Nina Jankowicz Worked For CIA/Zelensky Now Defended By Taylor Lorenz

What, specifically, is the "DHS's work" when it comes to disinformation? Do they decide what is and is not disinformation? Do they use specific powers to "combat" it? It's not just the new Board itself that is unclear. DHS's entire role in all of this is unclear - and creepy. https://t.co/0PJGcTlqul

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) May 18, 2022

politico  |  President Zelensky has made ending the war in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region—which was instigated and is sustained by Russia and has claimed 13,000 lives and counting—his administration’s top priority. He has made some progress toward that goal, overseeing a historic prisoner swap with Russia that saw one of Ukraine’s most respected filmmakers as well as 24 sailors captured last November returned home. According to information from the U.N. High Commissioner on Human Rights, fewer civilians have been killed in the conflict this year than any year previously. A July cease-fire at the contact line seems to be holding firmer than its previous incarnations.

For Zelensky, Trump could be the key to ending the war in the Donbas. The American president has made his admiration for and cozy relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin no secret. Likewise, Trump’s views about Ukraine—ambivalence about the status of Crimea, which Russia illegally seized in 2014, and support for ending the sanctions placed on Russia in response to its activities in Ukraine—make Ukrainians nervous. A cordial relationship between Trump and Zelensky could give Trump insight into Ukraine’s perspective and give Ukraine leverage it did not enjoy under former President Petro Poroshenko, who struggled to connect with the U.S. leader.

Ukraine does not have the luxury to pick and choose its international partners, something I learned when I served as an adviser to the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry in 2016 and 2017 under the auspices of a Fulbright Public Policy Fellowship. Ukraine relies on its larger, richer allies as it attempts to shed its post-Soviet legacy. The United States—its largest and richest ally—provides not only for the now-famous military aid package, but hundreds of millions of dollars in civilian aid, supporting projects in just about every sector. The containment of the Chernobyl nuclear site, fighting HIV/AIDS, building cybersecurity capabilities, and creating government bodies that are more responsive to citizens are just a few of the projects that U.S assistance makes possible. Continued reform, including the pursuit of energy independence from Russia and the cleanup of the court system, the biggest obstacle to Ukrainian anti-corruption efforts, would be imperiled without this assistance. The United States also plays a key role in corralling European partners to uphold their own sanctions on Russia and to continue to support Ukraine as it walks the long and often bumpy road of democratic reform.

There are reasons to believe Zelensky’s slippery answers to President Trump’s repeated requests that he investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter were deliberate. According to congressional staff who recently visited Ukraine and spoke with senior Ukrainian officials, the Zelensky administration was upset at feeling that it was being used and didn’t want to be a pawn in America’s domestic political machinations. In the phone call and at the meeting of the two presidents Wednesday at the U.N. General Assembly, Zelensky was careful not to let the name Biden cross his lips. Instead, Zelensky says he will “look into the situation” related to Burisma, the company on whose board Hunter Biden sat, more generally. At the U.N., Zelensky also mentioned a few of the other important cases he hoped his new prosecutor would investigate in addition to Burisma, and maintained that he didn’t want to be dragged into American politics. 

Nina Jankowicz, who served as a Fulbright fellow, works in a press room at Volodymyr Zelensky's campaign headquarters in 2019 in Kyiv, Ukraine. Jankowicz was recently named the head of the Department of Homeland Security's Disinformation Governance Board.

WaPo  | On the morning of April 27, the Department of Homeland Security announced the creation of the first Disinformation Governance Board with the stated goal to “coordinate countering misinformation related to homeland security.” The Biden administration tapped Nina Jankowicz, a well-known figure in the field of fighting disinformation and extremism, as the board’s executive director.

In naming the 33-year-old Jankowicz to run the newly created board, the administration chose someone with extensive experience in the field of disinformation, which has emerged as an urgent and important issue. The author of the books “How to Be a Woman Online” and “How to Lose the Information War,” her career also featured stints at multiple nonpartisan think tanks and nonprofits and included work that focused on strengthening democratic institutions. Within the small community of disinformation researchers, her work was well-regarded.

But within hours of news of her appointment, Jankowicz was thrust into the spotlight by the very forces she dedicated her career to combating. The board itself and DHS received criticism for both its somewhat ominous name and scant details of specific mission (Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said it “could have done a better job of communicating what it is and what it isn’t”), but Jankowicz was on the receiving end of the harshest attacks, with her role mischaracterized as she became a primary target on the right-wing Internet. She has been subject to an unrelenting barrage of harassment and abuse while unchecked misrepresentations of her work continue to go viral.

Nina Jankowicz Designated "Minister Of Truth" In Preparation For World War III

jonathanturley  |  Many politicians and pundits are in full panic over Elon Musk’s threat to restore free speech values to Twitter.  While Hillary Clinton has called upon Europeans to step in to maintain such censorship and Barack Obama has called for U.S. regulations, the Biden Administration has created a new Disinformation Governance Board in the Department of Homeland Security. It appointed an executive director, Nina Jankowicz, who is literally pitch perfect as an advocate for both corporate and state censorship.

I don't know the exact percentage but I know the vast majority of self-proclaimed "anti-disinformation" agents peddled:

-- The Steele Dossier
-- The fairy tale that Russia seized control of the US with blackmail
-- The CIA fabrication of "Russian bounties" in Afghanistan.

This: pic.twitter.com/EehxRCQCkE

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 29, 2022

It would have been hard to come up with a more Orwellian name short of the Ministry of Truth. However, the DGB needed a true believer to carry out the monitoring of political speech in the United States. It found that person in Jankowicz, who has long been an outspoken anti-free speech advocate.

Jankowicz was selected by the Biden Administration after years of pushing disinformation on the left while calling for censorship of the right.

Jankowicz previously argued that Congress should create new laws to block mockery of women online by reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) and including “provisions against online gender-based harassment.”

Jankowicz testified before British House of Parliament last year about “gender misinformation” being a “national security concern” and a threat to democracy requiring government censorship.

She has demanded that both tech companies and government should work together using “creativity and technological prowess to make a pariah of online misogyny.”

On the Hunter Biden laptop, Jankowicz pushed the false narrative that it was a false story and that “we should view it as a Trump campaign product.” She continued to spread that disinformation, including tweeting a link to a news article that she said cast “yet more doubt on the provenance of the NY Post’s Hunter Biden story.” In another tweet, she added “not to mention that the emails don’t need to be altered to be part of an influence campaign. Voters deserve that context, not a [fairy] tale about a laptop repair shop.”

She even cites the author of the Steele Dossier as a guide for how to deal with disinformation. In August 2020, Jankowicz tweeted “Listened to this last night – Chris Steele (yes THAT Chris Steele) provides some great historical context about the evolution of disinfo. Worth a listen.”

She also joined the panic over the Musk threat to reintroduce free speech values to Twitter. In an interview on NPR, she stated “I shudder to think about if free speech absolutists were taking over more platforms, what that would look like for the marginalized communities.”

 

Unintended Irony Of The Bezos Post Pantshitting About Musk's Bid To Own Twitter

WaPo  |  “What we need is a First Amendment-respecting process in which the government doesn’t dictate content but does cause there to be an acceptable behavioral code,” Wheeler said.

Even professionals who think that social media is a net good say that Twitter as Musk envisions it would be terrible for users and investors. The past few years have spawned any number of Twitter knockoffs catering to those who feel muzzled by the original, including Gab and Parler, but none has taken off in the mainstream.

That is not an accident, said Alicia Wanless, director of the Partnership for Countering Influence Operations at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace in Washington. People want basic rules in the same way they would avoid a nightclub that turns a blind eye to casual violence.

“Musk can buy Twitter and try to take it back to some nostalgic lost Eden of the early days of the Internet, but platforms with the least community standards, like Gab, hardly rank because it isn’t a good business,” Wanless said.

Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who has helped protect global rights activists from government hacking and ordinary people from domestic stalking, said she “would be concerned about the human rights and personal safety impacts of any single person having complete control over Twitter’s policies.”

She added, “I am particularly concerned about the impact of complete ownership by a person who has repeatedly demonstrated that he does not understand the realities of content moderation at scale.”

Citing Musk supporting the idea for allowing anything legal, Galperin said: “Twitter’s content moderation practices leave a lot to be desired, but they tried the policies that Musk seems to favor more than a decade ago, and it did not work.”

A pullback in moderation would disproportionately harm women, minorities and anyone out of favor with the establishment, civil rights advocates said. “Without rules of the road, we are going to be put in harm’s way,” said Rashad Robinson, president of the racial justice group Color of Change. “Our protections cannot be up to the whims of billionaires.”

Alex Stamos, the former Facebook chief security officer who called out Russian disinformation on that platform during the 2016 election, said Musk has a notion of Twitter as a public square for free expression that is divorced from the reality of many individuals and failed to acknowledge that it would give more power to the most powerful.

Without moderation, Stamos said, “anybody who expresses an opinion ends up with every form of casual insult ranging to death and rape threats. That is the baseline of the Internet. If you want people to be able to interact, you need to have basic rules.”

Speaking Of Toxic White Women...,

greenwald  |  Even when one marvels, as one must, at all these impressive displays of cynical elite emotional manipulation and self-victimization, there is absolutely nobody who exploits it better than Taylor Lorenz. Raised in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, educated at Greenwich High School and lovely private boarding schools in the Swiss Alps, then graduating from the leafy private liberal arts Hobart and William Smith Colleges in bucolic upstate New York, Lorenz developed an intense and unyielding obsession with TikTok teenagers and their TikTok houses. This interest in the lives of online teenage culture was cultivated as she approached middle age, and she parlayed this unique interest into stints as a star front-page reporter with the two most powerful newspapers in the U.S.: The New York Times, which she quit two months ago, and The Washington Post, where she is now a star columnist.

It is almost impossible to envision a single individual in whom power, privilege and elite prerogative reside more abundantly than Taylor Lorenz. Using the metrics of elite liberal culture, the word “privilege” was practically invented for her: a rich straight white woman from a wealthy family raised in Greenwich, Connecticut and educated in actual Swiss boarding schools who now writes about people's lives, often casually destroying those lives, on the front pages of the most powerful East Coast newspapers on the planet. And yet, in the eyes of her fellow media and political elites, there is virtually no person more victimized, more deserving of your sympathy and attention, more vulnerable, marginalized and abused than she.

That is because — like Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren and Labour MPs and columnists from The Independent and The Guardian and The New York Times who pioneered these paths of elite victimhood before her — Taylor Lorenz must sometimes hear criticisms of her work and her views. Virtually alone among journalists — who are famously universally beloved and never subjected to any form of real abuse: as Julian Assange will be happy to tell you if you can visit him in his high-security prison cell in the UK, or as these Sri Lankan journalists will explain from their hospital beds after being physically brutalized by the police for covering an anti-government protest on Thursday — Lorenz hears criticisms of her work, sometimes in the form of very angry and even profane or threatening tweets from anonymous people online. This not only means that she deserves your sympathy and concern but, more importantly, that you should heap scorn and recrimination on those who criticize her work because they are responsible for the trauma she endures. Most of all, you must never criticize her publicly for fear of what you might unleash against her.

In other words, Lorenz — like all employees of large media corporations or powerful establishment politicians in Washington and London — is and always should be completely free to continue to publish articles or social media posts that destroy the reputations of powerless people, often with outright lies. But you must never criticize her because she suffers from PTSD and other trauma as a result of the mean tweets that are unleashed by her critics. If you believe that is some sort of straw man exaggeration of what political and media elites are trying to do — create a shield of immunity around them while they retain the right to target, attack, insult, malign and destroy anyone they want — then it means you did not see the Emmy-worthy performances of Lorenz and various NBC News personalities on Friday afternoon during their five-minute segment on Chuck Todd's Meet the Press Daily designed to fortify this warped, inverted standard of morality and power.

The NBC segment was ostensibly designed to "cover” a “study” from January published by the Brookings Institutions and conducted by "NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics and the International Women’s Media Foundation.” This study purported to forensically analyze — and I am not joking — the increase in criticisms of Taylor Lorenz as the result of a tweet I posted criticizing her (re-cast in elite parlance as “attacking” and "targeting” her), as well as a television segment that aired on Tucker Carlson's Fox program that also criticized the NYT reporter. You will never guess what the study revealed: namely, our criticism of her was responsible for a torrent of violent abuse, misogynistic rage, and traumatizing brutality against the corporate journalist:

Our analysis used large-scale quantitative data to assess how the public conversation surrounding these journalists changed in the aftermath of being targeted by prominent media personalities. The research findings showed sharp increases in harmful speech after the journalists were targeted by Carlson and Greenwald….After Carlson targeted Lorenz in a segment on his Fox News show, we found that one in two tweets mentioning Lorenz contained either toxic or insulting language….In Figure 2, we plot the 24-hour moving average of tweets before and after Greenwald targeted Lorenz. The figure shows that after Greenwald’s attack, the likelihood that tweets mentioning Lorenz would contain harmful speech increased by 144%, peaking on Aug. 15, 2021, two days after he targeted Lorenz.

Now, permit me to pause to acknowledge an important concession. The three academic scholars who are the authors of this groundbreaking study on online abuse of powerful elites are absolute experts in marginalization, victimhood and abuse. They have the lived experience of it. Indeed, nobody has suffered worse deprivations than they, so one should be extremely deferential in treating their pronouncements with the respect they deserve. Zeve Sanderson is a graduate of Brown University and the Masters’ Program of New York University and is now the Founding Executive Director at the NYU Center for Social Media and Politics. The other two have degrees from New York University and George Washington University and are also now employed studying “online extremism” at NYU, one of the country's most expensive private universities residing in the heart of Manhattan. So they clearly know marginalization and victimhood when they see it.

The on-screen title of the NBC segment was “1 in 3 Women Under 35 Experience Online Attacks.” This was an extremely odd title since they interviewed two journalists who recounted their online trauma, neither of whom fall into that category. Though Lorenz is often infantilized by her media supporters as some teenager or very young adult — a natural assumption, I suppose, given her obsession with teenaged TikTok houses and other adolescent online paraphernalia — in fact her age is expressed at anywhere in the range from 36 to 43 years old depending on her mood of the day.

The other featured journalist alongside her was Kate Sosin, who does not identify as a woman at all but rather “a proud trans person” who uses the pronouns “they/them"; by referring to Sosin repeatedly as a woman and using the pronouns “she” and “her” to reference their work, NBC repeatedly misgendered the journalist. Anyway, one would think, or at least hope, that if NBC is going to broadcast a report on “women under the age of 35 [who] have experienced harassment online,” they could find journalists who actually fall into that group and not misgender a journalist who is already complaining about abuse and trauma.

The NBC segment has to be watched in its entirety to be believed. Though the emotional performances are moving and spectacular — no denying that — it is important not to let your tears drown out the actual point they are making. It is a quite sinister and insidious lesson they are preaching. When powerful media elites receive mean and abusive tweets from anonymous and random people on Twitter, it is not the fault of those sending those tweets but rather the fault of anyone criticizing their work and their journalism. The only moral conclusion is clear: one should refrain from criticizing employees of media corporations lest one be responsible for unleashing traumatizing abuse at them. Marvel at this performative elite victimhood by all the actors involved:

We Live In The Toxic Hen-House That White Women Have "Created"...,

newyorker  |  In 2013, when people still nursed high hopes for the salvific effects of the Internet and cancellation was a fate reserved for poorly rated TV shows, a private citizen with a hundred and seventy Twitter followers was loitering in Heathrow Airport, waiting for a flight to Cape Town, South Africa. “Going to Africa,” she dashed off before boarding. “Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” By the time she landed, eleven hours later, her ill-advised missive had gone disastrously viral. She stumbled off the plane to discover that a multitude of online detractors had weighed in on her character. Now she was a globally known racist.

The woman, Justine Sacco, was one of the first high-profile casualties of public shaming in the digital era, and she suffered all the consequences that have since become routine: job loss, wide-scale condemnation, and a public identity subsumed by a very public sin. Still, in the wake of subsequent disasters, her story is almost quaint. How pleasant it is to recall a simpler, kinder time when an online mobbing was an occurrence so unusual that it merited two articles in the Times.

Our social fabric has since frayed considerably. What’s curious about the brutality that fuels Internet shaming frenzies is that in real life—that is, IRL, in the usual online parlance—most of us would hesitate to consign a normal nobody to nationwide notoriety and several years of unemployment. We might even have mustered the charity to read Sacco’s quip as a satirical, if clumsy, sendup of the white privilege and parochialism that give rise to public-health inequalities. (Sacco, as people in her inner circle would have known, was no stranger to either Africa or progressive causes.) Yet the nasty comments went on accumulating, as if of their own accord. “We are about to watch this @JustineSacco bitch get fired. In REAL time. Before she even KNOWS she’s getting fired.” “All I want for Christmas is to see @JustineSacco’s face when her plane lands and she checks her inbox/voicemail.” “Her level of racist ignorance belongs on Fox News. #AIDS can affect anyone!”

It’s an open question whether there is anything redeeming about our transformation into bloodhounds as soon as we log on, and two new investigations into the nature of shame offer contrasting answers. In “How to Do Things with Emotions: The Morality of Anger and Shame Across Cultures” (Princeton), Owen Flanagan, a professor of philosophy and neurobiology at Duke University, suggests that our tense political climate is the product of poor emotional regulation. In “The Shame Machine: Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation” (Crown), the data-scientist-cum-journalist Cathy O’Neil suggests that shaming is structural: its ubiquity is the fault not of individual vigilantes but, rather, of the many industries that manufacture and exploit mortification for profit.

At the heart of these diverging perspectives is an ambiguity built into the very concept at issue. Shame is an emotion—a person can suffer from its bilious bite, as Sacco did—but it is also a state of affairs. No matter how Sacco felt, her ostracism was an established fact, a thing that happened to her. Is shame fundamentally a feeling or fundamentally a social phenomenon? Should we treat it as a matter of psychology or of politics?

In “How to Do Things with Emotions,” a scholarly plea for a renovated emotional landscape, Flanagan casts his vote for psychology. Troubled by the churlishness of contemporary American politics, he sets out to isolate “emotional habits that are mixed up in our troubles,” by which he means our descent into polarity, chaos, and mutual mistrust. He’s against the more vituperative forms of anger, which he believes are too prevalent, and is in favor of shame, which he regards as all but absent from our ethical repertoire. Shame, in his view, is an unjustly maligned emotion that we might rehabilitate in order to discipline racists and misogynists.

Shame, canonically, is the sinking sentiment that attends deviation from widely endorsed mores, whatever they happen to be. You can be sad or elated for any reason or for no reason, but shame requires a shared social context. The emotion in question arises not because you violated a standard that you set for yourself but because you violated a standard that your milieu (perhaps policed by Twitter) imposes on you. Because shame is a means of enforcing whatever values are operative in a given society, whether it proves salutary hinges on the merits of the moral system in which it is deployed, at least according to Flanagan. He admits that shame has too often been conscripted as a weapon against the oppressed—as when women and queer people have been encouraged to suppress their sexual impulses. Nonetheless, he calls for shame to be enlisted in the service of social justice, as it was when a concerted social-media campaign ejected the Hollywood producer and serial rapist Harvey Weinstein from power.

Too Many Witches, No Honest Stitches - Guarantee A Culture Of Snitches...,

chronicle |   When I read about the downfall of the University of Michigan’s president, Mark Schlissel, fired after an anonymous complaint about his consensual though “inappropriate” relationship with a subordinate, my first thought was “What kind of idiot uses his work email for an affair?” Then I recalled that I myself am the kind of idiot who persists in using my university email account for everything, despite pledging at least once a year to tear myself away from this self-destructive habit. Schlissel, c’est moi. The next time I get in trouble, will my employer emulate the classy behavior of the Michigan Board of Regents and release troves of my own embarrassing emails for my enemies to savor and mock?

My next thought: Who was the snitch? I knew none of the players, but my inner Hercule Poirot went right to work, assembling likely suspects in the drawing room of my imagination (betrayed spouse, disappointed paramour, assorted foes and rivals, maligned underlings), cleverly disarming them with my continental charm until the culprit was exposed — most likely by the irrepressible look of creepy satisfaction playing across his or her face. To bring down an apparently much loathed and vastly overpaid university president, even for the stupidest of reasons: what ecstasy!

Among the questions prompted by Schlissel’s termination is whether higher education has, on the whole, become a hotbed of craven snitches. From everything I’ve heard and experienced, the answer is yes.

First let us pause to consider our terms: Was Schlissel’s narc a “snitch” or a “whistle-blower”? Whistle-blowers are generally attempting to topple or thwart the powerful, and Schlissel was certainly powerful. But the reported offense was, in the words of a lawyer I spoke with, “a nothingburger.” Let us provisionally define snitching as turning someone in anonymously, for either minor or nonexistent offenses, or pretextually. Also: using institutional mechanisms to kneecap rivals, harass enemies, settle scores and grudges, or advantage oneself. Not to mention squealing on someone for social-media posts and joining online mobs to protest exercises of academic and intellectual freedom.

This last is a variant of the “social-justice snitch,” a burgeoning category composed of those who want to defund the police and reform the criminal-justice system but are nevertheless happy to feed the maws of a frequently unprocedural and (many say) racist campus-justice system. There are, to be sure, right-wing students and organizations dedicated to harassing professors whose politics they object to, but that’s to be expected. What’s not is the so-called campus left failing to notice the degree to which the “carceral turn” in American higher ed — the prosecutorial ethos, the resources reallocated to regulation and punishment — shares a certain cultural logic with the rise of mass incarceration and over-policing in off-campus America. Or that the zeal for policing intellectual borders has certain resonances with the signature tactics of Trumpian America, for which unpoliced borders are equally intolerable. But what care social-justice types about fostering the carceral university if those with suspect politics can be flattened, even — fingers crossed! — expelled, or left unemployed and penurious?

Americans once famously disliked snitches. Witness the parade of Hollywood liberals who refused to stand or applaud when the director Elia Kazan, who’d named names to the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1952, received an honorary Academy Award in 1999. According to Kazan’s autobiography, he named only those who’d already been named or were about to be, and he’d long since come to despise the cultural despotism of the American Communist Party. But he’ll still go down in history with “snitch” attached to his name. If only he’d labored in today’s academe! He’d be lionized for it.

The carceral campus provides a haven for that formerly reviled personality type, the jailhouse snitch, around whom so many classic prison dramas revolved. The Big House (1930) established the category and delivered a message for the ages: Snitches get stitches. When the privileged 24-year-old Kent (Robert Montgomery), in for carelessly killing someone while driving drunk, starts ratting out his fellow inmates, things don’t turn out well for him. In the film’s moral universe, only snivelers snitch. Or as the seen-it-all warden opines: “Prison does not give a man a yellow streak, but if he has one, it brings it out.”

Hen Houses With Long Incumbency Must Inevitably Become Toxic Environments

reason  |  Much of the information provided in this article, comes from the most extensive investigation into Jaeger, which can be read in full here. This piece also relies on additional investigations as well as interviews with Jaeger's colleagues and contemporaries, some of whom requested anonymity for fear of professional consequences.) 

The fundamental issue may have been that Jaeger refused, in some ways, to assimilate, to act his station in life. Part of this was probably his personality and part of it probably cultural. He dated or slept with several students in his early years as a professor at U.R., although none worked in his lab or were under his tutelage. This was, at the time, permitted under departmental policy, but this once-common practice is now taboo, perhaps guaranteed to cause problems for both the professor and for his or her students. Jaeger says he sees that now, but in his early 30s, to him, it seemed normal. 

All of this—his personality, his jokes, his flirting and boundary-pushing and sleeping around—made some people in his department uncomfortable enough to avoid him.

One of those was Keturah Bixby. In November 2013, Bixby, then a graduate student, wrote a letter to department head Greg DeAngelis. She then printed it out, brought it to his office, and sat there while he read it. (Bixby did not respond to a request for comment.)

"There's a professor here who's been doing unprofessional things that make me uncomfortable," the letter, which was provided to Reason, began. "It's never anything huge, but it's built up over the years I've been here and I don't feel safe around him. Although I'm generally really happy at Rochester, these situations have made me miserable at times. It's Florian."

Bixby went on to describe two incidents in which Jaeger made her uncomfortable.

In the first, she wrote that he walked into her shared office and, without asking, picked up a pen and Post-it notes off her office mate's desk and stood behind her writing a note. She said it was "creepy and unprofessional."

In the second incident, Bixby said that at a recruiting party that year, Jaeger asked if he could take a picture of her. She refused, and he later took a picture of her anyway.

"I was pretty angry," she wrote in her letter, "and the picture (if it still exists anywhere) is of me flipping him off. It makes me feel angry, sick, and my skin crawl to think of him having a picture of me anywhere."

Bixby added that she avoided both social and professional events for fear of seeing Jaeger, and asked that DeAngelis look into Jaeger's behavior and require "training on boundaries and respecting them." She also wrote that she never wanted to interact with Jaeger again.

"I never want him at a talk I give," she wrote. "Is that possible? If he ever tries to push for interaction, is it ok to tell him I prefer not to because of how uncomfortable his unprofessional behavior has made me?"

Fat, Ugly, Non-Binary "Chief People Officers" Now Dominate Western Public Discourse...,

yahoo  |  Daniil Medvedev, the Russian player currently sitting at No. 1 in the ATP rankings, may not be allowed to play at Wimbledon unless he denounces Russian president Vladimir Putin.

That was the situation outlined during a meeting at British Parliament on Tuesday, where sports minister Nigel Huddleston confirmed discussions were taking place to prevent supporters of Putin from entering the world's oldest tennis tournament amid Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.

Russia's tennis teams have already been thrown out of the Davis and Billie Jean King Cup, but Huddleston indicated the government wanted sanctions to go further.

From The Telegraph:

Giving evidence to the Digital, Culture, Media & Sport select committee, Huddleston said: “It needs to go beyond that. We need some potential assurance that they are not supporters of Vladimir Putin and we are considering what requirements we may need to try and get some assurances along those lines.”

Asked whether individual Russian and Belarusian athletes wanting to come to the UK would be required to “denounce” Putin’s invasion, Huddleston said the details were still being discussed, including with other countries.

He added: “It would be better if we can decide some broad global consensus on this.”

Such an action would affect Medvedev and any other Russian and Belarusian tennis players, who are currently not allowed to play under their national flags while the Ukrainian invasion continues. There are currently four Russian players in the ATP top 30, while the WTA has three Russians and two Belarusians in its top 30.

The world of sports has seen an overwhelming and potentially unprecedented wave of bans against Russia's teams and athletes since the country's military made its move across the Ukrainian border. That has included suspensions from international competition in hockey, soccer, figure skating and many more, as well organizations removing events and business from the country and governments freezing Putin allies' assets.

Amazon Whole Foods "Just Walk Out?" - What Kind Of Self-Respecting Man Ever Bothered To Walk In?

NYTimes  |  “Would you like to sign in with your palm?”

That was the question a cheerful Amazon employee posed when greeting me last week at the opening of a Whole Foods Market in Washington’s Glover Park neighborhood. She blithely added, “You can also begin shopping by scanning the QR code in your Amazon app.”

“Let’s go for the palm,” I said.

In less than a minute, I scanned both hands on a kiosk and linked them to my Amazon account. Then I hovered my right palm over the turnstile reader to enter the nation’s most technologically sophisticated grocery store.

For the next 30 minutes, I shopped. I picked up a bag of cauliflower florets, grapefruit sparkling water, a carton of strawberries and a package of organic chicken sausages. Cameras and sensors recorded each of my moves, creating a virtual shopping cart for me in real time. Then I simply walked out, no cashier necessary. Whole Foods — or rather Amazon — would bill my account later.

More than four years ago, Amazon bought Whole Foods for $13 billion. Now the Amazon-ification of the grocery chain is physically complete, as showcased by the revamped Whole Foods store in Glover Park.

For a long time, Amazon made only small steps toward putting its mark on the more than 500 Whole Foods stores in the United States and Britain. The main evidence of change were the discounts and free home delivery for Amazon Prime members.

But this 21,000-square-foot Whole Foods just north of Georgetown has catapulted Amazon’s involvement forward. Along with another prototype Whole Foods store, which will open in Los Angeles this year, Amazon designed my local grocer to be almost completely run by tracking and robotic tools for the first time.

The technology, known as Just Walk Out, consists of hundreds of cameras with a god’s-eye view of customers. Sensors are placed under each apple, carton of oatmeal and boule of multigrain bread. Behind the scenes, deep-learning software analyzes the shopping activity to detect patterns and increase the accuracy of its charges.

Like Standard-Issue Sheeple, MIT Has Surrendered Its Last Remaining Vestiges Of Testicular Fortitude...,

stevekirsch  |  I tried to give a talk about the science behind the COVID vaccines and mask wearing in the auditorium at MIT that I funded for $2.5M.

No dice. They won’t let me talk there. They suggested I give the talk at a different university.

See my original post: Is science dead? for the full story.

Stephanie Seneff is not an MIT faculty member

After my original posting, a lot of people suggested I ask Stephanie Seneff to sponsor me. In fact, if I had a dime for everyone who suggested Stephanie, I could retire :)

Stephanie and I are good friends (we talk all the time). She would do it if she were an MIT faculty member. But she isn’t.

I can tell you one thing though: it was absolutely stunning to me that she was the only person at MIT people suggested I ask. That in itself is remarkable.

The entire MIT faculty is wrong on this issue

There are over 1,000 faculty members at MIT and not a single one thinks the vaccines might be unsafe? Nobody?!?!?

OK, I can live with that. Apparently, they’ve all drunk the Kool-Aid at MIT.

But what is totally unacceptable is that they refuse to even consider the possibility that they could be wrong.

What ever happened to open-minded scientists?

I know that there are a few faculty members who believe I should be able to speak at MIT, but they are afraid of retribution from their peers. So they avoid the controversy by doing nothing. They won’t even let me publicly reveal who they are.

What’s even worse than that is that there are serious cases of vaccine injury at MIT that are not being reported

More on those stories later. They’ve been covered up.

MIT should be speaking out for what the science says, not actively suppressing scientific discourse. Fist tap Big Don.

Even Declaring Discretionary Martial Law Canada's Political Leadership Is Too Fruity To Take Seriously

cbc  |   Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has told his caucus he will invoke the never-before-used Emergencies Act to give the federal government extra powers to handle anti-vaccine mandate protests across the country, sources say.

Those sources, who were not authorized to speak publicly, said the prime minister informed the premiers of his decision this morning.

The Emergencies Act, which replaced the War Measures Act in the 1980s, defines a national emergency as a temporary "urgent and critical situation" that "seriously endangers the lives, health or safety of Canadians and is of such proportions or nature as to exceed the capacity or authority of a province to deal with it."

It gives special powers to the prime minister to respond to emergency scenarios affecting public welfare (natural disasters, disease outbreaks), public order (civil unrest), international emergencies or war emergencies.

• Government considering emergency powers with 'appropriate caution,' federal minister says

• Opportunity to end convoy protest peacefully is slipping away, experts say

The act grants cabinet the ability to "take special temporary measures that may not be appropriate in normal times" to cope with an "urgent and critical situation" and the resulting fallout. It is still subject to the protections of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Once cabinet declares an emergency, it takes effect right away — but the government still needs to go to Parliament within seven days to get approval. If either the Commons or the Senate votes against the motion, the emergency declaration is revoked.

NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh said Monday that while he sees the prime minister's decision to turn to the Emergencies Act as "proof of a failure of leadership," he will support the declaration — which should secure its passage through a minority Parliament.

"The reason why we got to this point is because the prime minister let the siege in Ottawa go on for weeks and weeks without actually doing anything about it, allowed the convoy to shut down borders without responding appropriately," he said.

The Left Can't Do A Trucker Protest Because It Lacks The Right's Decentralized Capacity For Violence

ianwelsh  |  The left cannot do what the truckers do because if they did, they would be shut down with extreme violence — if they were even allowed to get going. Remember, the Ottawa police chief let the truckers set up, knowing in advance what they were going to do.

Note also, that the right uses decentralized action a lot. Their shooters are created by their ideology, but act individually. The truckers may have organization, but they are individuals. Each truck has to be seized individually. There is some central organization, and when its visible it’s taken out (the shut down of the GoFundMe) but mostly it’s buried in the financial and third-party weeds. Ezra Levant of Rebel news, for example, hired a lawyer to fight parking tickets for the truckers. He’s not directly involved so far as we know yet, but he is indirectly involved.

Then there’s Ontario’s Prime Minister, Doug Ford. Doug could have this stuff broken up easily, and if it truly does need the military, he’s the person with the authority to call them in (the Feds arguably can’t without passing a new law). Doug’s daughter is with the protesters.

FDR alleged (but only allegedly) once said, “You’ve convinced me. I agree with what you’ve said. Now go out and make me do it.” Doug almost certainly agrees with the truckers, but he knows that polling is against him.

“Make me do it.”

Killing people for the market is economic orthodoxy. Impoverishing people so the rich can get richer is economic orthodoxy. Taking care of people, in the US, Canada, and Britain is against the ruling ideology — it is actually not legitimate. (It is in China and Japan, as people there are viewed as productive assets, not as assets to be mined.)

For unions to do what the truckers do they would have to start by decentralizing. No significant  headquarters, few assets to be seized, and leadership that doesn’t matter because anyone can lead. If the “president” is locked up, it doesn’t matter because someone else steps up, and regular members know what to do anyway.

Plus, there needs to an implicit threat. “If you take us out by force, we will keep showing up, and you can’t lock us all up.” The “truckers” (most truckers disagree with them, including the Teamsters) belong to a movement that shows up at school board meetings, that pickets hospitals & legislatures and threatens nurses, and that is generally perceived as dangerous. Politicians don’t feel entirely safe using force and law against them, though this is (or was) far more true in the US than in Canada. The left has spent generations telling themselves that violence is always bad and that even the threat of it should never ever even be considered because Gandhi, Gandhi, Gandhi.

All people are equal, but some people are more equal than others. All protests are equal, but some protests are more equal. Some ideologies are far more equal than others.

Glenn Greenwald Misses The Spotify Forest For The Censorship Trees

greenwald |  The emerging campaign to pressure Spotify to remove Joe Rogan from its platform is perhaps the most illustrative episode yet of both the dynamics at play and the desperation of liberals to ban anyone off-key. It was only a matter of time before this effort really galvanized in earnest. Rogan has simply become too influential, with too large of an audience of young people, for the liberal establishment to tolerate his continuing to act up. Prior efforts to coerce, cajole, or manipulate Rogan to fall into line were abject failures. Shortly after The Wall Street Journal reported in September, 2020 that Spotify employees were organizing to demand that some of Rogan's shows be removed from the platform, Rogan invited Alex Jones onto his show: a rather strong statement that he was unwilling to obey decrees about who he could interview or what he could say.

On Tuesday, musician Neil Young demanded that Spotify either remove Rogan from its platform or cease featuring Young's music, claiming Rogan spreads COVID disinformation. Spotify predictably sided with Rogan, their most popular podcaster in whose show they invested $100 million, by removing Young's music and keeping Rogan. The pressure on Spotify mildly intensified on Friday when singer Joni Mitchell issued a similar demand. All sorts of censorship-mad liberals celebrated this effort to remove Rogan, then vowed to cancel their Spotify subscription in protest of Spotify's refusal to capitulate for now; a hashtag urging the deletion of Spotify's app trended for days. Many bizarrely urged that everyone buy music from Apple instead; apparently, handing over your cash to one of history's largest and richest corporations, repeatedly linked to the use of slave labor, is the liberal version of subversive social justice.

Jack Cocchiarella @JDCocchiarella

Spotify chose Joe Rogan over Neil Young. I’ll choose Apple Music over Spotify.

January 27th 2022

5,580 Retweets55,983 Likes

Obviously, Spotify is not going to jettison one of their biggest audience draws over a couple of faded septuagenarians from the 1960s. But if a current major star follows suit, it is not difficult to imagine a snowball effect. The goal of liberals with this tactic is to take any disobedient platform and either force it into line or punish it by drenching it with such negative attacks that nobody who craves acceptance in the parlors of Decent Liberal Society will risk being associated with it. “Prince Harry was under pressure to cut ties with Spotify yesterday after the streaming giant was accused of promoting anti-vax content,” claimed The Daily Mail which, reliable or otherwise, is a certain sign of things to come.

One could easily envision a tipping point being reached where a musician no longer makes an anti-Rogan statement by leaving the platform as Young and Mitchell just did, but instead will be accused of harboring pro-Rogan sentiments if they stay on Spotify. With the stock price of Spotify declining as these recent controversies around Rogan unfolded, a strategy in which Spotify is forced to choose between keeping Rogan or losing substantial musical star power could be more viable than it currently seems. “Spotify lost $4 billion in market value this week after rock icon Neil Young called out the company for allowing comedian Joe Rogan to use its service to spread misinformation about the COVID vaccine on his popular podcast, 'The Joe Rogan Experience,’” is how The San Francisco Chronicle put it (that Spotify's stock price dropped rather precipitously contemporaneously with this controversy is clear; less so is the causal connection, though it seems unlikely to be entire coincidental):

Three Geezerwaffen Plus One Replacement Negroe Out To Get Joe Rogan

hollywoodreporter  |  Nils Lofgren, a longtime guitarist for Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, is among the musicians to pull music from Spotify in the wake of the streaming platform spreading COVID-19 misinformation.

He follows Neil Young, who announced Wednesday that he would remove his catalogue in protest of COVID vaccine misinformation being spread on Joe Rogan’s podcast, and Joni Mitchell, who followed in solidarity soon after.

Both musicians referred to an open letter sent to Spotify from 270 professionals in the scientific and medical communities, calling on the streaming service to address misinformation distributed on the platform.

In a statement shared to the Neil Young Archives on Saturday, Lofgren shared: “A few days ago, my wife and I became aware of Neil and Daryl [Hannah] standing with hundreds of health care professionals, scientists, doctors and nurses in calling out Spotify for promoting lies and misinformation that are hurting and killing people.”

Lofgren noted that 27 years of his music has been taken off the service and that he is also reaching out to labels that own his earlier music to have that removed as well. The Hollywood Reporter has reached out to Spotify for comment.

“Neil and I go back 53 years,” Lofgren’s statement continued. “Amy and I are honored and blessed to call Neil and Daryl friends, and knew standing with them was the right choice.”

MOAR Censorship PUH-LEEZ!!!!

taibbi |  Censors have a fantasy that if they get rid of all the Berensons and Mercolas and Malones, and rein in people like Joe Rogan, that all the holdouts will suddenly rush to get vaccinated. The opposite is true. If you wipe out critics, people will immediately default to higher levels of suspicion. They will now be sure there’s something wrong with the vaccine. If you want to convince audiences, you have to allow everyone to talk, even the ones you disagree with. You have to make a better case. The Substack people, thank God, still get this, but the censor’s disease of thinking there are shortcuts to trust is spreading.

Lastly, while the Post certainly has its own problems in this area, the Guardian editors should puke with shame for even thinking about condemning anyone else’s “misinformation,” while their own fake story about Assange’s “secret talks” with Paul Manafort in the Ecuadorian embassy remains up. Leaving an obvious hoax uncorrected will tend to create a credibility problem, and you compound it by pointing a finger elsewhere. There is a lesson in this for health authorities, too. Clean your own houses, and maybe you won’t have such a hard time being believed. 

I’ve used Substack to show the amazingly diverse range of speech deemed unallowable on private platforms, from raw footage of both anti-Trump protests and the January 6th riots, to satirical videos no one had even seen yet, to advocates and detractors of the medication Ivermectin, to a Jewish tweeter’s pictorial account of Hitler’s life, to a now proven-true expose about the president’s son. The latter case is on point, because the widely distributed story that the New York Post’s Hunter Biden report was Russian disinformation was the actual disinformation. If the fact-checkers are themselves untrustworthy, and you can’t get around the fact-checkers, that’s when you’re really screwed.

This puts the issue of the reliability of authorities front and center, which is the main problem with pandemic messaging. One does not need to be a medical expert to see that the FDA, CDC, the NIH, as well as the White House (both under Biden and Trump) have all been untruthful, or wrong, or inconsistent, about a spectacular range of issues in the last two years.

 

Metaverse Already Distorted To Accomodate An Infinitesimally Small Slice Of The Mentally Ill

technologyreview |  Last week, Meta (the umbrella company formerly known as Facebook) opened up access to its virtual-reality social media platform, Horizon Worlds. Early descriptions of the platform make it seem fun and wholesome, drawing comparisons to Minecraft. In Horizon Worlds, up to 20 avatars can get together at a time to explore, hang out, and build within the virtual space.

But not everything has been warm and fuzzy. According to Meta, on November 26, a beta tester reported something deeply troubling: she had been groped by a stranger on Horizon Worlds. On December 1, Meta revealed that she’d posted her experience in the Horizon Worlds beta testing group on Facebook.

Meta’s internal review of the incident found that the beta tester should have used a tool called “Safe Zone” that’s part of a suite of safety features built into Horizon Worlds. Safe Zone is a protective bubble users can activate when feeling threatened. Within it, no one can touch them, talk to them, or interact in any way until they signal that they would like the Safe Zone lifted.

Vivek Sharma, the vice president of Horizon, called the groping incident “absolutely unfortunate,” telling The Verge, “That’s good feedback still for us because I want to make [the blocking feature] trivially easy and findable.”

It’s not the first time a user has been groped in VR—nor, unfortunately, will it be the last. But the incident shows that until companies work out how to protect participants, the metaverse can never be a safe place.

“There I was, being virtually groped”

When Aaron Stanton heard about the incident at Meta, he was transported to October 2016. That was when a gamer, Jordan Belamire, penned an open letter on Medium describing being groped in Quivr, a game Stanton co-designed in which players, equipped with bow and arrows, shoot zombies.

In the letter, Belamire described entering a multiplayer mode, where all characters were exactly the same save for their voices. “In between a wave of zombies and demons to shoot down, I was hanging out next to BigBro442, waiting for our next attack. Suddenly, BigBro442’s disembodied helmet faced me dead-on. His floating hand approached my body, and he started to virtually rub my chest. ‘Stop!’ I cried … This goaded him on, and even when I turned away from him, he chased me around, making grabbing and pinching motions near my chest. Emboldened, he even shoved his hand toward my virtual crotch and began rubbing.

“There I was, being virtually groped in a snowy fortress with my brother-in-law and husband watching.”

Stanton and his cofounder, Jonathan Schenker, immediately responded with an apology and an in-game fix. Avatars would be able to stretch their arms into a V gesture, which would automatically push any offenders away.

Stanton, who today leads the VR Institute for Health and Exercise, says Quivr didn’t track data about that feature, “nor do I think it was used much.” But Stanton thinks about Belamire often and wonders if he could have done more in 2016 to prevent the incident that occurred in Horizon Worlds a few weeks ago. “There’s so much more to be done here,” he says. “No one should ever have to flee from a VR experience to escape feeling powerless.”

VR sexual harassment is sexual harassment, full stop

A recent review of the events around Belamire’s experience published in the journal for the Digital Games Research Association found that “many online responses to this incident were dismissive of Belamire’s experience and, at times, abusive and misogynistic … readers from all perspectives grappled with understanding this act given the virtual and playful context it occurred in.” Belamire faded from view, and I was unable to find her online.

A constant topic of debate on message boards after Belamire’s Medium article was whether or not what she had experienced was actually groping if her body wasn’t physically touched.

“I think people should keep in mind that sexual harassment has never had to be a physical thing,” says Jesse Fox, an associate professor at Ohio State University who researches the social implications of virtual reality. “It can be verbal, and yes, it can be a virtual experience as well.

 

"In Our Country, You Can Shoot And Kill A N-gga But You Better Not Hurt A Gay Person’s Feelings."

GQ  |  In the show’s opening minutes, under the auspices of updating the audience on his pandemic experience — he got the Johnson & Johnson vaccine: “Give me the third best option! I’ll have what the homeless people are having!” — Chappelle makes it clear that, in addition to being entertaining, he’s out to test our limits because, it becomes increasingly clear, he believes we need to have our limits tested. A few breaths after likening his immune system fighting coronavirus to Black people violently beating up Asian-Americans, Chappelle surveys the gasping audience and says “It’s gonna get worse than that. Hang in there; it’s gonna get way worse.”

And then it does. Discussing DaBaby, for example, Chappelle opines “In our country, you can shoot and kill a n-gga but you better not hurt a gay person’s feelings." Never mind that DaBaby’s onstage comments about AIDS at the Rolling Loud festival were truly out of pocket, or that the apology that followed was late and lackluster, or that DaBaby eventually took the apology back.

By the time Chappelle declares that “gender is a fact” and that he’s “Team TERF” in solidarity with J.K. Rowling, I turned my television off because I wasn’t having fun anymore. And part of freedom as I experience it is that I don’t owe Dave Chappelle any of my time.

Maybe you watch comedy specials to endure them, but I watch them to have a good time, and I stop watching them when that’s no longer the case. Chappelle argues this makes me "too sensitive, too brittle"; I just think I have better things to do than watch a standup set that could just as well have been a Fox News special. As a gay Black man, even when I’m watching a comedy special, my identity is inconveniently present. It’s so annoying; I asked my queerness to chill in the other room so I could watch "The Closer" in peace, but no such luck.

 

Anti-feminist Negroes Reacting To The Demise Of The Black Nuclear Family...,

level |  Like so many online communities, the Black Manosphere is rife with internal divisions and disputes, each more ridiculous than the last; what unites it is its founding principles of anti-feminism. Most of these are cribbed from the larger “manosphere,” an umbrella term for a collection of subreddits and “men’s rights” forums claiming that women and a feminist-leaning society have robbed men of their power, and then tailored to Black women specifically. Black women lack femininity, says Black Manosphere dogma; they refuse to be submissive; they are the ones responsible for Black family dysfunction.

As with the manosphere at large, the Black Manosphere traffics in jargon that makes them sound like Matrix superfans whose experience with actual women doesn’t extend beyond fantasy. “Red pill” ideology casts followers as visionaries who dare to see through the illusion; they divide other men into “alpha” and “beta” categories to denote their power and status (“betabux,” for example, is a term used for weak men whose only value to women is as sugar daddies). Sexually empowered women are denigrated as riding the “cock carousel” until they hit “the wall” in their mid-twenties and their “sexual market value” drops; the 80/20 rule dictates that women find only one out of every five men attractive enough to have sex without added incentives like money (at which their “hypergamy,” or drive to marry up a class, kicks in).

As with the manosphere at large, the Black Manosphere traffics in jargon that makes them sound like “Matrix” superfans whose experience with actual women doesn’t extend beyond fantasy.

Unlike the larger, ostensibly White manosphere, the Black Manosphere isn’t a pathway into the alt-right. It reserves its ire solely for its own community: Black women and men who violate its expectations. Black women in particular are its targets, with men referring to them as “scraggle daggles,” “demons,” and “the most filthy and disease-ridden women on the planet.” It’s a codified system of misogynoir — misogyny toward Black women in particular — that gives stark form to an attitude Black women have been noticing and discussing for well over a decade.

Before the Black Manosphere, there was the men’s rights movement, and lo, it was bad. It was also predominantly White, or at least non-Black. A Philadelphia-based man who calls himself Mumia Obsidian Ali sought to change that. After coming across men’s rights activists online in the mid-2010s, he began to contribute pieces to blogs like A Voice for Men and Return of Kings, and eventually launched a radio show where he holds forth on his favorite topic: Black women. (The seeds of his own anti-feminism were sown in childhood, he suggested in one article, when he saw his grandmother and mother being verbally abusive toward his grandfather and father, respectively.) “Black women [in America], as a group, suck,” he tells me in an email exchange.

As the Black Manosphere proliferated, so did a deluge of content. Men — mostly from North America and Western Europe — write ceaseless articles referencing other articles, and upload videos as long as 12 hours blaming Black women for every societal ill plaguing Black communities in Western societies. Literally, every one: crime rates, single motherhood, STD rates, killing sprees, lagging school performance, out-of-wedlock births; abortions, incarceration rates. To bypass YouTube’s content moderation policies, some make their videos age-restricted. Others post their content on BitChute or Free Speech Avenger, both of which can feature profane or even pornographic content, as well as their own websites, blogs, podcasts, private Facebook pages, and Telegram chat groups. Some self-publish books. Revenue builds through donations during livestreams, one-on-one consultation fees, book sales, merchandise, and Patreon subscriptions. A nearly two-hour video can generate more than $200 in donations.

Lacking Anything Resembling Moral Consensus We're Doomed To Political "Might Makes Right!"

benjaminstudebaker |  There’s an endemic debate over what people are saying when they refer to ‘the west’. Is the west defined by its whiteness, its wealth, its liberal democracy? Should we call it the ‘highly developed countries’, the ‘advanced economies’, the ‘first world’, or the ‘global north’? I think most of these terms misses what is distinctive about this set of places. The countries we think of as ‘western’ are all countries where Catholicism was once dominant but is now in varying levels of retreat. Western countries are ‘post-Catholic’.

Catholicism has certain distinctive effects on a place. Crucially, Catholicism situates politics as subordinate to morality. In medieval Catholic states, the monarch derives authority from the pope or from divine right. This means the monarch’s legitimacy depends on the monarch having the right moral orientation. In other parts of the world, politics and morality were more heavily enmeshed. In the Byzantine Empire, the emperor was supreme in both religious and temporal matters. In the Islamic world, the caliph combined both political and religious authority. In China, different dynasties embraced and promoted the teachings of many different schools of thought at varying points. It was only in the Catholic west that politics and morality were firmly separated, with the former rendered clearly subordinate to the latter.

Because Catholicism made politics subject to religion, it became especially important for its theology to be clear. If the legitimacy of the regime depends on the regime having the right moral orientation, a moral consensus must be maintained and articulated. Any breakdown in the consensus over religion would threaten to destroy the political consensus, too. So in the Catholic world, heresy became extraordinarily taboo. The effect of this was to make Catholicism steadily more rigid over time. Its theology became enormously detailed and ornate, but it also became less flexible. Eastern rulers could adjust moral and religious emphases to suit their political needs, but Catholic rulers were in a moral straightjacket. Over time, the tensions between the Catholic moral vision and the political imperatives faced by Catholic rulers intensified. Catholic kingdoms consolidated their power, and monarchs sought to reduce their dependence on Catholicism for legitimacy. This led to state-sponsored Protestantism, as well as the promotion of secular humanism.

The trouble is that abstractions like the good, the true, or God are inherently difficult for human beings to concretely define. Attempts to capture them conceptually necessarily lead to simplification and distortion. But because Catholicism had become the dominant legitimation paradigm for medieval states, it had to articulate precise conceptualizations of irreducibly abstract ideas. This was understandable–without precision, how could we know the king really was legitimate? But the subordination of politics to morality compelled Catholics to develop a theology that was too precise to be accurate. In other words, by trying to subordinate politics to morality, Catholics were forced to subordinate morality to politics.

The excessively strong, excessively precise claims of the Catholics led to the repudiation of these claims by the Protestants and humanists. This tore apart the Catholic consensus and badly undermined political legitimacy. For a while, Protestants and humanists tried to replace Catholicism with another precise account of good/truth/God. But because precise accounts necessarily distort these abstractions, it was impossible to convince the public to embrace these substitutes with anything like the level of conviction with which Catholicism had once been embraced.

This forced post-Catholic states to make their peace with a level of moral pluralism. But post-Catholics could not have the same attitude to pluralism which the Romans or Persians or Chinese had. In these ancient empires, politics and morality were inseparably bound up with one another, and therefore as long as religious views remained compatible with the law they posed no deep problems. In the post-Catholic world, the state was still expected to justify itself in reference to morality. Without a moral consensus, the basis of the state’s authority was in jeopardy. So when post-Catholic states embraced pluralism, they had to embrace pluralism as a morality in itself, so that this morality could take on the role which Catholicism had previously played. This, ultimately, is what liberalism is–a kind of pluralism fashioned into a morality to which the state might be answerable.