Yes, They REALLY ARE Coming For Your Kids

On March 17, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

News from the UK:

The parents of an autistic teenage boy were warned he would be taken into care after they objected to him being given powerful hormone drugs to help him change sex.

Doctors at an NHS clinic had recommended he be given puberty-blockers – which delay adolescence – after the youngster declared he believed he was female.

But his mother and father, fearing the potential side-effects of the drugs, stopped him going to the clinic. And they suspected his abrupt decision to change sex was a result of his autism.

After the boy told the school he had been barred from treatment, a teacher told his parents that they should find alternative accommodation for their son or else he would be put into temporary foster care. And the school reported the couple to children’s services for being ‘emotionally abusive’ to their son by not supporting his wish to change gender.

A month later, the local authority placed him in a child protection plan after social workers concluded he was likely to suffer ‘significant harm’ under his parents’ care.

The Mail On Sunday reports that at least three children in Britain were put into foster care by the state last year because their parents wouldn’t agree to transgender treatment. The boy was struggling to cope with school because of his Asperger’s and autism. When he started to self-harm, his parents asked his doctor to refer him to children’s mental health services.

When the child met with a child psychotherapist, he said he believed he was female. According to the parents, that was the first the boy had ever said of such a thing. They assumed that it was another of his autistic obsessions (parents of kids on the spectrum are well aware of how these kids become obsessed with particular topics, and then drop them as suddenly as they acquired the obsession). Too late! The state therapy bureaucracy already had its claws sunk into the boy.

Read the whole thing. 

Americans need to wake the hell up. We need legislation right now to protect families from these fixers. Congressional Republicans, where are you?

Readers, I strongly urge you to follow 4th Wave Now on Twitter. It’s the Twitter feed of a politically non-partisan website for concerned parents of gender-dysphoric kids. Here’s a link to an interview with Denise, who founded the site when her daughter Chiara told her a few years ago that she was a trans male. Chiara has since desisted, and has started the Pique Resistance Project, a movement of detransitioners/desisters. The interview is actually with both Denise and Chiara — neither of whom are right-wing in any way, shape, or form. Excerpt:

Denise, as every parent knows who has experienced something similar, hearing your daughter suddenly declare she is transgender and tell you she needs hormones immediately is very stressful. How did you cope?

Starting the website—which was initially a cry into the wilderness, just hoping to find and speak to other parents who were skeptical of their teen’s desire to embark on medical transition—was crucial in helping me to cope with the situation. I suspect there would have been more arguments and difficult times between Chiara and me if I had not had the outlet of writing and finding others online who were in the same boat.

Pretty much all my “in real life” friends at the time were lifelong liberals/lefties like me, who saw (as I had) everything to do with trans activism as purely and simply the next civil rights movement; they hadn’t had a reason to look into some of the more controversial aspects because their lives hadn’t been touched by the issue. So, for the most part, I couldn’t talk to them openly about what was happening in my family.

Here’s a bit from Chiara, who identifies now as a lesbian:

Was there a lot of talk about suicide online? If so, did that influence you in any way?

There was a large amount, the most notable being the case of Leelah Alcorn, an MtF teenager who committed suicide in 2014. Her death affected me, along with many others, as it was sensationalized and widely held up as a warning to parents: “This is what happens when you don’t let your kid transition.” This mantra continues to be repeated online and everywhere, and perpetuates the idea that suicide is the “only way out” for kids whose parents will not accept their gender identity—this is a false statement that should under no circumstance be peddled to impressionable young people.

What made you feel unhappy about being a girl?

I was dealing with trauma, which caused me to want to escape my body. This, in addition to my resistance to accepting my same-sex attraction, resulted in a rejection of being female.

How did your dysphoria manifest itself? What “triggered” it for you?

It came on in the span of a couple months, but was still a fairly gradual process. The main triggers were my increased usage of social media, which facilitated my exposure to trans ideology and activism, as well as my social isolation and beginning to learn about and come to terms with past trauma. My dysphoria caused me to adopt an appearance that was as masculine as possible—I cut my hair short, wore men’s clothes, bound my chest, and packed off and on for over a year. I even used the men’s bathrooms in public, and felt good about myself when I passed successfully.

More from Chiara:

You mentioned that you had no desire to transition until you heard about others doing so. Did your dysphoria increase the more you learned about gender identity and transition?

Absolutely. The more information I consumed on the topic, the more adamant I was that transition was right for me. Other people’s hormonal and surgical results appealed to me at the time, and I desperately wanted that for myself. It was a vicious circle: the more I watched, the more my dysphoria grew, and the more my dysphoria grew, the more I needed to “escape” in the form of this addictive media.

Parents! Wake up! The smartphone and unfettered Internet access is not your child’s friend.

Read the entire interview. Educate yourself. The mainstream media is not going to do it for you.

Christchurch, the White Victim Complex and Savage Capitalism

On March 17, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

Despite his own denials, anti-Muslim xenophobia underwrites the 74-page manifesto compiled by Australian mass murderer Brendan Tarrant. The title itself, The Great Replacement, references a far-right conspiracy theory holding that white genocide is being engineered by useful idiots amongst the liberal elite advocating mass migration, demographic growth and cultural diversity.

To this conspiracy theory, the failure to uphold cultural and racial supremacy is identified with the destruction of whites. The politics of the dummy spit underwrite the belief that acknowledging the existence of and respecting other cultures and ethnic groups is tantamount to the death of the Self. It reflects the mentality of the infantile ego, yet to discover the existence of others outside of the realm of the known, associated in practise with the ego.

It is not a little telling that this atrocity was carried out on the same day as the latest in a series of large-scale climate strikes by secondary students throughout Australia and the world. On the one side, those directly threatened by a very real crisis took active measures to do something positive and constructive. On the other, a small group of people preoccupied with the threat of the existence of others carried out a negative and destructive atrocity. The contrast could hardly be clearer.

What to make of the difference between the two? In an eponymous 2017 work, anthropologist Ghassan Hage enquires, is racism an environmental threat? Hage explicitly links the global rise in racism, demagoguery and bigotry, of which we can quite easily include this latest Christchurch massacre, with a reaction amongst elite groups to the social consequences of climate change.

In awakening a need for meaningful and profound social change amongst increasingly vast sectors of the world’s population, Hage argued, the climate crisis has come to present increasingly clear and present threats to elite privilege. It has done so in the main, he contended, through rude infringements of scientific fact and lived daily experience on the ideological mores that have upheld a world order of haves and have nots built on 500 years of colonialism.

Not the least of these was the Self vs. Other binary that had been at the core of what Edward Said called ‘Orientalism.’ Orientalism referred to the paternalistic frame of reference for subjugated peoples used to rationalise colonial extractivism as ‘civilising the savages’—a mentality with roots in the Roman propensity to view everyone not under their control as ‘barbarians,’ until they were ‘civilised’ (with all the attendant tributes for the imperial power).

Such formed the basis, Hage argued, for a tendency within advanced capitalism to oscillate between what he called‘savage’ and ‘civilised’ capitalism—the ‘savage’ being that of the racialised associated with the early period of colonialism. The ‘civilised,’ by contrast, was of the type commonly associated with modern industrial capitalism and the liberal democracies associated with it.

This oscillating tendency reflected in essence a scapegoating dynamic, deriving from the fact that capitalist development remained an ongoing process after it had reached an advanced stage. This was specially insofar as late capitalism is plagued by periodic crises driven by the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, or by democratic challenges from below. This, Hage argued, drove the oscillation between ‘civilised’ and ‘savage’ modes, as privileged elites returned to violence to rescue their privilege from the shortcomings of the system that upheld them, or from democracy, or from both.

Periodic returns to the ‘savage’ modalities and mentalities accompanying the conditions that produced its birth was encouraged then as a stopgap against crisis—in the manner documented by sociological research into moral panic and the documented tendency of elite-controlled corporate media to manufacture consent through scaremongering and the production of deviance. Herman and Chomsky produced a classic work exploring this phenomenon; more recent scholarship has identified moral panic in the process.

The Islamic bugbears and hobgoblins in particular were created as a result of the power of the corporate media to control the meaning of deviance and impose their definition on public discourse—not on the features of those so demonised. The global instability created by a world order in which the richest one percent owned half the world’s wealth and the richest ten percent owned ¾ of it could be blamed on the Islamic Other.

Which brings us back to this latest example of white supremacist terrorism in Christchurch. Nothing about this atrocity and the terrible loss of life is special, other than the fact that it took place on the same day as the latest round of climate strikes lead by secondary students. The contrast between the preoccupation with conspiracy and manufactured crisis and the very clear scientific understanding of climate crisis reflects with a unique conspicuousness the function of the former in dodging the reality of and constructing scapegoats for the latter.

If whites are feeling insecure, this has nothing to do with the social and environmental consequences of global economic modality built on the assumption that the world is an infinite resource and infinite garbage dump—it is the fault of those existing outside of the culturally hegemonic and supremacist monoculture for existing. Herein lies the scapegoating dynamic of savage capitalism, built on a white victim complex refusing to acknowledge any difference between respecting other cultures and the death of the Self.

As Ghassan Hage noted, the impetus for the scapegoating of savage capitalism and the white victim complex arises out of accumulation crisis, as the very real social, economic and environmental consequences of maintaining the world of haves and have-nots becomes harder and harder to sweep under the rug. As corporate-captured governments around the world continue to fail to act on climate change in prioritising profit over the planet, opposition from the young in particular can only ever grow.

In the face of this dire threat of democracy, the value of manufactured conspiracy theories alleging racial existential threats to be used as scapegoats increases accordingly—all the more so as the climate crisis continues to worsen, presenting an increasingly unavoidable existential threat to human society.

Atrocities like those perpetrated in Christchurch in the final analysis are driven by the impulse to blame the consequences of the social and economic modalities behind climate change on the victims and any other convenient scapegoats. They are driven by the impulse to reassert the fundamental modalities and mentalities that produced the interconnected crises of our age in the first place.

As long as they continue to be useful in suppressing the ultimate reality that there is no class privilege on a dead planet, prominent Islamophobes in the corporate media and politics (Andrew Bolt and Cori Bernadi here in Australia being prime examples) will continue to promote the conspiracy theories driving the likes of Brendan Tarrant and Anders Brevik to deadly violence. In the end, the terror that these atrocities produce for the affected communities only reflects the racialised terror from which the Western-dominated world order was born, and whose consequences condemn us all to ecological Armageddon.

In Tech Platforms, White Supremacists Found Their Amplifier

On March 17, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

In the 1960s, reporters became attuned to the power they had over the public’s attention, and some tried to use it judiciously. While white supremacists, especially members of the Ku Klux Klan, offered privileged insider access to reporters who provided favorable coverage, the black press chose to ignore the Klan unless it was to highlight the group’s decreasing power. Jewish civil rights organizations suggested that journalists practice “quarantine” and actively choose not to cover the American Nazi Party. The Klan and the Nazis wanted attention. In each of these situations, media outlets acted as gatekeepers that could strategically silence those seeking to use the press as a megaphone.

Social media has fundamentally changed who controls the volume on certain social issues. Facebook, Google, and other platform companies want to believe they have created a circumvention technology that connects people directly to one another without any gates, walls, or barriers. Yet this connectivity has also allowed some of the worst people in this world to find one another, get organized, and use these same platforms to harass and silence others. The platform companies do not know how to fix, or perhaps do not understand, what they have built. In the meantime, previously localized phenomena spread around the globe, so much so that the culture of American-style white supremacy turned up in a terrorist attack on Muslims in New Zealand.

As a sociologist at Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center, I study how technology is used by social movements, including groups on the far left and the far right. Since the uprisings in the Middle East and elsewhere in 2011, we have witnessed thousands of protests and events inspired by and organized through social media. Progressive social movements routinely use networking technologies to grow their ranks and publicize their ideas. White supremacists have their own ways of deploying the same technology.

In the aftermath of outbursts of violence like the one in New Zealand, traditional news outlets draw heavily upon social-media postings for insights into the perpetrator’s motives and mine them for details that make stories sound more authoritative and vivid. Certain oddball phrases, Internet memes, and obscure message boards garner mainstream attention for the first time. Inevitably, people Google them.

The extra attention that these ideas gain in the aftermath of a violent attack isn’t just an unfortunate side effect of news coverage. It’s the sound system by which extremist movements transmit their ideas to a broader public, and they are using it with more and more skill.    

One variable remains consistent across all networked movements: The moderation policies of different platforms directly affect how groups amplify political ideologies online. For white supremacists and other extremists, they tend to use anonymous message boards to plan manipulation campaigns. These places traffic in racist, sexist, and transphobic content and link to obscure podcasts and blogs. Moderation is rare and tends to occur only when too much attention is drawn to a certain post. In some forums, posts self-delete and leave few traces behind.

Far more useful in reaching a new audience are places like Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook, which remove objectionable content—but may not do so before it spreads virally.

Taking advantage of that dynamic, the murderer in New Zealand posted a full press kit on an anonymous message board prior to live-streaming his terrifying acts on Facebook. Many have labelled it a manifesto, but it reads more like a collection of copy-and-pasted white supremacist conspiracy theories and memes. It would never have been notable on its own. This individual did not have the power or influence to boost these worn-out tropes. This manifesto could have probably existed in perpetuity on obscure document-hosting sites, and no one would have noticed. For platforms, this kind of content is simply white noise.

Explosive violence was the signal necessary to call attention to these posts. The New Zealand attacker used the live-streaming feature of Facebook to control the narrative, even to the point of saying “subscribe to PewDiePie”—a meme referencing a popular right-wing YouTube influencer—during his broadcast. He succeeded in linking his deeds to PewDiePie’s fame. As of today, Google search returns on “PewDiePie” include references to the Christchurch attack.

The New Zealand attacker also knew others would be recording and archiving the video for further amplification. When choosing to publish on an anonymous forum first, he also ensured that group of sympathetic trolls would re-upload content in the wake of takedowns by the major platforms. We’ve seen this tactic many times before. Sometimes it’s used in playful ways. When Scientology tried to get a leaked promotional video featuring Tom Cruise removed from the Internet, users made a point of reposting it in a variety of places—making it impossible to stamp out. Other instances are darker: Some users attempted to keep videos on YouTube of a misogynistic murderer from Santa Barbara, California. The scale of these efforts can be startling. In the first 24 hours after the Christchurch attack, Facebook alone removed 1.5 million postings of the video. In a statement late Saturday, the company said it was still working around the clock to “remove violating content using a combination of technology and people.”

Weeks before Friday’s attack, the New Zealand shooter littered other social media platforms with memes and articles about immigrants and Muslims to ensure that journalists would have plenty of material to scour. These sorts of cryptic trails are becoming an increasingly common tactic of media manipulators, who anticipate how journalists will cover them. The perpetrator of the New Zealand attacker clearly hoped that a new white supremacist would hear a siren song by directly connecting with his words and deeds.

The sophistication of these manipulators presents a challenge for the media. In describing these dynamics, I’m not mentioning the New Zealand killer’s name. Other than PewDiePie, I’m not citing any of the other personalities and tropes he tried to publicize. Withholding details runs counter to the usual rules of storytelling—show, don’t tell—but it also helps slow down the spread of white-supremacist keywords. Journalists and regular Internet users need to be cognizant of their role in spreading these ideas, especially because the platform companies haven’t recognized theirs.

Just as journalists of the past learned to cover white supremacists differently from other groups, platform companies must address the role their technology plays as the megaphone for white supremacists. In designing, deploying, and scaling up their broadcast technologies, Internet companies need to understand that white supremacists and other extremists will find and exploit the weak points. While Facebook, Google, Twitter and others have resisted calls for accountability, there is no longer any doubt about how these platforms—and the media environment now growing up around them—are used to amplify hate.