Conquest and Consequence

It is hard to believe that it was the ancestor of those stolid and downtrodden Indians who one sees today, peddling their rude wares in the marketplace of Cuzco. It is their old imperial town, but there is scarcely one among them above the rank of a laborer; and during the last three centuries few indeed have emerged from the abject condition to which the Conquest reduced them.

The sudden fall of an entire race is an event so rare in history that one seeks for explanations. It may be that not only the royal Inca family, but nearly the whole ruling class was destroyed in war, leaving only the peasants who had already been serfs under their native sovereigns. But one is disposed to believe that the tremendous catastrophe which befell them in the destruction at once of their dynasty, their empire, and their religion by fierce conquerors, incomparably superior in energy and knowledge, completely broke not only the spirit of the nation, but the self respect of the individuals who composed it.  

–South America, James Bryce

It all sounds so familiar, except the part about the conquerors’ superior intelligence and energy, but that just adds to our present humiliation–deemed inferior to foreigners morally, by virtue of their material inferiority.

Pozland Dispatch

Protests follow closely upon police shootings in Portland.

Demonstrators blocked a section of a downtown Portland street for hours Monday where a 27-year-old man was fatally shot by police, calling for answers on why officers killed him.

About 150 people gathered near Southwest 4th Avenue and Harvey Milk Street for a vigil in memory of Patrick Kimmons. Yellow caution tape that ran from a public parking lot to a strip club blocked the street from traffic. A memorial with signs, pictures of Kimmons and candles lined the sidewalk just outside the parking lot.

Newly renamed Harvey Milk Street is christened with diversity. Kimmons is the third police shooting fatality in Portland this year.

John Elfritz was  white guy having a psychotic episode and armed with a knife when police shot and killed him inside a homeless shelter. Controversy followed.
In 2012 Eric Holder’s Justice Department sued the city of Portland for excessive use of force against mentally ill suspects. The city eagerly settled, instituting rules on police engagement with the mentally ill.

Sarah Michell Brown was a burglary suspect wounded in an exchange of gunfire with police, and one bad-assed Becky apparently, but as such of no interest. Tearfully recounting high school pranks before Congress is heroic, squaring off against armed men, meh…

Those are the only other two listed on the Portland Police Bureau’s site. Portland State University police shot and killed a black man after his legally concealed gun fell onto the sidewalk in the middle of a melee. PSU cops have only been armed since 2014 and a permanent campaign to disarm them is enlivened.

A grand jury declined to indict the officers. The recent shooting appears to be gang-related

Central Precinct Sgt. Garry Britt and Officer Jeffrey Livingston were patrolling the downtown area early Sunday when a shooting occurred near Southwest Third Avenue and Harvey Milk Street (formerly Stark) and injured two people. 

This is where the strip clubs are.

Britt and Livingston at some point encountered Kimmons and fired at him. He later died at a hospital, police said. One gun was found near Kimmons and other guns were found by police in the area, according to police. Two other men suffering from gunshot wounds were taken to a hospital in private vehicles and are expected to survive.

Kimmons was spotted by rival gangbangers and exchanged gunfire with them, allegedly.

Police believe they were injured before officers arrived. Police haven’t said what prompted the shooting that drew officers to the scene. They also have not confirmed how many shots were fired or where Kimmons was hit. Surveillance video in the area is being reviewed by investigators. 

Police sources told The Oregonian/Oregonlive that Britt and Livingston fired fewer than 10 shots. Britt, who has been with the police bureau for 10 years, and Livingston, with the bureau for one year, encountered Kimmons as he turned toward them holding a gun and fired at him, sources said.

Kimmons’ received 15 or 16 wounds most or all to the back, allegedly.

Investigators found five guns at the scene of the shooting, including some discovered in or around cars searched in the lot. It’s not clear who owned the guns. 

A witness described the shooting differently than police sources. 

Ayan Aden said she was stopped early Sunday in a public parking lot near Southwest Fourth Avenue and Harvey Milk Street with her boyfriend when she heard yelling. Aden said she and her boyfriend saw Kimmons run from Fourth Avenue through the parking lot, drop a gun near the car she was in and keep running.
Aden said she heard who she thought were officers yell “stop,” twice and then open fire immediately after. She said her boyfriend told her to duck down once the gunfire began. Two bullets hit the passenger side of the car, but neither of them were hit.
Aden said she and her boyfriend were ordered to remain in the car by police for several hours and were questioned if they knew Kimmons because the gun was near their car. She said they didn’t know him. She said she also didn’t know how many shots were fired.
“The shooting was excessive,” said Aden, 18, at the vigil. “He was clearly running away and threw the gun away.”

That has the ring of honesty. By the way, every one who’s seen old movies knows there used to be a time when police shot at fleeing suspects (I’m not entirely sure you had to be armed and dangerous). The fleeing felon rule allowing this was limited in scope in 1985 but still appears to stand in extreme cases:

A police officer may not seize an unarmed, nondangerous suspect by shooting him dead…however…Where the officer has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a threat of serious physical harm, either to the officer or to others, it is not constitutionally unreasonable to prevent escape by using deadly force. 

Meriting Attention

Way back in 2007 a national crisis was initiated by the press over the prevalence of nooses, a symbol of lynching in the Jim Crow South, throughout America terrorizing blacks–all prompted by a series of hoaxes of course.

I wrote a little satire (below) and thought I was being clever when I created, for a fictional black studies Professor Balder-Dash, a book called The Myth of Merit.

Then I found the left had already identified merit as a tool of oppression, and the joke was in no way ahead of reality Still, we had to reach the Current Year for Merit, spawn of Reason and Objectivity, to, er, merit being called out by name. Indeed, “merit” just reeks of white-shoe law firms and Anglo notions of fair play; it comes off a lot better than going right after objectivity and reason and makes a good “dog whistle” by which to attack them (soon enough, justice willing, we can abandon the ruse).

Linux’ open-source code of conduct for developers has been replaced by a “contributor covenant”,
apparently after Linus Torvalds lost a skirmish with its proponents (he taps out in a letter “I am going to take time off and get some assistance on how to understand people’s emotions and respond appropriately”) that opens:

Open Source has always been a foundation of the Internet, and with the advent of social open source networks this is more true than ever. But free, libre, and open source projects suffer from a startling lack of diversity, with dramatically low representation by women, people of color, and other marginalized populations. 

Part of this problem lies with the very structure of some projects: the use of insensitive language, thoughtless use of pronouns, assumptions of gender, and even sexualized or culturally insensitive names.

Marginalized people also suffer some of the unintended consequences of dogmatic insistence on meritocratic principles of governance. Studies have shown that organizational cultures that value meritocracy often result in greater inequality. People with “merit” are often excused for their bad behavior in public spaces based on the value of their technical contributions. 

Meritocracy also naively assumes a level playing field, in which everyone has access to the same resources, free time, and common life experiences to draw upon. These factors and more make contributing to open source a daunting prospect for many people, especially women and other underrepresented people.

(For more critical analysis of meritocracy, refer to this entry on the Geek Feminism wiki.)

Score one for social justice. Then, Torvalds’ daughter, a progressive activist based out of Portland Oregon (who insists Dad had “nothing” to do with her interest in computing, and may actually be honest because she seems more interested in politics), apparently signed on to something called the Post Meritocracy Manifesto that begins:

Meritocracy is a founding principle of the open source movement, and the ideal of meritocracy is perpetuated throughout our field in the way people are recruited, hired, retained, promoted, and valued. 

But meritocracy has consistently shown itself to mainly benefit those with privilege, to the exclusion of underrepresented people in technology. The idea of merit is in fact never clearly defined; rather, it seems to be a form of recognition, an acknowledgement that “this person is valuable insofar as they are like me.” 

(If you are not familiar with criticisms of meritocracy, please refer to the resources on this page.) 

It is time that we as an industry abandon the notion that merit is something that can be measured, can be pursued on equal terms by every individual, and can ever be distributed fairly.

You can run but you can’t hide from social justice, Mr. M.

Ah, for the days when all this was a little farther out on the horizon.

OCT 27, 2007
POINT DEFERENCE, WA (UNS*) — Civil rights leaders in this Seattle suburb are up in arms over what they say is the latest incident in a nation-wide trend of hate crimes involving the public display of nooses, a symbol of lynching in the Jim Crow south.
A noose was discovered hanging from a tree in a remote corner of a wooded park early Friday morning by two children, ages twelve and fourteen. Doug Beedle, head of Seattle’s NAACP chapter, said he is considering seeking damages against the city for not moving more quickly to deal with the apparent hate-crime. 

“The city is engaged in a white-wash, treating this as a minor incident. If we hadn’t been notified by an alert citizen, the whole thing would’ve been swept under the rug and treated as something other than what it was.” Mr. Beedle did not rule out filing a complaint with the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. “We’re opening a dialogue with the city, but if they refuse to come around to our way of thinking, we’re prepared to take it to the next level. No justice, no peace.” 

The childrens’ mother, Misty Handringer, who is white, tearfully related that she initially didn’t realize the significance of the noose. “At first all I could think about was the other aspect of it. I’m not proud of this, but I was more concerned about the fact that the kids had found a dead body. I was mortified when the ugly reality of it was explained to me. I really thought we were above that sort of thing here. I’m not very proud of my community right now. I guess nowhere is safe.” 

Police say it appears the man, who is white, acted alone in stringing up the noose before using it to hang himself. Officials haven’t ruled out bringing posthumous charges.
“Allowing this to simply die with the perpetrator would be wrong. Suicide is just the sort of transgressive act that brings out the underlying racism inherent in our society.” 

Tanyika Balder-Dash, professor of Afro-American studies at Northwest College and author of The Myth of Merit, said, explaining why the man chose the inflammatory racial symbol for his apparent suicide. “People feel liberated to express their darkest impulses.”
The children who discovered the noose are receiving counseling. “First we have to make them aware of the trauma they’ve suffered, then we can begin to deal with it.” Professor Balder-Dash said. “Most distressing of all is that these kids have no idea about the profound image of hatred and oppression they encountered. People don’t realize that racism is in fact far worse now than it ever was, due to faltering awareness. I fear we are allowing this image of America’s racist past to slip into the past.” 

A march is planned for this Monday. The man remains unidentified. 

(*Untethered News Services; Additional reporting for this story was provided by Dennis Dale, who is white.) 

In related news, the U.S. Army has retroactively legalized lynching.

Media v Media

Google’s Perspective algorithm is a tool for censoring “toxic” speech based on word combinations that isn’t effective enough for censorship proponents. (Who come mostly from media. Oliver Darcy’s efforts on CNN were crucial to the campaign to ban Alex Jones. They should just give him the Pulitzer. Come on, msm, you know you want to.) Cable news, formerly more prestigious outlets such as the Atlantic, and of course the Huffpo-sphere all contribute to the campaign prodding the social media companies toward ever more de-platforming and censorship. Tech media provides creative technical advise.

The near future of censorship will focus on individuals and their ability to associate. Taking out Jones isn’t just about silencing him, but also about taking out a node of transmission, by which the curious find their way to more serious and ultimately, to the Narrative, damaging content. From the severely progressive site Rantt

Google’s new Perspective algorithm is a good start, but it’s just one piece of the puzzle we can’t solve with the data points from a single comment, even with the most well trained recurrent neural networks. Ultimately, we need to teach computers to follow a conversation and make an informed opinion of a person’s character, something that can’t be done by a single neural net heavily reliant on parsing language.

It’s not the character of the content but the content of your character

Understanding how to do it may be one of the most important technical issues we tackle, or lose the web to armies of trolls, bots, and people really into goose-stepping to a strongman’s tune.

Social media executives, down with the cause but retaining sympathy for the bottom line, are pressured from within as well. Their ranks are rotten with progressives clamoring for more censorship, like cops who resent not being able to bust heads:

Tech companies succeed or fail based on the talent of their developers, which gives those workers the leverage to shape the company culture. So when your engineers tell you there’s a problem, you listen. That was clear again this week when Twitter engineers took to the site to push back against CEO Jack Dorsey’s comments about why notorious conspiracy theorist Alex Jones is still on the platform when other tech companies have banished him. 

Dorsey responded to his engineers publicly, thanking them for their thoughts and pledging to do better… 

The pressure on Twitter to ban Jones from its platform grew exponentially this week, though, after other major companies like Apple, Facebook, and YouTube started taking action against him for violating their terms of service. On Tuesday, Dorsey tweeted, “We didn’t suspend Alex Jones or Infowars yesterday. We know that’s hard for many but the reason is simple: he hasn’t violated our rules. We’ll enforce if he does. And we’ll continue to promote a healthy conversational environment by ensuring tweets aren’t artificially amplified.” 

Dorsey further explained that Twitter couldn’t ban Jones based on “succumbing to outside pressure,” and he called on journalists to continue to fact-check him. This didn’t go over well with journalists—many pointed out that we spend a lot of time fact-checking nonsense, but that it’s not our job to keep a viral disinformation incubator healthy;

spit take 

it’s our job to report facts. The defense also fell flat with some current and former Twitter employees. “There is no honor in resisting ‘outside pressure’ just to pat ourselves on the back for being ‘impartial,’” 

Jack, the call is coming from inside the house…! 

Twitter engineer Marina Zhao tweeted. “I agree with @ekp that Twitter does not exist in a vacuum, and it is wrong to ignore the serious real-world harm, and to equate that with political viewpoints.” @ekp is Ellen Pao, formerly of Twitter and Reddit, who had earlier replied to Dorsey, “We tried treating @reddit as a silo, and it was a huge mistake. People got harassed cross-platform. Also if your site is the only one that allows this hate and harassment, it will get overrun and collapse.”

In the end taking Jones out might be the best thing for the right. The left is defusing a bomb that’s already gone off, and if Jones disappears entirely, he takes with him a reputation for crazy that is no longer applied to the right. And in all likelihood the deplatforming of Jones will work as intended.

Here’s Motherboard:

“We’ve been running a research project over last year, and when someone relatively famous gets no platformed by Facebook or Twitter or YouTube, there’s an initial flashpoint, where some of their audience will move with them” Joan Donovan, Data and Society’s platform accountability research lead, told me on the phone, “but generally the falloff is pretty significant and they don’t gain the same amplification power they had prior to the moment they were taken off these bigger platforms.”

The sad fact is someone like Jones has nothing other than his platform–his voice. Emphasis added:

Deplatforming works “best” when the people being deplatformed don’t have any power to begin with. Nor are we talking about people from marginalized communities who have self-censored or left social media because of far right harassment and hate campaigns (and could, in theory, come back with more proactive moderation by large platforms.)

I say the author’s self conscious, he’d say thorough, but following “we’re crushing the powerless” with “but not the real powerless” is comic gold. Thank you, social justice man. Who, whom all the way down.

Once they’ve purged the net to the extent possible, expect to be hounded right into the dark web weeds:

Nonetheless, the concern among academics is that, as hate moves to the darker corners of the internet, that some of their old followers may move with them and become further radicalized. “The good that comes with deplatforming is, their main goal was to redpill or get people within mainstream communities more in line with their beliefs, so we need to get them off those platforms,” Robyn Caplan, a PhD student at Rutgers University and Data and Society affiliate, told me on the phone. “But now we’ve put them down into their holes where they were before, and they could strengthen their beliefs and become more extreme.” The question is whether it’s more harmful to society to have many millions of people exposed to kinda hateful content or to have a much smaller number of ultra-radicalized true believers.

The work of social justice never ends, or, it ends at the barrel of a gun.

Reading the report “Alternative Influence: Broadcasting the Far Right on YouTube”

Intro:
“For a short time on January 4, 2018, the most popular livestreamed video on YouTube was a broadcast dominated by white nationalists. More specifically, it was a stream by YouTubers Andy Warski and Jean-François Gariépy, facilitating a debate between a white nationalist and a libertarian. The debate topic was scientific racism, which they refer to as “race realism”—a contemporary incarnation of the long-standing claims that there are measurable scientific differences between races of humans. Arguing in favor of scientific racism was infamous white nationalist Richard Spencer, known for having popularized the term “alt-right.”1 Ostensibly on the other side was Carl Benjamin, a YouTuber who goes by the pseudonym Sargon of Akkad. During the broadcast, the debate became the #1 trending live video worldwide on YouTube, with over 10,000 active viewers. The archived version of the broadcast has been viewed an additional 475,000 times.

….

This debate is part of a larger phenomenon, in which YouTubers attempt to reach young audiences by broadcasting far-right ideas in the form of news and entertainment. An assortment of scholars, media pundits, and internet celebrities are using YouTube to promote a range of political positions, from mainstream versions of libertarianism and conservatism, all the way to overt white nationalism. While many of their views differ significantly, they all share a fundamental contempt for progressive politics—specifically for contemporary social justice movements. For this reason, I consider their collective position “reactionary,” as it is defined by its opposition to visions of social progress. United in this standpoint, these YouTubers frequently collaborate with and appear with others across ideological lines. Together, they have created a fully functioning media system that I call the Alternative Influence Network (AIN).”

Hate in Context

An opinion piece in the NYT:

Manal al-Sharif, co-founder and leader of the #Women2Drive movement and founder and CEO of Women2Hack Academy, is author of the memoir “Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman’s Awakening.”

As a Saudi Arabian woman who has lived most of her life under one of the last surviving absolute monarchies in the world, the closest I have come to experiencing democracy has been in challenging the status quo through my tweets.  

In 2016 a lot of Americans felt that way. Donald Trump’s victory was more Arab Spring maybe than the Arab Spring–way less foreign intervention, I’ll bet.

For activists and citizen journalists in the Arab world, social media has become a powerful way to express dissent, to disrupt and to organize. Digital activism, however, comes at a high price: The very tools we use for our cause can be — and have been — used to undermine us. While social media platforms were designed as a way to connect people online, activists used them as technological tools of liberation, devising creative hacks to defy state censorship, connect with like-minded people, mobilize the masses, influence public opinion, push for social change and ignite revolutions. With these opportunities came risks: The more we posted and engaged, the more vulnerable we became, as our aggregated data was weaponized against us.  

Likewise, after the catastrophe of Trump, the socials and old media rally to shut  down dissent by classifying our arguments Hate–by weaponizing our words against us. Regardless of truth, or genuine “hate” for that matter.

Over time, such data can be used to build an accurate picture not only of users’ preferences, likes and behaviors, but also of their beliefs, political views and intimate personal details; things that even their family and friends may not know about them. 

It strikes me that “build[ing] an accurate picture” of “beliefs, political views” is precisely one of the things those combating Hate Online are trying to do to right wingers.
Attempts to censor right wing speech online look increasingly to focusing on individuals’ histories and associations, likes and links, as systems focusing on word combinations to flag actual speech transgressions can always be dodged with creative speech as this article laments:

To try and answer that, we need to step way, way back and first talk about bigotry not as an algorithm, but as social entity. Who exactly are bigots and what makes them tick, not by dictionary definition one would expect to find in a heavily padded college essay, but by practical, real world manifestations that quickly make them stand out. They don’t just use slurs, or bash liberal or egalitarian ideas by calling them something vile or comparing them to some horrible disease, which means the bigots in question will quickly catch on to how they’re being filtered out and switch to more subtle or confusing terms, maybe even treating it like a game.

White supremacists keep behaving in un-hateful fashion, unfortunately. But when did “hate” become forbidden? We lapsed in a fit of absentmindedness from robust freedom of speech into a bizarre system ostensibly censoring the emotion “hate”.

Just note how Google’s algorithm goes astray when given quotes light on invective but heavy on the bigoted subtext and what’s known in journalist circles as dog whistles. Sarcasm adds another problem. How could you know on the basis of one comment that the person isn’t just mocking a bigot by pretending to be them, or conversely, mocking those calling out his bigoted statements? Well, the obvious answer is that we need context every time we evaluate a comment because two of the core features of bigotry are sincerity and a self-defensive attitude. Simply put, bigots say bigoted things because they truly believe them, and they hate being called bigots for it.

Google’s “harassment tool” did not impress. Richard Spencer’s “at the end of the day, America belongs to white men” somehow only scored 29 percent toxic on their meter rating speech from “healthy” to “toxic” (why not “unhealthy”? is this the difference between hate and Hate?). The disappointment with which censorship proponents in the media greet these programs and how they go about testing them (plugging in crimespeak quotes to see if they pass) reveals comically that it’s content, and not hate they’re after.

If they have their way, perhaps after Trump (or, counter-intuitively, maybe they’ll let up, no longer in panic because of him) we can expect internet censorship to focus on individuals and their associations to just choke off the “hate” at the source.

I fear we’ll view this already repressive time as when free speech cops thought they could get away with writing tickets on the street, instead of kicking down your door.

Bugmen of the Cloth

Burnaby British Columbia looks like a lovely place just east of downtown Vancouver, with an active refugee resettlement program.

The pastor of a church that helped sponsor a Syrian refugee family said it was “absolutely devastating” to find out one of the family members has been charged with murder in the death 13-year-old Marrisa Shen. Ibrahim Ali, 28, was arrested last Friday, according to police, and has been charged with first-degree murder in the death of the Burnaby teen, whose body was found in Central Park on July 19, 2017. 

Ali came to Canada about 17 months ago as a privately sponsored refugee, the NOW has learned. 

A red circle on a police map shows where the body of 13-year-old Burnaby resident Marissa Shen was found in Central Park on July 19, 2017.  

Residents of Bowen Island had raised $45,000 to support him and a brother as well as a third brother and his family during their first year in Canada. 

A fourth brother had come to Canada four years earlier as a government-sponsored refugee and was already living in Burnaby, according to a story in the Bowen Island Undercurrent. 

The Bowen Island community had partnered with Vancouver’s St. Andrew’s-Wesley United Church, which has a refugee committee and has helped to settle other families. 

“In terms of the (refugee) work that we do, I mean, the vetting situation is very good,” he said, “and they’re people who are in crisis, and of course our work is to respond to those who are suffering and in crisis as best we can with whatever resources we have available. Always a situation like this gives one pause to review, and we’ll review, but it’s really out of an act of compassion and care that there is the response to the refugee situation, which is not going to stop, right?

The girl was sacrificed to the volcano of “our” simmering “compassion”, tended by a bugman priest, demanding more money (“…whatever resources we have available…”), and taking not shame but a sort of pride in the sacrifice of someone else’s child–it’s “really an act of compassion” ,the “response to the refugee situation”, in its totality, so the sacrifices are ennobled. But above all they have to be borne, because the “refugee” crisis is “not going to stop” (“right?” as in “got it?”).

The pastor is sorry, but the girl had to go.

“It’s a tragic, tragic thing,” pastor Dan Chambers said of the charges against Ali.
Chambers told the NOW he couldn’t say much because the case is before the courts.

Doubling up on adjectives always has a condescending effect (I picture him shaking his head, biting his lip, “…sad, sad…”) but a pastor taking the public equivalent of the Fifth is remarkable.

Like members of the Syrian community and others who work with refugees, Chambers said he is worried the charges against Ali will create a negative perception of refugees and other newcomers. 

It’s grimly comic the way every expression of remorse from both the refugee colonies and their liberal benefactors comes with the “backlash” disclaimer (Syrian community: ““At this moment of deep sadness, we earnestly join all Canadians in mourning and hope that this terrible incident won’t result in a backlash against refugees,”).

It should be a cliche: every time they say “negative perception” something awfully negative has happened, which must not be perceived as such.

“I really appreciate the comments that have already been made in the media by people who have been saying this is really atypical; it’s a very rare case,” he said. 

Members of the Syrian community will be lighting candles Friday morning outside B.C. Provincial Court in Vancouver where Ali is scheduled to appear. 

It’s not clear who they’re lighting the candles for, accused or victim. But the irony gets grimmer still. Like gamblers with someone else’s money, the church and donors got Ali by rolling the dice one time too many

In late 2015, Bowen Island residents undertook a campaign to raise $30,000 in 30 days to bring Ali’s brother, his sister-in-law and their three children to Canada. 

But the community ended up exceeding their goal and raising an extra $15,000, allowing them to bring Ali and a younger brother as well, according to a January 2016 article in the Undercurrent.

They thought it would be great to keep the family together.