birminghammail--2019-02-14--Schools drastic plan to close early every Friday - and parents are furious

School's drastic plan to close early every Friday - and parents are furious

A Birmingham primary school is set to close at lunchtime every Friday, triggering an angry backlash from some parents.  Bellfield Junior School in Northfield is the latest city primary to announce the drastic step to cope with squeezed budgets and help safeguard jobs.  At least a dozen other primaries across Birmingham have already introduced a shorter week, with others understood to be considering following suit.  Bellfield Junior head teacher Nigel Attwood notified parents by letter last week of the proposal. He said the decision to close at 1.05pm every Friday, starting in September, was originally motivated by lack of money.  But after discussions and visits with other schools already operating a 4.5 day week he was now confident it would be "extremely positive" for the children and staff.  That explanation has not won over all of the school's parents.  "It's ridiculous - schools are meant to be open five days a week in term time," said furious mum of three Kirsty Williams, 28, a nursing assistant at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital.  "It's going to be inconvenient for a lot of parents, but it's also a terrible thing to do. Where will it end?"  Kirsty is also studying for a healthcare qualification at university and says her life is complicated enough without juggling the new closing plan.  "Early education is so important; we are risking our children's futures."  Georgina O'Sullivan, who is the carer for three grandchildren Mackenzie, Macauley and Demi-Rose, said:  "I think it's totally wrong. I can't fault the school, it's a brilliant school, but I blame the Government for this.  "Why should our kids have to suffer and lose out on school time? They are losing half a day of education every week."  Georgina said her links to the school went back over 20 years, she added: "This is the worst I've known it for money. The parents are constantly fund-raising to try to pay for school trips and equipment, with the Friends parent group shaking charity tins every week in the playground to try to raise a bit more. It's awful."  The changes would mean she would have to collect the youngsters at different times staggered through the afternoon from 1.05-3.15pm.  Selina Cole, mum of four, including three at Belfield infants and juniors, said the first she knew of the proposals was from a letter sent home last week.  "I knew they had been thinking about it but thought they had given it a rest. I am going to be running around a lot picking them up at different times. I don't have anyone else, it's just me. I know it's the government and funding but it's going to impact on us all."  Tracy Gallacher's daughter Emily is due to start at the junior school in September.  She said: "My daughter will be losing two hours of education a week. This decision also makes it difficult for mums who work part time or are looking for work."  The school has offered working parents and full time carers the option of leaving their child at the school on Friday afternoons for childcare sessions hosted by teaching assistants but have asked for a £2 contribution per child.  Parents also have to provide evidence of their working status - a move that appears to have added fuel to the fire.  "There's no way I'm paying £2 for education time that should be provided through taxes," said one passing mum who did not want to be identified. "And to ask us to prove we are working is also ludicrous. It's insulting."  The school says the early finish will provide more time for family activities, health appointments and homework, as well as the chance to get away early for weekends away or holidays.  Mary Harper, 31, has two girls going to the junior school in September, and said she was opposing the new weekly schedule.  "I think it's a horrible idea, we are going to lose out. Other schools who open five days will move ahead of us."  For Tammy Spence there was an additional concern - how she was going to juggle pick-up from three different schools at three different times. She has children at the infants, juniors and at a nearby special school.  "It's hard enough for working parents and those looking for work - this will definitely complicate things."  But other parents have rallied to the school's defence and say they support the change.  Parent Lisa Shale, mum to nine year old Madison, said: "With all the government funding cuts affecting schools I think it's a tough decision to close early, but if it's the only way to save them having to lose valuable teaching assistants I do not see what other choice there is. The TAs are most definitely needed in schools for our children."  Amy Butler has two daughters at Bellfield schools - Myley Payne in year 3 and Holly Payne in year 6. "I am very much in favour of this. I understand it’s not a decision taken lightly by the school and I appreciate the measures put in place to help working moms such as myself.  " I feel that I never get enough time with my girls and having this half day will actually give me more time to not only help with homework but have quality time. I currently work evenings and have a hour an evening to feed them, bond and help with homework.  "While I understand every situation is different I’m all in favour of the changes. My youngest daughter says at times it can be hectic with class changeover and she thinks also this will be a good idea."  Another parent added she was pleased about the proposal. "Currently my nine year old daughter's class teacher has her PPA time on a Tuesday afternoon and a replacement teacher comes in and my daughter hates it, it causes her real upset every Tuesday.  "This is a much better way of doing things, and will give us chance to spend time together. The school is in real financial difficulties but I know would do everything possible to ensure the best for the children."  Coun Olly Armstrong (Labour, Northfield) said budget cuts have driven schools to find alternative approaches.  He said: "Our schools are under immense pressure from severe cuts to their budgets and from devastating cuts to support services for children and families who are struggling, meaning the weight and responsibility heaped on staff is huge. I know that Mr Attwood is doing what he believes will be the absolute best for the children in the current circumstances."  Nigel Attwood, head at Bellfield Junior School, said the idea was first mooted with parents earlier this year but had been under discussion for around 18 months.  "I became aware of other schools that had gone down this route and was interested to find out more. My initial reaction, like that of some of the parents you've spoken to, was that it might be detrimental to the children. What I have found is that it actually works exceptionally well, especially for those children who most need consistency and continuity.  "If this was just about saving money but would be detrimental to the children, we would absolutely not be considering going ahead with it.  "We will save money but the reason we are going ahead is because of the huge benefits overall."  Mr Attwood added: "By having a single afternoon without pupils, all our teachers can have their statutory PPA time (Preparation, Planning and Assessment) at the same time. That means for the rest of the week the children have consistency and we limit use of agency and supply staff. This is particularly beneficial for children who are vulnerable and thrive on continuity."  He received advice and support from a range of schools who have already introduced similar measures, including head Michelle Gay at Osborne Primary in Erdington, who introduced half day closing last year.  "Their parents and staff were extremely positive about the impact on the children. Teachers feel healthier and happier, and the children reap the benefits of that throughout the week."  Mr Attwood said the proposals had been shared with parents last week and he had received several positive responses, two emails with concerns, and two requests for meetings to discuss the impact of the change. He added he would be delighted to meet any parents with concerns to discuss any special circumstances.  Consultation over the proposals ends on Friday. The school will then meet with parents and governors to make a final decision.


birminghammail--2019-03-20--Parents warned theyll go to hell unless they sign LGBT protest petition at Moseley school

Parents 'warned they'll go to hell unless they sign LGBT protest petition' at Moseley school

A councillor claims parents have been warned they will 'go to hell' unless they sign a petition against LGBT teachings at a Birmingham school.  Mums and dads have staged protests outside Anderton Park Primary School, Moseley, demanding lessons about same sex relationships are scrapped.  The school does NOT teach the 'No Outsiders' programme, which has sparked similar demos at Parkfield Community School and five other city schools.  But local councillor Kerry James branded the Anderton protests yesterday as 'intimidating' as the LGBT crisis in Birmingham schools continues to escalate.  She tweeted: “I have learnt tonight about ‘intimidating protests’ held today outside Anderton Park School with parents being harassed and told they will go to hell if they do not sign a petition. This because they teach the equality act.  “This behaviour is not acceptable & will be challenged.”  The ‘No Outsiders’ programme was recently suspended at Parkfield Community School following a backlash. It has also now been halted at Leigh Primary School, Alston Primary School, Marlborough Junior, Marlborough Infants and Wyndcliff Primary School.  The Anderton Park protests took place at home time yestreday.  Shakeel Afsar, on behalf of the parents, said the demos will continue at least the end of the week until their demands are met by headteacher Sarah Hewitt-Clarkson.  Mr Afsar, who has no children at the school, says the protesting parents are not homophobic or against the transgender community .  He said: “The school is not willing to listen to the parents.  “We want these lessons about over-promoting homosexuality suspended until a collective dialogue with the local community can be made.  “There are children who can’t use the toilet properly, yet they are being taught homosexual or transsexual relationships.  "We also feel once our children are slightly older in secondary school, they will be in a position to decide what they are being taught is correct.  “We have no confidence in Mrs Clarkson’s ability to lead our children.”  Two police officers watched over on Tuesday as around 50 parents chanted slogans such as ‘Our Children, Our Choice’, ‘Say No To Undermining Parental Rights & Authority,’ and ‘Education Not Indoctrination.’  One mum, who did not wish to be named, said: “Our kids are too small to understand about LGBT.  "I’ve got an older son in Year Six and I’ve no problem about him learning about LGBT - it’s fine.  “But the rest are five and six and too young to understand this. I want to be involved in my kids' education.”  Anderton Park Primary has not publicly commented about the row.  We approached Birmingham City Council but it only sent a statement which was previously issued in the midst of the Parkfield School row .  Councillor John Cotton, cabinet member for community safety and equalities , said: “Birmingham City Council has for many years championed programmes such as No Outsiders as a way of promoting the values of the 2010 Equality Act.  “Equality is the law of the land and a right for all, and people can’t pick and choose which parts of the Act they support.  “We will always as a council stand up for the rights of all our children, whoever they are and whatever kind of family they are from.”


birminghammail--2019-03-21--Birmingham parents fined over failing to get children to school hits record high

Parents in Birmingham are being slapped with record numbers of fines for failing to make sure their children go to school.  New figures published by the Department for Education reveal that 2,656 fines were handed to parents in the city in 2017/18.  That is more than double the 1,087 fines issued the previous year and is at the highest level since 2013/14, when modern records began.  The Department for Education said that the rise could be down to a number of high profile court cases that “may have affected trends in recent years”.  Parents have a legal duty to make sure their child attends school.  If they don’t, the child’s headteacher can request that the local authority issues the parent with what is known as a “fixed penalty notice”.  This is a fine of £60 if paid within 21 days - an amount that rises to £120 if paid between 22 and 28 days.  If the money goes unpaid then the local authority can begin the process of prosecuting the parent.  Most of the fines handed to mums and dads in the city were because of unauthorised family holidays (2,048).  A further 267 were given for other unauthorised absences.  In Birmingham the majority of the fines (2,048) were paid within 28 days, and there were 167 that were withdrawn.  This can happen for various reasons but includes if the notice contained errors or if the council chose not to prosecute the parent despite failing to pay the fine.  There were, however, 621 prosecutions made against parents who hadn’t paid the fine.  The remaining 111 cases were unresolved at the time the figures were published.  Across England there were 260,877 fines handed out to parents in 2017/18 - up from 149,321 the previous year and again, a record high.  Paul Whiteman, general secretary of school leaders’ union NAHT, said: “It is important that children miss as little time at school as possible.  “The cumulative effect of missed days can be harmful to children’s education. The best way to ensure children are learning and progressing is for them to attend school during term time.  “This means that requests for time off during term time can only be authorised in exceptional circumstances, which does not normally include holidays.  “The NAHT has clear and reasonable guidance on what constitutes exceptional circumstances.  "However, the system of fines is clearly too blunt an instrument and in many cases it drives a wedge between schools and families.  “Neither parents nor schools set the prices of holidays.  “They will both continue to be caught between a rock and a hard place without some sensible government intervention.”  The Department for Education was contacted for comment.


birminghammail--2019-03-23--Parkfield School parents halt protests against No Outsiders LGBT programme

Parkfield School parents halt protests against 'No Outsiders' LGBT programme

After nearly two months of protests, parents at Parkfield Community School have decided to halt their campaign against the controversial 'No Outsiders' programme.  The row has been over Saltley school's headteacher introducing a curriculum supporting homosexuality and promoting understanding and equality for everyone.  Called ' No Outsiders ', the programme runs alongside sex and relationship education lessons and promotes LGBT equality in primary schools.  But the programme has come under fire from some Muslim parents who say homosexuality is strictly forbidden in Islam.  Increasingly heated protests have been held outside Parkfield School, led by parents claiming parts of the programme were unsuitable for young children.  Today, members of Parkfield Parents Group issued a statement saying they will no longer hold any protests - while talks take place.  It is because the group has now engaged in consultation with the school in a bid to resolve the issues.  "Parkfield Parents Community Group has engaged the mediation and consultation to resolve the issues concerning the 'No Outsiders' programme in Parkfield school with the school's trust, facilitated by the DfE," said a spokesman for the group.  "During the mediation and consultation process, parents will cease to hold any protests in relation to the 'No Outsiders' programme.       "Parkfield Parents Community Group will not make any further official statement for the duration of the consultation, or mediation, on No Outsiders programme.       "Parkfield Parents Community Group is independent of any other group or person who may speak about No Outsiders in a personal capacity."  Earlier this month, the Saltley school was said to have temporarily halted its LGBT lessons until after Easter after hundreds of parents had reportedly withdrawn their children from classes.  The suspension of the 'No Outsiders' classes is said to be happening while a 'consultation' takes place with the parents.  However, the school headteacher pledged to resume the programme after Easter. However the school later said it had decided to suspend the lessons while teachers and parents work together "over the coming days and weeks" to find a solution.  In a statement, a school spokesman said: "Until a resolution has been reached, No Outsiders lessons will not be taught at Parkfield and we hope that children will not be removed from school to take part in protests."  Assistant headteacher Andrew Moffatt has been at Parkfield Community School for four years.  In 2016, the 740-pupil school was deemed outstanding across the board by Ofsted and, a year later, Mr Moffat was awarded an MBE for services to equality and diversity in education.  The 'No Outsiders' programme includes reading books such as Mommy, Mama and Me which talks about same-sex marriage and being lesbian.  In a previous response to BirminghamLive, the school said: " The No Outsiders programme teaches children that everyone is welcome.  "It was created in 2014 by Andrew Moffat, assistant head at Parkfield Community School, and piloted at the school.  "The aim was to find a way to teach children about the Equality Act 2010, developing an understanding of British values through an inclusive curriculum and school ethos.  "A key element of the No Outsiders ethos is engagement with parents from the start, in order to promote solid foundations of tolerance that are matched both in and outside the school gates."


birminghammail--2019-05-04--Anti-LGBT lesson protests from furious parents part of UK-wide organised campaign

Anti-LGBT lesson protests from furious parents 'part of UK-wide organised campaign'

Protests against LGBT education in schools are part of an "organised campaign" across the country, a union has heard.  The National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) annual conference in Telford was told national demonstrations were being held by opponents of children being taught about same-sex relationships.  Conference unanimously passed a motion calling on the national executive to work with appropriate bodies to develop and lobby for more robust policy and support for schools.  Dave Woods, a member of the NAHT national executive, said head teachers in Ealing, west London, had been sent a number of emails and requests for withdrawal from parents.  He said: "One head reported 20 parents surrounding him and demanding an on-the-spot meeting. Another one said a request for withdrawal had gone from two children to 80 in six weeks. This is happening across the country. It is an organised campaign.  "Relationships are for everybody. We don't consult on maths, we don't consult on English, we don't consult on any subject, we don't need to consult on relationships."  Parkfield Community School, a primary in Saltley , sparked protests with its "No Outsiders" programme of lessons , mainly Muslim parents who object to their children learning about same-sex relationships.  As a result of the disruption and negative effect on the youngsters, the school decided to suspend its No Outsiders programme until an agreement could be reached with concerned parents.  Anderton Park Primary in Moseley has also been the target of demonstrations at home-time.  And The Leigh Trust, which runs five city primaries, has dropped the programme until after Ramadan in June while it consults with parents.  Earlier on Saturday Ofsted chief Amanda Spielman said it was "unacceptable" for teachers and schools to be intimidated.  She also said it would be a "huge step backwards" if schools became reluctant to teach about diversity in Britain.  Ms Spielman said: "The Equality Act is designed to enforce a number of different rights. And of course, there are places where these different rights can bump into each other.  "One clear tension exists in places where equality between the sexes comes second to religious belief and cultural preferences.  "Another tension arises between religious belief and relationships education in the context of LGBT issues. And what we're talking about here is not sex education.  "It's just a simple understanding that, just as families worship differently, they also love and marry differently."  The chief inspector of schools added: "But as a result, we're seeing protests at school gates and children being withdrawn from schools."  Conference heard the demonstrations were worrying on a number of fronts including their effect on community cohesion and the impact on schools and children.  Ms Spielman said: "Clearly, it's unacceptable to intimidate schools and to intimidate teachers who are trying to do what's asked of them under the law."  Three new subjects - relationships education from primary school, relationships and sex education at secondary school, and health education for all ages - will form part of the school curriculum in England from 2020.  Primary school children will not learn about sexual relationships, but will learn about having respect for all kinds of people in an age-appropriate way.  Where a maintained primary school chooses to teach aspects of sex education, the school must set this out in its policy and consult parents on what is to be covered.  Addressing the NAHT conference, Education Secretary Damian Hinds called on protesters to stop, and instead engage in dialogue.  He said: "No child should have to walk past a protest to go to school, and no teacher should have to walk past a protest to go to school.  "It is right that there is dialogue, we want schools to consult with parents. Ultimately there is no veto over what is taught in schools. That is head teachers' domain.  "I call on people to not be protesting - talking by all means, but not protesting - because it is not good for those children, and it is not good for your fellow professionals."


birminghammail--2019-05-30--The number of Birmingham kids with special needs soars to record levels as parents protest in street

The number of Birmingham kids with special needs soars to record levels as parents protest in streets

The number of children and young people with special needs eligible for extra support has risen to record levels in Birmingham.  The figures were released as thousands of parents, disabled children and young people took to the streets across the country on Thursday (May 30) to demand that the government act on a “national crisis” in special needs funding.  The new statistics from the Department for Education show that 805 children and young people were put onto an Education, Health and Care (EHC) plan to aid their learning last year.  That brings the total number with special needs in Birmingham to 9,437 - the highest figure on record.  The figure is rising partly because since 2014, those aged 19-25 have been eligible for an EHC plan.  However campaigners warn that government funding is not matching demand.  An EHC plan is a document that describes a child or young person's special educational, health and social care needs.  Children with EHC plans are those who require more attention than would normally be given in a school setting because of their special educational needs.  According to figures from the National Education Union (NEU), special needs provision in England has lost out on £1.2 billion since 2015.  The union says that this is because increases in funding have not matched increases in the number of children with an EHC plan, due to the “unplanned and insufficiently funded” policy of extending provision to those aged 19-25.  At the same time as marches were going on in Birmingham Victoria Square and across the country, campaign group SEND National Crisis delivered a petition to Downing Street.  It demanded an independent enquiry in to the unfair treatment of young people with additional needs.  Nationally, Department for Education figures show the number of children with an EHC plan rose from 319,819 in 2018 to 353,995 this January.  That’s up 49% from the 237,111 in 2014 - the year that the new policy took place which extended provision to 25 year olds.  However an Ofsted report in December cast doubt over the new system, finding that provision was “disjointed and inconsistent”, diagnoses are “taking too long and are often inaccurate” and that “mental health needs are not supported sufficiently”.  Kevin Courtney, Joint General Secretary of the NEU, said: “This is clearly a crisis, with pupils and parents bearing the brunt of real-terms funding cuts and the wholly inadequate planning by Government.  “Last year, when the NEU won an additional £350m for children and young people with additional needs, the Government admitted that ‘more needs to be done’. We hold them to those words today. Get on with it.”  The Department for Education were contacted for comment.

newsdesk@birminghamlive.co.uk (Michael Goodier, James Rodger)


sputnik--2019-02-13--Islam vs Societal Ethics Scholars on How Public Perception Affects Religion

Islam vs Societal Ethics: Scholars on How Public Perception Affects Religion

In light of a historic meeting between Pope Francis and Grand Imam of al-Azhar Shaykh Ahmed Mohammad al-Tayeb that took place on 3-5 February, YouGov conducted multi-country research on attitudes to religions in Western countries and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.  The survey indicated that 46 and 47 per cent in France and Germany, and 36 and 38 per cent in the US and the UK, respectively, believe that there is a clash between Islam and national societal values.  "It is interesting that so much consideration is given to such survey findings without first asking about what this perceived ‘clash' is," Hamza Andreas Tzortzis, a British public speaker and researcher on Islam, told Sputnik. "Rather than a clash between Islam and national societal values, there seems to be a disconnect between what Islam is and what public perception has become."  The researcher highlighted that "from my experience" relations between both Christian and Muslim communities "are getting better".  "However, to continue improving relations we need authentic engagement and dialogue where people genuinely listen with a view to understand the other's perspective. People, especially influentials, must take the lead and convey the universal message of understanding, co-existence, tolerance and forbearance," Tzortzis pointed out.  For his part, Joshua Landis, an American academic who specialises in the Middle East, presumed that public opinion could have been shaped by the long string of revolutions in the MENA region.  "Middle Eastern societies are going through a period of crisis and revolution," Landis noted. "The Iranian revolution was the first Islamist revolution. It turned out a secular, pro-Western government. The Arab uprisings of 2011 are in some ways a continuation of this upheaval. Many secular, military leaders have fallen as a result or, in the case of Syria, almost fallen."  However, the 2011 uprisings not only failed to "bring about democratic governments and liberation" but resulted in the spread of "terrorists groups, many using Salafist Islam as justification for acts of violence and attacks on the West," he said, adding that "immigration and refugee numbers have gone through the roof," being triggered by chaos and civil wars.  "It is little wonder that Europeans look on this upheaval as dangerous and threatening. It is also little wonder that they associate it with Islam," he suggested.  Meanwhile, "we see western governments throwing up walls and other barriers to immigration from predominantly Muslim countries," Landis said, presuming that "fear of Islam is natural outcome."  Commenting on Pope Francis' visit to Abu Dhabi, Tzortzis suggested that "in the grand scheme of things anything that symbolises peaceful coexistence between people of different faiths and spiritual traditions is very good."  He expressed scepticism about the clash of civilisations theory of Samuel P. Huntington, stressing that "binary thinking, in the context of society and politics, always results in absurdities".  When asked as to how the Abu Dhabi Declaration for World Peace and Living Together signed by the pope and the grand imam of al-Azhar may affect the ongoing Middle Eastern crises, including the war in Yemen, the researcher opined that "religious figures do not seem to have significant influence over foreign policy, and one could argue that the war in Yemen and elsewhere has little to do with Muslim-Christian relations."  "We live in an excessively ideological world," Tzortzis said. "Today, ideology unfortunately trumps ethics… However, anything that promotes good is positive, even if has limited influence."  Pope Francis made a trip to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) from 3 to 5 February. During the historic journey the pontiff met with the grand imam and celebrated a Catholic mass with 135,000 people.  On 4 February, Pope Francis and Shaykh Ahmed Mohammad al-Tayeb inked the historic document that declared "the adoption of a culture of dialogue as the path; mutual cooperation as the code of conduct; reciprocal understanding as the method and standard."  For his part, Sheikh Ahmed Mohammad al-Tayeb called upon Muslims to "embrace [their] Christian brothers and sisters."  "They are companions in the state. They are close to us. There are special bonds between us," the grand imam emphasised.  The views and opinions expressed by the speakers do not necessarily reflect those of Sputnik.


thedailyblog--2019-07-02--Global smart tech ethics and cyber humanism

Global smart tech, ethics and cyber humanism

A LEADING cyber security expert has called on universities to play a more active role in implementing ethics and legal frameworks for communications smart technology to save society from an Orwellian future.  Dr Mohamed El-Guindy, an Egyptian consultant to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC-ROMENA), says communication research programmes should promote “ethically aligned” design.  In an era of “accelerated addictiveness” to smartphone and other digital technologies, he told media researchers, policy advisers and journalists at the recent 27th Asian Media Information and Communication (AMIC) conference in Bangkok, Thailand, that it was vital for democracy that universities stepped up.  He also said families and parents needed to be more critically active by balancing screen time and promoting “real social interaction”.  Addressing the “persuasive technologies” industry, Dr El-Guindy spoke about being “hooked”, the “scrolling dopamine loop” and the “digital skinner box” models and how they had made smartphones fill psychological needs.  “Our social fabric is being torn apart,” he said. “As we expect more from technology, we expect less from each other as people.  “We have suffered a loss of ability to focus without distraction. The result is mental health issues, less empathy and more confusion.”  ‘Misinformation, lies’    Dr El-Guindy said societies were engulfed in “misinformation, propaganda and lies”.  He quoted from educator and media theorist Neil Postman’s book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, originally published in 1985 and drawn from a talk reflecting on George Orwell’s 1984.  “Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in [Aldous] Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to ignore the technologies that undo their capacity to think.”  In a separate address, Dr El-Guindy and other presenters spoke about facial recognition technologies, voice generators that can put words in people’s mouths and how artificial intelligence is compromising and undermining privacy.  The three-day AMIC conference at Chulalongkorn University featured the theme “Are you human? Communication, Technology and New Humanism”.  Manila-based AMIC is the major global organisation focused on Asian media policy and research and publishes two leading journals, the Asian Journal of Communication and Media Asia.  AMIC board chair Professor Crispin Maslog challenged the more than 200 participants to take a more “humanist” approach to communication research and policy building.  “We stand on the brink of a technological revolution that will fundamentally alter the way we live, work, and relate to one another,” he said. “In its scale, scope and complexity, the transformation will be unlike anything humankind has experienced before.  “As the millennials would say, OMG!”  Climate change guide   Among four new international books about communication research and technology, prolific Filipino author and communications expert Dr Maslog launched his 36th title, Science Writing and Climate Change.  Developed as a guide for journalists in the Asia-Pacific region, it has been co-authored with New Zealand’s Pacific Media Centre director Professor David Robie and regional editor Joel Adriano of SciDev.Net, a leading online publication with a focus of science and development.  Among several UNESCO delegates and speakers at the conference, Dorothy Gordon, of the governing board of the UNESCO Institute for Information Technologies in Education, called on participants to lobby through their national commissions and global agencies if they wanted action.  “Asia has the potential to be in control, it can make changes for tech for peace,” she said. “UNESCO is made up of member states. If you want something to happen, you need to lobby your own country first to take up the issue.”  Malaysia’s Dr Azman Azwan Azmawati, an associate professor at the Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) in Penang and president of the Asian Congress for Media and Communication (ACMC), called for more critical research on patriarchal systems.  “It is crucial for more study of patriarchal systems because of their negative impact on women and stereotyping of women,” she said. “The patriarchal system hinders women from reaching their potential.”  Power imbalance   Much more research was needed to focus on the imbalance of power – ‘deconstructing the power of the powerful over the powerless.  “Cultural norms and mindsets must be re-examined, critiqued, reevaluated and rethought.”  Professor Mark Pearson of Australia’s Griffith University spoke of human rights advocacy journalism in a global justice context.  “Global justice can be a legitimate ethical objective of advocacy journalism, requiring factuality as a platform,” he said.  “It is achievable in some cases through a wise and intentional position of ‘advocacy journalism’ which sits comfortably with the professional values of the livelihood of journalists.”  He cited several examples of advocacy journalism in Australia and New Zealand, including Greenpeace investigative journalist Phil Vine.  Dr Pearson, author of The Journalist’s Guide to Media Law, also spoke about “mindful journalism”, a form of journalism with “wisdom and compassion” drawing from elements of secular Buddhist approaches to meditation and ethics.  He dedicated a separate paper on the topic to the memory of Dr Shelton Gunaratne, who died in March this year after being awarded the 2016 AMIC Asia Communication Award for his “ground-breaking scholarship and intellectual contribution to Asian media and communication research”.  High tech ‘slavery’    Professor Jack Linchuan Qiu, author of Goodbye iSlave and director of the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s C-Centre for Chinese Media and Comparative Communication Research, gave an inspired address on the impact of modern day “slavery” in the high tech industries.  Taiwan’s Professor Georgette Wang of the National Chengchi University engaged with the debate about Asian research methodologies, saying that perhaps the right questions were not being asked.  She said there was an absence of “East-West dialogue” over research methodologies and there needed to be more engagement. Blaming globalisation, she said that while the “periphery” had gained greater presence in the international arena, it had also “brought the profile of theories and questions originating in the West to greater prominence”.  Instead of rejecting Western research models in an Asian context, more effort was needed to “develop a new paradigm” drawing on both East-West traditions.


theguardianuk--2019-03-23--How will British museums survive if they subject every donor to an ethical audit Mark Lawson

How will British museums survive if they subject every donor to an ethical audit? | Mark Lawson

Consumers of culture will have been aware of the name “Sackler” above the frame of rooms and galleries in artistic institutions around the world. I remember once briefly wondering, when ducking under such an arch, how they had made the money that permitted such extensive philanthropy.  Now everyone knows. The photographer Nan Goldin has advertised demonstrations outside the [Metropolitan](https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/nan-goldin-s -anti-opioid-activist-group-storms-new-york-museums) Museum of Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York and [threatened](https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/feb/16/nan-goldin- sackler-gift-oxycontin-national-portrait-gallery) to withdraw a planned exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London, in protest at the institutions receiving donations from the Sacklers.  The objection is that the wealth of those members of the Sackler family being targeted by the protests derives from a stake in OxyContin, a strong opioid painkiller that has [been implicated](https://www.theguardian.com/us- news/2019/mar/21/sackler-family-500-cities-counties-and-tribes-sue-oxycontin- maker) in thousands of deaths from addiction or overdose. Following this scrutiny, the Sacklers have withdrawn a £1m handout that was held up in the NPG’s ethics committee, which decides whether the promised dosh is “in conflict with the objectives and values of the gallery”. The Tate galleries soon [announced ](https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/mar/21/tate- art-galleries-will-no-longer-accept-donations-from-the-sackler-family)that they would no longer take Sackler cash.  There has been a discernible glee at the institutions having become purer, if also poorer, similar to the smack of satisfaction in literary circles when the Man Group hedge fund recently decided to [drop its sponsorship](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jan/27/booker-prize- trustees-search-for-new-sponsor-after-funding-dropped) of the Booker prize, possibly due to frequent criticism from writers uneasy about the collision of books and book-keeping.  As OxyContin is literally so toxic, it can be seen as an extreme test-case. But just as the controversy over the conduct of Harvey Weinstein led to hunts for similar alleged offenders, the Sacklers will surely not be the last philanthropists to face sacking.  And, in the quick and vicious audit of the source of gallery and museum donations and sponsorship, it will be easy to find unethical specks on the hands that wrote the philanthropic cheques.  What would count as an acceptable way of having become rich enough to have some spare to dish out to the arts? Sponsorship by BP and Nestlé has been questioned because of environmental or ethical concerns about the nature of the patrons’ business. Airlines, which have consistently been generous to the arts, are now on the wrong side of history, as, in a post-crash era queasy about capitalism, are most makers of money.  Watching what has happened to the Sacklers, I began to fear for Sir Lloyd Dorfman, one of the most generous cultural benefactors in Britain. His private subsidising of the Royal Opera House, Royal Academy and National Theatre has been so extensive that the NT even [renamed an auditorium](https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2010/oct/28/national-theatre- dorfman-donation) the Dorfman.  The original source of the fortune was foreign exchange dealing. There is no suggestion that Dorfman’s success in this field ever involved impropriety, but legality and decency might not be enough to prevent his largesse being queried.  The new puritans among the producers and consumers of arts do not rely on financial audit or legal due diligence but on a subjective sniff test. It would be surprising if their delicate moral nostrils entirely approved of someone becoming super-rich by swapping one currency for another.  The big concern is how holes in the coffers left by a donor-wash will be filled. The Old Vic theatre in London, for instance, has received several payouts from the Sacklers and, receiving no direct state funding, would surely struggle if forced to close off that source.  And if the funding of buildings and exhibitions is subject to ethical scrutiny, then why not their content as well?  The “objectives and values” of the various national and royal artistic institutions, policed by their ethics committees, seem unlikely to include paedophilia, incest, rape, fraud, racism or fascism and yet you do not have to lose much shoe leather in their halls to come across a creative figure who has been implicated in one or more of those sins.  The usual defence of continuing to tolerate the work of a controversial creative is that great artists are rarely great people, and, on the issue of arts patronage, the equally sensible position is that all money is to some extent dirty, especially when microscopically examined from a perspective inherently suspicious of riches and defining philanthropy as, an accusation made against the Sacklers, “reputation laundering”.  Nan Goldin held a ‘die-in’ at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in February, in protest against its funding by members of the Sackler family. Photograph: Yana Paskova/The Guardian  It seems unlikely that many contemporary winners of Nobel prizes are actively enthusiastic about dynamite and armaments, the cash from which set up the foundation that now honours titans of thinking. It must be particularly odd for recipients of the peace prize to reflect on where the money came from, yet laureates presumably take the view that the somewhat bloodied money can now be put to purer use. This attitude is understandable and might offer a model for the response of artists and gallery-goers haunted by the provenance of the wonga that allows the institutions to put on the shows.  At the end of this process of ethical cleansing looms the spectre of a museum that, after returning exhibits to the owners from whom they were looted by colonising collectors, and sending to the storerooms works by artists whose behaviour offends the morals of today, stands completely empty. And, above the doors of those barren galleries, the wood is chipped and discoloured from the emergency removal of the names of those donors whose wealth or values risk gathering pickets outside exhibitions.  If, unsurprisingly, the Sacklers now take their money elsewhere and are followed out of the boardroom doors by other philanthropists concerned that their bank accounts will be found to lack sufficient moral underpinning, then it will be our cultural institutions – and, as a consequence of their funding poverty, artists and gallery-goers – that suffer a pain from which, in a state that increasingly encourages the arts to seek private funding, there will be no easy relief.  • Mark Lawson is a writer and broadcaster


theirishtimes--2019-08-30--Doctors issued with new ethical guidelines on providing abortion

The Medical Council has issued revised ethical guidance for doctors following the introduction of abortion legislation earlier this year.  A new version of its ethics document provides updated guidance for doctors who have conscientious objections to particular forms of treatment, procedures or care, not just in relation to abortion.  The amended guide to professional conduct and ethics for doctors says termination of pregnancy is legally permissible within the provisions of legislation introduced in 2018.  It says doctors have a duty to provide care, support and follow-up for women who have had a termination of pregnancy.  The revised guide says that doctors may refuse to provide, or to participate in carrying out, a procedure, lawful treatment or form of care which conflicts with their sincerely- held ethical or moral values. However it also sets out obligations that the doctor will have to the patient in such circumstances.  “If you have a conscientious objection to a treatment or form of care, you should inform patients, colleagues, and, where relevant, your employer as soon as possible. If you hold a conscientious objection to a treatment, you must:  - inform the patient that they have a right to seek treatment from another doctor; and  - give the patient enough information to enable them to transfer to another doctor to get the treatment they want.  The guide says where doctors in such circumstances refer a patient and/or facilitate their transfer of care, they should make sure that this is done in a safe, effective and timely manner.  “You should help make it as easy as possible for the patient. When discussing the referring and or transferring a patients’ care to another health professional, you should be sensitive and respectful so as to minimise any distress your decision may cause. You should make sure that patients’ care is not interrupted and their access to care is not impede their access to care.”  The guide says doctors should not provide false or misleading information, or wilfully obstruct a patient’s access to treatment based on your conscientious objection.  “If the patient cannot arrange their own transfer of care, you should make these arrangements on their behalf. In an emergency situation, you must provide - as a matter of priority - the care and treatment your patient needs.”  The Medical Council said on Friday that it had appointed an ethics working group to advise it on any amendments to its ethical guidelines, which were updated in 2016.  It said this group had sought input from doctors and key stakeholder groups, and the public.  The chairwoman of the ethics working group, Dr Suzanne Crowe, said: “The majority of the amendments made are to be read from the practising of medicine point of view and not in isolation for any one procedure. The ethical guide contains guidance and information on a variety of matters which affect the medical profession on a daily basis, and we urge doctors to consult this edition for the most up-to-date, relevant and inclusive advice.”  Dr Rita Doyle, Medical Council president said: “When the eighth edition of the guide was launched three years ago, it was envisioned that rolling changes would be incorporated to keep the guide up to date, and this is the first of these changes. The current medical landscape can be fraught with uncertainty for doctors, and this guide aims to clarify the Medical Council’s advice in these areas.”  Prior to the introduction of abortion last January, the Medical Council deleted a number of paragraphs in its ethics guide to remove “any conflict” with the legislation introduced by the Oireachtas.


abcnews--2019-03-13--California announces moratorium on death penalty halting more than 700 executions

California announces moratorium on death penalty, halting more than 700 executions

California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced a moratorium on the death penalty Wednesday, halting more than 700 executions in the state and drawing criticism from President Donald Trump.  The executive order grants a reprieve to 737 inmates on the country's largest death row and halts the use of the death penalty in the state, according to the governor's office.  During an exclusive sit-down interview with ABC affiliate station KGO, Newsom called the decision "personal" and "moral" for him, while also pointing to what he sees as systemic racial and economic inequalities in the criminal justice system.  "I cannot in good conscious sign death warrant for someone," Newsom told ABC’s Eric Thomas from the governor’s mansion. "This is coming on me... I just can’t do it."  Newsom has long been an opponent of the death penalty, but he said in the interview that the question was largely academic until he was elected governor. Now, he would be asked to approve a death penalty protocol in the state, and he says it is "raw and emotional."  "This is not a quick response," he went on explaining his decision. "This is not a political response… this is a deeply held belief."  "I have to live with myself," he continued, but acknowledged that he thought "good people" would completely disagree with him on this issue.  Citing criminal justice figures in his state and around the country, Newsom added he thought that poor Americans and racial minorities are too often treated differently under the law.  "The American justice system is completely broken, and we all are perpetuating it. The systemic racism, the implicit bias, the overt bias, the whims of prosecutors based on geography, based on the will of people in the moment, fear and anxiety... until we address that I don’t think we can do what Saudi Arabia is doing and what North Korea is doing," he added.  Early Wednesday morning, Trump tweeted his dismay at the governor's move, expressing solidarity with the family and friends of victims.  The decision is especially controversial considering that California voters rejected a ballot measure that would have repealed the death penalty in 2016, but Newsom said he was elected for his judgment.  Newsom, who signaled that he wanted to move on the issue when he first took office, cited high costs, racial inequities and lack of deterrent as key reasons behind the decision.  "The death penalty is absolute. Irreversible and irreparable in the event of human error," he added, noting that the state had spent $5 billion since 1978 to keep inmates on death row and that across the country more than 100 citizens on death row have been found innocent.  "I do not believe that a civilized society can claim to be a leader in the world as long as its government continues to sanction the premeditated and discriminatory execution of its people," Newsom added.  "If you rape, we don’t rape you back," he went on during the interview. He called the entire American justice system broken.  "In short, the death penalty is inconsistent with our bedrock values and strikes at the very heart of what it means to be a Californian," he said.  Newsom, a Democrat, said he is not issuing commutations for the convicted and that he does not believe life sentences should be changed.  California's last execution was in 2006, under Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.  The executive order will also close the execution chamber at San Quentin State Prison, which has never been used, and withdraws California’s lethal injection protocol  Sharon Sellitto, a victim’s advocate whose brother, Paul Cosner, is believed by authorities to be a murder victim of serial killers Charles Ng and Leonard Lake, told ABC she is "heartbroken" by the governor’s decision.  "He's not the judge, not the jury and was not at the trial," Sellitto told ABC News in a phone interview Tuesday evening. "He should be concerned with the victims, not the perpetrators."  In 2001, a San Francisco Superior Court judge officially ruled that Cosner "was the victim of murder at the hands of Leonard Lake and Charles Ng."  Sellitto said she received a phone call Tuesday night from the Department of Corrections Office of Victims Survivors Rights and Services giving her a heads-up about the governor's announcement and providing her with a contact in his office if she wished to speak to anyone further about his decision.  "Awful, just awful," she said. "Nobody should use the word 'justice' in my presence again."  Mike Semanchik, managing attorney for the California Innocence Project -- which works to exonerate inmates on death row -- cheered the move.  "Conservative estimates suggest 4 percent of people on death row are innocent. That conservative estimate means 29 of the 737 people are awaiting execution for a crime they did not commit," Semanchik tweeted Wednesday. "Thank you, Gavin Newsom, for eliminating the risk of executing the innocent!"  "It has been my dream for many years that we would end the human rights violation known as the death penalty in California," Justin Brooks, director of the California Innocence Project and a Professor at California Western School of Law, said. "It is certain that as long as there is the death penalty there is the risk of executing innocent people. I am proud of our new Governor for taking this bold step."  Kim Kardashian West, who has championed criminal justice reform and successfully lobbied President Donald Trump to commute a Tennessee woman's life sentence, said she was "very supportive" of the governor's decision.  Criminal justice experts said Newsom's decision will most likely be challenged in court.  The Association of Deputy District Attorneys, which represents about 1,000 deputy district attorneys in Los Angeles County, called the decision "hasty and ill-considered."  "The voters of the State of California support the death penalty," Association President Michele Hanisee said in a statement Tuesday amid rumors about the governor's decision. "Governor Newsom, who supported the failed initiative to end the death penalty in 2006, is usurping the express will of California voters and substituting his personal preferences via this hasty and ill-considered moratorium on the death penalty."

Karma Allen,, MaryAlice Parks , John Parkinson


russiainsider--2019-02-04--Cabal of Sophists Whines About Slow Death of Liberal Values

A group of 30 respected intellectuals, writers and historians has published a manifesto bewailing the imminent collapse of Europe and its supposed Enlightenment values of liberalism and rationalism. The idea of Europe, they warn, “is falling apart before our eyes”, as Britain prepares for Brexit and “populist and nationalist” parties look poised to make sweeping gains in elections across the continent.  The short manifesto has been published in the liberal elite’s European house journals, newspapers such as the Guardian. “We must now fight for the idea of Europe or perish beneath the waves of populism,” their document reads. Failure means “resentment, hatred and their cortege of sad passions will surround and submerge us.”  Unless the tide can be turned, elections across the European Union will be “the most calamitous that we have ever known: victory for the wreckers; disgrace for those who still believe in the legacy of Erasmus, Dante, Goethe, and Comenius; disdain for intelligence and culture; explosions of xenophobia and antisemitism; disaster”.  The manifesto was penned by Bernard-Henri Levy, the French philosopher and devotee of Alexis de Tocqueville, a theorist of classical liberalism. Its signatories include novelists Ian McEwan, Milan Kundera and Salman Rushdie, the historian Simon Shama, and Nobel prize laureates Svetlana Alexievitch, Herta Müller, Orhan Pamuk and Elfriede Jelinek.  Though unnamed, their European political heroes appear to be Emmanuel Macron of France, currently trying to crush the popular, anti-austerity protests of the Yellow Vests, and German chancellor Angela Merkel, manning the barricades for the liberal elite against a resurgence of the nationalist right in Germany.  Let us set aside, on this occasion, the strange irony that several of the manifesto’s signatories – not least Henri-Levy himself – have a well-known passion for Israel, a state that has always rejected the universal principles ostensibly embodied in liberal ideology and that instead openly espouses the kind of ethnic nationalism that nearly tore Europe apart in two world wars last century.  Instead let us focus on their claim that “populism and nationalism” are on the verge of slaying Europe’s liberal democratic tradition and the very values held dearest by this distinguished group. Their hope, presumably, is that their manifesto will serve as a wake-up call before things take an irreversible turn for the worse.  In one sense, their diagnosis is correct: Europe and the liberal tradition are coming apart at the seams. But not because, as they strongly imply, European politicians are pandering to the basest instincts of a mindless rabble – the ordinary people they have so little faith in. Rather, it is because a long experiment in liberalism has finally run its course. Liberalism has patently failed – and failed catastrophically.  These intellectuals are standing, like the rest of us, on a precipice from which we are about to jump or topple. But the abyss has not opened up, as they suppose, because liberalism is being rejected. Rather, the abyss is the inevitable outcome of this shrinking elite’s continuing promotion – against all rational evidence – of liberalism as a solution to our current predicament. It is the continuing transformation of a deeply flawed ideology into a religion. It is idol worship of a value system hellbent on destroying us.  Liberalism, like most ideologies, has an upside. Its respect for the individual and his freedoms, its interest in nurturing human creativity, and its promotion of universal values and human rights over tribal attachment have had some positive consequences.  But liberal ideology has been very effective at hiding its dark side – or more accurately, at persuading us that this dark side is the consequence of liberalism’s abandonment rather than inherent to the liberal’s political project.  The loss of traditional social bonds – tribal, sectarian, geographic – has left people today more lonely, more isolated than was true of any previous human society. We may pay lip service to universal values, but in our atomised communities, we feel adrift, abandoned and angry.  The liberal’s professed concern for others’ welfare and their rights has, in reality, provided cynical cover for a series of ever-more transparent resource grabs. The parading of liberalism’s humanitarian credentials has entitled our elites to leave a trail of carnage and wreckage in their wake in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and soon, it seems, in Venezuela. We have killed with our kindness and then stolen our victims’ inheritance.  Unfettered individual creativity may have fostered some great – if fetishised – art, as well as rapid mechanical and technological developments. But it has also encouraged unbridled competition in every sphere of life, whether beneficial to humankind or not, and however wasteful of resources.  At its worst, it has unleashed quite literally an arms race, one that – because of a mix of our unconstrained creativity, our godlessness and the economic logic of the military-industrial complex – culminated in the development of nuclear weapons. We have now devised the most complete and horrific ways imaginable to kill each other. We can commit genocide on a global scale.  Meanwhile, the absolute prioritising of the individual has sanctioned a pathological self-absorption, a selfishness that has provided fertile ground not only for capitalism, materialism and consumerism but for the fusing of all of them into a turbo-charged neoliberalism. That has entitled a tiny elite to amass and squirrel away most of the planet’s wealth out of reach of the rest of humanity.  Worst of all, our rampant creativity, our self-regard and our competitiveness have blinded us to all things bigger and smaller than ourselves. We lack an emotional and spiritual connection to our planet, to other animals, to future generations, to the chaotic harmony of our universe. What we cannot understand or control, we ignore or mock.  And so the liberal impulse has driven us to the brink of extinguishing our species and possibly all life on our planet. Our drive to asset-strip, to hoard resources for personal gain, to plunder nature’s riches without respect to the consequences is so overwhelming, so compulsive that the planet will have to find a way to rebalance itself. And if we carry on, that new balance – what we limply term “climate change” – will necessitate that we are stripped from the planet.  One can plausibly argue that humans have been on this suicidal path for some time. Competition, creativity, selfishness predate liberalism, after all. But liberalism removed the last restraints, it crushed any opposing sentiment as irrational, as uncivilised, as primitive.  Liberalism isn’t the cause of our predicament. It is the nadir of a dangerous arrogance we as a species have been indulging for too long, where the individual’s good trumps any collective good, defined in the widest possible sense.  The liberal reveres his small, partial field of knowledge and expertise, eclipsing ancient and future wisdoms, those rooted in natural cycles, the seasons and a wonder at the ineffable and unknowable. The liberal’s relentless and exclusive focus is on “progress”, growth, accumulation.  What is needed to save us is radical change. Not tinkering, not reform, but an entirely new vision that removes the individual and his personal gratification from the centre of our social organisation.  This is impossible to contemplate for the elites who think more liberalism, not less, is the solution. Anyone departing from their prescriptions, anyone who aspires to be more than a technocrat correcting minor defects in the status quo, is presented as a menace. Despite the modesty of their proposals, Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and Bernie Sanders in the US have been reviled by a media, political and intellectual elite heavily invested in blindly pursuing the path to self-destruction.  As a result, we now have three clear political trends.  The first is the status-quo cheerleaders like the European writers of liberalism’s latest – last? – manifesto. With every utterance they prove how irrelevant they have become, how incapable they are of supplying answers to the question of where we must head next. They adamantly refuse both to look inwards to see where liberalism went wrong and to look outwards to consider how we might extricate ourselves.  Irresponsibly, these guardians of the status quo lump together the second and third trends in the futile hope of preserving their grip on power. Both trends are derided indiscriminately as “populism”, as the politics of envy, the politics of the mob. These two fundamentally opposed, alternative trends are treated as indistinguishable.  This will not save liberalism, but it will assist in promoting the much worse of the two alternatives.  Those among the elites who understand that liberalism has had its day are exploiting the old ideology of grab-it-for-yourself capitalism while deflecting attention from their greed and the maintenance of their privilege by sowing discord and insinuating dark threats.  The criticisms of the liberal elite made by the ethnic nationalists sound persuasive because they are rooted in truths about liberalism’s failure. But as critics, they are disingenuous. They have no solutions apart from their own personal advancement in the existing, failed, self-sabotaging system.  The new authoritarians are reverting to old, trusted models of xenophobic nationalism, scapegoating others to shore up their own power. They are ditching the ostentatious, conscience-salving sensitivities of the liberal so that they can continue plundering with heady abandon. If the ship is going down, then they will be gorging on the buffet till the waters reach the dining-hall ceiling.  The third trend is the only place where hope can reside. This trend – what I have previously ascribed to a group I call the “dissenters” – understands that radical new thinking is required. But given that this group is being actively crushed by the old liberal elite and the new authoritarians, it has little public and political space to explore its ideas, to experiment, to collaborate, as it urgently needs to.  Social media provides a potentially vital platform to begin critiquing the old, failed system, to raise awareness of what has gone wrong, to contemplate and share radical new ideas, and to mobilise. But the liberals and authoritarians understand this as a threat to their own privilege. Under a confected hysteria about “fake news”, they are rapidly working to snuff out even this small space.  We have so little time, but still the old guard wants to block any possible path to salvation – even as seas filled with plastic start to rise, as insect populations disappear across the globe, and as the planet prepares to cough us out like a lump of infected mucus.  We must not be hoodwinked by these posturing, manifesto-spouting liberals: the philosophers, historians and writers – the public relations wing – of our suicidal status quo. They did not warn us of the beast lying cradled in our midst. They failed to see the danger looming, and their narcissism blinds them still.  We should have no use for the guardians of the old, those who held our hands, who shone a light along a path that has led to the brink of our own extinction. We need to discard them, to close our ears to their siren song.  There are small voices struggling to be heard above the roar of the dying liberal elites and the trumpeting of the new authoritarians. They need to be listened to, to be helped to share and collaborate, to offer us their visions of a different world. One where the individual is no longer king. Where we learn some modesty and humility – and how to love in our infinitely small corner of the universe.


activistpost--2019-02-11--Why is Liberty the Noblest of All Values

Why is Liberty the Noblest of All Values?

Why are Libertarians so obsessed with liberty? Many foreign to the philosophical basis for Libertarianism may wonder what exactly makes them think of liberty as so special and unique in comparison to all the other standards one can use as the fundamental basis for one’s ethics, such as fairness, justice or equality. Why should liberty be held before that, no matter whether the consequences may be that some of these others are impaired (depending on how you define the terms)?  The short answer is that liberty is not only the most important of all ethical values, but the precondition for all the others, as an act cannot legitimately be judged morally to be good or bad if it was not made through the person’s own free will [1]. You may say it would be a good deed of me to donate to a charity that would help people in Africa or South Asia, for instance, but what if someone held a gun to my head and told me that they would kill me if I didn’t do it? Though the results may be deemed as good (i.e., that people potentially got better lives for the money I donated), the process cannot, as it was not done by my good intentions of donating to charity, but that I valued my own life more than the money required for the donation, and was forced to make the decision accordingly.  This hypothetical example is not mere abstract philosophizing. It also has significant implications for how all legislation in general ought to be judged on an ethical level if one accepts the premise laid forth above. With any legislation, I put it through the test of five questions: 1) are the intentions good; 2) are the means incorporated in the legislation good; 3) will the legislation actually accomplish what it’s intended for (or is it likely); 4) are there negative side-effects; and 5) are those potential negative side-effects out-weighing the benefits? Almost no, if any, legislation passes this test as I judge it, because all government activity is de facto based upon coercion and compulsion. Rose Wilder Lane, one of the founders of the American Libertarian movement, once wrote that “the need for the State is the need for force; where there is no need for force, there is no need for the State” [2].  Take, for instance, the act of taxation, the life-blood of the State. For the State to give, it must first take. That’s the essence of one of the most important differences between the public and private sector.  Taxation is usually justified on the kind of consequentialist argument solely based upon the merits of its intended results, whereas the process is ignored almost completely. Yes, some people will clearly benefit from government programs, but what about those from whom the money is taken? When Libertarians say that “taxation is theft”, they absolutely mean it literally. Taxation naturally isn’t a problem when those who are being taxed don’t mind, but the same would be the case with a non-governmental thief if he told you to give him your money and you didn’t mind (though there is a clear difference in terms of perceived legitimacy and authority, which would make the latter far less likely). It’s when the legitimacy of taxation is challenged that it becomes clearer how similar it is to decentralized theft (or extortion). If taxation was voluntary, how much do you think people would chip in in comparison to how much the State takes at the moment? If the answer is less, or even much less, it should make one wonder why fewer people don’t choose to not do so at the moment. Is it not due to the threat of potentially being fined or jailed if one doesn’t pay as much as the State demands? If you consider this case different from the one I laid out at the beginning of the article, I think you should consider how they can be distinguished logically to the extent that they are to be judged in different moral categories. You see, Libertarians question the legitimacy of taxation because they set the same ethical standards to government officials as private individuals, but it has become so common and legitimatized that most others just accept it without question. As Murray Rothbard put it, “Taxation is theft, purely and simply even though it is theft on a grand and colossal scale which no acknowledged criminals could hope to match. It is a compulsory seizure of the property of the State’s inhabitants, or subjects.”  Roger Ver, an active Libertarian crypto-investor, has additionally pointed out that “the means are the ends. There’s no unethical way of achieving ethical goals, and there’s no ethical way of achieving unethical goals. It goes both ways. Every step of the way you need to be doing the right thing…” So, though the intended results of taxation, for instance, is for the State to obtain money to use for whatever programs they may have in mind, the additional results are that those from whom the money is taken now have less to use for their budgets than they would have otherwise.  The further consequences of this can be understood by the 19th century French economist Claude-Frédéric Bastiat’s distinction between the “seen” and the “not seen”. Bastiat writes that  Do You Want to Learn How to Become Financially Independent, Make a Living Without a Traditional Job & Finally Live Free?      In the economy, an act, a habit, an institution, a law, gives birth not only to an effect, but to a series of effects. Of these effects, the first only is immediate; it manifests itself simultaneous with its cause – it is seen. The others unfold in succession – they are not seen: it is well for us if they are foreseen. Between a good and a bad economist this constitutes the whole difference – the one takes account of the visible effect; the other takes account both of the effects which are seen and also of those which it is necessary to foresee. Now, this difference is enormous, for it almost always happens that when the immediate consequence is favorable, the ultimate consequences are fatal, and the converse. Hence it follows that the bad economist pursues a small present good, which will be followed by a great evil to come, while the true economist pursues a great good to come, at the risk of a small present evil [3].  Thus, though what is the immediate consequence, that which is seen, of a government program, for instance, is those who are seemingly benefited: the jobs it created and the increased opportunities of access to goods and services it offered the recipients. That which is not seen is the goods and services that would be bought without an income tax; the jobs which would’ve been created without a corporate tax or job-killer regulations such as the minimum wage; the private and voluntary alternatives to the programs that would’ve been created or maintained due to the inherent incentive in the profit- and loss system to act in accordance with gaps between market supply and demand, and so on.  It can be difficult to locate and investigate these “unseen” effects without having foreseen them, but it’s not impossible. A study by the Cato Institute, for instance, investigated the results of restricting U.S. firms from accessing tax havens in Puerto Rico to exclude income from corporate taxes by comparing the economic metrics of the relevant firms before and after the restriction. The Cato researchers found, 15 years after the repeal, a 7.2% reduction in employment growth, 6.7% reduction in the U.S. employment rate, and the elimination of 720,000 jobs. There’s an immeasurable amount of similar cases of economic activity being impeded by government intervention in the economy. In an “unplanned” economy, you cannot foresee accurately exactly what people are going to do, and what decisions they are going to make, but better results tend to follow in the private sphere as people know better what they want and need for themselves than politicians and bureaucrats with their own interests, and are more able to achieve it in more decentralized and less regulated economic environments.  The Austrian School of Economics (ASE) is unique regarding how they try to investigate and account for these unseen consequences. This methodology, called a “general theory of human action”, is praxeology. One of the major advocates of the ASE, Ludwig von Mises, claims that “No treatment of economic problems proper can avoid starting from acts of choice; economics becomes a part, although the hitherto best elaborated part, of a more universal science, praxeology [3].” Praxeology essentially treats the investigation of human action more like making inferences from logical axioms in geometry than from the observation in accordance with the scientific method as is done in the natural sciences. We cannot think a priori to what an atom might do in particular circumstances, but we may do so to a certain degree with what other human beings may. To illustrate, if someone has a desire X, they will best fulfill that desire by doing activity Y. Thus, we may deduce that they are incentivized to do activity Y. It’s certainly possible, however, that the person doesn’t know that Y is a viable alternative, and thus instead chooses to do Z, though that may be a less efficient alternative and/or one less likely to fulfill its desired ends. Praxeology tends to analyze action in a similar manner.  One advantage with this method, besides making it easier to foresee “unseen” consequences, is how it gets around the common economical phrase “ceteris paribus”. Presented by Dr. Daniel Lacalle of the ASE as “the two most dangerous words in economy,” ceteris paribus means “all other things equal” and is used for hypothetical circumstances where certain conditions and consequences follow if, but only if, there aren’t “other forces acting on the system”, so to speak. Practitioners of the ASE may fall into this trap if they don’t take into account of all the possible factors that may be involved, just like a physics student would end up with wrong or misleading numbers if there were certain forces acting on the physical system at hand that he overlooked. Praxeology may be an advantage as a methodology, however, in understanding and evaluating aggregated statistics that encompass a bunch of information that must be carefully and accurately dissected. Followers of the ASE focus on the fact that all economic activity must be the result of individuals acting, and that to understand the activity (and the aggregate of many individuals’ actions), one must first look at the context the decisions are made in, such as the reasons they are made and what incentive structure made it the most desirable option (perceivable). The followers of the ASE may thus use ceteris paribus for the analysis of each individual factor that may influence the system, and then make a general overview with a cost- and benefit analysis of the consequences. The ASE is often criticized for being “pseudo-scientific” for its reliance of praxeology and by extent an a priori basis for understanding human action, but its track record of accurate predictions by followers of the ASE of business cycle phenomena, as well as their deep insights in their literature, should, in my opinion, make one consider that there may be some merit to the contributions that the ASE has made to the field of economics, and that one either way should be open to investigating heterodox ideas. What I’ve tried to lay forth here is an understanding of ethics as indivisible from liberty. Activities done by those who are coerced, or who are threatened by coercion, cannot, according to this framework, legitimately be judged as good or bad; it must be made in accordance with his own desires and decisions unimpeded from such coercive entities. As seen, this has significant implications as to how to ethically judge government legislation, and that it sets a much stricter standard to what ought to be accepted of it than how it is perceived generally. The ethical issue of taxation was in length delineated in order to challenge a fundamental element (or function) of the government, and to explain what Libertarians mean when they equate it with theft. Further, Bastiat’s distinction between the “seen” and “unseen” consequences of economic and governmental activities is presented as having great significance for how one ought to better analyze economic matters, and the methodology of praxeology of the Austrian School of Economics is shown to be a prominent way to uncover these unseen consequences. By “ethics”, I mean in this regard the reasoning upon which moral judgments are made. The reasoning in this regard is that the person doing the activity that is to be subjected to a moral judgement cannot meaningfully be either condemned or praised for performing certain activities when they are not based on the person enacting his will in the form of the activity, but rather that he would face off a worse scenario if he did not. For this article, I will not address a myriad of the different activities that the State is involved in and explain how the market would do a better job at each and every one of them. Much of this blog is dedicated to exactly that, and I will continue with further efforts to getting more sectors covered in this regard. Bastiat, C. F. (2007 [1850]) ch. “That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen”, Bastiat Collection, p. 1 This article was republished with permission from MisesRevived.


breitbart--2019-11-11--WSJ: Veterans Feel Betrayed by Colleges that Undermine American Values

A column published in the Wall Street Journal on Sunday makes the case that colleges and universities undermine the values that American veterans risked their lives to defend.  U.S. Air Force Veteran Rob Henderson penned a column for the Wall Street Journal this week in which he made the case that veterans feel betrayed by colleges and universities that seek to undermine American values.  Henderson expressed concern that campus activists actively seek to destroy the American values that veterans have risked their lives to defend. Henderson noted that college students often boast about their opposition to basic American values, like the First and Second Amendments. Henderson describes a discussion he had with a fellow veteran about campus culture.  He said he was mystified, observing that the predominantly working- and middle-class people in the military swear an oath to defend with their lives the U.S. Constitution, including the First and Second amendments. Meanwhile, affluent college students regularly trash the First and seek to dismantle the Second. Are veterans being duped, he questioned, into believing they are upholding American values while the richest kids in the world—the ones being groomed for success and power—try to undermine them?  Henderson claims that many veterans feel that they are fighting for the right of student activists to fight against American values. He claims that many veterans feel like “suckers” for fighting for ungrateful students that seek to fundamentally transform America and its values.  He’s not the only one who feels that way. Many veterans I know who enter college are bewildered by what they see: students from the top income decile expressing derision for the values that service members signed up to defend. Perhaps they could be forgiven for feeling like suckers.  Henderson says that many veterans feel forced to remain silent on campus. He believes that campus leftists that seek to undermine American values may feel differently after they’ve matured.  Veterans who first serve in the military and then attend elite colleges learn to navigate both moral worlds. On campus we learn to blend in, even at the cost of feeling betrayed. We keep our love for America to ourselves. We don’t want to give veterans a bad reputation. We want to make friends. We try to understand campus protesters, to see where they’re coming from. Maybe their grievances are a bit overblown, but still, they’re young. They’re still maturing. Just like we were when we volunteered our lives for this country. Just like our friend was when he hanged himself after returning from his second deployment.  Stay tuned to Breitbart News for more updates on this story.


breitbart--2019-12-12--Cuba Admits Its Legal Immigrants – Not Exiles – Used to Promote Communist 'Values'

Cubans living abroad with the blessing of their government “constitute an important pillar in the defense of the Nation, our culture, history, and values,” the communist Foreign Relations Ministry admitted in a press release published on its site Thursday.  The Castro regime’s admission that it is using Cubans allowed to live abroad to defend communism and spread the regime’s “values” follows months of controversy in Latin America as immigration officials in Chile, Bolivia, Brazil, and Ecuador have accused Cuban nationals of participating in riots, inculcating Marxist extremism, and otherwise acting as “cells” to destabilize conservative governments.  The revelation came in a press release announcing a conference titled “The Nation and Immigration” that will take place in April 2020 to discuss the role the communist regime can take in controlling and directing the voice of the Cuban diaspora. In the release, dated Tuesday, the Foreign Relations Ministry (Minrex) said the conference was necessary for the “deepening of ties with our citizens abroad.”  “Heirs to the traditions of struggle handed down by our forebears, Cubans residing abroad constitute an important pillar in the defense of the Nation, our culture, history, and values,” the release read. “In that sense, this [conference] will unite those Cubans who respect, love Cuba, defend it as free and independent and actively oppose the blockade imposed by the government of the United States.”  America has nominally kept an embargo on the Castro regime since the early 1960s in an attempt to starve the regime out of power, but it has largely failed as a result of Democrat presidents overriding the embargo to allow Americans to travel to the island, fund its businesses, and otherwise interact with the regime. In contrast, Cuba maintains a strict embargo against American business and culture entering the country, banning Cuban citizens who do not have connections within the regime from accessing concerts, luxury items, and academic exchanges with Americans. That embargo strengthened in 2014, limits the necessary goods that many Cuban exiles in America ship to their relatives – such as soap, glasses, and underwear – in response to President Barack Obama allowing some American companies to disregard the alleged American embargo and do business with the regime.  Minrex admits that Cuba once used emigration to win the “Necessary War” – exiling Cubans who did not agree with the brutal, deadly communism imposed by Fidel Castro – but that now Cubans abroad must help “preserve the nation before those who wish to deny it the right to exist as a sovereign nation,” implying that Washington seeks to annex Cuba.  Like other communist countries, Cuba treats all the world’s ethnic Cubans as Cuban citizens, meaning they are subject to the same repressive tactics used on the island if they find themselves under the control of regime officials. The regime reserves particular control for Americans of Cuban descent; an American born in America who has never visited Cuba is considered a Cuban citizen under Cuban law if their parents were born in Cuba.  The official newspaper of the Cuban Communist Party, Granma, claimed on Tuesday that Cubans living abroad with ties to the regime belong to “166 organizations existing in 79 countries, from which they defend the sovereignty of their fatherland” – that is, defend the communist regime – “and pronounce themselves against the embargo.”  The summit in April is the fourth of its kind – the first organized by Fidel Castro in 1978 as an attempt to regain control of young people in the exile community – and will take place shortly before that community has organized an unprecedented event in rejection of the Castro regime and its proxies in the region: America’s first-ever concert against communism.  Cuba’s economic and social collapse finalized in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union, creating a near-constant demand to escape the island. Many do so by joining the regime’s athletic organizations or the Cuban slave doctor program, which sends thousands of poorly trained doctors around the world to offer health care for the developing world without receiving a salary. The host countries pay the Cuban regime for the doctors, but the doctors only see a meager living “stipend.” According to several Latin American countries, these doctors and their teams engage in political destabilizing activities to benefit Havana.  The government of Brazil, under conservative President Jair Bolsonaro, demanded this year that Cuba pay its doctors a living wage or no longer engage in the doctor trade with Brazil. Havana immediately withdrew its doctors, leaving a trail of evidence behind that Bolsonaro told reporters proved Cuba was building “guerrilla cells” of communists in the country.  Bolivia, following the resignation of socialist President Evo Morales, found similar evidence of political activity by Cuban doctors in the country. Amid the leftist riots that followed Morales’ resignation and flight to Mexico, Bolivian police arrested four Cuban nationals with bags of money after neighbors accused them of handing out cash to locals who rioted and burned down buildings. The Cubans claimed to work for the slave doctor program. Bolivia has since expelled hundreds of Cuban government agents allegedly working on the slave doctor program and accused outside agitators from Cuba and its colony Venezuela of instigating violence.  Chile similarly arrested and deported 30 Cubans present in the country illegally amid leftist riots in November, accusing them of participating in destructive activities against police and the state.


liberaldemocratvoice--2019-07-05--Lord William Wallace writesFighting for liberal values

Lord William Wallace writes…Fighting for liberal values

Putin has paid us a compliment.  He’s defined politics as a conflict over values, with liberal values as the enemy that authoritarian regimes like his define themselves against.  He’s full-throated in defending autocracy against democracy: government by diktat, authoritarian leader as father figure, leaning on nationalist myths and ‘traditional’ values for legitimacy. A regime underpinned by force, disguising huge gaps between the privileged rich, close to power, and the poor.  Viktor Orban (in Hungary) and other rising authoritarians haven’t yet gone quite so far: he defines his style of government as ‘illiberal democracy’, retaining some of the outer structures of popular participation while bringing media, universities, and much of the economy under state control.  Many 19th century liberals were optimistic about progress and education leading almost inevitably to enlightenment, tolerance of diversity and minorities, the rule of law and an open society.  The 20th century taught liberals that these achievements can never be taken for granted, and have to be promoted and defended by every generation.  And that’s not an easy task: it’s a complicated argument to defend minorities and minority rights, to talk about the importance of law and political processes, when much of the population is more concerned about economic insecurity and more attracted by the easy promises of charismatic populists.  Britain, like many other countries, has made enormous advances in recognising liberal values over the past fifty years – in opportunities and rights for women, in attitudes to ethnic diversity and to sexual and gender diversity.  But the populist appeal to ‘traditional values’ blows a dog whistle against all this.  Populist attacks on ‘elites’, often described as ‘liberal elites’, dismiss reasoned debate in favour of gut feelings.  Michael Gove’s attack on ‘experts’ was an encouragement to the public to follow their guts and stop listening to reason or detailed argument; his efforts to return the teaching of history to ‘the national story’ would have pleased Putin.  Boris Johnson’s campaign is becoming more illiberal by the day. His dismissal of his own party’s reasoned policy on the sugar tax is a classic example of an appeal to prejudice against enlightened self-interest.  Putin’s interview with the Financial Times last week touched most main anti-liberal themes.  He saw liberalism as ‘decadent’, a symptom of societies that have lost their moral cohesion and of elites that ‘have broken away from the people’.  He stressed ‘traditional…biblical values’ as the basis for social solidarity, with a sideswipe at liberal acceptance of the LGBT community at the expense of ‘the core population.’  Religion ‘must play an important role in terms of national culture and cohesiveness’. But he warned that the Catholic church is now infected with liberalism, in contrast to the Orthodox Church – taking the side of the hardliners opposed to attempted reforms of the current Pope.  And he attacked migration and the threat that migrants may not ‘respect the laws, customs and culture of the country’ they move to.  Multiculturalism – ‘diversity as an organising principle in society’ -, he insisted, is ‘no longer tenable’ and must give way to ‘the interests of the core population.’  President Trump’s ideological guru Steve Bannon, meanwhile, has been raising funds for an academy for authoritarian populists, with close links to right-wing Catholics who also condemn the ‘liberalism’ of the current Pope.  Their hopes of leasing an Italian monastery have now been blocked; but their attempts to create a ‘nationalist international’ are continuing.  Don’t forget that Bannon has links to Farage and Johnson (which Johnson has attempted to downplay); that Russian as well as American money flows around the circles in which these anti-liberals operate; and that President Trump admires strong authoritarian leaders much more than democratic liberals.  So we need to find a way to defend liberal values that can cut through to the wider public.  We have to talk about reviving and reforming democratic government, through stronger local democracy and constitutional change – easier to do as we approach a potential constitutional crisis.  We need to argue the importance of equal rights for all citizens, against libertarian Conservatives who are penalising and excluding the disadvantaged.  We have to find ways to discredit false ‘men of the people’ who expect to live in luxury themselves, and without obeying ‘traditional values’; Johnson and Farage are reported to have benefitted from earnings (or subsidies) of around half a million pounds each in the last tax year. And we should dig out Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies to remind us of the authoritarian ideology that drives Corbyn’s neo-Stalinist advisers – the authoritarianism of the hard left, not so different from its counterpart on the hard right.  Not easy to get across to the wider public: but Liberal values are our centre ground.  * Lord Wallace of Saltaire is a Liberal Democrat member of the House of Lords.


realclearpolitics--2019-05-21--Do You Want to Play Russian Roulette With Your Childs Values

Do You Want to Play Russian Roulette With Your Child's Values?

Are You Sure You Want to Play Russian Roulette With Your Child's Values?  Most Americans are not aware how morally and intellectually destructive American colleges -- and, increasingly, high schools and even elementary schools -- have become. So, they spend tens of thousands after-tax dollars to send their sons and daughters to college.  But today, to send your child to college is to play Russian roulette with their values. There is a good chance your child will return from college alienated from you, from America, from Western civilization and from whatever expression of any Bible-based religion in which you raised your child.  If you think this is in any way an exaggeration, here is some of what has happened on campuses in recent months:  Harvard University fired law professor Ron Sullivan from his position as faculty dean of Winthrop House, a student residential hall, because he was one of Harvey Weinstein's lawyers. (He has since resigned from the Weinstein legal team.) Some female Harvard students said they felt "unsafe" with Sullivan as a faculty dean.  Alan Dershowitz, a professor emeritus at Harvard Law, said the decision "may be the worst violation of academic freedom during my 55 year association with Harvard." Laurence Tribe, also a professor at Harvard Law, said he could not recall a "worse" blunder in his 50 years as a professor there.  Also at Harvard, all-black graduation exercises were initiated. And like most other colleges, Harvard has long allowed an all-black student dorm to exist on campus.  If nothing else, this provides additional proof of the vast difference between liberalism and leftism. That is why liberals such as Dershowitz, Tribe and numerous liberal writers have condemned Harvard's cowardly capitulation to a few female students. Unfortunately for America, however, most liberals will not confront the fact that they have far more to fear from the left than from the right. Conservatives are not the enemy of liberalism; the left is.  In Minnesota, some students at South St. Paul Secondary petitioned the administration to allow students to wear sashes -- stoles -- with ethnic and LGBT colors to celebrate their identities. As one student said in leftist English, "I'm able to repurpose what was once an obstacle into a source of energy and pride."  As reported in the Minneapolis Star Tribune: "If they're not allowed to don the sashes, some students have talked about wearing them anyway, said Naomi Gedey, a Black Pride Organization leader. Gedey added that many immigrant students also hope to wear flags of their nations of origin."  Other Minnesota schools already allow students "to don so-called 'identity adornments.'"  Those who still believe that one of the primary purposes of American public (and most private) schools is to Americanize students should know this is no longer the case. On the contrary, most American high schools now celebrate every identity except American identity (which the left brands a euphemism for white supremacy).  Meanwhile, at its commencement next month, the City University of New York will award an honorary doctorate of humane letters to Al Sharpton.  Among the many nonhumane activities Sharpton has been involved in was the infamous Tawana Brawley hoax, in which he fabricated a charge that four white men had raped a young black woman named Tawana Brawley.  Sharpton also runs a phony civil rights organization called the National Action Network, which has collected many millions of dollars from corporations in what essentially amounts to an extortion racket that enables those corporations to buy racial peace.  And Sharpton helped stoke the Jew-hatred that sparked black anti-Jewish riots in 1991. In a book published in 2006, Edward S. Shapiro, a Brandeis University historian, described the riot as "the most serious anti-Semitic incident in American history."  In Pennsylvania, the Sabold Elementary School in Springfield announced that its principal will no longer say "God bless America" after the Pledge of Allegiance. The school district released a statement two weeks ago stating that the principal saying "God bless America" "violated the law."  And of course, college students across the country are increasingly taught, often from their first day at college, that being male and female is a choice, not a biological fact.  Other than Hillsdale and a handful of other colleges and religious colleges, the American university has become nothing more than a left-wing seminary.