On January 24 2022, at Peterborough Crown Court, Nelson was found guilty of racially aggravated intentional harassment, alarm or distress and of sending a letter/electronic communication/article with intent to cause distress or anxiety. When the sentencing took place two months later at Southwark Crown Court, however, he was given 18 months in prison yet that was suspended for two years. This meant that, until this months successful appeal by CAA, Nelson was set to be spared prison, in spite of the fact that he had been found guilty of the same crime not once but twice before, and despite the latest offence occurring within the time-frame of an earlier suspended sentence.

The first was in 2018, when Nelson was handed a 20-week prison sentence, suspended for a year, after admitting harassing two Jewish then-Labour MPs, Luciana Berger and Ruth Smeeth. Then, in 2020, he was handed a 30-month prison sentence, suspended for 18 months, after repeatedly targeting Dame Margaret Hodge and Dame Louise Ellman (both Jewish), and Lord John Mann, whom he called c----s and told to leave the party and die.

With Nelson avoiding jail for the third time, not only did I feel a lack of justice for the four years of my life he had poisoned, I was left wondering: what exactly does it take for antisemitism to be taken seriously? This is why, together with Campaign Against Antisemitism, I appealed the outcome. After an intervention from the Attorney General, the Court of Appeal re-examined the sentence on July 15, and the result was emphatic. The original judges decision was stridently overturned; Nelson had to surrender himself and was immediately sent to prison for 18 months.

The Court of Appeal stated that the harassment I experienced was some of the worst kind imaginable, about as low as it can get, the most despicable of all in a crowded field. It added: For the avoidance of doubt, the fear of violence being perpetrated was entirely rational and justifiable.

And so the saga was brought to an end. Nelson, a racist internet troll, was plucked out of the shadows, and is now in a prison cell. The hands that once spread hate online are now chained. The message to all anti-Semites is clear: you dont get to abuse Jews for free. You will be found and you will be the one that suffers. This is a message that can be applied to all internet trolls. The game is over. The world is sick of you. People are motivated to find you and there are now ways to do so.

Originally posted here:

I tracked down my Corbynite troll and now he's in prison - The Telegraph

So, another unelected Italian government is collapsing, and the putatively pro-democratic media are all calling it a dark day. In many ways, it is. Mario Draghis resignation (his second in the space of a week and this time for real) is bad news for Brussels and the Eurozone. The war in Ukraine was the catalyst for Draghi's fall as it tore apart Italys left-wing populist party, the Five Star Movement. That, in turn, destabilised Italys government. The Russian media will be ecstatic: first Boris, now this.

But it is a great day for Italy's leading right-wing populist party the post-fascist Fratelli d'Italia (Brothers of Italy) which is now in a very powerful position. Fratelli d'Italia continues to top the opinion polls and its leader Giorgia Meloni looks set to become Italys next prime minister. Its an astonishing change of fortunes for a party that received just 4 per cent of the vote in 2018.

At the next general election, which could take place as early as September, it is likely that Brothers of Italy in coalition with its traditional allies the Lega, led by Matteo Salvini, and Berlusconi's party Forza Italia (which these days polls about 8 per cent) would get enough seats to form a government.

None of this was meant to happen, according to the mainstream media and their experts. But the experts didnt understand what the war in Ukraine would do to European politics.

Francis End of History Fukuyama summed up the prevailing view back in March when he wrote on his website that the war in Ukraine would be a hammer blow to right-wing populists because their leaders had treated Vladimir Putin as an ally in their culture wars to defend traditional values and had thus acted as his useful idiots.

In Italy, however, the war has delivered what looks like the coup de grace, not to right-wing, but to left-wing populism. Last month, the left-wing Five Star movement split into two parties over whether to send arms to Ukraine. Its leader, Giuseppe Conte, and the majority of its MPs and senators, do not agree with sending weapons on the grounds that this will merely prolong the war uselessly.

Such views reflect a widespread opposition in Italy to America and Europes involvement in the war in Ukraine (prompted by a knee-jerk hatred of America), as well as cynical selfishness given that 40 per cent of Italy's gas comes from Russia. Theres also an ingrained Italian pacifism which is partly a reaction to the countrys fascist past. A majority of Italians consistently oppose sending arms to Ukraine, according to the polls.

But Five Stars founder Luigi Di Maio, Italy's Foreign Minister, believes it is Italy's duty to help Ukraine defend itself against the Russian invader. This is the official line of the Draghi government even though in practice Italy sends fewer arms to Ukraine than tiny Latvia whose population is similar toMilan's.

So Di Maio and 51 of 5 Stelle's 155 MPs, plus 11 of its 72 senators, quit Five Star to form a new party called Insieme per il Futuro (Together for the Future). Di Maio told a press conference: We needed to decide on which side of history we wanted to be on with those on the side of Ukraine which has been attacked, or on the side of the aggressor, Russia.

Before the split, Five Star had the most MPs in Parliament. Now, the radical-right populist Lega has the most. But even before this schism, the alt-left Five Star was already in a sorry state. Just four years ago it got more votes than any other party at the general election (32.7 per cent), formed a coalition government and became the most talked about populist party in Europe.

In 2013, during the campaign for the first general election Five Star contested, its founder Beppe Grillo, a raucous, bearded comedian who is a Latino version of Billy Connolly, promised if we get into parliament we'll open it up like a can of sardines, we'll let you see all the stitch-ups where the money goes, where the contracts go, we'll let you see everything... So stealing will be difficult, because when you put reflectors in there the thieves become as good as gold.

His slogan was Vaffa! eff off, roughly speaking to everything, it seemed, except wind farms. His dream was to replace parliament with direct democracy on the internet. He built the movement which was run like a cult by delivering high voltage rants to packed piazzas and on his website, which attracted millions of followers. His was a movement, not a party, he insisted, because parties like parliament are corrupt. He instructed his followers for that is what they were to refuse to speak to the media for the same reasons. He swore blind that Five Star would never form a coalition with anyone else and withdrew from the frontline to play the role of guru.

Slowly but surely, it all began to unravel. Five Star's politicians began to talk to the media. It became a party. And as it did not have enough votes to govern on its own, it agreed to take part in a coalition government with the unelected Conte, a law professor, as prime minister. Initially Five Star formed a coalition with its arch enemy the radical-right Lega and then once that had collapsed with its other arch enemy, the post-communist Partito Democratico, which also collapsed, and then finally, in February 2021, with both these arch enemies together, in Draghi's emergency national unity government.

That Five Star agreed to participate in such a government led by Draghi the ex boss of the EU's Central Bank and ex director of Goldman Sachs, who is the epitome of Davos Man, and the Euro Establishment shows just how far the party had travelled. It was only ever populist in words, never in deeds. Its one concrete achievement has been the introduction of automatic unemployment benefit for an unlimited period which had never existed in Italy. Previously, only people with full time contracts who lost their jobs received unemployment benefit and only for a limited period.

Nowadays Five Star is polling only 11 per cent and has lost 8 million voters since 2018. At local elections last October and in June it was virtually wiped out. What we are seeing in Italy is the death of left-wing populism.

Look at Five Star very beautiful Virginia Raggi, who swanned in from nowhere, aged 38, to be elected mayor of Rome in 2016. Five years later, with wild boar roaming the streets amid the uncollected rubbish and buses going up in flames, Raggi did not even make it to the second ballot. In Turin, where the outgoing mayor was another young Five Star woman, the party got just 9 per cent of the vote compared to 30 per cent in 2016.

In a desperate attempt at renaissance, Conte last week deliberately it is certain provoked a crisis for the Draghi government when Five Star Senators refused to take part in a vote last week on a welfare package. The pretext was their objection to a clause in the package authorising the mayor of Rome to start construction of an incinerator to tackle the citys chronic rubbish crisis.

Draghi immediately tendered his resignation even though his coalition won the vote without Five Stars support. President Sergio Mattarella refused to accept his resignation and Draghi agreed to report back to parliament this week. In theory he could govern without Five Star but he refuses on the grounds that his government was formed as a national unity government to tackle the Covid emergency.

Conte no doubt bets that the only way to recuperate his partys lost votes is to abandon the Draghi government, however late in the day, and return Five Star to its origins as the scourge of corrupt elites and saviour of the planet. It is surely too late.

Meanwhile, as Italys left-wing populism collapses, support for right-wing populism in the shape of Brothers of Italy continues to grow. True, the other right-wing populist party, the Lega, has seen support collapse from a high of more than 30 per cent at the 2019 European Parliament elections to 15 per cent now. But it is not Salvini's support for Putin that has lost him consensus. It was his decision to abandon the first Conte government in 2019 in a doomed attempt to force a snap general election which he thought he would win followed by his participation in the Draghi government.

Brothers of Italy, in contrast, has reaped the benefits of remaining in opposition. It was the only major party to refuse to participate in the Draghi government on the not unreasonable grounds that it is yet another Italian government led by an unelected figure (five of the last seven Italian prime ministers were not elected politicians when appointed). The last elected Italian prime minister in the sense of being the leader of the party which got the most votes at a general election was Silvio Berlusconi, who resigned in 2011. That grim statistic is a terrible indictment of the state of democracy in Italy.

Follow this link:

Mario Draghis fall and the death of Italian left-wing populism - The Spectator

Here are some example macros that will help you get started:

This macro renames all files in a given folder to "file1", "file2", "file3" etc. Just keep pressing Ctrl + Alt + Z in Macro Recorder and the macro will iterate to the next file.

This macro launches the Windows Update tool and forces it to check for updates by simulating a mouse click on the Check now link. The mouse-click uses relative coordinates, so its immune to window size and location change.

This macro has been tested under Windows 7 only, might not work under Vista or XP.

This macro launches Internet Explorer's "Proxy server" dialog.

The macro actually has no practical use, but it's a fine example of how a macro can use:

This script for Jitbit Macro Recorder launches Internet Explorer privacy cleaner. Tested under IE7, IE8. Never tested it with IE9 though.

Windows 7 introduced a new disk defragmenter tool that is automated in by this macro.

The macro simply starts the defragmenter and sends an Alt+D keyboard combination to its window.

1) The first line of the macrolaunches the Windows XP Disk Defragmenter:

2) The next line simply waits for the defragmenter window to appear:

3) Finally this block launches the appropriate item in the defragmenter window menu (which in our case is "Actions -Defragment"):

Of course you don't have to actually type these commands when you create a script in Macro Recorder, you can use the toolbar instead. First you click "Insert 'Open file' command", then you click "Insert 'Wait for window' command" etc... Jitbit's macro-language remains "hidden", it is used only if you decide to edit a saved macro in some external text editor like Notepad (which is the preferred way for some programmers and tech-geeks).

Full macro:

Last updated: 4/29/2017 more whitepapers

Read this article:

Sample Macros - Jitbit

Introduction

In this tutorial, we're going to learn how to use pyautogui library in Python 3. The PyAutoGUI library provides cross-platform support for managing mouse and keyboard operations through code to enable automation of tasks. The pyautogui library is also available for Python 2; however, we will be using Python 3 throughout the course of this tutorial.

A tool like this has many applications, a few of which include taking screenshots, automating GUI testing (like Selenium), automating tasks that can only be done with a GUI, etc.

Before you go ahead with this tutorial, please note that there are a few prerequisites. You should have a basic understanding of Python's syntax, and/or have done at least beginner level programming in some other language. Other than that, the tutorial is quite simple and easy to follow for beginners.

The installation process for PyAutoGUI is fairly simple for all Operating Systems. However, there are a few dependencies for Mac and Linux that need to be installed before the PyAutoGUI library can be installed and used in programs.

For Windows, PyAutoGUI has no dependencies. Simply run the following command in your command prompt and the installation will be done.

For Mac, pyobjc-core and pyobjc modules are needed to be installed in sequence first. Below are the commands that you need to run in sequence in your terminal for successful installation:

For Linux, the only dependency is python3-xlib (for Python 3). To install that, followed by pyautogui, run the two commands mentioned below in your terminal:

In this section, we are going to cover some of the most commonly used functions from the PyAutoGUI library.

Before we can use PyAutoGUI functions, we need to import it into our program:

This position() function tells us the current position of the mouse on our screen:

Output:

The onScreen() function tells us whether the point with coordinates x and y exists on the screen:

Output:

Here we can see that the first point exists on the screen, but the second point falls beyond the screen's dimensions.

The size() function finds the height and width (resolution) of a screen.

Output:

Your output may be different and will depend on your screen's size.

In this section, we are going to cover PyAutoGUI functions for mouse manipulation, which includes both moving the position of the cursor as well as clicking buttons automatically through code.

The syntax of the moveTo() function is as follows:

The value of x_coordinate increases from left to right on the screen, and the value of y_coordinate increases from top to bottom. The value of both x_coordinate and y_coordinate at the top left corner of the screen is 0.

Look at the following script:

In the code above, the main focus is the moveTo() function that moves the mouse cursor on the screen based on the coordinates we provide as parameters. The first parameter is the x-coordinate and the second parameter is the y-coordinate. It is important to note that these coordinates represent the absolute position of the cursor.

One more thing that has been introduced in the code above is the PAUSE property; it basically pauses the execution of the script for the given amount of time. The PAUSE property has been added in the above code so that you can see the function execution; otherwise, the functions would execute in a split second and you wont be able to actually see the cursor moving from one location to the other on the screen.

Another workaround for this would be to indicate the time for each moveTo() operation as the third parameter in the function, e.g. moveTo(x, y, time_in_seconds).

Executing the above script may result in the following error:

Note: Possible Error

If the execution of the moveTo() function generates an error similar to the one shown above, it means that your computer's fail-safe is enabled. To disable the fail-safe, add the following line at the start of your code:

This feature is enabled by default so that you can easily stop execution of your pyautogui program by manually moving the mouse to the upper left corner of the screen. Once the mouse is in this location, pyautogui will throw an exception and exit.

The coordinates of the moveTo() function are absolute. However, if you want to move the mouse position relative to the current mouse position, you can use the moveRel() function.

What this means is that the reference point for this function, when moving the cursor, would not be the top left point on the screen (0, 0), but the current position of the mouse cursor. So, if your mouse cursor is currently at point (100, 100) on the screen and you call the moveRel() function with the parameters (100, 100, 2) the new position of your move cursor would be (200, 200).

You can use the moveRel() function as shown below:

The above script will move the cursor 100 points to the right and 100 points down in 2 seconds, with respect to the current cursor position.

Check out our hands-on, practical guide to learning Git, with best-practices, industry-accepted standards, and included cheat sheet. Stop Googling Git commands and actually learn it!

The click() function is used to imitate mouse click operations. The syntax for the click() function is as follows:

The parameters are explained as follows:

Here is an example:

You can also execute specific click functions as follows:

Here the x and y represent the x and y coordinates, just like in the previous functions.

You can also have more fine-grained control over mouse clicks by specifying when to press the mouse down, and when to release it up. This is done using the mouseDown and mouseUp functions, respectively.

Here is a short example:

The above code is equivalent to just doing a pag.click(x, y) call.

The last mouse function we are going to cover is scroll. As expected, it has two options: scroll up and scroll down. The syntax for the scroll() function is as follows:

To scroll up, specify a positive value for amount_to_scroll parameter, and to scroll down, specify a negative value. Here is an example:

Alright, this was it for the mouse functions. By now, you should be able to control your mouse's buttons as well as movements through code. Let's now move to keyboard functions. There are plenty, but we will cover only those that are most frequently used.

Before we move to the functions, it is important that we know which keys can be pressed through code in pyautogui, as well as their exact naming convention. To do so, run the following script:

Output:

The typewrite() function is used to type something in a text field. Syntax for the function is as follows:

Here text is what you wish to type in the field and interval is time in seconds between each key stroke. Here is an example:

Executing the script above will enter the text "Junaid Khalid" in the field that is currently selected with a pause of 1 second between each key press.

Another way this function can be used is by passing in a list of keys that you'd like to press in a sequence. To do that through code, see the example below:

In the above example, the text junaide would be entered, followed by the removal of the trailing e. The input in the text field will be submitted by pressing the Enter key.

If you haven't noticed this so far, the keys we've shown above have no mention for combined operations like Control + C for the copy command. In case you're thinking you could do that by passing the list ['ctrl', 'c'] to the typewrite() function, you are wrong. The typewrite() function would press both those buttons in a sequence, not simultaneously. And as you probably already know, to execute the copy command, you need to press the C key while holding the ctrl key.

To press two or more keys simultaneously, you can use the hotkey() function, as shown here:

If you would like to take a screenshot of the screen at any instance, the screenshot() function is the one you are looking for. Let's see how we can implement that using PyAutoGUI:

This will store a PIL object containing the image in a variable.

If, however, you want to store the screenshot directly to your computer, you can call the screenshot function like this instead:

This will save the screenshot in a file, with the filename given, on your computer.

The last set of functions that we are going to cover in this tutorial are the message box functions. Here is a list of the message box functions available in PyAutoGUI:

Now that we have seen the types, let's see how we can display these buttons on the screen in the same sequence as above:

In the output, you will see the following sequence of message boxes.

Confirm:

Alert:

Prompt:

In this tutorial, we learned how to use PyAutoGUI automation library in Python. We started off by talking about pre-requisites for this tutorial, its installation process for different operating systems, followed by learning about some of its general function. After that we studied the functions specific to mouse movements, mouse control, and keyboard control.

After following this tutorial, you should be able to use PyAutoGUI to automate GUI operations for repetitive tasks in your own application.

Go here to see the original:

Getting Started with Python PyAutoGUI

An alt-left historian accuses the elites of betraying the working class by embracing liberal and nationalist versions of pro-market bourgeois ideologies. A pro-government pundit welcomes the governments efforts to weaken the cultural and intellectual domination of left-wing liberal elites.

Hungarian press roundup bybudapost.eu

OnMrce, historian Eszter Barthaaccusesthe Left of abandoning progressive ideas which focused on the welfare of workers and the underprivileged. Bartha contends that social democratic ideals lost their appeal after the end of Communism, and since then, elites want to impose their own worldview on the underclasses and deprive them of their collective class consciousness.

Bartha goes so far as to claim that spiritual and cultural life was more diverse and better under Kdr than it is today. She also thinks that both liberal and conservative nationalist elites want to dominate culture in order to maintain their economic privileges. In the 1990s, liberal pro-market and pro-EU ideas were more popular, but since 2010, the Fidesz counter-narrative of creating a strong national bourgeoisie has gained momentum.

Bartha believes that the government wants full control over the media, universities and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in order to entrench its ideological hegemony. She finds it sad that the disorganized workers who are loyal to Fidesz have internalized liberal and Christian-nationalist ideas, abandoned anti-capitalist critical thought, and betrayed the labour movements age-old struggle for universal social emancipation.

InMagyar Nemzet, Mikls Sznth, head of the Center for Fundamental Rights, a pro-government think tankfindsthe governments cultural politics justified. Sznth dismisses criticism that the government is too aggressive in the culture war.

What the government wants, he writes, is to complete the mission of the 1989-1990 regime change, and get rid of the post-communist status quo created by the late Communist elite to extend their power positions after the fall of Communism. Sznth writes that former Communists wanted to transform their political capital into cultural and economic capital to entrench their privileged status after 1990. To achieve this, they clung to their dominant positions in the media and cultural life, which enabled them to keep public sentiment and taste under their control, Sznth believes.

By fighting against hegemonic left-wing liberal institutions, the government wants to break the unfair and monolithic spiritual power of left-wing liberals, and to accomplish the regime change stolen by the Socialists, he concludes.

featured image: demonstration against SZFEs transform (illustration); via SZFE HK- Facebook

Continued here:

Hungarian Press Roundup: Two Opposing Views on the Culture War - Hungary Today

If you found yourself chatting with Eliot Higgins at the bar in a pub (remember those?) and asked what he did for a living, theres a good chance hed smile shyly for a moment behind his thick beard and glasses, wondering what to say. Hed probably settle for investigator. And if, curiosity piqued, you questioned what his most recent case was, how would he answer?

Theres a secret Russian nerve-agent programme that has been used for assassinations, both at home and abroad, by both the domestic intelligence services and the foreign services this is where people start looking at me as if Im mad, he tells i.

The i newsletter latest news and analysis

Leaning back in his chair in his small office at home in Leicester, wearing an Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia hoodie and drinking the green smoothie his wife has dropped in for him, its fair to say from our video call at least that Higgins looks an unlikely opponent to Vladimir Putin. But as the founder of Bellingcat defined as an intelligence agency for the people in the slogan for his new book his groups achievements are startling.

We proved that the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad fired chemical weapons at his own people, he writes in We are Bellingcat. We showed who was behind the downing of Flight MH17. We located Isis supporters in Europe. We identified neo-Nazis rampaging through Charlottesville. We helped quash the floods of disinformation spreading alongside Covid-19. And we exposed a Kremlin kill team.

Bellingcats list of scoops is even more startling for an organisation launched through a Kickstarter campaign in 2014, growing out of a blog about the Arab Spring that Higgins wrote while working part-time in admin for a lingerie company, and which still employs just 18 full-time staff. (Oh, and with an unlikely name taken from the fable Belling the Cat, about mice deciding to fit a bell on a cat to know when their enemy is coming, only to wonder who among them is brave enough to do it.)

Many journalists start out by blogging and have stories of being rejected for training schemes as Higgins was by the BBC and ITN early in their careers. Plenty are also self-trained in their specialisms, just as Higgins became an expert in weapons being used in the Syrian civil war by researching online every day.

What makes his work more extraordinary is that Higgins, 42, helped to invent a new kind of reporting. Working with fellow obsessives that he met through website message boards, they would meticulously scour social media to find and study photos and videos taken in conflict zones. They would identify times and places through geolocation, matching minor details with satellite images on Google Maps and other data sourced online. This would piece together what really happened in atrocities such as the Isis execution of US journalist James Foley, or Assads Sarin attack in Ghouta. Everything would be shared independently and for free, with explanations, plus tips and invitations for others to join in.

Open-source intelligence, or Osint, has existed for centuries. Higgins now an adviser to the International Criminal Court and his allies have revolutionised it. But taking on the worlds autocrats has led to hacking and phishing attacks, disinformation spread online, and great personal risk of becoming the next person on Russias hitlist.

The latest case for Bellingcat centres around Alexei Navalny, the Russian anti-corruption activist who has become Putins biggest opponent and was barred from running against him in the 2018 presidential election. Navalny fell violently ill during a flight in August and was taken to Germany, where doctors found that he had been poisoned by Novichok, the same chemical weapon that was used in the attempted assassination of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury in 2018. (It was Bellingcat that revealed the true identities of the two Russian GRU agents alleged to have poisoned the Skripals.)

Bellingcats team, headquartered in the Netherlands but with most working remotely, began investigating. Christo Grozev, a Bulgarian researcher, examined flight records and phone data and discovered that from 2017 Navalny was followed on around 40 trips by officers from Moscows FSB security service, who may have tried to murder Navalny on other occasions.

There seems to have been at least one previous case in July, where his wife was affected by a toxin, says Higgins. They also found FSB flights that overlap with the movements of other people who either died or were taken seriously ill. It appears there are multiple other cases where theyve been targeting people forassassinations.

As for how Bellingcat alerted Navalny, it sounds disarmingly simple. Christo basically just messaged him and said Hey, we know who tried to kill you, says Higgins. They met up in person and Christo took them through all the evidence, loads of spreadsheets and databases. Putin called Bellingcats investigation a falsification, but admitted Navalny was being followed, it was the FSB.

We thought: This is fantastic, hes just confirmed half our story, says Higgins. What about the other half? Putin denied the agents tried to poison his rival, but Bellingcat had already obtained proof by Navalny posing as an FSB generals aide, calling an agent, Konstantin Kudryavtsev, and tricking him into confessing they had placed the nerve agent in his underpants.

Higgins says that until a recording of the 47-minute conversation was released by his team, even he hadnt realised who made the call. I just didnt think the FSB officers would be dumb enough to talk to Navalnydirectly.

Navalny returned to Russia last month and was arrested immediately. That didnt stop his team releasing a near-two-hour video, viewed more than 100 million times, alleging that Putin owns a palace with a casino, ice rink and vineyard spread over land that is 39 times the size of Monaco, saying its 1bn cost was paid for with the largest bribe in history. The president has denied this but protests have been held across Russia with chants of Putin is a thief, resulting in thousands of arrests.

What will happen next to Navalny and his movement? Hes been poisoned to prison before, says Higgins. If any harm comes to him whatsoever, I think thats key.

Is Higgins, a married father of two children aged six and nine, worried about risks to his family? At one point in our conversation, the phone on his desk unexpectedly comes to life with the sound of a voice, and he deadpans: Its the Russians. Nevertheless, he and Grozev do have serious concerns.

I have the police coming over, checking on me every month, advising me that I should have cameras all over my property, he says, well aware the Skripals were probably poisoned by Novichok placed on their front door. If I touched my door handle and it had anything on it, I would very quickly wash my hands.

At a hotel where hes a regular guest, he has thrown away complimentary cookies delivered to his room in case theyre poisoned. Anyone could get a name badge and say theyre the duty manager, he says. You have to have that level ofparanoia.

Danger could also come from extremists picketing Bellingcat events. You dont know which one of the conspiracy theorists thinks youre a satanic paedophile and decides that you need a good stabbing. He adds: Im quite introverted, so I dont mind being in the house all the time. But it still sucks.

Bellingcat partnered with CNN, Der Spiegel and The Insider for their Navalny investigation, but those outlets made it clear who obtained the data. As the Washington Post puts it: Bellingcat breaks stories that newsrooms envy using methods newsrooms avoid. On this occasion, Grozev paid a reported 22,000 to obtain the phone and flight details via Russias black market for data, where information often leaks easily for a price.

Higgins knew this could be controversial. We had a lot of discussions about whether or not we should do this, he says. When I first started blogging, it was about the phone-hacking scandal, so Im very aware of using information obtained by non-traditional means. But we arent looking into celebrities, were looking into international assassination programmes It would possibly stop more people being poisoned, and reveal more assassinations.

Russia was not going to investigate and no other states, including Germany, had any jurisdiction to do so. Bellingcat felt they were the only people able to find out what hadhappened.

RT, the Russian news organisation, which the UK Foreign Office says plays an active role in spreading disinformation and has been fined by Ofcom for impartiality breaches, dismisses Higgins as a professional web-surfer. Among its recent headlines about him and his team are Bellingcat reacts badly to scrutiny, What have they got to hide? and Bellingcats (race) war against RT.

They doorstepped my mother, says Higgins. He claims that RT sent a crappy comedian to visit him in Leicester for an interview, who began visiting addresses linked to him, including his brothers house where his mum opened the door. She was really upset about that. (RT did not reply to is invitation to respond about this.)

Bellingcat has no advertising on its site but allows people to donate. It raises a third of its income from reporting workshops. Among six grants it receives is one to train journalists abroad from the National Endowment for Democracy, which takes funding from the US State Department, and Eliot Higgins says the Foreign Office once paid for a Slovakian journalist to attend a workshop. These links, he says, are twisted by opponents to discredit their work and independence.

Vladimir Putin claims that Bellingcat uses materials of American intelligence agencies, but Higgins says they have never been handed information by spies, adding claims they are funded by the CIA are nonsense.

Talking about the reporting workshops in a 2018 New Yorker article, Higgins said: Were going to start explicitly saying that people from intelligence agencies arent allowed to apply Its awkward for everybody in the room if theres an MI5 person there. However, he says in reality he has never been approached by a British or US spy, and its defence officials from smaller countries being turned away.

Bellingcat has been contacted by the FBI over specific kidnapping cases that weve been working on some people who went missing in Syria just so they could pick our brains, says Higgins but Bellingcat does not routinely provide services for the FBI as they have enough resources to bloody do it themselves.

Having spent his teenage years reading Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein and watching Michael Moore, Higgins identifies with the leftist politics but not the alt-left media which sees everything through the lens of the 2003 Iraq War, and hes happy to work with politicians from the centre right.

He finds it frustrating to hear arguments that Bellingcat focuses purely on Russia, even though were challenging the UKs arms exports to Yemen in court and covering many other stories worldwide, including the baseless QAnon conspiracy that Donald Trump has been fighting a cabal of sex-trafficking cannibals. Hed like to work on China but says a new network of Mandarin-speaking investigators would be needed.

More disheartening for Higgins is uncovering troubling facts about Russia, only to see the UK and its allies fail to take significant action. We have politicians going: Lets do some more sanctions, thatll work. Its honestly pathetic. He rails against leaders who are all just spineless middle managers who dont stand up for anything. They dont really believe in anything apart from them having the job.

Regretting that it has become uncool to speak about Western values, Higgins also points to the Trump fanatics who attacked the US Capitol and two QAnon believers who were elected to Congress.

It is about standing up to stuff, not just laying back and thinking things are going to be OK. Because you look over to the US and see what happens when you do that: extremists become radicalised and start taking over and becoming part of the government. If we dont really stand up for what we believe in, and what our democracies are based on, then we cant expect them to besustainable.

The internets greatest strength bringing like-minded people together is the root problem, he argues, as it also encourages conspiracies to radicalise people and cut them off from reality. Its basically about the integral structure of the internet The way the social media companies work, the way you get recommended stuff from Facebook or Google, is part ofthat.

Its all very well banning thousands of Twitter accounts that propagate QAnon lies, he says, but if the big tech firms arent forced to take more fundamental action, then its just going to happen again and again: well have these communities build up and then theyll burn down a building or kill someone, and then theyll be shut down, and then itll happen again. Until thats addressed, its going to be very difficult.

The problem is that social media companies and Google base their income on this model, and youre basically asking those companies to give up vast amounts of income. Are they really going to do that without a very big stick? I cant imagine what the carrot would be.

We are Bellingcat by Eliot Higgins is released on Thursday (Bloomsbury, 20)

See more here:

Bellingcat's Eliot Higgins on messaging Alexei Navalny to say 'we know who tried to kill you' - iNews

NETFLIX is testing out its own TV channel in France.

The channel is called Netflix Direct and will provide rolling content just like a regular TV channel.

2

The shows and films on the channel will be from Netflix's current library.

It's said to be avaliable for current Netflix subscribers.

Netflix said in statement: "Maybe youre not in the mood to decide, or youre new and finding your way around, or you just want to be surprised by something new and different.

Netflix is said to have chosen France for the Netflix Direct launch because traditional TV is hugely popular there.

2

The streaming brand wants to try and fit in with the culture of not having the pressure of choosing what to watch.

Netflix Direct has started to roll out in some parts of France already.

There's plans to expand it further in December.

This is good news for the millions of French Netflix subscribers.

It could also be useful for people who live in different households but who want to watch a show at the same time.

They could just turn on the channel whenever its playing their preferred TV series and watch the exact same content.

Use Netflix on a computer or laptop? Try these useful shortcuts

Here are some handy keyboard shortcuts...

APP HAZARDDangerous apps parents NEED to know as groomers target bored kids in lockdown

Review

HOME SWEET HOMEApple HomePod Mini review: Epic sound and smarts from tiny Alexa rival

MUSIC TO YOUR EARSEcho Dot deal includes six-months FREE Amazon Music unlimited

BIG SAVERExcellent Black Friday Galaxy S20 deal saves 254 - with NO upfront cost

PHONE HOMEiPhone 12 Mini and Pro Max out TOMORROW here's where you can get them

ZUCK OFFWoman claims she has PROOF Facebook is spying on conversations

In other news, Apple One, thetech giant's big servicesbundle, has launched.

Samsung may befollowing in Apple's footstepsand ditching free chargers and earphones from the box of its next smartphones.

And, Virgin Media is bringing superfast broadband to three million more homes in the UK.

What are your thoughts on the Netflix TV channel? Let us know in the comments...

We pay for your stories! Do you have a story for The Sun Online Tech & Science team? Email us at tech@the-sun.co.uk

Read the original here:

Netflix launches its first TV channel that streams shows just like regular telly - The Sun

As he left for Wisconsin Tuesday, President Trump said this of his doddering opponent:

Biden doesnt know hes alive.

That was just Tuesdays back of the hand. POTUS has also said that the 77-year-old Biden is not all there.

And that hes not playing with a full deck.

Not to mention, He doesnt know where he is.

And, no doubt in the coming days, the president will inform us that Slow Joe is a few fries short of a Happy Meal, not to mention three bricks shy of a load.

But why has Trump come to the conclusion that Joe Biden, never known as the sharpest knife in the drawer or the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree, no longer has anything left on his fastball as hes rounding third on the back nine while approaching the checkout counter?

(Did I miss any? Do you see it easy it is to get into the rhythm of these dismissals?)

Perhaps Trump was watching Joe on TV in Pittsburgh Monday at his live event, in which he appeared in a cage, in what was in fact an almost empty auditorium.

And the Democrat nominee delivered yet another, well, Biden-esque oration:

COVID has taken this year just since the outbreak, has taken more than 100 years look, heres the lives its just its just, I mean, think about it, more lives this year than any other year for the past hundred years.

May we quote you on that, Mr. Vice President?

Every time his handlers lead him gently out of his basement, Dementia Joe steps in it.

Sometimes he confuses his wife and his sister. Or he forgets who he is (Im Joe Bidens husband) or the office hes running for (Senate? President?) or the offices hes held (hes said Congress when he apparently meant the city council).

Hes confused the name of viruses (Luhan, N1-H1). He thinks 40 people were shot at Kent State, not four. Hes said 150 million have been killed by firearms since 2007, that 120 million have died of the virus, that 720 million women are in the U.S. workforce.

He thinks Margaret Thatcher is still alive. He talks about his prior job in the OBiden-Bama administration. He brags that hes known eight presidents, three of them intimately.

On Monday, in Pittsburgh, Biden developed a new verbal tic. He started adding rs to words, on a very random basis.

Here Biden is on the violence in the urban areas. You recall that this is the same rioting and looting and mayhem that the alt-media media and the Democrats have been endlessly assuring us for months were peaceful protests.

But now its all Trumps fault. All those peaceful protests are now an orgy of what we all saw with our own eyes.

Every day George Orwells 1984 becomes more prescient. Here is Biden on how Trump is handling the, uh, peaceful protests:

He doesnt want to shed light, he wants to generate heat and hes stroking violence in our cities.

Stroking violence. Thats what Joe said, he accused the President of stroking violence. He was reading off a Teleprompter and he added an r, to make the word stroking.

Why is Trump stroking violence, Joe?

Since Donald Trump and Mike Prence cant run on their record.

Mike Prence? Of course, during the primary campaign he once called the president Donald Hump, I guess you could say Biden is running against the Hump-Prence ticket.

In his speech, in front of maybe five people, including cameramen, Joe also mentioned building the nations roads, bridges, solar rays.

And Biden bemoaned the declining faith in the birth of the right American future.

He also asked the empty auditorium if anyone thought he had a soft spot for radicals.

If I were one of Dementia Joes handlers, I would make sure he never again uttered the word soft. Thats a key part of a couple of more of those Trumpian phrases, you know, like soft as a grape, or softer than a sneaker full of

Biden is just lucky that the alt-left media averts its eyes from his obvious decline. They even allow him to lie with impunity, as he did Monday when he denied saying that he wanted to ban fracking.

He has said that, repeatedly. But nothing to see here, folks, move along. Thats the verdict from CNN, MSNBC and all the rest of them.

Same thing with his endorsement of defunding the police. Biden denies now that he ever said it, and to be fair, he didnt use the d word. Instead, Biden just said he wanted to reallocate law enforcement budgets.

Ill leave you with one final thought, from Bidens final words at the virtual Democrat convention two weeks ago.

Theres never been anything weve been able to accomplish when weve done it together.

I think Uncle Joe misread unable as able. But if hes talking about his campaign, I can only hope hes right. For once.

Visit link:

Slow Joe Biden is a few fries short of a Happy Meal: Howie Carr - Boston Herald

As the controversy over the restructuring of the University of Theatre and Film rages on, the political debate has escalated into a full-fledged culture war between the government and the opposition. Both sides rule out the possibility of compromise.

Hungarian press roundup bybudapost.eu

Related article

Following the resignation of the leadership of the University of Theater and Film Arts (SZFE), a demonstration was organized by the students on the eve of the new system entering into force. They later barricaded themselves inside the university building in a protest against the forced restructuring, that in their view results in total loss []Continue reading

Magyar Nemzets Bence Apti accuses the outgoing leadership of the University of Theatre and Film (SZFE) of left-wing liberal ideological bias and propaganda. Apti writes that the mad-lib professors at SZFE have incessantly criticized the government and advocated gay marriage and transgender rights as well as migration. In addition, they expected students to follow their ideology and political leanings, whilst silencing right-wing and conservative students. Apti concludes by claiming that it was the previous leadership of the SZFE that launched a political and ideological attack on the university thirty years ago when they took over the institution.

On Vasrnap, Kristf Trombits calls for a regime change in culture. Trombits finds it justified for conservative nationalists to demand a greater presence in cultural institutions. The conservative pundit writes that right-wing individuals purged from cultural life under Communism are still in a minority, as the pre-2010 left-wing liberal governments failed to break the monopoly of Communist cultural elites. Trombits believes that Christian conservatives need to confront the current left-leaning elites in order to claim back their role in Hungarys cultural life.

In Magyar Demokrata, Lszl Szentesi Zldi interprets the resistance to the new SZFE leadership as an effort by liberal, Communist, anarchist, feminist and homosexual elites to preserve their power positions in cultural life. The pro-government commentator also labels the current liberal cultural elite as the successors of Communists. Szentesi Zld proclaims that the battle for cultural domination is no longer a fight between the governing party and the opposition, but rather a matter of Hungarian culture, thinking and way of life. No compromise is therefore possible between the two camps. Either liberals maintain their domination in culture, or those that put the national interest first take over, Szentesi Zld concludes.

444.hus Mrton Bede praises the students of the SZFE for occupying the university in protest against the governments restructuring plans and the new leadership. The liberal commentator thinks that both the editorial staff of Index (who collectively resigned fearing government interference with editorial policies) and SZFE students set a good example for Hungarians as they show that the government should be resisted in an uncompromising way. Bede hopes that the revolt of the students and the resignation of leading faculty members will cause the government a powerful headache and will also become the first sign of a more general resistance against the government.

Magyar Narancs in a first-page editorial also celebrates the SZFE students determination to fight to the last bullet. The liberal weekly suggests that the student revolt may not last long, but even if they fail, they will have shown a good example by trying to resist a government that wants to plunder everything.

On Mrce, Mrk Losoncz goes so far as to claim that the protest of the SZFE students is relevant for the whole country or even the world. The alt-left blogger contends that public universities belong primarily to students, and therefore they should be the ones to decide how the universities are managed, and by whom. Losoncz likens the governments restructuring plan to capitalist privatization, claiming that the government intends to hand over the university to its acolytes and friends. He hopes that students taking part in the protests will taste grassroots democracy and collective decision-making, and also that they will set an example for others, how to resist the government.

Npszavas Pter Nmeth calls for organized resistance against what he calls a piecemeal takeover of all important institutions by the government. The left-wing journalist acknowledges that we are not in 1944, and there is no open dictatorship in Hungary, but thinks nonetheless that those threatened by the government need to join forces, otherwise the government will hunt them down one by one. After the Central European University, the research network of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and now the Theatre and Film University, further institutions will be targeted, he believes.

Related article

A pro-government commentator accuses students occupying the Theatre and Film University of political bias. A left-wing pundit calls for dialogue. Hungarian press roundup bybudapost.eu Background information: students protesting against the restructuring of the University of Theatre and Film occupied the university building on Monday night, and say they intend to stay there. Several faculty members []Continue reading

Featured photo via Theatre and Film University Students Unions Facebook page

Read the original here:

Hungarian Press Roundup: No Compromise in Sight over Theatre and Film University - Hungary Today

President Donald J. Trump participates at a roundtable on donating plasma Thursday, July 30, 2020, at the American Red Cross-National Headquarters in Washington, D.C. (Official White House Photo by Tia Dufour)

DOOMSDAY in America is what President Donald Trump has been scaring people about in his campaign. He warns that if his opponent, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, wins in November, then people will not be safe with all the chaos, violence, and killing happening in the country. He claims only he can fix this and bring law and order back in America.

No self-respecting and thinking Republican, Democrat, or Independent will choose to be blind to the truth because the fact is: all that he is warning voters about is already happening under his watch, in Trumps America.

Trump purposely fans the flame of hate, mistrust, and division in America. He emboldens racists, white supremacists and right-wing extremists. This is his own doing. His words, actions and policies have been inciting the chaos, violence and carnage we are now experiencing.

Falling behind in the polls because of his failed leadership, especially in handling the coronavirus pandemic, he uses the tactic that got him elected in 2016: stoking racial and cultural divide. He is desperate to be re-elected to buy time and escape all the lawsuits waiting to be filed against him for all the crimes and transgressions he has committed against the Constitution and the American people.

The violence, looting, and destruction we now see are perpetrated NOT by the peaceful Black Lives Matter Movement protesters rallying against racism and racial injustice in America, but by opportunists, anarchists, right-wing extremists and white supremacists, some of them coming from other states and cities. This is tactically done so Trump can blame protesters and the Democrats, and cast himself as the savior and the hero for the crises he and his administration have created.

Trump has been using people as pawns and props for his fabricated narrative to appeal to his base and to convince those who are still undecided to vote for him, using lies, fear-mongering and doomsday scenarios.

The violence and crimes happening in America are not mainly perpetrated by peaceful protesters, Black Lives Matter activists, Antifa, immigrants and Democrats as alleged by Trump the so-called bad guys in his playbook that he loves to blame and demonize.Here is the truth about the issue from Anti-Defamation League (ADL). ADL is a leading anti-hate organization that was founded in 1913 in response to an escalating climate of anti-Semitism and bigotry, and its timeless mission is to protect the Jewish people and to secure justice and fair treatment for all.

The facts from the ADLs annual Murder and Extremism report that Trump does not really want you to know:

Of the 42 extremist-related murders in the U.S. last year, 38 were committed by individuals subscribing to various far-right ideologies, including white supremacy.ADL ranked 2019 as the sixth-deadliest year on record for extremist-related violence since 1970.

A total of 17 separate incidents were counted last year. The deadliest, by far, was the August white supremacist shooting spree at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, which left 22 people dead and at least 24 more wounded. Including the El Paso attack, white supremacists were behind 81 percent of the domestic extremist-related murders in 2019.

Right-wing extremists were responsible for 90 percent of such murders in 2019 and for 330 deaths over the course of the last decade, accounting for 76 percent of all domestic extremist-related murders in that time.

Over the last decade, right-wing extremists have been responsible for more than 75 percent of extremist-related murders in this country, said ADL CEO Jonathan A. Greenblatt. This should no longer come as a shock to anyone. Lawmakers, law enforcement and the public need to recognize the grave and dangerous threat posed by violent white supremacy. We cannot begin to defeat this deadly form of hatred if we fail to even recognize it.

The past five years (2015-2019) include four of the deadliest years on record for extremist murders. Last year, the number of extremist-related fatalities in the U.S. declined slightly from the previous year, dropping from 53 fatalities in 2018 to 43 in 2019. But last years total was still higher than 2017, when 41 deaths were recorded.

For the eighth year in a row, firearms were the weapon of choice for domestic extremists.

Guns were involved in 86 percent of last years fatalities. In the past 10 years, 315 of the 435 people (72 percent) killed in the U.S. by extremists were shot to death. The increase in extremist-related shooting sprees in recent years is of particular concern.

These are the people Trump referred to as very fine people after one woman, 32-year-old Heather Heyer, was killed by a white supremacist while she protested at a rally of alt-right groups, who were defending the white supremacists and neo-Nazis in August 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia.

These very fine people in Trumps playbook were neo-Nazis who staged a torchlight parade, unabashedly chanting anti-Semitic slogans, and roughed up students locked in arms around a statue of Thomas Jefferson. When the violence escalated and became fatal, Trump immediately blamed the alt-left, the Antifa, and defended the neo-Nazis.

In May of this year, Black American George Floyd was arrested and killed by a white Minneapolis police officer who knelt on his neck for eight minutes as he was handcuffed and faced down pleading for his life, saying I cant breathe.

In the wake of this brutal murder, Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement protesters rallied in Minneapolis (and in other parts of the country and the world) to fight against racial injustice. Chaos, looting and violence perpetrated by anarchists, opportunists followed. Trump and his administration were quick to blame antifa without bases in fact.

Antifa is not a single group with a clear organizational structure or leader. It is a decentralized network of activists who dont coordinate. Antifa is a monicker for these people whose common goal is opposing anything that they think is racist or fascist.Experts who have studied antifa say there is no evidence that the fringe, amorphous group is driving nationwide protests, and Trump hasnt cited anything specific as he accused them of doing so, theWashington Postreported.

But according to thePost, even as the protests have been overwhelmingly peaceful in recent days, Trump and Barr have made a concerted effort to implicate antifa involvement in them.

The Trump administrations own intelligence reports reveal that most of the violence appears to have been driven by opportunists. A separate DHS document dated June 17 stated, anarchist and anti-government extremists pose the most significant threat of targeted low-level, protest-related assaults against law enforcement. The document did not mention antifa by name and the documents definition of anarchist extremist

appears to exclude the group, thePostfurther reported. Did Trump tell you about this?The president also did not differentiate the Black Lives Matter (BLM)s peaceful protesters from anarchists who infiltrated the rallies, and did not acknowledge what BLM was fighting against racial injustice and police brutality. Trumps malicious attempt to tie antifa with peaceful protesters is an assault to peoples constitutional right of peaceful assembly to a voice out their legitimate grievance in a democracy.

So who is behind this misinformation about antifa? Twitter has shut down multiple accounts that it says were operated by a white supremacist group posing as liberal groups encouraging violence. This account violated our platform manipulation and spam policy, specifically the creation of fake accounts. We took action after the account sent a Tweet inciting violence and broke the Twitter Rules the company said, as reported by CBS News.

Twitter said the white supremacist group Identity Evropa used one fake account, @Antifa_US, with the intent to call for violence in majority white suburbs, maliciously using the name of the Black Lives Matter movement. Did Trump tell you about this?Yet despite all of this, Trump even wanted to declare antifa as a domestic terrorist group.

Have you ever heard the president denounce white supremacists, right extremists and vigilantes subscribing to far-right ideologies for the violence and deaths they have perpetrated despite all the facts? Did he ever call for the right extremists, and white supremacists to be declared as domestic terrorists? No. He even defends them.

And what about the supposed peaceful protests against the white police officer who shot an unarmed black man seven times at the back, witnessed by his kids in the car in Kenosha, Wisconsin on August 23?

TheNew York Postreported that of the 175 arrested during protests, a total of 105 were not from the city. They came from 44 different cities, including 17-year old Kyle Rittenhouse, the teen accused of shooting dead two men and seriously injuring a third with an assault rifle.

The teenage shooter, along with his mother, had also allegedly crossed state lines and was arrested in his home in Illinois. What were they doing in Kenosha, Wisconsin armed with military-style weapons? The report said police seized more than 20 firearms during the protests, leading to numerous charges for carrying concealed weapons. And did you see the video of the police ignoring this teen as he walked around with his weapon amid the chaos?

And what did Trump do? He defended the teen, who we now know is a Trump supporter. He attended a Trump rally in Iowa, seating in the front row. This kid is not old enough to vote, smoke nor drink but was already in possession of an assault weapon that has killed innocent people.

When Trump was asked if he would condemn the actions of vigilantes like the teen Kyle Rittenhouse, he ignored the question and claimed Rittenhouse probably wouldve been killed if he had acted differently, BuzzFeed reported.

Rittenhouse idolized the police and posted pictures of him on social media posing with guns, in support of Blue Lives Matter. How ironic that he chose to turn an otherwise peaceful protest to tragedy with his knee-jerk vigilante approach to discord.

The president refused to condemn the actions of vigilantes like Rittenhouse even after denouncing the shooting of a right-wing demonstrator in a pro-Trump rally in Portland on Monday, August 31.

This prompted Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden to challenge Trump in a statement: The deadly violence we saw overnight in Portland is unacceptable. I condemn this violence unequivocally. I condemn violence of every kind by anyone, whether on the left or the right. And I challenge Donald Trump to do the same.

Throughout the Republican National Convention, Trump has been branding and selling himself to be the president who will bring back law and order in the United States. He failed to do it as president now, why should we believe he can solve this crisis when re-elected?

Trump accused the Democrats of spreading hate, when in fact, his rhetoric of hate, prejudice and divisiveness against people of color, immigrants, Muslims and his political opponents is the one that has led to the surge of hate crimes in the United States.Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler nailed it when he said:

Its you who have created the hate and the division. Its you who have not found a way to say the names of Black people killed by police officers even as people in law enforcement have. And its you who claimed that White supremacists are good people.

Your campaign of fear is as anti-democratic as anything youve done to create hate and vitriol in our beautiful country.

* * *

Gel Santos Relos has been in news, talk, public service and educational broadcasting since 1989 with ABS-CBN and is now serving the Filipino audience using different platforms, including digital broadcasting, and print, and is working on a new public service program for the community. You may contact her through email at gelrelos@icloud.com, or send her a message via Facebook at Facebook.com/Gel.Santos.Relos.

Gel Santos Relos is the anchor of TFCs Balitang America. Views and opinions expressed by the author in this columnare solely those of the authorand not of Asian Journal and ABS-CBN-TFC. For comments, go to http://www.TheFil-AmPerspective.com and http://www.facebook.com/Gel.Santos.Relos

More:

[OPINION] Law and order president? The chaos and violence Trump wants you to be fearful and hateful of is happening now under his watch - Asian...

On Aug. 15, President Donald Trump stood before a podium in the lobby of his New York City home. Trump was ostensibly there to talk about infrastructure, but the conversation swiftly turned to Charlottesville and the administration's failure to appropriately handle the fallout of the events of the weekend before. A heated Trump brought back his much-derided "many sides" argument from a few days prior . . . and then took it to a whole new level, asking the members of the press gathered before him: "What about the alt-left that came charging at, as you say, at the alt-right?"

Let's set the record straight here and now: there is no alt-left; there has never been an alt-left, and there will never be an alt-left. And there's a good reason why.

The phrase "alternative right" first entered the public consciousness in a real way in 2008 when Taki's Magazine published "The Decline and Rise of the Alternative Right." The outrageously highfalutin speech was given by conservative philosopher (and son of Jewish immigrants) Paul Gottfried to the H.L. Mencken Club, an organization that in and of itself has nationalist-leaning ideologies. Two years later, the questionable association would be concreted when noted white supremacist Richard B. Spencer who had long been hopping around the conservative blogosphere, facing job troubles due to his extremist views used it as the domain name for his very own editorial website: AlternativeRight.com.

Spencer and like-minded hate-speech enthusiast and white supremacist Jared Taylor would use the shorthand "alt-right" to describe their following and the "intellectual" movement that they claim to have given birth to. Fueled by the propaganda issued by the National Policy Institute think tank an organization in which they both sat at the top of the org chart and by their respective websites, the two men would slowly nurture a burgeoning neo-Nazi movement in the darkest depths of the internet. Spencer was not satisfied with his underlying claims of ownership of the phrase and would go on to launch AltRight.com in 2017.

For many, the first time they confronted the hatred and rage of the group was during the 2016 election when the alt-right coalesced behind then-candidate Donald Trump. But it's important to recognize that there is a difference between the right, conservatives, and even an "alternative" conservative movement and the neo-Nazis and white supremacists who Taylor and Spencer represent. Therefore, it's crucial that we are clear in our usage of these phrases when identifying groups of Americans and meticulous about the ideas and actions that we attribute to them. Richard Spencer wants his white nationalist following to be called the alt-right so that they don't have to be called what they are: hate-filled racists who seek to add inequality and despair to each and every conversation on the national scale.

And so we come to the "alt-left." While some have tried to equate the alt-right to a left-leaning counterpart, one underlying fact has made this a false equivalent: the alt-right is a movement fueled by sentiments that have been relegated by modern thought to the deepest, darkest caverns for their impossibly hateful rhetoric. Alt-left, for all intents and purposes, is merely an epithet used by these individuals to indicate that they are not the worst, to pretend that those who oppose their views are just as bad.

But let's dispel of that notion right here and now: there is no alt-left. There is nothing worse than the alt-right. They deserve to stand alone in the unique category of evil that has no counterpart. There is no place for white nationalism, white supremacy, neo-Nazism, or the KKK in 2017. And no amount of deflection about some countermovement on the left, right, or anywhere else can ever change that fact.

View original post here:

Here's Why You Should Never Use the Term "Alt-Left" - POPSUGAR

After working my usual day, I arrived home to find that three people in our house had received our "official absentee ballot applications" from Ohio Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose, who does not like to be photographed with his eyes wide shut in public meetings in Hillsboro.

To be clear, not one us had requested an "official absentee ballot application." For the vast majority of the last 41 years, I have voted in person in either Highland County or Adams County. You could, as I told a former mayor years ago, look it up.

I have not opened my "official absentee ballot application," nor do I plan to. I know where and how to vote, thank you very much.

Upon receiving the "official absentee ballot application," I couldn't help but recall a recent story by the alt-left NPR. (By the way, my MacBook Pro dictionary recognizes "alt-right" but not "alt-left." No surprise, there.)

In a June 25, story (https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/06/25/883441640/nearly-1-4-billion-in-coronavirus-relief-payments-sent-to-dead-people), NPR reported that nearly $1.4 billion in coronavirus relief payments were sent to dead people.

The Government Accountability Office said the error involved almost 1.1 million checks and direct deposits sent to ineligible Americans. The payments were part of the COVID-19 package passed by Congress in March and known as the CARES Act.

Reasonable minds must wonder how many unrequested "official absentee ballot applications" have been sent to dead people. Without question, we will be assured that there's a distinction between these government mailings.

Signatures must match. (Not true. After decades of writing notes during public meetings, I am fortunate if I sign my name the same way more than 10 times in a row. That's why I always vote in person with a valid ID, including using my state fishing license just for fun one time in Tranquility.)

There will be checks and balances. Sure there will. Just like the $1.4 billion in coronavirus relief payments that were sent to dead people.

Unrequested official absentee ballot applications are the same as absentee voting and are not to be confused with universal vote by mail. Wrong.

The traditional definition of absentee voting involves a voter who, is for some reason, unable to make it to the polls on Election Day. The voter obtains a form to request a ballot, fills that form out with his/her excuse for not being able to vote in person and sends it to the state. The state sends the voter a ballot and the voter finally returns the ballot with his or her vote.

The official absentee ballot application that we and, no doubt, millions of other Ohioans received, allows voters to receive a mail-in ballot without providing a reason why they need one, much less asking for one.

Voters ought to at least have some skin in the game when exercising their constitutional right to vote.

Universal vote by mail is a great opportunity for fraud.

* * *

Given that the Nov. 3 general election is closer than we may think, and given that letters to the editor of this newspaper in support of some and in opposition to others are inevitable, let's get this out of the way now.

For the record, I edited portions of a recent letter that disparaged someone's political opponent. As I told the author of that letter, I've done this job longer than most people in southern Ohio, and I've learned that political letters to the local newspaper are best when written in support of Candidate A, rather in opposition to Candidate B.

To the letter writer's credit, he understood. That policy is a two-way street, too. I really don't care about the letter after your name. That doesn't impress me.

* * *

In recent news, one Highland County public official deserves some well-deserved recognition. Lord knows, many public officials over the years have begged that I not mention them. No good can come from that, given my own track record of endorsements and other political musings for the last 30 years.

Nonetheless, Highland County Prosecuting Attorney Anneka Collins does deserve some credit for standing on principle.

First, her office worked diligently to have approximately $30,000 in taxes paid by a North Shore Drive business. That issue was half-arsed addressed a decade ago to no avail. Counselor Collins corrected this. Thank you.

Last week, county commissioner Terry Britton pointed out that State Rep. Shane Wilkin said the State Controlling Board had approved the release of $175 million to help local communities with the cost of COVID-19 pandemic-related expenses, including $501,166.42 for Highland County. This was in support of unbudgeted administrative leave funds for the county engineer's office.

Im just too conservative to vote yes for this, Collins said. If you guys want to vote, we can argue this all day long. Im not going to change my position.

Collins said that as long as the prosecutors office isnt at a shortfall, Im not asking for any more money, because that money can be used somewhere else.

Indeed.

Other counties have considered small businesses that are hurting before adding to the coffers of already bloated government budgets, whose salaries, wages and benefits far exceed the family per-capita incomes in Highland County.

Four Republicans voted to shake the federal "free-money tree," all three commissioners and Highland County Auditor Bill Fawley. (What is the federal deficit these days, anyway? Republicans used to care about that.)

Highland County has one public servant working hard to recoup $30,000 and four others who are spending twice that before the first check is cashed.

Good for Anneka Collins for speaking truth to power.

Rory Ryan is publisher and owner of The Highland County Press, Highland County's only locally owned and operated newspaper.

See the rest here:

With Republicans like these, who needs Ds? - The Highland County Press

RESIDENT Evil fans will be pleased to hear a new TV series based on the video game franchise is coming to Netflix.

The streaming platform has revealed some details about the live-action adaptation.

The @NXOnNetflix account tweeted: "When the Wesker kids move to New Raccoon City, the secrets they uncover might just be the end of everything.

"Resident Evil, a new live action series based on Capcoms legendary survival horror franchise, is coming to Netflix."

For those who don't know, the Wesker kids referred to are the daughters of the main villain from the first five video games.

He's known as Albert Wesker.

1

Netflix added: "The 8 x 1 hour episode season will be helmed by Andrew Dabb (Supernatural), Bronwen Hughes (The Walking Dead, The Journey Is the Destination) will direct the first two episodes."

The first episode will be called "Welcome to Raccoon City".

According to Deadline, the series will feature two timelines.

The first timeline will reportedly focus on the two fourteen year Wesker sisters who move into a manufactured, corporate town.

This is where they learn a potentially world destroying secret.

The second timeline will apparently feature a virus stricken world with a dwindling human population, where the sisters are separated.

With Resident Evil fans already tweeting excitedly, it is possible that the series could become as popular as Stranger Things.

We don't have a date for when the series will air but seeing as the first episode is written, we can hope they'll start filming soon.

Use Netflix on a computer or laptop? Try these useful shortcuts

Here are some handy keyboard shortcuts...

CHANGING PLACESFind YOUR town 750million years ago with mind-blowing Earth map

Hot Deals

LISTEN UPSpotify is giving away FREE Google Nest Mini smart speakers to subscribers

SPEAK EASYActivate these 4 WhatsApp settings NOW to stop snoopers including face-lock

ROCKY HORRORNASA tracking huge asteroid which will 'hit Earth's orbit next month'

TINY-SAURUS REXT-Rex may have weighed HALF of previous estimates coming in at 7 tonnes

FREE NETFLIXWatch Netflix for FREE with no subscription thanks to a global promotion

In other news, Disney fans are fuming after the entertainment giant announced its live-action remake of Mulan will cost up to 26 to stream in the UK.

Gamers will have to pay as much as 449 for the PlayStation 5, a new leak suggests.

And, Disney recentlyreleased a trailerfor its latest Star Wars TV series, "The Bad Batch".

What's your favourite thing to watch on Netflix? Let us know in the comments...

We pay for your stories! Do you have a story for The Sun Online Tech & Science team? Email us at tech@the-sun.co.uk

Read more:

Resident Evil survival horror TV series is coming to Netflix and fans think its the next Stranger Things - The Sun

Photo: Universal History Archive Images/Universal Images Group via Getty

Over the past few years, online-publishing platforms have made it easy for users to charge a subscription fee for newsletters. As Facebook, Google, and private equity have laid waste to print media nationwide, these platforms have given rise to a new publishing economy, in which any writer with a dedicated following might be able to make a living. Of all the platforms out there, Substack, launched in 2017, has become the preferred tool for writers striking out on their own. According to the company, more than 100,000 subscribers now pay for at least one newsletter, and the platforms top users collect hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue, which, in some cases, amounts to more than they might earn as staff writers at legacy publications.

Substack collects a 10 percent fee from all subscriptions, which allows it to maintain its one sacred oath: no advertisements. Like traditional media, publishing platforms have been crushed under the pressure advertisers put on traffic expectations and Substack sees its commitment to remaining ad-free as insurance against venture capitalists looking to bulk up or scrap publishers for parts. But that doesnt mean Substack hasnt gotten attention from investors. The company raised $15.3 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz last year, some of which has been used to provide fellowships and sizable advances to writers, and it the company is also considering using the some of the money to provide its users with legal and editorial guidance.

The newsletter trend is bigger than independent journalists. Print veterans like Graydon Carter and Jonah Goldberg have styled their new publications staffed with editors and funded by investments from private equity as newsletters. And some Substack users are beginning to join forces, bundling their subscriptions at a discount, to offer their readers something that resembles a traditional publication (and that, perhaps, can bring together writers across the ideological spectrum). The question may no longer be whether readers are willing to pay for hyper-focused newsletters, but how many are willing to do so. Substack CEO Chris Best thinks the appetite is great.

Weve developed this habit of outsourcing everything were reading to our Facebook and Twitter feeds. Paying for writers that you trust is a way to take back control, Best said. People are ready to take back their mind.

National Review editor Jonah Goldberg and Weekly Standard alum Stephen Hayes founded this conservative newsletter, which they describe as a center-right Atlantic.

For: Your uncle who rails against Trump but probably wont vote for Biden.Launch: October 2019.Cost: $10 a month.What you get: Regular columns from Goldberg, Hayes, David French, and a collection of editors and writers drawn from The Weekly Standard, The Bulwark, and various conservative think tanks.

Heather Cox Richardson, a professor at Boston College, contextualizes todays news with American history.

For: Ken Burns fans.Launch: November 2019.Cost: $5 a month.What you get: Richardsons newsletter started as a regular Facebook post in which she offered historical context for Trumps Ukraine scandal and subsequent impeachment. Now, readers wake to a roundup of the previous days news delivered in the clear-eyed language of an email from your smartest friend, who happens to have a Ph.D. from Harvard and has spent decades researching American history and politics.

Matt Taibbi moves his alt-left blogging from Rolling Stone to a sort-of-weekly newsletter.

For: Gonzo nostalgics and Russiagate skeptics.Launch: April 2020.Cost: $5 a month.What you get: Taibbis irreverent columns are just as critical of corporate greed and the barbarism of Trumps GOP as they are of anti-racism initiatives and cancel culture, which, according to Taibbi, are symptoms of the New Lefts tendency to divide people between victimizers and victims (he adds an asterisk as a sarcastic scarlet letter to the name of anyone who has been canceled).

Bill Bishop, who formerly wrote newsletters for Axios and the New York Times, strikes out on his own with a daily newsletter on all things China.

For: Day traders and retired spooks.Launch: October 2017.Cost: $15 a month.What you get: Bishop breaks down the days essential eight most-important stories, from a Xi Jinping inspection tour, to Huawei, to TikTok. Bishop knows when to be skeptical of Chinas propaganda and when to be skeptical of propaganda about China.

Former New York Magazine columnist Andrew Sullivan returns to blogging.

For: People who despise Trump but think wokeness is also a threat to the American experiment.Launch: July 2020.Cost: $5 a month.What you get: A cosmopolitan conservatives analysis of race, gender, sexuality, religion, and class, sprinkled with deconstructions of Trumpism.

A former staff writer at The New Republic, Emily Atkin writes an impassioned, deeply reported newsletter on climate change four times a week.

For: People who are the right amount of angry (outraged) about climate change.Launch: September 2019.Cost: $8 a month.What you get: Atkin breaks news, as she did recently when she discovered Democratic congressman Tim Ryan had taken $10,000 from a corrupt fossil-fuel company despite signing the No Fossil Fuel Money pledge. Atkins work has earned her about 2,500 subscribers and, according to The New York Times, she expects to gross $175,000 this year.

Boston-based writer and reporter Luke ONeil.

For: Your friend who laments the death of alt-weeklies.Cost: $6.65 a month.Launch: July, 2018.What you get: ONeil packages his columns in stream-of-consciousness reports that detail the many reasons reasonable people have to be angry right now. His reports are filled with accompanying exhibits and tweets and he frequently includes original interviews and guest posts. ONeil has said he is on track to make $100,000 annually.

When G/O Media folded the news site Splinter, eight journalists started a WordPress site. In March, they switched to Substack and in July launched a paid subscription.

For: Your friend who laments the death of Splinter.Cost: $8 a month.Launch: March 2020.What you get: A leftist politics newsletter thats heavy on the labor beat.

ThinkProgress founder Judd Legum reinvents his liberal news and opinion blog as a newsletter.

For: Your cousin who canvasses for Dems.Cost: $6 a month.Launch: July, 2018.What you get: Want a comprehensive guide to the Trump Administrations attack on the USPS? Or an investigation into Sarah Palins Facebook grift? Popular Information has you covered.

Anonymously written analysis on investing, restructuring, and bankruptcies.

For: Anyone looking for a break from GMAT prep.Cost: $49 a month.Launch: November 2016.What you get: Two newsletters a week provide a skim of corporate bankruptcies and disruptions in the countrys largest industries and offer analyses on everything from airlines and J. Crew in the time of Covid to WeWorks epic implosion.

Business, technology, and media analysis from Ben Thompson.

For: New York tech investors.Launch: March 2013.Cost: $12 a month.What you get: Thompsons daily columns cover everything from the Big Four, to venture capital, to the future of business and media. Thompson is considered by many to be the godfather of the modern paid-subscription newsletter.

Gender, politics, and whatever else is on her mind that day.

For: Anyone in search of a friend.Launch: March 2013.Cost: $5 a year, minimum.What you get: Like Thompson, Friedman is a newsletter pioneer and has spent the better part of the last decade winning readers over with insightful writing and reporting, reading recommendations, and doodled pie charts.

Magazine legend Graydon Carters weekly newsletter picks up where he left off at Vanity Fair, albeit with a smaller platform and a tighter budget.

For: Globe-trotting boomers and bankers who buy art.Launch: July 2019.Cost: $9.99 a month.What you get: Culture, crime, travel, politics from magazine luminaries (including many Vanity Fair alums). The newsletter is a weekly window into Carters proclivities vacations on Lake Como, designer suit recommendations. It all smacks of an era when magazine editors could afford such decadence.

Charlotte Ledger: North Carolina business news, by Tony Mecia.The Dog and Pony Show: Tennessee news and gossip, by Cari Wade Gervin. Street Justice: Washington, D.C., newsletter, by Gordon Chaffin. Importantville: Indiana politics, by Adam Wren.

ParentData: Evidence based parenting advice, by Emily Oster.Hola Papi!: Witty LGBTQ advice column, by John Paul Brammer.BIG: Thinking on monopolies, by Matt Stoller.Margins: The intersection of business and technology, by Ranjan Roy and Can Duruk.

*This article appears in the August 31, 2020, issue ofNew York Magazine. Subscribe Now!

Daily news about the politics, business, and technology shaping our world.

Continue reading here:

Checking In With the Newsletter Economy - New York Magazine

If the vision outlined in the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 for higher education institutions is realised, it will not only spell disaster for the country but will be Prime Minister Narendra Modis worst legacy. (I am not using these words lightly but with full responsibility.)

This is sad because in the last five years, Modi government has taken numerous steps to improve higher education such as providing unprecedented levels of academic and financial autonomy to Indian Institutes of Management, graded autonomy to institutions of higher learning based on their performance, freeing top 20 institutions 10 public and 10 private the so-called Institutions of Eminence from excess regulatory load, launching Massive Open Online Courses (MOCCs) under SWAYAM initiative where teachers of top institutions provide free courses, opening seven new IIMs, six new IITs, establishing a agency to give financial support to institutions, setting up a new regulatory council, the National Testing Agency and so on.

The government is also trying to achieve some level of internationalisation of its university spaces - by attracting foreign teachers and foreign students. The Study in India programme launched in 2018, for instance, envisions to increase foreign student strength in India to over two lakh by 2023 from present 40,000.

But if NEP 2020 is implemented, all this good work wont matter.

Most dangerous idea

The NEP states that, By 2040, all higher education institutions (HEIs) shall aim to become multidisciplinaryinstitutions and shall aim to have larger student enrolments preferably in thousands, for optimal use of infrastructure and resources, and for the creation of vibrant multidisciplinary communities. This - transforming all higher education institutions into large multidisciplinary universities - is the highest recommendation of the NEP.

Even engineering institutions, such as IITs, will move towards more holistic and multidisciplinary education with more arts and humanities, the NEP states.

NEP justifies this approach in two ways:

First, it eludes to ancient Indian universities such as Takshashila, Nalanda et al which were multidisciplinary institutions in nature. This notion of a knowledge of manyarts or what in modern times is often called the liberal arts (i.e., a liberal notion of the arts) must be brought back to Indian education, as it is exactly the kind of education that will be required for the 21st century, the NEP reasons.

Second, NEP says that as per assessments of educational approaches in undergraduate education, mixing arts and humanities with Science, Technology, Engineering, Management (STEP) courses leads to positive learning outcomes, including increased creativity and innovation, critical thinking and higher-order thinking capacities, problem-solving abilities, teamwork, communication skills, more in-depth learning and mastery of curricula across fields, increases in social and moral awareness, etc., besides general engagement and enjoyment of learning, research.

Nalanda and Takshashila were not successful because they were multidisciplinary in nature. Moreover, touting liberal arts part education as something that is required in the 21st century is a liberal opinion, not a fact.

And it is bizarre to think that learning (say) sociology along with (say) coding will improve learning outcomes, critical thinking and accrue to the students other assorted great benefits the NEP has listed out. This reasoning is so poor that it doesnt merit discussion but contempt.

In fact, injection of liberal arts into anything and everay thing, which seems to be the overarching focus of NEP 2020, will not lead to establishment of even a single Nalanda but will certainly help create thousands of JNUs throughout the country.

After independence, the Indian State took a different approach of setting up higher education institutions than the western world. It established institutions focussing on different areas: IITs are for engineering, IIMs for management, IISc for Sciences, NLUs for Law, Jawaharlal Nehru University focussing on liberal arts and so on.

These were supposed to be institutes for specific purposes rather than universities which mean everything for everyone. In hindsight, this has proved to be a boon for the country, especially in 2020 when we are witnessing some of the finest education institutions in the West fall victim to alt-left politics, activism and values thanks to the liberal arts education chicken finally coming home to roost.

We are seeing the same in India - in places like JNU, Jadavpur university, Jamia Milia Islamia, Aligarh Muslim University, etc. But the reason why we are facing only scores of alt-left mutinies and not thousands is precisely because of our unique higher education setup which has kept STEM institutions (the places of excellence) segregated from liberal arts ones thereby providing the much-needed inoculation against bad ideas.

Now, NEP wants India to ape the West and inject arts and humanities in IITs, IIMs, IIScs, etc. We will end up with little JNUs in these top-quality institutes known for their academic excellence.

Of course, it is no ones case that IITs, IIMs et al shouldnt come up with courses which blend their specialism with some social sciences. For example, IIIT-Delhi started a B.Tech course in 2017 which would be a blend of Computer Science and Social Sciences. The idea is to producesocial scientists who can understand and use computational technologies.

This is a unique, rational and better approach for Indian institutes like IITs, IIMs to take based on the institutions needs rather than the one size fits all approach advocated by the NEP.

Second worst idea

On top of making every HEI a multidisciplinary one, the NEP envisions that all HEIs will gradually move towards full autonomy - academic and administrative. Additionally, the autonomy of public institutions will be backed by adequate public financial support and stability. Now, imagine a thousand JNUs, scores of them funded by public monies, enjoying unprecedented autonomy in selecting faculties, students, management, courses and curriculum, etc.

Giving autonomy to IITs, IIMs, IISc, etc is great because more freedom leads to more excellence as there are no political agendas to push through funding certain areas and the research is chiefly driven by market needs and aspirations of brilliant minds studying there. But autonomy in liberal arts hijacked by one ideology (which is inevitable) is a recipe for disaster.

The narratives and politics will drive the research and not the other way round. For those who question the inevitability of left controlling all higher education institutions should only look at the United States where conservatives dont lack resources or the numbers but have never been able to enjoy any kind of influence in the universities. The situation of the so-called right in India (or whatever other name Dharmic side wants to use) is many times worse.

Another bad idea

Just as the NEP talks about opening schools in areas with high populations of SCs/STs/minorities, it has similar plans for higher education as well. Such ghettoisation will lead to creation of caste/religion based institutions and will be detrimental to national unity and integrity. But unlike the schools, the NEP doesnt mention that there should be focus on hiring faculties from certain communities. This is a relief.

However, it directs that all governments and HEIs will have to

a) Provide more financial assistance and scholarships to socio-economically disadvantaged students

b) Make admissions processes more inclusive

c) Make curriculum more inclusive

It is yet to be seen how the term inclusive is defined but prima facie this opens a can of worms. The NEP is handing over a big Social Justice tool in the hands of the government which can be wielded in a very harmful manner. It is one thing for the government to directs public funded institutions to do something but entirely different to direct private ones to implement its agenda. It also doesnt gel well with its vision of autonomy for these institutions.

Is there anything positive for higher education in NEP?

Of course, there is.

NEP bats for giving institutions and faculty autonomy to innovate on matters of curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment within a broad framework of higher education qualifications. This is great idea in principle.

Mainstreaming of vocational training and education into credible higher education institutions is a much needed move. Providing vocational courses through HEIs is a smart move that will not only greatly improve the quality of skilling courses but also encourage more people to take them up. Also, HEIs are in much better position to forge partnerships with industry and design relevant courses based on skills which are in demand in the market.

Breaking up of 3/4 year duration degrees into 1/2 year certificate/diploma courses is also a great improvement. Students will be able to exit from 3-4 year duration bachelors degree courses after one or two years, with a diploma or certificate in a domain, with an option to continue and finish their degree later. Students couldnt have asked for a better arrangement in this age of lifelong learning. Since academic credits will be digitally scores under Academic Bank of Credits, students will be able to collect these from different HEIs as well. This combined with vocational courses in HEIs are the top two best recommendations in the NEP.

Setting up of National Research Foundation is a welcome move though its effectiveness is in questions given that the implementation will be in hands of just another government department.

Regulatory environment may see an improvement as the NEP promises to give importance to self disclosure over inspector raj and also intends to make it easier for HEIs to set shop.

However, the damage potential of the bad idea of converting every HEI into a multidisciplinary institution cant be underestimated. Good ideas such as vocational training, institutional autonomy or flexibility of curriculum wont matter much if liberal arts education get a foothold in every institution.

There is not much to be gained from vocational course if you are brainwashed enough to believe that internship is child labour (as the JNU Student Union President recently called it).

If someone has put a time bomb in the basement of the house, it doesnt matter if you are hanging nice paintings on the first floor.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi should take a really hard look and reverse his governments stance before it is too late. Otherwise, three decades down the line, people will remember the destruction of Indias premier education institutions via this NEP as his worst legacy.

The rest is here:

Say Goodbye to IITs, IIMs Et Al? NEP 2020 Will Convert Indias Top Institutions Into JNU Copies - Swarajya

On 15 August 2017, as President Trumpdoubled downon his earlier position that the violence at a neo-Nazi rally in Virginia that left a woman dead was the fault of both sides, he used a term that has only recently come into existence: the alt-left.

Responding to a question about calls to condemn the movement known as the alt-right, Trump responded, What about the alt-left that came charging at, as you say, at the alt-right?

So what, exactly, is the alt-left? Unlike the term alt-right, which was created by members of an ideology by its supporters(in order to make more palatable to the mainstream what had previously been considered radical views),the term alt-left appears primarily in social media and news reports as a term leveled against an inconsistently defined group of people with liberal ideologies in an effort to imply a parallel of extremism on both sides.

Use of the term alt-left gained ground quickly online (according to Google Trends charts) when conservative Fox News host Sean Hannityused the term in adebatewith BuzzFeed writer Rosie Gray over media coverage of the so-called alt-right. Searches for the term spiked again directly after Trump used it in his 14 August 2017 press conference:

It is unclear if Hannity himself coined the term, but we could not find widespread use of the term on reddit or4chan, a web form popular with the alt-right, prior to his 22 November 2016 use of it.

There was prior to Hannitys use of the term a web site founded in 2015 (AltLeft.com) that espouses a philosophy that it describes as the left of the AltRight. It presents a philosophy ideologically closer to the actual alt-right than the leftists with which the alt-right stands in opposition, based on an archivedversionof the site:

The AltLeft exists in that small space where Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan begin to meet. Its that point in time where Mussolini ditched marxism and moved toward fascism. The question is, can the AltLeft be divorced from political correctness and white ethnomasochism?

This appears to be a small group, and is most likely not what Trump meant by the alt-left.

This does not mean that people who could be considered left-leaning do not use the term. For example, James Wolcott, a cultural critic for Vanity Fair, argued in March 2017that the alt-left provides a mirror image distortion: the same loathing of Clinton, rejection of identity politics, and itch for a reckoning. Here, as in nearly all of its other uses, however, it is a term leveled against a group from which the writer is separate. Washington Post reporter Aaron Blake articulated this in a 1 December 2016 story:

The difference between alt-right and alt-left is that one of them was coined by the people who comprise the movement and whose movement is clearly ascendant; the other was coined by its opponents and doesnt actually have any subscribers.

This differs substantially from the derivation of the term alt-right, which was either invented or co-invented by white nationalist Richard Spencer. The term found a home on the internet in 2010 when Spencer founded the blog AlternativeRight.com. Though heterogeneous, the alt-right broadly represents a collection of far-right ideologies that primarily object to multiculturalism and support racially-based policies that explicitly and implicitly serve to benefit white people.

Put more simply, the term alt-right does refer to an actual movement, while the term alt-left is primarily a rhetorical device used either to imply an equivalency between radicals on the left and on the right or for left-leaning moderates to criticize those those who they see as spoilers.

However, now that the president has used the term, those with an interest in undermining the left or antifa groups (anti-fascist protestors) will likely push its use. Days after Trumps press conference, a reddit user created the forum /Alt_Left_Violence/ (which has no posts as of press time). Users of the 4Chan /pol/ forum, from which many dubious political blogs are sourced, have already promoted the term:

THE PRESIDENT HAS GIVEN US A LABEL TO USE

NOW IS OUR CHANCE, DON WENT UP TO BAT FOR US AND IS TAKING HITS FOR US, DONT LET IT GO TO WASTE

REDPILL THE NORMIES ON THE ALT-LEFT

THEY ARE COMPARING THE ALT-LEFT TO WWII VETS

SHOW THEM THE TRUE FACE OF THE ALT-LEFT

IM TAKLING ANTIFA RIOTS, VIOLENT ATTACKS ON INNOCENT PEOPLE, THE WHOLE KIT AND CABOODLE

FIRE UP YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA SOCK PUPPETS, SEARCH FOR THE TERM ALT-LEFT

LOOK FOR POSTS COMPARING THEM TO WWII VETS

THEN REDPILL THE NORMALFAGS

The term will likely continue to be a moving target, depending on who the person using it is seeking to discredit, and thus cannot yet be accurately defined.

In fact, less than an hour after we originally posted this article, alt-right social media figure Mike Cernovich demonstrated its lack of meaning better than we ever could have in a tweet blaming a 17 August 2017 terrorist attack in Spain on the alt-left and conflating leftists with radical Islamic terrorists two groups that have absolutely nothing in common:

Go here to see the original:

Is There an 'Alt-Left'? - Snopes.com

President Trump on Tuesday said "there is another side" to the violence in Charlottesville, specifically calling out the "alt-left."

"What about the alt-left that came charging at, what you say, the alt-right?" Mr. Trump asked. "Do they have any semblence of guilt? What about the fact they charging with clubs in their hands, swinging clubs, do they have any problem? I think they do."

What is the "alt-left"? Let's start with the basics.

It's the group Mr. Trump is partly blaming for the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia over the weekend. Except it's not really a group, and more of just an epithet that's gained currency in some conservative and liberal circles to describe leftists, particularly "Antifa" groups that sometimes skirmish with right-wing demonstrators.

The term "alt-right" was coined by the white supremacist Richard Spencer, who used it to describe people like himself. The alt-right is a loosely defined movement that rejects traditional conservatism and typically embraces a white supremacist viewpoint.

It is usually used to encompass far-right activists who reject the idea of racial egalitarianism and equality of the sexes. Some alt-right adherents, such as Spencer, also hope for the dissolution of the United States and the creation of an "ethnostate" for non-Jewish people of European heritage.

Mr. Trump's chief strategist Steve Bannon once said that the news website he used to run, Breitbart, was "the platform for the alt-right." But that was before internal disagreements within the alt-right created what some adherents call the "alt-light," which is less extreme in its views and tends to distance itself from the outright white supremacy of people like Spencer and David Duke, a former KKK leader. Both Spencer and Duke were present at the Charlottesville protests.

The alt-left, meanwhile, is a purely pejorative description. Few, if any, people on the left claim to be part of anything called the alt-left, as the term was created in an attempt to demean leftists and imply they are morally equivalent to the alt-right.

It grew out of the conservative media. In particular, Fox News host Sean Hannity, an outspoken supporter of Mr. Trump, frequently references the alt-left on Twitter.

In a November appearance on Hannity's show, former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci said the alt-left think Trump voters "are misogynists and misanthropes and negative people."

But conservatives aren't the only ones talking about the alt-left. Some liberal commentators have employed the term as well when writing about left-wing activists and politicians. For example, an April article in New York magazine identified Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, French politician Jean-Luc Melenchon,, and British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn as "evidence of an active contemporary 'alt-left.'"

Liberals and conservatives tend to use "alt-left" somewhat differently, however. Hannity will often use the term to describe mainstream liberals, while liberals sometimes use it to describe socialists, social democrats, and other far-left groups.

The people who arrived to protest white supremacists at the rally were mostly clergy, students, and residents of Charlottesville, according to CBS News' Paula Reid. And the vast majority of them were unarmed, despite Mr. Trump's claims to the contrary.

While there were some Antifa protesters with batons, but they were vastly outnumbered by armed white supremacists. The white supremacists committed the worst acts of violence at the rally, including one who appeared to deliberately plow into counter-protesters with a car, killing one woman.

Excerpt from:

What is the "alt-left" Trump was talking about? - CBS News

President Trump angrily denounced the so-called alt-left at a news conference on Tuesday, claiming that the group attacked followers of the so-called alt-right at a white supremacist rally that exploded into deadly violence in Charlottesville, Va., on Saturday.

What about the alt-left that came charging at the, as you say, the alt-right? Do they have any semblance of guilt? he asked. There was blame on both sides, he said. I have no doubt about it.

Both phrases are part of a broad lexicon of far-right terminology that has become important to understanding American politics during the Trump administration. Many of these terms have their roots in movements that are racist, anti-Semitic and sexist.

Here is a brief guide to the meaning of those expressions and others used by white supremacists and far-right extremists.

The alt-right is a racist, far-right movement based on an ideology of white nationalism and anti-Semitism. Many news organizations do not use the term, preferring terms like white nationalism and far right.

The movements self-professed goal is the creation of a white state and the destruction of leftism, which it calls an ideology of death. Richard B. Spencer, a leader in the movement, has described the movement as identity politics for white people.

It is also anti-immigrant, anti-feminist and opposed to homosexuality and gay and transgender rights. It is highly decentralized but has a wide online presence, where its ideology is spread via racist or sexist memes with a satirical edge.

It believes that higher education is only appropriate for a cognitive elite and that most citizens should be educated in trade schools or apprenticeships.

Researchers who study extremist groups in the United States say there is no such thing as the alt-left. Mark Pitcavage, an analyst at the Anti-Defamation League, said the word had been made up to create a false equivalence between the far right and anything vaguely left-seeming that they didnt like.

Some centrist liberals have taken to using this term.

It did not arise organically, and it refers to no actual group or movement or network, Mr. Pitcavage said in an email. Its just a made-up epithet, similar to certain people calling any news they dont like fake news.

On Tuesday, Mr. Trump said the alt-left was partly to blame for the Charlottesville violence, during which a counterprotester, Heather D. Heyer, was killed.

The alt-light comprises members of the far right who once fell under the alt-right umbrella but have since split from the group because, by and large, racism and anti-Semitism are not central to its far-right nationalist views, according to Ryan Lenz, the editor of Hatewatch, a publication of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Members of the alt-right mocked these dissidents as the alt-light.

The alt-light is the alt-right without the racist overtones, but it is hard to differentiate it sometimes because youre looking at people who sometimes dance between both camps, he said.

The two groups often feud online over the Jewish Question, or whether Jews profit by secretly manipulating the government and the news media.

Antifa is a contraction of the word anti-fascist. It was coined in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s by a network of groups that spread across Europe to confront right-wing extremists, according to Mr. Pitcavage. A similar movement was seen in the 1980s in the United States and has re-emerged recently as the alt-right has risen to prominence.

For some so-called antifa members, the goal is to physically confront white supremacists. If they can get at them, to assault them and engage in street fighting, Mr. Pitcavage said. Mr. Lenz, at the Southern Poverty Law Center, called the group an old left-wing extremist movement.

Members of the alt-right broadly portray protesters who oppose them as antifa, or the alt-left, and say they bear some responsibility for any violence that ensues a claim made by Mr. Trump on Tuesday.

But analysts said comparing antifa with neo-Nazi or white supremacist protesters was a false equivalence.

Cuck is an insult used by the alt-right to attack the masculinity of an opponent, originally other conservatives, whom the movement deemed insufficiently committed to racism and anti-Semitism.

It is short for cuckold, a word dating back to the Middle Ages that describes a man who knows his wife is sleeping with other men and does not object. Mr. Lenz said the use of the word by the alt-right often had racial overtones.

S.J.W. is short for social justice warrior and is used by the right as an epithet for someone who advocates liberal causes like feminism, racial justice or gay and transgender rights. It is also sometimes used to imply that a persons online advocacy of a cause is insincere or done for appearances. It became widely used during GamerGate, a controversy that began in 2014 over sexism in video game subcultures.

Mr. Lenz, whose organization has specific criteria for which groups it classifies as Nazi organizations, said the right used the phrase to rhetorically address the fact that the left sometimes calls anyone who disagrees with it Nazis. He said the alt-right had created the term so its followers had a similar blanket term to deride the left.

Video taken at the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville on Saturday showed marchers chanting blood and soil. The phrase is a 19th-century German nationalist term that connotes a mystical bond between the blood of an ethnic group and the soil of their country.

It was used as a Nazi slogan in Germany during the 1930s and 1940s and since then has been transported to neo-Nazi groups and other white supremacists around the world, Mr. Pitcavage said. It is one of several Nazi symbols that have been adopted as a slogan by some members of the alt-right.

Globalism is sometimes used as a synonym for globalization, the network of economic interconnection that became the dominant international system after the Cold War. The word has become more commonly used since Mr. Trump railed against globalism frequently on the campaign trail.

For the far right, globalism has long had distinct xenophobic, anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic overtones. It refers to a conspiratorial worldview: a cabal that likes open borders, diversity and weak nation states, and that dislikes white people, Christianity and the traditional culture of their own country.

White genocide is a white nationalist belief that white people, as a race, are endangered and face extinction as a result of nonwhite immigration and marriage between the races, a process being manipulated by Jews, according to Mr. Lenz. It is the underlying concept behind far-right, anti-immigration arguments, especially those aimed at immigrants who are not white Christians.

The concept was popularized by Bob Whitaker, a former economics professor and Reagan appointee to the Office of Personnel Management, who wrote a 221-word mantra on the subject that ended with the rallying cry: Anti-racist is code word for anti-white.

Mr. Pitcavage said the concept of white genocide was often communicated online through a white supremacist saying called the Fourteen Words: We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.

The saying was created by David Lane, a white supremacist sentenced to 190 years in prison in connection with the 1984 murder of the Jewish radio host Alan Berg.

See original here:

Alt-Right, Alt-Left, Antifa: A Glossary of Extremist ...

Donald Trumps challenge on August 15 what about the alt-left has stirred silly arguments. Claiming there is no alt-left because no one calls themselves alt-left, ignores the long, colorful history of political nicknaming. And claiming there is no alt-left because all leftists hate Neo-Nazis mistakenly defines the alt- modifier as being about racism not fanaticism. With 100 goons from the Left having attacked peaceful demonstrators from the Right as recently as this Sunday afternoon in Berkeley, we must stop viewing the growing epidemic of political brutality through myopic, partisan lenses. The real question remains: Is alt-left a useful term?

You can repudiate racism unequivocally, yet still recognize an alt-left in America today. The term emphasizes a new breed of extremist virtual, vitriolic and violent without getting tangled in the rights or wrongs of being anti-Trump, against police violence or bigoted. Similarly, in the 1930s and 1940s, when Americans condemned Communism and Nazism for being totalitarian, they werent accusing Communists of murdering Jews like the Nazis did.

Moreover, believing that in order to exist, the alt-left must call itself alt-left neuters the power of political nicknaming. In the 1950s, the liberal Washington Post cartoonist, Herblock Herbert Block coined the term McCarthyism to demean right-wing anti-Communists. More recently, Politically Correct, RINO (Republican in Name Only), Snowflake, Libtard, and Cuckservative, were imposed by opponents.

Two centuries ago, the British essayist Isaac DIsraeli called political nicknaming one of the arts practiced by all political parties. DIsraeli noticed that sometimes, politicos hijacked a contemptuous name, making it their own: The first revolutionists of Holland known as Les Gueux or the Beggars accepted the name as much in defiance as with indignation, and acted up to it.

Although the label alt-right originated with alt-rightists, Hillary Clinton mainstreamed use of the term. In a sweeping attack a year ago, Clinton condemned Trump as representing the paranoid fringe in our politics, steeped in racial resentment. Introducing an unfamiliar term, she explained: Alt-right is short for alternative right. She failed to connect the growing familiarity with the word alt to the computer keyboard. She quoted the Wall Street Journals description of this loosely organized movement, mostly online, that rejects mainstream conservatism, promotes nationalism and views immigration and multiculturalism as threats to white identity.

Clintons analysis proves why alt-left is a useful term. The alt-left is also a paranoid fringe steeped in resentment, and some of the resentment is racial, although moral, in that it is resisting racism. It too is loosely organized, mostly online, wallowing as the alt-right does in Internet-fueled hysteria and harshness. It too rejects mainstream ideology, in this case, liberalism. And it is broader than Antifa, the violent anti-Fascist fringe that combats neo-Nazis and the KKK.

The alt-left designation helps explain the Democrats emerging civil war, with extremists assailing centrist liberals, and turning the word neoliberal into one of their overused epithets. It exposes the postmodern fanatics: bullies who violate liberal principles by shutting up speakers they dislike; brats who riot in Berkeley, Portland, Oakland and elsewhere when they dont get their way; hypocrites who denounce their opponents unreason and violence yet cant see their own; and brutes who whip each other into vulgar frenzies on the Internet. The alt-left is populated by ideologues who reject the American value of compromise. They see a world of conspiracy theories, imagined enemies and exaggerated slights. Ironically, they echo their far right rivals by demonizing Wall Street, the Big Banks, the Mainstream Media and, frequently, Jews or Zionists. Both far right and far left radicals represent a politics of backlash and lashing out, not consensus-building or reaching out.

Neither Left nor Right has a monopoly on virtue or violence. The alt-left continues the violence of the Weatherman and the Black Panthers in the 1970s, and the hooliganism of the Battle of Seattle WTO Protestors in 1999. And like the alt-right, leftwing radicals are finding ideological allies worldwide, particular among Jeremy Corbyns Labourites; these British leftists also prefer dictating the outcomes they seek instead of trusting democratic processes to work.

Yes, calling radicals the alt-left is mischievous, tarring those fanatics with their ideological rivals brush. But as Communists and Fascists showed, the political world is round. If you go too far left or right, you meet in the anti-democratic land of intolerance and violence.

For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder.

Contact us at editors@time.com.

See the rest here:

Antifa Berkeley: Why the 'Alt-Left' Is a Problem | Time

By Chris Marsden 29 July 2020

Sir Keir Starmer has launched a witch-hunt against the left, in the Labour Party and beyond, of unprecedented scope.

He leads an alliance of Blairite Labour MPs, Zionist groups, the Conservative Party, and the mainstream media, intent on driving out what remains of the official Labour left, expelling hundreds, if not thousands, of members, setting up former party leader Jeremy Corbyn and others for legal prosecution, bankruptcy and worse, and is planning the same for various left-leaning websites.

In the process, political opposition to the criminal suppression of the Palestinians by Israel will be officially recast as a form of anti-Semitism, slandering, and virtually outlawing, a vast swathe of left-wing opinion. The only disagreement within this unprincipled cabal, given that it extends into Tory central office and has the support of Benjamin Netanyahus far-right government, is whether the entire Labour Party should be bankrupted in the process.

On Wednesday, July 22, Labour apologised in the High Court to seven former staffers from Labours governance and legal unit, involved in investigating accusations of anti-Semitism, who became whistleblowers in a July 2019 BBC Panorama documentary, Is Labour Anti-Semitic? A letter of apology was sent to BBC journalist and Panorama presenter John Ware. Undisclosed financial compensation was made to the whistleblowers and to Ware, reported to be worth around 500,000.

Under Corbyn, the party had issued a press release immediately after the Panorama programme aired, that Labour now accepted, contained defamatory and false allegations about the seven whistleblowers. We unreservedly withdraw all allegations of bad faith, malice and lying. We would like to apologise unreservedly for the distress, embarrassment and hurt caused by their publication.

Corbyn and the former party leadership had rejected the accusations made in the Panorama programme that they had shown a lack of commitment to investigating charges of anti-Semitism levelled against Labour members. A party spokesman had called the whistleblowers disaffected former officials, who had worked actively to undermine Corbyn and had both personal and political axes to grind.

They described the Panorama programme as a seriously inaccurate, politically one-sided polemic, which breached basic journalistic standards, invented quotes and edited emails to change their meaning.

Labour has been investigated by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) into its handling of anti-Semitism allegations under Corbyn. A report was commissioned by Labours former General Secretary Jennie Formby to be submitted as evidence to the EHRC, but which was blocked by the partys lawyers. This internal report was leaked in April. It accused the Panorama whistleblowers of bad faith in their charges made against Corbyns leadership and insisted that all accusations of anti-Semitism had been pursued once Corbyns team had control of the partys governance and legal unit. The report referred to a hyper factional atmosphere of hostility towards Corbyn in Labours head office.

With Starmer having accepted all the allegations made against Labour, Corbynas his opponents would have anticipatedwas forced to respond, insisting in a Facebook post, The Partys decision to apologise today and make substantial payments to former staff who sued the party in relation to last years Panorama programme is a political decision, not a legal one.

Our legal advice was that the party had a strong defence, and the evidence in the leaked Labour report that is now the subject of an NEC [National Executive Committee] inquiry led by Martin Forde QC strengthened concerns about the role played by some of those who took part in the programme.

Others, including Len McCluskey, general secretary of the Unite trade union, voiced criticisms. McCluskey tweeted, Todays settlement is a misuse of Labour Party funds to settle a case it was advised we would win in court.

A fresh round of legal action was swiftly announced, instigated by Ware, the seven whistleblowers, and by some of those named in the leaked internal Labour Party report commissioned by Formby. Mark Lewis of Patron Law, representing Ware and the whistleblowers, said, I can confirm that I have been instructed to pursue cases. Wednesdays settlement, he said, was the first battle of many battles. The leaked Formby report had seriously harmed a whole list of people and would now also have to be challenged in the court.

The findings of the EHRC are due to be published in September, after which many of those named in the leaked report and other Jewish members would be entitled to bring discrimination cases against Labour, citing personal injury. Each of these claims can be for an upper limit of 47,000. The Jewish Chronicle has reported that the pro-Zionist Jewish Labour Movement is considering bringing a class action against Labour, on behalf of its members, if the EHRC report finds they have been discriminated against.

The internal party inquiry into the leaked report, led by Martin Forde QC, will also no doubt become an occasion for condemning its authors.

For Patron Law, Lewis revealed that former Labour General Secretary Iain McNicol is already suing the party over the leaked report, adding, There are many other people who are named in the report, they come under different categories: people who work for the party, people who were in the party in political positions.

Claims covering the Data Protection Act, invasion of privacy, and libel have already been submitted. Estimates of the potential costs of various cases, encompassing more than 50 individuals, range from 5.5 million to 8 million.

Corbyn is being personally targeted. The Mail on Sunday reported that some of the ex-party staff would drop their legal action against Labour if Corbyn were to be expelled. A source said, Labour says they have zero tolerance to anti-Semitism. Zero tolerance means no Corbyn and no Corbynistas. Its Keirs choice, zero tolerance, or zero money.

Campaign Against Anti-Semitism chief executive Gideon Falter has also called for Corbyns suspension or expulsion for gaslighting the whistleblowers he bullied for standing up to Jew-hatred.

Corbyn already faces a legal case based on allegations of anti-Semitism. On July 10, blogger Richard Millett won the first stage of a libel case against Corbyn for claiming that Zionists in the audience at a 2013 meeting featuring Palestinian ambassador to the UK, Manuel Hassassian, lacked English irony and were disruptive and abusive.

Mr Justice Saini ruled that Corbyn was making factual allegations as to Mr Milletts behaviour. By then, Millett had been publicly identified as one of the two individuals referred to by Corbyn on BBC1s Andrew Marr Show in September 2018 while defending his 2013 comments from claims of anti-Semitism. Millett, too, is represented by Lewis, of Patron Law.

Starmer had already begun purging the few remaining Corbynites from the party leadership before making his apology to the Panorama whistleblowers. He dismissed Rebecca Long-Bailey as Shadow Education Secretary for retweeting comments by actress Maxine Peake that were critical of Israel. Peake had pointed out that Israeli security forces trained US police in the restraint techniques that led to the May 25 death of George Floyd.

Lloyd Russell-Moyle, a shadow environment minister, did not even need to be expelled. He quit after the Jewish Labour Movement demanded his resignation for an old Facebook message describing Zionism as a dangerous nationalist idea.

This is nothing compared with what is to come. The legal and political witch-hunt will extend far beyond Corbyn and his immediate periphery and prepare the machinery for a more ferocious onslaught on any socialist movement of workers and young people. Lewis for Patron Law warned, This is just the start. Actions are being taken against those who repeat the libels and will be taken against those who choose to do so in future. An honest opinion has to be based upon facts.

On July 23, John Ware wrote in the Jewish Chronicle, in which he has a commercial interest, of a year-long fusillade of falsehoods from a stream of Left wing bloggers, media activists, Labours people powered Momentum faction, and alt-Left outletsall of whom share a conviction that the mainstream media is fundamentally dishonest.

Acknowledging an unwritten code that says we journalists should never sue because however offensive or defamatory criticism of our journalism may be, we hold free speech sacrosanct, he continued, It was a rule with which for decades I agreed. I no longer do. That is why my proceedings against Labour are only the first of several I have begun against alternative media outlets and individuals.

Ware cited the then Chair of Momentum Jon Lansman, pro-Corbyn alt-Left outlets, notably Skwawkbox and the Canary, and more mainstream journalists who should have known bettersuch as Owen Jones, the Guardian columnist.

Lansman has already issued a public apology effectively blaming Corbyn for statements he (Lansman) made, because they were based on the partys advice and assurances.

This orgy of McCarthyite slanders must be opposed by all workers and young people. This includes defending Corbyn and others facing legal censurea crowdfunding appeal for Corbyn has already raised over 300,000.

But opposing this right-wing offensive cannot be left under the leadership of Corbyn and his allies. The working class has already paid a bitter price for the glorification of the Corbynites as a supposedly socialist alternative by pseudo-left groups such as the Socialist Party and Socialist Workers Party.

Even as the Blairite right and their Zionist and Tory allies prepare for all-out war, Corbyn, McDonnell, Long-Bailey, et al. remain tight-lipped in the faint hope of a compromise on the rights termsincluding allowing ordinary Labour members to be expelled or driven out of the party.

Corbyn is absolutely opposed to any political struggle by workers and young people against the Labour and trade union bureaucracy. He stands for a policy of death by a thousand compromises. That he now faces a personal attack of such magnitude is because he spent his four and a half years as party leader demobilising opposition to the Blairites and bowing to their every dictateincluding granting free votes on war against Syria and the renewal of the Trident nuclear weapons programme, dropping opposition to NATO, and instructing Labour councils to impose Tory austerity cuts. In the process he delivered an electoral victory to Boris Johnson, before meekly handing back control of the party to the representative of the right wing, Starmer.

Corbyns refusal to oppose the Zionist and Blairite rights anti-Semitism witch-hunt epitomises his political cowardice and lack of principle. He allowed some of his closest allies to be driven from the partyincluding Ken Livingstone, Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth, and Chris Williamsonon trumped up charges, along with hundreds of other members. Moreover, his endorsement of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)s designation of legitimate political criticism of Israel as a form of anti-Semitism, and its inclusion in Labours new code of practice, has fashioned the noose his opponents intend to hang him with.

Even now, the message of unity with the right wing remains the same. Responding to the sacking of Long-Bailey, for example, McCluskey complained, Unity is too important to be risked like this. Unite Assistant General Secretary Steve Turner tweeted, Sacking her is wrong and undermines unity in our Party.

The working class must respond to the witch-hunt by striking out on a new political road.

Corbyns abject betrayal of his popular mandate to end the Blairite era of austerity and imperialist militarism and take the fight to the Tories and the ruling class was predicted by the Socialist Equality Party. Basing itself on Trotskys writings from the 1920s onwards, the SEP explained that the role of the Labour and trade union lefts has always been to ensure the domination of the right wing.

Today, moreover, no change of leader, or influx of left-leaning members, could reverse Labours transformation into a naked party of big business. Labours abandonment of reforms and embrace of Thatcherite neoliberalism was not the product of the scheming of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Rather, fundamental changes within world capitalism associated with globalisation have objectively undermined all organisations embedded in the nation state and seeking limited reforms through an accommodation with their own bourgeoisie.

The conflict between rival imperialist powers for control of global markets and resources demands trade war and militarism abroad and austerity, authoritarianism, and class war at home. Combatting the agents of this capitalist perspective such as Starmer and his allies, therefore, demands far more than trench warfare to maintain a left rump within the Labour Party. It means building a new leadership, the SEP, to take forward a revolutionary struggle against capitalism and for socialism.

Read the original post:

McCarthyite witch-hunt over alleged anti-Semitism explodes in British Labour Party - WSWS