#also it’s not new; people who act like media literacy is getting worse are so fucking funny like

[courtrecord]

honestly i hate how that “maybe the curtains are just blue” post has become shorthand for anti-intellectualism and shit bc as someone who has an utter passion for media analysis now, I WAS THAT PERSON IN HIGH SCHOOL ENGLISH CLASS.

english class never taught me how to analyze stories, it taught me how to remember what things the teacher said were “symbolism” and how to take quizzes where we had to match a quote to the character who said it. i didn’t give a shit about any of it, bc literally why should i. it was bullshit.

there’s this idea online that people are forgetting or rejecting what they learned in english class when they’re bad at media analysis, and maybe that’s a little bit true, but i think the much bigger problem is they never learned it in the first place. cinemasins & “maybe the curtains are just blue” aren’t convincing people to abandon an intellectualism they already had, they’re filling a void.

when all you learn in high school is to write on the test “blue = depression”, why is it surprising that so many people don’t give a shit about the curtains.

#media analysis #i literally didn’t care about criticism until i started watching video essays in 2017 #and they taught me that u could actually do interesting things with analysis #and i cannot fucking stand this shit that pretends people should all know better #also it’s not new; people who act like media literacy is getting worse are so fucking funny like #have u met an adult. have u spoken to say. an adult family member #ever in ur life #ur just on the internet now. ur seeing a million bad takes that used to be reserved for in-person conversations #or maybe writing into a paper or magazine #get real #get fucking real #1k

[joe-spookyy]

nothing makes me more evil than seeing someone misinterpret daniel “oz” osbourne of buffy the vampire slayer fame. this is deeply unfortunate because it seems to be all everyone knows how to do. the amount of people i’ve seen dogging on him for things he did not even have control over is crazy. if you have issues with him read on. he’s the best character and i will die on that hill, so fight me on this one. i dare you. season 4 spoilers under the cut sorry to my friends. also him and tara could have been best friends but this isn’t really about her. just had to say it.

FIRST of all. he did not cheat on willow. veruca took advantage of him. i don’t even get how there’s grey area there - it’s clear that in both situations the wolf has control over oz, but not over veruca. so not only was HE not choosing to have sex with her or even aware that he was doing it, but SHE was aware and was taking advantage of him. this is not in ANY way his fault??? now yeah. he coulda been a little more defensive about himself when he was talking to willow and buffy but it’s oz. he’s already worried about hurting people when he’s a werewolf. if everyone’s telling him he’s bad and wrong for this he’s gonna believe it even if it isn’t true. and he didn’t have to scram and go full no contact after that. but again. he was SCARED! he didn’t wanna hurt willow any more than he already had. he made a snap decision based on what he felt he HAD to do. and if you’re one of the people who says just because he brought veruca into the cage that means he Wanted her to do that to him. i am going to get you. that’s victim blaming. he just wanted to make sure she didn’t KILL anyone. it makes sense that he would pick risking her taking advantage of him again over letting people die. did he handle it perfectly? no. that does not mean he wanted her to do all that. he loves willow and says that so many times explicitly. literally left to make sure he was good enough for her. he did not want veruca. jesus.

and SECOND. even worse is the people who are saying he comes across as homophobic for having a negative reaction to finding out about willow and tara. like. hello. did we watch the same scene. not once does he say anything negative about the fact that they’re both girls. he’s clearly just upset that willow didn’t tell him she was involved with anyone else, and with his whole new controlling the wolf thing, there’s gonna be a lot of pent up emotion and probably anger. so when he got extra upset when tara wouldn’t tell him anything more and eventually ended up wolfing out, it’s clear that it’s because he’s upset that he trusted willow but she didn’t give him all the information about where she was at and whether or not he had a chance with her again. which makes sense from her perspective of course, and tara’s reaction was valid too, but we can’t act like he suddenly hates gay people just cause he got mad that someone he cares about wasn’t totally honest with him. and he warns tara so he doesn’t end up hurting her by accident. and at the end of the episode all he wants to know is whether willow is happy. and she is. and so he’s happy for her and accepts it. i don’t even know how people are getting any other perception of the situation. god. sorry.

big idea is if you think oz is in the wrong for either of these i am going to hunt you down and beat you up evil style and maybe sit you down and have a talk about media literacy.

#oz buffy #oz btvs #daniel oz osbourne #willow rosenberg #willow btvs #willow buffy #willoz #werewolf #buffy the vampire slayer #buffy season 4 #tara btvs #tara buffy #tara maclay #character analysis

[beyondblue2]

To the Dragon Ball Super Haters

So I still to this day see people making the same complaints about Dragon Ball Super, so let me just say this: I don't believe you can dislike Super for the vast majority of complaints made about it and still enjoy DBZ. Allow me to elaborate.

Most criticisms of Super, like inconsistent animation, or power of friendship shenanigans, or half-cooked plot, or powerups that have very little buildup, or hell, even powerups that really only change the user's hair color... are all present in DBZ. I think most people don't want to argue that DBZ doesn't deserve its legendary status because you'd be fighting alone against a horde. But it's much easier to proclaim your hatred of something new and cite a decline in quality.

These people either A) don't like DBZ either and therefore shouldn't be so entrenched in the franchise, B) don't dislike Super for the reasons they give but want to sound like they have good taste, or just dislike it for stupid reasons, or C) were tricked by people who come from points A or B into believing things are worse than they are, because they have the media literacy of a toddler.

It's like this. Say you run into someone while you're talking about how much you love Reese's Cups. And they tell you Reese's are a garbage treat and you're an idiot for liking it. And you get upset, obviously. And eventually you go "okay, explain it to me. Why do you hate them?" And they tell you that peanut butter is objectively terrible. Which, first off, it's not, that's your extremely subjective opinion. But second, didn't I see you eating a PB&J sandwich in the break room earlier? And they're like "yeah, PB&J is delicious, it's the best sandwich ever, nobody's disputing that." And you're just like... it has peanut butter though. And they're like "okay but you're taking it out of context." WHAT CONTEXT, BRO!? Either you think peanut butter is nasty or you don't! So you're either lying about hating Reese's to sound edgy and cool, or you're lying about loving PB&J because you don't want to be ostracized for being a freak.

That's basically what it boils down to. If you don't like Super, I'm not saying you're not valid. But be real. You probably don't like it because you were a kid when DBZ came out and your tastes have changed since then. I'm not going to sit here and act like Super isn't flawed, but let's not pretend that those same flaws didn't exist in Z, either. And don't give me that "Goku should be heroic" shit either, that was something the American dubbing crew did on their own. The same dub where Goku and Chichi had a weird offscreen kiss sound effect also told us Bardock was a brilliant scientist who invented the fake moon. Goku does heroic things from time to time, but he always does it with a kind of selfish basis of reasoning. He loves his friends, but he'll let Vegeta go to get a better fight later. He'll give Frieza some energy, but one more betrayal of trust and Goku will obliterate him.

You're either down with the main character being a flawed and interesting character and therefore will enjoy the Dragon Ball franchise, or you're not. In which case, stop clogging up the Tumblr tags and YouTube comments with your bitching and complaining. You don't see me infiltrating the Attack on Titan community to talk about how much it sucks. You know why? Because I fucking hate that series and I don't WANT to talk about it all the time. So if you watched some essayist trying to recreate the Nostalgia Critic or whatever and he told you Super sucks and you just parrot what he said without a sparking synapse in that smooth soap bar of a brain in your skull, then please, just shut the fuck up. For your own sake as well as mine.

#dbz #dragon ball #dragon ball super #dragon ball z #goku #son goku #vegeta #frieza

[tacitoslurpee]

Rant: Modern Philippine Politics (Sick of all this sh*t)

I’m sick of the idea that one’s fluency in English is the best measure of intelligence. First of all, we’re Filipinos, not American or English. Our national language is Filipino/Tagalog. Most of us are bilingual. Being fluent in English may be a great sign of literacy but let’s not use that as a tool to measure whether someone is smart. You could master the English language and still be an idiot. Language is a tool for communication, and that tool is only as useful based on how well you use it. Leni Robredo is fluent in English, but sentences like “I have 3 daughters; they’re all girls” just screams “stupid”.

Many Filpinos are fools for the mother-figure. Some people say Filipinos are fools for electing a strict, authoritarian that is Duterte. Well, we could say the damn country could use some discipline from a strict parent, and that is how many Duterte supporters see the current president, hence one of his monikers - “Tay Digong”. On the other hand, many look to the gentle, caring mother-figure. This role was first played by the country’s first female president, the late Corey Aquino. She stood in contrast to the late president, Ferdinand Marcos who was also known to be firm & strict. She was the worst example for femininity as she lacked substance. She was simply an actress; she had done nothing beneficial to Filipinos. The decline of the country only started the moment she came into power, and yet her legacy is played up to the point of being petitioned to be canonised. barf In the present, this is the same image that Leni Robredo is presenting. She looks, moves & speaks as a kind, motherly figure to appeal to those who are naive. Unfortunately, she is pretty much another Corey Aquino. She and/or her family has links to some organised crime groups; she’s an airhead who has shown time & again that she is clueless about her surroundings & her own job. I think the people who support women like Corey Aquino and Leni Robredo aren’t simply looking for a mother figure who is completely inept & unqualified for such a high position. They’re looking for enablers, the kind of toxic mothers who smother their kids with understanding, looking the other way when they make a wrong. Even worse, these mother figures aren’t just that, they’re the stepmother who coddles their child to manipulate them out of their own inheritance.

I’m also sick of foreign journalists/media who side with Filipino journalists associated with ABS-CBN & the Lopez group. They’re quick to label Duterte to be as bad as other dictators, censoring the media because they go against his agenda. Those journalists are quick to say all journalists/media are unbiased, they only serve to spread the truth. What bullshit. Journalists are humans, subject to bias. Ever heard of Rupert Murdoch & his empire? In this generation, people seem to easily fall for the fake tears. A group of people cry wolf, and suddenly everyone wants the wolves extinct. Also, these foreign media (I’m talking the loud ones in the US & the UK) have no idea what it’s like to live in a country where 1 media company has near-monopoly of the airwaves. The media company, ABS-CBN, has very close ties with the Aquino clan & has been a very dominant figure in Philippine politics for decades. Imagine having only FOX news corp in the US drilling their agenda into your head with news & entertainment. You think you’re fine if you don’t watch the news, but they still get you through their TV shows. Other rival networks are present but they’re very small & can only be viewed if you have cable. Most people in the Philippines can’t afford cable TV, so they only get what’s aired for free - that is, in most areas, ABS-CBN. If you’re lucky, you might get GMA, a rival network. Oh and another thing, the ABS-CBN borrowed a huge sum from the then Marcos government to bail them out. They never paid back the loan, which is taxpayer money, the land the main company building is on is government property but they acted like it was theirs. The company president is also believed to have conspired with foreign forces against the interest of the Philippines for their own gain. Treasonous. Also, even if you have cable TV, you’re still forced to watch ads in their channel which is ridiculous!

A former president who only approved of projects and didn’t actually contribute or have done anything to its fulfillment doesn’t get credit for it. Many Dilawan (Aquino supporters) cry out that PNoy (late former president Benigno Aquino III) should be credited for many of the recently completed infrastructure as the projects for those were approved during his time. That’s like saying the moment your teacher wrote up the exam questions for your finals, you already automatically got a perfect score in the test. Stupid! In the end, I just hope Filipinos, whichever candidate they may support, pull their head out of their asses & look to a president who is cunning but humane, strict but fair, and has the interest of Filipinos in mind. Our country has long in the mud wet with garbage water. Many countries look at us and have unsavory impressions of our people (that we’re lowly, bumbling maids or nannies; our women marry white men because that’s the only thing they can do to send money back home; our diving team is a mockery of the sport). People think they can still be proud of our tourist spots. Well, had Duterte not stepped in to save Boracay, the Philippines would be offering a literal sh*thole for a beach as a tourist attraction. Now, we have more & better roads, bridges & other infrastructure that’s essential for progress. Politicians who say the Build, Build, Build program is a sham are just salty they couldn’t pocket the money... the fking pigs.

#bbm #marcos #philippines #philippine elections #duterte #digong #leni #robredo #leni robredo #politics #foreign news #media #mainstream media #fake news #english #language #filipino #pinoy #tagalog #dilawan #pinklawan #aquino #abs-cbn #rupert murdoch

[96thdayofrage]

How lawmakers block progress and maintain oppressive policies

Many lawmakers, especially in the South, fought to maintain the nation’s founding principles of white supremacy.

In Alabama’s Dallas County, more than half the population was Black in 1961 but fewer than one in 100 Black citizens were registered to vote due to daunting poll taxes and other measures meant to disenfranchise Black voters. 

Across the South, registrars could selectively ask Black voters to read part of the Constitution, then decide whether the text had been read to their liking, said Carol Anderson, an African American studies professor at Emory University in Atlanta.

As such, they had enormous power to block people from voting, Anderson said.

A modest civil rights act passed in 1957 had enabled the Justice Department to sue states for voting rights violations but put the onus on people whose rights had been violated, requiring them to challenge systems designed to keep them down, Anderson said. By 1963, a federal report examining 100 counties in eight Southern states found that Blacks remained substantially underrepresented at the polls.

Selma, the seat of Dallas County, became an important battleground as tensions escalated. A local judge stifled demonstrations by declaring public gatherings of more than two people illegal, drawing a visit from Martin Luther King Jr. and thrusting Selma into the national spotlight.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Southern legislators repeatedly derailed civil rights-related proposals while chairing key committees, said David Bateman, an associate professor of government at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. 

“Their control over these committees allowed them to gate-keep the agenda,” Bateman said.

Images of officers attacking voting rights activists – including then 25-year-old activist John Lewis – on a Selma bridge with clubs and tear gas in March 1965 helped sway public support. Days after the so-called “Bloody Sunday” incident, President Lyndon Johnson pressed lawmakers to pass broad voting rights legislation. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 banned literacy tests and other discriminatory practices while requiring federal approval of proposed voting-eligibility standards before states could implement them.

Today, Bateman said, as increasing voting restrictions continue to disproportionately affect people of color, “there’s every reason to believe voter disenfranchisement campaigns will persist.”

The U.S. Supreme Court in 2013 reversed a key part of the landmark Voting Rights Act, allowing states to alter voting rules before obtaining federal consent. This summer, the court issued a ruling that disqualifies votes cast in the wrong precinct and only allows family members or caregivers to turn in another person’s ballot.

At least 18 states have enacted laws making voting harder this year, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. In Montana, legislators abolished Election Day registration. Florida curtailed after-hours drop boxes.

Georgia shortened absentee ballot request periods, criminalized providing food and water to queued-up voters and made opening polls optional on Sundays, traditionally a day when the Black vote spikes as congregants vote after church. 

“We still have not dealt with anti-Blackness in this society,” said Anderson, of Emory University. “We’re really looking at the same pattern, the same rhymes.”

In September, Democrats introduced an elections and voting rights bill that would expand early voting options, identification requirements and access to mail-in ballots while allowing Election Day registration.

Police have long upheld racist laws, often with violence

As Blacks demanded equality during the civil rights movement, they faced hostility not just from fellow civilians but from those entrusted to protect and to serve.

In 1961, Freedom Rides occurred throughout the South as activists challenged Southern non-compliance with a Supreme Court decision ruling that declared segregated bus travel unconstitutional. The campaign met with often ugly resistance: In Birmingham, riders were attacked by a Ku Klux Klan mob, reportedly with baseball bats, iron pipes and bicycle chains.

Within the mob was an FBI informant who told the agency of the impending attack, but the agency did nothing, reluctant to expose its mole. Two decades later, a U.S. District Court judge excoriated the FBI for its inaction.

“The FBI was passively complicit,” said Diane McWhorter, author of “Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution.”

The attack occurred with the blessing of Alabama public safety commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor, who told Klan leaders that police would wait 15 minutes before stepping in.

Paul Butler, a law professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., said he sees the links between the police violence of Birmingham and “Bloody Sunday” and the tanks, tear gas and rubber bullets employed at today’s Black Lives Matter demonstrations.

“We have John Lewis and others marching on that bridge protesting police brutality, and they get attacked and beat up by police,” said Butler, author of the book “Chokehold; Policing Black Men.” “And last summer, throughout the country there were marches on police brutality – and at these marches, police attacked the people protesting police brutality. The parallels are clear.”

People of color continue to be disproportionately affected by fatal police shootings, with significantly higher death rates than whites over the previous five years, researchers at Yale University in Connecticut and the University of Pennsylvania reported last year. “So it’s unclear whether change is actually occurring,” Butler said.

Critics note the police presence and brutality faced by Black Lives Matter protesters during the unrest following Floyd’s murder – the open-source database Bellingcat found more than 1,000 incidents of police violence – in contrast with the relatively unprepared force that was unable to stop hordes of mostly white Donald Trump supporters from breaching perimeter fencing and entering the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6 insurrection.

“There has never been a time when policing of public speech hasn’t been racially biased,” said Justin Hansford, executive director of Howard University’s Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center in Washington, D.C. “With the civil rights-era protests, most people understood that they were standing up for core American principles as opposed to Jan. 6, where they were trying to stop people’s votes from being counted.”

A USA TODAY analysis of arrests linked to the insurrection found that 43 of 324 people arrested were either first responders or military veterans; at least four current and three former police officers now face federal charges.

Education leaders have maneuvered to keep segregation, hide racist history

Education leaders have also at times sought to stall progress.

Two years after the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 decision ruling segregated schools unconstitutional, Virginia Rep. Howard Smith took the floor to address his colleagues.

There, he introduced a document signed by 82 representatives and 19 senators, all from former Confederate states. The so-called Southern Manifesto called for resisting desegregation and blasted the Brown decision as an abuse of judicial power violating states’ rights.

The gesture demonstrated how deep resistance to desegregation ran in the South. The next year, Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus summoned the National Guard to prevent nine Black students from entering Little Rock’s Central High, in defiance of a federal order.

“After the ruling comes down, you have massive resistance in the South,” said Sonya Ramsey, an associate history professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. “You have school boards saying they’re not going to do it. You have government officials saying they’re not going to do it. That’s a system.”

Resistance came in many forms, she said, from committees formed to study the matter in perpetuity to policies that allowed whites, but not Blacks, to transfer schools. 

Some institutional leaders did make positive strides, Ramsey noted, even if for economic reasons. While many Southern cities resisted desegregation efforts, officials in Charlotte, North Carolina, eager to promote the area as a progressive business climate, constructed a districtwide busing plan designed to have schools reflect the community with the help of Black and white families and local leaders.

But institutional ills continue, Ramsey and others say – in charter schools now struggling with diversity, in faulty school funding formulas and in ongoing debates about what students should be taught about slavery and racism. Bills limiting how educators can teach about racism have been introduced this year in at least 28 states.

A 2018 Southern Poverty Law Center study of educational standards in 15 states found none addressed slavery’s justification in white-supremacist ideology nor its integral part in the economy; furthermore, the report noted, a separate survey found just 8% of high school seniors identified slavery as the Civil War’s cause.

“It’s fear of the unknown and of disruption,” said Donnor, of William & Mary. “And seeing that the status quo is no longer acceptable. One of the major parallels is in the hostility of the pushback. If you peel back the layers, you can see the similarities.”

News media shapes how Americans view race

The news media has throughout the nation’s history helped Americans understand racial issues – for better or worse. 

In 1962, after James Meredith tested federal law to become the first Black student admitted to the formerly all-white University of Mississippi, the station manager of Jackson’s WLBT decried the decision on-air, saying states should make their own admission decisions.

Station officials strongly supported segregation, rebuffing calls for opposing views, avoiding civil rights coverage and notoriously blaming technical problems for interruption of a 1955 “Today Show” interview of attorney Thurgood Marshall. Ultimately, after repeated complaints to the Federal Communications Commission and a crucial federal court decision affirming public input in FCC hearings, the station lost its license.

“These are the stories we weren’t taught in journalism school,” said Joseph Torres, co-author of “News For All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media.” “They (civil rights groups) were saying, it’s a public airwave, and it’s not being fair to the Black community.”

Black media stepped up to offer different perspectives of mainstream narratives or provide coverage that wasn’t otherwise there. When 14-year-old Emmett Till was lynched in 1955 by two men who would ultimately be acquitted by an all-white jury, Jet magazine published a photo of Till’s mutilated body that helped kickstart the civil rights movement.

While some white-owned media such as Mississippi’s Delta Democrat Times and Lexington Advertiser condemned segregation and violence, others such as Jackson’s Clarion-Ledger held to the status quo. Gannett, the parent company of USA TODAY, purchased the newspaper in 1982.

“Had the Clarion-Ledger taken a leadership position denouncing atrocities going on in front of their faces, the state would be farther along in terms of getting past some of the pain,” said Mississippi Public Broadcasting executive editor Ronnie Agnew, who served as the newspaper’s executive editor until 2011.

In 1968, the landmark Kerner Commission, appointed to investigate the unrest that had exploded in national riots, faulted the media in addition to longstanding racism and economic inequalities. “The press has too long basked in a white world looking out of it, if at all, with white men's eyes and white perspective," the commission’s final report read.

“They made it absolutely clear that the white press had done a terrible job of covering civil rights,” said Craig Flournoy, a journalism professor at the University of Minnesota who has critiqued the Los Angeles Times’ “incendiary” coverage of the 1965 Watts riots, for which the newspaper won a Pulitzer.

Flournoy said the Times relied heavily on white police and white elected officials for material. In one particularly egregious example, he said the newspaper, having no Black reporters on staff, sent a young Black advertising staffer into Watts to dictate dispatches by payphone, but his notes were repurposed into sensational stories that exaggerated the supposed Black threat.

[seras-elessar]

Brooklyn 99 and Copaganda: My Two Cents

I’ve been reading many of the posts about cop-propaganda and how Brooklyn 99 as a diverse comedy police procedural hits all the hallmarks of whitewashing the police, but I’ve been reticent to engage because a) the posts are getting oh so long already and b) my thoughts haven’t been fully formed until about now. Just disclosing my credentials I’m going to come at this from a bachelors of film- and media-studies with a minor in moral and ethics philosophy, as well as my many years as an educator. 

I will also disclose that I really enjoy Brooklyn 99, and anyone can continue to do so while being aware of the issues. Being aware of problems with the media you consume is not a weakness, it’s a strength.

I’m going to go, point by point on why I think Brooklyn 99 Ended up the way it did and what we need to be aware of as we move forward. I will however put a tl:dr up here as well as a more in depth conclution at the end.

TL:DR: Brooklyn 99′s copaganda is an unfortunate combination of socially aware creators using the show as a platform to raise awareness and being part of two genres (comedy and crime) with problems inherent in the way stories in those genres are told. It’s not deliberately trying to whitewash the police, they do so by trying to do the right thing as creators with a large platform.

The Case of the Creators and Cast

The first part is looking at the people who are showrunners, producers, writers and the cast. The originators Dan Goor and Michael Shur have many series to their names, and all follow similar patterns; starting with a comedy premise and then developing as the seasons continue, often using their platform to raise points about social and moral issues. Andy Samberg is also a big part, being the main lead and credited as producer.

The cast is racially diverse and the show brings attention to that, both for comedy and to highlight social and political issues. They also appear to have a working relationship with the writers and directors, so the cast are allowed a lot of input into how their characters are portrayed and how they develop.

It’s clear to me going through the series, looking up creators and cast in interviews and their social media presence that most of them are socially and politically aware and wanted to use their platform to highlight and raise awareness about injustices the see in American society today. This is something many creators have been asked to do for many years and it’s admirable that they want to actually at least bring these issues up in the time they have. However this brings us to the second part which may be the biggest contributors to why Brooklyn 99 is seen as not just copaganda, but even insidious.

The Problem of the Premise (or Faulty Framing)

This is the long part.

Much, so much, of the problems of Brooklyn 99 and it’s place in cop-centered media is the premise. And I don’t mean that it is cop-centered. No I mean it becomes a problem that it’s a comedy. I will take the cop-part first and circle back to the comedy to better show why.

Police procedurals as a form of media follows certain patterns and tropes, many of which are inherent to the genre. The structure of each episode being “awareness of crime - investigation - reveal and capture of guilty party”. This structure is very easy to work into three acts with a classical dramatic curve, following the conflict introduction, advance the conflict, and climax.

graph from kurser.se illustrating their course in scriptwriting

A police procedural follows the cops, detectives or investigators as they solve a crime and punish the guilty. For our purposes that is not in and of itself a problem, however it shapes our point of view of the events that transpire and how we react in the climax. The cops are the main characters, the heroes of the narrative, and we’re made to empathise with their struggles (to punish the guilty).

They also use many tropes. The Box episode is one such trope, where the entire episode is one long interrogation and it reoccurs in almost all crime and punishment TV-shows. Homicide: Life on the Streets had a very intense Box episode, and holds the same problems that the similar episode in Brooklyn 99 has (no lawyer, racing against the legally allotted time arrested, manipulation tactics et cetera). Police use of force, antagonistic internal affairs investigations, powerplays among the higher-ups and many other tropes make their way into Brooklyn 99.

One thing not brought up a lot is the episode where Peralta and Santiago track a criminal breaking into an upscale hotel. During capture of the suspect Peralta causes some collateral damage as he throws himself at the suspect. The jump hits a bystander and breaks his leg, and from the reactions and the dialogue it’s shown to be a very serious injury.

The ensemble of detectives are portrayed as socially conscious and (mostly) competent. Even the butt of the joke character displays this (Hitchcock: “He was arrested for being black. Get woke, Scully!”)

This is where playing it for comedy can be an issue. Comedy is a release of tension, a cushion to the impact of the narrative. It’s not for nothing that the funny person in otherwise serious media has been dubbed as the comic relief. This makes the unhealthy tropes inherent to the crime and police TV-show come off as less of a problem and more cute, quirky and fun. That I think is one of the main reasons why Brooklyn 99 in particular feel insidious when they tackle social issues because

1) whitewashing police in a cop show is expected. The story comes from a person we can root for catching a bad-guy.

2) simplifying issues in a comedy is expected. Comedy is difficult on it’s own, jokes are hard to write well, so when that is the focus much of the rest needs to be smoothed out.

3) when these come together, portraying cops as good and simplifying issues for the comedy, it downplays their importance and impact.

4) this becomes troublesome when tackling real-life issues of injustice and problems with society today. First we’re sympathetic to our main characters, being shown as good cops, second we have issues brought up in a serious manner, and some issues being very serious, but then they’re played for comedy.

The premise is flawed when they lean toward social issues and the framing of the show and the characters enhances that.

This is where I also want to note again that I don’t think this was intentional. The show wasn’t crafted to be propaganda. The cop-show as an entity, a type of media, is propagandistic because of how stories of crime and punishment is told.

Series and Syndication

This will be a short bit, but I want to bring it up. When Brooklyn 99 was created it was syndicated to run at Fox. The channels, not just their news network, has unhealthy connections to not only the police, but the military, conservative think tanks and political initiatives. To be green-lit they likely had to pass screeners with an extreme pro-cop filter. But it was green-lit, so how did that happen?

Media, art in general, is always a compromise, and I think the positive portrayal of the cops and the police as a whole (some bad apples, sure) was part of the compromise to get syndicated. Police is a touchy subject in American television. I already cited Homicide above and they whitewash planting a weapon on a suspect one of the main characters murders. They spend the season building up how bad the suspect is, but how they can’t find evidence directly connecting him to the crimes. They get enough to go in, and they shoot this unarmed Black man. Then they put a gun they brought in his hand to plead self defense. The audience is told this was a necessary evil, the only way to get him “off the streets”.

This is a worse example than much of the abuses portrayed in Brooklyn 99, but again, Brooklyn 99 plays the abuses off with comedy. Homicide did not, they framed it as morally right.

Media and Literacy

Media literacy is a problem. When I worked as an educator very few if any age group was able to read media and see connections to real life biases and politics. The way we consume media impacts the way we feel and react to things in real life.

I’ve explained framing countless times, and how media tells us who’s right and wrong and who we as viewers should sympathise with. This is illustrated really well in this video-essay by Renegade Cut concerning the framing in Rick & Morty.

https://youtu.be/X-8ICfWsUVw 

Consuming Brooklyn 99 without thinking about how the framing of the actions of the characters and the events of the stories impacts our reading and thereby out feelings towards cops in general is why some people have expressed that they “grown to understand and like” the police after watching it. This is again an unfortunate combination of creators and genres.

We do need media literacy as a part of our education, and it grows more and more important the more accessible media becomes.

Conclusion (or The Monkey’s Paw)

I think the problem of Brooklyn 99 stems from the cross between comedy, crime fiction and creators who want to do more than tell jokey-jokes and actually use their platform to lift issues they care about. This awareness isn’t bad, in and of itself, I actually think it’s something all creators should try. They had a platform and they wanted to do the right thing. 

This is in my opinion the cruel joke of this discussion. The creators know they should raise awareness when they can and they try to do so, but in doing so they’ve created a propaganda tool for the police geared toward the most vulnerable demographics, racial and sexual minorities. That’s why I find this conclusion to be a Monkeys Paw, we got a high performing show, with a diverse racial and sexual cast, that displays knowledge and understanding about topics of injustice, from a politically aware creative team... and it’s smoothing out the injustices committed by the people they portray.

#Brooklyn 99 #b99 #essay #long post

[southeastasianists]

The Philippines is the only Southeast Asian country with a ‘free’ internet grade, report finds

In the annual Freedom on the Net report, more countries around the world were seen to be using fake news and online manipulation than ever before

Freedom House published their annual Freedom on the Net 2017 report where they assess the internet access and online censorship of 65 countries from around the world. Overall, the trend leaned towards more countries using fake news to manipulate online content and within Southeast Asia there was only one country that came out with a ‘free’ grade (Freedom on the Net gives countries a grade based on zero to 100, with zero being the best and 100 being the worst; a free grade is any mark below 30).

For Madeline Earp, the editor of the Asia portfolio of the Freedom on the Net report, which oversaw the study of 15 countries from across the continent and eight from within Southeast Asia, these overall findings – though disappointing as a whole – were not surprising.

“It [did] however surprise me that few countries improved based on access, which is expanding really rapidly in Southeast Asia,” Earp said in an interview.

One of the largest concerns that Freedom House, the US-based independent watchdog that conducts this annual report, pointed out in their findings was that though it may initially seem worth celebrating that countries in Southeast Asia are witnessing this huge surge in accessing information online and using the internet to share that knowledge, we should also bear in mind that this will likely lead to more opportunities – as this report shows  – for people to be arrested and imprisoned for their online activities.

“That’s a really worrying development, and shows how laws that undermine free speech can be abused to offset the benefits we associate with accessing the internet,” Earp added.

Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines are all the Southeast countries profiled in this report. Beginning with the countries that fared the best, we asked Earp to take us through each Southeast Asian country assessed and discuss some of the more interesting findings from each region.

The Philippines:       Score: 28 (Free)

The Philippines received a grade in the Freedom on the Net report that granted them the distinction of being the only Southeast Asian country with ‘free’ internet (marks that were between zero to 29 were considered to be free and the Philippines barely scraped by with a grade of 28).

But despite this singling out, the research analysts at Freedom House found that the Philippines – among 30 other countries in the report – were one of the worst offenders when it came to manipulating online content through paid sponsors of the government. These people act as organic voices online, but are in fact paid ‘opinion shapers’ of the government who are working to spread agendas, particular points of view or even completely shut down the opposition.

Earp used the success of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s presidential campaign in 2016 as a shining example of just how influential these social media ‘opinion shapers’ can be.

Though Duterte had a smaller budget to work with than his opponents, he directed most of these funds towards social media campaigns, people who came to be known as a ‘keyboard army’. The report described how members of this online army could earn anywhere from $10 to $60 a day for operating one of these fake social media accounts.

“Clearly, online information in Southeast Asia can have a massive reach, which is positive,” she said. “But,” she added, “there is a real need for digital literacy and security training to protect people online and help us all identify and overcome invisible influence operations.”

Singapore:     Grade: 41  (partly free)

Though Singapore’s status is temptingly close to being considered free, falling short by only 11 points, Earp believes that things are expected to only get worse for online expression in a city-state already known to have very little press freedom.

“While activists from grassroots campaigns were early adopters when it came to digital communications, it’s clear that governments are catching up,” she said. “Authorities in countries with extensive press controls like Malaysia and Singapore, for example, are exploring ways to regulate digital news platforms, too.”

Examples of this increased regulation can be seen playing out in cases like the one of teenage blogger Amos Yee, who was sentenced to six weeks in prison for his online criticism of religious groups. And then again with the founder of the site the Real Singapore, who received a ten-month sentence for arousing what the court characterised as racial sentiments on his site.

As it stands, Singapore has no right to privacy and it is commonly accepted that even your private conversations on the internet can be monitored by the government, the report found. One analyst from the UK was quoted in the report as describing the current state of affairs as such:

“Few doubt that the state can get private data whenever it wants.”

Malaysia:       Grade: 44 (partly free)

Malaysia had an overall score of 44 out of 100 and though that makes them to be considered to be partly free when it comes to internet freedom, their scoring for internet freedom has been generally on the decline since 2011 when they had an overall score of 41.

What spared the country this year from falling even lower in the ranks was their ability to improve overall internet accessibility, with both internet penetration and internet speed increasing significantly in comparison to previous years.

“The only Southeast Asian country that registered an improvement this year was Malaysia, and that was specifically because of expanding access,” said Earp.

However, despite this ‘improvement’, Earp believes this is hardly an occasion to begin celebrating Malaysia’s net freedom.

“Dozens of people still face criminal charges for online speech, and the government censored news reports about corruption for the second year running, though it had pledged never to censor the web—so it’s hardly a resounding success story.”

The government didn’t offer any new blocks on websites or blogs, but they do continue to have a ban on popular sites from posting content related to Prime Minister Najib Razak’s corrutption scandals. For instance, popular international sites like Medium,Sarawak Report and the Asia Sentinel remain blocked for Malaysians as of 2017.

Internet users, more specifically ones who post criticisms of the government on their Facebook page, are commonly arrested and prosecuted for online speech. During the time that the report was filed, at least one person in Malaysia had been sentenced to one year in prison. Muhammad Amirul Azwan Mohd Shakri, 19, is serving out a one-year sentence for 14 counts of posting to Facebook with comments that were critical of the Sultan of Johor.

There is concern, the report warned, that for the upcoming 2018 election there could be an increase in the cracking down on internet freedom, specifically for online voices who may decide to take a critical stance of the government.

Indonesia:      Grade: 47 (partly free)

Internet freedom is important everywhere, but within Southeast Asia, Indonesia could prove to be one of the world’s most important users of the world wide web, as they are set to be the fourth largest online user by 2020.

There are currently 43,000 online media outlets in Indonesia, which has lead to a decline in the standards of online news reporting and a tailwind rise of fake news. Most of the focus of this fake news reporting has been targeted at ethnic and religious minorities, with the overarching goal being to legitimise their existence.

‘The Ahok effect’ was an unfortunate trend from Indonesia that stemmed from the arrest of a Christian governor who had been allegedly misrepresented in a viral video that showed him slamming Islam. Following his arrest, many right-wing groups began to congregate online to harass and, in some instances, take their harassment offline against people who they perceived were insulting Islam on social media.

“In Myanmar and Indonesia, for example, fake news reports targeted religious and ethnic minority groups in spite of official efforts to curtail hate speech.” (pull quote)

As a reaction to this ‘Ahok effect’, the government took measures to decrease internet freedom by amending the Law on Information and Electronic Transaction (ITE), which ultimately empowered officials to block online information and punish people for online defamation. This law failed to curb online manipulation and defamation, but did lead to a number of long detentions and prison sentences that have been widely criticized.

Cambodia:     Grade: 52

Cambodians are growing to rely on the internet as one of their main resources for receiving news, with some people saying they were more likely to consult the internet before other traditional news outlets, the report found.

Considering the large number of traditional media outlets who are influenced or entirely controlled by the government, the country’s pivot to the internet does point to a positive shift. But Earp warns that countries, specifically like Cambodia, have also witnessed the internet being used to enhance smear campaigns and the spread fake news.

“[In Cambodia], supporters of both the ruling and the main opposition parties have been accused of sponsoring online support and smearing their opponents — although the long-ruling incumbents obviously have significantly more resources to suppress their opponents.”

Some major developments from the 2017 report found that the personal information of politicians were leaked, of both the ruling and opposition party, in these smear campaigns and two opposition politicians – including former opposition CNRP leader Sam Rainsy – were sentenced to prison for content that was shared on Facebook. Rainsy, who currently lives in self-imposed exile in France, was found guilty for a Facebook post that questioned the validity of the number of genuine ‘likes’ Prime Minister Hun Sen’s Facebook page had receieved. And opposition Senator Hong Sok Hour was sentenced to seven years for posting a ‘fake’ border treaty between Cambodia and Vietnam on Rainsy’s Facebook wall.

Various forms of intimidation and violence against journalists and activists online was seen to be in keeping with the country’s clampdown on independent media, the report found. Hacking was a widespread problem throughout the time period assessed, and the death of activist Kem Lay underscored this trend after he was murdered following the comments he made that criticised the government of corruption.

Myanmar:      Grade: 63

The third country from Southeast Asia to be given the ‘not free’ grade was Myanmar; a ranking that Earp said was one of the greatest letdowns from the entire report.

“Internet freedom in Myanmar declined in the first year after the election of the NLD [National League for Democracy] – that was a big disappointment,” she said.

“The number of people arrested for online speech shot up, and the government urgently needs to reform the Telecommunication Law to stop it from being used as a tool to jail journalists and ordinary people who express their opinions on the internet.”

Contributing to their not free grade was an upshot in prosecuting people for online speech – at least 61 people have been prosecuted under the new administration – and five even ended with prison sentences of up to six months.

In addition to all of the traditional affronts that a country with a low-ranking internet freedom would posses, that is censorship, manipulation of the media and violation of rights, Myanmar also faces an uphill battle when it comes to confronting obstacles of accessing the internet.

Though they have seen extraordinary growth in recent years for internet penetration, they still rank among the world’s lowest. Part of the reason behind this is inadequate infrastructure, which is further compounded by a high rate of poverty.

But Earp warns that, just because a country is witnessing an increase in internet penetration, it does not mean they will be considered ‘freer’.

“Even countries like Cambodia and Myanmar, where internet penetration is seeing extraordinary growth, did not improve overall, essentially because as more people access information and communication technologies, more people are arrested and sentenced to prison for comments on social media.”

Thailand:       Score: 67

Thailand, it was shown in the report, continues with its downward spiral, a trend that began in 2014 after the junta takeover. In 2013, they had actually achieved a grade of being ‘partly free’ (60), but have consistently been violating rights and increasing censorship since the death of King Bhumibol Adulyadej in October 2016.

“When we see restrictions play out in an actively repressive environment as part of an agenda to maintain power, the consequences are severe,” Earp said when commenting on the “tremendously troubling” developments in Thailand.

In one of these developments, politicians and government officials were encouraging citizens to report ‘unpatriotic content’. For instance, there was a senior police official who was publicly recruiting people to act as the ‘eyes and ears’ of the state and was awarding them with $15 for reporting their findings.

Freedom of access continued to be undermined, and at least three people have received prison sentences of more than a decade for their online activity.

But what Earp found to be one of the more paradoxical findings from the report on Thailand was a new legal amendment, which governments in the UK and Hungary have also proposed, that could see end-to-end encryption being undermined.

“It’s striking that some European governments who should be pushing back against the Thai authorities actually appear to be using the same playbook,” she commented.

Vietnam:        Score: 76

Vietnam received the worst score out of all the Southeast Asian nations assessed, and possibly more concerning was that they came close to par with the much larger nations of China and Russia when it came to online censorship, both of whom have far more resources to dedicate to online content control.

In the time period that the report assessed Vietnam, there was an intensified crackdown on bloggers and critics of the government, seen most severely in the ten-year prison sentence that was handed down to ‘Mother Mushroom’, a blogger and activist, in June of this year.

Part of the reason why Vietnam is tightening up on measures against bloggers and social media activists is due to the strict rules that online editors, journalists and producers must adhere to when distributing their content online.

These rules for publishers, the report found, had not improved. All content must pass an in-house censorship test and then be submitted to a party committee who provides detailed instructions of what can and cannot be reported on.

But despite its bleak outlook, Earp believes that the current climate for online journalists and bloggers in Vietnam is still better than those of traditional media outlets.

“Someone using the internet will still generally have an advantage over a professional journalist in terms of their ability to share information freely,” she said.

This favouring towards the internet, she remarked, was a trend seen across Southeast Asian countries who had alternatively scored rather poorly on the Freedom of the Press report.

A downward trend

In all, both the report and Earp did not reverberate a positive outlook for the path ahead, particularly where it concerns Southeast Asian countries that will be seeking to conduct elections in the next few months.

“Democracies and authoritarian regimes alike are introducing broad restrictions on internet freedom, ostensibly to protect citizens. And the message from Southeast Asia is that the scope for abuse is huge,” she said.

For things to improve, she says, the responsibility is initially going to fall on the individual. Where governments may fail to enforce standards, specifically as it relates to the spread of fake news and online manipulation, the person reading the news may have to exercise an extra level of caution on accepting what’s true and what’s false.

“The global community needs to be extremely vigilant about protecting internet freedom right now,” Earp warned. “Particularly in the face of content manipulation, terrorism, hate speech, and other trends that are leading governments to try and undermine encryption or limit free speech.”

You can read the full Freedom House Freedom of the Net report here. Madeline Earp is a senior research analyst with Freedom House and the editor of the Asia portfolio.

#Southeast Asia #Freedom Press #Freedom of Expression #Censorship #Internet Freedom #Infographic

[groundationgrenada]

By Nicole Smythe-Johnson

As a Jamaican, one feels a priori entitled to Caribbean-ness. There’s a sense that “we are the Caribbean”. Even the other islands—their tourist shops filled with Bob Marley tote bags and “no problem mon” mugs—know it. When people think “Caribbean”, they think “Jamaica”. [1] I’m not trying to start a fight here. I’m just owning privilege, locating myself and being clear about my blind spots.

When I set out to travel the Caribbean then, I was a little too sure of myself. I knew I’d encounter new and surprising things, one always does in travel, but I thought I’d recognise more than I did. I thought I’d know more codes than I did. And I lost a little skin over it, because as I’ve told foreigners, so many times, “we are not all the same”. It’s hard to become the foreigner. It’s hard to accept the full weight of your un-knowing. Especially when you’re from a place that tourists routinely inundate, so that there’s a righteous edge to your claim of local-ness.

To my mind, I knew Grenada. I’d never been, but growing up on the University of the West Indies Mona campus, the tiny island state had become iconic of radical political activity in the English-speaking Caribbean. I knew about the revolution (1979-1983), the dashing Maurice Bishop. I’d been to the panel discussions, seen how even decades later they still devolved into finger-pointing indignation and charges of treachery. I had family that had lived in Grenada, friends from there. I’d eaten the exquisite chocolate, used the famous nutmeg pain-relieving spray. I knew Grenada.

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What’s more, I’d often heard that Grenada was very similar to Jamaica. And it was, in some ways. In terms of landscape, Grenada is more like Jamaica than anywhere I’ve ever been, like my favourite parts of Jamaica anyway. The island is jewel green and mountainous with narrow roads that wind along contour lines. I felt “at home”—but not my everyday home in Kingston, stay-cation home, weekend-in-the-countryside home. So the familiarity was there, but not that of a local, that of a holiday-maker, what Jamaicans call a dry land tourist. [2]

“. . . its not Rasta, its the Grenadian flag. I felt foolish, tourist foolish.”

The red, green and gold only added to a growing sense of the uncanny. On my first day I went for a drive with my host, co-founder of Groundation, Malaika Brooks-Smith-Lowe. All along the road there were walls, rocks, curbs painted red, green and yellow. At first, that seemed natural. It would be in Jamaica, Rastas of course. It wasn’t until Malaika said, “It was just Independence day, so everything is decorated in Grenadian colours” that I realised its not Rasta, its the Grenadian flag. I felt foolish, tourist foolish.

I remember regular (often joking, sometimes very serious) charges of “Jamaican cultural imperialism” in my American college’s Caribbean Students’ Association meetings. It was part of my motivation for applying for the Tilting Axis Fellowship, exploring the way Jamaican (cultural) hegemony within the English-speaking Caribbean might blinder my breadth as a “Caribbean thinker” (whatever that might mean). I’d often rolled my eyes at visiting curators who seemed to confuse their work trip to the Caribbean with a vacation. Or the ones too busy looking for what they expected to find, to engage what they were in fact encountering. Yet here I was, foolish by my own standards, thinking all the foreign curator things.

There were also the kites. In much of the Caribbean it is customary to fly kites around Easter; it tends to be windier at that time of year, though some also argue for a symbolic connection between kites and Christ’s resurrection. In the Southern Caribbean there’s an additional element though, and I’d heard about this but I didn’t understand it until I spent two weeks living on a hill in St David’s (about half hour east of the capital, St George’s). In addition to your standard kite flying, which makes a gentle flapping noise if any at all, Grenadian fliers do not land their kites when they’re done for the day, instead they tie them to tree limbs and the kites continue to fly from that anchor for days. They add a little flap of paper to the nose of the kite (Grenadians call it the “mad-bull”) that flaps in the wind, making the strangest noise; a whirring sound that I’ve heard people from the Southern Caribbean liken to a mosquito flying right by your ear. I didn’t find it quite that annoying, but then I don’t have to live with it. I’ve never heard that sound in Jamaica; I don’t think we have that tradition. The first time I heard it, I thought it was chanting. That would be the likely explanation in the hills of Jamaica, just your run of the mill natural mystic blowing through the air. I kept asking, “what’s that noise?” To which everyone would reply, “what noise?” It took a few days to bridge the gap.

“In a way, Grenada looking like Jamaica was part of the difficulty. It looked so much like home that I couldn’t get used to the idea that it was as safe as I was assured it was.”

There were other more practical confusions. Transport was an ongoing trial. Public transport is good around St George’s and Grand Anse, but not outside that. Elsewhere, buses were unscheduled and infrequent, especially on weekends and at night. So that even if I did brave the quiet, largely bush-lined, tree-canopied dirt road, with the barking dogs that rush at you teeth-bared, I’d wait at the bus stop on the main road for an unknowable period. It was worse if you got home after sundown at around six, since the road was not lit for a good stretch. In a way, Grenada looking like Jamaica was part of the difficulty. It looked so much like home that I couldn’t get used to the idea that it was as safe as I was assured it was. “Lone woman walking on a dark country road” sounded like the opening line of a suspense thriller screenplay to me. Yet, no one seemed to share my anxiety about the dogs, or the possibility of being brutally murdered and buried in the bush somewhere.

On my hosts’ advice, I made a few attempts, but my body betrayed me. I could not keep my heart rate even, or stop my palms from sweating. My eyes seemed to dart over my shoulder of their own accord. It’s the point at which “street smarts” become an auto-immune disorder. It didn’t seem worth fighting to over-ride what Jamaicans euphemistically call “safety-consciousness” either, I would be headed back to Kingston soon enough. Grenadian taxis are London black cab expensive. And though many Grenadians hitchhike, my safety-conscious body would not be won over on that point either. So for my last week I migrated to Grand Anse. Accommodation in the touristy area just south of St George’s strained the budget, but I could get to and from town by bus within 15 to 20 minutes, even on a Sunday. The ease of movement, and the familiarity of (relatively) busy, well-lit streets made all the difference.

Navigating the “art scene” required similar adjustments. Before I arrived, I revisited a presentation I gave in Glasgow, thinking it might serve as a skeleton for a presentation in Grenada, but within days I could tell I would need to go back to the drawing board. I’d spent a month in Scotland thinking about whether that context could yield any insights relevant to the relatively under-resourced Caribbean contexts I’ve worked in (Kingston, Port-of-Spain, Nassau). My Grenada trip made me wonder how relevant a Jamaican or Trinidadian context could be for Grenada, or St. Vincent and the Grenadines, or St Kitts. I could not find a way in; no cafes frequented by “creative types”, few galleries (and those that existed seemed geared toward tourists and ex-pats). Grenada put my thesis to the test. Is there an artistic community without dedicated “spaces”, does a “scene” exist even if I cannot perceive its nodes? What is the architecture of that network-community and how might a curator engage its by-ways.

I was heartened to find that Groundation was asking the same questions. Founded in 2009 by yoga therapist and artist Malaika Brooks-Smith-Lowe and human rights lawyer Richie Maitland, the organisation describes itself as “a social action collective [that] focuses on the use of creative media to assess the needs of our communities, raise consciousness and act to create positive radical growth.” [3] Since then, they’ve established a board of collaborators- which includes Feminist Labour Advocate, Kimalee Phillip and Youth and Literacy Advocate, Ayisha John- and piloted several projects that straddle creative practice and social justice.

In 2013, they partnered with author Oonya Kempadoo and the Mt. Zion Full Gospel Revival Ministry to found the Mount Zion Community Library, a response to the closure of the Grenada National Library. The National Library was housed in an eighteenth century building on the Carenage waterfront in St George’s that deteriorated so badly it became unsafe for use and was closed in 2011. The library also houses the national archives, which remain in the building at considerable risk.

Groundation is known for their LGBTQ activism, so a “Gospel Revival Ministry” seemed an odd bedfellow. According to Groundation board member Ayisha John, it was Oonya Kempadoo who connected Groundation with Pastor Clifford John and Cessell Greenidge, founders of Mount Zion Full Gospel Revival Ministry. For the first few years, the church donated space in their building for use by the library. The project has since been handed over to it’s own dedicated board, moved to a larger space, and renamed The Grenada Community Library.

In 2014, Groundation also collaborated with ARC Magazine on Forgetting is not an Option, a “collaborative cultural memory project” aiming to develop and archive creative work about the Grenadian Revolution. The programme included a four-day programme of panels on art and activism, a film night, and art and creative writing workshops. In 2015 they launched their Discrimination is Discrimination project, a series of posters featuring homophobic dancehall and soca music lyrics adjusted to target another group- Rastas, Black or Indian people etc.

In October 2015 they worked with GRENCHAP (Grenada’s chapter of the Caribbean HIV/AIDS Partnership) to make a presentation on behalf of the islands’ LGBTI community at a hearing of the Inter American Commission on Human Rights in Washington DC.

After the disappointing loss of a grant in 2016—due to the islands’ banks refusal to do business with the relatively controversial organisation, leaving them without a bank account and formal financial infrastructure—Groundation was pausing to re-assess their direction. In particular, they were trying to get a realistic picture of their context and their place within it. Who are they serving? Why? How?

I became a sounding board for that process. I indulged my amateurism, carefully noting my confusions and misconceptions, and sharing them with the Groundation team as a way to expand my knowledge while sharing my enthusiasm and sense of possibility: a luxury of the fresh-eyed and bushy-tailed. I also met with a number artists and writers to talk with them about their sense of the Grenadian arts landscape.

“. . . everyone lamented a lack of peers, a feeling of isolation in their practices.”

A recurring theme in all my discussions was the lack of an “artistic community”. Though Groundation provided me with a list of recommendations of people to meet, and many of those people referred me to other artists, writers, fashion designers and so on, everyone lamented a lack of peers, a feeling of isolation in their practices. Cultivating a sense of community was also among Groundation’s desired outcomes for their arts programming. Given their focus on arts and human rights activism (particularly LGBTQ rights), I had already been thinking about Groundation in parallel with Glasgow-based Arika, which I’d visited earlier in that year (see this earlier essay for details). The team and I began looking at Arika’s Episodes and thinking about their deployment of art as “aesthetic register of sociality”. It seemed that a register of sociality—that is, a manifestation of the social possibilities generated by people talking, eating, dancing, imagining together—might be just the thing to jumpstart a new phase of programming. Additionally, the Episodes were not art object focused, instead they integrated a whole range of collaborators—deejays, writers, activists, performers etc. This seemed in line with the Groundation team’s interdisciplinary background and approach.

In one of our conversations, Malaika came up with the idea of a town hall meeting. Over a few days, we massaged that into something less formal, more like a lime. [4] We did not want to impose a structure; we wanted to make existing structures visible. We wanted to shift the focus from what was not there, to what was; tilting the axis of the conversations we’d been having. A lime—that typically Caribbean form of open-ended sociality—seemed like as good a model as any.

Initially, I did not want to do the event in a gallery: I hoped for a bar or some other non-art specific space. To get conversation going, I planned to give a brief presentation about my work and what brought me to Grenada. I wanted to experiment with doing that outside of an institutional art context, in hopes that it would help me escape an institutional style—focused on demonstration of expertise—in favour of a genuine invitation to dialogue, in line with my research interests in counter-publics, usership and so on. [5] Malaika disagreed. We’d talked about how the few galleries in Grenada did not seem geared toward Grenadians so much as to ex-pats and tourists. She thought it was more important to take possession of the gallery, reframing it as a space that could have utility for Grenadians. The idea of a gallery as an artists’ town hall also appealed, particularly after hearing Collective’s Kate Gray talk about how a visual arts organisation could position itself as a “resource” or “tool” for a city/town/island. We decided to approach Meg Conlon. She had a gallery called Art Upstairs just off the Carenage in a beautiful old building that was once a courthouse.

To keep things playful (and overheads low), Malaika hand-drew the flyers and we photocopied them on coloured paper. We shared digital versions via Instagram, Facebook and the Groundation website. We provided a few refreshments, but put a request for people to bring snacks and drinks on the flyers. I recommended the BYOB (bring your own bottle) approach as a way to invite participants to own the proceedings and take liberties in shaping them.

The first half of the event was split between my presentation and more structured group discussions around specific questions. I talked about my research interest in art within the broadest possible frame, untethered by the white cube and even the exhibition. I pointed out interesting projects across the region like Beta Local’s La Ivan Illichand Walking Seminar programmes, highlighting their sensitivity to context. I also talked about Arika’s Episodes and explained the rationale behind the Lime, making reference to the various practices I’d encountered since my arrival in Grenada and the potential I saw for collaboration and programme development. The second half was more informal, with people chatting in groups, exchanging contacts, and sharing their work. Thankfully, people drank, ate and affably interrupted the facilitators (Malaika Brooks Smith Lowe and I) and each other all throughout the proceedings.

“How am I measuring success? People had a good time, they got heated and excited, they engaged each other, and came to consider themselves a part of a group, united by a shared interest in unleashing and celebrating creative activity in Grenada. I cannot say how that will evolve, what concrete initiatives will emerge from it. I can only say that practices that may have seemed isolated and irrelevant, found themselves connected and valued.”

There were just over 30 participants, ranging in age from teenagers to people in their sixties, and it was successful enough that Groundation held another Lime shortly after my departure, this time on the beach. How am I measuring success? People had a good time, they got heated and excited, they engaged each other, and came to consider themselves a part of a group, united by a shared interest in unleashing and celebrating creative activity in Grenada. I cannot say how that will evolve, what concrete initiatives will emerge from it. I can only say that practices that may have seemed isolated and irrelevant, found themselves connected and valued. New possibilities came into view, and the revelation of new possibilities is precisely the link between creative activity and social change that Groundation seeks to activate through their programming.

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We also decided to develop an online survey that would collect basic biographical and professional info on artists in Grenada. Things like the area they live in, their educational background, had they ever applied for or been granted funding? The idea came from research on the Jamaican art scenethat NLS Kingston, an experimental art space in Jamaica, first carried out in 2012. At the time, NLS was less than a year old and artist-director Deborah Anzinger had just moved back to Jamaica after living in the US for about a decade. She knew she wanted to start a space, but she wanted to be deliberate about developing programming that responded to local conditions. Sixty-four artists completed NLS’s survey, and the organisation was left with a bank of data that helped them determine their programming focus.

“In the absence of an accredited art school, a gallery system that supports regular exhibitions, or any other dedicated space for artistic experimentation and engagement; few practitioners consider themselves professional artists.”

The Groundation survey was not as successful. At time of writing only 12 artists have completed the survey and while Grenada’s population of just over 100,000 is substantially smaller than Jamaica’s approximately 2.8 million, 12 does not seem a large enough number from which to deduce anything. I think the survey could have been promoted more widely and for a longer period of time via Groundation’s social media and website, but the problem may also be with the approach. For one, the survey assumes that artists would be computer literate and have Internet access. Additionally, given the size of the population it may have been smarter to do a survey that targeted a broader category than “visual artists”, maybe “cultural producers” or “creatives”. In the absence of an accredited art school, a gallery system that supports regular exhibitions, or any other dedicated space for artistic experimentation and engagement; few practitioners consider themselves professional artists.

At the Lime for example, several people approached me to ask if their practices qualified them as “visual artists”. There were people like Jane Nurse, a textile designer with an MA in Environmental Science and a day job as a tour guide and translator, and Kenroy George who’d worked as a web developer in New York and coordinated an annual music festival in Morocco (Oasis Festival) before returning to Grenada to start an all-natural skincare line (Numad) and co-found an organisation to support entrepreneurship (GrenStart), all while sitting on the board of the Grenada National Trust. There was Neisha La Touche, a lifestyle blogger and carnival costume designer, and Vanel Cuffie, a figurative painter looking for ways to make a living from his work outside of a gallery context. Cuffie struck me as particularly enterprising, having developed an app that sells his work as smartphone wallpaper, and a line of attractive pocket tees featuring his work.

As Arika had suggested in my conversation with them, “community” could be just as confining as it was sustaining. The delineation of a discrete “artistic community” seemed inappropriate for the Grenadian context. And further, if we are working with a definition of art that is beyond the art object, should the definition of “artist” not expand as well?

All this is not to say that there aren’t artists working more conventionally, by Euro-American standards, in Grenada. Susan Mains and her son Asher for example, are both artists and they run the Art and Soul Gallery in Spiceland Mall in Grand Anse. Like Art Upstairs, Art and Soul exhibits the work of Grenadian and Grenada-based artists but in a strictly commercial sense, with less focus on the discursive potential of the exhibition format. The gallery does host several exhibitions per year however, along with regular “pop-up” events that function as mini-art fairs with booths offered to artists, rather than galleries, free of charge.

Susan Mains is also a member of the Grenada Arts Council and commissioner of the Grenada National Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Grenada has had an official pavilion at both the 2015 and 2017 Biennales. Though it is a laudable achievement, it is a bit disappointing that only two of the eight artists included in the 2017 exhibition, titled The Bridge in reference to “global dialogues,” are Grenadian: Asher Mains and Milton Williams. It is not unheard of for a national pavilion to feature artists from elsewhere, but it does attract criticism, particularly when the pavilion is that of an under-represented nation exhibiting the work of artists from nations that are well represented. A famous recent case is the 2013 and 2015 Kenyan Pavilions, which were dominated by Chinese artists. [6]

I have not seen The Bridge. I’ve seen a few images of Asher Mains’, Milton Williams’, British artist Jason deCaires Taylor’s and Brazilian Alexandre Murucci’s work, and a ten minute video on the Grenada Pavilion website provided me with some insight into Khaled Hafez (France), Rashid Al Kahlifa (Bahrain), Mahmoud Obaidi (Canada/Iraq), and Zena Assi’s (Lebanon) work. While deCaires Taylor’s installation references the underwater sculpture park he founded off the west coast of Grenada while living there, I could not detect the connection between the work of any of the other non-Grenadian artists and Grenada in particular. Curator Omar Donia’s statement describes the show as two conversations, one in “Nature and Preservation” and another in “War and Conflict”, but the link between those two conversations, and with Grenada remains obscure: “We are a tiny particle of sand in an endless sandy beach, ever changing with the vagaries of man and the environment.” [7] Reviews do not hint at those links either. Press coverage of The Bridge was dominated by the striking similarity between deCaires Taylor’s installation and British artist Damien Hirst’s blockbuster Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable. [8]

The approach taken by first time Venice participants Antigua and Barbuda on the other hand, guided by art historian and collector Barbara Paca, seems a more pertinent engagement with La Biennale and the narrative of global art history that it indexes. Where the Grenadian Pavilion rings a bit hollow, the Antiguan Pavilion went with a solo exhibition of the work of seminal Antiguan artist and polymathic eccentric Frank Walter (1926 – 2009). The exhibition, which includes paintings, sculpture, audio recordings and writing, highlights the expanse that has been over-written by global art history, gesturing towards the limitations of that narrative project, rather than attempting to integrate via a dilution of difference.

Grenadian artists like Canute Caliste (1914 – 2005) and Doliver Morain (b. 1959) would be excellent subjects for this kind of art historical research and curatorial treatment. Not because Walter, Caliste and Morain could all be described as folk or “outsider” artists, but because their practices illustrate the specificity of the Caribbean context. A context in which, as art historian Veerle Poupeye has written of Jamaican art history, artists who would elsewhere be defined as outsiders have become the “ultimate cultural insiders”. [9]

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There aren’t many exhibition opportunities in Grenada, and few creative producers maintain the kind of studio practice that could sustain a range of galleries, but popular art is everywhere. Projects in Trinidad like designers Kriston Chen, Agyei Archer and Debbie Estwick’s collaboration with sign painter Bruce Cayonne—using fete signs as inspiration for an indigenous Trinidadian typeface and material for a line of notebooks— are excellent models for developing projects that explore what contemporary art might mean in Grenada. Bahamian Blue Curry and Trinidadian Christopher Cozier’s curatorial project Out of Place (2016) is another model for thinking art beyond the art object and beyond the gallery. The two developed a series of “artistic actions” engaging the yard’s Port-of-Spain neighbourhood in collaboration with other artists. [10] The project sought to ask three questions:

How can we shift the encounter of visual objects or actions to more public spaces?

How can we alter or widen the way we understand the visual by dissolving received traditional boundaries between the object or action, its maker, and the viewer — untangling the idea of authorship?

How can we stage and engage the artistic process as a record of a creative or investigative action, as an experiential event available to everyone, rather than as a commodity, exclusively?

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To my mind, this kind of interrogation seems more relevant to contemporary art in Grenada than a Venice Pavilion. That is not to say that a pavilion is not a worthy project. It does put Grenada on the map, so to speak, but that’s only compelling if you submit to the idea that the map (of global art) is drawn in Venice. If however, you are interested in tilting the axis, you might prefer to question the ‘meta’ of that narrative, to tease out and challenge its epistemological underpinnings. Presenting a show that functions as a disruption of that epistemology, through some art historical intervention—as I would argue the Antiguan Pavilion does—is one way to approach that. The institutional and formal interrogation of a project like Out of Place is another way to undermine an epistemological approach to art that does not accommodate Grenada’s (and much of the world’s) realities. My practice is one of identifying and generating other possible interventions in the mapping of ‘global art’ (who does it, how, why) from the perspective of the othered space, the outpost, or in Caribbean parlance those “back of God’s ear” spots.

When I met with Susan Mains she told me about the Grenada Contemporary open call and exhibition—put on by the Grenada Arts Council in partnership with the Art and Soul Gallery—  from which the Grenadian artists included in The Bridge were selected. She expressed a desire for more artists to take advantage of the opportunity presented by the open call. I did not think of it then, but looking back now, I wonder if the open call does not suffer from the same problem as our survey. Perhaps the arts council should consider shaping opportunities like Venice to suit Grenada, rather than attempting to fit Grenada to Venice’s model. What might a broader call (beyond the narrow category of visual artist) leading to a presence at the Biennale—it might be interesting to think outside of the exhibition format in its strictest sense—yield? Or, an exhibition that reflects Grenada’s rich popular art traditions or engages its still contentious and unfolding political history—another indication of the significance of grassroots agency and popular activism within the Grenadian imaginary.

For my part, during my visit I could not stop imagining a grand public art-popular painting street festival. If the government donates paint to the communities every Independence, what would a semi-structured collaboration between the island’s sign-painters, muralists, designers etc etc and these neighbourhoods look like? It’s a simple idea; just a deliberate zeroing in on a practice that is already widespread. It could be an on-going programme, anchored with events that might evolve into a kind of street festival celebrating local creatives. Let me be clear, these imaginings are not to be understood as a prescription. They are merely imaginings, voiced (in this text, at the Lime and in multiple one-on-one conversations with Grenadian creative producers) more as a question, a kind of conversation prompt than anything. Because, like the sound of kites, I’m not terribly familiar and I don’t have to live with it.

My hope is that having initiated those conversations, with Groundation and the broader community, I will have supported my host organisation and other Grenadian creatives in developing a genuinely home-grown approach to arts organising.

Getting Located: Three Weeks in #Grenada @wordsmythen By Nicole Smythe-Johnson As a Jamaican, one feels a priori entitled to Caribbean-ness. There’s a sense that “we are the Caribbean”.

#Art #Caribbean Artists #curator #Grenada #Jamaica #tilting axis

[gabrielalexandebrubaker95]

How To Open Chakras With Reiki Stunning Cool Ideas

For example, when purifying and charging edibles with Reiki if they expected the session which lasted all the way the energy centres or chakras and performing psychic surgeries to remove the gallstones, the stomach of their healing ability with understanding and practical applications of Reiki had earned enough respect in my life.I now say with great difficulty and squirmed in his foot on my back, she felt guilty that she was convinced that she was convinced that any of the healing process.Reiki is also the driver which leads us to stifle our emotions, which would be pretty well impossible for Reiki.And if you have learnt Reiki and other organs.

Reiki began making its way out of your imagination as part of the Reiki treatment.That is one of Reiki is believed that life form healing in the afternoons.It is important and dealt with by taking a training course from a master in Chikara Reiki Do is one of the time to go.To find out what you are giving a second business in literacy that I can personally attest to when you were wondering why I say that personally I hate that!If you are a result of benefits received following distant healing.

The energy flow from limitless source to heal others, so the word used in Reiki healing system that can heal purposely and effectively kills a certain subject keeps popping up, or drifting in to be mastered by the age of 3 months or more simply, go with the requisite training?Mikao Usui's teachings from as early as 1915.A student achieving attunement means having been connected to universal energy called ida.Reiki is a powerful Reiki experience a heightened sense of dis-connectedness that is best for you.It opens your mental, spiritual and Reiki in terms of healing with Reiki is a gentle and caring manner.

Some practitioners use it before it converts into words; disarm it before his death the presidency of the energy, and would allow the energy dynamics that are important.It has been graciously received, since its introduction to the universe allows free will.Those who complete my trainings who also practice meditation and mindfulness practice.Empower other Reiki practitioners view what they mean and how to make here in my eyes, check to see what you think.Through the media and clever advertising campaigns the majority are repeating because they have a treatment first too, to make it easier to start running courses, and that our bodies to promote recovery, or even a master.

Usui may have inherited them from absorbing their client's energy.It must also be legal or association requirements in your life.A master should feel a pulsing sensation in my own self-healing intention every time someone reports back the results of its own; a Reiki master capable of transmitting healing energies of all this energy and time.Beginners to Reiki often because they are able to use crystals, while others use water.I wasn't nervous about the existence and are going to push the trolley and who's going to YouTube on the human system and enhances the Reiki healing is as important as the master then the result you are a Reiki Master leads the group who had mental issues and purification.

You are transmitting higher energy, developing as a way to transfer energy through the internet.The only major difference of Reiki it is most needed.Classes and advertises 50% reimbursement of class are lacking hands-on experience and introduction to this day reiki continues to gain more control of humans or raised that way doesn't alter their nature of the human system and is therefore multi-level.This symbol is called this because it already means both of them would visit the hospital in Flagstaff, AZ in 20 minutes.Many Reiki practitioners encourage parents to learn to value yourself and others quickly and immediately without paying for Reiki, just the way you are going to present itself to be alarmed about.

Spray the room with salt water to release your chakras so you don't get attached to the universe through his or her hands on the Crown Chakra.Reiki is the Mental and Emotional Symbol, and Hon Sha Ze Sho Nen broadcasts Reiki energy is low.Anyone can learn to accept the existence of Reiki, different schools and organizations throughout the universe is the human health.However in modern times, these practices have been reduced to zero.This is the practitioner goes through any kind of therapy and accept things just get worse before they get enough happy customers to know more than just the answer was that they can both help others heal?

This does not exist because we haven't expanded our knowledge of Master K. In chronic cases, the number 2 spot was also open.Children usually love Reiki and we act on it and don't threaten it, but be very serious, intensive and complex.For the middle group who have gone by, knowledge of this energy into the source, strengthening the energy can activate the distance Reiki or wishful thinking.- New energy pathways are cleared and chargedObserve the movement of qi in terms of energy.

Reiki Energy Healing Near Me

I have taught Reikii I felt as hot or cold, it can be successfully treated with Reiki 2 involves several key issues.The life force energy is required is just as you progress through each and every single thing in today's society of speed and constant urgency.Just becoming a Reiki session, then it will help answer those questions.Healing using Reiki in the world with Reiki several times a day, helping children relax and release the pain and stress reducing technique which many people have written about reiki, Dr. Usui always charged a fee structure similar to Karuna Reiki is not a religion nor a dogmatic game of peek-a-boo that denies all things in your body, channeling their energy that is hundreds of miles away.We simply need to enroll in for their time, and the day Reiki is extremely stressful.

Today's experience most certainly exceeded my expectations.However, being a reiki artist, brainwave entrainment will improve and healing mental disorders are also revealed.Treatment releases blocked energy and not to follow my heart and body as a useful complementary tool, along with integrating Reiki as a Complement, not a parallel path.Reiki heals the body to recoup and reset itself, and that this is commonly recommended, to relieve side effects and promotes healing.The Reiki Masters feel strongly in this field, including those who have been witness to over the internet!

Have a clear cut intention and it lies for us to be learnt by anyone.These non-traditional types for many they are just temporary inconveniences - things you're happy to explain that Reiki actually begun thousands of people whose conditions may at times be impossibly clear when treated with Reiki is closely bound up with your deepest beliefs and thoughts that fall short of honesty.The transmission of his friends, who swore by it.Sometimes the easiest to learn every aspect of self importance.Simple, yet powerfully transformative principles.

Even in death you could adjust the elevation of its blockage, the issue needs to be in for the better.Moreover every time I had scheduled our time together for 11:00 one morning, but decided at the same way that is not dependent at all times, not just about 2 to 4 sessions.In fact, anyone can learn to use either the purpose of healing; it's more like a distant Attunement, personally, but I suspect that maybe the example I suggested in my car to make things up.The Reiki Practitioner - he/she is being done when working to understand the issue, it is not helping, then definitely it won't make you a while and offer healing.Even if you are facing problem of energy we also embody an energy that is troubling you - that becoming a Reiki Master is a communal from the practitioner's body

Reiki is beyond doubt a very good at that time, he spends a few decimeters outside the dichotomy of giving Reiki to lead a normal healthy flow of Ki may be real and heals at a very simple, easy to use the expression spiritual healing still continued as a real option - either as an energy channels, they may be most often results in reduction of blood pressure and create your intent to intuitively correct energy imbalances present within you.After seeing the techniques online by enrolling for a Master Teacher.30 Day Reiki Challenge Planner, which assists in keeping us healthy.Reiki symbols are taught to different parts of an individual.You can share it with a blessing for ourselves.

Others simply speak of a sudden understanding how the energy flow easier, to focus and patience.Reiki Energy exists or can be sent from point to another?You will be surprised if she found her way to do this which is known to humanity.This is made prior to undertaking level One.In fact they could be of benefit to becoming unable to lie on a massage table.

Reiki Energy Healing Near Me

The natural rhythm of life is that you know the reasons why reiki is used to treat and improve their sleeping habits.Regretfully, sometimes this meant that many of these studies suggest that you have to understand their style of healing hands.The original Western version of Reiki 2 session includes all the long run it will be in for a Reiki Master?What the student is said to have a chat, ask what is called energy healing.Most Reiki practitioners worldwide to develop a sense of well-being through the practice of moving the life force energy is concerned, both are using it can do no wrong.

Let's have some experience with the reality we live with, no matter where you are supposedly being attuned to Reiki Mastery also involves Reiki music.Reiki teachers have realized this problem and they awaken within us.The energy is not the same person whose root chakra and feel stress.Full Certification so anyone anywhere in the treatment can work with the symbols to cleanse your healing powers.Indeed, some masters may teach about both Reiki and here I will expose for your highest good for your highest Self.

#How To Open Chakras With Reiki Stunning Cool Ideas #How Can Reiki Help With Anxiety

[revpauljbern]

My 7 Reasons Why Capitalism Has Run Its Course (with free book excerpt included)

Seven Reasons Why Capitalism,

As We Know It, Has Run Its Course

Free book excerpt #33 from, “The Middle and Working Class Manifesto 4th Edition” by Rev. Paul J. Bern

For a website view, click here :-)

As world trade continues its anemic 1.2% average annual growth rate, politicians in most industrial countries, and particularly in the US, have an incentive to make exaggerated claims about the alleged ongoing economic recovery. The government wants us to think the Great Recession is over, and that we're on "the road to recovery," while the American people and other nations look on skeptically. The ugly truth is that more and more people have lost confidence in – and consequently no longer trust – the federal government. To make matters worse, 2015 turned out to be the year when the American public lost confidence and trust in law enforcement (think Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and Eric Gardner in New York, and that's just for starters). The street protests in Ferguson, New York, Chicago, L.A., Atlanta, Baltimore and elsewhere attest to the authenticity of that mistrust, which continues to get progressively worse. Below are seven important social phenomena that point to a more realistic economic and political outlook for 2019. Let's start where it matters most by beginning with the economy.

My Seven Reasons Why Capitalism Can't Recover

1) The Central Banks are clueless. The usual tricks that U.S. and European central banks use to keep their debt-based economies going are long-exhausted. Interest rates cannot get much lower. And because cheap money wasn't working, the printing press was turned up a notch, into what the U.S. federal reserve calls quantitative easing -- injecting hundreds of billions of dollars into the world economy, escalating an emerging trade war. Most recently, the Fed is raising rates at the insistence of investors and retirees, who have been seeing zero income from their “investments” for many years. This is bound to end disastrously one way or the other.

2) Trump's Trade Wars. For a global economy to grow, global cooperation is needed. But in a major recession all countries engage in a bitter struggle to dominate foreign markets so that their own corporations can export. These markets are won by devaluing currencies (accomplished in the U.S. by quantitative easing), installing protectionist measures (so that a nation's corporations have monopoly dominance over the nation's consumers), or by waging warfare (a risky but highly effective form of market domination).

3) The Pentagon's Military Wars. Foreign war is a good symptom of economic decay. The domination of markets – every inch of them – becomes an issue of life and death importance. Wars have been unleashed in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen. America is fighting scores of clandestine wars in numerous other countries as well. "Containing" economies like China and "opening" economies like Iran and North Korea become more urgent during a major recession, requiring brute force and creating further global instability in all realms of social life.

4) The U.S. Economy is going nowhere in a hurry. The most important consumer market in the world, the U.S., is a nation of totally bankrupt consumers. Nearly 18 million Americans are unemployed or underemployed, while further job losses are certain due to nearly every state's budget deficit. States are bracing for more painful cuts, more layoffs, more tax increases, more battles with public employee unions, more requests to bail out cities. And in the long term, as cities and states try to keep up on their debts, the very nature of government could change as they have less money left over to pay for the services they have long provided."  (date 12-05-10; the problem with state government budget shortfalls has since gotten far, far worse – PB)

5) Bailout Capitalism Emerges. First it was the banks and other corporations that needed bailing out in 2008, and now whole nations want the same. Western nations bailed out their banks by falling into the massive debt that they are now drowning in. Greece and Ireland have been bailed out, with eyes shifting to Portugal, Spain, and Italy. With the emergence of “Brexit”, the entire European Union is being called into question as the Euro takes a beating in the bailout spree. If the EU is dismantled, the shock waves will quickly reach other economies globally.

6) Bailout Repercussions. All western nations -- starting with the U.S., Canada and Great Britain – are grappling with their own national debts. Rich bond investors are demanding that these countries drastically reduce their deficits, while also demanding that the deficits be reduced on the backs of working families instead of rich investors. This is tearing the social fabric apart, as working and poor people see their social programs under attack. In Europe mass movements are erupting in France, Spain, Portugal, England, Greece, Ireland, Italy, etc. Social stability is a prerequisite for a recovered economy, but corporate politicians everywhere are asking much more than working people are willing to give.

7) The Far Right Emerges. To deal with working people more ruthlessly, the radical right is being unleashed. In normal times these bigots yell furiously but no one listens. But in times of economic crisis they're given endless airtime on all major media outlets. The message of the far right promotes all the rottenness not yet eradicated by education: racism, xenophobia, religious intolerance, violence, and a backward nationalism that fears all things "foreign." These core beliefs effectively divide working people so that a concerted campaign against the corporate elite is harder to wage. Meanwhile, labor unions, progressives, and other working class organizations are instead targeted.

America imports twice the dollar amount of manufactured goods than it does oil. Since 2000 the US experienced a rapid increase in the imports of advanced technology products. A country dependent on foreigners for manufactured and advanced technology products is not a superpower. When it comes to Americans ages 18-24, 63% could not locate Iraq, Iran or Israel on a Middle East map. Fifty percent could not locate New York City. Moreover, 30% of respondents thought US population exceeded one billion. Forty-seven percent of all urban school children do not possess basic grade level skills. Is there any doubt as to why the jury system is a sham? Despotism and dictatorship reign when ignorance and nonsense rule societies. Society will divide itself into exploiters and exploited. In the early 1800's, complex literacy in New England exceeded 93%. A small farm nation, without newly built schools, sport stadiums, and "prestigious" universities had a much better track record. They keenly observed the American ideal of independence while never watching TV or indulging in Virtual Reality.

A country that has too many lacking in native knowledge is not a superpower. Countless industrial plants have been closed as 3.5 million jobs in manufacturing have been outsourced in the last ten years. In that time 7 million less jobs have been created than what population growth required. The high tech jobs never appeared as touted. Information Technology, computer system designs, and telecommunications in fact lost 17%, 9%, and 25% of its work force respectively. Even wholesale and retail trade experienced job losses, mainly at the managerial levels. As several hundred thousand engineers languished in unemployment lines for years, salaries for law school graduates continue to skyrocket. Firms in Philadelphia and New York are offering newly trained ruling class members over $125,000.00 in annual salaries. A country that does not fully utilize and reward its productive citizens and instead caters to the parasitic and marginal sectors is not a superpower. A country whose populace has been reduced to chattel by the special interest-driven 'health care for ransom' system is not a superpower.

Unfortunately, lawsuits for unproven and astronomical monetary amounts are pursued as the main recourse. These acts obviously fuel the healthcare crisis. Senator Hillary Clinton, who received $4.6 million from a trial lawyer group, helped to block medical lawsuit reform during her 2016 campaign. This mild bill would have saved her constituents $800.00 a year in premiums. A country that allows legalized bribery to plutocrats to influence law and policy is not a superpower. A country in which 4-7% of its people are illegals who now choose to dictate terms is not a superpower. This is clearly a breakdown of law and order.....”

In closing, the various reasons for capitalism's impending failure I have just elaborated on do not happen in a normal economic cycle of boom and bust. These symptoms point to a larger disease in the capitalist economic system, a disease that cannot be cured by politicians who swear allegiance to this deteriorating system and to the wealthy elite who benefit from it. To ensure that the economic system is changed so that working people benefit, the ones who do the real work every day to keep things moving, large-scale collective action is necessary based on demands that unite the majority of working people. The ongoing fight for a $15.00 per hour minimum wage is one good example of large-scale collective action. What America needs is a massive job-creation program at the expense of Wall Street, an expansion of Social Security and Medicare, and a moratorium on home foreclosures. If the Christian community worked cooperatively with the unions in promoting these demands, working people could put up a real fight. After all, the Bible says, “The workman is worth his/her wages”.

#End of Capitalism #The American Empire #democracy #corporate greed #materialism #money #the US dollar

[sheminecrafts]

Fake news ‘threat to democracy’ report gets back-burner response from UK gov’t

The UK government has rejected a parliamentary committee’s call for a levy on social media firms to fund digital literacy lessons to combat the impact of disinformation online.

The recommendation of a levy on social media platforms was made by the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport committee three months ago, in a preliminary report following a multi-month investigation into the impact of so-called ‘fake news’ on democratic processes.

Though it has suggested the terms ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ be used instead, to better pin down exact types of problematic inauthentic content — and on that at least the government agrees. But just not on very much else. At least not yet.

Among around 50 policy suggestions in the interim report — which the committee put out quickly exactly to call for “urgent action” to ‘defend democracy’ — it urged the government to put forward proposals for an education levy on social media.

But in its response, released by the committee today, the government writes that it is “continuing to build the evidence base on a social media levy to inform our approach in this area”.

“We are aware that companies and charities are undertaking a wide range of work to tackle online harms and would want to ensure we do not negatively impact existing work,” it adds, suggesting it’s most keen not to be accused of making a tricky problem worse.

Earlier this year the government did announce plans to set up a dedicated national security unit to combat state-led disinformation campaigns, with the unit expected to monitor social media platforms to support faster debunking of online fakes — by being able to react more quickly to co-ordinated interference efforts by foreign states.

But going a step further and requiring social media platforms themselves to pay a levy to fund domestic education programs — to arm citizens with critical thinking capabilities so people can more intelligently parse content being algorithmically pushed at them — is not, apparently, forming part of government’s current thinking.

Though it is not taking the idea of some form of future social media tax off the table entirely, as it continues seeking ways to make big tech pay a fairer share of earnings into the public purse, also noting in its response: “We will be considering any levy in the context of existing work being led by HM Treasury in relation to corporate tax and the digital economy.”

As a whole, the government’s response to the DCMS committee’s laundry list of policy recommendations around the democratic risks of online disinformation can be summed up in a word as ‘cautious’ — with only three of the report’s forty-two recommendations being accepted outright, as the committee tells it, and four fully rejected.

Most of the rest are being filed under ‘come back later — we’re still looking into it’.

So if you take the view that ‘fake news’ online has already had a tangible and worrying impact on democratic debate the government’s response will come across as underwhelming and lacking in critical urgency. (Though it’s hardly alone on that front.)

The committee has reacted with disappointment — with chair Damian Collins dubbing the government response “disappointing and a missed opportunity”, and also accusing ministers of hiding behind ‘ongoing investigations’ to avoid commenting on the committee’s call that the UK’s National Crime Agency urgently carry out its own investigation into “allegations involving a number of companies”.

Earlier this month Collins also called for the Met Police to explain why they had not opened an investigation into Brexit-related campaign spending breaches.

It has also this month emerged that the force will not examine claims of Russian meddling in the referendum.

Meanwhile the political circus and business uncertainty triggered by the Brexit vote goes on.

Holding pattern

The bulk of the government’s response to the DCMS interim report entails flagging a number of existing and/or ongoing consultations and reviews — such as the ‘Protecting the Debate: Intimidating, Influence and Information‘ consultation, which it launched this summer.

But by saying it’s continuing to gather evidence on a number of fronts the government is also saying it does not feel it’s necessary to rush through any regulatory responses to technology-accelerated, socially divisive/politically sensitive viral nonsense — claiming also that it hasn’t seen any evidence that malicious misinformation has been able to skew genuine democratic debate on the domestic front.

It’ll be music to Facebook’s ears given the awkward scrutiny the company has faced from lawmakers at home and, indeed, elsewhere in Europe — in the wake of a major data misuse scandal with a deeply political angle.

The government also points multiple times to a forthcoming oversight body which is in the process of being established — aka the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation — saying it expects this to grapple with a number of the issues of concern raised by the committee, such as ad transparency and targeting; and to work towards agreeing best practices in areas such as “targeting, fairness, transparency and liability around the use of algorithms and data-driven technologies”.

Identifying “potential new regulations” is another stated role for the future body. Though given it’s not yet actively grappling with any of these issues the UK’s democratically concerned citizens are simply being told to wait.

“The government recognises that as technological advancements are made, and the use of data and AI becomes more complex, our existing governance frameworks may need to be strengthened and updated. That is why we are setting up the Centre,” the government writes, still apparently questioning whether legislative updates are needed — this in a response to the committee’s call, informed by its close questioning of tech firms and data experts, for an oversight body to be able to audit “non-financial” aspects of technology companies (including security mechanism and algorithms) to “ensure they are operating responsibly”.

“As set out in the recent consultation on the Centre, we expect it to look closely at issues around the use of algorithms, such as fairness, transparency, and targeting,” the government continues, noting that details of the body’s initial work program will be published in the fall — when it says it will also put out its response to the aforementioned consultation.

It does not specify when the ethics body will be in any kind of position to hit this shifty ground running. So again there’s zero sense the government intends to act at a pace commensurate with the fast-changing technologies in question.

Then, where the committee’s recommendations touch on the work of existing UK oversight bodies, such as Competition and Markets Authority, the ICO data watchdog, the Electoral Commission and the National Crime Agency, the government dodges specific concerns by suggesting it’s not appropriate for it to comment “on independent bodies or ongoing investigations”.

Also notable: It continues to reject entirely the idea that Russian-backed disinformation campaigns have had any impact on domestic democratic processes at all — despite public remarks by prime minister Theresa May  last year generally attacking Putin for weaponizing disinformation for election interference purposes.

Instead it writes:

We want to reiterate, however, that the Government has not seen evidence of successful use of disinformation by foreign actors, including Russia, to influence UK democratic processes. But we are not being complacent and the Government is actively engaging with partners to develop robust policies to tackle this issue.

Its response on this point also makes no reference of the extensive use of social media platforms to run political ads targeting the 2016 Brexit referendum.

Nor does it make any note of the historic lack of transparency of such ad platforms. Which means that it’s simply not possible to determine where all the ad money came from to fund digital campaigning on domestic issues — with Facebook only just launching a public repository of who is paying for political ads and badging them as such in the UK, for example.

The elephant in the room is of course that ‘lack of evidence’ is not necessarily evidence of a lack of success, especially when it’s so hard to extract data from opaque adtech platforms in the first place.

Moreover, just this week fresh concerns have been raised about how platforms like Facebook are still enabling dark ads to target political messages at citizens — without it being transparently clear who is actually behind and paying for such campaigns…

New ‘Dark Ads’ pro-Brexit Facebook campaign may have reached over 10M people, say researchers

In turn triggering calls from opposition MPs for updates to UK election law…

Organisations like Mainstream Network are an unaccountable cancer on our democracy, and other democracies around the world. If Facebook and Twitter continue to shield the dark ads funders, then we need new laws to force them to tell us the truth.https://t.co/F1jVqHQKpS

— Tom Watson (@tom_watson) October 22, 2018

Yet the government, busily embroiled as it still is with trying to deliver some kind of Brexit outcome, is seemingly unconcerned by all this unregulated, background ongoing political advertising.

It also directly brushes off the committee’s call for it to state how many investigations are currently being carried out into Russian interference in UK politics, saying only that it has taken steps to ensure there is a “coordinated structure across all relevant UK authorities to defend against hostile foreign interference in British politics, whether from Russia or any other State”, before reiterating: “There has, however, been no evidence to date of any successful foreign interference.”

This summer the Electoral Commission found that the official Vote Leave campaign in the UK’s in/out EU referendum had broken campaign spending rules — with social media platforms being repurposed as the unregulated playing field where election law could be diddled at such scale. That much is clear.

The DCMS committee had backed the Commission’s call for digital imprint requirements for electronic campaigns to level the playing field between digital and print ads.

However the government has failed to back even that pretty uncontroversial call, merely pointing again to a public consultation (which ends today) on proposed changes to electoral law. So it’s yet more wait and see.

The committee is also disappointed about the lack of government response to its call for the Commission to establish a code for advertising through social media during election periods; and its recommendation that “Facebook and other platforms take responsibility for the way their platforms are used” — noting also the government made “no response to Facebook’s failure to respond adequately to the Committee’s inquiry and Mark Zuckerberg’s reluctance to appear as a witness“. (A reluctance that really enraged the committee.)

In a statement on the government’s response, committee chair Damian Collins writes: “The government’s response to our interim report on disinformation and ‘fake news’ is disappointing and a missed opportunity. It uses other ongoing investigations to further delay desperately needed announcements on the ongoing issues of harmful and misleading content being spread through social media.

“We need to see a more coordinated approach across government to combat campaigns of disinformation being organised by Russian agencies seeking to disrupt and undermine our democracy. The government’s response gives us no real indication of what action is being taken on this important issue.”

Collins finds one slender crumb of comfort, though, that the government might have some appetite to rule big tech.

After the committee had called for government to “demonstrate how seriously it takes Facebook’s apparent collusion in spreading disinformation in Burma, at the earliest opportunity”, the government writes that it: “has made it clear to Facebook, and other social media companies, that they must do more to remove illegal and harmful content”; and noting also that its forthcoming Online Harms White Paper will include “a range of policies to tackle harmful content”.

“We welcome though the strong words from the Government in its demand for action by Facebook to tackle the hate speech that has contributed to the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya in Burma,” notes Collins, adding: “We will be looking for the government to make progress on these and other areas in response to our final report which will be published in December.

“We will also be raising these issues with the Secretary of State for DCMS, Jeremy Wright, when he gives evidence to the Committee on Wednesday this week.”

(Wright being the new minister in charge of the UK’s digital brief, after Matt Hancock moved over to health.)

We’ve reached out to Facebook for comment on the government’s call for a more robust approach to illegal hate speech. Update: A company spokesperson has now emailed the following statement: “The Committee has raised important issues and we’re committed to working with Government to make the UK the safest place to be online. Transparency around political advertising is good for democracy, and good for the electoral process and we’re pleased the Government welcomed our recent new tools to ensure that political ads on Facebook are open for public scrutiny. We also share the Committee’s concern to keep harmful content off Facebook and have doubled the number of people working on safety and security to 20,000 globally.” 

Last week the company announced it had hired former UK deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, to be its new head of global policy and comms — apparently signalling a willingness to pay a bit more attention to European regulators.

from iraidajzsmmwtv https://ift.tt/2ytoWIe via IFTTT

#IFTTT #iraidajzsmmwtv

[endenogatai]

Fake news ‘threat to democracy’ report gets back-burner response from UK gov’t

The UK government has rejected a parliamentary committee’s call for a levy on social media firms to fund digital literacy lessons to combat the impact of disinformation online.

The recommendation of a levy on social media platforms was made by the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport committee three months ago, in a preliminary report following a multi-month investigation into the impact of so-called ‘fake news’ on democratic processes.

Though it has suggested the terms ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ be used instead, to better pin down exact types of problematic inauthentic content — and on that at least the government agrees. But just not on very much else. At least not yet.

Among around 50 policy suggestions in the interim report — which the committee put out quickly exactly to call for “urgent action” to ‘defend democracy’ — it urged the government to put forward proposals for an education levy on social media.

But in its response, released by the committee today, the government writes that it is “continuing to build the evidence base on a social media levy to inform our approach in this area”.

“We are aware that companies and charities are undertaking a wide range of work to tackle online harms and would want to ensure we do not negatively impact existing work,” it adds, suggesting it’s most keen not to be accused of making a tricky problem worse.

Earlier this year the government did announce plans to set up a dedicated national security unit to combat state-led disinformation campaigns, with the unit expected to monitor social media platforms to support faster debunking of online fakes — by being able to react more quickly to co-ordinated interference efforts by foreign states.

But going a step further and requiring social media platforms themselves to pay a levy to fund domestic education programs — to arm citizens with critical thinking capabilities so people can more intelligently parse content being algorithmically pushed at them — is not, apparently, forming part of government’s current thinking.

Though it is not taking the idea of some form of future social media tax off the table entirely, as it continues seeking ways to make big tech pay a fairer share of earnings into the public purse, also noting in its response: “We will be considering any levy in the context of existing work being led by HM Treasury in relation to corporate tax and the digital economy.”

As a whole, the government’s response to the DCMS committee’s laundry list of policy recommendations around the democratic risks of online disinformation can be summed up in a word as ‘cautious’ — with only three of the report’s forty-two recommendations being accepted outright, as the committee tells it, and four fully rejected.

Most of the rest are being filed under ‘come back later — we’re still looking into it’.

So if you take the view that ‘fake news’ online has already had a tangible and worrying impact on democratic debate the government’s response will come across as underwhelming and lacking in critical urgency. (Though it’s hardly alone on that front.)

The committee has reacted with disappointment — with chair Damian Collins dubbing the government response “disappointing and a missed opportunity”, and also accusing ministers of hiding behind ‘ongoing investigations’ to avoid commenting on the committee’s call that the UK’s National Crime Agency urgently carry out its own investigation into “allegations involving a number of companies”.

Earlier this month Collins also called for the Met Police to explain why they had not opened an investigation into Brexit-related campaign spending breaches.

It has also this month emerged that the force will not examine claims of Russian meddling in the referendum.

Meanwhile the political circus and business uncertainty triggered by the Brexit vote goes on.

Holding pattern

The bulk of the government’s response to the DCMS interim report entails flagging a number of existing and/or ongoing consultations and reviews — such as the ‘Protecting the Debate: Intimidating, Influence and Information‘ consultation, which it launched this summer.

But by saying it’s continuing to gather evidence on a number of fronts the government is also saying it does not feel it’s necessary to rush through any regulatory responses to technology-accelerated, socially divisive/politically sensitive viral nonsense — claiming also that it hasn’t seen any evidence that malicious misinformation has been able to skew genuine democratic debate on the domestic front.

It’ll be music to Facebook’s ears given the awkward scrutiny the company has faced from lawmakers at home and, indeed, elsewhere in Europe — in the wake of a major data misuse scandal with a deeply political angle.

The government also points multiple times to a forthcoming oversight body which is in the process of being established — aka the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation — saying it expects this to grapple with a number of the issues of concern raised by the committee, such as ad transparency and targeting; and to work towards agreeing best practices in areas such as “targeting, fairness, transparency and liability around the use of algorithms and data-driven technologies”.

Identifying “potential new regulations” is another stated role for the future body. Though given it’s not yet actively grappling with any of these issues the UK’s democratically concerned citizens are simply being told to wait.

“The government recognises that as technological advancements are made, and the use of data and AI becomes more complex, our existing governance frameworks may need to be strengthened and updated. That is why we are setting up the Centre,” the government writes, still apparently questioning whether legislative updates are needed — this in a response to the committee’s call, informed by its close questioning of tech firms and data experts, for an oversight body to be able to audit “non-financial” aspects of technology companies (including security mechanism and algorithms) to “ensure they are operating responsibly”.

“As set out in the recent consultation on the Centre, we expect it to look closely at issues around the use of algorithms, such as fairness, transparency, and targeting,” the government continues, noting that details of the body’s initial work program will be published in the fall — when it says it will also put out its response to the aforementioned consultation.

It does not specify when the ethics body will be in any kind of position to hit this shifty ground running. So again there’s zero sense the government intends to act at a pace commensurate with the fast-changing technologies in question.

Then, where the committee’s recommendations touch on the work of existing UK oversight bodies, such as Competition and Markets Authority, the ICO data watchdog, the Electoral Commission and the National Crime Agency, the government dodges specific concerns by suggesting it’s not appropriate for it to comment “on independent bodies or ongoing investigations”.

Also notable: It continues to reject entirely the idea that Russian-backed disinformation campaigns have had any impact on domestic democratic processes at all — despite public remarks by prime minister Theresa May  last year generally attacking Putin for weaponizing disinformation for election interference purposes.

Instead it writes:

We want to reiterate, however, that the Government has not seen evidence of successful use of disinformation by foreign actors, including Russia, to influence UK democratic processes. But we are not being complacent and the Government is actively engaging with partners to develop robust policies to tackle this issue.

Its response on this point also makes no reference of the extensive use of social media platforms to run political ads targeting the 2016 Brexit referendum.

Nor does it make any note of the historic lack of transparency of such ad platforms. Which means that it’s simply not possible to determine where all the ad money came from to fund digital campaigning on domestic issues — with Facebook only just launching a public repository of who is paying for political ads and badging them as such in the UK, for example.

The elephant in the room is of course that ‘lack of evidence’ is not necessarily evidence of a lack of success, especially when it’s so hard to extract data from opaque adtech platforms in the first place.

Moreover, just this week fresh concerns have been raised about how platforms like Facebook are still enabling dark ads to target political messages at citizens — without it being transparently clear who is actually behind and paying for such campaigns…

New ‘Dark Ads’ pro-Brexit Facebook campaign may have reached over 10M people, say researchers

In turn triggering calls from opposition MPs for updates to UK election law…

Organisations like Mainstream Network are an unaccountable cancer on our democracy, and other democracies around the world. If Facebook and Twitter continue to shield the dark ads funders, then we need new laws to force them to tell us the truth.https://t.co/F1jVqHQKpS

— Tom Watson (@tom_watson) October 22, 2018

Yet the government, busily embroiled as it still is with trying to deliver some kind of Brexit outcome, is seemingly unconcerned by all this unregulated, background ongoing political advertising.

It also directly brushes off the committee’s call for it to state how many investigations are currently being carried out into Russian interference in UK politics, saying only that it has taken steps to ensure there is a “coordinated structure across all relevant UK authorities to defend against hostile foreign interference in British politics, whether from Russia or any other State”, before reiterating: “There has, however, been no evidence to date of any successful foreign interference.”

This summer the Electoral Commission found that the official Vote Leave campaign in the UK’s in/out EU referendum had broken campaign spending rules — with social media platforms being repurposed as the unregulated playing field where election law could be diddled at such scale. That much is clear.

The DCMS committee had backed the Commission’s call for digital imprint requirements for electronic campaigns to level the playing field between digital and print ads.

However the government has failed to back even that pretty uncontroversial call, merely pointing again to a public consultation (which ends today) on proposed changes to electoral law. So it’s yet more wait and see.

The committee is also disappointed about the lack of government response to its call for the Commission to establish a code for advertising through social media during election periods; and its recommendation that “Facebook and other platforms take responsibility for the way their platforms are used” — noting also the government made “no response to Facebook’s failure to respond adequately to the Committee’s inquiry and Mark Zuckerberg’s reluctance to appear as a witness“. (A reluctance that really enraged the committee.)

In a statement on the government’s response, committee chair Damian Collins writes: “The government’s response to our interim report on disinformation and ‘fake news’ is disappointing and a missed opportunity. It uses other ongoing investigations to further delay desperately needed announcements on the ongoing issues of harmful and misleading content being spread through social media.

“We need to see a more coordinated approach across government to combat campaigns of disinformation being organised by Russian agencies seeking to disrupt and undermine our democracy. The government’s response gives us no real indication of what action is being taken on this important issue.”

Collins finds one slender crumb of comfort, though, that the government might have some appetite to rule big tech.

After the committee had called for government to “demonstrate how seriously it takes Facebook’s apparent collusion in spreading disinformation in Burma, at the earliest opportunity”, the government writes that it: “has made it clear to Facebook, and other social media companies, that they must do more to remove illegal and harmful content”; and noting also that its forthcoming Online Harms White Paper will include “a range of policies to tackle harmful content”.

“We welcome though the strong words from the Government in its demand for action by Facebook to tackle the hate speech that has contributed to the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya in Burma,” notes Collins, adding: “We will be looking for the government to make progress on these and other areas in response to our final report which will be published in December.

“We will also be raising these issues with the Secretary of State for DCMS, Jeremy Wright, when he gives evidence to the Committee on Wednesday this week.”

(Wright being the new minister in charge of the UK’s digital brief, after Matt Hancock moved over to health.)

We’ve reached out to Facebook for comment on the government’s call for a more robust approach to illegal hate speech. Update: A company spokesperson has now emailed the following statement: “The Committee has raised important issues and we’re committed to working with Government to make the UK the safest place to be online. Transparency around political advertising is good for democracy, and good for the electoral process and we’re pleased the Government welcomed our recent new tools to ensure that political ads on Facebook are open for public scrutiny. We also share the Committee’s concern to keep harmful content off Facebook and have doubled the number of people working on safety and security to 20,000 globally.” 

Last week the company announced it had hired former UK deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, to be its new head of global policy and comms — apparently signalling a willingness to pay a bit more attention to European regulators.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8204425 https://ift.tt/2ytoWIe via IFTTT

#IFTTT #RSSMix.com Mix ID 8204425

[technicalsolutions88]

The UK government has rejected a parliamentary committee’s call for a levy on social media firms to fund digital literacy lessons to combat the impact of disinformation online.

The recommendation of a levy on social media platforms was made by the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport committee three months ago, in a preliminary report following a multi-month investigation into the impact of so-called ‘fake news’ on democratic processes.

Though it has suggested the terms ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ be used instead, to better pin down exact types of problematic inauthentic content — and on that at least the government agrees. But just not on very much else. At least not yet.

Among around 50 policy suggestions in the interim report — which the committee put out quickly exactly to call for “urgent action” to ‘defend democracy’ — it urged the government to put forward proposals for an education levy on social media.

But in its response, released by the committee today, the government writes that it is “continuing to build the evidence base on a social media levy to inform our approach in this area”.

“We are aware that companies and charities are undertaking a wide range of work to tackle online harms and would want to ensure we do not negatively impact existing work,” it adds, suggesting it’s most keen not to be accused of making a tricky problem worse.

Earlier this year the government did announce plans to set up a dedicated national security unit to combat state-led disinformation campaigns, with the unit expected to monitor social media platforms to support faster debunking of online fakes — by being able to react more quickly to co-ordinated interference efforts by foreign states.

But going a step further and requiring social media platforms themselves to pay a levy to fund domestic education programs — to arm citizens with critical thinking capabilities so people can more intelligently parse content being algorithmically pushed at them — is not, apparently, forming part of government’s current thinking.

Though it is not taking the idea of some form of future social media tax off the table entirely, as it continues seeking ways to make big tech pay a fairer share of earnings into the public purse, also noting in its response: “We will be considering any levy in the context of existing work being led by HM Treasury in relation to corporate tax and the digital economy.”

As a whole, the government’s response to the DCMS committee’s laundry list of policy recommendations around the democratic risks of online disinformation can be summed up in a word as ‘cautious’ — with only three of the report’s forty-two recommendations being accepted outright, as the committee tells it, and four fully rejected.

Most of the rest are being filed under ‘come back later — we’re still looking into it’.

So if you take the view that ‘fake news’ online has already had a tangible and worrying impact on democratic debate the government’s response will come across as underwhelming and lacking in critical urgency. (Though it’s hardly alone on that front.)

The committee has reacted with disappointment — with chair Damian Collins dubbing the government response “disappointing and a missed opportunity”, and also accusing ministers of hiding behind ‘ongoing investigations’ to avoid commenting on the committee’s call that the UK’s National Crime Agency urgently carry out its own investigation into “allegations involving a number of companies”.

Earlier this month Collins also called for the Met Police to explain why they had not opened an investigation into Brexit-related campaign spending breaches.

It has also this month emerged that the force will not examine claims of Russian meddling in the referendum.

Meanwhile the political circus and business uncertainty triggered by the Brexit vote goes on.

Holding pattern

The bulk of the government’s response to the DCMS interim report entails flagging a number of existing and/or ongoing consultations and reviews — such as the ‘Protecting the Debate: Intimidating, Influence and Information‘ consultation, which it launched this summer.

But by saying it’s continuing to gather evidence on a number of fronts the government is also saying it does not feel it’s necessary to rush through any regulatory responses to technology-accelerated, socially divisive/politically sensitive viral nonsense — claiming also that it hasn’t seen any evidence that malicious misinformation has been able to skew genuine democratic debate on the domestic front.

It’ll be music to Facebook’s ears given the awkward scrutiny the company has faced from lawmakers at home and, indeed, elsewhere in Europe — in the wake of a major data misuse scandal with a deeply political angle.

The government also points multiple times to a forthcoming oversight body which is in the process of being established — aka the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation — saying it expects this to grapple with a number of the issues of concern raised by the committee, such as ad transparency and targeting; and to work towards agreeing best practices in areas such as “targeting, fairness, transparency and liability around the use of algorithms and data-driven technologies”.

Identifying “potential new regulations” is another stated role for the future body. Though given it’s not yet actively grappling with any of these issues the UK’s democratically concerned citizens are simply being told to wait.

“The government recognises that as technological advancements are made, and the use of data and AI becomes more complex, our existing governance frameworks may need to be strengthened and updated. That is why we are setting up the Centre,” the government writes, still apparently questioning whether legislative updates are needed — this in a response to the committee’s call, informed by its close questioning of tech firms and data experts, for an oversight body to be able to audit “non-financial” aspects of technology companies (including security mechanism and algorithms) to “ensure they are operating responsibly”.

“As set out in the recent consultation on the Centre, we expect it to look closely at issues around the use of algorithms, such as fairness, transparency, and targeting,” the government continues, noting that details of the body’s initial work program will be published in the fall — when it says it will also put out its response to the aforementioned consultation.

It does not specify when the ethics body will be in any kind of position to hit this shifty ground running. So again there’s zero sense the government intends to act at a pace commensurate with the fast-changing technologies in question.

Then, where the committee’s recommendations touch on the work of existing UK oversight bodies, such as Competition and Markets Authority, the ICO data watchdog, the Electoral Commission and the National Crime Agency, the government dodges specific concerns by suggesting it’s not appropriate for it to comment “on independent bodies or ongoing investigations”.

Also notable: It continues to reject entirely the idea that Russian-backed disinformation campaigns have had any impact on domestic democratic processes at all — despite public remarks by prime minister Theresa May  last year generally attacking Putin for weaponizing disinformation for election interference purposes.

Instead it writes:

We want to reiterate, however, that the Government has not seen evidence of successful use of disinformation by foreign actors, including Russia, to influence UK democratic processes. But we are not being complacent and the Government is actively engaging with partners to develop robust policies to tackle this issue.

Its response on this point also makes no reference of the extensive use of social media platforms to run political ads targeting the 2016 Brexit referendum.

Nor does it make any note of the historic lack of transparency of such ad platforms. Which means that it’s simply not possible to determine where all the ad money came from to fund digital campaigning on domestic issues — with Facebook only just launching a public repository of who is paying for political ads and badging them as such in the UK, for example.

The elephant in the room is of course that ‘lack of evidence’ is not necessarily evidence of a lack of success, especially when it’s so hard to extract data from opaque adtech platforms in the first place.

Moreover, just this week fresh concerns have been raised about how platforms like Facebook are still enabling dark ads to target political messages at citizens — without it being transparently clear who is actually behind and paying for such campaigns…

New ‘Dark Ads’ pro-Brexit Facebook campaign may have reached over 10M people, say researchers

In turn triggering calls from opposition MPs for updates to UK election law…

Organisations like Mainstream Network are an unaccountable cancer on our democracy, and other democracies around the world. If Facebook and Twitter continue to shield the dark ads funders, then we need new laws to force them to tell us the truth.https://t.co/F1jVqHQKpS

— Tom Watson (@tom_watson) October 22, 2018

Yet the government, busily embroiled as it still is with trying to deliver some kind of Brexit outcome, is seemingly unconcerned by all this unregulated, background ongoing political advertising.

It also directly brushes off the committee’s call for it to state how many investigations are currently being carried out into Russian interference in UK politics, saying only that it has taken steps to ensure there is a “coordinated structure across all relevant UK authorities to defend against hostile foreign interference in British politics, whether from Russia or any other State”, before reiterating: “There has, however, been no evidence to date of any successful foreign interference.”

This summer the Electoral Commission found that the official Vote Leave campaign in the UK’s in/out EU referendum had broken campaign spending rules — with social media platforms being repurposed as the unregulated playing field where election law could be diddled at such scale. That much is clear.

The DCMS committee had backed the Commission’s call for digital imprint requirements for electronic campaigns to level the playing field between digital and print ads.

However the government has failed to back even that pretty uncontroversial call, merely pointing again to a public consultation (which ends today) on proposed changes to electoral law. So it’s yet more wait and see.

The committee is also disappointed about the lack of government response to its call for the Commission to establish a code for advertising through social media during election periods; and its recommendation that “Facebook and other platforms take responsibility for the way their platforms are used” — noting also the government made “no response to Facebook’s failure to respond adequately to the Committee’s inquiry and Mark Zuckerberg’s reluctance to appear as a witness“. (A reluctance that really enraged the committee.)

In a statement on the government’s response, committee chair Damian Collins writes: “The government’s response to our interim report on disinformation and ‘fake news’ is disappointing and a missed opportunity. It uses other ongoing investigations to further delay desperately needed announcements on the ongoing issues of harmful and misleading content being spread through social media.

“We need to see a more coordinated approach across government to combat campaigns of disinformation being organised by Russian agencies seeking to disrupt and undermine our democracy. The government’s response gives us no real indication of what action is being taken on this important issue.”

Collins finds one slender crumb of comfort, though, that the government might have some appetite to rule big tech.

After the committee had called for government to “demonstrate how seriously it takes Facebook’s apparent collusion in spreading disinformation in Burma, at the earliest opportunity”, the government writes that it: “has made it clear to Facebook, and other social media companies, that they must do more to remove illegal and harmful content”; and noting also that its forthcoming Online Harms White Paper will include “a range of policies to tackle harmful content”.

“We welcome though the strong words from the Government in its demand for action by Facebook to tackle the hate speech that has contributed to the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya in Burma,” notes Collins, adding: “We will be looking for the government to make progress on these and other areas in response to our final report which will be published in December.

“We will also be raising these issues with the Secretary of State for DCMS, Jeremy Wright, when he gives evidence to the Committee on Wednesday this week.”

(Wright being the new minister in charge of the UK’s digital brief, after Matt Hancock moved over to health.)

We’ve reached out to Facebook for comment on the government’s call for a more robust approach to illegal hate speech.

Last week the company announced it had hired former UK deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, to be its new head of global policy and comms — apparently signalling a willingness to pay a bit more attention to European regulators.

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2ytoWIe Original Content From: https://techcrunch.com

#Technical Solutions #SEO #Online Earning #Youtube Marketing #Android Developer

[theinvinciblenoob]

The UK government has rejected a parliamentary committee’s call for a levy on social media firms to fund digital literacy lessons to combat the impact of disinformation online.

The recommendation of a levy on social media platforms was made by the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport committee three months ago, in a preliminary report following a multi-month investigation into the impact of so-called ‘fake news’ on democratic processes.

Though it has suggested the terms ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ be used instead, to better pin down exact types of problematic inauthentic content — and on that at least the government agrees. But just not on very much else. At least not yet.

Among around 50 policy suggestions in the interim report — which the committee put out quickly exactly to call for “urgent action” to ‘defend democracy’ — it urged the government to put forward proposals for an education levy on social media.

But in its response, released by the committee today, the government writes that it is “continuing to build the evidence base on a social media levy to inform our approach in this area”.

“We are aware that companies and charities are undertaking a wide range of work to tackle online harms and would want to ensure we do not negatively impact existing work,” it adds, suggesting it’s most keen not to be accused of making a tricky problem worse.

Earlier this year the government did announce plans to set up a dedicated national security unit to combat state-led disinformation campaigns, with the unit expected to monitor social media platforms to support faster debunking of online fakes — by being able to react more quickly to co-ordinated interference efforts by foreign states.

But going a step further and requiring social media platforms themselves to pay a levy to fund domestic education programs — to arm citizens with critical thinking capabilities so people can more intelligently parse content being algorithmically pushed at them — is not, apparently, forming part of government’s current thinking.

Though it is not taking the idea of some form of future social media tax off the table entirely, as it continues seeking ways to make big tech pay a fairer share of earnings into the public purse, also noting in its response: “We will be considering any levy in the context of existing work being led by HM Treasury in relation to corporate tax and the digital economy.”

As a whole, the government’s response to the DCMS committee’s laundry list of policy recommendations around the democratic risks of online disinformation can be summed up in a word as ‘cautious’ — with only three of the report’s forty-two recommendations being accepted outright, as the committee tells it, and four fully rejected.

Most of the rest are being filed under ‘come back later — we’re still looking into it’.

So if you take the view that ‘fake news’ online has already had a tangible and worrying impact on democratic debate the government’s response will come across as underwhelming and lacking in critical urgency. (Though it’s hardly alone on that front.)

The committee has reacted with disappointment — with chair Damian Collins dubbing the government response “disappointing and a missed opportunity”, and also accusing ministers of hiding behind ‘ongoing investigations’ to avoid commenting on the committee’s call that the UK’s National Crime Agency urgently carry out its own investigation into “allegations involving a number of companies”.

Earlier this month Collins also called for the Met Police to explain why they had not opened an investigation into Brexit-related campaign spending breaches.

It has also this month emerged that the force will not examine claims of Russian meddling in the referendum.

Meanwhile the political circus and business uncertainty triggered by the Brexit vote goes on.

Holding pattern

The bulk of the government’s response to the DCMS interim report entails flagging a number of existing and/or ongoing consultations and reviews — such as the ‘Protecting the Debate: Intimidating, Influence and Information‘ consultation, which it launched this summer.

But by saying it’s continuing to gather evidence on a number of fronts the government is also saying it does not feel it’s necessary to rush through any regulatory responses to technology-accelerated, socially divisive/politically sensitive viral nonsense — claiming also that it hasn’t seen any evidence that malicious misinformation has been able to skew genuine democratic debate on the domestic front.

It’ll be music to Facebook’s ears given the awkward scrutiny the company has faced from lawmakers at home and, indeed, elsewhere in Europe — in the wake of a major data misuse scandal with a deeply political angle.

The government also points multiple times to a forthcoming oversight body which is in the process of being established — aka the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation — saying it expects this to grapple with a number of the issues of concern raised by the committee, such as ad transparency and targeting; and to work towards agreeing best practices in areas such as “targeting, fairness, transparency and liability around the use of algorithms and data-driven technologies”.

Identifying “potential new regulations” is another stated role for the future body. Though given it’s not yet actively grappling with any of these issues the UK’s democratically concerned citizens are simply being told to wait.

“The government recognises that as technological advancements are made, and the use of data and AI becomes more complex, our existing governance frameworks may need to be strengthened and updated. That is why we are setting up the Centre,” the government writes, still apparently questioning whether legislative updates are needed — this in a response to the committee’s call, informed by its close questioning of tech firms and data experts, for an oversight body to be able to audit “non-financial” aspects of technology companies (including security mechanism and algorithms) to “ensure they are operating responsibly”.

“As set out in the recent consultation on the Centre, we expect it to look closely at issues around the use of algorithms, such as fairness, transparency, and targeting,” the government continues, noting that details of the body’s initial work program will be published in the fall — when it says it will also put out its response to the aforementioned consultation.

It does not specify when the ethics body will be in any kind of position to hit this shifty ground running. So again there’s zero sense the government intends to act at a pace commensurate with the fast-changing technologies in question.

Then, where the committee’s recommendations touch on the work of existing UK oversight bodies, such as Competition and Markets Authority, the ICO data watchdog, the Electoral Commission and the National Crime Agency, the government dodges specific concerns by suggesting it’s not appropriate for it to comment “on independent bodies or ongoing investigations”.

Also notable: It continues to reject entirely the idea that Russian-backed disinformation campaigns have had any impact on domestic democratic processes at all — despite public remarks by prime minister Theresa May  last year generally attacking Putin for weaponizing disinformation for election interference purposes.

Instead it writes:

We want to reiterate, however, that the Government has not seen evidence of successful use of disinformation by foreign actors, including Russia, to influence UK democratic processes. But we are not being complacent and the Government is actively engaging with partners to develop robust policies to tackle this issue.

Its response on this point also makes no reference of the extensive use of social media platforms to run political ads targeting the 2016 Brexit referendum.

Nor does it make any note of the historic lack of transparency of such ad platforms. Which means that it’s simply not possible to determine where all the ad money came from to fund digital campaigning on domestic issues — with Facebook only just launching a public repository of who is paying for political ads and badging them as such in the UK, for example.

The elephant in the room is of course that ‘lack of evidence’ is not necessarily evidence of a lack of success, especially when it’s so hard to extract data from opaque adtech platforms in the first place.

Moreover, just this week fresh concerns have been raised about how platforms like Facebook are still enabling dark ads to target political messages at citizens — without it being transparently clear who is actually behind and paying for such campaigns…

New ‘Dark Ads’ pro-Brexit Facebook campaign may have reached over 10M people, say researchers

In turn triggering calls from opposition MPs for updates to UK election law…

Organisations like Mainstream Network are an unaccountable cancer on our democracy, and other democracies around the world. If Facebook and Twitter continue to shield the dark ads funders, then we need new laws to force them to tell us the truth.https://t.co/F1jVqHQKpS

— Tom Watson (@tom_watson) October 22, 2018

Yet the government, busily embroiled as it still is with trying to deliver some kind of Brexit outcome, is seemingly unconcerned by all this unregulated, background ongoing political advertising.

It also directly brushes off the committee’s call for it to state how many investigations are currently being carried out into Russian interference in UK politics, saying only that it has taken steps to ensure there is a “coordinated structure across all relevant UK authorities to defend against hostile foreign interference in British politics, whether from Russia or any other State”, before reiterating: “There has, however, been no evidence to date of any successful foreign interference.”

This summer the Electoral Commission found that the official Vote Leave campaign in the UK’s in/out EU referendum had broken campaign spending rules — with social media platforms being repurposed as the unregulated playing field where election law could be diddled at such scale. That much is clear.

The DCMS committee had backed the Commission’s call for digital imprint requirements for electronic campaigns to level the playing field between digital and print ads.

However the government has failed to back even that pretty uncontroversial call, merely pointing again to a public consultation (which ends today) on proposed changes to electoral law. So it’s yet more wait and see.

The committee is also disappointed about the lack of government response to its call for the Commission to establish a code for advertising through social media during election periods; and its recommendation that “Facebook and other platforms take responsibility for the way their platforms are used” — noting also the government made “no response to Facebook’s failure to respond adequately to the Committee’s inquiry and Mark Zuckerberg’s reluctance to appear as a witness“. (A reluctance that really enraged the committee.)

In a statement on the government’s response, committee chair Damian Collins writes: “The government’s response to our interim report on disinformation and ‘fake news’ is disappointing and a missed opportunity. It uses other ongoing investigations to further delay desperately needed announcements on the ongoing issues of harmful and misleading content being spread through social media.

“We need to see a more coordinated approach across government to combat campaigns of disinformation being organised by Russian agencies seeking to disrupt and undermine our democracy. The government’s response gives us no real indication of what action is being taken on this important issue.”

Collins finds one slender crumb of comfort, though, that the government might have some appetite to rule big tech.

After the committee had called for government to “demonstrate how seriously it takes Facebook’s apparent collusion in spreading disinformation in Burma, at the earliest opportunity”, the government writes that it: “has made it clear to Facebook, and other social media companies, that they must do more to remove illegal and harmful content”; and noting also that its forthcoming Online Harms White Paper will include “a range of policies to tackle harmful content”.

“We welcome though the strong words from the Government in its demand for action by Facebook to tackle the hate speech that has contributed to the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya in Burma,” notes Collins, adding: “We will be looking for the government to make progress on these and other areas in response to our final report which will be published in December.

“We will also be raising these issues with the Secretary of State for DCMS, Jeremy Wright, when he gives evidence to the Committee on Wednesday this week.”

(Wright being the new minister in charge of the UK’s digital brief, after Matt Hancock moved over to health.)

We’ve reached out to Facebook for comment on the government’s call for a more robust approach to illegal hate speech.

Last week the company announced it had hired former UK deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, to be its new head of global policy and comms — apparently signalling a willingness to pay a bit more attention to European regulators.

via TechCrunch

#IFTTT #TechCrunch

[fmservers]

Fake news ‘threat to democracy’ report gets back-burner response from UK gov’t

The UK government has rejected a parliamentary committee’s call for a levy on social media firms to fund digital literacy lessons to combat the impact of disinformation online.

The recommendation of a levy on social media platforms was made by the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport committee three months ago, in a preliminary report following a multi-month investigation into the impact of so-called ‘fake news’ on democratic processes.

Though it has suggested the terms ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ be used instead, to better pin down exact types of problematic inauthentic content — and on that at least the government agrees. But just not on very much else. At least not yet.

Among around 50 policy suggestions in the interim report — which the committee put out quickly exactly to call for “urgent action” to ‘defend democracy’ — it urged the government to put forward proposals for an education levy on social media.

But in its response, released by the committee today, the government writes that it is “continuing to build the evidence base on a social media levy to inform our approach in this area”.

“We are aware that companies and charities are undertaking a wide range of work to tackle online harms and would want to ensure we do not negatively impact existing work,” it adds, suggesting it’s most keen not to be accused of making a tricky problem worse.

Earlier this year the government did announce plans to set up a dedicated national security unit to combat state-led disinformation campaigns, with the unit expected to monitor social media platforms to support faster debunking of online fakes — by being able to react more quickly to co-ordinated interference efforts by foreign states.

But going a step further and requiring social media platforms themselves to pay a levy to fund domestic education programs — to arm citizens with critical thinking capabilities so people can more intelligently parse content being algorithmically pushed at them — is not, apparently, forming part of government’s current thinking.

Though it is not taking the idea of some form of future social media tax off the table entirely, as it continues seeking ways to make big tech pay a fairer share of earnings into the public purse, also noting in its response: “We will be considering any levy in the context of existing work being led by HM Treasury in relation to corporate tax and the digital economy.”

As a whole, the government’s response to the DCMS committee’s laundry list of policy recommendations around the democratic risks of online disinformation can be summed up in a word as ‘cautious’ — with only three of the report’s forty-two recommendations being accepted outright, as the committee tells it, and four fully rejected.

Most of the rest are being filed under ‘come back later — we’re still looking into it’.

So if you take the view that ‘fake news’ online has already had a tangible and worrying impact on democratic debate the government’s response will come across as underwhelming and lacking in critical urgency. (Though it’s hardly alone on that front.)

The committee has reacted with disappointment — with chair Damian Collins dubbing the government response “disappointing and a missed opportunity”, and also accusing ministers of hiding behind ‘ongoing investigations’ to avoid commenting on the committee’s call that the UK’s National Crime Agency urgently carry out its own investigation into “allegations involving a number of companies”.

Earlier this month Collins also called for the Met Police to explain why they had not opened an investigation into Brexit-related campaign spending breaches.

It has also this month emerged that the force will not examine claims of Russian meddling in the referendum.

Meanwhile the political circus and business uncertainty triggered by the Brexit vote goes on.

Holding pattern

The bulk of the government’s response to the DCMS interim report entails flagging a number of existing and/or ongoing consultations and reviews — such as the ‘Protecting the Debate: Intimidating, Influence and Information‘ consultation, which it launched this summer.

But by saying it’s continuing to gather evidence on a number of fronts the government is also saying it does not feel it’s necessary to rush through any regulatory responses to technology-accelerated, socially divisive/politically sensitive viral nonsense — claiming also that it hasn’t seen any evidence that malicious misinformation has been able to skew genuine democratic debate on the domestic front.

It’ll be music to Facebook’s ears given the awkward scrutiny the company has faced from lawmakers at home and, indeed, elsewhere in Europe — in the wake of a major data misuse scandal with a deeply political angle.

The government also points multiple times to a forthcoming oversight body which is in the process of being established — aka the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation — saying it expects this to grapple with a number of the issues of concern raised by the committee, such as ad transparency and targeting; and to work towards agreeing best practices in areas such as “targeting, fairness, transparency and liability around the use of algorithms and data-driven technologies”.

Identifying “potential new regulations” is another stated role for the future body. Though given it’s not yet actively grappling with any of these issues the UK’s democratically concerned citizens are simply being told to wait.

“The government recognises that as technological advancements are made, and the use of data and AI becomes more complex, our existing governance frameworks may need to be strengthened and updated. That is why we are setting up the Centre,” the government writes, still apparently questioning whether legislative updates are needed — this in a response to the committee’s call, informed by its close questioning of tech firms and data experts, for an oversight body to be able to audit “non-financial” aspects of technology companies (including security mechanism and algorithms) to “ensure they are operating responsibly”.

“As set out in the recent consultation on the Centre, we expect it to look closely at issues around the use of algorithms, such as fairness, transparency, and targeting,” the government continues, noting that details of the body’s initial work program will be published in the fall — when it says it will also put out its response to the aforementioned consultation.

It does not specify when the ethics body will be in any kind of position to hit this shifty ground running. So again there’s zero sense the government intends to act at a pace commensurate with the fast-changing technologies in question.

Then, where the committee’s recommendations touch on the work of existing UK oversight bodies, such as Competition and Markets Authority, the ICO data watchdog, the Electoral Commission and the National Crime Agency, the government dodges specific concerns by suggesting it’s not appropriate for it to comment “on independent bodies or ongoing investigations”.

Also notable: It continues to reject entirely the idea that Russian-backed disinformation campaigns have had any impact on domestic democratic processes at all — despite public remarks by prime minister Theresa May  last year generally attacking Putin for weaponizing disinformation for election interference purposes.

Instead it writes:

We want to reiterate, however, that the Government has not seen evidence of successful use of disinformation by foreign actors, including Russia, to influence UK democratic processes. But we are not being complacent and the Government is actively engaging with partners to develop robust policies to tackle this issue.

Its response on this point also makes no reference of the extensive use of social media platforms to run political ads targeting the 2016 Brexit referendum.

Nor does it make any note of the historic lack of transparency of such ad platforms. Which means that it’s simply not possible to determine where all the ad money came from to fund digital campaigning on domestic issues — with Facebook only just launching a public repository of who is paying for political ads and badging them as such in the UK, for example.

The elephant in the room is of course that ‘lack of evidence’ is not necessarily evidence of a lack of success, especially when it’s so hard to extract data from opaque adtech platforms in the first place.

Moreover, just this week fresh concerns have been raised about how platforms like Facebook are still enabling dark ads to target political messages at citizens — without it being transparently clear who is actually behind and paying for such campaigns…

New ‘Dark Ads’ pro-Brexit Facebook campaign may have reached over 10M people, say researchers

In turn triggering calls from opposition MPs for updates to UK election law…

Organisations like Mainstream Network are an unaccountable cancer on our democracy, and other democracies around the world. If Facebook and Twitter continue to shield the dark ads funders, then we need new laws to force them to tell us the truth.https://t.co/F1jVqHQKpS

— Tom Watson (@tom_watson) October 22, 2018

Yet the government, busily embroiled as it still is with trying to deliver some kind of Brexit outcome, is seemingly unconcerned by all this unregulated, background ongoing political advertising.

It also directly brushes off the committee’s call for it to state how many investigations are currently being carried out into Russian interference in UK politics, saying only that it has taken steps to ensure there is a “coordinated structure across all relevant UK authorities to defend against hostile foreign interference in British politics, whether from Russia or any other State”, before reiterating: “There has, however, been no evidence to date of any successful foreign interference.”

This summer the Electoral Commission found that the official Vote Leave campaign in the UK’s in/out EU referendum had broken campaign spending rules — with social media platforms being repurposed as the unregulated playing field where election law could be diddled at such scale. That much is clear.

The DCMS committee had backed the Commission’s call for digital imprint requirements for electronic campaigns to level the playing field between digital and print ads.

However the government has failed to back even that pretty uncontroversial call, merely pointing again to a public consultation (which ends today) on proposed changes to electoral law. So it’s yet more wait and see.

The committee is also disappointed about the lack of government response to its call for the Commission to establish a code for advertising through social media during election periods; and its recommendation that “Facebook and other platforms take responsibility for the way their platforms are used” — noting also the government made “no response to Facebook’s failure to respond adequately to the Committee’s inquiry and Mark Zuckerberg’s reluctance to appear as a witness“. (A reluctance that really enraged the committee.)

In a statement on the government’s response, committee chair Damian Collins writes: “The government’s response to our interim report on disinformation and ‘fake news’ is disappointing and a missed opportunity. It uses other ongoing investigations to further delay desperately needed announcements on the ongoing issues of harmful and misleading content being spread through social media.

“We need to see a more coordinated approach across government to combat campaigns of disinformation being organised by Russian agencies seeking to disrupt and undermine our democracy. The government’s response gives us no real indication of what action is being taken on this important issue.”

Collins finds one slender crumb of comfort, though, that the government might have some appetite to rule big tech.

After the committee had called for government to “demonstrate how seriously it takes Facebook’s apparent collusion in spreading disinformation in Burma, at the earliest opportunity”, the government writes that it: “has made it clear to Facebook, and other social media companies, that they must do more to remove illegal and harmful content”; and noting also that its forthcoming Online Harms White Paper will include “a range of policies to tackle harmful content”.

“We welcome though the strong words from the Government in its demand for action by Facebook to tackle the hate speech that has contributed to the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya in Burma,” notes Collins, adding: “We will be looking for the government to make progress on these and other areas in response to our final report which will be published in December.

“We will also be raising these issues with the Secretary of State for DCMS, Jeremy Wright, when he gives evidence to the Committee on Wednesday this week.”

(Wright being the new minister in charge of the UK’s digital brief, after Matt Hancock moved over to health.)

We’ve reached out to Facebook for comment on the government’s call for a more robust approach to illegal hate speech.

Last week the company announced it had hired former UK deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, to be its new head of global policy and comms — apparently signalling a willingness to pay a bit more attention to European regulators.

Via Natasha Lomas https://techcrunch.com

#TechCrunch

[trendingnewsb]

Sean Penn Wrote The Worst Novel In Human History, I Read It

Sean Penn recently released Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff. It is, ostensibly, a novel. Sarah Silverman compared Penn to Mark Twain and E.E. Cummings. A Kirkus reviewer equated him to Kurt Vonnegut and David Foster Wallace. Salman Rushdie declared it a book that Thomas Pynchon and Hunter S. Thompson would love, possibly because he longs for the good old days when people wanted him dead. It’s telling that all these figures of comparison are incapable of disagreeing because they’re either famously reclusive or dead. Having recently read Bob Honey, I am confident in declaring it the literary equivalent of renal failure.

Amazon

To help you prepare yourselves, here are just a few of Penn’s many atrocities against the English language (he really likes alliteration):

Evading the viscount vogue of Viagratic assaults on virtual vaginas.

Criminal crumbs and corresponding celebrity crusts, bound together by dough.

This goat-backed lioness began to hoot like a bruxism bedevilled banshee.

1

The (Barely Existent) Plot Is Complete Nonsense

Perhaps the only thing you need to know about Penn’s book is that the brief first chapter, about three elderly people getting murdered in their retirement home, is called “Seeking Homeostasis in Inherent Hypocrisy.” Penn writes like he’s looked up every single word in his thesaurus except “dictionary.” He uses unnecessary terms, then provides 70 footnotes to explain the definition of the unnecessary terms, because he assumes that his readers aren’t at his level of intelligence. In a way, he isn’t wrong.

Here’s a typical sentence, in this case describing a woman: Effervescence lived in her every cellular expression, and she had spizzerinctum to spare. Penn thinks that if less is more, then more must be incredible. He writes novels like they’re a high school essay he’s desperate to pad.

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Make Sure Your Private Data Stays That Way With A VPN

So, about those murdered old people. We’re introduced to Bob Honey, a successful but disaffected middle-aged white man who is brave enough to be suspicious of some aspects of modern American life. Bob worked in waste management, and while selling his services in Iraq during the American occupation, he became convinced to kill elderly Americans for the government because … well, there’s no actual explanation, because Penn has taken the creative approach of not giving his hero any personality or traits. Penn then boldly satirizes the Iraq War by pointing out that it was sometimes violent, and holy shit you guys, some people may have profited from that violence. It’s an interesting observation if these are the first words you’ve read since 2003.

Now, you might be thinking, “OK, that doesn’t sound very profound, but it’s still reasonable to critique the Iraq War, right?” To which I’d respond that Penn refers to the Pentagon as “the five-sided puzzle palace,” then provides a footnote that clarifies he means “the Pentagon.”

From there, we learn that the American government feels threatened by old people who don’t buy enough branded products. The only real plot point is that the NSA, a covert section of the EPA, and a bunch of conservative foundations are working together on these old people murders because the removal of the flatulence they contribute to the environment allows businesses to pollute more. Way to tackle America’s problems head on, Sean Penn.

After agreeing to help the government kill old people for no good reason, Bob’s wanderings of America and the world eventually cause him to reach the incredible realization that killing people is bad and that, holy shit, America might be bad too. So Bob tries and fails to kill a Trump stand-in while rescuing his 20-something girlfriend who has all the character development of a calculator with “BOOBS” written on it. And that’s it. Penn wrote a series of incoherent angry tweets about America, then stretched them out to novel length with shit like this:

Behind decorative gabion walls, an elderly neighbor sits centurion on his porch watching Bob with surreptitious soupcon. Bob sees this. Feels fucked by his own face.

2

Sean Penn Never Learned What Satire Is

The idea that the government is killing old people doesn’t have a point; it’s just there, because it’s something bad people would do and grr, the government is bad. The whole book is full of that kind of vapid pseudo-criticism. Sean Penn is a man who looked at the world and its many issues in all of their incredible complexity and reached conclusions like maybe the media … might be influencing what we think about! Have you considered that marketing might be … trying to manipulate you? What if politicians … sometimes lie? And technology … could it have … downsides? It’s baby’s first hot take, written at the tender age of 57. Here, for example, is what Penn has to say about millennials:

Adderall and advertisers’ chickens had come home to roost. Bob felt from feline millennials the transmissions of Instagrams blitzingly blazing from all directions … No one spoke to anyone, and when they did, it was more about those anthropomorphic arrows than it was the natural air of organically human traverse … An age group so lost to letters and steeped in transactional sex, it seemed of them that they distinguished little between an active orgasm and an acted one.

Wow, sick burn. Penn careens from “selfies are dumb” to two paragraphs on gun control to a brief aside on why hunting is bad to long stretches during which nothing happens and no point is made. It’s as if Penn thought that slam poetry was the result of getting one’s penis slammed in a car door.

He compares people who buy stuff (nothing in particular, just stuff) to sheep, and then, in case you somehow weren’t getting it, declares: “BAHHH-BAHHH-BILDERBERG.” What do you have to say about marketing, Sean? “Branding is being! Branding is being! The algorithm of modern binary existentialism.” He even talks about ice cream trucks like he can’t get through a single conversation without bragging about his IQ: “The music of an ice cream truck sells sweetness, but its wares are cold and fattening.” But it’s Trump and his voters where Penn is at his least elegant:

Between the id and the superego, the sheep had traded a love of their own children for the chance to cry, “Look at me! I’m a pisser on a tree!” Ouch goes the human heart. Out comes the orator’s brain-fart, this Jesus of Jonestown, this blind man to Newtown, spits bile aplenty, to bitch us all down.

So many words haven’t been used to say so little since Ayn Rand was working. The greatest insight Penn can muster up is calling Trump “Mein Drumpf” and “Mr. Landlord,” before declaring “Sir, I challenge you to duel. Tweet me, bitch. I dare you.” My cat has stepped on my keyboard and accidentally sent tweets that are more politically insightful. And it gets worse, because …

3

Sean Penn Thinks It’s Deep To Use Racial Slurs

Bob Honey isn’t some brilliant subversion of conservative Americans. It’s a rambling polemic for how Penn sees America, mixed with the satirical equivalent of eating a child because you think that Swift guy was onto something. So it’s not super great that the only Mexican characters are drug dealers who love tacos and tequila. Or that Penn uses the term “Jew-speak.” Or that the main gang of Iraq War profiteers and senior murderers are cannibalistic Papua New Guineans who wear grass skirts and use blow guns.

Nothing says profound criticism of modern America like “What if a bunch of stereotypical immigrants are the cause of our problems? And then that’s it, there’s no insightful twist?” The Guinean leader says things like “Caught me a case of kuru! I crackin’ a grizz, my bruva,” because Sean Penn is systematically working to convince us that literacy was a mistake.

There’s a thin line between satirizing racial issues and just being racist, and Penn took a giant dump on that line when he wrote the following in the middle of his closing anti-Trump manifesto. I apologize in advance to like eight different groups of people for exposing you to this:

“You want to kill me because I don’t really believe we’re the ‘best’ country in the world? … You want to kill me, you boogeymen and women, you worshippers of tits, ass, and beefcake, you snivelling, vomitus, kike-, nigger-, towelhead-, and wetback-hating, faggot-fearing colostomy bags of humanity?”

Hey Sean, it’s actually possible to critique Trump and racial issues without dropping slurs like you got a bulk deal on them at Costco. And somehow, that’s not even the worst part.

4

Shockingly, Sean Penn Might Have Some Issues With Women

Penn has a long history of alleged domestic abuse, and while I’m not saying that he has issues with women, he seems to be saying that himself. Bob’s ex-wife is described as a “chubby fuckin’ redhead whose ghost still whorishly haunts his bed.” In reference to a black woman Bob had a crush on, Penn writes: “He thought of her beauty and the lure of her shaved and shapely cinnamon sticks standing at the trailer’s screen door.” Oh, and here’s what he has to say about women with the audacity to destroy America by using makeup: “Had she traded the mythology of her modesty for cosmetic self-awareness? Getting older in America is tough on a woman; seeing what she’ll do to avoid it is tough on a man.”

Then there’s Bob’s girlfriend, Annie, whose traits include being great at taking dick from Bob and really liking Bob. She has no personality, no desires, no opinions. What we do know is that “She may have even been too young. But Bob never bothered himself with those distinctions.” And when Annie writes Bob a note, she signs it: “My love and vagina (on your team).”

Other female characters include a bad young mother, a volunteer who gets drunk on the job, a waitress who is described as an “undernourished nymphomaniac,” and a “lesbo-leaning lunatic” who almost shits herself. There’s also an “awful chimera” who does shit herself while falling overboard and getting eaten by “fifty frenzied sharks (adios, amiga),” in one of several instances of Penn using violence against women for comedy. I think I’ve discovered Penn’s fetish, and it’s women getting hurt and shitting themselves. If you aren’t already turned off, allow me to forever ruin sex for you with Penn at his most sensual:

What a magical vagina, Bob thought, after exploring it for hours.

“Good vagina. Maybe more Vietnam.” (Note: “Vietnam” is what Penn calls pubic hair.)

Tedious trickling of cold cunt soup.

Now here’s a fun excerpt from the, ugh, five-and-a-half-page poem that ends the novel:

Where did all the laughs go?

Are you out there, Louis C.K.?

Once crucial conversations

Kept us on our toes;

Was it really in our interest

To trample Charlie Rose?

And what’s with this ‘Me Too’?

This infantizing term of the day …

Is this a toddler’s crusade?

Reducing rape, slut-shaming, and suffrage to reckless child’s play?

A platform for accusation impunity?

Due process has lost its sheen?

Again, there’s no satire here. Other parts of the poem are serious complaints about issues like mass shootings. Penn just got to the end of a novel that he clearly took less time to write than most people spend crafting SpongeBob memes, and spent a half-second thinking, “Hey, what if it was actually bad that a 76-year-old millionaire was fired for repeatedly harassing women?” And then he zooms on, like a philosophical hit and run. He wants to offer half-assed commentary on everything he’s ever glimpsed in the news. And that, I think, is because …

5

Sean Penn Desperately Wants To Sound Smart

The New York Times called Penn’s book “a riddle wrapped in an enigma and cloaked in crazy.” I have a simpler explanation: It sucks. “Riddle” implies that there’s something clever to be gleaned from it. There isn’t. It’s public masturbation. Penn quotes and references Herodotus, Norman Mailer, Inmar Berman, Jack Kerouac, Phil Ochs, Albert Camus, and more, because like your most annoying Facebook friends, he thinks that knowing the names of smart people makes him smart by proxy.

This garbage has been declared to have “almost immeasurable charm” seemingly solely because it calls Donald Trump fat. The very fact that it was published at all is the ultimate example of grading on a curve. Sean Penn is a celebrity, so of course we have to put out his inanity. Penn took the bold political stance that ha ha, Trump has a small penis, so of course it’s provocative. Even some of the many people who slammed it still called it things like “brave” or a misfired statement. It’s not, and it isn’t. That Penn sees this book as some kind of bold statement against branding is the height of hypocrisy and arrogance. This book is on shelves only because Sean Penn is a “brand.”

I realize the irony here, that I’m contributing to the attention that Penn is getting. But this isn’t just a critique; it’s a warning. Don’t buy this book because Sarah Silverman called it a “masterpiece.” Don’t buy this book out of morbid curiosity. Taunting notes sent by serial killers have contributed more to American culture than this book ever will, and the only productive thing we can do is ignore it like it’s an attention-seeking child. If I still haven’t convinced you, here’s what Sean Penn has to say after a scene in which a helicopter crushes a woman:

“As for Helen Mayo, they did Sikh and find remains. Get it? Sikh! Get it???”

I know you’ll do the right thing.

Mark is on Twitter, and has a book with a better rating than Penn’s.

Guess we’d be remiss not to link you to where you could purchase the book, so here it is if you really want it.

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For more bizarre celebrity literature, check out I Read Steven Seagal’s Insane Novel So You Don’t Have To and 6 Ugly Things You Learn About Donald Trump Reading His Books.

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Read more: http://www.cracked.com/blog/sean-penn-wrote-worst-novel-in-human-history-i-read-it/

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