Two very different but equally shocking stories in the papers today: The New York Times reports on the safety features missing from two Boeing 737 Max plans that crashed, killing dozens, while The Guardian publishes an extract from Beth Gardiner’s book about “dieselgate”, the car emissions scandal. 

The stories do have a common thread: corporations putting profits above human lives. In dieselgate, car firms deliberately cheated on their vehicles’ emissions tests, putting God knows how many lives at risk from very damaging air pollution (the emissions from diesels, if not dealt with properly, are particularly dangerous).

With the 737 Max, Boeing withheld crucial safety features, making them an optional extra. The planes that crashed didn’t have them.

The NYT:

There’s something missing from the ongoing coverage of homophobic, transphobic parents demanding schools cancel their inclusive education classes: any detail about what’s actually being taught. So hurrah for Luke Tryl, formerly of education watchdog Ofsted and director of the New Schools Network, who’s shared an example of the kind of thing these parents want to protect their children from.

Imagine letting your children see this.

The whole thing’s thoroughly depressing, of course, but at least there’s some gallows humour on Twitter. This, by the writer Paul Coleman, made me laugh.

Homophobic parents are right to be worried about their children turning gay after lessons about LGBT awareness. I lived as a Tudor wench for 2 years following a history class.

I’m not usually affected by news events but the terrorist attacks in Christchurch had me in tears this morning.

As if the events weren’t horrific enough, the Daily Mail, the Daily Mirror and The Sun have all put auto-play video from one of the terrorists’ cameras on their front page and surrounded it with adverts in a shockingly cynical attempt to make money from the dead.

And the comments sections on Breitbart – to which President Trump posted a link while the news was breaking – on Reddit and in many right-wing British newspapers are packed with people celebrating the murders and downvoting expressions of grief and empathy.

These things are connected.

As the NY Times’ Wajahat Ali wrote on Twitter:

Pay attention. Take this extremist ideology & terror threat seriously. Be wary of politicians, academics & media heads who give it a platform and spout it under the guise of “free speech” and fighting “political correctness.” Look out for each other. Love each other.

After ongoing protests, a Birmingham primary school has suspended its “no outsiders” programme, which teaches children about equality. The protesters have done the usual religious thing, accusing the school of “promoting gay and transgender lifestyles.” It’s been reported as a muslim protest but many of the parents protesting are christians; the lessons have been reported as “LGBT lessons” when they’re also about religion, race and disability.

No Outsiders is about teaching children that “there are no outsiders here!” I know this because the programme is available online, as are presentations to parents about it.

Here’s a slide explaining the ethos.

The characteristics of the Equality Act are age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage/civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion/belief, sex and sexual orientation.

As the course’s creator Andrew Moffat MBE explains: “we have to find ways to encourage children to choose to sign up to living in a multicultural and multi-faith UK, where they can live alongside, work alongside and get along with people who are different to them.”

Cancelling the lessons sets a terrible precedent. The aim of the lessons is to teach children “to recognise and celebrate diversity and difference in their own communities and in the wider society.” Letting the intolerant shut them down is entirely the wrong lesson to teach children.

After far too long, far-right puppet Tommy Robinson has been kicked off Facebook and the Facebook-owned Instagram for flouting the rules on hateful conduct.

Which makes it a good time to link to this piece by Renee Diresta, Free Speech Is Not The Same As Free Reach.

in this moment, the conversation we should be having—how can we fix the algorithms?—is instead being co-opted and twisted by politicians and pundits howling about censorship and miscasting content moderation as the demise of free speech online. It would be good to remind them that free speech does not mean free reach. There is no right to algorithmic amplification. In fact, that’s the very problem that needs fixing.

…The social internet is mediated by algorithms: recommendation engines, search, trending, autocomplete, and other mechanisms that predict what we want to see next. The algorithms don’t understand what is propaganda and what isn’t, or what is “fake news” and what is fact-checked. Their job is to surface relevant content (relevant to the user, of course), and they do it exceedingly well.

That efficiency gives the likes of Robinson disproportionate visibility and influence, something the social media giants still don’t seem to have woken up to. If they can’t prevent the likes of the far-right from gaming the system, then they need to do a better job of keeping them off their platforms.

For years, we’ve been told not to panic. It turns out that maybe we should be panicking after all.

Writing in the New York Times, David Wallace-Wells says “the age of climate panic is here.”

We are living today in a world that has warmed by just one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) since the late 1800s, when records began on a global scale. We are adding planet-warming carbon dioxide to the atmosphere at a rate faster than at any point in human history since the beginning of industrialization.

We can no longer stop climate change. It’s already happening. But if we panic, we can at least make it slightly less catastrophic and deadly than it would otherwise be.

For years, we have read in newspapers as two degrees of warming was invoked as the highest tolerable level, beyond which disaster would ensue. Warming greater than that was rarely discussed outside scientific circles. And so it was easy to develop an intuitive portrait of the landscape of possibilities that began with the climate as it exists today and ended with the pain of two degrees, the ceiling of suffering.

In fact, it is almost certainly a floor. By far the likeliest outcomes for the end of this century fall between two and four degrees of warming.

Wallace-Wells rightly says that complacency is a huge problem, and that individual acts are pointless if we don’t do anything about, say, farming and industry:

Buying an electric car is a drop in the bucket compared with raising fuel-efficiency standards sharply. Conscientiously flying less is a lot easier if there’s more high-speed rail around. And if I eat fewer hamburgers a year, so what? But if cattle farmers were required to feed their cattle seaweed, which might reduce methane emissions by nearly 60 percent according to one study, that would make an enormous difference.

…No matter how bad it gets, no matter how hot it gets, we’ll still have the ability to make successive decades relatively less hot, and we should never stop trying. There is always something we can do. It’s too late to avoid a 21st century that is completely transformed by the forces of climate change, but we have to do everything possible to make the future cooler, safer, and healthier.

One of the most frightening theories I’ve heard about climate change is that the wealthiest, most powerful people in the world know full well what climate change will do, and they want it to happen.

It’s called “exterminism”. Rather than worry about saving the poor, feeding them, educating them, ensuring clean air and water for them… why not just let them burn? If you have sufficient resources, you can survive the eco-apocalypse and return to your rightful place in a world that no longer has to worry about all those inconvenient poor people.

If people believed such things, they wouldn’t be investing in climate change. They’d be buying bunkers.

And that’s what some of the world’s wealthiest people are doing.