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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 3 years ago

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Florida has just become the first state in the Union to mandate that high school students learn about the crimes of communism. The subject is indeed very important, and too little known. The problem is that the new legislation, like other recent Florida measures, itself recalls certain evils of communism.

As of this coming school year, high school students who wish to graduate from a Florida school must pass a class in U.S. government that includes "comparative discussion of political ideologies, such as communism and totalitarianism, that conflict with the principles of freedom and democracy essential to the founding principles of the United States."

Any high school teacher is going to sigh at the awkward circularity of the "principles essential to the principles" formulation. As Orwell tried to remind us in "Politics and the English Language," though, vague formulations demand our critical attention. This weird phrasing serves a sinister purpose, one that becomes clear later in the law. The point is that the United States is to be defined as free and democratic, regardless of what Americans or their legislators actually do. American is free and democratic because of a miraculous investiture from the past. Complacency is therefore patriotic, and criticism is not.

The law presents "totalitarianism" as an ideology. Totalitarianism is not an ideology, so Florida teachers are henceforth legally required to teach nonsense. To be sure, one can find historical figures who referred to themselves as "totalitarian" in a positive sense, but in general the term has been used as analysis and critique. In use for about a century now, "totalitarianism" has generally been used as a category that brings together regimes with very different ideologies, drawing attention to underlying similarities.

As such, totalitarianism can also be a tool for self-critique, since it draws attention to political temptations that make different systems possible. The most important book about totalitarianism, by Hannah Arendt, presents Nazism and Stalinism as possibilities within modern politics. When in Origins of Totalitarianism Arendt wrote about conspiracy theories, she was writing not only about Nazi and Soviet practices, but also about a human failing. When she wrote about narratives where we are always right and they are always wrong, where we are always innocent and they are always guilty, she was describing a universal risk. When she wrote of people who were simultaneously gullible and cynical, for whom “everything was possible and nothing was true,” she got uncomfortably close to contemporary American reality.

By defining totalitarianism as a foreign ideology to be contrasted with American principles, Florida legislators have denied students not just the knowledge of what the term actually means, but also the possibility to appeal to a rich body of thought that might help them to avoid risks to freedom and democracy.

Unlike totalitarianism, communism is an ideology. Its ideological character is visible in its approach to the past: communists transformed history, an open search for fact and endless discussion of interpretation, into History, an official story in which one's own country was the center of world liberation regardless of what its leaders did. The party was always right, even if what the party said and did was unpredictable and self-contradictory. The most important communist party still in power, the Chinese, takes this line today. To question the revolution or the inevitability of the system is to fall prey to "historical nihilism." In April 2018, a Chinese memory law accordingly made it a crime to question the heroism of past leaders. What we have is good and right because we inherited it from glorious dead revolutionaries, and we must not question what the government tells us about our glorious dead revolutionaries.

We have our own official story of revolution. The Florida board of education has recently forbidden teachers from defining American history "as something other than the creation of a new nation based largely on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence." That narrow formulation rules out most of reality but crams in a good dose of mysticism. Nothing is ever entirely new, and nations arise from many sources aside from principles. The board of education’s claim is political rather than historical: Everything good comes from the past, and we must not question what the government tells us about its righteousness. If there is only one story, and you have to tell it, that is not history but History. The point is not that the American Revolution is the same thing as the Chinese Revolution. The point is that we are treating it the same way, describing it in dogmatic terms that we enforce in memory law. And that is deeply worrying.

The same spirit is in evidence in that Florida communist law. Deep in the past, it instructs us, is where we find freedom and democracy. Freedom is not something to be struggled for by individuals now, but magically "inherited from prior generations." That phrase should give pause to anyone who cares about freedom. If you seriously think that freedom is something that you can inherit, like a sofa or a stamp collection, you are not going to be free for long.

In the law's logic, democracy is not actually allowing people to vote, but some silent tradition that somehow exists whether or not real Americans can vote in reality. Despite what actually happened between the eighteenth century and now (slavery, let's say, or voter suppression), we must close our minds to everything but those mythical "principles essential to the principles." The facts give way to an underlying logic, impossible to articulate, that demonstrates that my country is better.

The Florida communism law requires that someone (it is hard, given the awkward phrasing, to say who) must "curate oral history resources." The curation will involve the selection "first-person accounts of victims of other nations' governing philosophies who can compare those philosophies with those of the United States." There is something humiliating about turning real people into poster children for American exceptionalism. Refugees from other countries past and present have individual and complex stories, which cannot usually be reduced to tales of American superiority. Edith P., a Holocaust survivor, speaks of waiting for hours every day in front of the American embassy, which denied her family a visa. American schoolchildren read about Anne Frank, but no one tells them that her father applied for an American visa. Leon Bass was an African American soldier who saw a German concentration camp. He had something comparative to say about "governing philosophies," but it would not survive curation.

America today is not an especially free country. Our own non-governmental organization Freedom House, relying on our own preferred notions of freedom (civil and political rights) ranks us in fifty-eighth place. In other words, it would theoretically be possible (and it would certainly be valuable) for the Florida board of education to solicit testimonies from people from fifty-seven other countries where people live more freely than here, who could explain why they have not moved to the United States. They could compare their countries' "governing philosophies" with that of the United States (favorably, unfavorably, who knows: they are free people). But we know that this will not happen. Such an application of the Florida communism law is unthinkable, because the Florida communism law is not about freedom. It is about repeating that America is the best country in the world.

Self-absorption is not anti-communism. Anti-communism would entail listening to history rather than History, and educating individuals who can make up their own minds. You don't get freedom from the flock.

Another familiar communist trick can be found in a recent directive by the Florida board of education. The trick has to do with leveraging victory in the Second World War. Beginning in the late 1960s, a certain version of the Second World War became an important part of communist ideology. In the Soviet Union, and also in today's Russia, any wrong done by the system was explained away by the fact that the Red Army had defeated the Germans. The fact that Nazis were evil made the Soviets good. The fact of having resisted the Nazis made one's own system unassailable. This communist technique has now, uncannily, resurfaced in official Florida pedagogy.

In the recent school board directive, we learn that "examples of theories that distort historical events and are inconsistent with State Board approved standards include the denial or minimization of the Holocaust, and the teaching of Critical Race Theory, meaning the theory that racism is not merely the product of prejudice, but that racism is embedded in American society and its legal systems in order to uphold the supremacy of white persons." This repeats the Soviet (and Russian) logic. We don't deny German crimes, and therefore we are innocent of any crimes ourselves. Indeed, anyone who suggests that we look at our own history: well, they are like Holocaust deniers!

Another sad resemblance concerns voting. Freedom involves educating people about the past as it was so that they can make up their own minds about what the future should be. Democracy involves giving people the vote in the meantime. The Soviet Union held elections, but they were ritualistic and fake. When Soviet power extended across eastern Europe after the Second World War, local communist parties rigged elections. Thus authentic anti-communists would make sure that their own elections were not rigged, and that all citizens could take part. But the Florida communism law was passed in circumstances that suggest a lively interest in making voting more difficult. In 2019, the Florida legislature enacted pay-to-vote legislation that effectively disenfranchised people that Floridians, in a referendum, had voted to enfranchise the year before. The Florida communism law came into effect this 1 July, hard on the heels of a new Florida voter suppression law.

I have spent decades teaching and writing about communism, and I certainly think that young people should know about communist systems and their policies of mass killing. But declarations of superiority do not amount to a pedagogy, nor to an anti-communism worthy of the name. The content of the Florida communism law, and the Florida voter suppression law, and the board of education directive on race, do not suggest that Florida lawmakers and administrators have learned much about what was wrong with communism.

These measures reveal American weaknesses that make American tyranny more likely.

* * * * *

When I went to High School in Florida [many decades ago] all Seniors had to take a class called “Americanism vs Communism.” As I recall, most students slept through the class. I thought that it was insulting propaganda - using an inadequate text that was filled with poorly written boilerplate and boring poorly made films. If the right wing wants to inflict propaganda on teenagers it should invest in decent writers and film makers. They are very poor in the literacy department. I was 16 at the time and unsophisticated but I could still tell that what i was being taught was a waste of my time.

#political #articles #Timothy Snyder #history #communism #Florida

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sinrau · 4 years ago

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BuzzFeed News has reporters around the world bringing you trustworthy stories about the impact of the coronavirus. To help keep this news free, become a member .

MEXICO CITY — At first, S.G. thought it was fake news.

An undergraduate student from Venezuela, S.G. has been living in Florida for four years. The news she received earlier this week seemed as bizarre and implausible as some of the rumors that regularly float around in her home country. But this was happening in the US, and it was happening to her.

On Monday, the Trump administration announced that foreign students whose course loads are carried out exclusively online amid the coronavirus pandemic would have to leave the country. Shortly after, S.G.’s cellphone began lighting up with a frenzy of messages and links.

“This has to be a lie. It’s surely a rumor,” thought S.G., who requested that only her initials be used for fear of how her immigration status might change in the coming days. “Why would we have to leave if we are here legally and we have a visa?”

Her parents, S.G. said, decided to spend much of their life savings on her college education, even as Venezuela’s economy was nose-diving. Her parents still live in Venezuela, unlike many of their friends and neighbors who fled widespread insecurity, hyperinflation, a crumbling healthcare system, and frequent blackouts.

If she is forced to go back home, how will S.G. be able to take online classes when the power goes out?

The new policy, issued by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which runs the Student and Exchange Visitor Program, is the latest in a series of directives aimed at curbing legal immigration into the US. It puts more than 1 million international students in the US at risk of deportation amid a global pandemic that has severely restricted air travel.

If they are forced to return home, many of these students will be in different time zones and in locations where access to the internet might be spotty, at best, making it harder for them to follow the course than if they were in the US.

This modification “will encourage schools to reopen,” acting Deputy DHS Secretary Ken Cuccinelli told CNN. Holders of F-1 and M-1 visas, which are for academic and vocational students, must transfer to a school that offers partial in-person courses or leave the country. The State Department issued more than 398,000 of these types of visas in fiscal year 2019.

On Wednesday, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration in an effort to halt the new policy.

In a letter to students and faculty, Harvard President Lawrence Bacow said the policy aimed to pressure universities to open their campuses in the fall despite record numbers of coronavirus infections, and said its cruelty was “surpassed only by its recklessness.” Harvard had announced last month that classes next year would be held remotely with rare exceptions.

Professors across the country scrambled to understand the effects of the vaguely worded policy, and many offered to provide in-person classes, reimagined to protect students from COVID-19 transmission.

“If outdoors is the safest place to be and we need to meet in person, I will find a palm tree,” Joshua Scacco, a professor of political communication at the University of South Florida, told BuzzFeed News. There are more than 4,700 international students from 141 different countries at USF.

Professors at the University of California, Columbia University, DePaul University, and Syracuse University, among others, made similar offers on Twitter. S.G. said several professors reached out to her on the social media platform to offer support, even if it was only emotional.

More than half of the 1.1 million international students in the US come from China and India, according to the Institute of International Education. Many others come from Latin American countries, where they are often fleeing drug-related violence and political oppression.

When S.G. left Venezuela in 2016, food, water, and electricity shortages were already widespread. But things have worsened and now — they only get running water 30 minutes a day.

“I can’t imagine returning to that now,” said S.G., who reckons there are at least 300 other Venezuelan students at her university.

For now, S.G. is waiting to see what happens with the policy, given the massive pushback from universities. She fears for herself, and for the many Venezuelan students in the US who will have nothing to return to at home because their families are no longer there — millions have fled to neighboring countries, or even Europe, in recent years.

The policy, if enacted, would also pose a serious financial challenge to colleges and universities, which depend heavily on revenue from foreign students. International students contribute $45 billion to the US economy and support 455,000 US jobs, according to the Department of Commerce.

Like most international students, Garry Fanata, a fourth-year software engineering student at the University of California, in Irvine, is paying full tuition. His biggest concern right now is not being able to stay in the US after graduating to work for a few years in a top tech company.

“This was my plan to be able to repay my parents for the investment they have put into my education,” he said.

Fanata, who is the first generation from his Indonesian family to study in the US, said he is not looking at flights home yet because he is confident that his university will find a solution. “However, this might not be the case for smaller colleges and universities,” he added.

Others are less optimistic, including a computer engineering student who said he was planning on visiting his family in India in September. The 20-year-old student, who did want his name used for fear of being targeted by ICE, said that for months, he worried his plans would be derailed by the coronavirus. Now, he fears the US government won’t allow him back into the country.

“This week has been one of the most stressful weeks ever,” he said. On top of the stress, “I have to keep performing at my best. America is ready to kick me out.”

While much of the discussion is currently centered on the economic impact of international students, Scacco says it is important to remember that those affected by this policy are young, law-abiding people who are intent on learning at the best universities.

“These students are human beings deserving of respect, deserving of certainty over their educational processes,” he said. “We have entered into agreements with these students.”

International Students Try To Cope With Trump’s Online Class Rule

#IFTTT #WordPress

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lodelss · 4 years ago

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Alice Driver | Longreads | July 2020 | 16 minutes (3,906 words)

“Me with two suitcases, without knowing anything, so far away, not speaking the language, oh no, it was a total odyssey.” — Karla Avelar

* * *

Home was 16 by 26 feet. When Karla, 41, lay on her single bed at night, she could stretch out her left arm and grab her mother Flor’s* hand. She and her mother, who was 64, hadn’t lived together for 32 years: Now they practiced French together and her mother, who never learned to write, carefully traced the letters of the French alphabet in cursive well into the night. Neither of them had finished elementary school; Flor, born in rural El Salvador, was forced to leave school after first grade to work and help support her family and Karla was forced out of school in eighth grade due to bullying from teachers and students who told her she had to dress like a man in order to attend class, who once tried to hold her down and cut her hair and who frequently beat her up. Home was the name she had chosen for herself — Karla Avelar — one that was first legally recognized when she was 41 and requesting asylum in Switzerland. When the weight of memories of her previous life haunted Karla, she went outside to search for a place to cry alone.

When I first met Karla in San Salvador, El Salvador in July 2017, her home was a place I couldn’t safely visit. Karla, a renowned LGBTQ activist, had been nominated for the Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights, which would come with a large cash prize of if she won. Members of the Mara Salvatrucha in Karla’s neighborhood, part of an international gang known as the MS-13, had become aware of the news and had threatened to kill her if she won and didn’t hand the money over to them. She had even been forced to change houses due to the threats, but she still felt her neighborhood wasn’t safe for me to visit, so we met at the offices of COMCAVIS TRANS, an NGO that was the culmination of her life’s work as an activist. Like so many trans women in El Salvador, she had survived more violence than most of us could imagine — rapes, assassination attempts, being unjustly imprisoned — and after being released from prison, she founded COMCAVIS TRANS as the first openly HIV positive trans woman in the country. I interviewed Karla for a story about the reasons why trans woman flee El Salvador, neither of us knowing that Karla would eventually become the story.

On October 6, 2017, roughly a month-and-a-half after we bid each other farewell in San Salvador, Karla and her mother flew to Switzerland to attend the awards ceremony for Martin Ennals Award nominees. When they arrived in Switzerland, Flor broke down and told Karla that members of the MS-13 gang had come to her house, beat her up and forced her to watch a video in which they were torturing a man, telling her that they would do the same thing to Karla. Before leaving, they told Flor that they would rape her in front of Karla and then kill her if Karla didn’t hand over the prize money. And then they asked her to confirm the date that Karla would return to El Salvador after her trip to Switzerland.

Karla relayed the threats to the members of the Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights who were worried that she would be assassinated if she returned to El Salvador. They encouraged her and her mother to apply for asylum in Switzerland. At the awards ceremony, Karla was recognized for her activism and awarded a monetary prize plus an additional amount to donate to the NGO of her choice. Karla and Flor didn’t have time to celebrate — they needed a few days alone to consider what it would mean to never return to the land of their birth. Karla was proud that she had lived honestly in El Salvador, not hiding her past as a sex worker, as someone who had spent time in jail and was HIV+, even when it put her at risk, but she also knew many trans women who had been murdered for their activism.

On Oct. 22, 2017, Karla and Flor requested asylum in Switzerland, and they were sent to a shelter for asylum seekers. “It was huge,” said Karla of the shelter, adding, “at first [the other migrants] treated us very badly. There was a lot of xenophobia directed at us because we were from Latin America.” After Karla was harassed by a group of African migrants, she and Flor were moved to another shelter where they spent 22 days. The shelter — in contrast to the U.S. detention system which often disregards the safety of the transgender community — provided all transgender asylum seekers with a private room with a kitchen and a bath and guaranteed their privacy and security. Karla and her mother were assigned a social worker to help them through the asylum process, a woman who initially called Karla by the name assigned to her at birth. Karla explained that although it was insulting, “I didn’t want to switch social workers — I wanted her to change and to have the chance to rectify.”

After three weeks at the shelter, Karla and her mother were given the choice of three small government subsidized apartments in a town where they could await their asylum hearing. Karla requested that the names of places where she has lived in Switzerland be omitted for her safety. She visited them all and picked the apartment that was closest to a hospital knowing that she would need to take care of some urgent health issues — a doctor in El Salvador at the Ministry of Health had diagnosed her with a terminal illness. And that is how Karla and Flor ended up in a studio apartment with just enough room for two single beds, a small sink, and a bathroom. “I invade her privacy as an older adult person and she invades my privacy as a trans person,” explained Karla as we sat at an open-air restaurant in October 2018. When I visited her, she and her mother were still stateless, slowly working their way through the asylum process while living off a small monthly stipend provided by the Swiss government. As Karla described the situation, “Although we were born in El Salvador, we no longer have Salvadoran nationality and we can’t travel. We live in Switzerland but we don’t have Swiss nationality so we are two stateless people and that is frustrating — not to be able to work, not to be able to study, not to be able to speak the language, to need to request a permit for everything.”

Even so, Karla was aware that she was lucky to be able to request asylum in Switzerland, a country where requesting asylum was not criminalized and where she could study French while waiting to hear the outcome of her request. “As far as being an activist, I’ve been really fortunate during the [asylum] process,” she explained. “Activism has provided me with support — both financial and moral — from friends and allied organizations that I met through my work.” At COMCAVIS TRANS, Karla had provided support to help trans women who wanted to migrate to the U.S. understand the asylum process and gathered documentation of the violence they had experienced. She had lived the violence that trans women experienced, and understood intimately why trans women sought asylum in the U.S. and Europe.

A 2019 study which COMCAVIS TRANS contributed to, “El Prejuicio No Conoce Fronteras” (“Prejudice Knows No Borders”), found that four LGBTQ people are murdered every day in Latin America and the Caribbean. The study showed that roughly 1,300 members of the LGBTQ community have been murdered in the region in the past five years, a figure that includes many of Karla’s trans friends. To put this data in context, which is important because violence against the LGBTQ community is often underreported, between 1990-2019, 350 trans women who Karla was friends with in El Salvador or who she had met through work at COMCAVIS TRANS were murdered. Many countries in the region, like El Salvador, have few if any laws to protect the LGBTQ community, and since police and the army are often implicated in such violence, laws are rarely enforced.

Most Central American migrants still seek asylum in the U.S., but the number seeking asylum in Europe has increased nearly 4,000 percent in the last decade. Given the cost of paying smugglers and the violence of gangs controlling routes to the U.S., some Central American migrants have discovered that the journey to Europe is safer and cheaper. In Karla’s case, she never planned to migrate to Switzerland, but as soon as she requested asylum, she began networking with LGBTQ migrants from Central America across Europe to form a supportive community like the one she had created in San Salvador.

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The day we reunited in Switzerland, she greeted me in French, the skin around her eyes crinkling as she smiled. She wore jeans, light blue shoes, and a top with pink, blue, and black feathers. We sat in the golden late afternoon light and ordered fondue as we watched lean, youthful bodies jump into a nearby lake. Karla, her face relaxed, talked about the support the Swiss government had provided her to get medical care, describing how all tests for the terminal illness at the hospital had come back negative. She believed the diagnosis that she had received in El Salvador boiled down to doctors discriminating against her and misdiagnosing her as a form of “psychological torture” for being trans. “There are other concerns, right? But a negative diagnosis is the lottery for me right now,” she said.

Karla would also receive support to get reconstructive breast surgery and to fully transition into the body she had always dreamed of, a process that doctors said would take about three years. “In my youth, when I was 15, I injected mineral oil into my breasts,” Karla explained. “It is a do-it-yourself process in Latin America; some trans inject mineral, some airplane oil, some cooking oil, but they all are serious things over time.” When Karla had been beat up by the police in El Salvador — their way of punishing her for being a sex worker — they had hit her breasts, leaving behind hematomas that doctors in El Salvador diagnosed as a terminal illness. “That was news that emotionally destroyed me,” whispered Karla. The doctor in El Salvador had also told her, “What you need to do is look for God.” After being trapped in a body that was not aligned with who she felt she was and lied to by doctors in her own country, Karla was thankful to finally have doctors who respected her. Given that she had waited more than 40 years to fully transition to look and feel as she had always seen herself, three years would feel like no time at all.

Throughout the process of receiving asylum, the Swiss government provided Karla with comprehensive health care that respected her needs as a trans woman. “I am very lucky that the head HIV doctor speaks Spanish. She is from Argentina and she is fabulous,” said Karla, mentioning the compassion with which her team of doctors has treated her. Karla’s experience proved a marked contrast to the experience of trans women who seek asylum in the U.S. who: 1) are sent to detention centers rather than shelters like in Switzerland, 2) are often held in male detention centers in the US where they are likely to experience violence (Cibola County Correctional Center is the only ICE facility in the U.S. with a unit reserved exclusively for trans women), and 3) if they are HIV+, receive negligent medical treatment, which, in cases like those of Roxana Hernández and Joana Medina León, leads to death. In the U.S., migrants and asylees are treated like criminals in the billion-dollar detention business which is mostly run via private prison companies.

Even though laws protecting the LGBTQ community in Switzerland were stronger than in El Salvador, Karla still saw an opportunity to use her experience to provide support for others adjusting to a new home. “I’m thinking of founding an organization here for trans women migrants who are refugees,” Karla said as she dipped her bread in fondue. “We could raise funds and create a baseball or a soccer teams for LGBTQ refugees.” She had turned over COMCAVIS TRANS to one of her co-workers, but she felt a lot of guilt about leaving her colleagues and her community and worried that they felt abandoned by her. “Talking about Comcavis brings up memories — and not only memories — it moves my heart because it is a project that was born out of necessity that I experienced firsthand as a [trans] person and that, in the end, became a reality and went on to benefit many people,” explained Karla. “I hope I can achieve this other trans dream.”

When we first met in San Salvador, Karla talked about how she responded to being a victim of countless acts of violence. “There is nothing to do but rebel,” she said. “Rebelling is one way and another is to claim your rights. The fact is you’ve got to claim the right to live because if you don’t claim it, you become a victim of that violation, of that aggression.” And the beauty of watching how Karla worked was seeing that she rebelled by claiming rights for the LGBTQ community, by creating spaces where they could feel safe and learn more about their legal rights.

After dinner, we walked around a lake, stopping to sit on a bench at dusk, the night gathering around us as we talked. Cruise ships lit up red and yellow passed by as Karla talked about how she had waited her entire life to change her name legally, and that as of June 21, 2018, she was officially Karla Avelar. “This has allowed me to not only feel good about myself, but to also feel good socially because I know that I can go to the bank, the grocery store or the pharmacy and that they will treat me like I want to be treated,” explained Karla. Her mother, whose house she fled when she was 9 because she was being abused by a family member and was rejected for her long hair and feminine gestures, had only become part of her life again after she was released from prison in 2002. Flor first called her Karla in 2017. “It was such a surprise that I couldn’t think of what to say. I just thought, ‘Wow, my mom called me Karla’ and from then on, she said ‘Karla’ except sometimes she called me my birth name because she would call me her son. But it made me very happy to see that she corrected herself and called me ‘Karla’ and then when she was speaking to people she would say, ‘This is my daughter.’”

Both mother and daughter struggled with their inability to work. “It was not easy for me to throw away my life’s dream,” Karla said, referring to her work at COMCAVIS TRANS. In March of 2018, Karla became depressed and didn’t get out of bed for two weeks. “I told my mom to close the curtains and leave the room dark. I was so helpless that I think I went a week without showering.” In those first months in Switzerland, she and her mother looked for places to cry alone until they slowly built up the confidence to cry openly in front of each other. But there were also days when Karla and Flor were immersed in French classes, thrilled at the opportunity to be learning in a supportive environment. And as news of Karla’s asylum request spread, she began to receive messages on Facebook from members of the LGBTQ community around the globe. “They called me and sent me hugs and nice emails — so many trans people did, people who I helped,” said Karla. She shared one Facebook message that read: “Karla, it took you a long time, but congratulations, you are now free.”

Karla had begun to participate in events and conferences, including a one about global refugees, and she was helping a doctoral thesis student at a university in Holland with her research into the motives that force trans women to migrate to Europe. “I helped her contact trans women in Europe who are requesting asylum. Here she will do interviews with a Panamanian, a Costa Rican and me, and then she will go to Italy, Spain, Madrid, Morocco.”

Karla stood up from the bench, walked to the lake’s edge, and hopped onto the white railing surrounding the lake, kicking her legs in the air and throwing her head back. “I am excited, excited because I want to learn another language,” she said smiling. As soon as she mastered French, which she knew would be difficult given how long she had been out of school, she wanted to learn a third language: English. On the first day of French class, she was the only Latin American in class, so she felt like a fish out of water and wished that the earth would open and swallow her. However, as she continued attending classes, her excitement won out over her nerves — and she was also proud that she had earned high marks from her demanding teacher. “I think that this is a country of respect, a country of opportunities, a country that gives you confidence. And you should treat that confidence like a treasure. I also think that it’s a very strict country that adheres to a lot of laws, to the rules, but therefore it guarantees a lot of rights,” Karla said.

As we walked back to her apartment, down brightly lit avenues, she talked about Flor and her bravery in fighting against a society that had discriminated against her for having a trans daughter. “I think my biggest inspiration is my mother. I’m sure it is my mom because sometimes I’m in bed and she suddenly gets up and it is 12 or 1 in the morning, and she is studying. Then I think to myself, ‘How strong is my mother’s willpower!’”

We walked up a narrow stairway and down a hall lined with trash cans to a thin wooden door. When Karla opened it, we saw Flor sitting on the bed on the right side of the room, a pencil in hand, working on her French homework while practicing her pronunciation under her breath. She stood up, all of five feet tall, her wiry black hair shot through with white in a ponytail, and said, Bonsoir! The cinder-block walls were painted white, and the beds, a few feet apart, were narrow. On the right side of the room was a tiny sink and a hotplate surrounded by a few dishes, and on the left side was a small, bare bathroom. There was just enough space for two people to move around without bumping into each other, but as Karla put it, “In reality, we invade each other’s privacy because there is just one room.”

Karla and I sat on her narrow bed, while Flor situated herself across from us on her bed. Flor and Karla had the same round cheeks that flushed whenever they were happy. We talked about Estrella, a trans woman who Karla had introduced me to in San Salvador, who had received asylum in the U.S. and legally changed her name to Michelle. While Karla studied French in Switzerland, Michelle studied English in the U.S., something that brought them both joy given that they had been forced out of school in El Salvador due to discrimination. Over the two years of our relationship, Karla and Michelle often wrote me on Facebook, initially to discuss individual cases of injustice against trans women and later to celebrate the simple things they had always wished to do but been denied: to study, to work the job of their choice, to watch a same sex couple walk down the street peacefully hand in hand.

“I remember that when I started to express my gender, [the teachers] ordered me to cut my hair,” Karla said, looking back on her childhood. “I remember that my school teacher and director, who was named Francisco, said that because I identified as gay, I was ordered to collect shit from the toilets, from the latrines. I was ordered to collect rotten sludge for being queer. All those things force you not only to leave school but to abandon your studies. They condemn you, they condemn you to being poor, to pursuing sex work, to not being able to feed yourself, to ending up in prison because you have no preparation, no work, no home.” Karla, like Michelle, had faced discrimination in El Salvador from a young age. She remembered that when she founded COMCAVIS TRANS, she didn’t know how to turn on a computer. “Nobody was ever going to teach me, so I taught myself how to use Excel, Microsoft Word. I learned out of pure necessity,” described Karla. The last time we all saw each other on a street corner in San Salvador in August 2017, Michelle and Karla were both afraid of being assassinated by gangs, unsure of the future.

When I left their apartment that night, Karla and her mother were practicing French together, looking over their homework, reviewing their professors’ corrections, finding joy in an educational process they had both been denied for a lifetime. The began: un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq, six, sept, huit, neuf, dix and worked their way up to 100, their bodies relaxed, their faces hopeful. “If it is going to take me 10, 15 years to learn French — it will take you less,” said Karla to Flor. “I am going to die trying,” she added, laughing.

Two months later, in early December 2019, while at home in Mexico City, I received a WhatsApp message from Karla: “I wanted to share my happiness. Today I received official notice that my asylum has been approved.” She attached a letter that she had written to share with family and friends. She wrote, “The road has not been easy, neither for my family nor for me, with episodes of depression, nostalgia, despair, loneliness, tears, furies and others. But here I am, enormously grateful with life for giving me a new opportunity to advance in peace, secure, calm, happy, free, and without risk of losing it at any moment because of my gender identity and my work as an LGBTI human rights activist in El Salvador and in the region.” Reading it, I remembered sitting in her office in San Salvador in 2017 as we weighed the threats against her life. She mused, “I believe, and I am very clear, that the country does not need martyrs. And I am very clear that I serve more alive than dead.” And so, in the land that first legally recognized her as Karla, she leaned in for the long haul, continuing to do the daily work that over time changes lives — mine, her mother’s, yours.

* * *

*Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.

* * *

Alice Driver is a freelance journalist and the author of More or Less Dead. She writes and produces radio for National Geographic, Time, CNN, Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting, Las Raras Podcast and Oxford American.

* * *

Editor: Mike Dang Fact-checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo

#IFTTT #Blogger

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fierceautie · 4 years ago

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It took moms to hack the COVID quacksDate: September 1, 2020 Author: Anne Borden King “I am a Bishop of the Genesis II Church and you are harassing me. This is a sovereign church right here. … We’ve written the President. Jesus Christ is Lord and he is going to come back and he is going to save us from this evil empire!” So shouted Jonathan Grenon to the U.S. federal agents serving papers demanding his company cease and desist from selling MMS, a bleach product that Genesis II had been promoting as a phony COVID-19 treatment. Operation Quack Hack, a project of U.S. government regulators and law enforcement, continues to crack down on Genesis II and others selling phony COVID-19 treatments. The raids on the Grenon compound were the first major U.S. federal action against the Genesis II Church that has for years been peddling bleach as a cure for everything from autism to cancer. The pandemic accelerated the church’s profits; while the Grenon family earned $500,000 in all of 2019, it earned $123,000 in March 2020 alone. As the coronavirus pandemic spread, so grew the hubris of the scammers that profit from pseudoscience. The Grenons’ ongoing defiance of court orders and the entire premise of their “church” may seem shocking and bizarre. But none of it is a surprise to the group of mothers who have been fighting tirelessly to stop Genesis II and other MMS sellers for years. The only surprise to them was why it took so long to arrest the Grenons. The Genesis II Church and Kerri Rivera, among others, have been selling chlorine dioxide (marketed as “Miracle Mineral Solution or MMS) for more than a decade, with claims it can cure autism, cancer, diabetes and more. They not only profit from selling MMS but from seminars that they conduct worldwide. As Melissa Eaton, who has been closely monitoring Genesis II for years, notes: “It only takes 30 people to attend a seminar and that’s $15,000 in the Grenons’ pockets.” Genesis II sometimes refers to the bleach as “sacraments,” selling $600 church memberships and promoting MMS directly within 139 countries. In July, the Bolivian Senate designated MMS as a treatment for COVID-19, authorizing its sale in pharmacies. This market penetration fits with the Grenons’ marketing goals as for years they have applied a missionary style to their salesmanship. The Grenons even claimed to have reached out to U.S. President Donald Trump, who enigmatically announced at an April press conference that an “injection“ of disinfectant into the human body may be the answer to COVID-19. Although Trump walked back his comments in the following days, COVID-19 pseudoscience had penetrated public life in a new way. Poison control centres received hundreds of calls about using bleach as a COVID-19 treatment. Public Health officials scrambled to clear up communications. “I can’t believe I have to say this,” tweeted former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden “but please don’t drink bleach.” The Grenons and other MMS sellers also have had prime promotional space on Facebook and other social media. For years, they have sold and promoted their products on public Facebook pages, in advertisements and in private social media “support groups” as well as YouTube channels. They also have cross-promotion with others such as Joseph Mercola’s “Natural News” website. As Eaton notes, “A lot of their success is also from their multi-level marketing style: moms pulling other moms in. Some of these moms even run autism support group pages (on Facebook) and companies then give them a discount code for free product or income. So, they heavily promote these products with testimonies of ‘great’ results because they are generating an income from these followers. And there is a huge intersection of anti-vax pages where we see grifters … who have a huge following from promoting anti-vax misinformation. They are able to market the products that they sell as their pages grow, their followers grow and so do their customers.” For pseudoscience sellers, Facebook support groups are a form of stealth marketing, designed to encourage people to buy more and more of the product through a comfortable in-group environment. “It’s an unchallenged echo chamber,” says Eaton, who has worked with other advocates to infiltrate “MMS for autism” support groups. “It’s like a cult,” agrees Amanda Seigler, another mom who has been monitoring and reporting the groups for years. Health Canada was a leader in early action against MMS peddlers, issuing warnings for years prior to a series of legal actions that resulted in the arrests of Sarah Nowak of Alberta and Stanley Nowak of British Columbia on charges related to marketing and selling MMS bleach as a tonic for a broad range of health conditions. In the U.S., efforts to combat MMS were scattershot. In 2010, the FDA issued a warning letter on its website. Then in 2015, Daniel Smith was convicted and sentenced to four years in prison after a woman died from consuming MMS. Three years later, however, the FDA warning was inexplicably removed. Autistic activist Robert Gehrman organized a campaign to get the warning re-instated, which it was in August 2019. “The MMS problem hadn’t gone away in that time,” says Eaton. “It had grown.” In Europe, while Genesis II and other sellers were being identified by activist moms Emma Dalmayne (United Kingdom) and Fiona O’Leary (Ireland) in 2014, few in the media or regulatory communities focused on the need for action. Dalmayne faced disbelief when she reported to regulators and the media in 2015: “It was terrible,” says Dalmayne. “I’d phone newspapers up (about MMS) and they’d laugh, like ‘What?’ They didn’t believe it. It was too unbelievable. I actually got hung up on.” Dalmayne created a petition to make phony autism cures illegal in the U.K. It garnered more than 60,000 signatures. Her early advocacy on autism pseudoscience established the groundwork for the government to work toward regulation and enforcement. The Westminster Commission on Autism’s report established that weakness in regulatory enforcement meant there was little recourse against MMS marketing: “Healthcare fraud is big business and autism is one of its many targets,” the report concluded. Dalmayne’s campaign built on a broader movement in the autistic rights community and caught the attention of American moms Seigler and Eaton. The three organized and volunteered with other advocates, mainly from the autistic community, to document and report activities to local law enforcement agencies. (Disclosure: I have been involved in flagging and reporting in Canada since 2018). Advocates volunteered their time and kept watch on other social media sites, convincing eBay and Amazon to ban MMS sales and encouraging PayPal to close the accounts of MMS sellers (PayPal cancelled MMS seller Rivera’s account, for example). But new sellers would reappear on eBay, requiring renewed efforts. YouTube took action to remove MMS from its site in 2019 with an explicit ban on MMS-related content. In April 2020, the FDA issued warning letter against MMS sellers, including Rivera and the Grenons, as well as letters regarding off-label chelation, camels’ milk and other phony autism treatments. But moving beyond warning letters to enforcement was a big challenge. Regulatory frameworks can be confusing to an expert, let alone to a layperson. In Canada, individuals can make complaints about “natural health products” such as supplements directly to Health Canada regulators through an online form. However, as Ryan Armstrong of Bad Science Watch notes: “Health Canada does not appear to have the capacity to monitor” as much as it needs to. The agency is also challenged by the saturation of the market with health misinformation and false product claims. As Eaton says, “The dietary supplement industry is so big. Many of the products are not in stores. They’re promoted in places (regulators do) not expect.” Unlike radio and television that have significant oversight into content and advertising claims, social media remains a largely self-regulating platform. As one study noted: “Each social media platform is effectively its own universe … a commercially independent entity (that) can at best only control content in its universe.” One platform may have a commitment to reviewing and removing content (e.g., YouTube), another may arguably be a complete free-for-all (e.g., Brighteon). Research conducted by Press Gazette in July 2020 found that 4,094 of 7,295 misleading claims about the coronavirus originated on Facebook. In comparison, 1,066 false claims were traced to Twitter, 999 on WhatsApp, 265 on YouTube and 90 on Instagram. Relying on self-regulation means we are relying on the good intentions of the platforms themselves. Brighteon, Telegram and other platforms have made clear they have no intention of censoring content — and despite its promises, Facebook is not adequately filtering out misinformation. The other choice is to push for legislation to regulate social media in ways similar to radio and television marketing and advertising. In that, we will need political will from our policymakers. Weeks after he screamed at federal agents, Jonathan Grenon was jailed and charged with conspiracy to defraud the U.S. and distribute mislabelled drugs. Then on Aug. 11, Mark and Joseph Grenon were apprehended by military police while in hiding in Colombia. They are being extradited to the U.S. to face a host of conspiracy-related charges. “Now that we have some action against Genesis II,” says Eaton, “what we need to move toward is getting legislative and systemic change in place.” It’s going to take time, resources and immense creativity to combat this problem. But it’s not too late. Advocates like Eaton and her community, the original quack hacks, exemplify why it’s important to have many hands on deck when identifying and confronting pseudoscience.https://healthydebate.ca/2020/09/topic/moms-hack-the-covid-quacks?fbclid=IwAR2H84tuZONiHDAyXqcNRNkOhr1XkHPbSxWKrn7yjNfjo8SI5dn14abp8KM

http://www.fierceautie.com/2020/09/it-took-moms-to-hack-covid-quacks.html

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ladystylestores · 4 years ago

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International Students Try To Cope With Trump’s Online Class Rule

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MEXICO CITY — At first, S.G. thought it was fake news.

On Monday, the Trump administration announced that foreign students whose course loads are carried out exclusively online amid the coronavirus pandemic would have to leave the country. Shortly after, S.G.’s cell phone began lighting up with a frenzy of messages and links.

“This has to be a lie, it’s surely a rumor,” thought S.G., who requested that only her initials be used for fear of how her immigration status might change in the coming days. “Why would we have to leave if we are here legally and we have a visa?”

Her parents, S.G. said, decided to spend much of their life savings on her college education, even as Venezuela’s economy was nosediving. Her parents still live in Venezuela, unlike many of their friends and neighbors who fled widespread insecurity, hyperinflation, a crumbling healthcare system and frequent blackouts.

If she is forced to go back home, how will S.G. be able to take online classes when the power goes out?

The new policy, issued by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which runs the Student and Exchange Visitor Program, is the latest in a series of directives aimed at curbing legal immigration into the US. It puts more than one million international students in the US at risk of deportation amid a global pandemic that has severely restricted air travel.

If they are forced to return home, many of these students will be on different time zones and in locations where access to the internet might be spotty, at best, making it harder for them to follow the course than if they were in the US.

This modification “will encourage schools to reopen,” Acting Deputy DHS Secretary Ken Cuccinelli told CNN. Holders of F-1 and M-1 visas, which are for academic and vocational students, must transfer to a school that offers partial in-person courses or leave the country. The State Department issued more than 398,000 of these types of visas in fiscal year 2019.

On Wednesday, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration in an effort to halt the new policy.

When S.G. left Venezuela in 2016, food, water and electricity shortages were already widespread. But things have worsened and now — they only get running water 30 minutes a day.

“I can’t imagine returning to that now,” said S.G, who reckons there are at least 300 other Venezuelan students at her university.

The policy, if enacted, would also pose a serious financial challenge to colleges and universities, which depend heavily on revenue from foreign students. International students contribute $45 billion to the US economy and support US 455,000 jobs, according to the Department of Commerce.

“This was my plan to be able to repay my parents for the investment they have put into my education,” he said.

Fantana, who is the first generation from his Indonesian family to study in the US, said he is not looking at flights home yet because he is confident that his university will find a solution. “However, this might not be the case for smaller colleges and universities,” he added.

Others are less optimistic, including a computer engineering student who said he was planning on visiting his family in India in September. The 20-year-old student, who did want his named used for fear of being targeted by ICE, said that for months, he worried his plans would be derailed by the coronavirus. Now, he fears the US government won’t allow him back into the country.

“This week has been one of the most stressful weeks ever,” he said. On top of the stress, “I have to keep performing at my best. America is ready to kick me out.”

“These students are human beings deserving of respect, deserving of certainty over their educational processes,” he said. “We have entered into agreements with these students.”

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maritzaerwin · 5 years ago

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9 Things Americans Can Learn From European Offices

If you were born in the United States, your work habits probably raise more than a few eyebrows across the pond. Europeans have a different philosophy of work, and if you look at happiness surveys, you’d say they’re doing something right.

What can Americans learn from their cousins across the Atlantic? More importantly, what takeaways can U.S.-based industries borrow to improve productivity and employee retention? While many differences exist, the crucial contrast occurs in the realm of work-life balance.

1) They Don’t Eat at Their Desks

When was the last time you went out for lunch — not hitting the drive-thru, but sitting down to a meal? Many Americans eat their lunch at their work desks. Europeans treat food as more than mere fuel — it’s a celebration of life, a reward for work done well. They take the time to savor their food, which could be why they have smaller waistlines on average. Americans’ lack of mindfulness while eating could contribute to skyrocketing obesity rates. When you’re distracted, you lose track of how many calories you’re consuming.

The typical midday meal in France consists of three to four courses. They begin with a starter like a salad or soup — things Americans make an entire meal. They then have main and cheese courses, and sometimes finish with dessert. That sounds like an extravagant feast, but because they slow down to a leisurely pace, they recognize when their bodies feel full.

Given that obesity contributes to a host of diseases that lead to sick days, American industries should encourage their workers to take a more leisurely lunch. Instead of enforcing a strict 30-minute rule, they can stretch the break to at least an hour for employees who need it. This extension gives the workers who didn’t brown bag it time to get something healthy, and it frees up the frantic line at the break room microwave.

2) They Take a Different Approach to Automation

When Americans discuss automation, they frequently speak in terms of the jobs lost to innovations like automated checkout machines. As such, they express more skepticism toward the way technology could ease the workload on millions. By 2025, experts expect the division of labor to shift to 48% human and 52% machine or algorithm. However, Europeans embrace this change with far less trepidation.

Why? Part of the answer lies in declining birthrates. The trend toward aging in countries like Germany means that peak employment will occur within the next 50 years. Automation offers one way to perform the necessary labor when there are no longer enough people to man every machine.

3) They Take Family Leave

Having a baby in the U.S. proves challenging for many. Some companies now recognize paternal leave as being as critical as maternal. However, others offer little, if anything, to either parent. When you combine the lack of paid time off with the high cost of giving birth, it’s not surprising that many Americans choose to postpone parenthood.

Contrast this scenario with workers in the European Union. Per their rules, all employees, regardless of the type of contract, get paid leave as a right. Even part-time workers enjoy time off with their baby. When they return, they’re guaranteed the same or a similar job.

4) They Go on Vacation

The United States is the only developed nation that doesn’t mandate paid vacation time — and the strain shows. Even though science proves that taking strategic breaks increases productivity, many American workers don’t enjoy paid time off, even on holidays. As a result, many spend a significant portion of their time at work watching the clock, waiting to punch out and race home.

The European Union requires that each worker receive at least 20 working days of paid leave per year, but many countries do better than that. France mandates 30 working days, and the U.K. 28. Meanwhile, 23% of Americans get zero paid vacation time, and 22% don’t even enjoy holidays.

5) They Stay Home When They’re Sick

You hear it on the morning news all the time during cold and flu season — if you’re sick, you should stay home from work. However, if you’re an American, you’ve likely powered through at least one day when you’ve felt like death warmed over.

Even though some companies are beginning to shame employees into staying home when they’re contagious, many workers stumble through their days, anyway. Frighteningly, many of these folks work in the foodservice industry — would you like a side of rhinovirus with that?

Why do so many Americans go into work when they’re ill? Some of them are hourly workers who can’t cover their rent if they miss a shift. For many, their wages have barely budged in decades while the cost of living continues climbing. Others fear that missing work could lead to adverse employment action despite legal protections. Gig-economy workers, for example, often lack the protection of employees, and right-to-work legislation allows employers to terminate staff without cause.

The number of paid sick days varies across Europe, but all members of the European Union provide some paid days. Unlike in the U.S., benefits extend to all workers regardless of the type of contract they hold. Even part-time employees are entitled to time to heal when they fall ill.

Workers who report to work sick can do more than make their co-workers share their misery by spreading germs. You’re more prone to accidents on the job when you don’t feel well. Reporting to work while under the weather costs employers $150 billion to $250 billion each year. When you consider the high cost, it would be far cheaper for most offices to extend paid sick leave to staff members.

6) They Work Fewer Hours Overall

The average American works 44 hours each week, but many reports that they put in 50 or more. Plus, a growing number of U.S. workers tackle more than one job to make ends meet. When you factor in lengthy commutes and familial obligations, it’s no wonder that so many people complain about feeling tired all the time.

On average, Europeans work fewer hours, and many countries enact strict maximums on the number of hours worked weekly. For example, in Bern, the best European city to work in, people average only 41 hours per week. Requiring more than 45 to 50 hours, depending on the industry, is prohibited.

7) They Don’t Take Their Work Home

Technology connects the global community, but it creates undue pressure on many Americans to stay clocked in 24/7. Fully 39% of Americans report using their cellphones to send work-related emails when they’re not on the clock.

Some people sleep with their phones by their bedsides. They check their email first thing in the morning, and even when they awaken during the night. This practice robs them of a sound night’s slumber, as the blue light from such devices interferes with the production of melatonin, a critical sleep hormone. Even if they spend eight hours between the sheets, they don’t feel rested if they spent part of that time responding to clients.

Europeans, conversely, take the time to honor their need for rest. They also place a high value on family and traditions. For example, during the holiday season, many German cities host Christmas markets from the beginning of December through Christmas Eve. Parents take their children for strolls through the shops and sing carols in town squares. They’re recreating scenes worthy of something out of a Dickens tale — and they’re not emailing expense reports while they do so.

8) They Invest in Education

In the United States, many employers require a bachelor’s degree or higher from their new hires. However, only half of the American companies offer tuition reimbursement to their employees. The result is a scenario familiar to entry-level workers. You need the education to get your foot in the door — but for those who struggle, they need a break to obtain that degree.

Many European nations, conversely, offer free tuition to citizens and even international students. This focus on higher academics ensures them a highly educated talent pool. Plus, a comprehensive education empowers workers to apply their soft skills to a variety of fields, making them better prepared for an evolving world.

9) They Spend Their Tax Dollars Wisely

You might think that with all the leisure time Europeans enjoy, they must live in poverty and misery. After all, people teach you the mythology in the United States from a young age — hard work leads to prosperity, while sloth leads to the poorhouse. However, when you look at the GDP of many European nations, you’ll see they’re doing quite well economically as a whole.

How, then, do they afford benefits that many workers in the U.S. only dream of having? They’ve realized the power of the collective to make particular “perks” public goods. While it’s true that they pay a higher tax rate, small-business owners don’t have to foot the bill for health insurance for their staff. Government policies ensure everyone has the coverage they need. The relief of this burden makes it possible to raise wages and provide generous leave.

While it’s understandable that many American industry leaders resist any policy that expands the government’s power, it would benefit them to advocate for changes that would only pad their bottom lines. Moving to a single-payer system would encourage entrepreneurship and spur growth among many small businesses that now spend a veritable fortune on employee benefits packages.

American Offices Could Learn a Lot From Their European Kin

American companies can learn quite a bit from their cousins across the ocean. When you value workers as human beings, their productivity soars and their attitude toward work improves. Treating your staff more like the Europeans do will only benefit your bottom line.

The post 9 Things Americans Can Learn From European Offices appeared first on CareerMetis.com.

9 Things Americans Can Learn From European Offices published first on https://skillsireweb.tumblr.com/

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interkomitet · 5 years ago

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Svetlana Zhurova took part in the meeting with Sundberg Fredrik

The Chairman of the Committee on State Building and Legislation held a bilateral meeting in the State Duma with a delegation of the Council of Europe led by the Head of the Justice and Legal Co-operation Department of the Council of Europe Sundberg Fredrik.

The Head of Human Rights Policy and Co-operation Department of the Council of Europe Mikhail Lobov, the head of the department of the European Court of Human Rights, and the extrajudicial rapporteur Anna Stepanova also attended the meeting. The Russian side was represented by the Representative of the Russian Federation at the European Court of Human Rights, Deputy Minister of Justice of the Russian Federation Mikhail Halperin, Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Committee on State Building and Law Rafael Mardanshin, First Deputy Chairwoman of the State Duma Committee on International Affairs Svetlana Zhurova, and other participants.

The goal of the event was to discuss topical issues of compliance by the Russian Federation with the European Convention on Human Rights, enhancing the exchange of information and the implementation of best practices of the execution of decisions of the European Court of Human Rights. Both resolved and unresolved issues of preventing violations of the Convention were discussed at the meeting.

Head of the Justice and Legal Co-operation Department of the Council of Europe Sundberg Fredrik noted that the enforcement of the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights regarding the protection of the violated rights of applicants is a complex process that is ensured by many state structures, and much depends on the parliament in this process. He said that in recent years a number of laws have been adopted in Russia aimed at protection of the rights of citizens in criminal proceedings, which improves their reports on compliance with the Convention on Human Rights. Some important legislative initiatives are currently under consideration by the State Duma.

One of the important initiatives is the bill introducing a prohibition to keep accused persons and suspects in metal cages in courtrooms.

Representatives of the European Court of Human Rights emphasized that the confinement of a defendant in a metal cage in the courtroom is inconsistent with the rules of civilized conduct in a democratic society, violates Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights and undermine human dignity. In addition, this procedure does not provide accused persons with the possibility of confidential communication with their lawyers during the trial.

In turn, Pavel Krasheninnikov informed the delegation about the consideration of the bill aimed at solving this problem. He noted that the State Duma Committee on State Building and Legislation fully supports the humanitarian objective of the draft. Moreover, the new courts that are being established in the Russian Federation no longer have cages in their buildings.

Pavel Krasheninnikov informed the delegates that the bill has been reviewed several times by the inter-ministerial working group, which he chairs, on improvement of the legislation on judicial system and procedural legislation, which was created by order of the Presidential Administration, and was also conceptually supported. At the same time, an appropriate mechanism for ensuring the safety of participants in court hearings with the complete abandonment of cages has not yet been developed. There are difficulties both for the legal awareness of citizens, and for the implementation of the mechanism by different state bodies. The changes will require an increase in the number of employees of the convoy service, the bailiffs service to protect law and order in the courtroom, which in turn will entail significant financial implications.

“For all these reasons, now the process of phasing out cages is being discussed, first in individual constituent entities of the Russian Federation, and after successful implementation it will be possible to gradually use this practice on the entire territory of the Russian Federation,” said Pavel Krasheninnikov. A similar process took place with the introduction of a jury trial system in Russia: it was used in certain regions, and then was spread to the entire territory of the country.

The parliamentarian informed the members of the delegation that the Committee had sent requests for feedback and comments on the proposal to relevant bodies (FSB, Ministry of Internal Affairs, Prosecutor General’s Office, Investigative Committee, Supreme Court, Ministry of Justice, Federal Bailiffs Service). The Russian side continues its work on the implementation of the mechanism for abandoning protective cages in courts.

At the end of the meeting, representatives of the Council of Europe thanked the Russian side for the information provided and expressed hope for further cooperation in the context of ensuring respect for human rights.

http://interkomitet.com/about-the-committee/blogs/svetlana-zhurova/svetlana-zhurova-took-part-in-the-meeting-with-sundberg-fredrik/

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bharatiyamedia-blog · 5 years ago

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The place is the EU occurring tech and competitors coverage? – TechCrunch

http://tinyurl.com/yxm6r7oj Enormous know-how coverage questions are looming for whoever takes the highest jobs on the European Union within the coming months. Choices that might radically reshape tech enterprise fashions, reconfigure the aggressive panorama and alter the connection between Web customers and the content material and companies they eat. Briefly, the complete way forward for the tech business — and probably not simply in Europe however worldwide — is at stake. The incoming European Commission can be confronted with a prolonged checklist of urgent questions. How will they reboot competitors regulation for the digital period? Ought to they rush in swinging a break-up hammer at monopolistic tech giants or take a scalpel to the competition-crushing drawback of networked dominance by slicing up their knowledge flows? They should defend basic rights that decision for privateness by design and knowledge minimization in opposition to AI’s rapacious demand for knowledge and the predictive powers of pattern-spotting algorithms. They should consider how to verify platforms play honest — and be certain that the preliminary embrace of sellers or service suppliers doesn’t evolve into crushing abuse. They should style guidelines that may wrap round digital giants, quite than getting bent off form by ‘winner takes all’ enterprise fashions. The facility of tech giants to affect whole nations is now writ massive in EU home politics. Europe is aware of it must hammer out an settlement on reforming digital taxation, with rising citizen anger over tax inequalities. The query is how one can do it when sure states with low company tax charges have been colonised by tech giants which undoubtedly don’t need tax reform to occur. There’s additionally the difficult enterprise of arbitrating between Europe’s conventional artistic industries and the predominantly US sharing platforms which have gotten fats off of the again of others’ content material — a battle so fraught it’s already yielded an EU copyright reform as polarising as Brexit. How, too, to degree the taking part in subject between Web giants and conventional telcos? That requires successful settlement on an update to ePrivacy rules that’s been stalled for months. As a result of, once more, new guidelines are urgently wanted — to wrap round digital comms and deal with digital advertising’s weed-like sprawl, an outgrowth that’s spawned a whole shadowy business of trackers, knowledge brokers and folks profilers which could be linked to many a knowledge scandal and has pushed EU customers into the arms of advert blockers. Find out how to discover a means by means of all of the competing pursuits to carry order to the unregulated mess that’s trendy adtech? Then there’s hate speech and on-line disinformation. What’s to be finished to shrink the democratic dangers of political manipulation with out trampling freedom of expression? And the way can Europe finest equip its residents for the following waves of deepfaked info warfare whereas additionally getting platforms to accountably clear up their act? Europe must form a method to assist AI too. It needs to do that in a means that displays and bakes in European values. However how to make sure moral guardrails to make AI improvement delicate and “human-centric” don’t simply find yourself kneecapping homegrown technologists versus no matter’s popping out of China? Talking of China, then in fact there’s 5G. The Fee has to chart a fragile course between member states’ nationwide safety priorities and the fragmentation menace to its flagship digital single market coverage if EU nations reply in a different way to Huawei. The entire undertaking dangers collapsing into mutual distrust — which might reverse the supposed good points to Europe’s digital financial system. On the authorized entrance, an ongoing conflict of priorities between US surveillance practices and EU basic rights additionally seems like hassle brewing. A flagship EU-US knowledge switch mechanism launched by the Fee in 2016 is now going through serious legal questions. Does the following Fee have with a plan B to maintain crucial enterprise knowledge flowing for the hundreds of corporations signed as much as its Privateness Defend framework if it will get struck down by a choose’s pen? This isn’t a theoretical menace; the predecessor association that had stood for fifteen years was invalidated in 2015, after a authorized problem which drew on NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations of US mass surveillance packages. Trump’s ‘America First’ coverage agenda clearly risks exacerbating this conflict. The US president can be in fact persevering with to rain down commerce uncertainties which are rocking the steadiness of East-West know-how provide chains. How ought to Europe reply to the wreaking ball potential of Trump’s commerce warfare? What assist can it supply its personal tech business to handle a level of uncertainty that makes brexit seem like a picnic? And, because the Web splinters into more and more localized flavors, how will Europe put together and place itself? The techie to-do checklist crossing the following Fee’s desk is full of extremely charged, urgent and politically fraught issues. Over the previous 12 months the EU has dined out on making a reputation for itself on the world stage with a shiny new set of digital privacy rules — aka, the Basic Knowledge Safety Regulation (GDPR) — at a time when US policymakers are simply waking as much as the impolite incursions of homegrown data-mining tech giants. However consideration now must be paid to making sure it truly delivers what was promised or else the worldwide highlight can be pointing at coverage failure. So yet one more activity for the following Fee can be making use of the precise degree of strategic stress to verify the regulation’s wheels are turning. Nationwide knowledge safety businesses are the place GDPR enforcement will fly or fail. The very best profile instances that may actually check their mettle are in fact connected to tech giants — together with Fb and Google. The latter’s dealing with of non-public knowledge for behavioral promoting is now under scrutiny in Ireland. The Irish DPC additionally has greater than ten open investigations into Fb-owned companies, overlaying a spread of points — from probes of particular security breaches as to whether it’s lawfully gaining consent to course of the info of customers of its platform being because it provides no opt-out from behavioural adverts. If Eire fails to defend European values and rights in opposition to the industrial incursions of a number of the world’s strongest corporations it might characterize EU coverage failure on the highest degree. It might additionally invite revolt from much less conflicted elements of Europe. A dispute decision mechanism is baked into GDPR, which permits the European Knowledge Safety Board to step in if disagreement between DPAs om cross-border instances threatens to derail choices. Whereas this does look supposed as a device of final resort, the market denting energy of tech giants is piling the stress on — with report numbers of such complaints awaiting judgement. Both means, battles are brewing. And the most important struggle seems to be for the longer term form of the industrial Web. Advert-funded enterprise fashions which were allowed to develop like weeds are underneath regulatory scrutiny like by no means earlier than — thanks, largely, to European interventions. So too are the tech giants which have profited so handsomely by having the ability to use knowledge how they like. On the identical time a brand new technology of privacy-conscious startups is pondering in a different way and doing what it will possibly to realize footholds in markets the place platform giants suck many of the oxygen out of the room. Sturdy choices by the following Fee to defend European rights and reboot digital markets with equity and competitors on the heart have the potential to rework the digital financial system in order that there are way more winners, not just some taking all. The query is whether or not Europe’s leaders will rise to the problem. Who’s within the operating to be the following EC president? The middle proper’s most popular candidate — and subsequently the technical favourite for the EU’s high job — is German conservative, Manfred Weber. Manfred Weber. Picture by David Speier/NurPhoto through Getty Photos In Fee president candidate debates he has billed himself as providing “stability” for the European undertaking, through a “pro-compromise strategy” — and talked about strengthening “the innovation subject” as the important thing to constructing a stronger EU financial system, saying he additionally needs to improve the EU-US commerce relationship to bolster Europe’s prospects. However Weber has an absence of government expertise and suffers from one thing of a charisma vacuum at a time when an enormous persona would possibly effectively be required to sit down within the chair and ‘promote’ the following Fee to a extra fragmented European Parliament. The kaleidoscope twist of European parliamentary politics may have undermined Weber’s frontrunner possibilities by permitting critics to argue in opposition to him on the grounds that his occasion, the EPP, didn’t develop its share of the votes. So it could also be that one other European Folks’s Social gathering candidate comes by means of in the long run. One who provides a finer-grained political compromise. The EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, seems to have potential — and is being tipped by a number of the present political chatter — having performed a excessive profile function in current European politics, calmly dealing with the chaotic mess produced by the UK’s 2016 referendum vote to depart the EU. Extra importantly, maybe, Barnier is French. One of many EU’s highly effective nationwide leaders — France’s president, Emmanuel Macron — has been in search of to claim authority over the parliament by indicating he received’t be sure by a system of most popular candidates put ahead by its political blocs. That’s dangerous information for Weber, but it surely might carry Barnier out of the broader subject if Macron prevails in stamping France’s mark on the Fee presidency. Michel Barnier. Picture by Thierry Monasse/Getty Photos Though loads of different institution names are nonetheless being bandied round for the highest job — together with chair and MD of the Worldwide Financial Fund, Christine Lagarde (additionally French); and Dutch PM, Mark Rutte, to call simply two. It’s definitely laborious to think about a extra symbolically protected pair of palms for the EU to decide on for its high job proper now than Barnier: The person tasked with holding the EU collectively within the face of the menace posed by Brexit. Brexit dangers not simply the UK’s stability however might very effectively scatter wider seeds of destruction if it erodes and destroys the cohesion required to maintain the European undertaking collectively. So Barnier’s confirmed skill to attach the 27 remaining Member States on a standard negotiating path might be seen by EU leaders as having strategic attraction. What his presidency would possibly imply for wider EU coverage is much less clear, although, given his give attention to Brexit has saved him out of the fray — and away from taking part in public debates with a number of the proposed candidates. The middle left’s choose for president, Dutch politician Frans Timmermans, would wish to prevail in opposition to the dominant EPP bloc to achieve getting the nomination. Which probably means persuading a strengthened liberal contingent to throw its backing behind a ‘progressive alliance’ of socialists and liberals. Whereas attainable, it seems to be a problem. Frans Timmermans. Picture by Pier Marco Tacca/Getty Photos Timmermans has made a public pitch as a change candidate, saying Europe wants extra social justice and sustainable social insurance policies — together with placing taxing tech giants entrance and heart of his speaking factors, and dubbing it “unacceptable” that some corporations have gotten so large they’ll “arm twist” whole Member States to conquer taxes. Local weather coverage is one other acknowledged focus. He has referred to as for stepped up efforts to allow a European-wide viable carbon tax plus faster transformation of the power sector in addition to suggesting new concepts in agriculture — similar to switching to extra sustainable meals manufacturing. He has additionally mentioned he needs to see a company tax fee ground throughout the EU, and referred to as for each state to implement a minimal wage. An articulate and at occasions impassioned speaker, Timmermans posses at the least a number of the charisma Weber lacks — even whereas he faces loads of political hurdles. An out of doors wager — who has betted in opposition to large tech… For many who like an outdoor wager, the extra fragmented European Parliament vote might have buoyed the probabilities of liberal candidate for Fee president, Margrethe Vestager — who might emerge as a compromise various for the reason that liberals grew their presence in parliament (and her personal occasion in Denmark did effectively in nationwide elections). Margrethe Vestager. Picture by Thierry Monasse/Getty Photos Though she is only one of a full slate of candidates fielded by the liberals, which additionally contains one other distinguished EU politician, MEP Man Verhofstadt — who has additionally made his ire over large tech’s rights incursions felt when he heckled the Facebook founder final 12 months, when Zuckerberg addressed some MEPs and didn’t reply most of their questions. Few can compete with Vestager’s profile on that entrance although. The EC’s present competitors commissioner has gained fame on either side of the Atlantic for going after large tech, together with issuing three excessive profile antitrust choices in opposition to Google, similar to a $5 billion high-quality for Android in addition to motion on EU unlawful state help that noticed the Fee order Apple to pay $15 billion in back taxes to the Irish state, overlaying a decade of unpaid taxes. On her order, Amazon additionally bought hit with a big unlawful tax advantages invoice, and may yet face antitrust action. On account of holding a key workplace and the way forcefully she has spent her time as antitrust chief, she stays some of the high-profile European commissioners. Requested about what she would supply as Fee president she has mentioned “you must be forceful to serve individuals effectively.” Naturally, she is pro-regulation — a sentiment that chimes effectively with rising public concern over unfettered and even feckless Web giants. However whereas demonstrably forceful, she can be considerate and methodical, and may’t be accused of leaping on the bandwagon of populist positions. She’s additionally proven her metal in workplace, issuing competitors choices which have angered powerful heads of EU states — which could subsequently have been politically disadvantageous to her prospects of additional development within the Fee. In the direction of the tip of her time as commissioner, she instigated a evaluation of competitors coverage to reply to the challenges posed by digital markets, signaling a reform agenda. She has additionally talked publicly about regulating data flows as a extra clever route to manage large tech versus swinging the hammer to interrupt corporations up. A Fee headed by Vestager would absolutely have a robust urge for food for stamping its mark on digital regulation. At very least it might drive dialogue, even when successful consensus on pan-EU digital reforms could also be harder to attain (particularly on a extremely divisive problem like tax reform). In public debates of Fee presidency candidates, Vestager has mentioned that growing range and managing local weather change can be priorities if she took the highest job, emphasizing too the necessity for an inclusive transition to a sustainable financial system. Given her excessive private profile, it appears at the least cheap that ought to she miss out on the highest job she’s going to find yourself with one other main submit, similar to vp. It might additionally, in fact, sign progressive change if European establishments have been to nominate a lady to one of many high jobs for the very first time. It’s additionally not inconceivable that she could be reappointed as competitors commissioner, given how she has owned the workplace. Both means, Vestager’s affect on competitors coverage seems not possible to fade — not least as a result of comparable concepts are catching hearth throughout the Atlantic. At this stage, although, all continues to be in play the place the Fee presidency is worried. Extra readability might emerge after the following assembly of EU leaders, on June 20 and 21, when the Council will convene to debate nominations — and undertake a primary draft of their strategic agenda for the following 5 years. What’s on the EU Council’s strategic agenda? An outline of discussion topics for this agenda final month included, amongst myriad speaking factors, Europe’s migration problem; tackling on-line disinformation, bolstering cybersecurity and addressing hybrid safety threats; deepening and strengthening the only market and growing an industrial technique, in addition to investing in abilities and training, selling innovation and analysis. Guaranteeing honest competitors was additionally on the checklist. A bit on “constructing a greener, fairer and extra inclusive future” instructed accelerating the power transition and investing in “mobility of the longer term” amongst its listed factors. Whereas a bit entitled “embracing the digital transition” cited growing AI, selling “entry, sharing and use of information,” and making certain connectivity as key speaking factors. Elsewhere the doc talked about defending European individuals’s rights and freedoms, and certainly projecting European values on the remainder of the world. However with so many energy video games nonetheless to play out, the form of Europe’s future tech and competitors coverage stays simply that: A draft, with priorities laborious to foretell. “It’s impossible that there’s going to be any reversal of main insurance policies,” suggests Dr. Alistair Jones, an professional on EU political coverage at De Montfort College. “What we’re prone to see — and that is pure conjecture — is assuming Brexit goes forward (and that’s nonetheless an if) then what we’ll in all probability see is a Fee being a little bit bit extra tentative on the mixing course of and desirous to go ahead extra step by step on integration to maintain everybody on board. “So issues just like the digital market will proceed, slowly and punctiliously. I don’t see an enormous lunge ahead in better integration on any points. I feel it’s going to be very tentative, very a lot small steps.” On-line disinformation is a matter the place the EU does have critical considerations. The Fee has been paying shut consideration to how platforms are responding to elevated stress, through a (for now) voluntary code of practice — establishing a month-to-month monitoring requirement for them to ship progress stories, and issuing sharp rebukes that progress hasn’t been ok. However a pan-Europe regulatory response to on-line muck spreading is sophisticated by whether or not it’s an EU or nationwide competence. “The issue is it in all probability lies with the nationwide governments and they’re loath to wish to give better duty to the EU on this space as a result of they’ve their very own methods of doing issues,” says Jones. The Germans, for instance, haven’t been shy about passing a regulation to punitively punish platforms in the event that they fail to swiftly take away hate speech, whereas the UK stays targeted on devising a framework to control a broader range of online harms. The place on-line content material guidelines are involved, Europe’s cultural variations recommend that this kind of coverage patchwork will stay the norm. Picture through Getty Photos / AdrianHancu Equally, Jones believes core choices on regulating 5G will remain at a Member State degree — with the Fee probably solely transferring to set a future ground for trans-national EU minimal requirements, quite than in search of to impose hefty safety restrictions on procurement choices. “Because it strikes ahead, I can see the Fee — because it’s finished up to now — taking up a broad brush large image regulatory function,” he says. “So who could be concerned within the supply of 5G, which companies are concerned, issues like that. I can see as it’s rolled out the Fee and the EU collectively wanting a level of consistency, and that hyperlinks to single market guidelines, it hyperlinks to competitors guidelines, it hyperlinks to industrial coverage guidelines. A few of that’s already in place however on the identical time there could also be a necessity for better policing that additional down the road.” One problem that does usually minimize throughout the political spectrum is digital taxation, although attaining settlement on that entrance could also be hampered by a political requirement for the EU to be extra delicate to considerations about elevated integration — and never be seen blindly pushing on the accelerator. Once more, says Jones, Brexit complicates issues. He suggests a extra broad-brush strategy might win out within the close to time period, such because the Fee wanting on the operation of the complete single market — “and the way that may be finished extra successfully and effectively” — quite than making an attempt to sort out head-on nationwide resistance if the EU pushes to get enter on Member States’ tax techniques. “It’s one thing which will bubble alongside just under the floor,” he posits of digital tax reform. “Possibly in 5 years occasions, after the following elections, [there could be a] large package deal to presumably change the entire taxation system of the EU. And it could be that it provides the EU some enter into nationwide taxation insurance policies however that’s going to be resisted by some nations.” Some Member States have voiced loud concern about digital tax inequality. Together with France and the UK, that are pursuing their very own flavors of reform. Although with out a pan-EU strategy there’s no actual probability of addressing the issue. Getting political settlement on that can be troublesome, with smaller states having lucratively leveraged a low tax financial system to tug within the tech giants. So the Fee might stay caught within the center. “We frequently assume that the Fee units the insurance policies. The Fee don’t. The Fee tries to mould the agenda but it surely’s as much as the Council’s ministers and likewise the European Parliament to take that ahead,” says Jones. “So if we’ve a Fee that’s keen to say — ‘hey, digital financial system, the EU must have better involvement in all of this’. The nationwide governments have gotten to purchase in. And in the event that they don’t purchase in it doesn’t matter how good the commissioner is, it doesn’t matter how farseeing they’re, they’re not going to get anyplace. So there’s bought to be this skill to get buy-in from the Member States.” That mentioned, particular person commissioners could be key to driving a specific reform agenda. So the personalities and experience concerned could make an enormous distinction — if it helps them win the assist of member states. “There in all probability goes to be extra urge for food for large tech regulation however the issue they’ve bought on the Fee is that at occasions, collectively, their head is caught within the sand and they’re loath to go ahead on a variety of points,” says Jones. “It could be as much as particular person commissioners who have gotten that particular person rise up and go, that particular person vigor, that data of the world they’re in control of — it could be the person commissioners who may very well drive issues ahead.” “It could be there’s a commissioner within the digital financial system who’s going to develop into the function, in the event that they’re not already there,” he provides. “However what they are going to want is the assist of the person member states.” Picture through Getty Photos / KatarzynaBialasiewicz After the Fee president, the competitors commissioner function stands out as a crucial appointment, given its excessive diploma of autonomy and energy. Whoever lands the transient will definitely be one to observe, not least for a way they reply to growing political appetite over the Atlantic to crack the again of tech giants’ platform energy. A future date to look out for on that entrance is when the nominee for the EU antitrust transient will get questioned by the European Parliament — each to see how they reply but additionally what sort of questions they face. That can supply a taste of the brand new parliament’s priorities for regulating competitors. A parliament signalling it needs extra motion to rein in large tech might act as gas for the following commissioner, says Jones. The EU’s subsequent antitrust chief may even have on their desk the evaluation Vestager instigated of digital markets — so will probably be as much as them to make a name on how one can take that work forward. A decisive commissioner might have a significant impression on digital markets and enterprise fashions. So it’s a crucial appointment. However once more we’re nonetheless a great distance off figuring out who the individual can be. Not least as a result of particular person commissioner appointments can rely upon how large a persona the Fee president is. “When you’ve bought an enormous persona who can drive issues by means of with the assist of the European Parliament they’ll get the nationwide nominees into the locations that they need,” says Jones. “That is the issue that the president has — they have no idea who the person nominees are going to be from which Member States. So till they know who the nominees are from which Member State after which what portfolios they might be applicable for — what portfolios they wish to give them — it’s all up within the air.” How is the following Fee president determined? A number of candidates stay within the operating to take over from Jean-Claude Juncker as Fee president come November 1. Although even that timeline will not be 100% sure. If, for instance, MEPs take a dislike to a Council choose for president they’ll reject the entire Fee, delaying the complete course of. The method for deciding the following Fee president includes a nomination, by a professional majority, from the European Council that’s required to consider the results of the newest European elections. Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) then vote on the selection — with an absolute majority required for the Council’s nomination to prevail. Whereas the Fee’s high job is influential, as regards shaping pan-EU coverage — with the president accountable for setting political route and chairing their cupboard of commissioners atop the assorted coverage areas — the workplace shouldn’t be considered the equal of the president of the USA. However is a key strategic function. Collectively, the Fee executes on a pan-EU legislative program. It’s accountable for drafting the price range and is the one EU establishment that may suggest laws. The European Council is the ability behind this throne, feeding in no matter coverage priorities could be agreed by a roomful of heads of presidency/state of the EU’s (at present) 28 members — along with taking part in kingmaker by nominating their alternative for Fee president. Picture through Getty Photos / Dado Daniela There’s additionally a president of the European Council, who works to hunt consensus between Member States. This place is about to alter shortly too, through election by Council members, albeit for an preliminary time period that’s half so long as the Fee president. Nominations for the assorted European commissioners usually contain massive quantities of horse-trading and energy taking part in for portfolios between the Member States. The goal is for the Fee to comprise illustration throughout the bloc, factoring in regional variations in politics, nationality, north vs south, east vs west, range and so forth. However it’s a political compromise, by no means a flawless mirror. In follow, the alternatives of Fee nominees could be a stunning course of wherein little identified figures can out of the blue discover themselves with the precise mixture of technique, nationality and diplomacy to unlock the precise assist. With so many balancing and compromise elements in play, the make-up of the following Fee is all the time advanced and laborious to foretell, and arguably extra so this time round, given wider shifts within the European political panorama — together with ongoing ructions brought on by the UK’s vote for Brexit — including additional layers to the standard palimpsest. A extra fragmented European politics Elections for the parliament have been held final month and the vote returned a extra fragmented hemicycle — weakening the standard center-right and center-left blocs which have dominated for 40 years. Though they nonetheless stay the foremost political forces it’s the liberals, greens and nationalists that gained floor. A extra fragmented parliament suggests reaching consensus on each the form of the following Fee and what laws it can go on to suggest might show harder until new political alliances could be cast. At this stage, it’s not clear what the brand new European parliament voting blocs can be. There stays a threat that EU legislative processes might be stalled if compromise can’t be reached throughout a in a different way stripped spectrum of divergent political positions. “We don’t actually know what the teams are going to be within the European Parliament,” says Jones. “These groupings are fluid. So when you search for instance on the Brexit Social gathering getting into with the Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy — when Britain leaves, that entire grouping disintegrates. As a result of they’d solely have six nations represented. They’d want seven. “If that’s the case it could be that a few of these occasion teams might look elsewhere… We merely don’t know. So how the precise buildings of the smaller events are going to be — that’s up within the air. Till that’s resolved, the entire institution of the Fee past the presidency is up within the air as effectively.” “The whole lot’s up within the air on the minute,” he provides, noting only one certainty: That the 2 main events nonetheless dominate, regardless of their vote shrinking. “If they’ve organized issues in order that there’s an settlement that whichever occasion has probably the most seats their nominee for the presidency for the Fee would go ahead,” Jones suggests. “In the event that they keep on with that, then the start line of creating the Fee presidency signifies that the EPP will preserve their individual in place.” The total phalanx of Fee president and commissioner appointments has additionally bought to be permitted by the European Parliament, en masse — with MEPs getting a vote to both settle for or reject. “So what you’ve bought subsequently is a large haggling course of. And for this reason when individuals say there’s a fragmented European parliament we don’t know what’s going to occur — they’re completely proper. Till the teams are literally sorted within the European Parliament then we’ll get a greater concept of the ability buildings, after which we’ll get a greater concept in relation to with the presidency having been sorted how the remainder of it can movement by means of. “It might be — might be — actually problematic in making an attempt to get a Fee membership by means of if the smaller teams within the European Parliament work collectively to attempt to block appointees they might trigger issues.” So, once more, a lot hangs on who would be the subsequent Fee president, and the way persuasive they show throughout a extra fragmented political panorama. As famous earlier, Barnier’s negotiating glue might seem like a helpful particular energy. Though, as a persona, he’s hardly overflowing within the power of character division — famed just for having an unnerving stare. Picture through Getty Photos / robertiez Jones takes the view that the coverage company of the following Fee isn’t prone to emerge till Brexit itself has occurred — assuming, in fact, that Brexit does truly go forward. (And the place Brexit is worried there are nonetheless completely no ensures in any respect.) “When/if Britain leaves the complete energy construction within the European Parliament might change. As a result of the Freedom and Direct Democracy Group might collapse with Brexit leaving that group [assuming the party follows the UKIP template and involves itself with the same group]. So all the things is up within the air on the minute. That can get resolved, in all probability by if we’re fortunate the center of subsequent month. “Then you definately begin on the fee appointments and it’s the summer season — and a number of the nations successfully shut down. So it could be that it’s September or presumably even early October that we’re going to see this whole course of accomplished. That’s the nightmare situation. So the EU principally flounders for the following three to 4 months.” In the meantime, if muscle-flexing Macron misses out on a French Fee presidency it’s conceivable he might push for the highly effective antitrust portfolio as a comfort prize. Which maybe lends some shade to Fb’s current makes an attempt to cozy up to the French government to work on concepts for Web ‘co-regulation.’ Zuckerberg could also be putting his personal bets on the longer term form of the Fee by in search of to make highly effective French mates within the hopes of influencing pan-EU coverage earlier than the following fee has had probability to take form. However the place EU politics is worried, the phrase that’s been repeated advert nauseam of the Brexit negotiations applies right here too in spades: ‘nothing is agreed till all the things is agreed’. This time round Europe’s political dial the chance of dissettlement seems to be zooming alarmingly into view. So the true check of the European undertaking can be whether or not it will possibly climate disruption to its normal philosophy of onwards and upwards — its political push for ‘extra Europe’ — when a few of its individuals are voting for much less. If the EU can’t carry all its individuals alongside there can be little hope of driving any main coverage agenda — which implies key questions of know-how and competitors going unaddressed, producing authorized uncertainty and compliance threat for enterprise with knock-on financial results. Tech giants have the sources to handle political uncertainty — certainly, they’ve proven themselves adept at exploiting political vacuums and blindspots — so will probably be startups and the following technology of entrepreneurs that get failed. Consensus works till it doesn’t, because the UK’s Brexit schism illustrates. So there’s a transparent cautionary story for the EU powers that be — if they’ll however put their heads collectively and pay attention. “The difficulty goes to be how the remainder of the European nations work collectively. As a result of though [the UK is] a reluctant European, and we’re by no means very eager, one of many roles that we performed was as a break on a number of the extra extreme integrationist concepts which may have arisen from the Fee that a number of the different large nations similar to France and Germany purchased into,” says Jones when requested whether or not he thinks the European undertaking can survive Brexit. “With that function going, assuming we depart, it does give the EU the chance for the EU to drive ahead for better integration — and it could be that we see the event of a two-speed Europe. If that occurs the entire undertaking will disintegrate. Of that I’m satisfied.” “They must be taking over the extra reluctant members,” he provides. “So the Hungarys, the Polands, the Czech Republics… in addition to the extra integrationist nations, similar to Belgium, similar to Luxembourg, similar to Germany and France. They’ve bought to be taking everyone alongside collectively… Everyone’s been dragged alongside a bit reluctantly. They’re going to must be a little bit bit extra thoughtful if Brexit goes forward as a result of in any other case the undertaking might disintegrate.” Source link

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mideastsoccer · 6 years ago

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Achieving religious harmony in a world of fear and populism

By James M. Dorsey

A podcast version of this story is available on Soundcloud, Stitcher, TuneIn and Tumblr.

Edited version of remarks made at the Inter-Religious Organization Singapore, 1 October 2018

This is a tough time for men and women of the cloth, at least those whose message is one of peace, tolerance, mutual respect, equality and inter-faith dialogue.

Underlying the rise of populism, nationalism, protectionism, fear of the other, anti-migrant and anti-foreigner sentiment, and hate speech is an erosion of the norms of debate. Articulation of hate speech has become permissible, if not fashionable. Often blunt and crude language employed by leaders, politicians and some people of the cloth help shape an environment in which civility has been lost.

Intolerant, racist and supremacist have risen in significance even in democratic societies that project themselves as open, tolerant guarantors of equal rights irrespective of nationality, ethnicity, religion, colour or sexuality. Suppressing those voices through laws and bans drives hate speech and racism underground, it doesn’t erase or eradicate it. Countering it with a message of tolerance and mutual respect won’t erase it either but can help shape an environment in which those principles become dominant again.

Let’s face it, prejudice is a fact of life. Its inbred in whatever culture each of us adheres to and whatever education at home and in schools that we have enjoyed, irrespective of how conservative or liberal our family and societal backgrounds are. We all were raised on implicit or more explicit notions that our culture is best or by implication other cultures are not as good.

In other words, prejudice is not the issue, its how we deal with it, how we manage it. The problem arises when we lose our sense of relativity, when we adopt an absolutist approach, the high way or no way. It arises when pluralism is thrown out the window and we abandon the notion that our world is populated by a multitude of equally valid faiths, worldviews and belief systems.

To quote Mahatma Gandhi, a deeply religious Hindu, who said in 1942: “I believe with my soul that the God of the Qur’an is also the God of Gita and that we are all, no matter by what name designated, children of the same God. My whole soul rebels against the idea that Hinduism and Islam represent two antagonistic cultures… To ascent to such a doctrine is for me a denial of God.”

In the battles in the late 1940s and 1950s over a proposed national ban in India on the slaughter of cows, Gandhi declared himself a worshipper of cows whom he regarded with the same veneration as he viewed his mother. Yet, Gandhi, went on to say that “the Hindu religion prohibits cow slaughter for the Hindus, not for the world. The religious prohibition comes from within. Any imposition from without means compulsion. Such compulsion is repugnant to religion.”

On a visit in 1942 to a German camp populated by Indian prisoners of war captured from the British during fighting in North Africa, Subhas Chandra Bose, a deeply religious leader of the Indian independence movement, reportedly warned inmates that “if you use religion to unite yourself today, you leave the door open for someone to divide you later using the same sentiments.”

Recent history validates Bose’s warning, not only in India and Pakistan, but across the globe expressed in Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, and anti-Shiism, just to name a few, as well as in conflicts, wars and brutal repression in places like Syria, Yemen and the north-western Chinese province of Xinjiang.

Many of you represent faiths with multiple sects, legal schools and interpretations – proof that your belief system in the narrow context of that system is open to multiple interpretation. Some of those interpretations may be intolerant, anti-pluralistic, supremacist. They too are a fact of life, like it or not. Countering them depends on the social environment one creates, a sphere within which men and women of the cloth have an important role to play as well. It is also a function of the social and economic policies implemented by governments.

Indeed, the key is not suppression, what is suppressed doesn’t go away, at best it goes into hibernation, only to re-emerge at some point in the future. The key is containment, communities and societies that make discriminatory, racist, supremacist expressions socially taboo. That key is not enforcement by force of law but by social custom and an environment in which those expressions are continuously challenged in public debate, social settings and individual encounters. I am not talking about political correctness that stifles debate.

Leaving aside those whose beliefs are absolute and intolerant of any other view, a majority of people gravitate towards the middle. It’s what some call moral shock or what former trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb dubbed black swans coupled with economic, social and societal uncertainty and political manipulation that drives people towards more literal, absolutist, intolerant beliefs.

It is those circumstances in which normally tolerant communities and societies become more amenable to those beliefs. It’s what allows men like Slobodan Milosevic or Bashar al-Assad to turn societies where inter-communal relations and inter-marriage were the norm into wastelands in which one community tries to exterminate the other.

Think of Bosnia Herzegovina in the 1990s that seemingly transformed overnight from a beacon of harmony into a hell or the tensions in multiple countries ranging from Bahrain to Nigeria or the tenth parallel that journalist Elizabeth Rush aptly described as the fault line cutting across Africa and Asia between more strident forms of Islam and Christianity.

The last two decades have witnessed a renewed hardening of fault lines, not just ones between strands of Islam and Christianity, but across the board. This latest round started in 2001 with the moral shock of the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington and subsequent attacks across Europe as well as in Asia and Africa that continue until today. 9/11 was the death knell of multi-culturalism and the cradle of the latest wave of Islamophobia and rising anti-Semitism.

The economic financial crisis of 2008/2009 with its decimating effect on the lower and middle classes, the flourishing of jihadism, the impact of heinous attacks close to home and the fear, a human being’s most irrational emotion, that generated the breeding ground for populism, nationalism, protectionism and the return to primordial, absolutist beliefs propagated by multiple sources, including men and women of the cloth.

To be sure, the groundwork for this pre-date 9/11, fuelled by some strands of Christianity, massive Saudi funding across the globe of ultra-conservative strains of Islam, and the use of religious intolerance by leaders and governments because it served a political purpose.

Pakistan illustrates what this can produce. The tolerant and live-let-live types live in a bubble, primarily in Pakistan’s three foremost cities, Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad. The gravity of society has shifted towards intolerance, anti-pluralism and supremacism. Ultra-conservatism has been woven into the texture of segments of society and the culture of some institutions of the state. It is a world in which absolute truth rules supreme, discrimination based on an absolute truth is anchored into law, competence is determined not exclusively on the basis of merit but on what faith one adheres to, democratic freedoms are curtailed. Mob lynching becomes acceptable, violence against minorities the norm, and anti-blasphemy the tool.

It’s a trend that is not unique to Pakistan and not unique to the Muslim world. It is a trend that is nurtured by the rise of populism, nationalism, authoritarianism and autocracy visible across Western societies, the Muslim world and Israel, in other words irrespective of cultural-religious roots.

In most, if not all of these countries, significant segments of the population have no real stake in society. Intolerance, anti-pluralism, racism and supremacism fuel the perception of disenfranchisement and marginalization that often produces a sense of not having anything to lose. It is some combination of religious ultra-conservatism, exclusivist ethnic and nationalist sentiment, and lack of a stake that creates breeding grounds for militancy and extremism.

Men and women of the cloth working in Singapore are in many ways privileged. While Singapore regulates hate speech or expressions it believes would undermine harmony, it has been successful in ensuring that all segments of the population have a stake in society – perhaps the most important factor in combatting discrimination, racism and supremacism as well as militancy and extremism.

Singapore demonstrates messages of tolerance and inter-ethnic and inter-faith harmony can and will be heard in a political and social environment that fosters mutual respect and dialogue.

There is however one caveat. Peace and harmony in society requires peace and harmony at home. The divisions and animosity between different religions and ethnicities at large are reflected in divisions and animosity within faith groups.

Tolerance, mutual respect and dialogue starts in one’s own community and its message is as credible as one practices it without exception. That probably requires a redefinition of the concept of absolute truth. That’s a tough order, but no one claims that ensuring that a peaceful and harmonious existence and future would be easy. It also is a litmus test of one’s sincerity.

Dr. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, co-director of the University of Würzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture, and co-host of the New Books in Middle Eastern Studies podcast. James is the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer blog, a book with the same title and a co-authored volume, Comparative Political Transitions between Southeast Asia and the Middle East and North Africa as well as Shifting Sands, Essays on Sports and Politics in the Middle East and North Africa and just published China and the Middle East: Venturing into the Maelstrom

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lodelss · 4 years ago

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The Promised Land

Alice Driver | Longreads | July 2020 | 16 minutes (3,906 words)

“Me with two suitcases, without knowing anything, so far away, not speaking the language, oh no, it was a total odyssey.” — Karla Avelar

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douchebagbrainwaves · 6 years ago

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REALLY

A few years before by a big company it's necessarily the dominant one. Most of the people. There is only one real advantage to being a member of most exclusive clubs: you know you wouldn't be missing much if you weren't. They'd have sacrificed hundreds of thousands of dollars. So it is with colleges. Hackers should do this even if they don't plan to start startups, because it could be. I'm always delighted to find I've forgotten the details of disputes, because that is the future, places that don't have startups will be a tendency to push it back to their offices to implement them. Hackers are unruly. So if you can achieve the same level of performance with less effort, surely that's more impressive, not less. That was why they'd positioned themselves as a media company, or portal, or whatever we were, search could safely be allowed to wither and drop off, like an umbilical cord.1 033600237 programming 0.

If you keep the company moving forward—releasing new features, increasing traffic, doing deals, getting written about—those investor meetings are more likely to be productive. This one may not always be true. And strangely enough, the leaders now are European countries like Belgium, which has a capital gains tax rate of zero. As a little piece of debris, the rational thing for you to do everything.2 If you let the difficulty of raising money, but connections and advice. The difference between design and research seems to be mobile devices, but that they lack examples. And probably the only people who will notice. But they all said no, so I didn't do it. 4 month interruption. The only way a startup makes sense.3 If you're writing something that you'll be able to sign up a lot of people working for them.

It's this pattern that makes them; idleness is lonely and demoralizing. Like many of the half-truths adults tell us, this one contradicts other things they shared in common with us. One reason Europe pulled ahead was that the valuation wasn't just the value of our ideas, which turned out to be the same. They can be considered in this algorithm by treating them as virtual words. Is it just a coincidence that they used the same word, or is there some overlap in what they can say to you. And I think that's precisely why people put it off.4 Editorials quote this kind of statistic with horror. A word like shortest is almost as much evidence for innocence as a word like that is effectively a kind of whitelist and blacklist because they are based on entire messages, including the headers.5 Put them all in a building in Silicon Valley face an unpleasant choice: either live in the boring sprawl of the valley proper, or live in San Francisco and endure an hour commute each way.

There is a lot more in common than this, of course. Most adults looking at art worry that if you take a vote.6 If companies started doing that, they'd learn some frightening things. There is only one real advantage to being a member of most exclusive clubs: you know you have to know who you should be able to test in an hour, then you only have one meeting a day with investors, somehow that one meeting will burn up your whole day.7 I'm talking about filtering my mail based on a half-page agreement. Every engraver since Durer has had to live in them. The problem was not the 14 pages, but the other half you're thinking as deeply as most people only get to sitting alone on a Sunday morning.8 99 respectively, and a dial to control each. And thought you should check out the following: http://www.9 In the US things are more haphazard. Oddly enough, the better an idea it seems. Milan at the time, a lot of valuable advice about business, and also did all the legal work of getting us set up as a depressing, undifferentiated heap.

The added confidence that comes from the controversial topic of wealth, no one will know. So I don't think you should always be collecting data about investors' intentions. Among companies, the best opportunities are where things suck more than in corporate IT departments. In 1938 Buckminster Fuller coined the term ephemeralization to describe the atmos. IBM developing what they expected to be the right kind of vibe. The idea is to judge you, not more sophisticated. For the first 100 years or so of its existence, it was Stripe.10 All the unfun kinds of wealth creation slow dramatically in a society where I was the richest, but much less costly if you discover them early. The good news is, all you have to design what the user needs, not simply what he says he wants. Lately hackerliness seems rather frowned upon. This is harder to do than it sounds.11

Someone who does you an injury hurts you twice: first by the injury itself, and second by taking up your time afterward thinking about it afterward. I learned something valuable from that.12 Any wealth a serf created belonged to his master.13 That would have led to disaster, because our software was so complex. CEOs, it's hard to see how little launches matter. It might be a good one. It would cost something to run, and since 2001 there has been an unprecedented opportunity for learning how to pick winners. And if the idea of good art, then people who liked it would have meant taking on a newscaster—someone who, as they say yes. But this can't be an intrinsically European quality; previous generations of Europeans were as ambitious as Americans. And being charming and confident counts for nothing with users. Who made the wealth it represents?14 It assumes good technical people have college degrees, and that the weight of a few carefully observed and solidly modelled objects will tend to make filtering easier, because you'd only have to find your peers, which is the worst sort of strip development.

Notes

Survey by Forrester Research reported in their early twenties compressed into the sciences, even though you tend to use some bad word multiple times. Several people have historically done to painting may be some part you can say I need to fix once it's big, messy canvases that philistines see and say that's not directly, but Javascript now works. Whereas the value of a handful of companies used consulting to generate all the worse if you're measuring usage you need to, but this could be ignored. The downside is that the middle of the reason this trick works so well is that the government, it was wiser for them, not like soccer; you don't know which name will stick.

The main one was drilling for oil, over fairly low heat, till onions are glassy.

If we had high hopes for doesn't do well, but for different things from different types of people who start these supposedly local seed firms.

On the other hand, a lot of classic abstract expressionism is doodling of this process but that's a pyramid scheme. A knowledge of human anatomy.

At two years investigating it.

This argument seems to have been Andrew Wiles, but for the same thing, because you have to worry about the smaller investments you raise as you can control. It wouldn't cut their overall returns tenfold, because it aggregates data from so many people work with me there. Paul Buchheit points out, if you turn out to be vigorously enforced. This is one of the word procrastination to describe the worst.

There's not much use, because such companies need huge numbers of users to recruit manually—is probably no accident that the government and construction companies. If you have significant expenses other than salaries that you could get a poem published in The New Industrial State to trying to work for Gillette, but delusion strikes a step further.

Yes, actually: dealing with the other by adjusting the boundaries of what investment means; like any investor, than to call you about it. Google is much like the one the Valley use the name Homer, to the founders' advantage if it gets presumptuous for a year, they will come at an academic talk might appreciate a joke, they were beaten by iTunes and Hulu.

If a big factor in high school football game that will sign up quickest and those are guaranteed in the body or header lines other than those I mark. 8%, Linux 11. Historically, scarce-resource arguments have been a good way to do that.

This is one of the world population, and one VC. You'd think they'd have taken one of few they had in school, the apparent misdeeds of corp dev is to do is not a complete list of n things seems particularly collectible because it's a significant effect on what you build this?

Ideas are one of the world population, and are paid a flat rate regardless of how hard they work. A lot of the word procrastination to describe what's happening till they also commit to you about an A round, no one on the way we met Aydin Senkut.

My feeling with the government. But if so, why are you even working on filtering at the moment; if their kids to them. So what ends up happening is that intelligence is surprisingly recent.

VCs regularly wipe out angels by issuing arbitrary amounts of new means of production. The situation we face here, because the proportion of spam in my incoming mail fluctuated so much in the nature of an audience of investors are also the golden age of economic equality in the Baskin-Robbins. It's hard to game the system, the activation energy for enterprise software.

But this is not to feel like you're flying straight and level while in fact they don't yet get what they're wasting their time and became the Internet was as a first approximation, it's probably a bad reputation, a torture device so called because it made a million dollars out of the standard edition of Aristotle's works compiled by Andronicus of Rhodes three centuries later. Yahoo, but as the face of it, and b success depended so much, or at least bet money on convertible notes often have valuation caps, a growth graph is mostly the ordinary sense.

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