Everyday Erinyes #370

Posted by Joanne Dixon at 2:52 pm Politics

May 142023

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

Between an effective antibody for all the CoViDs (SARS-2) – mentioned in a short take today – and the promises of gene therapy, it’s been an impressive week. Yes, I realize I’ve put up a lot of good news/potentially good news today – but hey, it’s Mother’s Day.
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Gene therapy helps combat some forms of blindness – and ongoing clinical trials are looking to extend these treatments to other diseases

New gene therapies are helping to treat certain forms of inherited blindness.
GettyImages

Jean Bennett, University of Pennsylvania

An estimated 295 million people suffer from visual impairment globally. Around 43 million of those people are living with blindness. While not every form of blindness can be cured, recent scientific breakthroughs have uncovered new ways to treat some forms of inherited blindness through gene therapy.

Jean Bennett is a gene therapy expert and a professor emeritus of ophthalmology at the University of Pennsylvania. She and her laboratory developed the first gene therapy drug for a genetic disease to be approved in the U.S. The drug, Luxturna, treats patients with biallelic RPE65 mutation-associated retinal dystrophy, a rare genetic disorder that causes visual impairments and blindness in patients early in life.

In March, Bennett spoke at the 2023 Imagine Solutions Conference in Naples, Florida, about what gene therapy is, why it matters and the success she and her team have had helping the blind to see. The Conversation caught up with Bennett after the conference. Her edited answers are below.

Jean Bennett speaks at the 2023 Imagine Solutions Conference.

What is gene therapy and how does it work?

Gene therapy is a set of techniques that harness DNA or RNA to treat or prevent disease. Gene therapy treats disease in three primary ways: by substituting a disease-causing gene with a healthy new or modified copy of that gene; turning genes on or off; and injecting a new or modified gene into the body.

How has gene therapy changed how doctors treat genetic eye diseases and blindness?

In the past, many doctors did not think it necessary to identify the genetic basis of eye disease because treatment was not yet available. However, a few specialists, including me and my collaborators, identified these defects in our research, convinced that someday treatment would be made possible. Over time, we were able to create a treatment designed for individuals with particular gene defects that lead to congenital blindness.

This development of gene therapy for inherited disease has inspired other groups around the world to initiate clinical trials targeting other genetic forms of blindness, such as choroideremia, achromatopsia, retinitis pigmentosa and even age-related macular degeneration, all of which lead to vision loss. There are at least 40 clinical trials enrolling patients with other genetic forms of blinding disease.

Gene therapy treatments are now available in pharmacies and operating rooms all over the world.

Gene therapy is even being used to restore vision to people whose photoreceptors – the cells in the retina that respond to light – have completely degenerated. This approach uses optogenetic therapy, which aims to revive those degenerated photoreceptors by adding light-sensing molecules to cells, thereby drastically improving a person’s vision.

You created one of the first gene therapies approved in the US. What is the current state of the clinical use of gene therapy?

There are now many approved gene therapies in the U.S., but the majority are combined with cell therapies in which a cell is modified in a dish and then injected back into the patient.

Woman in lab coat, face mask, goggles and gloves squeezes syringe into petri dish — Many forms of gene therapy are helping to treat blindness.
GettyImages

The majority of those therapies target different forms of cancer, although there are several for devastating inherited diseases. The drug Skysona is a new injectable gene therapy medication that treats boys ages 4 to 17 with cerebral adrenoleukodystrophy, a genetic disease in which a buildup of very-long-chain fatty acids in the brain can lead to death.

The gene therapy that my team and I developed was the first FDA-approved project involving injection of a gene therapy directly into a person – in this case, into the retina. Only one other FDA-approved gene therapy is directly administered to the body – one that targets spinal muscular atrophy, a disease that causes progressive muscle weakness and eventually death. The drug, Zolgensma, is injected intravenously into babies and children diagnosed with the disease, allowing them to live as healthy, active children.

There are now more than two dozen FDA-approved cell and gene therapies, including CAR T-cell therapies – in which T cells, a type of immune system cells, are modified in the laboratory to better attack cancer cells in the body – and therapies for various blood diseases.

What are you currently working on that you’re most excited about?

I am very excited about some upcoming clinical trials that my team will soon initiate to target some other devastating blinding diseases. We will incorporate a new test of functional vision – how your eyes, brain and the visual pathways between them work together to help a person move in the world. This test utilizes a virtual reality game that is not only fun for the user but promises to provide an objective measure of the person’s functional vision. I hope that our virtual reality test will inform us of any potential benefits from the treatments and also serve as a useful outcome measure for other gene and cell therapy clinical trials involving vision.

What are the biggest challenges gene therapy faces?

The biggest challenges involve systemic diseases, or diseases affecting the entire body rather than a single organ or body part. For those diseases, super-high doses of gene therapy reagents must be delivered. Such diseases involve not only technical challenges – such as how to manufacture enormous amounts of gene therapy compounds without contaminating them – but also difficulties ensuring that the treatment targets diseased tissues without causing toxic immune side effects. That level of a problem does not exist with the eye, where relatively small doses are used and exposure to the rest of the body is limited.

Another challenge is how to address diseases in which the target gene is very large. Current approaches to delivering treatments into cells lack the capacity to hold large genes.

Cost remains a key issue in this effort – gene therapy drugs are enormously expensive. As drug manufacturers are able to refine this technique, gene therapy drugs may become more commonplace, causing their price to drop as a result.

Jean Bennett, Professor Emeritus of Ophthalmology; Cell and Developmental Biology, University of Pennsylvania

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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AMT, this news carries a lot of potential. Some of it will probably not work as expected and hoped. But even if only a few of the possibilities pan out, the results could be amazing. I’m thinking today of the pain mothers of children with some kind of genetic problem have had to suffer ocer the millennia, and hoping that may someday be a thing of the past.

The Furies and I will be back.

Everyday Erinyes #369

Posted by Joanne Dixon at 4:44 pm Politics

May 072023

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

Messaging. We all know that our greatest difficulty is in messaging. When we achieve things, conditions improve foreveryone. With progessive administrators, the economy getsbetter. With progressive prosecutors, crime goesdown. And on and on. But – getting people whp don’t already think progressively to see it – That seems to be a Sisyphean challenge. And ths article on Socrates, aimed at helping people to message, really almost does the opposite. I mean – look at how ir worked for Socrates. However, his techniques do help us as individuals to understamd what we are talking about, what we know, and what we don’t know, which can be much more important. I’ll share what I believe to be a better guideline on bridging the gap between knowing and messaging below
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What Socrates’ ‘know nothing’ wisdom can teach a polarized America

The most important part of knowledge, in Socrates’ view? Knowing how much you don’t know.
Yoeml/iStock via Getty Images Plus

J. W. Traphagan, The University of Texas at Austin and John J. Kaag, UMass Lowell

A common complaint in America today is that politics and even society as a whole are broken. Critics point out endless lists of what should be fixed: the complexity of the tax code, or immigration reform, or the inefficiency of government.

But each dilemma usually comes down to polarized deadlock between two competing visions and everyone’s conviction that theirs is the right one. Perhaps this white-knuckled insistence on being right is the root cause of the societal fissure – why everything seems so irreparably wrong.

As religion and philosophy scholars, we would argue that our apparent national impasse points to a lack of “epistemic humility,” or intellectual humility – that is, an inability to acknowledge, empathize with and ultimately compromise with opinions and perspectives different from one’s own. In other words, Americans have stopped listening.

So why is intellectual humility in such scarce supply? Of course, the quickest answer might be the right one: that humility runs against most people’s fear of being mistaken, and the zero-sum view that being right means someone else has to be totally wrong.

But we think that the problem is more complex and perhaps more interesting. We believe epistemic humility presents something of a twofold danger that makes being humble frightening – and has, ever since Socrates first put it at the heart of Western philosophy.

Knowing you don’t know

If your best friend told you that you were the wisest of all human beings, perhaps you would be inclined to smile in agreement and take the dear friend for a beer. But when the ancient Athenian Socrates was delivered this news, he responded with sincere and utter disbelief – even though his friend had confirmed it with the Delphic oracle, the fortune-telling authority of the ancient world.

This nascent humility – “No, get out of here, I’m definitely not the wisest” – helped spark what became arguably the greatest philosophical life of all time. Despite relative old age, Socrates immediately embarked on a journey to find someone wiser than himself and spent many days seeking out the sages of the ancient world, a quest Plato recounts in his “Apology of Socrates.”

The problem? He discovered that the sages thought they knew more than they actually did. Eventually, Socrates concluded that he himself was, in fact, the wisest of all men, because at least he “knew that he didn’t know.”

This is not to say that Socrates knew nothing: He demonstrates time and again that he knows a lot and routinely demonstrated good judgment. Rather, he acknowledged there were definite limitations to the knowledge he could claim.

This is the birth of “epistemic humility” in Western philosophy: the acknowledgment that one’s blind spots and shortcomings are an invitation for ongoing intellectual investigation and growth.

A coffee mug, pencils, pen and cookies next to a note reading 'The only thing I know is that I know nothing – Socrates.' — Reminder to self: Keep it humble.
tumsasedgars/iStock via Getty Images Plus

Provoking the powerful

But this mindset can feel dangerous to other people – especially if they feel absolutely certain in their convictions.

In ancient Athens, as much as in the U.S. today, being perceived as right translated into money and power. The city-state’s culture was dominated by the Sophists, who taught rhetoric to nobles and politicians, and the Poets, ancient playwrights. Greek theater and epic poetry were closely related to religion, and their creators were treated as mouthpieces for aesthetic and moral truth.

What’s more, theater and poetry were also major moneymakers, which motivated artists to adopt a mentality of “fail fast, fail better,” with an eye to eventually proving correct and getting paid.

By critically interrogating the idols and polarized views of his culture, Socrates threatened the power holders of his city. A constantly questioning figure is a direct threat to individuals who spend their lives defending unquestioned belief – whether it’s belief in themselves, their superiors or their gods.

Take Euthyphro, for example, one of Socrates’ principal interlocutors. Euthyphro is so sure that he knows the difference between right and wrong that he is bringing his own father to trial. Socrates quickly disabuses him of his certainty, famously debating him about the true meaning of piety.

Or take Meletus, the man who eventually brought Socrates to trial on accusations of corrupting youth. In Plato’s account of the trial, it takes Socrates no time to show this “good patriot,” as Meletus calls himself, that he does not understand what patriotism truly means. Without any pretensions to knowing the absolute truth, Socrates is able to shed light on the underlying assumptions around him.

It’s frustrating to read the Platonic dialogues, the works of philosophy that recount Socrates’ life and teaching, in part because Socrates rarely claims the final word on any subject. In short, he gives more questions than answers. But what remains constant is his openness to uncertainty that keeps his inquiry on the move, pushing his inquiries further and deeper.

Paying the price

The second danger of epistemic humility is now probably in view. It’s the danger that Socrates faced when he was brought to trial for corrupting Athens’ youth – the danger to the humble skeptics themselves.

He is brought up on two very serious charges. The first was an accusation that he taught students to make the weaker argument appear to be the stronger – which is actually what the Sophists did, not Socrates. The second was that he had invented new gods – again, he didn’t do that; poets and playwrights did.

What was he really guilty of? Perhaps only this: Socrates criticized the arrogant self-assertion of his culture’s influencers, and they brought him to trial, which concluded in his death sentence.

Vibrant red and purple flowers behind a statue of a slumped-over man. — He asked the big questions, and he paid a price.
Roland Gerth/The Image Bank via Getty Images

Socrates taught that being humble about one’s own views was a necessary step in searching for truth – perhaps the most essential one. That was and perhaps still is a revolutionary view, because it forces us to challenge preconceived ideas about what we believe, what we worship and where we tap meaning. He placed himself in the middle of Athenians’ sharply polarized debates about what truth and goodness were, and he was the one who got hit.

“Humility like darkness,” wrote American philosopher Henry David Thoreau, “reveals the heavenly lights.” Put another way, humility about the verity, accuracy and wisdom of one’s ideas can reveal the fact that others have understandable reasons for thinking as they do — as long as you try to see the world as they are seeing it. In contrast, arrogance tends to extinguish the “heavenly light” about what we still don’t fully understand.

Being humble about one’s position in the world is not an invitation for a post-truth, anything-goes opinion free-for-all. Truth – the idea of truth – matters. And we can pursue it together, if we are always open to being wrong.

J. W. Traphagan, Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies, The University of Texas at Austin and John J. Kaag, Professor of Philosophy, UMass Lowell

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, the life and teachings of Socrates are certainly instructive as to why people who want simple, short, and easily grasped ideas consider those of us who want facts, hard data, and reality to be elitists who look down on them. But how to turn that knowledge nto actual messaging is something else entirely.

I have not seen a better summation of what it takes to message to Republican voters than this, from our own Lona (emphasis mine):

What Americans need are short simple messages from Democrats that are easy to understand…uhh much like Republican messaging, you mean? I hope Democrats learn the art of messaging in time. Short, directed at creating a gut-feeling not so much as giving all relevant information and easily remembered. Creating that is about the only thing Republicans are good at. Democrats will have a harder time, because theirs will have to have some truth in it.

Of course, knowing what we need to create is no the same as creating it. But then, if you’re not sure where you’re going, you’ll probably end up someplace else. At least having a destination is a start.

The Furies and I will be back.

Everyday Erinyes #368

Posted by Joanne Dixon at 4:24 pm Politics

Apr 302023

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

This week, ProPublica is concerned about lethal injection. And heaven knows that is a problem (not that all capital punishment is not a problem, and ProPublica is well aware of that. But the abuses of lethal injection do cry out to heaven.) And I knew before I saw the title of this article that it would be about lethal injection – because it was the second article in the newsletter, and the first one was obviously about lethal injection. But the title did strike me as having multiple applications, and not least in the area of women’s health. And in other areas, including some that have not occurred to me.

Final scene from Theodora (Handel) as staged by Peter Sellars.
He chose modern time and allusions to Texas to emphasize the barbarity of lethal injection. Photo by Alastair Muir/Shutterstock

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“A Courtroom Is a Really Lousy Place to Decide Science”

by Lauren Gill and Daniel Moritz-Rabson

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

In 2017, as lawyers for prisoners in Ohio sought to spare their clients from lethal injection, they challenged one of the state’s key witnesses: Daniel Buffington.

As he had done elsewhere, the Florida-based pharmacist had submitted written testimony saying that prisoners would not feel pain from the three-drug cocktail administered by executioners. But the lawyers for the men on death row argued that Buffington was unqualified to testify in an upcoming hearing, noting that he had not administered general anesthesia or conducted research on midazolam, the key sedative in the execution protocol.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Michael Merz denied the motion to bar Buffington’s testimony. And when prisoners’ lawyers challenged the pharmacist again in court, the judge stood his ground.

“He’s certainly better able to understand and explain induction of anesthesia than I am,” the judge said of Buffington. “I have no experience of induction of anesthesia except having had anesthesia induced on my own body and watching it with my wife and my son, and that’s far less than this witness has.”

Merz admitted Buffington as an expert witness in that proceeding and considered his testimony.

Legal experts say such exchanges illustrate a critical weakness in the judicial system: While the law relies in part on lawyers to scrutinize experts, judges must also evaluate a host of technical issues for themselves, weighing questions like whether a forensic technique is legitimate science or whether a particular drug will anesthetize a prisoner. And some experts say jurists are not always well equipped to do so.

“It’s very, very hard,” Patrick Schiltz, the chief U.S. district judge for the District Court of Minnesota, said in a telephone interview. Schiltz is also the chair of the advisory committee on evidence rules for the Judicial Conference of the United States, the governing body of the federal court system.

Before 1993, judges had to decide only if the testimony of an expert was consistent with generally accepted methodologies in the field. That year, though, the Supreme Court issued a landmark decision in the case Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals Inc., setting a new standard for federal jurists evaluating scientific testimony. The ruling instructed federal judges to rigorously scrutinize the science directly, considering factors like whether the expert’s theory had undergone peer review. Six years later, in a 1999 ruling, the court strengthened judges’ gatekeeping power by applying the standard to all expert witnesses, not just those giving scientific testimony.

Together, these mandates presented a significant challenge for judges, particularly in the arena of capital punishment and lethal injection, where debates often involve complex and evolving science.

“Sometimes we have really, really hard technical issues,” Schiltz said. “And it is a criticism of Daubert that it asks the judges to do something that judges aren’t particularly well suited to do.”

Jules Epstein, a professor at Temple University’s law school, was more blunt. “A courtroom is a really lousy place to decide science,” he said.

Complicating matters is the fact that a significant portion of the judiciary has inconsistently applied the rules for admitting expert witnesses. Federal judges are supposed to act as gatekeepers that consider whether there’s more than a 50% chance that the expert’s opinion is reliable, a standard known as the preponderance of the evidence. But one recent study of more than 1,000 federal court opinions determining the admissibility of expert testimony in 2020 found that in 13% of cases, the standard for admissibility used was less stringent than the law demands, and judges actually presumed that the expert’s testimony would be admissible.

In bench trials, which take place in front of a judge instead of a jury, judges also can allow experts to testify, then decide later how much weight to give their testimony. This has happened at least twice in method of execution cases where states have hired Buffington.

A judge’s initial decision on an expert witness can have far-reaching consequences. Legal experts told ProPublica and Type Investigations that jurists look to what other judges decided in past cases when they are weighing an expert’s qualifications. “Being admitted once as an expert essentially guarantees acceptance going forward,” Chris Fabricant, the director of strategic litigation at the Innocence Project, wrote in an email.

As ProPublica and Type have reported, seven states have hired Buffington to vouch for their execution protocols since 2015, when he first appeared in a lethal injection case. Judges have allowed him to testify in nearly every instance, with the exception of the Ohio case, where Merz later excluded him. Even then, it was not due to his qualifications but because he did not list his prior expert testimony in a way that complied with federal rules. (Merz declined to comment on the case, saying the court’s practice is not to speak about past decisions. Buffington has said in court that opposing counsel took issue with the formatting of his disclosure form. “That information wasn’t conveyed in time to reformat the form,” Buffington testified in Arkansas in 2019. “We were working on that, but the judge made the decision that there was a time threshold and precluded on that.”)

Buffington declined to be interviewed about the findings of the ProPublica-Type investigation, but a spokesperson for the pharmacist said Buffington has significant training and professional expertise in the areas of his testimony, including pharmacology and toxicology, and has held positions over the years in various medical organizations, including the American Medical Association and the American Pharmacists Association. “Dr. Buffington’s pharmacology training and professional experience make him well qualified to provide expert opinions on medicines and their effects in a wide range of areas,” the spokesperson wrote. “The core training, curriculum and clinical practice experience within the Doctor of Pharmacy degree and practice of pharmacy is centered on the domain of pharmacology.”

The spokesperson also dismissed the criticism by prisoners’ experts. Disagreement between expert witnesses, the spokesperson said, “is a hallmark of the American justice system. It is expected and utterly unremarkable that for every case in which Dr. Buffington served as an expert witness, the opposing side will disagree with his testimony.”

In cases unrelated to lethal injection, however, some judges have also challenged Buffington’s credentials, criticizing him for crafting what they considered to be thinly researched opinions and for attempting to testify beyond the scope of his expertise.

In 2018, for instance, a judge found him unqualified to testify as an expert in a case brought by the widow of a veteran accusing the Department of Veterans Affairs of negligence in her husband’s death. “Dr. Buffington is not competent to testify regarding the standard of care — or breach thereof — by medical doctors, nurses, osteopathic physicians, or physician’s assistants, as these are different professions from that of a pharmacist,” wrote Judge James Randal Hall, chief U.S. District Court judge for Georgia’s Southern District. (Neither Hall’s office nor Buffington responded to requests for comment about the ruling.)

In another case, a judge scoffed at Buffington’s work, which he said lacked sufficient evidence or analysis to back up the pharmacist’s conclusions. “Buffington’s opinion is entirely without any intellectual rigor or any indicia of reliability,” wrote U.S. Magistrate Judge Mark Lane, who in 2017 excluded Buffington’s testimony in a case about regulatory compliance for a medication guide. (A spokesperson for Buffington said Buffington “testified to specific FDA guidelines” and the judge’s statement “contradicted the FDA’s established requirements.”)

The Judicial Conference has recognized a need to clarify the rules for judges. Last year, it proposed amendments to the Federal Rules of Evidence, clarifying language to underscore the responsibility that judges have to be gatekeepers of expert testimony. The amendments will go into effect in December 2023 if the Supreme Court adopts them and Congress does not reject them.

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Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, the founders of the United States certainly did not have all the scientific knowledge which our scientists have today. And I will not guarantee that everything we have is 199% accurate – I think it’s better described as “the best knowledge we have until new knowledge comes along.” But it still beats the heck out of legal theory when there is a question of fact. And the harm which can come from ignoring science in favor of myth or gut feelings or “sincerely held religious belief” is incalculable.

The Furies and I will be back.

Everyday Erinyes #367

Posted by Joanne Dixon at 6:05 pm Politics

Apr 232023

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

Last week was Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) and I was planning to use this article, but the fact that is was also income tax deadline weekend caused me to save it a week so that there would be less distraction and people would be able to think about it – about what we can do every day, to survive fascism and to help others survive fascism.

Some of us, of course, are living under fascism more than others. California and Florida may both have Disney theme parks, but living in one is a very different experience from living in the other – and that is particularly true for marginalized groups, but there is some effect on everyone. No one survives fascism alone.
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Defying the Holocaust didn’t just mean uprising and revolt: Remembering Jews’ everyday resistance on Yom HaShoah and year-round

Samuel Willenberg, the last survivor of the Treblinka uprising, poses for a picture at his art studio in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 2010.
AP Photo/Oded Balilty

Chad Gibbs, College of Charleston

Richard Glazar insisted that no one survived the Holocaust without help. To this Prague-born Jewish survivor, who endured Nazi imprisonment at Treblinka and Theresienstadt, plus years in hiding, it was impossible to persevere without others’ support. Glazar conceded that some of his fellow Treblinka survivors were “loners,” but he nevertheless believed that they “survived because they were carried by someone, someone who cared for them as much, or almost as much as for themselves.”

Carrying someone else took many forms. For fellow Treblinka prisoner Samuel Goldberg, a Polish Jew born in a small town called Bagatelle, it was the moment the women of his work detail stood up to a guard to save Goldberg’s life. For those around Glazar, it was the times he brought them more to eat because his position as a fence builder gave him chances to buy food outside the camp. Still more prisoners benefited from a friend willing to literally hold them up during roll call so no guard would notice they were sick – a near-certain death sentence.

In a place meant to destroy all Jewish life, the smallest acts of support and comfort were resistance.

On Aug. 2, 1943, the Treblinka II extermination camp in Nazi-occupied Poland was the site of one of the most dramatic acts of armed rebellion throughout the Shoah, as the Holocaust is called in Hebrew. Several hundred prisoners managed to escape, though most were recaptured and killed. Nonetheless, at least 70 people survived to recount what happened there. Without their actions, the camp might have continued to operate, and we would likely know next to nothing of its history.

In years of research on this extermination camp, I’ve come to place as much importance on the long trail of smaller acts as on the famous day itself. Long before the revolt, resistance was commonplace at Treblinka. It had to be. Here and elsewhere, prisoner revolt would have been impossible without those everyday acts of support that laid foundations for more.

A black and white photo shows a huge smoke cloud rising across a field. — A clandestine photograph of the burning death camp Treblinka II, taken by eyewitness Franciszek Ząbecki during the uprising on Aug. 2, 1943.
Franciszek Ząbecki/Wikimedia Commons

Defiance and dignity

Between July 1942 and November 1943, Nazi Germany killed as many as 925,000 people at Treblinka II. The vast majority of these victims were Jews, though the regime also murdered several thousand Romani people there.

This terrible place was unlike most other Nazi camps in that its sole purpose was the destruction of life. There were no slave labor industries or construction projects. The Jews responsible for the revolt were among the several hundred men and women kept alive to maintain facilities, sort the belongings of the dead, and dispose of the bodies. As the historian Michael Berenbaum put it, Treblinka was “a factory whose end product was dead Jews.”

In such a hell, life itself is resistance, but those held at Treblinka pushed back against Nazi designs for their destruction in every way possible. Early organized efforts took the form of escapes to warn other Jews. Abraham Krzepicki, for example, escaped Treblinka and went back to the Warsaw Ghetto to tell of what the camp really was – and later died there, fighting in the ghetto’s 1943 uprising.

A black and white photo shows women and children in coats walking beside cattle cars. — Deportation to Treblinka from the Jewish ghetto in Siedlce, Poland, in 1942.
Wikimedia Commons

These messengers of truth helped expose Nazi lies and give others the chance to try to go into hiding, fight or jump from trains.

Still, most people targeted by the Third Reich could not avoid transport to Treblinka or other camps even if they knew what awaited them there. For some, resistance was the way they carried themselves on the way to a certain death, such as saying prayers like the Shema Yisrael. Condemned for being Jewish, they steadfastly remained so to the end.

Samuel Willenberg, who was the last survivor of the Treblinka revolt when he died in 2016, remembered how a young woman named Ruth Dorfmann asked only if the gas would hurt, and calmly acted with such unshakable dignity that he felt compelled many years later to sculpt her final moments.

‘Choiceless choices’

Court testimonies, oral histories, survivors’ memoirs and other sources show that over months of concerted planning, Treblinka prisoners’ “Organizing Committee” laid the groundwork for the August rebellion by building a network of trusted men and women. Organizers found ways to place them in jobs that gave prisoner planners complete access to the camp.

That process was a winding and perilous road. Three earlier plans failed, and Nazi guards killed many Jews they suspected of resistance. It took at least eight months of concerted effort to finally pull off the revolt.

Though resistance at Treblinka eventually meant armed revolt, it could not have achieved that end without the countless little rebellions that came before. The same was true in Warsaw and throughout Nazi-controlled Europe. At its core, resistance is the way a person or a people chooses to stand against the challenges thrown at them. That holds true even if those options are what Holocaust scholar Lawrence Langer called “choiceless choices” between one terrible outcome and another.

In the Warsaw Ghetto, where hundreds of thousands of Jews were crammed into inhumane conditions, residents held each other up by establishing soup kitchens and clandestine schools, organizing the removal of waste to prevent disease, and setting up everyday events to help people feel normal, even for one moment.

People look at a museum display. In the foreground, a single slice of bread sits on a table. — A piece of bread, equivalent of a daily food ration in the Warsaw Ghetto, displayed during a commemoration of residents’ suffering in the ghetto.
Wojtek Radwanski/AFP via GettyImages

Warsaw Jews worked to archive what they endured and documented the medical effects of the starvation they faced. Both acts demonstrated hope for a future that would remember their suffering and use its lessons to ease the pain of others.

Yom HaShoah, the annual day of remembrance for the Holocaust established by the Israeli government, occurs on the 27th of Nisan in the Hebrew calendar: the start of major fighting during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Thousands died in the Germans’ brutal retaliation.

A more complete picture

The full name of Yom HaShoah is “Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day” – which, along with its tie to the Warsaw Ghetto, links remembrance with resistance in no uncertain terms. This pairing held great importance for Israel’s identity as a new state and for a people so deeply wounded by years of terror.

Whenever we remember the Holocaust, we should remember the small rebellions, the individual stands, and the little acts of caring that Glazar found so important. Only in seeing that wider picture of everyday struggles can we understand the true variety and scope of resistance.

Chad Gibbs, Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies, College of Charleston

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, if we haven’t already begun thinking about what we can do, not just to survive but to help as many to survive as possible, the time is now. Before the camps open. Because we don’t want it to get to that point.

The Furies and I will be back.

Everyday Erinyes #366

Posted by Joanne Dixon at 2:48 pm Politics

Apr 162023

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

Starting tomorrow at sunset and running through Tuesday is Yom HaShoah (“Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day,”) and I was planning on sharing an article on it today. But tomorrow and Tuesday are also the last two days of tax season, and what I had in mind deserves more time and more attention than is likely to be available this weekend. So it will run next week. Instead, I’m sharing an article looking at the platform “Discord,” a (presumably unwitting) player in the most recent classified document scandal to hit the news.
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What is Discord? An internet researcher explains the social media platform at the center of Pentagon leak of top-secret intelligence

Some of the nation’s most closely guarded secrets were posted to a small online gaming community.
AP Photo/Jeff Chiu

Brianna Dym, University of Maine

The Justice Department on April 14, 2023, charged Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guard member, with unauthorized retention and transmission of national defense information and unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or material. Media reports suggest that Teixeira didn’t intend to leak the documents widely but rather shared them on a closed Discord community focused on playing war games.

Some of the documents were then shared to another Discord community with a larger following and became widely disseminated from there.

So what is Discord and should you worry about what people are encountering there?

Ever since the earliest days of the internet in the 1980s, getting online has meant getting involved in a community. Initially, there were dial-up chat servers, email lists and text-based discussion groups focused on specific interests.

Since the early 2000s, mass-appeal social media platforms have collected these small spaces into bigger ones, letting people find their own little corners of the internet, but only with interconnections to others. This allows social media sites to suggest new spaces users might join, whether it’s a local neighborhood discussion or a group with the same hobby, and sell specifically targeted advertising. But the small-group niche community is making a comeback with adults, and with kids and teens.

When Discord was initially released in 2015, many video games did not provide players with live voice chat to talk to one another while playing the game – or required them to pay premium prices to do so. Discord was an app that enabled real-time voice and text chatting, so friends could team up to conquer an obstacle, or just chat while exploring a game world. People do still use Discord for that, but these days most of the activity on the service is part of wider communities than just a couple of friends meeting up to play.

Examining Discord is part of my research into how scholars, developers and policymakers might design and maintain healthy online spaces.

A little bit old school

Discord first came onto my radar in 2017 when an acquaintance asked me to join a writer’s support group. Discord users can set up their own communities, called servers, with shareable links to join and choices about whether the server is public or private.

The writer’s group server felt like an old-school chat room, but with multiple channels segmenting out different conversations that folks were having. It reminded me of descriptions of early online chat and forum-based communities that hosted lengthy conversations between people all over the world.

The people in the writers’ server quickly realized that a few of our community members were teenagers under the age of 18. While the server owner had kept the space invite-only, he avoided saying “no” to anyone who requested access. It was supposed to be a supportive community for people working on writing projects, after all. Why would he want to exclude anyone?

He didn’t want to kick the teens out, but was able to make some adjustments using Discord’s server moderation system. Community members had to disclose their age, and anyone under 18 was given a special “role” that tagged them as a minor. That role prevented them from accessing channels that we marked as “not safe for work,” or “NSFW.” Some of the writers were working on explicit romance novels and didn’t want to solicit feedback from teenagers. And sometimes, adults just wanted to have their own space.

While we took care in constructing an online space safe for teens, there are still dangers present with an app like Discord. The platform is criticized for lacking parental controls. The terms of service state that no one under 13 should sign up for Discord, but many young people use the platform regardless.

Additionally, there are people who have used Discord to organize and encourage hateful rhetoric, including neo-Nazi ideologies. Others have used the platform to traffic child pornography.

However, Discord does maintain that these sorts of activities are illegal and unwelcome on its platform, and the company regularly bans servers and users it says perpetuate harm.

Options for safety

Every Discord server I’ve joined since then has had some safeguard around young people and inappropriate content. Whether it’s age-restricted channels or simply refusing to allow minors to join certain servers, the Discord communities I’m in share a heightened concern for keeping young people on the internet safe.

This does not mean that every Discord server will be safe at all times for its members, however. Parents should still take the time to talk with their kids about what they’re doing in their online spaces. Even something as innocuous as the popular children’s gaming environment Roblox can turn bad in the right setting.

And while the servers I’ve been involved in have been managed with care, not all Discord servers are regulated this way. In addition to servers lacking uniform regulation, account owners are able to lie about their age and identity when signing up for an account. And there are new ways for users to misbehave or annoy others on Discord, like spamming loud and inappropriate audio.

But, as with other modern social media platforms, there are safeguards to help administrators keep online communities safe for young people if they want to. Server members can label an entire server “NSFW,” going beyond single channel labels and locking minor accounts out of entire communities. But if they don’t, company officials can do it themselves. When accessing Discord on an iOS device, NSFW servers are not visible to anyone, even accounts belonging to adults. Additionally, Discord runs a Moderator Academy to support training up volunteer moderators who can appropriately handle a wide range of situations.

A screenshot of a Discord community — Discord is another way for people to gather and communicate online.
Discord

Stronger controls

Unlike many other current popular social media platforms, Discord servers often function as closed communities, with invitations required to join. There are also large open servers flooded with millions of users, but Discord’s design integrates content moderation tools to maintain order.

For example, a server creator has tight control over who has access to what, and what permissions each server member can have to send, delete or manage messages. In addition, Discord allows community members to add automations to a server, continuously monitoring activity to enforce moderation standards.

With these protections, people use servers to form tight-knit, closed spaces safe from chaotic public squares like Twitter and less visible to the wider online world. This can be positive, keeping spaces safer from bullies, trolls and disinformation spreaders. In my own research, young people have mentioned their Discord servers as the safe, private space they have online in contrast to messy public platforms.

However, moving online activity to more private spaces also means that those well-regulated, healthy communities are less discoverable for vulnerable groups that might need them. For example, new fathers looking for social support are sometimes more inclined to access it through open subreddits rather than Facebook groups.

Discord’s servers are not the first closed communities on the internet. They are, essentially, the same as old-school chat rooms, private blogs and curated mailing lists. They will have the same problems and opportunities as previous online communities.

Discussion about self-protection

In my view, the solution to this particular problem is not necessarily banning particular practices or regulating internet companies. Research into youth safety online finds that government regulation aimed at protecting minors on social media rarely has the desired outcome, and more often results in disempowering and isolating youth instead.

Just as parents and caring adults tell the kids in their lives about recognizing dangerous situations in the physical world, talking about healthy online interactions can help young people protect themselves in the online world. Many youth-focused organizations, and many internet companies, have internet safety information aimed at kids of all ages.

Whenever young people hop onto the next technology fad, there will inevitably be panic over how the adults, companies and society may or may not be keeping young people safe. What is most important in these situations is to remember that talking to young people about how they use those technologies, and what to do in difficult situations, can be an effective way to help them avoid serious harm online.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on March 15, 2022.

Brianna Dym, Lecture of Computer Science, University of Maine

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, I am a firm believer that there is nothing wrong with the Internet which a race of humans smarter, better educated, and more conscientious than we are couldn’t handle. Unfortunately, that race is not what we have. And figuring out how to operate and regulate the Internet in such a way that those of us who are educated and conscientious have all the access we need nd want, while those who – are not – are protected from it (and we from them), and still fulfill the promise of the First Amendment – well, that is a nightmare. In fact, we need to protect ourselves, since there is really no one doing it for us.

The Furies and I will be back.

Everyday Erinyes #365

Posted by Joanne Dixon at 6:01 pm Politics

Apr 092023

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

“Protecting the Institution of the Presidency,” in and of itself,is not a bad idea. The bad ideas come in when it becomes confused with “protecting the President at all costs,” which is NOT the same thing by any means. I don’t expect to need to explain that to anyone here, but it apparently does need to be explained to a lot of people who really should know better. And way too many of those people are in Congress and sprinkled throughout the courts. Hopefully a look at what the founding fathers ctually thought – as evidenced by what they actually said (and did) could help to clear this up a bit.
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Trump’s indictment is unprecedented, but it would not have surprised the Founding Fathers

Former U.S. President Donald Trump sits with his attorneys for his arraignment at the Manhattan criminal court on April 4, 2023, in New York City.
Pool/ Getty Images News via Getty Images North America

Austin Sarat, Amherst College

Much has been made of the unprecedented nature of the April 4, 2023 arraignment on criminal charges of former President Donald Trump following an indictment brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. But a closer look at American history shows that the indictment of a former president was not unforeseen.

What the Constitution says about prosecuting a president

The Constitution’s authors contemplated the arrest of a current or former president. At several points since the nation’s founding, our leaders have been called before the bar of justice.

Article 1, Section 3, of the Constitution says that when a federal government official is impeached and removed from office, they “shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.”

In his defense of this constitutional provision, Founding Father Alexander Hamilton noted that, unlike the British king, for whom “there is no constitutional tribunal to which he is amenable; no punishment to which he can be subjected,” a president once removed from office would “be liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law.” Trump has been impeached twice, but not removed from office.

As a scholar with expertise in legal history and criminal law, I believe the punishment our Founding Fathers envisioned for high officeholders removed from office would also apply to those who left office in other ways.

Tench Coxe, a delegate from Pennsylvania to the Continental Congress from 1788–89, echoed Hamilton. He explained that while the Constitution’s speech and debate clause permanently immunized members of Congress from liability for anything they might do or say as part of their official duties, the president “is not so much protected as that of a member of the House of Representatives; for he may be proceeded against like any other man in the ordinary course of law.”

In Coxe’s view, even a sitting president could be arrested, tried and punished for violating the law. And, though Coxe didn’t say it explicitly, I’d argue that it follows that if a president can be charged with a crime while in office, once out of office, he could be held responsible like anyone else.

The indictment of Aaron Burr

Hamilton’s and Coxe’s positions were put to an early test soon after the Constitution was ratified. The test came when jurors in New Jersey indicted Vice President Aaron Burr for killing Hamilton in a duel in that state.

Black-and-white illustration showing Aaron Burr, in black top hat and coat, shooting Alexander Hamilton in a wooded area. Two eyewitnesses stand in the background. — An artist’s depiction of the Burr–Hamilton duel on July 11, 1804. Hamilton was mortally wounded, and Burr was indicted for his death.
Ivan-96/DigitalVision Vectors via Getty Images

The indictment charged that “Aaron Burr late of the Township of Bergen in the County of Bergen esquire not having the fear of God before his eyes but being moved and seduced by the instigation of the Devil … feloniously willfully and of his malice aforethought did make an assault upon Alexander Hamilton … [who] of the said Mortal wounds died.”

While Burr’s powerful friends subsequently interceded and persuaded state officials to drop the charges, their success had nothing to do with any immunity that Burr enjoyed as an executive officer of the United States.

Indeed, Burr’s legal troubles were not over. In February 1807, after his term as vice president ended, he was arrested and charged with treason for plotting to create a new and independent nation separate from the U.S. This time, he stood trial and was acquitted.

The Strange case of Ulysses S. Grant

Fast forward to 1872, when the incumbent president, Ulysses S. Grant, was arrested in Washington, D.C., for speeding in his horse-drawn carriage.

The arresting officer told Grant, “I am very sorry, Mr. President, to have to do it, for you are the chief of the nation, and I am nothing but a policeman, but duty is duty, sir, and I will have to place you under arrest.”

As The New York Post recently recounted the story, Grant “was ordered to put up 20 bucks as collateral.” But he never stood trial.

20th and 21st century precedents

A little over a century later, Republican Vice President Spiro Agnew had a more serious brush with the law when he was accused by the Department of Justice of a pattern of political corruption starting when he was a county executive in Maryland and continuing through his tenure as vice president.

On Oct. 10, 1973, Agnew agreed to a plea bargain. He resigned his office and pleaded no contest to a charge of federal income tax evasion in exchange for the federal government dropping charges of political corruption. He was fined US$10,000 and sentenced to three years’ probation.

Surrounded by Secret Service agents, Spiro Agnew speaks to reporters outside a federal courthouse. — Spiro Agnew leaves a Baltimore federal courthouse on Oct. 10, 1973, after pleading no contest to tax evasion charges and resigning as vice president.
Bettmann via Getty Images

Richard Nixon, the president with whom Agnew served, narrowly escaped being indicted for his role in the Watergate burglary and its cover-up. In 2018, the National Archives released documents, labeled the Watergate Road Map, that showed just how close Nixon had come to being charged.

The documents reveal that “a grand jury planned to charge Nixon with bribery, conspiracy, obstruction of justice and obstruction of a criminal investigation.” But an indictment was never handed down because, by that time, Hamilton’s and Coxe’s views had been displaced by a belief that a sitting president should not be indicted.

Nixon was later saved from criminal charges after he left office when his successor, President Gerald Ford, granted him a full and complete pardon.

Another occasion on which a president came close to being charged with a crime
occurred in January 2001, when, as an article in The Atlantic notes, independent prosecutor Robert Ray considered indicting former President Bill Clinton for lying under oath about his affair with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

Ultimately, Ray decided that if Clinton publicly admitted to “having been misleading and evasive under oath … he didn’t need to see him indicted.”

And in February 2021, after President Trump had left office, Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell acknowledged that the former president, who had escaped being removed from office twice after being impeached, would still be legally “liable for everything he did while he was in office … We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one.”

What history teaches about Trump’s indictment

This brings us to the present moment.

For any prosecutor, including Alvin Bragg, the indictment and arrest of a former president is a genuinely momentous act. As Henry Ruth, one of the prosecutors who was involved in the Nixon case, explained in 1974, “Signing one’s name to the indictment of an ex-president is an act that one wishes devolved upon another but one’s self. This is true even where such an act, in institutional and justice terms, appears absolutely necessary.”

For the rest of us, this nation’s history is a reminder that ours is not the first generation of Americans who have been called to deal with alleged wrongdoing by our leaders and former leaders.

Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science, Amherst College

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, I would have liked to read something about, say, Jackson, and Harding – but since neither faced any prosecution, their stories would really not add to this article, which is about actual and potential precedent. The point is, anyone who actually cared about what the founding fathers (would have) wanted would take steps to ascertain what that acually was, would they not? Republicans today are making it pretty obvious that they don’t care.

The Furies and I will be back.

Everyday Erinyes #364

Posted by Joanne Dixon at 3:00 pm Politics

Apr 022023

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

Now that Donald J. Trump** has finally been arraigned, everyome is wondering what this or that aspect of pressing the charges will look like. There are probably still a few people naïve eenough to think it is going to look like a trial in the movies or on TV. (It would not surprise me to learn that Trump** hnself thinks that.) It won’t. But the arraignment also won’t look like an ordinary actual arraignment for multiple reasons,none of them aimed at helping or hurting him, but simply reasons peculiar to his situation. For example, most arraignments do not involve the Sevret Service. This one, by law, must. And of course, there’s more. The author, being cute but I think probably accurate, describes this case as “the most complex straightforward case in history.”
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Trump’s indictment stretches US legal system in new ways – a former prosecutor explains 4 key points to understand

A supporter of former President Donald Trump protests the indictment announcement near Mar-a-Lago, Fla., on March 31, 2023.
Chandan Khan/AFP via Getty Images

Jeffrey Bellin, William & Mary Law School

When former President Donald Trump turns himself over to authorities in New York on Tuesday, April 4, 2023, and is arraigned, the charges on which a Manhattan grand jury indicted him will likely be made public.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg obtained the indictment on March 30, 2023, following a grand jury vote, but the exact charges against Trump remain sealed. Multiple media sources are reporting the indictment alleges the former president committed business fraud.

I am a former prosecutor and law professor who studies the criminal justice system. While the complexities of Trump’s case will continue to unfold, The Conversation asked me to break down the complex legal situation. Here are four key points to understand about the prosecution and what will likely come next.

A man is shown in silhouette raising his fist and standing on a red carpet surrounded by American flags. — Former President Donald Trump arrives at a campaign rally in Waco, Texas, on March 25, 2023.
Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images

1. Falsified business records are the key issue

From what we understand of the investigation, the charges against Trump appear to stem from a US$130,000 payment in 2016 by Trump’s then-lawyer, Michael Cohen, to an adult film star, Stormy Daniels. In return, Daniels promised not to tell the media about her alleged affair with Trump.

Media reports suggest that there could be about 30 counts against Trump, and at least some of those counts will be felonies.

Just the fact that there are so many counts does not mean that there are many different criminal events or kinds of crimes alleged. Prosecutors often charge similar, repeated conduct – for example, multiple drug sales – as separate counts. In this case, the multiple counts may refer to a series of business records that record the same or similar transactions. Or the charges may, indeed, span multiple alleged criminal events.

Media reports indicate that Bragg does not appear to be alleging that Trump’s payment to Daniels was itself illegal.

Instead, Trump will likely be charged with “falsifying business records” for trying to hide the payment by lying about its nature in the records of the Trump Organization, his company.

Creating a false business record with the intent to defraud is a Class A misdemeanor offense in New York. But the offense can become a low-level Class E felony if Bragg can prove that Trump created false business records for the purpose of facilitating a second crime.

It is not yet clear what the second crime will be – or even that a second crime is being alleged – but possibilities include federal or state campaign finance violations or tax evasion.

2. Bragg will have to prove Trump’s involvement, fraudulent intent

If there is a trial, the prosecution will have to put together a series of pieces to secure a conviction on each of the charges facing Trump.

First, the prosecution would have to prove that the Daniels payment was recorded by Trump officials as something clearly inaccurate. It is not enough to show that the payment was recorded ambiguously – like “miscellaneous” or even “legal services.” The business records at issue must be unequivocally “false.”

Second, it is not necessary that Trump himself created false records. The prosecution would just have to prove that Trump was the direct cause of the false entry – meaning someone followed his specific directions.

Third, the prosecution would have to prove that Trump created the false record for a fraudulent purpose and, to prove a felony, with the specific purpose of committing – or covering up – another crime.

This is important because there could be other potentially plausible reasons the defense might offer, including that Trump sought to avoid embarrassment to his family or himself. Another option is indifference, that Trump gave little thought to how the transaction was recorded. That’s why the details of the allegedly false records, and Trump’s degree of involvement in their creation, will be central questions at trial.

Finally, for the felony offense, the prosecution would also have to prove that there was another crime that was either committed or covered up by using this false business record.

A woman with white hair holds a sign that says 'Tick tock, time's up' with the photo of a man's head on it. She and another few people stand behind a police barricade that has yellow tape on it and says 'crime scene.' — People gather March 31, 2023, in front of Trump Tower the day after former President Donald Trump was indicted by a New York grand jury.
Spencer Platt/Getty Images

3. It’s the most complex straightforward case in history

While everyone will be watching to see if this case is handled like other cases, differences are inevitable. For example, the New York Police Department and court officers will need to coordinate the arrest process with Trump’s Secret Service agents.

Further complications will arise if there is any prospect of incarceration. Based on what we know now, there is little prospect that Trump will be jailed pending trial for this allegation of a nonviolent crime. And even if he is ultimately convicted, it’s still unlikely he’ll be locked up, based on the nature of the charges and his lack of a prior criminal record. That said, judges have broad discretion in determining sentences.

That is only a small window into the logistical challenges that await the Manhattan district attorney’s office and the New York courts. If this were any other defendant, this would be a relatively straightforward case, the kind that make up the hundreds of cases in a typical prosecutor’s caseload.

However, Trump is not any other defendant. That means this is likely to be the most complex straightforward case in American history.

A Black man with a goatee wears a dark coat, white shirt and appears to walk toward a waiting car. — Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg leaves his New York office on March 22, 2023.
Scott Olson/Getty Images

4. The judicial process will be a messy affair

Most low-level felony and misdemeanor cases are resolved before trial, especially when there is no obvious victim. Typically, the prosecution will offer a plea deal, perhaps including a term of probation, or even propose a diversion program with community service, for example, which will lead to a dismissal of the charges.

It will be interesting to see if Bragg makes an offer along those lines. Even if he does, defendants must typically admit guilt to take advantage of these arrangements, and Trump may refuse for political, personal or legal reasons to admit guilt.

So it’s likely the case will go to trial, a process that will be messy for many reasons – most importantly, the jury.

When choosing a jury in a criminal case, the trial judge is supposed to screen out potential jurors who are biased in favor of, or against, the defendant. That’s normally easy because the jurors have usually never have heard of the defendant.

But most potential jurors will have opinions about Trump and many will need to be excused from jury service because of a lack of objectivity.

In a trial with this much media attention, there will also be people who have strong feelings about Trump and want to be on the jury. Some of them may hide their biases. That’s a problem by itself.

Then, once the trial starts, the media attention will shine a spotlight on the selected jurors. If it becomes clear that the jurors lied or failed to disclose information in jury selection, that could be grounds for removing them from the jury in the middle of the trial. If enough jurors are removed, the case will end in a mistrial, sending everyone back to square one.

So, while there is a lot about this prosecution that isn’t yet clear to the general public, one thing is clear – this will be a case with unprecedented attention and complexity.

Jeffrey Bellin, Mills E. Godwin, Jr., Professor of Law, William & Mary Law School

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, while this has never happened before (though it probably should have), my expectation is that the prosecutors, the court, and the court security personnel (and there will be some) are going to be, at every moment, asking themselves, “Can we do this just as we would do for anyone else?” And if the answer is yes, that’s what will be done. If not, they will struggle to come as close to “just as … for anyone else” as they possibly can. I think it was Bette Davis (maybe technically her character in the film) who was the first person recorded to have said, not on an airplane, “Fasten your seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.”

The Furies and I will be back.

Everyday Erinyes #363

Posted by Joanne Dixon at 8:02 am Politics

Mar 262023

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

There has been a lot of discussion (to put it chartably) about secession lately. Red staters want to get out from under the Constitution and the Federal Government whose duty, among other duties, is to enforce it. A lot of blue staters would be happy to see them go – if only there were an obvious place for them to go which would free us from having to listen to them. What I have not heard, until now, is a theory the secession is already happening, and to an extent, has happened, except that we are still stuck with them. I’m not sure I totally buy it, but I do think it is something we should think about.
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Secession is here: States, cities and the wealthy are already withdrawing from America

Acts of secession are happening across the U.S.
Vector Illustration/Getty Images

Michael J. Lee, College of Charleston

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia, wants a “national divorce.” In her view, another Civil War is inevitable unless red and blue states form separate countries.

She has plenty of company on the right, where a host of others – 52% of Trump voters, Donald Trump himself and prominent Texas Republicans – have endorsed various forms of secession in recent years. Roughly 40% of Biden voters have fantasized about a national divorce as well. Some on the left
urge a domestic breakup so that a new egalitarian nation might be, as Lincoln said at Gettysburg, “brought forth on this continent.”

The American Civil War was a national trauma precipitated by the secession of 11 Southern states over slavery. It is, therefore, understandable that many pundits and commentators would weigh in about the legality, feasibility and wisdom of secession when others clamor for divorce.

But all this secession talk misses a key point that every troubled couple knows. Just as there are ways to withdraw from a marriage before any formal divorce, there are also ways to exit a nation before officially seceding.

I have studied secession for 20 years, and I think that it is not just a “what if?” scenario anymore. In “We Are Not One People: Secession and Separatism in American Politics Since 1776,” my co-author and I go beyond narrow discussions of secession and the Civil War to frame secession as an extreme end point on a scale that includes various acts of exit that have already taken place across the U.S.

A blond woman in a pink jacket stands in front of many lights and a marquee that says 'Marjorie Taylor Greene' — GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene wants red and blue states to separate.
Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

Scaled secession

This scale begins with smaller, targeted exits, like a person getting out of jury duty, and progresses to include the larger ways that communities refuse to comply with state and federal authorities.

Such refusals could involve legal maneuvers like interposition, in which a community delays or constrains the enforcement of a law it opposes, or nullification, in which a community explicitly declares a law to be null and void within its borders. At the end of the scale, there’s secession.

From this wider perspective, it is clear that many acts of departure – call them secession lite, de facto secession or soft separatism – are occurring right now. Americans have responded to increasing polarization by exploring the gradations between soft separatism and hard secession.

These escalating exits make sense in a polarized nation whose citizens are sorting themselves into like-minded neighbhorhoods. When compromise is elusive and coexistence is unpleasant, citizens have three options to get their way: Defeat the other side, eliminate the other side or get away from the other side.

Imagine a national law; it could be a mandate that citizens brush their teeth twice a day or a statute criminalizing texting while driving. Then imagine that a special group of people did not have to obey that law.

This quasi-secession can be achieved in several ways. Maybe this special group moves “off the grid” into the boondocks where they could text and drive without fear of oversight. Maybe this special group wields political power and can buy, bribe or lawyer their way out of any legal jam. Maybe this special group has persuaded a powerful authority, say Congress or the Supreme Court, to grant them unique legal exemptions.

These are hypothetical scenarios, but not imaginary ones. When groups exit public life and its civic duties and burdens, when they live under their own sets of rules, when they do not have to live with fellow citizens they have not chosen or listen to authorities they do not like, they have already seceded.

Schools to taxes

Present-day America offers numerous hard examples of soft separatism.

Over the past two decades, scores of wealthy white communities have separated from more diverse school districts. Advocates cite local control to justify these acts of school secession. But the result is the creation of parallel school districts, both relatively homogeneous but vastly different in racial makeup and economic background.

Several prominent district exits have occurred in the South – places like St. George, Louisiana – but instances from northern Maine to Southern California show that school splintering is happening nationwide.

As one reporter wrote, “If you didn’t want to attend school with certain people in your district, you just needed to find a way to put a district line between you and them.”

Many other examples of legalized separatism revolve around taxes. Disney World, for example, was classified as a “special tax district” in Florida in 1967. These special districts are functionally separate local governments and can provide public services and build and maintain their own infrastructure.

The company has saved millions by avoiding typical zoning, permitting and inspection processes for decades, although Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has recently challenged Disney’s special designation. Disney was only one of 1,800 special tax districts in Florida; there are over 35,000 in the nation.

Jeff Bezos paid no federal income taxes in 2011. Elon Musk paid almost none in 2018. Tales of wealthy individuals avoiding taxes are as common as stories of rich Americans buying their way out of jail. “Wealthier Americans,” Robert Reich lamented as far back as the early 1990s, “have been withdrawing into their own neighborhoods and clubs for generations.” Reich worried that a “new secession” allowed the rich to “inhabit a different economy from other Americans.”

Some of the nation’s wealthiest citizens pay an effective tax rate close to zero. As one investigative reporter put it, the ultrawealthy “sidestep the system in an entirely legal way.”

A lot of people applauding as they sit at a meeting. — Spectators applaud after the Buckingham County Board of Supervisors unanimously votes to pass a Second Amendment sanctuary resolution at a meeting in Buckingham, Va., Dec. 9, 2019.
AP Photo/Steve Helber

One nation, divisible

Schools and taxes are just a start.

Eleven states dub themselves “Second Amendment sanctuaries” and refuse to enforce federal gun restrictions. Movements aiming to carve off rural, more politically conservative portions of blue states are growing; 11 counties in Eastern Oregon support seceding and reclassifying themselves as “Greater Idaho,” a move that Idaho’s state government supports.

Hoping to become a separate state independent of Chicago’s political influence, over two dozen rural Illinois counties have passed pro-secession referendums. Some Texas Republicans back “Texit,” where the state becomes an independent nation.

Separatist ideas come from the Left, too.

“Cal-exit,” a plan for California to leave the union after 2016, was the most acute recent attempt at secession.

And separatist acts have reshaped life and law in many states. Since 2012, 21 states have legalized marijuana, which is federally illegal. Sanctuary cities and states have emerged since 2016 to combat aggressive federal immigration laws and policies. Some prosecutors and judges refuse to prosecute women and medical providers for newly illegal abortions in some states.

Estimates vary, but some Americans are increasingly opting out of hypermodern, hyperpolarized life entirely. “Intentional communities,” rural, sustainable, cooperative communes like East Wind in the Ozarks, are, as The New York Times reported in 2020, proliferating “across the country.”

In many ways, America is already broken apart. When secession is portrayed in its strictest sense, as a group of people declaring independence and taking a portion of a nation as they depart, the discussion is myopic, and current acts of exit hide in plain sight. When it comes to secession, the question is not just “What if?” but “What now?”

Michael J. Lee, Professor of Communication, College of Charleston

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, is this actually happening? Has it happened? Some of the passive-aggressive tactics are in my opinion simply irresponsible, such as not voting. Others involve breaking laws, so far mostly at such a low level as to fly under the radar and avoid prosecution. Some, such as actions which restrict voting and other rights guaranteed by the Constitution, are frankly horrendous. None address the problem that, whether secesion is individual and passive-aggressve, or by states with or without bloodshed, there is no way to make them work without innocent people getting hurt.

The Furies and I will be back.

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