Leettaschmidt

Illustrations after watercolours by Pauline Knip, who credited herself as the author of Dutch naturalist Coenraad Jacob Temminck’s study of columbids.

Each January 1st is Public Domain Day, when a new crop of works have their copyrights expire and become free to share and reuse for any purpose. Here's our highlights for 2025.

After a year of quiet labour, we are launching our new image-forward PDR sister-site!

Yes, it’s that time of year again! We’re gearing up for the latest edition of our annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1929! We’ve been running these game jams ever since 2019, when new works began entering the public domain in the US for the first time in over two decades, as a way to highlight the creativity that comes from a robust and growing public domain. Starting on January 1st, 2025, we’ll be doing it again to celebrate works from 1929 that are finally losing their copyright protection after nearly a century.

As in past years, we’re calling on designers of all stripes to create both analog and digital games that build on works entering the public domain. There are plenty of interesting works to draw on, including:

• Written works by Agatha Christie, William Faulkner, Mahatma Gandhi, Dashiell Hammett, Ellery Queen, Virginia Woolf
• Art by Salvador Dalí, Edward Hopper, Frieda Kahlo, Tamara de Lempicka, René Magritte
• Films including Blackmail, The Cocoanuts, The Skeleton Dance, St. Louis Blues
• Music by Irving Berlin, Noël Coward, Duke Ellington, George Gershwin, Cole Porter,  Bessie Smith, Thomas “Fats” Waller
• Other characters including Buck Rogers, Popeye, and Tintin

And that list only scratches the surface – there are lots more 1929 works, from the famous to the obscure, and we even have a prize for the best game with an obscure and unexpected source of inspiration.

If you’re interested in games, the public domain, or both, we encourage you to get involved – whether or not you have any experience as a game designer. There are lots of great tools available that let anyone build a simple digital game, like interactive fiction engine Twine and the storytelling platform Story Synth from Randy Lubin, our game design partner and co-host of this jam (check out his guide to building a Story Synth game in an hour here on Techdirt). And an analog game can be as simple as a single page of rules. For inspiration, you can have a look at last year’s winners and our series of winner spotlight posts that take a look at each year’s winning entries in more detail.

The game jam will run through the month of January, 2025 and at the end we’ll be choosing winners in six categories, and awarding a choice of prizes from Techdirt and Diegetic Games. You can read the full rules and other details, and sign up to participate, on the game jam page over on Itch.io. Every year we’ve been blown away by the creativity on display from designers who enter the jam, and we know this year will be no different! See you in January, when Gaming Like It’s 1929 begins.

“I am definitely not following the news anymore,” one patient told me when I asked about her political news consumption in the weeks before the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

This conversation happened around the time I talked with a local TV channel about why we saw fewer political yard signs during this year’s election season, compared with past ones.

I am a psychiatrist who studies and treats fear and anxiety. One of my main mental health recommendations to my patients during the 2016 and 2020 election cycles was to reduce their political news consumption. I also tried to convince them that the five hours a day they spent watching cable news was only leaving them helpless and terrified.

Over the past couple of years, though, I have noticed a change: Many of my patients say they either have tuned out or are too exhausted to do more than a brief read of political news or watch one hour of their favorite political show.

Research supports my clinical experience: A Pew research study from 2020 showed that 66% of Americans were worn out by political stress. Interestingly, those who are not following the news feel that same news fatigue at an even higher percentage of 73%. In 2023, 8 out of 10 Americans described U.S. politics with negative words like “divisive,” “corrupt,” “messy” and “polarized.”

In my view, three major factors have led Americans to exhaustion and burnout with U.S politics.

1. The politics of fear

In my 2023 book, “AFRAID: Understanding the Purpose of Fear, and Harnessing the Power of Anxiety,” I discuss how American politicians and major news media have found an ally in fear: a very strong emotion that can be used to grab our attention, keeping us in the tribal dividing lines and making us follow, click, tap, watch and donate.

Over the past few decades, many people have felt a strong push for tribalism, an “us vs. them” way of seeing the world, turning Americans against one another. This has led to a point where we are not just in disagreement with each other. We hate, cancel, block and attack those who disagree with us.

2. People live in information bubbles

It can feel like Fox News and MSNBC commentators are talking about Americas from two different planets. The same is true when it comes to different social media feeds.

Many people are part of social media communities that are closed to the world outside their homes and familiar social circles. Based on people’s political views and what they search for or watch and read, social media algorithms feed them content where everybody talks and thinks alike. If you hear about the other side, it is only about their worst attributes and behavior.

The disconnect is so wide that people are not even able to comprehend the thinking of those from other perspectives and find their logic or political beliefs unfathomable.

Many Americans have gotten to the point of believing that the other half of Americans are, at best, unintelligent and stupid; and at worst, immoral and evil.

3. People’s political opinions have become their identities

There was a time in American politics where two politicians or two neighbors could disagree, but still believe that the other person was fundamentally good.

Over time, and more so since the early 2000s, this ability to connect despite political beliefs has decreased.

The majority of both Democrats and Republicans said in a 2022 Pew Research survey that someone’s political ideas are an indicator of their morality and character.

This 2022 Pew survey also shows that partisan animosity extends to judgments about character: 72% of Republicans and 63% of Democrats said they believe members of the opposing party are more “immoral” than other Americans.

This is evident in day-to-day conversations of members of both political tribes: “How can I be friends with someone who wants to kill babies,” or “How can I talk to someone who is OK with women dying in a corner of a clinic parking lot”. We can no longer see someone’s political affiliation in the context of their humanity at large.

What psychology and neuroscience say

Fear as a deeply ingrained survival mechanism takes priority over other brain functions.

Fear guides your memories, feelings, attention and thoughts, and can cause you to keep watching, scrolling and reading to monitor this perceived threat. Positive or neutral news could then become uninteresting because it is not important in your survival response. That has been the key to a person’s deep engagement with the fear-based political news.

But too much fear does not keep someone engaged forever. That is because of another survival mechanism – what’s called “learned helplessness.”

In 1967, American psychologist Martin Seligman exposed two groups of dogs to painful shocks. Dogs in group 1 could stop the shock by pressing a lever, which they quickly learned to do. But the dogs in group 2 learned that they could not control when the shock starts and stops.

Then, both groups were placed in a box divided into two halves by a small barrier, and shock was applied to only one side of the box. Dogs in group 1 – who had learned how to stop the shocks in the earlier experiment – quickly learned to jump over the barrier to the shock-free side. But dogs in group 2 did not even attempt to do so. They had learned there is no point in trying.

This experiment has been replicated in different forms with other animals and humans with the same conclusion: When people feel they cannot control the painful or scary situation, they just give up. During such experiences, the brain’s fear region – called the amygdala – is hyperactive. Meanwhile, emotion-regulating brain areas like the prefrontal cortex decrease in activity under these circumstances.

Learned helplessness also means the brain mechanisms commonly involved in regulating anxiety and depression don’t function as well.

When working with patients who have suffered from long periods of intense anxiety, fear, trauma and exhaustion, I see learned helplessness showing up in the form of depression, loss of motivation, fatigue and lack of engagement with the world around them.

The COVID-19 pandemic, more than a decade of intense political stress, polarizing social media and wars across the world, as well as public disillusionment with U.S. politics and media, have led, I believe, to many people experiencing burnout and learned helplessness.

If you feel politically exhausted, you are not the problem. Feel free to tune out from the noise.

Arash Javanbakht does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Billionaires played an unprecedented role in the 2024 US elections, with 150 of the world’s wealthiest families contributing nearly US$2 billion (£1.57 billion) trying to influence the outcome. This included donations from the likes of Elon Musk (US$133 million for the Republicans) and Michael Bloomberg (US$45 million for the Democrats).

It was a big spend – but from their perspective, a very affordable one. The US$2 billion sum represents just 0.07% of their collective wealth.

Many of those donors were very open about their political spending. But it has also been claimed that some extremely wealthy people often engage in “stealth politics” in the US – seeking to influence policies that may conflict with the majority’s preferences, without attracting public attention.

Tactics might include covert lobbying and gaining private access to public officials, which largely go unnoticed. And even though it is hard to establish exactly how much political influence the elites really have, there is evidence which suggests that US government policy is disproportionately shaped by the preferences of the wealthy.

Ordinary citizens, meanwhile, exert minimal influence – yet effectively pay higher tax rates than the richest Americans.

So it is perhaps easy to see why some question the fundamental fairness of the country’s economic and political systems.

One option for change could be new legislation that focuses on areas like campaign funding and media regulation. This might create a greater separation between money and politics, which could in turn lead to greater equality in political influence. This separation is far clearer elsewhere, and may be one of the reasons why in other countries, the preferences of poorer people seem to affect government policy.

But the apparent political power afforded to billionaires has led some to propose bolder changes. Philosopher Ingrid Robeyns, for example, has made the case for “limitarianism”, which argues for a cap on individual wealth to safeguard democracy and curb inequality (among other goals).

A related idea links limitarianism to billionaires’ political influence, suggesting that the super-rich should face a stark choice. Either they should accept a 100% tax on wealth above a certain threshold, or forfeit certain political rights, such as party donations or standing for office.

These proposals face their own criticisms, including concerns that limiting wealth could negatively affect economic growth and innovation. But they still form part of an ongoing discussion about how to balance individual wealth accumulation with the needs of democratic systems and the principle of economic fairness.

Public opinion

But what do voters think?

One study suggests that most Americans favour higher taxes on the ultra-rich while hinting at widespread public misconceptions about the lives of many billionaires. When they learn more about how luxurious those lives really are, support for taxing the ultra-rich increases significantly.

So perhaps greater public awareness of the realities of extreme wealth would shift attitudes further in favour of policies geared to more distribution of the country’s wealth.

There also seems to be broad support for policies like President Biden’s billionaire minimum income tax, which seeks to impose a minimum 25% tax rate on billionaires’ income and their assets. California’s “extreme wealth tax”, a proposal for a new tax for those worth over US$50 million, also appears popular.

Beyond tax policy, one of our recent working papers explores public attitudes toward limiting billionaires’ wealth. Our findings indicate that many Americans – regardless of political affiliation, and even in a hypothetical situation where inequality is significantly reduced – support wealth caps.

Our study also suggests that people who support wealth caps are concerned about the effects of wealth concentration on economic, political and environmental systems.

That said, we do not expect such caps being part of the next US president’s plans. After all, Trump’s previous tax cuts were said to have overwhelmingly helped the richest.

But as the likes of Elon Musk become more openly involved in politics their influence is becoming more visible. And this increased visibility could attract more public scrutiny and even a backlash.

Then, ideas like wealth caps and higher top tax rates may gain traction as more Americans question the legitimacy of an economic system that allows a tiny elite to wield disproportionate power. And perhaps with their recent expensive interventions aimed at picking the next occupant of the White House, the ultra-wealthy may have inadvertently strengthened the case for sweeping reforms aimed at limiting their power and wealth.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Rains of blood and frogs, mysterious disappearances, baffling objects in the sky: these were the anomalies that fascinated Charles Fort in his Book of the Damned. “For every five people who read this book“, wrote one reviewer, “four will go insane”. Joshua Blu Buhs recounts Fort’s early life, unfinished manuscripts (“X”, “Y”), and the philosophical monism that informed his research.

Generative AI agents have the possibility to make us more productive, but once trained, who will own and control it?

The post Once It Has Been Trained, Who Will Own My Digital Twin? appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, a set of tax cuts Donald Trump signed into law during his first term as president, will expire on Dec. 31, 2024. As Trump and Republicans prepare to negotiate new tax cuts in 2025, it’s worth gleaning lessons from the president-elect’s first set of cuts.

The 2017 cuts were the most extensive revision to the Internal Revenue Code since the Ronald Reagan administration. The changes it imposed range from the tax that corporations pay on their foreign income to limits on the deductions individuals can take for their state and local tax payments.

Trump promised middle-class benefits at the time, but in practice more than 80% of the cuts went to corporations, tax partnerships and high-net-worth individuals. The cost to the U.S. deficit was huge − a total increase of US$1.9 trillion from 2018 to 2028, according to estimates from the Congressional Budget Office. The tax advantage to the middle class was small.

Advantages for Black Americans were smaller still. As a scholar of race and U.S. income taxation, I have analyzed the impact of Trump’s tax cuts. I found that the law has disadvantaged middle-income, low-income and Black taxpayers in several ways.

Cuts worsened disparities

These results are not new. They were present nearly 30 years ago when my colleague William Whitford and I used U.S. Census Bureau data to show that Black taxpayers paid more federal taxes than white taxpayers with the same income. In large part that’s because the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow and structural racism keeps Black people from owning homes.

The federal income tax is full of advantages for home ownership that many Black taxpayers are unable to reach. These benefits include the ability to deduct home mortgage interest and local property taxes, and the right to avoid taxes on up to $500,000 of profit on the sale of a home.

It’s harder for middle-class Black people to get a mortgage than it is for low-income white people. This is true even when Black Americans with high credit scores are compared with white Americans with low credit scores.

When Black people do get mortgages, they are charged higher rates than their white counterparts.

Trump did not create these problems. But instead of closing these income and race disparities, his 2017 tax cuts made them worse.

Black taxpayers paid higher taxes than white taxpayers who matched them in income, employment, marriage and other significant factors.

Broken promises, broken trust

Fairness is an article of faith in American tax policy. A fair tax structure means that those earning similar incomes should pay similar taxes and stipulates that taxes should not increase income or wealth disparities.

Trump’s tax cuts contradict both principles.

Proponents of Trump’s cuts argued the corporate rate cut would trickle down to all Americans. This is a foundational belief of “supply side” economics, a philosophy that President Ronald Reagan made popular in the 1980s.

From the Reagan administration on, every tax cut for the rich has skewed to the wealthy.

Just like prior “trickle down” plans, Trump’s corporate tax cuts did not produce higher wages or increased household income. Instead, corporations used their extra cash to pay dividends to their shareholders and bonuses to their executives.

Over that same period, the bottom 90% of wage earners saw no gains in their real wages. Meanwhile, the AFL-CIO, a labor group, estimates that 51% of the corporate tax cuts went to business owners and 10% went to the top five highest-paid senior executives in each company. Fully 38% went to the top 10% of wage earners.

In other words, the income gap between wealthy Americans and everyone else has gotten much wider under Trump’s tax regime.

Stock market inequality

Trump’s tax cuts also increased income and wealth disparities by race because those corporate tax savings have gone primarily to wealthy shareholders rather than spreading throughout the population.

The reasons are simple. In the U.S., shareholders are mostly corporations, pension funds and wealthy individuals. And wealthy people in the U.S. are almost invariably white.

Sixty-six percent of white families own stocks, while less than 40% of Black families and less than 30% of Hispanic families do. Even when comparing Black and white families with the same income, the race gap in stock ownership remains.

These disparities stem from the same historical disadvantages that result in lower Black homeownership rates. Until the Civil War, virtually no Black person could own property or enter into a contract. After the Civil War, Black codes – laws that specifically controlled and oppressed Black people – forced free Black Americans to work as farmers or servants.

State prohibitions on Black people owning property, and public and private theft of Black-owned land, kept Black Americans from accumulating wealth.

Health care hit

That said, the Trump tax cuts hurt low-income taxpayers of all races.

One way they did so was by abolishing the individual mandate requiring all Americans to have basic health insurance. The Affordable Care Act, passed under President Barack Obama, launched new, government-subsidized health plans and penalized people for not having health insurance.

Department of the Treasury data shows almost 50 million Americans were covered by the Affordable Care Act since 2014. After the individual mandate was revoked, between 3 million and 13 million fewer people purchased health insurance in 2020.

Ending the mandate triggered a large drop in health insurance coverage, and research shows it was primarily lower-income people who stopped buying subsidized insurance from the Obamacare exchanges. These are the same people who are the most vulnerable to financial disaster from unpaid medical bills.

Going without insurance hurt all low-income Americans. But studies suggest the drop in Black Americans’ coverage under Trump’s plan outpaced that of white Americans. The rate of uninsured Black Americans rose from 10.7% in 2016 to 11.5% in 2018, following the mandate’s repeal.

The consumer price index conundrum

The Trump tax cuts also altered how the Internal Revenue Service calculates inflation adjustments for over 60 different provisions. These include the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit – both of which provide cash to low-wage workers – and the wages that must pay Social Security taxes.

Previously, the IRS used the consumer price index for urban consumers, which tracks rising prices by comparing the cost of the same goods as they rise or fall, to calculate inflation. The government then used that inflation number to adjust Social Security payments and earned income tax credit eligibility. It used the same figure to set the amount of income that is taxed at a given rate.

The Trump tax cuts ordered the IRS to calculate inflation adjustments using the chained consumer price index for urban consumers instead.

The difference between these two indexes is that the second one assumes people substitute cheaper goods as prices rise. For example, the chained consumer price index assumes shoppers will buy pork instead of beef if beef prices go up, easing the impact of inflation on a family’s overall grocery prices.

The IRS makes smaller inflation adjustments based on that assumption. But low-income neighborhoods have less access to the kind of budget-friendly options envisioned by the chained consumer price index.

And since even middle-class Black people are more likely than poor white people to live in low-income neighborhoods, Black taxpayers have been hit harder by rising prices.

What cost $1 in 2018 now costs $1.26. That’s a painful hike that Black families are less able to avoid.

The imminent expiration of the Trump tax cuts gives the upcoming GOP-led Congress the opportunity to undertake a thorough reevaluation of their effects. By prioritizing policies that address the well-known disparities exacerbated by these recent tax changes, lawmakers can work toward a fairer tax system that helps all Americans.

Beverly Moran does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Is it possible to bridge America’s stark political divisions?

In the wake of a presidential election that many feared could tear the U.S. apart, this question is on many people’s minds.

A record-high 80% of Americans believe the U.S. is greatly divided on “the most important values”. Ahead of the election, a similar percentage of Americans said they feared violence and threats to democracy. Almost half the country believes people on the other side of the political divide are “downright evil.”

Some say that the vitriolic rhetoric of political leaders and social media influencers is partly to blame for the country’s state of toxic polarization. Others cite social media platforms that amplify misinformation and polarization.

There is, however, reason for hope.

I say this as an anthropologist of peace and conflict. After working abroad, I began doing research on the threat of violence in the U.S. in 2016. In 2021, I published a related book, “It Can Happen Here.”

Now, I am researching polarization in the U.S. – and ways to counter it. I have visited large Make America Great Again events for my research. I have also gone to small workshops run by nonprofit organizations like Urban Rural Action that are dedicated to building social cohesion and bridging America’s divides. Some refer to the growing number of these organizations as a “bridging movement.”

Their work is not easy, but they have shown that connecting with and listening to others who hold different political views is possible.

Here are three strategies these organizations are using – and people can try to use in their own daily lives – to reduce political polarization:

1. Listen first

Pearce Godwin, a former Republican-leaning consultant from North Carolina, was one of the first “bridgers.”

In 2013, Godwin was doing Christian humanitarian work in Africa. Upset by the vitriol of U.S. politics, Godwin, who had worked on Capitol Hill, wrote a commentary, “It’s Time to Listen,” while on an overnight bus trip across Uganda.

Multiple U.S. newspapers published his column, which called for what is the starting point of most bridging work: People should listen first to understand.

Later that year, Godwin started a nonpartisan and nonprofit organization, the Listen First Project, to promote this message through activities like a 2014 “Listen First, Vote Second” public relations and media campaign.

After Donald Trump won the 2016 election, Godwin decided to expand Listen First work. He established the #ListenFirst Coalition with three other similar organizations: The Village Square, Living Room Conversations and National Institute for Civil Discourse.

Today, this coalition includes over 500 organizations, whose work ranges from one-off dialogue skills workshops to longer-term projects that seek to build social cohesion in the U.S.

2. Be curious, not dogmatic

Braver Angels dates back to 2016 and is another large nonprofit organization that is part of the #ListenFirst Coalition.

On Election Day on Nov. 5, 2024, Braver Angels organized hundreds of pairs of Trump and Kamala Harris supporters to stand at polling stations and demonstrate that dialogue across the political divide is possible. Some held signs that read “Vote Red, Vote Blue, We’re All Americans Through and Through.”

During the past year, I have observed Braver Angels workshops on media bias, public education, immigration and the 2024 election.

Their fishbowl exercise stands out.

Designed by Bill Doherty, a couples therapist and co-founder of Braver Angels, the fishbowl involves a group of Republicans and Democrats talking.

People in the group take turns speaking on a particular political topic, while the others – along with a larger group of observers – listen to what they say without speaking. After peering into this “fishbowl,” each group member discusses what they discovered by listening to the other group. Many mention their “surprise” at points of agreement on certain issues and the thoughtful reasoning behind positions “on the other side” they had previously dismissed.

The exercise illustrates a key starting point of bridging work: Be curious, instead of trying to prove you are right. Learn how someone on the other side of an issue understands and perceives something.

3. Burst out of your bubble

Another key strategy to overcome division is helping people burst out of their bubble. The idea is that people can objectively detach from and examine their assumptions, and then try to explore alternative views outside their social media, news information and community silos.

One #ListenFirst Coalition partner, AllSides, tries to help people do this through a digital platform that shows how the same news of the day is being reported by left, right and center media organizations. It also has an online tool, “Rate Your Bias,” which helps users become aware of their own assumptions.

People can use these tools to compare different stances on issues like federal taxes and civil liberties – and how their own positions line up. People can also search for individual media outlets to see if the majority of other users have rated these organizations as liberal, conservative or center.

When people identify their own biases – which can become evident as they examine the media outlets they like, for example – it can help them become more curious and open. It also helps them move out of the information silos that divide people.

The bridging movement is not without its challenges. People who lean red are sometimes suspicious of these initiatives, which give people information on voting and democracy and can be perceived as having a liberal bias.

Group diversity is also a challenge. Based on my observations, Braver Angels participants tend to be older, white and educated.

And other groups, like #ListenFirst Coalition partner Urban Rural Action, have to spend considerable time and effort getting a diverse range of people in their programs.

But, given America’s stark political divisions, I think there is a clear need and desire for the depolarization work these groups do.

The vast majority of people in the U.S. are concerned about the current state of polarization in the nation. These bridging groups show a way forward and offer strategies to help Americans build bridges across the country’s deepening political divide.

Alex Hinton receives funding from the Alex Hinton receives funding from the Rutgers-Newark Sheila Y. Oliver Center for Politics and Race in America, Rutgers Research Council, and Henry Frank Guggenheim Foundation.

From Iraq to Afghanistan to the US, basic freedoms for women are being eroded as governments start rolling back existing laws.

Just a few months ago a ban on Afghan women speaking in public was the latest measure introduced by the Taliban, who took back control of the country in 2021. From August the ban included singing, reading aloud, reciting poetry and even laughing outside their homes.

The Taliban’s ministry for the propagation of virtue and the prevention of vice, which implements one of the most radical interpretations of Islamic law, enforces these rules. They are part of a broader set of “vice and virtue” laws that severely restrict women’s rights and freedoms. Women are even banned from reading the Quran out loud to other women in public.

In the past three years in Afghanistan, the Taliban has taken away many basic rights from women who live there, so that there’s very little that they are allowed to do.

From 2021, the Taliban started introducing restrictions on girls receiving education, starting with a ban on coeducation and then a ban on girls attending secondary schools. This was followed by closing blind girls’ schools in 2023, and making it mandatory for girls in grades four to six (ages nine to 12) to cover their faces on the way to school.

Women can no longer attend universities or receive a degree certificate nationally, or follow midwifery or nursing training in the Kandahar region. Women are no longer allowed to be flight attendants, or to take a job outside the home. Women-run bakeries in the capital Kabul have now been banned. Women are mostly now unable to earn any money, or leave their homes. In April 2024, the Taliban in Helmand province told media outlets to even refrain from airing women’s voices.

Afghanistan is ranked last on the Women, Peace and Security Index and officials at the UN and elsewhere have called it “gender apartheid”. Afghan women are putting their lives on the line — facing surveillance, harassment, assault, arbitrary detention, torture and exile — to protest against the Taliban.

Many diplomats discuss how important it is to “engage” with the Taliban, yet this has not stopped the assault on women’s rights. When diplomats “engage”, they tend to focus on counter-terrorism, counternarcotics, business deals, or hostage returns. Despite everything that has happened to Afghan women over a short period, critics suggest this rarely makes it onto diplomats’ priority list.

Iraq’s age of consent

Meanwhile, in Iraq, on August 4 2024, an amendment to Iraq’s 1959 personal status law which would possibly lower the age of consent for marriage to nine years old from 18 (or 15 with permission from a judge and parents) was proposed by member of parliament Ra’ad al-Maliki and supported by conservative Shia factions in the government.

The law would have the potential of having matters of family law – such as marriage – adjudicated by religious authorities. This change could not only legalise child marriage but also strip women of rights related to divorce, child custody and inheritance.

Iraq already has a high rate of underage marriage, with 7% of girls married by 15 years old, and 28% married before the legal age of 18.

Unregistered marriages, not legally recorded in court but conducted through religious or tribal authorities, prevent girls from accessing civil rights, and leave women and girls vulnerable to exploitation, abuse and neglect, with limited options for seeking justice.

Many women’s groups have already mobilised against the law. But the amendment has passed its second reading in parliament. If introduced, it could pave the way for further modifications that deepen sectarian divides and move the country further away from a unified legal system. It would also be an especially troubling step backward in protecting children’s rights and gender equality.

Abortion rights in the US

Meanwhile, in the US, women’s access to abortion has been eroded significantly in the past few years. In late 2021, the US was officially labelled a backsliding democracy by an international thinktank.

Six months later, the landmark US Supreme Court ruling of Roe v Wade, which had safeguarded the constitutional right to abortion for nearly 50 years, was overturned. This led to a cascade of restrictive laws, with more than a quarter of US states enacting outright bans or severe restrictions on abortion.

Republican US congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene suggested, in May 2022, that women should stay celibate if they did not want to get pregnant. If only all women had that choice. In fact, in the US a sexual assault occurs every 68 seconds. One in every five American women has been the victim of an attempted or completed rape. From 2009-13, US Child Protective Services agencies found strong evidence indicating that 63,000 children per year were victims of sexual abuse.

These developments reflect a troubling pattern. There is evidence from Donald Trump’s first term that there could be further erosion of women’s rights in his second presidency. During his previous term there were significant attempts to weaken healthcare access, with his foreign policy reinstating the “global gag rule” restricting access to women’s reproductive healthcare worldwide via funding conditions.

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Read more: How a second Trump presidency is likely to threaten abortion rights and women's healthcare globally

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Fragility of women’s rights

If the world can tolerate the Taliban’s abuses, Iraq’s restrictive laws and the US restrictions on abortion access, it reveals the fragility of women’s and girls’ rights globally, and how easy it is to take them away.

The UN agency, UN Women, says it could take another 286 years to close the global gender gaps in legal protections. No country has yet achieved gender equality, based on the gender pay gap, legal equality and social inequality levels. Women and girls continue to face discrimination in all corners of the world, and it seems to be getting worse. But despite everything women continue to resist.

Hind Elhinnawy does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Nothing is worse than thinking you are nearing the finish line and you’ve barely started the race. In my case, the finish line is the Yuengling Center stage and the race is my college career. I thought I was set to graduate this upcoming spring semester, but after meeting with my adviser I was disappointed […]

Have you picked up a book you liked recently? Well, it just might be on the banned books list. In some Florida public schools, “Slaughterhouse Five” by Kurt Vonnegut and “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” by Stephen Chbosky are two of the 700 books that have been banned during the 2023-24 school year, according […]

Laura Shaw, a senior political science major, said she no longer wants to have children in Florida after Amendment 4, a proposal to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution, did not pass.  “The act of getting pregnant in Florida is risking your life,” Shaw said. “People say that’s an exaggeration, but it’s not. People […]

Here’s to a week of various inboxes filled with old men typing paragraphs.

After a while, I kind of started to wonder if all of it was even genuine. The repetition was suspect, at best — an endless line of profile pictures featuring what very well could’ve been the same guy: sunburnt, pudding-faced, probably in sunglasses, most likely with a patchy beard, and almost definitely taking a selfie in a truck. The nattering of the same right-wing dog whistles and centrist mythology, like some kind of VanderMeer-esque madness mantra, didn’t do much to change this perception.
Considering that all this was in response to a post that primarily revolved around getting together with trusted friends, having soup, sharing skills, and cultivating community resilience, it seemed especially absurd.

Like a string of identical, pink-eyed mice preaching to a henhouse that it’s perfectly fine that a fox is in charge now, actually, and you’re hysterical if you think that might be a problem.

But if there’s one thing I’ve learned well, it’s when not to waste my time. Not everyone is worth a response. Not everyone’s words are even worth consideration. That’s not always an easy lesson to internalize, however — particularly when people show up to try to rile you up on purpose. There are an awful lot of arguments for why they think they deserve your time and attention, and oh boy will they repeat them at you.
Here’s why these arguments aren’t true:

“You’re being divisive!”

Please understand me when I say, from the bottom of my heart, that it doesn’t matter.

There’s a very common idea in toxic dynamics that the person who points it out is the one who’s the problem — not the person responsible for the toxic dynamic in the first place. If you didn’t point it out, then everyone else could’ve gone on quietly ignoring it and not having to admit their complicity. It shows up in families, workplaces, and social groups alike. I’ve seen it. You probably have too.

But keeping that kind of peace is not worth it.

“Division” isn’t a bad word. It will let you know who you can actually trust. You needn’t to go out of your way to please others, especially if they’ve shown up just to talk down to you about topics that they don’t understand.

“You’re just creating an echo chamber.”

There’s a difference between retreating to an echo chamber and prioritizing where your attention goes. If someone Kool-Aid-Mans in just to waste your time, you are not obligated to let them do it.

Modern media has created the false perception that all opinions need to be heard and respected equally. This is how we ended up with broadcasts featuring respected professionals alongside the heads of Facebook groups who think giving children bleach enemas will cure them of Autism.
Everyone is free to express their opinion.
You’re also free to not give them a platform or an iota of your time and attention. It’s okay.

Knowing when to save your breath is healthy.

“But what if you could change their mind?”

You probably won’t. I’m sorry.

By now, anyone who’s remained willfully ignorant (of actual evidence, not Qanon “think mirror” posts) isn’t going to be swayed by a reply in an email or comment section. It’s just a way to get you to waste energy that could be better spent on yourself, your family, and your actual community. It’s their choice if they want to spend their time trying to antagonize you, but you are by no means required to indulge them.

There’s a saying that, sometimes, arguing is like playing chess with a pigeon. You can do your best, but your opponent is still going to shit all over the board and strut around like they’ve won. You don’t need to include yourself in every argument that tries to rope you in. Save your energy and use it for the people who actually matter.

The post “I’m not gonna read all that, but I’m happy for you. Or sorry that happened.” appeared first on Marble Crow.

One of the best holiday shopping events of the season is taking over the Florida State Fairgrounds this November. The Junior League of Tampa is hosting its 22nd annual Holiday […]

The post Junior League’s huge Holiday Gift Market returns to Tampa this November appeared first on That's So Tampa.

When we think of gravestones, we often focus on their sentimental or historical value. Yet, gravestones contain an unexpected legal aspect: copyright. Other common motifs of Halloween, such as scary […]

The post Does Copyright Law Protect Gravestones? appeared first on Copyright Alliance.

Abortion bans are intended to reduce elective abortions, but they are also affecting the way physicians practice medicine.

That is the key finding from our recently published article in the journal Social Science & Medicine.

Medical providers practicing in states that implemented abortion bans in the wake of the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Supreme Court decision are forced to balance the needs of their pregnant patients against the risk that the providers could be prosecuted for treating these patients. This dilemma has serious and far-reaching consequences.

We interviewed 22 medical providers working in reproductive health care across Tennessee in the six months following the implementation of the state’s total abortion ban in 2022.

Providers spoke with our team about the need to protect themselves from criminal liability and told us that they were increasingly hesitant to provide care that their patients needed.

Why it matters

A 2024 ProPublica investigation found that at least two women have died in Georgia as a result of being denied medical care stemming from the implementation of these abortion bans. Nearly all of our interviewees spoke about their fear that these kinds of deaths would happen.

Providers told us that patients often believe that these bans include exceptions when the health of the pregnant person is at risk, but that is not always true in practice.

The Tennessee abortion ban allows for an “exception for situations where the abortion is necessary to prevent the death of a pregnant woman or prevent serious risk of substantial and irreversible impairment of major bodily function.”

The problem is that such cases are rarely clear-cut. And the stakes for health care providers are very high. In certain states, including Tennessee, if they are found to have provided an abortion in a case where the mother’s life or health was not imminently at risk, they can face felony charges, which could include multiple years in prison.

In interviews, providers described many cases where terminating a pregnancy is medically necessary for the pregnant person. Take cases of preterm premature membrane rupture, a condition where a pregnant person’s water breaks before 37 weeks of pregnancy. Serious complications can follow a premature membrane rupture, particularly in cases that do not result in the beginning of labor.

The standard treatment for this condition is to induce labor in an effort to prevent such potential medical complications. However, if it is early on in a pregnancy and the fetus would likely not survive outside the womb, this treatment is now discouraged, as the law does not sufficiently clarify what interventions are allowed to protect the pregnant person.

In many cases, the physical harm the pregnant person is experiencing correlates with the level of legal protection a medical provider receives.

Although doctors are trained to follow best practices around health care treatment, fear of malpractice accusations leads to the widely documented practice of defensive medicine, cases where providers either over-administer testing or avoid risks in an effort to prevent malpractice lawsuits.

Abortion bans make this dynamic far worse because they often involve the threat of criminal prosecution, which is not covered by malpractice insurance. This exposes providers to a new form of risk, one that is shaping how providers interact with patients and provide care.

Our team calls this new form of defensive medicine “hesitant medicine.” Providers are forced to prioritize their own criminal legal protection over the well-being of their patients, so they hesitate to provide treatment that patients need. Hesitancy is exacerbated by bans that are ambiguous about when a provider can intervene during a pregnancy complication.

What’s next

It will take years before researchers have data showing the full picture of how abortion bans are affecting women’s reproductive health. However, our interviews show that these bans are already shaping how providers are treating pregnant people.

A majority of our interviewees had considered moving to a state without an abortion ban to practice medicine with far less stress around the threat of criminal prosecution, a trend that is already occurring. Over time, this exodus of providers could exacerbate the problem of health care deserts in the United States.

To mitigate some of this harm, more effort is needed from medical associations, employers and legislatures to clarify or revise the Tennessee “Human Life Protection Act” in a way that better protects women’s health.

Sophie Bjork-James receives funding from the National Science Foundation.

Anna-Grace Lilly and Isabelle Perry Newman do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

It’s scary movie season, a time when many people watch films about zombies, serial killers, werewolves, magic and mysterious monsters who are impossible to kill.

However, as far as I know, there’s only one film that features all of those elements – and you’ve probably never seen it.

Made in 2007, “Trick ‛r Treat” consists of four interconnected horror stories, each about 15 to 20 minutes long, that all take place on a single Halloween night.

While characters from one story sometimes appear in other segments, the unifying force in the film is Sam, a mysterious creature wearing a burlap mask. He takes umbrage whenever a character disrespects a Halloween tradition, whether it’s by scaring away trick-or-treaters or blowing out a jack-o’-lantern before Halloween is over. Each meets a gruesome end.

Horror buffs eventually discovered the film. Today, it’s hailed as a modern classic.

What went wrong?

“Trick ‛r Treat” was produced by a major studio, Warner Bros. It featured A-list stars, such as Brian Cox and Oscar-winner Anna Paquin. It was produced by Bryan Singer, who was known for churning out hits such as “X-Men” and “The Usual Suspects.” And though its director, Mike Dougherty, was making his directorial debut, he had worked as a screenwriter on films such as “X2: X-Men United” and “Superman Returns.”

Despite all of these credentials, the film’s theatrical release was delayed from fall 2007 to 2008. Then a theater run was canceled altogether, with Warner Bros. finally releasing it on video in 2009.

The studio never gave an official reason for pulling the theatrical release; however, some critics have speculated that the box office success of the “Saw” franchise and Rob Zombie’s “Halloween” remake were factors.

Other reports suggest that the film’s anthology format, its mixture of horror and comedy, and a plot featuring murdered children made it too hard a sell.

Given the cost of marketing and promoting “Trick ‛r Treat” to a nationwide audience, perhaps the risk wasn’t worth it for a film with a relatively small US$5 million budget. Dougherty himself said these hang-ups constituted a “perfect storm”, suggesting that no one development sealed the film’s fate.

Bypassing the box office

As recently as a decade ago, films released directly to DVD were viewed as flops or cash grabs. In fact, there’s an entire subgenre called “mockbusters” – low-budget rip-offs of studio films, such as “Transmorphers,” which tried to piggyback the success of the “Transformers” franchise, and “Atlantic Rim,” which attempted to do the same for the 2013 blockbuster “Pacific Rim.”

Then there are direct-to-video sequels meant to capitalize off hits. Disney made a lot of money in the late 1990s and early 2000s producing widely panned, direct-to-video animated features such as “The Return of Jafar” and “Pocahontas II: Journey to a New World.”

But second lives for films that were initially snubbed or ignored are nothing new.

“The Boondock Saints” was briefly screened in a handful of theaters for a single week in 1999 before being dumped into the video market. Only then did viewers find it, and it became a cult favorite that eventually begat a sequel.

The stigma of direct-to-video release has diminished over the past decade thanks to the rise of streaming, in which content made directly for home viewing can receive critical acclaim and attract subscribers.

Actor Nicolas Cage has made a cottage industry of this format. While some have attributed his massive output in the past decade to his financial difficulties, Cage’s films “Joe” (2013), “Mandy” (2018) and “Pig” (2021) have all received critical acclaim, despite sometimes only running in a handful of theaters for a week before their release into streaming markets and video on demand.

It’s this sort of tradition that led to the rediscovery of “Trick ‛r Treat.”

Hipster horror

The appeal of “Trick ‛r Treat” is rooted in its subversion of horror tropes.

For example, women and children, who’ve historically served as victims in the genre, have a lot more agency in Dougherty’s Halloween tale. In fact, the mysterious Sam was played by Quinn Lord, who was only 8 years old when the film was shot. In the film, the character’s origin, age and gender remain undefined since Sam is masked or covered in prosthetics for the entire film, blurring the line between human and monster.

In addition, the film’s complex structure, which some speculated might have hurt its chances for commercial success, helped fuel the film’s critical praise. Dougherty called it “‘Pulp Fiction’ meets ‘Halloween,’” a nod to the interlocking structure of Quentin Tarantino’s breakout film and the setting of John Carpenter’s horror staple, which also unfolds over one Halloween night.

It has become somewhat of a cliché to say that esteemed art, initially overlooked, was “ahead of its time.”

Still, it would be fair to say that “Trick ‘r Treat” arrived on the cusp of what has been called a “horror renaissance” in the past 15 years. Directors like Jordan Peele, Ari Aster, Robert Eggers and Mike Flanagan have found critical and commercial success by branding themselves as horror auteurs.

In addition, Peele and directors like Nia Dacosta, who helmed 2021’s “Candyman,” have opened up a brand of horror that deals with social issues and identity. Dougherty’s film also anticipated a trend of horror films with a darkly humorous streak, including Peele’s “Get Out” and David Gordon Green’s reimagined “Halloween” sequels.

Despite the film’s rocky beginnings, “Trick ‛r Treat” received a belated theatrical release in 2022, which has spurred talk of a potential sequel.

Dougherty even acknowledges that the film may owe its current popularity to its botched release. While some mainstream films disappear quickly, “Trick ‛r Treat” – currently streaming on Max – reappears every Halloween. Just like Sam.

Scott Malia does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

It can be difficult to tell someone what you think of their work, even if you mean well and even if you think they’re doing a good job. Sometimes the person doesn’t understand what you mean, or doesn’t respond the way you’d hoped. Feedback should contribute to learning, but you might sometimes wonder if it’s any use at all. South African university lecturer Martina van Heerden studied the art of giving feedback to students in higher education. Her insights and three top tips are useful for effective communication in many areas of life.

Why did you decide to study feedback?

As a tutor, I initially did not get training on how to give feedback to students on their essays. After a while, I started thinking more about what exactly I was trying to say and do with my feedback. For example, if I told a student “your argument lacks depth”, was I just telling the to make a stronger argument in this essay, or was there a “deeper message”?

So, in my PhD, I explored “what lies beneath” our feedback. What I found is that often feedback has very specific messages for students, largely about what is valued in a particular context; what the student is expected to know in that discipline.

Feedback is a big concern in higher education globally. It is fairly well researched and most research identifies various problems with it. Students don’t seem to take up the feedback, or there are different understandings of its purpose, or it’s not as effective as it should be because of academic language and conventions. The blame tends to be put on students.

I wondered if the problem lay instead with how educators approach and give feedback.

Focusing on English literature studies, I analysed written comments given to first year students and worked with the tutors giving the feedback. English literature is a tricky discipline to give feedback in as it involves balancing language, literature and academic literacy aspects. Focusing too much on one aspect in feedback could mislead students.

What did you find?

There was a bit of misalignment between the purpose and the practice of feedback.

Ideally, the underlying message of feedback in literature studies should be to develop students’ ability to think critically and analytically about texts. It could do this, for example, by asking questions that stimulate thinking around the topics and themes of the text (rather than asking students to merely provide more information on it).

Most of the feedback in my study, however, focused on correcting surface-level errors like grammar and spelling. Although there is nothing wrong with this in itself, it could mislead students about what is valued in the discipline.

Feedback is often quite frustrating for both students and educators – both research and practice wisdom attest to this. Educators are frustrated because students don’t seem to learn from feedback, and students are frustrated because they are getting what they feel is unhelpful feedback. These are global concerns. There is a big discrepancy between how useful educators and students perceive feedback to be.

My work and other research highlights the importance of seeing feedback as a literacy – that is, as a skill – that needs to be developed deliberately.

Too often, it is assumed that educators will know how to give effective feedback, or it is assumed that students will know what to do with feedback. But a lot of the time, they don’t – we go by our instincts and what is perhaps easier to identify and correct. For feedback to actually “feed forward” – beyond a specific essay or task – the skill needs to be developed.

How can people give better feedback?

I recommend asking yourself three questions:

1.) What do I want to achieve with my feedback? Ask yourself if you just want to help students pass this essay or do well in this task, or if you want them to learn something. If they need to learn something, what should they learn?

2.) How understandable is my feedback language? The language of feedback may be steeped in academic, professional, or industry terms which you take for granted. Or you may have developed your own feedback shorthand. This might be easy for you to understand – you’re the one writing it – but that doesn’t mean a student will. So, ask yourself whether someone who is not you would understand your feedback.

3.) What do I want my students to do with my feedback? Too often, comments don’t really give students guidance on what to do. Correcting errors and making statements about students’ work takes agency and action away from students. Using questions and suggestions means that students become more active in the feedback process.

Feedback is important for learning and development. Too often, though, it becomes another obstacle that has to be overcome. Useful, clear, actionable feedback can help students become better writers, researchers, thinkers and scholars.

Martina van Heerden is a member of the South African Association of Academic Literacy Practitioners.

Is Donald Trump a fascist? General Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump, thinks so. Trump is “fascist to the core,” he warns.

John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, agrees. So does Vice President Kamala Harris, his opponent in this year’s presidential election.

But political commentators who have a grounding in history are not so sure. Writing in The Guardian, Sidney Blumenthal calls Trump “Hitlerian” and his rallies “Naziesque”, but stops short of calling him a fascist.

Michael Tomasky of The New Republic understands the reservations, but he is tired spending time debating the difference between “fascistic” and just plain “fascist”. “He’s damn close enough,” Tomasky writes, “and we’d better fight”.

I understand this logic. It’s the reason Harris uses the term “fascist” to describe Trump – to send “a 911 call to the American people”. But there’s a problem.

I have spent the past six years researching right-wing, authoritarian political communication in America. I can say with confidence how these kinds of labels can misfire. They can very easily be made to look like liberal hysteria, playing straight into the hands of the far right.

Here are the two reasons why it is crucial to call Trump exactly what he is.

1. Calling Trump a fascist, and then instantly adding, “or close enough,” plays directly into the hands of the far right. “See?” they might say. “Anytime anyone steps outside the liberal consensus, they get labelled a fascist. This is how political correctness silences dissent.”

2. Trump’s kind of authoritarianism thrives on ambiguity about what sort of right-wing populist figure he is. Its success depends on the fact that “fascist” is the only name we have right now for authoritarian politics.

In my view, Trump is not a fascist. Rather, he is part of a “new authoritarianism” that subverts democracy from within and solidifies power through administrative, rather than paramilitary, means.

Why the ‘fascism’ label is unhelpful

This brand of new authoritarianism hides in plain sight because there is no name for it yet. It looks like something else – for example, right-wing populism that is anti-liberal, but not yet anti-democratic. And then suddenly, it shows itself as anti-democratic extremism, as Trump did in refusing to accept the 2020 election result and encouraging the storming of the Capitol.

This moment starkly revealed Trump as a new authoritarian. Supplementary debate about whether Trump is like Adolf Hitler risks being pointless. But the problem is that fascism is the only name we have now for anti-democratic extremism.

All fascists are authoritarians. But not all authoritarians are fascists. It’s crucial to understand there are other types of authoritarianism – and how they differ.

This is not just important for preventing Trump from seeking to subvert American democracy. It is also vital for stopping Trump imitators, who will now spring forth in other democracies. If there is still no name for what they are other than “fascist,” then they, too, will thrive on ambiguity.

What is ‘new authoritarianism’?

I suggest we focus on what Trump actually is – an anti-democratic, “new authoritarian” – and understand what this means and how he is gaining wider support using right-wing populism.

The new authoritarians don’t necessarily take a sledgehammer to a nation’s institutions, for example, by doing away with elections. Rather, they hollow out democracy from within, so it becomes a façade draped over a one-party state.

We have many examples of this kind of ruler today: Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Belarus’ Alexander Lukashenko, Tunisia’s Kais Saied and, of course, the poster-figure for the new authoritarians, Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

Trump’s admiration for Putin is a matter of public record. For alt-right thinkers who are influential with Trump, such as Steve Bannon, Putin provides a blueprint for how new authoritarianism works.

Authoritarians like Putin must govern through the state, not the people, because, as social psychologist Bob Altemeyer explains, they ultimately represent a tiny minority of the population.

Military dictatorships rule through the armed forces. The fascist regimes of 20th century Europe were ultimately police states. They relied on converting paramilitary death squads into secret police (like the Gestapo) and state security (the SS in Nazi Germany).

The new authoritarians, however, govern through the transformation of the civil service into their own personal political machines.

That is why Trump is obsessed with the “deep state”, by which he means the way in which democratic institutions have built-in legal safeguards defended by civil servants, who can potentially frustrate executive orders. The new authoritarian strategy is to appoint a stratum of political loyalists to key positions in their administrations, who can circumvent institutional checks. But that is no easy matter.

If Trump is elected, he has vowed to “crush the deep state”, for example, by purging thousands of nonpolitical civil service employees. As part of this, he has pledged to establish a “truth and reconciliation commission” oriented to punishing those he thinks opposed him the past.

Trump has been following this new authoritarian playbook for nearly his entire political career. These are the three steps he is taking to lay the groundwork for authoritarian rule:

1) Undermine electoral integrity

The first key to new authoritarianism: subvert democracy by undermining electoral integrity. The acid test here? Authoritarians do not accept election results when the opposition has won. As Trump has very bluntly put it, “I am a very proud election denier”.

Trump’s opening move in this regard was to take over the Republican Party. He used election denialism to do this, while also marginalising any moderates who opposed him.

The Trump Republican Party is now a minority party, oriented to white grievance, resentment of immigrants and the anti-democratic idea that a country should be run like a company.

Its only hope for winning government as a minority party is by trying to suppress the vote of its opponents. To do this, pro-Trump Republican states have passed a number of laws since 2020 to make voting more difficult.

These states have also aggressively removed people from the voting rolls. Texas alone has stricken one million voters off its rolls since 2021, only 6,500 of whom were deemed non-citizens.

If Trump wins, he will likely make it even harder for people to vote. Civil rights groups fear he may introduce a citizenship question to the census, use the Department of Justice to conduct a massive purge of voter rolls, and launch criminal investigations of electoral officials.

As a backup, Trump will likely resurrect the “election integrity commission” he established in 2017 to justify his claims of alleged voter fraud in the 2016 election and support his election denialism narrative.

2) Weaken the legislative and judicial branches

The second key to new authoritarianism: circumventing the checks-and-balances function of the legislative branch of government. The goal here is to rule by executive fiat or govern through a stacked legislative majority.

The new authoritarians often govern through executive orders, including the use of emergency powers. For instance, Trump has envisaged a scenario in which a Republican Congress could enact emergency powers to empower the president to overturn the authority of state governors to fire their prosecutors and use the National Guard for law enforcement.

Such a development would depend on a number of factors, including the complicity of the judiciary. This is why new authoritarians also attempt to stack the judiciary with loyalists.

In his first term, Trump not only appointed three Supreme Court justices, he also placed judges to the federal appeals courts, district courts and circuit courts.

3) Attack their enemies

This leads to the third pillar of new authoritarianism: decapitating the political opposition and suppressing dissent.

Trump’s threats to investigate and prosecute his enemies, including leading figures in the Democratic Party, should be taken very seriously. His calls to target the “enemy from within” were pointedly directed at what he deemed “radical left lunatics”.

Journalists and the news media would also likely be targeted. Trump’s statement that the broadcast licenses of national networks should be revoked, for example, needs to be understood in the context of his pledges to dismantle federal regulatory agencies if elected.

That matters, because the next step for new authoritarians to solidify their power is through suppressing dissent. Trump has proposed using the military in civil contexts to target criminals and prevent illegal immigration. He has reportedly even questioned why the military couldn’t “just shoot” protesters.

It is important to understand how this differs from fascism, because it is central to Trump’s ability to retain electoral support.

Classical fascism under dictators like Hitler and Italy’s Benito Mussolini was based on street-fighting, paramilitary movements, which used violence to intimidate and crush the opposition. The equivalents of this today are right-wing militias such as the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers.

Trump keeps one foot on the edge of this camp. But alt-right figures like Bannon understand that swastika flags and paramilitary uniforms are a political liability. Their preference is for new authoritarianism, which is able to push a right-wing extremist agenda by reducing democracy to sham elections, rather than openly setting up a totalitarian regime.

As such, Trump can dodge accusations of being a “fascist” by telling the Proud Boys to “stand by”, while throwing up a smokescreen of equivocations about the January 6 Capitol insurrection. He can distance himself from kind of paramilitary violence that is reminiscent of classical fascism.

It is about time to call things by their true names. Trump has the anti-democratic tendencies of a new authoritarian – and, as his opponents point out, he seems likely to put his words into actions if elected a second time.

Geoff M Boucher does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Solar geoengineering research is advancing fast, after a recent flurry of funding announcements. Yet these technologies are still speculative and have many critics, and we worry their concerns won’t be heard. If geoengineering is essentially allowed to self-regulate, with no effective global governance, future research could easily take us down a dangerous path.

Solar geoengineering refers to proposals to reduce global warming by reflecting a portion of sunlight back into space before it reaches the Earth’s surface. In its best-known form, this means using high-flying aircraft to inject tiny reflective particles into the upper atmosphere.

This so-called “stratospheric aerosol injection” hasn’t actually happened yet, beyond a few very small experiments with balloons. Yet for a long time, such ideas remained fringe and too controversial to even consider – and for some academics they still are.

The academic discussion was highly polarised from the start. Opponents, mainly governance scholars and social scientists, stood firmly entrenched against assumed proponents, mainly natural scientists and engineers. Both sides had their champions, arguments, assumptions, key publications and meetings, generally working on the topic without proper engagement with the other side.

This polarisation is still visible in publishing today. Take, for example, articles on The Conversation. Critics focus on potential negatives such as altered rainfall patterns, the infringement of human rights, or even a catastrophic “termination shock”. Advocates highlight potential benefits such as reducing extreme heat and preserving ice caps, while others suggest we may soon be forced to try it.

The authors of these articles are all academic experts. Yet they come from different disciplines and use different arguments.

A public and private funding boom

Though the two camps have not resolved their arguments, geoengineering research funding is suddenly booming. There are major philanthropic pledges of US$50 million (£38 million) and US$30 million from the Simons and Quadrature Climate foundations, which are vying for the title of biggest donor with the £10.5 million and £56.8 million of the UK government’s UKRI and Advanced Research and Innovation Agency programs.

Other key organisations speaking about the need for more research include the European Commission, the US government and the World Climate Research Programme. This comes on top of the shock of controversial private enterprises pushing for solar geoengineering, most notoriously the US-based start-up Make Sunsets.

Support is certainly not unanimous. Many prominent scholars have signed up to a call for a moratorium, for instance. And at a recent UN Environment Assembly session in Kenya many climate-vulnerable nations mobilised against calls for further research into what they see as a highly risky technology that would enable big emitters to carry on emitting.

However, many powerful interests are seemingly in favour of more research, while the 1.5°C global warming target is moving ever further out of sight. In the near future, we can therefore expect further research, perhaps including including small-scale outdoor experiments.

As PhD students working on geoengineering, situated somewhere between both camps, we have found this polarisation deeply unproductive and difficult to deal with. Our own research sometimes feels like wandering through a minefield of opinions and perspectives. Yet we can also see the valuable concerns and hopes of both sides.

That’s why we believe that upcoming research projects must factor in the concerns of opponents, and not represent only supporters of geoengineering or those who have not been explicitly against it. Excluding critical voices would directly impact the scientific process, for one thing.

But this exclusion is especially worrying as there are currently no governance structures for solar geoengineering. If efforts to develop such governance only involve supportive researchers, they could lack the critical capacity to prevent risks or undesired effects. Disasters in the financial sector and the chemical industry warn us of the perils of self-regulation without critical voices.

Learn from the critics

There are other critiques that ought to be factored into any major research project. They include concerns that simply researching the technology will create a slippery slope towards it being deployed, or worries that geoengineering ignores the social and political dynamics behind climate change and addresses only its outcomes. There are also major governance concerns over issues such as the role of the military (could geoengineering be deployed for security reasons in contested regions like the Arctic?), or the concentration of research at influential institutions in the US and Europe.

Over time, geoengineering researchers have become more aware of such arguments and some are explicitly trying to include them in their work. The American Geophysical Union has recently published an ethical framework for geoengineering, which should provide valuable guidance for any research project. But without active dialogue with critical scholars, their arguments will likely only echo faintly in the pro-research space.

In practice, more engagement between the two camps would come with many difficulties. For advocates, it can be tempting to avoid such debates and exclude those who disagree with the very foundations on which their research is built. On the flip side, some scholars who have already explicitly argued against the continuation of solar geoengineering research would nevertheless have to participate in it.

The practical implications will therefore need to be carefully worked out. However, a more productive dialogue might still shape a future that can be acceptable to all sides.

Albert Van Wijngaarden receives PhD funding from Gates Cambridge. He is involved in UArctic's Frozen Arctic Conservation project, and was an advisory board member of Ocean Vision's Sea Ice Roadmap.

Adrian Hindes is also an analyst for Civilization Research Institute which does work pertaining to global catastrophic risks, including those related to emerging technologies such as solar geoengineering.

Chloe Colomer receives PhD funding from the UK Research Institute (UKRI) Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) with the grants EP/R513143/1 and EP/T517793/1.

Shortly after Donald Trump was inaugurated as president of the United States in January 2017, George Orwell’s 1949 novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four” shot to the top of Amazon’s bestseller list. Apparently, lots of people thought Orwell had something relevant to say in that political moment.

Nearly eight years later, the United States once again faces the prospect of a Trump presidency.

In 2016, many Americans were caught off guard by Trump’s win, leading them to grapple with the potential consequences of a Trump presidency only after he was elected. But this time, more people seem to be thinking about the ramifications of such an outcome in advance.

In my work as a professor of philosophy and law, I’ve spent a lot of time studying Orwell’s writing. I think people were correct eight years ago to conclude that Orwell could provide insight into a Trump presidency.

Here are three such insights that I think are useful for Americans to keep in mind as they prepare to vote for their next president.

Nationalism is not patriotism

In his 1945 essay “Notes on Nationalism,” Orwell distinguishes between the terms nationalism and patriotism.

For Orwell, nationalism was “the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests.”

He was quick to point out that this was distinct from the concept of patriotism, which he defined as “devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people.”

To understand Orwell’s conception of patriotism, I find it useful to consider an analogy. Many parents think that their kids are the best kids in the world. This doesn’t mean that they think there are objective metrics that could be used to rank children. Most parents recognize that there is no such thing, and they don’t go around saying other children aren’t as good as theirs. Yet there is still a real sense in which they see their own kids as the very best.

There is something similar in the attitude of Orwell’s patriot. They may think that their country or their way of life is the best, but – and this may be the most important part – they have no wish to force their views or way of life on others.

Not so with the nationalist. Orwell claims, “Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power.” The nationalist is like a parent who goes around tearing other people’s kids down in order to lift theirs up.

Mere love of country is not inherently dangerous. Making advancement of one’s nation or culture one’s top priority is extremely dangerous. Patriotism sticks to the former. Nationalism goes in for the latter.

Orwell insightfully recognizes that when the nationalist makes advancement of their way of life their top priority, they inevitably end up placing that goal “beyond good and evil.” This makes the nationalist susceptible to endorsing unethical means for advancing their own way of life.

A prime example of such a nationalist mentality was Trump’s response to losing the 2020 presidential election. He sought to subvert the election results by lying and by encouraging insurrection.

Similarly, Trump’s supporters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 were embracing a nationalist mentality. They engaged in an unethical means of trying to advance their own political agenda.

Donald Trump does exactly what Orwell predicts the nationalist will do. He conceptualizes everything, as Orwell put it, “in terms of competitive prestige” and “his thoughts always turn on victories, defeats, triumphs and humiliations.”

Fixation on competitive prestige is not patriotic. It’s unadulterated nationalism.

An autocrat is easy to underestimate

In a 1942 essay written during the middle of World War II and reflecting on his experiences as a volunteer soldier in the Spanish Civil War, Orwell wrote that “our traditions and our past security have given us a sentimental belief that it all comes right in the end and the thing you most fear never really happens,” and that “we believe half-instinctively that evil always defeats itself in the long run.”

Orwell was worried by these optimistic instincts because he thought they ran counter to the evidence. The evidence, on the contrary, suggested that things typically don’t turn out right on their own. Rather, social improvements normally require concerted effort and vigilance against backsliding.

In another essay from the same year, Orwell criticized various intellectuals who treated Hitler as “a figure out of comic opera, not worth taking seriously.” And he criticized many English-speaking countries for being places where it was “fashionable to believe, right up to the outbreak of war, that Hitler was an unimportant lunatic and the German tanks made of cardboard.”

As numerous commentators and news outlets have noted, Trump routinely speaks like an autocrat.

Yet many Americans excuse such talk, failing to treat it as the evidence of a threat to democracy that it is. This seems to me to be driven in part by the tendency Orwell identified to think that truly bad things won’t happen – at least not in one’s own country.

Orwell thought it was worth taking the possibility of bad outcomes seriously. This is one way to understand what he was up to in his most famous books, “Animal Farm” and “Nineteen Eighty-Four.” Americans would benefit from taking potential threats to U.S. democracy seriously, too.

Nationalism can attack within

You can read “Nineteen Eighty-Four” as Orwell’s attempt to think about what a ruling political party completely captured by nationalism might look like.

In “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” orthodox party members in the fictional nation of Oceania are obsessed with “competitive prestige” and “the desire for power.” Activities such as the Two Minutes Hate, where party members were encouraged to scream and jeer at a video of a political opponent, prompt party members to focus their thoughts on “victories, defeats, triumphs and humiliations.”

A notable feature of the party is how often it turns on its own members through kidnapping, torture and murder. The occurrence was so frequent in Oceania that it had a name: being “vaporized.” Nationalists are a threat not only to those outside the nation but also to those inside the nation who don’t fully support the nationalist’s pursuit of power at any cost.

From this perspective, Trump’s threats against those whom he views as “the enemy from within” reveal his own nationalistic desire to turn on Americans who threaten his pursuit of power.

Orwell’s writing suggests that voters should take such threats seriously.

Mark Satta does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Staring out at the red-brick streets of Ybor City’s historic downtown district is Tampa’s only GameTime, a video game arcade and restaurant chain. Ninety years ago, this towering concrete building was instead a small wooden home, part of the original Ybor City “slum” neighborhoods.  The building is the subject of one of the many photographs in […]

Historic Ybor City is set to host its largest cigar festival in decades on December 8 at Centennial Park (1800 E 8th Ave). Presented by Arturo Fuente Cigars and J.C. Newman Cigars, the 2024 Ybor City Cigar Festival honors the rich tradition of cigar culture in a celebration that promises to be unforgettable.

Cigar aficionados can explore premium hand-rolled cigars from global vendors, meet iconic cigar makers, and indulge in tastings. The festival also features live entertainment, cigar-rolling demonstrations, and a variety of food, desserts, and beverages, including beer, wine, and spirits. Local artisans will display unique jewelry, artwork, clothing, and cigar accessories, ensuring there’s something for everyone.

A free community event celebrating Ybor City history

Carlito Fuente Jr., owner of Arturo Fuente Cigars, expressed his pride in the event: “Every year, it gets bigger and better… It makes me so proud to be back in Ybor City and see how much it has blossomed.”

With free entry, this event welcomes locals and visitors alike to celebrate Ybor City’s vibrant history, craftsmanship, and community spirit. Don’t miss this unique opportunity to experience the legacy of one of the world’s most iconic cigar traditions!

For more details, click here.

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