Anna Lind-Guzik

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    [post_content] => Working from home under lockdown has highlighted some unanticipated gender and class issues.

I have a vivid memory of a 1990s television commercial for a then-state-of-the-art cordless phone. It portrayed an industrious young businesswoman working her way through the weekend from home. Her three young daughters appear and beg her to drive them to the beach. The woman is torn; she loves her kids, but she’s also a dedicated Career Woman, and, weekend or no, she has work to do.

The last shot of the ad shows the woman taking her daughters to the beach—and joining a conference call from her new cordless phone as they frolic in the waves. Technology, the ad suggested, would set a new generation of women free by allowing them to work from anywhere: with the right phone, you could spend time with your kids without sacrificing that promotion!



Fast forward to 2020 and a world reeling from a global pandemic. The ad now seems both dated and antithetical to modern concepts of gender roles and work-life balance (why can’t the children’s other parent take them to the beach? why is the person struggling to balance work and family always a woman? why should anyone have to join a conference call on a Saturday?). Now facing a grim choice between economic pain and physical risk are the huge number of people whose jobs cannot be performed from home—grocery store clerks, warehouse workers, transit workers, and health care providers, to name a few—as well as those whose employers are refusing to let them work from home, even in cases where their jobs can be done remotely.

Those who can work from home are the lucky minority. According to a survey conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 29 percent of wage and salary workers had the option of working from home in 2017-18, and 25 percent did so at least some of the time. Most of them are high-earning white collar workers. Of civilian workers, a category comprised of both private industry and state and local government workers, only 7 percent have access to “flexible” work, or telework.

The COVID-19 crisis has transformed a white-collar job perk into a necessary means of protecting the health of workers, businesses, and the overall economy. This is why, in the span of a few weeks, so many companies have gone from resisting to mandating it.

Organizations seeking to advance women in the workplace have been pushing for companies to allow flexible and/or at-home work since the 1970s. Women would benefit the most from these arrangements, the theory went, because they were expected to perform a greater share of domestic labor. Why should an ambitious, hardworking woman be held back in her career simply because she had to pick up the kids at 3pm or get dinner on the table by 7?

Today, women still do more child care and housework than men, but many fathers are playing a greater role in their children’s lives than did men of previous generations. Male and female, single and married, parents and child-free, many workers value the flexibility and freedom of working from home at least some of the time—being able to let in the plumber, sign for a package, go to the gym, walk the dog, or prepare a home-cooked meal reduces stress across the board.

Before the pandemic—and even now, in the midst of it—many organizations were and are reluctant to allow staff to work from home. Although more companies have been allowing at-home work in the last 20 years, the last decade saw a small backlash, led most notably by Marissa Mayer, who banned remote work when she took over Yahoo in 2013. Some employers worried that workers didn’t have the training or equipment necessary to work productively from home, or that being at home would be too distracting. Some managers feared a loss of control and didn’t trust employees to get work done. Mayer, Steve Jobs, and others believed that collaboration, connectedness, and innovation suffer when employees aren’t interacting with each other in person.

Now that working from home has, in some cases, gone from a reward reserved for upper management to a requirement of the job, more people are discovering its downsides. As a young entrepreneur named Adam Simmons told CBC News in 2019, "I think [working at home] is really damaging for your mental health…It definitely was for mine. I felt very, very lonely.”

When Simmons worked from home, he was alone. But due to pandemic-induced school and day care closures, many of today’s office workers are trying to meet the demands of full-time jobs while caring for children. An acquaintance recently described a meltdown her toddler son had while she was working from home. “He asked for a snack WHILE eating a snack,” she wrote in a Facebook post. “I said, ‘You’re already eating an apple,’ and he threw himself on the ground, moaning, ‘No, I need a snaaaaaaack!’” Never has the professor whose children famously interrupted a live BBC News interview in 2017 been more relatable.

Newer technologies like instant chat and video conferencing have made it easier than ever to work from home, if not necessarily more pleasant. Jeremy Bailenson, a professor of communication at Stanford and founding director of the university’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, wrote about why so many people find Zoom meetings more exhausting than in-person ones in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed.

Bailenson’s research suggests that employees now attending hours of Zoom meetings per week are experiencing “nonverbal overload.” The grid format of ten-person Zoom meetings, in which each participant stares at you from the screen for the entire time in an eerie echo of “The Brady Bunch,” can be “draining,” he wrote. In real-life meetings, we can “control our personal space,” whereas “for every minute we are in Zoom, we have staring faces inches from our own.”

Employers resist allowing people to work from home in part because they fear a dip in productivity. But research and workers’ experiences during the pandemic indicate that allowing (or requiring) work from home is in fact a boon to management. As Bailenson wrote in The Wall Street Journal, “people are forced to pay attention” on Zoom to a greater degree than in person. Even Kevin Roose, author of a recent New York Times op-ed entitled, “Sorry, but Working From Home is Overrated,” acknowledged that studies show remote workers are more efficient and productive and “tend to take shorter breaks and fewer sick days” than their on-site peers.

Advocates have emphasized for years that allowing employees to work from home at least some of the time can save companies money—e.g., by reducing office size or eliminating the need to rent one and slashing the cost of utilities, janitorial services, supplies, equipment, and furniture. According to a 2014 NBC News story, a typical business would save, on average, $11,000 per year by allowing employees to work from home just half of the time.

As Roose pointed out, having trouble separating work life from home life is a downside for workers, but not for bosses looking to “squeeze extra efficiency out of [their] employees.” Indeed, employees who now have to work from home because of the pandemic are encountering what one described in a recent career advice column as, “expectations that because we’re at home all the time anyway, we should be online and available at almost all times” and “being asked to do extra work during the evenings…because everyone knows we’re all here anyway.”

Without “the normal excuse of having plans,” the advice seeker wrote, “I'm finding it hard to say no.” Overwhelmed and/or abusive managers are already taking advantage of this situation; more than one person has noticed that they are working more hours now than they were before the pandemic, often because they’re replacing their daily commute with another hour or three of work.

Extra hours aside, working from home is not for everyone. Some—extroverts, parents of young children, people who value a clear separation between work and home—will be delighted to return to their offices as soon as it is safe to do so. Others, having discovered that they can work just as well (or better) from home, will not easily give up their newfound freedom.

For many companies, allowing people to work remotely at least some of the time makes sense for employers and employees alike, with or without a global pandemic. And it will be difficult for management to continue insisting it’s not feasible when workers have been doing it for months. Forcing adults to spend eight or more hours a day on-site is as outdated and ludicrous as running an ad that equates weekend work with women’s liberation.
    [post_title] => What the pandemic is teaching us about working from home
    [post_excerpt] => Now that working from home has, in some cases, gone from a privilege reserved for upper management to a requirement of the job, more people are discovering its downsides.
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What the pandemic is teaching us about working from home

by Raina Lipsitz

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    [post_content] => Even with ridership down by 90 percent and fare collection suspended, public transportation is considered an essential service.

In recent weeks, the coronavirus pandemic has forced transit systems worldwide to suspend fare collection to keep workers and riders safe. These changes were implemented to protect the public in a crisis, but the idea that urban areas should provide at least some free public transit is not new—roughly 200 cities around the world already do. Most of those cities are in Europe, but even in the United States, cities as disparate as Baltimore, Boston, Denver, Miami, Oakland, Olympia, and Pittsburgh have made some public transit fare-free for some or all riders.

According to An Van hamme, a spokeswoman for the Brussels Intercommunal Transport Company (STIB), public transit ridership in Brussels, Belgium, has fallen to about 15 percent of its normal level. “Price setting…is the prerogative of the Brussels government,” Van hamme responded to questions in an email. “There haven’t been any changes in the price setting since the coronavirus crisis began.” STIB has, however, taken steps to protect staff and riders, including banning payment aboard vehicles and implementing a “protection zone” around drivers, prohibiting the use of cash in STIB ticket sales, and taking extra measures to clean every tram, bus, metro, and terminal.

Verena Löw and Elke Krokowski, two spokeswomen for the transport association that serves Germany’s Berlin/Brandenburg metropolitan region (VBB), said in an email that they estimate a very sharp decline in the use of public transit since the onset of the coronavirus crisis, “between 50% and 90% depending on the line and mode of transport.” Despite this drop in ridership, they wrote, “public transit is rightly considered to be systemically relevant” and the region’s transit operators are committed to keeping it “up and running for those who need it.”

The front parts of buses in Berlin and Brandenburg are now closed to passengers to protect workers, and direct contact between riders and workers is strongly discouraged. All doors open automatically. Passengers must still buy a ticket before boarding a train, but they can no longer purchase tickets directly from transit staff (they are encouraged to use vending machines or apps instead). According to Löw and Krokowski, public transit is running “as much and often as possible in order to be able to offer lots of space for the passengers who do use it.”

Compare these measures to the situation in New York City, where ridership has declined by 87 percent on subways and more than 70 percent on buses. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) announced that it would reduce subway service by at least 25 percent. At least 59 MTA employees have died, over 6,000 have fallen ill or self-quarantined, and nearly 1,900 of the agency’s 72,000 workers have tested positive for the coronavirus, including the agency’s chairman, Patrick J. Foye.

Foye recently told The New York Times that the MTA has provided workers with 460,000 masks, “thousands” of face shields, and 2.5 million pairs of gloves; that they disinfect train cars and buses every three days; and have eliminated cash transactions between booth clerks and riders. According to workers, the agency did not implement many aspects of its own pandemic response plan, which was adopted in 2012, until nearly a month after the virus hit New York.

Ridership has declined throughout the city, but it has dropped by significantly less in areas like the Bronx, where most residents are black and Latino. Many hold jobs in health care, social services, retail, or food service, and few have the option of working from home. As The New York Times recently reported, many “say they have no choice but to pile onto trains with strangers, potentially exposing themselves to the virus” and the MTA’s service reductions have led to crowded conditions, “making it impossible to maintain the social distancing that public health experts recommend.”

The coronavirus crisis is proving that governments can always find alternative ways of funding essential services when they must. I asked the VBB spokeswomen how the agency plans to compensate for the sharp decline in revenue and how it has been able to continue offering high-quality service at a time when so few riders are paying to use it.

“That’s indeed the challenge many sectors are facing right now,” Löw replied via email. “In general, the financing of public transit is quite complex in Germany. Local public transit is financed roughly 50:50 through passenger fares and state subsidies.” The German government, she added, “has set up funds for companies facing financial difficulties due to the current crisis,” and the VBB is working with transport operators and the federal states of Berlin and Brandenburg on various financing schemes as well.

In the U.S., Congress recently passed a $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus bill which included $25 billion in federal funding for public transportation systems. The money is intended to fund daily operations, make up for lost revenue, and sustain transit workers’ jobs. Similarly, in Canada, transit experts concerned that a steep decline in ridership could cost the country's transit authorities millions of dollars are calling on Ottawa for federal support.

Fare collection is itself a waste of time and money. It’s expensive to purchase and install state-of-the-art ticket machines. It’s expensive to pay and ensure the safety of workers tasked with collecting individual fares. Most frustrating of all to the average city dweller, it causes delays

Criminalizing fare evasion and enforcing laws against it contributes to growing inequality. In 2015, the New York City Police Department arrested more New Yorkers for fare evasion than for any other offense. Of the 29,000 people arrested for fare evasion, 94 percent were people of color. From October 2017 to June 2019, black and Hispanic people—who account for slightly more than half of New York City’s population—made up nearly 73 percent of those ticketed for fare evasion and more than 90 percent of those who were arrested, rather than issued a ticket.

Peter Harrison, who is challenging long-time incumbent Rep. Carolyn Maloney in New York’s 12th congressional district, has put forth the “Freedom of Movement in America Plan,” which would require the federal government to invest $1.7 trillion in public transportation over the next decade and provide $17 billion in federal funding to cover fare revenue and make transit fare-free throughout the country. He recently told City Limits that his plan’s name was the result of his desire to start a conversation about what “freedom” means.

“I don’t think you’re free if you can’t walk down the stairs to get on the subway to go to a doctor’s appointment,” he said. “I don’t think you’re free if you’re one flat tire or missed car payment from losing your car, triggering losing your job and losing your house, and that’s the reality for a lot of people in New York City and for a lot of people in America.”

If fare-free transit is the goal—for the safety of riders and workers alike, for a freer and fairer society, for more efficient mass transit—where do we find the funding? Harrison and other proponents of free transit believe the money is already there.

“We spent $6 trillion on 20 years of endless wars…and we have spent a trillion dollars annually on deficits for taxes,” he told Town & Village in February. “Republicans have shown that we have enough resources in the federal government to pay for the types of infrastructure investments that we want. Putting money into our sustainable transportation system will unleash an immense amount of economic growth.”

“During a pandemic,” Harrison told me in a recent phone interview, “the least we can do is make subways and buses free and reduce touchpoints to make [mass transit] safer for the people operating and using it.” But in order to achieve fare-free transit throughout the United States, he acknowledged, we need to have a “deeper conversation” about restructuring our entire society. Our freedom of movement depends on it.
    [post_title] => The global pandemic shows that cities can afford to make public transport free of charge
    [post_excerpt] => If fare-free transit is the goal—for the safety of riders and workers alike, for a freer and fairer society, for more efficient mass transit—where do we find the funding?
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The global pandemic shows that cities can afford to make public transport free of charge

by Raina Lipsitz

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    [post_content] => In northern British Columbia, a female chef draws on her native heritage and introduces diners to local, pre-European cuisine.

Generations ago, Indigenous communities living in harsh environments found comfort and sustenance in a basic bread recipe. 

For many remote First Nations communities throughout North America, flour wasn’t available, so bread was made with ground-up roots, bear fat and berries to sweeten, it was then cooked in an open fire or wrapped around a stick to bake.

This bread, called bannock, changed over the years incorporating ingredients like flour, fat, and sugar that were rationed to people after the government forcibly removed them from their land. It was then fried and became an important staple at powwows. Indigenous people took the scraps of oppression and made something delicious with it.

Powwows are a meeting, a chance for Indigenous people to get together and showcase dancing, singing, artisan creations and spend time in cultural appreciation and celebration. They have also served as an act of powerful resistance against continuous attempts to destroy, legislate and remove Indigenous culture. They are a demonstration of pride.

Sharon Bond, who is from the Nooaitch Indian Band in Merritt, British Columbia, has made her “bannock and butter” from bringing this ancient food to modern diners and the public can’t get enough.

“Bannock was a survival bread that really brought communities together through celebrations and gatherings. And it was one of the roots of keeping people alive,” she says.

Bond owns Kekuli Cafe, which has become the first Indigenous-owned restaurant franchise in Canada. With two locations and a third set to open in the near future, Bond’s long-held desire to run her own restaurant has come to fruition. But it doesn’t stop there; by offering franchising opportunities, Bond is helping to empower another generation of Indigenous entrepreneurs to taste success with bannock too.

“Indigenous youth can be supported from the time they are in high school. We need to bring entrepreneurs and business people into schools to teach and inspire youth, to bring out their ideas and to be creative and know that they can make their dream into a business. Mentors are needed,” she says.

She herself guides and empowers youth and aspiring business owners through an initiative called Futurpreneur and through monthly Indigenous Women Networking Sessions. She also sees mentorship as a cycle and continues to benefit from her own mentor, a successful restaurant owner, who she can talk to about any industry-specific questions she may have.

Her journey to becoming a restaurant owner was a long process, in part because she wanted the endeavor to be a success and took her time to design a winning product.

“It took a few years to do the business plan, we took our time to make sure that everything was going to be just right, the colors, the logo, the slogan. We just wanted to have a very strong business. It took time to get to that point and then when we finally opened our doors people thought we were a franchise which was pretty cool. So, I said, Well, we're not, but we will be now!”

One of the decisions she grappled with was the name for the cafe, she eventually found the word “Kekuli” in a book by James Teit, a Scottish anthropologist who wrote extensively about the people of the Interior Salish First Nations.

It’s the name for a winter dwelling, found across the Okanagan region, a house built into the ground to provide shelter and warmth. Pronounced ke-koo-lee, it seemed like the perfect moniker for the type of space she wanted to create, she registered the business name the very same day.

Even though the process of launching the business was a slow burn, Bond has been interested in cooking since she was a child, when she was making a mess in her mom’s kitchen and watching her bake cinnamon buns and bread. She remembers enjoying the smell of spices and recently found an old recipe book with a missing cover, the pages of which were decorated with her childish doodles and colorings.

One of her mom’s regular recipes was chili, which also features on Kekuli Cafe’s menu, although Bond says its quite a different recipe. A staple offered at powwows; chili is traditionally served atop a piece of bannock to catch all of the meaty juices.

Bread forms a part of almost every human culinary culture across the globe and Bond has often been told that her bannock reminds customers of other fry bread that they remember from their childhood, whether that was in China, Scotland or anywhere else across the world.

Different Indigenous communities across North America make their bannock to their own unique recipes, in fact, at Kekuli they have their own ancient and secret recipe.

Bannock fans will find that the familiar frybread taste replicated perfectly at Kekuli Cafe with regulars often praising the softness of the bannock. But you can also find a number of innovative menu items like dessert topped bannocks, BLTs and bannock-wich sandwiches.

“Time has evolved so now we've got flour and oil and cast iron pans and fryers. It’s bannock with a twist, you know a little bit more contemporary bannock,” she says.

That contemporary bannock topped with sweet treats remains very popular but the traditional bannock is favored by purists as are some of the sweet yet naturally Canadian flavors from the land like Saskatoon Berry, Maple Glaze, and Maple Walnut.

The restaurant’s slogan “Don’t Panic... We Have Bannock!” came about from one of the first customers who ran up to the counter worried that they may have sold out. Sharon reassured them by stating the now-famous line and they all broke into laughter.

Bond is an incredibly warm person who makes people feel at ease, no doubt due to her genuine care and concern for how others are feeling. One of the philosophies that Kekuli Cafe is built upon is that all her customers should feel acknowledged when they arrive.

“I wanted to open a restaurant for 20 years and I always thought ‘Oh I'm going to do this with my restaurant,’ I'm going to make sure everyone smiles and is acknowledged, you're not just someone who comes in and orders and sits down and that's it. You know, I engage with all my customers and I really felt that there wasn't enough compassion or empathy, it's important to make someone's day,” she says.

Bond is also humble and credits her success to the whole team. In fact, she was recently awarded the Indigenous Woman-Business Award of Excellence from The National Aboriginal Capital Corporation but was almost too shy to tell me. She admitted that she sometimes finds it difficult to enjoy her success without feeling like she’s bragging.

Where she excels, however, is in empowering other women to proudly and confidently promote themselves. A culture she is trying to develop in her local community through her Indigenous Women Networking Sessions. 

“I can see it becoming a very important networking group. I've been to other networking groups for women and sometimes I just feel out of place,  it doesn't seem to be me, I'm not a high heel wearing type person and everyone's all decked right out and I am more of a Doc Martens person!” she says.

Through mentorship, encouragement, and plenty of bannock, Bond is building a culture of shared success.
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In Canada, a female Indigenous chef popularizes local, pre-European cuisine

by Fiona Tapp

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Despite their liberal manifestos, the Labour Party and the Democrats continue to choose men as their leaders


It wasn’t meant to be like this. This time it would be different; Britain’s Labour party was going to elect its new leader, and this time it would be a woman. They didn’t really seem to have a choice: Labour turns 120 this year, but not once had a woman managed to poll higher than a man in a leadership contest.


On top of that, the original field of candidates looked promising. There were four women— and one solitary man. Two women dropped out early but that still left twice as many women as men in the running.


In the end, none of that mattered. The results of the Labour Party leadership election will be announced next week and, unless there is a major upset, Keir Starmer, the lone male candidate, will be elected leader by a landslide.


It wasn’t meant to be like this. The Democratic candidate was going to be Kamala Harris — or was it going to be Elizabeth Warren? No, it was going to be Bernie Sanders. One thing was certain: it was not going to be Joe Biden.


Biden was polling high but his campaign was poor and he was nowhere to be seen; he was more of the same when the consensus seemed to be that the Democrats needed anything but that. Still, he went on and slowly but surely, until everyone but Bernie dropped out. Now Biden is almost certainly going to be the candidate for president who will face off against incumbent Donald Trump in November.


It wasn’t meant to be like this. Both contests had already been going on for weeks — months! — and were starting to near fever pitch, but the pandemic hit. We know for certain that the Labour party’s leadership race will end with a whimper as everyone remains focused on the coronavirus.


The Democratic convention, meanwhile, feels like it belongs to a distant future: who even knows what our world will look like in July? But this doesn’t mean either race should go unrecorded; there are lessons that will need to be learnt, once we have the time (and mental space) to do so.


Let’s look at what happened in Britain, where the Labour party has now been headed by Jeremy Corbyn for four and a half tumultuous years. He seemed to emerge from nowhere in 2015; with politics well to the left of the party’s mainstream, the 70-year-old lawmaker had for decades been a backbencher with obscure pet issues.


With Corbyn as its leader, the Labour party was in near constant revolt. Factional infighting reached its peak in the summer of 2016, when an attempt to oust him failed.


While his fellow MPs had a famously acrimonious relationship with Corbyn, he saw his popularity with the Labour membership spike and grow exponentially in the first few years. Sadly for him, it didn’t translate into success in the polls; sadly for then-Prime Minister Theresa May, Corbyn’s apparent weakness pushed her to call an election in 2017, which turned into one of the worst campaigns in memory, and resulted in Labour making some unexpected gains.


Buoyed, the left wing of the Labour party claimed victory over its centrist counterparts — whose policies, they insisted, had lost the party the 2010 and 2015 elections — but the triumphalism was relatively short-lived.


After May came Boris, and when Johnson called an election last year, it ended with Labour’s worst electoral results since 1935. The shock came and went, and then came the gloating, this time from the moderates. After warning for four years that the hard left would bring disaster, they felt vindicated.


Corbyn’s faction, on the other hand, claimed that the election had been solely focussed on Brexit, and that the loss could be attributed to the Conservatives’ straightforward Leave message, as opposed to their own muddled position of a second referendum.


Then the leadership contest started, with Rebecca Long-Bailey, Lisa Nandy and Keir Starmer emerged as the three main candidates.


Most people believed that Long-Bailey would win; she always was a close ally of Jeremy Corbyn’s and the membership presumably still loved Corbyn, so it should have been a done deal.


[caption id="attachment_1688" align="alignnone" width="799"] Rebecca Long-Bailey at a Manchester Labour Party event on November 7. 2019.[/caption]


It wasn’t. Stuck in the former leader’s shadow, Long-Bailey struggled to make a case for herself. Yes, she was of the left, no, she wasn’t “continuity Corbyn: yes, she was asked to rate his leadership on television and gave him “10/10”; no, she couldn’t really explain what policies of hers would be a departure from the past few years.


She’s also, well, a bit middle of the road. Brought up in Manchester, she studied politics and sociology at university, and eventually became a solicitor in 2007. She joined the Labour party in 2010, was elected to a safe seat in 2015, and joined the frontbench after Corbyn’s victory, though never quite made waves.


As the party’s spokesperson for business, she pushed on establishing a Green New Deal, but the policy got a bit lost in the discourse; in fact, everything she did in those five years always failed to really land. That she was seen as the given pro-Corbyn candidate was telling.


Many observers have pointed to the similarities between Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, both socialists roughly the same age who tend to have acrimonious relationships with their fellow legislators. But while Sanders has loyalists like 30 year-0ld Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez poised to pick up his torch, Corbyn has left no such legacy. Under Corbynism, no successor was allowed to grow and bloom—and here we are.


Lisa Nandy had the opposite problem. Unlike Long-Bailey, she is not stuck with the Corbynite label. Nandy is a woman of no faction.


[caption id="attachment_1689" align="alignnone" width="799"] Lisa Nandy on September 23, 2018.[/caption]


The daughter of Indian Marxist academic Dipak Nandy and granddaughter of Liberal Party MP then peer Frank Byers, she has been in Parliament since 2010 — a term longer than her two opponents. Despite her pedigree, she has always been a bit of an outsider; often hovering near the frontbench but never fully a frontline politician.


There is a drum she has been banging, often alone, and it is: English towns that used to be safe Labour strongholds are leaving us in droves because we have stopped listening to them, and the party must reconnect with its northern working class base if it wants to survive.


She is absolutely right, of course, and did gain traction when she got to claim that she had been warning that the 2019 election results would be inevitable for a long time. When the party lost seats like Bolsover — held by socialist stalwart Dennis Skinner since 1970 — and Sedgefield, which was home for decades to a certain Tony Blair, people finally started to listen.


 Still, identifying a problem and finding a solution are two different things, and she never quite convinced her peers that she had succeeded with the latter.


Then there is our last candidate, who is simultaneously the most and least exciting figure in the race. On the one hand, he used to be the Director of Public Prosecutions and head of the Crown Prosecution Service, for which he was knighted, and is rumoured to be the man Helen Fielding based dreamy Mark Darcy in her 1996 novel Bridget Jones's Diary (later made into a hit film with Colin Firth in the role of Mark Darcy).


On the other, he is boring. Keir Starmer is not an exciting politician; he is a former barrister who measures his words, speaks with the cadence of an expert, and has always managed to keep out of his party’s factional warfare. His policy platform is a bit Corbynite but not entirely so; he appealed to the moderates in Labour but without appearing like one of them either.


In fact, he is currently all things to all people; he really could not be possibly accused of leaning into populism, and he is about to become the Labour party leader. Perhaps his very own brand of establishment dullness will be needed in five years’ time, when Britain’s voters have gone through a full term of Boris Johnson. Or perhaps desperate times call for desperate measures, and he simply is not up to the gargantuan task ahead of him.


In short: Labour is playing it safe. It could have taken a gamble by electing one of two 40-year-old women occupying northern seats, but is going instead with a 57-year-old man based down the road from the current leader’s inner London constituency. Starmer and Biden may be different, but the circumstances of their rise feel eerily similar.




Header image courtesy of Chris Boland.


    [post_title] => In the UK and the USA, the political left has rejected female leadership in 2020
    [post_excerpt] => In their search for a leader who can beat the incumbent, both Labour in the UK and the Democrats in the USA chose white men who represent a status quo ante that already seems like ancient history.
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In the UK and the USA, the political left has rejected female leadership in 2020

by Marie Le Conte

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    [post_date] => 2020-03-27 03:07:35
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    [post_content] => What has been driving the harmful behaviors exhibited by some Christians in reaction to the coronavirus pandemic?

The World Health Organization worries, in a February 2 report about the spread of the COVID-19 virus, that an “infodemic,” i.e., “an over-abundance of information—some accurate, and some not,” is making the public feel that it’s difficult to find trustworthy sources and reliable guidance. The authors of the report seem to assume that most people want objectively reliable information. Unfortunately, far too many are looking not for objectively reliable information, but rather for “guidance” that corresponds with their political loyalties and ideological preconceptions.

In the United States, there are fundamentalist Christians who see institutions like the WHO and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as part of a “godless liberal” plot. Tony Spell, the Apostolic Pastor of Tabernacle Life Church in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, said: “The virus, we believe, is politically motivated.” He made this statement during a church service reportedly attended by 350 people on the evening of Tuesday, March 17, in defiance of a ban on gatherings of more than 50 people issued by Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards.

Governor Edwards is a Democrat.

While CBS News reported that police told Spell the National Guard would break up any future gatherings at his church, a FOX News report quotes Louisiana National Guard Colonel Ed Bush denying that any such order has been issued. In any case, Life Tabernacle Church doubled down, bragging that it planned to bring 27 buses’ worth of area children to church on Sunday, March 22;  and, according to a public Facebook post by Tony Spell’s father Timothy, that they planned to host a blood drive on the same day. And the church followed through.

In a period of surging right-wing authoritarianism, defenders of democracy must not ignore the dangers posed by those who embrace “alternative facts.” Anti-intellectualism and pseudo-intellectualism are hallmarks of authoritarianism, and in the United States in particular, opposition to much modern science has come to define the mostly white, mostly Christian Republican Party. The problem, however, is global.

Independent Apostolic Christians like Spell are extremists even among extremists, but similar radical charismatic Christians are attaining ever more power and influence in a number of countries, including Uganda and Brazil, where these far-right Protestants represent strong-man President Jair Bolsonaro’s base. Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin’s Russia has emerged as the global standard bearer for international efforts to oppose women’s and LGBTQ Rights. Russia, too, is one of the countries in which authoritarian Christians have undermined efforts to stem the tide of the coronavirus pandemic.

Over the past few weeks, the coronavirus threat has dominated the news cycle, and quite a few stories about the reactions of churches—both responsible and irresponsible—have appeared. In the Orthodox Christian World, the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople—traditionally considered “first among equals” among the world’s Eastern Orthodox Churches—initially sent mixed messages; now, however, in a tacit rebuke to Russian and Greek Orthodox Christians’ insistence that “coronavirus cannot be transmitted by communion,” it has announced the cancellation of all services for laity within its jurisdiction. Here geopolitical tensions are in play, as the Putinist Russian Orthodox Church has increasingly defied the more moderate Constantinople in recent years.

Meanwhile, after calling the virus, or at least Democrats’ responses to it, a “hoax,” President Trump seemed to feel compelled to address COVID-19 in a more serious (if still dubious) manner, and, for a moment his white evangelical supporters seemed to be shifting with him, at least in some cases. Jerry Falwell, Jr., who at first declared that he would not shut down Liberty University, changed his mind. Pastor Robert Jeffress, leader of the influential megachurch First Baptist Dallas, has canceled physical church services, even going so far as to state that “every pastor and every church ought to follow the guidance to not assemble during this crisis.” But then President Trump oafishly declared that he wanted America’s economy reopened by Easter (April 12 this year for Protestants and Catholics), and Falwell called for Liberty students to return to campus after all, in sharp contrast to most universities essentially shutting down in order to slow the spread of the virus. Liberty University’s residential enrollment is around 13,500 students.

What has been driving the harmful behaviors exhibited by some Christians in reaction to the coronavirus pandemic? I turned to several experts on aspects of the crisis for their assessments of Christian defiance of public health measures.

Sarah Kendzior, an expert in authoritarianism, notes in fairness that “there’s a rational component” to the fear of government malfeasance and overreach, which underlays the paranoia of American far-right actors. She sees “a combination of defiance and obedience” in right-wing Christians’ reactions to the pandemic, and is spot-on in describing Trump’s style of demagoguery as “much more similar to a televangelist than to any previous president.” Kendzior’s observation goes some way toward illustrating why white evangelicals tend to be Trump supporters.

Obedience to authority is certainly emphasized as a virtue among authoritarians, and the Christian Right is no different in this regard. However, the authority in question must conform to their white supremacist patriarchal social hierarchy in order for them to consider it legitimate. Hence the “defiance of what they think of as evil liberal officials telling them what they can’t do,” as seen, for example, in former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore calling the inclusion of restrictions on church services in public health responses to the pandemic “tyranny.” When asked about the parallels between right-wing American Christians and the Russian Orthodox Church with respect to coronavirus, Kendzior found them unsurprising.

André Gagné, a former charismatic pastor and current Associate Professor of Theological Studies at Concordia University in Montreal, offered some insights into why charismatic believers are so vocal in defying the imposition of public health measures to contain the spread of coronavirus. He maintains that we must understand charismatic Christians’ defiance in terms of their theology of “spiritual warfare” and the “victorious eschatology” espoused by some charistmatics, i.e., “the idea that the church will be victorious before the second coming of Christ.”

According to Gagné, “Some neo-charismatics believe that ‘end-time’ Christians will be able to heal people from plagues, diseases, or any other physical conditions, and even take dominion over entire hospitals, healing every patient in them by laying hands on the building.” Such theology is, of course, not benign. “When people die, these ministers will find a way to rationalize the consequences, saying that the Church is also called to go through a time of tribulation and persecution, and that God is somehow sifting his Church for the Second Coming of Christ.”

Also in play is Christian nationalism, a phenomenon that sociologists Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry have found to be predictive of Trump support. Whitehead was kind enough to speak with me about the issue and about his forthcoming research with Perry and Joseph O. Baker, which shows how anti-science views in the United States are intimately intertwined with Christian nationalism. Noting that “Christian nationalism is a threat to a pluralistic democratic society,” an issue I have also written about for both The Conversationalist and Religion Dispatches, Whitehead observes that Christian nationalists “legitimate their desires for the country in the will of the Christian God. This severely inhibits any chance or even desire for compromise.”

But how is this related to the kind of science denial we find in right-wing Christian responses to the coronavirus pandemic? Whitehead summarizes some of the key findings from his forthcoming paper with Perry and Baker as follows:

We find consistent evidence that Christian nationalism—a desire to see a particularistic and exclusive version of Christian symbols, values, and policies privileged and enshrined in US civil society—is a strong predictor about Americans’ attitudes toward science. In fact, the effect of political conservatism on skepticism about the moral authority of science is mediated through Christian nationalism, meaning that political conservatives are more likely to be skeptical of science because they are more likely to be Christian nationalists.

The conclusion of the new paper puts it more simply: “Christian nationalism is many things, but above all it is an effort to (re)assert the dominant moral and cultural authority of a white, native-born, straight, masculine, and Christian social order. Likewise, disputes about ‘science and religion’ are primarily conflicts over moral and cultural order.”

We can only hope that the empirical demonstration of such connections will prove useful in the struggle for a more equitable democratic future for reasonable believers and non-believers alike. Charismatic and evangelical Christians represent, after all, varieties of Christian fundamentalism, and fundamentalism is a constant source of disinformation. Indeed, fundamentalism is incompatible with democracy, yet for the most part the American press remains deferential to authoritarian Christians. That needs to change if we have any hope of stemming the influence of the radical right-wing Christians Trump has surrounded himself with. As has become clear, they threaten not only our human rights, but also our public health.
    [post_title] => Authoritarian Christians are deliberately undermining the public health response to coronavirus
    [post_excerpt] => In a period of surging right-wing authoritarianism, defenders of democracy must not ignore the dangers posed by those who embrace “alternative facts.”
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Authoritarian Christians are deliberately undermining the public health response to coronavirus

by Chrissy Stroop

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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.

 

 

 
    [post_title] => Nose to tail with a lady butcher
    [post_excerpt] => For those who avoid meat because they don't wish to participate in cruel factory farming methods, New Zealand butcher Hannah Miller offers a different approach.
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Nose to tail with a lady butcher

by Fiona Tapp

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    [post_date_gmt] => 2020-03-05 20:16:47
    [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
    [post_excerpt] => 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.  
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The Prodigal Techbro

by Maria Farrell

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    [post_date] => 2020-02-27 14:38:21
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    [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.

 
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    [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.
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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.
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Enya: icon of radical softness

by Rebecca Long

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