#liberal journalism has failed the country

[tramontane-fire]

I have got to stop reading liberal publications because lately the slant they all take is The South (Especially Texas) is a horrible evil cesspit of fascism, and then you've got the Comments Section which I know you should never read chiming in about how yeah there are good people in Texas much the same way there were good people in Germany in 1933, or that you should just move to, and I quote, New York, Los Angeles, or San Francisco. You know, those famously affordable cities.

So I move every few months for work, but I always come back to Texas because it's the closest thing I have to home. I love it here. I've lived in a couple different parts of the state and not only is it affordable (most places), you can find acceptance where you least expect it.

I was thinking today I would trashtalk these so called blue states and cities the way their highfalutin intellectuals and journalists see fit to trashtalk my home. Here goes:

Chicago, the Windy City, where the smell of hotdogs from street vendors outside Wrigley Field is accompanied by the dulcet tones of a guy with an Eastern European accent talking into a portable mic about how marriage is a sacrament between a man and a woman, and homosexuality is a sin. Behind him, posters tacked to telephone poles proclaim, Chicago doesn't have a gun problem, it has a black problem! in bold, racist lettering.

New York City, hub of arts, music, culture, fine food and wine, where a studio apartment in a bad part of town is a mere $2000/month, utilities not included. It's fine; just get a roommate! A man handing out leaflets on the corner bodyblocks a teenager from crossing the street, saying he will not let her cross until she smiles. Beneath the ever-present scaffolding, young people wearing shirts that say Bible Crusade hand out religious literature.

The Bay Area, where a gentle breeze blows off the water and missing the Grand Avenue exit and getting on the Bay Bridge by accident is only a $7 mistake. That's okay; if you don't want to drive, you can take AC transit in the East Bay, where bus drivers snap and yell at you if you try to ask them a question. Honey, this ain't the south. Scan the QR code and shut up. Oh, and your rent is $2000/month with utilities and you have to share a bathroom. People without $2000 to spare live in tents and broken-down RVs in a bad part of town. Let's go brandon! yells a sticker on a light pole.

True stories all. I have seen your exalted liberal cities and they are shit. You trashtalk the south from your cushy, overpriced apartment in a coastal city and yet you've clearly never been there.

This has been a rant.

[metamatar]

Employers desire foreign workers who are accustomed to the hazardous work sites of industrial construction; in particular, they specifically solicit migrants who do not have a history of labor organizing within SWANA. In response, labor brokerage firms brand themselves as offering migrant workers who are deferential. Often, labor brokers conflate the category of South Asian with docility; [...] as inherently passive, disciplined, and, most important, unfettered by volatile working conditions. "We say quality, they [U.S. employers] say seasoned. We both know what it means. Workers who are not going to quit, not going to run away in the foreign country and do as they are told.” [...]

For migrants, the U.S. oil industry presents a rare chance to apply their existing skill set in a country with options for permanent residency and sponsorship of family members. Migrants wish to find an end to their tem­porary worker status; they imagine the United States as a liberal economy in which labor standards are enforced and there are opportunities for citizenship and building a life for their family. [...] What brokers fail to explain is that South Asian migrants are being recruited as guest workers. Migrants will not have access to U.S. citizenship or visas for family members; in fact, their employment status will be quite similar to their SWANA migration.

While nations such as the Philippines have both state-mandated and independent migrant rights agencies, the Indian government has minimal avenues for worker protection. These are limited to hotlines for reporting abusive foreign employers and Indian consulates located in a few select countries of the SWANA region. [... Brokers] emphasize the docility of Indian migrants in comparison to the disruptive tendencies of other Asian migrant workers. [...] “Some of these Filipino men you see make a lot of trouble in the Arab countries. Even their women, who work as maids and such, lash out. The employer says one wrong thing and the workers get the whole country [the Philippines] on the street. [...] But you don’t see our people creating a tamasha [spectacle] overseas.” [...] Just as Filipinx migrants are racialized to be undisciplined labor, Indian brokers construct divisions within the South Asian workforce to promote the primacy of their own firms. In particular, Pakistani workers are racialized as an abrasive population.

[...] While the public image of the South Asian American community remains as model minorities, presumed to be primarily upwardly mobile professionals, the global reality of the population is quite to the contrary. [...] From the historic colonial routes initiated by British occupation of South Asia to the emergence of energy markets within the countries of SWANA, migrants have been recruited to build industries by contributing their labor to construction projects. Within the last decade, these South Asian migrants, with experience in the SWANA oil industry, have been actively solicited as guest workers into the energy sector of the United States. The growth of hydraulic fracturing has opened new territory for oil extraction; capitalizing on the potential market are numerous stakeholders who have invested in industrial construction projects across the southwestern United States. The solicitation of South Asian construction workers is not coincidental. [...] Kartik, a globally competitive firm’s broker, explains the connection of Indian labor to practices of the past. “You know we come from a long history of working in foreign lands. Even the British used to send us to Africa and the Arab regions to work in the mines and oil fields. It’s part of our history.”

Seasoning Labor: Contemporary South Asian Migrations and the Racialization of Immigrant Workers, Saunjuhi Verma in the Journal of Asian American Studies

[naipan]

History Goes to War in the Holy Land

Israel’s leading historian, Benny Morris, long exposed his country’s sins. Then he began to hold the Palestinians to account. His erstwhile admirers aren’t happy about it.

By Elliot Kaufman

March 29, 2024

The dogs of the neighborhood perk up to greet me at Benny Morris’s front gate in this middle-of-nowhere town in central Israel. The great historian, shaggy-haired, in T-shirt, open flannel and socks, has recently returned home from the U.K., where the barking did not cease.

He was there to debate a hard-line anti-Israel scholar and speak at the London School of Economics, where some students tried and failed to shut down his lecture with droning, preplanned slogans. “You’re actually quite boring,” Mr. Morris, 75, told them, at which point he was called a racist, doubtless in the expectation that he, a liberal, would be cowed by the slur. He wasn’t. “I’d rather be a racist than a bore,” he replied.

Mr. Morris was once the toast of the campuses. “I was sort of a symbol on the left,” he says on his back porch. “I don’t want to say ‘icon.’ ” If he won’t, I will. Mr. Morris was foremost among the “New Historians” who shook Israel in the 1980s and seemed to triumph in the 1990s with their revisionist accounts of the Arab-Israeli conflict. His 1988 book, “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-49,” was a landmark in Israel’s self-criticism and understanding. That same year, Mr. Morris spent 19 days in Israeli military prison for refusing to serve on reserve duty in the West Bank.

How did he go from there to the shouting match at LSE? To many on the left, Mr. Morris says, “I seem to have turned anti-Palestinian in the year 2000,” when Prime Minister Ehud Barak and President Bill Clinton offered a two-state solution and Yasser Arafat rejected it. “I thought this was a terrible decision by the Palestinians, and I wrote that.” When the Palestinians, in response to the offer of peace and statehood, then launched a wave of terrorism and suicide bombings unlike any before it, Mr. Morris disapproved of that, too. “I began to write journalism against the Palestinians, their decisions and policies,” he says, “and this was considered treachery.”

Mr. Morris was suddenly out of step “because people always forgive the Palestinians, who don’t take responsibility,” he says. “It’s accepted that they are the victim and therefore can do whatever they like.” Mr. Morris doesn’t contest the claim of victimhood but sees it on both sides. “Righteous Victims” is the title of his 1999 history of the conflict.

Israel is viewed as “all-powerful vis-à-vis the Palestinians,” he says. “But as we see it, we are surrounded by the Muslim world, organized in some way by Iran, and the West is turning its back on us. So we see ourselves as the underdog.” Try that on a college campus. “Now, the Palestinians are the underdog, and the underdog is always right, even if it does the wrong things,” he says, “like Oct. 7.”

The West hasn’t reckoned with Oct. 7. Not the massacre itself, which is at once too hard to fathom and too easy to condemn, but the broad support for it among Palestinians. “They were joyous in the West Bank and Gaza Strip when 1,200 Jews were killed and 250 were taken hostage,” Mr. Morris says. Palestinian support for the atrocities has remained constant, at over 70%, in opinion polls.

Mr. Morris tries to see it from their point of view: “700,000 Palestinians had become refugees as a result of Israel and its victory in ’48. They’d been living under occupation since ’67. I understand their desire for revenge and to see Israel disappear or very badly hurt.”

But that’s too easy. “In addition to those history-based grievances, there is Muslim antisemitism, terrorism and a level of barbarism, which for Israelis felt like more than revenge for bad things we’ve done,” he says. “It was a sick ideology and sick people carrying out murder and rape in the name of that ideology.”

Mr. Morris stresses the costs of that Palestinian decision. “There was never destruction like what has happened in Gaza over the past five months in any of Israel’s wars.” In 1967, “Israel conquered the West Bank with almost no houses being destroyed,” he says, “and the same applies in ’56 in the Gaza Strip, and the same applies in ’48. Israel didn’t have the firepower to cause such devastation. This is totally new.”

He doubts the scale of the suffering will move Palestinian nationalists. “Probably they’ll look back to Oct. 7 as a sort of minor victory over Zionism and disregard the casualties which they paid as a result,” he says. That’s the historical pattern.

“Not only has each of their big decisions made life worse for their people, but they ensure that each time the idea of a two-state solution is proposed, less of Palestine is offered to them,” Mr. Morris says. “In 1937, Palestinians were supposed to get 70% of Palestine or more.” The Zionists were willing to work with the plan, but the Arabs rejected it and chose violence. “Then, in 1947, the Palestinians were supposed to get 45% of Palestine,” with much of Israel’s more than 50% comprising desert. The Zionists accepted the partition, and, again, the Palestinians chose violence.

“And then in the Barak-Clinton things,” in 2000, “the Palestinians were supposed to get 21%, 22% of Palestine.” Instead they launched the second intifada. “Next time,” Mr. Morris predicts, “they’ll probably get 15%. Each time they’re given less of Palestine as a result of being defeated in their efforts to get all of Palestine.”

Mr. Morris says 1947 was the best chance for peace, but the Arabs instead tried to block and then crush the new Jewish state. Though they came to see the war as the nakba, or catastrophe, and as the final stage of a Zionist invasion, at the time “they thought they were going to win,” Mr. Morris says. “They have a problem explaining to themselves why they lost the war with twice as many Arabs as Jews—100 times as many if you include the Arab states.”

One day, Mr. Morris admits, the Palestinian strategy could work. “Somebody coming from Mars would say, ‘The Arabs have the numbers. They have the potential for much greater economic and military power, so they’re going to win here if they persist in their resistance.’ ”

Mr. Morris lets that hang in the air. “And yet, one never knows,” he says. “Unusual things happen here. Peace might also break out, which would be even more unusual.”

Especially now. “Over the decades,” Mr. Morris says, “left and center in Israel were willing to go for a two-state solution.” Oct. 7 has accelerated the process of convincing those Israelis they were misguided. “Israelis today don’t want to look at the two-state solution. Most Israelis fear Hamas would take over the West Bank”—a fear Mr. Morris says is amply justified by Hamas’s popularity—“and that it would be a springboard for attacks on Israel, as the Gaza Strip was.”

If Oct. 7 pushed Israelis further away from a deal, “internationally, Oct. 7 put the two-state solution back on the table,” he observes. “It had been removed from the table. Nobody cared about it. Nobody talked about it. Now it’s back on the agenda.”

Thus Mr. Morris says the massacre worked. “The terrorism told the international community that a solution must be found, otherwise this will keep going on and on.” As if to punctuate his point, the sound of distant Israeli bombing in Gaza makes its way to us. “But,” he says, “I don’t think anyone can impose a two-state solution, because the Arabs don’t want it and the Jews don’t want it.”

It wouldn’t work, anyway. “Palestinians might tactically agree to a two-state solution, but it would never be enough for them. Because they need more territory than the West Bank and Gaza, especially to absorb refugees from Lebanon and Syria. They’re too big.” They would also need Jordan, as he advocated in “One State, Two States” (2009), or the rest of Israel, as they have always demanded.

The Oct. 7 attack also succeeded by undermining Israeli-Saudi rapprochement, Mr. Morris says, but Iran shouldn’t get away with that. “Israel should have used this war to destroy the Iranian nuclear project, and I hope we still will. But this guy, [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, is incompetent,” he says. “I don’t know if the word ‘weakling’ is right, but he’s cowardly in relation to taking big decisions.”

Mr. Morris adds that “Western public opinion over the past 20 years has gradually seen Israel in Netanyahu’s image, which has cast a pall over the Jewish state.” Israel has suffered a “major turn” in global public opinion, he says, “and it’s largely, in my view, because of Netanyahu.”

Yet when I ask about the Netanyahu position that is now drawing President Biden’s ire, the determination to invade Hamas’s last stronghold in Rafah, Mr. Morris’s answer is instructive. “The Israeli public, myself included, thinks that we’ve begun the job and we must finish the job. We must destroy Hamas, and that will include taking Rafah,” he says. “In this, Netanyahu is right and in this, most Israelis agree.”

Perhaps Mr. Biden has misread Israelis. “If you like Cicero, think of Carthage,” Mr. Morris says. “Hamas must be destroyed after what it did. We can’t allow that on our southern border, in addition to having Hezbollah on our northern border and Iran, God knows where—we just can’t.”

Mr. Morris prefers to see the Palestinian movement on its own terms. Thomas Friedman’s writing in the New York Times about the Palestinian “dream of independence in their homeland in a state next to Israel” earns a chuckle. “I think the Palestinians regard the Zionist enterprise and the state of Israel which emerged from it as illegitimate, a robber state,” Mr. Morris says, “and that the Jews have no right to it. This, I think, all Palestinians believe.”

The real conflict “boils down to whether the Jews were right and had the right to come here and settle here and establish a sovereign state,” he says. “It’s not so much about Israeli behavior at any given point in time.”

Mr. Morris made his name exposing the dark side of Israel’s founding, but at the end of the day, “I’m a Zionist—I use the word,” he says. “I believe that the Jews had a right to establish a state here. The Arabs had a right because they were indigenous here, and the Jews had a right because they were here many, many years before the Arabs and always looked to this land as theirs.”

He puts Israel in context: “The Arabs had Arabia, and then another 24 states which emerged afterward. And the Jews have this little sliver of territory which used to belong to us. There’s something fair about that,” no matter how often it is denounced as a world-historical injustice.

While “most of the Arabs up to the 20th century understood that this had been the Jews’ land,” Palestinians have radicalized in their denial of Jewish history. “When Clinton mentioned the ancient Jewish temple at Camp David in 2000, Arafat said, ‘What temple?’ ” Mr. Morris recounts. “He basically argued there was no connection of the Jews to the Holy Land at all.”

This is also the claim today from Mahmoud Abbas, Arafat’s successor, who told the United Nations in 2023, “They dug everywhere and they could not find anything.”

Mr. Morris will criticize the Palestinians in moral terms, but he isn’t sure he knows what’s in their interest better than they do. When I ask what a true friend of the Palestinians would advise, he is conflicted. “A true friend might say, ‘Stop killing Israelis and you’ll get a deal and you’ll get the West Bank,’ ” he says. “But maybe a true friend, another one, would say, ‘The West Bank isn’t really enough for the Palestinians. The Jews stole Palestine from you. Just fight on, lose as many people as you can, kill as many Israelis as you can. You’ll ultimately get the rest.’ ”

When I ask what a true friend of Israel would say right now, Mr. Morris doesn’t hesitate. “Finish off Hamas,” he replies.

Even if one has problems with Israel—occupation, settlements?

“Get rid of Hamas.”

Mr. Kaufman is the Journal’s letters editor.

[connorthemaoist]

by OCR Leadership | 23 November 2023 | kites-journal.org

Despite the Nakba, despite 75 years of occupation and apartheid, despite repeated wars of aggression and land thefts, despite betrayals by Arab governments and Arafat and Abbas, despite hundreds of billions of dollars in US funding for Israel, the Palestinian people have remained steadfast in their struggle for national liberation. No amount of US money and weaponry, no amount of settler violence, no amount of Mossad fuckery, and no amount of Israeli bombs has been able to extinguish the resistance of the Palestinian people, which has long been an inspiration to the exploited and oppressed around the world. Regardless of our differences with the ideology and politics of Hamas, the 7 October 2023 lightning raid on Israel from the open-air prison that is the Gaza Strip was a powerful manifestation of the spirit of the Palestinian struggle, and it delivered a powerful blow to the Zionist enemy and the US-led imperialist bloc, demonstrating weaknesses in their supposedly invincible military power.

Israel’s response has been a genocidal war intended to mete out brutal punishment to all Palestinians and displace even more of them from their land. Initially, US imperialism and its closest allies were in lockstep in supporting Israel’s war, giving the most right-wing Zionist government yet carte blanche to carry out a genocide, with the US rushing to restock Israel’s armories with the latest death-doling contraptions. But a worldwide mass movement has emerged to demand an end to the war and challenge the legitimacy of not only Israel but also its imperialist backers. This movement has forced imperialists to start talking about “humanitarian pauses” and the president of France—a country whose distinguished imperialist history includes brutal (but failed) wars to maintain its colonies in Algeria and Vietnam—to even suggest that a ceasefire is necessary. And in countries neighboring and nearby Palestine, where the struggle of the Palestinian people has always been understood as part of a larger struggle against imperialism, the oil rentier bourgeoisie1 and the lackeys of US imperialism are in danger of losing whatever shred of legitimacy they have left, and maneuvering to prevent the war on Gaza from provoking a broader crisis. On the ground in Gaza, Palestinian guerrilla fighters are deploying innovative tactics against an exceptionally well-armed military, blowing up Israeli tanks and otherwise inflicting blows on the Zionist aggressor.

How the conflict on the ground and the geopolitical maneuvers around it play out remains to be seen, but it is clear that the mass movement around the world is having a positive effect. The focus of this statement is the challenges of the mass movement and the tasks of communists in the US. A deeper analysis of the events unfolding before our eyes and their historical backdrop, the various political forces in Palestine and the shifting political allegiances of the Palestinian people, the machinations of the Israeli bourgeoisie and the culpability of Israeli society as a whole, the role of Israel within the imperialist system, and the geopolitical dynamics of imperialist rivalry and oil rentier bourgeois interests in relation to Palestine are beyond the scope of this statement. We’ll just note here that on an international level, communists need to develop the ability to make and articulate such analysis, and we can look back to the journal A World To Win for a good model of how to do that.

Read: https://kites-journal.org/2023/11/23/spread-the-steadfast-spirit-of-the-palestinian-struggle/

[howwelldoyouknowyourmoon]

Nov 10, 2023

The July 2022 assassination of former Prime Minister Abe Shinzō focused attention on the Unification Church. The alleged killer’s mother, a church follower, had given her family’s riches to the organization, inspiring her son to take up arms against a politician he saw as having supported the group. A journalist and former politician who has long followed the church’s dealings looks at the issues involved.

To the west of the National Diet building in central Tokyo stand three 12-story buildings that house offices for members from both houses of the Diet. Arita Yoshifu’s former office in the Members’ Building of the House of Councillors commands a view of the Liberal Democratic Party’s Nagatachō headquarters. Arita still remembers the scene from his window one rainy day after the July 8, 2022, assassination of former Prime Minister Abe Shinzō.

“A long line of mourners formed behind tables that had been placed outside LDP headquarters for people to put flowers on. Some of the mourners were children who had been brought by their mothers. Even Abe would never have dreamt that he would be assassinated in broad daylight over the LDP’s involvement with the Unification Church. He met with great misfortune,” says Arita.

A Family Destroyed by the Church “I felt conflicted,” continues Arita. “As a journalist, I spent many years covering issues of religion, in the course of which I reported on the Unification Church’s ‘spiritual sales’—sales of trinkets claimed to have supernatural powers, along with demands for excessive donations. After being elected to the House of Councillors in 2010, I used Diet question time to draw attention to the plight of victims of the church. However, the government failed to take fundamental action.”

Yamagami Tetsuya, who has been charged with the murder of the former prime minister in addition to several other crimes, was born into a wealthy family. However, after Tetsuya’s father died, his mother became a devoted follower of the Unification Church, and Tetsuya’s life was turned upside down. One by one, his mother sold off the family’s assets, eventually even selling the family home. She donated more than ¥100 million to the church in all. The financial strain of the donations caused her to declare bankruptcy in 2002. The family faced severe financial hardship, and Tetsuya resigned himself to the fact that he would not go to university.

Tetsuya’ elder brother had a medical condition. In 2005, having taken out a life insurance policy that made his brother the beneficiary, Tetsuya tried to kill himself, in an effort to help with his brother’s medical bills. While Tetsuya’s suicide attempt was unsuccessful, the brother Tetsuya tried to save by giving his life would himself commit suicide in 2015.

“The Yamagamis were very unfortunate,” explains Arita. “I tour the country talking about the Unification Church, and when I talk about Tetsuya’s story, people start crying. That is probably the reason why so many parcels of food and money have arrived from all over the country addressed to him, despite his commission of a heinous crime,” he goes on.

Attacked for Reporting the Truth Arita has been covering the Unification Church since the late 1980s. His reporting subsequently led the Asahi Journal tabloid to mount a campaign to shut down the church’s “spiritual sales” of goods claimed to hold miraculous efficacy. “The church originally raised money by selling flowers, handkerchiefs, and socks, but that never generated significant revenue, so they shifted to miracle-working trinkets in the late 1970s,” explains Arita.

The objects claimed to have supernatural powers included urns, miniature pagodas, seals, pendants, and rings. The church sold these knick-knacks for dozens of times more than they were worth. When Ariyoshi’s articles were published, his exposés made him a target for attacks.

“I received numerous phone calls with nobody speaking on the other end, and I was frequently followed. One day, a man came up to me on the subway steps, punched me, and said ‘remember my face.’ I received threatening letters in which razor blades had been concealed in such a way as to cut the person opening them,” he reveals.

When Arita began reporting on the church, the postwar Japanese economy was booming thanks to the asset bubble. However, the burst of the bubble in the early 1990s and the ensuing recession brought about a host of social problems. It was in this climate of worry that TV commentators started to focus on the Unification Church.

The wedding of pop singer Sakurada Junko in a 1992 church-sponsored mass wedding in Seoul was reported repeatedly in celebrity news, both in magazines and on TV. In 1993, a story about a former rhythmic gymnastics athlete who escaped from the church also generated significant interest.

“From 1992 through 1994, I wrote over 100 articles on the church. TV stations and newspapers only ever treated the issue as celebrity gossip, however. There was very little coverage of the social issues created by the sale of supernatural knick-knacks,” says Arita.

Aum Attack Sucks Oxygen from UC Coverage However, despite the attention drawn by the Unification Church at one time, the public in Japan lost interest over time, most markedly after 1995, when the Aum Shinrikyō cult carried out a sarin gas attack in a Tokyo subway, killing 14 and injuring 6,300. The ensuing wall-to-wall Aum coverage ensured a total lack of interest in the Unification Church, and Aum came to dominate the job requests received by Arita.

“I would try and sell the tabloids stories about UC, only to have the editor tell me my story would not capture the public interest in the way that Aum would,” he says.

It was around this point that the church is believed to have gradually built relationships with politicians. A survey published by the LDP in September 2022 found that 179 of the party’s 379 Diet members, or nearly half, had some relationship with the Unification Church. It was also reported that in the 2021 House of Representatives election and 2021 House of Councillors Election, a Unification Church friendship organization signed agreements with LDP candidates regarding policy. The agreements required the candidates to commit to constitutional reform, increased national security, support for the disciplining of children, and a cautious stance on LGBT issues and same-sex marriage. The church asked candidates to sign endorsement agreements in which they explicitly declared their support for these policies.

Arita describes the history of the relationship between the LDP and the former Unification Church as follows: “The Unification Church was established in South Korea in 1954. In 1958, Korean followers who had entered Japan illegally began proselytizing in Japan. The church also began proselytizing in the United States that same year. In 1968, the International Federation for Victory over Communism was established in South Korea and Japan. The church used the slogan ‘victory over communism’ when approaching politicians, because doing so in the capacity of a religious organization would have triggered suspicion. It was through the Federation that Abe Shinzō’s grandfather, former Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke, strengthened his relationship with UC.”

Church’s Close Ties to Abe Family Abe Shinzō’s relationship with the Unification Church goes all the way back to his grandfather. Arita says that a former minister in an LDP cabinet once told him that it was Abe who handled the relationship between the Unification Church and the Liberal Democrats. The church valued Abe, too. In September 2021, Abe recorded a five-minute video message that was shown at a gathering in Seoul of the Universal Peace Federation, a group linked to the church. It is said that this video made Yamagami Tetsuya decide to attack the former prime minister. In the video, Abe makes the following comment: “I want to express my respects to UPF founder Han Hak Ja and the rest of you for working with the UPF to resolve conflicts around the world, in particular with regard to the reunification of the Korean peninsula.”

Han is the widow of Unification Church founder Sun Myung Moon and the current head of the organization, now known as the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification. For the organization, Abe remained an important ally, even after he had stood down as prime minister, because of the influence he wielded in the LDP.

But Arita finds one aspect of the relationship between Abe and the church curious.

“When Abe was LDP secretary general in 2003 and 2004, I asked him whether the Unification Church tried to get close to him and he said they did, frequently. When I asked if he met with church representatives, he said he tried not to. At that time, LDP politicians were still keeping their distance from the church. There was therefore a time when the LDP did not send congratulatory messages to be read at UC functions. But as concern about the church’s spiritual sales waned, Abe came to fraternize with church officials, even to the extent of recording a video message for their event,” he says.

Arita’s Aum Shinrikyō coverage led him to build relationships with senior police officers. A comment made by one of those officers stays with him today: “Once the Aum investigation wound up, we were all fired up and ready to get our teeth into the Unification Church.”

No developments were forthcoming, however. About 10 years later, Arita asked the police officer why they hadn’t gone after the church. His response was simple: “politics.”

Children of Followers Still Waiting for Justice In December 2022, the Diet passed a bill aiming to provide relief to victims of the former Unification Church. Attention is now focused on whether the bill will cause the organization to be stripped of its status as a religious organization. But some say that not enough is being done.

“If the church loses its religious standing, it will lose its preferential tax status as well. The private organization that is the former Unification Church will remain, however. In an age when you can send money across borders using a cellphone, it will be difficult to stop people from donating to the church. The church will claim it is the victim of religious persecution and mount a united defense.” Arita stood in the by-election for the Yamaguchi Prefecture seat that was called after Abe’s death, but was unsuccessful. He is currently being sued for defamation by the former Unification Church over comments he made on television. In a gathering held in May 2023 to support his legal fight, he made the following comment: “I take the attitude that it’s an honor to be sued. I will fight to the very end, as long as I’m alive.”

[fatehbaz]

The ways in which ideas about ‘Zomia’ have provoked, inspired, jostled and indeed riled are certainly intriguing. [...] A G[oo]gle search for the term ‘Zomia’ yields 90,700 results (as of [2019]) [...]. Among these, [...] in an opinion piece [...] titled “The Undiscovered Country” (14 Feb 2012), Frank Jacobs [...] offered up a short history of ‘refuges, sanctuaries, freetowns, zones of no control’, adding [...] ‘Zomia’ to this mix. [...] Jacobs suggested that,

there exists another type of border, one that doesn’t reflect back our image. In vampiric asymmetry [...]. The world as we know it -- reciprocal even across national borders -- ends here. [...] The borderline does not merely separate two territories, but two paradigms: law and order from anarchy, progress from primitivism. Or perhaps, seen from the other side: freedom from oppression [...].

In Germany, a caravan park calling itself “Wagenplatz Zomia” has also drawn inspiration [...] as the community protests against high rents in Hamburg [...]. [C]ommunity members face eviction from [...] hostile and inept municipalities that spend millions of Euros building commercial centres that end up derelict and empty [...]. The authorities are also seen as utterly resistant to providing affordable housing for low income residents. Here, Zomia encapsulates protest against the state, represented by the neo-liberal economic vision of progress.

Generally speaking, the debate generated, particularly by Scott’s emphasis on Zomia as an intentional ‘non-state’ space, has been significant [...], and it continues to unfold in surprising ways. [...]

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On the other hand, scholars not necessarily working in highland Asia but inspired by the emphasis on indigenous agency, namely that communities ‘chose to place themselves out of the reach of the state’ [...], have found ways to incorporate these ideas in their own research. [...] Benjamin Powell and Malvika Nair (2012), for example, have incorporated many of these ideas while engaging in comparative studies between a 19th century South Indian banking caste and modern day Somalia. Thus, as a ‘heuristic of resistance’, Zomia has stimulated considerations of applicability [...]. Perhaps the best example is Caroline Humphrey’s exploration of Zomia as an idea in Inner Asian studies. She wrote (2015: 105):

Thinking in terms of Zomia allows a looking outwards from peripheral areas as at the impositions of states and empires. It becomes clear that the ‘friction of terrain’, the very difficulty or remoteness of these zones, has given an advantage to the [...] inhabitants, who know the local passageways, the hideouts, the hidden desert wells, as so forth [...], while at the same time rendering tax collection, military conscription, etc. [...] difficult enough [...] for a pre-modern state apparatus. [...] Zomia-like areas could maintain a certain independence [...]. [T]heir relative inaccessibility was the very reason why these zones became refuges for repeated waves of runaways, migrants, deserters and bandits, and also, in some cases, sites of millenarian resistance to colonialism. [...]

---

Tom Brass, in his piece “Scott’s “Zomia”, or a Populist Postmodern History of Nowhere,” (2012: 125) suggested that Scott’s Zomia project [...] follows a trend of ‘resurgent populist historiography’ that orientalises the agency of people living at the margins, a trend that has ‘colonised academic journals’ [...].

Hjorleifur Jonsson (2014, 2010) similarly sees Scott and many of his followers as failing to recognise how the notion of everyday resistance as a kind of cultural trait essentialises a great multitude of complex peoples that are anything but the nostalgic anthropologist’s ‘pure’ and ‘unpolluted’ small-scale societies. [...] Sanford Schram, on the other hand, has suggested that the myriad forms that resistance and evasion from state interference engendered in Scott’s account point to a very important, context-specific insight, thus, on those grounds alone, meriting further exploration [...]. Unsurprisingly, in an age of increasingly authoritarian regimes, unfettered global capitalism, and [...] state and private surveillance, the idea of a large swath of Asia existing beyond state control [...] is very attractive.

Critics have been clear about the fact that we mustn’t essentialise this space. [...]

---

Text by: Arkotong Longkumer and Michael Heneise. “The Highlander.” The Highlander: Journal of Highland Asia. Volume 1, no. 1. December 2019. [Bold emphasis, italics, and some paragraph breaks added by me.]

[dickens-daily]

CHAPTER IV—THE ELECTION FOR BEADLE

A great event has recently occurred in our parish. A contest of paramount interest has just terminated; a parochial convulsion has taken place. It has been succeeded by a glorious triumph, which the country—or at least the parish—it is all the same—will long remember. We have had an election; an election for beadle. The supporters of the old beadle system have been defeated in their stronghold, and the advocates of the great new beadle principles have achieved a proud victory.

Our parish, which, like all other parishes, is a little world of its own, has long been divided into two parties, whose contentions, slumbering for a while, have never failed to burst forth with unabated vigour, on any occasion on which they could by possibility be renewed. Watching-rates, lighting-rates, paving-rates, sewer’s-rates, church-rates, poor’s-rates—all sorts of rates, have been in their turns the subjects of a grand struggle; and as to questions of patronage, the asperity and determination with which they have been contested is scarcely credible.

The leader of the official party—the steady advocate of the churchwardens, and the unflinching supporter of the overseers—is an old gentleman who lives in our row. He owns some half a dozen houses in it, and always walks on the opposite side of the way, so that he may be able to take in a view of the whole of his property at once. He is a tall, thin, bony man, with an interrogative nose, and little restless perking eyes, which appear to have been given him for the sole purpose of peeping into other people’s affairs with. He is deeply impressed with the importance of our parish business, and prides himself, not a little, on his style of addressing the parishioners in vestry assembled. His views are rather confined than extensive; his principles more narrow than liberal. He has been heard to declaim very loudly in favour of the liberty of the press, and advocates the repeal of the stamp duty on newspapers, because the daily journals who now have a monopoly of the public, never give verbatim reports of vestry meetings. He would not appear egotistical for the world, but at the same time he must say, that there are speeches—that celebrated speech of his own, on the emoluments of the sexton, and the duties of the office, for instance—which might be communicated to the public, greatly to their improvement and advantage.

His great opponent in public life is Captain Purday, the old naval officer on half-pay, to whom we have already introduced our readers. The captain being a determined opponent of the constituted authorities, whoever they may chance to be, and our other friend being their steady supporter, with an equal disregard of their individual merits, it will readily be supposed, that occasions for their coming into direct collision are neither few nor far between. They divided the vestry fourteen times on a motion for heating the church with warm water instead of coals: and made speeches about liberty and expenditure, and prodigality and hot water, which threw the whole parish into a state of excitement. Then the captain, when he was on the visiting committee, and his opponent overseer, brought forward certain distinct and specific charges relative to the management of the workhouse, boldly expressed his total want of confidence in the existing authorities, and moved for ‘a copy of the recipe by which the paupers’ soup was prepared, together with any documents relating thereto.’ This the overseer steadily resisted; he fortified himself by precedent, appealed to the established usage, and declined to produce the papers, on the ground of the injury that would be done to the public service, if documents of a strictly private nature, passing between the master of the workhouse and the cook, were to be thus dragged to light on the motion of any individual member of the vestry. The motion was lost by a majority of two; and then the captain, who never allows himself to be defeated, moved for a committee of inquiry into the whole subject. The affair grew serious: the question was discussed at meeting after meeting, and vestry after vestry; speeches were made, attacks repudiated, personal defiances exchanged, explanations received, and the greatest excitement prevailed, until at last, just as the question was going to be finally decided, the vestry found that somehow or other, they had become entangled in a point of form, from which it was impossible to escape with propriety. So, the motion was dropped, and everybody looked extremely important, and seemed quite satisfied with the meritorious nature of the whole proceeding.

This was the state of affairs in our parish a week or two since, when Simmons, the beadle, suddenly died. The lamented deceased had over-exerted himself, a day or two previously, in conveying an aged female, highly intoxicated, to the strong room of the work-house. The excitement thus occasioned, added to a severe cold, which this indefatigable officer had caught in his capacity of director of the parish engine, by inadvertently playing over himself instead of a fire, proved too much for a constitution already enfeebled by age; and the intelligence was conveyed to the Board one evening that Simmons had died, and left his respects.

The breath was scarcely out of the body of the deceased functionary, when the field was filled with competitors for the vacant office, each of whom rested his claims to public support, entirely on the number and extent of his family, as if the office of beadle were originally instituted as an encouragement for the propagation of the human species. ‘Bung for Beadle. Five small children!’—‘Hopkins for Beadle. Seven small children!!’—‘Timkins for Beadle. Nine small children!!!’ Such were the placards in large black letters on a white ground, which were plentifully pasted on the walls, and posted in the windows of the principal shops. Timkins’s success was considered certain: several mothers of families half promised their votes, and the nine small children would have run over the course, but for the production of another placard, announcing the appearance of a still more meritorious candidate. ‘Spruggins for Beadle. Ten small children (two of them twins), and a wife!!!’ There was no resisting this; ten small children would have been almost irresistible in themselves, without the twins, but the touching parenthesis about that interesting production of nature, and the still more touching allusion to Mrs. Spruggins, must ensure success. Spruggins was the favourite at once, and the appearance of his lady, as she went about to solicit votes (which encouraged confident hopes of a still further addition to the house of Spruggins at no remote period), increased the general prepossession in his favour. The other candidates, Bung alone excepted, resigned in despair. The day of election was fixed; and the canvass proceeded with briskness and perseverance on both sides.

The members of the vestry could not be supposed to escape the contagious excitement inseparable from the occasion. The majority of the lady inhabitants of the parish declared at once for Spruggins; and the quondam overseer took the same side, on the ground that men with large families always had been elected to the office, and that although he must admit, that, in other respects, Spruggins was the least qualified candidate of the two, still it was an old practice, and he saw no reason why an old practice should be departed from. This was enough for the captain. He immediately sided with Bung, canvassed for him personally in all directions, wrote squibs on Spruggins, and got his butcher to skewer them up on conspicuous joints in his shop-front; frightened his neighbour, the old lady, into a palpitation of the heart, by his awful denunciations of Spruggins’s party; and bounced in and out, and up and down, and backwards and forwards, until all the sober inhabitants of the parish thought it inevitable that he must die of a brain fever, long before the election began.

The day of election arrived. It was no longer an individual struggle, but a party contest between the ins and outs. The question was, whether the withering influence of the overseers, the domination of the churchwardens, and the blighting despotism of the vestry-clerk, should be allowed to render the election of beadle a form—a nullity: whether they should impose a vestry-elected beadle on the parish, to do their bidding and forward their views, or whether the parishioners, fearlessly asserting their undoubted rights, should elect an independent beadle of their own.

The nomination was fixed to take place in the vestry, but so great was the throng of anxious spectators, that it was found necessary to adjourn to the church, where the ceremony commenced with due solemnity. The appearance of the churchwardens and overseers, and the ex-churchwardens and ex-overseers, with Spruggins in the rear, excited general attention. Spruggins was a little thin man, in rusty black, with a long pale face, and a countenance expressive of care and fatigue, which might either be attributed to the extent of his family or the anxiety of his feelings. His opponent appeared in a cast-off coat of the captain’s—a blue coat with bright buttons; white trousers, and that description of shoes familiarly known by the appellation of ‘high-lows.’ There was a serenity in the open countenance of Bung—a kind of moral dignity in his confident air—an ‘I wish you may get it’ sort of expression in his eye—which infused animation into his supporters, and evidently dispirited his opponents.

The ex-churchwarden rose to propose Thomas Spruggins for beadle. He had known him long. He had had his eye upon him closely for years; he had watched him with twofold vigilance for months. (A parishioner here suggested that this might be termed ‘taking a double sight,’ but the observation was drowned in loud cries of ‘Order!’) He would repeat that he had had his eye upon him for years, and this he would say, that a more well-conducted, a more well-behaved, a more sober, a more quiet man, with a more well-regulated mind, he had never met with. A man with a larger family he had never known (cheers). The parish required a man who could be depended on (‘Hear!’ from the Spruggins side, answered by ironical cheers from the Bung party). Such a man he now proposed (‘No,’ ‘Yes’). He would not allude to individuals (the ex-churchwarden continued, in the celebrated negative style adopted by great speakers). He would not advert to a gentleman who had once held a high rank in the service of his majesty; he would not say, that that gentleman was no gentleman; he would not assert, that that man was no man; he would not say, that he was a turbulent parishioner; he would not say, that he had grossly misbehaved himself, not only on this, but on all former occasions; he would not say, that he was one of those discontented and treasonable spirits, who carried confusion and disorder wherever they went; he would not say, that he harboured in his heart envy, and hatred, and malice, and all uncharitableness. No! He wished to have everything comfortable and pleasant, and therefore, he would say—nothing about him (cheers).

The captain replied in a similar parliamentary style. He would not say, he was astonished at the speech they had just heard; he would not say, he was disgusted (cheers). He would not retort the epithets which had been hurled against him (renewed cheering); he would not allude to men once in office, but now happily out of it, who had mismanaged the workhouse, ground the paupers, diluted the beer, slack-baked the bread, boned the meat, heightened the work, and lowered the soup (tremendous cheers). He would not ask what such men deserved (a voice, ‘Nothing a-day, and find themselves!’). He would not say, that one burst of general indignation should drive them from the parish they polluted with their presence (‘Give it him!’). He would not allude to the unfortunate man who had been proposed—he would not say, as the vestry’s tool, but as Beadle. He would not advert to that individual’s family; he would not say, that nine children, twins, and a wife, were very bad examples for pauper imitation (loud cheers). He would not advert in detail to the qualifications of Bung. The man stood before him, and he would not say in his presence, what he might be disposed to say of him, if he were absent. (Here Mr. Bung telegraphed to a friend near him, under cover of his hat, by contracting his left eye, and applying his right thumb to the tip of his nose). It had been objected to Bung that he had only five children (‘Hear, hear!’ from the opposition). Well; he had yet to learn that the legislature had affixed any precise amount of infantine qualification to the office of beadle; but taking it for granted that an extensive family were a great requisite, he entreated them to look to facts, and compare data, about which there could be no mistake. Bung was 35 years of age. Spruggins—of whom he wished to speak with all possible respect—was 50. Was it not more than possible—was it not very probable—that by the time Bung attained the latter age, he might see around him a family, even exceeding in number and extent, that to which Spruggins at present laid claim (deafening cheers and waving of handkerchiefs)? The captain concluded, amidst loud applause, by calling upon the parishioners to sound the tocsin, rush to the poll, free themselves from dictation, or be slaves for ever.

On the following day the polling began, and we never have had such a bustle in our parish since we got up our famous anti-slavery petition, which was such an important one, that the House of Commons ordered it to be printed, on the motion of the member for the district. The captain engaged two hackney-coaches and a cab for Bung’s people—the cab for the drunken voters, and the two coaches for the old ladies, the greater portion of whom, owing to the captain’s impetuosity, were driven up to the poll and home again, before they recovered from their flurry sufficiently to know, with any degree of clearness, what they had been doing. The opposite party wholly neglected these precautions, and the consequence was, that a great many ladies who were walking leisurely up to the church—for it was a very hot day—to vote for Spruggins, were artfully decoyed into the coaches, and voted for Bung. The captain’s arguments, too, had produced considerable effect: the attempted influence of the vestry produced a greater. A threat of exclusive dealing was clearly established against the vestry-clerk—a case of heartless and profligate atrocity. It appeared that the delinquent had been in the habit of purchasing six penn’orth of muffins, weekly, from an old woman who rents a small house in the parish, and resides among the original settlers; on her last weekly visit, a message was conveyed to her through the medium of the cook, couched in mysterious terms, but indicating with sufficient clearness, that the vestry-clerk’s appetite for muffins, in future, depended entirely on her vote on the beadleship. This was sufficient: the stream had been turning previously, and the impulse thus administered directed its final course. The Bung party ordered one shilling’s-worth of muffins weekly for the remainder of the old woman’s natural life; the parishioners were loud in their exclamations; and the fate of Spruggins was sealed.

It was in vain that the twins were exhibited in dresses of the same pattern, and night-caps, to match, at the church door: the boy in Mrs. Spruggins’s right arm, and the girl in her left—even Mrs. Spruggins herself failed to be an object of sympathy any longer. The majority attained by Bung on the gross poll was four hundred and twenty-eight, and the cause of the parishioners triumphed.

_____

Title | Previous Chapter | Next Chapter

[bllsbailey]

DeSantis Brings Reality Check to Media Over Kamala Lovefest: She's 'Vapid,' 'Owns' All Biden's Policies

Ron DeSantis appeared on "Sunday Morning Futures" with Maria Bartiromo and was not shy about sharing his thoughts regarding the corporate media's endless fawning over Vice President Kamala Harris after she officially became a candidate and the likely Democrat presidential nominee.

Expect most of the corrupt press to outright lie to us for the next 100 days, he warned, and completely ignore Kamala's terrible record, her nonsensical statements, and her support for President Biden's destructive policies, which have negatively affected such a broad swath of the American people.

He didn't hold back:

...what you see is all the arteries of the left, the corporate media, Hollywood, academia—they're using all the king's horses and all the king's men to try to put the Democratic Party back together again [after Biden stepped out of the race].  And they have to whitewash Harris' background to be able to make her palpable to the American people—but I think we've all seen her.  I mean, she's incredibly vapid, even more incredibly liberal, and she doesn't have any accomplishments. 

Remind me not to get on his bad side. 

Watch:

Let the gaslighting begin:

JD Vance Claps Back at Kamala Harris After She Questions His Loyalty: What Have YOU Done for the Country?

#Journalism: Media Unburdens Itself With Long-Awaited Answer to Burning Question About Kamala Harris

Legalized Press-titution: Media Coverage of Kamala Has Reached Shameless Fangirl Levels Already

DeSantis was far from done, saying that it's going to be a long 100 days of media lies:

He's right: Harris participated in one of the great cover-ups of our time—the effort to tell the people that Biden was as "sharp as a tack" when he was clearly declining mentally right in front of our eyes—and she gave her full-throated support to the laughably named Inflation Reduction Act, which just threw trillions at pet leftist causes and led to even more inflation. Despite the press trying to say she was never named "Border Czar," the receipts are there, and we've been bringing them to you. She was given the task of protecting our border, and she failed miserably. The humanitarian disaster allowed to unfold under their regime has created unprecedented safety concerns for the U.S.

This was on Sunday alone:

Report: Suspect Who Allegedly Shot San Antonio Police Officer With a Rifle Is Venezuelan Illegal Alien

3 Terror Suspects Caught After Crossing US Border Illegally - How Many More Come In Undetected?

The Florida governor also spoke about the success of the Sunshine State under his watch, as well as the failures of the Secret Service in allowing a would-be assassin to come within millimeters of killing GOP nominee Donald Trump. It's worth watching the full clip.

DeSantis may not have won the Republican nomination this time around, but he continues to be a strong voice for conservative values, and his future looks very bright indeed.

[mariacallous]

New legislation would transform Slovakia’s RTVS into an outlet renamed Slovak Television and Radio that is fully under government control.

Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico appears not to have gotten over a question that foreign correspondent Katarina Vítkova of RTVS, the Slovak public service broadcaster, posed at the Visegrad Group summit at the end of February in Prague.

The journalist asked Fico whether he feared that Slovakia would face isolation given his “harsher” rhetoric on, say, the war in Ukraine, citing Hungary as an example of this.

“She lied and attacked the Slovak government,” Fico claimed in a recent interview with the online conservative daily Standard, criticising RTVS and labelling it as a “problem”.

The interview came out a day after Slovakia’s Culture Ministry, which oversees the media in the country, presented a new bill on the broadcaster on March 11. Led by Martina Simkovicova, a former TV presenter and notorious star of her own pro-Russian channel on Facebook, the ministry proposes to rename the public service broadcaster STaR (short for Slovak Television and Radio); change the way members of the RTVS Board are elected in order to take full control over the body; dismiss the current RTVS director, Lubos Machaj, without providing a reason; and establish a Programme Board to control and co-create RTVS content, both in television and radio.

“RTVS’s news reporting doesn’t shy away from reporting stories in a tabloid fashion, and deploying personal attacks that many times border on violating human and civil rights in RTVS broadcasts,” the Culture Ministry wrote in its proposal, failing to list a single example of this alleged practice.

Despite the state-funded broadcaster enjoying a high level of public trust, according to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and the Median SK research institute, the prime minister is convinced that RTVS journalists come from the liberal media, spread hatred against his coalition government, and threaten human rights because the broadcaster is, Fico claims, biased in its reporting.

“What’s happening in RTVS is unseen – it has nothing to do with public service,” Fico often repeats.

But the public service broadcaster itself, the opposition, media watchdogs and the public protesting on the streets disagree with the three-party coalition, accusing it of trying to turn RTVS into a state propaganda channel.

Fired without grounds

The leader of the opposition Progresivne Slovensko party, Michal Simecka, believes the coalition plans to use the public service broadcaster as its tool for spreading government propaganda.

It wouldn’t be the first time that the broadcaster has been exploited by a Slovak government: in the 1990s, then semi-autocratic premier Vladimir Meciar was first to try it – and succeeded; and Fico himself wanted to gain influence over the broadcaster when his Smer party took power for the first time in 2006.

“We’ll demand the withdrawal of this harmful legislation and also inform our partners in the EU,” vowed Simecka.

The government should submit the bill to parliament this week so that coalition lawmakers can adopt it in April. Given the alleged violation of human rights, Fico wants to see the bill passed in a fast-track legislative procedure and thus without proper debate. The coalition also used this extraordinary method to pass a widely criticised – and currently suspended – amendment to the Penal Code in February.

However, the two other coalition parties, Hlas and the far-right Slovak National Party (SNS), have said in recent days that a parliamentary debate on the media bill should last until the start of the summer.

“The legislative process, I can assure you, won’t be a fast-track legislative procedure,” Culture and Media Parliamentary Committee Chair Roman Michelko (SNS) told RTVS.

Yet a few days later, Michelko was no longer so sure: “If there were such a thing [fast-track procedure], it’d be a political decision.”

What’s already certain is that the bill will have to undergo several changes because it isn’t in line with EU legislation after the recent adoption of the European Media Freedom Act. Among other things, the new EU legislation doesn’t allow politicians to sack the head of the public service media arbitrarily.

“This regulation is a response to Orbán, Fico, Janša, Putin and those who want to transform media into their own propaganda tools or spread fake news and destabilise our democracies,” MEP Ramona Strugariu was quoted in the European Parliament’s press release as saying.

As such, the proposed provision that would allow the new seven-member RTVS Board, a body now to be selected by the coalition-controlled parliament and the culture minister, to dismiss the public-service broadcaster’s director without any reason will likely have to be removed from the bill.

The bill also has the RTVS Board assuming the power to elect the director. Until now, the director and members of the RTVS Board have been elected by parliament with a simple majority.

“The bill is in accordance with EU legislation, except for the provision that the RTVS Board can dismiss the director without giving a reason, and we will respect that,” the Culture Ministry’s chief of staff, Lubos Machala, said.

Machala, who openly expresses his admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin on Telegram, helped draft the bill.

Several opposition parties had submitted collective comments by the time a shortened inter-department comment procedure ended earlier last week. For example, more than 11,000 people signed under the SaS party’s collective comment, which the ministry will now have to deal with.

“The bill turns the public service radio and television into a state medium,” said the SaS party’s culture expert Rene Parak.

In total, over 40 collective comments and almost 400 individual comments on the draft legislation had been submitted by March 19.

Moreover, four days after the ministry unveiled the bill, around 15,000 people took part in opposition-led protests in Bratislava and Kosice, the two largest Slovak cities, in support of RTVS.

Programme Board as censor

European Commission Vice-President Vera Jourova, who is responsible for values and transparency in the bloc, said she’s been following the situation concerning the Slovak public service broadcaster very closely.

“In every country there should be strong public service media, and not media that will serve as mouthpieces of a party and a government,” Jourova said, adding that she wants to meet Culture Minister Simkovicova to discuss the bill.

Last year, the European Commission wrote in its annual rule of law report on Slovakia that the country should improve “the independent governance and editorial independence of public-service media”. Yet various media watchdogs and organisations point out that the opposite is now happening.

The European Broadcasting Union has called the draft bill “a thinly veiled attempt to turn the Slovak public service broadcaster into state-controlled media.” Reporters Without Borders and seven other international organisations called on the government to withdraw the bill, as have more than 40 organisations in Slovakia and the Czech Republic. More than 60,000 people have, moreover, signed an open letter, initiated by six Slovak media and anti-corruption organisations, that will be sent to EU institutions in the near future.

Media watchdogs all see a problem with the proposed Programme Board, an 11-member body to be elected by parliament. As the legislation stands, this Programme Board could intervene in RTVS broadcasts, including its news programmes.

Media analyst Ivan Godarsky from the Memo 98 organisation told Dennik N that the body would essentially serve as a censor, pointing out that the coalition used totalitarian language when describing the job of the Programme Board in the bill.

Smer’s former culture minister Marek Madaric shares Godarsky’s view. “Considering the style of changes and the way in which these bodies of the public service broadcaster will be created, we can safely perceive the Programme Board as a political censorship body of the government,” Madaric told Dennik N.

Although the coalition parties have criticised the public service broadcaster for allegedly being liberal and biased, the SNS party is now claiming that it couldn’t care less about its news programmes. “Our videos on social networks have a bigger reach than RTVS news programmes,” Environment Minister Tomas Taraba told the press, describing RTVS as a junk broadcaster.

Hlas leader Peter Pellegrini, who is on course to become the next Slovak president, said this week that he’d never allow “someone from the politburo to censor what should be broadcast in the news”. Yet Pellegrini also doesn’t think there is anything wrong with the government wanting to influence the operation of certain institutions, and has asked RTVS employees to wait for the final version of the bill.

More than 1,200 employees, supported by several hundred of journalists from other Slovak media outlets, have called on the government to withdraw the bill. The directors of Czech Radio and Czech Television, the public service broadcasters in next-door Czechia, have also stood up for RTVS.

“This [bill] is undoubtedly an initial step towards the nationalisation of the public service media in Slovakia and the suppression of its free and objective broadcasting,” the director of Czech Radio, Rene Zavoral, said.

Slovak President Zuzana Caputova said in a statement that she sees no real reason to cancel RTVS and rebrand it as STaR, other than an effort to take over the public service broadcaster politically.

Coalition wants better RTVS, yet cuts its budget

The coalition, needless to say, doesn’t see it that way, arguing that it only wants to transform the underfunded public service broadcaster from an “open-air museum” into a prosperous institution with better working conditions for employees and objective reporting.

At a recent press conference, SNS leader Andrej Danko said that journalists from commercial media “wouldn’t even have the courage to go to the loo in RTVS”, referring to the dilapidated state of the broadcaster’s headquarters in Bratislava. He then went on to attack RTVS director Lubos Machaj – a frequent target of the coalition. Danko’s environment minister, Taraba, referred to Machaj as “an indebted homeless person” and criticised RTVS contracts that he has struck with external suppliers.

Machaj has been open about his personal bankruptcy situation, which is linked to a loan that he took out many years ago to save Radio Twist – a station that played a key role in defending democracy in the 1990s when the semi-autocratic premier Meciar ruled the country and controlled the public service broadcaster.

“I rule out that, as [Environment Minister] Taraba has suggested, I would exploit external firms to solve my situation,” Machaj told Dennik N.

In fact, without these firms, the underfinanced RTVS wouldn’t have produced many of the popular programmes and films that it has in recent years. As of July 2023, the 4.64-euro monthly licence fee, which hadn’t been raised for two decades, was eventually scrapped and RTVS was supposed to receive 0.17 per cent of GDP every year instead. The current government, however, reduced this to 0.12 per cent last December, citing the need to consolidate the public finances.

The new bill doesn’t change the percentage. Instead, the coalition mentions increasing the advertising share for RTVS and the reintroduction of a “contract with the state”, through which the state would order production of a certain number of programmes in the public interest and pay for them.

Nor do reports attached to the bill explain in what way European countries such as Italy and Norway have inspired the bill, something the coalition boasts about. The coalition also claims the bill is in response to discontent voiced by various groups, but it has mentioned no specific organisation or name to date. Machaj says that the Council for Media Services, a national oversight body for the media sector, has identified only two minor issues under his management since he took up the position two years ago.

“I’m convinced that the coalition is not trying to solve problems based on facts, but only on assumptions,” Machaj said.

In fact, he believes that 95 per cent of the bill is identical with the current one and the only goal of the bill is to get rid of him. “Only the instruments of power influence have changed [in the bill]. I experienced censorship under Communism, and this is close to it,” the RTVS director said.

He added, however, that he won’t give up: “I will fight for the independence of RTVS until the last possible moment.”

If the coalition gets its way, that moment will come sooner than later.

[adventure-kindness-wellness]

Motion Creates Clarity

How often do you downplay your own successes? I fail to acknowledge the magnitude of my risks and accomplishments often.

As soon as I achieve a goal, I just move on to the next, and this is something I am becoming conscious of.



My current location is on the West Coast in a beautiful region of Central California. A small college town by the beach. San Luis Obispo.



Within a few minutes, I can drive on the beach and sand dunes, go surfing, lay out on a beautiful public beach full of happy people, or park on a mountain top with panoramic views of the city and ocean while I edit videos.



This area is not congested and homelessness is far less prevalent than anywhere I’ve been in a long time.

This mission of “Adventure, Kindness, and Wellness” in the pursuit of freedom and self sufficiency sounds foreign and crazy to some. To others, it sounds romantic and inspirational. Few, if any understand a journey like this if they have not engaged in some form of parallel experience.



Just over two-years ago, I was at the end of a 7-year phase, living in the place that I wanted to be most in the world. Breckenridge, Colorado. One of the two most visited ski towns in America. See the Book of Mike G YouTube for more awesome videos!

When I moved there in 2014, it was still possible to own a home, buy land, build something, and create a middle-class life through hard work and consistent income.

Within a few years that dream became unobtainable. Even with jobs like grocery stocker paying $30.00 per-hour by the time I left in 2021. 



Our housing economy and the community were changing quickly and in 2020, that process accelerated exponentially.

By 2021, our town of 5,000 residents had "lost" four-thousand housing units of all sizes to wealthy Air BnB and short-term rental owners from different states and countries… Housing for local workforce was effectively gone. Literally impossible to find. Thus the concept of a 4x4 camper that fits into a normal parking space and has room to comfortably work on my laptop.

 Sadly, after 7-years living the ski town life, I had to return to my hometown.

Once I lost my housing as the result of my divorce, I could not find anywhere else to live and honestly did not want to live in that small town and watch my ex wife move on. I knew everyone, everyone knew me. It was just time for a new chapter.

I

came home to Wichita defeated, depressed, but out of debt with a couple thousand dollars in the bank.



I returned at age 39. After a few weeks, I stepped into the gym for the first time in years.

Here, I developed habits and made changes that will be beneficial for the rest of my life.



I had the opportunity to take my contract work for the world’s largest custom motorcycle manufacturer, Big Dog Motorcycles and turn that work into a full time job for the next year.

During a moment like this, if one chooses, it is a wonderful time to truly assess what you desire your life to look like.

If you ever find yourself having lost a relationship, housing, possibly credit and additional objects, it can be one of the most liberating feelings, if you take the moment to acknowledge the gift of freedom that you have received.


My intention was to stay home for a year, save some money, figure out my next destination and make the move.



I obtained my Cannabis Masters Degree from Cannabis Training University and began pursuing that as a career path, but without any real direction. Previously, I worked in the industry and thought it could really be a good sustainable career path.



It’s funny how much time, money, and resources went into my prior university degree in video production and journalism, yet I never found the place I fit into the world happily trading my hours for dollars to make another person, party, or business profit. 



So, I got myself locked into a 1-year lease to work with Big Dog Motorcycles. I stayed home for a bit over a year, then my engine broke down and needed to be replaced.



During this two-year period at home, I spent hours upon hours daily, thinking about Who I am, who I want to be, and what purpose I will pursue with this moment of freedom in my life.

Remember, I was debt-free with cash in the bank when I arrived home.

Due to the engine replacement and taking a risk with a different friend’s business, which did not turn out fruitful, I was now $13,000 in debt on high interest credit cards.

Around this time, my mindset began to shift. Now that my eyes are open, I have been focusing on shifting from selling my skills and abilities to an employer to realizing all of my past challenges have been equipping me to pursue my own path if I can just find the right direction.



As a Video Producer of 17-years, I finally realized something so simple. I can make a legitimately sustainable career creating content for YouTube. The hard part is developing the concept, believing in myself enough to fully commit to the challenge, and being willing to see things through, even in moments of stagnation or hardship.



After deciding that I was completely serious about my YouTube career, I had to define my channel and content.

With much time and thought, I developed the concept of “Adventure, Kindness, and Wellness” Three things that are important to me in my own life and will be appealing to others who are also interested in similar pursuits.



If you delve into my first podcasts and live videos, you can see how much of an amateur I am in front of the camera, even with nearly two-decades of professional experience behind the viewfinder.

I was never interested in sitting in front of the camera in a studio and talking. At the same time, the adventure element that is supposed to drive everything was just not present in the flat, industrial conservative Midwestern city of Wichita, Kansas. 



The clarity I sought was still far away. At the same time, I was 40, closing in on 41, living in my hometown for nearly two-years.

At this point, the reality of my own mortality started to become a prevalent part of my conscious thought process.

Around that time, I realized that if I didn’t have a drop-dead date for departure and a destination, another year could pass and I might be in even worse financial shape, or something else could happen that kept me locked into a place and life that I did not want.



So, without having ever been there, I chose Palm Springs, California for my Winter destination. 



Next, the Redbull Imagination freestyle motocross event popped up on my Facebook feed and happened to land on the last day of September 2023. This was pretty close to the time I wanted to depart for my next adventures, and even though it is one of the biggest and most progressive Redbull FMX events in the world, it was only a few hours away from home in the middle of nowhere.



I bought my tickets and set this event as my drop-dead departure date.



So much has happened since that time. Make sure to check out my channel to see all of the adventures I have shared since then.

The point of this story isn’t to describe the adventures, but rather to explain how important it is to start moving, even if you don’t know exactly where you’re going.



At this point in life, I know I can be some thing amazing for myself and I have the ability to make this world a slightly better place.

I will be selling myself short and depriving the world of the gifts I can produce if I throw out all of the skills, experience, and fortitude I’ve developed… This is exactly how I see trading my hours for dollars to build something for someone else, literally throwing away my strongest attributes that I have painstakingly developed throughout my life.



What happens when a person like myself with this much experience and professional skills begins working for others? most of their skills and experience are disregarded.

That person is trained to follow directions, produce the result they are told, and use a small portion of their knowledge and experience. Meanwhile, all of their capabilities and strengths outside of those directions are not utilized, even if they are the most valuable skills the employee possesses. 



When I recognized how much of my time and energy will go into selling myself to others for their benefit, I realized that I was disregarding my ability to do amazing things with my life for myself and for others.



The amount of work, stress, dedication, education, time, and energy that goes into seeking an employer is substantial. 



I’ve come to the conclusion that in my life, I can dedicate that time and energy to my own pursuits… If I have the self discipline and dedication needed, I will be able to produce a far better outcome in life that will last the rest of my life, and it will only take a few years of hard work, dedication, and discomfort to get off the ground.

The hardest part is getting started.



Living in a world full of modern comforts, conveniences, and working for others while eliminating the need to figure things out and make them work, I see American culture turning weak, soft, and dependent. Not to mention depressed, unhealthy, and addicted.

One of my biggest pursuits in life is freedom.

What that means to me is that I am able to thrive without having to depend on an employer or clients to allow me the ability to feed myself and pay for shelter.

It means living beneath my means, owning land outright, and building my piece of the American dream with hands-on sweat equity instead of trading 30-years of my life for the currency to pay interest and taxes on, while not being able to save enough to comfortably retire. 



Realizing that I am selling myself short following the directions of others for their profit, and understanding that life is getting shorter by the day, I no longer have time to waste, dreaming, thinking, and hoping while living a soft life full of comfort and convenience. 



All of the comfort and convenience was coming at a high price. It was keeping me from moving forward and pursuing the man that I am capable of becoming. It was making me numb my dissatisfaction with alcohol, and it was not allowing me to become my authentic self.

Instead, it was forcing me into a mold that I was not suited to fit into.



This is where I do not give myself enough credit for what I have accomplished… Check out my channel to see all of the hard work I did to prepare for this new life I’ve decided to design and pursue.



I’m now on the West Coast, living in a place that I really like, making 4x the same income for literally the EXACT SAME JOB with the same company.



My location is perfect for my vision of parking my 4x4 mobile office camper in beautiful places to work on my laptop and shoot amazing, visually appealing videos.



By the time I began generating an income in California, I had accumulated several thousand dollars in credit card debt from the second friend’s business I wasted my time with, combined with travel expenses, and 20-days without income.



At the same time, I’m years ahead of where I could be if I stayed in my hometown with low income and a low cost of living. Especially sense my transmission is now failing and will also need to be replaced with credit over the next few weeks.



But…

Imagine if the transmission broke down in Wichita and I did not depart on the day that I set. I would likely still be there, working for so little that I can’t pay for the transmission or get on the road. I wouldn’t have the subject matter or visually appealing locations to capture content and tell my stories… Who knows, maybe I would have gotten myself a DUI or worse. (I’m 81-days alcohol free today, by the way.) 



My path is still fairly undefined. It is coming into focus and I am learning more, while improving my plan, tactics, content, and online presence daily. 



When I think about how far I’ve come over the last two-months, I realize how substantially vital this decision to move forward and risk everything I had left to put into this life truly is.



When I consider the monumental challenge of my failing transmission, I recognize that it is just another opportunity to build more fortitude, overcome a hard moment, and become even more dedicated to the mission that I am on.



Now, this challenge is part of my story that I am still writing. At the same time, I’m locked in. I’m on the West Coast, I have solid income, and even though I will be able to move on soon enough, I’m going to embrace this moment. Work hard, pay off the transmission and some additional debt, while continuing to create content, learn, develop, evolve, and pursue my mission of self-sustainable freedom with the theme of Adventure, Kindness, and Wellness.



When I think back to the moment that I chose the date 9/30/23 for my departure, I know that it would have been much easier to work for even another month before departure, yet I also recognize the substantial progress I have made on my mission over the last two-months, and in the long run, I believe that a single month’s progress is worth far more than the money I would have been able to save and dedicate to this adventure.



Now, my blurry vision of the future is coming into focus… Choosing a departure date and location were possibly the most valuable things I could have done for myself at that time. 



Now, I am in a position where I cannot find a better path or option than to stay the course that I am on, sail straight through the rough waters of transmission troubles.

Along the way, I have come to the conclusion that I have a far FAR higher likelihood of achieving the financial freedom for myself on this path, than wasting any more of my precious hours begging employers or clients for work, or going back to college for an MBA.



When my mind finally realized the substantial limits of the career world, it became obvious that the world the Boomers experienced will produce less buying power in my lifetime, and basically no chance at a comfortable retirement if I try to do things the way they did.



When my mind was able to break free of the idea that I must do what education and society says I should, then I began to realize that every moment not spent pursuing my dreams, goals, and vision were moments lost that I could never get back.



And now, here I am on the coast, proud of the progress I’ve made over the last few months. Moving towards my dreams on a daily basis, and making good enough money to pay down debt promptly and free up more time and money to focus on my desired outcome in life.



If I didn’t set that departure date and location, I would not be as far along as I am now, even if this is just the very beginning.



So if you are ever feeling stuck or lost, take some real time to understand your personal mission. Choose an outcome and a time. Commit to it, even if it is uncomfortable, then take action.In the end, you will develop courage, self esteem, grit, and joy. True joy.

[scottguy]

David Packman is another excellent progressive journalist who has been around for well over a decade with his David Packman Show.

We all need new sources for news because it's clear mainstream media, especially major network TV news, does not have the best interests of Americans at heart. (MSNBC is the sole exception, which was probably a marketing strategy because we liberals needed a news station. )

Why aren't the OTHER networks as critical of Trump and Republicans? Being "neutral" to a party with no moral foundation, a party that still lies to the public about the 2020 election and which is unapologetic about their attempted overthrow of democracy on January 6th, is an ONGOING THREAT. What is the logic? If people lie long enough, it just stops mattering? If consistently have no integrity, we, the media will pretend that you still have integrity! (for whatever twisted reasons such as right-wing owners, greed, laziness, cowardice, bad habits...)

They just don't want to admit how BAD right-wing politicians have become. Will honest reporting hurt your rich investors' feelings?

Better to just PRETEND it's perfectly acceptable to let a criminal, racist, traitorous, violent, stupid, mentally declining man and eager-to-be-a -totalitarian-leader take power and destroy America.

Corporate media gives tacit approval of traitorous and unAmerican behavior to the Republican party daily. It's why Trump is so close in the polls.

The biggest media outlets in the U.S. have FAILED Americans for the past four years. They've failed to make news out of Biden's many accomplishments in a hyper-partisan Congress while being sure to spend far more time on any perceived flaws. Meanwhile, Trump's obvious lack of fitness is simply a non-issue.

Why? Why is it a non-issue? Why isn't it front page news every single day that Trump would be a national and international disaster due to his plain stupidity and mental imbalance not to mention every warning sign of a totalitarian with a written plan to set up a puppet government?

Why don't ALL Americans know this? Because IT ISN'T IMPORTANT to corporate media!

Why don't you care about the well-being of your own country? That is the very nature of the job of journalism, to call out darkness and shine the light of attention upon evil.

Guess you're all not up to the job anymore. 🙄

Tunblrs, boycott those irresponsible corporate media bastards and consume progressive media. At least you'll hear the truth, and they are far less expensive.

Trump's brain is QUICKLY getting worse, says psychologist

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

There’s only one choice in Brazil’s election — for the country and the world

A second term for Jair Bolsonaro would represent a threat to science, democracy and the environment.

When Brazil elected Jair Bolsonaro as its president four years ago, this journal was among those that feared the worst. “The election of Jair Bolsonaro is bad for research and the environment,” we wrote (Nature 563, 5–6; 2018).

A populist and a former army captain, Bolsonaro charged into office denying science, threatening Indigenous peoples’ rights, promoting guns as a solution to security concerns and pushing a development-at-all-costs approach to the economy. Bolsonaro has been true to his word. His term in office has been disastrous for science, the environment, the people of Brazil — and the world.

This weekend, Brazilians will go to the polls in the second round of one of the country’s most important elections since the end of the military dictatorship in 1985. Bolsonaro is standing for re-election for the Liberal Party. His opponent is Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the Workers’ Party leader who was president for two terms between 2003 and 2010. In the first round of the election, held on 2 October, Lula beat Bolsonaro into second place, but by an unexpectedly narrow margin. He failed to win an overall majority, forcing the two into a run-off election.

No political leader comes close to anything like perfect. But Brazil’s past four years are a reminder of what happens when those we elect actively dismantle the institutions intended to reduce poverty, protect public health, boost science and knowledge, safeguard the environment and uphold justice and the integrity of evidence. Brazil’s voters have a valuable opportunity to start to rebuild what Bolsonaro has torn down. If Bolsonaro gets four more years, the damage could be irreparable.

Continue reading.

[ms-demeanor]

Just because capitalism is bad doesn't make rioting a good or effective means of change.

As much as I hate cops I feel like it pretty much proves my point to START with the article in the cop magazine about how the Rodney King riots changed policing in LA:

Shortly after the riot, Chief Willie Williams was sworn in as the first outside police chief in 45 years. The voters created a new system where the chief could serve only a five-year term, renewable once at the city's option. On two occasions so far, the city has sent the chief packing after five years.

(Police Mag April 2012)

Here’s Anaheim City Councilman Stephen Fassell talking about changes after riots in Anaheim due to police shooting people:

We now have a representative government that we did not have before. We now have a city government that listens more. We’re only six or seven months into this, so we still have to learn our way around. Overall, the city is taking a renewed interest in that neighborhood (Anna Drive) and others. Neighborhoods, in general, have higher visibility in the eyes of the city government from one end to another.

(OC Register, July 2017)

Here’s some historians talking to Vox about rioting:

The 1960s unrest, for example, led to the Kerner Commission, which reviewed the cause of the uprisings and pushed reforms in local police departments. The changes to police ended up taking various forms: more active hiring of minority police officers, civilian review boards of cases in which police use force, and residency requirements that force officers to live in the communities they police."

This is one of the greatest ironies. People would say that this kind of level of upheaval in the streets and this kind of chaos in the streets is counterproductive," Thompson said. "The fact of the matter is that it was after every major city in the urban north exploded in the 1960s that we get the first massive probe into what was going on — known as the Kerner Commission."

(Vox, September 2016)

This is from an abstract of a study done on the 1992 LA riots

Contrary to some expectations from the academic literature and the popular press, we find that the riot caused a marked liberal shift in policy support at the polls. Investigating the sources of this shift, we find that it was likely the result of increased mobilization of both African American and white voters. Remarkably, this mobilization endures over a decade later.

(American Political Science Review, 2019)

There’s a whole-ass article about this in Jacobin this week

Even the case of the 1960s is more complicated than the liberal story about scared white Nixon voters suggests. For one thing, there is substantial evidence that the riots led to higher government expenditures in the deprived cities where they erupted. James W. Button’s pathbreaking 1978 book Black Violence documented the ways the riots forced policymakers to pay attention to the effects of their policies on the urban poor, a group they had been happy to neglect previously. At a time when many social scientists viewed even protest movements as a kind of mass psychosis, Button showed that riots were a rational response to being ignored. Later research showed that riots could increase welfare expenditures, even in areas where white racism was strongest. In other words, even if riots pushed white public opinion in a conservative direction, they also brought important benefits to the areas where they occurred.

(Jacobin, June 2020)

And here is the full 17-page PDF of an article published by the American Political Science Association in their journal, I’m linking to the whole thing but I’m only going to reproduce the conclusion here:

We focus on violent protest as a political tool for a low-status group in the United States. While other scholarship has examined other forms of political action and asked if it is efficacious for racial minorities and other low-status groups, the scholarly literature has largely failed to ask whether rioting is a useful tool for building policy support, even though, from the perspective of the rioters, this question is paramount. Here we show that violent political protest can spur political participation among people who share an identity with the rioters.

Although it often seems extreme from the American perspective, political violence is not isolated to particular regions or eras and is still common in many parts of the world. Moreover, the implicit threat of violence underlies the relationship between governments and citizens in many places. As the use of violence continues to be an active feature of our political system, our findings and approach may help future scholars better understand this important topic.

(American Political Science Review, June 2019)

And also just because riots may or may not be politically expedient doesn’t prevent them.

I want to talk for a second about the concept of a state monopoly on violence.

The deal is that in most states (here meaning countries or governments, not US States) the State (or government) is the only entity that is allowed to be violent. You’re not allowed to break down your neighbor’s door, your partner isn’t allowed to hit you, you’re not allowed to smash your boss’s windshield. The state and its agents are the only things allowed to be violent and their violence is supposed to be used to curtail societal violence. The cops outnumber your partner and have the legal power to lock them in a cage if your partner hits you, this is in theory supposed to prevent your partner from hitting you. Fear of state violence is supposed to act as a deterrent to crime and interpersonal violence.

BUT there are supposed to be rules. The state is the only one allowed to be violent but they’re not allowed to be wantonly, willfully violent. The state doesn’t get to hit you with no evidence of a crime, the cops aren’t supposed to smash in your windshield, sheriffs aren’t supposed to break down your door if you haven’t committed a crime that warrants a violent response from the state.

The state isn’t holding up its end of the bargain.

The state has lost its right to a monopoly on violence.

Yes, the violence is unfortunate. Yes, the violence is not ideal. No, I’m not applauding when people set fire to local businesses.

I am maybe applauding a little when they set fire to a massive corporation that has utilized the violence of the state against citizens while working hard to protect itself against workers (Target) and I’m applauding the destruction of symbols of inequality and institutionalized racism (Rodeo Drive in LA and the Market House in NC and all the statues of racists on this list) and I’ma be real here, I kind of always think police stations should be torn down brick by brick or forcibly converted into libraries or low income housing.

So while the violence is not ideal I don’t think that it’s illegitimate. The state has lost its right to a monopoly on violence and a violent response is certainly one way to make that point.

But here’s the other thing:

All these riots started with peaceful protests against state violence. There are thousands of photos and videos of peaceful protestors peacefully protesting and having speeches and asking for change.

And there are hundreds of videos and photos of cops launching tear gas and rubber bullets at these peaceful protestors. There is a staggering amount of evidence that in city after city police escalated tensions and introduced violence to peaceful protests.

(and please let’s remember: all of this started in response to an act of police violence. These riots didn’t fall out of a clear blue sky, they are a direct reaction to four police officers killing a man by kneeling on his neck for eight minutes while he begged for his mother and his life. That is, in my opinion, something completely worth burning down a police station over even if that act never accomplishes anything further than burning down that police station)

[stoweboyd]

Anand Giridharadas reviews Kurt Andersen's ‘Evil Genuises’

Something I meant to post in 2020. The sooner the better, I guess.

Kurt Andersen Asks: What Is the Future of America? | Anand Giridharadas reviews Kurt Andersen's Evil Genuises

Thanks to a series of secret and not-secret memos, corporate America got organized to pursue political power in a way it hadn’t before. Through policy changes like corporate and high-earner tax cuts, society was reorganized. Just as important — Andersen is very useful here — the rising capital supremacists ruled through “countless nuts-and-bolts changes so dweeby and tedious, and so often bipartisan, that they appeared inconsequential and were uncontroversial,” as well as by even stealthier “screwing-by-inaction” or “malign neglect,” changing things by letting things expire, failing to index things. Year by year, continuing into the present, through these policy changes explicit and subtle, American life was turned upside down — in a way that many people seemed not to realize. Pensions were gutted. The minimum wage was effectively slashed. Companies started spending much more money buying back their own stock than on research and development. Wall Street took over the management of companies. Antitrust enforcement largely disappeared. An app-guided, app-stiffed servant class was born.

The rich and the right correctly understood what they were seeking as a cultural project with economic benefits. They acted accordingly. In territory that has already been reported by Jane Mayer, in her must-read-if-you-care-about-your-country-even-just-a-little book “Dark Money,” they reserved a fraction of the spoils of widening economic inequality to invest in the yanking open of political inequality, so as to widen the economic inequality yet further. Obviously, this meant political giving. But it also meant funding universities, think tanks and nonprofits. It meant ensuring that cause-boosting thinkers like Charles Murray were well tended. It meant developing new academic fields like “law and economics” and new campus organizations like the Federalist Society. It meant buying up media so that the capital-supremacist viewpoint could reach ordinary people through Fox News and elites through The Wall Street Journal.

So much of this review is wonderful:

It is a radicalized moderate’s moderate case for radical change.

And then the essence of Andersen's case:

Do not despair, for the hijacking that got us here is evidence of what is possible today: “If you need proof that ideas have power and that radical change is possible, it’s there in the rearview mirror. Evil genius is genius nonetheless. In the early 1970s, at the zenith of liberal-left influence, an improbable, quixotic, out-of-power economic right — intellectuals, capitalists, politicians — launched their crusade and then kept at it tenaciously. The unthinkable became the inevitable in a single decade. They envisioned a new American trajectory, then popularized and arranged it with remarkable success.”

To turn the world from that state, the progressives will have follow the same approach, adopt the same sort of genius. Or not.

“For Americans now, will surviving a year (or more) of radical uncertainty help persuade a majority to make radical changes in our political economy to reduce their chronic economic uncertainty and insecurity?” Andersen writes. Or, he wonders, “will Americans remain hunkered forever, as confused and anxious and paralyzed as we were before 2020, descend into digital feudalism, forgo a renaissance and retreat into cocoons of comfortable cultural stasis providing the illusion that nothing much is changing or ever can change?”

[arcticdementor]

Imagine that the US was competing in a space race with some third world country, say Zambia, for whatever reason. Americans of course would have orders of magnitude more money to throw at the problem, and the most respected aerospace engineers in the world, with degrees from the best universities and publications in the top journals. Zambia would have none of this. What should our reaction be if, after a decade, Zambia had made more progress?

Obviously, it would call into question the entire field of aerospace engineering. What good were all those Google Scholar pages filled with thousands of citations, all the knowledge gained from our labs and universities, if Western science gets outcompeted by the third world?

For all that has been said about Afghanistan, no one has noticed that this is precisely what just happened to political science. The American-led coalition had countless experts with backgrounds pertaining to every part of the mission on their side: people who had done their dissertations on topics like state building, terrorism, military-civilian relations, and gender in the military. General David Petraeus, who helped sell Obama on the troop surge that made everything in Afghanistan worse, earned a PhD from Princeton and was supposedly an expert in “counterinsurgency theory.” Ashraf Ghani, the just deposed president of the country, has a PhD in anthropology from Columbia and is the co-author of a book literally called Fixing Failed States. This was his territory. It’s as if Wernher von Braun had been given all the resources in the world to run a space program and had been beaten to the moon by an African witch doctor.

…

Phil Tetlock’s work on experts is one of those things that gets a lot of attention, but still manages to be underrated. In his 2005 Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?, he found that the forecasting abilities of subject-matter experts were no better than educated laymen when it came to predicting geopolitical events and economic outcomes. As Bryan Caplan points out, we shouldn’t exaggerate the results here and provide too much fodder for populists; the questions asked were chosen for their difficulty, and the experts were being compared to laymen who nonetheless had met some threshold of education and competence.

At the same time, we shouldn’t put too little emphasis on the results either. They show that “expertise” as we understand it is largely fake. Should you listen to epidemiologists or economists when it comes to COVID-19? Conventional wisdom says “trust the experts.” The lesson of Tetlock (and the Afghanistan War), is that while you certainly shouldn’t be getting all your information from your uncle’s Facebook Wall, there is no reason to start with a strong prior that people with medical degrees know more than any intelligent person who honestly looks at the available data.

…

I think one of the most interesting articles of the COVID era was a piece called “Beware of Facts Man” by Annie Lowrey, published in The Atlantic.

…

The reaction to this piece was something along the lines of “ha ha, look at this liberal who hates facts.” But there’s a serious argument under the snark, and it’s that you should trust credentials over Facts Man and his amateurish takes. In recent days, a 2019 paper on “Epistemic Trespassing” has been making the rounds on Twitter. The theory that specialization is important is not on its face absurd, and probably strikes most people as natural. In the hard sciences and other places where social desirability bias and partisanship have less of a role to play, it’s probably a safe assumption. In fact, academia is in many ways premised on the idea, as we have experts in “labor economics,” “state capacity,” “epidemiology,” etc. instead of just having a world where we select the smartest people and tell them to work on the most important questions.

But what Tetlock did was test this hypothesis directly in the social sciences, and he found that subject-matter experts and Facts Man basically tied.

…

Interestingly, one of the best defenses of “Facts Man” during the COVID era was written by Annie Lowrey’s husband, Ezra Klein. His April 2021 piece in The New York Times showed how economist Alex Tabarrok had consistently disagreed with the medical establishment throughout the pandemic, and was always right. You have the “Credentials vs. Facts Man” debate within one elite media couple. If this was a movie they would’ve switched the genders, but since this is real life, stereotypes are confirmed and the husband and wife take the positions you would expect.

…

In the end, I don’t think my dissertation contributed much to human knowledge, making it no different than the vast majority of dissertations that have been written throughout history. The main reason is that most of the time public opinion doesn’t really matter in foreign policy. People generally aren’t paying attention, and the vast majority of decisions are made out of public sight. How many Americans know or care that North Macedonia and Montenegro joined NATO in the last few years? Most of the time, elites do what they want, influenced by their own ideological commitments and powerful lobby groups. In times of crisis, when people do pay attention, they can be manipulated pretty easily by the media or other partisan sources.

If public opinion doesn’t matter in foreign policy, why is there so much study of public opinion and foreign policy? There’s a saying in academia that “instead of measuring what we value, we value what we can measure.” It’s easy to do public opinion polls and survey experiments, as you can derive a hypothesis, get an answer, and make it look sciency in charts and graphs. To show that your results have relevance to the real world, you cite some papers that supposedly find that public opinion matters, maybe including one based on a regression showing that under very specific conditions foreign policy determined the results of an election, and maybe it’s well done and maybe not, but again, as long as you put the words together and the citations in the right format nobody has time to check any of this. The people conducting peer review on your work will be those who have already decided to study the topic, so you couldn’t find a more biased referee if you tried.

Thus, to be an IR scholar, the two main options are you can either use statistical methods that don’t work, or actually find answers to questions, but those questions are so narrow that they have no real world impact or relevance. A smaller portion of academics in the field just produce postmodern-generator style garbage, hence “feminist theories of IR.” You can also build game theoretic models that, like the statistical work in the field, are based on a thousand assumptions that are probably false and no one will ever check. The older tradition of Kennan and Mearsheimer is better and more accessible than what has come lately, but the field is moving away from that and, like a lot of things, towards scientism and identity politics.

…

At some point, I decided that if I wanted to study and understand important questions, and do so in a way that was accessible to others, I’d have a better chance outside of the academy. Sometimes people thinking about an academic career reach out to me, and ask for advice. For people who want to go into the social sciences, I always tell them not to do it. If you have something to say, take it to Substack, or CSPI, or whatever. If it’s actually important and interesting enough to get anyone’s attention, you’ll be able to find funding.

If you think your topic of interest is too esoteric to find an audience, know that my friend Razib Khan, who writes about the Mongol empire, Y-chromosomes and haplotypes and such, makes a living doing this. If you want to be an experimental physicist, this advice probably doesn’t apply, and you need lab mates, major funding sources, etc. If you just want to collect and analyze data in a way that can be done without institutional support, run away from the university system.

The main problem with academia is not just the political bias, although that’s another reason to do something else with your life. It’s the entire concept of specialization, which holds that you need some secret tools or methods to understand what we call “political science” or “sociology,” and that these fields have boundaries between them that should be respected in the first place. Quantitative methods are helpful and can be applied widely, but in learning stats there are steep diminishing returns.

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Outside of political science, are there other fields that have their own equivalents of “African witch doctor beats von Braun to the moon” or “the Taliban beats the State Department and the Pentagon” facts to explain? Yes, and here are just a few examples.

Consider criminology. More people are studying how to keep us safe from other humans than at any other point in history. But here’s the US murder rate between 1960 and 2018, not including the large uptick since then.

So basically, after a rough couple of decades, we’re back to where we were in 1960. But we’re actually much worse, because improvements in medical technology are keeping a lot of people that would’ve died 60 years ago alive. One paper from 2002 says that the murder rate would be 5 times higher if not for medical developments since 1960. I don’t know how much to trust this, but it’s surely true that we’ve made some medical progress since that time, and doctors have been getting a lot of experience from all the shooting victims they have treated over the decades. Moreover, we’re much richer than we were in 1960, and I’m sure spending on public safety has increased. With all that, we are now about tied with where we were almost three-quarters of a century ago, a massive failure.

What about psychology? As of 2016, there were 106,000 licensed psychologists in the US. I wish I could find data to compare to previous eras, but I don’t think anyone will argue against the idea that we have more mental health professionals and research psychologists than ever before. Are we getting mentally healthier? Here’s suicides in the US from 1981 to 2016

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What about education? I’ll just defer to Freddie deBoer’s recent post on the topic, and Scott Alexander on how absurd the whole thing is.

Maybe there have been larger cultural and economic forces that it would be unfair to blame criminology, psychology, and education for. Despite no evidence we’re getting better at fighting crime, curing mental problems, or educating children, maybe other things have happened that have outweighed our gains in knowledge. Perhaps the experts are holding up the world on their shoulders, and if we hadn’t produced so many specialists over the years, thrown so much money at them, and gotten them to produce so many peer reviews papers, we’d see Middle Ages-levels of violence all across the country and no longer even be able to teach children to read. Like an Ayn Rand novel, if you just replaced the business tycoons with those whose work has withstood peer review.

Or you can just assume that expertise in these fields is fake. Even if there are some people doing good work, either they are outnumbered by those adding nothing or even subtracting from what we know, or our newly gained understanding is not being translated into better policies. Considering the extent to which government relies on experts, if the experts with power are doing things that are not defensible given the consensus in their fields, the larger community should make this known and shun those who are getting the policy questions so wrong. As in the case of the Afghanistan War, this has not happened, and those who fail in the policy world are still well regarded in their larger intellectual community.

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Those opposed to cancel culture have taken up the mantle of “intellectual diversity” as a heuristic, but there’s nothing valuable about the concept itself. When I look at the people I’ve come to trust, they are diverse on some measures, but extremely homogenous on others. IQ and sensitivity to cost-benefit considerations seem to me to be unambiguous goods in figuring out what is true or what should be done in a policy area. You don’t add much to your understanding of the world by finding those with low IQs who can’t do cost-benefit analysis and adding them to the conversation.

One of the clearest examples of bias in academia and how intellectual diversity can make the conversation better is the work of Lee Jussim on stereotypes. Basically, a bunch of liberal academics went around saying “Conservatives believe in differences between groups, isn’t that terrible!” Lee Jussim, as someone who is relatively moderate, came along and said “Hey, let’s check to see whether they’re true!” This story is now used to make the case for intellectual diversity in the social sciences.

Yet it seems to me that isn’t the real lesson here. Imagine if, instead of Jussim coming forward and asking whether stereotypes are accurate, Osama bin Laden had decided to become a psychologist. He’d say “The problem with your research on stereotypes is that you do not praise Allah the all merciful at the beginning of all your papers.” If you added more feminist voices, they’d say something like “This research is problematic because it’s all done by men.” Neither of these perspectives contributes all that much. You’ve made the conversation more diverse, but dumber. The problem with psychology was a very specific one, in that liberals are particularly bad at recognizing obvious facts about race and sex. So yes, in that case the field could use more conservatives, not “more intellectual diversity,” which could just as easily make the field worse as make it better. And just because political psychology could use more conservative representation when discussing stereotypes doesn’t mean those on the right always add to the discussion rather than subtract from it. As many religious Republicans oppose the idea of evolution, we don’t need the “conservative” position to come and help add a new perspective to biology.

The upshot is intellectual diversity is a red herring, usually a thinly-veiled plea for more conservatives. Nobody is arguing for more Islamists, Nazis, or flat earthers in academia, and for good reason. People should just be honest about the ways in which liberals are wrong and leave it at that.

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The failure in Afghanistan was mind-boggling. Perhaps never in the history of warfare had there been such a resource disparity between two sides, and the US-backed government couldn’t even last through the end of the American withdrawal. One can choose to understand this failure through a broad or narrow lens. Does it only tell us something about one particular war or is it a larger indictment of American foreign policy?

The main argument of this essay is we’re not thinking big enough. The American loss should be seen as a complete discrediting of the academic understanding of “expertise,” with its reliance on narrowly focused peer reviewed publications and subject matter knowledge as the way to understand the world. Although I don’t develop the argument here, I think I could make the case that expertise isn’t just fake, it actually makes you worse off because it gives you a higher level of certainty in your own wishful thinking. The Taliban probably did better by focusing their intellectual energies on interpreting the Holy Quran and taking a pragmatic approach to how they fought the war rather than proceeding with a prepackaged theory of how to engage in nation building, which for the West conveniently involved importing its own institutions.

A discussion of the practical implications of all this, or how we move from a world of specialization to one with better elites, is also for another day. For now, I’ll just emphasize that for those thinking of choosing an academic career to make universities or the peer review system function better, my advice is don’t. The conversation is much more interesting, meaningful, and oriented towards finding truth here on the outside.

[girlactionfigure]

Righteous Among the Nations  People's Republic of China

Pan Jun-Shun Pan Junshun (1889 – 1974), was the first Chinese national to be awarded the title Righteous Among the Nations for hiding and sheltering a Ukrainian Jewish girl during the occupation of part of the Soviet Union during World War II. Pan Jun Shun moved to Russia in 1916 looking for work. He settled in Moscow where he found work as a laborer. As an enthusiastic communist, he decided to stay in the USSR. He married and had two sons while living in Moscow, after which he moved to Kharkov, Ukraine in 1936. His wife died before the outbreak of World War II His two sons were drafted into the Red Army at the beginning of the war; they never returned home and were presumed to have been killed during the war. He survived the war and continued to live there until his death in 1974. Pan Jun Shun provided shelter and hiding for Ludmilla Genrichovna, a Ukrainian Jewish girl who had escaped from a detention area set up by the occupying German Army. She escaped through the efforts of her mother who realized that her children were likely to be killed as they were being transferred to another town.

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Salvadoran Savior of Thousands of Jews During Holocaust Honored by Germany

Jose Arturo Castellanos saved at least 25,000 from the Nazis during World War II by issuing them false identity papers. An army colonel and diplomat from El Salvador who helped save tens of thousands of Jews from Nazi persecution during World War II by providing them with false Salvadoran identity papers was honored in Germany.

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Knud Christiansen was a Danish rower who competed in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. His greatest feat, however, was preventing the mass murder of Denmark’s 7,000 Jews on Rosh Hashanah, 1943. Because of his fame and athletic connections, Knud learned of an SS plan to round up all Danish Jews in one mass action during their holy day. Knud coordinated with a large network of friends and associates to hide Jews in every spot available, including his own home. Starting shortly before Rosh Hashanah, the network hid fugitive Jews in farmhouses, churches, city apartments, and more. Then, during October, November, and December, Knud used his Olympic rowing skills to ferry one Jew at a time across the Øresund Strait. Eventually, the resistance used larger fishing boats to rescue greater numbers of Jews on each trip. Knud’s entire family participated in the effort: his mother, father-in-law, younger brother and wife were all involved in resistance work. His wife Karen also published a German language newspaper targeted at Wehrmacht officers. Her writing chronicled SS atrocities against the Jews, as reported in BBC broadcasts. As a result, many German officers stationed in Denmark looked the other way as the Danish people worked together to save the nation’s Jews. Knud and Karen immigrated to America with their children in 1970. Karen died in 1992. In 2005, they were honored as "Righteous Among the Nations" by Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Knud died at the age of 97 in 2012. ------

The man who saved 669 lives

Sir Nicholas Winton, was invited to a TV show and, there, everybody stood up for him, but he had no clue why everybody stood up. He had a secret which he kept hidden for last 50 years. Even his wife didn’t know about this until she found his book in the attic.

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Chilean diplomat who saved over 1,200 Jews honored as Righteous Among the Nations

A Chilean diplomat was honored as a Righteous Among the Nations for saving more than 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust. Samuel del Campo, who served as chargé d’affaires at the Chilean embassy in Bucharest, Romania, was honored Sunday at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem.

A relative of Del Campo received a medal and certificate of honor from Yad Vashem officials during the ceremony, which was attended by Milenko Skoknic, director general of the Chilean Ministry of Foreign Affairs.Del Campo began to issue Chilean passports for Jews of Polish nationality in October 1941, when a ghetto was established in the city of Czernowitz, and deportations to ghettos and camps in Transnistria began. Members of the Kiesler family of Czernowitz and the Rosenthal family from Bucharest were saved by Del Campo.After the deportations from Czernowitz to Transnistria resumed in June 1942, Del Campo continued to intervene with the Romanian authorities in favor of “the Jews under the protection of Chile.”Based on recorded minutes from discussions in the Council of Ministers of Romania, Yad Vashem was able to estimate that approximately 1,200 Jews received Chilean passports providing them with protection against the deportations. The documents that Del Campo issued were not in line with the Chilean government’s policy. He died in Paris in the 1960s.

Samuel del Campo is one of just two Chilean Righteous Among the Nations recognized by Yad Vashem.via jta . October 22, 2017

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Righteous Among the Nations 

 Ireland

Mary Elmes

Mary Elisabeth Elmes was born in Cork, Ireland, in 1909. When the Spanish Civil War broke out she decided to go to Spain, where she was involved in humanitarian aid as part of a Quaker organization, the American Friends Service Committee.

In 1939 she joined the Republican refugees who fled to France, and became responsible for all Quaker activity in Perpignan.

The Fall of France in 1940 resulted in great challenges for the relief workers. With her staff significantly reduced - the British workers on her team were now enemy aliens and had to leave the country - Elmes had to face the growing plight of Jewish refugees who were interned in detention camps in the Pyrenees region.

Elmes joined forces with the Jewish OSE organization and especially with Dr. Joseph Weill and Andrée Salomon, who were active in the rescue of Jews.

Until mid-August 1942 children could be legally released from the camps, but on August 11 deportations of Jews from the camp of Rivesaltes began, first to Drancy near Paris, and from there to Auschwitz.

From that time until the camp closed on 25 November 1942, the authorities no longer released children from the camp. Elmes was fully aware of the meaning of the deportations.

Lois Gunden (an American Mennonite who was recognized as Righteous Among the Nations in 2012 for rescuing children in the same region) wrote in her journal: "Mary informed me about the return of Polish and German Jews to Poland where death and starvation awaits them".

Braving the danger, Elmes and her Jewish colleagues smuggled children out of the camp and brought them to safe places.

Two of the children rescued by Mary Elisabeth Elmes were Ronald Freund (today Friend) and his brother Michael.

Their parents, Drs. Hans and Eva Freund fled from Germany to Italy when Hitler came to power in 1933. They lived in Milan, where their son Michael was born in 1936.

When the anti-Jewish laws were enacted in Italy, the family fled to France and settled in Paris. When Germany invaded France, they fled once again, this time to the South of France.

In 1942 they tried to flee to Switzerland but failed; and on 4 September 1942 they were interned in the camp of Rivesaltes. According to a letter Mary Elmes wrote to the American Friends Service Committee in Marseille, she convinced Dr. Freund to take the two children out of the camp.

"He has signed the necessary discharge, confiding the children to our care". Michael and Ronald were taken to a children's home in Vernet les Bains and then to the St. Louis Hospital in Perpignan.

Hans Freund was deported to Majdanek on 4 March 1943, where he perished. The mother survived the war and was reunited with her sons after liberation.

In February 1943 Mary Elmes was arrested by the authorities because of her resistance to the German occupiers and the Vichy government.

She was first held in Toulouse, and later taken to Fresnes prison on the outskirts of Paris. She was nevertheless released six months after her arrest. She continued her humanitarian work until the end of the war and the liberation of France. She lived in France until she passed away in 2003.

May their memories be a blessing.

Documenting Anti-Semitism