#law and society association conference

[aipuconnects]

Growing Your Career with Less Stress

Share strategies for introverted business owners or entrepreneurs on how they can build a solid network and grow their business without feeling overwhelmed by constant social interaction.

[garadinervi]

Litigating the Black Panther Movement: The Assassination of Fred Hampton, Featuring Flint Taylor, The National Lawyers Guild, American Constitution Society, Black Law Students Association, and ACLU, The Law School, The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, April 24, 2018

Plus: G. Flint Taylor and Ben H. Elson, The Assassination of Fred Hampton: 40 Years Later, «Police Misconduct and Civil Rights Law Report», Volume 9, Number 12, November/December 2009 (People's Law Office pdf here) [© Thomson Reuters]

[bonefall]

Don’t know if this is the right place to ask, but could you talk more about zoos? I’ve seen many people say that zoos are inherently exploitative and that we should instead focus on advocating for wildlife preserves, etc., but I’m not sure what to think of that. You seem to know a lot about wildlife protection, so what’s your opinion on this?

There are folks faaaar better than myself to talk about the issues of zoos specifically and I'll try to toss in some sources so you can go and learn more, but let me try and explain my mindset here.

Summary of my opinion on this: BOTH of these things can be poorly managed, and I broadly support both. They should exist in tandem. I am pro-accredited zoo and am extremely sensitive towards misinformation. I also do think the best place for animals to be is in their natural environment, but nature "preserves" aren't inherently perfect. They can also be prone to the capitalist (and colonialist) pressures that less informed people believe they're somehow immune to.

Because of the goal of my project being to make the setting of WC accurate to Northwestern England, my research is based on UK laws, ecology, and conservation programs.

On Zoos

On Nature Reserves

An Aside on Fortress Conservation

On Zoos

The legal definition of a Zoo in the UK (because that is what BB's ecological education is based around), as defined by the Zoo Licensing Act of 1981 (ZLA), is a "place where wild animals are kept for exhibition to the public," excluding circuses and pet shops (which are covered by different laws.)

This applies equally to private, for-profit zoos, as well as zoos run by wildlife charities and conservation organizations. Profit does not define a zoo. If there's a place trying to tell you it's not a zoo but a "sanctuary" or a "wildlife park," but you can still go visit and see captive wild animals, even if it's totally free, it's a marketing trick. Legally that is still a zoo in the UK.

(for fellow Americans; OUR definition is broader, more patchwork because we are 50 little countries in a trenchcoat, and can include collections of animals not displayed to the public.)

That said, there's a HUGE difference between Chester Zoo, run by the North of England Zoological Society, which personally holds the studbooks for maintaining the genetic diversity of 10 endangered species, has 134 captive breeding projects, cultivates 265 threatened plant species, and sends its members as consultants to United Nations conferences on climate change, and Sam Tiddles' Personal Zebra Pit.

Sam Tiddles' Personal Zebra Pit ONLY has to worry about the UK government. There's another standard zoos can hold themselves to if they want to get serious about conservation like Chester Zoo; Accreditation. There are two major zoo organizations in the UK, BIAZA and EAZA.

(Americans may wonder about AZA; that's ours. AZA, EAZA, and BIAZA are all members of the World Association of Aquariums and Zoos, or WAZA, but they are all individual organizations.)

A zoo going for EAZA's "accreditation" has to undergo an entire year of evaluation to make sure they fit the strict standards, and renewal is ongoing. You don't just earn it once. You have to keep your animal welfare up-to-date and in compliance or you will lose it.

The benefit of joining with an accredited org is that it puts the zoo into a huge network of other organizations. They work together for various conservation efforts.

There are DOZENS of species that were prevented from going extinct, and are being reintroduced back to their habitats, because of the work done by zoos. The scimitar-horned oryx, takhi, California condor, the Galapagos tortoise, etc. Some of these WERE extinct in the wild and wouldn't BE here if it hadn't been for zoos!

The San Diego zoo is preventing the last remaining hawaiian crows from embracing oblivion right now, a species for which SO LITTLE of its wild behavior is known they had to write the book on caring for them, and Chester zoo worked in tandem with the Uganda Wildlife Authority to provide tech and funding towards breakthroughs in surveying wild pangolins.

Don't get me wrong;

MOST zoos are not accredited,

nor is accreditation is REQUIRED to make a good zoo,

nor does it automatically PROVE nothing bad has happened in the zoo,

There are a lot more Sam Tiddles' Personal Zebra Pits than there are Chester Zoos.

That's worth talking about! We SHOULD be having conversations on things like,

Is it appropriate to keep and breed difficult, social megafauna, like elephants or cetaceans? What does the data say? Are there any circumstances where that would be okay, IF the data does confirm we can never provide enough space or stimulation to perfectly meet those species' needs?

How can we improve animal welfare for private zoos? Should we tighten up regulations on who can start or run one (yes)? Are there enough inspectors (no)?

Do those smaller zoos meaningfully contribute to better conservation? How do we know if they are properly educating their visitors? Can we prove this one way or the other?

Who watches the watchmen? Accreditation societies hold themselves accountable. Do these organizations truly have enough transparency?

(I don't agree with Born Free's ultimate conclusion that we should "phase out" zoos, but you should always understand the opposing arguments)

But bottom line of my opinion is; Good zoos are deeply important, and they have a tangible benefit to wildlife conservation. Anyone who tries to tell you that "zoos are inherently unethical" either knows very little about zoos or real conservation work, or... is hiding some deeper, more batshit take, like "having wild animals in any kind of captivity is unlawful imprisonment."

(you'll also get a lot more work done in regulating the exotic animal trade in the UK if you go after private owners, btw. zoos have nothing to do with how lax those laws are.)

Anyway I'm a funny cat blog about battle kitties, and the stuff I do for BB is to educate about the ecosystem of Northern England. If you want to know more about zoos, debunking misconceptions, and critiques from someone with more personal experience, go talk to @why-animals-do-the-thing!

Keep in mind though, again, they talk about American zoos, where this post was written with the UK in mind.

(and even then, England specifically. ALL UK members and also the Isle of Man have differences in their laws.)

(If anyone has other zoo education tumblr blogs in mind, especially if they are European, lmk and I'll edit this post)

On Nature Reserves

Remember how broad the legal definition of a zoo actually was? Same thing over here. A "nature reserve" in the UK is a broad, unofficial generic term for several things. It doesn't inherently involve statutory protection, either, meaning there's some situations where there's no laws to hold anyone accountable for damage

These are the "nature reserve" types relevant to my project; (NOTE: Ramsar sites, SACs, and SPAs are EU-related and honestly, I do not know how Brexit has effected them, if at all, so I won't be explaining something I don't understand.)

Local Wildlife Site (LWS) Selected via scientific survey and managed locally, connecting wildlife habitats together and keeping nature close to home. VERY important... and yet, incredibly prone to destruction because there aren't good reporting processes in place. Whenever a report comes out every few years, the Wildlife Trust says it often only gets data for 15% of all their registered sites, and 12% get destroyed in that timeframe.

Local Nature Reserve (LNR) A site that can be declared by a district or county council, if proven to have geographic, educational, biodiversity, or recreational value. The local authority manages this, BUT, the landowner can remain in control of the property and "lease" it out (and boy oh boy, landowners do some RIDICULOUS things)

National Nature Reserve (NNR) This is probably closest to what you think of when someone says "nature reserve." Designated by Natural England to protect significant habitat ranges and geographic formations, but still usually operates in tandem with private land owners who must get consent if they want to do something potentially damaging to the NNR.

Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) (pronounced Triple S-I) A conservation designation for a particular place, assessed and defined by Natural England for its biological or geographic significance. SSSIs are protected areas, and often become the basis for NNRs, LNRs, Ramsar sites, SACs, SPAs, etc.

So you probably noticed that 3/4 of those needed to have the private ownership problem mentioned right in the summary, and it doesn't end there. Even fully government-managed NNRs and SSSIs work with the private sectors of forestry, tourism, and recreation.

We live under Capitalism; EVERYTHING has a profit motive, not just zoos.

I brushed over some of those factors in my Moorland Research Notes and DESPERATELY tried to stay succinct with them, but it was hard. The things that can happen to skirt around the UK's laws protecting wildlife could make an entire season of Monty Python sketches.

Protestors can angrily oppose felling silver birch (a "weed" in this context which can change the ecosystem) because it made a hike less 'pretty' and they don't understand heath management.

Management can be reluctant to ban dogs and horses for fear of backlash, even as they turn heath to sward before our eyes.

Reserves can be owned by Count Bloodsnurt who thinks crashing through the forest with a pack of dogs to exhaust an animal to death is a profitable traditional British passtime.

Or you can literally just pretend that you accidentally chased a deer for several hours and then killed it while innocently sending your baying hounds down a trail. (NOTE: I am pro-hunting, but not pro-animal cruelty.)

The Forestry Commission can slobber enthusiastically while replacing endangered wildlife habitats with non-native, invasive sitka spruce plantations, pretending most trees are equal while conveniently prioritizing profitable timber species.

I have STORIES to tell about the absolute Looney Tunes bullshit that's going on between conservationists and rich assholes who want to sell grouse hunting access, but I'll leave it at this fascinating tidbit about air guns and mannequins which are "totally, absolutely there for no nefarious reason at all, certainly not to prevent marsh harriers from nesting in an area where they also keep winding up mysteriously killed in illegal snares, no no no"

BUT. Since Nature Reserve isn't a hard defined legal concept, and any organization could get involved in local conservation in the UK, and just about anyone or anything could own one... IT'S CHESTER ZOO WITH THE STEEL CHAIR!!

They received a grant in 2021 to restore habitat to a stretch of 10 miles extending outside of their borders, working with TONS of other entities such as local government and conservation charities in the process. There's now 6,000 square meters of restored meadow, an orchard, new ponds, and maintained reedbeds, because of them.

It isn't just Chester Zoo, either. It's all over the UK. Durrel Wildlife, which runs Jersey Zoo, just acquired 18,500 acres to rewild in Perthshire. Citizen Zoo is working with the Beaver Trust to bring beavers back to London and is always looking for volunteers to help with their river projects, and the Edinburgh Zoo is equipped with gene labs being used to monitor and analyze the remaining populations of non-hybrid Scottish Wildcats.

The point being,

Nature preserves have problems too. They are not magical fairy kingdoms that you put up a fence around and then declare you Saved Nature Hooray! They need to be protected. They need to be continuously assessed. They are prone to capitalist pressures just like everything else on this hell planet. Go talk to my boy Karl he'll give you a hug about it.

"Nature Preserves" are NOT an "alternative" to zoos and vice versa. They do not do the same thing. A zoo is a center of education and wildlife research which displays exotic animals. A nature preserve is a parcel of native ecosystem. We need LOTS of nature preserves and we need them well-managed ASAP.

We could never just "replace" zoos with nature preserves, and we're nowhere near the amount of protected ecosystem space to start thinking of scaling back animals in captivity. Until King Arthur comes out of hibernation to save Britain, that's the world we live in.

An Aside

My project and my research is based on the isle of Great Britain. The more I learn about the ecosystems that are naturally found there, the more venomously I reject the old lie, "humans are a blight."

YOU are an animal. You're a big one, too. You know what the role of big animals in an ecosystem are? Change. Elephants knock over trees, wolves alter the course of rivers, bison fertilize the plains from coast-to-coast. In Great Britain, that's what hominids have done for 900,000 years, their populations ebbing and flowing with every ice age.

Early farming created the moors and grazing sheep and cattle maintain it, hosting hundreds of specialist species. Every old-growth forest has signs of ancient coppicing and pollarding, which create havens for wildlife when well-managed. Corn cockle evolved as a mimic of wheat seeds, so farmers would plant it over and over within their fields.

This garbage idea that humans are somehow "separate" from or "above" nature is poison. It's not true ANYWHERE.

It contributes to an idea that our very presence is somehow damaging to natural spaces, and to "protect" it, we have to completely leave it alone. NO! Absolutely NOT! There are places where we have to limit harvesting and foot traffic, but humans ALWAYS lived in nature.

Even the ecosystems that this mindset comes from rejects it, but this shit doesn't JUST get applied to British people who become alienated and disconnected from their surroundings to the point where they don't know what silver birch does.

It's DEADLY for the indigenous people who protect 80% of our most important ecosystems.

It's a weapon against the Maasai people, stopped from hunting or growing crops on their own land. It's violence for 9 San hunters shot at by a helicopter with a "kill poachers on-sight" policy, as one of the world's LARGEST diamond mines operates in the same motherfucking park. The Havasupai people are kept out of the Grand Canyon that they managed for generations because they might "collect too many nuts" and starve squirrels, Dukha reindeer herders suddenly get banned from chopping wood or fishing, and watch wolves decimate their animals in the absence of their herding dogs.

It's nightmare after nightmare of human displacement in the name of "conservation."

That all ties back to that mindset. This idea that nature is pure, "pristine," and should be totally untouched. There are some starting to call it Fortress Conservation.

You can't begin to understand the criticisms of modern conservation without acknowledging that we are still living under the influence of capitalism and colonialism. Those who fixate on speaking for "animals/nature/trees who don't have a voice" often seem to have no interest in the indigenous people who do.

Listen. There's no simple answer; and the solution will vary for each region.

Again, my project is within the UK, one of the most ecologically devastated areas in the world. There are bad zoos that the law allows a pass. There are incredible zoos that are vital to conservation, in and outside of the country. There's not enough nature preserves. The best ones that exist are often exploited for profit.

I hope that my silly little blog sparks an interest in a handful of people to understand more about their own local ecosystems, and teaches folks about the unique beauty even within a place as "boring" as England.

But, my straightforward statement is that I have no patience for nonconstructive, broad zoo slander that lumps together ALL of them, and open contempt for anyone who tries to sell nature preserves like a perfect, morally superior "alternative." We need them BOTH right now, and we need to acknowledge that zoos AND preserves have legal and ethical issues that aren't openly talked about.

[uispeccoll]

Voices from the Stacks - The Morris Family

For the Morris family, achievement at Iowa is a family tradition. And luckily for all of us, it’s preserved with care in the Libraries Special Collections and Archives and the Iowa Women’s Archives. In today’s blog, we trace three generations of trailblazers in this impressive family tree.

James B. Morris Sr. - Image courtesy of Joan Liffring-Zug Bourget Collection, State Historical Society of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa

James B. Morris Sr. launches a legacy

James Morris Sr., left his descendants with large shoes to fill. James Sr. served as the owner and editor of the Bystander, the oldest Black newspaper west of the Mississippi. He also founded the Negro Bar Association, now known as the National Bar Association, along with the Iowa State Conference of the NAACP in 1939 with his wife Georgine. Today, James Sr.’s legacy lives on through the James B. Morris Scholarship Fund, which “provides financial assistance, motivation and internship opportunities for Iowa’s minority students pursuing post-secondary degrees,” and through the accomplishments of the Morris family members who came after him.

Image: James B. Morris Jr. found on Iowa Digital Library

Journeying on with James B. Morris Jr.

James Sr. and Georgine’s son, James B. Morris Jr., graduated from the University of Iowa in 1949. During his undergraduate years, he documented much of his time in Iowa City in a scrapbook filled with photos and charming captions for the various characters in his life. In this scrapbook we can see early photos of James and his then girlfriend, Arlene, who would later become his wife. Though the scrapbook is mostly centered on staged photos of James, Arlene, and their friends, it also contains a few photos of James throughout his service as a captain in the US Army from 1941–1945.

Images: Cover of James B. Morris Scrapbook and photos of friends

After graduation, James returned to Des Moines, joining his father’s law practice and becoming an active civil rights leader. He worked as legal counsel and served as president for the Des Moines branch of the NAACP as well as an officer in the National Conference of Christians and Jews. Heavily engaged with local concerns, James served as a frequent mediator between the Black Panther Party and the Des Moines Police Department—alongside his role helping his father with the Iowa Bystander newspaper. It was with the Bystander that James wrote a column, “Looking Over the Hawkeyes,” which details the experiences of 65 Black men and 10 Black women who attended the University of Iowa but were not allowed to live in the dorms or eat in the university dining rooms. One of those 10 women was James’ wife, Arlene.  

Images: Left, Arlene and James. Right, Arlene for the cover of Eyes magazine found at Iowa Women's Archives

Arlene was very accomplished herself. While in college, Arlene appeared on the cover of the first issue of Eyes magazine, a publication focused on African American life and culture, as well as serving on the magazine’s staff. After graduating from the University of Iowa, Arlene moved on to Drake University in Des Moines to earn a master's degree in psychology. With this qualification, Arlene established herself as the first African American female psychologist to be licensed by the Iowa State Board of Psychology. Heavily engaged with local organizations, Arlene participated in the Know Your Neighborhood Panel, a group consisting of a diverse group of women who traveled around Iowa and to several other states to speak about tolerance among races and religions. Arlene Morris also served on the Iowa Advisory Committee of the United States Civil Rights Commission for more than three years in the 1980s.  

Image: Robert V. Morris, 1976 from Iowa Digital Library

Robert V. Morris carries the torch

Robert V. Morris, James and Arlene’s son, continued the legacy of his family with a long list of accomplishments in his communities. Following in his grandfather’s footsteps, Robert would take over the Iowa Bystander from 1979 to 1983, a heavy role for someone who was still enrolled as an undergraduate. But Robert was no stranger to taking on challenges from a young age; in 1979, when he was just three years out of high school, he founded the Iowa City branch of the NAACP, leading it while pursuing his education and his position at the newspaper. After graduating, Robert became president of the Iowa-Nebraska chapter of the NAACP and wrote Black Faces of War: A Legacy of Honor from the American Revolution to Today, a book stemming from his previous television documentary project.  

Image: Robert interviewing Atlanta mayor Maynard Jackson, 1979 at the Iowa Memorial Union

The legacy of the Morris family has incredible significance within Iowa City and across the Midwest. Many materials related to the Morris family are held in the University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections and Archives and have been digitized. They can be viewed online in the Morris Family Papers Digital Collection. Arlene Morris’ personal papers, IWA 276, can be found in the Iowa Women’s Archives. 

-Kaylee S., Olson Graduate Research Assistant

[princessanneftw]

The Princess Royal interview: ‘I’m not sure that rewilding at scale is necessarily a good idea’

With conservation close to her heart, HRH explains what’s needed to save animals under threat and how the monarchy plays its part

By Jessamy Calkin for The Telegraph

Inside St James’s Palace there is a bit of a flutter about the weather. Her Royal Highness the Princess Royal has several engagements today, and things are not looking good; due to wind, the helicopter might not be able to land at the designated sites, which will make travelling times to and from events longer.

The staff are waiting to be informed by the police, who are in touch with the helicopter pilot. HRH, as everyone seems to call her, has not yet been told.

She has a lot to fit in: directly after our interview, she is off to a meeting about Gordonstoun school, in London, by car, then by helicopter to give a speech at an English Rural Housing Association conference in Bedfordshire, followed by a visit to the Aircraft Research Association, where she will unveil a plaque, then back to St James’s Palace to change for evensong at The King’s Chapel of the Savoy, where she will be reading the lesson for the Royal Victorian Order.

Her day will finish at about nine, when she will be able to eat. Quite often she has a dinner engagement as well. Next week she is going to Mumbai for four days.

Not for nothing is she known as the hardest-working royal. She is involved with more than 300 charities, organisations and military regiments, and last year carried out 200-plus engagements – more than any other member of the Royal family.

Her first official engagement was at the age of 18; shortly afterwards, in 1970, she became president of Save the Children – a position that led to her being nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize – and her work with that charity continues to this day.

Early on, her father, the Duke of Edinburgh, advised her to pick the charities she was interested in – and her interests have multiplied.

But one charity that is particularly close to her heart is the Whitley Fund for Nature, which is why I’m here. Started by Edward Whitley OBE as the Whitley Awards, WFN is now celebrating its 30th anniversary, and the Princess has been a patron for 24 years.

The annual ceremony takes place at the Royal Geographical Society in London and is colloquially known as the Green Oscars; WFN distributes grants totalling around £500,000 to worthy international winners.

So far, £20 million has been awarded to 200 conservationists across 80 countries. And the Princess has never missed a single ceremony, presenting the awards and delivering heartfelt speeches.

HRH is quite probably the most respected member of the Royal family. Her lack of pomp and ceremony and the low-key dedication with which she carries out her duties is much admired. There is no whingeing. She refused titles for her children, Peter and Zara.

She is well known for her dry sense of humour. She is an exceptionally accomplished horsewoman and in 1976 became the first member of the Royal family to compete in the Olympics; she had won Sports Personality of the Year five years earlier. She famously resisted an attempted kidnap in 1974.

She has also become an inadvertent style icon, often rewearing outfits she first wore decades ago, which is both charmingly thrifty and impressive in that she can still fit into them, and she seldom buys anything that is not made in the UK.

She recently made a good-natured appearance on her son-in-law Mike Tindall’s podcast The Good, the Bad & the Rugby and she seems like an all-round good egg.

She has both gravitas and spirit – there was some very moving footage of her accompanying her mother’s coffin on the long journey from Balmoral to Westminster Abbey.

Back in St James’s Palace, Charles, her private secretary, is arranging the chairs, anticipating where she might like to sit. HRH arrives in a striking bright-green suit over a striped silky shirt and heads smartly for a different chair than the one offered.

How did she first get involved with Whitley? ‘That’s entirely Edward’s fault,’ she says in her crisp voice. ‘But the common denominator is Gerald Durrell.’

The Princess grew up reading Durrell’s books and became patron of his zoo in Jersey, part of what is now the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, in 1972. ‘He very kindly asked me to become involved in the zoo – as it was then – in Jersey, and Edward [later became] one of Durrell’s trustees.

‘He and I had similar beliefs in what Gerald was doing. Apart from the fact that Gerald wrote very good books, during his travels he seemed to understand better than most the impact on the populations in which animals lived and the relationship between them and their animals.

‘Being told you have to save this, that and the other is all very well but have you been there? Have you ever tried living in that environment to find out what that means to them? Because the fundamental point is that unless the conservation comes from the local area, it won’t be sustained.’

No one is going to save an animal just because they’re told to. ‘You’ve got to work out how the animals are going to survive with the people who live there, who will be the ones who make sure that it works.’

What was Durrell like? ‘Every bit as entertaining as you would think. His humour but also his understanding of the relative importance of things in other people’s lives was absolutely fascinating – and he was spot on.’

Durrell said he felt ‘sympathy for the small and ugly; since I’m big and ugly I try to preserve the little ones’. He was an expert on captive breeding, with a view to releasing into the wild, and he tended to select animals that were close to extinction, or those that could best be helped, or just ones that were not very charismatic.

‘Yes, not the sexy ones,’ says the Princess. ‘Or the obvious ones. His approach was very holistic. He understood the impact of habitat – not just on one species but how all of the things that lived in that habitat related to each other and that you couldn’t replicate that instantly somewhere else – it was very specific to an area.’

Gerald Durrell died in January 1995, of septicaemia. He was an alcoholic and had successfully received a liver transplant but died of complications it gave rise to. ‘He told me that there was no point doing a transplant because his old liver had got used to being fed all the things he’d been given to eat and drink in order to make deals as he went round the world,’ the Princess says, smiling.

Durrell’s legacy is long. One of his innovations was to establish training for conservationists from around the world. The first trainee went on to become the first director of the National Parks and Conservation Service in Mauritius, and thousands of students from 151 countries have since attended the centre, whose graduates became known as Gerald Durrell’s Army.

This became the title of a book by Edward Whitley, who travelled round the world to assess the progress of some of the trainees and the animals they were conserving – such as the largest eagle in the world in the Philippines and Alaotran gentle lemurs in Madagascar.

To launch the book in 1992, Whitley was invited to give a talk at the Royal Geographical Society, and he asked the Princess to come along. It was at the book launch that he decided to set up the charity.

‘I sat down with Nigel Winser, who was the deputy director of the RGS and a long-time friend, and we designed what became the Whitley Awards on the back of a napkin,’ he tells me. In 1999, Whitley asked the Princess to become a patron. By then, ‘Attenborough was already on board, which encouraged her to think it wasn’t a fly-by-night organisation which would crash and burn’.

The awards focus on community-based conservation projects around the world. In order to qualify, each project has to be up and running – it cannot be a pipe dream. Initially there was only one award; this year there were six – of £40,000 each in project funding – plus a Gold Award of £100,000, given each year to a past winner in recognition of their outstanding contribution to conservation.

‘The reason WFN is so effective,’ says Alastair Fothergill, whose company Silverback made the acclaimed TV nature series Wild Isles, and who like Attenborough is a WFN ambassador, ‘is because its grants are awarded at the very cutting edge of conservation, where relatively modest funds can go a long way. Over the years, the fund has kickstarted the careers of many pioneers who have become leading lights in conservation.’

This year’s projects included safeguarding seabird nesting sites in Mexico; establishing ‘lion guards’ promoting coexistence in Cameroon; and protecting pangolins in Nepal, lemurs in Madagascar, freshwater fish in Lake Victoria and saiga antelope in west Kazakhstan. Each one heavily involves local communities.

In addition, WFN provides continuation funding for award-winners. To mark the 25th anniversary of Whitley, Kate Humble, also an ambassador, and Attenborough hosted an event at the Natural History Museum to help raise £1 million for continuation funding.

‘It was the first really big fundraiser we had,’ says Humble. ‘And one of the donors underwrote the entire cost of the event – so everything raised went into the continuation fund.’

The RGS ceremonies are joyous events. In addition to being presented with their award by the Princess Royal, each winner has a short film made of their work, narrated by Attenborough, screened at the event. ‘I’ve been going for 20 years,’ says Humble, ‘and every year I’m blown away by the winners – what they’ve overcome, what they’ve achieved.

‘You hear so much bad news, and you think, you know what? The world can be OK because people out there are doing this stuff – it’s demonstrable, it’s scientifically rigorous and it’s working. [It’s] an incredibly uplifting and inspiring evening.

‘And every year I watch Princess Anne speak and she never sounds like she’s reading someone else’s words. She cares deeply about what this charity does and what these people who win the awards have achieved – she is not a figurehead just trotting out nice words and providing a photo op. She could run the charity, she knows it so well and cares about it so deeply.

‘I’m not anti-royal,’ says Humble, ‘but neither am I someone who would go and wave a Union Jack. But when I see her I think, frankly you’re worth whatever it is we pay.’

HRH talks with fluency and knowledge on every subject. ‘She’s like a sponge – it’s unbelievable the information that’s stored in her brain,’ said her daughter Zara in an interview for ITV’s Anne: The Princess Royal at 70. ‘It’s quite annoying as well.’

She needs to know a lot because she works with a diverse range of charities, taking in early years, healthcare, microfinance and animal welfare. Promoting collaboration between charities is key. ‘I do a lot of that,’ she says now. ‘I have meetings bringing them together which they all seem to enjoy, though sometimes it’s a bit illogical.

‘Knitting together all the international NGOs is important, but we need to look slightly outside the box – can we do this better, are there ways of helping people to be more sustainable?’

The Princess does occasionally discuss conservation with the King, she says, but she won’t say if they always agree. And her grandchildren? How does she teach them about conservation? (She has five, four girls and a boy.)

‘I don’t see so much of them but making the point that they live in an area which they shouldn’t take for granted is important I think; both my children are aware of that.’

Gatcombe Park in Gloucestershire, where the Princess and her husband, Vice Admiral Sir Timothy Laurence, live in an 18th-century manor with 730 acres of parkland, has some beautiful trees – ‘the ones that survive – quite a lot don’t, we live on Cotswold brash which is not popular with plants; but having said that we have beeches.

‘You’ve just got to live with what’s there and make sure it doesn’t get overwhelmed. I’m not sure that rewilding at scale is necessarily a good idea – it probably is in corners, but if you’re not careful you rewild all the wrong things because they are just the things that are more successful at growing.

‘My biggest row at home is ragwort. Lots of people think that ragwort is absolutely brilliant because butterflies love it, but it’s not good for the horses [it is toxic]. I would say don’t take all the ragwort out, just where the horses are – but it’s quite a delicate balance.’

There are, she says, ‘quite a lot of horses at home, but they’re other people’s as well’. She rides whenever she can. ‘It’s a very good place to observe nature from.’

The Princess supports several horse-related charities, and became patron of Riding for the Disabled in 1971, and president in 1985. ‘It was just becoming a national body when I was invited to become a patron – at that stage I knew nothing about disability but the concept that ponies or horses could make a difference was obviously interesting and I knew about them. No matter what the disability was, the answer was, if they’d like to ride, we’ll give it a go. The commonality of the experience was important.’

Essential things for running a charity, she says, are evaluation and thinking of the long term. She cites the influence of Eglantyne Jebb, founder of Save the Children, ‘who constantly evaluated programmes to see if they were making a difference, whether they were doing the right things and whether people were invested’.

And it’s important to keep projects focused and manageable. ‘I’ve come to the conclusion that scale is the thing that defeats any good idea, because it can get to a size where people can’t cope.’

She has spoken in the past about the huge value of long-term commitment, in terms of the constitutional monarchy as well as in charity work. ‘Seeing things in the long term is a challenge,’ she says now, ‘but maybe part of our [value] – as a family – is long-term continuity, because the long-term view is quite hard to come by. And I think we can do that.’

May I ask what she might have done as a profession in another life? HRH laughs and looks vaguely impatient. ‘You can ask but I’ve no idea.’ Does she ever think about that?

‘Not really, and it’s way too late to have those concerns – in a way the fortunate part of my life has been the broad spectrum, to see so much. Not having a very specific interest has been a bonus, I suppose. We all have ways of doing things and with Whitley it is the practical aspects of what they do, and how to support them [that has been my focus].’

Edward Whitley, a member of the wealthy Greenall Whitley brewing family, set up Whitley Asset Management in 2002, alongside its finance director Louise Rettie, to serve a small number of clients. But there had always been animals in his life – his great-grandfather founded a small charity called the Whitley Animal Protection Trust; his great-great-uncle Herbert was an eccentric animal breeder who started Paignton Zoo.

In Edward’s office is a stuffed cockatoo that belonged to Herbert and a photograph of Mary, his favourite chimpanzee. Mary was famous for riding around on her tricycle and walking the dogs, or taking visitors by the hand and leading them round the zoo.

Edward studied English at Oxford then went into banking, joining NM Rothschild & Sons in 1983. He left in 1990 to write: Gerald Durrell’s Army came out in 1992 and he also co-wrote Rogue Trader, the autobiography of disgraced banker Nick Leeson, and worked with Richard Branson on his memoir.

Whitley is a tall, gentle man who doesn’t like talking about himself but is full of unbridled enthusiasm for WFN, and in particular its royal patron. ‘She transformed the charity – we never would have had the success we’ve had without her involvement. She saw what was possible and really helped us to achieve it, and she inspires the winners to do more. The winners are always pretty amazed at how she cross-examines them and cuts to the chase so quickly when she meets them.

‘She has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the world, and a phenomenal memory, and she is also very funny… And think of her father and the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award – she’s seen what a lifetime of work can achieve.’

In her speech at the Whitley Awards earlier this year, the Princess Royal cited her father, Gerald Durrell and Edward Whitley as the inspirations for her work with WFN. Among winners and their communities, she said, ‘it’s the global ambition to truly make a difference that has been astonishing’.

The awards, she continued, are for ‘the people on the ground, they’re the sharp end… It’s all very well to be here and understand what we think are the challenges, and want to make a difference, but when you meet the people who are actually out front and can turn that into a reality, it’s a real inspiration.’

Over the years, she has visited some of the winners’ projects, when her charity work takes her to those countries, ‘but not as many as I would like’, she says. In Uganda, for example, she met Dr Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka, who was working on improving hygiene in local communities after viruses had spread to gorillas she was managing in Bwindi national park. And in 1997, before she became a WFN patron, she travelled in a boat up the Amazon to see pink dolphins.

‘She was in Colombia for Save the Children and she asked the British embassy to include a visit to the Amazon in her trip – she was very interested in the dolphins,’ says Dr Fernando Trujillo, who went on to win an award in 2007.

‘The British embassy contacted me as an expert on rivers and dolphins. I was a little bit intimidated, and it was raining and I was worried we wouldn’t see any dolphins, but in the end we counted 32 – and she was so excited, every time she saw one she would jump up and down with excitement, and then rein herself in as if she suddenly remembered she was a princess. I could see her love for the environment was very genuine. From that day she was my favourite royal person.’

Another winner, Pablo Bordino, whose picture with HRH had been in the paper in Buenos Aires was flying back to Argentina. One of the flight attendants recognised him and when he arrived at the airport there was a television crew waiting to meet him. It raised the profile of his NGO - which protected marine life and habitats in Argentina - enormously and enabled him to generate further funding. ‘That’s the effect HRH has,’ says Whitley. ‘You can’t quantify it.’

Several award-winners went to the Princess’s 60th-birthday celebrations, including Claudio Padua, a successful businessman from Rio who gave it all up to pursue conservation, training at Durrell in Jersey and moving to a forest in Brazil with his wife, Suzana, and three children.

HRH had been to see them at their headquarters outside São Paulo and had taken an interest in their efforts to conserve the black lion tamarin, a monkey. They had no idea her visit would be such an ordeal, with all the security arrangements. ‘We had a call to ask what kind of security we had,’ says Claudio. ‘I said, “I have an old dog, that’s all.”’

‘She turned up with a security detail and entourage,’ Suzana adds. ‘They wanted to go into the forest to see the monkeys in our Land Rover and her security team asked, “Has this car been checked?” I said it hadn’t and they became very nervous but she ignored them and just got in anyway.’

Years later, the Paduas were invited to Buckingham Palace for her 60th. ‘It was a beautiful opportunity for us,’ says Suzana, ‘and as she came down the stairs she spotted us and said, “Oh how nice to see you. How are the monkeys?”’

The Whitley Fund for Nature is hosting a #PeopleforPlanet biodiversity summit on 6 and 7 November at London’s Royal Institution, where members of the public can hear live from Whitley Gold Award-winning conservationists from Africa, Central and South America, and Asia

[dailyanarchistposts]

On tranarchism and intellectual oppression

In November 2019, at the École de la Cause Freudienne’s annual conference in Paris, Paul B. Preciado presented a speech to around 3,500 psychoanalysts. By stating “Can the monster speak?”, Preciado (2020, n.p.) invited an academy of psychoanalysts to recognize the norms that psychoanalysis produces and reproduces, despite its subversive character in relation to modern biomedicine/psychiatry. In his words, “it is the normative heterosexual psychoanalysts who urgently need to come out of the closet of the norm”. Preciado poses as a trans body,

to whom neither medicine, nor the law, nor psychoanalysis, nor psychiatry recognize the right to speak with expert knowledge about my own condition, nor the possibility of producing a discourse or a form of knowledge about myself. (Idem, n.p.)

Preciado’s critique is addressed to academic rigour which, despite claiming to be neutral, operates as an exclusionary instrument that nullifies knowledges produced by ‘others’. No wonder, then, that during his speech, several of the psychoanalysts in the auditorium began to react verbally and to turn their backs and leave, refusing to exercise what underpins the psychoanalytic clinic — that of listening. This is the expression of Otherness (Kilomba, 2019), associated with the idea of Other (Morrison, 2019), whereby the modern self grants itself the ability — or the authority — to inferiorize the one it designates as Other.

It is worth wondering whether, during the drafting of the ICDs and DSMs, the trans individuals taken as research objects had a voice in defining transsexuality, or in conceptualizing cisgenderity in the official documents. Similarly to the national State defending its fictional borders with militarism and legislation, biomedical knowledge materializes, in its official documents and care protocols, the naturalization of cisgenderity and the pathologization of transsexuality. An example of this is the current brazilian legislation up until 2018, according to which, in order for a trans person to change their name and sex on their civil documents, they had to present psychiatric and psychological reports attesting to their transsexuality.

As Bakunin (1975, p. 48) pointed out, “what is true for scientific academies is equally true for all constituent and legislative assemblies”. Only on the basis of pathology would a non-normative gender identity be legitimized. Another example of universalist science being used to legitimize State violence is Operation Tarantula, which took place in 1987, when police forces took to the streets of downtown São Paulo (Brazil) to arrest transvestite sex workers, claiming, although without any evidence, that they were committing the crime of venereal HIV infection. This is ‘scientific’ knowledge being used to legitimize institutional violence against trans people.

It is not uncommon for insurgencies by trans movements to be dismissed as violent, as attacks on society or on the heterosexual bourgeois family. However, a distinction must be made between State violence and revolutionary violence — the latter being a form of self-defense. When Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera threw bricks at New York police officers during the StoneWall Riot (1969), they were defending themselves against the everyday racist and sexist violence that prevented them from freely walking the streets of the city. Not surprisingly, numerous trans movements with political strategies aligned with revolutionary anarchist ideals, especially self-determination, direct action and mutual support (Kropotkin, n.d.), emerged and/or received greater visibility after 1969. Furthermore, the naming of cisgenderity is a clear affront to this institutional power. If, until the mid-1990s, the antagonism of transsexuality was normality, from that moment on, with the term ‘cisgenderity’, this antagonism dissolved — and this term was rejected by scientific academia, especially in gender studies. The transfeminist movement was largely responsible for introducing the concept of cisgenderity in Brazil, motivating the union of countless trans organizations against intellectual oppression.

Intellectual oppression, for Bakunin, seemed to be one of the most arduous to overcome, for what determines an individual’s intellectual capacity are scientific academies whose institutional power exceeds the individual’s power to question them. It is this same institutional power that determines what ‘true’ transsexuality is, in its numerous and biased diagnostic criteria. The direction that trans movements adopt in relation to scientific academies is not to claim legitimacy or freedom, because “the one who restrains is just as trapped as the one whose movements are hindered by the ropes” (Preciado, 2020, n.p.).

It would not be coherent to plead for freedom, as freedom should not be granted, since it is, according to Bakunin, indivisible. By naming cisgenderity, we confront an academy that determines dichotomies between the ‘Self’ and the ‘Other’, which inferiorizes the different and imposes itself authoritatively in order to legitimize the Law. The fragility of the law is revealed by exposing the existence of an intellectual oppression that pushes us to the ‘outside’ of universities, since our presence on the ‘inside’ is far too damaging. If Malatesta (2009, p. 04) defines a government as “[...] an authoritarian organism which, by force, even if it is for good ends, imposes its own will on others”, it is clear that trans movements oppose precisely the imposition of gender and sexuality norms — which, as we have seen, are reiterated by the forces of the State.

Our preferred definition of tranarchism would elucidate the proximity between anarchist principles and trans emancipation strategies. Another concept that stands out in this proposition is self-determination. If, as Pfeil (2020, p. 146) writes, “the freedom of a people is its capacity to govern itself, in the anarchist perspective, to define its own future, then the freedom of a body is its capacity to self-determine [...]”. Self-determination is dear to both trans movements, in the sense that we do not need institutional legitimization to affirm who we are, and anarchist movements.

Tranarchism highlights individual and collective self-determination as a fundamental trait in the struggle for liberation. As Bakunin understood that one’s freedom is not limited, but expands with the freedom of others, likewise we understand that one’s self-determination only expands with the self-determination of others. Not surprisingly, mutual support is notable among trans movements in LGBTIAP+ shelters, autonomous care initiatives, orientation programs to facilitate access to health care and the modification of documents (Idem, 2020).

Just as, according to Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin (1993, p. 23), “Anarchists believe the first step toward self-determination and the Social revolution is Black control of the Black community”, the same is reflected in trans movements for social emancipation and combating State violence. Despite these remarks, Jeppesen & Nazar (2012) observe a scission between feminist/queer anarchisms and a supposedly ‘cisheteronormative’ anarchism, which would not consider ‘identity’ issues to be relevant to the popular struggle. However, anarchist movements have grown largely as a result of feminist and queer organizations in their strategies to confront State domination. It is in opposition to this separatism that our thoughts on tranarchism — an anarchism that does not reproduce the institutional normativities of modernity — are based.

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Anna Stanley

If Hamas's associates organizing protests across Europe is not concerning enough, they also exert significant political influence. Al-Zeer is the CEO of European Palestinian Council for Political Relations (EUPAC), a political lobbying group in Brussels. EUPAC states it "works to achieve its goals through civil, political and diplomatic means." EUPAC claims thirteen members are "placed all around Europe, and they are in contact with members of state parliaments around the continent, not only the MEPs. This provides us with a very broad net of support that is convergent at all the levels."

EUPAC officials claim to use the "European system of law and human rights to our advantage" and works with the International Crime Court to focus on "Israeli military personnel who also have European passports...we want the EU to create a system of punishment for them."

In 2013, Israel designated EUPAC's deputy CEO, Mazen Kahel, because of his involvement with Hamas.

Al-Zeer's PRC, meanwhile, regularly organizes and has spoken at the European Palestinians Conference (EPC), held annually in Europe since 2003. Speakers have even reportedly included Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and other senior leaders of the terror group.

A significant proportion of Hamas's activities are subsidized through funding and lobbying efforts provided by Western organizations. Government inaction and lawfare tactics by Hamas's proxies has allowed these organizations to flourish with impunity throughout Europe.

Al-Zeer has served as a crucial figure in the European Hamas industry for decades. Itai Reuveni, Director of Communications for NGO Monitor, argues this "demonstrates that European governments have failed to address the deadly nexus of terrorism, NGOs, and financial support. Numerous reports from both governments and civil society present open-source information that clearly exposes the connections between NGOs and designated terrorist organizations."

He warned: "However, when it comes to Palestinian terror groups, many European governments choose to turn a blind eye. These NGOs continue to operate in Europe, receiving funding, sometimes even from European governments themselves, which enables them to propagate hatred and incitement and in some cases to serve as a civilian facade for murderous terrorist organizations."

[mariacallous]

The Association Autonomous Women’s House Zagreb, a women’s advocacy body in Croatia, on Tuesday urged the Croatian state to support women, and proposed changes to the criminal code improving women’s right to voluntarily terminate pregnancies and limiting the rights of men to pray in public against abortion in public.

“It is about applying and protecting the principles that the state accepted when it ratified the European Convention on the Protection of Human Rights and when it accepted the European acquis [the common body of EU legislation]”, Neva Tolle, advisor to the Autonomous Women’s House Zagreb, AZKZ, told a press conference.

She said the so-called “kneelers” – men who pray in public places against abortion and for a restoration of manliness – are creating a platform for the tolerance of violence and inequality of women and so invite society to discriminate against women,.

BIRN has written about this initiative, which arose in ultra-conservative Catholic circles and gathers men who kneel and pray for “manliness” in city squares on the first Saturday of the month.

Tolle urged quick reaction from the state. It is clear, she added, that the “kneelers” are connected to the harassment of women in front of hospitals who are exercising their legal right to an abortion, disrespecting the basic principles of equality according to which women should decide for themselves about all aspects of their lives, especially about their own bodies.

AZKZ sent the proposed law changes to the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of the Interior on Thursday.

AZKZ lawyer Sanja Bezbradica Jelavic clarified that they propose adding a new article to the criminal code which would criminalise “Violation of a woman’s right to voluntary termination of pregnancy”, following the example of other countries, such as Spain and Germany.

The article would read: “Whoever interferes with the exercise of the right to voluntary termination of pregnancy by harassing a woman with actions or behaviour that is unwanted, intrusive, offensive, intimidating, or represents mental or physical coercion …shall be punished with a prison sentence of one to three years”.

They also seek amendments to the Law on Public Assembly, providing a legal basis for state interference in the freedom of peaceful assembly. This would prohibit even peaceful gatherings and protests near hospitals that disturb the peace of patients.

Bezbradica Jelavic said: “Regardless of who is in power … these are topics that … have to do with gender-based violence and the prevention of violence against women”.

[lboogie1906]

Jurist Ketanji Onyika Brown Jackson (September 14, 1970) serves as an associate justice of the SCOTUS. She was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Joe Biden and sworn into office on June 30, 2022. She was a US circuit judge of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

She was born in DC. Her father, Johnny Brown, further attended the University of Miami School of Law and became the chief attorney for the Miami-Dade County School Board; her mother, Ellery, served as school principal at New World School of the Arts in Miami.

She studied government at Harvard University. She performed improv comedy took classes in drama and led protests against a student who displayed a Confederate flag from his dorm window. She graduated from Harvard with an AB magna cum laude. Her senior thesis was entitled “The Hand of Oppression: Plea Bargaining Processes and the Coercion of Criminal Defendants”.

She worked as a staff reporter and researcher for Time magazine, then attended Harvard Law School, where she was a supervising editor of the Harvard Law Review. She graduated with a JD cum laude.

She is a member of the Judicial Conference Committee on Defender Services and the Council of the American Law Institute. She serves on the board of Georgetown Day School and the Supreme Court Fellows Commission.

She has served as a judge in several mock trials with the Shakespeare Theatre Company. She presided over a mock trial, hosted by Drexel University’s Thomas R. Kline School of Law, “to determine if Vice President Aaron Burr was guilty of murdering” Alexander Hamilton.

She has served as a judge for the Historical Society of the District of Columbia’s Mock Court Program. She served on the advisory board of Montrose Christian School, a Baptist school.

She presented at the University of Georgia School of Law’s 35th Edith House Lecture. She gave the Martin Luther King Jr. Day Lecture at the University of Michigan Law School and was honored at the University of Chicago Law School’s third annual Judge James B. Parsons Legacy Dinner, which was hosted by the school’s Black Law Students Association. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence #deltasigmatheta

[dragoneyes618]

European Jewish leaders have sharply criticized a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights (EHCR), which upheld a ban on kosher slaughter in Belgium, slamming it as a significant setback for religious freedom across Europe.

Dismissing legal and humanitarian appeals by Belgium’s Jewish community and Jewish leaders worldwide, the seven-judge panel in the Strasbourg court—the EU’s highest judicial body– invoked “the protection of animal welfare” as “an ethical value” that supersedes the Jewish and Muslim religious mandates.

The judges confirmed the ban already in place in Belgium that insists that animals be “stunned” prior to slaughter, regardless of Jewish law and Islamic practice that forbid it.

Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, President of the Conference of European Rabbis and Russia’s chief rabbi, called the ruling “a black day for Europe, when fundamental religious rights are no longer respected.”

“The court’s decision to enforce the ban on ritual slaughter in the Flanders and Wallonia regions of Belgium will be felt by Jewish communities across the continent,” Rabbi Goldschmidt said. “The bans have already had a devastating impact on the Belgian Jewish community, causing supply shortages. And we are all very aware of the precedent this sets in challenging our rights to practice our religion.”

Belgium is home to some 500,000 Muslims and 30,000 Jews. Those who want to observe shechitah and Muslim ‘halal’ must now obtain meat from abroad.

“This distorted verdict implies that the rights of citizens to freedom of religion and worship are of lower importance than the “rights” of animals,” said Rabbi Menachem Margolin, chairman of the Brussels-based European Jewish Association. He warned that the restrictions on Jews practicing their faith will lead to “serious damage to the fabric of life throughout the continent.”

Fearing A Domino Effect

By upholding the Belgian ban, the EU Court of Human Rights has effectively signaled other states within the European Union that they can implement their own laws prohibiting kosher slaughter for Jews and halal slaughter for Muslims, without fear of religious discrimination lawsuits.

The threat of legal consequences has until now acted as a brake on the anti-shechitah movement. But the EUHR ruling has removed that barrier, setting the stage in an expected domino effect for a wave of copycat restrictions on ritual slaughter by European governments.

“We are already seeing attempts across Europe to follow this Belgian ban, now sadly legitimized by the ECHR,” Dr. Ariel Muzicant, president of the European Jewish Congress, said in a statement.

The bans, imposed in the two regions several years ago, were the result of a long-running campaign by animal welfare activists. But they also raised fears among Muslim and Jewish community groups that they were “a cover for nationalist politicians to foster anti-immigrant sentiment,” reported Politico.

Ben Weyts, the Flemish minister responsible for animal welfare, was the first to propose the idea of a ban and expressed satisfaction with the verdict. “Now the door is open for a ban on ritual slaughter not only in Brussels but in the whole of Europe,” Weyts, of the far-right New Flemish Alliance, gloated in a television interview.

Yohan Benizri, president of the Belgian Federation of Jewish Organizations that opposed the slaughter ban, said he was “appalled” by the ruling. “This is the first time that the ECHR decides that protection of animal welfare is a matter of public morals that can trump the rights of minorities,” Benizri told Politico.

Hostility To Shechitah Deeply Rooted in European History

The hostility to shechitah endorsed by the Strasbourg court hardly comes as a shock; that animus has underpinned Belgian society for generations, deeply rooted in a legacy of Jew-hatred that has flourished throughout European history.

Blood libels across the ages have been fueled by malicious portrayals of shechitah as barbaric and cruel. Grotesque carvings on countless medieval church facades depicting Jews in obscene acts with pigs, on display to this very day, continue the tradition of mocking Jewish dietary restrictions.

Several European countries in the 19th and 20th Centuries oppressed their Jewish populations with bans against shechitah. Switzerland did so in 1893 to stop Jews fleeing pogroms from entering their country. Poland enacted a similar ban in 1936, Sweden in 1937.

Germany passed anti-shechitah laws three months after the Nazis came to power in 1933, citing cruelty to animals, and maligning kosher slaughter as a Jewish celebration of animal suffering. One of the first acts of the Nazi regime, the laws banning shechitah were aimed at making Germany unlivable for Jews, forcing them to emigrate.

Legislation prohibiting shechitah often follows the Nazi model, masquerading under the banner of animal welfare, and fueled by the canard that kosher slaughter inflicts undue suffering on animals. This misconception has persisted through generations and continues to resonate in various parts of the world.

In 2009, bowing to pressure from liberals and parties hostile to Jews and Muslims, the EU Council implemented the pre-slaughter stunning law. Following outcries from religious groups, the law made allowances for member States to provide exemptions to accommodate ritual slaughter by Jews and Muslims.

A number of countries including France, Germany, Luxembourg, Cyprus and Spain make use of that exemption. Other European countries refuse to grant any exemptions from the stunning law. These include Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Denmark, Cyprus, Spain, Slovenia, and now Belgium.

Five Years of Court Battles   

The Strasbourg court’s ruling marked the culmination of legal battles waged by Jewish and Muslim groups, together with seven advocacy groups, against bans enacted in 2017 and 2018 in Flanders and Wallonia against shechitah and Islamic ritual slaughter.

The bans were pushed through the Belgium parliament by an alliance of anti-shechitah forces, animal rights groups and anti-Muslim politicians.

The litigants first brought a religious discrimination lawsuit in a Belgium court, then at the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg in 2020, and finally the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

Their appeals argued that the laws violate guarantees of religious freedom enshrined in EU law; in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union; the European Convention on Human Rights; and the Belgian Constitution itself.

The Strasbourg court dismissed their arguments, stating that animal welfare was a component of “public morals” and carried significant weight in modern-day democracies.

Critics have drawn attention to Articles 9 and 14 under the European Convention of Human Rights, formulated in 1953, which protects the political and civil rights of Europeans. Its provisions guarantee freedom of thought, conscience and religion.

Muzicant said the Strasbourg court, in upholding the anti-shechitah law, “had violated the very charter” from which it draws its authority.

“We call on the European Commission and European Parliament to enact legislation which truly protects these fundamental rights and to give real meaning to their long-stated claims that they foster Jewish life in Europe,” Muzicant affirmed on the EJC website. “Jewish communities in Europe, now more than ever, need the protection of national governments and pan-European organizations to ensure that thousands of years of Jewish life on this continent do not come to an abrupt end.”

“Restrictions on fundamental aspects of Jewish religious freedom of expression, coupled with a background of massive increases in anti-Semitic attacks on Jewish communities, lead us to seriously consider whether Jews have a future in Europe,” the EJC representative said.

The EU Lowers Its Mask

Commenting on the Strasbourg court ruling upholding Belgium’s anti-shechitah ban, noted British political commentator Melanie Philips mocked the EU for its hypocrisy.

“The European Union likes to pose as the embodiment of tolerance, freedom and all civilized values. Now it has ripped off its own disguise to reveal something rather more ugly,” she wrote in the Jewish Star.

“The idea that stunning is humane is laughable,” Philips elaborated. “It’s often ineffective, causing the animal to be subjected to this assault more than once before it eventually loses consciousness. And even with prior stunning, meat processing plants in Europe are often inhumane places where livestock are factory farmed, pumped full of chemicals and industrially killed.”

So if the requirement for stunning actually has little to do with animal welfare, what’s the real driving force behind it?

At its core, writes Phillips, the law reflects a switch in priorities; animals being given priority over basic human rights, with a corresponding rise in ignorance and hypocrisy over what actually constitutes animal welfare.

“That moral confusion is one of the outcomes of the dogma of secularism, as well as the hostility to religion upon which the EU itself is based,” writes the author. Another key factor contributing to Western decay is its “moral and cultural relativism,” which preaches there are no absolute values.

“All of these [dark forces] have propelled the rise of paganism and the veneration of the animal at the expense of humanity.”

Pitfalls of Stunning an Animal

The practice of “stunning” refers to the methods of rendering an animal or bird unconscious prior to slaughter.

It was originally developed to facilitate the killing of large numbers of animals at once, in factory-like conditions. The main stunning method used for slaughtering cattle and sheep is by captive bolt gun, in which a steel bolt is shot into the skull at the front of the animal’s brain, details the National Institute  Health.

Another method is by electric shock, whereby electrodes are clamped to the animal’s head and heart, electrocuting it.

These methods are contrary to Jewish law which stipulates that an animal intended for food must be healthy and uninjured at the time of shechitah. Stunning injures and sometimes kills the animal, in either case rendering it forbidden for Jews to eat.

Apart from the halachic prohibition, there are other objections to stunning. Despite the rhetoric from animal rights activists, there is no conclusive evidence that stunning an animal renders it insensible to pain, experts say.

Some scientists claim that the animal is often only paralyzed—not fully sedated—and thus prevented only from displaying its pain.

In addition, when the captive bolt method fails, as happens not infrequently, it inflicts considerable suffering and distress on the animal. The conscious animal is left in acute pain as the captive bolt gun is reloaded and reapplied, or the electrical tongs reapplied to re-stun it.

According to Britain’s Royal Society for the Protection of Animals (RSPCA), stunning is done differently for poultry. “Birds are hung upside down by their legs on metal shackles along a moving conveyor belt,” the RSPCA details.

“They move along the production line to a stunning water bath; when the bird’s head makes contact with the water, an electrical circuit between the water bath and shackle is completed, which stuns the bird. The conveyor belt then moves the birds to a mechanical neck cutter, which cuts the major blood vessels in the neck.”

Shechitah avoids all the technical risks and humanitarian pitfalls of stunning. Yet, in one of the supreme ironies of this world, despite the gruesome, torturous nature of non-kosher slaughter, it is shechitah with its meticulous laws aimed at minimizing animal suffering that is being painted as barbaric and cruel.

*****

Why Isn’t Stunning Required for Animals Killed in Belgian Sporting Events? 

One of the EJC’s earliest legal appeals drew attention to the discriminatory nature of the Belgian anti-shechitah legislation, noting that hunting and killing animals in sporting events are not subject to any of the “humane” regulations that have been imposed on ritual slaughter.

On the contrary, the laws governing the popular activity of game-hunting in Belgium, whether for recreation of food consumption, make no reference whatever to the welfare of animals. The law’s concern instead is over environmental protections.

As a feature article in Flanders Today makes clear, the government’s aims in regulating hunting are purely environmental; to ensure that the region’s wildlife supply is not significantly reduced and that no damage is done to the land.

The article goes on to enthuse about the opportunities for hunting wild game in Belgian resort areas. “Hunting wild game in the winter is a hit among hunters, butchers and consumers,” the article begins, going on to list “deer, wild boar, partridge, ducks and pheasant” as “huntable animals.”

The Jewish community’s appeal challenged the double standard inherent in these hunting laws. It argued that since the law in Belgium permits the hunting and killing of animals at “cultural or sporting events” without prior stunning, how can the same government impose “stunning” requirements on ritual slaughter?

The court’s response exposed its show of caring about animal welfare as empty posturing.

“Cultural and sporting events result at most in a marginal production of meat which is not economically significant,” the court said. “Consequently, such events cannot reasonably be understood as a food production activity, which justifies their being treated differently from slaughtering.”

What does that gibberish mean? What does food production have to do with the obligation to spare an animal from undue suffering?

What the court seemed to be saying was that imposing humanitarian restrictions on game-hunting will make no economic dent on Jewish or Muslim meat-production industries (and by association, on Jewish or Muslim immigration), so why make a fuss over whether hunting game is done humanely?

In other words, hunt and kill for sport however you please, gentlemen, no stunning necessary, because we don’t really care about animals. That was never the point.

*****

Shocking Scenarios of Animals ‘Rights’ Superseding Human Life

“The protection of nature is gradually taking ideological precedence not only over the right to exercise one’s religion but also over the well-being of humans,” Prof. Eric Mechoulan who teaches in Paris, attested in Mosaic Magazine.

The writer describes a trip he took to Denmark a number of years ago, when he was confronted with a real-life scenario in which obsession over animal welfare trumped concern for the health and well-being of thousands of people.

The writer recalls during his trip being “trapped for six hours in a humongous traffic jam on the highway between Copenhagen and the island of Funen.”

“A truck carrying pigs had overturned and the animals had wandered into a field adjacent to a bridge pier,” he recalled “Not only did a crane have to be brought in to get the animals back into their truck, but “a veterinarian had to be called in to catch and kill the injured pigs in the middle of the countryside, as Danish law prohibits the transport of suffering animals.”

“It took [the veterinarian] a long time,” the author writes. “For this reason, a quarter of the country was blocked and tens of thousands of humans, women and children, old and sick, lacking water and washroom facilities, stayed for hours under the scorching sun.”

“The nature-worshippers in Europe wear the mask of progressive ecology and behind it lurks anti-speciesism,” the author scoffs. Anti-speciesism is an atheistic movement, rooted in the 70’s that claims that no species, including the human species, is more important than any other.

Animal Rights Activists Fight Municipal Orders to Kill Marauding Bears

In some parts of the world where sanity still rules, multiple sightings of a bear in populated areas where fatal bear attacks have taken place would naturally spur efforts to kill the animal as a safety precaution.

However, in regions were animal and environmentalists equate animal rights with those of human beings, threats to public safety are not considered valid grounds to end the life of suspected killer bear.

An incident unfolded early this month in Torentino, a northern province in Italy, that highlighted this unhinged mentality. A bear, identified by its collar and ear markings as M90, was sighted on 12 occasions “in residential areas or in the immediate vicinity of permanent dwellings.”

After Bear M90 reportedly stalked people on numerous occasions, terrifying them, he was deemed a danger to public security, tracked to its lair in the forest and killed, the Guardian reported.

Animal and environmental activists were incensed, slamming the action as “shortsighted and hostile to animals” and accusing the municipality of not “protecting biodiversity,” according to the article. The animal-loving activists went on to rally for the welfare of the brown bears in the provincial capital, Trento.

In other headlines from Italy, even after a hiker was fatally mauled by a bear last year in the Italian village of Caldes, and the same bear had previously attacked a father and a son, the order to kill the deadly animal was cancelled by an administrative court after intense lobbying by animal activists, reported the Guardian.

Only after intense counter pressure was brought to bear by influential parties was the order renewed and carried out.

Isolated incidents in Denmark and Italy? Or episodes reflecting something deeper and sicker in the fabric of European society, and in the moral rot lurking behind the EU judiciary’s shameful anti-shechitah ruling.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Erin Reed at Erin In The Morning:

In a major move, the Southern Poverty Law Center has formally designated the anti-transgender pseudoscience organizations Genspect and the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine as anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups. This designation is part of the civil rights organization’s latest release of its “Year In Hate & Extremism” report, which tracks hate groups and extremist groups throughout the United States. Members of these and other anti-LGBTQ+ organizations listed have played significant roles in the passage of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation and policy by concealing and underplaying their ties to anti-LGBTQ+ extremism. Most recently, members of the newly designated hate group, Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine, helped advise the Cass Review in the United Kingdom, which has led to the criminalization of possession of some forms of transgender care there and is currently being used to argue for heavy restrictions in the United States.

The designation is significant, placing these organizations alongside other extremist groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Family Research Council—Christian fundamentalist organizations pushing anti-LGBTQ+ policies in the United States and internationally. Justifying the new designations, the report points to conferences held by these organizations that featured “expert witnesses” employed by the Alliance Defending Freedom to target LGBTQ+ people in the United States. It also highlights an investigative analysis that discovered the organizations were at the center of a massive “anti-LGBTQ pseudoscience network.” The analysis further determined that in the case of SEGM, the organization’s funding stream included Koch Foundation money funneled through the Edward Charles Foundation. Notably, SEGM shared funding streams with right-wing Christian groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Family Research Council.

[...] The latest report from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) indicates that in 2023, the number of anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups increased by one-third to 86 groups, the highest number ever tracked by the organization. According to the group, this surge is primarily due to the rise of “family policy councils” that push right-wing Christian agendas and members of anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience networks that often share the same goals. “As in previous years, the anti-LGBTQ policy push was grounded in demonizing LGBTQ people and using pseudoscientific claims about LGBTQ people, but the weaponization of pseudoscience as a tool of trans suppression and the targeting of fundamental freedoms like free speech, expression, and assembly through book and drag bans has become a more prominent feature in recent years,” the report says, highlighting the increasing use of organizations weaponizing disinformation to target transgender people.

The SPLC has given anti-LGBTQ+/anti-trans extremist organizations such as SEGM, Genspect, Do No Harm, and Awake Illinois the hate group designations as part of their 2023 review of hate and extremism.

[aipuconnects]

Why Join the Law and Society Association: Benefits and Opportunities

Join the Law and Society Association on WCLS to connect with legal scholars and advance in legal academia. Gain access to exclusive resources, collaborative opportunities, and a vibrant network that bridges law and society, fostering professional growth and impactful research.

[adrl-pt]

Shelling of residential buildings in Ukraine. The offensive of Russian propaganda. The bill on “foreign agents” in Georgia.

You are watching news from the weekly rally at the Russian Embassy in Lisbon. Today is April 20, 14:30.

Today there is mourning in the Dnepropetrovsk region. As a result of the Russian attack on the night of April 19, 8 people were killed, including two children, and 34 people were injured. https://t.me/astrapress/53729?single

There was mourning in Chernigov 2 days ago. 3 Russian missiles hit a densely populated area near the city center. As of April 18, 18 people were killed and another 77 people were injured. President of Ukraine Vladimir Zelensky wrote in his Telegram that “this would not have happened if Ukraine had received enough air defense.” https://www.bbc.com/russian/articles/c0de1307xeko

Let us recall that in February, Captain 1st Rank of the Russian Army Igor Krokhmal, in an interview with the Zvezda TV channel, told how they aim and successfully hit the entrances of residential buildings in Ukraine. https://war.obozrevatel.com/esli-ne-v-etot-podezd-to-v-sosednij-popadet-rossijskij-komandir-priznalsya-chto-tselyami-ih-raket-yavlyayutsya-mnogoetazhnyie-doma-video.htm

Propaganda attacks have also intensified. In February 2023, disinformation tracking site NewsGuard reported that alleged RT documentaries had been uploaded to more than 100 YouTube channels. These films contained patently false claims that Ukrainian authorities were committing “genocide” against Russian speakers in the Donbass and that “Nazism was rampant” in Ukrainian politics and society. https://www.golosameriki.com/a/europe-didn-t-ban-rt-for-telling-the-truth/7193795.html

On April 6, in Rome, where there were screenings of the film “Donbass: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow”, created by the propaganda channel RT, an action against Russian propaganda was held, organized by the Christian Association of Ukrainians in Italy. It was attended by women from Donbass, activists of the Russians Against War community, and Italian parties. “Screenings of the films ‘Donbass’, ‘Witness’, conferences with the participation of Dugin and similar people… are weapons of the Kremlin’s hybrid war not only against Ukraine, but against the entire West,” the protesters said. https://t.me/FreeRussiansGlobal/6345

Film critic Ivan Filippov, in an interview for the Present Time media, described the film “Witness” as pure propaganda. According to him, the film spreads “the narrative that Ukraine was going to attack first.” https://www.currenttime.tv/a/eto-filmy-ne-dlya-zarabotka-s-prokata-kinokritik-ivan-filippov-obyasnyaet-kto-i-pochem-delaet-kinopropagandu-rossii-o-voyne- v-ukraine/32547182.html

On April 17, the Georgian parliament voted in the first reading for the bill on “foreign agents.” It was introduced by the Georgian Dream party, which is accused of sympathizing with Russia. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ocgS3rbqnE

The first version of the law on “foreign agents” in Russia appeared in 2012. Then it seemed to many that it would not affect them. https://meduza.io/feature/2022/07/20/10-let-nazad-v-rossii-prinyali-pervyy-zakon-ob-inostrannyh-agentah

The first criminal case under this law appeared in 2023. https://www.bbc.com/russian/news-64560653

The ECHR found the law on “foreign agents” to violate the rights to freedom of assembly and association. https://pravo.ru/news/241304/

And the good news: PACE announced the non-recognition of the legitimacy of Vladimir Putin as President of the Russian Federation and called for stopping contacts with him, except for humanitarian ones. https://www.dw.com/ru/pase-obavila-o-nepriznanii-legitimnosti-vladimira-putina/a-68859569

[coochiequeens]

An older article but worth sharing in light of an overrated white man who thinks his opinion means something because he's good at sports

By Kate Stringer March 25, 2018

March is National Women’s History Month. In recognition, The 74 is sharing stories of remarkable women who transformed U.S. education.

A self-described young, stuttering child, Joe Biden credits a group of women for building his confidence and giving him 12 years of education that would lead him to become vice president of the United States. “You have no idea of the impact that you have on others,” Biden told a group of Catholic nuns on a social justice tour of the United States in 2014.

Biden is just one of millions of Americans, many of them underprivileged, educated in Catholic schools, a system that would have been impossible if not for the generations of dedicated religious female educators. Working for very low wages, these women changed lives, moving large immigrant communities into the middle class and — though too often given short shrift by the male-dominated Catholic Church — opened doors to higher education for women.

“Teaching is a critical part of the sisters’ mission of education because we believe, in short, that education can save the world,” said Sister Teresa Maya, president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. “It empowers people, it broadens horizons, it deepens values, it engages conversation between faith and culture.”

Catholic schooling in the U.S. dates back as far as the early 1600s, as priests and nuns arrived in the colonies and established schools, orphanages, and hospitals. John Carroll — elected the first U.S. bishop in 1789 — pushed for religious schools to educate American Catholic children living in a predominantly Protestant country. As priests and brothers began creating schools for boys, it was left to the nuns to teach girls.

Elizabeth Ann Seton, recognized in the Catholic Church as the first native-born U.S. saint, started the Sisters of Charity, an order that opened separate parochial schools for families of poor and wealthy girls, in the early 1800s. Some consider these the first Catholic parochial schools in the U.S.

By the middle of the century, Catholics from Ireland, Italy, and Poland began immigrating to the United States and swelling the ranks of local churches, and in the early 1900s, bishops called for every parish to educate its children — a response to widespread anti-Catholic sentiment, a need to help Americanize the new arrivals, and a desire for an alternative to public schools where children prayed the Protestant version of the Lord’s Prayer and read the King James version of the Bible.

Most of this work was carried out by the nuns, who took vows of poverty and could teach children for very low wages.

“Without the nuns, you could not have had the parochial school system that this country has had,” said Maggie McGuinness, professor of religion at La Salle University.

Catholic schools were also invaluable in alleviating overcrowded public schools as populations surged in major cities, and giving immigrants a boost up the economic ladder, said Ann Marie Ryan, associate professor of education at Loyola University Chicago.

“(The nuns) moved entire groups of people into the middle class, which is a substantial feat in and of itself,” she said.

Still, anti-Catholic sentiment proved pervasive. As Catholic groups tried to obtain public funding for their schools in the late 1800s, states began passing Blaine amendments, which restricted state legislatures from using funds for religious schools. Today, 37 states have these laws.

Oregon even instituted a law, backed by the Ku Klux Klan, that prohibited students from attending Catholic school. The U.S. Supreme Court struck this down in Pierce vs. The Society of Sisters in 1925.

As the sisters fought for their students’ rights to be educated in Catholic schools, they also found themselves fighting against the church patriarchy for their own pursuit of higher education. As Ryan wrote, “The Catholic Church’s hierarchy in the USA was worried about the movement toward increased independence for women in this era.” To fill a need for higher education among Catholic-educated girls, more nuns began seeking Ph.D.s so they could lead Catholic colleges for women. But this pursuit of independence didn’t sit well with their governing bishops, and they pushed back.

For example, in the 1930s and ’40s, the archdiocesan board of Chicago mandated that nuns could not travel outside a convent or school without being accompanied by another woman, and even went so far as to tell the president of a neighboring college that nuns should not show up to their classes without a female companion. They were also not to go outside after sunset.

Mission statements of all-girls Catholic schools reflected the sisters’ challenge of balancing what the church considered the natural role of women with many young women’s desires for independence, Ryan wrote. When the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary established Mundelein College in 1930 in Chicago, they crafted goals that showed these dual perspectives: “(Mundelein education is) practical, preparing the student for successful achievement in the economic world,” but also “conservative, holding fast to the time-honored traditions that go to the fashioning of charming and gracious womanhood.”

“(The nuns) highlighted and equally lauded their graduates’ choices to marry, seek employment, enter a religious community, or attend college,” Ryan wrote.

In her research, Ryan found Catholic high school yearbooks that revealed what this opportunity meant to young women. At Chicago’s Catholic Mercy High School in 1927, the students published quotes from Tennyson’s poem The Princess: “Here might we learn whatever men are taught…knowledge is now no more a fountain sealed.” Sixty percent of Mercy’s graduates around this time attended college (nationally, female enrollment in higher education was 44 percent).

At a time when women were barred from many universities, nuns became their advocates. Catholic sisters established 150 religious colleges for women in the United States, starting in the late 1800s. Before coeducation of men and women became the norm, more women were earning degrees from Catholic colleges than those run by other religious groups, according to The Boston Globe. And the nuns’ own pursuit of higher education broke glass ceilings: The first woman to obtain a Ph.D. in computer science was a nun: Sister Mary Kenneth Keller, in 1965.

“They were role models,” McGuinness said. “If you went to Trinity University in D.C. in 1897 and had teachers who had doctorates, maybe you think, ‘I could do that, too.’”

Maya certainly experienced that when an older nun, Sister Rosa Maria Icaza, told her what she had to go through to earn her doctorate from Catholic University. Because enrollment was limited to men, the nun had to sit outside the classroom, near the door, rather than inside with her male classmates. “I thought, ‘Thanks to a woman like this, I could get a Ph.D.,’” Maya said.

Today, however, the number of religious leaders in the Catholic Church is declining, including nuns. From 1965 to 2017, the number of sisters decreased from 179,000 to 45,000, according to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate. And even in the face of this decline, the women who join the religious life are still finding themselves under fire from within their own church. As recently as 2012, American nuns were accused by the Vatican for being radical feminists.

The loss of nuns as a teaching force is one reason running Catholic schools is more financially challenging than ever before, Maya said. Catholic school enrollment peaked in the 1960s and has dropped significantly since then. In 1965, about 5 million children attended Catholic elementary and secondary schools. In 2017, enrollment was just under 2 million. The number of Catholic schools was cut in half, from 11,000 to 6,000, during that same time period.

Catholic schools today have been experimenting with different business models to survive, from the Cristo Rey schools that utilize student work study to help pay for tuition to Philadelphia Catholic schools that have been using tax-credit scholarships and voucher programs to pay tuition for poor families.

And their students no longer come primarily from their local church — many see Catholic schools as a better alternative to poor-performing urban schools. “In many major cities, Catholic schools are a parent’s best hope for both Catholic and non-Catholic kids,” McGuinness said.

Maya said she is proud of the work Catholic schools are continuing to do to reach the children who need it most.

“The sisters were always teaching the populations in the margins,” Maya said. Without these women, “I don’t think the U.S. Catholic education system would exist the way we know it.”

[shrinkrants]

Vietnam and the protests it provoked brought an epochal change. Richard Nixon ended the draft. This formalized a state of things that had already created a sharp division in American society. The system of deferments generally meant that college students would not be called up. Even at its best this amounted to favoring the fortunate. However, deferments had to be renewed at intervals, and they could expire. So the war was real to the whole population, and the scale of the protests against it became overwhelming. Nixon did not end the war. He did end the threat it posed to the relatively prosperous and their children.

...Because of the system of student deferments, universities became associated with draft dodging. To the degree that they had ever conferred social advantage, this was compounded by the immunity they offered from the stark claim the government was making on the lives of the population as a whole. They were largely and appropriately centers of resistance to the war, an opposition that could not entirely mitigate the appearance, or the reality, that some lives were being treated as having more value than others. The struggles for minority rights and women’s rights should have taught us that an inequity is also an insult, and that a sting can persist long after a law has been repealed.

-- Marilynne Robinson

[omegaphilosophia]

Types of Power

Power can manifest in various forms, each influencing individuals and societies in distinct ways. Here are some different types of power:

Coercive Power: Coercive power involves the ability to force compliance or obedience through threats, punishment, or use of force. It relies on fear of negative consequences and is often associated with authoritarian regimes, law enforcement, or military institutions.

Reward Power: Reward power stems from the ability to provide incentives, rewards, or benefits in exchange for compliance or desired behavior. It can involve material rewards such as money, promotions, or privileges, as well as social rewards like praise or recognition.

Legitimate Power: Legitimate power is based on recognized authority, formal roles, or institutional positions within society. It derives from social norms, traditions, or legal structures that confer authority to certain individuals or institutions, such as elected officials, government leaders, or religious figures.

Referent Power: Referent power arises from the attractiveness, charisma, or perceived likability of an individual or group. It is rooted in admiration, identification, or emotional connection with a person or group, leading others to voluntarily align with their values, beliefs, or goals.

Expert Power: Expert power comes from possessing specialized knowledge, skills, or expertise in a particular domain. Individuals or groups with expert power are perceived as credible, trustworthy, and competent, enabling them to influence others through their expertise and insights.

Informational Power: Informational power derives from controlling access to valuable information or resources. Those who possess information that others need or desire can wield influence by selectively sharing or withholding information, shaping perceptions, or guiding decision-making processes.

Connection Power: Connection power is based on social networks, relationships, or alliances with influential individuals or groups. Those who have extensive social connections, networks, or alliances can leverage their relationships to access resources, opportunities, or support, enhancing their influence and status.

Resource Power: Resource power involves control or ownership of valuable resources, assets, or material wealth. Individuals, organizations, or institutions that possess significant resources, such as financial capital, land, or technology, have the ability to influence others through control over vital resources.

Symbolic Power: Symbolic power arises from the ability to shape meanings, values, or cultural norms within society. It is associated with influential figures, institutions, or ideologies that shape collective beliefs, identities, or symbols, influencing how individuals perceive themselves and their social reality.

Relational Power: Relational power emerges from interpersonal relationships, dynamics, or interactions between individuals or groups. It involves the ability to negotiate, persuade, or influence others through communication, trust-building, or emotional connections within social contexts.

These different types of power interact and intersect in complex ways, shaping social hierarchies, organizational dynamics, and individual behaviors within societies.