Leettaschmidt

A profound change has been proposed by the Biden administration for U.S. immigration law. Following up on candidate Joe Biden’s promise of immigration reform legislation, the U.S. Citizenship Act would eliminate the term “alien” from the U.S. immigration laws.

The country’s bedrock immigration law, the Immigration and Nationality Act, would be amended to say that “[t]he term ‘noncitizen’ means any person not a citizen or national of the United States.”

Some might think that terminology is not a big deal. But as a scholar of immigration and civil rights law, I believe that the one-word change could deeply influence Americans’ views about the rights of noncitizens and, by so doing, the future trajectory of immigration law and policy.

In forging immigration law and policy, it is far easier to deny the humanity of an “alien” than to do so for a “noncitizen.” The use of the word “alien” helps rationalize the severe treatment of noncitizens of color, from detention in cages, family separation and more.

Signaling attitude

Consider that, in restricting immigration and deportations, generations of U.S. government officials, but especially those of the fervently anti-immigrant Trump administration, frequently used the term “illegal aliens.”

For instance, President Donald Trump tweeted in 2019 that the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency “will begin the process of removing the millions of illegal aliens who have illicitly found their way into the United States.”

Officials in other presidential administrations, such as President Barack Obama’s, used “undocumented immigrant” to refer to the same people.

Similarly, use of language by Supreme Court justices telegraphs how a case will come out, as well as suggests a justice’s attitude about immigrants and their rights. In writing for the Supreme Court in 2020 upholding deportation of an asylum seeker without a hearing, Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the first line of the opinion that “[e]very year, hundreds of thousands of aliens are apprehended at or near the border attempting to enter this country illegally.”

In contrast, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in finding in favor of the immigrants, wrote for the majority, “[t]he Court uses the term noncitizen throughout this opinion to refer to any person who is not a citizen or national of the United States.”

Targeting immigrants

The first federal immigration legislation, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, expressly targeted Chinese immigrants for exclusion from the United States from 1882 to 1965. Over time, the terms “alien” and “illegal alien” replaced the references to the Chinese in the immigration laws.

The word “alien” is the core of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which as amended constitutes the comprehensive U.S. immigration law. The law governs which “aliens” may be admitted to, and deported from, the United States. Immigration law dictates that the “term ‘alien’ means any person not a citizen or national of the United States.”

The term “illegal alien” has been criticized as a racial code for immigrants of color.. Today, “illegal alien” often is employed to refer to Mexicans and Central Americans.

“Next week ICE will begin the process of removing the millions of illegal aliens who have illicitly found their way into the United States,” former President Donald Trump said in mid-2019.

Late in the 2020 presidential campaign, Trump aide Stephen Miller tried to discredit Biden’s immigration policies by saying that Arizona, for example, “will be overwhelmed by hundreds of thousands, millions of illegal immigrants because they get apprehended, they get issued a court date and they get released.”

Terminology matters

In a law review article published more than 20 years ago, I criticized the dehumanizing impacts of alien terminology and how it helps to rationalize the harsh treatment of people:

“Citizens have a large bundle of political and civil rights, many of which are guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution; aliens have a much smaller bundle and enjoy far fewer constitutional and statutory protections…. [T]he use of the term alien helps to reinforce and strengthen nativist sentiment toward members of new immigrant groups, which in turn influences U.S. responses to immigration and human rights issues.”

The legal creation of the “alien” helps to justify the fact that our legal system offers noncitizens only limited rights. Constitutional law scholar Alexander Bickel noted that the use of terms that dehumanize people helps justify the denial of rights because it is easier to deny rights to a nonperson.

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Consider the public debate. Advocates of immigration enforcement claim that today’s faceless “illegal alien” invaders must be stopped. For example, Ken Cuccinelli, the acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in the Trump administration, was a founder of a group more than a decade ago that described “illegal aliens” as “foreign invaders” responsible for “serious infectious diseases, drug running, gang violence, human trafficking, terrorism.”

The Federation for American Immigration Reform, an advocacy group that works to limit immigration, recently issued a press release announcing that “Illegal Alien Population Soars to a Record 14.5 Million Amidst COVID-19 Pandemic.”

Glenn Spencer, the president and founder of American Border Patrol, an advocacy group that tracks migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, has said that “[e]very illegal alien in our nation must be deported immediately. …”

Although a seemingly minor and technical change, the elimination of “alien” from the U.S. immigration laws might transform the entire discussion of immigrants.

Terminology matters. Humans, not faceless invaders, are affected by the immigration laws. “Noncitizen” is more neutral than “alien.” On this score, the U.S. Citizenship Act would take a small but important step toward treating immigrants with humanity.

Kevin Johnson 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.

Since before Donald Trump took office, historians have debated whether he is a fascist.

As a teacher of World War II history who has written about fascism, I’ve found that historians have a consensus definition of the term, broadly speaking.

Given the term’s current – and sometimes erroneous – use, I think it’s important to distinguish what fascism is and is not.

Race-first thinking

Fascism, now a century old, got its start with Benito Mussolini and his Italian allies. They named their movement after an ancient Roman emblem, the fasces, an ax whose handle has been tightly reinforced with many rods, symbolizing the power of unity around one leader.

Fascism means more than dictatorship, however.

It’s distinct from simple authoritarianism – an anti-democratic government by a strongman or small elite – and “Stalinism” – authoritarianism with a dominant bureaucracy and economic control, named after the former Soviet leader. The same goes for “anarchism,” the belief in a society organized without an overarching state.

Above all, fascists view nearly everything through the lens of race. They’re committed not just to race supremacy, but maintaining what they called “racial hygiene,” meaning the purity of their race and the separation of what they view as lower ones.

That means they must define who is a member of their nation’s legitimate race. They must invent a “true” race.

Many are familiar with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime’s so-called Aryan race, which had no biological or historical reality. The Nazis had to forge a mythic past and legendary people. Including some in the “true race” means excluding others.

Capitalism is good

For fascists, capitalism is good. It appeals to their admiration of “the survival of the fittest,” a phrase coined by social Darwinist Herbert Spencer, so long as companies serve the needs of the fascist leadership and the “Volk,” or people.

In exchange for protecting private property, fascists demand capitalists act as cronies.

If, for example, a company is successfully producing weapons for foreign or domestic wars – good. But if a company is enriching nonloyal people, or making money for the imagined subrace, the fascists will step in and hand it to someone deemed loyal.

If the economy is poor, the fascist will divert attention from shortages to plans for patriotic glory or for vengeance against internal or external enemies.

Might makes right

Important to most fascists is the idea that the nation’s “patriots” have been let down, that “good people” are humiliated while “bad people” do better.

These grievances cannot be answered, fascists say, if things remain under the status quo. There needs to be revolutionary change allowing the “real people” to break free from the restraints of democracy or existing law and get even.

For fascists, might makes right.

Since for them the law should be subservient to the needs of the people and the need to crush socialism or liberalism, fascists encourage party militias. These enforce the fascist will, break unions, distort elections and intimidate or co-opt the police.

The historical fascists of Germany and Mussolini’s Italy extended the might-makes-right principle to expansion abroad, though the British fascists of the 1930s, led by Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists, preferred isolationism and preached a sort of internal war against an imagined Jewish enemy of the state.

What fascists reject

First and foremost, fascists want to revolt against socialism. That’s because it threatens the crony capitalism that fascists embrace.

Not only does socialism aim for equal prosperity no matter the race, but many socialists tend to envision the eventual extinction of separate nations, which offends the strong fascist belief in nation states.

Along with getting rid of aristocrats or other elites, fascists are prepared to displace the church or seek a mutually beneficial truce with it.

Mussolini, Hitler and the Falangists in Spain learned that they had to live with, not replace, the church in their countries – as long as their regimes weren’t broadly attacked from the pulpit.

Fascists also reject democracy, at least any democracy that could potentially result in socialism or too much liberalism. In a democracy, voters can choose social welfare policies. They can level the playing field between classes and ethnicities, or seek gender equality.

Fascists oppose all of these efforts.

Fascism grows from nationalism

Fascism is the logical extreme of nationalism, the roughly 250-year-old idea that nation states should be built around races or historical peoples.

The first fascists didn’t invent these ideas out of nothing – they just pushed nationalism further than anyone had before. For the fascist, it’s not just that a nation state makes “the people” sovereign. It’s that the will of righteous, real people – and its leader – comes before all other considerations, including facts.

Indeed, the will, the people, their leader and the facts are all one in fascism.

John Broich 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.

A protest took place in downtown Tampa on Sunday afternoon in response to the “Combating Violence, Disorder and Looting, and Law Enforcement Protection Act,” which intends to expand laws against those who act violently toward police officers and was announced by Gov. Ron DeSantis in September 2020.

The “anti-mob legislation,” as DeSantis referred to it when it was introduced, has been in the Justice Appropriations Subcommittee of the House of Representatives since Jan. 27. The legislation would give more authority to police officers to shut down protests, increase penalties for crimes committed at protests and alter defunding laws for local law enforcement agencies, a key demand of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement.

The bill transparently targets BLM protesters who have been accused of violence and looting as well as grants police officers too much power which could lead to infringements on the right to peaceably assemble, outlined in the First Amendment of the Constitution.  

The most egregious feature of this legislation is a possible violation of a citizen’s right to protest. The First Amendment provides U.S. citizens this right to peaceably assemble, and police have the ability to break up a protest that becomes violent. But this bill would make law enforcement the ultimate authority on deciding to terminate a protest if they deem it has devolved into a riot or mob.

The bill uses ambiguous terminology and language which could lead to an officer violating a citizen’s First Amendment rights. It doesn’t describe what type of evidence an officer needs to prove a violent event happened nor does it say if the officer needs proof at all. The bill could allow law enforcement to easily stop protesters who may not be their biggest fans, like BLM protesters, without facts to support their actions. 

In other words, if a situation were to arise in which an officer shuts down an otherwise peaceful protest he or she disagrees with, the bill gives them that option and effectively violates the protesters’ rights to assemble.

Issues with the legislation go beyond vague language. It also makes punishments for crimes committed while protesting far harsher than they need to be. 

If the bill is passed, punishments would be intensified for protesters who commit “violent conduct resulting in injury or damage to another person or property, or creating a clear and present danger of injury or damage to another person or property,” as stated in the bill, creating a mandatory minimum jail sentence of six months. Charges would also be increased from misdemeanors to felonies for property damage and traffic obstruction within a protest. 

The most severe of the penalty increases is the prohibition of bail or bond until a convicted protester first appears in court. These punishments are unnecessarily exaggerated and reactionary to the current political climate and shouldn’t become law. 

Most of the arrests made during the summer protests were nonviolent misdemeanors anyway. An analysis by The Washington Post performed in October found that 77%, or 2,059, of 2,652 people arrested in the 15 cities it analyzed were charged with nonviolent offenses. 

The act also is in contrast to the pleas of the BLM movement to defund the police and form laws in protection of minorities which historically have been affected by police brutality, the fifth demand listed on the movement’s official website. 

The bill prohibits any local government or state grant from defunding law enforcement budgets, a prominent wish of BLM and providing further evidence to suggest the bill is aimed specifically at hurting supporters of the movement.

This movement is not one that should be dismissed, as many American people support its efforts. After the summer of protests, a Pew Research Center survey of 10,093 American adults in September found that 55%, or 5,551 people, said they supported BLM.

Instead of instating protections for minorities, Florida legislators will be prioritizing the safety of law enforcement rather than those who have been protesting for their safety to be valued by police and the government. 

DeSantis denied this bill was against the BLM movement when asked in the wake of the Capitol riots Jan. 6, promising his intentions were to speak out against violence toward law enforcement of any kind.

“I don’t care what banner you’re flying, if you’re engaging in that conduct, we’re going to hold you accountable,” said DeSantis in a Jan. 7 press conference. 

Despite his seemingly good intentions, DeSantis’ legislation was introduced Sept. 21, in response to the BLM protests and specifically denies BLM protesters the ability to defund the police and obstructs their ability to protest against law enforcement.

If this bill is passed by Florida’s House, it should be stopped by the Senate. Democratic Ranking Member of the Justice Appropriations Subcommittee Michael Gottlieb along with the four other Democrats on the 14-member subcommittee need to work across the aisle to stop the progression of this bill and address real injustices affecting Floridians.

Some legislators in Florida have been listening to BLM protesters, like House Minority Leader Bobby DuBose, who spoke out against DeSantis’ legislation and is working with fellow Democrats to introduce two police reform bills. One of the bills would outlaw no-knock warrants while the other would create a statewide database to track decertified police officers and alert other counties of the officers’ histories if they tried to get hired elsewhere, according to DuBose in a Feb. 9 press conference.

Increasing penalties for protesters and making it harder for convicted protesters to obtain bail is a blatant attack on the BLM protesters, and loopholes for law enforcement can infringe upon Floridians’ First Amendment right to assemble. DeSantis should be following in DuBose’s footsteps and listen to the pleas of Florida protesters instead of attempting to silence them. 

Back in December, I decided to see what kind of essay I could get for super cheap. I then went to Fiverr and paid an essay writer $10 to pen me a 500-word essay about the history of copyright.

The essay I received was both garbage and worrisome. While it wouldn’t withstand any serious scrutiny, it’s easy to see how instructors and graders might be fooled by it if they weren’t paying close attention.

However, that story got me wondering, What if I was feeling even more lazy and spendthrift?

So, I decided to seek out an AI writing tool that was A) Completely free to use and B) Would do the bulk of the writing for me.

After some light searching, I found a prominent essay-writing bot that claimed to be my “professional essay typer” and set it loose on the same subject that my human ghostwriter did a few months ago.

To that end, the results were interesting. Pasted below (without edits) is my 500-word essay about copyright history.

Copyright History (As Told by a Free Bot)

Today usually subsumed under the broader category of statutory rules known as intellectual-property law, document is designed mainly to protect the artist, a firm, or another person against particular unauthorized uses of his work (e.g. , Reproducing this work in any matter structure, writing it, performing it publicly, shooting it, transmitting it, or making an adaptation of it) . The document provides the holder with a special dominance over the created substance that ensures him of both power over its usage and the part of the pecuniary benefits derived from it.This history of document starts with first privileges and monopolies given to printers of volumes. The island Act of Anne 1710, full name “ An Act for this hope of education, by vesting these copy of Printed Books at the writer or buyers of much Copies, during the Times therein mentioned s”, was the first copyright statute. Initially copyright law just used to the repetition of books. Over time different functions , e.g., translations and derivative works were given subject to copyright and document today covers a broad variety of jobs, including maps, performances, pictures, photographs, sound recordings, motion pictures and computer programs.

Yet before the U.S. Law was adopted, copyright was an important legal issue in this new independent country. These Articles of Confederation promoted each government to address this topic, and at 1782, writer and owner Noah Webster lobbied the 13 legislatures to pass copyright laws. New York and New shirt refused him. But in Jan, 1783, America passed the copyright law, which was modelled upon the act of Anne.

Contemporary copyright law has been influenced by the array of older legal rights that have been recognised throughout history, including the ethical rights of the writer who made the job, The economic rights of the benefactor who paid to get the material created, the property rights of the particular owner of the material, and the ruler’s place to censor and to regulate the printing industry. The origins of some of these rights may be traced back to old Greek civilization, old Jewish philosophy, and old Roman philosophy. In Greek society, during the 6th century B.C.E., there emerged the idea of the separate person, including individual ideals, desire, and ability. The human ego is critical in copyright because it describes the ability created by the individual from the rest of society. In old Jewish Talmudic law there may be seen acceptance of the ethical rights of the writer and the system or property rights of the author.

Understanding the Mess

Obviously, this is not a good essay and it’s far worse than the $10 one I got from a human writer, which also wasn’t impressive. In fact, significant portions of it are completely unintelligible. Much of that is caused by the fact that, though they claim to use AI and be a “bot”, they really aren’t.

The bot doesn’t write anything from scratch. Instead, it looks at your paper subject and tries to find what it thinks are relevant paragraphs. Then it “rewrites” the text through spinning in an attempt to hide the duplicate text from the search engines.

To that end, it’s more of a crude article spinning service connected to a search engine. It simply spares the user of having to search for the content to lift. You can see this yourself by comparing the paragraph of the above image (before modification) to the first paragraph of the History of Copyright Wikipedia entry.

This is reflected in the site’s marketing, which makes the claim that they aren’t aiding in plagiarism, that they are simply helping automate what students do anyway.

However, to be 100% clear, this is not how students should be writing. This type of writing is not actual paraphrasing and is the exact opposite of cleanroom writing. Even if a student took all these steps by hand, it would still be plagiarism.

In my test, it was not easy to use. The human operator still must pick the paragraphs to be rephrased and included. However, with this topic, the “bot” simply ran out of relevant copyright paragraphs (this is why the “essay” is barely over 400 words). After the first few paragraphs, it mainly gave me generic content about history and not copyright history.

To make matters even worse, the text couldn’t pass a basic plagiarism scan. A quick spin through CopyScape easily found one of the sources. It seems likely other plagiarism detection systems would work just as well, if not better.

And for the final straw, my promised “free” essay turned out to be anything but. When I went to copy and paste it, they attempted to charge me for the text that was generated.

Though I ended up not paying, I was able to get the text out through other means, it still felt like a broken promise given that it was heavily advertised as a “Free essay writing tool.”

For me personally, as a writer, it would have been faster to just write the essay myself. However, this service is not targeted at those that are comfortable with their writing and do it regularly. It’s targeted at those that either don’t wish to complete an assignment or those that lack the confidence to tackle the task.

Though this essay is far worse than the $10 one I bought, it’s still possible that it could fool someone not closely reading. It has a lot of the correct keywords/buzzwords and the tool can add citations if desired.

One couldn’t write their dissertation this way, but for small assignments that aren’t heavily scrutinized, this may still be able to work, though it is a risky endeavor to say the least.

Why This is a Worry

It’s important to repeat that this is not actual AI writing. Though all the marketing says it is an “artificial intelligence” it creates nothing from scratch. It simply copies other paragraphs, swaps words around and pretends to have made something new.

However, this bot is at the very tail end of what AI can do. It’s a “free” tool offered on the open internet. GPT-3, as well as similar systems, are capable of doing much, much more. That is part of why the researchers behind GPT-3 have withheld the most complete versions of that AI.

That said, as the technology improves it will become more common and it will be easier and easier for students to generate essays. For now, those essays are likely to be like the one above, quite bad. However, the improvements will come sooner rather than later.

That is something educators need to be prepared for.

Bottom Line

Though the essay above may not seem to give much reason to worry. The fact remains that I was able to create an essay in a few minutes for free. Though it doesn’t hold up to any scrutiny, there are still situations where students might find such a work useful (if unethical).

Still, the good news is that the recent spike of interest in essay mills may be doing a decent job of preparing us for a future with better AI writing bots. That issue has forced plagiarism detection services to invest in ways to not just detect copied text, but to determine authorship.

However, this doesn’t necessarily lead to a bright future. Instead, it’s a cat and mouse game as detection bots and generator bots try to outperform one another.

It’s a big part of why it’s time to start thinking about academic integrity more holistically and finding ways to combat it before it can happen. This can include changing the types of assignments that are given, incorporating better honor codes and offering students resources to help in areas they are struggling.

The essay above may not be very impressive. but the fact it exists at all should be of some concern for the future. The tools are just going to get better and easier to use.

What is gobbeldygook today could turn out to be a serious threat in a few years’ time.

The US government, in setting standards for food quality based on appearance, also shaped our perception of what is acceptable to eat. This does not always line up with reality. In some cases, the standards were not so much about quality as they were about protecting an industry, as in the margarine wars. — Read the rest

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post here about the bizarre meme of a fake Avril Lavigne song that started to appear on lyric websites, and eventually spawned its own covers. Several readers commented that it reminded them of "Trap Streets" — a cartography practice where a mapmaker marks their intellectual property by including a fake street where none exists. — Read the rest

NPR reports on a new survey from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) that shows how far a significant percentage of Republicans are willing to go to force the majority of Americans to live in their autocratic fantasyland.

From NPR:

The level of distrust among Republicans evident in the survey was such that about eight in 10 said the current political system is "stacked against conservatives and people with traditional values."

With control of the White House and both houses of Congress, Democrats are looking to make major changes in government initiatives – including on climate change, immigration and education.

But many of those ideas may end up in court – where they will face a Supreme Court dominated by conservatives.

Donald Trump’s appointments of Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett make the Supreme Court more conservative than it has been at any time since the 1930s, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president. Many court watchers expect that the current court’s decisions will lean much further to the right than Congress, the president and public opinion do.

Fearing a clash between the branches, some have even suggested that President Joe Biden consider adding justices to the court – as Roosevelt considered but ultimately decided against – to prevent key legislation from being struck down.

As scholars of U.S. legal history know, the court is often less insulated from politics than many people assume. Roosevelt’s threat to pack the courts, and what happened next, illustrate the pressures the Supreme Court faces to limit how far it strays from the other branches and from public opinion.

The Lochner era

Most Americans today are not accustomed to a right-leaning Supreme Court. Instead, they have viewed the judicial branch as a reliable – or lamentable – champion of liberal values. That dates back to the 1950s and 1960s, when the court, led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, made a series of landmark liberal rulings generally expanding civil rights on issues from school desegregation to criminal defendants’ rights.

But the liberalism of the Warren court was itself a major shift.

From the late 19th century through to the 1930s, federal courts, including the Supreme Court, were generally considered to be the most conservative branch of the federal government, especially on economic issues. The courts championed limited government and broad freedom for corporations.

That period of pro-business jurisprudence came to be known among legal scholars as the “Lochner era,” named for the 1905 case of Lochner v. New York.

In that case, the Supreme Court struck down a New York law that, to protect employees, had regulated working conditions in bakeries. The majority of the justices held that the law violated bakeshop owners’ liberty to contract with their employees as they wished.

The court also continued to limit Congress’ power to regulate interstate commerce to a narrow range of economic activity that excluded most manufacturing and services.

The New Deal and the court

In 1933, Roosevelt came to power with a strong mandate to tackle the Great Depression. He quickly established several new government agencies, reformed financial regulations and sought to regulate business in unprecedented ways.

The National Industrial Recovery Act, for instance, called for industrywide codes of fair competition that set minimum wages, prices, maximum working hours, production quotas and regulations for the process of selling goods. Although Congress saw the need for such a transformative piece of legislation, it was challenged in the courts by a poultry company that had been charged with violating a new code governing the poultry industry. Schechter Poultry’s violations included selling chickens on an individual basis and selling them to nonlicensed purchasers. The right-wing majority on the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Schechter and struck down key parts of the NIRA, drawing in part on its restrictive understanding of the commerce clause.

In this and other cases during Roosevelt’s first term, the Supreme Court demonstrated a growing divergence from the other branches and public opinion. The public had expressed its hunger for strong and far-reaching economic legislation by electing New Deal Democrats to Congress and the presidency. But unelected lifetime appointees on the court held onto a more conservative understanding of the scope of governmental power.

A crucial shift

When Roosevelt was reelected in a landslide in 1936, he proposed a bill to reform the federal judiciary in an attempt to stop the Supreme Court’s obstruction of his policy initiatives.

This bill included what became known as his “court-packing plan,” which would have potentially allowed Roosevelt to appoint six more justices, tilting the majority in his favor.

The Constitution doesn’t prohibit expanding the court, but even Roosevelt’s supporters were wary, so the eventual bill was passed without that provision.

As the bill was being debated in Congress, court-packing became less urgent to Roosevelt and his supporters because a change occurred within the Supreme Court itself. Nobody died, but someone switched sides. Associate Justice Owen Roberts had previously voted with the right-wing opponents to the New Deal, but in 1937 he joined the more liberal justices to uphold a minimum-wage law in the state of Washington.

From that point on, the court expanded its interpretation of the commerce clause to give Congress much broader powers to regulate the economy.

Some commentators claim that Justice Owen Roberts shifted his opinion in direct response to Roosevelt’s threat to pack the Supreme Court, seeking to avoid executive and congressional interference in the judicial branch and therefore preserve its apparent independence.

But Owen Roberts actually had decided his position in that case before Roosevelt publicly proposed the judicial reform bill.

Perhaps Owen Roberts already suspected that a court-packing plan, or something like it, was on the horizon when he decided to shift his position. But he might have been sufficiently concerned about the court’s departure from public opinion and the other branches even without such a threat.

When the court diverges drastically from the political mainstream, the public views it as less legitimate. That is an outcome Supreme Court justices are usually eager to avoid.

Lessons for today

There are perhaps more differences than similarities between Roosevelt’s confrontation with the court and the relationship between the Biden administration and the court today. For one thing, this court has not had a decadeslong rightward slant. Biden’s record is also as a centrist, and with a narrow majority in the Senate and a divided American public, he may not seek as transformative an agenda as Roosevelt did.

But the lesson from the 1930s remains: It is difficult for the Supreme Court to sustain a drastic divergence from other branches or public opinion without its legitimacy coming into question. To maintain the reputation of the institution, Supreme Court justices often limit their own divergence from the political mainstream, whether or not the other branches explicitly threaten to interfere.

Lucy Cane 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.

Hackers managed to break into a Tampa Bay water plant and momentarily poison the water, remotely, on Friday. Fortunately, a plant operator noticed his mouse moving across his computer screen. Although he thought it was nothing at first, minutes later he noticed the levels of sodium hydroxide – or lye, used in liquid drain cleaners – shoot up from 100 parts per million to more than 11,100 parts per million, "a hazardous level that could sicken residents and corrode pipes," according to The Washington Post. — Read the rest

A recent white paper from the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization shines a necessary but depressing light on working conditions within the arts industry throughout the world. There's the positives…

It shows that the industry sectors making up the creative economy generate annual revenues of US$2.250 billion, global exports of over US$250 billion, often generate up to 10% of national GDP, provide nearly 30 million jobs worldwide and employ more people aged 15-29 than any other sector.

On January 25, psychiatrist and gun violence expert Dr. Amy Barnhorst posted a Twitter thread that lobbed a very severe and shocking allegation. According to her, she had been plagiarized by an editor of a publication that, previously, she had been working with.

According to Barnhorst, the story began after the editor in question, Dr. Gary VandenBos, solicited a piece from her and her co-author. The two co-authors worked on it and produced a draft but, after a found rounds of revisions, they decided to pull the paper.

Barnhorst says that the editor had limited knowledge of the topic, firearm suicide, and that he was trying to alter the paper in ways they weren’t comfortable with.

Sometime after that, the editor in question sent them a copy of the paper that he along with a new co-author, Michael O. Miller, had published. However, after a review of the new paper, Barnhorst concluded that it was about 40% verbatim and 30% near-verbatim plagiarism.

The new paper included their case vignette, bibliography, clinical interventions and much more.

To make matters worse, when Barnhorst brought this to the attention of the journal’s editor in chief, the editor waited a week to respond and, instead of retracting the paper, offered the original authors co-authorship.

They further tried to dissuade her from taking the matter to Springer, the journal’s publisher, saying that it would “complicate things” for them. They did so anyway and, according to Barnhorst, a retraction is in process and she is working with an attorney to prevent them from doing this to anyone else.

But, while this seems to be a happy ending to this story, Barnhorst isn’t alone. As this case has highlighted, the unusual part of her story isn’t that it happened, but that something was done about it.

A Bigger Problem Than Many Thought

To outsiders, the story seems outrageous. However, to the researchers Barnhorst told the story too, it was eerily familiar.

In a reply to the original thread, Twitter user @ScienceIntegrity highlighted similar cases reported to them in IEEE and Elsevier. However, in those cases, no action has been taken over the course of several months.

Barnhorst, for her part, has also seen an outpouring of support with many telling her that similar things have happened to them.

“I got so many messages and emails and comments from people saying, ‘This [also] happened to me,’ ” Barnhorst said in an interview with MedScape.

Sadly, there seems to be no firm numbers on how common this is. Not only are these types of cases chronically underreported, but there’s no centralized location for tracking such incidents.

However, the anecdotal evidence is clear, what should be an almost unheard of problem happens more often than most would like to admit and the response to it often far too weak.

Sadly, without better data and better handling of such cases, this seems like a problem that’s only going to get worse.

Bottom Line

Editors are in a position of trust. That’s regardless of the field. Whether you’re a researcher, author, musician or any other type of creator, gatekeepers and editors are in a trusted position with your work.

When they abuse that trust to further their own careers through plagiarism, the consequences should be swift and severe. The problem is that people in positions of authority rarely face even the same consequences as those that are underneath them.

As many have pointed out, a high schooler that committed this kind of plagiarism would face significant disciplinary consequences. However, editors seem to be committing this kind of plagiarism without any notable repercussions.

This isn’t a case of a student being ignorant about citation standards or a new student being unclear about paraphrasing, this is a clear abuse of power from someone who, as part of their job, is supposed to detect and prevent plagiarism.

As we discussed in the previous article, there’s no point in one’s career that plagiarism is acceptable. However, I would argue that, once you reach a position of trust and authority, plagiarism, especially of those in your care, becomes a much more serious offense.

Here’s hoping that those at Springer see it the same way.

Denver replaced front-line cops with healthcare professionals. In six months, how many times did the healthcare professionals need to make an arrest or call for backup? Zero times.

A young program that puts troubled nonviolent people in the hands of health care workers instead of police officers has proven successful in its first six months, according to a progress report.

Published nearly 170 years ago, Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe had a profound impact on American slavery. But Uncle Tom is not a relic from the 19th century: this complex figure still has a hold over Black politics. In fact, the Uncle Tom stereotype is quite possibly the most resilient figure in American history. He has survived pandemics, lived through 33 presidents (including President Joe Biden), and remains the most recognizable Black character in history.

While most people know that Uncle Tom is the titular character of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, few people know how and why this literary character has transformed since his initial appearance. Why is Uncle Tom still alive in the 21st century?

Stowe’s Uncle Tom

The bestselling novel of the 19th century, and the second bestselling book of that century (after the Bible), Uncle Tom’s Cabin first appeared in the United States in 1851 as a serialized work of fiction published one chapter at a time, in the National Era, a weekly abolitionist newspaper edited by Gamaliel Bailey.

Today, we do not necessarily think of novels as shaping national identity. However, in 19th-century America, Stowe’s vision of Uncle Tom constructed a form of Black manhood that deeply impacted the nation. Despite being ripped from his wife and children, chained and sent off in a coffle with other enslaved men and women, let down by even a “good master,” and beaten, finally to death, Uncle Tom does not ever speak ill of anyone. He is loyal, passive in the midst of white violence and dies as a martyr.

Since then, various Black men have been called “Uncle Toms.” From Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to former president Barack Obama, at some point, they were accused of being too passive or a sell-out to the race.

Legalized rights did not translate to reality

In the 1896 landmark case, Plessy vs. Ferguson, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that African Americans had access to the legal system, equal to that of whites, but they had to maintain separate institutions to facilitate these rights. The ruling institutionalized a racial hierarchy that placed whites at the top and Black people at the bottom in nearly every facet of public life.

To live in North America meant that one had to choose not only between racial loyalty and disloyalty, but also between life and death. Survival meant performing servile roles as Uncles and Mammies, in public or on the job.

In this environment, Black people were forced to acquiesce to the white public’s desire to perpetuate the servile relations of slavery. Black men and women who violated these Jim Crow norms risked their homes, jobs and lives.

For survival in a racially segregated environment, the Pullman sleeping car porters, for instance, Black men who were employed on the railways of North America, had to perform the role of, and were measured against the image of, a servile Uncle Tom.

In Canada, the only reference for Uncle Tom is at Uncle Tom’s Cabin Historic Site. The former home of Rev. Josiah Henson, who lived from 1789–1883, has been turned into a museum to showcase Henson’s life, as founder of the Dawn Settlement in Dresden, Ont., for fugitive African Americans. Stowe’s novel was loosely based on Henson’s biography, The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada published in 1849. The museum documents Henson’s life but also reaffirms his connection to Stowe’s Uncle Tom.

The insatiable appetite of the white North American public for a docile, symbolically emasculated Black male archetype and the Uncle Tom controversies that follows them, speaks profoundly to how monumentally resistant to change this character has been.

From servant to sellout

In the decades following the novel, Uncle Tom transformed into a stereotype of Black masculinity characterized by docility, castrated sexuality, a happy-to-please-whites attitude with a safe, child-like essence, at the same time. Shirley Temple’s blond ringlets paired with Bill “Bojangles” Robinson’s soft-shoe routine in their “buddy” films of the 1930s is one example of the cinematic repackaging of Stowe’s Uncle Tom and his child-patron, Little Eva.

The servile Uncle Tom has been reproduced in Joel Chandler Harris’ Uncle Remus tales published in the 1880s, later adapted by Disney for Song of the South. Uncle Tom also became a feature at blackface minstrel shows known as “Tom shows.” Later, he mutated into commodity spokespersons such as Rastus the Cream of Wheat trademark and Uncle Ben.

The concept of the sellout Uncle Tom, however, is characterized by the idea of a Black man who appears only interested in serving whites, the government, corporations or “the system” generally. The insult is meant to connote that these men, these “Uncle Toms” will ensure that white needs come before the needs of both the Black community and themselves.

Men (or the fictionalized characters of men) who have faced accusations of being a sellout Uncle Tom include the film roles of actors like Sidney Poitier and, later, Bill Cosby during the height of his fame in the ‘70s and '80s, as well as Christopher Darden during the O.J. Simpson trial (not to mention O.J. himself), and even athletes like Tiger Woods.

Black people hate him, but it also seems we cannot live without him. The trope is especially brought up when it comes to political figures. Some political careers have been marred by Uncle Tom accusations. This includes people like Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and more recently Kentucky’s Attorney General Daniel Cameron.

Foils for Black social progress

The challenges that are brought to contemporary Black men in positions of authority, power and prestige who are either in service to white institutions or become the public spokespersons for white companies are very real.

The reason these Black men are accused of Uncle Tomism is that communities suspect them of thwarting Black social progress. It is a reliable trope called upon during moments when a Black individual is perceived by the Black community as maligning the race in order to win favour with white authority and institutions.

Beyond politics, we are surrounded with imagery of Black men who serve one purpose: to make the public (imagined as white) feel safe. They are useful only if they are clearly committed to the American way of life, which is to say consumer culture. From Uncle Remus there to sell white childhood innocence, Uncle Ben to sell rice, and even Michael Jordan’s squeaky-clean image, this image of Black masculinity has had a firm grip on what it means to be a Black man in North American society.

Why can Uncle Tom not just fade from memory, as have so many other characters from other mid-19th-century novels?

Stowe may have created this character to support the abolition of slavery. However, through constant reinvention and reproduction, Uncle Tom will continue to exist if the Black community remains divided on how to live within a capitalist system built on slave labour.

Yet this figure also reminds us to look deeper and to ask difficult questions about how we choose to relate to white society and its institutions. Uncle Tom will persist as long as anti-Blackness persists.

This article is adapted from Cheryl Thompson’s forthcoming book, 'Uncle: Race, Nostalgia and the Politics of Loyalty’ (Coach House Books).

Listen to Cheryl Thompson on Episode 1 of Don’t Call Me Resilient, a new podcast from The Conversation.

Cheryl Thompson receives funding from the Social Sciences Humanities Research Council.

Most academics regularly submit papers and compete for grants and promotions. These endeavours are necessary for their success but often end in rejection.

Responses to rejection in academia have typically been individually focused. Most discussions of the topic describe what academics themselves can do to cope with rejection.

For example, in a watershed tweet in 2017, Nick Hopwood posted a picture of his office wall papered with rejection letters. Academics were encouraged to celebrate rather than commiserate rejection, spawning the #NormaliseRejection hashtag.

Read more: Please reject me: a survivor's guide to 'publish or perish'

But, as we explored in our recent paper, persistent rejection is problematic, and focusing on the individual academic is not the whole solution.

Just how toxic is the rejection culture?

Academics’ careers are strongly linked to their success in publishing and funding applications. Unfortunately, rejection rates are high, ranging from 50% in general journals to 92% in prestigious outlets like Nature. The Conversation, too, rejects most submissions.

Read more: A guide to how we decide what to publish in Politics and Society

Such high levels of rejection have three adverse consequences.

First, it squanders a valuable opportunity for professional learning and development. Learning sciences show clearly described success criteria and constructive, task-specific feedback promote effective learning and development. Yet these are lacking in many decisions on publication or grant submissions.

In our teaching of students, we adopt this nuanced, incremental and developmental approach because it improves learning. In contrast, academic publication or funding decisions can be binary: submissions are rejected or accepted, with little or nothing in between. What’s missed in the process is a powerful learning and developmental opportunity for the academics whose work has presumably been assessed and evaluated.

Second, it wastes an inordinate amount of academics’ time, contributing to their well-documented excessive workload. One study showed that for one round of a funding scheme in Australia researchers altogether spent more than 500 years of their time preparing proposals. Most of their proposals did not get funded.

Third, rejection culture on top of excessive workloads contributes to stress and anxiety among academics. Mental health issues have significant impacts on their work satisfaction, productivity and general well-being.

Mental health problems among academics are already at an all-time high. These problems occur at twice the rate of the general population, an incidence higher even than among police or medical staff.

Read more: More academics and students have mental health problems than ever before

This is what institutions can do

Most papers on academic rejection focus on how the individual can improve their response – the so-called “suck it up” response. We argue, in contrast, that systemic or institutional responses can reduce the toxicity of the culture. Our recommendations for change fall into three main categories.

First, make success criteria clear prior to applications and provide timely and targeted feedback afterwards. The opportunity costs of applying for grants, funding and publications – time and effort that could have been invested in something else – would then be minimised.

This approach could involve pre-submission quality assessments. This can involve communities of academics assessing the quality of manuscripts before they are submitted for publication; journal editors would then only expend resources on the ones most likely to succeed. This would ensure academics pursue only submissions that are most likely to succeed.

When funders and editors approach researchers directly and “commission” proposals, that greatly reduces the opportunity costs. The MacArthur Foundation, for example, now commonly does this.

Second, the process of publication can be improved in several ways. For a start, editors can reduce the number of submissions forwarded for peer review.

Researchers have studied the benefits of providing authors with prompt decisions and specific feedback aimed at improving chances of future publication. When the submissions review history is included too, it ensures the incremental improvements from feedback are not wasted. Future reviewers also appreciate this as it avoids the problem of different reviewers rejecting for conflicting reasons.

Read more: Peer review has some problems – but the science community is working on it

Third, prioritising the mental health of academics at an institutional level will lessen the impacts of the rejection culture. Institutions can and should provide awards that recognise performance in writing and research – independent of publication metrics – ideally without any time-consuming application process.

Read more: Unis want research shared widely. So why don't they properly back academics to do it?

Institutions can also take steps to maximise mentorship and collaboration among academics. The recruitment of peer mentors enhances professional learning, research productivity and community and social connection.

Some journals have already successfully adopted initiatives that involve the recruitment of peer mentors to journal editorial teams who, like peer reviewers, volunteer their time to work collaboratively with authors to improve their manuscripts for publication.

To maximise the benefits to society from the academy’s pursuit and dissemination of new knowledge, academics need to function at their best. The current culture of rejection doesn’t help them do this.

There is little point in relying on academics to just suck it up or celebrate their failure – institutions need to play their part. A cultural problem requires a cultural solution.

Read more: 2020 locked in shift to open access publishing, but Australia is lagging

Clarification: An embedded tweet seeking to comfort academics whose work has been rejected by publishers depicts a supposed Einstein rejection letter, which is a fake. As embedded tweets lack explanatory captions, it has been removed from the article.

Kelly-Ann Allen is an honorary Fellow of the Centre for Positive Psychology, Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne, and a Fellow of the Australian Psychological Society and College of Educational and Developmental Psychologists. Kelly-Ann is an international affiliate of the American Psychological Association (APA) and a member of APA D15 (Educational Psychology) and APA D16 (School Psychology). Kelly-Ann is the Editor-in-Chief of the Educational and Developmental Psychologist and Journal of Belonging and Human Connection.

Dr. Gregory Donoghue is a consulting reviewer of The Educational and Developmental Psychologist journal. For his work in projects not related to this article, he has received Special Research Initiative funding from The Australian Research Council through the Science of Learning Research Centre, University of Melbourne (SRI 120300015). No conflicts of interest exist in relation to the publication of this article.

Saeed Pahlevansharif is an Associate Professor at Taylor’s University, Malaysia, and an Adjunct Professor at Saito University College, Malaysia. Saeed is the Director of Centre for Industrial Revolution and Innovation (CIRI). He is the editor-in-chief of Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Administration and the editor of Taylor’s Business Review. Saeed has received several research grants for projects not related to this article. There is no conflict of interests regarding the publication of this article.

John Hattie and Shane Jimerson 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.

Dark Patterns at Scale is a thorough collection of the high-pressure and deceptive tricks used on websites to get you to do things you didn't intend. Some are merely the online equivalents of the late J.C. Penney's neverending sales (96% off socks!), — Read the rest

Oregon made history today. It has decriminalized all drugs, including cocaine, heroin, and meth, via Measure 110. Users in possession of drugs can now opt for rehab rather than go to prison. Oregon is, of course, the first state in the US to pass this type of legislation. — Read the rest

A few days ago, a friend asked if I'd ever heard of the "Digital Creators Coalition," an apparently new group that claimed to be representing independent artists. I was unfamiliar with it, and its website provided basically no information about who was actually behind it, beyond this vague statement on its "who we are" page:

The Digital Creators Coalition (DCC) is a group of associations, companies and organizations that represent individual creators, independent producers, small-and-medium-size enterprises (SMEs), large businesses, and labor organizations from the American creative communities. We contribute significantly to U.S. GDP, exports and employment – collectively employing or representing millions of American creators, and contributing billions of dollars to the U.S. economy.

Right... but... uh... who? There's no named staff. There's nothing that shows who these associations, companies, and organizations actually are. Though, if you click through on the website to their "comments" page, it takes you to two separate letters that were sent nearly a year ago to negotiators trying to sort out a US-UK trade agreement, asking for the most extreme versions of copyright possible, including copyright term extension, secondary liability on websites that host content, no language on "balance" or "fair use" (yes, they explicitly say neither term should be mentioned). It's insanity.

Of course, that letter also reveals who they are, and it's a who's who of industry associations that lobby for the interests of the largest gatekeepers, and not, as the organization's website suggests, small and independent creators:

I mean, you've got basically all the copyright maximalist extremist groups there: the RIAA, the MPA, the Author's Guild, Creative Future, the Recording Academy, ASCAP, SoundExchange, NMPA, the IIPA. Not surprisingly, but incredibly disappointing is that the News Media Alliance is there. The News Media Alliance used to be the Newspaper Association of America, and, as such, you'd think would be supportive of free speech and the 1st Amendment. Considering how much newspapers rely on fair use, you'd think it would be odd that they're now against fair use. But, over the past few years, the leaders of the News Media Alliance have become so obsessed and infatuated with "GOOGLE BAD!" that apparently they have no problem throwing their lot in with copyright maximalists against their own members' interests. The organization literally came out against fair use a few years ago, and has since become just as bad (in some ways worse!) than some of the other organizations here.

But, just as if to prove that this group has nothing to do with small and independent creators, and is just a front for the big gatekeepers who screw over small and independent creators, the RIAA itself put out a press release announcing this group's official launch. Oh, and in case there was any doubt who is really behind this group, a simple whois lookup on who registered the website reveals all:

Yup. This organization set up to supposedly support small and independent artists... was literally set up by the RIAA itself.

This would be the same RIAA whose chairman and CEO's key claim to fame is that while he was a Congressional staffer, he snuck four words into an unrelated bill that literally would take the copyrights from artists and give them to record labels. No one realized he had done this until after it was passed and became law, at which point, the RIAA immediately hired him, and where he's moved up the ranks until he was in charge. This move set off a huge fight with tons of artists screaming about how the RIAA had actually "stolen" their copyrights out from under them, and Congress had to go in and fix this.

That's who's protecting the interests of small and independent creators? Don't make me laugh.

This is also the same RIAA made up of the major labels who have a long and detailed history of screwing over some of its biggest artists through creative accounting (the only thing the RIAA really does that is creative) to make sure it never needs to pay artists and to keep them tied to the system. These are not the friends of independent artists.

Notice who is not a part of this coalition? Any of the companies who have made it possible for actual small and independent artists to make, distribute, promote, build an audience, and make a living these days. No Apple. No YouTube. No TikTok. No Kickstarter. No Patreon. No Spotify. No Bandcamp. No Substack. Odd, isn't it? Then again, maybe not.

But seeing as this group is now officially "launched" you can expect to see a bunch of bullshit quotes from them that gullible reporters will repeat without question, saying that it's a group to support artists. Don't believe them. This is an organization to support the copyright maximalism of groups that have spent decades screwing over independent artists.

Headexplodie, otherwise known as Oakland-based artist Annie Wong, has been cooking up weirdness in her stop motion studio for over a decade. Her creations are undeniably adorable, even when they're oozing, barfing, or shaped like poop. Though I love it all, I'm especially fond of her Ovary Actions GIF series, Wong's project designed to combat period stigma with help from an angry uterus, a friendly maxi pad blob, and a diva cup surfing a crimson wave. — Read the rest

Everyone's favorite "death positive" Goth mortician, Caitlin Doughty, vents her spleen over the overwhelming number of COVID deaths her small LA funeral home and many others have been dealing with this winter. Doughty is not feeling so positive about the lack of organization and facilities for dealing with all of the victims of this lingering tragedy. — Read the rest

“Happy New Year!” I’ve always loved declaring this to others each January. The sentiment doesn’t ring with the same enthusiasm as it usually does. The events of 2020 and ongoing shifted many of our perspectives, for better but mostly for worse. To say people are very cautiously optimistic about heading into 2021 is an understatement.

I recall the phrase, “Feel the fear and do it anyway.” It is said that courage isn’t a lack of fear but moving forward despite of it. I agree with these sentiments while understanding all too well how hard they can be to live by. The fact of the matter is many of us, scarred from the events of the prior year, are battle-weary and afraid of what’s to come. But there’s no stopping time from moving forward in this human experience. How do we move into 2021 with hopes and expectations of success and joy, not just fear and dread?

Fear can be a useful tool and is necessary for survival. However, constantly being in fear clouds our judgement and can cause us to make terrible decisions. Times of fear will put us in survival mode and threaten to cut us off from the source of all life, Spirit. Time and experience will tell, but I believe the solution will be to move forward with fear and with hope. And to move forward knowing that our spirits are ultimately unbreakable. We are powerful beyond measure. Yeah, I said it!

The Strength card in the tarot comes to mind. This tarot card usually portrays a woman either gently closing or possibly opening a fierce lion’s mouth. This wild and dangerous creature stands or sits alongside her, utterly tamed but yet no less fearsome for having been tamed. We all know what a lion in the wild is capable of. But Strength isn’t about conquering fear so much as it is about taming it. Managing it. Fear may not leave us but we can tame it and walk with it.

How do we manage our fear like the maiden tames the lion? The first step is understanding that fear likely won’t be conquered. You’ll feel fear when thinking about and planning for the year ahead. You’ll feel fear when pondering the political landscape. You’ll feel fear when trying to protect yourself and your loved ones. Heck, you might even feel fear going to grocery store at this point. Wanting fear to just “go away” is something I’ve wanted so many times in my life. And it has hardly ever left my side! Think of fear as an annoying ever-present companion. Don’t look to get rid of it, expect to let it ride along with you while hopefully not taking up all of your attention.

Therefore, another helpful step is to monitor how much time you spend in worry/fear. Many of us spend hours of every day, if not entire days, weeks, and months in fear. This is not a useful, helpful, or constructive use of your energy. Yes, you will feel fear, but start to pay attention to how often it crops up. Once you notice feelings of fear, set them aside and say to yourself, “Yes, fear, I hear you. But I’m not going to entertain you right now. Maybe I’ll feel afraid or worried later. But not right now.” This may sound impossible to do, but I promise, it works!

Finally, know that you are so much greater and more powerful than anything you could ever be afraid of, including death. None of us wants our human journeys to include painful experiences and especially not death! But all our lives include these things regardless, don’t they? The maiden in the Strength card has a lemniscate above her head. The lemniscate or infinity symbol signifies our never ending battle to tame the beast within and without. It also symbolizes, more poignantly I believe, the infinite soul. The strength and power of our spirit will never stop being tested, for as long as we live. But our spirit will also defeat any foe and transcend any obstacle. Your strength is eternal. Our strength is eternal. The power and resilience of our human collective of souls dwarfs the greatest fears known to man. Whatever fears ride along with you this year and in this life, never forget you are greater.

It was only mid-day yesterday that it was confirmed that Congress has slipped in two controversial copyright provisions into the must-pass government funding bill. Last night, as everyone expected, that must-pass bill did indeed pass, and it will soon be law.

There are many, many reasons to be frustrated about this. First, just the way this was done is incredibly stupid. The government waited until the very last minute (with a couple of "extensions") to work out this agreement on a combination of the COVID relief bill (which is way too small and way too late for many, many people) and a bill to actually fund the government and avoid a shutdown. It's already ridiculous that we have to do this government funding bill each year, especially considering that Congress already approves a budget earlier in the year, and the appropriations bill is really just a fight over how to apportion what Congress has already agreed to spend. And then, because the appropriations bill is considered a "must pass" to keep large parts of the government funded, Congress lights it up like a Christmas tree with totally unrelated bills they couldn't get passed through normal process.

Incredibly, some politicians, like Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, seem proud of this practice:

I get why he's proud of getting some things into the bill, and many of the things he may be proud of are good. But many of them do not belong in this bill and should not be in a 5,000 page bill that was revealed mid-day and voted on hours later.

Incredibly, while the bill does have 2,000 pages of actual appropriations details, the other 3,000 pages are totally unrelated bills that Congress couldn't pass through the rest of the year. Even if you like the bills, even if you are mad that Congress is gridlocked at other times, that's no excuse to support this awful undemocratic process. Everything about it is bad.

Now, lots of people are still combing through the bill to find all the awful landmines that it's too late to do anything about, but the two that we've been talking about here are the copyright provisions. I've already explained multiple times why the felony streaming bill and the CASE Act are extremely problematic, so I won't go over either again. I will note that neither final provision is as bad as they were in earlier versions. Both were somewhat limited from truly terrible provisions to what is today merely awful. But that's nothing to celebrate.

As I said yesterday with regards to both bills, copyright law is controversial for a wide variety of reasons, but the biggest one is this: small tweaks to copyright law can have a massive impact on expression. Few people are even willing to grapple with the fact that significant parts of copyright law raise 1st Amendment issues. And when you rush through both of these bills (the felony streaming bill received literally no discussion or debate), you impact speech in a massive way. The felony streaming bill, even with its restrictions to platforms, may scare off many platforms from being willing to host streaming content, despite it being a key way in which many people -- especially younger generations -- express themselves these days.

The CASE Act, similarly, threatens to unleash a new generation of copyright trolling, at a time when we already have too much copyright trolling, threatening and shaking down people for money over incidental and accidental infringement. On top of that, especially in the midst of a pandemic when so many people are stuck at home and communicating, living, and working virtually, doing perfectly normal things can and will be seen as infringing. Nearly 15 years ago, law professor John Tehranian wrote about how on a random day that he tracked, he realized he (a copyright law professor!) probably committed 83 acts of infringement.

As we wrote a few years back, the only reason that copyright doesn't destroy speech is that he world has recognized a concept of copyright toleration -- which is that, more or less, copyright holders have mostly looked the other way at incidental and accidental infringements that happen all the time. The entire point of the CASE Act is to slam the door shut on the entire idea of copyright toleration, and open the floodgates for copyright holders to shake down basically anyone for such incidental uses -- telling them they could owe up to $30,000 as assigned by a non-judicial tribunal housed in the Copyright Office itself.

Supporters of the CASE Act say it's no big deal because you can opt-out of the process if you don't like it. But the opt-out process is unclear and potentially confusing. And, of course, in doing so, you are poking the copyright holder, and potentially egging them on to file an even more disastrous federal copyright lawsuit against you. But, honestly, just the mere threat of facing $30,000 fines from this new tribunal will cause many to shut up. It will cause many to pull down speech or never make it at all, because who wants to deal with that threat?

And, as law professor Eric Goldman notes, we did all this to get a stimulus package that will give a mere $600 to individuals... but that $600 likely won't cover your CASE Act bill, and you'll need many more stimulus checks to deal with the fact that you promoted a song you liked. It's a complete travesty.

In early March 2020, New York Magazine published an excellent article the went behind the scenes of a Shell corporate conference. It's a long read, but has continued to haunt me ever since, as journalist Malcolm Harris (author of Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials) chats it up with oil executives who — shockingly — aren't as in denial about climate change as one might expect. — Read the rest

James Sligh is a brilliant sommelier and writer, who also hosts the delightfully post-colonial Children's Atlas of Wine online club and tasting series. Sligh's knack for knowledge and words means that he's not just interested in the way that wines tastes — he's also deeply engaged with the cultural, historical, and geopolitical context of the wine. — Read the rest

The new National Native American Veterans Memorial is now open on the National Mall in DC.

Throughout US history, American Indians and Alaska Natives have enlisted in the Armed Forces at a rate five times the national average, despite the fact that they weren't even recognized as US citizens until 1924. — Read the rest

“No comments from the peanut gallery!” For many Americans who were born in the 1940s or 1950s, this phrase conjures up fond memories of the “Howdy Doody” show. It launched in 1947 as one of the first children’s television programs.

On that show, Buffalo Bob Smith – the host – his marionette sidekick, Howdy Doody, and Clarabell the clown entertained children who sat in bleachers onstage. Each episode opened with the kids singing the “It’s Howdy Doody Time” theme song and were then filmed reacting to the performers’ antics. Buffalo Bob referred to them as the “peanut gallery,” but the term didn’t originate with his show.

In fact, “peanut gallery” predates Howdy Doody by at least 80 years. Its first reference dates to an 1867 review of a vaudeville show published in the New Orleans Times-Picayune – and the term has a surprisingly controversial history.

Vaudeville came to North America from France. You could find almost any kind of act at a vaudeville show. On a given evening, spectators might be entertained by a comedian, acrobat, juggler, ventriloquist, magician or trained animal acts. Music and song-and-dance acts were mainstays. The lineup sometimes included burlesque acts, one-act plays or movies.

These traveling shows toured cities and towns from the early 1880s through the early 1930s. They were especially popular among the working class and recent immigrants who sometimes made up a majority of the audience.

Just like Broadway shows or concerts today, ticket prices varied, according to the location of the seats, with the most expensive up front. Those who sat in the most inexpensive seats in the back had a habit of throwing concession snacks at any performers who displeased them.

Since peanuts were the cheapest snack, they were the projectiles of choice for hecklers. Untalented – or unlucky – entertainers were pelted from the back of the theater – a section that became known as the “peanut gallery.”

Vaudeville fell into decline with the rise of motion pictures and lower-priced entertainment. But the phrase “peanut gallery” was given a new lease on life – and was cemented into the lexicon – with its use on “Howdy Doody.”

The term lives on, with a few meanings. One refers to any noisy or disorderly group of spectators. Another is a racial slur. During vaudeville’s heyday, the cheapest seats were usually high up in a balcony, a section often reserved for Black patrons. As a result, “peanut gallery” is now among a long list of terms becoming socially unacceptable because of apparently racist origins.

But since those seats were also occupied by poorer people and immigrants, there is some debate over whether the expression was racially motivated or was a more general derogatory term for less affluent people.

“Peanut gallery” is just one of many phrases whose problematic origins have become obscured, in this case by smiling, excited children laughing at a cowboy puppet. It’s more common for terms to acquire an unsavory connotation over time.

[You’re smart and curious about the world. So are The Conversation’s authors and editors. You can read us daily by subscribing to our newsletter.]

Many terms fall out of fashion as cultural sensitivities shift. For example, just a century ago, “imbecile” and “moron” were considered scientific terms describing mental development – and are now considered offensive.

The passage of time can obscure a term’s problematic origins or illuminate facts about a widely used and seemingly innocent term. As with “the peanut gallery,” an awareness of a term’s history can be essential to avoid giving offense.

Roger J. Kreuz 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.

The Star Feminine Band is a whole lot of girl power. The seven member all-female group hails from a remote West African town called Natitingou, a place where "forced marriages and early pregnancies" are all too common. Their self-titled debut album, dropping in November, really has something to say to the girls in their community. — Read the rest

What started as a small project between two engineering friends to gain experience within their field became a source for the USF community to stay informed about the latest COVID-19 cases across the campuses.

Computer science major students Adheesh Shenoy and Rafael Flores Souza created on an interactive COVID-19 dashboard July 10 as a way to facilitate the visualization of the latest positive COVID-19 cases across all three campuses — Tampa, St. Pete and Sarasota-Manatee. In less than two weeks of gathering and coding the data, the website was up and running.

“It was a personal project, but it was mainly to inform people at USF,” Flores Souza said. “We would go to the USF’s website and then be really confused about it or see a lot of letters that don’t really mean anything. So the main objective was to inform as many people as possible to share it as much as we could just to help people basically.”

USF has been tracking the daily number of cases reported across all campuses since March, but its platform leaves much to be desired. Filled with bullet points and no graphs, the website only displays the daily number of cases identified.

As a way to help the community better visualize the data, Shenoy and Flores Souza gathered data from the USF COVID-19 website and created interactive graphs and tables, ranging from bar graphs to box plots, showcasing the total number of cases, the percentage increase in cases and a comparison between the student and employee populations across campuses.

The website not only organizes the data in one place, but it also allows users to see the correlation, patterns and trends of positive cases reported by USF.

“It’s basically just so that people can see the correlation,” Shenoy said. “If you see on the graph, Sept. 7 is exactly the date from which it goes exponential. And what’s 14 days minus Sept. 7? It’s Aug. 24, and that was the first day of class.

“The [USF’s website] couldn’t really tell you all these things because it’s just saying there were eight cases today, six cases today, so you can’t see these things and so that’s the main reason we thought [the dashboard] was needed.”

All the data provided in the dashboard is updated every time a user accesses the website, according to Shenoy. Since USF does not provide an exact time when the cases are updated, Shenoy said they configured the dashboard so it reads USF’s COVID-19 website every time their dashboard is accessed.

“That’s all happening instantaneously,” Shenoy said. “Basically, every time any user logs on to the website, the website reads through the USF cases to see whether any updates have been made and if they have been made, it does the changes and then it updates the graphs.”

At first, Shenoy and Flores Souza created a dashboard to track COVID-19 cases around the world. However, after noticing the difficulty to interpret the COVID-19 cases from USF’s website, they decided to be the first to address the concerns many had.

“We started working on a world COVID-19 dashboard showing for every country, very similar,” Flores Souza said. “But we realized that there were so many projects about that, that we just used it to gain more experience and how to deal with websites. And then we were like, ‘could we work on a project that is going to be useful to someone?’ Working on a project that is better, feels better.

“So then, Adheesh and I had that idea of providing the same dashboard that we created, but for USF because we realized nobody actually did it. We just worked on it and in the end, it seems to be working and it’s really useful to people.”

For Shenoy, the most challenging part was to optimize the website’s speed so it provides information to its users simultaneously.

“We both have never really created something that people have actually used, so the most challenging part was to make it as fast as possible,” Shenoy said.

New features will be added to the dashboard throughout the semester to optimize the user experience, according to Flores Souza.

“There’re always going to be changes and, when we’re free, we’re going to be adding them but for now, the website is pretty functional. It shows enough information for people to know what’s happening,” Flores Souza said.

Based on the number of cases and the data reported, the dashboard also calculates future predictions on how the cases might be impacted across campuses. Shenoy said the predictions are updated on a monthly basis to reflect the number of cases reported.

For Flores Souza, the intent was to make the website as accessible for users as possible so they could better visualize and interpret the data.

“We also had the intent to show the website as something very simple and then add more complex graphs for people that are actually really interested in learning more.”

“There were a lot of people who were oblivious about the number of cases or what’s actually happening because the cases are really hidden. It’s a long text and people don’t really read that, so that’s the idea.”

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