#the American government is dangerous and most of the people in it (particularly in the-

[halorvic]

The danger is clear and present: COVID isn’t merely a respiratory illness; it’s a multi-dimensional threat impacting brain function, attacking almost all of the body’s organs, producing elevated risks of all kinds, and weakening our ability to fight off other diseases. Reinfections are thought to produce cumulative risks, and Long COVID is on the rise. Unfortunately, Long COVID is now being considered a long-term chronic illness — something many people will never fully recover from. Dr. Phillip Alvelda, a former program manager in DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office that pioneered the synthetic biology industry and the development of mRNA vaccine technology, is the founder of Medio Labs, a COVID diagnostic testing company. He has stepped forward as a strong critic of government COVID management, accusing health agencies of inadequacy and even deception. Alvelda is pushing for accountability and immediate action to tackle Long COVID and fend off future pandemics with stronger public health strategies. Contrary to public belief, he warns, COVID is not like the flu. New variants evolve much faster, making annual shots inadequate. He believes that if things continue as they are, with new COVID variants emerging and reinfections happening rapidly, the majority of Americans may eventually grapple with some form of Long COVID. Let’s repeat that: At the current rate of infection, most Americans may get Long COVID.

[...]

LP: A recent JAMA study found that US adults with Long COVID are more prone to depression and anxiety – and they’re struggling to afford treatment. Given the virus’s impact on the brain, I guess the link to mental health issues isn’t surprising. PA: There are all kinds of weird things going on that could be related to COVID’s cognitive effects. I’ll give you an example. We’ve noticed since the start of the pandemic that accidents are increasing. A report published by TRIP, a transportation research nonprofit, found that traffic fatalities in California increased by 22% from 2019 to 2022. They also found the likelihood of being killed in a traffic crash increased by 28% over that period. Other data, like studies from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, came to similar conclusions, reporting that traffic fatalities hit a 16-year high across the country in 2021. The TRIP report also looked at traffic fatalities on a national level and found that traffic fatalities increased by 19%. LP: What role might COVID play? PA: Research points to the various ways COVID attacks the brain. Some people who have been infected have suffered motor control damage, and that could be a factor in car crashes. News is beginning to emerge about other ways COVID impacts driving. For example, in Ireland, a driver’s COVID-related brain fog was linked to a crash that killed an elderly couple. Damage from COVID could be affecting people who are flying our planes, too. We’ve had pilots that had to quit because they couldn’t control the airplanes anymore. We know that medical events among U.S. military pilots were shown to have risen over 1,700% from 2019 to 2022, which the Pentagon attributes to the virus.

[...]

LP: You’ve criticized the track record of the CDC and the WHO – particularly their stubborn denial that COVID is airborne. PA: They knew the dangers of airborne transmission but refused to admit it for too long. They were warned repeatedly by scientists who studied aerosols. They instituted protections for themselves and for their kids against airborne transmission, but they didn’t tell the rest of us to do that.

[...]

LP: How would you grade Biden on how he’s handled the pandemic? PA: I’d give him an F. In some ways, he fails worse than Trump because more people have actually died from COVID on his watch than on Trump’s, though blame has to be shared with Republican governors and legislators who picked ideological fights opposing things like responsible masking, testing, vaccination, and ventilation improvements for partisan reasons. Biden’s administration has continued to promote the false idea that the vaccine is all that is needed, perpetuating the notion that the pandemic is over and you don’t need to do anything about it. Biden stopped the funding for surveillance and he stopped the funding for renewing vaccine advancement research. Trump allowed 400,000 people to die unnecessarily. The Biden administration policies have allowed more than 800,000 to 900,000 and counting.

[...]

LP: The situation with bird flu is certainly getting more concerning with the CDC confirming that a third person in the U.S. has tested positive after being exposed to infected cows. PA: Unfortunately, we’re repeating many of the same mistakes because we now know that the bird flu has made the jump to several species. The most important one now, of course, is the dairy cows. The dairy farmers have been refusing to let the government come in and inspect and test the cows. A team from Ohio State tested milk from a supermarket and found that 50% of the milk they tested was positive for bird flu viral particles.

[...]

PA: There’s a serious risk now in allowing the virus to freely evolve within the cow population. Each cow acts as a breeding ground for countless genetic mutations, potentially leading to strains capable of jumping to other species. If any of those countless genetic experiments within each cow prove successful in developing a strain transmissible to humans, we could face another pandemic – only this one could have a 58% death rate. Did you see the movie “Contagion?” It was remarkably accurate in its apocalyptic nature. And that virus only had a 20% death rate. If the bird flu makes the jump to human-to-human transition with even half of its current lethality, that would be disastrous.

[contemplatingoutlander]

That the Editorial Board of the premier U.S. newspaper of record is finally warning about Donald Trump is significant. As such, this is a gift 🎁 link so that those who want to read the entire editorial can do so, even if they don't subscribe to The New York Times. Below are some excerpts:

As president, [Trump] wielded power carelessly and often cruelly and put his ego and his personal needs above the interests of his country. Now, as he campaigns again, his worst impulses remain as strong as ever — encouraging violence and lawlessness, exploiting fear and hate for political gain, undermining the rule of law and the Constitution, applauding dictators — and are escalating as he tries to regain power. He plots retribution, intent on eluding the institutional, legal and bureaucratic restraints that put limits on him in his first term. Our purpose at the start of the new year, therefore, is to sound a warning. Mr. Trump does not offer voters anything resembling a normal option of Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal, big government or small. He confronts America with a far more fateful choice: between the continuance of the United States as a nation dedicated to “the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity” and a man who has proudly shown open disdain for the law and the protections and ideals of the Constitution. [...] It is instructive in the aftermath of that administration to listen to the judgments of some of these officials on the president they served. John Kelly, a chief of staff to Mr. Trump, called him the “most flawed person I’ve ever met,” someone who could not understand why Americans admired those who sacrificed their lives in combat. Bill Barr, who served as attorney general, and Mark Esper, a former defense secretary, both said Mr. Trump repeatedly put his own interests over those of the country. Even the most loyal and conservative of them all, Vice President Mike Pence, who made the stand that helped provoke Mr. Trump and his followers to insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, saw through the man: “On that day, President Trump also demanded that I choose between him and the Constitution,” he said.

[See more under the cut.]

There will not be people like these in the White House should Mr. Trump be re-elected. The former president has no interest in being restrained, and he has surrounded himself with people who want to institutionalize the MAGA doctrine. According to reporting by the Times reporters Maggie Haberman, Charlie Savage and Jonathan Swan, Mr. Trump and his ideological allies have been planning for a second Trump term for many months already. Under the name Project 2025, one coalition of right-wing organizations has produced a thick handbook and recruited thousands of potential appointees in preparation for an all-out assault on the structures of American government and the democratic institutions that acted as checks on Mr. Trump’s power. [...] Mr. Trump has made clear his conviction that only “losers” accept legal, institutional or even constitutional constraints. He has promised vengeance against his political opponents, whom he has called “vermin” and threatened with execution. This is particularly disturbing at a time of heightened concern about political violence, with threats increasing against elected officials of both parties. He has repeatedly demonstrated a deep disdain for the First Amendment and the basic principles of democracy, chief among them the right to freely express peaceful dissent from those in power without fear of retaliation, and he has made no secret of his readiness to expand the powers of the presidency, including the deployment of the military and the Justice Department, to have his way. [...] Re-electing Mr. Trump would present serious dangers to our Republic and to the world. This is a time not to sit out but instead to re-engage. We appeal to Americans to set aside their political differences, grievances and party affiliations and to contemplate — as families, as parishes, as councils and clubs and as individuals — the real magnitude of the choice they will make in November.

I encourage people to use the above gift link and read the entire article.

[edited]

[woman-respecter]

hi, i'm the soviet jewry anon

there's so much to kvetch about, i dont know where to begin

i was gonna traumadump but im gonna rant about jewish history instead

well ever since i noticed activism becoming an internet trend i knew we were doomed cuz a part of soviet antisemitism is an intellectualisation of jew hatred (that's why stalin would publicly condemn antisemitism and then be antisemitic in a manner he could treat as just "anti nationalism not antisemitism"). first of all jewishness/antisemitism is already so complex which means it's really easy for people (jews and non-jews) to misunderstand it and harm us. so when i saw people quickly latching on to binaries such as the oppressed/oppressor and good/bad and removing all nuance, i knew things were gonna go downhill. yes all forms of hatred are very complex but in my opinion even the most basic forms of antisemitism like "jews control the world!" aren't properly grasped by gentiles which strengthens antisemitism since they're so ignorant about us lol. this is particularly dangerous because most people have never met a jew or know much about us and we are only like .2% of the world. what's worse is that they view us through a culturally christian lens as well instead of seeing us for who we really are.

the phrase antisemitism makes you stupid is too real. it feels like a stupidity epidemic has really made itself clear with the rise of antisemitism which opens the door to other hatreds too.

back to soviet antisemitism, i cant really discuss it properly because yk tumblr antisemites are everywhere and i dont want you to get harassed by them but here's some things i wanna bring attention to

taken from this incredible book "The Jews of Eastern Europe, 1772-1881" by Israel Bartal, "The imperial project to enlighten and reeducate the Jews in the spirit of the autocratic Russian state was to be implemented through the establishment of a system of Jewish schools, with instruction in Russian. The actions of the authorities in the days of the affair of ‘‘government- sponsored enlightenment’’ were similar to those taken by colonial regimes that sought to disseminate European culture among the natives in their overseas colonies." of course this didn't work lmao but it was one of their many many many efforts. people don't realise the scorching similarities between native americans and jewish people and it is so frustrating. people don't understand the extent of both of our suffering.

2. In the early 1960s the image of the Jew in the Soviet Union was that of an evil capitalist carrying out illegal capitalist deals which resulted in a high number of death sentences and executions of Jews which was not really out of the norm since death sentences and executions were already "normal" punishments for Jews, it was just a new excuse :/

3. a book i read a long time ago about soviet jewry said: a) jews are more safe in the democractic centre than everywhere else and b) jews in the soviet union were not allowed to assimilate or live a jewish life, nor were they allowed to immigrate even though the soviet union didn't want them there which i found very interesting. i cannot remember the name or author but i will look and let you know later if i find it.

4. the newspapers in the soviet union in their antisemitic propaganda would list the full names of jews along with their home and work addresses, job positions, etc. these newspapers would also illustrate the jew as disrespectful and harmful to "even their own jewish people and synagogues" to show how bad we are lmao.

5. theres so many jewish political movements partly because when everyone is so dedicated to wiping out jewish culture, these political movements form a jewish culture as an attempt to make up for the absence. this may seem simple but it seems like people really don't understand our desperation for survival. moreover soviet union "atheism" mostly attacked jews and really shows how atheism/secularism can be damaging to us as well.

LASTLY. some book recs :)

the jews in poland and russia by antony polonsky, a writer at war by vasily grossman and anything by joseph roth.

sorry for this long rant but im tireddd

hi anon, thank you so much for this information! there really is nothing new under the sun when it comes to antisemitism huh. usually i’m a weenie when it comes to publically answering asks about jewish topics but i think this is too important and interesting to just leave in my ask box so i’m gonna post this one. hopefully some of my followers will take interest in it

and thanks for the book recs!

[justforbooks]

Does it matter if Americans think chocolate milk comes from brown cows?

A new survey indicating that seven percent of Americans believe that chocolate milk comes from brown cows has gotten a lot of media attention, including from NBC, Huffington Post, Food & Wine, and the Washington Post’s Wonkblog. As an example of public ignorance, this is not a particularly worrisome figure. As Caitlin Dewey notes in her Wonkblog article about the survey, “the most surprising thing about this figure may actually be that it isn’t higher.”

Seven percent is actually a pretty low number, and it’s not clear that it really matters whether people know where chocolate milk comes from or not. Some of the seven percent is likely caused by respondents being confused about the survey rather than genuinely ignorant (though some also probably got the correct answer by guessing). Even well-designed surveys have measurement errors that affect a small percentage of respondents.

Sadly, there are numerous far worse examples of public ignorance out there, including many about far more consequential issues. The seven percent figure pales in comparison with the 25 percent who don’t know the earth orbits the sun, the 66 percent who can’t name the three branches of government, and – my personal favorite – the 80 percent who support mandatory labeling of food containing DNA.

Most of this ignorance is not the result of stupidity or lack of information. It is in fact largely rational behavior. We all have limited time, energy, and attention, and so can learn only a small fraction of all the information out there. It makes sense for us to focus on that which is likely to be useful or interesting. For many people, large swathes of basic political and scientific facts don’t qualify.

In and of itself, ignorance is not a problem. It is often rational and is an unavoidable part of the human condition. But ignorance becomes dangerous when individually rational ignorance leads to harmful collective outcomes.

Sadly, that is often the case with political ignorance, and ignorance about scientific issues relevant to government policy. From the standpoint of the individual voter, it makes sense to devote little effort to acquiring information about government and public policy, because the chance that her vote will make a difference is infinitesimally small. But such behavior can lead to terrible outcomes when an entire electorate is ignorant in this way.

We shouldn’t worry much about the fact that a small minority of Americans think chocolate milk comes from brown cows. But we should take the problem of widespread political ignorance far more seriously.

It may be worth noting that 48 percent of respondents to the survey admitted they simply don’t know where chocolate milk comes from, a much larger figure than the 7 percent who said it comes from brown cows. Still, I think there is little cause for concern about this result, because it’s not clear why it matters whether people know how chocolate milk is produced. Most people don’t know much about the production process for the vast majority of the products they consume. It’s not a significant problem unless it leads them to support harmful or counterproductive public policies or ignore some significant safety risk.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[mercifullymad]

It’s frustrating and disappointing to see nominally social justice-focused eating disorder organizations (like Project Heal and the Alliance for Eating Disorders) support the passing of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA). KOSA is opposed by more than 90 civil rights and digital rights groups, including GLAAD, GLSEN, the ACLU, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the American Library Association, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. KOSA also contradicts the U.N.’s Convention on the Rights of the Child, which states that children should not be subjected to “unlawful interference with [their] privacy.” One of KOSA's main premises — the belief that increased parental surveillance of children’s Internet use will protect children’s mental health — is inherently flawed, and it is of paramount importance for abused and marginalized children that mental health organizations don’t buy into this belief.

This open letter signed by several organizations details the many dangerous implications of KOSA’s overreach. While KOSA aims to protect minors under 16 from the negative effects of social media use (such as “addictive” design features and content that “promotes” eating disorders, self-harm, or substance use), its vague language enables increased surveillance of children’s Internet use, increased data collection on both children and adults alike, and the power for parents and state government officials to decide what content is “appropriate” for children. With some states increasingly legalizing the idea that any kind of content that acknowledges the existence of queer people or the U.S.’s legacy of racism is inherently “inappropriate” for children (by banning books and preventing school curriculums from mentioning these realities), KOSA has the potential to prevent children from accessing these topics online, too.

KOSA is particularly dangerous to marginalized and abused children because of the level of inescapable parental surveillance it enables. Passing KOSA might prevent a 15-year-old from looking up how to report his abusive parents or where to seek help. It might prevent a 14-year-old whose parents will disown her if she’s pregnant from looking up sex education or abortion care. It might prevent a 13-year-old living in a homophobic household from connecting with accepting peers. It might prevent 12-year-olds who are already self-harming or eating unintuitively from looking up harm reduction techniques that could keep them alive. KOSA would not keep children safe or improve their mental health — it would make the most at-risk children even more unsafe, and it would worsen the mental health of anyone living in an unsafe household or state.

I presume that eating disorder organizations are campaigning for KOSA because they believe the unrealistic, fatphobic, and eurocentric beauty standards proliferating on social media are causing and/or exacerbating eating disorders, and they are desperate for any recourse to curtail these harms. But KOSA is premised on flawed understandings of media effects, and it is a dangerous piece of legislation that wouldn’t adequately address the very real harms of social media. Multiple studies have shown that similar content bans and increased parental control have not been effective, and have even made harmful content easier to find. Whatever good intentions eating disorder organizations might have by endorsing KOSA, it is important to note that all evidence points to KOSA harming children, not helping them. 

KOSA aims to make social media companies accountable for preventing children from seeing content that “promotes” eating disorders, self-harm, suicide, and substance use. The problem is, social media algorithms are incapable of distinguishing between content that promotes these behaviors and content that discusses these behaviors in a neutral manner or provides harm reduction techniques for making these behaviors less dangerous. As the EFF notes, “there is no way a platform can make case-by-case decisions about which content exacerbates, for example, an eating disorder, compared to content which provides necessary health information and advice about the topic.” We’ve already seen Instagram repeatedly fail at distinguishing between fresh self-harm and years-old scars, censoring and removing pictures of people simply living in bodies that are scarred. If KOSA passes, any mention of the aforementioned behaviors is liable to be censored and removed from social media platforms, which may have the paradoxical effect of pushing children who want community support, neutral information, or harm reduction techniques into more harmful corners of the Internet, such as specifically pro-ED sites. 

Moreover, KOSA and the eating disorder organizations supporting it buy into the same harmful narratives of social contagion that anti-queer and anti-trans groups promote so fiercely. The narrative that children uncritically adopt any behavior or identity they see online is egregious and clearly false (especially when it comes to teens, as opposed to 8-year-olds), but of course it is easier to blame social media alone rather than thoroughly examine the systems of injustice, oppression, and abuse that contribute to children’s poor mental health. While online content that promotes self-destructive behaviors is a real harm to children that should be addressed, the way to address this harm is not by mandating governmental and parental surveillance of children’s internet use. It is to equip children with better media literacy, trustworthy adult figures they can turn to for help, and tools for critically evaluating digital content. 

Platforms certainly do need greater regulation, and children do need greater protection from social media companies, which don’t care about their mental health as long as they can profit off them. But children need real protection, not KOSA, which is just increased surveillance for everyone under the thin veneer of child protection. I encourage you to read some of the many, many articles detailing the harmful effects KOSA would have. We must demand better for children than surveillance under the guise of “care,” and we must prioritize the children who are already hurting when considering who this legislation would harm the most. 

[batboyblog]

I think that the only real reason so many people are so willing and quick to denounce the IDF’s anti terrorist activities and conflate it with larger social issues that shouldn’t even be technically related is maybe because what Israel is doing as a means to defend itself similar to how we Americans originally responded in what we needed to do in response to 9/11.

We just wanted to take down the terrorists for such a heinous crime on our people.

The issue though is that people are looking at the consequences of our wars on terror rather than their baseline goals. They look to our actions in Iraq in 2003 and in Afghanistan post-2001 rather than the end goal of stopping terrorists, rather successful or not.

Basically, what these people are saying is that “the world had gone though one War on Terror and we all know how that went” in an attempt to discredit and denounce the whole affair, purposely ignoring the underlying objective of stopping armed and dangerous criminals that launched a heinous attack

This attitude of course is potent and corrupted by such bigotry that it frankly damages their arguments if anything

At least that’s what I think

I think there are a number of reasons,

the Iraq War is a big one in the US and UK (and the rest of Europe to a lesser extent) there's a lot of people, particularly on the left for whom any American/western involvement of any kind in a war in the Middle East is bad and always always will be because of Iraq you saw it with Libya and Syria back under Obama

I think however there's more than that, I think for Arabs and Muslims Palestine has long been an emotive issue and there's just that which we're seeing in Turkey but also from communities inside the UK or the US

I think the idea of the occupation is very emotive for a lot of people, in the 1990s there was a wave of correcting long standing historic wrongs and bring peace, you saw it in Northern Ireland, you saw it in South Africa, Americans and Europeans were involved in protests and sit ins etc in the 1980s and 90s for those causes, and also for Palestine. And I think the failure of the Camp David Process in 2000-2001 mixed with conflating American policy in Iraq with Israel (because of GWB's stated support for Israel, while being cold toward Arafat in his first term) lead to the Western peace camp to get more radicalized

I think antisemitism has ALWAYS fed into that, and lead to a lot of distortion and dehumanization, basically I think starting in the 1990s if you went to college for liberal arts and were at all political criticizing Israel was a way to get nearly automatic approval. And in the 90s it started off with reasonable criticisms you'd hear from most American Jews and many Jews of the Israeli center and left, settlements, occupation, Palestinian free movement, check points etc. But as every year goes by the need to one up and one up grows till you have groups cheering a truly horrific terrorist attack, mass murder etc.

I think it should be pretty easy to say that Hamas are bad people, monsters, and they shouldn't be in charge of any one, I think its the pro-Palestinian stand to say that an army of baby murderers and rapists shouldn't be the government of Gaza?

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Edward Schlosser

Published: Jun 3, 2015

I’m a professor at a midsize state school. I have been teaching college classes for nine years now. I have won (minor) teaching awards, studied pedagogy extensively, and almost always score highly on my student evaluations. I am not a world-class teacher by any means, but I am conscientious; I attempt to put teaching ahead of research, and I take a healthy emotional stake in the well-being and growth of my students.

Things have changed since I started teaching. The vibe is different. I wish there were a less blunt way to put this, but my students sometimes scare me — particularly the liberal ones.

Not, like, in a person-by-person sense, but students in general. The student-teacher dynamic has been reenvisioned along a line that’s simultaneously consumerist and hyper-protective, giving each and every student the ability to claim Grievous Harm in nearly any circumstance, after any affront, and a teacher’s formal ability to respond to these claims is limited at best.

What it was like before

In early 2009, I was an adjunct, teaching a freshman-level writing course at a community college. Discussing infographics and data visualization, we watched a flash animation describing how Wall Street’s recklessness had destroyed the economy.

The video stopped, and I asked whether the students thought it was effective. An older student raised his hand.

”What about Fannie and Freddie?” he asked. “Government kept giving homes to black people, to help out black people, white people didn’t get anything, and then they couldn’t pay for them. What about that?”

I gave a quick response about how most experts would disagree with that assumption, that it was actually an oversimplification, and pretty dishonest, and isn’t it good that someone made the video we just watched to try to clear things up? And, hey, let’s talk about whether that was effective, okay? If you don’t think it was, how could it have been?

The rest of the discussion went on as usual.

The next week, I got called into my director’s office. I was shown an email, sender name redacted, alleging that I “possessed communistical [sic] sympathies and refused to tell more than one side of the story.” The story in question wasn’t described, but I suspect it had do to with whether or not the economic collapse was caused by poor black people.

My director rolled her eyes. She knew the complaint was silly bullshit. I wrote up a short description of the past week’s class work, noting that we had looked at several examples of effective writing in various media and that I always made a good faith effort to include conservative narratives along with the liberal ones.

Along with a carbon-copy form, my description was placed into a file that may or may not have existed. Then ... nothing. It disappeared forever; no one cared about it beyond their contractual duties to document student concerns. I never heard another word of it again.

That was the first, and so far only, formal complaint a student has ever filed against me.

Now boat-rocking isn’t just dangerous — it’s suicidal

This isn’t an accident: I have intentionally adjusted my teaching materials as the political winds have shifted. (I also make sure all my remotely offensive or challenging opinions, such as this article, are expressed either anonymously or pseudonymously). Most of my colleagues who still have jobs have done the same. We’ve seen bad things happen to too many good teachers — adjuncts getting axed because their evaluations dipped below a 3.0, grad students being removed from classes after a single student complaint, and so on.

I once saw an adjunct not get his contract renewed after students complained that he exposed them to “offensive” texts written by Edward Said and Mark Twain. His response, that the texts were meant to be a little upsetting, only fueled the students’ ire and sealed his fate. That was enough to get me to comb through my syllabi and cut out anything I could see upsetting a coddled undergrad, texts ranging from Upton Sinclair to Maureen Tkacik — and I wasn’t the only one who made adjustments, either.

I am frightened sometimes by the thought that a student would complain again like he did in 2009. Only this time it would be a student accusing me not of saying something too ideologically extreme — be it communism or racism or whatever — but of not being sensitive enough toward his feelings, of some simple act of indelicacy that’s considered tantamount to physical assault. As Northwestern University professor Laura Kipnis writes, “Emotional discomfort is [now] regarded as equivalent to material injury, and all injuries have to be remediated.” Hurting a student’s feelings, even in the course of instruction that is absolutely appropriate and respectful, can now get a teacher into serious trouble.

In 2009, the subject of my student’s complaint was my supposed ideology. I was communistical, the student felt, and everyone knows that communisticism is wrong. That was, at best, a debatable assertion. And as I was allowed to rebut it, the complaint was dismissed with prejudice. I didn’t hesitate to reuse that same video in later semesters, and the student’s complaint had no impact on my performance evaluations.

In 2015, such a complaint would not be delivered in such a fashion. Instead of focusing on the rightness or wrongness (or even acceptability) of the materials we reviewed in class, the complaint would center solely on how my teaching affected the student’s emotional state. As I cannot speak to the emotions of my students, I could not mount a defense about the acceptability of my instruction. And if I responded in any way other than apologizing and changing the materials we reviewed in class, professional consequences would likely follow.

I wrote about this fear on my blog, and while the response was mostly positive, some liberals called me paranoid, or expressed doubt about why any teacher would nix the particular texts I listed. I guarantee you that these people do not work in higher education, or if they do they are at least two decades removed from the job search. The academic job market is brutal. Teachers who are not tenured or tenure-track faculty members have no right to due process before being dismissed, and there’s a mile-long line of applicants eager to take their place. And as writer and academic Freddie DeBoer writes, they don’t even have to be formally fired — they can just not get rehired. In this type of environment, boat-rocking isn’t just dangerous, it’s suicidal, and so teachers limit their lessons to things they know won’t upset anybody.

The real problem: a simplistic, unworkable, and ultimately stifling conception of social justice

This shift in student-teacher dynamic placed many of the traditional goals of higher education — such as having students challenge their beliefs — off limits. While I used to pride myself on getting students to question themselves and engage with difficult concepts and texts, I now hesitate. What if this hurts my evaluations and I don’t get tenure? How many complaints will it take before chairs and administrators begin to worry that I’m not giving our customers — er, students, pardon me — the positive experience they’re paying for? Ten? Half a dozen? Two or three?

This phenomenon has been widely discussed as of late, mostly as a means of deriding political, economic, or cultural forces writers don’t much care for. Commentators on the left and right have recently criticized the sensitivity and paranoia of today’s college students. They worry about the stifling of free speech, the implementation of unenforceable conduct codes, and a general hostility against opinions and viewpoints that could cause students so much as a hint of discomfort.

I agree with some of these analyses more than others, but they all tend to be too simplistic. The current student-teacher dynamic has been shaped by a large confluence of factors, and perhaps the most important of these is the manner in which cultural studies and social justice writers have comported themselves in popular media. I have a great deal of respect for both of these fields, but their manifestations online, their desire to democratize complex fields of study by making them as digestible as a TGIF sitcom, has led to adoption of a totalizing, simplistic, unworkable, and ultimately stifling conception of social justice. The simplicity and absolutism of this conception has combined with the precarity of academic jobs to create higher ed’s current climate of fear, a heavily policed discourse of semantic sensitivity in which safety and comfort have become the ends and the means of the college experience.

This new understanding of social justice politics resembles what University of Pennsylvania political science professor Adolph Reed Jr. calls a politics of personal testimony, in which the feelings of individuals are the primary or even exclusive means through which social issues are understood and discussed. Reed derides this sort of political approach as essentially being a non-politics, a discourse that “is focused much more on taxonomy than politics [which] emphasizes the names by which we should call some strains of inequality [ ... ] over specifying the mechanisms that produce them or even the steps that can be taken to combat them.” Under such a conception, people become more concerned with signaling goodness, usually through semantics and empty gestures, than with actually working to effect change.

Herein lies the folly of oversimplified identity politics: while identity concerns obviously warrant analysis, focusing on them too exclusively draws our attention so far inward that none of our analyses can lead to action. Rebecca Reilly Cooper, a political philosopher at the University of Warwick, worries about the effectiveness of a politics in which “particular experiences can never legitimately speak for any one other than ourselves, and personal narrative and testimony are elevated to such a degree that there can be no objective standpoint from which to examine their veracity.” Personal experience and feelings aren’t just a salient touchstone of contemporary identity politics; they are the entirety of these politics. In such an environment, it’s no wonder that students are so prone to elevate minor slights to protestable offenses.

(It’s also why seemingly piddling matters of cultural consumption warrant much more emotional outrage than concerns with larger material implications. Compare the number of web articles surrounding the supposed problematic aspects of the newest Avengers movie with those complaining about, say, the piecemeal dismantling of abortion rights. The former outnumber the latter considerably, and their rhetoric is typically much more impassioned and inflated. I’d discuss this in my classes — if I weren’t too scared to talk about abortion.)

The press for actionability, or even for comprehensive analyses that go beyond personal testimony, is hereby considered redundant, since all we need to do to fix the world’s problems is adjust the feelings attached to them and open up the floor for various identity groups to have their say. All the old, enlightened means of discussion and analysis —from due process to scientific method — are dismissed as being blind to emotional concerns and therefore unfairly skewed toward the interest of straight white males. All that matters is that people are allowed to speak, that their narratives are accepted without question, and that the bad feelings go away.

So it’s not just that students refuse to countenance uncomfortable ideas — they refuse to engage them, period. Engagement is considered unnecessary, as the immediate, emotional reactions of students contain all the analysis and judgment that sensitive issues demand. As Judith Shulevitz wrote in the New York Times, these refusals can shut down discussion in genuinely contentious areas, such as when Oxford canceled an abortion debate. More often, they affect surprisingly minor matters, as when Hampshire College disinvited an Afrobeat band because their lineup had too many white people in it.

When feelings become more important than issues

At the very least, there’s debate to be had in these areas. Ideally, pro-choice students would be comfortable enough in the strength of their arguments to subject them to discussion, and a conversation about a band’s supposed cultural appropriation could take place alongside a performance. But these cancellations and disinvitations are framed in terms of feelings, not issues. The abortion debate was canceled because it would have imperiled the “welfare and safety of our students.” The Afrofunk band’s presence would not have been “safe and healthy.” No one can rebut feelings, and so the only thing left to do is shut down the things that cause distress — no argument, no discussion, just hit the mute button and pretend eliminating discomfort is the same as effecting actual change.

In a New York Magazine piece, Jonathan Chait described the chilling effect this type of discourse has upon classrooms. Chait’s piece generated seismic backlash, and while I disagree with much of his diagnosis, I have to admit he does a decent job of describing the symptoms. He cites an anonymous professor who says that “she and her fellow faculty members are terrified of facing accusations of triggering trauma.” Internet liberals pooh-poohed this comment, likening the professor to one of Tom Friedman’s imaginary cab drivers. But I’ve seen what’s being described here. I’ve lived it. It’s real, and it affects liberal, socially conscious teachers much more than conservative ones.

If we wish to remove this fear, and to adopt a politics that can lead to more substantial change, we need to adjust our discourse. Ideally, we can have a conversation that is conscious of the role of identity issues and confident of the ideas that emanate from the people who embody those identities. It would call out and criticize unfair, arbitrary, or otherwise stifling discursive boundaries, but avoid falling into pettiness or nihilism. It wouldn’t be moderate, necessarily, but it would be deliberate. It would require effort.

In the start of his piece, Chait hypothetically asks if “the offensiveness of an idea [can] be determined objectively, or only by recourse to the identity of the person taking offense.” Here, he’s getting at the concerns addressed by Reed and Reilly-Cooper, the worry that we’ve turned our analysis so completely inward that our judgment of a person’s speech hinges more upon their identity signifiers than on their ideas.

A sensible response to Chait’s question would be that this is a false binary, and that ideas can and should be judged both by the strength of their logic and by the cultural weight afforded to their speaker’s identity. Chait appears to believe only the former, and that’s kind of ridiculous. Of course someone’s social standing affects whether their ideas are considered offensive, or righteous, or even worth listening to. How can you think otherwise?

We destroy ourselves when identity becomes our sole focus

Feminists and anti-racists recognize that identity does matter. This is indisputable. If we subscribe to the belief that ideas can be judged within a vacuum, uninfluenced by the social weight of their proponents, we perpetuate a system in which arbitrary markers like race and gender influence the perceived correctness of ideas. We can’t overcome prejudice by pretending it doesn’t exist. Focusing on identity allows us to interrogate the process through which white males have their opinions taken at face value, while women, people of color, and non-normatively gendered people struggle to have their voices heard.

But we also destroy ourselves when identity becomes our sole focus. Consider a tweet I linked to (which has since been removed. See editor’s note below.), from a critic and artist, in which she writes: “When ppl go off on evo psych, its always some shady colonizer white man theory that ignores nonwhite human history. but ‘science’. Ok ... Most ‘scientific thought’ as u know it isnt that scientific but shaped by white patriarchal bias of ppl who claimed authority on it.”

This critic is intelligent. Her voice is important. She realizes, correctly, that evolutionary psychology is flawed, and that science has often been misused to legitimize racist and sexist beliefs. But why draw that out to questioning most “scientific thought”? Can’t we see how distancing that is to people who don’t already agree with us? And tactically, can’t we see how shortsighted it is to be skeptical of a respected manner of inquiry just because it’s associated with white males?

This sort of perspective is not confined to Twitter and the comments sections of liberal blogs. It was born in the more nihilistic corners of academic theory, and its manifestations on social media have severe real-world implications. In another instance, two female professors of library science publicly outed and shamed a male colleague they accused of being creepy at conferences, going so far as to openly celebrate the prospect of ruining his career. I don’t doubt that some men are creepy at conferences — they are. And for all I know, this guy might be an A-level creep. But part of the female professors’ shtick was the strong insistence that harassment victims should never be asked for proof, that an enunciation of an accusation is all it should ever take to secure a guilty verdict. The identity of the victims overrides the identity of the harasser, and that’s all the proof they need.

This is terrifying. No one will ever accept that. And if that becomes a salient part of liberal politics, liberals are going to suffer tremendous electoral defeat.

Debate and discussion would ideally temper this identity-based discourse, make it more usable and less scary to outsiders. Teachers and academics are the best candidates to foster this discussion, but most of us are too scared and economically disempowered to say anything. Right now, there’s nothing much to do other than sit on our hands and wait for the ascension of conservative political backlash — hop into the echo chamber, pile invective upon the next person or company who says something vaguely insensitive, insulate ourselves further and further from any concerns that might resonate outside of our own little corner of Twitter.

--

==

This has been going on for over a decade. The correct response is to mock and laugh at the people complaining, and point out that they're not ready for the big wide world outside their kindergarten mindset, so they'd be better off going back home to mommy and daddy. Not validate and endorse their feelings. We need to get back to that.

[thatstormygeek]

Donald Trump’s second administration was always going to be part farce, part tragedy, but the swath of newly announced candidates for some of the most powerful appointed offices in the country is really something else.

There are two ways to look at this flood of circus casting. One is that it is a dangerous collection of political nihilists who will enact whatever depraved policies they think they can get away with to curry favor with the worst elements of American political, religious, and economic society. The second is that it is a collection of idiotic grifters who are not particularly efficient or motivated to enact actual policy, which, as the first Trump administration realized, is sort of difficult to actually do. These people are as evil as Stephen Miller was, that’s for sure. But do they have his drive? Are they actually going to govern? That remains to be seen. They’re certainly going to try, but for now, I think we can take some comfort in the fact that the kind of grifters and hangers-on that Trump often elevates are more effective at promoting themselves, and not at enacting the kind of dangerous national project the conservative movement is trying to build. One can hope, at least: and at the minimum, maybe remind the Pentagon press corps to stock up on hand sanitizer if they have to meet with Hegseth anytime soon.

[pscottm]

America Did This to Itself

This time, the nation was on notice. Back in 2016, those of us who supported Donald Trump at least had the excuse of not knowing how sociopathy can present itself, and we at least had the conceit of believing that the presidency was not just a man, but an institution greater than the man, with legal and traditional mechanisms to make sure he’d never go off the rails.

By 2020, after the chaos, the derangement, and the incompetence, we knew a lot better. And most other Americans did too, voting him out of office that fall. And when his criminal attempt to steal the election culminated in the violence of January 6, their judgment was vindicated.

So there was no excuse this year. We knew all we needed to know, even without the mendacious raging about Ohioans eating pets, the fantasizing about shooting journalists and arresting political opponents as “enemies of the people,” even apart from the evidence presented in courts and the convictions in one that demonstrated his abject criminality.

We knew, and have known, for years. Every American knew, or should have known. The man elected president last night is a depraved and brazen pathological liar, a shameless con man, a sociopathic criminal, a man who has no moral or social conscience, empathy, or remorse. He has no respect for the Constitution and laws he will swear to uphold, and on top of all that, he exhibits emotional and cognitive deficiencies that seem to be intensifying, and that will only make his turpitude worse. He represents everything we should aspire not to be, and everything we should teach our children not to emulate. The only hope is that he’s utterly incompetent, and even that is a double-edged sword, because his incompetence often can do as much as harm as his malevolence. His government will be filled with corrupt grifters, spiteful maniacs, and morally bankrupt sycophants, who will follow in his example and carry his directives out, because that’s who they are and want to be.

I say all of this not in anger, but in deep and profound sorrow. For centuries, the United States has been a beacon of democracy and reasoned self-government, in part because the Framers understood the dangers of demagogues and saw fit to construct a system with safeguards to keep such men from undermining it, and because our people and their leaders, out of respect for the common good and the people of this country, adhered to its rules and norms. The system was never perfect, but it inched toward its own betterment, albeit in fits and starts. But in the end, the system the Framers set up—and indeed, all constitutional regimes, however well designed—cannot protect a free people from themselves.

My own hope and belief about what would transpire last night was sadly and profoundly wrong—like many, I have the emotional and intellectual flaw, if that’s what it is, of assuming that people are wiser and more decent than they actually turn out to be. I feel chastened—distraught—about my apparently naive view of human nature.

I dare not predict the future again, particularly as it comes to elections and other forms of mass behavior. But I daresay I fear we shall see a profound degradation in the ability of this nation to govern itself rationally and fairly, with freedom and political equality under the rule of law. Because that is not actually a prediction. It’s a logical deduction based on the words and deeds of the president-elect, his enablers, and his supporters—and a long and often sorry record of human history. Let us brace ourselves.

[noreligionisgood]

In 2022, a coalition of right-wing writers and leaders published a document called “National Conservatism: A Statement of Principles.” Its section on God and public religion states: “Where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honored by the state and other institutions both public and private.” That’s an extraordinary — and ominous — ideological statement, one that would immediately relegate non-Christians to second-class status. It’s utterly contrary to the First Amendment and would impose a form of compelled deference to Christianity on both religious minorities and the nonreligious.

But Christian nationalism isn’t just rooted in ideology; it’s also deeply rooted in identity, the belief that Christians should rule. This is the heart of the Seven Mountain Mandate, a dominionist movement emerging from American Pentecostalism that is, put bluntly, Christian identity politics on steroids. Paula White, Donald Trump’s closest spiritual adviser, is an adherent, and so is the chief justice of Alabama, Tom Parker, who wrote a concurring opinion in the court’s recent I.V.F. decision. The movement holds that Christians are called to rule seven key societal institutions: the family, the church, education, the media, the arts, business and the government.

One doesn’t have to go all the way into Seven Mountain theology, though, to find examples of Christian identity politics. The use of Christianity as an unofficial but necessary qualification for office is a routine part of politics in the most churchgoing parts of America. Moreover, one of the common red-America arguments for Trump is that he might not be devout himself but he’ll place lots of Christians in government.

But what is Christian identity politics but another form of Christian supremacy? How does Christian identity alone make any person a better candidate for office? After all, many of the worst actors in American politics are professed believers. Scandal and corruption are so pervasive in the church that when people say, “I’m a Christian,” it tells me almost nothing about their wisdom or virtue.

Finally, we can’t forget the intense emotion of Christian nationalism. Most believers don’t follow ideological and theological arguments particularly closely. In the words of the historian Thomas Kidd, “Actual Christian nationalism is more a visceral reaction than a rationally chosen stance.” It is tied, in other words, to a visceral sense that the fate of the church is closely tied to the outcome of any given political race.

That fervor can make believers gullible and potentially even dangerous. Its good-versus-evil dynamic can make Christians believe that their political opponents are capable of anything, including stealing an election. It artificially raises the stakes of elections to the point where a loss becomes an unthinkable catastrophe, with the fates of both church and state hanging in the balance. As we saw on Jan. 6, 2021, this belief invites violent action.

Committed Christian nationalists represent only 10 percent of the population, according to a 2023 PRRI/Brookings Christian Nationalism Survey. But even members of a minority that small can gain outsize power when they fold themselves into the larger Christian electorate, casting themselves as “just like you.” That’s why we cannot conflate Christian activism with Christian nationalism. One can welcome Christian participation in the public square while resisting domination, from any faith or creed

[reasoningdaily]

Late one night several years ago, I got out of my car on a dark midtown Atlanta street when a man standing fifteen feet away pointed a gun at me and threatened to “blow my head off.” I’d been parked outside my new apartment in a racially mixed but mostly white neighborhood that I didn’t consider a high-crime area. As the man repeated the threat, I suppressed my first instinct to run and fearfully raised my hands in helpless submission. I begged the man not to shoot me, repeating over and over again, “It’s all right, it’s okay.”

The man was a uniformed police officer. As a criminal defense attorney, I knew that my survival required careful, strategic thinking. I had to stay calm. I’d just returned home from my law office in a car filled with legal papers, but I knew the officer holding the gun had not stopped me because he thought I was a young professional. Since I was a young, bearded black man dressed casually in jeans, most people would not assume I was a lawyer with a Harvard Law School degree. To the officer threatening to shoot me I looked like someone dangerous and guilty.

I had been sitting in my beat-up Honda Civic for over a quarter of an hour listening to music that could not be heard outside the vehicle. There was a Sly and the Family Stone retrospective playing on a local radio station that had so engaged me I couldn’t turn the radio off. It had been a long day at work. A neighbor must have been alarmed by the sight of a black man sitting in his car and called the police. My getting out of my car to explain to the police officer that this was my home and nothing criminal was taking place prompted him to pull his weapon.

Having drawn his weapon, the officer and his partner justified their threat of lethal force by dramatizing their fears and suspicions about me. They threw me on the back of my car, searched it illegally, and kept me on the street for fifteen humiliating minutes while neighbors gathered to view the dangerous criminal in their midst. When no crime was discovered and nothing incriminating turned up in a computerized background check on me, I was told by the two officers to consider myself lucky. While this was said as a taunt, they were right: I was lucky.

People of color in the United States, particularly young black men, are often assumed to be guilty and dangerous. In too many situations, black men are considered offenders incapable of being victims themselves. As a consequence of this country’s failure to address effectively its legacy of racial inequality, this presumption of guilt and the history that created it have significantly shaped every institution in American society, especially our criminal justice system.

At the Civil War’s end, black autonomy expanded but white supremacy remained deeply rooted. States began to look to the criminal justice system to construct policies and strategies to maintain the subordination of African-Americans. Convict leasing, the practice of “selling” the labor of state and local prisoners to private interests for state profit, used the criminal justice system to take away their political rights. State legislatures passed the Black Codes, which created new criminal offenses such as “vagrancy” and “loitering” and led to the mass arrest of black people. Then, relying on language in the Thirteenth Amendment that prohibits slavery and involuntary servitude “except as punishment for crime,” lawmakers authorized white-controlled governments to exploit the labor of African-Americans in private lease contracts or on state-owned farms.1 The legal scholar Jennifer Rae Taylor has observed:

While a black prisoner was a rarity during the slavery era (when slave masters were individually empowered to administer “discipline” to their human property), the solution to the free black population had become criminalization. In turn, the most common fate facing black convicts was to be sold into forced labor for the profit of the state.

Beginning as early as 1866 in states like Texas, Mississippi, and Georgia, convict leasing spread throughout the South and continued through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Leased black convicts faced deplorable, unsafe working conditions and brutal violence when they attempted to resist or escape bondage. An 1887 report by the Hinds County, Mississippi, grand jury recorded that six months after 204 convicts were leased to a man named McDonald, twenty were dead, nineteen had escaped, and twenty-three had been returned to the penitentiary disabled, ill, and near death. The penitentiary hospital was filled with sick and dying black men whose bodies bore “marks of the most inhuman and brutal treatment…so poor and emaciated that their bones almost come through the skin.”2

The explicit use of race to codify different kinds of offenses and punishments was challenged as unconstitutional, and criminal statutes were modified to avoid direct racial references, but the enforcement of the law didn’t change. Black people were routinely charged with a wide range of “offenses,” some of which whites were never charged with. African-Americans endured these challenges and humiliations and continued to rise up from slavery by seeking education and working hard under difficult conditions, but their refusal to act like slaves seemed only to provoke and agitate their white neighbors. This tension led to an era of lynching and violence that traumatized black people for decades.

Between the Civil War and World War II, thousands of African-Americans were lynched in the United States. Lynchings were brutal public murders that were tolerated by state and federal officials. These racially motivated acts, meant to bypass legal institutions in order to intimidate entire populations, became a form of terrorism. Lynching had a profound effect on race relations in the United States and defined the geographic, political, social, and economic conditions of African-Americans in ways that are still evident today.

Of the hundreds of black people lynched after being accused of rape and murder, very few were legally convicted of a crime, and many were demonstrably innocent. In 1918, for example, after a white woman was raped in Lewiston, North Carolina, a black suspect named Peter Bazemore was lynched by a mob before an investigation revealed that the real perpetrator had been a white man wearing blackface makeup.3 Hundreds more black people were lynched based on accusations of far less serious crimes, like arson, robbery, nonsexual assault, and vagrancy, many of which would not have been punishable by death even if the defendants had been convicted in a court of law. In addition, African-Americans were frequently lynched for not conforming to social customs or racial expectations, such as speaking to white people with less respect or formality than observers believed due.4

Many African-Americans were lynched not because they had been accused of committing a crime or social infraction, but simply because they were black and present when the preferred party could not be located. In 1901, Ballie Crutchfield’s brother allegedly found a lost wallet containing $120 and kept the money. He was arrested and about to be lynched by a mob in Smith County, Tennessee, when, at the last moment, he was able to break free and escape. Thwarted in their attempt to kill him, the mob turned their attention to his sister and lynched her instead, though she was not even alleged to have been involved in the theft.

New research continues to reveal the extent of lynching in America. The extraordinary documentation compiled by Professor Monroe Work (1866–1945) at Tuskegee University has been an invaluable historical resource for scholars, as has the joint work of sociologists Stewart Tolnay and E.M. Beck. These two sources are widely viewed as the most comprehensive collections of data on the subject in America. They have uncovered over three thousand instances of lynching between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and 1950 in the twelve states that had the most lynchings: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia.

Recently, the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) in Montgomery, Alabama—of which I am the founder and executive director—spent five years and hundreds of hours reviewing this research and other documentation, including local newspapers, historical archives, court records, interviews, and reports in African-American newspapers. Our research documented more than four thousand racial terror lynchings between 1877 and 1950 in those twelve states, eight hundred more than had been previously reported. We distinguished “racial terror lynchings” from hangings or mob violence that followed some sort of criminal trial or were committed against nonminorities. However heinous, this second category of killings was a crude form of punishment. By contrast, racial terror lynchings were directed specifically at black people, with little bearing on an actual crime; the aim was to maintain white supremacy and political and economic racial subordination.

We also distinguished terror lynchings from other racial violence and hate crimes that were prosecuted as criminal acts, although prosecution for hate crimes committed against black people was rare before World War II. The lynchings we documented were acts of terrorism because they were murders carried out with impunity—sometimes in broad daylight, as Sherrilyn Ifill explains in her important book on the subject, On the Courthouse Lawn (2007)—whose perpetrators were never held accountable. These killings were not examples of “frontier justice,” because they generally took place in communities where there was a functioning criminal justice system that was deemed too good for African-Americans. Some “public spectacle lynchings” were even attended by the entire local white population and conducted as celebratory acts of racial control and domination.

Records show that racial terror lynchings from Reconstruction until World War II had six particularly common motivations: (1) a wildly distorted fear of interracial sex; (2) as a response to casual social transgressions; (3) after allegations of serious violent crime; (4) as public spectacle, which could be precipitated by any of the allegations named above; (5) as terroristic violence against the African-American population as a whole; and (6) as retribution for sharecroppers, ministers, and other community leaders who resisted mistreatment—the last becoming common between 1915 and 1945.

Our research confirmed that many victims of terror lynchings were murdered without being accused of any crime; they were killed for minor social transgressions or for asserting basic rights. Our conversations with survivors of lynchings also confirmed how directly lynching and racial terror motivated the forced migration of millions of black Americans out of the South. Thousands of people fled north for fear that a social misstep in an encounter with a white person might provoke a mob to show up and take their lives. Parents and spouses suffered what they characterized as “near-lynchings” and sent their loved ones away in frantic, desperate acts of protection.

The decline of lynching in America coincided with the increased use of capital punishment often following accelerated, unreliable legal processes in state courts. By the end of the 1930s, court-ordered executions outpaced lynchings in the former slave states for the first time. Two thirds of those executed that decade were black, and the trend continued: as African-Americans fell to just 22 percent of the southern population between 1910 and 1950, they constituted 75 percent of those executed.

Probably the most famous attempted “legal lynching” is the case of the “Scottsboro Boys,” nine young African-Americans charged with raping two white women in Alabama in 1931. During the trial, white mobs outside the courtroom demanded the teens’ executions. Represented by incompetent lawyers, the nine were convicted by all-white, all-male juries within two days, and all but the youngest were sentenced to death. When the NAACP and others launched a national movement to challenge the cursory proceedings, the legal scholar Stephen Bright has written, “the [white] people of Scottsboro did not understand the reaction. After all, they did not lynch the accused; they gave them a trial.”5 In reality, many defendants of the era learned that the prospect of being executed rather than lynched did little to introduce fairness into the outcome.

Though northern states had abolished public executions by 1850, some in the South maintained the practice until 1938. The spectacles were more often intended to deter mob lynchings than crimes. Following Will Mack’s execution by public hanging in Brandon, Mississippi, in 1909, the Brandon News reasoned:

Public hangings are wrong, but under the circumstances, the quiet acquiescence of the people to submit to a legal trial, and their good behavior throughout, left no alternative to the board of supervisors but to grant the almost universal demand for a public execution.

Even in southern states that had outlawed public hangings much earlier, mobs often successfully demanded them.

In Sumterville, Florida, in 1902, a black man named Henry Wilson was convicted of murder in a trial that lasted just two hours and forty minutes. To mollify the mob of armed whites that filled the courtroom, the judge promised a death sentence that would be carried out by public hanging—despite state law prohibiting public executions. Even so, when the execution was set for a later date, the enraged mob threatened, “We’ll hang him before sundown, governor or no governor.” In response, Florida officials moved up the date, authorized Wilson to be hanged before the jeering mob, and congratulated themselves on having “avoided” a lynching.

‘The migration gained in momentum’; painting by Jacob Lawrence from his Migration series, 1940–1941. Credit: Museum of Modern Art, New York/© 2017 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

In the 1940s and 1950s, the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund (LDF) began what would become a multidecade litigation strategy to challenge the American death penalty—which was used most actively in the South—as racially biased and unconstitutional. It won in Furman v. Georgia in 1972, when the Supreme Court struck down Georgia’s death penalty statute, holding that capital punishment still too closely resembled “self-help, vigilante justice, and lynch law” and “if any basis can be discerned for the selection of these few to be sentenced to die, it is the constitutionally impermissible basis of race.”

Southern opponents of the decision immediately decried it and set to writing new laws authorizing the death penalty. Following Furman, Mississippi Senator James O. Eastland accused the Court of “legislating” and “destroying our system of government,” while Georgia’s white supremacist lieutenant governor, Lester Maddox, called the decision “a license for anarchy, rape, and murder.” In December 1972, Florida became the first state after Furman to enact a new death penalty statute, and within two years, thirty-five states had followed suit. Proponents of Georgia’s new death penalty bill unapologetically borrowed the rhetoric of lynching, insisting, as Maddox put it:

There should be more hangings. Put more nooses on the gallows. We’ve got to make it safe on the street again…. It wouldn’t be too bad to hang some on the court house square, and let those who would plunder and destroy see.

State representative Guy Hill of Atlanta proposed a bill that would require death by hanging to take place “at or near the courthouse in the county in which the crime was committed.” Georgia state representative James H. “Sloppy” Floyd remarked, “If people commit these crimes, they ought to burn.” In 1976, in Gregg v. Georgia, the Supreme Court upheld Georgia’s new statute and thus reinstated the American death penalty, capitulating to the claim that legal executions were needed to prevent vigilante mob violence.

The new death penalty statutes continued to result in racial imbalance, and constitutional challenges persisted. In the 1987 case of McCleskey v. Kemp, the Supreme Court considered statistical evidence demonstrating that Georgia officials were more than four times as likely to impose a death sentence for the killing of a white person than a black person. Accepting the data as accurate, the Court conceded that racial disparities in sentencing “are an inevitable part of our criminal justice system” and upheld Warren McCleskey’s death sentence because he had failed to identify “a constitutionally significant risk of racial bias” in his case.

Today, large racial disparities continue in capital sentencing. African-Americans make up less than 13 percent of the national population, but nearly 42 percent of those currently on death row and 34 percent of those executed since 1976. In 96 percent of states where researchers have examined the relationship between race and the death penalty, results reveal a pattern of discrimination based on the race of the victim, the race of the defendant, or both. Meanwhile, in capital trials today the accused is often the only person of color in the courtroom and illegal racial discrimination in jury selection continues to be widespread. In Houston County, Alabama, prosecutors have excluded 80 percent of qualified African-Americans from serving as jurors in death penalty cases.

More than eight in ten American lynchings between 1889 and 1918 occurred in the South, and more than eight in ten of the more than 1,400 legal executions carried out in this country since 1976 have been in the South, where the legacy of the nation’s embrace of slavery lingers. Today death sentences are disproportionately meted out to African-Americans accused of crimes against white victims; efforts to combat racial bias and create federal protection against it in death penalty cases remain thwarted by the familiar rhetoric of states’ rights. Regional data demonstrate that the modern American death penalty has its origins in racial terror and is, in the words of Bright, the legal scholar, “a direct descendant of lynching.”

In the face of this national ignominy, there is still an astonishing failure to acknowledge, discuss, or address the history of lynching. Many of the communities where lynchings took place have gone to great lengths to erect markers and memorials to the Civil War, to the Confederacy, and to events and incidents in which local power was violently reclaimed by white people. These communities celebrate and honor the architects of racial subordination and political leaders known for their defense of white supremacy. But in these same communities there are very few, if any, significant monuments or memorials that address the history and legacy of the struggle for racial equality and of lynching in particular. Many people who live in these places today have no awareness that race relations in their histories included terror and lynching. As Ifill has argued, the absence of memorials to lynching has deepened the injury to African-Americans and left the rest of the nation ignorant of this central part of our history.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964, arguably the signal legal achievement of the civil rights movement, contained provisions designed to eliminate discrimination in voting, education, and employment, but did not address racial bias in criminal justice. Though it was the most insidious engine of the subordination of black people throughout the era of racial terror and its aftermath, the criminal justice system remains the institution in American life least affected by the civil rights movement. Mass incarceration in America today stands as a continuation of past abuses, still limiting opportunities for our nation’s most vulnerable citizens.

We can’t change our past, but we can acknowledge it and better shape our future. The United States is not the only country with a violent history of oppression. Many nations have been burdened by legacies of racial domination, foreign occupation, or tribal conflict resulting in pervasive human rights abuses or genocide. The commitment to truth and reconciliation in South Africa was critical to that nation’s recovery. Rwanda has embraced transitional justice to heal and move forward. Today in Germany, besides a number of large memorials to the Holocaust, visitors encounter markers and stones at the homes of Jewish families who were taken to the concentration camps. But in America, we barely acknowledge the history and legacy of slavery, we have done nothing to recognize the era of lynching, and only in the last few years have a few monuments to the Confederacy been removed in the South.

The crucial question concerning capital punishment is not whether people deserve to die for the crimes they commit but rather whether we deserve to kill. Given the racial disparities that still exist in this country, we should eliminate the death penalty and expressly identify our history of lynching as a basis for its abolition. Confronting implicit bias in police departments should be seen as essential in twenty-first-century policing.

What threatened to kill me on the streets of Atlanta when I was a young attorney wasn’t just a misguided police officer with a gun, it was the force of America’s history of racial injustice and the presumption of guilt it created. In America, no child should be born with a presumption of guilt, burdened with expectations of failure and dangerousness because of the color of her or his skin or a parent’s poverty. Black people in this nation should be afforded the same protection, safety, and opportunity to thrive as anyone else. But that won’t happen until we look squarely at our history and commit to engaging the past that continues to haunt us.

Bryan Stevenson is the Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative and the author of “Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption.” This essay is drawn from the collection “Policing the Black Man: Arrest, Prosecution, and Imprisonment,” edited and with an introduction by Angela J. Davis, which will be published in July by Pantheon.


[moralomnivore]

Went to go look up how many fish are killed in a year and found this instead. It blew me away. A million people dead in decade! What the fuck!

In Central America, lobster fishing is a big business. It dominates the fishing industry in Honduras, which exports more than 1.3 million metric tons of lobster to the United States each year. Honduras is also one of the poorest countries in Latin America, with more than 60% of the population living in poverty. Given the importance of lobster to the economy, and the poverty of many workers and families, fishers are vulnerable to exploitation. Although lobster fishing—which is done either with traps or by hand by divers—is regulated, fishers often ignore these rules. This laxity particularly affects divers. The Honduran government limits divers to no more than two dives per day that go deeper than 60 feet, but the World Wildlife Fund has observed divers performing up to 13 each day either because there aren’t enough fish or prices are too low. These divers are at increasing and deadly risk for decompression sickness because of inadequate availability of health care. Yet divers continue because diving is one of the only ways for them to earn money. Consequently, Honduran lobster divers face an extremely high mortality rate—between 400 and 900 deaths per 100,000 fishers—largely because of the lack of oversight and enforcement of the rules by the authorities.

The deadliest professions in America (logging, domestic fishing) kill a horrifying 75-90 out of 100,000 workers, but lobster fishing for the American market kills 5-12x as many people! God damn!

[alanshemper]

book is available for free download here ➡️ https://muse.jhu.edu/book/22218

Jul 11, 2013 - Issue 524

BlackCommentator.com: Somebody “Fixin’ to be Killed” - A review of We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement - A View from the Battlefield - By Jamala Rogers - BC Editorial Board

Mississippi: Armed SNCC members abduct white night riders and release them after giving them a warning. A white cop gets knocked unconscious by a black man for slapping a 14-year-old black girl. Armed brothers do a citizens’ arrest when ambushed by the Klan and deliver one of the attackers to his father, the chief of police.

Before you start to romanticize about the good ole days, I should remind you that life in the South for black folks was dangerous and volatile. Any challenge to the traditions and system of white supremacy was met with raw violence. And Mississippi? Well, there’s a poignant reason why Nina Simone penned a song titled, “Mississippi Goddam.” People - mostly black - lost their lives in the freedom struggle as they fought to break down barriers to voting, employment, public accommodations and other aspects of life that were forbidden to African Americans because of racism. This is the backdrop for We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement by Dr. Akinyele Umoja.

We Will Shoot Back informs us that blacks were not the only ones who had to be in fear of their lives. Racist whites who got between armed black men and women and their struggle for civil and human rights apparently got a lesson in fear.

Though not intended by the author, the book came out in the heat of the gun control debate. In some segments of the black and brown communities, the notion of disarmament is seen as making them vulnerable to attacks by the state or white supremacist groups. Particularly in black communities where the carnage of young men is becoming the norm, We Will Shoot Back could elevate the public discourse on guns in the context of self-defense as opposed to the primary way people should resolve conflicts.

Most of us have heard about the legendary Deacons for Defense. Through exhaustive research and interviews, Umoja introduced us to many other unsung heroes and sheroes (although not surprising the historical documentation was scant on women’s contribution to armed resistance in the south). Men and women like Hartman Turnbow, Rudy Shields, Robert “Fat Daddy” Davis, C.O.Chin, Ora “Miss Dago” Bryant, Luella Hazelwood and many more. Their inspirational stories affirmed that black folks stood with dignity, unflinchingly looking in the face of pure hatred and forged on to re-define their futures.

In We Will Shoot Back, Akinyele Umoja goes further than dispelling a long held myth that black Mississippians were too paralyzed in fear to defend themselves and actively participate in the freedom struggle. And that the omnipotent Klu Klux Klan kept the black community in check. He confronts head-on the stereotype that black southerners were docile, head-hanging, cheek-turning second class citizens.

Umoja takes the reader to the time when black Mississippians were forced to embrace armed resistance for their own survival; blacks faced the realization that their government offered no pretense of protection and could not be relied upon. In many cases, local government officials, along with law enforcement, were part of the same white mobs terrorizing black communities. Umoja chronicles the inextricable and critical role of armed resistance in the advancement of the southern freedom strategy that ultimately led to the passage of the historic Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965. Boycotts and armed resistance were the primary means of effectively organizing for change during this period.

Umoja documents a sophisticated labyrinth of disciplined, well-organized communication networks, safe houses, haven towns and armed residents who, much to the chagrin of local authorities, used local gun laws to their advantage. The special expertise of Vietnam veterans was also tapped.

These armed organizers and citizens did not sell wolf tickets and their threats were not idle ones. Sometimes the brothers were moved to publicly display their arms as a deterrent or to telegraph their sentiments as when Deacon of Defense member, Claude Brown, told white officials that “some peoples fixin’ to be killed…ain’t all of them going to be Black”. Vintage photographs in the book illustrate the armed sentries set up for round-the-clock duties. It was not uncommon for the armed resisters to rough up blacks who dishonored the boycotts.

The protection was extended to courageous residents who dared associate themselves with these forces who were bringing down the walls of white supremacy. When families opened their homes to freedom fighters, it automatically put them in the crosshairs of racist terrorists. Cattle was poisoned, property destroyed, loans denied and a host of other intimidating tactics were used first before escalating to the more life-threatening tactics. Communities were organized not just for their own self defense but to defend any freedom fighter who came into southern towns and cities to support them in their struggle for democracy and equality.

Everyone wasn’t especially excited about this new model of defense. The book highlights an example about how the Deacons of Defense provided protection for the major civil rights groups who vowed to continue James Meredith’s “March against Fear” after he was shot trying to integrate Ole Miss University. Dr. King, Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young were opposed to the Deacons participating in the march. Dr. King conceded to the idea once it was clear the march would maintain its nonviolent character. Wilkins and Young would have none of this and high-tailed it back to New York. The pragmatist that he was, Dr. King went on to make the distinction between “defensive violence and retaliatory violence.”

The armed resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement continued under the Black Power era. Its intensity had changed with the two major pieces of civil rights legislation and the decline of the KKK. We Will Shoot Back takes us through the period of Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa (PGRNA) establishing it boundaries and program and through the demise of the United League. For almost twenty years, blacks understood the ugly period of segregation and terror and organized themselves to live another day and prepare for the next battle in the war against white supremacy and racism.

Whether it’s poetic justice or karma, one circle is complete. A young, lanky attorney with a big afro was part of the Republic of New African delegation who came to organize Mississippi in the early 1970s. He was Chokwe Lumumba. Lumumba was recently sworn in as mayor of Jackson, MS.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member and Columnist, Jamala Rogers, founder and Chair Emeritus of the Organization for Black Struggle in St. Louis. She is an organizer, trainer and speaker. She is the author of The Best of the Way I See It – A Chronicle of Struggle.

[justbeingnamaste]

....Where Are The American Demonstrations? 

The problems faced by Spaniards are strikingly similar to those facing Americans. The American left hates our heritage so much they torched American cities and destroyed historical statues and monuments for an entire summer.Our corrupt president, Joe Biden, was able to take power thanks to a rigged election, and his administration has weaponized the federal government against his most prominent political adversary, former President Donald Trump, and anyone in ideological opposition to the Democrats.

The Biden administration’s disregard for border security encourages mass illegal immigration at the Southern Border, exposing the public to dangerous criminals and additional economic burdens while the middle class struggles to stay afloat amid increasing taxes, inflation, and gas prices. And despite the public’s rapidly increasing suffering, Biden prioritizes sending billions of tax dollars to foreign wars and international green energy projects.

All these things, but particularly the federal government’s targeting of conservatives and its assault on election integrity, should be sparking massive protests. Yet they aren’t. Unlike Spain, America was founded on the idea that human beings have God-given, inalienable rights. Freedom of speech and assembly are not just First Amendment givens in the United States, but part of our culture. So why aren’t conservatives protesting?

Using fear and intimidation, the left is scaring conservatives into giving up their freedom to assemble. One of the primary fear tactics is to severely punish those who, on Jan. 6, 2021, opted to protest Democrat’s election-rigging practices, such as mass mail-in balloting and Big Tech censorship. As newly-released Jan. 6 footage further reveals, many of the Jan. 6 protesters accused of rioting were peaceful.

Yet federal courts openly admitted to making examples out of peaceful protesters in order to “deter others.” J6 demonstrators have been harassed by federal agents, held in solitary confinement, and demonized by the Jan. 6 Committee, Biden, and the corporate media. 

The American people have also been further scared into silence and compliance by FBI agents who terrorized pro-life activists, attempted to infiltrate traditional Catholic communities, labeled parents at school board meetings as domestic terrorists, and covertly categorized Trump supporters as “extremists.”....

[leviathangourmet]

For decades, advances in healthcare and safety steadily drove down death rates among American children. In an alarming reversal, rates have now risen to the highest level in nearly 15 years, particularly driven by homicides, drug overdoses, car accidents and suicides. The uptick among younger Americans accelerated in 2020. Though Covid-19 itself wasn’t a major cause of death for young people, researchers say social disruption caused by the pandemic exacerbated public-health problems, including worsening anxiety and depression. Greater access to firearms, dangerous driving and more lethal narcotics also helped push up death rates. Between 2019 and 2020, the overall mortality rate for ages 1 to 19 rose by 10.7%, and increased by an additional 8.3% the following year, according to an analysis of federal death statistics led by Steven Woolf, director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University, published in JAMA in March. That’s the highest increase for two consecutive years in the half-century that the government has publicly tracked such figures, according to Woolf’s analysis.

The increases in suicides and homicides among young people went largely unnoticed at first because overall child and adolescent mortality rates still declined most years.  Penicillin and other antibiotics drove down deaths from bacterial infections in the years following World War II, and vaccines controlled lethal viruses such as polio and influenza. Safer automobiles, seat belts and car seats made driving less deadly. Bicycle helmets, smoke detectors and swimming lessons reduced fatal accidents and drownings. Medical advancements that save premature babies and treat leukemia and other cancers helped more children survive once-lethal diagnoses. “All of those gains are now being offset by essentially four causes of death,” Woolf said.  When the pandemic started, deaths of young people due to suicide and homicide climbed higher. Deaths caused by drug overdoses and transportation fatalities—mainly motor-vehicle accidents—rose significantly, too. Covid, which surged to America’s No. 3 cause of death during the pandemic, accounted for just one-tenth of the rise in mortality among young people in 2020, and one-fifth of it in 2021, according to the research led by Woolf, which uses data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Joshua Gillihan was 11 years old when the pandemic closed his suburban Houston middle school in March 2020. He’d grown up confident with lots of friends, and played baseball and rode his dirt bike in their upper-middle-class neighborhood in Cypress, Texas, said his mother, Kim Gillihan. The shutdowns turned a temporary break from organized sports into an indefinite hiatus. Kim Gillihan watched as Joshua’s typical adolescent hangups about having to wear glasses and his appearance gave way to more worrisome levels of anxiety.  “When the Covid hit, our child that was never depressed became depressed,” she said. 

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Brazil’s Post-Riot Social Media Restrictions Aren’t Worth a Free Speech Freakout

Democracies have the right to act in their own defense—even if that means some people temporarily have to go without tweeting.

The Brazilian government wasted no time in responding to the insurrection that shook the capital city on January 8. Hundreds of arrests were made right away, and authorities mounted a robust investigation that quickly identified many of the individuals and groups who paid for the pro-Bolsonaro rioters to get to Brasília. Naturally, such a robust defense of democracy has its detractors: Some on the right have complained that the government is overplaying its hand by arresting people who were at the scene of the crime but who are really decent people in their heart of hearts.

Such allegations are too self-serving to take seriously. The element of the government’s response that has probably sparked the most indignation, however, has to do with social media. It all started when Supreme Court Minister Alexandre de Moraes issued an order around midnight after the insurrection, ordering Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram to block accounts inciting or supporting attacks on Brazil’s democratic order. A fine of 100,000 Brazilian dollars (just under $20,000, more or less) would be applied to companies that failed to act within two hours of receiving notice from the court.

Some saw this as a grave civil rights violation. Journalist Glenn Greenwald, who lives in Brazil and can fairly be described as a “free speech absolutist,” was particularly vocal in denouncing the moves of de Moraes. “I can’t overstate how shocking and dangerous this new censorship order is,” Greenwald tweeted on January 13. “It’s from the same judge that even the NYT has been warning about as authoritarian.” Greenwald repeatedly referenced a New York Times piece by Jack Nicas and André Spigariol, which noted “a raw display of judicial force” by de Moraes “that crowned a trend years in the making: Brazil’s Supreme Court has drastically expanded its power to counter the antidemocratic stances of Mr. Bolsonaro and his supporters.”

De Moraes is indeed immensely powerful, handing down decisions with a solitary force that puzzles most American observers. Criticizing the willingness of many Brazilians to applaud de Moraes in the aftermath of January 8, Greenwald tweeted, “I’ve never seen a judge in any democracy with this level of power. He’s become a venerated hero of the Brazilian left, feared and off-limits from criticism.” Greenwald’s alarmism attracted the attention of Twitter’s Grand Poobah himself. “This is extremely concerning,” Elon Musk tweeted in response to Greenwald. “Is it just one judge?” he later inquired.

One can understand why Musk, whose grip on what constitutes both the public square as well as free speech is so famously loosey-goosey, would perceive a temporary ban from Twitter as an excruciating sentence. It is not clear why anyone else should. When allegations of state censorship are bandied about, it is worth establishing a sense of proportion and stakes to which our perspective might be anchored. Here’s one: In 1975, Vladimir Herzog, a journalist born in the former Yugoslavia whose family emigrated to Brazil when he was 9, was called in for questioning by agents of the political police. The prominent editor at TV Cultura was suspected of having ties to the Brazilian Communist Party. On October 25, Herzog dutifully showed up at the police station. He was never seen alive again.

Being banned from social media for a time might be inconvenient, and it might suck for prominent users, but it is not tyranny. A handful of people being barred from social media does not a police state make.

Continue reading.