[Majorityrights News] Trump will ‘arm Ukraine to the teeth’ if Putin won’t negotiate ceasefire Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 12 November 2024 16:20.
[Majorityrights News] Alex Navalny, born 4th June, 1976; died at Yamalo-Nenets penitentiary 16th February, 2024 Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 16 February 2024 23:43.
[Majorityrights Central] A couple of exchanges on the nature and meaning of Christianity’s origin Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 25 July 2023 22:19.
[Majorityrights News] Is the Ukrainian counter-offensive for Bakhmut the counter-offensive for Ukraine? Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, 18 May 2023 18:55.
Posted by DanielS on Monday, 28 October 2019 05:00.
My first impression of Richard Houck was negative because he was attempting to make the case that America was on the wrong side of World War II.
This argument is destructive because it reconstructs a misframing of events that misleads susceptible White American demographics into a framework that pits European peoples against one another.
Isn’t that the point of this frame, you may ask? No brothers wars?
Not if you are honest about Hitler’s war mongering imperialism, his disposition to not value the lives of neighbouring nations, and if you honestly understand those nations’ positions.
If you do care about these things and the truth be known, you don’t suggest that America was on the wrong side but that Hitler was largely to blame for initiating an unnecessary war, catastrophic of itself and catastrophic in an ongoing way beyond, in its implications, stigmatizing with ostensible warrant to prohibit European peoples from rightful prejudice, discrimination and thus, racial self defense.
But while Houck and his interviewer in this case, J.F. Gariepy, are not penetrating enough to think outside of the Jewish box - “Nazis or Jews” and “White identity is right wing and purely objective while non and anti White identity is left and concerned with relative social group interests” - in the name of fairness, I must say that Houck does articulate a kind of social compassion for our people which bespeaks a left ethnonationalist position in this talk.
On Tuesday a federal judge ruled against a group of Asian American students who claimed that Harvard discriminated against them in their admissions policy. The full decision is here. There is no question that Asian American students face a disadvantage in gaining admission to Harvard. The question is why and whether Harvard is responsible for it.
The reason that it is harder for Asian Americans to get into Harvard is that their “personal ratings” (a subjective evaluation of personal qualities) are, on average, significantly lower than for white applicants. The federal judge, Allison D. Burroughs, wrote: “the Court therefore concludes that the data demonstrates a statistically significant and negative relationship between Asian American identity and the personal rating assigned by Harvard admissions officers, holding constant any reasonable set of observable characteristics.”
However, the Judge also held that the plaintiffs could not prove that the lower personal ratings are the result of “animus” or ill-motivated racial hostility towards Asian Americans by Harvard admissions officials.
This leaves the question of why Asian American applicants were being deemed to have, on average, poorer personal qualities than white applicants. The court entertained two theories. Judge Burroughs wrote that: “It is possible that the self-selected group of Asian Americans that applied to Harvard during the years included in the data set used in this case did not possess the personal qualities that Harvard is looking for at the same rate as white applicants . . .”
It is disappointing that a federal judge would indulge in that sort of conjecture. Surely the burden should be on Harvard to prove that its lower evaluation of the personal characteristics of Asian Americans is not the result of racial bias rather than vice versa. The court must be aware of various stereotypes of Asian Americans as “grinds” and math geeks who lack personality. The burden should be on Harvard to prove that such stereotypes are not at play here.
The judge wrote that the racial gap between the evaluation of Asian Americans and whites was small, but they are statistically significant. By definition, that means that it is very unlikely the gap is the result of chance. The court should be demanding that Harvard explain the gap or change their approach. Asian Americans cannot be expected to prove that they have personalities that are as admirable as whites. Given the racial gap, Harvard should have to prove that its evaluation system is fair.
The court’s second explanation for the racial “personal rating” gap is that there is racial bias in the evaluations by teachers and counselors. The judge wrote: “teacher and guidance counselor recommendations seemingly presented Asian Americans as having less favorable personal characteristics than similarly situated non-Asian American applicants . . . Because teacher and guidance counselor recommendation letters are among the most significant inputs for the personal rating, the apparent race-related or race-correlated difference in the strength of guidance counselor and teacher recommendations is significant.” This seems like a smoking gun showing that Asian American applicants are victims of discrimination. Nonetheless, the court ruled in favor of Harvard because she reasoned that: “Harvard’s admissions officers are not responsible for any race-related or race-correlated impact that those letters may have.”
Judge Burroughs should have ruled the other way here. If Harvard is knowingly using instruments that are racially biased (the counselor and teacher recommendations) and does not compensate for that bias, then Harvard’s process is biased. If Harvard didn’t already know the letters were biased, it knows it now.
To be fair to Harvard, it is between a rock and a hard place in some ways. When it relies on objective tests like the SAT’s it is often accused of using an instrument that is biased against African Americans. When it uses a subjective tool such as counselor and teacher letters, it must now contend with the fact that they are biased against Asian Americans. So the Harvard admissions officers are hardly a group of villains. But the judge is wrong to suggest that Harvard can take a “not our fault” approach to demonstrable anti-Asian bias in the letters that it relies upon. Difficult though it may be, Harvard must do better.
....
by Evan Gerstmann
I’ve always been interested in how we should balance individual and minority rights with majority rule. After several years practicing law in New York city, I found my true calling as a college professor and researcher. I’ve written about campus free speech, same-sex equality and racial justice for Cambridge University, The University of Chicago, and Harvard University. My latest book is “Campus Sexual Assault: Constitutional Rights and Fundamental Freedoms”.
Carola Rackete, the infamous captain of the NGO migrant transport vessel Sea-Watch 3, brought three men who ran a migrant detention center in Libya where migrants were raped, tortured, and murdered.
According to a report by Il Giornale, three of the 40 migrants who were picked up by Rackete’s boat are men who’ve been accused of raping, torturing, and murdering people in Libya. The suspects are said to have been arrested in the reception center in Messina, Italy.
Police had originally concealed the arrests which reportedly occurred on the same day that the migrants disembarked from the ship. “The captain transported three immigrants accused of torture on the Sea Watch,” Franco Grilli of Il Giornale writes.
“We cannot rule it out, but we have no precise information,” Sea Watch spokesman Ruben Neugebauer told German news agency DPA about the report.
The three men have been formally accused of ‘a criminal association dedicated to the management of an illegal prison center’, complete with torture, rape, kidnapping and even murder.
In response to the news, Italy’s most trusted politician and leader of the national populist Lega party, Matteo Salvini, wrote: “Not only did she violate the law and ram a Guardia di Finanza patrol boat; on June 29th Carola Rackete of the Sea Watch 3 unloaded into Italy three violent migrants accused of rape, kidnapping and murder. Democratic Party (PD) parliamentarians had demanded the landing of all immigrants, including those now suspected of being ferocious criminals.”
According to Chiara Giannini, who cites ‘reliable sources’, the new interior minister Luciana Lamorgese had asked for the embarrassing news not to be published. But instead, members of the real press made the arrests public, along with the names of the three suspects – Mohammed Condè, 27, Hameda Ahmed, 26 and Mahmoud Ashuia, 24.
Condé is from Guinea, whereas Ahmed and Ashuia are Egyptian.
Posted by DanielS on Friday, 20 September 2019 05:09.
Reflecting on his decision to go public with classified information, Snowden says, “The likeliest outcome for me, hands down, was that I’d spend the rest of my life in an orange jumpsuit, but that was a risk that I had to take.” Courtesy of Edward Snowden
Edward Snowden Speaks Out: ‘I Haven’t And I Won’t’ Cooperate With Russia
In 2013, Snowden was an IT systems expert working under contract for the National Security Agency when he traveled to Hong Kong to provide three journalists with thousands of top-secret documents about U.S. intelligence agencies’ surveillance of American citizens.
To Snowden, the classified information he shared with the journalists exposed privacy abuses by government intelligence agencies. He saw himself as a whistleblower. But the U.S. government considered him a traitor in violation of the Espionage Act.
After meeting with the journalists, Snowden intended to leave Hong Kong and travel — via Russia — to Ecuador, where he would seek asylum. But when his plane landed at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport, things didn’t go according to plan.
“What I wasn’t expecting was that the United States government itself ... would cancel my passport,” he says.
Snowden was directed to a room where Russian intelligence agents offered to assist him — in return for access to any secrets he harbored. Snowden says he refused.
“I didn’t cooperate with the Russian intelligence services. I haven’t and I won’t,” he says. “I destroyed my access to the archive. I had no material with me before I left Hong Kong, because I knew I was going to have to go through this complex multi-jurisdictional route.”
Snowden spent 40 days in the Moscow airport, trying to negotiate asylum in various countries. After being denied asylum by 27 nations, he settled in Russia, where he remains today.
“People look at me now and they think I’m this crazy guy, I’m this extremist or whatever. Some people have a misconception that I set out to burn down the NSA,” he says. “But that’s not what this was about. In many ways, 2013 wasn’t about surveillance at all. What it was about was a violation of the Constitution.”
Snowden’s 2013 revelations led to changes in the laws and standards governing American intelligence agencies and the practices of U.S. technology companies, which now encrypt much of their Web traffic for security. He reflects on his life and his experience in the intelligence community in the memoir Permanent Record.
On Sept. 17, the U.S. Justice Department filed suit to recover all proceeds from the book, alleging that Snowden violated nondisclosure agreements by not letting the government review the manuscript before publication; Snowden’s attorney, Ben Wizner, said in a statement that the book contains no government secrets that have not been previously published by respected news organizations, and that the government’s prepublication review system is under court challenge.
Interview Highlights
On how researching China’s surveillance capabilities for a CIA presentation got him thinking about the potential for domestic surveillance within the U.S.
I’m invited to give a presentation about how China is hacking the United States intelligence services, defense contractors, anything that we have available in the network, which I know a little bit about but not that much about, because they have the person who is supposed to be giving the presentation drop out. So I go looking ... seeing what exactly is it that China is doing? What are their capabilities? Are they hacking? Are they doing domestic surveillance? Are they doing international surveillance? What is occurring?
And I’m just shocked by the extent of their capabilities. I’m appalled by the aggression with which they use them. But also, in a strange way, surprised by the openness with which they use them. They’re not hiding it. They’re just open and out there, saying, “Yeah, we’re doing this. Yeah, we’re hacking you. What are you going to do about it?”
And I think this is a distinction: I think, yes, the NSA is spying — of course they’re spying — but we’re only spying overseas, we’re not spying on our guys at home. We wouldn’t do that. We have firewalls, we have trip wires for people to hit. But surely these are only affecting terrorists, because we’re not like China. But this plants the first seeds of doubt where I see if the capability is there.
Reflecting on his decision to go public with classified information, Snowden says, “The likeliest outcome for me, hands down, was that I’d spend the rest of my life in an orange jumpsuit, but that was a risk that I had to take.” Courtesy of Edward Snowden