#all that being said when it comes to things like the treatment of uighur muslims or the political situation in hong kong and taiwan. | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

vamptastic · 1 year

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i genuinely don't understand what capitalist countries stand to gain by fighting each other instead of collaborating economically. like why does the us warmonger against china when we would benefit more from trade? ostensibly it's for moral reasons, but regardless of the veracity of any given claim i think the united states has shown itself to prioritize economic success over human rights on a number of occasions especially during the cold war. i suppose i assume most wars are waged on the grounds of economic gain (natural resources, global political power, straight up money in the form of the military-industrial complex) but you could make an equally solid argument that just as many are waged over purely social and political issues- ethnic and religious conflict, blind nationalism, the whims of a dictator. it just confuses me at times, i guess. i have a hard time believing that the united states is bound and determined to wage war against china over human rights abuses, infringing on other countries sovereignty, and neo-colonialism in africa when we've propped up fascist dictators in many a country who've done far worse. is it literally just the association with communism? because surely whatever evil fuckers actually want war know that china is very far from communist right now. is it just nationalism? the idea that we must be on the top of the totem pole, even if our economy would stand to gain from trade? because i suppose i could believe that, but i think if that was true we wouldn't have gotten to where we are today in the first place. blegh. at the end of the day i am also ignoring the fact that many many different groups of people want war against china for reasons ranging from sinophobic jingoist nationalism to a genuine belief that the united states is a global moral watchdog determined to establish ~democracy~ worldwide. but there is a definite slant to media coverage on china right now, genuine attempts at disinformation, and given that the media in the us is so deeply tied to corporate interests it leads me to believe that there has to be some economic motive here, and it frustrates me that i can't figure out what it is.

#this post is long and convoluted and circuitous. sorry.#please do not try to like. publically own me or erupt into moral outrage over this post if you're reading it btw.#suppose i would be interested in hearing others takes on this but im just curious i genuinely don't have answers here #i don't want to argue or be accused of being immoral for not taking a hard stance on an incredibly complex issue.#anyway. i am also not trying to say that either the us or china are ' good ' or ' bad '#insomuch as any country can be good or bad. particularly a country millenia old or one that changes leadership every four years.#individual actions taken by each government are undeniably bad. yes.#but as a us citizen i find it very difficult to find reliable information about what is happening in other countries.#our media has become so wildly polarized that you can often figure out national issues by looking at both sides #but when the media is unified on portraying one falsehood both left and right? you're fucked.#often media that claims to be neutral could be more accurately described as western #i trust ap and the bbc on us politics - not global politics.#all that being said when it comes to things like the treatment of uighur muslims or the political situation in hong kong and taiwan.#i'm not entirely sure what to believe.#and i also believe that if every single immoral act the us claims china has done is real... we still wouldn't wage war based purely on that #...i do genuinely think the claims that china is colonizing africa by offering loans is horseshit though #even if it was itd be fucking rich for european countries that wrecked africa in the first place #to moralize about the means by which another global power allows them potential economic power #the problem arises from capitalism on a global scale itself i mean #there is no way to build up infrastructure and trade routes for an entire continent without #in some way eventually profiting from it #i do see the comparison to the us and latin america and i think that's kinda apt but #the way ppl talk about it you'd think they were doing what france did to haiti good god

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lightinalexandria · 3 years

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Love, Men, Women, and LGBTQ+ Life in Egypt

August 13, 2021 اغسطس ١٣

A good friend posed the question to me this week of asking “Where are you local?” Instead of “Where are you from?” I might even tweak that slightly to “Where do you feel at home?” For most of us, and in fact for most other places I’ve lived, the equation is a simple line graph. More time, more familiarity, more comfort, more feeling like home. I’m challenged here, at the end of my second summer in Egypt, with a different calculus.

The more I speak with my friends and teachers in their “heart language” of Arabic, the more I see how deep the generosity, sociability, and collective spirit run. Not all my friends are Muslim, but I see these traits represented in the 5 Pillars of Islam beautifully, and I’ve been told so in many different ways.

That’s the part that feels more like home. But of course, if it was all sunshine this would be a different story. This is not a happy post. I don’t have any female friends here who are truly, uncomplicatedly happy. I don’t have any queer friends here who are truly, uncomplicatedly happy.

Of course that doesn’t mean there are no happy females in Egypt; my internationally minded, English speaking group isn’t representative, I know, and I’ve had many conversations with more conservative teachers and friends about the contentment that can come from living inside a more rigid structure.

But…I don’t know everyone in Egypt. I just know my friends. And many of them are desperately, painfully unhappy, stressed, in ways that I understand more fully the longer I’m here. I think “right and wrong” or “good and bad” are wildly unhelpful terms, so when I’m trying to understand how I feel about these societal norms and systems, the right to happiness of my friends is my bellwether. Systems that make more people happier without hurting others are ones I want to support, period, which also means my anecdotal circle can’t be my only data points. I’m a little nervous where those conclusions might lead me, dancing around big questions of class and culture and religion, but more nervous not to draw a line in the sand with the best metric I know and explore from there.

Apparently sexual harassment has decreased a bit since the government put some teeth into a new anti-harassment law a couple years ago and they made an example of a few offenders. That’s nice. The street -especially at night- still does NOT feel like a safe or friendly place, and I just get tiny glimpses of that walking near female friends. Life is lived in the streets here, the pedestrian density like Times Square, always, so the sheer volume of people quickly makes crowd thoughts and judgement evident. Sitting with a female friend at anything but a super upscale cafe, I see the glances and catch bits of the conversation as they pass judgement on her for hanging out with me. What a wild thought, that any conversation I have with an Egyptian women starts with the brave act of her choosing to engage at all, know the subtle pressures that will start in from all sides. One of my friends who wears a hijab told me that when she went to Cairo, she brought extra wide clothes to walk the streets with, and it didn’t matter. She got just as many comments as when she was back in tights clothes.

Who gets the blame? Young men have so few opportunities to interact with young women outside immediate circles, period, but are still somehow supposed to meet a potential bride and move her into the new house that he’ll buy with cash savings from the extended family? Old black and white Egyptian movies show women in skirts and t-shirts, and Egyptian music videos show Western dressed Egyptian women gyrating, but aside from a few pockets of wealth and international society in Alexandria, those images of women don’t exist in the real world here. Men are allowed and encouraged to date casually, but women are called sluts for kissing someone who may not be an eventual husband. Women are supposed to protect their virginity, while men want to fool around with lots of women but settle down with a virgin bride. The math doesn’t work. My heart goes out to the working class men in an impossible, frustrating position, society and politics conspiring against biology, but while they have to worry about their reputation, women here worry about reputation AND safety, always.

And LGBTQ+? First of all, it’s just so difficult to have intimate relations here -every lives with family, you can’t be intimate until you’re married, you can’t be married until you own a house, you can be arrested in public spaces for PDA, and no one will rent rooms to an unmarried couple-. That means there is a SIGNIFICANT percentage of the men here who sleep with other men, feel shame, would never consider themselves gay, and would only consent to being a “top.” Honestly, it reminds me of what I know of the sexual politics in prison culture, except no one’s in a physical prison here.

Sexual health is also a huge challenge; access to STI testing apart from HIV is impossible for unmarried women and hugely expensive for men. Someone in my circle here had complications from a “Plan B” pill and wasn’t able to go to a gynecologist as an unmarried woman. Someone else was hospitalized for an unrelated illness, and jubilant that as part of the hospital stay, insurance would cover the full battery of STI screening before surgery, the first time in a very active sexual life they’d ever had that. Someone else just lost a friend to HIV; they told the family it was cancer, but were too ashamed to seek the HIV treatment pills, and died in a few months.

Mental health has its own obstacles. Someone I know was told by a licensed therapist they were going to hell if they kept sleeping with men, unmarried. I heard that from women and queer friends as well. How do you establish a relationship of trust in the first place if licensed practitioners in the country are able to say things like that in the privacy of their sessions without consequences?

So, full circle to the beginning of the post. “Where do you feel local?” or “Where do you feel at home?”

I feel infinitely more familiar and comfortable here than my first few weeks, no denying that. 95% of the time I can make myself understood in daily life (very different than understanding 95% of what’s being said to ME in daily life, but progress). I can call businesses here to ask questions. I can tell meandering stories. I can cross the comically busy and chaotic streets without an adrenaline spike. I run into friends on the street most days, and my last 100 meters from my neighborhood entrance to apartment involves a dozen different greetings and little conversations. I have my favorite….everything; food carts, Syrian sweets, juice shops, rotisseries, beaches, bars, cafes, and a good rapport with the folks working there. I have a lot of lovely but more surface level relationships, and a few real and intimate friendships. All that DOES feel local, does feel like home.

If feeling local or at home here means giving any kind of tacit acceptance to the norms that make my friends so unhappy, though, I don’t want to claim the label. I also don’t feel like I have any right or power as an outsider to do much more than listen, affirm, connect to resources when I can. I left China after staying in Xinjiang province and seeing the government’s cultural genocide of Uighur society, and I haven’t been back since. (You can read my writings at the time with the link here) What’s my path here in Egypt? Love the player, hate the game? Can I come back next summer and complete my 6 months of study plan, knowing I float through a golden bubble of American male protection I can’t extend to my friends here? I really don’t know yet. No wise or pithy ending sentence here. Just a lot of hurt, a mixed bag of emotions, and a whole lot of people who deserve uncomplicated love and happiness.

#womens rights #intersectionality #human rights

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calacuspr · 3 years

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Calacus Weekly Hit & Miss – Jen Beattie & Antoine Griezmann

Every Monday we look at the best and worst communicators in the sports world from the previous week.

HIT – JEN BEATTIE

Everyone in football was shocked to hear that Scotland and Arsenal defender Jen Beattie has been receiving treatment for breast cancer.

Beattie was diagnosed in October but has continued to play for her club and country and says the support of her teammates has been crucial while she’s unable to be with family due to coronavirus restrictions.

The 29-year-old says her aim now is to raise awareness of having breast cancer at a young age and encourage women to get checked.

"I know people are maybe scared to go to the hospital and scared to get checked out because of COVID, but there are still ways to do it," Beattie said in an interview with BBC’s Football Focus.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/55250450

"I have friends who work in the NHS and they've said diagnoses have gone down massively for cancer this year, and that scares me so much, knowing that people are sitting at home and can maybe feel things but are too scared to go in.

"Whether you're 29 or 79, it doesn't really matter and you might have to deal with it at some point.

"Even if it is still a horrible process to go through, it can be a much better ending if you just go and get checked."

Arsenal and Manchester City players showed their support for Beattie by wearing shirts with her name on ahead of their crucial Women’s Super League clash.

https://www.standard.co.uk/sport/football/jen-beattie-breast-cancer-arsenal-man-city-shirts-support-b290279.html

Beattie’s club twitter account commented ‘You’re an inspiration to all of us’ and the outpouring of well wishes has underlined how football can come together and unite in difficult times.

https://twitter.com/ArsenalWFC/status/1338124792646471683

Beattie has shown immense courage to tell her story and raise awareness for such an important topic when it may have been easier to keep it to herself and we wish her all the best in her recovery.

MISS – ANTOINE GRIEZMANN

What does it mean to be a brand ambassador?

In days gone by, it meant standing with a product or wearing a cap emblazoned with a brand’s logo and smiling for photographs.

But consumers demand a lot more from the brands they buy and support these days, expecting them to have a social conscience as well as be of good quality.

Antoine Griezmann, the Barcelona and France striker, used Instagram to make a statement declaring that he was severing ties with Chinese electronics brand Huawei due to their alleged involvement in China’s treatment of Muslim Uighurs.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/09/chinas-huawei-tested-ai-software-that-could-identify-uighurs-report.html

China has been criticised by global governments and other sports stars including Mesut Ozil and Sonny Bill Williams with up to a million Uighurs suspected to be in ‘re-education camps.’

https://twitter.com/mesutozil1088/status/1205439723302469632?lang=en

https://twitter.com/SonnyBWilliams/status/1204488061796507648

The Chinese government has consistently denied mistreatment and says the camps are designed to stamp out terrorism and improve employment opportunities.

“Following strong suspicions that Huawei has contributed to the development of a Uighur alert thanks to facial recognition software, I am announcing the immediate termination of my partnership with the company," Griezmann said in an Instagram post.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CInqQ5-ptdP/

“I take this opportunity to invite Huawei to not just deny these accusations but to take concrete actions as quickly as possible to condemn this mass repression, and to use its influence to contribute to the respect of human and women's rights in society.”

Given that Griezmann has been a Huawei ambassador since 2017, his statement does beg the question why there were no discussions between him or his representatives and Huawei before he cut ties.

Rather than just highlighting his concerns as he resigned, he could perhaps have had a greater impact by announcing that he wanted to work with Huawei to ensure that the Uighurs plight was addressed.

As it was, Huawei issued their own statement in which they said: “We would like to extend an invitation to speak to him personally, to explain the work that is currently being done at the highest level, inside the company, to address the issues of human rights, equality, and discrimination at all levels, and to reassure him, and all our customers and partners, that Huawei takes these concerns very seriously.”

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-55265989

Whether or not Huawei could or would have done anything is open to debate and conjecture, but if Griezmann had attempted to work with them to make a positive change for the Uighers, imagine how much more impactful that would have been both for the player and the company?

#Huawei #Antoine Griezmann #Barcelona FC #Arsenal #womens football #Uighurs #Manchester City #FAWSL #Mesut Ozil #Sonny Bill Williams

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donewithcapitalistfrayers · 3 years

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What is the root cause of the United States’ desire to confront China?

I think the rudimentary driver of the United States’ confrontation with China is psychology, not strategy. We became the world’s largest economy sometime in the 1870s. That’s 150 years ago. Now we’ve either already been eclipsed, or we’re about to be eclipsed, by China. So we’re afraid of not being number one and we’ve decided that we will hamstring the rise of China. No one on the American side has described where this confrontation is supposed to take us—it’s just an end in itself. Also, we have exercised military primacy in the Asia-Pacific region since 1945. Now, we confront the return of China to wealth and power in the region. And our position in the Asia-Pacific is precarious. What does that mean? It means that we object to things like China’s anti-access and area denial weapon system (A2/AD), otherwise known as defense. The Chinese now can stop us from running through their defenses. So this is a threat: we’re not all-powerful anymore. We are in danger of losing primacy.

But there’s not much evidence of China wanting to replace us. They are displacing us in some spheres because they’re big and growing and successful. Do they want to take on our global dominion and hegemony role? No, but we assert that they do. We posit that China thinks and behaves like us: “We had Manifest Destiny and it took us across the Pacific to the Philippines. Therefore, China must have a Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny in mind.” This is wrong. Things don’t work like that. So I would argue that we have inhaled our own propaganda, and we are living in the appropriately stoned state that that produces. If we have sound policies, we can out-compete anyone. But we’re not looking at sound policies; we’re looking at pulling down our competitor.

Isn’t the Belt and Road Initiative indicative of China’s desire to expand its influence, if not “replace” our hegemonic role on the global stage?

The initial impulse of the Belt and Road Initiative was that China had a surplus capacity in steel, cement, aluminum, and construction capability—and it extended these resources abroad. Then China looked at what it was doing and said, “Actually, it would be really good if Lisbon was connected to Vladivostok efficiently, and Arkhangelsk was connected to Colombo. Maybe we could throw in Mombasa, too. This would create a huge interconnected area in which trade and investment could flow smoothly.” So, actually, a major part of the BRI is an agreement on tariffs, customs barrier treatment, transit, and bonded storage. It is the construction of roads, railroads, airports, ports, industrial parks, fiber optic cables, et cetera, over this huge area.

And the Chinese assumption—not aspiration, but assumption—is that as the largest and most dynamic society in that area, they will be the preeminent force in it. But this is an economic strategy, it’s not a military one. So the problem we have conceptually is that the only way we, the United States, know how to think about international affairs is in military terms. Our foreign policy is very militarized and is driven by military considerations.

China has rejected the U.S. State Department’s characterization of its treatment of Uighurs in the Xinjiang region as “genocide.” Do you agree with this characterization?

I think what is happening to the Uighurs is awful—no doubt about it. We do not, however, know exactly what’s happening to them. There are terms like genocide being thrown around, which may not fit the case. But I think it is entirely appropriate that we express the view that the treatment of the Uighurs is appalling. What are we going to do about it? It is a complicated situation. I hate to keep coming back to American hypocrisy, but why does the Muslim world not line up with us on the Uighur situation? Because when was the last time we said anything about the Palestinians, Kashmiris, or Chechens? There are Muslims being oppressed all over the world, and we don’t say anything. So selective outrage isn’t very effective.

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xtruss · 4 years

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The Ugliest Face of China

John Oliver Rxplains China's 'Appalling' Treatment of Uighurs

The Last Week Tonight host called for action in response to Beijing’s human rights abuses against its Muslim Uighur minority

— The Guardian USA | By Adrian Horton | Monday July 27, 2020

John Oliver on China’s treatment of the Uighurs: ‘When you’re dealing with a concerted campaign centered on cultural erasure, one of the most important things we can do is continue to pay attention.’ Photograph: YouTube

John Oliver returned to Last Week Tonight on Sunday with a segment demanding attention be paid to China’s persecution and forced detention of the Uighurs, a mostly Muslim ethnic minority from the country’s north-west Xinjiang region, over a million of whom have been detained by the Chinese government in re-education camps.

“If this is the first time that you’re hearing about an estimated million people who’ve been held in detention camps – mostly Uighurs but also Kazakhs and other ethnic minorities – you are not alone,” said Oliver. “And it’s probably because China has done its level best to keep this story from getting out.”

Still, reports from earlier this month revealed that many Uighurs have been forcibly shipped to work in factories across China producing personal protective equipment (PPE) such as face masks in response to the pandemic in the US. In other words, “the very masks that some in this country see as unacceptable infringement on their personal liberty may be getting made by people who would absolutely love for their worst infringement to be getting politely asked to leave a fucking Costco,” said Oliver.

And while there is “clearly nothing new about horrific practices being hidden deep within the supply chain of global capitalism”, Oliver continued, “what is happening to the Uighurs is particularly appalling”.

Systemic government suppression of the Uighurs – who number about 11 million in Xinjiang and are culturally, linguistically and ethnically distinct from the Han Chinese who comprise 90% of the country’s population – builds on decades of discrimination by the communist regime based in Beijing. The Chinese government has exacerbated longstanding prejudice by some Han Chinese against Uighurs, largely based on the Uighurs’ Muslim faith in an aggressively secular country, by encouraging Han migration to Xinjiang.

The prejudice, tension and extreme discrimination boiled over into riots in Xinjiang’s capital in 2009, which killed more than 200 Han Chinese and spurred a decade-long crackdown by the central government; in 2014, the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, instituted the “Strike Hard Campaign Against Violent Terrorism”, which was “basically the Patriot Act on steroids”, said Oliver. “All of a sudden, Uighurs started being treated like they were all potential terrorists.”

Xinjiang is now one of the most heavily policed areas in the world, with authorities “surveilling things that most people would find utterly meaningless”, said Oliver, such as growing a beard or applying for a passport. Flagged individuals are entered into a predictive policing system which, according to one 2019 data leak, sent 15,000 Uighurs to “brainwashing camps” during just one week in 2017.

The crackdown is a “sore subject” for the Chinese government, Oliver continued, which initially denied the existence of the camps and then downplayed them as “vocational” facilities. But even strictly supervised state tours barely concealed their true role as Uighur prisons, as evidenced by leaked official documents encouraging staff to “strictly manage and control student activities to prevent escapes”.

“The phrase ‘prevent escapes’ is something of a tell there,” said Oliver. “If your employee handbook says ‘prevent escape’, you’re probably working at a prison or at the very least, a Scientology picnic.”

During the pandemic, the government has escalated the existing work-transfer deportation of Uighurs out of Xinjiang, and “as you’ve probably guessed, this isn’t a benevolent jobs program”, Oliver said. “The idea, as one local government report put it, is that sending Uighurs far from home will allow ‘distancing them from religiously extreme views and educating them’,” by sending a conservatively estimated 80,000 Uighurs to factories benefiting such multinational companies as Nike over a two-year period.

When contacted by Last Week Tonight, Nike said the factory no long employed Uighur workers and company representatives “are conducting ongoing diligence with our suppliers in China”. Which “feels like their policy on oversight is less ‘just do it’, and more ‘just talk about doing it and hope people eventually stop asking’”, Oliver retorted.

More broadly, “going forward, the entire global community needs to do more”, Oliver concluded, calling for the UN to appoint independent investigators to look into China’s abuses in Xinjiang, governments to speak out “without bending to China’s economic influence”, and companies such as Nike to clean up their supply chains while “actively using their financial leverage to pressure the Chinese government to end these abuses”.

But none of this will occur, he argued, without a redirection of individual attention. “I know that raising awareness is often a bullshit solution that doesn’t really solve a problem, but there can be a real benefit to awareness even if it is coming through a TikTok makeup tutorial or,” he added, pointing to himself, “the exact opposite of one.

“When you’re dealing with a concerted campaign centered on cultural erasure, one of the most important things we can do is continue to pay attention.”

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itsfinancethings · 4 years

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(BEIJING) – When police arrested the middle-aged Uighur woman at the height of China’s coronavirus outbreak, she was crammed into a cell with dozens of other women in a detention center.

There, she said, she was forced to drink a medicine that made her feel weak and nauseous, guards watching as she gulped. She and the others also had to strip naked once a week and cover their faces as guards hosed them and their cells down with disinfectant “like firemen,” she said.

“It was scalding,” recounted the woman by phone from Xinjiang, declining to be named out of fear of retribution. “My hands were ruined, my skin was peeling.”

The government in China’s far northwest Xinjiang region is resorting to draconian measures to combat the coronavirus, including physically locking residents in homes, imposing quarantines of more than 40 days and arresting those who do not comply. Furthermore, in what experts call a breach of medical ethics, some residents are being coerced into swallowing traditional Chinese medicine, according to government notices, social media posts and interviews with three people in quarantine in Xinjiang.

There is a lack of rigorous clinical data showing traditional Chinese medicine works against the virus, and one of the herbal remedies used in Xinjiang, Qingfei Paidu, includes ingredients banned in Germany, Switzerland, the U.S. and other countries for high levels of toxins and carcinogens.

The latest grueling lockdown, now in its 45th day, comes in response to 826 cases reported in Xinjiang since mid-July, China’s largest caseload since the initial outbreak. But the Xinjiang lockdown is especially striking because of its severity, and because there hasn’t been a single new case of local transmission in over a week.

Harsh lockdowns have been imposed elsewhere in China, most notably in Wuhan in Hubei province, where the virus was first detected. But though Wuhan grappled with over 50,000 cases and Hubei with 68,000 in all, many more than in Xinjiang, residents there weren’t forced to take traditional medicine and were generally allowed outdoors within their compounds for exercise or grocery deliveries.

The response to an outbreak of more than 300 cases in Beijing in early June was milder still, with a few select neighborhoods locked down for a few weeks. In contrast, more than half of Xinjiang’s 25 million people are under a lockdown that extends hundreds of miles from the center of the outbreak in the capital, Urumqi, according to an AP review of government notices and state media reports.

Even as Wuhan and the rest of China has mostly returned to ordinary life, Xinjiang’s lockdown is backed by a vast surveillance apparatus that has turned the region into a digital police state. Over the past three years, Xinjiang authorities have swept a million or more Uighurs, Kazakhs and other ethnic minorities into various forms of detention, including extrajudicial internment camps, under a widespread security crackdown.

After being detained for over a month, the Uighur woman was released and locked into her home. Conditions are now better, she told the AP, but she is still under lockdown, despite regular tests showing she is free of the virus.

Once a day, she says, community workers force traditional medicine in white unmarked bottles on her, saying she’ll be detained if she doesn’t drink them. The AP saw photos of the bottles, which match those in images from another Xinjiang resident and others circulating on Chinese social media.

Authorities say the measures taken are for the well-being of all residents, though they haven’t commented on why they are harsher than those taken elsewhere. The Chinese government has struggled for decades to control Xinjiang, at times clashing violently with many of the region’s native Uighurs, who resent Beijing’s heavy-handed rule.

“The Xinjiang Autonomous Region upheld the principle of people and life first….and guaranteed the safety and health of local people of all ethnic groups,” Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Zhao Lijian said at a press briefing Friday.

Xinjiang authorities can carry out the harsh measures, experts say, because of its lavishly funded security apparatus, which by some estimates deploys the most police per capita of anywhere on the planet.

“Xinjiang is a police state, so it’s basically martial law,” says Darren Byler, a researcher on the Uighurs at the University of Colorado. “They think Uighurs can’t really police themselves, they have to be forced to comply in order for a quarantine to be effective.”

Not all the recent outbreak measures in Xinjiang are targeted at the Uighurs and other largely Muslim minorities. Some are being enforced on China’s majority Han residents in Xinjiang as well, though they are generally spared the extrajudicial detention used against minorities. This month, thousands of Xinjiang residents took to social media to complain about what they called excessive measures against the virus in posts that are often censored, some with images of residents handcuffed to railings and front doors sealed with metal bars.

One Han Chinese woman with the last name of Wang posted photos of herself drinking traditional Chinese medicine in front of a medical worker in full protective gear.

“Why are you forcing us to drink medicine when we’re not sick!” she asked in a Aug. 18 post that was swiftly deleted. “Who will take responsibility if there’s problems after drinking so much medicine? Why don’t we even have the right to protect our own health?”

A few days later she simply wrote: “I’ve lost all hope. I cry when I think about it.”

After the heavy criticism, the authorities eased some restrictions last week, now allowing some residents to walk in their compounds, and a limited few to leave the region after a bureaucratic approval process.

Wang did not respond to a request for interviews. But her account is in line with many others posted on social media, as well as those interviewed by the AP.

One Han businessman working between Urumqi and Beijing told the AP he was put in quarantine in mid-July. Despite having taken coronavirus tests five times and testing negative each time, he said, the authorities still haven’t let him out – not for so much as a walk. When he’s complained about his condition online, he said, he’s had his posts deleted and been told to stay silent.

“The most terrible thing is silence,” he wrote on Chinese social media site Weibo in mid-August. “After a long silence, you will fall into the abyss of hopelessness.”

“I’ve been in this room for so long, I don’t remember how long. I just want to forget,” he wrote again, days later. “I’m writing out my feelings to reassure myself I still exist. I fear I’ll be forgotten by the world.”

“I’m falling apart,” he told the AP more recently, declining to be named out of fear of retribution.

He, too, is being forced to take Chinese traditional medicine, he said, including liquid from the same unmarked white bottles as the Uighur woman. He is also forced to take Lianhua Qingwen, a herbal remedy seized regularly by U.S. Customs and Border patrol for violating FDA laws by falsely claiming to be effective against COVID-19.

Since the start of the outbreak, the Chinese government has pushed traditional medicine on its population. The remedies are touted by President Xi Jinping, China’s nationalist, authoritarian leader, who has advocated a revival of traditional Chinese culture. Although some state-backed doctors say they have conducted trials showing the medicine works against the virus, no rigorous clinical data supporting that claim has been published in international scientific journals.

“None of these medicines have been scientifically proven to be effective and safe,” said Fang Shimin, a former biochemist and writer known for his investigations of scientific fraud in China who now lives in the United States. “It’s unethical to force people, sick or healthy, to take unproven medicines.”

When the virus first started spreading, thousands flooded pharmacies in Hubei province searching for traditional remedies after state media promoted their effectiveness against the virus. Packs of pills were tucked into care packages sent to Chinese workers and students overseas, some emblazoned with the Chinese flag, others reading: “The motherland will forever firmly back you up”.

But the new measures in Xinjiang forcing some residents to take the medicine is unprecedented, experts say. The government says that the participation rate in traditional Chinese medicine treatment in the region has “reached 100%”, according to a state media report. When asked about resident complaints that they were being forced to take Chinese medicine, one local official said it was being done “according to expert opinion.”

“We’re helping resolve the problems of ordinary people,” said Liu Haijiang, the head of Dabancheng district in Urumqi, “like getting their children to school, delivering them medicine or getting them a doctor.”

With Xi’s ascent, critics of Chinese traditional medicine have fallen silent. In April, an influential Hubei doctor, Yu Xiangdong, was removed from a hospital management position for questioning the efficacy of the remedies, an acquittance confirmed. A government notice online said Yu “openly published inappropriate remarks slandering the nation’s epidemic prevention policy and traditional Chinese medicine.”

In March, the World Health Organization removed guidance on its site saying that herbal remedies were not effective against the virus and could be harmful, saying it was “too broad”. And in May, the Beijing city government announced a draft law that would criminalize speech “defaming or slandering” traditional Chinese medicine. Now, the government is pushing traditional Chinese remedies as a treatment for COVID-19 overseas, sending pills and specialists to countries such as Iran, Italy, and the Philippines.

Other leaders have also spearheaded unproven and potentially risky remedies – notably U.S. President Donald Trump, who stumped for the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, which can cause heart rhythm problems, despite no evidence that it’s effective against COVID-19. But China appears to be the first to force citizens – at least in Xinjiang – to take them.

The Chinese government’s push for traditional medicine is bolstering the fortunes of billionaires and padding state coffers. The family of Wu Yiling, the founder of the company that makes Lianhua Qingwen, has seen the value of their stake more than double in the past six months, netting them over a billion dollars. Also profiting: the Guangdong government, which owns a stake in Wu’s company.

“It’s a huge waste of money, these companies are making millions,” said a public health expert who works closely with the Chinese government, declining to be identified out of fear of retribution. “But then again – why not take it? There’s a placebo effect, it’s not that harmful. Why bother? There’s no point in fighting on this.”

Measures vary widely by city and neighborhood, and not all residents are taking the medication. The Uighur woman says that despite the threats against her, she’s flushing the liquid and pills down the toilet. A Han man whose parents are in Xinjiang told the AP that for them, the remedies are voluntary.

Though the measures are “extreme,” he says, they’re understandable.

“There’s no other way if the government wants to control this epidemic,” he said, declining to be named to avoid retribution. “We don’t want our outbreak to become like Europe or America.”

#IFTTT #Blogger

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newstechreviews · 4 years

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(BEIJING) – When police arrested the middle-aged Uighur woman at the height of China’s coronavirus outbreak, she was crammed into a cell with dozens of other women in a detention center.

“It was scalding,” recounted the woman by phone from Xinjiang, declining to be named out of fear of retribution. “My hands were ruined, my skin was peeling.”

One Han Chinese woman with the last name of Wang posted photos of herself drinking traditional Chinese medicine in front of a medical worker in full protective gear.

A few days later she simply wrote: “I’ve lost all hope. I cry when I think about it.”

Wang did not respond to a request for interviews. But her account is in line with many others posted on social media, as well as those interviewed by the AP.

“The most terrible thing is silence,” he wrote on Chinese social media site Weibo in mid-August. “After a long silence, you will fall into the abyss of hopelessness.”

“I’m falling apart,” he told the AP more recently, declining to be named out of fear of retribution.

Other leaders have also spearheaded unproven and potentially risky remedies �� notably U.S. President Donald Trump, who stumped for the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, which can cause heart rhythm problems, despite no evidence that it’s effective against COVID-19. But China appears to be the first to force citizens – at least in Xinjiang – to take them.

Though the measures are “extreme,” he says, they’re understandable.

#Blogger

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lorajackson · 4 years

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The World Is Awaking to the Ugly Realities of the Chinese Regime

Earlier this month, a McDonald’s restaurant in Guangzhou, in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, was forced to remove a sign warning that “black people are not allowed to enter.” Upon removing it, McDonald’s told NBC News in a statement that the sign was “not representative of our inclusive values.”That sounds like what it almost certainly is: a product of the company’s communications department, called in to do damage control. And while we can accept that the McDonald’s corporation itself is not, on the whole, racist, the sign does unfortunately represent China’s values.As NR’s Jim Geraghty has noted, the incident is an example of the “xenophobia and racism” on display just now in China. This is phenomenon is not new to the PRC, but the government has an extra incentive to lean into it now, because it helps the government’s concerted campaign to deflect blame for the global coronavirus pandemic.There is ample evidence of this. A recent Reuters report noted that ambassadors from several African nations recently engaged the Chinese foreign ministry to raise concerns about how their citizens are being mistreated in China. Passport holders from African countries are subject to extreme stop-and-search practices. Many who are coronavirus-negative are being forced into 30-day quarantines anyway. Foreigners from a range of countries who can document clean bills of health are being denied entry to places of business and other facilities simply because they are foreigners.Much of this is taking place in Guangzhou, known to some as “Little Africa” because it has the largest African-immigrant population in China. To some extent, African immigration to China is a by-product of Xi Jinping’s effort to build a global network of trade and infrastructure investment that gives the regime a perceived geopolitical advantage over the West in the developing world. Ghanaians, Nigerians, and other immigrants to China are all too happy to take advantage of the work and educational opportunities China offers. But many of them have learned the hard way just how limited the country’s kindness is.In fact, China’s ill-treatment of foreign-minority populations reflects how the Chinese government treats its own citizens. Muslim minority Uighurs are being held in so-called re-education camps intended to strip them of their religious and ethnic identity, and in many cases subjected to forced labor. In Tibet, which China has oppressed since the very beginning of Communist rule in 1949, things have gotten worse under Xi: Last year, Freedom House named Tibet the second-least-free territory on Earth, behind only war-torn Syria.It would be natural to presume that such discrimination is a regrettable result of the dominance of the Han Chinese, who are more than 90 percent of China’s population and dominate its society. (By comparison, ethnic Uighurs, for example, make up less than 1 percent of the population.) The Han Chinese, with 1.3 billion members, are the largest ethnic group not just in the PRC but in the world. Antipathy, oppression, and discrimination toward minority ethnic groups in a country with such a dominant majority is regrettable but not surprising, and not unique to the PRC.Beijing’s response to critics who note all of this is to try to drown them out by highlighting America’s own well-documented history of racial discrimination. But that’s the point: Our historical sins are well-documented, and they inform just about every aspect of our public policy. A free press and other institutions hold up our actions for the world to see. There is no mystery about how our country continues to deal with the effects of the institutionalized discrimination that persisted for nearly two centuries after our own founding, and for a century after we fought a war to end it.That said, there is a quality to the pattern of behavior in the PRC that transcends ethnicity. Chinese racial discrimination is horrifying in its own right, of course. But it also suggests a farther-reaching chauvinism that is emerging as the defining characteristic of the Xi era.Han Chinese make up the same percentage of the population in Hong Kong as on the mainland, and are 97 percent of the population in Taiwan. Neither Hong Kongers nor Taiwanese have suffered any less at Xi’s hands for that. Nor, for that matter, have the 400 million mostly Han Chinese living on less than $5 a day in the country outside China’s megacities, who face vicious discrimination from urban elites.In some ways, the gulf between the rich in China’s cities and the poor in its rural areas has been institutionalized through the longstanding “hukou” system of internal registration, which hampers movement between regions and creates what amounts to an economic caste system. While Xi has made hukou reform a priority in order to create greater opportunity for urban migration and prosperity, the system continues to reinforce the divide between urban haves and rural have-nots. As the former become wealthier and more global in their perspective, the disdain they frequently show for those who are different — whether from Africa or rural China — is becoming more pronounced.Xi-era chauvinism is beginning to create a backlash around the world. One example is the cooling ardor toward the Belt and Road Initiative, Xi’s aforementioned effort to gain footholds in foreign markets. Many projects have caused host countries to take on excessive debt. In one instance, a strategic port in Sri Lanka was ceded to China when the debt burden became too high. Politicians in Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and other countries have reversed earlier positions of support because of what they see as China’s discriminatory debt diplomacy.This backlash is appearing even in European countries that once saw China as a potential counterbalance to the Trump administration. In Sweden, for instance, some cities have ended sister-city relationships with Chinese counterparts, and the country has closed its Confucius Institute schools, dealing a blow to one of Beijing’s other soft-power propaganda operations. European leaders, including NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenburg and French president Emmanuel Macron, have also called for better understanding of how Beijing handled the coronavirus pandemic and pushed back against China’s campaign to deflect blame for it.In short, the world finally seems to be recovering from its decades-long love affair with the PRC, which peaked with the rise of Xi, who was initially viewed as a reformer who would bring China onto the world’s stage as an equal, responsible actor. The true nature of the regime is becoming more apparent, and the world doesn’t like what it sees: the dreadful treatment of ethnic minorities and the rural poor; the obvious interference in Taiwan’s recent presidential election; the belligerence toward Hong Kong as the “one country, two systems” agreement is systematically dismantled and pro-democracy leaders are arrested or just disappear; the bullying of emerging economies through debt diplomacy; and now what is very likely a global pandemic caused by Chinese negligence.For the first time since the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre 30 years ago, the world has awakened to these ugly realities, and if anything good has emerged from this chaotic geopolitical era, that might be it. Here’s hoping that more aggressive action to counter Beijing comes next.

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actutrends · 4 years

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Obama-era tech advisors list potential challenges for the White House’s AI principles

Former Obama administration advisors say the White House regulatory AI principles announced this week are a good start in many ways, but they’re incorrect in their oversimplified mandate to avoid overregulation of private business use, and that the Trump administration could face an uphill battle in its appeal to the rest of the world.

Though the Trump administration has developed a reputation for blaming the Obama administration when things go wrong or trying to erase Obama-era policy, on artificial intelligence policy, at times the Trump administration has remained strikingly similar to its predecessor. This was evident in the AI research and development strategy plan for federal agencies released in summer 2019. In some instances, like with White House deputy CTO and assistant director of AI at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Dr. Lynne Parker who also served in the Obama administration, the same people drive White House AI policy.

The list of 10 AI principles are meant to guide US federal agencies as they consider making rules that regulate AI. White House CTO Michael Kratsios said he wants other countries around the world to adopt similar policies.

When asked how an administration with a less-than-ethical track record can be a leader in the ethical use of AI, Terah Lyons said the president’s record could keep the administration from mounting a campaign to convince others around the world to adopt similar principles.

Lyons shaped AI policy in the Office of Science and Technology (OSTP) during the Obama administration and is now executive director of Partnership on AI, a conglomerate of companies and nonprofits that promote AI policy that benefits humanity.

“For better or for worse, the best way to lead in technology policy or otherwise is from the very top, and without moral leadership coming from the president himself, it may be really tough for the United States to claim leadership and to really drive countries around the world to follow,” Lyons said. “So I think that that certainly can’t be lost from this conversation. I really appreciate the challenge of toiling on specific questions related to science policy as many of the folks at the OSTP are working to do, but I think who is sitting in the West Wing really matters.”

Good and bad AI regulation

Lyons said there’s not much novel about the regulatory AI principles. They continue policy promoting values espoused by the previous administration, she noted, adding that she’s happy to see that safety, privacy, civil liberties, human rights, fairness, and non-discrimination are all explicitly mentioned.

She’s also encouraged the principles call for performance-based rulemaking, which she says is vital to ensure that laws remain flexible to the emergence of scientific advances or evolutions in state of the art methods. And since AI is a widely applied suite of technologies, she thinks it’s good to have a heightened level of understanding for expected performance and accountability of AI regulated by federal agencies.

But she’s wary of one of the principle’s main tenants: the avoidance of overregulation.

Lyons said a focus on avoiding overregulation overlooks the fact that certain types of regulation can actually enable innovative companies.

“I think that the administration or anybody saying that imposing a regulatory limit is best for innovation, that is not always going to be the case,” she said. “This is a nuanced set of questions and considerations, and I think it paints a false dichotomy for anybody to say that regulation is wholesale good or is wholesale bad for innovation or industry or for an ecosystem.”

R. David Edelman agrees that there’s no single answer to whether regulation is good or bad or too much or too little. Edelman leads policy research at MIT’s internet Policy Research Initiative and worked in the White House National Economic Council during the Obama administration, and said many or most innovative AI business models, from health care applications to autonomous vehicles, require regulation before they can get started.

“Those in the community that I talk to [about regulation] are probably most concerned with under regulation, but I don’t mean that to suggest that they’re calling for new restrictions on AI,” he said. “There’s actually been a call for more — let’s call it regulatory action — to try to update some of the areas where public policies have fallen out of date relative to what’s possible in the AI space.”

One of the concerns Edelman said he has heard is around heavy-handed export control by the Department of Commerce. Last week, the Department of Commerce moved to place limits on the export of AI software.

To examine issues at the intersection of AI and policy like business, transportation, and labor, last year, Edelman and others at MIT hosted the AI Policy Congress, a series of conversations between former Obama and Trump cabinet officials as well as Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) leadership.

Among the key takeaways from the AI Policy Congress, he said, was that we’re not going to solve AI’s public trust crisis without clear direction to engineers about what the design requirements of public trust and law are. Another is that guidelines are just a start.

“One clear area of agreement between the Trump and Obama cabinet members was that international principles are excellent but inadequate to meet the design requirements; that at the end of the day, the economy is going to require to figure all this stuff out; that companies will require design systems that actually meet public trust or at the very least are lawful,” he said.

The U.S., China, and world AI leadership

Alongside the modern day re-emergence of AI, dozens of AI ethics principles have been produced, and today there is a tapestry of prescribed principles and best practices for military, government procurement officers, and nations.

Together with the United States, last year more than 40 countries signed on to OECD AI ethics principles.

The principles can be seen as an attempt to lay out an alternative approach to the kind Europe has taken on issues like privacy, he said, but that needn’t be the case since Europeans regulators share a concern for dystopian alternative vision of AI being seen in China and understand there’s a need to manage the growth of AI across the economy.

In the months ahead, EU Commissioners are expected to introduce new AI regulation with more protections for individuals. Some initiatives, like an AI ethics guidelines pilot project and recommendations from EU AI experts, were introduced last year. Members of the European AI community have talked about creating a third way to implement AI in business and society that’s different than the U.S. and China and more respectful to individual privacy.

Edelman says the White House appears to be trying to form some broad consensus among allies. However, the elephant in the room is China, a nation largely considered a world leader in AI with plans to become the world leader in the next decade. He believes the United States needs to begin to reach out to China.

A lack of such bilateral conversations today could be a reflection of a trade war related in large part to the treatment of technology and tech firms, and the ongoing detention of hundreds of thousands of Uighur Muslims in western China. Last fall in response to the humanitarian situation, the U.S. blacklisted Chinese AI startups.

But Edelman said bilateral talks between Beijing and Washington need to begin, and soon, because if there’s one area with substantial potential for mistrust and miscalculation particularly as it relates to national security, it’s AI.

VentureBeat reached out to a White House spokesperson to ask if the United States has held any direct talks with China over common AI principles but received no response. We will update this story if we hear back.

“It’s not to say we are going to agree on a whole lot, but we had decades of negotiations and discussions with the Soviet Union on issues like arms control and nuclear weapons even if we couldn’t agree on a lot then either. So dealing with AI issues and China should be very high on the to-do list of this administration as it thinks about what the next several years are going to look like in this space, and particularly if they want to create and sustain a model of what trustworthy AI that represents our values is and should be.”

Ultimately, Edelman and Lyons say follow-through on the expectations the White House put forward in the principles will require much expertise and effort by those who decided they want to take this leadership role, but the real test is whether agencies will take them seriously. That won’t be evident until well after the White House Office of Management and Budget(OMB) sends a final copy of the memo to federal agencies in two months.

“We won’t really see the real impact of this in all likelihood until the landscape analysis has been conducted by the agencies, and we understand what work and activities might take place as a result of it,” Lyons said. “I think that seeing how this plays out is going to be critically important, and that’s only really going to happen as agencies start actually conducting rulemaking.”

The post Obama-era tech advisors list potential challenges for the White House’s AI principles appeared first on Actu Trends.

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d2kvirus · 4 years

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Dickheads of the Month: December 2019

As it seems that there are people who say or do things that are remarkably dickheaded yet somehow people try to make excuses for them or pretend it never happened, here is a collection of some of the dickheaded actions we saw in the month of December 2019 to make sure that they are never forgotten.

There’s something wrong with the British electorate when they look at nine years of austerity, massive layoffs in police and NHS staff, outright persecution of the disabled, the country’s economy and standing being completely tanked and housing safety reports being sat on until Grenfell went up and their thought is “I want five more years of that!”

...although nobody should overlook how Liberal Democrat supporters refused to accept any responsibility for the result, in spite their party being directly responsible in handing control of Kensington to the Tories by 150 votes, as well as splitting the votes in Tory marginals Cities of London & Westminster and Finchley & Golders Green

...while Blue Labour crawled out of the woodwork to say the reason why Labour lost was because they weren’t indistinguishable enough from the Tories (which makes so much sense...) while saying the party should have listened to Caroline Flint - the same Caroline Flint who said that Labour should shut up and fall in line with the Tories...and lost her seat as a result

Nothing sums up Laura Kuenssberg better than how, the day before the General Election, she appeared on Politics Live to either blatantly lie about seeing postal votes or casually break electoral law by discussing postal vote results she claims to have seen - which is a direct violation of the The Representation of the People Act 1983

...although with Laura Kuenssberg being Laura Kuenssberg it wasn’t long before yet another example of gross unprofessionalism reared its head when she forgot her job is to report the news and not create it according to her own personal bias when she said history would condemn all Remainers who tried to undo Britait, which not only happens to be a direct violation of the BBC’s editorial guidelines but also betrays a remarkable failure to understand history

...and she was hardly the only example of this, not when Suraj Sharma was putting up anti-Corbyn posters outside polling stations across Merseyside on election day in spite doing so being illegal

It shouldn't surprise anyone that proven liar Boris Johnson broke his election promises within a week of duping the electorate, with him binning off pledges on workers rights, raising minimum wage and taking No Deal off the table - yet somehow the ignorant foghorns defend this by saying something about four legs being good

...soon afterwards proven liar Boris Johnson also reneged on the campaign pledge to raise the national living wage to £10.50 and instead raised it to £8.72 - and of course the BBC tried to spin that as a good thing, crowing about the percentage that it had increased by instead of how the Tories have been pledging that figure since the 2015 election

Smirking halfwit Priti Patel decided she too wanted to exploit the London Bridge attack for political gain and was quick to claim that the laws that saw the attacker released were implemented by a Labour government...in spite the obvious issue that he was released due to laws passed in 2012, i.e. when the Tories were in government and Theresa May was serving as Home Secretary, but that’s not important right now...

...soon afterwards Godfrey Bloom also decided the best course of action was to go on the offensive against the deceased’s family, going so far as to say that as the deceased believed Jihadists should be released early he reaped what he sowed and, by the way, could the deceased’s father pipe down and stop saying nasty things about the Tories

Australians were happy when their Prime Minister Scott Morrison responded to the widespread wildfires torching the country by...not being there as he’d rather bugger off to Hawaii on holiday, and having begrudgingly cut his holiday short his next suggestion was to try and withhold compensation for the volunteer firefighters that were combating what had become the most widespread wildfires in decades

Tory donors Alan Howard and Jeremy Isaacs showed how committed the two are to the party and to Britait by...paying millions of their own money to buy Cypriot passports so they don’t have to leave the EU like the plebs who voted to Leave will have to

It’s not even a surprise that the BBC somehow mutated a story of fact-checkers revealing that 88% of Tory Facebook ads contained lies compared to 0% of Labour’s into a headline saying both parties had been warned about publishing untruths during the campaign as opposed to just one of them

...although ITV were not far behind with their reimagining of Stormzy saying “Yes, 100%” as an answer to the question “Do you think Britain is racist?” into the headline “Stormzy says Britain is ‘100% racist’” which (predictably) got those who get far more riled up by the suggestion that they’re racist than they ever are by the existence of racism to kick off on social media

Nobody was surprised that Allison Pearson responded to the photos of the four year-old boy sleeping on the floor of Leeds General Infirmary was to claim the photos were staged...and being the coward that she is, she played the usual “I was hacked” card as if she doesn’t have a track record for shit like this

Among the wave of inept tactical voting guides The Guardian published the most inept of them all, telling their readers to vote Lib Dem in seats held by pro-Remain Labour MPs - which worked out marvelously in Kensington, didn’t it?

...and right before the year ended Jeremy Gilbert further aided The Guardian’s credentials of not having a clue by writing a hit piece saying that if Labour want to win elections they need to not be Labour, as if Clement Atlee or Harold Wilson didn’t exist - or, more likely with the usual centrist idiocy, the belief that Labour didn’t exist until Tony Blair came along and made them Labour In Name Only

Of course the dogwhistling boneheads would find some excuse to foam at the mouth about Diane Abbott during the election campaign, and this time it was her wearing two different shoes, which begs just one question: “...and?”

In a remarkable act of cowardice Arsenal responded to the Chinese state broadcaster pulling a broadcast of their match of their match against Manchester City due to Mesut Ozil’s criticism of the country’s treatment of Uighur Muslims by...throwing Ozil under the bus and claiming he doesn’t represent the club

In the mind of Patrice Désilets the reason why Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey got remarkably average Metacritic reviews isn’t because the game has a boring gameplay loop and unintuitive controls, but because a couple of reviewers spoke about features that weren’t in the game (although he neglected to say who those reviewers were, as they don’t appear to be on Metacritic) that obviously mean that all reviewers didn’t play the game and just decided to be negative for the sake of it

As if going full Pravda wasn’t reason enough to doubt anything the BBC say ever again, the fact that they ran a story about Cats receiving glowing reviews further showed just how uninterested they are in reporting an actual story compared to their own interpretation of it

When it emerged that Caroline Flack had assaulted her partner by cracking him in the head with a lamp while he was sleeping her response was to come out swinging with a bullish attitude that she wouldn't leave Love Island really worked in her favour...for about a day, until ITV announced she’d been replaced, and it wasn’t as if they had to look too hard for a replacement

It’s the time of year where Kevin Spacey posts a video of him totally in character as Frank Underwood from House of Cards...which was the creepy side of weird last year, but this year weird’s gone out the window

Somebody opened the crypt in which Michael Howard sleeps his eternal slumber, meaning we had to hear him venture his opinion about how judges should not be allowed to use their knowledge or judgment and instead shut up and fall in line with what the government tells them to do

Somehow a story about how Jo Maugham killed a fox in his back garden with a baseball bat while wearing his wife’s silk kimono on Boxing Day morning wasn’t a headline from Guido Blog designed to whip up their readers into indignant and/or ignorant rage, instead something that Jo Maugham himself tweeted on Boxing Day morning having done just that

Of course Tom Watson crawled out the woodwork to say it;s terrible how Labour members hated him...while at no point mentioning his years of backstabbing or how he tried to disqualify Labour members from voting in a leadership election so he could install the centrist option that nobody wanted

Nobody was surprised to see Darren Grimes taking to Twitter to bemoan the lack of funding in public infrastructure in the north...just as nobody was surprised to see the penny clearly hadn’t dropped with him that he was campaigning on behalf of the people who slashed public service infrastructure funding in the north for the past nine years

Hard centre extremist Andrew Adonis thought it was a smart idea to say that Corbynism needs to be “eradicated” from the Labour party. Just a hint: that’s what Tom Watson thought was a bright idea

It’s one thing for Youtube to play it safe with this year’s Youtube Rewind after last year’s downvote prison romance, but making the 2019 Rewind little more than a WatchMojo list video without the commentary goes beyond playing it safe and into being downright lazy

For a brief moment Giles Coren thought he was Rod Liddle, judging by his Times column where he spoke about Owen Jones getting a peerage and preying on the anal virginity of young researchers

There’s something pathetic about various WWE wrestlers taking to Twitter to mouth off about a badly-performed spot on an episode of AEW Dynamite that can either be explained by them being ordered to tweet that crap out by Vince McMahon or by their suddenly feeling threatened, which only served to make them look like the pro-WWE trolls that howl about everything AEW-related in a manner which stopped being amusing and started being concerning a couple of months ago

And finally, because of course, is Thanos wannabe Donald Trump and his belief that Justin Trudeau is “two-faced” because he said nasty things about the Orange Overlord - but of course, there’s no record of Trump ever saying nasty things about any nation’s leader after pretending to be all buddy-buddy with them

#dickheads of the month

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vinayv224 · 4 years

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A visitor at the booth of Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok) at the 2019 Smart Expo in Hangzhou, China, on October 18, 2019. | Costfoto / Barcroft Media via Getty Images

A US teen says the video-sharing platform suspended her account for criticizing China’s treatment of Muslims.

A US teenage TikTok user’s attempt to spread awareness about China’s oppression of its Uighur Muslim population has renewed questions about censorship on the China-based social media company’s platform.

Earlier this week, 17-year-old Feroza Aziz, who lives in New Jersey, posted on TikTok what was presented as a three-part tutorial on how to get longer eyelashes but quickly switched to a call-out about China’s treatment of its Muslim population. Several human rights groups have accused China of putting 1 million Muslims, mostly from the Uighur ethnic group, into concentration camps and shutting down or destroying mosques. China’s government denies this and claims that the camps are merely vocational training centers.

In her TikTok videos, Aziz begins her beauty tutorial simply enough. “The first thing you need to do is grab your lash curler, curl your lashes, obviously,” she says. Then she changes her message: “Then you’re gonna put [the curler] down and use your phone that you’re using right now to search up what’s happening in China. How they’re getting concentration camps, throwing innocent Muslims in there, separating their families from each other, kidnapping them, murdering them, raping them ... this is another Holocaust.”

Aziz said she sandwiched her political commentary between eyelash improvement tips in order to circumvent censorship she anticipated from the platform. Less than two days after her first video was posted, she tweeted that she had been suspended from TikTok for a month.

I am blocked from posting on tik tok for a month. This won’t silence me.

— feroza.x (@x_feroza) November 25, 2019

In a statement, TikTok confirmed that it banned Aziz — though it denied it was because of her beauty tutorial-cum-impassioned plea on behalf of China’s Muslims. Instead, it said it only banned the phone that Aziz used to upload those videos because it was tied to her previous account, which had been banned for violating policies on terrorism-related imagery. (One of her videos briefly showed a photo of Osama bin Laden in what she has described as a joke about other people’s perceptions of the kind of men that she, as a Muslim woman, is romantically interested in.)

There is a bit of a discrepancy here: TikTok says it only permanently banned one of Aziz’s devices and that her account was otherwise left alone. But Aziz says her entire account was suspended for a month, and she tweeted an image of what she said was a message from TikTok saying as much.

TikTok said that it had removed Aziz’s videos, but only for a 50-minute time period “due to a human moderation error.” Finally, the social media company apologized to Aziz and said it would un-ban her phone so she can access her account again. Aziz tweeted that she does not believe TikTok’s stated reasons for banning her, but said she had regained access to her account.

This all comes in the middle of the app’s attempts to distance itself from its Chinese owner, ByteDance, amid concerns over how it handles user data and whether or not the Chinese government has access to it. TikTok was fined $5.7 million by the FTC earlier this year over allegations that it knowingly allowed children under 13 to sign up for its service and provide their personal information without parental consent — a violation of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. In September, reports from the Guardian and the Washington Post claimed that TikTok was censoring politically sensitive content. Last month, Sens. Chuck Schumer and Tom Cotton co-authored a letter requesting that the intelligence community assess TikTok for any national security risks based on its parent company’s Chinese ties. And ByteDance’s 2017 $1 billion acquisition of Musical.ly, which was then folded into TikTok, is now being investigated by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.

In response, TikTok has repeatedly insisted that all US-based user data is stored in the US and Singapore, and that the Chinese government has no access to it. The company says it does not censor content the Chinese government disapproves of, that moderation of US content is done by a US-based team, and that it does not operate in China at all (for Chinese users, ByteDance has a similar app called Douyin — which is heavily censored, like everything else on the Chinese internet). In a recent interview with the New York Times, TikTok head Alex Zhu said that TikTok did not share user data with its parent company. He also said TikTok wasn’t really a platform for politics, but for a “creative and joyful experience.”

“Today, we are lucky,” Zhu told the Times, “because users perceive TikTok as a platform for memes, for lip-syncing, for dancing, for fashion, for animals — but not so much for political discussion.”

Examples like this only cast more doubt on TikTok’s claims that free speech is alive and well in the American version of its app. Despite those censorship concerns, it remains hugely popular, especially among Gen Z. After all, Aziz didn’t walk away when her previous account was banned; she simply created another.

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calacuspr · 3 years

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The Debate About Sports Activism Is Over – The Time Is Now

As we begin 2021, David Alexander, Managing Director of Calacus PR, looks at how the issue of sports activism altered over the past 12 months, and what is in store for 2021 as it continues to rise ahead of major events this summer.

There’s little doubt that 2020 was a difficult year for us all.

Sport suffered significantly due to lockdowns that have hindered competition, spectators attending in person and grassroots sport that means so much to so many.

But with more time on their hands, sports stars have been showing why the debate about sport and politics and sport and social good is essentially redundant.

If you go back in history, there are many instances of sports stars using their platform to make a political point.

“With more time on their hands, sports stars have been showing why the debate about sport and politics and sport and social good is essentially redundant.”

Muhammad Ali protested about the draft and refused to fight in the Vietnam war. That lost him his boxing licence and some of his peak years.

African-American athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised a black-gloved fist during the playing of the US national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner” during their medal ceremony in the Olympic Stadium in Mexico City in 1968.

And in more recent years we’ve had NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick take the knee to protest at inequality and police brutality in the United States.

Over in England, Manchester City and England forward Raheem Sterling has been vocal about racism in the game after both fans and media have targeted him.

“First and foremost, I don’t really think about my job when things like this happen. I think about what is right,” he said when discussing racism in the game.

In light of the death of George Floyd in the United States, footballers have been taking the knee before most top-level matches, to highlight the importance of diversity and equality in society.

England captain Harry Kane explained why it is so important that the ritual is continued: “We are a huge platform to share our voices across the world,” he said.

“I hear people talking about taking the knee and whether we should still be doing it and for me I think we should. Education is the biggest thing we can do to teach generations what it means to be together and help each other no matter what your race.”

Fellow England forward Marcus Rashford has also been in the news for all the right reasons, somehow managing to help Manchester United on the pitch while changing UK government policy off it.

Rashford has opened up about the struggles his family endured, relying on free school meals, breakfast and after-school clubs, food banks and vouchers to ensure he could eat.

He addressed the issue of children missing out on a free school meal during the UK’s coronavirus lockdown, which saw the government make a U-turn and make the vouchers available.

He then partnered with Fareshare to ensure food that would otherwise be wasted was redistributed to good causes and in early September, Rashford went even further, creating the Child Poverty Task Force with the food industry to shed light on the issue of child food poverty in the UK. No wonder he was awarded an MBE.

France and Barcelona forward Antoine Griezmann also took a stand against electronics brand Huawei, after reports emerged that the company was developing facial recognition software to be used on Muslim Uighurs in China.

“When sports stars, clubs or federations work with brands, particularly these days, there needs to be constant dialogue.”

Huawei responded that they would like to speak to Griezmann, which begs the question why these discussions were not had between Griezmann or his representatives and Huawei before he cut ties.

Griezmann’s resignation as an ambassador will make the news, but if he HAD spoken with the electronics brand, he could have potentially worked with them to ensure better treatment of Uighurs.

When sports stars, clubs or federations work with brands, particularly these days, there needs to be constant dialogue.

Aligning yourself with a brand just because of a logo or free merchandise is not enough these days – and there is a lot of research that suggests consumers want their brands to make a positive difference.

But we have seen this year that sports stars feel more empowered than ever to try and make a positive difference, using social media to communicate which gives them a huge reach on channels that THEY own and so avoiding any misinterpretation or sensationalism that may have come from sending out a press release or staging a press conference, for instance.

As we move into the new year, the Tokyo Olympic Games this summer will be fascinating and provide a strong indicator for future trends.

“Calls have increased this year for a change to Rule 50 of the Olympic Charter, which bans any form of political protest during the Games.”

Rule 50 of the Olympic Charter states that the field of play and medal events should be ‘separate from political, religious or any other type of interference’ but it has been criticised recently, with new independent body the Athletics Association saying it is not fit for purpose.

Calls have increased this year for a change to Rule 50 of the Olympic Charter, which bans any form of political protest during the Games.

World Athletics have, for instance, said that athletes should have the right to make gestures of political protest during the Games, contrary to official IOC policy.

IOC President Thomas Bach has said that the Rule will be reviewed but more recently has said that “Inclusiveness and mutual respect also by being politically neutral” is also important.

The Games are supposed to be unifying so it will be fascinating to see who protests if Rule 50 remains in place.

To read the original article, please click HERE

#Harry Kane #Marcus Rashford #IOC #Thomas Bach #Olympic Games #Huawei #Barcelona FC #England football #Raheem Sterling #Muhammad Ali #Manchester City #Manchester United

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itsfinancethings · 4 years

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New world news from Time: In China’s Xinjiang, Forced Medication Accompanies Coronavirus Lockdown