Just in time for today's Supreme Court arguments, our latest paper for CTEC is a deep dive Florida's anti-trans laws in the context of lawful extremism and how politicians seek to hide extremist intent behind the language of impartiality. By Beth Daviess and myself.
https://www.middlebury.edu/institute/academics/centers-initiatives/ctec/ctec-publications/lawful-extremism-floridas-anti-trans-laws
Lawful Extremism: Florida's Anti-Trans Laws
On Human Nature:
I've been thinking a lot about human nature this week (and as part of my work for years before). Are people essentially good? Some weeks, many weeks, it's hard to think so.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/human-nature-j-m-berger-v8obe/?trackingId=%2BhVHOuYKTueTZg69XI6dXQ%3D%3D
On Human Nature
I've been thinking a lot about human nature this week (and as part of my work for years before). Are people essentially good? Some weeks, many weeks, it's hard to think so.
If the specter of Elon Musk and RFK Jr. running this country isn't enough to shake people out of complacency, I'm not sure what would.
I had some thoughts (and primary source documents) to share on the recent reporting about new 9/11 evidence by ProPublica and the NYT
https://www.middlebury.edu/institute/academics/centers-initiatives/ctec/research-notes/still-untold-stories-september-11The Still-Untold Stories of September 11
We talk a lot about who radicalizes and not enough about who doesn't. So I'm really looking forward to digging into this brand-new paper on resilient non-radicalizers by my Swansea colleagues Kamil Yilmaz and Joe Whittaker with Mehmet Sozer and Niyazi Ekici.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17539153.2024.2397148?af=R#abstractA privacy nightmare on wheels. It's getting harder and harder to avoid having every aspect of your life vacuumed up, pulped, and injected into an algorithm. The world of "Optimal" getting a little closer every day.
https://therecord.media/ford-patent-application-in-vehicle-listening-advertising
Ford seeks patent for tech that listens to driver conversations to serve ads
A Ford Motoer Company patent application filed in February and published last month proposes software that would monitor in-car conversations and other data to help serve up advertisements.
Extremist groups rarely die off entirely, especially in the age of leaderless resistance, but in a best-case scenario, their impact can be dramatically curtailed for a long period of time.
It'll be very interesting to see if this breaks the back of the Terrorgram collective, or if the members will quickly regroup and rebrand. A *lot* of violence has been washed through these channels over the last several years. Disruption is good, but something that sticks would be even better.
Indictment comes against the backdrop of France's arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov. I want to stress that they don't to be connected at this point, but both cases reflect a growing (and overdue) focus on Telegram as the online refuge of last resort for extremists and other criminals.
J.M. Berger