Tag Archives: cultural

Donald Trump Can Deport People Without Even Giving Them a Hearing

by LindsaySwint569 Posted on February 27, 2017

Mother Jones

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Last week, the Trump administration released its blueprint for implementing the president’s executive orders on immigration. Not only did it lay out plans to vastly increase the number of undocumented people vulnerable to deportation, but it also revealed that the feds intend to deport many more people caught in their immigration crackdown immediately after their arrest.

“Expedited removal” is the term the government uses to describe the swift deportation of undocumented immigrants without an appearance before an immigration judge—and, as pro-immigrant advocates point out, without due process protections. Previously, only undocumented immigrants who had been in the United States for less than 14 days and were apprehended within 100 miles of the US border were eligible for expedited removal. According to a new memo signed by Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, expedited removal can now be applied nationwide to those who cannot produce documentation that they have been in the country continuously for at least two years.

Jennifer Chang Newell, a senior staff attorney on the ACLU’s Immigrants Rights’ Project, said expedited removal has long been marred by widespread, well-documented abuse and that it “violates due process absolutely.” In 2014, the last year for which there are public statistics, 176,752 people were given expedited removal orders. That number, advocates point out, is now sure to go up.

The expansion of expedited removal is part of the administration’s attempt to bypass the bottleneck of immigrants already awaiting deportation in the immigration court system. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) estimates that it has the capacity to deport 400,000 people annually, but there is currently a backlog of more than 500,000 cases in the courts. Expedited removal allows the administration to skip the courts and summarily deport people without a lawyer, or even a phone call.

Under the new plan, apprehended immigrants will be asked for proof (such as receipts, phone records, or identification) that they have been in the country over the past two years. If they can’t produce the necessary documentation, they will be deported in as little as 24 hours. In effect, Newell said, “the police officer who arrests you and interrogates you also convicts you.” While this obviously is a concern for the tens of thousands of immigrants estimated to have illegally crossed the border since 2015, Alyson Sincavage, a legislative associate at the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), argues that it could affect all undocumented immigrants who can’t immediately make their case to immigration officials—even those who’ve been here for years. (ICE did not respond to a request for comment.)

And then there’s the question of how this might influence asylum seekers at the US-Mexico border. Since 2014, there has been a surge of Central American immigrants—many of them unaccompanied minors or women with children—crossing the southern border due to increased gang violence and instability in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Both Newell and Sincavage expressed concerns that this group, many of whom have valid asylum claims, could be wrongly slated for expedited removal in the general chaos of a large-scale immigration overhaul. A 2013 study by the ACLU found that some asylum seekers were quickly deported because Customs and Border Protection agents failed to adequately screen them in so-called credible-fear interviews, which immigrants must pass before getting a full hearing before an immigration judge. (The Trump administration has indicated that CBP agents should “elicit all relevant information from the alien as is necessary to make a legally sufficient determination” during credible-fear screenings; CBP did not respond to a request for comment.)

Causing further concern, the administration has suggested that many immigrants apprehended at the border could be immediately sent back to Mexico, rather than to their home countries. Luis Angel Gallegos, a program coordinator at the Institute for Social and Cultural Practice and Research, a Mexico City-based nonprofit focused on migrant issues, wrote in Spanish that sending immigrants to northern Mexico would present an enormous logistical challenge and endanger already-vulnerable immigrants. “There is no infrastructure to host and receive them,” he said. “Shelters that help immigrants are often full. Immigration detention centers are full.” Gallegos argued that this could make immigrants targets for extortion, kidnapping, and other crimes by the criminal syndicates operating in the border region.

Even if the Mexican government blocks this part of the plan—on Friday, the Associated Press reported that Mexico’s interior secretary said the country had rejected it in meetings with American leaders—Newell and Sincavage stressed the cruelty of removing people so quickly without a phone call, let alone a day in court. Expedited removal leads to people being “ripped from their communities and whisked away and deported in a matter of hours, based on shoddy paperwork,” Newell said. “This violates our most American notions of fairness.”

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Donald Trump Can Deport People Without Even Giving Them a Hearing

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You Say You Hate Black Friday. Maybe You’re Just Lying to Yourself.

by AnyaDoughty Posted on November 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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Over the past five years, Black Friday has migrated steadily into Thanksgiving, with each new year bringing fresh examples of big box stores flinging their doors open on Turkey Day. But this year the trend hit the skids. Though Walmart and the other usual suspects will still open on Thanksgiving Day, many big retailers—Costco, Nordstrom, Marshalls, and Home Depot, for example—are holding the line. Outdoor superstore REI went even further, announcing that it will be closed not only on Thanksgiving, but all the way through Black Friday.

Are consumers finally starting to get fed up with the holiday shopping hype? And what motivates some stores to close on Thanksgiving even as others rake in the cash? To find out, I called up Curt Munk, a veteran consultant for big-box retailers and head of strategy for the renowned brand agency FCB Red.

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You Say You Hate Black Friday. Maybe You’re Just Lying to Yourself.

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Here Is a Study About Sad Little Men Having Affairs for Sad, Boring Reasons

by Kelle08Lrfcb Posted on June 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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Society tells us that men are supposed to go out into the world and earn the wages while women are supposed to stay at home and raise kids. Society, as many great thinkers have said, is stupid. It’s all very 1950s and Revolutionary Road and most people not from the fever swamp would acknowledge that these gender roles are detrimental to the world and terrible and dumb. Still, the pernicious effects remain in our psyche! Now, you can either believe that even the most enlightened people are still sick on some deep down interior level, or you can be the sort of person who doesn’t believe things, but either way it’s true.

How true is it? This true:

This new study, showcased in the June issue of the American Sociological Review, found that men who are 100% economically dependent on their spouses were most at risk for cheating, three times more at risk than women married to male breadwinners.

While, on average, women who are completely financially dependent on their husbands face about a 5% chance that they will stray, there is about a 15% chance that a man married to a female breadwinner will cheat, the study concluded.

“I think it has to do with our cultural notions of what it means to be a man and what … the social expectations are for masculinity,” the study author, Christin Munsch, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut, told CNN.

Being economically dependent on their wives may threaten their manhood, Munsch said, and having an affair is a way to re-establish their masculinity, even if it’s all done subconsciously.

God is a lazy screenwriter.

UPDATE:

No.

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Here Is a Study About Sad Little Men Having Affairs for Sad, Boring Reasons

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The Ohlone People Were Forced Out of San Francisco. Now They Want Part of Their Land Back.

by OpalSkillen Posted on November 22, 2014

Mother Jones

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“There are only three ways to get land,” said Tony Cerda, chairman of the Costanoan Rumsen Carmel Tribe, in 2010. “You can buy it, have it given to you, or steal it.” It’s clear which one of those applies to his people, the Ohlone, who lived in the central California coastal region for thousands of years prior to the arrival of Spanish missionaries in the 1700s. The Ohlone once numbered as many as 15,000 on lands stretching from the San Francisco Bay to Big Sur. But following years of enslavement under the Spanish mission system and, later, persecution by settlers, they are now largely a people in exile.

Cerda’s tribe—about 2,000 people living in the Pomona area east of Los Angeles—are now the largest contemporary Ohlone group in the state. They’re leading the push for cultural recognition in the city of San Francisco. Specifically, they’re asking the city for land to build a cultural center as part of a proposed shoreline redevelopment project in the Hunters Point Shipyard area. The area was once the location of a historic Ohlone village and burial site—one of over 425 in the San Francisco Bay region.

Ohlone leaders say a cultural center would highlight the oft-overlooked history of California’s native people while serving as a permanent place for today’s tribes to continue their song, dance, language, and art traditions. And they’re also hoping to rebuild their cultural presence through community events like the annual Big Time Gathering, which took place in October in San Francisco’s Presidio National Park. This year’s gathering was the biggest yet, drawing more than 100 Native Californians from seven different tribes. Their goal is to honor their roots, says Neil Maclean, one of the event’s organizers: “Through hearing them sing, seeing them dance, and joining with them in ceremony, the Ohlone will tell their side about what it is like to survive.”

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The Ohlone People Were Forced Out of San Francisco. Now They Want Part of Their Land Back.

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No, the Culture Wars Haven’t Heated Up. It Just Seems Like They Have.

by Ilaria3pl Posted on November 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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Andrew Sullivan cogitates today on the seemingly endless outpouring of outrage over relatively small lapses in decent behavior:

I wonder also if our digital life hasn’t made all this far worse. When you sit in a room with a laptop and write about other people and their flaws, and you don’t have to look them in the eyes, you lose all incentive for manners.

You want to make a point. You may be full to the brim with righteous indignation or shock or anger. It is only human nature to flame at abstractions, just as the awkwardness of physical interaction is one of the few things constraining our rhetorical excess. When you combine this easy anonymity with the mass impulses of a Twitterstorm, and you can see why manners have evaporated and civil conversations turned into culture war.

I’m as guilty of this as many….

Why yes! Yes you are, Andrew.

On a more serious note, I actually disagree with his diagnosis of the problem, which has become so common as to be nearly conventional wisdom these days. Here’s why: I have not, personally, ever noticed that human beings tend to rein in their worst impulses when they’re face to face with other human beings. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. Most often, they don’t. Arguments with real people end up with red faces and lots of shouting constantly. I just flatly don’t believe that the real problem with internet discourse is the fact that you’re not usually directly addressing the object of your scorn.1

So what is the problem? I think it’s mostly one of visibility. In the past, the kinds of lapses that provoke internet pile-ons mostly stayed local. There just wasn’t a mechanism for the wider world to find out about them, so most of us never even heard about them. It became a big deal within the confines of a town or a university campus or whatnot, but that was it.

Occasionally, these things broke out, and the wider world did find out about them. But even then, there was a limit to how the world could respond. You could organize a protest, but that’s a lot of work. You could go to a city council meeting and complain. You could write a letter to the editor. But given the limitations of technology, it was fairly rare for something to break out and become a true feeding frenzy.

Needless to say, that’s no longer the case. In fact, we have just the opposite problem: things can become feeding frenzies even if no one really wants them to be. That’s because they can go viral with no central organization at all. Each individual who tweets or blogs or Facebooks their outrage thinks of this as a purely personal response. Just a quick way to kill a few idle minutes. But put them all together, and you have tens of thousands of people simultaneously responding in a way that seems like a huge pile-on. And that in turn triggers the more mainstream media to cover these things as if they were genuinely big deals.

The funny thing is that in a lot of cases, they aren’t. If, say, 10,000 people are outraged over Shirtgate, that’s nothing. Seriously. Given the ubiquity of modern social media, 10,000 people getting mad about something is actually a sign that almost nobody cares.

The problem is that our lizard brains haven’t caught up to this. We still think that 10,000 outraged people is a lot, and 30 or 40 years ago it would have been. What’s more, it almost certainly would have represented a far greater number of people who actually cared. Today, though, it’s so easy to express outrage that 10,000 people is a pretty small number—and most likely represents nearly everyone who actually gives a damn.

We need to recalibrate our cultural baselines for the social media era. People can respond so quickly and easily to minor events that the resulting feeding frenzies can seem far more important than anyone ever intended them to be. A snarky/nasty tweet, after all, is the work of a few seconds. A few thousand of them represent a grand total of a few hours of work. The end result may seem like an unbelievable avalanche of contempt and derision to the target of the attack, but in real terms, it represents virtually nothing.

The culture wars are not nastier because people on the internet don’t have to face their adversaries. They’re nastier because even minor blowups seem huge. But that’s just Econ 101. When the cost of expressing outrage goes down, the amount of outrage expressed goes up. That doesn’t mean there’s more outrage. It just means outrage is a lot more visible than it used to be.

1I’ll concede that this is potentially a problem with a very specific subset of professional troll. Even there, however, I’d note that the real world has plenty of rough equivalents, from Code Pink to the Westboro Baptist Church lunatics.

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No, the Culture Wars Haven’t Heated Up. It Just Seems Like They Have.

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Stop Asking Why the Women Accusing Jian Ghomeshi Didn’t Go to the Cops

by Leola35Fvg Posted on October 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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In the past two weeks, nine women have come forward with stories about getting beat up by Jian Ghomeshi. Now, thousands of people are asking what on earth took them so long.

The confused disbelief seems genuine to me. Why on earth didn’t they rush to the nearest police station? Or call 911? If he hurt them, didn’t they want to stop him from attacking more women?

Plenty of people have already done a great job of explaining why. They’ve posted the depressing stats on rape convictions, explained how the justice system often retraumatizes victims of sexual crimes, patiently detailed the horrible abuse Ghomeshi’s past accuser had to bear.

But after hearing all these reasons and more, a lot of people still won’t let Ghomeshi’s accusers off the hook. And as frustrating as this is, I think it’s because to varying degrees, people need to believe that the world makes sense. It just doesn’t make sense that this beloved, artsy, liberal, talented public radio star with the Flock of Seagulls haircut and the cool jeans allegedly has a weird thing going on involving a teddy bear and punching women in the face till their ears ring and forcing his cock into their mouths until they nearly vomit.

Just like it doesn’t make sense that the beloved fatherly comedian who reminds you of sweaters and pudding pops has been accused over and over of drugging women and sexually assaulting them. Or that the beloved all-American champion football coach is a serial child molester. And so on, and so on.

It’s depressing, it’s confusing, it’s awkward, and it’s like, life is already complicated enough.

Ergo the wishful thinking that if these nine women had just dialed three numbers long ago, this confusing ugliness, if true, would have been neatly trapped in a box where it could never hurt anybody else ever again.

But the inescapable reality is that they didn’t make the call. So do we chalk it up to these nine women being a bunch of lazy, dumb, overly paranoid, weak, sisterhood-betraying fools?

It’s either that, or we have to run through a bunch of not-fun mental exercises. We have to face the possibility that in this world, the only one we’ve got, a woman who says she was attacked by a powerful man can’t necessarily expect justice and protection if she goes running to the law. That if she tells, her home address and telephone number will probably be splashed across the Internet where demented ragey misogynists will use them to terrorize her. That she’s not crazy to worry her relationships with her parents, her partners, her friends and colleagues will be forever altered if they hear about it, because lots of people just aren’t emotionally equipped to deal with a loved one going through something like this.

“So why didn’t I do anything?” says Reva Seth, the latest woman to come forward with a story about being attacked by Ghomeshi. “This is the part that I think is so important to understand if we are ever going to change the context in which rape culture and violence against women is perpetuated. I didn’t do anything because it didn’t seem like there was anything to do…And even if I had wanted to do something, as a lawyer, I’m well aware that the scenario was just a “he said/she said” situation. I was aware that I, as a woman who had had a drink or two, shared a joint, had gone to his house willingly and had a sexual past, would be eviscerated. Cultural frameworks on this are powerful.”

So either these nine women are all irresponsible dummies—doesn’t sound like it—or they did what tons of people in their shoes would do. They didn’t tell, because telling can be more painful than not telling. This is depressing, confusing, and awkward, but it’s also what happened.

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Stop Asking Why the Women Accusing Jian Ghomeshi Didn’t Go to the Cops

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Hindu Lore to Racial Politics, MIA’s "Matangi" Delivers

by PorterEspino Posted on November 18, 2013

Mother Jones

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Maya Arulpragasm (best known as MIA), predicted the NSA spying scandal. She is pop’s most rebellious musician. And after a delay of several years, her new album, which she has described as sounding like “Paul Simon on acid,” was finally released earlier this month. Whether or not it lives up to her characterization, Matangi—titled after MIA’s namesake, the Hindu goddess of music and the spoken word—is decidedly eclectic, ranging from reggae rhythms to club beats, hip-hop vocals to slower love songs, and Eastern instrumentation to a mainstream pop style.

An MIA album would be nothing without a complex, varied message, and Matangi delivers. It’s replete with allusions to Hindu stories and spirituality, alongside more current (if slightly outdated) pop-culture references: “YALA” (you always live again) plays off the cultural meme YOLO (you only live once) popularized by Drake’s “The Motto.” MIA’s response explores the Hindu concepts of reincarnation and karma. “YOLO?” she sings. “I don’t even know anymore…back home where I come from we keep being born again and again and again.” “Come Walk With Me,” ostensibly a song about modern love and romance, is accompanied by a an animated video of Hindu imagery.

Matangi also offers a strong (if ambiguous) political message. “Brown girl, brown girl, turn your shit down. You know America don’t want to hear your sound,” she raps on the short track “Boom.” Meanwhile, “aTENTion” was “written with all the words that have ‘tent’ in them,” she told NPR. “It’s sort of to describe the refugee philosophy—people who live in tents—because I feel like they are the modern-day untouchables…they’re faceless and placeless.” The song, weirdly enough, was written with the help of Wikileaks’ Julian Assange, who came by her London studio while she was working on his TV series. Mixed messages aside, Matangi, is everything you’d thought it would be, and gets better with every listen.

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Hindu Lore to Racial Politics, MIA’s "Matangi" Delivers

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We are learning mosquitoes are basically invincible

by 9ji7g4x Posted on February 21, 2013

We are learning mosquitoes are basically invincible

By Philip Bump

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Mosquitoes are, at best, horrible annoyances. At worst? They are genocidal maniacs, responsible for more than half a million deaths a year, transmitting malaria and other diseases. Were causing extinction subject to popular vote, mosquitoes would win in a landslide.

All of that, relative to the moment, is the good news. Now, the bad.

Mosquitoes laugh at your so-called repellant.

Well, they don’t laugh, as such, lacking the capacity for forced expulsion of air from their probosci and, likewise, any sense of humor. Point is, the most common chemical used to repel the little idiots is losing its effectiveness. From Smithsonian.com:

A group of researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine discovered that three hours after an exposure to DEET, many Aedes aegypti mosquitoes were immune to the chemical, ignoring its typically noxious smell and attempting to land on irresistible human skin. …

So why did the mosquitoes, as a whole, overcome their dislike of DEET? Previous studies by this group and others have found particular mosquitoes with a genetic mutation that made them innately immune to DEET, but they say that this case is different, because they didn’t demonstrate this ability from the start.

They suspect, instead, that the insects’ antennae became less chemically sensitive to DEET over time, as evidenced by electroantennography on the mosquitoes’ odor receptors after each of the tests — a phenomenon not unlike a person getting used to the smell of, say, the ocean or a manufacturing plant near his or her house.

In other words, all picnics should now be scheduled for two hours, 55 minutes in length.

That point about genetic mutation is an interesting one, worth pulling out. After all, one strategy used in Key West last year called for releasing genetically modified mosquitoes that would deplete the region’s supply of blood-suckers by greatly decreasing the bugs’ lifespans. The proposal prompted some concern, quite understandably: Regular mosquitoes are bad enough. But mutants?

It’s not clear what the repercussions of mutated mosquitoes might be.

In a very good, thoughtful article that will appear in this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, Maggie Koerth-Baker looks at the unintended consequences of tweaking skeeters. After noting how mosquitoes are adapting to mosquito nets (feeding more often during the day), Koerth-Baker considers the consequences of proposed plans to modify the insects or the malaria virus to reduce the damage each can do.

[A]ll solutions, whether as simple as a net or as complicated as splicing genes, come with risks. For instance, Aedes aegypti is the species primarily responsible for spreading dengue. It’s present around the world, but outside North Africa, it’s an invasive species. If scientists use flightless female modifications against A. aegypti and succeed in decreasing its presence in, say, Mexico City, then what will fill its ecological niche there? (What is its ecological niche anyway? One entomologist told me that we don’t even have a great understanding of mosquitoes’ place in our ecosystem, because we have focused our efforts on killing them rather than observing them.)

Even curing a disease poses risks, because in all likelihood it won’t stay cured forever. If G.M. mosquitoes completely neutered the malaria parasite’s threat, even in one part of the world, it would be an incredible success story. But what happens if the parasite adapts to circumvent the tools we’ve used to fight it? Today we know how to take precautions to prevent malaria transmissions and fight the disease with antimalarial drugs. But in the future, some version of malaria could surge through a population of humans without the cultural knowledge or pharmaceuticals necessary to defend themselves against it.

So, to summarize: Using repellant deters mosquitoes for a few hours. Genetically modifying them bears unknown risks. Oh, and as the world gets warmer, the insects’ range and seasons of activity expand, as we saw last year in Alaska.

But don’t worry. It’s winter. It will be weeks before mosquitoes are hovering over stagnant pools of water, attuned to your exhaled breath and ready to suck your blood. Make the most of it.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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We are learning mosquitoes are basically invincible

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