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    [post_date] => 2020-03-20 18:57:47
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    [post_content] => With security risks and data-leaks, why do some serving soldiers bring smartphones on deployment, and how do countries differ?

A few years ago, my husband deployed to Afghanistan where the British Army had categorically banned all soldiers from using their phones. He called once a week at most, and our conversations were stilted and short. It’s hard to share sweet nothings in front of a line of soldiers waiting their turn. All was well until one morning I had coffee with another army wife. Her husband was working in the US Marine Corps Camp Leatherneck, and she got to facetime him every. single. morning. What I’d thought was an iron law of deployment – no personal communications devices for anyone, anywhere, anytime – turned out to be more an evolving set of practices.

Cell phones are wildly insecure. They’re the most vulnerable node in a network designed to generate and exploit user-data and share it with a wide range of actors, from device manufacturers, operating system owners, content-creators, software and app-designers, phone companies and partner networks. And those are just the organizations officially permitted to pull down mobile device data. Many apps leak data continually, as a consequence of either poor design or the user’s failure to install updates. We also have a perennial problem of apps that access and share personal and device data they have collected unnecessarily.

Cell phones use several different families of communications protocol — SMS, MMS, WiFi, Bluetooth and GSM – each with its own security vulnerabilities and unpredictable interaction effects. Then there are the network exploits: network providers use signalling protocols that  have known and more or less unfixable weaknesses. This means that more than half the attempts to tap calls made on 3G networks succeed, while nine out of ten SMS messages can be intercepted.

Attackers can exploit all of these weaknesses. Spyware such as NSO Group’s infamous Pegasus software can allegedly read text messages, track calls, collect passwords, track the location of the phone, access its microphone and camera and suck up information from apps. No wonder so many militaries ban personal cell phones for soldiers in action, while some ban their use altogether.

For soldiers, however, a cellphone can seem essential. These are young people who exercise a lot, often using apps, are typically far from home and often bored — and they really, really like to show off to their friends by posting videos and photographs. But the morale boost of a cellphone can undermine operational security:

    
 	
  • Researchers for Bellingcat, the open-source intelligence website, used soldiers’ social media posts to forensically trace the entire journey of the Russian military unit that transported the Buk missile launcher, which likely shot down Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) over eastern Ukraine in 2014. Bellingcat used painstaking geolocation work on selfies the soldiers uploaded to popular Russian social media platforms VK and Odnoklassniki to determine the whole route. Some soldiers made the job a lot easier by photographing themselves in front of place-name signs along the way.
    • 
 	
  • In January this year, during a military exercise in the Mojave Desert, a US Marine Corps lance corporal ‘got his whole unit killed’ – hypothetically — by posting a picture of them on Facebook. Nowadays, every conflict zone is “an electronic warfare-type environment,” said the Marine Corps’ head of education, in a widely syndicated article clearly intended to get the message across the whole US military.
    • 
 	
  • But it’s not all soldier selfies. The 2018 Strava case showed that a popular fitness tracker, used by many in the US military and diplomatic services to record their favourite running routes for other app users, had exposed the locations of military and intelligence installations around the world.
    • 


Different militaries have varied in their responses, often in ways that seem to track their broader culture and politics. Turkey banned smartphone use by soldiers on-base in 2015, and Russia followed suit in 2019 when its parliament unanimously voted to ban tablets and smartphone use by on-duty armed forces. The Russian law also forbids men and women in the military from sharing information and photos about their service, because this content had been used by others “to shape a biased assessment of the Russian Federation's state policies."

A more liberal outlier is China, where the People’s Liberation Army decided in 2016 to limit where and when soldiers on domestic bases can use their smartphones, and only after they realized that the taxi-hailing apps soldiers used to get back at night were collecting personally identifiable location data around military installations. Some bans are specific to location; Indian soldiers along the “Line of Actual Control” between Indian and Chinese-controlled parts of the Himalayas are forbidden to use Chinese apps like Weibo and WeChat. Countries that are more likely to use internet shutdowns also seem more likely to implement blanket-bans on soldiers using smartphones. Turkey, for example, recently blocked access to Twitter during a bombardment in Syria. In India, Kashmir is now in its six-month of a government-imposed internet shutdown.

Authoritarian countries tend to be more absolutist in their policies regarding communications. They also lack the institutional capacity to consistently police their draconian rules, so smartphone bans may be observed more in the breach. Already, Bellingcat has easily identified many Russian soldiers’ pseudonymous profiles, and the weakest link in the chain — as I can attest — is often the proud or just emotionally needy wives and girlfriends who share pictures or insist on frequent phone calls.

The US seems more permissive on communications devices than the UK’s military, based on my experience of a friend’s husband buying and using an iPad on a US base in Afghanistan. One reason could be that US deployments tend to be longer and more frequent. But as our cell phones become increasingly integrated into every aspect of our lives, they represent an increasing threat — which is why the rules are tightening. Since 2018, the US has forbidden GPS-enabled functioning of personal devices on deployment, although this unintentionally hilarious education video – “Don’t end up like this guy”– suggests the ban is more honoured in the breach. Decisions to ban devices altogether, and not just specific GPS functionality on the devices, seem to be determined on a case by case basis. A recent 82nd Airborne deployment to the Middle East that banned all smartphones and devices was sufficiently newsworthy to be reported on CNN.

One factor quietly influencing phones and deployment is geography. Typically, a soldier is deploying to somewhere far away. Distance tends to lower the expectation of frequent contact, and it also complicates the matter of the cell phone service provider. Soldiers from the US or UK who deployed to Afghanistan could, in theory, buy a local prepaid SIM card and put it in their own smuggled phone. This would be a bad move. A unique identifier in the phone, verifiable via a global industry database, would immediately allow the local phone provider to determine the phone’s provenance. With Russian, Iranian and Chinese intelligence agencies widely believed to be perched on Afghan networks, they could build up a picture not just of troop movements but possibly of identified individuals to track when they went home. Following the soldier home electronically doesn’t seem to have happened Afghanistan, but it’s been reported to have happened to NATO personnel in the Baltics, whose families were apparently traced by Russian entities.

Not being able to trust the local cell phone provider can have a big impact, and it can happen even if the conflict is in the military’s own territory. The Kenya Defence Force (KDF) operates in Al Shabab-contested parts of north-eastern Kenya, near Somalia, and seem to have an active feud with Hormuud, the main Somali telecoms provider. The KDF frequently targets Hormuud cellphone towers across the border in Somalia. Al Shabab, which has long been suspected of being close to the cellphone operator Hormuud, returns the favour, frequently blowing up Safaricom towers inside the Kenyan border. This knocks out some of the KDF’s communications, and often happens just before attacks. Researcher Rashid Abdi has suggested that the battles over these cellphone towers could be some combination of a proxy war between the governments of Kenya and Somalia, and the Somali telecoms provider Hormuud using Al Shabab to “gain commercial advantage or to avenge previous attacks” on Hormuud’s cellphone towers. Either way, KDF soldiers cannot reliably and securely communicate with cellphones while on Kenyan turf.

The Israeli Defence Forces’ unusually liberal policy regarding cell phone use during active service may be partly because their soldiers stay relatively close to home and can use their own domestic service providers. A recent alleged catfishing attempt by Hamas tried to tempt Israeli soldiers to share information with fake profiles of attractive young women on social media sites. Like the US Marine whose unit selfie ‘got his whole unit killed’ and became a cautionary tale on the evening news, the thwarted Hamas attack on a known vulnerability – the infinite vanity and ever-hopefulness of horny young men far from home – seems to have been publicised as a lesson for the troops. A widespread ban on personal cell phones in the IDF seems unlikely, not least because in a small country with near-universal conscription, parents are eager to keep tabs on their children during military service.

Military chiefs often focus on the operational security problems of cell phones, but downplay another reason for their disquiet — i.e., soldiers using them to highlight bad treatment or conditions. Soldiers in India and Turkey have reportedly uploaded pictures or videos of bad food or poor shelter.

Even when conditions are fine, cell phones are an escape from military life, and not all countries welcome that. South Korea banned its conscripts from having mobile phones at all during their two years’ service, and rigorously enforced it. But in 2018 the ban was reviewed and partly relaxed as part of a wider effort to reduce the isolation and total control over conscripted soldiers. Now, soldiers are allowed to use cell phones for an hour or two per day in barracks, enforced not by the military itself, but by specialised subscriptions from telecoms providers. Both the conscripted soldiers and their families back home report being happier, and time will tell if lessening the total control over soldiers affects their morale or cohesion.

Enemies will always exploit vulnerabilities – both technological and human. Official policies on soldiers and cell phones will go on evolving as the demands of operational security change, the places they’re deployed to vary, and our expectations about connectedness to serving loved ones develop. And as the rules evolve, the ways people break them will, too.
    [post_title] => Soldiers with smartphones can be a gift to the enemy
    [post_excerpt] => Half the attempts to tap calls made on 3G networks succeed, while nine out of ten SMS messages can be intercepted.
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Soldiers with smartphones can be a gift to the enemy

by Maria Farrell

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    [post_content] => With environmentally conscious, humane butchery, Hannah Miller stakes a position between factory farming and veganism.

Picture a butcher and what do you see?

Perhaps a burly mustachioed man swinging a meat cleaver into a carcass. Hacking away, smeared in blood, working in a quick and inelegant fashion. Heaving body parts up onto his thick shoulder and then slamming them down onto a cutting table.

That out of date image persists but at a New Zealand company, aptly named “A Lady Butcher,” owner Hannah Miller does things quite differently. First of all, there’s no music blaring and no loud power tools or machinery running. In fact, it’s rather quiet—Zen-like, even. 

Miller, originally from Portland, Oregon, practices a type of butchery called seam cutting. It’s careful, precise work where every part of the animal is used. Miller describes this nose to tail work as “mindful” and finds it peaceful.

“When it's just you and a knife you have to pay attention to what you're doing. The seams and the muscles tell you what to do, it's very obvious where to cut. You can't be joking around and having a laugh and singing to music because you'll miss it, you'll miss the intricacies and the detail of that style of butchery, it's that mindful practice, I call it the Zen of butchery,” she says.

Before learning to butcher in London, Miller was a culinary student in New York. After a lecture delivered by world-famous chefs Anthony Bourdain and Fergus Henderson, she was inspired to make the move to the United Kingdom and found that butchery and cooking go hand in hand.

“They're completely intertwined, I don't think you can have one without the other,” she says.

The more butchers understand about the restaurant industry the better they can respond to operational matters like creating workarounds to offer little-used cuts of meat to prevent waste. For instance, when a trend for lamb rumps meant that restaurants might require dozens of lambs a week but were only using one part of the animal for their signature dish.

Practically sharing information and skills also means that butchers can better educate customers on the cuts of meat they need to create the recipe they have in mind. Miller says she would challenge butchers to go home and cook a particular cut and then have them share their experience with the crew the next day.

Before settling in New Zealand, Miller had traveled all over the world always finding that butchers were in short supply. When she landed in New Zealand at dawn, she had her first interview and had secured a job by lunchtime. 

Despite New Zealand traditionally having a meat-heavy diet, with dinner often called “meat and three veg,” Miller was surprised to discover that the majority of cured meats in New Zealand were imported.

A Lady Butcher began to provide homegrown Pancetta, Prosciutto, and Bresaola using grass-fed lamb, local free-range pork, and wagyu, from First Light Farms.  

Sharing meat education continues to be one of the most important parts of Miller’s business philosophy. She gives workshops to chefs in restaurants in Auckland, teaching them how to prepare different cuts to serve in order to use the animal economically. This is a better way for the restaurant to maximize profits and introduce customers to new cuts, but it also serves to reinforce her commitment to less wasteful meat production.

“We've chosen to take an animal for our own nourishment, so absolutely nothing can go to waste. I make sure the bones are perfectly clean, that everything's trimmed properly, part of the whole process is being in the moment, but also ultimately it's about respecting the animal,” she says.

She has also spread that message of education by offering workshops to chefs and in April when her new restaurant, Churly’s Brew Pub & Eatery, opens members of the public will be able to sign up for butchery classes too. This new venture will be a leader in nose to tail restaurants, changing the menu up regularly, sometimes even during service, to ensure all meat cuts are utilized and that nothing goes to waste.

From a 90-kilo animal, Miller says only about 150g should be thrown away. But she says to do this you really need to focus. “You can use absolutely everything, but you need to pay attention. When I teach butchery, I set out the rules and, safety is first, second is nothing, absolutely nothing goes in the bin unless I put it there.”

She says that the skill of the butcher determines much of the waste. Trimming fat from muscles meticulously results in a much higher yield of usable meat. She then renders down all the fat and bones for broths and even dehydrates sinew to make dog treats. Lately, she has also been giving away bones and skulls for people to decorate.

Her message of sustainability may at first glance seem to be at odds with her job. After all, veganism is often touted as the cure for much of the earth’s problems. I asked her if she ever thinks about the impact of meat production on the planet and she said it’s something that she considers daily. 

“It's not really so much about eating meat or not eating meat, it's about eating local, and seasonally. You don't need to eat a tomato in December, if you live in the northern hemisphere,” she says.

 Her remedy is that we all need to eat better quality meat from farmers that we know and trust, returning to a time before supermarkets and discount stores disrupted the relationship consumers had with the people who produced their food.

“Eat meat, but eat less of it, eat a better-quality meat. My husband and I eat meat most days. This week we had beautiful sausages, on the barbecue, I know the farm it came from and we had one sausage and then the rest of the plate was full of cauliflower salad and beautiful guac because right now we have tons of avocados.  We should first be eating local, and secondly, eating better but less.”

Developing a relationship with your local farm is an important step in becoming a more conscious food consumer, as I discovered when I first met Miller at the Taurapa Station in Napier, on New Zealand’s North Island. She gave a butchery demonstration using lamb from Atkins Ranch, who raise 100 percent grass-fed animals that wander and graze over beautiful pasture lands; it’s about as idyllic as farming can be.

In that way, New Zealand which is often described as 18 hours ahead and 20 years behind the rest of the world, really is a pioneer. Miller explained to me that the resurgence of interest in local foods and the proliferation of trendy farmers’ markets seen in the United States has always been part of the food culture in New Zealand.

Sustainability goes further for Miller though, it’s an entire way of life where she aims for balance. “We say regeneration instead of sustainability. Because regeneration is the idea of giving back. So, you're not just taking you actually make sure that this circle is completed. Think about it as a circle, instead of an A-Z,” she says.

Miller knows her customers care about where their meat comes from and how it was raised. At her new restaurant and pub, Churly’s, opening in Auckland, she’ll continue this education.

The restaurant takes its name from a popular kiwi expression. “Chur” can mean thank you, cool, OK, and a range of other expressions. It’s also the name of the mascot at her husband, Andrew Child’s, brewery Behemoth Brewing Company, which is a big part of the new brand.

To help with her increased workload, Miller has just taken on an assistant, another lady butcher, who sent her a message on Instagram asking to be mentored.

“I love that the people approaching me to come work for me and to learn and to invest their time are women. These women that I’ve  worked with have said how empowered they feel, they're just so excited and they have that feeling that they can take on the world and it just fills me with so much pride. I will definitely teach anyone and have a great time with it but there's something special about being a lady butcher,” she says.

 

 

 
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Nose to tail with a lady butcher

by Fiona Tapp

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    [post_content] => The tech executive turned data justice warrior is celebrated as a truth-telling hero, but there's something a bit too smooth about this narrative arc.

A few months ago, I was contacted by a senior executive who was about to leave a marketing firm. He got in touch because I’ve worked on the non-profit side of tech for a long time, with lots of volunteering on digital and human rights. He wanted to ‘give back’. Could I put him in touch with digital rights activists? Sure. We met for coffee and I made some introductions. It was a perfectly lovely interaction with a perfectly lovely man. Perhaps he will do some good, sharing his expertise with the people working to save democracy and our private lives from the surveillance capitalism machine of his former employers. The way I rationalized helping him was: firstly, it’s nice to be nice; and secondly, movements are made of people who start off far apart but converge on a destination. And isn’t it an unqualified good when an insider decides to do the right thing, however late?

The Prodigal Son is a New Testament parable about two sons. One stays home to work the farm. The other cashes in his inheritance and gambles it away. When the gambler comes home, his father slaughters the fattened calf to celebrate, leaving the virtuous, hard-working brother to complain that all these years he wasn’t even given a small goat to share with his friends. His father replies that the prodigal son ‘was dead, now he’s alive; lost, now he’s found’. Cue party streamers. It’s a touching story of redemption, with a massive payload of moral hazard. It’s about coming home, saying sorry, being joyfully forgiven and starting again. Most of us would love to star in it, but few of us will be given the chance.

The Prodigal Tech Bro is a similar story, about tech executives who experience a sort of religious awakening. They suddenly see their former employers as toxic, and reinvent themselves as experts on taming the tech giants. They were lost and are now found. They are warmly welcomed home to the center of our discourse with invitations to write opeds for major newspapers, for think tank funding, book deals and TED talks. These guys – and yes, they are all guys – are generally thoughtful and well-meaning, and I wish them well. But I question why they seize so much attention and are awarded scarce resources, and why they’re given not just a second chance, but also the mantle of moral and expert authority.

I’m glad that Roger McNamee, the early Facebook investor, has testified to the U.S. Congress about Facebook’s wildly self-interested near-silence about its amplification of Russian disinformation during the 2016 presidential election. I’m thrilled that Google’s ex-‘design ethicist’, Tristan Harris, “the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience,"(startlingly faint praise) now runs a Center for Humane Technology, exposing the mind-hacking tricks of his former employer. I even spoke —critically but, I hope, warmly—at the book launch of James Williams, another ex-Googler turned attention evangelist, who “co-founded the movement”of awareness of designed-in addiction. I wish all these guys well. I also wish that the many, exhausted activists who didn’t take money from Google or Facebook could have even a quarter of the attention, status and authority the Prodigal Techbro assumes is his birth-right.

Today, when the tide of public opinion on Big Tech is finally turning, the brothers (and sisters) who worked hard in the field all those years aren’t even invited to the party. No fattened calf for you, my all but unemployable tech activist. The moral hazard is clear; why would anyone do the right thing from the beginning when they can take the money, have their fun, and then, when the wind changes, convert their status and relative wealth into special pleading and a whole new career?

Just half an hour flipping through my contacts produced half a dozen friends and acquaintances who didn’t require a ‘road to Damascus’ conversion to see what was wrong with big tech or the ways governments abuse it. Nighat Dad runs the Digital Rights Foundation in Pakistan, defending online freedom of expression and privacy for women, minorities and dissidents. That’s real courage. Gus Hosein has worked in tech and human rights for over 20 years, runs Privacy International, the UK-based non-profit, and is the most visionary thinker I know on how to shake up our assumptions about why things are as they are.  Bianca Wylie founded the volunteer-run Open Data Institute Toronto, and works on open data, citizen privacy and civic engagement. The “Jane Jacobs of the Smart Cities Age,” she’s been a key figure in opening up and slowing down Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs juggernaut in Toronto. Aral Balkan runs Small Technology Foundation and works on both the tools and the policies to resist surveillance capitalism. Unafraid of being unpopular, even with other activists, Balkan freely hammers rights organizations or conferences for taking big tech’s sponsorship money while criticizing the companies’ practices. In the western Balkans, hvale vale works tirelessly and cheerfully on women's rights, sexual rights and the political and practical path to a feminist internet. Robin Gross,  a Californian intellectual property lawyer, could have put her persistence and sheer pizazz to work defending big entertainment companies, but instead she’s worked for decades against the copyright maximalism that strangles artists’ creativity and does nothing to increase their incomes. I would love to hear their voices amplified, not (just) the voices of those who took a decade and more to work out the rottenness at the core of big tech.

Ex-Google lobbyist Ross Lajeunesse left the company in 2019 over its censored search engine for China and also because of homophobic, sexist and racist work practices. He’s now running for a Democratic senate nomination, and recently wrote a classic of the ‘scales have fallen from my eyes’ genre, called “I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left.” Its lede is “The company’s motto used to be “Don’t be evil.” Things have changed.”

Really? Has Google really changed? Lajeunesse joined in 2008, years into Google’s multi-billion dollar tax avoidance, sexist labor practices and privacy hostility and continued to work there through the years of antitrust fines, misuse of personal health data, wage fixing, and financially pressuring think tanks. Google didn’t change. It just started treating some of its insiders like it already treated outsiders. That only looks like radical change if you’ve never thought too hard about what you are doing and to whom.

One hundred thousand people work for Google/Alphabet; some of them have much more power than others. The point isn’t whether Lajeunesse is or isn’t culpable for the many acts of the enormous company he represented—as its chief lobbyist in Asia for several years—it’s that of all the people who spent the decade of 2010-20 working thanklessly to expose and reduce the firm’s monopolistic abuse and assault on global privacy, it’s the ex-lobbyist who gets our attention now.

We all need second chances. Even if we don’t need those fresh starts ourselves, we want to live in a world where people have a reason to do better. But the prodigal tech bro’s redemption arc is so quick and smooth it’s barely a road bump. That’s because we keep skipping the most important part of the prodigal son story—where he hits rock bottom. In the original parable, the prodigal son wakes up in a pig sty, starving, and realizes his father’s servants now live better than he does. He resolves to go home to the people and place he did not value or respect before. He will beg to be one of his father’s servants. He accepts his complete loss of status. But instead of chastising and punishing his prodigal son, the rejoicing father greets him joyfully and heads off the apology with a huge party. It’s a great metaphor for how to run a religion, but a lousy way to run everything else.

Prodigal tech bro stories skip straight from the past, when they were part of something that—surprise!—turned out to be bad, to the present, where they are now a moral authority on how to do good, but without the transitional moments of revelation and remorse.  But the bit where you say you got things wrong and people were hurt? That’s the most important part. It’s why these corporatized reinventions feel so slick and tinny, and why so many of the comments on Lajeunesse’s train wreck post on Medium were critical. The journey feels fake. These ‘I was lost but now I’m found, please come to my TED talk’ accounts typically miss most of the actual journey, yet claim the moral authority of one who’s ‘been there’ but came back. It’s a teleportation machine, but for ethics.

(While we’re thinking about the neatly elided parts of the prodigal tech bro story, let’s dwell for one moment on the deletion of the entire stories of so many women and people of color barely given a first chance in Silicon Valley, let alone multiple reinventions.)

The only thing more fungible than cold, hard cash is privilege. The prodigal tech bro doesn’t so much take an off-ramp from the relatively high status and well-paid job he left when the scales fell from his eyes, as zoom up an on-ramp into a new sector that accepts the reputational currency he has accumulated. He’s not joining the resistance. He’s launching a new kind of start-up using his industry contacts for seed-funding in return for some reputation-laundering.

So what? Sure, it’s a little galling, but where’s the harm?

Allowing people who share responsibility for our tech dystopia to keep control of the narrative means we never get to the bottom of how and why we got here, and we artificially narrow the possibilities for where we go next. And centering people who were insiders before and claim to be leading the outsiders now doesn’t help the overall case for tech accountability. It just reinforces the industry’s toxic dynamic that some people are worth more than others, that power is its own justification.

The prodigal tech bro doesn’t want structural change. He is reassurance, not revolution. He’s invested in the status quo, if we can only restore the founders’ purity of intent. Sure, we got some things wrong, he says, but that’s because we were over-optimistic / moved too fast / have a growth mindset. Just put the engineers back in charge / refocus on the original mission / get marketing out of the c-suite. Government “needs to step up”, but just enough to level the playing field / tweak the incentives. Because the prodigal techbro is a moderate, centrist, regular guy. Dammit, he’s a Democrat. Those others who said years ago what he’s telling you right now? They’re troublemakers, disgruntled outsiders obsessed with scandal and grievance. He gets why you ignored them. Hey, he did, too. He knows you want to fix this stuff. But it’s complicated. It needs nuance. He knows you’ll listen to him. Dude, he’s just like you…

I’m re-assessing how often I help out well-established men suddenly interested in my insights and contact book. It’s ridiculous how many ‘and I truly mean them well’s I cut out of this piece, but I really do, while also realizing I help them because they ask, or because other people ask for them. And that coffee, those introductions, that talk I gave and so much more of my attention and care—it needs to go instead to activists I know and care about but who would never presume to ask. Sometimes the prodigal daughter has her regrets, too.

So, if you’re a prodigal tech bro, do us all a favour and, as Rebecca Solnit says, help “turn down the volume a little on the people who always got heard”:

    
 	
  • Do the reading and do the work. Familiarize yourself with the research and what we’ve already tried, on your own time. Go join the digital rights and inequality-focused organizations that have been working to limit the harms of your previous employers and – this is key – sit quietly at the back and listen.
    • 
 	
  • Use your privilege and status and the 80 percent of your network that’s still talking to you to big up activists who have been in the trenches for years already—especially women and people of colour. Say ‘thanks but no thanks’ to that invitation and pass it along to someone who’s done the work and paid the price.
    • 
 	
  • Understand that if you are doing this for the next phase of your career, you are doing it wrong. If you are doing this to explain away the increasingly toxic names on your resumé, you are doing it wrong. If you are doing it because you want to ‘give back,’ you are doing it wrong.
    • 


Do this only because you recognize and can say out loud that you are not ‘giving back’, you are making amends for having already taken far, far too much.

 
    [post_title] => The Prodigal Techbro
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The Prodigal Techbro

by Maria Farrell

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    [post_date] => 2020-02-27 14:38:21
    [post_date_gmt] => 2020-02-27 14:38:21
    [post_content] => In the coming election, the 21st Congressional district of northern New York State will choose between an incumbent who voted to reverse the Affordable Care Act—and a Democratic challenger who has devoted her political career to expanding healthcare access.

On a recent Thursday, Tedra Cobb rolled out of bed before 6 a.m. and did a kickboxing workout in the basement of her home in Canton, N.Y. She needed to blow off some steam–or “get my ya-yas out,” as she put it—after a frenetic few days traversing her 17,000 square mile district in upstate New York, the largest Congressional district east of the Mississippi, where she’s running against Republican incumbent Rep. Elise Stefanik. 

Those who watched the impeachment hearings will remember Stefanik, who achieved dubious fame with her unswervingly Trump-loyal line of questioning. On November 17 Trump tweeted a clip of Stefanik grilling former Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch about Hunter Biden and the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, commenting: “A new Republican Star is born.” The 35-year-old Congresswoman was rewarded for her dramatic, if intellectually dishonest, interrogations with a slot on Trump’s impeachment defense squad, alongside seven of the biggest far-right devotees in the House of Representatives. By the time Stefanik flew back from Iowa—photographed on a plane packed with surrogates wearing red “Keep America Great” hats—Trump was getting ready for his post-impeachment revenge spree, which Stefanik dutifully defended in the press. And the love fest continues: “Trump Has A Crush on Rep. Elise Stefanik,” declared a recent headline in City & State, a local news outlet. 

Trump went so far as to single out Stefanik during his post-acquittal speech in the White House East Room. “It’s most incredible what’s going on with you, Elise,” he said. “I was up campaigning for helping her and I thought, ‘She looks good, she looks like good talent.’ But I did not realize when she opens that mouth, you were killing them, Elise, you were killing them.” And, if nothing else, Trump loves a killer that looks good on television. 

Despite the impeachment hearings, Trump’s nationwide approval rating is at 49 percent—an all-time high since he took office in 2017. But in Northern New York, the 21st district—a mostly rural, economically challenged region that borders Vermont and Canada—is something of a “pivot” zone: it went twice for Obama before flipping red in 2016. So, will Elise Stefanik’s association with an increasingly erratic, impeached President help or harm her in 2020? And how will Cobb adapt for her rematch against Stefanik at a time when all local politics are being devoured by a national meta-narrative? 

I was looking forward to discussing these issues with Cobb, 52, who is a former volunteer firefighter, ESL teacher, healthcare non-profit founder and St. Lawrence County legislator, as she gears up for one of the most closely watched Congressional races in the country this November. 

There were some hurdles, however—mostly self-inflicted. That is to say, TapeACall Pro, the app I typically use to record interviews, kept malfunctioning. After the third dropped call, I apologized to Cobb, explaining that I was going to attempt to use an old-school digital voice recorder to capture our conversation instead. There was one problem: I hadn’t changed the batteries since the Obama Administration. Could she call me back in five minutes? Far from being annoyed by my technological issues, Cobb was calm and compassionate, seeing this mishap in a broader context: “That’s what we all need—many, many Plan B’s,” she said.

I had not yet internalized the lesson of the Iowa Democratic caucuses debacle: if you want to get something done, do not rely on an app. 

Once I figured out my Plan B, Cobb told me about how her career in public service led her to this moment. A resident of St. Lawrence County for the past 30 years, she was inspired to run for the first time in 2017, after Stefanik voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act. For Cobb, who had spent her career as a healthcare advocate—she worked as an educator for a local HIV/AIDS outreach program and served as Executive Director of a community health non-profit—the vote was a call to action. Just a year earlier, her daughter, now a senior at Cornell, had to have emergency back surgery, “and I didn’t blink an eye because I knew I had good insurance,” recalls Cobb, who at the time was working part-time at SUNY Potsdam, her alma mater. 

But a month after her daughter’s surgery, Cobb lost her job and her medical insurance. She realized that Stefanik’s vote to end the Affordable Care Act “would have repealed all the protections for people like my kid who have preexisting conditions,” she said. “I’ve been elected before”—to the St. Lawrence County legislature, where she beat a Republican incumbent and served for eight years—“and I just knew that feeling of, ‘I’ve gotta run.’” 

Cobb won the 2018 primary with 56 percent of the vote, but her victory was a pyrrhic one: she had blown through all her money and had to start fundraising from scratch for the general election, during which she was outspent by her opponent 3-to-1. Stefanik won the election by a 14 percentage-point margin, which seems like a lot until you compare it with her margin of victory in the previous election—35 percentage points—when she ran against a retired army colonel named Mike Derrick. Given that context, Cobb was encouraged by the results. 

“I knew going in that it might take two cycles,” she said. 

Supporters in her district are sticking with her. Rebecca Y. Rivers, owner of the Northern Light Yoga studio in Canton, New York, voted for Cobb in 2018 and plans to do so again this year. “I believe Tedra has what it takes to win because she has demonstrated greater interest in the residents of NY-21 than her opponent has,” says Rivers, 53, adding that she shares Cobb’s positions on healthcare, reproductive choice for women, environmental protection and public education. “Many in this district are seeking new representation after feeling that they haven’t been heard by Rep. Stefanik, who was making herself rather scarce and inaccessible in the district prior to seeing Tedra’s popularity increase.” (Until 2018, when she and her husband bought a home in Saratoga County, Stefanik didn’t live in her district, using a home that was owned by her mother as her address. “I like to say that we finally made her pay taxes here, like the rest of us,” said Cobb.)  

Michelle Poccia, a real estate broker who lives in Wilton, New York, says she had “high hopes” for Stefanik when she took office in 2015 at the age of 30, making her at the time the youngest woman to ever serve in Congress. “It sickens me to see someone from her generation making a play to be a career politician by latching on and following the cues of some of the most irritating, non-productive talking heads of her party,” says Poccia, 64, who changed her lifelong party affiliation as an Independent to a Democrat in 2016. “Being a puppet to the likes Jim Jordan and so obviously seeking favor with the most corrupt President in our country’s history has been painful to watch.” 

It has been painful not just for people in the 21st District. This time around, with Stefanik’s rise to the national spotlight, Cobb has seen more support emerge nationwide as a result. Before the impeachment hearings began last fall, Cobb had raised $656,000 and had about 2,000 Twitter followers. But by November 18, right after Stefanik battled with Rep. Adam Schiff when she interrupted the House Impeachment hearings, Cobb had a blowout fundraising weekend, generating $1 million from donors in all 50 states. Since then, her Twitter following has grown to more than 262,000, compared to Stefanik’s 324,000. At last count, Cobb had $2.7 million in her war chest, versus Stefanik’s $4.5 million. She recently was endorsed by End Citizens United, a non-profit devoted to getting money out of politics, which means that Cobb won’t accept money from corporate PACs; her campaign’s average contribution size is $27. 

And Stefanik seems to be feeling the heat. “My opponent is raising money from the Hollywood liberals calling me #TrashyStefanik,” she tweeted on November 17. She was referring to George Conway, the husband of White House advisor Kellyanne, whose vocal opposition to Trump is an ongoing media saga. Conway tweeted on November 16, “@EliseStefanik is lying trash. Please give to her opponent, @TedraCobb.” In response, some online supporters launched what became the aforementioned trending Twitter hashtag, #TrashyStefanik. Cobb says she doesn’t engage in name calling and has never herself used that hashtag to describe her opponent.

Amid the rise of the #MeToo movement and a surge in the number of women who were raising their hands to run for office, the Cobb-Stefanik faceoff in 2018 also had the distinction of being the only race in New York in which two women were going head-to-head as major party candidates for a House seat. Depending on the primary results, the situation may be the same in New York this year. But according to EMILY’s List, at least 20 likely matchups for House races nationwide will feature two women running against each other. 

Initially seen as a moderate, Stefanik has been drawn further and further into the Trumpian distortion field, like so many who get close to him. “In all honesty, when Elise Stefanik was first elected in 2014 I did not think that she would be bad for the district,” says John Cain, a 45-year-old high school history teacher from Watertown, New York. “The hopefulness I once had for her ability to represent our area has been destroyed by more recent events in her career.”

In addition to voting to repeal the Affordable Care Act, she voted to support the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act, an extreme piece of legislation that would have required all states to recognize permits issued in concealed carry states. She voted to allow coal companies to dump toxic waste into local streams without monitoring the damage that they were causing. She has also adopted Trump’s style of juvenile name-calling, referring to Cobb as #TaxinTedra and a “total trainwreck” on Twitter, and mocking elites even though she, like Trump, would by all accounts be considered a member of America’s elite socio-economic class. 

During the impeachment hearings, for example, she slammed Democrats for selecting renowned constitutional law professors, such as Harvard Law’s Noah Feldman, to respond to legal questions surrounding impeachment, arguing that “they are not in touch with the viewpoints of millions of Americans.” Stefanik is a Harvard graduate who previously worked for Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan; she failed to elaborate on who would be better qualified to weigh in on questions about constitutional law than professors who specialize in constitutional law. 

“She’s just like Trump,” says Cobb. “She calls names, she tells lies in her campaign. But quite frankly for me, always the mission is to make sure more and more people know who I am.” 

On the day Stefanik made headlines when Rep. Adam Schiff, following House rules, refused to acknowledge her questions—“the gentlewoman will suspend,” he told her repeatedly, over the objections of Rep. Devin Nunes—Cobb was focused on an issue closer to home. Her sister, who was struggling with addiction, needed a detox bed. The episode was a metaphor for her whole campaign, and her promise to provide much-needed healthcare for everyone in her district who needs it: “Elise Stefanik was performing to get attention for herself,” she says, “and I was trying really hard to be a sister and to also be meeting with people in this district.” 

All local elections are now haunted by the specter of the vindictive bully occupying the White House, but Cobb is quick to point out that she is not running against Trump. “I am running against Stefanik. I got into this race because Elise Stefanik voted to take people’s healthcare away. And she’s doing it again,” she said, referring to Stefanik’s December vote against the Elijah E. Cummings Lower Drug Costs Now Act, which would have given Medicare the power to negotiate directly with drug companies. “So she cares more about the pharmaceutical companies, because they are her donors, than the people in this district who are wondering, ‘Do I take my prescriptions or do I eat?’” 

At this stage in the campaign, it’s hard to gauge voter sentiment–polls aren’t yet publicly available—though the non-partisan Cook Political Report said in November that they considered Stefanik to be “not vulnerable.” But, as we learned in 2016, a lot can change between February and November. The lack of a Democratic primary in the 21st district this year will allow Cobb to better allocate her campaign resources, and continue to emphasize Stefanik’s record on health care and the environment, while tying her personally to Donald Trump. Because as much as Cobb says she’s not running against Trump, 2020 will be a referendum on his leadership and the example he has set.  

For example, just last weekend Cobb released an ad calling upon Stefanik to return a campaign donation from Las Vegas hotelier Steve Wynn, who resigned from his role as finance chair for the Republican National Committee amid allegations that he sexually assaulted dozens of women, including employees. So far, she’s keeping the money.  

“I think it is absolutely disgusting that any politician would hold on to the dirty money that Steve Wynn has passed around,” says Cain, the high school history teacher. “I was relieved to see most politicians give it back, and outraged that Stefanik, who has claimed to be a supporter of advancing women in politics, would refuse to do so, even after being called out on it publicly.” 
    [post_title] => Meet the Democratic candidate who plans to flip her district and take it back from the woman Trump called "a new Republican star"
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Meet the Democratic candidate who plans to flip her district and take it back from the woman Trump called “a new Republican star”

by Rachel Dodes

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    [post_content] => A band of First Nations people have won national and international support for their refusal to allow a pipeline through their land.

Until cross-country rail blockades by Indigenous activists and their allies made front-page news earlier this month, few Canadians noticed the protests against a pipeline in We’tsuewet’en territory. Opposition to the project from First Nations people in northwestern British Columbia has, however, been consistent—and years in the making. The dam that had been holding back a slow and steady bubbling of resistance burst late last month when heavily armed militarized police moved to enforce a court injunction and tear down a blockade against Coastal GasLink, the company that wants to run its 670-kilometre gas pipeline through unceded native land.

Hereditary chiefs of We’tsuewet’en territory maintain they have jurisdiction over this unceded land and that both Coastal GasLink/TC Energy and the government are in violation of a Supreme Court ruling. Complicating matters: under the Indigenous system of governance, hereditary chiefs from each clan are title holders of the land; meanwhile the band councils (created through the government-imposed Indian Act) have control over the land that the government allotted to reserves. The issue of who controls the land has never been settled legally, nor resolved by negotiation or litigation.

This is not the first time a confrontation between Canadian authorities and Indigenous people has made international news. In 1990, Mohawk people in Quebec held off for 78 days against a golf club developer who wanted to construct condos on traditional burial grounds. The confrontation led to the Oka Crisis, with the provincial and federal governments, in a rare show of unanimity, working together to deploy the military against the barricaded Mohawk. Like the current We’tsuwet’en standoff, it sparked a global solidarity movement in support of Indigenous communities fighting a centuries-old battle against colonialism.

This, however, is the first time Indigenous protests over land rights has garnered popular support among non-Indigenous Canadians.

    
 	
  • The Idle No More protest movement, founded in 2012 to honour Indigenous sovereignty and protect the water and land, sensitized non-Indigenous Canadians to the grievances and concerns of Indigenous communities.
    • 
 	
  • The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls demonstrated the direct connection between the violation of Indigenous rights and Canada’s staggering rates of violence against women and girls of the First Nations.
    • 
 	
  • The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada opened the nation’s eyes to the horrific and lasting impacts of the residential school system on Indigenous students and their families.
    • 


Add to all of the above a rising global awareness about the effect of climate change and the need to move away from fossil fuels to cleaner energy systems and it’s easy to see why popular support for the protests has grown—despite the economic cost of forcing the railway to shut down.

We’tsuwet’en advocates and hereditary leaders have been warning for years about the possibility of a showdown. Critics of the train blockades, however, are now saying that few Indigenous groups are involved in the protests. They point the finger instead at white eco lobbyists, allegedly funded by foreign groups with nefarious intentions. John Ivison, a columnist for the right-wing National Post, went so far as to claim “millennial eco-activists are the new colonialists.” This is a bold take, given that land protectors have for decades been defending the environment from corporations intent on ramming pipelines through unceded land.

Activists for Indigenous rights and for environmental protection rights have allies in Canada and around the world because they are intrinsically connected through shared goals. Shale gas development, pipelines transporting oil, the polluting effects of extraction for a country’s biodiversity, water and land, are issues that are not limited to Indigenous communities. Nor is opposition to pipelines uniquely Canadian: TC Energy has faced major opposition in Mexico and the United States. As long as the industrialized world refuses to transition to renewable sources, they will continue to expropriate Indigenous land and exploit the natural world for fuel.

This is why Indigenous activists around the world —Mexico, Honduras, Brazil, the Philippines, Colombia — are fighting against mining, logging, and other exploitation of community lands, often at the cost of their own lives.

The UN has warned of a “drastic increase” in violence against Indigenous people because of their resistance. According to UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, “67 percent of the 312 human rights defenders murdered in 2017 were defending their lands, the environment, or Indigenous rights, nearly always in the context of private sector projects.”

But there are success stories, too. Just last week, the Indigenous community in Oaxaca, Mexico, won a ruling against a Canadian-owning mining company operating in the town. The company had obtained permits to exploit local mineral and precious metal deposits without first consulting the community and, as a result, the environmental protection agency ordered the mine closed.

Political activism raises awareness, which in turn inspires conversations, and helps public sentiment turn in favour of the marginalized— and this is when the vilification begins. Smear campaigns and hate speech painting Indigenous people as obstacles to economic development, lawless “thugs” and “paid protesters” have already commenced, with some of these comments coming directly from the House of Commons in Ottawa.

Outgoing Conservative leader Andrew Scheer, who has repeatedly referred to the democratic protests as illegal, instructed Indigenous protesters—many of whom still live with boil-water advisories in communities that lack basic amenities—to “check their privilege.”

Scheer recently stood up in the House of Commons to demand the protestors be removed by police force if necessary. Peter MacKay, the man currently vying for Scheer’s job, chimed in by posting a video declaring Indigenous protesters and their supporters “a small gang of professional protesters” and “thugs” holding “innocent Canadians hostage.”

The Post Millennial, a pro-Conservative media platform, blamed CN Rail’s recent layoffs on Indigenous activists— ignoring both the fact that the company had announced upcoming layoffs in late 2019 and that unions and workers have expressed solidarity for We’tsuwet’en protests.

“Rail blockades could see cities run out of chlorine for water treatment,” read another headline. But the article itself attributes the claim to a lobbyist for chemical distribution companies. Most cities in fact have their chlorine trucked in; and The Post Millennial did not mention that 60 Indigenous communities have been living with boil-water advisories for decades.

In Canada, as in many other countries with significant Indigenous populations, the policy for decades has been to deny or ignore their legitimate rights and titles. Now, once again, a private company wants to invade unceded territory and exploit its land for economic gain at the expense of the people who live on it. Because those people have little legal or economic power, they are engaging in peaceful civil disobedience as a means to be heard. But instead of listening, the authorities are treating them like criminals.

Faced with escalating pressure from the blockades and the people outraged by them, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau cancelled a trip to Barbados, where he was expected to pitch Caribbean leaders on why Canada should be granted a seat on the United Nations Security Council. Instead, he held an emergency meeting of cabinet ministers Monday in Ottawa. To his credit, he denounced the calls for force, making it clear that a solution could only be found through discussions. Indigenous Services Minister Marc Miller reiterated that sentiment, stating that “the pathway to de-escalation is a painful one, and it’s an hour-by-hour conversation that involves engagement at the highest levels.” Violence and suppression are easy and respectful dialogue is tedious and long, but it’s the latter that is required now.

Canada has yet to engage fully with its grim colonial legacy. This is a country founded on the often-violent seizure of Indigenous land; the displacement of communities via  state-sponsored residential schools; and the banning and hoped-for extinction of Indigenous culture, languages, and culture. This legacy is responsible for countless deaths and for generational trauma that manifests in high rates of suicide, incarceration, and substance abuse; it has also played an instrumental role in settler privilege and prosperity.

Canada can no longer afford to prop up polluting industries that threaten our biodiversity and the viability of our land and water. It’s unconscionable to do so. Indigenous concerns should be our concerns also. They are one and the same.

The discourse and increasing support around the We’tsuewet’en protests and train blockades is evolving rapidly because public awareness is rising. Canadian attitudes toward environmental issues are evolving. We’re now starting to realize as a global community that Indigenous people are leading the way in a battle we must wage together.

 
    [post_title] => A standoff over a gas pipeline has become an international call for environmental action
    [post_excerpt] => Activists for indigenous rights and for environmental protection rights have allies in Canada and around the world because they are intrinsically connected through shared goals.
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A standoff over a gas pipeline has become an international call for environmental action

by Toula Drimonis

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    [post_content] => For the Christian Right, religious freedom means their right to discriminate against people who don't share their beliefs. 

In Bible class at my evangelical high school, I was taught that pluralism is “heresy” and must be rejected. This was a more formal way of conveying what I had already learned as a small child— that it was the task of all Christians to convert everyone to Christianity, and that the world would be a much better place if everyone were Christian.

A person who is committed to the liberal democratic project will probably be appalled at the idea of teaching children to desire a world in which everyone follows the same religion. Many, however, do not share that reaction—and that is because Christian hegemony is so smoothly woven into the fabric of American life that they fail to recognize it. Christian privilege and Christian supremacism are very real; if we are ever going to see the United States live up to the democratic potential contained in the higher ideals of the founding fathers, however much they failed to realize those ideals, we must be as committed to its dismantling as we are to that of white supremacism.

Pluralism: What’s at stake

Pluralism, of course, refers to people of diverse and conflicting beliefs coexisting peaceably, linked by their adherence to a shared social contract which commits members of different groups to treating others fairly and accommodating them equally in the public square. Outside academic settings, however, pluralism is little discussed these days—except by right-wing Christians. That’s a problem: failing to articulate a liberal understanding of pluralism will allow the authoritarian Christian Right, already advantaged in what I recently argued in Playboy Magazine is our de facto Christian public sphere, to drag the country ever further rightward.

Liberals do not feel comfortable discussing the place of religion in the public sphere, says Jeremy Forest Price, assistant professor of education and chair of the Jewish Faculty and Staff Council at Indiana University - Purdue University Indianapolis. Avoiding the topic, however,  has unintended consequences. “It allows those who seek to push their own religious agendas, particularly evangelical Christians, Christian dominionists*, and Christian nationalists, to [convince the public] not only to support their beliefs and practices over others, but to make the public sphere itself mirror their beliefs and practices.”

Because they reflexively support the separation of church and state, and therefore may not feel an innate sense of urgency to articulate its value, liberals and progressives run the risk of ceding the national discourse on pluralism to the Right.

Fortunately, there is an increasingly visible broad-based movement, including both believers and non-believers, who oppose the Christian nationalism that is ascendant in the Trump era. They are working actively to reclaim the meaning of religious freedom from those who would define it as the right to discriminate against members of othered groups on the basis of “sincerely held religious beliefs,” even at the expense of equal accommodation in the public square. I contend that we need similarly to reclaim the liberal value of pluralism.

Paul Rosenberg, a writer and activist who has documented and championed this movement, says that pluralism requires an openness that religious fundamentalists lack, and when it comes to building and participating in a functional democratic society, what people do is more important than their espoused beliefs. “It is in doing the work that we discover what we have in common,” he said, noting that the work itself leads to an appreciation of our differences.

I asked other stakeholders to comment on what pluralism means to them in theory and practice, hoping to encourage further discussion of this critical civic concept among those of us who reject the Republican Party’s authoritarianism. To understand the stakes, we need to take a brief look at the state of the discourse around pluralism on the Christian Right.

According to reactionary Catholic scholar Brad Gregory, “hyper-pluralism” is to blame for everything that ails the modern West, and the solution would seem to be a return to some sort of imagined Catholic unity. This would undoubtedly entail many horrors for non-Christians, women, and members of the LGBTQ community.

Russell Moore , the president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, is among those conservative Christians who dismiss pluralism as “heresy.” Sohrab Ahmari, the radical Catholic writer, unabashedly argues that conservative Christians should “enforce our order and our orthodoxy.” Attorney General William Barr seems to share this view: in a speech he delivered at Notre Dame University this past October, Barr decried “militant secularists” who were supposedly “behind a campaign to destroy the traditional moral order.” C. Colt Anderson, a Catholic theologian and professor of religion at Fordham University, was so appalled by the extremism in Barr’s remarks that he called him “a threat to American democracy.”

There are other conservative Christian commentators, however—people like evangelical historian John Fea and David French, a frequent contributor to The National Review—who embrace a concept of pluralism very much of a piece with the Christian Right’s understanding of “religious liberty” as their liberty to discriminate against others, including Christians with whom they disagree. Fea and French are public figures who enjoy a degree of respectability; it is dangerous to cede our contemporary understanding of pluralism exclusively to them and to those even further to the right. The Christian Right already dominates sex education in our public schools and has effectively ended abortion in numerous states. Christian hospitals regularly deny women and queer people life-saving healthcare on the basis of strictly religious views that many of their patients do not share. Deregulated homeschooling, pushed above all by conservative Christians, allows abuse and fundamentalist indoctrination to flourish. If liberals will not argue the meaning of pluralism and religious freedom precisely as liberal values, the Christian Right will only subject more and more of American life to its harmful theocratic agenda.

So what might a liberal pluralism predicated on robust separation of church and state and equal accommodation in the public square look like? And how might we navigate the tensions not just between representatives of different confessions, but also between believers and non-believers?

Liberal pluralism in theory and practice

Non-religious voters now make up the single largest defined bloc within the Democratic Party. But a large and significant part of the party’s base is composed of Christians—especially African-American Christians. It is self-evidently necessary for progressive atheists and agnostics to build coalitions with progressive believers and to work together toward the common good. Loud voices in the visible atheist community, like the prominent neuroscientist Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist and author, often alienate not only religious believers, but also women and people of color with remarks that are Islamophobic, racist, and misogynist. Progressive atheists who are interested in coalition building must work to repair the bridges that these men and their trollish online fans have damaged.

Tom Van Denburgh, communications director for American Atheists, acknowledged that “people within the atheist community sometimes engage in anti-religious rhetoric,” but attributes this anger in most cases to their having been harmed by religion. But he agrees that justifiable anger at religious privilege, which in the United States primarily pertains to Christians, must not become an excuse to dehumanize all religious people. “While there’s still a lot of work to do, the atheist community has become increasingly inclusive and more concerned about how religious privilege impacts different groups in disparate ways. And that means advocating for women, LGBTQ people, members of minority faith communities, and people of color.” He added: “Integral to [our] work is building bridges with religious allies when we find common ground.”

American Atheists can point to practical achievements in this regard, notably the launch of BlitzWatch Coalition, a project dedicated to opposing the Christian nationalist agenda of Project Blitz, which seeks to impose hardline Christian values on every aspect of American political and civil society. Van Denburgh sees the work involved in BlitzWatch Coalition as authentic pluralism in practice, and BlitzWatch Coalition’s member organizations include the Interfaith Alliance and the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (RCRC).

For Rev. Dr. Cari Jackson, RCRC’s Director of Spiritual Care and Activism, pluralism is associated above all with compassion. “To be compassionate requires decentering or stepping outside one’s own experiences in order to give priority to the experiences of others,” Jackson said. This task is more challenging, she added, for those who “are part of any privileged hegemony” because of “a limitation of experience and exposure.”

Christianity represents one of these hegemonies, said Jackson. “For interfaith dialogues to be healthy and viable, now is a critical time for atheist perspectives to be included,” she said, adding: “The path to social harmony and national unity is paved by compassion for and a genuine valuing of the stranger, those whose beliefs, practices, and so on, are different from those in the social, religious or political majority.”

Jeremy Forest Price, who is involved in interfaith work, agrees with Jackson on the importance of clear-eyed honesty regarding power dynamics and the importance of representation. “An emphasis on pluralism will help open up the discussion around religion (and worldviews, spiritualities, and the absence of religion) so that we can trace the ways that specific religious ideologies influence our shared public spaces,” he said.

Such tracing must include facing the impact of Christian supremacism in the United States, which means breaking the social taboo on criticizing any large Christian group. The focus of much of my own work in recent years has been on facilitating the collective visibility of ex-evangelicals and others who have left fundamentalist religion, and on advocating for us to be heard in our national discussions of religion and politics. Efforts to halt America’s lurch into authoritarianism will fail unless we shift the national discourse on Christianity.

I believe that by devoting some serious thought and effort to pluralism, both theory and practice, those of us who support democracy and human rights might succeed in nudging the American public sphere toward the kind of discourse that will aid us in the the realization of this country’s democratic potential.

* While there are a number of specific fundamentalist Christian ideologies whose adherents refer to themselves as Dominionists (for example, Seven Mountains Dominionism), broadly defined, Christian dominionism simply refers to the beliefs and politics of Christians who pursue social domination over members of other groups by enshrining their religious beliefs in coercive law.
    [post_title] => The only way to save democracy from the Christian Right is by fighting for pluralism
    [post_excerpt] => “The path to social harmony and national unity is paved by compassion for and a genuine valuing of the stranger, those whose beliefs, practices, and so on, are different from those in the social, religious or political majority.”
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The only way to save democracy from the Christian Right is by fighting for pluralism

by Chrissy Stroop

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    [post_content] => One of the world's most financially successful singers is a recluse who never performs, rarely gives interviews, and declines to play the role of a celebrity.

Enya, the Irish singer-musician, is perhaps one of the most mocked and memed artists of our time. Her body of work is often dismissed as New Age, a label she has disavowed. To many, her songs are the aural equivalent of astrology: mystical and fun, but lacking substance. Familiar tracks like “Only Time” provide ambience at yoga retreats, LARPs, facials, and tarot card readings. The singer has a reputation for being a bit of a recluse, rarely making public appearances or granting interviews. Music critics often offer muted or grudging praise for her albums, but they don’t take her seriously. I, however, love Enya—and not ironically.

When I was growing up, my dad often assumed the role of school chauffeur and minivan DJ. His taste was (and remains) eclectic; during those drives, he played everything from The Moody Blues, to German musical project Enigma, to ambient techno from the now-defunct 90s website mp3.com. Enya was always on heavy rotation and, as a result, still occupies a special place in my heart and on my Spotify playlists. 

My deep affection for Enya's music is rooted in more than just nostalgic childhood memories. Her ethereal songs are a testament to the worth of gentleness and beauty, qualities that have historically been categorized as feminine and, therefore, of little value. In a world where obsessive fans have endangered the lives of female musicians, her choice to live a private life is a salutary example; setting boundaries is an act of self-preservation and an empowering choice, not necessarily an eccentric one. It is also a mute but radical demonstration that professional success as a musician can be achieved without living the life of a celebrity, perpetually in the spotlight. As one of the best-selling artists in the world, Enya shows us there is another way to achieve wealth and fame.

Born Eithne Pádraigín Ní Bhraonáin, Enya began her music career singing with Clannad, her family’s award-winning Irish music band. In 1982, she became a solo artist in partnership with Nicky Ryan, who she met when he was Clannad’s sound engineer, and his wife Roma, a lyricist; they remain her creative team to this day. The three began experimenting with looping harmonies, eventually creating what is now Enya’s signature layered sound. Unless otherwise noted in song credits, Enya performs all the vocals for her music and plays all the instruments. Known for her facility with languages, she has recorded songs in Gaelic, Latin, Japanese, and Sindarin—the latter an Elvish language invented by J.R.R. Tolkien.

The music industry tends to expect that female artists will offer up their private lives for public consumption, but Enya refuses to play the celebrity game. Instead she lives alone in Manderley Castle, the Dublin-area Victorian mansion named for the house in Daphne Du Maurier's novel Rebecca. She never tours, rarely performs, and spends years crafting each album.

[caption id="attachment_1601" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Manderley Castle, Enya's mansion in Killiney.[/caption]

On the rare occasions she sits for interviews, Enya frequently points out that fame and success are not synonymous. In a 2015 profile for BuzzFeed she notes, “There’s no rulebook that says, ‘Your music is successful; you must now become famous.’” She remains unwaveringly committed to the integrity of her music, and isn’t afraid to say “no” to even the most tempting offers. She famously declined to compose the score for “Titanic,” and turned down an invitation to speak at Harvard. In an interview for The Irish Times, she explains, “I just did things that I wanted to do.”

Rooted in Celtic, classical, folk, and choral traditions, Enya’s music has a timeless quality. I can imagine someone cleansing a room with sage and crystals to "The Memory of Trees" in 2020 as easily as I can channel the image of fourteenth-century women singing the Gaelic lyrics of "Ebudæ" while dancing in a misty green field. Enya’s body of work is both beautiful and deeply, wonderfully weird. 

Despite her refusal to play the role of celebrity, Enya is by all objective standards a superstar. She is one of the best-selling musicians in the world, surpassing even Nirvana in album sales. She’s a four-time Grammy Award winner, and has been nominated for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe. The eclectic range of artists who have sampled her music include The Fugees, Panda Bear, Diddy, and Meek Mill; her music has provided the soundtracks for countless commercials and movies, and inspired artists from Weyes Blood to Nicki Minaj. Enya’s music has spent over five years in the number one spot on the Top New Age Albums chart. (Check it out, she’s still there.) 

“There isn't another modern artist who can stay holed up with her cats in her castle (next door to Bono's!) watching “Breaking Bad” and still sell 23.8 million albums in the United States alone,” writes Melissa Locker in a profile for NPR. In 2017, VICE described her as “a musician capable of selling the unsellable”—spiritual, synth-infused choral music. In a 1989 review in the Orlando Sentinel, Bill Henderson describes Enya’s music “as light as a whisper, yet as strong as a scream.” The Irish musician has become an unlikely music industry powerhouse on her own terms, according to her own rules. 

So why are similarly reclusive male musicians, like Leonard Cohen, or those who are “eccentric,” like David Bowie, or genre-bending, like Brian Eno, respected as artists, while she is not? 

In a searing 2000 review, Entertainment Weekly summarized  "A Day Without Rain," her fifth album, as “New Age nonsense," adding: “Unless you’re bound in an herbal body wrap, there’s simply no acceptable reason to listen” it. According to the reviewer for Rolling Stone, “The Irish-multi-instrumentalist-singer-composer's skill at ephemeral sonic watercolors has grown wearisome.” In 1989, The Los Angeles Times panned Enya’s second album, "Watermark," calling it “a portentous pastiche,” and dismissively referring to her as a “young chanteuse.” According to critics, Enya’s music is “too much,” and yet not substantive enough. Her talent is pretentious and tiring. Her success is baffling. Her songs are strange, but not in a cool way. (Siri, play “The Man” by Taylor Swift.)

For his film “Eighth Grade," director Bo Burnham uses "Orinoco Flow" (Sail away, sail away, sail away) as a poignant commentary on the swirling emotions of a socially anxious, lonely 13 year-old girl seeking the acceptance of her peers in the Instagram generation. Burnham feels the singer has been unjustifiably maligned. "We’ve been trained by countless commercials and Will Ferrell movies to find the retro needle-drop inherently funny,” he tells Vulture's Sean O'Neal. In "Eighth Grade," Burnham sets out to redeem "Orinoco Flow," a song he loves without irony. The treatment of Enya’s music in popular culture has clearly warped our collective ability to take it seriously, but Burnham remembers that as a child, Enya’s music made him “feel bigger than [he] was...deeper and more exciting.” I can relate.



The dual nature of Enya’s work is part of what makes it both hard to pin down and special. Are her songs beautiful, technical, and emotive? Or are they hilarious in their hyper-seriousness? The answer is, they are both.

“Derry Girls,” a comedy about a group of high school friends in 1990s Northern Ireland, channels these diverse elements of Enya’s music to great effect. “Caribbean Blue” opens and closes Season Two: In the first episode: a drone camera pans over Ireland’s iconic green hills and its urban rooftops, showing heavily armed British soldiers in armored personnel carriers, demonstrators throwing molotov cocktails, and walls covered in Irish nationalist graffiti; meanwhile we hear Erin, one of the protagonists, delivering a dramatic and very clichéd monologue about peace—and then the camera reveals she’s speaking from the bathtub. Here, the function of Enya’s music is to add humor—a comically solemn soundtrack to highlight the heroine’s sense of self-importance. 



The same song sets the mood for a serious moment in the season finale, when the girls stand sullenly in a cheering crowd, unable to join in celebrating President Bill Clinton’s visit to their town because their friend James is moving back to England. “Caribbean Blue” grows louder as one of the girls spots James, who has decided to stay; the song drowns out the crowd’s cheers, and the girls run to embrace their friend: If all you told was turned to gold, if all you dreamed was new… The song that provided comedy in the first episode of the season signals earnestness in the final one. Enya’s music is no longer the butt of the joke; it’s serious.

When I listen to Enya, I hear the sound of a woman in control, undaunted by those who underestimate her. Her delicate, ethereal songs affirm that in softness, there is power.
    [post_title] => Enya: Icon of radical softness
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Enya: Icon of radical softness

by Rebecca Long

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    [post_content] => Grassroots organizers are proving to be a formidable challenge to the Republican Party's voter suppression tactics. 

When Stacey Abrams, the first black woman ever nominated by a major party to run for governor of any state, ran as Georgia’s Democratic candidate for governor in 2018, voters knew she might lose. Abrams’ skills, tenacity, and national profile—enhanced by a decade of service in Georgia’s state legislature and an endorsement from Barack Obama—helped secure her historic nomination. But the state’s long history of voter suppression was a formidable obstacle to victory.

Brian Kemp, the Republican gubernatorial candidate then serving as Georgia’s Secretary of State, was responsible for overseeing voter registration. One month before the election, his office was holding 53,000 voter registration applications for review—nearly 70 percent of which were for black residents, who compose approximately 32 percent of Georgia’s population. In a leaked recording Kemp can be heard saying that the Abrams campaign’s voter turnout operation “continues to concern us, especially if everybody uses and exercises their right to vote.”

Abrams lost the election by 54,723 votes.

The United States has a long history of voter suppression. For decades following Reconstruction, black American residents of Jim Crow states who tried to exercise their right to vote were subjected to poll taxes, literacy tests, arrests, savage beatings, and murder. In the United States (and in Britain), women who agitated for the right to vote were arrested and imprisoned; when they protested by going on hunger strikes, they were violently force-fed.

Contemporary voter suppression tactics are just as prevalent, though implementation is no longer as violent. In 2011, New Hampshire House Speaker William O’Brien vowed to “tighten up the definition of a New Hampshire resident” and crack down on same-day voter registrations in college towns, which, he said, were full of “kids voting liberal, voting their feelings, with no life experience.”

Voter suppression has been a key component of Republican electoral strategy at least since 2008—particularly, but not exclusively, in the Midwest and South. The last Republican presidential candidate to win the popular vote was George W. Bush in 2004. Republican strategists saw in Obama’s 2008 and 2012 victories a rising tide of “kids voting liberal” and minority voter turnout that threatened GOP power. In response, they crafted a strategy to suppress the vote, especially among young people and black people.

It’s no secret that conservatives are deliberately targeting people of color. In a 2019 documentary called “Rigged: The Voter Suppression Playbook,” a North Carolina retiree named Michael Hyers describes his role in helping to purge thousands from his state’s voter rolls in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. While claiming—without evidence—that he’s working to counteract rampant voter fraud, Hyers, who is white, repeatedly uses language that suggests his true motives are to keep black people from voting. “We got to clean the rolls up one way or another,” he says. “It’s about time we turned the lights on in the kitchen and started cleaning the cockroaches out of here.” In explaining that people like him have a knack for spotting anomalies in registrations, he says, “It’s kind of like seeing a lump of coal in a bale of cotton—it’ll just pop right out at you.”

Don Yelton resigned as chair of North Carolina's Buncombe County Republican Party in 2013 after “The Daily Show” aired an interview in which he acknowledged that new state voting laws were designed to “kick the Democrats in the butt” and could hurt “lazy blacks that want the government to give them everything.”

This sort of overtly racist discourse can incite violence. Shortly before a gunman opened fire in 2019 outside a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, killing 22 and wounding 26, a manifesto that he is believed to have authored appeared online. The long, detailed document includes a description of the author’s intent to “remove the threat of the Hispanic voting bloc” through violent means.

While Republicans work to keep certain demographic groups from voting, institutions like the Electoral College sap the power of our votes. In November, Stacey Abrams told Oliver Laughland, a reporter for The Guardian U.S., that the Electoral College should be abolished. It was, she said, “designed because those who were in power did not trust the peasants and the working people to actually make good decisions, and we should all be in rebellion against that idea.”

One way to join Abrams’s efforts to fight back against voter suppression is to get involved with one of the grassroots organizations that have sprung up over the last decade to combat anti-democratic measures. After Brian Kemp was declared the winner of Georgia’s gubernatorial election, Abrams founded Fair Fight to “promote fair elections in Georgia and around the country, encourage voter participation in elections, and educate voters about elections and their voting rights.” Through Fair Fight’s nonprofit she also helped organize a lawsuit that challenged Georgia’s entire election system, arguing that it violates the constitutional rights of voters of color.

While large black populations can make states like Georgia targets of voter suppression efforts, they also create bases of power from which those efforts can be fought. In a 2017 Alabama Senate election, black voters organized to propel Doug Jones, the Democratic candidate, to a narrow victory over Republican Roy Moore; his victory made Jones the first Democrat since 1997 to represent the state of Alabama in the U.S. Senate. Doug Jones is white, but 56 percent of those who voted for him were black. According to NBC News exit polls, 96 percent of black voters supported Jones, including 98 percent of black female voters and 93 percent of black male voters.New groups like Woke Vote, a “tiny” collection of students, church-going activists, and organizers, succeeded in getting out the vote for Jones by concentrating on “potential sites of latent black political power, including historically black colleges and universities and black churches,” writes Vann R. Newkirk II in The Atlantic. Newkirk describes these institutions as “force-multipliers, turning each potential new voter into an organizer.” Woke Vote “secured pledges from members not only to vote, but to bring people with them to the polls.”

Steve Phillips, the founder of Democracy in Color, writes in a 2017 New York Times op-ed that “independent, under-the-radar, grass-roots, on-the-ground voter turnout efforts by black leaders and organizers in black neighborhoods” made the difference in Alabama—and not the Democratic Party, nor Doug Jones’ campaign. Phillips names organizations like BlackPAC, which canvassed the state and organized transportation for voters.

In his notorious interview for "The Daily Show," Don Yelton said that laws restricting voting only hurt lazy people. “If it hurts a bunch of college kids that’s too lazy to get up off their bohunkus and go get a photo ID, so be it,” Yelton said.

Acquiring an ID card is, however, not an easy undertaking. Government agencies have limited hours and are often inaccessible to people who cannot afford time off work or the cost of travel. The 25 percent of Americans who do not have internet access at home face an additional obstacle: they have no easy way of looking up voter requirements in their area.

When election law is deliberately abstruse and selectively enforced, it’s rational to conclude that it might be safer to skip voting than to risk breaking the law. In 2018, a dozen people—nine of them black—in North Carolina’s Alamance County were charged with voting illegally in the 2016 presidential election. All were on probation or parole for felony convictions, and most had no idea they were committing a crime by voting while on parole. One of those charged, a man named Taranta Holman who was then 28 years old, told The New York Times that he had never voted before 2016 and never would again; it was simply “too much of a risk.” Residents of Texas, Kansas, Idaho, and other states have also been charged with voting illegally.

Grassroots efforts to counteract voter suppression have succeeded in part because many Americans see voting as a duty as well as a right. They want to vote, but they need information, encouragement, and support. Reported obstacles to voting include lack of time, lack of transportation, work and family responsibilities that preclude people from waiting in long lines, broken machines, unclear and/or onerous voter ID requirements—and, notably, anxiety. (I remember feeling slightly panicky entering a voting booth for the first time as an adult; the machines are not user-friendly!)

Accompanying a person who is nervous or uncertain because they haven’t voted in a long time, if ever, to the polls is not only an act of kindness—it’s a powerful act of solidarity. Like women seeking to exercise their right to a safe and legal abortion, marginalized people have, ever since winning the right to vote, been actively discouraged or prevented from using it.

We can’t reform institutions, repeal unjust laws, or ensure that every election official is capable and fair-minded overnight, but we can support one another, logistically and psychologically, in exercising our rights. Just as escorting one woman into an abortion clinic is an act of communal solidarity that communicates to all women the message “We are in this together,” escorting voters to the polls doesn’t just move the needle in one election: it helps build community power in the long term.
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Escorting voters to the polls is as crucial as escorting women to abortion clinics

by Raina Lipsitz

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    [post_content] => Can the law save our democracies? A new crop of podcasts, films, and television dramas attempt to answer the burning question of our times.

Legal dramas and police procedurals are hugely popular genres of entertainment. 12 Angry Men, Law & Order, and the Wallander detective novels by Swedish author Henning Mankell spring randomly to mind, but there are of dozens of examples in film, television, and literature. Recently, however, a crop of new dramas and documentaries that focus on the law and legal process seem to indicate, based on popularity and critical acclaim, to reflect a shift in the zeitgeist. Instead of providing escapism through fiction, the latest legal procedurals offer intellectual engagement with current events, and possibly answers to an urgent and poignant question: can the law, if implemented ethically, stabilize the shaky institutions holding up our democracies and redeem our social norms?



Donald Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate, which began this week with saturation media coverage, comes on the back of months of shocking revelations regarding Jeffrey Epstein and what appears to be a high-level conspiracy between the state and Epstein’s defense team to look the other way for decades while he openly trafficked in and preyed sexually upon underage girls. In another case that is receiving global media coverage, opening arguments were presented this week at the New York City trial of Harvey Weinstein on two charges of rape and sexual assault; more than 100 women have accused the once-powerful producer of sexual assault, harassment, and rape.

All of these cases hold enormous implications. Can the law, which these powerful men flouted openly for decades, provide justice? The future of our vulnerable democracies seems to be predicated on an affirmative answer to this question.

Preet Bharara, a widely respected former Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) who lost his job when Trump purged Obama appointees in early 2017, now hosts two popular podcasts that provide analysis of current events and their legal implications.

In Stay Tuned with Preet, Bharara offers a sober and non-partisan approach to the law that is remarkably appealing. Each episode is divided into two parts: Bharara opens by providing informed, engaged responses to listeners’ questions on the law, and moves on to a thought-provoking conversation with a feature guest. The latter have included Sally Yates, the former United States Deputy Attorney General; Jill Lepore, the prominent Harvard historian who is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker; filmmaker and actor Ed Norton; and George Conway, Kelly Ann’s stridently anti-Trump—but conservative—husband.

Bryan Stevenson, a prominent civil rights attorney who is often described as America’s Nelson Mandela, was Bharara’s guest on the December 26 episode of Stay Tuned.

Stevenson, who is black, grew up in racially segregated rural Delaware. He was deeply affected by his childhood experiences of institutional racism, and by the murder of his grandfather. During the podcast conversation, Stevenson explains that while he was keenly aware of how the law had been used to oppress black people in the United States, he also saw how it could be implemented to address inequities. The law ended school desegregation, for example, and it provided due process after police arrested his grandfather’s murderers; they were convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Stevenson, who has a law degree from Harvard, founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a non-profit law firm based in Alabama that is dedicated to challenging racial injustice and ending mass incarceration. He is also the author of Just Mercy, a memoir about his experience of representing Walter McMillan, a man wrongfully accused of murdering a white woman. Critics have responded positively to recently released film based on the book, and starring Jamie Foxx.

The subject of Café Insider (tagline: Make Sense of Law & Politics), which Bharara co-hosts with Anne Milgram, the former New Jersey Attorney General, is the week’s events. In a single episode on August 12, 2019, Bharara and Milgram discuss and analyze Jeffrey Epstein’s suicide; the lawsuit by two former FBI officials claiming that they were wrongfully terminated as political retaliation; and the massive raids conducted by ICE agents of food processing plants in Mississippi. With their seasoned and engaging legal minds, Bharara and Milgram fill an urgent need for legal and factual clarity.

In television, the critically acclaimed series The Good Fight, a spin-off of The Good Wife, stars Christine Baranski as Diane Lockhart, now a partner at a majority black Chicago law firm. The plot of each episode is based on stories “ripped from the headlines” — but always with a thought-provoking “what if?” twist. Lockhart, a liberal whose commitment to the law is challenged by the rise of Trump appointees in the judiciary, confesses to exhaustion and is tempted by gonzo feminist activists who claim that the only path of resistance is through dirty tricks and extra-legal activity. But each time Lockhart seems ready to capitulate to temptation, someone or some incident pulls her back, reminding her of and re-asserting the value, effectiveness and function of the law and adhering to legal process.

The law plays a major role in the gripping HBO miniseries Our Boys, which was broadcast to international critical acclaim. The series, which is co-directed by an Israeli and a Palestinian, dramatizes the horrific events of the summer of 2014 in Israel-Palestine, when three Jewish boys abducted and immolated 16 year-old Mohamed Abu Khdeir, a Palestinian from East Jerusalem, in retribution for the abduction and murder by Palestinians of three yeshiva students from a West Bank settlement.

The story is framed as a police procedural, with a forensic dramatization of how the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, identified and arrested Abu Khdeir’s murderers, and how the criminal justice system prosecuted them. The series provides one of the most nuanced portrayals of the social, cultural, religious, and political divisions in contemporary Israel-Palestine, shining an uncomfortably bright light on the fissures between various subcultures of Jewish society, and between Jewish and Arab-Palestinian society.

From the moment they report him missing to the police, Mohamed Abu Khdeir’s parents are under enormous pressure. Not only must they rely on their political oppressors, the Israeli state, to pursue and prosecute their son’s killers, but they must also justify to their Palestinian community their controversial decision to abide by the Israeli legal system, trusting it to provide justice.

State Attorney Uri Korb, played by Lior Ashkenazi, communicates superbly the Israeli liberal intelligentsia’s failure to recognize that the country's legal system does not define justice for Palestinians in the same way it does for Jews. This is particularly true for Palestinians like the Abu Khdeir family, who are stateless residents of East Jerusalem with nebulously defined legal rights. Korb sees himself as the representative of the Israeli state, rather than a pursuer of justice on behalf of any one party. He does not, for example, see cognitive dissonance in dismissing Mohamed Abu Khdeir’s father, portrayed with luminous verisimilitude by Jony Arbid, when the latter demands that the homes of the Jewish Israelis convicted of his son’s murder be destroyed. This, after all, is a punishment that the Israeli state commonly metes out to Palestinians who are convicted of having committed political violence against Jews.

The ambiguous ending of Our Boys leaves open the question of whether or not the law can provide justice to Palestinian victims of a crime committed by Jews. There are, however, several gripping and complex scenes that illustrate the violent, anarchic consequences of rejecting the law and choosing extra-judicial action. As a dramatic device, the granular reconstruction of the police investigation provides a compassionate and insightful portrayal of contemporary Israeli-Palestinian society.

Also from Israel, Advocate (2019), an award-winning documentary that was shortlisted for an Oscar nomination, is a portrait of Lea Tsemel, an Israeli human rights lawyer who has spent most of her life defending Palestinian political prisoners. Miri Regev, the populist right wing Minister of Culture, predictably proclaimed her loathing for the film even as she acknowledged that she had not seen it; this type of criticism from Regev has become something of a badge of honor for left wing Israeli artists.

Advocate traces Tsemel’s career from the genesis of her left-wing activism in the 1970s, while she was a student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, to the present; it follows her as she represents one of her most highly publicized recent — that of Ahmad, a 13 year-old boy who is accused of attempting to kill a Jewish teenager with a knife. In a memorable scene that takes place in her cramped office, Tsemel explains to Ahmad and his family that they must choose between pleading guilty and seeing Ahmad charged as a minor, or going to trial; the latter option means that the barely adolescent boy could be sentenced as an adult if he is convicted. Ahmad, who insists that he had no intention of causing injury with the knife, and who was, as video footage shows, brutally questioned for hours by Israeli security without a lawyer or guardian present, opts for a trial. In court, Tsemel predicates her legal argument on the demonstrably true assertion that Jewish Israelis accused of the same crime as the one for which Ahmad is on trial are not charged with attempted murder. Nor do they risk being sentenced to life in prison.

Tsemel mentions frequently during the film that she has never won a case. Given the legal and political climate in Israel, she knows that her losing streak is likely to continue uninterrupted, but she is ideologically and morally committed to challenging the structures imposed on her clients. She has chosen her path of resistance, which is to demonstrate the legal system’s failures by the very act of working within the system. Giving up is not an option and refusing to work within the system will not, she seems to believe, help anybody.

Many observers of President Trump’s impeachment trial in the senate hope that the legal process will reverse what seems, due to partisan politics, to be a predetermined result. News outlets are providing saturation coverage of the lead-up to the trial, the role of Chief Justice Roberts, the number of Senate votes required to bring forward new witnesses and new evidence, and many other matters of procedure.

In Israel, meanwhile, the question of whether and for how long Benjamin Netanyahu can continue to occupy the position of prime minister while he is under criminal indictment is keeping everyone on edge, with the media providing saturation coverage of every new development. Does the law permit Netanyahu to run as head of his party in a third election while he is charged with criminal corruption? It does. Americans and Israelis are discovering, more or less in tandem, but for different reasons, the extent to which the law is predicated on social norms. Can the law provide justice even as populist authoritarianism systematically undermines and destroy those norms?

For social and political activists, the silver lining of these deeply troubling times is a noticeable uptick in civic engagement. Demonstrations, grassroots activism, and artistic resistance play a crucial role in social transformation, but so does the law. Three years into the Trump administration and a decade into the global rise of authoritarianism, it seems that many people are also recognizing with new appreciation the critical function of the law and legal process in maintaining a democracy.
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Desperately seeking answers in the law

by Yael Friedman

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    [post_content] => Two decades after her breakout memoir was published, a writer once dismissed as a narcissist died a literary heroine.

When Elizabeth Wurtzel published Prozac Nation in 1994, she seemed all too eager to regale the public with her struggles. Raised on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, she was the gifted daughter of a prosperous family who attended private schools and graduated from Harvard. In her memoirs, however, Wurtzel luridly described her depression: snorting coke to kick her lithium dependence, curling up on bathroom floors sweating and sobbing, and falling into bed with the wrong man at every turn. Yet, she looked gorgeous as she lived this self-destructive life. Posing on the cover of a magazine with a come-hither stare and a crop top, Wurtzel embodied the dark and angsty glamour of the 1990s—a literary Courtney Love or Tracey Emin. The memoir sat atop best-seller lists and was made into a movie starring Christina Ricci. Critics, however, were split. Was this the second coming of Sylvia Plath (had she survived a suicide attempt to promote The Bell Jar on MTV); or, was she merely a raving narcissist who, in Wurtzel’s own words, “didn’t even come across as sad any longer, just obnoxious”?  

Elizabeth Wurtzel died last week, and she died young—if not as young as she once predicted. (“I’m starting to wonder if I might not be one of those people like Anne Sexton or Sylvia Plath who are just better off dead…Perhaps, I, too, will die young and sad, a corpse with her head in the oven.”) She was 52 when she died of breast cancer. 

By the time of her passing Wurtzel had cleaned up and, in defiance of her erstwhile Gen X slacker image, had graduated from Yale Law School, joined a white-shoe firm, and even—GASP!—married. Parsing her legacy, however, is more complex than simply caring about whether or not she “grew up,” as the New York Times obituary writer suggested. Wurtzel laid herself bare, but we did not know her. It’s a profound compliment to her writing that her readers—detractors and admirers alike—assumed that they did. Confessional writing as a genre can have great value, transforming both the lives of individuals and the cultural discourse. Wurtzel’s impact, though inextricably bound up in her celebrity, lies in the role she carved out for herself—and in everyone else who has since played the same part.  

Prozac Nation inspired a robust national conversation at the time it was published. Although many dismissed Wurtzler as a whiny egomaniac—no less a critic than Walter Kirn called the book “a work of singular self-absorption”—she kicked off a trend. The publishing market suddenly made room for confessional memoirs meant to make the reader at once cringe and relate, from Dani Shapiro’s Slow Motion (raised in a traditional suburban Jewish home, she dropped out of college and became the kept woman of a wealthy married man) to Susan Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted (recollections of leaving a mental institution; Angelina Jolie starred in the film version and won an Oscar for her performance). What critic Nathan Rabin deemed “the Manic Pixie Dream Girl” came to define an archetype of the 1990s; the educated-woman-as-hot-mess trope can be traced directly down the line to more recent cultural fare, including Lena Dunham’s television series Girls, as Meghan Daum asserted in The New Yorker. 

A friend of Wurtzel’s hit upon the importance of her legacy in an interview for her New York Times obituary, 

“Lizzie’s literary genius rests not just in her acres of quotable one-liners...but in her invention of what was really a new form, which has more or less replaced literary fiction—the memoir by a young person no one has ever heard of before. It was a form that Lizzie fashioned in her own image, because she always needed to be both the character and the author.” 

This runs deeper than genre or medium. Allow me to explain it in the context of what you are reading right now: at some point in this essay, I will tell you something about myself. Why? Because I have to; that’s what writers do now. Last week, Geraldine Brooks wrote an excellent opinion piece to contextualize Iranian perceptions of American aggression. It wasn’t enough for her simply to mention in her bio blurb that she used to report from Iran for the Wall Street Journal; she also incorporated information about her background anecdotally into her argument, as though to prove she had the right to her opinion. Writing no longer exists on its own: it is a given that the author is a character, with their own motivations for writing. It’s almost as though they have a duty to contextualize a piece of writing within the greater timeline of their lives. 

Memoir may well be the narcissist’s playground, but the exhilarating rides the reader shows up for are not the high points. Wurtzel knew well that darkness was the draw. Whereas in 1994 readers perceived her style of memoir as wallowing, a 2020 reader might see plenty of space for a very contemporary word: empathy. Wurtzel spoke fearlessly about her problems. Depression, addiction, family dysfunction, and self-harm were all dragged out into broad daylight. She didn’t worry about what was in good taste: she told her truth, no matter who called her a poor little rich girl or a “brat”—as the writer of an unusually spicy Kirkus review opined. In 2020, therapy and mental health are talked about openly. 

Confessional writing played a part in this sea change, allowing for a more intimate glimpse into pain. And for those who contend Wurtzel looked too chic as she profited handsomely from her suffering, her own cancer advocacy offers a riposte. Although she failed to have herself tested for the BRCA gene, she campaigned for wider testing in the wake of her diagnosis. “I could have had a mastectomy with reconstruction and skipped the part where I got cancer,” she wrote. “I feel like the biggest idiot for not doing so.”

In creating a space to speak about her own problems, Wurtzel made a niche for other writers to inhabit, too—those who aren’t white or rich or Ivy League-educated. Prozac Nation was certainly not the first confessional memoir, but it pioneered something far more particular. Maya Angelou and James Baldwin wrote memoirs, but they did so in order to shine a light on the plight of a larger group of people—i.e., black people in the United States. Wurtzel’s motives were not quite so high-minded: she was unsparing in her depiction of her own individual privilege. Sylvia Plath certainly covered a lot of the same ground as Wurtzel, but she veiled it as fiction and, because The Bell Jar was published shortly before she killed herself, the book reads like a suicide note—an explanation of the writer’s absence rather than a plea for her presence. Although she was derided for self-pity, Wurtzel notably did not ask for sympathy. 

Arguably, Wurtzel ripped herself open so effectively that it has taken a couple of decades to see the precedent she set and its value as literature. The wounded, weird, yet compellingly charismatic individual is now a literary trope in memoirs written by a broad spectrum of writers. It is a space as suited to Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation as it is to Saeed Jones’ How We Fight For Our Lives, about growing up black and queer in a small Texas town, or to Roxane Gay’s Hunger, in which the author describes her struggles with sexual trauma, obesity, and her own identity. 

Perhaps we don’t like the idea that Wurtzel—wealthy, white, Harvard-educated—created this space, but the access those qualities granted her created a more accepting landscape for others. We cannot know if this was her intent, but it is the effect of her writing. What Gloria Steinem’s looks were to second-wave feminism, Elizabeth Wurtzel’s were to a platform capable of accommodating almost anyone brave enough—or exhibitionistic enough—to inhabit it. 

What does the reader gain from coming in contact with all of this? The confessional memoir opens a window onto the aspects of human nature that we tend to hide, mostly out of shame. It allows us to see and accept that we are messy, complex, and multifaceted human beings. It’s a genre with a natural intersectionality about it, like a soapbox on which anyone can stand. And you, the reader, don’t need to love any of these authors to appreciate that by putting themselves out there, they make more space for the rest of us, not only to be messy but to understand one another. On the one hand, we can see ourselves in the problems we share; we are less alone, validated. As someone with cancer in the family (and, just like that, I told you something about myself!!), I know the nerve Anne Boyer’s The Undying hits all too well. On the other hand, I will never be a queer man of color from rural Texas; reading Saeed Jones allows me to step inside an experience that isn’t mine, but also to appreciate our shared realities—and maybe even weigh the social and political ties that bind us. There is a great deal of courage in the kind of vulnerability that begets those bigger conversations.  

This kind of discourse is vital to any pluralistic society and to any democracy. We must understand one another to truly value one another, and there isn’t enough space for that transaction in a tweet. This kind of understanding can never be credited to a single confessional memoir, but rather to the aggregate effect they have had on how we treat one another and accommodate one another’s needs. As we continue to fight for various civil rights in a precarious political moment—an election year, no less—we should remember that, even if there is not a direct line between Prozac Nation and gender-neutral bathrooms, there is certainly a direct correlation between how the culture allows us to express ourselves and what arguments the body politic is capable of understanding and integrating. 

As a teenager reading Prozac Nation a few years after it came out, I wondered if I needed to be a bigger mess to succeed as a writer. Perhaps I was a Millennial rolling her eyes at Gen X. I asked myself if we really needed to know that Wurtzel’s “mouth was getting tired and chapped from giving so many blowjobs” to appreciate gems like, “If you feel everything intensely, ultimately you feel nothing at all.” The answer is no. No, we did not. But we also don’t need to like someone to admire them. More importantly, any exercise in empathy is a chance at community building, both an opportunity to feel less alone in this world and to see more of it from a perspective that glories in its lack of varnish. Confessional memoirs—even in their most profound self-absorption—are just that: a chance to be let in on something other than ourselves. 

 
    [post_title] => The personal (even on Prozac) is political: Elizabeth Wurtzel's literary legacy
    [post_excerpt] => The confessional memoir allows us to see and accept that we are messy, complex, and multifaceted human beings.
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The personal (even on Prozac) is political: Elizabeth Wurtzel’s literary legacy

by Cara Marsh Sheffler

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    [post_content] => As Americans worry about suffering reprisals for the killing of Iran's top general, they overlook the civilians who have already been paying for many years — with their blood.

In an Egyptian political satire play called al-Za’im (The Chief), a military dictator who is an archetype representing the Middle East’s various tyrants dies of a sudden heart attack. His inner circle scrambles to replace him with a two-bit actor who looks exactly like the deceased president, so they can buy time to consolidate their power.

When told that he would be the new leader because the real one had perished, the actor smirks and lets out a derisive laugh. “Are there presidents who die, Sir?”

Many of us Middle Easterners and observers of the region had a similarly incredulous reaction to the death of General Qasem Soleimani, Iran’s top military general, who was killed in a US airstrike over the weekend. Analysts and experts claimed that his death would change everything and nothing, that it would lead to World War III; it had the American president vowing to commit war crimes just a few days into the new decade.

These predictions appear to be overblown. Soleimani’s legacy of violence and dispossession in Syria and Iraq will, however, endure. For his many victims, there is momentary relief at his passing.

Soleimani was the leader of the Quds Force, the unit responsible for external operations of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps. The IRGC’s remit is protecting the Islamic Republic’s political system from internal and external threats. Soleimani gained his formative experience fighting on the frontlines of the cruel eight-year war between Iran and Iraq, during which Saddam Hussein deployed chemical weapons with impunity while continuing to enjoy western backing. He witnessed the enormous loss of life – more than half a million, including children and soldiers who were sent into minefields as human detonators, in what was ultimately a pointless war of attrition. 

By 1998 Soleimani was head of the Quds Force; and in 2011 he was promoted to major general. Meanwhile the Arab Spring was sweeping through the region, with Syria the focal point of the Islamic Republic’s paranoia.

Soleimani loomed large as the face of Iran’s campaign for regional dominance, a figure of mystique and mythical brilliance and strategic wisdom. He was the second-most powerful man in Iran, after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei; he battled the US for influence in Iraq during the American occupation, arming and backing Shia militias in order to guarantee a weak Iraqi state that functioned under the shadow of Iranian influence.

Though he was always an elusive figure, Soleimani had grown less wary of the limelight in recent years. He allowed himself to be photographed and took selfies with Shia militias on the frontlines in Iraq and Syria. 

In Iraq, he organized militias that defeated ISIS; but then those militias turned around and launched military reprisals against ordinary Sunni civilians, thus alienating the very people they had just liberated from the jihadi terror group. 

In Syria, the Iranian general’s self-appointed mission was to save the dictator Bashar al-Assad’s regime from collapse. In doing so, he presided over the country’s destruction, the displacement of millions of civilians, the greatest refugee crisis since the Second World War, and the survival of a tyrannical regime.

All the while, he was portrayed as a master strategist who foiled American designs in the region at every stage.

Iran’s pro-Assad policy is based on its desire to maintain regional influence. The Islamic Republic needs Syria to be stable in order to maintain a secure overland avenue for the transportation of military supplies to Hezbollah in Lebanon, which is its most powerful proxy force. Iran also needs to maintain an overland route to ports on the Mediterranean. When the Arab Spring of 2011 spread to Syria from Egypt, where protesters set a precedent by forcing the resignation of long-time ruler Hosni Mubarak, Iran sent advisors to Syria. Soon after that, it sent proxy militias to fight alongside Assad’s forces. In 2013, Hezbollah forces entered Syria to fight for the regime as well.

These proxy forces were responsible for some of the cruelest tactics of the war. In early 2016, I reported on the siege of Madaya, a border town that was home to 30,000 civilians who were being systematically starved to death by Hezbollah in an effort to force their surrender. To survive, people ate grass, leaves, and spiced water instead of soup.

These starvation sieges were replicated throughout the country, with Soleimani’s proxy forces often leading the charge into areas held by anti-Assad rebel troops. In addition to using hunger as a weapon of war, the pro-regime militias used scorched earth tactics. To recapture Aleppo, they bombarded from the ground while the Syrian and Russian air forces bombed from the air; as they reclaimed territory from the rebels, they carried out extrajudicial killings.

When the rebel forces eventually surrendered, tens of thousands of civilians, fearing the regime would persecute them for suspected anti-government sympathies, were forcibly displaced. Soleimani’s tactics are responsible for rendering countless Syrians destitute and homeless, and for driving many to seek refuge abroad. The ensuing refugee crisis contributed enormously to sectarian tensions in the Middle East. Those who stayed inside Syria continue to suffer from the violent tactics of the Assad regime and its Russian and Iranian allies.

In 2015 Soleimani traveled to Moscow and personally convinced the Russians to intervene on Assad’s behalf. Russian warplanes have carried out dozens of attacks on hospitals in rebel-held areas, and they have killed thousands of Syrian civilians in various air strikes.

In Iraq, the extent of the atrocities carried out by Soleimani’s proxy forces in Sunni communities liberated from ISIS was so extreme that, according to cables leaked by rivals, the intelligence services worried they were undermining Iran’s popular reputation.

More recently, Soleimani was reportedly involved in the crackdown on the popular protest movement against government corruption in Iraq. Security forces and Tehran-backed militias killed hundreds of Iraqi protesters in the weeks leading up to Soleimani’s death. According to reports, the Iranian general attended key security meetings in Iraq; he advised his counterparts to learn from Iran, where security forces killed over a thousand civilians in anti-government demonstrations that took place in December.

In the weeks and months before the Trump administration assassinated Soleimani, the Iranian regime carried out several calculated provocations against the US, as payback for their having pulled out of the multilateral nuclear deal. They threatened and disrupted shipping in the Persian Gulf and bombed Saudi oil installations; more recently, Iran launched rocket attacks against Iraqi bases housing American troops and attacked the US embassy in Baghdad on New Year’s Eve.

The question of whether assassinating Soleimani was legal or not is an academic one. Not just because it is already done and nobody will be held accountable for it, but because Soleimani had been waging an overt and covert war against the US and its allies for years. He orchestrated the death and displacement of hundreds of thousands of civilians over nearly a decade of war in Syria, against a backdrop of a broad violence and civil warfare in Yemen and Libya, as well as political crackdowns and resurgent authoritarianism throughout the region. 

The Middle Eastern conflagration that American pundits claim to be so concerned about Soleimani’s death sparking has already been raging for a decade, with hundreds of thousands of civilians paying in blood.

For now, the worst predictions of the alarmists have not been realized. World War III has not started, and Tehran responded with a calculated attack that didn’t kill any Americans. It did kill or injure Iraqi soldiers stationed on the military base housing American troops, but this was a matter of indifference to both Iran and the United States. As we have seen since the invasion of 2003, America places little value on Iraqi lives.

If there is a future escalation, it will take place on the backs of Arab civilians, because Iran does not have the capacity to match American military aggression. If it does respond further, it will do so through its proxies, further destabilizing the region and risking war. Tehran and Washington will never allow Arab civilians to stand between them when it comes to pursuing their foreign policy goals in the Middle East.

Trump does not care about Arab lives — about this, there is little doubt. Nor is he concerned about human rights, international law, or even having an actual strategy for his foreign policy in the most volatile part of the world. 

But amid the hand-wringing, spare a thought for Soleimani’s victims. For a brief moment, their suffering has been eased.

 
    [post_title] => Dear America: The death of Qasem Soleimani is not all about you
    [post_excerpt] => For now, the worst predictions of the alarmists have not been realized. World War III has not started, and Tehran responded with a calculated attack that didn’t kill any Americans. It did kill or injure Iraqi soldiers stationed on the military base housing American troops, but this was a matter of indifference to both Iran and the United States. As we have seen since the invasion of 2003, America places little value on Iraqi lives.
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Dear America: The death of Qasem Soleimani is not all about you

by Kareem Shaheen

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    [post_content] => There is a crack in everything; that's how the light gets in.
 — Leonard Cohen

I’m writing these words from a yoga center in the snow-covered Berkshires, in an atmosphere of extreme serenity that is both deeply comforting and somewhat intimidating. On the second day of my little retreat, during a silent meditation walk in the snowy woods, the woman leading the group had us stop at a particularly idyllic spot and stand still, listening to the quiet. Tree branches creaked gently in the wind, a stream of water bubbled over rocks, a woodpecker tapped on a tree, and someone (it might have been me) struggled to control her jagged breathing (it was a steep climb!). Gazing up at the treetops, the instructor asked us to describe what we heard during the silent walk. Reader, I was honest: during the meditation walk, all I could hear was the cacophony in my head — and it sounded like a super highway at rush hour. 

Most of us walk around with a head full of noisy thoughts. Meditation is supposed to help quiet the mind, but sitting still (or walking in deliberate silence) while thinking about nothing is incredibly difficult. Still, I don’t think I am alone in feeling that the normal roar inside my head has become much louder and shriller in recent months. When I mentioned to a friend, a journalist who covers the Christian and white nationalist right in the United States, that I was feeling overwhelmed by an unending stream of worried thoughts, she said, without missing a beat: “It’s the fascism.”

For those of us who are concerned about the state of civil society and democracy, 2019 was a disquieting year. Authoritarianism continues to rise and spread, while once robust democracies falter as the pillars of supporting institutions — the judiciary, the independent media, and the legislative branch — are weakened. Around the United States, in New Zealand and in Europe, we have seen a notable uptick in violent racist and antisemitic incidents. Perhaps most worrying of all, governments continue to dither over the climate crisis, even as scientists issue dire warnings about the consequences of a failure to implement policy changes. 

The news is so bad, and the sense of hopelessness so pervasive, that there’s a constant temptation to withdraw and focus inward rather than fight back. This is especially true when the exigencies of daily life — working, raising children, worrying about money, and trying to find a little time for oneself — are so all consuming. Where do people who don’t have any experience of struggling for their rights, because they took them for granted, find the inner resources to fight back? 

The story of this yoga retreat center provides some insight and inspiration on the matter of fighting for what is important. For many years, it was an ashram led by a guru. His devotees and disciples lived on the property in a communal lifestyle that involved providing a lot of free labor, from teaching yoga classes to cooking meals and cleaning rooms for paying guests. In return, the devotees received all the emotional benefits of being part of a nurturing, close-knit, spiritual community. In the mid-1990s, however, the guru was discovered to have “abused his power” — i.e., preyed sexually on some of the devotees. For the community, this was a devastating betrayal. Many had lived at the ashram for years; they had taken on new names bestowed by the guru; their friends, community, and identity were all tied up with the ashram and its spiritual leader.

Twenty-five years later, the ashram is a thriving, non-profit educational center, which provides a nurturing, peaceful place for people who need some time to take care of their bodies and their spirits. 

The center provides scholarships to grassroots community leaders interested in learning how to broker and teach non-violent conflict resolution in challenging environments, and to people who want to use yoga as a means of enriching their professional practice — as healthcare providers, teachers, or corporate wellness consultants. The people who clean and cook are no longer volunteer religious devotees, but staff who are paid and treated well — many of them refugees, or people who live with physical or intellectual limitations. The instructors have stripped the yoga classes of Sanskrit chanting, except for the occasional “om” or “namaste.” Instead, they emphasize that yoga is a science and a practice that promotes physical well being, but not a religion. Slowly, some of the disillusioned devotees who moved away after the guru’s betrayal are drifting back to spend time at the ashram-turned-yoga center. They’ve reconnected with old friends, and rejoined a changed community. 

Nothing about this trajectory was obvious in 1994, shortly after the guru was exposed and ousted. I remember, because I happened to visit at the time and saw how crushed and unmoored the devotees were. They could easily have closed up shop and dispersed into a fog of bitterness and loneliness, but they decided that the place had too much to give and teach, and that it must be salvaged. And so they set to work, and after a few years they realized that they hadn’t needed a guru, after all.

I am inspired by people who are willing to face and overcome emotional devastation.

Over the past year, as I mourned the decline of democracy and civil society and tried to fight my way through the spiritual malaise that is caused by fear and a perception of helplessness, I saw some thought provoking inspiration around the world. 

In a Moscow courtroom, a 21 year-old university student named Yegor Zhukov was tried for “extremism,” after he was arrested for posting YouTube videos in which he extolled the virtues of nonviolent protest, criticized Vladimir Putin, and discussed his campaign for a seat on the Moscow City Council. Masha Gessen translated the moving and powerful speech Zhukov gave at his court hearing, after which he was sentenced to only three years of probation. In Putin’s repressive Russia, this was a surprisingly light sentence. The explanation, Gessen writes, lies in Zhukov’s speech, the response it elicited from the public — and the fact that several Russian media outlets “dared” to publish it.

Globally, the number of grassroots movements challenging corrupt and/or authoritarian governments with sustained protests is breathtaking. In Chile, protestors have faced down police using live ammunition and mass arrests as they continue to protest the social and economic inequality in their country. In Lebanon and Iraq, protestors have joined forces across sectarian lines to challenge the corrupt and ineffective governing systems in their countries. In Hong Kong, the sustained pro-democracy demonstrations are entering their eighth month. The Chinese government issued dire threats and even indicated it was prepared to intervene militarily, but has so far done nothing. 

In India, just this week, a stunning number of ordinary citizens flooded the streets of major cities to protest the controversial new citizenship act that discriminates against Muslims. 

And last October, just steps from my home in Montreal, an estimated 500,000 people gathered to cheer for Greta Thunberg, the 16 year-old Swedish girl who single handedly inspired a global movement to raise awareness of the climate crisis. 

The power of authoritarians can and must be challenged. The temptation to check out and turn inward must be fought. Giving up is not an option. 

I think I’ll adopt those thoughts as my meditation mantras. Meanwhile, The Conversationalist will continue to publish insightful, knowledgeable, thought provoking articles about the urgent issues that we all care about so deeply. I don’t know if 2020 will be better than 2019, but let’s get ready to meet its challenges. 

 
    [post_title] => Lessons in resistance at a former yoga ashram
    [post_excerpt] => Over the past year, as I mourned the decline of democracy and civil society and tried to fight my way through the spiritual malaise that is caused by fear and a perception of helplessness, I saw some thought provoking inspiration around the world. 
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Lessons in resistance at a former yoga ashram

by Lisa Goldman

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