Canada urged to fund program to send students abroad

2017/11/09 Leave a comment

Is is availability of funding or willingness to study abroad? The International Experience Canada program for 18-35 year olds also has an imbalance between those coming to Canada to work/study versus Canadians going abroad.

That being said, funding may help:

Canada should launch an ambitious new program to send college and university students abroad in an effort to prepare tomorrow’s work force to drive trade and economic relations with emerging markets, a new report says.

The report released on Wednesday was co-authored by one of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s former advisers and the former president of Canada’s primary international development agency. It recommends the federal government spend $75-million a year for the program’s first five years to help tens of thousands of students study and work abroad as part of their undergraduate education.

Rather than focus on typical U.S. and Western European destinations, students should be encouraged to study at institutions in emerging economies, a move that will help diversity Canada’s global trade links, the report says.

“If you look at the trends in Canada’s trade relationships and trends within the global economy, it’s quite likely that we are going to be dealing with a shifting set of trade partners in the coming years; we already are,” said Roland Paris, one of the report’s co-authors and university research chair in international security and governance at the University of Ottawa. “This is a long-term investment in the ability of our country to be engaging with those societies, and not just economically, but in other areas as well,” he said.

Dr. Paris wrote the report with Margaret Biggs, a former president of the Canadian International Development Agency who is now a fellow in public policy at Queen’s University. Dr. Paris was a key adviser in Mr. Trudeau’s election team and throughout the government’s early months in power and drafted the Liberal foreign policy strategy leading up to the 2015 election.

Canada will succeed on the world stage by “building bridges” through engagement with international organizations, Dr. Paris has said.

This is not the first report to argue that Canada must redress its lagging investment in outbound student mobility. Such proposals have come annually for the past several years from a variety of educational groups and federally-appointed task forces.

But the authors of the new 40-page report hope to restart a stalled discussion by trumpeting the benefits of study-abroad programs for an audience outside the postsecondary sector. The report’s recommendations have been crafted with the help of corporate leaders, and it emphasizes the benefits of foreign education to the country’s economy.

It also stresses that studying abroad must be accessible to students of all means and backgrounds, a message likely to resonate with a government that has made it clear that its financial contribution to postsecondary institutions, such as research grants, depends on the schools’ commitment to equity and diversity. “We are hoping that this will ignite interest not just in the usual circles, but in the private sector,” Ms. Biggs said.

To kick start the discussion, the report, titled Global Education For Canadians, recruited representatives from Manulife, Royal Bank of Canada and Power Corporation, among others, along with college and university leaders.

But the report highlights how global education can help even small and medium-sized firms, said Sue Paish, a member of the report study group and chief executive of LifeLabs, a health-care company.

“I think we are at the early stage of Canadian business learning that finding the people who can comfortably and effectively navigate the ambiguity in the business world … can be accelerated by hiring people who have had an international study experience,” Ms. Paish said.

In spite of the national and individual benefits, convincing students to go abroad has been difficult for many countries that are part of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. High-quality education systems in their own countries and concerns about costs abroad keep more than 95 per cent of students in Britain, Australia and the U.S. at home. Less than 3 per cent of Canadian postsecondary students currently study abroad for any length of time, according to statistics from the Canadian Bureau for International Education.

But unlike those other English-speaking countries, Canada lacks a national strategy to raise its number, the report points out.

“Our peer countries have already recognized that international learning provides important strategic advantages to their young people and to their societies. We need to have that conversation in Canada; it has barely even begun,” Dr. Paris said.

There is one advantage of Canada’s lack of attention to outward mobility so far. Any future program will learn from the mistakes other countries have made and ensure that studying abroad does not become another advantage for privileged students.

Both Australia and Britain have increased supports to underrepresented students after studies found far less participation in studying abroad.

“The gap between the rich and the poor is only going to get wider if it’s only the affluent students who can make those connections and develop those skills,” Dr. Biggs said.

The report was released by the Centre for International Policy Studies at the University of Ottawa and the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto.

via Canada urged to fund program to send students abroad – The Globe and Mail

Filed under Other Tagged with , , , ,

What happened to respectful debate in Canada? Erna Paris

2017/11/07 Leave a comment

Great commentary by Erna Paris, notably regarding the Writers Union of Canada and the more recent Dalhousie controversies:

Will Trumpism come to Canada? When asked over the past year, I’ve said no. Canadian respect for diversity, an economy that has stayed afloat and our reputed politeness have made such an evolution improbable – at least in the near term.

That’s still true, but we’re seeing ground-level challenges.

Yes, Ezra Levant’s hateful website, The Rebel, fell into disrepute after its coverage of the white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., last August. Yes, the federal NDP has elected a Sikh man as its leader. And yes, the recent outing of men with a history of predation may actually kick-start change to the oldest status quo in history: the demeaning of uppity women who think they’re equal.

But, starting with the kerfuffle at The Writers’ Union of Canada last May, there have been troubling signs – not because the concerns being raised are inappropriate, but because of the way they’re being handled.

In an issue devoted to Indigenous writing, the editor of the house magazine, Write, said provocatively that he believed in cultural appropriation. Writers must be encouraged to imagine other peoples, other cultures, other identities, he explained, before flippantly calling for an “appropriation prize.”

Those of us who hope to build a new relationship with First Nations peoples recoiled at his insensitivity, but the brouhaha that followed, including his immediate firing and a public apology on the part of the union erased his central point: that it is the work of writers to imagine and interpret the world.

This used to be self-evident. Was E.M. Forster appropriating Indian culture when he wrote A Passage to India? Did this year’s Nobel Prize winner, Kazuo Ishiguro, appropriate British culture in The Remains of the Day because he happened to be born in Japan? Was I wrong to circle the globe to write Long Shadows, a comparative look at how different cultures re-imagine their history after times of crisis? Limitless vision used to be the hallmark of good writing. If this is now being contested, the editor’s remarks ought to have triggered a serious public discussion about the nature of writing itself. This didn’t happen. The Writers’ Union correctly took action, but it simultaneously curtailed the conversation.

Another distracting development has been the self-serving effort to redefine common words, such as the term “racist.” According to a teenager of my acquaintance, some Ontario teachers are using the word to apply uniquely to those who are presumed to hold power, meaning that only white people can exhibit the flaw. It has been a near-universal understanding that anyone, regardless of skin colour, can harbour hatred and hold racist views. How will children learn to think with nuance about difficult questions if their teachers eschew history, context and moral complexity?

Last month, another indication of the emerging zeitgeist took place at Dalhousie University when its student union condemned Canada 150 celebrations because of the country’s exploitative history with Indigenous people. After a student launched an obscenity-laden tweet in support, engendering a complaint, the university decided to investigate, but withdrew when mounting anger seemed to preclude a mediated solution.

There was much that was disturbing about the Dalhousie affair. The student motion was certainly open to debate, but the tweet was not. It was, on the contrary, an attempt to silence speech in the name of free speech. The second problem was the capitulation of authority when faced with intimidation. The retreat of the university leadership sent a message that balanced discourse on a sensitive matter would not be possible, leaving everyone without recourse. The third concern was gross incivility in the public sphere. How many will risk engaging publicly if their interlocutors are more likely to hurl insults rather than debate the issue?

Because Canada is a diverse society largely sustained by historical compromise and the goodwill of its citizens, it will always be a fragile place, one that needs vigilant oversight. We must accept the anger that has been released by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and listen with respect to unpleasant truths. We must also have a respectful national debate on the complex historical issues being brought to light. At the same time, we cannot lose sight of the larger picture – the flawed beneficent country that sustains us.

via What happened to respectful debate in Canada? – The Globe and Mail

Filed under Other Tagged with , , ,

Canada stays civil amidst the polarization of American media: John Ibbitson

2017/10/28 Leave a comment

Good piece by Ibbitson:

CNN has a new commercial that features a picture of an apple. “Some people might try to tell you it’s a banana,” says the narrator. They might even scream that it’s a banana. “They might put BANANA in all caps. … But it’s not. This is an apple.”

The ad was, of course, immediately attacked by right-wing columnists. “Trump Derangement Syndrome has struck CNN and is taking a terrible toll,” wrote Thomas Lifson at American Thinker.

The American media have become so deeply polarized that each side has now lost any ability to listen to the other. Each accuses the other of committing fake news – stories based on false facts that are intended to deceive. But the deeper problem resides in columns and editorials and blogs and tweets that take implacable stands, distorting facts and belittling opponents, ignoring or disrespecting other points of view.

On Thursday, on the RealClearPolitics aggregator website, you could find headlines such as “The Bone Spur Bozo in the White House,” and “Does the Dems Dossier Trick Count as Treason?”

So why aren’t Canadians screaming at each other the way the Americans are?

One answer is that “we don’t have Donald Trump as prime minister,” observes Janni Aragon, who teaches political science at the University of Victoria. The President personifies the anger embedded within American discourse. But Prof. Aragon adds that the differences in media reflect differences in the political cultures of the two countries.

America, she says, is a land divided. In Canada, “divisiveness is not as strong.”

There isn’t a single political leader in Canada whose platform mirrors the nativist, anti-immigrant, authoritarian strains that we see in President Trump and his supporters. Nor, with a few minor, on-the-fringe exceptions (We’re talking about you, The Rebel), do Canadian media cater to racist phobias.

Why not? There could be several reasons.

Since the first Loyalist settlers arrived in the late 1700s, Canadian political culture has been tinged with what has been called a “tory touch,” an upper-class British tradition that stresses collective obligations over individual liberties. This sense of noblesse oblige underlies many of the value assumptions of the mainstream media.

Our small and scattered population also contributes, says Kirk Lapointe, who held a variety of positions in Canadian media (he was once my boss), and who teaches journalism at the University of British Columbia. There are so many Americans, he points out, that fringe publications can profitably publish, giving extremists a voice. But Canadian publications must cater to more moderate views in order to win a large enough audience to make a profit.

Mr. Lapointe hosts a Vancouver radio talk show. In his experience, extremists don’t attract listeners. “I see a fair amount of revulsion when someone like that tries to grab the microphone,” he said in an interview.

Canada’s large immigrant population is also a steadying influence. With four in 10 Canadians either an immigrant or the son or daughter of an immigrant, nativist voices have little hope of dominating the print, broadcast or digital conversation.

Pollster Michael Adams has published a book, Could It Happen Here? that compares Canadian and American political and social values in the age of Trudeau and Trump. To cite just one powerful statistic: According to one poll, 50 per cent of Americans believe that “the father of the family must be the master in his own house.” In Canada, the figure is 23 per cent.

To explain these differences, Mr. Adams refers to a chronic streak of paranoia that has long run through American politics, and Horatio Alger-like belief that anyone can make it to the top – so if you don’t, the system must be conspiring against you. He also cited the baleful influence of evangelical religion, gerrymandered Congressional districts and increasing income insecurity.

“In this paranoid atmosphere, people feel entitled not only to their own opinions but also to their own facts,” he believes. “And now, in the age of the internet, each is his own publisher and editor locked inside an ideological bubble with fellow travellers.”

This paranoid polarization infects the right more than the left in American politics. There is no progressive equivalent to Rush Limbaugh or Breitbart News. But the left is not immune to intolerance.

At the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) last week, a small group of protesters self-identifying as antifascists interrupted a forum on, of all things, how best to challenge hate speech. “No Trump, no KKK, no Fascist U.S.A.” they yelled, shutting down a question-and-answer session that resumed later in another room.

The discourse in Canadian politics and journalism is far from perfect. Indigenous Canadians, especially, do not see their values and priorities reflected in either Canada’s political culture or its media. Newsrooms are far less diverse than the communities they cover.

And Prof. Aragon warns of the tendency of American cultural influences to “trickle up” across the border. Polarized American media risk polarizing Canadian media through the sheer power of proximity.

Nonetheless, as President Trump sends out one angry tweet after another, Canadians retain deeper wells of moderation and goodwill than their American cousins.

In this country, just about everyone seems to agree that an apple is not a banana.

Source: Canada stays civil amidst the polarization of American media – The Globe and Mail

Filed under Other Tagged with , , ,

Facebook’s chief security officer let loose at critics on Twitter over the company’s algorithms – Recode

2017/10/10 Leave a comment

Interesting and revealing thread regarding some of the complexities involved and the degree of awareness of the issues:

Facebook executives don’t usually say much publicly, and when they do, it’s usually measured and approved by the company’s public relations team.

Today was a little different. Facebook’s chief security officer, Alex Stamos, took to Twitter to deliver an unusually raw tweetstorm defending the company’s software algorithms against critics who believe Facebook needs more oversight.

Facebook uses algorithms to determine everything from what you see and don’t see in News Feed, to finding and removing other content like hate speech and violent threats. The company has been criticized in the past for using these algorithms — and not humans — to monitor its service for things like abuse, violent threats, and misinformation.

The algorithms can be fooled or gamed, and part of the criticism is that Facebook and other tech companies don’t always seem to appreciate that algorithms have biases, too.

Stamos says it’s hard to understand from the outside.

“Nobody of substance at the big companies thinks of algorithms as neutral. Nobody is not aware of the risks,” Stamos tweeted. “My suggestion for journalists is to try to talk to people who have actually had to solve these problems and live with the consequences.”

Stamos’s thread is all the more interesting given his current role inside the company. As chief security officer, he’s spearheading the company’s investigation into how Kremlin-tied Facebook accounts may have used the service to spread misinformation during last year’s U.S. presidential campaign.

The irony in Stamos’s suggestion, of course, is that most Silicon Valley tech companies are notorious for controlling their own message. This means individual employees rarely speak to the press, and when they do, it’s usually to deliver a bunch of prepared statements. Companies sometimes fire employees who speak to journalists without permission, and Facebook executives are particularly tight-lipped.

This makes Stamos’s thread, and his candor, very intriguing. Here it is in its entirety.

  1. I appreciate Quinta’s work (especially on Rational Security) but this thread demonstrates a real gap between academics/journalists and SV.

  2. I am seeing a ton of coverage of our recent issues driven by stereotypes of our employees and attacks against fantasy, strawman tech cos.

  3. Nobody of substance at the big companies thinks of algorithms as neutral. Nobody is not aware of the risks.

  4. In fact, an understanding of the risks of machine learning (ML) drives small-c conservatism in solving some issues.

  5. For example, lots of journalists have celebrated academics who have made wild claims of how easy it is to spot fake news and propaganda.

  6. Without considering the downside of training ML systems to classify something as fake based upon ideologically biased training data.

  7. A bunch of the public research really comes down to the feedback loop of “we believe this viewpoint is being pushed by bots” -> ML

  8. So if you don’t worry about becoming the Ministry of Truth with ML systems trained on your personal biases, then it’s easy!

  9. Likewise all the stories about “The Algorithm”. In any situation where millions/billions/tens of Bs of items need to be sorted, need algos

  10. My suggestion for journalists is to try to talk to people who have actually had to solve these problems and live with the consequences.

  11. And to be careful of their own biases when making leaps of judgment between facts.

  12. If your piece ties together bad guys abusing platforms, algorithms and the Manifestbro into one grand theory of SV, then you might be biased

  13. If your piece assumes that a problem hasn’t been addressed because everybody at these companies is a nerd, you are incorrect.

  14. If you call for less speech by the people you dislike but also complain when the people you like are censored, be careful. Really common.

  15. If you call for some type of speech to be controlled, then think long and hard of how those rules/systems can be abused both here and abroad

  16. Likewise if your call for data to be protected from governments is based upon who the person being protected is.

  17. A lot of people aren’t thinking hard about the world they are asking SV to build. When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.

  18. Anyway, just a Saturday morning thought on how we can better discuss this. Off to Home Depot. 

Source: Facebook’s chief security officer let loose at critics on Twitter over the company’s algorithms – Recode

Filed under Other Tagged with , , ,

Penguins’ White House decision means Crosby can’t ‘stick to sports’ – Sportsnet.ca

2017/09/28 Leave a comment

Good analysis:

The president’s call for the release of NFL players who take a knee during the national anthem to protest racial injustice caused widespread backlash across the league this weekend. According to the Chicago Tribune, more than 200 players took a knee or sat on the bench while the anthem was played. Three teams, including the Pittsburgh Steelers, remained in their locker-rooms for the anthem. (Steelers offensive lineman, Alejandro Villanueva, an Army veteran, stood at the mouth of the players’ tunnel for the anthem by himself, though he has said that was due to a mistake.)

The president also disinvited the Golden State Warriors from visiting the White House as NBA champions, because the team’s star player, Steph Curry, said he wouldn’t attend — causing further backlash from NBA stars, like LeBron James and many others.

In the midst of it all, the Pittsburgh Penguins released a statement saying that they would, indeed, be attending the White House in celebration of the team’s Stanley Cup victory. That decision — not to mention the timing of the announcement — resulted in an outpouring of both criticism of and support for the Penguins.

When he was asked for his thoughts on visiting the White House by reporters after an exhibition game on Sunday, Crosby faced a polarizing question — whether he realized it or not.

“I support it,” the Penguins captain said. “It’s a great honour for us to be invited there.”

Despite Crosby’s honest efforts to be inoffensive, there was simply no way around it this time. He was going to offend one side or the other regardless.

And in that moment, Crosby made a statement about what he, his team and, yes, the NHL stand for.

Because in Trump’s America, sports and politics are inextricably linked. They’ve been mashed together like two mounds of Play-Doh in the hands of a toddler. And so Crosby was handed a discoloured pile of highly political mush, courtesy both of the president and of his own team’s decision to make an announcement about going to the White House.

This is the kind of discomfort that neither Crosby nor the NHL is used to.

Hockey is the least diverse of the major North American pro sports leagues. It is a sport that is by and large dominated by white people. And it is a sport that, for the most part, only the affluent can afford to play.

For those reasons, the NHL has less connection to the issues that are at the forefront in leagues like the NFL and the NBA. The majority of NHL players don’t face the systemic racism that their counterparts do. And so, in all its whiteness, the NHL doesn’t carry the social conscience that other leagues do. In fact, it deliberately tries not to.

Commissioner Gary Bettman has expressed his preference that players remain apolitical when representing the league. Meanwhile, Adam Silver, the NBA commissioner, has encouraged the players in the league to use their platforms to express their views.

The NFL, NBA and WNBA all have players who have long used their platform to protest the systemic racism that people of colour face in the United States. Some prominent baseball players, like Adam Jones, have also spoken out against racism. Oakland Athletics catcher Bruce Maxwell also knelt during the anthem on the weekend.

Although hotly debated, these protests have all been peaceful, respectful and eloquently explained by those who take part or support those who do. But the NHL has slipped through the controversy relatively unchallenged. Questions of race are left to black players such as P.K. Subban and Wayne Simmonds.

Still, hockey hasn’t been completely devoid of opinion. In recent years, several players in the NHL have shared their views about politics and social issues. Tim Thomas refused to meet with President Barack Obama when the Boston Bruins won the Stanley Cup. Earlier this year, Toronto Maple Leafs forward Nazem Kadri was critical of President Trump’s ban on people entering the United States from specific Muslim-majority countries. Mika Zibanejad of the New York Rangers spoke about the difficulty the ban created for his family still living in Iran. This weekend, Winnipeg’s Blake Wheeler slammed the president on Twitter for his comments regarding protesting athletes.

Source: Penguins’ White House decision means Crosby can’t ‘stick to sports’ – Sportsnet.ca

Robyn Urback’s take, after correctly calling out those using intemperate language criticizing Crosby:

Personally, I would have liked to see Crosby turn down the invite for any number of reasons: Trump’s attacks on athletes, women, immigrants, the U.S. Constitution and a normal news cycle, or for appearing to declare war on North Korea over Twitter. Take your pick.

I suspect Crosby assumed, rather adorably, that accepting the White House invitation was the less political of his two options. And after theexcoriation Boston Bruins goaltender Tim Thomas received for skipping his team’s White House visit in 2012, it’s not hard to see why he might think that.

Two wrong choices

But in 2017, there is no such thing as an apolitical move. Crosby was damned either way. He’d either be a Trump sympathizer by accepting the invitation, or a rogue liberal by turning it down.

Ideally, there would be room for some nuance, but we seem to exist in a climate now where there’s this impulse to characterize everyone — athletes, actors, co-workers, etc. — as either “with us” or “against us,” which is absolutely being encouraged by the guy in the White House.

Indeed, separating people into “good” and “bad” is straight from the Trump playbook, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us have to play along. We don’t have to see an athlete who visits the White House or chooses to stand during the national anthem as a de facto Trump sympathizer; perhaps he disagrees with Colin Kaepernick’s method of protest, or fears being seen as anti-American, or maybe he just wants to try to stay out of it, to the extent that’s possible.

There is an argument to be made, however, that someone who does nothing in the face of injustice is himself guilty of perpetuating that injustice. It’s a fair point, which is why Crosby doesn’t exactly deserve a high-five for shrugging off the president’s bizarre views on the free speech rights of athletes.

But it’s unrealistic to expect every prominent figure in the world to declare his or her position on this presidency. Some people just aren’t built for it (which, granted, speaks to an extraordinary level of privilege, since some people have to be political, whether they want to or not). Hockey players are not exactly known for their thoughtful takes on social justice.

In any case, Crosby is not the enemy. If there is an enemy here, it’s his indifference, which won’t be challenged by sending him a tweet calling him a moral leper.

You don’t change minds by dividing people into camps and declaring as enemies those with whom you disagree. And you don’t change minds by yelling at strangers on the internet.

Change happens when those with whom we disagree are seen as potential allies, not hopeless adversaries. Crosby could be an ally. Or else he’ll just be a pretty good hockey player.

 

Filed under Other Tagged with , , , , ,

Facebook’s Frankenstein Moment – The New York Times

2017/09/23 Leave a comment

Good and sobering analysis and how Facebook and other social media were caught unprepared for the darker side of human nature and societal impact:

On Wednesday, in response to a ProPublica report that Facebook enabled advertisers to target users with offensive terms like “Jew hater,” Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s chief operating officer, apologized and vowed that the company would adjust its ad-buying tools to prevent similar problems in the future.

As I read her statement, my eyes lingered over one line in particular:

“We never intended or anticipated this functionality being used this way — and that is on us,” Ms. Sandberg wrote.

It was a candid admission that reminded me of a moment in Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” after the scientist Victor Frankenstein realizes that his cobbled-together creature has gone rogue.

“I had been the author of unalterable evils,” he says, “and I lived in daily fear lest the monster whom I had created should perpetrate some new wickedness.”

If I were a Facebook executive, I might feel a Frankensteinian sense of unease these days. The company has been hit with a series of scandals that have bruised its image, enraged its critics and opened up the possibility that in its quest for global dominance, Facebook may have created something it can’t fully control.

Facebook is fighting through a tangled morass of privacy, free-speech and moderation issues with governments all over the world. Congress is investigating reports that Russian operatives used targeted Facebook ads to influence the 2016 presidential election. In Myanmar, activists are accusingFacebook of censoring Rohingya Muslims, who are under attack from the country’s military. In Africa, the social network faces accusations that it helped human traffickers extort victims’ families by leaving up abusive videos.

Few of these issues stem from willful malice on the company’s part. It’s not as if a Facebook engineer in Menlo Park personally greenlighted Russian propaganda, for example. On Thursday, the company said it would release political advertisements bought by Russians for the 2016 election, as well as some information related to the ads, to congressional investigators.

But the troubles do make it clear that Facebook was simply not built to handle problems of this magnitude. It’s a technology company, not an intelligence agency or an international diplomatic corps. Its engineers are in the business of building apps and selling advertising, not determining what constitutes hate speech in Myanmar. And with two billion users, including 1.3 billion who use it every day, moving ever greater amounts of their social and political activity onto Facebook, it’s possible that the company is simply too big to understand all of the harmful ways people might use its products.

“The reality is that if you’re at the helm of a machine that has two billion screaming, whiny humans, it’s basically impossible to predict each and every possible nefarious use case,” said Antonio García Martínez, author of the book “Chaos Monkeys” and a former Facebook advertising executive. “It’s a Whac-a-Mole problem.”

Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s vice president of communications and public policy, said in a statement: “We work very hard to support our millions of advertisers worldwide, but sometimes — rarely — bad actors win. We invest a lot of time, energy and resources to make these rare events extinct, and we’re grateful to our community for calling out where we can do better.”

When Mark Zuckerberg built Facebook in his Harvard dorm room in 2004, nobody could have imagined its becoming a censorship tool for repressive regimes, an arbiter of global speech standards or a vehicle for foreign propagandists.

But as Facebook has grown into the global town square, it has had to adapt to its own influence. Many of its users view the social network as an essential utility, and the company’s decisions — which posts to take down, which ads to allow, which videos to show — can have real life-or-death consequences around the world. The company has outsourced some decisions to complex algorithms, which carries its own risks, but many of the toughest choices Facebook faces are still made by humans.

Even if Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg don’t have personal political aspirations, as has been rumored, they are already leaders of an organization that influences politics all over the world. And there are signs that Facebook is starting to understand its responsibilities. It has hired a slew of counterterrorism experts and is expanding teams of moderators around the world to look for and remove harmful content.

On Thursday, Mr. Zuckerberg said in a video posted on Facebook that the company would take several steps to help protect the integrity of elections, like making political ads more transparent and expanding partnerships with election commissions.

“We will do our part not only to ensure the integrity of free and fair elections around the world, but also to give everyone a voice and to be a force for good in democracy everywhere,” he said.

But there may not be enough guardrails in the world to prevent bad outcomes on Facebook, whose scale is nearly inconceivable. Alex Stamos, Facebook’s security chief, said last month that the company shuts down more than a million user accounts every day for violating Facebook’s community standards. Even if only 1 percent of Facebook’s daily active users misbehaved, it would still mean 13 million rule breakers, about the number of people in Pennsylvania.

In addition to challenges of size, Facebook’s corporate culture is one of cheery optimism. That may have suited the company when it was an upstart, but it could hamper its ability to accurately predict risk now that it’s a setting for large-scale global conflicts.

Several current and former employees described Facebook to me as a place where engineers and executives generally assume the best of users, rather than preparing for the worst. Even the company’s mission statement — “Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together” — implies that people who are given powerful tools will use those tools for socially constructive purposes. Clearly, that is not always the case.

Hiring people with darker views of the world could help Facebook anticipate conflicts and misuse. But pessimism alone won’t fix all of Facebook’s issues. It will need to keep investing heavily in defensive tools, including artificial intelligence and teams of human moderators, to shut down bad actors. It would also be wise to deepen its knowledge of the countries where it operates, hiring more regional experts who understand the nuances of the local political and cultural environment.

Facebook could even take a page from Wall Street’s book, and create a risk department that would watch over its engineering teams, assessing new products and features for potential misuse before launching them to the world.

Now that Facebook is aware of its own influence, the company can’t dodge responsibility for the world it has helped to build. In the future, blaming the monster won’t be enough.

Filed under Other Tagged with

New Antifa Book: Only Bougie Wimps Oppose Left-Wing Violence Against Fascists

2017/09/22 Leave a comment

Good review and critique of those on the left who justify violence:

Thanks to the well-timed release of his book, Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook—a thorough study of anti-fascist activism—Dartmouth lecturer Mark Bray has become an in-demand media presence. His authoritative point of view has been featured by Meet the Press, The New Republic, and also (along with two self-professed antifa) in a debate with me on Al Jazeera over antifa violence.

A former Occupy Wall Street organizer, Bray utilized his contacts among the pan-leftist activist community to interview scores of international antifa. Their perspectives, combined with Bray’s rigorous historical research and his unabashed advocacy for antifa’s battle against amorphously defined “fascists,” constitute the bulk of Antifa’s pages.

Bray’s book dispels certain misperceptions about the group. Not merely defined by violence, antifa devotes much of its energy to the investigation and outing of various white supremacists. Taking a historical long view of the movement, Antifa details how communities of anti-fascists rousted racist skinheads out of the punk rock and soccer scenes in a number of cities, and recounts some notable historic antifa victories, such as “The Battle of Cable Street,” when in 1936 over 100,000 anti-fascist protesters stopped a march through London of over 5,000 black-shirted fascists.

Bray eschews any pretense of objectivity. And there’s nothing wrong with that—he chooses to use history in service of advocacy. Yet because of its glorification of antifa violence regardless of justification or effectiveness—Antifa is more hagiography than history. For example, Bray neglects to point out that “The Battle of Cable Street” led to electoral gains and a surge in membership for the British Union of Fascists (BUF), and he devotes exactly one paragraph of his book to concern over a growing “culture of insurrectionary maschismo” that fetishizes black bloc tactics at the expense of non-violent anti-fascist activism.

Though critics of antifa’s violent “no-platforming” tactics include Noam Chomsky, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren—and despite substantial evidence that such actions increase the prominence of the very speakers antifa seeks to silence—Bray insists that non-fascists need not fear the fists or fire of antifa. But the fact is that some victims of antifa violence have included people that only someone who sees Nazis on the insides of their eyelids could define as fascistic: journalists, photographers, and people of color.

Just as many mainstream liberals did, Bray lauds the well-publicized antifa sucker-punch of alt-right leader Richard Spencer as a contributor toward “legitimizing anti-fascism.” This was on Inauguration Day, when Spencer was giving an interview to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and an antifa member punched Spencer as he was being interviewed on a Washington street. Footage of the reeling white supremacist went massively viral and triggered a wide-ranging debate over the righteousness of “Nazi punching.”

But Bray also writes glowingly of “the most iconic moment of the day… when a limousine was set ablaze.” Bray neglects to mention the immolated limousine was occupied by a Latino driver who suffered minor injuries in the attack, and the vehicle was owned by a Muslim immigrant, who asserts he was later harassed by individuals who mistook him for a Trump supporter.

Antifa is not a paramilitary group, nor does it have a hierarchy. This fact leaves the deployment of violence to the discretion of individual participants. Docu-journalist Leighton Woodhouse, who has written favorably of antifa, covered the demonstrations against a right-wing “free speech” rally in Berkeley this past August and wrote of how easily mob violence in the name of “justice” turns innocent people into collateral damage. “Anybody who challenged the Black Bloc made themselves a target, whether they were a white supremacist looking to stir shit up (and there were maybe five or six of those in a crowd of thousands), or a liberal who yelled their disapproval at their tactics, or a reporter taking pictures after being commanded to stop,” he wrote. “If you pissed someone in the Black Bloc off, and someone came after you, the rest of the bloc followed. Suddenly you were facing a hostile mob, the time for arguing your case expired, literally fearing for your life.”

Though Bray dismisses concerns about potential antifa mission creep—insisting that average foot soldiers in the fight against fascism are disciplined and sophisticated enough to distinguish actual fascists from less threatening right-wingers—he and other advocates continue to lower their own bar for acceptable violence.

Case in point: After antifa rioted to shut down a scheduled speech at Berkeley by far-right commentator Milo Yiannopolous, the group’s supporters cited unnamed sources claiming Yiannopolous intended to publicly out undocumented students. Though Yiannopolous’ noxious politics are unabashedly anti-immigrant, he issued a public denial that he intended to dox (although he admitted he liked the idea). He never did do it. Significantly, this unsubstantiated rumor continues to be cited by pro-antifa journalists to justify the violence.

Following neo-Nazi violence in Charlottesville, Bray and other advocates have made conflicting claims, arguing on one hand that a fascist takeover is imminent unless the rest of us tacitly approve of masked vigilantes acting as judge, jury, and executioner of anyone they choose in the streets. On the other hand, such advocates boast of scores of alt-right rallies subsequently canceled because of the counter-threat posed by antifa. (The latter claim is likely inflated due to one anti-immigrant group’s decision to cancel one day of 67 rallies in part because they didn’t want neo-Nazis and alt-rightists co-opting their cause.) A more likely supposition, suggested by Kill All Normies author Andrea Nagle, is that Charlottesville made any association with the alt-right so toxic that once sympathetic alt-light trolls are running for cover.

Bray never explicitly accuses President Trump of being a fascist, but he argues that the alt-right’s influence on Trump further justifies antifa action, and as a revolutionary socialist group, Bray notes antifa could not be bothered with the lamentations of mainstream Democrats who worry the group could provoke an electoral backlash. Though he doesn’t claim to be a part of antifa, Bray shares the group’s illiberal view of civil liberties and supports its goal of a “revolutionary socialist alternative… to a world of crisis, poverty, famine, and war that breeds fascist reaction” which they believe would create a crime and prison-free “classless society.”

Ultimately, Bray addresses nearly every argument by invoking the fact that Hitler and other far-right insurgents began with small followings, but then some of these groups did what had been previously considered unthinkable—assuming political power and murdering millions. Therefore, Bray persistently relies on the counterfactual argument that because countless fascist movements have been “nipped in the bud” by anti-fascist activism over the past century, non-violent protest can be blithely dismissed as a bourgeois obstruction to the true justice only antifa is brave enough to deliver.

As an advocate for a cause he believes in, Bray comes loaded for bear with historical precedent. But because of his assertion that the ends justify antifa’s means—period—his perspective is hampered by a willful obtuseness and a refusal to address inconvenient facts.

Source: New Antifa Book: Only Bougie Wimps Oppose Left-Wing Violence Against Fascists

Filed under Other Tagged with , ,

How an article defending colonialism was ever published is a mystery roiling academia: Paradkar

2017/09/22 Leave a comment

One can only wonder:

If a social debate is based on fuzzy ideas accumulated from something read somewhere, sometime, an academically published view is the antithesis of it, based on rigorous research, citations and knowledge. Before being published, it is peer-reviewed, or tested for accuracy and integrity by someone with subject matter expertise.

This process is at the heart of a controversy roiling the academic community after the Third World Quarterly, a reputable British journal on global politics, published a piece earlier this month titled “The case for colonialism” by Bruce Gilley, a Princeton University Ph.D and Portland State University professor.

(Although “third world” is now considered a derogatory term, the 40-year-old journal’s name derived from the non-aligned movement of countries who did not want to support either side of the Cold War.)

In his article, Gilley says colonialism has been unjustly vilified, that it was legitimate and its “civilizing mission” was in fact beneficial. He also writes that it is time to re-colonize parts of the world and create “new Western colonies from scratch” because developing countries are failing at self-governance and anti-colonial ideology was harmful to native populations.

The reaction was explosive, targeted at both the article and the journal’s decision to publish it. A petition calling for the article’s retraction gathered more than 10,000 signatures. On Tuesday, roughly half of the journal’s 34 editorial board members resigned in protest.

Two researchers writing for a London School of Economics blog called the piece “a travesty, the academic equivalent of a Trump tweet, clickbait with footnotes.”

That it appeared in a respected journal devoted to anti-colonial politics, made it “the equivalent of a journal devoted to Holocaust studies publishing that the Holocaust didn’t happen,” according to Ilan Kapoor, a York University professor at the Faculty of Environmental Studies, who was one of the board members who quit.

The primary problem, though, revolved around whether the piece published under the label “Viewpoint” passed the scholarship test for publication.

“As with all articles in the journal, this Viewpoint did undergo double-blind peer review and was subsequently published,” said Shahid Qadir, editor-in-chief of the quarterly in a statement.

In a double-blind review, the author’s and reviewer’s identities are withheld from each other.

The editorial board members say they asked for but didn’t get copies of the review. They also say the article was not passed, but rejected by three reviewers. (Qadir did not respond to my requests for comment on this.)

“The piece in question was rejected by two peers who were editors of a special issue on ‘Whatever happened to the idea of imperialism?’ and then it was further rejected by another peer,” said Lisa Ann Richey, a scholar from Denmark currently at Duke University in the U.S.

“There was a remedy available last week — to retract the piece and apologize for the gross error — and this remedy was not implemented by the editor. After this disappointing outcome, the only option available for anyone sitting on the Board who wanted to stand for academic integrity was to resign.”

Kapoor said, “This discrepancy between what the editor has told us and what we have found is highly problematic.”.

Meanwhile, the piece is being torn apart by academics on factual grounds.

“Gilley says he is simply asking for an unbiased assessment of the facts, that he just wants us to take off our ideological blinders and examine colonialism from an empirical perspective,” writes Nathan Robinson in a scathing piece in Current Affairs.

“But this is not what he has done. Instead … (he has concealed) evidence of gross crimes against humanity.”

For instance, he omits any mention of the first 300 years of Western colonization because it’s “impossible to spin it,” as beneficial to native populations, says Robinson. Or he quotes a Congolese man saying, “Maybe the Belgians should come back” and entirely bypasses Belgian King Leopold’s reign of terror in the Congo that scandalized the world.

In the think tank Cato Institute’s blog, Sahar Khan gives five examples of how the piece is “empirically and historically inaccurate.”

For instance, “Gilley attributes the abolition of slave-trading to colonialism, which in addition to being ridiculous, is factually incorrect … Systematic decolonization and subsequent wars of independence eventually ended the slave trade.”

The unexplained publication of a piece that does not meet academic standards of quality should sound alarm bells for those of us outside the ivory towers, too.

The desire to appear even-handed under pressure from faux free-speech defenders has created a damaging false equivalency model in mainstream media, where the compulsion to get “the other side” means unfounded ideas are given the same weight as sound reasoning.

Despite the imperfections of academia, academically credited facts established with rigour, empirical evidence and scholarship remain a credible tool to fight climate change deniers, racism deniers, anti-vaxxers or any one floating in the universe of “alternative facts.”

Not condemning this attempt to Breitbart-ize academia will effectively wipe out the role of accountability in fact-gathering and remove any barriers to revisiting lasting atrocities of our past.

Source: How an article defending colonialism was ever published is a mystery roiling academia: Paradkar | Toronto Star

Filed under Other Tagged with , , ,

Undercover With the Alt-Right – The New York Times

2017/09/21 Leave a comment

Good long disturbing read. Part I found most interesting is the relationship between the more and less extreme elements:

The extreme alt-right are benefiting immensely from the energy being produced by a more moderate — but still far-right — faction known as the “alt-light.”

The alt-light promotes a slightly softer set of messages. Its figures — such as Milo Yiannopoulos, Paul Joseph Watson and Mike Cernovich — generally frame their work as part of an effort to defend “the West” or “Western culture” against supposed left-liberal dominance, rather than making explicitly racist appeals. Many of them, in fact, have renounced explicit racism and anti-Semitism, though they will creep up to the line of explicitly racist speech, especially when Islam and immigration are concerned.

This apparent moderation partly explains why they tend to have much bigger online audiences than even the most important alt-right figures — and why Hope Not Hate describes them as “less extreme, more dangerous.” Alt-light sites like Breitbart, formerly home to Mr. Yiannopoulos, as well as Prison Planet, where Mr. Watson is editor at large, draw millions of readers and are key nodes in a hyperkinetic network that is endlessly broadcasting viral-friendly far-right news, rumors and incitement.

Fluent in the language of online irony and absurdism, and adept at producing successful memes, alt-lighters have pulled off something remarkable: They’ve made far-right ideas hip to a subset of young people, and framed themselves as society’s forgotten underdogs. The alt-light provides its audience easy scapegoats for their social, economic and sexual frustrations: liberals and feminists and migrants and, of course, globalists.

The alt-light’s dedicated fan base runs into the millions. Mr. Watson has more than a million YouTube followers, for example, while Mr. Yiannopoulos has more than 2.3 million on Facebook. If even a tiny fraction of this base is drafted toward more extreme far-right politics, that would represent a significant influx into hate groups.

According to researchers, the key to hooking new recruits into any movement, and to getting them increasingly involved over time, is to simply give them activities to participate in. This often precedes any deep ideological commitment on the recruits’ part and, especially early on, is more about offering them a sense of meaning and community than anything else.

Intentionally or not, the far right has deftly applied these insights to the online world. Viewed through the filters of alt-light outlets like Breitbart and Prison Planet, or through Twitter feeds like Mr. Watson’s, the world is a horror show of crimes by migrants, leftist censorship and attacks on common sense. And the best, easiest way to fight back is through social media.

The newly initiated are offered many opportunities to participate directly. A teenager in a suburban basement can join a coordinated global effort to spread misinformation about Emmanuel Macron, France’s centrist president, in the hopes of helping far-right leader Marine Le Pen. Anyone who wants to do so can help spread the word about supposed mainstream media censorship of the Muslim “crime wave” the far right says is ravaging Europe.

These efforts — a click, a retweet, a YouTube comment — come to feel like important parts of an epochal struggle. The far right, once hemmed in by its own parochialism, has manufactured a worldwide online battlefield anyone with internet access can step into.

And if you’re one of those newcomers happily playing the part of infantryman in the “meme wars” that rage daily, maybe, along the way, one of your new online Twitter buddies will say to you, “Milo’s O.K., but have you checked out this guy Greg Johnson?” Or maybe they’ll invite you to a closed online forum where ideas about how to protect Europe from Muslim migrants are discussed a bit more, well, frankly. Maybe, if you’re really lucky, you’ll eventually discover a whole new political movement to join.

All of which can explain why members of the hard-core alt-right are watching the explosive success of their more moderate counterparts with open glee, unable to believe their good luck. “I’m just fighting less and less opposition to our sorts of ideas when they’re spoken,” Mr. Johnson, the Counter-Currents editor, told Mr. Hermansson. His optimism, unfortunately, appears to be well founded.

Filed under Other Tagged with , ,

When Picasso and Orwell Went After Tyrants and Risked It All

2017/09/19 Leave a comment

Good reminder:

This is a story about truth and how, against all the odds, it can be discerned and defended against liars through individual acts of courage and genius. It is a story for all time and particularly our time, when totalitarianism bludgeons the truth tellers with renewed support.

Pablo Picasso and George Orwell never met. But each of them, reaching the heights of their powers, looked at the same events in the same place at the same time, 80 years ago, and used their art to expose the true face of totalitarianism. At the time they were vilified for doing so.

Picasso produced his huge and wrenching masterpiece, Guernica, named for the northern Spanish city that was the first European city to be carpet-bombed. Orwell produced Homage to Catalonia, his gimlet-eyed record of fighting in the Spanish Civil War in which he nearly died.

Spain, Orwell discovered, “was a pawn in an enormous struggle that was being fought out between two political theories.” He fought with the republican government forces against the fascists but in the course of several battles realized that the republicans were being manipulated by Moscow and that “the Communists stood not upon the extreme Left but upon the extreme Right.”

The error—made by many thousands of European and American volunteers fighting with the republicans—was to believe that the forces opposing Generalissimo Franco’s fascists were naturally on the side of the angels simply because they were anti-fascist. As Orwell himself was swiftly disabused of this idea he came to the core revelation of his political life—that the true evil was totalitarianism, no matter what uniform it wore or what language it spoke.

Eventually that revelation shaped his two literary masterpieces, Animal Farm and 1984.However, the most immediate and personal result was that Orwell, in Homage To Catalonia,had delivered a message that nobody wanted to hear. In London his old socialist friends disowned him. Many of them were in thrall to Moscow’s utopian propaganda that the struggle in Spain was for universal liberty, rather than the slavery that Stalin had in mind.

Picasso was in a different kind of trap. When Guernica was exhibited in the U.S. the American Right labeled it “Bolshevist art controlled by the hand of Moscow.”  In fact, Picasso did not join the French Communist Party until 1944, when Paris was liberated from the Nazis. Political theory had nothing to do with the raging art that drove Guernica.

On the afternoon of April 27, 1937, successive waves of German and Italian bombers dropped a combination of bombs on Guernica carefully designed to kill, maim and terrorize the civilian population—they included fragmentation bombs that eviscerated people and incendiaries burning at 2,500 degrees centigrade that turned the city into a fireball. People who fled into the hills were strafed with machine guns. More than 1,600 people died and nearly 1,000 more were injured.

Seen in the perspective of what followed, Guernica was a calculated forewarning to the world that total war now included the mass slaughter of civilians. Picasso’s canvas was more than 25 feet wide and eight feet deep. Within this space every figure—including a bull, a horse, a mother with a dead child, was eviscerated. Limbs, fingers, skulls interlocked in a gruesome dance of death. What Picasso took from the atrocity was intensely personal: the people of his native country had become the cannon fodder of a new order in Spain. Franco, abetted by Hitler and Mussolini, would rule by terror.

Guernica was exhibited in London before being shipped to the US. Critics were divided. As a commentary on war some ranked it with Goya’s rending account of the savagery of the Napoleonic wars. But the hand of ideology also surfaced. The critic Anthony Blunt called the painting “hopelessly obscure, its meaning elusive.” Unknown to anyone then, Blunt was a Soviet sleeper agent, unmasked only in 1979 as the long-sought Fourth Man in an espionage ring—his rejection of Guernica was the Stalinist party line conveyed as aesthetic distaste.

Source: When Picasso and Orwell Went After Tyrants and Risked It All

Filed under Other Tagged with , ,

← Older posts

Newer posts →