Sunday, July 26, 2020

France to fight cannabis use with €200 on-the-spot fines
LEGALIZE IT! YOU MAKE MORE TAXING IT

AND SAVE MONEY BY NOT PUTTING PEOPLE IN JAIL

Issued on: 25/07/2020 -

Tea bags containing cannabis flowers that were meant to be sold as herbal tea are pictured at a police station in Brest, western France, on August 1, 2018. © Fred Tanneau, AFP
Text by:FRANCE 24

French police will start hitting users of illicit drugs, particularly cannabis, with on-the-spot fines starting in September, Prime Minister Jean Castex announced on Saturday.

Spot fines of 200 euros ($233) have been tested in several French cities in recent weeks and will now be applied nationwide, Castex said, ruling out a decriminalisation of cannabis.

A French law dating back to 1970 allows for illicit drug use to be punished with up to a year in prison and fined with up to 3,750 euros, but few users actually do jail time.

French people are Europe's leading consumers of cannabis and hold the number three spot for cocaine use.

The new measure would simplify police procedures by "inflicting punishment without delay", Castex said during a visit to the southern port city of Nice, and would be an efficient tool against sale points run by drug dealers "which are eating away at neighbourhoods".

If paid within two weeks the fine will be reduced to 150 euros, but will rise to 450 euros unless settled within 45 days.

The move honours an election campaign pledge by President Emmanuel Macron, who said spot fines should be used to deter petty crimes that often end up unpunished in overloaded courts.

The number of 15- and 16-year-olds who admitted recent use of cannabis was higher in France than any other European country in a 2015 survey published by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug addiction, an EU agency.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP, REUTERS)

Protestors clash with Seattle police in latest outcry over US feds

Issued on: 26/07/2020 -

Federal police guard a courthouse in downtown Portland, Oregon as protestors rally against police brutality Kathryn ELSESSER AFP

Seattle (AFP)

US police used flashbang grenades, pepper spray and tear gas as protestors marched in cities across the country amid a wave of public anger over Donald Trump's planned "surge" of federal agents into major metropolises.

The demonstrations against racism and police brutality -- sparked by the death in Minneapolis of unarmed African-American George Floyd -- come as the US president faces an increasingly tough battle for re-election, and is campaigning heavily on a platform of "law and order".

Protestors marched in Austin, Texas, as well as Louisville in Kentucky, New York, Omaha, California's Oakland and Los Angeles, and Richmond in Virginia -- where riot police fired chemical agents at a Black Lives Matter march, according to US media.

In Seattle the sounds of repeated small detonations rang out in some streets, and smoke rose from an area where demonstrators had set fire to trailers by a construction site for a youth detention facility, an AFP reporter observed.

Protesters slashed car tires and smashed trailer windows.

Police in riot gear faced off against the protestors, some holding umbrellas against falling pellets of pepper spray.

Late Saturday, Seattle Police said 45 people were arrested in connection with the demonstrations, which they designated a riot, according to the force's official Twitter account.

Police Chief Carmen Best implored people to "come in peace to the city," and castigated the demonstrations.

"The rioters had no regard for the community's safety, for officers' safety or for the businesses and property that they destroyed," local media reported her as saying.

- Federal agent 'surge' -

The latest spasm of violence came after police and federal agents fired tear gas and forcefully dispersed protestors further south in Portland early Saturday, also in anger over Trump's heavily-criticized surge of security forces.

The city, the biggest in the state of Oregon, has seen nightly protests against racism and police brutality for nearly two months, initially sparked by Floyd's death.

Portland is also a stage for the highly controversial crackdown by federal agents ordered by Trump -- one that is not supported by local officials, and which many say smacks of authoritarianism.

Friday's demonstration was mainly peaceful, with crowds playing music and dancing, blowing soap bubbles and setting off fireworks.

But it ended -- like many before it -- in a showdown between protestors and police, which escalated in a haze of tear gas and flashbang devices.

Portland police confirmed a man was stabbed, with the suspect "held down by protestors" before he was detained by officers and charged with assault, according to a statement.

The victim was transported to hospital with a serious injury.

- 'Little green men' -

Earlier, protestors who spoke to AFP complained of the federal agents in the city and voiced their support for the Black Lives Matter movement.

"I don't like what's happening down here, what Trump is doing," Mike Shikany, a 55-year-old aerospace engineer, said, adding he did not "want to get anywhere near the little green men," meaning the federal troops.

Portland retiree Jean Mullen, 74, said that without pressure nothing would change.

"It's time to become the country we always brag about being. And we can't brag anymore, about anything. We aren't first in anything and it's a terrible, terrible thing to see at the end of my life," she said.

The inspector general of the US Justice Department on Thursday opened an official investigation into the federal crackdown, but an Oregon federal judge on Friday rejected a legal bid by the state to stop agents from detaining protestors.

Agents deployed there will partner with local law enforcement, not riot control forces as seen in Portland.

Local officials have warned they would draw the line at any Portland-style deployment.

© 2020 AFP

Chemists Just Worked Out How to Recycle Some of Our Toughest Single-Use Plastics

Aerial photo of waste disposal site. (kokouu/Getty Images)
ENVIRONMENT

DAVID NIELD
25 JULY 2020

Thermosets are some of the toughest plastics around. They're used in products that have to be particularly durable and heat-resistant – but that also makes them very difficult to break down and recycle.

That could change with the help of new research into the chemical bonds that hold these thermosets together. The study suggests that by changing the way they're made, we could keep the original strength of these thermosets, but make them able to be broken down and recycled.

Currently, around 75 percent of the plastic we use in items such as plastic wrappers and plastic bags can be broken down and then reused. But thermosets, which are found in things such as car parts, aren't reusable.

The new approach involves slightly adjusting the mixture that makes up thermoset plastic, adding particular types of building blocks (or monomers) called silyl ethers that are more susceptible to being pulled apart and reshaped.

"This work unveils a fundamental design principle that we believe is general to any kind of thermoset with this basic architecture," says chemist Jeremiah Johnson, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

The same research team had previously used silyl ether monomers in other types of synthetic plastic – plastics which shared some common characteristics with thermosets.

Here, they showed the same approach could work for thermoset plastics too.

In particular, the latest study looked at the thermoset polydicyclopentadiene (pDCPD), which can typically be found in truck and bus body panels: great for vehicle strength and durability, but not so great for recycling.

By making silyl ether 7.5 to 10 percent of the liquid precursor to pDCPD, the team was able to create a new blend of the plastic – one that could retain its mechanical strength but which broke down on contact with fluoride ions.

The revamped formula passed another key test as well – not only could they be broken down, the products could be reused.

The researchers were able to form new pDCPD products from the dissolved power left by the first recycling stage. It's likely that other thermosets can be modified in this way too.

"That new material has nearly indistinguishable, and in some ways improved, mechanical properties compared to the original material," says Johnson. "Showing that you can take the degradation products and remake the same thermoset again using the same process is exciting."

The process outlined here uses degradable monomers to form the actual individual polymer strands, and it improves on previous approaches where only the bonds linking the strands were actually degradable.

The next step is to see how widely this innovative approach can be applied, and if the new technique can be successfully implemented into the production of pDCPD and other thermosets.

With global plastic pollution already at crisis levels, we need to find some solutions as soon as we possibly can.

"Thermosets – polymeric materials that adopt a permanent shape upon curing – have a key role in the modern plastics and rubber industries, comprising about 20 percent of polymeric materials manufactured today, with a worldwide annual production of about 65 million tons," the researches write in their paper.

"Optimisation of the cleavable bond location can be used as a design principle to achieve controlled thermoset degradation. Moreover, we introduce a class of recyclable thermosets poised for rapid deployment."

The research has been published in Nature.

ENVIRONMENT

Plant Roots Are Melting Permafrost And Unearthing Vast Stores of Carbon Emissions

CARLY CASSELLA
26 JULY 2020

As plants begin to spread across melting permafrost, scientists are growing ever more worried their roots will stir microbes into unleashing vast stores of carbon.

To scientists, roots are known as rhizomes, and when these tendrils extend deeper into the soil, it accelerates microbial decomposition by up to fourfold, potentially 'priming' the frozen ground for further thawing.

This mechanism, known as the rhizosphere priming effect (RPE), has been known since the 1950s, and it could have a huge impact on one of Earth's most troubling carbon feedback loops.

Yet today, no climate models include rhizomes as a risk factor for melting permafrost - in large part because the data simply doesn't exist.

"It is important to expand the knowledge in this field," researchers wrote in paper from 2017, "as the magnitude and direction of [rhizome priming] are not very well understood, and contradicting results have been observed."

For the first time, researchers have now combined high-resolution data on both the spread and depth of key plants growing in Arctic permafrost to determine how much carbon they are actually releasing.

As rising temperatures stimulate further plant growth, the researchers estimate that rhizome priming alone enhances the overall respiration of soil microbes by roughly 12 percent. By 2100, that means an absolute loss of around 40 billion tonnes of carbon from northern permafrost.

And that's so not what we were expecting. In fact, it's practically blown a hole in our climate budget.

To keep global warming under the 1.5 °C threshold, scientists have estimated that at a minimum we must keep our carbon emissions to 200 billion tonnes, and currently, 50 to 100 billion tonnes is put aside for thawing permafrost.

These new figures make up a quarter of that budget, which means there are minute and overlooked ecological interactions that we are clearly not taking into account. And those between plants and soil microbes appear to be high on the list.

The impact of plant roots and soil organic microbes on thawing permafrost. (Keuper et al., Nature Geoscience, 2020)

Basing their results on a meta-analysis of plant and soil experiments, researchers say we will have to constrain our emissions much more than we were bargaining on.

In 2019, the world emitted about 43 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide. By 2100, soil microbes munching on sugar from newly-formed roots will have unleashed nearly the equivalent of that into our atmosphere.

The authors say they have identified hotspots for RPE losses in boreal forests, including Hudson Bay in Canada and Siberian lowlands, as well as large swathes of eastern Siberia.

We've known about rhizome priming since the 1950s, but in all that time we've researched the mechanism very little, and we still don't know how this interaction will change in a rapidly warming Arctic, especially for other greenhouse gases.

Previous studies have shown that the soil in which rhizomes reside is an important sink for methane, which is even more potent as a global warmer than carbon dioxide, especially over shorter time-frames.

The new study, however, was focused solely on carbon. What's more, it did not explore how soil microbes differ, or if rhizomes prime deeper soil beyond their physical reach, possibly through the leaching of minerals and gases.

When permafrost stores as much carbon as all the plants in the world and all the carbon in the atmosphere together, roots are clearly a huge deal, and we need to know more about what they're doing.

The study was published in Nature Geoscience.

Fewer say US is headed in right direction

A new AP-NORC poll finds only 2 in 10 Americans say the U.S. is headed in the right direction. That figure is the lowest of Trump's presidency so far, continuing a decline that began amid the COVID-19 crisis.

Percent who say the country is headed in the right direction:
Results based on interviews with 1,057 U.S. adults conducted July 16–20. The margin of error is ±4.3 percentage points for the full sample.

A GLASS HALF FULL SAYS AP

BUT IT'S REALLY A GLASS 80% EMPTY

https://apnews.com/43a096bc2bcf376de04b696c5143ee99

The deeper ramifications of Trump’s sympathy for Maxwell

Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell.

Virginia Heffernan, Tribune News Service

At President Trump’s news conference, which was supposed to be about COVID-19, he was asked an easy question. Not about the pandemic. Not about reopening schools. About Ghislaine Maxwell, alleged accomplice of Jeffrey Epstein, who died in prison by suicide one year ago, or so official reports say, before he could be tried on sex trafficking charges.

Maxwell was arrested this month and now sits in jail in Brooklyn, accused of helping Epstein recruit, groom and sexually abuse underage girls.

A reporter asked Trump whether Maxwell might implicate any of the famous men in Epstein’s circle. Prince Andrew, say. Or Bill Clinton. All Trump had to do was go boilerplate: “These allegations against Maxwell are very serious,” he could have said, “and I hope justice is done.” If that was too difficult, why not take a shot at Clinton, who travelled with Epstein and hosted Maxwell at his daughter Chelsea’s wedding.

But the president couldn’t muster anything that suggested he disapproves of sexually abusing children. Instead, he sent his regards to Maxwell. Best wishes to Ghislaine, who has pleaded not guilty, as she stews in jail.

Trump, as he helpfully reminded the briefing room, was Epstein’s and Maxwell’s neighbour in Palm Beach. After Epstein was first convicted, of soliciting a child for prostitution, the president claimed that their friendship had been over for years. But Trump once called Epstein a “terrific guy,” and as for Maxwell, “I just wish her well, frankly,” Trump said Tuesday.

“I wish her well,” he repeated. Prosecutor Twitter started to pop off. “I can think of four times when Trump has publicly extended his best wishes to people charged with federal crimes by DOJ: Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort — and now Ghislaine Maxwell,” tweeted former federal and state prosecutor Elie Honig.

What do Stone (convicted felon), Flynn (pleaded guilty to a felony) and Manafort (convicted felon) have in common? They’re all people Trump has had a powerful interest in silencing.

Trump’s mob-style verbal thuggery with witnesses and rivals is well known. Remember what he said about Marie Yovanovitch, the former US ambassador to Ukraine? “She’s going to go through some things.”

But he uses carrots, too. Blowing Maxwell figurative kisses, the Twitterverse suggested, could be a way to signal that he has her back. As early as the 1980s, Trump and Epstein “swam in the same social pool,” as the Washington Post put it. Epstein long bragged that he introduced Trump to his current wife, Melania.

In 1992, the Epstein and Trump were the sole male guests at a Mar-a-Lago party with 28 young women who had been flown in “for entertainment.” Video from another 1992 Mar-a-Lago party surfaced last year showing the two men appraising NFL cheerleaders and Trump pawing at one. Epstein, Trump told New York magazine in 2002, “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

Trump has never been implicated in Epstein’s terrible history, detailed in Julie K. Brown’s omnibus expose last year in the Miami Herald. On Thursday, White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, was at pains to point out that the president was “ahead of this, banning this man from his property long before this case was even being played out in a court of law.” And yet Trump’s sympathy for Maxwell not only put the two men together again in people’s minds; it also hit the “refresh” button on the president’s five decades of leering, exploitative history with women.

For four years, Trump has hoped that with payoffs, aggressive attorneys and Twitter intimidation he can avoid real consequences for his history of adultery, ritual humiliation of women, harassment and sexual abuse. But it’s all in plain sight.

Experiments Show Bacteria Grow More

Lethal And Antibiotic-Resistant in Space

VIKRANT MINHAS, THE CONVERSATION
26 JULY 2020

China has launched its Tianwen-1 mission to Mars. A rocket holding an orbiter, lander and rover took flight from the country's Hainan province earlier this week, with hopes to deploy the rover on Mars's surface by early next year.

Similarly, the launch of the Emirates Mars Mission last Sunday marked the Arab world's foray into interplanetary space travel. And on July 30, we expect to see NASA's Mars Perseverance rover finally take off from Florida.

For many nations and their people, space is becoming the ultimate frontier. But although we're gaining the ability to travel smarter and faster into space, much remains unknown about its effects on biological substances, including us.

While the possibilities of space exploration seem endless, so are its dangers. And one particular danger comes from the smallest life forms on Earth: bacteria.

Bacteria live within us and all around us. So whether we like it or not, these microscopic organisms tag along wherever we go – including into space. Just as space's unique environment has an impact on us, so too does it impact bacteria.
We don't yet know the gravity of the problem

All life on Earth evolved with gravity as an ever-present force. Thus, Earth's life has not adapted to spend time in space. When gravity is removed or greatly reduced, processes influenced by gravity behave differently as well.

In space, where there is minimal gravity, sedimentation (when solids in a liquid settle to the bottom), convection (the transfer of heat energy) and buoyancy (the force that makes certain objects float) are minimised.

Similarly, forces such as liquid surface tension and capillary forces (when a liquid flows to fill a narrow space) become more intense.

It's not yet fully understood how such changes impact lifeforms.
How bacteria become more deadly in space

Worryingly, research from space flight missions has shown bacteria become more deadly and resilient when exposed to microgravity (when only tiny gravitational forces are present).

In space, bacteria seem to become more resistant to antibiotics and more lethal. They also stay this way for a short time after returning to Earth, compared with bacteria that never left Earth.

Adding to that, bacteria also seem to mutate quicker in space. However, these mutations are predominately for the bacteria to adapt to the new environment – not to become super deadly.

More research is needed to examine whether such adaptations do, in fact, allow the bacteria to cause more disease.
Bacterial team work is bad news for space stations

Research has shown space's microgravity promotes biofilm formation of bacteria.

Biofilms are densely-packed cell colonies that produce a matrix of polymeric substances allowing bacteria to stick to each other, and to stationary surfaces.

Biofilms increase bacteria's resistance to antibiotics, promote their survival, and improve their ability to cause infection. We have seen biofilms grow and attach to equipment on space stations, causing it to biodegrade.

For example, biofilms have affected the Mir space station's navigation window, air conditioning, oxygen electrolysis block, water recycling unit and thermal control system. The prolonged exposure of such equipment to biofilms can lead to malfunction, which can have devastating effects.

Another affect of microgravity on bacteria involves their structural distortion. Certain bacteria have shown reductions in cell size and increases in cell numbers when grown in microgravity.

In the case of the former, bacterial cells with smaller surface area have fewer molecule-cell interactions, and this reduces the effectiveness of antibiotics against them.

Moreover, the absence of effects produced by gravity, such as sedimentation and buoyancy, could alter the way bacteria take in nutrients or drugs intended to attack them. This could result in the increased drug resistance and infectiousness of bacteria in space.

All of this has serious implications, especially when it comes to long-haul space flights where gravity would not be present. Experiencing a bacterial infection that cannot be treated in these circumstances would be catastrophic.

The benefits of performing research in space

On the other hand, the effects of space also result in a unique environment that can be positive for life on Earth.

For example, molecular crystals in space's microgravity grow much larger and more symmetrically than on Earth. Having more uniform crystals allows the formulation of more effective drugs and treatments to combat various diseases including cancers and Parkinson's disease.

Also, the crystallisation of molecules helps determine their precise structures. Many molecules that cannot be crystallised on Earth can be in space.

So, the structure of such molecules could be determined with the help of space research. This, too, would aid the development of higher quality drugs.

Optical fibre cables can also be made to a much better standard in space, due to the optimal formation of crystals. This greatly increases data transmission capacity, making networking and telecommunications faster.

As humans spend more time in space, an environment riddled with known and unknown dangers, further research will help us thoroughly examine the risks – and the potential benefits – of space's unique environment.

Vikrant Minhas, PhD candidate, University of Adelaide.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

BUSINESS IS SLOW

Ukraine's snail farmers fear collapse over EU lockdowns

Most snail farmers in Ukraine rely heavily on sales to restaurants in Europe

Published: July 26, 2020 15:14AFP

1 of 12

Ukraine's snail farmers — Voynivka, Ukraine: When the first snail farm in Ukraine opened five years ago, local villagers couldn't hide their curiosity. Residents of Voynivka south of the capital Kiev would peek over the fence of the old dairy farm where manager Yulia Koretska kept the snails to ask if people really ate them.Image Credit: AFP

2 of 12

3 of 12

4 of 12

5 of 12

6 of 12

7 of 12

8 of 12

9 of 12

10 of 12

11 of 12

12 of 12

Another virus plagues India: Modi’s economic advisers are cheerleaders not managers

Brain drain: Two ex-RBI bosses red flag issues, but Modi prefers 'hard work' to Harvard

Published: July 26, 2020 Swati Chaturvedi, Special to Gulf News

Migrant worker cries on the side of a road in IndiaImage Credit: Twitter

HIGHLIGHTS
So two RBI governors in a row had serious issues with the easy ride corporates seemed to be getting under the Modi government. Both Patel and Rajan red flag serious issues, which have not been addressed by the government.

The common factor in case of both appears to be the overarching powers that Modi’s PMO has aggrandised.

Eventually the coronavirus will provide a huge alibi for the Modi government for its utterly underwhelming performance of steering the Indian economy.
Narendra Modi’s instinct to centralise all authority in the hands of his all-powerful Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) has seen full fruition in his second term. Arguably, this is the most critical reason for the economy to tank post the Modi-made disaster that was demonetisation, which made 86.4 per cent of India’s currency vanish overnight.

The second hit was the awfulness of the babu excess that is the badly implemented Goods and Services Tax (GST).

Even more cause for alarm from a prime minister, who was famous for being corporate friendly as Gujarat chief minister is what Urjit Patel, former governor of the Reserve Bank of India, who famously and in an unprecedented move quit his post, has now revealed.

Patel, in his just released book - Overdraft: Saving the Indian Saver says the move to dilute the new bankruptcy laws caused disagreements between the Modi government and the Central Bank.

Patel, who headed the RBI between September 2016 and his sudden resignation in December 2018, says the government seemed to lose enthusiasm for the legislation in the middle of the year when he left the Central Bank.

The rift centered around an RBI circular issued in February 2018, which forced banks to immediately classify borrowers are defaulters when they delayed repayment; barred defaulting company founders from trying to buy back their firms during insolvency auctions; and push them into bankruptcy if a resolution timeline wasn’t met.

Patel, in a chapter, called the Empire Strikes back says: “Instead of buttressing and future proofing the gains an atmosphere to go easy on the pedal ensued.”

While Patel has refrained from naming names, the period he flags is when Piyush Goyal was temporarily handling finance. Goyal was clearly carrying out instructions from the powerful PMO as he is a lightweight politician utterly dependent on Modi’s political capital.

Patel was the second RBI governor who felt that he was unable to work with the Modi government. The first and more famous was Raghuram Rajan whose term as governor was not renewed by the Modi government.

Rajan hit a similar wall with the Modi PMO when he sent the Rajan list to the PMO to take action against “a list of high profile fraud cases of Non-Performing Assets for coordinated investigation” eight months into Modi’s first term.

Not only did the Modi government not act, it refused to make the list public. Some of the names allegedly flagged by Rajan managed to flee the country despite being on the Rajan list.

So two RBI governors in a row had serious issues with the easy ride corporates seemed to be getting under the Modi government. Both Patel and Rajan red flag serious issues, which have not been addressed by the government.

All-powerful PMO

The common factor in case of both appears to be the overarching powers that Modi’s PMO has aggrandised. It refused to order investigations in to the Rajan list and someone in the highest echelons of the Modi government did not want time bound action of threat insolvency against corporate debtors.

Modi, has famously after losing two RBI governors, said he preferred “hard work” to Harvard. What this attitude has seen is a talent bleed of huge proportions. Chief economic advisor Arvind Subramnium quit has chief economic advisor before the completion of his term in 2018. Viral Acharya, the RBI deputy governor, quit in June 2019 after he had angered the Modi government by questioning the transfer of RBI reserves to the government.

It all began with vocal Modi supporter Arvind Panagariya quitting the Niti Ayog in August 2017. The Ayog was the planning commission renamed by Modi.

Capital like stable rule of law and the “spectaculars” like demonetisation that Modi keeps coming up with periodically has made investors nervous. It does not help that Modi’s entire economic team look more like cheerleaders and less like economic managers.

The proliferation of Gujarat cadre IAS officials in the PMO who work the phones to all stake holders and seem to have a final say in policy making is also causing its own problems. Nobody seemed to believe Nirmala Sitharaman, another lightweight politician appointed as finance minister, and her stimulus packages before coronavirus broke out and it did nothing to stimulate demand and get confidence back. The much hailed Gujarat model is clearly having trouble going national.

The Morning and Evening Brief
A daily brief with the biggest stories of the day

Is cancel culture a positive movement?

A series of controversies have arisen around the phrase. We decode the meaning of the term

https://gulfnews.com/opinion/op-eds/is-cancel-culture-a-positive-movement-1.72713731

Published: July 22, 2020

Anupa Kurian-Murshed, Senior Digital Content Planning Editor , Sadiq Shaban, Opinion Editor , Sanjib Kumar Das, Assistant Editor , Bindu Rai, Entertainment Editor , Tabitha Barda, Baby & Child Editor and Yousra Zaki, Assistant Editor Features

There is a huge debate about the role cancel culture has been playing in our society

Image Credit: Seyyed Llata/Gulf News

Earlier this month nearly 150 high-profile authors, commentators and scholars signed an open letter in Harper’s magazine claiming that “open debate and toleration of differences” are under attack. Signatories included celebrated names like JK Rowling, Margaret Atwood, Gloria Steinem, Salman Rushdie and Noam Chomsky.

The writers were loosely pointing to the new internet trend called cancel culture. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, cancelling and cancel culture have to do with the removing of support for public figures in response to their objectionable behaviour or opinions. This can include boycotts or refusal to promote their work.

"There has been a weakening of the norms of open debate in favour of dogma, coercion and ideological conformity", the Harper’s letter alleges. Without alluding directly to cancel culture, it was obvious what troubled the signatories was the new zeitgeist of the internet culture: the idea that a person can be “cancelled”.

A statement signed by 150 people incl. Bill T. Jones, Wynton Marsalis, Jennifer Finney Boylan, Noam Chomsky, J.K. Rowling, Margaret Atwood, and Salman Rushdie expresses concern over the illiberal trend intensified by our national reckoning.https://t.co/4zPjuPNXBu— Harper's Magazine (@Harpers) July 7, 2020

Is it true that people are consistently feeling outraged by opposing viewpoints? Have the pressures of social media and the constant, non-stop back-and-forth led to confirmation bias and groupthink?

Many believe that cancel culture harms individuals who fall in the mob’s crosshairs. Others think that it is incredibly effective at combating sexism, racism, or any other type of abuse. If we had a justice culture, the argument goes, would we even need to worry about cancel culture?

So, is cancel culture a force for good or quite simply a digital witch hunt? The conversation around it is both polarising and complicated.

Gulf News editors weigh in on one of the most important cultural debates of our times.

When that fine line of reason is crossed over into misplaced

vigilantism, then it is no longer 'woke' Image Credit: Gulf News

Time to ‘cancel’ online vigilantism?

Anupa Kurian-Murshed — Senior Digital Content Planning Editor

Cancel Culture.

Online vigilantism?

Digital mob mentality?

Or a natural progression of the American Civil Rights movement?

To be honest, I truly got properly acquainted with it when the J.K. Rowling controversy erupted over her ‘transphobic’ tweet late last year. For a woman worshipped by generations of Harry Potter fans, she was suddenly not their beloved author anymore.

I’m going to get into serious trouble for what I will write next, but it is necessary to understand what started my journey of exploring this idea, which I had only vaguely known about till then.

From what I have read and seen online, most times it doesn’t seem to impact the celebrity targeted
-

Yes, parts of her tweet did seem transphobic, but she wrote it to support Maya Forstater, a researcher on business and international development at The Center for Global Development (CGD) in London.

Forstater best explains it: “Last summer [2019], the UK government launched a public consultation on reforming the Gender Recognition Act 2004 towards ‘self ID’. Like most people I agree that transgender people should not face discrimination and harassment as they live their lives.

But I am concerned about the impact of ‘self ID’ on women and girls, and in particular on single sex spaces and services such as women’s refuges, hostels, prisons, changing rooms and hospital wards, as well as women’s sports.

“I am concerned that governments around the world are rushing through laws and policies which say that people with male bodies can become women simply by identifying as women. This is happening without adequate consultation or consideration for the impact on women’s privacy, safety and inclusion.

“I started to tweet about the issue and had polite discussions with people about the definition of ‘woman’. I wrote an article aimed at people working in international development, and shared drafts with my colleagues.

“I never thought I would lose my job over this. But I did.”

Do I agree with her? Yes, especially as there will be people with malicious intent wanting to prey on women, and this would give them access. And, I guess, that is where Rowling came from. But, she got hunted for it. She got ‘cancelled’.

Which brings me back to ‘Cancel Culture’.

From what I have read and seen online, most times it truly doesn’t seem to impact the celebrity targeted. Apparently R. Kelly’s music sales have not been affected. The man currently faces 22 federal criminal charges for sexual abuse of women over two decades, across the US.

I find it offensive that he’s not been really cancelled!

So, then what is the point?

Well, my guess is that it is a sense of empowerment in a situation that we are powerless in — I cannot hold you accountable, but I have the power to ignore you, thereby ‘cancelling’ you.

The original usage was apparently traced back to a Wesley Snipes movie and filtered down into Black Culture online, as per Vox.com. So, in a way, it is perhaps a version of the Civil Rights Movement or India’s ‘satyagraha’.

I get that, I support that, but, as in all things to do with social consciousness — when that fine line of reason is crossed over into misplaced vigilantism, then it is no longer ‘woke’, it’s just a witch hunt.

Cancel culture has been much more than identity politics

Image Credit: Gulf News

An empowering movement

Sadiq Shaban — Opinion Editor

We live in a world of more engagement than ever before. Social media has made this tremendous connectivity possible. While earlier there was no way an average person could put his thoughts across, the advent of platforms like Facebook has vastly amplified the voice of the ordinary person.

And each time a celebrity goes on Twitter, they are speaking directly to hundreds of thousands of their fans and the world at large.

This convergence of ideas and thoughts, while great in theory, has its practical limits. In popular culture, it soon became very easy to say things otherwise deemed racist, Islamophobic, misogynist, homophobic or anti-minority.

Previously newspaper editors, the guardians of public morality, would act as gatekeepers and keep the transgressors out. However, in the era of social media, who blue-pencils such stuff?

#CancelCulture started as a hashtag on Black Twitter. The online ecosystem was quick to realise that it was the post-modern culture’s long overdue way of speaking truth to power. A ‘go-to’ tool for the marginalised communities to publicly assert their value systems through pop culture.

Cancel culture has been much more than identity politics
-

Therefore, when JK Rowling, the celebrated author, recently put out a condescending and borderline trans-phobic tweet, the backlash was swift. She was almost immediately called out. Those who spoke against her included Daniel Radcliffe.

In the last one year the list of people who have faced being cancelled included alleged sexual predators like R. Kelly, entertainers like Kanye West, Scarlett Johansson, and Gina Rodriguez, comedians like Kevin Hart and Shane Gillis and many more.

A common thread running through the actions, comments and tweets made by most of these public figures: dogmatic, sexist, racist or bigoted acts or quips.

True that cancel culture is open to some form of abuse by a few but it remains an effective tool in the way it has helped hold to account those in authority.

People derive satisfaction from coming together online against sustained social transgressions. In that sense, cancel culture is a clansperson of #MeToo.

With its egalitarian structure, where each individual has an easy say, social media perhaps needed a gear where even the marginalised could speak up to the privileged, and where the historical minorities could turn back and tell the elite that the monologue of the entitled must give way to dialogue for all.

In that, cancel culture has been much more than identity politics. It is an empowering movement.

It is undeniable that #MeToo used this tool effectively to bring down the empires of the Harvey Weinsetins and Kevin Spaceys of this worldImage Credit: Gulf News

Cancel the criminals, not the culture

Bindu Rai — Entertainment Editor

Urban dictionary and social media may have defined cancel culture as a millennial crusade, but the OK Boomers and generations that came long before had their own monikers to label their revolutions.

Criticism towards calling out or cancelling wrongdoers as the woke thing to do these days has found many takers in the recent past. Former US President Barack Obama was one of the most notable critics who argued that social media judgements don’t amount to true activism.

JK Rowling, author of the critically-acclaimed ‘Harry Potter’ series, also threw her weight behind Obama’s cause, while stepping up as one of 150 celebrity signatories to denounce the cancel culture in an open letter this month, which called out the “disproportionate punishments” given to its targets.

Rowling’s voice appears almost hypocritical and self-serving in light of the fact that she herself bore the brunt of online hate for her views on transgender issues in recent weeks.

Culture must also remain equally resilient to bring about real change
-

While the jury may be divided over the author’s stance, the question has never been about whether Rowling was right or wrong in her views, but rather, can the world keep quiet any longer in the face of wrongdoing?

It is undeniable that #MeToo used this tool effectively to bring down the empires of the Harvey Weinsetins and Kevin Spaceys of this world after years of abuse and suppression.

Calling out George Floyd’s wrongful death at the hands of a police officer, and the corresponding protests that gave a renewed voice to the Black Lives Matters movement, are not just matters of historical record or your flash-in-the-pan couch side activism.

These were revolutions given voice by the movements that the cancel culture spearheaded. Online bullying, brandishing rape and death threats can never find endorsement in true believers, but damning a powerful collective voice over the crimes of a few is also not an effective solution.

Cancel the perpetrators with zeal, but the culture must also remain equally resilient to bring about real change.

Premise that cancel culture is based on is perhaps as old as civilisation itself

Image Credit: Gulf News

Two sides to a coin

Sanjib Kumar Das — Assistant Editor

“My right to pull a punch ends where your nose begins”. A casual acquaintance, a co-passenger rather, had once said this to me during a banter on a moving train somewhere in India, as we were engaged in a point-counter point on the merits and demerits of a democracy, vis-a-vis a dictatorship.

In the wake of the current furore over ‘cancel culture’, I was once again reminded about that statement that I had heard many years ago, the basic import of which being: All rights and privileges, in whatever form or shape they come in a liberalised world, are only relative.

Cancel Culture, more than anything else, has really brought this debate front and centre — that while opinion should be nuanced and not over-the-top, reaction to opinion should also be within the limits of civility and based on a very rational and malleable approach to perspectives — even when they are not necessarily to one’s liking.

Any communication or dialogue cannot take place in a vacuum
-

Cancel culture is a relatively new term, but the premise it is based on is perhaps as old as civilisation itself. And there are always two sides to this debate: A Donald Trump who holds “far-Left fascists” responsible for all things evil in the liberal world is as guilty as many of the signatories to that open letter in Harper’s magazine who feel that the “lifeblood of a liberal society is daily becoming more constricted”, for they are as much guilty with their lack of accountability and misjudgements.

Any communication or dialogue cannot take place in a vacuum. Context is what makes any interaction worth being a part of. And this question of context cannot be seen or understood in isolation from the subject on hand. When author Salman Rushdie made certain contentious comments in his celebrated work ‘Midnight’s Children’, the temptation, for some, to take it out of context and give it a sinister twist was too high.

That was far from being a constructive critique. Issuing a religious edict to stifle a creative voice is the worst form of fundamentalism. Likewise, when painter late M.F. Hussain depicted images of a certain deity that seemed to be derogatory to some, the reaction it generated from a section of self-proclaimed gatekeepers of religious and cultural ethos was shocking to the core.

Both, in case of Rushdie and Hussain, cancel culture was at play in its ugliest form perhaps. The debate was taken out of context to give it a hue that the creators of the original works had probably never intended. That was unfortunate.

But on the flip side, didn’t Rushdie and Hussain also make an error of judgement in not realising what could be the fallout of a sweeping cultural generalisation?

If they didn’t, then that was their hubris. Creators of content, in any field or occupation, ought to remember that it is all right to project reality or a perception of reality or a myth or an analogy from a certain sense of artistic entitlement, so long as that sense of entitlement is not based on a perceived sense of intellectual superiority that tends to co-opt broad cultural ethos and sensitivities.

There are many instances of supposed cancel culture that have really been trolling disguised in a cloak of woke Image Credit: Gulf News

Cancel culture does not threaten free speech

Tabitha Barda — Baby and Child Editor

Everyone seems to have a slightly different perception of what cancel culture means and because of that it’s not a terribly helpful term.

However, the movement at its roots has a positive role to play.

At its core it is a way for people to rally together and call for a boycott or ‘cancellation’ of high-profile, influential people who have been offensive or harmful in some way to a marginalised group.

The ‘ganging up’ aspect of this may feel uncomfortable, but the point is that these people would not be heard on their own — the group is what gives them a voice.

It overlaps with call-out culture but goes one step further: holding privileged public figures to account for their words or actions, and calling for retribution through a “cancellation” of their status and influence.

It can quickly become needlessly sadistic and slide into online bullying
-

Cancel culture does not threaten free speech — It is using the strength of many voices to balance out an already amplified voice

However, like a lot of things on social media, it’s easily abused, and can turn cruel and destructive in a flash.

The power structures at play are important. If the person being ‘cancelled’ has considerable public cachet and has said or done something to marginalise a minority group then that’s cancel culture (as I understand it). If any of these dynamics is slightly off then it can quickly become needlessly sadistic and slide into online bullying.

Without a doubt there are many instances of supposed cancel culture that have really been trolling disguised in a cloak of woke.

But where it comes into its own — and the reason why it is so profoundly unsettling for many people (especially for the sort of writers and thinkers who signed the Harper’s open letter) — is where it calls out and punishes those public figures who are doing something or expressing an opinion that up until now has been widely accepted.

This is where it truly challenges the status quo and can be a powerful force for societal change.

Put it this way: Were you aware that defining “people who menstruate” as “women” was controversial before JK Rowling was ‘cancelled’ for doing so? If not then cancel culture has done its job.

The entire idea of cancelling people is poisonous Image Credit: Gulf News

We need to stop trying to tear people down

Yousra Zaki — Senior Features Editor

The first time I came across cancel culture, was when I read about a “feud” between two beauty influencers over YouTube. The two make-up moguls, James Charles and Tati Westbrook, had a falling out.

The YouTube and social media battle of immense proportions played out right before our eyes. The YouTube star and make-up artist Westbrook, had at the time completely severed ties with 19-year-old YouTube megastar Charles.

Tati posted a 43-minute YouTube video titled: “BYE SISTER” in which, she explained the ongoing feud between both of them and her decision to cut her ties with James. Basically, all he did was promote a vitamin brand that is a competitor to her own vitamin brand.

A person’s actions do not define who they are
-

The beauty community “cancelled” James. He lost over 1 million YouTube subscribers in less than 24 hours. People sent him hate messages on social media and unfollowed him on his platforms.

This is an example of how cancel culture is a dumb way for society to invest their time in blowing people’s mistakes or negative comments out of proportion. The entire idea of cancelling people is poisonous because humans make mistakes, they say dumb things and they sometimes act stupid. However a person’s actions do not define who they are.

JK Rowling for example, has donated the proceeds of the two of her books to Comic Relief — a total estimated at over £17 million. She regularly contributes to over 20 different charities including supporting AIDS, cancer, homelessness and more. However, she was cancelled due to her comments.

Rowling has drawn criticism for posting tweets taking issue with the phrase “people who menstruate”. “I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out,” she had tweeted earlier, resulting in many calling her out for being transphobic.

We need to stop trying to tear people down.

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment

Sunday, July 26, 2020

The deeper ramifications of Trump’s sympathy for Maxwell

BUSINESS IS SLOW

Ukraine's snail farmers fear collapse over EU lockdowns

About Me