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eretzyisrael · 3 years

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Letter to U of T President Meric Gertler

Meric Gertler June 30, 2021

President

Kelly Hannah-Moffat

Vice President

Human Resources and Equity

University of Toronto

The purpose of this letter is to request appropriate responses to an act of bigotry from a member of the University of Toronto faculty. As explained below, speed of reaction matters. As also elaborated below, the situation is a matter of some gravity.

Before the particular act is addressed, a few general remarks are in order. Prejudicial slurs often occur in the form of a noun and an adjective. The noun refers to the group under attack. The adjective asserts a stereotype about the group.

These prejudicial slurs may occur generally. They may also occur in response to a particular incident which, abstracted from the prejudicial slur, may itself be objectionable. The problem here is not criticism of the incident but rather the attribution to all members of the target group the blame for an incident for which they are not responsible.

Bigotry can occur against a group in whole or in part. When it occurs in part, the bigoted would say that there are good members of the group and bad members. The good are those whose behaviour contradicts the stereotype. The bad are those who conform to the stereotype. For the bigoted, what they would characterize as the good are exceptions.

Bigotry often engages in victim inversion. The bigoted often claim that they are the victims and that their targets are the victimizers. The bigotry here takes the form of claimed defense against the target group.

The bigoted often uses double entendres, words that have both an innocent meaning and a coded meaning to their bigoted cohort. They use dog whistles, sounds with the intent that only their bigoted cohort will appreciate.

The particular remarks we wish to draw to your attention is a statement of University of Toronto Faculty Association president Terezia Zorić made from the floor after a panel discussion at York University Osgoode Hall, June 15, 2021. A link to the video of her remarks can be found at the link below at the 1:58:50 mark.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiJ8cRpyzW8&t=3163s

The transcript of her remarks, in their entirety, is this:

“Very, very quickly many thanks to the organizers of this wonderful event on the censure [by the Canadian Association of University of Teachers (CAUT) of the University of Toronto] of u of t [the University of Toronto] and all the activists who’ve made it possible for those of us doing institutional work to have some room to maneuver.

I wanted to offer that, as an early leader who defended the folks at the law school and the principles of academic freedom and collegial governance, there was nothing short of unending harassment and psychological warfare where those of us were supportive of the principles at stake at the heart of the censure. [We] experienced horrible backlash by an entitled powerful Zionist minority that felt that any criticisms of Cromwell [the author of a review report] or anyone else could be met with accusations of antisemitism. And it took an enormous amount of work to get us to a point where we could have even have a conversation about what went on why it went on and so on.

Many graduate students with whom I’ve worked ‑ I teach in the Department of Social Justice Education ‑ have complained that any time they want to talk about a boycott [and] divestment [against Israel in support of] Palestine or anything like that, they feel targeted in similar ways. If you don’t think faculty themselves, including those of us in senior positions, can be intimidated by the powerful response you don’t understand what’s at stake and we continue to be in that position.”

The sentence from the quote above which encapsulates the problematic nature of the remarks of Ms. Zorić is this:

“[We] experienced horrible backlash by an entitled powerful Zionist minority that felt that any criticisms of Cromwell or anyone else could be met with accusations of antisemitism.”

To be even more specific, a phrase and an attitude which imbues her remarks throughout, is this: “an entitled powerful Zionist minority”. This phrase is an antisemitic slur.

The form of her statement is

“We experienced horrible backlash by a group of [insert here a prejudicial slur against the group] who felt that any criticisms of their views could be answered with accusations of prejudice against the group.”

The very form of discourse is an exercise in bigotry. The form of discourse is ridiculous because, on the one hand, it rejects the accusation of prejudice and, on other hand, manifests it. The discourse is internally self-contradictory. It establishes the charge of bigotry against which it claims to defend. Ms. Zorić, on the one hand, uses an antisemitic stereotype “an entitled powerful Zionist minority” and, on the other hand, defends herself against the charge of antisemitism.

Robert Wistrich, in 2004, then Professor of European and Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and director of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, described antisemitism as including attributing “to Jews excessive power and influence”. He observed that “‘anti-Zionist’ attacks on Jewish … targets show that we are talking about a distinction without a difference.”[1]

Martin Luther King stated:

“When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You’re talking antisemitism.”[2]

That is what is going on here. When Ms. Zorić criticizes “an entitled powerful Zionist minority”, she means “an entitled powerful Jewish minority”.

The antisemitic stereotype Ms. Zorić uses is the classic, the original, antisemitism, the very source of the term. Antisemitism, literally, means opposition to semitism and semitism according to Wilhelm Marr, who coined the term, was self‑interested Jewish power. Antisemitism was opposition to this fantasized power. Marr opposed “the Jewish spirit and Jewish consciousness [which] have overpowered the world”[3]. He founded an organization titled – “The League of Anti-Semites”.

Until the defeat of Nazi Germany, antisemites commonly identified as such. Before the end of World War II, there was a proliferation of self-identified antisemitic organizations – for instance the Anti-Semitic Union of the Diet of Lower Austria or the Universal Anti-Semitic Alliance of Romania. The Nazis themselves self-identified as antisemitic.

All of these self-identified antisemitic individuals and organizations espoused the very ideology Ms. Zorić telegraphs with the phrase “an entitled powerful Zionist minority”. As Holocaust scholar Yehuda Bauer observed, the term “antisemitism” has now gone out of fashion, even among antisemites. Even the most virulent antisemites today do not self-identify as antisemites. Ms. Zorić fits within this pattern, both asserting antisemitic ideology and denying that it is antisemitism.

Zionism may seem objectively to be an innocent or positive term, a national liberation movement for the Jewish people, a short hand for the existence of Israel as the expression of the right to self-determination of the Jewish people. Yet, it is used by antisemites as, at least among themselves, an acceptable form of antisemitism.

Ms. Zorić uses a dog whistle or double entendre with the term “Zionist”. To her, there are good Jews and bad. The bad are the Zionists.

Ms. Zorić uses victim inversion. She both attacks Jews (Zionists) and claims that she is the victim of the group she attacks.

Adding to the weight of concern is the fact that Ms. Zorić made her remarks publicly as head of the University of Toronto Faculty Association (UTFA). She was introduced as representing UTFA. In her remarks, she referred to herself as the “leader” of UTFA.

By making her remarks in a public forum as president of UTFA, she misrepresents UTFA as itself antisemitic. Her remarks do not just discredit herself. They discredit the University Faculty Association.

By doing and saying nothing about these remarks, UTFA and the University put themselves in a compromising position. Silence speaks. UTFA and the University need to react. Silence in the face of these remarks becomes complicity, tacit consent, an authorization to continue these sorts of remarks.

Any human rights violation, unless stopped, spreads. This is particularly true of bigoted discourse, which spreads easily and quickly if not contradicted. The reaction to bigoted discourse should be swift.

Both UTFA and the University need publicly to disassociate themselves from the remarks of Ms. Zorić. UTFA should call on Ms. Zorić to resign her position.

The problem that the remarks of Ms. Zorić present go beyond the University of Toronto. What makes them even more alarming is that they appear to be a driving force behind the CAUT censure of the University of Toronto.

Ms. Zorić refers to her views as “the principles at stake at the heart of the censure” by CAUT of the University of Toronto. CAUT needs to reconsider its censure in light of the fact that a driving force behind the movement for censure was antisemitism.

We make these recommendations:

1) Ms. Zorić should resign as president of the University of Toronto Faculty Association. She holds publicly expressed views which are incompatible with that position. The Faculty Association should request her resignation.

2) The University of Toronto should disassociate themselves from the remarks of Ms. Zorić. The University should state publicly that her views do not represent the views of the University.

3) CAUT should reconsider its censure of the University of Toronto in light of the publicly expressed views of Ms. Zorić. The impact that those views may have had on the decision to censure justifies the reconsideration.

Sincerely

David Matas

Senior Honorary Counsel

B’nai Brith Canada

602-225 Vaughan Street Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada R3C 1T7 Tel: 1 204 944 1831 Fax: 1 204 942 1494 E-mail: [email protected]

Cc: Terezia Zorić

University of Toronto Faculty Association

David Robinson

Canadian Association of University Teachers

[1] “Anti‑Zionism and Anti‑semitism” Jewish Political Studies Review 16:3‑4 (Fall 2004) page 27 on JSTOR

https://www.jstor.org/stable/25834602?read‑now=1&seq=2#page_scan_tab_contents 3/4

#university of toronto #u of t #b'nai brith canada #teresia zoric #bigotry #antisemitism

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hallsp · 3 years

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When Fred Halliday—scholar, activist, journalist and teacher—died two years ago at the too-early age of 64, obituaries and tributes swamped the British press; the New Statesman subtitled its remembrance “The death of a great internationalist.” Halliday was a truly original thinker, a combination of Hannah Arendt (in her concern for the connection between ethics and politics) and Isaac Deutscher (in his materialist yet supple approach to history). Halliday also knew a little something about the Middle East: he spoke Arabic, Farsi and at least seven other languages, and he traveled widely throughout the region, including in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Palestine, Israel, Libya and Algeria. He is one of the very few writers who, after 9/11, understood the synthesis between fighting radical Islam and opposing the brutal inequities of the neoliberal global order. He was an uncategorizable independent, supporting, for instance, the communist government in Afghanistan and the US invasion of that country. He embodied the dialectic between utopianism and realism. In his scholarship and research, in his outspokenness and courtesy, in the complexity of his thinking, he was the model of a public intellectual. It is Halliday’s writings—not those of Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, Alexander Cockburn, Christopher Hitchens or Tariq Ali—that can elucidate the meaning of today’s most virulent conflicts; it is Halliday who represented radicalism with a human face. It says something sad, and discouraging, about intellectual life in our country that Halliday’s death—which is to say, his work—was ignored not only by mainstream publications like The New York Times but by their left-wing alternatives too (including this one).

It is cheering, then, that a selection of essays, written by Halliday for the website openDemocracy between 2004 and 2009, has just been published by Yale University Press. Called Political Journeys, it gives a taste—though only that—of the extraordinary range of Halliday’s interests; included here are analyses of communism , the cold war, Iran’s revolution, post-Saddam Iraq, violence and politics, radical Islam, the legacies of 1968 and feminism. The book gives a sense, too, of Halliday’s dry humor—he loved to recount irreverent political jokes from the countries he had visited—and his affection for lists, as in the essay “The World’s Twelve Worst Ideas” (No. 2: “The only thing ‘they’ understand is force”). But most of the articles, written as they were for the Internet, are comparatively short and represent a brief span in a long career; this necessarily sporadic volume will, one hopes, lead readers to some of Halliday’s two dozen other books and more extensive essays.

Political Journeys is a well-chosen title for the collection. It alludes not just to Halliday’s travels but also to the ways his ideas—especially about revolution, imperialism and human rights—changed in reaction to tumultuous world events over the course of four decades. For this he has often been attacked, even posthumously. Earlier this year, Columbia University professor Joseph Massad opened a piece about Syria, published on the Al Jazeera website, by dismissing Halliday—along with his “Arab turncoat comrades”—as a “pro-imperial apologist.” (Massad also put forth the novel idea that Syria “has been…an agent of US imperialism,” which might be news to Bashar al-Assad and the leaders of Iran and Hezbollah, Syria’s allies in the so-called axis of resistance.) Yet it was precisely Halliday’s intellectual flexibility—his ability to derive theory from experience rather than shoehorn the latter into the former—that was one of his greatest strengths. Pace Massad,

Halliday didn’t move from Marxism into imperialism, neoconservatism, neoliberalism or “turncoatism”; rather, he developed a deeper, more humane and far sturdier kind of radicalism. It was one that refused to hide—much less celebrate—repression, carnage and virulent nationalism behind the banner of progress, world revolution, selfdetermination or anti-colonialism. Halliday sought not to reject the socialist tradition but to reconnect it to its heritage—derived from the Enlightenment, from 1789, from 1848— of reason, rights, secularism and freedom. He would also develop an unsparing critique of the anti-humanism that, he thought, was ineradicably embedded in the revolution of 1917 and its successors.

Halliday believed that the duty of committed intellectuals is to keep their eyes open, to learn from history, to be humble enough to be surprised (and to admit being wrong). The alternative was what he called “Rip van Winkle socialism.” He sometimes told his friends, “At my funeral the one thing no one must ever say is that ‘Comrade Halliday never wavered, never changed his mind.’”

* * *

Fred Halliday was born in 1946 in Dublin and raised in Dundalk, a town near the northern border that, he pointed out, The Rough Guide to Ireland advises tourists to avoid. The Irish “question” and Irish politics remained, for him, a touchstone—though more as a warning than an inspiration, especially when it came to Mideast politics. The unhappy lessons of Ireland, he wrote in 1996, included “the illusions and delusions of nationalism” and “the corrosive myths of deliverance through purely military struggle.” He added: “A good dose of contemporary Irish history makes one sceptical about much of the rhetoric that issues from dominant and dominated alike.… [A] critique of imperialism needs at the very least to be matched by some reserve about most of the strategies proclaimed for overcoming it.” Growing up in the midst of the Troubles, Halliday developed, among other things, a healthy aversion to histrionic nationalism and the repugnant concept of “progressive atrocities.”

Halliday graduated from Oxford in 1967 and then attended the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). Later he would earn a PhD from the London School of Economics (LSE), where, for over two decades, he taught students from around the world and was a founder of its Centre for the Study of Human Rights. (The intellectual and governing classes of the Middle East are sprinkled with his graduates.) He was an early editor of the radical newspaper Black Dwarf and, from 1969 to 1983, a member of the editorial board of the New Left Review, a journal for which he occasionally wrote even after he broke with it over key political issues. He immersed himself in the revolutionary movements of his time and gathered an enviable range of friends, interlocutors and contacts along the way: traveling with Maoist Dhofari rebels in Oman; working at a student camp in Cuba; visiting Nasser’s Egypt, Ben Bella’s Algeria, Palestinian guerrillas in Jordan and Marxist Ethiopia and South Yemen (the subject of his dissertation). He wasn’t shy: he proposed a two-state solution to Ghassan Kanafani of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, infamous for its hijackings; argued with Iran’s foreign minister about the goals of an Islamic revolution; told Hezbollah’s Sheik Naim Qassem that the group’s use of Koranic verses denouncing Jews was racist—“a point,” Halliday dryly noted, “he evidently did not accept.”

Halliday received, and accepted, invitations to lecture in some of the Middle East’s most repressive countries, including Ahmadinejad’s Iran, Qaddafi’s Libya and Saddam’s Iraq, where a government official told him, without shame or embarrassment, that Amnesty International’s reports on the regime’s tortures and executions were correct. Clearly, he was no boycotter. But neither was he seduced by these visits: in 1990, he described Iraq as a “ferocious dictatorship, marked by terror and coercion unparalleled within the Arab world”; in 2009, he reported that the supposedly new, rehabilitated Libya was just like the old, outcast Libya: a “grotesque entity” and “protection racket” that was regarded as a joke throughout the Arab world. His moral compass remained intact: that year, he warned the LSE not to accept a £ 1.5 million donation from the so-called Charitable and Development Foundation of the dictator’s son, Saif el-Qaddafi. Alas, greed trumped principle, and Halliday’s arguments were rejected—which led, once the Arab Spring reached Libya, to the LSE’s public disgrace and the resignation of its director.

* * *

In May 1981, Halliday published an article on Israel and Palestine in MERIP Reports, a well-respected Washington journal that focuses on the Middle East and is closely identified with the Palestinian cause. It is an astonishing piece, especially in the context of its era, more than a decade before the Palestine Liberation Organization recognized Israel’s right to exist and the signing of the Oslo Accords. It is no exaggeration to say that, at the time, the vast majority of the left, Marxist and not, held anti-Israel positions of various degrees of ferocity; to do otherwise was to risk pariahdom.

While harshly critical of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and of the occupation , Halliday proceeded to question—and forcefully rebuke—the bedrock beliefs of the left: that Israel was a colonial state comparable to South Africa; that Israelis were not a nation and had no right to self-determination; that Israel was a recently formed and therefore inauthentic country (most states in the Middle East—including, for that matter, Palestine— are modern creations of imperialist powers); that a binational state was desired by either Israelis or Palestinians and, therefore, could be a recipe for anything other than civil war and a harshly authoritarian government. (Halliday asked a question often ignored by revolutionaries: Why would anyone want to live under such a regime?)

Most of all, he challenged the irredentism of the Palestinian movement and its supporters. Partition, he presciently warned, is “the only just and the only practical way forward for the Palestinians. They will continue to pay a terrible price, verging on national annihilation, if they prefer to adopt easier but in fact less realizable substitutes, and if their allies and supposed friends continue to urge such a course upon them.” Halliday stressed that a truly revolutionary strategy cannot be “at variance with reality.” Solidarity without realism is a form of betrayal.

The reality principle, and its absence, was a theme Halliday would return to frequently, as in his reappraisal of the legacy of 1968. “It does not deserve the sneering, partisan dismissal,” he wrote in 2008. But nostalgic celebration was also unearned, for “the problem is that in many ways, we lost.” Despite triumphal rhetoric, the year of the barricades led not to worldwide revolution but to conservative governments in France, England and the United States (Richard Nixon). In the communist world, the situation was even worse: “It was not the emancipatory imagination but the cold calculation of party and state that was ‘seizing power.’” In Prague, socialist reform was crushed; in Beijing, the Cultural Revolution’s frenzy reached new heights.

Yet Halliday, like most of us, was sometimes guilty of letting wishful thinking cloud his vision too. In 2004, he called for the United Nations to assume authority in Iraq, which was then in free fall. This ignored the fact that Al Qaeda’s shocking bombings of the UN’s Baghdad mission the previous year—resulting in the death of Sergio de Mello, the secretary general’s special representative in Iraq, and so many others—had disposed, rather definitively, of that issue; the UN had withdrawn its staffers and, clearly, could not ask them to undertake another death mission. (Nor was there any indication that the UN’s member nations—many of whom opposed any intervention in Iraq—would have supported such a proposition.) And his claim, made in 2007, that “a set of common values is indeed shared across the world,” including a commitment to “democracy and human rights,” is hard to square with much of Halliday’s own reporting—such as his 1984 encounter with a longtime acquaintance named Muhammad, who had formerly been a member of the Iranian left. Now a supporter of the regime, Muhammad visits Halliday in London and explains, “We don’t give a damn for the United Nations.… We don’t give a damn for that bloody organisation, Amnesty International. We don’t give a damn what anyone in the world thinks.… We have made an Islamic Revolution and we are going to stick to it, even if it means a third world war.… We want none of the damn democracy of the West, or the socalled freedoms of the East.… You must understand the culture of martyrdom in our country.” Indeed, Halliday’s optimism of the intellect here is belied by even a casual look at any of the world’s major newspapers— whether from New York or Paris, Baghdad or Beirut—on any given day.

* * *

Iran, which Halliday first visited in the 1960s as an undergraduate, was foundational to his political development; he analyzed, and re-analyzed, its revolution many times, as if it was a wound that could not stop hurting. (Iran is the only country to which Political Journeys devotes an entire section of essays.) His initial study of the country, Iran: Dictatorship and Development, was written just before the anti-Shah revolution of early 1979. Based on careful observation and research, the book scrupulously analyzed Iran’s class structure, economy, armed forces, government, opposition movements, foreign policy—everything, that is, but the role of religion, which Halliday seemed to regard as essentially a front for political demands, and which he vastly underestimated. The book’s last sentence reads, “It is quite possible that before too long the Iranian people will chase the Pahlavi dictator and his associates from power… and build a prosperous and socialist Iran.”

Events moved quickly. In August 1979, Halliday filed two terrifying dispatches from Tehran, published in the New Statesman, documenting the chaotic atmosphere of fear and xenophobia, the outlawing of newspapers and political parties, and the brutal crackdown on women, intellectuals, liberals, leftists and secularists. “It does not take one long to sense the ferocious right-wing Islamist fervour that grips much of Iran today,” he began. Later, he would write, “I have stood on the streets of Tehran and seen tens of thousands of people…shouting, ‘Marg bar liberalizm’ (‘Death to liberalism’). It was not a happy sight; among other things, they meant me.” A revolution, he realized, could be genuinely anti-imperialist and genuinely reactionary.

But the problem wasn’t only Iran or radical Islam. As the ’70s turned into the ’80s, it became clear—or should have—that most of the third world’s secular revolutions and coups (in Algeria, Syria, Libya, Ethiopia and, especially, Iraq) had failed to fulfill their emancipatory promises. Each became a one-party dictatorship based on repression, torture and murder; each stifled its citizens politically, intellectually, artistically, even sexually; each remained mired in inequality and underdevelopment. None of this could be explained, much less justified, by the legacy of colonialism or the crimes of imperialism, real as those are. These were among the central issues that led to Halliday’s rift with the New Left Review—and that continue to divide the left, both here and abroad. Indeed, it is precisely these issues that often underlie (and sometimes determine) the debates over humanitarian intervention, the meaning of solidarity, the US role as a global power, the centrality of human rights and of feminism, and the Israel-Palestine conflict. (In 2006, Halliday would sum up his points of contention with his former comrades, especially their support of death squads and jihadists in the Iraq War : “The position of the New Left Review is that the future of humanity lies in the back streets of Fallujah.”)

Halliday’s revised thinking—his emphasis on democracy and rights; his aversion to the particularist claims of tribe, nation, religion or identity politics; his unapologetic secularism; his questioning of imperialism as a purely regressive force—is evident in his enormously compelling book Islam and the Myth of Confrontation, published in 1996. (Halliday dedicated it to the memory of four Iranian friends, whom he lauded as “opponents of religiously sanctioned dictatorship.”) In this volume he took on two still prevalent, and still contested, concepts: the idea of human rights as a Western imposition on the third world, and the theory of “Orientalism.”

Halliday argued that, despite the assertions of covenants such as the 1981 Universal Islamic Declaration of Human Rights (which defines “God alone” as “the Source of all human rights”) and the 1990 Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam (which defines “all human beings” as “Allah’s subjects”), there is no such thing as Islamic human rights—or, indeed, of rights derived from any religious source. Such rights apply to everyone and, therefore, must be based on man-made, universalist principles or they are nothing: it is the “equality of humanity,” not the equality before God, that they assert. (That is why they are human rights.) Because rights are grounded in the dignity of the individual, not in any transcendent or divine authority, they can be neither granted nor rescinded by religious authorities, and no country, culture or region can claim exemption from them by appealing to holy texts, a history of oppression, revered traditions or because rights “somehow embody ‘Western’ prejudice and hegemony.”

In this light, the search for a kinder, gentler version of Islam—or, for that matter, of any religion—as the basis of rights is “doomed” to failure; for Halliday, the question of a religion’s content was entirely irrelevant. “Secularism is no guarantee of liberty or the protection of rights, as the very secular totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century have shown,” he argued. “However, it remains a precondition, because it enables the rights of the individual to be invoked against authority.… The central issue is not, therefore, one of finding some more liberal, or compatible, interpretation of Islamic thinking, but of removing the discussion of rights from the claims of religion itself.… It is this issue above all which those committed to a liberal interpretation of Islam seek to avoid.” The issues that Halliday raised in 1996 are by no means settled today, and they are anything but abstract; on the contrary, the Arab uprisings have forced them insistently to the fore. In Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, secularists and Islamists struggle over the role (if any) of Islam in writing new constitutions and legal codes; at the United Nations, new leaders such as Egypt’s Mohamed Morsi and Yemen’s Abed Rabbu Mansour Hadi argue that the right to free speech ends when it “blasphemes” against Islamic beliefs.

But more than a defense of secularism is at stake here. Halliday argued that the very idea of a unitary, reliably oppressive behemoth called the West—on which so much antiimperialist and “dependency” theory rested— was false. “Far from there having been, or being, a monolithic, imperialist and racist ‘West’ that produced human rights discourse, the ‘West’ itself is in several ways a diverse, conflictual entity,” he wrote. “The notion of human rights was not the creation of the states and ruling elites of France, the USA, or any other Western power, but emerged with the rise of social movements and associate ideologies that contested these states and elites.” The West embodied emancipation and oppression, equality and racism, abolitionism and slavery, universalism and colonialism. Political theories and practices that refuse to acknowledge this—proudly brandishing their “anti-Western” credentials—will be based on the shakiest foundations.

* * *

The argument between advocates of the concept of “Orientalism,” put forth most famously by Edward Said, and its critics—often associated with the scholar Bernard Lewis—was close to Halliday. Lewis had been a mentor of his at SOAS, and one he admired; Said, whom Halliday described as “a man of exemplary intellectual and political courage,” was a friend. (Though not forever: Said stopped talking to Halliday when the two disagreed on the first Gulf War.) Yet on closer look, Lewis and Said shared an orientation: both had rejected a materialist analysis of Arab (and colonial) history and politics in favor of a metadebate about literature. “For neither of them,” Halliday argued, “does the analysis of what actually happens in these societies, as distinct from what people say and write about them…come first.” Increasingly, Halliday would regard the Orientalist debate as one that deformed, and diverted, the discipline of Mideast studies and helped to foster a vituperative atmosphere.

Said had argued that, for several centuries, British and French writers, statesmen and others had created a static, mythical Middle East—sometimes romanticized, sometimes denigrated, always objectified— as part of an unwaveringly racist, imperialist project. (Indeed, Said’s book has turned the word “Orientalist,” which used to refer to scholars of the Muslim, Arab and Asian worlds, into a term of opprobrium.) With sobriety and respect, Halliday considered and, in the end, devastatingly refuted the theory’s major tenets. With its sweeping, all-encompassing claims, he argued, the concept of Orientalism was a form of fundamentalism: “We should be cautious about any critique which identifies such a widespread and pervasive single error at the core of a range of literature.” It was based on a widely held yet entirely unsubstantiated belief that Europe bore a particular hostility toward the Muslim world: “The thesis of some enduring, transhistorical hostility to the orient, the Arabs, the Islamic world, is a myth.” It was undialectical, ignoring not only the myths that Easterners projected against the West—ignorant stereotyping is, if nothing else, a busy two-way street—but the ways the East itself reproduced the tropes of Orientalism: “A few hours in the library with the Middle Eastern section of the Summary of World Broadcasts will do wonders for anyone who thinks reification and discursive interpellation are the prerogative of Western writers on the region.” In fact, Islamists can be among the greatest Orientalists, for many insist on an Islam that is eternal, opaque and monolithic.

Most of all, though, Halliday questioned the assumption that the presumably impure origin of an idea necessarily negates its truth value. “Said implies that because ideas are produced in a context of domination, or directly in the service of domination, they are therefore invalid.” Carried to its logical conclusion, of course, this would entail a rejection of modernity itself—from its foundational ideas to its medical, technological and scientific advances—for all were produced “in the context of imperialism and capitalism: it would be odd if this were not so. But this tells us little about their validity.” (“Antiimperialism” and “self-determination” are, we might note, Western concepts, just as penicillin, the computer, the machine gun and the atom bomb are Western inventions.) And he questioned a key tenet of postcolonial studies and postcolonial politics: that the powerless are either more insightful or more ethical than their oppressors. “The very condition of being oppressed…is likely to produce its own distorted forms of perception: mythical history, hatred and chauvinism towards others, conspiracy theories of all stripes, unreal phantasms of emancipation.” Suffering is not necessarily the mother of wisdom.

But if Halliday was a foe of the simplicities of Orientalism, he was equally opposed to Samuel Huntington’s notion of “the clash of civilizations”—a concept that, he pointed out, was as beloved by Osama bin Laden as by neoconservatives—and to essentialist fictions like “the Islamic world” and “the Arab mind.” (On this, he and Said certainly agreed.) More than fifty diverse countries contain Muslim majorities; the job of the intellectual—whether located inside or outside the region—was to specify and demystify rather than deal in lumpy, ignorant generalities. “Disaggregation and explanation, rather than invocations of the timeless essence of cultures,” was the Mideast scholar’s prime task, Halliday insisted. He rejected mystified concepts such as Islamic banking and Islamic economics (“Anyone who has studied the economic history of the Muslim world…will know that business is conducted as it is everywhere, on sound capitalist principles”); the Islamic road to development (Iran’s economy was “a perfectly recognisable ramshackle rentier economy, laced with corruption and inefficiency”); and Islamic jurisprudence (Sharia, Halliday noted, has virtually no basis in the Koran). Echoing E.P. Thompson, Halliday argued that much of what passes for the ancient and authentic in the Islamic world—including Islamic fundamentalism itself—is the creation of modernity, and can be productively analyzed only within a political context.

Halliday proposed that even the Iranian Revolution—with its mobilization of the masses, consolidation of state power, repressive security institutions and attempts to export itself—had, despite its peculiar ideology, reprised the basic dynamics of modern, secular revolutions: “not that of Mecca and Medina in the seventh century but that of Paris in the 1790s and Moscow and St Petersburg in the 1920s.” Islam, Halliday insisted, could not explain the trajectory of that revolution or, for that matter, the politics of the greater Middle East.

Was Halliday right? Surely yes, in his refusal of essentialist fantasies and apolitical thinking. And in some ways, the Arab uprisings have confirmed everything for which he had spent a lifetime arguing. Here were populist movements demanding democratic institutions, transparency, and an end to tyranny and corruption; here were hundreds of thousands of protesters demanding entry into the modern world, not its negation; here was the assertion of participatory citizenship over passive subjecthood. Yet the subsequent trajectory of those initial revolts also proved him wrong: nowhere else in the contemporary world have democratic elections led to the triumph of religious parties. Nowhere else do intra-religious schisms result in the widespread carnage of the Shiite-Sunni split. Nowhere else do the democratic rights to freely speak, publish and create collide with strictures against blasphemy—even among some presumed democrats. Nowhere else does the fall of dictatorship and the assertion of self-determination translate, so quickly and so often, into attacks on women’s equality. “Islam explains little of what happens” in Turkey and Pakistan, Halliday wrote in 2002, and he believed this to be true of the region as a whole. Yet I doubt there are many Turks or Pakistanis (or, for that matter, Iranians, Egyptians, Algerians, Lebanese, Afghans, Saudis or Yemenis) who would agree. Can they all be the victims of false consciousness?

Here, I think, lies the problem: in his fight against lazy generalizations about Islam and its misuse as a univocal explanation, Halliday sometimes sought to scrub away, or at least radically minimize, Islam itself, as was demonstrated by his early book on Iran. It is almost as if he—the confirmed skeptic, the lover of reason, the staunch secularist, the self-proclaimed bani tanwir (“child of enlightenment”)—could not quite believe in religion as a force unto itself, and an astonishingly powerful one at that. “What people actually do,” he wrote in 2002, “is not determined by ideology.” This is, we might note, a classic Marxist position, in which the “superstructure” of belief is subsumed beneath class and politics. Yet Halliday’s erstwhile Iranian friend Muhammad— and, indeed, so many of the events that Halliday himself witnessed—told him otherwise. And as organizations as diverse as the Nazi Party and Al Qaeda have shown, rational, politically focused strategies and utterly lunatic ideologies can, alas, coexist.

* * *

In the immediate aftermath of September 11, Halliday was clear about several points: that the attacks would resonate throughout global politics, changing them for many decades to come; that Al Qaeda was a “demented” product not of ancient Islam but of modernity, and represented “the anti-imperialism of racists and murderers”; and that terrorist violence “from below,” though not directly caused by poverty, could not be severed from the grotesque inequalities that international capital had created. In 2004, he wrote, “The central challenge facing the world, in the face of 9/11 and all the other terrorist acts preceding and following it, is to create a global order that defends security while making real the aspirations to equality and mutual respect that modernity has aroused and proclaimed but spectacularly failed so far to fulfil.” This was not a question of either/or, but of and/ and. Ever the dialectician, Halliday observed that imperialism and terrorism are hardly antagonists; rather, they share a “central arrogance,” each “forcing their policies and views onto those unable to protect themselves, and proclaiming their virtue in the name of some political goal or project that they alone have defined.” And he noted with anger and sorrow how terrorism—which has killed far more people in the East than in the West —had transformed millions of people throughout the world into bewildered bystanders, creating an internationale of fear.

Afghanistan had been one of Halliday’s key areas of study, and he repeatedly pointed to several crucial facts that many Americans still resist understanding. Al Qaeda did not spring out of nowhere, much less from its beloved eighth century. It was Ronald Reagan’s arming of the anti-Soviet guerrillas— even after the Soviet pullout in early 1989, when Kabul’s communist government still stood—that was instrumental in creating the Islamist militias and warlord groups, some of which transformed themselves into the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Thus had our fanatical anti-communism led to the empowerment of “the crazed counter-revolutionaries of the Islamic right.” For Halliday there was no schadenfreude in this, no gloating, no talk of chickens coming home to roost or of blowback (a concept that fundamentally misunderstands— and moralizes—historic causation: was Sobibor the blowback from the Versailles Treaty?). But he insisted, rightly, that the crisis of 9/11 could not be understood, much less successfully confronted, in the absence of engaging this “policy of world-historical criminality and folly.”

Halliday had supported the US overthrow of both the Taliban and Saddam (in addition to military intervention against Saddam in the first Gulf War, and against Milosevic in Bosnia and Kosovo). He criticized three tendencies of the post-9/11 world with increasing dismay, though not quite despair: the retreat into rabid nationalism in both East and West; the Bush administration’s conduct in Iraq and in international affairs generally (“The United States is dragging the Western world…towards a global abyss,” he warned in 2004); and the left’s romance with jihad, especially in relation to Hamas, Hezbollah and the Iraqi “resistance.” And indeed, it was somewhat shocking to read Tariq Ali, writing in the New Left Review in the especially bloody year of 2006, exulting in the rise of “Hamas, Hizbollah, the Sadr brigades and the Basij.… A radical wind is blowing from the alleys and shacks of the latter-day wretched of the earth.” Or, more recently, to find his colleague Perry Anderson arguing that the “priority” of Egypt’s new, post-Mubarak government should be to annul the country’s “abject” peace treaty with Israel as a way of recovering “democratic Arab dignity.” Rip van Winkle socialism, indeed.

After September 11, Halliday focused much of his intellectual energy on explaining the ways the attacks and their serial, convulsive aftermaths were decisively changing international relations. While classic internationalism—in the sense of humane solidarity with the suffering of others—was imperiled, a kind of militarized internationalism was on the rise. Conflicts that had been relatively distinct, except on a rhetorical level, had become ominously entwined and the ante of violence—especially against civilians—cruelly raised. “Events in Lebanon and Israel, Iraq and Afghanistan, Turkey and Libya are becoming comprehensible only in a broader regional and even global context,” he wrote in 2006. This new dispensation, which he dubbed the “Greater West Asian Crisis,” represented a struggle for political supremacy in a region that now included not just the Arab world and Israel but also Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan, among others—including a plethora of volatile nonstate militias that are beholden to no constituencies and recognize no restraints. While some conflicts, such as Hezbollah versus Israel, might still be geographically confined, none could be politically or, because of the existence of transnational guerrillas, operationally confined. (Consider, for instance, the reported presence of Islamist fighters from Chechnya and Pakistan in Syria’s civil war.) Halliday warned that the resulting strife would be “more complex, multilayered and long-lasting than any of the individual crises, revolutions or wars that characterized the Middle East.” This was written six years ago; despite the hopefulness of the subsequent Arab Spring revolts, it would be difficult to dispute the alarming vision contained therein.

* * *

In the last decade of his life, Halliday turned, with an urgency both intellectual and moral, to the legacy of revolution in the twentieth century. His writings on this topic—precisely because they are the work of a writer deeply embedded in, and respectful of, the Marxist tradition and committed to the creation of what one can call, without cynicism, a more just world—are important for anyone who seeks to understand the history of the past century or the bewilderments of the present one. These essays make for painful reading, too—especially, I think, for leftists—in their willingness to question, and discard, comforting beliefs.

Halliday’s re-evaluation shared nothing with the smug rejection of revolution that had become so fashionable after 1989, or with the disparagement of communism as an “aberrant illusion.” To the contrary: “Millions of people struggled for and believed in this ideal,” he wrote in 2009. “As much as liberalism, communism was itself a product of modernity…and of the injustices and brutalities associated with it.” Nor had Halliday signed on to a celebration of the neoliberal world order: “The challenge that confronted Marx and Engels,” he wrote in 2008, “still stands, namely that of countering the exploitation, inequality, oppression, and waste of the contemporary capitalist order with a radical, cooperative, international political order.” Against flat-earthers like Thomas Friedman, he argued that the globalized world of the twenty-first century is more unequal than its predecessors.

And so the question of what is to be done still remained, but had to be faced with far more humility and critical acumen than ever before. If Halliday had little sympathy for talk of failed gods, he was equally impatient with the “vacuous radicalisms” and romanticized revival of tattered revolutionary ideals that permeate too much of the left, including—or perhaps especially— the anti-globalization and solidarity movements. The idealization of violence (“the second intifada has been a disaster for the Palestinians”); the eschewing of long-term political organizing in favor of dramatic but impotent protests; the failure to study the complex and blood-soaked trajectory of the past century’s revolutions; the Pavlovian identification with virtually every oppositional movement, regardless of its real political aims: all of this was, in Halliday’s view, the road to both tragedy and farce. “The anti-globalization movement has taken over a critique of capitalism without…reflecting on what actually happened in the 20th century,” he told an interviewer in 2006. “I read the stuff coming out of Porto Alegre and my hair falls out.”

For despite communism’s commitment to, and partial achievement of, certain economic and social values (including a planned economy, women’s equality and secularism)—values that, Halliday believed, must be preserved—its record of murder and authoritarianism could not be evaded. “The history of revolution in modern times is one not only of resistance, heroism and idealism,” he wrote in 2003, “but also of terrible suffering and human disaster, of chaos and incompetence under the guise of revolutionary transformation, of the distortion of the finest ideals by corrupt and murderous leaders, and of the creation of societies that are far more oppressive and inefficient than those they seek to overthrow.” What distinguished Halliday’s argument, however, was his insistence that these failures could not be rationalized as the divergence between “Marxist theory and communist practice”; twentieth-century revolution must be judged an inevitable failure, he concluded.

Thus Halliday rejected all “what if” forms of analysis: what if Lenin had not died, or Bukharin had come to power, or the Germans had turned to the left instead of to the Nazis. (These are questions that, I admit, still haunt me.) He did not believe that a more liberalized version of communism could have prevented the collapse of the Soviet Union. In his view, the key issue— one that many leftists want to avoid—is that communism’s “failure was necessary, not contingent.” This was because of four elements that were central to any communist program and, he argued, to Marxism itself: “the authoritarian concept of the State; the mechanistic idea of Progress; the myth of Revolution; and the instrumental character of Ethics.” (However, Halliday did not—at least as far as I know—ever adequately explain the relationship between the socialist tradition that grew out of the Enlightenment and the fatal flaws of communism.)

A kind of ethical wasteland was, in his view, socialism’s greatest failure. No socialist state, at least none derived from the Bolshevik revolution, had developed institutions that defended the rights of the individual or articulated any “justifiable criteria” for the use “of violence and state coercion.” The Russian Revolution had led not to a withering away of the state but, rather, to the establishment of fearsome regimes with almost unlimited powers to control, repress and terrorize their citizens. Halliday added tartly that many leftists “appear not to have noticed this…an index of how little they have learnt, or have noticed the sufferings of others. Unless and until they do, they have no right to claim that they are advancing the cause of human emancipation.”

The seriousness of such revolutionary failures, the massiveness of such defeats, led Halliday to revisit even such cherished notions as internationalism and solidarity: not as values but as practices. In a brilliant 2008 essay called “Revolutionary Internationalism and Its Perils,” he noted that internationalism, though always heralded by revolutionaries, has historically divided rather than united the left (think of the First, Second and Third Internationals, the Sino-Soviet split, etc.). And he noted a fascinating if counterintuitive process: it is nationalism, not its opposite, which has “spread across the world as a transnational force, crossing boundaries and cultures, to become the universally accepted normative code of modern politics.” At the same time, internationalism had, “in the practice of twentieth century revolutions, become an instrument of states”—had been used, that is, to further the interests and fortify the power of individual states rather than to create global unity. Within this dialectic, Halliday wrote, lies “much of the dynamic, and not a little of the tragedy, of the politics of the past century.” Stirring calls for international solidarity will have to confront this history, and these contradictions, if they wish to move from rhetoric to reality.

* * *

From the time of his break with the New Left Review (and haunted, I suspect, by the bitter fates of slaughtered friends in Iran, Lebanon and elsewhere), Halliday increasingly, and consistently, affirmed the defense of others’ rights—to civil, intellectual and political freedoms, to self-determination, to an unfettered press, to women’s equality, to human dignity and bodily integrity—as the nonnegotiable foundation of solidarity: “The concept of solidarity presupposes that of rights, and the two were so combined, in rhetoric and policy, in the French revolution.” But he opened a circa-2007 essay called “The Fate of Solidarity: Uses and Abuses” with a troubling observation: “In the course of the twentieth century something strange, and distorting, appears to have happened to the concept of ‘solidarity.’” He traced the circuitous history of solidarity—and the left’s practice of it—from the French Revolution through the era of colonialism to the anti-imperialist independence movements and the fall of communism. “Among the many ironies of this process has been the way in which solidarity has been declared with states, movements, and individuals who in their practice deny the very concepts of rights on which the solidarity is supposedly justified in the first place,” he argued. “At the same time, the ideal and practice of solidarity has been turned against those, in the communist movement, who most sought to espouse it.” To declare solidarity while ignoring human rights abuses and the suffering they entail was the worst sort of empty posturing.

For Halliday, to evade the concept of rights was to reject the very notion of a shared humanity—a tendency that, he argued, had only increased since 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq. Indeed, a weird convergence had transpired, whereby the right (George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Alberto Gonzales) joined with Islamists, jihadis and their Western supporters in a mutually enthusiastic denigration of human rights, an embrace of “moral particularism” and a rejection of the laws of war. (From there it is a very short step—really no step at all— to waterboarding, Guantánamo, suicide bombings, and the murder of UN and humanitarian aid workers.) What made this more repellent was that each side proudly proclaimed its internationalist commitments while trampling them to death.

Halliday also questioned the very idea of revolution, and of whether it will prove to be the best way—either ethically or practically—to transform global capital in the twenty-first century. “We are much more certain about the structures, and inherent inequities, in the present system than we are about the alternatives, and the ways to get there,” he admitted in a 2003 essay. Had the traditional opposition between reform and revolution led to productive change, or was it a historic dead end? In any case, he noted, it was late modern capitalism, not revolutionary socialism, that had “formed the global vision of the future” in the 1990s; to succeed, a radical critique of the existing order would have to reverse this momentum and “wrest the initiative within a world of growing inequality and rancor.” This would necessitate the creation of new ideas, new strategies, new ethics and a new capacity for realism in place of reliance on 100-year-old truisms. Even so, it remains to be seen whether revolution—and, if so, what kind—can “fulfill the promise, in terms of economic distribution and the implementation of rights, which modernity has always propounded.” The explosions in the Arab world since December 2010 (and in Iran in 2009)—stirring and heartbreaking, inspiring and ominous—have proved how vital Halliday’s questions, hopes and doubts remain.

Fred Halliday did not live to see the democratic uprisings that have swept the Arab world, which seems like a cruel irony. (One might think of Moses gazing at the Promised Land, except that Halliday didn’t believe in promised lands.) In the days since, it is his voice—calm, knowledgeable, realistic, empathic yet sharply honest—that has been so sorely needed: to explicate the meanings of those events, to look beneath their surfaces, to place them within history, to discover their political and ethical contradictions, just as he did after 9/11. In a lovely essay written in 2005, Halliday praised his intellectual mentors, the Marxist historians Maxime Rodinson and Isaac Deutscher, for their skepticism, universalism, wisdom and independence. “Amid a world scarred by state and terrorist violence and debased public debate,” he wrote, these men—these values—are necessary “more than ever.” The same could be said of Halliday and his incisive yet generous intelligence; I never met the man, but I can’t stop missing him.

Susie Linfield, The Nation

#halliday #linfield

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kevinpolowy · 6 years

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'Blade Runner 2049': See how they pulled off that stunning threesome scene and Sean Young's CGI return (exclusive)

Warning: Blade Runner 2049 spoilers below.

yahoo

In a film full of eye-popping effects and breathtaking cinematography, one scene stands above all others in Blade Runner 2049. Agent K (Ryan Gosling) watches as his holographic A.I. girlfriend Joi (Ana de Armas) “merges” with flesh-and-bone femme fatale Mariette (Mackenzie Davis) so Joi and K can physically consummate their love. (Watch the scene exclusively above.)

“Honestly, it was so difficult to do,” director Denis Villeneuve admitted to Yahoo Entertainment during a recent Facebook Live interview. “On set it was [done with] very precise choreography. Then I put all the pressure on the shoulders on the VFX crew.”

Creating this fluid, hybrid “strange third woman,” as Villeneuve called her, was a perfect marriage of old-school acting technique and new-school effects wizardry. De Armas and Davis spent three days filming the scene, painstakingly mimicking each other’s movements. Then the effects house Moving Picture Company, lead by VFX supervisor Richard Clegg, spent the better part of a year digitally layering the actresses’ performances using the footage combined with 3-D scans of the women.

“I wanted the actors to be free. I said to my crew, I really want to protect the acting because I was looking for very specific emotions coming from both actresses,” explained Villeneuve, whose filmography also includes Arrival, Sicario, and Prisoners.

There was plenty of pressure on de Armas and Davis to execute the movements in exacting fashion, and they would alternate takes over the three days it took to complete the sequence. “One person would do part of it, and then the other person would take their place,” Davis explained to us (watch below).

yahoo

“We were actually fighting because [neither] of us wanted to be the second one,” said de Armas, with Davis adding, “Because we had to perfectly match each other’s motions.” Going second meant the actress would have an iPad screen in her sightline where she could see her body superimposed on her co-star’s in real time.

The scene marks not just a technical triumph for Villeneuve but an emotional high point for the film. “It was important for me that the scene would be erotic but also mysterious and almost frightening,” the filmmaker said. “Because it becomes almost frightening to see that ghost coming out the merge of both women. I didn’t want it to look gadgety. I wanted it to free analog and feel real.”

And like many of film’s greatest sex scenes, Villeneuve’s sci-fi spin on the ménage à trois is sensually fulfilling despite not showing any actual sex. “I wanted to keep the sense of the scene, which is about human contact and about intimacy. And not being distracted by nudity. It needed to be poetic.” (Plus, let’s face it, it would probably have taken VFX another few years.)

In another of the sequel’s most surprising and spellbinding moments, Villeneuve, Clegg, and MPC digitally resurrected Rachael, the love interest of Agent Deckard (Harrison Ford) played by Sean Young in the original 1982 Blade Runner. (Watch the making-of clip from MPC below.)

“That also is state-of-the-art computer animation. And that took a year [as well],” the director said.

To capture Rachael’s return, Villeneuve enlisted Loren Peta, a performance double who is the same height and proportions as Young. “We studied Sean’s movements in the first movie,” he said. “And then she did the scene with Harrison because I wanted Harrison to have a real person in front of him.”

Also on set was Young, who initially had misgivings over the sequel, once even calling for a boycott of the film if she was invited back. “It was important for me, because we were bringing back Sean from the past, I wanted Sean to be there with me and to give me advice,” Villeneuve said. “And just to be there guiding me with subtle details.”

Like the threesome, the return of Rachael, who replicant technologist and tycoon Niander Wallace (Jared Leto) revives in an attempt to extract intel from Deckard, is a melding of practical and visual effects. The body is real, but the face is CGI-generated.

“It’s never been done like that. It’s a landmark scene [with] what} we were able to achieve,” Villeneuve said, adding that he wanted to make sure the VFX team executed the graphics more seamlessly than Tarkin in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. “During the making of the film I saw Rogue One, and I immediately called my VFX supervisor and said we need to make it better than that. … I admire and respect the [Rogue One] filmmaker and the artists, but it took me out of the movie.”

The intense work paid off; in the end, Villeneuve was thrilled by his team’s results. “People that saw the movie don’t think it’s computer-generated, they think it’s a real human being.”

yahoo

Read more on Yahoo Entertainment:

The 50 best movies of 2017

‘Blade Runner 2049’ underperformance at box office a ‘mystery’ to Denis Villeneuve despite career-best reviews

‘Blade Runner 2049’ star and Daryl Hannah doppelgänger Mackenzie Davis used to cosplay as Pris

#movie:blade-runner-2049 #Mackenzie Davis #_revsp:wp.yahoo.movies.us #Superfan #_uuid:8a971550-0f20-329c-9a9b-55bd9ea41872 #video #Ana de Armas #_lmsid:a0Vd000000AE7lXEAT #Sean Young #_author:Kevin Polowy #News #denis villeneuve #Interviews #Blade Runner

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caffeinated-fae · 4 years

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The TBR Book Tag

Join me as a stare into the void that is my TBR! #BookBlogger

Danni tagged me over on _ForBooksSake in The TBR Book Tag, and I am honestly a little scared to answer these questions because it will force me to look into the void that I call my TBR. 2020 is all about doing things that scare me, so join me as I stare into the void and try not to drown in the infinite piles of books that stare back. Psst. Give her blog a follow. She’s AWESOME!

1 – How do…

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jacobnsteel84 · 7 years

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#WomenBoycottTwitter: Rose McGowan's suspension prompts protest

Anna Paquin, Alyssa Milano and Mark Ruffalo among users joining one-day protest against treatment of women on social media platform

Actors and activists are calling for users to boycott Twitter for a day after the service suspended Rose McGowan for violating its terms and policies.

Related: The banning of Rose McGowan shows nothing's changed at Twitter | Hannah Jane Parkinson

Continue reading... from Trading Tips http://ift.tt/2xBRYHs

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stephaniefchase · 7 years

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Bajan News Cap 8/27/2017

Good Morning #realdreamchasers. Here is your daily news cap for Sunday, August 27th, 2017. There is a lot to read and digest so take your time. Remember you can read full articles via Barbados Today (BT), or by purchasing a Sunday Sun Newspaper (SS).

INNISS TELLS COLLEAGUES TO HEED ADVICE ON THE ECONOMY - An outspoken Government minister has issued a stern warning to his colleagues and other policymakers to heed the advice of experts and take the action needed to bring about a turnaround in the country’s economic fortunes. Minister of Industry, International Business, Commerce and Small Business Development Donville Inniss contended that while the advice is not always what politicians want to hear, it can be useful and should not be ignored. His comments came on the heels of regional economist Marla Dukharan warning at a public forum organized by the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Barbados (ICAB) on Wednesday evening, that painful remedies would be required to fix the ailing economy. She said government had to pick its poison now – whether a homegrown austerity programme or one from the International Monetary Fund. The former RBC Group economist submitted that based on similar experiences in the region, if the “reset button” is pressed now and necessary measures implemented to reverse the high debt, low reserves, wide fiscal deficit and falling international reserves, the island’s economic health could be stabilized within three years. Today, addressing an ICAB-organized international business update seminar at the Hilton Barbados Resort, Inniss said: “There may be those who may be critical of people like her and her comments, but I hold the view that we must listen to people like her. We must not shoot the messenger.” He said he was “satisfied that a part of the conversation of moving the country forward and a part of the action plan has to be, first and foremost, for people at my level and position to be willing to be fully engaged, listen and, more importantly, take some damn action to really transform this nation once and for all.” During Wednesday night’s event at which Dukharan spoke, president of the Barbados Private Sector Association, Charles Herbert called for decisive, fair and firm leadership as well as the political will to do what was needed to save the economy. He lamented Government’s lack of implementation as one of the major hindrances to correcting Barbados’ economic problems. (BT)

UNION-BUSTING - The Chief Labour Officer will investigate claims of “union-busting tactics” following a call from Barbados Workers’ Union (BWU) general secretary Toni Moore to boycott Cost-U-Less. The disclosure came from Minister of Labour Esther Byer Suckoo who spoke to the Sunday Sun after Moore hit out at Cost-U-Less during the union’s annual delegates’ conference at Solidarity House yesterday. After hinting at exposing anti-union companies two weeks ago, Moore ripped into the retail giant over several issues, especially its decision to keep its store at Welches, St Thomas, open four hours after a national shutdown was recommended for Tropical Storm Harvey on August 18. Speaking following a stirring rendition of We Shall Overcome by The Mighty Gabby, the general secretary said the song encouraged the union that the “struggle” must continue against those who “wish to entrap workers in a form of modern day slavery”. (SS)

CUSTOMS NO CLOSER TO BRA FIT - Workers at customs and excise department still believe that the Barbados Revenue Authority (BRA) will be an uncomfortable fit for them. That is why the transition to the BRA, which has been a bone of contention for the past two years, has not been completed. President of the National Union of Public Workers (NUPW), Akanni McDowall, told the SUNDAY SUN that even before signing any option forms to secure transition over to Government’s main revenue collection agency can be considered, there’s still the unresolved issue of appointments. “Customs officers are still to be appointed after yeoman service. Many officers have been acting for extremely long periods without being appointed or without being given the opportunity to act in higher posts,” McDowall said. (SS)

TRADE UNIONS ISSUE WARNING ON NSRL - General Secretary of the Barbados Workers Union, Toni Moore this morning used the platform of her union’s 76th Annual Delegates Conference to send Government a warning of sorts on its National Social Responsibility Levy (NSRL). At the conference being held at the union’s Solidarity House Headquarters, she warned against taking the silence from the movement in the past weeks since the meeting of the Social Partnership, as a sign that they have accepted Government’s position. Her comments were echoed by President of the National Union of Public Workers, Akanni McDowall. who noted that the Freundel Stuart Administration was well aware that public servants had not received a salary increase in almost a decade, and, this year with the introduction of the NSRL, parents will find the cost of back to school to be more burdensome. Likewise, President of the Barbados Secondary Teacher Union, Mary Redman expressed dissatisfaction with the state of Trade Union / Government relations, suggesting that she has never seen it at this level. She told the annual delegates conference that the reality was that unions were being aggressively attacked, dismissed and insulted as being noisemakers, vagabonds and enemies of the state. Finance Minister, Chris Sinckler, in the Budget on May 30, announced that the NSRL, which was introduced in September 2016, would move from two per cent to ten per cent effective July 1. He said then it would result in “increased revenue of $291 million for a full financial year and $218 million for the remaining nine months of the current fiscal year”. The NSRL was imposed on goods imported into Barbados and on domestically manufactured goods. It was designed to finance the burgeoning cost of health care on the island and to assist with maintaining a clean environment. Last month, unionized workers staged a work-to-rule and they were eventually joined by the Private Sector Association in a national protest march, in an attempt to force the Stuart administration to accede to a coping subsidy proposed by the unions. (BT)

MEDICAL SCHOOLS IN WAR OF WORDS - Conflict is brewing between the two offshore medical schools in Barbados. The three-month-old Washington University of Barbados (WUB) is accusing the American University of Barbados (AUB), which has been operating here for six years, of engaging in a smear campaign against WUB and “stealing” its students. The AUB has denied the claims and said its sole focus was on enhancing the school’s brand and promoting Barbados. An upset Gopi Venkat, chief executive officer of WUB, which is located at Casa Grande Hotel, St Philip, said that since a video surfaced three weeks ago of their former dean complaining about certain situations at the school, messages had been circulating on social media bearing the name of an official of the AUB and carrying its logo, saying that WUB was a fake medical school. (SS)

BROOMES: MIXED MESSAGES - Former Principal Jeff Broomes is accusing president of the Barbados Secondary Teachers Union (BSTU), Mary Redman, of sending mixed messages concerning the marking of school-based assessments (SBAs). “For the last few years, the president of the BSTU has been telling her teachers not to correct SBAs, saying they’re not doing it, but now there’s a problem with the SBAs this year and [even though] the investigation has now started, she’s in the paper blaming CXC,” he said. “What has happened this year is nothing new and I suspect when the investigation is done, it will be a computer glitch.” Broomes was delivering the Astor B. Watts lunchtime lecture on Friday at the Democratic Labour Party’s George Street, Belleville, St Michael headquarters. (SS)

HOUSE PRICES ‘TO TAKE FURTHER HIT’ - Barbadians can expect house prices to drop by at least ten per cent in the next year or so, a well-known estate agent has said. Julie Dash of Hannah Properties was responding to a survey by an Australian removals company which put Barbados second in a list of least affordable places in the world to buy a house. Called The World’s Most (Un)Affordable Places to Live, the study by Assured Removalist combined recent worldwide data on average annual salary, income tax and average house prices in order to measure house affordability and found that the property market in Barbados was overpriced. Barbados was quoted at a house price to income ratio of 133.77 behind only the Pacific island nation of Papua New Guinea. (SS)

RETAILERS REPORT SLUGGISH BACK TO SCHOOL SALES - Bridgetown retailers are reporting sluggish business as Barbadians shop for the new school term which will commence on September 12. Store Coordinator at Cave Shepherd Broad Street, Mark Clarke told Barbados TODAY whereas customers in previous years would have bought five uniforms, they are being more conscientious in their purchases. Cave Shepherd is one of the retailers that have removed the National Social Responsibility Levy (NSRL) at cash point in an effort to ease the burden to consumers. However, consumers have not been coming out in their droves for the back-to-school season. The popular retail duty-free shopping store says it is offering discounts on school uniforms and supplies to drum up sales. Retailers such as Woolworth and Shopper’s Paradise have also been offering discounts. Store Owner of Shoppers Paradise Kiran Venasimaz said that 45-year-old retail store is trying to accommodate the needs of their loyal customers. She also revealed that some consumers started their shopping early by applying for layaway plans at the end of the previous school term. Managing Director of Woolworth, Martin Bryan, noted that shoppers are being more cost conscious, opting to browse for cheaper alternatives and purchase fewer items. Although his Prince William Henry Street store has seen a steady flow of customers, Bryan noted that people are shopping with a discerning eye. Meanwhile, supervisor of Shoe Locker, Jacqueline Maloney, noted that although the shoppers are feeling the weight of hefty taxation, they have no choice but to purchase the necessities. (BT)

DOTTIN: ACT NOW - The distribution of drugs is driving a parallel economy in Barbados. At the same time it is also fuelling crime and disorder. These strong words of warning from the island’s former top cop Darwin Dottin. “It is an issue that requires an urgent and sustained response”. Dottin made the comments while speaking to the SUNDAY SUN on the upsurge in gun-related crime which has been plaguing the country for much of this year. (SS)

SOCIAL PARTNERSHIP TO HEAR REPORT ON GANGS, GUN VIOLENCE - The social partnership will soon be getting an idea of just how serious gang violence and gun-related crime is in Barbados. Officials from the Attorney General’s Office are expected to make a presentation at the next subcommittee meeting of the Social Partnership next month. The presentation was to have been done last Friday but was postponed due to the unavailability of Minister of Home Affairs Adriel Brathwaite. That meeting was still a valuable one for the Social Partnership, as a special presentation on disaster management and preparedness was conducted by the Department of Emergency Management (DEM). (SS)

JAMAICA – POLICE CONDEMN VIDEO SHOWING FEMALE OFFICER BERATING SUPERIOR - Members of the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) have expressed concern that a video being circulated on social media allegedly showing a female officer berating her superior for giving her a hard time, saying it does not reflect the professionalism of the Force. In a statement, the JCF said that the video will be investigated and the required mediatory or disciplinary action taken. It said that the video does not reflect the image, training and professionalism of the JCF and is encouraging members to access counselling services through the Medical Services and the Chaplaincy Services Branch. It said peer counsellors and volunteer chaplains are also available at all police stations. “If it is worthwhile, we will meet with both of them to see if we can come up with an amicable solution . . . but sometimes, it’s best to separate both and have them in different locations. We deal with it on a case by case basis,” said the Chief Chaplain, Gary Budhoo Fletcher. (BT)

TWO TONS - It’s been almost 18 years since two Barbadians scored a century in the same Test innings. Kraigg Brathwaite and Shai Hope did it yesterday to give West Indies the advantage over England after the second day of the second Test at Headingley, Leeds. Brathwaite, 24, scored 134 to complete his sixth Test hundred and third away from home, while Hope, 23, made an unbeaten 147 – his first Test century as the Caribbean side closed the day on 329 for five in response to England’s 258. It was the first time that two Barbadians passed three digits in the same Test innings since December 1999 when Sherwin Campbell and Adrian Griffith featured in an opening stand of 276 against New Zealand at Seddon Park in Hamilton. (SS)

TRIDENTS HOME LEG READY FOR TAKE-OFF - All systems are in place for the Barbados Tridents home leg of the Hero Caribbean Premier League, which bowls off on Tuesday, August 29 with a massive clash against Guyana Amazon Warriors at Kensington Oval. Months of intense preparations will culminate in a week of exciting cricket and explosive entertainment, when the Tridents go in search of a spot in the playoffs with matches against St Lucia Stars (Aug. 31), Trinbago Knight Riders (Sep. 2) and St Kitts and Nevis Patriots (Sep. 3). Barbados Tridents CEO, Jason Harper, believes the four matches will provide a fitting climax to the preliminary campaign of the tournament dubbed “the biggest party in sport”, and leave a lasting legacy for the country’s sporting culture. The four matches will bring together world class stars like Chris Gayle of St Kitts and Nevis Patriots, Eoin Morgan of Barbados Tridents and Dwayne Bravo and Sunil Narine of Trinbago Knight Riders, providing for a blockbuster line-up of cricketing talent. Off the field, excitement is also expected to be high quality with several initiatives being planned to ensure that that the Tridents home leg of the Hero Caribbean Premier League provides a varied and unparalleled entertainment experience. Tridents sit in fifth spot in the six-team standings on four points – just outside the playoff positions – and will use the coming games to secure their spot in the next round. The 2014 champions, Barbados Tridents will put on show the likes of captain Kieron Pollard, New Zealander Kane Williamson along with Morgan, who joined the squad in time for the home leg, and are confident of a positive outcome. (BT)

LOOK FUH POINTS TAKE TWO TITLES - Look Fuh Points have completed another successful hockey hunt. No points were at stake but they found a second straight men’s title while A Badd Connection (ABC) regained their women’s crown when the 32nd Barbados Hockey Festival climaxed last night. ABC prevailed 4-3 on penalties over Du Badd Crew in the women’s final at the Barbados Football Association’s AstroTurf, Wildey after a 1-1 stalemate at the end of regulation time. Look Fah Points (LFP) were emphatic 3-0 winners in the marquee men’s final over UWI Blackbirds, who also lost 2-0 to the same opponents in the 2016 championship match. (SS)

KING WINS ON PRO DEBUT - Barbadian boxer Keithland King has started his professional career with a bang. He defeated Rob Mitchell of England by a knockout at the Mark C. Marin Centre, Antilles School in the US Virgin Islands recently. When SUNSPORT caught up with King, he said he was happy to have had such a positive result in his debut match. “My original opponent pulled out at the last minute, but I went out there and gave it my best shot,” he said. (SS)

MINISTRY OF CULTURE EXTENDS CONDOLENCES ON PASSING OF CARIFESTA EXHIBITOR - The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Youth and the CARIFESTA Secretariat have confirmed the death of Petal Frank of Guyana. They have also extended sincere condolences to her family and the Guyana contingent to CARIFESTA on her passing. An Independent exhibitor at the CARIFESTA Grand Market at the Lloyd Erskine Sandiford Centre, Frank fell ill on Wednesday and was taken to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital where she passed away on Friday as a result of diabetic complications. The authorities said the CARIFESTA family is saddened on the passing of Ms Frank. (BT)

A PLAYGROUND OF LESSONS - Tradition versus progress through education, the rites of passage from a boy to a man, nature verses nurture, family conflict and the roles of each member are some of the themes explored in the play Playground. Written by Dr Frank McField, Cayman Islands' “most accomplished playwright” and staged at the Frank Collymore Hall on Thursday night for CARIFESTA XIII, the play suggested several lessons during Act 1, which left members of the audience wanting to see more. (Let me say here that only one act was done because of the limitations of CARIFESTA, in terms of time.) Nevertheless, the props, costumes, scenes and the actors did a really good job in getting the messages across. The concerns and hopes of Lucille (Merta Day) were conveyed, the trepidation of her young son Willie (Aiden Watler), whom she wanted to better his chances by being educated in England, and the nonchalant but adamant resolve of her husband Tom (Matt Brown). (SS)

OF MASKS AND DRUMS AT PELICAN - Thursday night's showcase at Pelican Craft Village had all the elements of a great event. Fantastic weather, skilful acts, and a sizeable crowd that was ready, ramped up and raring to sample some of the rich culture of sister nations St Kitts and Nevis along with Antigua and Barbuda.

When one of the CARIFESTA XIII fringe events got underway, though a bit late, people of all ages, races and social backgrounds were already situated on steps, walls or whatever vantage point they could plant themselves to take in the evening’s proceedings. First for the night was a dramatic piece by the Poinciana Theatre Productions out of St Kitts called When Man Mek Woman Heart Like Iron. (SS)

CARIBBEAN DANCE - Local talent Dancin’ Africa and Jamaica’s L’Acadco were awesome as they lifted a large crowd at CARIFESTA XIII Dance Caribbean! In The Contemporary at the newly refurbished Wildey Gymnasium on Thursday night. Dancin’ Africa opened the night with a piece entitled Black Lives Matter, an energetic and poignant depiction of the horrors inflicted on Blacks throughout history. The stifling of black consciousness and speech and societal suffocation ended with the dancers casting off dampening white cloaks and freeing their taped mouths. The scaffolding on the stage evoked physical and psychological memories of slavery and also projected scenes of hanging and crucifixions. Ironically, those “slaves” on the scaffold helped to lift some of the modern-day sufferers from their oppression. (SS)

HALL DOCUMENTARY CAPTIVATING - All eyes were locked onto the screen at the Olympus VIP Theatres yesterday as scores of people showed up to watch the movie Hall. The thrilling documentary told the tale of notorious Barbadian fugitive Winston Hall who was one of four men charged with the murder of plantation owner Cyril Sisnett in 1985. Unlike the other men, Hall was able to make many daring escapes from maximum security, often sending the island’s law enforcement agencies on several manhunts. During his time on the run, Hall was able to make it as far as the Grenadines and he even made Trinidad his home during one of his stints on the run. Yesterday, from around 2 p.m., there was a capacity audience at the cinema as some people had to be turned away. Those who were fortunate enough to get a seat could not take their eyes away from the screen. They laughed, and looked on in amazement at Hall’s elusiveness. By the end of the local documentary, produced by Hall-e-wood, everyone gave the production a round of applause. (SS)

That’s all for today folks there are 127 days left in the year Shalom! #thechasefiles #dailynewscaps Follow us on Twitter, Facebook & Instagram for your daily news. #bajannewscaps #newscapsbystephaniefchase

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junker-town · 7 years

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P.J. Fleck’s first Minnesota team is a Big Ten West wildcard. This will be fun.

The fired-up coach’s Gophers could contend right away.

Sometimes the projections are dead on. My early-2016 projections had Minnesota finishing 8-4 with a No. 42 S&P+ ranking, and the Gophers went 9-4 with a No. 42 S&P+ ranking. First-year head coach Tracy Claeys hit the mark set for previous head coach Jerry Kill, and his 2016 signing class was a little better than what Kill tended to sign.

It’s hard to hope for more than that out of the gates, isn’t it? Claeys was seen as an uninspired hire, but as I wrote in last year’s Minnesota preview, a lack of creativity doesn’t automatically correlate to a lack of quality.

If the Gophers have their house in order from the beginning of the season, and if they're decent at closing out games, an 8-1 start is on the table.

Per S&P+, they have a below-50 percent chance of winning in only one game in the first nine, and while there are a few tossups (and you can't expect to win all of those), if they handle their business in September, October could have magnitude. And if Claeys is able to stick a nine-win total on the board, then I'm curious where his recruiting goes from there.

Done and done.

But.

Have never been more proud of our kids. I respect their rights & support their effort to make a better world! 〽️

— T Claeys (@t_claeys) December 16, 2016

Claeys was fired in January. An alleged sexual assault took place early in the season, and by the time a Title IX investigation was completed in December, 10 players had been suspended. Frustrated by a lack of communication from the university, players announced a boycott in the run-up to their bowl against Washington State. Claeys announced unequivocal support for his players after warning them that a boycott would come across as “pro-sexual assault, which we’re not,” acknowledging the stance might get him fired.

The boycott ended, and Minnesota knocked off Wazzu, but on January 3, Claeys was indeed fired.

And needing to stick the landing in the wake of a threatened “countless transfers,” the school did. From 2014-16, Minnesota’s recruiting classes averaged a ranking of 55.3, per the 247Sports Composite. Fleck’s Western Michigan averaged 71st, basically only a couple of three-star recruits behind, despite residence in the MAC.

Fleck inherited a team that had gone 4-8 and ranked 109th in S&P+ in Bill Cubit’s last year, and he underwent a full-fledged youth movement. WMU went 1-11 with a No. 117 ranking in 2013, but 8-5 with rankings in the 50s in each of the next two years. As Fleck’s recruits became upperclassmen, the Broncos surged to 13-1 with a No. 35 ranking in 2016.

Fleck has a schtick. He might be the most outwardly energetic coach in football. It’s not for everybody, and depending on whom you talk to, it might have prevented him from a more marquee job. But in recruiting, motivation, tactics, and buy-in, he proved about as much as he possibly could’ve in Kalamazoo. The results were there. And while the Minnesota roster thinned, “countless transfers” did not occur.

The BIg Ten West race has an interesting shape this offseason. There’s a clear leader, two clear bottom teams, and who-the-hell-knows in between. Take Athlon, for instance: its preview ranks Wisconsin 10th, Purdue and Illinois deep into the 80s, and the four other teams between 41st and 54th.

My own projections are similar: Wisconsin 11th, Illinois 85th, Purdue 87th, and the other four between 37th and 48th. Three clear tiers. Northwestern’s experience could make the Wildcats a top-30 team, Nebraska has more upside than its rivals but is replacing two-thirds of last year’s offense, and Fleck’s culture change makes Minnesota a high-variability team within that cluster.

In recent years, Minnesota and WMU were increasingly similar in quality, but their positive traits were reversed. WMU ranked in the Off. S&P+ in each of the last two years but was dragged down by its defense; Minnesota hasn’t cracked the Off. S&P+ top 50 since 2007 but ranked in the Def. S&P+ top 25 in each of the last two years.

Fleck acknowledged the disparity by bringing offensive coordinator Kirk Ciarrocca from Kalamazoo, but attempting a defensive upgrade; former Rutgers and Arkansas coordinator Robb Smith takes over on that side.

Fleck was a dynamic recruiter at WMU, and while that hasn’t immediately translated in Minneapolis — his 2018 class currently ranks 23rd per 247, but that’s mainly because he’s already gotten 19 commits; the per-recruit average is barely ahead of last year’s pace — odds are good there will be an uptick. He won’t have to strip this house to its studs. If this transfusion of energy translates, Minnesota could become the No. 1 contender to Wisconsin’s crown.

Or we might find out that only Fleck’s recruits truly respond to Fleck’s coaching, and the house gets stripped down. That option is still on the table.

2016 in review

2016 Minnesota statistical profile.

My postgame win expectancy measure (found on teams’ statistical profiles) takes the key stats from each game and announces, “With these stats, you could have expected to win this game X percent of the time.”

And per win expectancy, the Gophers’ 2016 had no surprising results. In only one of their four losses did they have a postgame win expectancy higher than 15 percent. In only one of their nine wins did they have an expectancy lower than 80 percent.

Sounds like a bunch of blowouts! But on the field, as opposed to on paper, Minnesota was rarely separated much from its opponent. The Gophers won four games by a touchdown or less and lost three. They were close to dramatic over- and underachievement and instead just ... achieved. Even the best loss (29-26 to Penn State, with 15 percent win expectancy) and worst win (34-32 over Rutgers with 80 percent win expectancy) seemed cut-and-dried on paper.

The results were similar for Fleck’s WMU: only one win with a less than 79 percent win expectancy, and the lone loss (24-16 to Wisconsin) producing a 30 percent win expectancy.

Odds are decent that a second head coaching change in two years could make the team a little bit more vulnerable to volatility.

Offense

Full advanced stats glossary.

Ciarrocca should like what he has inherited at Minnesota. His WMU offense was pretty straight-forward: run the ball on standard downs (67 percent of the time, 24th in the country), play it safe on rare passing downs (35 percent PD run rate, 45th), force teams to gang tackle, and operate with decent tempo. A lot of Fleck’s best recruits at WMU were running backs, and Ciarrocca used them. Granted, he also deployed star Corey Davis effectively in play-action, but the run was the heart of the attack.

It was the same for Minnesota, only with a slower tempo and even more passing-downs rushes. The Gophers wanted to grind away and set a table for their defense, but with two sophomore running backs, one reliable receiver, and a line so banged up and shuffled around that not a single player started all 13 games, that wasn’t always possible.

Inconsistent personnel meant inconsistent production: Minnesota scored 29 or more points eight times but scored 17 or fewer on four occasions. And after an October surge (37 points per game against Maryland, Rutgers, Illinois, and Purdue), the well dried up (20 points per game over the last four games).

Photo by Sean M. Haffey/Getty Images

Rodney Smith

The combination of stability and experience could be helpful. Those sophomore backs are now juniors, and both Rodney Smith and Shannon Brooks had their moments last year; during that 37 PPG run, Smith averaged 6 yards per carry and 127 yards per game, while Brooks averaged 6.9 against Colorado State and Penn State.

Of the eight linemen who started at least one game last year, only four return, but let’s just say Minnesota won’t lack for girth. Not only are all four of those players now upperclassmen (two juniors, two seniors), but they also average 6’5, 325 pounds. And they’re now led by Ed Warinner, Ohio State’s former line coach and one of the best in the business.

That Ohio State’s line grew a little glitchier when Warinner took on coordinator duties in Columbus probably isn’t a coincidence, but in theory he can focus on his biggest strength. And Minnesota’s run game could get awfully mean, awfully quickly.

Photo by Hannah Foslien/Getty Images

Brandon Lingen

Of course, that will only matter so much if the Gophers can’t throw. And the passing game is a total mystery. Longtime starter Mitch Leidner is gone; senior-to-be Conor Rhoda went 7-for-15 while filling in for an injured Leidner against Maryland last year ... and that’s basically the extent of Minnesota’s QB experience.

If Rhoda isn’t the starter this fall, it will probably be mid-three-star sophomore Demry Croft, who maybe eked ahead this spring. The main job will be to stick the ball into Smith’s and Brooks’ bellies and hope that the run works well enough that they can throw over the top to Rashad Still. Still is a 6’5 target who caught 19 of 39 balls last year but averaged 18.3 yards per catch.

The loss of steady Drew Wolitarsky will hurt; he was one of the most-targeted No. 1 receivers in the country — he had 102 targets, 63 more than No. 2 target Still, and he was the only guy with a success rate over 50 percent. There will be a lot of pressure on someone like sophomore Tyler Johnson to provide a possession threat.

The return of tight end Brandon Lingen will help in this regard, at least. He caught 33 balls in 2015 but missed the last 10 games of 2016 with injury.

Defense

Smith’s track record at Arkansas was a bit confusing. His first Hog defense surged from 78th to seventh in Def. S&P+ in 2014. Arkansas was all sorts of disruptive up front, but once those pieces departed, he couldn’t find the same rhythm. His last two defenses ranked 65th and 64th, nearly equal to WMU’s No. 69 ranking in 2016.

If he requires disruption up front to succeed, though, he should find things to like about Minnesota. Tackle Steven Richardson is one of the most active interior guys in the conference; he recorded 11 tackles for loss and seven sacks last year, and opponents distracted by Richardson and Andrew Stelter allowed linebackers Jonathan Celestin and Blake Cashman (combined: 17.5 TFLs, 10 sacks, four breakups, three forced fumbles) to make plays as well.

Granted, in terms of known quantities, it gets thin up front after these four; the next leading tackler on the line (sophomore end Winston DeLattiboudere) made just 10.5 tackles last year.

Still, having four upperclassman play-makers is a good place to start. And for what it’s worth, both DeLattiboudere and Tai'yon Devers, another sophomore end, flashed major play-making potential in minimal time — they had just 15 tackles in 2016, but 6.5 of them came behind the line. And a third sophomore, former blue-chip linebacker Carter Coughlin, moved to rush end this spring as well. The potential is massive.

Photo by Adam Bettcher/Getty Images

Steven Richardson

Depth on the line will remain a concern until proven otherwise, but there could be even bigger issues in the back. Due to injury and suspensions, Minnesota had to do a lot of shuffling in the secondary — only two regulars played in all 13 games — and the fact that the Gophers finished 24th in Passing S&P+ was an accomplishment.

The return of safeties Antoine Winfield Jr. and Duke McGhee gives the Gophers steadiness despite the loss of Damarius Travis, but if either gets hurt, Minnesota could find itself relying on freshmen. Though corners Antonio Shenault, Adekunle Ayinde, and Coney Durr saw decent playing time, the best play-makers at CB (Jalen Myrick and KiAnte Hardin, who combined for 18 passes defensed) are gone. Redshirt freshman Kiondre Thomas had a nice spring and could be counted on sooner than later. Like, in Week 1.

Depth issues are a funny thing — you never know in advance if they’re going to bite you. If some sophomore ends and a couple of young defensive backs come through, Minnesota’s starting 11 could have all the activity up front and steadiness in the back that Smith requires. But the Gophers could also be a couple of poorly placed injuries away from a build toward 2018.

Mike Granse-USA TODAY Sports

Antoine Winfield Jr.

Special Teams

The Minnesota offense was inefficient, and the defense was thin enough to have its shaky moments. But the Gophers could count on special teams. They ranked sixth in Special Teams S&P+, powered by brilliant place-kicking from Emmit Carpenter (10-for-10 on field goals longer than 40 yards), tremendous returns from Jalen Myrick and KiAnte Hardin, and solid coverage units.

Carpenter’s return alone will likely keep this unit pretty high in the rankings. He’s brilliant, and punter Ryan Santoso isn’t too bad in his own right. But Minnesota will be starting over in the returns department, which could be worth at least a small slide in the rankings.

2017 outlook

2017 Schedule & Projection Factors

Date Opponent Proj. S&P+ Rk Proj. Margin Win Probability 31-Aug Buffalo 128 27.0 94% 9-Sep at Oregon State 54 -1.8 46% 16-Sep Middle Tennessee 89 13.7 79% 30-Sep Maryland 72 8.3 68% 7-Oct at Purdue 87 8.5 69% 14-Oct Michigan State 44 1.8 54% 21-Oct Illinois 85 12.8 77% 28-Oct at Iowa 48 -2.5 44% 4-Nov at Michigan State 44 -3.2 43% 11-Nov Nebraska 42 1.3 53% 18-Nov at Northwestern 37 -4.7 39% 25-Nov Wisconsin 11 -11.7 25%

Projected S&P+ Rk 47 Proj. Off. / Def. Rk 89 / 21 Projected wins 6.9 Five-Year S&P+ Rk 4.0 (49) 2- and 5-Year Recruiting Rk 52 / 55 2016 TO Margin / Adj. TO Margin* 8 / 7.2 2016 TO Luck/Game +0.3 Returning Production (Off. / Def.) 57% (45%, 68%) 2016 Second-order wins (difference) 8.7 (0.3)

Even though Claeys did a good job in his lone season, Minnesota did well in bringing Fleck to town, and I’m doubting he’ll end up in a Year Zero situation the way he did at WMU.

But this could end up a significant change in culture, and it’s hard to know how that will play out. Either it provides a bolt of energy, or it leads to a rebuilding year or two.

Of the Big Ten West’s middle four teams, Minnesota’s ceiling might be higher than anybody’s outside of Nebraska, but its floor for 2017 is probably the lowest, too. And a fascinating schedule features a whopping six games with S&P+ win probabilities between 39 and 54 percent each. There are few guaranteed wins and almost no guaranteed losses. A small number of injuries could make the difference between West contention and a 4-8 record.

Team preview stats

All power conference preview data to date.

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