#but i believe the only instances of the actual words terrorist or terrorism are first during the broadcast | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

kevinbingham · 4 years

Text

The story of how white terrorists overthrew the US Government

Originally from here.

WOW. I knew some bits of this, but not all of it with the big picture. It is well worth the read. It’s a 2000 word essay (approximately 4 pages). ________________________________________

@michaelharriot 9:24 PM · Oct 21, 2019 ------ Thread:

A lot of white people were shocked to learn about the bombing of Tulsa from HBO's "Watchmen" while most black people are familiar with the bombing of Black Wall Street.

Even historians mention these events as isolated incidents. ------- Racial terrorism is actually normal in American history but I believe we talk about in the wrong way. These are not isolated incidents , nor are they rare.

This is the story of how a national campaign by whites terrorists overthrew the US government ------- A few weeks ago, Donald Trump tweeted that there would be a coup if he was ousted from the presidency and media outlets portrayed him as crazy. It it is NOT crazy to think that a race war is possible.

It has happened FOUR TIMES in history. ------- The first race war was the genocide of native Americans. The Civil War was the second. But I want to talk about the third one because it was actually an overthrow of the US government. ------- When we talk about racial injustice in America, we usally start with slavery and then go to the Jim Crow era. But we often forget that there was a period after the Civil War where white racists actually overthrew the government. This is not hyperbole. ------- First, we must remember that blacks were a LARGE part of Southern states right after the World War Wyipipo ((If they can call it "the War against Northern Aggression" then I can call it what I want).

Ala., Fla., Ga., & La. were more than 40% black. SC & MS were MAJORITY black ------- Because racial terrorists hadn't taken black people's right to vote SEVENTEEN black people served in Congress between 1870 and 1898.

All of these were Republicans (We'll get to what happened later). ------- In many states, including Mississippi, 90% of black eligible voters were registered to vote. Part of this was because Union troops were still in the South after the War for White Supremacy (Again, I call it what I want, you call it what you want). ------- And this "black wave" didn't just happen in Congress. It started happening on the local and state level, too. To combat this, white people enacted poll taxes, literacy tests and...

Nah, I'm just bullshitting.

They just started killing black people. ------- Now history books often mention these incidents as "riots" or "racial violence," but the FBI defines terrorism as acts "inspired by or associated with primarily US-based movements that espouse extremist ideologies of a political, religious, social, racial or environmental nature" ------- In 1866 during the Louisiana Constitutional Convention, ex-Confederates, police officers and regular, store-brand white folks attacked black Republicans in New Orleans. They killed any women, kids & black person they could find.

238 people were killed, most of whom were black ------- Historians estimate the Pulaski, Tenn. KKK committed 1,300 murders during the run-up to the 1868 election.

The same year, in St. Bernard Parish, white Democrats dragged somewhere between 35 and 200 black people from their homes and killed them to prevent them from voting ------- In Opelousas, La. members of the "Knights of the White Camelia" along with white Democrats killed 200-300 black people and slaughtered 27 prisoners in the fall of 1868.

It happened all over SC. Altogether, 1500 were killed to prevent them from voting ------- One of the things you must remember is that in many of these state, the Union soldiers in charge of upholding the law were black.

Can you imagine how salty white confederates must have been to fight for white supremacy and then have negroes lording over them as a reminder? ------- Not to mention the fact that these black people were now controlling politics. Remember, in many of these states, black people were OUTVOTING these traiterous-ass white supremacists.

Some of them decided to overthrow the government. ------- In Laurens County SC, THOUSANDS of white KKK sympathizers attacked black freedman after the white people's plan to stuff the ballot box failed. No one knows how many black people were killed in the resulting mass murder, but the Governor had to declare martial law in the county. ------- In NC, there was an actual 2-Year war. In the Kirk-Holden war (look it up, it's CRAZY), the army had to come in and fight the KKK.

Racist white Democrats took up arms, ARRESTED the leader of the army (Kirk), impeached NC's governor(Holden) and removed him from office. ------- Ark. had to form a militia to fight the KKK. They basically had to travel across the state fighting the Klan. But they didn't just intimidate blacks from voting, they had another plan: They just assassinated black candidates.

The Arkansas "Militia Wars" lasted almost 2 years. ------- Now, in all of these incidents, NO whites were ever charged, and white, racist Democrats managed to overthrow the will of the majority using violence and intimidation.

But none of those stories compare to what happened to the Original 33 in Georgia. ------- In 1868, a few years before Outkast had their first hit, the citizens of Georgia elected 30 black state representatives and 3 black senators to the state legislature.

24 were ministers. Y'all know white folks weren't having this: ------- First, they expelled 26 representatives.

Then they removed the 3 senators.

10 days later, they removed the final "mulatto" representatives from offices.

Then they started killing them. One-quarter of those black elected officials were jailed, beaten or shot. ------- Then, the Ga. Supreme Court ruled that the elected officials had no right to hold office because their veins held" African or blood."

So the representatives decided to go on a protest march to attend a Republican convention. ------- Now this wasn't just legislators, it was supporters too. You see, a lot of these men had been enslaved, so imagine how proud those black people must have been to see these brave men fighting for their rights.

Of course, the white people were incensed! ------- Knowing this, the black people brought their guns. Of course, during this time, this was perfectly normal... Kinda.

ONE reason these men were elected into office was that, after the Great "Can-I-Keep-My-Slave" War (I call it what I want, dammit!) there was an unspoken rule: ------- Knowing this, the black people brought their guns. Of course, during this time, this was perfectly normal... Kinda.

ONE reason these men were elected into office was that, after the Great "Can-I-Keep-My-Slave" War (I call it what I want, dammit!) there was an unspoken rule: ------- So, to combat this, one of those state senators reportedly had FOUR HUNDRED armed guards with him. I guess he figured that they couldn't ask each one individually but we know the whites don't play by the rules. ------- Remember, these people were walking 25 miles to a POLITICAL rally, when they encountered a white "citizens committee."

Now, if you're white, that might not sound scary, but trust me, black people know that ANY white person who refer to themselves as a "citizen" is up to no good. ------- So the citizens committee told the black people to hand over their guns, which the black crowd refused. The white Democrats were like: "aight, we tried," and let them past.

The black people thought: "Damn, that was too easy. If I know white folks, they are up to something." ------- Of course they were.

A little further down the road, in all-white town of Camilla, the sheriff had deputized damn near all of the white "citizens" and handed out guns.

When the black legislators and marchers came through, they massacred them ------- But they didn't just stop there. For WEEKS white Democrats roamed the Georgia countryside beating, murdering, lynching and killing any black person who even looked like they might vote. ------- Some of y'all know this, and some of y'all don't but in the entire history of America, this was the ONLY non-wartime incident that the President of the United States suspended the constitutional right to Habeas Corpus (the right to be detained without being charged with a crime) ------- That's right. A white supremacist army is the only army that ever defeated the US army.

In 1874 the FIVE THOUSAND members of the Democratic "White League" literally overthrew the Republican Lousiana Governor in the Battle of Liberty Place. ------- In Colfax, La., the same year, the White League killed 150 black people and assasinated Republican candidates

The same thing happened that year in Coushactta, La.

So why do I say the KKK won?

Is it a bit extreme to say they "overthrew the government?" -------- Well, not only did these terrorists use violence to oust democratically elected candidates from office but they changed the course of history.

In the 1876 election, racist Democrats cheated so bad that the Electoral College was basically disbanded. ------- For instance, SC stuffed the ballot box xo bad that 101 percent of eligible voters were represented. In Fla and Georgia, they just created their own ballots. Some of the Southern states just REFUSED to give Republicans their electoral votes, regardless of the results. ------- Instead, Congress decided to let a 15-member group go into a back room and decide what to do (It's a little more complicated than this, but not really. They LITERALLY let some white men decide who would be president because of this racial terrorism) ------- And Rutherford B Hayes was declared the winner 185 electoral votes to Tilden's 184

And to make up for a Republican president, Congress and Hayes agreed to do 5 things:

1. Put a Democrat in the cabinet (Hayes did it.) 2. Remove the troops from the South (Hayes did it) -------

3. Build a transcontinental railroad through the south (It never happened) 4. Help build the south from an agrarian economy to an industrial economy (Congress didn't do it)

But the fifth item is why I say the racist terrorists overthrew the government and beat won ------- The South wanted the Congress and the president to assure them that they would not interfere in how Southern states treated its black citizens.

Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce you to Mr. Jim Crow. ------- Now, this kind of racial violence would go on for nearly a century without federal intervention, all because of "compromise" in 1876 when the racist Democrats overthrew the government.

Oh, I haven't forgotten what I said earlier. ------- You see, in 1948, Harry Truman integrated the armed forces and those Southern racists Democrats hated that. They could see that integration was coming, so they decided to form their own party: The Dixiecrats ------- By 1964, almost every Southern Democrat had switched to the Republican party. Their platform was the same as those racial terrorists from the 1860s: They believed they should be able to do whatever they wanted to black people.

Yes, the South seceded again. ------- 100 years after terrorists started their quest to overthrow the government, no Democratic presidential candidate would ever win a majority of white voters in ANY state again.

EVER. ------- So when Republicans talk about how Democrats used to be racists, they are partially correct. But I don't think of them as Democrats or Republicans, I just refer to them as "Racist Whites."

Since the beginning of this country, they have never been on the side of Democracy ------- And these incidents have nothing to do with hate. They are an orchestrated terrorist campaign to keep power. Whether its voter suppression or mass murder, they've done it before and they are still doing it.

And that, my friend, is called "white supremacy" ------- *correction: No Democratic president has won a majority of white voters in any SOUTHERN state since 1964 ------- By the way, I’m not some kind of history genius.

I didn’t know most of this information until a few months ago when phone calls with @HenryLouisGates and @AfricanaCarr sent me down this rabbit hole.

Now THEY are geniuses -------

#racism #end racism #white supremacy #southern history #black wall street #race war #racial injustice #jim crow #white terrorism #us history #micheal harriot #voter supression #kkk

20 notes · View notes

all-things-are-nothing-to-me · 5 years

Text

OK Bookchin

There is perhaps no modern thinker who has done more to damage the term “anarchism” than Murray Bookchin. Beyond all the physical repression over the centuries, by both capitalists and communists, the right and the left, Bookchin’s piece “Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm” stands as the most notable instance of ideological sabotage against anarchism.

Even the title of the piece is a lie. The only reason this “chasm” exists, is because Bookchin and his followers have been harping about it for the last 20 years. Additionally, individualist and social anarchism share a long history of tolerating each other, if not working together. Bookchin conveniently ignores that fact that many individualist anarchists were members of the First International, right alongside social anarchists, and even Marxists. There may have been tension between these groups, but there was no chasm, as there was no chasm until Bookchin created one.

Bookchin starts by going through the history of individualist anarchism, making sure to label them as terrorists pretty quickly out of the gates.

“individualistic anarchists committed acts of terrorism that gave anarchism its reputation as a violently sinister conspiracy.”

This is patently false, as shown in the work “The Anarchist Beast” by Nhat Hong. If Bookchin knew what he was talking about, he would have known that the drive to label anarchists as terrorists was going strong since likely before the 1880s. Yes, some individualist anarchists were terrorists, but anarchism had largely been stuck with that label already. The deeds of terrorists are not what established the label, it was the fear of those in power, and their need to discredit anarchism.

“Despite their avowals of an anarchocommunist ideology, Nietzscheans like Emma Goldman remained cheek to jowl in spirit with individualists. “

Here, we see Bookchin using Nietzsche like his name is some type of slur, in addition to using him to discredit Emma Goldman. Goldman did far more to advance anarchy in this world than Bookchin ever did, and often did it side by side with more social leaning anarchists. Where is the chasm then? Of course Bookchin wants to dismiss Goldman away, as her very life disproves his thesis here.

“The period hardly allowed individualists, in the name of their ‘uniqueness,’ to ignore the need for energetic revolutionary forms of organization with coherent and compelling programs.”

Moving past the 1800s and early 1900s, Bookchin moves on in time, suggesting that social anarchists in the period past that had “compelling programs.” What were these programs exactly? Allying with the Stalinist red fascism in Spain and getting murdered? While individualist anarchists may have been focused on smaller scale actions, the larger scale actions of the social anarchists of the 1930s ended quite literally, in fascism. I would hardly call that compelling or coherent.

“These trendy posturings, nearly all of which follow current yuppie fashions…”

It is at around this point in the piece that Bookchin abandons his delusional version of history, and moves on to mere ad hominem attacks and mere complaining. Bookchin is the last person who should be complaining about anything fashion related! Look at his hat! Bookchin constantly looks like how he thinks a worker should look like, and could absolutely deal with some sense of fashion other than his self-styled “assembly line chic”.

“the 1990s are awash in self-styled anarchists who — their flamboyant radical rhetoric aside — are cultivating a latter-day anarcho-individualism that I will call lifestyle anarchism. Its preoccupations with the ego and its uniqueness and its polymorphous concepts of resistance are steadily eroding the socialistic character of the libertarian tradition.”

Here, Bookchin attempts to coin individualist anarchism as something he created, a “lifestyle anarchism”, if you will. He claims lifestyle anarchism erodes the socialistic character of anarchism? So be it! The socialistic tradition in anarchism is what has led historically to anarchists buddying up to, and later being murdered by, socialists and communists. If erosion of this socialistic character is what it takes for anarchists to stop thinking that leftist traditions have their best interests at heart…Erode away!

“The ego — more precisely, its incarnation in various lifestyles — has become an idée fixe for many post-1960s anarchists, who are losing contact with the need for an organized, collectivistic, programmatic opposition to the existing social order.”

What Bookchin does not realize, is that this type of collectivist, programmatic “opposition” has become ingrained in the social order itself. Mass politics, with its programs for social change, has become part of the status quo. The system itself would much rather have people mimicking its structures and playing within its rules, as opposed to the infinitely diverse forms of resistance available to all individuals at any moment. The state understands how to deal with the same dogmatic resistance it has faced for centuries. It is not prepared for outbursts of individuality, fluid and innumerable in their scope.

“Lifestyle, like individualist, anarchism bears a disdain for theory,”

Yes! We do! We disdain those who fetishize thought, while cowering from action. Unlike Bookchin, who spent his life writing dozens of books, and many more pieces outside of them, the individualists see the world as their parchment upon which to write. Action is worth more than a million words, and also the most effective way to breed more action. People have been theorizing about the same things for centuries now, to little effect. It has been those who commit themselves to enacting theory, rather than steeping themselves in it, who have made the strongest stands against rulership.

“The price that anarchism will pay if it permits this swill to displace the libertarian ideals of an earlier period could be enormous.”

And here is where we see that Bookchin is not interested so much in opposing rulership, as he is using anarchism as a method of control. As evidenced above, Bookchin cares more about anarchism as a static ideology, than as a fluid attempt by people to not be ruled. He is concerned with anarchism as a monolithic entity, because as a singular and dogmatic ideology, anarchism becomes another box in which to contain people’s ideas, and thereby control people’s actions.

“Thus, instead of disclosing the sources of present-day social and personal pathologies, antitechnologism allows us to speciously replace capitalism with technology, which basically facilitates capital accumulation and the exploitation of labor, as the underlying cause of growth and of ecological destruction. Civilization, embodied in the city as a cultural center, is divested of its rational dimensions, as if the city were an unabated cancer rather than the potential sphere for universalizing human intercourse…”

Bookchin also attempts to attack currents of thought like primitivism and anti-civilization, but really just proves that he does not understand the critique these strains are making. Anti-civilization ideas are generally not “anti” technology, so much as they are insisting on an honesty about technology. The technology that exists, exists because of a globalized system of coercion. As anarchists, we need to be critical of this system, and understand that without coercion modern technology would simply not exist. Those who critique technology often do not oppose technology itself, but the manner in which technology is produced. Bookchin’s claim of “antitechnologism” is either a misunderstanding, or a purposeful falsification.

It is also worth noting that Bookchin again vulgarizes primitivism and anti-civ ideas by equating civilization with cities. He dares not address something like Fredy Perlman’s idea of civilization as the roots of all hierarchy…as simply rulership. Instead, Bookchin shows his cowardice by addressing anti-civ ideas with a meme level understanding of it, avoiding those who have thought deeper on the subject.

“Lifestyle anarchism must be seen in the present social context not only of demoralized black ghettoes and reactionary white suburbs but even of Indian reservations, those ostensible centers of ‘primality,’ in which gangs of Indian youths now shoot at one another, drug dealing is rampant, and ‘gang graffiti greets visitors even at the sacred Window Rock monument,’ “

And, of course, no old white man rant would be complete without some statements that just end up sounding like a confused racism. Bookchin actually attempts to claim that lifestyle/individual anarchism is responsible or related to the severe marginalization of people of color?! I believe that responsibility lies with capitalism and the racist structures it has created, not some individualist spectre.

“Social anarchism, in my view, is made of fundamentally different stuff, heir to the Enlightenment tradition…”

Finally, Bookchin comes clean, after the thinly veiled racism, and comes forth with an admission of his true forebearers…the archetypical “old white dudes” of the Enlightenment. Bookchin’s anarchism is not rooted in a simple desire for “no rulers”, but tied up in the liberal white supremacism of Enlightenment ideas.

“it describes the democratic dimension of anarchism as a majoritarian administration of the public sphere.”

Bookchin cannot rid himself of statist ideas, as he goes on to talk about his notion of Communalism. Bookchin does not stop to think “What if the majority does not want to administrate anything?” To him, anarchism is just another system of rulership, albeit a “majoritarian” one. Anarchism to him, becomes less about “no rulers”, and more about “everyone rules”.

“The sovereign, self-sufficient ‘individual’ has always been a precarious basis upon which to anchor a left libertarian outlook.”

Clearly, Bookchin does not believe in any sort of “bottom up” egalitarianism, or else he would not be so quick to dismiss the individual. Free and empowered individuals make up free and empowered societies, and should absolutely be the basis of liberty. One cannot force a system onto people, and then call those people free, no matter how inclusive the system.

“Democracy is not antithetical to anarchism; nor are majority rule and nonconsensual decisions incommensurable with a libertarian society. “

Any sort of rule…Any sort of nonconsensual decision is antithetical to anarchism. Here, again, Bookchin shows his desire to control others in the name of freedom. He literally attempts to reconcile the very tools of the state with anarchism!

“That no society can exist without institutional structures is transparently clear to anyone who has not been stupefied by Stirner and his kind.”

Again, his blatant statism is laid bare. Is “institutional structures” not simply another name for “rulership”? Of course, given the many societal blueprints that Bookchin created in his lifetime, it is clear that Bookchin saw himself at the helm of, or at least a theoretician of these “institutional structures”. Bookchin is incapable of rejecting these structures, because he views them as instruments to be used in ruling over others.

“Certainly, it is already no longer possible, in my view, to call oneself an anarchist without adding a qualifying adjective to distinguish oneself from lifestyle anarchists.”

And again, Bookchin shows that he is the one attempting to dilute anarchism, by attempting to add qualifiers and appendages to it. If anarchism can be obscured by adjectives, then its true meaning of “no rulers” can be watered down and even changed into something else.

“Mere opposition to the state may well unite fascistic lumpens with Stirnerite lumpens, a phenomenon that is not without its historical precedents. “

Bookchin finishes with a bit of classist flair, using the same terms that Marx used with disdain when talking about the underclasses of people. Bookchin, the “good worker”, must berate and chastise others. In a fit of workerism, Bookchin then plays the card common to leftists, and sinks to claims of fascism, putting to rest the notion that he ever had any real argument to begin with.

This final cry of “fascism!” truly shows Bookchin’s true designs here. He is willing to use the threat of fascism to scare those who might not be convinced by the piece’s end into complying. This final statement perfectly illustrates the authoritarianism masking itself as anarchism that Bookchin exemplifies.

“Follow my ‘organized’ and ‘coherent’ plans, or you are a fascist!” he cries.

OK Bookchin…

#no wing anarchy #google murray bookchin #murray bookchin #left wing #anarchy #anarchism #social anarchism

37 notes · View notes

comp6841 · 5 years

Text

Lectures - Week 4 (Mixed)

I’m going to try a new style this week which is to provide a mix of both the content in the 2016 and 2019 lectures to give a detailed understanding of the topics at hand. As I only went to the evening lecture I’ll supplement it with anything I missed covering from Richard’s cryptic notes, other blogs and the course textbook. (although the notes I take are pretty cryptic too)

Type I vs Type II Error Example

I found the example Richard gave in 2016 regarding the deadlock quite interesting - an apartment was on fire but a woman couldn’t get out because the door was locked on both sides. Luckily she was able to escape through the balcony. We have the type 1 error where someone who owns the apartment isn’t able to leave the apartment and the type 2 error where someone who doesn’t own the apartment is able to leave the apartment. You have to ask yourself whether having requiring a key to exit on the inside is really worth it? Is it really that great a risk of an attacker breaking in through the balcony and needing that door to take whatever they are stealing?

Moral Hazard

A significant portion of the reason why humans are a source of poor security is the moral hazards they are subjected to. Often there is a significant incentive to act in the wrong way and the larger this incentive becomes the more likely they are to do it. This once again links back to the human weakness of acting in self-interest - Richard actually argued in the 2016 lecture that it was quite difficult to predict who will go corrupt. I believe the only reason for this is because individuals usually don’t have a spotlight on them at this point (i.e. the resources spent on recon aren’t there), however an analysis in retrospect would make sense of it. We see this all the time when individuals use power for their own personal advantage - we see this overseas, in particular relating to police officers and drug cartels.

Rick Rescorla - World Trade Center (example of dealing with risk)

It all started after the 1993 terrorist attack in the basement of the WTC - Rick (head of security at Morgan Stanley) had recognised the significant shortfalls in the evacuation procedures and the new wave of terrorism aimed at innocent office workers. He was concerned about the WTC being a target and the associated risk; he recommended them to move out. After realising this wasn’t possible he tried to minimise any damage associated with a potential attack by ensuring everyone was prepared for an emergency (drills every 3 months).

After hearing advice over the PA from the Port Authority to stay calm and at their desks after the first plane hit, his plan was immediately mobilised. He knew they wouldn’t stand a chance by doing this if this was a terrorist attack and immediately got everyone to evacuated. His efforts are often credited with saving 2,000 lives in the south tower and he died trying to rescue even more. Basically what this story demonstrated was the first two steps associated with risk management: prevention (trying to move them out) and limit (minimise the casualties). He had analysed the risks and thought a terrorist attack on the building was a credible concern; from here he tried to plan as best he could for it.

Physical Security

We place a lot of importance in protecting our digital assets, but sometimes we forget that they can only be as secure as the servers which are physically holding them. In order to do this we can can look at some of the steps in risk management:

Prevention - physical deterrents including guards, walls, locks, cameras, alarms, etc combined with obscurity in location (i.e. positioning of certain data - mixed, etc)

Limit - decentralising the data (limiting what is in one location), encryption, making tamper evident (through seals, cameras, casing), etc

Breaking Physical Security

I think I already discussed in enough detail how we can compromise physical security in the form of locks last week. Richard discussed in 2016 some of the ideas behind (mechanical) safe locks - basically the idea is you want to be able for the lever to move into the aligned notches of all the wheels. You can find the combinations through listening and noting where the left and right contact areas next to the notches for a number of different positions in which the wheels are parked. (parking just means positioning the wheels 180 degrees opposite to the initial contact area) By finding where the left and right contact points converge for all these parking positions, you can determine the combination of codes. (you just have to try all the orders) For more information, you can checkout this article.

Richard also broke a bike lock (combination) in the lecture applying a somewhat similar technique. The idea is that you apply tension to the lock and due to manufacturing errors this will result in a greater force applied to one of the individual combinations in the lock. This means that when you try moving through the combinations you will be able to hear a ‘click’ when you move over the correct digit. You can then repeat this for all the individual digits.

One of the other big issues facing physical security is tailgating - this means following someone in who has credentials by walking closely behind them. Individuals are less likely to cause suspicion if they “look important”, “look angry” or are “struggling to carry a bulky object”. Security guards can prevent most instances of this, however we are increasingly seeing camera analytic techniques which are able to alert when this occurs.

Hashing

A hash function basically maps any sized input of data to output data of a fixed size. Cryptographic hash functions are a subset of these with the intention of being one-way and extremely difficult to invert. The important properties of a cryptographic hash function include:

Deterministic - hashing the same message will always give the same output

Difficult to reverse - extremely difficult to find a message with a given hash

Avalanche property - small change in the message should result in a large change in the output hash (i.e. changing 1 bit in the input should on average change half the bits in the output)

Hard to find collisions - very hard to find 2 unique messages with the same hash

Relatively fast - quick to compute hash value for any given message

Cryptographic hashes have a wide variety of uses, some of which include:

MACs - verifying integrity of messages

Passwords - “secure” storage of passwords in databases; compute hash of password and compared to hash stored in database on login

Cryptocurrency (proof of work) - basically involves hashing the block data and “doing work” by trying to determine a hash input which would result in a certain number of leading 0s (based on difficulty)

Fingerprints - check the file you downloaded is actually the one you wanted (i.e. minimise man-in-the-middle); means an attacker has to compromise file and web server

Types of Hashing Attacks

The amount of bits of work to perform an attack in modern algorithms such as SHA-2 is usually too high for an attacker to perform, however we will describe some of the means in which they may compromise security:

Preimage attack - given a hash h(M), you can find the original message M

2nd preimage attack - given a message M, you can determine h(M) = H(M’) and find out M’

Collision attack - (less restrictive than above) able to find 2 messages M and M’ such that h(M) = h(M’)

Birthday Attacks

This type of attack basically exploits some mathematics in probability theory - the initial problem is consider a group of 50 people in a room and their birthdays. What is the probability that 2 people have a birthday on the same day? Well let’s calculate the probability that this isn’t the case first (result comes from looking at 365/365 * 364/365 * ... * 315/365):

So basically the probability is around 97% that 2 people in the room have a birthday on the same day (seemingly defying odds). You can apply a similar argument to hash functions (and their input vs output) - for example, crappy MD5 outputs hashes which are 128 bits long (3.4 * 10^38 combinations) and if we consider passwords of length 20 we have around 2.9 * 10^38 combinations. (from example here) We can calculate using the above formula how much work we would need to do for a 99% chance of collision - this is around 6.0 * 10^19 which could be done fairly quickly on a decent multi-CPU setup.

Brute Forcing and Entropy

It’s important to consider how much data is actually conveyed in a message when considering how long it may take for an attacker to compromise it. This is essentially known as entropy - it is the degree of randomness, with lower values indicating a greater level of order. For example, if we consider a substitution cipher involving lower case letters of the alphabet, we have 26! possibilities - this corresponds to around 88 bits of work. In theory this is quite a bit of work for an attacker, however it doesn’t take into account letter frequency and the low entropy of the English language. In the case of 5-letter words there are around 2^23 combinations of 5 letters, however only around 2^13 actually form valid words (meaning each little only adds 2.5 bits on average)

Data Integrity - MACs

One of the big focuses in the lecture was regarding how can we maintain data integrity - that is, know if a message has been modified during transmission. The way in which we achieve this is through hashing and MACs (message authentication codes) - basically what you do is take the message, combine it with a key (shared secret) and hash it. You send this hash alongside the message; on the other end the hash is then calculated for the message using the shared secret and compared to the hash provided as part of the MAC.

The problem with having the key in a known position in the MAC’s calculations is that it is vulnerable to attack. For example, MACs of the form hash(key|message) are vulnerable to length extension attacks - cool article on how to attack SHA-1 MAC in Python here. The way we basically overcome these issues is by using HMACs - this means the MAC is of the form hash(key1 + hash(key2 + message)). Key1 and key2 are derived from the original key by XORing with some constants. Since the key is hashed twice in the message, it means that the code is no longer vulnerable to the attack described earlier.

Social Engineering (Extended)

This method of attack is one of the most common - in fact it is involved in 95% of attacks involving breaching of security. It is essentially the art of learning and lying and relies on the inherit (emotional) weakness in humans. They are some of the most difficult to detect and on average take around 146 days to be reported. The basic cycle of an attack is as follows:

Investigation - recon about the target

Hook - make contact with target and build rapport

Play - obtain the information or use the target

Exit - leave the interaction without suspicion

Some of the main techniques utilised in these forms of attack include:

Pretexting - inventing a scenario to get someone to reveal information or do something

Baiting - taking advantage of a person’s curiosity or greed

Quid pro quo - getting information in exchange

Tailgating - using someone else’s privilege to gain access (i.e. following them in)

Phishing - digitally inventing a scenario to trick someone

A lot of the digital attacks surrounding social engineering revolve around being able to conduct recon and break into accounts via security questions. This is because the answers to these questions aren’t particularly unique and often the details can be found online such as through social media. The best technique in preventing these forms of attacks is to lie on these questions or to use randomly generated sequences of characters. (in fact I’ve been doing this technique for years)

Persuasion is one of the main aspects involved in social engineering - you need to be able to convince someone that they can trust you and what you are asking for is genuine. There are a number of ways you can do this:

Reciprocity - do someone a favour, and they often will feel obligated to return it; it shouldn’t feel like a bribe however (increasing the time delay between the two can increase success)

Liking - if someone likes you as a person they are easier to influence (e.g. presentation, body language, rapport, etc)

Social ques - getting someone to do something based on what they think ‘the norm’ is

Authority - make them believe you have authority; people often blindly follow people with this

GIPA Requests (Guest)

Following up on FOI requests we were talking about the other week as a means of conducting recon and revealing information, Matt O’Sullivan was out as a speaker from the Sydney Morning Herald. He discussed some of his own personal experiences with FOIs and GIPA - one such example was the case of 2 Qantas executives in 2011 who were banned from leaving Vietnam for more than 6 months. He basically went through some techniques to achieve success with regards to these requests:

Limiting the question - have a specific period of time, scope, type of documents, targets and divide request

Asking for specific types of documents - ask for briefing documents, reports or schedule of documents

It’s also a good idea to check out if they have already handled a request of a similar nature in the agency. I discussed the topic of FOIs a couple of weeks ago, but definitely need to start following up on an idea for it.

#week4 #reflection #lectures

6 notes · View notes

sanjuno · 6 years

Note

from the tone of ur mcu/got fic it seemed like u really hate or at least disiked steve, how come?

Woo boy, okay. So first things first. Let’s clarify the statement. Steve Rogers, aka Captain America is a character that has been re-imaged several times dependant on the universe he’s in. Classic and Silver Age Steve is okay. I’m kind ‘meh’ about Steve in 616 and Ultimates.

MCU Steve is everything wrong about American superheroes distilled into one storyline. And it’s not just one thing, it’s many things that build up until I want to set him on fire for the good of the world and all the poor, impressionable fanboys in it.

My issues with Steve in the First Avenger are:

MCU Steve refuses to accept any dissenting opinions and his first resort is always violence instead of debate. He’s manipulative in that he verbally antagonizes people so that they “throw the first punch” so he can feel justified in “standing up to bullies”.

MCU Steve glorifies active military service to the point of outright refusing to support the army in a way he’s actually capable of succeeding at and instead commits treason (lying on the enlistment forms) rather that applying for a support role. To say nothing of the danger Steve’s fellow servicemen would be in covering his ass if he did actually manage to lie his way to the warfront. Plus he completely ignores the fact that Bucky was drafted, which means that Bucky did not willingly enlist.

MCU Steve took steroids that had the proven, recorded side effects of increased aggression, sociopathy, and psychosis in every known survival case.

MCU Steve never finished basic training, and thus never even made it to the rank of Private. He’s never been employed by the US Army. “Captain America” is a stage name, not a real rank. If anything, Steve was a consultant employed by the SSR to deal with Hydra and only Hydra.

My issues with Steve in The Avengers are:

MCU Steve is isolating himself and refuses to take care of his own mental health and stability. He expresses obsessive behaviours and rigid thought processes that make it easy for the Hydra agents embedded in SHIELD to gaslight him about people and the operation of modern society. In short, Steve is ignorant and uneducated in a way that he could easily change but refuses to despite have unrestricted access to the resources he needs, and so any failures or bad judgement calls on his part as a result of his ignorance are on his head. Self-education is the responsibility of every thinking person who wants to interact with the wider world.

MCU Steve doesn’t know how to accept specialist opinions, as proven by his distain for Tony and Bruce’s work in the lab so they can track down the cube. Again, distain for cerebral pursuits such as engineering or computer sciences because there’s no visible effort to show for it aside from the results that are produced once the actually work is over.

More attempts to provoke people into violence when MCU Steve is losing an argument because he doesn’t have the facts to back up his statement.

Takes off on a road trip, but when the hell did MCU Steve have the time to get a motorcycle certification or driver’s license? Does he even have a source of income? Second instance of lawbreaking confirmed.

My issues with Steve in The Winter Soldier are:

MCU Steve has no proof that Sam isn’t a Hydra plant when he goes for help, just a gut feeling. Sorry, but background checks are a thing you need to do before sharing classified information for a reason. Operational security is nothing but a dream at this point.

Doesn’t call Tony to get the Helicarriers shut down. Why? Tony has made multiple public statements that Stark tech in the hands of terrorists goes boom!

Yes, there were Hydra agents in SHIELD but dumping the database just meant that all the good, actually SHIELD agents are the ones who got burned. How many active or retired agents and their families got killed because of that info leak? That’s like burning down your house because you saw a spider.

MCU Steve fucks off and doesn’t go to the hearing, and he never actually gets debriefed about what went down. Once again Steve disrespects governing authority and the due process of laws put in place to protect the public. (Because Bucky, and I’m so sick of that mentality.)

My issues with Steve in Age of Ultron are:

MCU Steve hasn’t told Tony that his parents death was a murder but accuses Tony of lying to them. Tony never lies, he doesn’t have enough of a self preservation instinct to bother lying. But Steve is covering up a murder and still somehow thinks he’s a moral authority.

Blames Tony for Ultron when it’s obvious that (a) Bruce was helping and (b) alien magi-tech bullshit was at fault. Plus JARVIS is dead and Steve doesn’t care despite the fact that it’s obvious Tony is grieving.

Identifies with Wanda, known Hydra volunteer who only switched sides because she was going to get killed by Ultron otherwise. Trusts Wanda’s word over Tony’s, when Wanda’s goal has always been to messily murder Tony and she set an enraged Hulk on a city full of civilians with the intent to kill everyone there.

Throws the shield when he gets to Tony’s lab while Vision is being born, so yet again violence is the chosen option instead of debate.

My issues with Steve in Civil War are:

MCU Steve is still so ignorant of modern politics that he thinks the UN is a government. Also refuses to respect the right of sovereign nations to say “no” to having the Avengers cross their borders. If Steve wants to operate against human organizations instead of just the random alien invasion then he needs to have oversight and a proper command structure. Otherwise he’s just another extremist pushing his personal agenda on the populace. And that’s the definition of terrorism.

MCU Steve fucks up Bucky Barnes’ chances of being acquitted of Hydra’s crimes when they escape custody by blowing through the anti-terrorist task force and collapse a transit tunnel on civilians during the midday commute. Until that point everything Bucky did was could be filed under Bucky being non copus menti as a result of the Winter Soldier programming and the deliberately, maliciously cultivated PTSD triggers implanted by Hydra. But that chance is gone now because Bucky Barnes was the one “in control” when they fucked up the airport and beat up Tony.

MCU Steve lies to Clint and Scott about the reason they’re fighting. Steve says they needs to stop the other Winter Soldiers from being set loose and that the Accords will stop them from acting, but in reality it all boils down to saving Bucky. Meanwhile everyone on Team Cap gets labelled an international criminal in the end and chances are they aren’t going to be able to go home for years even if they’re very, very lucky.

Bad laws are argued in court and amendments get made if a law infringes on the civil rights of the people it impacts. But MCU Steve doesn’t obey the laws, he has never obeyed the laws, and so he has no fucking goddamned clue about how to work inside the system to get what he wants peacefully. Cue more punching his problems.

LYING OR WITHHOLDING INFORMATION ABOUT A MURDER CASE IS OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE AND IT’S A CRIME, STEVE.

Breaking people out of prison when they have, in point of fact, broken the law, IS A CRIME, STEVE.

So in summary, MCU Steve is a violent, delusional bully who likes to be the centre of attention and has never believed that the laws apply to him. It’s especially grating because the script writers keep trying to make him a sympathetic character but all I can see is some jacked up white boy on steroids whining because it’s not fair that he needs to be a decent, law-abiding human being. Due Process, Workplace Health and Safety Regulations, Harassment Policies, things like that. Also, Steve and Wanda are actually close to the same age in life experience according to the MCU storylines but he marginalizes her and denies her agency by saying she’ “just a kid”, which is the most bullshit patronizing expression of a superiority complex I’ve even seen in media. And that’s why I don’t like MCU’s version of Steve Rogers.

#Sanjuno Answers #MCU meta #MCU Steve Rogers #Character Analysis #Let me tell you my issues with bad character reimaging with bullet points

76 notes · View notes

kiir-bee · 7 years

Text

What the fuck is happening in Catalonia, by a Spaniard

You’ve probably already heard about what happened in Catalonia, Spain (for now), on October 1st. If not, here’s a brief summary:

Catalonia has had a big independance movement for a very long time (I’ll expose the reasons later). In the last few years, it’s grown much stronger, and after many attempts at talking with the Government to pact a referendum about that matter and being ignored time after time, the Govern (autonomic government of Catalonia) decided to make one nonetheless. They don’t have the power to do so, according to our Constitution, so it’s illegal; and the Government reacted by sending practically all the police force to Catalonia to stop people from voting. (All while the country is in a Level 4 of alert for terrorism — meaning there hasn’t been a terror attack in Madrid because terrorists didn’t want to.) And on October 1st, tragedy came. Despite being illegal, many Catalans went to vote, and the response of the policemen was hitting, harming, kicking, pulling, pushing. The international press referred to it as “Spain’s day of shame”, among others. Over 800 injured (the terror attack last month barely left 30!), a deep social crisis... and the President, Mariano Rajoy, said we’ve been “an example to the world”.

How did we come to this?

Originally, what we nowadays know as Spain was a bunch of different kingdoms, the biggest of which were Castile and Aragon. Many wrongly believe that these kingdoms were united when Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon (commonly known as the Catholic Monarchs) got married, but the truth is, they didn’t. They remained as two separate kingdoms that just happened to be ruled by the same king.

This system remained the same while the monarchs were from the house of Habsburg. However, in 1700 the king Charles II died without an heir, and Europe went into war for the Spanish throne. Castile and France supported the French candidate, and Aragon, Austria and England supported the Austrian, to name a few. The war lasted for 14 years, and eventually the French candidate, Felipe d’Anjou, became the new king. He was ruthless to the rebels from Aragon and there was an important repression: he burnt flags and hanged generals, even though he had promised he wouldn’t, and fully united the kingdoms. It’s only now when there’s a country actually called Kingdom of Spain.

1714, the year in which the French and Castilian troops took Barcelona, has become a symbol in the independance movement; and September 11th, the day it happened, is in fact Catalonia’s day.

Since then, though Catalonia has always remained under Spanish rule, the thought of independance has never left them. For instance, when Spain first became a Republic (1873), the Govern (one-sidedly —is that a word?—) declared that Catalonia would be a Republic inside a Spanish Federal Republic. The Government didn’t let them, and the First Republic was such a mess it wouldn’t have worked anyway.

The Second Republic came in 1931, and it ended with the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), caused by a militar coup. In the war, Catalonia was in favour of the Republic; it was the last land to fall and suffered a lot in both the war and afterwards. The Civil War was followed by a fascist dictatorship led by general Francisco Franco, and ended with his death in 1975. Among other things, Franco prohibited any other languages besides Spanish to be spoken, and so Catalan (and Galician and Esukera) were banned.

After Franco’s death, there was a process called the Transition, in which politicians tried to have a pacific transition from the dictatorship to a democracy. The success of this process is still argued nowadays. In 1978, our current Constitution was written, and because the Catalan people wanted autonomy (and because Spaniards are like this, so wanted many others), in the end it was decided to have the system of autonomic regions we have nowadays.

That didn’t seem to be enough to some, and the independance movement in Catalonia has been growing since then. In the last few years it has increased drastically, accentuated by the economic crisis and the lack of response from the Government.

Now you know the reasons behind Catalonia’s referendum. You may still be wondering how a Government can react with such violence.

The party that currently governs in Spain, Partido Popular (People’s Party) was founded by a few of Franco’s ministers. Remember our peaceful Transition? This is one of its ill effects: fascism isn’t banned, Franco’s flag isn’t banned, the Nazi salute isn’t banned. What would you expect from a party heir of a fascist dictatorship? The only way they know to solve things is violence. You may have wonder why Spain hasn’t suffered the rise of extreme-rightist (read: neo-Nazi) parties like many other countries. The answer is simple: they never left.

But please remember: that’s not Spain, That’s not us. Most of the population was sickened, disgusted and ashamed of the violence used in Catalonia against people who just wanted to be heard. On that same day there were demonstrations in many Spanish cities.

I took this picture in the demonstration in Madrid. We chanted “Catalonia, you’re not alone”, “Madrid stands with the Catalan people”, and “No pasarán” (”They shall not pass”, a famous line from the Civil War that’s become an anti-fascist motto in Spain).

I’d hate for Catalonia to leave, but I’ll fight for their right to speak and be heard.

I don’t want my country to be regarded as the shameful pseudo-dictatorship of Europe.

I am repulsed and ashamed by what happened yesterday.

There are many who think like me.

Citizens of the world and Catalonia, please, don’t commit the mistake of thinking that the current Spanish Government is Spain.

Spain is so much more than that.

And Spaniards have been through enough.

#catalonia #spain #cataluña #catalonia referendum #referendum #history #i cried yesterday

316 notes · View notes

backstorywithdanalewis · 4 years

Text

France and Free Speech and Terror (Back Story with Dana Lewis podcast link: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1016881/6234526

Anne Guidicelli: (00:00) Not all people are, let's say agreeing with such a satirical cartoon, uh, but the, or agree for freedom of expression. Dana Lewis - Host: (00:18) Hi everyone. And welcome to another edition of backstory. I'm Dana Lewis, French president Macron is about to crack down on radical Muslims. After several attacks in France, a school teacher, Samuel Petty was recently beheaded for showing children cartoons of the prophet Muhammad and talking to them about free speech. A Muslim man who carried out the attack was later shot by the police. Then in niece, a woman was decapitated and two others had been killed during a knife attack inside the Notredame Basilica church. The mayor of ni said the, his Lamel fascist assailant didn't stop shouting Alawak bar, even under medication after being shot and arrested countries have condemned friends for arresting dozens of Muslims, some of cold for boycotts of French goods. Turkey's president Erewhon made an explosive speech saying Macron needs some sort of mental treatment. What else is there to say about a head of state who doesn't believe in freedom of religion and behaves this way against millions of people, of different faith living in his own country. Dana Lewis - Host: (01:29) He said France condemned air to one's remarks and recalled its ambassador, the French foreign minister denounced the quote hateful and slanderous propaganda against France, unquote, any accused Turkey of quote, showing a wish to fan hate against and among us unquote. And then a few days later after everyone's comments in Vienna, Austria 22 injured with knife and gunshot wounds and four killed a member of ISIS is shot dead by police nine minutes into his attack. And as I speak to you from London, the government here has raised at security alert to the highest level warning attacks here are likely, okay, just a little more background in case you don't know these satirical cartoons of the prophet Mohammed published in the Charlie Hebdo magazine in France also sparked attacks in 2015, they left 17 dead. The three gunman in two attacks were shot by the police as the TV correspondent. I covered those attacks and the nation rallied around Charlie Hebdo in support of free speech, but this time it's a bit different in this backstory. We talked to an expert on secularism in France and why this is a free speech issue and Judah cellie and later [inaudible], she is a Muslim commentator on discrimination who says French Muslims are treated unfairly Dana Lewis - Host: (03:00) And that the French government, while dealing with terror also has to be more measured to Muslims who make up 9% of francis' population, both interviews, honestly, incredibly insightful to understand the different forces at work in France and the backstory behind the headlines. All right. And Judah Kelly runs the international intelligence cluster and she consults on security, efficient, uh, issues. And she joins me now from Paris high-end hi. I sort of make a practice of asking people during COVID 19, how they're doing. I mean, you were under locked down as we speak and we are about to go under, locked down in London yet again. Anne Guidicelli: (03:44) Yeah, I think it's more and more, I mean, we'll have more, more countries that are in our case. Well, let's say we have a double, a double knock down one, which is a link to a health and the other one to security because we, as we, you know, we, we went through three attacks in one month, a terrorist attacks. So, uh, while with a big, uh, protest, I mean, uh, criticize him coming from the Muslim countries. So it's, uh, we have, let's say three craziest 200 nowadays security has and diplomatic. So, uh, it's, it's, let's say it's not a holiday. Dana Lewis - Host: (04:32) And what is the, what is the mood there? Like, I mean, there's, there's, there has been more security deployed to the street and visible security. I understand around churches and, uh, historic sites and that kind of thing. The army actually, right. Anne Guidicelli: (04:47) It's part of a system which was already existing, which is called the VGP heart, which has been raised to the, the, uh, it was the highest lever that means having more security forces in the streets. And, uh, I mean, uh, well, it's not specific to this time it's to this barrier it's, uh, uh, any times there is, uh, any, um, at dark or a suspicion of attack, it's much more linked to, to show that. Uh, yeah. Yeah, sure. I mean, it's much more to, let's say there any waiting to do something or even to, we ensure the people that they are in, in the safe situation, because they can see, uh, uniforms and forces in the streets. So it's much more, I mean, for, uh, for that then to really prevent, uh, the rest of day, Dana Lewis - Host: (05:51) I heard a lot of the terror attack in France. So I've, I've been to Paris many times, uh, after the attacks on Charlie and the bot, the Klan theater attacks. Um, and they are some of the most, uh, bloody shocking, uh, terror attacks that I have covered. But I mean, but the Klan theater, uh, was a horrendous event and I, and, uh, I'm sure people can not forget there and plus all of the shootings and the cafes leading down the street towards about the clan. And I mean, at that time, you know, there were these tremendous marches in France and, uh, through Paris, you know, it was just, we, Charlotte, we are Charlie and people really came out despite the publication of these cartoons and supported Charlie Hebdo, is, is this different? Anne Guidicelli: (06:39) Well, you know, uh, first of all, what the meaning of being Charlie, I mean, everybody can understand it, uh, differently, uh, being Sharley could mean being for the, some kind of, uh, freedom of expression, but being Sharley, uh, could also mean that we like those scary catchers Orca cartoons, which is not the case of the whole people in France. So, um, so you can put your other understanding, uh, in that you can, you can be, you can be a challis who not being Charlie, but not against Charlie. He wants that being that we fought, we, not all people are, let's say agreeing with such a satirical cartoon, uh, but the, or agree for freedom of expression, you understand the, the, the, the, the smaller distinction between the two, Dana Lewis - Host: (07:50) Right? But that distinction is lost on another culture. Um, because Muslim people who follow the Muslim faith believe that they are insulting the prophet Mohammed, uh, you know, one with a bomb in his turban, uh, another one with him crawling on the ground, they're associating the prophet Muhammad with attacks of terror and extremism. Um, and so to them, it it's insulting and it is not freedom of expression. And yet to the French public, you have this term, and maybe you can explain it to me a little bit, and it is less C T let's see, T which essentially means secular secularism. Anne Guidicelli: (08:31) Yes. Right. It's secure secular States yet secure is in fact that mean that well also, you see, um, it's very important to, to, uh, to use the proper word because it's not as well as Charlie is not understood in the same way the Lacy day or securities is, um, uh, according to who is using it or who is understanding it. It's not the same reality. You see, sorry. Dana Lewis - Host: (09:05) In what way is it different depending on it, Anne Guidicelli: (09:07) Some of you have a Tran here, um, that I call the laces. Like we said, the Islamists, if you take the word light light, which is a four Lacy tape, uh, let's say secure very stuff, if you want that, that means that they are activists in, um, in the, in promoting Lacy against religions, which is not at all the, the real meaning of, uh, lady CT or secretaries security. Dana Lewis - Host: (09:43) I mean, historically in the, in the French state and the Republic was the separation between church and state, wasn't an in to push the Catholic church. Anne Guidicelli: (09:54) But that was, first of all, in the history, you have an agreement with the catalysis then with the GDSs, I mean the Jewish community. Now it seems that it could be the turn of the Mexican community. So, uh, but the, the real meaning of [inaudible] is, um, to, um, that everybody can have his own face and leave his, or his own face, but in the public, uh, space, uh, you are only one community that's mean that you can, you don't have to show your difference, which is completely the other system that the one in, in the United States or in the UK, or it's, uh, it's not a lot of the same approach. Uh it's once one community is the nation nation is full of the same citizen. And if they have some differences, like a religion, so they have to leave that in their, uh, privates SoCo, not to, to show up with that. Anne Guidicelli: (11:07) That's a bit complicated even to understand for the French people in the meeting that, uh, some, sometime some, let's say in some territories, just to, to, let's say to please some, uh, some, uh, association you will allow them to, uh, to have specific hours for swimming pool, uh, for, for girls in the swimming pool, because they, and they will get some votes, of course, uh, I think the majors, for instance, but, uh, that, that, what I want to say is that, um, now, uh, the Lacy's, uh, trans eh, or wink is, is trying to, to use, uh, the Lacy as, as an, an arm, a weapon against Islam. That's now a things how they are moving. And, um, it is perceived now abroad specifically in the Michigan countries, uh, like that. Uh, so, so, uh, we are now in that debate and they, um, uh, me and my side that I really tried to, um, work, um, to, to one the authorities and the, the opinion that the republishing of the cartoon of those prophet Hammad cartoons, uh, wasn't very, very threatening. Um, uh, ms. [inaudible], Dana Lewis - Host: (12:54) I want to just clarify, I want to be clear because you make a distinction between the original publication and the republication in you believe that the republication, uh, was a provocation. Anne Guidicelli: (13:10) Yes. Uh, I mean, not a provocation, but is doesn't mean freedom of expression in that case. Uh, I mean, because you know, a very small who, I mean, surely those cartoon has becomes like the, the, you know, the, the flag, uh, of the freedom of expression, which is not how, uh, it's not so shared within the French, uh, opinion, but as they are being victim of a terrorist attack, the let's say being a victim doesn't allow, uh, uh, to, uh, lose, um, the understanding of the world in ways in which we are, Dana Lewis - Host: (13:59) Why doesn't, uh, president Macron just condemn the republishing of the cartoon. Why doesn't he say, look, we understand that the sensitivities of the Muslim population, um, w we support the original publication, but republication obviously is causing bloodshed and division within society just don't, you know, I, I'm not going to ban you from public publishing them, but it was wrong to publish them. Why won't he take that step? Or do you believe that that's something he shouldn't do that he should stand up and by supporting free speech, he should support those cartoons. Anne Guidicelli: (14:39) Yeah, it's exactly what a former, uh, president Chirac has done, uh, more than, uh, uh, let's say, 14 years ago. Uh, when it, when he just said that it was very angry with the publishing at the time, because that will make the water Muslim world very angry, and they will not understand that you, I mean that in explanation. So, uh, what I mean, um, what happened, what is happening nowadays was very predictable. And, uh, but the fact, as I said previously, as Charlie Hebdo has been attacked, they are like some sexual lions are like, Holy, uh, people, you know, that's mean that you cannot tell them, or is not good for you, what you're doing, because we understand you have been victim. So that has impacted, uh, the debates and that's, uh, really, uh, puts, um, macro, uh, a very complicated solution as, um, is there is, I mean, the opposition Dana Lewis - Host: (15:52) You're right. Okay. I want to ask you, because the opposition, like Marilla Penn, who was far right. And as it is by a lot of estimates, Islamophobic, um, that, because he has elections coming up Macron, he has to play to the far right. To some degree. I mean, is that, is that unfair, or do you think that that's, what's taking place? Anne Guidicelli: (16:13) Well, he's between two, uh, let's say, uh, track, uh, um, and also trap, we can say as well, you have the trap of the, the right extreme right-wing of course, that, uh, is in position now to use what is going on against the, the platforms per se, and, uh, as well, you have the, let's say the, the laziest people. I mean, those people who are like, uh, you know, a majority in the media or in the, let's say certain intellectual circle that say, we cannot touch our freedom of expression. If you touch to the cartoon, you will touch the horror, our more, uh, value, uh, uh, for fear of expression. And you have a certain voice that I, I, I do represents, uh, which is, uh, I mean, uh, freedom of expression doesn't mean that you have to, um, uh, let's say humiliate people. And, uh, and, uh, I remember the Obama speech in 2009, uh, when he addressed the Muslim world in Cairo and telling that when you, you attack one, when believing, when belief, you just, uh, attack the whole whole of them. So it really address a very, very good speech. And I, uh, tried to, to not to put it as a mother, that's what we could do, what the president could do now, uh, instead of having, let's say a kind of a very, a military speech, you know, very, uh, strong and, Anne Guidicelli: (18:15) Um, Obama at the time was using a very positive speech. And, uh, let's say towards the Michelin people, uh, not the missing States. So he contributed to, uh, give some humanity and the D politicized, or if we can say that, um, the, the debates and, uh, is the Islam compatible, uh, with the Republic or the democracy. Dana Lewis - Host: (18:47) But do you think of Macron had been more conciliatory and found more middle ground rather than making this tough on terrorist speech come out and said, look, we condemn terror. We condemn what happened in nice. We condemn violence at any stage, but we also ask for sensitivity to religious symbols that may anger the Muslim population, uh, not as a sign of surrender, but as a sign of inclusion, do you think that would have taken the temperature down a little bit and why couldn't he do that? I mean, he must have known what he was doing. Anne Guidicelli: (19:21) Yeah, sure. You know, uh, differently Chirac, uh, he doesn't know very well he's part of the world, but if you notice at the beginning, he, he said something during the, his campaign, uh, telling that the, the, the war in geria, uh, was, you know, a mistake and colonization was a, uh, crime of humanity. It was, uh, something that very far from his position nowadays. So we can understand that. I mean, I'm, I'm sure that he really, uh, he doesn't like the cartoons, those cartoons, but, uh, he it's too late anywhere nowadays, because the, all the, I mean, the, the consequences, the impact of not only the republication of challis and those cartoons, but also what he said about these radical Islam and the, what he called the [inaudible], which is, uh, fighting against the community who are living communities, which are living in France, but not, not in compliance with the French system, uh, recovery. So, uh, that has not been well understood and also very well as to metabolized by of course, uh, missing brother, uh, brotherhood, uh, and the other country like Turkey who jumps on the occasion. Dana Lewis - Host: (21:03) Yeah. President Eric, the one certainly called him crazy to some degree. And you have, uh, you know, leaders around the world and demonstrations around the world against France now, and Macron really making it out to be the, that France is against, uh, the, against the Muslims, even though France has taken in so many Muslims. Anne Guidicelli: (21:25) Yeah. I mean, uh, I think that's, we are now, I mean, me, I'm really promoting, I advocate the fact that we have to dialogue, dialogue, explain, explain what is our STEM put more value of? I mean, what, what the Muslim, the French ms. Freeman had, uh, brought to our, uh, success or our country, you know, all positive things that that could be cool. And, uh, we re recreate some, uh, some, uh, dialogue and, uh, uh, respects. And, uh, Dana Lewis - Host: (22:06) Right now the divide is, is growing. And th th just, it's just the promise of more, more bloodshed and more conflict. Do you think Anne Guidicelli: (22:17) There's many consequences? First of all, of course, security, a consequence under, in the T under the territory, but also abroad because, um, the, the risk is to have similar to news attacks in France and in another country against French targets, interest or individuals. And, uh, the second one is, uh, uh, diplomatic. That means that, uh, uh, France will not, would not be able to make his voice, its voice hurts anymore. And, uh, somebody of economical consequence is because, uh, some country could choose to buy some, uh, uh, to sign big deals, you know, with, uh, the, the French, uh, big companies, because they are French. So, uh, eh, we cannot trust any more French people and we don't want to have them on the ground and things like that. So the only things to do is to, uh, at least to, to, to, to, to hold the narrative about domestic things in France and the, the, how we consider the Muslim civilization. And it was all seen as, you know, the counter influence. The, even some say, may not know to, uh, to come to the provider that, that in some country, uh, by, uh, [inaudible] and all the radical trends that, that friendship is fighting Dana Lewis - Host: (24:04) Anne Guidicelli from the international intelligence cluster. And great to talk to you, thank you for being generous with your time. Anne Guidicelli: (24:10) Thank you. Dana Lewis - Host: (24:15) Rokhaya Diallo is a writer and documentary maker in Paris. Uh, she does a lot of writing for many different sources, including the Washington post, and she is a prominent anti-racist campaigner and very prominent in France. Thank you very much for joining us. Rokhaya Diallo: (24:30) Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. Dana Lewis - Host: (24:32) You're a black feminist daughter of Muslim, uh Singhalese and Gambian immigrants. And you grew up in Paris, uh, in a suburb there, and you earn your living sort of writing about race and France. And I only, I only say this and draw the attention to the fact that you have a Muslim background, because it's important understanding how Muslims feel right now in France. Can you tell me, um, you know, you're in touch with the community? What are people saying? Rokhaya Diallo: (24:59) Yes. Um, it's a very difficult time because, um, they have been from the politicians, uh, constant, uh, demands, uh, to the Muslim community to say openly that they didn't stand with the terrorists. And the thing is that it's very offensive to say that because most of the, uh, official organism Muslim organizations have ascended deepest condolences, um, after the attacks and have said how they were, um, standing with the rest of the, of the nation against terrorism and the idea that Muslims should stand, um, higher than the rest of the population, um, draw a line between us and them who are supposedly close to extremism. And who's, if they don't say anything, we'll be, you know, people could be suspicious against them. So it's, it's kind of difficult. Even myself as a Muslim domain is, have faced, faced some, some nasty moments, Dana Lewis - Host: (26:03) Nasty moments in terms of people lashing out at you in the community. Rokhaya Diallo: (26:07) Uh, no. Um, for example, I have been very, uh, I have been one of the people who were very critique against Shania DOE before the attacks. I signed an op ed in 2011. So it was, um, four years before the deadly attacks to say that to me, uh, the way they were using, um, their, uh, their cartoons was what's kind of nurturing, feeding and Islamophobic context. So, uh, that, that, uh, op ed was signed in a context where, uh, Sharia do was already did, did already face an attack that was not deadly. It was in the night, it was a fire. So I signed that op-ed, Dana Lewis - Host: (26:50) This is before the actual shootings took place in 2015 in their office. Rokhaya Diallo: (26:54) It was four years, four years before. And, and we still don't know who said the local on fire. And the thing is that we were 22 sign the op ed, and that I am the only one to be consented with, questioned about me, about my signature. And two weeks ago, I was in a debate about gender, about feminism, and a very prominent philosopher told me that I was, um, I was responsible for the shooting. And before saying that, he said, you are a Muslim black woman, and you aren't the arms of the terrorists. You say that on the TV channel in front of 1 million people, I was in shock because, you know, I didn't understood the, the, the reason for reminding that I was Muslim. And to say that the text that I signed years before the shooting was made me having any relationship with the terrorist. So it was, it really was major contributors here in France, but it reminded me that besides being a journalist to some people, I was seeing a Muslim woman, Dana Lewis - Host: (28:04) Where is the truth between the two, this great division within France, because the, the original publication of the cartoons, which resulted in those shootings, um, you know, obviously all of us stood with France at the time I was a reporter. I came to Paris and I covered that. Um, and we felt that, you know, obviously there was extreme violence going after cartoonists in an office and shooting them. And, um, and then there was also another attack on, uh, on a grocer Jewish grocery store. Um, and, and people felt terrible and they felt real solidarity with France. And yet there is many people that are uncomfortable with the publishing of these cartoons because they do offend. So, so where do you either have to be on Macron side or on the Muslim population side? Or do you think most people in France fits somewhere in the middle? Rokhaya Diallo: (28:59) I think that many people are in the middle. Like you, you have people who understand that we have the right to publish any cartoon. And I understand that, I understand that it's the freedom of speech and you have the right to criticize any religion. The thing is that, why are you doing that? Like, I understand the idea that, um, [inaudible] is a, is a, is, um, humoristic newspaper. And th they have a way to use satire to tack people and to make them make fun of them. But to me, it's my personal conception. When you are power as a, as a newspaper, the is to make fun of those who are in position of power. So constantly, uh, targeting Muslims is there, right? But I'm not sure, uh, about the reason because Muslims, people, Muslim people are already at the bottom of the society that they belong to the poorest fringes of the French society. They face constant discrimination, a constant offensive language in the media. So I think on the top, the top of that, um, those, um, how can I say that offensive cartoons? I don't know how it can help us getting any better. Dana Lewis - Host: (30:20) Good. Tell me, why do you think that president Macron didn't deliver? I mean, he's an intelligent person. Why did he not deliver a more measured statement after the beheading of the school teacher obviously was an emotional moment for him and for the, for France, that violence, again, a terrible act of violence against the teacher teacher, who, who through educating people about free speech, showed some cartoons and there was a debate whether he should have or not. But do you think that Macron could have been a little more measured and a little more sensitive to the Muslim population? Why was he not? And did he, did he do that intentionally, do you think because of the political field in France and elections are, are in front of them? Rokhaya Diallo: (31:03) I think that my coins in a very, very tricky position, because those cartoons as the cost, the customer lives, and it was a major trauma in France, the killing in China do. And then in the, in the, in the [inaudible], the Jewish supermarket was, uh, a major tumor because it was so horrendous. And so I think that from that time, the cartoons have been the symbol of freedom of speech. And people would say that it is our identity, and we need to stand in the defense. And I think that Muslims don't process it that way. No, like that there are most of the Muslim, I'm not comfortable with the cartoons, but they're, you know, they're okay. They're like, okay, it's okay. We won't say anything because it's the freedom of speech, but I, they're not, they're not comfortable with that. And there is a small portion of postpone portion of people who, um, are violent, but it's, it's, it's like just a, no, some, some, some persons. Rokhaya Diallo: (32:03) And the thing is that I think that my home cannot really, uh, uh, have a more balanced, uh, this course without it can't because it would anger the majority of, uh, French people. Because I think that most of them think that it is the symbol of our identity of free, free speech. We don't, I don't think, I don't think it's like, I don't think that our free speech or free speech only stands in those cartoons, but it has become a kind of symbol of what we stand for. And the fact that so many countries, um, out of friends don't understand what we are doing, really feed the idea that we are a very particular identity and way of defending freedom of speech. So we need to stand and to defend of French particularism. And it's a trap because my comb, it cannot say that it's offensive. And at the same time, it cannot say that we need to give up because it would send a message that, Oh, we have lost, uh, to, uh, terrorism and violence. Dana Lewis - Host: (33:15) I'm Canadian. I talking to you from London, but I'm Canadian. My prime minister Trudeau came out and he said, he said in, in, in solidarity with friends and in condemning violence, he also said in a press conference, um, freedom of expression does not come without limits. We owe it to ourselves to act with respect for others and seek not to arbitrarily or unnecessarily injure those with whom we're sharing a society that's measured. Rokhaya Diallo: (33:44) Yes, that's measured. And I definitely understand what he says. And the thing is that in France, in France, many people commented what he said as Oh, as him being a coward. You see? So they don't understand that he's trying to bring, um, a whole society together and to make sure that the freedom of some wouldn't be an offense to the others. It's, um, it's not seen like that. And, um, and, and to me, there is this, we, we, we don't in France. We don't really understand what it is to be a minority. And the fact that you cannot just say I'm free to say anything. And that freedom would be offensive to a group that is already, um, already on the side, on the side, on the side of the society. So I feel like, um, we coming from a very different culture in which, um, the culture of the majority, uh, is not seen as dominant, but it's seen as being the norm. Dana Lewis - Host: (34:45) I mean, obviously they have some history there with the Roman Catholic church and, and S and Francis secular ism and separation of church and state. But they, they apparently haven't explained this very well to people like president Erdogan of Turkey who sees this as, you know, what is Macron's problem with Islam and nor have they seem to explain it to their own people, people who have immigrated to France and live there and are French citizens. Rokhaya Diallo: (35:13) I think that people understand because you don't have protests in France, again, against the cartoons. You don't have protests from French Muslims. Most of the organizations and the religious leaders, they come to, to try to bring peace to the public experience. Actually, I think that the French Muslims are much more moderate than Muslims from the other countries, but still they are facing demands to say louder and louder that they are not terrorists, that there are, uh, they are okay with the caricatures, which is, you know, you can just, uh, don't care. You can just not care about the characters, but I think that there is a difference between what was the situation of France in the early 20th century with the church that was dominant. And we get to racism being the religion of the majority. And now there is no, uh, Islam is not in the same position. It's not threatening the power of the state and Muslim people are less than 10% of the population. And among them, uh, there are the poorest, um, fringes of, uh, the French nation. So it's not the same. There is no threat of Islam, uh, you know, getting over, uh, the French state. So it's very different. Dana Lewis - Host: (36:29) Two, two quick questions, president air to one. Do you think that that was helpful? What he said, do you think that he, he thought he's standing up for Muslims, or do you think that he was igniting the situation further in France? Rokhaya Diallo: (36:41) You know, um, uh, I think is, is, is just, um, using that what's going on to, to make domestic politics because, you know, we haven't heard him being that loud against China and the way they are treating wiggles. So like, I understand that there is an issue in France, but if you cannot be a president dealing so well with China and not saying anything about the way Muslims are tortured there, and then, uh, say that France is your, uh, top problem. So I think that, Dana Lewis - Host: (37:13) And obviously they have a little bit of history Macron in there, the one over Greece and the Mediterranean and other differences Rokhaya Diallo: (37:19) And the integration. So I think in just, it's just taking advantage of the rage rage against Muslims, community, Muslim communities, Dana Lewis - Host: (37:27) Where does this go from here to, to wrap this up, do you think, and what do, what do you worry about? Is it going to become more radicalized? And is there going to be more violence? Um, or how, how does, where does it go from here? It doesn't seem, we've seen this attack in Vienna now. Um, and obviously there's the danger that, um, there, isn't more understanding in the Muslim community in France, that there is less, uh, and they feel more discriminated against. Um, and that acts like what has taken place with the school teacher become even more possible tragically Rokhaya Diallo: (38:07) It's, it's, um, it's very concerning actually, because I can feel that with the pandemic, with the lockdown, there is much tension in the French society, as well as many, many, many other societies. And the fact that the government is focusing so much on trying to shut down and Muslim organizations, uh, so quickly, um, make, um, Muslim people think that there are criminalized for just being openly Muslim and trying to stand for their rights. So on one side, it goes, uh, you know, to, to, to feel, to fuel the idea that, um, that, uh, you know, you are not accepted as a Muslim in the French nation. And then on the other side, there is, um, these like, uh, civilization, civilization, war rhetoric that makes French, uh, you know, that makes, uh, the country having the idea that we are standing alone against another civilization, civilization, which is not true. It's much more complex than that. Dana Lewis - Host: (39:14) Well, and as we speak, you know, even here in the United Kingdom, now they've increased the security alert to the top level, and they're worried about attacks here. So it is spreading beyond francis' borders, but Rokia Diablo really pleasure to talk to you. Thanks for being so generous with your time. And it was great to have your thoughts. Rokhaya Diallo: (39:30) Thank you. It was a pleasure. Thank you for inviting me, Mexico Q4 Speaker 2: (39:34) In that hour, backstory on France and free speech and the crackdown on radical Muslims who have used terror in an attempt to silence what they view as offensive cartoon. Much of this took place when America was consumed with its election and the cliff edge dramatic vote count. I mean, we can't blame Americans if they tuned out of international news and missed a lot. And I was watching a lot of it too, but usually us news networks don't cover the world the way they should. That's why we bring you backstory with Dana Lewis. Please share this podcast subscribe, and you're welcome to sponsor this podcast. Get in touch, stay healthy, and I'll talk to you again soon.

#france attack #backstorywithdanalewis erdogen @anneguidicelli @rokhayadiallo macron terror vienna

0 notes

anonymousbloggers-blog · 5 years

Text

The Dilemma - Should India play Pakistan at the 2019 World Cup ?

What is the significance of the date 14th of February?

Ask this question to any teenager and the answer is going to be extremely obvious – Valentine’s day; a day cherished worldwide as the day of love.

While there was quite a buzz around this date (there always is ) 14th February 2019 in India was by no means celebrated. It was one of the darkest days for modern India as over 40 Indian soldiers were martyred in the now well publicized Pulwama attacks.

The events that have followed since have been nothing short of remarkable and by politically isolating Pakistan India have really cornered Pakistan in a spot of bother. While this was certainly having the desired choking effect on the Pakistan officials and media it was by no means as satisfying as the non-military strike Indian Air Force carried out beyond the LoC in PoK and Balakot.

Kudos to the Indian officials for executing this mission successfully!

The unprecedented and unprovoked attacks in Pulwama have no doubt unified India as never before. But even in these extreme circumstances there are bound to be disagreements and differences in opinions.

Consider for example the Indo-Pak cricket world cup match to be played in June this year.

We have had many acts of virtual patriotism, social media-posts, social experts suggesting various measures to show our support towards our military one of them being boycotting the colossal upcoming clash against Pakistan.

Here is the question put bluntly – Should India play against Pakistan in the upcoming ICC Cricket World Cup 2019?

This question actually led to quite a heated debate amongst our friend circle. So, we decided to put this to paper (virtually) in the form of a debate i.e. in favor of playing and against playing the match.

Opinion 1- Excerpt from the person in favor of playing the match:

My opinion here says that India should opt to play, and in the process if we manage to win, this may be the best tribute to the country and her martyrs.

Not playing Pakistan would not only mean a loss of 2 points, but also a virtual victory to Pakistan.

Whereas a loss of 2 points could hamper India’s progress to the knockouts, but conceding a virtual victory to Pakistan in itself seems unacceptable to the Indian mindset. Additionally, these vital 2 points may help Pakistan advance to the knockouts, where the possibility of an India-Pakistan tie cannot be denied.

(God knows what, it may turn out to be a India-Pakistan world cup final!)

Coming to the point, I personally feel that this boycott will not have much of an impact on the world’s perspective of Pakistan, Pakistan cricket and neither Pakistan as a county.

Instance 1: Even after the terrorist attacks on Sri-Lankan Team in Pakistan, Pakistan still continue to conduct bilateral series in their rented home and cricketing nations too tend to visit and play them.

Instance 2: After the 26/11 attacks, India have refrained from playing bilateral series with Pakistan and not including Pakistan player in the IPL. Did that achieve anything for us??. Maybe some pride and no money to Pakistan players from India. But has that affected Pakistan or the Pakistan cricket team.

I feel NO.

Pakistan jugad to counter the boycott from India : They conduct PSL in front of an empty ground, other major leagues around the world have a high demand for Pakistani players and there you go. No impact on Pakistan cricket team.

Also, the concerned authorities of Pakistan (Pakistan Government/ Pakistani Forces, God knows) continue to feed the terrorist organizations (for their own benefits maybe), the attacks go on and happen periodically and again the Pakistan forces deny any support to the terrorist organizations and them being aware of any terrorist organizations in their country. This is becoming a f**** cycle.

So, if we need to really make the Pakistanis pay, it has to be on some different front(field).

We did play against Pakistan in the 1999 world cup, where the memories of the Kargil war were still afresh, and by defeating Pakistan, we, in my opinion paid a big tribute to our martyrs.

Also, as we cannot deny the fact that there may be an India-Pakistan final, what then?

Do we not play that too?

Do we forfeit??

Will this be a lesson for Pakistan????

No, No and No. This would be even worse than surrendering on a battlefield, as per my opinion. So, I go with the firm opinion that if we are participating in the tournament, then we play whoever we have to.

If we really want to express our condolences, patriotism in the form of a cricketing boycott, we don’t participate in the tournament at all…..

Opinion 2- Excerpt from the person against playing the match:

I am of the opinion that India should not play Pakistan in the upcoming ICC world cup event on the basis of a simple premise: Some things are more important than cricket.

While no-one would enjoy an Indian victory over Pakistan if the clash did happen, I am staunchly against this tie taking place in the first place.

As stated earlier as well, since the Pulwama attacks the Indian government has taken strong steps to politically isolate Pakistan from the rest of the world. When the world is looking up to India for leading the motion against a nation known to harbor terrorists, I feel it is imperative that leaders world wide see that India keep true to their word of maintaining absolutely no relationship with their neighboring country.

Imagine the statement India can make here by boycotting the Pakistan clash – A nation obsessed with cricket where statements like ‘Cricket is a religion, Sachin is the God’ feel nowhere like an exaggeration decides to boycott a World Cup clash by sacrificing 2 points of their group clash to stay true in their purpose of war against terrorism.

As for the question of – what if India face Pakistan in a knock out? I think the bigger the stakes are for the match the stronger statement we make. It would be utterly unfortunate and almost cruel on the Indian cricket team but as I said earlier – Some things are more important than cricket.

We could end up handing a world cup to our enemy nation and though it would be very difficult to digest & the Pakistan media could be all over their players but the world would know that this victory was of no significance as they did not compete against one of the favorites of the tournament who have gotten the better of Pakistan on all but one occasions in ICC events.

Even from an emotional perspective, where the nation is still mourning the 42 CRPF jawans from Pulwama how big a blow would it be for the morale our armed forces if we are seen ‘playing’ a cricket match against a nation whose actions have cost them the lives of their fellow brothers and orphaned so many children?

We could avoid this by not playing the match. In fact, by not playing we as a nation could back our ‘Jawans’ on the border and support them by just letting them know that we understand the sacrifices they make for the nation and they are not alone in their battles, their sacrifices are not in vain and that the nation is with them.

As for the calls from Pakistan to avoid mixing sports and politics here is my view:

There is an anger, a frustration amongst the Indians because of the support Pakistan provides to terrorist activities and the losses it is causing the Indians in terms of our courageous army personnel. The nation is ready to battle as one against whatever stands in its way and for the first time in a long time it does not feel like ‘politics’ to me. This is way beyond politics. This is the public sentiment or consensus and I believe respecting this cannot not be termed as politics.

And besides sports are the best way to compete against one another to find out the better player/team all the while maintaining friendly/sporting relations with our competitor. What we have with Pakistan is nowhere close to friendly.

Potentially sacrificing a world cup seems rather insignificant to me when compared to what our soldiers undergo for the nation or for that matter what the war against terrorism means to us. On that note I rest my case.

While the debate rages on in our group locally, it seems that the ICC, BCCI and the Indian government have reached an impasse over the decision to play/not play Pakistan in the world cup, but we can be sure of one thing: This debate will continue till the match day maybe even beyond!

What is your opinion ? Should India play Pakistan in the world cup or should they not.

Let us know your views through the comments. We would love hearing some more neutral opinions and views on this matter!

#cricket #icc cricket world cup 2019 #india vs pakistan

0 notes

nothingman · 7 years

Link

From the start of his presidency, Donald Trump’s “war on terror” has entailed the seemingly indiscriminate slaughter of innocent people in the name of killing terrorists. In other words, Trump has escalated the 16-year-old core premise of America’s foreign policy — that it has the right to bomb any country in the world where people it regards as terrorists are found — and in doing so, has fulfilled the warped campaign pledges he repeatedly expressed.

The most recent atrocity was the killing of as many as 200 Iraqi civilians from U.S. airstrikes this week in Mosul. That was preceded a few days earlier by the killing of dozens of Syrian civilians in Raqqa province when the U.S. targeted a school where people had taken refuge, which itself was preceded a week earlier by the U.S. destruction of a mosque near Aleppo that also killed dozens. And one of Trump’s first military actions was what can only be described as a massacre carried out by Navy SEALs, in which 30 Yemenis were killed; among the children killed was an 8-year-old American girl (whose 16-year-old American brother was killed by a drone under Obama).

In sum: Although precise numbers are difficult to obtain, there seems little question that the number of civilians being killed by the U.S. in Iraq and Syria — already quite high under Obama — has increased precipitously during the first two months of the Trump administration. Data compiled by the site Airwars tells the story: The number of civilians killed in Syria and Iraq began increasing in October under Obama but has now skyrocketed in March under Trump.

What’s particularly notable is that the number of airstrikes actually decreased in March (with a week left), even as civilian deaths rose — strongly suggesting that the U.S. military has become even more reckless about civilian deaths under Trump than it was under Obama:

This escalation of bombing and civilian deaths, combined with the deployment by Trump of 500 ground troops into Syria beyond the troops Obama already deployed there, has received remarkably little media attention. This is in part due to the standard indifference in U.S. discourse to U.S. killing of civilians compared to the language used when its enemies kill people (compare the very muted and euphemistic tones used to report on Trump’s escalations in Iraq and Syria to the frequent invocation of genocide and war crimes to denounce Russian killing of Syrian civilians). And part of this lack of media attention is due to the Democrats’ ongoing hunt for Russian infiltration of Washington, which leaves little room for other matters.

But what is becoming clear is that Trump is attempting to liberate the U.S. military from the minimal constraints it observed in order to avoid massive civilian casualties. And this should surprise nobody: Trump explicitly and repeatedly vowed to do exactly this during the campaign.

He constantly criticized Obama — who bombed seven predominantly Muslim countries — for being “weak” in battling ISIS and al Qaeda. Trump regularly boasted that he would free the U.S. military from rules of engagement that he regarded as unduly hobbling them. He vowed to bring back torture and even to murder the family members of suspected terrorists — prompting patriotic commentators to naïvely insist that the U.S. military would refuse to follow his orders. Trump’s war frenzy reached its rhetorical peak of derangement in December 2015, when he roared at a campaign rally that he would “bomb the shit out of ISIS” and then let its oil fields be taken by Exxon, whose CEO is now his secretary of state.

Trump can be criticized for many things, but lack of clarity about his intended war on terror approach is not one of them. All along, Trump’s “solution” to terrorism was as clear as it was simple; as I described it in September 2016:

Trump's anti-terror platform is explicitly 1) more bombing; 2) Israel-style police profiling; 3) say "radical Islam" https://t.co/NyivdkUanp

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) September 19, 2016

The clarity of Trump’s intentions regarding the war on terror was often obfuscated by anti-Trump pundits due to a combination of confusion about and distortions of foreign policy doctrine. Trump explicitly ran as a “non-interventionist” — denouncing, for instance, U.S. regime change wars in Iraq, Libya, and Syria (even though he at some points expressed support for the first two). Many commentators confused “non-interventionism” with “pacifism,” leading many of them — to this very day — to ignorantly claim that Trump’s escalated war on terror bombing is in conflict with his advocacy of non-interventionism. It is not.

To the extent that Trump is guided by any sort of coherent ideological framework, he is rooted in the traditions of Charles Lindbergh (whose “America First” motto he took) and the free trade-hating, anti-immigration, über-nationalist Pat Buchanan. Both Lindbergh and Buchanan were non-interventionists: Lindbergh was one of the earliest and loudest opponents of U.S. involvement in World War II, while Buchanan was scathing throughout all of 2002 about the neocon plan to invade Iraq.

Despite being vehement non-interventionists, neither Lindbergh nor Buchanan were pacifists. Quite the contrary: Both believed that when the U.S. was genuinely threatened with attack or attacked, it should use full and unrestrained force against its enemies. What they opposed was not military force in general but rather interventions geared toward a goal other than self-defense, such as changing other countries’ governments, protecting foreigners from tyranny or violence, or “humanitarian” wars.

What the Lindbergh/Buchanan non-interventionism opposes is not war per se, but a specific type of war: namely, those fought for reasons other than self-defense or direct U.S. interests (as was true of regime change efforts in Iraq, Libya, and Syria). Lindbergh opposed U.S. involvement in World War II on the ground that it was designed to help only the British and the Jews, while Buchanan, on the eve of the Iraq invasion, attacked neocons who “seek to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America’s interests” and who “have alienated friends and allies all over the Islamic and Western world through their arrogance, hubris, and bellicosity.”

The anti-Semitism and white nationalistic tradition of Lindbergh, the ideological precursor to Buchanan and then Trump, does not oppose war. It opposes military interventions in the affairs of other countries for reasons other than self-defense — i.e., the risking of American lives and resources for the benefits of “others.”

Each time Trump drops another bomb, various pundits and other assorted Trump opponents smugly posit that his doing so is inconsistent with his touted non-interventionism. This is just ignorance of what these terms mean. By escalating violence against civilians, Trump is, in fact, doing exactly what he promised to do, and exactly what those who described his foreign policy as non-interventionist predicted he would do: namely, limitlessly unleash the U.S. military when the claimed objective was the destruction of “terrorists,” while refusing to use the military for other ends such as regime change or humanitarianism. If one were to reduce this mentality to a motto, it could be: Fight fewer wars and for narrower reasons, but be more barbaric and criminal in prosecuting the ones that are fought.

Trump’s campaign pledges regarding Syria, and now his actions there, illustrate this point very clearly. Trump never advocated a cessation of military force in Syria. As the above video demonstrates, he advocated the opposite: an escalation of military force in Syria and Iraq in the name of fighting ISIS and al Qaeda. Indeed, Trump’s desire to cooperate with Russia in Syria was based on a desire to maximize the potency of bombing there (just as was true of Obama’s attempt to forge a bombing partnership with Putin in Syria).

What Trump opposed was the CIA’s yearslong policy of spending billions of dollars to arm anti-Assad rebels (a policy Hillary Clinton and her key advisers wanted to escalate), on the ground that the U.S. has no interest in removing Assad. That is the fundamental difference between non-interventionism and pacifism that many pundits are either unaware of or are deliberately conflating in order to prove their own vindication about Trump’s foreign policy. Nothing Trump has thus far done is remotely inconsistent with the non-interventionism he embraced during the campaign, unless one confuses “non-interventionism” with “opposition to the use of military force.”

Trump’s reckless killing of civilians in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen is many things: barbaric, amoral, and criminal. It is also, ironically, likely to strengthen support for the very groups — ISIS and al Qaeda — that he claims he wants to defeat, given that nothing drives support for those groups like U.S. slaughter of civilians (perhaps the only competitor in helping these groups is another Trump specialty: driving a wedge between Muslims and the West).

But what Trump’s actions are not is a departure from what he said he would do, nor are they inconsistent with the predictions of those who described his foreign policy approach as non-interventionist. To the contrary, the dark savagery guiding U.S. military conduct in that region is precisely what Trump expressly promised his supporters he would usher in.

The post Trump’s War on Terror Has Quickly Become as Barbaric and Savage as He Promised appeared first on The Intercept.

via The Intercept

#IFTTT #Feedly #Nothingman uses feedly

4 notes · View notes

esprit-de-corps-magazine · 5 years

Text

Damage Control: China pulls out all the stops in an effort to denounce international claims of human rights abuse

By Scott Taylor

In early June, a group of 22 countries including Canada, Japan, the U.K., France, and Australia, signed a letter to the United Nations Human Rights Council calling upon China “to end the mass arbitrary detentions and related violations against Muslims in the Xinjiang region.”

Although they are not the signatories on that letter, the U.S. administration has also voiced critical concern over China’s religious crackdown. At a July 16 conference in Washington, D.C. regarding global religious freedom, the U.S. Vice President Mike Pence claimed “In Xinjiang, the Communist Party has imprisoned more than a million Chinese Muslims, including Uighurs, in internment camps where they endure round-the-clock brainwashing.” Taking things up a notch, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo alleged, “China is home to one of the worst human rights crises of our time… It is truly the stain of the century.

In response to these charges, the Chinese government has steadfastly maintained that the facilities in question are in fact vocational schools aimed at poverty alleviation and as a means to curtail the spread of Islamic extremism. To bolster their case with the U.N., China managed to solicit the support of 31 nations – including Russia, North Korea and Venezuela - to write their own letter to the Human Rights Council, expressing their collective support for China’s anti-terror measures and the policy toward ethnic minorities in Xinjiang.

In a further attempt to prove their claims, the Chinese government organized a seven-day international media tour of Xinjiang, which included a total of 27 journalists from 24 countries. Media outlets represented included ABC News, the Irish Times, Australian Financial Review and the Corriere Della Serra of Italy. I was the sole Canadian representative.

The tour began in the city of Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, China’s largest and westernmost autonomous region. This area is home to approximately 11 million Uighurs – an ethnic Turkic minority, but also includes ethnic Kazakhs, Kirghiz and Tajiks as well as a steadily growing number of Han Chinese.

The first exhibit we were shown was a graphic display of the violent insurgency, which first erupted in this region in 2009. Photos and videos depicted in gory detail all of the terrorist attacks, which have killed a total of 197 people to date. Victims shown included small infants, women, and even the corpses of murdered policemen. In the centre of the hall was a vast collection of captured weaponry and home made bombs.

The subsequent Chinese crackdown has been largely successful and it was noted that the last terror attack occurred more than 30 months ago. This was the start point for our education as the Islamic extremism threat is the lynchpin for China implementing its policy of re-educating the Muslim minorities.

The Chinese wanted to make the point that the terrorists had in fact hit them hard, and thus they are justified in taking strong measures to reduce future threats.

However, during our subsequent seven days travelling throughout Xinjiang one did not get the sense that this was a region still living with the fear of imminent violence. There were an abundance of security cameras around public spaces and airport style body searches were conducted at entrances to crowded centres, but police did not wear body armour and there were no sandbagged bunkers in evidence. This was definitely not Kandahar, Afghanistan, or Baghdad, Iraq.

The second stop on our tour was a boarding school and a Mosque, where a new generation of Imams are being taught Islamic studies. With the world accusing China of committing cultural and religious genocide of the Uighurs, we were shown that the Beijing regime is actually funding schools to produce newly minted Muslim clergy.

To counter international claims that Uighur culture is being suppressed, we were shown a brand new $100 million Arts Centre, which is home to a professional orchestra and dance troupe. To further drive home this point we were treated to a full fledged Uighur cultural spectacle at the Xinjiang Grand Theatre in the city of Changji.

This celebration of the history of China’s Silk Road featured a cast of hundreds, live camels, horses running on treadmills, water cascading over the stage, the world’s largest video screen, and women in traditional garb dancing on Segways. It was essentially Las Vegas on steroids.

Of course, the key sites we were to see were the controversial vocational training centres, which are alleged to be re-education detention camps by the Western media. Our group visited two of these facilities – one at Shule County on the outskirts of Kashgar, and one in the city of Atushi. The first housed approximately 1,000 Uighur students, and the second held around 200. In both schools the student age ranged between 20-40 years old with a fairly even male-female ratio.

They were housed ten persons to a room, with bunk beds and a single squat toilet per dorm room. There were no guard towers or barbed wire and we were told that there were only eight security guards on the premises. This is less than one would find at the average hotel in western China.

It was noticed that the doors to the dorm rooms only locked from the outside. We were witness to a meal serving which featured generous portions, and no one in the two schools appeared malnourished. We were shown classrooms where students were chanting out their lessons in Mandarin, and others were studying Chinese laws. There were also study areas for vocational training such as computer skills, sewing, automotive, cooking and basic electrical.

Through the official translators, and under the steady gaze of our Chinese government minders, we were able to speak directly with several of the Uighur students. They had a very interesting story, and I deliberately use the singular as they all had almost the exact same story.

Every one of them claimed to be their of their own free will. Every one of them had a tale of how they had become radicalized by Islamic extremism. Every one of them claimed they were willing to commit violence against non-believers when they had been discovered either by the authorities or in some cases a friend or spouse. The story was that they then saw the light and enrolled in the vocational training program.

One slight young man, 25 year-old Qurbanjan, claimed he had actually procured bomb making equipment prior to his village police suggesting he enter the school and forget about waging Jihad.

In total we interviewed three young women who all claimed to have been radicalized by Islam, all claimed their husbands were unaware of their thoughts, and all three had left toddlers at home in order to attend the boarding schools. Gulmire Azair is 29 years old and a graduate of the vocational school program. She presently has a factory job as a seamstress in Kashgar. Her story mirrored the others in that she had found herself wanting to “kill pagans” after visiting some Islamic websites.

This is of course the narrative that the Chinese government wants to communicate to the world. These educations centres are, according to the official line, part of an anti-terrorism effort. The problem was that it was all too staged. The students would invariably rise at their desk, stand at attention and deliver their statement while staring straight above your head. It was very reminiscent of prisoners of war reciting their name, rank, and serial number to their captors.

Throughout our entire tour, the Chinese authorities overlooked no detail as they attempted to present to us a picture perfect glimpse of ethnic minority utopia in Xinjiang. When we visited a newly constructed relocation site for Kirghiz herdsmen for instance, everyone had a brand new white and black traditional Kirghiz hat. Those elderly residents, who just happened to be playing a game of cards in the common area, had a pristine deck of cards. When we entered family condos to witness the living conditions, there would be a feast awaiting us on the coffee table. When visiting a second similar site, hundreds of kilometres away, we were treated to the exact feast – as if there was an actual playbook detailing what the local party officials were to provide to our tour.

I am under no illusions as to the fact that the Chinese government showed us exactly what they wanted to show us. The schools we toured were prepared well in advance of our visit, and in both cases they treated us to Uighur cultural displays of folk dancing complete with elaborate costumes. In other words, how could the Chinese be suppressing Uighur culture when here they are teaching them dance numbers celebrating their unique heritage? The fact is that our media tour did not see all the camps, and in fact we could not get a straight answer from any official as to how many people are presently enrolled in this project.

If the Chinese government wants to seriously refute these serious allegations that they are perpetrating the ‘stain of the century’ upon Muslims of Xinjiang, they are going to have to provide unfettered and unlimited access to international observers.

Captions for photos above Left to Right:

Photo One: There are nearly 1000 students enrolled in the Shule vocational school.

Two: Twenty five year old Gulmire Azair, mother of one and a self pro-claimed former Islamic extremist. She had desires to kill Pagans before her friends convinced her to enrol in the vocational school program. She now works as a seamstress in a factory near Kashgar.

Three: Basic automotive skills are taught at the Atushi vocational school

Four: One of the vocations taught at the Atushi school is esthetician.

Five: The vocational school at Atushi has no guard towers, simply a high wall surrounding the complex. The yard includes volleyball courts and table tennis facilities.

Six: Cooking classes are a popular course at the vocational school. Students can learn either western style or Chinese style cuisine.

Seven & Eight: Lunch is served at the Atushi vocational school. Serving were generous and students did not appear malnourished.

Nine & Ten: In an effort to illustrate the extent of the islamic insurgency in Xinjiang, we were shown a large cache of captured weapons. These included crossbows and swords and a collection of antiquated rifles.

Eleven: This relocated Kirghiz herdsman all had bright new traditional white hats for our visit.

Twelve: Uighur students in Urumqi study the Koran as well as Mandarin language and China’s legal system, on their path to becoming Imams

Thirteen: The Chinese central government has built a mosque and boarding school to train a new generation of Muslim Imams.

Fourteen: Traditional dance routines are taught to the Uighur students, complete with elaborate costumes and a fog machine.

0 notes

ralphmorgan-blog1 · 6 years

Text

Sam Harris and the Myth of Perfectly Rational Thought

Sam Harris, one of the original members of the group dubbed the “New Atheists” (by Wired!) 12 years ago, says he doesn’t like tribalism. During his recent, much-discussed debate with Vox founder Ezra Klein about race and IQ, Harris declared that tribalism “is a problem we must outgrow.”

But apparently Harris doesn’t think he is part of that “we.” After he accused Klein of fomenting a “really indissoluble kind of tribalism” in the form of identity politics, and Klein replied that Harris exhibits his own form of tribalism, Harris said coolly, “I know I’m not thinking tribally in this respect.”

Robert Wright (@robertwrighter) is an Ideas contributor for WIRED and the author of Nonzero, The Moral Animal, The Evolution of God, and, most recently, Why Buddhism Is True. A visiting professor of science and religion at Union Theological Seminary, he publishes The Mindful Resistance Newsletter.

Not only is Harris capable of transcending tribalism—so is his tribe! Reflecting on his debate with Klein, Harris said that his own followers care “massively about following the logic of a conversation” and probe his arguments for signs of weakness, whereas Klein’s followers have more primitive concerns: “Are you making political points that are massaging the outraged parts of our brains? Do you have your hands on our amygdala and are you pushing the right buttons?”

Of the various things that critics of the New Atheists find annoying about them—and here I speak from personal experience—this ranks near the top: the air of rationalist superiority they often exude. Whereas the great mass of humankind remains mired in pernicious forms of illogical thought—chief among them, of course, religion—people like Sam Harris beckon from above: All of us, if we will just transcend our raw emotions and rank superstitions, can be like him, even if precious few of us are now.

We all need role models, and I’m not opposed in principle to Harris’s being mine. But I think his view of himself as someone who can transcend tribalism—and can know for sure that he’s transcending it—may reflect a crude conception of what tribalism is. The psychology of tribalism doesn’t consist just of rage and contempt and comparably conspicuous things. If it did, then many of humankind’s messes—including the mess American politics is in right now—would be easier to clean up.

What makes the psychology of tribalism so stubbornly powerful is that it consists mainly of cognitive biases that easily evade our awareness. Indeed, evading our awareness is something cognitive biases are precision-engineered by natural selection to do. They are designed to convince us that we’re seeing clearly, and thinking rationally, when we’re not. And Harris’s work features plenty of examples of his cognitive biases working as designed, warping his thought without his awareness. He is a case study in the difficulty of transcending tribal psychology, the importance of trying to, and the folly of ever feeling sure we’ve succeeded.

To be clear: I’m not saying Harris’s cognition is any more warped by tribalism than, say, mine or Ezra Klein’s. But somebody’s got to serve as an example of how deluded we all are, and who better than someone who thinks he’s not a good example?

There’s another reason Harris makes a good Exhibit A. This month Bari Weiss, in a now famous (and, on the left, infamous) New York Times piece, celebrated a coalescing group of thinkers dubbed the “Intellectual Dark Web”—people like Harris and Jordan Peterson and Christina Hoff Sommers, people for whom, apparently, the ideal of fearless truth telling trumps tribal allegiance. Andrew Sullivan, writing in support of Weiss and in praise of the IDW, says it consists of “nontribal thinkers.” OK, let’s take a look at one of these thinkers and see how nontribal he is.

Examples of Harris’s tribal psychology date back to the book that put him on the map: The End of Faith. The book exuded his conviction that the reason 9/11 happened—and the reason for terrorism committed by Muslims in general—was simple: the religious beliefs of Muslims. As he has put it: “We are not at war with ‘terrorism.’ We are at war with Islam.”

Believing that the root of terrorism is religion requires ruling out other root causes, so Harris set about doing that. In his book he listed such posited causes as “the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza…the collusion of Western powers with corrupt dictatorships…the endemic poverty and lack of economic opportunity that now plague the Arab world.”

Then he dismissed them. He wrote that “we can ignore all of these things—or treat them only to place them safely on the shelf—because the world is filled with poor, uneducated, and exploited peoples who do not commit acts of terrorism, indeed who would never commit terrorism of the sort that has become so commonplace among Muslims.”

If you’re tempted to find this argument persuasive, I recommend that you first take a look at a different instance of the same logic. Suppose I said, “We can ignore the claim that smoking causes lung cancer because the world is full of people who smoke and don’t get lung cancer.” You’d spot the fallacy right away: Maybe smoking causes lung cancer under some circumstances but not others; maybe there are multiple causal factors—all necessary, but none sufficient—that, when they coincide, exert decisive causal force.

Or, to put Harris’s fallacy in a form that he would definitely recognize: Religion can’t be a cause of terrorism, because the world is full of religious people who aren’t terrorists.

Harris isn’t stupid. So when he commits a logical error this glaring—and when he rests a good chunk of his world view on the error—it’s hard to escape the conclusion that something has biased his cognition.

As for which cognitive bias to blame: A leading candidate would be “attribution error.” Attribution error leads us to resist attempts to explain the bad behavior of people in the enemy tribe by reference to “situational” factors—poverty, enemy occupation, humiliation, peer group pressure, whatever. We’d rather think our enemies and rivals do bad things because that’s the kind of people they are: bad.

With our friends and allies, attribution error works in the other direction. We try to explain their bad behavior in situational terms, rather than attribute it to “disposition,” to the kind of people they are.

You can see why attribution error is an important ingredient of tribalism. It nourishes our conviction that the other tribe is full of deeply bad, and therefore morally culpable, people, whereas members of our tribe deserve little if any blame for the bad things they do.

This asymmetrical attribution of blame was visible in the defense of Israel that Harris famously mounted during Israel’s 2014 conflict with Gaza, in which some 70 Israelis and 2,300 Palestinians died.

Granted, Harris said, Israeli soldiers may have committed war crimes, but that’s because they have “been brutalized…that is, made brutal by” all the fighting they’ve had to do. And this brutalization “is largely due to the character of their enemies.”

Get the distinction? When Israelis do bad things, it’s because of the circumstances they face—in this case repeated horrific conflict that is caused by the bitter hatred emanating from Palestinians. But when Palestinians do bad things—like bitterly hate Israelis—this isn’t the result of circumstance (the long Israeli occupation of Gaza, say, or the subsequent, impoverishing, economic blockade); rather, it’s a matter of the “character” of the Palestinians.

This is attribution error working as designed. It sustains your conviction that, though your team may do bad things, it’s only the other team that’s actually bad. Your badness is “situational,” theirs is “dispositional.”

After Harris said this, and the predictable blowback ensued, he published an annotated version of his remarks in which he hastened to add that he wasn’t justifying war crimes and hadn’t meant to discount “the degree to which the occupation, along with collateral damage suffered in war, has fueled Palestinian rage.”

That’s progress. “But,” he immediately added, “Palestinian terrorism (and Muslim anti-Semitism) is what has made peaceful coexistence thus far impossible.” In other words: Even when the bad disposition of the enemy tribe is supplemented by situational factors, the buck still stops with the enemy tribe. Even when Harris struggles mightily against his cognitive biases, a more symmetrical allocation of blame remains elusive.

Another cognitive bias—probably the most famous—is confirmation bias, the tendency to embrace, perhaps uncritically, evidence that supports your side of an argument and to either not notice, reject, or forget evidence that undermines it. This bias can assume various forms, and one was exhibited by Harris in his exchange with Ezra Klein over political scientist Charles Murray’s controversial views on race and IQ.

Harris and Klein were discussing the “Flynn effect”—the fact that average IQ scores have tended to grow over the decades. No one knows why, but such factors as nutrition and better education are possibilities, and many of the other possibilities also fall under the heading of “improved living conditions.”

So the Flynn effect would seem to underscore the power of environment. Accordingly, people who see the black-white IQ gap as having no genetic component have cited it as reason to expect that the gap could move toward zero as average black living conditions approach average white living conditions. The gap has indeed narrowed, but people like Murray, who believe a genetic component is likely, have asked why it hasn’t narrowed more.

This is the line Harris pursued in an email exchange with Klein before their debate. He wrote that, in light of the Flynn effect, “the mean IQs of African American children who are second- and third-generation upper middle class should have converged with those of the children of upper-middle-class whites, but (as far as I understand) they haven’t.”

Harris’s expectation of such a convergence may seem reasonable at first, but on reflection you realize that it assumes a lot.

It assumes that when African Americans enter the upper middle class—when their income reaches some specified level—their learning environments are in all relevant respects like the environments of whites at the same income level: Their public schools are as good, their neighborhoods are as safe, their social milieus reward learning just as much, their parents are as well educated, they have no more exposure to performance-impairing drugs like marijuana and no less access to performance-enhancing (for test-taking purposes, at least) drugs like ritalin. And so on.

Klein alluded to this kink in Harris’s argument in an email to Harris: “We know, for instance, that African American families making $100,000 a year tend to live in neighborhoods with the same income demographics as white families making $30,000 a year.”

Harris was here exhibiting a pretty subtle form of confirmation bias. He had seen a fact that seemed to support his side of the argument—the failure of IQ scores of two groups to fully converge—and had embraced it uncritically; he accepted its superficial support of his position without delving deeper and asking any skeptical questions about the support.

I want to emphasize that Klein may here also be under the influence of confirmation bias. He saw a fact that seemed to threaten his views—the failure of IQ scores to fully converge—and didn’t embrace it, but rather viewed it warily, looking for things that might undermine its significance. And when he found such a thing—the study he cited—he embraced that.

And maybe he embraced it uncritically. For all I know it suffers from flaws that he would have looked for and found had it undermined his views. That’s my point: Cognitive biases are so pervasive and subtle that it’s hubristic to ever claim we’ve escaped them entirely.

In addition to exhibiting one side of confirmation bias—uncritically embracing evidence congenial to your world view—Harris recently exhibited a version of the flip side: straining to reject evidence you find unsettling. He did so in discussing the plight of physicist and popular writer Lawrence Krauss, who was recently suspended by Arizona State University after multiple women accused him of sexual predation.

Krauss is an ally of Harris’s in the sense of being not just an atheist, but a “new” atheist. He considers religion not just confused but pernicious and therefore in urgent need of disrespect and ridicule, which he is good at providing.

After the allegations against Krauss emerged, Harris warned against rushing to judgment. I’m in favor of such warnings, but Harris didn’t stop there. He said the following about the website that had first reported the allegations against Krauss: “Buzzfeed is on the continuum of journalistic integrity and unscrupulousness somewhere toward the unscrupulous side.”

So far as I can tell, this isn’t true in any relevant sense. Yes, Buzzfeed has had the kinds of issues that afflict even the most elite journalistic outlets: a firing over plagiarism, an undue-advertiser-influence incident, a you-didn’t-explicitly-warn-us-that-this-conversation-was-on-the-record complaint. And there was a time when Buzzfeed wasn’t really a journalistic outlet at all, but more of a spawning ground for cheaply viral content—a legacy that lives on as a major part of Buzzfeed’s business model and as a parody site called clickhole.

Still, since 2011, when Buzzfeed got serious about news coverage and hired Ben Smith as editor, the journalistic part of its operation has earned mainstream respect. And its investigative piece about Krauss was as thoroughly sourced as #metoo pieces that have appeared in places like the New York Times and the New Yorker.

But you probably shouldn’t take my word for that. I’ve had my contentious conversations with Krauss, and maybe this tension left me inclined to judge allegations against him too generously. In any event, I suspect that if the Buzzfeed piece were about someone Harris has had tensions with (Ezra Klein, maybe, or me), he might have just read it, found it pretty damning, and left it at that. But it was about Krauss—who is, if Harris will pardon the expression, a member of Harris’s tribe.

Most of these examples of tribal thinking are pretty pedestrian—the kinds of biases we all exhibit, usually with less than catastrophic results. Still, it is these and other such pedestrian distortions of thought and perception that drive America’s political polarization today.

For example: How different is what Harris said about Buzzfeed from Donald Trump talking about “fake news CNN”? It’s certainly different in degree. But is it different in kind? I would submit that it’s not.

When a society is healthy, it is saved from all this by robust communication. Individual people still embrace or reject evidence too hastily, still apportion blame tribally, but civil contact with people of different perspectives can keep the resulting distortions within bounds. There is enough constructive cross-tribal communication—and enough agreement on what the credible sources of information are—to preserve some overlap of, and some fruitful interaction between, world views.

Now, of course, we’re in a technological environment that makes it easy for tribes to not talk to each other and seems to incentivize the ridiculing of one another. Maybe there will be long-term fixes for this. Maybe, for example, we’ll judiciously amend our social media algorithms, or promulgate practices that can help tame cognitive biases.

Meanwhile, the closest thing to a cure may be for all of us to try to remember that natural selection has saddled us with these biases—and also to remember that, however hard we try, we’re probably not entirely escaping them. In this view, the biggest threat to America and to the world may be a simple lack of intellectual humility.

Harris, though, seems to think that the biggest threat to the world is religion. I guess these two views could be reconciled if it turned out that only religious people are lacking in intellectual humility. But there’s reason to believe that’s not the case.

Related Video

Culture

How the Internet Tricks You Into Thinking You're Always Right

A guide to busting through confirmation bias, the cognitive fallacy that's destroying our discourse.

Original Article : HERE ; This post was curated & posted using : RealSpecific

=> *********************************************** See More Here: Sam Harris and the Myth of Perfectly Rational Thought ************************************ =>

Sponsored by SmartQuotes - Your daily smart quote

This article was searched, compiled, delivered and presented using RSS Masher & TrendingTraffic

=>>

Sam Harris and the Myth of Perfectly Rational Thought was originally posted by A 18 MOA Top News from around

#A 18 MOA Top News from around

0 notes

spooky-froll · 6 years

Link

You’ve heard it all before: there were the various “surges” (though once upon a time sold as paths to victory, not simply to break a “stalemate”); there were the insider, or “green-on-blue,” attacks in which Afghans trained, advised, and often armed by the U.S. turned their weapons on their mentors (two such incidents in the last month resulted in three dead American soldiers and more wounded); there were the Afghan ghost soldiers, ghost police, ghost students, and ghost teachers (all existing only on paper, the money for them ponied up by U.S. taxpayers but always in someone else’s pocket); and there was that never-ending national “reconstruction” program that long ago outspent the famed Marshall Plan, which helped put all of Western Europe back on its feet after World War II. It included projects for roads to nowhere, gas stations built in the middle of nowhere, and those Pentagon-produced, forest-patterned camouflage outfits for the Afghan army in a land only 2.1% forested. (The design was, it turns out, favored by the Afghan defense minister of the moment and his fashion statement cost U.S. taxpayers a mere $28 million more than it would have cost to produce other freely available, more appropriate designs.) And that, of course, is just to begin the distinctly bumpy drive down America’s Afghan highway to nowhere. Don’t even speak to me, for instance, about the $8.5 billion that the U.S. sunk into efforts to suppress the opium crop in a country where the drug trade now flourishes.

And considering those failed surges, those repeated insider attacks, those ghost soldiers and ghost roads and ghost drug programs in the longest conflict in American history, the one that most people in this country have turned into a ghost war (and that neither of the candidates for president in 2016 even bothered to discuss on the campaign trail), what do you suppose Donald Trump’s generals have in mind when it comes to the future?

For that, let me turn you over to a man who, in 2011, in one of those surge moments, fought in Afghanistan: TomDispatch regular Army Major Danny Sjursen, author of Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge. Let him remind you of how that war once looked from the ground up and of what lessons were carefully not drawn from such experiences. Let him consider the eagerness of the generals to whom our new president has ceded decision-making on U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan to... well, let’s not say “surge,” since that word now has such negative connotations, but send thousands more U.S. troops into that country in a... well, what about a “resurge” in already vain hopes of... well... an American resurgence in that country.

Tread Carefully The Folly of the Next Afghan “Surge” By Danny Sjursen

We walked in a single file. Not because it was tactically sound. It wasn’t -- at least according to standard infantry doctrine. Patrolling southern Afghanistan in column formation limited maneuverability, made it difficult to mass fire, and exposed us to enfilading machine-gun bursts. Still, in 2011, in the Pashmul District of Kandahar Province, single file was our best bet.

The reason was simple enough: improvised bombs not just along roads but seemingly everywhere. Hundreds of them, maybe thousands. Who knew?

That’s right, the local “Taliban” -- a term so nebulous it’s basically lost all meaning -- had managed to drastically alter U.S. Army tactics with crude, homemade explosives stored in plastic jugs. And believe me, this was a huge problem. Cheap, ubiquitous, and easy to bury, those anti-personnel Improvised Explosive Devices, or IEDs, soon littered the “roads,” footpaths, and farmland surrounding our isolated outpost. To a greater extent than a number of commanders willingly admitted, the enemy had managed to nullify our many technological advantages for a few pennies on the dollar (or maybe, since we’re talking about the Pentagon, it was pennies on the millions of dollars).

Truth be told, it was never really about our high-tech gear. Instead, American units came to rely on superior training and discipline, as well as initiative and maneuverability, to best their opponents. And yet those deadly IEDs often seemed to even the score, being both difficult to detect and brutally effective. So there we were, after too many bloody lessons, meandering along in carnival-like, Pied Piper-style columns. Bomb-sniffing dogs often led the way, followed by a couple of soldiers carrying mine detectors, followed by a few explosives experts. Only then came the first foot soldiers, rifles at the ready. Anything else was, if not suicide, then at least grotesquely ill-advised.

And mind you, our improvised approach didn’t always work either. To those of us out there, each patrol felt like an ad hoc round of Russian roulette. In that way, those IEDs completely changed how we operated, slowing movement, discouraging extra patrols, and distancing us from what was then considered the ultimate “prize”: the local villagers, or what was left of them anyway. In a counterinsurgency (COIN) campaign, which is what the U.S. military was running in Afghanistan in those years, that was the definition of defeat.

Strategic Problems in Microcosm

My own unit faced a dilemma common to dozens -- maybe hundreds -- of other American units in Afghanistan. Every patrol was slow, cumbersome, and risky. The natural inclination, if you cared about your boys, was to do less. But effective COIN operations require securing territory and gaining the trust of the civilians living there. You simply can’t do that from inside a well-protected American base. One obvious option was to live in the villages -- which we eventually did -- but that required dividing up the company into smaller groups and securing a second, third, maybe fourth location, which quickly became problematic, at least for my 82-man cavalry troop (when at full strength). And, of course, there were no less than five villages in my area of responsibility.

I realize, writing this now, that there’s no way I can make the situation sound quite as dicey as it actually was. How, for instance, were we to “secure and empower” a village population that was, by then, all but nonexistent? Years, even decades, of hard fighting, air strikes, and damaged crops had left many of those villages in that part of Kandahar Province little more than ghost towns, while cities elsewhere in the country teemed with uprooted and dissatisfied peasant refugees from the countryside.

Sometimes, it felt as if we were fighting over nothing more than a few dozen deserted mud huts. And like it or not, such absurdity exemplified America’s war in Afghanistan. It still does. That was the view from the bottom. Matters weren’t -- and aren't -- measurably better at the top. As easily as one reconnaissance troop could be derailed, so the entire enterprise, which rested on similarly shaky foundations, could be unsettled.

At a moment when the generals to whom President Trump recently delegated decision-making powers on U.S. troop strength in that country consider a new Afghan “surge,” it might be worth looking backward and zooming out just a bit. Remember, the very idea of “winning” the Afghan War, which left my unit in that collection of mud huts, rested (and still rests) on a few rather grandiose assumptions.

The first of these surely is that the Afghans actually want (or ever wanted) us there; the second, that the country was and still is vital to our national security; and the third, that 10,000, 50,000, or even 100,000 foreign troops ever were or now could be capable of “pacifying” an insurgency, or rather a growing set of insurgencies, or securing 33 million souls, or facilitating a stable, representative government in a heterogeneous, mountainous, landlocked country with little history of democracy.

The first of these points is at least debatable. As you might imagine, any kind of accurate polling is quite difficult, if not impossible, outside the few major population centers in that isolated country. Though many Afghans, particularly urban ones, may favor a continued U.S. military presence, others clearly wonder what good a new influx of foreigners will do in their endlessly war-torn nation. As one high-ranking Afghan official recently lamented, thinking undoubtedly of the first use in his land of the largest non-nuclear bomb on the planet, “Is the plan just to use our country as a testing ground for bombs?" And keep in mind that the striking rise in territory the Taliban now controls, the most since they were driven from power in 2001, suggests that the U.S. presence is hardly welcomed everywhere.

The second assumption is far more difficult to argue or justify. To say the least, classifying a war in far-away Afghanistan as “vital” relies on a rather pliable definition of the term. If that passes muster -- if bolstering the Afghan military to the tune of (at least) tens of billions of dollars annually and thousands of new boots-on-the-ground in order to deny safe haven to “terrorists” is truly “vital” -- then logically the current U.S. presences in Iraq, Syria, Somalia, and Yemen are critical as well and should be similarly fortified. And what about the growing terror groups in Egypt, Libya, Nigeria, Tunisia, and so on? We’re talking about a truly expensive proposition here -- in blood and treasure. But is it true? Rational analysis suggests it is not. After all, on average about seven Americans were killed by Islamist terrorists on U.S. soil annually from 2005 to 2015. That puts terrorism deaths right up there with shark attacks and lightning strikes. The fear is real, the actual danger... less so.

As for the third point, it’s simply preposterous. One look at U.S. military attempts at “nation-building” or post-conflict stabilization and pacification in Iraq, Libya, or -- dare I say -- Syria should settle the issue. It’s often said that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. Yet here we are, 14 years after the folly of invading Iraq and many of the same voices -- inside and outside the administration -- are clamoring for one more “surge” in Afghanistan (and, of course, will be clamoring for the predictable surges to follow across the Greater Middle East).

The very idea that the U.S. military had the ability to usher in a secure Afghanistan is grounded in a number of preconditions that proved to be little more than fantasies. First, there would have to be a capable, reasonably corruption-free local governing partner and military. That’s a nonstarter. Afghanistan’s corrupt, unpopular national unity government is little better than the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam in the 1960s and that American war didn’t turn out so well, did it? Then there’s the question of longevity. When it comes to the U.S. military presence there, soon to head into its 16th year, how long is long enough? Several mainstream voices, including former Afghan commander General David Petraeus, are now talking about at least a “generation” more to successfully pacify Afghanistan. Is that really feasible given America’s growing resource constraints and the ever expanding set of dangerous “ungoverned spaces” worldwide?

And what could a new surge actually do? The U.S. presence in Afghanistan is essentially a fragmented series of self-contained bases, each of which needs to be supplied and secured. In a country of its size, with a limited transportation infrastructure, even the 4,000-5,000 extra troops the Pentagon is reportedly considering sending right now won’t go very far.

Now, zoom out again. Apply the same calculus to the U.S. position across the Greater Middle East and you face what we might start calling the Afghan paradox, or my own quandary safeguarding five villages with only 82 men writ large. Do the math. The U.S. military is already struggling to keep up with its commitments. At what point is Washington simply spinning its proverbial wheels? I’ll tell you when -- yesterday.

Now, think about those three questionable Afghan assumptions and one uncomfortable actuality leaps forth. The only guiding force left in the American strategic arsenal is inertia.

What Surge 4.0 Won’t Do -- I Promise...

Remember something: this won’t be America’s first Afghan “surge.” Or its second, or even its third. No, this will be the U.S. military’s fourth crack at it. Who feels lucky? First came President George W. Bush’s "quiet" surge back in 2008. Next, just one month into his first term, newly minted President Barack Obama sent 17,000 more troops to fight his so-called good war (unlike the bad one in Iraq) in southern Afghanistan. After a testy strategic review, he then committed 30,000 additional soldiers to the “real” surge a year later. That’s what brought me (and the rest of B Troop, 4-4 Cavalry) to Pashmul district in 2011. We left -- most of us -- more than five years ago, but of course about 8,800 American military personnel remain today and they are the basis for the surge to come.

To be fair, Surge 4.0 might initially deliver certain modest gains (just as each of the other three did in their day). Realistically, more trainers, air support, and logistics personnel could indeed stabilize some Afghan military units for some limited amount of time. Sixteen years into the conflict, with 10% as many American troops on the ground as at the war’s peak, and after a decade-plus of training, Afghan security forces are still being battered by the insurgents. In the last years, they’ve been experiencing record casualties, along with the usual massive stream of desertions and the legions of “ghost soldiers” who can neither die nor desert because they don’t exist, although their salaries do (in the pockets of their commanders or other lucky Afghans). And that’s earned them a “stalemate,” which has left the Taliban and other insurgent groups in control of a significant part of the country. And if all goes well (which isn’t exactly a surefire thing), that’s likely to be the best that Surge 4.0 can produce: a long, painful tie.

Peel back the onion’s layers just a bit more and the ostensible reasons for America’s Afghan War vanish along with all the explanatory smoke and mirrors. After all, there are two things the upcoming “mini-surge” will emphatically not do:

*It won’t change a failing strategic formula.

Imagine that formula this way: American trainers + Afghan soldiers + loads of cash + (unspecified) time = a stable Afghan government and lessening Taliban influence.

It hasn’t worked yet, of course, but -- so the surge-believers assure us -- that’s because we need more: more troops, more money, more time. Like so many loyal Reaganites, their answers are always supply-side ones and none of them ever seems to wonder whether, almost 16 years later, the formula itself might not be fatally flawed.

According to news reports, no solution being considered by the current administration will even deal with the following interlocking set of problems: Afghanistan is a large, mountainous, landlocked, ethno-religiously heterogeneous, poor country led by a deeply corrupt government with a deeply corrupt military. In a place long known as a “graveyard of empires,” the United States military and the Afghan Security Forces continue to wage what one eminent historian has termed “fortified compound warfare.” Essentially, Washington and its local allies continue to grapple with relatively conventional threats from exceedingly mobile Taliban fighters across a porous border with Pakistan, a country that has offered not-so-furtive support and a safe haven for those adversaries. And the Washington response to this has largely been to lock its soldiers inside those fortified compounds (and focus on protecting them against “insider attacks” by those Afghans it works with and trains). It hasn’t worked. It can’t. It won’t.

Consider an analogous example. In Vietnam, the United States never solved the double conundrum of enemy safe havens and a futile search for legitimacy. The Vietcong guerillas and North Vietnamese Army used nearby Cambodia, Laos, and North Vietnam to rest, refit, and replenish. U.S. troops meanwhile lacked legitimacy because their corrupt South Vietnamese partners lacked it.

Sound familiar? We face the same two problems in Afghanistan: a Pakistani safe haven and a corrupt, unpopular central government in Kabul. Nothing, and I mean nothing, in any future troop surge will effectively change that.

*It won’t pass the logical fallacy test.

The minute you really think about it, the whole argument for a surge or mini-surge instantly slides down a philosophical slippery slope.

If the war is really about denying terrorists safe havens in ungoverned or poorly governed territory, then why not surge more troops into Yemen, Somalia, Nigeria, Libya, Pakistan (where al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden’s son Hamza bin-Laden are believed to be safely ensconced), Iraq, Syria, Chechnya, Dagestan (where one of the Boston Marathon bombers was radicalized), or for that matter Paris or London. Every one of those places has harbored and/or is harboring terrorists. Maybe instead of surging yet again in Afghanistan or elsewhere, the real answer is to begin to realize that all the U.S. military in its present mode of operation can do to change that reality is make it worse. After all, the last 15 years offer a vision of how it continually surges and in the process only creates yet more ungovernable lands and territories.

So much of the effort, now as in previous years, rests on an evident desire among military and political types in Washington to wage the war they know, the one their army is built for: battles for terrain, fights that can be tracked and measured on maps, the sort of stuff that staff officers (like me) can display on ever more-complicated PowerPoint slides. Military men and traditional policymakers are far less comfortable with ideological warfare, the sort of contest where their instinctual proclivity to “do something” is often counterproductive.

As U.S. Army Field Manual 3-24 -- General David Petraeus’ highly touted counterinsurgency “bible” -- wisely opined: “Sometimes doing nothing is the best reaction.” It’s high time to follow such advice (even if it’s not the advice that Petraeus himself is offering anymore).

As for me, call me a deep-dyed skeptic when it comes to what 4,000 or 5,000 more U.S. troops can do to secure or stabilize a country where most of the village elders I met couldn’t tell you how old they were. A little foreign policy humility goes a long way toward not heading down that slippery slope. Why, then, do Americans continue to deceive themselves? Why do they continue to believe that even 100,000 boys from Indiana and Alabama could alter Afghan society in a way Washington would like? Or any other foreign land for that matter?

I suppose some generals and policymakers are just plain gamblers. But before putting your money on the next Afghan surge, it might be worth flashing back to the limitations, struggles, and sacrifices of just one small unit in one tiny, contested district of southern Afghanistan in 2011...

Lonely Pashmul

So, on we walked -- single file, step by treacherous step -- for nearly a year. Most days things worked out. Until they didn’t. Unfortunately, some soldiers found bombs the hard way: three dead, dozens wounded, one triple amputee. So it went and so we kept on going. Always onward. Ever forward. For America? Afghanistan? Each other? No matter. And so it seems other Americans will keep on going in 2017, 2018, 2019...

Lift foot. Hold breath. Step. Exhale.

Keep walking... to defeat... but together.

#Freeblr #Afghanistan #U.S. Foreign Policy #Middle East

0 notes

shirlleycoyle · 5 years

Text

Facebook and YouTube Are Failing to Detect Terrorist Content in Arabic

Moustafa Ayad is the Deputy Director of International Technology, Communications and Education at the ISD, an international group fighting terrorism, extremism, and fascism.

Abu Bakr Naji wants you to believe that it was the prayers of the mujahideen in Afghanistan that caused the Chernobyl disaster. “They raised their palms in prayer against the Russians and after a short period of time God wiped out many in the Chernobyl disaster,” Naji wrote in The Management of Savagery: The Most Critical Stage Through Which the Ummah Will Pass—one of the most infamous terrorist strategies published in the post-9/11 era.

The pages of Naji’s 2004 book are notorious for more than ludicrous correlations between mujahideen prayers and a nuclear disaster. It is infamous for foreshadowing the future strategy of governance used by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). What makes The Management of Savagery dangerous is its deliberate, and almost clinical, dissection of international terrorist groups, and the solutions Naji proffers as corrective strategy until the establishment of a “Caliphate.”

In an era where more than 70 percent of the American population above the age of 12 uses YouTube for streaming audio, and more users use the platform for streaming audio than any other streaming service, it only makes sense that The Management of Savagery made its way onto YouTube as an audiobook. The text also found a home on Facebook, where large “educational” pages shared direct links to the text.

It seems to have began in 2017, when an Egyptian YouTube user recording controversial audiobooks as an “educational channel,” uploaded the first audiobook version of the terrorist strategy. It garnered more than 22,500 listens, and was shared across four different playlists, and ultimately evaded detection until researchers from the Institute of Strategic Dialogue (ISD) found it by using simple Arabic searches for the names of terrorist ideologues, groups, and texts. If we were able to find these so easily, why didn’t Facebook and YouTube?

“jihadists are aware that Arabic, in addition to considering it a sacred language, provides a linguistic firewall which their adversaries find difficult to penetrate”

Facebook, YouTube, Microsoft, and Twitter formed the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, and, at a meeting in San Francisco and another meeting held in Jordan a month ago, I specifically noted to these platforms the need for improved Arabic detection practices. But The Management of Savagery’s Facebook and YouTube presence highlights the inability of technology companies to plug, disrupt, and identify legacy terrorist content in multiple languages on their sites. Mimicking ISD findings, a research report commissioned by social media companies, and put out through the Global Research Network on Terrorism and Technology, noted that “jihadists are aware that Arabic, in addition to considering it a sacred language, provides a linguistic firewall which their adversaries find difficult to penetrate.”

Throughout June and July, the team of ISD researchers I led used simple Arabic language searches to surface Facebook and YouTube networks of users, channels, and pages sharing al Qaeda and ISIS legacy terrorist content across both platforms. It was as simple as typing “ The Management of Savagery” into YouTube and Facebook search fields. ISD shared all of its findings, including the links to content on both sites with both Facebook and Google. Both companies are reviewing the content, or have taken the content down. Facebook has yet to take down multiple posts linking to a direct download of The Management of Savagery—shared more than 180 times across the platform.

Much of the technology companies’ focus over the past four years has been on removing and limiting the impact of ISIS-affiliated content on their platforms at the behest of governments around the world. While much of the Islamist terrorist activity online has migrated to alternative, end-to-end encryption platforms such as Telegram, the ability to still find treasure troves of terrorist content on the largest platforms in the world, in Arabic, the fastest growing language of social media, is mind-numbingly confounding. To be clear, Facebook says it has taken down millions of pieces of ISIS and Al-Qaeda related content this year alone, while Google says it has reviewed a million pieces of potential terrorist-related content on its platforms.

Users are growing bolder and more creative in their tactics and strategies to spread terrorist propaganda. On YouTube, a channel with more than 22,500 subscribers turned The Management of Savagery into a 10-part audiobook that has more 25,000 views and four reposts, which spread the content even further. On Facebook, five public pages with more than 4,000 followers, have dedicated themselves to sharing the ideas contained in al Qaeda linked Global Islamic Resistance Call—a 1,600-page terrorist tome that set the tone for the era of the “individual jihad” we are witnessing now —and The Management of Savagery. All of the terrorist content found had been on the platforms for more than two years.

Terrorist sympathizers on Facebook and YouTube have clearly taken advantage of these gaps, and are deploying simple tactics to evade both manual and automated detection by the companies. Facebook users identified terrorist content or pages as “educational,” tagging terrorist material as “books,” “public figures,” or “companies,” in order to evade detection. As per the companies’ own rules, educational content that might otherwise violate the platform’s codes of conduct are often spared take downs. Facebook’s Community Guidelines outline this exception under the company’s “Objectionable Content” section. YouTube similarly outlines this exception under its “Violent Criminal Organizations” policy.

Facebook’s design actually aids users in finding more content. The “related pages” option functions as an algorithmic bridge between networks of terrorist content propagators. I was linked from pages that were sharing explicitly terrorist content to other “softer” pages supportive of Salafi-jihadism, Salafi-jihadist principles, and Salafi-jihadist ideologues. Two clicks away from The Management of Savagery through related pages is a “Company” page title that reads “Jihad for the Sake of God.” This page claims more than 42,000 followers, and is dedicated to countering “misguided sheiks.”

On YouTube, terrorist propagandists are linking extremist material to mainstream content. This approach appears designed to game the platform’s search algorithms by linking mainstream content to terrorist content, and hence driving traffic back to dangerous content. A number of the playlists were also posting a smattering of mainstream content, including videos of popular Egyptian singers, belly dancers, and mobile-phone shot videos of families.

Islamist supporters seeded eight different direct links to the PDF version of The Management of Savagery on Facebook. The links were shared 184 times across the platform, and in some instances were downloaded thousands of times. One public page with more than 137,000 followers posted a link to the PDF version of the terrorist strategy that has been shared 61 times on Facebook. The same link has been liked more than 160 times.

Both YouTube and Facebook have made strides in detecting terrorist content. For instance, Facebook claimed last year to have removed 99 percent of “terror content” before it was reported by third parties. In the first three months of 2019, YouTube said it removed 89,968 videos that “violated its violent extremism policy.” The question remains, is what we are finding in Arabic the remaining one percent that has not been reported or automatically detected? Most likely both. How large is that one percent, especially in terms of how much content is uploaded to both sites, not only in a day, but in any given hour? YouTube similarly contends that “90 percent of violent extremist videos that were uploaded and removed in the past six months were removed before receiving a single human flag, and of those, 88 percent had fewer than ten views .”

It’s evident that much of the effort of social media platforms has been on English language content, however, the inability to detect clearly defined terrorist content in Arabic, the digital sphere’s fastest growing language, is a gaping hole for the companies. YouTube and Facebook should update their manual and automated Arabic language detection efforts to ensure legacy terrorist content no longer festers across their platforms. This should include the basics. Arabic names of al Qaeda and ISIS ideologues, and the titles of terrorist strategies, pamphlets, books, and films. While the platforms have been diligent at removing some English-language terrorist content, the same approach has yet to be reproduced in Arabic. Until that basic level of detection is instituted, terrorist content will, in the words of the infamous ISIS refrain, “ bakiya, bakiya, bakiya, or remain, remain, remain.”

Facebook and YouTube Are Failing to Detect Terrorist Content in Arabic syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

0 notes

omginstantpaperbouquetblr · 7 years

Link

By Vijay Prashad. This article was first published on Frontline.

Donald Trump feels he has to undo a great deal from the eight years of Barack Obama’s presidency, and he is in a hurry. Obamacare has been ordered out and a “Muslim Ban” is signed in. His deregulation orders are just what the corporate sector wants. All this to “Make America Great Again”!

Time is of no consequence in America these days. President Donald Trump awakens early and fires off a tweet. These are as important as the executive orders he has been signing with remarkable frequency. He is a man in a hurry. There is a great deal, he feels, to undo from the eight years of Barack Obama’s presidency. It is almost as if Trump does not believe that he will be long in the job. Changes must be made, and speed is of the essence. The midnight oil burns in the White House feverishly.

The executive orders are hard to keep up with. Serious issues are deliberated in a few pages. Trump ordered federal agencies to set aside Obama’s health care initiative, which was one of the main social reforms passed in recent memory. Trump’s anger at what is known as Obamacare is part of the general corporate sensibility against regulations of any kind. Trump pushed for oil companies to be able to build their controversial pipelines and demanded that federal agencies must ease up on financial and environmental regulations. One order said that if the government introduces a new regulation, it must first abolish two others. This is sweet music to the corporate sector, which instinctively dislikes the fetters of government intervention. The Trump claim is that deregulation will spur business activity, produce growth and therefore deliver jobs to the “forgotten Americans” —Trump’s base.

The deregulation orders did not receive the kind of attention they deserve. These are dull compared with the more flashy orders, the ones that reflected Trump’s most dramatic campaign promises: build the wall against Mexico, ban Muslims, and fight “radical Islamic terrorism”. It was the flash of the orders on these issues that drew all the attention. No one expected Trump to actually enact these policies. It was felt by the encrusted establishment that Trump—like other politicians—would make grand social claims during the campaign but would then ignore these promises when the “realities” of governance settled in. But Trump and his team had no patience for such formulas. Trump and his advisers know full well that his base—the “forgotten Americans”—is hungry for action. They want their man to deliver something fast. Trump will not be able to take the American economy by the throat and make it cough out jobs. That is simply impossible. Far easier to tackle these social issues to prove his fidelity to his base.

When the orders came out, a frisson of delight went through Trump’s base. Early polls showed that the majority of Americans disapproved of Trump’s “Muslim Ban”, but 45 per cent of those asked said that they approved of it. That is about the same percentage of the electorate that voted for Trump. A seam of the Far Right —including the fascists—have long said that the decline in the fortunes of the white Americans came from the enfranchisement of blacks, Latinos, immigrants, gays, lesbians and Muslims. “Make America Great Again” is a line that Ronald Reagan used as his campaign slogan in 1980. During a speech in that campaign, Reagan said that his project was for a “national crusade to make America great again”. The word “crusade” with all its Christian implications is an old one for the American Right, but here it was linked to the suggestion that America—in 1980—had been lessened by the gains of the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, which had been driven by secularism. These had to be put in their place. Reagan, and now Trump, would cleanse the country of its crud and reveal it for what it was always supposed to be: a white, Christian nation. It is fitting that the Trump administration will remove the white supremacist groups and the fascist groups from the terror listing; only “radical Islamic terrorists” will be on that list.

Orders can be delivered with ease, but implementation is another story. The “Muslim Ban”, for instance, created chaos between the Customs and Border Protection and the Department of Homeland Security. Officials in these government agencies, as well as in the State Department, did not know how to act on the basis of the orders. A hundred thousand visas were cancelled in the chaos. One minute no one from the seven countries was allowed to board a flight to the U.S., and the next minute people were allowed on aircraft. It is this chaos that has come to define the Trump administration. Deliberative statements from above do not translate easily for the massive apparatus of the U.S. government.

These orders came from Trump’s pen with a great flourish of royalty. Trump did not deign to explain his decisions or make any argument. There is no time for that. His language is simple and direct. “We’re going to do great,” he says, “we’ll make America great.” Complexity is not necessary. There is no conversation here about how computers and other technology have made workers more productive, which has led to a great haemorrhaging of jobs. It is this, rather than foreign trade, that has truly cut deep into the heart of employment in factories and in fields. None of this is on the table. Trump is able to blame a long list of people who have gained socially for the ailments of those who have been defeated economically. Hate crimes against the long list of Trump’s enemies —Mexicans, Muslims and those who look like them —have risen. Hatred has taken on a mundane quality. “Muslim-free zones” is a sign that can be found in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where there are only a handful of Muslims in residence. In Little Falls, Minnesota, two white men came to the home of a Somali family and told them to move out or else they would burn down the home. The Roth Family Jewish Community Centre of Greater Orlando (Florida), which runs a preschool, received three bomb threats in two weeks. In San Francisco (California), a white man accosted an Asian woman and said to her: “I hate your fucking race. We’re in charge of this country now.”

Will removing Bannon help?

Hatred of Obama defined Trump’s political life over the past eight years. He was one of the first to stoke the rumour that Obama was not an American and that he was a Kenyan immigrant. The “Birther Movement” embraced Trump, who thumped on this theme right until he became a presidential candidate. The sewers of the American Far Right—the fascists and racists—welcomed the attention given them by Trump’s celebrity. Here was a rich real estate baron and television star who was giving credence to the worst kind of falsehoods. It was in this drain that Trump met Breitbart News’ Steve Bannon.

Bannon drifted from Wall Street into the propaganda world of the Far Right, where he made films and curated a website that produced what is now known as “alt-facts” (alternative facts or, in more common language, lies). Over the years, Bannon has made clear his great dislike of the gains made by minority communities and of H-1B visa technocrats who surrounded him in the world of finance and media. His hatred of them was clarified in a March 2016 radio show, when he said: “Engineering schools are all full of people from South Asia, and East Asia. They’ve come in here to take these jobs.” American students, he said bitterly, “can’t get into these graduate schools”. Twenty per cent of the U.S. population is made up of immigrants, Bannon noted. “Is that not the beating heart of the problem?” These technocrats not only surrounded him, but they made him feel uneasy. “These are not Jeffersonian democrats,” he complained. “These are not people with thousands of years of democracy in their DNA coming in here.” Resentment and revenge are the contours of Bannon’s viewpoint. It is fitting that he used the term DNA in his statement. Skin is the limit of ideas such as democracy. America made an error, Bannon suggests, in allowing darker skins to participate in its democratic experiment. Trump brought him in as his main adviser for his campaign. Bannon is now, it is said, one of the main intellectuals of the Trump presidency.

Is Bannon Trump’s brain? Bewilderment at the depth of the Trump presidency has led some to think that the removal of Bannon would somehow bring normalcy to Trump’s world. But this might be wishful thinking. Each of Trump’s Cabinet appointments and many of his political appointments into the agencies seem Bannonesque in their world view. They are behind the “Muslim Ban” and the “Mexican Wall”; they would like to undermine public education and eviscerate regulations; they would like to lift up “alt-facts” to the status of reality and send pesky reporters to prison. This is a world view shared across the administration, from Vice President Mike Pence to Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly. Talking to people in the Trump administration is startling: they believe that they have been out of power and are now, finally, in charge, with little time to spare. Bannon is not their leader. What unites them is the feeling of resentment and revenge that he articulates and Trump embodies.

Resistance

Trump’s ban on the entry of people from seven Muslim-majority countries was not going to be taken quietly. Organisations that work on civil liberties and refugee relief as well as Left groups and platforms such as Black Lives Matter and Occupy hastily mobilised people to flood the airports. From John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York to San Francisco International Airport, the crowds chanted “Let Them In” and “Not My President”. It was a powerful demonstration, with bodies on the line to resist the Trump order and to make it clear that such actions would not go unchallenged on the streets.

Democratic Party politicians hastened to the airports to give their support to the protests. Senator Elizabeth Warren went to Boston airport and said: “We will make our voices heard all around the world. We will not turn away children, we will not turn away families, we will not turn away anyone because of their religion.” Senator Kamala Harris, the first Indian American Senator in U.S. history, was forthright in her criticism. “On Holocaust Memorial Day, President Trump enacted an executive order that will restrict refugees from Muslim-majority countries. Make no mistake—this is a Muslim ban. During the Holocaust, we failed to let refugees like Anne Frank into our country. We can’t let history repeat itself.”

Trump’s threat to deport undocumented migrants received a sharp rebuke from Democratic politicians. Boston’s Mayor Marty Walsh said that any migrant who felt threatened could come to City Hall and take shelter. “If people want to live here,” he said, “they’ll live here. They can use my office. They can use any office in this building.” When a reporter asked him if this applied to “illegal immigrants”, Walsh was sharp with his rebuke saying that no one was illegal. Trump has threatened to withdraw federal money from cities and towns that do not enforce his anti-immigration agenda. “We will not be intimidated by a threat of federal funding,” said Walsh. “We will not retreat one inch.”

Popular resistance strengthened the spine of these leaders, many of whom come from political traditions not used to such forthright resistance. This is not the time for politeness, they suggest. Stiffer measures are needed.

Boycotts of businesses that operate alongside the Trump agenda have had an impact. During the airport protests, the New York Taxi Workers’ Union decided to go on strike at the airport. Seeing an opportunity, Uber suspended its surge fees and decided to break the strike. Thousands of people deleted their Uber app, sending a strong message to the company. Its CEO felt the pressure to resign from Trump’s business council. Department stores such as Nordstrom’s and Neiman Marcus have dropped the Ivanka Trump jewellery line. Amazon and Expedia took the Trump administration to court saying that the immigration orders would hurt their business.

When the acting Attorney General, Sally Yates, refused to execute the “Muslim Ban”, Trump fired her. The view from the White House is that officials of the federal government must be loyal to Trump and not worry about the U.S. Constitution. Trump’s allies came in to defend his action, blaming the bureaucracy for their allegiance to liberal and secular values. “This is essentially the opposition in waiting,” said Trump’s friend Newt Gingrich. “He may have to clean out the Justice Department because there are so many left-wingers there. [The] State [Department] is even worse.” A chill has gone through the administration. Judge James Robarts, nominated to the federal courts by Trump’s fellow Republican George W. Bush, stayed the “Muslim Ban”. Trump called him a “so-called judge”, like the “so-called protesters”. These are not real people to Trump. They are to be swatted aside. Whether by an executive order or on Twitter.

from Home http://ift.tt/2kRjlCG

#NEWS

0 notes

repwinpril9y0a1 · 7 years

Text

Like A Rug

No, that's not a Donald Trump hair joke. It is nothing more than the end of a simile on lying. Rugs are the epitome of lying, since nothing lies more obviously than a rug. Of course, I could have gone with a different motif, but Al Franken had already used the title: "Lies And The Lying Liars Who Tell Them," so I had to go with what was available, as it were.

The administration of Donald Trump has, so far, been breathtaking at its dishonesty. Some of this comes from the president himself, but a fair portion comes from his advisors, who are often put in the unenviable position of trying to prove something which is not actually true (so as not to contradict a Trump lie). They pretzel themselves into explaining what Trump really meant, and how in a certain light it bears a passing resemblance to something which is actually quasi-factual. Must be tough, but they all knew what they were signing up for, so it's hard to feel too sorry for them, really.

The Trump administration began this dishonesty on their first day in power. Sean Spicer was sent out to the press podium to state as a fact something which was simply not true. Trump's inauguration had: "the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration -- period -- both in person and around the globe." This was laughably untrue, and anyone with eyes to see the photos knew it. That was Day One.

Since then the lies have been so constant and unrelenting it's actually hard to keep up with them all. Some of these wouldn't be classified as lies by some, such as Trump tweeting about a "so-called judge" who ruled against him. There's nothing "so-called" about him -- the man is indeed a federal judge, confirmed by the Senate, with a lifetime tenure on the bench. This is precisely why America's judiciary is completely independent, in fact, so they can ignore political pressure from other branches of the government. But some might call this merely an insult, rather than a lie.

Then there are questions of interpretation. When Trump spoke of Frederick Douglass seemingly in the present tense, it was interpreted as Trump not knowing Douglass was not still alive. Perhaps. He's not the most eloquent president we've ever had (by a long shot) so perhaps it was just his clunky speaking style. We're bending over backwards to give him the benefit of the doubt, but he could have just misspoken on this one. Then again, he could have just never heard of Frederick Douglass before in his life -- also a plausible explanation.

Other strange statements could likewise be chalked up as opinions, misguided though they may be, such as Kellyanne Conway insisting that there had been "no chaos" at the airports when Trump's Muslim ban was instituted, and everything was going swimmingly. To be as charitable as possible, it depends on her own personal definition of what she considers to be chaos. Looked like chaos to me, but who am I to contradict her opinion?

This all has to be seen through the lens of spin, because top advisors to any president are indeed spin doctors -- it's part of the job, really. But this is normally an exercise in framing the presentation more than disputing obvious facts. A presidential spokesperson might say something like: "We don't see this as a black-and-white incident. We see countless shades of grey, in fact, and while this incident may be seen by some as a darker shade of grey, we instead see the overall picture as lighter grey, like a pre-dawn brightening that promises much more light and sunshine to come." That's standard-issue spin, in other words. But the Trump people can't even manage that, when Trump himself insists in a tweet: "Black is white. Many people agree with me on this, believe me. Any use of the word BLACK is fake news, and sad." There's not a lot a spin doctor can do to fix something like that, in other words.

This is where we get into the astonishing lies erupting from the Trump administration which are just flat-out bald-faced lies, period. Not opinion, not spin, not misinterpretation -- just lies. Most of these are self-inflicted wounds of the most embarrassing type because they are so easy to refute.

Kellyanne Conway provided the most amusing example of this, last week. She castigated Chris Matthews for the media completely ignoring the "Bowling Green massacre" -- a phrase she has used in multiple interviews. The media didn't report on it because it didn't happen, of course. It was nothing short of a whopper of a lie.

This got more amusing when CNN refused to invite Kellyanne Conway on its Sunday morning show this weekend (although she did appear on the channel later in the day), because they considered her an untrustworthy source who had lost all credibility (because of lies like the Bowling Green massacre). Conway tried to lie her way out of this one, insisting that she was the one who turned CNN down. Sean Spicer was asked about this at a press briefing:

Q: CNN reportedly declined to interview Kellyanne Conway on Sunday because of questions about her credibility. Is the White House willing to offer alternative representatives to networks that refuse to work with specific spokespeople?

SPICER: I, I, well, frankly, I think that, that my understanding is they retracted that, they've walked that back or denied it or however you want to put it. I don't care.

This was also a lie. CNN never retracted, walked back, or denied that this was in fact the truth of the matter -- something they reiterated in a tweet. So Kellyanne lies about a massacre that never happened (while incredulously berating the media for not covering it), CNN doesn't invite her because she's a liar, and then Sean Spicer lies about it to the press, using an easily-checkable "fact" that wasn't true.

But I shouldn't pick on the advisors so much, because Donald Trump himself is the emperor of lies. While speaking to a meeting of law enforcement officials, Trump stated: "And yet the murder rate in our country is the highest it's been in 47 years. I used to use that, I'd say that in a speech and everybody was surprised. Because the press doesn't tell it like it is. It wasn't to their advantage to say that. But the murder rate is the highest it's been in, I guess, 45 to 47 years." This is not true. In fact, the opposite is true -- the murder rate is at a low point for the past 50 years or so. It was twice as high in the 1980s, in fact. An easily-checkable fact that Trump felt the compulsion to lie about.

This wasn't even Trump's biggest falsehood in the past few days (as I said, it's hard to keep up, due to the sheer volume of lies). Trump went off script in a recent speech to complain that the media was refusing to report on terrorist attacks, for unspecified nefarious reasons: "You've seen what happened in Paris and Nice. All over Europe, it's happening. It's gotten to a point where it's not even being reported. And in many cases, the very, very dishonest press doesn't want to report it. They have their reasons, and you understand that." This is, in fact, not true. Not even remotely. Unless he was referring to the Bowling Green massacre, of course, which wasn't reported by the media because it didn't happen.

Since then, his advisors have been trying to morph Trump's lie into a statement that he just didn't make -- that terrorism stories were merely underreported. Read Trump's own words -- that's not what he said, but whatever. When the press challenged the White House to name terrorist incidents which weren't covered, they hastily put together a list with laughable misspellings ("attaker," for instance). Almost 80 terrorist incidents were on this list, but it bizarrely contained attacks such as the Pulse shooting in Florida and San Bernardino (misspelled "San Bernadino") which were covered pretty much nonstop by all the news networks for over a week. Hard to call those "underreported" stories.

So Kellyanne Conway was dispatched to explain how the explanation didn't actually mean what they had previously said it meant. She helpfully explained that the list had both attacks which were sufficiently covered by the media, as well as others that weren't. Even though the list was supposed to only consist of underreported attacks (indeed, that was the whole point of the White House writing the list in the first place). Again, an easily-refuted lie. Her biggest whopper during this interview, however, was to insist: "I don't intend to spin." After which, her pants burst into flames on camera, and had to be quickly doused with a nearby fire extinguisher.

Well, no -- that last part didn't actually happen. It is nothing short of a lie, born of overly-wishful thinking. Still, it was astonishing the path these lies took over the past few days. Conway lies about a fictional terror attack, while castigating the media for not reporting it. Trump castigates the media for underreporting terror attacks, because the media somehow has "reasons" for not wanting to report it. Challenged on this statement, the White House comes up with a list of 78 terror attacks, all of which were reported on in the media, and some of which dominated coverage for weeks. The official story then shifted to "underreporting" as opposed to "not reporting" (Trump's original lie), and somehow the list morphed into a list of both adequately-reported and underreported incidents (even though that, too, was a lie -- they were all reported on). To top it all off, Conway returns to the airwaves to Trumpsplain it all to us, insisting that she doesn't intend to spin.

This is not a new phenomenon, of course. Hans Christian Andersen pointed it out almost two centuries ago, which is how I'm going to end this story:

The noblemen who were to carry his train stooped low and reached for the floor as if they were picking up his mantle. Then they pretended to lift and hold it high. They didn't dare admit they had nothing to hold.

So off went the Emperor in procession under his splendid canopy. Everyone in the streets and the windows said, "Oh, how fine are the Emperor's new clothes! Don't they fit him to perfection? And see his long train!" Nobody would confess that he couldn't see anything, for that would prove him either unfit for his position, or a fool. No costume the Emperor had worn before was ever such a complete success.

"But he hasn't got anything on," a little child said.

"Did you ever hear such innocent prattle?" said its father. And one person whispered to another what the child had said, "He hasn't anything on. A child says he hasn't anything on."

"But he hasn't got anything on!" the whole town cried out at last.

The Emperor shivered, for he suspected they were right. But he thought, "This procession has got to go on." So he walked more proudly than ever, as his noblemen held high the train that wasn't there at all.

Chris Weigant blogs at:

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2koqD0y

#DIYS

0 notes

repwincoml4a0a5 · 7 years

Text

Like A Rug

SPICER: I, I, well, frankly, I think that, that my understanding is they retracted that, they've walked that back or denied it or however you want to put it. I don't care.

This is not a new phenomenon, of course. Hans Christian Andersen pointed it out almost two centuries ago, which is how I'm going to end this story:

"But he hasn't got anything on," a little child said.

"Did you ever hear such innocent prattle?" said its father. And one person whispered to another what the child had said, "He hasn't anything on. A child says he hasn't anything on."

"But he hasn't got anything on!" the whole town cried out at last.

Chris Weigant blogs at:

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2koqD0y

#DIYS

0 notes