21 November, 2021

As year-long protests and Modi’s retreat from the issue demonstrate, government promises of continued stability and new market opportunities ultimately couldn’t sway India’s farmers, who are often already burdened with debt and lacking alternative sources of income. According to the Brand India Equity Foundation, 58 percent of India’s population depends on the agriculture industry for its livelihood — and as Arvin explains, India has struggled to provide reasonable jobs in alternative sectors, despite the fact that agriculture brings in only about 18 percent of India’s GDP.

Beyond just being a victory for India’s disadvantaged farmers, however, Modi’s contrition tells a bigger story about his government, its recent failings, and the state of India’s flagging democracy.

India’s farmers are a powerful bloc in a precarious economic position

India’s agriculture system has for decades operated under a subsidy system — farmers grow food and other agricultural products and the government purchases them at a specific price from the farmers to sell internally or export, providing them with a guaranteed income. Since most farmers in India — 82 percent in 2018, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization — are small family farmers, not large corporate farms, their incomes are extremely precarious and contingent on the ability of the government to provide a minimum basic income for their crops.

Prior to the controversy over the farm laws, farmers in India already struggled with suicides — sometimes due to insurmountable debt, crop failure, and the volatility of food prices. That kind of despair, combined with few alternatives for careers that can adequately support a family, particularly in rural areas of the country, put farmers in an untenable position exacerbated by last year’s attempted farm reforms.

As Sadanand Dhume, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and an expert on South Asia, explained to Vox late last year, India’s agricultural system — and its economy more generally — requires significant change in order to keep up with global markets and provide an adequate standard of living for India’s population.

“If the economy were creating jobs, then there wouldn’t be as much anxiety,” Dhume said. However, “because job creation [in India] has been so weak, the thought of losing the guarantee is unsettling for farmers.”

Massive protests started soon after laws were passed, with farmers from all around the country — including Punjab, one of the country’s major grain suppliers, and Uttar Pradesh, the most populous state — congregating outside New Delhi.

International media coverage of the protests brought attention to the farmers’ cause, as did comments by Western celebrities like Rihanna and climate activist Greta Thunberg, and protesters built encampments that remained through the winter, despite occasional violence and a deadly wave of Covid-19 cases.

According to Harinder Happy, a spokesperson for Samyukta Kisan Morcha, the United Front of Farmers’ Unions, “at least 670 protesters have died” over the duration of the protests from a number of causes, including exposure, Covid-19, and suicide.

In October this year, four protesters also died when a car registered to a government minister plowed into a protesting crowd in Uttar Pradesh; previously, farmers had begun following BJP politicians as they campaigned in Uttar Pradesh in an extension of the protest movement centered on New Delhi.

The death of farm reforms is a rare concession from the Modi government

Under Modi, India has experienced a surge in Hindu nationalism, with deadly consequences for the country’s religious minorities. That nationalism has translated into political success for Modi — he won reelection in 2019 by a landslide on an overtly “Hindu-first” platform, as the AP described at the time. But his government’s response to the Covid-19 crisis — first shutting down much of India’s economy, then downplaying widespread suffering as crematoriums and hospitals overflowed during the nation’s deadly second wave — have weakened his standing nationally.

That weakness was underscored earlier this year in the Indian state of West Bengal, where Modi’s BJP lost decisively in local elections that saw Covid-19 become a major issue, and worries about the farm laws becoming an additional political vulnerability may have driven Modi’s decision to back down now.

“The repeal, which if enacted will partially reframe his damaging economic policy, comes in the face of the forthcoming Uttar Pradesh elections of 2022,” Chatterji told Vox over email. “Winning [Uttar Pradesh] is hyper critical for the Hindu nationalist BJP to continue their experiment in absolute nationalism in India.”

Protesters in both Uttar Pradesh and Punjab have already shown forceful opposition to BJP policy and an ability to organize a credible offense against them — and some experts say Modi’s decision to change course now may not be enough to repair the damage already done.

“The government is likely to spin this as the PM listening to the people, but after a year of hard protest, acrimony and violence, it’s going to be difficult to make that notion adhere,” Gilles Verniers, a political science professor at Ashoka University in India, told the AP this week.

Despite his missteps, however, Modi appears likely to remain in office for the time being. “While this presents an opening for the political opposition, it remains to be seen if the flailing Congress Party and its allies can galvanize a comeback,” Chatterji said.

The success of the farm law protests could mark a shift, though: Given the large proportion of India’s nearly 1.4 billion people who are engaged in the agriculture industry, the movement certainly had the numbers to mount a serious challenge, and Happy, the farmers’ union spokesperson, says the protesters have built a sustained movement to meet the demands of the agricultural sector.

“Indian agriculture sector and farmers and farm laborers are going through a deep crisis,” Happy said. “So our priority is to work intensively for farmers and farm laborers cause.”

The protest “was not just about [repealing] the laws, we had other demands as well,” he told Vox, including legislation to enshrine a minimum support price for agricultural goods. “Those demands are still pending.”

Currently, India’s parliament is set to convene later this month, at which point Modi said Friday that legislators “will begin the procedure” of repealing the laws.

In his Friday speech announcing the end of the new farm laws, Modi also told the protesters that they could go home and urged them to “start afresh”; as Happy told Vox, however, that’s not happening any time soon.

“We had a meeting of core committee today and have prepared some resolutions,” Happy said, and another meeting of the General Body of the United Farmers Front on the group’s next steps is scheduled for Sunday — all while protesters remain on the outskirts of Delhi, intending to agitate until the laws are repealed and the rest of their demands are met.

“The media never gave him the time of day because Richard didn’t come from a ‘tennis background,’” Katrina Adams, a former top 10 doubles player and top 100 singles player, told me. Adams is the first Black woman to serve as the president, chair, and CEO of the USTA. As a Black player on the tour, she saw the media coverage focus on the Williams sisters. She knows intimately what “the sport was offering or not offering to them.”

“It was very difficult for the media to think anything different than existing stigmas and stereotypes,” Adams told me. “As Black people, we couldn’t possibly be that smart to have the plan that Mr. Williams had in place. Our girls couldn’t possibly be that disciplined. That’s what the media assumed, and that they wanted to portray, and that’s what they did portray.”

Despite not following tradition, Richard promised, quite vocally, that his daughters would be the best players in the world, a plan that he hatched, he says, before they were born.

“My plan was simple: to bring two children out of the ghetto to the forefront of a white-dominated game. Could it be done? I hoped so. In fact, I was beyond hope. I was certain,” Richard Williams wrote in his 2014 memoir, Black and White. “Eliminating the last doubts from my mind, I wrote a final seventy-five-page tennis-training plan for myself, Oracene, and my daughters-to-be, detailing every step of the road we would travel, more than two and a half years before they were both born.”

When Venus and Serena started winning, Williams never stopped reminding anyone watching. He famously held up a whiteboard sign during the 1999 Lipton Championships, Serena and Venus’s first big tournament final, with messages like “Welcome to the Williams Show” and “I Told You So”.

Venus and Serena Williams were never afraid to say they wanted to win

Serena and Venus carried the same confidence Richard Williams instilled in them.

“Right now I’m Number 5. Soon I’ll be Number 4, and that’s great. One day I’ll win the French Open, and that’ll be great. Then I’ll have to move on and win Wimbledon,” Venus told Sports Illustrated in 1999.

In that same interview, Serena vowed to win a Grand Slam too. “I can see myself lifting that [Wimbledon] plate for sure. I just can’t see it not happening,” Serena said.

Caitlin Thompson, publisher of Racquet Magazine, explained to me that tennis has an inherent level of racism and classism due to the sport’s history and barriers to entry. To her, it wasn’t a surprise that the Williams family had to battle through this. The coverage of the family and Richard being portrayed as angry, bombastic, abrasive, overly confident, was the product of a predominantly white media covering a predominantly white sport with one Black family audacious enough to say they were going to be the best.

Thompson also points out that Richard would say outrageous things like how he and his family were going to buy Rockefeller Center or that he was going to outsell Michael Jackson. That didn’t win him fans among journalists and tennis pundits who already saw his antics as outrageous.

The real trigger though, she theorizes, is that the Williams sisters were so good. It wasn’t just that the sisters said that they would beat everyone, it’s that they made good on that promise. And Richard was seen as the mastermind behind it, the person who taught his daughters to behave like this.

“So much of the early coverage was focused on how the Williams family is too loud, how they’re fixing matches against each other, how it’s brute athleticism — and you know a lot of that is racially coded. They [the tour and the media] basically treated them like they were invasive species on the tennis court,” Thompson added.

This animus was clear during the semifinals of the 1997 US Open. Irina Spirlea, a Romanian player with a monster forehand, had defeated American Monica Seles in the quarterfinal. Venus, making her US Open debut, looked like a threat to win against Spirlea. During a changeover (where players switch sides and take a break between games) in the second set, Spirlea bumped into Williams.

Later, after losing their match, Spirlea hinted that she bumped Venus on purpose. “She thinks she’s the fucking Venus Williams. I was like, ‘I want to see if she’s turning,” Spirlea said, describing her approach to Williams. “She didn’t.”

Richard responded, calling Spirlea a “big, tall, white turkey” (Spirlea is 5’9” and not a bird). He also said that the bump was perhaps racially motivated. “I’ve seen a lot of racial things happen to my baby,” Richard Williams told the AP at the time. “I think what happened to Venus yesterday was a racial thing.”

He added, “She ought to be glad it wasn’t Serena she bumped into. She would have been decked.”

Even though Spirlea told reporters she deliberately bumped Venus, and even though Spirlea has the distinction of being the first female player disqualified after verbally abusing officials, some outlets portrayed Richard as the aggressor for his comments. The Los Angeles Times inexplicably ran a column from a probation officer that scolded Richard for being a bad father, writing that Venus “needs to learn how to interact with all people and to differentiate between healthy competition and true racism.”

Adams points out that instead of questioning Spirlea, tennis commentators and journalists wondered if Richard would stand by his comments, and speculated that it was Venus’s fault.

“‘Oh, she did something. Venus must have said something to her. She must have this. She must have that,’” Adams said. “You know what Venus was doing? She was kicking her ass.”

A year after the bump, in 1998, Williams apologized for calling Spirlea a large festive poultry and his allegation that she was racist.

At the 2001 Indian Wells Masters, themes of Williams being the problem in the face of racism popped up again.

After losing to Venus in the quarterfinals, a player named Elena Dementieva threw out the baseless accusation that Richard Williams would decide which sister won matches against each other. She said she had this “feeling.” The Women’s Tennis Association did not comment about Dementieva and did not defend the sisters.

The next day, four minutes prior to a scheduled match against Serena, Venus pulled out of the tournament citing tendinitis. The crowd, upset that they weren’t going to see a match, lashed out. The family said in interviews that some audience members called them slurs. Serena and Venus would go on to boycott the tournament for over a decade because of these racist displays.

Instead of giving Venus the benefit of the doubt about her injury and instead of questioning Dementieva’s motives, critics of the Williams family called their integrity into doubt. Both Thompson and Adams cite that incident as troubling, saying that journalists at the time did not believe the Williams’s family account of the attacks against them. This time, the problem was that they weren’t angry enough, with LA Times columnist Bill Dwyre writing, “They deny, but with less than the normal conviction, even anger, one would expect in the face of such serious issues. How about pounding on the table and saying it ain’t so? How about some tears, some anger?”

Critics said Richard Williams was a bad influence on Venus and Serena

That same year, Hall of Famer Martina Navratilova told reporters that there wasn’t any racism in tennis. In fact, she claimed that Venus and Serena enjoyed privilege because they were Black. “There’s no racism as far as I know,” said Navratilova. “I think that people have been treating them with kid gloves because they are African-Americans, and if they were white they would have been told off before and more.”

She also implied that Richard was a bad influence and that they would be better off without him. “The girls are great. They’re great athletes, nice women. I like them a lot and their father seems to be getting in the way. That’s what I have to say about that, and he’s probably going to yell at me next time he sees me.” she said.

The idea that Richard is some kind of puppet master or a bad influence that his daughters needed to be separated from became an underlying theme. As Venus and Serena kept winning, pundits, players, and legends like Navratilova seemed to pin their grievances on Richard while simultaneously lauding his daughters’ achievements. Essentially, the narrative was that they were winning in spite of him.

“Would another family have been treated as mine was?” Richard wrote in his book. “The harsh reality is that [America] has not eradicated prejudice. Racial barriers have fallen in record numbers throughout the years. Blacks not only ride in the front of the bus, some of us own the bus company. The events at Indian Wells were a reminder of how much farther we had to go.”

King Richard might be for the people who never believed in him

There’s an exquisite example of Richard Williams’s behavior caught on tape, a clip that has gone viral a few times since. It’s an interview for ABC News from 1995, with correspondent John McKenzie. McKenzie is interviewing a 14-year-old Venus about her tennis dreams and he asks her why she’s so confident.

“Did you think you could beat her?” McKenzie questions Venus. “You say it so easily. Why?”

Each time, Venus responds with a smile, telling him she’s “very confident.” But after prodding her confidence one more time, Richard interrupts. He tells McKenzie not to undermine her. He says:

Richard’s interruption, at the time, could be seen as bombastic or out of line. Through today’s lens, though — and for some at the time — it’s evident that Richard was trying to protect his daughter. He understood then that Venus and Serena needed to be confident in themselves because they were going to be constantly surrounded by people who told them otherwise.

“We in the Black community, we knew that, we understood it. We knew exactly where he was coming from. We knew exactly what he was doing,” Adams told me. “I already know how much he protected them.”

It’s only fairly recently, as Serena is in the twilight of her career, chasing history, that the sport at large has truly begun to appreciate what she and her sister have accomplished.

“I remember, there was a point, and it was later than you’d think — it was somewhere around her having 16 or 17 Grand Slams — when tennis commentators kind of decided to start talking about Serena specifically as a legend and not so much the open criticism they had of her,” Thompson recalls. Prior to that, she says, pundits would talk about Serena being lazy, out of shape, or distracted.

“There’s now this sort of retroactive narrative,” she said, explaining how tennis insiders are effectively ret-conning how they treated the Williams family. “Like they’ll say, ‘I’ve always thought of Venus and Serena as being elegant, transcendent champions.’ And it’s like, really? Did you? It didn’t sound like that at the time.”

Adams echoed this idea, telling me that watching commentators negatively portray the sisters is what spurred her to become a commentator herself. “I wanted to help tell their story better. I understood the pressures that they were under. I understood the targets that were on their backs.” Adams points out that white players who have gone through very public struggles have rarely been subject to the same kind of scrutiny.

In a sense, Serena and Venus’s Hall of Fame careers and their stewardship of the sport have made it impossible to dismiss Richard Williams. Squaring away their success means at the very least some admission that he was right. He protected them and guided them through turmoil like what happened at Indian Wells, a racist incident that no player should have to endure. And when you reexamine what Williams senior said, that his kids were going to be the very best, it isn’t all that different from what coaches at prestigious tennis academies have said about their brightest proteges.

“The reconsideration of Mr. Williams’s career is for the people that never believed in him in the first place,” Adams told me. “I always knew he was a legend. And I’ve always considered him and the girls to be legends. There’s no one else like them.”

A reexamination of Richard Williams’s legacy also comes as the US culturally has had a reckoning on race and gender in the realms of theater, movies, music, and of course sports. Conversations about the hurdles and systemic bias that Black athletes experience, including Black female tennis players, are being had on a national stage. Richard, Venus, and Serena, by way of their success and their openness about their experiences, are part of that reckoning.

In a way, it feels as though Richard himself wouldn’t really care about King Richard or how history will remember his legacy. He’s always been steps ahead, as he was when he decided that his girls would be the most dominant female tennis players that history has ever seen. And he’s always been devoted to his daughters, even if there were people — and there were plenty — who weren’t able to see it at the time.

“Choosing between having a child whom you love and who loves you, and money, was easy. I found it even made it easier for me to accept my kids on the court,” Richard wrote in his memoir, asserting that his daughters’ welfare was always more important than their success. “I never was a super coach, but I sure have been, I hope, a super parent.”

The long-awaited decision comes after months in which the boundaries of who can get a booster have been widening. The Biden administration first announced its plans to make boosters widely available in August. Since then, we’ve seen the rollout of boosters to Pfizer and Moderna recipients over age 65, and those who are 18 or older who are immunocompromised or at high risk of infection. All adult Johnson & Johnson one-dose recipients have also been approved for booster shots, two months after their first.

The fact is, the federal government has been lagging on this front. Several states have already gotten ahead of the federal government by approving boosters for adults: Colorado, California, New Mexico, and Arkansas, among others, have all moved in the last few weeks to declare nearly all adults eligible. And based on anecdotal accounts, even adults not eligible yet have been able to get a booster shot.

That has left people anticipating official federal guidance that anyone who wants a booster can get one — and it has also fostered confusion over what exactly the US’s public health game plan is, and whether getting the booster is the right personal choice for any given person.

Those questions will only loom larger now, with the expanded booster eligibility. Here’s how to help you think through the situation.

I’m healthy and not at higher risk for serious disease. Should I get a booster?

If you got two shots of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines, as I did, you’re already fairly well-protected from severe Covid-19 outcomes. The main thing a booster does is make you less likely to get infected and (mildly) sick — but that’s still good to have.

We have a lot more data on these vaccines than we did when they were first approved. We know that they generally remain very effective against severe illness and death even a year after someone gets two shots. But they do wane in effectiveness against infection. Six months after your second dose, the vaccine is less protective against catching Covid-19 and, perhaps, virus spread.

That’s because antibody levels in the blood decline over time. Experts disagree on how much people should worry about that. Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told me that a healthy, functioning immune system gradually prunes blood antibodies for infections the body hasn’t encountered, and it doesn’t mean you won’t fight off Covid-19 just fine (likely suffering only mild, maybe even unnoticeable illness, if you do catch it).

There’s a fair debate to be had about whether preventing infection, if illness is likely to be mild, is all that important as a public health priority. But even though I won’t get all that sick if I get Covid-19 because I’m fully vaccinated, I prefer not to get it at all. The booster does reduce my risk of becoming infected with Covid-19 — period. For me, that’s sufficient to take a booster, especially given that I didn’t have bothersome side effects from the first two shots.

This lukewarm recommendation becomes a much stronger one for older adults and others at elevated risk from Covid-19 due to their health or setting. If your immune system functions less well, then at least one additional shot might be needed just to get your immune system to the level of readiness that other people were at after two shots. That’s well worth it.

And if you got Johnson & Johnson, you should definitely get a booster (which the CDC had already approved) to combat some waning in vaccine efficacy for the one-dose shot.

If I’m healthy and get a booster, am I taking a dose away from someone who needs it more?

A lot of Covid-19 questions are complicated, but here’s one thing we can be fairly sure of: Your booster shot, if you choose to get one, is very likely not directly coming at the expense of other people, experts told me.

The concern stems from the fact that many people in the US will be getting their third shot when about half of the world hasn’t had even one shot. That’s not just an injustice and a humanitarian wrong, it’s also strategically foolish: Virus variants can develop more easily when Covid-19 cases are high, and vaccines are the most effective way to lower them.

If skipping a booster would get that shot to someone in a poor country instead, I’d prefer to do that.

But that’s not really how vaccine allocation works. Many months ago, the US placed orders with Moderna and Pfizer for millions of doses of their vaccines. Other countries and international organizations did the same.

Those orders, experts told me, are being fulfilled in the order they were placed — so if Moderna is committed to delivering 20 million doses to the US first, then 10 million to France next, that’s the order they will send them. And if the US orders additional doses now in response to increased demand from booster-getters like us, that request will be at the back of the queue.

Not getting your booster won’t get that shot to people in other countries who need them more. What might help, Amanda Glassman, senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, told me, is queue-swapping: the US formally ceding its place in line to other countries that need it more or to Covax, the international alliance to vaccinate the world.

If you’re frustrated, like I am, that millions of vaccines are going unused in the US while they’re badly needed elsewhere, you should absolutely push for the US to give up its place in line. But skipping a booster shot won’t change how many doses Moderna or Pfizer will deliver to the US before they move on to the next country on their list.

And within the US, we have plenty of supply of mRNA vaccines at this point — so getting a booster isn’t taking one from your neighbors either.

Why there has been so much confusion over boosters

The confusion surrounding boosters is in some ways an outgrowth of messy communications from the public health establishment. It likely explains the markedly different response to boosters than to the initial wave of vaccines.

Conversations about boosters have been tinged with ambivalence and uncertainty. In the early days when the vaccines first started rolling out to the larger population, my family and friends drove for hours to land our Covid-19 vaccines. I hate long car rides, but I spent the whole time actively excited. There’s a bit less of that feeling this time (but don’t tell that to our 5-year-old, who was so inspired she declared she’ll invent an immortality shot when she grows up).

“We’ve miscommunicated this,” Offit told me. He argues that the adults dying of Covid-19 are almost all people who are unvaccinated or those at much-elevated risk, and the back-and-forth on boosters for healthy people has ended up leaving people confused. Many people who are already very safe from serious infection or death have ended up with the impression they’re at risk, while people who actually are at risk — largely those who are unvaccinated — have ended up with the impression the vaccines don’t really help.

The FDA and CDC announcements on expanding booster eligibility should hopefully clarify some of the confusion out there. And the science on booster shots will continue to evolve — as we learn more, it should inform our public policies and individual decision-making.

In the meantime, it’s okay to go ahead and grab a booster to increase your protection. The earlier doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are still protective against severe disease and hospitalization, but an added coat of armor — especially since there is little vaccine scarcity in the US — can only help.

Update, November 19, 6:15 pm: This story was updated to reflect news of the CDC approving expanded booster shot eligibility, after FDA approval earlier in the day.

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From Ars Technica

From Jokes Subreddit

I think my family is racist -

I brought my Asian girlfriend home for dinner and my wife and kids were very rude to her.

submitted by /u/liquidporkchops
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Men vacuum in the same way that they have sex. -

They just put it in and make some noise for 3 minutes before they collapse on the couch, thinking that their wife should be really happy.

submitted by /u/Waitsfornoone
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The best joke I’ve ever heard which never fails to make me smile whenever I remember it.(NSFW) -

Three explorers get lost in a huge jungle. After wandering around for days, they are found and captured by a jungle tribe. The tribesmen take the explorers to their leader and drop them at his feet. The chieftain looks at them for a moment and says, “ The three of you will die unless you manage to do a near impossible task. Each of you must gather 10 fruits of the same kind and bring them to me.” The explorers cannot believe their luck at being given such an easy task. They set out their separate ways to find a fruit as fast as they can. The first one finds an apple tree and so quickly gathers 10 of them. The second one finds some cherries and plucks a bunch of them.They rush to the chieftain and present the fruits. The chieftain smiles and says, “ Now you must shove them up your ass one by one, and if you make any noise or facial expression I will slit your throat right here.” The first explorer,resigned to his fate, puts on a brave face and starts shoving the apples. He gets to four and then he can’t take it anymore. As soon as he yells in despair, the chieftain takes his knife and slits his throat leaving him to bleed out on the ground. The first explorer dies and reaches the gates of heaven, and while he is walking in he sees the second explorer running to catch up with him. “Why are you here? I thought you only had ten small cherries with you?” The first guy asks him. The second explorer laughs and says “ Well all was for going fine and I was just sliding the ninth cherry inside, but then I saw our friend dragging a cart of the largest pineapples have seen behind him and I burst out laughing!”

submitted by /u/texit_
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Ten years ago today, I married my best friend -

My wife was pretty upset about it, but Dave and I were drunk and thought it was funny

submitted by /u/RockIngChairDad
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An elderly woman goes to the doctor for a check up. NSFW -

The old woman enters the doctors room and the doctor asks her to sit on the table so he can examine her. He starts by testing her reflexes.

The doctor takes out his reflex hammer and taps on one knee. The elderly woman gasps but her leg doesn’t jerk. Concerned the doctor hits the other knee, once again the woman gasps but her leg doesn’t jerk. He asks the patient “Do you have any difficulty walking?” The elderly woman says she indeed does. The doctor tries again and again and again to get a reflex out of the old woman’s knees but each time she only gasps.

The doctor, concerned and analyzing the situation asks the old woman if she’s feeling any pain or discomfort in her knees and she replies “No Doc, but can you stop with the hammer?! My tits are killing me!”

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