North Carolina’s Police Attack on Election Marchers Had a Long History Behind It

A racist sheriff and a system of voter suppression meet in a cloud of pepper spray.

By JULIA CRAVEN OCT 31, 2020
THE SLATEST

Early voting in Fayetteville, North Carolina, on Thursday. Alex Wong/Getty Images

On Saturday, Alamance County sheriff’s deputies and city police pepper-sprayed a crowd of about 200 people who were peacefully marching to the polls in Graham, North Carolina, without warning and on slim reasoning. Graham police claimed that protesters didn’t have the adequate permits to close off the road, while the Alamance County Sheriff’s Office said that the march was shut down out of “concerns for the safety of all.”

If it is at all difficult to understand how a police department could act so heinously—particularly when children and elderly community members are present within the crowd—then it’s important for one to grasp the context that the law enforcement operates within.

This is the second time since 2016 that Alamance County has made national news for its treatment of voters. In 2017, 12 residents, most of whom were Black and on parole or probation for felony charges, were charged for illegally voting in the 2016 election. If someone is convicted of a felony in North Carolina, they lose their right to vote for the entirety of their incarceration and until any parole or probation has concluded—another key method of voter suppression in the state.

“There is no doubt that in North Carolina’s history, felony disenfranchisement legislation was enacted by legislators as a way to keep African Americans from voting and participating in democracy,” Orville Vernon Burton, the Judge Matthew J. Perry distinguished professor of history at Clemson University, told WRAL in July.

While it’s up to the local district attorney to bring charges in these cases, police—particularly sheriffs, who wield an astounding amount of power within their jurisdictions—have a critical role in setting the tone for the prosecutions.

Voter intimidation is an omnipresent concern in North Carolina, a state that has tried to prevent Black and brown voters from casting ballots with “surgical precision” since Reconstruction. During the late 1800s, a high-level white supremacist campaign in North Carolina went to extreme acts of violence—including massacring Black residents in Wilmington—in order to regain political power within the state. Less outwardly violent voter suppression tactics have cropped up in the state following the Supreme Court’s weakening of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby v. Holder, such as North Carolina’s infamous voter ID law and gerrymandering so precise that every district in the state had to be redrawn.

Prior to the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Black people across the South were at risk of being arrested by police on Election Day for minor crimes by officers hoping to deter voters from casting ballots. In recent years, there have been complaints about suspiciously timed arrests and traffic stops involving Black residents on Election Day.

In North Carolina, “the sheriff’s office is a creation of the state constitution. The sheriff’s office is on the same hierarchical tier as the governor’s office,” explained Dawn Blagrove, executive director of the Carolina Justice Policy Center, to WUNC in May. “So you need to know what they think, where they stand policy-wise, and what type of culture they’re going to create in your county.”

Alamance County Sheriff Terry Johnson, who has held the position for almost 18 years, has a record defined by racism and intimidation. As the 2004 general election approached, Johnson announced that he would send deputies to the homes of all new registrants with a Hispanic-sounding name to investigate whether they were citizens. He claimed that undocumented people were registering to vote at local Division of Motor Vehicles offices with falsified documents. (The Justice Department sent election monitors to Alamance in 2004, 2008, and 2012.)

Johnson has a history of making incredibly racist statements about immigrants—including egregious, nonsensical claims that it’s socially acceptable to sexually assault underage girls in Mexico. The sheriff has been vehement about incarcerating “criminal immigrants,” or “taco eaters,” who are coming into the country to “victimize our children, our citizens, with drugs, murders, rapes, robberies, you name it.” In early 2019, he told the Alamance County Board of Commissioners that undocumented “criminals” were “raping our citizens in many, many ways.”

Beyond his rhetoric, Johnson has used his office to wreak havoc on immigrant communities in Alamance. The sheriff’s office was sued by the Justice Department for an alleged pattern of abusive enforcement against Latinos, including charging Latino drivers with traffic violations at least six times as often as non-Latino drivers. (A district court dismissed the suit, and it was then settled in lieu of an appeal, with the sheriff’s office agreeing to implement a “bias-free policing plan” and other reforms.) Johnson has also advocated for higher policing budgets in order to crack down on immigration, and used money from the $3.6 million the county received from housing Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees in 2019 to give out bonuses to his staff.

This summer, as citizens were demanding the removal of a Confederate statue in Graham, the sheriff’s office announced that the city’s police department would not be granting permits to protesters. When an activist asked Johnson why he and his deputies were “breaking the law” by forgoing North Carolina’s mask mandate, he replied: “Ma’am, you’re breaking the law. We know you’re a member of antifa.”

Trump adviser falsely claims Democrats could "steal" electoral votes

Orion Rummler


WATCH https://tinyurl.com/y29skxyc

Trump campaign senior adviser Jason Miller falsely claimed on Sunday that Democrats would try to "steal" electoral votes after election night if President Trump appears to be ahead, signaling a coming legal fight over mail-in ballots that are counted after Nov. 3.

Reality check: Electoral College votes are not awarded until December, and no state ever reports its final count on election night — despite Trump's insistence that the election should end on Nov. 3 and that the courts should not allow ballots to be counted in the days following.

The big picture: Amid massive early turnout, Americans are expected to vote by mail in record numbers this election — and polling has found that more Democrats than Republicans said they would mail ballots.

Many of those votes won't be counted by election night, as states process more mailed ballots than they ever have before.

That delay could mean that Trump will appear to lead on election night, which would shift as more Democratic votes are tallied.

Trump has baselessly accused Democrats of trying to "steal" the election by pointing to efforts that expand voting access, such as extending mail-in ballot deadlines in Pennsylvania and building an in-person voting center in the California suburbs.

Between the lines: Trump has repeatedly declined to say whether he would accept the results of the 2020 election if he loses to Joe Biden.

He told reporters in September that he believes the Supreme Court may have to decide the result, after claiming that the only way he can lose the election is if it is "rigged."

The Trump campaign is reportedly raising money to continue ballot fights into mid-December, per the New York Times.

What they're saying: "If you speak with many smart Democrats, they believe that President Trump will be ahead on election night, probably getting 280 electoral, somewhere in that range," Miller said on ABC's "This Week."

"And then they're going to try to steal it back after the election. We believe that we will be over 290 electoral votes on election night.

"So no matter what they try to do, what kind of hijinks or lawsuits or whatever kind of nonsense they try to pull off, we're still going to have enough electoral votes to get President Trump re-elected."

Scoop: Trump's plan to declare premature victory

Jonathan Swan AXIOS

Photo: Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Getty Images

President Trump has told confidants he'll declare victory on Tuesday night if it looks like he's "ahead," according to three sources familiar with his private comments. That's even if the Electoral College outcome still hinges on large numbers of uncounted votes in key states like Pennsylvania.

The latest: Speaking to reporters on Sunday evening, Trump denied that he would declare victory prematurely, before adding, "I think it's a terrible thing when ballots can be collected after an election. I think it's a terrible thing when states are allowed to tabulate ballots for a long period of time after the election is over."

He continued: "I think it's terrible that we can't know the results of an election the night of the election. ... We're going to go in the night of, as soon as that election's over, we're going in with our lawyers."

"We don't want to have Pennsylvania, where you have a political governor, a very partisan guy. ... We don't want to be in a position where he's allowed, every day, to watch ballots come in. See if we can only find 10,000 more ballots."

Behind the scenes: Trump has privately talked through this scenario in some detail in the last few weeks, describing plans to walk up to a podium on election night and declare he has won.

For this to happen, his allies expect he would need to either win or have commanding leads in Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Texas, Iowa, Arizona and Georgia.

Why it matters: Trump's team is preparing to falsely claim that mail-in ballots counted after Nov. 3 — a legitimate count expected to favor Democrats — are evidence of election fraud.

Details: 

Many prognosticators say that on election night, Trump will likely appear ahead in Pennsylvania — though the state's final outcome could change substantially as mail-in ballots are counted over the following days.

Trump's team is preparing to claim baselessly that if that process changes the outcome in Pennsylvania from the picture on election night, then Democrats would have "stolen" the election.

Trump's advisers have been laying the groundwork for this strategy for weeks, but this is the first account of Trump explicitly discussing his election night intentions.

What they're saying: Asked for comment, the Trump campaign's communications director Tim Murtaugh said, "This is nothing but people trying to create doubt about a Trump victory. When he wins, he's going to say so."

Trump campaign senior adviser Jason Miller predicted that Trump "will be re-elected handily and no amount of post-election Democratic thievery will be able to change the results."

Reality check: Mail-in ballots counted after Election Day as set forth in state-by-state rules are as legitimate as in-person votes recorded on Nov. 3.

Many states won't be done counting mail ballots by Tuesday night.

In Pennsylvania, state law prevents election officials from counting mail-in ballots before Election Day.

Night-of counts may be deceptive. It could be days, if not weeks, before we know who won Pennsylvania. If it's a close race, this could also be true for other states, given the record numbers of Americans who voted by mail this year.

Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar said on NBC's "Meet the Press" today that there could be 10x as many mail ballots this year than in 2016, "so, yes, it will take longer" to count.

"I expect that the overwhelming majority of ballots in Pennsylvania, that's mail-in and absentee ballots, as well as in-person ballots, will be counted within a matter of days," Boockvar said.

What we're watching: Miller, on ABC's "This Week," predicted 290+ electoral votes for Trump on election night, and he claimed Democrats are "just going to try to steal it back after the election."

He described any prospective challenges by Democrats as "hijinks or lawsuits or whatever kind of nonsense."

Between the lines: Trump advisers are more optimistic about winning than they were three weeks ago, based on my conversations with multiple senior campaign officials over the past week, including two officials with direct knowledge of sensitive internal data.

They said analyses of early-vote totals in battleground states indicate he's doing substantially worse in Iowa and Georgia compared with this point in 2016, but better than expected in Texas, Nevada, North Carolina, Arizona and Wisconsin.

Just a few weeks ago, senior Trump advisers were bearish about Wisconsin and had reduced TV advertising there to an insignificant figure. A senior campaign official told me, then, that the state didn't figure in his paths to 270 electoral votes.

But that appears to have changed. In recent days, senior Trump advisers have privately expressed growing optimism about Wisconsin, based on their analysis of early vote data.

The other side: “It comes as no surprise that Donald Trump and his campaign plan to declare victory before all the votes are counted. That has been his strategy for months, and nobody should fall for it,” Sen. Bernie Sanders said in a statement to Axios.

“It's why he is demonizing mail-in ballots and sabotaging the postal service. ... We will not allow that to happen. Every vote must and will be counted."

Biden Warns Trump Against Declaring Victory Early on Tuesday Night

By DANIEL POLITINOV 01, 2020

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden speaks at a get out the vote event at Sharon Baptist Church on November 1, 2020 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

 Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Former vice president Joe Biden was asked Sunday night about a report that President Donald Trump is planning to declare victory early on Tuesday. “My response is the president is not going to steal this election,” Biden told reporters in Philadelphia. Earlier in the day, Sen. Kamala Harris said the goal of the Democratic campaign is to make sure the victory is so resounding that it won’t even be an issue. “First of all, we plan to decisively win this election so I don’t think we’re going to need to get to that point,” she told reporters in North Carolina.

Biden reacted after Axios reported that Trump is planning to get ahead of things and will declare victory Tuesday night if it looks like he’s “ahead.” Even if there are still lots of uncounted votes in key states like Pennsylvania, Trump has apparently told those around him that he will prematurely declare himself the winner, Axios reported, citing three anonymous sources.

People close to the president believe that Trump will be ready to declare himself the winner of the election if he has significant leads in Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Texas, Iowa, Arizona, and Georgia. Simply declaring himself the winner wouldn’t actually change much, but it would allow him to challenge ballots from a position of perceived victory as there are more and more signs that the president’s allies will be arguing that mail-in ballots counted after Tuesday should not be valid.

Later Sunday, Trump denied he would prematurely declare victory but he also raised questions about the validity of ballots counted after Election Day. “I think it’s a terrible thing when ballots can be collected after an election. I think it’s a terrible thing when states are allowed to tabulate ballots for a long period of time after the election is over,” Trump said. The president added it was “terrible” to not know the results on the night of an election and previewed a long legal battle ahead. “We’re going to go in the night of, as soon as that election’s over, we’re going in with our lawyers.”

Trump denies he will declare victory before results are in

Julian Borger in Washington and Martin Pengelly in New York
THE GUARDIAN
Sun 1 Nov 2020 
 

Donald Trump arrives for a campaign rally at Michigan sports stars park, in Washington, Michigan, on Sunday. Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP

Donald Trump embarked on a blistering final campaign sprint on Sunday, lining up 10 rallies in seven swing states over two days in an effort to defy the polls and replicate his shock election win in 2016. As he did so, it was reported that he is planning to declare victory on Tuesday, before the result is called.

Citing three anonymous sources “familiar with his private comments”, the news site Axios said Trump “has told confidants he’ll declare victory on Tuesday night if it looks like he’s ‘ahead’.

“That’s even if the electoral college outcome still hinges on large numbers of uncounted votes in key states like Pennsylvania,” the site said, adding: “Trump has privately talked through this scenario in some detail in the last few weeks, describing plans to walk up to a podium on election night and declare he has won.

“For this to happen, his allies expect he would need to either win or have commanding leads in Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Texas, Iowa, Arizona and Georgia.”

Trump denied the Axios story, describing it at false, but then confirmed he would try to shut down vote counting as soon as the polls close on Tuesday.

“I don’t think it’s fair that we have to wait for a long period of time after the election,” the president told journalists in North Carolina “As soon as the election is over - we’re going in with our lawyers.”

Asked about the Axios report, Trump’s Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, said: “My response is the president’s not gonna steal this election.”

According to FiveThirtyEight.com, Trump leads in Ohio, Texas and Iowa while Biden is up in Florida, North Carolina, Georgia and Arizona. The races are all exceptionally tight: the biggest lead in the FiveThirtyEight.com polling average is Biden by three points in Arizona, the smallest Trump by 0.2 in Ohio.

Under the coronavirus pandemic, early and mail-in voting has reached unprecedented levels, fuelling expectations of record turnout but also fears many states will take longer than usual to count their ballots.

Trump’s tactics, Axios said, will depend on continuing to claim without evidence ballots counted after election day are illegitimate and evidence of voter fraud. Vote counting after election day is a regular feature of US elections.

CHILD ABUSE

A child holds a flag as supporters wait for the rally of Donald Trump at Hickory regional airport in Hickory, North Carolina, on Sunday. Photograph: Hannah McKay/Reuters

Many of Trump’s claims have focused on Pennsylvania, where the race is close but where votes counted after 3 November are expected to favour Biden who leads most national and battleground polls. Both candidates campaigned heavily in the state this weekend.

“Pennsylvania is critical to this election,” Biden told a drive-in rally in Philadelphia on Sunday evening, describing the president as an obstacle to defeating the pandemic.

“To beat the virus we’ve first got to beat Donald Trump,” he said “He’s the virus.”

Democrats have long worried that Trump will declare victory early, aiming to sow uncertainty and legal battles over ballots and results. Some observers have called the tactic the “red mirage”, which former housing secretary Julián Castro said this week “sounds like a super villain, and it’s just as insidious”.

“On election night, there’s a real possibility that the data will show Republicans leading early, before all the votes are counted,” Castro said. “Then they can pretend something sinister’s going on when the counts change in Democrats’ favour.”
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On Sunday, on CNN’s State of the Union, Biden adviser Anita Dunn said she thought the victor would be known some time on 4 November, the day after election day.

“A lot of the early states that are battleground states, especially in the Sunbelt, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, are states that tend to get their votes counted on election night,” Dunn said. “I think we will get some sort of indicator what kind of night it’s going to be from those three states. We will see. Obviously, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin may be slower.”

The Pennsylvania official in charge of elections, Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, a Democrat, told NBC’s Meet the Press there could be 10 times as many mail-in ballots than in 2016 and added: “I expect that the overwhelming majority of ballots in Pennsylvania, that’s mail-in and absentee ballots, as well as in-person ballots, will be counted within a matter of days.”

Axios said the Trump campaign was bullish about key states including Texas, Nevada, North Carolina, Arizona and Wisconsin. On ABC’s This Week, Trump adviser Jason Miller claimed: “If you speak with many smart Democrats, they believe President Trump will be ahead on election night, probably getting 280 electoral [votes], somewhere in that range. And then they’re going to try to steal it back after the election.

“We believe that we’ll be over 290 electoral votes on election night. So no matter what they try to do, what kind of hijinks or law suits or whatever kind of nonsense they try to pull off, we’re still going to have enough electoral votes to get President Trump re-elected.”

Miller’s claim rested on the idea that all ballots must be counted on election day, a legal and political nonsense. Nonetheless, the Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh told Axios: “When he wins, he’s going to say so.”

Trump’s final 2020 tour, which began on Sunday in Michigan, is aimed at holding states he won four years ago and shoring up support in traditional Republican strongholds, like North Carolina and Georgia. Biden was due to hold two drive-in meetings in Pennsylvania, one of a string of former Democratic bastions in the north-east which Trump won from Hillary Clinton by less than a point.

New polls showed Biden holding on to a lead in Pennsylvania. The New York Times and Siena College gave the Democrat a six-point edge, while the Washington Post and ABC showed a seven-point margin

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 Supporters attend Trump’s campaign rally in Washington, Michigan, Sunday.

 Photograph: Carlos Barría/Reuters

In Michigan, Trump repeated some of the messages that worked in 2016, highlighting the impact of globalisation on the car industry.

“I gave you a lot of auto plants, so I think we’re even,” he told a crowd at a wind- and rain-swept rally in the town of Washington.

One new car plant has been announced since Trump took office, while Michigan automotive jobs had fallen by 2,400 even before the Covid-19 pandemic. Employment in the sector is down more than 18,000 in the state, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Trump’s other principal line of attack was to warn voters Biden would implement a drastic lockdown that would kill jobs. The president has insisted the nation has “turned the corner” despite record numbers of new cases across the country, and warnings of a spike in deaths over the winter.

Trump has insisted on holding mass rallies with no social distancing, at which few wear masks. A study by Stanford University economists estimated at least 30,000 coronavirus infections and 700 deaths caused by 18 Trump rallies between June and September.

“We’re in for a whole lot of hurt,” Anthony Fauci, the country’s leading expert on infectious disease, told the Washington Post. “It’s not a good situation. All the stars are aligned in the wrong place as you go into the fall and winter season, with people congregating at home indoors. You could not possibly be positioned more poorly.”

A NBC and Wall Street Journal poll on Sunday put Biden up 10 points, a majority of voters saying they were unhappy with the president’s handling of the pandemic and the direction of the country. The same poll four years ago had Clinton up but by only four. In 2016 there were many more undecided and third-party voters.

The Trump camp has stepped up signals that they will look to Republican-leaning courts to cast doubt on the integrity of the enormous volume of postal ballots. In Texas, a federal court will hear a lawsuit on Monday aimed at having 117,000 votes in Houston thrown out because they were cast at curbside ballot boxes set up to make voting easier during the pandemic, which the Republican plaintiffs argue was illegal.

The Texas supreme court has twice rejected a similar argument but a federal court in Houston has agreed to hear the case, presided over by an ultra-conservative judge.

Trump finds unlikely backers in prominent 

pro-democracy Asian figures

Hong Kong tycoon and dissidents praise US president’s hardline approach towards China but others dispute its authenticity

Emma Graham-Harrison
Sun 1 Nov 2020 THE GUARDIAN 
 

Media mogul Jimmy Lai praised Donald Trump in an editorial of his Apple Daily newspaper. Photograph: Tyrone Siu/Reuters

Jimmy Lai, Hong Kong media tycoon and one of the most prominent pro-democracy figures in the city, waded into the US election in its final days, with an enthusiastic endorsement of the incumbent in his Apple Daily newspaper.

“I find a stronger sense of security in [Donald] Trump,” he wrote in an editorial that praised the US president for his “hardline” approach to Beijing.

His position is echoed by many in Hong Kong’s increasingly battered pro-democracy movement, across Taiwan and among many exiled Chinese dissidents living in America, including blind lawyer Chen Guangcheng, who endorsed Trump at the Republican national convention.

The US president might not seem like a natural ally for pro-democracy campaigners after years of public support for strongmen and dictators, undermining the press at home, and even attacking domestic protesters as “rioters”.

At a time of increased hate attacks on Asian Americans he has also used racist rhetoric about Covid-19, describing it as “kung flu” and the “China virus”. Advocacy groups have warned Trump’s language could have dangerous consequences.

But Lai and others who want democracy for China see in Trump’s unpredictable approach to foreign policy, and his escalating confrontations with Beijing, their greatest hope of challenging Chinese Communist party rule.

“The Trump administration might be the hand that eventually pushes China to democracy,” dissident Wang Juntao, who fled into exile after the crackdown in Tiananmen Square in 1989, told local New York paper The City.

In Taiwan a recent poll found that independence-leaning Taiwanese back Trump strongly. 80% of Democratic Progressive party supporters wanted US voters to return him to office, the Taiwan Times reported.

These enthusiastic Trump supporters are motivated by the president’s turn away from decades of US engagement with Beijing, rather than his personal politics, said Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS China Institute in London.

“They are focusing much more on confronting the challenges posed by the Communist party of China than they are focusing on the principles of democracy and human rights,” Tsang said.

Since Nixon, US presidents had all “to slightly different extents, belonged to the school of engagement with China”, Tsang added. Trump began his presidency with a similar approach, so keen to strike a trade deal that he held off taking action over human rights abuses in Xinjiang to smooth negotiations.

But amid escalating tensions over everything from the coronavirus to the economy and allegations of industrial espionage, he has broken definitively with that tradition, deploying the strongest rhetoric on China since the early days of the cold war.

Trump has also brought in a series of sanctions over alleged abuses in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, boosted diplomatic and military support for self-ruled Taiwan, and challenged Chinese-owned tech firms operating in the US.

For prominent figures like Lai, that has meant support for both his cause, and him personally. When the tycoon was arrested by Hong Kong authorities in August, Trump denounced the detention as “a terrible thing”.

Lai’s media empire has even been accused of trying to actively meddle in the US election. He recently apologised for the role the Apple Daily played in a report on Hunter Biden’s alleged Chinese business links.

He admitted funds from his private firm had been used to pay for it, but said he personally had “nothing to do” with its commissioning or dissemination.

Support for Trump is far from universal among critics of China, however. Kevin Yam, a Hong Kong-based lawyer, is among those who argue that the lure of a hardline stance against Beijing is superficial, and the president’s position on other issues will ultimately undermine everything they are fighting for.

“I dispute the very idea that Trump is ‘tough on China’ given his record, and his words and deeds make it hard for him to have credibility when pushing a human rights agenda around the world,” said Yam who laid out his concerns in an editorial for Ming Pao and said he was showered with abuse when it came out.

“If an anti-universal values power ‘beats’ another, that’s not a triumph for freedom, it’s just Orwellian Nineteen Eighty-Four-style endless mutual destruction as between hegemons,” he wrote in an English language summary of his argument on Twitter.

In the US, another Tiananmen Square dissident, Wan Yanhai is campaigning hard against the incumbent, and says he too has faced verbal abuse and even a death threat, but is determined to continue.

“Trump has inflicted major damage on democracy,” he told The City. “You want to fight against the CCP [Chinese Communist party], but you shouldn’t expect one monster to eat another monster.”

Interview
What can we learn about 2020 from the Black Death? Dorsey Armstrong has all the answers

The US professor became an unlikely TV star this year, with a series about the plague. She explains what the 1348 pandemic can tell us today about conspiracy theories, recklessness, deurbanisation and social unrest

Sam Wollaston
@samwollaston
Sun 1 Nov 2020 

Dorsey Armstrong: ‘It’s not, once we make it through, all sunshine and rainbows, but there is hope for improvement in society.’ 

Photograph: Jeff Mauritzen/Jeff Mauritzen - inPhotograph/Courtesy of The Teaching Company

A pandemic rages across the globe, leaving a trail of death, confusion and economic ruin, and changing everything. This is a new disease, about which little is understood. People and communities don’t know what to do, and they react in different ways – sensibly, understandably, honourably, idiotically, criminally. Cities go into lockdown, quarantine rules are introduced, new hospitals are built to try to cope with the numbers of sick. There are heroes and acts of kindness and selflessness. There are also deniers, conspiracy theorists, finger pointers. And there are people – including those in positions of leadership and power – who don’t just fail to step up to the plate, but abandon the field of play.

The year is 1348, of course. Not 2020, but you knew that. Different deals: Covid is a virus; the Black Death – the Great Mortality, pestilence, plague – a flea-driven bacterial infection. Now (it still exists) plague is mostly treatable with antibiotics; then, of course, it lived up to its names. “The thing I like to stress to people feeling anxious about Covid is that the mortality rate for the Black Death in the 14th century was about 80%,” says Dorsey Armstrong. With Covid it is far, far lower, “although I understand absolutely it’s not encouraging to people with family members who have gotten ill and who have died”.

Armstrong, 49, is a professor of English and medieval literature at Purdue University in Indiana. She did a series of TV lectures – The Black Death: The World’s Most Devastating Plague – that became an unlikely hit. Made in 2016, way before Covid, it went out on Amazon Prime this year, just as the new pandemic struck and locked-down 21st-century humans looked to the distant past to try to understand what was happening and what may happen next

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Scene of the plague in Florence in 1348, described by Boccaccio, by Baldassarre Calamai. Photograph: Dea Picture Library/De Agostini/Getty Images

We meet the modern way, on Zoom. She is sitting at her desk at home in West Lafayette, Indiana, in front of busy bookshelves. No plague kitsch on display, sadly. In the series she charts the spread of the Black Death across Eurasia from a panelled room decorated with skulls and rats. Standing on an oriental rug and wearing a series of brightly coloured jackets (chosen by her mum), she alternates her angle of delivery as if addressing students on different flanks of a lecture hall. The lessons are scholarly but lively, compelling and human; as likely to reference The Walking Dead as Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron. And she serves them up with relish and a wry wit. So the mass graves of medieval Florence were dug deep, then filled with a layer of bodies, followed by a thin layer of earth, then more bodies, “like how one layers lasagne with cheese”.

It has been an intense few months for Armstrong. Four family members – her parents, her brother and her sister – got Covid-19. All have recovered, though her mother was hospitalised for several weeks and still suffers from exhaustion. Armstrong’s 14-year-old twin daughters have been at home all day, off school. One, who has autism and for whom school was stressful, “likes to tell us that she is having a great coronavirus … For the other, the lack of social contact is really difficult.” At the same time there has been this explosion of interest in her Black Death course, though she stresses she would “prefer that the course languished in oblivion rather than there be Covid-19 sparking an interest in it”.

Different diseases, different times, but a lot of human nature spans the centuries and Armstrong immediately saw parallels. “The thing that is most horrifying about studying the Black Death is that, in the terror, people were looking for anyone to blame,” she says. “These conspiracy theories start to circulate about Jewish populations, that this was a Jewish conspiracy and that Jews were poisoning wells and planned to wipe out medieval Christian society, which of course was absolutely not true. When Covid first erupted we saw, to my distress, scapegoating of people of Asian ancestry because it looked as if the virus had originated in China.” It didn’t help that the US president called it the “China virus” and “kung flu”. She’s not a fan.

When it was clear the Black Death was wiping out whole communities, some turned to God, prayer, even self-flagellation. Others thought, if we are going to go, let’s have a good time. Armstrong hasn’t noticed any whippings today, but the partying is going on. “We see that quite a bit with college campuses where students – 18 to 22 years old, prefrontal cortex not fully developed – have decided they are going to have a good time.”
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A loss of confidence in leaders – political, religious – is another parallel. Also deurbanisation. Armstrong witnessed well-to-do New Yorkers heading to their second homes out of town when the city was hit hard in the summer. In Florence – which kind of was the New York of the 14th century – “rich Florentines fled to the countryside to try to avoid the Black Death while the city was suffering”. Then, once everyone had left, the city fathers started dishing out fines, telling people they had to come back to do their jobs. Not unlike essential workers being called back to work today.

 Ambulance men of plague-stricken Florence. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

I wonder what connection she sees between Covid and the recent protest and unrest in her country, with people calling for a radical change to deeply entrenched inequalities? “It’s not that the pandemic contributes to social unrest, it is that the pandemic allows other systemic problems in society to become more visible. They cannot be controlled or contained or dismissed or covered up because the systems that were in place to maintain a status quo are too busy coping with this other emergency.”

She brings up the serfs in medieval England who were suddenly enabled to tell the lord of the manor they didn’t need to stay with him, instead they could head off down the road where people were desperately needed to work the land, and actually charge wages. “In some places, people who had been at the bottom of the social order were able to carve out a better situation for themselves – if they survived the plague.”

This sounds like good news. And though the same feudal agrarian system no longer exists, even in the US midwest where Armstrong lives, perhaps opportunity for social mobility may emerge from this? “This situation has made plain that the system, especially in the US, is fatally flawed and that there are no safety nets. For the first time I hope that we will begin a conversation about universal basic income. And it’s made clear that if you connect health insurance to employment you are going to have a disaster if people lose their jobs because businesses have shut down. I hope we are going to have another conversation about universal health care in this country.”
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Scholars have often said that medieval European society would have continued being medieval for longer had it not been for the Black Death. Also that it sowed the seeds that led to the Reformation and the Renaissance. And while Armstrong doesn’t dispute these positive changes, she points out that it took time for them to register. “It’s not, once we make it through, all sunshine and rainbows, but there is hope for improvement in society.”
Armstrong presenting her show The Black Death: The World’s Most Devastating Plague. Photograph: Courtesy of The Teaching Company

More than a post-Covid new Renaissance, she would like to see a fundamental step backwards to shore up the foundations of society. “It would be great if we get some great literature out of this,” she says. But what she really wants to see is “communal and systemic structures in place that support people that we don’t currently have”. She looks back to Florence – I think Armstrong likes Florence – which set up the first board of health after the first wave of plague.

It’s going to be easier for the historians of the future; there is so much more documentation. “In the case of the Black Death, sometimes you don’t have information,” she says. “What we have that shows the devastation is a lack of information – bureaucratic documents that suddenly cease being continued, or a sudden silence some place because there is no one left to document what happened. Or an increase in people writing wills.”

She is in no doubt that our times will be studied, in detail; not just the 21st century, they will be zooming in much closer. “Someone will say: ‘So, what’s your field of study?’ and they’ll say: ‘Well, I do the mid-portion of 2020, I focus on March through July.’ Another will say: ‘I focus on the second half of the year.’ Because this year has been so unusual in the way it has affected all levels of society and everyone around the world.”

If more people knew about the Black Death, she thinks, things could have been different. “If people had understood the devastation plague had wrought on the medieval world, going into the current pandemic, I think more people would have taken steps to curb the spread of Covid a little earlier.”

She’s not suggesting that Donald Trump wasn’t up on his medieval history, is she? “Or with what is happening right now. Or reality.” And she rattles off the list of failures – delayed lockdown, not enough adequate PPE or accurate test and tracing, no coordinated national plan – that could so easily also be applied to this country. Oh, go on, give him a score, it’s part of your job. Student Trump, out of 10? “Minus 20.”

Belarus protesters use Telegram to keep up pressure on Lukashenko

Secure messaging app pivotal to organisation of protests and spreading of news about repressions

Shaun Walker in Minsk
Sun 1 Nov 2020 

 

Participants in women’s peaceful solidarity march in Minsk on Sunday. Photograph: EPA

In a small Minsk apartment one evening last week, a group of people gathered to discuss plans for a Halloween party with a twist. There would be costumes, drinks and games, but the main event was a ceremonial funeral. The plan: to bury Alexander Lukashenko’s dictatorship.

“Maybe we should bury a pumpkin with a moustache,” suggested one young woman.

“What about a giant rat?”

“Yes! Brilliant idea! Write it down in the chat. We’ll need to work out where to get the rat model from.”

“And we’ll need spades to dig the grave. It would be cool if we have a proper grave. There’s a funeral parlour near me, maybe we can actually order a proper gravestone.”

The discussion went on in a similar vein for several hours. Those gathered were the most active members of a local group coordinating protest events in one small district of Minsk, using Telegram. The app has been a driving force of the protests against Lukashenko, since they began in August after he declared victory in a rigged election. The biggest channel has nearly 2 million followers, helping to direct the weekly Sunday protests and spreading news about new repressions.

Since August, the protest has also become localised, and hundreds of smaller groups have appeared. Now there are Telegram channels for each city, each district, and in some cases even individual apartment blocks. They provide support for people who get detailed by police, a forum to swap ideas, and in many parts of Minsk, local protest events, lectures or concerts.

The most famous of these courtyard protest venues is just north of the centre, where a mural has been painted of two DJs who achieved cult status before the election, when they were hired for a pro-Lukashenko gathering and played the perestroika-era track Changes, which has become the unofficial anthem of the Belarusian uprising. The square has been unofficially renamed Changes Square and attracts musicians who give concerts most weekends.Quick guide

Symbols of Belarus protest

White bracelets/ballot initiatives

Supporters of Svetlana Tikhanovskaya wore white bracelets to polling stations on Sunday in the hope that a show of popular support for the opposition candidate would prevent election workers from spoiling their ballots. Similar initiatives called for voters to upload photographs of their ballots or to fold them in specific ways, so they would be visible in the ballot box. Supporters later wore white ribbons to protests or tied them to their cars and motorcycles.
Protest anthems

Two songs have been popular at pro-Tikhonovskaya rallies. One is the Kino classic Peremen, or Changes, a perestroika-era song that became a protest anthem in eastern Europe. Two Belarusian DJs were each sentenced to ten days in jail last week for playing the song at a pro-government concert. The other was a Russian translation of the Polish song Walls, which was popular among the workers of 1980s Solidarity movement. The chorus ends: “Then the walls will fall, fall, fall. And bury the old world.”
The Trio and hand symbols

Three women spearheaded the campaign to unseat Alexander Lukashenko, a novelty in Belarus’ male-dominated politics. When Svetlana Tikhanovskaya announced that her campaign would ally with those represented by Maria Kolesnikova and Veronika Tsepkalo, the three women held up hand symbols: a peace sign, a raised fist, and a heart. They quickly became a campaign symbol.

Andrew Roth
Photograph: Sergei Gapon/AFP


“I saw the atmosphere at Changes Square and thought it would be good to set something up for my own district,” said one of those present at the gathering last week. Others joined in, and now they form a small underground protest cell, one of thousands across Belarus.

Three months ago, hardly any of the people gathered took any interest in politics. They felt Lukashenko’s neo-Soviet authoritarianism did not affect their lives much. But things have changed quickly in Belarus, with a broad swath of the population developing political consciousness in a remarkably short time.

“At the first big protests there was a feeling of: ‘Wow, are we really allowed to do this?’ Then there was a feeling of total helplessness seeing that it was not working, and now we are doing all this organisation as a form of therapy,” said one man in his 30s, who is responsible for distributing opposition leaflets and newsletters to people’s apartments in the neighbourhood.

He has recruited a network of volunteers in each apartment block, as an intercom code is required to reach the letterboxes. “None of the carrier pigeons know who the others are, and why should they? I also don’t know the identities of the people who are printing the materials. It’s better that way, if they pick me up and start breaking my fingers, then I won’t be able to give anyone else up,” said one young man.

With thousands of people arrested in recent months, everyone here now takes precautions. When going to protest, they take rucksacks full of essentials in case they are arrested. Several say they wear two pairs of pants just in case – nobody wants to spend 15 days without a change of underwear.

As the protest mood refuses to be quashed, Lukashenko’s regime ploughs on with its grim crackdown. This week, some restaurants that joined a strike called by the opposition on Monday have been closed down, ostensibly on health and safety grounds, while Lukashenko has ordered universities to expel striking students. The dean of one university resigned, apparently unwilling to do so.

On Friday, Lukashenko said the regime would no longer “take prisoners” and would hunt down opponents even if they were hiding in private apartments. “If someone touches a serviceman, he should be left at minimum with no hands,” said Lukashenko, who has on occasion made suggestions he is ready for reform though his actions have suggested the opposite.

The district protest planners said for security reasons, they only communicated through encrypted Telegram chats, using accounts that were not linked to their phone numbers and registered under pseudonyms. Most of those gathered do not know each other’s full names, and only one of them knows who the Telegram channel administrators are.

Sometimes, the conspiratorial chatter last week could seem a little bit overdone. It was only a local Halloween party they were discussing, after all. But the caution turned out to be far from misplaced. In the days after the meeting, strange men arrived at the apartment of one of the channel’s administrators and rang the doorbell for 15 minutes.

She did not open the door, and waited for them to leave. Later, after other group members had done a sweep of the area and given the all clear, a friend picked her up and brought her away. Shortly afterwards, her landlord received a call from the authorities that they had a warrant to search the apartment. The rest of the group are now worried for their safety. Some of the details in this article have been left vague to protect their identities.

“I don’t know what charges I face or whether I can go back, I don’t know what to do at all,” the channel administrator whose flat was searched said, on a Telegram audio call from a safe location outside Belarus. “But I know one thing: I’m not giving up the fight.”

POST MODERN #ANTISTALINISM

Thousands protest in Belarus amid continued crackdown

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People help a woman after she collided with a police during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus, Sunday, Nov. 1, 2020. Nearly three months after Belarus' authoritarian president's re-election to a sixth term in a vote widely seen as rigged, the continuing rallies have cast an unprecedented challenge to his 26-year rule. (AP Photo)

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Thousands of protesters in Belarus swarmed the streets of the capital to demand the resignation of the country’s longtime president for the 13th straight Sunday and encountered police using stun grenades to break up the crowds and making warning shots in the air from what authorities said were “non-lethal weapons.”

As many as 20,000 people took part in the rally, the Visana human rights center estimated. Large crowds of people gathered in the eastern part of Minsk headed toward Kurapaty, a wooded area on the city’s outskirts where over 200,000 people were executed by Soviet secret police during Stalinist-era purges.



Demonstrators carried banners reading, “The people’s memory (lasts) longer than a life of a dictatorship” and “Stop torturing your people!”

The crowds directed chants of “Go away!” at Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, who won his sixth term in an Aug. 9 election that is widely seen as rigged. Lukashenko’s crushing victory over his popular, inexperienced challenger, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, has triggered the largest and the most sustained wave of mass protests of his 26 years in power.

The 66-year-old former state farm director, who was once nicknamed “Europe’s Latest Dictator,” has relentlessly suppressed opposition and independent media in Belarus but struggled to quell the recent unrest. Large protest crowds have assembled in the streets of Minsk and other cities almost daily, despite police countering the demonstrations with water cannons, stun grenades, rubber bullets and mass detentions.

The Belarusian Interior Ministry threatened to use firearms against the rally-goers “if need be.” On Sunday, police acknowledged officers fired several warning shots into the air during the demonstration in Minsk “to prevent violations of the law,” but maintained that “non-lethal weapons” were used.

Armored off-road vehicles equipped with machine guns were seen in Minsk for the first time in almost three months of protests, along with water cannon vehicles and other anti-riot equipment. Several metro stations were closed, and mobile internet service did not work.

Police detained over 250 people in Minsk and other Belarusian cities where protests were held Sunday, according to the Viasna center. Several journalists were among the detainees, and many of those detained were beaten up, human rights activists said.

“The authorities are trying to close the lid on the boiling Belarusian pot more tightly, but history knows very well what this leads to,” Viasna leader Ales Bialiatski said.

Tsikhanouskaya entered the presidential race instead of her husband, a popular opposition blogger, after he was jailed in May. She challenged the results of the election in which she secured 10% of the vote to the incumbent president’s 80%, then left Belarus for Lithuania under pressure from the authorities.

She issued a statement Sunday in support of the ongoing protests.



“The terror is happening once again in our country right now,” Tsikhanouskaya said. “We haven’t forgotten our past, we won’t forget what is happening now.”

Over 15,000 people have been detained since the presidential election, and human rights activists have declared more than 100 of them to be political prisoners.

All prominent members at the helm of the opposition’s Coordination Council, which was formed to push for a transition of power, have either been jailed or left the country. One more activist on the Council, Denis Gotto, was detained during Sunday’s demonstration.

Lukashenko scoffed at suggestions of dialogue with the opposition and instead intensified the crackdown on protesters, ordering officials to expel students from universities for participating in demonstrations and to take action against plant workers that go on strike.

On Thursday, the government shut Belarus’ borders with Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Ukraine. They said the move was intended to stem the spread of the coronavirus, although officials previously accused neighboring countries of trying to destabilize Belarus.

Starting Sunday, all foreigners — with the exception of diplomats, government officials, individuals with permits to work in Belarus and people in some other narrow categories — were banned from crossing the country’s land borders. Foreigners, however, are allowed to travel into Belarus via the Minsk National Airport.

Tens of thousands protest in Belarus, defying warning shots

By Tom Balmforth

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Riot police fired warning shots into the air, used stun grenades and arrested more than 200 people to deter tens of thousands of Belarusians who marched through Minsk on Sunday to demand veteran leader Alexander Lukashenko leave power.

Mass demonstrations have flooded the capital for 12 straight weeks since a disputed election, ratcheting up pressure on the embattled leader of 26 years who rejects accusations the vote was rigged and says he has no intention of quitting.

This week Lukashenko partially closed the border to the west, replaced his interior minister and said that any protester who lays a hand on officers policing the protests should “at least leave without hands”.

Tens of thousands of people swept through Minsk in at least two columns, the Nasha Niva newspaper reported.

The Vesna-96 rights group published the names of 221 people who had been detained.

Senior police officials have threatened to use firearms against protesters if needed.

“The situation is really alarming and everyone’s mood is tense,” one protester who requested anonymity said by phone.

“Police buses and equipment are constantly driving past the column. It feels like people are ready for any kind of escalation.”

A witness told Reuters that riot police used force to disperse marchers who had marched towards Kurapaty, a site on the outskirts of Minsk that is a memorial to victims of execution by Soviet secret police.

“People got to a field near Kurapaty, (police) buses pulled up and chased after people at top speed, then they started throwing grenades. What’s more, they were throwing them into the thick of the crowd,” the witness said by phone on condition of anonymity.

A man in civilian clothing chased a resident through a courtyard near one protest route firing a paintball gun at them in footage published by the RFE/RL media outlet.

Video posted on opposition social media showed a crowd of people chanting “We believe, we can, we will win!” while marching through the streets. The video footage could not independently be verified. 

https://www.reuters.com/video/?videoId=OVD2QR8ZL&jwsource=em

Mobile phone internet in the capital was unavailable and several metro stations were briefly closed down.

Writing by Tom Balmforth; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky and Frances Kerry

Nearly 3 months after vote, Belarus protests still go strong

KYIV, Ukraine — Nearly three months after Belarus' authoritarian president's re-election to a sixth term in a vote widely seen as rigged, demonstrators keep swarming the streets of Belarusian cities to demand his resignation in the most massive and sustained wave of protests the ex-Soviet nation has ever seen.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

While President Alexander Lukashenko has relied on massive arrests and intimidation tactics to hold on to power, the continuing rallies have cast an unprecedented challenge to his 26-year rule.

Authorities have responded to protests triggered by Aug. 9 election that gave Lukashenko a landslide victory over Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya by unleashing a violent post-election crackdown. Police dispersed peaceful demonstrators with stun grenades and rubber bullets, detained thousands and beat hundreds, which caused protests to swell and prompted the U.S. and the European Union to introduce sanctions against Belarusian officials.

Tsikhanouskaya, who went to Lithuania after the vote under pressure from authorities, called for a nationwide strike this week that so far has failed to halt production at state-run industrial plants forming the backbone of the Belarusian economy. But observers predict that economic troubles amid a surge in coronavirus infections will fuel discontent and steadily erode Lukashenko's grip on power.

By putting forward an ultimatum to Lukashenko to resign by Oct. 25 or face the strike, Tsikhanouskaya has managed to mobilize and re-invigorate her supporters after nearly three months of protests. About 200,000 demonstrators flooded the Belarusian capital last Sunday, one of the biggest rallies since the protests began.

Several hundred women, some clad in Halloween outfits, marched across the Belarusian capital of Minsk on Saturday while demanding that Lukashenko step down. A bigger protest is planned for Sunday.

Authorities, meanwhile, have focused on derailing the opposition efforts to stage strikes at major state factories. They have moved methodically to arrest strike organizers, threatened workers with dismissals for joining the action and deployed officers of the State Security Committee still known under its Soviet name KGB to monitor the situation at industrial plants.

Lukashenko this week charged that “a terrorist war” is being waged against the government “on some fronts,” accusing the largely peaceful protesters of “radicalizing." Following his orders, over 300 students are facing dismissal from their universities for taking part in protests.

While thousands of students and retirees took to the streets in Minsk pressing for Lukashenko's resignation, and some small business owners closed their doors earlier this week, most state enterprises have continued to operate as usual.

In the western city of Grodno, the managers of a manufacturing plant that makes nitrogen compounds and fertilizers dismissed about 50 workers who took part in this week's strike and quickly recruited others to replace them.

“The scared workers couldn’t be expected to back the opposition’s political demands,” said Alexander Yaroshuk, the leader of the Congress of Democratic Unions, an association of independent labour unions. “The opposition only has managed to create some hotbeds of strikes at factories, which already can be considered a big achievement in conditions when KGB officers have flooded factory shops and raised pressure on strike organizing committees.”

But Yaroshuk noted that even though the nationwide strike hasn't materialized, the economic stagnation will likely foment unrest in the coming months.

“The worsening economic situation could transform isolated hotbeds into the flames of a real strike,” he said.

According to the official statistics, the Belarusian economy has contracted by 1.3% in the first nine months of the year as the nation's main export markets have shrunk under the impact of the coronavirus pandemic.

Lukashenko’s cavalier dismissal of the coronavirus threat has added to the public frustration over the 66-year-old ex-state farm director's iron-fisted rule, helping fuel protests.

Facing a run on the national currency amid the unrest, the Belarusian government has spent $1.5 billion, or about one-fifth of the nation's hard currency reserves, to shore up the Belarusian ruble in August and September.

“The economy is becoming Lukashenko's main enemy,” said Minsk-based analyst Valery Karbalevich. “Lukashenko needs money to pay workers for their loyalty and law enforcement officers for their brutality. His regime is quickly running out of cash and losing support,”

Faced with the opposition's ultimatum and the threat of a nationwide strike, Belarus on Thursday shut its borders with Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Ukraine for most visitors. Lukashenko also reshuffled his top officials this week, appointing Interior Minister Yuri Karayev and Security Council Secretary Valery Vakulchik his envoys to the westernmost Grodno and Brest regions bordering Poland and Lithuania.

Tsikhanouskaya's adviser Franak Viachorka, argued that the shakeup reflected Lukashenko's nervousness.

“Lukashenko can't trust local authorities in western regions, and so he has to put his trusted law enforcement officials in charge there,” Viachorka said.

Viachorka also argued that the reshuffle may reflect Lukashenko's fear that his main ally and sponsor, Russia, could be talking to his top lieutenants behind his back.

The Kremlin has backed Lukashenko amid Western pressure and provided a $1.5-billion loan to help refinance Belarus' debt to Russia. But many observers believe that Moscow could reach out quietly to Lukashenko's entourage on a possible successor as his authority crumbles.

“Lukashenko has failed to quash the protests in nearly three months, and that shows the scale of discontent in the country and pushes the Kremlin to search for new scenarios and partners in Belarus,” Karbalevich said. “It opens a window of opportunity for the opposition to hold talks with Moscow, which until that moment has refused to talk to Tsikhanouskaya and her team.”

Viachorka, Tsikhanouskaya's adviser, said that the opposition will continue pushing for the creation of parallel structures of power, “exacerbating the crisis of legitimacy for Lukashenko” and pushing him into talks on a transition of power.

The Associated Press

Researchers say natural selection favored friendliness in early humans
Shane McGlaun - Oct 31, 2020

An anthropologist from Duke named Brian Hare says that humans unintentionally experienced a process whereby they became less fearful and aggressive towards other people. That process left our distant human relatives more cooperative than the now-extinct Neanderthals and Denisovans. He believes that natural selection favored friendliness in Homo sapiens, and the early Homo sapiens didn’t realize they were self-domesticated by evolution.

He also believes that the more agreeable demeanor is ultimately responsible for the success and propagation of Homo sapiens across the planet. Recently Hare published a book that presents a thesis on why he believes being more cooperative with those around us and were willing to compromise was a survival advantage. He outlines how he believes violence and aggression wasn’t always a sound evolutionary stage in the book.

He believes that being the aggressive alpha meant they were more often enraged during dangerous encounters and became a target of the larger group when the best interest was to weed out threatening and destabilizing males. Homo sapiens are the only creatures to have undergone the sort of domestication. Hare says that it happened in Fox’s, wolves, and even plant pollinators.

There were clear benefits for each of these groups, with wolves becoming friendlier towards humans leading to the dogs we know and love today; they had more reliable food source and a better chance of living. The researcher notes that a major social milestone for humans happened between 40,000 and 90,000 years ago, along with our cognitive revolution. During that time, early humans created tools, weapons, carvings, and cave drawings.

Improved cooperation meant those skills could be spread within and between groups of hunter-gatherer ancestors. Researchers believe that when a new or abundant resource is available, the benefits of aggression no longer pay off.

Disney researchers create a creepy robot with a life-like gaze
Shane McGlaun - Oct 30, 2020

When humans are talking, typically, eye contact is something we do intuitively to show that we are involved and interested in the conversation. Researchers at Disney want robots to better connect with humans and have created a system that provides a life-like gaze for human-robot interactions. The system uses a humanoid Audio-Animatronic bust of the sort seen on various Disney rides around its parks.

The new research builds on previous work that involved mutual gaze between robots and humans and focused on technical implementation. The researchers say they are now presenting a general architecture seeking to create gaze interactions from a technical standpoint and through the lens of character animation when fidelity and believable motion are critical. Essentially, the researchers want to create an interaction giving the illusion of life.

Researchers have described a system that can perceive persons in the environment, identify persons-of-interest based on their actions, and selects appropriate gaze behavior. The system will use high fidelity motions to respond to the stimulus. Disney researchers plan to mimic biological systems, including attenuation habitation, saccades, and differences in motion bandwidth for actuators.

The mechanisms can mimic motor and attention behaviors that are observed in biological systems to provide a life-like interaction. A subsumption architecture allows layering of motor movements to create increasingly complicated behaviors. Those behaviors can react realistically to stimuli in the environment by subsuming lower levels of behavior.

The result is an interactive human-robot experience that is capable of human-like gaze behaviors. The creepy skeletal robot in the video above shows what the researchers have been working on, highlighting its interactive capabilities.