Forgetting Citizenship: Australia Suspends Flights from India

2021/05/03 Leave a comment

Interesting arguments given that Australia is often cited as the model in Canada. That being said, Australia has been much more serious than Canada in its quarantine requirements and enforcement for all groups, not just South Asians:

As India is being devastated by COVID-19 at a daily rate of 400,000 cases, Australia has taken the decision to suspend all flights coming into the country till mid-month. The decision was reached by the Morrison government with the blessing of the State Premiers and the Labor opposition.

Not happy with banning flights from India, the Morrison government promises to be savage in punishing returnees who find ways to circumvent the ban (for instance, by traveling via a third country). Citizens who breach the travel ban can face up to five years imprisonment and fines up to $51,000. “We have taken drastic action to keep Australians safe,” explained the Treasurer Josh Frydenberg. The situation in India was “serious”; the decision had only been reached after considering the medical advice.

According to a statement from Health Minister Greg Hunt, it was “critical the integrity of the Australian public health and quarantine systems is protected and the number of COVID-19 cases in quarantine is reduced to a manageable level.”

The decision fails to carry any weight. It did not take long for more alert medical practitioners to wonder why the approach to India was being so selectively severe. Health commentator and GP Vyom Sharma thought the decision“incredibly disproportionate to the threat that it posed.” Sharma is certainly correct on this score in terms of international law, which requires the least restrictive or least intrusive way of protecting citizens.

Then there was the issue of the previous policies Canberra had adopted to countries suffering from galloping COVID-19 figures. A baffled Sharma wondered, “Why is it that India has copped this ban and no people who have come from America?” Former race discrimination commissioner Tim Soutphommasane seconds the suspicions. “We didn’t see differential treatment being extended to countries such as the United States, the UK, and any other European country even though the rates of infection were very high and the danger of its arrivals from those countries was very high.”

The Australian Human Rights Commission has also asked the federal government to justify its actions. “The government must show that these measures are not discriminatory and the only suitable way of dealing with the threat to public health.”

In the face of such behaviour, aggrieved citizens are left with few legal measures. Australia, among liberal democratic states, is idiosyncratic in refusing to adopt a charter of rights. Down Under, parliamentarians are supposedly wise and keen to uphold human rights till they think otherwise. (Human rights, the argument goes, would become the fodder of lawyers and judges, interfering with the absolute will of Parliament and the electors.) The Australian Constitution is hopelessly silent on the issue of citizenship. Left at the mercy of legislative regulation, Parliament and the executive can be disdainful towards their citizens without consequences.

One avenue remains the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Committee. On April 15, the UNHRC ruled on the case of two petitioners of FreeAndOpenAustralia.org (formerly StrandedAussies.org) that the Morrison government had to “facilitate and ensure their prompt return to Australia.”

Represented by the notable sage of international law Geoffrey Robertson QC, the petitioners argued that Australia was in breach of Articles 12(4) and 2(3) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The first article provides that no one shall be arbitrarily deprived of the right to enter his own country; the second provides for “effective” remedies to be granted to those whose rights and freedoms have been breached under the ICCPR. The petitioners also freely admitted that they had no issue with quarantining for 14 days on returning to Australia.

In the words of Free and Open Australia spokesperson Deb Tellis, the Commonwealth should “use its power to expand quarantine facilities, and end travel caps that are being dictated by the states. There are thousands of our fellow citizens suffering [the] loss of their relatives and loss of their jobs.”

The government has preferred a meaner, penny-pinching approach in coping with quarantine, reducing flights when needed rather than expanding facilities to accommodate a greater number of infected arrivals. The hotel quarantine system continues to receive effusive praise from Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison as being 99.99 percent effective. But it is impossible for him, and his ministers, to conceal the fact that they do not trust, and are unwilling, to use other facilities and expand existing ones.

Since last November, there have been 16 COVID-19 leaks across the cities of Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, and Perth from quarantine hotels. At this writing, another quarantine leak is being reported in Western Australia, involving the now customarily infected hotel security guard and the inevitable seepage into the community. The problem of airborne transmission continues to plague, as does the uneven provision of personal protective equipment. No national standard of quarantine has been formulated throughout the country, with each state adopting its own approach. Audits of the ventilation systems in many such hotels remain sketchy.

Western Australian Premier Mark McGowan, who recently imposed a lockdown of the Perth and Peel areas and may well do the same thing over the next few days, suggested that the Commonwealth be generous with some of its facilities. Why not use the RAAF Curtin Air Base, or the immigration detention centres of Yongah Hill and Christmas Island? “It’s kind of staring us in the face and there are things that could assist, it’s just that the Commonwealth doesn’t want to do it.”

The evidence so far is that facilities such as Howard Springs in the Northern Territory tend to work. It features single-storey cabins, segregated air conditioning systems, outdoor veranda space, and, in the vicinity, a fully functioning hospital. No leaks have been recorded. And location is everything: distant from densely populated areas. This government, however, is miserly on the issue of quarantine, an obligation it has transferred without constitutional justification to State premiers who fear both the virus and its electoral consequences.

Source: Forgetting Citizenship: Australia Suspends Flights from India

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With Great Demographics Comes Great Power: Why Population Will Drive Geopolitics

2021/05/03 Leave a comment

Same logic as with Canadian advocates for a much larger population such as the Century Initiative. But of course, should other countries adopt similar strategies, any “population race” will not change relative positions. And the geopolitical perspective is a limited one compared to broader perspectives of prosperity, quality of life and well-being:

Demographics may not be destiny, but for students of geopolitics, they come close. Although conventional measures of economic and military power often receive more attention, few factors influence the long-term competition between great powers as much as changes in the size, capabilities, and characteristics of national populations.

The United States is a case in point. In 1850, the United States was home to some 23 million people, 13 million fewer than France. Today, the U.S. population is close to 330 million, larger than the British, Dutch, French, German, and Italian populations combined. For more than a century, the United States has had the world’s largest skilled work force, and by measures such as mean years of adult schooling, it has long had among the world’s most highly educated populations. These favorable demographic fundamentals, more than geography or natural resources, explain why the United States emerged as the world’s preeminent economic and military power after World War II—and why it still occupies that position today.

Yet past performance is no guarantee of future results. Thanks in large part to demographics, rival states such as China have become genuine great-power competitors over the past few decades. The United States, meanwhile, has eroded or squandered its demographic edge in a number of ways, even as its traditional allies in Europe and Asia have struggled with population stagnation or decline. So far, the damage to U.S. power has been limited by the fact that the United States’ main geopolitical rivals face serious demographic problems of their own. Gazing further into the future, however, population growth and rising levels of education may propel new countries toward great-power status.

Demographics offer a clue to the geopolitical world of the future—and how Washington should prepare for it. To maintain the United States’ edge, American leaders must take steps to slow or reverse the negative demographic trends now eating away at the foundations of U.S. power. They must also begin to rethink Washington’s global strategy, recognizing that the future of the U.S.-led international order lies with the young and growing democracies of the developing world. With wise domestic policy and farsighted diplomacy, U.S. leaders can ensure that their country’s still considerable human resources reinforce American power long into the coming century.

PEOPLE POWER

For premodern empires and kingdoms, a larger population meant more people to tax and send off to war. But thanks to modern economic development, demographics are more important now than ever before. Since the Industrial Revolution, technological innovations and other improvements in human productivity have led to a long-term decline in the price of natural resources and basic commodities such as food. At the same time, they have greatly increased the returns to skilled labor. In fact, most global economic growth since World War II can be attributed to two factors: improvements in human capital—a catchall term for education, health, nutrition, training, and other factors that determine an individual worker’s potential—and favorable business climates, which allowed the value of those human resources to be unlocked. Human capital, in particular, has an extraordinary impact on economies. For each year of increased life expectancy today, for instance, a country sees a permanent increase in per capita income of about four percent. And for each additional year of schooling that a country’s citizens obtain, the country sees, on average, a ten percent increase in per capita GDP.

Vast disparities between human capital development in different countries have produced gaps in economic productivity that are larger today than at any previous point in history. For example, in 2017, according to World Bank estimates, Ireland’s per capita GDP was roughly 100 times as high as that of the Central African Republic (when adjusted for relative purchasing power). Yet such disparities are not set in stone: thanks to technological breakthroughs, nations can now augment their human capital faster than ever before. It took Sweden from 1886 to 2003 to raise its life expectancy from 50 years to 80 years; South Korea accomplished the same feat in less than half the time, between the late 1950s and 2009.

Despite the possibility of such rapid and often unexpected improvements in human capital, demography as a whole is a fairly predictable social science. Unlike economic or technological forecasts, population projections tend to be reasonably accurate for at least a few decades, since most of the people who will be living in the world of 2040, for example, are already alive today. And although such projections cannot predict the future, they can offer a rough guide to the emerging contours of international politics—the changing realm of the possible in world affairs. Policymakers who want to plan for the long term should be paying attention.

POPULATION PROBLEMS IN THE PRC

Today, the international arena is dominated by one superpower (the United States) and two great powers (China and Russia). Recent U.S. misadventures abroad and political turbulence at home have naturally led some to suggest that American power is on the wane. A look at demographic projections for China and Russia, however, suggests that fears that the United States will lose its position of primacy anytime soon are misplaced. 

China is the United States’ main international rival, and at first glance, it is an impressive rival indeed. It is the world’s most populous country, with almost 1.4 billion people, and over the past four decades, it has seen the most rapid and sustained burst of economic growth in human history. Adjusting for relative purchasing power, the Chinese economy is now the largest in the world. China’s growth since the 1970s is usually attributed to the policies of Deng Xiaoping, who pushed the country in a more market-friendly direction after becoming the paramount leader in 1978. But demographics also played a critical role. Between 1975 and 2010, China’s working-age population (those aged 15–64) nearly doubled, and total hours worked grew even faster, as the country abandoned the Maoist policies that had made paid labor both less available and less appealing. Overall health and educational attainment rose rapidly, as well.

Given this impressive record, many—apparently including China’s leadership—expect that China will surpass the United States as the world’s leading power sometime in the next two decades. Yet the country’s longer-term demographic prospects suggest otherwise. Over the past two generations, China has seen a collapse in fertility, exacerbated by Beijing’s ruthless population-control programs. The one-child policy, introduced in 1979, was ended in 2015, but the damage had already been done. China’s total fertility rate (TFR) has been below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman since at least the early 1990s. According to the UN Population Division, China’s TFR now stands at 1.6, but some analysts, such as Cai Fang, a Chinese demographer and member of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, believe it may be as low as 1.4—more than 30 percent below replacement. In major cities such as Shanghai, fertility may stand at one birth per woman or less.

With decades of extremely low fertility in its immediate past, decades more of that to come, and no likelihood of mass immigration, China will see its population peak by 2027, according to projections by the U.S. Census Bureau. Its working-age population has already been shrinking for the past five years, and it is set to decrease by at least 100 million between 2015 and 2040. The country will see a particularly large decline in its working-age population under 30, which may plunge by nearly 30 percent over these years. Although this rising generation will be the best educated in Chinese history, the country’s overall growth in educational attainment will slow as the less educated older generations come to make up a larger and larger share of the total population. The Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital estimates that by 2040, China’s adult population will have fewer average years of schooling than that of Bolivia or Zimbabwe.

As China’s working population slumps, its over-65 population is set to explode. Between 2015 and 2040, the number of Chinese over the age of 65 is projected to rise from about 135 million to 325 million or more. By 2040, China could have twice as many elderly people as children under the age of 15, and the median age of China’s population could rise to 48, up from 37 in 2015 and less than 25 in 1990. No country has ever gone gray at a faster pace. The process will be particularly extreme in rural China, as young Chinese migrate to the cities in search of opportunity. On the whole, China’s elderly in 2040 will be both poor and poorly educated, dependent on others for the overwhelming majority of their consumption and other needs.

Taken together, these unfavorable demographic trends are creating heavy headwinds for the Chinese economy. To make matters worse, China faces additional adverse demographic factors. Under the one-child policy, for instance, Chinese parents often opted for an abortion over giving birth to a girl, creating one of the most imbalanced infant and child sex ratios in the modern world. In the years ahead, China will have to deal with the problem of tens of millions of surplus men, mostly from disadvantaged rural backgrounds, with no prospects of marrying, having children, or continuing their family line. 

China will also face a related problem over the next generation, as traditional Chinese family structures atrophy or evaporate. Since the beginning of written history, Chinese society has relied on extended kinship networks to cope with economic risks. Yet a rising generation of urban Chinese youth is made up of only children of only children, young men and women with no siblings, cousins, aunts, or uncles. The end of 2,500 years of family tradition will be a departure into the unknown for Chinese civilization—and Beijing is manifestly unprepared for this impending great leap.

THE RUSSIAN PARADOX

For Russia, the demographic outlook may be even worse. The Kremlin sees itself as helming a global power, yet its grandiose self-conception is badly mismatched with the human resources at its disposal. From the standpoint of population and human capital, Russia looks like a power in the grip of all but irremediable decline.

In some respects, Russia is a typical European country: it has an aging, shrinking population and difficulties assimilating the low-skilled immigrant work force on which its economy increasingly depends. When it comes to human capital, however, Russia faces an acute crisis. After fully half a century of stagnation or regression, Russia has finally seen an improvement over the last decade in the overall health of its people, as evidenced by measures such as life expectancy at birth. But the situation is still dire. In 2016, according to the World Health Organization, 15-year-old Russian males could expect to live another 52.3 years: slightly less than their counterparts in Haiti. Fifteen-year-old Russian females, although better off than the males, had a life expectancy only slightly above the range for the UN’s roster of least developed countries.

In addition to its health problems, Russia is failing in knowledge production. Call it “the Russian paradox”: high levels of schooling, low levels of human capital. Despite an ostensibly educated citizenry, Russia (with a population of 145 million) earns fewer patents each year from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office than the state of Alabama (population: five million). Russia earns less from service exports than Denmark, with its population of six million, and has less privately held wealth than Sweden, with a population of ten million. And since Russia’s working-age population is set to age and shrink between 2015 and 2040, its relative economic potential will diminish, too.

Ambitious revisionist states such as Russia can, for a time, punch above their weight in international affairs. Yet for all of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s foreign meddling and military adventurism, his country is facing demographic constraints that will make it extraordinarily difficult for him and his successors to maintain, much less seriously improve, Russia’s geopolitical position.

THE AMERICAN ADVANTAGE

Relative to its principal rivals, the United States is in an enviable position. This should come as no surprise: the United States has been the most powerful country in the world since World War II, and its demographic advantages—its large and highly educated population, relatively high fertility rates, and welcoming immigration policies—have been crucial to that success.

The United States’ most obvious demographic advantage is its size. It is the world’s third most populous country, and it is likely to remain so until 2040. No other developed country even comes close—the second and third largest, Japan and Germany, have populations that are two-fifths and one-fourth the size of the U.S. population, respectively. Between 1990 and 2015, the United States generated nearly all the population growth for the UN’s “more developed regions,” and both UN and U.S. Census Bureau projections suggest that it will generate all of these regions’ population growth between 2015 and 2040. In fact, excluding sub-Saharan Africa—the only region where the rate of population growth is still increasing—the U.S. population is on track to grow slightly faster than the world population between now and 2040. 

The United States benefits from what might be called “American demographic exceptionalism.” Compared with other developed countries, the United States has long enjoyed distinctly high immigration levels and birthrates. Between 1950 and 2015, close to 50 million people immigrated to the United States, accounting for nearly half of the developed world’s net immigration over that time period. These immigrants and their descendants made up most of the United States’ population growth over those decades. But U.S. fertility is also unusually high for an affluent society. Apart from a temporary dip during and immediately after the Vietnam War, the United States’ birthrates after World War II have consistently exceeded the developed-country average. Between the mid-1980s and the financial crisis of 2008, the United States was the only rich country with replacement-level fertility. Assuming continued levels of immigration and near-replacement fertility, most demographers project that by 2040, the United States will have a population of around 380 million. It will have a younger population than almost any other rich democracy, and its working-age population will still be expanding. And unlike the rest of the developed world in 2040, it will still have more births than deaths.

Yet the United States’ demographic advantage is not merely a function of numbers. For over a century, the United States has benefited from a large and growing cadre of highly skilled workers. Research by the economists Robert Barro and Jong-Wha Lee on educational attainment suggests that between 1870 and 2010, Americans were the world’s most highly educated people in terms of average years of schooling for the working-age population. In 2015, by their estimate, 56 million men and women in the United States aged 25 to 64 had undergraduate degrees or graduate degrees: twice as many as in China and almost one-sixth of the global total. The United States leads the world in research and development, as measured by international patent applications and scientific publications, and in wealth generation, with Americans having accumulated more private wealth since 2000 than the Chinese have in recorded history.

THE TASK AHEAD

Despite these advantages, all is not well for the United States. Warning lights are flashing for a number of key demographic metrics. In 2014, U.S. life expectancy began slowly but steadily dropping for the first time in a century. This drop is partly due to the surge in so-called deaths of despair (deaths from suicide, a drug overdose, or complications from alcoholism), especially in economically depressed regions of the country. Yet even before the decline began, U.S. progress in public health indicators had been painfully slow and astonishingly expensive. Improvements in educational attainment have also been stalled for decades: as of 2010, American adults born in the early 1980s had, on average, 13.7 years of schooling, only fractionally higher than the average of 13.5 years for their parents’ generation, born in the early 1950s. Meanwhile, employment rates for American men of prime working age (25–54) are at levels not seen since the Great Depression.

Further, it is possible that consensus projections for U.S. population growth are too optimistic. Such projections generally assume that U.S. fertility will return to replacement levels. But U.S. fertility fell by about ten percent after 2008 and shows no sign of recovering. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2017, the United States’ TFR stood at 1.77, the lowest level since the 1970s and below those of European countries such as France and Sweden. Most demographic projections also assume that the United States will maintain net immigration at its current level of roughly one million per year. But immigration is an intrinsically political phenomenon. In the past, the United States has decided to all but shut off immigration in response to domestic turbulence, and it may do so again.

Even with these troubling signs of decline, no rival is likely to overtake the United States in terms of raw human potential anytime soon. China and India, for instance, may have more college-educated workers than the United States does by 2040, but the superior quality of U.S. higher education will weigh heavily in the United States’ favor, and the United States will almost certainly still have the world’s largest pool of workers with graduate degrees. If U.S. demographic and human resource indicators continue to stagnate or regress, however, Americans may lose their appetite for playing a leading role in international affairs. Isolationism and populism could thrive, and the U.S. electorate could be unwilling to bear the considerable costs of maintaining the international order. There is also a nontrivial risk that the United States’ relatively disappointing trends in health and education will harm its long-term economic performance.

To avoid these outcomes, the United States will need to revitalize its human resource base and restore its dynamism in business, health, and education. Doing so will be immensely difficult—a far-reaching undertaking that is beyond the powers of the federal government alone. The first step, however, is for Americans of all political persuasions to recognize the urgency of the task.

AGING ALLIES

Even as they try to put U.S. demographic trends back on track, American policymakers should also begin considering what U.S. strategy should look like in a world in which demographic advantages no longer guarantee U.S. hegemony. One appealing solution would be to rely more on traditional U.S. partners. Japan’s GDP is nearly four times as large as Russia’s on an exchange-rate basis, and although its total population is slightly smaller than Russia’s, it has a larger cadre of highly skilled workers. The current population of the EU is around 512 million, nearly 200 million more than that of the United States, and its economy is still substantially larger than China’s on an exchange-rate basis.

The trouble is that many of Washington’s traditional allies face even more daunting demographic challenges than does the United States. The EU member states and Japan, for instance, all have healthy, well-educated, and highly productive populations. Yet the EU and Japan have both registered sub-replacement fertility rates since the 1970s, and their fertility rates began to drop far below the replacement level in the 1980s. In both the EU and Japan, deaths now outnumber births. Their working-age populations are in long-term decline, and their overall populations are aging at rates that would have sounded like science fiction not so long ago. The main demographic difference between the EU and Japan is that Europe has embraced immigration and Japan has not.

Both approaches have their drawbacks. For EU members, immigration has postponed the shrinking of their work forces and slowed the aging of their populations. Yet the EU’s record of integrating newcomers, particularly Muslims from poorer countries, is uneven at best, and cultural conflicts over immigration are roiling politics across the continent. Japan has avoided these convulsions, but at the cost of rapid and irreversible population decline. As in China, this is leading to an implosion of the traditional Japanese family. Japanese demographers project that a woman born in Japan in 1990 has close to a 40 percent chance of having no children of her own and a 50 percent chance of never having grandchildren. Japan is not just graying: it is becoming a country of elderly social isolates, with rising needs and decreasing family support.

Population decline does not preclude improvements in living standards, but it is a drag on relative economic and military power. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the United States’ working-age population is set to grow by about ten percent between 2015 and 2040. Over the same period, Germany’s and South Korea’s working-age populations are expected to shrink by 20 percent, and Japan’s, by 22 percent. The number of young men aged 15 to 24, the group from which military manpower is typically drawn, is projected to increase over that period by three percent in the United States but to fall by 23 percent in Germany, 25 percent in Japan, and almost 40 percent in South Korea.

This decline, combined with the budgetary politics of the modern welfare state—borrowing money from future generations to pay for the current benefits of older voters—means that most U.S. treaty allies will become less willing and able to provide for their own defense over the coming decades. The United States, in other words, will become ever more valuable to its aging security partners at the same time as they become less valuable to Washington—all while the United States’ own demographic advantage is beginning to erode.

MAKING NEW FRIENDS

Yet even as population trends sap the strength of traditional powers in Europe and East Asia, they are propelling a whole new set of countries, many of them potential U.S. allies and partners, toward great-power status. By courting these rising powers, U.S. policymakers can strengthen the international order for decades to come.

Washington should begin by turning its attention to South and Southeast Asia. As Japan and South Korea lose population, for instance, emerging democracies such as Indonesia and the Philippines will continue to grow. By 2040, Indonesia could have a population of over 300 million, up from around 260 million today, and the Philippines’ population could reach 140 million—which would be possibly larger than Russia’s. Both countries, moreover, are young and increasingly well educated. In 2015, China had almost four times as many people aged 20 to 39 as Indonesia and the Philippines did combined; by 2040, it is projected to have only twice as many. Both Indonesia and the Philippines are likely to come into increasing confrontation with an expansionist China, and as they do, they may discover an interest in deeper security cooperation with the United States.

Indonesia and the Philippines, however, pale in comparison to India. India is on track to overtake China as the world’s most populous country within the next decade, and by 2040, India’s working-age population may exceed China’s by 200 million. India’s population will still be growing in 2040, when China’s will be in rapid decline. By that time, about 24 percent of China’s population will be over 65, compared with around 12 percent of India’s. India has its own demographic and human resource problems—compared with China, it still has poor public health indicators, low average educational attainment, and egregiously high levels of illiteracy. Despite years of attempted reforms, India still ranks 130th out of 186 countries on the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom. Yet by 2040, India may have a larger pool of highly educated workers aged 20 to 49 than China, and its advantage will be increasing with every year. The United States and India have already begun defense cooperation in the interest of countering China; American leaders should make it a priority to deepen this partnership in the years ahead.

The United States today has many advantages over its international rivals, thanks in no small part to its favorable demographics. Yet U.S. power cannot be taken for granted. It would be a geopolitical tragedy if the postwar economic and security order that the United States built really were to fade from the scene: no alternative arrangement is likely to promise as much freedom and prosperity to as many people as the U.S.-led international order does today. Thankfully, it is a tragedy that can be averted. If the United States can begin to repair its human capital base and forge new alliances for the twenty-first century, it can strengthen—with the aid of demographics—Pax Americana for generations to come.

Source: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/world/2019-06-11/great-demographics-comes-great-power?utm_medium=newsletters&utm_source=weekend_read&utm_content=20210501&utm_campaign=Weekend%20Read_050121_With%20Great%20Demographics%20Comes%20Great%20Power&utm_term=FA%20Weekend%20Read-012320

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How the N-Word Became Unsayable

2021/05/01 1 Comment

Interesting history:

In 1934, Allen Walker Read, an etymologist and lexicographer, laid out the history of the word that, then, had “the deepest stigma of any in the language.” In the entire article, in line with the strength of the taboo he was referring to, he never actually wrote the word itself. The obscenity to which he referred, “fuck,” though not used in polite company (or, typically, in this newspaper), is no longer verboten. These days, there are two other words that an American writer would treat as Mr. Read did. One is “cunt,” and the other is “nigger.” The latter, though, has become more than a slur. It has become taboo.

Just writing the word here, I sense myself as pushing the envelope, even though I am Black — and feel a need to state that for the sake of clarity and concision, I will be writing the word freely, rather than “the N-word.” I will not use the word gratuitously, but that will nevertheless leave a great many times I do spell it out, love it though I shall not.

“Nigger” began as a neutral descriptor, although it was quickly freighted with the casual contempt that Europeans had for African and, later, African-descended people. Its evolution from slur to unspeakable obscenity was part of a gradual prohibition on avowed racism and the slurring of groups. It is also part of a larger cultural shift: Time was that it was body parts and what they do that Americans were taught not to mention by name — do you actually do much resting in a restroom?

That kind of concern has been transferred from the sexual and scatological to the sociological, and changes in the use of the word “nigger” tell part of that story. What a society considers profane reveals what it believes to be sacrosanct: The emerging taboo on slurs reveals the value our culture places — if not consistently — on respect for subgroups of people. (I should also note that I am concerned here with “nigger” as a slur rather than its adoption, as “nigga,” as a term of affection by Black people, like “buddy.”)

For all of its potency, in terms of etymology, “nigger” is actually on the dull side, like “damn” and “hell.” It just goes back to Latin’s word for “black,” “niger,” which not surprisingly could refer to Africans, although Latin actually preferred other words like “aethiops” — a singular, not plural, word — which was borrowed from Greek, in which it meant (surprise again) “burn face.”

English got the word more directly from Spaniards’ rendition of “niger,” “negro,” which they applied to Africans amid their “explorations.” “Nigger” seems more like Latin’s “niger” than Spanish’s “negro,” but that’s an accident; few English sailors and tradesmen were spending much time reading their Cicero. “Nigger” is how an Englishman less concerned than we often are today with making a stab at foreign words would say “negro.”

For Mandarin’s “feng shui,” we today say “fung shway,” as the Chinese do, but if the term had caught on in the 1500s or even the early 1900s, we would be saying something more like “funk shoe-y,” just as we call something “chop suey” that is actually pronounced in Cantonese “tsopp suh-ew.” In the same way, “negro” to “nigger” is as “fellow” is to “feller” or “Old Yellow” is to “Old Yeller”; “nigger” feels more natural in an Anglophone mouth than “negro.”

“Nigger” first appeared in English writings in the 1500s. As it happens, the first reference involved “aethiops,” as it had come to refer to Ethiopia, or at least that term as applied sloppily to Africa. We heard of “The Nigers of Aethiop” in 1577, and that spelling was but one of many from then on. With spelling as yet unconventionalized, there were “neger,” “nigur,” niger,” “nigor” and “nigre” — take your pick.

It was, as late as the 1700s, sometimes presented as a novelty item. Scottish poet Robert Burns dutifully taught, referring to “niger,” that it rhymes with “vigour, rigour, tiger.” Note, we might, that last word. If “tiger” rhymes with “vigor” and “rigor,” that means that “tiger” could once be pronounced “tigger,” which then sheds light on the rhyme:

Eeny, meeny, miny, moe
Catch a tigger by the toe
If he hollers, let him go
Eeeny, meeny, miny, moe.

“Tigger,” then, was a polite substitute for the original “nigger.” After all, do we really imagine a tiger hollering in protest? So, for one, we gain insight into why the Winnie-the-Pooh character is called “Tigger” and the books are so vague on why it’s pronounced that way. That was an available alternate pronunciation to A.A. Milne. But more to the point, the original version of the “Eeny, meeny” doggerel is a window into how brutally casual the usage of “nigger” once was, happily trilled even by children at play. For eons, it was ordinary white people’s equivalent of today’s “African-American.”

Someone wrote in passing in 1656 that woolly hair is “very short as Nigers have,” with the term meant as bland clinical reference. “Jethro, his Niger, was then taken,” someone breezily wrote in a diary 20 years later. And this sort of thing went on through the 1700s and 1800s. Just as “cunt” was a casual anatomical term in medieval textbooks, “nigger,” however spelled, was simply the way one said “Black person,” with the pitiless dismissiveness of the kind we moderns use in discussing hamsters, unquestioned by anyone. After a while, the current spelling settled in, which makes the contrast with today especially stark.

Its use straddling the 19th and 20th centuries is especially interesting: While America was becoming recognizable as its modern self, its denizens said “nigger” as casually as today we do “boomer” or “soccer mom.” Frank Norris’s anthropological realism is an example. In his “Vandover and the Brute,” set at the end of the 1800s, the white protagonist in San Francisco squires a gal about town who has been doing some teaching and tells him

about the funny little nigger girl, and about the games and songs and how they played birds and hopped around and cried, “Twit, twit,” and the game of the butterflies visiting the flowers.

Annals of popular dancing shortly after this era gaily chronicled dances such as the bunny hug, turkey trot and grizzly bear but discreetly left out that a girl like the one in “Vandover” were equally fond of one called the nigger wiggle, named as if Black people were just one more kind of amusing animal. (This dance entailed, for the record, a couple putting their hips together and holding each other’s rear ends.)

Of course, the word was also used in pure contempt. Not long after “Vandover,” William Jennings Bryan, the iconic populist orator, as secretary of state, remarked about Haitians, “Dear me, think of it, niggers speaking French.” Meanwhile, the Marine in charge of Haiti on the behalf of our great nation at the time, L.W.T. Waller, made sure all knew that whatever their linguistic aptitudes, the Haitians were “real nigs beneath the surface.”

There was a transitional period between the breeziness of “real nigs beneath the surface” and the word becoming unsayable. In the 20th century, with Black figures of authority insisting that Black Americans be treated with dignity, especially after serving in World War I, “nigger” began a move from neutral to impolite. Most Black thinkers favored “colored” or “Negro.” But “nigger” was not yet profane.

Film is, as always, illuminating. We have been told that early talkies were splendidly vulgar because, for instance, Barbara Stanwyck’s character openly sleeps her way to the top in “Baby Face.” But linguistically, these films are post-Victorian. That character never says “fuck,” “ass” or “shit” as the real-life version would, and in films of this genre, that reticence includes “nigger.” It is, despite the heartless racism of the era, almost absent from American cinema until the 1960s. Rather, we today can glean it in the shadows: There it reigned with an appalling vigor.

So in the film “Gone With the Wind” no one utters it, but in the book it was based on, which almost everyone had read, Scarlett O’Hara hauls off with, “You’re a fool nigger, and the worst day’s work Pa ever did was to buy you.” And she then thinks, “I’ve said ‘nigger’ and Mother wouldn’t like that at all.” As in, there was now a veil coming down, such that one was supposed to be polite — approximately in the book, conclusively in the movie. But still, it was always just under the same surface that our Marine saw “nig”-ness through.

Same period, 1937: a Looney Tunes cartoon (“Porky’s Railroad”) has Porky Pig as the engineer in a race between trains. Porky’s rival zooms past a pile of logs and blows them away to reveal a Black man sitting, perplexed. Today we wonder why this person was sitting under a pile of logs. The reason is that this was a joke referring to the expression “nigger in the woodpile,” an old equivalent of “the elephant in the room.” No Looney Tunes character ever utters “nigger,” but this joke reveals that their creators were quite familiar with the word being used with joy.

Even into the 1970s, the word’s usage in the media was different from today’s. “The Jeffersons,” a television sitcom portraying a Black family that moves from working-class Queens to affluence in a Manhattan apartment tower, was considered a brash, modern and even thoughtful statement at the time. Here was the era when television shows took a jump into a realism unknown before, except in flashes: The contrast between the goofy vaudeville of “Here’s Lucy” and the salty shout-fests on “The Jeffersons” is stark. So it was almost a defining element of a show like “The Jeffersons” that loudmouthed, streety George Jefferson would use “nigger” to refer to Black people with (and without) affection.

George freely hurled it while playing the Dozens in an early episode. (“Take this elite nigga, wolfin’ at my door / With your yellow behind, I’m gonna mop up the entire floor!”) On the show the character began in, “All in the Family,” while bigoted Archie Bunker does not use the word, as his real-life counterpart would, George uses it, such as when he rages about the possibility of having (white) Edith Bunker help out at his dry-cleaning location. (“The niggers will think she owns the store, and the honkies will think we bleached the help!”)

Nor are only Black people shown using it; the writers air the “real” “nigger” as well. White men use it a few times on an episode in which George meets modern Klansmen. But white people aren’t limited to it only in very special episode cases like this. George calls his white neighbor Tom Willis “honky,” and Tom petulantly fires back, “How would you like it if I called you ‘nigger’?” Then, that read as perfectly OK (I saw it and remember); he was just talking about it, not using it. But today, for Tom to even mention the word at all would be considered beyond the pale — so to speak.

The outright taboo status of “nigger” began only at the end of the 20th century; 2002 was about the last year that a mainstream publisher would allow a book to be titled “Nigger,” as Randall Kennedy’s was. As I write this, nearly 20 years later, the notion of a book like it with that title sounds like science fiction. In fact, only a year after that, when a medical school employee of the University of Virginia reportedly said, “I can’t believe in this day and age that there’s a sports team in our nation’s capital named the Redskins. That is as derogatory to Indians as having a team called Niggers would be to Blacks,” the head of the N.A.A.C.P., Julian Bond, suggested this person get mandatory sensitivity training, saying that his gut instinct was that the person deserved to simply be fired. The idea, by then, was that the word was unutterable, regardless of context. Today’s equivalent of that employee would not use the word that way.

Rather, the modern American uses “the N-word.” This tradition settled in after the O.J. Simpson trial, in which it was famously revealed that Detective Mark Fuhrman had frequently used “nigger” in the past. Christopher Darden, a Black prosecutor, refused to utter the actual word, and with the high profile of the case and in his seeming to deliberately salute Mr. Read’s take, by designating “nigger” “the filthiest, dirtiest, nastiest word in the English language,” Mr. Darden in his way heralded a new era.

That was in 1995, and in the fall of that year I did a radio interview on the word, in which the guests and I were free to use it when referring to it, with nary a bleep. That had been normal until then but would not be for much longer, such that the interview is now a period piece.

It’s safe to say that the transition to “the N-word” wasn’t driven by the linguistic coarseness of a Los Angeles detective or something a prosecutor said one day during a monthslong trial. Rather, Mr. Darden’s reticence was a symptom of something already in the air by 1995: the larger shift in sensibility that rendered slurs, in general, the new profanity.

This occurred as Generation X, born from about 1965 to 1980, came of age. These were the first Americans raised in post-civil-rights-era America. To Generation X, legalized segregation was a bygone barbarism in black-and-white photos and film clips. Also, Generation X grew up when overt racist attitudes came to be ridiculed and socially punished in general society. Racism continued to exist in endless manifestations. However, it became complicated — something to hide, to dissemble about and, among at least an enlightened cohort, something to check oneself for and call out in others, to a degree unknown in perhaps any society until then.

For Americans of this postcountercultural cohort, the pox on matters of God and the body seemed quaint beyond discussion, while a pox on matters of slurring groups seemed urgent beyond discussion. The N-word euphemism was an organic outcome, as was an increasing consensus that “nigger” itself is forbidden not only in use as a slur but even when referred to. Our spontaneous sense is that profanity consists of the classic four-letter words, while slurs are something separate. However, anthropological reality is that today, slurs have become our profanity: repellent to our senses, rendering even words that sound like them suspicious and eliciting not only censure but also punishment.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/30/opinion/john-mcwhorter-n-word-unsayable.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

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National security threats are changing, but Canada is mired in conventional thinking

2021/05/01 Leave a comment

Valid arguments:

An invisible virus borne on the air and reaching across continents and oceans, moving freely among people, disrespecting borders and ideas of state sovereignty, will mark the most profound shake-up of thinking about national security since the beginning of the atomic age in 1945.

We have entered an era in which national security is not just about protecting the state against adversaries, but also against dangers that have a direct impact on the daily lives of people.

The vectors of these threats are new and different — they don’t present the menacing face of armies and war, the shadowy artifice of the traditional spy, or the low-tech threat of terrorism. The new threats come at us straight out of our digital environment and are unleashed out of the natural world.

Digitally enabled threats take aim at precious resources — our data, our economy, our research — and the fundamentals of our democracy. They rob us and bend the truth, and as more of our economy is digitally enabled it is capable of being digitally disabled.

Natural hazards from climate change and the globalized spread of serious infectious diseases threaten livelihoods and lives across the country.

Thinking about national security in Canada has long been the preserve of small cadres of federal government officials and even smaller elements of civil society, each profoundly disconnected from the other. It’s not a subject taught much at our colleges and universities, from which future generations of leaders emerge as innocents. National security has rarely penetrated public debate, hardly ever featured in election campaigns, and only spasmodically seized the headlines — usually in moments of scandal.

In the new environment in which we live, that must change.

Government, political parties, and civil society must all pivot to a new understanding of what national security means and how threats are expected to be met.

We have, in Canada, a long way to go to embrace this new and disquieting understanding of national security, yet our collective future depends on it.

The distance we have to go was on display recently in two reports tabled in Parliament.

One was presented by the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP), a cornerstone of the Liberal government’s efforts to create a much stronger system of review for our security agencies. NSICOP devoted the entirety of its 2020 annual report to an analysis of the national security threats facing Canada.

This was a laudable endeavour, but one mired in conventional thinking. It failed to be sufficiently forward looking, and the committee limited itself to a discussion of five threats:

  1. Terrorism
  2. Espionage and foreign interference
  3. Malicious cyber activities
  4. Major organized crime
  5. Weapons of mass destruction

All of these are undoubtedly threats, but look hard at this list and you see the conceptual problems.

To give priority of place to terrorism threats is legacy thinking. Espionage and foreign interference are distinct problems, not to be mashed together. Organized crime comes into the national security picture only in very specific manifestations.

More problematic by far is what is missing: pandemic and biosecurity threats, climate change security impacts, and economic security. Precisely the issues that matter most to Canadians, the ones that have the greatest impact on their daily lives, were absent from the frame.

The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), in its annual public report for 2020, did better. It is clear from the report that CSIS is seized by threats to Canada’s economic security, including those that emerged to the bio-pharma sector during the early months of COVID-19.

Likewise, troubling state-sponsored disinformation campaigns are now on the CSIS radar. Counterintelligence, long a pillar of CSIS operations, is now focused beyond espionage on foreign interference operations.

The CSIS mandate places it squarely in the fight against violent extremism, but unlike the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians, CSIS does not make this the top item in its picture of the threat environment.

And CSIS is working alongside the Communications Security Establishment in trying to understand and counter cyber threats.

However, the CSIS picture of the threat environment is necessarily geared to its lawful mandate. It doesn’t have a pandemic security mission writ large, or a climate change security mandate.

To embrace those missions properly will require new thinking and new ways of organizing our national security apparatus.

When it comes to national security, the past is not prologue. The present is moving fast and the future is hard to get a grip on. But here is a prediction: the comfortable and time-honoured habit of treating national security as far-removed from the general public discourse, of erasing it from politics, is over.

The 2015 federal election in which the Conservatives stumbled over opposition to their anti-terrorism legislation was but a small foreshadowing of a much larger debate over how to live safely, prosperously and democratically in a new age.

The next federal election campaign will be one in which all parties will have to prepare coherent and plausible visions of national security, and argue them in public in the interests of all Canadians.

Source: National security threats are changing, but Canada is mired in conventional thinking

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Robots are coming and the fallout will largely harm marginalized communities

2021/05/01 Leave a comment

Interesting piece on the possible impact of automation on many of the essential service workers, largely women, visible minorities and immigrants (more speculative than data-driven):

COVID-19 has brought about numerous, devastating changes to people’s lives globally. With the number of cases rising across Canada and globally, we are also witnessing the development and use of robots to perform jobs in some workplaces that are deemed unsafe for humans. 

There are cases of robots being used to disinfect health-care facilities, deliver drugs to patients and perform temperature checks. In April 2020, doctors at a Boston hospital used Boston Dynamics’ quadruped robot called Spot to reduce health-care workers exposure to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. By equipping Spot with an iPad and a two-way radio, doctors and patients could communicate in real-time. 

In these instances, the use of robots is certainly justified because they can directly aid in lowering COVID-19 transmission rates and reducing the unnecessary exposure of health-care workers to the virus. But, as we know, robots are also performing these tasks outside of health-care settings, including at airports, offices, retail spaces and restaurants. 

This is precisely where the issue of robot use gets complicated. 

Robots in the workplace

The type of labour that these and other robots perform or, in some cases, replace, is labour that is generally considered low-paying, ranging from cleaners and fast food workers to security guards and factory employees. Not only do many of these workers in Canada earn minimum wage, the majority are racialized women and youth between the ages of 15 to 24. 

The use of robots also affects immigrant populations. The gap between immigrant workers earning minimum wage and Canadian-born workers has more than doubled. In 2008, 5.3 per cent of both immigrant and Canadian-born workers earned minimum wage, compared to 2018 where 12 per cent of immigrant workers earned minimum wage and only 9.8 per cent of Canadian-born workers earned minimum wage. Canada’s reliance on migrant workers as a source of cheap and disposable labour, has intensified the exploitation of workers.

McDonald’s has replaced cashiers with self-service kiosks. It has also begun testing robots to replace both cooks and servers. Walmart has begun using robots to clean store floors, while also increasing their usage in warehouses. 

Nowhere is the implementation of robots more apparent than Amazon’s use of them in its fulfilment centres. As information scholars applying marxist theory Nick Dyer-Witheford, Atle Mikkola Kjøsen and James Steinhoff explain, Amazon’s use of robots have reduced order times and increased warehouse space, allowing for 50 per cent more inventory in areas where robots are used, and have saved Amazon’s power costs by working in the dark and without air conditioning.

Already marginalized labourers are most affected by robots. In other words, human labour that can be mechanized, routinized or automated to some extent, is work that is deemed to be expendable because it is seen to be replaceable. It is work that is stripped of any humanity in the name of efficiency and cost-effectiveness for massive corporations. However, the influence of corporations on robot development goes beyond cost-saving measures. 

Robot violence

The emergence of Boston Dynamics’ Spot, gives us some insight into how robots have crossed from the battlefield into urban spaces. Boston Dynamics’ robot development program has long been funded by the American Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). 

In 2005, Boston Dynamics received funding from DARPA to develop one of its first quadruped robots known as BigDog, a robotic pack mule that was used to assist soldiers across rough terrain. In 2012, Boston Dynamics and DARPA revealed another quadruped robot known as AlphaDog, designed to primarily carry military gear for soldiers. 

The development of Spot would have been be impossible without these previous, DARPA-funded initiatives. While the founder of Boston Dynamics, Marc Raibert, has claimed that Spot will not be turned into a weapon, the company leased Spot to the Massachusetts State Police bomb squad in 2019 for a 90-day period. 

In February 2021, the New York Police Department used Spot to investigate the scene of a home invasion. And, in April 2021, Spot was deployed by the French Army in a series of military exercises to evaluate its usefulness on the future battlefield. https://www.youtube.com/embed/xYbhKHfZSEE?wmode=transparent&start=0Massachusetts State Police lease Boston Dynamics’ Spot in 2019.

Targeting the most vulnerable

These examples are not intended to altogether dismiss the importance of some robots. This is particularly the case in health care, where robots continue to help doctors improve patient outcomes. Instead, these examples should serve as a call for governments to intervene in order to prevent a proliferation of robot use across different spaces.

More importantly, this is a call to prevent the multiple forms of exploitation that already affect marginalized groups. Since technological innovation has a tendency to outpace legislationand regulatory controls, it is imperative that lawmakers step in before it is too late.

Source: https://theconversationcanada.cmail20.com/t/r-l-tltjihkd-kyldjlthkt-c/

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Even in hot spots, newcomers to Canada are missing out on COVID-19 vaccines

2021/05/01 Leave a comment

Good detailed analysis:

Refugees, immigrants and other recent newcomers to Ontario are being vaccinated for COVID-19 at much lower rates than Canadian-born or long-term residents, new data shows.

And even with the provincial government’s revised vaccination rollout plan prioritizing hot spots, newcomers living in neighbourhoods most at risk for transmission continue to experience the lowest rates of vaccination compared to those who were born in Canada or who have lived here for more than 35 years, according to a new report by the non-profit ICES, formerly the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences.

The report acknowledges that the province’s decision to target hot spots and expand age eligibility in early April has resulted in an overall increase in vaccinations in these neighbourhoods, but finds that vaccine coverage continues to lag in immigrants, refugees and recent OHIP registrants, including older adults. 

“There’s age risk and there’s transmission risk, and we know that immigrants and refugees are overrepresented in essential workers, and we know that many immigrant communities live multi-generationally,” said Dr. Astrid Guttmann, chief science officer of ICES and lead author of the report. “So the risk of transmission is higher and they’re less vaccinated. We need it to be the other way around.”

In the province as a whole, Guttmann and her team found that, as of April 26, vaccine coverage in Canadian-born and long-term residents 16 years of age and older was 38 per cent, compared to 28 per cent in immigrants, 22 per cent in refugees and 12 per cent in recent OHIP registrants. 

The report notes that large percentages of Canadian-born and long-term residents aged 70 and over have been vaccinated, between 71 and 86 per cent. But in the same age cohort among immigrants, refugees and recent OHIP registrants (with the exception of recent OHIP registrants in the lowest-risk neighbourhoods), vaccine coverage has ranged between 47 and 65 per cent. 

“We’ve seen within a hot spot, not everyone is feeling the heat equally,” said Dr. Andrew Boozary, executive director of social medicine at University Health Network. “And that is where we need to continue to be more data driven, being led by communities as to how to best reach the most disadvantaged populations, even within a postal code.”

He noted that the provincial government’s announcement Thursday that it will shift 50 per cent of Ontario’s COVID-19 vaccine supply to the 114 hardest hit neighbourhoods for two weeks starting next week was “definitely welcome” but that not doing so earlier “has come with very real costs.”

Last Friday, Ontario’s Science Advisory Table published a brief recommending immediately moving half of the province’s vaccine supply to the 74 highest-risk neighbourhoods for four weeks, a strategy it said could dramatically cut case counts, hospitalizations and deaths. 

Safia Ahmed, executive director of the Rexdale Community Health Centre, said she was not surprised by the ICES report’s findings, noting that many recent immigrants are essential workers who are not able to get to vaccination sites unless the locations are open on evenings and weekends. 

“When you think about the way vaccines have rolled out across the city, with mass vaccination sites that require online bookings, that’s a challenge, definitely, for new Canadians and immigrant seniors,” she said. 

Having clinics closer to home staffed with people who speak different languages, and who are a “familiar face,” all helps.

She noted that her organization learned during COVID-19 testing that “the more local, the more community-based services are, the more trust people have.”

Sabina Vohra-Miller, co-founder of the South Asian Health Network, said many older new Canadians may not have the digital literacy or language skills to navigate the complex web of online vaccine booking portals. And their children and grandchildren may not have time to support them if they are essential workers.

“It’s a Hunger Games style right now,” she said, adding those that are tech savvy and work from home have a huge advantage. 

“Who’s sitting in front of the computer waiting for appointments?”

Source: https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2021/04/30/even-in-hot-spots-newcomers-to-canada-are-missing-out-on-covid-19-vaccines.html

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The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism Is a Very Welcome Initiative

2021/05/01 Leave a comment

Of note, advocacy of alternative to IHRA working definition that has been increasing adapted by more jurisdictions and institutions:

On March 25, 2021, the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA) was presented by a group of over 200 eminent Jewish scholars of antisemitism studies and related fields, some of whom had been engaged in discussion since June 2020. They defined antisemitism as follows: “Antisemitism is discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews (or Jewish institutions as Jewish,’ and made it clear that ‘while antisemitism has certain distinctive features, the fight against it is inseparable from the overall fight against all forms of racial, ethnic, cultural, religious and gender discrimination.”

The authors explain that the declaration is based on universal human rights principles, and is a response to two circumstances. One is the alarming resurgence of antisemitism by groups mobilising hatred and violence in politics, society and on the internet, which make it imperative to have a usable, concise and historically-informed core definition of antisemitism with a set of guidelines; and the other is the definition adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) in 2016, which they regard as unclear in key respects, widely open to different interpretations, and weakening the fight against antisemitism by causing confusion and generating controversy. They express particular concern that some of the ‘examples’ of antisemitism included in the IHRA exclude legitimate political speech and action concerning Zionism, Israel and Palestine. Thus, their aim is two-fold: “(1) to strengthen the fight against antisemitism by clarifying what it is and how it is manifested, (2) to protect a space for an open debate about the vexed question of the future of Israel/Palestine.”

According to the IHRA ‘working definition’ of antisemitism (WDA), “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred towards Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.” This is followed by 11 ‘contemporary examples’ of antisemitism, seven of which relate to Israel. A legal opinion by Hugh Tomlinson QC submitted to the UK House of Lords in March 2017 described this definition as “vague”, “unclear”, “confusing”, “too narrow”, and “a definition which lacks clarity and comprehensiveness’; moreover, ‘A number of the “contemporary examples” of antisemitism in public life included in the IHRA Definition might, if read literally, appear to condemn as antisemitic conduct which does not constitute or manifest hatred or intolerance against Jews”.

As Neve Gordon and Mark LeVine observe, according to this definition, Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt would be antisemitic because they sent an open letter to the New York Times in December 1948 describing the Israeli right-wing Herut party as ‘closely akin… to the Nazi and fascist parties’; Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz would fall into the same category because of his reference to ‘phenomena of Judeo-Nazism’ in 1982; and so would Israeli human rights organisation B’tselem for producing a report entitled ‘A Regime of Jewish Supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is Apartheid’. Most damagingly, “Once criticism of Israel becomes the primary marker of anti-Semitism, then the unquestioned support of American evangelicals for Israel is considered a blessing, even as anti-Jewish stereotypes remain prevalent among members of their communities, while Israel’s alliance with Europe’s most illiberal and anti-Semitic governments (particularly Hungary’s and Poland’s) is considered ethically kosher.”

Indeed, it can be argued that by blurring the distinction between the Jewish people and the state of Israel, the IHRA definition is itself antisemitic, because it implies that all Jewish people are implicated in the crimes committed to establish and perpetuate the Israeli state. Those responsible for the aggressive campaign that has led to the widespread adoption of the IHRA definition are also guilty of promoting antisemitism by implying that all Jews – and not the Israeli state and its supporters – are responsible for the resulting assault on academic freedom and victimisation of students, faculty, universities and others who support the human rights of Palestinians and/or criticise the Israeli state.

Support for the non-violent Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign has effectively been criminalised by this lobby. What are the demands of the BDS campaign? (1) Ending Israeli occupation and colonisation of the Palestinian Occupied Territories and dismantling the ‘apartheid’ wall that cuts deep into Palestinian land; (2) Recognising the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; (3) Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN Resolution 194. Every one of the these demands is supported by international human rights law; to say that Palestinians are not entitled to these universal rights is racist.

The confusion and contention resulting from the IHRA WDA not only undermined struggles against antisemitism and for the human rights of Palestinians, but also divided and weakened antiracist struggles more generally, because “Enacting laws or adopting statements that potentially criminalise criticism of state violence and racism subverts the struggles of marginalised communities seeking social justice.” Concerned at the undermining of their moral standing and physical security by widespread adoption of the IHRA definition, numerous Jewish individuals and organisations explicitly rejected it. The Jerusalem Declaration grew out of this movement.

Because the Jerusalem Declaration presents itself as an alternative to the IHRA definition, it must necessarily grapple with the Palestine-Israel conflict. Of the fifteen guidelines it presents, five are general examples of antisemitism, and ten relate to Israel and Palestine. However, in stark contrast with the IHRA definition, five of these latter are “examples that, on the face of it, are not antisemitic (whether or not one approves of the view or action)” (emphasis added). These are “11. Supporting the Palestinian demand for justice and the full grant of their political, national, civil and human rights… 12. Criticising or opposing Zionism as a form of nationalism… 13. Evidence-based criticism of Israel as a state. This includes its institutions and founding principles… Thus… it is not antisemitic, in and of itself, to compare Israel with other historical cases, including settler-colonialism or apartheid… 14. Boycott, divestment and sanctions are commonplace, non-violent forms of political protest against states. In the Israeli case they are not, in and of themselves, antisemitic. 15. Political speech does not have to be measured, proportional, tempered, or reasonable to be protected under Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights… Criticism that some may see as excessive or contentious, or as reflecting a “double standard,” is not, in and of itself, antisemitic…”

The authors make the important clarification that each of the guidelines should be read in the light of the others, and they call for judgement and sensitivity to context in applying them to concrete situations; for example, hostility to Israel expressed as a reaction to a human rights violation, or as an emotional response by a Palestinian to an experience at the hands of the state, would not be antisemitic.

Progressive Jewish and other groups campaigning for Palestinian rights welcomed the JDA as a far superior alternative to the IHRA definition, although some had reservations. In the UK, Jewish Voice for Labour recommended that it be deployed in universities, political parties, local authorities and other institutions. In the US, Jewish Voice for Peace acknowledged that it “opens space for debate” and “champions freedom of speech”, but felt that the disproportionate emphasis on Israel-Palestine distracted from the danger faced from far-right white supremacists, and argued that the authors should have included Palestinian perspectives and analyses. These two criticisms had earlier been voiced more emphatically by the BDS National Committee, along with more detailed criticisms of some of the JDA formulations.

I agree with Mike Cushman that the involvement of pro-Palestinian groups in drafting the JDA would have resulted in improved formulations, but at the cost of drastically reducing its weight as a statement about antisemitism. I also feel that oppressed people are entitled to define their own oppression provided their vision of freedom from oppression doesn’t trample on the rights of others; for example, the authors of the JDA may feel that antisemitism predates white-supremacism, and therefore cannot be attributed to it. These criticisms misread the JDA as a statement about Palestine and Israel, whereas its real purpose is to draw the line demarcating antisemitic hate speech from protected freedom of expression and academic freedom. If it is read in the same nuanced manner as the manner in which it has been written, I believe it achieves this purpose.

Source: The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism Is a Very Welcome Initiative

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Mayor Naheed Nenshi to Canadians: ‘We need to talk’

2021/04/30 Leave a comment

Always worth listening to:

Welcome to Corridors. We’ve been sharing this space with contributors as obsessed as we are with policy and Canadian politics. This week, we bring you a voice from Alberta. Naheed Nenshi has been mayor of Calgary since 2010. He’s studied at Harvard’s Kennedy School and taught at Calgary’s Mount Royal University. Nenshi is a first-generation Canadian. His parents immigrated from Tanzania and, he says, “instilled the ethic of seva — service to the community.” He’s just announced he will not seek a fourth term in office and has been reflecting on lessons to share from his tenure. Over to you, Mayor. — Sue Allan, editor of POLITICO Canada.

DRIVING THE WEEK

When I announced this month that I won’t be running for re-election, I expected conversations about legacy, our historic investments in transportation, Calgary’s state-of-the-art library, or how we transformed government to deliver services more efficiently while maintaining the lowest tax rates in the country.

Instead, I’ve been mostly asked about racism and the increasing divisions in our society. In many ways, the exit interviews are a funhouse mirror to the conversations after I was first elected.

I found myself very famous the day after that 2010 election. Every national media outlet wanted a piece of me, as well as CNN, Time and Al-Jazeera. But no one was interested in my come-from-behind campaign or my radical ideas on how cities can work better; they only wanted to talk about my faith.

At the time, I took part, because I wanted to talk about this place where we live pluralism every day. I wanted to talk about how my race and my faith were not factors in the election, and that people just saw me as a Calgarian. Even in 2010, as I was seeing increasing waves of intolerance and hatred globally, I thought, and still think, that the story of Canada serves as a model for the world.

But now, things are different. We are more polarized than ever. Differences, whether political or cultural, are exploited to sow division. And with division, the threat of hatred, radicalization and violence grows.

You need only look to the dialogue around any of our current challenges. Either you believe climate change is real, or you love oil and gas (hint: most us think both are true). Personal freedoms are pitted against public health measures. This black and white, us-versus-them political positioning is not only a barrier to pragmatic solutions, it creates an environment where political disagreements stray outside the acceptable boundaries of debate.

Nowhere is this more obvious than on social media. In 2010, social media helped me, as a little-known academic, reach Calgarians during my first mayoral campaign. Twitter still held the promise of a platform to engage in constructive discourse. Today, social media is an anti-social battleground for unfiltered, post-truth put-downs and provocations. Whether I post about politics or a lost puppy, I can count on receiving vitriolic, racist and personal attacks.

This behavior isn’t limited to the online sphere. Political life has become increasingly adversarial, confrontational and dangerous. RCMP data shows threatsof violence against Canadian politicians are on the rise, and I’ve felt that in my own life. I’ve been asked to chair Council meetings remotely, or not to step outside. Attacks on gender, religion and race are much more common — all this at a time when we need better representation from women and people from diverse backgrounds.

Meanwhile, reports of anti-Asian hate crimes have risen to disturbing levels in North America, no doubt fueled by the former U.S. president labelling Covid-19 the “Chinese virus.” In Quebec, Bill 21 restricts what job you can have based on your faith. That’s not secularism, that’s bigotry, and we need to call it out no matter the political risk.

I don’t mind taking the arrows. I have broad shoulders and thick skin. But that doesn’t mean it’s okay. Not for me, not for anyone.

I fear that people, at a time when we need diverse voices in the public sphere, will see how I am treated, and how women in politics, who experience far more abuse than I could imagine, are treated, and will shy away, at the moment we need them most.

What we need now is a major shift in thinking. It’s a huge challenge, but one place we can start is with the way we interact with each other.

Politicians need to resist cheap political shots and rhetoric and we all need to hold ourselves and each other to higher standards, listen as much as we speak, and be disciplined in all we do. I know it sounds naive, but we need to learn to be much more deliberate, much less careless, or we risk losing, well, everything.

I still live in gratitude every day that I get to live here. There is no better place in the world to have these conversations. But we have to have them. And we have to have them now.

Source: Mayor Naheed Nenshi to Canadians: ‘We need to talk’

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with

How one federal agency broke free of outdated IT infrastructure

2021/04/30 Leave a comment

While written a bit too much as a puff piece, an interesting and relevant example of modernization (some of these remind me of my time in the early days of Service Canada and IT infrastructure renewal, where of course the issues were on a much larger scale and higher risk for CPP and EI):

The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the need for modern, agile IT systems as both the public and private sectors grapple with a suddenly remote workforce. Cloud platforms are the backbone of modern IT infrastructure, providing scalability, speed, and remote access, and are secure without the expense of physical infrastructure. Yet less than 10 per cent of federal departments have transferred some of their operations to a cloud platform. Part of this is because the pandemic diverted focus, but it is also due to fear of the unknown and uncertainty over security benefits and procurement rules.

Had the pandemic struck five years earlier, Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) would have been crippled by its lagging IT infrastructure. Instead, CMHC’s operations continued without missing a step – even supporting the government’s pandemic response by rolling out critical economic support with record speed, such as the Canada Emergency Commercial Rent Assistance for small businesses and the Insured Mortgage Purchase Program to support the financial system.

CMHC’s partnership approach to transforming its IT infrastructure can serve as a model for other federal departments. CMHC and Accenture, a global professional services company, came together five years ago to move CMHC’s outdated and siloed systems to a robust digital service platform.

Back in 2016, CMHC relied on close to 1,000 separate software applications, many of which were customized and hard to maintain. From operations and insurance underwriting to applications for program funding and accounting, every structure had its own siloed system.

Technology was a source of frustration. Twenty-three per cent of CMHC employees rated it their number one barrier, and one in six employees spent their time trying to find data.

Today, those systems have been replaced with enterprise platforms that have automated manual tasks, sped up processing times and offer real-time data to support better decision-making. This endeavour was no small feat. Finding the right partner and doing a thorough analysis of the scope of the challenge took over a year.

Together as CMHC’s deputy chief information officer and Accenture’s federal government practice lead, we helped execute a project that took place over several years and involved hundreds of employees from both organizations. Ultimately, we found that how we implemented the technology was just as important as the technologies we invested in. Sometimes it was even more important.

Here are five key lessons learned that we believe can help other departments successfully approach digital innovation:

1. Leadership buy-in is crucial

The journey for the project – called CMHC in Motion – began under CMHC’s president and leadership team with the goal of becoming a more agile, focused and efficient company with a culture of accountability.

CMHC modernized its organizational structure and focused on communication and training to manage risk, change and execution and to encourage innovation. Fixing technology was the next step.

The leadership team ensured the building blocks were in place for technology and business transformation. Program funding and resources were made available to drive this three-year transformation and its evolution for years to come.

The CIO role was elevated. Now the CIO sits on CMHC’s executive committee and is positioned to influence decisions that affect all parts of the company. Digital and technological thinking need to be able to influence business strategy rather than being made to fit into strategy that is already set. The two need to evolve hand-in-hand.

2. Innovative solutions require innovative approaches

It was clear from the start that the traditional procurement route of a complicated and time-consuming request-for-proposal process would be an obstacle for the project. Inviting potential partners to analyze the scale of the problem was critical to finding not only the right partner but also the right solutions. For three months, two potential partners were given access to CMHC’s infrastructure and systems to fully assess the scale of the situation they would face. More importantly, it allowed CMHC to leverage the experience of external experts in defining the solution. Incorporating this into the proposal process allowed for a broader, more robust and feasible path forward.

When CMHC and Accenture came together there was already an understanding of the challenges and potential solutions, and the project team was able to move straight to planning implementation.

3. A true partnership and governance structure is vital

From day one, CMHC wanted a partner. The vision was an arrangement where both parties shared in the benefits and risks and would collaborate on challenges. Given the complexity and timelines of the project, it was impossible to predict where the work would lead, what outcomes and technologies would be needed or even be available. A risk-sharing fund positioned both parties to carefully consider potential project variances and cost overruns, and both parties came together to solve emerging needs and to consider any potential changes to the scope of work.

Agreeing up front to share in the financial risk is not the norm for public sector transformation projects, but it eliminated years of delay as we avoided time-consuming project scoping, trying to describe the perfect solution. It meant that CMHC was not dictating a solution, but rather defining the problem and getting fresh outside perspectives on how to address it through a cohesive joint team.

Managing outsourcing relationships isn’t easy, so CMHC created a partner relationship management team. Three levels of governance are used at CMHC. It starts at the highest level, with the executive team, then flows to the management and operational governance structures. On a bi-weekly basis CMHC and Accenture Canada’s CEOs met to discuss program performance, relationship status and planning. Five years after the contract was signed, these meetings still take place.

4. Commit to an uncharted path

A multi-year transformation will not follow a straight path. Innovative, agile organizations need to be open to imperfection and experimentation. Innovation requires an acceptance that not all ideas work, and that getting out of planning mode and into testing mode happens so we can learn, adapt and move forward. Progress over perfection and timeliness was important, and we made risk-based decisions to move quickly.

For CMHC, technology was also used to help drive a change in culture around risk-taking, speed and being ok with failure. For CMHC and Accenture, there was an understanding that immediate answers would not always be available, especially with rapid advances in technology. This enabled the delivery team to take risks and push forward at a quicker pace, knowing that it was ok to fail fast to avoid the lengthy detours of searching for the “perfect” solution.

Along the journey, unforeseen events – like the introduction of the National Housing Strategy in 2017 and the COVID-19 pandemic – required significant changes to plans and priorities. CMHC was able to adapt, demonstrating that with the right culture and committed senior leadership, organizations can become resilient and better equipped to respond to unexpected changes in their business environment.

5. Create a feedback loop to guide the pace of change

Engaged and enabled employees can make or break transformative IT projects. Change management is often the first thing to cut when an organization is trying to save its resources, yet it is one of the areas we found to be critical. Continuous dialogue and check-ins through surveys and consultations ensured employees believed in the transformation and had the skills and confidence to adopt transformed business approaches. It is essential to communicate early and often to employees in a transparent and simple way.

To get early buy-in from employees and to show our commitment to making this transformation work, the first project we tackled was the one with the biggest positive impact for our employees – moving off Lotus Notes email to Outlook and Skype. The success of this implementation was instrumental in gaining buy-in from employees and made the transformation real for them.

We were cognizant of the massive cultural shift we were asking employees to make. Their entire technological world was being altered, from a new email platform and filing systems, to a client relationship management system, invoicing and how they manage client requests. We developed a “heat map” to identify which areas of CMHC were undergoing the most change. With the map and employee feedback, we were able to adjust our approach and ease up where the pace of change was too intense. We worked alongside senior management and human resources to continuously evaluate progress and identify areas that needed more training or support.

Moving forward

We find ourselves at an exciting time, where rapid innovation in technology has the potential to drastically change the way we develop and deliver public programs and policy. Over the past few years, technology companies have improved the ease of use, security, scale and interoperability of their offerings. The flexibility and cost-effectiveness of cloud services are undeniable.

The pandemic has highlighted the need for agility in our IT infrastructure. As Canadians look to all levels of government to lead them through these unprecedented times, they have seen the tangible results of government in action to keep them safe, provide them with financial support and navigate the road to economic recovery. Now is the time to build a better, more resilient IT environment for our public sector, one that will allow us to weather storms and continue to provide Canadians with world-class government services.

Source: How one federal agency broke free of outdated IT infrastructure

Filed under Government Tagged with ,

Farber: The under reporting of hate crimes in Canada

2021/04/30 Leave a comment

Of note:

Seven months after 58-year-old Mohamed-Aslim Zafis was brutally slain outside a Rexdale mosque, Toronto police have released a new report that details statistics and specific types of hate-motivated offences committed against individuals in 2020.

Zafis’s killing is not among those crimes.

The glaring omission of the slaying is striking — especially consideringZafis’s family and the community itself pleaded with police to treat it as a hate crime.

When the suspect’s name was released, the Canadian Anti-Hate Network immediately reviewed his social media. Our findings suggested that the suspect is someone who subscribes to the most dangerous hate-promoting conspiracy theories, including “the Great Replacement.”

The theory dangerously asserts that white Europeans — and North Americans — are being intentionally replaced through immigration and low birth rates. While the original theory focused on an alleged Muslim invasion, more recent proponents of the theory overlay it with antisemitism. 

In August 2017, it inspired over 200 American neo-Nazis to march in Charlottesville, Virginia, in a torch light parade bellowing “Jews will not replace us,” injuries, and the tragic murder of anti-racist Heather Heyer by one of the white supremacists. 

In March 2019, another hate-monger attacked the Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch, N.Z., murdering 51 innocent Muslims and leaving 40 injured. The New Zealand government’s Royal Commission on the attack singled out the terrorist’s belief in the Great Replacement as one motivating racist factor.

While the story of Zafis’s death made worldwide news, the issue of police not treating what are arguably self-evident hate crimes as hate crimes is not new.

An Angus Reid survey, released in mid-2020, revealed that almost one-third of Chinese Canadians report being physically attacked during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet only 12 incidents of hate-motivated crimes against Chinese Canadians are included in the report. 

Studies tell us that only one to five per cent of hate incidents in Canada are reported to police. The real number of hate crimes and incidents is actually 20 to 100 times higher.

Members of communities targeted by hate-motivated attacks often don’t report them. In some cases, the number of victims who don’t report is over two-thirds. When attacks are reported, the police treat many as unfounded — they either don’t believe the victim, don’t see the point in pursuing the report, or are unsuccessful in their investigations. They only report forward a small subset that they have at least partially successfully investigated. 

Laudably, Toronto police made an arrest within a week of Zafis’s slaying. So why was his death not included in the 2020 hate crimes report? Some answers may lie in a new study by Barbara Perry of Ontario Tech University’s Centre on Hate, Bias and Extremism that involved interviewing police officers in Ontario. 

Officers expressed frustrations with the process. The only hate crime under the Criminal Code is wilful promotion of hatred. Other offences, such as assault or vandalism, could be subject to enhanced sentencing provisions if the offence is hate-motivated, with police providing evidence to the Crown. Officers told Perry that they are usually not successful and cases just “disappear into a vacuum.” 

Some officers candidly admitted that they feel police departments are falling short in their obligations to ensure communities feel comfortable coming forward. 

“I don’t think we do enough to ensure the community feels that it will be taken seriously,” one officer noted.

So, then, what does this tell the Muslim community when Zafis’s slaying is not counted among hate crimes? 

The alleged killer’s YouTube channel had saved xenophobic videos perpetuating the myth of roving migrant gangs, and clips from Russian propaganda outlets about the “Belgian Muslim State.” 

And, of course, the Great Replacement. 

It isn’t hard to draw the line between those toxic ideas and the cold-blooded killing of a Muslim man serving his community in front of his neighbourhood mosque. 

Surely one can understand the fear within racialized communities when self-evident hate crimes like the Zafis death is not seen as such.

According to the new report, hate crimes in Toronto have risen 51 per cent. But considering only 1 to 5 per cent of hate incidents and crimes are reported, the question remains: what about the other 95 per cent?

Source: https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/2021/04/27/the-under-reporting-of-hate-crimes-in-canada.html

Filed under Hate crimes, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

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