Community

Stories about building, finding, and becoming an active member of your community.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 
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The personal (even on Prozac) is political: Elizabeth Wurtzel’s literary legacy

by Cara Marsh Sheffler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 
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Lessons in resistance at a former yoga ashram

by Lisa Goldman

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(CC BY 2.0)

The claim that social media is a neutral platform for the amplification of free speech does not hold up to scrutiny. 

Does it matter that Mark Zuckerberg dines with far-right politicians and activists, or that he genuinely seems to believe their websites are trustworthy fact-checkers? Does it matter that Jack Dorsey personally overrules Twitter bans on white supremacists but allows Donald Trump to ignore the acceptable use rules that the rest of us must obey?

Yes and no. Yes, it matters because the political preferences and blind spots of social media C.E.O.s influence their businesses. And no, because leaders’ opinions matter less than how right-favoring ideas, incentives and ways of organizing are baked into social media’s business models in ways those executives don’t even seem fully aware of.

We know that Facebook’s Washington D.C. lobby-shop and electoral integrity work is dominated by Republican party operatives and members, and we know Twitter prefers to give Nazi sympathizers a blue check mark rather than the boot. Google funds climate change deniers and YouTube is a right-wing radicalization engine. There is no shortage of evidence that America’s West Coast tech unicorns qualify as liberal only on a narrow range of identity issues. They’ll stand up for LGBTQ rights, but they’ll come down hard on any union activism among their own employees.

Less obvious is the fact that social media itself is structurally right-wing. Not because its CEOs are tech-bro libertarians or even because of their suspiciously agile pivot to Trump, but because social media affords advantages to the ideas, feelings and organizing principles of the hard-right. Oh, and also because of the money.

Structure

First, some heavy lifting. Social media as we currently organize it is trivially easy to weaponize in ways that favour autocracy and damage democracy. Political scientist Henry Farrell* and information security expert Bruce Schneier recently explained why democracies are so easily harmed by disinformation attacks while autocracies are actually strengthened by them. It’s because democracies and autocracies rely on people having two different kinds of shared knowledge; and social media disinformation disrupts one and favours the other.

In an autocracy, you know who’s in charge and what they want, but you’re not sure who the different political movers in society are, how much power they have and who you could form a coalition with. Certainly, political conflict occurs in societies that are dominated by the power vertical, but mostly off-stage or in ways only insiders can interpret. That’s why we still use the term ‘Kremlinology’ to describe the study of subtle public signs of largely secret power struggles. In an autocracy, shared knowledge about other people’s political views is low. This makes it risky and difficult to organize an opposition. In 2010, democracy activists in Tunisia had very little idea how many other people felt the same and were prepared to rise up against the regime until Mohamed Bouazizi, that fateful vegetable seller, set himself on fire and triggered the entire Arab Spring. Social media did help those protests to go viral — though its role has been exaggerated — but autocratic rulers learned quickly how to turn social media against citizens.

The main tactic autocrats use is "flooding," sending huge numbers of often contradictory political messages via automated social media accounts to drown out discourse and make it impossible to figure out who’s friend, who’s foe, or who’s even a human. The Chinese government strategically uses social media flooding both as a censorship tool — "who knows what’s really true?" —  and to distract and divide people, weakening them as a political force. Autocracies are strengthened by divisions that prevent people coming together as a political force. The tactics autocrats use at home can quickly become part of their strategy abroad. Russia is known to have used flooding to undermine shared belief in the validity of electoral politics in Ukraine and also in the U.S., U.K., France, and Germany. Social media makes flooding cheap and successful because increasing the quantity of noise degrades the quality of discourse. It might even make it impossible to sustain. When a tactic becomes a strategy, things can change, sometimes very quickly.

An aside: I recently heard a well-connected U.K. conservative saying something I’ve heard from at least a dozen people in powerful positions: "Social media doesn’t do anything new. It just lets people express themselves, for good and for ill." Wrong. Different technologies — embedded in different business models — have different affordances. They encourage certain kinds of behavior, ways to make money and means to concentrate power. Those who benefit from these affordances seem to be almost unaware of the advantages thus bestowed, as though they’re used to playing the game of life on "easy." The same person later regretfully confided that yes, it was dreadful their own party was going to fight an election campaign that would pit parliament against "the people," but no, there was nothing to be done about it. Nothing at all.

Farrell and Schneier’s article explains that democracy is so vulnerable because flooding destroys precisely the kind of information democracy depends on. In a stable democracy we disagree about who should be in charge, but we share — and depend on — common knowledge about who the political actors are, how much support they have and how we can form coalitions. That shared knowledge allows us to have a functioning political opposition. We also share the knowledge that our electoral systems are basically fair, that outcomes approximate what enough people really feel, and that if we lose this year’s election we still have a good chance of winning the next one. If that knowledge goes away, then the institutions that depend on it can, too.

All very interesting, you might say, but this shows that social media helps autocrats, and autocracy can be of the left, too, at least in its self-justifying propaganda. What is peculiar to how social media helps right-wing autocracy?

Social media is structurally disposed to weaken our real-life horizontal ties with one other, to poison our ability even to imagine a social contract, to disrupt our drive to discover shared interests and shape them into collective political action. Social media is great for democracy only if you think democracy is a an exercise in ticking all the boxes for crowning a strongman. I say social media is inherently right-wing because it is structurally predisposed to making social democracy impossible.

Social democracy depends on the ability to form rolling coalitions of different groups around broadly shared goals. If I’m the middle-class parent of a disabled child, I can make common cause with an unemployed miner hundreds of miles away. We both want the state to be a social safety net for when life throws us a curveball. We don’t want all the same things, but we agree on enough to vote for or even belong to the same political party. And it’s not purely transactional. In our kinder moments, we feel solidarity, even though we are in different places and belong to different social classes. But what happens if I start seeing that ex-miner as an enemy, and vice versa? If our tribal identities have become so narrow and hardened that we no longer feel we’re on the same side? Hell, that we no longer even live the same world? If the broad-based coalitions that built social democracy can no longer recognize each other as allies, then it’s devil take the hindmost in a world of an unchecked and punitive state. Goodbye fraternity, hello Koch brothers.

Social media is the ideal medium and amplifier for the actively divisive and zero-sum politics of the hard, populist right. It disadvantages any politics based on compromise, on solidarity, on a forgivingly broad concept of who ‘the people’ are. Social media’s methods structurally favour Duterte, Trump, Orban et al the way tennis disinterestedly favours athletes with long arms.

Methods

Facebook and Google act as advertising consolidators, collecting vast amounts of personal data on users and renting that data and access to their users to advertisers. So the more you use their services, the more data they can gather and ads they can sell. This is called adtech, and it is social media’s chosen business model.  The official version regarding the unique selling point (USP) of adtech is that social media firms can target ads to us more closely because they know so much about us. The private, and more accurate, USP to advertisers is that they have finely segmented the markets we inhabit in order to identify the tiniest possible groups for advertisers to target. The key to adtech is market segmentation— i.e., breaking people down into ever smaller groups to sell things to. We sell things to people by convincing them of the importance and uniqueness of their group. What sells is making people feel they are different, special and even superior. They deserve things most others don’t. In society at large we call this "fomenting division." Social media, the pill we swallow to ingest adtech, is based on creating and exploiting social division. So too, it turns out, is the right-wing project whose goal and working methods are to create in-groups and out-groups for an ever-smaller number of people who count as ‘people’. Social media’s business model is to make us feel more divided than ever, and monetize the finest of distinctions we can be made to feel.

Feelings

And what keeps us clicking? Strong emotions like fear, anger and even hate. By now, most of us know that YouTube and others drive "engagement" by presenting the most emotive content, with most of us barely three clicks away from politically extremist content.

Social media divides us ever more finely, all the better to market our profiles to its real customers, the advertisers, and then it makes us internalize distinction and divisions by force-feeding us hateful clickbait.

Xenophobia and conspiratorial distrust create clicks. These are the signature emotions of the far right. It's anger with no purpose except to be monetized. Clickability almost always leads to the dark side. The political radicalization that helps make social media so wildly profitable is almost exclusively to the right. As well as fomenting division and making political solidarity harder to evoke, the dark emotional palette social media spatters everywhere has a deeper effect on what we think politics is actually for.

Firehosing is a technique used by disinformation merchants to pump out a stream of often contradictory lies. No one has the time, energy or resources to dispute each lie, and airing out lies to debunk them can make even more people believe them. This method is used by anti-vaxxers, far-right media sites and state-sponsored disinformation campaigns. Firehosing floods what used to be a conversation with wacky grimdark lies that cumulatively insist that nothing really works, everyone is on the make and no organization or authority can be trusted. It implies that nothing we do to collectively improve the state of the world can work, because someone, somewhere is gaming the system and that someone is probably brown or female or educated.

Firehosing helps explain why people who think the government should slash taxes and drop environmental regulations also think it should kidnap immigrants’ children and micro-manage women’s uteruses. The world of the firehose is one in which reality is not true and almost everyone is bad. In this world, the only useful way to use state power is to punish, to coerce, and to hurt. It reinforces a world where states can do no positive good because it will be taken advantage of — someone, somewhere is getting stuff for free that you have to pay for. If the only effective state power is violence, the only role of politics is to decide who to target. This isn’t an intentional effect of the medium, but it is a real world consequence of the quality and sheer volume of the messages it transmits. Social media is rightwing because its amplified nihilism makes far-right misanthropy sound like a fundamental truth and ushers its dream into being; a world where the state exists only to punish outsiders and throttle the poor, not to rebalance wild excesses of inequality.

Organizing

But if social media companies are making money from advertisers, and advertisers – most of them aggregators – are making money from the companies whose ads they place, who is making money from the emotive content that keeps people clicking? Who is paying to feed the beast? All those videos, images and stories that trigger and sustain the outrage cycle aren’t going to just make themselves.

New York Times columnist Charlie Warzel asked whether the Democrats can compete with Trump’s Twitter feed and concluded that “one of the few ways to power right now is to never, ever stop making content."

A Photoshopped image of a dog getting the Medal of Honor. Sharpiegate. A Fourth of July military parade. They’re all attention spectacles.

To "win" social media you must spew out content optimized for virality. Individuals can only do so much. Volunteer organizations don’t have the time and are too busy firefighting (and, let’s be honest, infighting). The organizations manning the firehose are top-heavy political outfits with strong message control – typically the preserve of the hierarchical right — and astro-turf fronts pretending to be grassroots organizations. Yes, there is an ecosystem of ad aggregators and content amplifiers. But the optimal organizational form to create firehose content at scale isn’t the pyramid of large and unwieldy membership organizations so beloved of the left, but a thorn — rigid, narrow and sharpened to a point — all the better to sink deep into the flesh of the body politic.

Social media lets small, well-funded organizations convert grey and dark money into attention. It makes big money’s ideas look like they’re backed by the masses. People on the left almost never have hundreds of millions of dollars sitting around waiting for a vast, anonymizing influence engine to convert money into power. People on the right do. Fake organizations are more effective than real ones. Sock puppets, amplification accounts and automatic reply-guys work 24/7, never disagree with the leader, get disillusioned or split into factions. Social media makes fake organizations look real, and real ones look like dinosaurs. Only on the right is there a sufficient concentration of capital with the means and motivation to exploit this.

Ideas

None of this can be unknown to those running the big social media companies. Their job is to understand what works on their websites in ways we outsiders can only guess at. Science writer James Gleick recently observed that “people on the left and people on the right BOTH understand that Facebook’s policy of allowing lies benefits the right.” Monetizing lies drives profit. How can anyone possibly defend that?

In the US, free speech absolutism is a feature of the right. Liberals argue for laws banning hate speech and incitement, while conservatives and the far right insist freedom of expression is enshrined without condition in the U.S. constitution, even if that means people are hurt or sometimes die. This year, as the clamour has grown against Facebook’s damage to democracies around the world, the company has doubled down on its insistence that advertising is protected speech. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, has said: “We believe that ads are a big part of [freedom of expression]."

Social media executives’ insistence that their companies are just neutral bystanders but that the most important value of all is free speech shows how closely aligned their interests now are to the right. Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t invite Tucker Carlson home to try and understand the alien mindset of America’s hard right, but because they share a common financial interest in protecting the peculiar political ecosystem of which Facebook is the apex predator.

Social media companies share ideas with the right not because they are awkward fellow travellers but because they share fundamental interests. But just as my conservative acquaintance couldn’t admit, even to themselves, that social media’s affordances privilege the ideas and organizations from which they personally and politically benefit, so social media executives seem to believe their pursuit of self-interest is simply the acting out of self-evident philosophical imperatives like the absolute value of freedom of speech.

But guess what? It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter whether Mark Zuckerberg holds his nose when he dines with the far right, if Jack Dorsey torments himself about open Nazis he keeps inviting back in, or if Susan Woijicki truly believes YouTube is a force for good. It is wholly irrelevant whether these individuals believe they are speaking in good faith or how deep any self-deception may go. Their interests are fully those of their companies, and their companies exist to make money. Their companies are once-in-a-century concentrations of capital whose only imperative is survival and growth. Capital doesn’t care if the boss still thinks he’s one of the good guys, if, in his heart of hearts, he’s truly not a racist but just happens to run a company that monetizes racism. Capital doesn’t care if he can’t sleep at night. Capital calls to capital everywhere.

Social media empires are big business and history shows us that big business doesn’t have a problem with the far right. They want many of the same things; to act unfettered, to weaken horizontal social ties, to re-shape the world in their own twisted image. Social media driven by adtech will only, always serve capital, however many beanbags they have in the office.

* Henry Farrell is the writer's brother.


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Social media’s right wing bias is baked into its business model

by Maria Farrell

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    [post_content] => We can't seem to quit social media, even though we know it's not good for us. Is there a way to take back control of the user experience? 

The good news is that we now know, thanks to investigative journalism, that bad faith actors are using social media to manipulate our emotions and, by extension, our political domain. The bad news is that despite rising awareness, nothing has changed. Facebook is still manipulating its algorithms so that we all live in our own information bubbles. Twitter is still full of fake accounts, often called bots, that dupe even sophisticated users —  like prominent journalists or well-known politicians — into sharing information that simply is not true. 

As Robert Mueller said while testifying to Congress last month, social media manipulators working for Russian intelligence continue to interfere in U.S. politics “right now.”

An addiction to social media goes well beyond craving the dopamine hit supplied by seeing one’s Tweet shared widely, or one’s Facebook post liked many times. These days, journalists need Twitter to follow the news and promote their own work, while Facebook has become an all-but essential tool for staying abreast of cultural events and keeping in touch with friends and family. But while we’re “liking” photos of our friends’ new babies and sharing important investigative journalism via Twitter, we are also inadvertently exposing ourselves to people whose job it is to manipulate our thoughts and emotions. And they are experts.

Now scholars and journalists are warning that YouTube has become a terribly dangerous radicalizing tool. Zeynep Tufekci, an expert in the sociology of technology, warned about YouTube last year in a column for The New York Times. Almost by accident, she writes, she discovered that the video platform was algorithmically programmed to direct users toward opinions more radical than the ones they seemed to hold. If a user searched for a Bernie Sanders video, for example, YouTube might recommend an Atifa video. On the other hand, search for a video by a mainstream conservative commentator and next thing you know the algorithm is suggesting videos by white nationalists. YouTube, concluded Tufekci, "[might be] one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century."

One year later, The New York Times published an investigative story that shows how bad faith actors manipulated YouTube videos in order to radicalize Brazilian society by upending long-held social norms. Teachers quoted in the article say, for example, that their students disrupted classes to quote conspiracy theories they had seen on YouTube videos. Meanwhile Bolsanoro staffers were uploading videos that propagated conspiracy theories about teachers manipulating their students to support communism. The result: voters chose Jair Bolsanor, the far right newly elected president of Brazil. Danah Boyd, the founder of Data & Society, told The New York Times that the YouTube-influenced results of Brazil’s elections are “a worrying indication of the platform’s growing impact on democracies worldwide.”

Similarly, Britain saw its democracy undermined in 2016 when bad actors who funded and led the Brexit campaign used Facebook to manipulate British public opinion. The result: a slight majority of Britons voted in favor of leaving the European Union.  

Read more about Brexit: How less-than-great men brought Britain to its worst hour

But given that few Britons had expressed any interest in the EU prior to the referendum, how did this result come about? We now know, as The Guardian’s Carole Cadwalladr reported in a bombshell investigative piece, that British public opinion had been manipulated by misinformation published on Facebook accounts set up by a now-notorious (but then unknown) company called Cambridge Analytica. The same company later acknowledged the role it had played in manipulating public opinion in the United States prior to the 2016 presidential election. 

Craig Silverman, the Canadian BuzzFeed journalist who coined the term “fake news” in 2015, warned the CBC that Canadians are not immune from the disease of social media manipulation, either. Facebook, he told the CBC, is publishing anti-Trudeau propaganda as well as attacks on members of Trudeau’s government who are people of color. Silverman added that “...people acting outside of Canada publishing, in some cases, completely false or unsupported stories that are having an effect on what Canadians think about the current government and politics in Canada in general.”

How are we to remain connected and informed and still deal with the crisis of disinformation? 

Taylor Owen, a prominent digital media scholar who holds the Beaverbrook Chair in Media, Ethics and Communications at McGill University, suggests that some self-awareness would help. We must stop and think carefully before responding to news and opinion that makes us feel an emotion, whether it be satisfaction or anger. “When people are supplied with a wide variety of information that confirms their biases,” he says, they are less willing to accept opinions that contradict them. 

But journalists also have an important role to play, he says in this interview. According to Owen's newly published research, people who consume a great deal of news are not better informed. The reason: they tend to consume and retain information that confirms their biases. The media, suggests Owen, would be doing a public service by reporting deeply on issues for which there is bipartisan agreement. In Canada, interestingly, one of those issues is the environment. 
    [post_title] => How can we stop social media from manipulating our emotions?
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How can we stop social media from manipulating our emotions?

by Lisa Goldman

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    [post_content] => More people are currently fleeing war and extreme poverty than at any time in history, but those who try to help often face criminal charges

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reports that 839 people have already died in 2019 trying to cross the Mediterranean. In 2018, the number of dead or missing was 2,277. At its height in 2016, 5,096 people died at sea. These are desperate people fleeing war and extreme poverty. But no state will take responsibility for them. 

Yet even as international accountability for human rights violations becomes a hollow joke, there are people who have taken it up themselves to dedicate their lives to rescuing and helping refugees, no matter what the personal cost. These are idealistic people who also have a firm grasp on reality: they know they cannot save the world, but they believe that capitulating to helplessness is not an option.

Salam Aldeen is the founder of Team Humanity, a Danish nonprofit dedicated to helping refugees who made the perilous journey across the Mediterranean to the Greek island of Lesbos. A Dane of Iraqi-Moldovan descent, Salam flew to Lesbos in 2015 to begin sea rescue operations two days after seeing the now-iconic image of Alan Kurdi, the three year old Syrian boy whose body washed up on a beach in Turkey. Alan and his family had been trying to reach Europe in an inflatable raft.

In January 2016, Greek authorities arrested Salam and four other humanitarian volunteers after they responded to a distress call from a group of refugees on a sinking rubber raft. The arresting officers accused them of crossing into Turkish waters with the intent to traffic refugees into Greece. Salam spent 48 hours in jail, and then two more years on trial, with prosecutors seeking a life sentence. The five men were acquitted of all charges in May 2018 and Salam immediately went back to work, this time building a women and children’s center adjacent to Moria, a notorious refugee camp on Lesbos that is known for violence and horrifying conditions. Moria was built for 3,000 people but shelters more than three times that many, mainly Syrian refugees and Afghan asylum seekers. 

The Team Humanity center is a reprieve for the 1,500 women and children who use it daily. “All women and children are welcome,” Salam said, noting that 11 is the cutoff age for boys. There’s a playground, and space for people to gather to dance, listen to music and watch movies. The center is funded entirely through private donations from all over the world. The money goes toward providing camp residents with necessities like food, diapers, winter clothes, and underwear. Salam gets wistful when he talks about building a school. “I don’t have funds for chairs and tables.”

On August 11th, the night of the Muslim festival of Eid-al-Adha, a group of men attacked the women’s center. “It was Eid, Ramadan had finished and everyone was happy. People went out. But then some troublemakers started making problems,” Salam says. 

https://vimeo.com/355385248

Salam described a scuffle between camp residents, which included a drunk man, volunteer security people restraining him, and a woman who screamed and pretended to faint. “It was all over quickly, Salam says. “She fainted for attention, it was a joke, and the drunk guy apologized.” But then, he says, a rumor started in the camp that someone had hit the woman. Salam estimated that between 100 to 200 men from Moria showed up, angry. There were only 26 volunteers working at the time, with additional women and children inside. When some men began to climb over the fence, Salam chased after them with sparklers and they ran off. 

https://vimeo.com/355385512

The local Greek police took an hour to arrive. “They don’t want to help. They don’t want us to be there. They want us to suffer so we go home,” Salam says. 

On August 14th, the Greek police returned, this time to rearrest Salam. “The police said the fireworks that I used to protect us were illegal,” Salam says. “They held me for over two hours, and at the same time brought someone in to report me for hitting him. I don’t know what they promised him for that, but it’s so corrupt.” 

He doesn’t expect the harassment will stop. Salam says he received a letter from the United Nations last week, also sent to the Greek government, which condemned the legal actions taken against Salam and the criminalization of humanitarian aid. Still, his biggest hope is for celebrity intervention — a “We are the World” moment to capture international attention.

Salam Aldeen is not the only humanitarian volunteer facing legal charges for aiding refugees. Pia Kemp, the German captain of a ship that was impounded for rescuing migrants at sea, recently announced she was turning down a medal from the city of Paris. Addressing the mayor of Paris, Kemp wrote in a Facebook post, “Madame Hidalgo, you want to award me a medal for my solidarian action in the Mediterranean Sea, because our crews 'work to rescue migrants from difficult conditions on a daily basis'...while you raid protests and criminalize people that are standing up for rights of migrants and asylum seekers. You want to give me a medal for actions that you fight in your own ramparts." Kemp reportedly faces 20 years in prison in Italy on charges of aiding in human trafficking.

There is no humanitarian exception to the European Union Directive that criminalizes aiding illegal migration. The burden of hosting refugees and asylum-seekers falls heavily on Mediterranean countries due to the Dublin Regulation, an EU law which states that people seeking asylum are the responsibility of the first European country they land in. At the same time, whistleblowers in the Greek government have accused the state of misappropriating EU funds meant for refugees, and awarding inflated contracts to local businesses. As Salam put it, “Finance crisis, bullshit, I see new cars. They didn’t have them in 2015, now they do.”

In Denmark, Salam’s home country, the government’s laws and rhetoric are increasingly anti-immigrant. In 2016, Denmark passed the controversial “jewelry law,” which allows the government to confiscate valuables from refugees to pay for their care. The law has not been enforced, but the symbolism remains. “I’m ashamed that Denmark doesn’t take refugees. That’s why I’m here helping people. I’m trying to show that it’s not every Danish person that feels this way,” says Salam. 

In 2018, Arizonan geography teacher Scott Warren was charged by Border Patrol with three felonies for aiding a pair of Central American migrants. His trial resulted in a hung jury. Federal prosecutors have refused to drop the charges since the mistrial, and plan to retry Warren on two felony harboring charges in November.

Warren’s case, like his European counterparts, failed in court because prosecutors could not prove intent to commit a crime. Still, Warren’s arrest is part of an escalating attack on humanitarian volunteers, who for years have put out jugs of water for dehydrated migrants traversing the desert along the United States’ southern border.

Migration flows will increase as the planet warms and regions become uninhabitable. The post-World War II liberal order, built upon freedom of movement and freedom from persecution has failed. The Refugee Convention was not written to account for massive influxes of people fleeing widespread violence and climate change. Permanent impermanence has been normalized - the most obvious example being Palestinian refugees, who were placed under their own UN agency in order to sidestep UNHCR. 

Ironically, during World War II, Syria played host to thousands of European refugees. Now that the tables have turned, Europeans are treating the refugee crisis like a game of hot potato, selling out basic principles in order to keep Muslims out. What began with a 2016 deal to return refugees to Turkey was followed by an even worse deal with Libya. 

In America, our government has behaved no better. Just this week, the Trump administration announced a new policy that would allow for indefinite detention of migrant families and children. Meanwhile, Haitians who have lived for decades on Temporary Protected Status (TPS) now face deportation since the Trump regime denied them renewal. 

The crackdowns are real, and until new institutions are constructed to provide accountability, legal or otherwise, we’ll return to the same solutions humanity has used throughout history. 

There’s a Jewish teaching, naaseh v'nishma, which means “we will do and we will hear.” If somebody shows up to your doorstep, feed them, give them a bed, and ask questions in the morning.

Tyrants have always used vulnerable populations as pawns in their games with one another. But there have always been people willing to sacrifice their bodies and voices for others. 

Salam and his family arrived in Denmark in 1992 after fleeing civil war in Moldova, but he insists that his past is irrelevant to what he’s doing now. “Everyone can do what I do. No money in the world can give you the feeling you get when you’re saving a human from drowning. I can’t explain it to you because it’s something insane. Giving a baby back to their mother after pulling them from the water, that is something I’ll never forget. People if they want to do something — know one thing — don’t think that you will get something back, but you’ll get peace with yourself. That feeling when you help somebody, this is your reward. You’ll understand, I did something good. Because one day, maybe it’s you who is going to run.”
    [post_title] => 'Saving lives is not a crime': When ordinary people sacrifice everything in the name of humanity
    [post_excerpt] => Tyrants have always used vulnerable populations as pawns in their games with one another. But there have always been people willing to sacrifice their bodies and voices for others. 
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‘Saving lives is not a crime’: When ordinary people sacrifice everything in the name of humanity

by Anna Lind-Guzik

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    [post_content] => Despite the bleakness of the current political moment, the slide to authoritarian oligarchy is not inevitable.

America’s inequality crisis has emerged as the central issue of the 2020 presidential campaign. The realization that “it’s the economic inequality, stupid,” was a long time coming, given that the global economic crisis of 2008 is now more than a decade behind us. During the intervening years the global grassroots Occupy movement demonstrated for months to raise awareness, staging sit ins on Wall Street in New York and in major cities across Europe. In remarks delivered in 2013, Barack Obama called economic inequality “the defining challenge of our time.” And three years ago an anti-establishment voter revolt gave the United States its first plutocrat president in the form of Donald J. Trump. Americans have at last come to understand the effect of economic inequality on their lives. But the question of how to address inequality is fraught with controversy.

At the Democratic party debates in June, nearly all of the candidates for the presidential nomination railed against the U.S. economy for benefitting only the very rich. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, who have made inequality their signature issue, have both proposed detailed plans that would completely remake the American economy. Even frontrunner Joe Biden, for years affiliated with centrist politics, noticed that progressivism was rising in popularity; he too is now talking about inequality—with his donors.

All this is a far cry from the “America is already great” message that hampered the Clinton campaign in 2016, but is undoubtedly closer to the way Americans actually feel. Six years ago, the English edition of Thomas Piketty’s seminal book Capital in the Twenty-First Century was published, becoming a surprise bestseller and a cultural phenomenon. At the time, economists regarded as controversial Piketty’s warning that if the concentration of wealth and power remains unchecked we risk repeating the adverse conditions of the nineteenth century. In a 2016 paper, however, French economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman showed that American inequality is at levels unseen since the Roaring 1920s, with the top 0.1 percent controlling 22 percent of the wealth. This year, former Fed chairman Paul Volcker told the New York Times that the U.S. is “developing into a plutocracy.” Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz has written that the American economy is “rigged.” In the media, you can often see our current era referred to as the Second Gilded Age, after the period between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the twentieth century, when inequality ran rampant and robber barons like Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan plundered and pillaged their way into unimaginable wealth.

But Americans, who encounter extreme concentrations of wealth and power wherever they turn these days, don’t need economists to tell them what they already know: that capitalism, or at least their country’s form of it, is broken — perhaps irreparably. While the U.S. is among the world’s wealthiest countries, it is also, according to the UN, “the world champion of extreme inequality.” Forty million Americans live in poverty; in some areas of the country, life expectancy is equivalent to that of developing states. Meanwhile, “deaths of despair” — caused by drug abuse, alcoholism and suicide — have spiked. According to the UN, Americans lead “shorter and sicker lives, compared to people living in any other rich democracy.”

The American Dream — the idea that if you worked hard, you could succeed regardless of where you were born or what your parents earned — is still the national ethos, despite the fact that the U.S. currently has the lowest rate of economic mobility of any industrialized democracy. In contrast to earlier generations, very few young Americans will do better than their parents: they are buried in debt, struggling with rising rents and healthcare costs, and see more deaths from suicide and drug overdose than any other age group. The life trajectory of most contemporary Americans is inextricably linked to their parents’ education and income, and to their geographic location. A recent study by researchers at the N.Y.U. School of Medicine, for instance, found a 30-year gap in life expectancy between two neighborhoods in Chicago, one rich and one poor.

Republicans, meanwhile, passed an enormous $1.5 trillion tax cut for the wealthy and are now considering another one, while trying to cut Social Security and kick millions off Medicaid. White-collar crime prosecutions are at a record low, the president is openly corrupt, and corporate lobbyists literally run the government. Is it any wonder that polls have repeatedly shown that over two thirds of Americans believe the economic and political systems are rigged in favor of big business and the rich? This is why millions of voters paid attention when Donald Trump said during his presidential campaign that “the American dream is dead.”

While growing inequality has long been a fact of American life, income inequality has increased dramatically since the mid-1970s, to the point where the top one percent now earn 26.3 times more than the other 99 percent. And while the top one percent’s share of the nation’s earnings has doubled during that period, the top 0.1 percent fared even better: their incomes quadrupled, even as incomes for the bottom 90 percent, once adjusted for inflation, have remained stagnant.

But it is the distribution of wealth that truly highlights the vast disparities hidden by four decades of policies that have created the illusion of economic prosperity. In the U.S. today, wealth is concentrated to such an extent that three men alone — Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett — are richer than the bottom half of the entire population. Recent data released by the Federal Reserve reveals in startling detail how the distribution of wealth in the U.S. became so unequal. Matt Bruenig of the People’s Policy Project, who analyzed the data, calculated that between 1989 and 2018, the net worth of the top one percent increased by $21 trillion, while the bottom 50 percent became poorer to the tune of $900 billion during the same period. In 2018, Bruenig finds, the top one percent owned “nearly $30 trillion of assets while the bottom half owns less than nothing, meaning they have more debts than they have assets.”

A 2018 study by researchers at the University of Bonn shows how the 2008 financial crisis exacerbated U.S. inequalities, particularly for black households, as the crisis contributed to the widening of a racial wealth gap that had already persisted for decades due to systemic discrimination. According to the authors, the median black household has only 12 percent of the wealth of a median white household and earns about half the income, leaving black households 80 percent poorer than white households. The economic crisis of 2008 erased the few gains they had made, while over the past 70 years “virtually no progress” has been made in reducing wealth inequality between blacks and whites in the United States.

The U.S. is the most extreme example, but most of the world has seen increased inequality over the past 40 years. In the U.K., deaths of despair have spiked following a decade of deliberately cruel austerity policies. In France, 2018’s gilets jaunes protests highlighted the country’s inequality crisis, partly fueled by Emmanuel Macron’s policy of cutting taxes to the top one percent while leaving those clinging to the lowest rungs of the income ladder worse off.

The causes of rising inequality vary from country to country, but in the U.S. and Europe the economic literature points to a few culprits. These include automation, the decline of organized labor, financial deregulation, regressive tax systems that allow the rich to cut their own taxes, and globalization. In the U.S. in particular, a growing body of research points to monopoly power and diminishing competition across the American economy as a major contributor. Among economists, a new movement highlights the negative impact done by decades of policies based on dubious market fundamentalist reasoning.

At the heart of all this is the ongoing failure of capitalist democracies to counter growing concentrations of wealth and power, which in turn fuel voter discontent and elevate populist authoritarians to power worldwide. In recent years many have raised the questions of why liberal democracy failed to address the rise of economic insecurity, or why the popular backlash to rising inequality has been marked by a turn toward far-right nativism —  as opposed to, say, a demand for higher taxes on the rich. Some, like Harvard economist Dani Rodrik and author Thomas Frank, argue that the answer lies in the left and center-left parties’ abdication of their historical responsibility toward low-income workers. Whereas the right has always been up front about its allegiance to business elites, the complicity of center-of-left parties in the policies that increased inequality has made them ill-equipped to address the problems that they helped create. A 2018 study by Piketty seems to confirm this view.

With democracies unable to ensure prosperity for all but the rich and well-connected, support for democracy is decreasing. In a recent speech, Angus Deaton, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, declared that rising inequality threatens democratic capitalism. But it’s not the “capitalism” part that’s under threat. Despite their populist protestations, far-right authoritarians like Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and Donald Trump are not opposed to rabid capitalism or even globalization—they just don’t believe democracy must be a part of it, or that it should stop them from giving handouts to their friends. Vanderbilt law professor Ganesh Sitaraman explains that the real threat to liberal democracy “isn’t authoritarianism—it’s nationalist oligarchy.” If left unchecked, the future of Western democracies could look a lot like Brazil, where pervasive inequality and lack of elite accountability gradually eroded support for democracy until the authoritarian Bolsonaro could rise to power — with the help of the country’s business elites.

Despite the bleakness of the current political moment, the slide to authoritarian oligarchy is not inevitable. One remedy, particularly in the U.S., is tougher enforcement of antitrust laws, which is necessary to constrain the power of corporate monopolies. Another, as historian-turned-folk hero Rutger Bregman told members of the global elite gathered in Davos earlier this year, is astoundingly simple: “Taxes, taxes, taxes.” Our current system, as documented by Zucman, is built upon massive tax evasion amounting trillions of dollars, by multinational corporations and the ultra-rich. Any solution to our inequality crisis necessarily involves wealthy people paying their fair share.

Any attempt at meaningful reform, however, would inevitably have to contend with the fact that all of our political and regulatory institutions have been completely captured by big business and the rich. Which brings us back to the 2020 elections.

The 2020 presidential election is not just a referendum on Trump’s authoritarian populism. It is also a test case for the ability of democratic capitalism to correct itself. The Democratic party’s candidate is thus a critical matter, whether that person is a progressive like Sanders or Warren, whose promises include a more equitable construction of the American economy, student debt forgiveness, reining in corporate power and a wealth tax; or a lifelong neoliberal centrist like Biden, who recently promised his donors that despite his newfound interest in income inequality, under his presidency “no one’s standard of living will change, nothing will fundamentally change.”

The choice goes beyond the likelihood of defeating Trump, straight to the heart of the debate over what American capitalism, and democratic capitalism in general, mean in the twenty-first century. Does democracy mean an oligarchy rooted in injustice, which is what we have had for the last few decades; or should it be a system that benefits the whole of society, rather than only a select few?
    [post_title] => In 2020, America will decide between oligarchy and egalitarianism
    [post_excerpt] => While growing inequality has long been a fact of American life, income inequality has increased dramatically since the mid-1970s, to the point where the top one percent now earn 26.3 times more than the other 99 percent. 
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In 2020, America will decide between oligarchy and egalitarianism

by Asher Schechter

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    [post_content] => The current political climate seems disastrous for the Palestinians. But as recent history shows, the bleakest circumstances can yield great opportunities.

Alongside the dog whistle politics, much of Donald Trump’s public image is a throwback to 1980s New York City culture, with its gaudy society parties, unapologetic misogyny, and predatory real estate practices. His presidency jerks between rhetorical excess and emptiness. From negotiations with North Korea abroad to immigration policy at home, Trump’s actions have cycled between Twitter onslaughts devoid of meaningful content and the implementation of acutely retrograde executive orders. His administration’s recent effort to address conflict in the Middle East by convening the “Peace to Prosperity” conference in Manama, Bahrain, is a further case in point.

At the core of the Trump administration’s economic plans for the Palestinians is a glossy brochure released shortly before the summit itself. Notwithstanding the slick graphics and  the presentation, which makes it look like something a business consulting firm would publish, it is an astonishing study of hollowness and deception. The $50 billion dollar pitch book promotes all sorts of investments, including a desalination plant in Gaza and a transport corridor with the West Bank, but does not even mention the word “occupation” to describe Israel’s control over the occupied Palestinian territories. Particularly galling to Israeli and Palestinian civil society activists was the discovery that the photographs used to illustrate that glossy brochure were from promotional material for the very grassroots peace building initiatives — such as The Bereaved Parents Circle Forum and Olive Oil Without Borders — that the Trump administration had abruptly defunded in recent months.

Live-tweeting from the lobby of Manama’s Four Seasons hotel, where the workshop was held, journalist Jack Moore wrote that he was “was left speechless by the Davos-esque Conflab” he had witnessed during the two-day event. In a widely-circulated Twitter thread, he described a gathering of shady private sector grandees, all male panels, and patronizing U.S. flippancy toward absent Palestinian officials. In his opening speech, Jared Kushner described his vision for an economically vibrant West Bank and Gaza without broaching the political context in which such development might take place. Other participants had spent so little time on the ground in Palestine, that they mispronounced names of well-known places. Meanwhile, the head of FIFA touted the virtues of football as a means of “contribut[ing] to change” in the region. When the numbers were crunched, it was clear that the U.S. government was looking for a way to offload the major costs of economic investment to the Gulf states and private investors, shouldering even less of the paltry amount they now provide in the form of economic assistance in the occupied territories.

This opportunistic spirit of Manama fit with a broader pattern of pushing the Palestinians into a corner. During several interviews in the run up to the Bahrain Summit, Kushner reinforced the approach of excluding the PLO while dismissing fears of American imbalance. Asked if he understood why the Palestinians did not trust him, Kushner responded curtly, “I’m not here to be trusted.” As the Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi has argued, this “neocolonial arrogance” of the U.S. administration is a throwback to the British Mandate and the notion that Palestinians are not quite ready to govern themselves.

Israeli leaders have also promoted this paternalistic view. The former Education Minister and leader of the right-wing Jewish Home party, Naftali Bennett, for example, called for the Palestinians to govern themselves “in all aspects barring two elements: overall security responsibility and not being able to allow the return of descents of Palestinian refugees.” When asked whether his vision would provide self-determination for Palestinians, Bennett demurred. “It’s unrealistic…the Stability Plan is only partial self-determination, but in the real world you have to make compromises.”

Since Trump’s election the alignment between the U.S. and Israeli governments has yielded a series of transformative developments that in practice put an end to the two-state solution.

The most widely publicized of these developments was the relocation of the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. With this move, the U.S. indicated that it no longer regarded as legitimate the Palestinians’ claim to East Jerusalem as the putative capital of their future state. The U.S. also closed its consulate in East Jerusalem, which had served Palestinian residents of the occupied territories; and it ordered the Palestinian mission in Washington D.C. to close, ending the official Palestinian diplomatic presence in the U.S. capital.

The U.S. withdrew its funding to UNWRA, the United Nations agency that provides essential services, like education and medical care, to over five million Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Gaza, and the West Bank. The State Department denied visas to prominent Palestinian figures who had been visiting the U.S. for years — including PLO executive committee member Hanan Ashrawi, who received her PhD from the University of Virginia. In addition to adopting a policy of complete indifference to Israel’s ever-expanding settlement expansion in the West Bank, the U.S. removed the word ‘occupied’ from government documents. When Netanyahu campaigned in the recent national election partly on a promise to annex the West Bank, which Israel has occupied for 52 years, the Trump administration did not even respond, even as it has chosen a permissive attitude towards the growing Israeli call for annexation of the West Bank. In all these ways, the conflict has returned to a pre-Oslo paradigm. The Palestinians are, as it were, stuck back in the 1980s.

Rather than simply lament the circus in Bahrain, the Palestinian leadership must look for a meaningful way to respond to this diplomatic farce. Some Palestinians have argued that since the Oslo Agreement has been fatally violated, the Palestinian Authority should formally be dismantled. Those who oppose this move say it would cause harm to the Palestinian population, and perhaps even lead to the outbreak of violence. Another historical parallel to consider is the PLO’s position following the 1978 Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel. Abandoned by Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat, sidelined in autonomy talks over their future without participation, surrounded by an expanding ring of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, the Palestinians were forced to confront both political efforts at state prevention followed swiftly by the 1982 military intervention in Lebanon and Israeli attempts to defeat the PLO in its Beirut stronghold.

This moment of acute crisis was also an opportunity for Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian leadership to rethink the future of the national struggle. After the PLO was forced to retreat from Beirut in 1982, Palestinian political activists in Gaza and the West Bank forced a shift of power away from the exiled leaders, now based in Tunis, and a new reckoning with their demands, culminating in the outbreak of the first Intifada in December 1987. The mass grassroots protest against the then 20-year old occupation led to tangible results: the U.S. finally recognized the PLO; and by the early 1990s the Israelis began to engage with the Palestinian political movement. With that same occupation now extending over five decades, what new opportunities might be seized beyond the fulsome rejection of the Trump administration’s effort to impose what one Palestinian playwright has called a “slumlord’s peace”?

In the summer of 1986, the Palestinian political activist and intellectual Sari Nusseibeh toyed with an idea that might shake up the paradigms of political discussion. Writing in the newspaper Al-Mawqef, he posed a thought experiment about which situation was preferable: “autonomy or annexation with full equal rights [for Palestinians] in Israel?” In his view, freedom through the ballot box would give Palestinians joint control over their own lives and the lives of their Jewish neighbors. He soon appeared on a leading Israeli political talk show alongside one leader of the settler movement, who was startled by Nusseibeh’s argument. Either Palestinians would get a state of their own, or Israel would have a battle for equal rights on its hands. Suddenly, the left-wing Labor Party began invoking fears of a “demographic threat” as a means to accelerate negotiations, while the Israeli representative to the UN noted that “If Palestinians begin to think like this, then we’ve really got something to worry about."

These fears remain highly relevant today. What happens when the political conflict is framed as a conversation about equal rights, access, and citizenship? The government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is acutely concerned about the rhetoric shifting in this direction, a fear underscored by the backlash against the movement for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) as a means of pressuring Israel in economic, cultural and diplomatic realms. Recent efforts to criminalize BDS, and to label it anti-Semitic, underscore how far this battle of delegitimization can go.

In the face of these developments, advocates for an equitable solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict must continue to push for a values-centered approach where the language of rights and equality for Arabs and Jews remains at the center of political discourse. Trump himself was quick to dispose of the two-state paradigm in his first meeting with the Israeli Prime Minister, telling reporters he was not wedded to the idea of territorial partition. But rather than promote an equitable alterative, his administration has tipped the scales firmly in one direction. To reverse this sense of defeat, a reorientation of the parameters of debate is in order. Rather than haggle over the crumbs of economic peace, there needs to be a clear demand for meaningful sovereignty and citizenship—along with the means of leveraging that equitable future—in whatever political constellation might eventually emerge.

A return to the 1980s can evoke retrograde politics, but it is also an opportunity to interrogate the political imaginaries that took hold at the end of the Cold War, and to imagine alternative paths not taken. Could contemporary developments offer a chance to rethink the Palestinian future, moving away from territorial division and statist demands? Are there lessons to be learnt from Nusseibeh’s earlier calls for annexation alongside Netanyahu’s promise of implementing a more restrictive version? Might this crisis provide a viable way for Palestinians to firmly back out of the narrow Israeli and American corner? The current political landscape might appear calamitous, but Trump and Netanyahu will not last forever. Even as the foolhardy mandarins like Jared Kushner, Jason Greenblatt, and David Friedman demand Palestinian surrender, the threat of being vanquished can also be redirected in bracing new directions.

 

 

 

 

 

 
    [post_title] => Back to the future: How Palestine can pull itself out of the 1980s
    [post_excerpt] => Pushed into a corner by U.S. and Israeli policy and the indifference of Arab leaders, Palestinian leadership is in a moment of acute crisis. But the calamitous political landscape also presents an opportunity for creative new paradigms.
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Back to the future: How Palestine can pull itself out of the 1980s

by Seth Anziska

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    [post_content] => An unlikely partnership between politically opposed billionaires raises questions about the role money plays in ...  everything.

Perhaps the most surprising news this week is the unlikely partnership between two billionaires who represent opposite sides of the political spectrum. George Soros, the billionaire known for his liberalism, is partnering with the far-right Charles Koch to fund a Washington think tank that will promote a non-interventionist foreign policy. 

Stephen Kinzer, a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, describes his reaction to the announcement in  an op-ed for the Boston Globe:

"The depth of this heresy can only be appreciated by recognizing the meretricious power that nourishes Washington’s think-tank ecosystem… In foreign policy, all major Washington think tanks promote interventionist dogma: the United States faces threats everywhere, it must therefore be present everywhere, and “present” includes maintaining more than 800 foreign military bases and spending trillions of dollars on endless confrontations with foreign countries.” 

The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, as it will be known, will be led by a number of critics of American foreign policy, including Trita Parsi, the former president of the National Iranian American Council. Parsi said:

“It shows how important ending endless war is if they’re willing to put aside their differences and get together on this project. We are going to challenge the basis of American foreign policy in a way that has not been done in at least the last quarter-century.”

One of the loudest critics of billionaires bearing liberal gifts is Anand Giridharadas. In his book Winners Take All: the elite charade of changing the world,  the former McKinsey consultant turned social critic attempts to answer the question: “What is the relationship between the extraordinary elite generosity of our time, which is real, and the extraordinary elite hoarding of our time?” Giridharadas’s conclusion: that elite generosity is a partner of elite hoarding.

The billionaires’ partnership raises the issue of the role of money in, well, just about everything, explains Kelsey Piper in an article for Vox. 

Institutional pushback against “endless war” feels like a relief and a welcome change in Washington, D.C., but one should temper one’s reaction with a healthy skepticism of billionaires who want to shape the world. 
    [post_title] => The problem with billionaires bearing liberal gifts
    [post_excerpt] => George Soros and Charles Koch would seem to be the most unlikely of partners, but the two billionaires have found synergy in their newly launched think tank.
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The problem with billionaires bearing liberal gifts

by Jessica McKenzie

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    [post_content] => We've changed our name and expanded our mission, but our ethos remains the same

In 2017 a group of journalists and academics with expertise in authoritarianism launched a Medium blog called The Anti-Nihilist Institute. Over the ensuing months they wrote sharp analysis about the historical and social context of anti-democratic forces, and published thought provoking interviews with experts in the field. With a rapidly growing readership of thoughtful people seeking new thinking about critical issues, the founders decided to migrate the Medium blog to its own, dedicated website.

We are delighted to announce that the launch of our new website comes with a new name — The Conversationalist.

The name reflects our expanded mission, which is to bring together thoughtful writers who are experts in a variety of fields to provide new insights into critical issues. Over the past half year we have published thought provoking articles on diverse topics that range from the role of art in times of political despair to a new way of thinking about how to treat opioid addicts. The thread that links these many ideas together is one of creative new approaches to the urgent issues of our times, from social inequality to the stale thinking that underlies political stagnation. We invite you, our readers, to contribute to this conversation: share our articles on social media, comment on our Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts, and send us your ideas for new topics to write about here.

We look forward to playing a role in supporting an ongoing conversation about how to make our society  more inclusive, healthy, environmentally sustainable, and thoughtful.
    [post_title] => The Conversationalist: A new name and an expanded mission
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The Conversationalist: A new name and an expanded mission

by Lisa Goldman

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    [post_date] => 2019-06-20 16:00:09
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    [post_content] => With leading publications having phased out their public editors, external watchdogs have stepped in, holding the media to account in an age of declining public trust.

The Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) has decided to fill the vacuum left by the near disappearance of public editors from major newspapers by appointing a few of its own: Gabriel Snyder will take on The New York Times; Ana Marie Cox will monitor The Washington Post; Maria Bustillos will keep an eye on MSNBC; and Emily Tamkin will oversee CNN. Whether or not the news organizations will engage with these outsiders much (if at all) remains to be seen, but the Columbia Journalism Review is counting on having enough organizational clout so their efforts are not in vain.

Emily Tamkin has already been on CJR's podcast to take CNN to task for filling the airwaves with “underqualified pundits.” An article in the Washingtonian provides more information on CJR’s project, reporting that staffers for various media platforms have already been in touch with editor Kyle Pope to suggest issues for the attention of the public editors.

Something those public editors should consider: Joshua Benton reports for Nieman Lab on the “new avoidance” phenomenon, which is unfortunately becoming more common globally, and especially in the United States. The report is dismaying, but also illuminating. Some of the comments from readers explaining why they sometimes or always avoid the news demonstrate real demand and hunger for more positive coverage of things that are working—problems that are being solved—which is part of our goal here at The Conversationalist.

In other news:

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has signed a new law that permits undocumented immigrants to apply for driver’s licenses. Read more.

An argument for targeting the world’s 2.4 billion gamers with messaging about environmental issues and sustainability. Learn more.

How is participatory budgeting enlivening democracy in New York? Read the op-ed.
    [post_title] => The important work of keeping the media honest
    [post_excerpt] => Journalists passionate about keeping the media relevant have taken on the job of shadow ombudsman

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The important work of keeping the media honest

by Jessica McKenzie

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