Divisiveness, National Narratives, and the Establishment Clause

The Supreme Court habitually justifies the Establishment Clause as a means to prevent political division, protect the civil peace, and forestall citizen alienation. In spite of this popularity among the judiciary, legal scholars have emphatically rejected the political division theory. They state that religion is not especially divisive, and that even if it was, there is no reason to think non-establishment will prevent such political harm. This rejection relies on the misconception that the validity of the political division theory requires that all forms of religion must foment civil strife. This is a mistake. Often, laws apply to a wider category than to the core of what they seek to address. If this is the case, then even if non-establishment comes to merely prevent an especially erosive type of state and religion involvement, it may still be a valid and useful theory. In this Article, I argue that the political division theory is compelling when it is applied to a religion which seeks to collapse the distinction between politics and religion. To achieve this, I portray one such form of establishment of religion: American Christian Nationality, an ideology which sees the United States as having deep religious meaning and promotes Christianity as the central attribute of American identity. This Article will show that the combination between nationality and religion is uniquely divisive because it promotes a religious-based exclusionary understanding of who is a “real” American citizen. Many of the canonical Establishment Clause doctrines seem tailored to protect against government involvement in such religious movements

Moderating from Nowhere

We are living in the midst of a battle over online hate speech regulation, and the stakes could not be higher. Hate speech not only harms its intended victims, be they individuals or groups, but it also polarizes and divides society in ways that undermine the health of democratic regimes. While there is widespread agreement that the current situation of online discourse is untenable, scholars and policymakers are deeply divided on the best way to improve it. Until recently, American free speech norms have dominated the content moderation policies of digital media platforms. First Amendment norms are extremely resistant to censorship and therefore very protective of offensive and hateful speech. However, in recent years, this influence has been gradually eroded by what could be called European free speech norms, which are significantly more comfortable with directly regulating speech to try to prevent social and political harm. The epitome of the European approach is Germany s Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG), which requires platforms to enforce domestic hate speech laws within that country s borders. This general transformation, and NetzDG especially, have been met by nearly unanimous rebuke by digital free speech scholars, who argue that such measures might steer the platforms into creating a public sphere in which speech is stunted, and the values of free speech are not upheld. While acknowledging (to some extent, at least) the strength of these critiques, this Article argues that they may well be outweighed by how laws like NetzDG respond effectively to one of the major challenges of the new digital platform public sphere: its detachment from civil society and the public discourse of particular democratic societies. Digital platforms are moderating the digital public sphere from nowhere. This disconnection between the new information gatekeepers (the platforms) and the circumstances and needs of democratic states undermines the social conditions necessary for a healthy democracy. Specifically, the rise of a transnational digital sphere dominated by major digital platforms undermines traditional media gatekeepers capacity to moderate the public debate. Without this guiding hand and without any legal regulation, the public debate quickly devolves, as is evident from the increasingly divisive impact online hate speech has on democratic societies. When tried and true social mechanisms – such as traditional media – are rendered ineffective, it makes sense to counteract the effects of hate speech and stabilize public debate by turning to legal speech regulation such as NetzDG. In at least this sense, we are likely to be better off with an internet influenced by European norms

Brain Computer Interface for Gesture Control of a Social Robot: an Offline Study

Brain computer interface (BCI) provides promising applications in neuroprosthesis and neurorehabilitation by controlling computers and robotic devices based on the patient's intentions. Here, we have developed a novel BCI platform that controls a personalized social robot using noninvasively acquired brain signals. Scalp electroencephalogram (EEG) signals are collected from a user in real-time during tasks of imaginary movements. The imagined body kinematics are decoded using a regression model to calculate the user-intended velocity. Then, the decoded kinematic information is mapped to control the gestures of a social robot. The platform here may be utilized as a human-robot-interaction framework by combining with neurofeedback mechanisms to enhance the cognitive capability of persons with dementia.Comment: Presented in: 25th Iranian Conference on Electrical Engineering (ICEE

Variational auto-encoders with Student's t-prior

We propose a new structure for the variational auto-encoders (VAEs) prior, with the weakly informative multivariate Student's t-distribution. In the proposed model all distribution parameters are trained, thereby allowing for a more robust approximation of the underlying data distribution. We used Fashion-MNIST data in two experiments to compare the proposed VAEs with the standard Gaussian priors. Both experiments showed a better reconstruction of the images with VAEs using Student's t-prior distribution

Bridging the Gaps in the International Climate Change Regime through Regional Approach: The Potentials of Regulation (EU) 2018/1999 on the Dimension of Energy Transition and the Paris Agreement

The gap between the amounts of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions being produced at the global level and the adequacy of the regulatory framework that will achieve the required reduction of the global levels, commensurate to international climate targets, is one of the many uncertainties and challenges facing the international community since the twilight of the 20th century. This is further exacerbated by another gap between the level of the energy demand/supply to the ever-increasing world population, and the number of people and communities who still lack the necessary access to electricity around the world. There is no doubt that more energy production is required for world economic growth, particularly in developing countries. This research is an attempt to identify, inter alia, what are the factors responsible for the disparities between the objective(s) of the international climate regime and the substantive provisions requiring global actions to the attainment of the objectives of the international climate change regime. The Paris Agreement and the European Union (EU) ‘energy and climate package’ serve as the reference of this research. On the assumptions that the current climate regime may be incapable of meeting the aim of the Paris Agreement, that is: “holding the rise in global temperatures to well below 2°C and pursuing efforts to limit it to 1.5°C”; the attention is being turned to regulatory efforts at the regional and subregional levels, especially the European Union (EU), which is one of the major global emitters. The approach by the EU to operationalize the Paris Agreement into a functional legal instrument, through a regional comprehensive legislative package provides a template for analyzing the potentials of the ‘internal’ and the ‘external’ impact of the regional implementation of the global instrument

Beyond True and False: Fake News and the Digital Epistemic Divide

The massive fact-checking, flagging, and content removal campaigns run by major digital platforms during the 2020 elections and the Covid-19 pandemic did some good. However, they failed to prevent substantial portions of the population from believing that the election was stolen or that vaccinations are dangerous. In this Article, we argue that the reason for the ineffectiveness of truth-based solutions—such as fact-checking— is that they do not reach the heart of the problem. Both scholars and policymakers share the implicit or explicit belief that the rise of digital fake news is harmful mainly because it spreads false information, which lays a rotten groundwork for both individual decisions and collective policy making. While acknowledging the importance of accurate information, we argue that the main problem with fake news is not that it is false. Instead, what is distinctly threatening about digital misinformation is its ability to circumvent and undermine common knowledge-producing institutions including the sciences, courts, medical and other professions, and the media. The fundamental challenge is the fragmentation of our societies into separate epistemic communities. This shakes the factual common ground on which we stand. What does fact-checking matter if twenty percent of the population thinks that the fact-checkers are chronic liars? We call this new reality the Digital Epistemic Divide. Epistemic fragmentation of society is both more fundamental and more dangerous than the harms of false information as such. It is more fundamental because once a society is epistemically fragmented, the lack of trust in common epistemic authorities will inevitably proliferate disagreement over factual beliefs. It is more dangerous because it can exacerbate political polarization. It is one thing to believe that the other side of a political issue holds wrong values and preferences; it is quite another to believe that they are either constantly lying or deeply manipulated. To bridge the digital epistemic divide, we must go beyond truth-based solutions and implement policies to reconstitute societal trust in common epistemic authorities

الزام مادر به رعایت سلامت جنین از منظر فقه امامیه

Background and Aim: One of the most important stages of a child′s life is the fetal period. Any conscious and unconscious behavior of the pregnant mother plays an essential role in the physical and mental development of the fetus. If the mother makes bad plans and behaves in ways that harm her physical and mental health, it will have consequences and responsibilities for her. The purpose of this study is to investigate the jurisprudence of the mother's duty towards the right of the fetus’s health. Materials and Methods: This descriptive-analytical study has collected data related to the jurisprudential foundations of the mother's responsibility in relation to the fetus’s health and hygiene. Conclusion: Now, the lack of clarification by the legislator brings the ambiguity that the pregnant mother can freely use her will regardless of the fetus’s health. This hypothesis would be rejected due to the general rules governing human actions and leaving human actions and by referring to numerous legal jurisprudence evidences taken from Quran, tradition and rules such as harmlessness, the obligation to avoid possible harm, Tasbib, respect, inviolability of certain things, health as an introduction to take care of the fetus and the jurisprudential discussion of the purposes of Sharia and the possibility of requiring the mother to observe the fetus’s health is inferred.زمینه و هدف: دوران جنینی، یکی از مهم‌ترین مراحل حیات کودک به شمار می‌رود. هرگونه رفتار آگاهانه و غیرآگاهانه مادر باردار، نقش اساسی در رشد جسمی و روانی جنین ایفا می‌کند. چنانچه مادر، سوء تدبیر نماید و رفتارهایی انجام دهد که از رهگذر آن به سلامت جسم و روان وی آسیب وارد شود، تبعات و مسئولیت‌هایی برای وی خواهد داشت. هدف پژوهش حاضر، بررسی فقهی تکلیف مادر در قبال حق سلامت جنین است. مواد و روش‌ها: مقاله حاضر با روش توصیفی تحلیلی به گردآوری داده‌های مرتبط با مبانی فقهی مسئولیت مادر در مقابل رعایت سلامت و بهداشت جنین پرداخته است. نتیجه‌گیری: در حال حاضر، عدم تصریح قانون‌گذار، این ابهام را به همراه می‌آورد که مادر باردار می‌تواند بدون توجه به سلامت و بهداشت جنین، آزادانه اراده خود را اعمال نماید؛ این فرضیه‌ به دلیل قواعد کلی حاکم بر افعال و ترک فعل‌های انسانی و با استناد به ادله فقهی حقوقی متعددی برگرفته از کتاب، سنت و قواعدی از قبیل لاضرر، وجوب دفع ضرر محتمل، تسبیب، احترام، لایبطل دم امرء مسلم، بهداشت به عنوان مقدمه واجب نگهداری از جنین و بحث فقهی مقاصد شریعت، رد و امکان الزام مادر به رعایت سلامت جنین استنباط می‌شود