Sex Lists

11-19-2017

Sex Lists

Mobs give anonymity and allow for the release of inner demons without consequences—at least for the attackers. And mobs are nothing if not gleeful. When masses of people feel powerful and pure in attacking individuals, the attackers are painted in a patina of brutal glee. We are living through a period where such carnival instincts run wild. And as Samantha Hill argues, one prime space for mob-like glee is the anonymous list.

"In 1956, toward the end of McCarthyism, a concerned father wrote the FBI about his daughter’s professor. He was worried that she was being corrupted by a teacher, and that the teacher posed a threat to national security.

“Mr. X advised he felt that HANNAH ARENDT was very dangerous to the best interests of this country in view of the fact she is a professor who travels around the United States instructing at numerous colleges as a visiting professor. He stated his daughter changed her thinking completely after taking courses from HANNAH ARENDT at the University of California at Berkeley, California, in 1955, and feels that it was her influence which had influenced his daughter to go to Europe to study under Professor PAUL RICOERUR.”

Arendt’s case was closed because it did not warrant an active investigation. The FBI did not see her as a risk. Today, I’m sure there are FBI files on suspect individuals, but instead of worrisome parents writing to the government, we have websites with lists of professors to stay away from. Professors who are too liberal, professors who don’t support free speech, professors who grade too harshly. When we don’t like someone, when we judge them to be wrong or bad, we seek recourse in public lists. These lists are not innocuous. They pose a serious threat to our society, breaking down trust, the ability to speak freely, eroding the world we share in common. In response to the Harvey Weinstein scandal, many have taken to making lists of men."

Form more information visit: https://medium.com/amor-mundi/sex-lists-the-new-mccarthyism-87111b25f192

Emoluments and Political Corruption

A number of legal historians have filed a brief in United States District Court in a case arguing that President Trump is in violation of the Foreign Emoluments Clause (“FEC”) of the U.S. Constitution. That clause states that “no person holding any office of profit or trust under [the United States], shall, without the consent of the Congress, accept of any present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state.” The Department of Justice, supporting President Trump, argues that “emolument” should be narrowly defined as “profit arising from office or employ.” The historians argue that the emoluments clause was broadly imagined to protect against conflicts of interest and corruption.

"The framers adopted the Emoluments Clauses to advance core republican goals: to protect against corruption and the appearance of corruption; to maintain a balance of state and federal power; and to avoid foreign entanglements with Europe. The Emoluments Clauses were not a subject of great debate or disagreement in 1787 and 1788. The absence of controversy reflects a broad consensus against the dangers of political corruption. Moreover, the extant voluminous records of debates, particularly those tied to the ratification of the Constitution by the states, demonstrate that in ordinary usage the word “emolument” had a broad range of meanings. It was not reducible to a simple fee or salary. Within the framework of Anglo-American political thinking, a concern with emoluments was closely tied to the pervasive fear of political corruption. In the middle decades of the eighteenth century, this concern dominated Real Whig views of the insidious ways in which the British Crown had corrupted Parliament’s vaunted independence and legal supremacy after the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The concern was that the Crown could use an array of emoluments (e.g., offices, pensions, grants of income, and other benefits) to make members of both houses docile tools of the reigning ministry. The American colonists were schooled to think that a power-seeking ministry was scheming to deprive them of their vested rights of self- government, leaving them to be governed by a supine Parliament that had the power to legislate for America “in all cases whatsoever.” The use of emoluments to undermine self-governance was viewed as a significant problem. There was, however, another famous example in which an emolument conveyed from one king to another threatened the fundamental rights of the entire realm. This was the secret Treaty of Dover of 1670, when Louis XIV of France paid large sums of cash to Charles II (and provided a young French mistress) in order for Charles to convert to Catholicism and ally with France in an ill-fated war against Holland. Louis XIV also secretly paid James II in 1687 for similarly compromising allegiances. These well-known events contributed to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, an inspiration for the American Revolution and the Founding, but the secret payments were not revealed until 1771. At the Federal Convention, Gouverneur Morris, regarded as a chief architect of the presidency, explicitly invoked this episode during the July 20, 1787 debate over impeachment:

'Our Executive was not like a Magistrate having a life interest, much less like one having an hereditary interest in his office. He may be bribed by a greater interest to betray his trust; and no one would say that we ought to expose ourselves to the danger of seeing the first Magistrate in foreign pay, without being able to guard agst. it by displacing him. One would think the King of England well secured agst. bribery. He has as it were a fee simple in the whole Kingdom. Yet Charles II was bribed by Louis XIV.'

Although Morris did not use the word “emolument” in this passage, this incident provides a paradigmatic historical explanation for why the framers adopted a prohibition on foreign emoluments in the Constitution. Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, the delegate at the Constitutional Convention who provided the final FEC language on August 23, 1787, was also a delegate at the South Carolina ratifying convention. In a debate there about treaty powers, Pinckney raised broader concerns about foreign financial influence upon presidents, and he specifically cited the secret Treaty of Dover and “Charles II., who sold Dunkirk to Louis XIV.” Moreover, two prominent early commentators on the Constitution, St. George Tucker and William Rawle, emphasized the scandal of Louis XIV secretly paying Charles II as the background for the Foreign Emoluments Clause. Justice Joseph Story cited these pages from Tucker and Rawle in his own Commentary on the Constitution in 1833. Several key constitutional documents reflect concern with the corrupting effect of both foreign and domestic emoluments. The Articles of Confederation adopted the text that would become the F[oreign] E[moluments] C[lause]. he drafters may have borrowed from the Dutch rule, adopted in 1651, prohibiting foreign ministers from taking “any presents, directly or indirectly, in any manner or way whatever.” The French practice of giving expensive diplomatic gifts was called presents du roi or presents du congé, so these prohibitions likely stemmed initially from the problem of “presents.”33 The DOJ brief claims that a broad interpretation of “emolument” would produce a “surplusage” or redundancy because it would include presents, making the word “present” unnecessary. The argument fails for at least two reasons. First, “presents” generally connotes gratuitous exchange, while “emoluments” encompasses benefits of commercial transactions. Second, the origin of this clause probably lies with the Dutch bar on “presents,” which the Americans broadened by adding the term “emoluments,” without deleting the earlier wording. As legal texts evolve, historical layers sometimes resist the logic of interpretive canons.... These events were part of the background motivating a separation between public service and international moneyed interests (again not limited to offices and salaries). Soon thereafter, an emoluments restriction was placed in the 1784 Consular Convention with France, as well as the 1788 Consular Convention with France and the 1789 Act to Establish the Treasury Department. DOJ asserts that “the history of the [FEC’s] adoption” is “devoid of any concern about an official’s private commercial businesses.” The example of Robert Morris, the emoluments prohibitions adopted by American governments from 1776 to 1789, and the constitutional debates themselves undercut DOJ’s claim."

Form more information visit: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzmLEQBX1_PMc2JmdmdhdVhRU2ppQUNXeHR3VUdTcUhjaUJF/view

Swedish Nationalism

[caption id="attachment_19316" align="alignright" width="300"] By Frankie Fouganthin - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0[/caption] Andrew Brown has a long and important essay on the rise of the Swedish Democrats, a far-right nationalist party in Sweden.

"The dynamics of integration that played out in Sweden were not essentially different from those in other Western European countries: the metropolitan elites were in favour, the people among whom the immigrants settled were often hostile, and those furthest away from both among the most hostile. But there were two large differences. The first was the solid identification of patriotism and virtue with an openness towards refugees. All of the newspapers, all of the television channels, and all of the major political parties made this identification. The second was the role of Sweden’s neighbours. Both Denmark and Norway had much more restrictive policies and rhetoric. Both had flourishing anti-immigrant parties who formed part of the political system, entering coalition governments and openly negotiating with the other parties. In Sweden, unpleasant and sometimes violent extremism on the left was regarded as a legitimate expression of political opinion – while your reputation as a public intellectual could survive praise of Pol Pot, it could not endure publicly expressed hostility to immigration. When the Sweden Democrats finally entered parliament in 2010, it was on the back of a commercial which showed an elderly white woman pushing her walking frame across a shadowed hall towards a desk where two benevolent civil servants sat, ready to hand her money. But she is overtaken from behind by a crowd of women in burkas. The camera cuts to two emergency stop handles hanging from the ceiling. One is labelled ‘Pensions’, the other ‘Immigration’. A woman’s voice, husky, urgent, says ‘You can choose between a brake on pensions or a brake on immigration. Vote for the Sweden Democrats’. This advertisement was rejected as racist by state TV and at least one commercial channel, but was broadcast to an immense audience on YouTube. The Sweden Democrats swept into Parliament with twenty seats, which more than doubled to forty-nine at the next election in 2015. The other parties united around a policy of complete denial. They refused to debate with the SD in public, so far as this was possible; refused to eat with them in the canteens and refused to pass legislation that was dependent on SD support. That might have worked twenty years before, when the only source of national news was the newspapers and the television. But by this time there was a thriving underground of news sites spreading the Sweden Democrats’ message, and the official silence merely amplified their appeal to people rebelling against the culture of conformity around immigration. The same alternative media worked to loosen the secrecy of crime reporting. The culture of official anonymity and obfuscation, which back in the last century shielded the Swedish from crime, suddenly seemed much more sinister. The shower curtain which once preserved decency now revealed the silhouette of an unknown murderer. Crime, and especially violent crime, had risen enormously since the seventies. The homicide rate nearly tripled, from 122 in 1975 to 338 in 2016; violent assaults have risen over the same period from 21,509 to 88,576. Some of this is the result of redefinitions, whether legal or social, so that behaviour that had once not seemed criminal is now treated as such. Rape is the clearest example, which makes the statistics confusing, but eye-catching: an increase from 769 cases reported in 1975 to 6,715 in 2016. During this period, immigration from outside Scandinavia rose greatly, too. The link between increased crime and immigration is contested and complicated, but it is universally believed to exist, and the result is that people find anonymised reports of crime in the newspapers more disturbing than they used to, since many of them believe that the names being concealed are no longer plain Swedish ones like Olofsson and Pettersson."

Form more information visit: https://granta.com/trollhattan/