Daily Archives: July 24, 2017

Secret Garden Party bows out with its most debauched bash yet – NME – NME.com (blog)

Posted: July 24, 2017 at 8:00 am

The famous Cambridgeshire hedonist's playground closes its gates after 2017's final bash - here's all the naked, paint-flinging, mansion-burning fun of the last ever SGP.

Who wants to wear my pubic hair hat?

In the age of unkillable super-gonnorhea, this question really shouldnt get the enthusiastic response that it does. But the rush to don the pubic headwear of a random woman on the Palais De Boob stage is perhaps the biggest of its kind in recorded history. For this is Secret Garden Party, a place where normal convention does not hold, where every yoga session involves at least one naked man, where your inhibitions are best left in the care of the massive sad fox by the entrance and theres no concern whatsoever for cultural appropriation. Forget all the Native American head-dresses, there would be real uproar if word of this place ever got back to the ancient Amazonian tribe of the Glittertits.

Go Big & Go Home is the weekends motto. 2017 marks the last ever Secret Garden Party I got very emotional, twice, says Head Gardener Freddie Fellowes, discussing his Q&A about shutting the gates for good so in wild-ass hedonism terms, time is of the essence. Everywhere you turn lies another invitation to get naked. Outside the Spiritual Playground tent an array of Buddhist monkey gods and false idols are celebrating the birthday of a nude bloke called Phil The Little Acorn (for evident reasons) by playing a game of Pass The Parcel where virtually every prize is a silver thong. The Palais De Boob stage is dedicated to freeing the nipple and every game of Keeping Up With The Car-Crashdashians in the Colosillyum seems to end with the loser fortfeiting most of their clothing. Its like the worlds biggest game of Spin The Bottle decided to put some bands on.

The acts certainly get in the spirit. On Sunday afternoon Beans On Toast has written a song especially for the festival, commemorating the sight of a grown man attempting to leap a gap on a five-year-olds bike during the Wonky Races and the time he took a pill live onstage at Where The Wild Things Are. And Peaches appears to have won the race to the pubic hat she opens her Friday night set wearing a vagina headpiece and flanked by dancing vaginas, and ends it half naked, simulating such rampant lesbianism youd think she was pitching her own Netflix drama.

All of which makes Secret Garden Party an affront to God, so naturally He tries to wash it from the face of the earth on Saturday and Sunday. SGP just organises a mass moon at the clouds. The Zeuses and nuns of the Spiritual Playground just move their game of Blind Deity inside. The men with gold TVs for heads dont let a spot of rain stop them having a dance off in the onsite boxing ring. Two Amy Winehouses still stop for a natter by The Drop, a dance ditch featuring the worlds shittest Transformer.

Indeed, despite the rain, Secret Garden Party pulls out all the stops for its final curtain. The spectacular Sunday afternoon paint fight comes with paint fireworks, and the Dance Off even has a champagne fight on Friday. A skywriting plane shooting fireworks circles over the Lake Stage during Jagwar Mas Saturday set and the legendary burning of the effigy in the middle of the lake sees an entire faux mansion house go up in smoke, revealing a gigantic heart of fire in its ruins.

Its tempting to call this weekend the death of the boutique. A monochrome film shown on the big screen of the Lake Stage on Saturday night made up of footage shot here over the past fifteen years certainly makes people on bungees hitting each other with giant balloons look as mournful as it can. As SGP bows out and Bestival shrinks onshore, there are few bijou festival wonderlands left, places you can go to take on a three-day identity, become a superstar of costumed idiocy and, most crucially, feel like you really own. A toff-fest in Freddies glorified back garden, yes, but Secret Garden Party was also a community of free-spirited souls in a way that Leefest, frankly, isnt. Perhaps the bleakness of Brexit, Trump and May overwhelms even the need to find respite in a place where you can dance to reggaeton in a spangly tassled leotard to your hearts content. Perhaps hedonism only really thrives hand-in-hand with hope and the Oh Jeremy Corbyn chants are more ardent here than anywhere.

Or maybe, as Fellowes claims, think of it more as Dylan goes electric than our Altamont.You cant be avant-garde from within an institution and lest we forget, the frontier always moves. So watch this space for the phoenix rising from the ashes. It seems new borders are being planted, gardeners

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The many flavors of Israeli hotels – ISRAEL21c

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When traveling, you can sometimes let go of normalcy and embrace something dreamlike. Israel abounds with wonderful places to sleep and to dream, catering to all tastes and imaginations.

There are the lush fairy houses of the Castles that Move in the Wind up in the Golan;Beresheet, a stone hotel that sits, as silent and monolithic as the city of Ur, on the edge of the Ramon crater in the Negev; and the sublime respite Mitzpe Hayamim,a spa/hotel/organic farm near Rosh Pina, and many more.

We have not stayed in every hotel in Israel not by a long shot but we have touched down in nearly every corner of the country and have seen a wide gamut of lodging places, from mud huts on working farms in the desert to the most elegantly appointed hotel rooms overlooking vistas of green hills, borderlines, and history.

What we have seen throughout our travels is that Israelis have a knack for combining elegance with a lack of pretention, a Mediterranean understanding of hedonism with a kibbutznik practicality.

Each of the hotels, inns, and guesthouses weve mentioned combines those factors.

Your feet are always on the ground in Israel; it is hard not to feel agreeably at home here in the most basic and the most high-toned places. That kind of comfort is the ultimate luxury.

Lin Arison & Diana C. Stoll are the creatorsofThe Desert and the Cities Sing: Discovering Todays Israel, a treasure box that highlights Israels creative achievement and innovation.

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On Melodrama, Lorde reveres being young and dumb – McGill Tribune

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Its easy to trivialize pop music, or dismiss it as something intrinsically lesser than real music." It can seem banal, and focus on catchiness in lieu of explicit meaning. But those criticisms often miss the point of the genre. At its best, a pop song isnt about a message, per se, but rather a feeling, wrapped up in a chorus that seems so true to a moment or person or place that you cant not sing along with it.

Every Top 40 aspirant tries to manufacture that irresistible magic. Regular placeholders like Drake and the Chainsmokers seem to have it down to a science. While a good way to score airtime, such a formulaic approach is also what separates generic radio hits from the likes of pop princess Lordes debut album, Pure Heroinea hypnotizing, shapeshifting gem that made house parties everywhere suddenly uncomfortably introspective.

For her part, the New Zealand artist has expressed not merely a love, but a reverence for the pop genre. And throughout Melodrama, her latest offering, that adoration is alive and well. The result is an exquisite, affecting account of all the heartbreak and hedonism of life at 20-something.

Much like 2013s Pure Heroine, Melodramanails that pendulum swing between revelry and restlessness that should be familiar to anyone on the fringe of adulthood, while avoiding the predictability that often weighs down songs about young people partying. Thats largely thanks to Lordes exceptional songwriting, which defies conventional pop structure at every turn. Unexpected yet irresistible flourishespunching horns on Sober, Green Lights triumphant piano bridge, a penultimate guitar riff warped to sound like wrenching metal on Hard Feelings/Lovelesspunctuate beats like Pop Rocks candies that are sometimes watered down, sometimes chased with tequila.

On highlight track The Louvre, a soaring hook crops up as giddily and unexpectedly as the crush you didnt know was going to be at the bar tonight, before the spoken chorusBroadcast the boom, boom, boom and make em all dance to itpulls it all back, muting the party because youve stepped into the bathroom to try and stop blushing.

Thematically, the album is a soundtrack to some bender of a weekend, and all the barely-suppressed emotional baggage that comes with it. Drunken, reckless decisions abound on Homemade Dynamite, but hangover and heartache are never far off. Liability is a delicate ode to the party girl tired of being cast aside, and sways sad and reflective in the middle of the albums otherwise humming dancefloor. The contrast is somewhat poignant, but lays on the pure melancholy just a little too thick. Its successor, Hard Feelings/Loveless, yanks the heartstrings more effectively. The two-parter narrows the focus from broad heartache to that implosive, painstakingly concealed brand of hurt unique to the era of hook-ups and smartphonesthe kind that requires confessions like: It was real for me.

The singer-songwriters diagnosis of the young adult saga as one big, messy melodramabuilding relationships on boozy nights out, agonizing over the punctuation of a text, how we kiss and kill each otheris spot-on. Like any good soap opera, being young can be tragic, ridiculous, and, quite often, both at the same time. Cloaking jarringly insightful social commentary in winking, snarky lines like, Ill give you my best side, tell you all my best lies / Awesome, right?, Lorde strikes the balance between comedy and tragedy effortlessly.

And its not all anguishthis drama wouldve been cancelled seasons ago if there werent at least a few victories now and again. The closing track, Perfect Places, is an anthem apt for stumbling out of a house party like a living god, while the sparkling Supercut captures the afterglow of a fling never meant to last.

Above all, Lordes magnetism lies in her authenticity. Shes not just singing about being young and reckless; at 20 years old herself, shes right there with you, searching for peace of mind at crowded parties and noisy bars. She reflects on the absurdity of it all with sensitivity, candor, and wry humorbut never condescension. Its her melodrama, too.

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The 2017 ALSA Study Tour group to present key findings – The Shout

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By Deborah Jackson, Editor, National Liquor News

The 2017 Australian Liquor Stores Association (ALSA) Study Tour group has returned to Sydney, after a successful trip looking at the London retail market.

The group of 14 retailers and suppliers were able to identify some key themes in the London market, which they will be presenting at the Australian Retail Drinks Conference in Canberra next month.

ALSA Project Manager Mal Higgs told National Liquor News that the decision to go to London was made because of a resurgence in the independent liquor space in that market.

We chose London because our network has been telling us that there has been quite a resurgence in independent land. So the trading up or premiumisation trend that were seeing here in Australia, is also very evident in the UK.

The dynamics of the UK packaged liquor trade are that supermarkets own about 90 per cent of the business. However, at the moment as we saw from some of our suppliers over there, the only category of the retail market that is growing is the independent slice.

The aim of this years Study Tour was to look at the resurgence of the independent operator and why this has occurred, and at the other end of the spectrum, to see how the influence of the discounters, such as Aldi and Lidl has impacted the market.

The group visited a number of retail outlets across London, including Hedonism Wines, the World of Whisky and Vagabond Wines as well as receiving presentations from local suppliers on each of the major categories. This allowed the group to gain a broad understanding of the market, from which they were able to identify relevant themes.

Overall, the group found that its not just about stocking premium products, but is also about providing an experience.

In the Australian market, the traditional independent liquor store, for the most part, is part of a banner group, and is generally suburban-based. Therefore, almost by definition they are a convenience-based retailer.

It raises the question that in the right demographic and the right environment, could you specialise that convenience model a little bit and rather than try to sell everything to everybody, could you look at specialising in maybe whisky or craft beer? And that challenged the groups thinking, said Higgs.

The group came up with two or three key themes, around identifying what to do and understanding your customer, which will be presented at the Australian Retail Drinks Conference on Thursday 17 August.

In one respect it is fairly simple, and in another sense, something that appears simple isnt necessarily that simple to execute. So, by the time we get to the Conference we will have some of the retailers presenting exactly what theyve done in their stores, said Higgs.

As a follow on, ALSA is looking at doing a short trip to Hong Kong in November, which will include two days in the trade and two days at the Hong Kong Wine & Spirits Fair.

Then the next international Study Tour will head to New York in February, where Higgs says I want to have a closer look at the delivery model, and of course New York is always fantastic for really leading edge retail.

For more on the Study Tour, including its look at the Amazon Impact, see the August issue of National Liquor News, which will be out soon.

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NON-FICTION: THE FAILED RATIONALIST – DAWN.com

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The growing religious-ideological discord and presence of an assortment of religiously inspired extremist movements and groups in Pakistan have complex socio-political implications. Where these processes of negative social change will lead Pakistan is a worrying prognosis.

The religious discourse in the country, though diverse in sectarian terms, is largely monolithic intellectually. Even ideological diversity is rare; historically two trends have remained dominant, ie a traditional religious-political discourse, and Islamisation.

Although the two trends have some common violent and non-violent expressions, Islamist movements have also nurtured certain rational tendencies. These rational tendencies acted as a catalyst for overall religious trends in the country. On the one hand, rationalists shaped their own movements and established their institutions and on the other, under their influence or in reaction the traditionalists and Islamists tried to amend their strategies. However, the rationalists have failed to completely transform the religious discourse in the country. Their desire to become distinguished among the religious discourse would be a reason for this failure. This is strange, that in South Asian intellectual discourse leading Muslim scholars, rather than contributing, established their own movements while being part of the mainstream tradition.

An examination of why post-Islamist movements are unable to transform into populist social movements

Scholar, researcher and professor Dr Husnul Amin argues in his doctoral thesis about why the rationalists could not develop a populist approach. He counts many reasons, including the countrys peculiar societal structures, rationalists comfortable relationship with the power elites and most importantly the rationalists larger focus on the middle classes and special interest in academic issues. These findings give an impression that the rationalists failed on a strategic level, but one can argue about their whole intellectual paradigm, which may be borrowed from the West and influenced by contemporary socio-political environments rather than be linked with philosophical tradition or evolution of Islamic thought.

In pursuit of alternative modernity, the rationalists are developing compatibility with Islamic text and democratisation. Amin has tried to understand the dynamics of this process in his book Post-Islamism: Pakistan in the Era of Neoliberal Globalisation. This is indeed an important contribution to understanding the construct of Muslim intellectual movements in contemporary societies. He takes Javed Ahmed Ghamidis blueprint as a case study to comprehend the phenomenon, but uses the term post-Islamism for Muslim rationalism.

Post-Islamism is not a new term. French scholar Olivier Roy, as well as Iranian Asef Bayat, have mainly constructed the framework of post-Islamism, which is taken as a transformative form of Islamist movements of post-world wars that emerged in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia. Bayat contributed more in shaping the conceptual framework of Amins thesis, as he has acknowledged, but Amin applied this framework in a different context and with some variation. Amin believes post-Islamism is not the dead end of Islamism. It may not be dubbed anti-Islamic or secular, but secularisation of state/society. Post-Islamism proffers a framework where political reform is linked to religious reform. The Islamist parties have shifted their focus to minorities, youth and gender concerns and adopted a rights-based approach this is a practical manifestation of post-Islamism.

As far as Islamism is concerned, Amin considers it a revivalist movement and lists three factors that contributed to the conceptualisation of Islamism: 1. Political interpretation of religious text and thus blurring of categories of collective obligation and personal obligation. 2. Socio-political struggle to enforce Sharia, pursuance of an Islamisation programme through the institutional arrangement of the state and re-affirmation of Islam as a blueprint of socio-economic order. 3. Islamists openness to adopt and deploy all modern means of propaganda machinery, technology, print, electronic and social media.

In that context, he distinguishes post-Islamism as a social movement with a retreat from the idea of creating an Islamic state and an outcome of neo-liberal globalisation inspirations on modern Muslim minds. The Ghamidi movement is a perfect manifestation of this phenomenon as it has succeeded in creating an interpretive community in Pakistan that engages with liberalism and democracy.

It is interesting that Ghamidi thought was promoted by military dictator Gen Pervez Musharraf as his top-down project of enlightened moderation. It could be conceived as an enforced moderation project, that was part of a political tool and foreign policy agenda of the military government. Amin rightly argues, Ghamidi and his close associates received disproportionate media coverage on newly liberated private television channels. He became a member of the Council of Islamic Ideology in 2006 and remained in this position for two consecutive years. Despite an overwhelming emphasis on the status of democracy in their [Ghamidi movements] religious discourse, Ghamidi has hardly directly questioned the legitimacy of the system in place in which he gained the opportunity to flourish.

It is also interesting that Ghamidi does not subscribe to major Islamic schools of thought in the Indian subcontinent and places himself in a self-constructed category, Dabistan-i-Shibli. Amin believes that this imaginary school of thought has served the Ghamidi movement in multiple ways. It enables them to place themselves in the middle of two popularly known opposite poles, namely Deobands conservatism and Sir Syed Ahmed Khans rationalism. As a post-Islamist, Ghamidi has challenged the notion of the Islamic state projected by the Islamists including Maulana Maududi, who believes in the supremacy of Sharia over all aspects of social, political and religious life.

Amin also examines existing religious political movements in the country in the third chapter Islamism Without Fear. He argues that though the Jamaat-i-Islami is a well-structured and organised party in Pakistan and played a leading role in shaping the Islamism discourse in the country, compared to the Jamiat-Ulema-i-Islam Fazl (JUI-F), which is a loosely connected party, the latter remains more accommodative to religious minorities and in its political approaches. It can be assumed that despite its conventional credentials, the JUI-F has more flexibility to accommodate post-Islamism concepts of a social life.

Despite making some visible intellectual contribution, post-Islamist movements have failed to transform their ideas into a popular social movement. Amin is not hopeless and he agrees with Bayat that post-Islamism is an evolving concept and a conscious attempt to conceptualise and strategise the rationale and modalities of transcending Islamism in social, political and intellectual domains. Most importantly it provides an inward-looking approach, which may have a slow impact.

Amin is a fine scholar with exposure to the best international academic forums and his attempt will provoke healthy academic debate in Pakistan.

The reviewer is a security analyst and director of the Pak Institute for Peace Studies, Islamabad

Post-Islamism: Pakistan in the Era of Neoliberal Globalisation By Husnul Amin International Islamic University, Islamabad ISBN: 978-9697576050 198pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, July 23rd, 2017

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Herb Van Fleet: The sad state of education in America – Joplin Globe

Posted: at 7:59 am

Here we are with 2017 more than half over and weve got a lot on our plate to deal withour political system, our environmental problems, our federal and state debt, our infrastructure, our civil unrest, our dealings with domestic and international terrorism, our health care problems, and many more.

But one issue that is rarely brought up these days is education; specifically, where is education in terms of priorities, what are the issues and how will its shortcomings be remedied?

The people of the United States need to know that individuals in our society who do not possess the levels of skill, literacy and training essential to this new era will be effectively disenfranchised, not simply from the material rewards that accompany competent performance, but also from the chance to participate fully in our national life. A high level of shared education is essential to a free, democratic society and to the fostering of a common culture, especially in a country that prides itself on pluralism and individual freedom. That quote was taken from a report called A Nation At Risk and presented to president Ronald Reagan in April 1983.

The report goes on to enumerate the deficiencies of our school systems and to offer suggestions for improvement. But the negative findings in that very report are just as valid today as they were 34 years ago. Arguably, even worse.

Youve probably seen some of the statistics. The United States ranked 14th out of 40 nations in overall education. We are 24th in literacy and 17th in educational performance. In its 2015 report by the Program for International Student Assessment, the U.S. was ranked 38th out of 71 countries in math and 24th in science and reading. Among the 35 member nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States ranked 30th in math and 19th in science.

This lack of education has produced some disappointing results. For example, the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs commissioned a civic education poll among public school students. A surprising 77 percent didnt know that George Washington was the first president, couldnt name Thomas Jefferson as the author of the Declaration of Independence and only 2.8 percent of the students actually passed the citizenship test. Along similar lines, the Goldwater Institute of Phoenix did the same survey and only 3.5 percent of students passed the civics test. According to the National Research Council report, only 28 percent of high school science teachers consistently follow the National Research Council guidelines on teaching evolution, and 13 percent of those teachers explicitly advocate creationism or intelligent design. And 18 percent of Americans still believe that the sun revolves around the earth, according to a Gallup poll.

Another statistic that is alarming today is the result of a July 10 poll taken by the Pew Research Center in Washington, where 58 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning Americans said colleges and universities had a negative impact on the way things were going in the country. Two years ago, only 37 percent of that group said that. In recent months, that seems to ring true.

This decline of education in America has been going on for years. And problems engendered by this diminution have been and continue to show up in most of our institutions, our culture and our national conscience. As a result, we are losing respect from the rest of the civilized world along with our competitive edge. In short, we are facing a national tragedy.

As Susan Jacoby writes in a 2008 article in The Washington Post, The Dumbing of America, Dumbness, to paraphrase the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of heretofore irresistible forces. These include the triumph of video culture over print culture; a disjunction between Americans rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism. There is a growing and disturbing trend of anti-intellectual elitism in American culture. Its the dismissal of science, the arts, and humanities and their replacement by entertainment, self-righteousness, ignorance, and deliberate gullibility.

So here we are at the beginning of the 21st century with too many of us dismissive of science and rational discourse. Literacy and critical thinking are becoming anathema to our future leaders.

For some time now, Ive been studying the Iroquois Confederacys political philosophy as set fourth in its constitution. A small excerpt from that document seems pertinent here.

In all of your deliberations in the Council, in your efforts at law making, in all your official acts, self-interest shall be cast into oblivion. ... Look and listen for the welfare of the whole people and have always in view not only the present but also the coming generations, even those whose faces are yet beneath the surface of the ground the unborn of the future Nation.

Time to wake up America.

HERB VAN FLEET, a former Joplin resident, lives in Tulsa.

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At UCLA, free speech is suppressed and double standards reign – Washington Examiner

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On June 27, University of California at Los Angeles Professor Keith Fink was told that his 10-year teaching career in the Department of Communication Studies was over. No substantive reason was given; Interim Dean of Social Sciences Laura Gmez simply stated "your teaching does not meet the standard of excellence." The decision attracted national attention in large part because Fink teaches courses on the First Amendment, including a course on Free Speech on Campus a hot-button topic that has become politically-charged in recent years (inversely and ironically so, because the Free Speech Movement was born within the liberal mecca of UC Berkeley in the 1960s).

Today, for reasons worthy of a Ph.D. thesis, Free Speech purism has shifted from a "liberal" cause to a "conservative" cause. The First Amendment (especially with respect to its first clause: speech) should be apolitical. Accordingly, I (and Fink, too) view it simply as a non-partisan constitutional law issue one where the past 10 years of campus speech codes, mandatory "diversity training," "hate speech," so-called "safe spaces," and "trigger warnings" all fly in the face of dozens of Supreme Court opinions, none of which lend any credence to the legality of the aforementioned "ideals."

The facts of Fink's case alone are intriguing, especially insofar as they highlight UCLA's lack of commitment to academic freedom, due process, and fundamental fairness. His case also illustrates the growing intolerance on campuses toward ideas that do not conform with their traditional progressive agendas, especially among faculty.

While American research universities have historically dominated international rankings, largely due to their willingness to support a wide range of intellectual beliefs, academic freedom is under siege. Administrators, who rarely are zealous defenders of academic freedom and instead are typically trained in problem mitigation, are undermining the very purpose of the modern research university: to promote the free exchange of ideas. This, in turn, leads to them targeting students, faculty, and ideas that are at odds with their own.

Indeed, Fink, a rare conservative on a campus largely comprised of left-leaning faculty and ideologues, is not the first victim of viewpoint and/or political discrimination at UCLA: there are striking parallels between Fink's story and those of Political Economist Tim Groseclose and Epidemiologist James Enstrom. The nexus between these three cases is UCLA's cultural intolerance towards "conservative" views, or more precisely, views that contradict those of the faculty majority.

Particularly galling, however, are the stark differences between Fink's treatment and that of Gabriel Piterberg, the disgraced Professor of History and sexual predator.

By all outward measures, Fink is an excellent teacher.

His qualifications to teach the subjects of free speech on campus, free speech in the workplace, entertainment law, and contemporary social issues are unparalleled. He's a renowned attorney who specializes in these fields, and won the National Collegiate Debate Championship for UCLA for three consecutive years a record unmatched to this day. His students (liberal and conservative alike) universally love his teaching and describe his classes as among the most influential and developmentally-important classes they've taken at UCLA, some going as far to say that his classes "teach tolerance without imposing tolerance." Students characterize his lectures as dynamic and engaging; he's garnered widespread admiration for the attention he gives to students' individual academic and professional pursuits.

His instructor ratings and course ratings are significantly higher than those of his peers a point that his department chair, Kerri L. Johnson, even concedes which has propelled his classes to the top of students' lists of favorites. Fink can easily fill classrooms with hundreds of eager students; there are always students that are turned away due to lack of space (or more recently, arbitrary and dishonestly-justified caps on his courses' enrollment).

In short, he's an excellent teacher with a virtually impeccable teaching record.

Piterberg's case is a totally different story.

Piterberg has been sanctioned by the UC Regents as a result of allegations of sexual misconduct with two graduate students. His settlement includes a minor reduction in pay along with a conveniently-timed quarter away from UCLA where he could instead pursue a prestigious fellowship, thereby boosting his (and UCLA's) academic credentials. As Cassia Roth notes, "Piterberg's 'quarter off' may have cost him financially, but it actually boosted his real academic capital, his research status. And it also enhanced UCLA's own academic standing."

Even before his sexual assault fiasco, he was not particularly popular in the classroom. Students characterize his lectures as monotone and unorganized; he's not known for his concern for students, and students generally note that success in his courses requires mere regurgitation of facts and that he is "not so great a lecturer."

That's no way to teach a subject as important as history. Many students are skeptical of taking his courses, with some even protesting his mere presence on campus. His classes this past year have failed to attract even 50 students. "[I]ts not a good learning environment," says one student who recently took his course.

Although the disgraced Piterberg may be tenured, sexual assault is absolutely "for cause" grounds sufficient enough to justify early dismissal yet he remains on campus. Fink, a lecturer up for promotion to Continuing Lecturer (effectively granting job security), who boasts an objectively excellent teaching record and well-documented influence on thousands of students easily exceeds the criteria set forth for his advancement yet he was shown the door.

These cases have diametrically different outcomes, but why?

This dissonance sheds light into some of the less-glorious aspects of UCLA's inner workings. It exposes a system where department chairs like Kerri L. Johnson can make up rules to suit their interests; it highlights UCLA's flagrant disregard for their very own rules; and perhaps most shockingly, it shows a top-down culture whereby deans and vice chancellors (such as Laura Gmez and Jerry Kang) don't simply administrate, but rather dictate their campus' intellectual climate in complete derogation of academic freedom (a principle they pay lip service to but rarely match it with their actions).

It's no surprise that Jerry Kang (Vice Chancellor of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion) dislikes Fink's presence on campus. Fink regularly takes Kang to task about issues related to student speech, conduct, and academic freedom typically using Kang's in terrorem email missives as springboards to highlight how the abstractions of First Amendment jurisprudence commonly pan out in public universities.

After all, what better way to teach free speech on campus than to use examples from students' own university?

But when Kang and his peers took issue with this, they should have addressed their concerns directly, expediently, and professionally rather than waiting until Fink's eighteenth quarter where they could sheepishly assemble a star chamber review process rigged against Fink from the outset.

For now, Johnson, Gmez, Kang, and the other administrator-bureaucrats who orchestrated Fink's Kafkaesque review may be rejoicing in the fact that they successfully eliminated Fink's outspoken, popular, and intellectually-competing voice from their campus.

But their rejoice will be short-lived: UCLA is already suffering as a result. Fink will not put this battle to rest, not because it involves him, but because it threatens all lecturers' academic freedom and belies the very tenets upon the modern research university are predicated.

Andrew Litt is a law clerk at Keith A. Fink & Associates. He was a teaching assistant for Fink at UCLA.

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6 Incidents Unmasking Social Media Giants as Enemies of Free Speech – Townhall

Posted: at 7:58 am

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Posted: Jul 24, 2017 12:01 AM

Hate speech is not free speech, the Left increasingly insists particularly on college and university campuses. In my new book The Complete Infidels Guide to Free Speech (and Its Enemies), I show why the very concept of hate speech is a scam. Here are the top seven:

1. Twitter decides who has the right to hate speech

Consider, for example, what Twitter does not consider to be hate speech. A Muslim named Obaid Karki, @stsheetrock on Twitter, runs a website headed Obaid Karki St.Sheetrocks Painfulpolitics Offensive Comedy Hepcat and another called Suicide Bombers Magazine. He posted this on one of them in late May 2016, just before the European Union and the social media sites announced their new agreement: Robert Spencer mustnt [be] featured but lynched

Karkis posted this call for me to be lynched on Twitter. But Twitter refused to delete his account or even remove the threatening tweets.

2. Social Media blocks the truth by deeming it hate speech

Videogame developer Mark Kern was suspended from Twitter for writing, I dont see why mosques with radical leanings should be excluded from surveillance when the rest of us get our emails collected by the NSA. The administrator of a proDonald Trump Facebook group was banned for arguing that Trump was not anti-Muslim but anti-ISIS.

In early February 2017, they came for me.

On February 7, 2017, referrals to my website, Jihad Watch, from Facebook numbered 23,783, and from Twitter, 1,718. These numbers were generally representative: referrals from Facebook for several years up to that point had averaged between 15,000 and 20,000 a day, and 1,500 to 2,000 a day from Twitter. But on February 10, 2017, those numbers dropped suddenly and precipitously, with only 2,923 referrals from Facebook and 295 from Twitter. Thats around where they have held since then: on March 20, 2017, there were 1,954 referrals from Facebook and 241 from Twitter.

Did thousands of people who used to click through to Jihad Watch articles from Facebook and Twitter suddenly lose interest on February 10, 2017? Of course not. What happened on that day was that Facebook and Twitter began to censor Jihad Watch as hate speech, in accordance with the assurances they had given to the European Union.

Blocking the Truth

Facebook, immediately after concluding an agreement with the European Union, began moving aggressively against foes of jihad terror and mass Muslim migration in the West. Nina Rosenwald, the president and founder of the conservative think tank Gatestone Institute, on June 2, 2016 recorded Facebooks haste to implement the new speech regulations: On Tuesday, the European Union (EU) announced a new online speech code to be enforced by four major tech companies, including Facebook and YouTube. On Wednesday, Facebook deleted the account of Ingrid Carlqvist, Gatestones Swedish expert.

Carlqvists crime, according to Rosenwald, was to take note of real crimes by Muslim migrants: Ingrid had posted our latest video to her Facebook feedcalled Swedens Migrant Rape Epidemic. In that video, said Rosenwald, Ingrid calmly lays out the facts and statistics, all of which are meticulously researched. Rosenwald added that the video was adapted from a research paper that Gatestone published last year. The video has gone viralracking up more than 80,000 views in its first two days. But the EU is quite candid: it is applying a political lens to their censorship....

Facebook banning anti-jihad opinions

Facebook banned the page of a gay magazine, Gaystream, after it published an article by David Berger, its editor-in-chief, criticizing German gay activists and leftists for ignoring the Islamic root causes of the Orlando jihad massacre. Berger wrote, Whoever had thought the culmination of masochism and Islam-appeasement by left-green professional homosexuals was already achieved, will now be mistaken: it becomes even more masochistic and perverse.

5. Deleting jihad awareness

In July 2016, YouTube also invoked hate speech criteria, which supposedly it had developed as a tool to use against jihad recruiting videos, to delete a video critical of non-violent Muslim Brotherhood efforts to advance Sharia in the West.

6. The immunity of the censorship of certain social media groups explain a lot

On July 13, 2016, the American Freedom Law Center (AFLC) filed a federal lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, on behalf of Pamela Gellers American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), of which I am vice president, challenging Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), which grants Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube immunity from lawsuits, and thus makes it impossible to challenge their consistent bias against foes of jihad terror and tolerance of jihad terror activity.

Section 230 of the CDA explicitly immunizes Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube from challenges to anything they do to restrict access to or availability of material that that they deem obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected.

David Yerushalmi, AFLC co-founder and senior counsel, added, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have notoriously censored speech that they deem critical of Islam, thereby effectively enforcing blasphemy laws here in the United States with the assistance of the federal government. It has been the top agenda item of Islamic supremacists to impose such standards on the West.... Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are falling in line, and we seek to stop this assault on our First Amendment freedoms.

Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watchand author of the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades)and The Truth About Muhammad. His latest book is The Complete Infidels Guide to Free Speech (and Its Enemies). Follow him on Twitter here. Like him on Facebook here.

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6 Incidents Unmasking Social Media Giants as Enemies of Free Speech - Townhall

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Editorial: UC makes right call on free speech – San Francisco … – San Francisco Chronicle

Posted: at 7:58 am

Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle

Visitors walk through Sather Gate at UC Berkeley.

Visitors walk through Sather Gate at UC Berkeley.

Give UC Berkeley credit for learning from the past years intensive course in free speech and right-wing provocation. After a series of standoffs with conservative speakers left the university looking less than eager to accommodate all comers, its approach to the latest controversial invitation strikes the right tone by making unfettered expression the clear priority.

University officials initially expressed reservations about the time, date and type of venue requested for the Berkeley College Republicans next would-be guest, conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, prompting the group to revive its accusations of a consistent bias against right-wing speakers. But the university announced Thursday that it would take additional steps, including possibly paying or waiving venue fees, to make the speech happen on the September evening requested by the student organization.

UC Berkeleys new chancellor, Carol Christ, said in a statement that the university welcomes a broad range of perspectives, including Shapiros: We believe deeply in the value and importance of free speech and fully support student groups right to invite speakers of their choice to campus. She added that the school had hosted literally dozens of speakers from both conservative and libertarian movements without incident. The key is for the hosting organization to work collaboratively with the campus.

Indeed, the recent crop of speakers and their supporters have at times seemed more eager to be refused than to be accommodated and to therefore have the opportunity to accuse UC Berkeley of being a liberal echo chamber that has drifted a long way from the days when the Free Speech Movement began there. The Berkeley Republicans habit of demanding a particular date, time and venue without consulting the administration makes the universitys job more difficult. So do left-wing protesters threatening and carrying out violence, necessitating heightened security measures.

For those and other reasons, scheduled campus speeches by professional provocateurs Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter were ultimately called off this year. UC Berkeley appears to be striving to avoid a similar outcome in the case of Shapiro, whose books and commentary have targeted Palestinians, Hollywood and universities.

If all the student group and its guests are looking for is a cancellation and a headline, maintaining an open campus will only serve to call their bluff.

UC Berkeleys efforts to welcome the next controversial speaker recognizes that the public university has a special obligation to facilitate the free exchange of ideas even when the ideas are questionable and the interest in exchanging them is in doubt.

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EDITORIAL: Freedom of speech never more valuable – The Northwest Florida Daily News

Posted: at 7:58 am

When it seems anyone can say or write almost anything and have it published on the internet, recent events offer reminders that the freedom of expression is not universal.

The Financial Times first reported this week that the Chinese government has banned Winnie-the-Poohs likeness and name on social media.

Yes, that Winnie-the-Pooh, the anthropomorphic bear created by author A.A. Milne and digitized by Disney. As USA Today reported in a follow-up: The characters name in Chinese was censored in posts on Sina Weibo, a social media platform similar to Twitter, while a collection of Winnie-the-Pooh gifts vanished from social messaging service WeChat. ... Any attempts to post Poohs Chinese name on Weibo prompted a message: 'Content is illegal.' "

Insiders speculated that government censors acted on behalf of Chinese President Xi Jinping, who was the subject of an internet meme featuring roly-poly Pooh and his wiry pal Tigger. Those images emerged in 2013 after the stout Xi was photographed with the slender President Barack Obama.

As is often the case, examples of absurd government censorship in China and elsewhere are accompanied by appalling abuses of human rights. Too often one leads to another, or vice versa.

It has been widely reported in the free world that Liu Xiaobo, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, recently died in Chinese custody denied access to his wife, who is under house arrest. But Chinese officials who control the media have been on social sites busily blocking news of Lius death and monitoring private conversations.

Liu was in state custody because he had been sentenced to 11 years in prison for writing about and advocating universal values shared by all humankind, including human rights, equality, freedom, democracy and the rule of law.

Eleven years.

For advocating universal values shared by all humankind.

Horrifying.

China is one of the most populous offenders but hardly alone. We have written previously about Raif Badawi, a blogger who has criticized the entanglement of religion, namely Islam, and government in Saudi Arabia and was sentenced to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes as a result. Considered a foe of the state and the national religion, he remains in custody; little is known about his condition or the extent of the beatings he has suffered.

Examples of repression are everywhere. Credible reports by watchdogs show that 34 journalists have been killed in Russia since 2000 with evidence that the killings were in retribution for coverage of public- and private-sector corruption. Turkey has recently jailed human-rights advocates.

And, yes, in the United States, there are troubling signs of intolerance: Campus speakers have been threatened and shouted down by political opponents, the tenor of the cultural wars is increasingly hostile and dishonest journalists have been labeled by the president as enemies of the people.

But at least in America we have the First Amendment and its protections, which have seldom seemed more necessary and valuable.

This editorial was originally published in the Sarasota Herald Tribune, a sister newspaper of the Daily News within GateHouse Media.

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