Month: May 2019

World Wide (Conversation) – Facebook recently banned several far-right extremists, including Canadian Faith Goldy, who made a failed bid for Toronto mayor last year. Far-right media darling Lauren Southern was denied admission to the United Kingdom last year because of her extremist political activities. Goldy now protests in the streets and rants on American extremist Alex Jones’s TV show. Southern, along with the conservative media, is crying censorship on the YouTube release of her documentary this week — likely to create publicity. These Canadian women are part of a new generation…

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United States (CJ) – President Trump has yet again advanced an evil longstanding agenda of America’s depraved intelligence and defense agencies, so as usual the QAnon cult is out in force telling everyone not to worry because this is all part of the plan. Ever since WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was slammed by Trump’s Justice Department with a mountain of espionage charges carrying a possible sentence of 175 years in prison, QAnon acolytes have been showing up in my social media mentions with screenshots of a new post from the mysterious 8chan anon…

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Australia (Conversation) – Born in rural Thailand, Watcharaporn Nantahkhum gave birth to her first child at the age of 17. Her father killed himself when she was young, to absolve the family of debt. Her mother later ran into debt, and arrangements were made for her to travel to Australia, to earn money to support her family. She knew she would be working in the sex industry, however, at 37 years of age, she had been sold. Details of the conditions she put up with in a Sydney brothel were…

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World Wide (Conversation) – The Age newspaper recently highlighted the issue of so-called “helicopter parenting” at universities. The report talked of parents contacting lecturers to ask about their adult children’s grades, sitting in on meetings with course coordinators and repeatedly phoning academics to inquire about students’ progress. Over-parenting involves parents using developmentally inappropriate tactics that far exceed the actual needs of their children. It involves excessive protection of children by their parents. Over-parenting is often called “helicopter parenting”, as these parents hover over their children to make sure nothing goes…

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United States (Conversation) – Alabama’s governor signed a bill this week that criminalizes nearly all abortions, threatening providers with a felony conviction and up to 99 years in prison. It is one of numerous efforts across the United States to restrict access to abortion and challenge the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade that legalized abortion nationwide. Six states have recently passed legislation that limit abortions to approximately six weeks after the end of a woman’s last period, before many know they are pregnant. Although the laws have…

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United States (Conversation) – As the nation celebrates the 65th anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case, the case is often recalled as one that “forever changed the course of American history.” But the story behind the historic Supreme Court case, as I plan to show in my forthcoming book, “Blacks Against Brown: The Black Anti-Integration Movement in Topeka, Kansas, 1941-1954,” is much more complex than the highly inaccurate but often-repeated tale about how the lawsuit began. The story that often gets told is that – as…

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United States (Conversation) – The Trump administration wants to make people fleeing persecution in their home countries pay for something they’ve long gotten for free: the right to apply for asylum in the United States. As an immigration attorney and a law professor who has represented people seeking asylum for over a decade, I believe this change, which could go into effect as soon as the summer of 2019, would be not just cruel but also unusual. At present, only Australia and Fiji charge fees to would-be asylum-seekers. But making…

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World Wide (Conversation) – Hundreds of Mozambicans were killed and thousands made homeless recently by Cyclones Idai and Kenneth. Almost immediately, there were reports of a sadly familiar story: women being forced to trade sex for food by local community leaders distributing aid. Globally, international organisations appear to be grappling with the issue more seriously than before. Yet reports about sexual exploitation keep coming. How does the aid community strategise to protect women’s safety in disaster situations? Over the past 15 years, I have done research on sexual exploitation of…

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United States (CJ) – Whenever you speak out on a public forum against internet censorship, like the recent Instagram/Facebook banning of Louis Farrakhan, Infowars, and several right-wing pundits, you always offend two major political groups. The first group are the power-serving authoritarians who identify with the left side of the political spectrum; they argue that it’s good and right to trust Silicon Valley plutocrats to regulate political speech on giant monopolistic platforms. The second group are the capitalism cheerleaders who believe there’s a free market solution to every problem; they argue that these Silicon…

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