Freethoughtblogs uses Cloudflare protection — we need it because every once in a while, some jerk targets us with a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, and the worst jerks are the ones who try to shut down free speech in the name of free speech. Unfortunately, as I’ve recently learned, Cloudflare isn’t necessarily one of the good guys — they also shelter various contemptible hate groups, like incels. Follow the link if you want to see examples of violent threats against women and other groups, since I don’t feel like quoting that crap today.

I do appreciate their insistence on remaining neutral on content, though. Who knows who would be shut down if they didn’t explicitly avoid judging the servers they defend?

Civil liberties organization Electronic Frontier Foundation released a poignant statement in the aftermath of the Charlottesville violence, highlighting the trouble with selective censorship: “All fair-minded people must stand against the hateful violence and aggression that seems to be growing across our country. But we must also recognize that on the internet, any tactic used now to silence neo-Nazis will soon be used against others, including people whose opinions we agree with” such as the Black Lives Matter movement, it said.

So sure, if that’s all this was about, I’d agree that staying out of the fight would be a fair and reasonable way to maintain the integrity of the service. But there is also the idea that you shouldn’t be allowed to shout “fire!” in a crowded theater, and some of these sites are inciting violence and murder. It also seems fair to me that there are some limits — that you ought to be able to express unpopular opinions, but are limited in encouraging dangerous activities.

Other companies place these reasonable restrictions on their users.

Private internet companies can reserve the right to terminate a client’s website if its users post content that violates their terms of service, as many did with The Daily Stormer. GoDaddy, for example, does not allow its clients to use their sites in a manner that “promotes, encourages or engages in terrorism, violence against people, animals, or property,” or for “morally objectionable activities.”

Cloudflare, of course, is also free to set such terms, but has argued that it has no business regulating content because it is a security and delivery network, not a host provider.

OK, “morally objectionable activities” is unacceptably vague — there are people who would say that being gay, or skipping church, are morally objectionable. But saying that a client can’t use your service to promote terrorism or violence is a specific and reasonable constraint. We already have that requirement here at FtB, and we’ve invoked it against bloggers here in the past. If Cloudflare had that kind of provision in their terms of service, we’d sign it without hesitation, and we’d be enforcing it here as well as by our hosting service.

We aren’t even close to what is represented by the clients using Cloudflare, though. Follow the link: it’s people advocating mass murder, torture, and rape. These are mobs whipping each other up into ever more furious hate, and there are multiple examples of readers of those sorts of sites taking action and killing people.

Unfortunately, Cloudflare is so ubiquitous it now has an effective monopoly (they also do a really good job of protecting web sites). Does anyone know of any equally capable alternatives?

That’s one of the results of a report on American perspectives on native peoples. You know, if we’re going to be upset that some people don’t understand that the earth is older than 6000 years, we ought to be even more outraged at this level of ignorance — an ignorance that dehumanizes.

The study found that largest barrier to public sympathy for Native rights was “the invisibility and erasure of Native Americans in all aspects of modern U.S. society.” Representation of contemporary Native Americans was found to be almost completely absent from K-12 education, pop culture, news media, and politics. Two-thirds of respondents said they don’t know a single Native person. Only 13 percent of state history curriculum standards about Native Americans cover events after the year 1900. For the average U.S. citizen, the main exposure to contemporary Native Americans is through media and pop culture. Unfortunately, contemporary Native Americans are almost completely absent from mainstream news media and pop culture, and “where narratives about Native Americans do exist, they are primarily deficit based and guided by misperceptions, assumptions and stereotypes,” says the report.

Crystal Echo Hawk (Pawnee), co-project leader of Reclaiming Native Truth, said that in the focus groups, “the only references [to Native Americans] that we continuously heard as people were struggling to make a connection were Dances with Wolves and Parks and Recreation. So these stereotypes and caricatures are really forming perceptions of Native people.”

The sheer invisibility of Native people leads to some very warped perspectives about contemporary Native life. Forty percent of respondents did not think that Native people still exist. While 59 percent agree that “the United States is guilty of committing genocide against Native Americans,” only 36 percent agree that Native Americans experience significant discrimination today — meaning nearly two-thirds of the public perceive Native Americans as experiencing little to no oppression or structural racism.

I guess that might go a ways to explaining another phenomenon, that so many Indian women disappear, presumed murdered, every year, and the data is ignored and neglected.

Spend time in Indian Country and you’ll hear this story over and over: A niece, a daughter or a cousin who was taken quickly and violently from this world.

As many as 300 indigenous women go missing or are killed under suspicious circumstances every year in Canada and the U.S., but the exact number is unknown because the Federal Bureau of Investigation isn’t really tracking the numbers.

If they didn’t exist in the first place, they can’t disappear, right?

assertive of authority in an annoyingly domineering way, especially with regard to petty or trivial matters: a policeman came to move them on, an officious, spiteful man.

• intrusively enthusiastic in offering help or advice; interfering: an officious bystander.

Isn’t that perfect? I’m just getting tired of these stories coming up every day about white people reporting black people for mowing a lawn, or selling candy, or picnicing, or walking in a neighborhood. Use it more often.

Use it in a sentence: White people, why are you being so fucking officious?

It’s always been that way, hasn’t it? Here’s just another example: an old white woman sees a black youngster selling candy and has to protest, claiming her own righteousness.

God Almighty these people have nothing better to do than harass young Black entrepreneurial kids?
•Black child is selling candy
•Random old woman comes demanding to see a business license🤦🏽‍♂️

POC & White Allies: Record Everything pic.twitter.com/SkBhIqelip

— Qasim Rashid, Esq. (@MuslimIQ) July 11, 2018

The most telling moment in the woman’s complaint:

“They do it all around the country and you should see how they live,” the woman says.

As the teen counts the candy Lopez tells the woman that she’s ignorant.

“How dare you call me a racist, you have no idea,” says the woman to Lopez who completely ignores her and leaves the scene to get cash.

“They”. You should see how “they” live. And then to complain that you’ve been called a racist.

The man who bought all the candy is named Jay Lopez. He was being more than an ally — he was a collaborator. We all need to be more like that. It’s time to subvert the dominant paradigm.

The first comment on the Twitter thread is this one, and it’s also very true:

Everyone needs to go to their grandparents house, and change the channel on the tv.

— TheShrike (@bklinger62) July 11, 2018

I’m pleased to say that I’m at my mother’s house this week, and she watches MSNBC, and last night we watched Rachel Maddow together. Just sayin’ there are some grandmas who don’t need their channels changed, and we all know which poisonous network that comment is talking about.

And they’re rising now! If you need some optimism, I rather liked this analysis.

Sessions: asylum seekers are like criminals breaking into your house.

Real analogy: your neighbor’s husband is shot and killed. She flees to your house with her baby. When she knocks, you call the police and have her arrested for trespassing.

She never sees her baby again.

It’s time for another example of abusive academia: in this case, it’s a woman, Guinevere Kauffmann, director of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany who has been bullying and flinging racist emails about.

The research shows how employees and students are treated at one of the most highly respected research institutes in the world. While the institute in Garching outwardly presents itself as the cutting edge of German research, young scientists talk of despotism, fear of superiors, and destroyed careers.

The accusations against the director are only the latest in a global debate about bullying and abuse of power in science. Women physicists and astrophysicists are making harassment allegations public under the hashtag #AstroSH. For example, famous physicist Lawrence Krauss was placed on temporary leave at Arizona State University following accusations of sexual harassment. And astrophysicist Rachael Livermore was harassed by a colleague in a scientific article so severely that she has since left the field of science.

In early February German news magazine Der Spiegel reported similar accusations at a Max Planck institute, yet without naming the specific institute (Astrophysics) or the professor (Kauffmann).

It sounds like this branch of the Max Planck has utterly miserably working conditions. This is not how science thrives.

“This matter with Guinevere Kauffmann and her husband is by far the worst. But the prevailing culture in the entire institute is bad. Things happen there that aren’t okay,” said Hans. Andressa Jendreieck agreed. “I get the impression many of the advisors are bullying their employees.”

All nine scientists who spoke with BuzzFeed News Germany say that the institute is profoundly hierarchical. You either endure it, or you break.

“Hierarchical” is the magic word. Science isn’t a top-down process, and when you give select individuals so much power and control, it doesn’t lead to greater productivity. It breaks everything.

I’ve worked in an institute that was profoundly egalitarian — there were PIs, sure, but their role, for which they were respected, was to take on more responsibility, rather than more “power”. Everyone was fully aware that the goal of the institute was to work as a team to do great science, which meant that everyone, undergraduates, grad students, post-docs, technicians, and PIs had essential roles in getting that done — and taking a dump on someone at a lower level in the imaginary hierarchy was disruptive and self-defeating. All human beings in the great machine of science must be regarded as equals, or the enterprise will fail.

This is why the myth of the Great Men of Science is so wrong and damaging. It leads to pathologies like the situation at the Max Planck in Garching. Good science is collaborative and cooperative.

Although he insists that he hasn’t.

Trump is not Hitler; I am not Neville Chamberlain; i’m a passionate Never-Trumper who wants to solve a problem that is empowering white nationalism everywhere

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) June 22, 2018

Only his solution to that problem of white nationalism is to surrender and give them what they want.

So give him his fucking wall. He won the election. He is owed this. It may never be completed; it may not work, as hoped. But it is now the only way to reassure a critical mass of Americans that mass immigration is under control, and the only way to make any progress under this president. And until the white working and middle classes are reassured, we will get nowhere. Don’t give it to him for nothing, of course. It should come with a full path to citizenship for all DACA immigrants, as in the proposed deal in January that Trump first liked and then reneged on, under Miller’s toxic influence. But it should also go bigger: a legislative fix for Flores; massive new funding for detention facilities, humane family-friendly housing, and, above all, much more money for the immigration legal system, now completely overwhelmed by asylum cases. If Democrats can show they want to deal with the humanitarian problem as a whole, and are willing to compromise on the wall, they’ll be in a much stronger position going forward than in the recent past.

He is not “owed” anything. Trump has a big job to do, running the country, which he is not doing — if anything he owes us, especially since he and his family and his cronies see their position of power as an opportunity to enrich themselves. He is supposed to be engaged in public service, and that is most definitely not what he is doing.

Isn’t Sullivan remarkably cavalier about throwing tens of billions of dollars on a wall that won’t work, throwing it away as a sop to the masses? Why not instead spend billions of dollars on improving educational opportunities for immigrants, helping them to integrate better into the culture here, for instance? Because that won’t appease that “critical mass of Americans” who’ve been encouraged by the propaganda machines of Trump and Fox News to settle for nothing less than punching down hard on the brown people.

And to think that once you give the bigots the great big wall they’re shrieking for, they’ll calm down and decide they’ve gone far enough is ludicrous — it betrays a total failure to understand how humans work. Give them a victory, and their cultlike devotion to Maximum Leader will increase, and they’ll demand more. Can you imagine Trump saying a nice “thank you” for his beautiful wall, then sitting back, reading the Constitution, and deciding to buckle down to the paperwork and minutiae of his job? No. He’ll start looking for another cause he can use to inflame his base, and win cheers for him and rage against the Democrats at future rallies. Sullivan is a man utterly clueless about human nature, who then engages in stupid punditry about human nature. He is blinded by his biases.

And then there’s this cack-handed nonsense.

Preventing illegal immigration is not racist, not white supremacist, not bigotry; it’s integral to any democracy functioning; it’s a core function of government.

Slowing massive demographic change is not fascist; it's conservative.

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) June 22, 2018

What that says to me is that Sullivan sees conservativism as nothing more than a nicer word for fascism. Fine with me; I agree. Massive demographic change is happening, it always has, and the question is…will you resist until you break and die, or do you adapt and become something new? Deny reality, or grow and change? This has been the story of human history for thousands of years, and conservatives have always opposed, often violently, the inevitable change that is always going to overwhelm them. It’s that transition from old guard defending the status quo to the status quo fighting to oppress change that marks the shift from conservative to fascist, nothing more.

But here’s the bit where I started to see red.

If all this sounds like appeasing a bigot, I understand. But better to see it, I think, as a way to address the legitimate concerns, fears, and worries of a large number of Americans who feel like strangers in their own land, and whose emotional response to that has been to empower the white nationalist right.

It was one little word.

“legitimate.”

“legitimate concerns, fears, and worries.”

What fucking LEGITIMATE concerns are you talking about? The anti-immigrant hysteria fomented by the Right? The lies about how “They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists”? Shall we discuss lies about how Germany is experiencing a crime wave committed by immigrants, when the German crime rate is the lowest it’s been in decades? Shall we have another White House photo op in which victims of crime by immigrants can misrepresent the threat? (I’d like to see the photo op in which Trump greets the families of people murdered by the police — it would be larger, but too many of those families would be black and would make the Republicans uncomfortable).

I feel like a stranger in my own land. I was brought up in a country that educated me to think that there were these important American ideals, like liberty and equality, that we were a nation of immigrants, this great melting pot where we welcomed the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free”, that Americans fought and died to bring freedom to others. These were all lies. This country was built on the backs of slaves over the corpses of the native peoples, and we fought wars to open markets so that we could exploit others.

Revealing that reality is what drives those Americans to be concerned, afraid, and worried — they want to pull the blanket back over their heads, and if that requires more death and persecution and children thrown into cages, so be it. Those are not the Americans I want to make happy, though. Those are the comfortable burghers who need to be dragged into the public square and confronted with the fruits of their labors.

And what about the people who are fleeing to America? They aren’t criminals. They tend to be families who are trying to escape desperate, intolerable conditions in their home countries — conditions that are often a consequence of meddling and disruption by a certain Northern nation that prefers weak client states that serve its economic need. Read about the actual makeup of these migrants from people who study them. These migrants are the victims of gang violence, and are people with a fucking legitimate need to move to new opportunities, even to a country where official policy hates them and where they will be beaten and imprisoned and separated from their children.

For Central American residents, control of these gangs over their neighborhood likely means a weekly or monthly extortion payment simply for the right to operate a business or live in their territory. The price for failing to provide this money is death. All it takes is a neighbor or nearby shopkeeper to be gunned down for failing to pay the adequate fees, and it becomes clear that the only options are pay or flee. Parents may also send their children to the United States or take them north as the gangs try to recruit them into their activities: Boys of eleven years old (or younger) may be recruited as lookouts and teenage girls may be eyed for becoming the members’ “girlfriends.” Older women who date or at one point dated a gang member can become trapped and unable to escape the violence, with partner-violence a driving migratory factor for many women.

While the gang activities and gender-based violence can empty out neighborhoods, they are not the only factors driving outward migration from these cities. Across the region’s larger cities, LGBT migrants are fleeing discrimination and violence. At a recent trip to a migrant shelter in southern Mexico, I listened as the shelter’s director recounted the story of a father and teenage son who had fled Guatemala City only a few weeks prior: the father was afraid that his son would be killed for coming out as gay. It is not an idle threat. Since 2009, 264 LGBT people in Honduras have been murdered. The La 72 shelter in Tenosique, Tabasco even has a building in the shelter dedicated to providing specialized housing for LGBT migrants.

Our policy seems to be to stem the trickle of migration by making the US even more cruel and inhospitable than a Central American neighborhood dominated by MS-13 or Barrio-18, or by building walls so the “wretched refuse” die in the deserts outside our nonexistent Golden Door.

The very concept of “illegal immigration” is racist, white supremacist, and bigoted. Borders are artificial constructs used to maintain power imbalances, and what is undemocratic is refusing to acknowledge the needs and rights of whole groups of people on the basis of what side of an imaginary line they were born on. We use a racist notion of “legitimacy” to argue who lives, who dies, who suffers, who profits.

We should embrace and welcome people who see our country as a beacon, as representative of idealistic values we’re not particularly good at acting on, because maybe they’ll help change us to better be what we claim we are. Between the people in power who actually are fascists, and the media mouthpieces who make excuses for and enable the fascists, we need more people who are willing to stand up for equality and fairness and against oppression and brutality.