After Dartmouth and a surprising stretch as a stockbroker in Minneapolisan experience that goes mostly undescribed in Afropessimism but which Wilderson has elsewhere characterized as a kind of double lifeWilderson enrolls in the creative-writing program at Columbia. At night, he attends classes at the New School, where stream of consciousness is in vogue. That downtown influence still shows: Wilderson skids from one glint of perception to the next without much regard for grounding details or fluid transitions; in the middle of an anecdote, he tosses you down a chute and you find yourself stumbling through a thick tangle of theoretical jargon. He thinks vertically, in terms of hierarchies and structures; the horizontal time line is beside the point. He writes from historys humid basement, or from its even less accessible underground bunker, and the plants that bloom in his writing are less floral than fungalhis arguments and remembrances grow in tight groups, close to the ground and propped atop rotting anecdotal logs, all of them adding to the shroomy funk of the room.

Though Afropessimism may veer from the Black autobiographical tradition, the book doesnt escape genre altogether. It falls into a category sometimes called auto-theory, an attempt to arrive at a philosophy by way of the self. The most pertinent example is Black Skin, White Masks, by the French-Martinican psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon, who worked up his theory of epidermalizationthe process by which the societal inferiority of Black people is grafted onto the skinby recounting his own experiences, along with a series of psychiatric case studies. Wilderson takes from Fanonand then exaggerates, literally to deatha critique of humanism as it has been practiced (or, more often, not practiced) in the Western world. Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe, Fanon wrote. And yet, for Fanon, the process of decolonizationby way of inevitably bloody revolutionwas also a process of humanization. Decolonization, he wrote, in The Wretched of the Earth, is the veritable creation of new men.

For Wilderson, Fanons cup is too full. Other previously colonized peoples are indeed human, but not Black people. One of the bleakest aspects of Afropessimist thought is its denial that there is any meaningful analogy between Blacks and other nonwhites. When Frank and Stella try to explain their poison-induced injuries to a Chinese-American doctor, she turns them away, and Wilderson muses that Dr. Zhou is as much a master as Edwin and Mary Epps, the antagonists in 12 Years a Slave. In Wildersons view, people of colora term he uses for those who are neither white nor Blackare junior partners to whites in the enslavement of Blacks. One of the memories that recur in Afropessimism involves a Palestinian friend named Sameer, who, detailing life under Israeli occupation, describes the shameful and humiliating way the soldiers run their hands up and down your body, then admits that the shame and humiliation runs even deeper if the Israeli soldier is an Ethiopian Jew. This expression of anti-Black racism from a Palestinian is a cataclysm for Wilderson. Now he understands that, in the collective unconscious, Palestinian insurgents have more in common with the Israeli state and civil society than they do with Black people.

In the same vein, Wilderson describes a meeting that his father attended, as an emissary of the University of Minnesota, with several Native American leaders, hoping to resolve a conflict about reservation lands. Young Frank was in the audience, and someone sitting near him cried out, We dont want you, a nigger man, telling us what to do! The lesson that Wilderson takes from the episode is that the Native Americansraped and slaughtered on these lands, subjected to a genocide that enabled the Americas as we know them to existare sovereigns, and therefore human, while his dad, middle class, American, and Black, is not. In a previous book, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S.Antagonisms, which grew out of his dissertation, Wilderson describes the Red, Indigenous, or Savage position as existing liminally as half-death and half-life between the Slave (Black) and the Human (White, or non-Black). In Afropessimism, even that gradation is gone. Wilderson overwrites history with the darkest, most permanent marker.

Every society has a murderous hierarchy: someones always knocking at the basement door, trying to get free. But life is prismaticits possible to be Black and degraded in America while also profiting from wanton extraction of resources overseas, oppressing millions of non-Black others, and living on land stolen from indigenous people. We are always joined in our sufferings, often by somebody we cant see through the darkness. We speak of solidarity precisely because the empathetic act of analogy is a way of acknowledging this complexity, and of training our ethical senses, again and again, to widen the circle of our concern. Any system of thought that has refined itself beyond the ability to imagine kinship with the stranded Guatemalan kid detained at the U.S. border, or with the functionally enslaved Uyghur in China, or, againI cant get over itwith the Native American on whose stolen ancestral ground you live and do your business, is lost in its own fog.

Black thought at its best has been a vehicle for and a product of analogy. Black Christians saw the liberatory potential in the story of the Hebrews rescued by God from beneath Pharaohs thumb and, still more, in the life of the Jewish Palestinian preacher Jesus, put to death by the colonizers of his homeland. Some of them looked to Latin America, where liberation theology blossomed; they created Black liberation theology, and forever transformed the flavor of American religion. A feeling of kinship with the colonized people of India, and with Gandhi in particular, helped make nonviolence a core practice of the civil-rights movement. A study of the revolutionary struggles in Algeria, Fanons great subject, helped to make the caseargued most famously by the Black Liberation Army, an influence on Wildersonfor the occasional necessity of violence. None of this is incidental: the impulse toward freedom is always seeking friends.

While he was studying at Columbia, Wilderson was in a long-distance relationship with a woman he had met on a trip to South Africa. After completing his M.F.A., he moved to Johannesburg. It was the early nineties, the end of the apartheid era. He became involved with the African National Congress, Nelson Mandelas party. He participated in political education and worked for a time as what sounds like a minor spy; eventually, he became an elected official in the A.N.C. Later, he broke with Mandela, siding with the partys more radical members. These adventures are the subject of his first book, Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid. The South African section of Afropessimism mostly concerns Wildersons brief employment as a waiter at an Italian restaurant.

He takes the job after getting fired from a teaching gig, essentially because of his political commitments. The restaurant, Marios, is owned by a white immigrant, and Wilderson works there alongside several Black Africans: an older waiter who tries to school him in the intricacies of racial manners under apartheid; two cooks who, he learns too late, are supporters of the reactionary party that opposes the A.N.C.; and a young woman named Doreen, who is casually harassed by the owner and eventually framed for theft by his wife, Riana. Everybody tiptoes around the whites except for Wilderson, who, by his telling, is a charismatic, bombastic presence. He meets, flatters, and befriends the Nobel-winning novelist Nadine Gordimer, a regular at the restaurant. He goads his Black peers into taking ever more brazen liberties with the whites. Why should they sit in the kitchen eating porridge during their breaks when the whites are out in the dining room, feasting on Italian? Owing to his obvious erudition and, above all, his Americanness, hes invited to join the whites one night. He drags the other Blacks along with him, largely against their will. He chows down while everyone else falls silent. Of course, he understands the situation. He sort of glories in it.

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The Argument of Afropessimism - The New Yorker

Viewpoint by Glauco Benigni*

This article was originally published by Other News and is reproduced with permission.

ROME (IDN) They are called Vanguard, BlackRock and State Street Global Advisors and they are the world's 3 largest mutual funds. They are also known as asset managers or investment funds, operated by professional experts who collect "fresh" money from an immense and varied number of investors and savers. With this "fresh money" they buy securities in the various stock exchanges of the planet and redistribute profits (when things go well) to those who have entrusted them with the surplus of their capital and/or savings. Investors can be of a commercial or institutional nature, but also simple private individuals who access the various investment plans attributable to and controlled by the Big 3.

The 3 appear closely interconnected with each other, thanks to proprietary intersections and extremely confidential and personal links among their representatives at the head of operations and the respective boards of directors.

Basically, when we speak of "financial capitalism", of "neoliberal imperialism", or when we evoke "finance" tout court, we speak of or rather "evoke" them as a compass for guide the destinies of today's world and the future without mentioning them. Like any true power, they are already taboo.

The 3 are at the centre of a vast galaxy of acronyms, in which other important mutual funds and financial entities appear (including Fidelity, T-Rowe, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley). The financial masses managed by them act as within a gravitational system, causing attractions and repulsions on the entire constellation of banking and insurance. Thanks to strategic positions in the various shareholdings, made up of their monumental investments, the Big 3 are able to "condition" the direction of each area of activity: production, distribution of goods and services, transport, healthcare, research, etc..

Imagine that, in the last 12 years, 3 massive new planets have grown dramatically, in a planetary system, dynamic but fundamentally balanced, and have assumed a central position in the system, thus determining new balances and imbalances and new orbits of all the previous planets and satellites that were present in the system.

The 3 obviously enjoy maximum respect, but they really scare all those who rightly fear the verticalisation of power.

As early as 2017, Jan Fichtner, Eelke M. Heemskerk and Javier Garcia, three researchers from the University of Amsterdam, explained that: "Since 2008, a massive shift has occurred from active toward passive investment strategies (see below, ed.). The passive index funds sector is dominated by the 'Big Three'. We have comprehensively mapped ownership of the Big Three in the United States and found that together they make up the largest shareholder in 88% of the 500 companies in the S&P index."

In other words, this means that the Big Three are the largest shareholder in almost 90% of the companies in which most people invest. To give an idea, the S&P 500 lists both old giants of the 'old economy' (such as ExxonMobil, General Electric, Coca-Cola, Johnson & Johnson and JP Morgan) and all the new giants of the 'digital age' (Alphabet-Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple). This means that their influence also extends to the major vehicles of information and e-commerce.

These are exceptional findings. If as seems they correspond to reality, the scenario that appears contravenes any previous vision of free competition and describes a dominant position that had never been achieved in history.

"Through an analysis of proxy vote records," continue the Amsterdam professors, "we find that the Big Three do utilise coordinated voting strategies and hence follow a centralised corporate governance strategy. They generally vote with management, except at director (re-)elections. Moreover, the Big Three may exert 'hidden power' through two channels: first, via private engagements with management of invested companies; and second, because company executives could be inclined to internalising the objectives of the Big Three."

BlackRock recently claimed that it is not legally the "owner" of the shares it holds. "We are rather the custodians of money entrusted to us by investors," they said.

This is a technicality to be interpreted: what is undeniable is that the Big Three exercise the voting rights associated with these shares. Therefore, they must be perceived as de facto owners by corporate executives. It is easy "to be prone" when your post and your millionaire liquidation depends on who is "custodian" of the controlling share package of the company you work for.

As long as the accusing finger was pointed by the Europeans and notwithstanding the concerns of the EU Antitrust Commission the scene in the USA was minimised and the risks associated with it were underestimated. However, the US Antitrust and Justice Department woke up last year. The real reasons for the new state of alert are obviously political and attributable to the power structures in and around the White House. Officially, the authorities showed concern because among those putting the Big Three under the magnifying glass appeared the Harvard Law School. From their prestigious benches, Lucian Bebchulk and Scott Hirst, two academics considered among the top experts in corporate governance, produced an alarming study called "The Specter of the Giant Three".

Basically, figures at hand, it is shown that the 3 alone manage 16 trillion dollars (in 2019) and that in this way they find themselves controlling 4 out of 10 shares of the major US corporations.

As explained by Vincenzo Beltrami on Startmagazine: "The Harvard paper has the merit of photographing the exponential growth that especially BlackRock and Vanguard will have in the coming years in the financial structures known to date, triggering a change of global paradigm of which it is already today possible to predict the effects. The Harvard academics have calculated that the masses managed by these giants, with the relative power of representation that derives from them, are destined to increase respectively by 34% in the next ten years and by 41% calculating a period of twenty years."

Now let us look at some "details" published on Wikipedia:

The Vanguard Group is based in Malvern, a suburb of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Founded in 1975 by John C. Bogle, it manages 6.2 trillion dollars in assets and has approximately 17,000 employees. The current CEO is Mortimer J. Buckley.

BlackRock is based in New York. It manages a total of 7.5 trillion dollars in assets, of which one-third invested in Europe and 500 billion in Italy alone. It was founded in 1988 by Laurence D. Fink (CEO), Susan Wagner and Robert S. Kapito. It has 15,000 employees

State Street Global Advisors is the investment management division of State Street Corporation. It manages around 3 trillion dollars. It is based in Boston, Massachusetts. The CEO is Cyrus Taraporevala. It has 2500 employees.

These data confirm that the total assets managed by the Big 3 amounted to 16 trillion dollars in 2019. Now the question is: if the funds are equal to 4 times the German GDP or, if you like, 8 times the Italian public debt ... what is the vision of the future of who manages it?

But above all, going back to the projections of the Harvard academics, if you exceed 20 trillion in 2030 and fly towards 30 trillion in 2040, then the funds will be equal to half the GDP of the entire planet Earth.

Adding up all the employees of the Big Three, equal to 35,000 people, how is possible to manage a similar financial mass that is equivalent to that produced by half the population, or 3.5 billion humans? Something serious is going on. Antitrust authorities are therefore right (but are they able to intervene?). If there is one, where is the catch?

Enrico Marro gives us a first "technical" answer from the columns of Sole 24 Ore. "It should be clarified that the main driver of growth is represented by passive management: that is, by ETFs, destined to reach 25 thousand billion dollars in assets managed within the next seven years according to estimates by Jim Ross, president of State Street".

ETFs, or exchange-traded funds, are a type of investment funds belonging to ETPs (Exchange Traded Products), or to the macro family of listed index products, with the aim of replicating a reference index (benchmark) with minimal interventions. Unlike mutual investment funds and SICAVs (collective investment schemes), they have passive management, are released from the manager's ability and are listed on the stock exchange in the same way as shares and bonds.

Passive management means that their return is linked to the listing of a stock exchange index (which can be equity, commodity, bond, monetary, etc.) and not to the fund manager's ability to buy and sell. The manager's work is limited to verifying the consistency of the fund with the reference index (which may vary due to company acquisitions, bankruptcies, collapses of quotations, etc.), as well as correcting its value in the event of deviations between the fund's quotation and that of the reference index, which are allowed to the order of a few percentage points (1% or 2%).

"Passive management" makes these funds very economical, with management costs usually lower than the percentage point, and therefore competitive with respect to active funds. Their large or huge diversification, combined with stock exchange trading, makes them competitive with respect to investment in single stocks. And there you have it!

They were born in the United States in 1993, negotiated in the AMEX to reproduce the trend of the Standard & Poor 500 index.

ETFs can also be called "financial clones" because they faithfully mimic the performance of a particular index.

Enrico Marro continues: "There now exist 'clones' of all kinds, from those related to pink quotas to those following the Bible, from those that invest by listening to Twitter to those guided by artificial intelligence or that focus on therapeutic marijuana. Not to mention the ETFs that follow sophisticated "smart beta" strategies, more or less countercurrent, sometimes extravagant. All that's missing is a "clone" on Bitcoin, nipped in the bud by US regulators for obvious reasons of financial stability and common sense."

I would like to add some macro financial policy considerations to this technical explanation. Before the stock market boom, and in detail before the start of Nasdaq, which replaced "human" buying and selling with digital buying and selling managed by algorithms, exchange value (financial capitalisation) was strongly correlated with use value (produced by the real economy). Simplifying, it can be said that material wealth (GDP) had a reasonable counterpoint in the wealth dealt with in stock exchanges. With the advent of Nasdaq and the first placement on the stock exchange of "all digital" companies, finance begins a path of numerical virtualisation, favoured by digital exchanges that take place in a space-time where speed and volumes tend to infinity while times of access and exchange tend to zero. In this new "numerical-financial dimension", the production of exchange value is exalted and its volume grows exponentially, "untying itself" from the material counterpoint (the real economy). This has allowed speculators to have access to the production and management of endless financial masses, which are created continuously thanks simply to the multiplication of "exchanges" and have nothing to do with the real material economy. So much so that it is now known that for each dollar or euro corresponding to use value (real economy) there is a slightly higher equivalent value in circulation on the stock exchanges (according to the IMF). XXXX According to other sources, however, the value of market capitalisation would be 4 to 8 times higher than that of planetary GDP.

Here is another explanation quite disconcerting of why 35,000 employees manage a value equivalent to what is produced by 3.5 billion humans.

Let's now look at the scene from the point of view of regulations:

In 1933 in the USA, the Banking Act was incorporated into the wider Glass-Steagall Act. It was the response to the financial crisis of 1929, aimed at introducing measures to contain speculation by financial intermediaries and prevent situations of banking panic. The measures included the introduction of a clear separation between traditional banking and investment banking. Under the law, the two activities could no longer be exercised by the same intermediary, thus creating the separation between commercial banks and investment banks. The real economy was in fact prevented from being directly exposed to the influence of finance. Due to its subsequent repeal in 1999, precisely the opposite happened in the 2007 crisis: insolvency in the subprime mortgage market, which began in 2006, triggered a liquidity crisis that immediately spread to traditional banking, because the latter was mixed with investment activity.

Among the effects of the repeal, the creation of banking groups was permitted which, within them, allow, albeit with some limitations, the exercise of both traditional banking activity and insurance and investment banking activity. After the new Great Recession of 2008, during the Obama presidency, attempts were made to at least partially restore the Glass-Steagall Act with the Dodd-Frank Act. In reality the stable door had opened and the horses had already all bolted. Today some observers believe that the triumphal march of mutual funds was made possible precisely by repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act.

And, in fact, the extent of the change is surprising: from 2007 to 2016, actively managed funds recorded outflows of approximately 1,200 billion US dollars, while index funds had inflows of over 1,400 billion US dollars.

We now come to historical-philosophical considerations-conclusions concerning the collective behaviour of the human species. Following the Great Revolutions, the idea of equality spread and rights, in some seasons, appeared better than interests. This referred to the idea of distribution of wealth, to be pursued thanks to bargaining between the labour force and capital. It was an action that was proclaimed with the hypothesis that the means of production should belong to those who actually produced wealth and not to the masters of capital. Notwithstanding the many civil and political battles, with the unconditional surrender of the USSR and the decline of socialist and communist ideas, capitalism and its substitutes have won the arm wrestling with the working and peasant masses and with the class of intellectuals who supported them. The elites imposed a neoliberalism that is based no longer and not only on the hegemony deriving from the accumulation of surplus value obtained from the production of goods, but on a series of new sources of income, among which as described the uncontrolled production of exchange value on stock exchanges.

Well, this is where the choice has been made by the world population in the last 30 years: is it better to struggle to own the means and infrastructure of production or is it better to try to participate in the profits that the neoliberal system produces on the stock exchange?

Given the disadvantageous gap between the volumes of the real economy and those of numerical finance, having regard to the respective tax rates that favour finance, together with political propaganda, the seduction of advertising and the induction of lifestyles favourable to individualist liberalism, the choice is increasingly turning towards the second option. And so the Anglo-American neoliberal weltanschaung, characterised by the acceptance of the "gamble" outpoints visions characterised by the search for "certainties". Right now tens (perhaps hundreds) of millions of savers and millions of small and medium-sized companies are not re-investing their savings and capital surpluses in productive structures and only a small minority imagines generating work for themselves and for their "equals". They are not even thinking of it! As soon as there are some savings, a severance indemnity, a hereditary bequest or an immobilised capital, the overwhelming majority look for "a short way" to make it bear fruit, or the best way to invest it to derive profits and position without tiring and worrying about "the next guy".

An eloquent figure: according to a Morningstar analysis reported by the Financial Times, in 2018, BlackRock and Vanguard alone collected 57% of what flowed globally in the varied panorama of mutual funds.

Let's say that in the eternal swing between individualism and collective solidarity, the pole that represents immediate and measurable personal interests is leading the game on a ground that has totally escaped the control of supportive humanism.

To return to the issue of mutual funds and conclude: many believe that everything is legitimate and that their success is determined by historical circumstances and knowledge that is high and above the average of mass capabilities. But we know that behind this image of efficiency lurk very opaque and ambiguous practices. Practices that could even allow, given the enormous amounts of money involved, the buying not only of company managers but also of the governments and oppositions in democracies. Let's take this into account.

* Italian journalist and writer, Glauco Benigni holds a BA in Mass Communication Sociology. For 20 years he was a correspondent and media editor for Italian newspaper La Repubblica, followed by 15 years in RAI, Italys national public broadcasting company, where he was responsible for relations with the foreign press and for the promotion and technological development of RAI International. [IDN-InDepthNews 20 July 2020]

Collage of the images of Van Guard, BlackRock and State Street Global Advisors.

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The Spectre of the Big Three - IDN InDepthNews | Analysis That Matters

By: Express News Service | Pune | Published: July 19, 2020 4:54:21 am Celebrated mathematician and teacher C S Seshadri

Celebrated mathematician and teacher C S Seshadri, who is globally acclaimed for his work in a branch of mathematics known as algebraic geometry, died in Chennai late Friday. He was 88.

Seshadri, who was also an accomplished exponent of Carnatic music, set up the Chennai Mathematical Institute, a leading centre of excellence in mathematics, computer science and physics, and was considered to be one of the finest teachers of mathematics in the country.

In passing away of Professor C S Seshadri, we have lost an intellectual stalwart who did outstanding work in mathematics. His efforts, especially in algebraic geometry, will be remembered for generations, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said.

President Ram Nath Kovind described Seshadri as a multifaceted personality and mathematical genius. In his passing, we have lost an institution builder, Kovind said.

Hailing from the temple town of Kancheepuram in Tamil Nadu, Seshadri spent his most productive years in research at the Mumbai-based Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) before moving to the Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Chennai.

He established the Chennai Mathematical Institute, which was born out of his desire to integrate undergraduate and post-graduate studies with advanced research.

In an interview to the mathematical magazine Bhavana a couple of years ago, Seshadri said he had seen that many great mathematicians in other countries were actively teaching undergraduate students apart from indulging in their own research, something that was not common in India. The Chennai Mathematical Institute, according to him, was set up to play that kind of role.

Many of Seshadris students at the Institute are now noted mathematicians and professors at some of the worlds best universities.

The passing of Professor C S Seshadri is a great loss to mathematics in particular, and to science and teaching in general. He was among those who built the TIFR School of Mathematics to global acclaim, K VijayRaghavan, Principal Scientific Advisor to the government, said in a statement.

Seshadris lasting contribution is that he has ensured there will be many more like him from the CMI, and from all over India. A life in mathematics, music, institution building and humanism. Worth understanding and its core values worth emulating, no matter what we do, he said.

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A life in mathematics, music, institution building, humanism - The Indian Express

'Rather than trying to make ourselves invulnerable, we recognize our vulnerability and use it to make better choices as a society,' Brock U professor suggests

NEWS RELEASEBROCK UNIVERSITY*************************While much of the province will be moving to Stage 3 reopening on Friday, July 17, it will still take time for people to become comfortable with their vulnerability and rebuild trust in each other, says Brock University Professor of Philosophy Christine Daigle.

Daigle, who also serves as the Director of the Posthumanism Research Institute, has been researching how the pandemic and quarantine experience has affected how we experience ourselves and others.

While many of us have been able to socialize through online apps, the computer as a tool never entirely replaces being in the presence of others, she says.

I think there is a need for everyone, especially people who have been really cautious about isolating, to readjust to being in the presence of others, says Daigle.

We humans are fundamentally trustful that other people are OK. Thats why were always surprised, shocked and hurt when people fail to meet expectations, she says. Now people are still well intentioned, but they may still be a threat. You cant entirely trust that someone is not a threat.

While there is still a great amount to learn about how the virus operates, taking precautions, such as wearing masks, signals to others that we know we may be a threat but we are trying to minimize that threat and be trustworthy and responsible, says Daigle.

St. Catharines became the first Niagara municipality to mandate masks be worn inside public places when council passed a bylaw Monday, July 13. The Ontario government is allowing much of the province, with the exception of Niagara and several other regions, to move into Stage 3 reopening.

Despite measures by organizations to revive trust, it will take a long while for people to regain their trust in others and it may never come back to what it was, says Daigle. This pandemic may serve to make us realize that we were never invulnerable the way we thought we were.

She suggests that rather than trying to make ourselves invulnerable, we recognize our vulnerability and use it to make better choices as a society.

Vulnerability is a fundamental characteristic, says Daigle. We feel it is a negative and want to be invulnerable. But we can come to understand it and embrace existing as vulnerable beings.

*************************

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Becoming comfortable in Phase 3 will take time, says Brock prof - ThoroldNews.com

Quebec Culture Minister Nathalie Roy is investigating theMuseum of Fine Arts in Montreal(MMFA) for its abrupt dismissal of director and chief curator Nathalie Bondil.

Roy said she was flabbergasted when she first learned that Bondils job was in jeopardy, telling Le Devoir: the Montreal Museum of Fine ArtsisNathalie Bondil.

Roy is hiring an outside firm to look into the museums management,CBC Newsreports.

The investigation follows an international outcry, includingthe Muse dOrsay in Paris allegedly taking the drastic step of cutting ties with the MMFA.

Laurence des Cars, the head of the Muse dOrsay, toldtheArt Newspapershe was appalled by the absolutely unacceptable and shocking conditions of Bondils sacking.

A planned joint exhibition, The Origins of the World: The Invention of Nature in the 19th Century, about the work of naturalist Charles Darwin and the intersection of the arts and sciences in the period, will reportedly no longer travel to Montreal. (The MMFA toldLa Presse Canadiennethat there had not been any decisions regarding the exhibition.)

The investigation also comes on the heels of a Change.org petition from museum members calling on the MMFA to hold a special assembly to offer insight into the decision-making process that led to Bondils firing.

Started by Thomas Bastien, who served as thedirector of the MMFAs education and wellness department until February, it has over 3,000 signatures.

Museum regulations provide for a special assembly if a request is made by a minimum of 100 members, Bastien told the Montreal Gazette.

The museums first woman director, Bondil joined the institution in 1999 as curator of European art, was named chief curator in 2000, and director in 2007.

Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Photo courtesy of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

MMFA terminated Bondils contract on Monday, citing a staff union letter alleging that she had created a toxic work environment that led several high-level employees to step down from their posts.

Despite efforts on the part of the board to resolve the issue, the situation was becoming steadily more problematic with disturbing accounts and allegations of psychological harassment, the museum said in a press release announcing her termination.

The board of directors initially proposed an arrangement in which Bondil would have continued in her post through the end of her contract in June 2021, reports La Presse.

Under the proposal, which Bondil rejected, she would have retained her title and salary, but any choices regarding museum programming for two final exhibitions of her tenure would have to be approved by Michel de la Chenelire, the president of the board of directors.

Before firing Bondil, the board sought an external audit from a human resources management company, Le Cabinet RH, which found a significant and multifactorial deterioration in the work climate, according to the Montreal Gazette.Bondil denies those findings.

Roy, the culture minister, said in astatement that she asked to see the report twice, but that the museum refused.

In response, the museum announced that it would cooperate fully with the investigation.

We nonetheless remain convinced that the decision to terminate Ms. Bondils contract was the right decision in respect of our role as trustee, Chenelire, the board chair, said.

Bondil told theGlobe and Mail that she was also never shown the report, andclaimsthat the reason she was fired was because of her objections to thepromotionof Mary-Dailey Desmarais to thenewly created post of director of the curatorial division.

Desmarais is the wife ofPaul Desmarais III, whose late grandfatherPaul Desmarais Sr. was a major donor to the museum. TheDesmarais name is attached to a pavilion added to the museum after a major 1991 expansion.

Mary-Dailey Desmarais. Photo by Stephanie Badini, courtesy of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

Paul Desmarais IIIs uncle, Andr Desmarais, is currently on the museums board, and is one of three private donors funding half of the CAD$20 million (about $18 million) wing for artist Jean-Paul Riopelle, set to open in 2023.In 2018,Canadian Businessmagazine found that the family was the nations seventh wealthiest.

The toxic workplace allegations are a lie meant to cover up irregularities in recruitment, Bondil toldCBC Radio-Canada.

Three other candidates were seriously considered for the new post now occupiedby Mary-Dailey Desmarais, and internal documents ranking the finalists reveal thatDesmarais was given the lowest score, just 97.5 out of a possible 180 points, reports Le Devoir.

The top-ranked candidate got 175 points, but the boards human resources committee unanimously selectedDesmarais. Bondil favored hiring the candidate with the near-perfect score, and proposed that Desmarais instead be promoted to a new deputy chief curator role.

Desmarais joined the MMFA in 2014 as an associate curator, the first job listed on her LinkedIn, and has been the curator of international Modern and contemporary art since 2018.

She did her undergraduate work at Stanford University in American studies, and earned a masters in art history at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Desmarais went on to receive her PhD from Yale University in 2015, with the dissertation, Claude Monet: Behind the Light.

Museum of Fine Arts, Jean-Noel Desmarais Pavillon, Montreal. Photo by Thomas Ledl, via Wikimedia Commons.

Following media coverage of the controversy, the MMFA released a statementsigned by 11 of its curators, conservators, and other top employeesaimed at counteracting numerous comments, many of which are damaging to [Desmaraiss] reputation and that of the museum.

We feel strongly that Mary-Dailey Desmaraiss outstanding educational background coupled with her experience as curator at the museum, will make her a valued and trustworthy director of the curatorial team, the letter said.

At least a dozen former and current museum employees have anonymously corroborated complaints about an unhealthy atmosphere and a regime of fear at the MMFA during Bondils tenure, according to La Presse. The employees didnt take issue with Bondils own behavior, but contend that she did not do enough to address their complaints.

One museum patron, Pierre Bourgie, published an opinion piece inLe Devoir supporting Bondils dismissal, arguing that her inability to handle growing staff complaints undoubtedly weakened the museum.

In 2020 it is impossible to close ones eyes to a toxic workplace environment. Such allegations are every serious, the board president, Chenelire, told theMontreal Gazette.

But many high-profile figures have voiced their disappointment over Bondils dismissal, including Montreal Mayor Valrie Plante and Emma Lavigne, the director of Pariss Palais de Tokyo.

Bondil has put the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts on the international mapand showed us and millions of visitors that art and humanism could be a tangible reality, Lavigne told the TAN. She called the abrupt dismissal an act of pure violence.

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The Explosive Firing of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Director Has Become a Messy International Affair. Heres What Happened - artnet News

In truth, Hamilton or not, Jefferson himself is on the forefront of this dialogue with some voices calling for the overall celebration of the founding father to finish. Recognized by most merchandise of the American training system solely because the writer of the hovering rhetoric of the Declaration of Independenceand its then-radical vision of those self-evident truths that all males are created equal, that theyre endowed by their Creator with sure unalienable Rights, that amongst these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happinesshis apparent hypocrisy on not extending these beliefs to the 200 folks he owned at Monticello on the time might be overwhelming. A lot so, even two of his personal descendants, one descended from his white spouse Martha Jefferson and one from his Black mistress, and Marthas half-sister, Sally Hemings, have just lately called for the possible removal of the Jeffersons statue on the Jefferson Memorial in Washington D.C.

Judging historic figures by fashionable social standards can usually be an illusory activity, however within the case of Jefferson and the difficulty of slavery, even he was conscious of the evil inherent within the Souths peculiar establishment. A self-styled thinker and American thinker, his behavior for analyzing and self-reflection within the mold of post-Renaissance humanism was immortalized by the mansion on a hill he designed for himself: Monticello, Italian for Little Mountain, sat on the heart of his 5,000-acre plantation. There hed be seen as the good determine pacing his balcony at dawn every morning, stewing over radical concepts concerning the separation of Church and State, the necessity for a decimal system in U.S. foreign money and measurements, and the swivel chair (sure, he invented it). But the proud man was blind to the truth that his intellectual leisure was made attainable by the a whole bunch of Black our bodies round him toiling in Monticellos fields and choosing his tobacco, or serving his visitors below concern of punishment.

Nonetheless, he was conscious sufficient. Therefore a passage within the Declaration of Independence the place he tried to blame the British crown for being liable for the slave trade within the North American coloniesSouth Carolina and Georgias delegates pressured him to take it outand the very fact he proposed in 1781 that Virginia emancipate its slaves by 1784, shifting them into the inside North American continent (he thought-about separation necessary partly as a result of he considered Black folks intellectually inferior to whites). He even proposed in 1784 that the Congress of the Confederation (below the pre-Structure Articles of Confederation) prohibit slavery in all future states created out of the Northwest territory. Whereas his fellow Southern representatives defeated his proposal that 12 months, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 made it so, stopping future states like Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan from changing into slave states.

Nonetheless, he dedicated what we now call rape when he made Sally Hemings a lover in France, doubtless when she was 14 and he was 43. It was at these ages after they met, with Hemings being despatched as a companion for his daughter Polly on a voyage throughout the Atlantic. On the time, Jefferson had already been Minister to France for years, pursuing a number of political beliefs and the bed room after his spouse Martha died in 1781extracting on her deathbed a promise from her husband to by no means marry once more. However when Sally arrived in France, right here was the a lot youthful half-sister of his useless spouse, a woman identified by different slaves at Monticello as Dashing Sally due to her gentle pores and skin and straight hair. Simply as Jefferson would take Sally as a lover, his father-in-law John Wayles had taken Sallys mom Elizabeth Hemings as his personal coerced mistress. And Elizabeth was likewise the daughter of one other white man and Black slave.

The way in which Madison Hemings, considered one of Jefferson and Hemings 4 kids to outlive to maturity, tells it:

Their stay was about eighteen months. However throughout that point my mom grew to become Mr Jeffersons concubine, and when he was referred to as dwelling she was enceinte by him. He desired to deliver my mom again to Virginia with him however she demurred. She was simply starting to grasp the French language properly, and in France she was free, whereas if she returned to Virginia she can be re-enslaved. So she refused to return with him. To induce her to take action he promised her extraordinary privileges, and made a solemn pledge that her kids must be free on the age of twenty-one years. In consequence of his guarantees, on which she implicitly relied, she returned with him to Virginia. Quickly after their arrival, she gave start to a child, of whom Thomas Jefferson was the daddy.

Madison Hemings

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Hamilton: Thomas Jefferson Controversy Explained - World Top Trend

Pardon me while I engage in a momentary hissy fit.

How is it harmless for a 60-something-year-old woman to sustain 103-degree body temps sometimes higherfor 14 straight days? In Week Three, she is enjoying a more normal body temperature of 102. Also, outstanding is a hacking cough and three weeks of labored breathing so that a five-minute phone conversation is too much to sustain. Is there a level-headed, relatively sane human being among us who is exclaiming, I cant wait to experience Covid-19 symptoms for myself. Even for the thrill seekers among us, this virus has no place on anyones Bucket List.

In a second situation, my extremely health-conscious friend (a New York City school teacher) who devours a pound of steamed broccoli at a single seating and calls that a meal, contracted the virus in the classroom in March. To date, she has yet to regain her sense of taste and sense of smell. Should you doubt the significance of this loss, consider that not tasting ones food might lead to serious depression and extreme weight loss. After all, why continue to consume three meals a day if you dont derive some pleasure from your food intake? What if your favorite snack suddenly tasted like cardboard? Or had the appeal of plain boiling water?

When my friend was in full virus-mode, nausea and dizziness for six straight weeks was responsible for a 15-pound weight loss she could ill afford. You might find her lying flat on the floor of her apartment when the virus was at its worst. Sixteen weeks from the onset, lingering symptoms remain, including balance issues. Believing the virus to be behind her, she finds herself stumbling and losing her footing when she least expects it. Still, she remains grateful for having a mild case that kept her out of the E.R.

One Long Island woman who prides herself on a disciplined organic lifestyle, contracted the virus and continues to suffer with on-going symptoms that mimic multiple sclerosis. She goes to bed at night frightened that the lingering neurological symptoms (alternating numbness and tingling in both her arms and legs) may worsen or become chronic and permanent. Countless Americans go to bed each night frightened for symptoms they dont understand and their physicians dont fully understand either.

Just when you thought things couldnt get worse, on Wednesday, July 8, CNN announced Coronavirus Pandemic could cause a wave of brain damage. This news comes as a result of a study by British researchers at University College of London and published in the Journal, Brain. The findings express concern for complications post-Coronavirus such as stroke, nerve damage and potentially fatal brain inflammation even among patients who had a mild form of the virus. Patients studied ranged in age from 16-85.

If only we could wish away the worry, but its not that simple. Regardless of whether or not you acknowledge G-D, Buddha, humanism or atheism, why not be grateful for the one bright light in the midst of this medical madness. There already exists a low-cost, proven winner capable of combatting Covid-19. It comes in a variety of colors, materials and price points. Visitors to the popular website Etsy are no doubt familiar with the distinctive options in fabric face coverings. There are endless smile-worthy options.

Query any Emergency Room or ICU patient and theyll tell you 103-degree daily temps are best suited for the tropics not for human body temperatures. So listen up, Long Island, the personal responsibility you demonstrate today may mean the difference between life and death or lingering illness tomorrow.

Be bold, be brash, but please protect yourself with a face mask. Finally, please remember to fully cover your nose and your mouth. The war against Covid-19 wont be won with peek-a-boo nostrils showing or a downward sliding face covering.

Judy Shore Rosenthal

Great Neck

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Readers Write: Tales of damage to patients on Covid-19's front lines - Opinions - The Island Now

The current crisis has had a devastating effect on the performing arts. Broadwayhas shut downfor at least the rest of 2020, and the ban on gatherings in New Yorkextends to all other performance spaces as well. So the show must go onlineand streaming video makes that possible. Here are some of the best theater, opera, dance and cabaretevents you can watch today without leaving home, many of which will help you support artists and charities.Performancesthat go live today are at the top of the list; scroll down past the daily listings to find events you can stillwatch for a limited time and, below that, a bonus section of videos that have no expiration. We update this page every day, so bookmark it for the latest information.

The Seth Concert Series: Norm LewisMonday 3pm EDT / 8pm BST (live only)Seth Rudetskys intimate chat-and-sing series at the Art House in Provincetown has drawn top Broadway stars to the tip of the Cape for nearly a decade. He knows exactly what stories and songs people need to hear from each of his A-list guests, and now he brings the magic online in a weekly series that uses a new approach to sound design to make it possible to accompany his guests in real time. Joining him for this episode is the radiantly amiable leading man Norm Lewis, whose versatile 25-year career on Broadway has included stints in Porgy and Bess, Les Misrables, The Little Mermaid, The Wild Party and Side Show; in 2014, he became the first Black actor to play the Phantom on Broadway. Virtual tickets cost $25 (or $20 with the discount code NORM20); the live edition on Sunday night is recorded and rerun on Monday at 3pm.

Norm Lewis | Photograph: Kevin Yatarola

Maries Crisis Virtual Piano BarMonday 4pm9:30pm EDT / 9pm2:30am BSTThe beloved West Village institution keeps the show tunes rolling merrily along every night of the week. Read all about it here. Join the Maries Group page on Facebook to watch from home, and dont forget to tip the pianist and staff through Venmo. Tonights scheduled pianists are Alex Barylski (@Alexander-Barylski) and Brandon James Gwinn (@brandonjamesg).

Dixon Place: Hot! FestivalMonday 6:30pm and 7pm EDT / 11:30pm and midnight BST (live only)Escape your humdrum black-and-white life for the many shades of gay at the Hot! Festival, Dixon Place's annual celebration of all things same-sex. The virtual festivities continue today with the 10-minute They & High Flying (6:30pm), the third edition of Jeff McMahons weekly series of short works, and Tadeusz von Moltke and Alexander Zuccaros Stop When Youre Done 20/21 (7pm), a 20-minute tribute to Jean Genet that imagines an encounter between civil-rights protesters in 1970 and today. Contributions to both shows are voluntary.

Tadeusz von Moltke and Alexander Zuccaro | Photograph: Zoran Trifunovic and Retratochino

Theater for the New City: Visitors in the DarkMonday 7pm EDT / midnight BST (available for four days)The kind of camp that Charles Busch (Vampire Lesbians of Sodom) has practiced for more than 35 years, with great affection and without modern peer, is rooted in nostalgia for the black-and-white magic of the silver screen of yore. In between Off Broadway productions (such as this years The Confession of Lily Dare), he often returns to the East Villages scrappy Theater for the New City to try out new material. Tonight, he costars with Julie Halston, Becky London and Ruth Williamson in Visitors in the Dark, in which four Greenwich Village women suspect that space aliens may be involved in the 1965 blackout. Longtime Busch leaguer Carl Andress directs the world premiere.

Charles Busch | Photograph: Jim Cox

Project Sing Out!: A Benefit for Arts EducationMonday 7pm EDT / midnight BSTHailey Kilgore, who made a memorable Broadway debut in the 2017 Broadway revival of Once on This Island when she was just 18, corrals a terrific lineup of fellow musical-theater lights to raise funds for the Educational Theatrical Foundation, which supports arts education in low-income communities and communities of color. Hosted by Playbill, the event includes performances and appearances by Lea Salonga, LaChanze, Brandon Victor Dixon, Javier Muoz, Ruthie Ann Miles, Ali Stroker, Saycon Sengbloh, Colman Domingo, Chita Rivera, Don Cheadle, Vanessa Williams, Audra McDonald and Will Swenson, Jordan Fisher, Jenna Ushkowitz, Peppermint, Jamie Brewer, Celia Rose Gooding, Adam Jacobs, Ana Villafae, Rodney Hicks, Jon Rua, Telly Leung, Quentin Earl Darrington, Jelani Alladin, Robin Roberts, Whoopi Goldberg, Eden Espinosa, Nikki Rene Daniels, George Salazar and many more.

Hailey Kilgore | Photograph: Jeffrey Mosier

Transport Group: Broadbend, ArkansasMonday 7pm EDT / midnight BST (available through August 16)The Transport Group, whose consistently fine work has earned it special honors from the New York Drama Critics Circle and the Drama Desks, streams a recording of its original 2019 musical Broadbend, Arkansas, which follows three generations of an African-American family in the South as it grapples with questions of civil rights, economic inequality and police brutality. The music is by Ted Shen, and the libretto is by Ellen Fitzhugh and Harrison David Rivers. Jack Cummings III directs a cast led by Justin Cunningham and Danyel Fulton. Contributions to the Black Theatre Network are encouraged.

Danyel Fulton | Photograph: Brian Gustaveson

The New Group: Facing the Rising Tide: Quik-MartMonday 7pm EDT / midnight BST (live only)This week, Off Broadways New Group teams with the Natural Resources Defense Council for a digital festival called Facing the Rising Ride, which comprises live readings and post-performance discussions of five plays by emerging writers that address questions of environmental racism, the climate crisis and hope. The fest begins tonight with Charles Gershmans Quik-Mart (directed by Arpita Mukherjee), a drama that centers on the ownership of a New York City bodega.

Red Bull Theater: Short New Play Festival 2020: Private LivesMonday 7:30pm EDT / 12:30am BST (available for four days)New Yorks gutsiest classical-theater troupe, Red Bull, offers the tenth edition of its annual feast of playlets. This years virtual version, hosted by Craig Baldwin, features live remote performances of eight brief works loosely inspired by Nol Cowards Private Lives. Two of themJeremy O. Harriss Fear and Misery of the Master Race (of the Brecht) and Theresa Rebecks The Panelwere commissioned for the festival; the other six (by Ben Beckley, Avery Deutsch, Leah Maddrie, Jessica Moss, Matthew Park and Mallory Jane Weiss) were chosen from among more than 500 submissions. Mlisa Annis, Vivienne Benesch and Em Weinstein direct a luxury cast that includes Kathleen Chalfant, William Jackson Harper, Charlayne Woodard, Lilli Cooper, Edmund Donovan, Frankie J. Alvarez, Ali Ahn, Louisa Jacobson and Peter Francis James.

Jeremy O. Harris | Photograph: Quil Lemons

Metropolitan Opera: Il Barbiere di SivigliaMonday 7:30pm EDT / 12:30am BST (available for 23 hours)The Met continues its immensely popular rollout of past performances, recorded in HD and viewable for free. A different archival production goes live at 7:30pm each night and remains online for the next 23 hours. Tonight the series begins its 19th week with a 2014 performance of Rossini's 1816 opera buffa (and Bugs Bunny favorite) The Barber of Seville, adapted from a French stage comedy by Pierre Beaumarchais and a prequel of sorts to Mozart's 1786 The Marriage of Figaro. Michele Mariotti conducts; the cast is led by Isabel Leonard, Lawrence Brownlee, Christopher Maltman and Maurizio Muraro.

Il Barbiere di Siviglia | Photograph: Ken Howard

Bindlestiff Open Stage Variety Show: Quarantine EditionMonday 7:30pm EDT / 12:30am BST (available for one week)Mounted by the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus gang, this exhibition of curious human endeavors features everything from stripping clowns to heavy-metal magicians. A remote edition of the vaudevillian variety pageant now hits YouTube every week. This week, Bindlestiffs Keith Nelson hosts sideshow performer Coney Island Chris, comedic magician Jeff Moche, hand balancer Joel Herzfeld, contortionist Maddy (from Pegasus Riders), comic juggler Sam Malcolm, hula hooper Dizzy Lizzy, aerialist-musician Amy Chen, jugglers Susan Voyticky and Kelsey Strauch and Ugandan acrobat-jugglers Eries El Malabarista, as well as circus historian Hovey Burgess. Contributions are welcome via Venmo (@BindlestiffFamilyCirkus).

Joel Herzfeld | Photograph: Scott Chasteen

Pregones/ Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre: Remojo 2020Monday 7:30pm EDT / 12:30am BST (live only)Pregones/PRTT, whose 2014 merger united two of New Yorks oldest Latinx-centered theater companies, continues its five-part weekly platform for works-in-progress and indie short films. Rosal Colon (Orange Is the New Black) hosts each half-hour episode. Todays edition features Joel Prezs Colonial, in which a young man makes surprising discoveries after inheriting a family manse in Puerto Rico, and Cedric Leiba Jr.s LGBTQ-themed solo cabaret My Emancipation. Reservations are required.

Rosal Colon | Photograph: Courtesy of the artist

Jim Caruso's Pajama Cast PartyMonday 8pm EDT / 1am BSTPart cabaret, part piano bar and part social set, Birdland's long-running Monday-night open mic Cast Party offers a chance to hear rising and established talents step up to the spotlight. The waggish Jim Caruso presides as host, and now he brings the show online via YouTube. This weeks guest list includes Broadway broad Sally Mayes, jazz pianists Monty Alexander and Jim Clayton, singer Nicole Henry, erstwhile Queer Eye culturista Jai Rodriguez and young musical-theater fan Colin OLeary, who went viral with a YouTube video of him lip-synching show tunes in the car with his none-too-pleased-looking mom. The show is free, but tips are welcome (Venmo: @Jim-Caruso-1).

Jim Caruso | Photograph: Bill Westmoreland

Stars in the House: Andra Burns and friendsMonday 8pm EDT / 1am BSTShowtune savant and SiriusXM host Seth Rudetsky (Disaster!) and his husband, producer James Wesley, are the animating forces behind this ambitious and very entertaining series, in which they play host to theater stars in live, chatty interviews interspersed with clips and songs. Dr. Jon LaPook, the chief medical correspondent for CBS News, provides periodic updates on public health; surprise virtual visitors are common as well. Donations benefit the Actors Fund. On Monday nights the show is guest-hosted by Broadways vivid Andra Burns (On Your Feet!).

Andra Burns | Photograph: Justin Patterson

Mondays in the Club with LanceMonday 9pm1am EDT / 1am5am BSTHes worked with Alan Cumming, Liza Minnelli and just about every downtown act in NYC. Now the songwriter, pianist and performer Lance Horne hosts his own wild night of piano-bar singing, storytelling and dancing at the East Village nightlife hub Club Cummingtransposed, for the time being, to the key of YouTube, where loyal regulars and curious visitors can keep the flame burning. Expect show-tune geekery and advanced community spirit. In its new Monday+ format, the livestream includes new material as well as highlight clips from past events. (The stream is free, but you can also tip Horne directly via Venmo at @LanceHorne.)

Mondays in the Club with Lance | Photograph: Jeff Eason

The Muny: The Muny 2020 Summer Variety Hour Live!Monday 9:15pm EDT / 2:15am BST (live only)The St. Louis Municipal Opera Theatre, known to all as the Muny, is the biggest and oldest outdoor musical-theater venue in the United States, and it usually mounts multiple productions every summer in its 11,000-seat amphitheater. Since thats out of the question this year, the company is creating weekly online specials (through August 17) that include highlights from past seasons, cast reunions and live song-and-dance material recorded remotely. Tonights debut episode includes scenes from The Little Mermaid, Singin in the Rain, The Wiz and The Music Man and performances by Jennifer Cody, Hunter Foster, Ashley Brown, Lara Teeter and original Cats star Ken Page, as well as an episode of the game show Munywood Squares with guest stars E. Faye Butler, J. Harrison Ghee, Ann Harada, Raymond J. Lee, Vicki Lewis, Steve Rosen, Jeffrey Schecter, John Scherer and Christopher Sieber. (The show will be rerun once only on Thursday night.)

The Music Man | Photograph: Phillip Hamer

CyberTank Variety ShowTuesday 4pm EDT / 9pm BSTThe Tank, one of NYCs premiere incubators of emerging talent, rolls forward with a weekly multidisciplinary variety show and discussion group, in which artists are welcome to participate remotely.

Maries Crisis Virtual Piano BarTuesday 4pm9:30pm EDT / 9pm2:30am BSTSee Monday 4pm. Tonights scheduled pianists are James Merillat (@James-Merillat-2) and Franca Vercelloni (@Franca-Vercelloni).

The 24 Hour Plays: Viral MonologuesTuesday 6pm EDT / 11pm BST (available for four days)Since 1995, the 24 Hour Plays series has set itself a challenge: to write, cast and perform new playlets in the span of a single night and day. In this weekly variation on that theme, writers create monologues or two-handers for actors who record them and send them in for online broadcast. On Tuesdays starting at 6pm, a new piece goes live every 15 minutes on the 24 Hours Plays Instagram feed, where they remain viewable for four days.

Irish Repertory Theatre: The WeirTuesday 7pm EDT / midnight BST (live only)After its success in May with a virtual revival of Brian Friels Molly Sweeney, the Irish Rep is offering a summer season of love online productions of three other shows from the companys history. This week, the company revisits its excellent 2013 revival of Conor McPherson's 1997 drama, a series of tall tales told by four Irishmen vying for the attention of a woman in a pub. The Irish Repertory Theatres offering boasts a palpable liquidity, an accelerating rush of people swept off their feet by loneliness who are nonetheless caught and stilled in a village bar, wrote Helen Shaw in her five-star Time Out review. But the work moves beyond mere coziness; an excellent cast and McPhersons profoundly felt humanism make the piece warming on some deep, maybe even soul-deep, level. Three members of the 2013 castDan Butler, Sean Gormley and Irish Rep utility player John Keatingare joined this time by Amanda Quaid and Tim Ruddy, all directed once again by Ciarn OReilly. The play will be performed live five more times this week at different times; each performance is free, but a $25 donation is suggested and registration at least two hours in advance is required.

The Weir | Photograph: Carol Rosegg

The New Group: Facing the Rising Tide: shadow/landTuesday 7pm EDT / midnight BST (live only)See Monday 7pm. The festival continues tonight with Erika Dickerson-Despenzas shadow/land (directed by Candis C. Jones), the first part of a planned 10-play cycle about the effects of Hurricane Katrina.

Piano Bar Live!Tuesday 7:15pm EDT / 12:15am BSTBefore the current isolation situation, Scott Barbarinos Piano Bar Live! was already devoted to streaming piano bar entertainers at Brandys and the Duplex to folks cooped up at home. Now the series goes fully virtual. This weeks edition features Michael Orland, the Bleam Sisters, Ashley Argota, Dan Bauer, Hadiza Dockeray, Robin Lyon, Julie Sheppard, Nancy Timpanaro-Hogan and Peter Allen Vogt.

Monk Parrots: After an Earlier Incident (A Dyschronic Romeo and Juliet)Tuesday 7:30pm EDT / 12:30am BST (available for one week)The NYC experimental-theater company Monk Parrots streams a recording of its world-premiere production of David Todds After an Earlier Incident (A Dyschronic Romeo and Juliet), which draws on the work of French deconstructionist Jacques Derrida as it combines elements of various Romeo and Julietlike stories throughout the ages. Directed by Luke Leonard, the multimedia production was recorded at La MaMa in 2013.

After an Earlier Incident | Photograph: Emily Boland

Metropolitan Opera: TannhuserTuesday 7:30pm EDT / 12:30am BST (available for 23 hours)See Monday 7:30pm. Tonights Met selection, which predates the HD era, is Wagners Tannhuser, a tale of transcendent love and a medieval version of the Eurovision Song Contest that everyone takes very seriously. James Levine conducts this 1982 performance, which stars Richard Cassilly, va Marton, Bernd Weikl, John Macurdy and, as the goddess Venus, Tatiana Troyanos.

Tannhuser | Photograph: Metropolitan Opera Archives

Amber Martin: AmbyokeTuesday 8pm EDT / 1am BSTThe multitalented Amber Martin, a chameleonic performer with a killer voice, is a significant player in the downtown alt-cabaret scene, and shes not going to let a little quarantine slow her down. In her weekly hang session on Facebook, she sings favorites and requests to karaoke tracks and chats with guests. (You can tip her through Venmo at @Amber-Martin-101.)

Amber Martin | Photograph: Rayon Richards

Stars in the House: The Comeback reunionTuesday 8pm EDT / 1am BSTSee Monday 8pm. Tonight's edition strays from the seriess usual theatrical focus to reunite cast members of HBOs much-cherished cult comedy The Comeback. Series star Lisa Kudrow is joined by castmates Laura Silverman, Dan Bucatinsky, Lance Barber and Damian Young as well as by series co-creator Michael Patrick King.

Folksbiene Live: Maida Feingold: Sing Out for Peace and JusticeWednesday 1pm EDT / 6pm BSTMore than a century old, the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene recently had a surprise breakout hit with its Yiddish-language production of Fiddler on the Roof. In the latest edition of its Folksbiene Live series, billed as "an online celebration of Yiddish culture," Maida Feingold performs Yiddish and English folk songs with social-justice messages.

Martha Graham Dance Company: ClytemnestraWednesday 2:30pm EDT / 7:30pm BSTThe queen of modern dance's legacy lives on. In this edition of its Martha Matinee series on YouTube, the company that bears her name takes a look at Grahams take on the Oresteias vengefully murderous Clytemnestra. The company is showing the workas danced by a 1979 ensemble led by Yuriko Kimurain three pieces; todays is the third. The program also includes footage of Graham herself in the title role and a live discussion with special guests.

Martha Graham in Clytemnestra | Photograph: Martha Swope

Irish Repertory Theatre: The WeirWednesday 3pm EDT / 8pm BST (live only)See Tuesday 7pm.

Maries Crisis Virtual Piano BarWednesday 4pm9:30pm EDT / 9pm2:30am BSTSee Monday 4pm. Tonights scheduled pianists are Drew Wutke (@DrewWutke) and Kenney Green (@KenneyGreenMusic).

Metropolitan Opera: The Merry WidowWednesday 5pm EDT / 10pm BST (available for 48 hours)In addition to its nightly gift of filmed productions (see 7:30pm), the Met offers an additional free opera from its Live in HD series every Wednesday through its Free Student Streams program. The videos stay live for 48 hours, and supplemental materials help newcomers unpack each offering. This week's study subject is an English-language version of Franz Lehrs frothy 1905 operetta The Merry Widow, starring the beloved American soprano Rene Fleming as a rich widow and Nathan Gunn as the handsome former flame whose pride prevents him from marrying her for her money. Sir Andrew Davis conducts this 2015 performance, which also features Broadways Kelli OHara.

The Merry Widow | Photograph: Ken Howard

The New Group: Facing the Rising Tide: That Heavens Vault Should CrackWednesday 7pm EDT / midnight BST (live only)See Monday 7pm. Tonights hump-day edition of the New Groups festival presents Rae Binstocks That Heavens Vault Should Crack (directed by Kareem Fahmy), a set of short plays about preparing for impending disaster.

New Works: Tenn and Americano!Wednesday 7pm EDT / midnight BSTIn this weekly 45-minute show, New York Theatre Barn's development series Zooms in on musicals-in-progress. Jullian Horniks Tenn depicts the early life of great American playwright Tennessee Williams; and Michael Barnard, Carrie Rodriguez and Jonathan Rosenbergs Americano!, inspired by the life of DREAMer turned political entrepreneur Antonio Valdovinos.

Carrie Rodriguez | Photograph: Courtesy of the artist

Ballet Hispnico: Homebound/AlaalaWednesday 7pm EDT / midnight BST (available for one week)The venerable Ballet Hispnico, which was to celebrate its 50th birthday with a two-week run at the Joyce in April, continues its virtual program, B Unidos. Most of its offerings are on Instagram Live, but its weekly watch parties of archival favorites are the exception. Todays offering is Bennyroyce Royons 2019 piece Homebound/Alaala, which looks at the intersection of Latin and Asian cultures. A live Q&A follows the premiere, with artistic director Eduardo Vilaro and associated artists.

Homebound/Alaala | Photograph: Paula Lobo

Dixon Place: Hot! Festival: Veronica GarzaWednesday 7pm EDT / midnight BST (live only)See Monday 6:30pm. The Hot! Festival flames on tonight with a show by Brooklyn stand-up comedian Veronica Garza. Reservations are required.

Veronica Garza | Photograph: Courtesy of the artist

Metropolitan Opera: MacbethWednesday 7:30pm EDT / 12:30am BST (available for 23 hours)See Monday 7:30pm. The Mets 19th week of free operas continues with Verdis first stab at adapting Shakespeare: Macbeth, in which a Scottish nobleman is egged on to regicide by his wife and a chorus of witches. In this 2008 performance, conducted by James Levine, eljko Lui and Maria Guleghina play the central couple; the supporting cast includes Dimitri Pittas, and John Relyea.

Macbeth | Photograph: Ken Howard

The Tank: Mrs. LomanWednesday 8pm EDT / 1am BSTThe Tanks Meghan Finn directs a reading of Barbara Cassidys Mrs. Loman, a sequel to Death of a Salesman.

Irish Repertory Theatre: The WeirWednesday 8pm EDT / 1am BST (live only)See Tuesday 7pm.

Stars in the HouseWednesday 8pm EDT / 1am BSTSee Monday 8pm. Guests for tonights episode have not yet been announced.

Lake Tahoe Dance FestivalWednesday 9pm EDT / 2am BST (available for one day)Lake Tahoe Dance Collective presents its eighth annual dance festival in a virtual edition that is spread out over three successive nights. On the lineup are works that have been featured in past years of the festival or by artists who were originally slated to perform this time. Tonights collection focuses on American classical ballet and includes dances by Agnes de Mille, Antony Tudor and Lauren Lovette; festival founders Christin Hanna and Constantine Baecher host a conversation about the works with guests Daniel Baudendistel, Stephen Hanna, Adrian Danchig-Waring and Ashley Bouder. A $25 contribution is suggested.

Agnes De Milles The Other | Photograph: Jen Schmidt

NOTE: If you would like to be considered for this page, please write to Adam Feldman at theaterfromhome@gmail.com. Listings continue below.

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The Best Live Theater to Stream Online Today - Time Out New York

Director Kim Do-joon poses before an interview with The Korea Herald on June 26. (Park Hyun-koo/The Korea Herald)

I strained to hear what was being said, but the words bounced off the building walls, becoming incomprehensible echoes by the time they reached my ears through the open window.

When the shrill noise reverberated through the apartment buildings again the next Saturday, I left the book I was trying to read and headed to the entrance of the apartment complex on the pretext of getting something from the nearby convenience store. I was sure I would see the protesters on the way. I was curious who they were, what grievance had brought them to this run-of-the-mill apartment complex. In my more than 20 years in the neighborhood, something like this had never occurred before.

On the way back home, I saw a small group of people wearing labor union vests, one of them speaking into a microphone, which magnified the sound manifold. They were protesting against the firing of highway toll collectors. While picking through ice cream bars at the convenience store, I very briefly debated whether I should try to interview them. But it ended at that -- an internal debate. After all it was my day off, the heat of the midday sun was unbearable and I thus justified my decision to not pursue the matter.

Kim Do-joon, a 33-year-old student at Korea National University of Arts, was in Gwanghwamun in downtown Seoul one day last August, doing groundwork for a film project when he happened upon a group of protesters. Unlike me, Kim, who had his camera with him, went over and immediately began interviewing the protestors, effectively starting work on a new film.

Kims documentary feature Bora Bora, which was screened online in early June as part of the Jeonju International Film Festival, answered the questions I did not ask that Saturday morning last August.

In an interview prompted partly by a sense of guilt at having ignored the protests and motivated by a desire to make it right, I ask Kim what led him to drop what he was doing and run over to the protesters.

These were women who were my aunts, my mothers age protesting under the blazing sun, Kim says. The sight debunked for Kim, who had had no previous experience with labor movements and whose knowledge about such movements came from reading, the stereotypical image of protesters as strong, robust men.

Bora Bora -- the Korean term for Look Look also refers to the name of a workers dance team featured in the film, as well as the desire for a single unified labor union at the company -- is an insiders look into the protests that were sparked by the firing in July 2019 of 1,500 non-regular workers who had demanded regular worker status as employees of Korea Expressway Corp.

The documentary film follows the protesters as they talk about the families they have not seen in months, as they debate the next course of action and as a protester has her hair done by a fellow protester. Emotions are not withheld and the camera does not shy away from conflicts among different groups.

Such an intimate look was possible because of the footage taken inside the protest venues by protesters themselves during the more than 200 days of rallies calling for the reinstatement of fired workers as regular employees of KEC.

Kim Mi-young and Kim Seung-hwa, who are named as directors along with Kim Do-joon, shot the footage from inside the protester-occupied KEC headquarters in Gimcheon, North Gyeongsang Province, and from atop the Seoul Tollgate canopy, respectively.

When Kim began filming, the protests had been going on for three weeks. Unable to get inside the Korea Expressway Corp. headquarters building occupied by the unionists and cordoned off by police, Kim had to contend with interviewing people protesting outside the building. In the process, he learned the women protesting 10 meters above ground on the Seoul Toll Gate canopy were sent up food twice a day via a pulley system.

Kim, who had decided against the use of a drone to shoot the group on the canopy as it would have meant a mere glance at a protest scene, sent up a video camera to the protesters, hiding it in the pulley delivering food.

My interest was in what the unionists were talking about. I did not want a television interview. I was curious about the story that unfolded once the camera was put down, the story that took place behind the camera, Kim says.

Getting a camera to the protesters occupying the headquarters building since Sept. 9 proved more challenging, and Kim had to bide his time until the police watch relaxed somewhat. Kim hid a video camera and other accessories inside boxes of tonic drinks and made a dash for a gap in the police barricade. He was stopped by police but, fortunately, only two of the six boxes Kim was carrying were inspected. The two boxes contained bottles of Ssanghwa-tang, the four unopened boxes held a camera and other filming paraphernalia.

Once the cameras were inside, Kim asked the protesters to shoot. I asked them to treat it like a toy, to play with it and to film every day as if keeping a diary, Kim says.

By the time the protests ended in late January, Kim had some 1,000 hours of footage in his hands. He was surprised at how good the footage taken by the protesters was. They were not conscious of the camera, says Kim. While media and documentaries typically portray protesters as suffering -- as people in need of help -- what he saw in the footage taken from inside was anything but.

What was really surprising was how bright, cheerful, strong, dignified, confident they were, Kim says. I was shocked and moved.

Editing was a Herculean task -- it would have taken two months just to watch the 1,000 hours of footage and about one to two years to edit -- but circumstances demanded it be done as soon as possible. The situation had resolved by the end of January and I thought the film needed to be quickly sent out to the world, Kim says.

Working at a speed that most people would find incredulous, editing was completed in one month. The final film is 2 1/2 hours long -- 50 minutes of footage by the unionists and 100 minutes shot by director Kim and the films director of photography. What the audience sees is 1/400th of what was filmed, he explains.

It helped that he had continued to view the footage by the unionists as it came in so that he could give feedback and also so that what he filmed outside would meld seamlessly with what was filmed inside.

Bora Bora took form as it was being shot. The film had to reflect the changes in my thoughts because my thoughts changed too, living with the unionists for half a year, says Kim.

Early on, Kim had decided that for the footage shot by the unionists and his own -- as an outsider -- to merge harmoniously, a close relationship with the unionists was a must.

It seemed a daunting task at first, but relentlessly tailing the unionists and spending time together, the distance between them gradually faded. In a follow-up email, I ask how the feeling as if he were part of the community he was filming may have influenced his work. I moved in a position that was somewhere between being a member of the community and an outsider, Kim replies. But the principle of staying side by side with them, not observing them from above, remained consistent.

Laid-off toll collectors perform synchronized dance movements as they protest on top of Seoul Tollgate in a scene from documentary film Bora Bora. (Kim Do-joon)

Noting that directors today tend to rely on the image of workers inside their own heads, Kim says they are squeezing workers and minorities into a frame of a victim narrative, competing to show who is the bigger victim in an increasingly sensational manner. It must be asked if this is right, says the so-far mild-mannered Kim, raising his voice in anger and frustration.

While collaboration with the unionists began as a way to overcome the limits of not being able to get inside the protest sites, as filming progressed Kim saw that it could be a breakthrough for the current state of indie film.

I pursued collaboration with the workers as I thought that through such collaboration perhaps the workers real thoughts, faces, history may be shown, he says, adding that he believes that Bora Bora may present an alternative in Koreas indie film scene.

The director has a lot to say about independent cinema in Korea, including how indie films are increasingly becoming more like public interest commercials or sentimental human drama.

In these films you only see pain, but as Bora Bora shows, there is also joy, festivity and conflict, Kim says. I wanted to show what is authentic.

In making Bora Bora, Kim followed his conviction that authenticity would have a far greater persuasive power to change the minds of those hostile to the toll gate protests and the issue of non-regular workers than eliciting viewers sympathy to appeal to low-level humanism.

Kims desire for authenticity is apparent in his cinematography as well. Rather than close-ups of individual faces against a blurred background, which effectively eliminates the context of the emotion, Kims camera pans the scene, looking at the individuals as well as the surroundings in depth.

Have the unionists been able to watch the film together, I ask, since an important part of a film experience is shared viewing and the discussions that follow.

COVID-19 made that impossible, but the unionists who watched the film online expressed wonder at how the film was shot from their perspective, Kim explains. They didnt think it would come to this. They said they hadnt imagined that it could be made into a movie and be seen by many people, says Kim.

Kim admits that without background knowledge about the tollgate workers protests, the film may be strange and unfamiliar initially. I agree but add that the film also has a way of pulling you in and you soon become oblivious to its length. I would like the audience to think of it as their problem as well. After all, there is no one that does not engage in labor, Kim replies.

Kim has four films to his name: three shorts and one feature-length documentary.

While Bora Bora is Kims first documentary feature, his previous short films are also grounded in the realities of the marginalized.

His first work, a 2008 film about the homeless, starred actual homeless men, including one who was also an activist. Juliana, a story of an elderly woman living like a ghost in a condemned apartment building and a man his 40s with nowhere to go, evolved from Kims interviews with three elderly women tenants facing eviction from Sky Apartment in Jeongneung, Seoul, and the life story of the elderly actress he had cast for the film. After listening to the 80-something actress tell her story, Kim rewrote the script over a two-day period.

Since his teenage years, Kim had always known that he wanted to create. That it would be in the medium of film that he would create was decided after watching Deep End, a 1970 coming-of-age film by Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski, as a second-year high school student. Thinking about it now, it is a wonder that EBS aired it in 2003, albeit with some scenes with nudity deleted, says Kim.

Unlike so many Hollywood movies, the Polish films genre could not be defined and it did not depend on a narrative, Kim recalls many years later. But, it had a power to keep you watching, entranced, he says. He would later learn that these were the characteristics of modern cinema.

After graduating high school, Kim chose to attend cinematheques rather than going to university. I thought, This is a place I can study film, he says. For more than two years, he watched films every day, focusing on classics and art films.

This was a time when films were all I thought about every single day, says Kim.

Kim cites Jeanne Dielman by Belgian film director Chantal Akerman as his first cinematic experience. It was as if an electric current went right through me, he says. In 3 1/2 hours, the feminist director shows a widow living with her son going about her daily routine over a course of three days. The housewife who performs household chores with mechanical precision, much like performance art, is also a prostitute who receives clients daily at her home. After giving the womans work around the house the time it takes to complete, the films climax comes in the last few minutes. It made me think differently about time, he says, adding with a laugh, If you like this kind of movies, your life gets difficult.

Watching films, he not only ruminated over aesthetics, he also became interested in politics and history, eventually leading to his joining a civic movement and finding himself at a crossroads: film or civic activism. Thinking it would be unfair to give up on filmmaking without ever having actually made one, he enrolled at a filmmaking academy, and by the time he graduated six months later he had his first short film about homelessness.

Moviemaking came to an end as he joined the military at the end of that year. It was upon starting university a few years after his discharge from the military that he began making films again, although, initially his reason for going to a university had nothing to do with film.

I wonder if Bora Bora a film a distributor is likely to pick up.

The director has been asked if it could be shortened, so he knows that there is an interest. On top of the sheer length of the film, distributors also express reservations about the use of amateurism, according to Kim. Indie films dealing with serious topics have a slim chance of theatrical release, usually passed over in favor of romance stories that pander to those in their 20s, who make up the majority of the indie film market.

In a later email response, Kim, who is currently reediting Bora Bora, is adamant that he would not reedit solely for the purpose of shortening it at the request of a distributor. If the typical screening avenues are closed to the film, Kim will seek alternative ways.

A copy could be sent to a school, workplace or other communities where they could be shown on their screening system, Kim says, citing a recent inquiry about screening from a labor union of non-regular workers at Korea National University of Arts.

He also sees crowdfunding as a possible way to fund theater screenings. If the problem of distribution could be solved this way, the film would have set a significant precedent in the history of Korean indie films, Kim says.

When the film is more widely screened, Kim believes it will be evaluated not only on its story but also on the way it was made by the collaborative efforts of workers and students. This has significance as an attempt by the workers to record their history by themselves without relying on the intellectuals. It also shows that the arts can be a means for the workers to educate themselves, and in this context, it is related to the question of the artists role, he says.

Bora Bora has been submitted to several local and international film festivals, including the Vancouver International Film Festival and DOK Leipzig, with plans to send submissions to International Film Festival Rotterdam, Sunday Film Festival and Toronto International Film Festival, among others.

Kims next film is a mix of documentary, drama and essay on post-1987 Korean history that he plans to finish in the first half of 2021. No one really talks about the 87 regime, he says, referring to Koreas democratization in 1987. I think movies could be an outlet for those stories, he says.

Kim, who regretted not being able to share Bora Bora with an audience in a theater setting and receive critical reviews, will get his day in the sun soon.

Bora Bora is among a selection of films that JIFF will be screening in theaters in Jeonju from July 21 to Sept. 20 and in Seoul for three weeks starting Aug. 6 as part of its extended festival. Screenings will be followed by artist talks and discussions.

What would he like to make if he could make any movie? A movie that requires a lot of money! he says with a big laugh.

Turning serious, he says, I would like to make many films. Ive found that I have a lot of stories I want to tell.

By Kim Hoo-ran (khooran@heraldcorp.com)

Go here to see the original:

[Eye Interview] I want to show authenticity - The Korea Herald

The reconversion of the Hagia Sophia into a mosque by Erdogans Turkey is a historic event. It marks the rebirth of an Islamic Turkey, and the further retrenchment of universalist values of liberalism and secularism in a world increasingly composed of majoritarian nation-states.

Unfortunately we are not secular any more, Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel Prize-winning Turkish novelist, told BBC on Friday. It all looks so familiar from India. A year ago, in a mirror to the judgment in Turkey, Indias Supreme Court essentially sanctified the majoritarian desire to have a Ram temple built at the site of the demolished Babri Masjid. Like the Hagia Sophia, the issue was not about religious structures, but competing visions of the Indian Republic. The Supreme Court order confirmed to both chauvinistic Hindus and gloomy Muslims what they already suspected: the secular republic had given way to a Hindu India.

Bartholomew I, the usually reticent Patriarch of the Eastern Orthodox Church at Istanbul, issued a stern condemnation of the absurd and harmful reconversion of Hagia Sophia. A place that now allows the two peoples to meet and admire its greatness can again become a reason for contrast and confrontation, Bartholomew said, warning that it will push millions of Christians around the world against Islam. The angry reactions from Greece and Russia, countries with historical ties to the Cathedral, seemed to confirm his fears. Right-wing parties across Europe, which often use Turkey as a bugbear for their nativist politics, would be licking their chops. The Indian right wing, which anyway does not need any excuse to hate Muslims, has also chimed onto the Hagia Sophia issue. What international precedent does Hagia Sophia set for Kashi and Mathura? Shouldnt Parliament pass a law for reclamation of sacred Hindu sites and rebuild temples demolished by Muslim rulers? tweeted Delhi University Professor Abhinav Prakash.

Not that any of this much concerns Erdogan, who has long fashioned himself as a latter-day Ottoman Sultan, systematically dismantling the secularist republic of Mustafa Kemal. The global condemnation only plays into his image as a doughty defender of national causes in the face of external pressure. We will never resort to seeking your permission or your consent, said Erdogan, responding to warnings from other countries on Hagia Sophia. Do you rule Turkey, or do we?

Erdogan has also tried to sell himself as a global protector of Muslims, much like the Ottoman Caliphs, reorienting his foreign policy since 2011 towards what experts have termed pan-Islamism. Sure enough, his Arabic statement glided smoothly beyond Turkey: The revival of Hagia Sophia is a sign towards the return of freedom to Al Aqsa mosque.

There are obvious similarities between Modi and Erdogan (and BJP and AKP). Both espouse religious nationalism, are implacably opposed to democratic institutions such as a free judiciary and a free press, and use repression of minorities as a way to consolidate political support. Arguably, Erdogan has been even more ruthless than Modi in curbing civil liberties (although the gap is fast narrowing)helped by the fact that Turkey only has a brief experience of democracy. Erdogan has jailed more journalists than any other country in the world, used the coup to pack courts with loyalists, and changed the constitution through a referendum granting himself sweeping executive powers.

There are differences though between the two countries. First, Turkey is more evenly divided between secularists and Islamists, an enduring legacy of the long Kemalist rule. Even in the recent moves at Hagia Sophia, while 47 per cent of the public supported turning the monument into a mosque, 38 per cent wanted it to stay as a museum. The urban educated middle classes, who form a large part of Turkey, generally dislike the influence of religion in politics and dislike Erdogan. In a Pew survey, 68 per cent of Turks with a post-secondary education disapproved of Erdogan, compared with only 44 per cent of Turks without secondary education. In India, the educated middle classes are the biggest ideological supporters of Modi and Hindutva. The secular, liberal elite here is tiny, hardly found outside isolated spheres of media, academia and social media.

Second, Erdogans politics of majoritarianism, while imbued with religion, uses repression of ethnic minorities (the Kurds) to buoy his political support. This is mainly because there is no significant religious minority (the Christians now make up only 0.2 per cent of Turkey). And to be sure, Turkish political parties across the spectrum are hostile to Kurds, and persecution of the Kurds has long been a central feature of the Turkish republic. When Turkey launched a gruesome bombing campaign last year on Kurds in northeast Syria, the political opposition swarmed around the military, and the largest anti-government newspaper ran the image of burning Syrian houses with the headline Traitors burnt to smoke. In fact, ironically enough, it was Erdogan who at first went further than anyone to initiate peace with the Kurds in 2010-15.

Yet, when he sensed that his political position was weakening (reflected in the 2013 Gezi protests) and his outreach to Kurds costing him votes, he dramatically reversed himself. When he lost his parliamentary majority in June 2015, he launched a war on the PKK, which helped him regain his majority five months later. Since then, he has been bombing Kurdish villages in northern Iraq, northeast Syria, and carrying out military operations in the Kurdish stronghold of southeast Turkey, where thousands have died. He has also jailed the leaders of the main Kurdish opposition (HDP) party, as well as thousands of its activists. The spike in conflict with the Kurds has helped him shore up his political support at key moments, such as before the 2017 referendum. Of course, this is similar to how Modi uses hostilities with Pakistan, or in Kashmir, or Hindu-Muslim tensions, to rally Hindus behind him at critical moments.

The Hagia Sophia move also comes at the moment when Erdogan is flagging in polls owing to a bad economy and the coronavirus pandemic. When populist strongmen have little else to offer, they offer pride.

It was unsurprising though that all the symbolism of an occasion of pride for the Muslim ummah also sparked celebration among some sections of Indian Muslims. It was partly a desperate latching on to some sense of vindication and Muslim pride at a time Muslims worldwide are subject to cruel forms of oppression. Across the border in China, at least a million Muslims find themselves in detention camps. But it was also partly a reminder that liberal and secular values, in principle (as opposed to pragmatism), are lacking in large sections of every community in India. At another level, it was a muted echo of how Turkish politics of religion had shaped Indian history.

Exactly 100 years ago, the Mahatma Gandhi-led Congress joined the Khilafat movement demanding the restoration of the Ottoman Caliphate. It was a fateful decision with profound historical consequences: it helped birth the non-cooperation movement, encouraged Hindu-Muslim unity, and brought Muslim masses into the anti-colonial struggle. But it also had less beneficial consequences.

First, it cast a long shadow on how Indian secularism would deal with minorities. Secularism often became a byword for accommodating the religious sensibilities of Muslims (often innocuously symbolic but sometimes regressive like in the Shah Bano case), which took precedence over their material rights. Second, the pan-Islamist discourse of the Khilafat movement also arguably contributed to the growth of Muslim nationalism which found its culmination in Pakistan. Naseem Qureshis deeply researched book Pan-Islam in British India: The Politics of the Khilafat Movement, 19181924 argues that pan-Islam (embodied in the Khilafat movement), even though it proved chimerical in the end, played a central role in mobilising Indian Muslims for mass politics and in so doing contributed decisively to the development of Muslim nationalism in the long run.

The Hagia Sophia reconversion ultimately points to the failure of the Kemalist project of top-down secularism. Much like the state secularism of nationalist authoritarian leaders in Egypt, Iran, Iraq etc had failed to lead to the secularisation of the wider society, it seems Turkey is no longer the exception it was long hoped to be. More fundamentally, the failing secularism of Turkey and India begs the question: is secularism even possible in non-Christian/non-Western societies? Without the Western experiences of Reformation and the Enlightenment, hard-fought victories as they were, can non-Western societies value the principles of freedom and secularism? Why is it that, unlike in the West where democratisation and secularism went hand in hand, greater democratisation has seemed to only bring religious chauvinism in India and Turkey?

The answers to these questions are perhaps disturbing, and cannot be obscured by the charge of Eurocentrism, which has long been used to justify reactionary leaders. But what is clear is that the modern reconquests of religious structures are not being effected by sultans and generals, but by the democratic will of the majority. Historical wounds are being opened afresh, and nations being made anew. Both the processes are linked, of course, and values of liberal humanism are offering little resistance.

(Asim Ali is a research associate at the Centre for Policy Research. Views expressed are personal)

See the article here:

Why Hagia Sophia, Turkey And The Charismatic Figure Of Erdogan Bristle With Resonances For India - Outlook India

Western philosophy has had two broad strategies for dealing with racism. One is to wave away hate speak and prejudice as of its time. The other is to divert all discussion of the topic into the low-status realm of ethnic, gender and equality studies.

The Black Lives Matters movement has put paid to these ploys for good. No longer can one pretend that the Enlightenment figure David Hume was speaking out of character when he ranked black people as naturally inferior to the whites. Nor can one pass off Immanuel Kants lowly regard for the Negroes of Africa as an aberration. Nor indeed can Voltaires anti-Semitism and offensive baiting of non-whites be treated like a minor blip in an otherwise unblemished intellectual record.

As John Gray writes in his book Seven Types of Atheism, Voltaires racism was not simply that of his time. Like Hume and Kant, he gave racism intellectual authority by asserting that it was grounded in reason.

The Enlightenment is still regarded as a high-point in European civilisation, and the scientific and secular values at the heart of it continue to inspire. Yet the question needs to be asked: Was it also a racist project, deeply entwined with the colonial and missionary expansions of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries?

Professor Aislinn ODonnell, acting head of the department of education at Maynooth University, believes answering this starts with learning: Learning not only how western philosophical thought has contained a racist undercurrent but also how those outside the canon have perceived things.

One of many thinkers people need to know more about, she says, is douard Glissant, a French philosopher from Martinique in the Caribbean who defended ones right to be opaque, or to lack transparency. Those in authority today like to pigeonhole, categorise and reduce minorities to subgroups. Demanding the right to opacity may be the first step towards dismantling this human taxonomy.

ODonnell explains further as this weeks Unthinkable guest.

Philosophy has largely been taught through the eyes of male, pale thinkers. Is it time for an overhaul?

Aislinn ODonnell: Philosophy departments lack of diversity when it comes to both curricula and staff has been flagged as a problem for many years, and in more recent times the American Philosophical Association and British Philosophical Association have issued guidelines which has resulted in some improvements in gender diversity.

However, philosophers like George Yancy, Simone de Beauvoir and Charles Mills argue that so-called mainstream approaches to philosophical enquiry, philosophical problems, and philosophical categories are not necessarily as abstract and universal as they may purport.

Yancy argues the dominance of a particular kind of human being in the field of philosophy white and male determines who gets to be let in to philosophy, and what counts as philosophical.

The ideas and positions of the philosophers and thinkers that I list here would enrich philosophy curricula. For a start, read Denise Ferreira da Silva, Fred Moten, Eli Clare, Christina Sharpe, George Yancy, Saidiya Hartman, Paul Gilroy, bell hooks, Charles Mills, Derrick Bell, Hortense Spillers, Frantz Fanon, Franoise Vergs, Enrique Dussel, Alexander Weheliye, Linda Martn Alcoff, Jasbir Puar, Sara Ahmed, Falguni Sheth, Sylvia Wynter, Achille Mbembe, douard Glissant.

Explain Glissants right to opacity and how it relates to the Black Lives Matter movement today.

The right to opacity rejects the argument that in order to be able to co-exist with others, I must first understand them. No doubt, there is something attractive about discourses of mutual understanding, but Glissant argues that what most matters is for each of us to be able to live with difference. He calls out the violence of making others transparent, that is, reducing people into pre-existing categories or forcing them to reveal and explain themselves in order to judge or compare.

He says: As far as Im concerned, a person has the right to be opaque. That doesnt stop me from liking that person, it doesnt stop me from working with him, hanging out with him, etc. A racist is someone who refuses what he does not understand. I can accept what I dont understand. Opacity is a right we must have.

For Glissant, a key driver of racism is when a logic of identity and purity is privileged over difference, exchange, transformation, and relation. Arguably the same logic is at play when people hold to a monocultural idea of Irishness, judging one group to be culturally the same - or properly Irish - and hence belong, and others to be culturally different and not fully Irish. It undermines the very idea of a pluralistic polity.

It doesnt matter if this is a post-colonial legacy in the Irish case; this way of thinking about identity as fixed operates with the same mechanisms of exclusion.

The metaphysics of modernity has privileged concepts and images of essence, filiation, lineage, territory and identity rather than foregrounding communication, transformation, exchange, difference and identity-in-relation. Such metaphysics has viewed identities as closed, separate, and pure, rather than identities-in-relation.

In terms of Black Lives Matter, I think Glissant would agree that we need to lay bare the ways in which claims to, and desires for, purity operate and how these play out in terms of white supremacy which presupposes whiteness as the norm. It means acknowledging just how much, quite frankly, black lives have not mattered in our recent histories. The creative move for him would involve creating new kinds of relations and solidarity.

Finally, as many people have said, an example of where the right to opacity matters involves white people not asking others to explain race and racism to them, or to demand that they tell their stories and experiences so they can understand them. Do some reading!

To what extent was the Enlightenment a colonial or imperialist exercise?

Glissant and others challenge the images of the Enlightenment and transparency this project of human understanding has been experienced for many people as one whereby they were studied as objects and viewed as not fully human.

Different philosophers will have different positions in terms of the Enlightenments legacies, what we ought to let go, what we ought to renew and what we ought to reimagine. Charles Mills has tried to reimagine liberalism, Paul Gilroy to imagine planetary humanism , while Denise Ferreira da Silva engages in the tradition of critique in philosophy arguing that violence, conquest, and colonisation are at the heart of the project of modernity.

I think what all these thinkers agree is that colonialism and imperialism cant be swept to one side. Indeed, Sylvia Wynter argues that what she calls the mono-liberal human has come into being because what was presented as salvation, the embrace of a common humanity, quickly became an exercise in imposing a threshold and ranking of who was to be counted as human. In this way vast swathes of people were positioned as infra-human needing development and civilisation to become fully human. She wants to imagine the human as creative praxis.

In many respects, this brings us back to your first question and it might help to re-frame it. What happens when the story of Enlightenment philosophy and modernity ignores its historical relation to colonialism, to racial slavery, to genocide, to racism, to sexism and so on? What kinds of images and concepts came to be privileged, like autonomy, sovereignty, property, or identity, and how did they come into existence?

In The Underside of Modernity, Enrique Dussel asks the reader to critically reflect on the inheritance of modernity and he says rather than Descartes famous cogito ergo sum we should reflect on the ego conquiro I conquer, therefore I am.

I think this needs to be taken seriously, and it means that we interrogate the canon more carefully rather than ignoring and dismissing those bits of texts that are problematic as simply prejudices of those times.

Read more:

Why does philosophy have a problem with race? - The Irish Times

A labourer works at an apparel factory at Savar on the outskirts of Dhaka on June 18 as factories reopened after the general holiday ordered as a preventive measure against COVID-19. Agence France-Presse/Munir uz Zaman

You can make sense of neutron bombs

But not human beings! Helal Hafiz, An Obscene Civilisation

The goal of all life, as Sigmund Freud would have said it, is death. In other words, the story of human civilisation is a story of cultivated inhumanity. The global defense expenditure stands at $2 trillion in 2019, which raises a moral question about the opportunity cost in terms of spending on health, agriculture, education, housing and overall sustainable development. The twist of capitalism is that as profit motive becomes paramount, the inhumane drive of self-maximization pervades the entire society. When systemic greed meets dysfunctional institutions, corruption thrives.

As we are well into the fourth month into the COVID-19 outbreak, the total number of patients who tested positive inches towards one and half lac and the number of deaths crossed the two-thousand bar. Almost everyone now knows someone close by to have been affected by the symptoms of the virus. Renowned intellectuals, seasoned bureaucrats, business tycoons, health workers, and ordinary citizens have lost their lives in their fight with the invisible organism. While everyone tries to cope with the alarm and morbidity in the air, a section is trying to make a sordid fortune out of the crisis.

The overwhelming majority of the frontline fighters policy makers, administrators, physicians, or essential workers are demonstrating exceptional integrity and grit in the face of an unprecedented havoc. Yet, the remorseless graft of a minority of government employees, public representatives, businesses and private hospitals are hindering effective response to the outbreak and its socio-economic fallout.

II

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may Robert Herrick

A brief mapping of the main sectors in which COVID-related corruption is happening reveals interesting details. Crooks have been found unsurprisingly in the public administration the powerhouse of an overtly bureaucratically governed nation but also in local government and private sector businesses.

The viral outbreak laid bare the unthinkable fragility of our health sector. The number of intensive care units for treating critically ill patients is terribly low. Lack of medical equipment restricts doctors efforts to treat the patients. Colluding forces, known in the local parlance as syndicates, create artificial crisis of health equipment, thwarting companies that have sufficient reserve of corona testing kits from supplying to the point of use. The health ministry aided by international development organisations took initiatives to procure personal protective equipment, masks, goggles, and other health equipment for the government hospitals. Incredibly, in certain cases costs, according to news reports, estimated in the procurement process have been found to be four times the original market price. Earlier, in-depth investigations into health sector by Anti-Corruption Commission unearthed the endemic corruption that has bled the sector dry. When the survival of the entire populace hinges on the availability of adequate medical facilities, the health sector mafia are die hard. Had the cost been estimated honestly, four times more health equipment could have been procured, additional lives could have been saved. The corruption bonanza was not centered on medical equipment alone. Imaginative figures were suggested for software and website development. Large financial allocations were made for paying honorarium for seminars and conferences. Not only estimated costs of these services were fancied too high, the utility of these services are questionable given that fundamental health products are short of supply.

The local government, rural development and cooperatives ministry has suspended no less than 104 public representatives for irregularities in relief distribution since the start of coronavirus outbreak. Misappropriation of funds or relief goods and manipulating the lists of beneficiaries are probably the two main graft ploys. At the local government level, embezzlement of public resources was a problem even prior to the coronavirus outbreak, but seems to have escalated in the times of a national crisis.

Private sector health care industry is also not immune from malfeasance. Doctors have been risking death and a significant number of healthcare professionals have died. While their humanism and professional ethic lights a ray of hope in these dark hours, certain businesses and private hospitals have seized upon the COVID-19 as an opportunity for brisk profit. Price of oxygen cylinder shot up in certain areas and a few private hospitals are charging exorbitant prices for their services.

III

When the city burns, even the temples of the gods are not spared.

Bharatchandra Roy

No one is invulnerable to the new virus. Friends and family members of even the rich and the powerful have fallen victim. Imminent risk of death usually modifies our behaviour by triggering the primal instincts of fight or flight. It boggles mind to surmise what motives may be inducing the corrupt to keep stealing during catastrophic time. Fear of death doesnt hold them back. Do they have some twisted risk perception that makes them believe that they or their family will somehow escape the viral scourge?

In rare instances of heroism, people stick to their guns in the face of certain destruction. When the ship RMS Titanic was sinking the eight musicians on board decided to keep on playing their routines as the terrified passengers ran for their lives. The musicians sank with the ship still at their act and are today remembered for their heroism. History remembers another musician for the same grit, although for opposite effects: when Rome was burning, as the myth relates, its god-emperor Nero was strumming the chords of his fiddle. We got too many little, terrible Neros in a COVID-19-plagued Dhaka. When the novel coronavirus calamity will be over, they will be remembered for their passionate attachment to the business of inflating bills, falsifying lists and misappropriating resources meant for the most vulnerable section of the society.

The corruption bonanza is precisely the usual stock in trade for the unscrupulous sections in our predatory capitalist structure. In 2019, the Anti-Corruption Commission itself identified a number of factors driving the health sector corruption but there is no evidence that the reports recommendations could bring about any transformative change in the sector.

The risk-benefit assessment is the prime factor, if we assume that the corrupt nexus is acting on the basis of rational choices. In a system characterised by weak governance, often benefits are privatised and losses are public. The corrupt nexus might be anticipating that if they could make extra money, they could appropriate the benefit, while the loss, i.e. the risk of death can be passed off to the others, the most vulnerable.

Centralised and exclusionary patron-client structure: The ability to appropriate benefits and pass off losses to others is based on a political system strongly defined by partisan biases over considerations of rightful entitlement. The allegiance of the actors is primarily upward in a thoroughly centralized governance system, and thus whatever benefits they pass down to the public may be perceived as whatever pittance of favor or patronage the public is good enough for. The rest can be appropriated by them since they see their own position and rank in the centralised patron-client structure as an extra-institutional entitlement validated by political affiliation and so on. Crooks may even be seen justifying their rent-seeking actions and abuse of power with reference to the risks and sacrifices they have made for the sake of preserving this centralised and exclusionary patron-client structure.

A narrow horizon of action: The administrative and political personnel who engage in corruption may not have an interest or incentive in the greater good. They may lack the imagination and motivation to engage in actions that could both benefit the community and fortify their own social and institutional credentials. Innovative solutions with regard to institutional coordination, use of technology and knowledge are required for handling a situation like this, but that requires a larger horizon of action for public officials.

Conflicting value systems: Social values are more often than not narrowly centered on personal and familial success. Social status in the immediate social circle is chiefly defined by pecuniary riches. Powerful self-maximising socio-political networks mainly judge the merit of an action not in terms of values of impartial and rule-bound procedural and substantive justice, but in terms of direct gains to themselves and their networks.

The four reasons listed above are like scratches on the surface of a bottomless, inscrutable malaise that call for thoroughgoing analyses beyond mere moralisation or methodologically individualist psychologisation.

IV

A stronger nation sold death and destruction to a weaker nation and has been making some profit out of it. What profit on the one side, and what inconceivable harm to the other!

Rabindranath Tagore, The Death Trade in China

JOS Saramagos Nobel-winning novel Blindness is based on the idea of a pandemic. The story goes like this: An invisible virus began rendering people blind. The government took the decision to quarantine the patients in a specific area. Among the quarantined blind people, one group consisted of those blind by birth. The born-blind group formed a syndicate and started monopolising relief foods meant for all. They told their blind fellows that from now on the latter would need to buy their foods. Others from the quarantined population were shocked to hear this as they had no money or assets in the quarantine. The syndicate however came up with solutions. First, they told them to give up all their valuables for getting food. After plundering the valuables, the thugs came up with a new proposal: women for food.

Blindness in this case has a pattern to it: all are blind but some are blinder than others. The pervasive syndicates in our country are blind to everything but profit. They could capitalise a pandemic, a war, probably even a zombie outbreak or the armaggeddon. There is a certain denaturation in this money-centered conception of life. Norman O Brown demonstrated that the essence of modern economic activity involves an inability to grapple with ones mortality. The imperative to accumulate is linked with the need to be able to give gifts to others which is twisted back into a hyperbolic notion of self-interest, as captured in the concept of homo economicus. In a post-colonial, peripheral country like Bangladesh, the system of accumulation has been warped into a process of de-linking ones fate with others. Marx showed that in capitalism the transaction between the capitalist and the worker was not an exchange of equal value, instead the very creation of exchange value is predicated upon capture of a surplus value by the capitalist from the value produced by the worker. In the predatory capitalism that we have in our country, the predatory caste systematically delinks its fate with the ordinary populace. There may be a profound cynicism hidden in the predatory mentality: that the others, the people have no future. For all the rhetoric of boundless prosperity and breathless growth, the predators with hearts full of cynicism believe that they should untie their fate from the masses doomed to perpetual misery and eventual death. Hence, they seek to steal their way out of annihilation for the sake of their little circles defined by kinship, party, and other narrow affiliations.

Unable to live and phobic to die, our little Neros are like so many zombified undead trying to feast upon the flesh of the people that live against systemic odds.

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A glimpse into psyche of the corrupt - newagebd.net

Health Minister, Vaughan Gething. Photo by Ymnes is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Owen Donovan,Senedd Home

Health Minister, Vaughan Gething, has written-off the 470m owed by NHS organisations in Wales so they can focus on recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Since the introduction of the NHS Finance Act 2014 a stipulation was introduced that placed a duty on organisations to break even over a three-year period.

This years accounts show four health boards have not been able to operate within their budgets since 2014 and together have amassed deficits of more than 600m.

The government has provided cash support of almost 470m to these health boards over this period.

Mr Gething said: This level of historic deficit is clearly a barrier to the NHS as it starts to plan for the long-term recovery from the coronavirus pandemic and it holds these health boards back from achieving financial balance.

Until now, there has been an expectation NHS organisations would repay this deficit and the cash support. To do this, they would need to generate underspends. I have decided the 470m of cash support will not need to be repaid and when an organisation achieves its three-year break-even duty, it will not be required to repay any historic deficits.

This will provide certainty to these organisations, helping them to focus on the immediate recovery from coronavirus, while also planning for the future and striving for financial balance.

New 44 production set to switch from Bridgend to France

Ineos Automotive has suspended plans to build a new 44 vehicle plant in Wales amid reports that production could be switched to a site in Moselle, France.

The companys new Grenadier 44 was to have been built next to the Ford engine plant at Bridgend, which is to shut this autumn with the loss of 1,700 jobs.

In a statement released on Tuesday, Ineos Automotive chief executive,Dirk Heilmann, said: Overcapacity has long been a major issue for the automotive sector.

Of course, we considered this route previously, but as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic some new options such as this one with the plant in Hambach have opened up that were simply not available to us previously.

We are therefore having another look and reviewing whether the addition of two new manufacturing facilities is the right thing to do in the current environment.

Petrochemicals firm Ineos, which is owned by billionaire Sir Jim Ratcliffe only announced that it would make the vehicle in Wales last September.

The facility in Bridgend was expected to create up to 500 jobs.

Support

The Welsh Government was reportedly providing around 10 million to bring production to Wales and the company was also set to receive support from the UK Government.

Economy Minister Ken Skates said: I have told the CEO that abandoning Bridgend at this late stage, after so much effort and money has been invested in preparing the site, would be a terrible decision for Wales and the UK.

We have impressed on the company in no uncertain terms the importance of honouring its commitment to Wales and to deliver on its promise to build a British icon here in Britain.

Plaid Cymru Shadow Minister for the Economy, Helen Mary Jones MS, described the news as an ominous sign of things to come.

Its deeply disappointing to hear that plans to build a new factory in Bridgend have been put on hold although not a complete shock. The fact that a site on mainland Europe appears to be favoured over a site in Wales may be a sign of what we risk, post Brexit.

It is very important that Welsh Government seeks to understand the full picture from Ineos, engage with them and try to change their minds.

Minister prioritises faster test turnaround

Health Minister Vaughan Gething said that increasing the speed at which coronavirus tests are processed in Wales is a real priority at Tuesdays coronavirus press briefing.

Currently just 49.4% of test results are returned within 24-hours and 74.4% of results come back within two days.

The health minister said he was is meeting officialson Tuesday afternoonto understand whats being done and when I can expect to see those further improvements being made.

The governments scientific advisers have set 24-hours as the benchmark for a successful tracing programme and Mr Gething acknowledged that the speed of the test results makes a difference to the effectiveness of the contact tracing system.

Because as soon as those results are available, theyre passed on to that Test, Trace, Protect service to begin the process of not just notifying that person but obviously follow-up contact tracing, he said.

He added he would say more on the practical changes to improve test processing speed over the next few days.

Strategy

The minister also said that he will publish a revised testing strategy for coronavirus by the end of next week.

He explained the benefit of conducting more asymptomatic testing was being reviewed with scientists and the chief medical officer, but added At this point in time, the evidence still isnt there to suggest we should have a widespread programme of testing groups of people who dont have symptoms.

I can though say that Im expecting to have a revised testing strategy with updated advice information and evidence to underpin it, and I expect to be able to publish that revised strategy before the end of this Senedd term so by the end of next week at the latest.

Earlier in the week Welsh Conservative Shadow Health Minister Angela Burns MS criticised the slowdown in the governments testing programme in recent weeks.

It is a scandal that only half of Covid test results in Wales are being turned around in a day compared to two thirds of a similar number of daily tests being processed in this time just a few weeks ago. Ministers need to get a grip and turn this situation around to ensure an effective testing system in place as we reopen Wales, she said.

Three more deaths from coronavirus were reported by Public Health Wales on Tuesday, taking the total number of deaths due to Covid-19 to 1,534.

Seven new cases were confirmed, meaning 15,900 people have now tested positive for the virus. There were 3,174 tests carried out yesterday.

School categorisations to be suspended next year

The government has announced it will suspend school categorisation for the 2020 to 2021 academic year, as part of its measures to reduce pressure on schools during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Every year, all primary and secondary schools in Wales are measured against a range of factors and placed into one of four colour-coded categories.

The system helps identify schools that need the most support and guidance, those doing well but could be doing better and those thatare highly effective and can act as support to other schools.

The updated categories are published every January on theMy Local School website.

Education Minister, Kirsty Williams, said: I recognise the difficult circumstances schools are currently operating in. My priority is to allow staff to focus their energies on the needs of pupils during these extraordinary and challenging times.

I am committed to help reduce the administrative workload on education settings, where it is appropriate and safe to do so. I have temporarily relaxed requirements to undertake national tests and assessments and also worked with Estyn to pause its inspection arrangements.

These steps will help give schools the space to continue the fantastic work they are doing in supporting their learners.

Kirsty Williams AM Education Minister. Photo National Assembly for Wales and licensed under CC BY 2.0

Law setting out new national curriculum introduced at the Senedd

Curriculum & Assessment BillIntroduced by Education Minister, Kirsty Williams (Lib Dem, Brecon & Radnor)Bill (pdf)Explanatory Memorandum (pdf)

Why introduce the Curriculum and Assessment Bill?

The Bill gives legal effect to the proposed new national curriculum for Wales (more details here).

The principles of the new curriculum were developed byProf. Graham Donaldson during the Fourth Senedd. A white paper was published at the start of 2019 and following consultation exercises and the advice of expert groups, a final version was published at the start of 2020.

The new curriculum applies to students aged 3-16 and will be phased in for nursery, primary and Year 7 pupils from September 2022, with the process completed when 2022s Year 7 cohort start Year 11 in September 2026.

The only provisions relating to sixth-forms/post-16 education mention providing a broad and balanced curriculum.

The Scottish curriculum introduced in 2010 as theCurriculum for Excellence is similar to the one being introduced in Wales. An independent review is currently beingprepared by the OECD on its impact, withissues emergingabout narrowing subject choice (at the Scottish equivalent of GCSE and A-Level) and a failure to close the attainment gap between state schools and independent schools.

The Lowdown: Four Key Proposals in the Bill

I summarised the core principleshere, but for the sake of clarity therell be four overarching principles/aims to the new curriculum (Four Purposes) and instead of traditional subjects, therell be six Areas of Learning (Expressive Arts, Health & Wellbeing, Humanities, Languages & Literacy, Mathematics & Numeracy, Science & Technology).

Teachers and schools will be given the freedom to choose how and (to an extent) what students study in each Area of Learning. However, religious education (more later), relationship & sexuality education (RSE), Welsh and English will be mandatory (with a few exceptions, touched on below).

Digital skills, literacy and numeracy will be fully integrated across all subjects, while a local, national and international context to learning (known as the concept of cynefin/habitat) aims to ensure students understand Wales and their place in the world.

Headteachers of Welsh-medium schools and nurseries can opt-out of mandatory English until pupils reach the age of 7 to ensure pupils attending Welsh-medium settings can gain a measure of fluency before they leave Foundation Phase.

Pupils will begin to specialise and choose subjects as they get older in preparation for GCSEs, and schools must offer a choice of subjects in Year 10 and 11 though headteachers will be able to override this if a pupil isnt meeting attainment expectations or a subject is impractical or disproportionately expensive to teach (subject to review/appeal).

Key Stages will be scrapped and replaced with progression steps at ages 5,8,11,14 and 16 based on a teachers assessment of how well a student is doing and a determination of what additional support they may need.

The Welsh Government will be required to prepare three codes to govern specific areas of the curriculum:

The draft codes will be subject to Senedd approval, seemingly under the negative procedure (they come into effect automatically unless MSs explicitly vote to reject them).

The Welsh Government will be able to disapply or amend elements of the curriculum by order to specific schools or nurseries if those schools/nurseries are taking part in experiments or development work.

Adevelopment plan for students with Additional Learning Needscan also disapply parts of the curriculum, while headteachers (through powers in government regulations) will be able to disapply parts of the curriculum foranypupil for a maximum of 6 months (subject to appeal).

While Pupil Referral Units (PRUs) usually used for children with behavioural problems or otherwise at risk of permanent exclusion have to apply the new curriculum too, theyll only need to do so as far as is reasonably practical in order to provide additional flexibility given the challenging teaching environment.

Religious Education is to be reformed as Religion, Values & Ethics (RVE) its actually the only specific subject dealt with in any detail on the face of the Bill, though Im sure MSs will want to add their own as the Bill proceeds through the Senedd.

Faith schools can shape their RVE syllabus around their specific religion or denomination, but if theres no mention of religious education in their trust deed, theyll have to include the teaching of beliefs, religions and denominations other than the one of their school though in such circumstances parents will be able to request that their children are taught solely to the religion/denomination of the trust deed.

The RVE syllabus will be drafted by local authorities. It must reflect that Christianity forms the main religious tradition in Great Britain whilst taking into account other religions and the range of non-religious philosophical positions.

The RVE syllabus in each local authority will be developed in consultation with an advisory council which will have to include representatives of non-religious philosophies (in practice this means humanism, but could potentially also include Pastafarians, Satanists, Jedis, Heavy Metal, Dennis Bergkamp and Scientology).

Sixth-formers (16-18-year-olds) can choose for themselves to opt-out of collective acts of worship and would no longer have to receive compulsory RVE. For the under-16s, parents can withdraw their children on request.

How much will the Curriculum & Assessment Bill cost?

A lot.

The Welsh Government has already spent around 68million on developing the new curriculum, teacher training and trialling it at pioneer schools. They expect to spend a further 21million in 2020-21. Thats 89million already.

The Regional Consortia have spent 15.5million, Estyn has spent 4.4million and Qualifications Wales 3.5million. So the total rises to around 113million before the curriculum has even been introduced.

The total cost of the Bills provisions (on top of the money thats already been spent) is expected to be anything between 196.4million and 225.5million between 2021-22 and 2030-31.

The actual benefits are hard to quantify and the new curriculum is more about pedagogy/teaching methods than generating a hard quantifiable benefit.

There would be a natural positive social, environmental and economic impact if the new curriculum results in a closed attainment gap between disadvantaged and advantaged pupils and boys and girls. Other potential benefitscouldinclude improved qualification rates amongst school leavers and the teaching workforce, increased numbers of students staying on to post-16 education and also improved job satisfaction amongst teachers (which may reduce stress and sickness levels and improve recruitment and retention). Itll be a long time before wed see any of that though.

Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash

Report: 1,100 top-earners would need to move to Wales to make a top-rate income tax cut pay off

Finance CommitteeThe impact of variations in national and sub-national income tax(pdf)Published: 2nd July 2020

Though we concluded our evidence gathering for this inquiry before the true extent of the Covid-19 pandemic was realised, it is clear that difficult decisions on taxation will need to be made in order to aid economic recovery. We urge the Welsh Government to start considering tax policies and looking at contingencies to ensure that all the fiscal levers are available to aid Wales recovery from the global pandemic. Committee Chair, Llyr Gruffydd MS (Plaid, North Wales)

Since April 2019, Wales has been able to vary income tax up or down by up to 10% (Welsh Rate of Income Tax/WRIT). The Welsh Government has committed to keeping WRIT unchanged for the remainder of the term.

A combined 141,200 people are estimated to cross the Wales-England border in both directions for work daily, but the income tax they pay will be based on where they live. The Committee was focused on the cross-border impact of different rates of income tax.

Research by Cardiff Business School found that a 5% cut in income tax in Wales would reduce Welsh Government revenues by up to 3.9%. While it would eventually result in a 0.13% increase to GVA and a 0.35% increase in employment, this will only happen over a longer period.

However, theres a lack of Wales-specific data, making accurate economic and tax modelling (particularly concerning cross-border issues) difficult. The Committee recommended that HMRCs knowledge and intelligence division improves taxpayer identification and works with the Welsh Government to improve research.

To be in the top 1% of earners in Wales you need to earn a minimum of 94,600, while the UK figure was 153,400, meaning differences in earnings between Wales and England were also bigger at the top end than at the lower end.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies David Phillips told the Committee that international evidence points to higher earners making the most of different tax regimes than average earners. That said, moving to take advantage of different tax rates is in itself expensive (cost of moving properties, tax planning, social impact). He concluded that it may only be worth the effort if theres a big difference in tax rates.

If Wales abolished the additional/top rate of income tax (45%), then at least 1,100 top earners would need to move to Wales for the tax cut to lead to an increase in Welsh Government revenues. If 6,000 top earners moved to Wales, tax revenues would increase by up to 129million a year effectively doubling the number of top-rate taxpayers in the country.

The Committee recommended the Welsh Government considers tax policy options to broaden the tax base including attracting young graduates and high-earners but only after taking into account non-tax factors which may affect migratory behaviour (employment, cost of living, education).

One of the biggest tax loopholes to minimise an income tax bill is for someone to incorporate their income by, for example, registering as self-employed or as a company.

The difference in tax bills between an employee earning 40,000 a year (income tax) and a company/self-employed person (dividends, corporation tax, capital gains etc.) earning the same amount can be up to 4,500 and its completely legal.

David Phillips said devolving savings and dividend income (the WRIT only applies to non-savings and non-dividend income) may give the Welsh Government more options but would expose the Welsh Government to more volatile parts of revenues. The Committee agreed though the Welsh Government wasnt keen to seek those powers yet.

There was also a warning on so-called spill-over effects. In Scotland, when the basic rate of income tax was cut to 19%, those who claimed means-tested benefits run centrally by the UK such as universal credit saw their benefits reduced, which effectively cancelled out the tax reduction.

See original here:

Senedd roundup: Government writes off 470 million of NHS debt - Nation.Cymru

Lets begin with a recap, friends. Its been rough times for me here in Colombia, just as its been rough times for a great many of you around the world. Having a lock on what to say, as a humanist with a platform, isnt easy when it feels like weve a hundred fires to put out all at once. The best Ive been able to do, these past few weeks, is to try to advocate for thinking carefully about where were looking to advocate for comprehensive change, how were handling a fear of getting things wrong, and how to avoidsweating the small stuff when theres so much hurt to go around.

And yet, every time I go online Im still inundated by posts fixated on the inanity of religious people in the US, the infotainment circus of major newsmedia continuing to parrot dangerous lies so that we can all be shocked by whos saying them, and the bevy of heated online disagreements around speculation about various celebrities actions.

And Im just so tired of it, friends. Im tired of the rubbernecking at developing disasters.

So, todays post is less about thinking, and more about doing.

And the stark reminder thatdoingsomething is at the heart of humanisms aims.

Last night, I stayed up comforting a friend. (In Spanish, I might add, which is one of the most gratifying affirmations of the worth of learning another language.) Her mother is dying, and it is not a good death. Because there is no state support for healthcare for those without insurance, the mothers renal cancer advanced too far before my friend, with my help, was able to get her mother to a treatment centre where Im sad to say I recognize that what they were giving her was more palliative care than genuine hope. (My friend, on the other hand, is not fully processing that the cancer has already spread.)

But just as happens in the US, another blow befell my friend while she was getting her mother into treatment. She lost her job for want of personal-day protections. Which meant the family had nothing. With no savings, they started going hungry the moment the mother was released from treatment. My friend started begging on the street.

The support I gave her to buy food helped, of course, but then a third lack of safety net kicked in at the end of June. President Duque had extended the lockdown in Colombia, butnotthe eviction protections. I learned from a legal source that some rental companies had prepared themselves quite well for this loophole, and filed thousands of mediation requests to take effect July 1, to start the contractual proceedings necessary either to force people to pay or else to hasten along their evictions. But that process is just for peoplewithcontracts. The vast majority here live by spoken agreement and there are no underlying rental protections without contracts.

The landlord came to my friends apartment and shouted in her dying mothers face that he would throw them both to the street by force if they didnt have the rent the next day. And no police force would stop him.

Now, Im not telling this story to toot my own horn for helping one family, but rather to illustrate that helping families in the singular is itself a sign that ever so much more action is required if were to build a better, more just world.

Because, while I have been helping this family, Ive also been seething not just at the arbitrary nature of giving personal aid, but also at the level of care that serves as a social norm not just here, but in many parts of the world where people have come to stop expecting massive systemic changes. The thoughts and prayers, that is, which the rich issue because theyve no interest in sharing the wealth and security of their class status; and the thoughts and prayers the poor lean on because they literally have nothing else.

My friend, as youve probably guessed by now, is Catholic. Her mother is Catholic, too. Neither knows Im an atheist nor does it matter, at this juncture, because I know my friend has nothing to offer me in exchange for my help but the standard God bless you. What kind of jackanape would I be if I dismissed her calling on God and the Virgin to keep me in good health, while shes crying her eyes out daily over not being able to feed her mother or alleviate her pain?

But there are times, friends boy howdy, there are times when I almost wish therewerea god, because what an awful thing it is to hear tell of a poor woman devout her whole life, dying painfully in a modest barrio, crying out to her daughter Dont let me die!

Because, well, we know, dont we, fellow atheists? We know that only silence awaits. There is no wiping away of all these horrible tears. And so, how I sorely wish shecouldhave a feeling of grace wash over her, to ease her all the better to that end and my friend, too, as she comes to terms with her mothers impending death. But it isnt to be, no matter how much mother and daughter pray together these days, and no matter how much ever so many others do the same while dying in similarly downtrodden neighbourhoods across our deeply hurting world.

Which isnt to say, humanists of faith, that Im suggesting theystoppraying. (Not if theres no better available aid than the solace of ritual and presence of others through it!)

Im just saying that we humanists, from all across the spectrum, need to aim higher in our practice of giving aid.

In some ways, then, for all its horrifying disasters, the US is alsopositivemarvel these days for look how quickly the conversation about systemic injustice has accelerated along a host of critical issues requiring a deep uprooting of supposedly too-entrenched norms. Racist statues coming down, the 79-year-old Mount Rushmore centered as a target for similar dismantling, cities being sharply rebuked and brought to account for bloated police budgets, relief cheques being cut in a country that claims such actions to be communism What the US has amply illustrated in these last few months, that is, is that when the zeitgeist is upon us, when a sense ofurgencyis truly believed in, suddenly quite a few elements of the status quo can indeed be dropped almost overnight.

Which means, fellow humanists, that weve no excuse for not pushing that sense of urgency even further. Socioeconomic precarity comes in many forms, but they all share one key outcome: a disparity with respect to who gets to live and die with dignity.

Why is this a matter for humanism, in particular? Because humanism is not just about the recognition that humans have the most pressing agency in our known universe (whether or not you believe in a higher power), but also about a prioritizing ofknowledge, comprehensive worldly knowledge, from a wide range of behavioural sciences as from the facts of biology, geology, and cosmology, to develop a body of public policy that will best extend the capacity for informed agency to as many human beings as possible.

In this struggle, though, wearecompeting with fellow human beings: those, that is, who view agency differently some from within religious parameters, and some from without. The nihilists of the world favour human subjection, either to one another or to specific framings of a spiritual order. Nihilists would say that it is sufficient that some humans get tolive in such a way that their agency supersedes others in the day-to-day world. Nihilists would further try to diminish the critical importance of alleviating human suffering, such as when one claims that there is perhaps more dignity to the old woman who dies in Christ, however horribly in poverty and fear, than to the rich man who dies comfortably and quietly in his secular home.

One thing popular atheistic discourse has done over the last 20 years or so is focus on the nihilism in Christianity. And there is certainly plenty of it! There are some choice anecdotes I could pull from prominent atheists interactions on panels and radio shows, but lets go right to the source instead. As part of my Victorian lit studies I read excerpts from John Henry Newmans Apologia, so when he was canonised last year by the Catholic Church, all the nihilism in his account of conversion from Anglicanism to Catholicism came rushing to the fore. Ill give you just a nip of it here, as it pertains to the above:

What shall be said to this heart-piercing, reason-bewildering fact [i.e. the existence of suffering]? I can only answer, that either there is no Creator, or this living society of men is in a true sense discarded from His presence. Did I see a boy of good make and mind, with the tokens on him of a refined nature, cast upon the world without provision, unable to say whence he came, his birth-place or his family connexions, I should conclude that there was some mystery connected with his history, and that he was one, of whom, from one cause or other, his parents were ashamed. Thus only should I be able to account for the contrast between the promise and the condition of his being. And so I argue about the world;ifthere be a God,sincethere is a God, the human race is implicated in some terrible aboriginal calamity. It is out of joint with the purposes of its Creator. This is a fact, a fact as true as the fact of its existence; and thus the doctrine of what is theologically called original sin becomes to me almost as certain as that the world exists, and as the existence of God.

Its a fascinating excerpt, no? Because, of course, atheists are slapping their foreheads at the line before the part in bold, shouting, No Creator! Obviously! but humanists of all stripes should be shaking their heads at the wickedness of the binary drawn here by Newman: the either no Creator or mankind discarded. Spiritual and religious humanists: youknowthese arent the only two options. And its important for all of us to call out bullpucky when we see it.

But also, Ive placed one part in bold because Newman clearly didnt understand the psychology underpinning his baffling conclusion here but we do. We humanists know both that it would be patently absurd to see a child living in the streets and first think wow, his parents mustve been ashamed of him butalso, that Newman was plainly unaware offundamental attribution error, wherein one tends to attribute fault for a specific situation to individual character in lieu of broader environmental factors.

So, yes, lots of classist nastiness built into exalted forms of religious belief.

The problem with the atheistic trend of just focussing on nihilism in the church, though, is that we become trained to see it as only existing inthat quarter, onthatside of the spectrum when absolutely, secular nihilists are also well-seasoned in using naturalistic defenses, falling prey to Humean is/ought fallacy, to justify why inequity must simply be accepted (so long as they are comfortably situated within its systems).

In your part of the hurting world, my fellow humanists, action might look different from action in my own. But these differences need only be superficial. So much of the world rose up in solidarity with Black Lives Matter, for instance, that its clear we now operate within a globalized discourse, where the strong, unwavering actions towards greater justice in one part of the worldcanhave a significant impact upon related campaigns in others.

As such, an old standby in the justice-seeking community, Think Globally, Act Locally, is long overdue for a rewrite. What we need to do, rather, is act locallyto move the world.

And that means not being satisfied with individual acts of social outreach.

That means pushing for bolder, more systemic changes in our necks of the wood, secure in the knowledge that any one city, province, or whole countrys initiative towards a greater justice for allwillserve as a test case, for better or for worse, for citizens elsewhere striving to enact the same.

Lets all give each other, then, the very best test cases possible for the creation of more humanistic societies, globally, requires no less than a rethinking ofthe world on whole.

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Humanists, the Time for Action Has Always Been Now - Patheos

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BSEB Dummy Registration Card released for 2021 exam - Elets

PUBLISHED: 17:00 19 June 2020

Will Self

Following a social media post by the far-right activist known as Tommy Robinson, members of far-right linked groups have gathered around statues in London. Here, one argues with a police officer. Photo: Getty Images

2020 Anadolu Agency

WILL SELF on the paradoxes and contradictions which make up multiculturalism

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Almost four years after its creation The New European goes from strength to strength across print and online, offering a pro-European perspective on Brexit and reporting on the political response to the coronavirus outbreak, climate change and international politics. But we can only continue to grow with your support.

Years ago I had the misfortune to be seated at a fancy dinner next to Conrad Black, who at that time was a controversial if ennobled media tycoon. Throughout the meal we argued about everything, such was the divergence in our opinions, our beliefs, and our very weltanschauung. Then, at the end, as we rose to leave, he grasped my hand firmly in his and said: Good! Thats settled then we agree, turned on his handmade heel and left.

At the time I understood Blacks besetting character defect to be a need to be always in the right and little thats happened since, including his imprisonment for fraud and obstruction of justice, has changed my view. There are some people who will do anything they can to maintain a sense of self-righteousness including arbitrarily enlarging it to include another whose views dont accord with theirs whatsoever. And this leads me, fairly logically, to the culture wars currently consuming the British body politic.

As the two sides of the argument concerning Britains culture square off in one corner conservative traditionalists, in the other post-colonial revisionists so levels of self-righteousness are rising throughout the body politic, inducing a feverish state within which the greatest crime of all is to be neutral. Yes: you can tell when things really are falling apart because the centre not only cannot hold but is actively under attack by partisans who claim that if youre not with them, youre necessarily opposed.

For the record: any essentialist judgement made about anyone by virtue of their race or ethnicity disgusts me, and I believe we should do everything we can individually and collectively to foster a society in which such judgements are entirely otiose. This being noted, a culture as Ive had cause to remark numerous times in this space is a vector that carries through time (and space) commonly held values, together with their associated practices, including aesthetics in the form of taste and the cultural objects (artworks and artefacts) born out of that taste and those values. The problem for multiculturalists is that they are caught up in a colossal paradox: in order for a culture to enshrine multiple value-systems it would have to cease being a culture, since its manifestly impossible to educate young people to, for example, believe in God and not believe in God at the same time.

The suppressed premise that lies behind both multiculturalism and liberal humanism more generally is that of world-governance: human rights were a sequel to the establishment of the United Nations following the Second World War, and unless you believe in an omnipotent and omniscient God capable of enforcing divine justice, you must aspire towards a mundane authority thats capable of doing the same for secular justice. Because no one has any rights purely by virtue of being human as any of the chattel slaves currently owned in Eritrea and Mauritania could tell you, or the indentured workers in the UAE and China for that matter. There arent even equal rights in this country something made abundantly clear by the disparity in death rates between the haves and the have-nots during the current pandemic.

Even if we did have an effective world government, able to ensure equal dibs for all groups everywhere, what could that possibly look like? Surely, in order to ensure that the God-believers could pursue their cultural agenda unfettered including proscriptions and practices that liberal humanists find deeply offensive their cultural space would need to be demarcated. So, this great progressive development would mirror the Biblical homily of the Tower of Babel: we would have built a great edifice exemplifying our commonality, only by that act alone to bring about still further fissiparousness.

Another way of grasping the paradox is that some people are currently passionately insisting on the absolute significance of cultural identities that they wish to be totally ignored when it comes to others forming judgements about them whether this is their ethnicity, their religion, their sexual orientation or gender. Meanwhile, others of the formerly dominant culture are reduced to a literal rump: obese thugs, p***ing in public and beating up on the police. Both sides are intent on colonising the past (which is, indeed, another country), because neither party is capable of envisioning a viable future. The British culture which was based, entirely hypocritically, on the manifest destiny of white Europeans has foundered on brute geopolitical and environmental reality; the multi-culture that aspires to succeed it will founder on its own internal contradiction.

Of course, neither moiety will thank me for pointing this out let alone indulge in the sort of radical critique of their own views that might lead to genuine clarity. For my part, I wont commit the Conrad Black solecism and insist on an agreement where none actually obtains. As it is with Brexit, for me, so it is with this: a plague on both your houses. Metaphorically speaking, that is.

Almost four years after its creation The New European goes from strength to strength across print and online, offering a pro-European perspective on Brexit and reporting on the political response to the coronavirus outbreak, climate change and international politics. But we can only rebalance the right wing extremes of much of the UK national press with your support. If you value what we are doing, you can help us by making a contribution to the cost of our journalism.

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Will Self on the paradox of multiculturalism - The New European

The West is in the grip of a violent culture war. It started with the brutal murder of George Floyd in the US, rode on the wings of anti-racism fueled by fury against police brutality, appropriated across the Atlantic and now has become a fierce explosion of rage, outrage, looting, violence, vandalism of statues, cynicism and self-hatred.

To a certain extent, this upheaval was due because the US never really got down to confront its racist past the way Germans did. But the protests, triggered by systemic racism in the US, are also hastening the mutation of western liberalism into a virulent strain. Driven by the reactionary Left, among the many manifestations of this culture war is an all-out assault on history and a reinforcing of the cancel culture that seeks to boycott everything that fails the ideological purity test.

This churn in western liberal democracies throws up some questions that need to be engaged with. What is driving this culture war? Why are statues being attacked? Why is there a movement to amend the past? Why are universities and liberal institutions de-platforming dissent and cultivating a form of extreme censorship instead of serving as a marketplace of vibrant, even competing ideas? Why are revivalism and violent upheaval upstaging the political process in the West? Why is liberalism ceding space to an intolerant version of itself that looks, talks and behaves like a religion demanding unquestioning faith from its followers?

This new, dogmatic ideology lends itself to various semantical expressions such as intersectionality, cultural Marxism, neo-Maoism, identity politics or even the more pejorative call-out culture, virtue-signaling or wokeness but its core beliefs run contrary to and are even antithetical to liberalism.

This dogmatism, that now dominates western (also Indian) campus, media and institutional spaces and defenestrates anyone that its pious practitioners deem as not deferential enough to their cause, has been called successor ideology by cultural critic Wesley Yang that succeeds liberalism but is more of an authoritarian Utopianismmasquerading as liberal humanism while usurping it from within.

This successor ideology is amorphous, frequently changes its goalposts and draws tighter and tighter its chastity circle. Writer JK Rowling may testify. She has apparently been cancelled by her own charactersin the transphobia row.

This radicalism germinates from liberalism and shares some of the liberal goals, but it operates within a faith-based disciplinary superstructure that brooks no questions, imposes a stricter value system, demands total ideological conformity and installs an evangelist doctrine that carries punishment for slip-ups. The successor ideology of social justice warriors, in effect, militates against the very notions of liberalism.

For instance, the #MeToo movement arguesNew York Timescolumnist Ross Douthat after achieving admirable and long-cherished liberal goals has delivered a post-liberal order where intimate life is subject to bureaucratic supervision. Presumption of male guilt has replaced due process. The line between sexual and political is blurred. The tension between liberal values and tenets of successor ideology is now stark.

This tension is visible in the recent controversy around gay and transgender rights where author Rowling has been called a transphobe and hauled over coals for disagreeing with trans-rights activists view that gender identity is separate from biological sex.

Rowlings focus on thereality of biological sexas a way of reinforcing the rights won by women through a long struggle has been called transphobic, and she has been called out for insensitivity.

This is an interesting paradox, and it takes us right into the heart of the debate. Rowling, a radical feminist, and trans rights activists have taken competing political positions.

However, the writers nuanced position and unwillingness to dismiss her own lived reality have been eclipsed by the totalitarian views of the other side that negates her experiences because she is seemingly betraying the cause and her fellow travellers. We know from scholarNassim Nicholas Talebthat the most intolerant winsbut theres more going on here.

Successor ideology may propagate some liberal ideas, but the curve of the movement takes it away from liberalism. To quote from Douthat in NYT, In their liberal form, these causes seek an individual right to live ones life without facing unjust discrimination. But when other constitutional rights long considered essential to liberalism freedom of speech, freedom of religion come into conflict with the movement, its assumed that the old rights must inevitably give way. And the movements vanguard increasingly rejects debate entirelyApplied to this context, it looks thus: author Rowling was exercising her freedom of speech but the moment it came into conflict with the scriptures of the successor ideology, her views were cancelled and she was called out by the torchbearers of neo liberalism. In the sanctified world of Leftist identity politics, wordsare actions.

This semantic twist turns the rules of our world upside down. As James Lindsay writes in the essay How the Left Turned Words Into Violence, and Violence Into Justice: under a prevalent view that has emerged from universities in recent years, a wrong opinion is seen as tantamount to a thrown punch or even an indication of a willingness to genocidewhich invites the idea that an offended party who throws a real punch (or worse) is simply acting in self-defense.

Through her opinion regardless of whether it was nuanced and despite her protestations that she is empathetic to the cause of trans rights Rowling had committed acardinal sinand must be punished. She apparently hasfeet of clay.

When neo-liberalism (or successor ideology) has decided that words are actions, it can leave no space for dissenting views. In a paradigm where non-conformity invites charges of moral transgression and may result in expulsion from the circle, holding a contrary opinion is tantamount to issuing a threat to life. This is the precise scenario that played out at theNew York Timeswhere opinion editor James Bennet was forced to resign for well publishing opinions.'

Through his act of publishing on the NYT Op-Ed page the opinion of Tom Cotton US Senator who advocated calling troops to quell rioters on American streets if local law enforcement fails Bennet had committed such an unpardonable sin that he had to be sacked to redeem the newspaper.

This act of redemption complete with a sincere apology from the NYT apparentlyfollowed a revolt by the newsroomas staffers saw in Senator Tom Cottons words a threat to lives. In the ensuing battle between free speech advocates and social justice progressives, Bennets head had to roll to placate the offended newsroom. It ought to tell us something about a liberal newspaper which had to grovel for publishing a dissenting opinion, sack the commissioning editor and withdraw the article to atone for its sin.

Senator Cottons views could have been wrong, even provocative though he did make a distinction between peaceful protestors and looters and rioters who had taken the law into their hands but if journalists start behaving like thought police and carry an eraser to wipe out opinions that run contrary to their ideology then it speaks of a mediascape that has dropped all pretensions of objectivity.

It indicates that journalists see themselves as crusaders in the battle between good and evil, reserve for themselves the exclusive right to determine good and evil and perceive neutrality as a form of complicity with the devil. Once this Rubicon is crossed, the journalists moral compunction to be objective is gone, what remains is a crusade for the truth as designated by secular ideology. Any dissenting opinion is to be de-platformed, every contrarian voice is to be stifled.

As an author and former editor ofNew RepublicAndrew Sullivan writes, the situation is very reminiscent of totalitarian states where you have to compete to broadcast your fealty to the cause. In these past two weeks, if you didnt put up on Instagram or Facebook some kind of slogan or symbol displaying your wokeness, you were instantly suspect.

This phenomenon is being replicated across media, campuses, institutions to a wide array of cultural symbols. Paw Patrol, a childrens cartoon on canine characters has been de-platformed. Gone With The Wind was sought to be cancelled, but instead of going away with the wind it came back with a vengeance in pop culture.

The editor of a top US academic publication, University of Chicago economist Harald Uhlig, was sought to be de-platformed and dislodged for not being supportive enough to the Black Lives Matter cause and for criticising the movements demand of defunding the police.

Top editor atPhiladelphia InquirerStan Wischnowski was booted out for carrying the headline Buildings Matter, Too, in context of rioters destroying buildings;Bon Apptiteditor-in-chief Adam Rapoport was forced to resign reportedly for not being sufficiently deferential to the cause; a radio jockey was suspended for questioning the orthodoxy of white privilege; an LA Galaxy footballer was fired due to his partners post on BLM, a UCLA lecturer was suspended for refusing to cancel his exam for black students, and a Cornell Law School faculty member faced termination for censuring Black Lives Matter, according to reports.

Bear in mind that some of these de-platformings were done not only because some were guilty of holding incorrect views, but in some cases, the actors supporting the secular ideology were considered not committed enough, reminiscent of life in a totalitarian state where insufficient zeal towards the ideology is a severe crime. Heaven help you if you were the first person to stop applauding after comrade Stalins speech.

What this successor ideology seeks is absolute moral clarity, and it rejects all manner of complexity. It refuses to see humans as complex beings and human societies as complex structures that cannot be straitjacketed into an absolutist doctrinaire. Cancel culture, that remains a prominent symptom of this neo-liberalism, functions on the notion that every perceived deviation is a microaggression and a betrayal of the cause, whose purity must be upheld at all times.

One of the reasons why liberalism is ceding space to this totalitarian strain is that the cancel culture makes an easy replacement for activism, providing the same adrenalin rush of feeling good about oneself merely by being judgmental about others. This, as Barack Obama had pointed out last year during a youth convention, isnt real activism.

Like, if I tweet or hashtag about how you didnt do something right or used the wrong verb then I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself, cause, Man, you see how woke I was, I called you out. Thats not activism. Thats not bringing about change If all youre doing is casting stones, youre probably not going to get that far. Thats easy to do.

And yet this totalitarian ideology has gained massive ground among the educated urban youth in democracies because it cuts through the complexities and ambiguities of human nature and offers a clear sense of purpose, moral clarity and a thrill of solidarity, a spiritual horizon for ordinary human life, things that an exhausted liberalism fails to do, points out Douthat in NYT.

And yet it is a false clarity that fails to consider the agency of an individual and dismisses the notion that human beings can be flawed and yet virtuous, and one doesnt cancel the other. Obama had stressed this very point when he said, This idea of purity and youre never compromised and youre always politically woke and all that stuff You should get over that quickly. The world is messy; there are ambiguities People who do really good stuff have flaws

The protestors who had declared a war on the statues and sought to deface or bring down the effigies of Mahatma Gandhi, Winston Churchill, Christopher Columbus, George Washington or even Abraham Lincoln, apply modern standards of morality on historical figures, try to sort them in simplistic boxes of good and evil, and if found inadequate, proceed to cancel them from history.

This act is problematic on multiple counts. First, dismantling of statues is a symbolical act of erasing the past making it difficult for later generations to honestly confront events which they an inescapable part of. Any attempt at editing history makes us rootless, places usin medias reswithout a context and erodes our identity. In this, the totalitarian neo-liberalism ideology takes a leaf out of Chinese playbook. The Communist Party has meticulously erased all links to its violent past when Mao Zedongs permanent revolution destroyed millions of lives.

China has sought to erase that history to the extent that a visitor wandering the streets of any Chinese city today will find no plaques consecrating the sites of mass arrests, no statues dedicated to the victims of persecution, no monuments erected to honor those who perished after being designated class enemies.

The Communist Party did that because any acknowledgement of guilt, it fears, may delegitimize the party. It speaks of insecurity that successor ideology seeks to emulate.

Second, the secular ideology driving this statue activism isnt that different from the Talibans act of destroying the Bamiyan Buddhas to underline the threat cultural motifs of the past pose to dominant ideologies of the present. The Taliban sought to establish its power structure by destroying the past, the woke Taliban seeks to amend the future by doing a surgical procedure on history.

Gandhi may have held problematic views on racism at an early stage in his career but to cherry-pick that flaw, amplify it, define him solely through that prism and invalidate one of the 20th centurys greatest political leaders is a perfectly woke and pointless thing to do. The call to cancel Cromwell, Churchill, Columbus, or even Edward Colston, a 17th-century philanthropist who made his money in the slave trade, arises from the same infantile impulse rid the public sphere of characters who fail the modern purity test. No allowance is given for context, human agency, flaws and complexity of characters.

As Sahil Mahtani writes inSpectator, The Taliban drew strength from cultish beliefs taught in schools - and so, too, are we now seeing the maturing of a moral system developed on campuses. The Taliban were anti-Shia, seeing their revivalist Sunnism as the only acceptable version of Islam. The statue campaigners think they are the only acceptable heirs of liberalism

India, too, has witnessed the removal of cultural motifs of the colonial past but that process be it renaming of roads or cities has largely been a slow, evolutionary and political process unlike the violent upheaval of a beheaded Columbus. There have been instances of vandalism, for sure, but those were borne more out of political opportunism than any grand and coordinated ideological purge.

As Swapan Dasgupta writes in Times of India, Indians, it is often said, have a feeble sense of history. Yet, in todays world, we seem remarkably at ease with it.

Western liberalism, though, is facing a crisis of confidence, upstaged by a transmogrified version of itself that demands obeisance, genuflection, unquestioning faith and gives the thrill of moral upliftment and cohesion in return. It represents the end of reason and Americas irreversible ideological decline.

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End of reason: Why statue vandalism, thought policing and rise of a 'woke' religion signal decline of liberalism - Firstpost

When the gravity of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis began to come into focus, casting a shadow on global horizons, world-famous Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari rushed to print a series of articles in an effort to steady our resolve. We need to be careful, Harari warned, not to draw the wrong conclusion from the outbreak of the pandemic.

While there are borders that need to be strengthened, he said, such as those between viruses and humans, it would be a mistake to reinforce borders between nations. The answer to the coronavirus, in Prof. Harari's opinion, lies in greater global cooperation, especially in the joint efforts of the international scientific community not in a return to atavistic divisions.

Harari, a worldwide best-selling author is, perhaps, the most widely known ideologue of the new, progressive neoliberal globalism. And he was right to be worried. Because the dream of a "global village" on which internationalist elites have staked their political and economic fortunes is now in jeopardy. But his eloquent defense of globalism, with all the beautiful ringing phrases we have come to expect from him, published just as the world was turning its attention to China and Italy, seemed strangely out of step.

The growing crisis had not only shown that epidemics have been globalized along with almost everything else, it also offered a ready metaphor for other dangers globalism had brought into its fold: China is clearly not becoming a responsible partner in a liberal global village, based on universal human rights. Rather the Chinese Communist Party, the most murderous regime in the history of mankind, has been using the post-Cold War international order in order to steal technology, oppress minorities, bully smaller nations, pollute the environment and run roughshod over anything that stands in its way to global hegemony. The coronavirus and the web of lies around it have reminded us whom we are dealing with.

Italy, meanwhile, seemed to offer a complementary metaphor about international institutions: They can't be trusted to help the afflicted. As the pandemic ravaged the country, the world press was full of stories about how its fellow European Union member states turned their backs on Italy and scrambled to hide their own medical supplies, contrary to their EU obligations.

Harari had little to say about the conduct and future of the EU, or about how the Chinese totalitarian regime had deceived the world by, among other things, leveraging its influence on the World Health Organization, and by withholding information until it was too late: Flights departed Wuhan for the rest of the world after domestic flights from the city were stopped. Instead the historian focused his wrath on Donald Trump, the first American leader to seriously challenge China since 1972.

Trump's America First policy, said Harari, exemplified the bad old idea of national egotism. In response to Trump's halting U.S. support to the WHO, Harari announced he personally would donate $1 million to the organization. The proper response to the pandemic, his Twitter account announced, is a show of "global solidarity and generosity."

In articles in the Hebrew press, he also berated Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was using the pandemic, Harari claimed wrongly, it turned out to turn Israel into a dictatorship. It turns out that China's dictatorship bothered Harari less.

This is not the first time that he has chosen to accommodate dictatorships. He infamously replaced his criticism of Vladimir Putin with criticism of Trump in the Russian edition of his blockbuster book "21 Lessons for the 21st Century."

But this time not only Harari's moral credentials were on the line. This time his views of politics and history were also put to the test, and it can be said they have stood it very well. If you want to defend globalism from the coronavirus pandemic, though, you have to do better than that. It is not enough to conflate Western nationalism with egotism while ignoring the bullies that are taking advantage of the neoliberal global order.

If you're serious you would need to explain why international institutions have failed us so badly in stopping China's egotism, and why so many people turned instinctively to rely on to the nation-state, which the internationalists have been casting in the role of villain since the end of World War II.

Loyalty and altruism

It turns out that people have good reasons for turning to the nation-state in such a crisis. The first is solidarity. National societies are able to evoke altruism and self-sacrifice among their citizens. Sadly, larger collectives, such as "humanity" or "Europe," have so far not been able to do the same. For nations are, as Israeli scholar Yoram Hazony's "The Virtue of Nationalism" has recently reminded us, like extended families: They are bound by ties of "mutual loyalty."

The second reason to turn to nation-states, one that is even harder for neoliberal internationalists to acknowledge, is democracy. So far nation-states have proven to be the most effective vehicle for people and peoples to exercise control over their common fate. Self-determination perhaps better described as self-sovereignty is not a singular act of creation at the birth of independence; it is a continuous form of collective action. Democracy is nothing if not the framework for exercising self-sovereignty.

This seems to be lost on contemporary liberals. In the false dichotomy neoliberalism has imposed on our political discourse there are two opposing poles: On the left there are abstract, universal individual human rights, and opposite them, on the right, there is jingoistic blood-and-soil nationalism, which is all but synonymous with fascism.

This misleading picture is habitually found in Israeli discourse too, in every second op-ed by Profs. Zeev Sternhell and Mordechai Kremnitzer as well as among their many allies. The dichotomy falsely implies that democracy is somehow automatically on the side of individual human rights. We rarely pause to notice, however, that the more human rights have wedded themselves to internationalism, in the admirable cause of promoting universal humanism, the less they have been able to explain how people could hold their leaders to account, or control their own political fortunes.

It turns out that transcending nationalism also means transcending democracy. The EU , for example, though liberal, exercises much power over the lives of people who do not feel it takes their political will into account. Or consider the International Criminal Court in The Hague: Clearly intended to embody liberal values and uphold the universality of human rights, it nevertheless defies the first principle of democracy: government with the consent of the governed.

This trend had also shrunk our concept of liberty. On this view, it seems to mean something like Isaiah Berlin's "negative liberty": freedom from external coercion. But when left alone humans are not free. Alone we are helpless and defenseless. We can be free only within a society and we are the freest when we can take part in charting the course of the collective of which we are a part. This is why democracy, rooted in national solidarity, has been able to turn us from subject into citizen, anchoring liberty in sovereignty. And what this means, to the chagrin of internationalists, is that, through the medium of democracy, solidarity is the precondition of liberty.

The coronavirus crisis has reminded us why in times of distress we cling to the nation-state, its government and its borders to protect us. Because nations are bound by solidarity and can demand that their citizens exercise caution not just to protect themselves, but also to protect others. In the context of solidarity moral behavior is derived from something more than enlightened self-interest. And thus such societies can expect genuine altruism of their citizens.

The EU, it now seems abundantly clear, has failed to produce such bonds of mutual loyalty. And this is why it didn't take its various member states long to revert to shutting down their national borders: In a crisis that demands sacrifice for the sake of others, everyone seemed to know what political frameworks can be expected to deliver.

By contrast, globalist neoliberalism whose purveyors today call themselves the progressive left is not just unable to offer a framework for solidarity. It has in fact mutated into a form of individualism so extreme as to reject the very idea of solidarity. Pivoting around 1968, or thereabouts, the left, all across the West, has taken a momentous turn from class solidarity (which failed) to personal self-realization from Marx to Nietzsche, from communism to existentialism.

America first

Not surprisingly America took the lead, because the turn was seemingly the most natural there: In America socialism never found a comfortable home among the working class, and individualism was its homegrown creed. It is therefore no surprise that Reaganism eventually replaced the framework of the New Deal, in 1980. What we tend to forget is that the individualist revolution had already taken place on the other side of the spectrum when the 1960s New Left replaced the Old Left's quest for class solidarity with a quest for personal authenticity. So that when Reagan stepped into the ring, he found no serious opponent.

If anything, the left's individualism was more extreme than the right's. The American right, though strongly wedded to the free market, as well as to the old Emersonian ideal of the self-made man, still had the traditional checks of conservatism to circumscribe its rugged individualism: the trinity of God, Country and Family. The left rejected all three. We may therefore say that what we now call leftism is not an attack on individualism but the very opposite: an attack on the remaining checks the right has to restrain it. It has therefore become a rejection of solidarity.

One may of course object and say that the contemporary left has enlarged the circles of solidarity to include, beyond class, race, gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation. But in practice the whole trend not only balkanizes class solidarity, it also produces an emphasis on the symbolic at the expense of the political. It offers symbolic quotas in elite jobs and institutions, and individualistic experimentation in self-styled transgressions of gender boundaries. This is not something we should expect to appeal to workers who have lost their jobs to China and are now constantly berated by their would-be betters for their backwardness. "Clingers," Barack Obama called them. "Deplorables," his anointed successor, Hillary Clinton, echoed.

But despite constant attempts to delegitimize them as xenophobes, homophobes, Islamophobes and, of course racists, a growing number of citizens have come to understand what is at stake in the struggle over globalism: their civil rights, their citizenship, which is to say, democracy itself. Elites who seek to dismantle the nation-state under the guise of curing us from atavistic nationalism are really dismantling democracy's political apparatus, which is all that stands between the mass of citizens and the reversion to the status of subjects.

But the masses stubbornly see themselves not as enemies of democracy but as the only force that can save it from the globalist dreams of elites. Indeed, the dream of a single global village has always looked better from airport business lounges than from working-class neighborhoods ravaged by unemployment, and transformed into foreign countries for their indigenous inhabitants by illegal immigration (which has also depressed wages in local markets). The globalist dream seems to them more like a nightmare. The very rich may become "citizens of the world" but the rest of us would become subject of nowhere, under international managerial elites.

Harari's internationalism is not an alternative form of solidarity. It is the alliance between bureaucratic elites over the heads of their various national publics the same alliance which has failed to face the current crisis, and proved impotent in holding China to account. Of course, no one in their right mind, except in totalitarian states, would be against sharing scientific knowledge. No Western nation has done that in the face of the pandemic.

But when actual international solidarity is called for, it cannot be achieved by first suppressing solidarity within states. An international order is probably best suited to preserve liberty when it seeks to become a family of free independent nations not a uniform humanity under a single bureaucratic managerial elite.

The internationalist elite, with its frequent traveling, would probably recognize a handy metaphor for this in flight-safety videos, rendered perhaps even more evocative in a world scrambling for ventilators: When traveling with a person in need of assistance, first put on your own oxygen mask. It is clear why: otherwise you would impair your ability to assist them.

If we are to subdue this disease and emerge from the crisis in reasonable shape we had better hope that Donald Trump, to return to Harari's example, takes care of the America economy first. Unless, of course, Europe will be content to see the next Marshall Plan come from China.

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Wake up, globalization fans: In a pandemic, nation-states are at their best - Haaretz

Ethereum (ETH)s fees are hard-coded to only be payable in Ether, but a clever trick with smart contracts allows users to effectively pay for gas with a special token, which reduces the total fee they incur.

This principle was used by the team behind 1inch.exchange, a decentralized exchange aggregator, to introduce the Chi token. The technology was formally announced on June 5, and it builds on a previous iteration of the concept, called Gas Token (GST).

Chi takes advantage of a mechanism that refunds gas when storage space is freed on the Ethereum virtual machine. In the case of gas tokens, burning them destroys dummy sub-smart contracts that were created when the tokens were minted, which the team says is more efficient than erasing data directly.

Chi tokens are meant to be created when the gas fees on Ethereum are low, which allows the user to store that price for later use. As the CEO of 1inch.exchange, Sergej Kunz, explained at the ETHGlobal hackathon, this is especially useful for deploying smart contracts, an operation that can consume millions of gas. To put that in perspective, the total gas limit for a block is currently 10 million.

To save on fees, the token must be burned alongside the primary operation, which reduces the total amount of gas spent in that transaction. This is because the refund operation cannot result in zero or negative total gas usage meaning that it must be paired with another action to be effective.

Nevertheless, Chis developers say that the token can cut down the price of a transaction by as much as 50%.

The ability to lock in low gas prices during periods of inactivity could have important repercussions on Ethereums fee market.

As noted by Vitalik Buterin and other developers in their discussions around the earlier Gas Token, the mechanism could smooth out the price of gas between periods of high and low activity. Users would stock up on gas tokens when its cheap to do so, and unload them when gas fees rise thus balancing the overall demand for gas.

Anton Bukov, 1inch.exchanges CTO, was nevertheless skeptical that Chi would alter the fee economics of Ethereum:

I dont think this will change anything, except that users have a way of tokenizing the price of gas, and they will be able to speculate on it.

Bukov pointed out that Chi already has a use case on the 1inch platform, allowing users to save on fees with token swaps.

On the other hand, the Gas Token, born in 2018, largely failed to achieve adoption because few people understood how it works, Kunz told Cointelegraph.

Bukov said that GST also had an issue interacting with the ERC-20 standard, which resulted in wallets and even Etherscan showing the wrong balance.

While GST was primarily used by arbitrageurs, Kunz noted, the direct integration with 1inch.exchange resulted in interest from other users as well. He also revealed that some decentralized finance providers are looking to integrate Chi in their systems.

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A New Token Lets You Save on Ethereum Fees by Storing Gas - Cointelegraph

EOS

EOS fell by 1.00% on Monday. Reversing a 0.55% gain from Sunday, EOS ended the day at $2.7834.

It was bearish through most of the day. EOS fell from an early morning intraday high $2.8181 to a late afternoon intraday low $2.7542.

Falling short of the major resistance levels, EOS found support at the first major support level at $2.7537.

EOS managed to recover to $2.78 levels in the final hour, however, to limit the downside on the day.

At the time of writing, EOS was up by 0.47% to $2.7965. A bullish start to the day saw EOS rise from an early morning low $2.7924 to a high $2.8028.

EOS left the major support and resistance levels untested early on.

EOS would need to avoid sub-$2.7850 levels to take a run at the first major resistance level at $2.8163 into play.

Support from the broader market would be needed, however, for EOS to break back through to $2.81 levels.

Barring an extended crypto rally, the first major resistance level at $2.8163 and Monday high $2.8181 would likely cap any upside.

Failure to avoid sub-$2.7850 levels could see EOS struggle on the day once more.

A fall through the $2.7850 pivot would bring the first major support level at $2.7524 into play.

Barring a crypto meltdown, however, EOS should steer clear of sub-$2.70 levels. The second major support level at $2.7213 should limit any downside.

Major Support Level: $2.7524

Major Resistance Level: $2.8163

23.6% FIB Retracement Level: $6.62

38% FIB Retracement Level: $9.76

62% FIB Retracement Level: $14.82

Ethereum rose by 0.72% on Monday. Following on from a 1.20% gain on Sunday, Ethereum ended the day at $246.55.

It was a mixed start to the day. Ethereum rose to an early morning high $245.5 before hitting reverse.

Coming up short of the first major resistance level at $248.68, Ethereum fell to an early afternoon intraday low $240.82.

Finding late support, however, Ethereum rallied to a final hour intraday high $247.97 before wrapping up the day at $246 levels. In spite of the late rally, Ethereum came up short of the first major resistance level at $248.68.

At the time of writing, Ethereum was up by 0.93% to $248.85. A bullish start to the day saw Ethereum rise from an early morning low $246.55 to a high $249.99 before easing back.

Ethereum tested the first major resistance level at $249.41 early on.

Story continues

Ethereum would need to avoid sub-$245.10 levels to support another run at the first major resistance level at $249.41.

Support from the broader market would be needed, however, for Ethereum to break back through to $249 levels.

Barring an extended crypto rally, the first major resistance level and resistance at $250 should cap any upside.

Failure to avoid sub-$245.10 levels could see Ethereum see give up Mondays gain.

A fall back through the morning low $246.5 to sub-$245.10 levels would bring the first major support level at $242.26 into play.

Barring an extended crypto sell-off, however, Ethereum should continue to steer clear sub-$240 levels on the day.

The second major support level sits at $237.96.

Major Support Level: $242.26

Major Resistance Level: $249.41

23.6% FIB Retracement Level: $257

38.2% FIB Retracement Level: $367

62% FIB Retracement Level: $543

Ripples XRP rose by 0.44% on Monday. Reversing a 0.05% decline from Sunday, Ripples XRP ended the day at $0.20433.

It was a mixed start to the day. Ripples XRP rose to an early morning high $0.20375 before hitting reverse.

Falling short of the major resistance levels, Ripples XRP fell to a late morning intraday low $0.20137.

Steering clear of the first major support level at $0.1993, Ripples XRP rallied to a final hour intraday high $0.20472. In spite of the late rally, Ripples XRP failed to test the first major resistance level at $0.2062.

At the time of writing, Ripples XRP was up by 0.21% to $0.20475. A bullish start to the day saw Ripples XRP rise from an early morning low $0.20422 to a high $0.20541.

Ripples XRP left the major support and resistance levels untested early on.

Ripples XRP will need to avoid sub-$0.2035 levels to support a run at the first major resistance level at $0.2056.

Support from the broader market would be needed, however, for Ripples XRP to break out from the morning high $0.20541.

Barring a broad-based crypto rally, the first major resistance level would likely cap any upside.

Failure to avoid sub-$0.2035 levels could see Ripples XRP return to the red.

A fall back through the morning low $0.20422 to sub-$0.2035 levels would bring the first major support level at $0.2022 into play.

Barring an extended crypto sell-off, Ripples XRP should avoid sub-$0.20 levels on the day. The second major support level at $0.2001 should limit any downside.

Major Support Level: $0.2022

Major Resistance Level: $0.2056

23.6% FIB Retracement Level: $0.3638

38.2% FIB Retracement Level: $0.4800

62% FIB Retracement Level: $0.6678

Please let us know what you think in the comments below.

Thanks, Bob

This article was originally posted on FX Empire

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EOS, Ethereum and Ripples XRP Daily Tech Analysis June 9th, 2020 - Yahoo Finance