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A resurgent Bernie Sanders is terrifying the Democratic establishment and has seen Warren lash out and attempt to smear Bernie as a sexist.

This sexism smear is as outrageous as it is desperate, because Bernie was a feminist well before Warren was a Republican.

Sanders vs Warren represents the great Class vs Identity Politics schism on the Left and those woke Identity Politics activists wont tolerate the patriarchy robbing them of another female candidate for President so expect the name calling and tribal social media lynch mobs that make them about as a popular as Donald Trump at a Queer Intersectionist Feminist Folk Festival to erupt if Bernie wins.

These woke Identity Politics dynamics have managed to alienate working class voters on social media to such an extent that they were major factors in the Trump win, the Brexit win, the Scott Morrison win and the Corbyn loss so if Sanders can beat Warren and then beat Trump, Class Left solidarity will have retaken the philosophical high ground on the Left.

This dynamic of woke Identity Politics activism alienating working class voters is one Bryce Edwards notes in his latest Guardian column, where he highlights that because there is so little in way of real policy difference between National and Labour, National will fight the next election using culture wars instead

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So where can it differentiate? National increasingly relies on stoking culture wars and law and order. It is these fertile new hunting grounds that give Simon Bridges his best chance of painting Ardern and her colleagues as out of touch with mainstream New Zealand.

Culture wars are concerned with debates relating to ethnicity, gender, sexuality, human rights, discrimination, free speech and civil liberties. Elements of the political left especially in the Labour and Green parties are increasingly associated with campaigns in these areas, and often their stances are not shared by many mainstream voters.

hilariously for daring to point out that many woke Identity Politics activists are alienating more voters than they are winning over, Bryce has been immediately decried on Twitter by those very same alienating woke Identity Politics activists.

You cant make this shit up.

I think the identity politics left in NZ are more focused on cancelling voters than recruiting them.

If your starting point as a woke Identity Politics activist is that all men are rapists, all white people racist, Trans Rights over all other rights always, if a woman says it then it must be true and anyone standing up for free speech is a Nazi, then you might want to sit this next election out because that message is pushing people away from our progressive cause, not towards it, as this excellent piece in The Atlantic points out

The Twitter Electorate Isnt the Real Electorate

Social media is distorting our sense of mainstream opinion.

Does Twitter matter? The temptation is to say no. Its user base is small compared with Facebook321 million monthly active users versus more than 2 billionand a quick glance at the trending topics reveals its fractious, claustrophobic atmosphere. Yet as one dead fox proves, it does matter: On December 26, a single tweet by a British lawyer with 178,000 followers, announcing that he had killed a fox with a baseball bat, made the front pages of two major newspapers.

Yes, it was a quiet news day. But Twitter has become journalists easiest and most reliable source of cor-blimey (or OMG, to American readers) stories, because all of human life is there, and its searchable. It is also the worlds wire service: Just look at Donald Trump, who drops his unfiltered thoughts straight onto Twitter, confident that they will be picked up by journalists. For anyone interested in politics, it is the closest thing to a global community center, or a small-ads sectionthe virtual room where it happens.

All of this gives the social networkand its most active usersoutsize power to shape the political conversation. Its influence can be seen in contests currently under way in the United States and Britain: the race to become the Democrats presidential nominee, and the struggle to succeed Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party. Both risk being distorted by what we might call the Twitter Primary.

British tweeters skew left and toward remaining in the European Union, which reflects their demographic makeup. On average social media users are younger and better educated than non-users, wrote the researchers Jonathan Mellon and Christopher Prosser in 2017. Users were also more likely to live in cities, particularly wealthier areas with younger populations. This phenomenon has been more thoroughly studied in the U.S., where The New York Times has reported that the views of Democrats on social media often bear little resemblance to those of the wider Democratic electorate. Active political tweeters in America were whiter, more left wing, more likely to be college educated, and less likely to say that political correctness was a problem than primary voters as a whole. Given the faux-democratic promise of social media, it is ironic that it has created a new establishment with roughly the same tight demographic boundaries as the old one.

The real danger of identity politics over class politics, as we have seen in the UK election and with Trump, is that when white poor men start seeing themselves not as a class but as an identity, the Right win.

In the NZ context that means 500 retweets by Wellington Twitteratti = alienation not winning. If its popular on The Spinoff, its poison at the ballot box and if Action Station have a petition on it, avoid it like the fucking plague.

The woke wont change their rage politics of alienation, they cant. Social media has given them a sense of power theyve never held before, an ocean of the bullied who can now bully will never hand over their weapons, so the Left need to ignore the Woke, stop alienating white working class men and actually try to win them over.

Take white male privilege. Why would men want to be told they have it (when their suicide rates, mental health issues, low life expectancy, violence and murder rate is so high) and why would they willingly hand it over if they did have it?

Isnt white male privilege being treated with respect? Not getting hassled by the cops? Getting paid properly?

The Woke scream for white men to hand over that privilege, but why would any white male look at the list and agree to be paid less, be treated poorly by the cops or accept sub-standard service?

Wouldnt it be better to say that we want to expand white male privilege to everyone? Instead of attacking those Men, hold up their agency as the right every citizen should enjoy.

Expanding the franchise of democratic agency is something everyone can get behind including those it currently benefits because removing my agency so people who despise me can have more isnt an easy political sale.

Fellow citizens shouldnt fear the Left, the 1% should.

If Sanders can re-establish Class as the foundation for the Left, we can pull back working class voters from realigning with the Right and there might be a chance to avoid the madness of right wing Demagogues.

If Sanders loses, we are doomed to right wing populism. Theres more at stake this election than America gaining its first woman president, it could lose its soul.

See more here:
Bryce Edward's Guardian Column, Culture Wars and why Sanders vs Warren is the Class vs Identity Politics schism on the Left - thedailyblog.co.nz

Nancy Pelosi speaking at the 2019 California Democratic Party State Convention (photo by Gage Skidmore/Flickr)

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D.-Calif.), said in a televised town hall meeting on December 5 that she thinks the arts will help heal an America profoundly fractured by the divisive political and cultural realities of life in the Trump era. When asked how the Speaker planned on unifying the country during impeachment, Pelosi answered, I myself think thatone of the ways that America will heal is through the arts. I truly believe thats something where we find our common ground. You enjoy music together, you see a play or movie, youlaugh, you cry, youre inspired, you laugh, you cry

But the arts are more divided than ever. Schismatic tribal factions generate and consume art and media thats increasingly characterized by blatant political partisanship, and overt contempt for ideological dissidents.

Two paintings of presidents completed in 2018 perfectly exemplify the opposing camps. The first, a portrait of Barack Obama by Kehinde Wiley, was widely celebrated as a presidential portrait for progressives who, until that point, mostly rejected presidential portraiture as corny establishmentarianism. Its unveiling at the National Portrait Gallery became an artistic gathering as much as a political event, which the right interpreted as a clear declaration of the art worlds majority support for Obama. The painting drew near-unanimous disdain in conservative media which referenced Wileys earlier work: Judith and Holofernes in which a black woman beheads a white woman as a way to condemn Obamas portrait as radically progressive and maybe even racist. For Trumps 2020 reelection campaign, his action committee appropriated the image for satirical merchandise.

The other work by outsider artist Jon McNaughton is a camo-hued campy adaption of George Binghams painting of Washington crossing the Delaware, replaced with Trump and his cabinet entitled Crossing the Swamp. The painting received over 20,000 likes on Twitter and was featured on Fox News, ABC News, and USA Today as an example of trending contemporary conservative art. (I reached out to McNaughton, and his assistant declined to provide an image or more information about the work. She stated the artist didnt want the painting to be used for political purposes. Which is supremely ironic considering the subject matter.)

Old debates about the role of government in the arts are re-emerging, and once more a presidential administration is looking to put politics upstream of culture. Republican officials have been threatening to cut funding for the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) for decades in part as a way to censor work the NEA funds, like the famously graphic photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serranos Piss Christ. The Trump presidency has perpetuated this legacy by threatening to cut $126 million of NEA funding three years in a row.

This socio-political factionalism isnt exclusive to Washington partisan posturing though. The art world is itself experiencing divisive convulsions between conservative institutional policymakers and their progressive workers. Last year the Marciano Brothers promptly shuttered the Marciano Art Foundation in Los Angeles and fired all of its staff after workers tried to unionize. Similarly, in the events leading up to the resignation of Warren Kanders from the board of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the power players at the institution seemed at ideological odds with staff that produce some of the most progressive exhibitions in the world.

The so-called right has been eagerly constructing a conservative popular culture that counterbalances an arts establishment it sees as dominated by leftists and progressive values (despite evidence to the contrary mentioned above). But the left is also suspicious of the overbearing influence of conservatism in the arts. This impasse of perceptions precludes the possibility of Pelosis prognostication ever coming true.

If you do a quick Google search for articles related to conservative art you get things like The Rise of Conservative Art and Poetry on theepochtimes.com, or Conservatives Need to Start Taking Art Seriously on quillete.com, the first paragraph of which reads:

Conservatives, crack open some champagne and celebrate. A remarkable renewal of traditional painting and sculpture has taken place in the American art scene over the past 10 years. At last, a cultural movement has emerged that builds upon time-honored practices instead of deconstructing them.

Both authors identify an urgent need for conservatives to create an alternative to progressive culture with their own celebrities, writers, and artists, but also to define spaces where the right can share art.

This isnt the first time Americans have gone through culture wars, and perhaps todays iteration is just a continuation of the tumult experienced in the 60s and 80s. Theres always been a traditional ideological rift between urban progressives and rural conservatives in this country, but unlike past struggles, social media and search engine algorithms have intensified insular bubbles and soothing echo chambers.

Increasingly, people from both sides only see content with appealing values that are reflexively organized by convenient left and right-wing polarities. If you couple this with block, ban, unfriend culture, the effect is people are finding fewer opportunities to find common ground through art. As long as the arts continue this trend of inspiring parallel but opposite cultures, art will exacerbate our divisions, not heal them.

President Trumps recent tweet threatening strikes on Iranian cultural sites is a scarily literal expansion of the culture wars. Although Trump walked his statement back in a later press conference saying he would respect international law it seems thats the only thing stopping him. His tweet set an unretractable presidential precedent that arts institutions across the country unanimously condemn. We must, of course, unequivocally oppose virulent partisans from either faction weaponizing art for short-term political advantage, especially in exchange for the destruction of cultural heritage sites millenia old.

As this sort of discordant rhetoric intensifies, we must do more than just find commonality through shared culture, as Speaker Pelosi suggests. We must also recognize and resist self-serving politicians who use art to divide us.

Go here to see the original:
Nancy Pelosi Says the Arts Will Help Heal America, but They Can't - Hyperallergic

Lets turn our attention from the hypocrites and apparent monarchists in the Capitol, to the peculiar and embarrassing subset of gay Americans who proudly support Trumps reelection. This, despite the fact that Trump and the religious zealots his White House serves have rolled back rights for LGBT people, imperiled their health, and even endangered their lives.

How much hard-won ground has been lost? A report to be released Thursday by The Fenway Institute lays it all out, in distressingly vivid detail.

Among the lowlights:

The administration has rolled back rules protecting LGBT people from discrimination in employment, education, and housing, and proposed rules allowing health care providers to refuse to treat LGBT patients on moral or religious grounds.

And then there are the judicial nominations, a retrograde fanatics dream. According to the Fenway Institute report, almost a third of 2019 nominees to federal courts have expressed anti-LGBT sentiments, some arguing that gays and lesbians should be excluded from nondiscrimination protections. One nominee, Lawrence Van Dyke, was associated with a group that has advocated for the sterilization of transgender people, and for the criminalization of homosexuality here and abroad. Nice.

Trumps defenders point to his plan, announced in his 2019 State of the Union speech, to end the HIV epidemic by 2030. But how much does that mean, when the administration is making it harder for LGBT folks to access health care? When theyve acted to redouble the stigma on LGBT folks who might seek treatment?

Sure, Trumps ambassador to Germany announced a global campaign to end the criminalization of homosexuality in 70 countries, but the administration has been very selective about it, the Fenway report points out, objecting to Chechnyas treatment of gays and lesbians, but remaining silent on similar brutality in, say, Saudi Arabia. And last year, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo established a Commission on Unalienable Rights that seems designed to shrink the definition of human rights in US foreign policy to exclude gays and lesbians.

The administrations policies reflect the beliefs and priorities of small-minded religious conservatives including Vice President Mike Pence who hold massive sway in the White House: In addition to regularly laying hands on the unrepentant sinner in the oval office, they also lay them on the levers of power at every level.

Just this past Sunday, Pence promised members of a church in Memphis that he would stand strong for their values. Moments later, the bishop, in a sermon streamed by the White House, called homosexuality unnatural and demonic.

Who on earth could see all of this intolerance and inhumanity piling up and conclude the Trump administration is friendly to LGBT Americans?

Why, the Log Cabin Republicans, thats who or at least, whats left of them after several leaders resigned in protest after the group endorsed Trump last summer. The gay GOP group, which did not endorse Trump in 2016, explained its decision to do so in the 2020 election via an op-ed in the Washington Post. While acknowledging there is still work to be done, Log Cabin leaders touted Trumps new HIV prevention policy, and the efforts to pressure foreign governments to be more tolerant despite the fact that the administrations policies make a mockery of both initiatives.

Basically, it boiled down to their view that the GOP is no longer openly hateful towards gays and lesbians. They credited Trump with moving past the culture wars that dominated the 1990s and early 2000s.

Say what, now?

Either they are not paying attention, are woefully misinformed, or are misleading, said Sean Cahill, director of health policy research at the Fenway Institute, and a coauthor of the report.

Like others who enable Trump, the Log Cabin Republicans appear to have learned to hear only what they want to hear, and to see no evil. Even when it is staring them in the face.

Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham can be reached at yvonne.abraham@globe.com and on Twitter @GlobeAbraham.

See the original post:
Hey Log Cabin Republicans, Trump is not your friend - The Boston Globe

Register for the THE World Academic Summit 2020

A leading scholar who has been described as the godfather of deep learning will join presidents of some of the worlds top universities among a prestigious line-up of speakers confirmed for the Times Higher Education World Academic Summit in September.

Geoffrey Hinton, distinguished emeritus professor at the University of Toronto and a researcher at Google Brain, who has led pioneering research on artificial intelligence, will speak at the event, which takes place from 1 to 3September 2020.

Meanwhile, Ronald Daniels, president of Johns Hopkins University; Dame Nancy Rothwell, president and vice-chancellor of the University of Manchester; and Michael Spence, vice-chancellor and principal of the University of Sydney will discuss how world-class research universities produce world-class cities.

The summit, which will take place at the University of Toronto, will be on the theme thepower of place. It will explore why place still matters in a globalised world, whether online learning is the answer to spreading educational opportunities and how branch campuses project power.

Michael Ignatieff, president and rector of the Central European University, which relocated to Vienna last year after being forced out of Budapest by the Hungarian government, will deliver a keynote speech on finding a new home, while Stephen Toope, vice-chancellor of the University of Cambridge, will explore to what extent universities are defined by their location.

Mamokgethi Phakeng, vice-chancellor of the University of Cape Town, will discuss whether digital technology is redefining universities boundaries.

The summit will also include an exclusive reveal of the THE World University Rankings 2021.

Tim Sowula, head of content and engagement for the THE World Summit Series, said the summit would help to tackle the challenges that universities face as a result of their dual role in society.

Universities have to both direct their research on long-term global challenges, attracting and working with the best global talent available, and respond to the immediate needs and concerns of the community on their doorstep, paying attention to the local electoral cycle, the immigration policies of their host government, and the economic concerns of their public funders, he said.

By focusing on the power of place, this summit will bring together university leaders from across the globe to celebrate the impact of universities both near and far, question conventional wisdom about the contribution universities can make to their host communities, reveal what are the most important factors that can empower a research university, and examine what rebalancing the worlds higher education resources might look like now that we have a clearer picture of technological opportunities and the demographic and economic realities that this century will demand of universities.

Phil Baty, THEs chief knowledge officer, said: Now perhaps more than ever before, universities across the world are facing extraordinary political and public scrutiny of their role and value to society in particular with regard to their social and economic impact, including their relationship with the local communities they are part of. The rise of nationalism across the continents, campus culture wars and rows over free speech, populist challenges to the value of entire fields of academic research, and the need for major improvements to social mobility all combine to raise profound questions about how globally focused universities deliver public good in their neighbourhoods and communities, as well as for the world at large.

So the theme of the 2020 THE World Academic Summit, the power of place, could not be more timely or relevant to global higher education, and our host, the University of Toronto, as one of the worlds leading universities firmly rooted in its community, could not be better equipped to tackle these issues head-on.

ellie.bothwell@timeshighereducation.com

See more here:
World Academic Summit 2020: speakers announced - Times Higher Education (THE)

In a centuries-long debate about gender and sexuality, 2020 could mark a turning point for abortion rights in the US.

In the coming year, the anti-abortion president, Donald Trump, faces re-election, and a conservative supreme court will take up its first abortion case, with potentially far-reaching consequences for a womans right to choose in America.

Supporters and activists on both sides of the divide pro-choice and anti-abortion are braced for a titanic fight that could change the face of abortion access in the States.

I dont think theres any doubt that the big issue this year is going to be the election in November, said Carol Tobias, president of National Right to Life, an anti-abortion organization.

For activists like herself, the worst fear would be absolutely everything goes against us in the election, and we have a pro-abortion president and Democrats like Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi in charge of the House and the Senate, said Tobias. They could do some serious, long-lasting damage, but I really, really, really do not believe that is going to happen.

Meanwhile David Cohen, a pro-choice Drexel University law professor and co-author of Obstacle Course: The Everyday Struggle to Get an Abortion in America, described the coming election as an all-consuming news item this year. He said: We have two parties with starkly different views on abortion, so that is going to be a major issue in the presidential campaign.

This week marks the 47th anniversary of the landmark US supreme court case Roe v Wade, which legalized abortion in the US and has been a target for conservatives since the religious right adopted abortion as a cause in the late 1970s.

Hundreds of thousands of anti-abortion protesters will also gather in Washington DC on 24 January for the March for Life, the nations largest anti-abortion protest. And the evidence of recent years shows they are successfully rolling back access to abortion across the US.

Last year saw an unprecedented wave of the most restrictive anti-abortion laws in decades, many blatantly unconstitutional. In 2019, so-called heartbeat bills, which ban abortion at six weeks, before most women know they are pregnant, became law in Georgia, Kentucky, Ohio and Mississippi. Alabama banned abortion outright.

In one case, an extreme bill proposed in Ohio would have charged doctors with abortion murder if they did not attempt to re-implant an ectopic pregnancy. There is no such procedure in medical science, and ectopic pregnancies that form in the fallopian tubes are never viable. They do, however, threaten womens lives.

None of these laws are in effect, as they directly contravene law set out in Roe v Wade. This is by design. Emboldened by Trump and funded by conservative Republican mega-donors, abortion opponents hope they can push the right-leaning supreme court to take up a case and overturn Roe, even though most of the public agrees abortion should remain legal.

The main takeaway is that the states will continue to be important players on abortion laws and regulation,said Elizabeth Nash, state issues manager at the pro-choice Guttmacher Institute.

There will be an intense focus on the supreme court this spring, as it hears oral arguments in June Medical Services LLC v Gee. The case from Louisiana focuses on whether doctors should be required to obtain the right to admit patients to local hospitals and will have national implications.

The right to admit patients to hospitals, called admitting privileges, is meant to sound like it improves womens health. In fact, hospitals are already required to take all cases which come through the emergency department. Instead, admitting privileges often serve as an insurmountable hurdle for doctors who practice independently at abortion clinics, in effect closing their practices.

If it is ruled constitutional, the regulation could shut down two of Louisianas three abortion clinics, despite providing no measurable health benefits for women. Legal scholars were shocked the countrys highest court was even hearing the case. It ruled on an identical law from Texas in 2016, finding the measures unconstitutional and an undue burden to women seeking abortions.

The breadth of the outcomes is really wide, said Cohen. The case could result in everything from you can regulate a little more to you can outlaw abortion. So theres a lot we dont know about whats coming in the future.

But if the case in the supreme court could decide the legal fate of abortion rights, a womans ability to exercise her right is already in dire straits. Between 2011 and 2017, 4% of abortion clinics closed across the US. This modest change obscures a broader truth clinics are shuttering in large numbers in the south and midwest and opening on the coasts, leading to expensive logistical nightmares for many women.

Abortion is now central to Americas culture wars, one of a number of divisive issues shaped by a hyper-partisan political divide. Trump has played a key role in widening the gulf and attempting to exploit it for electoral gain.

Virtually every top Democrat also now supports late-term abortion, ripping babies straight from the mothers womb right up until the moment of birth, Trump told a booing audience at a recent rally in Toledo, Ohio. That statement is false but emblematic.

Abortion is a repeat topic as Trump campaigns for re-election at rallies, where his rhetoric often goes beyond what even the anti-abortion movement could have hoped for from past Republican candidates.

Tobias and other anti-abortion activists have worked diligently to spread news of Trumps amazing work to the broader electorate. She mentioned a list of his administrations achievements that the movement holds in esteem, including remaking the federal bench with ideological judges and preventing foreign aid from being used to advise women on abortions.

Im expecting more pro-life laws to be passed, and there will of course be more challenges in the court, but were moving forward, said Tobias.

That was not always the case. The Christian right only took up the mantle of abortion after Roe was decided and after the supreme court ruled against the segregationist policies of private Christian schools, many of which were founded to exclude African American students.

Southern Baptists even supported abortion rights at their annual conference until 1976. Until Roe, abortion was seen mostly as an issue for the Catholic church, and it was predominantly Democratic states that opposed access to abortion and contraceptives.

Now, most Americans nearly 80%, according to Gallup polling support legal abortion in at least some circumstances. However, abortion has historically been a motivating issue for conservative voters, less so for liberals. That has led to a virulent anti-abortion right, while the left has only begun to enshrine abortion rights in state law.

Loretta Ross is a reproductive justice activist and expert who has worked not just for abortion rights but against pregnancy discrimination and maternal mortality. We just have to keep on fighting the same way black people have to keep on fighting for voting rights for 400 years, she said.

Some older feminists in particular fear abortion rights, which younger women have grown up with, have been taken for granted since Roe v Wade. Doctors such as Mary Jane Minkin, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Yale School of Medicine, worry about a return to illegal and deadly procedures.

Unfortunately, the young women today dont realize how bad it was, said Minkin. When she was attending Brown University in 1968, I knew of a young woman a couple years before me, she got pregnant during freshman week.

She was subsequently infertile had an illegal abortion done, and couldnt get pregnant thereafter, said Minkin. There were, of course, even worse outcomes. One of Minkins mothers friends had a sister, a flight attendant, who died from an illegal abortion.

There were very dark times with people dying having septic abortions and people being infertile for the rest of their lives, said Minkin. We dont want to go back to that. We really dont want to go back to that.

Read more:
Will 2020 be the year abortion is banned in the US? - The Guardian