Michel de Montaigne once described the ceremonies of the Tupinambá in Brazil in his celebrated essay, “Of Cannibals” (1580) wherein he compares the cannibalism of these people to the 16th century barbarism within Europe:

I find that there is nothing barbarous and savage in this nation, by anything that I can gather, excepting, that every one gives the title of barbarism to everything that is not in use in his own country. As, indeed, we have no other level of truth and reason than the example and idea of the opinions and customs of the place wherein we live: there is always the perfect religion, there the perfect government, there the most exact and accomplished usage of all things. They are savages at the same rate that we say fruits are wild, which nature produces of herself and by her own ordinary progress; whereas, in truth, we ought rather to call those wild whose natures we have changed by our artifice and diverted from the common order. 

This statement by Montaigne regarding the “other” was everything that non-Europeans represented:  savages, cannibals, anyone deemed less than human. These were the humans deemed to be feared, a viewpoint which permeated much of Western civilisation at the time. While Montaigne’s work ushers forth an equally problematic framing of the “noble savages” whose existence represented the innocent “state of nature,” what the cannibal represents today demonstrates the limits of political ideology. Or rather, where one human’s “war” is the other’s terrorism.

And so it goes that today, seven years later, the Chilcot Report is finally released.  At the time I began writing this article I did not have access to the report as the Iraq Inquiry website states: “Inquiry’s report and supporting documents will go live once Sir John Chilcot has finished his public statement on 6 July.”  But the prelude to this report was telling as the BBC had been laying the groundwork for the release of this report from the weekend prior highlighting the historical development of this report through various video clips and articles, publishing snippets of Sir John Chilcot stating the obvious: “Careful analysis [is] needed before war.”  At the risk of sounding dismissive, why, exactly, was this person chosen to be the chairperson to the Iraq Inquiry?  Chilcot, who served in the home office as Deputy Under-Secretary for the Police Department, permanent Under-Secretary of State at the Northern Ireland Office during the height of Irish troubles, various other civil service appointments in the home and cabinet offices, and private secretary to Roy Jenkins, Merlyn Rees, William Whitelaw, and head of the civil service William Armstrong, retired from civil service in 1997.  Today Chilcot is the Chairman of Trustees for the independent think tank The Police Foundation which in recent years has focused upon the policing of young adults and crime reduction.  One must wonder to what degree this report can be any more than a symbolic hand-slapping given the basic conflicts of interest that Chilcot represents.

Tangentially one must question why is every single person on the Iraq Inquiry committee is a member of the peerage:  Sir John Chilcot, Sir Lawrence Freedman, Sir Roderic Lyne, Baroness Prashar and Sir Martin Gilbert (now deceased)?   While Chilcot clarifies that this committee is not a court, he claims, “We’ve tried to apply the highest possible standards of rigorous analysis to the evidence where we make a criticism….”  But how is criticism or any objective inquiry possible when this particular group of examiners has been vetted by the crown, bearing titles which speak to the vested interests of the royal family and of the state?   By their very nature, these individuals cannot possibly be objective examiners and any conclusion that they draw would necessarily be far less severe than someone who has examined the larger historical and political theatres which set up Blair as both somewhat at flaw and yet in a difficult position, whereby according to the likes of Lord Butler “he exaggerated the reliability of intelligence but acted in good faith and did not lie.”

Let’s leave the class nepotism aside and go to the part where Chilcot expands in his BBC promotional video a central facet of the report:  “The main expectation that I have is that it will not be possible in the future to engage in a military or indeed a diplomatic endeavour on such a scale and of such gravity without really careful challenge, and assessment and collective political judgment being applied to it.”  I am now at a loss to as to how it took seven years to reach this conclusion given the deaths in Iraq alone amount to approximately one million by conservative estimates, that is if we are speaking of Iraqi lives as equal to British lives. The weight preceding this report’s release, however, has not been put on the value of Iraqi lives, but instead on the British lives lost. Certainly, it is a painful reality for many families in the UK to learn that their children killed in combat were pawns in a larger political war.  Or, in the words of Reg Keys who lost his son, “He did not die defending his country, he died serving his country because his country was never under threat from Iraq.”

What the Chilcot Report produces in faux knowledge has already been preemptively set up by the media and politicians.  And while many suspected beforehand that this report would be as part of the larger theatre of democracy where an allegedly serious body sets out to uncover the “truth” about Iraq, it was inevitable with such a hand-picked committee that any “truths” uncovered would fit into the larger legitimation of military aggressions in the neo-colonial expansion of capital.  It is through such truisms where “war” and “serving one’s country” covers up the backstage actions of politicians seeking to keep their political narratives intact, their economic dealings with transnational corporations in check, all the while creating a nifty package where money is to be made in destroying countries because we can just send in our own companies to pick up and set up shop once again. Just ask Halliburton and Bechtel how that worked out for them!

Ultimately what the Chilcot Report does not question is the inevitability of war that most everyone in the UK, to include Reg Keys, embrace:   “I am proud of my son.  He faced death in the face along with five colleagues and not one of them tried to run…He served his country.”   As those under thirty years of age comprise of over 50% of the armed forces in the UK, they take a gamble with their lives when it is time to serve overseas in any of the questionable occupations that the UK has joined in recent years.  Still in 2016 so many buy into the glorification of war whereby notions of bravery and cowardice dominate the discussion and where being proud of one’s dead child is the only measure of political patriotism.  Indeed, it would be refreshing if the Chilcot Report endeavoured to uncover the tendentious links between recruitment of young adults and narratives of patriotism, but I am quite certain this was not in the interest of this committee or of the political figureheads who stand by this report.  Nor are the worrying statistics about the massive rates of violence or suicide by ex-military men returning home after deployment in the Global War on Terrorism.

More interesting than the countless editorial pieces and various blog entries from Amnesty to The Economist, are the comments in these mainstream publications where the British public evidences that they are not easily duped by the latest political theatre created by the Chilcot Report.  As one Independent commenter, Makhnovtchina, states:  “If we are lucky, Chilcot will lead to further questions as to how such events are endemic to all political structures dominated by elite groups and hierarchies, no matter their colour, under the influence of charismatic leadership and powerful, Orwellian-style propaganda systems. But don’t hold your breath.”  Indeed, Chilcot does not produce any earth-shattering revelations about how the war was conceived or the degree of culpability specific to each political player in this tragedy.  The best political critiques on the UK’s involvement in Iraq have come from journalists like Patrick Cockburnwho writes:  “If there is one word which springs to mind in describing the approach of all arms of the British state towards the Iraq war it is “amateurism”, a persistent lack of rigour in knowing the terrain in which a British Army would be operating combined with a tendency towards wishful thinking.”  While the Chilcot Report offers insight, it is a bit too little, too late, authored by a group of individuals whose children were not deployed and who offer symbolic conclusions over a series of neo-colonial transactions that continue in various other forms.

The two issues highlighted in Chilcot’s 6 July statement establish a re-thinking of Great Britain’s international policy as necessarily being independent from that of the United States:

There are many lessons set out in the Report.   Some are about the management of relations with allies, especially the US. Mr Blair overestimated his ability to influence US decisions on Iraq.  The UK’s relationship with the US has proved strong enough over time to bear the weight of honest disagreement. It does not require unconditional support where our interests or judgements differ. 

Inasmuch as these points give comfort for those Brits who were among the million who protested Blair’s advances to war in 2003, the Chilcot Report still leaves military invasion and occupation (for us), terrorism (for the other), on the table. There is no ethical questioning of how military action might be phased out in a larger diplomatic policy which has left the United Kingdom’s fingerprint over many of the sites of ethnic cleansing and civil wars that have followed UK colonisations around the planet.  Indeed as we see a group of Tory MPs organising to put forward a vote against Tony Blair for contempt of Parliament over his decision to invade Iraq in 2003, the Chilcot Report argues that the legal basis for war was “far from satisfactory,” still not specifying that it was illegal.

What our culture celebrates, sadly, is the invisibility of the Iraqi other in this conflict together with the conterminous marginalisation of the soldiers returning home whose narratives do not fit the images which a film directed by Howard Hawkes might represent.  Just in the past month we have seen some troubling trends which celebrate the military draft of women and the inclusion of transgender Americans in the military. Instead, what we ought to be asking as a society, as should have the Chilcot Report, is this:  why are military options from recruitment to drafting celebrated at all?  Why can we not arrive at a consensus politically where neo-colonial occupations are no longer options to be adorned in the language of heroism, but should instead be regarded with the very shame of Montaigne’s realisation that once we step foot into that mire of violence, we too are cannibals.

[published in CounterPunch, 1 July, 2016]

One of the first times I experienced serious xenophobia in the UK was when a car, which had made an illegal turn, almost hit me on my bike. I shouted at him. He heard my accent. Then followed me and shouted at me to ‘learn how we do things here’. He probably added ‘sweetheart’, ‘darlin’ or ‘fucking cow’. I can’t remember. He’d made a wrong turn. He’d almost run me over. But I was in the wrong because I’m a foreigner… It wasn’t the first time and wasn’t the last… And I’m pretty tired of British people—especially today—trying to pretend that this stuff doesn’t go on. It does. A lot.

Before the EU Referendum vote last week, I would have placed money on the Vote Remain side winning. And I am not a gambler by any stretch of the imagination.  Had I in some sort of political desperation turned to tarot cards or tasseomancy, nothing would have led me to think that it was possible in the United Kingdom that the Leave campaign would win simply because poll after poll showed that the Remain camp was leading and that as a foreigner in the UK, despite a recent xenophobic attack on my family and me which ended in a man kicking my child’s pushchair with my child in it, I naively believed that this country might be more forthright about its historical relationship with its colonial past and its contemporary cultural morass of racism and xenophobia.  Post EU Referendum, not only has this country become an oxymoron of its own name divided almost completely in half over Brexit, but it appears that nobody has won anything of worth.

Just before the day of the referendum,  I received a flier from Vote Leave which was notably different from its website version.  The pamphlet emphasises the dangers of immigration with the first two points setting up the ethos for this campaign: “Over a quarter of a million people migrate to the UK from the EU every year” and  “The EU is expanding to include: Albania, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Turkey.”  The cover of this leaflet reaveals a physical road sign at a cross roads to demonstrate that this battle is not only about the geography of us  and them, but there is a subtle directional message in telling people, take this road out of here where not only the voter for Brexit will “VOTE LEAVE and take back control” as the sign indicates, but it is a clear visual message to the foreigner that they are not welcome.   The catchphrase “take back control” eerily echoes Florida’s “stand-your-ground,” where guns are replaced with another eerily xenophobic message to run out of town immigrants and this mandate has never been so visible since the outcome of the vote last Friday.

That this entire campaign was met with almost zero resistance from the Corbyn camp is shocking, to say the least.  I will leave Corbyn’s incompetence in this matter to the side for the purpose of focussing on the larger narratives of racism and xenophobia, but it is worth noting that the Leave camp’s silence in the face of a campaign which was clearly orchestrated on the back of xenophobic ideology gave a tacit nod to its structural ethos.  And it was this finely orchestrated avalanche of nationalism and racism from the right married with an ostensibly leftist attempt to “bring down the system!” which demonstrates, in the interstices, the ways in which xenophobia and racism is not uniquely tethered to Brexit and serves as a social subconscious within the UK today.

Just this week alone on my Facebook wall, I had one British person who posted to say that “Not everyone in the UK is xenophobic, but foreigners…”  and on it went from there. In her favour, however, I do believe some of her best friends are black.  And another person lectured me on how my being offended by his using the term “mixed-race” and “mixed-race couple” is not a problem because even his Indian girlfriend uses this term.  I replied that race does not exist amongst humans.  I even had a woman, many years ago while looking to buy into a farming cooperative in Cornwall, ask me what “race” my child was.  At that moment in time I was not only 6 months pregnant but I did not know this woman at all. When I told her that race doesn’t exist, her response was, “You know what I mean.  Don’t play games.”  I informed her that games were really far out of my purview and that I find the question extremely problematic and racialising.  She completely flipped out and of course I was the uppity one.  Before I gave birth to my son last year, I was given a form to fill out in the hospital and did not fill in the “race” question and told the nurse, “It’s 2016 and I prefer not to categorise myself.”  Upon my discharge, I noticed that it had been filled for me.  It was then that I learned the heritage of the United Kingdom and this society’s pathological need to document, to label, to name, and ultimately to use these apellations to put every single person in their place.

The funny thing about racism, as I told my Facebook interlocutor (you know, the one with the “Indian girlfriend”), is that he would never use terms like “my heterosexual neighbour,” “my British friend,” or “my white girlfriend.”  In the UK today, the other is still very much encoded in the quotidian discourse of belonging.  And of not belonging. So of course it is shocking to many British people when you point out that their words or actions are profoundly offensive. Indeed, it is not uncommon that the offender will attempt to turn the tables on you since your interfering with hundreds of years of British colonial legacy is rocking their boat.  And when manifestations over ethnic  inequality occur, just leave it up to the BBC to brush away institutionalised racism rushing to aid the government in eschewing its responsibility to the people as it recasts the events of Autumn 2011 as a “riot” perpetuated by a small group of angry, outlaw thugs with a following of uppity black and brown folks.

The neo-colonial mind believes that saying “my Indian girlfriend” actually levels out the playing field, but this is just more identitarian nonsense where words become surrogates for real political action and a remotion of the personal recognition of one’s complicity within the larger system of racism which disavows people of colour and immigrants from being fully integrated into a society which ostensibly we all share. So by saying “my Indian girlfriend,” the white British man telling me that he is being “contemporary” and “progressive” in his usage of a racialising term, is also conceding, albeit obliquely, that words mean nothing if the only descriptor of his girlfriend is anyone who does not look like him.  If one cannot even understand how language actually has meaning, then perverting words to mean anything you want because you are white and claim that science doesn’t matter and because in your mind race is real, then you can hardly win over the black and brown segments of the population which you are so desperately trying to own.

And herein lies the problem. The white British subject is generally completely out of touch with how racism functions in their own country because they participate in perpetuating certain economic and class models that would have them believe and parrot fictions such as foreigners taking benefits from them (when there is zero factual base for such assertions) or that immigrants are to blame for decrease of jobs in the UK (when studies have shown that it is the global financial crisis and not immigration which has effected the job market here).  What is shocking, as an American in the UK, is how for decades I have heard my comrades on the left deliver righteous and complex critiques of racism of my own country, but who are today blindsided and mute to critiques of racism of theirs. Indeed, the United States has given its friends on the other side of the pond much to critique, but I assumed the media they watched of our society, was in addition to critiques of their own and not the featured film. As I researched this subject more, however, racism in the UK is hardly given any airtime because generally speaking, Brits prefer to think of their society as far more equitable in this regard whilst finger-pointing westward.  When one looks to the prison system, the sentencing of criminals, and poverty in the UK alone, the facts reveal that black and brown people in the UK are treated no differently than in the USA.  When one speaks to immigrants of any colour, it is shocking how xenophobia has persevered for so long in this country without nearly as much media attention that the recent obsession with identitarian politics today has garnered.

If the underlying bubbles of racism and xenophobia were not evidenced by the manifestations of 2011, then the Brexit vote in this country has precipitously pulled away the curtain of ignorant bliss to confirm the flip-side of this situation.  Just as shocking however are the many debates I have undertaken this week with Lexiters who truly believe that their vote to leave the EU was fuelled by class consciousness and who actually proclaim this a “left-wing victory.”  The problem with the Lexit rationale is that you simply cannot have class-consciousness if this state of mind leaves behind vast swaths of the population in a revolution which seem to be uniquely taking place in the mind and to the detriment of many marginalised persons.  Over the past week I have witnessed what resembles a quasi-juvenile rebellion against “the system” from some on the left who have zero sense of Realpolitik and a lesser sense of solidarity with people who are not British and not white.  Make no mistake, this is not a victory of the people—this was merely an unspoken alliance with the right to piggyback a “victory” while Lexiters taciturnly turned their backs on the mounting racism and xenophobia at home.  We are just “collateral damage” for the Lexit faction, or as I am told, we just need to sit tight and be patient for the impending revolution.  Apparently, the Lexiters are going to topple market capitalism and liberate us all while, in the meantime, Johnson, Gove or May will become Prime Minister somewhere between now and October and someone will point us to safety with the bat-signal.  Someone pinch me now!

The reality on the ground is bitter. (And yeah, I am speaking to those of you in Canada who keep telling me how the revolution is coming my way!)  That my family and I have suffered several xenophobic attacks while living in this country does not indicate that this problem is somehow more urgent, it just makes us one more dot on the vast chart of statistics.  Hell, just ask your Uber driver or the person who makes your flat white about theirs. And believe me, they all have their stories.  The last Uber driver when I asked if he has experienced heightened racism since last Thursday responded, “Oh yeah…I just ignore them and go on with my day.”

What is terrifying as a foreigner living here, however, is knowing that there is nothing that can be done to change this tidal wave of anger directed towards some of the most vulnerable members of this society who paradoxically are the ones ensuring, thanks to the generally low paying jobs which many immigrants occupy, that the benefits received by a UKIP supporter in Newcastle are even possible.  The Brexit campaign took up the mantle to fight against Westminster and the EU as a bloc, but it did so on the backs of the very immigrants that Farage uncovered in poster form (because you know, when we aren’t watching the Eastenders and thinking of other ways to scam the system, we pose for UKIP propaganda pics).  As an epilogue to this message, the Lexit camp responded with its “purity politics” whereby one can only a “true” leftist if one did not vote to invade Iraq, if one did not misstep with the Troika in Greece.  So to hell with the those who will be be unduly harmed by a vote which naively assumes that power in the UK is any less problematic and centralised than that of the EU, justice will be orchestrated in our name. And indeed the left and its brocialists galore are each marking out their territory insisting this will be their revolution.  And not coincidental to the UKIP party, this “revolution” is quite white.

Richard Seymour has chimed in on this tragedy most beautifully:

The vote cannot be reduced to racism and nationalism — but that is the primary way in which it has been organised and recruited and directed, and that is the primary way in which the outcome will be experienced. That this was achieved so soon after the fascist murder of a centre-left, pro-immigrant MP, is stunning in a way. It says something about the truculence of some of the chauvinism on display. It says something about the profound sense of loss which a reasserted ‘Britishness’ is supposed to compensate for. This is what many of the left-Brexiters have simply failed to appreciate. In refusing to see that resentful, racist nationalism was indispensable to the Brexit victory, in imagining that the flag-waving and conspiracy theories about the EU are superfluous relative to the ‘class anger’ about neoliberalism and declining living standards, they have adopted an exceptionally crude model of ‘consciousness’.

The jingoism of the right is met by the self-congratulatory delusions of the far left who together have contributed to the parade of dunces.  And if anyone is to doubt the severity of things over here while pundits theorise to death what the referendum “really means” and the benefits of last week’s vote, please allow me to detail what this referendum signifies from the ground. You know, reality, if that even matters any more.  This happened to a friend last week on a train from Oxford to London:

I phoned [name] to tell her that I made the train in time, speaking in Hebrew. This was a very short conversation, but apparently not short enough. The obvious Brexiter from across the aisle said in a loud voice: “In this country we speak English! Can’t you speak English, Sir?”
I had to stop breathing for a second and then said to him, in the same tone of voice, with everyone around watching: “You know, Sir, I have a principle – I never take advice from racists, and I am not going to make you the exception!”.  To my utter amazement, people around us clapped… the guy got up and walked away, red faced. A woman said to me afterwards “I wish I got this on the phone, it was perfect”. I wish she did… In few months time, people will indeed be worried about speaking in foreign languages, and then, no one will clap [for] me – they will clap [for] him.  So you see, they actually got their country back.

Or why not take a look at this article, “A Muslim Shop in the UK Was Just Firebombed While People Were Inside,” or the Jewish lecturer attacked on a train for carrying a bag with the word  “schlep” in English and Hebrew printed on its side, the hundreds of tweets which attest to the xenophobia experienced or witnessed, or just go directly to #PostRefRacism  and Worrying Signs where you can have a field day reading through racist reports.  The Independent has taken note of a surge in police complaints of xenophobia over the past week currently surpassing the 100 mark such that one could believe that xenophobia and racism were not problems before last week. Just look at the very same newspaper, one of the UK’s great leftist publications, and you will find this article, “Why did people really vote for Brexit?”  What is fascinating about this piece is not so much the article as the comment section beneath which could be viewed as the working notes of what the article is referencing, replete with racism, Islamophobia and xenophobia.  There is an incredible dissonance within these comments, for one can only fathom that if a leftist publication’s readership is harbouring this degree of animosity for immigrants, how much more violent must the ire be for immigrants by those on the right?

The bottom line here is that while xenophobia is not something that UKIP alone created, this party has certainly had a hand in inciting fear and hatred towards foreigners among its constituents, rather than to explain honestly to these individuals the ABCs of market capitalism and the economic crisis of 2008, the true cause of their woes.   Similarly, Labour constituents were not guiltless of a similar pushback to immigration as the EU Referendum has revealed. In fieldwork conducted from 14 through 25 April, Ipsos MORI in a survey of 4,000 British adult, almost half (48%) stated that immigration would be an important factor to them when in voting in the EU referendum. Among those who were planning to vote “leave” this rises to 72%.  In a post-referendum survey conducted by Opinium from 24 to 28 June, these figures citing immigration as a motive for voting to leave the EU remain quite high.  To the question, “Which of the following issues, if any, was most important in your decision to vote to ‘remain’ or ‘leave’?”  37% voting to leave the EU selected “Britain’s ability to make its own laws without interference from the EU” and another 45% selected “Britain’s ability to make its own laws without interference from the EU” which arguably would also include the immigration question along with other domestic affairs.  The more nuanced question to ask, however, is where the line exists—if any—between a “concern about” immigration and what such a concern constitutes and xenophobia.  Given the numbers of Labour Party members who also voted out of the EU not on a Lexit platform, uncomfortable questions loom regarding the UK citizenry’s views on immigration and how financial and social crises are often projected onto the foreigner.

While the current theatre of nationalism and xenophobia is not without its repercussions socially, politically, and personally,  the current crisis of xenophobia and racism in this country is one that must be addressed head-on.  No more can we pretend that these are one-off incidents. Any immigrant will tell you they are not.  It is crucial to realise that such eruptions are responses to an underlying problem that very few are discussing, namely capitalism and its associated ills. It is clear that we are coming to the end of capitalism’s reign. And when the recession hits the UK, which by the predictions of many economists is due to come this way soon, the levels of frustration and anger will only rise as will the sense of injustice and disenfranchisement.   And the racism and xenophobia will certainly not be limited to solely Farage’s camp or to the right-wing. Plainly put, racism and xenophobia cannot be spun into class solidarity, nor can they be forgotten away as if some new class spirit will erase the eruption of hyper-nationalism.  Race as a construct is a tool to silence those who are disposable by those who feel authorised to dispose.  The moment the flags come out (and the Union Jacks are unfurled!), lines are drawn as to who does what to whom, who feels entitled to shout “Britain first!” while wielding a knife, or who tells the stranger with the “funny” accent to get out of his country.

I told my interlocutor in his “mixed-race relationship,” the other day that he should strongly consider the a reality most uncomfortable to most British people: that not only is there no race amongst humans, but nobody is purely British or purely “white.” Not even the Queen.  The Slave Owner registers from 1834 in England demonstrate that not only was slavery intertwined within English life in the British Isles, but DNA is telling another story. Roberta Estes, a scientist working on genealogy, has laid out a fairly convincing case for the presence of Africans in England as far back as the 12th century, having uncovered in Europeans and British persons who have never left Europe, “haplogroups that are unquestionably sub-Saharan African in origin, such as Y DNA E-M2, old E1b1a now E-V38, and often, mitochondrial haplogroups such as L1, L2 and L3.”  It is even contended by some experts that Queen Charlotte, wife of the English King George III (1738-1820), was directly descended from Margarita de Castro y Sousa, a black branch of the Portuguese Royal House. Just like Farage’s anti-immigration stance despite his having a German great-grandfather, there is an oblique absurdity to anyone in this country who claims that immigration is hurting this country.

The unspoken dilemma central to all “white power,” neo-Nazi and nationalist movements is that they almost all invariably operate upon the myth of whiteness when the reality is that we all—each and everyone of us—have more than a few drops.

The reality is that felony disenfranchisement is practices in all but two states, Maine and Vermont, where former and current prisoners are free to vote in elections. The rest of the forty-eight states bars prisoners from voting while in prison (15), during prison and parole (4), during prison, parole and probation (18), and those who anywhere from in prison to probation and post-sentence (12), this last group making up approximately 45 percent of the entire disenfranchised population. The Sentencing Project maintains that of those individuals disenfranchised currently in prison or jail, this number actually represents a minority of the total disenfranchised population. Of the disenfranchised voters, approximately 75 percent live in their communities, “under probation or parole supervision or having completed their sentence.” Of those states which restrict voting rights after the completion of sentence, 2.6 million people are disenfranchised.

Legally speaking disenfranchisement has been challenged in courts over the past century with Richardson v. Ramirez 418 U.S. 24 (1974) being a key case on this matter where three men from California who had served time for felony convictions filed a class action lawsuit for their right to vote. The legal argument in this case was principally that the state’s felony disenfranchisement policies denied them the right to equal protection of the laws under the U.S. Constitution (Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment). According to this part of the U.S. Constitution, a state cannot restrict voting rights unless it shows a compelling state interest. Notwithstanding, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld California’s felony disenfranchisement policies as constitutional, affirming that a state does not have to prove that its felony disenfranchisement laws serve “a compelling state interest,” essentially allowing for the denial of voting rights “for participation in rebellion, or other crime.” In the majority opinion, Justice Rehnquist found that Section 2 which was arguably intended to protect the voting rights of freed slaves by sanctioning states that disenfranchised them, exempts from this sanction the disenfranchisement based on a felony conviction. In this way, the Equal Protection Clause could not have been intended to prohibit such disenfranchisement policies.

The problem of felony disenfranchisement has come under political scrutiny in recent weeks when a federal judge in Brooklyn, Frederic Block of Federal District Court, issued a groundbreaking opinion issued on Wednesday that rallies courts to contemplate how felony convictions affect people’s lives. So instead of sentencing Chevelle Nesbeth, a 20-year-old Black woman arrested last year with 600 grams of cocaine in her luggage at JFK International Airport to prison, Block voiced his concern that the collateral consequences she would face as a felon would be punishment enough and he sentenced her to probation. Attesting that such consequences serve “no useful function other than to further punish criminal defendants after they have completed their court-imposed sentences,” Block underscored that there were almost 50,000 federal and state statutes and regulations that imposed penalties on felons. These penalties range from denial of government benefits, ineligibility for public housing, revocation or suspension of driver’s licenses and voter disenfranchisement and can have devastating effects. Bloch’s 42 page opinion on this matter made a most salient appeal to reason adding that felonious convictions for drug offenders may be “particularly disruptive to an ex-convict’s efforts at rehabilitation and reintegration into society.”

The reality is that upon release ex-convicts face extra-judiciary punishment in civil society that can continue throughout their life. For instance, many states have statutory bans which prevent those with certain convictions from working in industries like child care, home health care and nursing—three sectors that employ women of colour at disproportionate rates. As a means to curb such discrimination, in April 2012 the EEOC published an “Enforcement Guidance” requiring companies to establish procedures to show that they are not using criminal records to discriminate by race or national origin. Yet, empirical evidence demonstrates that wage disparity of ex-convicts is harsh and impedes their ability to integrate into society: “There is strong evidence that incarceration reduces the wages of ex-in- mates by 10 to 20 percent. More relevant for the idea of imprisonment as a turning point, incarceration was also found to reduce the rate of wage growth by about 30 percent” (Western, 541). And black ex-convicts encounter wage disparities at an extremely high rate growing at a 21 percent slower rate than that of white ex-convicts. When prison time ends, a second longterm punishment is thus extended throughout life for convicts and voter disenfranchisement is just one of the many ways of creating a specifically racialised marginalisation of those persons who cannot cannot participate in civil society. Former prisoners’ lives are mired by criminal records checks, barred entry to many professions, suffer life-long physical and mental illness because of their marginalisation, and even face difficulty in survival.

The English colonists brought the common law practice of “civil death” to North America. This was a set of criminal penalties which included the revocation of voting rights for certain offences related to voting or considered “egregious violations of the moral code.” After the American Revolution, states began codifying disenfranchisement provisions and expanding the penalty to all felony offences. It is worth noting that the link between wealth and voting is not new as some scholars believe that the rise in disenfranchisement laws in the 1780s was a direct response to the elimination of the requirement that a citizen hold property to vote. As such it is commonly viewed that felony disenfranchisement served an alternative means to reduce the voting power of the lower classes, specifically to the benefit of the wealthy.   After the Civil War felony disenfranchisement policies were enacted and by 1869 twenty-nine states had such laws. And by the post-Reconstruction era, many Southern states amended their disenfranchisement laws specifically to bar black male voters, targeting those offences believed to be committed most frequently by the black population. This is eerily similar to how the powder versus crack cocaine sentencing under the federal Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 functioned to punish black offenders more severely than white offenders (100:1) until this disparity was reduced by the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 (18:1) which still manifests a striking disproportion.

Felony disenfranchisement in many southern states focused on “furtive offenses” which included burglary, theft, arson and wife beating but not for robbery or murder. So when the 1890 Constitutional Convention in Mississippi called for disenfranchisement for furtive offenses, it was later revealed in Mississippi Supreme Court decision several years later (Ratliff v. Beale, 1896), that the fact that blacks engaged in crime and were “given rather to furtive offenses than to the robust crimes of the whites” was the paradigmatic basis for the convention which attempted to bar blacks from voting. This was in addition to literacy tests, poll tax requirement and residency rules. So what was set into motion by these laws resulted in the disenfranchisement provision which resulted in a bizarre policy that would disenfranchise a man convicted of beating his wife, but not for killing her. Such policies would endure for over a century. The laws in place today continue this racist legacy.

Also of interest are the links being made between felony disenfranchisement laws and the right to hold public office, an issue taken up by Andre Steinacker who writes: “[I]f the policy considerations behind voter disenfranchisement laws are legitimate, the application of those considerations would be even more important in the case of candidate disenfranchisement. As evidenced by state candidate disenfranchisement laws, many states have made the decision that moral character is important in elected officials.” There are several glaring ironies here. First, that the law requires a higher moral character for voters than for their politicians. And secondly, that had George W. Bush been arrested and convicted for cocaine possession after 2010 and not in 1972, he would have never been able to have run for office without “judicial release.”

What this means is that still we have a two tier system regarding felony disenfranchisement and a system that still penalises African Americans.

Rape culture is a term coined by feminists in the 1970s which designates not only how females are vulnerable to sexual violence at the hands of males, but which speaks to the depth at which such violence is normalised. Quite often this term is met with ridicule in social media because for many, bitching about inequality is just part of the mantra of those women who refuse to be complicit, who refuse to STFU (shut the fuck up) and die in a fire as we are so often told to do on Twitter when we are not complicit subjects in the social use and production of our bodies and lives.

The actions of Brock Allen Turner epitomise the reality of assault by stranger which has recently been used to mock women online in social media and news comment section debates over the bathroom issue in the United States, as if the lower rate of stranger rape indicates that women should be unconcerned about the potential threat to their bodies at the hands of males. While sexual assault by stranger is the sort of scenario that most people still uniquely conceptualise as rape, this sort of assault is not uncommon accounting for 18% of all rapes. Still the problem of rape and how it is conceptualised, and more prevalently not conceptualised, within society as a major force of violence against women is rooted in its origins.

One of the best and first known rapes in Greek mythology is the rape of Chrysippus by Laius as he was first kidnapped and then sexually assaulted within that story. In fact, historically within Roman law, rape (raptus) was primarily conceptualised as kidnapping or abduction whereby the sexual violence was either secondary or presumed. Over time the notion of rape as an act in and of itself (stuprum) was legally distinguished in the late Roman Republic and then recorded into law (3 CE). This was the first shift from the implication of sequestering to the bodily and sexual violation of “boy, woman, or anyone.” However, rape at this stage was still conceived as a violation of the head of family, the paterfamilias, in that it was his consent that was needed, not that of the female who had little say in the possible arrangements of a forced marriage. Still, rape in this period was viewed as a crime against the citizen’s body and liberty. With the rise of Christianity, the framing of rape shifted from the larger political context of a crime against the individual, private body to a public offence. Together with Augustine’s interpretation of Lucretia’s suicide which is spins this as a sign that she might have encouraged her own rape, there was a violent shift in the discursive and legal constructions of rape from this time forward. Indeed, the rape of Lucretia was utilised as a political tool to foment male political power from Charlemagne to Louise XIV, with her inscription in the writings of Rousseau and Voltaire serving to bolster the French Republic. The notion that a female is in responsible for what happens to her body became a convenient political tool of empire where the actual violence of rape was paved over with other meta-discourses of male desire, male needs, male supremacy, and even the needs of the monarchy. The re-inscription of male subjectivity and power was as central to rape as the body of the female was incidental to this act of violence.

Turn to today, the reality is that Brock Turner is as much as residual of this historical legacy as is his victim. While his victim’s letter has received the attention of media, what is most confounding are the letters submitted to the court by various family members, friends, and coaches. Most shocking of all is the letter penned by his father, Dan A. Turner:

As it stands now, Brock’s life has been deeply altered forever by the events of Jan 17th and 18th. He will never be his happy go lucky self with that easy going personality and welcoming smile. His every waking minute is consumed with worry, anxiety, fear and depression. You can see this in his face, the way he walks, his weakened voice, his lack of appetite. Brock always enjoyed certain types of food and is a very good cook himself. I was always excited to buy him a big ribeye steak to grill or to get his favorite snack for him. I had to make sure to hide some of my favorite pretzels or chips because I knew they wouldn’t be around long after Brock walked in from a long swim practice. Now he barely consumes any food and eats only to exist. These verdicts have broken and shattered him and our family in so many ways. His life will never be the one he dreamed about and worked so hard to achieve. That is a steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action out of his 20 plus years of life.

Aside from the obvious reversal of guilt and innocence blatantly on display here, a tactic not new in rape trials, what Dan Turner misses about rape culture is constituent of the larger social misunderstanding of what it really is: rape culture not only implicates the millions of male rapists around the planet, rather it is the larger discursive framework which allows the individual rapist or rapist apologist, to take the sexual violation of a woman and parenthetically extricate these “twenty minutes of action” as somehow anathema to that male subject’s essentially good nature. You know, the other 23 hours and 40 minutes of that particular day. It is as if we must uniquely defer to what the male subject does when he is not “out of character” raping women to constitute his holistic “happy go lucky self” who can get back to his eating his ribeye steak.

And herein lies the punctum of rape culture: that the violation of women is conceived as the rupture in behaviour and “good boy” normalcy that constitutes the civil subject. Male as always good natured (except when he is not), male as in control (except when he is not), male as well meaning (except when he is not), and woman as collateral damage for the except when he is not for the “twenty minutes of action.” To anyone contemplating rape in terms of time management, one could vulgarly frame rape within a larger temporal structure to minimise these minutes such that one might rationalise the act of violation in this manner: “She needs to get over it. After all, it only lasted a few minutes.” Indeed, women are constantly reminded to move on and focus on those events that are really worthy of their attention, as if victims of violence evaluate must forgive the date rapist because she knew him and might have, like Lucretia, encouraged him. Women are told to put a line under what was only a few minutes of a long happy future (if only she could put it behind her).

Rape culture epitomises the presumption that women are perpetually willing victims in their own rape, not because in 2016 it is assumed that she wants to be raped, that she was in the wrong part of town, too drunk for her own good, or that she was wearing tight jeans, as the historical clichés go (clichés which are not at all fantastical, but very much based on historical and juridical fact). But because it is assumed that her body is still, in the eyes of the right a private possession, and of the left a public commodity. Because a woman’s cultural value is still pinned upon her ability to concede—to concede her vulnerability in the current bathroom wars, to concede the most minuscule doubt that perhaps she shouldn’t have taken that route home, and even concede that she should not have been drinking. She is even expected to consider the facts leading up to those “twenty minutes of action,” assumed to actively participate in the casting of doubt and aspersions on her possible willingness to have taken part in her own sexual assault. Dan Turner’s perverse reversal of victim and victimiser whereby his son is bizarrely cast as a victim, is all too common today and demands of the rape victim that she have sympathy with her victimiser, that she ally herself with her aggressor, because such is the task of the contemporary female to be perpetually linked to her symbolic paterfamilias as she strays from the perceived safety of the home. Nary a word about how many political actors of the left still regard rape as an unfortunate price to pay for freedom, rather than an extenuating symptom of male violence.

 The specific language of “twenty minutes of action,” is a sad indicator of the cultural temperature for reading violence against women today. When rape is regarded as an action, likened to swimming or any other sport or activity one is forced to extricate morality and violence from what is really just an activity like any other. That this action involved the penetration of an unconscious woman is incidental to Dan Turner and his son. In fact, such a letter indicates the familiar and social heritage of rape within the world. That indeed if it is possible for one person to commit this “action,” then it is even more probable that this actor is surrounded by other like-minded actors who have set the scenario, costumes, stage props, and lighting such that everyone but the victim is acclimatised to the leap of faith necessary to suspend disbelief in this his reality. Rape culture is a permanent state of this suspension of disbelief, from the perpetrator, to his father, and friends and anyone who prefers to view the staging of this tragedy as a romantic comedy, as rapist with a heart of gold, or as the potential professional swimmer who made bad judgment call. When it is time to invoke readings of male subjectivity, every effort is extended to the rapist and his clan to explain why he rapes and astonishingly, Dan Turner’s letter was only one of a pile of letters Judge Persky received.

Here is an excerpt of the letter from Turner’s childhood friend, Leslie Rasmussen:

I don’t think it’s fair to base the fate of the next ten + years of his life on the decision of a girl who doesn’t remember anything but the amount she drank to press charges against him. I am not blaming her directly for this, because that isn’t right. But where do we draw the line and stop worrying about being politically correct every second of the day and see that rape on campuses isn’t always because people are rapists.

Rasmussen, who is now bemoaning the fact that her band has recently had many gigs canceled from various events in New York is incredulous that people take issue with her having minimised a sexual assault because the victim lay unconscious while “not blaming her directly,” of course. But Rasmussen does ask a pertinent question that needs to be turned inside-out to speak to the inconsequence of rape culture in her world view since it is due to her support and the many other letters of support which enact the rationale of political correctness. Since political correctness today is commonly understood as the political discourse of policing language and policies so as not to offend or disadvantage a particular demographic, it is clear that every single letter handed to the judge in support of Brock Turner, to include that of Rasmussen, functions precisely to police the legal interpretation of what Turner committed: sexual assault. Or if we are to believe Rasmussen, “These are idiot boys and girls having too much to drink and not being aware of their surroundings and having clouded judgement.” When rape is tantamount to getting drunk and surroundings are a proxy for penises, fingers and vaginas, the stage setting of rape is really as good as the narrative spun by the accused and friends. That is, if they really believe it.

Justice for Brock Turner’s victim, however, is turning into the “gift” that keeps on giving as we now learn that Brock Turner’s sentence has already been reduced to three months due to good behaviour credits applied ahead of time because—sit down for this one—“it was assessed that he was unlikely to misbehave behind bars.” So not only are women like Turner’s victim up against Brock Turners of the present, but we have the luxury to fight against their future persona’s constructed by the generous court system which deems the sexual assailant as benevolent. Sexual offenders are de facto assumed to be “unlikely” to misbehave while paradoxically behind bars for a brief stint because they sort of have—emphasis on the “sort of.” Together with an entourage of people who explain “twenty minutes of action” as a result of “clouded judgment” due to alcohol consumption and who blame Turner’s assault on “sexual promiscuity,” we are being told, effectively, that rapists are just men who rape women. Unpacked, this means that rapists are men who by the sheer number of the world’s population have come into social contact with other humans and who, because of this fact (plus memories), are able to procure letters of support simply because they did not rape every other of these other humans in their inner circle. Unpacked once again: rapists are really not rapists because they did not rape me.

Since last year, the US government and Apple have been in a ateeadlock over the government’s demand that Apple unlock an iPhone. And now the landscape surrounding these cases has vastly shifted in recent months.

In a 2015 case, the SEC filed a civil suit against Bonan Huang and Nan Huang, former fraud analysts based in Virginia, for insider trading. However, the SEC’s case could not go forward without the passcode for the mobile telephones which were encrypted with Apple software.   U.S. District Judge Mark Kearney wrote that as the passwords for the smartphones are not recorded with the corporation, “the act of producing their personal passcodes is testimonial in nature and Defendants properly invoke their fifth Amendment privilege.” And when the Department of Justice attempted again to force Apple to unlock its iPhones, Apple issued its “Supplemental Response to Court’s October 9, 2015 Order and Opinion” which clarified Apple’s refusal to unlock the device in question.

Then there is the case of the San Bernardino shooter, Syed Rizwan Farook, who together with his wife, killed fourteen people in December 2015. The FBI requested that Apple unlock the shooter’s iPhone and Apple refused stating that complying with this request would entail the creation of “a backdoor to the iPhone.” More recently in February, 2015, a California judge ordered Apple to assist the FBI in breaking into the phone of the San Bernardino shooter. Apple again refused citing its reasons in this response:

The government is asking Apple to hack our own users and undermine decades of security advancements that protect our customers — including tens of millions of American citizens — from sophisticated hackers and cybercriminals… Rather than asking for legislative action through Congress, the FBI is proposing an unprecedented use of the All Writs Act of 1789 to justify an expansion of its authority. The government would have us remove security features and add new capabilities to the operating system, allowing a passcode to be input electronically. This would make it easier to unlock an iPhone by “brute force,” trying thousands or millions of combinations with the speed of a modern computer.”

This case is just one of many in recent months where the courts have attempted to force either the user or Apple to unlock an iPhone. Apple has been increasing its level of encryption in its mobile software amid privacy concerns in the almost three years following the leaks by former National Security Agency contractor, Edward Snowden. Today there are more and more cases going before the courts setting precedent regarding the use of smart phones and private information just a little over a year after DMCA regulations established that it was illegal to unlock smartphones. In what is now becoming a routine act of transparency post-Snowdon, Apple has revealed in a recent report that it has received over 1,000 government requests for user data.

Yet there have been two recent game changers. First, the case of San Bernardino gunman Syed Farook, where the FBI was able to retrieve data from the iPhone without the help of Apple. In March, less than twenty-four hours before its court date, Justice Department lawyers wrote in a court filing that they no longer needed Apple’s assistance.   FBI director James Comey confessed just last week that the FBI paid approximately $1.3m for software to hack Farook’s iPhone, a fee which he claims was “worth it.” Also last week was the case in New York where an individual had given investigators the passcode to an iPhone linked to a local drug investigation, resulting in the Department of Justice telling a federal judge that it was dropping its case against Apple.

Relatedly, The Wall Street Journal just announced today that the FBI has no plans to report the software vulnerability that should be reported to the Vulnerabilities Equities Process panel, stating that, “Such a move, tantamount to deciding not to share the vulnerability with Apple, is likely to anger privacy advocates who contend the FBI’s approach to encryption weakens data security for large groups of customers in order to preserve technical options for federal investigators.” What started as a standoff over privacy issues is now turning into a delicate balancing act between providing privacy measures for all users of information technology while not allowing government agencies to exploit their power over sensitive information. Even the future of software updates is endangered by the menacing pull on technology that the state is exploiting, according to the ACLU’s Principle Technologist with the Speech, Privacy & Technology Project, Christopher Soghoian.

What trust we put in software companies in the US or the UK is paramount to protect, but as we use our mobile devices for everything from banking to nourishing long distance relationships, along with the expansion of the Internet of Things, more and more software and devices in our home will be susceptible to the same sorts of government requests to hack. Until March 2016, Apple was able to rely upon the fact that the current iOS does not allow even Apple to access data, but this may soon change as the UK unveiled a draft “Investigatory Powers Bill” on 4 November, 2015 which would place tight controls on service providers to aid in intercepting data requiring web and phone companies to keep “internet connection records” for a maximum of twelve months without police warrant.

Additionally, the person commissioned with carrying out what is called in the UK the “Snoopers’ Charter,” David Anderson QC, has recently confirmed that he will be leaving his position as the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation. Anderson has recently written about the Investigatory Powers Bill which has recently finished (19 May 2016) going through the committee stage in the House of Commons after having passed its second reading in March of this year, “gets the most important things right….no one’s communications can be intercepted without the approval of a judge, the Bill goes a long way to meet the cynics who see its vital powers as ripe for governmental abuse.” Anderson outlines some of the more problematic areas of this proposed bill, namely that:   the powers in vigour do not cover the mass body of communication on the Internet, mobile platforms, and bulk equipment interference; the requirement of ISPs (Internet service providers) to retain Internet connection records is both controversial and expensive; and that the report (245 pages) is replete with technical details that require disambiguation.

The Bill will next be considered at the Report Stage and Third Readingwhose stages are scheduled to be debated on Monday 6 June and Tuesday 7 June 2016. Moreover, on 15 March 2016 MPs agreed a carry-over motion which allows for proceedings on the Bill to be resumed in the 2016-2017 session of Parliament.

On 7 February, 2016 NYMag.com published Jesse Singal’s phenomenally researched and written piece, “How the Fight Over Transgender Kids Got a Leading Sex Researcher Fired,” which details the mishandling of an investigation and the defamation of the target of this investigation, Dr. Kenneth Zucker, resulting in Zucker’s being sacked.  But don’t stop at the comments below the article!  They are tame compared to the Twitter abuse Singal faced in the days following the article’s publication.  And no matter where you stand on the subject of transgenderism and children—a very controversial subject to be certain—the conscious misrepresentations of Singal’s meticulously researched 11,000 word article are as denigrative as they are exploitative of a social media that allows for critique to pass through 140 characters.

After several years of watching a series of attacks on people who write coherent and considerate pieces on gender, I have grown accustomed to the almost textbook responses to attentive criticism and water-tight journalism:  from the fabrication of outright slander, claiming ideas that are in complete contradistinction to what the author has written, insinuating that the reader’s PTSD has been triggered, accusing one’s interlocutor of being wealthy and white (even when this is not the case), to charging those who do not follow a specific belief system are complicit with the murder—even genocide—of transgender persons.  Aside from the increase in exterminationist rhetoric, I have also noted that the increased use of  if statements that are merely clumsily written straw man arguments: “If this writer had written this in 1933 then death, end of the world, burning, hell-fire, this is a bad person who has the cooties…” even though the writer is stating a fact.   Indeed, in 2016 it seems that our ability to carefully read through a thoughtfully written article in its entirety is challenged by the temptation of cheap one-offs that Twitter and other social media offer the disappointed subject.  Why read when you can emote and then Twitter storm the journalist who spent what appears to be months researching a subject and presenting a fairly water-tight case against Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH)?  Singal’s article is lengthy because he took care to carefully document everything in his piece which demonstrates the orchestrated disparagement of Dr. Kenneth Zucker and his subsequent firing from the Child Youth and Family Gender Identity Clinic (GIC) in Toronto, while also revealing a rather shoddy investigation of the charges against Dr. Zucker.

It is clear to me that reading in the Internet age has become an act of reacting to, rather than thinking through the text presented.  It is as if the reader only engages in the act of reading to confirm that what he has already predetermined is mirrored in the text, or not.   And should a writer reveal other truths, then vitriol, public shaming, Twitter trolling, and character assassination will almost certainly ensue.   I have noticed that it is increasingly common that people will react to a title posted on Facebook without reading the article (or without reading an article in its entirely) in order to vituperatively decry the author on their timeline with careless representations and hyperbole (ie. that this author is a Fascist, a murderer, and/or responsible for the genocide of x).  In short, we are losing our ability to read because we have already lost much of our ability to understand nuance.

And such is the case with Jesse Singal’s article.  Chronicling a series of systemic abuses that transpired due to transgender activists and a flimsy external investigation gone awry, Singal carefully follows the details that led to the disparagement of Dr. Zucker, not to mention the loss of his career and somewhat public humiliation in the process.  Instead of accepting that a wrong has been committed against Dr. Zucker, many Twitter trolls attacked Singal for his investigation not returning other results because they view Zucker’s cautious position on the transgendering of children and his attempts to help these patients feel at home in their bodies as a rejection of transgender identity.  This reading presents no nuance;  there is no acceptance of the facts that Singal carefully unearthed.  As a result of complaints from activists regarding Zucker and what these activists deemed to be “conversion” or “reparative therapy,” a clumsy external review of the GIC and a carefully fashioned politicisation of Zucker through weak, anonymous allegations, several grave wrongs have been committed. And all that the many in the pro-trans camp could read from Singal’s investigation, bizarrely, is that Singal must be transphobic and wants to rid the planet of transgender persons.

But this fact of being trolled online for speaking of facts, of history, of biology is not new to feminists who have faced death and rape threats for writing articles which debate the issues surrounding gender as identity rather than as social construct.  Jane Clare Jones’ brilliant essay, “‘You are Killing Me’: On Hate Speech and Feminist Silencing,” addresses the very Twitterised form of debate which relegates anyone who questions gender identity theories:  “Maintaining that anyone who questions the theory of gender identity must be transphobic is equivalent to arguing that anyone who disputes ‘born-that-way’ narratives of homosexuality must be a homophobe.”  But critiquing theory is not the only object of silencing around transgender politics, for it would see that anyone who is not on board with Caitlyn Jenner’s courage and beauty must automatically be a transphobe.  It becomes painfully clear that a vast majority of Singal’s detractors had not even read his article and instead moved to troll the Twitter sphere often writing .@jessesingal with the full stop which guarantees that the harassing tweets will be seen by all of Singal’s followers on Twitter thus bringing the discussion from the bilateral to the polylateral, or rather a massive pile-on par excellence.

Singal was on top of the situation in the first days following the publication of his piece, responding to individual tweets with reasonable responses, noting how many people had not bothered to read his piece. The typical actors came out in full form from one Twitter user who made up some pretty interesting fictions from accusing Singal of “calling on a hate group to harass a trans person”accusations of creating a “sock puppet”and the overused—if not completely inaccurate—critique of biological essentialism as this person goes on to make an entirely biological essentialist argument (ie. you cannot negate the discourse of biology only to defer to Daily Mail and Telegraph articles that are precisely about biology!). It was clear that most of Singal’s detractors had either not bothered to read his article or had superficially skimmed it without giving it the deserved attention to detail that 11,000 words demands.

Other Twitterbators responded to Singal in what has become a familiar rhetorical style typically aimed at women and feminists who are gender critical, by completely misrepresenting Singal’s piece to the letter.  One Twitter user insinuated that Singal had provoked PTSD, another stated that he had “scapegoated [trans people] as an oppressor of” others, and and one writer falsely insinuated that Singal was transphobic, that he “appeared to offer his endorsement of some pretty blatantly transphobic articles” (ie. two New Yorker articles which both emphasise the difficulty transgender persons have in this world despite offering levelled analyses about their subjects).  Inevitably Singal came to realise that defending oneself on Twitter for ideas and words never expressed is fraught with a continuation of the pile-on of more sycophants who will continue forth with the blind insistence that because trans persons are oppressed, they are right and Singal wrong.

This victim mentality which endorses a binarism of power—privileged/oppressed—is itself a logical fallacy for one can be both oppressed and wrong as Paolo Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed demonstrates: one can be both oppressed and an oppressor.  Such nuances are lost in the Twitter sphere to most of its participants.  Thankfully @patdanbow sagely responded to the onslaught of claims of PTSD and the appeal to emotion: “Ppl use ‘legit trauma and anger’ to silence reason. One’s oppression doesn’t magically make one’s viewpoint correct.” But one Twitter user could not stop the free fall of  #firejessesingal hashtags which attempted to convert a nasty form of retaliation into a trending topic, the reprisal of a few figures from GamerGate who have an axe to grind with Singal, and of course the ad hominem attacks and innumerable misrepresentations of Singal’s essay with @ mentions to his employer at NYMag.  From gamers and nerds to those who have usernames that seem ripped out of a science fiction novel to the prevalence of anime heads as profile pics, Twitter discourse is as psychological as it is smoke and mirrors.

The larger task for writers and journalists is their struggle to communicate ideas with which not all people will be in agreement while handling the onslaught of harassment for writing thoughtful commentary that does not tow the line of political correctness.  After all, why write at all when detractors would rather fart out their ire in 140 characters rather than spend their time carefully reading the results of well-executed research?

In 2005 Stephen Colbert coined the term “truthiness” as part of the segment “The Wørd,” pointing to the appeal to emotion as a “gut feeling” that supersedes reason. Despite this term’s initial use as satire, truthiness retains an artifice of truth for what is happening today in popular culture, especially in the problematic and slippery space of social media (which could often be termed as “antisocial media”), given the ire and explosive emotions that are unleashed should one’s interlocutor dare disagree. Journalists face a very complex relationship with their readership because today it is sadly not uncommon that people read articles to confirm what they want to hear or to reinforce their preconceived notions—not to learn from what careful investigation and writing has revealed.  Truthiness is a very useful term when it comes to approaching call-out culture which seeks not to right a wrong, but rather to wrong a right.  In a world where people do not wish to exert the necessary time and energy to read articles which are crafted to unite and empower us in knowledge, the exact inverse occurs where readers come together on social media, more often than not, to trash the messenger, calling into question his motives, calling up her employer to further harass this person all because she did her job.

In the same vein, the recent public trolling directed at Singal has evidenced various abuses that tend to go hand in hand with truthiness and the inner sense that research and science are meaningless.  What really matters to these trolls is individual emotion.  There is a precedent for such menacing actions which have taken aim at reason and careful research, two of which are meticulously researched and articulated by Alice Dreger:  the case of Napoleon Chagnon and J. Michael Bailey. So too have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome activists taken aim at doctors in the US and the UK.  And just last week Rick Allgeyer, Director of Research of the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, was forced from his position for having co-authored a study that demonstrated adverse consequences for contraceptive use after Planned Parenthood was excluded from a state-funded replacement program in Texas.  Like 30 Rock’s Dr. Spaceman, those who troll and abuse researchers and writers view science as “whatever we want it to be.”  
In addition to the defamatory comments made against his person in social media, later the same week, publications such as Feministing took aim at Singal with much the same recklessness and illiteracy of Twitter.  And such articles often instigate the Twitter pile-ons which like the Feministing article elide the research and facts demonstrated and rely on emotionalised arguments which negate facts.  Intimidation tactics which insinuate slurs such as “transphobe,” “TERF” (trans-exclusionary radical feminist), and “bigot” are all familiar measures to shut down dialogue and to tarnish the public image of individuals through these and other trolling tactics. And Singal was no exception to these methods as one writer states that Singal “certainly seems to be somewhat uncomfortable with trans people existing at all.”  Any cursory reading of Singal’s article would simply not give this impression at all, no matter where you stand on the issue of transgenderism and children.

The events surrounding Singal’s publication reminded me of Twitter attacks I faced in 2013 when I published an article chronicling the assault on gender critical feminists in CounterPunch. After the publication of this piece, I was Twitter trolled and threatened (as well as my editor and both our children). Thereafter came a libellous piece co-published by Jacobin and Salon which commits similar acts of wilful misinterpretation, hyperbole and outright lies (ie. that my article was “about whether a group of people should exist” and that both CounterPunch and I do not regard trans as “human beings”). My article made no such allusion either directly or circuitously. When I approached both Jacobin and Salon to correct the inaccuracies and to publish my riposte to the calumnious article, Salon was uninterested in correcting the factual errors and Jacobin’s editor, Bhaskar Sunkara, wrote me to say that he would normally publish my response but that on this occasion he could not because his publication was facing legal action by Cathy Brennan who was also mentioned in the Jacobin article. Not only was Sunkara’s claim that Brennan had told her lawyer “to prepare litigation against Jacobin” untrue, but Jacobin took the opportunity to fund raise based on this fabrication. Refusing to give a rebuttal to a person incorrectly characterised in an article using a fake lawsuit as a pretext would seem to be a new low for “leftist” publishing these days. But hey, why publish properly researched facts when you can invoke vitriol through offensive epithets (ie. TERF), thinly veiled threats, labelling a reputable leftist publication and myself as part of a “hate group,” while taking part in the ongoing “oppression Olympics” of truthiness that social media and mainstream publishing currently foment? It appears that allowing for the healthy discussion about gender — a topic that affects everyone in societies throughout the world — is considered anathema to the mandate of certain allegedly leftist publications.

So imagine the irony when one of Jacobin’s editors, Connor Kilpatrick, after linking to Singal’s article on Twitter, was called out through very similar language with which Jacobin had smeared CounterPunch and me three years ago. Watching Kilpatrick’s surprise regarding the caustic reaction to his tweet and The Week’s Ryan Cooper comparing such cyber trolling to a witch hunt made me wonder where some of these men had been over the last several years. Then it hit me: it took men being attacked for there to be any sizeable discussion about or backlash against what has been and continues today to be intellectual bullying, cyber trolling, and vast misrepresentations, to include calumny and generous doses of misogyny. To be fair, when I first read Singal’s article, I wrote him to ask if he was being harassed to which Singal astutely noted: “I’m a male so I only get a tiny fraction of the harassment women do.” For most, however, that women have been the usual victims of these tactics seemed to have had little to no effect on the public perception of slurs like “TERF,” “transphobe,” or the notion that by being gender critical one is somehow murdering people with words. Indeed, it is an unhappy coincidence that such exceptions only demonstrate how sexist the practices of publishing academic or scientific debate has been in recent years, as many of these male writers were at the very least spared rape threats.

While there is some perfunctory satisfaction in knowing that a publication which went out of its way to publish a hack piece about CounterPunch and me is now being categorised as “transphobic” and as forming part of a “transphobic circle-jerk,” I am nonetheless concerned that ostensibly leftist editors of publications such as Jacobin do not understand how this sort of linguistic blowback functions. And worse, that these publications by censoring content, unwittingly contribute to the anti-intellectualism at the heart of any movement whose ethos rides uniquely on epithets and acronyms. Aside from these publications behaving similarly to these Twitter trolls, it is as if they are seemingly unable to recognise the acute distinction between responsible academic exchange on the one hand, and human rights violations on the other. Obviously, writers are not asking seasoned editors to agree with every piece they publish. But writers do generally expect the fair and equal representation of ideas while not having their critiques collapsed with obliquely radical, if not very real and damaging, human rights abuses. Even getting articles that are gender critical published in leftist publications today is a miraculous feat as so many editors either kowtow to gender essentialist discourses of “bravery” or they are weary of the fallout that inevitably occurs after publishing any piece that does applaud transgenderism as the cause célèbre du jour.

I am concerned that today the problem of reading reactively and not intellectually, with an eye to understanding, is a task that must be equally addressed by both the public and magazine editors. Given the growing political pressure to endorse certain viewpoints, I would expect that editors would take a hard line against such political pressure by pushing back in the form of publishing dissenting voices. Rather than champion the silencing of debate while yielding to defamatory practices about those who offer an informed critical discourse, editors should be stepping up to the challenge of bringing together divergent perspectives and of opening up polemic, rather than labelling critical difference as “hate speech.” Ensuring this is done seems to be paramount to our advancement as a society.

It is an inescapable fact that social media is making us lazy as both readers and as thinkers. Many have lost the capacity to read effectively and with refined cognitive skills that would allow the reader to understand that Jesse Singal can lend a critical eye to the politicisation of children and transgenderism as well as the dangers of political advocacy in medicine without concluding that Singal must necessarily be transphobic. Today it is more and more the case that writers feel pressured to genuflect to transgenderism in all its perceived “positive” forms despite the fact that at the heart of any given discussion might lie critiques which engage conflicting politics of gender, the politicisation of children and gender, or fraud committed by an individual who happens to be transgender.

But writers are not the only individuals feeling coercion on this matter. This past Tuesday the Lambda Literary Foundation announced that it rescinded its nomination for the 2016 Lambda Literary Award for the LGBTQ Nonfiction category, Alice Dreger’s Galileo’s Middle Finger (2015). Tony Valenzuela, Executive Director of Lambda Literary Foundation confirmed that his office received almost 100 letters of protest regarding Dreger’s nomination for the award, “including from major LGBT civil rights organizations.” Valenzuela stated, “Galileo’s Middle Finger, does not meet our organizational objective of promoting knowledge, understanding and acceptance of LGBTQ people,” adding that there were serious concerns about one of the chapters of the book “about which our transgender constituents strongly object and which, after careful and full consideration, we agree does not affirm LGBTQ lives.” Lambda Literary Foundation’s response, however, does not answer how a book which delves into the problems of scientific research when faced with political activism and aggression would actually be “in denial” of anyone’s life. Lambda Literary Foundation, in withdrawing Dreger’s text from consideration, is subtly suggesting that there is only one acceptable, monolithic reading of gender and that this reading is the only way to “affirm” lives. The skeptic in me questions why it is the public’s obligation to “affirm” anyone’s life, much less anyone’s gender. People can and do build respectful relationships with others of all sorts of identities which we would never be asked to affirm. I have colleagues who are religious, some friends who are politically conservative, and others who think they are the best cook on the planet (when they are not). In order for me to have a happy or even functioning relationship with these individuals, I am not given a litmus test that requires me to affirm their beliefs about their identities, to repeat after them that I affirm their belief in God. Affirmation is a personal construction and not a social pledge of allegiance in which we must collectively participate; yet today affirmation of the other’s feelings is troublingly making its way as part of a larger political doxa.

We are now witnessing the distressing domino effect of cultural illiteracy and Creationist-like views of gender being enforced throughout social and academic spaces which heretofore had been the harbingers of critical inquiry and democratic forms of expression. Given that the subject of Dreger’s book deals with the silencing of scientists, Lambda’s response to her critical study is nothing short of ironic as are the comments on Twitter regarding Dreger’s work. These tweets refer to Dreger as a “transphobe,” there are obtuse mentions to her sexuality and sex, and one tweet asserts that she should be “axed from @LambdaLiterary awards,” an unfortunate, if not entirely deliberate, choice of words. When women do publish on the subject of gender, it is increasingly common to witness the intentional denigration of females through the same old tropes of sexism and thinly veiled allusions to violence.

Twitterbating cries of transphobia in response to articulate and respectful publications constitute, like trigger warnings, a means to stifle discussion about an issue which actually affects us all — gender. Unless we intend to ask that journalists and scholars write endlessly boring articles about “courage” and red carpet moments, we must adopt thicker skin when it comes to accepting that on the subject of gender, everyone has a horse in this race. Agree or disagree, the starting point to understanding how we might stop the vicious attacks online must first begin by reading what the other has actually written while foregoing all desire to hyperbolise and misrepresent.

Earlier this week it was announced that Prime Minister Trudeau and President Obama are committing themselves to fight climate change announcing measures “from a 45% cut in methane emissions from the oil and gas industry to protections for a rapidly warming Arctic.”  Coming on the heels of COP 21 (or CMP 11) which was held in Paris last fall, that meeting put on the table various proposals to reduce global warming, the outcome of which were two primary agreements: to limit global warming to less than 2°C with an effort to limit increases to 1.5°C compared to pre-industrial levels (Article 2.1(a)) and “to achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century” (Article 4.1).  And this comes just in time since as of 3 March, 2016, the heat wave in the Northern Hemisphere has broken the 2°C above “normal” mark since recorded history, “and likely the first time since human civilization began.”

And just before his encounter, President of the Pacific Institute in California, Dr Peter Gleick,  presented evidence which  demonstrates a connection between rising temperatures and dangerous storms in the northern hemisphere.  Recently Gleick spoke with The Independent detailing how warm temperatures in the Arctic are behind the creation of catastrophic storms in the northern hemisphere. Gleick’s research shows a clear relationship between the rising temperatures in the northern hemisphere and the reduction of sea ice and the 4°C higher temperatures in the Arctic over the last 30 years, comparing these records to the 1951-1980 average.

Gleick is no stranger to the climate change debate when in 2014 he had already discussed the links between climate change and the California draught.  And Gleick goes on to address what he terms the “more interesting” question of the influence of climate change on the California draught:

We know that climate is changing and that climate changes influence weather. That “influence” can take many forms: changes in storm patterns, precipitation frequency or intensity, the form of precipitation, and so on. And we know that there are many uncertainties about the nature and extent of these changes. But I say the answer to this specific question is “yes” for one simple reason: current average temperatures in California, like average temperatures worldwide, are higher today than they were in the past century because of human-caused climate change.

Gleick’s work on climate change has been able to chart singular events such as the California drought and melting glaciers and directly connect these events to climate change.  The evidence is today considered unambiguous and Gleick is just one of many scientists making headway in publishing studies on the causes and effects of climate change.

In 2008, Carolina Pagli, a geophysicist at the University of Leeds (UK), and Freysteinn Sigmundsson, a vulcanologist at the University of Iceland,  co-authored a paper which discusses the possible links between global warming and ice-capped volcanoes in Iceland.  In their study, “Will Present Day Glacier Retreat Increase Volcanic Activity?” the authors note that since 1890 approximately 10% of Iceland’s biggest glacier, Vatnajökull, at 8,500 sq km (3,280 sq miles) with an average thickness of 400 metres and a maximum thickness of 1,000 metres, has melted.  As a result of the rising temperature in the Arctic, this particular glacier has effected the activation of volcanoes due to glacial retreat:  “[O]ur model indicates that a significant volume of additional magma, as high as 1.4 km3, could be produced every century under Vatnajökull due to present day glacial retreat, suggesting that increased volcanic activity may be expected in the future.”  In other words, there is also a circular connection between volcanic activity, glacial retreat, and climate change, each one inflecting the other as melting ice causes a release of pressure on the ice-capped volcanos thus decreasing the pressure on the rock which is the perfect condition for this rock to turn into liquid magma; and inversely with every eruption of volcanic magma comes the disintegration of glaciers such as Vatnajökull.  The results of both conditions is a continually warming climate.

Moreover, recent data suggests that the land mass surrounding Vatnajökull is rising by approximately 25 millimeters every year, a condition called post-glacial rebound or isostatic rebound.  So when the Vatnajökull glacier will have completely melted, the land under it will eventually rise to 100 meters (328 feet).  Isostatic rebound is a gradual recovery of the earth’s outermost layer after being crushed down by the weight of glaciers.  We can see isostatic rebound throughout the world today, from the Hudson Bay (Canada), to the Gulf of Bothnia (Finland/Sweden), and most of Scotland.  However, make no mistake, the falling sea-levels in association to this pattern is not proof against climate change as some of the climate change deniers would suggest.  In fact, some of this shifting of previously depressed land masses can have radical effects on the earth and its populations, most notably the induction of earthquakes and the affect to the earth’s rate of rotation.

Just as harsher winters do not mean that climate change is not real, it is imperative that we  examine all of the indicators of climate change which today interconnect the data and confirm the science behind climate change.  From draught, increased volcanic activity, growing incidents of earthquake, to glacial melt, we possess the knowledge which demonstrates causal links between certain land masses rising, sea levels climbing, the dwindling of Arctic ice, greenhouse gases, and predicted landslide activity in  the Andes, Himalayas, European Alps and elsewhere.  Despite the lip service paid by politicians, be they in Paris or Washington, it is imperative that we conjointly push our leaders for a realisation of their promises in addition to our collective and individual acts of ecological health and consciousness raising.

Since writing about the threat of iPhone privacy in the US and the UK in January, political lines have been drawn with Mark Zuckerberg siding with Apple and Bill Gates standing with the FBI in this ongoing debate. But how private is the information on our iPhones in the UK specifically?

Apple has been buttressing its claim in recent years that it sells products, not personal data like two of its competitors, Facebook and Google. A recent article in Macworld.co.uk, analyses privacy with Apple and Google and concludes that data is safer with Apple for the following reasons: the passcode on the iPhone locks out the user for one minute if the passcode is wrong for six tries and can be set to erase data if the passcode is wrong 10 times; the Touch ID fingerprint scanner; the Secure Enclave which “uses a secure boot system to ensure that it the code it runs can’t be modified”; Apple is demonstrating its commitment to user privacy by refusing to cooperate with the US government in unlocking iPhones (in large part because with the latest technology, Apple cannot break into the iPhone); and Google has demonstrated in the past that it is hostile to user privacy.

In the UK Apple has likewise let its position related to privacy be known: “Apple has never worked with any government agency from any country to create a “backdoor” in any of our products or services. We have also never allowed any government access to our servers. And we never will.” Conversely, a recent poll has shown that the majority of the general public (60%) in the UK is actually supportive of measures where the government should be able to monitor communications in questions of national security in a poll conducted by Comparitech.com: “[T]he study found that 49 percent of the 1000 people questioned from the UK (nationally representative) cite national security as having more importance than an individual’s right to privacy.”

Of all the actors in media and communications, Amar Singh, chair of ISACA, a UK security advisory group, finds these results troubling, especially when “so many are willing to sacrifice their civil liberties and privacy for claims of protection. Let’s not forget that no government has a stellar record in protecting their own information and if technologies are updated to allow ‘free access’ for the government, then criminals will no doubt be able to obtain the same.” And the Information Commissioner’s Office, the government watchdog criticised the internet connection records that would be revealed, “Although these are portrayed as conveying limited information about an individual they can, in reality, go much further and can reveal a great deal about the behaviours and activities of an individual.”

On the other side of this argument, the UK government has expressed that it does not want backdoors to encrypted messages but instead is asking that companies decrypt messages on demand. This is a contradictory policy as the government is expressing two antithetical ideas about privacy: we respect privacy, except when we do not. The Investigatory Powers Bill, also called the “Snoopers’ Charter,” will be introduced into the House of Commons this week. Home Secretary Theresa May has recently been accused of trying to rush through this problematic surveillance law before the EU referendum later this year. May, who is overseeing the creation of the IP Bill, witnessed similar changes blunted in 2012; nevertheless she now proposes 86 changes to the current spying laws. Recently May told a group of MPs and Lords that companies would be obliged to remove electronic protection on information when a warrant is issued.

Lord Strasburger, a Liberal Democrat peer who sat on the joint committee, criticised the bill stating: “The real reason is that although the Home Office pretends it wants a mature public debate, actually it does not like having to justify what would be the most intrusive snooping powers any Western government has into its citizens’ private lives.”

As American citizens discovered after 9/11 and more recently with the NSA files, the line between personal privacy and public safety is inscrutable when the politics that determine this line are constantly shifting.