Guardian |God,
I miss the pub. I miss pushing through the door and diving into a pool
of sound, all chatter and laughter and sport on the telly. I miss the
sight of people’s faces, friendly and relaxed and a bit flushed. I miss
finding friends gathered around a table, bantering and gossiping,
pausing only to place their order when I ask if anyone needs a drink. I
miss weaving through the crowd, taking care not to spill pints or drop
crisp packets, catching a flirty glance from a stranger out of the
corner of my eye.
What I would give to
go to the pub this evening and talk with my friends about everything and
nothing. Since many of us work in technology, at some point the
government’s “vaccine passports for the pub” plan would come up.
I’d say it is dumb. They would tell me that, no, I
am the one who is dumb. We’d hash it out, order another round and set
the world to rights. Sadly, it’s a conversation we won’t be having.
We’re in lockdown. None of us has tasted a proper pint in months. We’ve
had to debate what the prime minister, Boris Johnson, has called “papers
for pints” over WhatsApp and FaceTime while sitting at home and walking
in the park.
The good news is that pubs open
for outdoor service from 12 April and for indoor service from 17 May.
The bad news is that Johnson’s “papers for pints” plan is essentially a
national ID card by stealth, one that would link our identity to our
Covid status – whether we’ve been vaccinated, had a recent negative test
or have antibodies.
The UK has already toyed with national ID cards. It rejected them
in 2010. As Theresa May, then home secretary, explained in 2010: “This
isn’t just about cost savings, it’s actually about the principle, it’s
about getting the balance right between national security and civil
liberties, and that’s what the new coalition government is doing.”
That was before coronavirus, of course, but just
because we’re in a pandemic doesn’t mean that we stop caring about that
balance.
Already, the Conservatives have
announced plans to introduce a bill to make photo ID mandatory from 2023
for all UK-wide and English elections. There’s no obvious need for it:
there was only one conviction for “personation” fraud in the UK in 2019.
Ten days ago, I vigorously and explicitly waived in this direction - The Unrivaled Power of Google's Coalition of the Connected - I'm going to try again today. Once you accept that corporations are people under law, and that they wield exponentially greater power and thus rights under law - the nature of our current predicament becomes very straightfoward, simple, and plain.
crushlimbraw |The government has outsourced
tyranny. Let’s see how this black magic is performed.
Expression of
Viewpoints is Guaranteed to be Free from Government Abridgement, Even if the
Viewpoints are Hateful…
The First Amendment to the United States
Constitution is a remarkable provision that has, for centuries, protected
Americans from the abridgment of their freedom of speech by their government.
Even so-called “hate speech” is protected.
The relevant provision states that
“Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech.” As written, the
guarantee of free speech originally applied only to the federal government.
However, the Supreme Court ruled in Gitlow v. New York that the guarantee
had been “incorporated” in the Fourteenth Amendment and the guarantee is now
applied to all state and local governments as well.
Now, in practice, there are laws
regulating speech (you cannot shout “fire” in a crowded theater, and so on),
but such regulations are generally “time, place, and manner” restrictions. Our
Courts have universally frowned on what is called viewpoint discrimination:
Viewpoint discrimination is a form of
content discrimination particularly disfavored by the courts. When the
government engages in content discrimination, it is restricting speech on a
given subject matter. When it engages in viewpoint discrimination, it is
singling out a particular opinion or perspective on that subject matter for
treatment unlike that given to other viewpoints.
And, yes, viewpoint discrimination
explicitly includes hateful, hostile, and offensive viewpoints. This position
was unanimously upheld by the United States Supreme Court
in Matal vs. Tam. Justice Samuel Alito
wrote:
Speech may not be banned on the ground that it expresses ideas
that offend.
The disparagement clause denies registration to any mark that is
offensive to a substantial percentage of the members of any group… That is
viewpoint discrimination in the sense relevant here: Giving offense is a
viewpoint.
Speech that demeans on the basis of
race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground
is hateful, but the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we
protect the freedom to express ‘the thought that we hate.’
A more explicit statement could not be
made. Speech may not be banned for being offensive or hateful. Giving offense
is a viewpoint. There is no “hate speech” exception to the First
Amendment.
But Expression of
Viewpoints is Not Guaranteed Against Private Abridgement
Government cannot regulate your
expression of your viewpoint - but corporations can.
Most people understand that the First
Amendment does not apply to private actors on their private
property. A person or corporation can choose to allow free speech in their home
or business, or can choose to regulate free speech, even viewpoints, as they
deem. This “exception” to the First Amendment has been the case since the
foundation of Anglo-American law, and it is absolutely necessary to protect the
rights of property owners.
For instance, if I am running a bicycle
shop, I am absolutely permitted to prevent my employees from putting up posters
that say “bicycles suck” or telling my customers to “buy a scooter.” Likewise,
if I am running a video game news site, I am absolutely permitted to tell my
journalists not to write about the beauties of Sistine Chapel instead. And if I
invite you to my home to binge-watch Babylon 5, and you express the offensive
viewpoint that Star Trek is better, I am altogether within my rights to make
you leave.
Admittedly, there have been occasional
exceptions to this rule under the so-called state actor doctrine. Most notably, the
US Supreme Court ruled in Marsh v Alabama (1946)that the First
Amendment fully applied to expressive activities on the company-owned sidewalks
and streets of a company-owned town. The precedent of Marsh v
Alabama was expanded in Amalgamated Food Employees Union v Logan Valley Plaza
(1968) then overturned in Hudgens v NLRB (1976). Since Hudgens,
the state actor doctrine has waned in importance, despite numerous conservative
efforts to sue online platforms.
We will put aside the so-far toothless
Section 230 for a discussion another day. In general, private corporations can
regulate the expression of viewpoints, even though government cannot, and
that’s the law.
There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There
are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is
only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven,
interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars.
Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles,
pounds, and shekels. It is the international system of currency which
determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural
order of things today.” Arthur Jensen
nautil | The hero of Atlas Shrugged is John Galt, a supremely
self-confident inventor. He has figured out a way to turn static
electricity into an inexhaustible source of clean energy. But Galt and
his kind are living in an America veering toward the kind of ham-fisted
socialism that Rand escaped when she immigrated from the Soviet Union in
1926. Galt brings about a rebellion of the “producers” of the world,
like the mythical Atlas shrugging the earth from his shoulders, so that
the “looters” and “moochers” can be brought to their senses. The
centerpiece of the novel is a speech that Galt delivers to the world by
taking over the airwaves with his technical prowess.
Whether
conveyed through philosophy or fiction, Rand’s worldview couldn’t
function as a moral system if the pursuit of self-interest didn’t end up
benefiting the common good. That’s where the invisible hand of the
market comes in, a metaphor that was used only three times by Adam Smith
in his voluminous writing, but was elevated to the status of a
fundamental theorem by economists such as Milton Friedman and put into
practice by Rand acolyte Alan Greenspan, who served as Chair of the
United States Federal Reserve Board from 1987 to 2006.
Here’s how
it’s supposed to work: Everything of value can be represented as a
dollar value and therefore can be compared to anything else of value by
their relative prices. Making money is the surest way to provide value
to people because the best way to make money is to provide what people
are most willing to pay for. The system works so well that no other form
of care toward others is required. No empathy. No loyalty. No
forgiveness. Thanks to the market, the old-fashioned virtues have been
rendered obsolete. That’s why Milton Friedman could make his famous
claim in 1970 that the only social responsibility of a business is to
maximize profits for its shareholders. In Ayn Rand’s fictional
rendering, the word “give” is banned from the vocabulary of the Utopian
community founded by John Galt, whose members must recite the oath: “I
swear by my life and love of it that I will never live for the sake of
another man, nor ask another man to live for the sake of mine.”
My sequel to Atlas Shrugged is titled Atlas Hugged
and its protagonist is John Galt’s grandson. Ayn Rand was not a
character in her novel, but since anything goes in fiction, I could
transport her into mine as Ayn Rant, John I’s lover and John III’s
grandmother. Rant’s son, John II, parlays her Objectivist philosophy
into a world-destroying libertarian media empire. John III rebels
against the evil empire by challenging his father to a duel of speeches.
In the process, he brings about a worldwide transformation based on
giving. Atlas Hugged is so anti-Rand that it isn’t even being
sold. Instead, it is gifted for whatever the reader wishes to give in
return. Eat your heart out, Amazon!
wired | Over the last five years, a growing community of
quantum physicists has been implementing the quantum switch in tabletop
experiments and exploring the advantages that indefinite causal order
offers for quantum computing and communication. It’s “really something
that could be useful in everyday life,” said Giulia Rubino, a researcher
at the University of Bristol who led the first experimental demonstration of the quantum switch in 2017.
But the practical uses of the phenomenon only make the deep implications more acute.
Physicists
have long sensed that the usual picture of events unfolding as a
sequence of causes and effects doesn’t capture the fundamental nature of
things. They say this causal perspective probably has to go if we’re
ever to figure out the quantum origin of gravity, space and time. But
until recently, there weren’t many ideas about how post-causal physics
might work. “Many people think that causality is so basic in our
understanding of the world that if we weaken this notion we would not be
able to make coherent, meaningful theories,” said Brukner, who is one
of the leaders in the study of indefinite causality.
That’s
changing as physicists contemplate the new quantum switch experiments,
as well as related thought experiments in which Alice and Bob face
causal indefiniteness created by the quantum nature of gravity.
Accounting for these scenarios has forced researchers to develop new
mathematical formalisms and ways of thinking. With the emerging
frameworks, “we can make predictions without having well-defined
causality,” Brukner said.
Progress has grown swifter recently, but many
practitioners trace the origin of this line of attack on the quantum
gravity problem to work 16 years ago by Lucien Hardy, a British-Canadian
theoretical physicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical
Physics in Waterloo, Canada. “In my case,” said Brukner, “everything
started with Lucien Hardy’s paper.”
Hardy was best
known at the time for taking a conceptual approach made famous by
Albert Einstein and applying it to quantum mechanics.
Einstein
revolutionized physics not by thinking about what exists in the world,
but by considering what individuals can possibly measure. In particular,
he imagined people on moving trains making measurements with rulers and
clocks. By using this “operational” approach, he was able to conclude
that space and time must be relative.
In 2001, Hardy applied this same approach to quantum mechanics. He reconstructed all of quantum theory starting from five operational axioms.
He
then set out to apply it to an even bigger problem: the 80-year-old
problem of how to reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity,
Einstein’s epic theory of gravity. “I’m driven by this idea that perhaps
the operational way of thinking about quantum theory may be applied to
quantum gravity,” Hardy told me over Zoom this winter.
theconversation | The tense test of strength began when Biden was asked about Putin in an interview
with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos and agreed he was “a killer” and
didn’t have a soul. He also said Putin will “pay a price” for his
actions.
Putin then took the unusual step of going on the state broadcaster VGTRK with a prepared five-minute statement in response to Biden.
In an unusually pointed manner, Putin recalled the US history of
genocide of its Indigenous people, the cruel experience of slavery, the
continuing repression of Black Americans today and the unprovoked US
nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the second world war.
He suggested states should not judge others by their own standards:
Whatever you say about others is what you are yourself.
Some American journalists and observers have reacted to this as “trolling”. It was not.
It was the preamble to Putin’s most important message in years to
what he called the American “establishment, the ruling class”. He said
the US leadership is determined to have relations with Russia, but only
“on its own terms”.
Although they think that we are the same as they are, we are
different people. We have a different genetic, cultural and moral code.
But we know how to defend our own interests.
And we will work with them, but in those areas in which we ourselves
are interested, and on those conditions that we consider beneficial for
ourselves. And they will have to reckon with it. They will have to
reckon with this, despite all attempts to stop our development. Despite
the sanctions, insults, they will have to reckon with this.
This is new for Putin. He has for years made the point, always
politely, that Western powers need to deal with Russia on a basis of
correct diplomatic protocols and mutual respect for national
sovereignty, if they want to ease tensions.
But never before has he been as blunt as this, saying in effect: do
not dare try to judge us or punish us for not meeting what you say are
universal standards, because we are different from you. Those days are
now over.
theburningplatform | What appears to be happening is the last dying gasps of an empire of debt
as it thrashes about using un-Constitutional means to control its
subjects, while injecting trillions of fiat dollars as an adrenaline
treatment for a terminal cancer diagnosis.
As a last resort, initiating a global war with Russia and China would
certainly distract the masses and keep them from realizing the true
enemy within. Turning Washington DC into an armed encampment is not to
protect the government from white supremacists. It is to protect the
traitorous creatures in Congress and the White House from the citizens
when this diabolical plan blows up in our faces.
Inflation is already raging, but the government and Fed tell you it is
1.5%. There are 261 million working age Americans and only 127 million
are employed full-time, but the government tells you the unemployment
rate is 6.2%, when more than 50% of those capable of working are not.
The government will tell you GDP soared in the first
quarter at 6%, when we are in the midst of a government created
Depression, and the GDP calculation is nothing more than the government
borrowing trillions from future generations and giving a minuscule
portion to current generations, with the vast majority going into the
pockets of billionaire oligarchs, Wall Street, and mega-corporations.
The “economic recovery” narrative is entirely false, but the jar shakers
know the plebs do not understand math.
The plumbing of our astonishingly crooked financial system began to
fail in September 2019, with overnight Repo rates soaring to 10%. The
Fed immediately leapt into action by restarting QE (aka No Banker Left
Behind) to keep the depth of our debt predicament hidden from the
public. A flu released from a Chinese bio-lab, which is highly
non-lethal to anyone under 80 years old, has been utilized by the jar
shakers to unleash a tsunami of digital fiat (aka debt) to prop up a system being smothered by too much debt.
Since March of 2020, our beloved legislators have added $4.5 trillion to the national debt,
a 20% increase in one year. The Fed has done their part by jolting
their balance sheet up by $3.5 trillion, an 85% increase in one year.
The current administration is saying hold my beer, as they are busy
adding another $4 trillion in the next year and the Fed will add another
$2 trillion or so to their balance sheet. Meanwhile, hundreds of
thousands of small businesses
have been permanently destroyed, while Bezos and the rest of his
billionaire buddies have increased their net worth by tens of billions.
At least your grandma is earning .015% in her savings account, while her
living expenses rise by 10%. Do you get it yet?
theburningplatform |“If you catch 100 red fire ants as
well as 100 large black ants, and put them in a jar, at first, nothing
will happen. However, if you violently shake the jar and dump them back
on the ground the ants will fight until they eventually kill each other.
The thing is, the red ants think the black ants are the enemy and vice
versa, when in reality, the real enemy is the person who shook the jar.
This is exactly what’s happening in society today. Liberal vs.
Conservative. Black vs. White. Pro Mask vs. Anti-Mask. Vax vs. Anti-vax.
Rich vs. poor. Man vs. woman. Cop vs. citizen. The real question we
need to be asking ourselves is who’s shaking the jar… and why?”Shera Starr
A few weeks ago, I saw the above quote in Jeff Thomas’ articleLearning from Ants,
and it has been reverberating in my mind ever since. It is a perfect
analogy for what has been happening in this country for years, with the
jar lately being shaken at a rate faster than a Biden vote count
increase at 3:00 am in a swing state. Everyone in this country, and the
world, is at each other’s throats. Who is shaking the jar? Why are they
shaking the jar? Why do they want us fighting each other?
If they keep us focused on fighting each other, they believe we will
not notice their reprehensible criminality, as they manipulate the
masses through psychological engineering
and the employment of propaganda techniques to push their desired
narrative. If you ask someone – who is shaking the jar? – they will
likely answer based on the standard left vs right, liberal vs
conservative, white vs black paradigm which has been created by those
benefiting from conflict. It is always a safe bet to follow the money
when trying to identify the culprits.
The elevated intensity of manipulation by those pulling the strings
of societal discontent reveals much about their level of desperation in
creating more chaos, because the awakening of more to the truth,
endangers their wealth, power, and control. They have turned the shaking
power up to eleven in the last year, as an implosion of the Ponzi
financial system was looming as we entered 2020, and the Deep State
oligarchs needed cover to implement a massive injection of liquidity
into the veins of Wall Street bankers, the medical industrial complex,
and mega-corporations like Amazon, Wal-Mart and Target.
The weaponization of a contagious, but highly non-lethal to anyone
under 80 years old, flu became the perfect camouflage of fear to bailout
the teetering financial system and creating turmoil, chaos, and
distrust among the populace. The non-stop fear mongering was purposely
ramped to keep the public distracted while the national wealth pillaging
operation proceeded at a breakneck pace behind the scenes. $600 for you
and $10 trillion for them.
The monstrous effort to polarize the country by the psychopaths in
suits pulling the strings of societal disgruntlement has the ultimate
purpose of subjugation and dominion over every aspect of our lives. They
no longer feel the need to conceal their treachery, as they openly
proclaim their Great Reset, where you will own nothing and be happy –
living in a 200 sq ft shipping container, eating synthetic meat,
drinking Gates endorsed reprocessed piss, snacking on bugs, and praying
their windmill and solar power works on calm cloudy days as a frigid
winter storm front arrives.
LATimes | In late January, when protesters shut down the vaccine site at Dodger
Stadium, his research team tracked a surge in online new world order
activity, including posts tagged with #greatreset, #scamdemic and
#agenda21, a theory based on a 1990s United Nations resolution that some
consider proof of a plot to depopulate the Earth.
The reasons why
some Southern Californians have latched onto new world order rhetoric
are complex. Finkelstein’s organization found a correlation between
places with high incidence of both Black Lives Matter activity and what
he terms as pushback against it in the form of anti-mask, anti-lockdown
rallies — a mix that fed new world order activity online. Los Angeles
County had the greatest abundance of both types of protests, followed by
San Diego and Orange counties.
“Where
the Black Lives Matter protesters showed up, the quarantine became sort
of a counter-cause,” he said. “This idea that ‘we are the ones being
victimized.’”
Mia Bloom, professor of Communication at Georgia State University and
an expert on QAnon, also pointed out that Southern California is a
hotbed of wellness culture, where anti-vaccine sentiment has found a
foothold. Last summer, conspiracy theories jumped to Instagram, she
said, where women previously more interested in lifestyle content were
drawn in, creating an unlikely bridge between liberal and conservative
movements.
Levin, Blazakis and others said regardless of why they
took hold, new world order theories will likely play a role if the state
holds a recall election for Gov. Gavin Newsom this fall. Newsom is
already being featured in recall-related memes that portray him as
“puppet” of the Chinese Communist Party and complicit in the global
takeover. At rallies, he has been portrayed as Hitler and called a
tyrant.
Recall supporters have posted on Twitter with hashtags
such as #nwo, #trumpsarmy and #Agenda21 among others. Another recall
meme posted online showed Newsom with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San
Francisco) with “Nuclear Powered Satan,” written below them. A commenter
on an official recall Facebook page called Newsom an “idiot communist,”
and a recall founder recently posted about “Beijing Biden.”
A recent analysis of articles by the Network Contagion Research
Institute about the California recall for a six-month period from
September through March found about 800 articles from just more than 300
sources. Of those sources, 177, or 57%, were classified as
disinformation sites or uncategorized. That designation, said researcher
Lea Marchl, usually means they cannot be trusted. Similar numbers held
true when it came to videos about the recall.
“What’s driving the
recall is not merely an honest difference on policy but something that
is framed in a deeper and more dark matter,” Levin said. “I’m concerned
that people with legitimate, fact-based reasons for wanting to recall
the governor are now mixed into those whose currency also is aggression
and conspiracy and that is a problem because each feed on each other.”
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).
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.
CJR |Meanwhile,coverage
of the shooting by national media outlets remained vague; reporters
seemed reluctant (or were unable) to find details about the victims or
pick up reports from the Korean press. Instead, the mainstream press
published profiles of the shooter. And when the Atlanta Sheriff’s Office
held a press conference on Wednesday morning, the press raced to take
down the official statement, whichuncritically
echoed the suspect’s claims that he suffered from sexual addiction, and
which minimized the role of racial animus in his motivation for the
killing spree.
Lee, who had worked the police beat
in Korea earlier in his career, was in disbelief. “I’ve never before
seen a case where the police suggest: ‘The suspect said it wasn’t the
case, therefore it’s not the case,’ ” he says. Worse, the press
replicated the official statement in headlines and presented it as breaking news.
In most news pieces, the spokesperson’s words were treated as
self-explanatory, without additional context or questions. “It was
almost as though the press believed what was said to be correct, like
they wanted it to be the case,” Lee says.
To Lee, the official statement was
“clearly too absurd to repeat.” He felt no obligation to cover the press
conference or to recite the spokesperson’s words. Instead, Atlanta K ran a story that recounted the community response to the official statement, titled: “ ‘Does a bad day mean you can kill someone?’: white police officers’ protection of a white murderer.”
The press corrected course a day
later, but already, public perception of the suspect’s racist and
anti-Asian motives had been muddied. The shooter’s explanation for the
murders—sex addiction—had been widely circulated, giving weight to
long-standing associations between Asian-owned massage shops and illicit
sex work. Investigations into the spas in the past week cited
suggestive customer reviews and a history of police raids (some of
which had been undertaken wrongfully, Lee says), in effect imputing
criminality to the women. The media should ask if it is meaningful to
determine whether the victims had been offering sexual services, and
whether such questions are worth stigmatizing the deceased women and
risking harm to family members and other spa workers. This also means
that survivors, who have long lived under the radar—fearful
of losing their livelihoods and immigration statuses—feel discouraged
from talking publicly. “Unless they have immense courage, it’s
improbable for these women to want to put themselves out there,” Lee
says.
From the beginning, Lee had feared
this sort of scrutiny. Reporters for national media outlets had asked
him about criminal activity at the spas, to which he declined to
respond. Why speculate on a question that lacks clear relevance to the
story at hand? Already, the women have been unfairly immortalized in
association with their place of work. The spas could never be a full
reflection of who the women were; they were survival jobs—jobs the women
might have worked tirelessly to retire from, had they been allowed to
live out their lives.
NYTimes | Sue-ling Wang prided himself on being a self-made businessman.
The
son of a farmer in Taiwan, he attended a vocational school that trained
students at a factory producing zippers and ballpoint pens. But he made
his ascent after arriving in America on a scholarship and obtaining a
Ph.D., then starting his own company in the Atlanta area three decades
ago.
He appeared at civic events,
donated to Republican candidates and ensconced himself in an exclusive
country club community northeast of Atlanta where he bought two stately
homes, each valued at about $1 million.
Later
this year, he will assume the role of head of the World Taiwanese
Chambers of Commerce. It is a prestigious post: Taiwan’s government
recently produced a 14-minute video of him discussing his life that included a photo of him with the island democracy’s president, Tsai Ing-wen.
“When
we go abroad, we are not afraid of hardship, because we must raise our
children, we want to glorify our ancestors,” Mr. Wang, himself a father,
said in the video.
In telling his immigrant success story, Mr. Wang, 68, did not mention
his tie to a business whose employees had little opportunity to follow
his path: Gold Spa, one of the three Atlanta-area massage parlors where a
gunman last week killed eight people and wounded another.
Six victims were of Korean or Chinese descent, fueling outrage and
despair about the surge of anti-Asian violence, particularly against
women, in the United States.
But as details about the employees emerged, so too did another narrative: the story of the wealth divideamong
people of Asian descent in America — a community often viewed by
outsiders as monolithic and whose economic disparities have long been
misunderstood.
The income gap between the rich and the poor in the United States is, in fact, greatest among Asians, who are considered the most economically divided group in the country, according to the Pew Research Center.
fearlessj1111 | Sociologist Tamara K. Nopper argued against depicting these Black-Asian conflicts as “mutual misunderstanding” in a 2015 article.
“The use of ‘mutual’ misunderstanding suggests shared status or power,
with each group contributing to each other’s vulnerability and
suffering,” Nopper wrote. “The employment of the mutual misunderstanding
framework suggests Asian store owners desire identification with and
from Black customers across class and race lines. Yet many studies of
Asian immigrant storeowners show they hold racist views of Black people
and associate them with negative qualities purportedy absent among
Asians.”
Asian Americans must admit and rectify the
ways we uphold white supremacy, namely our anti-Blackness. Much like
the U.S., Asian countries suffer from colorism and caste systems within
their own societies. “Anti-Blackness is foundational to the creation of
America,” said Diane Wong, an assistant professor and faculty fellow at
NYU Gallatin, whose research has focused on the gentrification of
Chinatowns and Afro-Asian solidarities. “It’s no secret then that
anti-Blackness is reflected in Asian immigrant families, businesses,
institutions and interpersonal relationships on a frequent basis.”
As a society, we have “progressed” from
lynchings to viral videos of violence against Black people, from
police killings and brutality to baseless accusations of criminality. In retail spaces, Black people continue to experience racism and antagonization.
When Asians internalize and perpetuate anti-Black racism and violence,
we are reifying our complicity and driving a deeper wedge between the
minority groups.
It’s important to note that two groups are
not equally positioned in larger structures of power, especially when
one racial group is profiting off the other, which is oftentimes the
case in these violent clashes between Black people and Asians.
“Race is certainly a factor, but it is not
the only factor,” Kang, an associate professor at the University of
Massachusetts, Amherst, said in an interview. Kang’s research has
focused on Asian-owned nail salons and their racially diverse customers.
“Many nail salon workers are under pressure to work quickly and keep
costs down, which does not create the best environment for building
customer relations.
The potential for tensions is heightened
by the intimacy of the service, which involves direct physical contact,
and the fact that many of the workers and owners are immigrants who do
not speak the language or understand the culture of their customers.” In
these scenarios, the tension is stoked by economic stress: the salon
workers who often work for low wages under poor conditions, and the mostly working class clientele who cannot afford to waste money on subpar service.
Kang stressed the importance of putting
these largely publicized conflicts in context. “I have observed hundreds
of interactions in salons in this neighborhood that were very cordial
and where workers and customers were very respectful and appreciative of
each other,” she said.
Our perspectives are largely shaped by the
way Black-Asian conflict is covered in media. “There is a lot of
misinformation when it comes to reporting on salient issues that affect
both Black and Asian communities,” Wong said. However, when videos of
Asian business owners and workers inflicting violence on Black customers
go viral, when Asian American activists protest in support for Peter Liang,
an NYPD officer who shot an unarmed Black man in a stairwell, the
message received by the public is that Asians do not care about Black
lives.
These acts of violence are only a
microcosm of the conflict between the minority groups, moments when the
tension bubbles up to the surface and pops. There have been many ways
statistics about Asian American achievement and the “model minority”
myth have been used as a wedge between Asians and other minority groups, most notably through Ed Blum’s anti-affirmative action lawsuit against Harvard.
Many Asian Americans have thrown their support behind ending affirmative action and in support of standardized testing in
school admission, placing their own concerns ahead of the communities
marginalized by these systems, namely Black, Brown, and indigenous
peoples.
KRON4 | San Francisco school board members will move forward to remove Vice
President Alison Collins from the board and other committee positions in
a special meeting later this week.
This comes after derogatory tweets Collins made in 2016 recently resurfaced.
On Tuesday night, the school board held a regular meeting where we heard an apology from Collins for the first time.
Despite this apology, Collins still made no suggestion of plans to step down from her position.
That’s why two other school board members plan to introduce a
resolution at Thursday’s special meeting, calling for Collins to be
stripped of her titles.
The San Francisco School Board met on Tuesday for the first time
since derogatory tweets resurfaced from the board’s vice president,
Alison Collins.
While Collins gave no indication of plans to resign, she made a public apology.
“I’d like to reemphasize my sincere and heartfelt apologies and I’m
currently engaging with my colleagues and working with the community for
the good of all children in our district,” Collins said.
Fellow school board member Jenny Lam called for Collins to make this
apology several days ago and stands behind demands for Collins to
resign.
“I am not alone when I say I don’t have confidence in Commissioner
Collins’s ability to fairly govern a school district that is almost half
API with no bias. Restorative justice begins by acknowledging the harm
and making the intentional effort to connect with those in the community
that has been harmed,” Lam said.
Lam and board member Moliga will introduce a resolution at a special
meeting on Thursday, calling for Collins to be stripped of her VP
position and committee assignments.
tomdispatch | For the next 40 years, Washington’s secret Cold War weapon, the
Central Intelligence Agency, or CIA, fought its largest and longest
covert wars around the rim of Eurasia. Probing relentlessly for
vulnerabilities of any sort in the Sino-Soviet bloc, the CIA mounted a
series of small invasions of Tibet and southwest China in the early
1950s; fought a secret war in Laos, mobilizing a 30,000-strong militia
of local Hmong villagers during the 1960s; and launched a massive,
multibillion dollar covert war against the Red Army in Afghanistan in
the 1980s.
During those same four decades, America’s only hot wars were
similarly fought at the edge of Eurasia, seeking to contain the
expansion of Communist China. On the Korean Peninsula from 1950 to 1953,
almost 40,000 Americans (and untold numbers of Koreans) died in
Washington’s effort to block the advance of North Korean and Chinese
forces across the 38th parallel. In Southeast Asia from 1962 to 1975,
some 58,000 American troops (and millions of Vietnamese, Laotians, and
Cambodians) died in an unsuccessful attempt to stop the expansion of
communists south of the 17th parallel that divided North and South
Vietnam.
By the time the Soviet Union imploded in 1990 (just as China was
turning into a Communist Party-run capitalist power), the U.S. military
had become a global behemoth standing astride the Eurasian continent
with more than 700 overseas bases, an air force of 1,763 jet fighters,
more than 1,000 ballistic missiles, and a navy of nearly 600 ships,
including 15 nuclear carrier battle groups — all linked together by a
global system of satellites for communication, navigation, and
espionage.
Despite its name, the Global War on Terror after 2001 was actually
fought, like the Cold War before it, at the edge of Eurasia. Apart from
the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Air Force and CIA had, within
a decade, ringed the southern rim of that landmass with a network of 60
bases for its growing arsenal
of Reaper and Predator drones, stretching all the way from the
Sigonella Naval Air Station in Sicily to Andersen Air Force Base on the
island of Guam. And yet, in that series of failed, never-ending
conflicts, the old military formula for “containing,” constraining, and
dominating Eurasia was visibly failing. The Global War on Terror proved,
in some sense, a long-drawn-out version of Britain’s imperial Suez
disaster.
By grasping the geopolitical logic of unifying Eurasia’s vast landmass —
home to 70% of the world’s population — through transcontinental
infrastructures for commerce, energy, finance, and transport, Beijing
has rendered Washington’s encircling armadas of aircraft and warships
redundant, even irrelevant.
greenwald |A report declassified last Wednesday by the
Department of Homeland Security is raising serious concerns about the
possibly illegal involvement by the intelligence community in U.S.
domestic political affairs.
Entitled “Domestic Violent Extremism Poses Heightened Threat in 2021,” the March 1 Report
from the Director of National Intelligence states that it was prepared
“in consultation with the Attorney General and Secretary of Homeland
Security—and was drafted by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC),
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and Department of Homeland
Security (DHS), with contributions from the Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).”
Its primary point is this: “The IC [intelligence community] assesses
that domestic violent extremists (DVEs) who are motivated by a range of
ideologies and galvanized by recent political and societal events in the
United States pose an elevated threat to the Homeland in 2021.” While
asserting that “the most lethal” of these threats is posed by “racially
or ethnically motivated violent extremists (RMVEs) and militia violent
extremists (MVEs),” it makes clear that its target encompasses a wide
range of groups from the left (Antifa, animal rights and environmental
activists, pro-choice extremists and anarchists: “those who oppose
capitalism and all forms of globalization”) to the right (sovereign
citizen movements, anti-abortion activists and those deemed motivated by
racial or ethnic hatreds).
The U.S. security state apparatus
regards the agenda of “domestic violent extremists” as “derived from
anti-government or anti-authority sentiment,” which includes “opposition
to perceived economic, racial or social hierarchies.” In sum, to the
Department of Homeland Security, an “extremist” is anyone who opposes
the current prevailing ruling class and system for distributing power.
Anyone they believe is prepared to use violence, intimidation or
coercion in pursuit of these causes then becomes a “domestic violent
extremist,” subject to a vast array of surveillance, monitoring and
other forms of legal restrictions:
Department of Homeland Security report, Mar.1, 2021
It
goes without saying that violence of any kind — including that which is
politically motivated — is a serious crime under U.S. law, and it is
the proper role of the U.S. Government to investigate and prevent it.
But there are real and important legal and institutional limits on the
authority of the intelligence community to involve itself in domestic
law enforcement, or other forms of domestic political activity, that
seem threatened here, if not outright violated.
consentfactory | So, according to Facebook and the Atlantic Council,
I am now a “dangerous individual,” you know, like a “terrorist,” or a
“serial murderer,” or “human trafficker,” or some other kind of
“criminal.” Or I’ve been praising “dangerous individuals,” or
disseminating their symbols, or otherwise attempting to “sow dissension”
and cause “offline harm.”
Actually, I’m not really clear what I’m
guilty of, but I’m definitely some sort of horrible person you want
absolutely nothing to do with, whose columns you do not want to read,
whose books you do not want to purchase, and the sharing of whose
Facebook posts might get your account immediately suspended. Or, at the
very least, you’ll be issued this warning:
Now, hold on, don’t click away just yet. You’re already on whatever
website you’re reading this “dangerous,” “terrorist” column on (or
you’re reading it in an email, probably on your phone), which means you
are already on the official “Readers of Mass-Murdering Content”
watch-list. So you might as well take the whole ride at this point.
Also, don’t worry, I’m not going to just whine about how Facebook was
mean to me for 2,000 words … well, all right, I’m going to do that a
little, but mostly I wanted to demonstrate how “reality” is manufactured
and policed by global corporations like Facebook, Twitter, Google, the
corporate media, of course, crowdfunding platforms like Patreon and
PayPal, and “think tanks” like the Atlantic Council and its Digital Forensic Research Lab (“DFRLab”).
First, though, let me tell you my Facebook story.
What happened was, I made a Facebook post, and a lot of people tried
to share it, so Facebook and the DFRLab suspended or disabled their
accounts, or just prevented them from sharing it, and sent them the
above warning. Facebook didn’t suspend my account, or censor the post on
my account, or contact me to let me know that they have officially
deemed me a “dangerous individual.” Instead, they punished anyone who
tried to “boost” my “dangerous” post, a tactic anyone who has been
through boot camp or in prison (or has watched this classic scene from Full Metal Jacket) will be familiar with.
Writing in 2014, Gurri foresaw that the Establishment would respond
by denouncing all evidence of public discontent, as lies and
disinformation. The Establishment would, in Gurri’s telling, be so
constrained within their ‘bubble’ that they would be unable to
assimilate their loss of monopoly over their own confected ‘reality’.
This Establishment denial would be made manifest, he argued, in a
delusional, ham-fisted authoritarian manner. His predictions have been
vindicated with Trumpist dissidence denounced as a threat to ‘our
democracy’ – amidst a media and social platform crackdown. Such a
response would only confirm the suspicions of the public, thus setting
off a vicious circle of yet more “distrust and loss of legitimacy”,
Gurri concluded.
This was Gurri’s main thrust. The book’s striking feature however,
was how it seemed so completely to nail the coming Trump and Brexit era –
and the ‘anti-system’ impulse behind them. In America, this impulse
found Trump – not the other way around. The point here essentially being
that America no longer saw Red and Blue as the two extended wings
belonging to the bird of liberal democracy. For something around half of
America, the ‘system’ was rigged towards a profiteering 0.1%, and
against them.
Continued ‘westification’ of the globe – the principal component to
‘old’ liberal globalism – though tarnished and largely discredited,
remains mandatory, as made clear in the cogent reasoning recently advanced
by Robert Kagan: Absent the justifying myth of ‘seeding democracy
across the world’ around which to organise the empire, the moral logic
of the entire enterprise begins to fall apart, Kagan argued (with
surprising frankness). He thus asserts that the U.S. empire abroad is required – precisely in order to preserve the myth of ‘democracy’ at home. An America that retreats from global hegemony, he argues, would no longer possess the cohesive binding to preserve Americaasliberal democracy, at home either.
There may indeed be some truth in this latter observation, yet what
is happening today in the U.S. is but one ‘battle’ (albeit a key one) in
a longer strategic war, reaching far back. The notion of a New World
Order is nothing new. Imagined by globalists today, as before,
it remains a teleological process of the ‘westification’ of the globe
(western ‘universal values’), pursued under the rubric of (scientific)
modernism.
taibbi | When Columbia law professor Timothy Wu was appointed by Joe Biden to
the National Economic Council a few weeks back, the press hailed it as
great news for progressives. The author of The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Ageis
known as a staunch advocate of antitrust enforcement, and Biden’s
choice of him, along with the appointment of Lina Khan to the Federal
Trade Commission, was widely seen as a signal that the new
administration was assembling what Wired called an “antitrust all-star team.”
Wu’s
appointment may presage tougher enforcement of tech firms. However, he
has other passions that got less ink. Specifically, Wu — who introduced
the concept of “net neutrality” and once explained it to Stephen Colbert on a roller coaster
— is among the intellectual leaders of a growing movement in Democratic
circles to scale back the First Amendment. He wrote an influential
September, 2017 article called “Is the First Amendment Obsolete?” that argues traditional speech freedoms need to be rethought in the Internet/Trump era.
Listening to Wu, who has not responded to requests for an interview,
is confusing. He calls himself a “devotee” of the great Louis Brandeis,
speaking with reverence about his ideas and those of other famed
judicial speech champions like Learned Hand and Oliver Wendell Holmes.
In the Aspen speech above, he went so far as to say about First
Amendment protections that “these old opinions are so great, it’s like
watching The Godfather, you can’t imagine anything could be better.”
If
you hear a “but…” coming in his rhetoric, you guessed right. He does
imagine something better. The Cliff’s Notes version of Wu’s thesis:
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.
A Foundation of Joy
-
Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
on, either beating the fuck out of the tumor, or reattaching that slippery
eel ...
April Three
-
4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
Return of the Magi
-
Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
-
Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
-
sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
