#this is just a group that uses violence to enforce an arbitrary set of rules on vampires in the area

[gh-0-stcup]

Reminder that the Paris coven is not actually a governing body of any kind. It's literally just a cult.

[theramblingonesie]

Facing Our Making, Part 3: Makeup and Gender

Welcome to Part 3 of my makeup blog series! This week we’re going to poke at gender and makeup. But before I begin, let’s review parts 1 & 2, and check in about where we’re at:

1. Beauty standards are impossibly harsh and cause a lot of unnecessary pain.

2. Let womxn decide what they want to do with their own damn bodies and stay out of it. Unless they hire you for a consultation.

3. Wearing makeup is awesome

4. Not wearing makeup is awesome

5. Your gender presentation and basically any presentation of your body and behavior do not determine who you are and aren’t attracted to sexually. And no one is the (*^*^%^$#%$#&*&^&%% authority to determine that for you. If they try, remember that they’re judging and labeling you in relation to their own internal gender/sexuality struggles. More on this in today’s blog below.

6. How toxic masculinity ruins the day in relationship to makeup or not makeup needs to die, and YES womxn also support and host this behavior (internalized misogyny). Just because a person has a vagina or presents as femme does not mean they are exempt.

7. Womxn who wear makeup are not whores unless they are, in fact, professional whores. Professional whores keep the world turning, and bless em for it. The problem isn’t sex work. It’s violence against sex workers. Consider your complicity.  

8. Womxn are reclaiming the hell out of the word “Slut”, so don’t get caught being a dumb idiot who uses the outdated, violent, misogynist definition. 1000 years vagina dentata upon your entire household.

9. If you want sexual attention because you enjoy sex, then FUCK YEAH GIT IT!!!

10. “Pretty girls are dumb” is a myth that our society desperately seeks to nurture and maintain. This is rooted in dominance, power, control, and whorephobia. Stop it.

11. “Ugly girls are smart” makes no damn sense. Okay, yes I can see the backwards logic, but also if you listen to flat-earthers long enough you could even be like, “ok, I see where you’re coming from with that”.  

It is not lost on me that certain beauty trends and habits can trigger and enable body image problems, ranging in severity. After attending a panel discussion that featured a speaker from Media Girls Boston, I learned that girls as young as 9 are learning that they essentially need to brand themselves through social media so that they can merely exist. Saying this is a problem is an understatement.

I support makeup and rituals of adornment. I support a lot of things that, if used improperly with dangerous motivations, can result in severe consequences.

Understand that there’s a lot of nuance in subjects like this, and utilize your critical thinking brain when exploring such topics. Continue your personal research if you’re curious about any subcategory in this series that I have not addressed.

If issues of beauty standards and pressure are uncomfortable or triggering for you, or if you or a loved one believe they may be suffering from a body-image related disorder, please know you are not alone, and there are people out there who are ready and available to support you through this. Links and hotline numbers are available in the resource section at the end of this blog. -------------------------------------------------------------

“If we are all members of one body, then in that one body there is neither male nor female; or rather there is both: it is an androgynous or hermaphroditic body, containing both sexes [...] The division of the one man into two sexes is part of [our] fall.” --Norman O. Brown, in Love’s Body, 1966

Okay! Let’s talk about this super important element of the art and ritual of beauty:

Gender!

To Marie Kondo this: This subject does not bring me joy, and I do not want to write about it, but I feel that I have a responsibility to not play floor-is-lava about it. It does not even bring me the type of righteous rage that fuels me to furiously complete a post. It fills me with doubt, insecurity, self loathing, trust issues, and a desire to disappear.

I need to say this because I know I am not alone in my feelings and experience. But I will keep it very brief because I’d like to move on.

I have experienced a lifetime of pain from the bullshit pressure the heteropatriarchy puts on female bodies. I never anticipated the heartache I would experience as a result of being judged and denied by fellow queers.

I am too butch, too unfeminine to be accepted as the right kind of woman in heteropatriarchal society. I make men question their sexuality, and I am the one made to suffer for it. I am too feminine for queers to believe and accept me when I tell them I’m genderfluid (which I have been, quietly and privately, my entire life). I am not feminine enough to be femme.

Too much woman. Not enough woman. Not woman. Not human. Once again, my body and my soul are everyone else’s to judge, determine, and own. Not mine. 

And no one wants to listen when we say the world hates women.

I highly suggest looking up the toxic concept of femme invisibility in queer communities. You can start by reading this great article by Bust:

https://www.bustle.com/articles/166081-what-does-femme-mean-the-difference-between-being-femme-being-feminine.

For the record, I still use she/her pronouns. I stand by my allegiance to the fullness and diversity of womxnhood in a deeply ferocious way. My reasoning for that is both very simple and very complicated. So I guess that just makes it very complicated. Ask me how.

Mood.

Anyway, makeup.

About a month ago, I had wrapped a film shoot with some friends who flew up from Mexico. It was an incredible weekend that filled me up with so much bliss. On the drive back to Boston, I was chatting with my beloved friends and fellow Scarlet Tongue artists, Creature and Cass, about how much I enjoy the company of Mexican men. A large part of that is because it is refreshing to be around men who so easily embrace and express feminine qualities of articulating their emotions, accessing their emotions, gentleness and nurturing. Creature presented the important argument that such qualities don’t need to be classified as feminine or masculine; they’re simply personality and behavioral traits that anybody can have.

Such a point is absolutely crucial in untangling the oppressive nature of the gender binary.

Exercise:

The following traits have been classically designated as “masculine” or “feminine” behavior, but I’ve jumbled them together in the list below. Which traits do you believe belong to whom?

Reserved Warm Sensitive Utilitarian Deferential Apprehensive Reactive Emotionally Stable Serious Lively Socially bold Shy Rule-conscious Expedient Private Perfectionism Anxiety Group-oriented Self-reliant Tolerates disorder Vigilance Extraversion Traditional Grounded Agreeableness Neuroticism Excitement-seeking Attraction to aesthetics

Answer:

Hahahahah, I’m not going to give you the answer. It doesn’t matter.

Yes, hormones do impact some behavior. And YES, how we’re socially conditioned impacts which traits are more dominant. But the point is, there is an imaginary line between the two categories. The saddest reality is that, even though any human is capable of any of these traits on the list, society has determined that consequence and punishment must befall anyone who strays from their category. An enforced gender binary is dangerous.

Enter makeup.

Makeup has served infinite purposes throughout the course of history. It’s an incredible vehicle for expression, as well as radical social and political rebellion. Makeup has shaped entire movements of art, social justice, philosophy, and construction/deconstruction of body politics.

Your lipstick is more than patriarchal pigment in a tube. It is a tool for revolution.

Most people assume that makeup is only for clowns and cisgender women, and anyone else who uses it is simply a deviant who has “stolen” it.

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Nononononononono

This probably won’t come as a shock to most of you, but yes-- Christianity also temporarily ruined makeup. Once upon a time, it was quite normal for men to wear makeup. Then the Jesus toe-suckers made up a whole bunch of arbitrary rules about what we currently observe masculinity and femininity to be, and here we are in this stinky pile of crap rules. 

I highly recommend reading this article to learn a tiny bit more of the history of men and makeup:

https://www.byrdie.com/history-makeup-gender

Who wears makeup and how people wear makeup has shifted so much throughout history, and the struggles we experience around this today have only been relevant for a hundred years or so. One of the most common forms of rebellion we hear of is when women reject traditional femininity. Whether “burning our bras”, shaving our heads, or growing out our armpit hair, this is not an uncommon experience for a lot of women. The scandal!! The pet has escaped her cage!! So many women I know have experienced an anti-femininity phase at least once in their lives. Sometimes this “phase” transitions into a permanent rejection of gender norms, but it really varies from person to person. Often it’s set off by an overwhelming awareness of how much women are defined by superficial characteristics, traditionally determined and enforced by men. So we attempt to take ourselves out of the system by wearing neutral and aggressive clothing, switching up which parts of our bodies are hairy and which aren’t, and avoiding anything “girlie”. Revisiting my conversation with Aepril, my high-glam friend who inspired this blog and was mentioned in Part 1, she made a good point about honoring such an experience: “I went through a miserable phase in my feminist youth where I thought I was being uber feminist by not shaving or wearing makeup or wearing heels, etc, because to do so was giving into the patriarchy. I was miserable of course. It took my drag queen friends to wake me up to that, as I realized that they were willing to give up family, social status...their safety and even their lives for the privilege of expressing themselves in a glamorous, feminine way. While I had that privilege because I was born in a female body. I might be criticised by both men and women, but I wouldn’t be beaten in the street for transgressing gender roles. I realized how much it meant to me through seeing how much it meant to them. Why should I give that up either? Why should anyone have to?” In Aepril’s situation, she found that her place of authenticity was through femininity. In a world that is so divided between the shoulds and should-nots of who we’re supposed to be, I find it important to squeeze ourselves through and experience all sides so we can settle on what’s true for us. Then it’s no longer conformity; it’s an outlet.

In the 20th and 21st centuries, the use of makeup norms has been subverted to amplify voices that demand human rights and fair treatment. Its application has been largely linked to LGBTQ+ visibility and gay rights movements. The anti-Vietnam movement in the late 60s and 70s utilized makeup to display over-feminization and homosexuality as a way to avoid being drafted. The glam rock movement gave us icons like David Bowie, exposing and exploding restrictive gender norms through outrageous clothing and makeup, utilizing pop culture to spread ideas and acceptance of androgyny. “Female impersonation” has origins dating back to the 19th century in Europe, and the art of Drag Queens & Kings is alive and well today, celebrating, mocking, questioning, and expanding gender in clubs and theaters, in film, and right in our homes through TV favorites like Ru Paul’s Drag Race.

For our trans-sisters, the decision to wear makeup could have life or death consequences. As a transwoman friend of mine disclosed a few months back, when she’s walking down the street and hears a man call after her, her immediate thoughts turn to, “will I experience violence because I’m a woman? Or will I experience violence because he thinks I’m a faggot?” There is a lot of discussion in the trans community about the privilege of “passing”, and I believe these conversations have further supported the struggles womxn generally face-- does wearing makeup make you more or less of a woman? As writer Lux Alptraum points out, “the idea that external appearance is what makes someone a “real” woman is the very thing that many trans women have committed themselves to fighting. To the extent that makeup is an essential part of any trans woman’s gender identity or notion of her womanhood, it’s largely because that’s the message the rest of the world aggressively forces upon her.” Read the rest of this article at https://www.racked.com/2017/3/23/14937266/trans-women-makeup

Makeup is incredibly powerful. It can be used for protest, and it can be used for comfort. It’s daily wear, and it’s political. It’s an expression of freedom, and a bold face confronting restriction. It’s transformative, giving people the opportunity to live in the bodies and images that feel right and true for them. Makeup is art, an embracing of life and physicality, a way to show up, be counted, and be present. It’s an act of defiance, and an act of love.

I recently read that Facebook now has 56 gender identities one can choose from. Facebook blows, but wow that’s actually really awesome! Within that list, some of the more frequently used terms include:

Agender/Neutrois Androgyne/Androgynous Bigender Cis/Cisgender Female to Male/FTM Gender Fluid Gender Nonconforming/Variant Gender Questioning Genderqueer Intersex Male to Female/MTF Neither Non-binary Other Pangender Trans/Transgender Transsexual Two-spirit (Important: this is Native American. Don’t pull a Jason Mraz. Don’t appropriate)

Out of this list, the following folks are allowed to wear makeup:

All of them Everyone Anyone Everybody The General Public The Whole World Human Beings Aliens Animals but only if they’re actually humans in animal costumes

If you’re interested in following makeup artists on IG who are trans or gender non-conforming, here is a great starter list (partially sourced from wearyourvoicemag.com):

@ brownbeautystandards @ vlad_theunicorn @ jade_poncee @ makeupby_bran @ rosalynnemontoya @ miles_jai @ completedestruction 

Again, there are infinite reasons why people of any gender do and don’t wear makeup, and I’m not going to be an authority on the matter. But I hope some of this information helps you on your journey to understand yourself better, and hold space of greater allyship and tolerance for others.

Below are some links and phone numbers if you feel you need greater support for the topics being discussed in this blog series. Being beautiful is cool, and so is being safe. You deserve to be here, and you matter.

Enjoy your week, and we’ll see you back here next week for Part 4: Performance Artists and Makeup!

National Eating Disorders 24 hr Hotline: 1-800-931-2237

https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/body-image-0

TransLifeline Hotline: 877-565-8860

https://www.translifeline.org/

LGBT National Hotline: 1-888-843-4564

https://www.glbthotline.org/

National Suicide Prevention 24hr Hotline: 1-800-273-8255

http://sexworkersproject.org/resources/

[surly01]

It Can’t Happen Here

The media here is the opposition party. They don’t understand this country. They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States.”

Originally published on the Doomstead Diner on June 2, 2020

"I swear to the Lord, I still can't see, why Democracy means, everybody but me." –Langston Hughes

I'm old enough to remember when White America was outraged– OUTRAGED, I say– when H. Rap Brown offered America the simple truth that "Violence is an American as cherry pie" in July of 1967 at a press conference in Washington, D.C. That was long before the Chicago police and the FBI murdered a sleeping Fred Hampton in December of 1969.

I'm old enough to remember WMD. Remember those?  "Yellowcake," the excuse for a Republican administration lying us into the wrong war, with Fox News and Hate Radio accusing those opposed of treason. Remember The Great Recession?  Presided over by a Republican president who having pissed away the Clinton budget surplus on tax cuts (and more tax cuts) for a war based on lies?  The effects of which then exacerbated by Republicans in Congress determined to sabotage whatever Obama might have tried to ease the suffering of millions?

Memory: the liberal superpower. But the long history of this country is written in blood, built on the bones of the indigenous, the slave, the immigrant laborer, and other "conditional citizens," whose rights to "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness" are conditioned upon not being locked on by a police searchlight or targeted by police weapons.

There has been an open season on black American males with no bag limit. Cops are able to summarily execute black Americans with minimal, if any, consequence. Hence the long overdue rising which has bubbled over this week In response to the on-video murders of George Floyd, and before him Ahmaud Arbery. But a list of the dead would be a roll call of ignominy: Breonna Taylor, Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Philando Castile…

In late stage capitalism, where everything has been commoditized, where almost all speech is marketing, no one should be surprised that police are the occupation army of capital. Occupation armies treat the citizenry as hostile. Expect no less on America's streets.

Yet the brutality and direct targeting of journalists is new for this country, another milestone in the march to fascism.

Trump has sown hatred of the press for years, borrowing techniques more often seen in third world dictatorships, Now journalists are under assault from police and protesters alike.

On Friday, while reporting on live TV, CNN's Omar Jimenez and his crew was arrested as the crew covered George Floyd protests.  CNN reported that the arresting officers were from the Minnesota State Patrol. The reason for their arrests was not immediately clear, but was later attributed to orders issued by Gov. Tim Walz to clear the area.

CNN's Josh Campbell, also reporting from the area but not standing with the on-air crew, said he, too, was approached by police, but was allowed to remain. Jimenez is black and Latino, while Campbell is white. For his part, Walz apologized to CNN, saying there was "absolutely no reason" for the arrests and that he took "full responsibility."

Elsewhere around the country, journalists were harassed and targeted by police.

In Louisville, a police officer fired pepper balls at a local TV reporter, Kaitlin Rust. In Denver, police fired paintballs and tear gas, hitting a news photographer and his camera. Bellingcat has documented at least 50 separate incidents where journalists have been attacked by law enforcement.

Those who say that Trump's rhetoric is just harmless bloviating are kidding themselves. We are watching a real time devolution to fascism, American-style. Steve Bannon may be gone from the White House grounds, but his message lives on. The press is the enemy, says Bannon.

The media here is the opposition party. They don’t understand this country. They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States.”

But they're going to understand it good and hard. Bannon's advice is to “flood the zone with shit,” overwhelming the media with disinformation, distraction, and denial. After three and a half years, the American press finds itself having gone from being called names to becoming targets of police suppression. Late Tuesday, Trump emerged from his bunker for a photo op and a message of repression.

"At this point we should probably just be called the states of america."

–Sarah Silverman

Trust in the government has steadily eroded ever since the Warren Commission report. Vietnam, death tolls. Pentagon Papers. Iran-Contra and that lying lout Oliver North. Pardons all around. Yellowcake. Cooked intel. War in Iraq after 9-11. Concealment, deception and outright lies have characterized U.S. national security policy for decades. So little surprise that some people are willing to dismiss appeals to authority and evidence-based claims.

Others are as eager and willing as ever to turn over their legal rights to a legally spurious junta making it up as they go along.

Far-Right extremists Are showing up, hoping to Turn the George Floyd Protests Into a new civil war. They show up in cars with license plates removed, and often dress in "antifa" drag, wearing the black goodies associated with "black bloc" anarchists. Plus it appears that Agents provocateur may now be part of the standard policing playbook for dealing with protest. For those interested, the blog Just Security has published an analysis of these infiltration tactics, particularly those of "accelerationists," an extreme subset of white nationalism whose goal is to bring about chaos and destruction via a Charles Mansonesque race war.

Many reports from Minnesota of cars without license plates. When approached by police the occupants scatter on foot. Here is one.

During Occupy I told anyone who would listen to assume that anyone exhorting you to violence is a cop or a spy. Now you can add infiltrator to the mix.

Trump called the protesters “thugs” and threatened to have them shot. “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” he tweeted, parroting a former Miami police chief whose words spurred race riots in the late 1960s. Marvelous deflection from the over 100,000 deaths Trump has caused by his mishandling of the Covid-19 pandemic. All the better to drive Whites into the arms of the assorted fascists, grifters and neo-Confederates that comprise the Trump regime.

And we learn that "antifa," that all purpose blamesicle beloved of the alt-right, (and which is not an organized group), is to be designated as "terrorist organization." As with so many Trump pronunciamentos, the government has no existing legal authority to label any domestic group in the manner it currently designates foreign terrorist organizations.

Antifa just means "anti-fascist;" It's not a club holding monthly meetings.  But for the fuzzy thinkers of the right, antifa is some centrally controlled, George Soros-funded Monolith of The Resistance. Within the cult of perpetual victimhood that defines the drooling right in this country, antifa is a made-to-order whipping boy.

Why does he get away with it? The complicit beltway media and their apparatchik bosses whose fat livings depend on Republicans returning their phone calls. And whose stock in trade is "bothsiderism" punctuated by "whataboutism." A.J. Liebling famously said, "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one." And the bookers and producers understand that and follow their assigned scripts, all of which support the existing system and the preservation of capital.

This week we learned that the only way to protest correctly is show up armed with guns at a state capitol.

10 steps to closing societies and to totalitarianism.

Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy. Create secret prisons where torture takes place. Develop a thug caste or paramilitary force not answerable to citizens. Set up an internal surveillance system. Infiltrate and harass citizens' groups. Engage in arbitrary detention and release. Target key individuals. Control the press. Cast criticism as espionage and dissent as treason. Subvert the rule of law.

–Naomi Wolf

We should have undone the so-called PATRIOT Act and other pernicious laws before now. Indefinite detention, anyone? Trump and Barr will exploit the far corners of American law to hound their opponents. So for the second or third time in a decade, I awaken to learn I've been labeled a terrorist by my own government for believing that the government is abusive. So now I find myself an enemy of the state. It's not even Wednesday yet.

"When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."

–Attributed to Sinclair Lewis

So why don't we just bring civil charges Or otherwise attempt to bring rogue cops to some sort of justice?

But when Goerge Floyd’s family goes to court to hold the officers liable for their actions, a judge in Minnesota may very well dismiss their claims. All because of a legal doctrine called "qualified immunity" that specifically shields government officials, including poilice, from most such claims. Police act like laws don't apply to them because of 'qualified immunity.' They're right.

The Supreme Court created qualified immunity in 1982. With that novel invention, the court granted all government officials immunity for violating constitutional and civil rights unless the victims of those violations can show that the rights were “clearly established.”Although innocuous sounding, the clearly established test is a legal obstacle that’s nearly impossible to overcome. It requires a victim to identify an earlier decision by the Supreme Court or a federal appeals court in the same jurisdiction holding that precisely the same conduct under the same circumstances is illegal or unconstitutional. If none exists, the official is immune. Whether the official’s actions are unconstitutional, intentional, or malicious is irrelevant to the test.

One imagines that if police were subject to civil liability for their actions, including loss of pension oif convicted, we might quickly see a change in the amount of abusive behavior on the part of police.

As I got ready to post this, events have swarmed these scribblings. Moments after threatening to unleash the military against the American people, styling them "antifa," or "professional anarchists” – for the crime of seeking racial justice, #BunkerBoyTrump had military police teargas and shoot rubber bullets into a peaceful crowd. This display of supposed "toughness" was so a reality TV "president" he could hold a pointless photo op, clutching a Bible in front of a church. Thus making Sinclair Lewis a prophet:  Fascism has come to America.

I'm old enough to remember a different America. One where the cop on the beat or street was a potential source of aid and safety. Where people didn't cower in fear or snarl in loathing at their neighbors for their political beliefs. And one in which every yahoo with a grievance didn't brandish an AK-47 (or a hunting bow) at a public demonstration. Or where the President at least pretended to care about the welfare of his fellow citizens. But those days are long gone, as the American public learns what foreign governments have already learned through the last three and a half years: America is no longer to be trusted or counted upon.

Surly1 was an administrator and contributing author to Doomstead Diner. He is the author of numerous rants, screeds and spittle-flecked invective here and elsewhere. He lives a quiet domestic existence in Southeastern Virginia with his wife Contrary. Descended from a long line of people to whom one could never tell anything, all opinions are his and his alone, because he paid full retail for everything he has managed to learn.

[loyallogic]

Mob Lynching: A Vigilante’s attack on Rule of Law

This article is written by Shubham Gurav and Bodhi Ramteke, students of ILS Law College,  Pune. In this article, they have explained the concept of mob lynching, the current scenario in India and the laws relating to it.

Introduction

“In regard to the law of hate speech responsible for inciting communal passions, the central reality in India is not the abuse of law, but persistent refusal to enforce it.”

‘We the people’ – the opening words of the Constitution, the founding document of India – sums up the perception of society, of shared culture and history, and of civic affiliation, a perception that has been questioned throughout the lengthy period of Indian history. India, the fifth-largest economy in the world, is facing a threat to its integrity and growth, given the growing incidence of lynching. It is one of those hate crimes that through structured hate campaigns has become a language of indoctrinating vigilance. Mob lynching in India is a big religious and politico-legal crisis for democracy, requiring urgent solutions.

Religion, when assisted by the political support, is an instrument used to infuse disdain in the minds of individuals, aiding the accused to commit such an offence fearlessly. There is a noticeable accretion in community forces that have succeeded in spreading violence by taking punitive extra-judicial measures, with rumours playing a significant role. The individuals are under consistent danger of getting executed or thrashed on insignificant grounds of doubt that they belong to a specific group, religion or caste. This attitude transforms society into a fascist state, as individuals, who elect their leaders, maintain silence at gunpoint, ultimately strengthening the moral legitimacy of the offenders.

This article examines the participation of the people as a racialized group with extra-legal punitive power of death, and how it catalyzes the rise of mobocracy affecting the individual right of the person by their ostensible judgement, which conclusively is an ambush on democracy. 

An extensive, magnificent document, the Constitution must be ascribed to India’s achievement as a democratic autonomous country. This holy book is the preeminent document, and it was with the reception of this scripture, India embraced the ‘Rule of the law.’ This Rule of law, along with its enforcement machinery, was assigned the role of protection of the people from any arbitrary principle and to provide justice to all. The law enforcement agencies cannot act arbitrarily in order to regulate social behavior, but they are governed by land law. The primary goal of the law is to have an orderly society where the citizen dreams for change and progress is realized, and the individual aspiration finds space for the expression of his/her potential. In such an atmosphere where every citizen is entitled to enjoy the rights and interest bestowed under the constitutional and statutory law, he is also obligated to remain obeisant to the command of the law.

In Tehseen S. Poonawalla v. Union of India, the Supreme Court stated (see here) “The majesty of law cannot be sullied simply because an individual or a group generate the attitude that they have been empowered by the principles set out in law to take its enforcement into their own hands and gradually become law unto themselves and punish the violator on their own assumption and in the manner in which they deem fit. They forget that the administration of law is conferred on the law enforcing agencies and no one is allowed to take the law into his own hands on the fancy of his “shallow spirit of judgment”. Just as one is entitled to fight for his rights in law, the other is entitled to be treated as innocent till he is found guilty after a fair trial. No act of a citizen is to be adjudged by any kind of community under the guise of protectors of law.”

However, individuals over the world have been taking the law in their very own hands and have been punishing the individuals in a way they deem fit. They end up behaving barbarously, driven by their personal perceptions of right and wrong. The outcome of such episodes may be something as serious as murder, executed usually by a group of individuals and not a person.  Such an act, driven by extreme beliefs and made aggressive by a resolve to attack any other belief contradictory to it, is, in short, mob lynching.

In recent years, India has seen a considerable rise in mob lynching activities. An overwhelming majority of such incidents involve the spontaneous attack by a racialized group of people, who consider the act of the victim as a strike against the deep roots of traditions and religion. 

Meaning of the Phenomenon

Lynching is not a new phenomenon, but it has been around the world all the time. The term lynch law refers to a self-constituted court that imposes sentence on a person without due process of law. Both terms are derived from the name of Charles Lynch (1736–96), a Virginia planter and justice of the peace who, during the American Revolution, headed an irregular court formed to punish loyalists. (see here)

Fitzhugh Brundage states “lynching combines the fellowship of a hunt with the honor of serving the alleged needs of the community,” Generally, lynching is defined as a homicidal aggression punishing (often killing) a person or persons by an angry mob to suppress the tendency of deviance and the heinous crime committed by the former. The crime is so savage that it socially revolts the crowd to gather spontaneously killing the criminal (see here).

The common definition of lynching by NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) in the US is that: 

(i) there must be evidence that a person was killed; (ii) the person must have met death illegally; (iii) a group of three or more persons must have participated in the killings; and (iv) the killing is carried out in public (see here).

Thus, lynching is an act of unspeakable horror. There is an absolute asymmetry of power. It is a mob versus an individual, who is often defenceless and begging for life.

Current Scenario in India

Lynching in India includes lynching of those accused of petty crimes, individuals accused of murder and rape, and also the individuals perceived by the mob as deviants. The main reason for deaths by lynching has been a result of witch-hunts, the barbaric caste system in the country, and other religiously driven reasons. 

The number of incidents of lynching in India has been on the rise. Accompanying this overall rise is the rise of mob lynching, particularly by cow vigilantes. At the epicentre of upheaval in the country is the indolent animal cow. While it is sacred and mother-like for the majority Hindus; cow mulching is the source of income for the minority Muslims. Cow vigilante groups or ‘Gau Rakshaks’, following the Government’s ban on cow slaughtering, have been ruthlessly killing those suspected of killing, trading, or consuming beef.

Dadri lynching of 2015 invited huge media attention. On 28-9-2015, the 52-year-old ironsmith was dragged from his house in the village of Bishahra, in the district of Dadri in Uttar Pradesh, after a local Hindu temple announced that a cow, considered sacred by many Hindus, had been slaughtered by him. He was beaten to death, and his son was severely wounded. Later, it came out by forensic reports that the meat was mutton, not beef. (see here) On 18th March 2016, Majloom Ansari, 32 and Imtiyaz Ansari, 12 were taking their cattle to a fair. The mob assaulted them near Jhabar village of Jharkhand. Their bodies were hanged from a tree.  On 25th May 2015 an e-rickshaw driver was beaten by a mob of students of Delhi University who tried to stop two drunk students from urinating in public to which the students (see here). On 1st July 2018, five people, belonging to the Nath Gosavi community, were brutally thrashed by a mob in the remote Rainpada village, about 100 kilometres from the district headquarters, leading to their death. The attack was believed to have been triggered by a rumour about a child-lifting gang being active in the area (see here).  On the night of April 16, Two Sadhus along with their driver were lynched by the mob of around 400 people in the Palghar district of Maharashtra, being conveyed as child-lifters (see here).

For the brutal crime of murder, lynching is just another name. There can be no single factor behind the commission of an act of mass abuse, as many variables can contribute to such abuse. According to experts, the commission of such crimes requires a special environment and a belief system, to overcome the reticence to carry out such a horrifying crime. Such an environment is created when people believe that they have the authority to accomplish this responsibility and cease to recognize the victim as a member of society. The responsibility of representing the entire community, the mistrust in the state’s competence in delivering justice, when supplemented with the rumours initiate an idea that an individual is not killing another individual, but the community is punishing the offender who has violated their self-styled moral and religious sentiments. 

The politicization of this issue knocks up the sense of impunity- a sense that we can do it and can get away with it as the government is with us. It is our government. When a Union minister laurels convicts of a lynching, it gives the culprits a feeling that they have accomplished something great. One when convicted, then given bail and then a minister garlanding the person will certainly add to the sense of impunity and bluster (see here).

             Click Above

Indian Laws and Failure of their Implementation

The criminal laws face a void as there is no law or provision that criminalises mob lynching. Although IPC has provisions for murder, culpable homicide, rioting, and unlawful assembly but there is no provision for a group that comes collectively to kill a person. Under Section 223 (a) of Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC), it is possible to punish two or more accused committing the same offence in the course of the “same transaction.” However, the provision falls short of punishing offenders of mob lynching (see here). The National Campaign against mob lynching drafted a Lynching Act, 2017 for protection against violent lynching.

Right to non-discrimination is imbibed in Article 14, which guarantees each person in the territory of India equality before the law and equal protection of laws. Article 15 of the Indian Constitution prevents discrimination of communities based on caste, sex, race, or religion. Incidents of lynching violate the right to equality and prohibition of discrimination enshrined in the Indian Constitution under Article 14 and Article 15, respectively.

Article 21 of the Indian Constitution states, “No person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty except under procedure established by law.” The objective of Article 21 is to prevent the state from depriving a person of his/her personal liberty and life.

However, the Indian states have failed to implement the laws. The widespread corruption in law enforcement agencies, unconscionable delays in the disposal of cases by the judiciary and the unfair advantages to the rich and the dominance in the judicial system contribute to improper implementation of laws. In almost all of the cases, the police initially stalled investigations, ignored procedures, or even played a complicit role in the killings and cover-up of crimes. Instead of promptly investigating and arresting suspects, the police filed complaints against victims, their families, and witnesses under laws that ban cow slaughter (see here).

Conclusion 

In a civilised society, even one lynching is too many. But India has seen a spate of them recently. The gravity of the situation has made the Supreme Court term it as a “horrendous act of mobocracy”. The Supreme Court has provided guidelines to deal with this situation and has asked the Parliament to make a new law to deal with it which will instil a sense of fear among those who involve themselves in such activities (see here). However, mere laws without proper implementation would not suffice the purpose. The implementation should be accompanied by the proper manner of media coverage. There’s a need for rationalised social leadership rather than a biased political leadership. Politicians must rise above their political intentions; the public must come forward to prevent these hooligans; the media must be more cautious in depicting these occurrences.

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[welcometothecinema1]

Assassin’s Creed - A not Movie Review of the Movie, Assassin’s Creed, by Welcome to the Cinema

Assassin’s Creed takes everything that is boring and dumb and dull and hazy and bad graphicy about the game series Assassins Creed and everything about the Spanish Inquisition that is boring, grim, sad and dumb and combines them together into something that is dumb, sad, needlessly grim, hazy and bad graphicy.  I should call it a film. But it is not a film, and to call it thus does a disservice to the auteurs and craftsmen of this and the previous century. I could barely refer to it as an association of images and sounds. That it even got made is endemic of how lazy and cannibalistic the Hollywood machine has become.  

As such, I will not deign to review it in the traditional sense – I will talk about it, however.  

If you like this association of images and sounds called hereafter, Assassin’s Creed, or Ass Creed for the short hand, you have either suffered a stroke or are about to suffer a stroke. I don’t care much which it is. But there is a good chance that your genetic material is not worth duplicating, so consider that as I go on to talk about the movie itself.

We open in some dark, dusty catacombs.  There’s lots of haze and smoke. And weird people in hoods are speaking in Spanish – talking about free will and how they are assassins and shit, which is already pretty laughable.  I would suppose that somewhere in the script or screenplay they referred to this sequence as “the initiation” because the main character, Callum Lynch’s ancestor (both ancestor and Callum are played by a needlessly dour and morose Michael Fassbender), is becoming an assassin, a defender who fights in the night to secure the light. No shit.  And how does he do that, you might ask? By killing a lot of people. Like a lot. At times he kills one person, a bad guy with an evil agenda, or a bad guys lackey, who might just be at the wrong place at the wrong time. But that’s basically it. He fights and kills guys. I cannot stress to you how dumb this plot point is, because it is the fulcrum of the movie.  Rather than having some set and arbitrary goal to strive towards over the course, Ass Crack’s dramatic fulcrum is lynched (no pun intended) to the fact that our protagonist kills a lot of folks.  To call them “assassinations” in turn does a disservice to actual assassins. When I think of assassination, I think of a guy sneaking around to kill a very specific person for a very specific reason.  What we who view this turd of a movie are forced to witness is an assassin who kills people really quickly, which is not really assassination at all.  It is more like murderation, or mass murderation, if you will.  

Visually, Ass Creed is shot by a lunatic.  We go from birds eye view shots, to close ups, from indoor to outdoor, in quick succession, directly, one after the other, breaking then re-breaking the 180 degree rule to the point of sheer insanity. I am not certain that I did not suffer from multiple bleeding aneurysms over the course of it. From light to dark and light again��maybe they’d have something here if this was an actual movie, but frankly, there are more interesting ways to establish that theme visually than a camera that can’t keep track of basic filmic principles.  

There is not even the remnant of a nugget of a shard of a film in this mess.  How did this get made? Seriously. I’m asking for a friend.  

Despite that, there are ways to turn the story into something worthwhile.  The entire plot is predicated on one giant conceit that is never addressed – that the “apple of eden”, this ark of the covenant type device, has been around for over a thousand years, and somehow…it contains the genetic information to help end violence, or rather, enforce slave will over the masses of mankind.  Obviously the baddies, this esoteric, all powerful group of robe wearing thespians called the Templars, desire this object.  And obviously these assassins…called the Assassin’s Creed, are standing in their way, conveniently siding with those who want to retain free will. And yet this movie does not only fail to address the fact that genetic helixes were only discovered in 1953 and thus, ancient peoples would have had no idea about how to somehow RETAIN THE KEY TO ENFORCING ONES WILL OVER HUMANITY WITH GENES, but they fail to deal with any of the social implications about the subject matter this battle over free will gives rise too.  Seriously. They only go over it with the briefest of explanations.  An explanation that is so completely terrible that it is laughable. They say “There was an ancient civilization that was very advanced, and it’s what made the Apple of Eden”.  Like what? Are you talking about aliens? You know, the dudes who helped us build the pyramids? Why is this a throwaway line of exposition and not the CRUX OF THE FUCKING MOVIE? Like, what if the Templars are after the Apple of Eden because it leads to a catacombs where there’s all this super advanced technology leftover from the aforementioned civilization and they want to get their hands on it?  That could be interesting. But again, no.  This movie is an utter fucking failure and the writers involved should be banned from ever touching pen to paper again.

It’s not that the ground isn’t right for ploughing and reaping what is plowed. There is genuinely interesting source material in the form of some of the plot points and themes in the video games. But these are never gone into. Such as the animus – this machine built by the Templars to allow modern day humans, who’s ancestors were assassins, relive the past through “genetic memory”.  Ripe territory to bring up questions about the nature of reality – about knowing what’s real and what’s fabrication, about the subjective will and how it is connected to the wider world. But nope. Not even close.

And that’s endemic of the whole movie experience. One insane missed shot to the next. On and on for like a hundred minutes. Fuck. THIS. MOVIE. FUCK ASS CREED.

Please, Regency Pictures, get in touch with me and I will help write a sequel. Just kidding, do not get in touch with me. 

-��         Signed, February 1st, 2017

-          The “Welcome to the Movies!” Guy

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[iasshikshalove]

Daily News Articles/Editorials 01st May 2020

PLASMA THERAPY IS NO SILVER BULLET

CONTEXT:

The COVID-19 pandemic has posed unprecedented challenges to governments, health professionals and the general public at large, around the world.

Every response, administrative, social, economic or medical is being subjected to intense public scrutiny, as it rightly should be in the spirit of mature democracy.

PLASMA THERAPY:

The therapy involves infusing patients suffering from COVID-19 with plasma from recovered patients. In theory, the antibodies of the recovered person may help that patient’s immune system fight the virus. While showing great promise, it is a line of treatment that is yet to be validated for efficacy and safety and cannot be deployed widely without caution.

The current evidence to conclude anything about the true benefits of this therapy is very thin.

Scientific research in medicine is the only means to overcome novel and complex diseases such as COVID-19 and that too thrives on the same spirit of debate and criticism.

The difference, however, is that the standards of evidence required, to generate consensus and arrive at the most optimal protocols, are far more rigorous and time-taking than in most other walks of life.

So is the case with the convalescent plasma therapy, that is being currently studied by the Indian Council of Medical Research, through open label, randomised controlled trial to evaluate it for both safety and efficacy.

Already, four patients have been enrolled in Ahmedabad and the study will be rolled out in 20 hospitals by the end of this week and at more centres over the next month.

NEED FOR MORE SEARCH:

The most important principle in medical ethics is “do no harm”. The transfusion of convalescent plasma is also not without risks, which range from mild reactions like fever, itching, to life-threatening allergic reactions and lung injury.

To recommend a therapy without studying it thoroughly with robust scientific methods may cause more harm than good.

Till date, there have been only three published case series for convalescent plasma in COVID-19 with a cumulative of 19 patients.

Given the very small number of patients involved in these studies and a publication bias in medicine, we cannot conclude the therapy will work on all patients all the time or even believe that the convalescent plasma was the only reason for their improvement.

RANDOMISED TRIAL:

To say with certainty whether a drug is truly effective or not, the gold standard in medicine is to conduct a randomised controlled trial, where half the patients get the experimental drug and the other half do not.

Only if patients in the first half show substantial improvement over those in the second half, it indicates the drug is beneficial.

Further, convalescent plasma therapy requires intensive resources, healthy COVID-19 survivors to donate, a blood bank with proper machinery and trained personnel to remove plasma, equipment to store it and testing facilities to make sure it has an adequate amount of antibodies.

Too much focus on one approach can take away the focus from other important therapeutic modalities like use of oxygen therapy, antivirals, and antibiotics for complicated hospital courses.

To overcome the pandemic comprehensively, we should focus on strengthening health systems at all levels, including referral systems, supply chain, logistics and inventory management.

We need to work on protecting our healthcare workers, improving prevention methods, promoting cough etiquettes, effective quarantining and accurate testing.

CONCLUSION:

Even these times of collective uncertainty are no reason to lower scientific temper.

While it is good to be hopeful, the fact remains there are no real silver bullets in medicine and health outcomes are a result of not just a few pills or therapies but a complex set of factors. Science should be driven by reason and evidence with hope as a catalyst but not by either fear or populism. Pushing one or the other therapy without evidence or caution can only set back our larger fight against COVID-19.

SOURCE: THE HINDU

RELIGION AND FREEDOM

CONTEXT:

Religious freedom is of paramount importance, not because it is about religion, but because it is about freedom.

The characterisation by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) of India as a country of particular concern, in its annual report, is not entirely surprising, considering its dim and known views about sectarian violence and aggravating governmental measures over the last year.

RECOMMENDATION:

The Indian government not only repudiated the report but also ridiculed the USCIRF.

The autonomous, bipartisan commission’s influence over any U.S. executive action is limited and occasional but its presumption of global authority appears amusingly expansive.

Whether or not the U.S. government acts on its recommendation to impose targeted sanctions on Indian government agencies and officials depends on American strategic interests.

The U.S. has used arguments of freedom, democracy, tolerance, and transparency as tools in its strategic pursuits, but there is no proof of any uniform or predictable pattern of enforcement of such moral attributes.

The process can be selective and often arbitrary in spotlighting countries. Mirroring this pattern, India selectively approaches global opinions on itself, embracing and celebrating laudatory ones and rejecting inconvenient ones.

The frantic, and relatively successful, efforts to raise its Ease of Doing Business ranking by the World Bank is a case in point.

Many of these reports have a circulatory life — the USCIRF report quotes UN Special Rapporteurs to buttress its point on the discriminatory outcome of the National Register of Citizens in Assam.

Overall, such reports contribute to the construction of an image of a country, and the Indian government is cognisant of this pattern. In March, the Indian government told Niti Aayog to track 32 global indices and engage with the bodies that measure them, to advance reform and growth.

RELIGIOUS FREEDOM:

India advertises itself as a multi-religious democracy and as an adherent to global norms of rule of law.

It also aspires to be on the table of global rule making. For a country with such stated ambitions, its record on religious freedom as reflected through events of the last one year is deeply disconcerting.

The catalogue of religious violence, incitement and wrecking of the rule of law in several parts of the country remains an unsettling fact.

CONCLUSION:

The partisan nature of the ruling dispensation is also difficult to wish away. Reputation is important for a country’s economic development and global standing but beyond that instrumental perspective, rule of law and communal harmony are essential for any functioning democracy.

Reputation is important for a country’s economic development and global standing but beyond that instrumental perspective, rule of law and communal harmony are essential for any functioning democracy. India must protect its freedoms, and come down heavily (take strong actions) on religious violence.

SOURCE: THE HINDU

THE MAKING OF THE MODERN PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL

CONTEXT:

This article is based on fundamentals of a just law. Law is not the source of its own moral authority and legitimacy.

A SETBACK TO DEMOCRACY:

Centuries later, M.K. Gandhi reiterated(repeated) that a law is binding only if it satisfies the unwritten codes of public ethics.

He spoke in the context of colonial rule. Surely democratic regimes ought to respect the right of citizens to dissent(disagreement).

In today’s India, however, holders of state power refuse to tolerate ideas, reflection, debate, and discussion.

Two years ago, the government arrested eminent(important) members of civil society on charges that were clearly produced by conspiratorial(relating to or suggestive of a secret plan made by a group of people to do something unlawful or harmful) imaginations.

On April 14, two of India’s well-known scholars/activists, Anand Teltumbde and Gautam Navlakha, surrendered before the National Investigation Agency.

In early April, an FIR was filed by the Uttar Pradesh government against the editor of the news website, The Wire, Siddharth Varadarajan. The charges in these cases are flimsy(weak).

It is obvious that intellectuals are being penalised for taking on the government.

DEPRESSING COMMENTARY:

The arrests are a depressing commentary(state) on the nature of the present government. Sophisticated(having, revealing, or involving a great deal of worldly experience and knowledge of fashion and culture) societies respect intellectuals because they subject the present to historically informed investigation,interpretation(explanation), critique and prescription. This is integral to the idea of democratic politics as self-critique.

Politics establishes rules that govern multiple transactions of society. It cannot be its own defendant, judge and jury. If politics is, as Aristotle put it, the master science (science for Greeks is knowledge), it has to accept reflective and critical activity. Politics is too important to be left to politicians alone.

While authoritarian societies breed(give birth) court historians, mature democracies appreciate critical scholarship. But today intellectualism is dismissed contemptuously(feeling that a person or a thing is worthless) as elitist.

Not only does this attitude foster(develop) a culture of mediocrity, intellectuals who hold a mirror to the state are hounded and arrested.

This is a setback to democracy, because it forecloses(prevents) engagement with structures of power. Without its public intellectuals, democracy slides into authoritarianism.

DREYFUS AFFAIR:

The first public intellectual was, of course, Socrates. The modern notion of the public intellectual is, however, fairly recent.

It took shape in the tumultuous(disturbed) days of what has come to be known as the ‘Dreyfus affair’ in France in 1894. Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish Army officer, had allegedly handed over important government documents to the Germans.

He was convicted of treason(crime of betraying one’s country) amidst a roar of revolting anti-Semitism(hatred towards jews).

When Dreyfus was stripped of his medals, the crowd shouted ‘Death to the Jew’. The atmosphere was charged, mob mentality ruled, and sane(good) voices were drowned in the din(dark).

Scholars, artists, and novelists could hardly keep away. They had to summon(recall) their knowledge to reflect on citizens’ rights, the irrational(without sense) behaviour of crowds, the ugly slogans that stereotyped(targeting entire community) an entire community, and the unholy glee(pleasure) with which crowds watched the humiliation of an army officer.

The incident propelled(forced) Paris-based intellectuals into the mainstream of French politics. This was the time when scholars came out from their ivory towers(luxury chairs) and took sides, despite massive crowd hysteria(excessive emotions) that broke bounds(limits) of civility.

INJUSTICE, PREJUDICE AND INTOLERANCE:

Dreyfus was later exonerated(absolve (someone) from blame for a fault or wrongdoing), but the affair split the French intelligentsia wide open.

Emile Zola wrote an open letter, J’Accuse, in support of the beleaguered(under attack) army officer. Zola attacked injustice, prejudice(bias) and intolerance. He reserved for the intellectual the function that Socrates had reserved for the philosopher: stand by the universal in the quest for truth and in the fight against injustice.

Julien Benda, a noted Jewish intellectual, argued that the duty of the intellectual is to defend universal values over and above the politics of the moment.

COMMITMENT TO TRUTH, REASON AND JUSTICE:

But other scholars propagated(supported) anti-Semitism. In 1942, the philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote an account of the anti-Semitism directed at Dreyfus by right-wing intellectuals in France.

Intellectuals who upheld(supported) Republicanism and basic rights were too weak to confront the power of the mob. Mobs are fickle(changing frequently, especially as regards one’s loyalties or affections), their rhetoric is blood-curdling, they hate debate, detest(hate) institutions, and hero-worship leaders.

When intellectuals follow the mob or, worse, the leader, they pave the way for fascism, the destruction of institutions, the emergence of the hero, and pogroms(mass massacre) of the minority. When intellectuals fail to live up to codes of public ethics, they uphold injustice. Their commitment to truth, reason and justice lapses; they become partners in injustice.

MORAL CONSCIENCE OF SOCIETY:

The Dreyfus affair legitimised(strengthened) the idea that a public intellectual has to denounce injustice despite the power of the mob. Since then it has been held that intellectuals are not defined by what they are — professors, writers, artists or journalists — but by what they do. Intellectuals have to be competent in their own field, otherwise they will not be taken seriously by anyone.

But there is more to being an intellectual. Scholars have to be public intellectuals. They have to cast their scholarly gaze(look) on issues that cause explosions, sift(screen) out the details, analyse, evaluate, and take a position. An intellectual has to be involved in public affairs.

Public intellectuals are the moral conscience of society, simply because they think. To think is to question, to call for freedom, and to invoke the right to disobey. Our intellectuals have to be reflective, philosophical beings, philosophical in the sense that they think about issues, addresses contemporary social problems and see them as the legacies of previously unresolved issues of social injustice.

IN INDIA:

It is precisely the unresolved issue of social injustice that has been taken up by Mr. Teltumbde, Mr. Navlakha and Mr. Varadarajan repeatedly and insistently. All three of them have battled the reproduction of injustice in their own ways.

Teltumbde is a fine chronicler of the injustice that has been heaped(meted) on the Dalit community. Mr. Navlakha has fiercely(strongly) castigated(formal expression of disapproval) violations of civil liberties. And Mr. Varadarajan has exposed the horrific crimes committed by the merchants of hate.

None of them has advocated(supported) violence, none of them has asked the Indian people to revolt against the elected regime. All they ask for is that the provisions of the Constitution be honoured by our leaders.

CONCLUSION:

Leaders wield the scalpel(knife used by surgeons), they ought to be the healers. Their touch should nurse the wounds in the body politic. Public intellectuals are the conscience of our country.

They should be respected because they speak out against injustice wherever it occurs, not be subjected to punitive(inflicting or intended as punishment) action.

Public intellectuals are of value because they bring the sane, cool voice of reasoned reflection to bear on contentious and stormy public issues.

SOURCE: THE HINDU

GOING HOME

CONTEXT:

More than a month after the nationwide lockdown dried up the sources of livelihood for migrant workers in different parts of the country, the Union Home Ministry has passed an order allowing the inter-state movement of these workers.

By all accounts, most of them have spent the past five weeks in overcrowded shelters arranged by state governments, civil society groups or employers. The decision to allow them to return home, though belated, is welcome.

SAFE RETURN:

The Centre has also done well to direct states to ensure that the homecoming of the workers happens in controlled conditions: “Only asymptomatic people will be allowed to travel, and a second assessment of their health will be conducted after they arrive at their home states”.

States have been asked to develop protocols for receiving and sending stranded persons. The onus(responsibility) is now on them to draw plans to facilitate their safe return.

A majority of the migrant workers hail(come from) from Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal, Jharkhand and Odisha.

These states have a varying COVID-19 burden. Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh have more than 2,000 cases while the states in the east have a comparatively low incidence of the disease, though, as a report in this paper shows, West Bengal, Bihar and Jharkhand are showing signs of becoming potential.

CHALLENGES TO THESE STATES:

The return of migrants could pose more challenges to these states. But that is a responsibility for the respective governments to address — not a burden to be shouldered(carried) by the returning workers alone.

The local authorities must reach out to the migrants to conduct periodic assessments of their health — as required by the home ministry’s guidelines — and the state governments must be ready with quarantine facilities where, if required, they can be isolated in a dignified manner.

The humanitarian case for these measures is evident(obvious). But, as former chief economic adviser Arvind Subramanian underlined at an e-adda organised by this paper on Tuesday, there is also economic sense in facilitating the exit of workers. Migrant workers will return to work only when they are assured that, in times of crisis, they can go back easily and safely to the sanctuary of their villages.

GRIEF OF MIGRANT WORKERS:

The Covid-19 pandemic has bared(uncovered) the precarious(worrying) existence of at least a 100-million people, many of them migrants, who work in factories, build roads and houses, pull rickshaws and operate the informal economy. They live in squalor(dirt) and in shanties — even on pavements of the cities they serve — without regular supplies of potable water and electricity.

Many of them do not have proof of domicile(home) in the places they work, cannot get a ration card and thus remain out of the ambit(control) of the public distribution system.

In rural India, the MGNREGA, the PM Kisan Yojana and crop insurance schemes provide a semblance(appearance) of relief during distress.

But in cities migrant workers do not have even this modicum(small amount) of social security. Without social safety nets for such workers, the wheels of the economy could stop turning. That’s one important lesson of this pandemic.

CONCLUSION:

Centre’s decision to allow migrants to return home is welcome. Their safety and dignity is the state’s responsibility.

SOURCE: INDIAN EXPRESS

END THE UNCERTAINITY

CONTEXT:

In the midst of the pandemic, Maharashtra is staring(looking) at a building political crisis. Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray will have to vacate his office if he fails to get elected or nominated to the state legislative assembly or council before May 27.

DEFERRED ELECTIONS:

Thackeray was sworn in on November 28 last year, and as per the law, must become a member of the House within six months, in this case, before May 27.

Since the Election Commission has deferred(postponed) all elections, including to nine legislative council seats in Maharashtra, in the wake of the COVID outbreak, the ruling coalition has proposed that Governor Bhagat Singh Koshyari nominate Thackeray to a vacant seat in the legislative council.

The governor has been silent on the proposal, though the state cabinet made a formal recommendation, first on April 9 and then, on April 27. On Thursday, however, he requested the EC to declare elections to the nine legislative council seats “at the earliest”.

It is important that a prolonged political impasse(deadlock)is avoided in a state in which COVID is taking a high and mounting toll. At the same time, it is also imperative(needful) that a solution is found only through due process, and not by short circuiting it, or by setting a precedent(model) that could return to haunt(bad memory), and be misused.

REPRESENTATION OF THE PEOPLE ACT:

The main opposition party in Maharashtra, the BJP, has argued that Thackeray’s nomination to the legislative council would be in violation of the Representation of the People Act.

The RPA mandates that a vacant seat be filled only if the remainder of the term extends to at least a year – the term of the seat proposed for Thackeray ends in June.

However, some constitutional experts have argued that the cited law applies only to by-elections, and not nominations. It is for the courts to clarify the law.

But a resolution – whether by the nomination route, or the holding of election – needs to be reached quickly, taking into account the context, while adhering(following) to due process.

If the COVID crisis had not unfolded, it would not be wrong to say that, given the ruling Maha Vikas Aghadi’s numbers in the assembly, Thackeray’s election to the legislative council was a fait accompli(thing that has already happened or been decided before those affected hear about it, leaving them with no option but to accept it).

CONCLUSION:

The Election Commission could find a way of holding the deferred elections to the nine council seats in Maharashtra immediately. There may be logistical issues due to the COVID restrictions, but the EC could explore innovative solutions.

Elections to the council require only the MLAs to vote and polling could be held without making them congregate(assemble) in the House. Most importantly, all the stakeholders must avoid the temptation to politicise or prolong the uncertainty.

Governor Koshyari has urged EC to hold election in which Maharashtra CM will be candidate. EC must act without delay.

SOURCE: INDIAN EXPRESS

B.R AMBEDKAR LAID THE FOUNDATION FOR WORKER’S RIGHTS, SOCIAL SECURITY IN INDIA

CONTEXT:

International Labour Day is celebrated on May 1 to honour workers. Labour has an undeniable role in shaping the nation’s fortune. Since the timesimmemorial(long time), the working class has struggled and sacrificed for greater causes — first for Independence and then building the nation brick by brick.

The ongoing fight against COVID-19 has brought temporary hardship for everyone, including workers.

BEACON FOR WORKERS:

Many leaders have been a beacon(signal) for workers and B R Ambedkar was one among them. As the representative of the Depressed Classes in the Round Table Conference, Ambedkar forcefully pleaded for living wages, decent working conditions and the freedom of peasants from the clutches of cruel landlords.

He also fought for the removal of social evils that blighted(infected) the lives of the downtrodden.

INDEPENDENT LABOUR PARTY:

He went on to form the Independent Labour Party (ILP) in 1936 with a comprehensive programme to meet the needs and grievances of the landless, poor tenants, agriculturists, and workers.

In the polls held in 1937, the first election under the newly enacted Government of India Act of 1935, the ILP achieved spectacular success by winning 15 of the 17 seats it had contested for the Bombay Legislative Assembly.

On September 17, 1937, during the Poona session of the Bombay Assembly, he introduced a bill to abolish the Khoti system of land tenure in Konkan. He opposed the introduction of Industrial Disputes Bill, 1937 because it removed the workers’ right to strike.

PROFOUND KNOWLEDGE:

His profound knowledge of labour matters was universally acknowledged and demonstrated during his term as Labour member of the Viceroy’s Executive Council from 1942 to 1946. When the world order was in flux during World War II, Ambedkar was guiding Indian labour.

The changing economy provided opportunities for the expansion of industries. While entrepreneurs and managers could hope for prosperity, labour was not given its due share. Ambedkar piloted and introduced measures for labour welfare by laying the foundation for the basic structure for the government’s labour policy.

He tackled the knotty(complex) problems and won esteem(pride) and respect from employees and employers alike. The Indian Trade Union (Amendment) Bill, introduced by Ambedkar on November 8, 1943, compelled the employers to acknowledge trade unions.

Mines Maternity Benefit (Amendment) Bill 1943:

On February 8, 1944, in the legislative assembly during the debate on the Lifting of Ban on Employment of Women on Underground Work in Coal Mines, Ambedkar said: “It is for the first time that I think in any industry the principle has been established of equal pay for equal work irrespective of the sex.”

It was a historic moment. Through the Mines Maternity Benefit (Amendment) Bill 1943, he empowered women workers with maternity benefits.

PROPER CODE OF LABOUR LEGISLATION:

Addressing the Indian Labour Conference held in New Delhi on November 26, 1945, Ambedkar emphasised the urgent need to bring progressive labour welfare legislation: “Labour may well say that the fact that the British took 100 years to have a proper code of labour legislation is no argument that we should also in India take 100 years. History is not always an example. More often it is a warning.”

COMMUNISM:

Ambedkar did not accept the Marxist position that the abolition of private property would bring an end to poverty and suffering. In Buddha or Karl Marx, he writes: “Can the Communists say that in achieving their valuable end they have not destroyed other valuable ends? They have destroyed private property.

Assuming that this is a valuable end, can the Communists say that they have not destroyed other valuable end in the process of achieving it? How many people have they killed for achieving their end? Has human life no value? Could they not have taken property without taking the life of the owner?”

PRADHAN MANTRI SHRAM YOGI MAAN-DHAN YOJNA:

Inspired by Ambedkar, the current government has taken steps to improve the quality of life of workers. For example, the Pradhan Mantri Shram Yogi Maan-Dhan Yojna was launched in February 2019 to ensure protection of unorganised workers in their old age. Through technological interventions like Shram Suvidha Portal, transparency and accountability are ensured in the enforcement of labour law.

The government is working to simplify,amalgamate(cmbine) and rationalise(justify) the provisions of the existing central labour laws into four labour codes — Labour Code on Wages, on Industrial Relations, on Social Security & Welfare and on Occupational Safety, Health & Working Conditions.

CONCLUSION:

As we recall the innumerable contribution of the countless labourers in nation-building, with an ever-increasing spirit of Shramev Jayate, we must remember the contributions of Ambedkar.

SOURCE: INDIAN EXPRESS

[technicalsolutions88]

A report by campaign group Avaaz examining how Facebook’s platform is being used to spread hate speech in the Assam region of North East India suggests the company is once again failing to prevent its platform from being turned into a weapon to fuel ethnic violence.

Assam has a long-standing Muslim minority population but ethnic minorities in the state look increasingly vulnerable after India’s Hindu nationalist government pushed forward with a National Register of Citizens (NRC), which has resulted in the exclusion from that list of nearly 1.9 million people — mostly Muslims — putting them at risk of statelessness.

In July the United Nations expressed grave concern over the NRC process, saying there’s a risk of arbitrary expulsion and detention, with those those excluded being referred to Foreigners’ Tribunals where they have to prove they are not “irregular”.

At the same time, the UN warned of the rise of hate speech in Assam being spread via social media — saying this is contributing to increasing instability and uncertainty for millions in the region. “This process may exacerbate the xenophobic climate while fuelling religious intolerance and discrimination in the country,” it wrote.

There’s an awful sense of deja-vu about these warnings. In March 2018 the UN criticized Facebook for failing to prevent its platform being used to fuel ethnic violence against the Rohingya people in the neighboring country of Myanmar — saying the service had played a “determining role” in that crisis.

Facebook’s response to devastating criticism from the UN looks like wafer-thin crisis PR to paper over the ethical cracks in its ad business, given the same sorts of alarm bells are being sounded again, just over a year later. (If we measure the company by the lofty goals it attached to a director of human rights policy job last year — when Facebook wrote that the responsibilities included “conflict prevention” and “peace-building” — it’s surely been an abject failure.)

Avaaz’s report on hate speech in Assam takes direct aim at Facebook’s platform, saying it’s being used as a conduit for whipping up anti-Muslim hatred.

In the report, entitled Megaphone for Hate: Disinformation and Hate Speech on Facebook During Assam’s Citizenship Count, the group says it analysed 800 Facebook posts and comments relating to Assam and the NRC, using keywords from the immigration discourse in Assamese, assessing them against the three tiers of prohibited hate speech set out in Facebook’s Community Standards.

Avaaz found that at least 26.5% of the posts and comments constituted hate speech. These posts had been shared on Facebook more than 99,650 times — adding up to at least 5.4 million views for violent hate speech targeting religious and ethnic minorities, according to its analysis.

Bengali Muslims are a particular target on Facebook in Assam, per the report, which found comments referring to them as “criminals,” “rapists,” “terrorists,” “pigs,” and “dogs”, among other dehumanizing terms.

In further disturbing comments there were calls for people to “poison” daughters, and legalise female foeticide, as well as several posts urging “Indian” women to be protected from “rape-obsessed foreigners”.

Avaaz suggests its findings are just a drop in the ocean of hate speech that it says is drowning Assam via Facebook and other social media. But it accuses Facebook directly of failing to provide adequate human resource to police hate speech spread on its dominant platform.

Commenting in a statement, Alaphia Zoyab, senior campaigner, said: “Facebook is being used as a megaphone for hate, pointed directly at vulnerable minorities in Assam, many of whom could be made stateless within months. Despite the clear and present danger faced by these people, Facebook is refusing to dedicate the resources required to keep them safe. Through its inaction, Facebook is complicit in the persecution of some of the world’s most vulnerable people.”

Its key complaint is that Facebook continues to rely on AI to detect hate speech which has not been reported to it by human users — using its limited pool of (human) content moderator staff to review pre-flagged content, rather than proactively detect it.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has previously said AI has a very long way to go to reliably detect hate speech. Indeed, he’s suggested it may never be able to do that.

In April 2018 he told US lawmakers it might take five to ten years to develop “AI tools that can get into some of the linguistic nuances of different types of content to be more accurate, to be flagging things to our systems”, while admitting: “Today we’re just not there on that.”

That sums to an admission that in regions such as Assam — where inter-ethnic tensions are being whipped up in a politically charged atmosphere that’s also encouraging violence — Facebook is essentially asleep on the job. The job of enforcing its own ‘Community Standards’ and preventing its platform being weaponized to amplify hate and harass the vulnerable, to be clear.

Avaaz says it flagged 213 of “the clearest examples” of hate speech which it found directly to Facebook — including posts from an elected official and pages of a member of an Assamese rebel group banned by the Indian Government. The company removed 96 of these posts following its report.

It argues there are similarities in the type of hate speech being directed at ethnic minorities in Assam via Facebook and that which targeted at Rohingya people in Myanmar, also on Facebook, while noting that the context is different. But it did also find hateful content on Facebook targeting Rohingya people in India.

It is calling on Facebook to do more to protect vulnerable minorities in Assam, arguing it should not rely solely on automated tools for detecting hate speech — and should instead apply a “human-led ‘zero tolerance’ policy” against hate speech, starting by beefing up moderators’ expertise in local languages.

It also recommends Facebook launch an early warning system within its Strategic Response team, again based on human content moderation — and do so for all regions where the UN has warned of the rise of hate speech on social media.

“This system should act preventatively to avert human rights crises, not just reactively to respond to offline harm that has already occurred,” it writes.

Other recommendations include that Facebook should correct the record on false news and disinformation by notifying and providing corrections from fact-checkers to each and every user who has seen content deemed to have been false or purposefully misleading, including if the disinformation came from a politician; that it should be transparent about all page and post takedowns by publishing its rational on the Facebook Newsroom so the issue of hate speech is given proportionate prominence and publicity to the size of the problem on Facebook; and it should agree to an independent audit of hate speech and human rights on its platform in India.

“Facebook has signed up to comply with the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights,” Avaaz notes. “Which require it to conduct human rights due diligence such as identifying its impact on vulnerable groups like women, children, linguistic, ethnic and religious minorities and others, particularly when deploying AI tools to identify hate speech, and take steps to subsequently avoid or mitigate such harm.”

We reached out to Facebook with a series of questions about Avaaz’s report and also how it has progressed its approach to policing inter-ethnic hate speech since the Myanmar crisis — including asking for details of the number of people it employs to monitor content in the region.

Facebook did not provide responses to our specific questions. It just said it does have content reviewers who are Assamese and who review content in the language, as well as reviewers who have knowledge of the majority of official languages in India, including Assamese, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Punjabi, Urdu, Bengali and Marathi.

In 2017 India overtook the US as the country with the largest “potential audience” for Facebook ads, with 241M active users, per figures it reports the advertisers.

Facebook also sent us this statement, attributed to a spokesperson:

We want Facebook to be a safe place for all people to connect and express themselves, and we seek to protect the rights of minorities and marginalized communities around the world, including in India. We have clear rules against hate speech, which we define as attacks against people on the basis of things like caste, nationality, ethnicity and religion, and which reflect input we received from experts in India. We take this extremely seriously and remove content that violates these policies as soon as we become aware of it. To do this we have invested in dedicated content reviewers, who have local language expertise and an understanding of the India’s longstanding historical and social tensions. We’ve also made significant progress in proactively detecting hate speech on our services, which helps us get to potentially harmful content faster.

But these tools aren’t perfect yet, and reports from our community are still extremely important. That’s why we’re so grateful to Avaaz for sharing their findings with us. We have carefully reviewed the content they’ve flagged, and removed everything that violated our policies. We will continue to work to prevent the spread of hate speech on our services, both in India and around the world.

Facebook did not tell us exactly how many people it employs to police content for an Indian state with a population of more than 30 million people.

Globally the company maintains it has around 35,000 people working on trust and safety, less than half of whom (~15,000) are dedicated content reviewers. But with such a tiny content reviewer workforce for a global platform with 2.2BN+ users posting night and day all around the world there’s no plausible no way for it to stay on top of its hate speech problem.

Certainly not in every market it operates in. Which is why Facebook leans so heavily on AI — shrinking the cost to its business but piling content-related risk onto everyone else.

Facebook claims its automated tools for detecting hate speech have got better, saying that in Q1 this year it increased the proactive detection rate for hate speech to 65.4% — up from 58.8% in Q4 2017 and 38% in Q2 2017.

However it also says it only removed 4 million pieces of hate speech globally in Q1. Which sounds incredibly tiny vs the size of Facebook’s platform and the volume of content that will be generated daily by its millions and millions of active users.

Without tools for independent researchers to query the substance and spread of content on Facebook’s platform it’s simply not possible to know how many pieces of hate speech are going undetected. But — to be clear — this unregulated company still gets to mark its own homework. 

In just one example of how Facebook is able to shrink perception of the volume of problematic content it’s fencing, of the 213 pieces of content related to Assam and the NCR that Avaaz judged to be hate speech and reported to Facebook it removed less than half (96).

Yet Facebook also told us it takes down all content that violates its community standards — suggesting it is applying a far more dilute definition of hate speech than Avaaz. Unsurprising for a US company whose nascent crisis PR content review board‘s charter includes the phrase “free expression is paramount”. But for a company that also claims to want to prevent conflict and peace-build it’s rather conflicted, to say the least. 

As things stand, Facebook’s self-reported hate speech performance metrics are meaningless. It’s impossible for anyone outside the company to quantify or benchmark platform data. Because no one except Facebook has the full picture — and it’s not opening its platform for ethnical audit. Even as the impacts of harmful, hateful stuff spread on Facebook continue to bleed out and damage lives around the world. 

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/32UMIKB Original Content From: https://techcrunch.com

[maxwellyjordan]

Symposium: The DACA cases may be the next big test for the Roberts Court

Dayna Zolle is Appellate Counsel and Brianne Gorod is Chief Counsel at the Constitutional Accountability Center.

Earlier this year, President Donald Trump made news when he suggested, repeatedly, that he views the Supreme Court as an ally, one he can count on to give him a “fair shake” when he thinks that other courts won’t. To the extent Trump thought that he could count on the court’s very conservative majority to always rule in his favor, last term’s decision in the census case should have given him pause.

Another big test of the president’s apparent belief that he has the Supreme Court in his back pocket is right around the corner: This term the court will hear challenges to the administration’s termination of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA. The president may ultimately be disappointed by the result in these cases — because if the Supreme Court follows the law and well established precedent, it will conclude, like the lower courts that considered these cases, that the administration’s decision to terminate the program was unlawful.

In 2012, the Department of Homeland Security established DACA to authorize the temporary deferred removal of “certain young people who were brought to this country as children and know only this country as home.” In doing this, DHS was simply doing what administrations of both major political parties have done for decades — exercising the substantial discretion Congress has conferred on the executive branch to set priorities and make determinations about how best to enforce the nation’s immigration laws. Indeed, the tool DHS used to implement those priorities — deferred action from removal — is one that administrations of both parties have consistently employed, and that Congress has repeatedly endorsed on a bipartisan basis.

Since DACA went into effect, its impact on recipients of deferred action has been “profound,” as one study put it: “Under DACA, beneficiaries saw increased educational attainment, higher social mobility, and better mental health.” According to another study, “DACA recipients continue to make positive and significant contributions to the economy, including earning higher wages, which translates into higher tax revenue and economic growth that benefits all Americans.”

Despite the successes of the program, the Trump administration decided to end it in 2017, citing its supposed “legal and constitutional defects.” But, far from being illegal, DACA is only the latest in a long line of programs in which the executive branch has permissibly exercised its broad discretion to grant undocumented immigrants deferred action on either a case-by-case or class-wide basis. And that means that the Trump administration’s decision to terminate DACA on those grounds is itself unlawful under the Administrative Procedure Act’s provision proscribing agency action that is “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law.”

Because immigration is a complex and dynamic issue, Congress has long conferred significant discretion on the executive branch to implement the nation’s immigration laws. In particular, Congress has, for more than 60 years, authorized the secretary of DHS (previously the attorney general) to “establish such regulations; … issue such instructions; and perform such other acts as he deems necessary for carrying out his authority” under the Immigration and Nationality Act, which charges the secretary “with the administration and enforcement” of the federal immigration laws. Moreover, in recognizing a growing gap between the size of the unauthorized-immigrant population and the resources reasonably available for enforcement, Congress directed the secretary of DHS in the Homeland Security Act of 2002 to establish “national immigration enforcement policies and priorities.” As law professors Cristina Rodríguez and Adam Cox have explained, these and other provisions in our federal immigration laws “delegat[e] tremendous authority to the President to set immigration screening policy.” Indeed, the Supreme Court itself has repeatedly recognized that Congress has given the executive branch broad discretion in the immigration context, observing that a “principal feature of the removal system is the broad discretion exercised by immigration officials” and that “[f]ederal officials, as an initial matter, must decide whether it makes sense to pursue removal at all.”

And for decades, administrations of both major political parties have exercised that discretion, including by granting undocumented immigrants deferred action on both case-by-case and class-wide bases. In 1987, for instance, after the Immigration Reform and Control Act gave lawful status to some undocumented immigrants, the Reagan administration created the Family Fairness Program, which allowed Immigration and Naturalization Service district directors to choose not to remove some children and spouses of immigrants whose status had recently changed under the act. That program was then expanded in 1990 under President George H.W. Bush to allow more people to qualify for deferral of deportation and also to receive work authorization. And in 2006, during the administration of President George W. Bush, Immigration and Customs Enforcement published a field manual that included, among other things, guidelines for when deferred action could be granted.

The Supreme Court has recognized that such deferred action is “a regular practice” that the executive branch engages in “for humanitarian reasons or simply for its own convenience,” and Congress itself has repeatedly taken affirmative steps that demonstrate its approval of these exercises of executive discretion, including passing legislation that presumes that the executive will continue to grant deferred action or that expressly directs the executive to continue doing so. For example, in passing legislation defining “deportable aliens,” Congress assumed that the executive would sometimes grant deferred action, as the statute provides that the “denial of a request for an administrative stay of removal under this subsection shall not preclude [an] alien from applying for … deferred action.” And when Congress reauthorized the Violence Against Women Act in 2000, it “not only acknowledg[ed] but also expand[ed] the deferred action program … , providing that children who could no longer self-petition under VAWA because they were over the age of 21 would nonetheless be ‘eligible for deferred action and work authorization.’” Thus, DACA was plainly a permissible exercise of the executive branch’s discretion.

It was also a necessary one: Congress has made a substantial number of noncitizens deportable, but it has nowhere mandated that every single undocumented immigrant be removed, nor has it provided sufficient resources to effectuate the removal of more than a small fraction of the nation’s undocumented immigrants. Instead, Congress has reasonably permitted the executive branch to set the nation’s immigration-enforcement priorities, and the executive branch determined in 2011 that “aliens who pose a danger to national security or a risk to public safety” were the highest priority for civil immigration enforcement, while other undocumented immigrants remained a lower priority.

Significantly, by the time DACA was implemented, there was a history of members of Congress asking the executive to exercise its discretion to protect essentially the same group of individuals who were made eligible for deferred action under DACA. In a 1999 letter to the attorney general and the INS commissioner, bipartisan members of Congress noted the “well-grounded” principle that the “INS has prosecutorial discretion in the initiation or termination of removal proceedings” and specifically called on the executive to issue written guidelines and “exercise … such discretion” in “[t]rue hardship cases,” including those involving people “who came to the United States when they were very young.” And shortly after the DHS secretary issued the 2012 memorandum implementing DACA, a group of 104 members of Congress sent a follow-up letter to President Barack Obama praising the use of prosecutorial discretion in DACA, which they acknowledged deferred the removal of certain “outstanding young Americans.”

In sum, DACA did what Congress legally authorized the executive to do: temporarily defer the removal of qualified “young people who were brought to this country as children and know only this country as home,” so that immigration officers could instead focus their enforcement efforts and limited resources on higher-priority cases. DACA is therefore lawful — just like the various deferred-action programs that preceded it. Given that, Trump cannot now claim that he is compelled to end the program on the ground that it suffers from “legal and constitutional defects.” As the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit recognized, “where the Executive did not make a discretionary choice to end DACA — but rather acted based on an erroneous view of what the law required — the rescission was arbitrary and capricious under settled law.”

Trump may be hoping that the Supreme Court will give him the victory on DACA that the lower courts in these cases have denied him, but there’s good reason to think that it won’t. And that would be a good thing not only for DACA recipients, but also for the rule of law and the country as a whole.

The post Symposium: The DACA cases may be the next big test for the Roberts Court appeared first on SCOTUSblog.

from Law https://www.scotusblog.com/2019/09/symposium-the-daca-cases-may-be-the-next-big-test-for-the-roberts-court/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[neptunecreek]

Payment Processors Are Profiling Heavy Metal Fans as Terrorists

If you happen to be a fan of the heavy metal band Isis (an unfortunate name, to be sure), you may have trouble ordering its merchandise online. Last year, Paypal suspended a fan who ordered an Isis t-shirt, presumably on the false assumption that there was some association between the heavy metal band and the terrorist group ISIS.

Then last month Internet scholar and activist Sascha Meinrath discovered that entering words such as "ISIS" (or "Isis"), or "Iran", or (probably) other words from this U.S. government blacklist in the description field for a Venmo payment will result in an automatic block on that payment, requiring you to complete a pile of paperwork if you want to see your money again. This is even if the full description field is something like "Isis heavy metal album" or "Iran kofta kebabs, yum."

These examples may seem trivial, but they reveal a more serious problem with the trust and responsibility that the Internet places in private payment intermediaries. Since even many non-commercial websites such as EFF's depend on such intermediaries to process payments, subscription fees, or donations, it's no exaggeration to say that payment processors form an important part of the financial infrastructure of today's Internet. As such, they ought to carry corresponding responsibilities to act fairly and openly towards their customers.

Unfortunately, given their reliance on bots, algorithms, handshake deals, and undocumented policies and blacklists to control what we do online, payment intermediaries aren't carrying out this responsibility very well. Given that these private actors are taking on responsibilities to help address important global problems such as terrorism and child online protection, the lack of transparency and accountability with which they execute these weighty responsibilities is a matter of concern.

The readiness of payment intermediaries to do deals on those important issues leads as a matter of course to their enlistment by governments and special interest groups to do similar deals on narrower issues, such as the protection of the financial interests of big pharma, big tobacco, and big content. It is in this way that payment intermediaries have insidiously become a weak leak for censorship of free speech.

Cigarettes, Sex, Drugs, and Copyright

For example, if you're a smoker, and you try to buy tobacco products from a U.S. online seller using a credit card, you'll probably find that you can't. It's not illegal to do so, but thanks to a "voluntary" agreement with law enforcement authorities dating back to 2005, payment processors have effectively banned the practice—without any law or court judgment.

Another example that we've previously written about are the payment processors' arbitrary rules blocking sites that discuss sexual fetishes, even though that speech is constitutionally protected. The congruence between the payment intermediaries' terms of service on the issue suggests a degree of coordination between them, but their lack of transparency makes it impossible to be sure who was behind the ban and what channels they used to achieve it.

A third example is the ban on pharmaceutical sales. You can still buy pharmaceuticals online using a credit card, but these tend to be from unregulated, rogue pharmacies that lie to the credit card processors about the purpose for which their merchant account will be used. For the safer, regulated pharmacies that require a prescription for the drugs they sell online, such as members of the Canadian International Pharmacy Association (CIPA), the credit card processors enforce a blanket ban.

Finally there are "voluntary" best practices on copyright and trademark infringement. These include the RogueBlock program of the International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition (IACC) in 2012, about which information is available online, along with a 2011 set of "Best Practices to Address Copyright Infringement and the Sales of Counterfeit Products on the Internet," about which no online information is found. The only way that you can find out about the standards that payment intermediaries use to block websites accused of copyright or trademark infringement is by reading what academics have written about it.

Lack of Transparency Invites Abuse

The payment processors might respond that their terms of service are available online, which is true. However, these are ambiguous at best. On Venmo, transactions for items that promote hate, violence, or racial intolerance are banned, but there is nothing in its terms of service to indicate that including the name of a heavy metal band in your transaction will place it in limbo. Similarly, if you delve deep enough into Paypal's terms of service you will find out that selling tickets to professional UK football matches is banned, but you won't find out how this restriction came about, or who had a say in it.

Payment processors can do better. In 2012, in the wake of the payment industry's embargo of Wikileaks and its refusal to process payments to European vendors of horror films and sex toys, the European Parliament Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs made the following resolution: 

[The Committee c]onsiders it likely that there will be a growing number of European companies whose activities are effectively dependent on being able to accept payments by card; [and] considers it to be in the public interest to define objective rules describing the circumstances and procedures under which card payment schemes may unilaterally refuse acceptance.

We agree. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies notwithstanding, online payment processing remains largely oligopolistic. Agreements between the few payment processors that make up the industry and powerful commercial lobbies and governments, concluded in the shadows, can have deep impacts on entire online communities. When payment processors are drawing their terms of service or developing algorithms that are based on industry-wide agreements, standards, or codes of conduct—especially if these involve governments or other third parties—they ought to be developed through a process that is inclusive, balanced and accountable.

The fact that you can't use Venmo to purchase an Isis t-shirt is just one amusing example. But the Shadow Regulation of the payment services industry is much more serious than that, also affecting culture, healthcare, and even your sex life online. Just as we've called other Internet intermediaries to account for the ways in which their "voluntary" efforts threaten free speech, the online payment services industry needs to be held to the same standard. 

from Deeplinks http://ift.tt/2urJRv2

[teachanarchy]

Download and Print Here

I. The protest marshal wears a neon vest and has a walkie-talkie.

The protest marshal sets themself apart in the protest by wearing a high-visibility vest, making their position look like one of expertise and authority. The intention to be seen is paradoxical: even though they stand out visually, the generic safety vest makes them also look like the invisible worker of any urban environment. The walkie-talkie communicates to the crowd that they are included in a secret loop of information, setting them at a professional distance from the protesters. It appears like they are protesting with you but they are instructed to keep their distance. The protest marshal relies on symbolic markers of legitimacy to aid in the control of the protest.

II. The protest marshal is in constant contact with the organizer.

The protest marshal assumes the position of a protest ‘expert’, whose authority is not supposed to be challenged. The authority of the police can be called into question when it is obvious to everyone that they are acting ‘unjustly’—e.g., when the police tear gas a bunch of ‘peaceful protesters’. The authority of the protest marshal, however, with their aura of activist expertise, is not so obviously repressive. They want protesters to see them as helpful, legitimate, knowledgeable; as experts in dealing with the police and in protest ‘safety’. They use this perceived position to control the protest and maintain the same order that the police keep with their tear gas and guns. The control that the protest marshal wields over the protest stems from the perception that they are a leader of the group, or at least ‘one of us’.

III. The protest marshal wants you to express yourself.

The protest marshal thinks it’s your right to carry the craziest sign, chant the loudest chants, and take the most revolutionary selfies, as long as you follow the unspoken rules of obedience and only express yourself symbolically. The protest marshal has already determined for you how best to demonstrate without causing too much disruption. The protest marshal helps guarantee that expressions of rage have no direct effect on anything and that demonstrations remain non-events. Rather than acknowledging the differences that bring people into the streets and respecting the actions people might choose, they only see the enforced, empty unity espoused by the controlling organizations. Any action that might threaten the actual powers you are demonstrating against will attract the attention of the protest marshal, who is there to step in and stop anything that doesn’t abide by their rules. The protest marshal turns the protest into a parade, a perfect selfie opportunity, in which nothing actually happens.

IV. The protest marshal is trained in the art of managing crowds.

The protest marshal exists on the margins of the protest. They move in formation, encircling the crowd, cutting through groups and forming a line between protesters and the police. This modification of the crowd’s spatial form is effective because it doesn’t appear as control at all. The protest marshal appear as a perfectly objective observer, refraining from chanting or carrying signs, simply moving people along the pre-established route. They undergo professional training given by non-profit organizations and are sometimes directly taught by the police. They’re shown the basics of crowd management, risk assessment, and how to profile and single out anyone deemed ‘undesirable’ or ‘uncontrollable’. The protest marshal subtly conducts the protest to ensure an event that is easily manageable and doesn’t threaten to break out of the limits set by the ‘professional’ activists and police.

V. The protest marshal defends oppressed people from the police.

The protest marshal believes they ‘protect’ protesters from the police while they actually assist in carrying out police operations. Like the police, they see themselves as the guarantor of everyone’s safety, but the ‘safety’ they intend to maintain is seldom defined. How ‘safe‘ is it when the normal order of things produces unsafe and unlivable conditions for most people? Deportations, police murder, and ecological destruction are not exceptional occurrences, they are part of the normal operation of modern society. Open businesses, open roads, and a smooth functioning city all facilitate these operations and help make them possible. By prioritizing the normal functioning of the city, the protest marshal ensures that the protest will not actually disrupt the conditions of a society where black life doesn’t matter. Whatever the intentions and personal identity of the protest marshal, they hold a structural position aligned with the police, which can only fortify white supremacy.

VI. The protest marshal allows the police to be virtually invisible at demonstrations.

The protest marshal helps ensure that the police keep a good image. It looks bad when the police are beating (white) people with batons and deploying their arsenal of weapons, so the protest marshal is there to improve police-public relations. The protest marshal, exhibiting their authority, assures everyone that they ‘know’ the police will react only if ‘provoked’ by certain disruptive actions. Whether the protest marshal is explicitly working with the police (like negotiating with them about getting a crowd off a highway) or imagining themself as ‘protecting‘ protesters from the police (by controlling and subduing the crowd), the protest marshal does the work of police so that the police can recede into the background. The protest marshal is deputized to diffuse the power of the police, which has the duel function of blurring the line between citizen and cop and also expanding the reign of the police by creating a mobile, ‘community’-appointed surveillance unit.

VII. The protest marshal is against violence.

The protest marshal is determined to ‘keep the peace’ and promote ‘non-violence’ at events. They assert that ‘violence’ is antithetical to their ‘non-violence’. In doing so, they neglect the reality that the ‘peace’ they are defending is merely the well-ordered violence of those who’ve won—i.e., the violence of the state, going back to Columbus and European slave traders, through rape culture, and carrying on today. This violence is so normalized that it has ceased to register as violence, since it goes into remission once established and only emerges to maintain the status quo. The protest marshal’s insistence on ‘non-violence’ is a grotesque proposition when people’s lives are threatened everyday. They’re willing to betray anyone who would use any means to defend themselves against a world that makes life more and more unlivable. The protest marshal believes that ‘violence’ and ‘non-violence’ are poles on a spectrum, when this spectrum is really only a tool of control to allow for some actions while condemning others that challenge the normal operation of power.

VIII. The protest marshal believes we must respect the free speech of everyone.

The protest marshal advertises ‘tolerance‘ and says we must treat all speech as equal. They believe in protecting everyone’s ‘right’ to ‘free speech’ and think speech is something neutral. In prioritizing ‘free speech’ as a concept above its content, the protest marshal fails to understand that speech comes from a position oriented to history and does not exist in a vacuum of neutrality. Speech from white supremacists perpetuates white supremacy. Despite explicitly advocating for ‘free speech’, the protest marshal implicitly knows that speech is not neutral since they themselves censor speech that is deemed too ‘hostile’. They smile when the crowd chants the harmless ‘love trumps hate‘ but scold those yelling ‘fuck the police‘, insisting on respect because they know where chants like that might lead. The protest marshal speaks as though speech exists in a vacuum but acts in accordance with the reality that speech exists in a war.

IX. The protest marshal is there to prevent outside agitators from hijacking the protest.

The protest marshal propagates the myth that anyone acting according to their own volition (i.e., against the orders of the protest marshal) must be an ‘outside agitator’, there only to hijack the ‘peaceful’ protest and ruin the validity of the message. According to the protest marshal, only tactics imagined to be legal or for ends within the law can be used, even if the means are in fact illegal. They are willing to go to some lengths (such as blocking highways, while deluding themselves that this is legal) but anything past an arbitrary limit is considered ‘harmful’ to the cause since autonomous action eludes the control of the protest marshal. ‘Trouble makers’ who would use any means necessary to oppose oppression are castigated as ‘outsiders’ regardless of what neighborhood they live in. The protest marshal fails to understand that there is no ‘outside’ to police brutality, capitalism, or white supremacy and that all resistance to these things is a part of the struggle.

X. The protest marshal’s role can be fulfilled by anyone at the event.

The protest marshal exists at every protest, even without the neon vest. No one ever just is a protest marshal—they become one through their actions. The protest marshal is anyone who draws upon morality (‘property destruction is wrong’) or perceived privilege (‘fighting back is macho patriarchy‘) to stop people from doing things. The attempts people make to be ‘helpful’ at events are generally done through actions intended to control and manage, rather than actions that would encourage the fight against those forces destroying our lives—like supporting queers to bash their bashers. Commands such as ‘calm down’ or ‘don’t do that’ only aim to suppress another person’s agency and reflect a fear of genuine expression. People don’t need to undergo specialized training to become a protest marshal—all it takes to become one is to reinforce the familiar and normal functioning of things. Anyone who tries to manage and control the protest becomes a protest marshal.

[sheminecrafts]

Facebook is failing to prevent another human rights tragedy playing out on its platform, report warns

A report by campaign group Avaaz examining how Facebook’s platform is being used to spread hate speech in the Assam region of North East India suggests the company is once again failing to prevent its platform from being turned into a weapon to fuel ethnic violence.

Assam has a long-standing Muslim minority population but ethnic minorities in the state look increasingly vulnerable after India’s Hindu nationalist government pushed forward with a National Register of Citizens (NRC), which has resulted in the exclusion from that list of nearly 1.9 million people — mostly Muslims — putting them at risk of statelessness.

In July the United Nations expressed grave concern over the NRC process, saying there’s a risk of arbitrary expulsion and detention, with those those excluded being referred to Foreigners’ Tribunals where they have to prove they are not “irregular”.

At the same time, the UN warned of the rise of hate speech in Assam being spread via social media — saying this is contributing to increasing instability and uncertainty for millions in the region. “This process may exacerbate the xenophobic climate while fuelling religious intolerance and discrimination in the country,” it wrote.

There’s an awful sense of deja-vu about these warnings. In March 2018 the UN criticized Facebook for failing to prevent its platform being used to fuel ethnic violence against the Rohingya people in the neighboring country of Myanmar — saying the service had played a “determining role” in that crisis.

Facebook’s response to devastating criticism from the UN looks like wafer-thin crisis PR to paper over the ethical cracks in its ad business, given the same sorts of alarm bells are being sounded again, just over a year later. (If we measure the company by the lofty goals it attached to a director of human rights policy job last year — when Facebook wrote that the responsibilities included “conflict prevention” and “peace-building” — it’s surely been an abject failure.)

Avaaz’s report on hate speech in Assam takes direct aim at Facebook’s platform, saying it’s being used as a conduit for whipping up anti-Muslim hatred.

In the report, entitled Megaphone for Hate: Disinformation and Hate Speech on Facebook During Assam’s Citizenship Count, the group says it analysed 800 Facebook posts and comments relating to Assam and the NRC, using keywords from the immigration discourse in Assamese, assessing them against the three tiers of prohibited hate speech set out in Facebook’s Community Standards.

Avaaz found that at least 26.5% of the posts and comments constituted hate speech. These posts had been shared on Facebook more than 99,650 times — adding up to at least 5.4 million views for violent hate speech targeting religious and ethnic minorities, according to its analysis.

Bengali Muslims are a particular target on Facebook in Assam, per the report, which found comments referring to them as “criminals,” “rapists,” “terrorists,” “pigs,” and “dogs”, among other dehumanizing terms.

In further disturbing comments there were calls for people to “poison” daughters, and legalise female foeticide, as well as several posts urging “Indian” women to be protected from “rape-obsessed foreigners”.

Avaaz suggests its findings are just a drop in the ocean of hate speech that it says is drowning Assam via Facebook and other social media. But it accuses Facebook directly of failing to provide adequate human resource to police hate speech spread on its dominant platform.

Commenting in a statement, Alaphia Zoyab, senior campaigner, said: “Facebook is being used as a megaphone for hate, pointed directly at vulnerable minorities in Assam, many of whom could be made stateless within months. Despite the clear and present danger faced by these people, Facebook is refusing to dedicate the resources required to keep them safe. Through its inaction, Facebook is complicit in the persecution of some of the world’s most vulnerable people.”

Its key complaint is that Facebook continues to rely on AI to detect hate speech which has not been reported to it by human users — using its limited pool of (human) content moderator staff to review pre-flagged content, rather than proactively detect it.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has previously said AI has a very long way to go to reliably detect hate speech. Indeed, he’s suggested it may never be able to do that.

In April 2018 he told US lawmakers it might take five to ten years to develop “AI tools that can get into some of the linguistic nuances of different types of content to be more accurate, to be flagging things to our systems”, while admitting: “Today we’re just not there on that.”

That sums to an admission that in regions such as Assam — where inter-ethnic tensions are being whipped up in a politically charged atmosphere that’s also encouraging violence — Facebook is essentially asleep on the job. The job of enforcing its own ‘Community Standards’ and preventing its platform being weaponized to amplify hate and harass the vulnerable, to be clear.

Avaaz says it flagged 213 of “the clearest examples” of hate speech which it found directly to Facebook — including posts from an elected official and pages of a member of an Assamese rebel group banned by the Indian Government. The company removed 96 of these posts following its report.

It argues there are similarities in the type of hate speech being directed at ethnic minorities in Assam via Facebook and that which targeted at Rohingya people in Myanmar, also on Facebook, while noting that the context is different. But it did also find hateful content on Facebook targeting Rohingya people in India.

It is calling on Facebook to do more to protect vulnerable minorities in Assam, arguing it should not rely solely on automated tools for detecting hate speech — and should instead apply a “human-led ‘zero tolerance’ policy” against hate speech, starting by beefing up moderators’ expertise in local languages.

It also recommends Facebook launch an early warning system within its Strategic Response team, again based on human content moderation — and do so for all regions where the UN has warned of the rise of hate speech on social media.

“This system should act preventatively to avert human rights crises, not just reactively to respond to offline harm that has already occurred,” it writes.

Other recommendations include that Facebook should correct the record on false news and disinformation by notifying and providing corrections from fact-checkers to each and every user who has seen content deemed to have been false or purposefully misleading, including if the disinformation came from a politician; that it should be transparent about all page and post takedowns by publishing its rational on the Facebook Newsroom so the issue of hate speech is given proportionate prominence and publicity to the size of the problem on Facebook; and it should agree to an independent audit of hate speech and human rights on its platform in India.

“Facebook has signed up to comply with the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights,” Avaaz notes. “Which require it to conduct human rights due diligence such as identifying its impact on vulnerable groups like women, children, linguistic, ethnic and religious minorities and others, particularly when deploying AI tools to identify hate speech, and take steps to subsequently avoid or mitigate such harm.”

We reached out to Facebook with a series of questions about Avaaz’s report and also how it has progressed its approach to policing inter-ethnic hate speech since the Myanmar crisis — including asking for details of the number of people it employs to monitor content in the region.

Facebook did not provide responses to our specific questions. It just said it does have content reviewers who are Assamese and who review content in the language, as well as reviewers who have knowledge of the majority of official languages in India, including Assamese, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Punjabi, Urdu, Bengali and Marathi.

In 2017 India overtook the US as the country with the largest “potential audience” for Facebook ads, with 241M active users, per figures it reports the advertisers.

Facebook also sent us this statement, attributed to a spokesperson:

We want Facebook to be a safe place for all people to connect and express themselves, and we seek to protect the rights of minorities and marginalized communities around the world, including in India. We have clear rules against hate speech, which we define as attacks against people on the basis of things like caste, nationality, ethnicity and religion, and which reflect input we received from experts in India. We take this extremely seriously and remove content that violates these policies as soon as we become aware of it. To do this we have invested in dedicated content reviewers, who have local language expertise and an understanding of the India’s longstanding historical and social tensions. We’ve also made significant progress in proactively detecting hate speech on our services, which helps us get to potentially harmful content faster.

But these tools aren’t perfect yet, and reports from our community are still extremely important. That’s why we’re so grateful to Avaaz for sharing their findings with us. We have carefully reviewed the content they’ve flagged, and removed everything that violated our policies. We will continue to work to prevent the spread of hate speech on our services, both in India and around the world.

Facebook did not tell us exactly how many people it employs to police content for an Indian state with a population of more than 30 million people.

Globally the company maintains it has around 35,000 people working on trust and safety, less than half of whom (~15,000) are dedicated content reviewers. But with such a tiny content reviewer workforce for a global platform with 2.2BN+ users posting night and day all around the world there’s no plausible no way for it to stay on top of its hate speech problem.

Certainly not in every market it operates in. Which is why Facebook leans so heavily on AI — shrinking the cost to its business but piling content-related risk onto everyone else.

Facebook claims its automated tools for detecting hate speech have got better, saying that in Q1 this year it increased the proactive detection rate for hate speech to 65.4% — up from 58.8% in Q4 2017 and 38% in Q2 2017.

However it also says it only removed 4 million pieces of hate speech globally in Q1. Which sounds incredibly tiny vs the size of Facebook’s platform and the volume of content that will be generated daily by its millions and millions of active users.

Without tools for independent researchers to query the substance and spread of content on Facebook’s platform it’s simply not possible to know how many pieces of hate speech are going undetected. But — to be clear — this unregulated company still gets to mark its own homework. 

In just one example of how Facebook is able to shrink perception of the volume of problematic content it’s fencing, of the 213 pieces of content related to Assam and the NCR that Avaaz judged to be hate speech and reported to Facebook it removed less than half (96).

Yet Facebook also told us it takes down all content that violates its community standards — suggesting it is applying a far more dilute definition of hate speech than Avaaz. Unsurprising for a US company whose nascent crisis PR content review board‘s charter includes the phrase “free expression is paramount”. But for a company that also claims to want to prevent conflict and peace-build it’s rather conflicted, to say the least. 

As things stand, Facebook’s self-reported hate speech performance metrics are meaningless. It’s impossible for anyone outside the company to quantify or benchmark platform data. Because no one except Facebook has the full picture — and it’s not opening its platform for ethnical audit. Even as the impacts of harmful, hateful stuff spread on Facebook continue to bleed out and damage lives around the world. 

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