Medical student connects with dying patient, chronicles the experience – UC Davis Health

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Ross Perry grew up determined to become a politician.

I was always a pretty gregarious child, and I didnt mind public speaking, he recalled of his middle- and high-school years in leadership roles and drama. So I thought I would go into politics for that reason.

But after he left his hometown of Santa Rosa and took political science courses at UCLA, he changed his mind. His impression was that politics was a morally complicated field full of opinions. Instead, he majored in psychology, taught English in South Korea, and worked for a chiropractor.

A few years after college, he decided he wanted to become a doctor and studied in a pre-medical post-baccalaureate program at Mills College in Oakland. He then found his way to UC Davis, where he expects to graduate from medical school next spring.

He doesnt regret dropping his political pursuit.

Because now, at the end of the day, I dont have to sell an opinion, Perry said. I just have to sell people on the importance of their own health goals and how we can together help them achieve those goals.

During his four years at the UC Davis School of Medicine, Perry has been a fervent supporter of promoting wellness among his classmates and the community.

That passion earned him distinction as a Blum Fellow in 2019, a UC Davis humanitarian award. The fellows program granted Perry $2,000, which he used to start a walking program to help prevent diabetes among patients of Paul Hom student-run clinic. Perry has spent many hours at the clinic volunteering.

At the programs first meeting in pre-COVID 2019, dozens of Walk with a Doc participants exercised as a group, watched a healthy cooking demonstration, and received $20 grocery vouchers to use at the Oak Park Farmers Market. The grant also paid for exercise equipment for patients.

Honestly, the reason I felt inspired to do these things at Davis is, in part, because Im just surrounded by the amazing diversity of students who are doing these amazing things; theres so much advocacy, Perry said. He then quipped: Its a wonder any of them have time to study.

In the past two years, Perry has earned a much-deserved reputation for providing compassionate care to his patients.

In fact, this past summer, the Arnold P. Gold Foundation awarded Perry the top prize in a national essay contest for his poignant account of caring for an oncology patient who later died.

Perry, a childhood cancer survivor who aspires to specialize in pediatrics and palliative care, won the foundations 2021 Hope Babette Tang Humanism in Healthcare Essay Contest for his paper, Dear Reader. The contest asked medical and nursing students to engage in a reflective writing exercise that illustrates an experience in which they or a team member worked to ensure humanistic care. It is named for Hope Babette Tang-Goodwin, who was an assistant professor of pediatrics at Columbia University.

Perrys 850-word essay recounts his interaction with a 32-year-old man who lacks family support and is being treated at UC Davis Medical Center for a recurrence of cancer.

Perry starts the essay pleading with the reader to walk a mile in the shoes of his patient, who at one point gets discharged with a urine collection bag and a colostomy bag. You are complicated now. You are messy. But you are alive, Perry writes.

Perry tells how he met the patient as a third-year medical student and felt ill-prepared to provide care.

It is day two of my six weeks on the wards, and you are far too complicated for me. I am a deer in the headlights, and you are a sixteen-wheeler with the brakes cut loose. Still, they put me on your case, Perry writes.

Perry starts to bond with the patient.

We talk through many afternoons. You are hungry to be heard, and so I listen. I hear about your travels. Your jobs. Your regrets. Your mistakes. Your fears. Your hopes. Your plans. Slowly, your humanity unfolds itself, and I begin to see a side of you no scan could ever capture.

Even after Perrys six-week rotation ends, he occasionally visits his former patient. He writes him a card, tells him it was my greatest privilege to take care of him.

You were my first real teacher, Perry states. And in the end, although I could not save you, I think I made you realize how much you matter. And I think that might be enough.

Perry thanks the patient and calls him his friend.

To you I dedicate this essay, he writes. Even in the age of medical miracles, Perry emphasizes, there is still no intervention more powerful than a genuine human connection.

He concludes that the soul, heals not by human medicine, but by human kindness. When a patient passes away, Perry declares, we often wish we had practiced a little bit less of the former and a whole lot more of the latter. May I never forget that. May I never forget you.

The essay will be published in an upcoming edition of Academic Medicine, the journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges. Perry also received $1,000.

He said he was surprised and honored to win the contest and hopes readers can learn from his challenging experience.

One of his mentors can relate.

Ross seems drawn to difficult situations, in a positive way, said Internal Medicine Clinical Professor Rachel Lucatorto.

The first day Lucatorto and Perry worked together, the professor took him to a comfort care patient whose condition was deteriorating. Perry and Lucatorto stayed until the patient died an hour later. Perry then stayed longer, after the patients wife and daughter arrived.

It meant everything to Perry to enter the familys emotional space, Lucatorto said.

While his behavior and presence were remarkable in this situation, it was also his reflection after the experience that impressed me, Lucatorto said. He completely appreciated what a big deal and even an honor it was to be present.

In addition to volunteering at Paul Hom Clinic, Perry helped found the School of Medicines Academic Medicine student interest group. He was also elected to the position of co-wellness chair of his class, a four-year responsibility.

Perry is also is known for organizing a popular ping pong tournament and other wellness activities at the School of Medicine, along with Sharad Jain, the associate dean for students, and Maggie Rea, a clinical psychologist who is director of student and resident wellness.

Focusing attention on student wellness, Jain said, shows that Perry is thinking of the future: Theres a lot of literature thats coming out on physician burnout, and it leads to depression and dissatisfaction with jobs and medication errors.

Jain added: We want our students to learn good habits now that theyre going to carry forth.

When Perry spends time away from his fourth-year clinical duties he enjoys writing poetry, playing sports, and backpacking with his wife Alyssa. Lately, hes getting extra exercise by frequently running after the couples 15-month-old daughter, Frances.

In less than five months, Perry will know which residency program hell join to continue his dream of becoming a pediatrician and a physician dedicated to helping patients deal with their serious illnesses.

And although hes done with the notion of entering politics, he doesnt completely dismiss the idea. Like any good politician, hell never say never to future possibilities.

"I may go back into politics one day, Perry said, but I hope it's after many years of direct patient care and community advocacy."

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Medical student connects with dying patient, chronicles the experience - UC Davis Health

When the Bones of our Ancestors Speak to Us: A Fugitive Conversation with Bayo Akomolafe – Resilience

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Earlier this year I interviewed the postactivist philosopher Bayo Akomolafe forDark Mountain: Issue 19,our spring collection of art and writing on death, loss and renewal. I had just completed his innovative online courseWe Will Dance with Mountainswhich has just begun again this month.

I am preparing to leave a house I have lived in for 18 years. A gathering of starlings loopand swerve overhead in the falling light, and in the distance you can hear the grind and thump of the sugar beet harvesters in the winter-flooded fields. For the last two months, as we pack up, I have been focused on a task with four strangers from different places and ports of origin (Manchester, Holland, Nigeria, Germany, Jamaica and London): to consider the fate and future inscribed in the bones of an unknown slave woman, unearthed from a burial site in the Port of Rio de Janeiro in 1996.

The archaeologists named her Bakhita (after the Sudanese slave turned Catholic saint) and all we know of her life is that she did not survive the Atlantic crossing to work in the sugar cane fields of Brazil alongside an estimated five million of her compatriots from West Africa. Our task is to rebuild the slave ship, set by the philosopher, writer and recovering psychologist, Bayo Akomolafe, as part of an online course he has been spearheading called We Will Dance With Mountains.

I wanted to speak with Bayo because this issues contemplation of death and dying also revolves around change; how, in times of fall, we allow a known world to collapse and reform from within. In no other modern thinker have I come across such a dynamic approach to undertaking that radical act of consciousness, embedded as it is in the startling imagery of the transatlantic slave trade.

Bayo works in intense metaphor, using metaphysical infrastructure to enable us to perceive how we are kept trapped by civilisation and how we might liberate ourselves from its invisible manacles. The building blocks of his lexicon include the slave ship (with three decks of colonisers, slaves, and Earth resources); the plantation, where we are set to work; and the fugitive who escapes the capture of both. Sanctuary is a gathering place where fugitives might flock and find other ways of being together.

Charlotte Du Cann: In the Bakhita Project, we have been meeting in the transformative space of sanctuary to consider the ancestral consequences of the colonial slave trade. Do you feel our legacies can ever be resolved?

Bayo Akomolafe: The legacies of the slave ship are yet-to-come. Modernity captures the slave ship in the same way it captures black bodies, white bodies, all kinds of bodies, and allots them prescribed ways of behaving and responding to crisis events, like the idea of racial injustice and climate chaos. It looks at the white body and says you are the enemy, and to black and brown bodies it says you are the victim here. Sanctuary is this emergent space which might be tethered to a post-modernist escape from modernity.

The slave ship was an instrument of oppression and capture, an instrument of horror, but when I lean into my traditions, when I listen to the tale of the trickster and the tricksters of other cultures, such as Pan or Loki, the boundaries of what is supposedly horrific and evil, it is also shape-shifting. It is moving, productive, generative, and escapes our modern gaze. Our elders are asking us to look at the slave ship, not as a thing that is gone and done with but as a thing that is energetically present, right now.

We are all in a slave ship: capitalism is a form of slave-shipping and we are captured here, ontologically incarcerated master and slave. The very architecture of the slave ship is hinted at in the ways we perform hierarchy and order bodies on a scale of worthiness with the other-than-human world being below black bodies.

So, you might say that the invitation to rebuild the slave ship is to revisit the conditions of our incarceration, to look around us, to look again, and to see that these boundaries are never still, always movable. So I dont want to make the legacies of the slave ship OK. I want to make it sensuous, inviting, I want the wall to be porous, olfactory, membranous, I want it to be exposed and open, experimental, diffracting one thing into another. This is how new things are born.

I refuse to categorise artifacts of history as evil or good, because we do away with a lot of resources when we stabilise these things in those ways. When we name their colours too soon. So, to step into a space that is as troublesome as the slave ship is the tricksters way, to play with trouble, and that might help us to transform.

CDC This books theme is centered on death, dying and change. Is that collective space of sanctuary also where things can die and provide energy, or compost, for transformation?

BA We think of death too strictly I think, as this absolute terminal point. I am interested in spaces in culture, for gatherings, where we touch the traces of our unbecoming and notice where we are falling apart. Where we reimagine death not as something down the line, but a paradigm, a thick now, an immanent field of loss and creativity that is entangled with what we rudely tease out as life. Modernity is about putting things together neatly, proliferating still images, being coherent, noble, independent. Consider what might be produced if, instead of thinking of death strictly as a firm line or an isolated event, we find ways to experiment with how we are already falling away, and how, for example, your identity is dying, how you are nomadic, diasporic, constantly moving, even when the habits of my perceiving you compel me to see you as a white woman. If we had practices to notice the ways where our names, our bodies are changing and giving way to something else. How we are actually ghosts.1

I think dying well is about becoming with our traces and learning to touch the traces of our falling away. In a literal sense, I am leaving my cells here and there, I am less or more than I was a few minutes ago. Maybe a practice like this is the urgency of the hour. This is what I mean by fugitive exile, about leaving the plantation which reproduces images and instead helping us to see we are beyond static images. We are not as photographic as we think we are. We are abroad in ways that escape the Man, the head of the pyramid, of the capitalist structure. And that is the invitation of a constellation, of processional relational ontologies.

CDC Your teaching of ways of being and becoming in many ways echoes one of the principles of Dark Mountains Uncivilisation: taking that Man out of the centre and letting life be in the centre. You have called it a constellation of fugitive technologies that allows us to meet the world differently. Could you name a few of those that most urgently need paying attention to?

BA By fugitive technologies, I refer to sites of encounter where we might be met by the world in return, where we might learn to listen and cultivate humility in the face of a world that exceeds us, a world that never receded to the background of human ascension, even when we pretend that it did. And it is very difficult to talk out of context about what this constellation of practices might mean for different communities, which is why I have hesitated to frame making sanctuary as a universal, ahistorical process that I can plant anywhere I want.

Someone told me that poetry doesnt appeal to this moment and that we need facts. And I countered by saying: poetry is the spirituality of fact. Facts vibrate at the speed of mystery and poets are attuned to that, that facts are not as stable as you think. When people hear about fugitive technologies, they say: well, here is a practice that if I do, I might be saved. Here is a product, lets call it racial healing system, here is an app for emancipation, here is an idea, a concept that is already neatly packaged. The very presence of the word fugitive dismantles that. The fugitive is a figure that is constantly moving, so I am not talking about the arrival state, the Coca-Cola at the end of the factory line. I am talking about the methods of dis/inquiry; I call it dis/inquiry to remove ourselves from the centre of the inquiry. The inquiry is how to get lost. The question of the fugitive is how do I lose my way? How do I lose this plantation? How do we get as far away as possible? So, these technologies I speak of are not fixed products one can scale up; they are cartographies of lostness, rehearsals in losing ones way in order to meet the world anew.

Making sanctuary is a gathering place, a village of these technologies. The Bakhita Project is premised on post-qualitative/post-anthropocentric research, decentring the anthropological figure as the central researcher and storyteller and learning to listen to the world. What might that do to us? The idea of becoming lost is to become otherwise by virtue of encounters with the more-than-human world. This is not research that is intended for us to be better, or to get back to business, to our shiny ivory towers.

I might ask, right now, for the purposes of our conversation: how is Charlotte learning to trace her ghostliness, the legacies made in her name? What are the recipes for your undoing? How are you noticing the extraordinary that is packed within the ordinary? How are you sharing these recipes of your undoing around you so that we form a politics of mutual undoing?

So, my sister, it has to do with dis/inquiry, the methodologies of exile.

CDC You talk about a state of betweenness, finding the cracks, a state that is neither inclusive nor exclusive. Is this engaged with by oneself or with others or both?

BA I am very wary of individual journeys of salvation or emancipation, of personal enlightenment workshops. I am not sure what the individual is anyway anymore, when we find microbial communities living in our guts, and viruses living within bacteria. Post-humanist processes are always involved. Even if you deem it fit to focus on yourself as a separate entity, you would need physical resources to do that. Thought is not always as internal as cognitive scientists would have us believe. I feel it is environmental and ecological and that you are pulling on outside resources, even as you turn to your navel.

The basis of a fugitive politics-to-come always involves an irreducible collective of bodies, humans and more-than-humans, even when a single individual is in focus. I am interested in framing a project that does not privilege humans as the starting point, how bodies are forced to think by the environment, by happenings in the world. So for me the instigator of thought isnt human. A virus has forced India to rethink education. Because of the pandemic we are forced to go in a different direction.

I think making sanctuary is gathering those who have been disarticulated by cracks in the environment to work with those cracks, rather than patching them up and returning to normal. Are things awkward for you? You dont know how to proceed with work? You have existential questions with politics? If you feel that despair, you are not alone. Lets gather here and instead of trying to run away and fix the problem, lets move away from those solutionisms and stay with the trouble with our dis/inquiry. Lets do research which might be ecologically framed and culturally framed as katabasis. Going under and finding ways to go deep into the ground and honour ancestors, to listen beyond ourselves. We can call it individual or collective work, or human and non-human. But I just feel nothing is as isolated as we think it is. Sanctuary is making space for the world to exist.

CDC I feel civilisation has held us in a fixed grip for thousands of years, beyond even those centuries of the transatlantic slave trade, and when you consider this and the fact that slavery still exists widely in the world, you ask yourself the bigger question: why have human beings been slaves, or commanded them, for so long?

BA Im very shy about responding to why questions! The standard official explanation for what happened over 400 years to black bodies is that it was due to (human) evil or wickedness. I understand the legacies of such responses, but it does not feel generative for me. Its a conversation-stopper and doesnt do anything except label people, and might perpetuate the dynamics of the slave ship that feels so horrific to the imagination.

But if we consider that things are assemblages, acting upon other assemblages, suddenly theres somewhere to go that does not necessarily terminate prematurely at a moral judgment. When I touch the assemblage of the transatlantic slave trade that features heavily in my work, if you look at the ingredients that made it possible the Catholic enterprise of rationality that emerged from the Enlightenment, its ideologies and philosophies; sugar cane and its metabolism within human white European bodies; the climate that drove people away from chilly Europe to the sunny Caribbean and how assembling the pieces together and noticing how those ingredients interacted together became the conditions for slavery, it might free us and liberate us in ways that go beyond just answering why.

It helps to ask: if sugar was an active non-human agent in the proliferation of that economy, that arrangement of master and slave, then what kind of moves can we make today to make sure that doesnt happen? Then we talk beyond just active legislation, or healing people of their evil. We talk about meeting sugar cane, the idea that we are framed in unmasterable fields and forces that go beyond the liberal humanist project.

We need to create rituals of humility to know we are not masters of ourselves. Just framing it as something beyond us, without belittling accountability. Framing it as something that is more than human. That is what I am interested in as postactivism.

CDC It could be said that Dark Mountain was founded as a postactivist project, in that the art and writing it hosts is created by sitting with the trouble rather than fighting it. How do you define postactivism and how do you see it as a force within culture?

BA Its a pervasive myth that we are independent thinkers, that I think my thoughts, Charlotte thinks her thoughts, and that there are as many thoughts as there are people on the planet and that we all have our separate thoughts, that we act from some volitional force or agency that comes from within.

What escapes that analysis is that we are connected in very sticky ways. We actually think territorially, ecologically, we run, we hide, we look at people like us and we congregate together. And patterns and sticky formulas are at work that are occluded when we think of ourselves as individual activists. I bring that up because when we talk about activism today, it seems activism is colluding conspiratorially with the world it is trying to change. The way we tend to see it in the developing world, in the Global South, is that the very solutions passed down to us only deepen the problem we want to get rid of, so we tend to be stuck in a cycle of repeatability. The IMF comes down and says here is a structural readjustment programme, here is austerity, something to help your people, lets buy laptops for African children, so they can learn. And the laptops come and introduce new problems of their own.

I read somewhere that the West exports psychological and pathological categories. As a clinical psychologist I have gone into villages in Nigeria and been told: you are the expert, tell me whats wrong with me. What they were in fact saying was that since I was trained in Western psychology, I was superior to them, and their own indigenous experiments with being and becoming were discardable. The solution of my discipline and my expertise was supposed to cancel out the problem. It was just an allopathic response that compressed the problems and left the sickness intact.

I think activism is as materially complicit in the problems we are trying to solve, and as entangled as anything else. Postactivism is not a superior, spiritual way of responding. It is not saying here is a stream of thinking and acting, a way of behaving that will guarantee you utopia or a place of arrival. Postactivism is a democratising of responsivity. Its saying we have been stuck on a highway of responding but there are other ways that are not tethered to this highway, where we can investigate and which might lead to another kind of transformation.

So postactivism is in alliance with a different theory of change. We have thought change is what humans do. We are burdened with the idea of change, and feel we need to change the world. Posthumanism comes into the picture and tells us humans are not central to the world, we have never been central to the world, we did not create the world. We are always immersed in a field of differential becomings, what Deleuze would call transcendental materialism. We are not stable things. We are diffracted, porous and transcorporeal.

Postactivism is based on posthumanism. It is my way of saying that change is not human, it is not our work. We can only ally and build stronger coalitions for change with the world around us (and not just with humans). Postactivism is the opening to this. It is about cracks and faultlines and fissures. It is like a hungry teenager, who asks: what can we do with this crack? How might this help us to build a partnership with this alien over there, in order to ask complex and new questions about the world we are in? It is not about solutions, though solutions are welcome. It is about wonder, building new alliances for becoming different. Touching the material body of activism and allowing it to shudder.

CDC You said at the beginning of your course you deliberately pivoted its enquiry not within the United States, but in Africa. What was the reasoning behind this?

BA Empires colonise conversations about change. They capture conversations that might redeem it from what you call the holding station, and then take these conversations and put them in the family way. Soon the ways we speak about decolonisation and racial justice, which might otherwise ring true for other people and cultures and lead to new sites of shared power, become about how do we appeal to the powers that be, or use certain languages or phrases to signal I am woke, or woke enough. Soon, the nuances and complexities of navigating a difficult world are reduced to a few codes, a few linguistic choices, which Empire selects, and which others must adhere to in order to be righteous. So it becomes very territorial.

I am looking for conversations that are fugitive, that escape, that grant themselves permission to do what they want to do, and do not look towards the plantation, saying can you allow me to be seen? The fugitive does not want to be seen. And America is the most visible trope.

As such, I did this decentring for me, and to let our brothers and sisters in America know that they are not central to the world. You are not carrying the burden of change, you dont have to change us. The boundaries of America are not the boundaries of the world, you are just a small aspect of what is happening. That should be liberating. So I think I am being hospitable when I say it is not about you.

CDC What often happens regarding any conversation about race, or slavery or emancipation, is that it centres on the United States and thus limits our imagination and allows people to say in Europe, for example, well it didnt happen here, it happened in the colonies. As a result we dont get to look at this properly. So having the pivot of inquiry in Africa allows other kinds of knowing and awareness to happen. Which wouldnt have happened within a North American frame it would have become stuck in what you call the ethical monoculture, a Christian duality of right and wrong.

BA I dont think the pivot is even in Africa. Its off the coast of Africa, maybe somewhere off the Bight of Benin, in the Atlantic Ocean. Its definitely in the waters, where things are rippling and diffracting. Thats the site of the course, where there is no land yet.

The kings in Africa also sold the slaves; we also sold our brothers and sisters into slavery. That is one part of the conversation we need to have not that I am trying to create an equal culpability situation here. We are entangled in this as well.

CDC I sometimes find writers shy away from metaphysics or the work of transformation while those who are focused on consciousness work resist putting it into a creative or physical form, holding their knowing in a kind of abstract cloud. I feel everything needs to be spoken out loud, or danced, or cooked, earthed in some kind of way to be effective, to let these approaches become entangled as you say. Do you ever feel hemmed into a role of spiritual teacher?

BA I think people use me, as you use the future or food or a pen. The people that I sometimes work with use me as a magical Negro (laughs) because of the way I appear and because of my experiences as a black person. There is often a sense of just listen to what Bayo says which could be patronising. I dont want to be trapped there, into being a spiritual guru. I like to have a conversation, pose questions of my own. This is not a transmission from some ancestor, or angel, or alien, but a diffracted meeting of each other in the middle.

We are all on this slave ship. You might be on the upper deck but we are all in this holding station that pegs our bodies in place. The gift of this paradigm of diffraction, or this idea that things lose their edges, this relational ontology, is that it allows us to meet each other. As I said earlier, activism can become very industrial. The way we think about transformation is very categorical. You are an artist, you do artist stuff; you are a dancer, you dance into oblivion; you write about this and that, and it becomes an industry in itself, and modernity is quite happy with that. Its not scandalised about you doing your work.

CDC Mostly, it doesnt take any notice of it, Bayo!

BA It doesnt care, so long as you stay in your place. What scandalises modernity is when things spill. And facilitating spillage is good work. Diffraction allows me to read myth, through quantum dynamics, through performativity. When we see things through each other, that is when the new has a chance to emerge. So that is what we need to learn today, to become citizens of diffraction, to become fugitives.

CDC One aspect of the sanctuary which really grabbed me is that the site of transformation is where the real power is, where the change can happen, rather than dominating forces of civilisation which activism is always trying to defuse or stop or take over from. It explained to me why writers have always had a very bad deal, because they bring that to the fore, that change is always possible in any moment, the fact you can change, or that you are porous, or that something can come out of nothing, or that the immanent god you spoke of is always becoming, is always creating within us. Which is why writers are silenced and flung into gaol, because they are trying to stop that change from disrupting the fixed control of Empire.

BA In this quest to be seen, to be noticed, which in the Deleuzio-Guattarian literature might be indexed as the politics of recognition, can be found a different power that isnt tethered to being seen. There is historical precedent for this. When the slaves were crammed into a tight space, they tried to escape. There are accounts of their efforts to take over the ship and wrest power away from the captain, but the ships themselves were designed to keep them at bay; certain structures would demarcate where the non-citizens were, and those who needed rehabilitation and those who were embodiments of purity.

The slave ship worked against them. Its almost as if their efforts to escape only enforced the trade, it made it stronger, because the slavers could get together and say, why dont we make the space smaller, dehumanise them further? To keep their property busy and sellable, they even invented practices like dancing the slave. The slavers did this both for entertainment and to keep these appropriated bodieseconomically viable.

The beautiful tradition of capoeira, the dance encoded with martial arts, which is famous in Brazil, could not have happened without the boot of the oppressor on the necks of the slave. The limbo dance is the slave trying to navigate the structure of the slave ship. And I can give many more examples of how oppression became the alchemy for transformation. How disarticulated bodies became portals for other ways of being: in dance, music, rituals, ways of interacting with the world, religions, spiritual systems.

This is why the elders said the trickster, travelled with them. The trickster works in places you do not expect generativity. You expect death and dismal silence, but there life springs. So to go back to our original conversation about death and dying, modernity has framed death and dying as eternal silence. But through the eyes of the glitch, the eyes of the trickster, death is an invitation, a lively vocation to recreate, reformulate and use our porous skins, our disarticulated bodies, to become different.

Bayo Akomolafe is one of the keynote speakers for the upcomingBorrowed Time summiton death, dying and change,hosted by art.earth on 31st October 2021

Dark Mountain: Issue 19 is available from the online shop here

Teaser photo credit: Painting of the slave deck of theMarie Sraphique. By Desertarun1 Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=108838114

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When the Bones of our Ancestors Speak to Us: A Fugitive Conversation with Bayo Akomolafe - Resilience

How extremist Christian theology is driving the right-wing assault on democracy – Salon

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Progressive policies and positions are supposed to be rooted in reality and hard evidence. But that's not always the case when it comes to the culture wars that have such an enormous impact on our politics especially not since the unexpected evangelical embrace of Donald Trump in 2016, culminating in the "pro-life" death cult of anti-vaccine, COVID-denying religious leaders. If this development perplexed many on the left, it wasless surprising to a small group of researchers who have been studying the hardcore anti-democratic theology known as dominionism that lies behind the contemporary Christian right, and its far-reaching influence over the last several decades.

One leading figure within that small group, Rachel Tabachnick, was featured in a recent webinar hosted by the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (archived on YouTube here), as part of its Religion and Repro Learning Series program, overseen by the Rev. Dr. Cari Jackson. Tabachnick's writing on dominionism can be found at Talk2Action and Political Research Associates, and she's been interviewed by Terry Gross on Fresh Air.

Her presentation sheds important light on at least three things: First of all, the vigilante element of the Texas anti-abortion law SB 8. Second, the larger pattern of disrupting or undermining governance, including the "constitutional sheriffs" movement, the installation of overtly partisan election officials and the red-state revolt against national COVID public health policies. While Donald Trump has exploited that pattern ruthlessly, he did not create it. And third, the seemingly baffling fact that an anti-democratic minority feels entitled to accuse its opponents including democratically elected officials of "tyranny."

Some dominionist ideas such as the biblical penalty of death by stoning are so extreme they can easily be dismissed as fringe, others have been foundational to the modern religious right, and still more have become increasingly influential in recent years. Those latter two categories are what we need to understand most, say both Tabachnick and Jackson.

"One of the things that struck me, as a relative newcomer," said Jackson, a former Congregationalist minister, "was that there was not sufficient understanding about the theological frames used by many individuals who are opposed to abortion." She continued, "I'm a strategist in a lot of ways, and one important strategy, I believe, must be to understand what the teachings and the theological frames are" on the other side. Which links directly to the question of what progressive activists need to do differently in this changed environment.

This failure to understand the nature of dominionism has hampered activists, not just in the realm of reproductive justice, but across an entire spectrum of political issues, both cultural and economic. Jackson discussed her own background, raised within a conservative Christian worldview.

"I was taught a very individualistic approach," she said, "taught that we shouldn't pay taxes, because doing so enabled people who were not working, and enables people whose lifestyle we don't agree with." There's nothing new about such views, but dominionism provides believers with an even stronger foundation for them.

Jackson describes her current understanding of religious faith as highly intersectional: "We believe that to understand the attacks on abortion also invites us or even requires us to look at attacks on voting, to look at attacks on immigrants, attacks on prison reform, attacks on equal pay and on and on," she said. "It's all of the same cloth: They are all attacks on humans flourishing. That's my language. The God of my understanding wants all of us to flourish in who we are."

The language of dominionism is strikingly different, to put it mildly. In her webinar, Tabachnick played a clip of one of the movement's leading figures, C. Peter Wagner, providing a definition:

Dominion has to do with control. Dominion has to do with rulership. Dominion has to do with authority and subduing. And it relates to society in other words what is talked about, what the values are in heaven [that] need to be made manifest here on earth. Dominion means being the head and not the tail. Dominion means ruling as kings. It says in Revelation chapter 1:6 that "he has made us kings and priests," and check the rest of that verse, it says "for dominion." So we are kings for dominion.

Later she provided a definition from Frederick Clarkson, author of the 1997 book, "Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy":

Dominionism is the theocratic idea that regardless of theological view, means, or timetable, Christians are called by God to exercise dominion over every aspect of society by taking control of political and cultural institutions.

Wagner, who died in 2016, is known as the founding father of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), one of the two main branches of dominionism, which grew out of the Pentecostal and charismatic traditions within evangelical Christianity. Dominionists in the other branch, known as "Christian reconstructionism," come out of conservative Calvinism, with a focus on bringing government and society under biblical law. They tend to be more circumspect, often obfuscating their true intentions and avoiding the word "theocracy" in favor of "theonomy," for example. But not Wagner, as can be seen in the title of his 2011 book, "Dominion!: Your Role in Bringing Heaven to Earth." The NAR talks constantly about taking dominion over the "seven mountains" of society: education, religion, family, business, government, arts and the media.

But it's the other branch, the Christian reconstructionists, who have excelled at strategic organizing and providing blueprints across different right-wing constituencies for almost 50 years. They are the ones Tabachnick focused most of her presentation on, specifically two key figures: Rousas John Rushdoony, the movement's master theologian, and his son-in-law Gary North, a prolific strategist, propagandist and networker who was once a staffer for Rep. Ron Paul, the libertarian hero.

Christian reconstructionism, Tabachnick explained, is "about bringing government in all areas of life under biblical law, a continuation of the Mosaic law in the Old Testament, with some exceptions." This dispensation would include, "according to Gary North, public execution of women who have abortions and those who advise them to have an abortion."

In a recent private presentation, Frederick Clarkson asked a rhetorical question: "People have long said that there should be Christian government, but if you had one, what would it look like? What would it do? Rushdoony was the first to create a systematic theology of what Christian governance should be like, based on the Ten Commandments, and all of the judicial applications he could find in the Old Testament including about 35 capital offenses."

But the "Handmaid's Tale"-style extremism of dominionists' ultimate vision shouldn't really be our focus, Tabachnick told Salon. "Nobody cares about the theocratic, draconian future envisioned by reconstructionists because they don't believe it will happen," she said.

What'shappening right now, however, is that this ideology has had tremendous impact on more immediate politics. "Christian reconstructionism is the merger of a distinct brand of Calvinism with Austrian School economics," Tabachnicksaid. "In other words, it's an interpretation of the Bible grounded in property rights." The results have been far-reaching:

For more than 40 years, its prolific writers have provided the foundations and strategic blueprints for the attacks on liberation theology and the social gospel, as well as many other streams of Christianity which do not share the Reconstructionists' belief in unfettered capitalism as ordained by God and its fierce anti-statism.

The larger religious right's attack on public education, the social safety net and most government functions are largely grounded in the writings, strategies and tactics formulated by reconstructionist writers. Reconstructionism is not the only (and certainly not the first) source of interposition and nullification in this country. However, much of what is currently being taught today about using interposition to undermine the legitimacy of government is sourced in reconstructionism.

This idea of "interposition" comes through what's known as the doctrine of the "lesser magistrate," which we'll return to below. But its significance especially in the post-2020 Republican Party has only recently become apparent. Reconstructionism's initial appeal was more immediately, as Tabachnick explained in the seminar:

What Rushdoony provided is a package that included attacking what these fundamentalists hated and feared most in society, often expressed in terms of "This is communist. This is socialist." But Rushdoony provided a way to sacralize these ideas, and at the same time not just tear down the old order, but provide a blueprint for the new order.

Everyone didn't have to agree on the blueprint, she said: "Rushdoony's ideas went out in bits and pieces. The Christian right leaders took what they wanted and discarded what they didn't."

"Christian reconstructionism, as articulated by Rushdoony, provided a standard by which everyone else had to measure themselves," Clarkson told Salon. "Not everyone on the Christian right agreed with Rushdoony and his fellow Reconstructionist thinkers on, for example, the contemporary application of capital crimes listed in the Old Testament. And followers were often at pains to distinguish themselves."

Clarkson cites the case of conservative Presbyterian theologian Francis Schaeffer, who disagreed with Rushdoony on the applicability of biblical law, but became a driving force behind the anti-abortion activist movement Operation Rescue. That "militant Schaefferism," Clarkson said, "led activists to think: What's next, beyond political protest and stopping abortion? This is where the conversation has been in the Christian right for decades."

The doctrine of the "lesser magistrate," mentioned above, first emerged into public discourse out of Operation Rescue. But it did so as part of a larger, more complicated story.

There's a long history of right-wing opposition to federal authority, particularly grounded in the 19th-century defense of slaveryand continuing in the defense of Jim Crow segregation. In his famous "I Have a Dream" speech, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke specifically of the governor of Alabama "having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification."

As detailed by Randall Balmer in "Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right," the religious right wasn't initially fueled by opposition to the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, but by opposition to a lesser-known decision in 1971, Green v. Connally, which threatened the tax-exempt status of racially discriminatory institutions, most famously the evangelical stronghold Bob Jones University.

Anti-abortion activists have long sought not just to bury that past but to stand it on its head, somehow equating Roe v. Wade with the notorious Dred Scott decision of 1857 and claiming the moral heritage of abolitionism.

"Throughout these movements there is also an attempt to turn the tables on the claims of racism," Tabachnick said in her webinar. "This is one of the roles that anti-abortion activism as abolition plays. Also, there's a promotion of narratives that provide a different history and legal justifications for interposition, nullification and even secession. One of the things that Christian reconstructionism has added to this dialogue is the concept of the lower magistrate."

As Tabachnick explains it, the "lesser magistrate" is a heroic figure who "resists the tyranny of a higher authority" defining "tyranny" in biblical terms, potentially including any number of popular or common-sense laws or policies. This notion first gained salience in the anti-abortion context in the 1980s and '90s, as Tabachnick went on to explain.

"Many violent anti-abortionists have justified their actions in reconstructionist teachings," she said. "One of these was Paul Hill, who studied under one of the major reconstructionist leaders and corresponded with others." Hill went on to murder Dr. John Britton, a physician who performed abortions, as well as Britton's personal bodyguard, in 1994. Hill was executed in 2003, but the reconstructionist movement sought to cast him out well before that.

"Gary North responded, after the murders had taken place, in a book called 'Lone Gunners for Jesus,'" Tabachnick said. His message to Hill was, "You're going to burn in hell, you've been excommunicated. This was because Paul Hill stepped outside the bounds of the guidelines set by the movement."

To explain this, she quoted a passage from another book by North that offered qualified support for Operation Rescue: "We need a statement that under no circumstances will Operation Rescue or any of its official representatives call for armed resistance to civil authority without public support from a lesser magistrate."

"On the basis of their belief of what the law or the word of God is, they are allowed on the advice, on the interposition, of a lesser magistrate to commit acts of violence," Tabachnick continued. North was seeking to control or curb anti-abortion terrorism, but without rejecting it in principle. Murdering abortion providers or even murdering women seeking abortions could be morally justified, with the blessing of a lesser magistrate.

This is relevant to SB 8 in Texas in at least two ways. That bill bans abortions after six weeksandis enforced not by state officials, but by deputizing private individuals to sue anyone who performs the procedure or "aids and abets" it. First of all, giving private individuals these vigilante-style rights seems a lot like making them into "lesser magistrates," however narrowly constrained.

Second, the Supreme Court's refusal to stay the law which clearly violates the Constitution and existing precedent, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor argued in her dissent can be seen as an example of the doctrine in action. In more normal circumstances, the court would have stayed the law pending consideration on the merits, even if a majority of justices intended to overturn precedent. That's how common law has worked for centuries.

But biblical law isn't common law, especially as reconstructionists understand it. Under the doctrine of the "lesser magistrate," Roe is not precedent but an instance of tyranny and the justices have a duty to God to resist it. Of course, not even Amy Coney Barrett or Clarence Thomas has said anything like that, but it's entirely consistent with their behavior as well as with their silence, since openly making such an argument would clarify just how radicalized they have become. But adherents of the doctrine of the lesser magistrate must surely appreciate the drift in direction.

Nor is the doctrine limited to abortion cases, as already noted. Matthew Trewhella is a pastor who was a prominent leader of violence-prone wing of the anti-abortion movement in 1990s, and author of the 2013 book, "The Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates," which greatly heightened its visibility.

"Trewhella is now all over radio and the internet," Tabachnick said in her webinar, "claiming to meet with state legislators and attorney generals at the moment, with the cause of fighting the 'tyranny of mask mandates' and vaccination for COVID. So you can see how this is a concept that is not just limited to abortion. It is a concept that can be used in resistance of government authority all over the country in all different kinds of ways FEMA, EPA, Bureau of Land Management and so forth."

Trewhella isn't breaking new ground here. Clarkson's 1997 book "Eternal Hostility" describes him making similar arguments in a speech to an anti-tax group in Wisconsin. He was just one figure among many spreading the seeds of reconstructionist resistance to federal authority among militia members, "freemen" and anti-abortion activists at the time.

"This movement believes that rights come from God and not from any government," Tabachnick told Salon. "Therefore, any 'rights' that conflict with their interpretation of God's law are not actually rights. They are 'humanist' or a product of man's laws and not God's laws. This theme of 'human rights' versus inalienable rights from God has been at the center of the Christian Reconstructionist movement since its beginnings."

She pointed to "What's Wrong With Human Rights," an excerpt from a book of the same name by the Rev. T. Robert Ingram published in "The Theology of Christian Resistance," a collection edited by North. Ingram sweeps aside the Bill of Rights as "a statement of sovereign powers of states withheld from the federal authority of the Union," and turns instead to the Virginia Declaration of Rights, authored by George Mason in 1776.

The first section of the Virginia Declaration, beginning "That all Men are by Nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent Rights," is dismissed by Ingram for omitting any mention of God, as an "error of unbelief which falsifies all the rest that is said about human life." The second, beginning "That all power is vested in, and consequently derived from the People; that Magistrates are their Trustees and Servants, and at all Times amenable to them," he dismisses as well: "The meaning could not be more clear, nor more opposite Biblical thought. The ruling proposition of Scripture and Christian doctrine is that 'power belongeth unto God.'" In short, there are no human rights.

The connection to the doctrine of the lesser magistrate is clear: Power comes from God, not the people. Whatever the people want is irrelevant. Whatever laws they may pass are irrelevant, too, if they go against God. "Tyranny" is whatever the Christian reconstructionist decides he doesn't like.

Elsewhere, Ingram denigrates freedom of speech and the press:

Freedom of speech and freedom of press are, in fact, applied seriously only to giving government protection to instigators of riot and rebellion, as well as those who would undermine human order by more subtle attacks on morals and customs.

As for the right to dissent, he calls it "not a lawful claim to own or to do something, which is the true right," but "a turning upside down of right and wrong, calling good evil and evil good." Similarly, there is no scriptural right to "resist authority," only that granted by thefalse doctrine of "human rights."

Ingram's interpretation of the Civil War is that "Yankee radicals inflamed the Northern peoples to mount the Civil War in the name of a 'human right' to be free ... if they did not destroy the whole Southern Order, they did at least dismantle its vast and efficient plantation economy." The civil rights movement, unsurprisingly, is understood as a defiance of "Tradition, law, and custom, which preserved public peace and order in the bi-racial state of the union, both North and South," and became "the target of the right to resist in the 60's, the supposed human rights justifying the violent means."

Tabachnick didn't dig into this text in her webinar, but it serves toillustrateher central principle: "This attack on the very concept of 'human rights' can be found throughout today's religious right."

Jackson told Salon that the most important part of Tabachnick's presentation came "when she talked about humanism and the humanistic frame, from the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Those who are within the dominionist camp see that as contrary to God. I read those same documents and I say, this is pointing us toward the direction that God wants for us. They look at it and see that as counter to God, because humanism from their perspective is something very contrary to God."

If we take such arguments seriously, then we understand why for dominionists there is nothing wrong with breaking any law at all, so long as "God wills it" and you have the blessing of a so-called lesser magistrate. This is the reconstructionist argument supporting a whole range of chaotic right-wing activity today, including baseless claims that the 2020 election was a fraud. After all, the fundamental reconstructionist argument is that all such democratic government is illegitimate.

"The goal of reconstructionism is to tear down the existing order and reconstruct a new society based on biblical law," Tabachnick said. "Even if we assume that this vision of a theocratic America will never come to fruition, it's important to recognize the movement's impact on the ideas, strategies and tactics of the larger religious right and its role in sacralizing the actions of other anti-statist fellow travelers.

"As I wrote almost a decade ago, the theocratic libertarianism of Christian reconstructionism has been surprisingly seductive to Tea Partiers and young libertarians many of whom may not realize what is supposed to happen after the government is stripped of its regulatory powers."

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How extremist Christian theology is driving the right-wing assault on democracy - Salon

International Symposium on Sorgner’s "We Have Always Been Cyborgs"Back to Events – Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies

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Organized by JCUsGuarini Institute for Public Affairs(in cooperation with theHistory and Humanities Department), the InternationalSymposium on SorgnersWe Have Always Been Cyborgswill bring together a group of internationally renowned thinkers, academics, and intellectualsto discuss, analyze and reflect upon suggestions about values, norms, and utopia, as they were presented inProfessor Stefan Lorenz Sorgners latest monograph entitledWe Have Always Been Cyborgs(Bristol University Press 2022).

According to Julian Savulescu from the University of Oxford,We Have Always Been Cyborgsis an eye-opening, wide-ranging and all-inclusive study of transhumanism. Sorgners account avoids both the utopian trap and the bogeyman spectre. He makes a compelling case for placing ourselves on the transhuman spectrum. How we continue to use technologies is in our hands. Sorgners book is both a comprehensive introduction to transhumanist thought and a clear-sighted vision for its future realization. N. Katherine Hayles from the University of California, Los Angeles adds further that With an encyclopedic knowledge of transhumanism and a deep philosophical grounding, especially in Nietzschean thought, Stefan Sorgner tackles some of the most challenging ethical issues currently discussed, including gene editing, digital data collection, and life extension, with uncommon good sense and incisive conclusions. This study is one of the most detailed and comprehensive analyses available today. Highly recommended for anyone interested in transhumanist/posthumanist ideas and in these issues generally.

The blurbs by Katherine Hayles and Julian Savulescu provide an excellent summary of the myriad of topics, which will be analysed, discussed, and reflected upon in this ground-breaking international symposium. The discussants, who agreed to respond to Sorgners reflections are world-leading academics in the fields of political sciences, applied ethics, theology, as well as philosophy, i.e. Jennifer Merchant from the University of Paris 2, Benedikt Paul Gcke from the University of Bochum, Fr. Philip Larrey from the Pontifica Univerity Lateranense in Rome, Sarah Chan from the University of Edinburgh, Maurizio Balistreri from theUniversity of Turin, and Piergiorgio Donatelli from the Sapienza in Rome. Thus, the state of the arts of intellectual exchanges on transhumanism, critical posthumanism, and the ethics of gene technologies, digitalisation, and human-machine-interfaces will be critically dealt with during this event.

Program

You can access to more detailed information about the speakers in the file Speakers Biographies file located in the Additional Info tab down below.

Please send an email to reserve your spot and use your John Cabot University email address. If you are part of our study abroad programs, please state your university.

For those who cannot attend in person, the event will be streamed live onMetahumanities YouTube channel.

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International Symposium on Sorgner's "We Have Always Been Cyborgs"Back to Events - Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies

Kerala: Proposed anti-black magic law to make going tough for godmen, sorcerers – The New Indian Express

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THIRUVANANTHAPURAM : Blessing women unable to conceive, mischiefs of kuttichathan or sale of lucky charms on the promise of bringing good fortune. These and more will become punishable offences in the state under the proposed anti-black magic law The Kerala Prevention and Eradication of Inhuman Evil Practice, Sorcery and Black Magic Bill, 2019.

Mooted by the Law Reforms Commission, the proposed legislation has stringent provisions to combat superstitions and evil practices while creating awareness among people. What this means is godmen and exorcists will find going tough in Kerala.

The bill has a detailed schedule listing various offences. They include black magic, sorcery, exorcism by violent means, bounty hunting and cheating people in the name of supernatural powers and sacrifice of animals. Godmen can also be booked for subjecting women to inhuman and humiliating practices such as parading them naked or engaging in sexual activity to bless women who are unable to conceive. Sale of lucky charms like lamps and conches on the promise that they would bring good fortune will also become punishable.

Other practices against women that the draft proposes to criminalise are forced isolation, prohibition of entry into the village or facilitating segregation of menstruating or post-partum women. Certain superstitious practices with religious colour, such as piercing of cheek with iron rods or arrows, are also banned. Pelting of stones at houses or pollution of food or water, under the guise of mischiefs of kuttichathan, will also attract punishment.

Govt will take a final call on draft bill

The minimum punishment for various offences is one-year imprisonment and Rs 5,000 fine. This may go up to seven years in jail and Rs 50,000 fine depending on the severity of the crime. The bill spares certain practices associated with religions. Also, performing religious rituals at homes, temples, mosques or other religious places, which do not cause physical harm to any person, are excluded.

The government will take a final call on the draft bill. It can amend the list of offences by addition or deletion. The bill upholds the spirit of Article 51A (h) of the Constitution that encourages the citizen to develop scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform. Due emphasis is given to awareness programmes, said Law Reforms Commission vicechairman K Sasidharan Nair.

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Kerala: Proposed anti-black magic law to make going tough for godmen, sorcerers - The New Indian Express

After 40 Years, Abba Takes a Chance With Its Legacy – The New York Times

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In a way the exchange was pure Abba: easygoing, but undergirded by serious concerns. Another chance for debate came up when the two men were discussing their Abbatars. Andersson remarked that Ulvaeus had requested a change to his digital alter egos hair because there is only so much 1979 realness anybody can take. When I remarked that it was a great way to rewrite a little bit of history while still being faithful to its spirit, Ulvaeus replied, with a slight smile, Yes, its such an interesting existential question. (Ulvaeus, known in Sweden for his commitment to atheism and humanism, enjoys such questions, later asking, So, do you think the American constitution is strong enough to withstand another Republican president?)

The Andersson-Ulvaeus songwriting bond has withstood intraband divorces and the pressure brought on by critical scorn. (For those who have forgotten: Andersson used to be married to Lyngstad, Ulvaeus to Faltskog.) They have been writing together nonstop since meeting in 1966, and their post-Abba collaborations include songs for Anderssons band as well as the musicals Chess and Kristina from Duvemla, an epic about 19th-century Swedish immigrants to America that includes the rare showstopper about lice.

While the division of labor used to be fluid in the 1970s, it is now much more clear-cut: Andersson comes up with melodies and records demos in his Skeppsholmen lair then sends them to Ulvaeus, who writes the lyrics. Asked how elaborate those demos are, Andersson volunteered to play Dont Shut Me Down, and walked over to his computer. Then he couldnt find it among his dozens of files, searching Tina Charles since the Abba song has a slinky vibe like one of the British singers hits.

He eventually unearthed not the demo but the finished backing track, and cranked it up on the immaculate sound system, providing a great example of how crucial Faltskog and Lyngstads voices are to Abbas sonic tapestry.

All the various successful groups since the 70s have had more than one singer, Andersson said, mentioning Eagles and Fleetwood Mac, alongside Abba. You hear Frida sing one song and then you hear Agnetha sing its like two bands. The dynamics are helped immensely by the fact that there are two. And then when they sing together

Their harmonies on the Voyage album bear the unmistakable Abba stamp, even if the register is a bit lower than it used to be. Age alone does not account for the difference: We used to sort of force them to go as high as they could on most of the songs because it gives energy, Andersson said.

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After 40 Years, Abba Takes a Chance With Its Legacy - The New York Times

The forgotten life of Australias most prolific Hollywood director… and the tall stories he told – Sydney Morning Herald

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Even in film circles, John Farrow is pretty much unknown in Australia. But almost 60 years after his death, the product of Marrickville in Sydneys inner west remains easily the countrys most prolific filmmaker in Hollywood.

He directed almost 50 movies, produced six and wrote more than 25 screenplays winning an Oscar before dying from a heart attack in 1963.

Dynamic, driven and prone to telling spectacularly tall stories about his life, Farrow is part of a famous Hollywood family.

Driven, dynamic and enigmatic: Hollywood director John Farrow who grew up in Marrickville and went to sea at 15.Credit:Ronin

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When he married actress Maureen OSullivan, who played Jane to Johnny Weissmullers Tarzan, they had seven children including actress Mia Farrow and author Prudence Bruns, who inspired John Lennon to write Dear Prudence. Their grandson is famed investigative journalist Ronan Farrow.

Outside movies, Farrow wrote eight books, including a collection of poetry and a history of the Popes. He became a Commander in the Canadian Navy during World War II. He won an OBE and a Papal knighthood. And, despite being a staunch Catholic, he was a Hollywood playboy whose romancing of a series of Hollywood actresses apparently continued through two marriages.

When Australia won its first Oscar for Ken G. Halls documentary Kokoda Front Line in 1943, Farrow collected it.

The fact that someone so accomplished is so little known in this country fascinated filmmakers Claude Gonzalez and Frans Vandenburg when they discovered a shared affection for Farrows critically acclaimed film noir The Big Clock (1948).

Director John Farrow (left) with John Wayne and Lana Turner on the set of The Sea Chase. Credit:Ronin

Now, after more than a decade of detective work and interviews, they reveal his brilliantly colourful life in the documentary John Farrow Hollywoods Man In The Shadows that is screening at the Sydney Film Festival.

Wed always loved 40s cinema, Gonzalez says. We loved The Big Clock and got into a discussion about how good and vibrant a work it was, then we found that there was really nothing written about Farrow.

Vandenburg adds that they were fascinated to discover he was Australian and that he had made so many Hollywood movies.

John Farrow, Maureen OSullivan and their seven children.Credit:Ronin

As well as directing movies starring Boris Karloff, Lucille Ball, Robert Mitchum, Lana Turner, Bette Davis and John Wayne, Farrow won an Oscar for co-writing the comedy Around The World In 80 Days (1956) after an earlier nomination for directing the war drama Wake Island (1942).

His best-known movies also include Five Came Back (1939), Two Years Before The Mast (1946), Night Has A Thousand Eyes (1948), Alias Nick Beal (1949), Where Danger Lives (1950), Hondo (1953), The Sea Chase (1955) and John Paul Jones (1959).

Farrow was a stylish director who told engaging stories with a constantly moving camera.Credit:Getty

Gonzalez describes him as a stylish director who told engaging stories with a constantly moving camera.

Hes always creating a wonderful pace and energy to his filmmaking, he says. You can also see a humanism that is very much part of his style. He always cares about not just the hero but the secondary and the third person in the story ... the unheard voice of a female protagonist or the underdog.

The documentary shows that Farrows father worked for a tailor and his mother was a dressmaker until her death aged just 26, when he was three, in what was then called Callan Park Hospital for the Insane. While not diagnosed at that time , it is now thought she had post-natal depression.

While Farrow later claimed to have studied at Newington College, near his home, he really went to the more humble Newtown Boys.

According to a relative living in Engadine in the southern suburbs, 88-year-old Jim Farrow, the family talk was that John was a rascal and a scallywag as a child.

While Farrow later claimed to have studied at Newington College, near his home, he really went to the more humble Newtown Boys.

He used to walk around with a white coat on and a stethoscope pretending he was a doctor, he says. We knew he used to exaggerate stories and that carried on after he left Australia.

While the retired hospital courier never met his first cousin twice removed, his family research was invaluable for the documentary.

Can you imagine making, on average, 15 films per decade?: Frans Vandenburg (left) and Claude Gonzalez, who directed the documentary John Farrow - Hollywoods Man In The Shadows.

Aged 15, Farrow borrowed money from his aunt and left Sydney as a crew member on the RMS Makura in 1919. The destination was Vancouver via Fiji and Hawaii.

He later claimed to have fought in revolutions in Nicaragua and Mexico before arriving in the US in 1923, though the documentary-makers believe that was a colourful fabrication. Just like his claims to be related to Englands kings, to have written an English-French-Tahitian dictionary and to have studied at Winchester College in England and the US Naval Academy.

He just ran away to sea, had these adventures, began writing and jumped ship in San Francisco, Vandenburg says. Thats how he arrived in America: as an illegal alien.

Around a year after landing, Farrow married the daughter of a mining magnate, Felice Lewin, and they had a daughter. There is a tall story behind that marriage as well.

A report with the headline Divoce looms for Cinderella Boy about two different sides of John Farrow inThe Oakland Tribune in 1927.Credit:Ronin

In 1927, The Oakland Tribune carried a story headlined Divorce looms for Cinderella Boy that reported Jack Farrow had been living a lie when he won over Lewin.

Working as a Coast Guard seaman swabbing the decks during the day, he had been wearing a monocle and spats, claiming to be a British Lord known as the Honorable John Neville Burg-Apton Villiers Farrow, to mix with appreciative debs and dowagers at night. She wanted a divorce on the grounds of cruelty.

Working as a Coast Guard seaman swabbing the decks during the day, he had been wearing a monocle and claiming to be a British Lord at night.

Arriving in Los Angeles that same year, Farrow started to gain recognition as a poet and short story writer. He worked as a script consultant and caption writer on silent seafaring movies then graduated to writing dialogue when talkies began.

David Niven in Around The World in 80 Days: John Farrow won an Oscar for co-writing the screenplay but was sacked as director.Credit:Fairfax Media

He met the right people, Vandenburg says He was advised to go down to Hollywood, which he did. It was perfect timing during the transition from silent to sound.

Farrow made another colourful newspaper story in 1933.

The Daily News reported that he had been threatened with deportation for moral turpitude after being arrested while dancing with Argentinian actress Mona Maris at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub.

John Farrow and his famous actress wife 9and Mias mother0 Maureen OSullivan attend a wedding in 1933.Credit:Getty

The paper added that Farrow, who had previously been engaged to actress Lila Lee, had been advised to quit the US two years earlier over his questionable residency permit. He left for Tahiti and England then returned with papers declaring he was an assistant consular attach to one of the Balkan countries.

Described in court as a screenwriter and actor, Farrow was given five years probation instead of being deported. He eventually became an American citizen in 1947.

These lively interludes did nothing to stop Farrows rise as a filmmaker. After all, he was not alone in reinventing his past among the immigrants in Hollywood.

A lot of figures including Errol Flynn and Merle Oberon would recreate or reshape their lives, Gonzalez says.

Pivotal movie: Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan and Maureen OSullivan as Jane with Cheeta the Chimp in Tarzan Escapes.Credit:Reuters

When we checked, a lot of these things were proven false, but he was a great fabulist. He not only wrote good stories, he wrote good copy for his own life.

Author and critic Scott Murray says Tarzan Escapes (1936) was a pivotal movie for Farrow it was his first movie as co-writer and he met then married OSullivan after converting to Catholicism.

He soon directed his first movie, the Caribbean crime drama Men In Exile (1937), focusing on what were intended as second-string attractions in double bills. He had a surprise hit with plane-crashes-in-the-jungle pic Five Came Back two years later.

When World War II broke out, Farrow enlisted in the Canadian Navy and reached the rank of Commander before being shipped out with typhus in 1941. He returned to directing when he recovered making A-grade pictures for the top of the bill now and quickly succeeding with Wake Island.

Poster for Around the World in 80 Days.Credit:Getty

Farrow started directing Around The World In 80 Days until the famously brash producer Mike Todd sacked him, apparently over how long he was taking to shoot the movie. It went on to win five Oscars, including best picture.

His son, John Charles Farrow, says in the documentary that Farrow told his children and others that they were directly related to the kings of England.

It was important to people at that age and in his profession to have a polished side to them, he says. The raw and the rough of Australia wasnt in style at that time.

The documentary makers had no luck interviewing Mia Farrow not surprising given the continuing controversy around former partner Woody Allen and their children.

We wrote to all the family and they all responded differently, Vandenburg says. Mia was very private in her exchanges because she had a lot of her own issues going on. All families are dysfunctional, I suppose, but theirs is a little bit more tragic.

Mia was very private in her exchanges ... All families are dysfunctional, I suppose, but theirs is a little bit more tragic.

Farrow children prepare to fly to a film shoot in Ireland where their parents are working in 1948, from left, Paddy, 5, John, 21 months and Mia, 3.Credit:Getty

Gonzalez adds that Farrow died when his children were adolescents, leaving them without a very dominant, very dynamic father at an important time in their lives. But our agenda was giving John Farrow a voice: who was he as a person, what made his films so compelling and why should they be reassessed?

Hollywood director John Farrow carries his daughter Mia, aged 9, out of hospital after a 1954 polio scare.Credit:Getty

But Mia did appreciate one discovery during production the unmarked grave of her grandmother, Johns mother, at Rookwood cemetery.

When Jim told her the news, she paid for a plaque. She was delighted and wanted to place a memorial to her grandmother on the grave, he says.

It reads in part: In loving memory of Lucy Farrow. Death came before you could know your baby John.

John Farrow on the set of his last film.

While some of Farrows best-known movies are being released on DVD, they are not streaming. We hope with the documentary that more of his movies might become available, Gonzalez says.

So how did Farrow pack so much into his life?

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Gonzalez says two of his children described him as an insomniac who was constantly on the go.

As filmmakers, we know how difficult it is to make a film, he says. Can you imagine making, on average, 15 films per decade? Its an incredible amount of work, plus writing these books and also having affairs with some of the leading ladies of the time.

John Farrow Hollywoods Man In The Shadows is screening at Sydney Film Festival this weekend and then online at Sydney Film Festival On Demand from November 12. Tickets from sff.org.au or 1300 733 733.

Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.

Email the writer at gmaddox@smh.com.au and follow him on Twitter at @gmaddox.

See the article here:

The forgotten life of Australias most prolific Hollywood director... and the tall stories he told - Sydney Morning Herald

The Forced Birth Movement Hates Real Religious Liberty How to Use That Against Them by Making Abortion a Religious Right; Part 1 – Patheos

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(This being a big subject that has been largely ignored it needs a lot of explanation, the essay is split into two parts. Part 2 will be posted tomorrow)

It has not worked.

The pro-choice movement opposed by the religious right has been making an enormous mistake. We know that because it is facing disaster. That when a solid majority of Americans favor abortion rights. It is all too clear that what it has been done in support of women being full class citizens has been gravely defective. It follows that it is time to move on to a more effective strategy.

Roe v Wade rests largely upon the 14thAmendment principle of privacy as a legal and societal expression of individual freedom from invasive state control in favor of personal responsibility. The thesis is valid, but it is a defensive posture that has proven insufficient to fend off assaults from a dedicated forced birth campaign. The situation is so bad for the sovereign rights of American women that even as Catholic heritage nations like Mexico and Ireland place their trust in the gender to make the best choice, the USA is reverting to the paternalistic misogyny of the early 1900s.

The womens right movement must go on the offensive to regain the legal and moral high ground over the force birthers. Doing that requires utilizing two interrelated lines of argument.

The Big Medical Lie

One issue that has for reasons obscure long been oddly underplayed is womens health. The ant-abortion conspiracy promotes the anti-scientific disinformation that first trimester feticides are artificial and therefore bad for mothers, while child birth is natural to the point that the government must force all pregnant women to do what is good for their health physical and mental. Law enforcement must protect an apparently gullible gender from a diabolical abortion industry that is so clever that it somehow seduces many hundreds of thousands of each year a third of the national female population over time to commit a dangerous unnatural act that is against the wise ways of Gods benign creation. That when not getting an abortion is as easy as simply not going to a provider. Yet many go to great lengths to get to such, sometimes traveling long distances if necessary, knowing exactly what will happen when they do so, yet only a small percentage report having significant post procedure regrets [https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2020/01/416421/five-years-after-abortion-nearly-all-women-say-it-was-right-decision-study].

The hard truth is that nature is not always the best. Modern medicine is the artificial practice that has saved billions of lives from the deadly side of the biological world, including the many risks of pregnancy. Early term abortions surgical and medicinal are over a dozen times less lethal than going through the months long complexities and risks of pregnancy [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22270271]. And because the latter pumps lots of mood altering hormones into mothers, they are highly likely to experience serious mental distress before and especially after birth, post-partum depression being very common and often serious. Early pregnancy does not involve such hormone loads, and mental trauma is much less frequent after termination. That is why the regrets are rare, of the many women I know who have had abortions none was gravely upset about it. Which makes sense since a woman is making the safest decision when ending a pregnancy as early as feasible. Legally sentencing a woman to bear her pregnancy violates her core medical rights. Its like preventing someone from taking say statins, or forcing them to smoke or use mind altering drugs.

But there is another major right that the anti-abortion project violates big time. the one that the pro-choice forces have been resisting despite its potential potency.

Religious liberty.

Forced Birth, its a Religious Thing

Heres the fact that is as screamingly obvious as it is irrationally paid much too little attention by the body politic. Almost the entire movement to render women second class citizens by making them reproductive slaves of the state once pregnant, stems from one source. The religious right. That is a historically rather novel entity formed by a once unimaginable collaboration of evangelical Protestants with the Church of Rome. The anti-abortion project is the core engine of a brazen attempt by one religious clique that constitutes about a third of the population to impose their hardline faith-based beliefs on everyone else. Outside of the religious right who opposes abortion rights? Nontheists against womens full reproductive rights are as scarce as hens teeth, I personally know of only one. Polling suggests that one in ten atheists are forced birthers, but the sample is small and the figure appears inflated. Many if not most Christians Protestants, Orthodox, Catholics, etc. of the center-left favor reproductive choice, along with most Jews and other theists. That alliance of nonrelig0ious and believers form the solid majority who want broad abortion rights to remain in force in all 50 states.

The overwhelming and narrow religious basis of forced birth differs strikingly from other conservative causes such as limited government size and power regarding guns and economics, and heavy law enforcement against crimes and drugs. Those secular theses enjoy substantial support outside theoconservatism, including many nontheists advocates of laissez faire capitalism for instance have included such prominent nonbelievers as Herbert Spencer, Ayn Rand, Milton Freidman, Penn Jillette and Michael Shermer.

No God Opposes Abortion

That feticide has become such a fixation of the religious right is remarkably ironic for a reason too few are aware of. The startling fact is that forcing women to bear pregnancies to term lacks theological justification. The central motivating claim by theoconservatives that they are sincerely merely obeying the dictates of a prolife creator is patently false both on real world and scriptural grounds. Our lovely but child toxic planet provides the proof that a prolife creator cannot exist. In the academic journal Philosophy and TheologyI was the first to calculate and publish the telling and terrible statistics that remain scandalously ignored [http://www.gspauldino.com/Philosophy&Theology.pdf. I further detail the problem in Essays on the Philosophy of Humanism https://americanhumanist.org/what-we-do/publications/eph/journals/volume28/paul-1 & http://americanhumanist.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/03_Paul-SkeptoTheoPt2.pdf%5D. The stats start with how it is well documented that about 100 billion people have been born to date. To that add how medical analysis indicates that about three quarters of conceptions naturally fail to come to term about half failing to implant in the first place usually due to rampant genetic defects, the rest are later term miscarriages, many of which go unnoticed. The human reproductive complex is a Rube Golbergian mess that usually fails far from the womb being a safe refuge for fetuses, it is where most lives come to a natural early end. As geneticist William Rice states, accidental abortion is the predominant outcome of fertilization [and] a natural and inevitable part of human reproduction at all ages. [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326485445_The_high_abortion_cost_of_human_reproduction] That means something like 300 billion pregnancies have been spontaneously aborted to date. Currently, somewhere in the area of 30,000 spontaneous abortions occur every day in the US, over ten times more than those that are induced. After birth half those born have died as children from a vast array of torturous diseases that infest our biosphere, so some 50 billion kids have not grown up. It is the artifice of medicine that has driven juvenile mortality down to a few percent, less can be done about our deeply dysfunctional reproductive system. As I detail in the P&Tand EPHstudies, it is demonstrably impossible for a supernatural creator that allows hundreds of billions of preadults to die to be prolife.

The mass loss of immature humans helps explain a stark scriptural truth birth enforcement adherents evade as much as they can. Neither the Jewish nor Christian texts come anywhere close to banning abortions. The only direct mention of the issue instructs that if someone accidently causes a miscarriage involving a woman who is not their wife, then the negligent party can be sued by the father who owns the fetus feticide is a civil property matter, not criminal murder in the Holy Bible. That the Biblical God orders the Israelite warriors to kill captive children as well as women even when pregnant reinforces the indifference of the deity to the lives of youngsters. The Gospels of Jesus have nothing to say about the topic. The abject absence of scriptural condemnation against abortion illuminates why most Bible believing Protestants, including the most popular evangelical of the day, Billy Graham, had no comment in the immediate wake of Roe v Wade. Then famed Southern Baptist leader W. A. Criswell did opine that he had always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person, and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.The sanctity of preborn life was largely a Vatican thing it cannot be overemphasized the degree to which the Roman and Lutheran churches despised one another; a few years ago a couple of evangelicals standing right in front of me bemoaned how a relation who had gone Catholic was now worshipping the clergy, not Jesus. So why the ensuing great evangelical Protestant switch Graham and especially Criswell evolved into staunch forced birthers to sociopoliically weaponizing abortion as murder via a new found alliance with the heretical Catholic clergy? First a little history.

A Little History

Abortion was the norm in largely Protestant colonial and early independent America for that matter, early term feticide has always been very common in societies whether legal or not. The Puritans of yore were not as super repressive and chaste as usually thought, oops pregnancies outside of marriage were fairly frequent. And there were women who after having birthed a bevy of babies did not want to go through thatagain. All the more so because childbirth was very dangerous, about one out of fifty pregnancies killed the mother. Mother nature is not much kinder to mothers than their young ones. Early term termination with herbal toxins had its dangers, but to a lesser degree. Such abortions were not a concern to the authorities if it was done before quickening. When the all-male founders, nearly all Protestants and Deists, were assembling the Constitution that instituted separation of church and state they never imagined considering feticide, that being a womens affair outside their manly concerns. The only faction that might have been interested in the issue were the few Catholics. That they made no attempt to mention much less ban abortion was logical because the rest of the patriots would have slapped that down as an attempt to subvert the intent of the 1stAmendment to keep specific religious cliques from seizing control of governmental policies and vice-versa. Duh.

In the 1800s going into the early 1900s repression of sexuality and women reached a peak in tune with Victorian culture. Also of growing concern was that abortions were killing women, albeit less often than pregnancy. At the same time the all-male profession of medical doctors wanted to suppress competition form midwives who often aborted the much bigger money to be made from full term pregnancies. And the nativist eugenics based on agricultural selective breeding favored by Protestants (but not Catholics) called for WASP women to bear as many children as possible to prevent the others from dominating the population. Laws banning abortions appeared for the first time, and quickly became the national norm. (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/05/abortion-in-american-history/376851.)

The result. A little over a century ago the religious right owned these United States. Well over nine out of ten were Christians, nearly all conservative. It was a culture of imposed Judeo-Christian virtue. A pious repressive hyper misogynist patriarchy in which women were second class citizens required to wear heavy clothing even at the beach, and mandated to remain nonsexual until marriage in which husbands could legally rape their wives and she had no legal choice but to bear the child that by the way helps elucidate why modern forced birthers are often not concerned about if a pregnancy resulted from nonconsensual sex. The draconian Comstock laws banned mailing information on contraceptives in flagrant contradiction of the Bill of Rights. The culture of repressed sexual liberty had to have a heavy government hand to it. Lacking the force of law to keep people in reproductive line, most folks feel free to have way too much fun for the likes of the power craving forces who enjoy imagining they know what it best for all of us, feckless women especially. Note that the Dour Culture was to a fair extent a white matter, black culture was less uptight, as reflected in the advent of the sex music, jazz that quickly gained a following among white youth.

The rather Taliban like mainstream Christian scheme began to unravel what with women (mainly white) getting the vote, and the first sexual revolution of the Roaring Twenties. That unprecedented loosening of sexual habits was never entirely beaten back by the right, but as late as the 1950s women were still expected to be virgins on their wedding nights who then became stay at home housewives, access to contraceptives remained limited, and abortions forbidden. With blue laws keeping most retail closed on Sundays three quarters of American were church members according the Gallup, as virtually all professed a belief in God.

Since then its all gone to theocon hell. Even in the 50s the hot black culture continued to infiltrate the white majority via the first wave of rock-and-roll previously black slang for intercourse. What was Elvis doing up there on the stage with his pelvis? Seeing the way things were going Billy Graham started his mass crusades to try to restore America to its righteous ways.

That did not work.

Nowadays, with women being emancipated, first class citizens free to have sexy fun, sinfully tempting females strut down streets in minimal clothing. Sex outside marriage is actually the accepted societal norm. Marriage rates are down while divorce rates are sky high that started with the WW 2 generation in the late 60s BTW including among conservative Christians. Birth rates are below replacement level that when many on the right oppose the immigration of nonwhites thats needed if an expanding population is to help grow the economy. On the networks people can say screw when not talking about hardware. Then there is cable and the web. Most women have careers. The grand corporate project to convert pious frugal church goers into hedonistic materialists and digital social media addicts has succeeded spectacularly as Gallup tracks church membership plummeting from 70% at the beginning of the 2000s to 50% today [https://news.gallup.com/poll/341963/church-membership-falls-below-majority-first-time.aspx] as white Protestants are a fast shrinking minority, the religious right the once ran the country has been reduced to a widely disparaged subgroup, and the nonreligious balloon by an amazing tenth of the population each decade [for a look at that see http://americanhumanist.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/art-1-Paul-The-Great-and-Amazingly-Rapid-Secularization-of-the-Increasingly-Proevolution-United-States.pdf%5D. Even Republicans are becoming less religious for Christs sake listen to how the Trumpites swore like sailors as they stormed the capital, and denounce Biden with vulgarities like Richard Pryor.

Their Real Goal

That is what the forced birth movement is really about. Having lost the mainstream culture big time over the last century theocons have no viable means to recover it by persuasion, and deep down they know that bitter fact. All those crusades, religious TV channels, megachurches, and Christian rock are getting nowhere with the mainstream. What are they to do in their desperate power trip to return the country to the good old days of largely white righteous Christian domination?

Its obvious. Try to do what worked up to the 1920s, and see if reapplying governmental coercion will get America back to its straighter laced Godly ways. There is nothing else for them to. This invidious strategy to employ laws to achieve religious aims requires the high grade hypocrisy of theoconservatives who love to proclaim individual liberty while decrying government power when the latter promotes what they see as ungodly secular-liberal values, but to without batting a cynical eye deploy said government power to lever America back to something like it was in the 1950s. When father knew best and subservient women properly behaved themselves sex wise and raised their many kids and heaven forbid could not terminate their sacred pregnancies and the churches were packed on Sunday mornings rather than folks hitting Walmart and Home Depo.

So. How to get the government back under the blessed control of the theocon minority? You have to be fairly sneaky about it. Openly admitting that the ultimate goal is to use the state to bring back the good old theoconservative days by banning abortion et al. would intensify majority opposition, while fatally undermining the legal case for making a private procedure that the Puritans were OK with into murder.

To try to rewin the culture wars via the law they have smartly gone on the sociopolitical offensive by putting a peculiarly lethargic prochoice side on the public relations defensive, to the degree that even liberals agree that the feticide that has always been common should somehow become uncommon. A hard and sad choice consistently avoided by preventing unwanted pregnancies in the first place, rather than by barring terminations. Its the abortion should be legal but rare line, rather than rare because its illegal. Both are naive fantasies that have never been achieved and never will be. Early term abortions are the norm in all societies because they involve a modest collection of cells whose humanity is problematic and mainly propounded by extremist theocons, they are fairly easy to do, in secret if necessary, and are not as dangerous as is pregnancy to the mother. At least a fifth of observed pregnancies are terminated, whether that being in advanced democracies with excellent safe sex programs, or where the procedure is illegal and riskier [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343147586_Unintended_pregnancy_and_abortion_by_income_region_and_the_legal_status_of_abortion_estimates_from_a_comprehensive_model_for_1990-2019]. This is in stark contrast to murder, which is rare in many nations including most democracies that these gun laden United States are the exception is pertinent because most who claim to be prolife support the widespread distribution of firearms that is the primary people killing device. Because murder involves a patent human being, can be difficult to do, produces an awkward corpse that is hard to secretly dispose of, and those who have been born are usually noticed to have gone missing, outlawing intentional homicide is correspondingly practical because only it renders only a tiny fraction of the population criminals while keeping the event highly atypical there are under 4000 homicides in western Europe per annum for instance, many dozens of times less than feticides. Whatever success is or is not achieved by criminalizing the latter, it does not make much actual difference because the great majority of conceptions will continue to naturally abort, so what is the point? That when making abortion illegal means turning a fifth or more of knowingly pregnant women into lawbreakers each year, and a quarter to a third of all women over their lives, while not saving many preborn, but injuring or killing a number of pregnant women in the punitive process. It is probably not possible to drive yearly American abortions below a few hundred thousand whatever the methods used. Prohibiting abortion works about as well as banning alcohol, and we know how that worked out. A basic legal tenant is that all legitimate laws must be reasonably practicable to implement the stop the abortions folks like to compare themselves to the abolitionists, but mass slavery can be ended simply by eliminating all laws that enforce bondage, leaving all slaves free to up and walk away from their masters birth enforcement does not meet that feasibility criterion. Pro-choicers, use that fact.

The theocon grand Godly plan to try to overturn modernity is simple enough. Having concocted the notion that abortion is against the will of a prolife Lord Creator contrary to all worldly and scriptural evidence, make the private procedure illegal. Hopefully eventually nationwide as a form of outright murder if enough hardcore theocon justices can be plopped into SCOTUS and extend personhood to conception the alternative is revision of the Constitution, perhaps via a constitutional convention dominated by theocons via the electoral manipulations they are working on. That doing so is not likely to actually protect enormous numbers of preborn is not the critical necessity. That would be nice if it happened in the opinion of many theocons, but the true activism driving societal hope of most forced birthers is that by making those who terminate pregnancies into criminals or at least subject to financial suits, that fear of having abortions will help tame wanton American women to be less willing to be get it on with men outside of holy matrimony. The idea is to discipline women into being both more chaste and fecund as the arrogant power hungry theocons want them to be. Its the fear and shame factors of the rights massive national social engineering project. To that add putting strictures on contraceptives to further boost the righteous mission to reChristianize America Catholics especially like that. That doing so may well increase induced abortions due to more unintended pregnancies is not the theoconservatives driving concern (with supreme irony, another side effect of protection reduction is a great increase in the rate of natural abortions).

The prochoice side often wonders often with breathtaking naivety why those opposed to abortion want to also cut back on the use of protection that can suppress said abortions. That is because abortion reduction is not the real point, lifestyle alternation is. Get that? That women will be injured and killed by unsafe outlaw abortions and by forced pregnancies is not a great concern of the birth forcers those wayward women should have known better than to get pregnant out of wedlock in the first place, and if raped oh well, the growing soul inside them takes priority to its reproductive vessel who needs to understand their Godly prolife duty. If a woman who would have gotten a legal termination if she could because it is safer than not having one happens to die from what seemed like a normal pregnancy oh well thats too bad, its Gods Will anyhow, and if she was right with Christ she is in a better place so what is the big problem. The wastage of pregnant women is well worth the glorious aims of the prolifers.

(Part 2 to continue 10/29/21)

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The Forced Birth Movement Hates Real Religious Liberty How to Use That Against Them by Making Abortion a Religious Right; Part 1 - Patheos

Has Joe Biden Abandoned Trumpism and Populist Politics? – BU Today

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Photos by Adam Schultz/Biden for President and Gage Skidmore via Flickr

In this Question of the Week podcast episode, College of Arts & Sciences political scientist Lauren Mattioli assesses Joe Biden one year after his election. Promising to jettison Trumpism, the president has lowered the rhetorical thermostat, Mattioli says, but in areas like immigration, he is disappointing supporters with a populist politics, while GOP obstructionism imperils the rest of his agenda.

You can also find this episode onApple Podcasts,Spotify,Google Podcasts, andother podcast platforms.

Dana Ferrante: This is Question of the Week, from BU Today. Has Joe Biden jettisoned Trumpism and populist politics as promised? In this episode, Rich Barlow, BU Today senior writer, talks to Lauren Mattioli, a College of Arts & Sciences assistant professor of political science, about whether Biden has lowered the temperature, as he promised, and abandoned the incendiary style of governance of his predecessor.

One year after the 2020 presidential election, Mattioli discusses which aspects of Trumpism Biden has rejected, and whether there are some aspects he has not.

Rich Barlow: Thank you, Professor Mattioli, for joining us this week.

Lauren Mattioli: Sure. Happy to be here.

Barlow: We are roughly one year after the presidential election of 2020. Has Joe Biden abandoned Trumpism and populist politics as he promised?

Mattioli: I wanted to push you a little bit on your working definition of Trumpism, to see if we have the same one. I think I might have a guess of what your definition of Trumpism is, but if you wouldnt mind explaining a little bit, that would probably make it easier for me to answer.

Barlow: Well, partly, stylistically being the incendiary center of attention 24/7 with tweets in the wee hours that consume the news cycle. And substantively, I guess populist politics would be policies that made up his MAGA platform, from immigration restrictionsand I think, what a lot of people would say, being a window, or a channel, for white grievance.

Mattioli: So yeah, it sounds like were working with the same ideas. I guess I was thinking more about the substance I think the question of whether the Trumpistic style rhetoric has changed is pretty self-evident. Not only do we see a different tone when Biden speaks, but also hes letting the members of his administration do the talking sometimes. And relying on his very competent communication staff and press staff. So I think thats one feature of the rhetoric thats really different. Also, just in terms of the text analysis that Ive done, hes using less incendiary language. Hes not using the types of words that we would normally associate with ideological extremism.

And then substantively, I guess, I thought of Trumpism as having three primary components, at least as far as he and Biden differ. So, the sort of general international relations isolationism, where it was a very America-centric, isolationist policy. And I think Biden, by reengaging in the Paris Climate Accord and with the WHO, reversing the travel ban from primarily Muslim countries, rebuilding our refugee resettlement program, that those are all policy steps that hes taken that I think show a distinct, substantive shift.

Another isI think Trumpism, as you mentioned, is sort of a window, or a sounding board, or a welcome of a set of thoughts around white grievance. And to me, Trumpism was about conserving the status quo around race and gender and anti-progressivism on those fronts. And I think Biden has made some progress on that.

Hes done a couple of things within the administration, like creating this gender policy council and asking the Department of Education to look back over their policies regarding education and sexual violence rules [which Betsy DeVos, Trumps education secretary, had rolled back]. President Trump talked about COVID as being the China virus, whereas the Biden administration has created a task force to combat racism against Asian [Americans] and Pacific Islanders.

So I think thats a big distinction just in policy, and in rhetoric around race, gender, and sexual violence. I forgot to also mention the reversal of the transgender ban on the military. And last, there was this element of Trumpism that was like very pro-business, pro-elite, which is sort of in opposition to what we would normally think of as populism.

But I think if anything, Biden is more populist in that regard, in terms of focusing on labor and the economically marginal, whereas some of the Trump administration policies were actively antagonizing problems that the economically marginal face. But, I wouldnt say complete abandonment is the right characterization of the Biden administration, because theres still lots of rhetoric that is very popular around traditional isolationism, like this Buy American policy within the Biden administration, which is reminiscent of the economic isolationism that was characteristic of the Trump administration.

[Biden has] maintained the steel tariffs that were so controversial during the Trump administration Also, I think the maltreatment of allies, which [has not been] so bad in the Biden administration, but was particularly heightened during this recent debacle with the withdrawal from Afghanistan. And so I dont think its a total abandonment of populist policies and rhetoric, [but] its certainly toned down.

Its definitely a shift away from this individual-centered, charismatic leadership thats vested in ideological extremism. And so, definitely a shift rhetorically and substantively, but maybe not as far as Biden supporters might have hoped.

Barlow: You mentioned [its] not as far as his supporters had hopedcritics would also say that Bidens immigration policy and his fumbled withdrawal from Afghanistan are also reminiscent of Trumpism.

What changes should he make in his approach?

Mattioli: I think I want to take those in turn. So, I think the Afghanistan withdrawal was going to be thorny for any president that tried to do something, instead of just continuing to kick that policy can down the road. But I think this was a particularly poor handling of it.

And policy obviously matters, but how we talk about policy decisions matters [too], and I think Bidens rhetoric around Afghanistan was really problematic. I think it was an Al Jazeera article that described it as humility free, and I liked that because weve come to associate Biden with being almost self-effacing and a humble everyman. But then in discussing Afghanistan, he really isnt owning the mistakes that are very clear to his detractors.

And I think thats sort of interesting, because that was what many people thought was good about Biden as a contrast to Trump. But I think on the Afghanistan thing, the idea of not owning the problemsthere may have been problems inevitablybut I think failing to acknowledge them is undermining the overall effort.

It was going to be difficult no matter what. But the way hes dealt with it I think has exacerbated the problem. And then on immigration, this is the characteristic of democratic infightingthe rhetoric isnt the issue as much as the policy. So in contrast to Afghanistan, yeah, the border has still, I think as of two or three days ago, its still using public health measures to keep people from entering the country, still putting children in cages.

And theres no rhetoric that can excuse that. So I think the change you need to make on immigration is to stop using [Title] 42 [the principal set of public health rules and regulations issued by US federal agencies] to expel immigrants. Its offensive to the public health policy. We cant say we have this new turning point in the administration of a pandemic and then co-opt public health to serve a political agenda.

And then I think, generally, the move after that sort of long-term goal needs to be developing a legitimate process for dealing with asylum cases that can deal with this influx. If the system is overwhelmed, its not the asylum seekers fault, its the systems fault and the system needs to be reformed.

And I think that would require effort and also acknowledgement of the failures of the administration. And I havent seen that decisively.

Barlow: Youre a scholar of the American presidency and American government. So let me play devils advocate and ask you this: you talked about the presidents failures of humility on Afghanistan and policy on immigration, but with Republicans bent on obstruction, pretty much of anything he does, and Democrats bitterly divided among themselves, is quiet and successful governance possible for any president these days?

Mattioli: This is a question that I might steal from you and put on my final exam the next time I teach the presidency. Im not sure if weve ever had quiet, successful governance, I want to push back on that, [but] youre right, the policy for Republicans in Congress has been total obstruction of a Democratic presidents agenda.

And thats forced Democratic presidents and some Republican presidents facing divided government to act unilaterally. And so the source of successful governance comes from the executive branch and to a lesser extent the judiciary. So the prospect for good governance if nothing substantive can come out of Congresswe still have options, maybe less attractive options and less democratic, majoritarian options, but therere still possibilities for governance through unilateral executive action and through case-by-case policy-making, what I call judicial policy-making in the courts.

And Democrats are divided on breadth and depth of policy change, and the sort of exhaustion of effort amongst themselves isI think theyre putting a lot into identifying precisely what policy should look like without an eye towards actually getting those policies through Congress. Not to say that theyre totally not forecasting the possibilities, but I think the focus needs to be on overcoming obstructionism rather than overcoming their own internal factions, which is easier said than done, of course.

And then, probably the better approach politically for them will be focusing on winning a unified government come election time next year. And in the meantime, putting Republicans in a position where they have to make unpopular votes and force them to sort of call the bluff. Thats something thatweve seen [in] the sort of blame game politicking that has been successful to a certain extent in the past.

But whos going to suffer are the people who need policy, like Americans who need health care and need food aid and need unemployment insurance. And so the cost of obstruction then is public good. So a successful governance is going to have to come from someplace other than Congress, I think, so long as trends continue as they have been.

Barlow: And that place would be?

Mattioli: I think the executive branch and the courts. I think the prospects for major policy changesexcept for maybe on infrastructure, which is sort of shown to be the only bipartisan issue thats getting real momentumwell have to see about any major policy advancement; I think thats going to have to happen unilaterally through the executive branch, which will be unpopular, but so will not doing anything.

Barlow: I was going to ask, thats a gamble for the president, right?

Mattioli: Of course.

Barlow: Some pundits are saying that if he cant achieve anything between now and the midterms, or cant achieve much of his agenda, and a lot of his agenda cant be achieved, unless Im wrong, solely by executive action, the Democrats can take a shellacking next year.

Mattioli: Yeah, I think Democrats want to avoid committing the sins of the 2010 midterms, where having a unified Democratic Congress, they were able to get a lot of policies through and were basically saying, we take full credit for everything thats happened, and then sort of got blamed for everything that didnt happen that may have been due to obstructionism.

Unified government doesnt mean complete consensus on everything. So I think if theyre smart, Democrats will have to make it clear what theyre going to really take credit for. And politicians are horrible about this, right? They take credit for successes even if they arent theirs, and they reject their culpability and failures, even if they are theirs.

And then itll be up to voters to decide whos responsible. So its possible, youre right, that Democrats could take a shellacking and could really face defeat in the midterms, if Biden doesnt get a lot of [his agenda] through, with the caveat that if he can successfully blame Republicans, it may not be the case.

Ferrante: Thanks to Lauren Mattioli for joining us on this episode of Question of the Week. If you liked the show, subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts and never miss an episode. Im Dana Ferrante; see you next week

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Shared Loves and Strong Loyalties | R. R. Reno – First Things

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This essay is adapted from the preface to the forthcoming paperback edition of Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West.

A few months after Return of the Strong Gods was published, the strong gods returned.

Panic struck in March 2020 as a virus originating in China spread around the world. Fear of death and disease rippled through the population, especially among influential, university-educated people, who in the West are especially anxious about their health and safety. Politicians responded by throwing entire countries into lockdown, an unprecedented measure that put society in a state of suspended animation for months.

Nature abhors a vacuumespecially human nature, which is sociable and restless. In June 2020, amid the existential void of the universal lockdown, police in Minneapolis arrested an agitated, unruly black man named George Floyd, who died under restraint. The result was an explosion of protests across the United States that often descended into violence and looting.

We can argue endlessly about what killed George Floyddrugs in his bloodstream, vicious police tactics, a criminal justice system that targets blacks. We can speculate why protests spread so quicklysystemic racism, endemic violence in poor black communities, networks of professional agitators. But one thing is indisputable: In the vacuum of lockdown, blood cried out from the ground. After a long season of turmoil and confinement, the rhetoric of diversity and inclusion seemed ineffectual. It was replaced by strident demands for retribution, reparation, and punishment. No justice, no peace. This is the slogan of a strong god.

We should not judge movements by extreme voices, but anyone who wishes to understand the events inspired by the slogan Black Lives Matter must pay attention to what people say, especially people of influence. In early June 2021, a woman named Aruna Khilanani revealed her fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any White person that got in my way, burying their body and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step. Khilanani is not an anger-addled street-corner crank but a psychiatrist, and her words, uttered in a lecture at the Yale School of Medicine, expressed more than political correctness. She was there to worship the strong god of vengeance.

In the ensuing controversy, Khilanani insisted that she had been exaggerating for rhetorical effect, which was no doubt true. But how and when we exaggerate is revealing. Impatient with calm discussion and meticulous analysis, she will no longer deliberate about root causes. Her remarks excluded all softening gestures such as sharing perspectives or hearing new voices. The hot hyperbole rejected the open-society slogans that have dominated for so long, clichs that soften civic life and make things more porous and fluid, formulations that weaken strong claims and blur sharp boundaries.

Khilananis talk of guns and blood points in a very different direction. A powerful consensus in favor of fluid openness was embraced by the left and right in recent decades. I call it the postwar consensus, because I trace its origins to the American-led reconstruction of the West after Auschwitz. In my reading of recent history, that fell name denotes more than a death camp in Poland. It sums up the entire orgy of destruction that began in the trenches of World War I and ended with mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The consensus that took hold after 1945 sought to dissolve the political passions that many deemed to be the underlying cause of those decades of violence. The postwar consensus sought to banish the strong gods.

By the first decade of the twenty-first century, the postwar consensus supported a power-sharing arrangement between the Democratic party, favoring go-fast liquefaction of traditional culture and go-slow economic deregulation, and the Republican Party, favoring go-fast economic deregulation with the hope of not-too-fast cultural deregulation. When I wrote Return of the Strong Gods, the establishment consensus in favor of openness was plain to see. And when I was writing, a rejection of open borders, open trade, and other fruits of the postwar consensus by the populist right was also obvious. The events of 2020 indicate that the strong gods are returning on the American left as well.

Return of the Strong Gods offers a succinct history of the past seven decades, most of which I have experienced as a teenager and adult. I distrust the sufficiency of singular explanations, including my own. Technological innovations (the Pill, for example) shaped that history, as did international events and economic developments. There exists no Lord of the Rings in social analysis, no single explanation that rules them all.

But I remain confident in the basic story I tell. After 1945, our ruling class agreed that powerful loves and intense loyalties make us easily manipulated by demagogues. Our passions hurl us into disastrous conflicts and brutal ideological movements. Our only hope, the postwar consensus holds, is to tamp down our loves and loyalties, to weaken them with skepticism, nonjudgmentalism, and a political commitment to an open society.

And I argue that the wheel of history is turning. The gods of weakening are losing their power over public life. Donald Trump horrified the establishment because he derided the open-society consensus. His brash Americanism, his promises to tear up trade deals, and his loud talk of building a wall thrilled voters who wanted reconsolidation not deregulation, protection not limitless openness.

You can find Trump odious or inspiring. You can reject or affirm his political priorities. But a sober observer recognizes that Trump rose to prominence because an angry populace felt betrayed by the postwar consensus. What I did not see while writing the book is that the American left, which opposed Trump bitterly, would pivot to affirm the return of its own strong gods.

Only yesterday, multicultural managers and HR bureaucrats spoke solemnly of diversity and inclusion, vague notions that serve the gods of weakening. Today, however, the same managers and bureaucrats add equity, a term that signifies a change in direction. Equity operates in the domain of justice, and justice promises not diversity but the right result. Equity encourages strong measurescondemning the unjust, punishing the oppressors, denouncing the unfairly advantaged and the wrongly privileged. Diversity is a feel-good word. Equity topples statues.

I cannot pretend to know the future. I can only take the measure of present trends. The postwar consensus trusted that a better future could be achieved by removing barriers, setting aside traditional mores, empowering individual choice, and letting markets decide. The sudden prominence of the rhetoric of equity suggests that many on the left are losing confidence in the promise of an open society. They now demand racial and sexual quotas, hard numerical measurements that cannot be evaded with avowals of good intentions. As the right demands clear and enforced borders, the left demands clear and enforced results. It wants a just society (as it conceives of it), not an open society. And it is willing to rule with an iron fist to achieve that goal.

I am suspicious of those who turn too quickly to Nazi Germany for analogies that illuminate our present distempers. But if we remain sober and do not allow ourselves to be swept up into moral and political panic, we can detect parallels. In the 1920s, conservatives in Germany distrusted the procedural justice and commercial ethos of the Weimar Republic, believing that a good society would not automatically evolve in accord with liberal principles and market forces. The future, they argued, must be shaped by a decisive act of will. A similar view is emerging on the left. Progressives are impatient. Free speech? Merit? Procedural justice? Laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race? These formal commitments must be set aside, we are told, because they stand in the way of transformative justice.

And so it is not only Trump and the populist right that wants the strong gods to return. Many on the American left look to blood for answers, a vengeful and punitive image that suggests strong gods with grim designs. They champion bloods binding power, its demand for justice, and its powerful symbolism of moral and political urgency. The signs of the times suggest that the historical thesis of the book is correct. The postwar era is ending. The strong gods are returning. Let us work to ensure that they are ennobling, not debasing, that they rebuild and renew rather than tear down and degrade.

Return of the Strong Gods has been criticized from a number of angles. I will not try to respond to all of them, but it is useful to consider some. Some have complained that my talk of strong gods is imprecise and obscure. Yes, but every consequential episode in human history is blurry and opaque, including the past seventy years. My aim is to illuminate, as best I can, our political and cultural struggles, which have become intense. The metaphor of strong gods casts useful light on our situation.

Friends counsel that I should be less enthusiastic about the return of the strong gods. I am fully aware of the dangers they pose, which is why, following the Bible, I urge a politics of noble loves. The Book of Wisdom begins with an extended allegory. Lady Wisdom goes through the city, explaining to men the bad consequences of their liaisons with prostitutes and loose women (a metaphor for idolatry). But the men are smitten, and the arguments of Lady Wisdom have no effect. Returning to her palace, she prepares a great banquet and sends her beautiful young attendants into the public square to draw in the men of the city. They come to feast, and their perverse loves are corrected by the higher love of Lady Wisdom. The opens society tries to buy peace with dispassion and small ambitions, encouraging critique and other techniques of weakening. This approach will not succeed in the long run. The only reliable safeguards against debased political passions are elevated ones.

Though many defend the status quo, I will not raise my voice in defense of the dying postwar consensus. I argue that the West overreacted. Intent on countering the evils of Auschwitz and all it represented, we embarked on a utopian project of living without shared loves and strong loyalties. Human nature was never going to allow that project to succeed. We are made for love not open-ended diversity, limitless inclusion, and relentless critique. The postwar consensus went too far, emptying our souls and desiccating our societies. So yes, the strong gods can be dangerous. But they make transcendence possible. They restore to public life spiritual drama and shared purpose.

Christian allies warn that I am insufficiently alive to the danger that populism will make an idol of the nation. In Platos Symposium, Socrates recounts the teaching of Diotima, his mentor, who observed that we often love finite goods as if they were ultimate. But this is not reason to despair. For once aroused, loves ardor can be directed toward a ladder that rises from lower loves to higher ones. I hold the Platonic view. There is no guarantee that we will climb the ladder of love. Misjudging lesser goods as the highest good (the essence of idolatry) always remains a danger. But the unstated premise behind Return of the Strong Gods is that life without love is a greater evil than life in which finite loves are made absolute. I have argued for this premise in other works (see especially the essays in Fighting the Noonday Devil). Put simply, to love wrongly is dangerous, but however debasing, it is human. By contrast, to fail to love is inhuman. The deepest failure of the postwar consensus, then, is that it trains us to be loveless and therefore to be something less than human.

Let me issue my own theological warning: Beware iconoclasm. It is a heresy born of the fantasy that we can eliminate the possibility of idolatry by destroying every object of love other than the highest, which is God. Thomas Aquinas taught that grace perfects nature; it does not destroy nature. Family, team, city, countrythese social spheres rightly win our love and command our loyalty. We can be seduced and blinded by our loves. A great deal can go wrong, which is why Jesus warns us that our love of God may require us to hate our father. The same holds for fatherland. But our capacity for perversion does not destroy these natural goods. They remain worthy of our love if we will but love rightly.

Liberal allies worry that I court a dangerous illiberalism. Their concerns are overwrought, but they have a basis in truth. Our liberal traditions aim to limit the role of religious and metaphysical passions in public life. In this regard, liberalism harkens to the gods of weakening. The open-society consensus gained traction after 1945 so easily because it drew upon the liberalism that is an important part of our Anglo-American inheritance. Like my liberal critics, I cherish this inheritance. Let us by all means defend the Bill of Rights and other honorable components of our liberal tradition. But let us also remember that liberalism tempers and moderates; it does not initiate. It weeds the field but does not plant. When liberalism becomes dominant, as it has done in the postwar consensus, civic life withers, for liberalism offers no vigorous language of love.

For everything there is a season. I argue that our historical moment begs for the restoration of shared loves. We must not fail to meet this need. In my estimation, only an uplifting politics of solidarity can counter identity politics, which makes a dark promise of solidarity, one based on blood, chromosomes, and sexual appetites. In this historical moment, full of the confusion and danger that attend the collapse of a governing consensus, we need something more than liberalism. We need strong gods, purified by reason and subordinate to true religion but nevertheless powerful enough to win our hearts.

I have cryptically thanked Philip Rieff in my acknowledgements. I never met him, but as a young theological scholar I read his books. A brilliant sociologist, he despaired of the desacralization promoted by so-called critical reason, which he believed was leading us to an anti-culture, a third world of spiritual impoverishment heretofore unknown to men. And Rieff despaired over his despair. In his agony of unbelief, he pointed me toward a fundamental truth: It is more precious to love than to know.

Of course, the Bible says as much. Love of God is the first commandment, and as the First Letter of John teaches, Love is of God, and he who loves is born of God and knows God. As I have already noted, Plato strikes a similar note. I should not have needed Philip Rieff to guide me to such an obvious truth. But I did need him. He reasoned his way to the dark bottom of the postwar consensus, allowing me to see that the opposite of love is not hate but death, the placid cessation of aspiration and desire, the tempting void of nothingness.

The spasms of violence in the twentieth century rose to great heights, casting a long shadow over our moral and political ideals and even over our spiritual imaginations. The postwar consensus was originally modest. I would have supported the efforts of men like James B. Conant, and in fact I did in my younger days. But as it developed and became more and more rigid in its dogmatic openness, that consensus became an enemy of love.

I am more than sixty years old. The only society I have known is the one dominated by the postwar consensus. I am therefore a largely blind guide to whatever comes next. But of this I am sure: It will require a restoration of love. And love is roused by the strong gods, which is why they are returning.

R. R. Reno is editor ofFirst Things.

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Sam McBride: Childish populism at Stormont ultimately hurts the very voters they are trying to woo – Belfast Telegraph

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Alliance deputy leader Stephen Farry once summed up Stormonts financial ideology as having two components: a left-wing spending policy alongside a right-wing taxation policy.

very problem was the fault of the Treasury not sending enough money for public services, while most politicians in Belfast boasted to constituents about how they had lowered their taxes.

The devolved administration set up after the 1998 Belfast Agreement was never designed to provide good government and some defenders of the Stormont experiment argued that in time politics would mature; having to make difficult decisions would force ministers to build cross-community alliances and to grapple with problems beyond the orange and green divide.

Such optimism has been unfulfilled. Devolution has now been back for almost two years, yet there is little evidence of any willingness to take unpopular decisions even when some politicians privately concede that they are necessary.

This week Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced his spending review a medium-term allocation of resources to public services which allows the devolved administrations to plan ahead. Stormont Finance Minister Conor Murphys response demonstrated the shallowness of his thinking about the public finances. But in truth, his mindset is shared to varying degrees across much of the Assembly chamber and in parts of the civil service.

The chancellor announced that Stormont would receive its largest budget in history, with increased spending for every one of the next three years. By 2024, the Executives budget will have risen to 15.2bn. The government said this amounted to an additional 1.6bn a year on average over the three-year spending review period.

Those figures do not include Annually Managed Expenditure which sees roughly another 10bn sent to Northern Ireland to pay for things like pensions and social security. If Northern Ireland was an independent country, it would be bankrupt because there is a multi-billion pound shortfall between what is raised in tax and what is spent on public services.

But as far as Mr Murphy is concerned, this is no cause for thankfulness. The Sinn Fein veteran said the extra money was nowhere near what is required. He disputed the claims of a 1.6bn increase in the block grant, highlighting that this did not account for the vast Covid spending over the last year and a half.

In that, he had some justification the Treasury was using Stormonts pre-pandemic budget as its baseline. Like every government, the Executive is going to face enormous bills over coming years, some of which cannot yet be foreseen although last year the Executive was struggling to spend all the money which the Treasury sent to deal with Covid, and the pandemic has shown that if there is a crisis the Treasury will provide additional funds.

However, there is a more awkward truth for Mr Murphy and many within the Stormont system. They have the ability to act out their left-wing economic ideology, but they are declining to use that ability.

Sinn Fein has long complained that Stormont does not have enough tax-raising powers, and Mr Murphy has set up an inquiry to examine the case for further fiscal devolution.

Yet, despite seeing itself as in the same economic category as Castro and Chavez, there is scant evidence that Sinn Fein would use any additional tax-raising powers to tax the rich.

Indeed, the partys one big economic idea (parked for now) has been to devolve corporation tax so that it can slash taxes for the biggest corporations. To put into context how ideologically absurd that is for a socialist party, consider that this Tory chancellor is increasing corporation tax.

For years, Sinn Fein and the DUP boasted about the taxes they had spared the people of Northern Ireland. The regional rate had been frozen year after year, water charges had been blocked, there had been a cap on the rates which the wealthiest homeowners had to pay, and so on.

The cap on rates bills is an example of how economically conservative successive administrations led by the DUP and Sinn Fein have been.

A condition of the 2006 St Andrews Agreement was that there would be a cap on rates bills, set at half a million pounds meaning that anyone with a house worth more than that sum would not pay any extra in rates. Two years after the restoration of devolution in 2007, the cap was lowered to 400,000 and it has remained there ever since.

In simple terms, that means that the poorest ratepayers subsidise the bills of the most wealthy (who include among their number some Stormont ministers and senior civil servants). The most expensive house for sale in Northern Ireland is a huge five-bedroom mansion on Malone Park, valued at 2.5 million. Its annual rates bill is listed by the PropertyPal website as being just 3,187 a year.

That is the consequence not of decisions taken by Tories in London, but by DUP and Sinn Fein finance ministers, backed by the vast majority of MLAs.

Based on the current level of rates, removing that cap would bring in about 8 million a year equating to the salaries of about 300 nurses (or 65 First or deputy First Ministers).

Most of the Executive parties doggedly opposed water charges, presenting them as a cynical attempt to over-tax the poorest in society. Yet they have the chance to set the rules as they see fit. If they want to see redistribution of wealth an ideology to which Sinn Fein and the SDLP subscribe then charges could be set for those in the biggest houses. There are arguments against that, but to claim that the Executive has no ability to raise the money it claims to need is demonstrably false.

One of the few areas in which Stormont has used its powers to raise some of the money which it says it needs is through the carrier bag levy.

But the rate was set at a paltry level 5p a bag and has never been increased (Edwin Poots is considering increasing this to 20p a bag). If it wanted, the Executive could massively increase that charge, something which would not only bring in money, but would help to protect the environment.

Stormont is also on course to hand back hundreds of millions of pounds in money to subsidise renewable heat because of its bungling over RHI first making it too generous, now making it insufficiently generous in comparison with GB.

For every 100 spent per person on comparable public services in England, the Treasury calculates that 127 is spent in Northern Ireland. There is good reason for a region like Northern Ireland receiving more money almost every UK region raises less than it spends, reflecting the financial power of London. Other parts of the country contribute in other ways. Northern Ireland, for instance, is a major food producer.

The Treasury has poured money into the Executive. Almost every time there has been a political crisis, there has been a financial reward for the parties which caused that crisis. In line with that principle, last years New Decade, New Approach deal was accompanied by an additional 1bn.

Alliance is the only major party to have opposed this populism. I recall a very senior DUP figure coming up to me many years ago after a pre-election debate in which the then Alliance leader David Ford had set out his support for water charges. The politician was ecstatic, believing that this would undermine Alliance with voters who dont want to pay anything more.

But in some ways it was easier for Alliance to make those arguments when a vote for its candidates was not going to see such policies implemented. As it grows, that may no longer be the case, and there will be a test of the unresolved economic ideology of a party whose central focus is not economic.

Its easy to demand that London sends us more and more money, but its not grown-up politics and as the cash for ash scandal demonstrated, it can have perverse outcomes.

If we want a better health service, are we prepared to pay for it both financially and in terms of unpopular but necessary decisions about centralising some services away from small hospitals? No one enjoys paying tax, but lower taxes come at a cost.

However, higher taxes do not necessarily mean better public services. Boosting public spending ultimately means taking the money from the public; that can only work if the public trust that the money will be well spent.

Having been notorious for squander and incompetence, the Executive is not best placed to convince voters to give it more of their cash.

And yet, without ever taking the responsibility for raising more of the money which they say public services need, our politicians will remain infantile and our health service, our water infrastructure, our schools and myriad other aspects on which we depend will require ever greater reform and someone will have to pay for it.

Huey Long, the 1930s governor of Louisiana, once said: One of these days the people of Louisiana are going to get good government and they arent going to like it.

One of the things which the DUP and Sinn Fein must worry about is this: If despite their relentless populism for 14 years, Stormont is deeply unpopular, how precarious would their positions be if they were to take unpopular decisions?

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Sam McBride: Childish populism at Stormont ultimately hurts the very voters they are trying to woo - Belfast Telegraph

The Rise of Jos Antonio Kast in Chile – Americas Quarterly

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SANTIAGO When millions of Chileans took to the streets in October 2019, after a small hike in transport fees quickly morphed into a national movement for political change, it seemed that Chiles populist moment had finally arrived. Alongside protesters demands for better healthcare and pensions were sentiments that populists around the world would recognize: A strong current of anti-elitism, demands for institutional change, and a mistrust of existing political parties. Yet one thing seemed to be missing: A strong and personalistic leader who could channel those populist inclinations and put them into practice.

That may now be changing. As Chiles November 21 election quickly approaches, the presidential race has been upended by the meteoric rise of the far-right Jos Antonio Kast, a former congressman once seen as a fringe candidate, but who now leads at least one major poll and is second in others. While polls suggest the Kast would lose in a runoff to leftist front-runner Gabriel Boric, the race has tightened substantially in recent weeks, according to Cadem. Behind Kasts rise: a backlash against politics as usual, strong rhetoric against immigrants, and his ability to channel the simmering anger of Chiles middle class. Indeed, he could be described as the true populist in the race.

Many observers had assumed a populist figure would come from the Chilean left. But Boric, a congressman who represents a coalition of forces that see themselves as representative of the spirit of the 2019 protests, has for the most part avoided descending into populism. He emphasizes the importance of respecting democratic institutions, and unlike many on the left, he is a vocal critic of the Venezuelan, Nicaraguan and Cuban regimes. He supported a November 2019 cross-party agreement aimed at rewriting Chiles constitution, something his Communist coalition partners rejected.

To be sure, there is a touch of populism in the campaigns fetishization of lo popular. And in a recent interview, Borics economic advisor admitted that a policy the candidate has supported (successive withdrawals from private pension funds) is bad public policy and terrible economics, but that hes doing something reasonable for someone whos in politics, which is to respond to what people want.

But does Boric really know what people want? The tattooed 35-year-old candidate is betting on Chile being as woke as he and his coalition buddies are. On a whole range of campaign issues, they engage in the language of todays progressive left. From foreign policy to education, his election platform promises to be feminist, green, anti-racist, participatory and decentralized. The constitutional convention has committed to gender neutral language and a rule forbidding denialism, which severely limits the scope of discussion. Those who deny, for example, that the 2019 protests involved systemic human rights abuses (an open question) could be subject to re-education programs (Article 45 of the Conventions Ethics Regulations states that the programs will be geared towards training in the area infringed, such as human rights, intercultural relations, gender equality, religious or spiritual diversity, or any other that is required).

Chiles efforts to make strides towards a more inclusive society should be applauded, especially if they avoid falling into us-vs-them populism or authoritarian efforts to reprogram offenders. Such efforts are also not especially unusual, as Chiles economic progress has pushed it closer towards the post-material attitudes common in Western democracies. For years now, polls have shown Chileans to be increasingly liberal on a range of values, and this is especially true among the young the kind of voters Boric hopes to attract.

However, while these values are common among highly educated young people, they are resisted by other sectors of society. Widespread access to tertiary education is relatively new in Chile, so a good part of the highly educated cohort in Chile is under 40. But many older, less educated or rural voters view progressive values not only as elitist but also morally objectionable, reflecting trends in other countries that have lurched toward populism, as Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart have noted.

And so it is that Kast has come to lead polls, four years after finishing fourth in the 2017 presidential race with just 8% of the votes. Since then, Kast founded his own party, the Republican Party, frustrated by what he saw as the failure of the right-wing UDI party to defend the legacy of the Pinochet dictatorship with sufficient enthusiasm. In recent weeks he has supplanted the traditional rights chosen candidate Sebastin Sichel, who, with origins in the Christian Democratic Party, had hoped to capture disaffected centrist voters. He failed, and the traditional right returned to its natural candidate and political space: conservativism, corporatism and a dogged defense of Pinochets constitution.

But this is 2021, and this is not your grandparents pinochetismo. Kast criticizes immigration, downplays the demands of the countrys indigenous communities, and promises to combat gender ideology. His campaign promises measures to promote natural methods of contraception and to involve Christian churches in dealing with alcohol and drug addiction. On the international front, Kast, who is close to Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, questions globalism and sees the United Nations as a tool of the left, often blaming it for Chiles immigration problem. He promises to withdraw Chile from the UN Human Rights Council. He also plans to build physical barriers between Chile and its northern neighbors. Kast, then, is a pretty good representative of the new, nationalist, populist right. And while not especially charismatic, he does seem to embody, far more than Boric, the anger and frustration of a middle class that feels represented neither by unresponsive parties and institutions, nor by the new, progressive Chile being celebrated in the constitutional convention.

Kasts success thus far shows that the assumptions about the 2019 protests have been, if not exactly wrong, then insufficient. More than a peaceful movement for political change, the protests were always more about anger and frustration and rejecting traditional political parties and leaderships. This why a constitutional agreement aimed at redesigning those institutions was understood to be the only way out at the time. And this is why the far right may be as close as the far left to capitalizing on the current political moment.

Funk is professor of political science at the University of Chile and a partner in Andes Risk Group, a political consultancy firm.

Any opinions expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect those of Americas Quarterly or its publishers.

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The Rise of Jos Antonio Kast in Chile - Americas Quarterly

2022 and ‘the passion gap’ why Republicans are more fired up | TheHill – The Hill

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The culture war in the U.S. has been raging for more than 50 years, ever since the 1960s when divisions over values (civil rights, diversity, sexual liberation) began to emerge. Those divisions have intensified to the point where today, the defining issues of American politics involve race, sex, religion and education more than economics.

From the 1930s to the 1960s, the question that best defined partisanship was, Which side do you favor more business or labor? Today, the defining questions at least for white voters would be, Do you have a college degree? and How often do you go to church?

Liberals dominate American culture. According to statistics recently cited by Elisabeth Zerofsky in the New York Times, Conservatives compose a minimal percentage of Silicon Valley; their influence is declining in the corporate world; and they are all but absent from mainstream media, academia and Hollywood. All institutions dominated by educated elites.

Conservatives are using their political power to challenge liberal domination of the culture. Left-wing populism has always been economic, driven by resentment of the rich. Populist hero and three-time Democratic nominee for president William Jennings Bryan once called Republicans the party representing nothing but an organized appetite. Right-wing populism is cultural, driven by resentment of educated elites and their cosmopolitan values especially educated elites who tell them what to do, like get vaccinated or mask their children, or obey quarantines and lockdowns.

Liberals sometimes feed this resentment by showing condescension. Barack ObamaBarack Hussein ObamaObama honors Jay-Z as 'the embodiment of the American Dream' 2022 and 'the passion gap' why Republicans are more fired up Virginia set to elect first woman of color for lieutenant governor MORE criticized small-town voters who cling to guns and religion. Hillary ClintonHillary Diane Rodham ClintonFranken rules out challenge against Gillibrand for Senate seat Abedin says anger over Weiner 'almost killed me' 2022 and 'the passion gap' why Republicans are more fired up MORE called Trump supporters a basket of deplorables.

Conservative political power is based on two things: structural advantages and intensity of opinion.

A lot of Democratic House votes are wasted because Democrats are more likely to live in densely populated urban areas. In the 2020 election, the average margin of victory for House Democrats was 31.5 percent and for House Republicans, 26.0 percent.

The fact that every state elects two senators creates a disadvantage for large urban Democratic states like New York, California and Illinois. Article V of the Constitution provides that No state, without its consent, shall be deprived of equal suffrage in the Senate. It is the only provision of the Constitution that can never be amended (something insisted upon by southern slave states, which feared becoming outnumbered by northern free states).

Following the 2000 and 2016 presidential elections, when the popular vote winners lost the electoral vote, Democrats protested the undemocratic nature of the electoral college. But no move was taken to change the system.

Right now, gerrymandering is aiming to ensure Republican control of the U.S. House and most state legislatures. Republicans control the redistricting process in 20 states, with 187 U.S. House seats. Democrats control redistricting in eight states with 75 House seats. (The remaining House seats are in states with one at-large seat or divided party control, or independent redistricting commissions.)

Conservatives usually have another advantage intensity. Polling has a dirty little secret: Polls don't measure intensity of opinion very well. Typically, polls can tell you how many people are on each side of an issue, but not whether they feel so strongly about the issue that it's likely to drive their vote. And that's what really matters to politicians.

Let's say you take a poll and show a politician that his constituents divide 75 to 25 percent in favor of gun control. The politician knows what will happen if he votes for a gun control law: Maybe 5 percent of the 75 percent majority care enough about the issue to vote for him for that reason alone, but he may lose 20 out of the 25 percent on the other side. Gun owners may be a minority, but many of them see gun control as a threat to their Second Amendment rights. It drives their votes. And they make sure politicians know it.

On a lot of social issues, the right is more intensely committed than the left. Call it the passion gap. That's why conservatives have often won battles over gun rights and abortion and immigration. They are more watchful, better funded, better organized and angry. They let politicians know that if they dare to take the wrong position, a posse of voters will come after them.

Why are gun owners so politically powerful? a pro-choice activist once said to me in an interview. There are more uterus owners than gun owners. And when uterus owners begin to vote this issue, we will win.

The left typically gets passionate over anti-war issues. That's when the passion gap tilts in their favor and Democrats win (2006, 2008). But when there is no Vietnam or Iraq war controversy, the right is typically more angry and intense. That's what sustains the talk radio industry.

Right now, conservatives feel like a persecuted minority because of the cultural dominance of the left. It has radicalized the right. Donald TrumpDonald TrumpStunning survey gives grim view of flourishing anti-democratic opinions Southwest investigating report pilot said 'Let's go Brandon' on flight Texas police refused requests to escort Biden bus surrounded by Trump supporters: report MORE did something that has never been done before: He brought the radical right to power and gave them (temporary) ascension over the cultural left. Neither he nor his supporters have any intention of giving that up without a fight.

Bill Schneider is an emeritus professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University and author of "Standoff: How America Became Ungovernable"(Simon & Schuster).

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2022 and 'the passion gap' why Republicans are more fired up | TheHill - The Hill

Power tariff cut to put Rs5K cr burden – The Tribune

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Ruchika M Khanna

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, November 1

The Charanjit Singh Channi governments power-populism announcements will cost the cash-strapped Punjab Rs 4,966 crore. The latest reduction in power tariff by Rs 3 per unit for those having a load of up to 7 KW will put an additional burden of Rs 3,316 crore on the exchequer.

Also read:Punjab slashes power tariff by Rs 3 per unit

Poll play by parties

Release dues

It is good that people are getting relief, but what about PSPCL? We have a huge unpaid subsidy bill. Jasbir Singh Dhiman, PSEB

The big question is how Punjab State Power Corporation Limited (PSPCL) will manage its operations, considering the poor credit history it shares with the state government. For years now, the subsidy amount of any given year has been carried forward to the next fiscal.

Earlier, the Channi government announced a waiver of Rs 1,500 crore worth of pending bills of consumers having upto 2 KW load and also reduced the fixed charges on medium-scale industry by 50 percent, adding another subsidy of Rs 150 crore.

This fiscals power subsidy is Rs 10,668 crore, besides around Rs 7,000 crore of unpaid subsidy from the previous years. The government has to clear a subsidy of Rs 17,796 crore by March 2022. Eight months, the government is still to pay Rs 4,960 crore of subsidy to PSPCL.

As on November 1, it is paying Rs 600 crore a month as subsidy. As calculated at the time of the Budget, the government should be releasing Rs 1,483 crore each month to clear the subsidy bill. With the additional subsidy burden of nearly Rs 5,000 crore (this year, only Rs 2,083 crore will have to be paid from November to March, provided this is okayed by the Punjab State Electricity Regulatory Commission), the power subsidy burden is clearly becoming unbearable.

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Power tariff cut to put Rs5K cr burden - The Tribune

DAVID MAIMELA: The DA, populism and the return of its poster child – Eyewitness News

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OPINION

One of the pitiful things happening in South Africa today, is that racists are emboldened once more to lead the discourse on racism!

Recently, the Democratic Alliance (DA) put up fancy posters around Phoenix to declare boldly that "The ANC called you racists. The DA calls you heroes." To be sure, there are multiple accounts of what happened in Phoenix during the July movement. For now, it is better to leave it to the police and other agencies to reveal the true facts to the nation. However, one article published by New Frame with the title "Past and present push Phoenix over edge" sheds some interesting insights about the complexity of life in Phoenix and the events of July 2021.

In a tragicomedy turn of events, the DA pulled down the posters after a national uproar against them. And then the next day, the same party proceeded to defend the posters. They did so through the mouths of Helen Zille, John Steenhuisen and DA "stalwart" Mike Waters, who allegedly wrote a letter to resign from the party's local government elections campaign in defense of the posters.

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In the township, such an "apology" or "withdrawal" is often described in this manner: "They say I must say I am sorry because you are offended. Kodwa oksalayo, sengishilo. Manje senijabulile?" (But what I have already said cannot be unsaid. Are you happy now?).

Last week, of course, Gareth Cliff added his piece to the puzzle of rising arrogant, racist and conservative right-wing movements that believe local government voters and South Africa as a whole should not be worried about the problem of racism. Of course, the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) is the basis of knowledge on racism for these sects and its studies come in handy for racists. It is these studies or surveys that have made the IRR launch campaigns such as "Racism is not the Problem" and earlier, #SaveTheOpposition, a code for DA.

In part, the rising racism and right-wing conservative politics and discourses are informed by the latest volumes of "scientific" studies and surveys from the IRR. But it is also interesting to observe that the further South Africa moves away from the 1994 moment and the honeymoon of the rainbow nation and towards the complex evolution of the democratic state and society, the more the racists become emboldened and abandon their pretense openly and without shame. It would seem that the so-called fight back movement is back in full swing!

Part of this racist and conservative discourse is a well-orchestrated strategy to delink national issues from local ones. This is a false delinking and very much unscientific. There is a reason why the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), for example, has chosen the campaign slogan: "Land and jobs. Manje!"

So, what does the evidence and data say about national issues as determinants of voter behaviour in local government elections? And why is the DA acting so desperately?

Survey after survey proves that even during local government elections, the biggest issues that concern the voters are jobs, crime, corruption, and local government services. You can pick any elections study or survey; it will have these as high-ranking issues. It is self-evident that voters see the local and national issues as intersectional rather than separate.

Another example is Herman Mashaba of Action SA's conservative campaign. He is using the local and national, as well as the global, issue of migration to get Joburgers to vote for him. Why? Because right or wrong, he understands the intersectionality of migration politics with local experiences of the people. Despite his lofty promises, Mashaba knows he will have no authority to change migration policies as a councillor.

And so, the return of racist and populist conservative politics work for the DA and similar parties. Remember, the DA has suffered at two levels recently: firstly, the strategy of appeasing the black community through a black leadership did not work. The excuse was that this failed strategy was encouraging race-based politics, something that belongs to the ANC and not the "liberal" DA. The real reason is that the strategy had alienated some sections of the white electoral base of the party.

Secondly, the DA suffered a double defeat in the 2019 general elections by dropping 2% under Maimane and losing to the ANC, which was led by Cyril Ramaphosa (and not Jacob Zuma, who was easy to attack). In 2018, Tony Leon acknowledged this as much when he reportedly said: "Cyril Ramaphosas election has been a game changer for everyone, for the country, for our economic fortunes, and indeed the DA will have to up its game because Ramaphosa is a very different proposition."

The DA's 2% loss became a gain for the Vryheid Front Plus (VF+) which moved from 0.9% in 2014 to 2.38% in 2019. This means that VF+ ate from the DA's base, hence the 2% decline. Partly, this is what accounted for Maimane's dramatic departure, Steenhuisen's election of and the return of the poster child, Zille.

In 2014, Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection analysed voting trends by drilling down to the voting district. The analysis produced very fascinating but generally accepted truths. The evidence showed "the continued saliency of race in South African society. The phenomenon is further demonstrated by the general voting patterns. Minorities have largely gone for the DA, while Africans have largely remained with the ANC." The analysis concluded that the death or decline of other white opposition parties meant that the white vote had steadily consolidated under the DA since 1994.

In 2016, the fortunes of the DA did not change significantly in real terms either. Rather, it is the ANCs declining fortunes that saw the DA gain percentage advantages through a higher voter turnout, while the ANC voter stayed away. DAs marginal gains in the black community were insignificant for the bigger picture of electoral shifts. The truth is that the DA has reached an electoral ceiling in South Africa and its slide in 2019 meant that it must retreat to the racial laager once more. The intra-party instability, the return of its poster child and the racist rhetoric is a populist attempt to regain the support of the conservative white voter.

Well, only 1 November will tell if the DA has managed to shed its temporary blackness and get the love back from its traditional base.

One thing is for sure: there is a dangerous racist and populist right-wing resurgence in South Africa and the DA seems to be playing into that kind of gallery. It is in this context that the non-apologetic apology on the DA Phoenix posters must be understood.

In a recent debate on the local government elections that I had with Tony Leon, for example, he accepted that "identity", code for "race", remains one of the key determinants of electoral outcomes in South Africa. This reality will not change in the foreseeable future.

Therefore, the DA's political quagmire is far deeper than the poster. It is about a love relationship between the DA and its traditional narrow base, which was beginning to sour. The love affair was somewhat messed up by Zille who later felt she must return to fix her own mess after promoting black leadership, something the traditional base rejected in 2019. Hence the return of the poster child. And like the prodigal son, the DA has effectively chosen to drop all the pretense and takes a leaf out of the gospel of race(ism), liberalism and politics - RW Johnson's book!

It is truly unscientific and dishonest to think that race or other national issues do not have a bearing on electoral choices of the voter, simply because this is a local government election. The DA itself campaigned through attacking Zuma while he was president in 2016, even though he was never a ward candidate. Even ActionSA and the EFF are using national issues such a migration and jobs respectively to solicit votes.

May we all enjoy the final period of the spectacle of politics and live to see 2 November. In the meantime, do not allow deceptive rhetoric to mislead you into thinking that local and national issues do not intersect - they do. In fact, the unlink rhetoric is a feeble ploy to defocus the public from serious discourses about the political settlement and the unguided national drift to nowhere! Wake up. Vukani! While at it, beware of the boldness of racism!

I apologise for telling the truth. Oksalayo sengishilo! Happy voting to all!

David Maimela is a political analyst. He writes in his personal capacity.

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DAVID MAIMELA: The DA, populism and the return of its poster child - Eyewitness News

Attacks on Hindus: Bangladesh could be following the recent global trend of rising majoritarian populism, – Free Press Journal

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In April 2000, I travelled to Dhaka with a formidable battery of my talented lieutenants from my internet venture CricketNext.com. The occasion was indeed historic. The International Cricket Council (ICC) had curated an extraordinary contest; the worlds first Asia XI versus Rest of World XI ODI. The Kargil betrayal was indeed fresh in most minds, but in an unparalleled happenstance, Pakistani and Indian players were playing on the same side. The worlds wiliest left-arm genius Wasim Akram was the captain of the Asia XI, and playing under him were Indias legends, such as Sachin Tendulkar, Sourav Ganguly, Anil Kumble, Ajay Jadeja etc.

As someone said to me, It is surreal seeing the two neighbours who had a nasty military conflict less than a year earlier, play like a bunch of school-mates, as one collective unit (the gargantuan trolling of Indian fast bowler Mohammed Shami by right-wing zealots after Indias defeat to Pakistan in the T20 World Cup, 2021 is another story altogether).

Dhaka appeared like any capital city in South Asia; brimming with staggering aplomb, its tilted demography favouring strapping youngsters who vociferously screamed for Tendulkar, its main street a crowded marmalade, reflecting a country in a chaotic state of profligate frenzy. They welcomed us with unbridled love. They loved their cricket. They clearly idolised their Big Brother to their west, the one that had valiantly in 1971, helped give them their unique identity. Thus, when I saw the deadly attacks on Hindus in a systematic, organised manner, I was perturbed. Some things had clearly changed. After all, it has been almost two decades since that public bonhomie.

Communal template

There were over half-a-dozen Hindus killed in a brutal programme of religious targeting in Bangladesh. ISKCON has been singled out too, as per reports. As is the usual communal template, the conflagration happened at the time of an annual religious festival; this time it was the Durga Puja. The trigger for the violent aggression was a social media post that allegedly ridiculed the Koran.

The fact that cannot be denied is the tinder-box circumstance in which several societies exist today, especially those in our neighbourhood. It takes one WhatsApp instigation to create social unrest and bloodletting. Years of peaceful camaraderie can be incinerated, like their burnt homes. Hindus are a small minority of 10 per cent in Bangladesh, which has also been experiencing the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, as the former East Pakistan grapples with local extremism.

In the age of social media, it takes little to influence impressionable minds. While Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has reacted promptly, demonstrating her commitment to its secular composition, it is quite likely that the aftermath of the mayhem will linger much longer. This is unlikely to slow up overnight. Back home in India, one can already see that some of Indias ruling party cheerleaders are upping the communal temperature by reigniting a divisive debate. This hardly portends well.

Voices of outrage

On a TV show, the BJP spokesperson screamed loudly about why the opposition parties were playing minority-appeasement politics in opposing the Citizenship Amendment Act passed by the Modi government in 2019. It was palpable that the BJP would once again raise the outside infiltrators story as crucial state elections in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand draw closer. Expect the termites disdain to return to the mainstream. But this was being disingenuous to say the least.

For one, until the coronavirus pathogen suddenly hit India in March 2020, the country was witnessing nation-wide large, spontaneous uprisings against the brazenly discriminatory law that disallowed Muslims refugees persecuted in their home countries (Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh) from getting sanctuary in India. Coupled with the nation-wide NRC and NPR, it was a deadly triumvirate to disenfranchise Indias largest minority population. The apprehensions were genuine. Detention centres for illegal migrants were going to be the next big infrastructure project. Polarised politics is BJPs coveted meal menu. It works magically at the hustings. Bangladesh appears to be following the same political business model.

Majoritarian populism

As the highly reprehensible attacks on Hindus show, Bangladesh could be following the recent global trend of rising majoritarian populism. Eventually, it is self-defeating. A few years ago, The Economist, considered a free-market torchbearer, had shortlisted Bangladesh among the countries of the year for its burgeoning exports, trade liberalisation, improved transparency and poverty alleviation. Bangladesh is the worlds second largest in garment merchandise exports. For four years in a row, pre-2020, GDP growth exceeded seven per cent, helping it to outperform its two bigger benchmarks, Pakistan and India.

On crucial human development indicators such as education access, infant mortality, primary healthcare, womens participation in the workforce etc. Bangladesh has registered a robust turnaround. Thus, if PM Sheikh Hasina allows sectarianism to spread, it will come at a huge social consequence and economic cost. No country can get away with manufactured social disunity for short-term political aggrandisement. It gets you. Finally.

Radicalism is the bane of fragile democracies that are also battling economic inequalities and social tensions. Nativism is retrograde even if in the short-term, it pays handsome electoral dividends. Bangladesh needs to be watchful here. It is easy for a country to lose the plot, just as a cricket team can suddenly find itself with an impossible asking rate. A civilised society is one that safeguards its minorities. When Sheikh Mujibur Rahman became president in 1971, he had inspired millions with his sincere message of a secular Bangladesh. His daughter now needs to walk the talk.

The author is former spokesperson of the Congress party

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Attacks on Hindus: Bangladesh could be following the recent global trend of rising majoritarian populism, - Free Press Journal

Pulitzer prize finalist speaks on the role of writing in urban development – Yale Daily News

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Suketu Mehta spoke on how journalists can bridge communication between urban planners and citizens.

Jasmine Su 12:33 am, Nov 01, 2021

Contributing Reporter

Non-fiction writer and journalist Suketu Mehta spoke on Thursday about the role of writing in urban studies as part of the Universitys Introduction to Urban Studies course.

Suketu Mehta is an associate professor of journalism at New York University and writes extensively about immigration and urban development. The talk on Thursday, titled The Secret Lives of Cities, was sponsored by the Poynter Fellowship in Journalism and hosted by architecture professor Elihu Rubin 99, who teaches Introduction to Urban Studies. The course is a series of lectures made by Yale faculty and external speakers, all from different academic disciplines, on their methods of urban studies.

So much of the conversation in urban planning is buildings talking to buildings, and they forget that there are human beings living inside and underneath these buildings, Mehta said during the talk. So where I come in is I can speak to people who are doing the planning I understand what they want to convey, and then I can render it into a story for the average educated reader.

Mehta added that far too often, urban plans are thrust down the throats of citizens, serving the interests of real estate developers as opposed to the people. This is why communication between storytellers and urban planners is crucial for cities, according to Mehta.

He gave the example of the Hudson Yards development in New York City, citing that it was designed to remind people of their poverty. Mehta said that very few consultations were made with New Yorkers about the development, and that the 7 train was extended to serve the development, making it one of the most expensive mass transit developments in New York City. This extension for Hudson Yards occurred despite ongoing needs for the trains to be extended to outer boroughs of the city, Mehta added.

The Hudson Yards development includes luxury condominiums, malls and the Vessel, a 16-story structure of staircases.

The narrative of what makes for a good city has been taken too much towards luxury condominiums and skyscraper office buildings, as if money is the only thing that a city needs, Mehta said. Its not, actually. Too many rich people coming into a city can destroy as effectively as too many poor people coming into the city.

The problem with cities today, according to Mehta, is that there is a disconnect in narration. He explained that on the one hand, there is an official narrative from urban planners and real estate developers about what a city should be. On the other hand, he continued, there are also unofficial, little stories about the people who live in those cities. A journalists job is to tell the unofficial narrative, Mehta said.

Mehta added that a journalists storytelling ability is especially important given the rise of populist leaders like Donald Trump, Narendra Modi and Vladmir Putin.

There is a global war of storytelling going on right now, Mehta said. A populist is basically a gifted storyteller, like the real estate companies that advertised Hudson Yards as the gleaming symbol of New York. They are gifted at telling a false story well. The only way a populist can be fought is by telling a true story back at it, a fact-checked story back at it. And thats where journalists and writers come in. We can tell a true story better.

Journalists and writers ability to tell a true story is the reason why supporters of populist leaders fear them, according to Mehta.

The rise of populism also has deep roots in urbanization and immigration, he said. Cities, being cosmopolitan and diverse, are deeply threatening to people who enjoy individualism and small-like minded communities. The urban-rural tension gives rise to support for populism in the countryside, according to Mehta.

I think Suketus idea of locating the urban-rural divide at the core of the recent resurgence in far-right populism significantly raises the stakes of our conversations about urban issues, Tyler Lutz GRD 21 who joined the talk via Zoom, told the News.

Anoushka Ramkumar 23, a student in Rubins class, said that she was fascinated by Mehtas idea of immigration as reparation, or the view that immigration is a way to fight centuries of colonization and oppression.

Ramkumar said that she bought Mehtas book on immigration after the talk to learn more.

Mehtas book about Mumbai, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, was a Pulitzer prize finalist in 2005.

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Pulitzer prize finalist speaks on the role of writing in urban development - Yale Daily News

The Murder of David Amess must change the way we look at politics – Cherwell Online

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CW: Violence and murder

On the afternoon of October 15th, Leigh-on-Sea was shaken by the tragic stabbing and murder of Sir David Amess.Widely regarded as one of Westminsters most admired and dedicated MPs, the outpouring of grief from across the political spectrum was profound.The ramifications of this tragedy stretch far beyond the borders of Amess Essex constituency, and after the second murder of a British MP in five years, now is the moment to reflect on how and why the rise of populism and the subsequent polarisation of politics has changed the way we treat our public servants.

Jo Coxs murder in Leeds in June 2016 shocked the nation.For the first time since the 1990s, when Ian Gow was killed by the IRA, a sitting British MP was brutally murdered for doing their job.There were 26 years between those two tragic incidents, and now British politics is left facing the second deadly attack in five years. But what steps can we possibly take to ensure that this violence ends?

There was a lot of talk across news networks and in newspapers on the following day about increased security, changes to the way in which MPs do their jobs, and upping spending on personal protection in the name of preserving democracy.In reality, the problem is far larger and harder to solve.In the last ten years, the rise of populism has seen politics become more divided, more aggressive, and ultimately more violent than ever before.

It is important to remember that this is not simply a UK problem. Donald Trumps election in 2016 marked a turning point in American and global politics alike. The success of populism helped by a rise in the use and exploitation of social media for political gain.The Capitol riots earlier this year serve as yet another reminder of how dramatically things have changed in such a short space of time: just a few years ago the idea of the US President defying the democratic process and calling on his supporters to take the country back by marching on the symbolic home of American free speech would have been impossible to comprehend.

That climate of hatred, created in the build-up to the 2016 presidential elections in the United States, has spread far and wide and it is perhaps only now that here in the UK we are seeing the true ramifications of how things have altered in our sphere.The Brexit referendum and Trumps victorious campaign have been compared many times: both used social media to give a platform to lies and exaggerations, both captured the minds of a section of society that had been ignored and underinvested in for far too long, but most importantly, both fuelled division and hatred.The goalposts moved for what was acceptable in British politics in 2016, and they havent moved back.Huge numbers of MPs today have been forced to install panic alarms and security cameras in their homes and offices in an effort to protect staff, family, and friends.These days you will struggle to find a democratically elected official who doesnt regularly receive online hate and even death threats.

The question of how to reverse the situation is a very difficult one to answer.Suggestions in recent days have often focussed on the removal of anonymity on social media.Problems exist here too:on a basic level there are plenty of platforms, such as Facebook, where anonymity doesnt exist, and people are still happy to spout abuse and hatred.Radicalisation is almost impossible to stop in person, never mind online.Beyond that, the ability to remain anonymous is also key to allowing whistle-blowers and healthy critics to come forward and voice their political opinions without fear of consequences.What the country needs is a change in tone at the very top of politics, a change from the rhetoric of hate and division and a shift back towards healthy debate.

So, what next?Where do we go from here?It is all too easy for lawmakers to sit down in interviews and call for more stringent regulation of social media and put money aside for investment in personal protection.The truth is that the change we need is far more profound.We must return to a discourse of respect and understanding.British politics is characterised by the passionate and vocal defence of our personal beliefs, something very different to the violence and division often inspired by the leaders and politicians of today.The line has been crossed now we must go back before its too late.

Image Credits: Richard Townshend / CC BY 3.0

For Cherwell, maintaining editorial independence is vital. We are run entirely by and for students. To ensure independence, we receive no funding from the University and are reliant on obtaining other income, such as advertisements. Due to the current global situation, such sources are being limited significantly and we anticipate a tough time ahead for us and fellow student journalists across the country.

So, if you can, please consider donating. We really appreciate any support youre able to provide; itll all go towards helping with our running costs. Even if you can't support us monetarily, please consider sharing articles with friends, families, colleagues - it all helps!

Thank you!

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The need to move away from clientelism – The Hindu

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Welfare initiatives embody civil rights, whereas freebies cultivate a patron-client syndrome

A neoliberal economy encourages private capital and the market, while forcing the state to withdraw from welfare. The state is limited in taking concrete and constructive efforts to fulfil the aspirations of the people. Even as the poor perceive the state as an arbitrator of their well-being and a facilitator for their mobility in all spheres of life, todays political parties resort to unsolicited freebies to attract them. The line between welfarism and populism has blurred.

Welfare initiatives include a targeted Public Distribution System, providing social security for labourers, quality education, fair employment, affordable healthcare, decent housing, and protection from exploitation and violence. Freebies, on the other hand, are provided to attract voters to cast their vote in a particular election. They create limited private benefit for the receiver and do not contribute towards strengthening public goods/facilities.

The culture of freebies in Tamil Nadu was started during the 1967 Assembly elections. The then Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) chief C.N. Annadurai offered three measures of rice for 1. The practice of providing freebies was followed by subsequent Chief Ministers of both the DMK and the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), who promised free TV sets, free laptops to students, free rides for women in buses, free gas cylinders and stoves, a goat and a cow for poor farmers, and so on.

Initially, the government attempted to strengthen the redistribution of resources for all. After the 1990s, Dravidian parties moved towards clientelism, narrowly focussing on electoral gains. A study by Shroff, Kumar and Reich (2015) on the DMKs health insurance scheme demonstrated that the main beneficiaries were the partys core supporters and swing voters who could be influenced easily. Worse, after 2009, fewer people accessed public health care centres.

In 2021, however, there was a qualitative difference in the manifesto of the DMK, which avoided most of the freebies except tablet devices to students studying in higher secondary schools and colleges. The manifesto reflected more of a programmatic policy intervention towards better public services than narrow private benefits in the form of freebies. But both the DMK and the AIADMK were silent on land distribution and enhancing budgetary allocation for maintenance of public infrastructure like schools, colleges, hostels and hospitals. The GSDP share for health was better under AIADMK rule compared to DMK rule, but both were below 1.5%. Tamil Nadus 2021-22 Budget shows that it has allocated around 13.3% of its total expenditure for education, which is lower than average allocation for education by all States, which is 15.8%.

When Senior Counsel Arvind P. Datar submitted his arguments in S. Subramaniam Balaji v. Govt. of Tamil Nadu (2013), which challenged the freebies of both the DMK government in 2006 and AIADMK government in 2011, he emphasised that freebies violate the constitutional mandate of extending benefits for public purpose and instead create private benefits. He asserted that the literacy rate in Tamil Nadu was around 73% and there were 234 habitations across the State with no school access whatsoever, and distribution of free consumer goods to the people having ration cards cannot be justified as public purpose. Further, distributing laptops does not serve the purpose of increasing the quality of education. According to a report by Anaivarukkum Kalvi Iyakkam (Sarva Siksha Abhiyan) in 2019, there were 3,003 government schools attended by less than 15 students. Due to lack of proper infrastructure facilities and specialised teachers, parents prefer to move their students to private schools. According to a report in this newspaper in 2019, more than 1,500 hostels for Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs) were in a dilapidated condition. Hence, freebies will not only depoliticise the poor and marginalised communities but also indirectly deny them their due share of state resources. Freebies drastically widen the gap between the rich and the poor. Populism encourages mediocre political critics and erases critical and rational thinking, which are important to raise pertinent questions to people in power.

Compared to other States, Tamil Nadu has made impressive strides in many development indicators such as education, healthcare (mortality rate and life expectancy) and infrastructure facilities. However, it lags behind in other aspects. According to the Tamil Nadu State Agricultural Departments publication, Salient Statistics on Agriculture, 2019, SCs, who constitute nearly 20% of Tamil Nadus population, accounted for 10% of agricultural landowners and possessed 7.8% of the farmland in the State. Even though the literacy rate is high in Tamil Nadu, according to the National Family Health Survey (NFHS)-4 (2015-16), only 32% of women aged 15-49 had completed 12 or more years of schooling, compared with 38% of men. The NFHS-4 showed sharp differences between SCs and Other Backward Classes in Tamil Nadu. The neonatal mortality was 12.3 for OBCs, but 17.4 for SCs. Infant mortality was 18.4 for OBCs but 23.6 for SCs. And under-five mortality was 24.8 for OBCs and 31 for SCs. The data reflect inequal access to public health infrastructure.

According to a paper by the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations, Explaining the contractualisation of Indias workforce (2019), the share of contract workers in Tamil Nadu increased sharply from 8.3% in 2000-01 to 20.17% in 2013-14, which shows the withdrawal of the state in providing social security, and leaving the workforce at the mercy of neoliberal market forces.

Theoretically, there is a qualitative distinction between being subjects in an authoritarian regime and being citizens in a democratic polity. Unsolicited freebies cultivate a patron-client syndrome and encourage personality cults in a democratic polity. Besides, they affect the critical faculties of citizens, particularly the poor and the marginalised. Providing freebies is to treat people like subjects, whereas citizens are entitled to constitutional guarantees. Welfare initiatives are an embodiment of civil rights, whereas unsolicited freebies show benevolence at best and apathy at worst towards the poor by the ruling parties.

Also read | Have freebies and bribes depoliticised voters?

There was a positive indication that the DMK is reconsidering unsolicited freebies/populism when it tabled a White Paper on the States Finances in the Assembly recently. Thereafter, there has been a lot of public discussion on this issue, which may lead to a reorientation of public policy in a healthy direction. Political parties and civil society should consider quality aspects in education, healthcare and employment and ensure fair distribution and redistribution of resources for the marginalised communities. We draw the publics attention and debate to the dichotomy between welfare and unsolicited freebies or populism, so that the constitutional ideal of a secular, egalitarian and democratic India can be realised.

C. Lakshmanan is Associate Professor at the Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai, and Convenor, Dalit Intellectual Collective, and Venkatanarayanan S. teaches at Christ University, Bengaluru

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The need to move away from clientelism - The Hindu

Politicians talk about net zero but not the sacrifices we must make to get there – The Guardian

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To be facetious about it, they only have 12 days to save the Earth. As politicians and officials from 197 countries begin just under a fortnights work at the Cop26 summit in Glasgow, you can sense a strange mixture of feelings: expectation, cynicism, fatalism, anger and fragile hope.

It will be easy to lose track of what is at stake and who is who although anyone feeling confused should recall the report issued in August by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its bracing conclusion: that huge environmental changes triggered by global heating are now everywhere, and avoiding a future that will be completely catastrophic demands immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions in carbon emissions. The point is simple enough. But one familiar factor may well weaken the resolve of the key people at Cop26: the fact that too few politicians will arrive in Scotland bearing any mandate for serious climate action, because almost none of them have tried to get one.

Two crucial political problems define the contrast between what is required and what those in power have so far chosen to deliver. One centres on the populism and power cults that actively get in the way of climate action something evident in both the records of strongmen like Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Brazils Jair Bolsonaro and Turkeys Recep Erdoan, and where our ecological emergency sits in the cultural and generational conflicts that are now bubbling up all over the world.

In the UK, the latest manifestation of the populist rights belligerent scepticism is the suggestion that we might rerun the Brexit referendum in the form of a vote on whether or not to pursue the goal of net zero carbon emissions. You also see it in those seemingly daily video clips of some or other sub-Alan Partridge TV or radio host arguing with someone from Extinction Rebellion or Insulate Britain, a ritual which feels like a new national sport.

The other impediment to action is more insidious. On both the centre-left and centre-right, there is superficial recognition of the hard yards required to do something about the climate emergency but, so far, an aversion to thinking about the huge changes to everyday life that will be necessary. We can build back greener without so much as a hair shirt in sight, says Boris Johnson.

Keir Starmer may not have uttered anything so crass, but he too seems to believe in a modest utopia of a new green economy, insulated homes, increased funding for science, and the day somehow being saved by British derring-do. Climate change is about jobs, he insists, which is partly true. But, like Johnson, he doesnt mention revolutionising what we eat and why and how we travel, or God forbid the continuing fetishisation of economic growth.

Might that be an inevitable feature of democracy? Perhaps. But in the UK, the first focus of blame should be the two-party Westminster model of politics kept in business by our stupid electoral system, and the way that it sustains political philosophies that ought to have been left behind in the 20th century.

On the right, notwithstanding Johnsons swerve into the politics of big spending and economic interventionism, Toryism remains beholden to the market, and dead against the idea of the common good shaping the lifestyles of anyone who is halfway affluent (the poor, of course, are fair game). Its contorted priorities are illustrated by the fact that the governments current leading lights managed to take us out of the European Union at a huge cost to national income and the countrys economic future. But they cannot muster anything like the same enthusiasm for risking some stability and prosperity in the interests of saving the planet.

And Labour? Here is a radical thought: given his beleaguered position and the urgency of the crisis, Starmer could conceivably go for broke, and predicate his leadership on the climate emergency, finally bringing its scale and urgency somewhere close to the heart of politics. The thought, unfortunately, would not even occur, because of what the Labour party is. Its origins lie in a world of coalmines and smokestacks. Like its sister social-democratic parties in Europe, whatever reinventions Labour has undergone since, it has a deep, sentimental attachment to an idea of the good life centred on work and the factory, and raising peoples living standards so that they can consume with the same enthusiasm as everyone else. At the most basic level, it shares the Tory idea that growth is the sine qua non of economic policy.

During the Corbyn years, some of this stuff was undoubtedly shaken up, although there were also signs of a conservatism that still runs across all wings of the party. In 2015, as he ran for the leadership, Jeremy Corbyn endorsed reopening mines in south Wales. Four years later, as Labour decisively embraced a so-called Green New Deal in preparation for the 2019 election, some of the big unions who represent gas, oil, and aviation workers insisted on 2030 being a target for significant progress rather than a non-negotiable net zero deadline.

It is worth remembering the view of the then leader of the GMB union, Tim Roache: the latter stance, he raged, would mean within a decade peoples petrol cars being confiscated. This will mean families can only take one flight every five years. Net zero carbon emissions by 2030 is utterly unachievable.

So, which way out? As a means of at least trying to reorientate our politics, a lot more people are going to have to vote for the Green party and, to maintain the sense of last-ditch urgency that Extinction Rebellion have brought to things, the case for what some people call extra-parliamentary activity feels beyond argument. Without wanting to sound overly pessimistic, the most likely outcome of all the negotiations and diplomatic theatre in Glasgow will push even more people in that direction, and their protests will bring on the usual sneers and priggishness, not least from Westminster politicians. But as ever, the people involved will have a simple answer: that if politics endlessly fails, the streets may be all you have left.

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Politicians talk about net zero but not the sacrifices we must make to get there - The Guardian