Daily Archives: March 21, 2017

Microsoft, Adobe make some progress on their joint cloud commitments – ZDNet

Posted: March 21, 2017 at 11:42 am

Last September, Adobe officials said they would make a number of their cloud services available as Azure-hosted services. This week, Microsoft and Azure provided an update on their progress.

Last Fall, the pair said that Adobe Creative Cloud, Marketing Cloud and Document Cloud would all be available on Azure, and Azure would be the "preferred cloud platform" for these services. (I believe that means optional, not exclusive.)

The pair also announced that Adobe's Marketing Cloud would be Microsoft's Marketing module for the Enterprise version of Dynamics 365, its combined CRM/ERP suite. Microsoft is developing its own, still unofficially announced marketing app for SMBs, which is expected some time this Spring.

At Adobe Summit on March 20, Adobe announced a new umbrella service called Adobe Experience Cloud, which encompasses Adobe Marketing Cloud, Adobe Analytics Cloud and Adobe Advertising Cloud. The company also announced Adobe Analytics will be integrated with Microsoft Power BI.

The two companies made some incremental progress towards the goals announced last September. Adobe Experience Manager Sites Managed Service -- one component of the Adobe Marketing Cloud -- is available as an Azure-hosted service. Adobe Campaign, another piece of the company's Marketing Cloud, is now integrated with Dynamics 365 Enterprise.

Adobe and Microsoft are collaborating on a semantic data model for customer engagement. They are collaborating with AppDynamics, Acxiom, Dun & Bradstreet, Quaaltrics, Zendesk, [24]7 and MasterCard on this model and will build applications based on the common language. It's not clear from the announcement how this model relates to Microsoft's Common Data Model which is at the heart of its Dynamics 365 service. (Note: Microsoft officials lately are talking Common Data Service, or CDS, rather than CDM. But, same question as to how this relates still applies.)

Microsoft officials said the pair would provide another update on the progress of their plans at Microsoft's Build 2017 in mid-May.

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Alonso braced for difficult weekend, despite Honda progress – Motorsport.com, Edition: Global

Posted: at 11:42 am

The two-time world champion endured a frustrating pre-season testing programme, with McLarens running hampered by poor reliability and a lack of power from its new Honda power unit.

Although Honda has been working on cures to address its engine mapping and reliability, Alonso is under no illusions that things will be dramatically different when the F1 season begins in Melbourne.

After a difficult two weeks of testing were prepared to face a difficult weekend in Melbourne, said Alonso ahead of the Australian GP.

Well do our best with what we have and theres a lot of hard work and collaboration happening within the team, but the lack of time before the first race means you have fewer options for big changes.

The first step will be to work on reliability before we can make any assumptions or predictions about performance, and we will try to enjoy the weekend as much as we can.

As well as focusing on the cause of its reliability dramas in testing, Honda has spent considerable focus on improving its engine mapping for the start of the season.

It is understood that problems with the mapping were the root cause of the vibrations that led to some of the issues in Barcelona testing.

Hondas F1 chief Yusuke Hasegawa has said that progress has been made with mapping plus in other unspecified areas.

In terms of performance, there has been room for improvement with mapping in order to have better driveability, and with further analysis we were able to make additional changes to be ready for Melbourne, he said.

We know we are heading in the right direction and well continue our efforts in order to increase our competitiveness throughout the season.

For McLaren, which has sounded out Mercedes about a future customer supply dealin case Honda does not make the progress needed, this weekend will be important for better understanding exactly how it compares against the opposition.

Racing director Eric Boullier said: Itll be interesting for us all to see the pecking order emerge as each session goes by, as well as where our own strengths and weaknesses lie, and were prepared for a challenging weekend ahead.

We will approach this season race-by-race for us Australia will be the benchmark by which we can understand where we are in relation to the rest of the field, and what we need to do to tackle the coming grands prix.

We wont make any promises or predictions about our performance or results, but McLaren and Honda will continue to worth together in partnership and maximise everything we have in our package.

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Slow progress for Purdue receivers – Journal and Courier

Posted: at 11:42 am

Freshman wide receiver DJ Edwards follows the ball as passing game coordinator/wide receivers coach JaMarcus Shephard tries to distract him during spring football practice Wednesday, March 8, 2017, in the Mollenkopf Athletic Center.(Photo: John Terhune/Journal & Courier)Buy Photo

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. The inexperience showsin route running.

The youth shows in attention to details.

The lack of playmakers shows in the limited big plays.

The inability to concentrate shows in the high number of dropped passes.

This is Purdues receiving group at spring practice. This isnt a surprise. The Boilermakers lost a bulk of theirproduction and leadership from last years team, forcing younger players to become veterans in a hurry.

Progress is coming slowly, especially Monday, the first practice after spring break.

I didnt think today was one of our better days, first-year coach Jeff Brohm said. When our kids are fresh and feeling good, I think we can be OK. Today we got tired and we didnt do near as well as I wouldve liked. We have to push through it.

It also doesnt help when players arent practicing.

Freshman DJ Edwards, who enrolled in January, suffered a hamstring injury during the March 8 scrimmage. The Florida native was on the sidelines for most of Mondays practice.

The 6-foot-2 Edwards doesnt see the injury as a long-term issue.

I couldve gone today but they told me to sit out, he said. I dont think its major. Its just a little tweak. I cant get to the top speed how I want to.

Sophomore Terrance Landers saw limited playing timelast season and was expected to receive a look from the new coaching staff to see if the Dayton, Ohio native could contribute.

However, Landers was absent from Mondays workout.

First-year coach Jeff Brohm evaluates the first day of practice after spring break. Still a lot of work ahead for the Boilermakers Mike Carmin/Journal and Courier

Theres some things in the classroom he has to get cleaned up and we hope to get him out here as soon as we can, Brohm said.

Another newcomer freshman Tyler Hamilton is being evaluated to see where he fits into Brohms offense. Gregory Phillips, who made 17 receptions last season, along with Benaiah Franklin, Anthony Mahoungou and Jackson Anthrop are among other players getting as many repetitions as possible.

But is the competition currently in place to force the group to raise their level of play?

Regardless, a high standard exists in coach JaMarcus Shephards world.

These guys are quickly learning that excuses are not something that will be tolerated, the energetic Shephard said. Its something that were going to have as an expectation of what youre going to do as a football player on this football team. Youre going to do it.

On the surface, Edwards would appear to give Brohm and his coaching staff a viable option. In a short sample size, Edwards brings quickness, possesses a deep threat and the ability to turn short passes into big gains.

Hes going to be a very good player for us eventually, Brohm said. Hes a young freshman who needs to add a lot of strength and endurance. He broke down on us. I thought he would be back by today but hes not. Weve got a ways to go with him.

The Boilermakers don't have a lot of experience at the receiver position. How is the group progressing after six spring practices? Mike Carmin/Journal and Courier

For Edwards, his biggest challenges may come off the field.

Hes only been in college since second-semester classes started two months ago and hes learning theres a higher expectation level compared to his time at Palm Beach Lakes High School in West Palm Beach.

Its been good, he said. I have my days when Im not in the mood. Im not in high school anymore. Its not so much you do what you want to do you do what youre told to do. I either get with it or get out and I cant go home.

Contact Journal & Courier sports reporter Mike Carmin at mcarmin@jconline.com. Follow him on Twitter: @carmin_jc

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Blake Bortles confident about offseason progress – NFL.com – NFL.com

Posted: at 11:42 am

After yet another winter and spring where the Jacksonville Jaguars spent lavishly in free agency, quarterback Blake Bortles is trying to hold up his end of the bargain.

In what has amounted to a make-or-break year for the former No. 3 overall pick, Bortles is attempting to adjust his clunky mechanics and streamline his throwing motion with the help of quarterbacking gurus Tom House and Adam Dedeaux.

"The first week, it wasn't pretty," Bortles said of his progress, via Jacksonville.com. "It didn't look good. Part of trying to change things is it won't be great (right away). But we were able to hash it out."

In a separate comment to ESPN.com, he acknowledged the obvious: His performance this season is essential not only to his career but the immediate future of the new-look Jacksonville Jaguars.

"It's huge," Bortles said. "It's as big as however you want it to be, but regardless we've got to be here on April 10th and we've got to show up for camp in August and eventually they're going to start playing football games, so I think all that's stuff's irrelevant.

"I'm confident with what I've done this offseason and that I'll be able to come help this team be as good as we possibly can be. Everything involving the contract, that's up to them. I look forward to playing football."

It seems like an awfully large burden for Bortles to bear right now. Changing one's mechanics -- or in Bortles' case, eliminating his exceedingly long windup, which manifested itself in a big way last year when Bortles dropped from a 4,428-yard, 35-touchdown quarterback in 2015 to a 3,905-yard, 23-touchdown quarterback last season -- is not a simple endeavor. It involves a complete mental and muscular sync which can take experienced athletes years to adjust to. Meanwhile, the Jaguars are making it clear that this team is good enough everywhere else to return to the playoffs.

The team has yet to pick up Bortles' fifth-year option and will have a little less than a month's worth of practices before the early May option deadline hits. His on-field progress could give us a window into whether that option will end up being exercised, even if it makes all the sense in the world to do so.

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Brave New Transhumanism World – Patheos (blog)

Posted: at 11:41 am

Todays guest post is brought to you by Chris Van Allsburg (no, not the childrens book author).Chris teaches apologetics and ethics, holds an Mdiv, and is an MA in philosophy student. He teaches his children at home in the classical tradition, imbibing in Latin, Greek, Logic, and the good of C.S. Lewis. He loves Tolkien, sitting by the fire, and dreaming about being a master guitarist some day.

In Sundays The Guardian, Yuval Noah Harari answers peoples probing questions concerning the end of mankind. Harari grew up as a secular Jew, lives with his husband in Israel outside of Jerusalem, and holds a doctorate from Oxford. He has become a public intellectual with his popular book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. As he probes the future, he sees the end of humanity as we know it, due to globalization and technological advances. Now, this end is not the death of mankind, but his transformation. Man will be changed and upgraded with biotechnology and artificial intelligence into something else, into something different.

In other words, transhumanism is the end of mankind. In this sense, end turns out to be teleological. There are a number of flaws in his argumentation, however.

First, Harari says that homo sapiens has advanced over and against the other animals on the planet due to shared fictions. This prognostication echoes Ludwig Feuerbach, whose projection theory influenced Sigmund Freud, who in turn influenced Richard Dawkins, atheist author of The God Delusion. Hence, a Sky Daddy is required for humans to live meaningful, fearless lives.

However, this is a genetic fallacy, which says a belief is false (or, fictitious) due to its origins. Granted, even if belief in the existence of God is due to fear of the unknown in this sometimes scary world, that doesnt mean that such belief is a fiction as Harari says. Albeit, belief in God can be demonstrated as rational, as shown in Aquinas Five Ways (arguments from motion, efficient causality, contingency of being, degrees of perfection, and final causality).

Second, it is interesting how Harari singles out Christianity as the chief fiction in the world. He says Christianity derives its meaning from the concept of death. At the close of the interview, Harari says:

Previous cultures, especially traditional religions, usually needed death in order to explain the meaning of life. Like in Christianity without death, life has no meaning. The whole meaning of life comes from what happens to you after you die. There is no death, no heaven, no hell there is no meaning to Christianity. But over the past three centuries we have seen the emergence of a lot of modern ideologies such as socialism, liberalism, feminism, communism that dont need death at all in order to provide life with meaning.

This is a straw man fallacy. In Christianity, death is an enemy; it does not serve as the sine qua non for human meaning. Rather, as the Apostle Paul says, Death, where is your victory? Death where is your sting? And, Thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ! If anything, Christianity most certainly has a theology of death, and a meaning deriving from its notion: it is an enemy which will eventually be defeated by God through Christ.

Third, Harari is mistaken when he says, The best test to know whether an entity is real or fictional is the test of suffering. A nation cannot suffer, it cannot feel pain, it cannot feel fear, it has no consciousness. He is making an indirect, anthropological statement here:

P1: Knowing reality requires suffering

P2: Suffering requires consciousness

Therefore, consciousness is required for knowing reality.

But consciousness is presupposed for knowledge in the first place. This has the veneer of intellectual remarkability, but its nothing but circular reasoning and question-begging. Perhaps the best way to test what is real is the route Aristotle suggested: the external world as evident, known by the reliability of sense perception. Alas, since Descartes, Hume, and Kant, we live in a postmodern world of suspicion: everything is suspect, except for the notion of progress.

Finally, Harari believes that religion, law, nations, etc. are mere fictions, developed by the subjectivity of the human mind (hints of Descartes theory of knowledge here) with the purpose of promoting progress. Knowing this, he believes, will enable mankind to progress by discarding old systems of religious thought and believe in the reality of humans to evolve into a better, technological, transhuman thing. To the contrary, his fundamental beliefs driving his argument come from his flawed concept of the origin of religionand humanssubjectivist, Cartesian epistemology, and 19th century pragmatism, which results in relativism.

In Episode IV, Darth Vader warns Grand Moff Tarkin not to put too much faith in the Death Star, this technological terror youve constructed. For, You do not know the power of the Force. In the same way, Hararis prognostications about the future of mankind with its hope based in evolution and technology, should be recapitulated in a system of thought which comports with what is truly real: God.

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A remembrance of Spring Weekends past at SUNY-New Paltz – Hudson Valley One

Posted: at 11:38 am

The Youngbloods immortalized Spring Weekend at SUNY-New Paltz in 1970 by putting a shot of the crowd on the back cover of their Rock Festival album. That famous two-day concert also featured performances by Hot Tuna, Jefferson Airplane, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Stone The Crows, Eddie Kirkland, Baby Tate, Larry Johnson and Joe Cockers Mad Dogs & Englishmen (which featured Leon Russell). (Warner Brothers)

Remember the Tripping Fields, that spacious, California-shaped tract of somewhat swampy multipurpose grassland at the southern tip of the SUNY-New Paltz campus, probing into the lower Moriello Orchards? Even my mother, who moved here in 1962 well before the activism/hedonism of the counterculture redesigned her quaint little Huguenot town called them the Tripping Fields. I dont think she knows what tripping means. She probably imagined that it had something to do spring, youth, meadows, daisies and free time. She was right.

Spring Weekends were held there: two-day rock concerts featuring a panoply of surprisingly big names, afforded by the Student Associations mandatory fees and justified by an assumed homogeneity of taste that has since been rightfully redressed. I dont have the data to back this up, but I seem to recall that, at the peak of the Spring Weekend era, the crowds at these concerts were more than double the student population of the college.

In my youth, before my own college years elsewhere, I attended a bunch of Spring Weekends. I remember: mud, mostly, cities of mud; but also hippies packed like salted fish onto a tract of land that was (actually, not kidding) a single long golf hole, with a green, a bunker and a pin. As if in orchestrated cultural counterpoint, along the forested eastern fringe of the Tripping Fields hid the opposite of golf, the exemplary communal village of the long-defunct Environmental Studies Program: some A-frames circled around organic gardens, one high-tech solar house that always seemed to be in progress, a single-residence grotto like an aquarium tank embedded in the side of a hill. I looked for the grotto for years, and couldnt verify its reality until I met a man who claimed to have lived there. Its all gone now.

Just as Spring Weekend attracted thousands of non-students, the Environmental Studies Site, if I recall correctly, had some issues with casually matriculated squatters. This was a different New Paltz, well before the academic rehab that may well have spelled the end for innovative studies and, indeed, for the classic Spring Weekend itself. Perhaps, in the 70s and into the 80s, academic standards were low and the students were high; but in a timeless paradox, lax standards sometimes encourage a kind of imagination and autonomy that high standards can squeeze right out of you.

I didnt actually see a lot of great shows in the tripping fields: the Waitresses, Gary US Bonds, a Pure Prairie League side project and, in one year in the gymnasium, after the field shows had been prohibited, They Might Be Giants, Michelle Shocked and Tribe Called Quest. But the legendary student-run Jedi Productions booked excellent gymnasium and theater rock shows year-round, so there was no shortage of big-name talent passing through.

Many veterans of those days rue the passing of New Paltz as a tour destination. Even though I remain a working rock guitarist, I am no rockist True Believer. Monolithic guitar-rock did not fairly represent the diversity of the SUNY-New Paltz studentry. That SA budget should have been more fairly distributed to a variety of student-initiated programming, and ultimately it was, moving the SA beyond what my friend Mark Aldrich once called the great melting-pot rainbow of white.

So I dont rue the rock, but I do miss the idyll of Spring Weekends. As the licenses of the 60s gave way to the 80s attempt to restore the academic sobriety of the institution, the administration may have grown less comfortable with allowing students that kind of free rein and access to facilities. From the perspective of the Sudbury educational model, Spring Weekends exemplify learning at its very best: students working without adult interference or the need for external validation, initiating and organizing themselves and using real money to make real things happen. From an administrative perspective, it is not hard to understand some reluctance. Rock concerts are chaos unleashed. New Paltzs reputation as a vigorous party school was not an academic asset, and Spring Weekend had become its flagship ritual, when the loonies ran the bin.

Baby-Boomers and vets of the culture wars like to remember an era of free love, pre-HIV, before sex was all second-guessing and actualized Freudian nightmares. Me, I wax nostalgic about the pre-Lyme era of fields and long grasses, the days of hill-rolling and copse-traipsing, gone forever. Spring was long, meadows werent poisoned and everyone loved guitars.

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Where did all the rationalists go? – The Australian Financial Review

Posted: at 11:38 am

by Richard Denniss

Are there any economic rationalists left in the Australian business community? Where are the fiscal conservatives when you need them?

Hard headed budget hawks are missing in action when it comes to our governments giving a $1 billion subsidy to help build the world's largest coal mine.

Just because something is a bad for the environment doesn't mean it is a good for the economy. Environmentalists wanting to stop the Adani Carmichael mine is not a reason for business to support it.

Yet in Canberra, the silence from Australian business leaders on Adani is taken as tacit support for the subsidies needed to build its mine. Let's take a look at the reasons put forward to justify this wasteful public intervention in the coal market, all of which used outrage economic rationalists.

First up: jobs. While it is hard to imagine spending $1 billion and not stimulating some economic activity, it is even harder to imagine a project that would create fewer jobs per public dollar spent than the Adani mine. Indeed, Adani's hand-picked economic expert told a court that the project would create only 1464 direct and indirect jobs, and that estimate was based on the average capital/labour ratio of existing coal mines. Since that court case, Adani have been keen to talk up how "high tech"their mine would be now promising shareholders automation "from pit to port".

But even if we take Adani's best-case scenario, and even if all of the 1464 new jobs were drawn from the ranks of the 161,200 people who were unemployed in Queensland in February 2017, then the unemployment rate would fall from 6.4 per cent to, wait for it, 6.4 per cent. The impact of the Adani project on the Queensland economy would be so small that it wouldn't shift the unemployment rate at the first decimal place.

Then there are "all the taxes' that the subsidised mine will provide. State government tax revenues from mining come in the form of royalties paid in exchange for the resources extracted. But after nearly sevenyears of talking about the benefits to the Queensland budget of the Adani mine no one has any idea what price Adani will pay Queenslanders for their coal. We do know that former Queensland Premier Campbell Newman had offered Adani a "royalty holiday"(free coal). But the current government has never clarified what price, if any, they intend to charge. As for the federal government revenue, the mining industry already pays the lowest proportion of their profits in company tax. Beyond that, the existence of Adani subsidiaries in Mauritius and the Cayman Islands have already been revealed before the first tonne of coal has even been mined.

Finally, and most bizarrely, at a time when world demand for coal is flat and the price of renewable energy and batteries is collapsing, some coal supporters say public subsidies are justified because, wait for it, the renewable energy industry gets subsidies. It is a strange form of economic rationalism or fiscal conservatism that argues that if you can't remove the subsidies from one product you should invent a new subsidy for its competitor.

Of course as Margaret Thatcher, Angela Merkel and Arnold Schwarzenegger have shown, there is no need for economic conservatives to be climate sceptics. Indeed, historically economic "hard heads"would have been more likely to trust scientific advice than the average environmentalist. Let's not even get into the fact that the mining industry couldn't exist without science but it has bankrolled science scepticism when it comes to climate. Internationally, conservatives that do take the advice of economists and scientists prefer the introduction of a carbon price to level the energy playing field than the creation of new subsidies for the coal industry.

But in Australia, despite the stated concern of business leaders about the state of the budget, taxpayer subsidies for the construction of an enormous new coal mine is not subject to the principles of fiscal conservatism, economic efficiency or even market risk. On the contrary, the fact that environmentalists want to stop the mine is enough for some to assume it must be a good idea. Not a very rational way to make decisions.

Richard Denniss is the chief economist for The Australia Institute

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IRS Granted Tax-Exempt Status to After School Satan Club in Only … – Townhall

Posted: at 11:38 am

The IRS granted tax-exempt status to theAfter School Satan Club 10 days after it applied, records obtained byJudicial Watch show. At the same time, tea party groups were forced to wait up to seven years or were denied altogether.

The tax-exempt status is meant for charitable, religious, and educational groups that operate as nonprofits. The After School Satan Club is operated by The Satanic Temple, which says Satanism is a religion that endorses scientific rationalism as our best model for understanding the natural world.

The club seeks to counter the Evangelical Good News Club, which the group claims robschildrenof theinnocence and enjoyment of childhood, replacing them with a negative self image,preoccupation with sin, fear of Hell, and aversion to critical thinking.

In 2016 the Satanic Temple released the following video on their YouTube page announcing the launch of its after school club in schools across the nation.

Warning: Its extremely creepy.

Judicial Watch has more on the clubs background:

The principle goal of establishing the Satan clubs in public schools throughout Washington State appears to be to counter existing enterprises operated by a Christian-based group.Documentsobtained by Judicial Watch include the process of establishing an after-school Satan club at Point Defiance Elementary in Tacoma. The entity behind the club is a nonprofit called Reason Alliance, which is based in Somerville, Massachusetts, and operates in Washington State as the Satanic Temple of Seattle. Its director, Lilith X. Starr, established the Point Defiance Elementary Satanic club, the records show. In its application the club states that its purpose is character development and that adult instructors are vetted by the Satanic Temples Executive Ministry. Children ages 5-12 will develop basic critical reasoning, character qualities, problem solving and creative expression, according to the Satanic Temple filings included in the documents. The club logo is a pencil with devils horns.Recordsobtained by Judicial Watch from the Treasury Department show that the Satanic cult applied for tax-exempt status on October 21, 2014 and received it on October 31, 2014.

So while the Obama administration's IRS illegally targeted conservative groups, it evidently saw no problem whatsoever with fast tracking the application of a leftist satanic group.

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Yudof: Fine line between what is free speech – Cleveland Jewish News

Posted: at 11:37 am

Mark Yudof, former president of the University of California, said he believes in the right to free speech and opposes the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, but doesnt view the two as mutually exclusive.

He spoke with the Cleveland Jewish News March 15 about recent attempts by the BDS movement on college campuses, including a failed ballot initiative at The Ohio State University in Columbus on March 9. That night, he participated in the Sidney Z. Vincent Memorial Lecture, Free Speech on Campus: Are There Limits? at The Temple-Tifereth Israel in Beachwood.

Yudof, now chair of the advisory board at the Academic Engagement Network, said he couldnt speak specifically about the failed Ohio State issue, but his organization is there to rally students and faculty who oppose BDS and let administrations know if they handled a situation well or could have done better. Yudof said the Academic Engagement Network, which has its national office in Washington, D.C., acts on a case-by-case basis but tries to answer questions in what Yudof said are mutual learning experiences.

Jewish people are very concerned, concerned about anti-Semitism on campus and concerned with the lack of tolerance of people who disagreed with their point of view Yudof said of the BDS movement on college campuses. We reply mostly to our members on the campuses, since the field was tilted so much in favor of BDS. Well have a few faculty members on campus sign a petition or sometimes we send a letter to the president thanking them for their work on campus.

Yudof didnt think people needed to agree with Israel completely in order to see the issues with BDS.

If you dont like the settlement policy, many of our members dont like the settlement policy Yudof said. If you either like or dislike (Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahus) regime, thats neither here nor there in terms of our purpose.

Yudof said often the distinction between Jews and Israelis is lost in the BDS movement, but ultimately BDS is a delegitimization effort.

To me, that creates enormous problems, he said. Its one thing to say were going to negotiate with the Russian government over Ukraine and another thing to say there shouldnt be a Russian government. Its one thing to negotiate with Mexico over border rules and immigration and another to say there shouldnt be a state of Mexico. That is right in your face.

Although his organization doesnt perceive enormous problems with the movement in Cleveland, BDS organizations often frame the issue in a way that is appealing to students, which he says is opportunistic. Yudof said progressive organizations often line up on the pro-BDS side.

Its almost like a coalition, he said. You support me on my issues and Ill support you on yours. Even Jewish students often dont have a good grasp on Israel and where they came from and what its all about.

Yudof said he didnt really understand why there is a connection between many progressive movements and BDS. He said when he was president of the University of California, there was a pro-BDS, anti-fossil fuel rally.

Its born of an ignorance and sort of a knee-jerk reaction to what is progressive, he said.

Yudof, a former constitutional lawyer, isnt trying to completely silence BDS supporters, but wants to get out the correct information about what the movement represents and support faculty members and administration who stand up against it.

Basically, hate speech is constitutionally protected, but if you put a swastika on a synagogue or you burn a cross on the lawn of black familys home, we have precedent that says its not protected, he said. But by and large when someone stands up and says Jewish people are terrible, it may be reprehensible speech. In those cases, what we look for is moral leadership, we dont try to silence the speakers but what we say to the president is look, is if (former Ku Klux Klan leader) David Duke came to your campus and said racist things, youd be all over it, why arent you all over this, which involves an equal amount of hurt to Jewish people when they hear from anti-Semitic speakers?

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Unless online giants stop the abuse of free speech, democracy and … – TechCrunch

Posted: at 11:37 am


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Unless online giants stop the abuse of free speech, democracy and ...
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When thousands, perhaps millions, of people use social networks to spread hate speech, online harassment and abuse, the problem might often seem..

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