Respect the Old Notice how the all-too-familiar rhetoric of dehumanization works: “The elderly” are bunched together as a faceless mass, all of them considered culprits and thus effectively deserving of the suffering the pandemic will inflict upon them. Lost entirely is the fact that the elderly are individual human beings, each with a distinctive face and voice, each with hopes and dreams, memories and regrets, friendships and marriages, loves lost and loves sustained. But they deserve to die—and as for us, we can just go about our business. It is bad enough if we remain indifferent to the plight of our elders; it is far worse to dress up our failings as moral indignation. As a rabbi and theologian watching this ethical train wreck, I find myself thinking about the biblical mandate to “honor your father and mother.” Why do I say “the elderly”? Yascha Mounk: Cancel everything
The Alt-Right’s Star Racist Propagandist Has No Regrets Editor’s Note:White Noise, the debut feature film from The Atlantic, is in theaters now and will be available to rent in the U.S. starting October 21. Find more information here. Updated on October 20, 2020, at 10:20 a.m. ET Gavin McInnes took a swig of whiskey from a bottle on his talk show’s on-set bar before bringing Lauren Southern onstage. McInnes is a founder of Vice magazine and of the Proud Boys, an all-male, neofascist group that promotes violence against its political opponents. From the November 2020 issue: Right-wing militias are bracing for civil war McInnes watched stonily as Southern joined the men. Southern’s reporting for Farmlands had rippled through right-wing media—Trump would order Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to “closely study” the issue—and McInnes, now finished with his commentary on gender roles, had Southern discuss her revisionist history. Southern finished on set and ordered an Uber to the airport for her flight home to Toronto. I did not know the answer.
How Does an 83-Year-Old Jesuit End Up in Prison? More striking — and more telling of the attitude of the authorities — was a much shorter document, running to about a page and half, released to the press on Nov. 29. It was issued weeks after Father Swamy’s lawyers went to court asking that he be provided with the inexpensive objects he needs at mealtimes. “When Stan was arrested, one of his associates handed over his clothes and the sipper to the N.I.A. officials,” said Mihir Desai, one of his lawyers. But then, about a month after his arrest, the lawyers learnt that Father Swamy hadn’t been reunited with his straw and sipper. Reliant on his increasingly unstable hands, he was struggling. The lawyers went to court on Nov. 6, asking that the priest be given what he needs. The N.I.A. took 20 days to respond, a delay that the agency attributed to legal procedure. Yet in the intervening period, nobody thought to provide Father Swamy with any old straw and sipper. The N.I.A.’s explanation?
The Innocence Files: a shocking Netflix series on wrongful convictions | Documentary Franky Carrillo was just 16 years old, doing schoolwork at home, when police stormed in and arrested him for a drive-by murder in Lynwood, California. Kennedy Brewer was just a few years older when he was sentenced to death for the brutal abduction, assault and murder of his girlfriend’s three-year old daughter in Noxubee county, Mississippi. Chester Hollman was 21 when his rental car, similar to the getaway car used in a nearby murder, got him arrested in Philadelphia. All of them were innocent. Carrillo, Brewer and Hollman would have stayed incarcerated if not for the work of the Innocence Project, a New York-based non-profit founded by lawyers Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld in 1992 that works to overturn fraudulent and false convictions. The series is broken into three sections, according to the three predominant causes of wrongful incarceration: misuse of forensic evidence (or, more simply: junk science), false eyewitness testimony and prosecutorial misconduct.
How Do Bad Cops Stay in Power? Just Look at Miami. In 2009, the year that Ortiz arrested Vilma, Ortiz started to gain real political power when Miami FOP President Armando Aguilar tapped Ortiz to be the union’s vice president. At the time, the Great Recession was deepening. Tax collections plummeted. Labor costs didn’t. So, in August 2010, the city declared a “financial urgency” under state law and cut city workers’ pay, including that of police. From his union post, Ortiz rose up as the voice of the cop on the street as many officers felt under siege. The next year, Miami’s Black community was reeling from the police shooting deaths of seven Black men in an eight-month period. The U.S. DOJ launched an investigation into the seven deaths and pointed out that Miami police had shot at people 33 separate times during a three-year period from 2008 to 2011. Throughout, Ortiz’s willingness to stand up for his colleagues was appreciated by much of the rank and file, who admired his confidence and style. “This has nothing to do with race.
Sacha Baron Cohen ripping Facebook, internet giants apart is a must-watch - Business Insider In 24 minutes, comedian Sacha Baron Cohen completely tore apart Facebook's defense for not policing disinformation that exists on its website.Cohen also made the case to regulate the world's multi-billion-dollar tech companies like Google and YouTube, as well as the people who run them, who he called the "Silicon Six."The entire speech is a must-watch, considering how many billions of people use products made by Facebook and Google every single day.Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories. I don't want to waste your time with me talking. Just please watch this video below, for your own sake. For context: Sacha Baron Cohen, the comedian known for playing fake news reporters like "Ali G" and "Borat" for movies and TV shows, was chosen to give the keynote address at the Anti-Defamation League's 2019 Never is Now Summit in New York City. "Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitter and others, they reach billions of people," Cohen continued. This is an opinion column.
‘They Just Dumped Him Like Trash’: Nursing Homes Evict Vulnerable Residents Traditionally, ombudsmen would regularly go to nursing homes. In March, though, ombudsmen — and residents’ families — were required to stop visiting. Evictions followed. “It felt opportunistic, where some homes were basically seizing the moment when everyone is looking the other way to move people out,” said Laurie Facciarossa Brewer, a long-term care ombudsman in New Jersey. Nursing homes are allowed to evict residents if they aren’t able to pay for their care, are endangering others in the facility or have sufficiently recovered. But some homes have figured out a workaround: They pressure residents to leave. That is what David Mellor said happened to him. “I saw what was going on,” Mr. A spokesman for the Windsor Park Care Center declined to comment.
He spent 10 days in jail after facial recognition software led to the arrest of the wrong man, lawsuit says Editor’s note: This article has been updated to remove the name of a facial recognition software firm. It is unknown which facial recognition program was used to identify Nijeer Parks. It has also been updated to include a statement from the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office. When Nijeer Parks walked out of a New Jersey prison in 2016, he returned to his family in Paterson and told them he was done messing up his life. Twice convicted for selling drugs, Parks spent six years behind bars and said he decided after his release to earn an honest living. So when police last year filed numerous charges against Parks stemming from a shoplifting incident at a Woodbridge hotel in which the suspect hit a police car before fleeing the scene, the ex-convict who had worked eagerly to repair his life, tried just as hard to clear his name. “I had no idea what this was about. “I’ve never even been to Middlesex County besides going to a Rutgers University football game,” Parks said.
Black men executed in 1951 rape granted posthumous pardons RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam granted posthumous pardons Tuesday to seven Black men who were executed in 1951 for the rape of a white woman, in a case that attracted pleas for mercy from around the world and in recent years has been denounced as an example of racial disparity in the use of the death penalty. Northam announced the pardons after meeting with about a dozen descendants of the men and their advocates. The “Martinsville Seven,” as the men became known, were all convicted of raping 32-year-old Ruby Stroud Floyd, a white woman who had gone to a predominantly black neighborhood in Martinsville, Virginia, on Jan. 8, 1949, to collect money for clothes she had sold. Four of the men were executed in Virginia’s electric chair on Feb. 2, 1951. At the time, rape was a capital offense. “These men were executed because they were Black, and that’s not right,” Northam said. “Their punishment did not fit the crime. “It means so much to me,” he said of the pardon.
'The goal is to automate us': welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism | Technology We’re living through the most profound transformation in our information environment since Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of printing in circa 1439. And the problem with living through a revolution is that it’s impossible to take the long view of what’s happening. Hindsight is the only exact science in this business, and in that long run we’re all dead. Printing shaped and transformed societies over the next four centuries, but nobody in Mainz (Gutenberg’s home town) in, say, 1495 could have known that his technology would (among other things): fuel the Reformation and undermine the authority of the mighty Catholic church; enable the rise of what we now recognise as modern science; create unheard-of professions and industries; change the shape of our brains; and even recalibrate our conceptions of childhood. And yet printing did all this and more. Why choose 1495? That’s not for want of trying, mind. Which is why the arrival of Shoshana Zuboff’s new book is such a big event.
Right-Wing Militias Are Bracing for Civil War Editor’s Note: After this story was sent to press for the November issue of The Atlantic, President Donald Trump was asked in the September 29 debate whether he would “condemn white supremacists and militia groups and say that they need to stand down.” The president said “Sure,” and then said that the Proud Boys, a militant nativist group, should “stand back and stand by” as the election approaches. Subscribers to the print magazine can expect to receive the issue in mid-October. Photographs by Philip Montgomery Image above: Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers Stewart Rhodes was living his vision of the future. To hear more feature stories, get the Audm iPhone app. It was a Friday evening in June. Rhodes had been talking about civil war since he founded the Oath Keepers, in 2009. Over the summer, Rhodes’s warnings of conflict only grew louder. As Trump spent the year warning about voter fraud, the Oath Keepers were listening. Read: Why can’t he just say it?
Retracing a Donner Party Path, Nearly Two Centuries Later - Atlas Obscura On the second day of their December 2020 voyage through the punishing Sierra mountain range, the four team members of the Forlorn Hope Expedition woke to find six inches of snow had piled on their tents, and more was falling. They made oatmeal on their camp stoves and hustled to get moving. The previous day, they had covered ground that a group of pioneers in the winter of 1846-47 had needed a week to accomplish—and they would ultimately traverse 100 miles in five days, versus the pioneers’ 33. “This is not a re-creation or reenactment,” says Bob Crowley, a member of the 2020 expedition. The original Forlorn Hope members had set out from the larger Donner Party—a group of emigrants traveling from the Midwest to California by covered wagon across rugged terrain—in a desperate bid to get to shelter and food at Johnson’s Ranch in Wheatland, California. When going forward seemed impossible for the 19th-century group, thoughts of those left behind starving proved inspirational.
Hong Kong Protesters Who Fled by Boat Are Sentenced to Prison in China HONG KONG — A group of Hong Kong protesters who were arrested by the Chinese authorities while fleeing the city by speedboat were sentenced by a mainland court to between seven months and three years in prison on Wednesday, in the Chinese Communist Party’s latest offensive against pro-democracy activists. The case of the 12 protesters, who were caught in August by the Chinese Coast Guard while trying to seek refuge in Taiwan, was closely watched by Hong Kong’s beleaguered opposition movement. For many in the movement, the experiences of the 12 — who were detained in the mainland for months without charges, then tried out of public view — embodied the worst of their fears about Hong Kong’s future under tighter central government control. It was the nightmare prospect of being subject to the mainland’s opaque criminal justice system that set off the antigovernment protests last year. Eight of them were sentenced to seven months’ imprisonment for illegally crossing a boundary. Mr.