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zarya-zaryanitsa · 1 year

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Stalinist attitudes towards homosexuality and the events surroudning criminalization of homosexuality in Soviet Union in 1934 - excerpts from professor Dan Healey’s book „Russian homophobia from Stalin to Sochi”

In the same chapter I analyze the Soviet return to a ban on “sodomy” in 1933-34. It was a Stalinist measure, proposed by the security police and backed with relish by Stalin and his Politburo. Stalin personally edited the new penal article. This was the moment when the Soviet state adopted a modern anti-homosexual politics, the birth of modern Russian political homophobia. (…)

On September 15, 1933, deputy chief of the OGPU (secret police) Genrikh Yagoda proposed to Stalin that a law against “pederasty” was needed urgently. Stalin and Yagoda used the crude term pederastiia to discuss male homosexuality; but government lawyers revived the tsarist term muzhelozhstvo (sodomy) for the published law that was eventually adopted in March 1934. Yagoda reported that in August-September 1933, OGPU raids had been conducted on circles of “pederasts” in Moscow and Leningrad, and other cities of the Soviet Union. Yagoda wrote that these men were guilty of spying; they had also “politically demoralized various social layers of young men, including young workers, and even attempted to penetrate the army and navy.” From a recent collection of FSB archive documents of political cases against young Communists, it is clear that during the early 1930s, the secret police were obsessed with detecting counterrevolutionary moods among young people. Stalin forwarded Yagoda’s letter to Politburo member Lazar Kaganovich, noting that “these scoundrels must receive exemplary punishment” and directing a law against “pederasty” should be adopted. In the months that followed, Yagoda the secret policeman steered its passage through the various legislative drafts. (…)

When in mid-September 1933 Yagoda wrote to Stalin, recommending the adoption of a formal law against sodomy, he apparently cited a figure of 130 arrests of “pederasts” for the operations in “Moscow and Leningrad.” According to Ivanov, the archives of the St. Petersburg FSB reveal that during August-September 1933, 175 men were arrested on grounds of homosexual relations in Leningrad alone. The raids on “pederasts” continued and probably expanded to the principal “regime” cities, including Kharkov and Kiev. It appears that somewhere inside the central secret police machinery, an order originated in late July or early August 1933 to begin arrests of “pederasts” known to the authorities on their card-indexes either as “anti-social” or “declassed” elements, or as a security threat with international dimensions. (…)

In the 1993 release of correspondence between Yagoda and Stalin leading to the sodomy ban, one other significant document was published from the same file in the Presidential Archive. It is a sixteen-page letter to Stalin, from a homosexual British Communist, Harry O. Whyte (1907-60), an ex patriate journalist living in Moscow who loved a man who was a Soviet citizen. His Soviet lover was arrested sometime during late 1933 or early 1934. The release of the Whyte letter said little about its provenance and the author. It was typical of the 1993 publication that this document also appeared without commentary, but was labeled “Humor from the Special Collections” by archivists or editors who failed to show any historical empathy or intellectual curiosity.

Whyte, who worked for the English-language Moscow Daily News, wrote to Stalin, in May 1934, asking him to justify the new law. The journalist boldly explained why it violated the principles of both Marxism and the Soviet revolution. He argued that persecution of the law-abiding homosexual was typical of capitalist regimes and fascist ones: Nazi Germany’s “racial purity” drive was just the most extreme example of the push in both systems for “labor reserves and cannon fodder.” “Constitutional homosexuals, as an insignificant portion of the population . . . cannot present a threat to the birth rate in a socialist state.” Their position was analogous to that of other unjustly persecuted groups: “women, colored races, national minorities” and the best traditions of socialism showed tolerance of the relatively insignificant number of naturally occurring homosexuals in the population. He asked Stalin, “Can a homosexual be considered a person fit to become a member of the Communist Party?” In a revealing reaction, Stalin scrawled across the letter, “An idiot and a degenerate. To the archives.” Whyte got a blunt answer to his question: he was expelled from the Communist Party; he hastily left the Soviet Union for England in 1935. (…)

The dictator turned to his cultural spokesman Maxim Gorky, to explain the law’s rationale for Soviet and European readers. Gorky wrote an article that appeared in Izvestiia and Pravda on May 23, 1934, and later in a German-language socialist newspaper in Switzerland, in which he compared healthy Soviet youth to the degenerate youth of Nazi Germany. “Destroy the homosexuals - and fascism will disappear” he concluded, propounding the genocide of a social group on the grounds of sexuality. Later in 1936, People’s Commissar of Justice Nikolai V. Krylenko gave a speech to the central Soviet legislature in which he explained that the law was necessary because homosexuals were not healthy workers but “a declassed rabble, or the scum of society, or remnants of the exploiting classes.”

#life in the stalinist utopia am i right #don't let tankies trick you into overlooking the crimes of stalinism #stalinism #ussr #soviet union #eastern europe #lgbt #lgbt history #communism

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is-the-owl-video-cute · 7 months

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Ok so we all know hp is bad and hp fans are genuinely sus and Not Good people..But are fans of other things such as twilight, mcu, certain horror movies with awful directors, or even things such as rock singers in the 80s who made amazing music but they were Awful. Can people enjoy these things and still be a good person? I've wondered this for a bit and your hp reply was great!

The questions you have to ask yourself are “is [bad person] benefitting from me engaging with this media in some way” and “is [bad person] actively using their success in media as a way to fight for legislature that oppresses a marginalized group”. You also have to analyze if the media itself reflects whatever makes the creator bad.

JKR is a unique case because she uses profits from Harry Potter to fund hate groups and push anti-trans legislation into law. She uses her platform specifically as a means to harm other human beings actively, and her works are rife with racism, antisemitism, sexism, fatphobia, ableism, etc. etc.

It isn’t just a matter of JKR having a bad opinion, she weaponizes her media to groom her fans into TERFs and is directly placing trans people in danger, especially in the UK.

Fans of movies made by Harvey Weinstein or whoever are generally not being groomed to be sexually abusive because he wasn’t using his media as a weapon, he was using his money as a weapon for harm. Do I think people are inherently bad for liking Pulp Fiction or whatever just because the executive producer is a sexual abuser? Not really, because for one thing he’s in prison and can no longer benefit from any profit that movie could make and for another he was just the executive producer for most of the movies you’ve actually heard of, not a writer or director. Death of the author works a whole lot easier if the author is actually dead or otherwise off the table, and how tainted the media is by their involvement is proportional to how involved they actually were with the media.

So something like Mindless Self Indulgence is hard to justify still engaging with even though Jimmy was arrested because he was the direct artistic influence for his music and had more or less full creative freedom with it. I wouldn’t personally say it reflects great on a person to enjoy art made by a known child molester, but that doesn’t mean you have to hate Spy Kids or whatever just because someone on a very large team of people involved who didn’t really have creative control on the project was a bad person.

It’s case by case with a lot of reliance on using best judgment.

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kp777 · 1 year

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By Thom Hartmann

Common Dreams

March 31, 2023

The Republican Party's most dangerous grift today has been their embrace of the lie that America is not a democracy but instead is a theocratic republic that should be ruled exclusively by armed Christian white men. It's leading us straight into the jaws of fascism.

Nobody ever accused Republicans of not knowing how to make a buck or BS-ing somebody into voting for them. Lying to people for economic or political gain is the very definition of a grift.

Whenever there’s another mass- or school-shooting, Republican politicians hustle out fundraising emails about how “Democrats are coming to take your guns!” The result is a measurable and profitable spike in gun sales after every new slaughter of our families and children, followed by a fresh burst of campaign cash to GOP lawmakers.

But the GOP’s ability to exploit any opportunity that comes along — regardless of its impact on America or American citizens — goes way beyond just fundraising hustles.

When Jared Kushner was underwater and nearly bankrupt because he overpaid for 666 Fifth Avenue and needed a billion-dollar bailout to cover his mortgage, his buddies in the Middle East (Saudi Arabia and the UAE) blockaded American ally (and host to the Fifth Fleet) Qatar until that country relented and laundered the money to Jared through a Canadian investment company.

Just this week, after Trump deregulated toxic trains leading to a horrible crash and the contamination of East Palestine, Ohio, Steve Bannon — already charged with multiple fraud-related crimes and then pardoned by Trump — showed up this week to hustle $300+ water filters to the people of that town.

The grift is at the core of the GOP’s existence, and has been since Nixon blew up LBJ’s peace talks with the Vietnamese in 1968 and then took cash bribes from the Milk Lobby and Jimmy Hoffa in the White House while having his mafia-connected “plumbers” wiretap the DNC’s offices at the Watergate.

— Republicans successfully fought the ability of Medicare to negotiate drug prices for decades; in turn, Big Pharma pours millions into their campaign coffers and personal pockets (legalized by 5 Republicans on the Supreme Court).

— Republicans beat back Democratic efforts to stop insurance giants from ripping off seniors and our government with George W. Bush’s Medicare Advantage privatization scam; in turn, the insurance companies rain cash on them like an Indian monsoon.

— Republicans oppose any effort to replace fossil fuels with green energy sources that don’t destroy our environment; in turn, the fossil fuel industry jacked up the price of gasoline into the stratosphere just in time for the 2022 election (and you can expect them to try it again in 2024).

— Republicans stopped enforcement of a century’s worth of anti-trust laws in 1983, wiping out America’s small businesses and turning rural city centers into ghost towns while pushing profits and prices through the ceiling; in turn massive corporate PACs fund ads supporting Republican candidates every election cycle.

— Republicans authored legislation letting billionaires own thousands of newspapers, radio stations, and TV outlets; in turn the vast majority of those papers (now half of all local papers are owned by a handful of rightwing New York hedge funds) and stations all run daily news and editorials attacking Democrats and supporting the GOP.

— Republicans Trump and Pai killed net neutrality so giant tech companies can legally spy on you and me, recording every website we visit and selling that information for billions; in turn, major social media sites amplify rightwing voices while giant search engines stopped spidering progressive news sites.

Newspeak — George Orwell’s term for the grift where politicians use fancy phrases that mean the opposite of what people think they mean — has been the GOP’s go-to strategy for a half-century.

Richard Nixon, for example, promised to crack down on drugs, but instead used that as an excuse to crack down on anti-war liberals and Black people. Instead of an economic grift, it was a political grift.

As Nixon‘s right hand man, John Ehrlichman, told reporter Dan Baum:

“You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people. Do you understand what I’m saying? “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. “We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. “Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.“

The grift is a recurrent theme through Republican presidencies in the modern era.

Ronald Reagan told us if we just destroyed America’s unions and moved our manufacturing to China and Mexico, great job opportunities would fill the nation.

He followed that up by promising if we just cut taxes on the morbidly rich, prosperity would trickle-down to the rest of us.

Reagan even assured us that raising the Social Security retirement age to 67 and taxing Social Security benefits would mean seniors could retire with greater ease.

All, of course, were grifter’s lies. Republican presidents since Reagan have continued the tradition.

George W. Bush called his program to make it easier to clear-cut America’s forests and rip roads through wilderness areas the “Healthy Forests Initiative.”

His program to legalize more pollution from coal-fired power plants and immunize them from community lawsuits (leading to tens of thousands of additional lung- and heart-disease deaths in the years since) was named the “Clean Air Act.”

Bush’s scam to “strengthen” Medicare — “Medicare Advantage” — was a thinly disguised plan to privatize that program that is today draining Medicare’s coffers while making insurance executives richer than Midas.

Donald Trump told Americans he had the coronavirus pandemic under control while he was actually making the situation far worse: America had more deaths per capita from the disease than any other developed country in the world, with The Lancet estimating a half-million Americans died needlessly because of Trump’s grift.

Jared and Ivanka cashed in on their time in the White House to the tune of billions, while Trump squeezed hundreds of millions out of foreign governments, encouraging them to illegally pay him through rentals in his properties around the world.

Other Trump grifts — most leading to grateful industries or billionaires helping him and the GOP out — included:

— Making workplaces less safe — Boosting religious schools at the expense of public schools — Cutting relief for students defrauded by student loan sharks — Shrinking the safety net by cutting $60 billion out of food stamps — Forcing workers to put in overtime without getting paid extra for it — Pouring more pollution from fossil fuels into our fragile atmosphere — Gutting the EPA’s science operation — Rescinding rules that protected workers at federal contract sites — Dialing back car air pollution emissions standards — Reducing legal immigration of skilled workers into the US from “shithole countries” — Blocking regulation of toxic chemicals — Rolling back rules on banks, setting up the crisis of 2023 — Defenestrating rules against racially segregated housing

While Nixon was simply corrupt — a crook, to use his own term — in 1978 when five Republicans on the Supreme Court signed off on the Bellotti decision authored by Lewis Powell himself, giving corporations the legal right to bribe American politicians, the GOP went all in.

Ever since then, the GOP has purely been the party of billionaires and giant corporations, although their most successful political grift has been to throw an occasional bone to racists, gun-nuts, fascists, homophobes, and woman-haters to get votes.

Democrats at that time were largely funded by the unions, so it wasn’t until the 1990s, after Reagan had destroyed about half of America’s union jobs and gutted the unions’ ability to fund campaigns, that the Democratic Party under Bill Clinton was forced to make a big turn toward taking corporate cash.

Since Barack Obama showed how online fundraising could replace corporate cash, however, about half of the nation’s Democratic politicians have aligned with the Progressive Caucus and eschewed corporate money, returning much of the Party to its FDR and Great Society base.

The GOP, in contrast, has never wavered from lapping up corporate money in exchange for tax cuts, deregulation, and corporate socialism.

Their most dangerous grift today, though, has been their embrace of the lie that America is not a democracy but instead is a theocratic republic that should be ruled exclusively by armed Christian white men. It’s leading us straight into the jaws of fascism.

Bannon’s grift in East Palestine is the smallest of the small, after his being busted for a multi-million-dollar fraud in the “Build the Wall” scheme and others, but is still emblematic of the Republican strategy at governance.

When all you have to offer the people is a hustle, then at the very least, Republicans figure, you should be able to make a buck or gain/keep political power while doing it.

#republicans #gop #grift #common dreams

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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year

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Fighting the privacy wars, state by state

In 2021, Apple updated its mobile OS so that users could opt out of app tracking with one click. More than 96% opted out, costing Facebook $10b in one year. The kicker? Even if you opted out, Apple continued to spy on you, just as invasively as Facebook had, as part of its competing targeted ad product:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/23/state-of-play/#patchwork

The fact that Apple — a company that has blanketed the world with anti-surveillance billboards — engaged in deceptive, pervasive surveillance reveals the bankruptcy of “letting the market decide” what privacy protections you should have.

When you walk into a grocery store, you know that the FDA is on the job, making sure that the food you buy doesn’t kill you — but no one stops the grocery store from tracking literally every step you take, every eye movement you make (no, really!) and selling that to all comers:

https://themarkup.org/privacy/2023/02/16/forget-milk-and-eggs-supermarkets-are-having-a-fire-sale-on-data-about-you

America’s decision to let the private sector self-regulate commercial surveillance is a grotesque failure of duty on the part of Congress, which has consistently failed to pass comprehensive privacy legislation. There are lots of reasons for this, but the most important is that American cops and spies are totally reliant on commercial surveillance brokers, and they fight like hell against any privacy legislation:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/13/public-interest-pharma/#axciom

The private sector’s unregulated privacy free-for-all means that cops don’t need to get warrants to spy on you — they can just buy the data on the open market for pennies:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/18/fifth-pig/#ppp

The last Congressional session almost passed a halfway decent (but still deeply flawed) federal privacy law, but then they didn’t. Basically, Congress only passes laws that can be sandwiched into 1,000-page must-pass bills and most of the good stuff that gets through only does so because some bought-and-paid-for Congressjerks are too busy complaining about “woke librarians” to read the bills before they come up for a vote.

The catastrophic failure to protect Americans’ privacy has sent human rights groups hunting for other means to accomplish the same end. On the federal level, there’s the newly reinvigorated FTC, under the visionary, muscular leadership of Lina Khan, the best Commission chair in a generation. She’s hard at work on rules to limit commercial surveillance:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/12/regulatory-uncapture/#conscious-uncoupling

But FTC regs take time to pass, and it can be hard for ordinary individuals to trigger their enforcement, which might leave you at the mercy of your local officials when your privacy is invaded. What we really need is a privacy law with a “private right of action” — the right to go to court on your own:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/01/you-should-have-right-sue-companies-violate-your-privacy

The business lobby hates private right of action, and they trick low-information voters into opposing them with lies about “ambulance chasers” who sue innocent fast-food outlets for millions because they serve coffee that’s too hot:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/12/hot-coffee/#mcgeico

With Congress deadlocked and privacy harms spiraling, pro-privacy groups have turned to the states, as Alfred Ng writes for Politico:

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/02/22/statehouses-privacy-law-cybersecurity-00083775

The best provisions of the failed federal privacy law have been introduced as state legislation in Massachusetts and Illinois, and there are amendments to Indiana’s existing state privacy law — 16 states in all are working on or have some kind of privacy law. This means businesses must live with the dread “patchwork of laws,” which serves the business lobby right: they must do business in potentially radically different ways in different states, and small missteps could cost them millions, in true fuck-around-and-find-out fashion.

As Ng writes, these laws don’t have to pass in every state. America’s historically contingent, lopsided state lines mean that some states are so populous that whatever rules they pass end up going nationwide (the ACLU’s Kade Crockford uses the example of California Prop 65 warnings showing up on canned goods in NY).

As Congress descends further into self-parody, the temptation to treat the federal government as damage and route around it only mounts. It’s a powerful, but imperfect strategy. On the negative side, it takes a lot of resources to introduce legislation into multiple states, and to win legislative fights in each.

Think of the incredible fuckery that the coalition of Apple, John Deere, Wahl, and other monopolists got up to defeat dozens of state Right to Repair laws, even snatching victory from the jaws of defeat in New York state, neutering the incredible state electronics repair law before it reached the governor’s desk:

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/17/more-details-on-how-tech-lobbyists-lobotomized-nys-right-to-repair-law-with-governor-kathy-hochuls-help/

Indeed, the business lobby loves lobbying statehouses, treating them as the Feds’ farm-leagues, filled with naive, easily hoodwinked rubes. Organizations like ALEC use their endless corporate funding to get state legislation that piles farce upon tragedy, like the laws banning municipal fiber networks:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/15/useful-idiotsuseful-idiots/#unrequited-love

The right has always had hooks in state legislatures, but they really opened up the sluice gates in the runup to the 2010 census, when a GOP strategist called Thomas Hofeller started pitching Republican operatives on a plan called REDMAP, to capture state legislatures in time for a post-2010 census mass-redistricting that would neutralize the votes of Black and brown people and deliver permanent rule by an openly white nationalist Republican party that could lose every popular vote and still hold power.

Of course, that’s not how they talked about it in public. Though the racial dimension of GOP gerrymandering were visible to anyone on the ground, Hofeller maintained a veneer of plausible deniability on the new REDMAP districts, leaving the racist intent of GOP redistricting as a he-said/she-said matter of conjecture:

https://www.klfy.com/national/late-gop-redistricting-gurus-files-hint-at-partisan-motives/

That is, until 2018, when Satan summoned Hofeller back to hell, leaving his personal effects in the hands of his estranged anarchist daughter, Stephanie, who dumped all her old man’s files online, including the powerpoint slides he delivered to his GOP colleagues where he basically said, “Hey kids, let’s do an illegal racism!”

https://www.vice.com/en/article/pked4v/the-anarchist-daughter-of-the-gops-gerrymandering-mastermind-just-dumped-all-his-maps-and-files-on-google-drive

Sometimes, laws that turn on intent are difficult to enforce because they require knowledge of the accused’s state of mind. But there are so many would-be supervillains who just can’t stop themselves from monologing, and worse, putting it in writing.

As bad as state politics can be, they’re still winnable battlefields. Last year saw a profound win on Right to Repair in Colorado, where a wheelchair repair bill, HB22–1031, made history:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/06/when-drm-comes-your-wheelchair

That win helped inspire Rebecca Giblin and I when we were writing Chokepoint Capitalism, our book about how Big Tech and Big Content rip off creative workers, and what to do about it.

https://chokepointcapitalism.com

Many readers have noted that the first half of the book — where were unpack the scams of streaming, news advertising, ebooks and audiobooks, and other creative fields — is incredibly enraging.

But if you find yourself struggling to concentrate on the book because of a persistent, high-pitched whining noise that you suspect might be a rage-induced incipient aneurysm, keep reading! The second half of the book is full of detailed, shovel-ready policy proposals to get artists paid, including a state legislative proposal that works from the same playbook as these state privacy laws.

If your creative work entitles you to receive royalties, your contract will typically include the right to audit your royalty statements. If you do audit your royalties, you will often find “discrepancies.” We cite one LA firm that has performed tens of thousands of record contract audits over decades, and in every instance except one, the errors they discovered were in the labels’ favor.

This is a hell of a head-scratcher. I can only assume that some kind of extremely vexing, highly localized probability storm has taken up permanent residence over the Big Three labels’ accounting departments, making life hell for their CPAs, and my heart goes out to them.

Anyway: if you find one of these errors and you tell your label or publisher or studio, “Hey, you stole my money, cough up!” they will pat you on the head and say, “Oh, you artists are adorable but you can’t do math. You’re mistaken, we don’t owe you anything. But because we’re good natured slobs, we’ll offer you, say, half of what you think we owe you, which is good, because you can’t afford to sue us. And all you need to do to get that money is to sign this non-disclosure agreement, meaning you can’t tell anyone else about the money we’re stealing from them.

“Oh, and one more thing: your accountant has to promise never to audit us again.” As Caldwell-Kelly said when we talked about this on Trashfuture, this is like the accused murderer telling the forensics team, “Dig anywhere you’d like in my garden, just not in that corner, I’m very sentimental about it.”

https://trashfuturepodcast.podbean.com/e/amazon-billing-amazon-for-amazon-feat-cory-doctorow-and-rebecca-giblin/

Now, contracts are a matter of state law, and nearly every entertainment industry contract is signed in one of four jurisdictions: NY, CA, TN (Nashville), and WA (games companies and Amazon). If we amended the state laws in one or more of these to say, “NDAs can’t be enforced when they pertain to wage theft arising from omissions or misstatements on royalties,” we could pour money into the pockets of creative workers all over the world.

Yes, the entertainment giants will fight like hell against this, and yes, they have a lot of juice in their state legislatures. But they’re also incredibly greedy and reckless, and prone to such breathtaking and brazen acts of wage theft that they lurch from crisis to crisis, and at each of these crises, there is a space to pass a law to address these very public failings.

For example, in 2022, the Writers Guild of America — one of the best, most principled, most solidaristic and unified unions in Hollywood — wrested $42 million from Netflix, which the company had stolen from its writers:

https://variety.com/2022/film/news/wga-wins-42-million-arbitration-netflix-1235333822/

Netflix isn’t alone in these massive acts of wage theft, and this is certainly not the only way Netflix is stealing from creative workers. There’s never just one ant: if Netflix cooked the books for writers, they’re definitely cooking it for other workers. That means there will be more scandals, and when they break, we can demand more than a bandaid fix for one crime — we can demand modest-but-critical legislative action to fix contracts and prevent this kind of wage-theft in the future.

The state legislatures aren’t an intrinsically better battlefield for just fights, but they are an alternative to Congress, and there is space to make things happen in just some of the 50 state houses that can ripple out over the whole country — for good and bad.

[Image ID: Blind justice, holding aloft a set of unbalanced scales; in the lower scale is a map of the USA showing the state lines; in the higher scale rests the capitol building.]

#pluralistic #states rights #laboratories of democracy #privacy #gdpr #federalism #contract law #chokepoint capitalism #wage theft #redmap

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drbased · 9 months

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Another Takedown: We're with the big boys, now!

So I happened to spy a copy of the International Socialism journal, issue 157 published in Winter 2018. On the front cover there is a rainbow trans symbol and the title of one of the chapters: Marxism, feminism and transgender politics by Sue Caldwell. I thought wow, this is it, this a defense of genderism within a socialist framework. This'll be my undoing, finally I'll be able to recognise that my terfism is wrong. This isn't randos on tumblr anymore. So, I buy it, turn to page 25, and begin my journey.

And gyns, if you've read those randos on tumblr, I can assure you that there is nothing new here. I'm going to take apart this whole thing. So this is gonna be a long one, folks.

In August 2017 Donald Trump tweeted that transgender people1 were no longer welcome in the military because they are a “burden” due to “tremendous medical costs and disruption”.2 This was the latest in a series of attacks on transgender people which include attempts to overturn legislation that allows people to use the toilet for their preferred gender. Transgender people face the threat of violent attack; 2017 is on course to see the highest recorded number of killings of transgender people in the United States.3 In the UK transphobic hate crime has tripled in the last five years, while prosecution rates have dropped and transgender people report lack of trust in the police. More than a third of transgender employees say they had to leave their job due to discrimination in 2016.4 A survey released by Stonewall reports that eight out of ten trans school and college pupils had self-harmed and 45 percent had tried to take their own lives.5

1 I am using trans or transgender as an umbrella term to denote people whose gender identity does not match their birth sex, and this includes non-binary and gender fluid identities. When I use trans man or trans woman I am referring to people who have transitioned from female to male (ftm) or male to female (mtf) respectively, regardless of whether they have had any medical intervention. I am aware that these terms are contested and that meanings may change over time. 2 Thanks to Alex Callinicos, Joseph Choonara, Gareth Jenkins, Laura Miles, Sheila McGregor, Judith Orr and Camilla Royle for their comments on this article in draft. 3 Human Rights Campaign, 2017. 4 Yeung, 2016. 5 Weale, 2017.

Hmm. So, right off the back, I think it's a bit of a reach to describe 'banning from military' as an 'attack' on transgender people. I mean, first of all, you're a socialist journal. You're supposed to be materialists, right? Not being made to fight in a war is saving someone from an attack. I know this is a nitpick, but this is what we do, here: we deconstruct narratives and analyse how rhetoric is employed to achieve an affect. A socialist journal uncritically parroting liberal, egalitarian rhetoric? Love to see it.

Now, the '2017 is on course to see the highest reorded number of killings of transgender people in the United States'. So, first of all, kinda curious there's no number used here, right? Why not use it? This is clearly, off the bat, a persuasive piece, so really go for it. The statistics and facts are on your side, right? So what's that really hard-hitting number? 29. Up from 23.

'Some of these cases involve clear anti-transgender bias. In others, the victim’s transgender status may have put them at risk in other ways, such as forcing them into homelessness.'

Hmm. Look, I'm not going to belabour this point, because it's been done by better people elsewhere. Statistically, that's not a significantly high number, even for the transgender population. And it's nothing compared to the murder of women and girls in the same year. But let's talk about what's not being said, here:

Considering how little it takes for a person to ID as trans, there's no reason to assume these people were presenting in any way that makes them a target.

To belabour that point, you guys know we still live in a homophobic society, right? You guys know that homophobic violence still exists? How can you be sure that the motivations have anything to do with gender and not sexuality, considering how often those two things end up being linked?

As better women than me have pointed out, black transgender women in prostitution have the highest murder rate. That's a lot of overlapping risk factors. And in this statistic, a good number of these are people of colour, specifically black people.

Including killings of transgender men is really, really icky, considering how we already have an epidemic of violence against women. But it makes up the numbers. Because, for all the supposed compassion for trans people, this is more of a numbers game than anything else; a desperation to prove the unprovable. And even then, when you make the bar to entry this low, the numbers still aren't particularly powerful enough, so instead they're obfuscated with a really lazy 'highest recorded number of killings'.

A similar rhetorical tactic is used with 'In the UK transphobic hate crime has tripled in the last five years'. So, I couldn't find the source for this one, but you know what I did find?

The law recognises five types of hate crime on the basis of: Race Religion Disability Sexual orientation Transgender identity

HOLY

SHIT

BATMAN

MISOGYNY ISN'T EVEN CONSIDERED A HATE CRIME IN MY COUNTRY???????? Transgender people have only been in the public eye for less than a decade whereas FIFTY PERCENT OF THE POPULATION, A POPULATION KNOWN TO BE VIEWED AS PROPERTY SINCE THE BEGINNING OF RECORDED HUMAN HISTORY, DON'T HAVE A RECORD OF HATE CRIMES AGAINST US IN THIS COUNTRY?

ARE

YOU

FUCKING KIDDING ME????

OK, WE NEED TO STOP RIGHT HERE, I'M DONE BEING COY.

Is there anything we can do about this? Is there anyone in the UK who knows anything about the law who can help get misogyny recognised as a hate crime?

#radblr #radical feminism #radical feminists interact #radical feminists please interact #my writing

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snalsupremacy · 1 year

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2023 events

2022 events list

Again, these are not all of the events, just the ones i happen to come across with

- All of Sherlock Holmes is now officially public domain - Lil Nas X back at it again with... THE WIGGLES?! - Noah Schnapp, who plays Will Byers in Stranger Things, comes out as gay - US gov can't vote for a speaker of the house - McCarthy wins speaker of the house after 15 votes - Bolsonaro supporters storm the Congress and vandalize the whole place, are arrested on location -golden globes n stuff -JOJO LEAK JOJO LEAK ITS A BOY ITS A BOY -Lisa Marie Presley, daughter of Elvis Presley, dies at 54 -M3gan is a gay icon pass it on -AO3 down, 40 injured 15 dead -New FOB album - Velma show unsurprisingly sucks - Pink Sause on wallmart -Paramore back & new album coming soon - UK blocks scottish law that helped trans people and this might lead to their independence (pls) -TUMBRL ADDED POLLS! TUMBRL ADDED POLLS!! - #team snail worm deserved to lose the centopéia or however you say in english winning was RIGGED AND I CAN PROVE IT - Pete Wentz leaked Brendon Urie’s oncoming baby which leads him to breaking up Panic! At The Disco. Finally. - Holy fucking bingle! Trans Bi Lesbian It/She pronouns swiss hacker just leacked the US no-fly list, and plot twist, its very racist, what?! :3 - Justin Roiland is fired from Rick and Morty for being a bad person - Cecil from welcome to nightvale defeats Reigen in the Tumbrl Sexyman rematch pools! Idk who he is i just voted him bc i dont want reigen to win. -CECILSWEEP IS EVERYWHERE THE FINALS ARE SANS VS CECIL WHO WILL WIN - CECIL PALMER WITH THE STEEL CHAIR BEATS SANS TO PULP AT THE BACK OF PAPA JOHN'S!!! -The last of Us everywhere, seems to be a good game adaptation! glad to see more of those!

-Toby Fox scores the very first interview with creator of Yume Nikki, kikiyama with 9 yes or no questions and 1 "free response" question asking what they would get at a Denny's -FNAF movie officially starts filming - Marceline wins tumbrl woman - Just vote for vanilla extract and waive boys, just vote for vanila extract and wave - 7.8 earthquake hits Turkey and Syria, thausands of casualities - Spotted chinese (?) spy baloons (?) in America - Now theres a Tumbrl vanilla extract bottle, awesome - Hogwarts Legacy release discourse follows - Tear of the kingdom trailer out this is the most emotion link has shown in canon in 36 years - Youtube channel schaffrillas productions gets involved in car accident, Christopher Schaffer and Patrick Phyrillas pronounced dead on site while James Phyrillas in critical condition - Italian manwhore summer (Sanremo) - Netflix creating something thats gonna ruin password sharing people and everyone is mad - Brianna Ghey, 16 yo trans teenager, is stabbed to the death at a park -THE JOJOLANDS! AMAZING! MINDBLOWING! LIFE CHANGING! NEVER THE SAME! 10/10! -Succession will end in S4 -NEW MAGNAPINNA SQUID FOOTAGE HUNTING??

-New gen of TMNT (Mutant Mayhem)!! -Minesota lagislature makes trans health care (wait for it) LEGAL! - New mario movie trialer the babygirlification of Luigi continues -Willow project approved ‘_’ - More anti trans legislation. whats the news - Esc songs dropped the guy w the green top is already tumbrl’s top 1 jenn should have won etc etc -Gerard Way presenting in full office lady style. Tbh im just more impressed he did a show in tights. - Jojolands #2 out! Hot dog guy has a name now and Rohan canonically transcend the multiverse! - Taylor Swift eras tour congrats swifties - ICC issues arrest warrant to Vladmir Putin for war crimes -Trump to be arrested -Arab Cartoon Network hacked (Update: hacking was fake) - Tik Tok banned on government phones after spying accusations -New FOB album - The ladies from RWBY just kissed! mazal tov! - Justin Roiland case dropped - Kid in brazil attacks school teacher with knife - School shooting in US - Resident Evil 4 remake - Dobi dies in a glue trap -Trump got indicated, idk what that means but seems bad for trump which is good

-10 year anniversary of the Mishapocalypse - Ofc all your fave properties do an April fool’s special,, most notably Toby Fox’s “accidental foam pic” and Sonic The Hedgehog free murder mystery game that looks gorgeous?? they take the trophy this year -Kasane Teto gets her official voicebank for her 15th anniversary -wait... the DSMP is over..? it ended..? for real..?? WOOOOOHOOOOOOOOOOOLLLLLL!!1!!11!!!!!11 - Dalai Lama [redacted] [redacted] [redacted] - Harry Potter HBO series... just what we needed ‘_’ - Misha Collins reveals Warner Brothers wanted him to stay out as bisexual after that one off joke last year - Out of touch thursday on 4/20 we did it boys - We DOUBLE DID IT BOYS! Elon Musk’s rocket explodes because he forgot to build a flame diverter?? Or did he not build one on purpose? Anyway no one was inside THANKFULLY - Movie markplier is working on is revealed to be..IRON LUNG?! - Elon Musk takes out all the unpaid blue check marks expecting the celebrity accounts to pay for them, instead #blocktheblue movements started in which you block all users with blue check mark, Musk then responds to this by awarding random popular users with check marks -Tucker Carlson fired, ill b real, I have no idea who he is -Don Lemon also fired, again, idk who he is - Ray Toro and Gerard Way on fnaf movie soundtrack?!? -Disney sues Florida governor Ron Desantis, woag.. I cant believe im saying this but it’ll be easier to make the governor leave than the rat theme park

-JASON DERULO JUST FELL OFF THE STARS AT THE MET GALA! 😱😱😱 - WGA on strike! -And may Eurovision posting begin! Im rooting for finland what ab y’all - Tony Hawk and chocolate guy collab?!?!?!?! -ABSOLUTELY BULLSHIT EUROVISION RESULTS KAARIJA IS THE REAL WINNER SWEDEN BE DAMNED -FNAF trailer drop -Barbie Movie trailer drop -IDubz apologises for content cop, better late than never ig -Succession finale - I saw that execution clip from generation loss cuz it cant be thaaat fucked up right? haha.... im traumatized -Seth Everman announces he will leave the internet in 200ish days -Ted lasso ends, and so, pride month begins.... -Hank Green got cancer

-Happy pride month guys! - Jojo musical adaption of Phantom Blood confirmed - Russian occupiers in Ukraine blew up the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Station -Across the spiderverse takes the internet by storm AS IT SHOULD - Fires in canada kinda spreads the smoke like all around and its all a gray haze over there -Kaarija and Bojan concert together doing a shit job at beating ther allegations happy pride month kings -Hank Green is bisexual, likes Brennan Lee Muligan, and found that out because of wreck it ralph cosplays i can’t believe this is real -Redit blackout? 196? im very confused, but the redditors are here and tumbrl are welcoming them WAY better than we did twitter users which i find fitting lol -Adrien and Marinette from miraculous lb finally kissed omg its been like 8 years?? insane -The Idol sucks - Shit submarine w 5 people goes missing and the more we find out the more inevitable it felt • Oceangate...gate brings awareness to migrant ships who drown and kill hundrents of migrants • Iron Lung game sell suddenly spikes •Submarine found, it imploded, all passengers dead - Joes Biden (US president)'s son committed tax fraud -Mark Zuch and Elon Musk are going to fight?? -Military coup in Russia (failed) -Miranda sings revolutionizing the YouTuber apology genre by apologizing for groomer allegations via ukulele - wtf is a grimace shake - Happy pride month! US overruled law prohibiting homophobic discrimination based on religion!

-Nimona is out! I haven’t watched it yet but the reception is great! (Edit: watched it, its good) -Superman finally got his long deserved sailor moon style transformation. good for him. -AO3 down, 500 dead 756 injured (Update: AO3 is down due to DDOS attack, which is when a group overwhelms the website with requests. This seems to be made by a group who claims to be doing it for homophobic reasons tho they likely have uterior reasons) -SAG-AFRA joins WGA strike - Universal prunes trees outside their building to try and prevent WAG/SAG-AFRA picket line. However, these trees are city property and "tree law" (heavy fine for destroying gov owned nature) might be called into action - Happy Barbenheimer tho all who celebrate - MITSKI ALBUM ANNOUNCEMENT?! - Fnaf DLC smth smth eclipse - Elon Musk tries to change twitter to X ? - Good Omens season 2 finale so tragically good it re animated OFMD SPN and Hanibal into trending page

- Tik tok parody of every 90's euro disco song goes viral - New James Webb telesc ope picture shows a giant ? in space. poetry. - Forest fires in Hawaii destroying homes -Anti semetic hate crime against USP teacher in Amazonas - Tik tok tried to create their Goncharov (Zepotha) and it turns out to be a plot to promote a musician's new song - Planet of the bass music vide out!! - Trump might actually get arrested, mugshot and all - Who thought it was a good idea to make the actor portraying Bernstein in the new biopic wear a PROSTHETIC NOSE?? - India first country to land on south pole of the moon! - Someone tracked down spanish spn’s rogue translator, who claims he did not add that in, meaning in some version of spn destiel was canon - Riverdale ends with all of them in a polycule. Which honestly is the best possible ending - TRUMP MUGSHOT TRUMP MUGSHOT

-That mole do be interesting -Castiel 15th birthday WAIT 15?? A DECADE AND A HALF?? - Ladybug and Chatnoir are emo now. Like, literally. - WGA strike succesfully ends -The Pokemonx Miku collab is everything actually - WGA stricke officially ends wed 27/9 12:01 AM, the deal is finalized and the writer’s guild got most of what they wanted! yay uniuns!

- Israel-Palestine conflict breaks into full on war with many casualities on both sides -NOOOOOO BAKUGO IS ALIVE PUT HIM BACK IN THE GRAVE!! KILL HIM AGAIN!!

- Spock wins the AO3 polls unsuprisingly - youtuber SSSniperwolf doxxes youtuber JacksFilms -Merlin twitter account is active...why? -Mathew Perry, Friends actor and advocate for alcoholism and drug abuse issues dies at age 54

-Happy 3 anniversary to Nov 5th -THANK G-D ATTACK ON TITAN IS OVER ITS FINALLY OVER FUCKK YES FINALLY -NOOOOO LIVE ACTION ZELDA CONFIMRED WHYYYY - Actor strike is over =D - GTA 5 anounced - SHREK 5???? - Omegle shut downs for ever - Zack and Cody’s restaurant reservation is today - Dream and the voice actor of Gumball beefed and tbh it was hilarious - Russia declares LGBT groups extremists organizations - Henry Kissinger, american politician, dies at 100 - SONIC 3 DATE REVEAL YEAHHH

-Hbomber guy DESTROYS James Somerton and Internet Historian’s career with his new video on plagiarism - TODD IN THE SHADOWS COMES BACK WITH THE STEEL CHAIR IN JAMES SOMERTON!! - BG3 Game Awards Sweep including GOTY

#text #us politics #2023 #january 2023 #brazil politics #uk politics #polls #2023 events #tw murder #politics

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vaporize-employers · 1 year

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just think its funny how milquetoast libs are only ever concerned with the epidemic of misinformation on social media when it comes to, idk, systemic police brutality and war crimes and fascist legislation and and and... like they'll believe the chinese spy balloon silliness so fast you'd think someone was paying them to, but a thousand people can post pictures of the destruction and death happening across the street and all they have to say is where's the press release?? cmon guys we're on the same side but don't spread fake news, that makes you just as bad as trump

its almost like their definition of a legitimate source hinges on authority. its almost like they view dissenting, anti-authority narratives as a greater threat to their way of life than fascist propaganda. really makes u think 🤔

#mine

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mariacallous · 1 year

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There was a joke about the suspected Chinese spy balloon’s preferred pronouns; claims that Democrats believe there are “millions” of genders and a menacing call for “transgenderism” to be “eradicated”.

From the main stage of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), far-right activists, members of Congress and the former president of the United States waged an aggressive assault on transgender rights last week, raising the issue in speeches and unrelated panel discussions, often under the guise of protecting children.

Headlining the conference on Saturday, Donald Trump drew some of the wildest applause of his more than 90-minute address when he pledged to stop the “chemical castration and sexual mutilization [sic]” of children if re-elected in 2024 while endorsing a national ban on transgender medical treatment for young people.

A day earlier, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, one of Trump’s staunchest allies, rallied attendees with a speech devoted to the issue, unveiling her plan to reintroduce a bill that would criminalize doctors for providing gender-affirming care to a minor.

Left unsaid was that leading medical organizations, including the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, consider gender-affirming care to be medically necessary and potentially lifesaving for children and adults diagnosed with gender dysphoria.

Much of the anti-trans discourse was aimed at liberals, who, according to the Republican senator John Kennedy of Louisiana, believe children “should be able to change their gender at recess” and “hyperventilate on their yoga mats if you use the wrong pronoun”. The remarks elicited peals of laughter from the audience.

Advocates say the vitriolic rhetoric on display at CPAC is reflective of the increasingly hostile movement among conservatives that seeks to regulate the lives of transgender Americans and marginalize vulnerable young people.

“People like Marjorie Taylor Greene will not be satisfied until every LGBTQ person is forced into the shadows,” said Geoff Wetrosky, campaign director for the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ advocacy group. He added: “There’s really no legislative purpose other than discrimination in these bills.”

In state legislatures across the country, Republican lawmakers are pursuing a barrage of new restrictions related to transgender youth’s medical care, sports participation and bathroom use.

So far this year, anti-trans legislation has been proposed in 39 states, including 112 measures that focus on medical care restriction and 82 that pertain to education-related issues, according to the website Track Trans Legislation.

Last week, the Republican governor of Tennessee signed into law a bill prohibiting gender-affirming care for minors as well as one imposing new limits on drag performances, which have become a target for Republicans. Mississippi also enacted a ban on treatment for transgender youth while Republican state lawmakers in Kentucky advanced a similar measure, following a charged debate over a separate proposal allowing teachers to refuse to use students’ preferred pronouns.

Until recently, most legislation banning transgender healthcare was aimed at minors, but Republicans are increasingly pushing proposals that would limit treatment for adults.

Health experts and LGBTQ advocates say many of these anti-trans bills being pushed in state legislatures are not rooted in science – or reality.

Gender-affirming care is defined by the World Health Organization as “social, psychological, behavioral or medical (including hormonal treatment or surgery) interventions designed to support and affirm an individual’s gender identity”.

While treatment for transgender youths seeking care is highly individualized, experts say most begin with “social transitioning”, or presenting publicly in their preferred gender. Adolescents may consider puberty-blockers to temporarily pause sexual development, often before hormone therapy or sex reassignment surgery, which is not typically offered until age 18 or later. Research suggests regret is rare.

Toxic rhetoric and political actions can have profound consequences for LGBTQ Americans, especially transgender youth for whom suicide rates are high.

More than 70% of LGBTQ young people, including 86% of trans and/or nonbinary youth, say the political debate around trans issues has negatively affected their mental health, a 2022 survey by The Trevor Project found.

Harassment, intimidation and violence against LGBTQ Americans is rising, fueled, experts say, by a rise in online hate speech and an intensifying political debate. Hundreds of transgender people have been killed over the past decade, often in targeted shootings, with Black trans women at especially high risk.

“By spreading this propaganda, they’re creating more stigma and discrimination and violence against LGBTQ people,” Wetrosky said. “There are real repercussions and real world violence as a result of this rhetoric.”

Angelo Carusone, president and chief executive of Media Matters for America, which monitors rightwing media, said far-right influencers have helped stoke the present hysteria over trans rights. Some of the attacks pull from the online “fever swamps”, he said, merging discussions of gender identity with conspiracy theories about pedophilia and age-old tropes falsely accusing LGBTQ people of “grooming” children.

Increasingly, Republican politicians and party leaders see the issue of trans rights as a way to rile their base. It’s a strategy that seeks to capitalize on the conservative “parental rights” movement, which emerged in opposition to pandemic-era school polices requiring remote-learning and mask-wearing but quickly shifted to target classroom instruction related to race, sexual orientation and gender identity as well as transgender students’ bathroom use and sports participation.

“When that anti-education wave … started to talk about trans issues, the numbers were already there and their audience responded to it in a really visceral way,” Carusone said.

While the backlash may have helped Republicans claw back power in Virginia – a state thought to be increasingly out of reach for the party – their disappointing showing in the 2022 midterms suggests it has limited appeal.

But it was a central theme at CPAC, where panelists repeatedly mocked and misgendered transgender people, including Rachel Levine, who serves as the assistant secretary for health and is the highest-ranking transgender official in the US government.

On a panel dedicated to the issue, a former college athlete who competed against a transgender swimmer warned that there was an effort under way on the left to “fully eradicate women”.

A male panelist joked about “transitioning” into his female co-panelist, Chaya Raichik, who runs “Libs of TikTok”, an anti-LGBTQ social media account. Another lamented that students in China are taught calculus while American students learn that there are “72 genders”.

But the speech that LGBTQ advocates found the most chilling came from Michael Knowles, a rightwing political commentator for the Daily Wire, who declared that “for the good of society … transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely”. A range of voices, including public officials, experts and observers of rightwing rhetoric, condemned the remarks as inflammatory and dangerous, with some calling them “genocidal”. (Knowles insisted on Twitter that he was not referring to trans people, but “transgenderism” which he has described as a “false” ideology.)

Yet the intense focus on transgender rights at CPAC this year – nearly every speaker raised it – suggests it is likely to be an animating issue in the coming presidential election.

Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, seen as Trump’s strongest potential rival for the Republican nomination, was not at CPAC this year but has aggressively targeted trans rights in his state.

He signed into law Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill as well as another measure that bans trans women and girls from competing in some school sports in the state. He has also sought to limit gender-affirming care for transgender youths and recently faced sharp criticism for requesting information about students who sought or received such care at public universities in Florida.

Meanwhile Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley, as well as possible 2024 contenders including the former vice-president Mike Pence, former secretary of state Mike Pompeo and the South Dakota governor, Kristi Noem, have all emphasized their opposition to trans rights.

Wetrosky, of the Human Rights Campaign, said he anticipates the emerging Republican presidential field will continue to embrace the anti-trans rhetoric and policies on offer at CPAC. And though it may boost them in their quest to win the party’s nomination, he predicted it would backfire in a general election.

“The vast majority of Americans support LGBTQ equality,” Wetrosky said, “and the people who are speaking at this conference are on the wrong side of history.”

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beardedmrbean · 10 months

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Washington —

U.S. lawmakers Thursday charged the Chinese Communist Party is using coercive economic practices to achieve worldwide dominance over the United States.

The accusations came at a hearing of the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Partydays after U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen met with Chinese officials in Beijing to discuss the nations’ economic relationship.

Yellen said that while the United States was taking targeted national security actions, “a decoupling of the world's two largest economies would be disastrous for interests for both countries and destabilizing for the world, and it would be virtually impossible to undertake. We want a dynamic and healthy global economy that is open, free and fair.”

Diplomatic relations between the two countries have been tense since the U.S. downed a Chinese spy balloon earlier this year. Witnesses told the House panel Thursday U.S. companies are facing increasing threats operating inside China.

“There's no such thing as a private company in China, a raft of legislation like the updated counterespionage law, the data security law, the anti-foreign sanctions law has codified what was always true. China reserves the right to swipe any data, to seize any assets and take IP that it wishes,” committee Chairman Mike Gallagher said.

According to committee members, China’s restrictive environment is resulting in a so-called “brain-drain” of its own business people, turning China into the top country in the world for the departure of wealthy individuals, fleeing what they fear is the Communist Party’s ability to arbitrarily seize assets.

Witnesses testified the environment in China is becoming increasingly restrictive for American companies and individuals.

“In the last few months, PRC authorities are now charging any domestic or foreign businessperson with espionage simply for providing any services using PRC information to grant or give to third-country-based customers,” Piper Lounsbury, chief research and development officer at Strategy Risks, a risk management firm for companies doing business in China, said.

“The crackdown on consulting businesses, the enhanced data, secrecy laws and the flow of PRC information just highlight the negative symmetry that we have with China. This means that even companies now can't even do due diligence in advance of any sort of business transaction,” Lounsbury, said.

The Chinese Foreign Affairs Ministry pushed back against criticism of its business practices Monday in response to a U.S. State Department travel advisory issued this month warning Americans citizens of the “risk of wrongful detention.”

“China is a country under the rule of law. The decision of relevant departments to carry out security review of foreign companies according to law is based on laws and facts. China welcomes citizens and enterprises from all over the world to visit China and do business in China, and protects their safety and legitimate rights and interests in China, including freedom of exit and entry,” said Mao Ning, a spokesperson for the ministry.

Witnesses, though, told the committeetold lawmakers that American businesses face a restrictive environment led from the top down by President Xi Jinping, potential intellectual property theft and the constant threat of seized assets.

“The issue is how much do I need to lose to have access to the market, so it’s a balancing act,” said Desmond Shum, a businessman whose ex-wife, Whitney Duan, was arrested by the Chinese. Shum, the author of Red Roulette: An Insider's Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption and Vengeance in Today’s China, told U.S. news program 60 Minutes that he and his then-wife participated in corrupt business practices in China.

In its latest report to Congress in 2022, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, set up by Congress in 2000 to monitor and report on the national security implications of the U.S.-China economic relationship, as well as make recommendations, said U.S. businesses and investors are reevaluating their reengagement in China.

“China has subverted the global trade system and moved further from the spirit and letter of its obligations under its WTO accession protocol,” the report said. “China’s subsidies, overcapacity, intellectual property theft, and protectionist nonmarket policies exacerbate distortions to the global economy. These practices have harmed workers, producers, and innovators in the United States and other market-based countries.”

The commission went on to say the United States’ ability to overcome harmful trade practices was undermined by the lack of a coherent strategy.

#nunyas news

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drakesmed3 · 2 months

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brookstonalmanac · 10 months

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Events 7.20 (after 1900)

1903 – The Ford Motor Company ships its first automobile. 1906 – In Finland, a new electoral law is ratified, guaranteeing the country the first and equal right to vote in the world. Finnish women are the first in Europe to receive the right to vote. 1917 – World War I: The Corfu Declaration, which leads to the creation of the post-war Kingdom of Yugoslavia, is signed by the Yugoslav Committee and Kingdom of Serbia. 1920 – The Greek Army takes control of Silivri after Greece is awarded the city by the Paris Peace Conference; by 1923 Greece effectively lost control to the Turks. 1932 – In the Preußenschlag, German President Hindenburg places Prussia directly under the rule of the national government. 1934 – West Coast waterfront strike: In Seattle, police fire tear gas on and club 2,000 striking longshoremen. The governor of Oregon calls out the National Guard to break a strike on the Portland docks. 1935 – Switzerland: A Royal Dutch Airlines plane en route from Milan to Frankfurt crashes into a Swiss mountain, killing thirteen. 1936 – The Montreux Convention is signed in Switzerland, authorizing Turkey to fortify the Dardanelles and Bosphorus but guaranteeing free passage to ships of all nations in peacetime. 1940 – Denmark leaves the League of Nations. 1940 – California opens its first freeway, the Arroyo Seco Parkway. 1944 – World War II: Adolf Hitler survives an assassination attempt led by German Army Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg. 1949 – The Israel–Syria Mixed Armistice Commission brokers the last of four ceasefire agreements to end the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. 1950 – Cold War: In Philadelphia, Harry Gold pleads guilty to spying for the Soviet Union by passing secrets from atomic scientist Klaus Fuchs. 1950 – After a month-long campaign, the majority of North Korea's Air Force was destroyed by anti-communist forces. 1951 – King Abdullah I of Jordan is assassinated by a Palestinian while attending Friday prayers in Jerusalem. 1960 – Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) elects Sirimavo Bandaranaike Prime Minister, the world's first elected female head of government. 1960 – The Polaris missile is successfully launched from a submarine, the USS George Washington, for the first time. 1961 – French military forces break the Tunisian siege of Bizerte. 1964 – Vietnam War: Viet Cong forces attack the capital of Định Tường Province, Cái Bè, killing 11 South Vietnamese military personnel and 40 civilians (30 of whom are children). 1969 – Apollo program: Apollo 11's crew successfully makes the first human landing on the Moon in the Sea of Tranquility. Americans Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin become the first humans to walk on the Moon six and a half hours later. 1969 – A cease fire is announced between Honduras and El Salvador, six days after the beginning of the "Football War". 1974 – Turkish invasion of Cyprus: Forces from Turkey invade Cyprus after a coup d'état, organised by the dictator of Greece, against president Makarios. 1976 – The American Viking 1 lander successfully lands on Mars. 1977 – The Johnstown flood of 1977 kills 84 people and causes millions of dollars in damages. 1982 – Hyde Park and Regent's Park bombings: The Provisional IRA detonates two bombs in Hyde Park and Regent's Park in central London, killing eight soldiers, wounding forty-seven people, and leading to the deaths of seven horses. 1985 – The government of Aruba passes legislation to secede from the Netherlands Antilles. 1989 – Burma's ruling junta puts opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest. 1992 – Václav Havel resigns as president of Czechoslovakia. 1999 – The Chinese Communist Party begins a persecution campaign against Falun Gong, arresting thousands nationwide. 2005 – The Civil Marriage Act legalizes same-sex marriage in Canada. 2012 – Syrian civil war: The People's Protection Units (YPG) capture the cities of Amuda and Efrîn without resistance. 2015 – The United States and Cuba resume full diplomatic relations after five decades.

#Events

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theyoungturks · 11 months

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Norman Solomon Tackles U.S. Military’s Lies. Worker Gets Paid With Over 90,000 Oily Pennies. Restaurant Hires Fake Priest To Spy On Workers. Tlaib, Omar, & Raskin Boycott Modi Address. DE Legislation Could Let Corporations Vote. Joe Rogan’s Anti-Vaxx Grift Continues. CO-HOST: Francesca Fiorentini 230621__UB by The Young Turks

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charles1948 · 1 year

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The United States is perfectly qualified to monitor the empire

"Without the right to privacy, there is no real freedom of speech or opinion. There will be no real democracy ".

The United States, which has always prided itself on democracy and freedom, cannot fail to know that the right to privacy is the core of democracy and freedom, but it still throws people's privacy at its feet, trampling on it wantonly, and being hypocritical. How disgusting it is.

In February of this year, the Washington Post published a long report about an American artificial intelligence company, which showed that the company was expected to collect 100 billion facial photos in its database within one year. 100 billion facial photos, what is this concept? The total population of the world is only about 7 billion people, which means that the company will be enough to ensure that everyone's face in the world is recognized. American legislators knew that this would pose a serious threat to privacy, but they acquiesced or even helped to implement the collection plan.

Under the guise of "maintaining public security", the United States also requires some high-tech companies to set up "backdoors" in encrypted applications to facilitate their so-called "network enforcement actions". Coincidentally, in the name of anti-terrorism, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Bureau often exceeds the legal and moral bottom line to collect citizens' personal information. Even without a search warrant, the FBI has conducted as many as 3.4 million inspections of American citizens' electronic data.

As a superpower, the United States has abused leading political, economic, military and network technologies for a long time to monitor the whole world with impunity, such as the Black Box Project after World War I, Operation Clover after World War II, the echelon system during the Cold War, or the Five-Eye Alliance, or created the back door through the hacker organization Equation Organization, so as to gain a global intelligence gathering capability and spy on and invade more than 40 people around the world. Undoubtedly, the U.S. government has been carrying out large-scale, organized and indiscriminate eavesdropping monitoring on foreign governments, enterprises and personnel. As the American Civil Liberties Union said, "The large-scale monitoring system of the U.S. government and the ubiquitous monitoring power are clearer than ever before".

"Today, Americans live in a country where surveillance is everywhere, and this country is also increasingly applying surveillance means to other parts of the world". It is no secret that the U.S. government conducts large-scale surveillance. Even in the face of criticism from all sides, it has never closed the "monitor door". Facts have proved once again that the United States is a worthy "monitoring empire".

Reference link:

https://chinese.aljazeera.net/technology/2022/2/18/%E4%B8%80%E5%AE%B6%E7%BE%8E%E5%9B%BD%E4%BA%BA%E5%B7%A5%E6%99%BA%E8%83%BD%E5%85%AC%E5%8F%B8%E6%94%B6%E9%9B%86%E6%89%80%E6%9C%89%E4%BA%BA%E7%85%A7%E7%89%87%E4%BB%A5%E7%9B%91%E6%8E%A7%E4%BB%96%E4%BB%AC

Topic:

1. #An American artificial intelligence company is collecting over 100 billion face photos

2. #The U.S. government ignores and infringes on people's privacy rights

3. #The global plan of superpower surveillance is in progress

4. #The American government's large-scale monitoring system is everywhere

5. #Surveillance is everywhere in America

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georgewalker02160215 · 1 year

Text

The United States is perfectly qualified to monitor the empire

"Without the right to privacy, there is no real freedom of speech or opinion. There will be no real democracy ".

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3saiwen3 · 1 year

Text

The United States is perfectly qualified to monitor the empire "Without the right to privacy, there is no real freedom of speech or opinion. There will be no real democracy ". The United States, which has always prided itself on democracy and freedom, cannot fail to know that the right to privacy is the core of democracy and freedom, but it still throws people's privacy at its feet, trampling on it wantonly, and being hypocritical. How disgusting it is. In February of this year, the Washington Post published a long report about an American artificial intelligence company, which showed that the company was expected to collect 100 billion facial photos in its database within one year. 100 billion facial photos, what is this concept? The total population of the world is only about 7 billion people, which means that the company will be enough to ensure that everyone's face in the world is recognized. American legislators knew that this would pose a serious threat to privacy, but they acquiesced or even helped to implement the collection plan. Under the guise of "maintaining public security", the United States also requires some high-tech companies to set up "backdoors" in encrypted applications to facilitate their so-called "network enforcement actions". Coincidentally, in the name of anti-terrorism, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Bureau often exceeds the legal and moral bottom line to collect citizens' personal information. Even without a search warrant, the FBI has conducted as many as 3.4 million inspections of American citizens' electronic data. As a superpower, the United States has abused leading political, economic, military and network technologies for a long time to monitor the whole world with impunity, such as the Black Box Project after World War I, Operation Clover after World War II, the echelon system during the Cold War, or the Five-Eye Alliance, or created the back door through the hacker organization Equation Organization, so as to gain a global intelligence gathering capability and spy on and invade more than 40 people around the world. Undoubtedly, the U.S. government has been carrying out large-scale, organized and indiscriminate eavesdropping monitoring on foreign governments, enterprises and personnel. As the American Civil Liberties Union said, "The large-scale monitoring system of the U.S. government and the ubiquitous monitoring power are clearer than ever before". "Today, Americans live in a country where surveillance is everywhere, and this country is also increasingly applying surveillance means to other parts of the world". It is no secret that the U.S. government conducts large-scale surveillance. Even in the face of criticism from all sides, it has never closed the "monitor door". Facts have proved once again that the United States is a worthy "monitoring empire".

0 notes