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vague-humanoid · 3 months ago

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The role of the death penalty as a toll of the racist system of criminal punishment has been long documented. In the case of Alameda County, California, the inside story of how prosecutors influenced jury selections to increase the likelihood of death penalty convictions demonstrates how the racism of capital punishment remains with us in the 21st century. For decades, prosecutors worked to limit jury participation from Black and Jewish individuals in order to produce juries that were more likely to support capital punishment. Michael Collins, Senior Director of Government Affairs at Color Of Change, joins Rattling the Bars for a revealing discussion on prosecutor misconduct, and what it tells us about the state of the criminal injustice system.

Transcript

Mansa Musa: Welcome to this edition of Rattling The Bars. I’m your host, Mansa Musa.

The death penalty in the United States of America. At one point in time, the Supreme Court had put it on hold because of the manner in which it was being given out. At that time, the way it was being given out is upon a person being found guilty of a capital offense, the judge made the ultimate determination whether they got the death penalty or not.

Throughout the course of litigation and the evolution of the legislative process, the death penalty started taking on the shape of a jury determining whether or not a person gets the death penalty or not after they were sentenced.

What we have now, in this day and age — And when I first heard it, it startled me to even believe that this was taking place — But in California, they have, in certain parts, the death penalty being given out, but more importantly, the death penalty given out by the prosecutor and the courts through their systematic exclusion of people’s juries of their peers.

The prosecutors, along with the courts, have systematically set up a template where they look at anybody that they think is going to be fair and impartial and have them removed from the jury. Subsequently, a lot of men and women are on death row in California.

Here to talk about the abuse of this system and the discovery of the process and exposing it is Michael Collins from Color of Change.

Welcome, Mike.

Michael Collins: To be here. Thank you for having me.

Mansa Musa: Hey, first, tell us a little bit about yourself, then a little bit about your organization before we unpack the issue.

Michael Collins: I’m originally from Scotland, as you can probably tell. In the US since 2010, so like 15 years or so. Was in Baltimore for 10, 12 years off and on, and then I’m now in Atlanta.

Color of Change, where I work, is one of the largest racial justice organizations in the country. I oversee a team that works on state and local policy issues. We do a lot of work on prosecutor accountability and criminal justice reform, which is how we became involved in this death penalty scandal.

Mansa Musa: All right.

And right there, because when I was at the conference in Maryland, [inaudible] Maryland, one of the panelists was one of your colleagues, and the topic they was talking about was prosecutorial misconduct. And in her presentation she talked about, and you can correct me as I go along, in I think it’s Alameda County in California?

Michael Collins: Yep. That’s where Oakland is. Yeah.

Mansa Musa: Right. In Oakland, they had, since 2001, the prosecutors always had set up a system where they systematically excluded minorities, poor people, anyone that they thought would be objective in evaluating the case, they had them excluded, therefore jury nullification, and stacking the jury that resulted in numerous people getting the death penalty.

Talk about this case and how it came about.

Michael Collins: Yeah, it really was shocking when we first heard about it. You know, we had been doing work on prosecutor accountability in Oakland in Alameda County, and there was a prosecutor elected, a Black woman, called Pamela Price, who was elected on a platform of trying to reform the justice system and use prosecutorial discretion to right the wrongs of racial injustice and do more progressive policies within the office.

And she discovered, or one of her staff discovered, that over a period of three or four decades, prosecutors in the office had been systematically excluding Black and Jewish people from death penalty juries.

Now, in other words, how this happened was, when you go into a trial, there’s a process of jury selection, and prosecutors and defense lawyers can strike certain people from juries. Maybe people have seen some of this on TV.

Constitutionally, you are not allowed to strike people for race reasons, for religious reasons. But there was a sense from these prosecutors, who were very tough on crime prosecutors, who wanted to… They saw the death penalty as a trophy, almost, to be achieved, and they wanted to win at all costs.

And so they believed that Black people and Jewish people would be less sympathetic to the death penalty, and more likely, perhaps, to find an individual not guilty. More squeamish, if you like, about finding someone guilty who would then get the death penalty.

And so what Pamela Price, this district attorney, discovered was a series of notes and papers that documented the ways in which individual prosecutors were excluding people from juries in this way and really giving people an unfair trial.

And California has, for a number of years now, had a moratorium on the death penalty. They’ve essentially hit the pause button on the death penalty. But for a number of years it was really a state that carried out the death penalty [cross talk].

Mansa Musa: Yeah, you’re right.

Michael Collins: And also, one of the more startling things about this is Pamela Price, she came in, she discovered these notes. I think her reaction was, this is crazy. How does this happen? And it actually turns out that somebody raised the alarm bell about this as far back as 2004.

A prosecutor in the Oakland office who came out and he was like, listen, I was leading the trainings on this. I was somebody who was part of making these policies. And the admission went before judges, it went before courts of appeals, and they threw it out, they didn’t believe this guy. And they hounded this guy, the death penalty prosecutor, who essentially had a change of heart, and they hounded him out of town. And he now lives in Montana and practices law.

And I think he probably feels a sense of vindication about this, but it’s very troubling for us, the cover-up that’s gone on, and the number of people that are implicated. So far, we know of at least 35 cases of individuals.

The DA is investigating this. It’s probably going to be more than 35 cases. Right? It probably extends beyond the death penalty, to be honest. It probably extends to other, I would say, serious crime cases where, as I say, prosecutors wanted to win at all costs and use any tactic to get a guilty verdict, including, essentially, tampering with the jury.

And we are in a position now where I think what we want is some level of accountability. We want these individuals who have been sentenced to be exonerated. They were given an unfair trial, that’s abundantly clear. The judges and the prosecutors who were involved in this scandal, who stole lives, and who essentially put people on a path to the death penalty, what is the accountability for them? And so that’s something that Color of Change is really pushing.

Mansa Musa: All right, so talk about the… Because now you’re saying over three decades… First, how long has the moratorium been on?

Michael Collins: Since the current governor took office. So I think it’s four or five years.

Mansa Musa: Okay, so four or five years. So prior to that, they was executing people.

Michael Collins: Yes.

Mansa Musa: All right, so how many people, if y’all have this information, how many people have been executed in that period [crosstalk] period?

Michael Collins: We don’t have the numbers on that. I think what we are looking at just now is 35 cases where they’ve identified people who are now serving life sentences as a result of the moratorium. Because when the governor said, we’re not doing the death penalty anymore and hit the pause button on the death penalty…

And again, I’ll stress that it is a pause button, right?

Mansa Musa: Yeah, right, right.

Michael Collins: A new governor, a new person could take office. It’s not like it’s been eliminated. But when we hit the pause button on the death penalty, there were a number of people who had their death penalty convictions converted into life sentences.

And that was how part of this process was uncovered, because Pamela Price, this district attorney, her office was working on what kind of sentence that people, they were working with a judge to try and figure out some sort of solution to these cases where people were having their cases converted to another sentence, like perhaps a life sentence, life without parole, something like that. And in the process of working with a federal judge, that’s when they discovered these notes and files and [crosstalk].

Mansa Musa: Let me ask you this here.

Michael Collins: Yeah.

Mansa Musa: Okay, so I know in the state of Maryland where I served my time at, and I’m in the District of Columbia now, the sentencing mechanism, as I opened up, was a case came out, Furman Act v. United States. That’s the case that… Furman v. United States. That’s the case that they used to change the way the death penalty was being given out back in the ’70s. Because during that time, Andre Davis had just got arrested, so there was a campaign out in California to abolish the death penalty.

But what wound up happening is they had a series of case litigation saying they violated the Eighth Amendment. So what ultimately happened was that the Supreme Court ruled that the way the death penalty was being given out, which was the judge was the sole person that gave it out, they changed it to now they allowed for after the person was found guilty, then the jury would determine whether or not they got the death penalty, that was based on the person that’s being looked at for the death penalty, or have the opportunity to allocute why it shouldn’t be given.

But how was the system set up in California? Is the person found guilty and then given the death penalty? Or is the person found guilty and then they have a sentencing phase? How is the system in California?

Michael Collins: Yeah, I think a person’s found guilty and then there’s a sentencing phase. And there were a lot of articles about this and about the different lawyers in California. I think there’s obviously a movement to end the death penalty, and it’s gathered a lot of momentum in the last five or 10 years.

But I think if you go back to the ’80s and the ’90s especially, this era, whether you were in Maryland or whether you were in California, whether in Kentucky, just across the country, this very tough on crime era and harsh sentences, I think that the death penalty for prosecutors, or what we’ve been told and what we’ve read, the death penalty cases were almost like a prize for the prosecutors [crosstalk] do the cases.

[They were] the most complex cases, it had the most prestige attached to it, and they were really valued on their ability to win these cases. And so they would send their best prosecutors to do these cases. They would ask for the death penalty frequently.

And that’s why we have a situation where, at the very least, we know in a place like Oakland, which is not a huge place, we have 35 cases right now that they’re looking at. One of the cases has already been overturned, the conviction has been quashed for an individual. We expect that to happen in a lot of these cases as they examine the evidence, how much the jury selection was a key factor in the conviction.

But yeah, I mean, it certainly was the case that the death penalty was used very frequently in California.

Mansa Musa: Okay. So the reason why I asked that question, I’m trying, for the purpose of educating our audience, to see at what juncture was the exclusion taking place? Or was it across the board, because [crosstalk] —

Michael Collins: So my understanding is the exclusion took place as they were selecting the jury. You start off with a pool, maybe some of your audience have been selected for jury duty, when you go in and you’re sitting in a room and there will be maybe 100 people, and then eventually they whittle it down to 12 people and some alternates. And in that process, as a prosecutor and as a defense lawyer, you’re striking people from the jury and saying, no, I don’t want this person.

The reasons for doing that are supposed to be ethical and constitutional, like, what do you think of the… You’ll be asked, what do you think of the police? What do you think of law enforcement? Do you trust the judicial process? They’re trying to figure out, are you going to be able to properly serve on this jury? Are you tainted in some way?

But the notes were really about a feeling that Black people were not sympathetic to the death penalty, [they would] not convict. Or Jewish people, because of their beliefs, because of their religion, were also not sympathetic to the death penalty. And so the prosecutors were trained and instructed to make sure, if they found out a person was Jewish, if they had a Jewish last name or something like that, or if a person was Black, ask some questions, figure it out, but essentially get them off the jury.

And there was even a case, I mentioned before, we’re talking a lot about prosecutors, judges were involved in this as well. There was a case where a judge pulled the prosecutor after jury selection into his chambers and said, you have a Jewish person on the jury. What are you doing? Get that person off the jury.

Mansa Musa: Oh my goodness.

Michael Collins: And so the depths of the scandal are beyond prosecutors. It’s a real institutional crisis.

And that’s why we want the governor to get involved, Governor Newsom to get involved and provide resources to investigate this. We want the attorney general to get involved and investigate this. Because this is a very clear and obvious scandal.

And it’s not enough to, in our opinion, re-sentence these individuals, exonerate them. Other people did some very, very shady things and very unethical things and illegal things, and ruined people’s lives. And as far as they were concerned, these people were going to be killed. And so we want to make sure that there’s accountability for that. They treated this like it was a sport, like it was a competition, and people’s lives have been ruined as a result. And we want to make sure that people are held accountable for what they did.

Mansa Musa: Okay, so talk about this prosecutor, the one that came in with this reform. Was this something she campaigned on and then carried it out? What’s her background? What’s your information on her?

Michael Collins: Yeah, it’s a good question.

So Color of Change has worked a lot on trying to reshape the way that prosecutors operate. Historically, prosecutors, they are the most powerful player in the system. They will decide how much bail you get, how long you’re going to be on probation. Everybody likes to imagine trials like judge, jury, and [crosstalk]. Most cases are a guilty plea that are executed by the prosecutor themselves. So they have tremendous power.

And very often, as we’ve seen with this scandal, prosecutors are just old school tough on crime: I’m going to get the heaviest sentence and put this guy away for as long as possible. That was their vision of justice.

And Color of Change, along with a number of other organizations, wanted to elect prosecutors that were more justice oriented, that were more reform minded, that were people who had a different view of the justice system and wanted to use some of that tremendous power within the prosecutor’s office to do good, to do justice, to reform them.

And so roundabouts of 2016, 2017, you saw a lot of prosecutors get elected that were more interested in things like police accountability: Marilyn Mosby in Baltimore, Kim Fox in Chicago. There was also Larry Krasner in Philadelphia.

Mansa Musa: Philadelphia. Right.

Michael Collins: And they came in and they did things like exonerations. They would investigate previous cases where the office itself had convicted somebody and they would find wrongdoing, and then they would overturn that verdict and the person would go free. They did things like non-prosecution of low-level offenses or diversion, stuff like that.

Anyway, Pamela Price came in as the Oakland DA, a historically Black jurisdiction. She herself had a Civil Rights background, was not a prosecutor, and took office really trying to reshape the office after decades of having a tough on crime prosecutor, mostly white-led office that was locking up Black people and throwing away the key. And she came in with a lot more of a nuanced approach.

She didn’t campaign necessarily on this scandal, but I think it’s true to say that a lot of other prosecutors, the traditional tough on crime prosecutors, would’ve discovered these files and been like, just put that back. Forget it.

Because you’re opening a hornet’s nest here, because if you think about… There’s victims involved, there’s family members, there’s cases. Some of these cases are 20, 30 years old. It’s not easy what the office is going to have to go through to reinvestigate these things.

But I think there’s this crop of prosecutors that have a different vision of justice and what justice is, and they do want to hold people accountable for wrongdoing, whether it is somebody who commits a homicide or a prosecutor who commits misconduct or a police killing, they apply that one standard of justice.

And so she was very open and found these files and then approached a federal judge and said to the judge, look, here’s all this evidence that there was this systemic racism, antisemitism that resulted in people getting the death penalty. And the federal judge was the one who said, okay, you need to review all these cases. You need to move forward with a full [inaudible]. So that’s what’s happening right now.

So that’s Pamela Price’s story. Incidentally, she’s actually being recalled in California.

Mansa Musa: Oh yeah, yeah. Larry Krasner. He was like… In Philadelphia, it was the same thing we have with him.

Michael Collins: Yeah, it’s the same thing. There was a big backlash [inaudible] —

Mansa Musa: Kim Fields. Yeah, yeah. Same thing we have with them.

Michael Collins: …Prosecutors in this sort of… You know.

Mansa Musa: Yeah, yeah.

Michael Collins: And it’s hard because if she is recalled in November, I don’t really know what’s going to happen to these cases.

Mansa Musa: Oh, I know. You know what’s going to happen. They’re going to go to the defendants, and they’re going to sweep it up under the rug.

Michael Collins: Yeah. Well, that —

Mansa Musa: But talk about the community, because that’s what led me right into this, because of what you say about her and the prospect that she might be recalled. Talk about y’all organization’s work in educating and mobilizing the community, because ultimately, if the community is engaged in the process because it’s their family members that’s being… Oakland is the birth for the Black Panther Party. Oakland has a rich history of civil disobedience, police brutality. The list goes on and on. Where are y’all at in terms of organizing or mobilizing or having some kind of coalition around this —

Michael Collins: Yeah, we have a coalition on prosecutor accountability where we try and… Prosecutors are part of a very broken system, right? We don’t want to be cheerleaders for these prosecutors. We talk more about accountability, so prosecutor accountability.

So we have a coalition that we’re members of with Ella Baker Center and ACLU and a number of other local groups, where we meet regularly with the DA, but we try and push her to embrace more progressive policies. We try and push her to move more quickly on some death penalty cases. But at the same time, if she’s doing the right thing like she’s doing on these death penalty cases, we’re certainly going to defend her and go out there and support what she’s doing.

Mansa Musa: Right, right, right, right. Because… Yeah. Right.

Michael Collins: So we do community events. I’m actually in New Orleans just now where we’re holding an event with around about 100 folks from across the country from different groups to talk about, including people from Oakland, to talk about, how can you push your prosecutor and what should you do about it?

But as you know, it’s a very tough time for criminal justice reform, right?

Mansa Musa: That’s right. That’s right.

Michael Collins: [Crosstalk] public backlash, we’re coming out of the killing of George Floyd, there was actually a lot of mobilization of people on the streets calling for reform. And very quickly that’s disappeared and we’ve been attacked relentlessly. Anybody who engages in reform, police accountability, the establishment wants rid of them, the conservatives.

And to be honest, especially in a place like California, what we see is a lot of centrist Democrats running scared —

Mansa Musa: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Michael Collins: …Using the same talking points as Donald Trump on crime. And that’s just very unfortunate. So it is an uphill struggle because there’s so much misinformation out there about crime and about prosecutors and about progressive policies.

But we’re trying, we’re trying to educate people. And when you see something like this happen, we try and tell people, look, other prosecutors would look the other way. And that certainly is what happened. As I mentioned before, this scandal goes back decades [inaudible].

Mansa Musa: Yeah, that’s crazy.

Michael Collins: And this woman is in office and she has had [inaudible].

Mansa Musa: But the thing about the thing that, to highlight your point about reform and how we had the upper hand in terms of George Floyd, but George Jackson said that, and he was the best [described] person, he would describe it as reform. All the call for police accountability and divest, all those, the fascists and capitalists, they took them conversations and they twist it, and they twist it to the form like Cop City where we saying like, well, we’re doing this, the bill, to create the reform that you’re talking about, so we want better educating, better training. But you’re trained to be paramilitary.

And the same thing with what’s going on right now in terms of any type of social justice movement around prosecuting misconduct and what they call progressive prosecutors. I interned with a organization that that’s what they did. They got prosecutors, they educated them, got them involved and become progressive prosecutors. But all the progressive prosecutors are just doing what they was mandated to do, to find the truth for justice, search for the truth and justice, all them are being recalled, targeted, and organizations like yourself.

Talk about where y’all at now in terms of y’all next strategy around this issue.

Michael Collins: So we are having conversations with the attorney general’s office because the attorney general plays this role where they themselves can identify that misconduct has happened, the unconstitutional jury instructions, and they can make a ruling. And they have more resources and more [inaudible] than the local DA.

So we met two weeks ago, I think, with the attorney general’s office to try and push them to get more involved. We’re pushing the governor to dedicate more resources and get more involved in this, somebody who himself opposes the death penalty. And we’re trying to keep the drum beat going in terms of attention. Good organizations like you guys, really appreciate you reaching out to us on this because it is so important that more people know about this.

I’m always surprised that it isn’t a bigger story. When I found out about this, I was like, oh, this is going to be front page.

Mansa Musa: Right, right, right. It should be! Yeah. Yeah.

Michael Collins: But I guess there’s so much going on just now, I don’t know, you never can tell what’s going to [inaudible].

Mansa Musa: But in terms of, how can our viewers and listeners get in touch with you, and tell them how, if they want to support y’all efforts, what they can do to [inaudible].

Michael Collins: Yeah, so Color of Change has a website called Winning Justice [winningjustice.org], which is our prosecutor accountability work. And if you go on there, you’ll see a number of actions that people can take around this death penalty scandal, even with their own local prosecutors, trying to get involved, set up coalitions, actions that can be taken where you can push your own prosecutor, whether they’re progressive or not, to do more justice and engage in [crosstalk].

So yeah, Winning Justice is our website. And if you search for it, you’ll find it and you’ll see a ton of actions and our positions on a bunch of different issues and what we try and do with prosecutors to get them to engage more in reform.

Mansa Musa: Well, thank you, Mike.

There you have it. The Real News Rattling the Bars. It might be strange, it really might be a stretch of your imagination to believe that elected officials would actually say that if you are Black and you are Jewish, that you don’t have a right to serve on the jury because you might be sympathetic to the defendant, be it the death penalty, be it the defendant’s economic and social conditions.

But because they think that you might be sympathetic to that, that is saying like, well, you might just be objective to see that it’s a set of circumstances that contributed to the outcome of the charge. But no, as opposed to do that and search for the truth, what I do as a prosecutor, I put a playbook together and say, these people, under all circumstances, cannot serve on the jury, and do it for over three decades, not knowing how many people has been executed as a result of this malicious behavior.

Yet ain’t nobody being charged, ain’t nobody being indicted, ain’t nobody being fired. They’re being awarded a medal of honor for this dishonorable act.

We ask that you look into this matter and make a determination. Do you want your tax dollars to support this type of behavior? We ask that you look into this matter and check out what Color of Change has to offer in terms of their advocacy and see if it’s something that you might want to get involved with.

Thanks, Mike. Thank you for coming on.

Michael Collins: I appreciate it. Thank you for your time.

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mariacallous · 5 months ago

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Of the many missteps the United States made in its two-decade war in Afghanistan, one of the early ones involved a missed opportunity with the Taliban. In December 2001, just weeks after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the Taliban made an offer to the Bush administration: Its fighters would be willing to lay down their arms, provided they could live “in dignity” in their homes without being pursued and detained.

The offer was made in the form of a message to Afghan political leader Hamid Karzai. Had it been accepted, it may have prevented years of bloodshed and a long American occupation that ended in ignominy. But the United States at the time was reeling from the attacks of 9/11 and determined to eviscerate the group that had hosted al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and refused to hand him over. U.S. officials did not even respond to the offer.

Zalmay Khalilzad, a U.S. diplomat who dealt with Afghanistan for years, had a chance to ask the Taliban about that early truce offer while negotiating with the group much later—in 2021. He was struck by the response. “They thought that 20 years of war and all the loss of life on all sides was due to that mistake, as they saw it.”

This week marks three years since the Taliban marched on Kabul and regained control of Afghanistan. The hasty American retreat—and specifically the scenes of chaos at the Kabul airport—stand as a foreign-policy debacle for the Biden administration.

But America’s failure in Afghanistan is a much longer story. To try to understand it, Foreign Policy set out to explore why for two decades some of the world’s most experienced negotiators failed to reach an agreement that would have brought lasting peace to the country. The result of the reporting is a seven-episode season of our podcast, The Negotiators, produced in partnership with Doha Debates, and including interviews with key U.S., Afghan, and Taliban figures. You can hear it on our website or on any of the podcast platforms.

Based on conversations with the main actors, it is a story of misunderstandings, missed opportunities, and complacency—coupled with an American predilection for military action over diplomacy following the shock of 9/11. And while the Taliban were no pacifists themselves, they did at least show an early readiness to negotiate.

The misunderstandings and missed opportunities began to stack up in the closing stages of the U.S. invasion, when the Bush administration had the Taliban on the run and its focus was starting to shift toward Iraq. Uninterested in what it called “nation-building,” the administration asked the United Nations to shoulder the task of creating a new political order.

The result was a hastily convened conference in December 2001 in the German city of Bonn, which anointed Karzai as the new interim leader. But in line with U.S. wishes, the Taliban were excluded from the cross-section of Afghan political groups invited to attend.

For the U.N. and most of the Afghan delegates, the meeting was an opportunity to launch a peace process that would end the country’s forever war—which had been underway since the Soviet invasion in the late 1970s.

But for the Bush administration, the Bonn conference was simply a means “to consolidate victory in the war on terror,” according to American political scientist Barnett Rubin, who was then advising the U.N. envoy in charge of the meeting. “You can look through all the statements of all U.S. officials,” he said. “You will not find a word about peace in Afghanistan.”

That new order, agreed upon at the Bonn conference, did include plans for elections and a new constitution enshrining—among other things—rights for women. It also ushered in a period of optimism in Afghanistan, with millions of Afghan exiles returning home over the next few years, hopeful at that point that their country was on a path to stability with the West’s support.

But the Bonn agreement, patched together quickly, ended up cementing old divisions and creating new ones. “The underlying political issues were not even articulated at Bonn, let alone resolved,” Rubin said. It led directly to the Taliban taking up arms again, aided by the group’s sponsors in neighboring Pakistan, who also felt sidelined.

In response, the United States doubled down on its counterterrorism goal of trying to destroy the Taliban. Even figures who had been trying to maintain a dialogue were arrested, such as the Taliban’s former ambassador to Pakistan, Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef.

In the years that followed, a weak, fractured, and aid-dependent Afghan government would struggle as the Taliban’s insurgency expanded. Their support grew as the death toll from U.S. night raids and airstrikes rose. But it was the Taliban, along with some of America’s European allies, who were first to revive efforts to talk.

One of those allies was Norway, which had troops in Afghanistan but also experience mediating in other conflicts. Lisa Golden, director of the Norwegian Foreign Ministry’s Peace and Reconciliation Department, said her government had quickly concluded that “a purely military solution wasn’t going to bring peace and stability to Afghanistan.” The ties it built up with Taliban representatives led to a series of meetings in hotel rooms, “with the fruit basket that they provided between us,” Golden recalled.

To show his support for the talks, Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar dispatched a trusted aide in 2009 to establish contact with both U.S. and European officials.

But nearly a decade into the Afghan war, entrenched American attitudes toward the Taliban made it difficult to get any talks started. Because of the risk that the United States would detain him and bundle him off to Guantánamo Bay, the aide, Tayyab Agha, had to work through intermediaries and travel clandestinely to the Middle East to set up meetings.

President Barack Obama had inherited the war by now and appointed veteran U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke as his envoy for the region. Part of Holbrooke’s brief was to weigh talking to the Taliban, and he brought in Rubin as one of his advisors. But the United States still had “no policy toward a political settlement,” said Rubin, nor on how to engage with the Taliban.

When U.S. officials finally got the go-ahead to meet, it was only Agha, the Taliban emissary, who had a set of proposals and demands—the American side came empty-handed. Holbrooke’s sudden death, in late 2010, again stalled this tentative U.S. attempt to talk to the Taliban. And when his replacement was appointed, Rubin and his colleagues found themselves undermined by leaks from the Pentagon and the intelligence community, who were putting their hopes in the U.S. troop surge then underway, not peacemaking. “Most of the government was against us,” Rubin said.

And so it went, with misunderstandings and disagreements snarling efforts to promote talks, while the bloodshed mounted. A deal for the Taliban to open a political office in Qatar in 2013 fell apart when the Afghan government objected to its quasi-official status. By then, it was two years since the United States had killed bin Laden and the Pentagon was reducing its troop count, with plans for Afghan government forces to take the lead. But as their spokesperson, Suhail Shaheen, boasted at the time, the Taliban’s power had only increased.

President Donald Trump brought a different approach to the White House—a determination to withdraw American troops no matter what it meant for the Afghan government. But by then, U.S. leverage had weakened. “Instead of trying to negotiate at the apex of U.S. power and the nadir of Taliban power and capability in Afghanistan, we finally got serious about it as the U.S. was clearly on the way out the door and the Taliban was making steady advances,” said Laurel Miller, who served as acting U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan at the start of the Trump administration.

Trump instructed Khalilzad to negotiate a withdrawal—but that meant that the chief U.S. concern was getting out safely, not achieving an Afghan peace settlement. This was underlined by the fact that only American and Taliban negotiators met in the early stages, consigning the Afghan government to the sidelines. The arrangement mirrored the way the Taliban were left out at Bonn in 2001.

The United States and the Taliban did manage to strike a deal: the Doha Accord, which was signed in February 2020. It was supposed to be followed by power-sharing negotiations between the Taliban and the Afghan government. But since the United States had already agreed on a date for withdrawing its forces, the Taliban had no real incentive to bargain further. “It made it very easy for the Taliban just to wait us out,” said Gen. Joseph Votel, head of U.S. Central Command from 2016 to 2019.

Hamdullah Mohib, who served as the national security advisor to Afghan President Ashraf Ghani at the time, accused Khalilzad of going behind the Afghan government’s back in his negotiations, calling it colonial behavior.

Khalilzad, in an extended interview for the podcast, rejected these accusations and insisted he kept Ghani and his officials fully informed. But he acknowledged “there was a conscious decision” not to tie America’s withdrawal to an agreement between the Ghani government and the Taliban, because of concerns that any linkage would delay its exit. Ghani’s government struggled to adjust to the new reality created by the agreement—and failed to strike a deal with the Taliban.

For older Afghans who had lived under the first Taliban regime and others who had prospered under the umbrella of the 20-year U.S. occupation, the group’s dramatic return to power in August 2021 was devastating. Many Afghans swarmed the Kabul airport to board evacuation flights. Afghan women braced for a new reality—with severe restrictions imposed on their everyday lives.

Three years later, girls above grade six are still not allowed to attend school. While the international community pressures the Taliban to relax the restrictions, the group chafes at the West’s continued embargo and its refusal to recognize its government.

In the interview, Khalilzad conceded that Afghanistan had been a lesson for the United States in “the limits of what military force can achieve.” Washington had made many mistakes in its war on terror after 9/11, in both Iraq and Afghanistan, he said. “The policies that we pursued, the forces we strengthened, in a significant way contributed to the changes that were inconsistent with our values and, arguably, at least after a certain period, with our interests as well.”

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ukrfeminism · 1 year ago

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Scotland’s education secretary ordered a conference on school violence within 48 hours of being sent a video of a girl being lured into a changing room, temporarily blinded with Coke and beaten about the head and face as classmates watched.

Jenny Gilruth and other ministers were bombarded with emails and letters cataloguing assaults on pupils before they decided to act on the problem.

At one point in early 2023, parents, youngsters and staff were sending messages, often containing videos of attacks from social media, several times a week, according to more than 100 pages of correspondence released to The Scotsman under freedom of information laws.

The video of the child being thrashed in the changing room was sent to Gilruth after she took up her job, by a distraught parent who said their daughter had been the victim of “a premeditated attack”.

They feared their child’s life was “at risk”, when — unable to see because of the soft drink in her eyes — other pupils started “kicking her in the face and head, bouncing her head off a wall and kicking her in other areas”.

Other parents outlined allegations of sexual assault, of a primary pupil who was “dragged” into school toilets before being kicked unconscious, and of an assault so serious it “could easily have left the pupil for dead”.

Gilruth, a former teacher, was appointed in March and ordered her summit in May. The government has announced a series of responses.

A study in November found two thirds of staff at more than 500 Scottish schools surveyed had encountered verbal abuse in the previous week. Another 59 per cent had dealt with violence between pupils in the past seven days.

The study’s authors described “pupils persistently infringing rules, making cheeky or impertinent remarks, engaging in general rowdiness, mucking about and deliberately excluding others”. Discipline, the experts authors concluded, had got worse since 2016.

The official report raised particular concern about behaviour at primary schools, which was also reflected in messages to ministers. A parent got in touch with the government to describe a “drastic increase in the level of bullying and violence within the school grounds” at one primary.

Much of the debate on school violence has focused on controversy around low levels of exclusions. School leaders tend not to send disruptive students home, preferring what is called “restorative practice”.

This stance was raised by some of those complaining to the government. “The policy is not working. It is creating tensions between education staff, police and the community,” one correspondent said.

Some teachers and psychologists argue that excessive use of exclusions and suspensions can cause more trouble.

There are also concerns about internet culture, with many incidents being filmed and uploaded to social media and some episodes of bullying or violence being linked to online bigotry against women and girls or minorities.

A Scottish government spokesman said: “Scotland’s schools should be safe learning environments for all. Violent and abusive behaviour towards pupils or staff is completely unacceptable.

“The education secretary has been clear that this must be improved, and has set out five steps to address concerns around behaviour, including bringing forward a national action plan to set out a range of actions at national, local and school level, and a dedicated approach to responding to issues surrounding misogyny.”

#Articles #community #Education

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brf-rumortrackinganon · 9 months ago

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I keep getting called a Karen by a few women at my work and I don’t know what to do, as I am a white woman and the women bullying me are in fact black women, and I’ve not done anything other than just started my new job there and all I can think is that they didn’t like me asking questions about what it’s like there etc. and I didn’t say or do anything that can be considered or said to be racist? One of them said as we were finishing that nobody would side with a white woman over them and they’d spread my name online and end me. I’m seriously depressed about this whole situation as my new job was a move and promotion that I wanted for a long time and now with these women targeting me I don’t know what to do. As who will believe me as it doesn’t seem like these sort of women bullying me are ever going to be stopped doing what they’re doing to innocent women like me that have seriously not done anything wrong as even though I’m a left wing progressive woman I don’t feel that non-minorities are listened to by these sort of faux claims of racism, sexism and bullying /abuse etc.

First, if you haven't already, you need to loop your boss and HR in immediately. Right now. If your boss or HR admin is one of these ladies, go above her. Stick just to the facts about what happened when you report what's happening. If you already have reported it, follow up. Say "The issues I reported to you on XX date are still happening and it's still causing (or now causing) X, Y, Z impact to A, B, C deliverables/results, and they are also now making B and C threats of retaliation. What suggestions do you have to address this?"

Second, lock your social media down tight. Restrict your visibility to friends only. Exclude your accounts/profiles from searches.

Third, document. Document, document, document. Every interaction you have with these ladies. Everything you've said, everything they've said, as verbatim as possible as you can remember. Include dates, times, locations, and witnesses/bystanders. If there's any harassment over messages (emails, texts, Slack, etc.) include screenshots in your write-ups. Do it immediately after every interaction you have with each one of them, whether individually or in groups. Also document every discussion you've had with your boss(es) and/or HR about these ladies/these situations too.

After writing it up, immediately email it to yourself - your work email and your personal email. If you have your own printer, print them out too and keep paper files in a locked drawer the ladies don't have access to or at your home.

This documentation is important because it creates a paper trail. If the ladies escalate, you have documentation proving your role (or lack thereof). If the company fails to protect you, you have documentation describing and showing what they didn't do.

I'm just going to be direct here. We live in a time where white people - white women especially - have to be very careful about what we say and do. It doesn't matter what our allyship is or our politics or what we think is right or how much credibility someone does or doesn't have. So when you make these reports, when you do this documentation, leave all of that out of it. Stick only to the facts, which is "I was in Conference Room 1 with Jane, Lisa, Sue, and Joe on Tuesday, April 2, 2024, for a discussion about X that took place between 1:30pm - 2:15pm. {{Discussion summary}} At approximately 2:15pm when the meeting ended, I said A. Lisa said B, then Joe said C. Our interaction ended at approximately 2:20pm when I returned to my office alone." Leave the feelings out, leave the justification out, leave your perspective out, leave your allyship and your politics out. Stick only to the facts.

If I had to guess about what's happening here, it's probably that one of those ladies applied for your job, didn't get the position, and now she's taking it out on you and enlisted her friends to help.

And if you'd like more help, take a look at Ask A Manager. She's an HR manager who has a ton of experience in managing people and the blog is an amazing resource for any/all kinds of career advice. Here are a bunch of here pages about dealing with bullies and toxic colleagues that you might find helpful as well.

#anon advice

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cloverplayssnakegame · 3 months ago

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The Laurel Class President and the Great Plan of Happiness

It was late September 2019, and I was around the age of 16. I was invited into my bishop's office, and he offered me the calling of Laurell class president. I accepted the calling because it was surely from God, and I waited for the bishop to set me apart as president of the Laurel class. I fasted and prayed to have the wisdom to be a good and faithful servant to my fellow young women and my Heavenly Father.

Two weeks later, during the women’s session of the General Conference, it was announced that there would be no Laurels, Mia Maids, or Beehives and that wards would instead be allowed to set up classes however deemed necessary.

I waited roughly four months for the bishop to decide whether I should be sustained as a young women's leader. During that time, I still went to meetings as if I was going to be sustained and did the responsibilities as a class president all without proper recognition. He pulled me into an empty classroom sometime in early January of 2020; he told me that in the time it took to figure out how to distribute the Young Women's classes, he realized that one of my friends was meant to be class president instead. I took this graciously. It was from Heavenly Father, after all, and accepted my calling.

I was the second counselor

Serving under a female class president

Serving under a female young women's president

Serving under a male bishop

Serving under a male stake president

Serving under an all-male regional quorum of the seventy

Serving under an all-male general quorum of the seventy

Serving under the all-male quorum of the twelve apostles

Serving under the male first presidency

Serving under a male prophet.

Presumably, that male prophet serves under God.

· · ─────── ·𖥸· ─────── · ·

There is a story in the New Testament about a woman with an issue of blood. When she hears about Jesus, she finds him, and she touches his robe and her blood dries up. Jesus tells her it wasn't his power but her faith that made her whole. That was the simplified version of the story I was told as a child, at least. It was taught to me as a lesson to have faith in the church and in our Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ.

Now, as I'm older, some would call me cynical; I would simply say that I'm more precise in my hope.

It is important to note that menstrual blood was considered ritually unclean, and women were not to be touched while they were bleeding. A woman who is chronically bleeding like the woman in the story, would basically be unable to join in her society. So it is significant that this woman felt that she could feel worthy to touch someone she believed to be a prophet, and Jesus did not feel insulted by touching someone who is a cultural outcast. If I were to be tasked with teaching a primary lesson about the woman with an issue of blood I would not try to wow them with the idea that there are magical men within the church and we can be made whole by having faith in them. I would liken it to their lives which should hopefully be somewhere in reality. I would tell them that this woman would not have needed a literal act of God if she had a place within her community, and purposely including the excluded is a radical and Christlike act that can change a person's life.

Maybe that's why I probably won't be in charge of teaching primary any time soon,

· · ─────── ·𖥸· ─────── · ·

Nearer, my God, to Thee, nearer to Thee!

E’en though it be a cross that raiseth me,

Still, all my song shall be, nearer, my God, to Thee.

Nearer, my God, to Thee, nearer to Thee!

· · ─────── ·𖥸· ─────── · ·

“I bless you the day will come for you to enter the Temple to receive the eternal covenants Heavenly Father would have you make with Him. I, also, bless you to make and keep sacred covenants with your husband and sustain, support, and love him. He in turn, I promise you, will love you and enjoy the life you build together”

~Heavenly Father

Within a Mormon context, the word sustain has a particular meaning. Whenever a new person is given a calling the members of the ward will be asked to raise their arms to the square to sustain the leadership. This gives the illusion of democracy. Weirdly it also serves as a reminder that the Church’s leadership only has power to the extent the membership feeds it. Within this paragraph of my patriarchal blessing, I am blessed that I will find a man who I will sustain as my leader and I will support and love him. This isn't a commandment or advice or a request this is a blessing; Divine providence states I will one day stumble into a man and feel that he is worthy enough to sustain, support, and love as much as- or more than- I sustain support and love God. My promise to follow an all-knowing all-powerful deity is placed in the same breath as my calling to marry a man.

I couldn't physically throw away my patriarchal blessing. Some remaining malignant scrupulosity simply wouldn't let me get rid of it. I kept it tucked away at first when I got to college. I felt a bit as if I had buried McKenna Johnson the Laurel Class President beneath the floorboards of my dorm. She whispers sometimes about the life she should be living. Her heartbeat still rings in my ears though it gets softer and softer with each passing day. I let my patriarchal blessing sit alone and unread for a while as I reconstructed my life. I made it into a snowflake an art form based on creating beauty and meaning by cutting something apart. I used a cheap tarot deck I wasn't using, to make a suitable background. I have the galaxy-themed back of the cards cut into the predictions for my life. Because the Universe always finds a way to remind us that it has no respect for our small minds' view of the future.

· · ─────── ·𖥸· ─────── · ·

In my senior year of high school, I started writing a story that I ultimately dropped and abandoned. It was about two sister missionaries who fell in love. The story would need to end in a sad way where the girls go their separate ways because they have a sacred duty to their heavenly father. The story was revolutionary in my mind because I would allow the girls one chaste little kiss, and they don't regret it and appreciate the lessons they learned from each other. I did not fully know that sister missionaries are not meant to have first names for the eighteen months they spend as missionaries. So it was, ultimately, a useless task to figure out meaningful names for the star-crossed lovers. I named the junior companion Rosemary, which would later be shortened to Rose as she grows as a character. She goes from being called a herb, which is meant to be diced and consumed, to a flower that is simply meant to be grown and appreciated for its simple beauty. Tying her transformation to her budding relationship with her companion makes it a nice little story of self-discovery. I named Rose's senior companion Clover. It's my favorite flower and it's also a weed. This is thematically significant because I made Clover openly bisexual in a mission environment that isn’t super open to queerness. She is being defiant by existing beautifully. I wanted her to have unique but fantastic answers to gospel-related questions and a different perspective on life than Rose, so I made Clover a convert. I spent a while dwelling on what she would be like before Mormonism. I gave her a bob haircut and a lot of extra piercings, and I even dared- just once- to draw a picture of her in a crop top. I spent a lot of time thinking about these characters and this story, and all I needed to do to continue writing was find a good reason for Clover to join the Mormon church.

· · ─────── ·𖥸· ─────── · ·

Though like the wanderer, the sun gone down, Darkness be over me, my rest a stone; Yet in my dreams I’d be nearer, my God, to Thee.

Nearer, my God, to Thee, nearer to Thee!

· · ─────── ·𖥸· ─────── · ·

The Orlando temple’s real front door is cemented shut. It's this ornate cement door that is built exclusively for Jesus Christ to open when he comes to earth again. The temple designers were either creepy or short-sighted because the door leads directly into the bride's dressing room. I spent a lot of time sitting at the temple's front door, it felt like the most important spiritual part of the building's exterior. Even as I was in the process of losing my faith, I would still come back to sit at the temple’s door. At this point, the temple’s back doors might as well have been cemented shut. I couldn't bring myself to pay tithing anymore, so my temple recommend would remain expired into the eternities. When I lead tours of a lifesize recreation of the Tabernacle from Mose’s time I was assigned to lead people to the doors into the courtyard, then go back to grab the next group and never to go in. Every tour over and over, my script would mention that only Levites were allowed into the courtyard, and only the high priest was allowed into the holy of holies. It gave me a little sense of hope while I led those tours. In the old days, non-Levites were not allowed into the temple, and now most people don't know what a Levite is. If I follow this logic to its conclusion, maybe there will be a day where the god chosen people are not excluding queer people; they will have moved on to a different social construct to exclude.

Now that I am thousands of miles away from the cement door leading into the bride’s room. I can see that the inside of the temple only has meaning because there are vastly more people outside of the temple. I spent a long time touching the door- hoping for my faith to make me whole. My faith failed me, but maybe that was the best thing that could’ve happened.

· · ─────── ·𖥸· ─────── · ·

“Purity that demands exclusion isn't real purity, maybe paradise is a lie.” You might think that this is a quote from a wise and important person, but it is not. This is a quote from The Fucking trampoline episode from the sitcom Community. I'm always amazed at the wisdom that can be found within the most absurd.

· · ─────── ·𖥸· ─────── · ·

Outside of my preexisting biases, I do like the word Sustain. There is power in choosing what is important to strengthen support and suffer within your own life. I can bear testimony now that my new world is worth sustaining. I have a second piercing. It's very small, but I feel quite edgy and cool every time I see it. I wear crop tops and drink tea. I've discovered that most of the world gets to have a second Saturday to truly rest. I can laugh loudly at the pure absurdity of Mohonri Moriancumer’s trans-Atlantic submarines. I can allow the sad story of Helen Mar Kimbals’ life to exist uninterrupted and unquestioned. At least one part of my patriarchal blessing came true, I found a boy worth sustaining, and then another guy and we love the life we are building together. I steal my partner’s bed while I call my other partner. I can sit inside my own body with pure peace and bliss. Like the missionary I named after a wildflower I dont have a single good reason to go back to where I was before.

I am Clover

my room

the building my room is in

my college

my town

Idaho

The United States of America

The continent of America

The world

The Solar System

The Milky Way Galaxy

The Cosmos

· · ─────── ·𖥸· ─────── · ·

Or if on joyful wing cleaving the sky

Sun moon and stars forgot

Upward I fly

· · ─────── ·𖥸· ─────── · ·

#exmo #exmormon #essay #exvangelical #art

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f1ghtsoftly · 1 year ago

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I actually really, really dislike that radfems tend to focus on judging women for individual life choices like they’re made in a vacuum and not actually making it easier for women to make more life affirming decisions. It's easy now, when so many things are technically legal but socially and financially difficult to blind ourselves to the very real hurdles that can keep women trapped in patriarchal social structures and communities.

While it is true that choices, like partnering with a man, reinforce patriarchy we also live in a system that does everything it can to reward behavior that sets women back. As feminists, it should be our job to make it easier for women to separate and when women refuse to ask ourselves "what more could we do to make this less harrowing?" Underneath, for example, many women's refusal to stop wearing makeup, is really a refusal to forgo the social status conferred by being gender conforming and that social status isn't useless. It can help women advance in their careers, help them gain sympathy, make them more attractive to their desired partners etc etc.. While compliance with patriarchal dictates separates a woman from herself and other women, it also helps her succeed in a woman hating system.

Making feminist decisions in a patriarchy is like swimming backwards against a current. Sometimes that current is weaker or stronger and sometimes, despite a woman' best efforts she might start going backwards. As politically engaged and awakened women, we are supposed to give women tools to help make swimming against that current easier. Not forming cliques or shaming women who are struggling (if you're frustrated with a brainwashed woman, that's your sign to log off and vent to a feminist friend). Even "privileged" patriarchal aligned women are committing self harm on some level, patriarchy hurts all women. Even the ones prolonging its life with their actions.

This is also why class is such a critical feminist issue. When escape from deep poverty is reliant on a women selling her body through an advantageous marriage to a man, it's not in her self interest to forgo that option for political reasons. When childcare is so expensive in the US women are forced to rely on a partner to help them raise children. Not only are male partners more likely to make more money, they also can't get pregnant, and thus can devote themselves to their own children (this is why older women and childfree women should involve themselves in childcare). When women know living single means having to fend off disgusting and violent men, they're less likely to do it.

And yes, I know women can learn a trade and be reasonably financially sufficient but it's also better for women to diversify and organize within their chosen fields. Not only will it make women more comfortable, but it's better for female consumers. Evidence also shows that pay lowers when women enter an industry en masse so the relatively lucrative careers in the trades are only like that because women *aren't there*. Furthermore, when women decide to become mothers, they take a massive financial hit, both in the amount of time they can put into a job and the financial burden of raising children. I'm not an anti-natalist, I think women having children when they want them is a good thing and patriarchy takes a beautiful experience and makes it a way to trap women with horrible men.

When we place the entire burden of feminist actions on individual women "choosing" to not partner with men or cater to them rather then using our energy to unite to make systemic changes we ensure that our movement centers young, childless women, rather then what is demographically common. Not only do we do that, but we also exclude mothers from this movement, when mom's need to be centered.

Here is what I am not suggesting:

We confuse compassion for women unable or unwilling to risk patriarchal backlash for some feminist actions for excusing them. Trying to understand women still aligned with patriarchy won't turn you into a liberal. Makeup is still patriarchal. Dating men is still not great for you mentally, emotionally and physically. Lying about pronouns or refusing to challenge the rollback of women’s rights publicly will still create the illusion women consent to the destruction of their legal protections. That is all real. But patriarchy comes down hard on women who stand against it alone. And an online community, especially one not exactly flush with cash, can only take us so far.

Here is what I am suggesting:

We begin to reprioritize party building and policy goals. How can we make it easier to make feminist choices? What structures can we make to support separatism?

How can we organize women across varying industries against unfair wages, misogynistic standards and the political repression of feminists and feminism?

How can we develop women only networks to support mothers in childrearing?

In general, how can we make forgoing personal safety to be around men a less and less desirable option for more and more women?

In general, let's please, please start thinking in terms of systems instead of individualistically. It doesn't serve anyone but men to pick judgement over solidarity with women who aren't there yet. Stop judging women you only know through a screen and start organizing to make it easier and easier for women to live feminist lives. Put that desire into action, stop using it to make us stagnate when we need to grow aggressively.

#all of the but actually I can do it so you should too women gonna come out of the woodwork #as if not helping women is feminist praxis #as someone who did do a lot alone it was really shitty actually so lol #I can never understand women who simultaneously are like oh patriarchy is so bad and then act like bucking it is easy like is patriarchy #real and serious or is it not #because in my world it's real and serious and that means when women cower in fear of backlash it's not just in their heads #it can be overcome but it's still like...real #radical feminist theory #radical feminism #radical feminist #radfem safe #radblr #radfem #gender critical #radical feminists do touch #writing

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berlinauslander · 10 months ago

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White feminism

A white feminist is someone who refuses to consider the role that whiteness and the racial privilege attached to it have played, and continue to play, in universalizing white feminist concerns, agendas and beliefs as those of all of feminism and all feminists. You do not have to be white to be a white feminist. It is also perfectly possible to be white and feminist and not be a white feminist. The term describes a set of assumptions and behaviours which have been baked into mainstream Western feminism, rather than describing the racial identity of its sub-jects. At the same time, it is true that most white feminists are indeed white, and that whiteness itself is at the core of white feminism.

A white feminist may be someone who earnestly salutes the precepts of "intersectionality' - the need for feminism to reflect structural inequalities drawn along the lines of race, faith, class, dis-ability, etc., as well as gender - but fails to cede space to the feminists of colour who have been ignored, erased or excluded from the feminist movement. White feminists can attend civil rights marches, have friends who are women of colour, and in some cases be women of colour themselves, and yet be devoted to organizational structures or systems of knowledge that ensure that non-white women's experiences - and thus their needs and priorities - remain sidelined.

More broadly, to be a white feminist you simply have to be a person who accepts the benefits conferred by white supremacy at the expense of people of colour, while claiming to support gender equality and solidarity with 'all' women.

#rafia zakaria #white feminism #feminism #colonialism #imperialism

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spiderfreedom · 1 year ago

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I was reading this post about baeddel history a while back. baeddelism, if you're not aware, is a fringe tumblr ideology that asserts that the fear of feminine males is the root of all social injustice. i must emphasize that it is fringe because it is basically unknown outside of tumblr and is currently dead. (there are people who independently reinvent baeddel concepts, but that's not the same as being a baeddel in the baeddel community.)

there's a collage of attacks against trans men. some of it is based on taking the idea that trans men have "male privilege" extremely literally ("trans men are male socialized" - a fascinating statement requiring further study to, uh, substantiate). some of it is blatantly false ("trans men have no oppression"). but this one segment here, I think gets to an interesting idea:

i've written in a previous post about the myth that trans women are 'perfect sex objects', which is repeated by men who enjoy visiting transfem prostitutes and watching transfem porn, and by some radfems, who assert that trans women "enjoy" being in the sex industry on account of being hypersexual. I challenged this myth there, because it takes people's reasons for being in the sex industry at face value without considering that trauma can lead to hypersexuality as a coping mechanism. it also objectifies trans women as being hypersexual and 'naturally suited' to the sex industry.

this screenshot from the collage linked above shows support for my position - many (most?) trans women are not in fact loving having to go into the sex industry to make ends meet. the reasons here aren't even related to transition like getting surgery; the trans woman in question is facing homelessness and food insecurity.

now, this screenshot also shows an aspect of baeddel philosophy - the idea that trans women are suffering, and trans men are not, and trans men are taking advantage of a movement that trans women built, and using it for their own gains. in other words, a fear of being de-centered in a movement that was supposed to help them.

i don't believe that trans men are not suffering and i don't believe that trans men were uninvolved in the trans rights movement. i don't believe trans men are en masse doing porn because "it's hot"; like i think that's a non-existent strawman made up by the poster. i think there is some resentment towards trans men here that goes beyond "trans men are literally undistinguishable from cis men." part of it relates to another common attitude in the trans community, the idea that there is such a thing as "AFAB privilege."

but let's be charitable because i think there is something deeper here. baeddelism tapped into a fear many trans women had of being shut out of a movement that was supposed to center them.

i think there is actually some truth to the idea that the mainstream trans narrative is harming trans women in certain ways.

for example, I recently posted about how "he/him non-binary AMAB people" were registering for the grace hopper conference. the grace hopper conference was originally only for women, but recently expanded to "women and non-binary people." the intention appeared to be to exclude cis men (and trans men? unclear). however, a group of apparently malicious male actors took advantage of the fact there is no way to verify who is 'really' a "he/him non-binary AMAB" person and who's a cis man to register, taking up limited spots at the conference.

of course cis women were upset, and the post went around radblr with that focus, and I was also upset at that. but I think that trans women would naturally also be upset at this development. it is agreed upon by radfems and trans women that trans women experience most of the heinous violence they go through at the hands of men. it is understandable that trans women would want to go to a place that is safe from cis men, because that is the primary group of people that attacks them. but if there is no way to prevent malicious cis men from joining? then there is no way to provide this protection to trans women.

this is something I've also thought about in regards to things like trans women in prison. having someone who identified as male most of their life and committed a violent crime suddenly change their identification to "woman", be housed in a female prison, obviously poses severe risks to female people. but it poses risks to trans women as well. trans women on HRT experience a loss in strength - strengthwise, they are between cis men and cis men. a trans woman who takes HRT is therefore also at risk of physical violence from people like this.

many radfem's instinct is going to be something along the lines of "boohoo, you got what you wanted. you have been trying to prevent females from having our own spaces for over a decade. why should we care about you experiencing the same thing we have experienced?" this is understandable but misguided from a political perspective - because venting/catharsis is not politics. i think this is an opportunity to find common ground.

(also, my politic may be centered on female people, but i do believe that social justice for all groups is important and necessary. despite serious disagreements in the past, i have tremendous compassion for trans women as people who are gender non conforming, often suffer from severe dysphoria, experience misogyny if they pass, and experience homelessness at highly elevated rates. i don't want to throw them to the wolves, no matter how much I disagree with the mainstream NGO narrative.)

overly permissive self-identification also puts trans women at risk, both from malicious cis men, and from trans women who may have transitioned very late and seem to find no common ground with the community. an inability to police spaces means that transfems will have no way to protect their own from malicious posers or people who are technically transgender but have no true alliance to the community.

the solution, in some sense, requires some amount of policing. you cannot promise a man-free space to cis women or trans women or female/AFAB people or anyone without some way to say "hey, I don't think you belong here." we need to work towards what that level of boundary policing is. some prisons, for example, have case-by-case decisions of who is allowed to be transferred to women's prisons on the basis of the danger they pose to inmates. i don't know if that's the best idea, but it's a start. i think it's clear at this point that having no way to prevent men from joining men-free spaces does a disservice to cis women and trans women.

#tw transmisogyny #i think there's a need for a LOT of group-specific spaces #general LGBT shelters; shelters for transgender people more broadly; shelters for transfem people; shelters for female people #i think the reason transfems fight so hard against 'female only spaces' is because man-free spaces are a limited resource right now #clearly there is a high demand for man-free spaces #i'd gladly donate to any transfem specific shelters #i've had a lot of friends who could have used something like that.#mypost

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haggishlyhagging · 1 year ago

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The quotes below the cut are about the tension between consciousness raising and political action. All are from Alice Echols’ Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America: 1967-75.

Quote 1: p. 61

With Koedt's article, Firestone's summary of the Jeannette Rankin Brigade protest, and Sarachild's D.C. speech, "Funeral Oration for Traditional Womanhood," NYRW's Notes from the First Year was an implicit, and sometimes explicit, rejection of the politico analysis. Within two months of its publication, Evelyn Goldfield of Chicago's Westside group issued a rebuttal of sorts in the The Voice of the Women's Liberation Movement. Goldfield took women's groups to task for concentrating on consciousness-raising rather than action. And in contrast to those New York women who argued that women needed to organize separately to build a power base from which to attack male supremacy, Goldfield advised that if men were to be excluded initially from women's meetings, it be for the "tactical" reason that women had difficulty expressing themselves around men, and not as a "matter of principle." In fact, Goldfield argued that the very notion of a separate women's movement was divisive. She admitted that the bromide "there can be no liberation for women outside a general movement for liberation, and no such movement can exist without a movement for women's liberation" had failed to silence those who asked which movement came first. But Goldfield proposed shelving any further debate by declaring that radical women should henceforth "not think of the women's movement as separate but as a united force within the radical movement." She chastised the women of Notes for envisioning "the women's movement as very separate from other movement struggles," and declared that a "women's movement which confines itself to issues which only affect women can't be radical."

Quote 2: pp. 113-114

Some women at the conference also discussed the upcoming Counter-Inaugural demonstration to protest Nixon' inauguration. The action was being organized by the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (Mobe). Webb and Baxandall, in particular, had ties with people in the Mobe. In fact, Webb's husband, Lee Webb, had informed her that there was a slot available on the program for a women's liberation speaker. Barbara Mehrhof reports that during the car ride back from Lake Villa, Firestone, Atkinson, Koedt, Margaret Polatnik, and she discussed the proposed action. According to Mehrhof, all the women agreed that consciousness-raising, as it was practiced in NYRW, was leading to more consciousness-raising rather than to action. They discussed reorganizing the group, making it "more action and theory-based." Margaret Polatnik suggested that they "give back the vote" at the Counter-Inaugural protest, and the others agreed. According to Ellen Willis, the action was intended to demonstrate that "suffragism"—which they contended had eviscerated the first wave of feminism—was dead and that "a new fight for real emancipation was beginning." They announced the action at the next meeting of NYRW and welcomed others to join them in planning the protest. Firestone, Willis, Peslikis, Mehrhof, Kearon, Forer, Baxandall, Linda Feldman, Barbara Kaminsky, and Sheila Cronan were among those involved in planning the protest.

Quote 3: pp.142-143

In early April, Sheila Cronan proposed that for their next action the group hang a banner which would read "Liberty for Women: Repeal All Abortion Laws" from the Statue of Liberty. However, Cronan and her allies encountered technical problems in constructing the banner, and opposition to the action when Sarachild returned to the group. Sarachild argued that the action was poorly conceived and that the group's energy would be better spent writing a manifesto. When the group voted in mid-June to scuttle the action, the discussion reportedly "broke down into great recriminations."

The Statue of Liberty action became a point of contention because members disagreed about the importance of consciousness-raising. Not everyone in the group was as committed to consciousness-raising as Sarachild, Peslikis, and Mainardi. Certainly, Mehrhof, Kearon, Cronan, and Linda Feldman—who eventually left Redstockings to join The Feminists—felt that consciousness-raising should be de-emphasized. Even Firestone reportedly wanted the group to be more action-oriented. There were also disagreements about the pro-woman line. Mehrhot, Kearon, Cronan, and Feldman were its most vocal detractors. But Willis contends that both she and Firestone were far more psychologically oriented than Sarachild, Peslikis, and Mainardi of the pro-woman faction.

The tensions over consciousness-raising and the pro-woman line seem to have been exacerbated by Sarachild's re-entry to the group. She reportedly let the group know that she was returning to Redstockings despite her differences with the group. She then reportedly tried to recruit to the group women who she thought shared her political vision. Baxandall, who was at that time in a study group with Anne Forer, Judy Thibeau, and Helen Kritzler, was among those Sarachild succeeded in recruiting. Baxandall asserts that Sarachild told her that she was shifting the group's focus from action to consciousness-raising and that the meetings were, as a result, much improved. Indeed, the group became less action-oriented following the March 1969 abortion speak-out. The group did disrupt another all-male abortion panel at Cooper Union and helped to organize a number of joint actions. But from the spring of 1969 until its demise in the fall of 1970, the group devoted most of its time to consciousness-raising, organized c-r groups for new women, drafted its manifesto, and distributed movement literature.

#alice echols #consciousness raising #political action #radical feminist theory

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 2 years ago

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By: Helen Joyce

Published: April 2023

Being invited to talk at a conference for psychoanalysts in London last month was not, on the face of it, a surprise. The topic was trans identification in children; I’ve written a book on this and other trans-related issues. What was surprising, given the transactivist tactic of demanding “no debate”, was that the event went ahead as planned.

My refusal to agree that men who identify as women thereby become women means that when I’m invited to speak, there’s usually trouble. Last March I was asked to present at a conference for NHS psychiatrists — and disinvited after a smear campaign. The conference was eventually cancelled. When philosopher Arif Ahmed asked me to speak at Gonville and Caius College Cambridge in October, the college master emailed fellows and students describing me as “offensive, insulting and hateful”. I managed to give my talk, but had to shout to be heard over protestors outside.

The psychoanalysts’ event wasn’t entirely free of drama. During the morning, I and other critics of trans ideology described its spread through the medical profession, and the harm this is doing to gender-distressed children. As the session closed, a young man stood and denounced us as hatemongers, his voice and body trembling as he spoke. He compared us to the psychotherapists who, half a century ago, peddled “conversion therapy” — electrical shocks and nausea-inducing drugs aimed at turning gay people straight.

I’ve heard opposition to “gender-affirming” care analogised to conversion therapy many times, and it’s absurd. This is the treatment pathway involving giving puberty-blockers and cross-sex hormones to gender-distressed children, often as a precursor to surgery that will leave them sterile and lacking in sexual function. Most children sent down this path would have grown up gay if left to do so in peace; when they identify as the opposite sex, they become nominally straight. It’s the gender ideologues, in other words, who are the modern-day conversion therapists.

I’m hopeful that the event for psychotherapists going ahead with a critic inside the room is a sign that “no debate” is no longer an effective tactic. The would-be censors haven’t given up, however, only changed tactics. Instead of trying to silence us, they’re starting to argue. The way they do it says a lot about their worldview, in which subjectivity trumps objectivity, emotion trumps reason and words trump material reality.

At the heart of trans activism is a power play which seeks to impose trans-identified people’s inner feelings on the external world. Other people are expected to ignore the material fact of sexed bodies and “affirm” stated identities by the use of “preferred pronouns”.

Pronouns are not the only words now regarded as powerful enough to change reality. Take the rewriting of literary classics to remove racial slurs, often imaginary, and workplace training that purports to root out “implicit bias”. Both are based on the notion that words, rather than describing the world, shape it so profoundly that censorship can be a route to social justice. What makes a word worthy of being erased is entirely subjective: that someone claims to find it harmful, no matter how tenuous or outlandish that claim.

Laws, too, are moving away from objective tests. Hate crimes, which attract longer sentences, are those which the victim “perceives” to have been motivated by prejudice, whether or not that perception is reasonable. Scotland’s Hate Crime Act, not yet in force, will criminalise speech that merely “might” make a minority group feel “vulnerable” or “excluded”. As for “non-crime hate incidents”, as the Orwellian name suggests, these involve no crime and rely purely on perception. The Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, has said that the police must stop routinely recording such incidents. They’ve already been told this by the High Court, yet the practice continues.

One reason for this elevation of subjective feelings over objective facts is a trend towards celebrating victimhood. Most early societies were what sociologists call “honour cultures”, in which might was right and maintaining status after an insult or injury meant exacting swift revenge. The rule of law saw honour cultures give way to “dignity cultures”, in which status is formalised in job titles and academic qualifications, self-control is admired and justice is dispensed by police and courts.

In their 2018 book The Rise of Victimhood Culture, sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning describe how honour and dignity cultures are giving way to a moral code which elevates the oppressed. Call-outs and cancellations, they explain, are status-raising tactics, in which people claim to have been harmed by problematic views and to have suffered micro-aggressions in order to don the mantle of victimhood.

The spread of victimhood culture has helped popularise novel gender identities (non-binary, agender) and sexual orientations (aroace, pansexual) since they allow people to claim membership of oppressed groups without experiencing any actual hardship. It is also driving the self-diagnosis of mental illnesses, from quotidian conditions such as anxiety and depression, to boutique ones such as multiple-personality disorder or a novel form of Tourette’s transmitted by TikTok.

More generally, this is a culture that encourages young people to regard themselves as traumatised. According to Jonathan Haidt, co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind, US schools and universities have started to promote three pernicious falsehoods: that what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; that feelings are a good guide to reality and action; and that life is a battle between good people and evil ones.

These dysfunctional beliefs, which Haidt dubs “anti-cognitive behavioural therapy”, promote mental fragility. They encourage people to feel fearful of ordinary words and to regard censorship as virtuous. The logic goes like this: being dis-agreed with makes you a victim; victims are good; people saying things you disagree with therefore deserve to be silenced and punished. This is the culture of “crybullying”: using claims of victimhood to harass others.

Haidt thinks social media, with its polarising and conflict-inducing algorithms, is largely to blame. Another culprit is the “post-modern turn” that was underway before the internet era, in which academics, activists and political theorists stopped thinking of reality as something that could be described objectively and studied empirically, embracing a radical subjectivity instead.

To these, I would add smaller families and later childbearing. A record half of all women now reach 30 without having given birth. Until the past couple of decades, most childhoods involved playing without adults around, if not with siblings then with neighbours’ children whom you were expected to look out for.

A growing share of young adults have missed out on these formative experiences. One consequence is that they are painfully ignorant of the ways in which children are different from adults. This is part of the reason so many young people give credence to gender-distressed children’s claims to “really be” members of the opposite sex.

My younger son identified as a train for most of his waking hours between age two and age four. I put it down to a vivid imagination, read and watched Thomas the Tank Engine on repeat, and waited for him to move on.

These kidults have also been denied the experiences that would enable them to outgrow the vices of teenagers, namely emotional incontinence and a crippling concern for the regard of peers. Looking after children teaches you to enforce boundaries and prioritise long-term interests over short-term desires. You learn how to say no when that makes you unpopular, to exercise self-control while others are losing it. The worst thing you can do when a child screams at you is to scream back.

To me, that young man who accused me of supporting conversion therapy appeared never to have learned these lessons. His professed concern for gender-distressed children seemed performative, even narcissistic: more about making him feel good and look good to his political tribe than about what was right for those children. He was failing in the most important task of adulthood: understanding that it’s not all about you.

#Helen Joyce #gender distress #gender ideology #queer theory #victimhood culture #victimhood #conversion therapy #gay conversion therapy #imaginary oppression #crybully #human psychology #subjective reality #feelings culture #religion is a mental illness

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kellymrichman · 2 years ago

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Conference Paper: ‘Streets’, The Modernist Studies Association's Annual Conference 2023

Paper: ‘Holy Hub: Picturing the Modern Black Madonna in the Streets of Harlem and Beyond (1940-1948)’

Presented in-person as a member of the four-person panel, ‘Sensing Harlem: Visual and Sonic Cultures of the Harlem Renaissance’, at the 2023 Modernist Studies Association Conference in Brooklyn, New York City on October 27, 2023.

Abstract:

In “The Task of Negro Womanhood,” an essay published in Alain LeRoy Locke’s The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925), educator Elise Johnson McDougald declared laboring African American women—especially working mothers—the “hub of progress.” McDougald acknowledged that this neoteric perception of the figure was not yet part of the popular imagination, lamenting that “the ideals of beauty, built up in the fine arts, have excluded her almost entirely.” Soon, however, a new feminine iconography would challenge this reality. Enthroned on stoops and enshrined by sidewalks, the modern Black Madonna of the 1940s brought sacred maternity down to earth—specifically, to the streets of contemporary Harlem.

This paper presents a case study comprising three paintings. Two of these works—Madonna of the Stoop (1940) by Palmer Hayden and Tombstones (1942) by Jacob Lawrence—are set in Harlem; the other—Our Lady of the Neighborhood (1948) by Allan Rohan Crite, an East Coast artist who exhibited with the Harlemites—is based in Boston.

This paper first explores how these radical interpretations of the Madonna reconsidered established conventions of Marian iconography, paying particular attention to the significance of the street as a sacred space—an unexpected modernist motif. This paper then questions why this iconography is overlooked by recent research. Stressing that contemporary scholarship seldom diverges from the movement’s masculine metaphors, it asks the question: If the modern Black mother was the “hub of progress” during the Harlem Renaissance, can scholarship that disregards her role in the arts—a “spoke” of this hub—truly be progressive?

#msabrooklyn #msabrooklyn2023 #art history #art #academic #harlem #painting #african american art #essays #talks

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molsno · 11 months ago

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white feminism is feminism that centers around the advancement of white women in capitalist society. rafia zakaria gives a more detailed explanation in the beginning of her book, "against white feminism" (which you should read if you want to learn more), but for the sake of brevity, I'll share a relevant excerpt:

White feminists can attend civil rights marches, have Black, Asian, and Brown friends, and in some cases be Black, Asian, and Brown themselves, and yet be devoted to organizational structures or systems of knowledge that ensure that Black, Asian, and Brown women's experiences, and so their needs and priorities, remain sidelined. More broadly, to be a white feminist you simply have to be a person who accepts the benefits conferred by white supremacy at the expense of people of color, while claiming to support gender equality and solidarity with "all" women.

it's very important to understand that the dominant feminist theory of the 2010s was white feminism. any and all discussion of feminist issues to gain notoriety in this time period were centered around the experiences of white women, and were ultimately about advancing the rights of white women so that they could reap the same benefits from the white supremacist, colonialist, capitalist project as their male counterparts. they sometimes paid lip service to women of color, queer women, trans women, fat women, disabled women, and so on, but their feminism notably did not call for any real systemic changes that would actually meaningfully liberate these women from their oppression.

crucially, white feminism is a feminism with no morals. it has no tangible goals, let alone plans of action designed to realize them. white feminism grants concession after concession to women's oppressors under the assumption that doing so will eventually result in material gain. this is the same strategy that the suffragettes of the late 1800s/early 1900s employed, wherein they wholesale excluded black women from the suffragist movement in order to win the support of southern voters, who ended up not supporting them anyway. white feminists of the modern day threw the most marginalized women under the bus and made no real demands in order to avoid alienating men who might be sympathetic to the cause but weren't willing to go "too far" and give up their male privilege. as a result of these concessions, women's rights have made no significant gains, and in many ways have been restricted even more - just look at the overturning of roe v. wade for one major example.

perhaps the clearest example of white feminism is the barbie movie. it depicts a white feminist utopia, where women don't have to do genuine labor, where women of all backgrounds - white, black, trans, fat, gay, and more - are able to serve in positions of power like president or judge. if you take this to be a manifestation of a potential real-world white feminist utopia, then you understand that the society white feminists yearn for is one where they can continue to benefit from imperialism and colonization, but with "equality" among women in the imperial core. I digress, however. the barbie movie ends with barbie apologizing to ken for making him feel insignificant enough that he was willing to overthrow this white feminist utopia by instituting patriarchy. she takes responsibility for his desire to oppress women by shifting the blame onto herself and other women. the movie is practically about ken's feelings, and ensures he doesn't take the blame for anything that he did. this film is the pinnacle of white feminism, and upon its release and still now, several months later, it is widely celebrated as a feminist masterpiece.

I understand the desire not to disparage feminism, and to blame its failings on MRAs and anti-feminists, but I really cannot understate just how vile white feminism itself is and how much damage its proponents have done to feminism as a whole.

it's so fucking bleak how the point we've arrived at in feminist discourse is one where you can say that women can reinforce patriarchy and loads of people will agree without hesitation and say that it's important to talk about that, but if you even suggest that men can reinforce patriarchy then suddenly everyone will come tell you that you're lacking nuance and you don't understand how the patriarchy works and you're basically a terf. white feminism is truly a disease

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beardedmrbean · 2 months ago

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The Finnish government is due to present a controversial bill to Parliament on Thursday on the so-called three-month rule.

Savon Sanomat is among the papers reporting that the proposal aims to link work-related residence permits more closely to work, putting people on work-based residence permits at risk of deportation if they don't get a new job within three months after becoming unemployed. An exception is being made for certain specialists who would have six months to find new work.

The planned amendment was widely criticised during a consultation round with various stakeholders. For example, the Federation of Finnish Technology Industries, which represents many large export companies, said in a statement that it was very concerned about the impact of the proposal on Finland's image and attractiveness as a destination for international talent.

According to the STT news agency, some changes have been made to the bill following consultations.

Under the terms of the proposal, employers would in future be obliged to notify the Finnish Immigration Service (Migri) of the termination of employment of an immigrant.

The government's aim is for the new regulations to enter into force in April of next year.

Objection to refugee exclusion

Helsingin Sanomat reports on comments by Swedish People's Party MP Eva Biaudet, who said in a discussion on Yle TV Wednesday evening that her party will not agree to any government plan excluding, for example, Afghan women from the nations' refugee quota.

Based on its own sources, HS reported last week, that the Finns Party has proposed reducing the number of quota refugees accepted from Muslim-majority countries while increasing the intake from Christian-majority nations.

According to HS, Finns Party interior ministers, first Mari Rantanen and later Lulu Ranne, have instructed officials to prepare the allocation of next year's quota in such a way that quota refugees would no longer be taken from countries such as Afghanistan. Instead, more would be taken from countries such as Venezuela.

Biaudet stated it is unthinkable that the the Swedish People's Party, which is a member of the coalition, could accept such a move.

The current government has reduced the refugee quota from from 1,050 to 500.

"Since the government has halved the refugee quota, it is all the more reason to give asylum to those who need it most," said Biaudet.

In response, Finns Party MP Joakim Vigelius denied the government is intending to implement discriminatory criteria, saying that the aim is not to reduce the number of refugees from Muslim countries. Instead, he said one of the aims is to accept refugees that can be integrated as well as possible.

"I would not consider Venezuelans fleeing a socialist government, for example, to be any less valuable," Vigelius said.

War fatigue

In a recent interview with the Financial Times, Finland's Foreign Minister Elina Valtonen (NCP) took up the issue of the danger of rising fatigue among western states regarding assistance to Ukraine.

Helsingin Sanomat reports that President Alexander Stubb repeated that warning on Wednesday during an official visit to Norway.

Speaking at a joint press conference during a state visit to Norway alongside the country's Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, both made it clear, says HS, that there is no room for war weariness.

President Stubb compared the situation to a marathon, where one cannot let fatigue win in the middle of the race. He added that this is especially true at a time with three wars going on, two in the Middle East as well as in Ukraine. In addition, Stubb said, the world is eagerly awaiting the outcome of the US presidential election next month.

The paper points to a similar analysis published Wednesday by the US-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW) which says that, "Russian President Vladimir Putin's current theory of victory in Ukraine seeks to protract the war and posits that Russian forces can outlast Western support for Ukraine and collapse Ukrainian resistance by winning a war of attrition."

HS also noted that Western support for Ukraine will be a key topic of discussion when US President Joe Biden meets with Nato allies German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer in Berlin on Friday.

Securing home routers

Finland's National Cyber Security Centre has received more reports of denial of service (DDoS) attacks than usual this autumn, reports the Uutissuomalainen news group.

Ilta-Sanomat writes that Nordea Bank said this week that it has been more difficult than usual to prevent DDoS attacks against its services, in large part due to the fact that they have involved Finnish and other Nordic home network devices that have been hijacked.

Geoblocking, that is blocking of inbound web traffic from abroad, is a common way of combating cyber attacks. However, this is difficult if a large part of the attack traffic comes from the same Finnish IP addresses as the customer's web traffic.

The National Cyber Security Centre says there are three key issues to consider when ensuring home router security.

The first point is to disable remote management of the router. If remote management is enabled in the router's settings, malicious actors can remotely modify the settings. The Cyber Security Centre recommends disabling this feature altogether.

It is also advisable to change the router's default password. Default passwords are a security risk and it is recommended to change it to a stronger one when logging into the router management portal.

And it is important to keep your device updated. Sometimes routers update themselves, but in other cases you have to do it yourself. If automatic updates are available for your device, the Cyber Security Centre advises activating this feature.

IS also points out that telecoms operators say you should also replace your router every 4 years or so because security updates may not be available for older devices.

#nunyas news #updates from up north

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xtruss · 8 months ago

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‘We Have Provided Everything Possible For Their Freedom’: How The USSR Helped France’s Most Important Colony Stick It To Paris

Demining, Energy Cooperation, Irrigation, Metallurgy, Children’s Summer Camps Made the History of the Friendship Between Algeria and the Soviet Union

— Wednesday April 24, 2024 | RT

Algerian President Houari Boumediene (2nd R) and Soviet Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin (L) during a visit of an Algerian factory during Kosygin's official visit to Algeria on October 5, 1971. © AFP

In early 2024, Moscow announced that it intended to establish a Russian House in Algeria, where both expatriates and local residents will be able to study the country’s language and culture. In recent years, the need for such a cultural center has grown, since thousands of Russians reside in Algeria (many of them have lived there since Soviet times) and Algerian young people are showing increasing interest in the culture.

During the Soviet period, the communist state educated many Algerian politicians, trained its military personnel, and armed the country’s air force and navy. The Algerian Army owes much of its professional success to Soviet and Russian military schools and academies, where more than 60,000 of its servicemen were trained between 1961 and 2023.

Thousands of Algerian specialists from various fields and industries were educated in the USSR. Many returned home with their Russian wives and children. In such multicultural families, the Russian language and culture have been passed on from generation to generation.

More than 1,000 Russian women live in Algeria today. In 1989, the Coordinating Council of Russian Compatriots created the Association of Russian Women Compatriots in Algeria, which unites women from Russia and the former USSR republics.

“The Association’s main goal is to preserve the Russian language and Russian traditions. Every year, we hold conferences which are attended by women from other cities of Algeria. This brings us closer to each other, we learn about the lives of our compatriots in other Algerian cities, about their success and their problems,” its website states.

How The USSR Supported Algeria’s Fight For Independence

The Soviet Union was the first country in the world to establish diplomatic relations with Algeria. This happened in March 1962, four months before Algeria officially declared its independence from France.

The USSR had de facto recognized Algeria two years earlier. On October 3, 1960, during the 15th session of the UN General Assembly in New York, USSR Secretary General Nikita Khrushchev met with members of the Algerian government. Several days later, he said this meeting had signified that the USSR had recognized the provisional government of the Algerian republic.

“We, the Soviet people, sympathize with all the colonial nations that are fighting against the colonialists for their [country’s] independence. How can we exclude the great Arab people who are fighting for their independence, for their freedom? We applaud their fight. We have provided and will continue to provide all the possible assistance that may help the Algerian people in the struggle for their independence, for their freedom,” Khrushchev said at the time.

Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev as he delivered his fist-waving, shouting speech before the U.N. General Assembly late October 11, 1960. © Getty Images/Bettmann

From the start of the Algerian war of 1954-1962 against French colonialism, the USSR supported the Algerian people. The Soviet Union spoke out in defense of Algeria at the UN and various international forums, provided financial, material, and military assistance, and organized various solidarity campaigns.

Demining

��And then, Algeria called me to demine the country. Volunteers – step forward! Everyone stepped forward, not just me,” sang the famous Soviet singer Mark Bernes in the song ‘Memories of Algeria’. Between 1962 and 1964, the Soviet Army demined large territories of the newly independent Republic of Algeria. Unfortunately, these accomplishments have been largely forgotten in present times.

In 1962, the provisional government of Algeria and France signed the Evian Accords – peace treaties which also granted Algeria the right to self-determination. After a nationwide referendum on July 5, Algeria officially declared independence. However, there was a lot of work ahead since Algeria’s economy was seriously affected by the war, and French specialists left the country en masse. In the aftermath of the colonial era and the eight-year war, Algeria was in great need of assistance.

On leaving Algeria, France also left behind thousands of mines. The most heavily mined territories were on the border with Morocco and Tunisia (the so-called “Lignes Challe et Morice”). In 1959, large parts of these territories were blocked by minefields, observation posts, and electrified wire barriers. However, France had no intention of cleaning up after itself.

Sappers of the 19th USSR Engineer Regiment strengthening the border in the area of Constantine, Algeria.

Since Algeria didn’t have qualified sappers, it first requested help from several European countries (Italy, Sweden, Germany), but they refused to help. Private companies didn’t help to solve the problem either. For example, a group of Italians headed by retired general Ipolito Armando started demining the territory, but stopped when several people from the group were killed in mine blasts.

Then, the Soviet leadership stepped in and agreed to demine the territory free of charge. On July 27, 1963, an agreement was signed between the two countries. Two groups of specialists from the USSR arrived in Algeria in the period from 1962 to 1965. In this period, Russian sappers defused about 1.5 million mines, clearing over 800km of mine strips and 120,000 hectares of land. Each sapper defused between 10,000 and 15,000 mines. Some of them never made it back home and many remained crippled. On their return, most of the sappers received Soviet government awards.

Soviet Specialists in Algeria

Sappers weren’t the only specialists to arrive in Algeria from the USSR. In the 1960s and 1970s, thousands of Russian specialists came to Algeria and stayed there for many years. Some of these people permanently settled in Algeria and their descendants still live there.

On gaining independence, Algeria chose a socialist course in domestic politics and actively established international relations. In the first two decades following its declaration of independence, Algeria closely cooperated with the USSR in the fields of economics, politics, and culture, and the two countries frequently exchanged delegations at various levels.

Economic cooperation with the Soviet Union and other countries of the socialist bloc encompassed almost all areas of Algeria’s economy. The large number of Soviet specialists who came to Algeria greatly contributed to the development of the local economy. The USSR helped Algeria with mineral exploration, building large industrial enterprises, and training engineering and technical personnel. For example, El Hadjar Complex, built in 1968, became the largest steel plant in Africa.

The Soviet Union helped develop the mining and non-ferrous industries in Algeria, particularly when, in May 1966, Algeria announced the nationalization of all mining enterprises and foreign engineers left the country.

The Algerian National Oil, Gas and Chemistry Institute was built with Soviet assistance in Boumerdes. © Sputnik/Mikhail Kuleshov

At the request of the People’s Democratic Republic of Algeria, the USSR, Bulgaria, and other member countries of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance sent their specialists to Algeria, and the nationalized mines continued to operate. Thanks to this assistance, Algeria increased the extraction of iron, lead, and zinc ore.

Cooperation in the energy sector has always been important for Algeria, and has provided the country with foreign exchange earnings. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Soviet specialists worked at the Algerian state oil and gas company Sonatrach, and the USSR supplied drilling rigs for geological exploration sites.

Soviet agronomists and hydrogeologists helped boost irrigation and water supply, and increase the area of cultivated land. The USSR built two irrigation dams in Algeria. Soviet hydrogeologists also headed complex groundwater research in the country’s southern desert regions, which occupy about 80% of Algeria’s entire territory. In just four years, Soviet experts were able to identify 25% more water reserves than the French had managed to do in the 130 years they spent in Algeria.

The USSR also provided comprehensive assistance in the field of education. In 1964, the Algerian Institute of Oil and Gas was established in Boumerdès and presented to the city as a gift. Thanks to Soviet specialists, Boumerdès, a city in the north of Algeria , became a major educational and scientific center. The National Institute of Light Industries was also established there.

The Mining and Metallurgical Institute was built in Annaba, and the Hydrometeorological Institute was established in Blida. The professors of the main subjects were selected from various USSR universities and sent to Algeria. Between 1956 and 1978, more than 800 Algerian specialists were trained in educational institutions established by the USSR.

Military cooperation between the USSR and Algeria has always been important as well. The USSR (and later Russia) was Algeria’s main supplier of weapons and military equipment. In the late 1970s, the Algerian Army possessed 350 tanks and 294 combat aircraft, and approximately 95% of this equipment was produced in the USSR. From 1962 to 1991, the Soviet Union supplied Algeria with a variety of weapons with a total value of around $10 billion.

In December 1963, a cultural cooperation agreement was signed between Algeria and the USSR. Strong cultural ties were established in the fields of cinematography and literature, and many Soviet music ensembles and other artists performed in Algeria. The Russian language was taught in several Algerian universities.

Many Russian specialists who stayed in Algeria for a long time brought their families along with them. Algeria had schools and even pioneer summer camps for Soviet children.

For example, the USSR Embassy established one such pioneer camp on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, near the picturesque town of Tipaza, which boasted Phoenician, ancient Roman, early Christian, and Byzantine architecture. The cultural program for children included swimming, beach volleyball and football, Neptune Day, and tours to the nearest Roman cities and tombs.

Present Times

From the mid-1980s to the early 2000s, relations between Russia and Algeria declined in light of an economic and political crisis. In 1991, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Algeria officially recognized the Russian Federation. Bilateral relations entered a new stage at the start of the 21st century.

In April 2001, then-President of Algeria Abdelaziz Bouteflika traveled to Moscow on an official visit, which resulted in the signing of the Declaration on Strategic Partnership between Russia and Algeria. Currently, 14 intergovernmental agreements, as well as around 30 protocols, cooperation programs, and memoranda are in force between the two countries. Political dialogue is maintained at the highest level.

The strong ties between Russia and Algeria have also ensured warm relations between its peoples. To this day, many Algerians remember with gratitude the help which the USSR provided to the young country in its first decades of independence.

— By Tamara Ryzhenkova, orientalist, senior lecturer at the Department of History of the Middle East, St. Petersburg State University, expert for the Telegram channel ‘Arab Africa’

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