An Appeal from Political Prisoner Nelson Maatman

This was posted online yesterday: 

Dutch gay political activist Nelson Maatman has now spent 2 1/2 years in Mexican jail awaiting trial on frame-up charges, under atrocious conditions. He's recently released an update on his conditions.

Nelson was arrested as a result of a set-up by two corrupt NGOs, the Netherlands-based Free A Girl and the US-based Operation Underground Railroad run by con man Tim Ballard. Below Nelson's message, I'm appending images of an email leaked from Ballard's organization acknowledging entrapment behaviors on their part.

> 11th of October 2024, RVPO, Ciudad de México > > For the last couple of months I've been dating the most amazing guy. We have so much in common and the things we don't have in common I like even more. It's been a hard knock life for the both of us, but when I'm with him it feels like the whole world disappears including the hell hole we're in. > It's far from easy. We're both scarred by our difficult pasts, but together we're working on it. Recently however things have become impossible and it seems like absolutely nobody is helping us. > A while back my boyfriend - whom was living 3 doors down at the time - ‘accidentally’ go transfer to a new dormitory by prison administration. They moved him to the group cell in the dormitory for recidivists. Those are people whom are in jail for at least the third time in their life. Not cold-hearted sicarios, but the worst kind of street thugs live there. > It's my boyfriend's first time in prison for a relatively small crime when he was 18. He's not some tough gangster. He has learned to stand up for himself, but he's still a timid gay guy that even the prison admits is vulnerable in prison, and for that he legally has the right to protection. Protection he doesn't get. Protection we need. > > Things went to hell a few weeks ago. For some thoughts brought me my boyfriend - whom was already marked by several hits he took - the hit him several times in front of me and told me that if I didn't pay that they'd beat the shit out of him. I paid the extortionist and then I paid some more to get rid of them. > I bought my boyfriend a bunk in a relatively quiet part of the group cell so he'd be safer, more comfortable and we'd have a place to hang out. I waited to visit so he could settle, but soon things went wrong again. A guy in one of the bunks below him falsely accused my boyfriend of stealing a radio. My boyfriend has a large history of false accusation and and as a gay guy in a homophobic ‘Catholic’ country ALWAYS got screwed over. > I didn't want to risk his safety or for him to end up in punishment. From my own experience I know how bad it is down there. I've often called it “worse than Guantanamo”, that should give you an image. > I paid to replace the radio, I paid to have the accuser moved out, and I paid for protection. I decided it was time to let my presence be known since I have a lot of rep in other parts of the prison. I paid the mafia for my right to visit and to get their ‘blessing’. > Despite the roaches and smell of death rat, his bunk turned into a little slice of heaven for us to hang out, smoke, talk, kiss, but it didn't last long. Things got weird quick. > My boyfriend started talking about how I should break up with him because he was supposedly no good for me. They found the real thief, but didn't give us back our money. And I was getting sick of the amount of favors and gifts the mafioso kept demanding. That was just the first day. > The second day my boyfriend acted distant, but initially wouldn't tell me why. At the end of the day as it was getting close for me to leave he finally broke and told me they were forcing him to extort me, but that he didn't want to. They had a used condom and wanted to force him to file a rape complaint if I didn't pay. > > No, yes, I know it sounds ridiculous, but do realize that I'm already being held for two and a half years for HUMAN TRAFFICKING and drug trade without trial, without evidence and without the possibility of a defense against a crime I obviously didn't commit. > With the Mexican Government against me a condom with my sperm and a forced or made up victim declaration. I could easily be looking at several extra years of pre trial detention. And what about my boyfriend his safety? > > I didn't have a choice. I paid to get the condom and faked breaking up with my boyfriend, publicly accusing him of extortion to stop the actual extortion. Obviously I didn't formally accuse him of extortion and it's with his knowledge and consent. Secretly we're still seeing each other in other parts of the prison. > > The prison and my embassy - his embassy sucks - are aware of the situation and have promised to take appropriate action. They haven't done anything at all. I communicate with them daily and they keep telling us ‘not to worry’. > We're in danger come on broke, underweight and starving. Nobody helps. > > Nobody helps mainly because apparently two guys who love each other is something horrible. More horrible than the systematic torture that goes on in this prison, or the trafficking of transforming for sex. > > Please somebody send help or at least some money so we can eat! Stop looking away. > > Nelson Maatman > > 11th of October 2024

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PfP's Annual Gala is Back!

From Playgrounds for Palestine:

Annual PfP Gala is back! Light refreshments & silent auction, followed by dinner, presentations, and entertainment.

It has been a long absence since covid first paused our annual gala, a constant of our community since 2001.

So much has happened in the past year, and PfP has stepped up to do our part to protect our children, especially in Gaza. This year, we finished three playground projects that carried over from previous years, but our flagship project now is a school we recently established in Gaza to serve 120 students (for now). We are hoping to expand and grow to meet the dire need of children who are facing another year without school.

These children are our future and we refuse to sit by while their futures are being stolen. We hope you will join us to learn more about this initiative and support our work.

PfP remains a labor of love, with an all volunteer administrative staff in the US. Our biggest source of income are individual donations and sales of AIDA olive oil products.

The evening will begin with light refreshments and a silent auction, followed by dinner, presentations, and music by the stunning, talented, compassionate, beautiful, soulful Farah Siraj.

Get your tickets now.

It's Kate Winslet's Birthday!

 

 

Actress Kate Winslet was born on this day in 1975. One of her best-known roles was in Titanic, whose opening she missed to attend the funeral of Stephen Tredre, her first love, after he died from bone cancer. He had urged her to break off their relationship so that she could focus on making the movie, but she subsequently expressed regret that she hadn’t been with him at the end. As related by T. Rivas in Positive Memories:

“British academy-award winning actress Kate Winslet had a relationship with her colleague Stephen Tredre that began when she was 15 and lasted for about five years, from 1991 to 1995. Tredre was almost 13 years her senior.

"Shortly after he died of cancer in 1997, Kate Winslet confessed he had been the love of her life.

“She confirmed this again for an interview in 2008 connected to her performance in The Reader:

“'He was very much the love of my life during those years.’"

https://www.vulture.com/2008/12/three_out_of_four_the_reader_s.html

The Inquirer's Confusion Reflects Why Democrats Are Losing

 

The Philadelphia Inquirer has an article reporting on the fact that Democrats have been losing ground to Republicans among working-class Philadelphians. The article itself is marked by a terminological conflation that precisely reflects the reason many Democrats don't understand why this is happening.

It says, "[W]orking-class voters in Philadelphia, a once reliable voting bloc for the party, have drifted right in recent years." Variations on this are repeated several times in the article. Yet not an iota of evidence is presented that working-class Philadelphians have become more conservative ideologically -- only that more are voting for the GOP, at least when its nominee is Trump.

It's not working people who've been moving to the right; it's the Democratic Party that's done so, leaving workers less reason to vote for it. In the absence of a mass workers' party, it's primarily the Republicans that benefit.

But this shift also increases the opportunities for a solution to this problem. The more workers see Trump as the lesser evil, the more can make Vote Pacts with those who still see Harris in that light -- freeing both to vote for a real pro-worker alternative like the Green Party.

FIRE: Penn takes a hammer to academic freedom

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression has issued the following statement about the University of Pennsylvania's sanctioning of Professor Amy Wax:

 

Yesterday, the University of Pennsylvania completed its years-long end run around academic freedom to punish law professor Amy Wax. FIRE's working hard to ensure Penn's dubious tactics won't become the new playbook for private universities, which, unlike public universities, are not bound by the First Amendment.



Long under pressure to "do something" about the controversial Wax — who's been widely criticized for her views on race and gender — Penn finally got its woman yesterday.

After conducting a nearly two-year investigation of Wax, which extended more than a year since the last real hearing in her case, Penn announced the professor would indeed be sanctioned for "unprofessionalism." She'll keep her tenured faculty role and serve a one-year suspension at half-pay. She'll also keep her benefits, an important fact given that Wax has been fighting cancer while battling Penn administrators.

Penn is a private school that nonetheless makes First Amendment-like promises to respect its students' and faculty members' right to free expression. Whether on a contractual or moral basis, Penn should have kept those promises. Instead, it abandoned principle for the sake of expediency.

While it remains to be seen whether Wax will keep her promise to sue Penn if she's punished, I told The New York Times yesterday that the university's decision "should send a chill down the spine of every faculty member, not just at Penn but at every private institution around the country."

Penn's dubious procedural efforts — which stripped Wax of many of the due process protections tenure affords — paid off. If that's all it takes to sidestep tenure, the rights of even the most protected private college faculty are tenuous at best.

FIRE has long defended Wax, and we continue to do so for two reasons. First, because her comments are unquestionably protected by academic freedom. And second, because the same principles that protect her right to hold both her views and her job also protect faculty who represent a range of viewpoints around the country.

In our hyper-polarized political moment, faculty increasingly find themselves called "unprofessional" for their views on Israel and Gaza. Or on race. Or gender. Or abortion, or immigration, or the police, or COVID-19, or politics more broadly. Often the only thing standing between the angry college administrator — or the disgruntled donor, or the social media mob, or the local legislator coming for that professor's job — is the time-honored principle of academic freedom.

That's why, regardless of whether you care for Amy Wax's opinions, you should care what happens to her. If our colleges and universities are to achieve their missions as bastions of academic excellence, faculty like Wax must remain free to speak their minds.

— Alex Morey, Vice President of Campus Advocacy

Voting As a Communal Activity

 

Ideally, voting should a communal civic activity, with a holiday set aside and related festivities organized around it. It's also something to which people should apply their critical judgment to the greatest extent possible. For this reason, I'm not an advocate of voting by mail except when it's a practical necessity. Voting by mail means voting early, which means that if you acquire new information close to Election Day after you've already mailed in your ballot, it's too late to change your mind. I don't approve of campaigns encouraging people to vote by mail merely in the name of convenience, since careful and fully informed deliberation, not convenience, should be the priority when it comes to exercising this civic responsibility.

In the spring of 2020 I applied for a mail ballot for the primary election on account of the pandemic. As it so happened, the ballot hadn't arrived by the weekend before the election, so I contacted the office of Al Schmidt, then one of Philadelphia's City Commissioners with whom I'm acquainted, and he swung by on Sunday afternoon to hand me an emergency ballot. I took a few minutes to go to a private spot to fill it out and then seal it, then brought it back to him, whereupon he dropped it in a portable ballot box right in front of me. Now Pennsylvania's secretary of state, he's a real public servant.

Since that primary, I haven't assessed contagion concerns as being sufficiently serious to argue against in-person voting for most people. But as of last November I've become a standby poll worker, serving in a different polling place than my own, so I've resumed voting by mail rather than having to take time out from my duties to go back to my own polling place and vote. My general opposition to voting early stands, however. So, even though my mail ballot arrived yesterday, I don't intend to fill it out and return it until about ten days before the election. That should be sufficient guarantee that it will be received before the deadline.

SEPA's First Braver Angels Debate

The Southeastern Pennsylvania Alliance of Braver Angels, the organization promoting cross-partisan dialogue in the United States, held its first debate last Saturday, September 28, at the Warminster public library. I was first up as a lead speaker for the pro side on the resolution, "Local communities should receive more federal funding to address homelessness." It appeared that all in attendance agreed that the ensuing discussion helped them understand each other's perspectives and additional ideas were brought forward to help bridge the divide, such as Citizens' Assemblies to ensure local control of programs while receiving federal funds.

 

This was the first Braver Angels event I've attended in person as well as my first time as lead speaker, but I've taken part in a few online, including a debate several months ago about school library censorship. I used my turn in part to share a childhood experience contradicting what other speakers on both sides seemed to be assuming about certain kinds of material being "inappropriate" for young people.

New Study Finds Nonpartisan Primaries Reduce the Influence of Wealthy Donors

 

As more and more states look into and pursue nonpartisan open primary initiatives and legislation, partisan insiders are finding more creative ways to attack including claiming that nonpartisan primaries are more susceptible to dark money expenditures. But in a new piece in RealClearPolitics, Researcher and Democracy Fellow at Unite America, Rich Barton points out this couldn’t be further from the truth: “Nonpartisan primaries significantly reduce the influence of wealthy donors in elections.”

Using data from the Federal Election Commission he analyzed all campaign contributions from Political Action Committees (PACs) and independent expenditures from Super PACs and found that:

“Ideological PACs like Club for Growth Action on the right and Protect our Future on the left, bankrolled by millionaires, have much less influence in states with nonpartisan primaries. In fact, nonpartisan primaries curb the power of ideological PACs by about two-thirds relative to partisan primaries.”