#debated for a while about posting this because its angry and controversial to admit that trans men are in fact affected by transphobia

[prettyboyscollection]

(draft from my main, disclaimer for anyone who sees this: this blog is primarily a porn blog and stupid debating will be ignored or laughed at, you can try it but i dont care)

reading stuff about trans rights (especially in the south) on places like twitter is SO fucking frustrating because SO many people uncritically say "people never judge trans men for not meeting/meeting male stereotypes!!" "conservatives/republicans/gender criticals/etc don't care about trans men, they only hate trans women!" "no one cares if a trans man wants to play sports with cis men!" "trans men dont have their presentation criticized!" etc because that's not fucking true! its not!

trans men have all of that and more thrown at them, we're the forefront of a lot of anti-trans talking points (IRREVERSIBLE DAMAGE: THE TRANSGENDER CRAZE SEDUCING OUR DAUGHTERS. do you remember this? do you realize this is still one of their huge sources?) and our bodies are seen as mutilated and disgusting, often even more than trans women's, because they see us as women, as ruined women, women they dont see as sexually appealing, potential mothers/incubators, and they take it out on us especially violently. i didnt go through DIY conversion therapy from two conservative transphobes (that included straight up illegal shit) in texas/oklahoma to see people online uncritically parroting the idea that trans men/trans masculinity arent just as fucking hated by people like that. fucks sake.

[scorpionyx9621]

Do you think Jason Todd fandom is kinda toxic? Because it seems like NO MATTER what DC do, there'll always be complains. Forget the bad adaptation like Titans. Even Judd Winick cannot escape the criticism with how he potrayed Robin!Jason. They just never satisfied.

SORRY, IT TOOK ME SO LONG TO RESPOND TO THIS. I just moved from Washington D.C. to Seattle, which, for my non-American friends, that's 4442km away. And I DROVE THERE ALL BY MYSELF. And now I'm trying to find new work in a new city and trying to stay mentally healthy and positive. Life is exciting but hard and scary.

*sighs*

As someone who was a fandom elder with V*ltr*n. I've seen some of the worst when it comes to fandom behavior. I'm talking people baking food with shaving razors and trying to give them to the showrunners. I'm talking leaking major plot details and refusing to take it down unless they make their ship canon (I am looking at you, Kl*nce stans) For the most part, DC Comics has had a decades-long reputation of treating their fans like trash and not caring what they think so from what I've seen, we all just grumble and complain in our corners of the internet about how we don't like how X comic portrays Jason Todd.

The challenge with Jason Todd is that he's your clinical anti-hero, the batfamily's Draco in Leather Pants, he's a jerkass woobie, and on top of all of that, he's a Tumblr sexyman. It's a perfect storm for a very fun but frustrating character to be a fan of. It doesn't help that every writer decides to re-invent the wheel every time Jason comes up so his canon lore is confusing at best and inconsistent as a standard.

I guess starting with a general brief on who Jason is and what is uniform about him with every instance he's appeared in comics/media.

Grew up in a poor family in Gotham with a dad who was a petty-mid-level criminal, and a mother who dies of a drug overdose.

Survives on the street on his own by committing petty crimes and potentially even engaging in sexual acts to keep himself alive.

Is cornered by Batman and taken in after Dick Grayson quits/is fired

Becomes the second Robin, but is known for being the harsher, more brutal Robin.

Is killed by Joker after being tortured, but somehow comes back to life and regains senses through the Lazarus Pit

Resolves himself to be better than Batman by basically being Batman but kills people.

Where there has been a lot of conflict in the fandom is the fact that Jason Todd is not a character that is written consistently. DC Comics loves to go with the narrative that Jason was "bad from the start" and was the "bad robin" when, yes, he has trouble controlling his anger, but he also still is just as invested in seeing the best of Gotham City and trying to be a positive change for the world as any other DC Comics hero.

Where I get frustrated with the fandom is its ability to knit-pick every detail of a comic they don't like while completely disregarding everything that makes the comics great and worth it to read. My example being Urban Legends. To which most people had pretty mixed reactions to. I was critical of the comic at first but as it went along I ended up really liking it. I have a feeling DC Comics went to Chip Zdarsky and told him he had 6 issues to bring Jason back into the Bat Family, and honestly he didn't do a bad job. Did it feel rushed? Absolutely. I wish there was more development of Jason and Bruce's characters and their dynamic as a whole. However, where I see a lot of people being angry and upset with Urban Legends is that they feel Zdarsky needlessly wrote Jason as an incompetent fool who needs Bruce to save him.

Whether or not that was the intention of Zdarsky is up to debate. However, and this may be controversial, but I don't think he wrote Jason Todd out of character at all. For as fearsome, intimidating, and awesome as Red Hood is. Jason is a character who is absolutely driven by his emotions. Why do you think he donned the role of Red Hood? As a response to his anger towards The Joker for killing him, and towards Bruce for not taking action against The Joker and for seemingly replacing him so quickly after he died. Jason didn't care about being the murderous Robin Hood or for being the bloody hammer of justice against N*zi's and P*d*ph*les. He only cared originally about making The Joker and Bruce pay. It wasn't until he trained under the best assassins in the world and realized most of them were horrific criminals who trafficked children and were p*dos that Talia began to realize that the teachers that she sent Jason to train under started dying horrific and painful deaths.

The entire story of the Cheer story in Batman Urban Legends was started because it finally forced some consequences upon Jason. Tyler, aka Blue Hood's father was a drug dealer who gave his supply to his wife and kids. And when Tyler's father admitted he gave the drugs to Tyler, it immediately made him fall within the self-imposed philosophical kill-list of Jason Todd. And Jason, well, he proceeds to kill Tyler's father. When this happens, Jason is in shock. Tyler's dad fit the bill to easily and justifiably be killed by Jason. We've never seen Jason having to deal with the consequences of being a murderous vigilante on a micro-level. When Jason realizes what he's done in that he's murdered Tyler's dad, he's shocked. He tells Babs the truth. He does a rational thing because he's in shock. He doesn't know what to do, he never has had to face the consequences of his actions as Red Hood and now the gravity of befriending a child as a vigilante hero who kills people just set in when he killed the father of the same child he was just introduced to.

(Oh here's a little aside because it had to be said, Jason would not have been a good father or a good mentor to Tyler and absolutely should not have been his new Robin. Jason is a man who is in his early 20's (not saying men in their early 20's can't be good fathers at all) who is a brutal serial killer using the guise of a vigilante anti-hero to let him escape most of the law. the complications of having the man who murdered your father adopt you and make you his sidekick are way too numerous for me to explain in a long-winded already heavy Tumblr essay post. There's a reason why we don't advocate for a story where Joe Chill adopted Bruce Wayne or one where Tony Zucco took in Dick Grayson.)

The next biggest argument is that they feel that Jason is giving up his guns as a means to just be invited back into the Bat-Family. To which I will tell anyone who has that argument to go actually read Urban Legends. Already have and still have that argument? Please re-read it. Don't want to? That's okay, I will paste the images from the comic where Jason specifically says that he doesn't want to give up his weapons for Bruce and his real reasoning down below since the comic isn't exactly readily accessible.

Jason gave up the guns because he felt the gravity of what he had done and knows how it'll effect Tyler. Thankfully his mom is alive and in recovery. But Tyler doesn't have a father anymore. And Jason killed Tyler's father. It may have been in accordance to Jason's philosophy, but it was a case where it blurred the lines. Jason Todd isn't a black and white character, just very dark gray. He doesn't kill aimlessly like the Joker. If you are on Jason's list you probably have done something pretty horrific, and also just in general, being in his way or being a threat to him. Mind you, in early days of Red Hood and the Outlaws (Image below) Jason almost killed 10 innocent civilians in a town in Colorado all because they saw him kill a monster. That being said, Jason isn't aimless in his kills.

(Also can we just take a moment to appreciate Kenneth Rocafort's art? DC Comics said we need to rehabilitate Jason Todd's image and Kenneth Rocafort said hold my beer: It's so SO GOOD)

That being said, the key emphasis in the story of Cheer asides from trying to introduce Jason Todd back into the Bat Family and give an actual purpose for him being there, other than him just kind of being there ala Bowser every time he shows up for Go Kart racing, Tennis, Golf, Soccer, and the Olympic games when Mario invites him, is that Jason and Bruce ultimately both want the same thing. Jason wants to be welcomed back into the family and to be loved and appreciated. Bruce want's Jason back as his son and wants to love and protect Jason. Both of these visions are shown in the last chapter of Cheer while under the effect of the Cheer Gas. It's ultimately this love and appreciation they both have for each other that helps them overcome their challenge and win.

Jason Todd is a character who, just like Bruce, has been through so much pain and so much hate in his life. The two are meant to parallel each other. While Bruce chose to see the best in everyone, giving every rogue in his gallery the option to be helped and give them a second chance, hence why he never kills, Jason has a similar view on wanting to protect the public, but he understands that some crimes are so heinous they cannot be forgiven, or that some habitual criminals are due to stay habitual criminals, and need to be put down. But at the end of the day, the two of them both try to protect people in their own ways.

I am aware that through the writings of various DC Comics authors such as Scott Lobdell and Judd Winick, the two have had a very tumultuous relationship. And rightfully so, I am by no means saying that Scott Lobdell writing an arc where Bruce literally beats Jason to within an inch of his life in Red Hood and the Outlaws, nor Judd Winick's interpretation of Under the Red Hood where Bruce throws the Batarang at Jason's neck, slicing his throat and leaving him ambiguously for dead at the end of the comic is appropriate considering DC Comics seems to be trying everything they can to integrate Jason back into the family. That being said, a lot of these writings have shaped the narrative of Jason and Bruce's relationship and have an integral effect on the way the fandom views the two. It doesn't help that Zdarsky acknowledged Lobdell's life-beating of Jason by Bruce at the very end of Cheer by having Bruce give Jason his old outfit back as a means of mending the fence between the two of them. That does complicate a lot of things in terms of how they are viewed by the fandom and helps to cause an even greater divide between the two.

Regardless, I want to emphasize the fact that Jason Todd is a part of the family of his own accord. Yes, he's quite snarky and deadpan in almost every encounter. However, Jason is absolutely a part of the family and has been for a while of his own will. There's a great moment in Detective Comics that emphasizes this. Jason cares about his family because it is his found family. Yes, they may be warry about him and use him as a punching back and/or heckle him. At the end of the day, we're debating the family dynamics of a fictional playboy billionaire vigilante whose kleptomania took the form of adopting troubled children and turning them into vigilante heroes. Jason Todd wants a family that will love and support him. This is a key definition of his character at its most basic. This was proven during the events of Cheer and is being reenforced by DC Comics every time they get the opportunity to do so.

Now, none of this is to say that I hate Judd Winick. I do not, I don't like the fact that in all of his writings of Jason, he just writes him as a dangerous psychopath, and Winick himself admits to seeing Jason as nothing much more than a psychopath. Yet Winick is the one who the majority of the fandom clings to as the one true good writer of Jason Todd because 'Jason was competent, dangerous, smart' Listen, friends, Jason is all of that and I will never deny it. However, what I love about Jason isn't that he's dangerously smart of that writers either write him as angsty angry Tumblr sexyman bait or that they write him as an infantile man child with a gun. There's a large contention of this fandom that has an obsession with Jason Todd being this vigilante gunman who is hot and sexy and while I definitely get the appeal. It is very creepy and downright disturbing that all of you hyperfixate on his use of guns and ability to be a murderer. It is creepy and I'm not necessarily here for it.

What I love about Jason Todd is that despite all of the pain, all of the heartache, all of the betrayal, and bullying, and death, and anguish. Jason Todd is one of the most loving and supportive characters in all of DC Comics. Jason has been through so much in his life, but he still chooses to love. He still chooses to see the bright side in people. Yes, he takes a utilitarian approach and chooses to kill certain villains, but at the end of the day he wants to see a better world, and he wants to be loved. It takes so much courage and so much heart to learn to love again after one has been abused or traumatized. I would not blame Jason at all if he said fuck it and just went full solo and vigilante evil. He has every right to, but he still chooses to be with the Bat Family of his own accord. That's something that I see a lot of in myself. I have been through a lot of trauma and yet I try to be a better person myself in any way that I can. It is extremely admirable of Jason to allow love back into his heart when he really doesn't need to. He kills and he protects because he has this love of society. It may have been shaped by anger and hatred, but Jason has found his place amongst people who love him and value him. I think Ducra, from Red Hood and the Outlaws put it best in the image given below.

To end this tangent, I love Jason Todd and all of his sexy dangerousness, but it's far more than that. As much as Jason may be dangerous and snarky, he loves his family without a shadow of a doubt. I look up to Jason Todd because despite all of his pain and all of his trauma, he still choses to love. Jason Todd is a character who is someone I love because despite all of his flaws and having a very toxic fandom, he still serves as a character filled with so much heart and so much passion. I wish more writers would understand that. But for now I will live with what I have. Even though the fandom may be vocal about it's hatred for his characterization, I choose to love Jason regardless because he is a character who chooses love and acceptance regardless of his pain. Jason Todd is by no means a good person in any sense of the word. He has easily killed upwards of 100 people by now. He is a character who is flawed and complex but ultimately is one who powers forwards and finds love and heart in a place from so much pain and anguish. That is what I love about Jason Todd. After all, to quote a famous undead robot superhero, "What is grief, if not love persevering?" Jason Todd chooses to love despite all of the trauma and pain and grief. Yes, he is hardened in his exterior, but inside there is a man with a lot of love to give and someone who deserves the world in my eyes.

[ginmo]

I’ve been sure since I read AFFC/ADWD that Jaime’s getting one of the better endings because House Lannister isn’t gonna be wiped out and both Cersei and Tyrion are now Too Dark To Live. But I’ve seen a lot of people rewatching bring up that awful sept fuck up and consensus is that it renders him irredeemable. The show is gonna have to WORK to avoid a million thinkpieces when he gets both power and a family. I’m not convinced they’ll pull it off.

That scene was gross af, but we’ve since learned that the intent of the scene was not for it to be rape. We also know that canon Jaime is not a rapist. So if the narrative intent was for it to NOT be rape (and ended up being just a really bad fuck up from writers, director, post production) then we can’t blame the non-rapist character for the shitty product. What’s gross is they didn’t realize they filmed a rape scene, so people need to shift their blame from Jaime to the filmmakers. If people are really stuck on Jaime being a rapist even though in canon he isn’t and wasn’t even meant to be on the show, then they’re going to really hate the outcome of this story, because there won’t be anything to revisit Jaime being a rapist in the narrative (such as redemption for that) because he isn’t supposed to be. This is why most of fandom acknowledges that scene was an oops from the production and don’t use it to judge the character.

In other words, since the show was doing a direct adaptation of a consensual canon sex scene from the books, thinking their adaption was also a consensual sex scene, then the narrative itself doesn’t need to, and will not, do anything to have Jaime redeem himself for something he didn’t do, but that the filmmakers stupidly did.

My friend Koops went off on this topic a while back, so I’m going to add a read more where I quote her posts. It’s way more than you asked about, and I already answered the question, but I just really love her rant over the sex scene lol. So for those who want cast, crew, and GRRM quotes, discussion of that D&D video people love to refer to, and a total take down of basically why using that scene against Jaime is completely moronic then here it is: 

In response to this D&D video:

I don’t think this video disproves anything. The girl is calling it “rape” but they are not once owning up to it. They’re calling it “this” and insisting that’s something Jaime would do in that moment, but it feels to me like what they were trying to do is avoid getting into a debate about whether it’s rape or not, because they know that can get them into all kinds of trouble. ETA: Also, notice how David rolls his eyes towards the end and the person who captioned the video interpreted it as him rolling his eyes at the girl who asked the question. I don’t think he is at all, that was 5 minutes earlier, talk about a delayed reaction. I think he’s rolling his eyes at KIT stepping in just as David had finished answering with that stupid comment calling it rape and saying how great it is that the show has rape scenes, when David had been so careful in avoiding using that word all along in order not to get into an argument. And they’re emphasizing how hard this was for Lena and so on (despite, IIRC, her always saying it wasn’t intended as rape), just to earn feminist points of “we know how tough this is for women, look at how distraught we all were filming it”.If that had been their intention, they would have followed up on it in subsequent scenes/interactions, which is something the show does with rape scenes (see Sansa). Yet it was never mentioned again and it’s like it never happened. I think D&D sometimes have a bit of a rape-style fetish when it comes to sex scenes because it makes them come across as “edgy”. See the way they wrote the broken tower sex scene in the original pilot script or the way they changed Dany and Drogo’s wedding night. But they refuse to admit it and hide behind nonsense like “this is something the character would do”. They want to see how far they can push it, basically.Even if we want to say they’re admitting to have it intended as rape, saying this is something Jaime would do is absolutely ridiculous since not only he saved Brienne from rape but in the books he even has one of his men executed for TRYING to rape Pia. It’s nothing to do about having a linear redemption arc or not, it’s about WHAT kind of “bad things” the character does and whether it’s consistent with its characterization or not. Rape, for Jaime, is absolutely NOT. Equating that scene to Jaime pushing Bran out of a window is completely insane since the two things are dramatically different in motivation and intention and while Jaime is a complex guy that can do horrible things for his family and for Cersei, he doesn’t do them out of his own selfishness, especially when it comes to sex when he even refuses women throwing himself at him. Not to mention the entire point of Jaime’s “bad deed(s)” is that he has to own up to them and deal with them and their consequences. If you just ignore that sept scene ever happened and never deal with it again then you either think it isn’t a big deal, or it wasn’t a bad deed in the first place. Otherwise it adds absolutely nothing to the character’s arc. It’s like they think that a “complex/not good guy” engages into all sorts of “bad behaviour” just by virtue of being complex/not good, which actually does precisely what they’re claiming they don’t want to do; i.e. making a clear cut distinction between good and bad guys, since they’re equating all possible bad actions as being equal and the same and stemming from the same psychological motivations, which is ridiculous. The bottom line to me always comes to the fact that, unlike most stuff post S5, we have the scene in the books, in written format, and we KNOW it’s not meant to be rape. It’s meant to be the kind of gross, rough, angry sex those two have. To change the intention of the scene just because you feel “that’s something the character would do”, to me is not really caring about really understanding the character’s intentions in the first place, since you have source material and an author you can check with. They simply didn’t care in order to get HBO points.

And for some quotes 

I find the idea that we are meant to read into Cersei’s actions after the sept encounter in the books as indicative of a woman who experienced rape, or that George did not come out to straight up say the words “I did not write it as rape” (he would never throw D&D under the bus that way, come on) as evidence that it was indeed intended to be rape all along in the books, even more of twisting oneself into a pretzel than trying to explain away the scene in the show as not rape. Neither D&D nor George have ever shied away from calling rape out for what it is in the show or the books. Why would they suddenly tiptoe around this one particular scene? I think it’s because the issue here is much more nuanced than just filming a rape scene; it’s about the grey lines of consent and it’s about changing something from the books to make it look much worse than it originally was intended to be, for a character they know it will be regarded as very controversial/OOC, which raises all sorts of uncomfortable questions about how far D&D are willing to go for shock value. This is what GRRM has to say on the issue (bolded and underlined for emphasis):

“I think the “butterfly effect” that I have spoken of so often was at work here. In the novels, Jaime is not present at Joffrey’s death, and indeed, Cersei has been fearful that he is dead himself, that she has lost both the son and the father/ lover/ brother. And then suddenly Jaime is there before her. Maimed and changed, but Jaime nonetheless. Though the time and place is wildly inappropriate and Cersei is fearful of discovery, she is as hungry for him as he is for her.The whole dynamic is different in the show, where Jaime has been back for weeks at the least, maybe longer, and he and Cersei have been in each other’s company on numerous occasions, often quarreling.The setting is the same, but neither character is in the same place as in the books, which may be why Dan & David played the sept out differently. But that’s just my surmise; we never discussed this scene, to the best of my recollection.Also, I was writing the scene from Jaime’s POV, so the reader is inside his head, hearing his thoughts. On the TV show, the camera is necessarily external. You don’t know what anyone is thinking or feeling, just what they are saying and doing. If the show had retained some of Cersei’s dialogue from the books, it might have left a somewhat different impression — but that dialogue was very much shaped by the circumstances of the books, delivered by a woman who is seeing her lover again for the first time after a long while apart during which she feared he was dead. I am not sure it would have worked with the new timeline.”

Nothing whatsoever of what GRRM is saying above in explaining how he wrote their sept encounter even remotely hints at the fact that he intended consent to be even a question in his original work. He is not pointing out that he is writing from Jaime’s POV to build a contrast with Cersei’s, he is pointing out that he is writing from Jaime’s POV to build a contrast between the books medium and the camera medium and what each does or does not allow. And he goes further by saying that Cersei’s dialogue from the books might have helped giving a different impression of the scene: i.e. that it was NOT rape. What is happening is George trying to distance himself from D&D’s choice while at the same time being a professional and not bashing their botched adaptation of his work, by explaining why perhaps they might have decided to approach it differently from the way HE wrote the original scene and how maybe some of his material might not have fit because of the timeline.We actually have Cersei’s own POV later in the books, where she reminisces about tons of events from her close and distant past, and not once does she ever think back upon that incident in the sept in a way so as to indicate it was in any way a “traumatic” experience for her, while she does plenty of reflecting back upon her unpleasant sexual experiences with Robert, for example. Meanwhile, Cersei being disgusted with Jaime’s loss of his hand, or the way his looks are changing and his personality is changing, is very much a plot point that she comes back to over and over. “How could I have ever loved such a wretched creature?”, or getting up naked from a bathtub in front of Jaime thinking he still wants her and even taunting him with “Pining what you lost?” and then getting annoyed that Jaime pretty much tells her she’s a fool for thinking that? Hardly dynamics one has with their rapist. And also GRRM also says: 

The scene was always intended to be disturbing, but I do regret if it has disturbed people for the wrong reasons.

“It has disturbed people FOR THE WRONG REASONS”, means that he wanted that scene to cause controversy because of how damn gross it all is, them having sex next to the corpse of their incestuous son, not because there was an issue of consent. So, no. The book scene was not intended to have consent be a central point, let alone rape. Yes, something happened in the adaptation to make it come across as significantly more forced, in a way that can very rightfully be interpreted as rape, while at the same time not being intended to be rape for plot point’s sake. But, when it comes to the filming of that scene, this is what the director had to say:

Of course Lena and Nikolaj laughed every time I would say, “You grab her by the hair, and Jack is right there,” or “You come around this way and Jack is right there.“ 

Yeah. Lena was SO distraught and it was so difficult for her to film that “rape” scene. They was totally totally totally directed to play it as such, and were so serious and affected by it. Give me a break, David. And also:

The consensual part of it was that she wraps her legs around him, and she’s holding on to the table, clearly not to escape but to get some grounding in what’s going on. And also, the other thing that I think is clear before they hit the ground is she starts to make out with him. The big things to us that were so important, and that hopefully were not missed, is that before he rips her undergarment, she’s way into kissing him back. She’s kissing him aplenty.

So there’s two possibilities here: either D&D intended it as rape from the start, but didn’t give clear instructions to the director, and, in turn, Nik and Lena, so that they didn’t set out to shoot it the way D&D intended, or nobody intended it as rape but something was messed up in the editing process (apparently after this scene, they made some changes to the editing process? Not sure how reliable this info is, but maybe someone can dig it out, if they remember). Regardless, what they ended up with is a scene that has some serious, serious issues of consent, and the comments afterwards, trying to downplay the consent in favour of highlighting the context or the way Cersei did give non-verbal consent, only ended up stirring more criticism of the director and actors being rape apologists. So, it doesn’t surprise me if they’ve just given up trying to defend their original intentions, since it only made things worse (and rightfully so), in favour of trying to explain it away the way GRRM did; by trying to make up explanations that the narrative required it and it made sense to be filmed that way.So, to conclude and link everything back to the reason why we are debating this (i.e. “NCW is a misogynist for disliking Dany when Jaime is a rapist and he excuses him”), while I can totally sympathize with a show-only person who watches that scene and sees it as rape, I also think this particular scene is not something we can use in the discourse about Jaime’s character and arc, given that not only there are huge question marks about what was intended with that scene in the first place, not only it is forgotten like it never happened to the point that you could skip it and nothing would change, but we know for a fact that it was NOT what was intended in the original source material by the original author. The one who decides where the characters’ arcs are supposed to go. You cannot say “it doesn’t make sense that Jaime does X and Y in his endgame because he’s a rapist” when that endgame is being decided by someone who never wrote Jaime as a rapist in the first place. All you can say is that D&D messed up big time with that scene because it literally does not line up or fit with anything else that is going on at the time or in the past or in the future when it comes to Jaime. 

- Koops (jaimetheexplorer)

[wellesleyunderground]

We Need to Talk about American Values in a Changing America by Farahnaz Ispahani ‘85, author of “Purifying The Land of the Pure: A History of Pakistan’s Religious Minorities”

I felt I could breathe here, in America. I was born in Pakistan, but US citizenship freed me from the burdens of religious tests, dictatorship and the absence of human rights. As I went about my work, I never felt that I was a woman, a person of color, a Muslim or an immigrant.

But more than a quarter-century after becoming an American citizen, I admit I feel a little vulnerable. There is a racial consciousness around me that I did not feel before. I feel Muslim. A woman. Of color. An immigrant. And my female friends are worried their right to choose what they do with their body will be taken away.

America has always been an optimistic country, a place that seemed to feel assured of its greatness. That so many people in this country embraced pessimism, and that the country needs a political novice to reinvent America’s greatness, is disturbing. The hatred and bigotry unleashed in the course of this campaign will not easily be pushed back into the Pandora’s box of stoked resentments.

I became a US citizen at a time when the country of my birth was suffering under a dictatorship. Gen. Zia-ul-Haq, a US ally, was “Islamizing” Pakistan by force, denying human rights to the country’s citizens. Sharia-based Hudood laws enshrined misogyny, while previously afforded rights and safeties for women were curtailed.

While a student at Wellesley, my Pakistani passport expired and I learned that applications for a new passport required a religious affirmation. Muslim citizens of Pakistan could get a passport only after signing a declaration that we disavowed members of the Ahmadiyya sect as non-Muslims. To me, signing such a declaration felt like being complicit in the marginalization of Ahmadis.

I decided I couldn’t. But fast forward to today, and too many minorities feel they now are being singled out and marginalized.

While working in television news, I traveled the length and breadth of this great country. I covered political party conventions, presidential debates and inaugurations, and even the controversial Florida recount of 2000. I have voted for Republican candidates and Democrats. In America, my sole identity was American.

More recently, as I campaigned for the Clinton-Kaine ticket, connecting with voters throughout the country, I met Muslim immigrants, Hispanic and black Americans — upstanding citizens, some with family members in the military — who said they feel scared. They feel “otherized.” They wonder what their neighbors think of them.

After it became clear that Donald Trump had been elected, CNN commentator and activist Van Jones spoke of “a nightmare,” describing the fears of Muslims and of families of immigrants. He described the results as, in part, “a whitelash against a changing country and a whitelash against a black president.”

As an optimist, I can only hope the rhetoric we heard will gradually subside now that the campaign is over. But, if Trump is going to make America great again, he will need to be genuinely inclusive of all Americans, especially those who did not vote for him and who do not agree with his vision.

More fundamentally, we need to start a discussion on American values in a changing world. Blacks, Muslims and others were not necessarily part of the original “idea” of America. But we are here, and we contribute to America’s greatness.

The reality is that America needs reconciliation and healing, something that both major political parties must contribute toward. Unfortunately, a Democratic Party that veers further to the left will only aggravate the people who elected Trump. The party might consolidate its base, and even win some elections, but it will not bring out the best in this great country. The Republican Party that I voted for in the past, meanwhile, is now unrecognizable. Until it stops being the party of angry white men, there won’t be room for people like me.

Holding on to outdated ideas about American values — and insisting on seeing American greatness through the prism of white men who resemble our Founding Fathers — will only lead to the disintegration of the fabric of our nation. Similarly, a vision of a social-democratic paradise backed primarily by minorities, also won’t work.

I became an American because of the good — and inclusiveness — of this country. I can only hope that America can move past this divisive campaign and ensure that future Americans feel they are exactly that — Americans, and not outsiders.

Farahnaz Ispahani is a Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the author of “Purifying The Land of the Pure: A history of Pakistan’s Religious Minorities,” Pakistan Parliament 2008-12, Adviser to President of Pakistan 2008-12 and Foreign Policy Global Thinker.

Posted at https://farahnazispahni.com/2016/11/10/we-need-to-talk-about-american-values-in-a-changing-america-by-farahnaz-ispahani/  

[celticnoise]

On 25 May this year, on the anniversary of the greatest triumph in the history of the club, and with another historic accomplishment just completed, even as the supporters were celebrating that fact, the Celtic board offered Neil Lennon, our interim boss, a man who took the job after the resignation of Brendan Rodgers, the full time post as manager.

They did it in the Hampden shower room.

It was a choice that even Lennon’s supporters must admit was controversial. There is no way of knowing how much of the support was in favour of that decision, but that there was a large and vocal section of the fan base that was wholeheartedly opposed to it cannot be denied.

In response, I penned a furious article, one of the angriest I’ve ever written, at a time when I should have been toasting the most successful Scottish team in generations.

I was angry in part because I did not support the decision, but I was angrier, by far, with the cynical timing of the announcement and the way it was made. It was exploitative. It was designed to fall at a time when the board knew the angry voices would be drowned out by fans who did not want the occasion ruined, as though we were the ones who’d ruined it.

Lawwell and his board knew it would drive a wedge between those who supported the appointment and those who did not.

In the days that followed, myself and others had to read all manner of nonsense about how we were behaving like “enemies within.”

I blame Lawwell and the board for that response; they had counted on it.

In the mind-bending press conference that followed, Peter Lawwell openly boasted about how he had never even considered other candidates for the job.

The man who sits at the apex of the football operation and who is paid the highest salary at the club didn’t even look at their CV’s.

It was, and it remains, the single greatest act of gross irresponsibility and corporate failure that I have seen at Celtic since the era of the Kelly’s and Whites, and it came at the end of a season in which Lawwell’s ego had clashed dramatically with that of the hugely successful Rodgers and fed into the situation that saw him depart the club with the season half done.

Last night, Lawwell’s shabby decision making resulted in the potential loss of tens of millions of pounds.

Neil Lennon carries the can for the performance, but he didn’t appoint himself. He was chosen above all the other managers out there, for all his flaws – and they are legion – by men who had made their minds up and used the Scottish Cup as their validation.

We will never know how they would have justified it and sold it to us had we lost that day.

Frankly it’s a question I never troubled myself with, because in spite of them 3Treble was a triumph I never wanted further sullied with speculative scenarios and talk of what might have been.

Looking back on it now, I don’t even think they’d have tried. They’d have appointed him – of that there is absolutely no doubt – and we’d have been expected to wear it, whether we liked it or not. That they hold the fans in contempt has never really been up for debate, not since the chairman accused some of us of racism for daring to question whether or not we should have a man like Ian Livingstone on the board, a Tory peer who had voted for austerity.

(He is Jewish, and although nobody but a very few internet goons knew that, far less cared, far less brought it up Ian Bankier shamefully accused those who criticised him of being motivated by antisemitism instead of his right wing politics and the way he had used his position of influence to inflict hardship on people who were already struggling.)

Bankier’s scandalous remarks came in front of shareholders at the club’s AGM.

It should have been his last.

That he survived that is outrageous, but it is no more outrageous than the never ending story of Peter Lawwell, the highest paid person in Scottish football, who has been at Celtic for seventeen years. It is almost unheard of, in any industry in the modern age.

In Price Waterhouse Cooper’s 2017 Global Strategy document, they pointed out that the average “shelf life” for a chief executive or senior operating manager in the leading 2500 companies traded on the NYSE is five years.

After that, things get stale.

Strategies start to repeat themselves.

A company is like a football team; it needs an overhaul after a while.

Peter Lawwell has been at Celtic through the reigns of six different managers and seven managerial tenures. He is the only senior official at Celtic to have appointed the same man to that post twice. His appointments have had varying degrees of success.

O’Neill, Strachan, Mowbray, Lennon, Deila and Rodgers have all worked at Celtic under him. Five years into his tenure, his failure to properly fund Strachan’s final transfer window cost us a league title and the manager left soon afterwards.

He appointed Mowbray who was a disaster and lasted less than a season.

He appointed Lennon as interim boss and then gave him the job despite the manager having exactly zero experience and that cost us another league championship. He refused to take any responsibility for those things. He never even considered his position.

The best thing that ever happened to Lawwell at Celtic happened at Ibrox, and there is a widespread belief that he may even have mishandled that.

Lennon had a free run at the league for several years, and when he left – tired of the restraints our board had imposed on him – we appointed, as his replacement, the man Lawwell had originally intended to come in and work as the assistant manager.

The chickens came home to roost on 17 April 2016, when the NewCo knocked us out of the Scottish Cup and the board was forced to accept that the Deila experiment hadn’t worked and that the club had gone backwards as a result.

Lawwell has always been a lucky man though, and for once our board acted decisively and they appointed the best manager they could find in Brendan Rodgers. Two trebles and two successive Champions League group stage qualifications followed.

And then Lawwell decided to grab a grenade, pull out the pin, and roll it under the manager’s desk.

There was wrong on both sides, but when the CEO authorised a public attack on Brendan Rodgers via the BBC he didn’t wait until a crucial Champions League qualifier was in the rear-view. He did it on the night of the game.

There was no going back from that.

Peter Lawwell has been the beneficiary of nearly a decade of self-inflicted damage at Ibrox.

But for that spell, we have no way of knowing where we’d be and what his record would look like, but the failures of Strachan’s last season, the Mowbray disaster and the decision to appoint an untried managerial rookie in his place do not suggest it would have gone well.

That he has repeated the same mistake in appointing Lennon again, a man whose post-Celtic Park record was the sack at Bolton and “mutual consenting” at Easter Road hammers home the message that this guy is either shockingly complacent or someone who learns nothing.

Lawwell is out of ideas, and that’s been evident for years now.

For all that, he is trusted to make these decisions by a board that is all but invisible and which is wholly unaccountable to the fans. Who are the people who run Celtic? Do they do so on a daily basis? No, they have other interests outside the club.

They show up on match days, they hob-nob in their executive dining room and then go off to their real jobs again.

The most visible, other than Lawwell, is Dermot Desmond, of course. He is widely regarded as the true decision maker at the club, which is an absurdity as he is merely the largest shareholder and has never shown the slightest interest in even being chairman.

But the rest of the board are viewed – probably rightly – as nodding donkeys doing his bidding.

For all the alleged “professionalism” at our club, it is a bizarre way to run a business with a £100 million turnover.

It is a shocking way to run a football team.

There is a vacuum at Celtic where power should be, and nature abhors a vacuum and Lawwell has moved to fill it.

His fingerprints are all over that disaster last night, from the Lennon appointment itself to the club’s abject transfer policy which they jokingly refer to as “risk averse” but which has probably cost us a nine figure sum in the last ten years based on failures to reach the Champions League groups, even when the path ahead of us seemed free of danger.

The last four teams to knock us out have not been amongst the great sides of Europe; their names, for posterity, are Maribor, Malmo, AEK Athens and Cluj.

Maribor, in 2014, finished bottom of their Champions League group with 3 points. The year after it, Malmo finished in the same position with the same points in their group. Last season, AEK Athens got there ahead of us and didn’t win a single point. If Cluj even get there at all I will be very, very surprised. They are probably the least impressive side out of the four of them. It is not ridiculous to suggest that these were beatable teams.

But in 2014 we failed to strengthen properly prior to the Legia Warsaw matches – our signings were Craig Gordon on a free and Jo Inge Berget on loan – and were destroyed over the two legs only for UEFA to grant us a reprieve.

What did we do with that reprieve? We sold Fraser Forster for £10 million and brought in Denayer and Tonev on loan.

We spent not one extra penny.

We failed utterly to maximise our chances and we paid the ultimate price for that with a double humiliation.

The following season, we nickel and dimed our transfer business with a permanent deal for loanee Denayer for £1.5 million, Saidy Janko, Logan Bailly on frees and a loan deal for Man Utd youth Tyler Blackett (remember those guys, eah?). Oh yeah, and we got the manager’s “first choice” signing, Nadir Ciftci from Dundee United and, inexplicably, Scott Allan.

After we’d crashed out of Europe’s premier competition we recouped all that cash and more when we punted Virgil Van Dijk and replaced him with Jozo Simunovic. We also bought Ryan Christie, but sent him back to Inverness on loan.

This is what “preparing us for Europe” looks like at Celtic Park, and that it has so often resulted in utter failure should hardly be a surprise.

We repeat this nonsense year after year, and in the campaign of 2013-14, where James Forrest struck late at home to knock out Karagandy, we had walked the fine line by perversely weakening the team prior to every round in the Champions League qualifiers.

Wanyama was sold before Cliftonville. We sold Gary Hooper prior to the qualifier against Elfsborg. Coming out of that game – just two days after the away leg – and with the Ukrainian’s on the horizon, Neil Lennon was forced to let go of Kelvin Wilson.

On the night of the home tie, which we won 3-0, there was not a single new player from those who had completed the previous season in our starting eleven; Amido Balde, Virgil Van Dijk, Steven Mouyokolo and Derk Boerrigter were all absent for one reason or another.

That we were damned lucky to go through hardly needed pointing out.

We learned so many lessons from that, of course, that Maribor followed the next year and Malmo after that. None of that had to happen. None of those defeats were necessary.

Of course, fans barely need reminding of how we “prepared” for Europe last time around, with the Athens game coming slap bang in the middle of the manager’s dummy spitting and the farcical saga of John McGinn having just days before.

Prior to that one, we had made just four signings, and two of those were permanent deals for players who had been at the club the year before. We had re-signed Emilio Izzaguire on a short term deal, and an Australian youth on loan who had never played a senior club match in his life.

When asked about that, the manager made it clear that he had no idea who the player was.

Last season’s summer was a calamity which in any other industry would have cost the CEO his job, and it was exacerbated by his public falling out with the manager which led to months of uncertainty and behind the scenes chaos.

Before the window shut – after it was too late to matter – we showed the full scope of our ambitions and intent when we brought in a Leicester City reserve on loan, an Arsenal youth player and signed Youssouf Mulumbu on a free after he’d been available for months.

Our Champions League failure was offset by the sale of Moussa Dembele shortly before the window closed, and too late for us to sign a replacement.

January came, and we brought in more loanees and haggled over a few hundred grand for a striker who has yet to hit the ground. We signed a Ukrainian winger the manager said he didn’t want and who we promptly let go back to his club for six months.

And then the manager quit, in February, and we pretended to be surprised.

We hired Lennon on an interim basis, watched as we squeaked our way through crucial league games and lost at Ibrox, and with fans expecting a proper Rodgers replacement we offered him the job in the shower room after a cup final win which was greeted as much with relief as satisfaction.

None of this has been the result of events beyond our control, which is to say none of these were things forced on us by external factors. These setbacks are the results of far-reaching decisions which have been taken inside our club.

They are the results of the choices we’ve made; of the policies we’ve decided to follow.

This is the strategy. This is the plan.

Of course, that is a little speculative because nobody at Celtic Park thinks explaining the strategy to us is worth the time or trouble. The commercial side of the club works overtime, to bring in as much money from us as possible.

But nobody ever explains the correlation between that and these grinding failures to strengthen the squad.

The board treats the fans like mugs.

They see us purely as customers, fools to be sold cheap tat and horrible third strips.

They have no respect for our views, and this is revealed time and time again. The contempt with which people inside the club have for the support is clearly expressed whenever they talk about social media, which they profess not to care about.

Yet Twitter, Facebook, the blogs and the forums are the only ways the fans have to make themselves heard.

No wonder the board and the manager disdain them.

This is a board that has no lines of communication with the supporters and who don’t want any.

The AGM is a farcical affair where they make decisions by diktat knowing there aren’t enough votes in the room to oppose a single one.

To cap it off, the main fan organisations are specifically prohibited, by their own constitutions, from criticising the club or the strategy in any way, shape or form.

When I tell people this they flatly refuse to believe it, but it’s true nonetheless.

And we laugh at the Ibrox fans and their pliability.

The club has other policies which neuter fans, and not all of them are obvious but one should be.

The “home ticket scheme” locks fans into buying Europa League tickets if they want to qualify for cup semis and finals.

It is a form of blackmail, and it is the only thing that guarantees that group stage games in that second rate tournament won’t take place in front of empty stands. Celtic supporter’s buses should withdraw from it en masse, but the Association will continue to support it even though it is a means of keeping everyone in line.

There is no stomach for a fight there.

I know a dozen people who’ve already said the idea of attending Thursday night matches in that second tier tournament holds no appeal. But they’ll be there, and they admit it, because they might miss out on Hampden tickets later on. That too might be a gamble with no upside.

You have to get to Hampden to need tickets for it, and nothing should be taken for granted.

Empty seats are the only language that this board understands or will respond to, and that was proved in Deila’s second season when they European games were played in front of closed upper tiers. That focussed minds, and Brendan Rodgers was the response we got.

Celtic fans need to take some responsibility here.

Only they can change this.

Real questions should have been asked this time last year when we endured a calamitous summer that put the manager on the brink of walking.

Somehow the people in charge escaped the scrutiny.

Lennon’s appointment was another chance to put them under pressure and make them explain the long term plan. But the Lennon fan club had its day and all talk of asking such questions was swept aside.

This board is not interested in serving us, only serving itself.

There is no long term strategy here that anyone can accurately identify. The people in charge of our club are hiding behind the domestic successes secured by Rodgers and Lennon, who inherited his team and played with his tactics for the latter part of that campaign.

Beyond simply winning this year’s title, I couldn’t tell you what they regard as good enough. The appointment of Lennon looked like, was, and has proved to be, a colossal backward step in terms of our European reputation and standing.

Do not expect explanations. Do not expect a detailed run-down on where they see us going from here.

An organisation stuck in the mud as we are would conduct a full-scale strategic review, and the starting point would be whether or not the CEO can still justify his salary.

This board appointed a third tier manager this summer, and I said at the time that right there you could judge their vision and their ambitions for this club.

Last night came as no shock as awful as it was. Is this good enough for most supporters?

It must be or there would be some attempt to change it.

Our Association will not rock the boat. Our shareholders organisation has sat in mute silence on our strategy for years now.

I criticise Club 1872, but their members have balls … they fight for something. Our own shareholders group is too busy playing politics; what damned good does that do us as a footabll club? Where is their focus on the things that matter to the fans?

I know how this ends.

We’re going to be told to sit on our frustration and “get behind the team for the next game.”

It is ever thus, and that’s how we’ve ended up here.

The board treats us with contempt because we deserve it.

They are unaccountable because we will not hold them to account, and even now there’s no real will to do it.

I sometimes wonder what it will take.

And I worry that we might be about to find out.

https://ift.tt/2KYObb5

[cryptnus-blog]

Is Spain’s Rebel Province Catalonia Introducing Blockchain Voting?

New Post has been published on https://cryptnus.com/2018/11/is-spains-rebel-province-catalonia-introducing-blockchain-voting/

Is Spain’s Rebel Province Catalonia Introducing Blockchain Voting?

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October 1, 2017. A clandestine referendum election is held against the Spanish government’s orders across schools and polling stations throughout Catalonia. It was a day of defiance with an overwhelming “yes” vote to sever ties with the rest of the mainland. It was also one marked with bloodshed, voter intimidation, and riots.

The main perpetrators, then-party leader Carles Puigdemont and ex-vice president Oriol Junqueras are in exile and prison respectively, along with several other members of the controversial Catalonian government who instigated its independence.

After a couple of weeks of rising tensions, in which the Spanish government pressured Puigdemont to officially declare independence–and which saw massive capital flight as thousands of key businesses moved their headquarters from Catalonia to other provinces in Spain, while the EU condemned the act, Puigdemont found his friends running out fast.

On October 21, the government of Spain eventually suspended Catalonia’s autonomy, declared article 155, and stated that fresh elections would be held on December 21 for a new Catalonian “Govern.”

It wasn’t the best moment for a Spanish government struggling with corruption cases and a never-ending financial crisis. And it also wasn’t truly reflective of the collective desire, as many of the population abstained their vote. The turnout was 43 percent. Although, of that number, a mindblowing 92 percent voted in favor of independence.

Those who wanted to remain were unlikely to leave their houses to angry mobs chanting for independence with a yellow ribbon pinned to their chests.

The Need to Reduce Voter Intimidation

The case of Catalonia isn’t unique, in so much as voter intimidation and poor turnout are characteristic of many elections globally, as is voter fraud, particularly in developing countries with political despots at the helm. Even in one of the most advanced countries in the world, the last election is still being debated and the 2018 midterm led to yet another Florida recount.

There has to be a better way, right?

Ismael Peña-López, Director General of Citizen Participation at the Government of Catalonia certainly thinks so. According to an interview with the La Vanguardia, one of Spain’s most prominent newspapers, he’s all for seeing the electronic voting law amended. Why? Because something isn’t working quite right.

The chaos of the October 2017 referendum and separatist tendency flared up strong emotions throughout the nation, dividing the public (and even families) in two.

It spurred a record number of votes from Spanish citizens outside of Catalonia in the December 21 election. However, turnout was 81.94 percent at the schools and polling stations–compared to just 12 percent of voters registered electronically.

Of all the 226,394 registered voters living outside Catalonia, there were just 27,231 votes, according to the Official Electoral Census.

This poor participation has led Catalonia’s government to approve a law to amend the electronic vote for residents living outside of Catalonia.

While it’s not a process that’s going to happen overnight, it’s projected to be ready as soon as 2020. And, in fact, is a project that was already begun under the leadership of the ousted Puigdemont.

Rolled Out in Three Stages

The new electronic voting will be rolled out in three stages, starting with those living abroad. It’s not that these votes matter less, Peña-López points out, but should anything go wrong with the new system, the damage will be more easily contained.

“It’s not that external votes are less important but we suffer less if it goes wrong, and if it works well, the gain will be enormous and could have a huge impact. This way, the risk is controlled, as it should be.”

Once the new system has been proven with citizens living abroad, it will extend to the anticipated vote, and finally to all citizens, with the main goal of improving voter participation. Although, Peña-López admitted that it would not be easy to make the electronic voting system quickly available to all due to legal, technical, social and economic issues.

An electronic vote costs about one-fifth of a regular vote although, the more the system is used, the more profitable it becomes. Peña-López says that it will increase participation and lower the cost at the same time.

The Problem of Security

While electronic voting is good for people living abroad, for those short on time, or who want to avoid the polling stations, there’s still the question of security. How do citizens know that their vote won’t be tampered with, lost, replicated, or deleted? How can voters be sure that their votes aren’t being monitored, and who takes charge of the data?

Ismael Peña-López, YouTube

These are all questions that naturally arise and complicate the matter. While Peña-López argues that it’s also possible to tamper with urns, he understands the concerns–and the need for a system that would detect any votes that had been tampered with and reject them:

“It’s harder to change 1,000 votes in a physical urn than electronically… That’s why it’s important to audit all votes and that there is a system in place with strong encryption.”

He points to several options for security and to ensure that voters are who they say they are, including biometrics, 2-factor ID, and e-voting in the local embassy.

The Catalonian government hasn’t yet decided the most efficient way of doing this although many are talking about blockchain.

“One interesting option is using blockchain… But we haven’t yet started with the electronic vote. The Government of Catalonia hasn’t laid out a clear bet for blockchain and is still exploring what options there are before deciding.”

However, he added that he had no doubt that the technology is secure and mentioned various examples of companies and parties using it successfully for voting.

Yet Peña-López Isn’t All for Blockchain Voting

Surprisingly, after speaking about encouraging greater voter participation, he says that fewer people would have participated in the Catalonia referendum if it had been done electronically, contradicting his earlier statements.

“It wouldn’t have been the same, it was like a ritual and we needed to see each other, stand together, and be with each other.”

He added that electronic voting loses the magic of mixing with the public and defending the urns.

So, while there is no clear decision on the technology to use for secure, encrypted electronic voting (or indeed a clear will to roll it out to all citizens and move away from traditional ballot boxes), Catalonia is considering blockchain. And just like everything to come out of this rebellious province, if they do go ahead, it will be a country-wide first.

Featured image from Shutterstock.

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[theconservativebrief]

The sexual assault allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh have brought out something in conservatives. Even elite Never Trump writers have started lining up to defend the nominee and the president behind him.

“Ever since the rise of Donald Trump, the conservative movement has oriented itself as a circular firing squad. The attacks on Kavanaugh broke that formation,” conservative pundit Seth Mandel writes in the Atlantic. “Mild-mannered anti-Trump conservatives would, in private conversations, fume at Kavanaugh’s treatment and insist Democrats had crossed a line and could not be appeased — the judge had to become a justice.”

Eli Lake, a neoconservative columnist for Bloomberg, put the point more bluntly in a Thursday morning tweet: “Congratulations Democrats. Your Kavanaugh circus has united the right behind Trump.”

On this analysis, Democrats’ investigation into serious and credible allegations of sexual assault — including an accusation that Kavanaugh pinned down a teenage girl, groped her, and held his hand over her mouth to prevent her from crying out — are so partisan that they are rallying even sober Republicans to Trump’s side.

It’s a claim that is, more than anything else, an expression of narcissism. The truth is that Republicans have been united around Trump long before Kavanaugh: The mostly DC and New York-based conservatives who criticize Trump have never really had a constituency in the actual American public. The Kavanaugh hearings may be truly be a turning point in elite conservative thinking, but they are generals in search of an army.

Trumpism was able to seize the commanding heights of the Republican Party easily. What the elites won’t admit is that when push comes to shove, and it becomes a question of Republicans versus Democrats, elite conservatives will hold their noses and side with their team. The Kavanaugh episode proves what we already knew: The conservative opposition to Trump is a sham.

Take a look at this chart, from the polling firm Civiqs, of Trump’s approval rating. It shows Republican approval of the president from the beginning of his presidency, through many of its major controversies, right up until this Tuesday:

Civiqs

Trump has had a approval rating near 90 percent among Republicans for basically his entire presidency. Nothing — not the travel ban, not Charlottesville, not the family separation controversy, nothing — really put a dent in that. Christine Blasey Ford publicly came forward with her allegations of sexual assault against Kavanaugh on September 16; the Civiqs data shows no change.

This isn’t just one pollster. Gallup’s tracking poll has had Trump’s approval rating among Republicans steadily in the 80s for almost his entire presidency; a Pew analysis of its data on Trump describes his approval rating as “remarkably stable” throughout his first 18 months, adding that there was consistently “a wider gap between Republicans’ and Democrats’ views of Trump than for any other U.S. president in the modern era of polling.”

Now, it’s possible that registered Republicans aren’t the right people to poll. It could be that many Never Trump Republicans now identify as independents when contacted by pollsters.

If that were true, then you’d expect to see a significant increase in Trump’s overall approval ratings since the Kavanaugh controversy began, as conservative-leaning independents came home. But there’s limited evidence of that.

Gallup’s polls of independents finds that Trump’s approval rating among independents has gone up by 3 points since the Kavanaugh controversy began, from 34 to 37, but it’s still lower than it was in August (39 percent). Trump’s Gallup numbers have been somewhere in the 30s for much of 2018, sometimes higher and sometimes lower, and there’s little evidence to show that the post-Kavanaugh data is anything outside the norm.

Similarly, the Civiqs numbers suggest a slight shift towards Trump since the Kavanaugh hearings began among independents, but not a major divergence from the overall 2018 numbers. Trump’s -6 net approval rating among independents as of Tuesday (50 disapprove-44 approve) is a bit worse than the -3 number it hit in mid-April (48-45):

(Civiqs)

So while it is possible that Trump’s handling of the Kavanaugh allegations has indeed helped him gain support from a small percentage of wavering independents, it’s a matter of a few percentage points, at most, among the sub-sample of Americans who identify as independents. And we’ve seen a narrowing at other times as well during 2018; there’s not yet any reason to believe this time is different.

Even if the slight post-Kavanaugh increase is real, the data isn’t good enough for us to know who these independents are. For all we know, these independents aren’t disgruntled center-right conservatives at all, but rather relatively non-ideological men who support Trump’s aggressive pushback against women accusing a high-profile man of sexual assault (polling suggests opinion on Kavanaugh is stratified by gender).

Mandel, in his Atlantic piece, argued that the Kavanaugh allegations are a defining moment in solidifying conservative support for Trump. “In terms of ideological and partisan sorting, no single event in Trump’s presidency has had anything like this impact. And nothing will be quite the same no matter how this ends,” he writes.

The data so far suggests otherwise. There is no wave of Republicans lining up behind the president, nor is there any tangible evidence of conservative independents coming home en masse. If elite Never Trumpers are moving back to the president, then it looks like they’re doing so on their own.

Now, there is a credible argument that the Kavanaugh fight is helping the president politically. The Washington Post’s James Hohmann has argued that Kavanaugh is driving up enthusiasm among Republican voters for the midterm elections: GOP supporters who might not have been willing to vote otherwise are getting angry, and are now getting ready to turn out at the polls.

This could be true, though the evidence for it is fairly thin (read FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver for the details). If it is, though, the mechanism is not wavering Republicans changing their mind about Trump: It’s people who already support the president, but weren’t really excited to vote, getting really pumped about backing their guy in November. It’s a story not of an ideological shift, but rising enthusiasm among Trump’s base.

This points to the forces really at work here. The Trump-GOP defense of Kavanaugh has largely amounted to a defense of privilege: An increasingly-obvious backlash against the MeToo movement and social change more broadly. It’s best summarized by Trump’s suggestion that he’s more worried about boys being falsely accused than girls actually being assaulted, or Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R-SC) now-immortal quote from a Senate debate the day after Ford and Kavanaugh’s testimony: “I’m a single white male from South Carolina, and I’m told I should just shut up, but I will not shut up.”

This argument has been paired with a partisan attack on Democrats as somehow being unfair or cruel to Kavanaugh by forwarding these allegations, an argument the nominee made himself in his testimony when he invented a conspiracy to undermine him motivated by pro-Clinton rage.

“This whole two-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit, fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election,” Kavanaugh said. “Fear that has been unfairly stoked about my judicial record, revenge on behalf of the Clintons, and millions of dollars in money from outside, left-wing opposition groups.”

“The Trump-era degradation of American conservatism is bringing out my inner liberal”

These twin appeals, backlash politics and partisanship, have formed the core of Trump’s appeal since Day 1. His argument has always been that I will “make America great again” by rolling back social change, and I’ll stick it to the Democrats in the process. This is the argument that seems to be exciting the Republican base — and, crucially, bringing Republicans who claim to be repulsed by Trump into his camp.

Some Never Trumpers, admirably, have seen this for what it is. But in doing so, they have come to see themselves as alienated from not just Trump, but conservatism in general.

“Some defenses of Kavanaugh are bringing out my inner feminist,” Bill Kristol, editor-at-large of the conservative Weekly Standard, tweeted. “The Trump-era degradation of American conservatism is bringing out my inner liberal.”

Most Never Trump conservatives refuse to admit what Kristol has: that the problem isn’t just Trump, but the Republican Party and conservative movement in general. Trump’s regressive social stances and hyper-partisanship are what make him popular in the GOP: If you are to opposed to Trump, then you need to challenge him on that terrain.

But when the choice is put out before Never Trumpers so starkly — either aid and abet Trumpism, or else side with Democrats — they choose the former, time and again. Partnering with the other tribe on something as important as the future of the Supreme Court is unthinkable.

“For the first time since Donald Trump entered the political fray, I find myself grateful that he’s in it,” the New York Times columnist Bret Stephens writes in his Thursday column. “I’m grateful because Trump has not backed down in the face of the slipperiness, hypocrisy and dangerous standard-setting deployed by opponents of Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court.”

When supposed Never Trumpers like Stephens write things like this, they are showing you who they really are. Believe them.

Original Source -> Brett Kavanaugh proves the Never Trump movement was a sham all along

via The Conservative Brief

[theliterateape]

Why I Will Only Post Positive Things On Facebook Ever Again

By Peter Kremidas

I. Bipedal Nomads Who Can Send Thoughts Worldwide At The Speed of Light

Historically speaking, we have only just started playing around with the internet in general and social media in particular. I think we’ve done, or at least I have done this, without much thought as to how powerful these tools truly are or how to use them responsibly.

I think we have a responsibility to really think about, to have an honest conversation about, how we use it. And then think we need to hold ourselves accountable to whatever conclusion we reach. Because this is potentially a very dangerous tool we have here. People get hurt on social media all the time. I know people who are changed, and not in a good way, for the way they were treated online. People can get broken by this stuff. It’s happened to me. I’ve done it to others. And it’s horrible. Kids are killing themselves over this stuff. And that’s just the stuff we are now reckoning with. We have no idea what it’s doing to our brains.

However on the other side of that, 2017 and 2018 and beyond are the dawning of a new and normalized increase in freedom for women. And it’s because of the internet. People could immediately share their stories to hundreds of their friends, see that they are not alone, and pull the lid off something that has been happening for centuries. The internet did that.

Because the power of the internet, just one of them, is that you can create such a fuss that traditional news media is forced to look. They don’t want to look. But they know if they don’t look they’ll look stupid. Because so many people already know about it without their influence, and they are supposed to be the greatest influencers of all. There’s a lot of power to protect there, and now we have some of that. And that is incredibly cool. So obviously there’s a lot of power for good here.

And I’ve been thinking about this for while, but instead of preaching to people I have no control over about what they should or shouldn’t do I started looking at myself. In 2018, I guess my new year’s resolution was to be more honest in my writing, and with myself. And that means calling myself out on my own bullshit, even when it hurts. It's been several bitter pills to swallow.

A few months ago, I was in some stupid facebook debate I don’t even remember what. But it was the billionth time I was impatiently just impolitely and obnoxiously being contrarian on social media. Nothing to gain from it. It was probably me quibbling as usual over some useless irrelevant minutiae that alienated me from someone I actually agreed with. I think it’s called ‘I almost see your point but you’re kinda being a dick so I don’t care.’ Or, more accurately, ‘Just being a dick.’

Someone commented, I don’t remember her name, and told me that there was another time on social media when I did this and it really hurt her. She asked me to stop. She said ‘please’. I reacted predictably, with more condescension and ‘fuck you’ subtext. She told me that was mean, and again could I please stop. Of course, I’d already thought of what to say next and was about to throw it.

But instead I just felt bad. And I knew she was right. And I hated that.

I stopped. I said that’s fair. I apologized. I haven’t been engaging in any debate or anything other than jokes and positive things since then.

Because when when I actually listened. Not just words, but what must this person feel like that makes them want to say that to me. It hit me. I hated that it did. I denied it and was angry for awhile. But it stuck. And at some point it got real quiet. Quiet enough to hear myself say, “Shit…”

“...I have an issue.”

She was right. And that’s why she was being polite, because she didn’t want to incite me more. That’s how smart she is. While I shoot my mouth off and make an ass of myself, she’s the adult in the room. It’s fuckin’ embarassing being such a broken guy sometimes.

II. The Medium

Ever since the election I’ve been reading about human psychology and neurology, because I had to understand how the fuck. And one of the things I’ve found is that humans, we aren’t all that smart. A full 98 percent of our thinking is unconscious. We get caught into different long term habits just by doing them a lot, because they’re rewarded somehow. It’s why if you see a video of someone at 7 years old you can see exactly where their personality traits have come from. They worked somehow and they just kept doing them. It’s why there is addiction. It’s why you have to spend 10,000 hours doing something before you’re a master at it. It’s why when you’ve had a belief for so long it’s hard to change it. Most of our behavior is pretty much automatic, based on some reward system we’ve set up for ourselves or to prevent us from feeling something bad.

The human brain is full of little cognitive weaknesses that would make you a very disappointing robot. If a self driving car slowed down and created unnecessary traffic every time there was a car accident to look at, that would be an annoying feature. But you aren’t a robot, you’re a human. Flaws are a feature, not a bug. They’re actually beautiful, the imperfections. Because they show that survival and progress requires all of us, because one person alone is too flawed to take on that weight. But together, we can take on any challenge because we compensate for each other’s weaknesses with our own strengths. Flaws humble us and remind us how we are weak, and in so being how we are the same.

But some of those flaws also make us easy to manipulate.

The social media business model, the literal one they drew up upon its creation, is that someone giving you a ‘like’ will addict you to the platform. This draws attention to the platform, and therefore advertisers with money along with demographic data to sell. And studies show that ‘likes’ are very much are addictive. You can’t eat them or even exchange them for a coupon. Regardless they cause a little rush of endorphins when you get them, and anything that does that is addictive. This is fact.

In this environment very few will express unpopular opinions. And I actually think that most of the time, that’s a good thing. There are a lot of people need to shut up and listen. Yes, including myself. People often forget that conformity can also be a good thing. But sometimes, not most of the time but every once in awhile, an unpopular opinion needs to be heard. A lot of important truths have started as controversial opinions. And I think that incentivizing human interaction with ‘likes’ can encourage the bad kind of conformity too.

It’s the reason why we’re all fake on Facebook. All of us. Admit it. As long as there is a way that you wish to be perceived, you’re faking it at least a little. And you do. We all do. None of us are above caring what other people think.

Because we all want to be cool. We all want to be accepted and loved. Our desire to be accepted in the tribe is one of the most deeply human qualities honed by billions of years of evolution. So naturally we all put ourselves out there in a way where we will be most accepted, with varying degrees of concern for authenticity.

So it becomes our own personal PR campaign. We choose how we are perceived. We have time to hone every phrase and pose. It grants us time to think about our responses based on how we want to be seen that we don’t have in the moment. We can tell people what we want them to know about us and what not. It’s a self reinforcing game of ego strokes as we are told how great we are, when it isn’t even our authentic selves being validated most of the time.

And the rush we’re subconsciously chasing is those delicious little likes and pieces of attention that shoot endorphins into our lizard brains. We really can’t help it, we’re human. And while it may not always be the case, over the course of time across all the billions of people using it, most actions within the social media landscape will be primarily incentivized by that endorphin rush because that’s the primary reward baked into the system.

If you think it doesn’t apply to you, I promise you that as long as you have a human brain, it does apply to you. And by the way studies actually show that the less you think you are able to be manipulated, the more you actually are because your guard is down. Also consider the truth that, in capitalism, if the product is free then you are the product. It’s no exaggeration to call it both Orwellian and Huxleian. And I think social media’s ubiquity is a testament to some very serious human brain design flaws.

III. The Exploit

And here is where I almost just quit the whole system altogether. And I did disengage almost completely for a time. Almost right away I could feel my lizard brain sinking into loneliness in the absence of my usual stream of digital affirmations. Like, in fact exactly like, an addict in withdrawal. I wondered if there was a way to make feed the addiction without all the harmful side effects. Because remember, it can also be a powerful tool for the positive. And unlike every advertisement, TV channel, magazine, movie, radio station, website, and so on fighting for my attention 24 hours a day every day, this is also the one medium wherein I have a some degree of control over the content.

What I’ve landed upon, at least for now, is just allowing addiction to be fed but with just a little more mindfulness. I have a line drawn now, I cannot allow the addiction to chase the endorphin rush with complaints, anger, to feed my ego, or so on. If my lizard brain is mostly in control of me, and it is, then I will only allow it to be incentivized by good.

Sure, in person I’ll be happy to debate politics and what not, but I think there’s something about arguing online that can never work. And I think it has something to do with how only 7 percent of human communication is conveyed by just the words alone. 38 percent is vocal elements, and 55 through facial expressions and body language. There’s some fundamental disconnect involved in debate on the internet that, when combined with what social media incentivizes, usually only serves to enrage and hurt people.

I'm done making complaint statuses. If I have complaints I will take them to someone who will hear them in person, someone I can vent to at least. If someone wants to have a disagreement, we can do it i person too. I will stop pretending to be someone I’m not. Because while a lot of that behavior is natural and fine, I just don’t want to be rewarded for it. I don't want my brain trained to do it. I will only allow the endorphin feedback to hit me for saying true and good things. And it has to be both. No bullshit.

Things like this:

If lizard brain wants to get that sweet hit, it better make someone else feel good first. I will be a better person, even if that means I have to manipulate myself into being it. I’m not particularly smart or wise, so maybe I just need this.

[junker-town]

The Ravens' cowardly, conflicted debate over Colin Kaepernick sums up the NFL hypocrisy

The coach and GM are interested in signing him. The owner is not. How it’s all playing out in Baltimore reveals a lot about the NFL.

Joe Flacco has been on the shelf with a bad back since last Wednesday. The Ravens backup quarterback, Ryan Mallett, has been struggling on the practice field. In the days since then, the Ravens have been talking publicly about their private deliberations about signing Colin Kaepernick to upgrade the No. 2 QB spot and give them a reliable starter should Flacco miss more time during the season.

The team’s self-aggrandizing handwringing over the question of signing Kaepernick has exposed a rift within the organization and reminded everyone of the hypocrisy of those deciding on Kaepernick's playing future.

Last Thursday head coach John Harbaugh took the unusual step of mentioning Kaepernick as a roster possibility to the press.

"He's a guy right now that's being talked about,” Harbaugh said Thursday, less than a day after Flacco’s injury. “We'll see what happens with that. Only speculation right now. He's a really good football player and like I said, I do believe he'll be playing in the National Football League this year."

The Ravens mentioned Kaepernick before the media. Why?

This the strangest part about the story, so far. It’s unusual in the first place for a coach to talk openly about players they’re considering to add to the roster.

Usually someone reports a team is interested in a player, information they most likely got via a team source or an agent, and maybe someone with the team will confirm in a follow up with reporters. But that’s about the extent of it. Coaches and general managers are conditioned to be notoriously tight-lipped about player acquisitions.

Harbaugh’s expressed his support for Kaepernick in the past. In March, he echoed his brother Jim’s (Kaepernick’s former coach with the 49ers) assessment that Kaepernick “can win games for people.”

He also said at the time that he didn’t believe Kaepernick was being blackballed. It’s harder to defend that notion given the reports out of Baltimore this week.

Harbaugh may have put Kaepernick’s name out there last week because he knew he’d get asked about him.

This could also be a case of Harbaugh publicly lobbying the team’s owner to let them sign Kaepernick.

Kaepernick fits a pattern for the kind of veteran free agents Ozzie Newsome has signed over the years. They’re players like Anquan Boldin, Steve Smith, Owen Daniels, Chris Canty, Will Hill. These are guys who fill a specific need for the team, usually as kind of a one- or two-year stopgap, who aren’t the most expensive players on the market for one reason or another.

Newsome and Harbaugh may see a quarterback who’s a big upgrade at backup and one who will keep the team competitive if Flacco’s back injury creates more problems during the season. But Kaepernick isn’t a player the GM and head coach can just sign because he’s got the talent and addresses a need the team has. It’s not a decision they can make without the owner.

Floating his name like this in the locker room and in the public can serve as a trial balloon, a way to gauge the reaction and/or put some pressure on owner Steve Biscotti.

It looks like that’s exactly what happened too. According to the latest report, Harbaugh and Newsome “support” adding Kaepernick to the roster. Owner Steve Bisciotti doesn’t.

Ravens HC John Harbaugh & GM Ozzie Newsome support signing Colin Kaepernick, but have met resistance from owner Steve Bisciotti per sources

— Dianna Russini (@diannaESPN) August 2, 2017

The team responded to that report within two hours.

Statement on today’s report regarding Colin Kaepernick: http://pic.twitter.com/ubfpwVA35O

— Baltimore Ravens (@Ravens) August 2, 2017

That doesn’t contradict Russini’s report. She said “meeting resistance” from the owner. The Ravens’ statement is more specific, saying that the owner has not “blocked” them from signing Kaepernick.

It’s an unusual statement to have to make, but an inevitable one after Bisciotti publicly inserted himself into the decision making process over the weekend.

The owner gets involved

At a fan forum on Sunday, Bisciotti said he didn’t like Kaepernick’s protest and wasn’t sure he could help the team win games. That’s the most direct quote we have from an owner disagreeing with Kaepernick’s protest.

Bisciotti and team president Dick Cass said at that same event that they were talking to fans — namely the ones who buy premium seats and season tickets — and sponsors about the possibility of signing Kaepernick.

"We're very sensitive to it, and we're monitoring it and we're still, as [general manager Ozzie Newsome] says, we're scrimmaging it," Bisciotti said Sunday at a fan event with Roger Goodell at M&T Bank Stadium. "We're trying to figure what's the right tact. Pray for us."

If circumventing the head coach a proven GM to crowd source a personnel decision seems weird to you, that’s because it is.

Remember something Adam Schefter said last week:

“Do I think that certain owners have blocked teams from visits or interest? I do, I do believe that. And I think that there has been more interest in him from the coaching and front office level than there has been at the ownership level. So it was always going to take a unique opportunity for him to be brought in, in the right place, at the right spot, at the right time.”

Giants owner John Mara openly worried about the angry fan mail he’d get for signing Kaepernick, but was more than willing to stand by Josh Brown, a serial domestic abuser.

Harbaugh being so open about their interest in Kaepernick as a means of lobbying the owner makes more sense with that insight and the report from Russini.

What makes this especially troubling for the Ravens weren’t concerned with what fans or sponsors thought when it came to Ray Rice or Ray Lewis following their involvement in highly publicized off-field incidents. (Bisciotti lobbied Roger Goodell directly to get Rice’s initial suspension reduced to just two games following his arrest for domestic violence in February 2014. It wasn’t until TMZ leaked the video of Rice punching his then-fiancé that the released him).

Bisciotti’s comments represent the high point of the league’s hypocrisy when it comes to signing Kaepernick. Just because he was more open about it than any other NFL owner has been, doesn’t make it any less jarring ... or just plain dumb. The former 49ers quarterback took a knee during the national anthem, a harmless protest to draw attention to a serious problem in our country, but somehow he’s been vilified for it and written off as too controversial to sign, no matter how good of a football player he may be.

Fans and sponsors weren’t the only ones the Ravens owner consulted. He also reached out to franchise legend Ray Lewis, which is an odd move in and of itself.

Ray Lewis weighs in

Why consult Lewis in the first place?

So in a way, Biscoitti wondering what Ray thinks, he's also feeling out Ray to get his blessing, which in turn might get blessing of fans.

— Kevin Van Valkenburg (@KVanValkenburg) July 31, 2017

The problem here is that I’m not sure Ray Lewis is capable of giving the team an unbiased opinion.

Look at what he’s said about Kaepernick since last fall. It’s clear that Lewis doesn’t support him, and after listening to him talk more about it this week, I’m not sure Lewis even understands the full situation.

Here’s what he said on Fox Sports back in September 2016:

“I understand what you’re trying to do, but take the flag out of it. [...] I think if Colin really just steps back, because to affect change, if you don’t have a real solution, if you ain’t seen as a true activist to go into these hoods and do these things on a daily basis and not just jump up and protest because you’re sick of this one thing …”

Kaepernick pledged a million dollars of his own money to “real solutions.” Did Lewis overlook that?

In June, Lewis later repeated another narrative crawling its way through the NFL media when he said that Kaepernick needs to choose between playing football and being an activist.

The issue came up again on Monday’s episode of Undisputed. Lewis and Shannon Sharpe debated the issue. I’m not trying to be snarky when I say it’s hard to make sense of what Lewis is saying here. The one thing you can take away is that while Lewis acknowledges issue of police brutality and the disparate treatment of non-whites, he’s apparently against anyone in the NFL taking a stand on the matter.

After Lewis gets around to acknowledging the need to bring in the best players available, Sharpe brings it back to Mallett and Kaepernick. Lewis can’t bring himself to admit that Kaepernick is even potentially a better option for the Ravens backup QB.

That brings us to Tuesday when Lewis posted a video on Twitter to address the issue. The long and short of it is that Lewis advises Kaepernick to set aside his social activism if he wants to play football.

brotherhood - we are in this together http://pic.twitter.com/Q3HpPA0uqr

— Ray Lewis (@raylewis) August 1, 2017

Suspend for a moment the notion that a player cannot both play football and be active in the community. (Players do both all the time; they’re encouraged to do so, albeit with issues seen as less controversial by the NFL). What Lewis tells Kaepernick to do is impossible without somehow bending the space-time continuum.

"If you do nothing else, young man, get back on the football field and let your play speak for itself. And what you do off the field, don't let too many people know, because they gonna judge you anyway, no matter what you do, no matter if it's good or bad."

Getting back on the field is exactly what Kaepernick is trying to do, but he needs a team to actually sign him before that can happen. Lewis also seems to be overlooking the fact that Kaepernick has said that he will not kneel during the national anthem this year.

It should be pretty clear that, whatever Bisciotti’s intentions, Ray Lewis was not the right person to ask.

There’s still a chance the Ravens could sign Kaepernick, especially if Flacco’s back problems flare up again later in camp or during the preseason. However, given how badly they’ve handled it up to this point, it seems unlikely. The owner made it clear, intentionally and through their own ham-fisted handling of this, that he doesn’t want Kaepernick on the roster.

Too bad. It’s an incredibly short-sighted decision to eschew from signing a player who would make the team better because the owner disagrees with Kaepernick’s stance and is afraid of whatever controversy the move might generate.

If Bisciotti was determined to get an approving nod from Ray Lewis in order for this to happen, he should’ve listened to another piece of advice from his cherished counsel:

“You got to be willing to walk in a storm. That's what I tell people all the time.”

[viralhottopics]

Did Cambridge Analytica influence the Brexit vote and the US election?

Nigel Oakess company is at the centre of a growing controversy over the use of personal data during elections. But is there any evidence that what it does works?

On Saturday 23 June 2012, David Miller received an angry email. Miller, a professor of sociology at Bath University, runs something called the Powerbase website, which records the political and business connections of influential people. The writer of the email, who seemed to be based in Russia, explained that all the content about Nigel Oakes, a PR fixer and political consultant, published on the website, was fake and demanded that it be taken down.

Miller asked for the inaccuracies to be pointed out so that he could make corrections, only for Oakes himself to make contact, a rare event given that, according to ex-colleagues, the old Etonian likes to cultivate an air of mystery. Nice enough, bit machiavellian, one said.

An ex-boyfriend of Lady Helen Windsor, Oakes once ran a mobile disco before joining the Tories favourite advertising agency, Saatchi & Saatchi.

Powerbase had suggested that Oakess claim to have studied psychology at University College London, made on one of his firms websites, was suspect. Miller has a letter from the university saying it has no record of him studying there. But in his email to Miller, Oakes admitted that while everything on Powerbase about him was true, he wanted it made clear that he had established something called the Behavioural Dynamics Working Group.

The group worked with two respected psychology professors, Adrian Furnham and Barrie Gunter, on understanding and potentially changing peoples behaviour. And it is the key to understanding how a former DJ ended up launching a network of behavioural-profiling firms whose expertise has been eagerly sought by politicians, defence ministries, Brexit campaigners, and now even the US president.

Oakes told Miller that he had been keen to employ the groups methodology and required academics to fill in the scientific blanks to my (largely commercial) knowledge.

But Furnham and Gunter told the website ItalyEurope24 that they cut their ties with Oakes because he was using them to further his career and making claims that could not be substantiated. A spokesman for Oakes insisted he had always had a good working relationship with both men.

The setback did nothing to diminish Oakess taste for psychological profiling, and in 1992 he set up a firm that specialised in influencing consumer behaviour through the use of aromas. Smells can influence attitudes and therefore behaviour, Oakes said when he launched Marketing Aromatics. The company appears to have had limited success but, by the late 1990s, Oakes had become interested in more than selling products: he was selling politicians. He established Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL) Group, which in 1999 won a deal to enhance the reputation of Indonesian president Abdurrahman Wahid.

SCL specialised in influencing behaviour by identifying key audiences and developing strategies to connect with them, and it offered a taste of things to come. Those who visited its Jakarta office told the Independent that it resembled a Tom Clancy novel, a vast room with huge screens and a huge one-way mirror behind which men and women sat glued to the internet.

The Jakarta ops centre appears very similar to one built by a company called Vision 360 for the James Bond film Goldeneye. This may be more than coincidence: Vision 360 built a similar control room for SCL when, in a bid to win military contracts, it began exhibiting at the annual Defence and Security Equipment International show.

According to a press release, SCLs Ops centre contained a 12-screen media feed, a 4x3m LED presenter video wall, 62 computer screens, a large 6x4m rear-projected screen, plus an enormous 10x4m operations overview screen. It claimed Oakes was delighted with it.

Afterwards, SCL started winning government contracts, including one from the Foreign Office to help counter violent jihadi propaganda in Pakistan.

As more contracts rolled in, SCL attracted funding from powerful investors including Lord Marland, a trade envoy under David Cameron. Oakess ambition for his company grew. In 2007, SCL paid $20,000 to a Washington lobbying company, Global Policy Partners, to promote it in the US. SCL won contracts with the Pentagon to conduct surveys in Iran and Yemen. Psych-ops was big business and people were just chucking money around, said one person familiar with the company.

In 2015, it secured a $750,000 contract to help Nato states counter Russian propaganda in eastern Europe.

At the same time it was wooing the military, SCL was using its skills to help win elections. Several Caribbean politicians paid handsomely for its services and its reputation flourished. It spawned another company, Cambridge Analytica, which sought to use data modelling and psychographic profiling [classifying people into personality types] to connect with people in ways that move them to action. Cambridge Analytica forged links with the US right, winning contracts with several Republican governors and working for Ted Cruz on his failed campaign to become the Republican presidential candidate.

According to returns filed with the US tax authorities, in 2014 it received more than $1m from America Inc, whose mission is to educate Americans about traditional American values. America Incs president is L Brent Bozell III, a Tea Party sympathiser who founded something called the Media Research Center to neutralise leftwing bias in the news media and popular culture.

The US billionaire Robert Mercer, a major financial supporter of Donald Trump, has reportedly become a Cambridge Analytica shareholder. Photograph: ddp USA/REX Shutterstock

The US billionaire Robert Mercer a major Trump supporter who is close friends with Bozell and the former Ukip leader Nigel Farage was so impressed with Cambridge Analytica that he has reportedly become a major shareholder. Trumps chief strategist, Steve Bannon, used to sit on its board. Perhaps inevitably, given these connections, the Trump campaign ended up paying almost 5m to the company to help it target swing voters. Mercer introduced Farage to Cambridge Analytica, according to Andy Wigmore, communications director of Leave.EU, the Brexit campaign championed by Farage.

On its website it boasts: We collect up to 5,000 data points on over 220 million Americans, and use more than 100 data variables to model target audience groups and predict the behaviour of like-minded people. Its chief executive, Alexander Nix, is an evangelist for the companys ability to reach voters that ordinary companies cant.

In an article for Campaign magazine last February, he described how his company had helped supercharge Leave.EUs social media campaign by ensuring the right messages are getting to the right voters online.

But some are dubious about the behavioural prediction claims. Frederike Kaltheuner of Privacy International, the organisation that campaigns against intrusive surveillance, said that she had tested the technology using her own Facebook data. She said: Cambridge Analytica uses data and machine-learning to profile people and predict personalities and attributes. When I did their test I had a 65% probability of being male, and [was] likely [to be] homosexual.

How this new generation of profiling companies is collecting data is becoming an issue for privacy campaigners and watchdogs. Responding to the disquiet, the Information Commissioners Office has announced that it is to conduct an analysis of the use of big-data analytics, including for political purposes.

A spokesman for Cambridge Analytica said fears about its use of psychographics were misplaced. Theres nothing magical or Pied Piper-ish about it. It doesnt give us special powers over people. Were all trying to better use the behavioural sciences to do our work in more effective ways.

Indeed, Cambridge Analytica is just one of many new companies trying to reach voters in novel ways. Both Barack Obama and Hillary Clintons campaigns employed behavioural profiling companies. The Vote Leave campaign paid 3.5m to a tiny Canadian company called AggregateIQ, which specialises in targeted Facebook advertising and profiling.

Cambridge Analyticas chief executive, Alexander Nix, at the companys office on 5th Avenue in New York. Photograph: The Washington Post/Getty Images

The Vote Leave campaign owes a great deal of its success to the work of AggregateIQ, Vote Leaves director Dominic Cummings has said. We couldnt have done it without them.

Puzzlingly, the phone number for AIQs president, Zack Massingham, is the same as that of SCL Canada, according to a cached version of SCLs website, now taken down. SCL explained that it had partnered with AIQ in the past and that the Canadian firm had once acted as a point of contact. It was recently brought to our attention that their contact details were still on the company website, so we updated the page by removing them, SCL said.

Massingham, who confirmed SCLs account, told the Observer his companys focus was about engaging with a campaigns supporters and tailoring the message to them. Its about communicating with them in a timely and meaningful manner, not giving them too much content, and what you do give them is within the lines of what they want to hear.

A debate is raging. Can behavioural profiling influence elections or is it a hyped technology, albeit with major consequences for privacy? Either way, the industry has come a long way since the 1980s when it first fascinated Oakes. Behavioural modelling involving big-data analytics has arguably passed an inflection point, said Dr Simon Moores, an expert on cybersecurity. Thanks to the growth of predictive analytics, algorithms and big data-mining businesses you can now look forward to a future thats made up of equal parts Orwell, Kafka, and Huxley.

Read more: http://bit.ly/2lNBdyX

from Did Cambridge Analytica influence the Brexit vote and the US election?