Category Archives: Political Correctness

Rarely a week passes without a rightwing commentator warning about the rise of cancel culture or decrying the woke agenda. Wokeness has been described as a threat to democracy, freedom of speech and in the words of the culture secretary, Oliver Dowden part of a wider effort to do Britain down. Boris Johnsons government, cheered on by sections of the British press, is waging a war on woke to deal with this alleged crisis, targeting leftwing activists, anti-racists, academics and trans rights advocates.

Some have suggested ministers are stoking this culture war to distract voters from their failures in government. But this explanation underestimates the ideological reasons behind the governments strategy, which is better understood as an attempt to shift the Overton window to the right while framing the rights of minorities as a fringe concern. The Conservatives seek a post-Brexit Britain bolstered by (among other things) an increasingly nativist and divisive populism, and a national pride in the achievements of the British empire, untrammelled by leftwing critics.

There is a long history in Britain of the right whipping up a moral panic about leftwing activists working within state institutions to promote minority issues that most ordinary people supposedly oppose. In the 1980s, the British media portrayed a coalition of Marxists, anti-racists, feminists and gay rights activists as the loony left, a trope that was embraced by editors, journalists and politicians alike, particularly during the 1987 general election.

Under Margaret Thatcher, the Conservatives endorsed a neoliberal free-market economy, but their liberalism did not extend beyond this. The governments regressive approach to issues of race, gender and sexuality was famously characterised as one of Victorian values. For the British right in the 1980s, a war on the loony left was part of a broader ideological battle to reverse the social changes of the 1960s, when progress had been made on issues such as legalising homosexuality and abortion, and the increased awareness the 1968 generation showed towards the rights of women, gay people and Black and Asian people.

After Thatchers electoral victory in 1979, the influence that the British left had previously enjoyed withered. Meanwhile, the face of leftwing politics was changing. In the 1970s and 80s, an array of social movements emerged, including the Anti-Nazi League in response to the National Front, the womens liberation movement and the growing gay rights movement. These pluralist movements indicated that the left needed to take issues such as race, gender and sexuality seriously.

While many leftwing MPs resigned themselves to fighting defensive battles at the national level, local government became a fertile site of resistance to Thatcherism. Councils across London, alongside the Greater London council (GLC) under Ken Livingstone, Sheffield city council and Liverpool city council became places to enact socialist politics in a country governed by majority Tory rule. The GLC funded anti-racist, feminist and pro-LGBT initiatives, while many local councils made strident efforts to denounce apartheid in South Africa and announced nuclear-free zones. In London, Ken Livingstone infamously organised talks with Sinn Fin representatives through the GLC.

Unsurprisingly, this provoked anger among sections of the British press. As James Curran, Ivor Gaber and Julian Petley show in their book, Culture Wars: The Media and the British Left, the tabloids started using the term loony left in the mid-1980s to portray the rise of a crackpot left more concerned with minorities than with class. Apocryphal stories of what would come to be known in the 1990s as political correctness gone mad, such as the alleged banning of the word manhole or the censoring of the nursery rhyme Baa Baa Black Sheep by Hackney council, made tabloid headlines supposedly exposing the lefts fixation with fringe and minority issues.

Stories of the loony left helped to justify the ultimate abolition of the GLC. The Conservatives made this a promise in their 1983 election manifesto, and alongside the defeat of the miners strike in 1985, the dissolution of the GLC in 1986 can be viewed as a Thatcherite victory over socialist politics. But stories of local authorities engaging with these issues still abounded, leading to further action by the Thatcher government. One of the most significant moves came in 1988, when the Conservatives introduced section 28 of the Local Government Act, which sought to prohibit the promotion of homosexuality by local authorities. It wasnt until 2003 that the Blair government repealed it.

Of course, criticisms of the loony left and the implicit accusation that too much attention was being devoted to the rights of minorities werent exclusively the preserve of Conservatives. Many people in the Labour party also attacked sections of the left that supported these issues. In 1983, the gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell ran as the Labour candidate in the Bermondsey byelection. He was criticised by Labour party insiders, and said that the party leadership pressured him to keep quiet about his private life. Under Neil Kinnock, Labour still viewed gay rights as a minority issue that might not appeal to voters, while Kinnock and Roy Hattersley, Labours former deputy leader, opposed the partys Black Sections, the movement established in 1983 to demand greater representation for African Caribbean and Asian people.

There are clear parallels between criticisms of the loony left in the 1980s and the labelling of movements such as Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion as woke in the present day. In both eras, Conservative politicians and sections of the British press have demonised leftwing movements and portrayed them as worrisome forces attempting to infiltrate national institutions. While the right sought to rid local authorities of the loony left in the 1980s, theyre now raising the alarm over the alleged creep of wokeness in cultural institutions such as the BBC and the National Trust.

As the political theorist Lea Ypi wrote last year, this culture war is stoking fears that Britain is threatened by leftwing identity politics that are harmful to a particular British way of life. Just as stories about the loony left gave credence to Thatchers war on local government in the second half of the 1980s, similar fear of wokeness and charges of leftwing bias or virtue signalling have legitimised the pressure that ministers have placed upon institutions such as the BBC. While some of their targets may have changed, the scare tactics of the right have not.

Read more from the original source:

The Conservatives have been waging their war on woke for decades - The Guardian

JTA Is anti-Semitism more of a problem on the left or the right?

Should Jews concentrate their energy on combating the far right? Or should they focus on fighting anti-Israel bias on campus? How do questions of race relations in the United States play into anti-Jewish bigotry?

As anti-Semitism has risen in the United States in recent years, these questions have preoccupied and divided Jewish leaders, activists and journalists, along with ordinary American Jews struggling to understand a country that may feel less safe than it once was.

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Now a survey of American adults, published this week, hopes to answer those questions with data. And the results, according to the two academics who authored it, are clear: Conservatives are more likely to hold anti-Semitic attitudes than liberals, with young conservatives being the most likely to believe stereotypes about Jews.

The survey of more than 3,000 American adults, most of them aged 30 and under, also found that Black and Latino respondents were more likely than white respondents to hold anti-Semitic attitudes. And it found that young people on the far left were more likely to hold Jews responsible for Israels actions than those in the center or right.

While we find evidence consistent with theories of both left-wing and right-wing anti-Semitism, the results convey an unambiguous message that anti-Semitic attitudes are far more prevalent on the right, the survey said. In addition, our evidence suggests significantly higher rates of anti-Semitic attitudes among racial minorities relative to whites across the ideological spectrum.

Eitan Hersh (Courtesy)

Conducted in the fall of 2020 by YouGov, the survey includes 2,500 young adult respondents, aged 18 to 30, and 759 older respondents over 30. It was commissioned by Tufts University political science professor Eitan Hersh and Laura Royden, a doctoral student in government at Harvard University. The margin of error among the young adults was 2%, and 4% for the older respondents.

Respondents on the right, both young and old, were more likely than those on the left to believe longstanding stereotypes about Jews, like saying that Jews have too much power, Jewish businesses should be boycotted in protest of Israels actions or American Jews are more loyal to Israel than the United States.

The respondents self-identified on a scale with seven levels ranging from very liberal to very conservative.

Laura Royden (via Twitter)

Less than 5% of very liberal young adults believe Jews have too much power, versus approximately 35% of very conservative young adults. Similarly, around 9% of very liberal young adults said Jews are more loyal to Israel than to the US, as opposed to about 36% of very conservative young adults. In general, the more conservative one was, the more likely they were to hold an anti-Semitic belief.

Younger conservatives were also more likely than older conservatives to believe anti-Semitic stereotypes. Younger conservatives were twice as likely to say Jews have too much power and to support boycotting Jewish-owned businesses in protest of Israel. They are also more likely to say American Jews are more loyal to Israel.

Hersh believes anti-Semitic attitudes among younger conservatives reflect their opposition to notions of political correctness.

It seems like they have reactionary attitudes toward political correctness in a lot of dimensions, and that manifests here in a very common willingness to say Jews have too much power or theyre disloyal, he said. I think we were a little surprised at how evident those attitudes are in our survey.

Vandals spray-painted You will die and various anti-Semitic slogans on a high school in Virginia on May 12, 2019. (WTVR screen capture)

In asking respondents whether they believe in anti-Semitic stereotypes, the survey employed a similar measuring stick as the Anti-Defamation League has used in surveys over the past six decades. An ADL survey from 2019 found that more than 60% of Americans believed at last one of 11 anti-Semitic stereotypes and that 11% believed a majority of them.

The finding that anti-Semitism is more prevalent on the right also jibes with a recent survey by the American Jewish Committee that measured Jewish and general American perceptions of anti-Semitism. That survey, taken last year, found that most Jews and Americans believe that the Republican Party holds anti-Semitic views, while 42% of Americans overall and 37% of Jews felt the Democratic Party held anti-Semitic views.

The survey also found that across the political spectrum, Black and Latino respondents were more likely to believe anti-Semitic stereotypes than white respondents. About 15% of self-identified white liberals believed in one of the three stereotypes included in the survey, compared to 26% of Latino liberals and 42% of Black liberals. Likewise, about 30% of white conservatives believed one of the stereotypes, compared to more than 50% of Black or Latino conservatives.

In general we think of young people as liberal, we think of minorities as liberal, Hersh said. The reasons why we see anti-Semitism among Blacks and Latinos are quite different from why we might see it among liberals.

Bruce Haynes (Courtesy)

Class differences help explain anti-Semitism among Black Americans, said Bruce Haynes, a sociologist and author of The Soul of Judaism: Jews of African Descent in America. African-Americans, he said, may see Jews primarily as white people who hold privilege in society, and may seize on anti-Semitic stereotypes as a way to scapegoat them.

He added that in his view, bigotry emanating from the Donald Trump administration helped normalize anti-Semitism in the public sphere even among people who did not support Trump.

Were talking about a society thats heavily segregated by race and class, and we wonder why groups turn to ethnic stereotypes and anti-Semitism to express whats happening to them, said Haynes, a professor at the University of California, Davis, adding that dynamic takes place precisely when those anti-Semitic explanations have been licensed in our public culture in a tremendous way by our legitimate government.

There was one question on which both very liberal and very conservative people were more willing than their more moderate peers to advocate what Hersh called an anti-Jewish double standard. More than 40% of very liberal and very conservative young people said Jews need to denounce Israels discrimination against non-Jews in order to participate in social justice activism. Only 20% of moderates agreed.

The survey asked the same question regarding whether Muslims need to denounce Muslim countries discrimination. Very liberal young people were more likely to demand that Jews denounce Israel, while very conservative young people were more likely to demand that Muslims denounce Muslim countries.

The elite schools where Israel debates get a lot of media coverage have very liberal student bodies. And, according to the survey, very liberal young people are disproportionately willing to implicate Jews when criticizing Israel

That statistic, Hersh said, goes a long way to explaining why people who pay attention to college campuses might think theres a lot of anti-Semitism on the left. The elite schools where Israel debates get a lot of media coverage, he said, have very liberal student bodies. And, according to the survey, very liberal young people are disproportionately willing to implicate Jews when criticizing Israel.

From the perspective of college students on a campus like mine, they dont see the full ideological range. Theyre living in that very liberal world, he said. We are seeing in our data evidence of that kind of double standard in that population.

But Hersh said that the survey data as a whole shows that left-wing anti-Semitism is much less prevalent overall than anti-Semitism on the right.

Regarding left-wing anti-Semitism, he said, I think what were showing is that kind of thing exists, but in the broader context thats not the main thing going on.

See the rest here:

The stats of US anti-Semitism: A new survey has some clear and dismal data - The Times of Israel

Some of the best hymns I have ever heard and learned were written well before my time. One of these songs is Leaning on the Everlasting Arms written by Elisha A. Hoffman in 1887. It is a song about trusting in Jesus. It is a song about how each and every day of our life would be better if we would open our hearts and eyes to the only one that can lead us through the turmoil this world gives us.

If we read or listen to the news that is provided for us today we find that the world is in chaotic conditions because we have taken our eyes off of Jesus. We see non-believers wanting attention from all countries and they have infiltrated our country in a stronger way than ever before. Our government leaders and judges have given into political correctness and have allowed non-Christian entities to get a strong hold on our livelihood. The Christians have set back and watched Satan get a stronger hold on the earth than he has ever had. We, as Christians, understand the Lord is in charge; however we are to be His messengers but we have a trust that is wavering toward worldly conditions.

Hoffman, who was a Presbyterian minister and writer of over 2000 hymns, knew what would happen to us if we took our eyes off of the Lord Jesus and try to go our own way. Read some of the verses that he put in his song and understand what trusting in Jesus will do for you.

What a fellowship, what a joy divine, leaning on the everlasting arms; what a blessedness, what a peace is mine, leaning on the everlasting arms.

Oh, how sweet to walk in this pilgrim way, leaning on the everlasting arms; oh, how bright the path grows from day to day, leaning on the everlasting arms.

What have I to dread, what have I to fear, leaning on the everlasting arms? I have blessed peace with my Lord so near, leaning on the everlasting arms.

The refrain: Leaning, leaning, safe and secure from all alarms; leaning, leaning, leaning on the everlasting arms.

Even though many claim to be Christians I wonder how many would say they are God-fearing Christians. Many of our churches have changed and the messages we are hearing from the pulpits are being watered down. Gods Holy Word, the Bible, does not water down its message and has remained constant since the beginning. Why have we as Gods people allowed our Christianity to be weakened by others when we know who and what the truth is?

Remember what Jesus tells us in John 14:6; I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me. Jesus stretches out His everlasting arms to us and all we have to do is trust in Him. On occasions our journey through life may be rocky but our eternal home is with Jesus where there will be no more pain or sorrow.

Prayer

Thank you Jesus for your promise of eternal life. Thank you for allowing me to come to you in any circumstances and you will guide me through all of them. Amen.

Suggested Readings

Sunday Psalm 46:1-3

Monday John 14:1-6

Tuesday Deuteronomy 33:26-29

Wednesday Mark 10:13-16

Thursday Isaiah 46:3-11

Friday Romans 8:31-39

Saturday Jeremiah 29:11-14

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FAITH: Leaning on the everlasting arms of Jesus - Kosciusko Star Herald

Citing those revisions, Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, said he would reverse his position on the measure and support it. Language in the original bill did not once refer to the Asian-American community but instead mentioned victims of Covid-19 hate crimes, Mr. Cotton said, adding that an earlier provision directed federal agencies to issue guidance advising what kind of terms to use in describing the pandemic, a move he said was too prescriptive.

Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, was the lone opponent of the legislation, arguing that it mandated an overly expansive collection of data around hate crimes that could slide into government overreach.

Democrats defeated a roster of amendments proposed by Republicans, including one aimed at banning federal funds for universities that discriminate against Asian-Americans something that is already unlawful. Another would have required a report on how the government had enforced restrictions on gatherings for religious worship during the pandemic, and a third would have prohibited the Justice Department from tracking cases of discrimination that did not rise to the level of a crime. Ms. Hirono dismissed the amendments as damaging and partisan.

Legislative efforts and debates around the spike of violence targeting Asian-Americans have not always proceeded with such bipartisan comity. In sometimes heated exchanges, some Democratic lawmakers have accused Republicans of supporting and echoing President Donald J. Trumps racist talk around the pandemic, including calling the coronavirus Kung Flu. Republicans, in turn, have accused Democrats of engaging in overreaching political correctness, and said that they are more interested in attacking rhetoric than in addressing violence.

A torrent of hate and violenceagainst people of Asian descent around the United States began last spring, in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.

After Representative Chip Roy of Texas, one of the top Republicans on the Judiciary Committee, used his introductory remarks at a hearing in March on anti-Asian discrimination to issue a lengthy condemnation of the Chinese governments handling of the coronavirus and asserted that Democrats were policing free speech, he was met with fiery blowback.

Your president, and your party, and your colleagues can talk about issues with any other country that you want, but you dont have to do it by putting a bulls-eye on the back of Asian-Americans across this country, on our grandparents, on our kids, said Representative Grace Meng, Democrat of New York.

This hearing was to address the hurt and pain of our community, to find solutions, she added, and we will not let you take our voice away from us.

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Senate Resoundingly Passes Bill to Target Anti-Asian Hate Crimes - The New York Times

Published: 4/22/2021 8:40:23 AM

Barring its current controversies, in the years immediately following the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, the nation was an impoverished mess. Many of its population were living in tent cities, the infrastructure was in name only and the country suffered an austerity more severe than what Great Britain was enduring. Food rationing allowed each Israeli citizen a meager 1,600 calories a day. Contrary to popular misconceptions, Israel had received no armaments or foreign aid from the United States. The entity that put Israel on its feet was none other than West Germany in the form of reparations for the crime of the Holocaust.

Starting in 1952, West Germany agreed to pay Israel a total of nearly $1.8 billion (in current dollars) over the space of 14years. These reparation payments transformed the fledgling state. Its electrical grid tripled, new manufacturing sprang up like mushrooms, a national airline, railroad and merchant fleet were established and the overall GNP rose by 15%; 45,000 jobs were created.

One would think that this arrangement would have resulted in a wave of general rejoicing. Instead, negotiating with the Germany caused violent riots in Israel a county with tens of thousands of Holocaust survivors by those who refused to take blood money from Nazis. Imagine if Osama bin Laden had offered reparations to New Yorkers for 9/11. Israels hard-headed and pragmatic leader, David Ben-Gurion, however, turned a deaf ear to the protests, claiming that the survival of the Jewish homeland depended upon these payments.

Despite the different circumstances, the above shows that the issue of reparations can trigger volcanic emotions. It can also bring about much needed justice where it is owned.

Here in the United States, reparations for the 246 years of African American slavery will check both boxes. It is a case of justice long overdue and a cause that will cause deep rifts in the American people.

In 1998, I participated in the Interfaith Pilgrimage of the Middle Passage, a year-long walk to face the legacy of this evil institution. One morning, as our multi-racial group was having breakfast at a community center outside of Raleigh, North Carolina, the question of reparations came to the fore. At the time, the concept of paying reparations was unheard of in the public realm.

A local activist, a young African American man clad in a dashiki, was curious to query any white person in our collective about their views on reparations. Being a genuine white person, I consented. Although it wasnt a topic I was particularly versed on, I gave my off-the-top-of-my-head opinions which were well received by my new companion.

To begin, I believed that reparations were necessary but admitted that the sticking point would be how to implement them. I noted that if you asked every white American to hand over a portion of their money to every Black American, you would have another Civil War on your hands (my exact words.) Even during the Clinton presidency, I was aware that there was still an undercurrent of white racism in America disguised but not extinguished by the phony pretenses of political correctness.

My alternative was to take several hundred billions of dollars from our pork-ridden, military-industrial sinkhole and invest in African American colleges, communities, businesses and other forms of Black-created infrastructure that would yield long range benefits far beyond a single check that vanished after a few bill payments.

Decades later, I feel the same way. America was built on the blood, sweat and tears of its kidnapped and brutalized citizens of African descent and as another North Carolina activist told me, We Black people have given far more to this country than we could ever possibly take. And while slavery was abolished in 1865, the pernicious denial of African American rights continues with police shootings of unarmed Black men and women as well as the undemocratic and racist voter suppression tactics of the Republican Party.

The messy part of reparations is that it will not end white racism which has been ingrained in the national character for centuries and is the Gordian knot of the challenges facing the United States. Even in progressive Franklin County, it is far from non-nonexistent as those of us who participated in a recent online community forum discovered. Hopefully, in the distant future, humanity will evolve beyond it and future enlightened generations will shake their heads in amused wonder. In the meantime, it is a matter of rendering justice in a tangible form to right past wrongs.

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The Recorder - My Turn: A case for reparations - The Recorder

The Nancy Hart burger at the Whistle Punk Taphouse and Grill in Richwood is a classic beef patty topped with thick-cut peppered bacon, a local egg fried over easy and a slab of cheese.

Its not the best seller among the popular restaurants signature sandwiches. That would be the Marian McQuade, named for the founder of Grandparents Day, or the Jim Comstock, which honors the publisher and founder of the West Virginia Hillbilly.

Owner Lance Raffo has never had a customer take offense at the burger, which is named for a notorious Confederate guerrilla and spy who killed several Union soldiers and is responsible for the burning of Summersville in 1862.

Most people who dine at the Whistle Punk park under a huge mural of Nancy Hart painted on the side of a Main Street building. Her tombstone perches just 7 miles away atop Manning Knob, one of the highest peaks in West Virginia. Placed there in 1986 by a class of fourth graders from a local elementary school, the bronze plaque on the grave reads Civil War Heroine.

But is Nancy a heroine? If so, to whom and for what cause?

Nancy didnt start out as a partisan. Her 92-year-old granddaughter said she never knew them to own slaves; in fact, Nancys father allegedly called it shameful when he and Nancy saw a white man beat an enslaved person.

She was more like a groupie, hanging out in the woods with whatever soldiers she came upon guerrilla bands, Rebels, Union soldiers, Home Guard. She was a guide, a courier, a scout, a spy, but mainly she loved to hang out around the campfire with teenage boys. She sang, danced, flirted and demonstrated her cracker-jack skills with a rifle.

Eventually she fell in with a guerrilla band called the Moccasin Rangers. Historians claim she was in love with their leader, Perry Conley. More than likely, it was Joshua Douglas she favored.

The Moccasins were responsible for all manner of mayhem during the border skirmishes burning down post offices and sabotaging bridges. Nancy soon became a wanted woman.

The heat was on, so in the fall of 1861 the teen-aged Nancy hid out in the Roane County home of her pregnant sister, Mary Price. The Home Guard stormed the Price house. But Mary had sewn the diminutive Nancy up in a pillowcase and rested her head on it, pretending to be in labor. One of the soldiers knelt down and ran his sword under the bed where Mary lay, so close to Nancy she could smell his breath.

Later, when the Home Guard learned they had been duped, they took Marys husband William and hanged him in a tree, leaving his boots under his dangling body.

For days, the enraged Nancy stalked one of the men who hanged her brother-in-law and later reported to her sister, He just dropped off a log.

But the Price incident shattered Nancys family, who left West Virginia for Kentucky. Nancys new family were the Moccasin Rangers. The violent band was ambushed in the spring of 1862 and scattered. Thats when Nancy and a female companion were captured by Col. William Starr. (Starr would later commission an itinerate ambrotypist to take the famous photograph of Nancy, posed like the Mona Lisa with a Yankee cap atop her head.)

After her escape from Starr, Nancy was reunited with her lover and later husband, Joshua Douglas, in late 1862. She never was heard from again. He died in 1907 after suffering a stroke riding into Richwood on a mule. He was given an honorable burial in Richwood City Cemetery, thanks to the Lost Cause movement of the early 20th century.

Nancy got a primitive rock tombstone miles away from Joshua.

So should Richwood be honoring a spunky teenager who supported the Southern Cause, regardless of her sympathies?

The family of Ivan Hunter, the watchtower scout who asked to be buried beside her, do not want to see the Confederacy glorified near the resting place of their loved ones (several family members ashes are scattered there). They objected when the Hart family wanted to plant the divisive Virginia battle flag on her grave.

On the other side, Lee Hart, a distant relative of Nancy, reveres her as a heroine. He also wants the errors on her tombstone corrected. Beside her grave, he raised a flag of the CSA and planted a Southern Cross in the ground beside her.

The controversy atop Manning Knob, however minor, is reflective of the larger question of preserving or destroying Confederate monuments.

Is it wrong to remember the story of Nancy Hart in a play or a mural or a hamburger? In Richwood, shes more or less considered a colorful outlaw. Still, visitors to Richwood from other parts of the world are jarred by the sight of an occasional Rebel flag on a truck tailgate. Should we scrub Nancy from our local history in the interest of political correctness?

I, for one, believe history is like an onion, with layers and layers of stories trying to get at the truth. The fact that the schoolchildren from Beaver Elementary got a few facts wrong in 1986 is itself a layer of that onion. That marker should remain, with a new marker setting the record straight.

At Monticello, visitors still tour the quarters where hundreds of Thomas Jeffersons enslaved persons lived in subhuman conditions. When I went there as a child, I remember the docent explaining how nice and cozy the slave cabins were. A more accurate account is being given to tourists these days. In fact, a whole new wing at Monticello is devoted to telling enslaved person Sally Hemmings story as Thomas Jeffersons concubine. New layers of history need to be added to the earlier layers to elucidate, revise, correct. Some, though, would like to scrub the slave-owning Jeffersons name and likeness from any public school, park or building.

Manning Knob, of course, is not public property and in this case, the stakeholders in the history of Nancy and Ivan worked out a compromise whereby competing versions of the past can live side by side. That way each generation can decide for itself what the truth is.

Public property is different. Statuary that glorifies human exploitation or a cause such as the trade and demoralization of Africans should not be held up for adulation in the public square. But I also dont believe these statues should be unceremoniously dragged down by an angry mob. These statues should be moved to a museum or other venue. Why? Because the story of the people who erected them and the story of the people who took them down is just as worthy of preservation as is the story of the man, or woman, cast in bronze.

Because it happened. Its history. Thats the truth.

Susan Johnson is a writer who lives in Richwood. Her column My Side of the Mountain appears weekly in the Nicholas Chronicle.

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Should we paper over the Nancy Hart story? - Charleston Gazette-Mail

Everyone knows the difference between male and female brains. One is chatty and a little nervous, but never forgets and takes good care of others. The other is calmer, albeit more impulsive, but can tune out gossip to get the job done.

These are stereotypes, of course, but they hold surprising sway over the way actual brain science is designed and interpreted. Since the dawn of MRI, neuroscientists have worked ceaselessly to find differences between mens and womens brains. This research attracts lots of attention because its just so easy to try to link any particular brain finding to some gender difference in behavior.

But as a neuroscientist long experienced in the field, I recently completed a painstaking analysis of 30 years of research on human brain sex differences. And what I found, with the help of excellent collaborators, is that virtually none of these claims has proven reliable.

Except for the simple difference in size, there are no meaningful differences between mens and womens brain structure or activity that hold up across diverse populations. Nor do any of the alleged brain differences actually explain the familiar but modest differences in personality and abilities between men and women.

My colleagues and I titled our study Dump the Dimorphism to debunk the idea that human brains are sexually dimorphic. Thats a very science-y term biologists use to describe a structure that comes in two distinct forms in males and females, such as antlers on deer or the genitalia of men and women.

When it comes to the brain, some animals do indeed exhibit sexual dimorphism, such as certain birds whose brains contain a song-control nucleus that is six times larger in males and is responsible for male-only courtship singing. But as we demonstrate in our exhaustive survey, nothing in human brains comes remotely close to this.

Yes, mens overall brain size is about 11% bigger than womens, but unlike some songbirds, no specific brain areas are disproportionately larger in men or women. Brain size is proportional to body size, and the brain difference between sexes is actually smaller than other internal organs, such as the heart, lungs and kidneys, which range from 17% to 25% larger in men.

When overall size is properly controlled, no individual brain region varies by more than about 1% between men and women, and even these tiny differences are not found consistently across geographically or ethnically diverse populations.

Other highly touted brain sex differences are also a product of size, not sex. These include the ratio of gray matter to white matter and the ratio of connections between, versus within, the two hemispheres of the brain. Both of these ratios are larger in people with smaller brains, whether male or female.

Whats more, recent research has utterly rejected the idea that the tiny difference in connectivity between left and right hemispheres actually explains any behavioral difference between men and women.

Still, sexual dimorphism wont die. Its a zombie concept, with the latest revival using artificial intelligence to predict whether a given brain scan comes from a man or woman.

Computers can do this with 80% to 90% accuracy except, once again, this accuracy falls to 60% (or not much better than a coin flip) when you properly control for head size. More troublesome is that these algorithms dont translate across populations, such as European versus Chinese. Such inconsistency shows there are no universal features that discriminate male and female brains in humans unlike those deer antlers.

Neuroscientists have long held out hope that bigger studies and better methods would finally uncover the real or species-wide sex differences in the brain. But the truth is, as studies have gotten bigger, the sex effects have gotten smaller.

This collapse is a telltale sign of a problem known as publication bias. Small, early studies which found a significant sex difference were likelier to get published than research finding no male-female brain difference.

We must be doing something right, because our challenge to the dogma of brain sex has received pushback from both ends of the academic spectrum. Some have labeled us as science deniers and deride us for political correctness. On the other extreme, we are dismissed by womens health advocates, who believe research has overlooked womens brains and that neuroscientists should intensify our search for sex differences to better treat female-dominant disorders, such as depression and Alzheimers disease.

But theres no denying the decades of actual data, which show that brain sex differences are tiny and swamped by the much greater variance in individuals brain measures across the population. And the same is true for most behavioral measures.

About a decade ago, teachers were urged to separate boys and girls for math and English classes based on the sexes alleged learning differences. Fortunately, many refused, arguing the range of ability is always much greater among boys or among girls than between each gender as a group.

In other words, sex is a very imprecise indicator of what kind of brain a person will have. Another way to think about it is every individual brain is a mosaic of circuits that control the many dimensions of masculinity and femininity, such as emotional expressiveness, interpersonal style, verbal and analytic reasoning, sexuality and gender identity itself.

Or, to use a computer analogy, gendered behavior comes from running different software on the same basic hardware.

The absence of binary brain sex features also resonates with the increasing numbers of people who identify as nonbinary, queer, nonconforming or transgender. Whatever influence biological sex exerts directly on human brain circuitry is clearly not sufficient to explain the multidimensional behaviors we lump under the complex phenomenon of gender.

Rather than dimorphic, the human brain is a sexually monomorphic organ much more like the heart, kidneys and lungs. As you may have noticed, these can be transplanted between women and men with great success.

Lise Eliot, Professor of Neuroscience, Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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You don't have a male or female brain the more brains scientists study, the weaker the evidence for sex differences - PhillyVoice.com

Ohio State University students hold a sit-in to demand that OSU sever ties with the Columbus Police Department, in Columbus, Ohio, April 21, 2021. (Gaelen Morse/Reuters)Since when do we need the cops to intervene in the recreational stabbings of our youth?

Just when I thought that America couldnt possibly get any softer, people start suggesting that theres a role for the police in preventing knife murders. The snowflake generation strikes once again.

Is there any tradition that the radicals wont ruin? As the brilliant Bree Newsome pointed outon Twitter, Teenagers have been having fights including fights involving knives for eons. And now people are calling the cops on them? I ask: Is this a self-governing country or not? When Newsome says, We do not need police to address these situations by showing up to the scene & using a weapon, she may be expressing a view that is unfashionable these days. But shes right.

Disappointingly, my colleague Phil Klein has felt compelled to join the critics. In a post published yesterday, Phil asked in a sarcastic tone whether the police should somehow treat teenage knife fights as they would harmless roughhousing and simply ignore it. My answer to this is: Yes, thats exactly what they should do yes, even if they are explicitly called to the scene. I dont know where Phil grew up, but where I spent my childhood, Fridays were idyllic: Wed play some football, try a little Super Mario Bros, have a quick knife fight, and then fire up some frozen pizza before bed. And now law enforcement is getting involved? This is political correctness gone mad.

Its hypocrisy, too. Who among us hasnt come within a second or two of murdering someone else with a steak knife? My best friend in school, Bobby The Blade Simpson, used to throw shivs at the smaller kids in the music room. Did we need the authorities to step in when that happened? No, we did not. As MSNBCs Joy Reid argued smartly on her show last night, pranks such as these were dealt with by our teachers just as we all expected they would be. And if something went wrong? Well, thats why we had substitutes.

In all honesty, I worry that this sort of helicopter policing is making us weak. Back in my day, the people who survived a good stabbing came out stronger for it. I learned a lot of lessons from my time in the ring: self-reliance, how to overcome fear, the importance of agility, the basics of military field dressing. And, given the turnover, I also learned how to make new friends.

Today, the free-range generation to which I belong is dying out and, this time, it is not from the wounds inflicted by everyday teenage knife fights but because our politicians and activists simply cannot leave us be. From the time of the Colosseum, our civilization has had a tradition of lightly regulated, highly entertaining combat. Who are we, exactly, to think we know better?

Originally posted here:

In Defense of Teenage Knife Fighting - National Review

WHITE RIVER JUNCTION A new order from President Joe Biden banning federal immigration agencies from using terms such as illegal alien is a step in the right direction, say some immigration activists in the Upper Valley.

But others argue that an order dictating language does not do enough to promote rights of undocumented people.

Lawyers and activists spoke out this week following the order, which Bidens office sent in a memo to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Patrol Monday. The order bans the federal agencies from using the terms alien, illegal alien and assimilation.

Instead, they should use terms like Noncitizen or migrant, undocumented, and integration according to the WashingtonPost, which first reported on the memo.

The order does not have any bearing on the language used in state or federal law. U.S. Code Title 8, which covers immigration laws, still refers to undocumented people as aliens.

Erin Jacobsen, an immigration lawyer and professor at Vermont Law School, called Bidens order a good first step. She said the order applies only to ICE and CBP because those are the only two agencies that Biden can have say over without going through Congress.

I think its welcome and I think it sends an important message that the Biden administration is trying to walk back a terminology and sense of vitriol that the Trump administration used, Jacobsen said.

She explained that during the Trump presidency, and in the 2016 election, Trump frequently used words like alien and illegal as well as calling some immigrants drug dealers, which Jacobsen calls a language of hate and fear. She also said using the word alien in the context of immigration makes people appear to be not human.

However, while shes supportive of Bidens order, Jacobsen said more needs to be done to further rights for asylum seekers and other undocumented people. That includes addressing the immigration court system, which Jacobsen calls broken, largely because of how long it currently takes asylum seekers to have their cases heard. She also wants the administration to work toward providing legal status to students and other residents who have long lived in the U.S. without documentation.

This is a really welcome first step, but I think were all kind of waiting to see what happens next, Jacobsen said.

Thats the case for Ethan Lawrence, a Windsor resident who grew up in the U.S., but whose father traveled to the States from his home country of El Salvador.

Terms like alien and illegal, have played a huge part in who we see as being human and whose lived experience is valuable, Lawrence said. However, he also criticized the order, calling it political and performative.

In and of itself its a positive step but its a little premature for self-congratulations, Lawrence said.

He explained that he would prefer to see the federal government ensure that all due process and the same civil liberties are shown to undocumented people as they are to U.S. citizens, and he would prefer to see Bidens administration fulfill campaign promises regarding immigration. Lawrence also said he was disappointed in another recent order Biden signed, keeping the cap on U.S. refugee admissions at 15,000 people a historic low that was set by Trump.

I dont really care what your language is, if youre going to treat people in a dehumanizing fashion, Lawrence said. It doesnt matter whether you call them illegals or not. It matters whether you put them in camps.

Other activists, like Windsor resident Kira Kelley, the chair of the Vermont National Lawyers Guild, shared Lawrences criticism. Kelley said the order merely addresses a symptom of a huge, underlying problem, without addressing the cause.

Theres a category of people who are treated as other because they were not born in this country, Kelley said.

She said while terms like illegal alien are racist, changing the language does not fix the larger issues regarding how the country treats immigrants and undocumented people. The issues she would like to see addressed are unjust immigration laws and a poorly regulated immigration court, Kelley said.

Some Republicans have objected to Bidens move. The Post noted that U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., tweeted: We use the term illegal alien because theyre here illegally. This kind of weakness and obsession with political correctness is why were having a crisis on the border in the first place.

In January, Biden brought a bill before Congress that would provide a path to citizenship for more undocumented immigrants living in the U.S.

Anna Merriman can be reached at amerriman@vnews.com or 603-727-3216.

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As Biden tweaks language around immigration, Upper Valley experts call for more substantive reform - Valley News

Posted on Apr 22, 2021

By Jan Worth-Nelson

Hard on the heels of his well-received nonfiction book Midnight in Vehicle City: General Motors, Flint, and the Strike that Created the Middle Class, Edward Ted McClelland has now released his first novel, Running for Home.

[McClelland, Edward. Running for Home. Huron, OH: Bottom Dog Press: 2021]

[McClelland, Edward. Midnight in Vehicle City: General Motors, Flint, and the Strike that Created the Middle Class. Boston: Beacon Press: 2021]

Reviewed in EVM here: https://wp.me/p6Ue43-5iP ]

A page-turner and quick and gratifying read at 220 pages, Running for Home, like its protagonist, covers a lot of territory: it is a suspenseful account of competitive running; it is also a coming-of-age story, a family drama, and a vivid and wrenching depiction of the effects of the decline of the auto industry, based in a city much like Flint.

As such, Running for Home struck me as a complement and post script to the story of the Sit Down Strike, Flints enduring hero narrative. Just as McClelland describes how the Sit Down Strike fueled the origins of the middle class, this novel captures in anguishing detail the elements of its decline.

In an email exchange, McClelland, 54, a Lansing native now of Chicago, agrees, saying he sees the novel as a fictional sequel to Midnight, the fate of auto-making cities two generations after the Sit Down Strike.

The inter-generational dimensions of the story son, father, grandfather vividly make manifest the contrasting perspectives and painful realities of a blue-collar white family in a factory town named Wenniway in the 1980s. McClelland says Wenniway is a composite of Lansing and Flint; local readers will recognize many accurate details from that era.

All this is delivered with mature and beautiful writing, an impressive gift in fiction from an author whose seven previous books are all nonfiction. This novel highlights McClellands range apparently he can deliver in whatever genre he chooses with panache, curiosity, gusto, and grace.

It is the son, Kevin Ward, an 18-year-old high school kid and long-distance runner, who tells the story.

Along the way, readers will be treated to authentic side details like a euchre tournament at a typical shop bar, the superiority of home-cooked pot roast, the efforts of young Kevin to get kissed and beyond by his hippie girlfriend and the account of his hilarious distaste for Elvis Costello, whom he tolerates only to appease that girl.

(McClelland went to high school in the 80s in Lansing, where there was a Fisher Body plant across the street. He notes the decade marked the end of the Running Boom and the beginning of the Rust Belt era the two historical forces affecting Kevin. McClelland says he too was a high school runner, though, unlike his protagonist, I never won a race,)

The dramas of the fictional 80s Ward family play out in the context of realistic pre-political correctness cultural polarities that hit as uncomfortable memories and precursors of some of todays divisions. Kevins high school running coach is proud of his teams diversity in a high school that we learn late in the book is half black, but it is clear the integration doesnt extend to daily life the black and white students congregate in the lunch room separately; the black runners are sprinters, while the white students run cross-country. Kevins family areproud that he ultimately outruns, the Mexican kid; and Kevin considers the word fag with some confusion but admires a runner who might be gay. Reflex resentment of Japanese imports runs deep, and discomfort about the Vietnam War ripples behind the scenes. Class differences, especially, recognizable even now to Flint observers, are represented by Kevins girlfriend Sara, whose mother is an English teacher and grown-up hippie in peasant clothes offering vegetarian foodSara cant wait to go to the U at a town like Ann Arbor, while to Kevin, thats an uncomfortable and confounding world.

I wanted to write about what differentiates the working class from the professional class not talent and ability, but an orientation to family and community v. individual achievement, McClelland says.

That differentiation is set up early in the novels through line whether Kevin will become the running champion he dreams of imagining making the Olympic team and maybe somehow from there, making a life,

Kevin is small 5 ft. 7 and not suited to any other high school sports. Hes also an introvert, a running nerd, spending hours reading running magazines and studying the techniques of famous racers like Bill Rodgers and Jim Ryun.

Meanwhile, readers meet Kevin Wards father, whos in his 40s and five years from retirement from the shop and a secure pension with health benefits. Like so many blue collar men of his generation, he went straight into the shop after high school, paid cash for the familys house, a cabin up north, and all his cars all American-made in the hometown plant.

And theres a grandfather, retired from the shop, a World War II era guy whod been a proud Wildcat Striker, a reference to the Sit Down Strike. The curmudgeonly Gramps , a widower, lives alone in his paid-off house, reliving the glory days of union power, suspecting the auto bosses of treachery, grumbling at the TV from his Lazy Boy and watching Get Smart reruns.

Kevin knows hell never work in the shopthat option no longer exists. So he has to decide what else to do with his life. Hes not a star student, but hes good at running and he loves to run.

Running, as a plot device, metaphor, and organizing philosophical and psychological principle, is powerful and effective. It allows McClelland to examine questions of the individual within himself, his responsibilities to the team, and to his family.

How McClelland describes his characters running life is specific, accurate, and often beautifully executed. Heres one example, capturing Kevins single-minded concentration, pain and transcendence:

Winning this race was going to hurt like a bitch. It was going to feel like being stabbed in the chest over and over again and then being crushed to death by boulders. I told myself I could run one more mile at this pace. Get to mile two. That was as far ahead as I could think. And we reached the midpoint of the race further than I had ever run so fast I could try to detach my mind from the pain, from the feeling of my chest constricting and I desperately inhaled air to fuel my legs. I pushed the essence of myself into a little pouch, allowing it to float about my head, where it could simply observe a body moving independently of any mental pleadings. Kevin Ward was not going to win this race a body wearing his face and my uniform was going to win. I just had to get out of its way, disassociate myself from the pain. Even if my brain decided to stop running here and now, my legs would not obey.

Then disaster hits, a familiar 80s narrative: the auto plant shuts down, setting off a devastating chain reaction. Kevins father at first resolves to go to Tennessee as offered by the company and commuting home on weekends for his last five years.

But then Gramps has a stroke and needs help. The father changes his mind and takes the buyout. The family put their house up for sale, along with the cabin up north, and move in with Gramps, whose house is bigger, to accommodate them all.

Kevin ultimately is offered a partial running scholarship at the prestigious U in a culturally foreign world based on Ann Arbor but its not enough. The price of their house drops and drops, as Wenniway gradually empties; the shop bar shuts down; the Wade family rent their house; the tenants quickly run into trouble and face eviction.

In one of the most poignant events of the book, the Wards house, where Kevin grew up, ends up stripped by copper bandits, trashed of everything of value within it, and not worth even $1,000 to a furious next door neighbor who blames Kevins father for abandoning it to renters.

And still Kevin runs mile after mile after mile.

The title, with that significant Running for Home, is no accident. Kevin comes to understand his running is more than simply being the fastest, or breaking the four-minute mile, He faces a hard choice to escape to the uncertain promises of a world away, or to stay.

Out of loyalty to his family, out of a need to keep things together, by the end of the novel, it appears he is choosing to stay. But his future is in doubt. And even as he runs for home, that literal home is in ruins and its supporting community nearing collapse.

If it were real life, McClellands protagonist, like McClelland, would be in his mid 50s now. If he stayed in town, maybe hed have ended up as a fire fighter, wearing a mask and rushing to the latest arsons Klock Korner or Jamins or the Pierce Park Clubhouse.

Maybe hed have volunteered to join the military and go to Baghdad or Afghanistan. Or maybe hed be working at the Crim Foundation, running events for school children and teaching them mindfulness. Or maybe, disillusioned by the collapse of his American Dream, he became a Trump supporter.

But the novel ends before all that. On the last page, McClellands young protagonist takes us for one last run:

I ran past the high school. Across the street, nothing remained of Empire Body, except a few gnarled metal struts, twisting out of hillocks of bare dirt. Beyond the fence waved wildflowers that thrive in abandoned places: Queens Annes Lace, pepper grass, teasel. Looking beyond the empty site toward the railroad tracks that once carried the cars away, I decided to speed up until I reached the gates.

McClellands sympathetic retracing of all that 80s upheaval and loss beyond those gates, set within the compassionate portrait of one young runner in one beleaguered working class family, offers sobering reminders of how hard things were before they got even worse.

[McClelland, Edward. Running for Home. Huron, OH: Bottom Dog Press: 2021]

[McClelland, Edward. Midnight in Vehicle City: General Motors, Flint, and the Strike that Created the Middle Class. Boston: Beacon Press: 2021] Reviewed in EVM here: https://wp.me/p6Ue43-5iP ]

EVM Consulting Editor Jan Worth-Nelson can be reached at janworth1118@gmail.com, She is the author of the novel Night Blind.

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Book Review: In Running for Home descendants of the Sit Down Strike find their race tough to win, no matter how fast they run - East Village Magazine