#has anyone been seeing the fact that america has been trending far right since 2016 and realizing that the rest of the world is following...

[putri900]

I mean yeah, that IS your only option. Sorry but it seems like a fully spoiled position to mock the idea that things shouldnt be allowed to get as bad as humanly possible. I will say i dont especially blame every non voter or third party voter since the dems are also personally sabotaging their electability... but yeah. The loss will result in trump. And lets see what theyre up to--

So besides project 2025 which outlines every obviously evil thing they want to do, such as destroying the democracy, hence alleviating everyone of the trouble and ability to vote to begin with, they already have been making clear everything else they want to do... by doing the things. Such as revoking trans health care, criminalizing queer people, queer education, and those aiding queer people medically, attacking racial minorities rights, working to relegate women to second class citizenship by trying to ban contraception and end divorce. They want a full ban of abortion. All they want to do to "illegal immigrants." The list goes on.

And btw, much as it seems to be chauvinistic... yeah, the USA holds a lot of international power. Like a lot. I mean youd think thats obvious when 99% of the world wants the genocide in genocide to end-- but since the USA refuses to, no one else will/can step in.

The USA also has the strongest military in the world as well, which doesn't seem like a great idea to place in the hands of rabid fascists.

But yknow. Oh well voting sucks. So let it be worse.

if you want to make politicians change their behaviour you should always vote for them no matter what. but send them a letter saying that it makes you feel kinda bad that you're going to keep supporting them whether or not they change. and also the US is meant to rule the world

[anthonybialy]

Not America Through This Again

We could do better than the worst.  Trying a most unpleasant human archetype again might fail to make life better.  Getting hit by a bus the second time could be more pleasant, but patterns tend to indicate consistent results.  That should be a no on any more Donald Trump anymore.  I could’ve written such in 2016, or 2011, or 1984.  Maintaining principles about prototypical fraud makes decisions easy.

Sucker disciples forget about the Trump presidency for the wrong reason.  There’s a difference between avoiding flexibility and refusing to fall for a conman’s spiel no matter the year.  Three-card Monte is a scam no matter the decade.  Getting conned never gets classier.

The prototypical attention whore won’t go away just because you want him to, and will in fact kvetch in an even more juvenile tone at increased volume to let you know there’s no escape.  I’m sensing a trend.  The only hope is to ignore a decades-long tantrum until the eternal infant wears himself out.

The 76-year-old ceaseless pouter is the only human more tired than the incumbent, who you may recognize as the worst president ever.  Joe Biden’s accomplishment was beating Trump.  All the defeated cares about is winning, and seeing him do the opposite again isn’t worth the laughs.

The only thing better than realizing the error of one’s ways is not screwing up in the first place.  Many self-professed reformed cultists vow to not vote for their erstwhile sullen savior again.  It’s the last word that’s concerning.

Wondering who fell for him before is an exhausting exercise that at least shows the source of humanity’s meager progress.  The best we can do in a most imperfect world where a the emptiest person who’s full of it can be president is seeking to avoid repeating such embarrassment.  There’s a difference between putting on The Office again in the background and enduring another binge the same joyless presidency in the forefront.

He’s always been like this.  Pretending a hateful messianic dismissive autocratic conspiracy lunatic obsessed with tearing down those who make him feel unsuccessful by comparison has teetered over the edge during retirement is a history rewrite as mortifying as pretending he won again.

Nostalgia for trying times might be a way to cope with getting seduced by an obnoxious slob.  But admitting a mistake is the tough and right move that shows more decency than the golden idol.

Drawing attention to himself remains Trump’s only skill.  This is breaking news from the time of the original USFL.  He should feel lucky the spell is wearing off, as coming to senses is also the surest case against him mortifying himself again as well as the rest of us.  Demanding protests on his behalf shows a deep commitment to the sole principle of getting dupes to worship him.

The phoniest, pettiest, nastiest example of a masquerading alpha imaginable is not trying a new persona.  Fans of noticing things shouldn’t need to point out that he’s a prototypical caricature.  But the fact the most obvious phony ever tricked anyone remains concerning.  Pretending the most blatant poser was as authentic as they come shows how advertising works even when the audience knows they’re being sold bad goods.

Never Trump was a commitment before it became a grift for a few soft mercenaries who copied his dedication to playing a character.  Actual conservatives who were sick of the tiresome presidency before it began still dream of a candidate who believes our dumb government has grown far beyond acceptable boundaries and is capable of shrinking it.  Or, go with someone who thinks everyone who doesn’t care for his style is an unpopular loser to see if it works this time.

Let’s review, since it’s apparently necessary.  Teachers of remedial classes have gone over the case against him like it’s explaining to liberals how prices drop while quality increases if businesses compete for customers.  The rather obvious lesson is still not setting in somehow even after he already had his chance at the top office.  Rant against the person who squandered every undeserved blessing he received once more and treat it as cathartic.

The perpetually dwindling Trump cadre is so dedicated that they act like he was never president.  I feel the same way,  The only thing lamer than believing he’d drain the swamp in 2020 is doing so now.  Such cultish devotion would’ve made Jim Jones twitch.

An embodiment of an ‘80s movie villain proved unhelpful in 2016.  A couple years and one presidency haven’t improved the outlook on a black glass-clad black hole.  Trying to show everyone that free markets are based in mutually beneficial voluntary exchange is tough while refusing to decline purchasing the caricature of financial tyranny.  Obsessing with winning instead of offering a worthwhile product defeats the goal.  Voters remain unhappy with the purchase.

Joyless emptiness remains as inspirational.  Stop giving Democrats something about which to be correct, especially for the most liberal Republican imaginable.  At least there’s no dignity.  The most wretched president and most depressing party  remind themselves too much of each other.  Own the libs by spending like them.

Business, politics, and humanity don’t have to be like this.  Ancient selfish tantrums are precisely what we’re trying to escape.  Trump’s miserable archetype is the unfortunate style that should be left in the past.  He was never the alternative.  The one worse notion than believing the ultimate Boomer shtick was once refreshing is still doing so now.

[forsetti]

On Progressive Politics: Wants, Needs, Racism, and Social Justice

For a good portion of my life, I believed racism was overt actions like the KKK burning down black churches and lynching people.  It was someone saying, ��nigger” with animosity and disdain.  It was separate drinking fountains and signs that declared, “Whites Only.” Sure there were still racists in America, but they were a small and dying group.  I was wrong.  Very, very, wrong.  There are lots of reasons why I was wrong.  I was wrong because I grew up in the bubble of a small town in Southeastern Idaho and was never exposed to the full spectrum of racism.  I was wrong because the real history of racism in America has been intentionally hidden and denied.  However, the main reason I was wrong is that as a white male, I have benefited the most America’s long history of racism and willingly or not, I had been part of the problem. As someone who has prided himself on being a staunch progressive and defender of equality and justice, the realization of my own ignorance and culpability in America’s racism has been a very humbling and painful process.  The depth and breadth of the problem are also very overwhelming and depressing.  My attitude about the problem constantly fluctuates from white-hot anger to existential nihilism.  I either want to take to the streets in protest or drink myself numb.  There are times when I think something can and should be done.  At other times, I think the problem is too ingrained in our culture for anything to change because there are too many ignorant and apathetic white people who keep breeding and passing their idiot traits down to a new generation of would-be racists. Adding to my feelings of hopelessness, there are too many “well-meaning” white people who don’t want to rock the white supremacist boat because deep down they enjoy the benefits of racism.

Because of how entrenched racism is in America, because of how long it has been going on, because of how reluctant even the most well-meaning whites are to real change, I have no suggestions on how to adequately address the problem and can’t even begin to comprehend how to make amends for the three-plus centuries of damage done by racism.  While I might not know what to do to correct the problem, I sure as fuck know what not to do to aggravate it.  The lessons I’ve learned the past few years may be few in number, but they have completely altered how I, a fifty-eight-year-old white man, views the world.

This new view as made me hypersensitive to anything that caters to the status quo.  Conservative politics has been built on catering to the notion of white supremacy since the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964.  I expect nothing less from them and am never surprised by anything they do or say, even Donald Trump who is just being more open and honest about the conservative strategy than most.  Since I am not a conservative and do not give a rat’s ass about what they do/don’t do because I have zero expectations they’ll ever change or listen to reason, I won’t address them, their attitudes or policies. It is progressives who I (reluctantly) rest my hopes on.

There is a very disturbing trend among some progressives when it comes to how people of color vote.  In 2008 progressives who supported Hillary often denigrated anyone of color who voted/supported Barack Obama. Their support was written off as not being thoughtful.  I hear a lot of progressives claim that POC voted for Obama not because they thought he was a good candidate or the best choice, but merely for the fact he is black.  Eight years later, that same attitude flipped from Hillary supporters to her opponents but with regard to gender not race.  It was complete bullshit in 2008 and it was complete bullshit in 2016.

In 2016 Hillary has won a large majority of black and Hispanic votes. Bernie did much better with white men.  These facts don’t mean anything by themselves.  They do, however, have significant meaning when you look at the strategies and words of the candidates and, more importantly, the beliefs of the minority voters.  I believe the latter is a direct reflection of the former.

If your spoken strategy is to “bring white working-class voters back to the Democratic Party,” you are not only on a fool’s errand, but you are also going to alienate minority voters.  When your supporters are condescending to minorities when they vote for your opponent, you are on the wrong side of this issue. I see a lot of the white, male, Democratic candidates this time around making this same mistake.  It really doesn’t matter if this is being done on purpose or out of ignorance.  The only things that really matters are how it is perceived and what will it do to address the problem of this strategy's underlying racism.

Going after the white working class vote is a really bad strategy for a number of reasons.  This group has largely already been voting for Republicans who have fed their fears and white supremacy for decades.  In fact, no Democratic presidential candidate has won the white vote since the passage of the Civil Rights Act. This isn't a coincidence.  White voters are not going to suddenly listen to reason or be willing to admit their economic decline is a direct result of their own voting patterns.  However, the real problem with this approach is it continues the long history of being concerned more about the situation of whites than minorities.  Even with many white working class people stagnating economically, they are still infinitely in a better economic state than minorities.  Putting your main focus on the group that needs the least help is politically tone deaf if you are progressive.   Another reason this strategy is a really bad idea is it completely ignores the demographic trends of the Democratic Party.  White voters are becoming a smaller and smaller portion of the voting pie.  Putting them as your main emphasis on winning an election is just plain stupid.  Even if you do win, you’ve sown negative seeds with the largest growing part of your base which will have repercussions down the road.  Demographically, progressives have the advantage against conservatives,  why on earth would you do anything to damage this and give conservatives an opening to gain traction with minorities or alienate them to where they don't vote?  This doesn’t mean you should ignore white voters.  It means you don’t make them the focal point of your campaign.  It also means you don’t sell your ideas to minorities as “they’ll also benefit,” but you sell your ideas to whites that “everyone benefits.”  

One of the main things I have learned the past few years is to really listen to the people who need the most help, who will suffer the most if the right policies are not enacted, who has the most to lose if the right people aren’t elected.  There are a lot of groups this applies to, but one really stands out; black women.  It was black women who helped elect President Obama in 2008.  They definitely were the major force behind his reelection in 2012 when a lot of white progressives stayed home.  While a President Romney and a GOP controlled Congress might have had negative consequences for white progressives, it would have decimated black households who are holding on by a thread.  Every positive thing President Obama did was a direct result of black women voting for him en masse.

Blacks and other minorities are focused on the bottom two levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.  Whites progressives are focused on the top two. White progressives, as a group, are not worried about whether they’ll have food to eat, shelter, security…  They are focused on feeling good about their job, their self-esteem, being respected for who they believe they are (superior)…  Morally and from a progressive political point-of-view, one of these takes priority over the other.  What I see far too often from white progressive politicians is a supply-side approach to justice, equality, opportunities.  If whites are helped, the benefits will trickle down to minorities.  Supply-side economics is complete bullshit.  Supply-side anything is complete bullshit.  If you are pushing a top-down political agenda, you are not progressive. It doesn’t matter what your intentions, how deeply you believe it, how long you’ve been advocating it…  You are either helping those who need the most help first and foremost or you are not.  There are no linguistic or argumentative gymnastics that can change this reality.  The people at the bottom of the hierarchy know this and can see through bullshit because they deal with it each and every day.  

I’m not saying certain aspects of Bernie’s or any of the other white, male candidate's agenda would not help those at the bottom of the hierarchy a lot, they would.  What I am saying is making your focus bringing back white working-class voters to the Democratic Party and trying to sell it as “it will help minorities too” is completely misguided.   I’ve listened intently to Bernie since he decided to run.  This is exactly what he says and how he tries to sell it.  It is why almost all of his events are in college towns that are predominately white.  It is why he has focused his campaign heavily in states that have a high percentage of whites. Whether intentional or not, the attitudes behind are picked up by his supporters.  When I see and hear his supporters and spokespeople say derogatory things about minority voters who supported Hillary, I see it as a reflection of the campaign’s attitudes and strategies.  When Hillary won Southern states because of the black vote and they talk about her “winning the Confederacy” and “winning red states that won’t matter in the general election,” I hear the dog whistles of progressives.   It isn’t KKK racism, but it is racism nevertheless.   When Joe Biden or Mayor Pete constantly talk about the pain and suffering of white, rural Americans, I hear these same dog whistles. It doesn't matter if they are intentional or not. Their impact is the same. What they are signaling to minorities is their vote isn't a priority. What they are signaling to white voters is their votes are. This is both strategically and morally wrong. The more and harder white Democratic candidates chase after white votes, the more it sends a message to their staunchest, most loyal, most in need of their help the base they are second-class voters.

In 2016 I heard a lot of Bernie supporters say, “black voters just don’t know what they are doing,” or “if black voters REALLY understood Bernie’s policies, they’d vote for him.”  The white supremacist condescension of this is thick and telling.  I’m pretty sure black voters know exactly what they want from a candidate and who will best help them.  They were pretty clear, it isn’t Bernie Sanders.  White progressives don’t need to agree with this, but they have to respect it.  When they don’t, they are nothing but racist-lite whether they realize it or not, whether they admit it or not.  White progressives need to stop telling minorities what is best for them. I’m not saying minorities didn't have issues with Hillary and her campaign.  They did.  However, when it came time to pull the lever in the voting booth, they overwhelmingly choose her over Bernie by a considerable margin.  Minority voters saw the candidates and to Bernie they said, to quote from “A Knight’s Tale,” “You have been weighed, you have been measured, and you have been found absolutely wanting.”  

My view in 2016 of the Democratic Party and the two major candidates for president was formed over a lot of time and thought.  It has been helped along by a couple of different sources as well as the most influential work on social ethics I’ve ever read.  The two outside sources that had the greatest influence in pushing me to a better understanding of the issues could not be more different.  One is a black woman on Twitter, Propane Jane, the other is a reformed white conservative blogger, John Cole.   Propane Jane is a psychiatrist from Houston Texas who, when she isn’t writing books goes on twitter rants that are so precise, brutally honest, and insightful about racism in America, I’m often stunned how 140 characters can have so much impact.  She has no time for bullshit or sugarcoating.  Every once in a while she will say something that at first blush seems completely wrong and my defenses go up.  But, if I put my defense mechanism away and am honest about the tweet, she’s completely right.  Her tweet storms are so legendary, they are often storified by others.  Here is one from January that gets to the heart of the problem with the Democratic Party and Bernie Sanders’ campaign with regard to their base: John Cole at “Balloon Juice,” started blogging in 2002 shortly after 9/11.  He was a die-hard conservative.  The actions of the Bush administration in Iraq, Abu Gharib, and the Terri Schiavo case pushed him to take a hard look at his belief in conservatism.  His blog went from being a go-to site for staunch conservatives to a mainstay for progressives.  Earlier this month he wrote an article titled: “I’ve Kind of Made My Decision,” that addresses his take on the Democratic primary and why he is supporting Hillary.  When I read it, I said to myself, “This is exactly how I feel and why.”  He lays out a number of reasons he is supporting Hillary over Bernie, but the one that stood out to me was the one where he admits that since the 2008 campaign, he has been exposed to more voices of women and POC and it has made him reevaluate how he views politics. “In my opinion as a white single male with a degree of financial stability, beyond agita and heartburn, I have very little at stake in this election. I’m not going to be drafted, my insurance won’t be lost if ACA is repealed, I won’t have to worry about losing my ability to get pap smears or mammograms or basic health services if PP is closed down, I won’t have to worry about feeding my children, I won’t have to worry about the right to control my body, I won’t have to worry about getting shot in the street for walking while white or be found dead in a jail cell after failing to signal a lane change. These are not and will not be a concern for me, ever. “ In other words, his concerns for himself fall in the top levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and the concerns of many women and POC fall in the bottom levels.  To put it another way, his problems are first world, white people problems that, when looked at in comparison to others seem trivial and shallow.  This is where he and Propane Jane intersect.  While John is pointed out how the outcome of the election really won’t impact him because of his station in life, Jane laid bare the lives of those who don’t enjoy that station.    Many white progressives are not as self-reflective as John.  They don’t see they are arguing for and from their own privilege.  Pointing out their lack of self-awareness and politics of privileged self-interest is Jane’s specialty.  While privileged white progressives are pissed bankers weren’t jailed because of the financial crisis, black families are worried about whether or not their child will be shot by the police, whether their unarmed teenager will be gunned down in the street, whether the rigged justice system will take their father away, whether or not their state government will give its wealthiest citizens more tax cuts while cutting social safety net programs, how to avoid being arrested or fined by a police force that uses the poor and disadvantaged to fund their department…

All of this is a perfect example of philosopher John Rawls’ “Difference Principle.”  Rawls in his seminal work, “A Theory of Justice” laid out an ethical framework for social justice.  One of the main tenets is his “Difference Principle.”  In a nutshell, the Difference Principle  says, “a law/rule/policy in society is only justified if it helps those disadvantaged as much or more than those advantaged.”  For example, a tax cut would be just and fair if those at the bottom of the economic ladder are helped by it as much or more than those at the top.  Any law/rule/policy that improved the position of the advantaged more than or at the expense of the disadvantaged would be unfair, unjust.  

When it comes to ethics, I am a devout Rawlsian.  “A Theory of Justice” is my ethical bible.  When I apply it to the ideas and policy proposals of the current Democratic candidates for president, Hillary’s lined up more with Rawls than Bernie.  It isn’t that Bernie’s or Joe's or Mayor Pete's ideas are not good or don’t have merit.  Many do.  However, their views operate from a top-down approach and this is the direct opposite of Rawls.  I’m not saying Hillary’s ideas were perfect Rawlsian, they were not.  However, more of her ideas operate from a bottom-up approach.  This is what John Cole was getting at in his article.  This is what Propane Jane gets at constantly with her tweets. Like it or not, there are two and only two major political parties in America.  Currently, one of these two is batshit crazy.  It appeals to and actively recruits angry, white, racist, misogynist, ignorant males.  The other party, faults and all, has a very large base of the most disadvantaged in society.  The reason I am a proud liberal and vote for Democratic candidates is that it is in the best position to help those who need it the most.  As a fifty-eight-year-old white man, I have enjoyed many benefits for the mere facts I am white and male.  Often, these benefits have come at the expense of people not like me.  I can’t change what has happened, but I can change what does happen.  I can and will push and vote for people and policies that improve the situations, opportunities, and lives of those who were not born with this privilege.  In so doing, I have two choices: I can either take an approach that I know what’s best for those less fortunate; Or, I can listen to the people who have the most to lose, the most skin in the political game.  If I opt for the first choice, I am perpetuating my white privilege.  I am no better than any white progressive who tells POC voters they don’t know what they are doing.  If I choose the second option, the consequence is not supporting Democratic candidates who are hell-bent on chasing the elusive white voter. I listened to every possible argument for Bernie and against Hillary in 2016, I am currently listening to every argument for Bernie/Joe/Pete versus Elizabeth/Kamala/Amy...  When push comes to shove, every single one of these arguments takes a backseat to the social justice and ethical argument I’ve discussed.  The future of the Democratic Party is with minorities.  The social justice argument belongs to them, not white middle-aged men or white college students.  The latter are important and their needs should be taken into consideration, but not in front or at the expense of the former.  I believe in equality, justice, and fairness with no qualifications, no asterisks that somewhere in really small fine print says, “people of color, women, gays, etc. need not apply” or “are separate but equal” or any other bullshit.  I can’t support any party or candidate whose main focus is white working class men, especially those who have voted against their own self-interest for decades because they don’t want “those people” to get something they don’t believe they deserve.  Fuck them.  They made their choices based largely on racism and bigotry.  They had choices and options and fucked them up.  Minorities and women, for the most part, have had neither.  It’s about damn time they did.  It’s about damn time we start listening to them.

[dipulb3]

Analysis: Going deeper on the battle for Hispanic voters

New Post has been published on https://appradab.com/analysis-going-deeper-on-the-battle-for-hispanic-voters/

Analysis: Going deeper on the battle for Hispanic voters

With Election Day just five days away, Latino voters are expected to be consequential in states including Florida and Arizona. In fact, President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden held dueling events in the Sunshine State on Thursday. And Trump held two rallies in Arizona on Wednesday.

But don’t mistake Latino voters for a monolith.

Meanwhile, it’s possible that Latino voters in Arizona, which the Republican presidential nominee has won in every election since 1952 save for one, could deliver the state to Biden. Arizona’s Latino voters are much more likely to be from Mexico or elsewhere in Latin America. A big push from this group, which tends to favor Democrats, would complicate Trump’s quest for reelection. A recent CBS News/YouGov poll puts Biden’s advantage among Arizona’s Latino voters at 61% to 33%.

“Whoever wins the Latino vote is going to win Maricopa County. And whoever wins Maricopa County is going to win Arizona,” Joseph Garcia, the director of the nonprofit Chicanos Por La Causa Action Fund, told The Guardian. “And whoever wins Arizona is likely to win the White House.”

Over the past several days, Trump has pushed to gain the backing of Latino voters in key states — but through characteristically vague and anemic appeals, as my Appradab colleague Maegan Vazquez wrote of his “American Dream Plan” for Latino communities.

Crucially, while Latino voters are a Democratic-leaning group, that doesn’t mean that the former vice president hasn’t been facing challenges with this bloc. Compared with Hillary Clinton in 2016, Biden is winning Latino voters by fewer points in preelection polls. His campaign also has received criticism for reaching out to these voters later in the game.

To discuss the battle for Latino voters — what it looks like, what lessons it offers for the future — I spoke with Democratic California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who from 1993 to 2017 was a US representative from California. During his tenure, he was a visible member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

The following conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

There’s long been this notion that Latino voters are the “sleeping giant”: a politically inert bloc with massive potential. But these days, the term seems too simple and timeworn, as many people are pointing out. What are your thoughts on how we, as a society, tend to characterize — even mischaracterize — Latino voters?

More and more, the Latino community is becoming familiar with being American. You’re seeing more and more integration and participation in the things that we sometimes take for granted as Americans.

My parents have always voted, though they were new voters. As an immigrant, you become a new voter after you become a citizen. What you’re finding is that the experience their generation had to go through to understand the process is very different today, when there are programs to help people become citizens, to learn what it means to exercise their rights as citizens.

So participation is growing. More and more, you’re finding that the Latino community, like other communities, is becoming active. And honestly, it’s being driven not by very seasoned people but by young people, a trend that bodes well moving into the future.

Could you talk a little bit more about young Latino voters? It sounds like there’s an interesting shift taking place.

You’re seeing that younger voters are more cognizant of the circumstances of the vote — what it means.

Quick example. There are hundreds of thousands of young Latinos who are Dreamers and can’t vote. But I guarantee that they’re active on the campaign trail, and for a righteous reason: They can’t help themselves to a vote, so they’re going to reach those who can. They have many friends who do have the right to vote. And these friends don’t understand why they can vote but others can’t, and they’ve become politically active because they see the injustice visiting their peers.

So it’s activism that comes from a personal experience and that maybe a generation ago wasn’t as salient. This activism has always sort of been there — the whole issue of immigration. But now it’s so salient because Trump, in trying to repeal the DACA program and in being so frontal in his assaults against immigrant families — has made it very personal. Activism has taken on heightened importance for many but especially for the younger generation.

What about Biden? What are some of the challenges that the campaign has been confronted with regarding Latino voters — it’s gotten some flak for seemingly neglecting them — and how has the campaign sought to overcome these challenges?

Remember that there were many candidates early on during the Democratic primary, and it was difficult for Biden to break through. There was a point when a lot of the resources for the Biden campaign had been exhausted. But then all of a sudden when he caught fire and it became clear that he’d be the nominee, he had to play catch-up, compared with the Trump campaign, in terms of resources and being able to reach out.

But what the Biden campaign has done is dramatic. It has 11 Latino vote directors throughout the country. It has multiple state directors who are Latino. It has what it calls Latino leadership councils that essentially help bring together the community to understand what’s at stake.

And all that is complemented by a platform that’s related to the interests of the Latino community. Without question, Biden can say when he takes office as president that he has the most ambitious agenda for the Latino community of any person who’s taken that office.

The blow that the pandemic has dealt to Latinos is staggering: More than 25,000 have died from Covid-19. Latino voters are no monolith, but what are some of the chief issues on the ballot for this bloc?

It always surprises people when I say this, but the reality is that when you poll in the Latino community, chances are the top three issues for Latinos are going to be the same top three issues you see in America writ large: jobs, health care, education. The intensity may vary slightly, but it’s largely the same.

Americans, regardless of their background, are most concerned about their jobs, about having the wherewithal to provide. And that certainly plays out more intensely among Latinos because, generally, we’re not a wealthy community.

What I can tell you is this. Anyone who can speak to providing for families is going to have an in with Latinos. Anyone who can offer security when it comes to health care is going to have an in with Latinos. Anyone who believes in offering a path to real educational opportunity is going to have an in with Latinos.

If you take a look at the two presidential nominees, you’ll see that Biden’s message resonates far more than Trump’s. Because while Trump likes to say, “Things are great. The economy is moving forward,” he forgets that most Latinos don’t work on Wall Street. In fact, he forgets that the very essential workers whom he insists go to work and not have protections are, for the most part, Latinos.

Trump is so out of touch with the needs and interests of Latinos that it doesn’t take much for Latinos to see the difference between what he’s offering and what Biden is offering. I haven’t even gotten to the harmful way Trump speaks about Latinos. Many people can disregard that kind of talk if they’re doing well, but Covid-19 has illustrated that Trump really doesn’t care about workers, in particular Latino workers.

Anything else you want to add, maybe about what observers should keep an eye on in the future?

I’ll just say that growth in civic participation is becoming more evident within the Latino community. I remember being interviewed in 2015 or 2016 about how there weren’t enough Latino leaders in elected office, yet political parties kept saying that Latino voters ought to go with them, though the parties weren’t giving Latinos opportunities to be in the highest posts.

Five or 10 years ago, there weren’t too many statewide elected officeholders in California who were Latino. Today, you don’t have to look very far. You’re beginning to see that Latinos are reaching those higher posts.

And so growth takes a while. But once it starts, it keeps going. And anyone who ignores that — who doesn’t realize that this is a community that’s only beginning to taste what it’s like to be involved in politics — does so to their detriment.

[newstechreviews]

Kelly Ferro is a busy mom on her way to the post office: leather mini-backpack, brunet topknot, turquoise pedicure with a matching ombré manicure. A hairdresser from Kenosha, Wis., Ferro didn’t vote in 2016 but has since become a strong supporter of Donald Trump. “Why does the news hate the President so much?” she says. “I went down the rabbit hole. I started doing a lot of research.”

When I ask what she means by research, something shifts. Her voice has the same honey tone as before, and her face is as friendly as ever. But there’s an uncanny flash as she says, “This is where I don’t know what I can say, because what’s integrated into our system, it stems deep. And it has to do with really corrupt, evil, dark things that have been hidden from the public. Child sex trafficking is one of them.”

Ferro may not have even realized it, but she was parroting elements of the QAnon conspiracy theory, a pro-Trump viral delusion that began in 2017 and has spread widely over recent months, migrating from far-right corners of the Internet to infect ordinary voters in the suburbs. Its followers believe President Trump is a hero safeguarding the world from a “deep state” cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles, Democratic politicians and Hollywood celebrities who run a global sex-trafficking ring, harvesting the blood of children for life-sustaining chemicals.

None of this is even remotely true. But an alarming number of Americans have been exposed to these wild ideas. There are thousands of QAnon groups and pages on Facebook, with millions of members, according to an internal company document reviewed by NBC News. Dozens of QAnon-friendly candidates have run for Congress, and at least three have won GOP primaries. Trump has called its adherents “people that love our country.”

In more than seven dozen interviews conducted in Wisconsin in early September, from the suburbs around Milwaukee to the scarred streets of Kenosha in the aftermath of the Jacob Blake shooting, about 1 in 5 voters volunteered ideas that veered into the realm of conspiracy theory, ranging from QAnon to the notion that COVID-19 is a hoax. Two women in Ozaukee County calmly informed me that an evil cabal operates tunnels under the U.S. in order to rape and torture children and drink their blood. A Joe Biden supporter near a Kenosha church told me votes don’t matter, because “the elites” will decide the outcome of the election anyway. A woman on a Kenosha street corner explained that Democrats were planning to bring in U.N. troops before the election to prevent a Trump win.

It’s hard to know exactly why people believe what they believe. Some had clearly been exposed to QAnon conspiracy theorists online. Others seemed to be repeating false ideas espoused in Plandemic, a pair of conspiracy videos featuring a discredited former medical researcher that went viral, spreading the notion that COVID-19 is a hoax across social media. (COVID-19 is not a hoax.) When asked where they found their information, almost all these voters were cryptic: “Go online,” one woman said. “Dig deep,” added another. They seemed to share a collective disdain for the mainstream media–a skepticism that has only gotten stronger and deeper since 2016. The truth wasn’t reported, they said, and what was reported wasn’t true.

This matters not just because of what these voters believe but also because of what they don’t. The facts that should anchor a sense of shared reality are meaningless to them; the news developments that might ordinarily inform their vote fall on deaf ears. They will not be swayed by data on coronavirus deaths, they won’t be persuaded by job losses or stock market gains, and they won’t care if Trump called America’s fallen soldiers “losers” or “suckers,” as the Atlantic reported, because they won��t believe it. They are impervious to messaging, advertising or data. They aren’t just infected with conspiracy; they appear to be inoculated against reality.

Sinna NasseriA man in a QAnon shirt appears outside a Trump rally in Tulsa, Okla., on June 20

Democracy relies on an informed and engaged public responding in rational ways to the real-life facts and challenges before us. But a growing number of Americans are untethered from that. “They’re not on the same epistemological grounding, they’re not living in the same worlds,” says Whitney Phillips, a professor at Syracuse who studies online disinformation. “You cannot have a functioning democracy when people are not at the very least occupying the same solar system.”

American politics has always been prone to spasms of conspiracy. The historian Richard Hofstadter famously called it “an arena for angry minds.” In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Americans were convinced that the Masons were an antigovernment conspiracy; populists in the 1890s warned of the “secret cabals” controlling the price of gold; in the 20th century, McCarthyism and the John Birch Society fueled a wave of anti-Communist delusions that animated the right. More recently, Trump helped seed a racist lie that President Barack Obama was not born in the U.S.

As a candidate in 2016, Trump seemed to promote a new wild conspiracy every week, from linking Ted Cruz’s father to the Kennedy assassination to suggesting Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was murdered. In interviews at Trump rallies that year, I heard voters espouse all manner of delusions: that the government was run by drug cartels; that Obama was a foreign-born Muslim running for a third term; that Hillary Clinton had Vince Foster killed. But after four years of a Trump presidency, the paranoia is no longer relegated to the margins of society. According to the Pew Research Center, 25% of Americans say there is some truth to the conspiracy theory that the COVID-19 pandemic was intentionally planned. (Virologists, global health officials and U.S. intelligence and national-security officials have all dismissed the idea that the pandemic was human-engineered, although Trump Administration officials have said they have not ruled out the possibility that it was the result of an accident in a lab.) In a recent poll of nearly 1,400 people by left-leaning Civiqs/Daily Kos, more than half of Republican respondents believed some part of QAnon: 33% said they believed the conspiracy was “mostly true,” while 26% said “some parts” are true.

Over a week of interviews in early September, I heard baseless conspiracies from ordinary Americans in parking lots and boutiques and strip malls from Racine to Cedarburg to Wauwatosa, Wis. Shaletha Mayfield, a Biden supporter from Racine, says she thinks Trump created COVID-19 and will bring it back again in the fall. Courtney Bjorn, a Kenosha resident who voted for Clinton in 2016 and plans to vote for Biden, lowered her voice as she speculated about the forces behind the destruction in her city. “No rich people lost their buildings,” she says. “Who benefits when neighborhoods burn down?”

But by far the greatest delusions I heard came from voters on the right. More than a third of the Trump supporters I spoke with voiced some kind of conspiratorial thinking. “COVID could have been released by communist China to bring down our economy,” says John Poulos, loading groceries into his car outside Sendik’s grocery store in the Milwaukee suburb of Wauwatosa. “COVID was manufactured,” says Maureen Bloedorn, walking into a Dollar Tree in Kenosha. She did not vote for Trump in 2016 but plans to support him in November, in part because “he sent Obama a bill for all of his vacations he took on the American dime.” This idea was popularized by a fake news story that originated on a satirical website and went viral.

On a cigarette break outside their small business in Ozaukee County, Tina Arthur and Marcella Frank told me they plan to vote for Trump again because they are deeply alarmed by “the cabal.” They’ve heard “numerous reports” that the COVID-19 tents set up in New York and California were actually for children who had been rescued from underground sex-trafficking tunnels.

Arthur and Frank explained they’re not followers of QAnon. Frank says she spends most of her free time researching child sex trafficking, while Arthur adds that she often finds this information on the Russian-owned search engine Yandex. Frank’s eyes fill with tears as she describes what she’s found: children who are being raped and tortured so that “the cabal” can “extract their blood and drink it.” She says Trump has seized the blood on the black market as part of his fight against the cabal. “I think if Biden wins, the world is over, basically,” adds Arthur. “I would honestly try to leave the country. And if that wasn’t an option, I would probably take my children and sit in the garage and turn my car on and it would be over.”

The rise in conspiratorial thinking is the product of several interrelated trends: declining trust in institutions; demise of local news; a social-media environment that makes rumor easy to spread and difficult to debunk; a President who latches onto anything and anyone he thinks will help his political fortunes. It’s also a part of our wiring. “The brain likes crazy,” says Nicco Mele, the former director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, who studies the spread of online disinformation and conspiracies. Because of this, experts say, algorithms on platforms like Facebook and YouTube are designed to serve up content that reinforces existing beliefs–learning what users search for and feeding them more and more extreme content in an attempt to keep them on their sites.

All this madness contributes to a political imbalance. On the right, conspiracy theories make Trump voters even more loyal to the President, whom many see as a warrior against enemies in the “deep state.” It also protects him against an October surprise, as no matter what news emerges about Trump, a growing group of U.S. voters simply won’t believe it. On the left, however, conspiracy theories often weaken voters’ allegiance to Biden by making them less likely to trust the voting process. If they believe their votes won’t matter because shadowy elites are pulling the country’s strings, why bother going through the trouble of casting a ballot?

Experts who follow disinformation say nothing will change until Facebook and YouTube shift their business model away from the algorithms that reward conspiracies. “We are not anywhere near peak crazy,” says Mele. Phillips, the professor from Syracuse, agrees that things will get weirder. “We’re in trouble,” she adds. “Words sort of fail to capture what a nightmare scenario this is.”

But to voters like Kelly Ferro, the mass delusion seems more like a mass awakening. Trump “is revealing these things,” she says serenely, gesturing with her turquoise-tipped fingernails. Americans’ “eyes are being opened to the darkness that was once hidden.”

After yoga in the morning, Ferro says, she often spends hours watching videos, immersing herself in a world she believes is bringing her ever closer to the truth. “You can’t stop, because it’s so addicting to have this knowledge of what kind of world we’re living in,” she says. “We’re living in an alternate reality.”

With reporting by Leslie Dickstein and Simmone Shah

[hotelconcierge]

The Subprime Directive

no one likes us / i don’t know why

I.

Trying to extract useful information from the 24-hour thinkpiece cycle is like trying to learn English by listening to low fidelity death metal: the signal to noise ratio is very, very low. (Admittedly, kind of a silly comparison—one imbues the audience with depraved bloodlust for unspeakable atrocities, the other is a genre of music.) The cacophony of 40,000 anhedonics exhausting every topical combination of syllables would be enough to institutionalize the Dalai Lama; words are infectious; once you find yourself forming political opinions about internet memes, your life is game over, A + B + Select + Start. I mean damn, I love pattern matching as much as the next former toy-sorter, but sometimes it’s okay to accept that a cigar is a cigar and a butterfly in New Mexico was having a bad day.

If you do want to stay “informed,” instead of doing something worthwhile like working at a soup kitchen or practicing the yo-yo, my advice is that you train yourself to zoom out. No one post-puberty will make a significant error of deductive reasoning. Nothing horrifies a teenager like hypocrisy: the first thing we learn out of Eden is how to circle A —> B around into Z —> A. Logic is easy, ask any expert on Aether. Nor will anyone worth rap battling commit a decisive factual error. Our flat earth has enough case studies to support even the most whacked ideology, ask any schizophrenic. Further, we humans of latitude have practiced the art of the squeal since our first lung expansion. We may be terrible at diagnosis, but we are the GOAT at identifying symptoms. So when you roll up your sleeves to shadowbox with a Bad Argument, you are going to face an internally consistent worldview backed by genuine hurt and fitting examples. This is why change is so difficult, and why other people are so infuriating: the problem is not bias, it is incompleteness. The only way out is to spot what is not included, the lie of omission, which requires perspective. Any given data point is both true and meaningless, a straight line across points makes you Nostradamus. Most arguments are nonsense, but when everyone chooses the same type of nonsense, that tells you something very interesting indeed.

With this methodology in mind, it is my contention that three of the most prevalent post-election news trends are designed with a single goal in mind: to prevent you from looking too closely at this picture—

—while humanity gets crunched into Google AdWords and fed to Cthulhu. The end of all things will be search engine optimized, at least we can take comfort in that.

Trend the first - Fake news: “Solving the Problem of Fake News” (New Yorker), “Donald Trump Won Because of Facebook” (New York Magazine), “Fake News Expert On How False Stories Spread And Why People Believe Them” (NPR), “Students Have 'Dismaying' Inability To Tell Fake News From Real, Study Finds” (NPR), “How Fake News Goes Viral: A Case Study” (New York Times), “How to Destroy the Business Model of Breitbart and Fake News” (New York Times), “The plague of fake news is getting worse -- here's how to protect yourself” (CNN).

Trend the second - Post-truth: “This Article Won’t Change Your Mind” (The Atlantic), “Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds” (New Yorker), “Why facts don’t matter to Trump’s supporters” (Washington Post), “Why People Continue to Believe Objectively False Things,” (NYTimes), “Why We Believe Obvious Untruths” (NYTimes), “It’s Time to Give Up on Facts” (Slate).

Pause—why do these articles, I suppose it’s too meta to call them “fake news”, exist? I mean, human intransigence has been around since at least the 1980s. And yes, Breitbart sells souls wholesale, but for every article penned in blood by Mephistopheles there are 666 million (Snopes confirms) incorrect tweets, tumblr posts, reddit comments, and Facebook memes. Where do people really get their news? The Urban News Network has no wish to enter such murky waters, nor do they want you to ponder their 2016 election blindsiding and whether, perhaps, maybe, their self-righteous sensationalism even contributed to this abhorrent outcome. No, quite the opposite:

Private browsing and Adblock if you must click the links, these sites will give your computer herpes.

Denunciations of “fake news” both aggrandize the media and flatter their readers—who, after all, are being informed by the Pulitzer-winning journalism that America needs. This crowd is even more pleased by articles on our innate resistance to facts, social science skin flicks brought back pay-per-view. Fake news is a concrete, solvable problem, but “Post-truth”—and note that anyone who uses this phrase is not just drinking the Kool Aid but is doing a keg stand with it—“Post-truth” is cozily fatalistic. “Some people, they just can’t handle facts. What can you do?” Needless to say, every human intransigence piece references the Trump administration in either the first or last paragraph, except the Atlantic piece, which compensates via a cartoon illustration of a Trump supporter being unable to handle facts.

It’s comforting to know that everyone else is dumb, else Facebook would be out of business. But imagining that 3/4ths of the U.S. is occupied by orcs is actually a little scary. It’s too many people to hate, and they have guns, and besides, it’s no fun to be disliked. “Why would they be angry at us?”

Trend the Third - The Oxy and the Pity: “The Original Underclass” (The Atlantic), “2 of a Farmer’s 3 Children Overdosed. What of the Third — and the Land?” (NYTimes), “‘Deaths of Despair’ Are Surging Among the White Working Class” (Bloomberg), “Study: Communities Most Affected By Opioid Epidemic Also Voted For Trump” (NPR), “Orphaned by America’s Opioid Epidemic” (Washington Post), “Disabled, or just desperate?” (Washington Post), “Why The White Working Class Votes Against Itself” (Washington Post).

Not everyone absorbs information through the cultish repetition of buzzwords. So, to accommodate visual learners, the Washington Post has been kind enough to provide photos.

He returned in torn jeans and, with nothing better to do, went outside. He limped to the truck and fiddled with jumper cables. He set a fire inside an iron bin and burned some trash. He inspected a sheet of aluminum he had found, wondering how much he could sell it for. He walked into the woods and walked out. He looked at the road. A car hadn’t passed in a long while. It was 1 in the afternoon. The day already felt over. (Washington Post)

Madie Clark looks in on her granddaughter Zoie Pulliam, 10, and a visiting relative at their home in South Charleston. Clark moved into the bedroom where her daughter Amanda Pulliam and son-in-law Austin Pulliam died of heroin overdoses. (Washington Post)

This is poverty porn. Orphaned kids and burning trash and mothers trailing secondhand smoke and framed pictures of Jesus. Sunburns and Frito-Lays and rotting teeth and AM country radio in waiting rooms. Dead grass, chronic pain, highway-Walmart-highway tessellated on a map. The loss of manufacturing jobs. A people devoid of purpose, seeing no option but to kill the pain or else themselves.

If you think the above paragraph is accurate, then I bet you think rap music videos are an accurate depiction of urban black life. It’s a stereotype, a stereotype constructed for your convenience. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your half-forgotten high school reading list. I don’t dispute that Dogville is accurate for some portion of the white working class. But it’s far from the whole picture.

Per fivethirtyeight: Clinton did well in medium-income, high-education counties; Trump did well in high-income, medium-education counties, pictured above. No one in a town of 95k median income is so overwhelmed by “economic anxiety” that they spaz out into intravenous heroin. #MakeAmericaGreatAgain is predicated on education, or lack thereof—class, not income. And to the neutral pH water crowd, that’s terrifying.

Different monikers have been proposed for the Urban News Network audience: blue tribe, White People, upper middle class, Aspirational 14%. For simplicity, I’m going to use “liberals,” but please do not interpret the following blast of vitriol as “conservative,” “leftist,” “anarcho-marxist,” or otherwise politically motivated. You will not find a policy proposal here. This is a critique of people.

The alt-right contends that a liberal belief in “multiculturalism,” uttered as a slur, is undermining the foundations of civilization. They’re delusional. Liberals don’t believe in multiculturalism at all. In its purest form, liberal ideology only recognizes two types of people: liberals, and the tragically misguided—who, if not for their brainwashing, would listen to hold music and take Zoloft like any sensible person. Oh sure, you can consume your culture. Dress how you will, eat your ethnic food and celebrate your ethnic holidays (how exotic!), place your religion on the mantlepiece, complain about white people on any number of white-people-owned forums and newspapers. Be as cultural as you want, as long as you choose cash or credit and don’t contradict the superculture. Zizek voice:

“The tragedy of our predicament, when we are within ideology, is that when we think we escape it, into our dreams—at that point, we are within ideology.”

Liberals do not want to look at cultural values, they do not even want to acknowledge that cultural values exist, because that would mean they have a set of cultural values, and ain’t nobody gonna FaceTime that abyss. So how do liberals explain the people who read magazines about car radios? If the FOX demographic contains human beings with thought-out opinions, then they are terrifying. But if they are would-be Tesla owners who have been cruelly deprived of Cotillion lessons, who have been tricked by Steve Bannon into liking Harley-Davidson and hydromorphone, who, as the saying goes, are “voting against their own interests”—then nothing needs to change.

As of late, this blog’s essays have been obsessed with a particular theme: how, in a capitalist society, defining yourself against something perversely encourages that something to exist. Your freakout alerts enemies, exes, and passing contrarians that they should rush to the other side; your panic deepens; soon enough you’ll pay the opposition to set up their bowling pins just so you can see them get knocked down again. But if/when your rage congeals into boredom and it’s time to silence a group once and for all, a different tack is required: pity.

The media coverage of the opioid epidemic aims to turn rural America into an Oppressed Group. It is the final bombardment of a culture war campaign that has been going on for decades, spearheaded by 600 episodes of This American Life crying “Look, even these savages have some nobility!” The Hallmark cards for Trump voters are not an attempt to heal a divided nation, they are Liberals Going Their Own Way. We want other groups to be post-truth, deprived of free will in an incoherent and unjust society, because this allows us to completely ignore them. For their own good.

Sam Altman of Y Combinator asked Trump supporters to explain to their vote. A few highlights:

“He is not politically correct.” Note: This sentiment came up a lot, probably in at least a third of the conversations I had.

“He is anti-immigration.” Note: This sentiment came up a lot.  The most surprising takeaway for me how little it seemed to be driven by economic concerns, and how much it was driven by fears about “losing our culture”, “safety”, “community”, and a general Us-vs.-Them mentality.

“He is anti-abortion.” A number of people I spoke to said they didn’t care about anything else he did and would always vote for whichever candidate was more anti-abortion.

I humbly submit that NONE OF THESE ISSUES were discussed in the run-up to the 2016 election. “Political correctness” prompted an eye-roll and a mention of a rogues gallery weakman (e.g. Milo Yiannopoulos). Immigration was always discussed in terms of economic anxiety or xenophobia/racism, never in terms of “loss of culture.” As to abortion...“What is this, 2004? Who cares?”

I have no idea if Altman’s sample was representative, methodology not printed, standard disclaimers apply. But I am concerned. As Hollywood liberalism disappears deeper and deeper into its own fractalizing asshole, those outside its cultural sphere—in America, France, England, and elsewhere—will feel progressively less heard and respected, which will prompt liberalism to bury its head all the more. “How come the white working class uses government programs while railing against handouts?” Because you are the government. They’ll take what they can, but they’ll be damned if they beg for it. “Why are all these hicks voting for authoritarianism?” Exercise some basic cognitive empathy, please. They’re not voting for authoritarianism. They’re voting for fuck you.

All I’m asking for is honor in dueling: when someone raises a specific complaint, address that complaint, not what you think that complaint should be. I’m not saying that you have to be nice to Trump supporters. I’m not saying their opinions aren’t—arguably—myopic, evil, stupid. But it's far better to say that someone has stupid opinions than to say that someone is so stupid that they are incapable of having a meaningful opinion. Liberal insistence on the latter has turned political discourse into a vacuum where everyone can scream yet no one feels heard. You should see what it’s done to their kids.

[freedomwriter1998-blog]

Latino Utopia and Backwards Britain

19/01/17

The other day I found myself playing FIFA 17. More specifically, I was playing as Brazil, against the 2016 European Champions Portugal. And I couldn’t help but notice how diverse the two sides were. For Brazil I boasted the likes of Thiago Silva, Neymar and Philippe Coutinho amongst Douglas Costa, Willian, Marcelo and Luiz Gustavo. I was mesmerised by the number of Black-Latino players and White-Latino players that were playing together for the same side in kind. Even on the opposition team I saw the likes of Black-Hispanic players such as William Carvalho, Joao Mario and Eder playing alongside White-Hispanic players like Jose Fonte and Cristiano Ronaldo. I mean, almost every national football team has Black players, such as England for instance, but the difference between a side like England and teams like Brazil and Portugal is that although Black-British players are as British as any other British person their relatives and ancestors came from Africa or the Caribbean and they simply see Britain as their home country, whereas the Black-Latino players and Black-Hispanic players who play for Brazil and Portugal almost always carry Latino/ Hispanic surnames as oppose to African or Caribbean surnames, as their ancestors originate from Brazil and Portugal as far back as their family tree takes them. I found this interesting, that certain countries seem to have naturally produced indigenous populations consisting of both white people and black people and lots more in between. I observed other Latin American national football teams, and many showed a similar correlation – Chile; Peru; Ecuador; Venezuela; Uruguay; Colombia, all these national football teams boast an incredibly diverse national pool, and 99% of the players eligible to play for these teams are of Latino or Hispanic origins.

This revelation made me reflect upon my own experiences of the matter. I remember travelling with my parents to Mexico, and I didn’t pay attention to it at the time but upon reflection I realised that Mexico was by far the most diverse place I’d ever visited with regards to the mixture of White Latinos and Black Latinos that we mixed with on a daily basis whilst we were there. My own girlfriend, who identifies as Black-Caribbean, has Black-Portuguese relatives. The more I pondered such things the more the subject fascinated me, and more and more I wondered whether there was a society out there that was free of racism?

I did some more research on this subject, and as it turns out, there isn’t. Unfortunately, racism exists in every country all around the world, and discrimination against any group is incredibly wrong. However, my research revealed that racism in Latin American countries and Hispanic countries is far different to racism here in the UK, in that discrimination is more stimulated by language, tribal allegiance or religious differences, as oppose to the colour of people’s skin. For example, the primary racial conflicts in Venezuela occur between two groups known as the Llaneros and the Criollos, and the conflict is far more tribal than racial. Bolivia has similar issues between groups known as the Aymara, the Quechua and the Mestizos, and although discrimination in any shape or form is unjustifiable, the discrimination in Bolivia isn’t a product of ethnicity, in spite of the wide range of skin tones ranging from the darkest brown to the lightest shade of tan that Bolivia is the home to. The philosophy that Brazil have adopted best symbolises the ideology encapsulated within Hispanic and Latino society, in that I discovered from my research that racial prejudice is not a significant factor in Brazilian society, in that the colour of one’s skin bares neither negative or positive connotations, as the colour of peoples’ skin isn’t acknowledged in any social situation or in any aspect of society, and Brazilians don’t define other Brazilians as ‘Black Brazilian’ or ‘White Brazilian’ and instead define all Brazilian people as simply ‘Brazilian’. Portugal, Colombia and many other Hispanic/ Latino countries adopt the same ideology, in that the concept of ‘ethnicity’ doesn’t really exist because these countries are so deeply integrated that racial tension doesn’t really exist.

It was incredible to think that somewhere on the other side of the world there were societies that were free of the type of racism and bigotry that occurs here in Britain on a daily basis. But more importantly I questioned why Hispanic/ Latino culture had such different ideas regarding ethnicity to what we have here in Britain. I dived deeper into this topic, scouring the web for an answer to this question, and what I found was truly fascinating. I discovered that to understand these differences one must apply historical context to integration and diversity. In Britain, we as a society naively think of diversity as something that first occurred in the 1700’s when the British Empire began to colonise parts of Africa and the Far-East, and people were brought from these places to serve aristocratic families in Britain as paupers and slaves, where they would live comfortable albeit unliberated lives amongst British high society, until Britain abolished slavery in 1802, thus ending the British Empire’s part in the practice of slavery. North America too have a different yet incorrect idea regarding the origin of diversity within the Americas, in that it is the widely-accepted belief that the first non-whites to integrate into the continent (aside from the Native Indians) were the black slaves from Africa who were trafficked into the grotesque cotton farms of the deep south, and the Chinese and Far-Eastern slaves that were put to work on the monumental railroads of the West Coast of America. However, society stands incorrect on both sides of the Atlantic, as the truth of the matter is that ethnic movement has been occurring since the beginning of recorded history, with records of people travelling from the Far East and Africa to what we now know as Europe dating back as far as the Roman Empire. Renaissance Italy, Renaissance Portugal, Renaissance Spain and Renaissance Constantinople were particularly diverse, with great numbers of people from all over the known world, including parts of Africa and the Far-East, integrating together within tiny pockets of Europe in order to be a part of this period of enlightenment that boasted a number of beautiful things, such as Christopher Columbus discovering the Americas, Johann Gutenberg inventing the printing press, and a glorious three centuries in a tiny corner of the world in which ethnic prejudices or ethnic stereotypes simply didn’t exist and all ethnicities were truly seen as equals, to name but a few.

It is this period of history that is the reason why ethnic groups in Latin American countries are so integrated and embracing of each other. During the Renaissance, Latin American countries were colonised by Hispanic countries (Spain and Portugal), and because Spain and Portugal were both already incredibly diverse and integrated during the Renaissance, they were able to colonise and thus populate the Latin American countries with Black-Hispanic people of African origin and White-Hispanic people of European origin, as well as Hispanic people of other ethnic origins. As a result, Latin America was not only born, but was born as an almost entirely diverse continent right from the get-go, resulting in the blossoming of a society free of racial prejudice as Britain knows it, as this society simply didn’t understand the concept of what we call ‘ethnicity’ because every Latin American person was accepted as an equal and every ethnicity was able to coexist as a result.

However, Britain unfortunately never had the privilege of diverse foundations, and until relatively recently Britain had remained a predominantly ‘White Nation’. As a result, other cultures, such as Black Culture for example, never had the chance to engrain itself within British culture as it did with Portuguese culture for example, and British culture evolved via the influence of predominantly British people due to a lack of diversity, which caused no harm to anyone until British people, who’d only experienced British culture, came into contact with those of different cultures, at which point these different cultures were met with hostility amongst British people. Prior to the 1950’s British people looked fondly upon those of various other nations, in that Allied nations of different cultures such as China, Greece, Ethiopia and Black-Caribbean nations, amongst others, fought by our side to defeat Hitler and Nazi Germany, and as a result these nations were looked upon favourably by British people. However, in the early 1950’s it was discovered that Britain’s population had dropped so much due to the casualties in the war that there weren’t enough employees in the country to keep up with the demands of big businesses, so the government devised a scheme whereby they would encourage those of other nations to come to the country to fill the high number of jobs that the country had available at the time. However, because British people of the 1950’s had become used to living a certain way for so long, the cultural differences between them and the migrants were more apparent, and thus the differences between the two groups of people were greatly analysed and contemplated by British people, which is something that wouldn’t happen in Brazilian culture, for instance. Not only that, but British people were afraid that more and more people would start following the trends brought to us by these new people from other cultures, and therefore saw these people and their cultures as a threat to their favourite things, like drinking beer at the pub or enjoying a traditional roast dinner or a Cornish pasty, as they were afraid that they would make British culture irrelevant and obsolete.

Yet in spite of the fact that racism as we know it didn’t begin in Britain until the 1950’s, it’s still a widely accepted belief in the 21st century that racism in Britain has always existed, and that simply isn’t the case. Whilst tribal conflict has always existed, such as between the Egyptians and the Hebrews for example, the term ‘race’ that we understand in the 21st century as being the concept that defines differences between ethnic groups, didn’t exist until the American Civil War, when the Confederate States coined the term to justify their abuses, mass murders and slavery that were suffered by Black people and Far-Eastern people in the plantations and on the West Coast railroad. Interestingly, it’s this point in history that defines the difference between racism in Britain and racism in America, in that the South became prosperous because of the grotesque practice of slavery that occurred on the plantations, and when the North took this vile practice away from them the South the Southern states fell away from the status of being amongst the wealthiest regions in America to become one of the poorest and most deprived areas in the world, just as Germany became after the First World War, and ever since then it’s felt as if the South has held a grudge against the Black community for triggering their fall from grace. This has made racism socially different in America compared to what we experience here in Britain, in that racism in Britain occurs mostly amongst the average British people with average suburbia homes and average nine-to-five jobs who are simply afraid that more people will start eating lamb rogan josh and jerk chicken instead of hot roast pork sandwiches, and British racism rarely occurs amongst those in higher socioeconomic groups because they tend to be more widely-read and therefore more educated and less naïve, and the only people within these higher socioeconomic groups that engage in such ideologies are those who use this fear amongst people to manipulate them in order to achieve another political aim (Nigel Farage for example, who utilised British fear amongst lower socioeconomic groups to achieve British independence from Europe). However, in the deep South on the other hand, racism is so engrained into it’s makeup that even those in high socioeconomic groups, such as government officials for example, also adopt the same misplaced grudge against the Black community that those in the lowest socioeconomic groups adopt, and therefore these people in positions of power often seek to ‘keep the black man in his place’, making the deep South one of the most backwards, intolerant places in the whole world today.

Nonetheless, whilst racism in all forms is without a shadow of a doubt the most dangerous ideology we face in the world today and shouldn’t be tolerated in any shape or form, it’s apparent that the rout of British racism is far less sinister than that of American racism, and therefore I believe it’s reasonable to suggest that Britain is a more tolerant country than America in the 21st century. However, here in Britain we presume that racism has always existed and always will exist and therefore act complacently in trying to prevent it, yet neglect to notice that these attitudes have only been prominent in British society for the past 65 years. Whilst it’s encouraging to think that we’ll leave this brief-yet-dark period of British history behind us quite soon, because of the intelligent, progressive attitudes held by most millennials due to greater diversity, I find it very unsettling that there are large numbers of people in this country today that are still fearful of other cultures pushing aside British culture and making it irrelevant to the extent that they aggressively spout made-up ‘race statistics’ to each other on a daily basis to justify their fear, and even voted Brexit, as it’s this fear and lack of understanding that’s holding British society back from progression.

But average British people of lower socioeconomic groups aren’t solely to blame for British society still living in a state of ignorance, naivety and bigotry that we should have escaped in the 90’s, as the government are just as much to blame. What I mean by this is that the government pays far more attention to places like London, Birmingham and Leeds, amongst others, that are already incredibly diverse and integrated cities, than they do to places that are less diverse or integrated. For instance, I recently visited the Liverpool Tate Modern Art Museum in the diverse city of Liverpool, and the museum had an entire exhibition dedicated to art inspired by Black culture, and was also located within the same precinct as the International Slavery Museum. It’s government-funded attractions such as these that take cities like Liverpool and turn them from diverse cities into integrated cities, as they offer the opportunity for people to learn how incredible other cultures are and the wonderful contribution they make to British society in the 21st century. However, people in less diverse/ integrated communities don’t have these opportunities, because the government doesn’t do enough to make people aware of all the wonderful things that are a part of various different cultures within such areas. As a result, people outside of integrated cities tend to gravitate towards communities that are made up of people who are of the same culture, due to the misconception that other cultures are having a negative impact on their own culture. This is a trend amongst predominantly White British people, but still occurs amongst lots of different groups in Britain today. For example, I recall having a conversation with a friend of mine at college who said he was perturbed by Arabic people who come to Britain and settle within established Arabic communities and fail to engage with people outside of that community, in that he encouraged the idea of people coming to Britain from all over the world and spreading their culture so long as they integrate and live amongst British people. And I can completely understand why he and other British people feel upset by things like that, because nobody likes to feel as if they’re being looked down upon, or as if they aren’t good enough to be a part of something, but that is the result of not accepting different people as part of your community and your culture. This is why I don’t think it’s helpful to have labels like ‘Black community’. Before I make this next point, I’d like to point out that some of my favourite things in the world are a product of Black culture, such as:

(HaHa)

But every culture excludes people, not because all cultures are prejudice, but because cultures will always attract some people and detract others. And that didn’t hurt anybody before there was so much movement amongst people, in that it wouldn’t hinder a British person to feel excluded from Italian culture in the 1930’s (or in the present day for that matter) because they don’t live in Italy, as an example. However, now that there is more movement amongst people labels such as ‘Black culture’ may make non-Blacks feel as if they aren’t welcome within the ‘Black community’, which may trigger negative feelings amongst these people, which may even develop into negative thoughts that lead to racism. However, I must also point out that whilst many groups in Britain should respect British culture, British people must also pay the same respect and mutually accept different cultures in kind, because the Black community in Britain only coined the term ‘Black culture’ because they felt rejected by British culture, and had British people embraced Black people into British culture more actively then the Black community wouldn’t require terms like ‘Black culture’.

In conclusion, there are places in Britain, such as London, Birmingham and Leeds that are heading in the direction of social progression, but places like Brazil and Portugal are still laughing at us for trying to mimic real diversity with integrated cities like London, Birmingham and Leeds that I have mentioned, because we as a nation are simply ignoring unintegrated places outside of the big cities that still hold the same fears and hostilities that they held in the 1950’s, and therefore these places couldn’t possibly want Britain to move in the same direction as London, Birmingham, Leeds and the other big cities want it to be moving in, which only deters people from different cultures from coming to Britain and therefore hinders the government’s goal of making Britain become more diverse and integrated. The modernization of Britain will come down to the British population quite simply pulling their heads out of their arses and seeing all the amazing things that other cultures have to offer, but in spite of the magnitude of such a movement I’ll be looking to Theresa May and her government to deliver that to the people of Britain. The future is bright, but only if we first enlighten ourselves!

[doctrinendonuts-blog]

Yes, Pennsylvania. You are a bigot.

Yes, Pennsylvania: you are a bigot. Dear Progressives: I understand that you’re in shock, because I am too. My Nasty Women Vote sticker is stuffed in my desk; I can’t bring myself to let it go even though I know that Nasty Women are outnumbered. As an American, I want to learn my lesson, so I can stop the internal and national bleeding. As a teacher, I know the difference between learning and making an unsupported argument (note to students—your final exams will reflect this). It feels like progressives are doing the latter. I’m hearing: Democrats focused too much on people of color and LGBT people (who apparently don’t work?) and not enough on the “working class.” “Working-class” anger, not racism and sexism, explains Trump’s win. The Democratic Party should simultaneously tack to the Left and stop focusing on progressive values such as reproductive choice and racial justice. “Identity politics” is dead, except if your identity is white, male, resident of a former manufacturing region. If you’re in mourning for America’s Unclean Coal, the Democratic Party should listen. If you’re concerned about your mom being deported, about becoming a mother against your will, or about being arrested for using a bathroom, then please take a seat. Your needs lost us one too many elections already. Yeah, no. First, can we please stop saying Trump won because steel and coal lost? The death of steel and coal predates NAFTA, according to economists, historians, and Billy Joel’s classic 1982 classic “Allentown.” Second, Trump voters weren’t poor and many voted against their economic interests. Knowing this, we have two choices: we can assume they’re stupid, or you can believe something other than steel motivated them. The road to 11/8/16 isn’t lined with shuttered steel mills, but with closed minds. The sooner progressives get used to saying this out loud, the better. Remember when we elected our first black president and many voters lost their collective minds? Trumpism in the form of birtherism was born of an explosive, racist rage among people who saw Michelle Obama as an ape and Trayvon Martin as a thug. Meanwhile—and this hurts, because we love our President– the Obama Administration allowed Republicans to falsely paint him as a divisive, my-way-or-the-highway partisan even when his compromises were enraging liberals. The stimulus bill was almost 1/3 tax cuts the GOP wanted. Had the White House crowed about this compromise, they could have painted the GOP into a corner and killed their message he was a divisive partisan before it could take root. Instead, like Lucy with the football, the GOP got everything they wanted, rejected the bill on party-line vote in the House (three GOP senators voted for it), and won the message battle. Lucy got the football back with health care. Instead of a single-payer system, we got a compromise bill based on a Heritage Foundation model. Again, the Administration failed to convey that this was a compromise bill or sell its own policy to the people who would benefit—the same Trump voters who are about to lose their health care. This enabled the 2010 electoral “shellacking” for which our President graciously accepted some responsibility, though the Democratic voters who stayed home bear just as much. Obamacare and infrastructure investments benefited the very people whom the pundits now claim the Dems forgot in our misguided insistence on insisting transgender people are human beings. The truth is, Obama did good things for working-class people, including millions of Trump voters who rely on Medicaid expansion and health care exchanges. But white America didn’t believe it, for some reason. When the incumbent president’s signature accomplishment is unpopular, you’re going to pay for it at the polls, and Hillary Clinton probably did. In spite of Obama Derangement Syndrome, Secretary Clinton left office with a 64% approval rating— 14 points higher than the President’s. The GOP resumes its war on Clinton, spending millions of tax dollars to wound her. They find no wrongdoing. Nonetheless, by the time Senator Sanders the presidential race on April 30, 2015, Clinton’s approval is down to about 46%. And that’s when it got really ugly. Any progressive who tangled with the Bernie Bros (and then got called a c--- for using the term Bernie Bros, and then got called a c--- again for calling out sexism) can tell you—that primary damaged her. Do you remember? Sanders, not Trump, introduced the rigged system into the election cycle. Sanders painted Clinton as an establishment hack owned by Goldman Sachs and unaccountable to real people. “Weak” candidate Clinton wins the primary anyway, and not because it was rigged. Sanders refuses to acknowledge the math and then claims that superdelegates he’d previously railed against as part of the rigged system should actually rig the system for him precisely because he was successful in weakening her. By the time AP declared Clinton the presumptive nominee on June 6, she was 17 points underwater. Although it’s true the email investigation remained active during this time, her decline among Democrats points to something else going on. Her trend line and Sanders’ go in opposite directions. Meanwhile, the GOP nominates a candidate who on a wave of racism, harnessing the rage of voters who have been seething since a black president was elected. America clutches its collective pearls. Nate Silver says oopsie but doesn’t mention racism because why mention racism? Thanks to pressure from Sanders and his energized base, the Democratic Party assembles its most progressive platform ever. But like Lucy with the football, his revolutionaries still don’t want to play for their own team. Sanders doesn’t do much to change that. After promising to rally his troops around Clinton and stop the bleeding from the primaries, Sanders retreats to Vermont, where he buys a third home, and tweets about billionaires while his disappointed supporters fall for former Lexington Town Meeting Representative Jill Stein, who claims that Clinton is more dangerous than Trump. Then Russia joins the Trump campaign and the FBI helps out (because why should Hillary be able to waltz into the presidency just by beating the GOP and the left wing of her own party?). Our nation holds the first presidential election since a right-wing Supreme Court gutted the Voting rights Act. North Carolina Republicans brag about suppressing black votes, and the results prove they were right to brag. In spite of Russia, the FBI, recalcitrant left wingers, Obama Derangement Syndrome, and the Roberts Court, Clinton still wins close to 3 million more votes than Trump, yet loses the presidency. (Breathe. I’ll wait). It doesn’t take long for the far left to blame Democrats for failing to see the electorate through a class-driven lens. Bernie Sanders takes a dig at Clinton and her supporters, saying “It is not good enough for someone to say I’m a woman, vote for me.” He does not consider that Clinton’s gender caused anyone not to vote for her. In stating that “The working class of this country is being decimated. That’s why Donald Trump won,” he does not account for all of the working class people of color who voted against Trump. Or that the majority of Trump supporters believe President Obama is a Muslim. Our class-first revolutionary says “Identity politics” is a game for middle-aged women. And look where that got us. But funny thing about identity politics is – white people play too, and Trump’s America is proof positive. We have a rash of hate crimes. White nationalists are celebrating with good reason. David Duke has praised Team Trump, including an attorney general designee who once prosecuted voting rights workers (ominously, Trump claims three million “illegals” voted in 2016, foreshadowing federal voter suppression efforts led by AG Sessions). But pay no attention to the chorus of “heil Trumps” behind the screen. With the threat of a Muslim registry, mass deportations, the end of Roe, and renewed assaults on LGBT rights, it’s astonishing—and frankly embarrassing—that so many Democrats believe it’s time to focus on (a) wooing the free college, anti-Establishment (white) youth voters who just weren’t feeling Clinton and (b) charming the working-class whites who were insufficiently alarmed by the "build the wall" and "lock her up" tendencies of Trumpism to reject them. Yes, we need to have a good long talk with those young progressive voters, nine percent of whom voted third party in the face of the Trump threat to progressive priorities. But let’s not apologize for failing to give them the candidate of their dreams. I’m a college teacher, and it’s my job to tell young people when they’re full of shit. Here’s an idea that’s full of shit: it’s a candidate’s job to earn your very special vote, and if she fails to do so, none of the consequences are on you. This idea is the civic equivalent of standing over a drowning person, dangling a life preserver just out of reach, and saying “you didn’t say please.” Saying Hillary Clinton didn’t deserve your vote misses the point. The point is, America deserved better than Trump, and you knew that, and you didn’t step up. Yes, we need to talk to white Trump voters. But let’s not reassure them we don’t think they’re racists just because they voted for a KKK-endorsed candidate who promised to build a wall, register Muslims, and promote stop-and-frisk. To paraphrase Chris Rock, what does a person have to do to earn the term racist—shoot Medgar Evers? The fact is, many voters are racist. Some who acknowledge Trump is racist support him anyway. We’re not going to make this racism go away by pretending white people have a right to be told it doesn’t exist. And so, my dear progressives: I ask you to remember how comfortable we were with saying (accurately) that many Americans rejected President Obama because of racism. Do you? Good. So do I. Now it’s time to acknowledge that Trump benefitted from racism. Now close your eyes and remember how, when only one third of Americans supported marriage equality, we committed to change voters' minds because the long-shot cause of equality was a moral imperative. Do you? Good. So do I. Well, 62.5 million Americans just voted for a KKK-endorsed presidential candidate. We must again commit to change voters' minds, because the long-shot cause of equality is a moral imperative. So say it with me: Yes, Pennsylvania. You are a bigot. Was that so hard?

[vincentvelour]

Caroline Baker on venture capital trends and the lure of Southeast Asia

Caroline Baker on venture capital trends and the lure of Southeast Asia

11/26/2019

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        By John Bostwick, Head of Content Management

Trade tensions, Chinese debt reduction and other factors have led to a 90 percent drop in Chinese investment into the U.S. over the last couple of years. Despite this decline, venture capital in the United States continues to be popular, with U.S.-based VC firms raising over $28 billion in the first half of 2019. That’s up nearly 10 percent from the same period last year.

The U.S. has of course long dominated the global VC market, but as the drop in Chinese investment into the U.S. shows, venture capital is undergoing profound global shifts. One area of dramatic VC-investment growth is Asia itself. According to an article in the Nikkei Asian Review, “Asia could overtake North America as the global centre for venture capital funding as early as next year.” The article cites a study indicating that five years ago, North American funds outstripped their Asian counterparts by $169 billion. That gap has narrowed to $74 billion and counting.

  Caroline Baker has been well-positioned to witness these changes over the past decade. She began her career at PwC in their asset management practice, with stints in Montreal, Sydney, London and Singapore. She went on to become CFO of Chandler Corporation, an investment firm with $5 billion of private equity and real estate investments, primarily in Asia. In 2014, she became Vistra’s managing director of the Alternative Investments division for Asia, and the global lead for private equity. She's based in Singapore.

    How long have you been providing services to venture capital firms, and how do you help them?

  We have been working with VC firms for many years, but in particular for the past four years, since the VC boom in Asia started. We provide full fund administrative and corporate secretarial services, as well as deal-structuring support. We can also work with the investee companies of the VC funds, ensuring they stay compliant — which is extremely important for the fund managers!

  In what significant ways has the global VC landscape changed in recent years?

  It’s becoming much more mainstream. Until recently, the VC market was a bespoke asset class. Now, more and more established fund managers are entering the space, and many entrepreneurs themselves are becoming venture capitalists.

  The market has grown immensely in Asia in particular. We are seeing more entrants into the market, and a variety of fund sizes are being launched, from $20 million for first-time fund managers to over $200 million for more experienced ones. Part of the growth comes from local government encouragement. Singapore for example has launched a new venture capital fund managers’ regime to make it easier to set up a VC fund.

  Are there certain countries you encourage firms to operate in and certain countries you routinely caution them about?

  In Southeast Asia there are many emerging markets that can deliver excellent growth, but are difficult to do business in, such as Vietnam, Indonesia and Myanmar. We don’t want our clients to miss the opportunities associated with these markets, so we encourage them to exercise due care and fully understand the risks before committing. We have offices and partners in many locations in Southeast Asia, so we have lots helping hands for fund managers to speak to.

  China is now the second-largest venture capital market in the world, with over 3,500 VC firms. Over the course of your own career, how has China’s rise in this area affected the marketplace and how you do business?

  Being in Asia, we have really seen the landscape shaped by China. The opportunity in that market is incredible, but it’s also remarkable the way that China has entered other Asian countries. The amount of money invested is obviously transformative, but they also bring their own way of doing business. We have had to be cognizant of how to work with Chinese investors and embrace their way of operating.

  After an all-time high in 2016, Chinese foreign direct investment has declined for two years due in part to tightening regulations and liquidity in China. How has this decline affected your own business over the last couple of years?

  We have seen fund launches that were focused on China flag somewhat due to fundraising difficulties, however this seems to be compensated by capital from other sources entering Southeast Asia. We are seeing increasing demand from European and even U.S. investors in the region.

  According to Preqin data, VC investment into China was down 77% in the second quarter of 2019 compared to Q2 2018. Why do you think some investors are less enthused about going into China than they were just a year ago?

  The U.S. trade war is definitely having an impact on investment into China, as are worries about slowing growth. I think investors may be in a bit of a "wait and see" pattern right now, but my view is that this is temporary, and China is still a strong long-term bet.

  China’s Foreign Investment Law was passed this year and goes into effect January 1, 2020. The law addresses foreign investors’ concerns over Chinese requirements to share technology with Chinese companies and the fact that foreign companies often have restricted access to China’s market. The law and related concerns speak to the fact that China is very different from many VC target countries. What are some of the pitfalls of China that foreign investors often don’t consider when targeting Chinese companies?

  The first is administration. It is not easy to do business in China, and even after all the due diligence is complete and you decide to make an investment, there is still a lot of work to make it happen. The second pitfall is access to information. You may not be able to get the information that would typically be provided by your investee companies in other jurisdictions. Finally, deal access may not be as easy to come by as in other countries. In China, it’s often driven by relationships.

  In light of the U.S.’s increased scrutiny of Chinese investment, where do you think China-based VC firms are likely to turn?

  We see these firms looking to Southeast Asia — Indonesia and Vietnam in particular.

  Vulcan Capital, the investment house of the late Paul Allen, recently opened an office in Singapore that plans to invest in Singapore, Indonesia and Vietnam. Why do you think U.S. investors are attracted to Southeast Asian countries?

  One major factor is ease of doing business. Singapore for example is typically ranked at or near the top of global ease-of-doing business rankings, and it’s close to many large emerging economies. It’s also a first-world country and an incredible place to live.

  Southeast Asia is also attractive because of its emerging middle class and sizable populations, along with less competition for deals relative to more traditional markets. All of these factors together represent a huge opportunity for investors.

  Have you noticed any significant recent trends in the types of industries that are attracting investors?

  We are definitely seeing a trend towards green investing, typically green backed by tech. There are some really interesting innovative products out there that leverage tech to provide impactful green products.

  Do you find that VC investors are investing in companies at an earlier or later stage than in previous years?

  We are seeing VCs invest earlier and earlier. As the market heats up and competition to get into certain companies increases, we are seeing VCs take smaller stakes earlier than ever. They may do this across multiple, very early-stage companies in the hope that one of them will succeed.

  A Pitchbook report released this month found that VC investments committed to female-founded startups have grown more than eight times in the last decade. Have you seen this trend reflected in the Asian market?

  We are seeing an increase in female founders, but it remains still by far a small portion of the market. However, with every step and with every success these numbers are growing!

  What’s the most memorable thing anyone’s said to you about working in the VC market?

  Generally speaking, it’s memorable when they talk about their investment returns! The numbers really can be mind-boggling. We also learn a lot from the actual investments our clients make, which often give us a glimpse of the newest trends before they become widespread.

    Join hundreds of global business leaders who receive weekly international expansion updates and need-to-know global information.

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[itsfinancethings]

October 21, 2019 at 08:00AM

On October 31, 2016, a 21-year-old man from Indiana named Damoine Wilcoxson was arrested after a three-hour standoff with police and charged with two crimes: the murder of John Clements, an 82-year-old man gunned down while getting the mail outside his home in Zionsville, a suburb 15 miles northwest of Indianapolis; and two shootings at local police stations.

The violent crimes, which took place from late September to mid-October 2016, were not initially believed to be connected. But investigators determined that multiple shell casings from the bullets fired at all three crime scenes matched up.

With no obvious connection between Clements’ murder and the police shootings, detectives sent the shell casings, along with other crime scene evidence, to the forensics lab, where they were able to identify a clear genetic profile left behind on some items. These genetic samples were then scanned against the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS), a national forensic DNA database used by law enforcement across the country, which led to a direct match with Wilcoxson, whose genetic material was already stored in the police index. On the basis of this evidence, Wilcoxson was charged, tried, and found guilty of both crimes, eventually receiving two consecutive prison sentences totaling 102 years.

Cases like Wilcoxson’s are known in law enforcement as “cold hits,” where detectives pluck perpetrators out of a genetic index to solve a crime with few leads and no suspects. Since this capability was first introduced in the late 1990s, the prevalence of cold hit cases has steadily risen. Today, with far larger databases and more efficient DNA processing, this tool is seen by some people as a kind of silver bullet for catching offenders, not only within the criminal justice system but also by anyone who has ever watched cable crime shows.

But what if instead of just bringing more perpetrators to justice, the widespread perception of law enforcement’s genetic omniscience was also preventing crimes from happening in the first place? Or to put it slightly differently, what if the fear of being done in by DNA is actually holding potential offenders back from criminal behavior? This would seem like an extremely difficult effect to measure, but some researchers are using sophisticated analysis of crime data to argue that it is real, and that it results in lower recidivism rates.

Just how strong the deterrent effect is, or whether it’s any better at discouraging would-be criminals than, say, incarceration — which studies suggest is at best a weak deterrent — remain open questions. And even if it is more effective, some civil liberties advocates argue that this sort of biosurveillance is likely to weigh more heavily on some segments of the population than others, raising genuine civil rights concerns.

After his arrest in October 2016, Wilcoxson’s case prompted a debate in Indiana’s Senate about who could and couldn’t be added to the forensic DNA database. As it stood, police in Indiana were only allowed to take DNA samples from convicted felons. Wilcoxson’s sample, however, had been added to CODIS after he was arrested for, but not convicted of, robbery in Ohio in 2015. Proponents of more expansive DNA collection laws in Indiana were quick to point out that if it weren’t for Ohio’s more lenient legislation, Wilcoxson might have got away with his crimes. So it was only natural that Indiana soon joined Ohio, as one of more than 30 states that now have “all crimes” DNA collection.

This increase in police authority was part of a broader and ongoing trend in the U.S., where DNA databases have expanded to include incrementally less severe crimes at different rates across state jurisdictions. When Jennifer Doleac, a professor of economics at Texas A&M University, read a New York Times article about this steady expansion across the country, she realized that it offered an excellent opportunity for doing what economists call a natural experiment. By comparing offenders before and after new sampling laws came into place, she would be able to measure the individual effect being swabbed had on future criminal behavior.

For example, she could compare future outcomes for people who served time in prison for burglary and then had their DNA added to a database, versus others who served time in prison for the same crime, but were not added to a database. In aggregate, one could surmise the effect of the database itself on recidivism rates.

In her first study, which used criminal history data from seven U.S. states between 1994 and 2005, Doleac found that violent offenders who gave a DNA sample were 17 percent less likely to reoffend within the first five years of release than those who did not; serious property offenders were 6 percent less likely to reoffend. In a follow-up study that considered crime rates in Denmark, she again found that DNA registration reduced recidivism: Those sampled were up to 43 percent less likely to reoffend in the first year. They were also more likely to find employment, enroll in educational programs, and enjoy a stable family life.

These findings were surprising for Doleac. “Going into this, I thought DNA databases didn’t work as a deterrence measure,” she told me. “I really was very skeptical, but the effect sizes on recidivism … are huge.”

For Doleac, the power of DNA databases as a preventative crime tool is best understood through the lens of behavioral economics, which considers criminal behavior as a rational response to competing incentives, a calculus of “should I, shouldn’t I” based on potential benefits and costs to the would-be offender.

This paradigm was first laid out by Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker, who proposed in his 1968 essay “Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach,” that fewer people will choose to commit crime when the expected punishment increases. But Doleac’s research suggested that increasing the likelihood of getting caught for a crime actually has a bigger impact on future behavior than changing the severity of the sentence.

“This is how DNA databases work as crime deterrents,” she explained. “Once an offender knows that these databases exist, they are wary of getting caught and so they are less likely to commit another crime.”

In 2003, a 22-year-old woman named Katie Sepich was raped and murdered outside of her New Mexico home. Traces of the attacker’s DNA were found under Sepich’s fingernails, which were scanned by New Mexico police on CODIS, leading to a direct match with Gabriel Adrian Avila, who subsequently confessed. Deeply appreciative of seeing their daughter’s killer brought to justice, Sepich’s parents became vocal advocates for expanding forensic databases.

Following passage of a state law a few years earlier, the Katie Sepich Enhanced DNA Collection Act, also known as Katie’s Law, was first introduced in Congress in 2010 to provide federal funding for state police forces to do just that. On an episode of the television program “America’s Most Wanted” aired that same year, President Barack Obama offered his support for the legislation, proposing that larger databases would help law enforcement “continue to tighten the grip around folks who have perpetrated these crimes.” The federal bill was signed into law in 2013.

The history of the U.K.’s genetic index, however, suggests a more complex story. The Brits were trailblazers in genetic policing, establishing their National DNA Database (NDNAD) in 1995. The database quickly became the largest in the world, and by 2006, contained 2.7 million people, more than 5.2 percent of the population.

The database had some early success in matching offenders to crimes, particular property crimes, but as it expanded, statistics show that it actually became less effective. In fact, wrote Carole McCartney, a professor of law at Northumbria University, in a paper earlier this year: “During the time of rapid expansion of the database, the number of crimes detected using the NDNAD fell in 2004/05 and did not significantly increase in the following three years.”

Similar effects hold across Europe and the U.S., where larger databases do not correlate to a more efficient crime fighting tool, and can even lead to increased margins of error. Some have suggested that this reduction in efficiency occurs in part because forensic labs become overburdened with new samples, creating a backlog of unanalyzed genetic data, rendering the bigger database less efficient in finding matches. Moreover, as databases grow and labs become overburdened, so do the chances of inaccuracies and false positive matches.

But for McCartney, this reduced efficiency is intimately connected with the database’s capacity to work as a crime deterrence tool. “There’s a risk that people will just say, oh well if we now have 9 million [people] on the DNA database, how come we haven’t solved crime yet? This will reduce public confidence in the DNA database as this silver bullet in finding a criminal,” McCartney said. “You lose public confidence, which in turn will reduce its so-called effectiveness as a deterrence measure.” Doleac concedes that the current deterrence effect identified in her research is at least partially caused by the “CSI-effect,” a term criminologists use to refer to an inflated belief in a forensic tool’s capacity to solve a case as a result of its media representation. But Doleac added that this effect — which functions subjectively in the mind of an offender when they are interacting with law enforcement — might be more powerful and persistent than some imagine.

“I think that when the police give someone a [saliva] swab and tell them they’re being added to the DNA database, the image pops into their head of these crime dramas on TV,” she said. “They think that as soon as they commit any new crime, their photo will appear on police station walls and they’ll get caught. This is an overestimation of the tool’s power, for sure, but I doubt that the majority of people who get arrested will ever go looking in science journals or crime statistics to correct this.”

Beyond the question of effectiveness, as forensic DNA databases have expanded across the U.S., there has been an ongoing legal debate about whether such surveillance techniques violate a constitutional right to privacy.

In 2009, Alonzo King was arrested on assault charges in Wicomico County, Maryland, and had his DNA sample taken, entered into the forensic database, and then matched to crime scene evidence from a 2003 rape case, for which he was then convicted. King filed a motion to suppress the DNA evidence, arguing that it infringed on his Fourth Amendment rights. The motion was initially denied in the trial court, but later granted in the Maryland Court of Appeals. The State of Maryland then appealed the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the case was heard in 2013.

A 5-4 majority held in favor of Maryland, ruling that taking DNA samples was “like fingerprinting and photographing, a legitimate police booking procedure that is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment.” But the dissenting judges, led by Antonin Scalia, argued that using DNA in “cold hit” searches was an unconstitutional invasion of privacy that eroded the presumption of innocence.

“Perhaps the construction of such a genetic panopticon is wise,” Scalia wrote in his judgment, referring to Jeremy Bentham’s design for a prison in which one warden sits in the middle of a circular building, giving the prisoners the impression of being surveilled at all times. “But I doubt that the proud men who wrote the charter of our liberties would have been so eager to open their mouths for royal inspection.”

But Doleac says there is a widespread misunderstanding about precisely how invasive DNA databases are. “People tend to think that this DNA is being used by the government to decode sensitive information about them but it’s not,” she said. “In my view, the privacy costs of [DNA databases] are pretty low relative to things like having CCTV cameras everywhere,” which most people, she said, have “become used to at this point.”

In a 2017 study, Doleac also looked at how much these databases may save us in purely economic terms: Each convicted felon profile added to a DNA database between 2000 and 2010, she estimated, generated a cost savings of between $1,566 and $19,945. From an economic perspective, this offers a powerful argument against historical policy decisions in the U.S. that have aimed to deter criminals by increasing prison time, which experts say has led to the current mass incarceration crisis.

But Terri Rosenblatt, supervising attorney of the DNA Unit at New York’s Legal Aid Society, argues that the “modern technology has made DNA databases more invasive than before.” As they’ve been expanded to include misdemeanor offenses, she explained, they have become racially biased, with an over representation of African American and Latino men, who are disproportionately apprehended by police for minor offenses. (The same is true in the U.K. In 2008, approximately 27 percent of the black population had profiles on the NDNAD compared with just 6 percent of the white population. Young black men were most overrepresented, with 77 percent of the population sampled.) “Over-representation of people of color is even worse where local governments, like NYC, maintain unregulated DNA indexes that include people who have never been convicted, and might not have even been arrested, for a crime,” Rosenblatt added in an email.

According to Marc Washington, project coordinator of Arches Transformative Mentoring Program in New York — which serves teenagers and young adults from ages 16 to 24 who are on probation — this takes a toll on communities that bear the burden of surveillance anxiety. “These techniques, they are used, they create an atmosphere of fear in certain neighborhoods,” he told me. “They are agents of control against black and brown men and they are not being used equally across the board.”

Doleac concedes that the databases reflect the racial biases that already exist in law enforcement, but suggested that it’s possible they could benefit these communities in the long run. “We don’t know for sure yet what the effects are by race or other demographic groups,” she said.

For the moment, however, this surveillance tool is fostering further mistrust between already marginalized communities and law enforcement. An apt comparison, Washington proposed, is stop and frisk, a policing method that was supposed to reduce crime but was used to target and intimidate African American and Latino men in New York and was ultimately found to be unconstitutional. For Washington, at the root of this type of law enforcement strategy is the belief that empowering police with new techniques will fix crime, when in his experience, the most profound deterrence happens by empowering people within these communities. Indeed, the program that he directs at Rikers Island, which offers mentoring to young offenders from people of a similar background, has a significantly more powerful deterrence effect than DNA databases, reducing one-year felony reconviction by up to 69 percent.

“We try to prevent people from getting in trouble by getting to know them and getting them to trust us, and letting them know that they have someone,” he said. “It is about looking out for the people, not watching over the people, which is like the opposite of a mouth swab and putting someone in the system.”

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

[ceciliatan]

G. Willow Wilson guest of honor remarks at #ICFA40

I’m in Orlando for the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA, pronounced “ick-fah”) where today the guest of honor, G. Willow Wilson, gave a terrific keynote speech at the luncheon in which she talked about how it is that some writers (particularly marginalized writers) get labeled “political” while others (of the most privileged groups) do not.

Some of you who read my blog might remember me getting into a Twitter storm in 2016 at a romance convention when I tweeted that a white, heterosexual, married writer had advised new writers “don’t be political on social media. Be Switzerland. Be neutral and don’t take sides.” My comment to that (on social media) was that only someone who is a member of the privileged class has the privilege to “decide” whether to be political. The rest of us don’t get to “choose” whether to be political or not because merely by existing we are perceived to be making a political statement.

G. Willow Wilson’s speech went right to the heart of that issue. What follows is a pseudo-transcript of about 60% of her remarks. I have recreated this from my notes, so please do not ascribe any direct quotations to her without checking with her first. Any errors are my own and I wouldn’t be surprised if I didn’t make a few while transcribing. (One little typo can change a “now” to a “not” and reverse the meaning of a sentence, entirely!)

I do these transcript-type blogs for my own record of things I find really noteworthy to talk about and to give folks who couldn’t attend the conference a taste of what was said. I stress again it’s only a fraction of what was actually said.

It begins with an introduction of the speaker by David Higgins, the vice president of the IAFA (hosts of ICFA) and then G. Willow Wilson’s remarks.

G. Willow Wilson GoH Speech March 14 2019 ICFA 40

Introduction by IAFA vice president David Higgins: You may have heard the Captain Marvel film just had a spectacular opening weekend, as the first female solo superhero film in the Marvel franchises, which has put to shame the [former Marvel CEO] Isaac Perlmutter’s wikileaked memos delineating his/the company’s anti-woman bias. I like to think that no one would be more excited by the success of Captain Marvel than Kamala Khan, the creation of our of our guest of honor, G. Willow Wilson.

Kamala is such a Captain Marvel fan, she writes fanfic about it, and [when she is imbued with superpowers] takes on the mantle of Ms Marvel. Although I myself have not written G Willow Wilson fanfic (audience laughter), I did help create the cover of this ICFA program. [Which depicts G. Willow Wilson and Mark Bould in comic book fashion fighting against unseen enemies.] Please let me let out my inner fangirl and gush about how much I love Ms. Marvel.

Let me also talk about the post-911 diversity efforts by DC to internationalize the Green Lantern corps. In the creation of Simon Baz there are elements combatting some problematic stereotypes while doubling down on others. Ms. Marvel, by contrast, is a great pleasure, and I teach Ms. Marvel in my class. Kamala doesn’t fit any of the easy labels that my students have been taught previously. Although they want to refer to her as Arab American but that’s not exactly true, she’s a second generation Pakistani American. My students arrive at [a really long string of words: second-generation Pakistani American millennial from Jersey City].

Part of the brilliance of Wilson’s writing is that Kamala’s identity isn’t oversubscribed to any one of those adjectives that describe her. Kamala comes to life and isn’t just a representative of a social category. Like her, Islam isn’t just one easy-to-understand thing. The fact that Kamala is a millennial is also important. Furthermore Kamala is loving, quirky, and inspiring. Wilson exhibits the same humor and sophistication in her other work. Cairo was recognized as a top pick by Library Journal, etc. [Long list of G. Willow Wilson’s accolades, and a detailed description of the novel Alef the Unseen.] Having finished a five-year run on Ms. Marvel, she has now started writing Wonder Woman for DC. And just days ago, The Bird King was released, a novel that tells the story of the last Emirate of Muslim Spain.

G. Willow Wilson: Wow, I’m apparently very busy! (Laughter) In my job, since I’m on these very specific comic book deadlines, you have to hit them month after month, but it’s easy to lose the forest for the trees. I have to move on to the next and the next. You don’t get to sit back and think, wow, I did such a lot of stuff. But hearing that list makes me think, wow, no wonder I’m so tired! (laughter)

Thank you for having me here. I can already see why so many of you love this convention so much. It combines the best of fan run cons like Westercon and an academically rigorous exchange of ideas. This has already begun to seed ideas into my brain. I wanted to talk a little bit about the theme of the conference this year: Politics and Conflict. I wanted to say something about the trends I see as a writer today in both books without pictures as well as comics.

When I saw the theme, I thought it could not be more timely than to talk about politics and conflict in genre. The roles that politics play in the genres we typically consider escapism, these are at the forefront of what we struggle with at the far end of the political spectrum. Not everybody who writes about politics is considered a “political” voice, while others are automatically considered political. It’s played out in interesting ways in my own career and life. Who is labeled “political?” To talk a bit more about that I’m going to tell you an origin story.

Once upon a time in 2009, I got the most extraordinary piece of hate mail. Every line was a different color. One was red, one was blue, the next one orange… Someone put a lot of work into this it, like a work of art! It was the old Internet so someone put a lot of work into a lot of highlighting to make it like that. This anti-fan or non-fan accused me of being part of the, now let’s see if I can remember all the parts: “socialist Islamist homosexual attack on America.” And as I read it back in 2009, I thought to myself wow, that is not a real thing. (laughter) But it sounds fabulous! (cheers)

This was before I took my email private so I used to get this kind of thing, but never one with such a load of hyperbole and such a work of art! But what was interesting to me was that I got this letter because I was doing a guest writer stint for J. Michael Straczynski on Superman. He was having some health problems and had to take a couple of months off, and I was going to tread water for three issues until he got back. Anyone knows that when there’s a big-name writer on the book who takes a break, the idea is you don’t change anything. You put everything back where it was when you started, and wait for the big-name writer to come back. I was told to “use Superman as little as possible.” I was happy to just have my name on the book and these filler issues were about Lois Lane reconsidering her life and going to her old stomping grounds. The artist they gave me came over from erotica and only knew how to draw women in 3/4 profile with this [stunned] expression her face. So maybe it’s not a surprise they weren’t very well received. But by writing these very mild, banal, filler issues of Superman I was labeled political. This occurred to me was something that was going to follow me. No matter how ridiculous and banal what I wrote was, I would be labeled political.

It was interesting to me to note that some people who wrote political stuff, on the other hand, were NOT labeled political. Some of you may know Fables by Bill Willingham, which is a large ongoing poignant exploration of fairy tales and fairy tale tropes. He was really the first to do that, widely imitated later; he created a genre-defining work. But he wore his Republican credentials on his sleeve. He is a friend and mentor. He was very generous with his time and insight, and when he was the toast of the comic book industry he would throw these infamous parties at Comcion. But he really wore his conservative politics on his sleeve. His beliefs come up not infrequently in Fables. I’ll read you this little bit:

The main character is talking to Gepetto, and there’s big conflict coming between fairy tale creatures. The main character says to Gepetto have you ever heard of Israel? Gepetto [asks him about it]. The character answers: Israel is a small country that is surrounded by countries who want to destroy them. They have a lot of grit and iron and I admire them. [Description goes on for a while.]

It really struck me that if I had said anything similar in my own work, praising real world events or countries, and putting them into the mouths of characters who were owned by a giant media corporation, I would have lost my job. But when I just tread water and write banal Lois Lane stories, here I get these hate letters. Bill Willingham could do this and face no reprisals. And all I had to do was exist and still face reprisals.

Why does that difference exist? When we’re talking about comics and graphic novels, these are a unique medium because they are visual. Those of use who are born with sight, we learn to interpret images automatically. But writing and drawing comics we learn to interpret things in a special way. You learn things as a comic book writer like if you want a cliffhanger it has to go on an odd numbered page, so it was be on a page turn rather than a spread which would be a spoiler. How do different readers interpret different gestures? It becomes political in a way other media do not because it goes straight into our brain that doesn’t differentiate truth from fiction. We believe what we see. And we begin interpreting what we see from the moment we see it whether we realize it or not.

And then when you are writing superheroes in particular you are using characters people grew up with. Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, the great irony is that superheroes are meant to reflect the zeitgeist, what’s going on right now. But people get very attached to the version of the character they grew up with. So when you reboot Spiderman and make him a black kid from New York or Batwoman a lesbian, and you do it just so you can tell a new story, something fresh and current, you get labeled political. That gets labeled a political and not artistic choice. Who owns those images? Corporations or writers or the fans? Who owns the characters, who owns the discourses around them? What do we do when there’s disagreement?

SF/F welcomes the reader to interpret the work because it is so symbolic. It invites us to put ourselves in the work and imagine things wildly beyond the bounds of our daily lives. There is conflict built into these genres that invite interpretation; interpretation invites dispute and discussion. It’s not always easy to know why we label certain things certain ways and not others. It’s been interesting to see this play out as I write Kamala Khan. My run on Ms. Marvel is done and I am now handing it off to Saladin Ahmed. The label of innate politicalness��here I am inventing words–is something that is kind of a spectre that has been hanging over this since the beginning.

I was talking with a mentor of mine and the editor on Ms. Marvel [Sana Amant] about how to navigate that political descriptor. I knew we were going to carry certain labels. A lapsed Catholic from Milwaukee with a typical American backstory wouldn’t get the same labeling. [Making Kamala Khan who she was] shaped the series by forcing us to put care and attention into every aspect of the series that we wouldn’t have examined otherwise.

We set our expectations quite low. We said let’s shoot for 10 issues and it will be really cool, and then we’ll probably go right back to what we were doing before. We didn’t know she’d have a shelf life. Kamala had the “trifecta of death”: new characters don’t sell, female characters don’t sell, minority characters don’t sell. The retrospective is that of course these various other projects failed for various reasons. But we had to create something that had joy and beauty in it and didn’t reflect the terror we were going through in the production of the series. Our editor Steven Wacker who championed us, our colorist, etc. the whole team. We worked more closely with the artistic team than any before or since because we knew there was zero room for error. When you have a character who doesn’t fit in a box, there is a burden of representation that unfairly falls under scrutiny. So everyone has to bring their A game at all times. Then we got to 10 issues, and then to 20, and then 30 and then 50, and then the trade paperback hit the New York Times bestseller list, and then the second one did. And we realized that we had pulled together a team that overcame the low expectations. Kamala survived and will outlive all of us.

[This success] can open the door for more. We have been living in a bottleneck for talent. When we didn’t consider representation [and only wrote/published for the dominant group/dominant paradigm] several generations of talent built up behind that bottleneck. That talent might have been lost if it weren’t opened at this extraordinary moment in history.

I’d like to close by saying nothing is impossible. If there is anyone who knows that for sure, it’s the people in this room. Thank you.

from cecilia tan https://ift.tt/2UBwi5F via IFTTT

[theconservativebrief]

I know we’re online, a space where it feels like everything we’re talking about is either iconic and the greatest of all time or a horrible crime against humanity that has ended our personal will to live, so I’m going to be very careful about overstepping into rhetorical hyperbole that makes you doubt my ability to process scales of importance or things in relation to other things. But I still have to tell you: There are so few objects in this world that fill me with as visceral and physical a rage as a “Hermione 2020” sticker.

Each time I see this sticker — which, if you’re unclear, is promoting the totally fake candidacy of a made-up British child Hermione Granger from the Harry Potter series for the upsettingly real position of president of the United States — feels the way a light pat on the direct top of your head feels. The way the Keith Urban song “Female” feels. The way that scene in The Sopranos where Junior Soprano breaks up with his girlfriend by shoving a lemon meringue pie into her face feels. The way a consolation prize feels when what you lost is, like, the belief that you will see women become full citizens of the United States in your lifetime and what you’re being consoled with is a dumbass sticker.

I mean, have you heard the phrase “adding insult to injury”? Have you wondered what you might use as the perfect, unimpeachable example if you had to explain the idiom to someone in just one second?

have you heard the phrase “adding insult to injury”?

To me, “Hermione 2020” is it. It says I am right that a woman will never be president, but that it’s okay because a fictional witch from England might. “Valiant effort!” it says. “Please retreat into the back of your imagination! Go ahead and unravel, placate yourself with your fantasy life, it’s fine!” I see “Hermione 2020” on cars and on coffee shop laptops, on YouTubers’ lapels and on innocent children’s school things on the train, on the internet and in the world. And each time I see it, I do unravel just a little more.

As we approach the midterm elections, and as questions of what constitutes real, urgent political action — the kind that protects others from harm and preserves some hope that democracy will not end — are again at the center of conversation, I’ve been wondering why exactly this one sticker is so uniquely appalling to me. Surely, over the past two years, I have seen enough “feminist merch” to be used to it. To not feel the need to bicker over something so small.

Is Hermione 2020 objectively worse than Supreme’s new “18 & Stormy” T-shirt, which features a computer-generated composite of 18 of the women who’ve accused Donald Trump of sexual assault or harassment, plus Stormy Daniels? I mean … obviously no. Is it worse than Outrage, a boutique in Washington, DC, that was, chillingly, founded in October 2016 and that sells an entire line of clothing that says “OMG GOP WTF”? No, I guess I have to admit it is not, and that I’d spend the next 48 hours eating Hermione 2020 stickers before I would agree to walk into that store.

I know Hermione 2020 is not worse than this Instagram comment from the “female-led brand” marketplace Bulletin, defending its “Ladies is pimps too” phone case: “We weren’t focusing on the literal meaning of pimp. More the colloquial meaning which is similar to ‘boss.’ Happy to chat with you — feel free to DM us about it.”

I know all this, yet Hermione 2020. Oh, my gosh. Even now, I feel like I’m one misplaced milligram of caffeine away from biting through my own tongue.

“Hermione 2020” was created by the in-house design team at New York City’s largest bookstore, the Strand, in December 2016, and is currently listed in the merch section of the store’s website with the product description, “Muggles for Hermione! This is the type of strong-minded, no nonsense wizard we can get behind.” The Hermione 2020 button combo five-pack description is similar to that of the sticker, but also worse: “Accio Hermione to the Oval Office! Can you even imagine how organized she would be in the White House? This is a strong woman we can get behind.” You can also buy a Hermione 2020 T-shirt, pin, mug, and magnet.

Similar items are available on Etsy and TeePublic, and from the Harry Potter Alliance — a nonprofit that reframes social and political issues through the lens of the Harry Potter series to encourage Harry Potter fans to participate in activism, and “the exclusive merchandiser for Granger/Lovegood 2020!” (“Lovegood” referring to the character Luna Lovegood, apparently Hermione’s vice president.)

To be fair, Hermione 2020 is rooted in the canon of the Harry Potter universe. In Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the play co-written by J.K. Rowling, Jack Thorne, and John Tiffany and first staged in London in the summer of 2016, Hermione Granger is the Minister for Magic. Widely accepted extrapolations from the broader Harry Potter timeline say Hermione took on this role sometime around the start of her daughter Rose’s fourth year of school at Hogwarts, which would have been in 2020.

When I spoke to the Strand’s head of marketing, Leigh Altshuler, a couple of weeks ago, she said the sticker is, in part, a reference to this in-universe event, and that the Strand often hides “Easter eggs” like this in its products for book superfans to find.

Sure. But merch does not exist just for delight. In fact, the Strand does not currently spend any money on advertising because it does such a good job with merch. According to Altshuler, the store sold 100,000 tote bags last year.

She politely defended the Hermione 2020 merch, which is sometimes more popular than the store’s Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Michelle Obama, and “Make America Read Again” lines, but sometimes not, depending on the week. “With the resistance and with this message of female empowerment going on, we definitely see that particular line at a steady sales pace. We hope that when we make these cheeky slogans, it helps people identify with the slogan itself and also as a reader, who is curious, who wants to be more informed,” she told me. The sticker is “a response to people getting more political” and is “inviting younger people to get more involved.”

“She’s so relatable and easy to champion”

“Who better [to do that] than a young female heroine that so many people in the literary world love?” she asked, and I was having trouble gearing up to argue until she followed it up by saying, “She’s so relatable and easy to champion.”

Oh, no. I know this is not what she intended, but I don’t think I can stomach, again, being presented with the impossible goal of finding a woman who is ambitious and driven and one-in-a-million smart and also relatable. Also not threatening. You know, not the hero of the book series that built a billionaire.

“It helped put a positive spin on things, and it still does,” Altshuler continued. “Maybe if somebody feels discouraged and like they want to give up hope, it helps people see forward.”

But forward to what?

“Harry Potter Nostalgia for Millennials,” on YouTube. Abbey Howe

Dissecting the broader trend of feminist merch for Racked just before the Women’s March last January, Aminatou Sow wrote, “Shopping is shopping and political action is political action, and no matter what anyone says, it’s very hard to blend the two in a sincere way that actually results in the kind of political change we so desperately need.”

She pointed out that while seeing something like a “Future Is Female” sweatshirt in the wild might make her feel just a little more comfortable for a second or two, it didn’t tell her anything about whether the wearer would actually be willing to “speak about injustice” when the moment arrived.

On a more conceptual level, her argument was preceded by comparative literature and gender scholar Ewa Ziarek, who wrote for the Journal of Speculative Philosophy in 2012:

On the one hand, art and aesthetics, implicitly or explicitly, have been a rich resource for feminist thinking about the nature of difference, gender, sexuality, and politics. On the other hand, however, the question of aesthetics has been, more often than not, subordinated to the more urgent issues of feminist politics.

My anger, while easy to feel, and an eye-roll, while easy to execute, is maybe not so totally, universally fair. There are great feminist artists who have taken on slogans and iconography as their primary media: Jenny Holzer, the Guerrilla Girls, Barbara Kruger (who also gave us the perfect words for addressing that Supreme T-shirt monstrosity we discussed), and many others twist the familiar language and symbols of our popular culture to make statements that question the necessity of our terrible structures.

In Kruger’s work in particular, the female body is described as a battlefield, and the ways in which feminists can control and distort public perceptions of their bodies — not explicitly with graphic tees, but not explicitly not with graphic tees — is framed as guerrilla warfare. The problem is the temptation to do this and nothing else.

Since I guess I don’t, not really, not purely, have an issue with people wearing slogan shirts, I think more of what frustrates me about Hermione 2020 is that it references the dull, inane, continued use of Harry Potter analogies to explain political realities that are either far more complicated or far more grim than could possibly be elucidated by a series of children’s novels.

“Even Hogwarts fell to Voldemort,” people tweeted after the election. “It’s Dolores Umbridge shit,” a famous scientist tweeted about the details coming out of a child immigrant detainment camp on the US border, referencing the evil headmaster who took over the school in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. The pleading refrain of “read another book” became so common, it’s now a meme.

“The internet is always going to be the internet, and there’s always going to be someone who’s unhappy with something,” Altshuler told me, seeming annoyed for the first and only time in our conversation. “There’s always going to be people on Twitter talking about everything. In terms of us talking about Harry Potter or books in general and the relationship to politics … we are a bookstore. We don’t really get the feedback of ‘we don’t want to hear anything else about books.’”

Okay, fair enough! The Strand does not need to be my scapegoat. I hate this sticker more each time I think about it, but probably only because I’m using it to embody complicated questions it is not well-suited to embody, much like I am accusing others of doing.

Admittedly, I have a handpainted “Make Feminism a Threat Again” poster in my room. I don’t really consider it particularly clever or a tangible form of political action, but do like to look at it. I’m not saying hokey merch should be given an “all good” simply because I’ve indulged in it, but maybe I should do others the courtesy of giving their chosen presentation of values and beliefs some more generous critical thought. Not just a knee-jerk so strong I shatter my own chin. My anger, after all, has far more diffuse a target than one sticker.

“There was never an intention of mocking,” Altshuler told me. Hermione 2020 “takes the edge off, or the pressure off. I think we really were trying to maybe help people not feel so let down.”

I still hate it. But it’s fine.

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Original Source -> The unbearable condescension of Harry Potter feminism

via The Conservative Brief

[avanneman]

Gregg Easterbrook watches the lying liberal media so you don’t have to

What is the deal with lying liberal media these days, those bad old legacy networks like CBS and NBC, filling the air with their bullshit lies? Deceit is the deal, and the Weekly Standard’s Gregg Easterbrook is on the case. Unfortunately, Gregg, in his role of “Tuesday Morning Quarterback,” tends to hide his epistemological light under a bushel basket full of bad boy blather regarding what’s up, and who’s down, in the NFL. Fortunately, I read Gregg so you don’t have to, and this last Tuesday ole Gregg went on a tear, tearing both CBS and NBC a new one, from which I will quote at length.

First up was the CBS shoot ‘em up Hawaii Five-0,1 which Gregg mercilessly indicts for its cartoonish carnage:

Five-0, a ratings hit, just reached its ninth season. In each season, individual episodes have shown more murders than occur in the actual state in a year. [35 in 2016, Gregg tells us] Five-0 has depicted machine-gun slaughters of surfer dudes and bikini babes on Waikiki beach; gigantic blasts leveling whole buildings in downtown Honolulu; bioengineered diseases causing evacuation of Hawaiian cities; death drones killing hikers and joggers on scenic Hawaiian hills; Honolulu bank robberies involving a dozen hoodlums firing military weapons; wildfires smothering Oahu; exploding tractor-trailer trucks in tourist areas; attacks by helicopter commandos on Hawaiian prisons; murders of the governor and other top public officials; and at least 100 police officers gunned down, significantly more than the total number of law enforcement officers who have died by gunfire in the entire history of the state.

But wait, Gregg’s just getting warmed up. He saves his real fire for Chicago P.D. I’ll quote from what he has to say at even greater length, since he touches on so many things that bother me about virtually all cop shows for the last 30 years—that, thanks to dramatic license/“magic”, we in the audience always know that the “perp” is not only “guilty” but guilty of the most “heinous” crimes, and not only guilty of the most heinous crimes, but a smug, arrogant smart ass as well, and thus all too deserving of getting his ass kicked sans any of this due process shit. What these shows are really about is revenge—we want to see awful people do awful things, and then have awful things done to them in return. Worst of all, as Gregg points out, on Chicago P.D. (which I’ve never seen) the awful people are black and their hapless victims are white.

Primetime American television, which is heavy on crime procedurals, is trebly wrong in its core depictions. First, violent crime is shown as out of control, when actually it is in a generation-long trend of decline. Second, affluent whites are depicted as primary targets of violent crime, when low-income minority group members are far more likely, as a population share, to be harmed. Third, law enforcement agencies are depicted as super-efficient avengers who always get their man, though, as the Washington Post reports, in the past decade, police in the nation’s largest cities have failed to make an arrest in about 50 percent of homicides.

Chicago P.D. takes these structural faults of primetime police procedurals and multiples them, pretending to be realism while relentlessly distorting practically everything about the city’s law enforcement.

,,,

Further troubling about Chicago P.D. is that the show lauds torture of suspects. Brutalized suspects always turn out to be guilty as sin, and the beatings always cause them to reveal information that saves an innocent life. Whether torture could be acceptable if law enforcement knew for sure an innocent life would be saved is a complex moral issue. In real-world policing, detectives rarely know if they have the right guy, while torture is, itself, a crime. Chicago P.D. manipulates audiences into rooting for torture, suggesting cops have godlike powers of knowledge and would never harm a suspect except if given no choice to protect the innocent.

Constitutional protections are laughed at on Chicago P.D. In this season’s premiere, the protagonist busts into the apartment of a dope dealer, threatens his girlfriend, and starts burning the dealer’s $100 bills to get the dealer to admit where the stash house is. The detective has probable cause, so why couldn’t the entry to the dealer’s apartment have been done legally? Because real heroes don’t waste time filling out forms for some namby-pamby warrant!

Chicago P.D. suggests to the NBC primetime audience that crime could end tomorrow if bleeding-heart politicians didn’t tie the hands of heroic cops who inexplicably know exactly where every offender is at every moment and never, ever mistreat the innocent. I wonder if Dick Wolf would want to live in a neighborhood where cops are free to smash down his door and rough him up because only a wimp would go to a judge for a search warrant.

Most disturbing is that Chicago PD depicts police officers as the real victims of urban dysfunction.

In one episode, a foot patrolman chases a murder suspect while loudly yelling “Stop! Police!” After the suspect raises a gun and the patrolman shoots him, the officer is immediately fired, then prosecuted. In another episode, a policewoman observes a murder and shoots the killer while trying to apprehend him; she is fired immediately, without any investigation or union rights. In both episodes, mobs of angry African Americans form outside the precinct house—causing the viewer to perceive police officers as the ones in danger, and blacks as the real threat.

At the end of last season, a decorated detective—shown to viewers as dedicated to protecting the innocent—is sent to prison on a trumped-up charge in order to appease the media and a sinister African-American higher-up. Though the detective’s record is clean, the judge denies bail. As soon as the noble officer is behind bars, he’s stabbed to death by the drug gang that runs the jail.

Why would a judge deny bail to an officer with no prior conviction? “I got a call from the mayor,” the judge explains to the show’s hero. The media and the minority group mobs, it is implied, like to hear that white Chicago cops are being killed.

Maybe there are cities in which mayors telephone judges with instructions, though this is really not how the criminal justice system is supposed to function. But that’s how the criminal justice system is presented to NBC’s primetime audience, in a show that bills itself as the hidden truth about Chicago law.

Yes, we are living in Trump’s America. NBC tells us so.

Afterwords Yes, I am quoting an awful lot of Gregg’s piece, but I don’t see why readers have to wade through 50 column inches of “funny” jokes about wide receivers to find this excellent journalism.

The one thing I would add to this piece, which Gregg actually touches on in his discussion of Hawaii Five-0, is the grotesque overemphasis on terrorism as a threat on these shows. Since 9/11, all of the major terrorist events in the U.S. have been the result of a few individuals, either citizens or long-time residents, acting without assistance from international terrorist groups. We have had no incidents involving "weapons of mass destrution" of any kind, and, as I've said before, those weapons, while terrifying, are not, in fact, "weapons of mass destrution", being no more (and no less) effective than old-fashioned explosives and considerably less reliable.

Typographical trivia, anyone? “Hawaii Five-0” supposedly means “Hawaii 50”, since Hawaii is the fiftieth state. But (I guess) “Hawaii Five Oh” is easier to say than “Hawaii 50”. But CBS “spells” the title with a “0” (zero) rather than an “O” (capital letter). “Everyone” still pronounces “0” as “O” (again, I’m guessing), even though computers have made the distinction significant for almost forty years now. ↩︎