Daily Archives: September 20, 2019

citiesUpdated: Sep 20, 2019 01:29 IST

The Punjab and Haryana high court on Thursday restrained the Punjab and Haryana governments from imposing fine on farmers for stubble burning.

The high court bench of justice RN Raina, while passing the order, also roped in Haryana Agriculture University, Hisar, and Punjab Agriculture University, Ludhiana, to suggest measures to deal with the problem of stubble burning. The notice has been issued to the Centre as well to suggest remedial measures. Detailed order is awaited.

Both the governments have been asked to not to make any recovery of compensation from farmers for stubble burning, petitioners lawyer Charanpal Singh Bagri said after the hearing. The petition has been referred to chief justice requesting to treat the matter as a public interest litigation. During the hearing, the bench of justice RN Raina observed that while farmers are committing suicides, the governments are making recovery of fines from them without discharging its duty.

The court was hearing a petition filed by Bharti Kissan Union, a Ludhiana based pressure group, in 2017. In this petition, the union has sought directions for adequate compensation per acre to the farmers as they have been restrained from burning paddy straw, stubble and residue by various orders of the state governments. As per petitioner, those farmers, who burn paddy straw, are fined from 2500 to 15,000 and criminal action is initiated. Besides, red entry is entered in the revenue record, which result in farmers facing difficulties in availing welfare schemes. State policy is thus resulting in oppression of the farmers and discouraging them from paddy cultivation, Bagri had told court, adding that from time to time, this court has directed the state to take proactive measures by providing affordable and readily available solutions to save farming community, however, government has not been able to help farmers.

First Published:Sep 20, 2019 01:29 IST

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Stubble burning: HC restrains Punjab, Haryana from imposing fine on farmers - Hindustan Times

Pro [from Federalist No. 10]:

The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular States, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other States. A religious sect may degenerate into a political faction in a part of the Confederacy; but the variety of sects dispersed over the entire face of it must secure the national councils against any danger from that source. A rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project, will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the Union than a particular member of it; in the same proportion as such a malady is more likely to taint a particular county or district, than an entire State.

In the extent and proper structure of the Union, therefore, we behold a republican remedy for the diseases most incident to republican government. And according to the degree of pleasure and pride we feel in being republicans, ought to be our zeal in cherishing the spirit and supporting the character of Federalists.

Con [from Anti-federalist No. 7]:

The Congresss having power without control-to borrow money on the credit of the United States; their having power to appoint their own salaries, and their being paid out of the treasury of the United States, thereby, in some measure, rendering them independent of the individual states; their being judges of the qualification and election of their own members, by which means they can get men to suit any purpose; together with Col. Masons wise and judicious objections-are grievances, the very idea of which is enough to make every honest citizen exclaim in the language of Cato, 0 Liberty, 0 my country! Our present constitution, with a few additional powers to Congress, seems better calculated to preserve the rights and defend the liberties of our citizens, than the one proposed, without proper amendments.

[]

What then may we expect if the new constitution be adopted as it now stands? The great will struggle for power, honor and wealth; the poor become a prey to avarice, insolence and oppression. And while some are studying to supplant their neighbors, and others striving to keep their stations, one villain will wink at the oppression of another, the people be fleeced, and the public business neglected. From despotism and tyranny good Lord deliver us.

From Congress, the Presidency, and the Supreme Court, you would never know that there was a real debate about the framing of the basic rules, by which we are supposedly governed. Before the several states ratified the base document, USA 2.0 if you will, there was actually a robust, substantive debate. After the Constitutional Convention, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison wrote a series of nominally anonymous essays, broadsheets, pamphlets, to make the case for ratification. Another group of writers, operating under other noms de plume, vigorously contested the claims made by the new constitutions advocates. It turns out that the side, later styled the Anti-federalists by the winners, were prescient in their concerns about the whole enterprise, especially the effectively unconstrained third branch, the judiciary.

From the two quotes offered here, you can see the broad outlines of the two positions, and how both were right, at least in part. Look within the four corners of the Constitution, as submitted to the original 13 states, and you will find an implicit acknowledgment that there are no perfect human institutions. Hence both the separation of powers, the checks and balances, and the built-in processes to amend the Constitution, as a supermajority of the states deem necessary. The Framers of the Constitution, as distinct from the Founders who pledged their lives and sacred honor in signing the Declaration of Independence, mainly approached their task with a tragic, mostly a biblical, view of human beings and their creations. See the famous quote in Federalist No. 51:

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

So, how are we doing? Consider the school handout offered by the Census Bureau for Constitution Day, painting a picture with a few numbers. Among those numbers:

Collecting Taxes

About $6.23 [$147 in 2016 dollars] The amount of state and local government taxes collected per person in 1880.

About $4,951The amount of state and local government taxes collected per person in 2016.

Note that these are not federal tax dollars, but the real growth in the scope of state and local government. In part, federal taxes could not be compared across the same interval as per person because the federal income tax was not ratified until 1913. This points to all of us, collectively, voting over and over again for more and more government at every level, in contradiction to the basic assumptions expressed by both sides of the debate back in 1787-1789. We may truly get the government for which we vote!

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Quote of the Day: Constitution Day - Ricochet.com

At his inauguration two years ago, Hungarian President Jnos der warnedthat there was a dramatic deterioration in the quality of political public discourse. If this continues, the Fidesz supported der said, [it] can destroy everything that we built up since 1990.

A studyconducted in 2017 found that 43 per cent of Hungarians blame Viktor Orbn, Fidesz, the government and government-linked media outlets for the decay of quality of public discourse. Earlier this year, the Association of Christian Intellectuals wrotein a press release that national public discourse has become increasingly rough, including public figures using vulgar and obscene expressions.

So far, all these warnings have been fruitless. Following the 2018 elections, one Fidesz minister replied to critics that democracy is a race, and consolidation is absurd. The European Parliament (EP) elections and the upcoming municipal elections have been a sufficient motivation for not holding back the well-oiled campaign machine.

The build-up and operation of this media machine is well documented. More importantly, a confrontational stance towards other parties is also a time-tested tool of Fidesz. The most consistent representative of this style is Zsolt Bayer, a proud founder of Fidesz, publicist, and writer.

In 2013, Bayer suggestedthat a large proportion of the Roma are not suitable for living among humans. In 2017, when talking about activists who protested against a law targeting NGOs, he saidthat if these, or their kind appear in the Parliament again () then you must drag them out on their snot and blood.

While Bayer was and still is one of the loudest pro-government voices spreading such violent narratives, pro-government circles have frequently been pushing similar opinions.

Opposition MEPs in the European Parliament, who are not voting in favour of Fidesz candidates, are attacked in a vocabulary that fits better for a civil war than for peacetime. In an opinion piece that appeared on Pesti Srcok, a government-linked online outlet, Pilhl Tams equated the opposition with spy agencies on the payroll of foreigners, representing the interests of large Western powers.

Tams: [They] are also not part of the Hungarian opposition, as they are not the opposition, but an enemy not only of the Hungarian government but the Hungarian nation, all of us.

In the last sentence of the article, Tamssuggested that the appropriate response is to treat them as enemies. To protect ourselves, all means are allowed.

The usage of such narratives is delegated to government-linked media outlets, to drum up voter support. However, Fidesz members are also prone to use demeaning tropes. The most prevalent example is the discourse around the Soros plan.

The discourse revolves around an international network of Soros-funded organisations that plan to flood Europe with migrants. This has become the main narrative of Fidesz communication since 2015.

As Viktor Orbn put it in a speech, Fidesz is fighting opposition candidates who are actually not candidates of political parties but of George Soros. This militant rhetoric dehumanises the opposition and dismisses them as anonymous chess pieces.

All these narratives have shared characteristics, which point to a similar process. Edward W. Said once demonstrated how the people of the East were conceptualised as the Other, something less than human, which in turn contributed to a colonial project and to the oppression of countless people.

The examples above show how in todays Hungary, a similar project is being implemented not only by government-linked media outlets, but also by elected representatives of the governing party. This othering of the opposition in Hungary has led to immense division among Hungarians. It can reach such a level of alienation that (constructive) dialogue will become unimaginable.

Faceless enemies

However, the opposition parties also share part of the blame. There were instances when media outlets not associated with the government, but also the opposition itself, engaged in a sinister tit-for-tat competition with government officials; both sides have tried to see who could dehumanise the others supporters more.

Greater partisan discourse in the Hungarian media has undermined information sovereignty, which is one explanation why Radio Free Europeis set to resume in the country.

Nevertheless, the burden of responsibility is not equal. The centralised nature of the Fidesz portfolio of media outlets and the consistent way in which the government drums up negative emotions, makes the situation imbalanced. Moreover, the government is failing to deliverequal chances for all media actors, and utilises public funds for partisan campaigning.

Given the continuous campaign-mode of Fidesz, the trenches of party politics will only become deeper. This until the opposing camps only see faceless enemies, and no longer fellow citizens on the other side.

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Othering the Hungarian Opposition - Visegrad Insight

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Good morning.

Were decoding Israeli election results and taking a closer look at Chinas Twitter trolls. Weve also got a story about a chef who turns dim sum dough into art.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo used the strongest terms yet from an American official to describe the strikes on Saudi oil facilities, and said that the U.S. was working to build a coalition to deter further attacks.

He made the remarks after arriving in Saudi Arabia for an emergency meeting with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Saudi Arabia, for its part, showed what it described as debris from the site of the attack, which it attributed to Iran, but didnt specify how it plans to respond.

President Trump played down the possibility of another American military engagement in the Middle East. He instead ordered new sanctions, but gave no details.

Related: Mr. Trump selected Robert OBrien, the State Departments chief hostage negotiator, to replace John Bolton as his national security adviser. Mr. OBrien has previously worked for Mr. Bolton and has cited his hawkish views.

The center-left Blue and White party, led by the former army chief Benny Gantz, seemed to come out just ahead of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahus Likud party. And the Joint List of Arab parties performed better than expected.

The murky outcome itself represents a setback for Mr. Netanyahu, the countrys longest-serving leader, who had failed to form a government after elections in April. Here are other takeaways from the election.

Whats next: In a few days, President Reuven Rivlin will give the mandate to form a government to the candidate with the best chance of forming a viable coalition. If projections hold, that opportunity could fall to Mr. Gantz.

Last month, the company took down nearly 1,000 accounts that it said were part of a Chinese disinformation campaign to undermine the antigovernment demonstrations in Hong Kong.

It was the first time that an American technology giant had attributed such an effort to the Chinese government. The Times worked with several researchers to analyze how the campaign worked and found that it lacked the sophistication of Russias disinformation efforts during the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Details: Many of the accounts posted messages that matched, word for word, others that Twitter had deleted, or posted messages at exactly 12 and 42 minutes past the hour, indicating an automated effort.

Perspective: While social media has made it easier to build mass movements, like the one in Hong Kong, it has made it harder to translate the sentiment into real change, argues our columnist Thomas Friedman. These modern movements are crowdsourced but also crowd-enforced, he writes, and thats intimidating for anyone who wants to make a deal.

The U.S. Federal Reserve cut rates by a quarter percentage point, the second time since late July, and suggested it was prepared to do more if the economy showed continued signs of weakness.

But the rate cut did little to appease President Trump, who has been pushing the central bank to take a bigger step and cut rates to zero, or even into negative territory.

A growing number of officials expect one more reduction in the coming months, based on economic projections released on Wednesday.

Another angle: Oil shocks, autoworkers on strike, political pressure on the Fed at first glance, this economic era seems similar to one in the 1970s. But there are a few big differences that are crucial to understanding the world economy in 2019.

A filmmaker, Miki Dezaki, set out to examine why a small group of conservatives continues to deny the countrys wartime atrocities, particularly the sexual enslavement of so-called comfort women, pictured above. The people he interviewed have reaches at the highest levels of the Japanese government, shaping the countrys cultural, political and social narrative.

Now, five of them are suing Mr. Dezaki for defamation.

The Philippines: President Rodrigo Duterte appeared to admit in a speech this week that he ordered an assassination attempt on a politician last year. A spokesman said he had misspoken.

Myanmar: Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the countrys civilian leader and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, could face prosecution for crimes against humanity stemming from the militarys brutal oppression of Rohingya Muslims.

Climate: The Trump administration is expected to revoke Californias authority to set auto emissions rules that are stricter than federal standards, part of a broader effort to weaken regulations that address climate change.

Snapshot: Above, a miniature scene from ancient China created by chef Joe Ng out of dim sum dough. The dough is steamed, plunged into boiling water, tinted with artists paint and left overnight to dry. Then Mr. Ng, considered one of the best Chinese chefs in the West, begins assembling his figurines, pressing one layer of dough at a time around a toothpick base.

Cook: Comfort is a cup of tea and a slice of apple skillet cake with salted caramel frosting.

Watch: Midnight Traveler documents a refugee familys search for safety. At its best, our film critic writes, it reminds you that those of us with homes make choices every day that affect the lives of others.

Read: In Red at the Bone, a new novel from Jacqueline Woodson, an unplanned pregnancy ripples through three generations of a Brooklyn family.

Listen: Trapcorridos tales of love, bandits, heroes and gangsters are a sensation in California and Mexico.

Smarter Living: Medical emergencies on airplanes are rare, but they do happen. If youre taking the kids on a flight, pediatricians have some advice: Keep childrens medications in your carry-on, and dont seat them on the aisle, where heavy bags could fall.

And many day care centers have guidelines for pink eye that dont follow the latest medical advice. Heres what parents should know.

Pack heavy items close to your back. Use both shoulder straps. And carry no more than 10 percent of your weight.

These are some of the ABCs of school backpacks from the American Occupational Therapy Association, which declared yesterday to be National School Backpack Awareness Day.

(Dont laugh the group also has ergonomic advice for toting purses, briefcases and suitcases.)

The first lightweight nylon backpacks appeared around 1967, designed by JanSport and Gerry Outdoors for use by hikers and, uh, backpackers. Soon, college kids started to adopt them. By the 1980s, backpack companies were making them specifically for textbooks.

The packs filtered down through the grades and around the world, replacing the book straps, satchels and schoolbags of earlier eras as an indelible part of a students identity.

Thats it for this briefing. See you next time.

Alisha

Thank youTo Mark Josephson and Eleanor Stanford for the break from the news. Victoria Shannon, on the briefings team, wrote todays Back Story. You can reach the team at briefing@nytimes.com.

P.S. Were listening to The Daily. Our latest episode is the first of a two-part series about a new book about Harvey Weinstein by two Times reporters. Heres our Mini Crossword, and a clue: Claus subordinates (five letters). You can find all our puzzles here. The Timess Travel section has introduced a new column, Tripped Up, that offers advice on how to resolve travel disasters.

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Israel, China, Saudi Arabia: Your Thursday Briefing - The New York Times

Being stuck in a culture war is a bit like being a driver stuck in a traffic jam. From within ones own car, the absurdity and injustice of the situation is abundantly plain. Other drivers can be seen cutting in, changing lanes excessively, and getting worked up. Roadworks appear needlessly restrictive. Why are there so many cars on the road anyway? Horns begin to honk. There is one question that few drivers ever consider: what is my own contribution to this quagmire?

Psychoanalysts refer to the process of splitting, where the self is unable to cope with its good and bad qualities simultaneously, and so splits the bad ones off and attributes them to other people. The result is an exaggerated sense of ones own virtue and innocence, but an equally exaggerated sense of the selfishness and corruption of others. We are all guilty of this from time to time, rarely more so than on social media, where the world can appear perfectly split into goodies and baddies. Populism and culture warriors exploit this aspect of human psychology, reinforcing the comforting (but ultimately harmful) feeling that any conflict in the world is their fault not ours.

The left is not averse to playing this game. Why did the financial crisis occur? Because bankers and Blairites are bad, selfish people. Apart from anything else, this makes for woeful social science. But the right plays it more dangerously. Where the left spies moral depravity in centres of wealth and power (which, as we know, can produce antisemitic conspiracy theories), the right sees it among newcomers, intellectuals and the already marginalised. The potential political implications of this dont need spelling out.

In The Madness of Crowds, Douglas Murray sets out to explain why societies are now so characterised by conflict. In public and in private, both online and off, people are behaving in ways that are increasingly irrational, feverish, herd-like and simply unpleasant. The daily news cycle is filled with the consequences. Yet while we see the symptoms everywhere, we do not see the causes.

Few would fail to recognise this as a starting point. MPs and journalists are being harassed and threatened simply for doing their jobs. A university was recently forced out of Hungary by the government. The Home Office is growing increasingly anxious about the threat of far-right extremists cooperating across Europe. But there is not so much as a sniff of these trends in The Madness of Crowds. Instead, Murray organises his material into four themes: Gay, Gender, Race and Trans. You can see where this is heading.

Murrays stock in trade is a tone of genteel civility. He writes gracefully and wittily, in keeping with his demeanour as a clubbable conservative, who simply wishes we could all just muddle through a little better. While never over-egging it, he proffers a kindly Christian gospel of love and forgiveness, which he believes might rid us of the political and cultural toxins that have so polluted our lives. Scratch beneath the surface, though, and his account of recent history is clear: authorised by leftwing academics, minority groups have been concocting conflict and hatred out of thin air, polluting an otherwise harmonious society, for their own gratification.

Murray is quick to celebrate struggles for racial, sexual and gay equality, but he's adamant they have now been settled

His narrative is roughly as follows. The decline of ideologies at the end of the 20th century created a vacuum of meaning, which was waiting to be filled. This coincided with the birth of a whole range of critical cultural theories, producing fields of gender studies, race studies and queer studies. Most damagingly of all, for Murray, was the rise of intersectional feminism, which assumes that different types of oppression (especially racial and patriarchal) tend to intersect and reinforce one another.

The bitter irony, as far as Murray is concerned, is that these new theories of oppression arose at the precise moment in human history when actual racism, sexism and homophobia had evaporated. Suddenly after most of us had hoped it had become a non-issue everything seemed to have become about race, he writes. This seems to bug him more than anything else: Among the many depressing aspects of recent years, the most troubling is the ease with which race has returned as an issue.

History, therefore, is much as his fellow neoconservative Francis Fukuyama brashly described it in 1989: ended. Or rather, it could have ended, if it werent for troublemaking intellectuals and activists. Murray is quick to celebrate past struggles for racial, sexual and gay equality, but he is adamant that they have now been settled. Questions persist regarding the nature of sex, sexuality and innate ability (what belongs to our physical hardware and what to our cultural software, as he puts it), but these are far better handled by biologists than political thinkers. The problem, as he sees it, is that malicious, fraudulent and resentful forces emerging from universities have refused to accept that justice has now been delivered.

The acclaimed gender theorist Judith Butler is held up as a malignant fraud who hides behind the complexity of her prose. The entire venture of social science is deemed corrupted by its insidious fixation on oppression. Murray turns to recent hoax articles that were published in the academic journal Cogent Social Sciences (a prank that he describes as one of the most beautiful things to happen in recent years) as evidence that social and cultural theory is all a sham. The reader is assured falsely that this is all a vast Marxist project, aimed at sowing dissatisfaction and discord.

Murray presumably knows that Michel Foucault was not a Marxist, but its important to his branch of conservatism that this is brushed over. The M word serves as a coded way of tying together the humanities, Marx himself and (with a small leap of imagination) the Gulag. The fact that it is now illegal to teach gender studies in Hungary, as decreed by Viktor Orbn (favourite intellectual: Douglas Murray), poses questions as to where the real threat to liberty is coming from. But you wont find any discussion of that in The Madness of Crowds.

We learn that the doctrine of intersectionality has now swept the world, even becoming embedded in the search algorithms written in Silicon Valley. Why? Because tech workers have decided to stick it to people towards whom they feel angry. Its for this reason, apparently, that Google image search throws up a disproportionate number of black faces. Intersectionality is being force-fed to people, encouraging them to seek revenge on white men, and that is why there is so much conflict.

Murray has no shortage of examples and anecdotes to back this up, many gleaned from the US. But its notable that they nearly all operate at the level of discourse, and mostly in the media and social media. Its not difficult to come up with absurd cases of social justice warriors saying stupid and hypocritical things online, especially when the Daily Mail appears to have an entire desk dedicated to unearthing them.

And there are plenty of well-known cases of people being shamed and sacked for things theyve said, many of which are unfair and sadistic. One critique of this would be that the logic of public relations and credit rating has now infiltrated every corner of our lives, such that we are constantly having to consider the effects of our words on our reputations. Another is that a global Marxist conspiracy has duped people into a fantasy of their own oppression. I know which I find more plausible.

Whenever Murray strays too close to any actual oppression (as opposed to the controversies surrounding it), he quickly veers away. His chapter on gender refers to the MeToo claims against Harvey Weinstein, but never to Weinstein or the power structures he built. His chapter on race (the longest in the book) makes no reference to one of the most controversial campaigns in recent US history, Black Lives Matter, presumably because its impossible to discuss without acknowledging what prompted it: black men being gunned down by police officers.

Anger is ultimately a mystery to Murray, seeming to emanate spontaneously from his political and ideological foes. He can come up with no better explanation for it than that bad people enjoy it, that their desire is not to heal but to divide, not to placate but to inflame. And yet when an author goes to such great lengths to assure you that others are degraded, and that we white, male conservatives simply want to live in harmony, you have to wonder whom much of this anger truly belongs to.

Nervous States: How Feeling Took Over the World by William Davies is out in paperback from Vintage. The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity is published by Bloomsbury (20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over 15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of 1.99.

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The Madness of Crowds by Douglas Murray review a rightwing diatribe - The Guardian