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reasonsforhope · 6 months ago

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Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is, by some measures, the most popular leader in the world. Prior to the 2024 election, his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) held an outright majority in the Lok Sabha (India’s Parliament) — one that was widely projected to grow after the vote count. The party regularly boasted that it would win 400 Lok Sabha seats, easily enough to amend India’s constitution along the party's preferred Hindu nationalist lines.

But when the results were announced on Tuesday, the BJP held just 240 seats. They not only underperformed expectations, they actually lost their parliamentary majority. While Modi will remain prime minister, he will do so at the helm of a coalition government — meaning that he will depend on other parties to stay in office, making it harder to continue his ongoing assault on Indian democracy.

So what happened? Why did Indian voters deal a devastating blow to a prime minister who, by all measures, they mostly seem to like?

India is a massive country — the most populous in the world — and one of the most diverse, making its internal politics exceedingly complicated. A definitive assessment of the election would require granular data on voter breakdown across caste, class, linguistic, religious, age, and gender divides. At present, those numbers don’t exist in sufficient detail.

But after looking at the information that is available and speaking with several leading experts on Indian politics, there are at least three conclusions that I’m comfortable drawing.

First, voters punished Modi for putting his Hindu nationalist agenda ahead of fixing India’s unequal economy. Second, Indian voters had some real concerns about the decline of liberal democracy under BJP rule. Third, the opposition parties waged a smart campaign that took advantage of Modi’s vulnerabilities on the economy and democracy.

Understanding these factors isn’t just important for Indians. The country’s election has some universal lessons for how to beat a would-be authoritarian — ones that Americans especially might want to heed heading into its election in November.

-via Vox, June 7, 2024. Article continues below.

A new (and unequal) economy

Modi’s biggest and most surprising losses came in India’s two most populous states: Uttar Pradesh in the north and Maharashtra in the west. Both states had previously been BJP strongholds — places where the party’s core tactic of pitting the Hindu majority against the Muslim minority had seemingly cemented Hindu support for Modi and his allies.

One prominent Indian analyst, Yogendra Yadav, saw the cracks in advance. Swimming against the tide of Indian media, he correctly predicted that the BJP would fall short of a governing majority.

Traveling through the country, but especially rural Uttar Pradesh, he prophesied ��the return of normal politics”: that Indian voters were no longer held spellbound by Modi’s charismatic nationalist appeals and were instead starting to worry about the way politics was affecting their lives.

Yadav’s conclusions derived in no small part from hearing voters’ concerns about the economy. The issue wasn’t GDP growth — India’s is the fastest-growing economy in the world — but rather the distribution of growth’s fruits. While some of Modi’s top allies struck it rich, many ordinary Indians suffered. Nearly half of all Indians between 20 and 24 are unemployed; Indian farmers have repeatedly protested Modi policies that they felt hurt their livelihoods.

“Everyone was talking about price rise, unemployment, the state of public services, the plight of farmers, [and] the struggles of labor,” Yadav wrote...

“We know for sure that Modi’s strongman image and brassy self-confidence were not as popular with voters as the BJP assumed,” says Sadanand Dhume, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who studies India.

The lesson here isn’t that the pocketbook concerns trump identity-based appeals everywhere; recent evidence in wealthier democracies suggests the opposite is true. Rather, it’s that even entrenched reputations of populist leaders are not unshakeable. When they make errors, even some time ago, it’s possible to get voters to remember these mistakes and prioritize them over whatever culture war the populist is peddling at the moment.

Liberalism strikes back

The Indian constitution is a liberal document: It guarantees equality of all citizens and enshrines measures designed to enshrine said equality into law. The signature goal of Modi’s time in power has been to rip this liberal edifice down and replace it with a Hindu nationalist model that pushes non-Hindus to the social margins. In pursuit of this agenda, the BJP has concentrated power in Modi’s hands and undermined key pillars of Indian democracy (like a free press and independent judiciary).

Prior to the election, there was a sense that Indian voters either didn’t much care about the assault on liberal democracy or mostly agreed with it. But the BJP’s surprising underperformance suggests otherwise.

The Hindu, a leading Indian newspaper, published an essential post-election data analysis breaking down what we know about the results. One of the more striking findings is that the opposition parties surged in parliamentary seats reserved for members of “scheduled castes” — the legal term for Dalits, the lowest caste grouping in the Hindu hierarchy.

Caste has long been an essential cleavage in Indian politics, with Dalits typically favoring the left-wing Congress party over the BJP (long seen as an upper-caste party). Under Modi, the BJP had seemingly tamped down on the salience of class by elevating all Hindus — including Dalits — over Muslims. Yet now it’s looking like Dalits were flocking back to Congress and its allies. Why?

According to experts, Dalit voters feared the consequences of a BJP landslide. If Modi’s party achieved its 400-seat target, they’d have more than enough votes to amend India’s constitution. Since the constitution contains several protections designed to promote Dalit equality — including a first-in-the-world affirmative action system — that seemed like a serious threat to the community. It seems, at least based on preliminary data, that they voted accordingly.

The Dalit vote is but one example of the ways in which Modi’s brazen willingness to assail Indian institutions likely alienated voters.

Uttar Pradesh (UP), India’s largest and most electorally important state, was the site of a major BJP anti-Muslim campaign. It unofficially kicked off its campaign in the UP city of Ayodhya earlier this year, during a ceremony celebrating one of Modi’s crowning achievements: the construction of a Hindu temple on the site of a former mosque that had been torn down by Hindu nationalists in 1992.

Yet not only did the BJP lose UP, it specifically lost the constituency — the city of Faizabad — in which the Ayodhya temple is located. It’s as direct an electoral rebuke to BJP ideology as one can imagine.

In Maharashtra, the second largest state, the BJP made a tactical alliance with a local politician, Ajit Pawar, facing serious corruption charges. Voters seemingly punished Modi’s party for turning a blind eye to Pawar’s offenses against the public trust. Across the country, Muslim voters turned out for the opposition to defend their rights against Modi’s attacks.

The global lesson here is clear: Even popular authoritarians can overreach.

By turning “400 seats” into a campaign slogan, an all-but-open signal that he intended to remake the Indian state in his illiberal image, Modi practically rang an alarm bell for constituencies worried about the consequences. So they turned out to stop him en masse.

The BJP’s electoral underperformance is, in no small part, the direct result of their leader’s zealotry going too far.

Return of the Gandhis?

Of course, Modi’s mistakes might not have mattered had his rivals failed to capitalize. The Indian opposition, however, was far more effective than most observers anticipated.

Perhaps most importantly, the many opposition parties coordinated with each other. Forming a united bloc called INDIA (Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance), they worked to make sure they weren’t stealing votes from each other in critical constituencies, positioning INDIA coalition candidates to win straight fights against BJP rivals.

The leading party in the opposition bloc — Congress — was also more put together than people thought. Its most prominent leader, Rahul Gandhi, was widely dismissed as a dilettante nepo baby: a pale imitation of his father Rajiv and grandmother Indira, both former Congress prime ministers. Now his critics are rethinking things.

“I owe Rahul Gandhi an apology because I seriously underestimated him,” says Manjari Miller, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Miller singled out Gandhi’s yatras (marches) across India as a particularly canny tactic. These physically grueling voyages across the length and breadth of India showed that he wasn’t just a privileged son of Indian political royalty, but a politician willing to take risks and meet ordinary Indians where they were. During the yatras, he would meet directly with voters from marginalized groups and rail against Modi’s politics of hate.

“The persona he’s developed — as somebody kind, caring, inclusive, [and] resolute in the face of bullying — has really worked and captured the imagination of younger India,” says Suryanarayan. “If you’ve spent any time on Instagram Reels, [you’ll see] an entire generation now waking up to Rahul Gandhi’s very appealing videos.”

This, too, has a lesson for the rest of the world: Tactical innovation from the opposition matters even in an unfair electoral context.

There is no doubt that, in the past 10 years, the BJP stacked the political deck against its opponents. They consolidated control over large chunks of the national media, changed campaign finance law to favor themselves, suborned the famously independent Indian Electoral Commission, and even intimidated the Supreme Court into letting them get away with it.

The opposition, though, managed to find ways to compete even under unfair circumstances. Strategic coordination between them helped consolidate resources and ameliorate the BJP cash advantage. Direct voter outreach like the yatra helped circumvent BJP dominance in the national media.

To be clear, the opposition still did not win a majority. Modi will have a third term in office, likely thanks in large part to the ways he rigged the system in his favor.

Yet there is no doubt that the opposition deserves to celebrate. Modi’s power has been constrained and the myth of his invincibility wounded, perhaps mortally. Indian voters, like those in Brazil and Poland before them, have dealt a major blow to their homegrown authoritarian faction.

And that is something worth celebrating.

-via Vox, June 7, 2024.

#india #narendra modi #pm modi #modi #bjp #lok sabha elections #rahul gandhi #democracy #2024 elections #authoritarianism #anti authoritarian #good news #hope

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thozhar · 6 months ago

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Indian tea production has been in severe crisis since the mid nineties largely due to neo-liberal structural adjustments in the Indian economy. The size of the tea industry, which is second only to China and accounts for 25 percent of global tea production, has made this a huge blow to the country’s agrarian economy. The industry employs 1.26 million people on tea plantations and two million additional people indirectly. As such, the economic crisis has had an enormous impact on the lives of local residents. In Kerala where I have been conducting research, there have been eight cases of suicide and twelve deaths due to starvation on tea plantations since 2001. Along with utter poverty and famine, tea plantation workers have faced increasingly unhygienic work environments, shattered social life/community relations, and withdrawal of the welfare measures previously enjoyed. The crisis punctured the isolated environments of the plantations and precipitated neoliberal reforms that closed down production in many areas either partially or completely. While many families remained on the plantations, large numbers of workers who had lived there for more than five generations were now compelled to seek work outside. Some went with their families to either their ancestral villages or regional industrial townships such as Coimbatore and Tirupur in Tamil Nadu. These plantation workers have now joined the ranks of the massive Dalit workforce powering India’s unorganised and informal sectors. In joining that pool of workers, Tamil Dalit labourers are exposed to aspects of a caste-ridden society from which they had previously been shielded. The situation of Saraswathi, a female retired worker in her early sixties, illustrates the dilemma and struggles of the workers who moved out the plantations.

— The hidden injuries of caste: south Indian tea workers and economic crisis by Jayaseelan Raj

#plantation tamils #kerala tea plantation #kerala #idukki #neocolonial india #neoliberalism #neoliberal india #plantation capitalism #plantation neoliberalism #tamil dalit workers #neoliberal casteism #jayseelan raj #tamil nadu #tamil labour migration

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mitigatedchaos · 4 months ago

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The Floating Causation of Vulgar Anti-Racism

Post for August 12, 2024 ~7,400 words, 36 minutes

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The late 20th century and the early 21st century were an excellent time for 'catch-up' development in under-developed countries. For example, the GDP per capita of the People's Republic of China rose from $312 in 1980, to $12,720 in 2022, more than a 40x increase. This is despite the People's Republic being nominally communist, 92% Han Chinese, and one of the largest potential geopolitical rivals to the United States. This is not a one-off – exports from the Socialist Republic of Vietnam to the United States rose from $50 million in 1994 to $114 billion in 2023.

While the ideologically liberal government of the United States did invade Iraq and Afghanistan, and placed strict limits on Iran, in practical terms, the United States was willing to direct hundreds of billions of dollars of demand, for everything from disposable gloves to rice cookers, to countries that were neither majority white nor, officially, capitalist, which allowed these countries to build up their industrial base.

Inside the United States, as of the early 2020s, Americans of Indian descent, Americans of Asian descent, and a number of other non-white groups are outperforming the median household income of white Americans. It's not uncommon to see an Indian-American as the CEO of a major US corporation, such as Microsoft's Satya Nadella, Google's Sundar Pichai, or IBM's Arvind Krishna. And while Americans of Nigerian descent aren't earning quite as much money as Sundar Pichai, they are doing better than the U.S. national average. [1]

The American economy is willing to award non-white Americans and non-white immigrants with average pay higher than that the average pay for white Americans, and American society is willing to award members of these same groups with highly prestigious positions – Google is one of the most famous American companies, and to be its CEO is highly prestigious indeed.

Why is it that vulgar anti-racists aren't content to leave well enough alone on negative racial messaging, and take advantage of this opportunity to focus on personal development, ingroup development, and national development? Why is it that they have a strange totalitarian bent, such as Ibram Kendi proposing to give veto power over all government policy to a body of unappointed race experts, which would de facto end democracy?

Last month, @max1461 wrote a post, attempting to find a balanced compromise between the social justice movement and its critics in the discourses on racism over the past 10 years. Perhaps this was intended to close the books and allow the participants to move to a saner footing going forward. Subsequently, Max flagged the post as unrebloggable in order to prevent it from being beat up like a piñata. Near the end of the initial chain, Max wrote:

I can’t stress enough that, for all the excesses of DEI seminars and modern anti-racist academia and whatnot, for however unhelpful or even regressive these things may often be, what they exist in response to is fundamentally a horror of an entirely different and incomparable scale; something unspeakably evil and destructive. And, after 200 years of such an evil world order, which only really began to melt in 1945, I think it would be incredibly naive to believe that all the wounds are now healed.

It would seem that for the most part, the wounds that Japan suffered from America in World War II have already healed. The country already went through reindustrialization, followed by a boom period (which startled Westerners), and then a subsequent crash and the 'lost decade' of the 1990s. The Japanese have a favorable view of the United States, as perhaps they should – Japan has prospered in the Post-WW2 international order, in which they can simply purchase whatever materials they need on global markets with no need to invade or occupy anyone.

Yet for others, the past lingers on.

Ibram Kendi is one of the most famous contemporary self-identified anti-racists, a New York Times bestselling author (his most famous book was titled "How to Be an Anti-Racist") who was not only platformed by major corporations such as Microsoft (in 2020, an advertisement on the login screen of Windows 10 computers linked to a search for "anti-racism books," with his at the top), but even received funding for his own anti-racism center (now under attack for its ineffectiveness).

At one time, Ibram Kendi thought that white people were aliens. A roommate talked him out of it, asking how it was that white people could have children with everyone else if that were the case. To his credit, Kendi did change his mind.

...but how could anyone have come up with Kendi's conclusion in the first place?

In school in the United States, children are taught that the Spanish conquered the Aztecs. It is true that Spanish military forces brought about the downfall of the Aztec Empire, but often people forget the details of what they learned in school, and often what they learn in school is itself a simplified story, designed to be told to children. Encyclopedia Britannica's summary of the Battle of Tenochtitlan largely agrees with the gist of Wikipedia's more detailed article on the Fall of Tenochtitlan, which is littered with instances of "[citation needed]."

Wikipedia, however, provides more numbers. In particular, Wikipedia's version provides one of the Internet's favorite parts of wiki battle articles, a listing of the balance of opposed forces (with citations):

There is a racist narrative of the conquest of the Americas in which the brave Spanish explorers overcame the savage, human-sacrificing hordes of the Aztecs. There is an inverted, anti-racist narrative of the conquest of the Americas in which the powerful, cruel Spanish showed up to oppress the weak, innocent Aztecs.

And then there is a third narrative - a narrative that politics happened. A number of tributary states had grievances with the Aztecs, and the small number of Spanish probably didn't seem like enough to conquer the whole territory from the perspective of the tributaries, but did seem powerful enough to rally around to fight the Aztecs and win.

Nobody comes out looking good in this third narrative. The Spanish brought about a brutal war with tens of thousands of casualties, and devastating disease followed their arrival. The Aztecs and tributaries combined failed to overcome a foreign invasion due to (relative to the foreigners being from another continent) local infighting. The Aztecs were awful enough that a number of tributaries sided with an army of foreigners against them.

Now, suppose that we delete the 200,000 native allies from the balance of forces above, but still record a victory for the Spanish. The effect of the native allies remains, but the cause of that effect disappears. This creates an effect without a cause – unattributed causation, which is disconnected from what came before, or what we might call, "floating causation."

Some might call overcoming a force of 80,000 with only 1,000 or so men a miracle. For those not so inclined, the 'floating' causation gets attributed to the Spanish soldiers – their equipment, their valor, their tactics, and their discipline. Each of a thousand Spanish infantrymen is now somehow worth 200 native warriors.

In this cartoon version of history, the Spanish are an unstoppable psychic warrior race. Their steadfast will in the face of danger and their unit cohesion are quite nearly inhuman, and their technological advantage is overwhelming. The natives have not merely made a political miscalculation similar to others of the pre-modern era, such as the decisions of states facing Genghis Khan, but are buffoons to the slaughter, incapable of putting up any real defense.

In this cartoon, the Spanish can go anywhere. They can do anything. And because of this, they are the only people with agency in the whole world.

They sound... like aliens.

Trying to rebalance this cartoon only leads to greater absurdities, such as the idea that only Europeans ever meaningfully engaged in conquest (contradicted by Genghis Khan), or that industrial technology and its resulting pollution are "European" in nature (China has been quite aggressive about industrializing), or that only "European" countries waged modern and industrialized wars of conquest (the Empire of Japan used guns, bombs, and tanks as part of its project to create the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere).

All three of the above counter-examples are from Asia, which is usually conspicuously absent from self-identified anti-racist thinking, but none of them are obscure.

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It is my belief that floating causation is a source of distortions across the ideological spectrum.

Ideology is not independent from human beings. Manifestos, one might say, do not print themselves. From the other direction, it is not a piece of paper which murders somebody – it is a human being who pulls the trigger.

There is ideology, which is a system of related rules and beliefs, and there are adherents who adopt ideology, spread beliefs, and put ideological rules into practice.

An ideology can contain taboos which prohibit noticing or explaining the true cause of some outcome, separating the cause from its effect. Practitioners can then attribute that effect to a preferred ideological construct instead, making it seem much more powerful, and often dangerous, than it really is.

The Elephants

Imagine (as this example is entirely made-up) that there is some village in which elephants are considered sacred, but the elephants in the area have a habit of trampling crops in the night. To avoid loss of face, the damage to crops is attributed to "bandits" by an initial group of elders. The young children who do not know better are then taught this explanation. Later, after the death of the elders, the initial truth is lost. Anyone claiming to have seen elephants trampling the fields is denounced as choosing the vile bandits over the virtuous elephants. An outsider who did not realize what was happening might be quite impressed to hear that a bandit in the region ruined a dozen fields in a single night, and assume that the bandit has tremendous physical stamina.

But floating causation is not necessarily the result of an ideological taboo. Someone may be ignorant about the cause of an effect, unable to understand the process by which an effect came about, have powerful emotions about the topic which they are unwilling to confront or may not even be aware of, or may simply have poor judgment. An adherent may be drawn to an ideology for these reasons.

Continuing with our example, a fresh-off-the-boat colonial administrator arriving at the village might be unaware that elephants exist, or trample crops, and conclude that there were ongoing feuds driven by animosity among the villagers, with bandits as the cover-story. Alternatively, the new colonial administrator might love the elephants and hate the villagers, and be unwilling to consider the possibility that the elephants are trampling the crops, including cooking up rather elaborate rationalizations.

Ideology

Issues with not understanding a process are more likely to come up with things like economics – occasionally a worker will post a video to social media complaining that he is not paid the full value of the items he sells or creates, ignoring all the money that went into the construction of the facility, the work from other workers putting together the input materials, and so on.

Liberals in the late 00s and early 2010s had an interest in memetics, which concerns the replication and spread of ideas. (This field is where the term "Internet meme" comes from.) Then, as now, they had a tendency to treat people as too similar to each other, and some of them leaned towards the idea that any person could hold any ideology. Ideologies do (in my judgment) influence behavior – there are far fewer monarchists around these days, and far fewer monarchs with real power, for example – but how a set of beliefs is expressed depend on the emotions, motives, and temperament of the person who holds those beliefs.

So do people choose ideologies, or do ideologies choose people?

One way to view this matter is as a cycle. Someone's social environment is partly a matter of choice, and partly a matter of circumstance. The ideologies that show up in someone's environment are generally going to be ones that spread (as ideologies that don't attract new adherents will die out), but which ideology someone actually chooses and how they practice it will be influenced by what type of person they are.

Another way to view this matter is that emotions, motives, temperament, and beliefs are all things that make certain actions or thoughts either easier (and cheaper) or more difficult (and more expensive). A drug addict who believes in hard work and free market capitalism, but finds himself stealing to feed his habit, may find that the influence of his beliefs is not enough to overcome his addiction. (He is likely to feel miserable.) However, when a religious person is choosing what time of day, or day of the week, to worship, the explicit belief of their religion is likely to have a great deal of influence.

Yet another way to view this matter is to treat things like social relations, ideology, and temperament as interacting layers, and then propose that politics spans multiple layers.

Human Talent

I don't believe that all human beings are equally talented, and I don't believe that they all have identical temperaments. Therefore, one of my beliefs is what might be called the "human capital theory of movements." Ideologies consist of networks of related beliefs which can be used to interpret the world, to guide behavior, or to create arguments. But ideologies do not create beliefs or arguments themselves. Humans do.

When a movement has a lot of talented, virtuous people working for it, these people can create new arguments in order to win debates, and change parts of the ideology, the network of beliefs, to adapt the network to changes in conditions. Without talented people, the ideology of a movement will drift farther from environmental conditions, causing its responses to become more misaligned with conditions on the ground.

Talented people are also needed for the implementation of an ideology. An ideological book is just an inert text. No matter how complex it may be, it is fundamentally limited in its complexity. Applying that text in the environment, bridging the gap between what the text says and what that means in the reality of a specific situation, requires both intelligence and good judgment. Not every person is equally talented, and not every person is equally informed. If someone more talented and with better judgment is around, they can read the situation and come up with some simpler rules or orders for others to follow.

The less talented the adherents of a movement are, the lower the ability of the movement to adapt to conditions over both the short-term and the long-term.

A shift in the distribution of talent can precede other forms of political change. Ideologues may smile as the most disagreeable members are driven out of their movement, but at the same time, the lack of criticism will reduce the movement's ability to respond to change.

There are trade-offs. The use of floating causation may make an ideology less aligned with reality, but it may also be useful for the movement to stoke the emotions of their followers in order to drive action. (This emotional motivation bit is why every election in the United States is "the most important in your lifetime.")

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Beliefs are not intelligence. Nonetheless, a person with a belief may act as though they are smarter (or even wiser) than they actually are. This is just the nature of knowledge (as cached intelligence, wisdom, and observation).

I developed the talent theory in the prior section by observing opposition to racism in the United States prior to 2014. In the United States between 2000 and 2014, there was substantial support for individualist "colorblindness," while at the same time, there was immense social pressure against overt white racial organizing.

Racial organizing takes time and effort. Because white Americans were not subject to racial discrimination, they could simply go out into the market and earn what their work was worth. For talented white Americans, the gains from white racial organizing would be marginal, so the penalties could easily overcome those gains. The less talented would have the most to gain due to the ability to reduce the amount of economic competition they would be up against, but they were also less able to organize. [2]

There was somewhere famous for white racial organizing in the US during this era: prisons.

Racial prison gangs have been particularly noted in the California prison system. Prison gangs offer inmates a credible threat of retaliation if the inmate is harmed, so every inmate has an incentive to join one, and the bigger the gang the better that threat of retaliation is, so every gang has an incentive to recruit. If you're a gang member and a new guy comes in and starts causing trouble, and you don't want to escalate (and thus risk extra charges for your guys or reduced privileges), what are you to do? You would prefer to negotiate with someone that has leverage on him. Race is very visible, even if inmates move around between prisons, so if all inmates get sorted into gangs by race, then someone is responsible for this guy, and by talking to the right people, you can make sure he knows it. (If the troublemaker still doesn't respond, and his own gang cut him loose, then you can punish him without fear of retaliation from other inmates.)

Different incentives produce different results.

Four Options

Glenn Loury is a black man, and an economist at Brown University. He views himself as an American and therefore an inheritor of human rights philosophy of the American founders and their English forebears. He has his own show on YouTube in which he regularly discusses matters with John McWhorter, another black man, who is a linguistics professor at Columbia University. (John strikes me as more liberal, and I heard that he was frightened of Donald Trump, a sentiment shared by many white American culturally liberal Democrats.) Both of these men are quite smart, and if you watch the show, you'll see them easily consider arguments from various perspectives and toss hypotheticals back and forth.

Neither of these men are vulgar anti-racists.

Roland Fryer is a black man, and is an economist at Harvard (although he was suspended for 2 years) who I have discussed previously. He thinks like an economist, and has conducted studies such as paying children to read books. In previous appearances, it seemed that he believes that education gaps can be closed through extremely rigorous selection of teachers and other methods.

Mr. Fryer does not appear to be a vulgar anti-racist.

These men are all relatively prominent voices. If you go looking for the sort of content they produce, they aren't that hard to find. And they're all smart. They might have disagreements with each other and with some of my readers, but smart people can disagree.

However, during the 2014-2022 era, when it was decided to push a black academic to prominence, political forces settled on Ibram Kendi instead. There must have been dozens of other candidates.

When I think about why that happened, I suspect that the answer is that while the first three men care about the interests of black Americans, all three of them are willing to say, "No." Although I doubt they would phrase it in exactly these terms, I suspect that all three understand human rights as rooted in high-order consequences, limits on information, and human bias.

If you proposed to John McWhorter that we should give veto power to a committee of unelected race experts, he would immediately recognize the problem with just that.

Why Vulgar Anti-Racism?

With all of that said, I believe we can think about vulgar anti-racism by means of comparison.

a. Economics

Loury and Fryer are both economists. They know about gains from trade, prices as a distributed form of economic planning, property rights as enabling investment, specialization of labor, economies of scale, and dozens of other things. They understand where wealth comes from.

The typical vulgar anti-racist that you will encounter on an Internet discussion board has little knowledge of economics, and tends to think of total production as fixed. From their perspective, if someone has more resources than another person, it has nothing to do with production, and is purely the result of hoarding.

The typical vulgar anti-racist also doesn't think in terms of entropy, the tendency of things to break down over time. They tend not to discount temporally-distant advantages. (If a well was built 400 years ago, they treat that advantage as retained today.) They tend to think of capital as fixed and not as something that is constantly being rebuilt and adjusted. They don't understand that the ability to create new capital is generally more important than the initial capital in the long-run.

Thinking about production is probably why we see Fryer focused on educational gains. His theory is likely that if the children have a good base of education, they'll be able to produce more, avoid losses, overcome entropy, and net accumulate wealth. If they don't have a good base of education, then they'll be less productive, and entropy will eat a higher percentage of their earnings, leading to reduced wealth.

If someone doesn't know economics, then the wealth of developed countries is "unexplained," and so are the motives of many people within developed countries.

b. History

I don't know about Fryer specifically, but Loury and McWhorter seem to have a good grasp of history.

A solid understanding of history leads to seeing actions as emerging from their historical contexts. This places a limit on the range of expected behavior.

For example, for most of history up until about the 1900s, the child mortality rate was about 50%. That example is relevant for feminism, as under such brutal conditions, we would expect any society that didn't push for women to have at least 4 children to die out. Gender-based oppression didn't occur for no reason, or because of pure male greed, but was influenced by material circumstances.

If we run this understanding backwards, it follows that 1700s or earlier gender norms would be unlikely to return without 1700s or earlier child mortality rates.

Likewise, some basic historical knowledge would reveal that wars of conquest have happened pretty much everywhere, so it's quite unlikely that Europeans are uniquely conquerors. You end up having to declare everything from feuding Chinese kingdoms, to the Māori, to chimpanzees, be "European" in order to fit the model.

The typical vulgar anti-racist's position is, implicitly, "Everyone lived together in peace and harmony, until one day, for no reason at all, the Europeans became possessed by the spirit of greed, and attacked."

If someone somehow doesn't know that war existed outside of Europe prior to 1492, then the wars of colonialism are "unexplained," and so are the motives of the people who fought them.

When vulgar anti-racists do research history, they generally focus on collecting racial grievances in order to build up a case that the group they favor are poor, oppressed, not responsible for anything bad their group has ever done, and are owed indefinite benefits for incalculable harms. They don't proceed from the idea of, "How does this work?" They don't, say, look at the tremendous economic success of South Korea, and ask, "Based on how South Korea obtained their wealth, how can our group achieve such riches?" (They don't even look at South Korea's birthrate and ask how they can avoid such a fate!)

Even before World War 2, Japan did look afar to ask how they could become rich. That kind of mentality is part of how they were able to become a developed country (who could threaten other people with tanks) in the first place.

Looking to Asia is useful for people making comparisons to figure out how things work, but is not useful for collecting racial grievances in order to build up racial claims to make demands. That's why vulgar anti-racists often don't know basic facts about Asian history, like that state testing to determine government positions was practiced in ancient China. [3]

c. Racial Attachment

Even during the individualist colorblindness of 2000-2014, there were still white Americans with some talent engaged in racial organizing. In general, these were people to whom race was very important, and thus who were out-of-step with the mainstream of white America.

It's my opinion that there is a natural range of tribalism among human beings. Sometimes, the rival tribe on the other side of the mountain just want to trade. Other times, they really are out to kill you. The trait doesn't disappear, because wars still happen, and even if they didn't happen, someone could just reinvent war and start it all back up again.

In my view, this tribalism trait isn't attached to race specifically. It can attach to religion. It can attach to sex. Some of the rhetoric from radical feminists sounds the same as rhetoric from hardcore ethnic nationalists – or at least it would, if we treated men as an ethnicity. In our modern environment in which race is highly legible due to intercontinental travel, for a lot of people, it gets attached to race.

Rather than assigning people a single number on a scale from "moral" to "immoral," it's probably better to think of people as having virtues and vices, strengths and weaknesses.

Some level of racial attachment itself is not inherently evil. Based on his research topics, for example, Roland Fryer seems interested in bringing about the success of people with a similar background to himself. His virtue (his interest in truth) and his strength (his intelligence) convert that attachment into something that's beneficial to society.

High levels of racial attachment fly much closer to the wire. A highly racially attached individual might do good work in other domains, but there's a risk that they'll end up routing too much of their sense of self-worth through their race, and become obsessed with guarding their race's self-perceived reputation. For such a person, any information deemed unflattering to the group may be interpreted as an attack on himself (or herself).

The Mayo Clinic (a network of hospitals in the United States) describes narcissism as:

Narcissistic personality disorder is a mental health condition in which people have an unreasonably high sense of their own importance. They need and seek too much attention and want people to admire them. People with this disorder may lack the ability to understand or care about the feelings of others. But behind this mask of extreme confidence, they are not sure of their self-worth and are easily upset by the slightest criticism.

A number of users on Twitter (now known as X.com) began using the term "ethnic narcissism" to describe this sort of disordered thinking when done on behalf of a racial or ethnic group rather than oneself specifically.

2019 and 2020 were banner years for platforming this sort of behavior, with the nation's leading newspaper arguing, in its own words, that we should make the suffering of a particular racial group the core narrative of American history, that everyone should define their identities around:

The 1619 Project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.

Obsession with self-perceived ethnic reputation is part of what leads to the "rebalancing the cartoon" behavior I discussed earlier:

How does someone end up so ignorant that they don't know that Genghis Khan existed? By being the kind of person that doesn't want to know that Genghis Khan existed. They don't look it up. If you tell them, they either forget or they take a conflict theorist approach and think that it's some sort of trick.

Unfortunately, while a fairly accurate description of the behavior at issue, the term "ethnic narcissism" can also be used as an attack by ethnic narcissists themselves, as well as people engaged in ethnic conflict. This makes it of limited utility in practice.

The Mysterious Anglo

Option #1: In general, the right wing would consider the vulgar anti-racists to be liars working to selfishly advance their own personal interests and those of their preferred groups. Left-wingers would tend to take a negative view of this, as they believe that right-wingers are unjustly dismissive in order to 'protect the unearned and unquestioned advantages of the privileged.'

In this version, vulgar anti-racists won't drop the issue and hit the GDP gym because they're bullies who think the particular groups they dislike are easy targets. The appropriate response is to become a harder target by systematically defunding any institution that supports them, putting them on the same footing as conventional racial supremacists in the US.

I tend to agree that many of the vulgar anti-racists are just being selfish. There is a question of just how consciously aware of it they are, however.

Option #2: A left-wing view would be that the vulgar anti-racists are "good people, just a bit misguided." Right-wingers tend to take a negative view of this, because if a right-winger published a book titled "Black Fragility" that was as circular in its reasoning as the "White Fragility" of Robin DiAngelo appeared to be, he would be hounded as a racist.

In this version, vulgar anti-racists just need patient guidance to put their empathy back on the right track.

I tend to believe that a good chunk of the vulgar anti-racists are just low-tier progressives who get their opinions socially. If the social consensus changes among progressives, they'll forget ever fretting about "microaggressions." Arguing with them individually mostly won't work, though, because it doesn't override their social consensus, and it won't make them think harder about the issues.

Many left-wingers would disagree with me on this assessment.

Option #3: A more centrist view would be that vulgar anti-racists are a mix of people with excessively high racial attachment, enthusiastic people who are underinformed, and people who serve their niche of the information and political economy, and that this isn't that different from the lower quality wings of other left and right political movements (look how bad "degrowth" is, for example), except that race feels much more core to people's identities (it's certainly not easy to change one's race), so it evokes more powerful emotions. A centrist would likely say that there are more academically and philosophically serious opponents of racism out there, but because the things they say are more serious, they're less controversial, so they get less coverage. ("You wouldn't expect a textbook in the Sunday paper.")

A person with this perspective would say that the appropriate course of action is mostly just to wait for it to blow over.

I would disagree. If vulgar anti-racism is taught in schools for a generation, it would create an expectation that racial blame is the default course of action. This would create a situation which is much more favorable for racial conflict, so it should be shut down now to prevent that from happening.

However, I feel that this does not adequately explain the totalitarian bent. What about other values society might have? What about trade-offs? [4] I would like to throw a fourth possibility into the ring.

Option #4: Life inside the vulgar anti-racist worldview is anxiety-inducing and subtly terrifying.

I don't fully endorse this view, because I think that vulgar anti-racism is a coalition of multiple groups (see the previous three options).

However, while I learned from school that racism and ethnic conflict are extremely dangerous in general (e.g. they can boil over and result in mass murder), the susceptibility of vulgar anti-racists to, "It's impossible to be racist to white people," which is very obviously racist, strongly implies that what they learned was, "Jews good; Germans bad" – basically just a list of which groups are acceptable, and which groups aren't. [5]

I reverse-engineered a sophisticated moral worldview, and when I was young, I assumed that everyone else had done so, too. And for a little while, society approximated that view closely enough for that misconception to kind-of work.

I think that a significant number of people in the vulgar anti-racist coalition don't understand white people.

In terms of anxiety, a number of them seem to think that Europeans and their descendants think about race as much as the vulgar anti-racists do – that they are silently passing judgment, or saying nasty things when others are not listening.

I've been around middle-class and above white Americans my entire life. I've seen some kids make stupid racist jokes, and I can imagine bullying targeting race if it looks like an axis of vulnerability, but in general, among themselves, they don't talk about race much at all.

A skeptic reading this may say that that's just anecdotal. However, according to surveys, "white conservatives" have about the same "racial/ethnic" "ingroup favorability" as either "hispanic moderates" or "asians." "White liberals" were the only group on the chart to have a "pro-outgroup bias."

If we interpret these ingroup favorability measures as racism (which is a stretch, because a favorability measure is not itself a discriminatory policy), then white conservatives have a "normal" (as in typical of most groups) amount of racism. White liberals (probably in the sense that the label "liberal" is used for the entire left in the US) are the only ones who loop around into what might be called "anti-racism." (Razib Khan has his doubts about the stability of this arrangement of anti-racism as opposed to non-racism.)

A vulgar anti-racist doesn't know this, and doesn't want to know this.

Now, for the "subtly terrifying" part. If someone accepts, for instance, that the British were sincere in sending warships to intercept slave traders, then there are all sorts of explanations that they can come up with for that behavior, such as it being a natural result of industrialization, or maybe a result of rising literacy, or motivated by Christianity in combination with previous political developments in England, and so on.

From Wikipedia, here's a map of the British Empire, a map of the Spanish Empire, and a map of the Portuguese Empire. While from the perspective of Europeans at the time, the European states were in competition with each other, if taken together as a group, they were closer to achieving true world conquest than anyone else in history. (Sure, the Mongol Empire was huge, but they didn't make it over to the Americas.)

If someone believes that the Europeans turned off the slave trade for some sincere or enduring reason, then the 1700s are unlikely to come back. If someone believes that the Europeans turned off the 1700s for no reason, or for a secret reason, then one day, they could just... turn the 1700s back on.

And maybe that thought isn't entirely conscious. Maybe it just sits quietly, at the back of the mind.

And they get stuck, much like people who are still focused on "overpopulation" as birthrates plummet in industrialized countries throughout the world.

-★-

Whether they consciously intend to or not, vulgar anti-racists leverage social taboos to make it difficult to argue for one group's innocence without making another, generally more vulnerable, group, look worse. People don't want to be mean and say mean things about a vulnerable group. Vulgar anti-racists exploit this. (This kind of behavior is immoral, but I'm not sure how much vulgar anti-racists consciously understand that.)

Online Tactics

I've developed tactics to argue with them in online space, but I haven't tried them out in in-person institutional spaces where they have institutional influence (power).

In general, you cannot argue with vulgar anti-racists grievance-for-grievance. Building up an ammunition depot of racial or ethnic grievances on behalf of "overperforming" groups won't work – vulgar anti-racists will dismiss you as irrationally motivated by racial hatred and dismiss your entire collection, and normal people will also think it's weird (even though they still don't think many racial or ethnic minorities collecting grievances is weird). [6]

A better approach is to pick one or two grievances to shut down the idea that the group you're defending are "invulnerable." Morally, you shouldn't have to point to, say, children or minors being mass victimized, because it should be obvious that people of any race can be victimized. But that's just the world we live in.

Collect examples of institutional policy, such as by governments, corporations, or universities, that is racially discriminatory against the group you're defending, in order to show that the intent of vulgar anti-racists is racial discrimination. Use center-left, mainstream sources to prevent dismissals. The goal is not to show major harms; most Democrats who are not social justice critical will initially attempt to deny that racial discrimination is a goal of vulgar anti-racism.

(If necessary, it can be emphasized that not wanting to be racially discriminated against is a normal thing to want.)

Vulgar anti-racists will try to shut you down by reciting their list of grievances. Memorizing racial grievances is something that they are strong at. Redirect the conversation to where they are weak: demand that they show whatever policy it is that they want will actually improve things and permanently close racial outcome gaps.

If you find someone who has memorized a list of successful academic or nutrition interventions, you've likely found a philosophical liberal. In my experience, almost no vulgar anti-racist has any even modestly-successful intervention memorized. If they propose an intervention, demand evidence that it will work.

It's possible that they could propose something scientific, but science is undergoing a replication crisis, and 'race scholars' have come under fire for scientific misconduct. If a vulgar anti-racist does come up with something, the next step is to get a binding commitment to close the racial claims against their target group.

If their political leaders will not agree, in writing, with binding mechanisms (and punishments with teeth if they don't follow through), to close out the racial claims against their target groups, conditional on some social intervention going into effect, then they don't believe that the intervention will work.

A working intervention is win-win. Outcomes improve, and the odds of conflict (over this particular issue) decrease.

IRL Tactics

X user CantonaCorona must live somewhere very different from me, because I never hear vulgar anti-racism from people in real life. His advice?

100%. I can’t even tell you the number of times I’ve been in a friendly/polite mutual friend gathering, and someone who knows 10% of the room will add “gawd, white people, gross” etc.

The issue is they are also the person lacking social skills to see the room gets uncomfortable

In 2023ish I started responding by asking them very honest seeming questions and leading them into saying really crazy stuff.

Takes a lot of finesse to not sound like a schizo, but if you can pretend to be genuinely curious it works wonders and someone else will call them out

It does, indeed, take a lot of finesse, even online. Because vulgar anti-racists are exploiting taboos, they have a huge terrain advantage in most encounters due to normal people not wanting to touch reputationally-damaging information. Successfully navigating the situation without sounding "schizo," and without sounding cruel, is difficult.

The advantage of the tactics discussed above are that you don't have to attack the reputation of the vulnerable group that vulgar anti-racists are using to justify their own bad behavior. It isn't surprising that, like a successful hostage rescue, it requires being more careful than the hostage-takers.

"Corrective" racial discrimination that does not permanently close racial outcome gaps is not actually a correction, it's just extra harm for no reason, and the motives of people who support it are suspect.

Demobilization

While the online tactics I've discussed above are reasonably effective for an online debate or argument format (and vulgar anti-racists are increasingly retreating to protected contexts where they don't have to engage in open debate), the long-term goal needs to be demobilization. Ethnic conflict interferes with stability and good government.

There are some supporters that don't recognize the logical errors in their positioning, but they can sense, "Wait, this guy isn't like the others," and flee rather than risk being split off from the social approval of their group.

I propose the fear theory for the potential to develop new angles. If the real motivation is fear, then addressing most of the intermediate arguments won't work, as the intermediate arguments are just products of the fear.

Reportedly, black musician Daryl Davis demobilized many Klansmen just by befriending them. [7] I suspect that most vulgar anti-racists already know a number of white people personally, so that tactic probably won't work here.

I have not conducted field experiments (either online or offline) on using the fear theory during encounters, so I can't provide solid information on its tactical use, yet.

-★★★-

[1] Stylistically, I have chosen to capitalize nationality while not capitalizing racial groups. On a quick reading, the tables provided by Wikipedia don't appear to disaggregate between first-generation immigrants, who have foreign nationality of origin and American citizenship, and second-generation immigrants who only have American nationality. All three CEOs listed were born in India.

[2] The ability to buy off competing talent is one of the reasons for the endurance of capitalism. Capitalist systems tend to be extremely productive. They can offer wages from increased productivity that are higher than the wages that other systems offer from rents.

[3] This is one of the reasons I got into writing about politics. It became common to find people whose professed opinions implied they'd never even heard of Genghis Khan, and at that point, I figured the bar was set pretty low.

[4] Positions on migration appear related, but I'll touch on that in another essay.

[5] One reason it wasn't obvious that people were just making an acceptable targets list at the time was that quite a few people from all over the world have a tendency to get wacky about Jewish people specifically, so putting antisemitism off-limits looked like it was backed by more sophisticated reasoning than it actually was. Obviously, people shouldn't hate Jewish people. The problem with the acceptable targets list approach is that it's fragile – since the list is based on social approval rather than deeper philosophical principles, it can end up being "readjusted" later.

[6] I also suspect that continuing to constantly expose yourself to the worst behavior of other groups may be corrosive. Watching a video where a man is shot on some other street, in some other city, may give you a jolt of adrenaline while you sit helplessly in your chair. Reading about atrocities may make you feel helpless and doomed.

[7] This behavior is morally praiseworthy, not morally obligatory.

#politics #criticism of social justice #idpol #epistemic blues #sj critical #flagpost

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the-garbanzo-annex-jr · 4 months ago

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by Steven Zeitchik

Those comments sparked a backlash at the time. But many liberal Jews in Hollywood, media and tech identified with her remarks.

To some non-Jews I talked to, today’s news was just a case of a tribal rooting interest not going our way. “Oh well, you’ll get the next one,” went their vibe. But when a Jewish leader this popular from a state so necessary gets passed over, it becomes more than just a matter of losing a round of identity-politics poker — it touches an existential nerve.

Some Jews have also noted that in choosing Walz, Harris was simply trying to stay away from raising Gaza as an issue. But outside of antisemitic projection, why would it do that? The idea that a candidate would automatically want to talk more about Israel simply because he’s Jewish raises ugly tropes of dual loyalty, or worse.

Wary of seeming killjoyish, some liberal Jewish Americans also sought to find a silver lining — at least now Jews wouldn’t be blamed for administration failures, they said. They cited The Atlantic’s Yair Rosenberg, one of the most eloquent expositors of the double standards applied to Shapiro, who in a recent piece expressed some reservations about what a Shapiro vice presidency would bring.

“Anti-Semitism conceives of Jews as clandestine puppeteers who control the world’s governments and economies, fueling political and social problems,” he wrote. “A Jewish vice president would provide the perfect canvas for these fevered fantasies — a largely ceremonial figure onto whom bigots could nonetheless project all of their conspiracies, casting him as the real power behind the Resolute Desk.”

Rosenberg has forgotten more about the history of antisemitism than most of us will ever know. But this train of thought has always struck me as self-defeating. The response to fears of prejudice can’t be, “Let’s hide the Jews to prevent us from finding out about it.”

A Jewish vice president would have been important not only because it would have signaled the latest progress of one ethnic group in America as thrillingly as Harris’ candidacy does for Americans of Black and Indian heritage, but also because it would have drawn antisemites out from the crevices, shining Louis Brandeis’ disinfecting light brightly upon them.

(That Harris’ husband is Jewish, incidentally, should do little to quell the unease. Jewish affiliations are proof of nothing except the reminder of past justifications. It calls to mind those who several years ago said Taika Waititi’s Nazi comedy Jojo Rabbit couldn’t be antisemitic because Waititi was Jewish. It wasn’t antisemitic. But that wasn’t the reason.)

Walz is a solid candidate with a strong record of speaking out against antisemitism. Just this spring he told Twin Cities PBS that, “I think when Jewish students are telling us they feel unsafe in that, we need to believe them.”

But Walz’s pro-Jewish bona fides don’t mean the decision to put him on the ticket — or the reaction to his appointment — can’t also be shadowed with antisemitism. Both can be true.

And so here liberal Jews again find ourselves, hopelessly marooned between a belief that Democratic policies are fundamentally better for our interests and yet worried we are not welcome in our own home — feeling a gentle nudge that perhaps we might find ourselves more comfortable in another place but unsure, in the end, of where else to go.

#jews #liberal jews #kamala harris #tim walz #josh shapiro #vice president

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arkipelagic · 9 months ago

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Asian slaves, indigenous Americans, and identity in colonial era Mexico

The Spanish Philippines had a diverse slave population for local labor and export, including Filipino Indians [i.e. natives; indios], Muslim war captives (moros), and foreign slaves from as far away as Portuguese India.

… Upon their arrival, chino slaves [i.e. any Asian slave, not just Chinese] were absorbed by the urban economy of Mexico City, where they mainly worked as domestic servants or in textile mills (obrajes) … For their part, working in the city provided chinos with some possibilities for manumission. Chinos in domestic service were especially apt to embrace the limited opportunities available to them and to experience some social mobility. In the obrajes, chinos had few of the freedoms given to domestic servants, but they did benefit from government oversight of the industry. During official visits, chino slaves appealed for protection from overt exploitation by claiming that they were Indians (even if they were from Portuguese India). Remarkably, visiting inspectors listened to their complaints, and they often responded by liberating individual chinos under the assumption that they were indeed native vassals and could thus not be held in bondage. The overall experience of chinos in the viceroyal capital confirms the benefits of living close to the center of colonial power.

The presence of free indigenous immigrants from the Spanish Philippines in Mexico reinforced the idea that all chinos were Indians. The complex governing structure of colonial Mexico involved two republics or political communities (the república de indios and the república de españoles); this organization separated the indigenous majority from everyone else to facilitate the collection of tribute and the ministry of the Catholic Church … [N]ative immigrants from the Philippines purposely sought to confirm their membership in the Republic because corporate status provided personal advantages. They asked to be tallied in tribute rolls in Mexico to benefit from concomitant privileges, such as trading rights and legal representation through the General Indian Court. At the same time, free Filipinos were frequently confused with chino slaves - a situation that had serious consequences for Filipinos' relations with colonial institutions and enslaved individuals. Some immigrants resented having their indigenous identity questioned and sought to maintain a sense of their Indian-ness by keeping their distance from chino slaves. The majority, however, expressed solidarity with chino slaves. Filipino artisans, for example, took on chino slaves as apprentices and taught them marketable skills. Similarly, Filipino traders incorporated chinos into their own credit networks to facilitate self-purchase.

Individual chinos who were manumitted also embraced an Indian identity, regardless of whether they were from Goa, Macau, or other places in South and Southeast Asia. In this way, chinos challenged official attempts to define them solely as former slaves. Instead, they sought to join the free republic. The possibility for this kind of social integration caused widespread concern among slave owners. To defend their property rights, masters started to brand chino slaves on the face, rather than on the chest or arm as they did with Africans, in order to dissuade them from fleeing and "passing" as free Indians. This horrifying development shows that Indian communities welcomed runaway chino slaves and, by extension, that slave owners sought visible markers of their slaves' status.

Excerpt from the Introduction to “Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico: From Chinos to Indians” (2014) by Tatiana Seijas

#spanish colonialism #mexico #slavery #native american #southeast asia #south asia #philippines #x

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kick-a-long · 2 months ago

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Hi I'm the previous anon and I have to say - everything you added was spot on!

I want to say something extra that has been bothering me for a long time.

I can't help but feel like there are specific (major) traits of antisemitism that always appear in every other form of bigotry. As a person of many different minority groups, I am not saying antisemitism is worst than all the other forms of hatred or downplaying the rest at all. But I see these traits that I feel like are inherently antisemitic appear everywhere else and I can't stop thinking "this shows bigotry starts and stops with jew hate"?

For example, I'm from country A (not saying where for personal reasons). In this country, (mainly) Arab Christians have moved here due to religious persecution. They are a very small group and have become wealthy due to 1) transferring of wealth or 2) they used their intelligence to make businesses. Due to assimilation into whiteness, they have become "white people" as well. As a result they are victims of the "they control the country and are behind everything bad" narrative. I would argue that "they control the world" is a uniquely antisemitic belief and it goes to show how people default to antisemitism to destroy any group. Additionally, I would argue antisemitism is truly people's map to the world and they use it to navigate. Moreover, Indians in Africa had also been accused of doing the same "controlling". Now there is a lot to be said about assimilation and doing anything for power and minorities being pit against each other for division but regardless of the nuance, these negative emotions (anger, frustration, sadness, etc) tend to lead back to antisemitism? Indians in Tanzania experienced random acts of mob violence in the 1920s/30s similar to pogroms (important to note: these were not common but their existence still highlights something).

Human beings love an easy, concrete group to hate and project onto hence the reason why the left loves nazis so much (they are their easy punching bags). As a result, the hatred stems from an antisemitic belief and morphs into anti- whatever the "nuisance" is, no matter how justifiable the hatred is.

Like when people hate immigrants and chant "they will not replace us and take our jobs", am I not supposed to think everything is a big antisemitic conspiracy?

!!!this this this^^^^ I agree so much!!!

antisemitism is older than racism, literally. it was around before the concepts of race or nationhood. it was around when feudalism and slave labor was the main economic system. jews were blamed for being poor and stupid just as often as for being smart and rich. jews have always been a convenient 'other' because we have always had to identify as a diasporic group from somewhere else with different customs based on living somewhere else.

antisemitism is in most other forms of bigotry imo because it's the prototype for it, since the roman empire and the destruction of the second temple. probably before.

I think it's pretty accurate to point to aspects of it in other bigotry because it's where hateful troupes were tested and popularized for thousands of years. what's wild is that people don't even realize what antisemitism does or how it's useful to maintain power structures. it's the most time tested way to scapegoat and distract from real problems and unite against real power structures that fuck up people's lives. you see antisemitism spike around economic crisis or huge cultural swings from liberal to traditional, but you never see the blame fall on changing the laws that caused the economy to crash or try to build bridges between liberal and traditional aspects of society. you just have the scapegoat of jews, or minority populations, or homosexuals, or X, or Y... but eventually the story is always explained with jews as architects of it.

conservative states could look at the successes of LGBTQ entertainers from those states and celebrate how their tradition bore that success (true or false) but instead they reject it. southern states could celebrate the black civil rights leaders from there and the parts of their culture that generated that rebelliousness (true or false) but they reject it. you can see it all over. jews are the only ones who are adopted as "from here" when they succeed and "jewish cabal" when the tide changes. it's the conditional oppression and conditional acceptance that alienates us from all other groups.

all bigotry is based on antisemitism but antisemitism is different than all other bigotry, imo.

#jumblr #leftist antisemitism #antisemitism

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justinspoliticalcorner · 4 months ago

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Eric Levitz at Vox:

When Vice President Kamala Harris chose Tim Walz as her running mate, many pundits lamented her decision. In their view, the Democratic nominee should have chosen a vice presidential candidate who could mitigate her liabilities, and balance out her party’s ticket — such as Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro.

After all, Harris had been a liberal senator from one of America’s most left-wing states and then had run an exceedingly progressive primary campaign in 2020. To win over swing-state undecideds, she needed to demonstrate her independence from her party’s most radical elements. And selecting the popular governor of a purple state — who had defied the Democratic activist base on education policy and Israel’s war in Gaza— would do just that. Walz, in this account, was just another liberal darling: As Minnesota governor, he had enacted a litany of progressive policies, including restoring the voting rights of ex-felons and creating a refuge program for trans people denied gender-affirming care in other states. Picking Walz might thrill the subset of Americans who would vote for Harris even if she burned an American flag on live TV and lit a blunt with its flames. But it would do nothing to reassure those who heard two words they did not like in the phrase, “California liberal.”

But there is more than one way to balance a ticket. Or so Harris’s team believes, if the third night of the Democratic National Convention is any guide. On Wednesday night, Democrats used Walz’s nomination to associate their party with rural American culture and small-c conservative moral sentiments, while remaining true to a broadly progressive agenda. Walz may not be especially distinct from Harris ideologically. But he is quite different demographically and symbolically. Harris is the half-Jamaican, half-Indian daughter of immigrant college professors who grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. Walz was born into a family whose roots in the United States went back to the 1800s, and raised in a Nebraska town of 400, where ethnic diversity largely consisted of several different flavors of Midwestern white (Walz himself is of German, Irish, Swedish, and Luxembourgish descent). Harris is an effortlessly cool veteran of red carpets. Walz is a dad joke that has attained corporal form.

In her person and biography, Harris represents the America that has benefited unequivocally from the transformations of the past half-century — the cosmopolitan, multicultural nation that has greeted the advance of racial and gender equality with relief, and the knowledge economy that’s taken to globalization with relish. Walz, by contrast, was shaped by the America that feels more at home in the world of yesterday, at least as it is nostalgically misremembered — a world where moral intuitions felt more stable, rural economies seemed more healthy, and the American elite looked more familiar; the America that put Donald Trump in the Oval Office, in other words. Or at least, the Harris campaign has chosen to associate Walz with all of that America’s iconography, attempting to make it feel as included in the Democratic coalition as possible — without actually ceding much ground to conservative policy preferences. The introduction to Walz’s speech Wednesday night looked like it could have been scripted by a chatbot asked to generate the antithesis of a “San Francisco liberal.” A video montage celebrated Walz’s diligent work on his family farm growing up, his service in the US military, skills as a marksman, and — above all — success as a football coach. Democrats leaned especially hard on that last, most American item on Walz’s resume. Just before the party’s vice presidential nominee took the mic, a group of his former players decked out in their gridiron garments marched on stage to a fight song (not to be confused with “Fight Song”).

[...] There is some basis for believing that Democrats might be able to win over a small but significant fraction of Republican-leaning independents by wrapping center-left policies in conservative packaging. Some political scientists have found that when moderate and conservative voters are presented with a progressive, Democratic economic policy idea — that is justified on the grounds that it will help uphold “the values and traditions that were handed down to us: hard work, loyalty to our country and the freedom to forge your own path” — some do respond favorably (as do liberal voters, who take no offense at such abstract, traditionalist pieties). Whether Walz tying himself to rural American symbology — or Harris tying herself to “Coach Walz” — will be enough to blunt Trump’s attacks on the Democratic nominee’s supposed “communism” remains to be seen. But the Democratic ticket is at least trying to make right-leaning Midwesterners feel like they belong (even if they do not think like Democrats do).

Tim Walz’s DNC speech last night reflects a broader trend of Democrats reclaiming freedom and patriotism while also selling its liberal agenda. #DNC2024 #HarrisWalz2024

See Also:

HuffPost: With Kamala Harris, It’s Cool For Liberals To Be Patriotic Again

#2024 DNC #Tim Walz #Kamala Harris #2024 Elections #2024 Presidential Election #Freedom #Patriotism

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mariacallous · 2 months ago

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Elections in Moldova and Georgia this week are turning into a sobering reality check for the European Union as it finds itself increasingly on the back foot in its battle for influence with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

For years, the EU has been confident that its liberal, democratic agenda will ultimately steer Georgia and Moldova away from the Kremlin’s orbit and toward the West — a confidence boosted by polls suggesting both countries have big popular majorities for EU membership.

This week’s elections now suggest that this optimistic EU vision is increasingly uncertain. Moldova voted for EU membership by only the narrowest of margins on Sunday — with 50.4 percent of voters in favor — and the populist Georgian Dream party that is expected to win on Saturday is set to pursue an illiberal agenda that would make EU membership impossible.

For the EU, the determination of its adversary in Moscow is daunting.

It is evident that the Kremlin — despite its heavy commitments in Ukraine — is still willing to pour big money into vote-buying and disinformation campaigns to reassert its stamp on former Soviet territories. In both Moldova and Georgia, Moscow is making headway with a propaganda narrative that countries which pursue a pro-EU or pro-NATO agenda are playing with fire, recommending neutrality as the antidote to conflict.

Aghast at the result, Moldova’s pro-EU President Maia Sandu complained of Russia’s “unprecedented assault on our country’s freedom and democracy.” While recent polls suggested a majority of some 60 percent were in favor of joining the bloc, it looked for much of the night as if the anti-EU camp would win.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was quick to stress the tight result was the result of Russian dirty tricks, and insisted Brussels would press ahead with getting Moldova into the bloc.

“In the face of Russia’s hybrid tactics, Moldova shows that it is independent, it is strong and it wants a European future,” she said.

Still, the result in Moldova lays bare the limits to EU influence just as Putin is styling himself as part of a broader anti-Western alliance.

On Tuesday, Putin will host Chinese President Xi Jinping, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Iran’s Masoud Pezeshkian and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and more than 15 other heads of state for talks in the Russian city of Kazan. Moscow has pushed for the admission of a handful of new countries into a BRICS format, designed to band developing economies together to challenge Euro-American interests. It also wants to use it to challenge the United States dollar.

Bribes and disinformation

There is little doubt about the scale of Russian intervention in Moldova.

In a statement following the count, the leader of the National Democratic Institute’s observation mission, former Finnish Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto, reported widespread efforts to undermine the process.

“The greatest threat to the integrity of these elections has been a broad and concerted campaign of malign foreign influence from Russia, collaborating with Moldovan actors through information manipulation, vote-buying, and other illicit financing of political activity,” he said.

To achieve even the slimmest of majorities in that context, other monitors said, was a significant achievement. “Moldovans demonstrated resilience in the face of unprecedented foreign interference,” said U.S. Congressman Peter Roskam, who led an International Republican Institute observer mission.

Moldovan officials repeatedly sounded the alarm over huge sums of Russian money being funnelled into the accounts of ordinary voters in the weeks leading up to the vote. The authorities accuse Moscow and its local proxies of seeking to use cash to push people into opposing EU membership and uniting behind a pro-Russian challenger standing against Sandu.

“We are talking about up to 20 percent of corrupted votes, and an estimated €150 million interference operation by Russia,” said Valeriu Pasha, program manager at the Moldova-based think-tank WatchDog.MD Community. “Without this massive vote bribing, the result would look totally different. So in these very harsh conditions, the fact that we still have a majority yes vote is already a very good result.”

A transferable model

Speaking to POLITICO ahead of the vote on Sunday, former Moldovan Foreign Minister Nicu Popescu said the referendum had been called to “settle the domestic conversation in the country” before voters head to the polls in next year’s parliamentary elections, where Sandu and her allies face a host of pro-Russian opposition parties.

That gambit appears to have failed. Instead of demonstrating unity, it has created a dangerous new dividing line, and convinced the Kremlin it pays to try to swing the result.

“The preliminary election results highlight the challenges Brussels faces in extending EU membership to post-Soviet countries,” said Marta Mucznik, an analyst with Crisis Group. “With Moldova preparing for parliamentary elections in 2025, these divisions are likely to shape political discourse in the months ahead.”

That bodes ill for Georgia, where the Georgian Dream party is seeking a majority in parliamentary elections on Saturday, vowing to ban the entire opposition if it secures enough votes. The dramatic campaign comes amid warnings of state capture by Russia, as the country passed Moscow-inspired restrictions on Western-funded nongovernmental organizations, the media and the LGBTQ+ community.

“It’s time Western policymakers woke up to the fact that Russia’s war isn’t just limited to Ukraine — it’s about taking on the democratic world anywhere that Moscow thinks it can exert influence,” said Ivana Stradner of Washington’s Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “And while risk-averse European and American officials think in terms of individual tactics, Putin has a whole strategy he’s using to try and win.”

For Sandu, it’s not just EU candidate nations that should be worried — or just smaller ones.

Everyone is at risk.

“It is true that you can damage the democratic process in a small country more easily,” the Moldovan president said. “But once these practices are tested in smaller countries, they can be tried in other countries.”

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scamallach-1 · 4 months ago

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it is incredibly difficult to get even people in my own circle who I’ve known for years to get it thru their heads and not give me empty stares that settler-colonialism is the ‘primary contradiction’, the root of basically any oppression anyone faces today. I learned this from indigenous and Black decolonial liberationists. Everything we suffer, it seems, goes back to the Western settler-colonialism. This is ringing true.

And I’ve tried putting it into perspective for my fellow settler “Americans”: we aren’t different than the “Israeli” settler in our status here on occupied indigenous lands. Decolonization is the way and it’s just and good to serve and work toward it for and with indigenous peoples.

And yes we do have to do this work and learn this education now! “I’m not my ancestors” is bullshit considering we are actively still destroying the land and it’s rightful stewards to this very day. “Our ancestors” genocidal crimes never stopped and were carried generations into now - so I don’t understand why we can’t accept this fact, follow indigenous peoples lead toward decolonizing “America”.

It’s free Palestine it’s land back to First Nations people it’s colonized countries globally forcing the white supremacist European and “US” powers out. It’s just to be dedicated to helping to do what is right. Go to hell otherwise. Expect hell. I don’t even know what to say anymore to other settlers except this.

Read from Fanon, read Klee Benally, read Gerald Horne, Read Decolonization is Not a Metaphor while y’all are at it.

Learn the histories of federal Indian law (here via DecolonizedBuffalo on ig):

[Img text reads - From DecolonizedBuffalo’s book, in the section on Self-Determination;

“Now that it is established that the primary contradiction is settler colonialism, the reader must acknowledge another fact: Indigenous communities within settler states are sovereign nations. They are internal colonies. Sovereign Indigenous nations within the US have their own governments, court systems, laws, economies, programs, cultures, and languages. Settler Marxists within the United States should learn about the history of federal Indian law, and court cases that pertain to Indigenous sovereignty . To understand Indigenous sovereignty better, it is advised to learn about the Marshall trilogy cases and the history behind them:

-Johnson vs Macintosh, 21 US (8Wheat.) 543 (1823)

-Cherokee Nation vs Georgia, 30 US (5Pet.) 1 (1831)

-Worcester vs Georgia, 31 US (6 Pet.) 151 (1832)”

End img Text]

- - -

So we who are settlers don’t just have these histories on-hand in our minds because we weren’t taught about Indigenous histories from Indigenous truths and lenses, and we must learn - and recognize fully the crimes we still commit! Like for one example, we rally up to continuously ignore Indigenous decolonial activists and scholars and talk about “establishing socialism”, more Eurocentrism, assuming that we working class settlers will continue occupying and holding the means of production - on stolen land. No!

Just don’t speak so sure of *anything* as a settler before you give your time to LISTEN to decolonial liberationists, before you LEARN the principles of decolonization here in the illegal settler-states; and there’s special emphasis on getting ‘Marxist’ settlers to light this fire under their asses too because too many seem to think they know it all, that they are exempt, and that arrogance is real-world damaging to liberation movements.

Y’all we don’t know Jack shit about shit and yeah we do have to prioritize our edu now going forward if we haven’t already. There’s lots to learn, lots of work to learn how to do for liberation. Those criticizing settler-colonialism, aiming to root it out, aiming for land back, for indigenous sovereignty, for forcing out and end on settler occupations, for returning to their lands with full self determination by any means necessary - they deserve our numbers and our full-hearted fealty and nothing less!

#cloudy one #decolonization #free palestine #land back #turtle island

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darkmaga-returns · 1 month ago

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With Egypt, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Iran joining the BRICS at the beginning of 2024, the group now embodies a group of influential states on the international stage, representing 46% of the world’s population and 29% of global GDP. While 2024 is synonymous with an important electoral year for several BRICS members, further enlargements could take place in the coming years. Are we heading for an alternative international order? What are the strategic advantages of the BRICS+? Can they embody the voice of the global South? Interview with Jean-Joseph Boillot, Associate Research Fellow at IRIS, specialised in the Indian economy and the emerging world.

A new mandate for Vladimir Putin in Russia, a historic setback for the African National Congress (ANC) in the South African elections, a narrow victory for Narendra Modi in India, new elections to come in Iran following the death of Ebrahim Raissi and in Ethiopia… 2024 is a pivotal electoral year for many BRICS+ countries. Should we expect any repercussions from these elections on the international agenda of the BRICS+ states?

Quite possibly, as the BRICS+ are a fairly heterogeneous group. All it takes, as we saw in Argentina, is for Javier Milei, a pro-American liberal, to be elected to leave this group. But what is interesting is to see that, even with the Indian elections, the results of which returned Narendra Modi with a small majority, most of the countries of the so-called ‘Global South’ are fundamentally united, with a strong internal consensus to finally free themselves from the Western international order known as Bretton Woods. So, with one or two exceptions, there can be changes of government without undermining this very strong consensus. And while some would like to see the BRICS+ as a confrontational anti-Western club, in reality it is clear that, with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt joining the group recently, the consensus is more along the lines of multi-alignment, rather like India, which has recently moved closer to the United States without severing its relations with Russia, for example. For the time being at least, elections in the developing world do not seem to be challenging this majority consensus in the South, and I am not talking about fake elections like the one in Russia with the election of Putin.

Since the expansion of the BRICS+ at the beginning of 2024, what analysis can be made of the group’s economic expansion? What are its strengths and strategic advantages?

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metamatar · 1 month ago

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for so long the indian example was been held up as an example for liberalization, because the indian economy improved in the 90s but rn india is wrecked (something like 80% of the unemployed are new grads) and china is doing really well despite both countries having similar challenges in 50s (large population, low industrialised base, primarily agricultural, food insecurity.)

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camisoledadparis · 2 months ago

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THIS DAY IN GAY HISTORY

based on: The White Crane Institute's 'Gay Wisdom', Gay Birthdays, Gay For Today, Famous GLBT, glbt-Gay Encylopedia, Today in Gay History, Wikipedia, and more … October 21

1891 – Ted Shawn (d.1972), originally Edwin Myers Shawn, was one of the first notable male pioneers of American modern dance. Along with creating Denishawn with former wife Ruth St Denis he was also responsible for the creation of the all-male company Ted Shawn and His Men Dancers. With his innovative ideas of masculine movement he was one of the most influential choreographers and dancers of his day. He was also the founder and creator of Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival in Massachusetts.

Ted Shawn was born in Kansas City, Missouri. Originally intending to become a minister of religion, he attended the University of Denver. There he caught diphtheria, which led him to take up dance in 1910 to regain his muscle strength. Shawn's dancing was discouraged by the University, which still had a Methodist affiliation, and was the reason for his expulsion the following year.

After marrying Ruth St Denis in 1914., she and Shawn opened the first Denishawn School in Los Angeles, California, where they were able to choreograph and stage many of their famous vaudeville pieces. The school and company went on to produce such influential dancers as Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman.

Although Denishawn came to an end in 1929 due to hard times both in Shawn's and St Denis' marriage as well as the economy, Shawn's second dance group Ted Shawn and His Men Dancers (1929-1940) were soon to follow in his dancing career. The new all-male company was based out of Massachusetts near his then home of Lee. In creating this company Shawn was hoping to make America become more aware, and accept the importance and dedication of the male dancer. It was with this new company that Shawn produced some of his most controversial and highly skilled choreography to date. With works such as Ponca Indian Dance, Sinhalse Devil Dance, Maori War Haka, Hopi Indian Eagle Dance, and Dyak Spear Dances he was able to showcase performances that all stressed male body movement.

His love for the relationships created by the men in his dances soon translated into love between him and one of his company members Barton Mumaw which lasted from 1931-1948. He had another partner following Mumaw, John Christian with whom he spent his life from 1949 until his death in 1972.

1917 – William Dale Jennings (d.2000) was an American LGBT rights activist, playwright and author.

Jennings was born in Amarillo, Texas. He and his sister Charlotte Elaine (two years older) grew up in Denver, Colorado where they were both schooled in music, Elaine playing the violin and Dale (as he was known, to distinguish himself from his father) the piano. The two made many appearances on local radio and at tent revival meetings. Dale showed an early love of dance, growing into a noted prodigy before the age of twelve. Later he joined the Lester Horton dance troupe as they traveled around the United States. In his late teens he moved to Los Angeles, with aspirations of becoming a writer and theater director, for which he had trained in Colorado. He eventually launched a theater company called the Theatre Caravan,located in a now demolished building near Olympic Blvd. and Alvarado, where he also lived. During this time he wrote and produced about 60 plays.

During World War II he was stationed at Guadalcanal. During his military service, he was awarded a WWII Victory Medal, an American Campaign medal, an Asiatic- Pacific campaign medal, and a Philippine Liberation Ribbon with one bronze star. After being honorably discharged in 1946, he returned to California where he studied cinema for two years at the University of Southern California. Before the war Jennings pursued relationships with women in the custom of the time, to avoid any suspicions about his true nature. He married once, an aspiring actress at Theatre Caravan; this lasted through the war, followed by divorce.

In November 1950, Jennings accompanied his friend Bob Hull, to a meeting with Harry Hay and Chuck Rowland to discuss a prospectus that had called on the "androgynies of the world" to unite. This meeting began the first official meeting of the International Bachelors Fraternal Order for Peace and Social Dignity, which would later be renamed as the Mattachine Society. The society sought to gain acceptance through greater communication between homosexuals and heterosexuals. The group began to grow and by the summer of that year they had adopted official missions and purposes which proclaimed homosexuals to be one of the largest minorities in America.

In the spring of 1952 Jennings was arrested for allegedly soliciting a police officer in a toilet in Westlake Park, now known as MacArthur Park. The Mattachine Society decided to help contest the charges brought against Jennings.They enlisted the help of attorney George Sibley, a member of the Citizens' Council to Outlaw Entrapment.

Jennings was one of the first homosexual men to contest charges such as this one. Most homosexuals at the time pled guilty so as not to be publicly scrutinized. His decision to fight back was a pivotal point in the movement. The organization raised funds and promoted Jennings' case nationally.

The trial began June 23, 1952 and lasted ten days. Jennings confessed to being a homosexual but denied any wrongdoing. The jury voted 11-1 for acquittal on the basis of police intimidation, harassment, and entrapment of homosexuals, and the case was dismissed. The trial brought a lot of attention to the Mattachine Society, increasing awareness of the Gay Rights Movement as a whole as well as increasing the organization's membership.

While Jennings was one of the founders of the Mattachine Society, his views on how to best fight for equal rights for homosexuals differed from the organization as a whole. Harry Hay believed that "gays were a unique and especially talented group who had been a primary part of tribal societies and needed to come together and reclaim those sacred and traditional roles". Jennings believed that there essentially was no difference between a gay man and a straight man. Jennings adopted a more private role, believing that homosexuals as a group had very little in common, and wanted to fight for the right to be left alone while Hay and the rest of the Mattachine Society collectively wanted to make homosexuality visible to the public and fought for more homosexual awareness.

In 1953, Jennings and others of like mind separated from the Mattachine and created ONE, Inc.. This organization became the dominant organization in Los Angeles and with the financial assistance of Jennings' sister Elaine and her husband James Porter its magazine became, for a period of time, the voice of the gay and lesbian movement. The magazine spoke out openly and more forcefully on behalf of the rights and interests of homosexuals.

After leaving ONE in 1955, Jennings wrote and published his first novel, The Ronin, followed by The Sinking of the Sarah Diamond. Another book, The Cowboys, based on a film treatment he sold to Warner Bros., caused considerable controversy among publishers due to its glimmers of homoeroticism. The Cowboys was made into a film in 1972, starring John Wayne. While not as successful as his first book, he made enough profit from the book that allowed him to buy a ranch outside of Los Angeles. Later he moved to northern California where he decided to re-involve himself in the movement. He contacted an old friend from ONE, Don Slater, who had also separated himself from ONE and founded a new organization, HIC (Homosexual Information Center) in 1965. Jennings was very passionate about his writings, and hoped that the HIC would accept and protect his scripts and books.

He continued to write until shortly before his death on May 11, 2000 at the age of 82.

1953 – Born: British former secretary of state for Trade and Industry Peter Mandelson, Baron Mandelson. Along with Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, he is regarded as one of the main players in the rebranding of the Labour Party as "New Labour". Mandelson served as Member of Parliament for Hartlepool for twelve years (from 1992), a seat he vacated in order to become a European Commissioner (2004-2008).

In October 1998, during his first period in the Cabinet, Mandelson was the center of media attention when Matthew Parris (openly Gay former MP and then Parliamentary sketch writer of The Times of London) mentioned during a live interview that "Peter Mandelson is certainly Gay".

In 2000, Peter Mandelson publicly recognized his long term relationship with his long-time partner, Reinaldo Avila da Silva by allowing photographs of them together. His memoir, The Third Man: Life at the Heart of New Labour, was published in July 2010.

In an interview, he said:

''I would hate to think that I take a stand because I have one sexuality, or one sexual orientation. I think it's important that people should be able to get to the top of politics - or whatever profession they aspire to travel to the top of - irrespective of what they are. I think I'm actually quite a good role model for people who, without any fuss or bother, without any self-consciousness or inverse or other discrimination, (are) able to make it in politics, to make it in public life, to make it to the top places in government of our country."

1968 – Trev Broudy is an American actor and former model born in California. Broudy came to national attention when he became the victim of a violent attack in 2002, which touched off a national discussion of hate crimes, drawing comparisons to the Matthew Shepard case.

On September 1, 2002, Broudy and boyfriend Edward Ulett were attacked after embracing outside Broudy's West Hollywood, California home by three assailants, Larry Walker, Torwin Sessions and Vincent Dotson. Broudy was beaten with a baseball bat and left in a coma for 10 days. In response the West Hollywood gay community organized a candlelight vigil.

Upon his regaining consciousness, Broudy's doctors determined that he had suffered permanent brain damage and was left legally blind. Part of his skull was replaced with a metal plate.

Walker, Sessions and Dotson were initially charged with attempted robbery, assault with a deadly weapon and conspiracy to commit robbery. Republican Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley declined to press hate crime charges, a decision that sparked outrage in the community. West Hollywood City Councilmember Sal Guarriello and his political consultants immediately launched a recall campaign against Cooley to demonstrate their disgust for Cooley's homophobia. Cooley stated that he believed the motive to be robbery, not bias, a conclusion that Broudy disagreed with. After the preliminary hearing, an additional charge of aggravated mayhem was added for each defendant.

On August 27, 2003, Walker pleaded guilty to all charges and a day later Sessions and Dotson did the same. Walker was sentenced to 13 years in prison, Dotson received a seven-year sentence and Sessions was sentenced to 21 years.

Prior to the attack, Broudy was best known for a small role in the independent film The Fluffer. After the attack he narrated the 2003 VH1 special Totally Gay! in which he countered the generally light-hearted tone of the special by describing the attack and the devastating effects on his life. Broudy has appeared in a number of guest roles in a variety of television series and has started a career as a voice actor, performing in television and radio commercials and playing Cole Yeager in Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Double Agent and Captain America in Marvel Ultimate Alliance.

1973 – Sasha Roiz is an Israeli-Canadian actor. He is best known for his portrayal of Sam Adama in the science fiction television series Caprica. He also had a regular role in the American dark fantasy television series, Grimm.

Roiz was born in Tel Aviv, Israel, to Russian Jewish parents. The family moved to Montreal, Canada in 1980. Roiz studied history before joining a theatre school in Montreal. He later graduated from Guildford School of Acting in England

He has appeared in a number of popular television dramas, including��CSI: Miami, House, NCIS, The Mentalist, Lie To Me, and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Roiz has joined Warehouse 13 as a recurring character named Marcus Diamond.

In 2008, he landed the role of Sam Adama on Caprica, a spin-off of Battlestar Galactica. His character is a Tauron enforcer for the Ha'la'tha crime syndicate on Caprica. His character is also the uncle of William Adama. On April 28, 2009, his role was expanded to series regular. He stated in an interview that it was later revealed to him that his character would in fact be gay, something he felt was an opportunity to explore the dynamic relationship of a gay character in a science fiction setting, as well as to explore the issue of homosexuality on a social level.

When asked whether he is gay, his stock response is not a denial, but "no comment" and he adds,

I'm very involved as much as I can be with any sort of causes in the gay community and I'm very supportive and I'll continue to be so. So far, no word of my character [ in "Grimm"] being gay but in my personal life I will continue to be a supporter.

Matt Dallas (L) with husband Blue Hamilton

1982 – Matt Dallas is an American actor, best known for playing the title character on the ABC Family series Kyle XY.

Dallas has starred in several films, including Babysitter Wanted, as well as the title character in the ABC Family television series Kyle XY for three seasons. The series ended on March 16, 2009 after it was canceled by ABC. Dallas also appeared in Living The Dream, Wannabe, Camp Daze, and Way of The Vampire. He has been a guest on the TV show Entourage.

In 2012, Dallas starred as Max in the musical love story movie You, Me & The Circus. He played the role of Bat Masterson in an action packed western movie Wyatt Earp's Revenge with Val Kilmer. He also starred as Lance Leigh in the Hallmark movie Naughty or Nice with Hilarie Burton. Dallas played the role of Scott Orenhauser in the indie syfy thriller film Life Tracker. Dallas had a recurring role in ABC Family show Baby Daddy, where he played Riley's love interest. In 2014, Dallas starred in the horror comedy movie Ghost of Goodnight Lane.

On July 5, 2015, Dallas married musician Blue Hamilton, musician, his partner of five years. On December 22, 2015, Dallas and Hamilton announced on their YouTube channel that they had adopted their two-year old son, Crow

1984 – Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman is a Canadian actor and fashion model. He is known for appearances in films and TV series including in the role of Jay in Lifetime dark comedy-drama series, UnREAL.

Bowyer-Chapman was born in Edmonton, Alberta and raised in Rimbey, Alberta. At the age of 16, he began his modeling career, shooting for a number of fashion brands. Alongside modeling, Bowyer-Chapman also began acting career, making his screen debut in gay-themed film Shock to the System (2006). He went to appear in Noah's Arc and The L Word, and well as romantic comedy The Break-Up Artist (2009).From 2009 to 2011, Bowyer-Chapman had a recurring role in the Syfy series, Stargate Universe. In 2012, he starred alongside Jussie Smollett in the LGBT-themed romantic comedy-drama The Skinny. In 2015, he began starring alongside Constance Zimmer and Shiri Appleby in the critically acclaimed Lifetime dark comedy-drama series, Unreal, playing the role of Jay, the gay producer on reality show. In 2016, Bowyer-Chapman appeared in the comedy fim Dirty Grandpa.

Born in 1984, he was adopted as a one-month old child. He carries the family name of both his mother and father's surnames. His biological younger brother is Cleyon Laing, defensive end for the Ottawa Redblacks. He got trained as a gymnast.

Bowyer-Chapman is openly gay. He was named one of "Five Of The Best…" in Out magazine's 2007 feature article "Canada's Coolest" and was listed in Mwinda magazine's 2009 special issue "The 10 Most Beautiful Africans In Entertainment". He has modeled in many venues including USA, Canada, South Africa and Europe and modeled in international campaigns for American Apparel and Levi's.

1986 – U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop calls for the use of condoms to prevent HIV transmission.

2010 – The European Court of Human Rights has ruled in favor of Moscow Pride president Nikolai Alexeyev, saying that authorities acted illegally when they banned gay pride in Moscow.

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sanskriti-2751 · 1 year ago

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What is Mutual Fund?

A mutual fund is a type of investment vehicle that pools money from multiple investors to invest in a diversified portfolio of securities such as stocks, bonds, and other assets. Investments in securities are spread across a wide cross-section of industries and sectors and thus the risk is reduced.

It is managed by a professional fund manager or an asset management company (AMC) who makes investment decisions on behalf of the investors.

Mutual funds offer good investment opportunities to the investors. Like all investments, they also carry certain risks

SEBI formulates policies and regulates the mutual funds to protect the interest of the investors.

OVERVIEW OF MUTUAL FUNDS INDUSTRY IN INDIA

The mutual fund industry in India was set up through a combination of regulatory changes, legislative reforms and the entry of various market players.

Unit Trust of India- UTI was founded in 1964, which is when the mutual fund sector in India first started to take off. To mobilize public funds and invest them in the capital markets, UTI was established as a statutory body under the UTI Act, 1963. The idea of mutual funds was greatly popularized in India because to UTI.

Regulatory Framework-In India, the mutual fund industry's regulatory structure began to take shape in the 1990s. The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) Act, which established SEBI as the governing body for the Indian securities markets, was passed in 1993. Among other market intermediaries, SEBI was responsible with regulating and supervising mutual funds.

The SEBI (Mutual Funds) Regulations,1996- This regulation established the legal foundation for the establishment, administration, and operation of mutual funds in India. These regulations outlined the standards for investor protection, investment restrictions, disclosure requirements, and eligibility requirements for asset management companies (AMCs).

Introduction of Private Sector Mutual Funds: UTI was the only active mutual fund provider in India prior to 1993. Private sector mutual funds were nevertheless permitted to enter the market as a result of the liberalization of the financial sector and the opening up of the Indian economy. Many domestic and foreign financial organizations launched their own AMCs and entered the mutual fund industry.

Product Line Evolution: The mutual fund sector in India has grown and increased its product selection throughout the years. Mutual funds initially mainly offered income and growth opportunities. To address various investor needs and risk profiles, the industry did, however, offer a wider range of products, such as equity funds, debt funds, balanced funds, and specialist sector funds.

Investor Education and Awareness: Serious efforts have been made to educate and raise investor awareness in order to encourage investor involvement in mutual funds. Industry groups, AMCs, and SEBI have run investor awareness campaigns, distributed instructional materials, and supported systems for resolving investor complaints. Systematic Investment Plans (SIPs) were introduced, and this was a significant factor in luring individual investors

Technological Advancements-The mutual fund sector in India has embraced technological development, making it possible for investors to access and invest in mutual funds through online platforms and mobile applications. Investors can now transact, track their investments, and get mutual fund information more easily thanks to digital platforms.

The mutual fund industry in India has developed into a strong and regulated sector through regulatory changes, market competition, and investor-centric initiatives. The sector keeps expanding, drawing in more investors and providing them with a wide variety of investment possibilities around the nation.

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geek-and-destroy · 11 months ago

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'Progressive' hindu nationalists - why are they Like That?

Tomorrow is the 26th of January, the 74th Republic Day in India - the day the Indian constitution was formalized and adopted. I thought i'd mourn my fast-fading nationalism on this occasion by kinda airing out some bullshit and starting a political longpost, which is always a good idea right? right???

Since about the end of last year, I've seen some blogs on here that define themselves around hindutva - hindu nationalism, the idea that India is a hindu nation and must abandon its secular status. Any leftie/liberal with any awareness of the news will know their rhetoric is bullshit. Anyone who isn't really aware of Indian religious dynamics would know to spot their Islamophobia from a mile away, because seriously, the discourse is Ben Shapiro levels of bad.

The most egregious of these include hindulivesmatter, rhysaka, yato-dharmasto-jaya, vindhyavasini and others. Basically a small hindu nationalist clique. They're actually not that big a deal even on this hellsite, but they keep annoyingly popping up to start firebrand arguments under posts. But they're not uncommon in the real world. In fact, i think the majority of the Indian urban youth is Like That - anti-homophobia, anti-misogyny, theoretically anti-islamophobia, the same general left-leaning values associated with Gen Z; but with a weird blind spot when it comes to the fascist decline of their own country.

These users are not too different from TERFs, with their couching of hate in progressive, tumblr-social-justice language. There's been a lot of discourse around why TERFs are the way they are, why their otherwise feminist and progressive values eventually shatter in favour of their hate. I want to do something similar for hindutva tumblr, because i see in it a newer kind of hindu nationalist aggression, yet one that i am very familiar with, as an urban upper-middle-class Indian born into a Marathi Hindu family.

The main question i want to answer is this: why does someone espousing dire Islamophobic rhetoric also sincerely believe in progressive ideas? Why do they not see the contradictions? To do that, we need a little primer in post-independence Indian history.

So, it's often said that Indian democracy was not handed to us; this is not only in the sense that we had to fight for our freedom against the Brits, but also in the sense that there were long deliberations on the exact type of republic we wanted to be. The constitution was drafted, finalized and adopted a full three years after the Brits left. This framing of a philosophical struggle stayed on, throughout the tumult of the following decades.

This is how the modern Indian is taught about our history: Several riots, the Emergency in the 70s, the wars with Pakistan and China, the formation of Bangladesh, the victory at the cricket world cup, the Cold War international policy of non-alignment, the Green Revolution, all of these are presented through a frame of struggle, with the Kargil War and the 1991 liberalization being the point of stabilization. The median citizen of 1971 was politically aware and politically involved. That of 2001 was most likely not. At least, that's the narrative of capitalism in the country. This narrative of a 50-year prolonged post-independence struggle is why Indian nationalism is so potent, even outside of the newer Hindu fascist rhetoric. We've got a very intense sense of national pride. I'm guilty of it myself.

In 1991, the economy was opened up to multinational corporations and eventually led to the formation of an Indian petit bourgeois. The period from 1991 to roughly 2011 is seen as a period of idyllic peace much like the Clinton administration in the US. Culturally, this was the time of the Bollywood masala movie - light, apolitical and all about a big Hindu joint family that preaches benevolent unity of all religions. But the thing that was never mentioned in these movies was caste - an elephant in the room that i haven't addressed yet. Just like the 'default' US Culture is white suburban christian, the default culture here is upper caste middle-class hindu. The aforementioned rise of the middle class was largely along caste lines. Households in the US have microcultures along ethnic lines, and they can be similarly mapped in India through caste and religion.

The Indian equivalent of the megachurch pastor is the ruling BJP's paramilitary parent organization, the RSS, as well as others like the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Karni Sena, etc - organizations that normal people largely didn't agree with but whose values and morals were ingrained in their subconscious. The apolitical Hindu in like 2004 did not believe, like the RSS does, that India should be a Hindu nation; but he (i use 'he' here because male tends to be default in this case, and that's a whole different conversation) did believe in the greatness of traditions, the Indian armed forces and in ancient Hindu scientific supremacy (which at the time was limited to Aryabhatta's zero and the actual progress in the sciences from ancients like Charaka and Sushruta to more modern ones like Ramanujan and CV Raman - it hadn't gone into cuckoo fantasy land yet, where we showhow had stem cell research and aeroplanes in ancient India and the Ramayana is apparently actual history now). To this person, Savarkar was an icon of the freedom struggle along with others like Gandhi, Bose, Ambedkar, etc, but he didn't know or care about his religio-fascist ideology. Fascist elements existed then and had their pockets of support - the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra, Modi's CM-hood in Gujarat, and the first BJP national administration came up during this time. To the normal citizen, they were simply extremists with 'some good points'.

2008 was the year of the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai. Islamophobia didn't fully enter Indian discourse just yet, largely because of the assertion of the city's multicultural identity, but the seeds were certainly sown. In fact, blatant Islamophobia wouldn't be mainstream till 2016 or so - the BJP's 2014 election was won on middle-class concerns. The petit bourgeois finally made its voice heard politically in the 2011 anti-corruption protests spearheaded by Anna Hazare and Arvind Kejriwal, the latter of whom is the founder of the newest major political party in the country. It's typical of protests of this kind, agitating against a vague idea of corruption with not many tangible demands. It is true that by 2011, the Congress government was notoriously bloated, corrupt and ineffectual at a systemic level. The BJP gained a single-party majority on an anti-corruption and pro-welfare platform, with religion not really a factor.

The middle class celebrated this as an ultimate affirmation of their hegemony, and the RSS-derived values kicked into high gear. The celebrations have now become a gloat-fest, kinda like vindicated Marvel fans when their Disney product makes a bajillion dollars. The best example of this is the Ram Mandir inauguration earlier this week. Modi cultivated an image of a messiah figure who could do no wrong. Anyone who opposed their goals is now an anti-national and a traitor. General attitudes as a whole have grown a lot more bloodthirsty and carceral. Propaganda, degradation of public discourse, weakening of the media and public institutions, the whole gamut.

The people running the above-mentioned blogs are quite representative of this demographic. They probably fully believe what they spout. They fully believe that Hindus and Hinduism are under threat in India, that love jihad ("forced conversion") is a real thing, that Islamists are taking over their nation, and even that Hindus have been 'sleeping' and are just now being 'woken up'. At the same time, they believe in socially progressive values. The supposedly pro-LGBT+ and pro-feminist stances taken by the RSS are very much targeted at urban Hindus, not at the West as PR.

The propaganda directed at them (which includes movies, social media and tragically, many news outlets) often appeals to the traditional acceptance of queer individuals in mythological texts to get straight, cis, sheltered urban Hindus of all ages to reconcile bigotries and get on board the hate train. It is often in a comparative frame, juxtaposed with the bigotry in Islamic or Christian texts and historical persecution in the West (btw, the term acceptance is very loose here, they often equate mention of a thing with acceptance of that thing even if it's derogatory. Ancient hindu culture only 'accepted' trans women, and that was a marginalized acceptance at best).

The RSS often preaches that Hinduism is the religion of tolerance, and advocates for a twisted version of the tolerance paradox. It's reached a level where propaganda doesn't have to be deliberate - the citizens will do it for them. These blogs are true believers despite the contradictions, but their online activity is probably a deliberate form of praxis, with the co-opting of social justice vocab and appealing to white/western/Indian expat guilt etc. So yes, very much like TERFs, except that TERFs are an actual minority whereas Hindutva ideology is increasingly the default 'apolitical' belief. The reactionary internalization has been successful.

Tl;dr: people like hindulivesmatter are sincere in their bigotry towards Muslims as well as their progressive beliefs, because Indian culture as a whole oriented itself towards appealing to the urban upper caste middle class.

#india #hindutva #religious jingoism in india #islamophobia #hindu nationalism #fascism #grumbles rambles and rants #this was partly written as a way to occupy myself while avoiding family during the temple inauguration #cause everyone turned into bigoted zealots #sorry for the overlong tangents and parentheses

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