Cohen: Why we ought to worry about democracy’s retreat globally | Ottawa Citizen

2018/05/03 Leave a comment

Good commentary by Andrew Cohen, including Rosalie Abella’s fears for the independence of Israel’s judiciary:

Justice Rosalie Abella of the Supreme Court of Canada lives on public platforms. She lectures often, at home and abroad, and collects laurels celebrating her shimmering career (including 38 honorary degrees) like loose change.

As a decorated jurist of 42 years, she contemplates law and society as a quotidian challenge. So there she was two weeks ago, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, on the 70th anniversary of the founding of Israel, addressing the country’s democracy.

It was an extraordinary speech – a cri de coeur, really – brimming with erudition and urgency. It was also brave. Abella laments the assault on the independence of Israel’s judiciary, whose stature she has long admired.

“As a Jew, it has made me particularly sad to see the judiciary’s noble mission and legacy under rhetorical siege here,” she said. “To me when an independent judiciary is under siege, democracy is under siege, and when democracy is under siege, a country’s soul is being held hostage.”

She is alarmed by the effort to “delegitimize the judiciary … in the name of patriotism.” She finds this “perverse.” After all, she asks, doesn’t patriotism mean reflecting national values, which, in Israel, means being Jewish and democratic?

For defending those values, she sees a judiciary “demonized by some for being independent from political expedience and immune to political will.” Judges are not there to comply with the will of politicians, she warns; those who think patriotism means doing only what politicians want “are the biggest threat to Israel’s values, because they misconceive democracy as majoritarian rule.”

Abella doesn’t name the right-wing politicians targeting the judiciary. What makes her warning timely – like a siren in the night – is that she is addressing the erosion of democracy, in fundamental and disturbing ways, across the world. As Foreign Affairs magazine asks in its current issue: “Can Democracy Survive?”

It’s not hyperbole. Democracy is under its greatest strain since the 1930s. Assaults on the press, free and fair elections, minority rights and civil liberties are common. Look around: the rise of authoritarianism is everywhere.

Having liberalized after the fall of Communism, Russia is an authoritarian state under Vladimir Putin, who fixes elections, jails opponents and kills journalists. In China, which showed signs of liberalization leading up to Tiananmen Square in 1989, the leadership may serve for life.

Poland, Turkey and Hungary have lurched into authoritarianism. That Stephen Harper could tweet congratulations to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán on his election was so brazen it was thought a joke; alas, it was not.

The man who once refused to shake Putin’s hand – “You need to get out of Ukraine,” Harper told him – now embraces Orban, who is silencing critics and attacking institutions in Hungary.

Freedom House tracks the state of democracy around the world. In 2017, it found that democracy declined in 71 countries and advanced in just 35. “Democracy in crisis,” it declares.

In old democracies such as France, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands, right-wing populists are gaining traction, appealing to anti-immigrant sentiments and shunning civil liberties or the rule of law. Surveys show that while support for democracy remains strong among those over 65, those under 35 care less about it. This is particularly disturbing.

Rwanda, Venezuela, Mexico, Kenya and Honduras are among the countries where democracy has eroded. The same in Nepal, Eritrea, South Sudan, Libya, Egypt and Yemen. In Myanmar, led by a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, ethnic cleansing is horrifying.

In the United States, the president declares the media “the enemy of the people,” and attacks the judiciary and law-enforcement agencies. He refers to “my justice department” and its failure to “protect” him.

In Canada, the threat to democracy comes through bots and fake news filling social media, which will play out dangerously in the next federal election.

For Abella, in Jerusalem, the attack on the judiciary in Israel reflects something larger: an attack on our humanity: “Without democracy there are no rights, without rights there is no tolerance, without tolerance there is no justice, and without justice, there is no hope.”

via Cohen: Why we ought to worry about democracy’s retreat globally | Ottawa Citizen

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Holocaust row: Abbas accused of anti-Semitism – BBC News

2018/05/03 Leave a comment

Not helpful:

Remarks by Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas about the Holocaust have been condemned as anti-Semitic by Israeli politicians and rights activists.

Mr Abbas told a meeting in the West Bank the Nazi mass murder of European Jews was the result of their financial activities, not anti-Semitism.

He described their “social function” as “usury and banking and such”.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s spokesman said the remarks were “anti-Semitic and pathetic”.

Michael Oren, Israel’s deputy minister for diplomacy, remarked in a tweet: “Mahmoud Abbas says money-lending Jews provoked Holocaust… Now there’s a peace partner.”

In New York, the Anti-Defamation League condemned Mr Abbas’s “anti-Semitic assertions”.

In its attempt to annihilate the Jews of Europe during World War Two, Nazi Germany murdered some six million of them, building death camps to expedite the mass slaughter.

Driven by fanatical nationalism, the Nazis regarded Jews as a threat to Germany’s “racial purity”.

What did Abbas say exactly?
He was addressing a rare meeting of the Palestinian National Council, the legislative body of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), in the West Bank town of Ramallah on Monday.

It was a rare meeting of the PLO’s legislative body

Carried live on Palestinian TV, the 90-minute speech in Arabic included a section on the Palestinian leader’s view of the history of European Jewry, based on what he said were books by “Jewish Zionist authors”.

Jews in eastern and western Europe, he said, had been periodically subjected to massacres over the centuries, culminating in the Holocaust.

“But why did this used to happen?” he asked. “They say, ‘It is because we are Jews.’ I will bring you three Jews, with three books who say that enmity towards Jews was not because of their religious identity but because of their social function.

“This is a different issue. So the Jewish question that was widespread throughout Europe was not against their religion but against their social function which relates to usury [unscrupulous money-lending] and banking and such.”

Mr Abbas also denied that Ashkenazi Jews – Jews from Germany and north-eastern Europe – were actually Semitic, saying, “They have no relation to Semitic people.” Ashkenazi Jews make up one of Israel’s biggest communities, giving the state a long line of prime ministers, including Mr Netanyahu.

It is not the first time the Palestinian leader’s views on the Holocaust have caused offence.

A student dissertation he wrote in the early 1980s argued there had been a “secret relationship between Nazism and Zionism” before the war, and appeared to question the death toll of six million.

He later played down allegations of Holocaust denial, saying in 2003: “The Holocaust was a terrible, unforgivable crime against the Jewish nation, a crime against humanity that cannot be accepted by humankind.”

How did the Anti-Defamation League respond?

Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive officer of the ADL, which campaigns to “stop the defamation of the Jewish people”, dismissed the Palestinian leader’s “ahistorical and pseudo-academic assertions”.

“The Palestinian President’s latest diatribe reflects once again the depth and persistency of the anti-Semitic attitudes he harbors,” he said in a statement.

“With public speeches like these, it is not surprising that under Abbas’ leadership, the Palestinian Authority has failed to renounce and combat Palestinian anti-Semitic incitement, including narratives that Jews are to blame for the Holocaust and other anti-Semitic persecution, and which deny or diminish the millennial Jewish presence in and connection to the Land of Israel.”

via Holocaust row: Abbas accused of anti-Semitism – BBC News

My friend and Mid-East expert Arun recently posted on the Arte film, Israel-Palestine: one land, twice promised, link here, noting the balance and comprehensiveness of this two hour doc.

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Trudeau government proposes major changes to elections law: Expatriate voting rights

2018/05/02 Leave a comment

Very limited media attention to this proposed change in Bill C-76 (identical to Bill C-33) compared to other aspects.

And interesting that the government has chosen to press ahead with this when the current five-year limit is before the Supreme Court (see my earlier post Expatriate Voting: National and Municipal):

And the Liberals also would repeal statutes that make Canadian citizens ineligible to vote if they reside outside the country for five consecutive years.

Brison said that change would “restore voting rights to more than one million Canadian citizens living abroad.”

The wording in the backgrounder:

For Canadians living abroad, this includes:

  • Removing the requirement that non-resident electors must have been residing outside Canada for fewer than five consecutive years; and,

  • Removing the requirement that non-resident electors intend to return to Canada to resume residence in the future.

via Trudeau government proposes major changes to elections law | CBC News

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Haidt’s Theory Vindicated at MIT

2018/05/02 Leave a comment

Further to yesterday’s post (Heterodoxy Academy: Encouraging diversity of thought), this example of interest.

One could likely just as easily find an example of “free market U” driven by ideologies of the right, with comparable blind spots and biases:

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology deserves some sort of research prize for confirming NYU professor Jonathan Haidt’s theory that the social sciences suffer from a deficit of viewpoint diversity.

Last Monday, several social scientists from prestigious universities gathered in a state-of-the-art theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts for MIT’s conference on Israel’s 70th anniversary. While enjoying trays of free cookies and drinks, the mostly upper middle-class audience got to hear speaker after speaker complain about the Jewish state.

Of the six academic speakers who were invited to participate, not one depicted the creation of Israel as anything other than a moral calamity. Only MIT professor Stephen Van Evera dared to criticize Yasser Arafat for turning down a generous deal put together by Bill Clinton in 2000. All the rest of the panelists seemed to agree with University of Massachusetts professor Leila Farsakh’s assertion that peace negotiations failed—and continue to fail—because of “Israeli intransigence.”

The near uniformity of opinion was a powerful instantiation of Haidt’s theory that the “American Academy has–arguably–become a politically orthodox and quasi-religious institution,” where “people compete for status as victims or as defenders of victims.”

Participants in the conference also lent credence to Haidt’s other big idea: that two incompatible “sacred” values are currently colliding on university campuses. One sacred value goes back to John Stuart Mill’s famous maxim, “He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that”; the other sacred value is rooted in Karl Marx’s injunction that intellectuals shouldn’t just interpret the world but seek to change it.

These two pedagogical visions, Haidt believes, are at loggerheads on college campuses because they aim at different goals. “Marx is the patron saint of what I’ll call ‘Social Justice U,’ which is oriented around changing the world in part by overthrowing power structures and privilege,” Haidt argues. “It sees political diversity as an obstacle to action. Mill is the patron saint of what I’ll call ‘Truth U,’ which sees truth as a process in which flawed individuals challenge each other’s biased and incomplete reasoning. In the process, all become smarter. Truth U dies when it becomes intellectually uniform or politically orthodox.”

Viewpoint diversity is, nevertheless, widely valued in broader American society. So much so that even dogmatic political activists must pretend to embrace it. Before MIT’s Israel conference, for example, the organizers felt the need to market the event as if it would offer a Millsian “array of narratives” by bringing together “Israelis, Palestinians, and Americans to discuss and debate the history, the politics, and the current critical moment.”

But it was false advertising. The conference was squarely in the “Social Justice U” camp. Tellingly, one of the conference organizers, Israeli philosopher Anat Biletzki, argued fervently for the elimination of the world’s only Jewish-majority country. That might explain why her selection of voices on the panel seemed deliberately intended to convey the notion that Israel’s existence was a historical blunder and that the Arabs were wholly innocent victims of it. None of the social scientists raised any uncomfortable truths that might challenge that storyline—truths such as Palestinian Arab collaboration with the Nazis; Islamist aspects of the 1948 war to destroy Israel; historic persecution of Jews in Muslim-majority lands, culminating in the almost total ethnic cleansing of indigenous Jewish communities across the Middle East and North Africa.

Echoes of Marx’s injunction to change the world could also be heard at the conference. Activist-historian Irene Gendzier, a BDS supporter, seemed to channel the spirit of Marx when she claimed that history only matters if “in some way it paves the way for changing not only the perception of the present but the future.” Her own historical publications, presumably, therefore have an a prioripolitical agenda. If not, her thinking suggests, why study the past?

She also said: “although we are consigned to talking about the past, it seems to me that we here [at the MIT conference] are really talking in disguise about what we would like to see for a different future.” Judging by the overall message of this conference, that future involves the Jewish state’s paying in some way for the crime of its existence.

Source: Haidt’s Theory Vindicated at MIT

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UK Immigration Scandal Offers Tories a Shot at Redemption – Bloomberg

2018/05/02 Leave a comment

Good overview with some polling data regarding UK attitudes towards immigration:

The resignation of U.K. Home Secretary Amber Rudd on Sunday is bad news for the Conservative government on several fronts. A close ally of British Prime Minister Theresa May who had her boss’s back on a number of occasions, Rudd was seen as a rising star in the Conservative Party, a potential prime minister herself and the most articulate opponent of Brexitin the cabinet.

The real problem her resignation raises, though, isn’t the damage to May’s already weakened government or the shifting cabinet balance toward more euroskeptic members. It is yet more confirmation that the Conservative Party’s immigration policy is a mess. It embraces a “target culture” that not only hurts Britain’s economic interests but damages its global reputation.

For most of the last decade Conservative immigration policy has been populist and ineffective. Officially and unofficially, the name of the game was keepy-outy. Rudd’s attempts to uphold the policies of her predecessors descended into the grotesque.

The first sign of serious trouble concerned a generation of immigrants who were invited between 1948 and 1971 to help rebuild Britain after World War II during a time of labor shortage. Members of the so-called Windrush generation (named for one ship on which many arrived) came from Caribbean countries and were told they could stay indefinitely. But the Home Office didn’t keep records of those granted a right to stay — by some estimates, about 500,000 people. And in 2010 the Windrush landing cards, proving arrival for many, were destroyed as part of a cull of old paperwork.

This shoddy management became a more serious problem when landmark changes to immigration law — overseen by May herself when she was home secretary — made the lives of the Windrush generation untenable.

Immigrants, even those who had been there decades, faced new requirements for detailed documentation in order to access employment or benefits and health care. May’s “hostile environment” for illegal immigrants was meant to encourage self-deportations. (Remember that idea, Americans?)

It didn’t seem to result in many self-deportations, but it did lead to widespread injustices. Migrants faced demands that they prove their immigration status; landlords and employers risked large fines for renting to or employing illegal immigrants. A Law Society report found “clear evidence of serious flaws in the way visa and asylum applications are being dealt with.”

Some Windrush immigrants faced inhumane treatment by the country that had been their home for decades. They were denied re-entry into the U.K., health care and other rights. A media and public opinion outcry in recent weeks forced by both May and Rudd to apologize and promise justice and compensation.

They looked likely to ride out the Windrush storm until it emerged that the Home Office had set targets for illegal deportations. Rudd denied the existence of targets to a parliamentary committee, before leaked Home Office documents confirmed them. Five public apologies in a week were too many. Either she wasn’t in command (something many suspected) or she simply misled Parliament.

In immigration control, when officials are ordered to meet deportation targets, ugly things happen. Asylum case workers have described a system that is arbitrary and rushed, in which workers are trained to find ways to say no.

British Conservatives may be more socially minded than their American counterparts — nobody questions universal health care here, for example — but they ostensibly stand for innovation, entrepreneurship, individual freedom and opportunity. And yet for years, dating back to David Cameron’s government in 2010, this party has made it harder — sometimes with just the sheer expense and bureaucratic hassle — for foreign workers, students and family members to settle in the U.K. with increasingly stringent immigration policy and populist rhetoric. In the race for global talent, Britain has slowed its pace to a languid walk.

It was left to Labour’s Diane Abbott to make the case for a more reasonable migration policy: “In trade negotiations our priorities favor growth, jobs and prosperity. We make no apologies for putting these aims before bogus immigration targets.”

Meanwhile, the government’s target to reduce net immigration to the “tens of thousands” is so unrealistic that very few Britons are under any illusion that it will be met. Net immigration has declined — but the biggest declineshave come from European Union citizens, without whom the health service and other parts of the economy couldn’t function. Migration from non-EU countries has continued to rise.

Sadly the government seems to be responding to a crude reading of public sentiment. Ask Britons if they want to see less immigration, and most will say yes — though notably views have softened somewhat since the Brexit referendum and the trend is toward greater acceptance.

But ask them about particular classes of immigrants — students, nurses, the Windrush generation — and their replies are far more magnanimous. They want border control and fewer immigrants, but also a system that is fair and humane and welcomes people who will contribute.

By many accounts Rudd, along with some other leading Conservatives, had been uncomfortable with the immigration targets; and yet she placed loyalty to her boss and the party first. Other Conservatives have challenged May over aspects of the Conservative immigration policy from the targets to the indefinite detention of immigrants that has led to appalling conditions.

The good news is that it’s never too late: The Conservatives now have an opportunity to clean up the mess. The new home secretary, Sajid Javid, is the son of a Pakistani immigrant and a Muslim; his father arrived in Britain with 1 pound in his pocket in the 1960s, according to Javid.

In his first remarks Monday, he promised to look into injustices at the Home Office and promised a full review of the policies that led to Rudd’s embarrassment. That review shouldn’t end with the Windrush scandal. An honest review will mean changing the policies that May and her party have been so closely associated with for years. That will not be easy, but the country will be better off if neither of them flinch. It just might save the Conservative Party from the embarrassment of more such scandals.

via Immigration Scandal Offers Tories a Shot at Redemption – Bloomberg

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Second son of Russian spies wins legal battle over Canadian citizenship | The Star

2018/05/02 Leave a comment

Government right to appeal given that their parents were clearly employees of a foreign government, just not on the official diplomatic list. Splitting hairs, IMO: the child of a Russian, American or other spy under diplomatic cover would not be granted citizenship at birth, the child of a spy not under diplomatic cover would:

Timothy Vavilov, a Toronto-born son of Russian spies, has won a court victory that effectively affirms his Canadian citizenship, four years after the government rebuffed an attempt to renew his passport.

The Federal Court of Canada ruling follows a similar decision in the case of his younger brother, Alexander.

However, the Supreme Court of Canada will have the final say on whether the young men are Canadian citizens. The high court is expected to rule soon on whether it will examine the legal issues at the heart of the unusual espionage saga.

The brothers — Timothy, 27, and Alexander, 23 — were born in Canada in the 1990s to parents using the aliases Donald Heathfield and Tracey Ann Foley.

The parents were arrested eight years ago in the United States and indicted on charges of conspiring to act as secret agents on behalf of Moscow.

In all, 11 people — four of whom claimed to be Canadian — were indicted on charges of conspiring to act as agents in the U.S. on behalf of the SVR, successor to the notorious Soviet KGB.

Heathfield and Foley admitted to being Andrey Bezrukov and Elena Vavilova.

Timothy tried to renew his Canadian passport in 2011, but was told to first apply for a Canadian citizenship certificate. He did so in 2013, and in November the following year the application was denied by a federal citizenship official.

The analyst concluded that Timothy’s parents were employees of a foreign government when he was born and therefore, under the provisions of the Citizenship Act, he was not a Canadian.

Just months earlier, the government had used the same rationale to strip Alexander of his citizenship.

Alexander successfully challenged the decision, with the Federal Court of Appeal ruling in his favour last year. The appeal court said the provisions shouldn’t apply because the parents did not have diplomatic privileges or immunities while in Canada.

Alexander has since been able to renew his Canadian passport, and he hopes to live and work in Canada — calling his relationship with the country a cornerstone of his identity.

Although it involves the same central issue, Timothy’s case has proceeded through the courts separately.

In his April 25 decision, Federal Court Justice Patrick Gleeson said the ruling in the younger brother’s case equally applies to Timothy, making him “a citizen.”

But the brothers face what is likely a final legal hurdle.

The federal government wants to contest the Federal Court of Appeal decision in Alexander’s case in the Supreme Court.

In its application to the high court, the government says the citizenship registrar’s conclusion — that Alexander is not Canadian — was “rational and defensible.”

Hadayt Nazami, lawyer for the brothers, says in a filing with the court that acceptance of the federal position “would result in uncertainty about an individual’s fundamental right to citizenship.”

The Supreme Court could decide as early as next month whether it will hear the case.

via Second son of Russian spies wins legal battle over Canadian citizenship | The Star

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Mohawk community’s law against mixed couples on reserve ruled unconstitutional | National Post

2018/05/02 Leave a comment

Interesting case that privileges (correctly IMO) individual rights:

A controversial membership law that requires residents of the Mohawk reserve of Kahnawake to move out if they marry a non-native violates the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, a court ruled Monday.

The ruling by Quebec Superior Court Justice Thomas Davis declares that a 37-year-old rule invoked to preserve Mohawk culture discriminates against Kahnawake members on the basis of family status and civil status.

The judge acknowledged that Kahnawake, just south of Montreal, has been disadvantaged by the actions of the federal government. “An important part of their land was expropriated for the (St. Lawrence) Seaway. The reserved lands have shrunk in size. For many years, the Mohawks were actively discouraged from practicing their culture,” Davis wrote.

But that does not justify an internal law that has sown division and sparked vandalism and online abuse as residents turned against each other.

The judge said the “Marry Out, Get Out” provision of the Kahnawake Membership Law is “largely (if not solely) grounded in a stereotypical belief that non-native spouses will use the resources and land of the Band in a way that is detrimental to it and that will have a negative impact on the ability of the Band to protect its culture and its land.”

The Mohawk Council of Kahnawake, the defendant, said it needs time to study the decision.

“Obviously, we maintain the position that matters that are so integral to our identity have no business in outside courts,” Grand Chief Joseph Norton said in a statement. “However, a decision on the case has been rendered. We are now taking the time to analyze the decision and will inform the community further in the coming days.”

Julius Grey, who represented the 16 plaintiffs, said he is optimistic the ruling can lead to reconciliation. The judge concluded there was “a clear violation” of Charter rights, but he left room for discussion, Grey said.

The lead plaintiff was Waneek Horn Miller, who represented Canada in the 2000 Summer Olympics, where she met her future husband, Keith Morgan. They have been a couple since 2002 and have three children.

When they were building a new home in Kahnawake in 2010, a petition began circulating demanding that the construction stop. In 2014, she learned her name was on an eviction list, and when she went to a band meeting to defend herself, she was verbally attacked and later received online abuse.

“Despite all of this, Ms. Miller would like to return to Kahnawake and would like her children to have access to the culture,” the ruling said. “She believes that she can contribute to the Kahnawake community. However, she is fearful of the consequences of moving back to Kahnawake for her family.”

The decision documents the verbal abuse suffered by the children of mixed marriages, who have been called “half-breeds” or “white bastard.” Tensions got particularly high in 2014 when a “grassroots” campaign began to persuade mixed couples to leave.

Marie Stacey, who lives on the reserve with her non-native partner, testified she received a notice telling her to leave. She attended a public meeting where one participant suggested a return to the 1970s, when “we burned their (non-natives’) houses,” she told the court.

“Ms. Stacey is scared of what is happening on the Reserve, scared that people might come to her home,” the decision reads. “Being a plaintiff in the present lawsuit has given her little comfort, as at least one Facebook post referred to the plaintiffs as having targets on the back of their heads.”

The plaintiffs had been seeking $50,000 damages each, but the judge said the sum was excessive. He awarded a total of $35,000 to be divided among seven plaintiffs who he said were harmed.

The judge disputed the Mohawk Council of Kahnawake’s contention that “Marry Out, Get Out” is theoretical because the council has not forcibly evicted anyone. “People’s lives have been affected,” he wrote.

via Mohawk community’s law against mixed couples on reserve ruled unconstitutional | National Post

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Heterodoxy Academy: Encouraging diversity of thought

2018/05/01 Leave a comment

Rubin Friedman flagged this initiative to me that aims to increase diversity of thought within the academic community (primarily social sciences). Although I sense a slight balance to the right (might reflect my bias!), the principles and approach of the Heterodoxy Academy are broadly applicable.

During one of my executive development programs, considerable emphasis was placed on being able to ask open-ended questions as a learning and engagement technique, rather than leading questions to advance one’s position.

I particularly like the OpenMind exercises to increase awareness of one’s biases and develop techniques to broaden one’s perspective and engage and understand the perspectives of others. These are particularly useful when engaging in polarized political discussions such as immigration.

The five steps are below but I would encourage readers check it out (for the useful “life hacks” you need to do the exercises, each step takes between 10-20 minutes in my experience):

First step: See what you’ll gain from viewpoint diversity

  • Viewpoint diversity helps you get closer to the truth. In order to fully understand an issue, you need to challenge your assumptions and consider it from multiple angles.
  • Viewpoint diversity will help you be more persuasive. By engaging with people with whom you disagree, you can understand where they’re coming from, and craft arguments that will more likely appeal to them.
  • Viewpoint diversity will open up opportunities for growth and learning. Realizing that your views and opinions have evolved over time is a sure sign of intellectual development.
  • Therefore, it’s ideal to talk to both people with whom you agree and disagree, and try to learn from them why they believe what they believe.

Second step: Cultivate intellectual humility

  • In order to prevent our certainty from blinding us to other ideas, we must develop intellectual humility: the value espoused by Voltaire, Alexander Pope, Buddha, and many others. We can become wiser by recognizing the limits of our knowledge.
  • But doing so isn’t always easy. Those with a fixed mindset believe that intelligence is set in stone. This often causes them to prioritize looking smart at all costs, which makes it harder to learn and grow. Those with a growth mindset believe that intelligence can develop. As a result, they often relish accepting new challenges, which makes it easier for them to learn and grow.
  • In order to inject more growth into your mindset, you can: acknowledge that your abilities are fluid; view each mistake as a learning opportunity; and challenge yourself to do things you haven’t already mastered.

Third step: Explore the irrational mind

  • Our minds are divided into two parts that sometimes conflict: the elephant represents our quick, automatic intuitive thinking; the riderrepresents our slow, effortful reasoning. (You saw these two processes in action when you read the colors out loud effortlessly and then struggled a bit when naming the colors after.)
  • We often fall prey to post hoc reasoning, the process in which our elephant makes a snap moral judgment, and our rider works to justify it. (You might have used post hoc reasoning to justify your response that it’s acceptable to hit the switch on the trolley, and it’s acceptable to push the worker off the bridge.)
  • A common form of post hoc reasoning is when we seek or interpret information in a way that confirms our preexisting beliefs, which is called confirmation bias.
  • Our reasoning becomes even less reliable when we are motivated to reach a particular conclusion, especially when a moral issue is at stake. (We explored this in the different cases about the unintended economic and environmental side-effects of the president’s new program.)
  • As a result, it can be difficult to convince other people to change their minds, especially on moral issues—because their brains, just like ours, are wired in these ways.

Fourth step: Break free from your moral matrix

  • We all live within a moral matrix: a consensual hallucination that we believe represents objective reality. Many different moral communities exist, each with its own set of shared values, and each convinced that its group alone sees truth as it really is. (You saw a metaphor for this with the optical illusion of the young woman and old woman.)
  • The moral mind is like a tongue with six different taste receptors. We all share these same foundations, but we build upon them in different ways to create our own moral matrices. The six moral foundations are: Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, Sanctity, and Liberty.
  • Many disagreements can be attributed to the application of different moral foundations. There are also cases when different people apply the same moral foundation in different ways. When someone disagrees with you, it’s probably not because they’re evil. It might be because they have constructed a different moral matrix and they rely on the moral foundations differently than you do.

Fifth step: Prepare for constructive disagreements

  • We can engage in constructive disagreement by seeking to learn, rather than to be right. The key to constructive disagreements is mastering the language of the elephant (automatic, intuitive thinking).

  • Sometimes, our automatic thoughts (generated by our elephants) aren’t accurate, and these cognitive distortions can cause negative feelings. Our riders can rein in our elephants by examining our initial thoughts, and—over time—training them to be more accurate

  • We can also hone our ability to communicate effectively with other people by focusing on their elephants. We can: respect their elephants (don’t criticize people or make them feel stupid); understand their elephants (learn about what other people care about and why); and appeal to their elephants (convey your thoughts in a language that will resonate with them).

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ICYMI: Fringe internet culture can’t stay in the fringes

2018/05/01 Leave a comment

Useful and insightful commentary as usual Amarnath Amarasingam on “incel” radicalization:

Combine powerful online echo chambers, the perceived decline of the white male, a surge in online troll culture and groups of angry and alienated men, and you have a powerful cocktail for dangerous radicalization.

As of yet, we don’t have proof that these conditions led to the horrific van attack in Toronto that left 10 dead and 14 injured. But we do have a clue: a Facebook post on the page of Alek Minassian, charged in Monday’s attacks, talking about the “Incel Rebellion.”

Incels or “involuntary celibates” are those who are essentially forced into celibacy because they cannot find a sexual partner. Many of the young men who join this movement feel ignored, and the groups of which they are a part have likewise been ignored by mainstream society. That’s why many of us hadn’t heard the term “incel” until this week.

As we learn more about Minassian’s history, it might very well turn out that the incel movement was not the primary factor in his decision to get behind the wheel. But it’s worth discussing regardless, because as many of us are beginning to realize, fringe internet culture can cause real social harm.

Incels operate across the same platforms as a range of extreme right activists — platforms such as Reddit, 4chan and 8chan, and use communications channels such as Discord, the gaming chat application noted for its use by activists seeking to influence European elections in favour of far right groups.

In fact, the movement plays off of similar tropes and language as the extreme right, using terms like “cuck” and “feminazi.”

The ideological nexus that ties these groups together is the perception of (white) masculinity being under threat from external forces such as women, people of colour, refugees and the political left, combined with a hatred of social progressive values that empower previously marginalized communities.

Normies, Chads and Stacys

These incel individuals, who often suffer from a range of vulnerabilities including anxiety and autistic spectrum disorders, flourish in digital fora that provide them with the opportunity to embrace their identity as outsiders, relishing in their role as “beta male.”

In the confines of these incel echo chambers, they blame their social misfortune on their peers who have fewer issues engaging in social activities — people they label as “normies,” “Chads” and “Stacys.”

Normies, a term originating on 4Chan and referring to anything and anyone who is mainstream, includes Chads, a nickname used to describe good looking men who have no difficulty finding women who will sleep with them, and Staceys who are women who always reject incels in favour of Chads. The behaviours that the “betas” feel incapable of achieving offline — such as social confidence and intimate relationships — are projected onto these imagined boogeymen.

Many of these youth needed support, though some of them may have turned to established social institutions already for help in the past. Today, they’re increasingly finding it in these closed-off online collectives, talking with like-minded and equally alienated individuals, which ends up amplifying and reinforcing — rather than addressing and counteracting — their angst and anger.

As with all cases of radicalization, under the right set of psychological and personal conditions, individuals can be pushed to violence. Thousands of youth may feel these grievances, but only a few may ever decide that violence is a necessary way to express themselves. Even after decades of research in terrorist radicalization, the question of who might ultimately turn to violence is still beyond our grasp.

Elliot Rodger is the primary example of an incel radicalized to the point of violence. In 2014, the 22-year-old killed six people in Isla Vista, California, after posting a manifesto about his hatred of women and desire to punish them for rejecting him. His violence was later lauded on the fringes of the internet, fostering a range of distasteful memes and helping to reinforce the mythos of the group.

Academic discourse around “fragile masculinity” has long pointed out that we need to start taking these grievances more seriously, particularly among youth. Many of these online discussions are overflowing with worrisome levels of toxic masculinity and anger. In the mindset of those who occupy these spaces, they are trapped between the strong men they cannot become, and the weak men who reinforce the feminism that they see as ostracising and oppressing them.

Ultimately, these communities are providing a home to those who feel unable to find a place in mainstream society. The attitudes espoused therein must be challenged, but more importantly, these individuals must be offered an opportunity to engage with those outside of their echo chambers, through meaningful interventions and support.

 

Source: Fringe internet culture can’t stay in the fringes

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

British interior minister Rudd resigns after immigration scandal | Reuters

2018/05/01 Leave a comment

Taking one for the team. This happened when PM May was Home Secretary:

Britain’s interior minister resigned on Sunday after Prime Minister Theresa May’s government faced an outpouring of indignation over its treatment of some long-term Caribbean residents who were wrongly labeled illegal immigrants.

The loss of one of May’s closest allies is a blow as she navigates the final year of negotiations ahead of Britain’s exit from the European Union in March 2019. It also deprives the cabinet of one of its most outspoken pro-European members.

In a resignation letter to May, Amber Rudd said she had inadvertently misled a parliamentary committee last Wednesday by denying the government had targets for the deportation of illegal migrants. May accepted her resignation.

For two weeks, British ministers have been struggling to explain why some descendants of the so-called “Windrush generation”, invited to Britain to plug labor shortfalls between 1948 and 1971, had been denied basic rights.

The Windrush scandal overshadowed the Commonwealth summit in London and has raised questions about May’s six-year stint as interior minister before she became prime minister in the wake of the 2016 Brexit referendum.

“The Windrush scandal has rightly shone a light on an important issue for our country,” Rudd said in a resignation letter to May.

Rudd, who was appointed Home Secretary in 2016, said voters wanted those who had the right to reside in Britain to be treated fairly and humanely but also that illegal immigrants be removed.

May to blame?

The opposition Labour Party, which had repeatedly called on Rudd to resign, said May was responsible and should explain her own role in the government’s immigration policies.

“The architect of this crisis, Theresa May, must now step forward to give an immediate, full and honest account of how this inexcusable situation happened on her watch,” said Diane Abbott, Labour’s spokeswoman on interior affairs.

Abbott called on May to give a statement to the House of Commons explaining whether she knew that Rudd was misleading parliament about the deportation targets.

Facing questions over the Windrush scandal, Rudd, 54, told lawmakers on Wednesday that Britain did not have targets for the removal of immigrants, but was forced to clarify her words after leaked documents showed some targets did exist.

The Guardian newspaper on Sunday reported a letter from Rudd to May last year in which she stated an “ambitious but deliverable” aim for an increase in the enforced deportation of immigrants.

After repeated challenges to her testimony on the deportation of immigrants, Rudd telephoned May on Sunday and offered her resignation.

“I feel it is necessary to do so because I inadvertently misled the Home Affairs Select Committee over targets for removal of illegal immigrants,” Rudd told May.

With her Conservative Party split over Brexit, May will have to be careful to preserve the uneasy balance in the cabinet after the loss of such a senior pro-EU minister.

Possible contenders who could replace Rudd include Environment Secretary Michael Gove, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt, Communities Secretary Sajid Javid, Northern Irish Secretary Karen Bradley and former Northern Irish Secretary James Brokenshire.

Windrush crisis

The government has apologized for the fiasco, promised citizenship and compensation to those affected, including to people who have lost their jobs, been threatened with deportation and denied benefits because of the errors.

But the controversy over policies which May is closely associated with has raised awkward questions about how the pursuit of lower immigration after Brexit sits alongside the desire to be an outward-looking global economy.

The immigrants are named after the Empire Windrush, one of the first ships to bring Caribbean migrants to Britain in 1948, when Commonwealth citizens were invited to fill labor shortages and help rebuild the economy after World War Two.

Almost half a million people left their homes in the West Indies to live in Britain between 1948 and 1970, according to Britain’s National Archives.

A week before local elections, May apologized to the black community on Thursday in a letter to The Voice, Britain’s national Afro-Caribbean newspaper.

“We have let you down and I am deeply sorry,” she said. “But apologies alone are not good enough. We must urgently right this historic wrong.”

The crisis has focused attention on May, who as interior minister set out to create a “really hostile environment” for illegal immigrants, imposing tough new requirements in 2012 for people to prove their legal status.

Rudd’s resignation comes four months after another close ally and her then most senior minister, Damian Green, was forced out of his job for lying about whether he knew pornography had been found on computers in his parliamentary office.

Anna Soubry, a Conservative lawmaker, predicted Rudd may one day return to a senior job in government.

“She is a woman of great courage and immense ability,” Soubry said. “If there is any justice she will soon return to the highest of office.”

via British interior minister Rudd resigns after immigration scandal | Reuters

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

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