Progress continues on new Sedalia Police Department station plans – Sedalia Democrat

The Sedalia City Council approved a bid for the removal of this building at 302 W. Third St. during Monday nights meeting. The building will make way for the future Sedalia Police Department station.

Photo by Nicole Cooke | Democrat

While there havent been many public updates on the future Sedalia Police Department station, the Sedalia City Council approved a bid during Monday nights meeting to help move the project forward.

Council approved a bid from All Weather Heating and Cooling for disposal of property, 302 W. Third St. in downtown Sedalia, which formerly housed the Bryant Motor sales office and multiple hair salons. According to the contract in the meeting packet, All Weather will remove the building in mid-September and pay the city $500.

Mayor Stephen Galliher told the Democrat that removing the building will save the city the cost of demolition.

The police station came in a little under budget, Galliher said. We hope to get the building removed soon and the other one (on the future SPD station property) demoed.

Galliher said he believes groundbreaking will occur in October for the new station, noting that is weather dependent.

We just have to finish up finalizing the financing of it. Theres a couple options were looking at and well take the best option in the near future. Ill be happy when I see machinery digging dirt over there, Galliher said. Its a much-needed expansion. It shouldve been done years ago.

Galliher said the city is trying to plan ahead by creating a building that can be expanded in the future, to avoid the current problem of needing to construct a new building.

With the new station underway, Galliher added that staff is now starting to work on ideas for a future Sedalia Community Center, after he and council told former Park Director Mark Hewett and the Park Board to go back to the drawing board to lower the cost.

Were trying to move forward with that and get it done. Im hoping we come in much less than the original. I thought we could do it a lot less so I put a halt to it a few months ago and now were starting back up, Galliher said. I think the city really needs one and weve tried for years. Maybe this time well get it done.

During the pre-council meeting, council heard from Sedalia Regional Airport Director Eric Bowers regarding the need to control wildlife at the airport for safety reasons. He said deer are frequently in the area of the airport and even on the runway, which can cause a crash if pilots are unable to see the animal in time.

He obtained councils approval to move forward with pursing options to contain the problem. One option was obtaining a permit from the Missouri Department of Conservation for a closed hunt. Another was thining out the treeline to discourage wildlife from the area.

Bowers said he looked into getting a wildlife fence for around the airport property, but said that option isnt feasible because it would cost roughly $1.5 million.

During the meeting council also:

Approved a bid of $28,564 and an ordinance approving and accepting an agreement with Agricycle Inc. for the yard waste grinding No. 9 project.

Approved an ordinance approving an agreement with Mission Communications LLC for software utilized by the Water Pollution Control Department SCADA system and ratifying the actions previously taken on past agreements.

Approved a bid of $73,737 and an ordinance approving and accepting an agreement with Poort Excavating LLC for storm drainage improvements, project areas 5B and 32 from the Storm Water Master Plan. This is the plan approved by council about three years ago.

Approved the appointment of Alice Clopton to the Sedalia Public Library Board for a three-year term expiring in June 2020.

Ward 4 Councilman Tollie Rowe was absent. A detective sergeant with the Pettis County Sheriffs Office, he was in Henry County assisting with the manhunt for a suspect who shot a Clinton police officer Sunday night.

The Sedalia City Council approved a bid for the removal of this building at 302 W. Third St. during Monday nights meeting. The building will make way for the future Sedalia Police Department station.

http://www.sedaliademocrat.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/web1_TSD080817Council.jpgThe Sedalia City Council approved a bid for the removal of this building at 302 W. Third St. during Monday nights meeting. The building will make way for the future Sedalia Police Department station. Photo by Nicole Cooke | Democrat

Nicole Cooke can be reached at 660-530-0138 or on Twitter @NicoleRCooke.

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Progress continues on new Sedalia Police Department station plans - Sedalia Democrat

TRICOAST ENTERTAINMENT RELEASES FIRST … – Digital Journal – Digital Journal

"AMELIA 2.0 // TriCoast Entertainment"

Los Angeles, CA - August 8, 2017 - TriCoast Entertainment is excited to announce the VOD release of Adam Ortons newest sci-fi thriller, AMELIA 2.0 today on August 8, 2017. From executive producers MORE Productions and WeatherVane Productions, AMELIA 2.0 is the first film to tap into the genre of transhumanism.

Transhumanism (n) The belief or theory that the human race can evolve beyond its currently physical and mental limitations, especially by means of science and technology.

AMELIA 2.0 combines romance, sci-fi and futuristic suspense to illustrate societies need and constant desire for advancements within the technological world.

As Carter Summerland weeps next to his decaying wife in a hospital bed, he is approached by Wesley Enterprises, an experimental program specializing in elongating human life.

The grief in his heart collides with his devastated mind, when he allows Wesley Enterprises to take the risk of high advancements in technology, by allowing them to download his wifes consciousness into an android.

When Amelia awakes, she finds herself within an android that looks just like her human self but she doesnt feel human at all. She battles the internal question of what really makes someone human? while the city breaks out in a public debate over using this high-tech technology, and the extreme opposition and danger to such experiments.

AMELIA 2.0 turns science fiction into a controversial discussion by exploring the genre of transhumanism, or the theory that human life can be extended through advancements in technology and science. Many scientists and other professionals argue about the rights and wrongs of extending human life.

Thats the thing about science fiction it doesnt leave viewers with the thought of aliens taking over Mars or portals to different worlds, but instead, makes us question things that are unordinary, yet seemingly possible. 20 years ago, did anyone predict the self-parking cars? In 20 years, will humans be able to extend their lives through technology?

AMELIA 2.0s all-star cast includes Ed Begley Jr. (Ghostbusters, Pineapple Express), Chris Ellis (The Dark Knight Rises, Apollo 13), Debra Wilson (Avatar), Eddie Jemison (Oceans Eleven, War Dogs) and Kate Vernon (Malcolm X, The Last Song, Pretty in Pink).

Watch AMELIA 2.0 now on: AT&T, Comcast, DirecTV, DISH, FandangoNow, FlixFling, Google, InDemand, iTunes, SlingTV, Sony (Playstation), Vubiquity, Vudu, and Amazon. Stay tuned for the DVD release!

Trailer Link: https://vimeo.com/200433561

For more information, go to: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3831344/?ref_=ttfc_fc_tt

AMELIA 2.0 (2017, 89 min.) Directed by Adam Orton. Editor: Izaak Levinson-Share. Cinematographer: Camrin Petramale. Original Music: Michael A Levine. US, English. MORE Productions, WeatherVane Productions. TriCoast Entertainment.

PRODUCTION COMPANY: MORE Productions, Weather Vane Productions

About TriCoast Entertainment:

A new home for story-driven American films, TriCoast Entertainment is a full service media company that creates, produces, manages and distributes unique and unusual entertainment. Bringing together filmmakers, distributors, financiers, and technologists, TriCoast Entertainment embraces change by redefining the production and distribution model for indie filmmakers, providing them with low cost tools, financing, and worldwide theatrical and digital distribution, along with market feedback and storytelling opportunities.

Media Contact Company Name: TriCoast Entertainment Contact Person: Jenna Wilen Email: jenna@tricoast.com Phone: 3107410070 Address:11124 Washington Blvd City: Culver City State: CA Country: United States Website: http://www.tricoastworldwide.com

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TRICOAST ENTERTAINMENT RELEASES FIRST ... - Digital Journal - Digital Journal

Rick and Morty Recap: Pickle Rick – The Mary Sue

The Recap: Rick turns himself into a pickle to get out of family therapy and winds up stuck. While Beth, Summer, and Morty talk through their problems, Rick finds himself accidentally swept up in a gruesome action movie.

R&M is at its best when it balances its fantastical and mundane plots, usually tying them together around a central theme. While the content of sitting in a therapists office couldnt be more removed from a slurry of Die Hard, Metal Gear Solid, Liam Neeson, and countless other action flicks and tropes, both plots focus around issues of agency and choice. Both begin with the characters being swept up, literally or figuratively, in some grand occurrence that seems to leave them powerless, and work their way up from there.

The execution mostly focuses on Rick and Beth, leaving Morty and Summer to act as this episodes baseline. By the end, its clear that while no one has their shit together, the kids are at least trying to process what theyve been through and improve things. The adults, meanwhile, would rather run screaming from any kind of revelation in favor of trading faux-philosophical dialogue or just ignoring the issue entirely.

The last point might be the most interesting one. The first two seasons dont shy away from the fact that Rick is terrible, but they also encourage us to think hes sort of cool. He gets all the great one-liners, he takes the audience to new and exciting places, he leads badass action scenes. And those elements cast an admiring light on his self-destructive habits and bleak nihilism (the show has never shied from nihilism, but it increasingly makes its stance as a constructive version that knows its different from that hopelessness).

If Rickmancing the Stone distanced us from Rick, this one brings us right up close for a dose of visceral unpleasantness. In some ways Ricks assault on the mansion isnt functionally different from his takedown of the Citadel of Ricks in the premiere; its the details that make it matter. While the premiere was a grand sci-fi battle that tugged us along on the assumption that Rick was doing something ultimately noble, here hes wading through a sewer and killing rats and roaches, working bits of brain with his tongue.

The rat-bug suit is some amazing Cronenbergian body horror, and the sheer nastiness that underpinned Ricks first few kills is embodied in the pragmatic trophies he wears for the rest of the episode. At first, he kills to save himself, then to get mobile, then just because some dudes irritated him; and even once cool lasers and explosions are involved, theres still that sickly veneer in the background. The imagery tells us that to Rick, everything in the world is spare parts that can be broken down if he decides he has a use for it.

The episode climax brings the reminder of that decay in an excellent way. It might arguably be a narrative cheat to have a character who can handily monologue all of Ricks problems in a succinct form, but putting it in the form of choice helps ease that burden. In the end, its not really a thesis on Ricks character or an attempt to offer an explanation that can then be reverse engineered into a cure; its a window into how his character might choose to reform his behavior going forward. It keeps the uncertainty going without being cheap, and Rick gives just enough of a consolation gesture to keep the viewer from simply writing him off.

If last week I was concerned the writers might be planning to sideline Beth, this episode has left me convinced that her increasingly unstable emotional state will be a major fixture of the season. Her desire to keep Rick in her life at any cost is no longer a personal decision but one that affects her family, and with people depending on her its not something she can continue being entirely selfish about. Or rather, she canbut that would make her just like Rick in ways that neither of them probably want deep down (waaaaaaaay deep; deeper; somewhere in there).

The kids have it worst of all in the meantime, and Im hoping the writing will continue to ratchet up that tension and division of loyalty versus self-preservation even when it takes time out for one-off adventures. Something is going to give, and its probably going to be real ugly when it does.

Vrai is a queer author and pop culture blogger; theyre very concerned about these kids. You can read more essays and find out about their fiction atFashionable Tinfoil Accessories, listen to them podcasting onSoundcloud, support their work viaPatreonorPayPal, or remind them of the existence ofTweets.

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Rick and Morty Recap: Pickle Rick - The Mary Sue

NSFW Photos of Berlin’s Hedonistic Nightlife – VICE

This article originally appeared on VICE Germany.

From ravers sucking spaghetti off one another, to live alpacas strutting around the clubthere's hardly a part of Berlin nightlife that Jess Pastor hasn't caught on camera. Over the past seven years, the photographer has roamed Berlin's most hedonistic parties to document its "animals of the night," as he likes to call them. "In Berlin, people are really awake at night," he tells me.

Pastor started in 2010, by capturing the hazy after parties of the Berlin International Film Festival. Soon, his reputation got him and his camera access to the kind of events that traditionally ban photographylike parties in the King Size Bar (famously tiny and hard to get in) or the House of Red Doors at the Wilde Renate nightclub, which its organizers describe using the key words "sex, hedonism, escapism, and exuberance."

Jess Pastor's latest series, Wild Wolves, brings together his best photos showcasing the hedonistic glory of Berlin after dark. He tells me that what he likes about Berlin nights is that people there have almost no taboos. "You can smell the freedom from every corner," he says.

Scroll down to see photos from Jess Pastor's Wild Wolves.

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NSFW Photos of Berlin's Hedonistic Nightlife - VICE

Outrageous Naked News presenter Carli Bei strips totally NUDE to visit a swingers party in Jamaica – The Sun

A NAKED News presenter has bared all from behind the scenes of a swingers party in Jamaica.

Outrageous Carli Bei stripped totally nude to visit the event Hedonism II in Negril this weekend.

She dared to quiz the sex experts on their favourite positions before they volunteered to show her how its done.

Her raunchy interview comes after the whole Naked News team got covered in whipped cream during a backstage game of Pieface on the show last week.

Before that the presenters were filmed snogging lads in the buff in a bid to raise money for charity.

The programme started in 1999 as an English speaking show and now has one based in Japan too.

It was reported to be attracting more than six million viewers at its height.

Current anchors include Whitney St-John, Isabella Rossini and Elise Laurenne.

The male version closed in 2007, six years after it was launched.

The channels Twitter page has more than 60,000 followers and the site even has a Naked at the Movies show for film fans.

Naked News airs six days a week, with 25-minute bulletins showing the women carrying out interviews and presenting the big news stories of the day completely starkers.

Earlier this month the presentersmesmerised viewers with their fancy moves doing an Irish jig.

One Reddit user pondered: Certainly the first time Ive sat through an entire hour of Irish dancing.

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Outrageous Naked News presenter Carli Bei strips totally NUDE to visit a swingers party in Jamaica - The Sun

Donald Trump’s face-off with North Korea has made more than a few people terrified – the Irish News


the Irish News
Donald Trump's face-off with North Korea has made more than a few people terrified
the Irish News
All machismo, no rationalism #NorthKorea. Key, Esq. (@kishenybarot) August 8, 2017. Trump is sittin' here threatening Kim Jong Un and instead of him being scared we are. Sam Without A Hoodie (@hood_goat) August 8, 2017. Observers noted the ...

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Donald Trump's face-off with North Korea has made more than a few people terrified - the Irish News

Unlearning the myth of American innocence – The Guardian

My mother recently found piles of my notebooks from when I was a small child that were filled with plans for my future. I was very ambitious. I wrote out what I would do at every age: when I would get married and when I would have kids and when I would open a dance studio.

When I left my small hometown for college, this sort of planning stopped. The experience of going to a radically new place, as college was to me, upended my sense of the world and its possibilities. The same thing happened when I moved to New York after college, and a few years later when I moved to Istanbul. All change is dramatic for provincial people. But the last move was the hardest. In Turkey, the upheaval was far more unsettling: after a while, I began to feel that the entire foundation of my consciousness was a lie.

For all their patriotism, Americans rarely think about how their national identities relate to their personal ones. This indifference is particular to the psychology of white Americans and has a history unique to the US. In recent years, however, this national identity has become more difficult to ignore. Americans can no longer travel in foreign countries without noticing the strange weight we carry with us. In these years after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the many wars that followed, it has become more difficult to gallivant across the world absorbing its wisdom and resources for ones own personal use. Americans abroad now do not have the same swagger, the easy, enormous smiles. You no longer want to speak so loud. There is always the vague risk of breaking something.

Some years after I moved to Istanbul, I bought a notebook, and unlike that confident child, I wrote down not plans but a question: who do we become if we dont become Americans? If we discover that our identity as we understood it had been a myth? I asked it because my years as an American abroad in the 21st century were not a joyous romp of self-discovery and romance. Mine were more of a shattering and a shame, and even now, I still dont know myself.

I grew up in Wall, a town located by the Jersey Shore, two hours drive from New York. Much of it was a landscape of concrete and parking lots, plastic signs and Dunkin Donuts. There was no centre, no Main Street, as there was in most of the pleasant beach towns nearby, no tiny old movie theatre or architecture suggesting some sort of history or memory.

Most of my friends parents were teachers, nurses, cops or electricians, except for the rare father who worked in the City, and a handful of Italian families who did less legal things. My parents were descendants of working-class Danish, Italian and Irish immigrants who had little memory of their European origins, and my extended family ran an inexpensive public golf course, where I worked as a hot-dog girl in the summers. The politics I heard about as a kid had to do with taxes and immigrants, and not much else. Bill Clinton was not popular in my house. (In 2016, most of Wall voted Trump.)

We were all patriotic, but I cant even conceive of what else we could have been, because our entire experience was domestic, interior, American. We went to church on Sundays, until church time was usurped by soccer games. I dont remember a strong sense of civic engagement. Instead I had the feeling that people could take things from you if you didnt stay vigilant. Our goals remained local: homecoming queen, state champs, a scholarship to Trenton State, barbecues in the backyard. The lone Asian kid in our class studied hard and went to Berkeley; the Indian went to Yale. Black people never came to Wall. The world was white, Christian; the world was us.

We did not study world maps, because international geography, as a subject, had been phased out of many state curriculums long before. There was no sense of the US being one country on a planet of many countries. Even the Soviet Union seemed something more like the Death Star flying overhead, ready to laser us to smithereens than a country with people in it.

I have TV memories of world events. Even in my mind, they appear on a screen: Oliver North testifying in the Iran-Contra hearings; the scarred, evil-seeming face of Panamas dictator Manuel Noriega; the movie-like footage, all flashes of light, of the bombing of Baghdad during the first Gulf war. Mostly what I remember of that war in Iraq was singing God Bless the USA on the school bus I was 13 wearing little yellow ribbons and becoming teary-eyed as I remembered the video of the song I had seen on MTV.

And Im proud to be an American

Where at least I know Im free

That at least is funny. We were free at the very least we were that. Everyone else was a chump, because they didnt even have that obvious thing. Whatever it meant, it was the thing that we had, and no one else did. It was our God-given gift, our superpower.

By the time I got to high school, I knew that communism had gone away, but never learned what communism had actually been (bad was enough). Religion, politics, race they washed over me like troubled things that obviously meant something to someone somewhere, but that had no relationship to me, to Wall, to America. I certainly had no idea that most people in the world felt those connections deeply. History Americas history, the worlds history would slip in and out of my consciousness with no resonance whatsoever.

Racism, antisemitism and prejudice, however those things, on some unconscious level, I must have known. They were expressed in the fear of Asbury Park, which was black; in the resentment of the towns of Marlboro and Deal, which were known as Jewish; in the way Hispanics seemed exotic. Much of the Jersey Shore was segregated as if it were still the 1950s, and so prejudice was expressed through fear of anything outside Wall, anything outside the tiny white world in which we lived. If there was something that saved us from being outwardly racist, it was that in small towns such as Wall, especially for girls, it was important to be nice, or good this pressure tempered tendencies toward overt cruelty when we were young.

I was lucky that I had a mother who nourished my early-onset book addiction, an older brother with mysteriously acquired progressive politics, and a father who spent his evenings studying obscure golf antiques, lost in the pleasures of the past. In these days of the 1%, I am nostalgic for Walls middle-class modesty and its sea-salt Jersey Shore air. But as a teenager, I knew that the only thing that could rescue me from the Wall of fear was a good college.

I ended up at the University of Pennsylvania. The lack of interest in the wider world that I had known in Wall found another expression there, although at Penn the children were wealthy, highly educated and apolitical. During orientation, the business school students were told that they were the smartest people in the country, or so I had heard. (Donald Trump Jr was there then, too.) In the late 1990s, everyone at Penn wanted to be an investment banker, and many would go on to help bring down the world economy a decade later. But they were more educated than I was; in American literature class, they had even heard of William Faulkner.

When my best friend from Wall revealed one night that she hadnt heard of John McEnroe or Jerry Garcia, some boys on the dormitory hall called us ignorant, and white trash, and chastised us for not reading magazines. We were hurt, and surprised; white trash was something we said about other people at the Jersey Shore. My boyfriend from Wall accused me of going to Penn solely to find a boyfriend who drove a Ferrari, and the boys at Penn made fun of the Camaros we drove in high school. Class in America was not something we understood in any structural or intellectual way; class was a constellation of a million little materialistic cultural signifiers, and the insult, loss or acquisition of any of them could transform ones future entirely.

In the end, I chose to pursue the new life Penn offered me. The kids I met had parents who were doctors or academics; many of them had already even been to Europe! Penn, for all its superficiality, felt one step closer to a larger world.

Still, I cannot remember any of us being conscious of foreign events during my four years of college. There were wars in Eritrea, Nepal, Afghanistan, Kosovo, East Timor, Kashmir. US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam were bombed. Panama, Nicaragua (I couldnt keep Latin American countries straight), Osama bin Laden, Clinton bombing Iraq nope.

I knew Saddam Hussein, which had the same evil resonance as communism. I remember the movie Wag the Dog, a satire in which American politicians start a fake war with foreign terrorists to distract the electorate during a domestic scandal which at the time was what many accused Clinton of doing when he ordered a missile strike on Afghanistan during the Monica Lewinsky affair. I never thought about Afghanistan. What country was in Wag the Dog? Albania. There was a typical American callousness in our reaction to the country they chose for the movie, an indifference that said, Some bumblefuck country, it doesnt matter which one they choose.

I was a child of the 90s, the decade when, according to Americas foremost intellectuals, history had ended, the US was triumphant, the cold war won by a landslide. The historian David Schmitz has written that, by that time, the idea that America won because of its values and steadfast adherence to the promotion of liberalism and democracy was dominating op-ed pages, popular magazines and the bestseller lists. These ideas were the ambient noise, the elevator music of my most formative years.

But for me there was also an intervention a chance experience in the basement of Penns library. I came across a line in a book in which a historian argued that, long ago, during the slavery era, black people and white people had defined their identities in opposition to each other. The revelation to me was not that black people had conceived of their identities in response to ours, but that our white identities had been composed in conscious objection to theirs. Id had no idea that we had ever had to define our identities at all, because to me, white Americans were born fully formed, completely detached from any sort of complicated past. Even now, I can remember that shiver of recognition that only comes when you learn something that expands, just a tiny bit, your sense of reality. What made me angry was that this revelation was something about who I was. How much more did I not know about myself?

It was because of this text that I picked up the books of James Baldwin, who gave me the sense of meeting someone who knew me better, and with a far more sophisticated critical arsenal than I had myself. There was this line:

But I have always been struck, in America, by an emotional poverty so bottomless, and a terror of human life, of human touch, so deep, that virtually no American appears able to achieve any viable, organic connection between his public stance and his private life.

And this one:

All of the western nations have been caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended humanism; this means that their history has no moral justification, and that the west has no moral authority.

And this one:

White Americans are probably the sickest and certainly the most dangerous people, of any colour, to be found in the world today.

I know why this came as a shock to me then, at the age of 22, and it wasnt necessarily because he said I was sick, though that was part of it. It was because he kept calling me that thing: white American. In my reaction I justified his accusation. I knew I was white, and I knew I was American, but it was not what I understood to be my identity. For me, self-definition was about gender, personality, religion, education, dreams. I only thought about finding myself, becoming myself, discovering myself and this, I hadnt known, was the most white American thing of all.

I still did not think about my place in the larger world, or that perhaps an entire history the history of white Americans had something to do with who I was. My lack of consciousness allowed me to believe I was innocent, or that white American was not an identity like Muslim or Turk.

Of this indifference, Baldwin wrote: White children, in the main, and whether they are rich or poor, grow up with a grasp of reality so feeble that they can very accurately be described as deluded.

Young white Americans of course go through pain, insecurity and heartache. But it is very, very rare that young white Americans come across someone who tells them in harsh, unforgiving terms that they might be merely the easy winners of an ugly game, and indeed that because of their ignorance and misused power, they might be the losers within a greater moral universe.

In 2007, after I had worked for six years as a journalist in New York, I won a writing fellowship that would send me to Turkey for two years. I had applied for it on a whim. No part of me expected to win the thing. Even as my friends wished me congratulations, I detected a look of concern on their faces, as if I was crazy to leave all this, as if 29 was a little too late to be finding myself. I had never even been to Turkey before.

In the weeks before my departure, I spent hours explaining Turkeys international relevance to my bored loved ones, no doubt deploying the cliche that Istanbul was the bridge between east and west. I told everyone that I chose Turkey because I wanted to learn about the Islamic world. The secret reason I wanted to go was that Baldwin had lived in Istanbul in the 1960s, on and off, for almost a decade. I had seen a documentary about Baldwin that said he felt more comfortable as a black, gay man in Istanbul than in Paris or New York.

When I heard that, it made so little sense to me, sitting in my Brooklyn apartment, that a space opened in the universe. I couldnt believe that New York could be more illiberal than a place such as Turkey, because I couldnt conceive of how prejudiced New York and Paris had been in that era; and because I thought that as you went east, life degraded into the past, the opposite of progress. The idea of Baldwin in Turkey somehow placed Americas race problem, and America itself, in a mysterious and tantalising international context. I took a chance that Istanbul might be the place where the secret workings of history would be revealed.

In Turkey and elsewhere, in fact, I would feel an almost physical sensation of intellectual and emotional discomfort, while trying to grasp a reality of which I had no historical or cultural understanding. I would go, as a journalist, to write a story about Turkey or Greece or Egypt or Afghanistan, and inevitably someone would tell me some part of our shared history theirs with America of which I knew nothing. If I didnt know this history, then what kind of story did I plan to tell?

My learning process abroad was threefold: I was learning about foreign countries; I was learning about Americas role in the world; and I was also slowly understanding my own psychology, temperament and prejudices. No matter how well I knew the predatory aspects of capitalism, I still perceived Turkeys and Greeces economic advances as progress, a kind of maturation. No matter how deeply I understood the USs manipulation of Egypt for its own foreign-policy aims, I had never considered and could not grasp how American policies really affected the lives of individual Egyptians, beyond engendering resentment and anti-Americanism. No matter how much I believed that no American was well-equipped for nation-building, I thought I could see good intentions on the part of the Americans in Afghanistan. I would never have admitted it, or thought to say it, but looking back, I know that deep in my consciousness I thought that America was at the end of some evolutionary spectrum of civilisation, and everyone else was trying to catch up.

American exceptionalism did not only define the US as a special nation among lesser nations; it also demanded that all Americans believe they, too, were somehow superior to others. How could I, as an American, understand a foreign people, when unconsciously I did not extend the most basic faith to other people that I extended to myself? This was a limitation that was beyond racism, beyond prejudice and beyond ignorance. This was a kind of nationalism so insidious that I had not known to call it nationalism; this was a self-delusion so complete that I could not see where it began and ended, could not root it out, could not destroy it.

In my first few months in Istanbul, I lived a formless kind of existence, days dissolving into the nights. I had no office to go to, no job to keep, and I was 30 years old, an age at which people either choose to grow up or remain stuck in the exploratory, idle phase of late-late youth. Starting all over again in a foreign country making friends, learning a new language, trying to find your way through a city meant almost certainly choosing the latter. I spent many nights out until the wee hours such as the evening I drank beer with a young Turkish man named Emre, who had attended college with a friend of mine from the US.

A friend had told me that Emre was one of the most brilliant people he had ever met. As the evening passed, I was gaining a lot from his analysis of Turkish politics, especially when I asked him whether he voted for Erdoans Justice and Development party (AKP), and he spat back, outraged, Did you vote for George W Bush? Until that point I had not realised the two might be equivalent.

Then, three beers in, Emre mentioned that the US had planned the September 11 attacks. I had heard this before. Conspiracy theories were common in Turkey; for example, when the military claimed that the PKK, the Kurdish militant group, had attacked a police station, some Turks believed the military itself had done it; they believed it even in cases where Turkish civilians had died. In other words, the idea was that rightwing forces, such as the military, bombed neutral targets, or even rightwing targets, so they could then blame it on the leftwing groups, such as the PKK. To Turks, bombing ones own country seemed like a real possibility.

Come on, you dont believe that, I said.

Why not? he snapped. I do.

But its a conspiracy theory.

He laughed. Americans always dismiss these things as conspiracy theories. Its the rest of the world who have had to deal with your conspiracies.

I ignored him. I guess I have faith in American journalism, I said. Someone else would have figured this out if it were true.

He smiled. Im sorry, theres no way they didnt have something to do with it. And now this war? he said, referring to the war in Iraq. Its impossible that the United States couldnt stop such a thing, and impossible that the Muslims could pull it off.

Some weeks later, a bomb went off in the Istanbul neighborhood of Gngren. A second bomb exploded out of a garbage bin nearby after 10pm, killing 17 people and injuring 150. No one knew who did it. All that week, Turks debated: was it al-Qaida? The PKK? The DHKP/C, a radical leftist group? Or maybe: the deep state?

The deep state a system of mafia-like paramilitary organisations operating outside of the law, sometimes at the behest of the official military was a whole other story. Turks explained that the deep state had been formed during the cold war as a way of countering communism, and then mutated into a force for destroying all threats to the Turkish state. The power that some Turks attributed to this entity sometimes strained credulity. But the point was that Turks had been living for years with the idea that some secret force controlled the fate of their nation.

In fact, elements of the deep state were rumoured to have had ties to the CIA during the cold war, and though that too smacked of a conspiracy theory, this was the reality that Turkish people lived in. The sheer number of international interventions the US launched in those decades is astonishing, especially those during years when American power was considered comparatively innocent. There were the successful assassinations: Patrice Lumumba, prime minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo, in 1961; General Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, also in 1961; Ngo Dinh Diem, president of South Vietnam, in 1963. There were the unsuccessful assassinations: Castro, Castro, and Castro. There were the much hoped-for assassinations: Nasser, Nasser, Nasser. And, of course, US-sponsored, -supported or -staged regime changes: Iran, Guatemala, Iraq, Congo, Syria, Dominican Republic, South Vietnam, Indonesia, Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, Uruguay and Argentina. The Americans trained or supported secret police forces everywhere from Cambodia to Colombia, the Philippines to Peru, Iran to Vietnam. Many Turks believed that the US at least encouraged the 1971 and 1980 military coups in Turkey, though I could find little about these events in any conventional histories anywhere.

But what I could see was that the effects of such meddling were comparable to those of September 11 just as huge, life-changing and disruptive to the country and to peoples lives. Perhaps Emre did not believe that September 11 was a straightforward affair of evidence and proof because his experience his reality taught him that very rarely were any of these surreally monumental events easily explainable. I did not think Emres theory about the attacks was plausible. But I began to wonder whether there was much difference between a foreigners paranoia that the Americans planned September 11 and the Americans paranoia that the whole world should pay for September 11 with an endless global war on terror.

The next time a Turk told me she believed the US had bombed itself on September 11 (I heard this with some regularity; this time it was from a young student at Istanbuls Boazii University), I repeated my claim about believing in the integrity of American journalism. She replied, a bit sheepishly, Well, right, we cant trust our journalism. We cant take that for granted.

The words take that for granted gave me pause. Having lived in Turkey for more than a year, witnessing how nationalistic propaganda had inspired peoples views of the world and of themselves, I wondered from where the belief in our objectivity and rigour in journalism came. Why would Americans be objective and everyone else subjective?

I thought that because Turkey had poorly functioning institutions they didnt have a reliable justice system, as compared to an American system I believed to be functional it often felt as if there was no truth. Turks were always sceptical of official histories, and blithely dismissive of the governments line. But was it rather that the Turks, with their beautiful scepticism, were actually just less nationalistic than me?

American exceptionalism had declared my country unique in the world, the one truly free and modern country, and instead of ever considering that that exceptionalism was no different from any other countrys nationalistic propaganda, I had internalised this belief. Wasnt that indeed what successful propaganda was supposed to do? I had not questioned the institution of American journalism outside of the standards it set for itself which, after all, was the only way I would discern its flaws and prejudices; instead, I accepted those standards as the best standards any country could possibly have.

By the end of my first year abroad, I read US newspapers differently. I could see how alienating they were to foreigners, the way articles spoke always from a position of American power, treating foreign countries as if they were Americas misbehaving children. I listened to my compatriots with critical ears: the way our discussion of foreign policy had become infused since September 11 with these officious, official words, bureaucratic corporate military language: collateral damage, imminent threat, freedom, freedom, freedom.

Even so, I was conscious that if I had long ago succumbed to the pathology of American nationalism, I wouldnt know it even if I understood the history of injustice in America, even if I was furious about the invasion of Iraq. I was a white American. I still had this fundamental faith in my country in a way that suddenly, in comparison to the Turks, made me feel immature and naive.

I came to notice that a community of activists and intellectuals in Turkey the liberal ones were indeed questioning what Turkishness meant in new ways. Many of them had been brainwashed in their schools about their own history; about Atatrk, Turkeys first president; about the supposed evil of the Armenians and the Kurds and the Arabs; about the fragility of their borders and the rapaciousness of all outsiders; and about the historic and eternal goodness of the Turkish republic.

It is different in the United States, I once said, not entirely realising what I was saying until the words came out. I had never been called upon to explain this. We are told it is the greatest country on earth. The thing is, we will never reconsider that narrative the way you are doing just now, because to us, that isnt propaganda, that is truth. And to us, that isnt nationalism, its patriotism. And the thing is, we will never question any of it because at the same time, all we are being told is how free-thinking we are, that we are free. So we dont know there is anything wrong in believing our country is the greatest on earth. The whole thing sort of convinces you that a collective consciousness in the world came to that very conclusion.

Wow, a friend once replied. How strange. That is a very quiet kind of fascism, isnt it?

It was a quiet kind of fascism that would mean I would always see Turkey as beneath the country I came from, and also that would mean I believed my uniquely benevolent country to have uniquely benevolent intentions towards the peoples of the world.

During that night of conspiracy theories, Emre had alleged, as foreigners often did, that I was a spy. The information that I was collecting as a journalist, Emre said, was really being used for something else. As an American emissary in the wider world, writing about foreigners, governments, economies partaking in some larger system and scheme of things, I was an agent somehow. Emre lived in the American world as a foreigner, as someone less powerful, as someone for whom one newspaper article could mean war, or one misplaced opinion could mean an intervention by the International Monetary Fund. My attitude, my prejudice, my lack of generosity could be entirely false, inaccurate or damaging, but would be taken for truth by the newspapers and magazines I wrote for, thus shaping perceptions of Turkey for ever.

Years later, an American journalist told me he loved working for a major newspaper because the White House read it, because he could influence policy. Emre had told me how likely it was I would screw this up. He was saying to me: first, spy, do no harm.

Main photograph: Burak Kara/Getty Images for the Guardian

Adapted from Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World by Suzy Hansen, which will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on 15 August

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Unlearning the myth of American innocence - The Guardian

The Right Thing About the Wrong Beliefs – Patheos (blog)

Ive decided to think about my beliefs in terms of how I live rather than what my unconscious assumptions are. Because there are lots of people that have all sorts of beautiful beliefs that live really awful lives. If Im on the side of a road bleeding, I dont care if the priest or the Levite have beautiful beliefs about the poor and the hurting Give me the Samaritan. The heretic. The outsider who may have the wrong beliefs in words and concepts but actually lives out the right beliefs by stopping and helping me. Thats the kind of belief Im interested in at this point. Michael Gungor

I came across this quote earlier on a friends facebook post.

Growing up in Alabama I had to come to terms with the fact I held what many considered to be the wrong beliefs. While I enjoyed working to help others I didnt want to proselytize to those who were often at their lowest point. I often say I believe in the power of good human beings working to help each other and I just wanted to leave it at that.

It was a dream come true for me to discover the Humanist Service Corps.

(image credit to Foundation Beyond Belief)

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The Right Thing About the Wrong Beliefs - Patheos (blog)

The ABC’S of Bitcoin and Everything You Need To Know About Forks – HuffPost

99% of Cryptocurrencies are total scams. And, yes, Cryptocurrencies are in a bubble.

BUTthe opportunity is NEVER going away and generational wealth will be made. So you have to know the basics, why this opportunity even exists and what to watch out for.

Heres the problem. Theres around 900 different cryptocurrencies that exist, with new ones being created every week.

I can tell you for sure: 95% of the cryptocurrencies are scams or Ponzi schemes. And I get questions every day: Is XYZ currency a scam? And nobody listens to the answer.

Everyone is convinced they are right. Thats a bad sign. I always tell myself Im the dumbest person in the room. Then I call the smarter people and ask them lots of questions. And then I read everything I can. And in this case, I read the code.

But the opportunity is immense. Think, Internet 1994. Right before the right before.

BC will stand for Before Crypto and AC will stand for After Crypto. We are in AC right now and the world is about to change.

Ive never written about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies before. But theres a reason I want to start now.

Were in a hype bubble.

It doesnt mean cryptos or bad. It doesnt mean you shouldnt buy. It just means.theres a lot of hype and scammers out there. Weve seen this story at least twice before in past 20 years and many people have gotten hurt.

Ive been actively involved in investing in Cryptocurrencies since 2013 (I sold my book, Choose Yourself in a Bitcoin-only store I created a month before I released it on Amazon). And for the past 18 months Ive participated in various ICOs (Internet Coin Offerings) that are all doing well.

I say this just to establish some credentials. I will be writing more frequently about cryptocurrencies simply because I see so many people I know starting to be hurt when, in fact, theres opportunities to make a lot of money in the space.

A simple cryptocurrency transaction looks like this:

A) James wants to send Joe 10bitcoin.

B) James has 100 bitcoins that he has gotten from 500 people who, in turn, got from 10,000 people, and on and on back to the very firstbitcointransaction.

C) James puts together a transaction (technically complicated but simply described as a transaction) and sends it out onto the block chain.

D) A block is a list of transactions.

E) enough miners confirm that the transactions in a block are legit (all of the inputs are legit and all of the outputs are legit. The merchant (in this case, Joe ) can decide how much validation he needs.

F) the bitcoins get transferred

Every step above is much more complicated, but for a reason.

A) a standardized and neutral confirmation policy backed by software that has no human agendas.

Imagine I want to send Joe dollars to buy his house.I need to trust all of the middlemen between Joe and me: local bank, central bank, lawyers, governments, Joes bank, etc to approve of this transactionif I do it in dollars.

This is ok but at each step someone can be untrustworthy. They are all humans, even the government (humans subtly influence the price of the dollar and also share details of the transaction with unfriendly parties (the IRS)).

Also, each step in the above has a transaction cost. So inflation is built into the system.

If this were abitcointransaction, enough miners need to approve that this transaction is valid. So even if a few miners are not trustworthy, the bulk of them will be and we can trust that the transaction between me and Joe is legit.

[This process is complicated. Suffice to say, it works on Bitcoin and any other legit cryptocurrency.]

This is the ENTIRE reason for cryptocurrency: avoid governments, borders, middlemen, extra transaction costs. As well as have high security and avoid forgery.

(there is another reason for cryptocurrency, which is to do more complicated transactions that we can call contracts without lawyers, etc. This reason is sometimes the basis for legit ICOs).

Imagine the history of money. Money is used as a store of value OR as a way to transact without having to use a barter system.

First it was the land you owned and the resources you developed on that land (wheat, grains, etc).

Then it was metals. Gold, silver, etc. You traveled with it by fashioning it into jewelry. Too much gold = harder to travel.

Paper currency. Backed first by gold but thenfaith in God (in God we trust) or government. (Or a pyramidwith an eye in it????)

Electronic currency. Easily transportable. But transaction fees all over the system. Zero privacy.

And the next generation is Cryptocurrency. Easily transportable, little to zero transaction fees, no human intervention between payor and payee, high anonymity, and even functionality.

Money evolves, like anything else, and the natural evolution of money is always as a store of value that is easier to move, more secure, and more private.

Transactions have the same history. And the same issues. How can you transact across a far geographic area with less fees, less costs, less chance for human error, higher security and privacy.

A natural evolution leads go crypto-currency.

Theism ==> Humanism ==> Data-ism

Think about every industry in human history:

Theism: A country planning on going to war would make sacrifices to their gods. Would pray. And would surrender to the fact that whosever god was stronger would win.

Humanism: More people, more bullets, more human intelligence, equals the winner in a war.

Data-ism: This is the war being fought every day right now. We saw tiny snapshot of it with the election but its only a snapshot in a ten year long movie.

The war is on every single day. Its fought in every country. Its fought with data and hacking and piracy.

Theism: Shamans and priests would pray for health or do rituals to enhance health.

Humanism: The doctor knocks your knee, puts hand on head, take two aspiring and call me in the morning

Data-ism: Bloodwork, DNA work, robotic surgeries, fMRIs, Catscans. Statistical matching with massive database of similar scans to do diagnosis. All medicine is starting to be outsourced to data.

Theism: In God We Trust

Humanism: Lets throw a President on there. Lets get the signature of the Secretary of Treasury up there. Dont worry, were good for it. While we print a few trillion without telling anyone.

Data-ism: The natural evolution: Cryptocurrency.

Does this mean Bitcoin is The winner. Buy bitcoin?

No. It just means the natural evolution of currency is arriving and nothing will stop it.

Decentralized. So no one government entity can quietly mint money for their own purposes and have access to your transactions, accounts, etc.

Security. So nobody can forge or steal your money.

Privacy. Your transactions cant be seen and reported to other entitles.

Functionality. This is the more technical parts of the blockchain in Cryptocurrencies but suffice to say some of the intrinsic value of a coin is the functionality and computational power used to mine that functionality.

Theres not going to be ONE winner.

Just like there is not one paper currency (or metal currency). Theres dollars, Euros, pesos.

The difference is: those currencies have geographic borders.

Cryptocurrencies have use borders. ZCash might be used by people requiring higher anonymity. Filecoin might be used by people requiring decentralized storage. Dash might be used be people requiring faster transactions.

The borders are created when more problems are solved. Which is a true innovation for currency.

As opposed to borders (and supply) being created by geographic boundaries, central banks with secret control, or a gold mine down the block.

With Bitcoin, a list of transactions is sent out to the network in the form of a block. Miners, who are slowly paid in more bitcoin up to a maximum of 21,000,000 validate a transaction.

If a transaction doesnt make it into a block (on Bitcoin) it waits a certain period of time to get into the next block.

This means it might take more time (a problem).

Another problem is that everyone can see the transaction on what is called the blockchain. They cant see who it was but they can see the size and other details. (a problem).

Sometimes software can provide a solution (a coffee shop can say, Ill verify the transaction anyway and trust that in ten minutes Ill know for sure and theres not a lot of risk in this).

But a software layer involves humans and human error and human evil. Hence there are scammers and Ponzi scheme and theft (just like with paper currencies).

The good news is these are problems that can be eliminated.

Just like Internet software since 1991 solved (although always improving) the problems of speed, security, transactions, privacy, more functionality, etc think of cryptocurrencies as the Internet of Money.

These problems are being solved.

Either with new currencies (examples: Ether, Dash, filecoin, etc) some of which may be scam currencies, others may be legit. Time and research will tell (just like with the Internet in 1995)OR with forks in currencies, like what is happening today with Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash.

SO WHAT IS BITCOIN CASH AND WHAT SHOULD I DO?

Bitcoin Cash tries to solve the problem of how can I buy a cup of coffee with bitcoin without using the software layer of Bitcoin.

Remember, if a transaction doesnt make it onto a block that is then sent out into the network to be validated, it has to wait.

Bitcoin Cash is simply the same as Bitcoin, except it increases the size of a block from 1MB to 8MB. Hence, faster transactions.

The reason that many exchanges are nervous about this hardfork is:

A) its never happened before. So there could be the possibility that smart developers can find a flaw in the process and steal money.

B) A fork is similar to a human election. We had a choice between Clinton and Trump and forked to Trump (not an exact analogy but rough).

Bitcoinis designed to limit human involvement as much as possible because all humans have different agendas.

For instance, perhaps China is greatly in favor ofBitcoinCash because they currently have a huge edge on mining and they will be able to amass a large amount ofBitcoinCash before others can.

So the fallout ofBitcoinCash, while probably correct philosophically and from a software point of view, is still unclear from a human point of view.

Same for the development of any new cryptocurrency (although all new currencies need scrutiny on the software side as well). But thisforkis abitmore intense becauseBitcoinis so big and its the first time this has happened.

This leads immediately to some logical conclusions:

What to do right now aboutBitcoinCash and August 1:

A) remove yourbitcoinwallet from exchanges and store it in cold storage. If you google cold storage you can see step by step how to do that.

B) If Bitcoin crashes 20% over the next few days because of this fork, Id be a buyer. The philosophy of Bitcoin remains the same, its still the biggest, and volatility only creates opportunity.

C) If Bitcoin Cash goes up too much, Id sell or sell short, only because we dont really know how people should value it.

Cryptocurrencies are going to be volatile for awhile. So in addition to the basic opportunity (Cryptocurrencies taking over all currencies) there is many additional trading opportunities due to the volatility.

First, back to the basics:

Why does volatility create opportunity?

Because its rare that intrinsic value changes very quickly from day to day.

Example: We know everything there is to know about McDonalds and 1000s of analysts research the company.

The intrinsic value of McDonalds will almost certainly never go down 20% in a day. But if the stock went down 20% in a day (example: a 9/11 event occurs causing a mass fear selloff across all stocks), then MCD becomes a value buy because the volatility exceeded the normal change in value.

If you can identify the Cryptocurrencies that are legitimate and not scams, then you can make a lot of money playing in volatile situations in Cryptocurrencies.

A) Cryptocurrency philosophy is valid and not going anywhere and is a natural evolution in:

a. the history of money from bartering to coins to paper money to data money

b. the history of every industry from theism to humanism to data-ism.

B) Volatility is huge as people determine what coins are real and what arent.

I wrote these basics around the circumstances of the event happening today: The bitcoin fork.

But I also want to begin helping the many people who are being scammed by all sorts of schemes and layers of schemes that are trying to dupe people into buying or trading cryptocurrencies that can be potentially worse than giant Madoff schemes.

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The ABC'S of Bitcoin and Everything You Need To Know About Forks - HuffPost

Stabenow questions ‘censorship’ of ‘climate change’ – The Detroit News

Sen. Debbie Stabenow(Photo: Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)

Washington Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow, ranking Democrat on the Senate Agriculture Committee, wrote Tuesday to Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue demanding an explanation for news reports that agency officials had instructed staff to use weather extremes instead of the term climate change.

The Guardian reported on a series of emails among staff at the USDAs Natural Resources Conservation Service that also suggested avoiding the phrase reduce greenhouse gases in favor of build soil organic matter or increase nutrient use efficiency.

Censoring the agencys scientists and natural resource professionals as they try to communicate these risks and help producers adapt to a changing climate does a great disservice to the men and women who grow the food, fuel, and fiber that drive our economy, not to mention the agencys civil servants themselves, Stabenow wrote to Perdue.

This censorship makes the United States less competitive, less food secure, and puts our rural families and their communities at risk.

The USDA did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday but has pushed back against the news reports, telling POLITICO that there was never a directive from the Natural Resources Conservation Service that using climate change was prohibited, and indicating it was unclear why the officials who wrote the memos had brought up the issue with staff.

Stabenow in her letter asks Perdue whether other USDA officials have issued directives regarding the removal of climate change and related terms.

She also wants to know what impact the terminology change could have on implementation of USDA programs and activities, and whether USDA intends to pursue a formal rule-making or other process to accompany the policy change. She asked for a response by Aug. 23.

As a firm believer in the science that underpins the urgent imperative to address climate change, the content of these emails is of great concern to me, Stabenow wrote.

USDA ought to be unequivocal in pursuing polices that uphold scientific integrity, yet these emails from senior USDA staff appear to run directly counter to such a pursuit. USDA should be open and transparent regarding the findings of agency research and the components of agency program activities that involve the topic of climate change.

President Donald Trump has questioned the whether climate change exists and has not said whether he believes it is caused by human activity.

mburke@detroitnews.com

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Stabenow questions 'censorship' of 'climate change' - The Detroit News

Jonathan Zimmerman column: Liberals worried about censorship forget about Sambo and the KKK – Richmond.com

By Jonathan Zimmerman

Hey, check out those yahoos in Florida! Theyre censoring textbooks!

My fellow progressives have worked themselves into a good liberal lather over a new law in Florida that allows citizens to object to books assigned in the public schools. Promoted by conservative activists, who accused textbooks of fostering left-wing propaganda, the measure lets anyone in the state raise concerns about teaching materials and entitles those who object to a public hearing of their complaints.

Liberals immediately raised the specter of censorship, worrying that schools would purge information about sex, evolution and climate change.

But we should applaud rather than resist the popular scrutiny of textbooks, which has been a force for social justice and equality in other key moments in our past.

If you think otherwise, Ive got three words for you: Little Black Sambo.

Remember Sambo? He was the jolly, ostensibly Indian figure who dotted the pages of elementary school readers and spellers for much of American history.

Sambo became racist shorthand for a docile and childlike African-American who cheerily accepted his subjugation to the white master.

Hes gone from our textbooks, thankfully. And the reason is you guessed it citizen pressure on the schools. Starting in the 1940s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and other African-American organizations issued a steady drumbeat of protest against Little Black Sambo and other types of racism in textbooks.

History books valorized the Ku Klux Klan. Music books featured the original lyrics of Stephen Foster songs, including the N-word and darky. Geography books described Africa as a dark continent of barbarity and superstition.

And in New York City, home to millions of Jews and African-Americans, schools taught an anti-Semitic and racist play called The Kings English.

It told the story of a boat shipwrecked on an island where a black cannibal Kawa Koo threatens to eat all 20 of the survivors.

Eventually, Kawa agrees to let a single passenger survive. The boats white captain, Ripley ORannigan, decides to select the person who speaks the best English. That draws gripes from the boats lone Jewish passenger, Perlheimer, who talks with both hands as he denounces Ripley.

Inklish? Vat for I speak Inklish? Perlheimer asks. I read Yiddische papers. I talk Yiddish mit mein friends. Ripley cuts him off. You may have him, Kawa! he tells the cannibal. America doesnt want him. Hes indigestible.

Black and Jewish protests led the New York schools to drop The Kings English in the early 1950s. Little Black Sambo held on a bit longer, but he mostly disappeared from our textbooks by the late 1960s.

Does that mean racism has been purged from school materials? Of course not. Just two years ago, a Texas citizen discovered that her sons history textbook described slaves as workers who came from Africa to America to work on agricultural plantations.

She objected, of course, and the publisher agreed to revise the offending passage. And that provided an object lesson in American democracy, which is always enhanced by citizen participation.

That doesnt mean every objection is valid, of course. Supporters of the new Florida law took aim at biology books describing evolution and human-made climate change, although both concepts are embraced by almost every informed scientist.

Others condemned history textbooks that allegedly praised government services at the expense of individual initiative and self-reliance.

But the answer to this challenge isnt to cut off citizen challenges, which would also prevent complaints of the sort that the Texas mom made. Nor should we squawk about censorship, which is the ultimate red herring in these debates. Im glad Little Black Sambo and The Kings English were censored, if by that term we mean their removal from the official curriculum. Arent you?

Instead, we liberals should use this occasion to call for more public engagement not less in school affairs. The Florida measure specifies that school boards must conduct an open public hearing about every citizen complaint before an unbiased and qualified hearing officer.

Theres our opening. When conservatives move to eliminate material about climate change or evolution, we need to flood these hearings to defend it. Weve got knowledge on our side, just as we did in the case of Little Black Sambo.

Depictions of slavery as a benign institution werent simply racist or offensive, although they were surely that. They were false.

Condemning the new Florida measure, one Democratic state legislator warned it could let anybody come in and complain about the history of slavery, or the fact that maybe we shouldnt have evolution in our textbooks. He was right, but it would be wrong to prevent that.

If you dont like what the schools are teaching, raise your voice. In America, thats the only way we get closer to the truth.

Jonathan Zimmerman, who teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author (with Emily Robertson) of The Case for Contention: Teaching Controversial Issues in American Schools (University of Chicago Press, 2017). Email at jlzimm@aol.com.

2017, The Philadelphia Inquirer

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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‘Censorship is for losers’: WikiLeaks offers fired Google engineer a job – BetaNews

Julian Assange has reached out to James Damore, the software engineer fired by Google for publishing an "anti-diversity manifesto." The WikiLeaks founder used his Twitter account (currently sporting a fake "verified" badge) to offer him a job.

Linking to an article entitled "Google Is Not What It Seems" about his book When Google Met Wikileaks, Assange said: "Censorship is for losers. @WikiLeaks is offering a job to fired Google engineer James Damore."

As well as the offer of a job for Damore, Assange criticized Google for what he sees as censorship, suggesting that employees should not be fired for "politely expressing ideas." The response on Twitter was not particularly positive, with many people calling out Assange for his definition of censorship and calling for him to vacate the Ecuadorian embassy where he remains holed up.

Assange posted a series of five tweets:

With no details given of what the job offer entails, the Twitter rant seems more like an excuse for Assange to revisit a favorite topic of his and sound off at the expense of Google. As for Damore -- from whom little has been heard -- the chances are he will not be short of job offers.

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'Censorship is for losers': WikiLeaks offers fired Google engineer a job - BetaNews

Wikileaks’ Julian Assange Just Offered Google’s Fired Anti-Diversity Employee a Job – Fortune

WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange has offered a job to James Damore, a Google employee who was fired after he wrote a scathing internal memo criticizing the company's diversity policies .

"Censorship is for losers, WikiLeaks is offering a job to fired Google engineer James Damore," Assange wrote on Twitter Tuesday. In the same post, Assange also linked to a WikiLeaks article he wrote called "Google Is Not What It Seems."

Damore, a now-former engineer at Google, accused the Silicon Valley web giant of suppressing conservative voices in a 10-page memo called Googles Ideological Echo Chamber ," which was circulated over the weekend.

[W]hen it comes to diversity and inclusion, Googles left bias has created a politically correct monoculture that maintains its hold by shaming dissenters into silence," the memo, which was initially published anonymously, said. He later confirmed in an email to Bloomberg that he had been dismissed for "perpetuating gender stereotypes."

Google CEO Sundar Pichai told employees on Monday that parts of Damore's memo "violate our Code of Conduct and cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace."

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Wikileaks' Julian Assange Just Offered Google's Fired Anti-Diversity Employee a Job - Fortune

Fearing Trump Censorship, Govt. Scientists Leak Alarming Climate Report – Common Dreams


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Fearing Trump Censorship, Govt. Scientists Leak Alarming Climate Report
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Fearing Trump Censorship, Govt. Scientists Leak Alarming Climate Report. Published on. Tuesday, August 08, 2017. by. Common Dreams. Fearing Trump Censorship, Govt. Scientists Leak Alarming Climate Report. Scientists at 13 federal agencies released ...
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Why ‘Free Speech’ Couldn’t Save That Google Engineer’s Job – Money Magazine

After a memo proclaiming women are underrepresented in tech because of biological differences between the sexes and not because of discrimination went viral , a Google employee is now out of a job in what's become one of the most public firings of the year. As with anything provocative (and tech-related), social media is aflame with differing opinions on whether or not circulating a memo disparaging the core values of your company is a fireable offense.

So is it?

Those who don't support firing the engineer who wrote the memo say that dissenting opinions are good for businesses, and that no one should be fired for exercising their right to free speech. Unfortunately, you don't actually have any free speech rights in the workplace. The First Amendment limits the government's ability to suppress free speech, not an employer's. If you're an at-will employee, which most Americans are (unless you're in a union), your boss can fire you for pretty much any reason. (The only people exempted from this are those employed by the government .) The Constitution does not guarantee you employment.

As Bloomberg Businessweek notes, federal statutes "limit companies rights to fire or hire workers and prevent them from joining unions ... based only on race, religion, ethnicity, sex, age, and a few other protected categories." Beyond that, though, employees can be fired for pretty much any reason. (A few states have limited protections for political speech, per the American Bar Association .)

In a letter to employees , Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the engineer was fired not for simply expressing unpopular opinions, but for perpetuating "harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace" and violating the company's Code of Conduct, adding,

The memo has clearly impacted our co-workers, some of whom are hurting and feel judged based on their gender. Our co-workers shouldnt have to worry that each time they open their mouths to speak in a meeting, they have to prove that they are not like the memo states, being agreeable rather than assertive, showing a lower stress tolerance, or being neurotic.

Creating a hostile work environment, as people are suggesting Damore did, is certainly grounds for termination. It also comes at a time when Silicon Valley is facing repeated criticism for gender discrimination (Uber anyone? ) and for Google, this has become a PR and HR nightmare. His actions likely caused lost productivity company-wide, and as Pichai noted, are having tremendously negative impacts on his co-workers, including reportedly causing some to consider leaving the company.

The big issue with this case is that the memo was not circulated among a small group of people or posted privately. No one exposed the man's beliefs against his will. He purposefully sent them out to the entire company, on a work platform, and directly questioned the judgement of his managers and the leaders of the company, in addition to informing his female coworkers that he viewed them as biologically incapable of doing their job well. Whether or not companies and bosses should fire employees because of these types of actions and politically incorrect rhetoric is a different question entirely . The laws are clear, and it's not just Google where that type of behavior wouldn't be tolerated.

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Why 'Free Speech' Couldn't Save That Google Engineer's Job - Money Magazine

Of Course James Damore Is Now a Free Speech Martyr – Slate Magazine

The Googleplex in Menlo Park, California, on Nov. 4.

Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images

James Damore, the Google employee fired for circulating an internal memo decrying the companys gender diversity efforts, is well on his way to becoming a right-wing martyr. Julian Assange has offered him a job with WikiLeaks. The right-wing social media platform Gab has offered him a job as well. As of this writing, WeSearchr, the alt-right crowdfunding tool, has raised more than $8,000 for him. A National Review piece equates the hapless engineer with Martin Luther, saying hes nailed 95 theses to the door of the Church of PC. Some people are tweeting the hashtag #JeSuisJamesDamore.

Michelle Goldberg is a columnist for Slate and the author, most recently, of The Goddess Pose.

I groaned when I read that Damore had lost his job, as much as he probably deserved it, because this reaction was inevitable. There are few things the right loves more than basking in its own sense of victimization, especially when it can claim the mantle of free speech while doing so. Indeed, one of Steve Bannons great political innovations lay in realizing that the rage of atomized men who live online could be harnessed for political ends. As Bannons biographer, Joshua Green, writes in his best-selling Devils Bargain: He envisioned a great fusion between the masses of alienated gamers, so powerful in the online world, and the right-wing outsiders drawn to Breitbart by its radical politics and fuck-you attitude. Damores firing is the sort of thing that cements this squalid alliance. Its a gift to the troll armies.

Thats true even though Damores firing doesnt mean what the right says it does. As conservatives see it, Damore lost his job for a thought crime. He opposed Googles politically correct monoculture and articulated, in a nonconfrontational way, what a lot of people probably believe: that at least some occupational gender differences are biologically based. Im simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we dont see equal representation of women in tech and leadership, Damore wrote, adding, Many of these differences are small and theres significant overlap between men and women, so you cant say anything about an individual given these population level distributions.

That sounds, if not right, then at least not unreasonable. One could describe the tone of this memo as cooperative, writes Michael Brendan Dougherty in the National Review. The author doesnt make any claims that he is victimized. He doesnt accuse anyone in particular of being unqualified. But the response it received wasnt argument, it was anathematization. This isnt quite true; Damore laments that the shaming of conservative views creates a psychologically unsafe environment, an ironic complaint from a critic of political correctness. But Dougherty is correct that Damore repeatedly nods to the value of diversity. He presents himself as an open-minded sort who is just trying to be helpful, though he seems to think that rational conversation begins with everyone accepting his premises. Once we acknowledge that not all differences are socially constructed or due to discrimination, we open our eyes to a more accurate view of the human condition which is necessary if we actually want to solve problems, Damore writes.

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He is a familiar typeone who postures as a brave truth-teller passing around sexism like samizdat.

To his supporters, it appears as if Damore was fired for refusing to take the position that all gender differences are socially constructed or due to discrimination. Silicon Valley has a very peculiar definition of diversity that requires proportional representation from every gender and race, all of whom must think exactly alike, writes Elaine Ou in Bloomberg View. But this is a red herring. Damore wasnt fired for harboring stereotyped views about women. He was fired for putting those views into a memo and disseminating it throughout the company in a way that calls his colleagues competence into question. Damore describes women as having more [o]penness directed towards feelings and aesthetics rather than ideas. Noting that women suffer, on average, more neuroticism than men, he suggests, This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs. Damore has every right to believe this. He should have a right to express these beliefs outside work; there are countless online communities where men are welcome to discuss womens inherent shortcomings at length. Whether Damore has a right to express his views about women internally, and then expect women to be willing to work with him, is another question.

This incident put Google in a difficult position. Fire Damore, and it seems to affirm his complaints about the companys intolerance for conservative ideas. Keep him, and deal with the internal effects on morale, cohesion, and recruitment. As Yonatan Zunger, who until recently had a senior role at Google, wrote in an open letter to Damore, Do you understand that at this point, I could not in good conscience assign anyone to work with you? I certainly couldnt assign any women to deal with this, a good number of the people you might have to work with may simply punch you in the face, and even if there were a group of like-minded individuals I could put you with, nobody would be able to collaborate with them.

Getting rid of Damore thus might have been the right thing for Google. But the fact that he will now be a reactionary culture hero is bad for the rest of us. He is a familiar typeone who postures as a brave truth-teller passing around sexism like samizdat. These men draw power from being censored. We flatter them when we treat them as dangers rather than fools.

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Of Course James Damore Is Now a Free Speech Martyr - Slate Magazine

Lena Dunham & Google Demonstrate Eroding Free Speech Culture … – National Review

When I talk about free speech, I often ask the audience two questions. First, did you know that the Supreme Court has been steadily expanding free-speech rights? Second, do you feel freer to speak now than you did five years ago? The answers are always the same some variation of no and heck, no.

The first assertion is undoubtedly true. Federal courts have consistently protected free speech from government interference and have been relentless in shutting down viewpoint discrimination. When government officials target speech because of a speakers views, they lose time and again.

At the same time, millions of Americans are extraordinarily reluctant to express even the most mainstream of (particularly) social conservative views. Theyre convinced that if they do that, theyll be publicly humiliated, investigated, and perhaps even lose their jobs. Theyre convinced that outspoken liberals enjoy greater opportunity in key sectors of the economy, and if conservatives want to thrive, they best keep their opinions to themselves.

Two recent incidents highlight this concern. The first comes courtesy of actress Lena Dunham, the paradigm of the celebrity social-justice warrior. Early last Thursday morning, she tweeted at American Airlines that shed heard two of its employees engaged in transphobic talk. Specifically, she said she heard two flight attendants talk about how they thought transgenderism was gross, and theyd never accept a trans kid. She did not see them harassing anyone. She was simply eavesdropping on a conversation.

How did American Airlines respond? By launching an investigation into the offending employees (they couldnt substantiate Dunhams claims). Is that now the standard? Will American Airlines investigate employees without any allegation that theyve actually mistreated a single customer merely on the grounds that their employees private conversation offended a leftist?

The second incident comes courtesy of Google, one of the most powerful corporations on the planet. An anonymous employee penned a multi-page memo addressing why there are fewer women than men in key fields in the tech industry. In the memo, he noted that Google values gender and racial diversity but has created an ideological echo chamber where some ideas are too sacred to be honestly discussed. This means that Google responds to gender imbalances with extreme and authoritarian measures. At the extreme, it views all gender disparities as due to oppression. Its authoritarian response is to discriminate to correct this oppression.

The writer than explores at length cultural and biological differences between men and women and then proposes some measures to increase female representation in the field without resorting to discrimination.

And how did his colleagues respond? How did Google respond? Employees demanded that he be fired. Google then penned a response that contained this ominous paragraph:

Part of building an open, inclusive environment means fostering a culture in which those with alternative views, including different political views, feel safe sharing their opinions. But that discourse needs to work alongside the principles of equal employment found in our Code of Conduct, policies, and anti-discrimination laws.

That was a thinly veiled warning. Speak your mind, but know that HR is looking over your shoulder. And late Monday, Google lowered the boom. It fired software engineer James Damore for perpetuating gender stereotypes. He wrote a memo describing how Google was intolerant of dissenting voices. Google proved his point.

Its important to note that Google and American Airlines are both private corporations. They have enormous latitude to advance their own corporate viewpoints and to regulate the speech of their employees. There is no First Amendment violation here. Theres nothing illegal about fellow employees or corporate employers attempting to squelch the speech of employees who quite literally dissent from the company line.

But just because something is legal does not mean its right, and the result is a crisis in the culture of free speech in the United States. As the politicization of everything proceeds apace, the company line has increasingly moved well beyond promoting its own products to promoting a particular kind of politics. Major corporations and virtually every university in the nation are now political entities just as much as theyre commercial entities, and they wear their progressivism on their sleeves.

The primary victims of this new culture of groupthink are social conservatives and other dissenters from identity politics. In field after field and company after company, conservatives understand that the price of their employment is silence. Double standards abound, and companies intentionally try to keep work environments safe from disagreement. Radical sexual and racial politics are given free rein. Disagree and lose your job.

It takes a person of rare constitution and moral courage to speak up. And thats precisely how the far Left likes it. After all, what value is there in disagreement? Theyve figured out that elusive path to racial, gender, and sexual justice, and disagreement only distracts. It does worse than distract. It wounds.

But take heart, conservatives. Its not all bleak. After all, the government is highly unlikely to persecute you for your speech. And if you want to succeed in cutting-edge businesses or enjoy equal opportunityin the academy, you do have one good option. You can shut your mouth.

READ MORE: The Anti-Diversity Screed That Wasnt Google Receives 95 Theses of Diversity and Inclusion Justifying Exclusion through Diversity

David French is a senior writer for National Review, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, and an attorney.

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Lena Dunham & Google Demonstrate Eroding Free Speech Culture ... - National Review

Do not legislate campus free speech – Albany Times Union

The following editorial appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

Rep. Jim Jordan, a Republican from Ohio, recently led a hearing on Capitol Hill about free speech on American campuses. Freedom of speech and thought are at risk in colleges and universities. But congressional intervention is a nonstarter. At the hearing, conservative commentator Ben Shapiro said that in speaking on college campuses, he's "encountered anti-free-speech measures, administrative cowardice, even physical violence."

In just the past year, Americans have seen a scholar greeted with a riot at a prominent liberal-arts college and a professor warned to leave campus to keep himself safe. The disinvitation of controversial speakers is now commonplace, as is the restriction of free speech to designated areas on campuses. And in a 2016 survey, a majority of college students agreed that the culture on their campus stopped some people from speaking their minds, lest they offend others.

This is wrong, and for the university, tragic. Colleges that become hostile environments for unpopular ideas or ideas that contradict a certain ideology are betraying themselves and their students.

It's good to see that the problem of free speech on campus is getting attention. But federal intervention is decidedly not the answer, as the First Amendment to the Constitution makes clear.

A federal campus-speech law might, in the end, have a chilling effect on speech. Suppose, for example, that the law required colleges to punish students who shout down speakers.

The university must police itself. Free speech, and the open market of ideas, is all the regulation a free society requires, or should tolerate.

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Do not legislate campus free speech - Albany Times Union

Editorial: Anti-boycott bill threatens free speech – The Recorder – The Recorder

The American Civil Liberties Union considers the proposed Israeli Anti-Boycott Act, which is working its way through Congress, a serious threat to free speech. We agree.

The act targets an international effort to boycott businesses in Israel and occupied Palestinian territories to pressure Israel to comply with international law and to stop the further construction of settlements on occupied Palestinian lands.

The bill would threaten large fines and prison time for businesses and individuals who dont buy from Israeli companies operating in occupied Palestinian territories, and who make statements, including social media posts, saying that they are doing so in order to boycott.

The bill would make it a felony to support the international boycott. Those found in violation would be subject to a minimum civil penalty of $250,000, a maximum criminal penalty of $1 million and 20 years in prison, according to the ACLUs analysis.

The global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, or BDS, began after Palestinian civil society organizations in 2005 called for a boycott to pressure Israel over its treatment of Palestinians. Among the movements goals: ending the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and Golan Heights; equality under Israeli law for Arab citizens; and stopping the expansion of almost exclusively Jewish settlements in Israeli-occupied territories, which the United Nations says is a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Detractors say that BDS unfairly targets Israel, with the Anti-Defamation League going so far as to say it is the most prominent effort to undermine Israels existence. Supporters, however, say its a nonviolent movement inspired in part by similar actions taken against the apartheid regime in South Africa in the 1980s.

In Massachusetts, U.S. Rep. Richard Neal, D-Springfield, is one of 237 members of the House to co-sponsor the bill.

Neal explained his sponsorship recently by saying, I am opposed to international efforts that attempt to isolate, boycott and delegitimize the State of Israel. If peace in the Middle East is to be achieved, it will only come about through direct negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians I take the views of the ACLU seriously, but remain deeply concerned about a movement that demonizes our close ally and rejects a two-state solution.

While we support Israels right to exist and our countrys historic alliance with Israel against its enemies, we should not let that trump the right of our citizens to express their political views through boycott without fear of retribution from a government that disagrees with their political stance. Today Israel, tomorrow what?

The ACLU is right to dig in on this. Its the edge of the proverbial slippery slope.

If members of Congress want to lend their support to Israel, then let them lend their voices, but not try to stifle the voices of their fellow citizens.

Other countries including France and Britain have enacted similar anti-boycott measures, but that doesnt make it right or mean we should follow suit. For more than 200 years America has seen itself as the champion of personal freedom and democracy, and we shouldnt now abandon that leadership role in the world.

As the ACLU has argued, individuals, not the government, should have the right to decide whether to support boycotts against practices they oppose.

The civil liberties organization has pointed to the 1982 Supreme Court case National Association for the Advancement of Colored People v. Claiborne Hardware Co., in which the court ruled that nonviolent advocacy of politically motivated boycotts is protected as free speech.

Meanwhile, a somewhat similar bill is moving through the state Legislature and would prevent those who have contracts with the state from refusing, failing or ceasing to do business with anybody based on their race, color, creed, religion, sex, national origin, gender identity or sexual orientation. But some of the bills backers have explicitly stated that the goal is to target the anti-Israel boycott as a movement.

Joseph Levine, a philosophy professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a member of Western Mass. Jewish Voice for Peace, testified against the state bill recently for the same reason he thinks the federal proposal is bad policy.

As a Jewish American growing up in the generation right after the Holocaust, I am well aware of the frightening consequences that attend social toleration for racism in all its forms, particularly anti-Semitism, Levine said in his testimony. But I strongly oppose this act because I believe it actually fosters, rather than combats, discrimination.

I think the bill is horrible. It is a clear violation of peoples right to express their opinion It represents a frightening kind of authoritarianism that would be absolutely horrible and a terrible precedent if it passed.

The anti-boycott act is a rare bipartisan effort in 2017, with 31 Republican and 14 Democrat co-sponsors, and a similar House bill has 117 Republican and 63 Democrat co-sponsors.

Normally, we would applaud such bipartisanship, that would see the likes of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, joining the likes of Sens. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio to cosponsor the bill. But as the ACLU presses its arguments, some are having second thoughts.

Gillibrands office said she had a different understanding of the bill than the ACLU, but she expressed a desire to change it.

We were relieved to hear that after the ACLU raised the alarm some federal legislators were reviewing their support of the bill and hope that Congressman Neal will do the same.

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Editorial: Anti-boycott bill threatens free speech - The Recorder - The Recorder

Free-speech rights don’t apply in the American workplace, as Google demonstrates – Quartz

Americans believe deeply in their right to speak freely and will proudly cite the First Amendment of the US Constitution to support it. Theres often a fundamental misunderstanding about what kind of speech is protected precisely, and Americans tend to believe they are more free than they really are.

In fact, employers in the US can fire almost anyone for almost any reason or no reason at all, as long as the termination is not discriminatory or retaliatory. This means that James Damore, the Googler fired for writing an internal anti-diversity memo claiming women arent biologically suited to engineering, probably will not have a viable wrongful-termination suit against his former employer.

Constitutional protections apply to government action, not private entities. The First Amendment provides that Congress shall make no lawabridging the freedom of speech, or of the press. In other words, the government cant limit your speech. A company certainly can under most circumstances: Google and other companies can fire employees for saying things that displease the bosses, with limited exceptions.

Of course, Googles termination of Damore does seem retaliatory since it follows the release and broad discussion of his memo. Thats not necessarily a problem for the company from a legal perspective.

Unless Damore can somehow prove that conservative male technologists are a protected class and that the company retaliated against him for exercising his right to speak freely under federal or state anti-discrimination law, Google likely would be OK. Considering that Google is also facing a US Department of Labor lawsuit for discrimination in the pay and hiring of female employees, it seems highly unlikely Damore will succeed in any legal action, His memo only supports the discrimination clams made by women, which led to the US investigation, and undermines Googles arguments that it ensures equal treatment in the workplace.

Damore told Bloomberg News that hes exploring his legal options. His chances of winning are probably quite limitedor perhaps nonexistentgiven the context of his termination.

Federal law prohibits terminating employees because of their race, gender, national origin, disability, religion, genetic information, or age (if above 40 years old). It also prohibits most employers from firing someone for being pregnant or having a medical condition related to pregnancy or childbirth.

Employers cant legally retaliate against employees who speak up about discrimination, assist in a government investigation, or refuse to participate in or choose to expose a companys illegal actions. A terminated employee who can prove one of those things will succeed in a wrongful-termination retaliation claim. Still, thats not so easy. To advance such a claim, an employee must prove three findings:

As the fact appear to be known, it seems highly unlikely Damore will succeed in a wrongful-termination suit. Yet he has already succeeded in making his employment and termination more widely known in the media than the plight of the women who say they were underpaid or never hired at Google. And now he has a job offer from Julian Assange.

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Free-speech rights don't apply in the American workplace, as Google demonstrates - Quartz