Month: September 2022

Pro-American Propaganda on Social Media Had Little Impact—Just Like Russian Propaganda on Social Media


U.S. social media propaganda

A purge of pro-U.S. bot accounts on Facebook and Twitter has given way to an inside look at covert propaganda on social media. In a new report, the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) and Graphika analyze these pro-America accounts, including the kind of content they shared and the paltry influence they had.

In July and August, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram removed more than 100 accounts spreading pro-U.S. messages in Afghanistan, Central Asia, and the Middle East. The accounts—including fake people with images generated through artificial intelligence as well as sham news outlets—were kicked off Twitter for violating its policies on “platform manipulation and spam” and off Facebook for “coordinated inauthentic behavior.”

The tech companies then provided a portion of this account data to SIO and Graphika. “The platforms’ datasets appear to cover a series of covert campaigns over a period of almost five years rather than one homogeneous operation,” notes the SIO/Graphika report, titled “UNHEARD VOICE: Evaluating five years of pro-Western covert influence operations.” These campaigns “consistently advanced narratives promoting the interests of the United States and its allies while opposing countries including Russia, China, and Iran.”

The accounts shared myriad articles from U.S. government-funded media such as Voice of America, as well as links to websites run by the U.S. military.

They also shared memes mocking and criticizing certain foreign leaders, as well as random content and hashtags presumably meant to generate attention. (Also: “Accounts often replied to tweets with the face with tears of joy emoji.”)

Overall, these accounts received very little engagement:

The vast majority of posts and tweets we reviewed received no more than a handful of likes or retweets, and only 19% of the covert assets we identified had more than 1,000 followers. The average tweet received 0.49 likes and 0.02 retweets. Tellingly, the two most-followed assets in the data provided by Twitter were overt accounts that publicly declared a connection to the U.S. military.

The lack of actual influence draws into question why exactly these accounts exist.

But their ineffectiveness shouldn’t be surprising. In the wake of the 2016 election, much was made of Russians posing online as U.S. citizens and media and then using these accounts to promote particular political ends or simply sow division. But these efforts’ tendency to spur panic and fear has always been a bit strange, given “the puny reality” (as Reason‘s Jacob Sullum put it) of their footprint.

The shock and outrage generated by Russian attempts to influence U.S. politics was also odd, given all the ways the U.S. government has historically engaged in covert influence operations abroad—and still seems to be doing so.

Not all of the accounts in the social media datasets could be directly traced to the U.S. government, though some could:

The Twitter dataset provided to Graphika and SIO covered 299,566 tweets by 146 accounts between March 2012 and February 2022. These accounts divide into two behaviorally distinct activity sets. The first was linked to an overt U.S.government messaging campaign called the Trans-Regional Web Initiative, which has been extensively documented inacademic studies, media reports, and federal contracting records. The second comprises a series of covert campaigns of unclear origin. These covert campaigns were also represented in the Meta dataset of 39 Facebook profiles, 16 pages, two groups, and 26 Instagram accounts active from 2017 to July 2022.

Twitter said the sham account activity originated in the U.S. and the U.K., while Facebook reported that it came from the U.S. alone. However, many of these accounts purported to be people or publications based in other countries.

In at least one instance, a Twitter account that purported to be an Iraqi man was previously identified as an account run by the U.S. military.

The account “was created in November 2016 and claimed in its bio to be ‘always in the service of Iraqis and Arabs.'” It “used a profile picture likely generated using artificial intelligence techniques,” and “an Instagram account and a Facebook profile in the Middle East group used the same image as well.”

Accounts less directly linked to the U.S. military were also suspiciously invested in military or other government-linked content. For example:

In 2020 and 2021, a Twitter account that presented itself as an Iranian individual living in “Cambridge” posted links to almashareq[.]com and diyaruna[.]com 25 and 26 times, respectively. Both websites say they are sponsored by the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) and post pro-Western articles in Persian and Arabic. This Twitter account was created on June 16, 2019, and its Twitter bio linked to a Telegram account with the same name and just three subscribers.

Another group of analyzed accounts mentioned the United States Agency for International Development 94 times on Twitter and 384 times on Facebook.

SIO and Graphika focused their analysis largely on the covert propaganda accounts, rather than those overtly linked to the U.S. government.

“Importantly, the data … shows the limitations of using inauthentic tactics to generate engagement and build influence online,” states their report. 

For instance, an operation targeting Russian-speaking Central Asian audiences “focused on praising American aid to Central Asia and criticizing Russia, particularly its foreign policy.” But the posts “gained little traction on social media. Facebook posts often had fewer than 10 likes, and only 10 posts gained more than 1,000 reactions.” Only two videos from this operation received a significant number of views, and one “was a non-political TV news excerpt about an Uzbek farmer growing fruits in the desert.”

FREE MINDS

A crackdown on “harmful” content on Chinese apps has silenced feminist concerns:

FREE MARKETS

A new view of income inequality. “Contrary to conventional wisdom, the most dramatic and consequential change in the distribution of income in America in the past half-century isn’t rising income inequality but the extraordinary growth in income equality among the bottom 60% of household earners,” write Phil Gramm and John Early in The Wall Street Journal:

In 2017, among working-age households, the bottom 20% earned only $6,941 on average, and only 36% were employed. But after transfer payments and taxes, those households had an average income of $48,806. The average working-age household in the second quintile earned $31,811 and 85% of them were employed. But after transfers and taxes, they had income of $50,492, a mere 3.5% more than the bottom quintile. The middle quintile earned $66,453 and 92% were employed. But after taxes and transfers, they kept only $61,350—just 26% more than the bottom quintile.

Even these figures don’t tell the whole story. In the bottom quintile, there are on average only 1.92 people living in a household. The second and middle quintiles have 2.41 and 2.62 people respectively. After adjusting income for the number of people living in the household, the bottom-quintile household received $33,653 per capita. The second and middle quintile households had on average $29,497 and $32,574 per capita, respectively. The blockbuster finding is that on a per capita basis the average bottom quintile household received 14% more income than the average second-quintile household and 3.3% more than the average middle-income household.

QUICK HITS

• The Food and Drug Administration has authorized an updated COVID-19 booster vaccine that specifically targets omicron subvariants. “The agency cleared two options aimed at the BA.5 variant of Omicron that is now dominant: one made by Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech for use in people as young as 12, and the other by Moderna, for those 18 and older,” notes The New York Times. “Only people who have received at least two shots will be eligible for the updated booster.”

• 11,000 federal inmates were sent home during the pandemic. Only 17 were arrested for new crimes, reports Reason‘s C.J. Ciaramella. Most of these were drug crimes, “while the rest of the charges included smuggling non-citizens, nonviolent domestic disturbance, theft, aggravated assault, and DUI.”

• Sarah Palin lost her election in Alaska. Palin was competing for Alaska’s sole congressional seat with former state Rep. Mary Peltola and the grandson of the man who previously held the seat. Peltola won, becoming “the first Democrat elected to that seat in nearly 50 years, and only the third Democrat since Alaska became a state,” notes Reason‘s Joe Lancaster. “She is also the first Native Alaskan to represent the state in Congress.”

• U.S. life expectancy has dropped for the second year in a row. “It was the biggest drop in almost 100 years,” reports NPR. “In 2019, someone born in the U.S. had a life expectancy of nearly 80 years. In 202o, because of the pandemic, that dropped to 77 years. In 2021 life-span dropped again — to 76.1 years.”

• Jesse Singal offers a worthwhile critique of an Inside Higher Ed column on affirmative action.

• President Joe Biden is going to give a speech on the “battle for the soul of the nation” tonight.

The post Pro-American Propaganda on Social Media Had Little Impact—Just Like Russian Propaganda on Social Media appeared first on Reason.com.

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Protecting People from Their Own Religious Communities: Other Community Members’ Religious Interests

This new article of mine will be coming out next year in the Journal of Law and Religion, and I thought I’d serialize it here; there’s still plenty of time for editing, so I’d love to hear people’s feedback. I posted several excerpts last week (you can read them in the PDF, if you’d like), and want to finish it up this week; here’s Part IV.A.

[* * *]

Let’s say that some members of a religious community don’t deny that community members who act in particular ways are shamed by the community. Rather, those members think that such shaming is an important and valuable feature of their religious life, and indeed of their exercising their First Amendment rights.[1]

We believe that stripping, premarital sex, taking disputes to outsiders (“lashon hara,” to Orthodox Jews[2]), drinking, gambling, or lending or borrowing money with interest, they might say, is contrary to God’s will. One way we deter breaches of these norms is through the threat of social shaming—much as many secular institutions threaten social shaming for what they view as immoral behavior, such as racism or sexism or hostility to homosexuality. This threat helps encourage members to stay on the right path, and helps protect people from the harms that straying can cause. And instances of such shaming also serve as “teaching moments” for reminding community members about these norms.[3]

Someone suing as a John Doe (to give a pseudonymous litigation example) now claims that he’s a member of our community, which condemns interest-bearing lending; and because of that he wants to sue pseudonymously over such a loan, so that we, his fellow community members, don’t learn about his conduct. Normally, he wouldn’t be entitled to sue pseudonymously in such a situation,[4] but here he seeks pseudonymity precisely because he fears the stigma of being labeled as a sinner by our community. But by shielding his identity, you’re deliberately denying us information because you think we’ll use the information illegitimately, by shaming him for his religious transgression, and perhaps being less likely to trust him.[5] You are thus preferring his preferences (and yours) over ours.

Now of course these hypothetical religious community members wouldn’t be claiming some legal entitlement to surveil all their group members’ sexual behavior. They aren’t, for instance, trying to subpoena the bank records of all their coreligionists, so that they can identify usurers and clients of usurers. When ordinary legal rules, applied completely without regard to people’s religious communities, provide community members with privacy, the community’s mechanisms for enforcing its norms are stymied, but unavoidably so.

But with the pseudonymity rules I’m describing, courts are making a deliberate choice, at least in cases involving the litigant’s voluntary behavior (as opposed to just the litigant’s being a sexual assault victim): Precisely because a litigant is violating the norms of the litigant’s religious community, they are giving the litigant extra access to pseudonymity that most litigants don’t have, and denying the religious community access to information about what’s happening in court—access that the general community usually has (and may well value[6]) with regard to most lawsuits. And the same would also apply to decisions to treat other kinds of records as confidential, when the purpose is to allow people to conceal information from their coreligionists.

Courts are thus observing something of a schism within a religious community—between the orthodox enforcers of norms and dissenters who reject the norms. And they are choosing to support the dissenters over the orthodox, by giving the dissenters special legal treatment, precisely because the courts condemn the beliefs that the orthodox hold (or at least because the courts think those beliefs are too militantly held).

I am not arguing here that such determinations of reactions within a community are foreclosed by the First Amendment’s prohibition on courts’ resolving “ecclesiastical questions,” such as the proper interpretation of “church doctrine.”[7] Deciding whether members of a religious group harshly condemns other members who act in particular ways (or who have been victimized in particular ways) would not generally involve “the interpretation of particular church doctrines and the importance of those doctrines to the religion”[8]—rather, it would involve estimation of how often members of a particular religious community hold particular views, not whether those views are consistent with religious doctrine or theologically important. Likewise, siding with the dissenters here rather than with the orthodox because one thinks the orthodox are being unduly judgmental is not necessarily a theological judgment as such.

Nonetheless, it does involve “tak[ing] sides in a religious matter,” by deliberately favoring one religious subcommunity’s approach at the expense of another’s.[9] The First Amendment presumptively forbids the government from discriminating among religions, even when the discrimination targets groups based on behavior and not belief, for instance religious groups “that solicit more than fifty per cent of their funds from nonmembers.”[10] It bars the government from discriminating against religious groups more broadly.[11] It should generally bar the government from favoring religious dissenters over the more religiously orthodox, or treating religious communities differently based on their more judgmental belief systems or based on their tendencies to use shame as a sanction. And even if such treatment is constitutionally permissible, it seems to me to be something that the secular legal system should generally avoid doing.

[1] Cf. Paul v. Watchtower Bible & Tract Soc’y of N.Y., Inc., 819 F.2d 875 (9th Cir. 1987) (rejecting, on Free Exercise Clause, a claim that the organized “shunning” of a dissenting religious group member constitutes tortious infliction of emotional distress); Hubbard v. J Message Grp. Corp., 325 F. Supp. 3d 1198, 1216 (D.N.M. 2018) (likewise).

[2] See supra note 33.

[3] Such overt embrace of shaming, I expect, would be more likely for voluntary behavior; presumably the groups would be less likely to expressly defend shaming of the involuntarily victimized, such as rape victims; even when such shaming of victims does happen, I expect that it would be more likely to be denied by community leaders rather than overtly endorsed.

[4] That’s why I used this hypothetical, to avoid the complications that arise in, say, sexual assault cases, where some courts do allow pseudonymity even without reference to religious community norms and others don’t.

[5] To be sure, many of these groups wouldn’t view such behavior as grounds for excommunication; they may be open to people who sin but repent, especially when they do so in front of the community. One point of pseudonymity, though, is to avoid the need for public repentance.

[6] See Volokh, supra note 1, at 1369­–70 (citing the many cases that stress the public’s presumptive right to access information about who is using the courts).

[7] See, e.g., Presbyterian Church in U.S. v. Mary Elizabeth Blue Hull Memorial Presbyterian Church, 393 U.S. 440, 445–46 (1969).

[8] Id. at 450.

[9] See Commack Self-Serv. Kosher Meats, Inc. v. Weiss, 294 F.3d 415, 425 (2d Cir. 2002) (concluding that laws that aimed at preventing mislabeling of food as kosher improperly favored the Orthodox Jewish understanding of what is kosher, and thus “t[ook] sides in a religious matter, effectively discriminating in favor of the Orthodox Hebrew view of dietary requirements”); id. at 426 (“As a result, because the challenged laws interpret ‘kosher’ as synonymous with the views of one branch, those of Orthodox Judaism, the State has effectively aligned itself with one side of an internal debate within Judaism. This it may not do.”); Pleasant Glade Assembly of God v. Schubert, 264 S.W.3d 1 (Tex. 2008) (refusing to allow liability for emotional distress—as opposed to physical injury—stemming from a religious ritual in which church members were “laying hands” on plaintiff as a means of exorcism, and concluding that, “[b]ecause providing a remedy for the very real, but religiously motivated emotional distress in this case would require us to take sides in what is essentially a religious controversy, we cannot resolve that dispute”).

[10] Larson v. Valente, 456 U.S. 228, 230, 244, 246–47 (1982) (concluding that a rule that draws such a line “clearly grants denominational preferences of the sort consistently and firmly deprecated in our precedents”).

[11] Carson v. Makin, 142 S. Ct. 1987, 1997 (2022) (holding that exclusion of religious institutions from generally available funding programs is generally unconstitutional).

The post Protecting People from Their Own Religious Communities: Other Community Members' Religious Interests appeared first on Reason.com.

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Taiwan Shoots Down Drone Off Chinese Coast For The First Time

Taiwan Shoots Down Drone Off Chinese Coast For The First Time

After two prior episodes in as many consecutive days which saw Taiwan military outposts on outlying islands fire warning shots against intruding unidentified drones, a fresh incident Thursday has resulted in an unidentified civilian drone being shot down near the Chinese mainland.

“The Jinmen Defense Command of the Army stated that at 12:30 p.m. today, an unidentified civilian aerial camera was found to enter the airspace over the restricted waters of Shiyu Island,” Taiwan’s Defense Ministry said. “The Ministry of Defense will continue to search, monitor, and monitor closely to maintain the security of the defence area.”

Taiwan controlled Shi Islet is the smallest Taiwan-controlled 

Like the prior incidents which just resulted in warning shots, the drone entered restricted waters near one of the Kinmen islands just off the Chinese mainland.

Thursday’s drone shootdown took place a distance of a mere minutes by boat ride from the Chinese coast, which has caused some pundits to question whether these incidents have involved civilian operated hobby drones from the mainland’s Fujian.

Shi Islet is the smallest Taiwanese island which has long had military personnel stationed on it, and is virtually a rock sticking out of the sea lying just northwest of Taiwan’s Lesser Kinmen.

As Reuters details, this is being widely viewed as likely part of a stepped-up Chinse harassment and pressure campaign against Taiwan since Nancy Pelosi’s August 2nd visit: 

Since mid-August, a number of civilian drones have been spotted flying over the outlying island of Kinmen, 180 kilometres from Taiwan’s main island but less than 10 kilometres from China. On one occasion, on August 16, two Taiwanese soldiers wearing masks reportedly threw rocks at a Chinese drone when it flew above their military post.

The Kinmen Defence Command said two other Chinese drones were detected at Little Kinmen island and nearby Lion islet on Saturday and Monday respectively. The one that passed over Lion islet at around 4 pm was flying very low, only 30 meters from the ground, it said.

China has increased its antics in the Taiwan Strait since the visit of US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Taiwan is warning that its military won’t hesitate to exercise right of self-defense and to counter-attack in the event of Chinese forces entering its territory.

The military will determine “whether to engage the target and exercise the right of self-defense to counter-attack,” if the foreign drones fail to depart after warnings, Major General Lin Wen-huang said Wednesday.

Chinese state media has meanwhile warned that even though these drone incidents are likely due to civilian operators from the mainland, Taiwan will still “bear the consequences” of opening fire.

Tyler Durden
Thu, 09/01/2022 – 07:47

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Fed Paper Admits Central Bank Can’t Control Inflation; Finger-Points At Federal Government

Fed Paper Admits Central Bank Can’t Control Inflation; Finger-Points At Federal Government

Authored by Michael Maharrey via SchiffGold.com,

It appears somebody at the Federal Reserve has figured out that the central bank can’t tame inflation, so it’s setting up a scapegoat – Uncle Sam…

A paper co-authored by Leonardo Melosi of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and John Hopkins University economist Francesco Bianchi and published by the Kansas City Federal Reserve argues that central bank monetary policy alone can’t control inflation.

The paper’s abstract asserts, “This increase in inflation could not have been averted by simply tightening monetary policy.”

In a nutshell, Melosi and Bianchi argue that the Fed can’t control inflation alone.

US government fiscal policy contributes to inflationary pressure and makes it impossible for the Fed to do its job.

Trend inflation is fully controlled by the monetary authority only when public debt can be successfully stabilized by credible future fiscal plans. When the fiscal authority is not perceived as fully responsible for covering the existing fiscal imbalances, the private sector expects that inflation will rise to ensure sustainability of national debt. As a result, a large fiscal imbalance combined with a weakening fiscal credibility may lead trend inflation to drift away from the long-run target chosen by the monetary authority.”

There are a couple of startling admissions in this single paragraph.

First, the authors acknowledge that the federal government uses inflation as a tool to handle its debt. In other words, it acknowledges that we’re all paying an inflation tax.

Peter Schiff talked about this inflation tax in an interview on Rob Schmitt Tonight.

Inflation is a tax. It’s the way government finances deficit spending. Government spends money. It doesn’t collect enough taxes, so it has to run deficits. The Federal Reserve monetizes those defiticts – prints money. They call it quantitative easing, but that’s inflation. Government is getting bigger and bigger, and families across America are going to have to bear that burden through higher prices.”

Second, the paper concedes that merely tinkering with interest rates won’t slay inflation if the government continues to spend far beyond its means.

And make no mistake, the US government is spending far beyond its means. Although the budget deficit is shrinking as emergency pandemic spending programs wind down, the Biden administration continues to spend about half-a-trillion dollars every single month, piling onto the ever-ballooning deficit.

This paper admits what I’ve been saying for months. Government spending is a big problem for the Federal Reserve. Powell and Company continue to insist they will stay in this inflation fight until the end. But Uncle Sam depends on the Fed buying Treasury bonds in order to facilitate its borrowing addiction. As the central bank buys bonds, it creates artificial demand and holds interest rates down. The government needs low interest rates when it’s borrowing trillions of dollars. Without the Fed’s big fat thumb on the bond market, Treasury prices will continue to sink as supply outstrips demand, and interest rates will rise.

Melosi and Bianchi also tacitly admit that the Fed isn’t going to win this inflation fight and warns we could be heading toward stagflation.

When fiscal imbalances are large and fiscal credibility wanes, it may become increasingly harder for the monetary authority to stabilize inflation around its desired target. If the monetary authority increases rates in response to high inflation, the economy enters a recession, which increases the debt-to-GDP ratio. If the monetary tightening is not supported by the expectation of appropriate fiscal adjustments, the deterioration of fiscal imbalances leads to even higher inflationary pressure. As a result, a vicious circle of rising nominal interest rates, rising inflation, economic stagnation, and increasing debt would arise.”

This is exactly what is happening.

Melosi and Bianchi call this a “pathological situation.”

Monetary tightening would actually spur higher inflation and would spark a pernicious fiscal stagflation, with the inflation rate drifting away from the monetary authority’s target and with GDP growth slowing down considerably.”

Well hello there, Fed! Welcome to reality.

The Federal Reserve has raised rates to 2.5%. Despite mainstream assertions to the contrary, it appears the economy has already dipped into a recession.  Private sector economic activity has dropped to the lowest levels since early in the COVID lockdowns, the housing market is tanking, and the economy has charted two straight months of negative GDP growth.

During his Jackson Hole speech, Jerome Powell said the Fed will “use our tools forcefully” to get inflation under control and even conceded that it will cause some economic pain. But the numbers undercut Powell’s confident assertions. The Fed would have to raise rates to a level that would obliterate this bubble economy in order to cool inflation.

I think the central bankers know this. This paper, co-authored by a Fed official, makes that pretty clear. I think the central bankers are setting the stage to finger point and pass the buck when this whole inflation-fighting scheme blows up in their faces.

The paper states,  that the central bank can control inflation “only when public debt can be successfully stabilized by credible future fiscal plans.”

Do you think that is going to happen?

I don’t either.

In fact, the only workable plan is for the Federal Reserve to monetize more debt by buying more Treasuries with more money created out of thin air. This is one reason I’ve been saying for months that the Fed won’t win this inflation fight.

In one sense, I think the Fed is setting the stage for its own failure. It’s already making excuses. And it’s a little pathetic. The central bank put quantitative easing on steroids during the pandemic, injecting nearly $5 trillion into the economy. That is the very definition of inflation. If you want to know who to blame for this inflation mess, the Fed stands at the front of the line.

That said, this paper isn’t completely disingenuous. As I’ve already explained, the federal government plays a role in the inflation game as well. As the saying goes, it takes two to tango. Federal government spending is out of control, and the spending spree necessitates inflation. (It’s not just Biden’s fault — the Trump administration was running massive deficits prior to the pandemic.)

So, even if Melosi and Bianchi are trying to point the finger in another direction, they aren’t wrong when they write, “[Stagflation] is caused by the progressive deterioration of the fiscal authority’s credibility to stabilize its large debt and the realization that the reputation of the monetary authority is incompatible with the expected behavior of the fiscal authority.”

In plain English, the central bank can’t stop inflation when the federal government needs inflation to survive.

This paper won’t get much attention. In fact, it comes with a disclaimer — “The views in this paper are solely those of the authors and should not be interpreted as reflecting the views of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago or any person associated with the Federal Reserve System.”

Regardless, they’ve swerved into the truth and we’d do well to pay attention.

Tyler Durden
Thu, 09/01/2022 – 07:20

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Protecting People from Their Own Religious Communities: Other Community Members’ Religious Interests

This new article of mine will be coming out next year in the Journal of Law and Religion, and I thought I’d serialize it here; there’s still plenty of time for editing, so I’d love to hear people’s feedback. I posted several excerpts last week (you can read them in the PDF, if you’d like), and want to finish it up this week; here’s Part IV.A.

[* * *]

Let’s say that some members of a religious community don’t deny that community members who act in particular ways are shamed by the community. Rather, those members think that such shaming is an important and valuable feature of their religious life, and indeed of their exercising their First Amendment rights.[1]

We believe that stripping, premarital sex, taking disputes to outsiders (“lashon hara,” to Orthodox Jews[2]), drinking, gambling, or lending or borrowing money with interest, they might say, is contrary to God’s will. One way we deter breaches of these norms is through the threat of social shaming—much as many secular institutions threaten social shaming for what they view as immoral behavior, such as racism or sexism or hostility to homosexuality. This threat helps encourage members to stay on the right path, and helps protect people from the harms that straying can cause. And instances of such shaming also serve as “teaching moments” for reminding community members about these norms.[3]

Someone suing as a John Doe (to give a pseudonymous litigation example) now claims that he’s a member of our community, which condemns interest-bearing lending; and because of that he wants to sue pseudonymously over such a loan, so that we, his fellow community members, don’t learn about his conduct. Normally, he wouldn’t be entitled to sue pseudonymously in such a situation,[4] but here he seeks pseudonymity precisely because he fears the stigma of being labeled as a sinner by our community. But by shielding his identity, you’re deliberately denying us information because you think we’ll use the information illegitimately, by shaming him for his religious transgression, and perhaps being less likely to trust him.[5] You are thus preferring his preferences (and yours) over ours.

Now of course these hypothetical religious community members wouldn’t be claiming some legal entitlement to surveil all their group members’ sexual behavior. They aren’t, for instance, trying to subpoena the bank records of all their coreligionists, so that they can identify usurers and clients of usurers. When ordinary legal rules, applied completely without regard to people’s religious communities, provide community members with privacy, the community’s mechanisms for enforcing its norms are stymied, but unavoidably so.

But with the pseudonymity rules I’m describing, courts are making a deliberate choice, at least in cases involving the litigant’s voluntary behavior (as opposed to just the litigant’s being a sexual assault victim): Precisely because a litigant is violating the norms of the litigant’s religious community, they are giving the litigant extra access to pseudonymity that most litigants don’t have, and denying the religious community access to information about what’s happening in court—access that the general community usually has (and may well value[6]) with regard to most lawsuits. And the same would also apply to decisions to treat other kinds of records as confidential, when the purpose is to allow people to conceal information from their coreligionists.

Courts are thus observing something of a schism within a religious community—between the orthodox enforcers of norms and dissenters who reject the norms. And they are choosing to support the dissenters over the orthodox, by giving the dissenters special legal treatment, precisely because the courts condemn the beliefs that the orthodox hold (or at least because the courts think those beliefs are too militantly held).

I am not arguing here that such determinations of reactions within a community are foreclosed by the First Amendment’s prohibition on courts’ resolving “ecclesiastical questions,” such as the proper interpretation of “church doctrine.”[7] Deciding whether members of a religious group harshly condemns other members who act in particular ways (or who have been victimized in particular ways) would not generally involve “the interpretation of particular church doctrines and the importance of those doctrines to the religion”[8]—rather, it would involve estimation of how often members of a particular religious community hold particular views, not whether those views are consistent with religious doctrine or theologically important. Likewise, siding with the dissenters here rather than with the orthodox because one thinks the orthodox are being unduly judgmental is not necessarily a theological judgment as such.

Nonetheless, it does involve “tak[ing] sides in a religious matter,” by deliberately favoring one religious subcommunity’s approach at the expense of another’s.[9] The First Amendment presumptively forbids the government from discriminating among religions, even when the discrimination targets groups based on behavior and not belief, for instance religious groups “that solicit more than fifty per cent of their funds from nonmembers.”[10] It bars the government from discriminating against religious groups more broadly.[11] It should generally bar the government from favoring religious dissenters over the more religiously orthodox, or treating religious communities differently based on their more judgmental belief systems or based on their tendencies to use shame as a sanction. And even if such treatment is constitutionally permissible, it seems to me to be something that the secular legal system should generally avoid doing.

[1] Cf. Paul v. Watchtower Bible & Tract Soc’y of N.Y., Inc., 819 F.2d 875 (9th Cir. 1987) (rejecting, on Free Exercise Clause, a claim that the organized “shunning” of a dissenting religious group member constitutes tortious infliction of emotional distress); Hubbard v. J Message Grp. Corp., 325 F. Supp. 3d 1198, 1216 (D.N.M. 2018) (likewise).

[2] See supra note 33.

[3] Such overt embrace of shaming, I expect, would be more likely for voluntary behavior; presumably the groups would be less likely to expressly defend shaming of the involuntarily victimized, such as rape victims; even when such shaming of victims does happen, I expect that it would be more likely to be denied by community leaders rather than overtly endorsed.

[4] That’s why I used this hypothetical, to avoid the complications that arise in, say, sexual assault cases, where some courts do allow pseudonymity even without reference to religious community norms and others don’t.

[5] To be sure, many of these groups wouldn’t view such behavior as grounds for excommunication; they may be open to people who sin but repent, especially when they do so in front of the community. One point of pseudonymity, though, is to avoid the need for public repentance.

[6] See Volokh, supra note 1, at 1369­–70 (citing the many cases that stress the public’s presumptive right to access information about who is using the courts).

[7] See, e.g., Presbyterian Church in U.S. v. Mary Elizabeth Blue Hull Memorial Presbyterian Church, 393 U.S. 440, 445–46 (1969).

[8] Id. at 450.

[9] See Commack Self-Serv. Kosher Meats, Inc. v. Weiss, 294 F.3d 415, 425 (2d Cir. 2002) (concluding that laws that aimed at preventing mislabeling of food as kosher improperly favored the Orthodox Jewish understanding of what is kosher, and thus “t[ook] sides in a religious matter, effectively discriminating in favor of the Orthodox Hebrew view of dietary requirements”); id. at 426 (“As a result, because the challenged laws interpret ‘kosher’ as synonymous with the views of one branch, those of Orthodox Judaism, the State has effectively aligned itself with one side of an internal debate within Judaism. This it may not do.”); Pleasant Glade Assembly of God v. Schubert, 264 S.W.3d 1 (Tex. 2008) (refusing to allow liability for emotional distress—as opposed to physical injury—stemming from a religious ritual in which church members were “laying hands” on plaintiff as a means of exorcism, and concluding that, “[b]ecause providing a remedy for the very real, but religiously motivated emotional distress in this case would require us to take sides in what is essentially a religious controversy, we cannot resolve that dispute”).

[10] Larson v. Valente, 456 U.S. 228, 230, 244, 246–47 (1982) (concluding that a rule that draws such a line “clearly grants denominational preferences of the sort consistently and firmly deprecated in our precedents”).

[11] Carson v. Makin, 142 S. Ct. 1987, 1997 (2022) (holding that exclusion of religious institutions from generally available funding programs is generally unconstitutional).

The post Protecting People from Their Own Religious Communities: Other Community Members' Religious Interests appeared first on Reason.com.

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China Puts Megacity Chengdu Under Lockdown As Zero-Covid Intensifies

China Puts Megacity Chengdu Under Lockdown As Zero-Covid Intensifies

Asian stocks tumbled after China announced the metropolis of Chengdu would lock down its 21 million residents as authorities battled a new Covid-19 outbreak.

In China’s Western region, officials in Chengdu launched massive Covid testing and requested residents to abide by “stay home in principle” from 6 pm on Thursday. The new measure allows one person per household the ability to procure essential items at places like supermarkets. 

“The current state of epidemic control is abnormal, complex, and grim,” officials said, adding the lockdown aims to “decisively arrest the spread of the outbreak and guarantee the health of all citizens.”

Chengdu is the biggest city to shut down since Shanghai’s lockdown earlier this year. The move to lock down Chengdu will generate even more macro instability for the world’s second-largest economy. It accounts for 1.7% of the national economy and is one of southwestern China’s most important manufacturing hubs. 

As the capital of Sichuan province — the 6th-largest province in terms of annual GDP — the metro area is home to 96 listed companies in the automobile, aerospace, IT, machinery, and pharmaceutical industries. 

Automakers, including Toyota Motor Corp. and VW China. Foxconn Technology Group, the world’s largest assembler of Apple Inc.’s iPhones and other devices. All have manufacturing facilities in the city. 

The lockdown was unexpected and caught investors off guard: Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index slumped almost 2%, and CSI 300 Index dropped by nearly 1% to its lowest in three months. 

Some US-listed Chinese stocks declined on the lockdown news. Alibaba traded 2% lower in the US premarket, while EV stocks such as Nio, XPeng, and Li Auto were down 3.4%, 3.1%, and 2.2%, respectively. 

A spillover of pessimism from China leaked into European luxury stocks after HSBC analyst Erwan Rambourg downgraded LVMH, Hermes, Richemont, and Swatch to a “hold” from “buy.” Rambourg wrote in a note he was more cautious about the short-term industry outlook, and valuation at these levels didn’t make sense. 

Analyst commentary (provided by Bloomberg) was overwhelmingly negative due to the uncertainty zero-Covid produces for the Chinese economy.

Bloomberg Intelligence, (Marvin Chen) 

  • “China’s Covid-zero policy will continue to be a risk for markets and sporadic lockdowns mean any reopening recovery will likely be a bumpy one” 
  • “Local governments may ramp up efforts to contain rising Covid cases ahead of the 20th party congress” 

Union Bancaire Privee, (Vey-Sern Ling) 

  • Sporadic Covid-19 lockdowns such as this will pressure already-weak economic conditions in China but we do not expect the Covid-zero policy to shift substantially ahead of the 20th party congress in October” 

AutoML Capital, (Rebecca Lim) 

  • “This worsens the worry of China’s economic slowdown, deepening of property crisis and even contagious to banking crisis if bad-loan continues” 
  • The “stringent zero-Covid measures have been enforced for more than 2 years and the wider economic environment will have a bigger impact”

All residents in the southwestern Chinese city will be confined to their homes until they test negative for Covid. There was no guidance from officials on how long the lockdown will persist. 

Also, in the Nanshan district in Shenzhen, tighter Covid measures beginning today through Sunday will close indoor public places, including cinemas, gyms, and bars, and halt in-person tutoring services to contain an outbreak. 

New lockdowns will pressure Beijing’s economic planners as the economy slips into the abyss as a worsening property market slowdown is causing turmoil among developers. 

China’s playbook to unleash stimulus primarily focused on infrastructure spending might not be enough to counter Covid lockdowns and a property market slump. 

Tyler Durden
Thu, 09/01/2022 – 07:06

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Iran Greenlights Bitcoin, Crypto Payments For Imports: Report

Iran Greenlights Bitcoin, Crypto Payments For Imports: Report

Authored by Shawn Amick via BitcoinMagazine.com,

  • Iran has passed legislation establishing a legal framework for bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

  • Under the new law, cryptocurrency can be used as payment for imports to the country by government and local businesses.

  • The law also addresses fuel supply and electrical consumption for bitcoin mining.

Iran passed an act which enables the use of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency payments for imports through a comprehensive legal framework, per a report from local news outlet Tasnim.

According to the report, Iranian Minister of Industry, Mine and Trade Reza Fatemi Amin revealed that the recently passed law defines regulations on cryptocurrencies, addresses supply concerns for fuel and electricity costs for mining and provides authorization for the administration to use cryptocurrencies.

Minister Fatemi Amin reportedly reiterated the authorization was an agreement between the Ministry of Industry and the Central Bank –– arguably suggesting a multi-departmental consensus on the viability of bitcoin as a means for international payments.

Additionally, Fatemi Amin also noted that local businesses will be able to import vehicles by using bitcoin, instead of the U.S. dollar or the euro. Tasnim highlighted the move comes on the heels of an August 9 announcement by the head of Iran’s Trade Promotion Organization (TPO) saying the country registered its first import order processed with cryptocurrency. The order was reportedly valued over $10 million.

Harkening back to May of last year, Iran previously banned the mining of bitcoin citing power grid concerns. Additionally, the Irananian central bank also banned the trading of cryptocurrencies mined outside of the country in the same month. The mining ban was later lifted in October just to be reimposed by December of the same year, once again citing power grid concerns.

Therefore, one could argue that Iran is taking this step towards comprehensive reform to take a firm and more long-standing stance on bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

Tyler Durden
Thu, 09/01/2022 – 06:30

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/7RiQe8v Tyler Durden

The New Abortion Prohibition Era


topicsfuture

Americans disagree about abortion. This is the understatement of 2022, yet it bears repeating in the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the June Supreme Court decision that returned abortion policy to state and federal legislatures. Ten states have already banned abortion and another four have prohibited abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, which amounts to nearly the same thing.

We already know what happens when governments try to impose prohibitions. We’ve seen it play out in gun control, immigration, sex work, the war on drugs, and other issues where large groups of people want or need something the government tells them they’re not allowed to have. The result is messy, deadly black markets.

The war on drugs has amply demonstrated the lengths to which governments will go to stop prohibited behavior. In the name of recreational drug prohibition, the state locks people up, steals their money, militarizes borders, wages war, and muddies international diplomacy. States abridge the voting rights, Second Amendment rights, and freedom of movement of hundreds of thousands of people associated with the sale and use of illegal drugs.

There is every reason to think that governments will do all this and more when it comes to abortion, which to pro-lifers represents a much graver threat than mere heroin or escorts. In fact, the drug-war apparatus that is already in place can be smoothly extended to the drugs already used in more than half of the roughly 650,000 abortions that happen in the U.S. annually.

We are entering the new abortion prohibition era, and we must reckon with its true costs.

There are plenty of pro-life libertarians, including several at Reason. They argue that the role of the state is to protect life, liberty, and property, that a fetus is a life, and therefore there is a justifiable state interest in banning abortion. This is a respectable view with a long history. Any good-faith conversation about abortion begins with a recognition that there may indeed be competing moral or legal claims between the woman and the fetus—between the mother and her child, if you like.

Most Americans think that, especially in the first trimester, it is permissible to resolve those claims in favor of the mother. A significant majority—about 85 percent—consistently tell pollsters they believe abortion in the first trimester is permissible. And more than 90 percent of the abortions that are actually performed are in the first trimester. Most Americans do not see the typical abortion as something that should be punishable in the way that murder is punishable. People arrive at this shared destination by walking many convoluted roads: through the rights to privacy, self-defense, or bodily autonomy; through feminism, environmentalism, or faith.

The fact that most Americans believe something doesn’t tell us much about whether that thing is right or true, of course. After all, a majority of Americans also tell pollsters they believe Atlantis was real.

But even if large majorities shared the pro-life view, anti-abortion laws are still very different from laws against murder in an important respect. When there is such deep, sincerely held disagreement about matters of such personal import, when hundreds of thousands of women every year personally weigh the factors and decide that an abortion is the right choice, that is a signal that new prohibition regimes will be extremely costly, and perhaps ultimately unjustifiable. Not everything bad must be banned. In the last three decades, abortions have fallen precipitously, from a high of 1.4 million in 1990, even as the law has remained largely unchanged, suggesting that even those who believe abortion to be a moral nightmare have other options at their disposal and that those other tools were working. We should seriously consider whether the outcomes are better all around if governments leave it to individuals to persuade each other, help each other, and talk to each other.

To do that, Americans need to be able to speak freely about abortion. They will need to share information about how abortions work and who gets them. And they’ll need to do that in broad daylight, so that bad information doesn’t go unchecked. This will be more difficult in states that choose more draconian criminalization regimes.

Old federal laws, still on the books, about mailing abortion information are about to become extremely relevant. But most of us don’t learn important information via the U.S. Postal Service these days; we get it online. Naturally, legislators of both parties are immediately keen to meddle with that flow.

In July, a group of congressional Democrats sent a letter to Google, demanding restrictions on search results for abortion-related terms that refer users to anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) took things a step further, introducing a bill calling for the closure of the centers under the rubric of “disinformation.” Republicans responded with a measured and principled defense of free speech and free association. Just kidding! They wrote a letter to Google threatening legal action if Google ceded to Democratic demands.

Model legislation being circulated by the anti-abortion group National Right to Life is forthright about its desire to restrict speech: Aiding and abetting an abortion, the group suggests, should “include, but not be limited to: (1) giving instructions over the telephone, the internet, or any other medium of communication regarding self-administered abortions or means to obtain an illegal abortion; (3) hosting or maintaining a website, or providing internet service, that encourages or facilitates efforts to obtain an illegal abortion; (4) offering or providing illegal ‘abortion doula’ services; and (5) providing referrals to an illegal abortion provider [numbering in original].”

Abortion will join sex work and election disinformation as a justification for restricting online speech, both personal and commercial.

Free speech isn’t the only arena where many people will pay for abortion prohibitions with their liberties and privacy. To criminalize abortion is to make criminals of pregnant women and their doctors, as well as their mothers, their boyfriends, their Uber drivers, their pharmacists, their doulas, or anyone else who plays a part. Many opponents of abortion seek to downplay the harsh logic of prohibition and its consequences for those it is meant to help. But the incarcerated drug user and the child in a border camp beg to differ. Soon this cast will have another character: the bleeding woman forced to lie to her emergency room doctor.

As with other prohibitions, poor people and minorities will suffer most. People without resources in states with harsh restrictions will carry unwanted babies to term and, if current trends hold, they will most often keep them despite financial or personal difficulties they will face in doing so. Wealthy women will be able to travel to get abortions, and they will be able to hire lawyers to get them out of trouble when they get caught. In those cases, the new laws won’t stop those women from getting abortions; instead they will simply get abortions secretly, unsupported, at greater expense, and far from home.

It’s been a while since first-​trimester abortions were illegal anywhere in the United States. But we have spent the decades since Roe experimenting with all kinds of other prohibitions, and all we have for our trouble is a trail of death and destruction.

The post The New Abortion Prohibition Era appeared first on Reason.com.

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