the citizenship question that relate to the VRA especially unconvincing, given that the Department of Justice and private plaintiffs have successfully enforced the VRA for 54 years without such block-level citizenship data, and that the Census Bureau clearly and repeatedly told decisionmakers that they could get more accurate information at less cost from administrative data. The California court came closer to following this thought to its logical conclusion, noting, “Secretary Ross’s senior officials … all claim, rather implausibly, to be ignorant of why Secretary Ross wanted the citizenship question on the 2020 Census,” and observing that Commerce Department Director of Policy Earl Comstock testified that he did not “need to know what [the Secretary’s] rationale might be, because it may or may not be one that is … legally-valid.”

The absence of a credible rationale is not just the sign of arbitrary decision-making. In a high-stakes action that was always destined for intensive public scrutiny and likely court review, powerful officials would have offered plausible justifications if they could have. They would have stated their real purpose if it were defensible.

The courts should recognize that the incomprehensibility of the administration’s actions in Department of Commerce v. New York is evidence of unconstitutional discriminatory purpose, which, given the pattern established over the course of 2017 and 2018, is likely to recur again and again until the courts give it its true name and provide proper redress.

The post Symposium: Unfinished business — SCOTUS and the citizenship question appeared first on SCOTUSblog.

from Law https://www.scotusblog.com/2019/04/symposium-unfinished-business-scotus-and-the-citizenship-question/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[clubofinfo]

Expert: The bad news is, we have been deluged with bad, even mortifying, news, and for such an extended period of time, the mind reels in bafflement as the spirit sinks. Despair seems an apt response to events one cannot reconcile, of circumstances of which one cannot gain perspective nor control. The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of. ― Rainer Maria Rilke, excerpt from Letters to a Young Poet Depression can be a compensatory response to the inherently manic nature of capitalist dominance of every aspect of life in late modernity. The affliction knocks you on your ass and keeps you there until the psyche can find a better means of using the agency of libido, which, under the extant corporate/consumer/surveillance state panopticon has been usurped. Under the system’s economic despotism and attendant anomie and alienation,  one’s longings, more often than not, do not lead to the connecting eros of a life-enhancing vocation or deepening interpersonal encounters but only as a vehicle that hijacks one’s life into the service of a soul-crushing system, wholly designed to exploit every moment of this fleeting life for the benefit of an overclass of parasites, a klavern of vampires and ghouls.  Depression is the soul’s way of saying, to paraphrase the Vietnam era antiwar chant, “Hell no, I won’t go.”  Alienation is an apt response to negotiating a soulless landscape. Where is the eros in Big Box/strip mall encounters? The ad hoc architecture of the consumer culture, which manages to be both utilitarian and garish, renders the heart dry as dust and grinds the mind to spittle. The psyche is in constant communion with its outer surroundings. Thus, what comes to pass if what is extant is a nadascape of vapid commercialisation, designed to deliver the shallow sensations concomitant to consumerism but lacking a connecting eros to both numinous inner realities and binding human encounters? A mortification occurs. Some individuals are driven to lash out in anger, even in acts of mass murder. The rage remains inchoate thus is displayed In acts of road rage…in nebulous hatred of outsiders and minorities and the foreign other.  The propagandists of empire are privy to the fact. Hence, so many are convinced, so easily, that North Korea and Iran are threat to the homeland; that Russiagate is a thing; that the US military and the nation’s so-called intelligence agencies are a force for good and act as agents of protection against a hostile world.  But with some, their soul isn’t buying it. Depression pulls one deep into oneself; therefore, manic compensation and displacement is not possible. They have opted out of the collective madness. Depression’s descent into the self becomes the option to surface level tropes of distraction. Compulsions fall away like Autumn leaves, the sap of life is seemingly frozen, the winds of the world howl through barren branches of one’s inner wilderness — to wit, an accurate apprehension of the sound of propaganda and its affront to mind and soul.  Yet: All too many cannot envisage the veritable dangers of our age: ecocide and their threatened extinction of the human species; blanched coral reefs, scoured of life; dying oceans, gagging in plastic particulates; the sky burning, the ashes of charred forests stippling the wind. Shooting sprees. As American as convenience store hotdogs, mass incarceration and drone murder.  Las Vegas, the crass and sterile US landscape on stilts and steroids, retails in empty sensation. Dominion of night where coruscating lights have scoured away the stars. Perpetual, meretricious come-ons. City of towering, shlock temples wherein what the US holds sacred is worshipped: legal larceny, the deification of empty sensation, and the transubstantiation of everything it touches, flesh and material, into fodder for exploitation. Kitsch über Alles. A 24/7 neon pentecost of mammon.  A wilderness of the collective mind howling with hungry ghosts. Vengeful spirits…inundate the air of the US cult of death. The imprecatory prayers of millions of slaughtered Indians ride the western winds and are funnelled into the void of vapidity that is Las Vegas.  A man, eaten hollow by alienation, his soul rancid with displaced rage, stands on a hotel balcony. The heft of his firearm is the only thing that feels tangible in his hollowness and amid the weightless sheen of the architecture of the city below.  The life of an Iraqi, Libyan, Yemenian, Syrian, Palestinian et al. translates into nothing in the US American system of value. “The only thing those people understand is brutality. When we rain down death….that is the fate they demand.”  The shooter’s mind roils. He acts as he has been conditioned to act. Now, he has achieved the power and control he has been denied. He is a military empire of one. His birthright as a US American has been fulfilled. God bless the USA.  After mass shootings in the US, the sale of firearms rises. The phenomenon is very much like the reaction of alcoholics whose solution to the stress-inducing trouble, pain, and chaos that their addiction inflicts upon their lives is to attempt to remedy the situation by careening into another drinking binge. US Americans are attracted to guns in the same manner drunks are in love with their chosen killer.  They are seeking sanctuary from fear. All too many view the world as a hostile place, and the remedy, US culture has instructed them, is to dispatch the threat by means of violence. These tormented souls believe they will be provided safety on a weapons-bristling citadel built on a mountain of corpses. (Floridians had to be advised that it would be a less than propitious act to fire weaponry into the fury of Hurricane Irma.) Thus discussions of “gun control” will only exacerbate more fear, will cause gun sales to rise, and will increase the body count. The great unspoken is: US Americans fear the wrong things. The culture roils in a miasma of confused apprehensions and displaced responses. The threat US Americans are attempting to ward off is comprised by an occupation of ghosts, the ghost of history that stalks the precincts of their own minds. If the habit of communal engagement is forsaken the heart atrophies from a lack of practice. The presence of others, even the panoply of life itself, is misapprehended as menacing…Others are perceived as malevolent, inhuman – as phantoms, devoid of face, heart, and blood. Empathy is cultivated through participation mystique. Denied of the experience, the heart is at risk of being rendered a cold citadel of angst and paranoia. Without empathy’s agency, passion cannot be transmuted into compassion. Sans the sublimation of the heart’s hearth, psychical fires threaten to become a raging wildfire of collective madness: “Putin’s neo-Cossack hacker squads have invaded my hard drive; Iran craves nukes; North Korea is a coiled, nuclear viper of seething crazy. Or the madness is made manifest as shooting sprees whereby the mass murderer attempts to cut down with barrages of semiautomatic weapon fire internal phantoms that torment him from within .” – Paranoid thoughts such as those can be read as, a confused soul’s dark fantasies of release from ego-ossified bondage although by means of the agency of death.  Moreover, I have noticed that often the true state of mind crouched beneath paranoia is envy.  Envy…unconsciously evinced as, others are taking up your space in the world and are plotting to maintain the arrangement by your undoing.  There is a solution: Go take a survey of the world beyond your self-circumscribed range and Insist on your portion of life — your portion of fate.  Yes, of course, all too many situations in this life are rigged; e.g., the capitalist state.  But life itself is too vast, too intricate to be fully controlled; the world is too big to rig.  First release yourself from the stultifying confinement attendant to self-inflicted bondage.  Then proceed into the midst of life and show your face to the world.  Storms will pass, the landscape glistens with renewing rain… Set barriers and barricades aflame…their flames caress the future. http://clubof.info/

[libramoon2]

[evening dionysian]

working title: [evening dionysian]

Dancers dance musicians play Enchanting sylph narrates stories while seductively moving to sinuous back beat, tick of chimes. Occasionally emphasizes subtle percussions with intense expressions, leaps, cunning stumbles, falling to crawl into spellbound speech. Scheherazade myths, archetypal passion escapades, poignant weeps, salient shouts to power. Exquisite meditations on mystic climes, spirit and form. Merry masks, sparkly costumes, paint and glitter as embellishment to the tellings. Theater as intimate ritual. Anything could manifest.

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Pisces murky androgeny Libra emits graceful beauty Scorpio at home in passion Deeply attractive Complicated self-hatred urging service and demeaning. At core strong self-belief expressed intuitively. Stories from the collective well, mystic ether, imbued in earth, exhaled by flames. Centering, sense memory trances exhibits as sinuous performance.

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This world is ending …

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Even happy families share dissonance, complex histories, emotional triggers. Happy families learn to thrive, profound mutual respect as guide, resort to good humor for smoother passage. Why fight, divide strength from where it is better spent? Folk who pull together by choice rejoice in shared communion.

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Outside self-circumscribed worlds Diverse perception of views Sight with wide spectra of hues

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She heard him crying, a lost child in the night. In her prophetic heart she knew only she could comfort him. But she was only a child who was never allowed to be lost. How could she comfort this lost boy when she had no freedom to reach out? Late in quiet dark, after her people, asleep, would not be checking on her, she opened her window and made daring escape. Wandering in the outside dark, she listened for his cries. At first she discerned wind among leaves and branches, small creature forays, clash of metal against pavement, perfumed strains from afar. Then, yes, whimpers, ragged rhythm past exhausted weeping. He was huddled, hidden, on the alley side of a cold brick building. Seeing him, frightened, lost, she did not know what to say. He smelled of rancid sweat and fear. She did not know how to speak. She cried. She emptied herself of every caustic tear, every regret held for guilty ransom, every sadness kept inside so no one would fuss. He looked up at her watery face and asked with amazed concern: “Are you lost, too? Because if we are lost together, really we have found each other. We don’t have to stay scared and alone.” She looked around, realized that in al her blind wandering she had lost her way. She had no idea where they were. She knelt beside him. They smiled and hugged. For that precious while they became beloved kin. Perhaps some special night they’ll meet again.

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Mythy visions to transcribe; thought fragments to form. Myths we live, and how to rewrite them.

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She knows she has awakened. Every effort of her body pinches, aches, demands refuge in self-talk, reason, mental override of pain. Carefully, she measures out tools of destruction, what she must carry in her pack into the city, to her place of destiny. Doing what one can to make sense, have meaning. Life is short, ugly, pointless, unless you get that call. Trying to act cool with familiar friends, laying low, hiding from everything that doesn’t allow relevant existence for dregs like us. Recognition? Commendation? A scrap of real notice? To sacrifice this humorless joke to Godly cause, that’s got to be imbued with meaning, to be holy. How not find zealous courage, so dishonor numbing a drug, one point of focus. All my sins, my impoverishments, inadequacies, forgiven in ultimate atonement. God can love me. I am made pure in His sight. A tool, a weapon, no matter how lowly, bestowed sacred purpose in this great fight. My parents, my kin, vindicated, their suffering denied nobility avenged. Cleansed in adventure’s icy plunge, only ever young in throes of romance, a chance for breathless rush of brief immortality.

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. question everything accept or reject with clear awareness and flexibility

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. purity of essence is to will one thing

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. She didn’t like her skin. So hard to blend in. She didn’t like her body, jutting awkwardly, too bulky, not compliant to conscious control. She ached to let her spirit free from matter’s burden, to ooze out onto open air. Her envisioned wish took her to aerial glee, and no more. “What would I see, outside of eyes, no biological boundaries?” Her attention, turned to this yearn for omniscient sight, was caught, held strong and seduced. Ever present, ever expanding through every crevice of her consciousness, she became inured to matter’s inadequacies. She desired entirely. No one could reach her, though no one tried. She trance-walked through her duties and habits with none to notice any lack of aliveness, lack of any impish spark within her eyes. Self-consumed, obsessed, absorbed in apotheosis, physical possibilities no longer matter. Her spirit no longer held to this room, this body. Blind to her unseeing world, enraptured in unfiltered light, colors far beyond our rainbow.

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. A brave and learned man hired out to guide a motley assortment through a narrow, rocky passage to a settlement in need of laborers. At this time, he was a stranger to settlers and these prospective immigrants. He had an idea of joining their project, but felt nag of doubt enough to only commit as far as hiring out for specified work and pay. This Job – this man who gave his name as Job – was curious, clever, aloof because caught up in thoughts complex, calculating, critical, cynical, contemplative, entertaining. He spoke as necessary for terse communication. He listened as if a subtle etching of rain on sand. He sucked in sounds and all their meaning to nourish his chattering brain. Though his behavior, demeanor, presentment appeared distancing, others tended to respect his leadership, his abilities. Even those who mocked or boisterously complained in private camaraderie in which he did not join agreed that he bested them at coming through. After their passaging, safely gathered at the settlement, words and gestures of gratitude lauded upon him were spontaneous and sincere. As settlers and new arrivals met together to discuss their common project, ask questions, give opinions, figure out teams and chores, Job continued his passage. Busy in their plans and adaptations, no one noticed him disappear.

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. Capture my imagination Take me for a ride self-discipline, acknowledge without judging

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Philip, he so tired, exhausted, can’t bear the nattering. Silly people, spew of soft-heart advice. Stupidly happy people, smug in their hugs and white smiles. Philip recedes into deep, dark hate – so mired and convoluted spirals down his mind. Lethargic impulses, held back, kicked down, pounded to weakness as he grew in twists and turns. “Don’t look at me.” He hears his silence scream. Horrid beast snarls, whimpers. Philip aches to hide from his own mind, beastly child whining, cringing around cutting steel for comfort. Snappy, happy babblers burst like saliva balloons, insult, annoy. “Don’t speak to me. Don’t daintily pretend you understand; oh so precious extended hands, limpid eyes question, judge, sentence to demented status. “I am fine, or will be when you all leave me alone. Ignore my retreat into secure solitary recrimination, whip lash of vengeful sin. You know you don’t really want to be let in, to feel the wrath I am. Scatter, you flesh-covered delusions who choose to disturb my sleep, my darling nightmares’ stomping victory. You clearly don’t need my input to be complete. Complete fools – go do your better things. Enjoy your day. I’ve no more to say, to share.” Aloud? Allowed? He allows himself to voice complaint aloud. And the folk crowd ebbs out beyond his self-fixed point. “Express your truth,” he silently affirms. People may listen.

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Imbibe trance Fall into story Record intimately

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Become one story Imbibe trance intimately Record while falling

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face shifter. story spinner. dervish zeitgeist possessed. defined by shades, by shadows, by negation.

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Sammy scary loco crazy. They say he got the paranoid schizophrenia. What he got is commandos tracking his thoughts, grinning. Party of demons who been with him, telling him what to do, clever talk when he needs to answer some fool. He’s got my nightmares, but can’t shake them awake. No one wants to listen to me or him when we say what’s real. They want us to be kids, whatever that is. They want us to make them feel alive in their self-comforting fantasies about responsibilities. What is Sammy responsible for or to? Because he suffers disability, because he can’t break through Hell’s circles, flames of purity. I walked from Hell. My mind still burns. I am strong, a born survivor. He survives as he can. Is that weakness, or alternative dimensions habitated? I am amazing, mobile, continuing, sensibly explaining, harmoniously relating, conversing like a pro. I struggle. I hurt, it feels unbearably. I work until I want to scream, become explosive screaming. I stifle, call up mania to work on. Efforts only I applaud – amazing me! Nothing spectacular to entice the jaded they. Sammy is spectacular. I am seriously amazing. I won’t let them blind me.

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. They walk in and out of patterns, broad swath of night. No designated home; no one has to accept them. They walk. Dust, dirt, soot, effluvia collect, protect in the sense of repel. In safe dark none encounter to harass. Those alive by day buried in bed. They walk without notice or plan. This is their closest approach to sleep, hypnotic glide through distance. Landscape undifferentiated by visible presentation. Footsteps feel clearly what comes under, it seems by instinct — or possibly familiarity. They walk on perhaps forever with no where to stop. Pit stops. Beg for food or find leavings. Play merry fool, eyes gleaming, lips voice hands form expressive grand soliloquies, hoped fee implied (implored). Sustenance they afford varies by mood of kindness, unswayed by desperation. Exhaustion only dulls, removes any attractive shine. As air blows colder, nights freeze over, they seem to dissolve into neverwere. Empty shadow, haunted tingle bereft of cause. “They were never us, nothing like us.” Unspoken song bears rhythms of walking unseen.

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She awoke in a body, young, womanly, driving consciousness on hold somewhere like dreamless sleep. It was her occasional brief invasion to feel in touch with mortal concerns. She is to be a bride, again. Foolish, innocent yet of so many regrets and betrayals to come. She is ready to exult in the veil and it symbolic lift. Happy to perform, darling of her audience of familiars. Happy day, swept clean of trepidations, of all yesterdays and their burdensome effluvia. Today is always hers. These ceremonies, traditional duties and pleasures, bind her to cults, cultures, accumulated lore and intuition. Not creature, but weaver – still she is inseparable from the story. Today she again assumes bridehood. Tonight, awash in festivities, again she removes her spell of possession. This new bride returns to a familiar world, changed. No longer civil child nor spiritual supplicant, she has ascended. People see her differently, treat her with more deference, more distance even as they proclaim her their precious chosen intimate, ply her with cherished secrets as if her allegiance would add value. Her bearing carries an air, an enhanced spirit, a subtle awareness, unspoken by any inner voicing. Language is a human art.

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Gathered on picnic table benches behind the home, hot in sunshine. Karen explains, fact by fact, how Gus became her inseparable soul. They beam together. He gives consoling hand to shoulder as she grieves children left with their father, her ex’s condemnation, stern paternal assertion of power. Saving his kin from this unrepentant whore. Karen cries, again – unrehearsed habit. She carries sadness; leaks occur. Gus hardly speaks. His troubled eyes, weary stance, gentle pull and pass of their pint bottle as he glances with deep countenance to each face around is eloquent conversation. Sweat smells, condensed alcohol, burnt tobacco, drying shit from local dogs, passing fumes from the road out front, all permeate, help set the mood. They treat the stranger in their midst as a friend of long acquaintance, just another straggly member of a morphing crew. “Ain’t we all strangers of long acquaintance – everybody a wrapping of layers, appearing in colored bits along our drowsy companionship. Strange friends, welcome distractions, smoky mirrors that let us see as we discern.” Bonnie and Denise giggle at Big Dan’s pedantic speech. They solicit contributions for their liquor store expedition. Enough gets thrown in to make it a go. Go, girls. We’ll be waiting, celebrating what we can because here we are.

[tragicbooks]

Portland's mayor took a stand against hate, but the ACLU is pushing back. Here's why.

You can't overcome hate with censorship, but that doesn't mean it has to win.

On May 26, 35-year-old Jeremy Joseph Christian allegedly stabbed three men on board a Portland light-rail train after they attempted to intervene on behalf of a Muslim woman who Christian was verbally harassing.

Two of those men, Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche and Ricky Best, died while a third, Micah Fletcher, survived.

Photos of Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche and Ricky Best in a memorial set up in Portland. Photo by Alex Milan Tracy/AP Images.

Three days after the incident, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler weighed in with an important message for his city.

In the message, posted to his Facebook page, Wheeler calls on the federal government to revoke the permit granted to an "alt-right" group hosting an event in Portland's Shrunk Plaza in June.

He also appeals to the organizers of the white supremacist group to cancel the planned demonstration. "There is never a place for bigotry or hatred in our community, and especially not now," Wheeler wrote.

"I am calling on every elected leader in Oregon, every legal agency, every level of law enforcement to stand with me in preventing another tragedy."

Here's the full text of Wheeler's post:

"On Friday three men Rick Best, Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche, and Micah Fletcher stood up against bigotry and hatred. Two paid with their lives. A third was seriously injured. Our community remains in shock and mourning. But we are also tremendously grateful to our heroes and their families for their selflessness and heroism. They will serve to inspire us to be the loving, courageous people we are meant to be. As Mayor, I wanted to update you on a few developments: 1) I have reached out to all of the victims and their families, including the two women who were terrorized and subjected to such hatred and bigotry. I have offered my unconditional assistance and support, day or night. 2) I have confirmed that the City of Portland has NOT and will not issue any permits for the alt right events scheduled on June 4th or June 10th. The Federal government controls permitting for Shrunk Plaza, and it is my understanding that they have issued a permit for the event on June 4th." 3) I am calling on the federal government to IMMEDIATELY REVOKE the permit(s) they have issued for the June 4th event and to not issue a permit for June 10th. Our City is in mourning, our community’s anger is real, and the timing and subject of these events can only exacerbate an already difficult situation. 4) I am appealing to the organizers of the alt-right demonstrations to CANCEL the events they have scheduled on June 4th and June 10th. I urge them to ask their supporters to stay away from Portland. There is never a place for bigotry or hatred in our community, and especially not now. 5) I am calling on every elected leader in Oregon, every legal agency, every level of law enforcement to stand with me in preventing another tragedy. 6) When and if the time is right for them, I would like to work with the families to find an appropriate way to permanently remember their sacrifice and honor their courage. Their heroism is now part of the legacy of this great city and I want future generations to remember what happened here, and why, so that it might serve to both eradicate hatred and inspire future generations to stand up for the right values like Rick, Taliesin, and Micah did last week."

The ACLU of Oregon, however, doesn't agree with Wheeler, saying that what he suggested is a form of censorship.

In a response on their own Facebook page, the organization explained (emphasis added):

"Our hearts are broken, but government censorship is not the answer. The government cannot revoke or deny a permit based on the viewpoint of the demonstrators. Period. It may be tempting to shut down speech we disagree with, but once we allow the government to decide what we can say, see, or hear, or who we can gather with, history shows us that the most marginalized will be disproportionately censored and punished for unpopular speech. We are all free to reject and protest ideas we don't agree with. That is a core, fundamental freedom of the United States. If we allow the government to shut down speech for some, we all will pay the price down the line. We must defend the Constitution, even when it is uncomfortable. If the government has concrete evidence of an imminent threat they can and should address it without restricting First Amendment rights of others."

The thing is ... both Wheeler and the ACLU of Oregon are right in different ways.

So where does that leave us?

At his arraignment, Christian shouted, "Free speech or die. Get out if you don't like free speech ... you call it terrorism, I call it patriotism ... die." Photo by Beth Nakamura/The Oregonian/OregonLive.

Like a lot of things in life, it's a bit nuanced.

Before you hop on #TeamTed or #TeamACLU, it's important to acknowledge that pretty much everyone involved in this has good intentions, is disgusted by Christian's actions, and doesn't want anything like it to happen ever again.

On one hand, you can absolutely see where Wheeler is coming from. With tensions running high and the fact that Christian had just recently attended a similar rally, it makes perfect sense that his impulse would be to shut down upcoming rallies for fear of provoking or inspiring another attack. With the city still mourning this loss, it's understandable that he'd look for ways to de-escalate the situation however he can and send a strong message against hate and bigotry.

On the other, the ACLU is totally right when it says the government can't simply revoke permits because of someone's political views. Responding to a comment on Facebook, the organization suggested that the mayor take a more measured approach that doesn't violate the Constitution by talking to the groups planning to hold rallies and asking them to reschedule in light of the recent attack. The groups don't have to, but without outlining why these rallies pose an imminent threat, that's about all Wheeler can legally do.

Freedom of speech, however, does not mean speech without consequences.

There are times when law enforcement can and should intervene to prevent speech from becoming action. For this, let's look at how the ACLU responded to the 2011 shooting outside the office of then-Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (emphasis added):

"It is important to remember that while the First Amendment carefully guards our liberty to speak freely except in the most circumscribed situations, it is not a barrier to effective law enforcement against those reasonably believed to be involved in unlawful activity. ... In times like these, it is natural to look for ways to quell our horror and fear. But it is when people feel most vulnerable that our liberties are most at risk. Unraveling the principles that form the core of our democracy is not the answer."

No matter what someone's personal politics are, no matter what group they belong to, it's important that they're afforded that crucial right to freedom of speech. However, in heated times with heated rhetoric, we — and law enforcement agencies — have a responsibility to prevent that speech from boiling over into physical violence.

If the groups behind those upcoming "alt-right" demonstrations want to act in good faith, then yeah, perhaps they should think about canceling their demonstration in light of recent events. Up until Jeremy Christian pulled out a knife, he sounded just like them. To show that they do not condone his behavior — and not risk being seen as "reasonably believed to be involved in unlawful activity" and held responsible should another attack happen — canceling might be in their best interest to preserve their freedom of speech.

Whether or not these demonstrations happen, it's on the rest of us to not let an ideology of hate win out.

We can look to the brave men who lost their lives to this senseless violence as an inspiration to recommit to looking out for one another and standing up against hate. That might just be the best way to honor their memories.

A memorial set up in Portland shares a message of love and hope. Photo by Alex Milan Tracy via AP Images.