#their moderation standard based on actual laws

[unpopularfanopinion]

There is a big difference between censorship and moderation. Plus maybe look up the 'slippery slope' fallacy

Moderation: The act of moderating, or of imposing due restraint.

Censorship, the changing or the suppression or prohibition of speech or writing that is deemed subversive of the common good. It occurs in all manifestations of authority to some degree, but in modern times it has been of special importance in its relation to government and the rule of law.

I'm assuming you're responding to the previous post regarding the people advocating for Ao3 to ban an entire subgenre of fanfiction. I'm sorry but the definition of censorship is closer to what those advocates want than the definition of moderation. Because Ao3 does have moderation. If you read the ToS you can learn and understand what their moderation standards are. Which are based on US laws, and are rather simple. If it's legal in the US, it's allowed on Ao3. Which allows for a lot of things not allowed elsewhere and means that moderators personal biases can't seep though to remove stuff that they personally don't like.

If you want to discuss logical fallacies please take the time to learn about "appeals to emotion" specifically the "Wisdom of repugnance"

[hero-israel]

I hear you on the song-and-dance with 'the disputed territories in the West Bank', but to some extent I kinda think the push back on the language choices used to describe Palestine are warranted. The West Bank WAS occupied. By Jordan, and then later by Israel FROM Jordan. And then Israel and Jordan made peace and agreed on their borders, and now the territories in the West Bank are disputed, not occupied. (but also, yeah, sure, end the occupation)

and Gaza is (was, current war notwithstanding) blockaded, not occupied, because a territory is considered occupied when it falls under “effective control of hostile foreign armed forces.” Traditionally, effective control requires three main components: the physical presence of a foreign military without consent; the inability of a local sovereign to exercise control because of foreign forces’ presence; and the imposition of occupying forces’ authority, and like, the only bit that can with any honesty be argued is 'imposition of Israeli authority' in terms of a moderately closed border and an import limitation. (like, yeah, borders be violence, why is cardamon on the prohibited substances list, BUT) you cannot honestly argue that the diagnostics of an occupation were present in Gaza. But us jews are so wily we can, unlike any other people in the world, enact an occupation without ANY OF THE DIAGNOSTIC INDICATORS, according to the EU, and the Red Cross, Amnesty, the African Union and several different UN organs. (in an inverse of the standard; rules for me but not for thee, fucking hypocrites)

Like, it's just frustrating, and I understand being Done and Tired about the attempts to get nuance into language, but also also, the WORDS MEAN THINGS GODAMMIT

(this Words Mean Things Rant brought to you by: Gaza can't be an enclave, godammit, it borders to both Egypt and Israel!)

To be clear - I will and do say that there was no occupation of Gaza after the pullout. Having a border fence between hostile neighbors is not an occupation. Even Hamas admitted publicly that the occupation was over. As you surely know, for the first 8 months after the pullout there was only a rather flimsy fence and no naval blockade at all, and it would have stayed that way if not for the Lost Causers.

In the West Bank, 90+% of the time it is just not a worthwhile argument to have. Especially when I think one of the best ways to show the falsehood of the "apartheid" accusation is how (as my pinned post says) there were no changes in the structure of the occupation itself and you can't just morph one into the other from being bored. When people try to relitigate 1948 and 1967 and "stealing from Palestinians," then I show them why those arguments were false at that point in time and get them to remember Jordan and Jordanians exist. But I feel like there is only so much needle-threading that we can ever expect people to sit still for, and in 2024 when the Israeli army really is dominating territory of people who don't like it and who live under military law instead of civilian law, it is much more an academic exercise than a home run. I don't want to sound like one of those guys who goes "ackshyually it's not pedophilia, it's ephebophilia".

It depressed me to realize that most people don't base their stances around legit evidence or consistent arguments. Nearly everything Jewish people can say to defend themselves against bias and prejudice boils down to "You're being inconsistent, you're treating us unlike other groups!" when just announcing that doesn't bring change. Life is not a college debate class, the heart is not a court of law, there is not actually a judge from a made-for-TV-movie who will listen to us and take our side and translate our accuracy into better lives. Most people don't even try to stick to consistency or principle, they just decide what they want and make up a reason after, and, as the quote says, they "indicate that the time for discussion has passed."

Jewish culture and literature and society famously revolves around dispute and interpretation and commentary. Our mindset, our epistemic interaction with reality, does not match that of the people who want to kill us. All we can do is argue but we cannot make them listen. Our ancestors in Spain and Germany certainly tried, and they were right, and it didn't matter. The sword is mightier than the pen and no one is actually afraid of us. When people say antisemitic things their "punishment" is getting a tour of a Holocaust museum. If our ancestors really had colonized the world and left billions of descendants to reap the rewards, maybe we could have our own version of the Mohammed cartoon approach and make people leave us alone.

[mathlann]

Big Lore Dump be upon ye. Nothing necessarily in-game related but a bunch of stuff that probably won't get its own post.

The von Valancius ancestor that eventually led to Casimira was from a ne'er-do-well bastard line of the family from Scintilla centuries back. This forgotten von Valancius eventually got in trouble with the law, but like many a bastard noble too valuable to kill outright, he was given a gun and some provisions, dropped onto Iocanthos with others of his ilk and abandoned. He married a local and had a few kids before eventually growing restless and trying to amass his own warband. Unfortunately, he lacked the combat and leadership abilities his family and descendants would be known for, and thus he met a grisly end after a good 20 years on the planet. His passing went barely remarked upon and his presence likely would have been erased outright if not for the Sisters of the Orders Famulous at the Abbey of the Dawn keeping a record of it.

Cas' native language is Ashleen/Iocanthan High Gothic, an archaic dialect that isn't spoken off-world but is moderately intelligible with its modern counterpart due to the influences of Imperial settlement. She eventually learns standard High Gothic on its own but she does have fun using her own dialect when talking shit because while someone who knows standard High Gothic may get a vague gist of what she's saying to everyone else it sounds fancy enough that they probably won't catch on so long as her tone doesn't shift.

Vhaebos VI is probably the favorite of Cas' domain planets, despite (or because of) how miserable it is. She has a large manor on the planet and is a regular patron of the arenas. She takes more "rest stops" on Vhaebos VI than on Dargonus or Janus in part because as a positive side-effect of the hostile social and physical environment, many of her most annoying nobles and hangers-on think twice about following her there for any extended period of time.

As she gets more settled in as Rogue Trader Cas does develop a taste for luxury, even though she doesn't ever fully adopt the more cumbersome Imperial styles. She has a large collection of furs and jewelry and at least one of her fancier court gowns is made of color-shifting Vaporian silk. This mantua is probably the closest to what she casually wears on Dargonus, fancy but not too structured.

Hardly anyone has actually seen them in full, but Cas does have tattoos going up her arms and extending back to her shoulder blades. While they are mostly clan/culture related with a few religious motifs thrown in, there's a thin line between God-Emperor-honoring folk tattoos and "this seems Khorne-y" so she keeps her arms covered just to avoid the hassle.

Cas is not very good at showing certain negative emotions (fear, pain, anxiety, etc.) or having to rely on others when she's physically vulnerable. She doesn't necessarily judge other people for having those emotions but as the Leader™ she feels as though it's bad for her to show them so she prefers to ignore or deflect from those feelings when they occur (ie, "the officers don't get to know about my kidnapping, shut up and throw me a party"). The exception to this being if the other person she's talking to is going through the same thing, then the walls can come down a little, like during Heinrix's moment in Commorragh. Beyond that, any attempt to intimidate or be protective of her automatically puts her in fight mode. (Abelard has found a semi-reliable way around this through the art of harrumphing but even then she has a good chance of ignoring him.)

She's very family oriented. The Ashleen are a clan-based people and even beyond the four siblings she grew up with, the idea that wherever she went there was a good chance of being in some proximity to at least one or two distant kin was just her reality. And so going off-world for centuries-removed relatives she's never heard of, only to then have two of those relatives die and the other go off to be evil was deeply unsettling and isolating. Getting cut off from the Imperium, and thus her homeworld later did not help with those feelings in the least, even if it was ultimately for the best.

The above reason is also one of the many as to why the Werserians are Cas' favorite nobles. She and Abelard don't agree on a lot but his family is always reliable and not prone to internal squabbling.

Bonus YM-specific HCs, (for @poetikat lol 💕)

YM is publicly known to be a mutant (by accident of Her Ladyship's warp travel late in her pregnancy, a side-effect of his home planet's environment, or a sign of the God-Emperor's disfavor for his mother's close association with Xenos, depending on who you ask). He can almost be compared to a voidborn with his height and thinness, if not for his coloring being so unnervingly vibrant. And like the voidborn, among people newly introduced/not frequently in contact with him, he's almost universally considered to be somewhat unpleasant to encounter. It wasn't as noticeable when he was an infant/small child and even as an adult there's nothing obviously wrong about him per se but his general person is just....uncanny.

Despite her past flagrant impiety, perhaps in a fit of conscience (or pressing from her Seneschal) Cas had nearly every sanctification, public ceremony, and convention followed to a T before and after her son's arrival. All of this was done on Dargonus, except for his actual birth, which took place in the privacy of Vhaebos VI. The first few months of YM's life were spent there before his official presentation to the court at the capitol, to the dismay and suspicion of the type of nobles and church men who cared about that kind of thing.

Even though Astartia's death does complicate her relationship with the Werserians quite a bit, Cas arranges for some of the younger Werserians to be raised alongside her son in lieu of siblings of his own. She does this in the hopes that he will have some actual close connections to rely on when he eventually takes over the dynasty and these Werserians in turn all receive prestigious positions when they come of age, whether they end up serving on the flagship or not.

YM was an incorrigible child, an absolute terror at the palace from infancy. This slowly got better with age but with the exception of close friends he still maintains a certain capricious meanness and an overall carelessness with other people's well-being that, while probably in-line with most noble scions, has been known to go far enough (with people of status) to be a frequent cause for concern.

Like his mother, he is a frequent patron of Vhaebos VI's arenas and rewards his favorite gladiators handsomely. It's been said that he himself fights in the arena incognito, which he did as an adolescent once or twice due to a dare from friends, but not nearly as often as the rumors say.

Also like Cas, he speaks Ashleen, although not her level of fluency and as an adult acquires some of the same tattoos she has, particularly the clan-specific ones. He also has a few deed-related tattoos similar to those of Cas' sister Eisha, by his choice and as a consequence of his own adventures.

He's also mostly fluent in Aeldari (Drukhari dialect) and conversational in the Asuryani dialect. Neither group particularly likes this. But he is in semi-frequent contact with both factions of Aeldari due to the state of the Protectorate so the skill is useful.

He is a swordsman! Which he's quite good at, although he does have some nasty scars from a few close-calls. There's one vicious one on his left arm that he's especially proud of, from where a Khymera nearly split his upper arm in half diagonally.

His first important "Rogue Trader" journey on the Charybdis happened when he was a teenager, and it's rumored something terrible occurred on board during that time even though nobody actually speaks of what it was. He doesn't return as a regular member of the crew until his thirties.

In the interim decade or so between the Incident and when he started assuming a more hands-on role as heir, he just...disappeared from public life and was unable to be easily contacted. Allegedly he went off to go see the Expanse on his own, but curiously not on a von Valancius ship. Cas never made much of a fuss about it despite only a few blips of contact and various rumored sightings over the years. Eventually he returned, scarred and triumphant, and was welcomed back as though he never left.

[demesa-jump]

How you can manage and implement moderation into your GCP/Firebase apps

In this day and age, many moderation tools are AI-powered, automated or even outsourced internationally. More especially if you’re a smaller firm or a startup , saving on $$$ and manual labor can really make a difference. 

GCP Natural Language Processing API

Biggest concern I have seen is that this can very easily run through the free initial $300 you are given in credits if you aren't careful.

Through this Natural Language processing API, you can utilize custom JSON files and strings to call for specific entity sentiment analyses and syntactic analyses to break up a phrase. By utilizing methods such as analyzeSentiment or analyzeEntity you can really dive deep into the details and specify certain settings within these methods.

GCP’s Translation API can auto-translate strings of text within conversational settings and chat rooms. This can work seamlessly with your other API’s and can provide feature rich experiences for international users. This is especially important if you plan on moving past the anglosphere and your home country as well, adding a net positive to your app’s reach and value. This is also super neat for video games - ROBLOX actually implemented similar tooling during the Pandemic - so users can have automated translation while they enjoy their games.

Within a moderation perspective, this is great if your keyword catching is strictly in one or two languages and you want to moderate in these primary languages themselves.

These two API's I have listed above are really stellar at processing language and helps you have a great start to your moderation journey. I would highly recommend having a linguist or copywriter on board as well if necessary.

Lastly let's talk about Firebase! Firebase is a suite of back-end services for your app that provides hierarchical setup, scripts, Crashlytics, and A/B testing. This is a cheap and effective option if you do not wish to go the AWS or Azure route. 

With Firebase you can access a desktop / web suite of moderation tools so you can manually moderate usernames and posts users input. I personally utilized this feature extensively when I was at Blue Fever and although it is a very effective tool, we did have to input AI-Based tooling based off of a list of words and sentiment / past posts as well. 

Some words we input for the AI (Not an extensive list obviously….) were obviously cuss words and sexually charged words, and any alternate spellings. 

For example, stupid could be also spelled out stewpid, stup1d, stüüpid, etc there are many more examples, but this is a short and sweet one that we potentially put into our list. A lot of younger folks especially will try their best to circumvent rules, so as a custodian to moderation you need to find the fine line between keeping your user-base stickiness and moderating with high quality standards.

Now…. how does this all factor into Privacy Laws, Child Safety etc.?

Apple’s strict requirements force most app developers to keep users 12 years old and up. under that age you should ban or restrict these underage almost entirely.

 Additionally, with many privacy and data laws such as CCPA, GDPR, COPPA and TRUSTe Guidelines, it is going to be considerably difficult to collect data on children to determine if they are actually children (Meaning, themselves or their parents would likely have to tell you). Also, you can't catch everything on an app or website and that is why so many policies and app platforms have strict requirements regarding age boundaries.

Aside from the features app developers can utilize and import into their developer toolkit, inputting the ability for parents to make Parental Accounts and Parent Settings is very important. This is especially important if you want parents of kids under 12 to keep a close eye on their kids internet activity.

Some companies have recommended that forced ID be put in place to circumvent the issues; however, ROBLOX (one such company who implemented this for voice chats during the Pandemic) noticed that many users were being auto-approved with a fake Spongebob ID. This begs the question, "How quality are ID checkers and how far is too far??"

Some teenagers circumvent laws by doing the Spongebob ID move, some just get their parents ID's because most don't have full on Real ID or Drivers Licenses. So this begs another question to be asked, "how far is too far with enforced app rules/age requirements before shutting down these features?" I would recommend some version of ID checking, just not too hardcore to the point where teens feel the need to do this regularly (and it has to not be sloppily implemented.)

Some places such as China banned gaming for more than 3 hours a week a few years ago, and recently Australia banned social media usage for teens under 16. (Sweden is planning something similar...)

References

[wciquota]

Workers Comp For Staffing Agencies In USA

Staffing organizations play a crucial part within the labor showcase, interfacing managers with qualified candidates over different businesses. Given the assorted and frequently high-risk nature of transitory and contract work, specialists stipend protections is basic for staffing offices. This direct investigates the significance of Workers Comp For Staffing Agencies In USA, the scope it gives, and key contemplations for office proprietors.

Significance of Laborers Emolument Protections for Staffing Agencies

Laborers recompense protections could be a lawful prerequisite for most bosses within the USA, counting staffing organizations. It serves to ensure both the organization and its workers by giving money related back in case of work-related wounds or ailments. Here's why it's significant:

Legitimate Compliance:  Government and state laws command specialists remuneration protections to ensure representatives. Non-compliance can result in serious punishments and legitimate results.

Money related Assurance:  The protections covers therapeutic costs and misplaced compensation for representatives harmed on the work, diminishing the money related burden on the organization.

Representative Maintenance:  Giving satisfactory scope makes a difference draw in and hold high-quality candidates, improving the agency's notoriety and unwavering quality.

Hazard Administration:  Laborers emolument protections makes a difference moderate the monetary dangers related with work environment wounds, shielding the agency's monetary soundness.

Scope Given by Specialists Remuneration Protections

Therapeutic Costs:  Covers all fundamental therapeutic medications for work-related injuries or sicknesses, counting specialist visits, healing center remains, surgeries, drugs, and restoration.

Misplaced Compensation:  Gives wage substitution benefits in the event that an worker is incapable to work due to a work-related damage or sickness, making a difference maintain financial soundness amid recuperation.

Inability Benefits:  Offers recompense for brief or changeless incapacities coming about from work-related wounds, supporting the employee's vocation.

Professional Recovery:  Covers the fetched of professional preparing or work situation administrations in the event that an representative cannot return to their past work due to an harm, making a difference them move to modern parts.

Passing Benefits:  Gives passing benefits to the dependents of workers who endure a work-related casualty, counting burial service costs and monetary back.

Key Contemplations for Staffing Offices

State-Specific Controls:  Each state has its possess directions with respect to laborers remuneration protections. Offices must get it and comply with these rules, counting scope limits, detailing methods, and recording due dates.

Representative Classification:  Appropriate classification of workers based on their job duties is fundamental for deciding precise laborers recompense premiums. Misclassification can lead to insufficient scope or higher protections costs.

Hazard Appraisal:  Conducting exhaustive hazard assessments for different work arrangements makes a difference in recognizing potential hazards and actualizing fitting security measures to decrease work environment mischances.

Protections Supplier Choice:  Choosing an protections supplier experienced in taking care of laborers emolument for staffing organizations is significant. Seek for suppliers who offer custom-made scope choices, competitive rates, and fabulous client benefit.

Claims Administration:  Building up effective claims administration strategies guarantees convenient communication and determination of claims, minimizing the affect of working environment wounds on both representatives and the organization.

Best Hones for Overseeing Specialists Remuneration

Security Preparing:  Execute standard security preparing programs for all employees to advance a culture of security and diminish working environment mischances.

Customary Reviews:  Conduct occasional reviews to guarantee compliance with state directions and to distinguish any zones requiring change.

Clear Approaches:  Create clear arrangements and strategies for reporting and overseeing work environment wounds, guaranteeing all representatives are educated and mindful of the forms.

Lock in Workers:  Energize representatives to take an interest in security programs and provide feedback on security hones to ceaselessly improve workplace conditions.

Workers Comp For Staffing Agencies In USA is not just a legal obligation but a fundamental aspect of protecting the workforce and ensuring the agency’s financial health. By understanding the coverage provided, complying with state regulations, and implementing effective risk management strategies, staffing agencies can create a safer work environment for their employees. Prioritizing workers compensation insurance demonstrates a commitment to employee well-being and positions staffing agencies for long-term success in the competitive labor market.

[locustheologicus]

Liberalism and Contextual Theology

This is a very thought-provoking discussion here where I want to offer two gentle critiques. The way these two Catholic thinkers, perhaps in a moderately conservative perspective, engage these topics is valuable for how they consider the philosophical and existential issues we face today. These two Catholic thinkers, Bishop Robert Barron and Professor Patrick Deneen, recognize the relativistic moral landscape that has been at least partially responsible for the social anxieties that many of our youth face. They recognize that the tired conservative/liberal positions offer no real solutions and are contributing to this social reality.

The youth are indeed struggling with this and I applaud these two thinkers for raising the issue and offering a solution that can be found in the Catholic social tradition: a universal standard of virtues and moral framework for our social and political order. A standard that will have meaningful implications for the diverse community of youths as they recreate a new social order.

But their moderately conservative positions betray two important shortcomings that must be addressed.

These two thinkers seem to be blaming modern liberalism as an inherently flawed philosophical system that is responsible for the issues we face. That would be fine if what they defined in the first ten minutes of the video was political liberalism... But it is not! What they, as a point of fact, are defining is libertarianism. That is the current political idea that has gained tremendous traction from those who lived in the 1960's and 1970's. These are the dominant ideas that have dictated contemporary conservative policies (socially and economically) and contemporary liberal policies (poltically and civily). What is missing from this dialogue is the element of liberalism that is very much part of its definition, the idea of contractarianism, the social contract.

Bishop Barron seems to look for a recovery of the "pre-hobbesian sense of the good." He looks for a recovery of the past moral framework and he asks Deneen for signs of hope where this could be found. Deneen does not actually respond to this question directly. Instead, he tells us that most people are not satisfied with the current system and that the young students seem to be the most restless. They do not see a "pre-hobbesian" ideal because that is not emerging. However, what is emerging is a new contextual framework that can, and I believe will, construct a new universal standard for virtues and moral framework based not on a universal ideal that was defined by 17th century Western philosophy and housed within European Universities. What is emerging is a theological and philosophical framework that is emerging from diverse voices from the global south as well as the north. This is the great contribution of contextual theology that is unfortunately dismissed by conservative thinkers without realizing that therein lies the seeds of hope they are seeking.

To respond to the first issue, Lockean Liberalism was not based on the premise that we ougth to exist in a state of absolute freedom, again that is libertarianism. Locke believed that the people must exist within a social contract, a social contract that retained and protected certain individual rights (life, liberty, and property). If the government becomes tyrannical and abuses those rights then the people are not obliged to follow the contract but so long the Government fulfills this obligation than the contract is the law of the land. Lockean liberalism is not relativistic license to do as you wish (as is implied above) but the adherence to the basic premise of human dignity and community participation/subsidiarity, two essential componants of Catholic social teaching.

To further appreciate the ideals of liberalism we should also consult John Rawls. For Rawls, liberalism is a system of justice (fairness) that is attentive to the values of liberty and equality. The following two principles are offered which regulates this system and keeps it from developing into a libertarian (free for all) position. (Rawls, pg. 5)

Each person has an equal claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic rights and liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme for all; and in this scheme the equal political liberties, and only those liberties, are to be guaranteed their fair value.

Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions: first, they are to be attached to positions and offices open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; and second, they are to be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society.

So to the values of dignity and participation we can add the common good and the preferential option for the poor as part of Rawlsian liberalism. What is necessary now, what our two thinkers are struggling with above, is to consider the ideological basis for values and a moral framework. This leads to my second critique.

There is a philosophical error when it is thought that a social framework must be found by recovering some past value-based ideal. The error that is being made is that the concept of cosmopolis is not being recognized. I have talked about this concept in the past, and in the future, I hope to further promote this concept that I first discovered when I read Stephen Toulmin's book titled "Cosmopolis." According to this principle, the state of nature plays an implicit role in dictating how we understand our social systems. How we understand the governing principles of our cosmology (cosmos) implicitly guides how we also understand the principles that govern our social system (polis). The ideals of capitalism and communism were both informed by a Newtonian model, and that is why the young do not connect with it. We no longer live within that cosmological framework. We live in a universe governed by general relativity, quantum mechanics, and string theory.

Barron and Deneen correctly recognized that the youth are very much agitated, depressed, and in a state of anxiety. Furthermore, they are right in saying that the former conservative/liberal arguments are no longer addressing their angst. But instead of thinking that the solution lies in some past ideal. What I would like to suggest is that they, and all who wish to enter this dialogue, should consult the "signs of the times" and consider how the ideological solutions may instead be found in the creative and dynamic theological and philosophical value-based framework that can be found in contextual theologies/philosophies. Asian, African, Latinx, women, and minorties are developing their own epistomological definition of meaning and happiness. Having these reworked within the liberal contributions of Western society may offer a value-based moral/ideological framework that can give the youth a universal standard for values and social ethics.

Unfortunately, this is not typically recognized by conservative voices, including the fairly moderate position exposed by these two white men we see before us. But they do see the problem and through the lens of the Catholic American tradition (which they know very well) they correctly recognize the immense value that our Catholic social tradition has in contributing to a new (rather than a recovered) universal standard. As they point out, the Catholic American tradition recognize that "The founders built better than they knew." I think our Catholic American tradition is correct in making this claim. The founders may have had a culturally limited framework, but their liberal (again, not libertarian) design allowed them to create a system that could emerge and adapt to the times. The Thomas Jefferson Memorial allows us to reflect on this amazing design element.

I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as a civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

The American experiment is far from over, Our founders had the wisdom to create something that could be creatively adapted over and over to the changing times. The two Catholic thinkers above offer us insights for a social conversation we need to have. But this conversation will need to clarify our liberal tradition and be more open to the idea of cosmopolis and contextual voices. As Toulmin tells us:

[timechamlp]

Average Salary in India: Factors and Comprehensive Comparion

India, recognized for its numerous and unexpectedly evolving economy, boasts a huge variety of industries that contribute notably to its overall income. The average revenue in India varies significantly relying on numerous elements together with profession, education, experience, and location. 

Understanding the dynamics of average income in India is essential for HR specialists, business proprietors, and managers. This guide offers an analytical view of the average salaries across numerous industries. 

What is the average salary? 

The average salary, in simple terms, is the sum of all the money earned by people in a particular group or location, divided by the number of people in that group. It gives you a general idea of how much money people typically earn in that specific group or place. 

For Better Umder standing  Let us see an example of a group of five persons in an organization for calculating average salary. 

Person 1: ₹30,000 

Person 2: ₹40,000  Person 3: ₹25,000  Person 4: ₹35,000  Person 5: ₹28,000 

To calculate the average salary, you would add up all these salaries and then divide by the number of people 

So, in this example, the average salary of this group of five people is ₹31,600. 

What is the Average Salary in India? 

The average salary in India is ₹3,87,500 per year or ₹32,840 per month. The average salary typically indicates the Standard of living. 

Salary Ranges in India 

Salaries in India range from 8,080 INR as an entry-level salary to 143,000 INR as the maximum average salary, although the actual maximum salary can be higher. This is not the minimum wage as per the law, but only the lowest salary recorded in an extensive survey by Salary Explorer with numerous participants, encompassing professionals from various regions across the nation. In India, the additional cash compensation averages INR 1,55,350 and it ranges from INR 75,000 to INR 3,10,419. 

What is the Indian Median Salary? 

Generally, the Median income marks the central point of the income scale. The median salary in India is 27,300 INR, indicating that half (50%) of India’s population earns below this amount, and the other half exceeds it. 

Salary Comparisons in India 

To understand the average salary in India, we want to consider various factors, such as profession, education, experience, and place.  Let us see how these factors can affect the salary trends in India. 

By Education 

Education crucial component influencing salaries in India. In general, individuals with better educational qualifications tend to earn more.  According to the Average Salary Survey by FORBES, let us see the average salary by educational level 

Below is a comparison table displaying how education qualifications affect salaries 

Note: All the salaries are only for guidelines. Individual salaries may vary significantly. 

Average Salaries India vs World :  

Based on the country’s  Unemployment status, Standards of living and country’s overall economic  development rate, The United Nations classifies all the countries of the world as  

Developed Economies  

Moderately developed countries (Intransition Economies) 

Developing Economies 

When compared to Developed countries, the Average salary in India is approximately 150% lower. Moderately developed Countries like Ukraine, the Russian Federation, Georgia, Albania and some other  Developing countries like India also have average salaries higher than India. 

This lower average salary trend in India is due to many factors like lower cost of living and the abundance of the talent pool in India. The cost of living in India is much lower than the other developing countries like the US, UK, Germany, etc. Also, lakhs of Engineers are graduating from nearly 4000 or above colleges. So the higher supply of engineers has lowered the demand for the engineers. 

[mostlysignssomeportents]

A systemic (not individual) approach to content moderation

As Mike Masnick is fond of saying, “Content moderation at scale is impossible.” The evidence for that statement is all around us, in the form of innumerable moderation gaffes, howlers and travesties:

Blocking mask-making volunteers to enforce a mask-ad ban;

Removing history videos while trying to purge Holocaust denial;

Deplatforming antiracist skinheads when trying to block racist skinheads;

Removing an image of Captain America punching a Nazi for depicting a Nazi.

But in a forthcoming Harvard Law Review paper, evelyn douek proposes that content moderation at scale can be improved, provided we drop the individual-focused “digital constitutionalism” model in favor of systemic analysis and regulation.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4005326

The paper opens with a blazing, lucid critique of the status quo, the “first wave,” “standard model” that moderation scholars call “New Governors.” In this model, the platforms have a set of speech policies about what you can say, enforced by moderators. This produces a “decision factory” where thousands of human moderators make billions of calls and when they get it wrong, the platform steps in as a kind of courtroom to hear appeals.

This has been a disaster. The calls are often wrong and the appeals process is either so cursory as to be useless or so slow that the thoroughness doesn’t matter. It’s a mistake to conceive of platforms as “a transmission belt implementing rules in an efficient and reliable way, organized around a limited set of hierarchically organized institutions and rights of appeal.”

But more importantly, these individual appeals and the stories of how they go wrong give no picture of what’s happening with speech on the platform as a system, what kind of speech is being systemically downranked or encouraged.

And even more importantly, focusing on how moderators (or filters) react to speech is wildly incomplete, because almost everything that’s important about platforms’ speech regulation happens before the moderator gets involved.

All this is background for douek’s proposal: a “second wave” of regulatory thinking that addresses platform speech regulation as a systemic problem, rather than a bunch of atomized “paradigm cases.”

Douek says the time is ripe for this second wave, because the internet and automated moderation have “made more speech possible, tractable and regulable than ever before.” Second wave regulation treats the whole business as a system, one that has to be understood and tweaked in the round, in a process that douek calls “moving slowly and fixing things.”

So what’s wrong with first-wave moderation? For starters, the focus on human moderator calls misses the vast majority of actual moderation choices, which are fully automated. Facebook removed 933 million pieces of content in 2021!

How does Facebook make 933 millions takedown decisions? Well, for starters, a vast majority of these are based on behavior, not content. Platforms devote a lot of resources to spotting “coordinated” activity — disinformation campaigns, organized harassment.

These takedowns aren’t run by the companies’ moderation teams — they’re under the remit of the security teams. That means that the standard demand for explanations for moderation choices is off-limits for all of these removals. The security teams maintain “security through obscurity” and say that disclosing their methods would help attackers evade them.

Removals aren’t just about harassment and disinfo — vast amounts of content is automatically removed by spam classifiers, a process that “gets almost no attention in content moderation debates.” As Tarleton Gillespie says, “[r]emoving spam is censoring content; it just happens to be content that nearly all users agree should go.”

Much of this automated takedown stuff isn’t just systemic within a single platform — the platforms coordinate with each other and governments to identify and remove objectionable content. Beyond those relationships, third-party fact-checkers are able to remove content without the platforms’ intervention (indeed, the whole deal is that these fact-checkers are independent and thus unsupervised by platforms). Even so, the decison of which fact-checkers to hire, and what their determinations mean for content on the platform is hugely consequential and entirely at the discretion of the platforms’ management.

And of course, “removal” is only the bluntest tool in the content moderator’s toolbox. The primary means of content moderation is downranking — “the number of times we display posts that later may be determined to violate our policies.” This is what Julie Cohen calls “content immoderation.”

Almost no regulatory attention is devoted to content immoderation (notwithstanding the GOP obsession with “shadow banning”) and yet it has all the problems — and advantages — of takedowns. Content immoderation is a locus of exciting stuff, with live proposals to let users control what’s recommends, to mass-delete post comments, and to nominate their own mods.

All this systemic moderation is on the rise, douek says, because the “paradigm case” model doesn’t actually resolve moderation problems. What’s more, these systemic interventions involve a lot of choices — for example, algorithms must be configured to prefer false negatives or false positives. These choices “are insensitive to context and provide little explanation for their decisions.”

It’s also an area that regulators largely ignore, even as they encourage it, imposing “ever-shorter deadlines for platforms to take content down while also expecting context-specific adjudications and procedural protections for users.”

This has real consequences, like censoring posts by Palestinians during violence in Gaza or Syrians’ evidence of war crimes. These errors were foreseeable consequences of the platforms’ choices about where to set the false positive/negative dial. They’re the foreseeable consequences of demanding rapid takedowns.

All of this has prompted loud calls for regulation, with “users feeling disempowered,” and the obvious deficits of a lack of competition and choice “raising concerns about a handful of platforms’ outsized power.”

These problems have created “legitimacy deficits” that make it harder for users’ to accept the platforms mistakes as honest errors, leading to louder calls for regulation. But those calls — and the response — are trapped in a “legalistic discourse” that wants to make the platforms’ speech courts better.

This is grounded in three assumptions:

“speech interests are special and especially resistant to systemic governance”

decisions about speech “must be individualistic”; and

“perfectibility is a necessary and desirable goal of speech regulation.”

Douek describes this as an American framework, with speech rules being “sacred individual rights,” which interferes with the idea of assessing platforms’ speech regulation as grounded in structure and process whose outcomes are best assessed over time.

Of course, the US has a First Amendment tradition (and restriction) that puts strong limits on what kinds of interventions governments can make. Despite this, US governments from local to federal have long been “concerned with the threat that private economic power poses to expressive freedom,” something that has emerged anew as antitrust has surged.

https://locusmag.com/2018/07/cory-doctorow-zucks-empire-of-oily-rags/

This power-focused analysis thinks about speech systemically, and works more like a class action than an individual case. It has to move beyond the obsession with takedown/leave-up decision, and the appeals process. Instead, it has to focus on design choices about fact-checkers, algorithm design and sensitivity. Most of all, we need to break free of the trap of requiring ever-shorter takedowns of ever-broader categories of speech, with stronger rights of appeal for when this goes wrong.

Focusing on individual cases isn’t just impractical, it’s unhelpful, for four reasons:

Individual cases do little to illuminate systemic problems;

Appeals processes do little to fix systemic problems;

Transparency about individual judgments isn’t transparency into system design;

Fixing things for individuals can make them worse for the group.

The individual-focused speech system “creates perverse incentives.. to report ever larger numbers, which is what regulators come to demand and what platforms boast about achieving.”

So if we accept that it’s time to move onto a second-wave paradigm of content regulation, what would that look like?

Douek begins with “separation of functions,” modeled on administrative agencies that break apart “businesses, rule-writers and rule-enforcers.” That would mean putting “a wall between those concerned with the enforcement of content moderation rules and those whose job performance is measured against other metrics, such as product growth and political lobbying.” The enforcers would report to a different chain, disconnected from “product growth or advertising revenue.”

In second-wave regulation, complaints could be channeled through an external regulator that could conduct investigations and sanction companies for failing to make disclosures.

What kind of disclosures? For starters, disclosing “contacts with third-party decisionmakers” -and those third parties should not include government actors with “special reporting channels to flag posts to be taken down to platforms” unless “the frequency and basis of such informal orders appearing in platforms’ transparency reporting.”

Platforms should be required to retain data about decision-making processes and disclose “information about the broader functioning of their systems”:

“distribution of errors in their content moderation that might highlight weak areas in platforms’ enforcement capacities”;

“the effectiveness of interventions other than taking posts down like reducing the distribution of or labelling certain posts”;

“how changing platform design and affordances (for example, making reporting mechanisms easier to use or increasing the number of emoji reactions users can give posts) affects the way users use their services.”

Some of this is now making its way into legislation; the Platform Transparency and Accountability Act,” which has “a conditional safe harbor for platforms from liability for violation of privacy or cybersecurity laws if they exercise reasonable care when providing access in accordance with such mandates.”

Douek proposes annual reporting requirements, forcing companies to disclose their moderation plans. These disclosures must “publicly explain the purpose of their rules, how they will enforce them, and how they will guard against risks to such enforcement.”

Douek argues that this is a powerful means of providing regulators “with basic information they currently lack about the systems they seek to regulate.” She sees four main benefits here:

“Requiring planning forces platforms to think proactively and methodically about potential operational risks” — the opposite of “move fast and break things”;

“Creat[ing] documentation of decisions and their rationales, facilitating future review and accountability”;

“Transparent plans facilitate broader policy learning for regulators and across industry… [showing] industry best (or worst) practices.”

[Facilitating] public involvement and comment.”

Douek acknowledges that all of this is dependent on effective quality assurance, and that this is hard. But: “The only thing worse than trying to define ‘quality’ is not trying.”

When it comes to appeals, douek sees a role for “aggregated claims.” These would review “all adverse decisions in a certain category of rule violation over a certain period.” This would help “identify institutional reform measures that could address system-wide failures or highlight trends and patterns.” This isn’t just a more efficient ways of dealing with claims — it’s a way of fixing systemic problems.

This may all seem dissatisfying, a slow-moving, largely self-regulating process that has few teeth. But douek argues that this is the first step to better regulation — just as the FTC’s practice of forcing companies to publish and stand behind their privacy policies created evidence and political will for privacy regulation. In other words, it’s the essence of “move slow and fix things.”

I found this paper very exciting, especially in its diagnosis of the problems with first-wave content moderation and its identification of the systemic issues that approach left out. That said, I found the critique a lot crisper than the recommendations — which is par for the course, I think. A good analytical framework for understanding systemic problems is a necessary starting point for crafting a remedy. Douek’s done something very important here, but I think there’s lots of work to do on what comes next.

Image: 陳韋邑 (modified) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzlFOEJ1MiA

CC BY 3.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode

[memecucker]

if you’re ever curious about why the US and Saudi Arabia are so tight and buddy buddy look up the history of Saudi Aramco which is the company that has an official monopoly on all oil in Saudi Arabia (and also does overseas ventures) which is 95% owned by the Kingdom of Saudi but you see Saudi Aramco used to simply be called “Aramco” which was short for Arabian-American Oil Company.

Basically after WW1 France and Britain agreed to exclude American oil companies from the parts of the Middle East they took over from the Ottomans. And the newly founded Kingdom Saudi Arabia had emerged victorious from its wars of conquest particularly against the the Hashemite dynasty of Hejaz, who had been the traditional rulers of Mecca for a thousand years and previously been seen as the most powerful rulers in the now modern Saudi borders as well as adhering to a much more moderate and tolerant application of religious law and also were allies of the British. So Standard Oil of California (now Chevron) steps in and wins an oil exploration contract against the British partially because Americans still needed a foothold in Middle Eastern oil and partially because the Saudis may have been suspicious of excessive British influence so they went with the Americans because at this point in time the idea of Americans trying to invade the Middle East was… not a thing quite yet. So Standard Oil of California forms a subsidiary called “California-Arabian Standard Oil” but the Saudis do get SoCal to formally agree that while the subsidiary is run by Americans they will do their best to hire Saudi nationals whenever possible. Also SoCal realizes they need to raise capital and other American oil companies would begin buying up shares of the subsidiary (which is now a joint venture i guess) like Texaco or the Standard Oil that’s now called Exxon. And since it’s not entirely owned by SoCal anymore the name changes to “Arabian-American Oil Company” or “Aramco”. And meanwhile the Saudis have been making sure Aramco holds up to the agreement to hire Saudi nationals and eventually that turns into building training schools and paying scholarships to study engineering in the US so over time more and more higher-up positions are given to Saudi nationals in what is still an American company. But eventually the Yom Kippur War happens in 1973 and that’s actually the first time the US publicly supported and sided with Israel in a war with Arab states in the manner we are now all familiar with. So the Saudis get a little suspicious and begin buying up huge portions of Aramco until eventually the company becomes wholly owned by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia while still retaining its American connections and contacts and shared interests and also it’s not like they were firing Americans or anything like Saudi Aramco’s Board of Directors is still like half Americans or something. And that’s just the corporate economic side of things because while the US and Saudi split on the question of Israel once the Cold War kicks in they remained united on the question of Communism and a desire to prevent it from spreading in traditionally Islamic areas and then military bases and contracts and the Gulf War etc etc

[thecreaturecodex]

Sharn

Image © Wizards of the Coast, by Eva Widermann

[Commissioned by @coldbloodassassin. Before it was a city in Eberron, “sharn” was a monster in the Forgotten Realms. They first appeared in the 2e Ruins of Undermountain boxset, and were one of the few Forgotten Realms creations to benefit from the conversion to 4e, whereupon their full backstory was unveiled. In FR, the sharn created themselves in order to fight against the phaerimm, but since I haven’t statted those up, I made it generic “aberrations” in my text. I had fun with the actual mechanics of this monster--I gave it +6 bonuses to all of its ability scores, and tried to keep its numbers in multiples of 3 whenever I could.]

Sharn CR 10 CN Aberration This bizarre creature looks something like an inverted cone of oily flesh, tapering away to a tail-like point that drags along the ground as it flies. It has three eyeless heads, each with great jaws, and emerging in clusters behind these are nine arms, three to a vertex. Each of these arms has a human-like eye set in the center of the palm.

A sharn is a bizarre creature, as much magic and mind as it is flesh. They were created from an arcane ritual gone awry in ancient times. A cabal of archmages, their cities under siege by magically-gifted aberration, sought to transform themselves into similar creatures in order to be better able to fight back. The ritual worked only too well—entire villages were absorbed in the creation of the first sharns, and thousands of mortals became eighty sharns in an instant. From these eighty sharns were all future sharns born, and the memories of that distant day and its failures still rub around their consciousnesses like a stone inside a shoe.

A sharn spends most of its life in an undifferentiated pool of sharn-stuff, a thick black liquid that is the bodies of multiple individuals. Individual sharns can extrude themselves from this pool in order to interact with the outside world, usually in pursuit of information, magical treasures, or to battle with other aberrations. Sharns grow and learn by eating still-living sapient creatures, whose minds become part of the sharn gestalt. Once an individual sharn has absorbed enough minds, its body splits into two or three individuals, which swiftly regrow a full body. Sharns are highly fractious creatures, and debate even with their own individual memories and thoughts, let alone those of other sharns. Sharn pools will often divide based on disagreements of opinion or philosophy, and may fight each other, but rarely to the death. Because of their physiology, sharns have a very hard time killing other sharns without resorting to hated lawful magic and weapons.

A battle with a sharn is a hectic and confusing experience. Sharns can open what they refer to as “hex portals”—small hexagonal rings of force, studded with eyes, that they can see, fight and cast spells through. All sharns are gifted in the use of multiple weapons, and can cast both arcane and divine spells. Thus, no two fights with sharn are likely to progress in the same way, as they have different tactics based on their particular gifts.  Sharn usually fight to either obtain items or knowledge, and can usually be treated with by generous offers of one or the other. They do not parley with other aberrations, only slay them, and a sharn may be a fountain of lore about these creatures if they can be kept focused long enough to reveal what they know. Those few unfortunates that have tried to read a sharn’s mind to reveal its secrets are exposed to the combined consciousnesses of all the individual personalities and identities inside a sharn, and few minds are hardy enough to survive the information overload.

Sharn CR 10 XP 9,600 CN Large aberration Init +6; Senses all-around vision, darkvision 60 ft., Perception +23 Defense AC 22, touch 16, flat-footed 15 (-1 size, +6 Dex, +1 dodge, +6 natural) hp 126 (12d8+72); regeneration 6 (lawful) Fort +10, Ref +10, Will +14 DR 10/cold iron or lawful; Immune mind-influencing effects, polymorph Defensive Abilities amorphous, archetypal shape, evasion, hostile mind Offense Speed 10 ft., fly 40 ft. (perfect) Melee masterwork falchion +15/+10 (2d4+9/18-20), 2 masterwork falchions +15 (2d4+6/18-20), 3 bites +12 (1d8+3) or 3 triple-claws (3d4+6), 3 bites +12 (1d8+6) Space 10 ft.; Reach 10 ft. Special Attacks double casting, hex portal Spell-like Abilities CL 12th, concentration +18 (+22 casting defensively) At will—clairaudience/clairvoyance Cleric Spells CL 6th, concentration +12 (+16 casting defensively) 3rd—blindness/deafness (DC 19), dispel magic, prayer 2nd—bull’s strength, cure moderate wounds, delay poison, silence (DC 18), spiritual weapon 1st—comprehend languages, cure light wounds, divine favor, protection from law (DC 17), shield of faith 0th—create water, guidance, resistance, stabilize Sorcerer Spells CL 6th, concentration +12 (+16 casting defensively) 3rd (4/day)—fireball (DC 19) 2nd (7/day)—blur, scorching ray 1st (8/day)—grease (DC 17), identify, mage armor, magic missile 0th—acid splash, detect magic, light, mage hand, prestidigitation, read magic, touch of fatigue (DC 16) Statistics Str 22, Dex 22, Con 22, Int 23, Wis 23, Cha 23 Base Atk +9; CMB +16; CMD 33 Feats Arcane Strike, Alertness, Combat Casting, Combat Expertise, Combat Reflexes, Dodge, Eschew Materials (B), Multiattack (B) Skills Bluff +16, Diplomacy +16, Fly +25, Intimidate +19, Knowledge (arcana, dungeoneering, religion, planes) +25, Perception +23, Sense Motive +20, Spellcraft +19, Stealth +15; Racial Modifiers +6 Knowledge (all) Languages Aklo, Common, Dwarven, Elven, telepathy 100 ft (sharns only) SQ aggregate memory, multiweapon mastery, undersized weapons Ecology Environment underground Organization solitary, pair, parliament (3-9) or pool (10-30) Treasure double standard (3 masterwork falchions, other treasure) Special Abilities Archetypal Shape (Ex) A sharn can never change its shape through polymorph effects, and no creature can assume the shape of a sharn using polymorph effects. Aggregate Memory (Ex) A sharn gains a +6 on all Knowledge checks, treats all Knowledge skills as class skills, and can make Knowledge checks untrained without penalty. A sharn is proficient with all simple and martial weapons, as well as with shields. Double Casting (Ex) Because of its fractious mind, a sharn can cast two spells as part of the same full-round action. These spells must be drawn from different spell lists. Hex Portal (Su) As a standard action, a sharn can create a hex portal within 400 feet of itself. Creatures can share a space with a portal without penalty, but the sharn can see and attack through it. A sharn can make attacks with one arm through a hex portal or use it as the point of origin for its spells. Creatures can attack the sharn through the hex portal, but treat it as if it had improved cover. A sharn cannot flank or make attacks of opportunity through its hex portals. A sharn can move one or more hex portals up to 40 feet as a move action. If a portal moves more than 400 feet from a sharn, it is automatically dismissed. A sharn can create up to nine hex portals a day, but may have no more than three open at a time. The hex portal does not take up space and cannot be attacked with normal weapons. A successful dispel magic against CL 12th closes a hex portal, as does a dimensional anchor or disintegrate spell, or anything that explicitly destroys a wall of force. A sharn can open or close a hex portal as a standard action, or can pull itself through a hex portal as a full round action, teleporting to the hex portal’s square and closing the portal behind it. A portal remains for 10 minutes if not dismissed or destroyed Hostile Mind (Ex) A creature trying to read a sharn’s mind must succeed a DC 22 Will save or become feebleminded (as the spell). The save DC is Charisma based. Multiweapon Mastery (Ex) A sharn does not suffer any attack penalty when fighting with multiple weapons. Spells A sharn can cast spells as a 6th level cleric and a 6th level sorcerer. It does not gain any other class abilities from these classes, such as a domain or bloodline. A sharn treats its own body as a holy symbol for the purposes of spell components. Triple-Claw (Ex) A sharn’s triple claws can be used to wield two-handed weapons. It cannot make claw attacks with a triple-claw holding a weapon, as it needs at least one free hand to see with. When using two-handed weapons in its triple claws, it treats its primary weapon as dealing 1.5 times its Strength bonus to damage, and secondary weapons as dealing its Strength bonus to damage.

[mitigatedchaos]

On Having “Whiteness”

(~2,200 words, 11 minutes)

Summary: A metaphysics of “Whiteness” has overtaken actual sociology in the Democrats’ popular consciousness - blinding them to racial interventions that might actually work and taking them off the table of political discussion.

-★★★-

Donald Moss - On Having Whiteness, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (emphasis mine)

Whiteness is a condition one first acquires and then one has—a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which “white” people have a particular susceptibility. The condition is foundational, generating characteristic ways of being in one’s body, in one’s mind, and in one’s world. Parasitic Whiteness renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse. These deformed appetites particularly target nonwhite peoples. Once established, these appetites are nearly impossible to eliminate. Effective treatment consists of a combination of psychic and social-historical interventions. Such interventions can reasonably aim only to reshape Whiteness’s infiltrated appetites—to reduce their intensity, redistribute their aims, and occasionally turn those aims toward the work of reparation. When remembered and represented, the ravages wreaked by the chronic condition can function either as warning (“never again”) or as temptation (“great again”). Memorialization alone, therefore, is no guarantee against regression. There is not yet a permanent cure.

So both @arcticdementor [here] and @samueldays have linked me to this allegedly “peer-reviewed” article.  The Federalist has a bit more context, but it doesn’t really make the situation better.

Race Theory Problems

Obviously, this is a work of sloppy thinking.  The categorization of “white supremacy culture” or “whiteness” used by people like this is vague handwaving that describes being bad at management as “white supremacy culture,” and which in general labels universal human problems, like organizations being resource-constrained, or people being impatient, as somehow uniquely “white.” 

But this sort of article is really what I mean when I say that social justice’s approach to “whiteness” is about “spiritual contamination.” 

Samueldays called it “the ‘I’m not touching you’ of inciting race war,” and I may cover more of his response to it later.  Suffice it to say, it has the same general kind of problems as “stolen land” arguments (where an entire present population’s living area becomes undefined), unbounded “reparations” arguments where no amount of transfers by the designated oppressor are considered to clear the debt, and so on.

This is exactly the sort of material that conservatives are seeking to remove government funding for and prohibit from use in employment training.  This is the kind of material that the Trump Anti-CRT executive order prohibiting racial scapegoating was meant to cover.

Race Theory Definitions

This kind of stuff is, of course, not really defensible, so usually at this point people will argue that 1), “that’s not real critical race theory,” and then 2), “it’s just a few weirdos.”  For those, I would say...

1) If it’s not real “Critical Race Theory,” then what is it?

We can’t measure or disprove Moss’s proposed “Whiteness,” and this malevolent psychic entity said to “deform” white people obviously isn’t based on a comparison with other human populations or historical periods.  When it comes to “insatiable” appetites, one study argued that the Mongol invasions killed so many people that it showed up in the carbon record.

At best, it’s sloppy race science as practiced by an amateur, like twitter users idly speculating whether whites have ‘oppressor epigenetics’ - but with the veneer of official status.  And it has similar risks to proposing that there is such a thing as biologically-inherited class enemy status, and other collective intergenerational justice logic.

Presumably, the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association is intended as a journal of science, or at least serious scholarship, and not of bad racist poetry with no rhyme or meter.

Moss provides a relatively pure example of whatever-this-is. I need to know what it’s called, so we can get rid of it.

Race Theory Prohibitions

2) If it’s just the product of a few race-obssessed weirdos, then it won’t hurt to get rid of it.  So get rid of it.

The actual text [PDF] of the Trump Anti-CRT order does not ban teaching about the Trail of Tears, or Jim Crow, and so on, and both of those topics were taught in school before this recent wave of whatever-this-is was popularized.

Trump’s order banned teaching that any race is inherently guilty or evil due to the actions of their ancestors, and the level of resistance to this has been bizarre.

These teachings don’t seem to provide gains in relatively objective metrics like underrepresented minority test scores (or at least that’s not something I’ve seen - and the continued opposition to standardized tests suggests proponents do not expect it to), so it’s unclear just what of value is going to be lost here. 

Collateral Damage

Samueldays wrote,

Because right now the conservatives talking about "critical race theory" as they fire in the direction of Moss et al. are very important in preventing another race war and you have a moral duty to help them aim, not throw smoke for Moss.

Right now Conservatives are assessing just how much stuff they’re going to have to rip out to make “standardized tests are racist” and “it’s impossible to be racist to white people” stop.  While this may not be the message that Liberals are intending to send, it is the message that many people are receiving.  (I discuss problems with both, and some alternatives to handle them better, in another post.)

Liberals need to get out in front of this.  Sooner is better.

If Conservatives think that they have to gut hostile work environment law in order to avoid their children being taught that they’re permanently morally contaminated by their race, and Liberals have no means to actually close race gaps within a 4-8 year period (and right now it’s slim pickings on that front), Conservatives are just going to gut hostile work environment law.

Aether

From their perspective, why not? 

Everything in the world is only six degrees of separation from something racist.  Anything in the world can be tied to something racist.  (So can anyone.)

But nowhere in this pervasive atmosphere of tying things to racism are there solutions.  There are guesses based on correlations.  Proposals.  But usually when you reach out to grab them, to really get a grip on whether it’s correlation or causation, they dissolve in your hands.  The few that do have any solidity to them are moderate in their success (such as Heckman’s involvement in the Reach Up & Learn study in Jamaica) - and don’t appear to be based on the same style of thinking as shown by Moss and others.

It isn’t just that trying to turn combating an invisible, non-measurable, unfalsifiable, parasitic psychic force into an actual political program would inevitably be oppressive and totalitarian.  It isn’t just that articles like Moss’s are an in-kind donation to the 2024 DeSantis Presidential campaign for that very reason.

It isn’t just that unfalsifiable Metaphysics of Whiteness content like White Privilege Theory has been found to lower sympathy for the poor, and that present diversity training doesn’t work...

Race Content Crowding

This stuff is crowding out legitimate scholarship.  I don’t just mean in terms of funding, tenure track positions, or high-flying magazine coverage - all limited by their nature.  I mean among the base.  I have been interrogating Democrats on Twitter for months, and not a single one has been able to cite a strongly-demonstrated intervention that’s being held back, or even a past one that was conclusively demonstrated to be effective.  They can often recite a list of racial grievances on cue.

Tucker Carlson could run boomer_update.exe on a list of every educational failure since the 1970s, and they would be reduced to sputtering accusations of racism against people who increasingly don’t care.  He could do this tomorrow.  The only thing that prevents this is Tucker Carlson’s conscience.

I discovered the Reach Up & Learn program through Glenn Loury - described as a ‘conservative.’ Scott Alexander, attacked by the New York Times crew, brought some success with multivitamins to my attention.  When I first heard about the Perry Preschool program, I believe it was from someone well to the right of him.

About the only one brought to my attention by the Democratic establishment constellation proper was lead removal, and the gains on that are probably getting tapped out.  The frame it was proposed in was not Critical Race Theorist, as this was likely in 2012. 

As it stands, I’m more likely to find something that works from someone the New York Times would disapprove of than someone they wouldn’t.  Or, as Wesley Yang wrote,

Reality has been contrarian for a while.

Succeed Early

Even if we suppose that Conservatives are inherently racist, Liberals have a duty to support interventions that work.  In fact, the more that Conservatives are a seething, undifferentiated mass of uniform racial hatred, the more important it is that Liberals stick to racial interventions that work, because nobody else is going to fix the problem if Liberals get it wrong.

It isn’t just a matter of resources per year.  It’s also a matter of time.

From Heckman’s website,

Although Perry did not produce long-run gains in IQ, it did create lasting improvements in character skills [...] which consequently improved a number of labor market outcomes and health behaviors as well as reduced criminal activity.

Even if we propose an unlimited amount of funding (which is not the case), people and politicians only have a limited amount of time and attention each year.  Newspapers only publish so many issues with so many pages each week.  Television programs only cover so many hours for so many viewers each day.  Even the dedicated can only read so many books in a year.

Even though the Perry intervention was imperfect, and the sample size was not as large as desirable, every second Democrat I talked to should have been able to answer the question “can you name an effective intervention?” with “what about Perry Preschool?”

Every year that we have entire cottage industries working on and popularizing contentious, ineffective, and backlash-provoking Metaphysics of Whiteness content, based on oversimplified oppressor/oppressed binaries, or theories in which power is held collectively by races as monolithic blobs (rather than modelling power as a network of relations between individuals, in which an individual of any background might be destroyed by the racialized relations in their environment), is another year we haven’t spent that energy on finding or implementing something that actually works.

This isn’t just an individual failure by Democrat voters, who typically have day jobs to focus on - it is a failure by the institutions who are supposed to inform and guide them.  This institutional failure likely contributed to the popularization of Metaphysics of Whiteness content in the first place.

Okay, now what?

Donald Moss is a crackpot.  Metaphysics of Whiteness content is unfalsifiable.  The idea that there is a psychic parasite of “Whiteness” is not a legitimate field of study; it’s parasociology.  The idea that “a sense of urgency” is “white supremacy culture” isn’t much better. [1]

We already tried isolating this content to obscure corners of academia, where individuals with high racial attachment could write about it.  It leaked out. 

We need to get this stuff out of the popular consciousness to make room for stuff that might actually work.  The best way to do that may be to cut off the source.  Since Donald Moss is a crackpot, perhaps it’s time we started treating him, and everyone else like him, as what they are.

People involved in Metaphysics of Whiteness content, like Donald Moss, need to be (figuratively) grabbed by the shoulder, and firmly, but politely, told to stop.  Society has been recklessly handing out race-colored glasses to the general population since around 2014, resulting in a rise in amateur race science, of which both right-wing Twitter users memeing about Italians and Metaphysics of Whiteness participants like Moss are examples.  If they do not stop, they must be stripped of institutional authority.  Metaphysics of Whiteness content is unfalsifiable and we should not be certifying it.

If institutions refuse to reduce the authority of Metaphysics of Whiteness practitioners, those institutions must have their accreditation penalized, and their government funding reduced or eliminated, just as if they insisted on producing study after study on magic or ESP which failed to yield results.  If they do not comply, they must be replaced.

It’s possible that Metaphysics of Whiteness content might have had some obscure, niche function in terms of the exploration of the idea space. 

However, as it has displaced popular knowledge of interventions that might work, and the attention given to them in the political system, Liberals should seek to surgically remove it, at the very least until some more effective interventions see the political light of day.

If not, Conservatives will attempt to remove it with a bludgeon.  "They described an entire race as ‘voracious, insatiable, and perverse,’ and here’s the citation for the exact page where they did that,” is perfect material with which to abolish entire departments.

-★★★-

[1] If we go a bit farther out, scholars of “Decolonization” argue that the field is wholly unconcerned with “settler futurity,” a phrase not much less ominous than describing “whiteness” as “incurable.”  It seems that their entire job should be to answer the very difficult questions they have decided not to.

[reading-writing-revolution]

Heather Cox Richardson

October 3, 2021 (Sunday)

Yesterday, people rallied at more than 600 marches across the country to demonstrate their opposition to Texas’s new restrictions on abortion rights.

Today, the Washington Post broke the story that the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) obtained more than 11.9 million financial records including emails, spreadsheets, contracts, and so on, that reveal a vast international network of financial schemes to hide money from taxation, investigators, creditors, and citizens. The trove is named the Pandora Papers, after the Greek myth of Pandora, who opened a container and released a host of evils upon the world.

The two stories are not unrelated.

Today’s Republican Party would like to end government oversight of wealthy individuals, but such oversight is actually popular. So, to win elections, officials have turned to ginning up their voting base.

That base is fired up by causes they have been taught to see as imperative to make America a free, virtuous country, as it was in their imagined past and as they want it to be again. Since 1972, when President Richard Nixon threw the issue of abortion on the table to attract Catholic Democrats to his standard after the 1970 Kent State shooting cut into his support, Republican politicians have called for an end to the constitutional right to reproductive rights.

Decades of gerrymandering and voter suppression mean that today’s Republicans are less worried about winning moderates to their standard than they are about firing up their base. So today’s Republicans are becoming more and more extreme. The recent Texas abortion bill, the so-called “heartbeat bill,” bans abortion six weeks into a pregnancy—before many women even know they’re pregnant—and it makes no exception for rape or incest.

To make it hard to challenge the new law, the Texas legislature left its enforcement up to individual citizens, leaving no state entity for opponents to sue. The law went into effect on September 1, after the Supreme Court declined to stop it.

But while extremists who back the current Republican Party applaud what is essentially the outlawing of abortion, most Americans don’t like it. According to a new Monmouth poll, only 11% of Americans think abortion should always be illegal. Sixty-two percent want the Roe v. Wade decision to stand; only 29% want it overturned. The Texas law is especially unpopular. Seventy percent of Americans oppose turning the enforcement of the act over to vigilantes, and 81%, including 67% of Republicans, oppose the bill’s provision awarding $10,000 to anyone who wins a suit against someone helping a woman obtain an abortion.

Crucially, Democrats (77%) and Independents (61%) say they have heard a lot about the new Texas law, while only 47% of Republicans say they have.

Republicans have fired up their base, but at the cost of alienating women and their allies who did not truly think that abortion rights were in danger. Those people were in the streets yesterday, illustrating their determination to reclaim a government that listens to what the majority wants.

And that’s where the second story comes in.

A government that answered to a majority rather than an extremist minority would crack down on the growing global elite uncovered by the journalists who pored over the Pandora Papers, an elite that has managed to hide its wealth in offshore accounts (meaning any accounts away from their country of citizenship) thanks to deregulation and lack of oversight.

The internet and a global economy have permitted the rise of a global elite that, as the Pandora Papers reveal, often overlaps with criminality. In January 2011, when he was the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Robert S. Mueller III gave a landmark speech in which he explained how globalization and technology had created “iron triangles” of “organized criminals, corrupt government officials, and business leaders” who were “motivated by money, not ideology.”

The United States government has the power and the ability to take on this anti-democratic global elite. Since he took office, Biden and his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, have made it clear that they consider our foreign policy and our democracy to go hand in hand.

In a speech to the State Department on February 4, Biden said that he would put “America’s most cherished democratic values” back at the center of American diplomacy, “defending freedom, championing opportunity, upholding universal rights, respecting the rule of law, and treating every person with dignity.”

Domestic policy, Biden said, was central to foreign policy. “We will compete from a position of strength by building back better at home,” he said. “When we…rally the nations of the world to defend democracy globally, to push back…authoritarianism’s advance, we’ll be a much more credible partner because of these efforts to shore up our own foundations.”

Those marching yesterday for women’s lives and their constitutional right to abortion were not commenting on the secret web of global finance that lets autocrats hide the enormous wealth they have taken from their people. But they were indeed commenting on governance, in particular whether a majority of the people, or a minority kept in power by passionate extremists, should run our country.

[fuckyeahtx]

Letters From An American: Texas Edition

October 3, 2021

Heather Cox Richardson

Yesterday, people rallied at more than 600 marches across the country to demonstrate their opposition to Texas’s new restrictions on abortion rights.

Today, the Washington Post broke the story that the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) obtained more than 11.9 million financial records including emails, spreadsheets, contracts, and so on, that reveal a vast international network of financial schemes to hide money from taxation, investigators, creditors, and citizens. The trove is named the Pandora Papers, after the Greek myth of Pandora, who opened a container and released a host of evils upon the world.

The two stories are not unrelated.

Today’s Republican Party would like to end government oversight of wealthy individuals, but such oversight is actually popular. So, to win elections, officials have turned to ginning up their voting base.

That base is fired up by causes they have been taught to see as imperative to make America a free, virtuous country, as it was in their imagined past and as they want it to be again. Since 1972, when President Richard Nixon threw the issue of abortion on the table to attract Catholic Democrats to his standard after the 1970 Kent State shooting cut into his support, Republican politicians have called for an end to the constitutional right to reproductive rights.

Decades of gerrymandering and voter suppression mean that today’s Republicans are less worried about winning moderates to their standard than they are about firing up their base. So today’s Republicans are becoming more and more extreme. The recent Texas abortion bill, the so-called “heartbeat bill,” bans abortion six weeks into a pregnancy—before many women even know they’re pregnant—and it makes no exception for rape or incest.

To make it hard to challenge the new law, the Texas legislature left its enforcement up to individual citizens, leaving no state entity for opponents to sue. The law went into effect on September 1, after the Supreme Court declined to stop it.

But while extremists who back the current Republican Party applaud what is essentially the outlawing of abortion, most Americans don’t like it. According to a new Monmouth poll, only 11% of Americans think abortion should always be illegal. Sixty-two percent want the Roe v. Wade decision to stand; only 29% want it overturned. The Texas law is especially unpopular. Seventy percent of Americans oppose turning the enforcement of the act over to vigilantes, and 81%, including 67% of Republicans, oppose the bill’s provision awarding $10,000 to anyone who wins a suit against someone helping a woman obtain an abortion.

Crucially, Democrats (77%) and Independents (61%) say they have heard a lot about the new Texas law, while only 47% of Republicans say they have.

Republicans have fired up their base, but at the cost of alienating women and their allies who did not truly think that abortion rights were in danger. Those people were in the streets yesterday, illustrating their determination to reclaim a government that listens to what the majority wants.

And that’s where the second story comes in.

A government that answered to a majority rather than an extremist minority would crack down on the growing global elite uncovered by the journalists who pored over the Pandora Papers, an elite that has managed to hide its wealth in offshore accounts (meaning any accounts away from their country of citizenship) thanks to deregulation and lack of oversight.

The internet and a global economy have permitted the rise of a global elite that, as the Pandora Papers reveal, often overlaps with criminality. In January 2011, when he was the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Robert S. Mueller III gave a landmark speech in which he explained how globalization and technology had created “iron triangles” of “organized criminals, corrupt government officials, and business leaders” who were “motivated by money, not ideology.”

The United States government has the power and the ability to take on this anti-democratic global elite. Since he took office, Biden and his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, have made it clear that they consider our foreign policy and our democracy to go hand in hand.

In a speech to the State Department on February 4, Biden said that he would put “America’s most cherished democratic values” back at the center of American diplomacy, “defending freedom, championing opportunity, upholding universal rights, respecting the rule of law, and treating every person with dignity.”

Domestic policy, Biden said, was central to foreign policy. “We will compete from a position of strength by building back better at home,” he said. “When we…rally the nations of the world to defend democracy globally, to push back…authoritarianism’s advance, we’ll be a much more credible partner because of these efforts to shore up our own foundations.”

Those marching yesterday for women’s lives and their constitutional right to abortion were not commenting on the secret web of global finance that lets autocrats hide the enormous wealth they have taken from their people. But they were indeed commenting on governance, in particular whether a majority of the people, or a minority kept in power by passionate extremists, should run our country.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

October 3, 2021

Heather Cox Richardson

Yesterday, people rallied at more than 600 marches across the country to demonstrate their opposition to Texas’s new restrictions on abortion rights.

Today, the Washington Post broke the story that the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) obtained more than 11.9 million financial records including emails, spreadsheets, contracts, and so on, that reveal a vast international network of financial schemes to hide money from taxation, investigators, creditors, and citizens. The trove is named the Pandora Papers, after the Greek myth of Pandora, who opened a container and released a host of evils upon the world.

The two stories are not unrelated.

Today’s Republican Party would like to end government oversight of wealthy individuals, but such oversight is actually popular. So, to win elections, officials have turned to ginning up their voting base.

That base is fired up by causes they have been taught to see as imperative to make America a free, virtuous country, as it was in their imagined past and as they want it to be again. Since 1972, when President Richard Nixon threw the issue of abortion on the table to attract Catholic Democrats to his standard after the 1970 Kent State shooting cut into his support, Republican politicians have called for an end to the constitutional right to reproductive rights.

Decades of gerrymandering and voter suppression mean that today’s Republicans are less worried about winning moderates to their standard than they are about firing up their base. So today’s Republicans are becoming more and more extreme. The recent Texas abortion bill, the so-called “heartbeat bill,” bans abortion six weeks into a pregnancy—before many women even know they’re pregnant—and it makes no exception for rape or incest.

To make it hard to challenge the new law, the Texas legislature left its enforcement up to individual citizens, leaving no state entity for opponents to sue. The law went into effect on September 1, after the Supreme Court declined to stop it.

But while extremists who back the current Republican Party applaud what is essentially the outlawing of abortion, most Americans don’t like it. According to a new Monmouth poll, only 11% of Americans think abortion should always be illegal. Sixty-two percent want the Roe v. Wade decision to stand; only 29% want it overturned. The Texas law is especially unpopular. Seventy percent of Americans oppose turning the enforcement of the act over to vigilantes, and 81%, including 67% of Republicans, oppose the bill’s provision awarding $10,000 to anyone who wins a suit against someone helping a woman obtain an abortion.

Crucially, Democrats (77%) and Independents (61%) say they have heard a lot about the new Texas law, while only 47% of Republicans say they have.

Republicans have fired up their base, but at the cost of alienating women and their allies who did not truly think that abortion rights were in danger. Those people were in the streets yesterday, illustrating their determination to reclaim a government that listens to what the majority wants.

And that’s where the second story comes in.

A government that answered to a majority rather than an extremist minority would crack down on the growing global elite uncovered by the journalists who pored over the Pandora Papers, an elite that has managed to hide its wealth in offshore accounts (meaning any accounts away from their country of citizenship) thanks to deregulation and lack of oversight.

The internet and a global economy have permitted the rise of a global elite that, as the Pandora Papers reveal, often overlaps with criminality. In January 2011, when he was the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Robert S. Mueller III gave a landmark speech in which he explained how globalization and technology had created “iron triangles” of “organized criminals, corrupt government officials, and business leaders” who were “motivated by money, not ideology.”

The United States government has the power and the ability to take on this anti-democratic global elite. Since he took office, Biden and his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, have made it clear that they consider our foreign policy and our democracy to go hand in hand.

In a speech to the State Department on February 4, Biden said that he would put “America’s most cherished democratic values” back at the center of American diplomacy, “defending freedom, championing opportunity, upholding universal rights, respecting the rule of law, and treating every person with dignity.”

Domestic policy, Biden said, was central to foreign policy. “We will compete from a position of strength by building back better at home,” he said. “When we…rally the nations of the world to defend democracy globally, to push back…authoritarianism’s advance, we’ll be a much more credible partner because of these efforts to shore up our own foundations.”

Those marching yesterday for women’s lives and their constitutional right to abortion were not commenting on the secret web of global finance that lets autocrats hide the enormous wealth they have taken from their people. But they were indeed commenting on governance, in particular whether a majority of the people, or a minority kept in power by passionate extremists, should run our country.

—

Notes:

https://www.monmouth.edu/polling-institute/reports/monmouthpoll_us_092021/

https://apnews.com/article/abortion-health-texas-laws-election-2020-7f78f6ca27a40bb68b99947a4e63e76a

https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/news/speeches/the-evolving-organized-crime-threat

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2021/pandora-papers-offshore-finance/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/10/03/pandora-papers-investigation-reaction/

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[bopinion]

2021 / 26

Aperçu of the Week:

"If Europe were once united in the sharing of its common inheritance, there would be no limit to the happiness, the prosperity, and the glory which its people would enjoy."

Sir Winston Churchill

Bad News of the Week:

Over the years, the EU has evolved from a purely economic alliance into a community of values. Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union makes this "respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights." And these values must be defended. Unfortunately, not only externally in bilateral relations with the whole world, but increasingly internally. Two incidents of the last week fill me with concern in this regard.

The highest body of the EU is the so-called Council, consisting of the heads of government of all member states. The presidency rotates every 6 months, and since July 1, 2021, it is held by Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Janša. The former constituent republic of socialist Yugoslavia and of it since 2004 first EU member is a European success story. A member of NATO and, since 2007, of the euro zone, Slovenia is now the most prosperous country in the Balkans. According to a 2020 assessment by the Bertelsmann Stiftung, it has achieved above-average success in its economic transformation and political development. And the United Nations Development Program ranks the parliamentary republic among the countries with very high human development.

So the European community of values should actually be in good hands with the head of government of this model student of democratization. Actually. Because Janša, to put it mildly, is polarizing. He repeatedly doubted that global warming in the context of climate change was man-made. He argues for the right of Slovenian citizens to carry firearms. He considers "cultural Marxism" a key threat to the European Union. He congratulated incumbent Donald Trump on his election victory in 2020 before the vote count ended. He has been investigated several times for corruption, once resulting in a prison sentence. He sympathizes with Identitarian movements. He constantly tries to undermine freedom of the press and independence of the judiciary. And and and...

Usually, an EU Council president is expected to moderate, to seek balance, to mediate, to push the general agenda forward, etc. But this agenda currently includes possible sanctions against member states if they do not respect the defined values. The headliner here is, of course, Viktor Orbán. And now Janša has backed Orbán in the dispute over a Hungarian law restricting minors' rights to information on homosexuality. It is to be feared that he will instrumentalize his temporary office - for the first time in its history - to support personal interests. And he will gladly do so against the EU itself.

Another essential body of the EU is the directly elected parliament. In it, the political camps form factions according to their basic orientation, with conservatives, social democrats, liberals and greens dominating. This stable structure, which reflects the preferences of EU citizens, is now facing a challenge: the right-wing populists.

Under the leadership of Marine Le Pen of France's Rassemblement National, Matteo Salvini of Italy's Lega and Viktor Orbán of Hungary's Fidesz, 16 parties explicitly belonging to the right-wing spectrum are preparing to build a new alliance. In addition to the above-mentioned parties, the corresponding parties from Poland, Spain, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Lithuania, Romania, Greece, Bulgaria and the Netherlands are also part of the alliance.

The planned alliance is the "first stone" in the construction of an alliance to "reform Europe," according to the official declaration of intent. This alliance is the "basis of a common cultural and political work," adds Le Pen, Salvini calls the agreement a "charter of values" on the basis of which a Europe is to be built that is based "on freedom and identity instead of bureaucracy and standardization." In other words, they are planning the overthrow.

Good News of the Week:

A fundamental pillar of every democratic legal system is the principle of "giving the accused the benefit of the doubt". Even in ancient Rome, "In dubio pro reo" applied, and it is still true today: everyone must be presumed innocent until proven guilty. That is good and makes sense. In the 19th century, people in this country spoke of preferring to let twelve guilty people go free rather than hang one innocent person. Innocence weighed more than guilt. So far, so civilized.

Another legal principle in ancient Rome was "Ne bis in idem": (You can) not (be accused) twice for the same. This principle, too, has made it into the modern rule of law. Until last week. Because then the German Bundestag decided to change the underlying law. The background to this is the availability today of forensic and criminal technology resources and tools that did not exist in the past. The decision is causing a great deal of discussion among legal experts.

On the one hand, some see it as calling into question the legal authority of the judiciary. After all, the verdict must be valid - forever. Publicist Franziska Augstein (yes, she is his daughter) denounces this with verve under the headline "Forever suspect". The law would subject once accused to lifelong fear. They would face a lifetime of having their case retried. So what? Victims always have to suffer the consequences of a crime for life.

On the other hand, in some cases it is possible to prove guilt after the fact. I can remember a case in which, after twenty years, fiber and DNA traces led to the conviction of a perpetrator who had kidnapped a child and left it to die in captivity. But at that time he was acquitted for lack of evidence (which was technically not usable at that time). And therefore - "Ne bis in idem" - he could not be charged and convicted again. He remained a free man despite proven guilt. How do you want to explain this to the parents of this child? Everything in me bristles.

Other news of the last days: Bill Cosby was released early from prison. He was the first legally convicted celebrity in #metoo. So why was a clearly guilty man who drugged and raped women released early? For one thing, because many of his at least 60 victims were not considered in court because his acts were "time-barred" - another one of those issues that doesn't sit right in my head without complications. On the other hand, because there was a legal "formal error" in the agreement between two prosecutors. I also find it difficult to acknowledge this.

In this respect, I am satisfied that resourceful - and expensive, since it is usually the financial strength of a defendant that determines the quality of his defense (this, too, does not correspond to my sense of justice) - lawyers now have one less legal dodge at their disposal, which is questionable at least in some cases. For there is one principle of jurisprudence that cannot be shaken: proof beyond reasonable doubt. In my opinion, this has to count. And it should count regardless of when it came to light, by whom, and under what circumstances. Likewise victims should have a higher value than (proven!) perpetrators. After all, Justitia is supposed to be blind - and not stupid.

Personal happy moment of the week:

In French, my son got an A on a team assignment. That is remarkable. Because according to his own statement, he "hates" this school subject. Which is a shame, because after all, his stepmother, a French Canadian, and I speak and love this language. However, I have to concede to him that, especially at his age, the teacher is crucial (I just leave it there). And that the first year of a new subject under "pandemic circumstances" is anything but ideal. Nevertheless, his big sister should finally stop picking on this belle langue - after all, she is a role model!

I couldn't care less...

...that Germany has been kicked out of UEFA Euro 2020. The Belgium vs. Italy match on Friday, for example, clearly showed that there are simply much better teams at the moment. And apparently also better coaches - I really don't understand any of this, but some tactical lineups seemed questionable even to me. But that doesn't mean that I would root for England now ;-)

As I write this...

...only with the right hand, I suffer from the so called "Moderna arm" - it's a good thing that as a right-handed person I had the first COVID vaccination put into my left arm. My daughter had still told me to let my arm rotate vigorously in order to avoid exactly that. But when everyone else in the waiting area looked at me a little irritated, I let it go. That was probably a mistake.

[emberbent]

QUESTIONS FOR YOUR OCs

[Originally posted by @cassandrapentayaaaaas, whose name apparently is also Elle, ayyyy. I’ll be filling this out for my Fire Avatar OC Shinza, and maybe also for some other characters later.]

What’s the maximum amount of time your character can sit still with nothing to do?

Previous to her airbending training, Shinza would have had a hard time being still and doing nothing for longer than a few minutes. Not out of a need to burn off energy, but out of a fear of being alone with her thoughts for too long. Now, she can meditate and be still for over an hour, or much longer if she takes short breaks. She sat for eleven hours for her tattoo, which was the longest she’s gone doing nothing.

How easy is it for your character to laugh?

She doesn’t appear to be easily amused - she’s more of a smirker than a laugher if she finds something funny. Unless she’s among people who are close to her, or she’s drinking pear sake.

How do they put themselves to bed at night (reading, singing, thinking?)

Shinza’s one of the lucky ones who falls asleep as soon as she climbs into bed. She doesn’t have to do anything special to fall asleep.

How easy is it to earn their trust?

Hard to say. Maybe moderate? She doesn’t like to reveal much about herself unless she really trusts someone not to abuse that information, which isn’t all that often. She’s self-reliant enough that she doesn’t need others to help her most of the time, which can be seen as untrusting. But really, all it takes is showing compassion and self-awareness to get her to let her guard down.

How easy is it to earn their mistrust?

Fairly easy, since her default mode is not overly trusting.

Do they consider laws flexible, or immovable?

She's always had trouble determining which rules are or should be flexible vs enforced. Now that she’s in a position where she’s more or less exempt from following rules as necessary to keep balance, she’s realizing it’s even more complex than she ever thought. She contemplates often whether she has a duty not to follow the rules she holds others to, or to lead by example and hold herself to those same standards.

What triggers nostalgia for them, most often? Do they enjoy that feeling?

The smell of petrichor mingling with the oily smog of Republic City brings her back to when she was small, and she would walk with her mother, a doctor, every day to the clinic. Her mother would hold her hand, and they’d traverse in silence, except to point out the stray capuchin cats sheltering under the Satos on the street, or Shinza would ask for a treat from the bakery.

What were they told to stop/start doing most often as a child?

Twirling, dancing, spinning around, singing. It wasn’t that her parents discouraged her from these normal activities, but she often didn’t have the presence of mind to refrain in the wrong situations.

Do they swear? Do they remember their first swear word?

Not often; usually to emphasize her point. She distinctly remembers being nine years old and watching someone walk into traffic. A bystander earthbent them out of the way just before a Sato could run them over. She said her first curse word aloud as she rode in a cab with her father. He wasn’t mad.

What lie do they most frequently remember telling? Does it haunt them?

She never got into habitual lying. Too much to remember, too much guilt.

How do they cope with confusion (seek clarification, pretend they understand, etc)?

Lucky for her, she has thousands of past Avatars to talk to. 

How do they deal with an itch found in a place they can’t quite reach?

She has long arms - this isn’t normally an issue.

What color do they think they look best in? Do they actually look best in that color?

Black and shades of red; absolutely.

What animal do they fear most?

Shinza’s not afraid of any animals in a phobia sense, but she does think canyon crawlers are fairly ugly, and she’d hate to meet one.

How do they speak? Is what they say usually thought of on the spot, or do they rehearse it in their mind first?

She thinks before she speaks, but she doesn’t rehearse what she wants to say before the conversation happens. She speaks deliberately and rarely says something she doesn’t mean. 

What makes their stomach turn?

The normal stuff - gore and viscera, bad smells, being anxious or nervous.

Are they easily embarrassed?

Very much so, although she tries not to let it show.

What embarrasses them?

The biggest thing is having her flaws or screw-ups used as an example to a group. She also suffers pretty bad secondhand embarrassment watching others do embarrassing things.

What is their favorite number?

She doesn’t have one.

If they were asked to explain the difference between romantic and platonic or familial love, how would they do so?

She’d explain familial love as distinctly separate from platonic or romantic love in that for her, it comes from a place of duty as well as physical proximity and similarity. Her personality closely matches both of her parents’, so they naturally got along well most of the time, which made them feel close, which she might define as familial love.

She feels there’s very little difference between platonic and romantic love, and that one can easily morph into the other and back. These are based on things outside of physical proximity or biology, like shared interests, a common goal, and sexual attraction. Sometimes it’s as simple as, “I don’t know. I just love them.”

Why do they get up in the morning?

Duty. Responsibility. The sunlight coming in through her window has woken her and she can’t go back to sleep. 

How does jealousy manifest itself in them (they become possessive, they become aloof, etc)?

It manifests as deep sadness and a feeling that there’s a flaw she should fix in herself that will make the situation better. Then it festers into shame for having those emotions or caring at all, and she becomes aloof.

How does envy manifest itself in them (they take what they want, they become resentful, etc)?

She might pine for whatever this other fortunate person has that she doesn’t for a second, but then she shrugs it off.

Is sex something that they’re comfortable speaking about? To whom?

She’s happy to talk about sex in an academic sense with acquaintances, but she’s only comfortable discussing her own experiences with her best friend Nero. Even then, she squirms a little.

What are their thoughts on marriage?

She likes the idea of loving someone so much that you’d enter a legally binding, life-long contract with them, and she certainly sees the financial and social advantages. As to whether she wants to get married herself, she’d be perfectly fine either way.

What is their preferred mode of transportation?

Xia, her dragon companion. Especially now that she’s not afraid of heights or the open air anymore. Plus, they just get each other - no words needed. They had a strong bond from the beginning, but ever since Xia saved Shinza’s ass in Gaoling, Shinza feels closer to her than ever.

What causes them to feel dread?

Knowing that the world is watching every move she makes, and that everything she does (or doesn’t do) will go down in history. Knowing that if she can’t protect herself, she could be the last Avatar.

Would they prefer a lie over an unpleasant truth?

Definitely not. Being lied to is something she has a hard time forgiving, and she’d much rather deal with the ripples of an unpleasant truth than feeling she can’t trust the person keeping the truth from her, and finding out anyway.

Do they usually live up to their own ideals?

No, but Shinza holds herself to impossibly high standards.

Who do they most regret meeting?

Yanyu, the ex-Dai Li agent who her parents hired to block her bending and repress her memories when she was little. Shinza thought Yanyu wanted to meet with her in Gaoling to apologize for her role in letting the world go for so long without its Avatar, but it turned out to be a trap; Yanyu attempted to subdue her and turn her over to The Organization.

Who are they the most glad to have met?

Amrit. She came to him on the Island of the Sun Warriors thinking she was a nonbender, that she couldn’t possibly be the Avatar, and he helped her through that confusion. He unblocked her chi and helped her flame. Maybe he was a little too hard on her during training, but he taught her the value of working til you puke. He’s always had her back, even from the first day.

Do they have a go-to story in conversation? Or a joke?

No. Shinza rarely leads conversations.

Could they be considered lazy?

Not by any stretch. She’s deliberate, diligent, and hard set on doing things right and thoroughly.

How hard is it for them to shake a sense of guilt?

Very, which is detrimental to her role as the Avatar. She doesn’t know yet that she will live with the burden of guilt for her decisions and actions her whole life, or how to be okay with that.

How do they treat the things their friends come to them excited about? Are they supportive?

She’s a supporter and an attentive listener. She does her best to follow up with questions or mention small details later. Unless it’s something like a friend being excited about getting back together with her toxic ex - then she’d be clear about where she stands on the matter. 

Do they actively seek romance, or do they wait for it to fall into their lap?

She’s never sought out romance, but she has experienced and enjoyed it. Romantic love isn’t something she requires to feel happy or validated.

Do they have a system for remembering names, long lists of numbers, things that need to go in a certain order (like anagrams, putting things to melodies, etc)?

She doesn’t have a system - she just remembers things like patterns, numbers, and names. It’s a gift that, oddly enough, she was bullied for in school. Sometimes she forgets that others don’t have such an incredible memory and gets frustrated with them, but she’s working on it.

What memory do they revisit the most often?

Leaving Nero alone at the bar, mouth agape, as two Fire Nation officials all but dragged her out the door with them. She never got to explain to Nero what happened after she figured it all out, and she hasn’t seen her since that day almost two years ago. The guilt eats at her.

How easy is it for them to ignore flaws in other people?

Fairly difficult. She can’t ignore her own flaws, so she’s unable to extend that to others. She’s working on it though, and she’s got Amrit to practice on. No shade tho.

How sensitive are they to their own flaws?

Extremely. She was an only child, so her parents were hawks circling her, watching her every move. They didn’t pick on her on purpose, but it was pretty clear to Shinza that they were disappointed she didn’t go to medical school or join the military. On top of that, she grew up believing she was a nonbender, which culminated in a general, oppressive feeling that she was deeply flawed.

How do they feel about children?

She was an only child and didn’t grow up around her extended family, so she doesn’t have a lot of experience being around kids. Before, she could think of worse things than raising a child of her own. But now, she can’t fathom trying to balance her duties while raising a child.

How badly do they want to reach their end goal?

The shame of leaving the physical and spirit worlds out of balance and being remembered as an ineffective Avatar is unfathomable to her. She’d say she wants it more than anything.

If someone asked them to explain their sexuality, how would they do so?

She’d say she’s sexual, sometimes, and leave it at that.

QUESTIONS FOR CREATORS

A) Why are you excited about this character? 

In every OC, I think there’s at least a little bit of their creator; I didn’t intend for Shinza to end up so similar to myself, but she is. And as I develop my own sense of self, I see that reflected in Shinza when I write her, and that’s pretty exciting.

B) What inspired you to create them? 

I’d been wanting to write an Avatar OC story for a long time, and nothing felt right or fun or exciting until I considered using Shinza, a character I’d had stewing in my head for a while. Once I pictured her in the Avatar world, things started falling into place pretty quickly.

C) Did you have trouble figuring out where they fit in their own story? 

Absolutely. I planned the story from start to finish so I knew where I was headed, but along the way, Emberbent!Shinza started to take shape in unexpected ways and deviate from the original plan. As her personality in this story evolves, I have to figure out her reactions to things, and the ripples from those reactions, from a new perspective. I don’t have a clear view of her transformation arc, because it’s happening in real time along with mine. The (already flimsy) ending I’d intended has been blown to smithereens, and I have no idea how it’ll go - I’m essentially 50% pantsing at this point - but I feel less frustrated knowing I have more room to see what happens.

D) Have they always had the same physical appearance, or have you had to edit how they look? 

She’s had a number of different physical appearances. At one point, she was a monk child in a DND campaign I played in. In the preliminary planning stages of Emberbent, she looked like Nero, her best friend, and was an Earth Avatar.

E) Are they someone you would get along with? Would they get along with you?

I like to think we’d get along, but we’d both have to be okay with natural silence. Neither of us are inclined to lead conversations.

F) What do you feel when you think of your OC (pride, excitement, frustration, etc)?

All of the above. Pride because of how hard she’s worked to get where she is; excitement because of all the horrific and wonderful things she’ll go through to turn her into who she’ll ultimately become; and frustrated because she feels flat to me, so I’m assuming she feels flat to others too.

G) What trait of theirs bothers you the most? 

She can’t see past her own nose yet in terms of her role. It will take some time for her to realize she has to relinquish all of her own desires and happiness to her duty as the Avatar. For now, she’s stuck in selfish-mode, doing her best to help those close to her while trying to maintain her grip on her old ego.

H) What trait do you admire most? 

While she’s still working on seeing things from a broad perspective, she has an innate ability to deeply understand people, their feelings, and the situations they find themselves in. She’ll drop everything in order to help.

I) Do you prefer to keep them in their canon universe? 

Yeah. I’m not into crossover fics... yet.

J) Did you have to manipulate or exclude canon factors to allow them to create their character?

Mmm, I don’t know about manipulating canon, but I definitely extended it and filled in some parts as needed. Since she’s not the Avatar that came directly after Korra, I had to create the character that came between them. And since Shinza’s timeline is well after Korra’s, I had to envision what Republic City and the world would look like 70 years or so in the future.

Edit: Actually, just kidding. I forgot I totally manipulated canon when I figured out a way for Shinza to reconnect with the Avatars before Aang.