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katherineharron

White supremacists pose as Antifa online, call for violence - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 02 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • A Twitter account that tweeted a call to violence and claimed to be representing the position of "Antifa" was in fact created by a known white supremacist group, Twitter said Monday. The company removed the account.
  • "This account violated our platform manipulation and spam policy, specifically the creation of fake accounts," a Twitter spokesperson said in a statement. "We took action after the account sent a Tweet inciting violence and broke the Twitter Rules."
  • The revelation of the account comes as President Donald Trump increasingly blames left-wing activists for violence occurring at protests across America.
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  • On Sunday, Trump tweeted he would designate Antifa a terrorist organization,
  • he fake account, @ANTIFA_US, tweeted Sunday, "ALERT Tonight's the night, Comrades Tonight we say "F**k The City" and we move into the residential areas... the white hoods.... and we take what's ours #BlacklivesMaters #F**kAmerica."
  • Though Twitter referred to the group as Identity Evropa when discussing the account's removal, the Anti Defamation League (ADL) states that the group dissolved and reformed under the name the American Identitarian Movement, which it also calls a white supremacist group.
  • The phenomenon of people on the right creating fake Antifa accounts predates the current wave of protests. The takedown Monday is not the first time a fake Antifa account linked to white supremacists has been suspended by Twitter, the spokesperson confirmed.
Javier E

Revisiting the prophetic work of Neil Postman about the media » MercatorNet - 1 views

mercatornet.com/...68239

postman media analysis social media psychology brain science technology education

shared by Javier E on 13 May 21 - No Cached
  • The NYU professor was surely prophetic. “Our own tribe is undergoing a vast and trembling shift from the magic of writing to the magic of electronics,” he cautioned.
  • “We face the rapid dissolution of the assumptions of an education organised around the slow-moving printed word, and the equally rapid emergence of a new education based on the speed-of-light electronic message.”
  • What Postman perceived in television has been dramatically intensified by smartphones and social media
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  • Postman also recognised that technology was changing our mental processes and social habits.
  • Today corporations like Google and Amazon collect data on Internet users based on their browsing history, the things they purchase, and the apps they use
  • Yet all citizens are undergoing this same transformation. Our digital devices undermine social interactions by isolating us,
  • “Years from now, it will be noticed that the massive collection and speed-of-light retrieval of data have been of great value to large-scale organisations, but have solved very little of importance to most people, and have created at least as many problems for them as they may have solved.”
  • “Television has by its power to control the time, attention, and cognitive habits of our youth gained the power to control their education.”
  • As a student of Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan, Postman believed that the medium of information was critical to understanding its social and political effects. Every technology has its own agenda. Postman worried that the very nature of television undermined American democratic institutions.
  • Many Americans tuned in to the presidential debate looking for something substantial and meaty
  • It was simply another manifestation of the incoherence and vitriol of cable news
  • “When, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility,” warned Postman.
  • Technology Is Never Neutral
  • As for new problems, we have increased addictions (technological and pornographic); increased loneliness, anxiety, and distraction; and inhibited social and intellectual maturation.
  • The average length of a shot on network television is only 3.5 seconds, so that the eye never rests, always has something new to see. Moreover, television offers viewers a variety of subject matter, requires minimal skills to comprehend it, and is largely aimed at emotional gratification.
  • This is far truer of the Internet and social media, where more than a third of Americans, and almost half of young people, now get their news.
  • with smartphones now ubiquitous, the Internet has replaced television as the “background radiation of the social and intellectual universe.”
  • Is There Any Solution?
  • Reading news or commentary in print, in contrast, requires concentration, patience, and careful reflection, virtues that our digital age vitiates.
  • Politics as Entertainment
  • “How television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged,” observed Postman. In the case of politics, television fashions public discourse into yet another form of entertainment
  • In America, the fundamental metaphor for political discourse is the television commercial. The television commercial is not at all about the character of products to be consumed. … They tell everything about the fears, fancies, and dreams of those who might buy them.
  • The television commercial has oriented business away from making products of value and towards making consumers feel valuable, which means that the business of business has now become pseudo-therapy. The consumer is a patient assured by psycho-dramas.
  • Such is the case with the way politics is “advertised” to different subsets of the American electorate. The “consumer,” depending on his political leanings, may be manipulated by fears of either an impending white-nationalist, fascist dictatorship, or a radical, woke socialist takeover.
  • This paradigm is aggravated by the hypersiloing of media content, which explains why Americans who read left-leaning media view the Proud Boys as a legitimate, existential threat to national civil order, while those who read right-leaning media believe the real immediate enemies of our nation are Antifa
  • Regardless of whether either of these groups represents a real public menace, the loss of any national consensus over what constitutes objective news means that Americans effectively talk past one another: they use the Proud Boys or Antifa as rhetorical barbs to smear their ideological opponents as extremists.
  • Yet these technologies are far from neutral. They are, rather, “equipped with a program for social change.
  • Postman’s analysis of technology is prophetic and profound. He warned of the trivialising of our media, defined by “broken time and broken attention,” in which “facts push other facts into and then out of consciousness at speeds that neither permit nor require evaluation.” He warned of “a neighborhood of strangers and pointless quantity.”
  • does Postman offer any solutions to this seemingly uncontrollable technological juggernaut?
  • Postman’s suggestions regarding education are certainly relevant. He unequivocally condemned education that mimics entertainment, and urged a return to learning that is hierarchical, meaning that it first gives students a foundation of essential knowledge before teaching “critical thinking.”
  • Postman also argued that education must avoid a lowest-common-denominator approach in favor of complexity and the perplexing: the latter method elicits in the student a desire to make sense of what perplexes him.
  • Finally, Postman promoted education of vigorous exposition, logic, and rhetoric, all being necessary for citizenship
  • Another course of action is to understand what these media, by their very nature, do to us and to public discourse.
  • We must, as Postman exhorts us, “demystify the data” and dominate our technology, lest it dominate us. We must identify and resist how television, social media, and smartphones manipulate our emotions, infantilise us, and weaken our ability to rebuild what 2020 has ravaged.
Javier E

It's Win-Win When Trump and the Democrats Work Together - 0 views

nymag.com/...e-democrats-work-together.html

violence leftist antifa New Left oppression speech silence ideology liberation culture history

shared by Javier E on 26 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • The “punch a Nazi” thread that became popular earlier this year among the left-liberal journalistic class opened my eyes to this, as more than a few liberal thought leaders loved it when they saw a video of Richard Spencer being clocked by a masked thug.
  • How has political violence now become acceptable on lefty Twitter and among one in five college students? I’d argue that it’s too easy to overlook the influence of the neo-Marxist ideology now pervasive on countless campuses — specifically the late philosopher Herbert Marcuse’s concepts of “violence of defense” and “violence of aggression” in the context of what he called “repressive tolerance.” For parts of the New Left, racist democratic capitalism perpetuates so much systemic oppression that any defense of it or acquiescence in it amounts to violence against the victims. Therefore violence in defense of the victims is perfectly defensible. It just levels the playing field.
  • Hence it’s okay to punch a Nazi, but not okay to punch a communist. It’s defensible for an oppressed person of color to assault a white person but never the other way round. Hence a recent discussion in The Guardian about whether cold-cocking a racist is defensible: “A punch may be uncivil, but racism is worse.”
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  • Actually, speech is not just interchangeable with violence; even silence is! One of the more popular signs at the rally in Boston a few weeks back was the following: “White Silence = Violence.” If you are not actively speaking out against white supremacy, in other words, you are actively enforcing it. Once you’ve apologized for being born white, and asked permission to speak, your next and only step is to inveigh against racism/sexism, etc. … or be accused of being a white supremacist yourself. At some point your head begins to explode. What is this: a Maoist boot camp?
  • We often discuss these things in the media without understanding the core ideas that animate them. But it’s important to understand that for the social-justice left, there is nothing irrational about any of this. If you take their ideas seriously, oppressive speech is violence and self-defense is legitimate. Violence is therefore not some regrettable incident. Violence to achieve liberation is a key part of the ideology they believe in.
sanderk

In Europe, Hate Speech Laws are Often Used to Suppress and Punish Left-Wing Viewpoints - 0 views

theintercept.com/...nd-punish-left-wing-viewpoints

education Knowledge social media

shared by sanderk on 28 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Many Americans who long for Europe’s hate speech restrictions assume that those laws are used to outlaw and punish expression of the bigoted ideas they most hate: racism, homophobia, Islamophobia, misogyny. Often, such laws are used that way. There are numerous cases in western Europe and Canada of far-right extremists being arrested, fined, or even jailed for publicly spouting that type of overt bigotry.
  • Does anyone doubt that high on the list of “hate speech” for many U.S. officials, judges, and functionaries would be groups, such as Black Lives Matter and antifa, far-left groups that fight against white supremacists?
  • In The Guardian, Richard Seymour went further and said that “Ahmed is the latest victim of a concerted effort to redefine racism as ‘anything that could conceivably offend white people.'”
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  • A leftist activist in France was convicted and fined for insulting former French President Nicolas Sarkozy by holding a sign that said “get lost, jerk”; ironically, those were the exact words Sarkozy himself uttered when a citizen refused to shake his hand at a public fair (the European Court of Human Rights ultimately overturned the Frenchman’s conviction).
  • Even if “hate speech” laws were magically applied by authorities exactly as advocates would wish — whereby only the ideas one hates would be suppressed and punished while the ideas one loves would be allowed to flourish — there would still be very good reasons to oppose such laws.
  • As Cole wrote: “When white supremacists called a rally the following week in Boston, they mustered only a handful of supporters. They were vastly outnumbered by tens of thousands of counter-protesters who peacefully marched through the streets to condemn white supremacy, racism, and hate. Boston proved yet again that the most powerful response to speech that we hate is not suppression but more speech.”
  • As The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf recently explained, there is a grave irony at the heart of these newfound liberal desires for “hate speech” censorship laws: The people who would implement and interpret them are those in power, people like Donald Trump, Jeff Sessions, GOP governors and legislators, and their litany of right-wing judges. It takes little imagination to see how such laws would be applied, and against whom. Indeed, the U.S. history of allowing such restrictions is that they have been used against exactly the groups that censorship advocates think they are protecting.
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