December 1, 2023

Rightwing personalities use X to bring antisemitic theories to light in US

Experts say figures like Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson bringing ‘great replacement’ theory mainstream signals growing extremism

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/nov/21/great-replacement-theory-antisemitism-racism-rightwing-mainstream



The racist and antisemitic “great replacement” theory is encroaching out of the far right and more visibly into mainstream US politics in the wake of its platforming by major figures like Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson, in a move experts believe shows the growing extremeness of rightwing politics in the US. High-profile users of Twitter/X including rightwing personality Carlson and the platform’s proprietor Musk, are helping to mainstream extremist narratives that are increasingly prevalent on the site, experts and advocates say. Despite Musk’s aggressive responses to organizations that criticize X for promoting extremism, white nationalists and other extremists last week took to the platform to celebrate the role of Musk, his platform and star attractions including Carlson for “shifting the Overton Window” on antisemitism.

The “great replacement” is a racist conspiracy narrative that falsely asserts there is an active, ongoing and covert effort to replace white populations in current white-majority countries. In many versions – such as those rehearsed in the manifestos of mass shooters in Christchurch, New Zealand; El Paso, Texas; and Buffalo, New York – the purported replacement is being coordinated by Jewish people. From the middle of last week through the weekend, events on X followed a pattern that has become increasingly familiar since Musk assumed control of Twitter in October 2022: extremist remarks from Musk and other high-profile users received widespread criticism, more advertisers abandoned the platform, and Musk furiously portrayed his critics as unfairly picking on him.

On Wednesday, Musk described another user’s claim that Jewish people had pushed “hatred against whites” and implied they were responsible for “hordes of minorities … flooding” western countries. The comments drew condemnation from Jewish groups, media commentators and even the White House. Heidi Beirich, extremism expert and co-founder of the Global Project on Hate and Extremism (GPAHE ), pointed to Twitter’s response to a 31 October GPAHE report showing that members of the white supremacist Generation Identity (GI) movement had returned to Twitter after widespread bans in 2020. Following the report’s publication, 31 GI accounts were suspended, but 26 were reinstated within 24 hours. “Somebody was trying to content moderate according to the rules and had the decision reversed,” Beirich argued. “I don’t know if that’s Musk or [X CEO] Linda Yaccarino or someone else, but clearly they don’t care to impose their own rules any more when it comes to this type of hate content,” she added.

Last week, on Carlson’s self-produced show which has run on X since his acrimonious exit from Fox News, he and guest Candace Owens discussed what they called the hypocrisy of pro-Israel donors in threatening college funding over pro-Palestinian protests after allegedly remaining silent during Black Lives Matter protests and the implementation of diversity initiatives. At one point Owens – on the show to discuss her public feud with the Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro over Israel’s actions in Gaza – claimed that discussions of race on college campuses were designed to “breed white people out of the population”. Carlson asked donors: “Where were you the last 10 years when they were calling for white genocide?” Carlson later added: “You were paying for it, actually … You were calling my children immoral for their skin color, you paid for it.”

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December 1, 2023

Melissa Barrera showed solidarity with Palestinians. Hollywood showed its persistent double standard.

https://www.latimes.com/delos/story/2023-11-30/melissa-barrera-scream-israel-palestine-scream-noah-schnapp-stranger-things

https://archive.is/fYj7A



Mexican actor Melissa Barrera was credited with revitalizing the “Scream” horror franchise before she was suddenly dropped from her lead role in the upcoming seventh installment. Fans speculated that her firing had something to do with her vocal support for Palestinians on social media, and last week, they were given an answer. Spyglass Media Group, the production company behind the campy films, said in an official statement to Variety that Barrera had been let go for material posted to her social media that they characterized as antisemitic.

Barrera’s firing is a sad reminder of how historically marginalized groups, like Latinas, are forced to walk a tightrope when advocating for social causes, and of how fragile “representation” is in Hollywood. According to Variety, Spyglass took issue with Barrera resharing a post accusing Israel of “genocide and ethnic cleansing,” as well as a Jewish Currents article about the distortion of the Holocaust to bolster the Israeli arms industry. It should be mentioned that the article was written by Raz Segal, a respected Israeli historian who has written multiple books about the Holocaust. A cursory glance at his body of work shows his dedication to preserving the memory of the Holocaust. He has, for example, written on Bulgaria whitewashing its role in the atrocity.

But Barrera wasn’t afforded the luxury of nuance. There was no slap on the wrist. Retribution was swift. “We have zero tolerance for antisemitism or the incitement of hate in any form, including false references to genocide, ethnic cleansing, Holocaust distortion or anything that flagrantly crosses the line into hate speech,” a Spyglass spokesperson said in the company’s statement to Variety. Again, the Holocaust distortion in question can be attributed to an Israeli scholar. For her part, Barrera has held her ground, condemning antisemitism while reaffirming her solidarity with Palestinians. “I will continue to speak out for those that need it most and continue to advocate for peace and safety, for human rights and freedom. Silence is not an option for me,” she wrote on Instagram.

Antisemitism is a real, pernicious evil. I recall the 2018 shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, which is only the visible tip of an issue that’s deeply entrenched in our country. But Barrera being smeared as antisemitic and unceremoniously dropped from a leading movie role highlights a persistent double standard in Hollywood and beyond. Marginalized individuals, when expressing their support for a cause, must assuage the anxiety of their peers before speaking up. They must promise that they aren’t a threat, must be exceptionally articulate, must cover all their bases, and even when all these conditions are meticulously met, punishment can come anyway.

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December 1, 2023

Sweden's far north sees sun for last time this year

December 1, 2023

Democracy's Deserters

https://prospect.org/culture/books/2023-12-01-democracys-deserters-levitsky-ziblatt-review/



When historians one day try to explain the decline of 21st-century American democracy, they may well point to Republican leaders’ willingness to minimize and excuse the violence at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. In denying the seriousness of that effort to block the peaceful transfer of power, those Republicans conformed to a political type that Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt call the “semi-loyal democrat.” This is a politician who nominally supports democracy but in practice ignores co-partisans’ extralegal and often violent efforts to subvert and overturn it. Semi-loyal democrats are indispensable to a democracy’s undoing, Levitsky and Ziblatt explain in their crisply argued new book, Tyranny of the Minority. An authoritarian like Donald Trump would find it hard to take power without the cover that semi-loyal democrats provide. They are central to the question at the book’s heart: Why have Republicans become so disaffected with American democracy that they are now likely to give their 2024 presidential nomination to a person who has betrayed it? The question is the right one, but the answers they provide fall short of satisfactorily explaining how this has happened and what to do in response.



Best known for their 2018 book How Democracies Die, Levitsky and Ziblatt are leading authorities on the rise and fall of democracies in the world and consequently well positioned to offer insight into American democracy’s troubles. According to a wealth of research, the United States was not a candidate for democratic breakdown. For example, a much-cited 1997 study by political scientists Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi found that no democracy richer than Argentina in 1975—at a per capita income of $35,682 in contemporary dollars—had ever broken down. The United States was the very model of a wealthy, mature, stable democracy. If past patterns held, it couldn’t break down, or so it seemed. Yet American democracy has begun to unravel. People of all ideological shades are increasingly likely to disdain those with different partisan views. Among both Democrats and Republicans, similar, albeit low, fractions express support for political violence. But among the two parties’ elites, there is no similarity in the repudiation of democratic norms. The Republicans stand apart.

To underscore this point, Levitsky and Ziblatt cite a study ranking the 261 Republican members of Congress seated in 2021 on six actions advancing the false claim that Joe Biden lost the 2020 election. More than 60 percent, or some 161 elected officials, adopted antidemocratic positions on at least five of these six points. Another 54 flunked four of the five questions. Of the 6 percent who consistently prioritized democratic norms over partisanship, most had either retired or lost primaries by 2022. In contrast to the prevailing Republican pattern, Levitsky and Ziblatt point out, Democrats have made no analogous effort to deny the validity of the elections they have lost. Levitsky and Ziblatt offer two lines of explanation for the change among Republicans—one concerned with the history of racial conflict, the other with the U.S. Constitution. Starting with the unjustly overlooked Wilmington, North Carolina, massacre of 1898, Levitsky and Ziblatt chart how racial conservatives, first in the Southern Democratic Party, and later in the national Republican coalition, have actively undermined election machinery in response to peaking racial resentment. Their tale jumps from Redemption to Strom Thurmond’s 1948 “Dixiecrat” party, Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign, and the spike in racial resentment around Obama’s presidency. For Levitsky and Ziblatt, this history shows how anxiety over race has repeatedly overwhelmed fidelity to democratic norms.



Their second line of explanation turns on institutions largely created by the Constitution that now tilt systematically against democratic rule. The Senate, Electoral College, and impossibly difficult amendment rule of Article V are all hardwired into the Constitution. All flowed in part from the framers’ fear of popular, redistributive majorities. Other counter-majoritarian aspects of U.S. government have no anchor in the Constitution’s text: the Supreme Court’s use of judicial review to invalidate national laws, the Senate’s filibuster, and the use of first-past-the-post House districts. All these emerged after ratification. But all have also sunk roots deep into our political culture to the point that they are often mistaken for constitutional fixtures. The end result is a surfeit of counter-majoritarian bodies, and what Francis Fukuyama has called a “vetocracy.” At first blush, Levitsky and Ziblatt’s historical and institutional explanations fit awkwardly with each other. The historical story begins with Redemption and continues with the Second Reconstruction and the Obama presidency. The institutional story harks by and large back to 1787. But the threads aren’t hard to weave together. After all, the United States has been a multiracial democracy only since the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And it has been during this recent period, Levitsky and Ziblatt rightly stress, that growing racial resentment has turned the American right into semi-loyal democrats.

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December 1, 2023

The Autumn-Winter issue of The Progressive Post is out (free download)

https://feps-europe.eu/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/PP23_WEB.pdf

Last April, the European Commission presented its long-awaited proposal to reform the EU fiscal governance, whose adoption should ideally take place in the first trimester of 2024. The plan aimed to address the shortcomings of the current framework, promote growth and sustainability and reduce high public debt ratios. Reforming the EU economic governance is certainly very much needed, but the Commission's plan lacks ambition. It falls short of enabling the green and social transition, and it lacks instruments to improve the democratic legitimacy and transparency of the decision-making process. That is the main assessment of the authors of the Special Coverage on EU fiscal rules in the new edition of the Progressive Post.

In this issue, we also look closely at international affairs: the Focus is dedicated to Turkey, a heavyweight of the European neighbourhood, an EU candidate country – but one with which the EU has a progressively deteriorating relationship. One of the Dossiers looks at Latin America, whose nations are increasingly breaking free from the traditional alignment of their foreign policy with more powerful allies in the northern hemisphere.

The other Dossier on Progressive cities in Europe offers a range of examples from European cities where a transformation towards sustainability is currently taking place concretely and on the ground, thanks to the vision and ambitions of progressive administrations.

December 1, 2023

Barrister fined 250 pounds for giving Nazi salute in court

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/barrister-fined-250-for-giving-nazi-salute-in-court-6clgl30rt

A veteran barrister and former judge has been fined for giving a Nazi salute to magistrates while saying “jawohl” at the end of a criminal trial. Thomas Davidson, who was called to the Bar in 1973 and spent 24 years as an immigration tribunal judge, was fined £250 over an incident last year at Salisbury magistrates’ court. A disciplinary tribunal found that Davidson, who is based at a set of barristers’ chambers in Fleet Street in London, “behaved in a way which was likely to diminish the trust and confidence which the public places in him or in the profession”.

The three-strong panel said in its short report that last year the chairman of the lay bench of magistrates had reprimanded the barrister for invoking a German accent during a criminal trial in which he was representing the defendant. Then, at the end of proceedings, Davidson was found to have looked at the bench and said “Jawohl” while raising his hand in a Nazi salute. The word technically means simply “yes” in German. But is also used in military circumstances as “yes, sir” — and more recently denotes sarcasm. The gesture invoked by the barrister is also known as the Hitler salute or the Sieg Heil salute.

Historians have noted that members of the Nazi party first started greeting Adolf Hitler with the salute — which was said to have originated in the Roman empire — in the early 1920s before it was made compulsory in 1926. It was seen as a sign of loyalty to Hitler. In Hitler’s Table Talk, Hitler himself credited the SS with having given the salute “a soldierly style”. The disciplinary tribunal said that Davidson’s actions were “seriously offensive and discreditable”, and in addition to imposing a fine on the barrister, it ordered him to pay £1,750 in costs.

In addition to his criminal law practice, Davidson is listed as acting in family, personal injury and landlord and tenant cases. He is also listed as an immigration law specialist and is reported to have sat as a tribunal judge between 1992 and 2016. The tribunal’s full decision, which would explain the context of the barrister’s actions, has not yet been published. Davidson has 21 days to appeal the ruling.

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December 1, 2023

Bananarama - Robert De Niro's Waiting (The Reflex Revision) (just dropped) + Velvet Lies (Luke Million Remix)

Released by:
London Records (Because Ltd)
Release date:
1 December 2023
P-line:
℗ 2023 London Records Ltd
C-line:
© 2023 London Records Ltd

full version:



Velvet Lies (Luke Million Remix)

November 30, 2023

!Action Pact! - Survival Of The Fattest (Full Album) 1984

Label: Fallout Records – FALL L.P.030, Fallout Records – FALL L/P 030
Format: Vinyl, LP, Album
Country: UK
Released: 1984
Genre: Rock
Style: Punk

November 30, 2023

The Cybertruck Is the Dumbest Thing I've Ever Seen: Elon Musk enters his Caligula era.

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/2023-11-30-tesla-cybertruck-dumbest-thing/



The Cybertruck—or CYBPRFRVKK, according to its " target="_blank">illegible branding image, which looks like a white suburban teenager’s first hesitant attempt at tagging the local Red Robin—is due to be released today. It’s the first new Tesla design since 2018, and the company has spent over four years and billions retooling its factories to make it. It’s anyone’s guess how much of a success or failure the truck will be, though the fact that at time of writing there is, incredibly, still no official information about price or battery capacity doesn’t bode well. But we can conclude that the Cybertruck is just possibly the dumbest vehicle ever produced. Here’s why.

Let’s start with the Cybertruck’s body panels, which are made of stainless steel. That is a nightmare for several reasons. First, it is quite a bit harder than ordinary steel, making it difficult to shape and machine. When Ford experimented with stainless steel in the mid-20th century, they discovered that the metal would eventually break the dies they used to press their door panels. Tesla has had to cut the sheets with lasers and bend them into shape, which is undoubtedly more expensive.



Second, there is cost. The chromium and nickel alloys typically used to make steel stainless—that is, resistant to corrosion—are expensive, at about $11,700 and $18,300 per metric ton, respectively, as compared to about $800 for steel. And while stainless steel is resistant to dents, that also means that if it is dented it is difficult and costly to repair. Incidentally, automakers have long since developed techniques to combat rust that are roughly equivalent to stainless alloys, like galvanizing the steel (that is, applying a zinc coating) and improved paint. Indeed, stainless steel itself is not entirely rustproof, as anyone with a stainless knife or cutlery has likely discovered. Leave it under a damp surface like a cloth (or leaf, or bird poop) for too long, and it will start to corrode.

Third and perhaps most importantly, stainless steel is much stiffer than the ordinary stuff, which makes it dangerous. Since the 1950s at least, automakers have understood that stiffer cars are more dangerous to people inside and outside the car, because in a crash they deliver energy to other parties rather than absorbing it. In early crash test experiments with more heavily built cars, collisions often did only minor damage to the car but turned the test dummies into paste. Since then, cars have been designed with progressively more sophisticated crumple zones to absorb impact forces. Musk’s boasts of a Cybertruck “exoskeleton,” if true, are a recipe for gruesome carnage.



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https://twitter.com/gamescan/status/1723161359477821861

November 30, 2023

The Curious Partner in Big Banks' Drive to Weaken Capital Rules

Why are civil rights groups and Black mayors concerned with the profits of giant financial institutions?



https://prospect.org/power/2023-11-29-curious-partner-big-banks-capital-rules/



The recent scandal involving sexual harassment at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, according to my colleague Robert Kuttner, only came to light after the big banks sought to disable a new rule the FDIC and other financial regulators have been working on to raise capital requirements on institutions with more than $100 billion in assets. Setting capital reserve rules at the appropriate level of risk definitely impacts big banks by reducing the leverage that they can use to spin up profits, but protects the public, and arguably the banks themselves, by providing a cushion to guard against securities losses and deposit runs. Bank executives and lobbyists are more worried about the former than the latter.

FDIC chair Martin Gruenberg is seen as unlikely to resign in the wake of the harassment scandal, which means that the agency will have a full complement of Democratic appointees on the board to advance the capital rules. But that doesn’t mean the banks have given up. They’ve turned to an old standby: third-party advocacy groups that weigh in on their behalf. When a think tank or research organization, with the imprimatur of independence, appeals to regulators to change policies in ways that benefit banking interests, it carries more weight.



That’s why big banks hand out a lot of money to these groups, in the hopes that it leads to favorable policy recommendations. So Wells Fargo giving a $50 million grant to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) does not necessarily come without strings, even if they appear invisible at first glance. In my research and reporting during and after the financial crisis, a strange connection would routinely pop up, where headline civil rights organizations and big banks would advocate for the same things. When I looked into the background, I would often find large monetary contributions. That’s what got my spider sense tingling when I saw some of the public comments on the capital rules.



Hollies Winston, the mayor of Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis that’s majority-minority and about 30 percent Black, submitted a comment stating that “raising capital requirements for banks … could potentially hinder the ability of Black-owned businesses to secure the financing they need to start, grow, and sustain their operations.” Angela Lang, executive director of Black Leaders Organizing for Communities (BLOC), a community organization in the Milwaukee area, cited an Urban Institute analysis in her comment, saying that the proposal would hurt African American borrowers “who have faced decades of redlining, discriminatory lending practices, and other forms of economic disparities.” Other comments like this have been submitted. Public comments do matter on complicated rules like this. The banking regulators extended the comment period, which was supposed to close this Thursday, to next January.

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much more at the top link