Mediaboss Marketing

My university email account got hacked last week. It happened at 10:00 in the morning. I was still in bed. Thankfully, several colleagues were awake and at their computers. Ten minutes after the attack a phishing email had been reported and my account closed down. Nevertheless, emails purportedly in my name had found their way across the whole university causing annoyance to those who didnt know me and bewilderment (or merriment) to those who did.

Our IT technicians are patient, extremely good at their jobs and, above all, very kind. What did l do wrong? l asked them.

It is nothing that you did. The bots are very clever you may have opened a dodgy attachment and it may have been years ago, they reassured me.

l pictured the university digital support experts reading my emails in order to reconfigure my corrupted account. There were some really nice emails about Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Townsend Warner. Then I had a momentary panic: was there anything that shouldnt have been there? No, squeaky clean I thought, congratulating myself for carefully keeping my work-related and personal accounts separated.

Oh by the way, there is no official university signature at the bottom of the emails youve been sending, the nice digital support technician told me. Weve been asked to remind you, she said apologetically. Ah yes, that email signaturethat l havebeen struggling to set up, but alaswith no success, I think to myself.

I am an emerita professor these days and enjoy supervising and researching as much as l ever did, but l have been reminded of my need for digital literacy virtually every day since l retired. l am a trustee of a local organisation, for example, with a rather good website that someone needs to update. l look pointedly at the floor when this comes up at meetings. I am the only one of us in the room who has no idea how to do this. l am hoping against hope that none of the others will realise this fact. Actually, they all realise it but everyone is much too nice to point it out.

Was it ever thus? No. l, too, was once a digital champion. l remember taking to email instantly, recognising its life-transforming communication potential the very first time l was shown it. The joy of being able to send my own academic writing instantly to a friend anywhere in the world!

I also becomeadept atspreadsheets, something I dont miss in my soi-disant retirement.

In my work in the community there are things about which l care passionately like the failure of the number 18 bus to materialise at the stop outside my house to take me to the Cambridge city centre.

Social media is the place for these types of rants these days. So why, when l know that a digital presence is a sine qua non for anyone who wants to be heard beyond their immediate family and friends, do I resist it? Especially when all universities (quite properly) expect digital literacy from both students and staff; when l know that elections are fought and won on Facebook; when influencers reach millions on YouTube; and my own academic monographs reach a few hundred. Why do l hate the very thought of anyone being able to press a like or dislike button on anything remotely connected with me? My regrets for no longer being a digital champion end here.

The reason, mainly, is internet trolls. Now I am noshrinking violet (sorry, snowflake). Yes, l probably could cope with trolling but only in some circumstances: when l am feeling happy, buoyant, in good health and surrounded by friends. Not when l am feeling depressed, tired, struggling with bereavement, illness and caring responsibilities or with utility companies and household appliances that dont work. A lot of women l know feel this way.

There was the recent story of the academic whose students alerted her to threats on social media. Her university acknowledged that she was in real and present danger. l read in the newspaper that she was to have security guards in her lectures who will accompany her to the lecture hall and check that she is not being followed. The security guards will also sit at the back until the students see them when they arrive. This is unconscionable; truly and unfathomably awful. After reading the article I realised that this is someone l have actually met.

Trolling can affect the victims support network as well. I think of my thoughtful, softly-spoken, sensitive student, for instance, who, as far as l can see, has never done anything to offend anyone and never would. The vitriol she received after posting something online did not just frighten her it frightened both of us. Were the trolls in Cambridge or in Canada? In Norwich or in Nigeria? It spooked me that we didnt know.

If Mary Beard can cope with it so can you, said one well-intentioned friend. She was encouraging me to enter the 21st-century culture wars with what she felt sure would be a new dazzling online presence. Mary Beard? Oh, to be the Cambridge classicist Mary Beard; to be brilliant, confident and indestructible; to have her sharpness of intellect; to be unimaginably wonderful in every possible way. I wish l were Mary Beard. But sadly, l am not.

Throughout my teaching career l kept a box of (usually floral) notelets in my office. There was always a use for them birthdays, congratulations, new babies, promotions but more often than not I associate them with sadness and disappointment; with messages of condolence, sympathy and support. l reach for my notelets and carefully begin to compose a few handwritten sentences to my fellow academic who now has bodyguards to protect her against online trolls. This is not the appropriate time for emails with or without a signature at the bottom. l am trying to remember if the old flowery notelets were really scented with lavender. Or was it Devon violets? But then my memory is nothing like as good as it was.

Mary Joannou is emerita professor of literary history and womens writing at Anglia Ruskin University.

See the rest here:
Confessions of a former digital champion - Times Higher Education (THE)

The Iranian revolution occurred 41 yearsago, but its consequences endure, having triggered a set of geopolitical earthquakes that transformed the Middle East.

The regime change in Tehran in 1979 deprived the US of one of its leading strategic assets in the region. Energy markets were affected by a second oil shock after the 1973 one; a Shia revival reactivated the centuries-old Sunni-Shia confrontation within Islam; and some Middle Eastern boundaries were redrawn with blood. Another centuries-old confrontation, between Islam and the West, found new life.

The revolution ultimately generated a sequence of events in the region similar to the 17th-century Thirty Years War in Europe, with the notable difference that the Middle Eastern version - more recently carried out by the US-led Arab Nato and the Iranian-led Axis of Resistance - has now reached its 40th year, and shows no signs of ending. A new security architecture in the region is highly needed, but it seems there is no will or leadership to promote it.

The last decade has provided hopes and delusions, from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal to the fears of a new regional conflict generated by the US withdrawal from that same agreement. Conflicts and tensions between two new geopolitical entities are affecting Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and the occupied Palestinian territories.

The meaning of the Iranian revolution goes beyond geopolitics. It is something much deeper and more difficult to grasp

To understand the revolutions impact, to an extent, it can be linked to the tragic events of 9/11 - although not in the sense promoted relentlessly by the diehard neocons who have tried for decades to hold Iran accountable for the 2001 terrorist attacks.

Rather, the thread linking these events is the reaction by the most fundamentalist branch of Sunni Islam, Wahhabism, to the revolution:a panic-driven responseby Saudi Arabia causedit to launch a massive campaign of global financing and promotion of its Wahabistrand which unintentionally culminated in terrorist attacks by groups includingal-Qaeda and, later, the Islamic State.

But the meaning of the Iranian revolution goes beyond geopolitics. It is something much deeper and more difficult to grasp. One of the lesser-known, but most significant acts carried out by the revolution's leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini a few months before his death may be helpful in understanding this.

On 1 January 1989, the former supreme leader directed a letter to then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, as the country and its communist ideology experienced its terminal phase.

The letter, complex and imbued with metaphysical and philosophical references, contained a couple of essential messages: that communisms crisiswas due to the choice to obliterat[e] God and religion from society,and that Gorbachev had deluded himself into thinking that the solution to his countrys problems was represented by the illusory heaven of the Western world.

Revolutionary Iran thus stood as the champion in opposing the two great historical materialisms: communism and capitalism. In essence, Khomeinis Iran waged a systemic cultural war against the Western Enlightenment - specifically, its removal of religion from the lives of individuals. Western secular civilisation and modernity were contested at their roots.

Leaving aside philosophy and metaphysics, the Iranian Revolution was the culmination of a systematic opposition, going back to the 19th century, against a perceived oppressive Western hegemony - not only political and military, but above all, economic and cultural.

Forty years later, Khomeinis letter still offers cues for reflection, especially in light of current global dynamics. Russia, after a brief interlude spent in what Khomeini called the Western garden, with disastrous economic and social outcomes, has in the last two decades taken another path based on different identity values, drawn from the Christian-Orthodox religious tradition.

In the last decade, Europe and the US have been ravaged by culture wars and identity conflicts, where religious and ethical values have played a non-secondary role. These conflicts have jeopardised the European political project and its set of secular values and principles. In the US, they are leading to a polarisation not seen since the 19th century civil war, making the leader of the free world barely recognisable, even by its more faithful allies and friends.

How 1979 reshaped Iran and Saudi Arabia

In the meantime, communisms last political bastion, China, seems to have succeeded in combining the best of these two ideologies, and it aspires to a world-leading role in 2049, the 100th anniversary of its own Revolution.

Ultimately, the persistence with which the US opposes Iran, and by which Israel portrays it as an existential threat, are due precisely to Irans ideological stance.

Tehrans alleged nuclear military programme is largely a pretext. Iran is not considered a normal nation because it has refused to bow to the Western world order and the Pax Americana in the Middle East, and is the last country in the region opposing the liquidation of the Palestinian problem.

Irans capital sin has been its missionary struggle, according to its own peculiar and disputable views, against perceived oppression and injustice attributed to Western nations and their Arab proxies. Iran still claims, perhaps naively, to oppose Western neoliberal materialism and its related world order, considered sources of moral corruption and depravity (the Great Satan).

Forty years on, however, the revolutions religious fervour has greatly subsided; the population, especially the youth, show strong signs of revolutionary fatigue. However, such a feeling should not be naively morphed into a propensity for regime change.

The essentially binary Western mind should make an effort to reconcile with the fact that the people in the streets of Tehran, Baghdad and Beirut may protest against their governments heavy-handed policies, economic mismanagement and corruption, but this does not equate to their automatic embrace of an increasingly decrepit Western model.

Watching the massive scale of Iranian General Qassem Soleimanis funeral, after his assassinationon Donald Trump's orders, it is clear that many Iranians, no matter their dissatisfaction with life in the Islamic republic, have no illusions that the US will be their saviour.

Theviews expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

The rest is here:
Four decades on, the West still doesn't get the Iranian revolution - Middle East Eye

Photo by picjumbo.com from Pexels

Im not much involved in the culture war because I think its a misuse of time and energy, especially on the part of Christians and churches, to be vying for political power.

The Evangelical Right was the first to fall to this temptation in recent American history, but the Progressive Left is quickly following suit. Its like well do and say almost anything to bolster our advantage against the other side.

Hear me out on this matter, please. Its not that I think certain issues arent important when it comes to our culture, and its not that I think we shouldnt stand for what is right, especially when it comes to our solidarity with the most vulnerable members of society. The church has a prophetic calling to speak truth to power in every sphere of life.

Its the way we go about it that matters.

Youre probably familiar with the story of Jesus going to the wilderness to be tempted by the devil (Luke 4:1-14). The good book says that after he fasted and prayed for forty days, Satan came to offer him some help.

Use your power to feed yourself, he suggested (Im paraphrasing here). Throw yourself down from the pinnacle of the temple. Just show me a little obeisance and all the kingdoms of the world will be yours. Easy peasy.

Of course, Jesus refused his offer on every count and subsequently returned to town in the power of the Spirit. I think we tend to overlook the significance of this exchange, especially that last little bit. Jesus returned with power, but it wasnt the kind of power the devil offered him. It wasnt worldly power Christ sought but spiritual power, the difference between power over and power with.

Essentially, this story symbolizes the human temptation to take power over our fellow creatures in effect, bypassing the suffering of the cross to gain what might otherwise seem to be legitimate ends.Jesus denied himself this temptation and chose a better way. Christians are called to imitate Christ in this way, but the culture war demonstrates our overwhelming failure to do so.

Forgive me if Im wrong here and Im well aware of how much my privilege may be playing into my viewpoint but I think both the Evangelical Right and the Progressive Left in America have fallen for the devils temptation. In a well-intended but misguided effort to advance their righteous cause(s), they have left the way of Christ to jockey for political power instead.

Without going deeply into it, I should also point out that political power is always power over. It is the power of the State which is maintained by either the threat or force of violence. Granted, the violence of the American state (at least upon its own citizens) may seem benign compared to other authoritarian countries, but it is no less real. If you dont believe me, just stop paying your taxes for a while. Youll find out how free you really are.

Until the time of Constantine, there seems to have been a fairly unanimous if not universal view among Christians that taking the way of Christ meant refusing participation in the ways of the world, which amounted to not being a direct participant in the affairs of the State. In the words of Eberhard Arnold,

The [early] Christians abhorred and attacked [any] mixture of the religious and the patriotic. They detested any State religion that forced back Gods rule; they loathed all religiosity influenced by the politics of the moment, and fought against any veneration of the existing power structure. This included any political system with a religious emphasis. These were to be regarded as the inheritance of Babylon, the works of sin and demonism. They were nothing short of the devils state and the service of Satan. (The Early Christians in Their Own Words)

Theoretically, this conviction would have held true whether or not the state was considered Christian, as it often is in modern-day America. In fact, most early disciples would have scoffed at the notion of a Christian nation, because, again every nation is founded on either the threat or force of violence, and this type of power (power-over) is essentially anti-Christ. It is the way of the world.

I realize that Im hinting at some pretty big implications here, but I dont see how the Christian faith proposes anything less.At the very least, it suggests that no matter which side wins the Christian culture war, weve already lost the battle for a new world just by participating in it.

Ill stop there. The prophets and patriarchs of old dreamed of a celestial city not built with human hands, whose builder and maker is God (Hebrews 11:10). Part of what I think this means is that the new Earth, including its people and its social systems, will not be built on the foundation of human violence as our current systems are. We need a better way for a new humanity. The way of Christ.

Follow this link:
What the story of Jesus' temptation says about the Christian culture wars | What the story of Jesus' temptation says about the Christian culture wars...

In the early days of Donald Trumps takeover of the Republican party, and of the conservative movement, many of us assumed that it was happening in complete defiance of the movements intellectual leadership.

Trump was aggressively anti-intellectual and routinely displayed a contemptuous indifference toward the ideas to which many intellectuals on the right have devoted their lives: small government, free markets, fiscal responsibility, moral character.

Many of them had previously lined up against him, drawing a line in the sand Against Trump.

Yet only a few years later, Trumps takeover of the conservative movement is nearly complete. You could interpret this one of three ways: That nobody ever really listened to the rights intellectuals; that the intellectuals never really believed their own supposed ideals; or that there was some hidden weakness on the part of conservative intellectuals that made them vulnerable to Trumpism.

As evidence for this third possibility, consider a revealing confession by one of those intellectuals at the blog American Greatness.

American Greatness is the kind of place that publishes anonymous white power poetry, yet qualifies, in the relative world of Breitbart and (these days) the Federalist, as highbrow Trumpism. It even manages to attract a number of reputable old names, the kind of conservative intellectuals who used to complain, back in the 1980s, about the coarsening of the culture. People like the author of that confession, Mark Bauerlein.

Yet Bauerlein is now arguing that both culture and politics are not a contest of ideas.

Margaret Thatcher once said that you have to win the argument before you win the vote, but when the Left controls the institutionsor rather, screens conservatives out of those institutions by applying tests of social opinion (Do you oppose or favor same-sex marriage?)Thatchers formulation can no longer hold. For 30 years, conservatives have won many debates, issued best-selling books, and swayed public opinion in many areas, but they havent slowed the long march of the Left through the institutions at all. For example, Allan Blooms The Closing of the American Mind and writings by Roger Kimball, Dinesh DSouza, Richard Bernstein, and countless others convinced the public that political correctness was becoming a serious problem on college campuses, but the coercive uniformity of opinion in higher education has only gotten worse since then. While the Right was beating them in the ideas arena, the Left was claiming office space.

Conservatives who appeal to liberal ideals in the context of existing institutions, be they the longstanding mores of cooperation in the Senate or academic freedom in the university, are beating their heads against a wall.

Donald Trump understands this. Thats one reason the Left despises him. He typically doesnt bother to debate ideas and ideals, but this is not anti-intellectualism, as the liberal says. It is, instead, his awareness that politics is now, first and foremost, a battle of persons, not ideologies or tax rates or trade.

The idea that Trump understands this is wishful thinking. Trump doesnt bother to debate ideas and ideals because he has neither the ability nor the inclination. Imputing ones own favored opinions onto Trumpwith no supporting evidenceas justification for his behavior is a consistent habit of his supporters.

Yet Bauerleins piece isnt really about Trump.

Instead, it is a confession of failure and a kind of personal breakdown, a crisis of belief. Bauerlein has been in academia for decades, held a position at the National Endowment for the Arts in the George W. Bush administration, and has offered up conservative cultural commentary in publications such as the New Criterion. So if we were going to have a new generation of compelling, interesting, and successful conservative intellectuals, both in the academy and out of it, he would have been involved in producing them.

If there is such a wave, I havent seen it. Instead, conservatism has become more lowbrow and ideologically depleted.

Donald Trump is not the cause of this decline, merely the symptom.

We could discuss some of the reasons behind this devolution: the longstanding conservative suspicion of ideology; the failed attempt to dress up religious traditionalism in a veneer of intellectualism; conservative intellectuals indulgence in populist anti-elitist rhetoric that has since been turned against them.

The important thing for our present purpose is not to answer this question, but to note that Bauerlein isnt trying to answer it, either. Instead, he concludes that if he has been unable to convince a new generation of his ideas, then convincing peoplewinning the argumentmust be impossible, and a waste of time.

Bauerlein reminds me of the evangelical Christians who have chosen Trump as their champion. That choice is a similar confession of failure, a confession that while Jerry Falwell may have gotten rich (and his son richer still), they have failed to spread the faith.

Some years ago, Ben Domenech perceptively identified this as the post-apocalyptic culture war, driven by an increasingly large portion of evangelicals who believe the culture wars are over, and they lost. This makes them a lot more open to the idea of an unprincipled blowhard who promises hes got your back on political correctness. (Domenech presented this in that Im-not-condoning-just-explaining style that tends to slip into condoningand eventually into cheerleading.)

Bauerlein is presenting us with this same notion of a post-apocalyptic culture warbut for intellectuals and academics.

But we should understand that Bauerleins approach is not a strategy for victory. Its a counsel of defeatism. He is not merely claiming that the contest of ideas has been lost, but that it cannot be won.

This would mean that the only way forward is to never lose another election.

This may not be a remotely realistic goal, but it does explain why support for Trump is so strident and inflexible, and why recalcitrant NeverTrumpers occupy so much space in the heads of Trumps supporters. Back in the old daysand by the old days, I mean five years agoit was commonly accepted that if a foolish or unworthy politician lost an election, it was probably his own fault, for not making a good enough case to the public. But all hope was not lost because the contest of ideas would go on.

But what happens when you give up on the contest of ideas? Then the political leader on your side at any given moment has to win, whoever he is and whatever his flaws. He has to remain in office and win re-election, because you have given up on winning converts and adding to your coalition. In this view, the crudest kind of partisanship remains as the only means conservative intellectuals have for achieving their ends.

This Flight 93 Election approach, in which Trump wins or the entire cause of the right dies, is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It is also another example of the point I made recently about the blue dots of outrage, the tendency to inflate bad news and prophesy the end of the world. I warned that this can cause us to reject the means by which the world is actually changed and improved.

Even worse, it deprives us of the standards by which we would judge what is improved.

If we give up the contest of ideas, we give up the task of defining what our goals are, and we are much more likely to achieve the opposite of what we originally set out to do. I cant think of a better example of this than intellectuals who used to agonize over the coarsening of the culture becoming strident champions of one of our cultures coarsest products.

This cultural defeatism means passing up real opportunities. Consider, for example, that some of the strongest responses to the distorted, anti-American history of the 1619 Project have come from progressive intellectuals and the Worldwide Socialist Web Site. Or that old-fashioned liberals are beginning to discover the dangers of Political Correctness.

These are opportunities to make common cause and maybe to win some converts. After all, the political right as we know it was formed in the middle of the 20th century by intellectuals who came out of the Red Decade of the 1930s. Many conservative intellectuals were former communists who had seen the light.

The contest of ideas is never irrelevant and it never ends. The only certain way to lose it is to give up on it.

The rest is here:
The Closing of the Conservative Mind - The Bulwark

President Trump won acquittal Wednesday in the U.S. Senate, bringing to a close only the third presidential impeachment trial in American history. The votes split the country, tested civic norms and fed the tumultuous 2020 race for the White House.

A majority of senators expressed unease with President Trumps pressure campaign on Ukraine that resulted in the two articles of impeachment. But the final tallies 52-48 acquitting him of abuse of power and 53-47 to acquit him of obstruction of Congress investigation fell far short. Two-thirds of the 100-member Senate, or 67 votes, were needed to convict and remove President Trump from office.

The outcome Wednesday followed months of remarkable impeachment proceedings in the U.S. House of Representatives, followed by the U.S. Senate reflecting the nations unrelenting partisan divide three years into the Trump presidency.

What started as President Trumps request for Ukraine to do us a favor spun into a far-reaching, 28,000-page report compiled by House investigators accusing the president of engaging in shadow diplomacy that threatened U.S. foreign relations for personal political gain as he pressured the ally to investigate Democratic rival Joe Biden ahead of the 2020 presidential election.

No president has ever been removed by the Senate.

A politically emboldened President Trump has eagerly predicted vindication, deploying the verdict as a political anthem in his re-election bid. The president claims he did nothing wrong, decrying the witch hunt and hoax as extensions of special counsel Robert Muellers probe into Russian campaign interference in the 2016 presidential election by those out to get him from the start of his presidency.

The Wednesday afternoon vote was swift. With Chief Justice John Roberts presiding over the trial, senators sworn to do impartial justice stood at their desks for the roll call and stated their votes guilty or not guilty.

On the first article of impeachment, President Trump was charged with abuse of power. He was found not guilty. The second, obstruction of Congress, also produced a not guilty verdict.

Only one Republican, Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, the partys defeated 2012 presidential nominee, broke with the GOP.

Sen. Romney choked up as he said he drew on his faith and oath before God to announce his vote of guilty on the first charge, abuse of power. He would vote to acquit on the second charge.

Virginias senators, Democrats Mark R. Warner and Tim Kaine, voted guilty on both charges.

Both President Bill Clinton in 1999 and President Andrew Johnson in 1868 drew cross-party support when they were left in office after an impeachment trial. Facing impeachment, President Richard Nixon resigned in 1974 rather than face revolt from his own party.

Ahead of voting, some of the most closely watched senators took to the Senate floor to tell their constituents, and the nation, what they had decided. The Senate chaplain opened the trial with daily prayers for the senators, including one Wednesday seeking integrity.

Influential GOP Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, who is retiring, worried that a guilty verdict would pour gasoline on the fire of the nations culture wars over President Trump. He said the House proved its case, but it just didnt rise to the level of removing the president from office.

Read the original:
Senate fails to remove Trump from office - Richmond Free Press