#for legal reasons this is a broad statement and not a History Fact

[my-deer-friend]

We've shifted so far culturally from the 18th century that we see queerness in every declaration of love and don't see queerness in deep declarations of friendship.

[radicalurbanista]

This spring, a woman named Jessica Burgess and her daughter will stand trial in Nebraska for performing an illegal abortion — with a key piece of evidence provided by Meta, the parent company of Facebook. Burgess allegedly helped her daughter find and take pills that would induce an abortion. The teenage Burgess also faces charges for allegedly illegally disposing of the fetus' remains.

TechCrunch reported internal chat logs were provided to law enforcement officers by the social media company, which indicated the pair had discussed their plan to find the medication through the app.

Meta said in a statement regarding the Nebraska incident that it responded to "valid legal warrants from local law enforcement" prior to the Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which overturned nationwide abortion rights and allowed for bans in some states.

And though the warrants Meta responded to in this case "did not mention abortion" — since law enforcement had requested the chat logs while investigating the teen's disposal of the remains, which incidentally revealed the discussion of abortion pills — the subsequent charges reveal how data released by social media companies can be used to prosecute people for abortion, even when they are being investigated for other reasons.

Pharmacies sharing data

An investigation by ProPublica found online pharmacies that sell abortion medication such as mifepristone and misoprostol are sharing sensitive data, including users' web addresses, relative location, and search data, with Google and other third-party sites — which allows the data to be recoverable through law enforcement requests.

ProPublica found similar web trackers that capture user data on the sites of at least nine online pharmacies that offer abortion pills by mail, including Abortion Ease, BestAbortionPill.com, PrivacyPillRX, PillsOnlineRX, Secure Abortion Pills, AbortionRx, Generic Abortion Pills, Abortion Privacy, and Online Abortion Pill Rx.

None of the pharmacies immediately responded to Insider's requests for comment.

Representatives for the FBI told Insider they were "unable to accommodate" Insider's detailed request for information about the criteria required for officers to issue a request for a civilian's social media or internet history, what information is generally turned over to them in the pursuit of such information, and what channels officers used to make those requests.

Representatives for Google and the Los Angeles and New York Police Departments, two of the largest police forces in the country, did not respond to Insider's requests for comment.

"We comply with government requests for user information only where we have a good-faith belief that the law requires us to do so," a spokesperson for Meta told Insider. "In addition, we assess whether a request is consistent with internationally recognized standards on human rights, including due process, privacy, free expression and the rule of law. When we do comply, we only produce information that is narrowly tailored to that request. If we determine that a request appears to be deficient or overly broad, we push back and will fight in court, if necessary. We do not provide governments with 'back doors' to people's information."

According to internal statistics provided by Meta, the company complies with government requests for user data more than 70% of the time and receives more than 400,000 requests per year.

"Certainly, we expect that social media companies are gonna cooperate with law enforcement when they make legitimate information requests, we need them to do that," Eric Goldman, law professor at Santa Clara University School of Law and co-director of the school's High Tech Law Institute, told Insider. "But we also know that social media isn't likely to stand up to illegitimate law enforcement requests, because of the fact that they fear their own liability, or because of the fact that it's just too costly to stand up."

Goldman indicated examples where internet services affirmatively go to court to protect user interest, "but those are the exceptions."

"There's thousands of requests for every one of those cases, and there's thousands of other decisions that the company made to just turn over the data because it's just easier quicker that way," Goldman said. "So law enforcement knows that they can make requests of social media, including court requests that do not comply with law, and expect to get most of them honored simply because that is the path of least resistance for the social media services."

No incentive to protect privacy

While cases against people seeking abortions are increasingly being informed by user data provided by social media companies, those aren't the only prosecutions being built off of what people share online.

Public social media posts can be used to build cases against people for major cases including child abuse and murder, as well as against less serious incidents that could have first amendment implications, such as jokesters who tweeted threats against airlines and memes interpreted by the DOJ as election interference.

Private content by users — such as location data or messages — requires law enforcement to obtain a warrant before it can be turned over.

But "social media companies don't really have incentives to protect privacy," Sharon Docter, PhD, JD, and professor of legal issues and new media at California Lutheran University, told Insider. She said because the platforms themselves are unlikely to prioritize user privacy, the burden to do so falls on the individual user.

"Users of social media need to be concerned about privacy, and that users really need to think through the fact that their digital footprint might potentially be available to law enforcement if there's a valid search warrant," Docter added. "And they should do all they can really to protect their privacy, by looking into sending encrypted messages, by making sure their location data is off, by engaging in any efforts that they can to understand the privacy policies of the platforms that they use."

Expecting social media companies to change their policies or standardize encryption is unlikely, Docter and Goldman told Insider, since they aren't incentivized by law or user pressure to do so. However, overly broad requests made by the government are the key point of the problem, Goldman noted — not that social media is cooperating with law enforcement in the first place.

"All the angst directed social media services for being a pawn in law enforcement's game seems misdirected to me. Social media is in fact a pawn in that game," Goldman told Insider, adding people often don't want to get mad at law enforcement or the government for overreaching and instead get angry at Facebook or Google for complying with sometimes illegal requests.

"We say 'law enforcement is just trying to do their job,' right, and 'if they get some wrong along the way, but they get the bad guys, you know, the ends justify the means,'" Goldman added. "It's so tempting to give benefit of the doubt to law enforcement, and that's why it's so hard for us to confront the reality: maybe there are times they don't deserve that benefit."

Facebook and google are helping cops prosecute people seeking abortion. Be very careful in this new era people.

[entity9silvergen]

I recently asked reddit for some LGBT history from countries other than the US. Here’s what I got:

Germany

The Weimar Republic was surprisingly accepting of "alternative lifestyles."

During the Weimar Republic, Germany had a pretty active LGBTQ scene, with some major films and songs being produced, despite it still being illegal at the time. However, there was also a push to decriminalize homosexual behavior which sadly wasn't passed as the Nazis came to power.

This was based of two factors: after WW1 the authoritarian culture of Prussia sorta received a long overdue pushback. People were kinda sick of it, especially since these losers led them into a seemingly pointless war to begin with. Second: A LOT of men died in WW1 - and the army did not exactly prefer LGBT people. So with a lot of regular folks dead, the percentages of the total populace was sorta shifted. This also pushed the women's rights movements at the time for a similar reason.

Magnus Hirschfeld was helping trans people transition, crossdressers get crossdressing 'licenses', and generally advocating for and helping the LGBT community in the early 1900s in Germany. Nazis ended up raiding and burning down his research institute.

Hirschfeld was a gay polyamorous man. He was one of the first advocates for trans and gay rights but his work was destroyed by the Nazis.

The institute he headed even did the first modern gender affirming surgeries. The institute was destroyed and many people who were there (including the first known person to undergo complete MtF surgery) were killed by the nazis and the place was little more than bombed out ruins at the end of the war.

More information on the institute

Pre Nazi interwar Germany (Weimar Republic)  was pretty open when it came to not only sexuality, but also gender identity. The Nazis put a stop to that & tried to destroy any & all research into either, but, for a brief moment, it was there.

Russia

Pretty sure all Russian LGBT history was erased before we even had a written language, but Russia almost got gay marriage legalized in the first soviet constitution (didn’t happen bc Stalin)

The early soviet period (pre-Stalin) is sometimes called “the first sexual revolution” as opposed to America’s “sexual Revolution” of the 60’s. Broad women’s suffrage, female employment and education, parental leave, advancement of GSM rights & decriminalization of abortion. This unfortunately did not stand the test of time & reactionary sentiment.

Additional Source

UK/ Britain/ England 

The lead singer of Judas Priest is gay. The commenter’s father thought it was kinda funny because it didn’t match with his biker aesthetic, but the commenter doesn’t think he considered how much leather he wears on a daily basis

Hell bent for Leather was a track off Killing Machine. It was written by lead guitarist Glenn Tipton (who is straight), but it's fun to find alternative meanings in Priest songs. A second commenter likes to pretend a lot of the lyrics Halford sings are gayer than they actually are.

A couple people mentioned how uncomfortable it was seeing Ru Paul interact with British drag queens because he barely knows anything about British culture.

Ru Paul got angry that a British drag queen hasn’t seen the Golden Girls because “it’s gay culture” and then not five minutes later someone had to explain to him who Alan Turing was.

Alan Turing, who was an incredibly noteworthy figure (He made the Enigma codebreaker machine, which broke the code that was used by Nazis during the war and basically sped up the war by a significant margin. He also set the foundations for artificial intelligence, one achievement he was named for: the Turing Test), was homosexual and prosecuted multiple times because of it

Shakespeare was probably bisexual (some of his sonnets had homoerotic subtext/were sent to a younger man). Plus, Hamlet is gay as fuck. 

Sonnet 46 was very gay. Here’s a link!

King James 1st was corrupt and used his position to promote his gay lover to higher positions than he should've gotten. 

The 13 year old king James 6th of Scotland and 1st of England fell in love with a 37 year old catholic Franco Scottish man. The king gave the older man so much free shit that other lords started getting salty and his lover ended up converting to Presbyterianism out of loyalty to his young lover. He also fell in love with a man who ''was noted for his handsome appearance as well as his limited intelligence.'' 

Clearly James was into himbos, and women too.

He had a secret tunnel connecting his bedroom to George Villiers’s bedroom.

His relationship with Villiers was basically common knowledge and a source of much amusement and mockery. He also once said that his relationship with Villiers was equivalent to the relationship that Christ had with John the Baptist

Much more recently, there's obviously JKR and the banning of puberty blockers and Margaret Thatcher opposing LGBTQ+ rights by passing a law meaning you couldn't 'promote homosexuality'. 

Prince Philip was a racist twat (and probably a huge homophobe knowing him).

Gay marriage only became legal in 2014.

The Wolfenden Report was published in 1957, and it recommended the decriminalization of homosexual acts between consenting adults. It was a huge topic of public debate, and ultimately led to the Sexual Offences act of 1967, which legalized sexual acts between consenting men aged 21 or over in England and Wales (sexual acts between women were never explicitly criminalized). Scotland decriminalized sex between men in 1980, and Northern Ireland in 1982. 

For a totally batshit real-life bit of gay history, check out the show A Very English Scandal. It's about a politician, Jeremy Thorpe, who put a hit out on his former lover who was threatening to go public with the fact they had had a relationship. 

Austria

Gay marriage was legalized in Austria about 3 years ago. The worst thing is that it'd have staid illegal if the Supreme Court wouldn't have jumped in and declare it to be unconstitutional.

Austria did have something called "partnership" which was where gay couples could officially register with the state as couples but not receive any of the benefits of married het people

They still have super backwards Transphobic laws requiring for example "real life experience" to get even diagnosed. Basically you're forced to be and live as feminine/masc as possible and a doctor them judges if you're femme or masc enough. It's torture

Australia had widespread, over 60% approval of gay marriage for well over a decade before the government legalized it. The governments were actually going against the people for a very long time by denying it.

Taiwan/ Hong Kong/ Mainland China

When Taiwan recently legalized gay marriage, their official statement was something along the lines that they were casting off Western-imposed values and returning to their own traditional values and the entire western lgbt community ridiculed them in a "if that's what you need to tell yourself" sort of way but it's actually the truth. 

Prior to western colonization, the Imperial Chinese attitude toward sexuality was not dissimilar to Greco-Roman attitudes in that a man must marry a woman to beget legitimate heirs but whatever else he does on the side is his own business. It wasn't until Victorian colonizers came along and imposed homophobic attitudes on China that China started treating gays like abominations. In Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Mainland China, as indeed most of the world, homophobia is a western value imposed by colonizers.

Bonus history: there is an actual saying in Arabic that was in widespread use across the Middle East and North Africa for thousands of years from classical antiquity until European colonization. The saying goes "Women are for babies, [young men] are for fun."

The commenter specifies that this means “college-aged twinks,” not children

Another commenter speculates about when homophobia arose in China and how. They also add that in Rome, bottoms were stigmatized. 

There’s a story of Emperor Ai of the Han dynasty & him cutting off his sleeve for his boyfriend

There is also a god worshipped in Taiwan, the Rabbit God Tu'er Shen, whose domain is managing love and sex between same-sex attracted people. He is meant to be the incarnation of a soldier from the 17th century, who fell in love with an imperial inspector and spied on him bathing, and was tortured and killed by that official because he was offended by the spying. A villager from the soldier's hometown dreamed that Tu'er Shen appeared to him and said that because his crime had been love, he had been appointed to manage the affairs of gay people. The villagers erected a secret temple to the soldier, and people have been praying to him ever since.

South Africa

South Africa became the first nation in the world to explicitly prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation in its constitution. It was also first country in Africa to legalize same sex marriage in 2006. What really set them back for so long was apartheid.

There is some speculation that that Shaka Zulu was gay since he never took any wives

South Africa's post Apartheid constitution was the first in the world to outlaw discrimination based on sexual orientation in 1996.

South Africa was also the 5th country in the world and only country in Africa to legalize same sex marriage in 2005.

Even before that the Constitutional Court ruled that sexual orientation was not relevant when deciding child custody in 2002.

Transgender folks have been allowed to change their sex in the population registry since 2003.

Conversion therapy is not illegal yet and public opinion still needs some work.

Spain

In Spain gay marriage was legalized in 2005, now they are considered one of de gay-friendliest countries in the world. The commenter is a lesbian and has never been closeted or directly experienced discrimination for being a lesbian.

In July 2005, Spain became the third country in the world to explicitly legalize gay marriage, after a thirty-year struggle following the fall of Franco's dictatorship, during which most activism was carried clandestinely (as it was illegal).

From 2007 onwards, Spanish [binary] trans people can legally correct the name and sex fields of their IDs and currently, there's a push for a law that would allow for legal recognition of non-binary Spaniards.

Despite the dictatorship in the 60s, there were cinemas that specialized in gay meet ups. Trans women also had ways to get passports so they could go to the US for surgery.

Ireland

In Northern Ireland, same sex marriage only became legal in 2020 and the leader of the most popular party is homophobic transphobic racist and sexist af. In fact, the majority of the party are but some of the quotes from the biggest party leader are depressing.

Same-sex marriage was only legalized in Ireland in 2015. Homosexuality was decriminalized in 1993. 

When Ireland legalized same sex marriage by popular vote in 2015, it was still something you got horribly bullied for in schools if you were out. Queer people got an apology from the Taoiseach in 2018, for the suffering and discrimination we faced from the State prior to the legalization of homosexuality.

In the case of trans rights, in 2015 the Gender Recognition Act was signed into law. It allows legal gender changes without the requirement of medical intervention or assessment by the state as long as you are over the age of 18. 

Ireland has fines and jail time for anyone found guilty of attempting conversation therapy. 

Ireland has seen a lot of progress in LGBT rights in the last 6 years but even up to the 2000s, citizens left their family members and friends to rot for being LGBT+. It still happens all over the country, especially in circles that are still fanatically Catholic. As the Catholic Church has lost the iron grip on the country, people have become more accepting of the LGBT+.

India

The Kamasutra(ancient text on sexuality etc.) has an entire chapter dedicated to homosexuality

The Arthashastra, a 2nd century BCE Indian treatise on statecraft, mentions a wide variety of sexual practices which, whether performed with a man or a woman, were sought to be punished with the lowest grade of fine. While homosexual intercourse was not sanctioned, it was treated as a very minor offence, and several kinds of heterosexual intercourse were punished more severely.

Sex between non-virgin women incurred a small fine, while homosexual intercourse between men could be made up for merely with a bath with one's clothes on, and a penance of "eating the five products of the cow and keeping a one-night fast"

Milk, curd (cheese), ghi (clarified butter), urine, and dung are the five products of a cow

The commenter adds that this is not a terrible punishment.

The Mughal Empire mandated a common set of punishments for homosexuality, which could include 50 lashes for a slave, 100 for a free infidel, or death by stoning for a Muslim

On 6 September 2018 the Supreme Court of India invalidated part of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code making homosexuality legal in India

Prior to the British colonization of India homosexuality was not all that looked down upon when compared to what happened when the British took over and instituted anti gay laws.

The Hijra (literally means third gender) were seen as normal and have been accepted since long before Christ, as evidenced by the Karma Sutra. The British took videos of them to take back to demonstrate how the Desi were ��barbaric”.

Bonsia

In Bosnia, there was a one pride parade that ended with religious extremists ruining it and the police not doing anything. It was supposed to be 5 maybe 3 days long but ended in like 1 or 2.

The Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe mapped out the entire night sky with only his eyes. It laid the foundations of many later scientists, such as Isaac Newton. He was a very rich nobleman, so much so that he owned 1% of Denmark's money. He had a pet dwarf that apparently could see the future, which sounds pretty gay. He was also part of the Elefant Ordning, which consisted of rich and strong Danish men.

Philippines 

Despite many attempts to legalize same-sex marriage, the Philippines still didn't budge. Being gay in itself is legal, but same-sex marriage still isn't.

Philippines ,the most Catholic Country in Southeast Asia, has held the largest Pride Parade in Southeast Asia.

Serbia

Serbia didn't have history from about 16th century to 1800's when the 1st revolt happened and failed till 1813's... Then yet another in 1830's for semi independence from Turks, and full in 1836

During the last lingering Ottoman rule over autonomous Serbia, Serbia was one of the very first few countries to have legal mostly everything... it then got removed with like 3 constitution changes and then it didn't move forward for a looong time

Switzerland

Would you have thought that small, conservative Switzerland was a center of the international gay community during the mid-20th century? The magazine "Der Kreis"- the circle - was the only queer magazine in the world that kept publishing during WWII. It was edited in Zurich and distributed internationally, which often meant illegal smuggling, even into nazi Germany. The magazine's annual ball was attended by hundreds of gay men from all over Europe each year. The whole thing was kept strictly secret from the public, though it was known and tolerated by the police.

The Kreis club disbanded in 1967, as repressions grew heavier after a number of murders in the scene had caught the public's attention. By then, other European and American groups took its place, publishing their own magazines.

They made a movie about it.

More info about Der Kreis

As of today, Switzerland doesn't allow gay marriage. A country-wide referendum will be held this fall on gay marriage.

The commenter speculates that gay marriage will be legalized.

A few people expressed surprise that Switerland is socially conservative and several people explained that women’s right to vote was only place in the 70s.

There’s a movie about it

Turkey

A Muslim Persian (born in modern day Turkey) philosopher/mysticist named Mewlana who is known for his sayings on acceptance and love for one another was gay! He had exchanged letters with his instructor Shams and wrote homoerotic poems to him! In Turkey this is ignored by many due to the country's stance on homosexuality

More information

Norway

The commenter’s hometown and the neighboring town arranged their first pride parade/event in 2017, which is a big deal for a small place and one of the local priests went livid and went straight to the newspaper and social media to condemn it. A local rapper wrote a short and to the point article in the newspaper calling him out for all kinds of things which was a great read. Then to top it off, the priest arranged for a "Jesus Parade" in protest to be held the day before the pride parade. Only like five people walked in it, not including the priest of course because he happened to be on vacation in Spain that week. The pride parade itself was a success though! It's become an annual event. Covid has put some breaks on it though, but they're making a documentary this year about the pride celebrations.

Hungary

Hungary has no same sex marriage or transition rights

Police are unkind to protestors

During “commie times,” being queer was illegal so queer people went to the gulag

Belgium

Same sex marriage was legalized in Belgium in 2003 (right after the NL who were the first in the world). The commenter says that same-sex marriage has always felt possible and she is confused about other countries’ actions.

Poland

Polish president on public assembly: 'LGBT is not people, this is ideology'.

Denmark

WHO took their sweet time declassifying being transgender as a mental illness, so Denmark got sick of waiting and became the first country to stop classifying it as an illness.

Australia

In Australia same-sex marriage wasn't legal until 2017.

Portugal

Portugal is know for having one of the most (if not THE most) peaceful revolutions in history back in the 60's, with only 4 deaths total.

Canada

Operation Soap.

Mexico

To learn more, watch Dance of the 41 on Netflix.

Netherlands

NL was one of the first countries to legalize gay marriage in 2001

Sweden

In Sweden they used to classify Homosexuality as a disease during the 20th century so in protest people would call in too gay to work.

New Zealand

When same sex marriage was legalized, the parliament broke into song.

The song

Other

Homosexuality is illegal in 73 countries, some by death or life in prison.

Only one country in Asia has legalized same-sex marriage: Taiwan

FNAF is older than same-sex marriage in the US

Condor Operation

I think this is some important stuff so please reblog so more people can see! And, if you would like to add to or correct anything here, feel free to do so!

[pawnbrulee]

BDMRR draft submission

I haven't sent this yet, but:

I am writing in broad support of the changes to the Births, Deaths, Marriages, and Relationships Registration Bill as proposed in Supplementary Order Paper 59. Many of the points I wish for you to consider will have been made already by others, so I have concentrated on the aspects that I fear may have been overlooked.

To the best of my recollection I did not submit to the original select committee in 2018, but I take issue with assertions made by both the media and official sources since then that the committee was not expected to consider issues relating to transgender people and birth certificates and that its recommendations were a surprise. In fact, as a transgender woman I did not submit to the committee because I simply assumed the changes would go through!

I am no historian but I do feel a certain amount of historical context has been lost. The proposed changes would replace a regime instituted in the 90s whereby a change to the sex listed in a person’s birth certificate could be changed — but only via the involvement of the Family Court in each case. Court cases as a mechanism for official recognition of gender change have a long history, particularly in the 20th century. One pioneering but now largely forgotten case was that of Arlette-Irène Leber, a Swiss woman who was recognised as such by a canton court in July of 1945 (a translation of the ruling, along with further details, can be found in Eugene de Savitch’s extremely linguistically-of-its-time 1958 book Homosexuality, Transvestism and Change of Sex, a copy of which can be found in the Lesbian and Gay Archive Collection at the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington, or alternatively in electronic form from the Internet Archive Library). In re Leber was not even the first such case in Swiss history, a title which probably belongs to the lawsuit of Margrith Businger in 1931, but I don’t bring up the Swiss because they were especially early or progressive.

Despite not submitting during the previous go-around I did read many of the materials produced by others both for and against. I have particularly noticed the claim that the rights of transgender women especially are somehow inconsistent with the sacrifices and struggles of our suffragist forebears, in the most extreme cases suggesting that we are interlopers introduced by the patriarchy as more acceptable substitutes for “natal” women. It might well be true that Kate Sheppard talked about sex and not gender, but this is a linguistic quirk of history and not a statement of hostility to transgender rights. It is simply the case that women’s suffrage received public attention and (typically) success earlier than the official recognition of transgender people - they are in no way in conflict

The Swiss then may be unique in recognising multiple transgender people, albeit on an individual basis, prior to granting women the right to vote (in this case, because they infamously failed to pass the latter until 1971) and as de Savitch noted (pg 75) Leber officially “joined the ranks of the voteless women of Switzerland” — the patriarchy does not function as some seem to envision! Much like in New Zealand, Switzerland established a formal process to change listed gender information through the courts in the 1990s, but as in NZ this has been seen as insufficient. While it is certainly preferable that an established process exists rather than each person having to make their way through the legal system completely alone, after the nth case it seems redundant. Must we prove our right to exist every time?

The campaign to replace the judicial mechanism with a purely administrative has been ongoing in New Zealand for quite some time, and we were all very disappointed when this BDMRR bill was first introduced without addressing the issue at all. Nevertheless it was well understood that the select committee was going to consider the matter, and browsing the 2018 submissions today will find numerous arguments for and against. As I hoped at the time they declined to agree with those pushing a story of fear over human rights and produced a set of recommendations that were on the whole quite reasonable, however as soon as it was released a narrative emerged that there had be insufficient consultation and the bill quickly languished. I am very happy that it has been resurrected but I was very disappointed when it was announced that a second round of consultation would be involved. Extra public engagement is generally a good thing in a democratic system, but in this case amounts to the appeasement of bigotry via the delay of good policy. I may be submitting for the first time on this bill, but I shouldn’t need to be.

While I consider the proposal to be broadly quite good some flaws have crept in to first the select committee recommendations and then the SOP being considered here. Firstly and most crucially the removal of all mechanisms for people born overseas to change documentation must not be done, even if this means leaving the family court mechanism in place for these people. We should not go backwards and demand that individuals sue on the grounds of the Bill of Rights Act, even if the BDMRR is not appropriate for providing a proper administrative solution for these people.

Secondly there should still be a way for people who change their name after their registered sex to gain the protection afforded by not including their “dead” name on their birth certificate. Ultimately even if all parts of the SOP are enacted into law the full process of administrative name and gender changes will still be very complex, and we should not punish people who merely get the order of a bureaucratic process wrong. The mechanism proposed in the select committee report whereby the next name change leads to the suppression of the original, not carried over into the SOP, seems sufficient to me to maintain the chain of identity, but if the linkage absolutely must be made stronger I suggest that an additional “intermediate” certificate be produced showing both names as a kind of receipt — at no additional charge to the petitioner.

The third matter that I feel should be more carefully considered is the time to enactment of the bill. I appreciate that it may take time for Internal Affairs to alter their computer systems, but in the context of such a long delayed bill an extra 18 months seems quite excessive.

There are many other issues here that I expect sensible people will have submitted on, including access for nonbinary people and the security under which records of gender changes will be kept. I hope that, with all due speed, the committee will put forward a new and strengthened version of this bill, which can finally be passed for the betterment of our community as a whole.

—Petra

=============================

You have a couple of days left to submit, and you might want to read through some of this document before you do so. I didn't submit to the conversion therapy one because I had nothing to add but incoherent rage, but in this case I seem to have written more than eleven hundred words. Oops!

[lastsonlost]

I HAVE BEEN SAYING THIS SHIT FOREVER!

In 2011, the US Department of Education issued a mandate to post-secondary educational institutions, regarding their handling of allegations of sexual misconduct among students. The department’s guidelines required these institutions to create their own pseudo-justice system wherein allegations would be investigated, and hearings held. The standards laid out by the department were a naked attack on students’ right to due process, dictating broad definitions for types of misconduct that stretched far beyond the legal definitions the criminal justice system uses, and laying out a systematic denial of the due process rights of accused students. In the legal chaos created by the concept of an accuser’s automatic victim status and “right to be believed,” many students, mostly young men, have seen their academic careers interrupted or even ended by mere allegations from fellow students.

Institutions all over the United States had responded to the 2011 “dear colleague” letter with changes to policy and procedures that resulted in disciplinary actions over which hundreds of students sued their universities. TitleIXforall.com is currently tracking 627 of these lawsuits. The site contains a database of these lawsuits, along with a list of helpful organizations or individuals for students experiencing discrimination, and a list of distinguished due process attorneys.

There have been rulings in federal court indicating that the dear colleague standards and the policies they inspired created violations of students’ constitutionally protected civil rights. In one ruling that dramatically contradicted the dear colleague guidelines, the 6th circuit held that in conducting Title IX investigations, colleges and universities are required to provide parties an opportunity to cross-examine witnesses in the presence of a neutral fact-finder in cases hinging on the credibility of such witnesses. In another, the court found that an accused student was deprived of due process rights when university administrators suspended him without first holding an official hearing. If anything, these rulings have made it clear that the dear colleague standards cannot remain in place as an unaltered policy, because they contain unconstitutional requirements.

Trump administration Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, upon accepting her appointment to the office, vowed reform. In late 2018, extending into January 2019, her office accepted commentary from citizens regarding the topic. Last year she released a set of proposed changes intended to restore due process and protect students’ freedom of speech, sending feminists into a panic as her new, updated guidelines were set to roll back or dramatically alter several points of the 2011 dear colleague guidance. Completely ignoring the fact that the 2011 rules were a huge departure from the real court system’s response to criminal allegations, the National Organization for Women accused DeVos of wanting to “turn the government’s response to assault, harassment and rape upside down,” and openly lamented the impending loss of “victims’ rights.”

Unphased by feminist melodrama, on Wednesday, May 6, Secretary DeVos’s office formally announced the new rules.

Robby Suave, writing for Reason.com, stated, “The new rules are similar to what the Department of Education proposed in November 2018. Most notably, the government has abolished the single-investigator model, which previously permitted a sole university official to investigate an accusation of misconduct, decide which evidence to consider, and produce a report recommending an outcome. Under the new rules, the final decision maker must be a different person than the investigator, and a finding of responsibility can only be rendered after a hearing in which a representative for the accused is able to pose questions to the accuser—i.e., cross-examination. Importantly, the new rules narrow the scope of actionable sexual harassment to exclude conduct that ought to be protected under the First Amendment. Obama-era guidance had defined sexual harassment as "any unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature." The new rules keep this definition but add that the conduct must be offensive to a reasonable person, severe, and pervasive. In practice, this should mean that schools will no longer initiate Title IX investigations that impugn free speech.

The new rules will also end the pernicious practice of universities initiating Title IX investigations in cases where the alleged victims are not interested in this course of action.”

On May 7, the National Organization for Women published a press release calling the new guidelines an all-out attack on the safety of women and girls. Their article begins with the theatrical line “We don’t see you.  We don’t hear you. We don’t believe you.” That’s the message Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is sending with the sweeping new changes to Title IX…” and only gets worse from there, lamenting that the Devos guidelines are set in law rather than just tied by policy to schools’ funding, labeling long-standing due process standards “new rights,” and calling the changes “draconian.” Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden disavowed the new guidelines, claiming in a statement quoted by Politico that the new rules “shame and silence survivors,” and give colleges “a green light to ignore sexual violence and strip survivors of their rights.” He has vowed to “put a quick end” to these changes if elected. The article goes on to quote Biden, who has recently vehemently denied a sexual assault allegation against himself by former aide Tara Reade, as stating that “Survivors deserve to be treated with dignity and respect, and when they step forward they should be heard, not silenced.”

While Biden thinks it is an attack on survivors for universities to carefully scrutinize allegations against their students, regarding his own case, he stated that accusers’ stories “should be subject to appropriate inquiry and scrutiny," and that when reporting on this particular allegation, “Responsible news organizations should examine and evaluate the full and growing record of inconsistencies in her story," a benefit he would not get from campus investigators if he were a student facing the same allegation from a fellow student under Obama-era guidelines.

The feminist response to this has been quite interesting. There doesn’t seem to be anywhere near the same degree of outrage leveled at presidential candidate Biden over this allegation as there was leveled at Donald Trump over his flippant remark about the variability of women’s sensibilities regarding men’s sexual pursuit depending on the subject’s wealth and popularity. In fact, some feminists have even followed up statements that they believe Biden’s accuser, which under today’s standards would mean they view Biden as a confirmed rapist - with declarations that they support his candidacy anyway. But they still oppose DeVos’s Title IX reforms because screw men and their due process rights if they can’t wheel and deal federal funding for feminist initiatives in return for feminists’ political support.

Biden’s history of garnering feminist support by opposing the due process rights of other men accused of sexual misconduct is longstanding and consistent. During his current campaign, he has bragged about his part as a co-author of the Violence Against Women act of 1994, Title IV of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. In 1993, he cited the work of radfem professor Mary P. Koss in support of the passage of his bill. VAWA included multiple attacks on due process and the gender neutrality of federal intimate partner and sexual violence law.

The law used wording that relies on the label “victim” for accusers throughout its text, presuming accusers’ stories to be factual and the accused to be perpetrators, thereby removing the presumption of innocence. This is normal for statutes describing criminal definitions, but VAWA does so in its descriptions of policy and procedures for criminal investigations and hearings, and federally funded social services for accusers whose alleged perpetrators haven’t been convicted.

Under VAWA, federal funding was allocated for indoctrinating every aspect of the justice system with feminist dogma, prejudicing them against the accused. Further, federal funding was allocated to incentivize arrest, prosecution, conviction, and sentencing, without regard to the merits or dubiousness of individual allegations. The law funded advocates to accompany accusers to court, creating a government-supported adversary against the accused that is unique to these types of criminal allegations. This advocate’s job is to support the accuser's interests against the due process rights of the accused, and to provide emotional support throughout the judicial process. The accused is not given any equivalent support. Under the law Biden brags about penning, the law enforcement and judicial systems are essentially ordered to approach criminal sexual misconduct allegations with a presumption of guilt and then cripple the defense of the accused, yet when accused of such misconduct himself, Biden expects the full benefit of the doubt from you peons whose due process rights he eviscerated with that law.

In all of his statements on Reade’s allegations against him, and his opinion of DeVos’s Title IX reforms, 

BIDEN HAS YET TO EXPLAIN WHY HE THINKS HE IS DESERVING OF A BETTER LEVEL OF CIVIL RIGHTS PROTECTIONS THAN YOU ARE.                                                   

In fact, to date, while it’s been posed rhetorically by some in the right-leaning media, he hasn’t even directly faced that question from anybody.

Will anyone in the establishment media have the courage to ask him? Does the presidential candidate have the courage to be interviewed by someone who would?

SOURCES

https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/titleix-regs-unofficial.pdf

https://reason.com/2020/05/06/betsy-devos-title-ix-due-process-college-sexual-misconduct/ https://now.org/media-center/press-release/betsy-devos-new-rule-on-campus-sexual-assault-continues-the-all-out-attack-on-the-safety-and-rights-of-women-and-girls/

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/06/biden-vows-a-quick-end-to-devos-sexual-misconduct-rule-241715

https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/01/politics/joe-biden-tara-reade-allegation/index.html

https://www.littler.com/publication-press/publication/sixth-circuit-provides-expansive-due-process-rights-title-ix-cases

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/08/08/ruling-umass-amherst-title-ix-lawsuit-may-lead-supreme-court-case-experts-say

https://now.org/media-center/press-release/see-no-evil-betsy-devos-endangers-survivors-of-campus-sexual-misconduct/

http://www.saveservices.org/2012/08/how-rape-laws-remove-the-presumption-of-innocence/

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BILLS-103hr3355enr/pdf/BILLS-103hr3355enr.pdf

https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=w2NPAAAAIBAJ&sjid=XgMEAAAAIBAJ&pg=5854%2C2479318

[and-then-there-were-n0ne]

We may be living through times of unprecedented change, but in uncertainty lies the power to influence the future. Now is not the time to despair, but to act.

Your opponents would love you to believe that it’s hopeless, that you have no power, that there’s no reason to act, that you can’t win. Hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender, a power you don’t have to throw away. And though hope can be an act of defiance, defiance isn’t enough reason to hope. But there are good reasons. […] 

It is important to say what hope is not: it is not the belief that everything was, is or will be fine. The evidence is all around us of tremendous suffering and destruction. The hope I am interested in is about broad perspectives with specific possibilities, ones that invite or demand that we act. It is also not a sunny everything-is-getting-better narrative, though it may be a counter to the everything-is-getting-worse one. You could call it an account of complexities and uncertainties, with openings. “Critical thinking without hope is cynicism, but hope without critical thinking is naivety,” the Bulgarian writer Maria Popova recently remarked. And Patrisse Cullors, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, early on described the movement’s mission as to “Provide hope and inspiration for collective action to build collective power to achieve collective transformation, rooted in grief and rage but pointed towards vision and dreams”. It is a statement that acknowledges that grief and hope can coexist. […]  

Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognise uncertainty, you recognise that you may be able to influence the outcomes – you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists adopt the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It is the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterwards either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone. […]  

After a rain mushrooms appear on the surface of the earth as if from nowhere. Many come from a sometimes vast underground fungus that remains invisible and largely unknown. What we call mushrooms, mycologists call the fruiting body of the larger, less visible fungus. Uprisings and revolutions are often considered to be spontaneous, but it is the less visible long-term organising and groundwork – or underground work – that often laid the foundation. Changes in ideas and values also result from work done by writers, scholars, public intellectuals, social activists and participants in social media. To many, it seems insignificant or peripheral until very different outcomes emerge from transformed assumptions about who and what matters, who should be heard and believed, who has rights.

Ideas at first considered outrageous or ridiculous or extreme gradually become what people think they’ve always believed. How the transformation happened is rarely remembered, in part because it’s compromising: it recalls the mainstream when the mainstream was, say, rabidly homophobic or racist in a way it no longer is; and it recalls that power comes from the shadows and the margins, that our hope is in the dark around the edges, not the limelight of centre stage. Our hope and often our power.

Changing the story isn’t enough in itself, but it has often been foundational to real changes. Making an injury visible and public is usually the first step in remedying it, and political change often follows culture, as what was long tolerated is seen to be intolerable, or what was overlooked becomes obvious. Which means that every conflict is in part a battle over the story we tell, or who tells and who is heard.

“Memory produces hope in the same way that amnesia produces despair,”the theologian Walter Brueggemann noted. It is an extraordinary statement, one that reminds us that though hope is about the future, grounds for hope lie in the records and recollections of the past. We can tell of a past that was nothing but defeats, cruelties and injustices, or of a past that was some lovely golden age now irretrievably lost, or we can tell a more complicated and accurate story, one that has room for the best and worst, for atrocities and liberations, for grief and jubilation. A memory commensurate to the complexity of the past and the whole cast of participants, a memory that includes our power, produces that forward-directed energy called hope.

Amnesia leads to despair in many ways. The status quo would like you to believe it is immutable, inevitable and invulnerable, and lack of memory of a dynamically changing world reinforces this view. In other words, when you don’t know how much things have changed, you don’t see that they are changing or that they can change. Those who think that way don’t remember raids on gay bars when being homosexual was illegal, or rivers that caught fire when unregulated pollution peaked in the 1960s or that there were, worldwide, 70% more seabirds a few decades ago. Thus, they don’t recognise the forces of change at work.

One of the essential aspects of depression is the sense that you will always be mired in this misery, that nothing can or will change. There’s a public equivalent to private depression, a sense that the nation or the society rather than the individual is stuck. Things don’t always change for the better, but they change, and we can play a role in that change if we act. Which is where hope comes in, and memory, the collective memory we call history.

The other affliction amnesia brings is a lack of examples of positive change, of popular power, evidence that we can do it and have done it. George Orwell wrote: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” Controlling the past begins by knowing it; the stories we tell about who we were and what we did shape what we can and will do. Despair is also often premature: it’s a form of impatience as well as of certainty. […] 

More broadly, shifts in, say, the status of women are easily overlooked by people who don’t remember that, a few decades ago, reproductive rights were not yet a concept, and there was no recourse for exclusion, discrimination, workplace sexual harassment, most forms of rape, and other crimes against women the legal system did not recognise or even countenance. None of the changes were inevitable, either – people fought for them and won them.

Social, cultural or political change does not work in predictable ways or on predictable schedules. The month before the Berlin Wall fell, almost no one anticipated that the Soviet bloc was going to disintegrate all of a sudden (thanks to many factors, including the tremendous power of civil society, nonviolent direct action and hopeful organising going back to the 1970s), any more than anyone, even the participants, foresaw the impact that the Arab spring or Occupy Wall Street or a host of other great uprisings would have. We don’t know what is going to happen, or how, or when, and that very uncertainty is the space of hope.

Those who doubt that these moments matter should note how terrified the authorities and elites are when they erupt. That fear signifies their recognition that popular power is real enough to overturn regimes and rewrite the social contract. And it often has. Sometimes your enemies know what your friends can’t believe. Those who dismiss these moments because of their imperfections, limitations, or incompleteness need to look harder at what joy and hope shine out of them and what real changes have emerged because of them, even if not always in the most obvious or recognisable ways.

Change is rarely straightforward. Sometimes it’s as complex as chaos theory and as slow as evolution. Even things that seem to happen suddenly arise from deep roots in the past or from long-dormant seeds. A young man’s suicide triggers an uprising that inspires other uprisings, but the incident was a spark; the bonfire it lit was laid by activist networks and ideas about civil disobedience, and by the deep desire for justice and freedom that exists everywhere. […] 

We write history with our feet and with our presence and our collective voice and vision. And yet, and of course, everything in the mainstream media suggests that popular resistance is ridiculous, pointless, or criminal, unless it is far away, was long ago, or, ideally, both. These are the forces that prefer the giant stays asleep.

Together we are very powerful, and we have a seldom-told, seldom-remembered history of victories and transformations that can give us confidence that, yes, we can change the world because we have many times before. You row forward looking back, and telling this history is part of helping people navigate toward the future. We need a litany, a rosary, a sutra, a mantra, a war chant of our victories. The past is set in daylight, and it can become a torch we can carry into the night that is the future.

[creepingsharia]

Notre Dame prof hails Islamic law, asks international law judges to consider “referring to parts of sharia”

Add sharia and another professor to this list:  American Professors Whitewash Islamic Terror

h/t Christine Douglass-Williams who writes:

Powell’s skewed view of the Sharia is deceptive, propagandistic and dangerous. There is no comparison between international law (which is democracy-based) and Sharia (which is authoritarian and discriminatory). The violence, human rights abuses and murders committed throughout history in the name of Islam are not an aberration. They are reflections of normative Islam, fully backed by Islamic jurisprudence, which teaches the murder of apostates and gays, the conquest and subjugation of infidels, and the inferiority of women, including the head coverings (Quran 24:31, Quran 33:59) about which Powell fallaciously rambles.  The arrogance displayed by Powell is also an affront to Muslim dissidents who face (and experience) imprisonment (and worse) for opposing the human rights abuses sanctioned by Islamic law. Powell’s potential influence on the young minds who must listen to her propaganda in the classroom is concerning. And she is not unique; in fact, in many colleges and universities today, she is the norm.

Islamic law and international law share many similarities, Notre Dame Professor says

The very term Sharia conjures negative images in the minds of many Westerners, in part due to its association with extremist groups. However, an in-depth look at Islamic law, as practiced in the vast majority of Muslim-majority countries, reveals that it is interpreted in different ways depending on the country, its culture and the very people conducting the interpretation.

Notre Dame’s Emilia Justyna Powell, an associate professor of political science and concurrent associate professor of law, an expert in both international law and the Islamic legal tradition, traveled to many Muslim-majority nations to research how the two systems work together in practice. Her findings were published earlier this year in the volume Islamic Law and International Law: Peaceful Resolution of Disputes.

Powell uses the differences in how women dress in various Muslim-majority countries as an analogy for the various interpretations of Sharia. 

“A perfect visualization is women’s head coverings. The Taliban encourages women to cover top to bottom, not even showing the eyes. In Saudi Arabia, sometimes eyes are visible but not much else,” she said. “I was recently in Bahrain where I witnessed a new trend:  Women are unzipping their abayas and you can see Western-influenced clothing underneath like jeans, ruffles and lace. Many women don’t wear the hijab scarf there and some only wear it halfway on. But who’s to say which is correct? Bahrain is no less Islamic than Saudi Arabia, for example, just different. People in all Muslim-majority countries interpret and, thus, practice the Muslim faith differently.”

International law itself is based on a broad set of norms agreed upon by people from many different nations and cultures. It is also heavily based on Western law which, itself, has deep roots in Christianity — a religion that originated at a time when Roman law was already well established. “Islam, on the other hand, had no a priori legal system to work with other than unwritten tribal customs,” Powell writes. And, while international law has moved to a more secular model, Islamic law remains based in the writings of the Quran and the sunna as well as ijma (judicial consensus) and qiyas (analogical reasoning).

“However, disconcerting the dissonance between the Islamic legal tradition and international law may appear, there are more similarities between these two legal systems than the policy world and the scholarship take into account,” she writes.

By its broad nature, international law allows for interpretation based on norms in individual countries. And many Muslim-majority states have their own declaration of human rights, she notes.

“Sometimes international law promotes the peaceful resolution of disputes, but does not give specific rules or cite specific laws for how to do so. Countries can mediate, peacefully, via negotiation in compliance with international law. Sometimes Muslim-majority countries will also sign international treaties but place restrictions on them — what are technically called ‘reservations.’”

For example, some Muslim-majority countries use reservations to remove “freedom of religion” clauses, because their religion is inextricably part of their culture, with the assumption (often part of the country’s own understanding of human rights) that many of their citizens are all Muslim. In this way, Powell says, they are complying with some international norms but allowing for their identity to remain intact.

Powell also examines how Muslim-majority nations in different geographical areas use Sharia and work within the international law framework. In general, Powell finds that if an ILS (Islamic Law State) country has a secular court system and their constitution mentions peaceful resolutions of disputes, they possess a more favorable attitude toward international courts. 

“The Islamic milieu is not a monolith. In each of the ILS, secular law and Islamic law coalesce to create a unique legal framework. Every one of the ILS is different in how it negotiates the relationship between these two legal forces — the religious and the secular — along with their respective differences in socio-demographic and political characteristics. Historically, every one of the ILS has worked out its own unique answers to the question of the balance of Islamic law and secular law,” she writes.

The examples Powell gathered through interviews shed light on the cultural and religious lenses through which many Muslims view courts.

“One of my interviewees, former Jordanian Ambassador Omar Rifai, explained to me, ‘Through the court you are talking to an enemy. When you are talking directly, it could be a brother or a cousin, but when you resort to the court, it means you have given up on finding a peaceful solution or a solution between friends or brothers.’” she writes. “This statement describes relations between individuals as well as ILS collectivities. Even though Islamic law and international law put a premium on peaceful resolution of disputes, each of these legal systems has a different conception of this process. On the individual level, people who carry on the Islamic legal tradition simply embrace unique values promoted by Islam.”

Powell’s interest in researching Islamic law further is driven, in part, by the bias she sees toward Western law to the point of absolute exclusion of any facets of Islamic law in international law. In fact, some international court judges she interviewed were irritated when she asked if they would ever consider referring to parts of Sharia.

“Out of all the religions of the world, we’ve contributed to a large-scale misunderstanding of their legal tradition,” Powell said. “Islamic law and international law share many more similarities than they are given credit for.”

[antoine-roquentin]

In the ruling for Wiley v. State, the court emphasized that officers had violated the “personal liberty of both Capt. Bates and the deceased,” who, “having committed no crime, were entitled to proceed on their way without interruption or molestation.” This presented a broad statement on the rights of drivers. Entitling them to proceed on their way without interruption or molestation necessarily included the corresponding right to decide for themselves whether officers had legal cause to stop them. If they decided that an officer did not, then they would have had the additional right to refuse to pull over. Indeed, the court made this exact suggestion when it stated hypothetically that even if “the Bateses had heard [the officers’] outcries and refused to stop, no inference of guilt could have been reasonably drawn therefrom,” a mandatory inference to justify an interference with the Bateses’ right “to proceed on their way.” The rules of the road according to the Arizona Supreme Court would have made it extremely difficult for officers to stop a car they found suspicious. This was the world of Wiley v. State, when the police were few in number, easily mistaken for highwaymen, and limited in their authority over innocent citizens.

A century later, on July 10, 2015, a Texas state trooper pulled over Sandra Bland for failing to use a turn signal. After a tense dialogue, the traffic stop quickly came to a violent end. The trooper first tried to yank the young black woman from the car before forcing her out with a Taser gun. He then arrested Bland, who was lying face down, crying, and screaming in pain. Three days later, Bland was found dead in her jail cell. A year later, the Nation published an article that asked the question that had become a viral hashtag, #WhatHappenedtoSandraBland? To find the answer, the article examined Bland’s life, beginning with her birth to a single mother in Chicago’s West Side. The answer, according to the writer, was not just the neglectful conditions in that Texas county jail that led to her death. The answer was also unemployment, insufficient mental health care, and draconian drug laws.

But another motif, never named, loomed throughout the article. The automobile appeared in nearly every significant setback in Bland’s life. Exorbitant traffic tickets that Bland paid for by “sitting out” in jail. Convictions for driving under the influence and arrest warrants for unpaid traffic fines that severely limited her employment options. Charges for possessing marijuana—her lawyer suspected that Bland was self-medicating—that the police discovered in her car. In Bland’s life, the automobile played a prominent role as a site of violence, poverty, and discrimination.

The overpolicing of cars is a fact of life for people of color in the United States. Although Bland was not killed during the traffic stop, in 2015, the year of her death, 27 percent of police killings of unarmed citizens began with a traffic stop. Bland herself had been increasingly vocal on social media against police abuse and violence against African Americans, especially when the Black Lives Matter movement gained momentum after a police officer fatally shot eighteen-year-old Michael Brown. It turned out that what had happened in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 9, 2014, was part of a larger trend. The U.S. Department of Justice opened an investigation of the Ferguson Police Department and found “a pattern of unconstitutional policing” that skewed along racial lines. Most encounters with law enforcement, the report concluded, began with a traffic stop, an experience that disproportionately befell Ferguson’s black residents. In 2014 its municipal court had roughly 53,000 traffic cases, compared with about 50,000 nontraffic cases. This pattern was not limited to Ferguson. In their book In Context: Understanding Police Killings of Unarmed Citizens, scholars Nick Selby, Ben Singleton, and Ed Flosi concluded, “No form of direct government control comes close to [traffic] stops in sheer numbers, frequency, proportion of the population affected, and in many instances, the degree of coercive intrusion.”

What is the history that can account for the changes from Wiley v. State to Sandra Bland? Today, it would be improbable that Mrs. Bates, a wealthy white woman sitting in the passenger seat next to her influential husband, would be killed in a police shooting. Such tragedy now happens almost exclusively to minority drivers. Contrary to what one might expect, though, the social and legal developments that made the systematic policing of minorities possible did not originate with an intention to do so.

Instead, the shift began with the mass production of the automobile and the immediate imperative to regulate the motoring public. Before cars, U.S. police had more in common with their eighteenth-century forebears than with their twentieth-century successors. What revolutionized policing was a technological innovation that would come to define the new century. In the span of a century, towns and cities throughout the country—and not just in metropolitan centers—expanded their forces and professionalized beat cops, turning them into “law enforcement officers.” Figures are hard to come by, but one early report indicated that in the sixteen smallest states, the number of officers as a percentage of the population nearly doubled from 1910 to 1930.

Those who became subject to regular police surveillance included not just criminals in getaway cars but, more importantly, and for the first time, the respectable class of citizens who were the automobile’s early adopters. The need to discipline drivers and to do so without giving offense necessitated changes to the police function and to well-established laws. Officers now required discretion to administer the massive traffic enforcement regime and deal with the sensitivities of “law-abiding” citizens who kept violating traffic laws. The law’s accommodation of discretionary policing profoundly altered what it meant to live free from state intrusion in the automotive age. By the Cold War, U.S. society’s dependence on the police to maintain order raised troubling comparisons with totalitarian police. Unforeseen by midcentury jurists, their solution to the potential arbitrary policing of everyone led directly to the problem of discriminatory policing against minorities. Only by considering how U.S. society as a whole came to be policed can we more fully understand the history of our criminal justice and its troubled present.

[aswithasunbeam]

Would you ever write a fic about Ham and that ghost story he made up (with his friend or cousin or someone) and people of New York got spooked?

I love that story! The fact that he had to issue a public statement assuring everyone that ghosts were not in fact real just cracks me up–I’d love to tackle his annoyance and frustration at the aftermath in a fic!

I did make an attempt at writing the underlying prank in my longer fic, “Finding Forgiveness.” Here’s that first part of chapter 10 as a stand alone:  

Eliza, February 1799

“Should we not rejoin the party?” Hamilton asked. His breath was hot on her face, and his voice was rough with passion. She nuzzled her nose against his as she shook her head.

“Not yet,” she whispered, clutching at his shoulders as she kissed him again.

They were standing in a shadowy servants’ corridor, the laughter and conversation of her sister’s dinner party a dull hum in the background.

Her husband had donned his new uniform for the occasion. She ran her fingers along the golden fringe of his epaulets as she pressed herself closer to him. He always looked so handsome in a uniform.

He obliged her request to remain, tightening his hold of her waist as he deepened the kiss. She hummed in satisfaction and wrapped her arms around his neck. “Mm, I love you,” she sighed when they pulled back for air.

He buried his head in her neck and planted a soft kiss just above her collarbone as he squeezed her against him.

It wasn’t that everything was fixed between them, she considered, brushing her fingers over the silky ribbon holding his clubbed hair in place.

She still found herself angry, or insecure, or jealous at times. The open wound of his betrayal had become a pink, tender scar that still ached if bumped the wrong way.

Yet, a more open communication between them did wonders for their relationship. Instead of retreating from him while she tried to bury the hurt, she could tell him what she was feeling. Seeing his sincere remorse and regret, hearing his apologies and his declarations of undying love, helped more than she’d initially anticipated.

“Where has Hamilton gone off to?” Angelica’s voice rose above the dull roar of conversation, just audible to them in the hall.

Eliza sighed as her husband straightened in her arms, and she stretched to press a last, loving kiss to his lips. She could feel him smiling into the kiss and her own lips quirked upwards in response. “Yes, all right, let’s go back,” she agreed at last.

She ran her hands over her dress as she followed her husband’s path back to the lively parlor.

Angelica had talked her into purchasing a dress in the new style, cut high at the waist and low over the bosom, with puffy short sleeves.

She’d paired it with a shawl, ostensibly for warmth against the winter chill, but also to preserve some of her modesty: she still felt slightly uncomfortable with the amount of skin on display. In fact, when she’d first tried it on, she’d been half considering returning the dress to

the tailor  and purchasing something more traditional. That is, until Hamilton had walked into the dressing room and stopped abruptly, staring openly at her.

“Do you like it?” she’d asked, turning sideways togive him a view of the dress in silhouette. He hadn’t replied. Her only answer had been how quickly he’d torn it off her. The simpler design had certainly helped on that front, she recalled with a smirk.

Hamilton joined a circle of men and women conversing, inserting himself beside Church and Angelica as he accepted a glass of wine. Eliza slid her arm into the crook of his and leaned against him, too distracted to properly take in the conversation. Everyone seemed to be focusing on one of the new guests, a Polish traveler named Julian Niemcewicz, who was regaling the company with the tale of his visit to Mount Vernon.

“The house itself seemed to me alive with history,” the gentleman continued, “Such that one could feel the spirits of its great visitors within its walls.”

She felt her husband perk up at the sentence.

“My dear nephew, Captain Church,” Hamilton gestured towards Phil vaguely as he spoke, “Returned from a trip to Newark with quite an interesting tale regarding your relationship with spirits.”

Niemcewicz’s eyes lit up with mischief. “Did he?”

“He informed me that you had learned from General Kościuszko the secrets of summoning the dead.” Eliza felt a chill go up her spine at the blasphemous statement. She tightened her hold of her husband’s arm.

“My dear General did indeed entrust me with that magical Secret,” Niemcewicz confirmed.

“I thought perhaps you might grace us with a demonstration,” Hamilton suggested.

Eliza stared up at her husband, perplexed. Why would he encourage such an unchristian display? As if feeling her gaze, he glanced down at her and winked imperceptibly. That did little to answer her questions.

“If you insist, my dear General Hamilton,” Niemcewicz agreed with a bow. “I will need you to step out of the room and close the doors behind you, if you do not mind. We shall determine which spirit to call forth from the beyond when you have left us.”

Hamilton nodded, bowed graciously, and departed the parlor, leaving his glass on a table and closing the doors behind him with a soft tap. Church went to a side table to retrieve a card and carefully wrote something down, Angelica leaning far over his shoulder as he did so. While Church handed the card to Niemcewicz, Angelica joined her, a broad grin stretching her pretty face.

“What fun,” Angelica whispered.

Eliza took a deep breath, much less enthusiastic about this turn of events. She looked over to the opposite corner of the room, where Phil and Kitty were standing with Pip and Angelica, the young cousins chattering excitedly as Niemcewicz prepared for the demonstration. Pip looked like a perfect young gentleman in his newly tailored suit, and her daughter shined in a new dress, her thick dark curls arranged to dangle elegantly around her face and neck. They were growing up so quickly, she thought.

“Mr. Church has asked me to summon the spirit of Baron de Vioménil,” Niemcewicz declared, gesturing for them to form a circle around him.

Eliza recognized the name as one of the French officers who had served bravely under Rochambeau at the Battle of Yorktown. He’d later been shot in the violence of the French Revolution and succumbed some months later due to complications from his injury. She remembered Hamilton being upset at the news, citing the tragedy as one of the reasons he could never support the bloody upheaval in France.

Niemcewicz began to recite incantations, his eyes closed in concentration. After a few moments, he picked up a small mallet and began to tap on a bell in a measured pattern, striking it several times, then pausing, only to begin to strike it again. The strange ceremony continued until the doors of the parlor swung open.

Her heart clenched in her chest at the sight of her husband. His face was pale and his eyes were wide with shock. He seemed to be shaking slightly, as though overcome with emotion. He spoke in a breathy voice, “I…I saw the Baron. Baron de Vioménil. He appeared to me just as he was at Yorktown.”

“Did he speak?” Church asked, striding to her husband’s side.

“Yes,” Hamilton answered. “Yes, some conversation passed between us, but I am not at liberty to report upon its substance.”

A wave of shocked whispers began to emanate from the guests.

Eliza hurried to Hamilton’s side, eager to comfort him from the shock, hardly able to wrap her mind around the implications that such a ceremony could truly raise the spirits of the dead. She pulled him into an embrace and pressed a kiss to his cheek. “Are you all right, sweetheart?”

Others were coming over as well, all pressing for more details about this extraordinary visitation. Hamilton shook his head; he appeared overwhelmed by the experience. His hand brushed over her back as he extracted himself from her arms.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I…I need a moment.”

He departed the room, leaving Eliza to watch him retreat towards the same servants’ corridor in which they’d shared their intimate moment. She was about to follow when Angelica grasped her elbow. The amusement had disappeared from her expression. “You should give him a moment alone,” Angelica advised.

She hesitated, then shook her head. Not once in the time she’d known him had her husband ever wanted to be alone. She followed his path into the corridor.

He was leaning against the wall, his shoulders quaking slightly. Was he crying? She reached out, laying a palm against his shoulder blade.

“You’re all right, darling,” she soothed. Stepping closer, she craned her neck to try to see his face in the dim light. He had his fist pressed to his lips. “I’m sure that was a terrible shock.”

He turned around to face her. The light caught his face more fully, and she noticed with a jolt that amusement lit his eyes. She narrowed her eyes. “Are…are you…are you laughing?”

His fist came away from his face to reveal his dazzling smile. Her jaw fell open and she smacked him in the arm. “You scared me. I thought you were distraught.”

“Just a little jest for the amusement of the company,” he explained, still laughing. His face was alight with good humor. “Church and Niemcewicz helped.”

The joke seemed in poor taste to her sensibility, like testing fate or a harbinger of ill events. Perceiving the lack of amusement on her part, he sobered. “Are you angry with me, Betsey?”

She sighed. His obvious amusement made it difficult to stay vexed with him. The pressure of his new duties in the army combined with the legal cases he took on the side to help meet their increased expenses made moments of unfettered happiness something of a rarity.

She gave him a half smile. “You big goof.”

He laughed again and took her in his arms. “You know,” he remarked, his lips ghosting over the skin just below her ear, “This is one of the best dinner parties I’ve attended in quite some time.”

“We’ve spent the better part of it hiding in a servants’ corridor,” she argued vaguely.

“Exactly.”

She laughed. “Philip and Angelica seem to be enjoying themselves,” she remarked as she stroked her hands down his back. “They both look so grown up, dressed in their best and partaking in conversation with the adults.”

He pulled away to look at her. “Pip will be graduating from Columbia soon,” he agreed. “Embarking on his own career in the law.”

“And Angelica will have suitors calling any day,” she added.

His lip curled in distaste. “Not if I have a say in it.”

“She’s nearly fifteen. It’s bound to happen sooner or later.”  

“Later. Much later. When she’s twenty-five, maybe thirty, she’ll be free to court whomsoever she chooses.”

She rolled her eyes at him. “You courted me when I was twenty-two,” she reminded him. “And at that age I already felt like an old maid.”

He scoffed. “You were a baby.”

“So were you,” she smiled, placing her hand on his cheek and stroking her thumb over his cheekbone. The sight of him in uniform had been making her nostalgic for those coveted visits from her dashing Colonel. She cocked her head to the side and smiled as she glimpse that young, ambitious man underneath her husband’s graying hair and laugh lines.

He turned his face slightly sideways to press a little kiss against her palm.

“I’m not ready for them to be so grown up,” he lamented, thoughts returning to their children.

“I don’t think you have a say, dearest.”

He wrinkled his nose comically in response, prompting another laugh from her. His gaze softened as he looked at her. “Let’s have another.”

“Another what?”

“Another baby.”

“Six wasn’t enough for you?” she asked.

Truthfully, the thought of another child had weighed heavily on her mind the past several months. William was nearly two and fully weened. Another pregnancy was a distinct possibility, especially considering how very close and intimate they had been with each other of late. She worried about adding another child to their brood given their strained budget; it did her heart good to hear him raise the possibility with such apparent joy.

“They’re getting too big. We need more little ones,” he answered.   

“It’s definitely your turn to carry this one,” she teased.

He snorted with amusement. “We’ll see what happens.”

He kissed her again, and she sank into his embrace. All those months of pain and heartache seemed a distant memory here in his arms. She relished their growing intimacy and the renewed strength of their bond. Together, as they were now, she thought boldly, they could face anything.

[uveghazhatas]

Savannah Personal Injury Law Firm

Economic issues should be the last thing on your mind as you are on your means to recoup from cars and truck crash injury, which is why a vehicle mishap lawyer could offer you a contingency charge basis with regard to their services. Car mishaps typically include spinal cord injuries. Guard on your own and also your economic health by coordinating with vehicle accident attorneys. The [location] car accident attorney or lawyer is most likely to proceed your lawful issues to court if it will certainly raise the worth of your suit. It is very vital that the automobile mishap attorney or legal representative makes an excellent situation which is relying on factual evidence, expert point of views and also witness statement. Every one of these actions will certainly assure that you receive reasonable compensation for your injuries and suffering. If you issue on your own with your instance being a concern, ask the lawyer or attorney the amount of instances he`s taken. You are deserving of customized legal services.

Auto accidents in Savannah Georgia can involve spine cord injury. Unfortunately, it`s impossible to reverse the injury to the spine. On the other hand, clinical advancements progressively have elevated the amount of patients who overcome these injuries. The treatment requires urgent medical help after the crash and also continuing treatment. The main emphasis of spine injury therapy is stopping much more injuries and aiding the hurt sufferer live an energetic life. In case the terrible spine damages resulted from somebody else`s negligence or recklessness, the victim might receive payment. The damaged target will be facing expensive therapy, considerable clinical costs and also perhaps lost salaries as well as ought to consequently be eligible for settlement.

Must you be involved in a vehicle crash, you should consider looking for an auto crash attorney. Legal experts with a specialized in auto accidents can give different dispute resolution in case they examine that a litigation, for instance, is not needed for the completion of the customer`s situation. Clearly, these legal representatives likewise have expertise handling other lawyers as well as therefore use such experience to regulate the process in the advantage of the target. These lawful advisors will certainly supply assistance as well as suggestions relative to the procedures bordering the implementation of the negotiation and/or any various other jury choice.

Employing an auto mishap lawyer is vital in functioning with lawful scenarios that involve a victim of physical or psychological injury. Such lawyers can not simply recommend their customers via the legal process when traveling to justice, yet they will likewise work as ambassadors in acquiring their customers` negotiations, ought to there be any. Commonly these therapists do not obtain lawyer`s fees if they do not recoup the damages inflicted upon their clients, and therefore their purpose to pursue justice and/or monetary vengeance for the individual would not aid the client but likewise them also.

Throughout your consultation with the Savannah GA lawyer or law firm, remove info as the legal representative or attorney responds to the inquiries you have, as well as ask follow-up questions if called for. The much better your concerns as well as notes are, the far better you`ll need to aid you choose in the future. Now, you`ll have a good amount of data you can collaborate with to make an option. Review your notes and evaluate each attorney or legal representative, both for his accreditation in accident law and also exactly how well the attorney matches your approach. You could request each legal representative to offer customer referrals. Getting in touch with past clients may use you the useful perspective of somebody with first-hand understanding about the lawyer. Utilizing the response to the inquiries you have, suggestions as well as your point of view of each, pick the lawyer or legal representative that will fully represent you as well as handle your situation.

There are plenty of files as well as case notifications which have actually to be submitted by specific target dates. A great deal of these may be in just a number of days and just an automobile accident lawyer experienced with his area can establish what cases need to be filed, which papers need to be completed, how to finish the kinds appropriately and also which insurance business to send the claims with. In instance you are associated with an auto mishap, ensure your lawyer will absolutely complete your lorry crash record record for your insurance coverage carrier and the accident report kind for the Division of Motor Autos. The insurance service provider of the private responsible for triggering your crash must be without delay notified by your attorney or lawyer, due to the fact that failing to do this might permit the insurance coverage supplier to decline protection for your mishap.

You can actually benefit in functioning with a car accident attorney by simply eliminating you as well as your family from the problem of filing an automobile mishap case all by yourself. As the claiming goes, leave it to the pros. Vehicle accident attorneys have knowledge checking out insurance claims and also functioning with insurance provider as well as jury decisions. If you`re still dealing with body injuries, you have actually obtained a greater cause to get an auto accident attorney. You have a bigger possibility for recovering far faster with no stress and anxiety as well as trouble of declare the damages cases.

If you`ve been injured in an auto accident, the initial thing you require to do after having your medical requirements seen to is take actions to defend your legal rights and call a car mishap attorney. Whether you realize it or otherwise, in the coming months as well as years your life is most likely to transform drastically. There are going to be costs associated with your accident as well as your recovery that you had no chance of planning for a year earlier, and also those expenses are likely to put a tremendous monetary drainpipe on your budget.

A great Savannah car accident attorney will certainly have the ability to aid alleviate a few of the worry of those expenses by bargaining a settlement for you with the celebrations in charge of the accident to begin with. If you`ve been injured as the result of another`s carelessness, that private now has a responsibility to you to ensure that you are able to get the treatment and also rehabilitative therapy you require to make a complete recovery without putting on your own into the inadequate residence.

Essentially, any type of costs arising from the accident are the responsibility of the individuals who created the mishap. Your automobile mishap lawyer will certainly function to make certain that they accept that responsibility as well as take steps to see that their obligation is satisfied and also you are effectively looked after.

When picking the automobile accident lawyer that will certainly represent your legal rights, you`re most likely to have an extremely big pool where to make your choice. Ideally, any type of lawyer that is proactively practicing personal injury law will have the skills as well as the court savvy to discuss the very best settlement feasible; however, as that is not always the case there are several points to take into consideration before making your choice.

Primarily, any type of excellent injury attorney is going to deal with a contingency basis. Simply put, they aren`t  likely to bill you a dime unless they are able to negotiate a settlement for you. The lower line is that a lot of lawyers are overworked, and also assembling a good legal instance takes some time and initiative. An excellent automobile accident attorney will certainly put in that time and effort to make certain that you obtain the most effective results possible from your claim, as well as they are going to gain the rewards of that initiative. A lawyer that bills you up front is far much more concerned with money than with your well being, as well as they may lead you into a court battle that is going to cost you thousands of bucks in fees with their eyes broad closed, understanding you don`t have a chance of winning or reluctant to place in the moment and initiative needed to strengthen your case yet going to take your loan anyhow.

The second thing you wish to try to find is experience. Really couple of legal representatives (and none with any type of sense) go straight from law school to exclusive method. A great car mishap attorney will collaborate with a large firm for numerous years to obtain their feet wet prior to branching off on their own, which will certainly provide you, the customer, the opportunity to see their medical history.

A Savannah Georgia lawyer who consistently walks right into the courtroom as well as works out a negotiation for their customers is a lot more likely to win you the payment you should have than one who is constantly stomped by the opposition, and also an automobile crash lawyer with more experience will know the composed and also word-of-mouth ins as well as outs of the profession that can make all the difference when it comes to your negotiation.

[kindabraveandlittlestupid]

Why Tumblr Chooses Censorship

It’s a strange day to jump online and suddenly hear about a major policy change on Tumblr from a few people I talk too. Words like “Total Bullshit”, “End of Tumblr”, “Burning Garbage Heap” and so on tossed among them to describe the policy change. Curious enough I logged on began reading over all the purposed changes and I admit I am a bit disheartened. Usually when a digital institution like AOL, Yahoo, Napster, or MySpace falls it because they didn't evolve and became stagnant in what they were providing the internet. I can’t think of a time where a site willfully regressed its own freedom of speech on a broad scale and basically swallowed a poison capsule that destroys their user base (perhaps deservingly so) but here we are.

That point aside, I am trying to have insight and hindsight to understand how/why they were pushed to this reckless conclusion (I will be leaving foresight out because I think Tumblr lacks foresight, the exodus from Tumblr will dramatically change the culture of this site likely for the worse). Tumblr like any social media medium is struggling in the current age of the internet; Bots, Far Right Extremists, Fake News, Illegal Porn, Data Theft, and so on. Many companies are walking this fine line between trying to combat these problems while preserving freedom of speech.

I struggle to find my own footing on this topic because I believe that society with LESS censorship historically does better. You look to countries in the past that repressed sexuality, individual thought, and so on; those countries were often the ones to invite the rise of repressive groups doing atrocious acts in history. While on the other hand because of this open and free social media platform we all see the echoing of those same repressive groups (who are also on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and Youtube) and to simply say/do nothing about their posts will inevitably allow them to rise still. This is where I struggle as I believe in that concept of a free society but I do feel that removing fake new stories is essential for the health of democracy.

I imagine the reason why sexual images are the target is that Tumblr makes things so easy to post. It's not hard to imagine pictures of minors getting liked or reposted from one blog or another happening. The problem is many of those pictures will circulate for a long period of time not being flagged as underage and there is good chance that every user has knowingly or unknowingly looked at an image like this on the web. I explore the porn side of Tumblr and have once or twice encountered a Tumblr full of these images at which point I couldn't close that tab fast enough and get the hell out of dodge. So Tumblrs solution of handling this problem instead of playing whack a mole with these underage accounts? Ban all adult content.

I can understand this motivation being a foolproof way of making sure there is no underage porn because there will be no porn. I imagine the result will be very effective, so effective that the various members of the community be they straight, bi, or gay who had their own private collection of legal adult material on Tumblr will stop visiting the site. A slow-moving exodus of users from Tumblr this site to perhaps a new blogging alternative that isn't so restrictive. I don’t suspect Tumblr will be closing its doors the week after the policy kick in (though they will see a HUGE decline in traffic) but even the PG accounts will likely move on because a sizeable user base shifted away and people want to be where the party is at. And much as I love Tumblr, it will not be here (sadly).

PC Culture VS Censorship Culture

One thing I noticed on the various posts is some people attempting to blame this policy change on the PC Culture. I am not sure I believe that as a valid argument. While I don't get along with PC Culture all the time (part of my free society is believing that humor is apart of it and PC Culture doesn't always like humor), I do think PC Culture has a broad/accepting view of orientation and sexuality. Just important is people having the right to explore those thoughts and feelings of their own free will. Tumblr has been one of those sites allowing emerging gay men and women to find others like them but also explore their sexuality with images/gifs/videos. What Tumblr might have not noticed is that the site itself is kind of a cultivation of the best images from the web, sure you can find some pretty hard porn on occasion but of all the adult sites on the web, Tumblr provides an almost artistic lense to the images that come thru the site.

Censorship can come from various political/social/religious groups but this sort of censorship against the human body, sex, and sexuality, in general, comes from a very conservative mindset. People who don’t wish to see nudity in any form on any medium; people who think a woman's nipple is lewd, that breastfeeding publically is disgusting, and that anything remotely sexual is a sin. And by the nature of Tumblrs policy change their beliefs align themselves alarmingly close to these individuals.

There is a thin veneer of progressive views on the site that remains where they say they are ok with this and that like gender orientation surgery but its just that a veneer. Once a person has transitioned anything that is shared of their new body (nudity or sex wise) beyond the initial transition falls into the realm of ‘smut’ by Tumblrs policies. I imagine the perception they are trying to sell us is “Hey we are still the same progressive safe haven for LGTBQ community! Stay with us!” but secretly thinking “Everything you enjoy in the bedroom is horrible and we fucking hate you.”

Perhaps I am being hyperbolic in that statement but damn if it doesn't feel like a vast policy of censorship on the human body. And whenever this happens (historically) it always comes from hyper-conservatives.

A General Attack On Expression and Orientation

I touched on this topic a little bit above but I feel it's worth stating again that Tumblr might be losing its safe-haven status for gender expression and sexual orientation. When scrolling through Tumblr you will likely see those new expressions of genders that is beyond that of ‘traditional’ male and female definitions. And while I don’t have any attraction to some of these new expressions, I understood why they are there and don’t get upset if/when the cross my feed. Like two men having sex my mind thinks “Not for me but I am sure that will make someones day”. I view sex (in all its forms) as natural, I don’t have to be into it for me to be ok with it (if that makes sense). It’s visual participation if that image you see isn't a turn on for you and does nothing for you, simply move on.

Tumblr’s policy doesn't seem to care about this concept of visual participation and while it is taking away my straight/lesbian porn I enjoy. It is also sweeping up all these new forms of expression and orientation in the process.

I am not sure what else to say... I am a straight male and I try to have a deep empathy for other people when I can. I feel this argument can be better structured but I also come from a position where I don’t know all the details. I add this to the post because Tumblr seemed to go out of their way to suggest that they would protect this community but from a long view that doesn't seem to be the case.

A Lessons To Be Learned

I am not going to say fuck Tumblr. I don’t want to see them fail. I liked what this space was about and what it provided. I prefer they reconsider changing the guidelines and consider a different course of action but I also understand why they want to do this. It’s “The Easy Way” to do things. If they ban all porn then it simplifies managing underage nudity and allows the site to have less criticism drawn to it.

I do, however, think this broad censorship approach will ultimately hurt the site and the community though. People will leave, alternative websites will arise and Tumblr will eventually become no more. I am not going to tell anyone to boycott or delete their accounts. I plan to collect my writing and images, backup my favorite adult gifs (might need to buy a hard drive) and settle into this new reality. I know I will personally be visiting the site less as I used to look at porn here at some of the better cultivated Tumblr archives. That lack of traffic by me and all the other users will hurt the company. I hope they understand eventually I won't show up at all and over time, eventually, no one else will either. Maybe the site will survive and change into something else but right now under these conservative policies of censorship, Tumblr won't last.

Sad Regards, Michael California

Update: Posted this originally with a woman in a shower with large censorship bars over the naughty bits. Flagged despite the fact she was more covered than most Sports Illustrated models. I know I just wrote above I am not advocating leaving the site... but after all this and the fact that Tumblr Support finally responded to a far-right Tumblr blogger photoshopping/doctoring a PM conversation we had before posting it to his blog. I feel as though Tumblr A) hates sex and sexuality B) not only enables but protects racism and harassment on this website. I think it’s time to move on.

[diamondorloj]

You are so smart and well educated, especially regarding Israel and Jewish history, so I hope you don't mind if I ask you to help me, an uneducated (and to be honest mostly ignorant towards politics because of personal issues) person, to graps what the fuss is about all the political statements during ESC this year? I'm really confused and used google but I understand like maybe half of what's going on. Sorry to bother you.

Hey, thank you for coming to me. First off, I have studied and learned a lot abut the topics, but they’re very complex and full of details beyond my grasp. I’ll try to make this short, but your ask was a little broad and calls for a couple of explanations.

First off, there are rules against political statements and activism in every Eurovision song contest. For example, the only flags allowed in the arenas are the flags of UN states and of the EU, as well as unpolitical flags like the rainbow or the trans flag. In 2016, there was a conflict because the Armenian delegation held up a flag of Bergkarabach, which is debatable territory between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Now, here’s the EBU statement: “In the live broadcast of the Eurovision Song Contest Grand Final, Hatari, the Icelandic act, briefly displayed small Palestinian banners whilst sat in the Green Room. The Eurovision Song Contest is a non-political event and this directly contradicts the contest’s rules. The banners were quickly removed and the consequences of this action will be discussed by the Reference Group (the contest’s executive board) after the contest.”

Determining a course of action on legal grounds based on the flag rule is going to be a little difficult because as of 29th November 2012, Palestine was granted the status of an observer state in the UN. However, showing the Palestine flag in Israel, on an Israelian stage, is considered political activism (and just generally…bad).

To briefly touch on the history of the Palestinian and Israelian conflict is almost impossible. The area of today’s Israel and Palestine used to belong to the Osmanian Empire, which shattered in 1922 officially and for a huge number of reasons. Great Britain took over mandate control for the area they then called Palestine, until it was possible to establish its own state. This was a common idea of the time for colonies that were supposed to be supported on their way to independency. Jews had fled to this area for centuries, but especially so during the 19th century because of rising antisemitism in Europe. While it wasn’t exactly pleasant to live as dimmi, people of the books and second-class citizens, it was relatively safe and peaceful, and Arab people happily sold their land to Jewish immigrants.

The idea of safety for the Jewish people led to the idea of a Jewish state, which is zionism. However, there were many options discussed as to where this Jewish state should be installed – among them were Uganda and Argentina. In the end, it probably was a mixture of many factors, like the Jewish connection to the land of Israel and Jerusalem, the fact that many Jewish people had bought land in Palestine for a relatively good price and that a lot of Jewish communities already lived there. Great Britain agreed to install a Jewish state, however they also installed the Great Mufti of Jerusalem, Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, and he incited violence and pogroms against the Jewish people. He vehemently opposed the existence of any Jewish state and also collaborated with the Nazis, organised a Muslim garnison in the SS, and is responsible for many people dying in the Holocaust because he prevented them from fleeing to Palestine.

So, after the Holocaust, the calls for a Jewish state for the Jewish people got louder because it had been made abundantly clear that no other state would guarantee their safety and survival. The UN was very newly installed and kinda improvised a new solution for the territorial conflict: There should be both a Jewish state, called Israel, and an Arab state, called Palestine. Jerusalem should stay under UN control. It was a hasty, imperfect plan, however the Jews accepted while the Arabs declined and the Arab nations surrounding Israel declared war on the same day Israel was founded. Against all odds, Israel won the wars and exists to this day. During the war, there were many refugees on both sides. Israel advertised for Arab people to stay and granted them full citizen rights. The Arab states called for Arabs to leave the places of war and conflict and were promised they could return to their homes when the war was over aka Israel destroyed. Well, guess what. Many refugees of these days and their decendants fled to Syria, Jordan, Egypt but were not taken in and instead were used against Israel. To this day, there are refugee camps in Jordan which does not grant any of their decendents who were born there city rights. Jewish people were dispelled from their homes and found a new home in Israel.

So, Israel as a state is the only guarantee in the world for safety and survival for the Jewish people. If you know any Jewish people in Europe, you will often hear their discussions and plans of going to Israel. The state exists, and it will continue to exist and thrive. To debate its right to an existence is politically pointless because it was granted by the UN and other leading political organisations, and antisemitic because it’s a direct call against the safety of Jews everywhere. Palestine wasn’t a state in the beginning at first and to this day has a special political status. In the 1940-1960s, a lot of Palestinians didn’t even want to be called Palestinians and the leading politicians in fact called for Palestine to be reunited with Syria, calling them Syrians. In 2005, Israel granted Gaza’s wishes and completely unrooted all Jewish life in the Gaza strip, making it free of living Jews for the first time in millenias. Unsurprisingly, peace did not follow.

Phew. I left out about a thousand details around here, so please use these points as a starting point for your research and take it with a grain of salt.

The conflict between Israel and Palestine to this day exists because Palestine does not acknowledge Israel’s right to exist and uses acts of terrorism and war against the state. Beginning of May, Gaza fired way over 600 rockets on Israel, aiming at schools and civilian buildings, killing 4 and injuring over 300 people. Their leading political organisation, Hamas, calls for the complete destruction of Israel and their people. They also refer to Israel as an oppressing state and an occupation of their territory.

One of the organisations that also believes Israel to be an occupator is the BDS organisation, which is a Boycott against Israel. It claims to be peaceful and harmless, but aims to completely isolate Israel in every way, culturally, economically, politically, from the rest of the world. They also want Palestinian refugees in Gaza and Westbank to have a right to return to Israel. However, given that Israel has a population of about 15 million people, and 20% of them are not Jewish, integrating about 8 million people of non-jewish Arabs into Israel would make Jews a minority in Israel and effectively end the existence of the only Jewish state in the world. (also good luck boycotting Israeli technology like the world's most efficient field hospital, the USB stick, and just about every smartphone works with Israeli technology.)

BDS called for a boycott of the ESC in Israel, Roger Waters himself foamed at the mouth when Madonna was announced to perform in Tel Aviv. One band that is at least close to the BDS is Hatari, the Icelandic group. They announced their intentions to use their performance to criticise Israel for the way they treat Palestinians.There was debate in Israel apparently whether they should be allowed to come to Tel Aviv, in the end they were allowed. They returned the favour by showing the flag of their biggest aggressor and threat to safety.

Funnily enough, homosexuality is punishable by imprisonment and death in Gaza. So I can’t help but wonder how well their support was received in Palestine… It’s a typically European knee-jerk reaction. They want to show solidarity with what they think is the underdog in that conflict, and they’re cowardly showing their protest in a democractic, safe country.

Madonna’s performance is problematic because she agreed to do a non-political act and proceeded to slap the flags on their dancers at the very last second, betraying the trust and rules of the hosts. Her act shows a big, scary man dressed like a soldier in a black uniform as Israel and a tiny woman in a white dress as Palestine, and in the beginning she talks about supposedly hidden crimes that ‘we all know of’ wink-wonk. It’s a tired provocatin and villainification of Israel imo. The reactions all over social media show that it was not actually perceived as a message of peace and love, but as a message of pro-Palestinian interests, painting them the victims and only the victims of the conflict.

There was probably more going on with political statements in the ESC, but you referred to Jewish history and Israel, so I hope your questions are covered with this response!

[thehaggardlawfirm]

The Nuts and Bolts of Negligent Security Cases

By: Michael Haggard (Bio) and Christopher Marlowe (Bio), The Haggard Law Firm

Negligent security cases are time consuming, very costly, require a hyper attention to detail, a team effort and knowledge of foreseeability, and in many cases criminal law and a ‘typical’ negligent security case does not and will not ever exist. Our firm has handled hundreds of these cases over the years and have obtained more than $400 million in results for our clients. We can most affirmatively say the immense challenges of these cases are outweighed by the results that can help bring justice to a victim or family that the criminal justice system may never be able to provide, while also changing the way a business or entire industry operates.

In a wrongful death car accident case, we all know to preserve evidence, request the relevant reports, statements and traffic homicide reports. We contact the witnesses tied to this particular moment in time, hound law enforcement and medical examiners to make sure we have all evidence tied to the incident, and begin working these pieces into the theory we hope will increase the probability of success at the end of the case. While this basic and incomplete framework is an important part of a negligent security case as well, it does not account for the historical analysis necessary to place the subject incident in the perspective necessary to appreciate which theory is best, and why.

Power of Foreseeability: $100 million verdict

Like any of the most complicated areas of practice there are multiple layers to consider when litigating a negligent security case. Foreseeability of the act in question, most often a crime, is the first element of the case to consider. For example, it is good to know whether a particular shooting or sexual assault occurred in the common area of an apartment complex, over which the owner or manager had exclusive control. It is important to know whether there is a history of any such activity upon the Premises, and in the areas adjacent or related thereto. There is a history of cases where the Plaintiff counsel assumes that because the crime does not appear to be a “hit” and because the crime on the property is “bad” that their case is a winner. Some of the most common arguments by defense council are tied to the character of the victim or because the area may have a high crime rate there isn’t much the property owner could have done to stop the incident that caused the death or harm of your client. In most states, neither argument has much merit because of the statutes that lay out the responsibility of the property owner to take reasonable measures to protect all guests, residents or customers on a commercial property from harm. In November 2007, we successfully obtained a $102.7 million verdict in a negligent security shooting case thought to be the largest verdict of its kind in the country. We represented a patron of an exotic dance club. Our client sat waiting in his car for his friend to return from retrieving his wallet when he was approached by an unknown person who attempted to rob him at gunpoint. The assailant shot our young client. The bullets rendered him a ventilator-dependent quadriplegic. The jury found that the strip mall where the club was located did not have sufficient security, as there was only one guard on duty. The strip mall’s ownership admitted they had never spent one dollar on security or safety despite the fact there were 26 violent crimes on the same property during the seven years prior to the shooting of our client.  Video on Case

Full Speed Investigation

Just as the homicide detective should be doing, the negligent security practitioner is on the scene canvassing for witnesses as soon as possible. These are not simply witnesses to the crime itself. The residents or employees at an apartment complex, the customers at a local mall, or motel guests or employees can speak to the history of the particular business in the days, months and years leading up to your client’s incident. While an easily accessible crime grid can help establish foreseeability, it is these witnesses that can bring the argument to life. One must be comfortable with the fact that even as you near trial, many questions surrounding the crime may never be known which makes these witnesses that are best cultivated in the early part of your investigation key elements to your case. Your investigation may also include research and prying into every resource at your disposal and available to you through both formal discovery and independent background research. There is no rest when examining the migration of tenants, guests and other visitors to the property, and searches for all relevant historical ties to the property, and to those who have worked at, lived, or visited it. A systematic inquiry, regardless of what the police reports for the property show (or don’t), will place the incident itself within a broader framework.

(Click to review Notable Negligent Security Cases)

Negligent Security and Crimes of Opportunity

But what about so many of those cases where you lack the luxury of relying upon a ream of police reports, disgruntled former employees, and former tenants who diligently memorialized their grievances in tidy emails ready for an exhibit sticker at a deposition? What happens, for example, when your examination of the facts does not fairly call for an increase in security patrols or heightened police presence? Too many practitioners fall into the trap that negligent security tragedies were caused, in whole or part, by an absence of sufficient security.

We recently obtained a $12 million verdict in a wrongful death case (Machado v. The Waves of Hialeah) against the owner/operator of a rent-by-the-hour motel in Hialeah, Florida. By all accounts, there had been no history of homicide or rape at the motel. The subject and the victim were strangers to each other, and at the time of her attack, the victim had a blood alcohol reading well above the legal limit for driving. The Defendant relied heavily on the absence of prior sexual batteries and murders or attempted murders, and argued that surveillance video showed a consensual sexual encounter gone tragically wrong. They further argued that even though they had no “real” prior crime, they did the responsible thing and provided a dedicated security guard to patrol the property. (News Coverage of Case)

Through discovery, and until the last day of trial, the defendant maintained laser focus on a paint-by- numbers defense to negligent security lawsuits. First, low crime. Second, a drunk victim. Third, a video arguably showing initial consent to sexual activity. Fourth, they had a security guard. Finally, the criminal who committed the act was so outrageously violent and demented, that no reasonable owner/manager should have foreseen that a person walking calmly around the premises would turn into a madman in the blink of an eye.

In preparation for trial, we closely examined all of the surveillance footage produced by the Defendant’s own CCTV systems. While there were several excerpts both sides used extensively, there were also very long, boring, and seemingly uneventful times where nothing appears to be happening. Staring at a tv screen watching a hallway, where the most interesting thing shows a man pushing a cart down a hallway, getting out a mop, and loading bath towels onto a cart is not exciting stuff – unless that man is actually the claimed security guard.

On cross examination at trial, the owner of the motel admitted he had never seen his security officer doing the kind of housekeeping shown in the video, which was taken at the same time our client was being beaten to death on the edge of the parking lot. After the 5-day trial, the jury returned its $12,000,000 verdict, and found no comparative fault upon the victim or anyone else, a point which meant far more to our clients than the financial result. Sometimes, a negligent security case can be as much about negligent management and inattention to critical details. Mismanagement can indeed create an inadequately secured environment, as was the case at The Waves. In other instances, as with the broad daylight murder of a Marine Corp veteran at an otherwise completely safe complex in Plantation whose widow we proudly represented, the failure can be on the defendant’s failure to actually read the background checks of one of its tenants, who harbored a dangerous relative. Nelson v. Greystar Management (Broward County). Just a few lines from a third party subpoena to the tenant screening provider in Texas took that case in a whole new direction, and saved a very difficult case from otherwise problematic foreseeability and preventability problems.

Many Paths to Justice

With negligent security cases, the avenues to a successful outcome are as varied as the clients and circumstances themselves. The path to ruin is equally diverse, and usually follows an evaluation and case strategy that presumes from the beginning that there is a simple formula to follow. The moving parts in any negligent security are so varied, so inherently human, and traditionally develop over such a protracted period of time, that treating the case as a simple snapshot in time will invariably either devalue the case or cause critical evidence to be either minimized or overlooked entirely.

Remember, negligent security cases are never just about “more security.”  

Common Theme Among Negligent Security Cases - Christopher Marlowe, Trial Lawyer

[anntyler3]

What Does 'Sedition' Mean for Protestors?

The right to speak out and assemble with others in protest is enshrined in the First Amendment for a reason. It is one of the most crucial rights ensuring the U.S. remains a "free" country. Protesting your government's actions should not and does not make you an enemy of the state.

So what does it mean when the attorney general says that some protestors should be charged with sedition? Should you be worried about attending a protest that has the potential to turn violent? Could you face these serious federal criminal charges for attending a protest?

Barr Wants Prosecutors to Get Tough

After a summer of protests in Minneapolis, Portland, Chicago, Kenosha, and many other cities across the country, federal authorities are making arrests on terrorism-related charges related to looting and arson.

But Attorney General William Barr allegedly told federal prosecutors last week to get tougher on protestors, encouraging the use of a federal sedition law against protestors who engage in violent crimes or rioting. Barr has been critical of local prosecutors in many of these cities for going "easy" on protestors who break the law.

The unearthing of Barr's comments led to widespread condemnation from civil liberties advocates. Noted Fox News personality Andrew Napolitano, a former judge, called it "a bridge too far."

Sedition Defined

"Sedition" is a broad term in U.S. law. It refers "to the act of inciting revolt or violence against a lawful authority with the goal of destroying or overthrowing it." According to federal law, "seditious conspiracy" occurs when two or more people:

Conspire to overthrow or destroy the U.S. government or make war against it

Use force to oppose the U.S. government's authority

"Take, seize, or possess by force" any federal property

"Prevent, hinder, or delay by force" any enforcement of U.S. laws

In a Justice Department memo issued after Barr's comments, Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen wrote that the portion of the statute referring to taking federal property or stopping law enforcement officers from carrying out their duties were sufficient for sedition charges against some protestors. In fact, Rosen wrote that the sedition law "does not require proof of a plot" to overthrow the government for its application.

Past Uses of Sedition Laws

While sedition charges are rare, they do have a chilling history. The original Sedition Act of 1798 made it easier for the young U.S. government to deport, fine, or imprison anyone who published "false, scandalous, or malicious writing" against the government.

The Espionage Act of 1917 made it a federal crime with up to 20 years in prison for willfully spreading false news of U.S. Army and Navy operations. The Sedition Act of 1918 expanded the law further during World War I, criminalizing statements criticizing the federal government. That law was ? thankfully ? repealed.

Over the years, sedition laws have been used against Puerto Rican separatists, white supremacists, Muslim terrorists, and a Christian militia.

Should Protestors Worry?

There is no doubt that many protests this summer have turned violent. In Seattle and Portland, protestors have tried to set fire to and overtake federal buildings. Several protestors in Minneapolis set fire to a police department precinct headquarters.

But is it fair to equate protestors upset about police killings of Black Americans to groups actively trying to separate from or overthrow the U.S. government?

"There's nothing wrong with aggressive prosecution. In the face of violence in the street that is destroying government property, private property, and injuring individuals, that's what the government should do," Napolitano said. "But this is not the case for sedition."

With ongoing police shootings earning headlines and many fearing election-season violence, protestors should be aware of what could be at stake. Even if federal judges are not interested in sedition charges against protestors, that does not mean the federal government will not try to use those charges to get convictions.

If you are intent on exercising your First Amendment rights at a protest, be aware of your surroundings. And if a protest turns violent, consider leaving the area as quickly as possible.? It would also be wise to memorize or write down the number of a criminal defense lawyer you want to contact if you are arrested.

Related Resources:

Find a Federal Criminal Defense Lawyer Near You (FindLaw's Lawyer Directory)

Virginia Citizen Brings Charges Against Vice Mayor Who Supported Firing a Police Officer (FindLaw's Legally Weird)

Can You Be Fired For Protesting? (FindLaw's Law and Daily Life)

Can I Be Arrested For Pulling Down Statues? (FindLaw's Law and Daily Life)

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8246803 http://blogs.findlaw.com/law_and_life/2020/09/what-does-sedition-mean-for-protestors.html

[armeniaitn]

Library of Congress urged to use Armenian Genocide subject heading

New Post has been published on https://armenia.in-the.news/politics/library-of-congress-urged-to-use-armenian-genocide-subject-heading-55156-03-09-2020/

Library of Congress urged to use Armenian Genocide subject heading

Representative Dina Titus (D-NV) is collecting the signatures of her U.S. House colleagues on a letter asking the Librarian of Congress, Dr. Carla D. Hayden, to correct the outdated and inaccurate Armenian Massacres subject heading to Armenian Genocide in the wake of last year’s near-unanimous passage of the Congressional Armenian Genocide resolution, reported the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA).

In the letter, legislators share with Dr. Hayden that they are writing “to ask that the Library of Congress, an agency of the legislative branch and the research arm of the U.S. Congress, use the historically accurate term “Armenian Genocide” in its subject heading for books and other materials regarding the Ottoman Empire’s intentional, systematic, and deliberate mass murder, deportation, and exile of more than one and a half million Armenians between 1915 and 1923.”

The letter spearheaded by Rep. Titus comes in the face of a June 19, 2020 Library of Congress correspondence informing the ANCA that it would not make this change, even in light of Congressional recognition of the Armenian Genocide, because it deferred to the White House and State Department. The Titus letter, notes that “while we understand the Library of Congress has said it defers to the president and State Department on terminology, we do not believe that determinations of fact by an agency of the legislative branch should be made for political reasons or under pressure from foreign governments.”

The letter makes the case that: “the current subject heading, “Armenian Massacres,” is outdated, having been created before Raphael Lemkin coined the term genocide and prior to the 1948 adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.” It goes on to argue that “the existing heading is also inconsistent with the broad, near-universal academic consensus recognizing the Armenian Genocide as a clear case of genocide as reflected in numerous resolutions, letters, and statements by the International Association of Genocide Scholars.”

“We share the view expressed by Congresswoman Titus and her colleagues from both sides of the aisle that the phrase “Armenian Massacres” – in modern usage – conceals more than it reveals,” said ANCA Executive Director Aram Hamparian. “It’s time for the Library of Congress to get this right.”

The full text of the Titus letter is provided below. 

Dear Dr. Hayden,

We write to ask that the Library of Congress, an agency of the legislative branch and the research arm of the U.S. Congress, use the historically accurate term “Armenian Genocide” in its subject heading for books and other materials regarding the Ottoman Empire’s intentional, systematic, and deliberate mass murder, deportation, and exile of more than one and a half million Armenians between 1915 and 1923. We also ask that all libraries, offices, services, and other entities within the Library of Congress use the accurate term “Armenian Genocide” in relevant displays, exhibitions, reports, presentations, conferences, lectures, websites, brochures, and other official events and publications.

The current subject heading, “Armenian Massacres,” is outdated, having been created before Raphael Lemkin coined the term genocide and prior to the 1948 adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Lemkin himself cited the massacres of Armenians as a definitive case of genocide. In 1951, the United States, in a written statement submitted to the International Court of Justice, affirmed that the destruction of Armenians met the U.N. definition of genocide.

The existing heading is also inconsistent with the broad, near-universal academic consensus recognizing the Armenian Genocide as a clear case of genocide as reflected in numerous resolutions, letters, and statements by the International Association of Genocide Scholars. Additionally, it is contrary to the U.S. record, including President Ronald Reagan’s 1981 Proclamation; resolutions adopted by the U.S. House of Representatives in 1975 (H.J.Res.148) and 1984 (H.J.Res.247); and, most notably, near-unanimous resolutions passed by the House (H.Res.296) and Senate (S.Res.150) in 2019 that state the sense of Congress that it is the policy of the United States to recognize the Armenian Genocide and to reject any denial of this crime.

Although originally created to serve legitimate academic and research purposes, the term “Armenian Massacres” has evolved into a euphemistic phrase often deployed to diminish the full historical, moral, legal, and contemporary meaning of the Armenian Genocide. In its modern usage, the outdated phrase conceals these horrific crimes.

While we understand the Library of Congress has said it defers to the president and State Department on terminology, we do not believe that determinations of fact by an agency of the legislative branch should be made for political reasons or under pressure from foreign governments. The use of the term “Armenian Genocide” by the Library of Congress would help paint an accurate picture of history and rightly honor the victims of this atrocity. Thank you for your attention to this request.

Read original article here.