MIT Davos Weasel Dick Misleadership Strikes Again....,

 

MIT | To the members of the MIT community,

 

You may have heard about a situation centered on our Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) regarding an invited speaker, Professor Dorian Abbot.

 

In a recent letter to the faculty, Provost Marty Schmidt lays out the facts, some of which have not come through clearly in the media and on social media. I encourage you to read his letter. You will also find thorough coverage in The Tech.

 

The controversy around this situation has caused great distress for many members of our community, in many quarters. It has also uncovered significant differences within the Institute on several issues.

 

I would like to reflect on what happened and set us on a path forward. But let me address the human questions first.

 

To the members of the EAPS community: I am deeply disturbed that as a direct result of this situation, many of you – students, postdocs, faculty and young alumni – have suffered a tide of online targeting and hate mail from outside MIT. This conduct is reprehensible and utterly unacceptable. For members of the MIT community, where we value treating one another with decency and respect, this feels especially jarring.

 

I encourage anyone who is subjected to harassing or threatening behavior or language to reach out for support and guidance to the Institute Discrimination and Harassment Response (IDHR) office.

 

I also want to express my tremendous respect for Professor Rob van der Hilst, department head in EAPS, who faced a difficult situation. I know Rob as a person of the highest integrity and character. We are fortunate to have his leadership in EAPS. In this case, when Rob concluded, after consulting broadly, that EAPS could not host an effective public outreach event centered around Professor Abbot, he chose to extend instead an invitation for an on-campus lecture; Rob took this step deliberately to preserve the opportunity for free dialogue and open scientific exchange.

 

Professor Abbot is a distinguished scientist who remains welcome to speak on the MIT campus, and he has been working with EAPS to confirm the event details.

 

Nevertheless, there is no doubt that this matter has caused many people inside and outside our community to question the Institute’s commitment to free expression. Some report feeling that certain topics are now off limits at MIT. I have heard these concerns directly from faculty colleagues, alumni and others who care deeply about the Institute.

 

Let me say clearly what I have observed through more than 40 years at MIT:

 

Freedom of expression is a fundamental value of the Institute.

 

I believe that, as an institution of higher learning, we must ensure that different points of view – even views that some or all of us may reject – are allowed to be heard and debated at MIT. Open dialogue is how we make each other wiser and smarter.

 

This commitment to free expression can carry a human cost. The speech of those we strongly disagree with can anger us. It can disgust us. It can even make members of our own community feel unwelcome and illegitimate on our campus or in their field of study.

 

I am convinced that, as an institution, we must be prepared to endure such painful outcomes as the price of protecting free expression – the principle is that important.

 

I am equally certain, however, that when members of our community must bear the cost of other people’s free expression, they deserve our understanding and support. We need to ensure that they, too, have the opportunity to express their own views.

Elite Capture: If You Believe Marc Benioff Is A Good Guy - Why Is San Francisco So Squalid?

NPR  |  Benioff's outspokenness is part of his brand. He frequently and forcefully weighs in on controversial issues, including gun policy, human rights, climate change, and politics more broadly.

He is an evangelist for changing the way companies do business, a defender of what's called "stakeholder capitalism," or the belief that corporations should look beyond just the interests of its employees or shareholders and customers.

"We need a new capitalism that is more fair, more equitable, more sustainable," he told CNBC. "Capitalism that values not just all shareholders, but all stakeholders."

Benioff defines "stakeholder" more broadly than most of his contemporaries.

In a recent interview with NPR, Benioff said the planet is a Salesforce stakeholder, and so is the homeless community in San Francisco, where his company has its headquarters, and where his family has lived for four generations.

It's a kind of advocacy few other CEOs have engaged in, according to Benioff.

"When I first started, I don't think there were a lot of CEOs who were willing to speak out and really take positions outside of, maybe, their product," he told NPR.

But that's starting to change — slowly.

In 2015, when Indiana passed a law that would have made it easier for business owners to deny services to same-sex couples because of religious beliefs, Benioff was joined by other CEOs, including Apple's Tim Cook and organizations like NCAA in denouncing the law.

That forced then-Governor Mike Pence to amend the law.

Last year, in a moment that seemed to represent a turning point for corporate America, executives widely condemned the killing of George Floyd, and many pledged to address racial inequality both within their companies and in society at large.

However, many company executives continue to stay away from hot-button issues.

 

 

Leana Wen Is So Viscerally Repulsive She MUST BE A Patsy Anti-Asian Judas Goat ....,

WaPo  | Since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention first came out with its misguided policy to lift masking requirements in May, I have been calling on it to reverse course. On Tuesday, it did, but the new guidance remains just as confusing and the communication just as muddled.

CDC Director Rochelle Walensky explained in a press briefing that in light of emerging data, the agency is recommending that vaccinated people wear masks indoors again in areas of high covid-19 transmission. Walensky cited unpublished research showing that vaccinated people who become infected with the delta variant carry a similar amount of virus to those who are unvaccinated and infected. This change in the science was the impetus for the new guidance, because it suggests that vaccinated people could be carriers and therefore capable of spreading the coronavirus to family members who are unvaccinated or immunocompromised.

That’s certainly important information for many Americans to know. As the mom of two children too young to be vaccinated, I have already been taking precautions to reduce my risk of being an asymptomatic carrier and unknowingly infecting my kids. I never stopped wearing a mask in grocery stores, hotel lobbies and other indoor, crowded spaces where I don’t know others’ vaccination status. My concern is that the unvaccinated could be a danger to me, and even though I’m well-protected from becoming severely ill myself, there’s still a chance I could contract the coronavirus and bring it back to my vulnerable family members.

On an individual level, the CDC guidance that people in my circumstance mask up is correct. But does it make sense for local governments and businesses to implement mask mandates because of the risk posed by or to the vaccinated? That’s what the new guidance implies, even though it’s contradicted by the CDC’s own data. During the same press briefing, Walensky said the vaccinated are 20 times more protected than the unvaccinated from becoming severely ill, and seven times more protected from having mild symptoms. She made clear that the vast majority of transmission appears to be from the unvaccinated and that “vaccinated individuals continue to represent a very small amount of transmission occurring around the country.”

That leaves many people wondering what’s actually going on here. If the vaccinated aren’t the problem, why are they being punished by having to put on masks again? If most transmission is happening because of the unvaccinated, then why is the CDC saying that the guidance is evolving because the science changed about transmission risk of the vaccinated?

 

STL's Replacement Negroe Epidemiologist Can't Peddle His BS To Rowdy STL Crowd...,

stltoday  |  St. Louis County’s acting health director says the rumor is true: He gave someone the middle finger on his way out of the council meeting on the mask mandate Tuesday night.

But in a letter to County Councilwoman Rita Heard Days sent Wednesday, Dr. Faisal Khan said he did it after a string of racist provocations from Republican politicians like Councilman Tim Fitch and a boisterously anti-mask audience pushed him past his limit.

“I have never been subjected to the racist, xenophobic and threatening behavior that greeted me in the County Council meeting last night,” he wrote, after noting he’s been in public health for 25 years.

Fitch and others blamed for stoking racism and xenophobia dismissed Khan’s allegations as baseless. Fitch also said Khan was trying to provide political cover for County Executive Sam Page, who called for the mask mandate.

“The entire letter is another desperate attempt at deflection and diversion by Sam Page,” Fitch said in an interview. “Dr. Khan knew he was in trouble for (giving the middle finger) and this was an opportunity to put that on someone else.”

Khan appeared at the meeting as the council was considering a move to terminate the mask mandate as unlawful and unnecessary, which it would do despite the rising threat of the delta variant. During the debate, dozens of people, some of whom held signs with anti-mask messages, filled the council chambers to cheer on the action and jeer the mandate’s defenders.

Khan said the trouble began as soon as he took the podium with a “dog-whistle” question from Fitch, looking to emphasize Khan’s foreign background.

As he spoke, Khan said he also endured harassment from Republican politicians Paul Berry and Mark McCloskey, who sat close behind him in the audience.

Berry was an unsuccessful candidate for county executive in 2020; McCloskey, who is running for U.S. Senate, gained notoriety with his wife, Patricia, for brandishing firearms at protesters last year. Both McCloskeys attended the council meeting.

Talk About "Race Relations" Deflects Mass Consciousness From The Political Economy

taibbi |  Combating racism becomes a convenient alternative to attacking inequality and inequality, even those inequalities that appear or the manifest themselves as racial disparities. Because the struggle against racism is exactly parallel to the struggle against terrorism… It can go on forever, because the enemy is an abstraction that you can define however you want to define it, at the moment that you wanted to find it.

DiAngelo’s not the first person to do this. There was a woman named Peggy McIntosh who going back to the eighties had the “knapsack of privilege,” or some shit like that. I know people who have had careers at racial sensitivity trainings, and the people that I know, in my world — the people who came out of the movement actually came out of anti-Klan politics, or rather left politics in the seventies, and they started doing this stuff. It makes sense in the same way that people who were graduate students in the late sixties and early seventies who were left theory-inclined people got into the Frankfurt School. That became the cornerstone of their academic careers.

Well, that’s what’s happened in the anti-racism or the racial sensitivity training world. And one of the things that’s happened over time is that the material incentives — and it’s funny, pardon this aside, but it’s funny how many political-economy-oriented leftists we encounter who apply critical political economic thinking to every domain in the world — outside the movement that they’re operating in. So the material incentives evolved, and changed over time. And some of my friends who have done this work have said to me that they used to do it for community groups, used to do it for unions and so forth and so on. Then, as the material incentives change, they want to build and do more for corporations, or for local governments who were under consent decrees.

So this becomes part of the thing. You’re under a consent decree for actual discrimination. One of the remedies that’s likely to be imposed as part of the decree is that you submit to this training. And we see it all the time now. Even the insurgencies within NGOs, right? Where the staff or whatever is going batshit crazy about how the leadership of the organization is all racist, sexist, whatever. And one of the first calls is to bring in some minor-league version of Robin DiAngelo to do the racial sensitivity training. So in that sense, it’s taken hold as part of what I’ve often described as the broader political economy of race relations.

How About Schools Teach Every Student To Read, Write, And Calculate At Grade Level?

WaPo  |  This week at the Oklahoma State Department of Education building, I was schooled in how the stealthy, well-orchestrated movement against teaching honestly about America’s racist history operates. It is fast and furious and determined to steamroll over truth in education.

But Monday morning, one Black woman and a Black high school student tried to hold the line. Though they were on the losing side of that steamroll — this is Oklahoma, after all — their courage and resistance in the face of white supremacy deserve to be celebrated.

The occasion was consideration of item 8(b) on the Oklahoma Board of Education’s meeting agenda: emergency rules for implementing a bill passed in May by the Republican-controlled state legislature limiting what students in the state can be taught on race and gender. Notice of the item was publicly posted only last Friday, giving educators and advocates next to no time to organize a response. The actual rules, too, were made available just minutes before the meeting. They included chillingly harsh penalties, such as teacher suspensions and district defunding, for instruction that makes any individual feel “discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex.”

Carlisha Williams Bradley arrived knowing she would cast one of the most consequential votes of her professional life. The only Black member of the board, she wondered whether she would be removed from her position for pushing back. But the education advocate and former executive director of Tulsa Legacy Charter School spoke truth: that the right-wing’s current bête noire, “critical race theory” — which the legislature claimed to be responding to — means merely the examination of laws and legislation that uphold racism and oppression. Oklahoma’s new education law and harsh punishment, she said, would serve only to generate fear in teaching an accurate history of the United States.

“We are robbing students of the opportunity to have a high-quality education,” Williams Bradley said.

Tribal Animosity Fuels The Insatiable Social Media Dopamine Buzz....,

pnas |  There has been growing concern about the role social media plays in political polarization. We investigated whether out-group animosity was particularly successful at generating engagement on two of the largest social media platforms: Facebook and Twitter. Analyzing posts from news media accounts and US congressional members (n = 2,730,215), we found that posts about the political out-group were shared or retweeted about twice as often as posts about the in-group. Each individual term referring to the political out-group increased the odds of a social media post being shared by 67%. Out-group language consistently emerged as the strongest predictor of shares and retweets: the average effect size of out-group language was about 4.8 times as strong as that of negative affect language and about 6.7 times as strong as that of moral-emotional language—both established predictors of social media engagement. Language about the out-group was a very strong predictor of “angry” reactions (the most popular reactions across all datasets), and language about the in-group was a strong predictor of “love” reactions, reflecting in-group favoritism and out-group derogation. This out-group effect was not moderated by political orientation or social media platform, but stronger effects were found among political leaders than among news media accounts. In sum, out-group language is the strongest predictor of social media engagement across all relevant predictors measured, suggesting that social media may be creating perverse incentives for content expressing out-group animosity.

According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, a Facebook research team warned the company in 2018 that their “algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness.” This research was allegedly shut down by Facebook executives, and Facebook declined to implement changes proposed by the research team to make the platform less divisive (1). This article is consistent with concerns that social media might be incentivizing the spread of polarizing content. For instance, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has expressed concern about the popularity of “dunking” (i.e., mocking or denigrating one’s enemies) on the platform (2). These concerns have become particularly relevant as social media rhetoric appears to have incited real-world violence, such as the recent storming of the US Capital (3). We sought to investigate whether out-group animosity was associated with increased virality on two of the largest social media platforms: Facebook and Twitter.

A growing body research has examined the potential role of social media in exacerbating political polarization (4, 5). A large portion of this work has centered on the position that social media sorts us into “echo chambers” or “filter bubbles” that selectively expose people to content that aligns with their preexisting beliefs (6⇓⇓⇓⇓–11). However, some recent scholarship questions whether the “echo chamber” narrative has been exaggerated (12, 13). Some experiments suggest that social media can indeed increase polarization. For example, temporarily deactivating Facebook can reduce polarization on policy issues (14). However, other work suggests that polarization has grown the most among older demographic groups, who are the least likely to use social media (15), albeit the most likely to vote. As such, there is an open debate about the role of social media in political polarization and intergroup conflict.

Other research has examined the features of social media posts that predict “virality” online. Much of the literature focuses on the role of emotion in social media sharing. High-arousal emotions, whether they are positive (e.g., awe) or negative (e.g., anger or outrage), contribute to the sharing of content online (16⇓⇓⇓–20). Tweets expressing moral and emotional content are more likely to be retweeted within online political conversations, especially by members of one’s political in-group (21, 22). On Facebook, posts by politicians that express “indignant disagreement” receive more likes and shares (23), and negative news tends to spread farther on Twitter (24). Moreover, false rumors spread farther and faster on Twitter than true ones, especially in the domain of politics, possibly because they are more likely to express emotions such as surprise and fear (25).

Yet, to our knowledge, little research has investigated how social identity motives contribute to online virality. Group identities are hypersalient on social media, especially in the context of online political or moral discussions (26). For example, an analysis of Twitter accounts found that people are increasingly categorizing themselves by their political identities in their Twitter bios over time, providing a public signal of their social identity (27). Additionally, since sharing behavior is public, it can reflect self-conscious identity presentation (28, 29). According to social identity theory (30) and self-categorization theory (31), when group identities are highly salient, this can lead individuals to align themselves more with their fellow in-group members, facilitating in-group favoritism and out-group derogation in order to maintain a positive sense of group distinctiveness (32). Thus, messages that fulfill group-based identity motives may receive more engagement online.

 

The Effects Of Platform Social Media On Politics And Identity Politics

newleftreview |   The reputation economy undergirded by platform capitalism has played an important role in the growth and mutation of the politics of recognition since the financial crisis. This is not simply to blame ‘the internet’ for identity politics, but to highlight how a new type of rationality has penetrated the social and cultural sphere, turning the distribution of esteem into a type of inter-capitalist competition. Controversies about the supposed threat to the liberal public sphere emanating from universities and the left often ignore a more structural transformation driven by Silicon Valley.

Cultural-political arguments in the Anglosphere frequently turn upon the question of free speech, and the need to rescue it from ‘identitarians’. In the uk, the Johnson government is intent on legislating to force universities to uphold ‘free-speech’ norms. While these allegations are often made in bad faith and on slim evidence—not to mention the accompanying crackdown on any free expression of Islamist views—the task should be to provide a more accurate diagnosis of the decline of liberal norms, not to deny that anything has changed. This requires paying close attention to the capitalist business model and the interfaces on which civil society and the public sphere increasingly depend. Arguments about censorship and ‘no-platforming’ of speakers are often driven by the quest for reputational advantage—on the part of institutions, individuals and social movements—and a need to avoid reputational damage. This is how the politics of recognition is now structured.

As Gramscian scholars have long argued, a capitalist business model does not only determine relations of production, but is mirrored in the mode of political and cultural activity that accompanies it—potentially providing a foothold for critique and resistance. Debates around Fordism and post-Fordism posed questions of what cultural and political analogues they facilitated, and of what new modes of organization and collectivism might emerge. For Jeremy Gilbert, similar questions need to be asked about the type of political-party mobilizations that might or might not be available through the template of the digital platform.footnote¹⁹ New technologies and economic relations also reconfigure the processes of political and cultural life, beyond their own immediate application.

This perspective tends to emphasize positive opportunities for new political strategies, but the negative outcomes also need to be identified. Platforms represent a watershed in the moral and cultural contests of modernity. They not only transform relations of production, but re-format how status and esteem are socially distributed. They are refashioning struggles for recognition no less decisively than the birth of print media did. At the same time, their logic is such that their principal effect is to generalize a feeling of misrecognition—heightening the urgency with which people seek recognition, but never satisfying this need. One effect of this process is the rise of groups who feel relatively deprived, to the point of political insurrection. In terms of Fraser’s perspectival dualism, one of the main questions raised by contemporary politics is how and why many people who are both economically privileged and culturally included can end up feeling like they are neither of those things.

Two paths of critique have opened up in this context, an internalist and an externalist one. The internalist path follows the example of pragmatist sociology in urging political movements to work with the grain of the speculative reputation economy, so as to sabotage centres of power. On a small scale, this might simply mean the mobilization of memes and trolls to build the capital value of a political insurgent or to undermine that of an incumbent power. This type of reputation warfare was notoriously used by the Trump campaign but is widely deployed on the left. Organizations like Greenpeace have worked to attack brand value through graphically disrupting the art galleries and museums that receive oil-industry sponsorship, for instance. Feher advocates a kind of ‘investee activism’, which posits the principal class conflict within neoliberal capitalism as a financial one, between investor and investee. In this perspective, resistance should take aim at the market value of company stocks and operate via debtor strikes that threaten the interests of finance capital and banks. Optimistically, Feher calls for the left to mobilize its own quasi-financial vision of a good society for investment: ‘Creditworthiness is worth vying for, lest we leave it to investors to determine who deserves to be appreciated and for what motives’.footnote²⁰ The very volatility of the moral-economic marketplace offers an opportunity to compete politically over the future.

The externalist critique focuses on the platform itself and its inherent injustices, both for its exploited workers and its users. Srnicek’s approach shows how Marxian political economy can identify the underlying structural conditions of this extractive business form and the variations that it can take. A materialist assessment and critique of the platform business model is a necessary starting point for rethinking the position of organized labour within the gig economy, in which employees are legally reconfigured as ‘contractors’. It is also the starting point for the real-utopian analysis and activism envisaged by Erik Olin Wright, which seeks to establish platform cooperatives and other forms of digital civic infrastructure.footnote²¹ Resistance to Amazon and Uber could involve inventing alternative means of mediating civic life that would not be dedicated to the extraction of rents. And yet, as Seymour’s critique of the ‘social industry’ reminds us, there are other aspects of platform technologies—their addictive, gamified qualities, which exploit and perpetuate our anxieties—whose very function is to suck the life out of social existence.

The challenge for social movements is how to update Fraser’s perspectival dualism for an age in which the platform is becoming a dominant distributor of both reward and mutated forms of recognition. Few movements can afford to abstain entirely from the reputation economy. A lesson from Black Lives Matter is that social media’s accumulation of reputational capital can be harnessed towards longer-standing goals of social and economic justice, as long as it remains a tactic or an instrument, and not a goal in its own right. Campaigns may trigger or seize reputational bubbles that spread at great speed—#MeToo is an example—and potentially burst soon after, making a political virtue of the ability to shift movements into other spaces, including the street. The quest for recognition is more exacting and slower than that for reputation, and appreciating this distinction is a first step to seeing beyond the cultural limits of the platform, towards the broader political and economic obstacles that currently stand in the way of full and equal participation.

Only A Special Pinhead Could Consider IdPol Ideology Net Of Panicdemic State Ideology

unherd |  The extraordinary spread in recent months of what has become known, in the writer Wesley Yang’s phrase, as “the successor ideology” has encouraged all manner of analysis attempting to delineate its essential features. Is it a religion, with its own litany of sin and redemption, its own repertoire of fervent rituals and iconography? Is this Marxism, ask American conservatives, still fighting yesterday’s ideological war?

What does this all do to speed along policing reform, ask bewildered African-Americans, as they observe global corporations and white celebrities compete to beat their chests in ever-more elaborate and meaningless gestures of atonement? What kind of meaningful anti-systemic revolution can provoke such immediate and fulsome support from the Hollywood entertainment complex, from the richest oligarchs and plutocrats on earth, and from the media organs of the liberal state?

If we are to understand the successor ideology as an ideology, it may be useful here, counterintuitively, to return to the great but increasingly overlooked 1970 essay on the “Ideological State Apparatuses,” or ISAs, by the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser. Once influential on the Western left, Althusser’s reputation has suffered somewhat since he killed his wife in a fit of madness 40 years ago. Of Alsatian Catholic origin, and a lifelong sufferer from mental illness, Althusser wrote his seminal essay in a manic period following the évènements of 1968, for whose duration he was committed to hospital. 

Composed with a feverish, hallucinatory clarity, Althusser’s essay aimed to elucidate the manner in which ideology functions as a means to prop up the political order, observing that “no class can hold state power over a long period without at the same time exercising its hegemony over and in the Ideological State Apparatuses”. 

What are these ISAs? Contrasted with the Repressive State Apparatuses — the police, the army, and so on — the ISAs are the means by which the system reproduces itself through ideology: Althusser lists the church, the media and the education system along with the family, and the legal and political system and the culture industry as the means through which the ideology of the governing system is enforced. Althusser here develops Gramsci’s thesis that the cultural sphere is the most productive arena of political struggle, and inverts it: instead of being the site of revolutionary victory, it is where the system reasserts itself, neutering the possibility of political change through its wielding of the most powerful weapon, ideology. 

It is through ideology, Althusser asserts, that the ruling system maintains itself in power: “the ideology of the ruling class does not become the ruling ideology by the grace of God, nor even by virtue of the seizure of state power alone,” he states, “it is by the installation of the ISAs in which this ideology is realised and real­ises itself that it becomes the ruling ideology.”

Does Nikole Hannah-Jones Channel Ronald McDonald Or Pennywise?

wsws |  The wealth and privilege of the leading proponents of racialism demonstrate the reactionary character of identity politics. It is entirely divorced from the real concerns and experiences of the working class. Fearful of a unified workers’ movement, the ruling class seeks to sow artificial racial divisions among workers through the promotion of identity politics. Additionally, middle class layers seeking a bigger slice of the pie see identity as a means of advancing their own wealth and social position.

The American ruling class is terrified of the growth of a working-class movement. The fight against police violence, racism, and poverty can only be waged through the building of a socialist movement, independent of the capitalist parties, that unifies workers on their common class interests.

New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, lead author of the Times’s “1619 Project,” was paid $25,000 for an online Zoom lecture given to the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication.

Through a Freedom of Information request, the right-wing news outlet Campus Reform obtained documentation detailing Hannah-Jones’s terms of compensation for the February 19 lecture. Additionally, the documents revealed that Hannah-Jones was partnered with the Lavin Agency, a talent agency that is “the world’s largest intellectual talent agency, representing leading thinkers for speaking engagements personal appearances, consulting, and endorsements,” according to its website. Hannah-Jones’s relationship with the agency suggests she regularly schedules events and is paid for them.

Part of the agreement between Hannah-Jones and the University of Oregon dictated that the lecture, titled “1619 and the Legacy That Built a Nation,” could not be recorded and redistributed. However, a promotional flyer advertised a discussion on “the lasting legacy of Black enslavement on the nation—specifically, how Black Americans pushed for the democracy we have today.”

News of the lecture came days after Hulu announced that it partnered with production studio Lionsgate and billionaire Oprah Winfrey to create a docuseries based on the 1619 Project. In a statement, Hulu said the project was a “landmark undertaking…of the brutal racism that endures in so many aspects of American life today.”

I Can't Think Of Any "Hypersexualized" Asians, But Sonny Chiba Had A Baaaad White Woman

teenvogue |  Last Tuesday, a suspect entered three different massage parlors in the Atlanta area, killing 8 people. The next day, 21-year-old Robert Aaron Long was charged with eight counts of murder. Most of the victims were Asian or Asian American women. Although the suspect’s motives are still under investigation, he claimed to have had a “sex addiction” that prompted the rampage, according to the New York Times. In a recent report by Stop AAPI Hate, there have been about 3,800 reports of hate incidents across the country since March 2020, with women reporting hate incidents 2.3 times more than men.

It’s no coincidence that Asian women are the most vulnerable when it comes to these attacks. This historic wave of anti-Asian racism is frightening and tragic, but its connection to Asian representation, especially Asian women, in America is disturbing.

Let’s start with the fact that there’s clearly a lack of Asian representation in Hollywood. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, about 5.7 percent of people identify as Asian or Asian American. However, in 2016, they only made up 3.1 percent of film roles according to UCLA’s 2018 Hollywood Diversity Report. Because of this lack of representation, oftentimes portrayals of Asian women in Hollywood have been harmful.

The oversimplified depiction of Asian identity has a deep-rooted history of racism and violence. Often pop culture (films, musicals, TV, operas, etc) has portrayed Asian women as incompetent and fragile foreigners, exotic femme fatales, and subservient “mail-order” wives.

"Consider the heartbroken Cio-Cio San of Madame Butterfly (1904), a Japanese woman who commits suicide after she is abandoned by her white lover,” says Dr. Stephanie Young, an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Southern Indiana. “Madame Butterfly epitomizes the Lotus Blossom (sometimes called the China Doll) trope — feminine, shy, fragile, subservient, and sexually submissive. We see the Lotus Blossom trope in Miss Saigon (1989) and Memoirs of a Geisha (2005). Another popular trope is the Dragon Lady who is cunning and deceitful. She uses her sexuality as a powerful tool of manipulation, but often is emotionally and sexually cold and threatens masculinity. A contemporary example of the Dragon Lady is with the Japanese Yakuza leader O-Ren Ishii (played by Lucy Liu) in Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003).

Factcheck: There HAS NOT BEEN A Surge In Anti-Asian Hate Crimes

realclearpolitics |  Before the next of kin were even notified in the horrific shootings last week at three Atlanta-area massage parlors, the narrative was established: The fact that six of the eight victims were Asian women provides the proof that a “surge in hate crimes” against Asian Americans has bubbled up in the U.S. in response to the coronavirus pandemic. That fits neatly with the view of some Americans that our society, at its heart, is racist. 

For contrast, consider the mass shooting this week in Boulder, Colo., in which the suspect is Syrian American. Even though all the victims were of the same race, no one assumes without proof that he was acting out of racial animosity because, of course, they were white. In Atlanta, the shooter killed two white people and injured a Latino. But the killings must still be motivated by anti-Asian hatred, right? 

“Racially motivated violence must be called out for exactly what it is -- and we must stop making excuses or rebranding it as economic anxiety or sexual addiction,” Rep. Marilyn Strickland (pictured) told members of the House a day after the Atlanta shootings. In a CNN interview, Strickland, whose heritage is both African American and Korean American, called the incident a racially motivated hate crime. 

None of the evidence to emerge thus far supports that speculation. 

Like Strickland, I am Korean American, and the idea that someone might randomly attack me at the gym or hurl racist invectives at me in the grocery checkout line makes me uneasy. So I looked into the numbers being used to support the so-called “surge” in attacks. They turn out to be thin, with data points cherry-picked to invoke fear and bolster the wobbly claim that the Atlanta shooter was driven by racism. 

A report by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism drew national media attention for identifying a 149% increase in anti-Asian hate crimes in 2020 compared to 2019 in 16 of our largest cities. A startling number -- until you learn the actual number of hate crimes in those cities rose from 49 to 122 – in a country of 330 million people.

In my hometown, Houston, there were three last year. The year before, there were none. 

And what about the 3,795 incidents of harassment and discrimination against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders documented by Stop AAPI Hate? The group’s data point is even more useless than the 149% increase figure. Stop AAPI (shorthand for Asian American and Pacific Islander) Hate was formed as the coronavirus pandemic took hold in the U.S. and its data has no baseline for comparison.  

But it may be sufficiently frightening to open a line of federal spending directly to Stop AAPI Hate’s member organizations. The group was on Capitol Hill last week to urge lawmakers to address the kind of incidents it tracks and to fund programs supporting the victims.

Internet Porn A MUCH BIGGER Cause Of Sex Addiction Than Evangelical Christianity Or Racism

nbcnews  |   While authorities said Atlanta-area spa shooting suspect Robert Aaron Long, 21, told investigators he was motivated by "sexual addiction" and claimed he had no racial motivation, health specialists say the explanation falls short.

Capt. Jay Baker, a spokesman for the Cherokee County Sheriff's Office, said Long — who is accused of killing eight people, six of them Asian women — indicated that the spas were "a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate." However, experts say such rationale has been used before in attempts to exonerate white men. The explanation also discounts racial dynamics and can “cause harm” in the way the public understands these issues.

White men have traditionally been given a pass when they say it — and have the privilege of overlooking how race is a factor, experts say.

“Historically, the term ‘sex addiction’ has been used by white males to absolve themselves from personal and legal responsibility for their behaviors,” Apryl Alexander, associate professor in the Graduate School of Professional Psychology at the University of Denver, told NBC Asian America. “It is often used as an excuse to pathologize misogyny.”

The defense of sex addiction itself, Alexander said, is a highly controversial one as those in the fields of psychology, psychiatry and sex research continue to debate whether to formally recognize it. Currently, the idea that sex addiction is a disorder is not supported by research, nor is it accepted as a clinical diagnosis, she said.

“A lot of individuals who are doing this kind of self-reports of sexual addiction are having normative sexual behaviors and urges, but they might be excessive. Or for a lot of people, it's rooted in shame that ‘I'm having these attractions and emotional desires that are normal, but I don't recognize them as normal,’” Alexander said.

Though the American Psychiatric Association added the concept of sexual addiction to its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1987, it later retracted the term and has since rejected the addition of the idea to its later editions including the DSM–5, which is widely seen as the definitive resource on mental disorders, on the basis of a lack of supporting evidence.

Alexander said this sexual behavior doesn’t affect the brain in the same ways other addictions, including substance use and gambling behavior, do, either, calling the characterization of Long’s behavior “concerning.”

The self-identification of sex addiction, she said, is often seen in individuals who are raised in conservative and religious environments, “where there's a high level of moral disapproval of their natural kind of sexual urges and desires.” Many of these populations are overwhelmingly white.

 

 

 

White Christian Nationalist Sexuality?

twitter |   I keep seeing "sex addiction" used as a term of agreed-on meaning, whether the speaker believes it explains the murders or not. But nearly all of what the conservative evangelicalism of the murderer describes as "sex addiction" is what the rest of the world calls sexuality...

In my book THE FAMILY I wrote about how fundamentalist ideas about sex have changed in the last decades, & in many ways gotten even more dangerous. The murderer's "sex addiction" may well refer to sexuality twisted by a hateful theology...

American fundamentalism has mostly moved beyond the "puritan" mores caricatured in 80s movies like Footloose. Before, it tried not to talk about sex. Now, it talks about sex--a lot. Sex manuals are fundamentalist best sellers. Pastors preach about it...

Today's fundamentalists claim to promote "healthy" sex. Part of that is pathologizing not just queer sex but hetero sexuality that isn't married & monogamous; hence "sex addiction." Many, many churches see resisting such "addiction" as a form of "spiritual warfare" ...

That idea of "spiritual warfare" has LOTS of implicit & often explicit racist currents. Non-Christians--and many white evangelicals see non-white people, especially Asians, as non-Christian unless otherwise informed--are seen as loci of "demonic" activity, endangering Christians.

Some megachurches and parachurch ministries practice "spiritual mapping" as part of "warfare"--marching through a city to "fight" "demonic activity" at strip clubs, porn shops, &, yes, massage parlors.

It's worth noting that many or most fundamentalists view what they think of as Asian religions as "demonic strongholds." When I visited The Family's C St house for congressman they had planned a day of prayer against the "demonic stronghold" of Buddhism.

So take "spiritual warfare," add a history of missionary orientalism (per Edward Said) steeped in US wars, & then update with contemporary fundamentalism's obsession with "healthy" sex vs. "sexual addiction." It's a recipe for this kind of racist, misogynist violence.

Contemporary fundamentalism's obsession w/ sex isn't in addition to its implicit & sometimes explicit racism; it IS its racism. Its ideal is "purity"--historically rooted in anti-Blackness, fear of "miscegenation," the "temptation" of the theological (racial) "other."

Defenders of fundamentalism will note that it's anything but all-white, & that many white fundamentalists & evangelical families adopt non-white children. But the "purity" narratives aren't about exclusive whiteness; they're about the supremacy of Christian "whiteness."

The sexuality of Christian nationalism is particularly concerned w/ the "purity" of its capitalist economic worldview; hence its obsession w/ rooting out commodified sexuality, "the idea that anything can be bought and sold." It's a contradiction, I know.

Christian nationalist sexuality both fetishizes sex & wants to "purify" it. Fundamentalist sex manuals say sex shld be frequent & fun--hetero married--& imply if its' not there's something wrong w/ you. But if all that "fun" sex leads you to see the world erotically--it's demons!

Remember, too, that Christian nationalism, in the pulpit & in Congress, has dedicated itself to the idea that there literally is no safe sex outside of hetero marriage. Disease, "contagion," physical & spiritual, is always a threat. Resisting it is "Every Man's Battle."

"Every Man's Battle" is the title of a series of megaselling evangelical sex guides. The battle is--I kid you not--against masturbation. What they mean is temptation, as embodied by shameless women. Who's most shameless? Godless women, especially those racially coded as such.

"You're sexually pure," declares Every Man's Battle, "when sexual gratification comes only from your wife." It advises men to "bounce" their eyes away from any woman or media they see as attractive--& to recognize (read: hate) that which they believe is designed to attract them.

Of course, such an approach doesn't de-eroticize the world; it profoundly sexualizes it, making every time you step out the door or sit down & yr computer a "spiritual war" adventure in which men imagine themselves heroes for looking away. The world becomes a fetish.

Did the Atlanta murderer read those bestselling books? We don't know. But he invoked "sexual addiction" in the context of a Christian nationalism that has made explicitly misogynist & implicitly racist purity narratives...

...and the murderer acted w/in an American fundamentalist tradition that has long seen Asia--& Asian bodies--as a site of "spiritual warfare" (alongside actual US wars). This doesn't make every fundamentalist a murderer! But purity narratives are always, in the end, murderous.

America's Sexualized Racism?

nbcnews  |  The only time I was ever in Atlanta, where six Asian women were shot dead on Tuesday, a young white man shouted "Me so horny" to me at the airport. And as the only Asian woman in the space, I knew he was talking to me. I locked eyes with him for a second and then rushed off to catch my flight back to Los Angeles. I was in Atlanta to attend the annual meeting of the Association of Asian American Studies, presenting a paper there for the first time. It was a big deal for me professionally. But what I remember most about that trip were a white man's racist, sexist words.

Tuesday's killings occurred at three spas in the Atlanta area. Two other victims, a white man and a white woman, were also killed. Investigators said the white male suspect told them that he has a "sex addiction" and targeted the spas to "take out that temptation."

"He was fed up, at the end of his rope," Cherokee County sheriff's Capt. Jay Baker said. "He had a bad day, and this is what he did."

Based on the reported statement, investigators have so far concluded that the attacks did not appear to have been motivated by race. As an Asian American woman who has endured sexualized racism all of my life, such ignorance enrages me.

Asian women, along with Black and Indigenous women and other women of color, endure racism and sexism in intersectional ways constantly, and they have throughout history. As lawyer Jaemin Kim argued in 2009, prosecutors and police may be even less likely to add "hate crime" charges in cases of rapes and sexual assaults targeting Asian women.

In 1875, Chinese women were targeted by a federal immigration law called the Page Act. This law effectively banned the immigration of Chinese women to the United States based on a morals clause that considered all of them prostitutes at the time. There were apparently specific racist and sexist concerns that Chinese "prostitutes" would bring in "especially virulent strains of venereal diseases ... and entice young white boys to a life of sin." Sound familiar?

 

Rev. Sen. Raphael Warnock's Ex-Wife Paid To Keep Quiet By The American Baptist Home Mission?

dailymail | 'I'm going to stay focused': Georgia Dem Senate candidate Raphael Warnock dodges questions about police bodycam showing ex-wife accuse him of running over her foot with his car

• Rev. Raphael Warnock, 51, declined to address police video of domestic dispute
• Warnock and his ex-wife Ouleye Ndoye, 35, divorced in May
• In March she called police to their Atlanta home after an incident in the drive
• She accused him of deliberately driving over her foot during an argument
• Warnock said he did not believe he ran over her and medics found no injuries 
• No charges were filed following the incident 
• Ndoye told officers that he was 'a very good actor' and obsessed with reputation
• She said she had 'tried to keep the way that he acts under wraps' for the election

ouleye |  Ouleye Ndoye is a global leader in human rights with over a decade of experience in government, non-profits, and academia. She advocates for the health, education, gender equality, and religious freedoms of people around the world and has dedicated her academic pursuits to these issues. Ndoye earned her bachelor's degree in international studies from Spelman College in Atlanta, GA, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude with honors; master of science in Migration Studies from the University of Oxford, UK; and master of arts in History with a concentration on African and Global history from Columbia University in the City of New York. Ndoye currently serves as the National Coordinator for Scholarships and Emerging Leaders at the American Baptist Home Mission Societies. 

- The Baptists Paid this woman to keep quiet about Warnock after the Dailymail Domestic Violence story broke in December - It is an OH TOO SWEET Irony That She is a specialist in Human Trafficking in light of the human trafficking massage parlor murders last week.

pathwaystofreedom |  Spelman College graduate Ouleye Ndoinye Warnock brings a wealth of local knowledge to her new role as Atlanta’s human trafficking senior fellow. With more than a decade of experience working to address human trafficking and other human rights-related issues around the world, Ouleye is well-positioned to lead efforts to tackle labor and sex trafficking in a city with a rich history of civil rights leadership.

 

It Never Fails, Some Professional And Managerial Class Dickweed ALWAYS Goes Too Far!!!

...., high on power and feeling their full Cartman, "respeck my author-i-teh!!!" these SUNY assclowns forgot they're a public university and that by extension, their censorship and censure of this kid is an explicit violation of his 1st Amendment rights. 

jonathanturley |   There could be a significant First Amendment case brewing in New York after the School of Education at the State University of New York-Geneseo suspended student Owen Stevens for posting his view that gender is limited to biologically males and females.  As a state institution, SUNY is subject to the limitations of the First Amendment and Stevens could challenge the action based on his statements on Instagram.

I have not been able to find the letter sent to Stevens by the school but it is quoted on a conservative website, The Daily Wire. According to that report, Owen posted on Instagram that there are only two genders. This may be that posting:

 

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Owen Stevens (@owen_stevens_)

The school reportedly maintains that such statements made on social media are grounds for suspension and other disciplinary action.  While she did not refer to him by name, SUNY-Geneseo President Denise Battles sent out a message stating that “[y]esterday, I was made aware of a current student’s Instagram posts pertaining to transgender people.” Battles acknowledges that “There are clear legal limitations to what a public university can do in response to objectionable speech. As a result, there are few tools at our disposal to reduce the pain that such speech may cause.” However, the school then suspended Stevens.

A spokesperson is quoted by the Daily Wire declaring students must follow the “professional standards” of their chosen field by acting and behaving in ways that “may differ from their personal predilections.”

That does not sound like an accommodation of the First Amendment, which protects your right to express your “personal predilections.” Many object to his view of transgender persons, but it is a view that often expresses a myriad of religious, political, social, and biological beliefs.

 

 

Do You Know How Much Damage One Racially Hypersensitive Snowflake Can Cause?

NYTimes |  On Oct. 28, 2018, Ms. McCartney released a 35-page report from a law firm with a specialty in discrimination investigations. The report cleared Ms. Blair altogether and found no sufficient evidence of discrimination by anyone else involved, including the janitor who called campus police.

Still, Ms. McCartney said the report validated Ms. Kanoute’s lived experience, notably the fear she felt at the sight of the police officer. “I suspect many of you will conclude, as did I,” she wrote, “it is impossible to rule out the potential role of implicit racial bias.”

The report said Ms. Kanoute could not point to anything that supported the claim she made on Facebook of a yearlong “pattern of discrimination.”

Ms. McCartney offered no public apology to the employees after the report was released. “We were gobsmacked — four people’s lives wrecked, two were employees of more than 35 years and no apology,” said Tracey Putnam Culver, a Smith graduate who recently retired from the college’s facilities management department. “How do you rationalize that?”

Rahsaan Hall, racial justice director for the A.C.L.U. of Massachusetts and Ms. Kanoute’s lawyer, cautioned against drawing too much from the investigative report, as subconscious bias is difficult to prove. Nor was he particularly sympathetic to the accused workers.

“It’s troubling that people are more offended by being called racist than by the actual racism in our society,” he said. “Allegations of being racist, even getting direct mailers in their mailbox, is not on par with the consequences of actual racism.”

 Ms. Blair was reassigned to a different dormitory, as Ms. Kanoute lived in the one where she had labored for many years. Her first week in her new job, she said, a female student whispered to another: There goes the racist.

Anti-bias training began in earnest in the fall. Ms. Blair and other cafeteria and grounds workers found themselves being asked by consultants hired by Smith about their childhood and family assumptions about race, which many viewed as psychologically intrusive. Ms. Blair recalled growing silent and wanting to crawl inside herself.

The faculty are not required to undergo such training. Professor Lendler said in an interview that such training for working-class employees risks becoming a kind of psychological bullying. “My response would be, ‘Unless it relates to conditions of employment, it’s none of your business what I was like growing up or what I should be thinking of,’” he said.

Dr. Sen. Rand Paul DESTROYED Serial FailTail "Rachel" Levine's Horrifying Ass Ideology....,

nationalreview |  Here’s the real story. What Senator Paul asked and what Levine refused to answer was this: “Do you believe that minors are capable of making such a life-changing decision as changing one’s sex?” And this, “Do you support the government’s intervening to override the parent’s consent to give a child puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and/or amputation surgery of breasts and genitalia?”

As Senator Paul referenced, these are the very same questions that appeared before the High Court in England and Wales last year. In his questioning of Levine, Senator Paul cited the plaintiff in that case, Keira Bell:

I would hope that you would have compassion for Keira Bell, who’s a 23-year-old girl who was confused with her identity. At 14, she read on the internet about something about transsexuals and she thought, “Well, maybe that’s what I am.” She ended up getting these puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, she had her breasts amputated.

But here’s what ultimately she says now, and this is a very insightful decision from someone who made a mistake, but was led to believe this was a good thing by the medical community.

“I made a brash decision as a teenager, as a lot of teenagers do, trying to find confidence and happiness, except now the rest of my life will be negatively affected,” she said, adding that the medicalized gender transitioning was a very temporary superficial fix for a very complex identity issue.

Having reviewed the evidence from all sides, the judges in Bell’s case concluded that it was “highly unlikely that a child aged 13 or under would be competent to give consent to the administration of puberty blockers,” adding that it was also “doubtful that a child aged 14 or 15 could understand and weigh the long-term risks and consequences of the administration of puberty blockers.”

Accordingly, the court ordered a National Health Service moratorium on the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for gender-dysphoric young people.

Got that New York Times, et al.? The Keira Bell decision happened in Enlightened, secular Britain — and at the behest of impartial and liberal-minded judges. Unfortunately, in the absence of a similar judicial intervention — or indeed of a centralized health-care system — the situation in the United States is far more out of control.

There are currently 40+ transgender-youth clinics (and counting) in the United States, according to the Human Rights Campaign. The largest transgender-youth clinic in Los Angeles saw more than 1,000 patients in 2019; the youngest patient was four years old. And the director of that clinic has admitted to personally recommending double mastectomies for “probably about 200” adolescent females, a decision she has justified by the argument that “they don’t identify as girls,” thus breast removal is actually “chest reconstruction.” Similarly, a study entitled “Age Is Just a Number,” published in 2017 in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, reveals that eleven out of the 20 surgeons interviewed admitted to having performed vaginoplasty — that is, castration followed by the inversion of the penis to form a pseudo-vaginal canal — “1 to 20” times on males under the age of 18.

If the British judges think that minors can’t consent to taking drugs and hormones to halt puberty, how likely is it that a minor can consent to having his or her sexual organs removed or mutilated?