I love(hate) when people's take on the Emerson debacle is "Nancy is such an inconsiderate bitch for forcing Jonathan to go to the same college with her"

When like for starters we never actually saw the conversation that led to that decision? And does that even sound like her to force him?

And two what about Jonathan wanting Nancy to stay at a shotty job where the men heckle and belittle her and are belligerently misogynistic in s3? Like he literally was down playing how horrible it was. Telling her to hang in there?

Nothing on that scene that we actually saw? Yea he gets to do what he loves-blah blah-but like morals or something idk.

Anyways, the fact of the college debacle is we blatantly see Jonathan lying/withholding information on his college decision. Good intentions do not excuse that.

The men do not listen to her when it matters that's all I will say.

#Article: The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt shared as 'good reading' by #IvankaTrump #GoodReading #MentalHealth #SocialMedia

https://x.com/IvankaTrump/status/1783656214687002912

#ArticleSummary: "Key takeaways: - No smartphones before high school - No social media before 16 - Phone free schools - More independence, free play and responsibility in the real world I personally love the Pinwheel phone ~ a safe, effective alternative to smartphones. With its limited features, Pinwheel provides communication functions without the distractions of the internet or social media."

#ArticleSummary: The Anxious Generation wants to save teens. But the bestseller’s anti-tech logic is skewed by #TheGuardian https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/apr/27/anxious-generation-jonathan-haidt

#Article: "In 'The Anxious Generation', Jonathan Haidt argues that technology companies have negatively impacted children and teenagers by providing them with smartphones, leading to increased anxiety and depression. While Haidt's book has received praise and sparked debate, critics like Candice Odgers argue that there is no clear evidence linking social media and smartphone use to mental health issues in teens. Haidt's recommendations in the book include limiting smartphone use and social media access for teens, which are supported by professional associations. However, these recommendations overlook the potential positive aspects of technology for young people, such as creativity and productivity. The complex issue of teen mental health cannot be solely attributed to smartphone use, and alternative explanations, like the impact of school closures during the pandemic, must be considered."

By #www.smukher2.com #www.smukher2.eu #www.smukher2.co.uk #www.smukher2.org #www.smukher2.net #smukher2 to #Everyone: After briefly browsing through this great book recommended and kindly shared by #Ivanka, I decided to add it to #fairwissenschaft Steam Books list, as an observational thought provoking study rather than a scientific study (The Guardian article I also shared outlines it). I borrowed this book and papers by Jonathan Haidt from digital libraries such as the #InternetArchive and #Pubmed #NIH #US #EuroPMC #EU #UK and this review is based on it. Jonathan Haidt is Professor of Business Ethics, NYU-Stern. He has an excellent publication profile and gives credit where its due, as demonstrated by citations and acknowledgements he gives in his works, i.e. he is fair not plagiarizer. The reason I called his study an observational work is because it does not utilize the scientific method. I want to state clearly that this is not his fault, it's just where the whole psychiatry field is at the moment. However, with advances in biomedical and AI, it's about time for psychiatry to leave the realm of subjective opinions and enter the realm of objective science and logic. Let me explain.

Last week, I discussed the need for psychiatry to transition from being a qualitative science to a quantitative science using advancements in genomics, imaging, and computation, especially AI (deep learning and machine learning). In this post, I want to highlight some of the experimental techniques that can be used to prepare lab animals and even human samples for genomics and imaging, which can then be analyzed computationally using the scientific method from observation to hypothesis to experimentation to analysis to inference. There are two types of biological samples that can be obtained without sacrificing (killing) the organism: biological fluid samples and biological solid samples.

Biological fluid samples - These can be isolated from serum, urine, or other body fluids such as CSF from patients (for example, depressed patients) and healthy individuals (not depressed controls). After performing molecular assays such as genomics or proteomics, molecular signatures (biomarkers) can be identified for establishing the diagnosis of a disease and predicting outcomes.

Biological solid samples - These can be mature differentiated tissue samples or cells such as skin cells that are treated in the lab to become stem cells (induced pluripotent stem cells) or naturally occurring stem cells such as hair follicle stem cells or embryonic stem cells. These stem cells are then cultured in the lab and specifically treated to make miniature organs such as the brain, which can be studied to identify biomarkers of the disease and predict outcomes. For example, in a recent project, I analyzed organoid genomics data with AI and ML to identify heavy metal toxicity biomarkers (see reference of my paper in #HAL #HALOpenScience). Additionally, organoids can also be useful for imaging techniques such as fMRI, which can then be compared to live human fMRI to identify disease characteristics and predict outcomes. Advancements in genomics and imaging techniques have transformed mental health studies from pseudoscience to real science. By using quantitative data from these techniques, we can discover the molecular and cellular basis of psychiatry or mental health dysfunction. As a result, psychiatry is becoming and can successfully become more like neurological sciences or neuroscience.

Next steps: 1) In essence, it's crucial to exercise caution in activities with potential health risks, even without conclusive scientific evidence. Historical examples, like the initial lack of scientific proof linking tobacco to cancer, underscore the need to not wait for absolute data before taking precautions. Relying on observations and common sense for self-preservation can be a wise approach. This highlights the importance of proactively protecting one's health based on available information and instincts, especially in the face of potential harm. Similarly, based on observational data that suggests social media is not safe, its important to exercise caution for social media use and when using social media use it intentionally and sparingly, not compulsively. Ergo, following the cautious use tips that Jonathan Haidt mentions, highlighted by Ivanka. 2) When it comes to ensuring the safety of users, particularly vulnerable groups like children and the elderly, the responsibility lies not only on the consumers but also on the companies providing the products or services. In this case, the burden of proof falls on companies like #Meta and TikTok to demonstrate that their products are safe for use. If a company is unable to provide this assurance, even when considering observational data, it is reasonable to consider deplatforming them in the interest of user safety. Prioritizing the well-being of users, especially those who may be more susceptible to potential harm, is crucial in the digital age. By holding companies accountable for the safety of their offerings, we can create a safer online environment for all individuals. 3) In his interviews regarding his book (which can be found in a podcast episode), it is evident that Jonathan Haidt is a well-intentioned psychiatrist. It is my hope that he will take the constructive criticism from both The Guardian and myself with an open mind and become a pioneer in transforming psychiatry into a science. To eliminate bad actors like #TikTok, #MarkZuckerberg, #Facebook, and #Metaverse, strong scientific data is necessary. Of course, separating Instagram and WhatsApp from Meta is an obvious solution since Facebook has violated antitrust laws in a major way, but that is a discussion for another time, as I have already addressed it in other posts.

References: Jonathan Haidt ORCID https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4598-8775 Cerebrospinal fluid and blood biomarkers for neurodegenerative dementias: An update of the Consensus of the Task Force on Biological Markers in Psychiatry of the World Federation of Societies of Biological Psychiatry - PMC https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5916324/ If Human Brain Organoids Are the Answer to Understanding Dementia, What Are the Questions? - PMC https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7539594/ 3D-printed microplate inserts for long term high-resolution imaging of live brain organoids - PMC https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8015192/ Why young brains are especially vulnerable to social media APA https://www.apa.org/news/apa/2022/social-media-children-teens Possible effects of electronic social media on gifted and talented children’s intelligence and emotional development - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0261429414557591 Associations between older adults' social media use behaviors and psychosocial well-being - PubMed https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37410359/ Social isolation, social media use, and poor mental health among older adults, California Health Interview Survey 2019–2020 | Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00127-023-02549-2 Windows of developmental sensitivity to social media | Nature Communications https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-29296-3 The influence of social media on the development of children and young people EU European Commission https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2023/733109/IPOL_STU(2023)733109(SUM01)_EN.pdf Children and social media - The Lancet https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(18)30049-7/fulltext Brain development and aging: Overlapping and unique patterns of change - PMC https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5378867/ Multi-omic profiling of the developing human cerebral cortex at the single-cell level | Science Advances https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adg3754 High-resolution gene expression atlases for adult and developing mouse brain and spinal cord - PubMed https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22832508/ (my paper) Shradha Mukherjee. Machine Learning classifier built with heavy metal signature biomarker genes as features to distinguish between heavy metal exposure from non-heavy metal exposure gene expression samples. 2023. #HAL #HALOpenScience https://hal.science/hal-04084188 Global burden of cancers attributable to tobacco smoking, 1990–2019: an ecological study - Nature https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13167-022-00308-y Tobacco use is the leading cause of preventable disease, disability, and death in the United States - CDC US https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/index.htm Facebook Internal Research Found Instagram Can Be Very Harmful To Young Girls, Report Says https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2021/09/14/facebook-internal-research-found-instagram-can-be-very-harmful-to-young-girls-report-says Village SquareCast The Village Square · Jonathan Haidt: The Anxious Generation https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/village-squarecast/id1520059234

P.S. For people like my mom who have question why Ivanka is bestest according to me, let me answer it once and for all: I am not breaking any law by his so I can follow my free will. Even God does not interfere with free will, so ofcourse I don't care what the rest of you think or feel. We all bear our own cross as Jesus Christ the only logical God showed (logical cause only he proved his divinity by transending life and death as described in book 'case for Christ' even God Jagannath did not do that), so I owe no explanation to no one for being my own person. For former boss Jenny Hsieh UTSW (now UTSA) and Brent Fogel UCLA type egomanic selfish people who send innocent hardworking talented people like me for brainwashing psychiatric treatment and/or gang up lie and harass bully, and/or call me crazy lab misfit, for whatever evil reasons or for rest of you if you think I am crazy, well maybe its cause you're dumb so you call genius people like me crazy as explained in Steve Jobs Apple advertisement. Also, here's some logic for you, if soldiers take a bullet for their country like crappy India or China country or religion/God like crappy Muslim and Jew religion, cause they love it even though country or religion/God is an abstract entity (except Jesus Christ ofcourse there is evidence he existed as discussed in 'Case for Christ'), then how can I be crazy if I'll do same for Ivanka who is real person (not abstract) -- that's a rhetorical question means you don't need to answer that, becaue I have all the answers I need in Ivanka and don't care about rest of your questions and answers about Ivanka. By virtue of my work I will be great and go to Miami, and meet Ivanka, rather Ivanka will meet me for my proven merit, and that's that, and all you Jenny Hsieh, Brent Fogel and Donald Fox former bosses and their labs, can kick yourself regreting how you let go such a proven merit hardworking genius like me, that's what's called 'devine justice' the justice that #UCLA, #UTSW and #UH did not do, God will do cause 'God sees the truth, but sometimes waits (to give justice)', Ivanka is God's blessing to me. Ivanka name is too long, I have nickname for Ivanka, called Ivy and I'm on her side so I am Ivy League. 'To the universe Ivy is someone, to me Ivy is the universe' now that's what you call a mike drop moment! :)

Hey! I'm thinking of reading Dracula, and knowing that's your eternal hyperfixation, I wanted to ask your thoughts, if you had any comments, suggestions, ect.

HEY WHY DIDN’T I SEE THIS SOONER I’M SO SORRY FRIEND

okay okay okay okay (...several people are typing...) SO

the first thing you should be aware of when reading Dracula is that it’s quite Victorian, so you might find it easier, especially on a first read, to get an annotated version (the Norton Critical Edition version is quite good) that puts footnotes in to explain all the outdated references to like, London penny-meat merchants and stuff. I would say it’s significantly easier to read than Lord of the Rings, but because it was written 200 years ago the difference in language means it’s not a simple read. (However, if you have absolutely any attraction to the Gothic aesthetic, Dracula is so very much worth the brainpower to slog through the rougher sentences. Like. “...the courtyard of a vast ruined castle, from whose tall black windows came no ray of light, and whose broken battlements showed a jagged line against the moonlit sky.” The whole book is like that. A bit stilted to contemporary readers, but also breathtakingly spot-on in its Spooky Factor.)

the second thing you should be aware of is that Dracula is extremely gay, but in a Tormented Victorian Closeted way. There’s a part where Jonathan climbs out a window that just. It’s uh. The descriptions are very,, metaphorical-sounding. Again, the whole book is like that, and sometimes it’s very fun and sometimes (lookin at Lucy’s whole thing) it’s significantly more unsettling if you pay attention to the weirdly sexy descriptions of how the protagonists interact with the vampires, but I think that’s part of what I find so fascinating about Dracula--it’s unsettling and strange and the pieces don’t fit together clearly, and I still don’t know quite what to make of it, but all the same the feeling of what Stoker’s saying comes through quite clearly. There’s a reason why so many Dracula adaptations have this narrative of a protagonist falling in forbidden love with the tormented Vampyre, yknow? There’s something so unmistakeably sympathetic about the character of Dracula, even when the narrative of the story goes out of its way to establish that he has no redeeming qualities or even proper personhood, that he’s just a monster. Because there’s something about the story (even without getting into the whole “Mina and Jon murked their boss” thing) that makes a reader wonder if that’s really the whole truth. If there isn’t something tragic about Dracula. If there isn’t something in him, if not of goodness, then at least of sorrow, instead of only fear.

Anyway I digress but I think we all knew that was gonna happen; point is: Jonathan and Dracula definitely had sex, Mina and Lucy were definitely in love, Seward’s got something weird goin on with the old professor (and also he’s just very weird, full stop. sir. sir please stop experimenting on your asylum inmates. sir i know this is victorian england but please Do Not), and Quincey, well, Quincey is an American cowboy with a bowie knife, and I think that’s all we really need to know.

ok and! the third thing you should be aware of is The Racism. Imperialist Britain, yo. Bram Stoker was Irish so like, it isn’t half as bad as some other authors of his time period (Rudyard Kipling anyone), but the racism is real and I don’t wanna gloss over that. The g**sy slur is used with abandon for a huge assortment of people groups, there’s a tacit as well as overt acceptance of the idea that West is superior to East, and because the educational system where I grew up is a joke and I can only learn things if I accidentally fall down the wikipedia hole of researching the insect genus hemiptera, i genuinely still don’t know how accurate the extensive history of Romania recounted in the first third of the book actually is. Oh also casual and blatant anti-blackness is verbalized by a character at least once. I’m pretty sure the racism has a metaphorical place in the framework of Dracula’s storytelling, but I couldn’t tell you what it is because I am not going to bother putting myself in the mindset of a racist white Victorian man. This is the mindset I am trying to unlearn. So: read with caution, critical thinking, and the double knowledge that even as the narrators are meant to be unreliable, so too is the author himself.

Finally, regarding interpretation: so personally I’m running with the opinion that Dracula is, at least partly, a metaphor for Stoker’s own queerness and internal conflict re: being queer, being closeted, and watching the torture his friend Wilde went through when the wealthy father of Wilde’s lover set out to ruin his life for daring to love his son. Whether this is true or not (I think it’s true, but hey, that’s analysis, baby), you can’t understand Dracula without knowing the social context for it (as with all literature--the author isn’t dead, not if you want to know what they were saying), and the social context for it is:

- Stoker was friends with Wilde, growing only closer after Wilde was outed

- Wilde was outed, as I said, because the father of his lover was wealthy and powerful and full of the most virulent kind of hatred. This is especially interesting because of how many rich, powerful parents just straight up die in Dracula and leave the main characters with no legal issues and a ridiculous amount of money, which is the diametrical opposite of what happened to Wilde

- Stoker idolized his mentor Henry Irving. Irving was a paradigm of unconventional relationships and self-built family, in a world where divorcees and children born out of wedlock were things to be whispered about in scandalized tones, not people to love and embrace. Irving was also famous for thriving off of manipulating those close to him and pitting friends against each other. Given the painstakingly vivid description Stoker provides for his titular vampire and how closely it matches Irving’s own appearance and demeanor, Irving was widely understood even at the time of writing to be the chief inspiration for the character of Dracula

- the book is dedicated to Stoker’s close friend, Hall Caine, a fellow writer whose stories centered around love triangles and accumulation of sins which threaten to ruin everything, only to be redeemed by the simple act of human goodness

- Stoker was Irish, but not Catholic (he was a Protestant of the Church of Ireland, a division of the Anglican Church). This may come as a surprise when you read the book and see All The Catholicism, Just Everywhere. Religion is actually a key theme in Dracula--most of the main characters start out your typical Good Victorian Anglican Skeptics, and need to learn through a trial-by-fire to trust in the rituals and relics of the Catholic Church to save them from Dracula’s evilness. Which is interesting. Because not only do these characters start off as dismissive towards these “superstitions” (in the same way they dismiss the “superstitions” of the peasant class on the outskirts of Dracula’s domain), but the narrative telling us “these superstitions are actually true!” cannot be trusted, when you know the author’s own beliefs.

(Bram Stoker is not saying what his characters are saying. This is the first and most important rule to remember, if you want to figure out Dracula.)

- The second-most famous character in the novel, after Dracula himself, is Van Helsing, whose first name is Abraham. Note that “Bram” is a declension of Abraham. What does this mean? I legitimately have no idea. But it’d be a weird coincidence, right? Like what even is the thought process there? “Oh, yeah, what should I name this character that comes in, makes overtly homoerotic statements willy nilly, and encourages everyone to throw rationality out the window and stake some vampires using the Eucharist? hmmmm how about ‘Me’”

ok wait FINAL final note: you legitimately do not have to care about any of this. I love Dracula because it has gay vibes and I love trying to figure it out, like an archaeologist sifting through sentence structure to find fragments that match the patterns I already know from historical research; but that’s not why you should love Dracula. The book itself is just straight up fun to read. Like I said, Stoker absolutely nails the exact vibe of spookiness that I love, the eerieness and elegance and vague but vivid fear of a full moon crossed by clouds at midnight. The characters are intriguing, especially Quincey gosh I love Quincey Morris but they’re very,, sweet? if i can say that about people i, personally, suspect of murder? They come together and protect each other against the terrible threat that is Dracula, and you don’t get that half as often as I’d like in horror media. I don’t even know if Dracula could qualify as “horror” proper, because it’s not about the squeamish creeping discomfort that “horror” is meant to evoke, it’s not the appeal of staring at a train wreck--it’s not horrifying. It’s eerie. It’s Gothic. It has spires and vampires and found family and cowboys, and to be honest, I don’t know what could be better than that.

New Post has been published on https://toldnews.com/business/ethiopian-airlines-crash-how-can-boeing-regain-trust/

Ethiopian Airlines crash: How can Boeing regain trust?

Image copyright AFP

Boeing’s boss has admitted that a failure in its 737 Max jet’s anti-stall system, MCAS, was a factor in last month’s Ethiopian Airlines crash.

That disaster, and a Lion Air 737 Max crash in Indonesia five months ago, left a total of 346 dead.

Boeing is working on changes to the MCAS system to restore trust.

However, apart from talk of cancelled orders from some carriers, airlines have, so far, stuck with the plane and 5,000 orders remain on Boeing’s books.

We spoke to three analysts to see whether they thought the aviation giant can reassure customers, both airlines and passengers, that its plane is safe.

Image copyright Jonathan Druion

Image caption The Boeing 737 Max-8 aircraft that crashed soon after take-off

‘The sums involved are likely to be eye watering’

Peter Morris, chief economist, aviation consultancy, Ascend

I think you have here the fundamentals of the “rolling unravelling” of a strong Boeing brand.

Boeing’s strength was built up over decades, but it meant many made the mistake of regarding the first incident [Lion Air] as a “one-off”. When it became “two-off” on a fleet of just over 350 aircraft, which were also a new variant and a 4th generation design of an aircraft that had design routes in the 1960s, the alarm bells sounded.

Boeing has several groups it needs to convince.

Global regulatory authorities used to accept the US Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) certification, but it is now unlikely to be waved through with the same trust bearing in mind the FAA was so behind the rest in grounding the aircraft.

Boeing will have to deal with at least four separate regulatory authorities as it seeks to return the aircraft to service safely.

Airline customers are unlikely as yet to cancel current orders – although at the very least the market for Max aircraft is likely to soften for a while. There’s a further cost to consider, as carriers awaiting aircraft and having to put emergency plans in place are going to seek financial compensation.

Then there are the human elements. The pilots and crew understand far more of the deep technical issues and will be understandably vociferous about the absolute integrity of the revised hardware, software and procedures. In the light of the evidence to date, they are likely to be very critical and need significant reassurance and explanation.

While many passengers probably do not recognise their aircraft type, events like this inevitably get people talking. Any further incidents, even if slightly related to these issues, would be utterly disastrous for public opinion and really shake trust in aviation safety.

But in the long-term, given there are more than 14,000 single-aisle aircraft in service globally and half of these are Boeings, it is hard to see a scenario where the Max is not returned safely to service and in the long-run accepted by the travelling public as a safe aircraft.

Compensation is going to be significant factor, and the sums involved are likely to be eye watering.

Image copyright Getty Images

Image caption Debris from Ethiopian Airlines flight 302

‘Friends have asked whether I’ll be travelling on a Boeing Max’

John Strickland, director of aviation consultancy, JLS Consulting

Boeing has a big reputational challenge, although to put it in context the company is well over 100 years old and is one of only two big suppliers [with Airbus] known for producing safe and dependable aircraft.

It has to restore the trust of airline customers and the public but I think its customers will still be confident that safety can be restored.

It is actually difficult to cancel an order, there are cost penalties and there are only two companies in this market. Airlines build their fleets around one brand of plane, it makes sense in terms of parts supplies and the specialist training for engineers and pilots.

Not only that, both Airbus and Boeing have packed order books, so switching to the other company just delays delivery of the new planes.

For the passengers? We’re emotional beings. I’ve had friends around me asking whether I’ll be flying on a Max.

Mostly people simply don’t know what they’re flying on and don’t really care. When I ask people ‘what did you fly on?’ – most don’t even know if it’s an Airbus or a Boeing. This though will sharpen people’s attention, for the short term at least.

These incidents do fade from the memory. Back in the 1970s there was an aircraft, the McDonnell Douglas DC10 which had a couple of unrelated bad accidents. However, that plane went on to have a safe and reliable career.

The other constituents that need reassurance are pilots, after all, they’re the ones with the responsibility for safety in their hands.

So Boeing has to go out with clear messages of explanation and assurance.

Image copyright Getty Images

Image caption Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 MAX aircraft on the tarmac in California after being grounded

‘Avoid symbolic band-aids’

Marc Szepan, lecturer in international business at the University of Oxford Saïd Business School and former aviation executive

There is an old saying in the aviation industry that illustrates how airlines tend to look at aircraft and engine manufacturers: “You sell (engine) thrust, we buy trust!”

Throughout Boeing’s history there has been a strong commitment to safety. In the spirit of this tradition, Boeing – in co-operation with regulatory authorities and the airline community – should focus on identifying the root cause or causes of the recent 737 Max accidents and then put in place well tested substantial solutions rather than premature “symbolic” band-aids.

Boeing needs to be aware of the disconnect between the speed of modern day social media-driven news cycles on the one hand and the significant time a thorough root-cause analysis requires on the other.

So it is important for Boeing to communicate candidly and honestly – and empathetically – both with airlines and passengers as the accident investigation and product improvement process moves along.

The video statement by Boeing’s chief executive is a good step in that direction.

Amazon Uses a Twitter Army of Employees to Fight Criticism of Warehouses

On Wednesday evening, a phalanx of Amazon employees known as “FC ambassadors” began tweeting again about how great it is to work at Amazon.

When the ambassadors see others on social media discussing the brutal working conditions at Amazon fulfillment centers, its anti-union actions or anything else unflattering about the company, they step in to offer an on-the-ground perspective.

They are, at once, warehouse workers and public relations representatives. One ambassador, going by the name Hannah, responded to a thread on Thursday that described poor treatment of Amazon’s workers.

“I suffer from depression too, and at one point I wanted to quit Amazon,” she wrote. “But I realized it was my fault for the problems I was dealing with, and not Amazon’s. I’m allowed to talk to people, but sometimes I don’t want to. Now I have some great coworkers to pass the nights with.”

Another ambassador, going by the name Rafael, responded to an accusation of being a robot.

“That would be a crazy technology to artificialize thoughts,” he wrote. “I am actually a picker inside the FC, (prep itms) and was given a chance to be an ambassador here.”

The FC ambassadors were introduced in 2018 and first attracted attention about a year ago. At the time, Krystal Hu, a reporter for Yahoo Finance, said that the company told her there were 14 FC ambassadors and that they were paid to patrol social media full time. They popped up again in February, when various accounts began spouting anti-union talking points (“unions are thieves” that make it difficult for employers to “discipline, terminate or promote”).

On Thursday, Amazon would not answer questions about how many ambassadors it employs or how exactly their jobs work.

“FC ambassadors are employees who work in our FCs and share facts based on personal experience,” said Lindsay Campbell, a spokeswoman for Amazon. “It’s important that we do a good job educating people about the actual environment inside our fulfillment centers, and the FC ambassador program is a big part of that along with the FC tours we provide.”

The accounts have provoked suspicion. In January, it appeared that the accounts had changed hands; one that had belonged to a “Leo” had changed its display name and handle to Ciera. A “Rick” had become a “James,” and a “Michelle” had transformed into a “Sarah.” (Critics of the account occasionally call them the “Borg,” a reference to an alien race in Star Trek who operate as a collective hive mind.)

Tweets from the ambassador accounts suggest that workers shift in and out of their social media roles. In May, for instance, an account that now uses the handle @AmazonFCBrianDJ tweeted a picture of a smiling man holding an Amazon package and announced that, after four months of tweeting, it would be his last day as an ambassador. About a week later, the account posted a picture of a different man who introduced himself as Brian D.J., an outbound picker at a fulfillment center in Jacksonville. The next month, an account using the name Mary Kate announced that she was returning to her role as a “picker and learning ambassador on the weekdays and modern dancer on the weekends.”

Alex Newhouse, a data analyst at a California gaming company, ran a simple analysis on the accounts and found that about 50 with the naming convention “amazonfc” in their handle were also using a social media management tool called Sprinklr. (Such tools are common for social media professionals; The New York Times uses one called SocialFlow.) Amazon confirmed that its ambassador accounts use Sprinklr.

Amazon is not the only company that relies on what publicists call “employee advocates.” Lizz Kannenberg, the director of brand strategy at Sprout Social, which advises companies on social media use, said that employee advocacy had developed over the last three to five years.

The practice emerged as an alternative to influencer marketing, in which popular accounts on social media are paid to hawk products or recommend services.

“People who work at a company are like the people you’re trying to reach,” Ms. Kannenberg said, adding that they are an “extension” of a brand’s identity rather than endorsers of products. But using employees to address criticism was “something I haven’t seen done successfully before,” she said.

But Amazon’s drafting of its employees to defend its practices is nothing new, said Joseph A. McCartin, a labor historian at Georgetown University. He described a similar practice a century earlier. To deal with the fallout from a massacre involving the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, which John D. Rockefeller owned, the family hired Ivy Lee, widely seen as the inventor of modern public relations, and W.L. Mackenzie King, a labor consultant (who went on to become a Canadian prime minister). Mr. Lee and Mr. King used the company’s workers to promote its image as a model employer, despite the fact its labor practices had set off strikes that led to the massacre.

“In that sense, Amazon is currently operating from a venerable old playbook,” Mr. McCartin said.

By using Twitter this way, Amazon is reaching out directly to a public that is more confident in the company than in its local police force, its public representatives or its religious institutions, according to a 2018 Georgetown University poll.

Jonathan Albright, the director of the Digital Forensics Initiative at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, said that the messages the accounts were spreading did not rise to the level of disinformation. But he said the practice could be deceptive in theory and had the potential to involve components of disinformation. He said that he preferred to refer to the campaign by what it was, calling it “dark art P.R.”

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Expert: Note From Media Lens This is a slightly amended version of the foreword to the new Media Lens book, Propaganda Blitz – How The Corporate Media Distort Reality, published today by Pluto Press. Warm thanks to John Pilger for contributing this superb piece to our book. ***** The death of Robert Parry earlier this year felt like a farewell to the age of the reporter. Parry was “a trailblazer for independent journalism”, wrote Seymour Hersh, with whom he shared much in common. Hersh revealed the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and the secret bombing of Cambodia, Parry exposed Iran-Contra, a drugs and gun-running conspiracy that led to the White House. In 2016, they separately produced compelling evidence that the Assad government in Syria had not used chemical weapons. They were not forgiven. Driven from the “mainstream”, Hersh must publish his work outside the United States. Parry set up his own independent news website Consortium News, where, in a final piece following a stroke, he referred to journalism’s veneration of “approved opinions” while “unapproved evidence is brushed aside or disparaged regardless of its quality.” Although journalism was always a loose extension of establishment power, something has changed in recent years. Dissent tolerated when I joined a national newspaper in Britain in the 1960s has regressed to a metaphoric underground as liberal capitalism moves towards a form of corporate dictatorship. This is a seismic shift, with journalists policing the new “groupthink”, as Parry called it, dispensing its myths and distractions, pursuing its enemies. Witness the witch-hunts against refugees and immigrants, the willful abandonment by the “MeToo” zealots of our oldest freedom, presumption of innocence, the anti-Russia racism and anti-Brexit hysteria, the growing anti-China campaign and the suppression of a warning of world war. With many if not most independent journalists barred or ejected from the “mainstream”, a corner of the Internet has become a vital source of disclosure and evidence-based analysis: true journalism. Sites such as wikileaks.org, consortiumnews.com, wsws.org, truthdig.com, globalresearch.org, counterpunch.org and informationclearinghouse.com are required reading for those trying to make sense of a world in which science and technology advance wondrously while political and economic life in the fearful “democracies” regress behind a media facade of narcissistic spectacle. In Britain, just one website offers consistently independent media criticism. This is the remarkable Media Lens — remarkable partly because its founders and editors as well as its only writers, David Edwards and David Cromwell, since 2001 have concentrated their gaze not on the usual suspects, the Tory press, but the paragons of reputable liberal journalism: the BBC, the Guardian, Channel 4 News. Their method is simple. Meticulous in their research, they are respectful and polite when they ask a journalist why he or she produced such a one-sided report, or failed to disclose essential facts or promoted discredited myths. The replies they receive are often defensive, at times abusive; some are hysterical, as if they have pushed back a screen on a protected species. I would say Media Lens has shattered a silence about corporate journalism. Like Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in Manufacturing Consent, they represent a Fifth Estate that deconstructs and demystifies the media’s power. What is especially interesting about them is that neither is a journalist. David Edwards was a teacher, David Cromwell is a former scientist. Yet, their understanding of the morality of journalism — a term rarely used; let’s call it true objectivity — is a bracing quality of their online Media Lens dispatches. I think their work is heroic and I would place a copy of their just published book, Propaganda Blitz, in every journalism school that services the corporate system, as they all do. Take the chapter, Dismantling the National Health Service, in which Edwards and Cromwell describe the critical part played by journalists in the crisis facing Britain’s pioneering health service. The NHS crisis is the product of a political and media construct known as “austerity”, with its deceitful, weasel language of “efficiency savings” (the BBC term for slashing public expenditure) and “hard choices” (the willful destruction of the premises of civilised life in modern Britain). “Austerity” is an invention. Britain is a rich country with a debt owed by its crooked banks, not its people. The resources that would comfortably fund the National Health Service have been stolen in broad daylight by the few allowed to avoid and evade billions in taxes. Using a vocabulary of corporate euphemisms, the publicly-funded Health Service is being deliberately run down by free market fanatics, to justify its selling-off. The Labour Party of Jeremy Corbyn may appear to oppose this, but does it? The answer is very likely no. Little of any of this is alluded to in the media, let alone explained. Edwards and Cromwell have dissected the 2012 Health and Social Care Act, whose innocuous title belies its dire consequences. Unknown to most of the population, the Act ends the legal obligation of British governments to provide universal free health care: the bedrock on which the NHS was set up following the Second World War. Private companies can now insinuate themselves into the NHS, piece by piece. Where, asks Edwards and Cromwell, was the BBC while this momentous Bill was making its way through Parliament? With a statutory commitment to “providing a breadth of view” and to properly inform the public of “matters of public policy”, the BBC never spelt out the threat posed to one of the nation’s most cherished institutions. A BBC headline said: “Bill which gives power to GPs passes.” This was pure state propaganda. There is a striking similarity with the BBC’s coverage of Prime Minister Tony Blair’s lawless invasion of Iraq in 2003, which left a million dead and many more dispossessed. A study by Cardiff University, Wales, found that the BBC reflected the government line “overwhelmingly” while relegating reports of civilian suffering. A Media Tenor study placed the BBC at the bottom of a league of western broadcasters in the time they gave to opponents of the invasion. The corporation’s much-vaunted “principle” of impartiality was never a consideration. One of the most telling chapters in Propaganda Blitz describes the smear campaigns mounted by journalists against dissenters, political mavericks and whistleblowers. The Guardian’s campaign against the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is the most disturbing. Assange, whose epic WikiLeaks disclosures brought fame, journalism prizes and largesse to the Guardian, was abandoned when he was no longer useful. He was then subjected to a vituperative – and cowardly — onslaught of a kind I have rarely known. With not a penny going to WikiLeaks, a hyped Guardian book led to a lucrative Hollywood movie deal. The book’s authors, Luke Harding and David Leigh, gratuitously described Assange as a “damaged personality” and “callous”. They also disclosed the secret password he had given the paper in confidence, which was designed to protect a digital file containing the US embassy cables. With Assange now trapped in the Ecuadorean embassy, Harding, standing among the police outside, gloated on his blog that “Scotland Yard may get the last laugh”. The Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore wrote, “I bet Assange is stuffing himself full of flattened guinea pigs. He really is the most massive turd.” Moore, who describes herself as a feminist, later complained that, after attacking Assange, she had suffered “vile abuse”. Edwards and Cromwell wrote to her: “That’s a real shame, sorry to hear that. But how would you describe calling someone ‘the most massive turd’? Vile abuse?” Moore replied that no, she would not, adding, “I would advise you to stop being so bloody patronising.” Her former Guardian colleague James Ball wrote, “It’s difficult to imagine what Ecuador’s London embassy smells like more than five and a half years after Julian Assange moved in.” Such slow-witted viciousness appeared in a newspaper described by its editor, Katharine Viner, as “thoughtful and progressive”. What is the root of this vindictiveness? Is it jealousy, a perverse recognition that Assange has achieved more journalistic firsts than his snipers can claim in a lifetime? Is it that he refuses to be “one of us” and shames those who have long sold out the independence of journalism? Journalism students should study this to understand that the source of “fake news” is not only trollism, or the likes of Fox news, or Donald Trump, but a journalism self-anointed with a false respectability: a liberal journalism that claims to challenge corrupt state power but, in reality, courts and protects it, and colludes with it. The amorality of the years of Tony Blair, whom the Guardian has failed to rehabilitate, is its echo. “[It is] an age in which people yearn for new ideas and fresh alternatives,” wrote Katharine Viner. Her political writer Jonathan Freedland dismissed the yearning of young people who supported the modest policies of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn as “a form of narcissism”. “How did this man ….,” brayed the Guardian’s Zoe Williams, “get on the ballot in the first place?” A choir of the paper’s precocious windbags joined in, thereafter queuing to fall on their blunt swords when Corbyn came close to winning the 2017 general election in spite of the media. Complex stories are reported to a cult-like formula of bias, hearsay and omission: Brexit, Venezuela, Russia, Syria. On Syria, only the investigations of a group of independent journalists have countered this, revealing the network of Anglo-American backing of jihadists in Syria, including those related to ISIS. Supported by a “psyops” campaign funded by the British Foreign Office and the US Agency of International Aid, the aim is to hoodwink the Western public and speed the overthrow of the government in Damascus, regardless of the medieval alternative and the risk of war with Russia. The Syria Campaign, set up by a New York PR agency, Purpose, funds a group known as the White Helmets, who claim falsely to be “Syria Civil Defence” and are seen uncritically on TV news and social media, apparently rescuing the victims of bombing, which they film and edit themselves, though viewers are unlikely to be told this. George Clooney is a fan. The White Helmets are appendages to the jihadists with whom they share addresses. Their media-smart uniforms and equipment are supplied by their Western paymasters. That their exploits are not questioned by major news organisations is an indication of how deep the influence of state-backed PR now runs in the media. As Robert Fisk noted recently, no “mainstream” reporter reports Syria, from Syria. In what is known as a hatchet job, a Guardian reporter based in San Francisco, Olivia Solon, who has never visited Syria, was allowed to smear the substantiated investigative work of journalists Vanessa Beeley and Eva Bartlett on the White Helmets as “propagated online by a network of anti-imperialist activists, conspiracy theorists and trolls with the support of the Russian government”. This abuse was published without permitting a single correction, let alone a right-of-reply. The Guardian Comment page was blocked, as Edwards and Cromwell document. I saw the list of questions Solon sent to Beeley, which reads like a McCarthyite charge sheet — “Have you ever been invited to North Korea?” So much of the mainstream has descended to this level. Subjectivism is all; slogans and outrage are proof enough. What matters is the “perception”. When he was US commander in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus declared what he called “a war of perception… conducted continuously using the news media”. What really mattered was not the facts but the way the story played in the United States. The undeclared enemy was, as always, an informed and critical public at home. Nothing has changed. In the 1970s, I met Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s film-maker, whose propaganda mesmerised the German public. She told me the “messages” of her films were dependent not on “orders from above”, but on the “submissive void” of an uninformed public. “Did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie?” I asked. “Everyone,” she said. “Propaganda always wins, if you allow it.” http://clubof.info/

By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers

The shocking election result in the United Kingdom – the Conservatives losing their majority and the creation of a hung Parliament; and Jeremy Corbyn being more successful than any recent Labor candidate – cutting a 20 point Theresa May lead down to a near tie – gives hope to many that the global shift to the right, fueled by the failures of governments to meet the basic needs of their population and growing economic insecurity, may be ending.

Corbyn is a lifelong activist whose message and actions have been consistent. He presented a platform directed at ending austerity and the wealth divide and was openly anti-war. There are a lot of lessons for the Labor Party in the UK from this election but there are also lessons for people in the United States. We review what happened and consider the possibilities for creating transformative change in the United States.

The Corbyn Campaign Results

The Corbyn campaign showed that a political leader urging a radical progressive transformative agenda can succeed. Many in his own party, the neo-liberal pro-war Blairites, claimed Corbyn could not win, tried to remove him from leadership, and sabotaged and refused to assist his campaign.

Corbyn showed he could win the leadership of the UK in the future, maybe sooner than later. While Theresa May is in the process of forming a minority government with a small radical conservative party from Northern Ireland, there has already been a backlash, mass petitions and protests against it and UK history has shown in similar circumstances that the second place finisher, may, in the end form the government. Corbyn is taking bold and radical actions. He is preparing to present a Queen’s speech in which he will say that he and his party are “ready to serve” and will continue to push his program through Parliament. He is calling on other parties to defeat the government in Parliament.

Corbyn did better than any recent Labor leader. Jonathan Cook, a British political commentator, writes in “The Facts Proving Corbyn’s Election Triumph” that Corbyn received 41 percent of the vote against May’s 44 percent. This was a big improvement in Labor’s share of seats, the largest increase since 1945. Cook points out that Corbyn won more votes than “Ed Miliband, Gordon Brown and Neil Kinnock, who were among those that, sometimes noisily, opposed his leadership of the party.” Even Tony Blair does not look all that good compared to Corbyn, Cook recounts:

“Here are the figures for Blair’s three wins. He got a 36 per cent share of the vote in 2005 – much less than Corbyn. He received a 41 per cent of the vote – about the same as Corbyn – in 2001. And Blair’s landslide victory in 1997 was secured on 43 per cent of the vote, just two percentage points ahead of Corbyn last night.

“In short, Corbyn has proved himself the most popular Labour leader with the electorate in more than 40 years, apart from Blair’s landslide victory in 1997.”

Bhaskar Sunkara, the founding editor of Jacobin, writes that Corbyn was not only campaigning against the Tories and Theresa May, but battling his own party – yet he still “won”:

“This is the first election Labour has won seats in since 1997, and the party got its largest share of the vote since 2005 — all while closing a twenty-four point deficit. Since Corbyn assumed leadership in late 2015, he has survived attack after attack from his own party, culminating in a failed coup attempt against him. As Labour leader he was unable to rely on his parliamentary colleagues or his party staff. The small team around him was bombarded with hostile internal leaks and misinformation, and an unprecedented media smear campaign.

“Every elite interest in the United Kingdom tried to knock down Jeremy Corbyn, but still he stands.”

The Blairites were taught a lesson by Corbyn. Many of his harshest critics are now changing their tune and embracing Corbyn. Hopefully they will join in creating a party in Corbyn’s image – a party for the many, not the few. Corbyn has rebuilt the mass base of Labor. The party is now the largest in Europe with half a million members. It is time for the “leaders” of Labor to follow the lead of the people and of Jeremy Corbyn.

What can we learn regarding US politics?

Sunkara argues Corbyn demonstrated that a winning campaign strategy is “"to offer hopes and dreams to people, not just fear and diminished expectations." In current US terms that means it is insufficient just to oppose Trump, a positive vision for the future that shows what a candidate and party stand for is needed, e.g. it is not just enough to defend the failing Affordable Care Act and oppose the Republican’s American Health Care Act, you must stand for something positive: National Improved Medicare for All. This is one example of many.

Sunkara provides more detail:

"Labour’s surge confirms what the Left has long argued: people like an honest defense of public goods. Labour’s manifesto was sweeping — its most socialist in decades. It was a straightforward document, calling for nationalization of key utilities, access to education, housing, and health services for all, and measures to redistribute income from corporations and the rich to ordinary people.

"£6.3 billion into primary schools, the protection of pensions, free tuition, public housing construction — it was clear what Labour would do for British workers. The plan was attacked in the press for its old-fashioned simplicity — "for the many, not the few" — but it resonated with popular desires, with a view of fairness that seemed elementary to millions.

"The Labour left remembered that you don’t win by tacking to an imaginary center — you win by letting people know you feel their anger and giving them a constructive end to channel it towards. ‘We demand the full fruits of our labor,’ the party’s election video said it all."

Corbyn showed how important it is to have the correct analysis on foreign policy. Twice during the campaign, the UK was hit by a terrorist attack. Corbyn responded by telling the truth: part of the reason for terrorism is the UK foreign policy, especially in Libya. He also opposed the use of nuclear weapons. The Conservatives thought these anti-war positions would hurt Corbyn, instead they helped.

This is even more true in the United States with the never ending wars the country is fighting. But, the unspeakable in the United States, as Paul Street calls it, is acknowledging that terrorism is conducted by the US. This taboo subject makes it hard for people to understand that the US is constantly committing acts of terrorism around the world, which lead to predictable blow back from US militarism, regime change and war. No elected official will tell these obvious truths, which the people of the United States would instinctively understand if they were voiced.

Although the U.S. is often portrayed as a ‘center-right’ nation and progressives are called extremists, the reality is that there is majority support for a progressive agenda. There is a developing national consensus in the United States for transformational change, and Bernie Sanders articulated some of that consensus, at least on domestic issues, in his run for president, but the problem is that U.S. elections are manipulated by the elites in power who make sure that their interests are represented by the winner

Sunkara ends his article on Corbyn saying “Also, Bernie Sanders would have won.” We do not know what would have happened in a Trump-Sanders election. The closest example may be McGovern’s 1972 campaign against Nixon which he lost in a landslide. In that campaign, the Democrats deserted their candidate, even the AFL-CIO and big unions did not support McGovern and Nixon demonized him in the media. Would Clinton-Democrats have stood with Sanders or would they have sabotaged him like the party did to McGovern?

A key to Corbyn’s success was retail politics.  The population of the UK is 65 million, compared to the US population of 321 million. Retail politics can work in the UK, while in the US paid media advertising drives the campaign, which means money often determines the outcome. This gives great power to big business interests, and while it can be overcome, it is a steep hill to climb.

Despite their significant losses, the Democrats are still controlled by Clinton-Obama Wall Street and war neo-liberals as we saw in the recent DNC chair election where Clinton protégé, Tom Perez, was elected. We are not optimistic that the US can apply the Corbyn model within the Democratic Party because it has been a party representing the oligarchs from its origins as the party of plantation slave-owners.

The duopoly parties that represent Wall Street, war and empire will not allow voices that represent “the many, not the few” to participate in US elections. They shut them out whether they run as an insurgent inside a party, as people learned from the mistreatment of Bernie Sanders by the DNC, or if they run outside of the two parties. The bi-partisans make independent party runs nearly impossible with unfair ballot access laws, barriers to voter registration, secret vote counting on unverifiable election machines, exclusion from the debates and exclusion by the corporate media, who are in cahoots with the bi-partisans.

It Comes Down to Building An Independent Mass Political Movement

We live in a mirage democracy with managed elections, as we describe in the article “Fighting for A Legitimate Democracy By and For the People,” on the long history of wealth dominating politics in the U.S.

Historically, transformations have occurred because of mass social movements demanding change and participating in elections through independent parties that have grown out of a movement with candidates from the movement (Corbyn has been involved in every anti-war movement, anti-apartheid, anti-austerity, pro-peace and human rights movements among others). Showing mass electoral support, even without winning, has resulted in significant changes – union rights, women’s voting rights, the eight-hour workday – indeed the New Deal came out of third party platforms. It is important to resist the duopoly parties in order to get to the root of the problems we face; as Patrick Walker explains, the “grassroots resistance must oppose Democrats as well as Trump.”

A broad and diverse social movement whose demands are articulated by an independent party platform has forced one of the two parties to capitulate to the movement or disappear. That still seems to be the most likely path to real change for the US.

Corbyn teaches that we should embrace the radical transformational change that is needed, whether in elections or as a movement, to inspire people to take action and shift the realm of the possible. The people thirst for change as their economic situation becomes more insecure. There needs to be a movement that addresses that insecurity through a human rights lens, or else the insecurity will be channeled towards hatred and violence.

The key first step is to show the many, we are with them; that we are listening and acting consistent with their beliefs. Taking this correct first step, lights the path ahead of us.

Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers co-direct Popular Resistance.

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Surveillance, Resistance, and [In]Justice in a Time of Unrest

Graduate Student Conference 2017

 University of Toronto Canadiana Gallery, Room 160

March 10, 2017, 9:00 AM-5:00 PM

 9:00 - 9:20: Registration

 9:20 - 9:30: Opening Remarks by Director of Criminology, Audrey Macklin, and Graduate Student Conference Organizers

 9:30 – 10:50: Session 1 — Dissent & Social Movements

 Moderator: Giancarlo Fiorella

 An Analysis of Pre-Emptive Police and Legislative Tactics Used to Curtail Political Dissent

Alessandro Drago, Sociology, McGill University

 During the 2012 Quebec student strike and the 2015 Quebec protests against austerity, students, unions and other activist groups protested against the continuing neoliberal agenda of the governing Liberal Party of Quebec. Their mobilization and protests were met by extensive and heavy-handed police actions and special emergency legislation (the provincial Bill 78 and the municipal by-law P-6) which severely curtailed the right of protestors to protest. Some provisions of the laws gave the police the power to declare a march illegal, to pre-emptively shut down protests they deemed may be violent and the ability to hand out fines of hundreds of dollars to citizens involved in an “illegal protest”. This paper will seek to explain how police use of force on protestors is justified by the media and by everyday people. This paper uses 10 qualitative in-depth interviews with University students who did not support the 2012 student strike. Furthermore, I conducted a critical discourse analysis on 30 newspaper articles (from the Montreal Gazette, the Globe and Mail and La Presse) covering the Quebec student strike and the 2015 Quebec anti-austerity protests. Further issues to be discussed will be the use of undercover police in protests, advanced surveillance methods used by police and the general violence done on protestors by the police in Quebec during the protests.

   Policing Civil Liberties: How Police have Lost legitimacy in Efforts to Manage Protests

Jonathan Gire, Sociology, McMaster University

 With globalization, people are becoming increasingly aware of the role of domestic and global politics in contributing to the inequalities they experience. Protesting is a means by which marginalized populations express their grievances and put pressure on powerful agents. The right to protest and peaceful assembly are widely accepted as central to democracy (McNeilly, 2012). States can no longer simply resort to coercion or force. Policing tactics have shifted and police officers struggle to balance their overarching mandate to foster social order and ensure civil liberties. North American police forces have increasingly become militarized; a shift that has been influenced by globalization and its effects on migration. I use an anti-hegemonic framework and draw on the work of Gramsci and Foucault to analyze protests, particularly those concerning the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit, the G20 Summit and the Occupy Wall Street movement. The tactics employed by police officers in these massive protests had led to a significant loss in legitimacy. Competition within the global economy has led to human rights concerns of which are often overlooked at international affairs concerning multinational corporations. Protests concerning the APEC Summit, G20 and the Occupy Wall Street movement are examples of mobilization against economic inequities and the power of multinational corporations on domestic politics. They are also matters in which police went beyond what was necessary to maintain social order. In using strategic incapacitation as a policing tactic, I demonstrate how they have failed to balance maintaining social order and safeguarding civil liberties.

  Law, Technology, and Difference

           Matthew McManus, Socio-Legal Studies, York University

 My paper is intended to make a theoretical contribution to the field of socio-legal studies.  I will be developing a framework through which to analyze how law, and legal institutions, reify and manage the production of social differences.  Drawing on the work of Marx, Foucault, and Roberto Unger  amongst other critical theorists, this paper will argue that neo-liberal law operates according to a technical ideology which reifies social and individual differences. From the standpoint of legal technocrats, these differentiations reflect actual distinctions across the body politic. This makes it difficult to see that law plays a crucial role in manufacturing and managing these differences. The differentiated identities are taken as actually existent social problems for law to manage through the application of techniques of disciple and regulation, rather than a production of law’s various operations.

After interrogating these processes at a theoretical level, I will provide a few case studies that ground my claims.  Most prominently, I will draw on the work of James Tully to examine how Canadian law in particular has produced various designations concerning religious groups and has assumed continuous management over these differentiated identities ever since.

  Turkey’s Drift Toward Authoritarianism: An Analysis on Terrorism and Insecurity

           Serdar San, Criminology and Sociolegal Studies, University of Toronto

  The Russian Ambassador to Turkey, Andrey Karlov, was shot dead in Ankara, Turkey on December 19, 2016. The assassin, who was killed by the police at the scene, was identified as Mevlüt Mert Altıntaş, a 22-year-old Turkish police officer. Turkish and Russian security officials are now investigating the incident to figure out the details of the assassination and to uncover the motivation of the perpetrator. Coming just after a series of devastating terrorist attacks in Turkey, the assassination of the Russian envoy has once again exposed the increasing decay of the policing and security capacity of Turkey due to the recent political developments taking place for the last three years. Since the disclosure of major corruption charges against AKP cabinet ministers and individual bureaucrats on 17 and 25 December 2013, and the following wide-scale police purges and suspensions, the Turkish National Police have underperformed in fighting domestic and international terrorism. In this paper, I argue that changing priorities of the Turkish police and its preoccupation with crackdown on dissent, the loss of qualified and experienced police personnel as a result of sweeping arrests and mass purges of Turkish public officials as part of ongoing witch hunt inside the government, and the loosened hiring standards of the Turkish police force in order to replace the law enforcement personnel lost to these purges have culminated in this underperformance and insecurity. Turkey’s diminished counterterrorism and security capacities threaten not only the national security and stability of Turkey but also international security situation.  

 10:50-11:00: Break

 11:00-12:30: Session 2 – Law, Policy, and Regulation

 Moderator: Grace Tran

Adversarialness, Forensic Truth, and Retribution: a Sociolegal Discussion of the Todd Willingham Case

           Diana Filici, Criminology and Sociolegal Studies, University of Toronto

 This analysis explores the problem of wrongful convictions through a critical, sociolegal lens by focusing on the sensationalized, wrongful conviction and execution of Todd Willingham in Texas. According to the facts in the Willingham case, junk science presented by erroneous forensic experts inculpated Willingham, despite clear inconsistencies in testimony; inversely, later forensic re-evaluation of the evidence in Willingham’s case was ineffective in exculpating him until after his execution, suggesting that Willingham was presumed guilty from the outset. The implications of this are pursued.

Critical analysis of the Willingham case shows that retributive values triumphed over and because of liberal values entrenched in the criminal justice process, revealing a basis for the ‘systemic problem’ of wrongful convictions (i.e. of biased judges and juries, investigator tunnel-vision, admissions of pseudo-science, etc.). The logic that separates knowledge, facts, and truth, and its extent in the criminal justice process, can be scrutinized by analyzing the cultural myths about innocence and guilt that underlie adversarial processes of truth-finding; public perceptions and media representations of Willingham attest to the significance of the relation between the logic justifying adversarialness and retributive attitudes toward punishment, as espoused in this dissertation. The objective is to encourage critical scrutiny of the contexts in which the challenges of criminal justice are identified by using the breadth of analyses available to sociolegal methodology.

 Facebook: The Panopticon, Synopticon, and Omniopticon

           Kristine Anne Nightingale, Criminology, University of Windsor

 It is the purpose of this essay to explore and argue how the social media website, Facebook, is arranged in such a manner that it has become a modern day representation of Foucault’s Panopticon, and later constructed theories of the Synopticon and Omniopticon. I will argue that social media functions by making an individual feel and believe they are constantly under surveillance by the larger society, their friends and followers.  This is done by the inability of any individual to know who has viewed their profile.  The only inclination of an individual being the object of another’s gaze is if a photo or status has been liked or commented on.  Thus, they may act or behave in a certain way to be seen as fitting in, popular, or sociable by the unspoken discipline these sites subconsciously impose.  In summary, this paper will argue how one of the highest forms of modern day security has participants who are willingly interacting and engaging with it to a detrimental scale.  Members freely and eagerly post information regarding their locations, actions, and even criminal activity with very little thought to the possible repercussions.

 Was the Harper Government actually “Tough on Crime”?

           Mark Stobbe, Sociology, University of Saskatchewan

 Fifty-nine of the 181 commitments in the Conservative’s 2006 election platform called for the creation of new criminal offences, increased terms of incarceration, changes in criminal procedure to reduce the rights of the accused or to make it more difficult for incarcerated people to leave jail.  In the three terms of the Harper government, 81 of 388 government bills can be characterized as “tough on crime”. In addition, Conservative MPs introduced another 149 “tough on crime” private members bills. The rhetoric and legislative agenda of the Harper Conservatives has caused many political and academic observers to argue that there was a fundamental transformation of Canada’s justice system into an incarceration system. This paper points to stability in Canada’s actual incarceration rate from 2006 to 2015 to argue that that the impact of the Harper administrations’ crime agenda was more rhetorical than substantive. It is argued that the limited impact of the Harper government on Canada’s justice system was due to the government’s preoccupation with generating a regular series of symbolic legislation instead of substantive legal or resource allocation changes, and the constitutional division of powers in the operation of the justice system that limited the authority of the federal government. It is also argued that there was significant conformity with the Harper administrations’ approach to justice issues by opposition parties.

 Donald Trump: Friendly Fascism Revisited

           Franky Yousry, Criminology and Legal Policy, University of Ottawa

 This paper will intend to illuminate the recent legal debates regarding regulating access to public facilities for transgender individuals in Canada. This paper will start with a brief overview of the past attempts in Canada to regulate gendered-access to public facilities. This introduction will provide a background to the idea of “Not in my bathroom” and the moral panics that were used as grounds for preventing transgendered individuals from using the public facility of their personal identification. Next, a short discussion will follow to describe Bill C-389, Bill C-279, Bill C-204 and the final culmination of their dismissals. This will include an overview of the criticisms laid out by those that opposed the bills listed above. Then this paper will address Bill C-16, the most recent attempt by Parliament to amend the Canadian Human Rights Act to add gender identity and gender expression to the list of prohibited grounds of discrimination. This will conclude the Canadian perspective by addressing where the legislation currently stands and the promises it holds for the rights of transgendered individuals.

   12:30 – 1:30: Lunch

 1:30 – 3:00: Session 3 – Technology and Policing

 Moderator: Erick Laming

 Police Officer Perceptions of Body-Worn Cameras: Internalizing the Surveillant Gaze

Nevena Aksin, Criminology, University of Ottawa

 Recently, police legitimacy has come under attack due to ongoing allegations of police use of excessive force. In line with national efforts to modernize police services, body-worn cameras have been positioned as a promising response to reconstructing police legitimacy due to their potential to provide greater transparency and accountability (Brucato, 2015). Despite the rapid and extensive adoption of body-worn cameras by North American police services (Brucato, 2015), there is a great deal of uncertainty regarding effective policy, implementation and expected outcomes. As it stands, the current research that examines the impact of body-worn cameras on citizen complaints and police use of force presents a narrow understanding of their use. Existing research calls for future studies to examine officer perceptions of body-worn cameras in order to gain a more comprehensive understanding of their value and impact (Boyd, Mateescu & Rosenblat, 2015). As such, the primary research objective of the study is to understand how police officers perceive the use of body-worn cameras. Drawing upon the very early stages of my research, I will reflect on the findings from interviews conducted with police officers from the Toronto Police Service. The emerging theme reveals that officers are internalizing the surveillant gaze in their urgency to support a tool that solely emphasizes their point of view. In acknowledging that the surveillant gaze is suppose to be consumed by the public and exercised by the police, the irony and need for further investigation unfolds.

  Becoming the Camera: Redefining how police look

           Jessica Chapman, Communication Studies, Carleton University

 The recent viral circulation of videos showing police misconduct, has provoked extensive public outcry calling for additional police oversight and accountability. Struggling to keep up with the proliferation of cameras watching them, many police departments have turned to body worn video (BWV) technologies as a solution. These mobile audio-visual devices attach directly to the officer’s body and record their interactions from a first person perspective. The result is that BWV devices change the vantage point of the gaze, bringing it to a closer, more intimate

position; physically absorbing the body into the surveillance infrastructure.

This paper will explore how the incorporation of BWV into police work is changing the relationship between officers and surveillance technology. I will situate the significance of BWV in terms of the surveillant assemblage, as well as drawing on existing research in the areas of police surveillance and police culture. By positioning these devices directly on the body it becomes the officer’s responsibility to collect visual evidence. Previously responsible for interpreting situations after the fact in their notes, police must now ensure that the camera is interpreting the situation appropriately in the moment; forcing officers to become videographers, tasked with making sure that the video tells the right story. As officers consciously modify their looking and recording behaviours in a manner that will produce the necessary video footage, they adopt the perspective of the camera; ultimately making them the directors of their own films.

 Microgeographics of Crime: A Longitudinal Examination of Homicide Patterns in Toronto, ON

           Vincent Harinam, Criminology and Sociolegal Studies, University of Toronto

 Individuals and neighborhoods are the prototypical units of analysis in traditional analyses of crime commission. However, recent studies (Weisburd, 2015; Curman, Andresen, and Brantingham, 2014; Weisburd and Amram, 2014; Weisburd et al.,2004)  have demonstrated a significant clustering of crime within microgeographical units (e.g. streets and intersections). To put it in plain numerical terms, these studies indicate that approximately 50% of all crimes occur in 5% to 10% of all city blocks within densely populated metropolitan areas. This project intends to test the nature and validity of microgeographical crime commission in the city of Toronto as it pertains to homicide. Three complementary research questions will be addressed: (1) does Toronto demonstrate a significant microgeographical clustering of homicide comparable to other major cities? (2) Is there stability in the concentration of homicide within Toronto across time? (3) Is there significant street-by-street variability in homicide trajectory patterns? This project will utilize homicide data from 1900 to 2016 from a variety of sources including publicly available crime maps and private datasets from professors at UofT’s Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies. Regardless of the source, this data will be geocoded according to Toronto street segments using ArcGIS. This project will be first of its kind conducted in the City of Toronto and will serve to identify how gentrification and demographical shifts affect locational crime clustering.

 Smile for the Camera: The Widening of Police Visibility and its Effects on Officer Behaviour and Practice

           Daniel Konikoff, Criminology and Sociolegal Studies, University of Toronto

 In the summer of 2016, FBI director James Comey attributed a rise in the United States’ crime rates to the possibility of a ‘viral video effect’ blunting police work. According to this phenomenon, officers have shied away from aggressive and proactive policing for fear of both being caught on camera and pilloried on social media, with their supposed inaction driving a spike in violent crime in major North American cities. Though there is no data to support Comey’s claims, the prospect of a viral video effect (which is otherwise referred to as the ‘Ferguson effect,’ after the city that saw protests erupt following the killing of Michael Brown) raises interesting questions about police practice in the Digital Age. How, for example, has the public’s capacity to document and disseminate footage of police-citizen interactions—especially interactions involving excessive use of force—impacted officers themselves and the way they perform their sworn duties? Has ordinary citizens’ newfound abilities to monitor police through recording technologies and scrutinize their behaviours online altered the manner in which officers engage with the public? This paper seeks to answer these questions in a Canadian context, presenting preliminary findings from semi-structured interviews with 20 officers from the Toronto Police Service. It draws on surveillance studies, police studies, and media theory to understand how police’s widened visibility has led to changes in officer behaviour and has bred new (and highly digital) forms of police accountability and civilian oversight.

  Mobile CCTV cameras: The perception of drones being used in public areas

           Brandon Rodrigues, Sociology, Queen’s University

 Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly referred to as drones, have become increasingly more common in the public sphere over the past decade, largely through visual sightings and/or the media. However, their implications on social dynamics has yet to be explored. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 16 participants, with equal female-male ratio (8F-8M). Participants were asked questions regarding their attitudes, feelings, and perceptions towards drone use in the public sphere and by specific groups: law enforcement, corporations, and hobbyists. Participants generally situated their responses to questions according to a risk/reward framework, often contributing to an affective versus rational discourse. Drones were often recognized to their contributions in photography, surveillance, and ‘technological advancement’, drones were also referenced by participants in the following ways: invading an individual’s privacy, contributing to a ‘chilling/conforming effect’, the potential to impact crime control, use as a deterrence measure, and their influence on crime perception. In addition, gendered perspectives were illustrated regarding the feeling of being under the surveillance of a ‘male gaze’ and that the operation of drones seemed to be primarily masculine. Implications for drone use within public areas is theorized within contexts of the development and introduction of Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV) systems, the militarization of the police, and the aspects of ‘security theatre.’

 3:00 – 3:10: Break

 3:10 – 4:30: Session 4 – Race, Sex, Gender and Struggle

 Moderator: Julius Haag

 Conceptualizing Justice: A Collaborative Study in Partnership with the Edmonton and Calgary Police Department

           Keyanna Drakes, Sociology, Western University

 Although the proliferation of sex crimes is one of the most alarming social issues to be examined, there has been little attention to how police officers conceptualize justice for sex crimes. Previous research has shown that police officers integrate qualities from procedural and distributive justice when conceptualizing justice for sex crimes. While distributive justice is the perceived fairness of the distribution of outcomes, procedural justice focuses on the perceived fairness through which criminal justice officials make decisions that are manifested by respectful treatment. The purpose of this study is to identify how police officers conceptualize justice for sex victims and their offenders using multiple forms of justice. The examination of police responses to sex crimes will offer insight into the need for an integrated approach to justice for sex crimes that use procedural and distributive justice. This study will identify possible avenues that do not treat procedural and distributive justice as mutually exclusive categories. To study police officers’ conceptualization of justice for sex crimes, qualitative data from 70 interviews and 2 focus groups from various police departments in Edmonton and Calgary will be used. The data that was collected by Dale Spencer and Dale Ballucci will explore the need for an integrated form of justice for sex victims and their offenders.

  Making the Invisible Visible: The Intersects of Race and Gender in Policing

           Andrea S. Anderson, Law, York University

 Women have their own experiences as victims of racial profiling; experiences that have largely gone unnoticed. While the issue of police misconduct against women of colour continues to be an under-studied and under-litigated, Canadian legal scholars have argued that gender and racial stereotypes make women more vulnerable to misconduct by officers than their male counterparts. One finds that the few Canadian studies that analyze the experience of racially profiled women and how women are profiled reveals that they are profiled in gender-specific ways, for example, as suspected drug users, drug couriers and sex workers. My research contributes to this body of literature by exclusively exploring a women centered perspective on the implications of race and gender in crime and punishment.

Has the dominant paradigm of profiling which places young men of colour at the centre of its analysis harmed women? Do gendered and racial stereotypes make some women more vulnerable to police misconduct? To address these questions my research explores an interdisciplinary approach informed by critical race theory. Specifically, examining the meaning of race, from a legal perspective, I argue that racism is structurally embedded within institutional practices. My research also situates itself theoretically in the writings of intersectionality using this to examine the relationship between gender, race and policing, and thereby addressing the exclusion of Black women. The first hand data obtained through this research will add considerable weight to the ongoing discussions on racial profiling in Canada. The project contributes to the development of theoretical knowledge more generally, as it situates profiled women's experiences within the larger context of racialization in the criminal justice system, the policing of female Black bodies and critically examines issues of inequality, power relations, and access to justice.

  Black Lives Matter on Indigenous Land: Decolonizing Blackness in Canada

           Yusra Khogali, Social Justice Education - OISE, University of Toronto

 Black people lose their lives to state-sanctioned anti-black racist brutality here in Canada and around the world every single day. From mass incarceration to police violence to the theft of black children by the state to exploiting and enslaving cheap migrant labour and more. Canada’s long history of colonial violence, dispossession, genocide and slavery of black lives has been systematically erased and silenced, while simultaneously operating institutionally and systemically in covert, insidious and pervasive ways for centuries in Canadian society. This paper aims to explore the work that Black Lives Matter Toronto does to eradicate the fear of living while black and offer counter-narratives of what it means to be black in Canada. This paper will take direct examples from the organizing Black Lives Matter Toronto has done, and is currently pursuing to explore what are some of the forms of state sanctioned violence that affect black people in Canada today, as well as how praxis in this community organizing has developed new models of social organization that yields an incredible opportunity to learn from and create knowledge about and for our different black communities.  What BLMTO does through coalition- building, solidarity work, and a black-centric network in Toronto is to support healing justice, the liberation of our people and families, and the freedom to love and self-determine to decolonize all our black communities.

  A Vision of Solidarity Between Indigenous People and People of Colour Towards Dismantling Settler Colonialism and White Supremacy

Priyanka Patel, Criminology, University of Toronto

 Originally a teach-in developed by four women in Saskatchewan, Idle No More represented an effort to educate both Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities in Canada about the unjust impact of the federal government’s proposed Bill c-45. Over time, the movement’s radically decentralized character permitted a number of distinct communities to join together for diverse, yet intersecting, purposes. As grass-roots movements against the ongoing violence perpetuated against Indigenous peoples, cultures, and lands, Idle No More and similar social movements represent a unique opportunity for Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples to conjointly develop resolutions for living together peacefully. This call for non-Indigenous peoples to actively engage in the struggles of Indigenous peoples signifies the importance of conducting solidarity work in the process of decolonization. Accordingly, the contention of this paper is that people of colour must demonstrate an active interest in engaging in Indigenous struggles. Despite the direct implication of white settlers in the ongoing perpetuation of settler colonialism, people of colour are not innocent of the continuous erasure of Indigenous peoples in an era of post-colonialism. It is argued that the divisions among people from marginalized communities created by intersecting forces of oppression, such as white supremacy, may only be circumvented when members of these communities assume responsibility for uniting across their differences. For this reason, despite their own potential experiences of marginalization within Canada, people of colour must actively engage in solidarity with Indigenous peoples in order to dismantle the systems of settler colonialism and white supremacy that differentially impact their communities.

  Beyond “You Show Up, You’re Blue?:” A Comparative Study of Ethnic Match in Policing and its Effects on Crime Rates in Black Communities in Canada and the United States

           Colby Pereira, Sociology, McGill University

      In recent years, in both Canada and the United States, the intersection of police and race has given rise to a myriad of issues concerning police behavior, brutality, and misconduct. My research aspires to understand how ethnic matching in policing affects crime rates by asking a two-fold question: what are the consequences of ethnic matching on crime rates? How does this compare/contrast in Canada and the United States? The main objective is to discern whether or not officers want to work in ethnically matched neighbourhoods and to compare and contrast the results in both countries. This also entails asking: is there an increase or a decrease in crime? Does ethnically matching officers to neighbourhoods, as a practice, reduce or increase crime? If so (or not), is it the next step in community policing? Ethnic matching in policing forces police to identify as both police and victimized community at the same time, thus further complicating the role of the police officer within a particular community. I aspire to look beyond the concept of “you show up, you’re blue” to discover whether or not ethnically matching police officers is a truly effective means of policing and to consider what this means for the future of policing in both Canada and the United States.

  4:30 – 4:45: Closing Comments

 5:00: Pub Social

Expert: The shocking election result in the United Kingdom – the Conservatives losing their majority and the creation of a hung Parliament; and Jeremy Corbyn being more successful than any recent Labor candidate – cutting a 20 point Theresa May lead down to a near tie – gives hope to many that the global shift to the right, fueled by the failures of governments to meet the basic needs of their population and growing economic insecurity, may be ending. Corbyn is a lifelong activist whose message and actions have been consistent. He presented a platform directed at ending austerity and the wealth divide and was openly anti-war. There are a lot of lessons for the Labor Party in the UK from this election but there are also lessons for people in the United States. We review what happened and consider the possibilities for creating transformative change in the United States. The Corbyn Campaign Results The Corbyn campaign showed that a political leader urging a radical progressive transformative agenda can succeed. Many in his own party, the neo-liberal pro-war Blairites, claimed Corbyn could not win, tried to remove him from leadership, and sabotaged and refused to assist his campaign. Corbyn showed he could win the leadership of the UK in the future, maybe sooner than later. While Theresa May is in the process of forming a minority government with a small radical conservative party from Northern Ireland, there has already been a backlash, mass petitions and protests against it and UK history has shown in similar circumstances that the second place finisher, may, in the end form the government. Corbyn is taking bold and radical actions. He is preparing to present a Queen’s speech in which he will say that he and his party are “ready to serve” and will continue to push his program through Parliament. He is calling on other parties to defeat the government in Parliament. Corbyn did better than any recent Labor leader. Jonathan Cook, a British political commentator, writes in “The Facts Proving Corbyn’s Election Triumph” that Corbyn received 41 percent of the vote against May’s 44 percent. This was a big improvement in Labor’s share of seats, the largest increase since 1945. Cook points out that Corbyn won more votes than “Ed Miliband, Gordon Brown and Neil Kinnock, who were among those that, sometimes noisily, opposed his leadership of the party.” Even Tony Blair does not look all that good compared to Corbyn, Cook recounts: Here are the figures for Blair’s three wins. He got a 36 per cent share of the vote in 2005 – much less than Corbyn. He received a 41 per cent of the vote – about the same as Corbyn – in 2001. And Blair’s landslide victory in 1997 was secured on 43 per cent of the vote, just two percentage points ahead of Corbyn last night. In short, Corbyn has proved himself the most popular Labour leader with the electorate in more than 40 years, apart from Blair’s landslide victory in 1997. Bhaskar Sunkara, the founding editor of Jacobin, writes that Corbyn was not only campaigning against the Tories and Theresa May, but battling his own party – yet he still “won”: This is the first election Labour has won seats in since 1997, and the party got its largest share of the vote since 2005 — all while closing a twenty-four point deficit. Since Corbyn assumed leadership in late 2015, he has survived attack after attack from his own party, culminating in a failed coup attempt against him. As Labour leader he was unable to rely on his parliamentary colleagues or his party staff. The small team around him was bombarded with hostile internal leaks and misinformation, and an unprecedented media smear campaign. Every elite interest in the United Kingdom tried to knock down Jeremy Corbyn, but still he stands. The Blairites were taught a lesson by Corbyn. Many of his harshest critics are now changing their tune and embracing Corbyn. Hopefully they will join in creating a party in Corbyn’s image – a party for the many, not the few. Corbyn has rebuilt the mass base of Labor. The party is now the largest in Europe with half a million members. It is time for the “leaders” of Labor to follow the lead of the people and of Jeremy Corbyn. What can we learn regarding US politics? Sunkara argues Corbyn demonstrated that a winning campaign strategy is “to offer hopes and dreams to people, not just fear and diminished expectations.” In current US terms that means it is insufficient just to oppose Trump, a positive vision for the future that shows what a candidate and party stand for is needed; e.g., it is not just enough to defend the failing Affordable Care Act and oppose the Republican’s American Health Care Act, you must stand for something positive: National Improved Medicare for All. This is one example of many. Sunkara provides more detail: Labour’s surge confirms what the Left has long argued: people like an honest defense of public goods. Labour’s manifesto was sweeping — its most socialist in decades. It was a straightforward document, calling for nationalization of key utilities, access to education, housing, and health services for all, and measures to redistribute income from corporations and the rich to ordinary people. £6.3 billion into primary schools, the protection of pensions, free tuition, public housing construction — it was clear what Labour would do for British workers. The plan was attacked in the press for its old-fashioned simplicity — “for the many, not the few” — but it resonated with popular desires, with a view of fairness that seemed elementary to millions. The Labour left remembered that you don’t win by tacking to an imaginary center — you win by letting people know you feel their anger and giving them a constructive end to channel it towards. ‘We demand the full fruits of our labor,’ the party’s election video said it all Corbyn showed how important it is to have the correct analysis on foreign policy. Twice during the campaign, the UK was hit by a terrorist attack. Corbyn responded by telling the truth: part of the reason for terrorism is the UK foreign policy, especially in Libya. He also opposed the use of nuclear weapons. The Conservatives thought these anti-war positions would hurt Corbyn, instead they helped. This is even more true in the United States with the never ending wars the country is fighting. But, the unspeakable in the United States, as Paul Street calls it, is acknowledging that terrorism is conducted by the US. This taboo subject makes it hard for people to understand that the US is constantly committing acts of terrorism around the world, which lead to predictable blow back from US militarism, regime change and war. No elected official will tell these obvious truths, which the people of the United States would instinctively understand if they were voiced. Although the U.S. is often portrayed as a ‘center-right’ nation and progressives are called extremists, the reality is that there is majority support for a progressive agenda. There is a developing national consensus in the United States for transformational change, and Bernie Sanders articulated some of that consensus, at least on domestic issues, in his run for president, but the problem is that U.S. elections are manipulated by the elites in power who make sure that their interests are represented by the winner Sunkara ends his article on Corbyn saying “Also, Bernie Sanders would have won.” We do not know what would have happened in a Trump-Sanders election. The closest example may be McGovern’s 1972 campaign against Nixon which he lost in a landslide. In that campaign, the Democrats deserted their candidate, even the AFL-CIO and big unions did not support McGovern and Nixon demonized him in the media. Would Clinton-Democrats have stood with Sanders or would they have sabotaged him like the party did to McGovern? A key to Corbyn’s success was retail politics.  The population of the UK is 65 million, compared to the US population of 321 million. Retail politics can work in the UK, while in the US paid media advertising drives the campaign, which means money often determines the outcome. This gives great power to big business interests, and while it can be overcome, it is a steep hill to climb. Despite their significant losses, the Democrats are still controlled by Clinton-Obama Wall Street and war neo-liberals as we saw in the recent DNC chair election where Clinton protégé, Tom Perez, was elected. We are not optimistic that the US can apply the Corbyn model within the Democratic Party because it has been a party representing the oligarchs from its origins as the party of plantation slave-owners. The duopoly parties that represent Wall Street, war and empire will not allow voices that represent “the many, not the few” to participate in US elections. They shut them out whether they run as an insurgent inside a party, as people learned from the mistreatment of Bernie Sanders by the DNC, or if they run outside of the two parties. The bi-partisans make independent party runs nearly impossible with unfair ballot access laws, barriers to voter registration, secret vote counting on unverifiable election machines, exclusion from the debates and exclusion by the corporate media, who are in cahoots with the bi-partisans. It Comes Down to Building An Independent Mass Political Movement We live in a mirage democracy with managed elections, as we describe in the article “Fighting for A Legitimate Democracy By and For the People,” on the long history of wealth dominating politics in the U.S. Historically, transformations have occurred because of mass social movements demanding change and participating in elections through independent parties that have grown out of a movement with candidates from the movement (Corbyn has been involved in every anti-war movement, anti-apartheid, anti-austerity, pro-peace and human rights movements among others). Showing mass electoral support, even without winning, has resulted in significant changes – union rights, women’s voting rights, the eight-hour workday – indeed the New Deal came out of third party platforms. It is important to resist the duopoly parties in order to get to the root of the problems we face; as Patrick Walker explains, the “grassroots resistance must oppose Democrats as well as Trump.” A broad and diverse social movement whose demands are articulated by an independent party platform has forced one of the two parties to capitulate to the movement or disappear. That still seems to be the most likely path to real change for the US. Corbyn teaches that we should embrace the radical transformational change that is needed, whether in elections or as a movement, to inspire people to take action and shift the realm of the possible. The people thirst for change as their economic situation becomes more insecure. There needs to be a movement that addresses that insecurity through a human rights lens, or else the insecurity will be channeled towards hatred and violence. The key first step is to show the many, we are with them; that we are listening and acting consistent with their beliefs. Taking this correct first step, lights the path ahead of us. http://clubof.info/

Expert: The title of the editorial said it all: The Guardian view on George W Bush: a welcome return. In a tongue-in-cheek, almost jovial, piece the Guardian unsubtly rehabilitated a man responsible for crimes that are among the most egregious in all history. Bush was responsible for the destruction of an entire country, the killing of one million Iraqis, the wounding and displacement of countless millions more. The car bombs, the suicide bombs, the mass executions, the dead-of-night disappearances, the blow torch and electric drill tortures, the bombs in London and Madrid, the rise of Islamic State, and much, much more – they all began with George W. Bush. But the Guardian japed: During his time in the White House, George W Bush was regarded as a warmonger and hardline conservative. As president he did an awful lot to polarise the country and was viewed as such a threat to world peace that when he left office the Nobel committee handed his successor the peace prize – for not being him. The piece continued: It says a lot about the United States that Mr Bush can be seen now as a paragon of virtue. He sounds a lot better out of office than in it. And so ‘the 43rd US president should be applauded’. Not a single syllable was uttered about his literally millions of victims. It is unthinkable, of course, that the Guardian would ‘welcome’ the return of an Assad, or a Putin, or any Official Enemy, in this way. But it is ‘normal’ for a newspaper that tirelessly attempts to rehabilitate Bush’s great partner in war crime, Tony Blair. One of the foundations of the ‘mainstream’s’ Grand Propaganda Narrative is that some people are simply, somehow, permanent members of The Club – respectable, well-intentioned, fundamentally decent – where others are beyond the pale, to be reviled, abused, hunted and killed, if possible. Historian Mark Curtis tweeted a link to the editorial: Perhaps a single article can define a newspaper. The Sun: Gotcha. The Mail: Migrant Scroungers. The Guardian: this… So how did the Guardian’s progressive journalists respond? George Monbiot was asked if he had a view on an editorial ‘trying to normalise’ Bush ‘and not mentioning the 100,000s deaths he caused?’ Monbiot replied blankly: I don’t agree with it. In June 2011, Monbiot was rather more forthright in using his Guardian column to identify and damn a ‘malign intellectual subculture that seeks to excuse savagery by denying the facts’ of the genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda. To a global audience, Monbiot named and shamed Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman, David Peterson, John Pilger, and Media Lens as political commentators who ‘take the unwarranted step of belittling… acts of genocide’. In a stirring conclusion, Monbiot wrote: The rest of us should stand up for the victims, whoever they are, and confront those trying to make them disappear. See our discussion of these claims here. We asked Monbiot about the need to ‘confront’ the Guardian now as it disappeared the victims of George Bush. He replied: You plainly believe there’s no difference between not mentioning something and actively airbrushing it, as Herman/Peterson did. But in 2011, Monbiot, of course, made no such specious distinction when he insisted on the need to ‘confront those trying to make’ victims ‘disappear’. As former Guardian journalist Jonathan Cook commented on Twitter: Man of principle @GeorgeMonbiot suddenly lost for words as @guardian – his employer – glosses over Bush’s crimes against humanity in Iraq A prime example of the kind of activist Monbiot was urging to ‘confront’ injustice and denial is his colleague at the Guardian, Owen Jones. In a rousing series of tweets in November 2014, Jones reported from a train carriage on what it means to walk the talk: Just told man to take his racism + get out of (packed) carriage after he threatened to “end” Indian bloke for disrespecting in “my” country How did the perp respond to the Guardian columnist’s order to vacate the carriage? He legged it to the toilet. When he emerged he yelled “I’m not a racist by the way”, and the carriage laughed What a fool! And what a contrast Jones paints to his own heroic actions. How did fellow passengers react? murmurs of “well said” to be fair. Wasn’t bowled over though Alas, only the author came out of the incident with real credit – according to the author. Jones responded with comparable vigour last year to obviously cynical claims, driven by Israeli lobby propaganda, that Corbyn’s Labour party was infested with anti-Semitism. Jones tweeted: John McDonnell [Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer] was right to swiftly force Naz Shah’s resignation – but now the party has to suspend her. One day later, Jones added: Ken Livingstone has to be suspended from the Labour Party. Preferably before I pass out from punching myself in the face. Jones’s response to the Guardian’s rehabilitation of George Bush was rather different: The Trump calamity doesn’t mean rehabilitating George W Bush, a man chiefly responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths and other horror There were no calls for the comment editor to be suspended, or for the editor to resign. In fact, Jones made no mention of his employer and did not link to the editorial. Happily for the Guardian, many of his Twitter followers will have had no idea what he was on about. The truth is that Guardian, Independent and BBC regulars never criticise their employers. But they do celebrate and defend them. Last December, former Guardian journalist Jonathan Cook challenged Monbiot on Twitter: Guardian, your employer, is precisely part of media problem. Why this argument is far from waste of energy. It’s vital. Monbiot replied: that’s your view. I don’t share it. Most of my work exposing corporate power has been through or with the Guardian. In March 2015, Jones tweeted: Incredible news that @KathViner is new Guardian editor! Nearly whooped in the quiet carriage. That’s how excited I am. Spare a thought for Jones’s fellow passengers. He certainly spared a thought for his outgoing boss: Like so many others, owe so much to Alan Rusbridger. The Guardian is a global force, and that’s so much down to him. Surreal he’s gone And: Surreal he’s going, that is. He’s still the boss! After 18 months of turning a blind eye to the Guardian’s relentless attack on Corbyn, both Jones and Monbiot have publicly dumped him. Jones told the Evening Standard last month: The Left has failed badly. I’d find it hard to vote for Corbyn. More recently, Jones plunged the knife in to the hilt. Having completely ignored the media’s anti-Corbyn campaign, Monbiot commented on Twitter: I was thrilled when Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party, but it has been one fiasco after another. I have now lost all faith. Monbiot added: I hoped Corbyn would be effective in fighting the government and articulating a positive alternative vision. Neither hope has materialised. Conclusion – Status From Silence The truth is that the ‘free press’ does not tolerate authentic dissent. In the final analysis, high-profile dissidents are salaried corporate employees. They can speak no more honestly about their employers, other potential employers, or the industry in general, than someone selling cars, computers or mobile phones. The exalted status of our most famous ‘left-leaning’ media corporations is based on de facto censorship rather than truth-telling. After all, why would the public doubt the honesty of the Guardian or the Independent when they are essentially never subject to serious criticism? This matters because the role of the corporate media is not just one issue among many – it is the key issue determining how all other issues are communicated to a mass audience. The result is devastating – empowered by their ill-deserved reputations, ‘left-leaning’ media, in fact, relentlessly agitate for wars in countries like Libya and Syria, relentlessly attack progressive voices challenging power and, worst of all, literally sell the high-tech, climate killing, corporate-led status quo as ‘normal’. Are we suggesting that writers of principle should resign from corporate media? Yes, it is time to stop pretending anything will ever be achieved by publishing radical journalism that will be used to draw readers into a moral and intellectual killing zone serving big business. There are other alternatives now – it’s time to boycott the corporate media, dump them in the dustbin of history, and build alternatives that will allow democracy and people to breathe. http://clubof.info/