Withdrawing from the Paris Accord: Trump is behaving like a nihilist, not a nationalist – Los Angeles Times

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To the editor: President Trump cited nationalism as his primary reason for withdrawing the United States from the Paris Climate Accord. (The clearest evidence yet that Trump is turning the U.S. into a force for bad in the world, editorial, June 1)

Nationalists are proud of their country and have a positive view of their future, although at some times badly skewed. I don't see any pride or positive energy coming from the Trump camp.

Instead, I would describe his action as one of nihilism, based on the historical definition of it is as the doctrine of an extreme Russian revolutionary party which found nothing to approve of in the established social order. The current attitude of Trump supporters is nothing more than tribal solipsism tinged with incoherence and unabashed greed.

Trump cant start to move the United States out of the Paris deal until 2019. A lot can happen between now and then, and given the pace of events since Trump was elected, it probably will.

Barbara Snider, Huntington Beach

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To the editor: Thirty years ago, the international community understood the grave danger of ozone depletion and came together to sign the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer. Through this multinational effort, nations showed the benefit of working together for the common good and for the well-being of each nation in a globalized world.

As a result of this cooperation, the ozone layer over Antarctica has started to recover.

This spirit of cooperation was lost the moment Trump set our nation and the world on a backward course. Who would have imagined that 1987 would have been a more enlightened time than 2017?

Linda Shahinian, Culver City

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To the editor: Europe and China are taking the lead on climate change. Since when did either of those two deserve to be a standard of moral authority?

I love Europe and have been there at least 30 times. But over the last 100-plus years, that continent has given us two world wars and the toxic trilogy of fascism, communism, and socialism, causing governments around the world to kill millions of their own people and impoverish even more. China has a similar moral history.

To be fair, Africa and the Middle East have also produced horrific states, but I really dont care if Uganda supports the Paris Accord.

David Goodwin, Los Angeles

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To the editor: In the early 1970s, when I was in college, a friend and I spent a summer traveling throughout Europe and Israel. Because the United States was viewed poorly in light of the Vietnam War, we were advised to downplay the fact that we were Americans and pretend that we were actually Canadian.

Now, because of Trumps behavior (specifically his abysmal decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate Accord), it is once again being suggested that while traveling abroad we would save ourselves a significant amount of ridicule if we laid low as Americans.

While most of us are unable to leave our current lives and become Canadians, it might be appropriate to, at least while abroad, pretend we are.

David Esquith, Northridge

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To the editor: A note to our friends and allies worldwide:

Please realize that the majority of Americans do not support abandoning the Paris agreement, reducing our support of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, buddying up to Russia, verbally bullying our closest friends, canceling international trade agreements, building a border wall or banning people from certain Muslim-majority countries.

Only Trump and the most conservative people in his party are for this. Unfortunately, they are currently in control of our government.

We are as aghast as you are. In a few short years, Trump and his co-conspirators will be gone and this nightmare will be over. Please bear with us until we are able to return to normalcy and rejoin the international community in a spirit of universal cooperation.

Steven Levine, Mill Valley, Calif.

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Withdrawing from the Paris Accord: Trump is behaving like a nihilist, not a nationalist - Los Angeles Times

A Defense for Moral Absence – Daily Utah Chronicle

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Christians vs. Mormons vs. Hindus vs. Democrats vs. Republicans vs. Alt-Rights vs. Utilitarians vs. Existentialists vs. [insert belief here]. Isnt it exhausting? The constant squabbling and never ending chain of opposing beliefs. All the debate and fracas about proving who knows best. For eons, humanity has waged wars, founded religions, established governments, etc., all in the name of moral justification.

What if there were no morals? Im not talking about atheism. Some religions and ethicists have circumvented the need for a god/goddess. I am talking about moral truths and laws of right and wrong. Do those exist? I am not going to sell my beliefs to you because I dont have any. Im a nihilist.

First off, lets make a distinction clear. Nihilism and atheism are two separate conclusions. Atheism denies the existence of any god(s) or goddess(es). Atheists are considered independent thinkers, counter-hegemonic, cosmopolitan chic. Of course, while it may be considered blasphemous in Bible Belt country, atheism today is more widely accepted than before. And to be an atheist doesnt necessarily make one a bad person. After all, they have other avenues to believe in like utilitarianism, existentialism or humanism. Greg Epstein, author and Humanist Chaplain at Harvard University, summarizes the beliefs of good atheists in a sentence from his book Good Without God: There is no life after death, so offer kindness to all, not in the next life but now. But where atheists depart from formal religion saying, We dont need a god to be good, I [and other nihilists] reply with Well who said good and bad are real, too?

Nihilism is the assertion that moral truths like good and evil, right and wrong, are as fictitious as the deities atheists denounce. Its no longer a question of deciding what is good and bad without the guidance of a preacher, it is just deciding there is no good or bad to choose from.

After this point, many misconceptions emerge on what being a nihilist means. Again, I am not selling my beliefs to you, but I want to address these common misconceptions of what nihilism entails. Believers have altars and politicians have pulpits to air their defenses. I have a laptop.

The following are common stereotypes and assumptions people make about what nihilism does to a person. Nihilists are considered destructive, untrustworthy, suicidal or just plain confused. That simply is not the case.

The Destructive Nihilist

A nihilist believes there is no true value in words like good and bad. Morality is a conventional tool which humanity created for itself, by itself. For opponents of nihilism, it follows then that nihilists are morally absent and a danger to society. They imagine nihilists murdering and bombing and so on because nihilists wouldnt know how to distinguish between good and bad actions.

My rebuttal: Why are nihilists categorized as inherently destructive? Yes, we dont believe in moral truths, but is demonizing nihilists truly founded? This assumption that nihilists are destructive seems to branch from the argument that people need religion or some equivalent to be a good person. If that is the case, explain the Crusades or ISIS to me. Explain how the most ruthless of kings and destructive of dictators can preach divine appointment or moral justification if its really the nihilists society should be worried about.

In short, having some moral belief is not sufficient on its own for one to be a productive, altruistic member of society. Ultimately, whether nihilist or otherwise, violent people will be violent. The concern is that humanity needs a big book or normative philosophy to prevent unnecessary violence, but that hasnt stopped killers and tyrants before. Just as the pendulum can swing from destructive to altruistic, nihilists can be either or somewhere in between. I choose to be altruistic not because I believe karma or moral goodness expects it, but because I choose to be altruistic for no other reason than to be giving. Nihilists arent all killers, just like how preachers arent all saints.

The Untrustworthy Nihilist

Apparently, you cant trust a nihilist either, at least that is what Ive heard. The stereotype of the deceitful nihilist seems to be concluded after considering if nihilists dont believe in good/bad then they have no ethical obligation to keep promises or duties. In other words, nihilists are liars that will not honor any commitments made with them.

My rebuttal: Liars lie, but not all nihilists are liars. Similar to the destructive nihilist double standard, this assumption implies moral believers dont lie because their morality obligates them to tell the truth. We all know thats not true, so again, belief in morality isnt enough for someone to be completely trustworthy. Some Methodists lie about email scandals and some Evangelical Christians institute scam colleges.

The point is that, again, morality alone isnt sufficient to keep an individual from deceitful behavior, so labeling nihilists as inherently untrustworthy is intellectually dishonest.

The Suicidal Nihilist

This is the idea that morality gives people a purpose in life, and that without it we are empty shells with the bleakest of outlooks. After all, if there is no true meaning to life or moral goodness, then what is there to live for?

My rebuttal: Is life not enough of a reason to live? I understand that life on Earth is no piece of cake. For some people, the world is a cruel, unjust, despicable place. But does it follow then that life is not a sufficient enough reason to live? Do we need some grand deity or moral tally score at the end of our lives to put meaning into living on Earth? I am comfortable with not having an afterlife or cosmic scoreboard tracking my good deeds. I dont feel the need to have my experiences on Earth be validated later on. I still appreciate life and people. I still find art beautiful, rainy days wonderful and cartoons magical. I look up to J. K. Rowling and Nathaniel Hawthorne as great writers, and my family and friends are dear to me. All these statements do not conflict with my belief in nothingness. I understand some may need a moral mission in life, but nihilists are not all suicidal for not having one.

The Fake Nihilist

No, Im not an atheist. No, Im not an existentialist. No, Im not a humanist. No, Im not an agnostic. Nihilism is a harsh position to relate to for many people. Its not like finding similarities between a pastor and rabbi or understanding the doubt of an atheist or agnostic. Nihilism throws everything out the door and rejects the basic concept of morality. Some people handle that by labeling us as confused. They refuse to dignify our belief in moral absence by properly recognizing it instead infantilizing our capability to understand nuanced philosophies and maturity to recognize our own beliefs.

My final rebuttal: Why are you threatened? How does my belief threaten your own spiritual autonomy? It is not as if I am frequenting your home regularly and asking to share the words of Friedrich Nietzsche. I do not set off across the globe in hopes of converting the religiously diverse into a homogenous network of global nihilism.

I respect the beliefs of my family (all of which are one variant of Christianity or another). I respect my friends identify as Buddhist, Muslim, Mormon, Catholic, etc. I do not degrade their beliefs by claiming they just havent figured it out yet or they are just confused. In the same way, I am not confused: I am a nihilist. I am just as capable of making that identification as the next fellow.

Nihilism may not be your cup of tea, and I am not asking for it to be. But in an age where religious tolerance and acceptance are widely paraded, dont forget that it is a diversity of thought that should be respected, not just religion.

letters@chronicle.utah.edu

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Changing This Bumbling Narcissist Impossible, So We Must Depose Him – Common Dreams

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Common Dreams
Changing This Bumbling Narcissist Impossible, So We Must Depose Him
Common Dreams
What some see as a blind tendency to stumble into huge blunders I see as a kind of aggressive nihilism that is much more primed to stumble in some directions than others. If such an assumption is on the right track, it makes no sense to appeal to you ...

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Changing This Bumbling Narcissist Impossible, So We Must Depose Him - Common Dreams

Modi governments greatest trick: Hate the intellectual – DailyO

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In a recent debate over Kashmir, the Twitter handle of the Republic TV, a reliable guide to the dominant state-supported narrative on any issue, belted out: Why intellectualise the problem? Tweet using #NationFirstNoCompromise and speak out.

In another debate, headlined as "Indian against Anti-Nationals", an RSS functionary noted that anti-nationals are of two types: Those who terrorise and those who provide intellectual justification."

Major Gaurav Arya, an in-house expert of the Republic TV, asserted that stone-pelters ought to be declared as terrorists, but are protected by the intellectual ideology weaved around them.

This deliberate opposition between intellectual opinion and "national interest" is not only a constant trope of the Republic TV, but also that of government spokesmen (although, lately, it has been hard to discern the difference between the two).

For almost every major problem Kashmir, Maoism, communalism, Pakistan the government and its enablers have devised a way to deflect all responsibility from its own failures towards a cabal of intellectual insurgents JNU type academics, "Lutyens' journalists", human rights activists, liberal writers, pro-pakistan peaceniks and so forth.

The term intellectual that relates to the ability to think and understand complicated things has itself become somewhat of a slur today. The popular demons in the dominant narrative academics, journalists, human rights activists, writers, rationalists are all persons engaged in professions that require them to think critically and rationally about issues of society and culture.

'This unwillingness or inability to compromise almost always leads to violence, witness the unending violence and repression in Kashmir.'

Unsurprisingly, the views of these groups of people often collide with the worldview of the Sangh Parivar, an institution whose value system is diametrically opposite to the values held by them. The Sangh and their millions of followers privilege values of obedience, loyalty, hierarchy and suspect values of individualism, rationalism and critical thinking. The rise of the Sangh Parivar as the pre-eminent force in Indian culture and politics has therefore inexorably reduced intellectuals from an object of respect to an object of popular loathing.

Richard Hofstadter, historian and author of the acclaimed book, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, defined intellectualism as the understanding of human society in terms of balance of forces and interests based upon the continuing process of compromise. Intellectualism, Hofstadter writes, is sensitive to nuances and sees things in degrees, and is essentially relativist and sceptical.

The present government represents one of our most anti-intellectual governments ever not merely because of its zealous devotion to its (right-wing) ideology, but because of its imperviousness to nuanced thinking and utter rejection of compromise as an essential tool of politics.

The discourse of the government, and the dominant media, is stepped in absolute moral terms, of right and wrong, where compromise is seen as weakness, or worse. The latest illustration is the discourse on Kashmir, where both the government and dominant TV channnels such as Times Now and Republic, have painted the separatists as evil traitors, with whom talks are an unforgivable compromise.

This unwillingness or inability to compromise almost always leads to violence, witness the unending violence and repression in Kashmir. Or look at the recurring episodes of vigilante violence all over the country, a natural consequence of taking an absolutist moral stance on beef eating, one that leaves no room for individual choice.

The violence and the hatred are but the sordid consequences of the fundamental vice a dominant mood of anti-intellectualism. As the Financial Times famously commented in the aftermath of Brexit: When (British Conservative, pro-Brexit politician) Michael Gove said the British people are sick of experts he was right. But can anybody tell me the last time a prevailing culture if anti-intellectualism has lead to anything other than bigotry?."

We have had a right-wing government before, under whom we did not experience a widespread surge of ideologically driven violence as we are witnessing today. Thats because Atal Bihari Vajpayee, a broader-minded person than Modi, had the ability to compromise, and understood that imposing a singular-ideological vision on a diverse country would only lead to violence and instability.

His repeated attempts at talks with Pakistan despite major betrayals, and his outreach and talks with Hurriyat would surely have been characetrised as anti-national treachery in the current atmosphere.

Indeed, Arun Shourie, a prominent member of Vajpayees cabinet, has famously termed the present government as not just anti-intellectual, but anti-intellect.

When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross, Sinclair Lewis had warned. While it would be a stretch to label it fascism, the current atmosphere of overbearing authoritarianism in our country is certainly wrapped in the flag and carries a trishul. The flag is used not to only muzzle dissenting voices, but to smother the very act of critical thinking.

Unquestioning obedience is demanded, any doubts or questions raised over the dominant narrative on Kashmir, Pakistan, Maoists, beef, academic freedom automatically consigns one to the detestable camp of anti-nationals.

Conformity is viewed as a sign of patriotism, while critical thinking is seen as tantamount to treachery.

Demonetisation was a perfect illustration of the morality play our rulers weave. In a digital version of Freudian slip, the word is sometimes autocorrected on the phone as demonisation, which is perhaps not altogether far from what the exercise was intended to accomplish, as it did with great success.

It not only painted the entire opposition as corrupt and self-serving, but more broadly tarnished anyone questioning the rationale or effectiveness of the move as selfish and unpatriotic. The trope of evoking soldiers to make us happily stand in endless lines was telling; for at that moment we were all conscripted as soldiers for the nation, and like good soldiers we were meant to obey and sacrifice without any questions or complaints.

In this militaristic view of society order and discipline is paramount, thinking and rational inquiry are signs of weakness and liberal decadence. Hard work, the PM suggested , was superior to Harvard.

It must be noted that of all the appeals made by the PM to the citizens to gather support for demonetisation, almost every argument was aimed towards the heart, to emotions and morality; none to reason or economic logic. Inevitably, while the economics of demonetisation failed miserably, the politics of it won handsomely.

HL Mencken noted that the most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. The most dangerous prevailing superstition in our country is the unthinking devotion to a narrow-minded concept of nationalism. The fact that many of us today justify things such as the beating up or killing of humans in the name of a scared animal, or tying up a citizen to a jeep and parading him around, or the demonisation of academics, journalists and minorities, or the elevation of a hate-spewing priest to lead a state, is evidence enough that many of us have, in Menckens words, stopped thinking things out for ourselves.

That is the greatest political triumph of the government of the day, as well as the greatest tragedy for the health of our democracy.

Also read: Tough times ahead: Anti-Modi is the new 'intellectual'

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Modi governments greatest trick: Hate the intellectual - DailyO

COLUMN: The statistical fallacy – The Auburn Plainsman

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By Weston Sims | Opinions Editor | 05/31/17 11:10am

Theres a difference between understanding a statistical probability about someone and using that probability to make an assumption about that person.

The former merely involves knowing how to comprehend a statistic, while the latter consists of misusing that statistic to imprison a person inside a generalization or in other words, committing a logical lapse. It denies them their full humanity, their individual autonomy. This assault on personhood is the mechanism by which racism, sexism, xenophobia and a million other degrading modes of thought operate. And its incredibly easy to get caught up in it; humans have a propensity to do so.

By nature, we categorize and simplify to make sense of the complicated world we live in and truth is likely to get lost in translation. We become seekers of simplicity rather than seekers of truth, and oftentimes, others who share this world with us bear the cost.

This cost takes many forms, some more malicious than others. A woman is denied a promotion because of an employers unconscious inclination that women are too emotional to lead. A black man is denied a job because the name on his application has ethnic connotations, and thus all of the baggage that carries in America. A homosexual man is assumed to be more promiscuous than his straight counterpart.

But all are connected through a singular defect: Its a cage crafted from the often unconscious attempts by human beings to categorize other human beings.

Many stereotypes are the result of social conditioning oftentimes through exposure to Hollywood, the news media or society in general and sometimes stereotypes are created and sustained in the cesspool of overt racism. For example, racists will come across a statistic about other human beings like how African Americans in the U.S. have a higher incarceration rate than other races and use that statistic to assume the character of the demographic represented by it. Without caring much for how such statistics come to be, such as through systemic oppression, these statistics give racists a foundational sense of rationalism for their misguided and immoral beliefs. Under the guise of this rationalism, they proceed to strip away room for doubt, that precious space that buffers people from the worst of dogmas. Doing so provides fertile grounds for racist movements.

Once racist movements capture this misguided sense of rationalism, they open themselves to broader appeal, an effect compounded by Western cultures enlightenment influences. One doesnt need to look too deeply into history to see this effect, though the early 20th century provides a stark example; you only have to look at America today with the rise of the Alt-right, a movement whose leader paints himself as an intellectual racist.

Its important we dont fall into the trap of letting a statistic, especially those taken out of context, lead us toward allowing negative stereotypes to shape our minds.

Making an assumption about which horse will win the Kentucky Derby based off statistics must be distinguished from making an assumption about a human being based off statistics. The crucial distinction is that the consequences between the two assumptions are in no way equal.

There are different consequences for betting on the horse race the worst material outcome is you lose money. The worst immaterial outcome may be a loss of pride.

Betting on human beings is a completely different game. Imposing assumptions about human beings, which are often negative, can have terrible, life-changing effects for the victims. In a material sense, people are denied jobs, promotions, housing, and the list goes on. As for immaterial outcomes, people are denied respect, friendship and basic humanity. These negative outcomes often provide a feedback loop with marginalized people being more likely to be pushed into a position of committing actions that lend toward their social exclusion.

Because of the difference in consequences, our decision calculus must adjust accordingly.

We must keep our unconscious biases in check. The trouble is that, while the effects of stereotyping are completely manifest for the victims, the causes are often hidden from the perpetrator under years of social conditioning. Moreover, many perpetrators are under the false assumption that they completely understand their own minds.

If they think they arent a racist, they believe it follows they arent a racist. They believe unconscious biases dont exist, despite the vast amount of research that points to the contrary.

To mitigate this self-deception, we must all confront ourselves with the acknowledgment that we arent completely aware of some of our own beliefs. It will require humility and a great deal of internal debate.

We must leave room for doubt; its the only assurance youre looking for Truth and not a crutch for your world view.

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COLUMN: The statistical fallacy - The Auburn Plainsman

French president to the resistance: The world believes in you – Shareblue Media

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In a political environment where it can be challenging to maintain a sense of hope and optimism about the future, French President Emmanuel Macron offered a soothing balm of rationality and compassion.

After Donald Trumpproclaimedhe was withdrawing the United States from the Paris Accord on climate change, political and corporate leaders both within the U.S. and around the world unanimouslydenounced the move in the strongest terms.

But Macrons approach was different. Like other prominent voices, Macron indeed spoke out against Trumps decision as a mistake for our planet. But in addition to speaking out, Macron also reached out.

He spoke to those of us in the United States who are feeling despair, embarrassment, and hopelessness in the face of Trumps actions. With clarity and conviction, he told the American people that others believe in us, and he even issued an invitation:

To all scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, responsible citizens who were disappointed by the decision of the US: pic.twitter.com/qxjPX8MhKt

Emmanuel Macron (@EmmanuelMacron) June 1, 2017

Tonight, I wish to tell the United States: France believes in you. The world believes in you. I know that you are a great nation. I know your history our common history.

To all scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, responsible citizens who were disappointed by the decision of the President of the United States, I want to say that they will find in France a second homeland. I call on them: Come and work here with us, to work together on concrete solutions for our climate, our environment.

I can assure you: France will not give up the fight.

In striking contrast to Trumps bombastic and grandiose tone, Macron exhibited a return to calm rationalism an approach grounded in the ideology upon which our two countries democracies were founded. With a heartfelt empathy juxtaposed against theisolationist rhetoric of Trumps nationalism, Macron recognized our common humanity, the fate of which ultimately rests in decisions made not within borders but despite and across them:

We all share the same responsibility: make our planet great again. pic.twitter.com/IIWmLEtmxj

Emmanuel Macron (@EmmanuelMacron) June 1, 2017

I call on you to remain confident.We will succeed. Because we are fully committed. Because, wherever we live, whoever we are, we all share the same responsibility: Make our planet great again.

Diametrically opposed to the attempts by Trump and the GOP to leverage fear, tribalism, and the myths of nostalgia to take our nation backward, Macrons words were a gift of encouragement and solidarity not you but we, working together to overcome the divisive forces of avarice and Trumpism at home, and the global rise of white nationalism and rejection of a shared humanity.

Nothing less than the future of all of the worlds children is at stake.Macron knows that. And the majority of the American people do, too.

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Sophisticated Man Is Stupid – American Spectator

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Man is stupid, you know, phenomenally stupid; or rather he is not at all stupid, but he is so ungrateful that you could not find another like him in all creation. I, for instance, would not be in the least surprised if all of a sudden, apropos of nothing, in the midst of general prosperity a gentleman with an ignoble, or rather with a reactionary and ironical, countenance were to arise and, putting his arms akimbo, say to us all: I say, gentlemen, hadnt we better kick over the whole show and scatter rationalism to the winds, simply to send these logarithms to the devil, and to enable us to live once more at our own sweet foolish will! Notes From the Underground, Dostoevsky

The logarithms Dostoevsky was talking about there would be the mathematical representation of all possible human action according to the laws of nature used to plan and build utopia.Rationalia, Neil deGrasse Tyson would have called it, but Dostoevsky chose the Crystal Palace after aglass exhibition hallbuilt in Hyde Park, which lives on in the name of an oft-relegated football club.

In this Crystal Palace, which is most assuredly LEED-certified, everything will be so clearly calculated and explained that there will be no more incidents or adventures in the world. Then this is all what you say new economic relations will be established, all ready-made and worked out with mathematical exactitude, so that every possible question will vanish in the twinkling of an eye, simply because every possible answer to it will be provided.

The Underground Man rejects all this calculation of his best interest, applauding the reactionary gentleman and his stupid followers, and insists: Ones own free unfettered choice, ones own caprice, however wild it may be, ones own fancy worked up at times to frenzyis that very most advantageous advantage which we have overlooked, which comes under no classification and against which all systems and theories are continually being shattered to atoms.

The Underground Man, you could say, is a Trumpkin. Dont let the leaders ironical countenance throw you off the resemblance; another more literal translation renders that a retrograde and jeering physiognomy.

This is the essence of President Trumps decision to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement. Here comes this jeering, ignoble brute kicking over the whole show, when President Obama and the rest of the worlds greatest minds had just finished solving it for us. Certainly, the question of what to do about global warming vanished after models provided every possible answer, didnt it?

Of course, the models continue to spit out every possible answer as in a broad range of possibilities, not a single truth one either accepts or denies and thats for the questions the models are meant to answer. Heres how NASA summarizes the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, on the unknowable questions: An increase of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will probably boost temperatures over most land surfaces, though the exact change will vary regionally. More uncertain but possible outcomes of an increase in global temperatures include increased risk of drought and increased intensity of storms, including tropical cyclones with higher wind speeds, a wetter Asian monsoon, and, possibly, more intense mid-latitude storms. So disasters, possibly. Or possibly not. But its certain that there will be either more disasters or not as many.

Yet leftists and journalists take dubious claims (it is possible to know the future! and we do!) and turn them into policy demands of supposedly incontrovertible merit. The question itself vanishes, ours not to reason why.

But doesnt the Paris agreement, surely, represent the global collective effort we need to save the planet? Well, to save it from an increase of 0.2 C degrees, yes. Thats what researchers at MIT figured would be the collective effect of the non-binding agreement. And thats if everybody else lived up to a plan that would cost us trillions $3 trillion over two decades, according to industry estimates that Trump cited.

Power plants would take a hit of $366 billion over 15 years under Obamas Clean Power Plan, according to industry estimates, but federal rulemaking reaches down into nooks and crannies few of us consider. The hit to the residential dehumidifier industry, which I didnt even know existed, from just one recent green rule is $220 million.

Instead of telling the truth, reporters obscure it. USA Today writes about how were missing out on a chance to develop our green energy industry, as if businesses are too stupid to make money without government telling them how. Business Insider promises devastating long-term economic consequences for the US. The reliably useless CNN Money reports that American businesses dont believe Obamas energy regulations were job killers.

My favorite was an AP news story headlinedLeaving Paris climate agreement unlikely to add U.S. jobs, economists say. The reporter then quoted exactly zero economists agreeing with that headline.

Withdrawing from the Paris agreement is hardly going to create jobs in the U.S., read the money quote from one Cary Coglianese, a professor of law. While specific environmental regulations can sometimes lead to job losses, they also can and do lead to job gains with the result being roughly a wash.

Thats also his position on regulations in general theyre roughly a wash.

A new study by the Competitive Enterprise Institute puts the annual cost of federal regulations at $1.9 trillion. My point isnt simply that the professor is wrong (though I think he is). Its not that there are no economists who would agree with that headline (there are; the far-left Economic Policy Institute, among others, imagines that regulation leads to harmony and efficiency).

There will always be geniuses with detailed plans for how to build the Crystal Palace. I mistrust them all.

Consider the gap between $1.9 trillion and zero. Consider the similarity between the economy and the climate both impossibly vast systems, with a googolplex of moving parts, few of them susceptible to study in isolation. We can identify some general principles and forces by observation certain incentives and physical effects but what do we know for sure? We can model a few things, but what are we leaving out that might matter more?

I think of the depth of research and the quality of data involved in economics, and theres still no consensus on the blueprint for a Crystal Palace. Yet the planners expect us to be impressed with the observations of climatologists. Ah, so clouds are shiny, and it gets hot when you do that one thing. So clearly, the snow in upper Canada and Norway is going to melt and drown us all.

Crystal Palace South transept & south tower from Water Temple, 1854 (Wikimedia Commons)

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Sophisticated Man Is Stupid - American Spectator

Pakistani thought process – Daily Times

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Pakistan started off as a promised land, and after some struggle, started creating promising national and international narratives. The nation succeeded doing that because the society was focused, and created excellence in the given resources of the day. Those who have lived through the Pakistani society in any of the decades from 1950s, to mid-1980s find it hard to believe that they live in the same country that once had more of promise and less of pessimism. The latter did not topple the former by accident. There were political, social and interpretive-religious processes of failures that gave birth to a muddled thinking one finds rampant in a confused population giving way to even more confused youth.

Those who left for greener pastures should try and become loyal citizens of their chosen lands, and leave Pakistan to those who either could not find an opportunity to leave or deliberately chose to stay back

Heres how it happened. The political nexus of civil-military bureaucracy was already undercutting the reason and rationalism in our society since 1956, but the sudden political shifts between 1965 and 1977 bedazzled the collective Pakistani memory. Then the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan began in 1979, and this pushed us into a spiral of conflicts that has further confused the already-confused. This strange war brought death and destruction to our people and their hopes in strange ways. People started losing hopes for a stable, prosperous and peaceful Pakistan for them and their generations. Those who could afford or cheat to migrate, migrated. And while doing so, thousands of pucca Muslims did not even hesitate to obtain fake certificates of declaring themselves Ahamdis, Hindus, Sikhs or Christians when it came to tricking the immigration officers of the foreign governments.

Confused state narratives create confused social narratives, and vice versa. Hence, leaving Pakistan, particularly since 1977s martial law of Gen Ziaul Haq, has been a discussion that probably every lower-to-middle class household in Pakistan has had. The elderly implicitly or explicitly but commonly encouraged the younger to leave. Interestingly, this very stratum of the society comprises of the super-patriots, and the self-proclaimed guardians of the ideological narratives of Pakistan; yet, the discussions! War, any kind of war precisely does that to a people and their socio-political psychology. From sanity, it pushes people towards quick and mindless reactions reactions that create more noise and less of sound. Resultantly, a nation breaks down into groups, and groups devolve into individuals where each living person tries to do just one thing: survive either by fighting or fleeing away.

Fight and flight, both, have been in abundance since the General Zias military dictatorship failed to contain the negatives of Afghan war on the Pakistani society. Crisis of the Pakistani State and society aggravated as a sectarian-political revolution in our neighborhood tried spreading its wings in our courtyard, but the Arab-brethren wanted Pakistanis to rather grow Arbi and not the Ajmi wings. The melting pot of the geo-strategic and sectarian conflicts created an environment that culled the middle class creativity and their ownership of the society. Alongside, the state formally promoted a certain version of Islam and tried making people good Muslims, instead of responsible citizens. Consequently, neither good Muslims nor responsible citizens, a scaring majority of Pakistanis chose becoming habitual pessimists criticising the state and society with half-baked ideas and knowledge.

Look around, and you shall find a predominant number of people pressing their thoughts as information and knowledge. This mixture gets exponentially interesting if you get to interact with the expatriate community, particularly the ones living in established Western democracies. Themselves enjoying rights and freedom that the Western democracies ensure, many among these hyper patriots want quick and ruthless change, military rule, Islamic caliphate, or revolution. People who took the flight, should rather become loyal citizens of their chosen lands, and leave Pakistan to the competence or incompetence of their compatriots who either could not flight, or deliberately chose to stay back and fight whatever the menaces and opportunities their land offered.

Probably for the first time in four decades since 1977, political elite as well as the deep state in Pakistan are talking about recreating a representative national narrative for varied audiences, locally and internationally. Whether it creates more muddles is yet to be seen, as Pakistanis have seen that happen before many times already. But heres a hope that the mess does not get messier, and a clear thinking process unfolds. Havent we had enough of muddled thinking already?

The writer is a social entrepreneur and a student of Pakistans social and political challenges. Twitter: @mkw72

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Pakistani thought process - Daily Times

Humanism Isn’t Just About Being Right, It’s About Doing Right – HuffPost

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This week, NPRs Scott Simon spoke with evolutionary biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins about religion, terrorism, and nontheism. While the interview is compelling overall, Simon makes some insulting statements about nontheists that deserve to be addressed.

The first of these points is Simons recollection that while he has covered many wars, conflicts, and natural disasters, in every one of these situations there is a dauntless nun, priest, clergy or religious person who was working very selflessly and bravely there for the good of human beings. And I dont run into organized groups of atheists who do this.

Dawkins rightly disagrees with this assertion, and points to an effort by his own organization, Secular Rescue, which is designed to provide emergency assistance to writers, bloggers, publishers, and activists who face threats due to their beliefs or expressions regarding religion. Whats more, humanists, atheists, and other nontheists have decades of experience in fighting some of the worst disasters on this planet, both man-made and natural.

Of course, plenty of humanitarian work is done without any reference to religion or irreligion, and Secular Rescue isnt the only specifically nontheistic organization doing good for the world. The Foundation Beyond Belief is about to launch a humanist disaster relief drive for the severe ongoing famine in several African countries, and will be donating all funds raised to local charities that will administer the program. This group is just one of the many humanistic charity organizations working for change on a global scale. The humanist Responsible Charity in India focuses on improving education, planned parenthood and self-employment. Groups like the Uganda Humanist Association support multiple humanist schools that do not discriminate on grounds of religion or social or ethnic background.

Of course, humanists also do good work in the United States. Nontheistic organizations like Smart Recovery help people recover from all types of addiction and addictive behaviors, including drug and alcohol abuse and gambling and prescription drug addictions, all without relying upon a twelve-step program that emphasizes a belief in a higher power. And humanists have been vital in protecting the civil rights of all Americans from the days of humanist Asa Philip Randolph and James Framer, to current approaches led by the likes of Angela Davis and Gloria Steinem.

So while it is important to properly thank religious individuals and communities for their hard work in helping their fellow human beings, it is important that we dont falsely tie altruism with religiosity.

At one point in the interview Scott seems to approach something resembling a recognition of this: I do wonder, am I just not seeing the world correctly to see large numbers of well-motivated atheists lending their lives to trying to better the world? Or if I might put it this way, are they more concerned about just being right intellectually?

Nontheists certainly are interested in talking and thinking in an intellectually honest manner about ideas and philosophies that impact the world. We respectfully challenge ideas that are evidently false or harmful. But to claim that nontheists care more about scriptural debates than actions meant to protect the human rights of marginalized communities is to insult a community bent on doing as much good in the world as they can.

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Humanism Isn't Just About Being Right, It's About Doing Right - HuffPost

How a ‘shadow’ universe of charities joined with political warriors to fuel Trump’s rise – Washington Post

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(Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)

The crowd rose to its feet and roared its approval as Sen. Jeff Sessions bounded onto the stage at the Breakers, an exclusive resort in Palm Beach, Fla. Stephen Miller, an aide to the Alabama Republican, handed him a glass trophy honoring his bravery as a lawmaker.

Heyyyy! Sessions yelled out to the crowd.

The ceremony that day, in November 2014, turned out to be a harbinger: It brought together an array of hard-right activists and a little-known charity whose ideas would soon move from the fringes of the conservative movement into the heart of the nations government.

The man behind the event was David Horowitz, a former 60s radical who became an intellectual godfather to the far right through his writings and his work at a charity, the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Since its formation in 1988, the Freedom Center has helped cultivate a generation of political warriors seeking to upend the Washington establishment. These warriors include some of the most powerful and influential figures in the Trump administration: Attorney General Sessions, senior policy adviser Miller and White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon.

Long before Trump promised to build a wall, ban Muslims and abandon the Paris climate accord, Horowitz used his tax-exempt group to rail against illegal immigrants, the spread of Islam and global warming. Center officials described Hillary Clinton as evil, President Barack Obama as a secret communist and the Democratic Party as a front for enemies of the United States.

The Freedom Center has declared itself a School for Political Warfare, and it is part of a loose nationwide network of like-minded charities linked together by ideology, personalities, conservative funders and websites, including the for-profit Breitbart News.

Horowitzs story shows how charities have become essential to modern political campaigns, amid lax enforcement of the federal limits on their involvement in politics, while taking advantage of millions of dollars in what amount to taxpayer subsidies.

In interviews with The Washington Post, Horowitz, 78, acknowledged the Freedom Centers partisan mission and said its aim is to protect traditional American values against adversaries on the left, who operate their own network of charities. This is a shadow political universe, he said.

Horowitz makes a good living as the Freedom Center chief executive, earning $583,000 from a charity that received $5.4million in donations in 2015, according to the latest available records. But he said he has come to believe that his group and others across the political spectrum ought to be reined in to ensure they fulfill the original spirit of the Internal Revenue Services charitable rules, even though such overhauls would be personally devastating for me.

They should redefine what a charity is, he said. A charity should be something that helps everybody.

The IRS prohibits charities from directly or indirectly participating in political campaigns, for or against candidates.

In an essay he published online in response to The Posts questions after refusing further interviews, Horowitz wrote the center does not engage in political activities in the narrow sense used in the I.R.S. code.

A lefty moves right

Horowitz looks like a professor, with a salt-and-pepper goatee and small oval glasses. He speaks with a scratchy voice that carries strong hints of his New York roots. He is quick to use fiery rhetoric and no-holds-barred tactics he had learned as a student radical.

Horowitz was a red diaper baby of communist parents in New York City. After attending Columbia University in the 1950s, he enrolled as a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley, an anchor of leftist thinking.

Over the next two decades, he took on prominent roles in the New Left. He served as an editor of Ramparts, an influential muckraking magazine in San Francisco.

But by the late 1970s, he had decided that the left represented a profound threat to the United States. On March17, 1985, he and a writing partner came out as conservatives in a surprising Washington Post Magazine article headlined Lefties for Reagan.

In August 1988, Horowitz launched the Center for the Study of Popular Culture in Los Angeles, a nonprofit group that would become the Freedom Center.

Charities have been around since the nations beginning, as citizens sought to help schools, churches and the poor. Decades ago, Congress created a special section of the IRS code to define and regulate charities, which are known as 501(c)(3) groups under the code. They have a special allure for donors: They can deduct contributions from their taxes.

IRS rules give charities wide latitude, but they may not devote a substantial part of their resources or activities to lobbying or carrying on propaganda. And they are absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office, according to the IRS.

In his IRS application for tax-exempt status in August 1988, Horowitz wrote his center would be entirely non-profit, non-partisan, according to records obtained through a public records request. It will not be organized to promote any particular political program.

Twenty years later, a brochure for one of the charitys events would sharply contradict that claim: In 1988, Horowitz created the Center for the Study of Popular Culture to institutionalize his campaigns against the Left and its anti-American agendas.

From the start, Horowitz was supported by contributions from stalwart conservative groups, including the John M. Olin Foundation and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, along with donations from the wealthy Scaife family of Pittsburgh.

In 1989, he co-wrote Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the Sixties, a harsh critique of the radical left. He also began hosting events. A gathering called the Wednesday Morning Club catered to conservatives in liberal Los Angeles. In the 1990s, one of the regular guests was Bannon, then a former Wall Street investor seeking to make his mark in Hollywood, according to Lionel Chetwynd, the events co-founder.

Conservatives are nervous around me, and theyre nervous because Im very outspoken, Horowitz told The Post. Steve Bannon was not nervous because hes like me.

Bannon did not respond to requests for interviews.

The origin of Stephen Miller

After the Sept.11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Horowitz and his center argued that liberals had been too tolerant of radical Islam and illegal immigration.

Open to that message was Stephen Miller, a 16-year-old high school student in Santa Monica, Calif. In the fall of 2001, Miller asked Horowitz for help in disputes with administrators at his school. Miller complained his teachers and classmates were insufficiently patriotic and refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance.

Horowitzs charity launched a group called Students for Academic Freedom, framing it as a counterweight to the dominance of the left in high schools and on college campuses. Miller formed a chapter and sought permission from school officials to invite Horowitz to the school to speak. When administrators delayed, Miller and Horowitz accused them of stifling free speech.

Horowitz eventually spoke at the school, and in November 2002, Miller wrote about the visit in an essay in Frontpagemag.com, the online news and opinion site run by the center. Miller portrayed himself as the victim of indoctrination and called on the systems superintendent to ensure that his schools stress inclusive patriotism, rather than a multiculturalism.

When Miller went on to Duke University, he formed another chapter of Students for Academic Freedom and again invited Horowitz to speak. At the time, Horowitz had just published The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, a book some condemned as a political blacklist.

After graduation, Miller wanted to work in Washington. Horowitz reached out to conservatives on Capitol Hill who had supported his group. He helped Miller land jobs with four lawmakers, including former representative Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and Sessions. I highly recommended him to Jeff, Horowitz told The Post.

Miller did not respond to requests for interviews.

By 2006, Horowitzs charity, now operating as the David Horowitz Freedom Center, was staging events, publishing books and pamphlets, and operating a website devoted to news on the war at home and abroad against the left.

That same year, Horowitz wrote The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and Sixties Radicals Seized Control of the Democratic Party. He and a co-writer argued that Soros, a hedge fund billionaire, was a political manipulator who financed a vast movement on the left, with help from charities and other nonprofit groups.

The Freedom Center stepped up its anti-Islamic rhetoric, sponsoring an Islamofascism Awareness Week on college campuses. Horowitz accused U.S. college campuses of fostering Jew hatred and supporting Islamist militant terror.

It also formed an alliance with another charity called Jihad Watch, which would become a leading voice in calling for restrictions on Muslim immigrants.

Our work at Jihad Watch relates to dispelling falsehoods and disinformation spread by The Washington Post and others regarding the motivating ideology, nature and magnitude of the jihad threat worldwide and within the U.S., the groups chief, Robert Spencer, told The Post in a statement last month.

In the 2000s, the Freedom Center continued receiving millions in support from conservative donors, more than $4million annually. The election of Barack Obama in 2008 provided an extra boost to fundraising.

It also affirmed the centers belief that the political left has declared war on America and its constitutional system, and is willing to collaborate with Americas enemies abroad, according to the centers website. For most of those years the Center was a voice crying in the wilderness with few willing to recognize the threat from the enemy within, a fifth column force that was steadily expanding its influence within the Democratic Party.

This was all too much for some prominent mainstream conservatives such as William Kristol and George Will, who formerly sat on the board of the Bradley Foundation. Some people seem not to feel fully alive unless they are furious, Will wrote in an email to The Post. [Will writes a twice-weekly column for The Post] Perhaps this is because they gain derivative significance from the feeling that they are personally involved in momentous events.

Minimal IRS regulation

The Freedom Center was among a growing group of allied charities that received funding from large, conservative foundations such as Donors Capital Fund, Donors Trust, the Bradley Foundation and the Scaife family. For decades, those foundations and others had financed nonprofit organizations that promoted free enterprise and small government and opposed the environmental movement and other issues favored by progressives.

In general, charities have been able to operate with little scrutiny by regulators. The number of enforcement officials at the IRS and the audits they conduct have dwindled over the past decade. The IRS became especially reluctant to enforce limitations on political activity, following a furious backlash from conservatives and Republicans in Congress in 2013 over allegations the agency was illegally targeting tea party groups seeking tax-exempt status. An IRS spokesman declined to comment.

Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer, Bradley Foundation board member and recipient of a Freedom Center award, said conservative charities take great pains to stay within their lanes from a legal perspective.

Matthew Vadum, senior vice president of the tax-exempt Capital Research Center and a prolific contributor to the Freedom Centers Frontpagemag.com, said there is no question the conservative charities work in concert. But the IRS rules are open to interpretation and unclear about the limits, he said.

Its a network, Vadum said. [C]onservative activist groups try to push the envelope. And its not always clear how far they should go.

Ron Robinson, president of Young Americas Foundation and another ally of the Freedom Center, said ideological alliances and shared financial support are commonplace across the political spectrum, not just on the right. This is a reality of the modern world, Robinson said. I dont view it as pernicious. They make it possible to enrich the world of ideas.

By 2008, the Freedom Center had assumed a leading role in the hard-right branch of the network, spending $2.7million on seminars and meetings that routinely attracted the luminaries of the conservative movement.

The most popular of these annual gatherings was David Horowitzs Restoration Weekend, which was often held at the Breakers in Palm Beach, a stunning hotel complex modeled on the Medici palaces of Renaissance Italy.

These were lavish affairs. In November 2009, the center paid $438,000 to produce the event at the Breakers, an IRS filing shows. That covered well-produced videos and cocktail parties and, for major donors, spa and golf privileges.

A marquee event that weekend was the Citizens United Film Festival. It included a documentary written and directed by Bannon about the ravages of the financial meltdown called Generation Zero. The Citizens United Foundation, another conservative tax-exempt charity, would soon pay Bannon hundreds of thousands for fundraising and film consulting.

Bannon was becoming an important ally for Horowitz and a pivotal figure in the growing network. Bannon and a partner once suggested including Horowitz in a proposed documentary to be called Destroying the Great Satan: The Rise of Islamic Fascism in America. The movies draft outline warned of an Islamic takeover of the United States.

In March 2012, Bannon was named the executive chairman of the online Breitbart News site, following the unexpected death of his friend and collaborator, Andrew Breitbart. Bannon immediately began steering the site even deeper into the anti-establishment movement.

The meet-and-greet

On Nov.12, 2013, Bannon hosted a book party for Horowitz at a Washington, D.C., townhouse that served as Breitbarts capital office and Bannons living quarters. Horowitz had just published a compendium of anti-liberal writings called the Black Book of the American Left.

As Horowitz mingled, Bannon introduced himself to Ronald Radosh, a prominent conservative intellectual and historian. Radosh had known Horowitz for a half-century and also worked his way through the ranks of the New Left before becoming a conservative.

Im Steve Bannon and this is my house, Bannon said, according to an account that Radosh wrote about for the Daily Beast in August and discussed with The Post.

Im a Leninist, Bannon said, according to Radosh. Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and thats my goal, too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of todays establishment.

A few days later, Horowitz traveled to Palm Beach to host another Restoration Weekend at the Breakers. Bannon was going, too in part to raise money for a documentary film about Horowitz. Bannon said he needed $1million and there were few venues better for finding wealthy donors. As it happened, Bannon could not raise the money, according to two attendees who heard his pitch. But he received an unexpected gift.

It came from Patrick Caddell, a veteran Democratic pollster who had once worked for President Jimmy Carter. He was speaking about his recent study of Americans sentiments toward Washington, the economy and the nations future. He said Americans were feeling glum: Two-thirds blamed self-serving elites in both parties for their troubles. They craved an outsider to shake things up.

His findings thrilled the crowd, Caddell told The Post in a lengthy interview. He earlier gave a similar account to the New Yorker.

Caddell said Bannon arranged for a private briefing the next day, to include Robert and Rebekah Mercer, a hedge fund billionaire and his daughter.

For two years, Bannon had worked with the Mercers, who invested millions in Breitbart News. The family also helped Bannon launch a Florida-based charity called the Government Accountability Institute, which describes itself as a nonpartisan investigative organization.

Bannon and the Mercers huddled with Caddell in a second-floor lounge at the Breakers. The Mercers were entranced by what they were hearing, Caddell told The Post, and Bannon was ecstatic.

Being a basic rabble-rouser, it fit his views, Caddell said.

Robert Mercer asked Caddell to confirm the polls findings, offering to pay the costs. Caddell told The Post the follow-up poll did just that. The charities and their media allies began to coalesce around the discontent that Caddell documented.

You dont find a lot of cooperation between conservative groups, but now this network, we have Breitbart, Drudge ... Horowitz told the 2013 Restoration Weekend attendees, according to video of the speech. Its going to be very, very powerful over time.

Fighting fire with fire

By late 2013, the Freedom Center barely resembled the charity the IRS had approved for tax exemption. When it began, he told the IRS that it planned to serve the broad public community as an educational institution.

Now it was openly involved in fighting a political war with the left. You can counter their attacks by turning their guns around, Horowitz said in a speech at the time. You can neutralize them by fighting fire with fire.

Among the centers targets was climate change, which it attacked repeatedly as a ruse by the left. Frontpagemag.com writers made fun of global warming in stories with headlines such as New Study Says Global Warming Is Good For Polar Bears and Global Warming Ended in 1996.

The site also ran stories insinuating that Democrats were cooperating with Islamist militants: Jihad Migrating to Red States With Obamas Blessing, The Lefts Embrace of Islamic Rape, and Sanctuary Cities or Safe Havens for Terrorists?

In March 2014, the center made the first of $175,000 in contributions to the Party for Freedom, a group founded by Geert Wilders, one of Europes most ardent anti-Muslim politicians, according to documents released by the Dutch government and originally described by the New York Times and the Intercept. He was campaigning on a platform of preventing the Islamization of the Netherlands, proposing a ban on Muslim immigration and the shuttering of mosques.

Later that year, Wilders spoke at Restoration Weekend.

The truth is that our own Western culture based on Christianity, based on Judaism and humanism is far superior, far superior, than the Islamic culture that immigrants have adopted, Wilders said to applause.

On hand that weekend was Jeff Sessions, a regular at the annual retreat. He was honored with a glass trophy for helping to derail a bipartisan bill aimed at overhauling U.S. immigration law. He acknowledged Horowitz from the stage. Ive seen some great people receive this, David. And its a special treat and pleasure for me, David, because you know how much I admire you as we battle for right and justice and law, Sessions said.

Later that night, Sessions and Miller went to a lounge at the resort. Joining them was Ann Coulter, another regular and a contributor to Frontpagemag.com. She was writing a book called Adios, America: The Lefts Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole.

As Sessions sipped on a drink, she and Miller batted around ideas about how to crack down on immigration until long after midnight. There was obviously a major meeting of the minds, said one person in the lounge at the time who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of repercussions. They thought immigration was the single most important issue in the country.

Coulter did not respond to requests for comment.

Its quite an impressive list

As the presidential campaign heated up, Horowitzs group and the conservative network shifted into high gear.

Hillary Clinton May Go to Prison, said a Breitbart headline in August 2015, when Bannon was still its chief.

That same month, Frontpagemag.com ran stories titled Hillary Under Siege and The Last Days of Hillary.

Peter Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute, Bannons charity, published Clinton Cash, a searing critique of Bill and Hillary Clintons foundation and personal enrichment. Schweizer worked with Bannon as an editor at large at Breitbart, and the two men were preparing to make a documentary based on the book.

For his part, Horowitz fired off contentious remarks about the race at every turn, and not only about Hillary Clinton. He also denounced the Republicans who branded themselves Never Trump. In May 2016, when it became clear Trump would be the Republican nominee, he called conservative columnist William Kristol a Republican spoiler and renegade Jew in Breitbart News because of his opposition to Trump.

To weaken the only party that stands between the Jews and their annihilation, and between America and the forces intent on destroying her, is a political miscalculation so great and a betrayal so profound as to not be easily forgiven, Horowitz wrote.

The article created an uproar, with some critics accusing the Jewish Horowitz of making anti-Semitic remarks. In response to questions from The Post, Kristol played down the episode and dismissed Horowitz as a bombastic self-promoter.

David is an angry man. He thinks hes been denied the power and recognition he deserves. So he lashes out. I shudder to think of Davids rage when he realizes hes been taken for a ride by a con man, Kristol said.

I look forward to the day when American conservatism regains its moral health and political sanity, and the David Horowitz center is back on the fringe, where Im afraid it belongs.

But the Freedom Center and others in the network were rising on the Trump tide. The campaign named Bannon the chief executive, David Bossie of Citizens United the vice president and Miller an adviser.

In August, Horowitz took advantage of his ties to the campaign to offer a proposal for spending billions on school vouchers for poor, largely minority children who Horowitz said had been underserved by Democrats. Miller made sure it became part of Trumps platform along with a proposed ban on Muslims, a border wall and other ideas long supported by the Freedom Center and its ideological allies.

On Dec.14, 2016, during a videotaped event, Horowitz expressed happiness about Trumps victory and said Republicans had finally woken up to his approach to politics. He pulled from his suit coat a piece of paper listing Freedom Center supporters already in the administration.

Its quite an impressive list, Horowitz said, rattling off the names: Sessions, Bannon, Vice President Pence, Reince Priebus, Kellyanne Conway and at least six others.

My personal favorite is Steve Miller, because Steve, who was today appointed the senior policy adviser in the White House ... is a kind of protege of mine, he said. So the center has a big stake in this administration.

The White House and Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment.

Two weeks later, the Freedom Center named Bannon its Man of the Year.

Over the years people would refer to my Freedom Center as a think tank and I would correct them, No, its a battle tank, because that is what I felt was missing most in the conservative cause troops ready and willing to fight fire with fire, Horowitz wrote in Breitbart in February. The Trump administration may be only a few weeks old, but it is already clear that the new White Houseisa battle tank.

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How a 'shadow' universe of charities joined with political warriors to fuel Trump's rise - Washington Post

Ancient Bengali music at free festival in Leeds – Yorkshire Evening Post

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12:37 Monday 05 June 2017

A free festival which aims to celebrate the wonders of Bengali folk music and tackle extremism will come to north Leeds in August.

The RadhaRaman Folk Festival will return to Leeds for the seventh year running on August 18-20, with visitors expected to attend from across the country.

The event boasts whole-day and whole-night performances by Bengali and non-Bengali performers, showcasing folk music and dance from different cultural traditions as well as panel discussions and childrens performances.

It kicks off on the banks of Swinsty Reservoir in Otley with flute performances and a barbecue until 8pm.

Otley Chevin is the venue for folk dance, music and poetry performances, with barbecue, from 4.30pm to 8.30pm before the next session begins at 9pm at Moortown Methdist Church.

This lasts until early morning on the Sunday when all day there will be music, dance, poetry and talks at the Bangladesh Community Centre on Roundhay Road.

Events also take place at the Reginald Centre on Chapeltown Road on Saturday.

Organiser Ahmed Kaysher said the festival tries to involve women and young people who are excluded through social and religious barriers.

Tackling extremism is one of the many objectives that this festival is working for.

This art and music even of folk tradition, originated from the ancient time, promotes wider humanism, love, devotion and it always preaches to make the most of the living moments.

He added: The festival is shaping as one of the prominent international festivals in the city in terms of the audiences who come from all over Europe and the artists come from both Bangladesh and India.

It will be inaugurated by one of the finest Indian classical vocalists in Europe, Chandra Chakraborty, from London, and 32 prominent artists from all across the country and Bangladesh wil perform throughtout the course of the festival.

These include Tagore singer Dr Imtiaz Ahmed, top folk singer Gouri Chowdhury, semi-classical vocalist Sumana Basu, Sufi Amir Mohammed, Laboni Barua, folk dancer Sohel Ahmed, Anasua Paul, Nandita Mukherjee, flute player Luthfur Rahman and Dutara player Nuruzzaman Ahmed.

For more information visit https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/radharaman-folk-festival-tickets-34802268522.

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Ancient Bengali music at free festival in Leeds - Yorkshire Evening Post

Steptoe Cyberlaw Podcast: Globalizing Censorship – Lawfare (blog)

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Episode 168 features the Tinkers-to-Evers-to-Chance of global censorship, as Filipino contractors earning minimum wage delete posts in order to satisfy US tech companies who are trying to satisfy European governments. In addition to Maury Shenk, our panel of interlocutors includesDavid Sanger, Chief Washington Correspondent forThe New York Times, andKaren Eltis, Professor of Law at the University of Ottawa. Even if you think that reducingIslamic extremist proselytizingonline is a good idea, I conclude, thats not likely to be where the debate over online content ends up. Indeed, even today, controls onhate speechare aimed more at tweets that sound like President Trump than at extremist recruiting. Bottom line: no matter how you slice it, the first amendment is in deep trouble.

In other news, I criticize the right half of the blogosphere for not reading the FISA court decision they cite to show thatPresident Obamawasspying illegallyat the end of his term. Glenn Reynolds, Im talking about you!

The EU, in a bow to diplomatic reality, will not bother trying to improve theSafe Harbor dealit got from President Obama. Instead, it will try to get President Trump to honor President Obamas privacy promises. Good luck with that, guys!

Wikimedias lawsuit over NSA surveillancehas been revived by the court of appeals, and I find myself unable to criticize the ruling. If standing means anything, it seems as though Wikimedia ought to have standing to sue over surveillance; whether Wikimedia should be wasting our contributions on such a misconceived cause is a different question.

Chinas cybersecurity law has mostly taken effect.Maury explains how little we know about what it means.

Finally, David Sanger, in his characteristic broad-gauge fashion, is able to illuminate a host of cyber statecraft topics: whether the North Koreans are getting better at stopping cyberattacks on their rocket program; how good a job did Macron really did in responding to Russian doxing attempt; and what North Korean hackers are up to in Thailand.

As always, the Cyberlaw Podcast welcomes feedback.Send an email to[emailprotected]or leave a message at +1 202 862 5785.

Download the 168th Episode (mp3).

Subscribe to the Cyberlaw Podcast here. We are also oniTunes,Pocket Casts, andGoogle Play(available for Android and Google Chrome)!

The views expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not reflect the opinions of the firm.

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Steptoe Cyberlaw Podcast: Globalizing Censorship - Lawfare (blog)

Theresa May’s Call for Internet Censorship Isn’t Limited to Fighting … – Reason (blog)

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Andy Rain/EPA/NewscomYou'd think Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg himself was the driver of the van that plowed into pedestrians on London Bridge Saturday, the way U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May is talking about the attack. He isn't, but everybody across the world, not just in the United Kingdom, needs to pay close attention to how May wants to respond to the assault.

May believes the problem is you and your silly insistence that you be permitted to speak your mind and to look at whatever you want on the internet. And she means to stop you. And her attitude toward government control of internet speech is shared by President Donald Trump (and Hillary Clinton), so what she's trying to sell isn't isolated to her own citizenry.

In a speech in the wake of this weekend's attack, May called flat-out for government authority to censor and control what people can see and access on the internet:

We cannot allow this ideology the safe space it needs to breedyet that is precisely what the internet, and the big companies that provide internet-based services provide. We need to work with allied democratic governments to reach international agreements to regulate cyberspace to prevent the spread of extremist and terrorism planning.

Note that May appears to be trying to narrowly pitch a regulatory regime that focuses entirely on censoring speech by terrorists. One might argue that even America's First Amendment would not protect such speech, since such communications involve planning violence against others.

But May and the Tories really want to propose much broader censorship of the internet, and they know it. May is using fear of terrorism to sell government control over private online speech. The Tories' manifesto for the upcoming election makes it pretty clear they're looking to control communication on the internet in ways that have absolutely nothing to do with fighting terrorism. BuzzFeed took note:

The proposalsdotted around the manifesto documentare varied. There are many measures designed to make it easier to do business online but it's a different, more social conservative approach when it comes to social networks.

Legislation would be introduced to protect the public from abuse and offensive material online, while everyone would have the right to wipe material that was posted when they were under 18. Internet companies would also be asked to help promote counter-extremism narrativespotentially echoing the government's Prevent programme. There would be new rules requiring companies to make it ever harder for people to access pornography and violent images, with all content creators forced to justify their policies to the government.

The manifesto doesn't seem to acknowledge a difference between speech and activity, Buzzfeed adds:

"It should be as unacceptable to bully online as it is in the playground, as difficult to groom a young child on the internet as it is in a community, as hard for children to access violent and degrading pornography online as it is in the high street, and as difficult to commit a crime digitally as it is physically."

New laws will be introduced to implement these rules, forcing internet companies such as Facebook to abide by the rulings of a regulator or face sanctions: "We will introduce a sanctions regime to ensure compliance, giving regulators the ability to fine or prosecute those companies that fail in their legal duties, and to order the removal of content where it clearly breaches UK law."

The United Kingdom already has some very heavy content-based censorship of pornography that presumes to police what sorts of sexual fantasies are acceptable among its populace. Reason's Elizabeth Nolan Brown has written repeatedly about the British government's nannying tendencies in trying suppress pornography.

In a manner similar to this censorship push, May and the British government sold the Investigatory Powers Actalso known as the Snooper's Charterto the public as a mechanism to fight terrorism. But the massive legislation, now in place as law, actually demands that internet companies store users' online data to investigate all sorts of activities that have nothing to do with terrorism at all.

The European Union is also hammering out regulations that would require social media companies to censor their services. But the E.U. plan is currently much more limited than what the ruling party in the U.K. is demanding. The European Union wants to force companies only to delete videos that contain hate speech or incitements to violence.

So be warned: This isn't even a slippery-slope risk that a government that claims the authority to censor terrorist communications might broaden that scope to other areas. May and her government already want those broader powers. They're just using the fear of terrorism to sell the idea.

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Theresa May's Call for Internet Censorship Isn't Limited to Fighting ... - Reason (blog)

Youtube’s Financial Censorship: the ‘Product Manager’ as Ultimate … – Heat Street

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Google has just announced that it is establishing new guidelines to determine whichcontent is ineligible to receive advertising dollars on its YouTube platform. More than any of the otherdebatesabout fake news and bias in media, this kind of financial muscle (censorship) is whats really going to haveimpact on the content business in the long-term. And, at the moment, the real leverage is held by the very small number ofgatekeepers which control large scale distribution and major ad dollars on the internetchief among them Google and Facebook.

YouTubesnew clarificationwill prevent ad money from being allocated to content in which family entertainment characters (think Mickey Mouse)are shown engaging in violent, sexual,or otherwise inappropriate behavior. Hard to argue with that one, though some satirical news outlets might still ask how YouTubes algorithm can really determine context and nuance.

The updated guidelines also take cash away from content that isgratuitously incendiary, inflammatory, or demeaning. Specifically, no more money for videos that are gratuitously disrespectful or language that shames or insults an individual or group. Imagine applying that test to the mainstream political debate. Basically, a good portion of cable news, talk radio, and political punditry would be un-monetizable.

This might translate into defunding videos from CNN or The Young Turks in which pundits call President Trump despicable and disgusting and all sorts of other things which are undeniably hateful.On the other side, imagine if youre a hardcore member of the alt rightand the incendiary voices of Alex Jones or Glenn Beck are financially censored?

So who actually makes these decisions on what is acceptable, or rather how to program the algorithm of financial acceptability? Is it some crusty Capital J journalism professor hired as a consultant? Perhaps some actual practicing journalists? Or maybe a panel of voices from different economic backgrounds, geographies, and intellectual viewpoints as well as the more conventional definition of diversity including varying racial, ethnic, and gender make-ups?

No, not really. Its most often some well educated, perhaps well intentioned, Silicon Valley executive who has climbed thecorporate ladder enough to be trusted, or saddled, with this sort of issue, which is the opposite of what a tech company actually wants to be handling.

Enter the product manager.

While its not possible for us to cover every video scenario, we hope this additional information will provide you with more insight into the types of content that brands have told us they dont want to advertise against and help you to make more informed content decisions, VP of Product Management Ariel Bardinwrote in the blog post directed at publishers who choose to let YouTube sell their ad inventory in return for a cut of the proceeds. According to LinkedIn, Bardin is a Stanford and USC grad who has been at Google for the last 13 years working inAdwords, Payments, and now YouTube.Not the usual resume for a key arbiter of the national conversation.

Perhaps itsa good thing after all that its next to impossible for large news brands to earn enough money on YouTube to meaningfully sustaintheir businesses. But thats not the case for smaller upstarts and individuals who may well havecontent which is no more or less inflammatory than the stuff which gets slung around on CNN, MSNBC, or Fox News.

Moreover, these same issues of objectionable content and the questions about the real value and placement of ad dollars have all existedfor adecade or more. Google is just now reacting to the howling of a bunch of advertisers.Companies such as AT&T, Verizon, Johnson & Johnson, The BBC, The Guardian, Channel 4, Toyota, McDonalds, and even the British Government allwithdrew advertsfrom Google-owned sites, including YouTube, claiming tobe deeply concerned about their ads appearing alongside content on YouTube promoting hate.

In this case, the big brands, and the agencies that manage their ad spend, saw an opportunity for some leverage. If youre a big consumer brand and you want audience reach thats going to move the needle, Google and Facebook are currently capturing most of your dollars, so why not goose them a bit when you have the chance? Certainly they are entitled to allocate their marketing dollars as they see fit.

The bigger issue here is the advent of a truth algorithm. Thats not what Google says its doing. But in the end its the money that matters.

Steve Alperin is the CEO of DSA Digital Holdings

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Youtube's Financial Censorship: the 'Product Manager' as Ultimate ... - Heat Street

‘To circumvent censorship,’ theater project launches series of shared short plays on Palestine – Mondoweiss

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Ismail Khalidi (l) and David Zellnik at the NY launch of Break the Wall theater project, June 5, 2017, photo by Phil Weiss

Heres some joyous news that seems very much in the spirit of the week the recognition of the 50th anniversary of the permanent Israeli occupation.

Last night the playwrights David Zellnik and Ismail Khalidi announced the launch of a theater project to create and produce works that challenge the dominant cultural narrative about Palestine. They did so in the Lark, a theater space on 42nd Street in New York, to an ebullient standing-room crowd of about 100 people. Ten of the short works were performed to spirited celebration; and the message of the evening was entirely positive: We are being shut out of the mainstream and we will take matters in hand, and we will be heard.

The playwrights said in a joint statement at the start:

We had both written plays about Israel and Palestine that were deemed too political, biased, leftwing, angry, anti Israel, and even anti-Semitic.Artistic directors said they would lose half their boards if they produced our shows and to be fair they probably would.

So inspired by the content and dissemination of Caryl Churchills great play, Seven Jewish Children, which she has shared with the world post-Gaza

We decided to take matters into our own hands, to circumvent censorship.

Here is the website for Break the Wall, with 13 plays so far, to be performed anywhere by anyone, in classrooms, in theaters and on the streets. Khalidi and Zellnik hope to have 25 by the end of the year, and another 25 by the end of the Nakba anniversary year, next year. They have simple requirements:

To address the issue of Palestine Israel in such a way that illuminates the actual power balance of the conflict and avoids the mainstream medias search for balance. togive witness and urgency to the ongoing human rights disaster of the occupation and apartheid.

And they ask that the plays be inspired/linked to an actual event.

A handful of skilled diverse players (Id name a couple but that would be unfair to the others) then presented ten of the works, humorous, lacerating, experimental, and yes, too, uplifting. Israeli soldiers peopled the stage, so did Palestinian mothers and, silently, Hitler. The American attitude of progressive-except-Palestine was lampooned. Happily, the writers Naomi Wallace, Noelle Ghoussaini, Betty Shemiah, Laura Maria Censabella, Kia Corthron, Stan Richardson, Yussef El Guindi, and Khalidi and Zellnik, too, would all rather laugh and observe than preach.

The mood was one of a page being turned: that the 50th anniversary of occupation has given strength and undeniability to the leftwing criticism of the occupation. An audience of consciously political people is demanding that the matter be addressed by American culture; and we are sure to influence the mainstream.

The program last night included a fine statement by Alisa Solomon addressing the transformative power of the works:

The political suspension of disbelief that governs so much of US discourse on Israel and Palestine has sought for decades to make the occupation invisible and the Nakba unutterable. For nearly 40 years, plays that have dared to tell Palestinian stories or challenge standard Zionist narratives have been shut out of major venues and sometimes silenced altogether, from Joe Papp reneging on a plan to present El Hakawati at the Public Theater in the late 1980s to the panicked backing away from the play My Name Is Rachel Corrie at New York Theatre Workshop some 10 years ago (a reaction from which the theater admirably learned and made amends).

Break the Wall seizes on theaters rare power in myriad forms, from street plays to family dramas, abstract experiments, raucous comedies, you name it to ignite radical empathy, to shake us out of complacencies, to kindle our political commitment and creativity. Its not just a good idea. Its a necessary one.

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'To circumvent censorship,' theater project launches series of shared short plays on Palestine - Mondoweiss

Callan: We can’t censor our way out of terrorism (Opinion) – CNN.com – CNN

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(CNN)Many in the United States, including the President, are likely to welcome British Prime Minister Theresa May's suggestion that it is time to place restrictions on "safe space" Internet websites, such as Facebook and Google, that allegedly allow terrorist ideology to "breed."

Such a policy in the United States would clearly violate the First Amendment's sacred guarantee of free expression -- the very same principle that helped spur the American Revolution against British tyranny. This core American belief should not be tossed aside, even in the face of terrifying ISIS attacks.

The fight against "Islamist extremism" does require continued and even more aggressive military action in Great Britain and throughout the world, but that action should not take the form of restrictions on free political speech.

Such calls for censorship always emerge when terrorists, foreign and domestic, preach and kill in pursuit of their hateful ideology. Ironically the speech requiring the strongest defense is often the most hateful speech of all. But in these cases, those who believe in freedom must stand even more firmly. Otherwise all political expression will be in danger of censorship, depending on who runs the government at any point in time.

Defending hateful speech may appear to be a crazy academic or legal position until we look at the "slippery slope" toward fascist or socialist totalitarianism created when we adopt our own special bans on the free speech of others. Soon the ideological radicals are calling for their own "safe spaces" and censorship of what they define as "hate speech."

Those who oppose abortion as murder might seek to ban speech that advocates such "killings." "Right to choose" advocates on the other side of the argument might seek to ban anti-abortion talk as a form of gender-based discrimination. In the end, the free speech rights of all Americans would be determined by the ideological flavor of the party in power.

Once the censorship of political expression begins, everybody wants to impose his or her own particular definition of religious propriety, discrimination and political correctness. Opponents of the current majority view are then intimidated into silence by law and by the aggressively expressed moral or intellectual superiority of the majority. We are already seeing a lot of this on American college campuses.

UK PM raises terror threat level to critical 02:42

May's proposed Web regulation as well could lead to government regulation of the permissible parameters of Muslim faith discussions online. Those with "radical" tendencies beware. But what defines "radical" in the world of religion? Should the belief in Sharia law be banned as antithetical to the fundamental view that all religions are free to practice in a free secular democracy?

Does the advocacy of one of the diverse styles of Muslim female head-covering constitute a form of hateful gender-based discrimination that should be banned? Would the same ban apply to female head-covering by Roman Catholic women attending church on Sunday? This is where the "slippery slope" of speech censorship leads.

The nation's high court confirmed an important free speech doctrine that only "fighting words" can legitimately be banned without violating the First Amendment and that even the display of a Nazi swastika in a village occupied by numerous Holocaust survivors is permitted under the US Constitution. This forcefully confirmed prior precedent that banned speech must be akin to yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater.

See British PM's full remarks on terror attack 08:00

In an age where overly sensitive college students and their supportive professors are seeking to ban unpopular speakers who advocate what they define as improper and "hateful speech," the Skokie case deserves to be added to the required reading list at American universities. There should be no "safe space" protection from free speech at any public forum in America, including college campuses and the Internet.

Intelligence agencies and law enforcement authorities have the right to review and monitor public Internet postings that suggest a direct link to ISIS' terror-related activities. Such sites may actually be helpful in locating and destroying ISIS terror cells.

If probable cause is established by the content of such postings, US law already provides the mechanism to follow up with a court-sanctioned search warrant and the arrest of a suspected conspirator.

What we do not need is an abridgment of our freedom of speech in a misguided effort to ensure the nation's security. We already fought one revolution to establish and preserve our First Amendment right, and we don't need another, prompted by the latest brand of barbarism and insanity emanating from the Middle East.

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Callan: We can't censor our way out of terrorism (Opinion) - CNN.com - CNN

Facebook blocks Chechnya activist page in latest case of wrongful censorship – The Guardian

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Facebook moderators have just seconds to decide whether to delete content. The company said the decision had been made in error. Photograph: Justin Tallis/AFP/Getty Images

Facebook censored a group of supporters of Chechen independence for violating its community standards barring organizations engaged in terrorist activity or organized criminal activity, the latest example of the social network mistakenly censoring government dissidents.

The Facebook group, Independence for Chechnya!, was permanently deleted by Facebook in late May, according to the group administrator, an Estonian human rights activist who asked to be identified by her initials, MP. She said she was shocked when she received a message from Facebook informing her of the deletion. We do not support terror, MP said. We support [a] political[ly] legal way for returning Chechen independence.

After the Guardian contacted Facebook about the group, it was reinstated. A company spokesperson said that the deletion had been made in error and pointed out that with millions of reports each week, the company sometimes gets things wrong.

The case is just the most recent example of how Facebooks mission of creating a more open and connected world can be compromised by its gargantuan task of policing billions of pieces of content.

In recent weeks, the company has censored a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist for publishing a series of posts alleging corruption by Maltese politicians and an abortion rights organization for violating its policy against the promotion or encouragement of drug use. In all of those cases, Facebook reversed its decisions after it was contacted by the Guardian.

Facebook is also facing complaints from critics who argue the network is not censorious enough and is failing to stamp-out extremist or abusive content.

The Chechen independence group, which had about 6,000 members, had existed for almost a decade and was originally created by a resident of Chechnya, according to MP, who said she took over administration of the group after the original administrator was forced into hiding due to threats to his relatives. The group is supportive of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, an unrecognized government consisting of exiled leaders from the wars for independence.

While some Chechen separatist groups, such as the Caucasian Emirate, are considered terrorist organizations by the US government, the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria is not. Indeed, the group is specifically listed as not violating in a list of terrorist groups that the Guardian reviewed as part of the Facebook Files. One Facebook moderator told the Guardian that content reviewers have less than 10 seconds to make a decision about whether content should be censored or not, making the careful policing of extremist content a mission impossible.

MP said that her group was used to spread news about what Chechens really want and how they think because there is no real free media in Russia. My friends and me, we wanted to give the Chechen point of view.

Its a modest but difficult goal: press freedom is tenuous in Russia as a whole, and basically non-existent in Chechnya, a Russian republic ruled with an iron first by Ramzan Kadyrov.

Local media works according to one principle: Do not make Kadyrov angry, an anonymous Chechen journalist wrote in the Guardian last year. Today, I do not know a single journalist here who would agree to work on a story that was anything other than positive about life in post-war Chechnya.

Kadyrov was selected to lead Chechnya by Vladmir Putin, and he has been linked to the assassination of Russian opposition leader Boris Nemstov and accused of various human rights violations, including the reported detention and torture of hundreds of gay men.

The Chechen leader has a particularly authoritarian attitude toward social media. He enthusiastically documents his lifestyle to his 2.7m followers on Instagram, while retaliating harshly against Chechens who voice even mild dissent on social networks. A favored tactic is public humiliation forcing those who wrote negative comments to appear on local television to renounce their views and apologize.

While the Chechen group has been restored, the case raises concerns for press freedom advocates about how Facebook is wielding its power to censor. Not every group of dissidents will catch the attention of a news organization or advocacy group, said Suzanne Nossel, the executive director of free-speech advocacy group PEN America, and that seems to be a much more reliable means of redress than Facebooks official system for appealing censorship decisions.

If that dissident group doesnt have the channels or access to power to get through to Facebook at a higher level, they may just find themselves silenced, said Nossel. What is necessary is a more accessible, transparent, timely process of individual appeal and the provision of rationale that make this incredibly powerful hand that Facebook and other platforms wield something that is more understandable and can be a subject of public debate.

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Facebook blocks Chechnya activist page in latest case of wrongful censorship - The Guardian

The New Censorship on Campus – The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)

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Tony Overman, The Olympian via AP Images

Students leave Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., last week after a threat prompted officials to evacuate the campus.

The turmoil at Evergreen State College where a professor is facing accusations of racism and demands for his resignation because he said white students should not be asked to leave campus for a day is only the most recent example of free-speech controversies roiling colleges across the country.

It is an illusion for minority groups to believe that they can censor the speech of others today without having their own expression muzzled tomorrow.

Free speech faces many challenges at colleges and universities these days, but none greater than the growing skepticism of some students especially those who feel particularly marginalized and disempowered in our society. Vocal elements of these groups increasingly question what the Supreme Court has celebrated as the countrys profound commitment to "uninhibited, robust and wide-open" public discourse.

Campaigns led by these students to silence and to exclude from their campuses speakers whose views they find offensive and odious has triggered a serious politicization of the principle of free speech, with "progressive" and minority students tending to condemn freedom of speech, and political conservatives suddenly waving the flag of free expression. This politicization of a fundamental right would be bad enough if it were to stay on campuses, but, as Evergreen State demonstrates, controversies at higher-education institutions are driving the polarization of free speech nationwide. It also poses a special danger to the interests of those very same minority students because, in the long run, it is they who most need the vibrant protection of freedom of speech as an essential and powerful weapon in our continuing struggle for equality.

It was not always this way. The civil-rights movement of the 1960s, for example, energetically embraced the principle of free speech. In April 1968 in Memphis, in the last speech he gave before he was murdered, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. provided a ringing endorsement of the central importance of the First Amendment for the civil-rights movement, when he declared that the freedom of speech is a central guarantee of "the greatness of America."

In a similar vein, the womens movement and the gay-rights movement were both made possible by the ability of courageous advocates for equality to challenge the accepted wisdom, to advance new ideas and understandings, and to shift the expectations and beliefs of countless Americans. Without a fierce commitment to freedom of speech, such progress would never have been possible.

Yet today, minority students and their supporters too often see free speech as the enemy. It is certainly understandable that they see certain speakers and certain ideas as offensive and odious. It is certainly understandable that they would be tempted to want to silence speakers like Milo Yiannopoulos at Berkeley, Heather Mac Donald at Claremont McKenna, and Charles Murray at Middlebury.

But it is also understandable that believers in creationism would want to silence supporters of Darwin in the 19th century, that supporters of the United States entry into World War I would want to silence critics of the war and the draft, that supporters of the belief that "a womans place is in the home" would want to silence supporters of the womens-rights movement, and that supporters of the view that homosexuality is sinful and immoral would want to silence supporters of the gay-rights movement.

Wanting to censor those whose views one finds odious and offensive is understandable. Actually silencing them is dangerous, though, because censorship is a two-way street. It is an illusion for minority groups to believe that they can censor the speech of others today without having their own expression muzzled tomorrow.

When students last year were asked in a Gallup survey sponsored by the Knight Foundation and the Newseum Institute if they thought colleges and universities should restrict the expression of "political views that are upsetting or offensive to certain groups," 24 percent of white respondents and 41 percent of African-American respondents said "yes." But as Dr. King understood, a fierce commitment to freedom of speech is most important to those who lack political power.

Even from a short-term perspective, efforts by minority groups to censor the expression of offensive and odious speech often backfires, because it makes those they oppose into ever-more famous martyrs, giving them larger audiences and growing book sales. Little has helped the brand of the likes of Ann Coulter and Milo Yiannopoulos more than their exclusion from speaking on college campuses.

Although censoring others may appear to be a courageous sign of strength, it is actually an indication of weakness. Those who resort to censorship do so in no small part because they lack confidence that they can compete effectively with the ideas of their opposition. Allowing others to speak and then challenging them in a forthright and open manner with more persuasive ideas is the way to win in the long-term. It was for this reason that Dr. King in the speech later known as "Ive Been to the Mountaintop" said, "We arent engaged in any negative protest and in any negative arguments with anybody." Rather, he said, "we are going on."

As President Barack Obama observed in a commencement address at Howard University last spring, No matter how much you might disagree with certain speakers, "dont try to shut them down. Let them talk, but have the confidence to challenge them ... If the other side has a point, learn from them. If theyre wrong, rebut them. Beat them on the battlefield of ideas. And you might as well start practicing now, because one thing I can guarantee you you will have to deal with ignorance, hatred, racism" and stupidity "at every stage of your life."

It is through debate, argument, and courage not censorship that truth will win out.

Jeffrey Herbst, a former president of Colgate University, is president and chief executive officer of the Newseum. Geoffrey R. Stone is the Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago.

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The New Censorship on Campus - The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)

Free Speech Group Says Trump Violates the First Amendment by Blocking Critics on Twitter – Gizmodo

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The Knight First Amendment Institute, a digital rights group out of Columbia University,published an open letter to President Trump on Tuesday asking him to unblock his critics on Twitter or potentially face legal action for violating their constitutional rights.

In the four-page letter, the lawyers argue that Twitter operates as a designated public forum for First Amendment purposes, and accordingly the viewpoint-based blocking of our clients is constitutional.

Because being blocked by a person on Twitter means you cant see, search for, retweet or quote-tweet the other user, the Knight Institute argues that Trump is silencing American citizens based on their viewpoint and impeding upon their ability to critique the government when he blocks his critics, both rights protected by the First Amendment. From the Knight Institute:

Of course, it is easy to understand why you and your advisers might have found our clients posts to be disagreeable. Even if the posts were scornful and acerbic, however, they were protected by the First Amendment. As the Supreme Court has observed, [t]he sort of robust political debate encouraged by the First Amendment is bound to produce speech that is critical of those who hold public office, and public officials will on occasion be subject to vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks. The protection of speech critical of government officials is perhaps the core concern of the First Amendment, because the freedom of individuals to engage in this kind of speech is crucial to self-government.

This letter comes only days after a confusing back and forth from Trumps advisers on whether or not Trumps tweets represent the White House. During Tuesdays press briefing, Sean Spicer said that the presidents tweets are in fact official White House statements, even though Spicer himself spends considerable time at these briefings distancing the White House from Trumps messages on Twitter. Spicers confirmation comes just one day after Kellyanne Conway criticizedthe medias obsession with the presidents tweets.

But well let the man speak for himself:

Spicer and Trump are seemingly of one mind on how seriously to take Trumps Twitter tantrums. That may actually be bad news for Trumps political agenda, as the ACLU promised to use his recent string of tweets on the Muslim travel ban against him in future legal cases.

Trumps greatest Twitter meltdown, however, might be coming later this week: According to The Washington Posts Robert Costa, the president is expected to live-tweet ex-FBI director James Comeys testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday. At a March hearing, Comey was called to fact-check one of the presidents tweets in real time.

To most, a world without Trumps Twitter account probably sounds like a wonderful reprieve, but the Knight Institute is demanding the president or his subordinates take action to unblock users immediately.

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Free Speech Group Says Trump Violates the First Amendment by Blocking Critics on Twitter - Gizmodo