The Weight of the Words: Levy – Niskanen Center

2018/02/12 Leave a comment

Good long read  by Jacob T. Levy of  McGill University on the importance and impact of words. Excerpt is with respect to impact on the public, article covers the full range:

….Within the electorate, the speech of elites matters in a couple of different ways. A large part of the population begins with a tribal sense of what team they’re on, which side they support, but relatively little information about the substantive policy views associated with that. Thanks to Trump’s Twitter feed and Fox News (and the strange reciprocal relationship between them) the Republican and conservative rank and file now have an unusually direct, unusually constant source of information about the things that people like us are supposed to believe and support. I think that we can see the effect of this in the rapid and dramatic swings in reported Republican opinion on questions from free trade to Russia policy. Trump’s stump speeches and unhinged tweets, and Fox News’ amplification of them, are changing what Republican voters think it means to be a Republican. He doesn’t speak for them; how many of them had a view about “the deep state” two years ago? He speaks to them, and it matters.

One example is the attack on the mainstream news media–“fake news,” by which Trump means nothing more and nothing less than “news outlets that aren’t subservient to me.” There have always been media outlets of different political colorations, and there have always been elected officials who disliked and feared media outlets critical of them. The delegitimation of the basic enterprise of independent journalism is something else, and something new to the US. In their important new book How Democracies Die, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt point to the delegitimation of the independent press as one of the key warning signs of a genuine would-be autocrat. They note the parallel between Trump characterizing the media as the “enemy of the American people,” his expressed desire to “open up” libel laws, and his “fake news” campaign and the words that preceded action in democratic breakdowns elsewhere. We don’t know how far Trump will be able to go in his attempts to suppress the media, but we know that he’s persuaded millions of Republicans to let him try.

There has been a lot of discussion lately about why Republican elites who presumably know better (like Paul Ryan) seem to have become fully complicit in the administration’s attack on the Russia investigation, fully willing to help conceal, impede, and obstruct when they don’t themselves know what the investigation will find. (If you’re the target of an investigation, you roughly know what you’re guilty of and what you’re not. Paul Ryan has no earthly idea what Trump or his circle have done; why risk having someone else’s unknown crimes hung around your own neck?) The popular theory is that they got their tax cut, and they’re willing to pay any price for that. I think that’s wrong, and underestimates Congressional self-interest. I think the answer is, at least in part: over the last year Trump has successfully radicalized the Republican electorate, with his words, in their support of him personally. Congressional Republicans who, a year ago, were still at least trying to keep Trump at arm’s length don’t dare to anymore. Trump has successfully belittled, marginalized, and demonized his occasional critics among Senate Republicans, with his direct line to the Republican electorate (and, again, as always, its amplification in the Trumpist media). The absurd drumbeat to “release the [Nunes] memo,” by its very absurdity, reveals Trump’s current power over Congressional Republicans. A year ago, more of them would have objected to delegitimizing the FBI. But Trump has successfully communicated to his voters that being on their team means not being on the FBI’s team. He’s changed what being a Republican means.

And he’s trying to change what being an American means. The power of elite speech in a democracy is only partly that of giving partisan cues to one’s supporters. It’s also the power to channel and direct the dangerous but real desire for collective national direction and aspiration. Humans are tribal animals, and our tribal psychology is a political resource that can be directed to a lot of different ends. The alleged realism of those who want to ignore words will often point to some past president whose lofty rhetoric obscured ugly policies. Whether those presidents are named “Reagan and George W. Bush” or “JFK and Barack Obama” varies in the obvious way, but the deflationary accounts are similar; there are blunders, crimes, abuses, and atrocities enough to find in the record of every American president. But all those presidents put forward a public rhetorical face that was better than their worst acts. This inevitably drives political opponents crazy: they despise the hypocrisy and the halo that good speeches put on undeserving heads. I’ve had that reaction to, well, every previous president in my living memory, at one time or another. But there’s something important and valuable in the fact that they felt the need to talk about loftier ideal than they actually governed by. They kept the public aspirations of American political culture pointed toward Reagan’s “shining city on a hill.” In words, even if not in deeds, they championed a free and fair liberal democratic order, the protection of civil liberties, openness toward the world, rejection of racism at home, and defiance against tyranny abroad. And their words were part of the process of persuading each generation of Americans that those were constitutively American ideals.

Trump’s apologists are now reduced to saying that his speech has been worse than his actions so far, the reverse of this usual pattern. The effect is the reverse, too. When he tells us that there are “very fine people on both sides” as between the Klan and their critics, he turns the moral compass of American public discourse upside-down. He channels the desire for collective aspiration into an attempt to make us worse than we are. The norm against publicly legitimizing Klan-type explicit racism was built up over a long time, calling on white Americans to be better than they were, partly by convincing them that they were better. The norm is still strong enough that Trump grudgingly kind of walked back his comments after the Charlottesville protests last year. But a norm that was built up through speech, persuasion, and belief can be undermined the same way. Trump’s own racism, his embrace of white nationalist discourse, and his encouragement of the alt-right over the past two years have, through words, made a start on that transformation….

via The Weight of the Words – Niskanen Center

 

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Facial Recognition Is Accurate, if You’re a White Guy – The New York Times

2018/02/12 Leave a comment

The built-in biases and limitations of facial recognition and the issues it raises:

Facial recognition technology is improving by leaps and bounds. Some commercial software can now tell the gender of a person in a photograph.

When the person in the photo is a white man, the software is right 99 percent of the time.

But the darker the skin, the more errors arise — up to nearly 35 percent for images of darker skinned women, according to a new study that breaks fresh ground by measuring how the technology works on people of different races and gender.

These disparate results, calculated by Joy Buolamwini, a researcher at the M.I.T. Media Lab, show how some of the biases in the real world can seep into artificial intelligence, the computer systems that inform facial recognition.

Color Matters in Computer Vision

Facial recognition algorithms made by Microsoft, IBM and Face++ were more likely to misidentify the gender of black women than white men.

Gender was misidentified in up to 1 percent of lighter-skinned males in a set of 385 photos.

Gender was misidentified in up to 7 percent of lighter-skinned females in a set of 296 photos.

Gender was misidentified in up to 12 percent of darker-skinned males in a set of 318 photos.

Gender was misidentified in 35 percent of darker-skinned females in a set of 271 photos.

In modern artificial intelligence, data rules. A.I. software is only as smart as the data used to train it. If there are many more white men than black women in the system, it will be worse at identifying the black women.

One widely used facial-recognition data set was estimated to be more than 75 percent male and more than 80 percent white, according to another research study.

The new study also raises broader questions of fairness and accountability in artificial intelligence at a time when investment in and adoption of the technology is racing ahead.

Today, facial recognition software is being deployed by companies in various ways, including to help target product pitches based on social media profile pictures. But companies are also experimenting with face identification and other A.I. technology as an ingredient in automated decisions with higher stakes like hiring and lending.

Researchers at the Georgetown Law School estimated that 117 million American adults are in face recognition networks used by law enforcement — and that African Americans were most likely to be singled out, because they were disproportionately represented in mug-shot databases.

Facial recognition technology is lightly regulated so far.

“This is the right time to be addressing how these A.I. systems work and where they fail — to make them socially accountable,” said Suresh Venkatasubramanian, a professor of computer science at the University of Utah.

Until now, there was anecdotal evidence of computer vision miscues, and occasionally in ways that suggested discrimination. In 2015, for example, Google had to apologize after its image-recognition photo app initially labeled African Americans as “gorillas.”

Sorelle Friedler, a computer scientist at Haverford College and a reviewing editor on Ms. Buolamwini’s research paper, said experts had long suspected that facial recognition software performed differently on different populations.

“But this is the first work I’m aware of that shows that empirically,” Ms. Friedler said.

Ms. Buolamwini, a young African-American computer scientist, experienced the bias of facial recognition firsthand. When she was an undergraduate at the Georgia Institute of Technology, programs would work well on her white friends, she said, but not recognize her face at all. She figured it was a flaw that would surely be fixed before long.

But a few years later, after joining the M.I.T. Media Lab, she ran into the missing-face problem again. Only when she put on a white mask did the software recognize hers as a face.

By then, face recognition software was increasingly moving out of the lab and into the mainstream.

“O.K., this is serious,” she recalled deciding then. “Time to do something.”

So she turned her attention to fighting the bias built into digital technology. Now 28 and a doctoral student, after studying as a Rhodes scholar and a Fulbright fellow, she is an advocate in the new field of “algorithmic accountability,” which seeks to make automated decisions more transparent, explainable and fair.

Her short TED Talk on coded bias has been viewed more than 940,000 times, and she founded the Algorithmic Justice League, a project to raise awareness of the issue.

In her newly published paper, which will be presented at a conferencethis month, Ms. Buolamwini studied the performance of three leading face recognition systems — by Microsoft, IBM and Megvii of China — by classifying how well they could guess the gender of people with different skin tones. These companies were selected because they offered gender classification features in their facial analysis software — and their code was publicly available for testing.

To test the commercial systems, Ms. Buolamwini built a data set of 1,270 faces, using faces of lawmakers from countries with a high percentage of women in office. The sources included three African nations with predominantly dark-skinned populations, and three Nordic countries with mainly light-skinned residents.

The African and Nordic faces were scored according to a six-point labeling system used by dermatologists to classify skin types. The medical classifications were determined to be more objective and precise than race.

Then, each company’s software was tested on the curated data, crafted for gender balance and a range of skin tones. The results varied somewhat. Microsoft’s error rate for darker-skinned women was 21 percent, while IBM’s and Megvii’s rates were nearly 35 percent. They all had error rates below 1 percent for light-skinned males.

Ms. Buolamwini shared the research results with each of the companies. IBM said in a statement to her that the company had steadily improved its facial analysis software and was “deeply committed” to “unbiased” and “transparent” services. This month, the company said, it will roll out an improved service with a nearly 10-fold increase in accuracy on darker-skinned women.

Microsoft said that it had “already taken steps to improve the accuracy of our facial recognition technology” and that it was investing in research “to recognize, understand and remove bias.”

Ms. Buolamwini’s co-author on her paper is Timnit Gebru, who described her role as an adviser. Ms. Gebru is a scientist at Microsoft Research, working on its Fairness Accountability Transparency and Ethics in A.I. group.

Megvii, whose Face++ software is widely used for identification in online payment and ride-sharing services in China, did not reply to several requests for comment, Ms. Buolamwini said.

Ms. Buolamwini is releasing her data set for others to use and build upon. She describes her research as “a starting point, very much a first step” toward solutions.

Ms. Buolamwini is taking further steps in the technical community and beyond. She is working with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a large professional organization in computing, to set up a group to create standards for accountability and transparency in facial analysis software.

She meets regularly with other academics, public policy groups and philanthropies that are concerned about the impact of artificial intelligence. Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, said that the new technology could be a “platform for opportunity,” but that it would not happen if it replicated and amplified bias and discrimination of the past.

“There is a battle going on for fairness, inclusion and justice in the digital world,” Mr. Walker said.

Part of the challenge, scientists say, is that there is so little diversity within the A.I. community.

“We’d have a lot more introspection and accountability in the field of A.I. if we had more people like Joy,” said Cathy O’Neil, a data scientist and author of “Weapons of Math Destruction.”

Technology, Ms. Buolamwini said, should be more attuned to the people who use it and the people it’s used on.

“You can’t have ethical A.I. that’s not inclusive,” she said. “And whoever is creating the technology is setting the standards.”

via Facial Recognition Is Accurate, if You’re a White Guy – The New York Times

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Douglas Todd: Immigrants’ children, Canadians of colour most educated

2018/02/12 Leave a comment

A further nuance to the data presented in the two studies mentioned can be seen in the above chart showing unemployment rates for 25-34 year olds for visible minority groups compared to non-visible minorities by level of education showing generally higher unemployment rates for college and university educated visible minorities (I don’t yet have the data table by generation).

The gender gap between non visible minority men and women with university education (12.8 percent for 25-34 year olds) is also characteristic, to varying levels, among visible minority groups:

….Contrary to widespread claims that white males are “privileged” in Canada, an earlier study by Picot and Feng Hou, of the University of Victoria, found that Canada’s 3.2 million women of colour are the most educated group in the country.

“The children of immigrants from many Asian countries, such as China and India, register remarkably high educational outcomes, with 50 of Chinese and 60 per cent of those from India holding university degrees,” Picot says.

When Jedwab zeroed in on the education levels of middle-aged adults in Metro Vancouver, he found 46 per cent of immigrant men and 48 per cent of immigrant women in the city had university degrees. That ratio was 41 per cent for Canadian-born females (between the ages of 35 and 44), and only 31 per cent for Canadian-born males.

As well as being accomplished at universities, a high portion of children of immigrants tend to find success once they venture out to work in Canada.

“On average, the children of immigrants are doing as well or better (as adults) in the labour market than the children of the Canadian-born,” said Picot. “Furthermore, because of their higher educational attainment, the children of immigrants are more likely to be in professional occupations and less likely to be in blue collar jobs than children with Canadian-born parents.”

The results do not offer good news for all immigrants and their children, though. The studies by Picot and Jedwab show that immigrants to Canada are tending to divide into two polarized groups: Some are unusually strong at the high end of the economic spectrum, others are over-represented at the low end.

Jedwab found immigrants and visible-minority Canadians are far more likely than the Canadian-born and whites to report low incomes. In Metro Vancouver, for instance, Jedwab found almost 15 per cent of immigrants had low incomes, compared to just 9.4 of non-immigrants. In addition, 24 per cent of Metro’s ethnic Chinese reported low incomes, compared to 10 per cent of non-visible minorities.

In an era where some North American academics, activists and media commentators are emphasizing “white male privilege,” the census data raises questions about the usefulness of such a broad concept. It highlights contradictions and disagreements over which groups are privileged and which are disadvantaged.

Jedwab, for instance, does not think much of the arguments of those who worry that males who are “non-visible-minority Canadians” (a Statistics Canada category that is largely made up of whites, but also includes aboriginals) are disadvantaged, or under performing. He says many are simply going into blue-collar work.

“In the case of the non-visible-minority male population,” Jedwab said, “there is a growing trend we see towards getting trade certificates, where there is a sense that job opportunities are better.”

Picot’s emphasis is on maintaining the success of immigrants’ children. “Taking steps to maintain the positive attitude of Canadians towards immigration can help, since a population backlash can negatively affect second generation outcomes,” he writes. “Canada is one of the few western where researchers, policy developers and the public are little concerned about immigrants ‘stealing the jobs of Canadians.’ This is a prominent issue in most western nations.”

While economists like Collier and educators such as Bennett also appreciate the many positive achievements of immigrants and people of colour, they don’t necessarily want Western societies to abandon the domestic-born population.

Bennett, a university instructor who maintains the website Educhatter, is concerned about the “lack of motivation” among average students of Canadian background, including whites and Aboriginals. His research has found many are languishing.

Collier says high-immigrant Western countries such as Britain, the U.S. and Canada have never figured out how to address the problems of the under-achieving domestically born. Such countries, he said, have developed either universal programs for everyone, or affirmative-action plans for immigrant, ethnic or other minority groups perceived as vulnerable.

No Western country, he suggests, has ever designed a way to respond to the more nebulous needs of those in the mainstream domestic population — whom many consider to be privileged, but who are under-achieving.

Is there any chance policy-makers in Canada will be the first to take up the challenge they offer?

via Douglas Todd: Immigrants’ children, Canadians of colour most educated | Vancouver Sun

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How Cheddar Man shatters accepted views of immigration | Shree Paradkar

2018/02/10 Leave a comment

The complexities of migration, history and identity:

You’ve got to confess it’s worthy of chuckles and cackles.

A made-for-Internet scientific discovery that at the same time strikes at the core of modern racial strife. An announcement Wednesday that DNA tests on the oldest complete skeleton in Britain, that heart and ancestral home of many white people around the world, suggest that the first modern Briton was blue-eyed, yes, but very dark-skinned and curly-haired.

The Cheddar Man, named thus for the English village of Cheddar where his skeleton was discovered in 1903, is about 10,000 years old.

To add salt to a supremacist’s wound, scientists said that the genes for lighter skin likely came from, you got it, immigrants from the Middle East.

Oh snap.

Dark-skinned native Britons and light-skinned immigrants.

It’s like reaching into the eye of a storm and fitting it with sunglasses.

Disorienting.

Those brave lads and fair maidens on glorious historical British dramas on TV — descendents of immigrants.

The image of God himself, majestic, kindly old white guy in white robes with flowing white beard — fashioned on immigrants.

Imagine being Nigel Farage, the former leader of the U.K. Independence Party, who proudly stood in front of a Nazi-era-like poster with the slogan, “Breaking point: the EU has failed us all,” and a photo of a winding lineup of migrants of colour.

Now he would have to change that slogan to “Breaking point: I come from them. I am them.”

Such horror.

No wonder there were hopeful comments online about Cheddar Man such as, “Who’s to say the person’s not a foreign visitor” or a call to index this as “fake news,” or the insistence that this was a finding driven by a social justice agenda to force poor victimized British people into accepting mass migration.

The Cheddar Man, 10,000 years old though he may be, absolutely has bearing on contemporary debates on race and migration.

This discovery of a dark-skinned original Briton doesn’t put the race genie back into the bottle in an equalizing “we’re all immigrants” kind of way.

On the contrary, in exposing the racial fluidity of Britons, Cheddar Man delivers a sucker punch to toxic ideas that drive the white power mobs who in turn fuel xenophobic policies. It reveals the basis of their quick codes equating skin colour to valour or danger as nothing but fear-based fiction.

Scientists have long argued that race is not a biological concept. People of one race — or at least people who can be grouped together with similar physical traits — are not genetically homogenous.

The concept of races evolved as a way of justifying slavery and to maintain an economy founded on slave labour; it was easier to rationalize the brutalization of the “savage” than to face the unconscionable alternative.

From then on, it continues to be a favoured tool to demonize “the other.”

Around the world, oppressor groups have always found identity a useful tool with which to assert themselves as inherently superior, as “natural” holders of power, be it on the basis of race, gender, sexual identity, religious identity, tribal identity or caste.

That race isn’t real does not mean racism isn’t real.

Anti-Black racism is so widespread and global in scope, that I wish scientists would hurry up and create a bust out of the fossils of the 750,000-year old Peking Man, for instance, and in keeping with the Out of Africa theory, definitively establish Blackness as the root ancestry of Chinese people.

Such knowledge might have given the Hubei Provincial Museum in Wuhan pause before it displayed a photography exhibit that juxtaposed wild African animals with Black African people.

I wish they were able create a bust that would depict an original “Indian Man,” one who existed before the Aryans and Dravidians did 5,000 years ago, as black-skinned — darker the better. Such knowledge might inject a modicum of humility before privileged Indians wreak racist violence on African students and caste-related violence on Dalits.

When nations look to figure out where they’re going next, it makes sense sometimes to turn back and look at the past for clues.

Being reminded of a shared heritage with people they consider coming from “s—hole” countries, might give Western leaders, including a certain U.S. president, a few pointers as they ponder immigration policies.

These leaders might read data helpfully put forward by Arvind Magesan, associate professor of economics, University of Calgary, in The Conversation. That might help them discover that although their own policies play a part in making those countries “s—holes,” those immigrants continue to be better educated, better employed (although lower-paid) than those of, shall we say, “Norway-like” countries.

This is one way the discovery of Cheddar Man’s skin colour could have the power to force aside the ahistorical lens with which we view our fellow humans.

At least for a few days.

via How Cheddar Man shatters accepted views of immigration | Toronto Star

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‘Weaponization’ of free speech prompts talk of a new hate law

2018/02/10 Leave a comment

One to watch:

The climate for hate speech regulation in Canada appears to be shifting.

Traditional free speech advocates are reconsidering the status quo they helped create, in which hate speech is only a Criminal Code charge that requires political approval, and so is rarely prosecuted. There is even talk of resurrecting the defunct and much maligned ban on internet hate speech, Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act.

The latest example was a lecture this week by Omar Mouallem, an Edmonton journalist and board member of free expression group PEN Canada, in which he argued online racists have “weaponized” free speech against Muslims, and Canada should consider a new anti-hate law to stop them.

Mouallem told a University of Alberta audience that public discourse is “fatally flawed,” and overrun with hate propagandists who traffic in lies and provocations in order to pose as censorship victims.

The far right has “co-opted” the issue of free speech, and their activism is not a principled defence of a Charter value, but “a sly political strategy to divide opponents on the left, humiliate them and cast them as hypocrites and unconstitutional, to clear a way for unconstitutional ideas,” Mouallem said in an advance email interview.

The traditional liberal response of public censure and rebuttal is no longer effective because it just “devolves into a pissing match that goes nowhere and only makes people double down on their opinions,” he said. “Given that Facebook groups and social media are the meeting point for hate groups to organize, and that online hate speech has a great ability to spread wider and faster, I think special regulation is worth considering.”

It is striking to hear that from a board member of PEN Canada, which is devoted to fighting censorship and defending freedom of expression, and was instrumental in the legislative repeal of Section 13, a law in the Canadian Human Rights Act that banned repeated messages, by phone or internet, that were “likely to expose” protected groups to hatred or contempt.

The lecture follows news that the federal Liberal government is openly mulling bringing back Section 13, which was repealed by Parliament in 2014, but later found by courts to be constitutionally valid. It allowed for legal orders banning offenders from engaging in further hate speech, on pain of criminal contempt charges, and provided for fines of $10,000.

It also follows the backtracking of another press freedom group, Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, which launched a petition for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to “disinvite” U.S. President Donald Trump from a G7 Summit on the grounds that his administration’s attacks on press freedom have harmed American democracy. That petition was deleted soon after it was announced, amid criticism that it hypocritically also violated the principles of free expression.

Even libraries have illustrated the shift. A memorial held in a Toronto library last year for Barbara Kulaszka, a prominent lawyer for Canadian hate propagandists, led the Toronto Public Library to change its room-booking policy, allowing officials to refuse bookings that are “likely to promote, or would have the effect of promoting, discrimination, contempt or hatred of any group.”

Tasleem Thawar, executive director of PEN Canada, said she encourages diverse perspectives on the board. There has been no change to the group’s official position “that an educated, thoughtful, and vibrantly expressive citizenry is the best defence against the spread of hateful ideologies,” she said.

“If the federal government were to propose a new law (against hate speech), we would certainly comment on the specifics and its possible effects,” she said. “However, PEN is also committed to dispelling hatreds, as stated in the PEN International Charter, including on the basis of identity markers like class, race, gender, and nationality. And it is true that hateful, marginalizing and even demonizing speech can chill the freedom of expression of the groups who are being subjected to such public bigotry.”

All this might be evidence that the culture war over Canada’s uniquely balanced approach to hate speech is set to flare up again. Old arguments are being repurposed to fit modern media. Laws that were written in the age of telephone hotlines and printed newspapers are being reconsidered in the context of Twitter, Facebook and Google.

As ever, religion — especially Islam — is at the core of the debate, according to Richard Moon, the University of Windsor law professor who authored an influential 2008 report for the Canadian Human Rights Commission that urged it to stop regulating online hate via Section 13.

In his forthcoming book Putting Faith in Hate: When Religion is the Source or Target of Hate Speech, Moon describes the traditional distinction between speech that attacks a belief, which is typically protected by law, and speech that attacks a group, which can rise to the level of banned hate speech. He argues that our understanding of religion complicates this distinction, because religion is both a personal commitment and a cultural identity. Hate speech, then, often works by falsely attributing an objectionable belief to every member of a cultural group.

“Most contemporary anti-Muslim speech takes this form, presenting Islam as a regressive and violent belief system that is incompatible with liberal democratic values. The implication is that those who identify as Muslims – those who hold such beliefs – are dangerous and should be treated accordingly. Beliefs that may be held by a fringe element in the tradition are falsely attributed to all Muslims,” Moon writes.

Mouallem, who does not identify as Muslim, is a former rapper, freelance writer, and co-author of a book on the Fort McMurray wildfire. He said he does not advocate the return of Section 13 exactly as it was. It often worked, he said, but it is “too tainted.”

Section 13 was a “messy, if not farcical process,” he said, made more so by the “manipulation” of Richard Warman, the lawyer and former Canadian Human Rights Commission staffer who effectively monopolized the law, filing nearly every case and eventually winning them all, sometimes after posing online as a neo-Nazi to gather evidence. It was also “misused,” he said, by Canadian Muslim leaders on the “wishy-washy” case of alleged anti-Islam hate speech in Maclean’s magazine.

But Canada should have some kind of “online clause” that addresses both the “uniqueness of online content” and this current historical moment in which there is “widespread vilification” of Muslims and “rapid mobilization of extremist groups.”

Now there are “flagrant” examples that would be caught by such a law, he said, such as Ezra Levant’s use of the term “rapefugees.”

“Allowing hate speech to remain in the public sphere actually signals that it’s socially acceptable, which gives licence to perpetuate it, and eventually can make it mainstream,” Mouallem said.

The expression that “sunlight is the best disinfectant,” meaning hate speech is best countered by more and better speech is “ineffective when you’re dealing with majority tyranny and certain discrimination is widely accepted. This is the unique moment of hate speech in Canada and much of the ‘West’ right now,” he said. “Society has made an exception for Islam.”

Source: ‘Weaponization’ of free speech prompts talk of a new hate law

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Taking Back the Language | Noah Rothman

2018/02/09 Leave a comment

Nice reminder that language can but both ways by Rothman:

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stumbled into controversy this week, although it was perhaps unwarranted. Trudeau became the subject of derision and mockery when he interrupted a woman at a town hall to correct her use of the term “mankind,” suggesting that she replace this dated designation with the more inclusive “peoplekind.” He only offered his proposal after enduring several minutes of a rambling new-age monologueregarding the chemical composition of “maternal love.” Trudeau’s interjection was probably flippant, but neither his interlocutor nor his critics seemed to notice. It’s hard to blame them.

When it comes to subservience to the many demands that identity politics makes on language and behavior, Canada’s prime minister takes a back seat to no one. It’s only prudent to assume Trudeau’s mawkishness is earnest. What’s more, the fact that “gendered” nouns and pronouns, including “mankind,” find themselves in the censors’ crosshairs isn’t exactly news. The popular grammar-checking program Grammarly flags “mankind” for “possible gender-biased language” and suggests more neutral substitutes like “humankind” or “humanity.” Learning to love unidiomatic expressions and consigning gender-specific language to history is a fixation of political activists posing as academicians, even if legitimate etymological scholars cannot support these arguments by citing linguistic corpora. Those who resent an increasingly overbroad definition of what constitutes offensive language are primed for a fight.

Language policing has been the stock-in-trade of a particular type of activist for decades, much to the consternation of both conservatives and liberals interested more in clarity than conformity. Recently, though, the intramural debate on the left over the limited utility of scrutinizing potentially objectionable speech rather than the ideas conveyed by that speech has been relegated to the back burner. That’s for a good reason.

Donald Trump’s presidency, much like his candidacy, is a brusque counterattack against “PC culture.” Often, what Trump and his supporters call “politically incorrect” language is just plain rudeness. The value of the kind of speech they find delightfully provocative isn’t its concision but its capacity to offend the right people. Thus, some self-styled arbiters of linguistic enlightenment might be tempted to dismiss Trump’s campaign against ambiguous semantics as nothing more than a brutish primal scream. If so, they would have failed to properly appreciate the threat Trump and the presidential pulpit he commands represent to their capacity to shape the terms of the debate through language. Trump isn’t limited to displays of rhetorical brute force. Sometimes, he and his speechwriters are capable of compelling eloquence.

Amid a blizzard of FBI texts, dueling intelligence committee memos, and legalisms regarding the oversight of America’s necessarily secretive espionage courts, the State of the Union address has all but been forgotten in Washington. It’s less likely, though, that a well-received speech watched by at least 46 million Americans will be so quickly forgotten across the country. And that should concern liberals because if there was any single line in that speech that won’t be overlooked, it was one that cuts at the heart of the Democratic Party’s ability to lay claim to the moral high ground. “My duty and the sacred duty of every elected official in this chamber is to defend Americans, to protect their safety, their families, their communities and their right to the American dream,” Trump said. “Because Americans are dreamers, too.” This was a masterful line. Its potency has been underestimated, and not just by those who resent the restrictive immigration policies it was designed to advance.

The name of the bipartisan 2001 “Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act” transgressed a little in order to achieve a lot for the children of illegal immigrants brought into the U.S. as minors. Referring to this demographic as “alien” is taboo, and an offense against modern sensibilities. But to describe them as “DREAMers” yields a windfall of sympathy for this already deserving group of largely naturalized non-citizens. Trump’s turn of phrase spreads the dreaming around, thus diluting the designation DREAMer of much of its unique sympathy.

Democrats might have missed the significance of this expression amid their irritation over another set phrase in that speech: “chain migration.” Trump’s use of this term during the State of the Union Address to describe the process by which legal immigrants sponsor members of their extended family to become American citizens elicited boos from Democrats. Many implied the phrase is a new invention with racist connotations, but the term has been used by policymakers (including some of these same Democrats) for decades. Maybe it was the self-evident hypocrisy, or maybe it was the contrived effort to move the goalposts. For whatever reason, the Democrats’ campaign to label “chain migration” a racist term landed with a thud. Time was that the left could dictate the terms of a debate by controlling the language of its participants, but their grip on the national dialogue may be slipping. The power of the presidency—you’ll forgive the expression—trumps the braying of the pedantic opposition.

The energy expended by political activists on policing speech is not wasted; dictating the boundaries of what constitutes acceptable discourse is a profitable and productive enterprise. If the right is getting into the game, they’re only following a course forged by their political adversaries.

via Taking Back the Language | commentary

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For women of colour, there’s a gap within the pay gap: Melayna Williams

2018/02/09 Leave a comment

Have been working through some of the Census data and the gender gap works both ways depending on the group as the above chart indicates.

Given Williams’ focus on the Black community, which the data supports, her perspective is understandable but the data shows a more complex reality among the different minority groups and gender:

The gender wage gap remains a pertinent issue in Canada, despite how long women have been lending their labour to the workforce. And we often hear statistics that contrast two categories: men and women. On this, the numbers are stark.

But that data doesn’t incorporate filters around identity and background of women, an omission that effectively erases the compounding discrimination faced by non-white women in Canada. A lens that compares only men and women sets up women’s rights as a replica of patriarchy, where one group is favoured over everyone else; in doing so it reinforces the rigid power structures that have brought us to this point. But including race in the analysis reveals a different kind of gender gap that’s perhaps even more alarming than the broader issue.

In a 2011 Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives report examining census data from 2006, Sheila Block and Grace-Edward Galabuzi found dire income disparities for racialized Canadians. They earn 81.4 cents for each dollar white Canadians make, and the jobs are typically less desirable: low wages, precarious, non-permanent. Add the filter of gender, though, and a much wider, more worrisome gulf appears: “Racialized women earned 55.6 cents for every dollar non-racialized men earned in 2005 . . . Racialized men made 77.9 cents for every dollar non-racialized men earned,” wrote Block and Galabuzi. “The gap narrows even further when comparing racialized and non-racialized women. Racialized women earned 88.2 cents for every dollar that non-racialized women earned.”

Research has been done to identify the core issues and advance solutions around the position of Indigenous and Canadian women of colour in the work market. “Inequality, discrimination and a segmented labour market have left women of colour with earnings at just 64 per cent of men’s, and Aboriginal women’s earnings at just 46 per cent of men’s,” wrote Lisa Lambert in a 2010 paper titled “Gender wage gap even more pronounced for Aboriginal women.” For women of colour and Indigenous women in Canada, she writes, “the earnings situation is inexcusable.”

How are we closer to gender parity in Canada when the gender gap we often think about ignores the unique struggles of women of colour and Indigenous women? If white men are still making more money than white women, can this be acknowledged while addressing the fact that women of colour fall far below both? If we actually believe in the principles of equality with which Canada so proudly associates itself, we must acknowledge both crises: the gap between men and women, and that between racialized women and everyone else.

Source: For women of colour, there’s a gap within the pay gap

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How the Australian Constitution, and its custodians, ended up so wrong on dual citizenship

2018/02/07 Leave a comment

For those interested, a good analysis of how Australia ended up in this mess regarding dual citizenship and political qualifications by Hal Colebatch of University of New South Wales:

The final session of the constitutional convention was held in Melbourne early in 1898. There was no further discussion of what became the now-infamous section 44, and a drafting committee took over to prepare a final draft.

Edmund Barton – soon to become Australia’s first prime minister – was the chair and dominant figure. He insisted on working till 4 or 5am, even though the other two members of the committee had gone to bed and only Robert Garran, the secretary, was left to maintain the illusion of a committee.

After four days of drafting, Barton presented the convention, on its second-last day, with 400 amendments. He proposed a three-hour break for the delegates to study them, after which they could be put to the vote en bloc.

Barton assured the convention that there was only one amendment of substance – to section 44(ii). What he did not say was that section 44(i) had been completely rewritten, changing it from an active voice (“done any act whereby”) to a passive voice (“is a subject or citizen … or is entitled to”).

No attention was drawn to this change, there was no explanation of it, and there was no time for debate on any clause unless someone objected to it. The constitutional text that proved so significant more than a century later was a last-minute change, drafted in private and accepted out of weariness.

In his history of the convention, J.A. La Nauze points out that, by this stage, the delegates “had had enough”, but muses:

it may one day interest a curious lawyer to inquire whether judicial review has lingered with significant consequences on new words approved on trust and intended … merely ‘to put the wishes of the convention in more complete and concise form’.

As it turned out, it interested more than the curious lawyer, and created a problem which has yet to be adequately managed.

Appealing to the umpire?

The constitution was rather unclear about how these provisions would be enforced. It said both that questions about qualification could be settled by each house, but also that “any person” who believed that an elected representative was disqualified by section 44 could sue them in “any court of competent jurisdiction”.

In any case, there was little call for either until the High Court decided in 1999 that the UK was a foreign power.

Even then it refused to hear a case calling for Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard to produce evidence they had renounced their UK citizenship, on the basis that they had declared that they were qualified, and so the court should presume that they were. To do otherwise would be a vexation and an abuse of the court’s time.

But when the court did deign to interest itself in the matter, it took the traditional High Court view that it was not interested in the problem, or what the writers of the constitution were trying to do, but only with the possible meaning that a black-letter lawyer could squeeze from these words, irrespective of its impact on the governing of Australia.

Where does this leave us?

The situation now is that the qualifications for candidature for the Australian parliament are set by the parliament, but the disqualifications are largely set by foreign governments via the High Court. This diminishes the ability of electorates to choose the representative they want (though, when given the chance, electorates show what they think of the High Court’s action by returning the ousted members in the ensuing byelection).

And the High Court’s escapade in the china shop is not yet over, for it has yet to rule on the disqualification of those who are “entitled to” foreign citizenship, even if they have not applied for it. If the court applied the same logic that it has used in the cases already decided, this would disqualify not only any Jew, but also anyone with a Jewish parent, grandparent or spouse, all of whom are entitled to Israeli citizenship under the Israeli Law of Return.

The best course would be to start with recognising the problem, rather than searching for a preferred solution. In contemporary Australia, identities are often complex, and citizenship entitlements may be multiple and overlapping. How these are to be recognised in the qualifications for candidature demands a period of public discussion culminating in political action.

The only way we could get this is to take the matter out of the hands of the High Court and foreign governments and return the task of defining qualifications and disqualifications for candidature to parliament. This could be done by adding to section 44 the phrase “until the parliament otherwise provides”, which is used in section 30 on qualifications, and at a number of other points in the constitution.

This would be a logical and constitutional response to the political problem that has landed on us. If the five main parties in the parliament (all of which have had their parliamentary representation threatened by the High Court’s actions) supported a referendum to achieve this change, it would probably be carried.

The voters, too, as they showed in New England and Bennelong, have had enough. They want the political leaders to lead.

via How the Australian Constitution, and its custodians, ended up so wrong on dual citizenship

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A reckoning on Black people and marijuana is a long time coming: Paradkar

2018/02/07 Leave a comment

Important aspect with compelling arrest stats:

As the banned substance begins to burgeon into a multi-billion-dollar industry, the once-petty crooks, many of them Black, with the grassroots know-how of how to run the business and who could become contributing members of society, are once again being shut out because they have criminal records.

The government has talked about amnesty for past marijuana crimes that would mean erasure of those records. But it is unlikely to take any action until after legalization — and already, others with money have plunked their grubby fingers in this pie to make more money.

This includes, of course, that shameless hypocrite and former chief of multiple police forces Julian Fantino, who helped passed into law Bill C-10 that included mandatory minimum sentences on people for having as few as six plants.

On Friday, The Canadian Press reported that a group of frustrated lawyers in Toronto is considering a class-action lawsuit against the government to push it into granting cannabis amnesty.

They should just do it.

Some advocates are also seeking an apology.

A reckoning of the unfairness with which anything related to marijuana has been treated is a long time coming.

Even the usage of the word marijuana — which comes from Mexico—came into being during the Prohibition Era to warn off Americans by appealing to their xenophobic sensibilities with the suggestion that it could lead to the intermingling of races.

In Canada, too, marijuana has proven handy as a system of racial control. In July last year, the Star published an analysis of 10 years of Toronto police data — including two years when Fantino was police chief — to show that Black people with no history of criminal convictions were three times more likely to be arrested for possession of small amounts of marijuana than white people.

The users are Black and white at about equal rates, but the people behind bars are disproportionately Black.

More recently, the American experience shows that even in states where the plant is legalized, while overall numbers of arrests have plummeted, Black people are still arrested at higher rates.

Four times higher in Washington, D.C., 10 times higher in Alaska.

From Richard Nixon’s so-called “war on drugs” to Ronald Reagan’s drug war to Bill Clinton’s “tough on crime” laws, the crackdown on drugs has always been an assault on race.

The scholar Michelle Alexander points out in her seminal book The New Jim Crow that Nixon’s White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman recalled that Nixon “emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the Blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”

The Reagan administration created an indelible link between drug abuse and Black people, she wrote in HuffPost. It hired staff whose responsibility it was “to publicize inner-city crack babies, crack mothers, crack whores, and drug-related violence.”

Clinton’s policies wrought the highest increase in number of people imprisoned.

But a change was coming. The face of drug users in the public imagination was getting lighter-skinned. Think Breaking Bad. Ozark.

“Changing attitudes and policies became possible in large part because the media was no longer saturated with images of Black and brown drug dealers,” Alexander said at a Drug Policy Reform conference in 2017. “The colour of drug users and dealers got whiter in the public imagination, and so we, as a nation, got nicer.”

Nicer in Canada would mean erasing criminal records without a fight, the flawed structure of the RCMP’s national criminal record database notwithstanding. That database can show whether someone has a record for possessing an illegal drug, but not necessarily which one, according to a report in Global News.

“That means that erasing marijuana possession (or trafficking) records could turn into a painstaking, manual process, involving searches in court and police archives across the country.”

No reason why people imprisoned for petty crimes should pay for the carelessness of those trafficking in power.

via A reckoning on Black people and marijuana is a long time coming | Toronto Star

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How political Islam is gaining ground in Southeast Asia despite the fall of Islamic State | South China Morning Post

2018/02/07 Leave a comment

More on Southeast Asia and the risks of political Islam:

The religious insurgency in the southern Philippines, which saw the capture of Marawi by fighters aligned to Islamic State last year, revealed the violent power of political religiosity. Given that Southeast Asia is home to a large proportion of the global Muslim population, transregional alliances formed between Southeast Asian terror groups and IS represent the possibility of religious warfare in the Middle East spilling over into Southeast Asia. The battlefield defeat of IS should not lull anyone into complacency. As a guerilla group, its scattered warriors remain a threat to nations, particularly the home states to which they are expected to return.

The growth of political Islam is undermining the very vocabulary of the public sphere in Southeast Asia

What unites the different manifestations of political Islam, ranging from electoral participation and street politics to outright terrorist war, is the idea of the capture of state power and its use to implement religious law. If there is a tussle, it is between the parliamentary and insurrectionary paths to power. However, the political outcome would be similar in both cases: the establishment of confessional states that could be expected to disenfranchise not only non-Muslims but also Muslims who owe national allegiance to secular democratic polities.

Indeed, what is frightening is how the growth of political Islam is undermining the very vocabulary of the public sphere in Southeast Asia. Words such as “liberalism”, “pluralism” and “democracy” have become suspect among even mainstream politicians, to say nothing of “secularism” or “socialism”. Liberals, pluralists and democrats are finding themselves in the defensive position of having to work their way delicately around the discursive space that the religious right has captured.

The rise of political Islam has generated countervailing forces in other religions. The popularity of a Thai Buddhist monk is a case in point. He rose to prominence after urging Buddhists across Thailand to burn down a mosque as punishment for every monk killed in the insurgency in the country’s south. He has made common cause with a monk in Myanmar famous for his anti-Muslim views. Given the violent dispossession of Myanmar’s Muslim Rohingya population last year, the potential of religious intolerance to dismantle the known order is immense.

In a far cry from the notion of Southeast Asia being a mosaic of religious identities, the chief threat to the region today comes not from foreign predators or new global ideological wars, but from the agency that religious dissension is gaining as a marker in regional relations.

Religions do not pass, but their violent politicisation can. Southeast Asian Muslims must understand that, while they belong legitimately to the global Islamic community or the ummah, they exist as well among other communities. China to the north and India to the west – both largely non-Muslim-majority countries – constitute a major segment of the world’s population. Europe and the Americas are largely non-Muslim as well. It is only the Middle East, Central Asia and a small part of South Asia which are demographic partners of Muslim Southeast Asia.

That partnership cannot challenge the economic, military and ideational heft of the rest of the world. Even if the non-Muslim sphere were to be riven by conflict between its two foremost players – the United States and China – it would pull together to resist any encroachment into its religio-political identity.
Support for Islamic State? In Indonesia, there’s an app for that

Equally, however, global powers cannot wish political Islam and its extremes away. The ability of terrorist groups to disrupt everyday life reiterates an old truth: it is not superiority of numbers and power that matters but what even a handful of people can do to disrupt peaceful political processes and change. After all, the essentially guerilla tactics employed by al-Qaeda and IS drew out nothing less than the concerted efforts of much more powerful states.

A moment of hiatus has appeared in the tired militarisation of global affairs. That moment will not last long. Political Islam’s Manichean division of the world into the spheres of believers and infidels is being felt keenly in Southeast Asia.

Indonesia, home to the largest number of Muslims on Earth, will be the test case of how that division plays out. A violent showdown will be avoided if most Indonesian Muslims subscribe to the idea that they can be faithful to their religion while owing political allegiance to a non-religious state. If the Indonesian state gives way to the demands of the PKS, the stage will be set for more intensive great-power intervention in Southeast Asia.

Unlike economic systems, which promise salvation in the present, religions do so in a hereafter that can destroy the present on the way to its fulfilment.

Political Islam is a danger.

via How political Islam is gaining ground in Southeast Asia despite the fall of Islamic State | South China Morning Post

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