Florida Citizens’ Alliance, a conservative, 20,000-member organization based in Naples that spearheaded a successful grassroots effort last year to pass the nation’s first state bill allowing residents to demand a public hearing on local school textbooks. With its passage, parents of students — as well as anyone living in a given district — can challenge the books a school is using to teach their community’s children. It was a seemingly parochial piece of civic legislation, but it was one with potentially great implications for science education in the United States.
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The Next Climate Battleground: Your Child's Science Classroom - 0 views
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Prominent on the group’s expanded menu of concerns was climate change, and humanity’s presumed role in driving it. The Alliance’s members began line-reading school textbooks for violations of their beliefs, creating carefully detailed reports on how many times, and in what context, elementary and high school students were learning about rising seas, or melting ice in Antarctica.
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Vernon said, echoing a prevailing concern among members of the Alliance and likeminded conservatives everywhere: the unchecked power and control over social institutions by perceived liberal elites. “We’re really concerned,” he added, “that our kids are not being educated, [but] simply indoctrinated in the philosophy of the academic aristocracy.”
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one that has conservative groups wrestling for control over how climate science will be taught to American students. The science classroom, after all, remains the dominant venue in which those students first encounter the topic, and it greatly informs how students eventually square-up to the veracity of climate change — either as something they believe to be happening and worth responding to politically, or as a phenomenon of nature, underserving of public funds and political action.
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The outcome matters: Whoever wins over the minds of this upcoming cohort of American voters will, to a large extent, shape the nation’s policies on climate change for decades to come.
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“Teachers are facing pressure to not only eliminate or de-emphasize climate change science, but also to introduce non-scientific ideas in science classrooms,” the statement said.
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For advocates of inserting climate change skepticism into the classroom, the notion of “teaching both sides of the debate” is a familiar refrain, and it’s one used to mask the more fundamental motive: Fostering doubt in students that the scientific community conclusively agrees climate change is occurring.
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For those science teachers who remain in the classroom, a comprehensive understanding of climate science itself is not a given. One recent report found that less than half of K-12 science teachers received formal climate science training during their own college education — a comprehension void that helps explain why political ideology has been shown to be the most consistent indicator of how a teacher presents climate science to their own students.
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Trying to continue with lessons on climate science despite this intensifying atmosphere of hostility has forced some teachers to become savvier — or more secretive — about how they present the information to their students. In Texas, Nina Corley is careful to keep explicit mentions of climate change out of her lessons, for fear that her skeptical administrators might try to censor the science. “The administrators in a school can have total control, because they’re your boss, you have to remember that. It’s going to be how you word it,” she said. “I’m not going to say my lesson plan is on climate change today, I’ll just talk about how we’re investigating the effects of carbon dioxide.”
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Recalling one student who was hostile to her lessons on climate change, Erin Stutzman realized the more personal ramifications catalyzed by the student changing his mind. “He was tightly engrossed in the skepticism, that belief was engrained in him. And his initial resistance wasn’t to the science, really, it was that someone was challenging his parents and his friend’s parents,”
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'West Side Story' Broadway review: Radical revival is a triumph - 0 views
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A galvanizing new revival of “West Side Story” opened Thursday night on Broadway, minus some familiar sights and sounds. Jerome Robbins’ legendary choreography has been Jet-tisoned along with the “Somewhere” ballet, and Maria’s chirpy “I Feel Pretty” was given the ax. There’s no longer an intermission, with the musical now running a breakneck one hour and 45 minutes.
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Instead, in Belgian director Ivo van Hove’s finger-snapping-free staging, there’s a gigantic video wall behind a mostly spare stage, modern clothes and a ferocity not seen since the musical’s 1957 premiere, when The Post’s Richard Watts Jr. called it the story of “the ugliness and horror of a war to the death between the boys.”
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By pushing back against what we remember from the Oscar-winning 1961 film, a musical that many can recite line-by-line becomes newly suspenseful and gripping.
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As we watch during Leonard Bernstein’s booming “Prologue,” when a camera pans across the cast’s faces, the racially specific animus (Puerto Ricans versus the Polish and Irish) is largely gone.
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Why Do Emotions Influence Us More Than Reason? - Exploring your mind - 0 views
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Our mind is extremely powerful and skillful in directing our behavior, both for good and for evil.
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We have the choice to follow our “heart” or to listen to the list of pros and cons.
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Most of the studies that have analyzed this process of decision-making affirm that, usually, emotions win.
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Emotions: as ethereal as air and as dangerous as sulfur
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Emotions are subjective experiences that induce you to act. They emerge basically from our perceptions of the world, instead of from an actual reasoning.
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Many human behaviors depend on emotions. Emotions have a great effect on the decisions we make. In fact, usually, they are crucial.
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In theory, emotions are not decisive, but in reality they can be very decisive. They are intrinsic to human beings and seep into all our judgments and deliberations in life. It is not about denying them, but rather about identifying them and learning to channel them for our own good.
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Emotions usually obey unknown causes.
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Emotions give way to certain thoughts, and thoughts, in turn, give birth to emotions.
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Emotions that have barely been thought out lead to a distorted perception of reality.
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In the same way, imagining purely emotional actions, without even a pinch of reason, is more or less absurd.
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Emotions are not prancing and runaway horses that we should “take the reins of.” They make us who we are as human beings. They help give meaning to our world. They do not have to be “eradicated,” nor denied or undervalued. Quite the contrary: being able to feel means being able to be human. Only on the basis of emotions can love, sacrifice, big dreams and great deeds be built.
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'The Police Do Nothing': Thugs Attack Protesters with Impunity in Bolivia - 0 views
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Protesters noted that, even disregarding the fact that the constitution banned him from running before the judicial intervention, Morales appeared to be only narrowly defeating opponent Carlos Mesa before the electoral commission abruptly shut down an electronic count.
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A woman can be heard echoing the journalist, saying, “The police aren’t doing anything!”
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“Most of the injured who arrived at clinics and hospitals showed injuries produced by firearms, stab wounds, burns, and concussions,”
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The mining industry has traditionally supported Morales.
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“The interim OAS (Organisation of American States) mission report has identified substantial shortcomings of the electoral process, notably the unexpected interruption of the publication of the voting results, that undermine the necessary credibility and transparency,”
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Donald Trump's trade wars have not been 'easy to win' | Financial Times - 0 views
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The phase one trade agreement between the US and China signed on Wednesday is only a truce in the trade war, rather than a major reversal of the tariffs imposed since 2018. Nevertheless, it halts a dangerous political momentum.
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Jan Hatzius of Goldman Sachs describes this as a “subtraction of the negatives”. Paradoxically, the worse the effects on US growth rates in the past two years, the greater the scope for a bounceback this year. Mr Trump’s initial confidence about the effects of trade protection was based on a belief that China’s bilateral trade surplus with the US would force President Xi Jinping to make major policy concessions to safeguard his own export sector. The outcome was rather different: China retaliated with similar measures and this damaged American manufacturers.
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The damage to financial and business confidence triggered by the trade announcements hurt US growth still further. The tightening in financial conditions caused by the rising dollar and the collapse in equities late in 2018 would probably have been more severe if the Fed had not reduced policy interest rates by 75 basis points since then.
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The good news is that part of this overall drag may disappear before the end of 2020, boosting American GDP growthby at least half a percentage point.What about the longer-term benefits of the trade deal?The purchase of $200bn of additional US exports in the energy, agriculture, manufacturing and services sectors, spread over two years, will reduce the bilateral trade deficit with China. But many of these exports will probably be redirected from elsewhere and will not boost US domestic output in those sectors. Longer term, China’s business restrictions, including alleged unfair trading practices, appear to be easing. Given the political boost from the phase one deal, Chinese economic reformers such as vice-premier Liu He may be in the ascendancy in Beijing for a while.
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The trade war has significantly damaged US growth in 2018-19Since President Donald Trump became more aggressive in his threats about trade protection early in 2018, US tariffs on Chinese goods have risen markedly, prompting retaliation from China. There have been only a few comprehensive studies on the overall impact of tariffs on the US growth rate. A notable exception is the work of Jan Hatzius’s US economics team at Goldman Sachs. They have estimated the possible impact of rising tariffs on net trade flows, real incomes, financial conditions and business confidence, and have combined these effects to produce the aggregate growth estimates shown in the graph below. As the negative effects of rising tariffs fade in 2020, the US growth rate is expected to be boosted by at least half a percentage point.
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Animations Reveal the Tricks Moving Optical Illusions Play On Your Brain | Mental Floss - 0 views
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Even when you know how an optical illusion works, it can be hard to convince your senses that what you're seeing isn't real. The best way to demystify an illusion isn't necessarily to read about it—sometimes, you just need to see the image from a different perspective.
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Once the solutions have been revealed, you may still have trouble reconciling what you see with what you know to be true. But at the very least, turning the illusions off in the moving images below should give your brain a break.
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Trump considers reopening U.S. economy despite coronavirus spread - 0 views
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President Donald Trump is considering measures to reopen the U.S. economy, even as the highly contagious coronavirus is spreading rapidly and hospitals are bracing for a wave of virus-related deaths.
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Trump issued guidelines a week ago that he said aimed to slow the spread of the disease over 15 days, including curbing unnecessary travel. Economic activity has ground to a halt in some states.
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Trump, who had hoped to build his campaign for the Nov. 3 election on a booming U.S. economy, now is looking at the potential of millions of lost jobs. Many of his Republican allies fear the toll on the economy would make it harder for him to win another four-year term.
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"If we can take some pressure off the economy fine, but my primary focus is to make sure the virus is contained and defeated. And we're just going to have to suffer through the economic consequences.”
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Over the last few days, some economic policy advisers have started to focus on how long lockdowns and other measures to contain the virus might last, one outside adviser said.
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Trump believes "we are strong and need a strong economy as we deal with this crisis," the source said.
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Moore questioned California's plan to shut down much of the economy last week. "We have to ask this question, is it worth trillions of dollars of losses?," he said on Fox News. Moore didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
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"We’re going to have, in my opinion, if it continues for long, because of the financial distress that people will have … a month from now, two months from now, three months from now when people are financially devastated, the domestic violence, suicides, deprivation that we’re inflicting upon ourselves," he said.
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Donald Trump is the moderate candidate in the 2020 presidential election - Washington T... - 0 views
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Washington has a way of capturing presidents more than they conquer its bureaucracy — in current parlance, President Trump has become an alligator more than he has drained the swamp.
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If one of the terribly serious six lands in the Oval Office, don’t look for that to change. With moderate revisions, Nancy Pelosi endorsed the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement. None of the Democratic aspirants could end the festering confrontation with China without winning fundamental reforms in its socialist market economy, which the Chinese Communist Party simply won’t tolerate, or facing a revolt within their own party in Congress.
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The economy entered 2020 in reasonably good shape, but thanks to Boeing’s problems and the coronavirus lockdown of China we will be lucky to get 2 GDP percent growth this year. A cooling economy means the improvements in wages and wealth of lower income Americans Mr. Trump bragged about in his State of the Union address will diminish.
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How Navy SEALs Conquer Fear and Anxiety - SEALFIT - 1 views
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Stress just means resistance or pressure. We need stress to grow as humans; it can be a positive force if mentally framed correctly — even enhancing performance to blast through a deadline. But prolonged stress erodes your performance and wellbeing.
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The workload we endured seemed impossible. But, amazingly, it was. Our “Why” enabled us to tap into our 20X Factor and an uncommon resolve.
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Despite the chaos, a SEAL is trained to focus with single-mindedness on the immediate threat and dispatch one target at a time. Excessive thinking would have killed me. My unconscious competence combined with relentless training saved my life.
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I was useless as a navigator but couldn’t abort the mission. My teammate took over. After my frustration and fear had dissipated, I slowed my breathing and held my breath at the inhale and exhale. I focused my mind on the breathing cycle while repeating the positive mantra, “Feeling good, looking good, ought to be in Hollywood!” thus accelerating my concentration and positivity. Suddenly we came to a halt. We’d arrived at the destination. A miserable three hours felt like an enjoyable 45 minutes just through focused breathing.
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he had his SEAL Team visualize the mission hundreds of times. They mentally pictured everything that could go wrong, as well as what the victory would look like. They also rehearsed it live in a mock-up of the compound the terrorist was holed up in. This tactic is a key to SEAL success.
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SEAL’s don’t take anything for granted and ensure that they win in their minds before stepping onto the helo
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The SEAL ethos makes quitting not an option. SEALs persevere to “find a way or make one.” Things inevitably go wrong, but they don’t entertain the concept of failure
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Lindsey Graham encourages senior judges to step aside ahead of election - CNNPolitics - 0 views
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Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham on Thursday encouraged senior federal judges to step aside so his committee can approve conservatives who President Donald Trump would nominate to replace them ahead of the November election.
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"This is an historic opportunity," Graham said in an interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt. "If (Trump) can get four more years, I mean, it would change the judiciary for several generations. So if you're a circuit judge in your mid-60s, late 60s, you can take senior status, now would be a good time to do that if you want to make sure the judiciary is right of center."
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The unusual plea was prompted by Hewitt and reflects a recognition from Senate Republicans they may not control the chamber next session and therefore won't be in a position to push through confirmations of Trump's judges should he win reelection.
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Federal judges who have reached age 65 are eligible to take "senior status" depending on their number of years on the bench. That allows them to maintain a reduced caseload, while creating a vacancy on the court
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Should Trump lose his reelection bid to presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden, any future vacancies could potentially be filled by liberal judges. If Trump remains in office but Democrats take control of the Senate, his nominations could be blocked by the new majority.
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"Obviously, the senior judges need to let the White House know in advance of the actual date so that we can be prepared to move the new nominee. As I said, my motto for the year is leave no vacancy behind, and that's exactly what I mean," the Kentucky Republican told Hewitt in an interview in February.
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Speaking late last year to Hewitt, McConnell remarked that "one of every four of the US circuit judges in the country have been put on the bench" during Trump's tenure.
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Trump's language is his tell on Syria -- Meanwhile in America - CNN - 0 views
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Ever since Donald Trump became president, critics have worried that his rudimentary knowledge of global affairs, erratic decisions and politicized foreign policy would get people killed. It's happening now. "You are leaving us to be slaughtered," Gen. Mazloum Kobani Abdi, commander of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces told a senior US official last week. Trump's abandonment of Kurdish allies in Syria has triggered a humanitarian crisis, and as Turkey moves in, there are reports of executions and fears that ISIS members could escape in the chaos.
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The President is trading on a "bring the troops home" mentality that often follows US military entanglements overseas. It's a politically palatable position because the people dying as a result of his decisions are not American. His language is the tell here: He's using stereotypes about war-mongering Middle Easterners to undermine the idea that the Kurds could be real allies deserving of loyalty -- despite the successful, years-long US-Kurdish alliance against ISIS and before that in Iraq.
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'They are coming and they will take everything. May God end America'
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This was the despairing prediction of a Kurdish man trying to save his family from the Turkish advance, speaking to CNN's Nick Paton Walsh inside Syria.
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Over the weekend, Wall Street Journal columnist and former Ronald Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan summed up Trump's national security leadership like this: "Foreign-policy decisions in this administration look like the ball in a pinball machine in some garish arcade with flashing lights and some frantic guy pushing the levers ping ping ping and thinking he's winning."
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Finally, some good news. China and the United States seem to have stepped back from the brink with a trade war truce.
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5 Tips to Properly Argue Your Point | HuffPost - 0 views
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In the age of blogging and social media, everyone wants to share their opinion. However, it has become abundantly clear to me that many people simply do not or cannot argue a point in a meaningful way
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But, if you are going to disagree or debate a blog post, Facebook post or any of the other mediums we now have to share our opinions, there is a wrong way and a right way to present your ideas. I hope these 5 points will help you share your ideas in a more meaningful way. If you do not like these ideas, share your own ideas below
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Someone states their opinion and it makes your blood curdle. You immediately want to attach this person. Honestly, do you think this person cares what you think of them? Do you think that others in the line of comments really care what you think of this person? That is not a way to win an argument or even how to defend your position. If you want to score points, you have to hit where it counts and that is against their position. Argue why their point is wrong and your point is right.
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If you read a post and disagree, before you respond, do a little research. Maybe you can find some data that supports your position.
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When you are quoting your opponent while using their blog post or Facebook post, use the statement as it was intended to be used. Do not try to fabricate what the meaning of a sentence was or add/subtract words to suit your needs.
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When you present your argument, you want it to be organized and specific to your point. You do not want people to become confused after reading your post. You want to persuade people to take your side, not confuse them and push them away. If you stay focused on your topic and continue to make valid points, it will make it difficult for your opponent to debate your position.
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When people start to rant and go off on tangents or attack the other person, the audience quickly loses interest. No one wants to back the person that turns rude, or becomes mean-spirited. They want to follow the professional, because they are professional. They want to follow the person who is positive and polite through the entire debate
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Police accountability and immunity could get a closer look by the Supreme Court - CNNPo... - 0 views
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Law enforcement accountability is missing in the justice system.
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The Supreme Court could decide soon whether it will take a closer look at a legal doctrine it created nearly 40 years ago that critics say is shielding law enforcement and government officials from accountability. Defenders argue that it protects an officer's ability to make a snap decision during potentially dangerous situations.
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"When the Supreme Court grants qualified immunity ... it sends a message to law enforcement that there are not consequences for violating the law and it sends the message to the people that their rights don't matter,"
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That requires a high bar and makes it difficult to win unless the situation is similar to a prior case with nearly identical facts. In some cases with unique fact patterns, of which there are many, officers have been granted immunity even if they have been found to have acted in violation of the Constitution.
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"Everyone has the potential for adverse encounters with state actors, whether it's members of law enforcement, public school officials, city council members, or other municipal employees," said Jay Schweikert, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute. "So long as the Supreme Court continues to permit this unlawful shield for government agents, no citizen will have any assurance that their rights will be respected."
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"Until we shift the focus of our inquiry to whether immunity existed at common law, we will continue to substitute our own policy preferences for the mandates of Congress," the conservative Thomas wrote in a concurring opinion. "In an appropriate case, we should reconsider our qualified immunity jurisprudence."
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In its 1982 decision, the court found that the aides were entitled to qualified immunity. "Government officials performing discretionary functions, generally are shielded from liability for civil damages insofar as their conduct does not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known," the court ruled.
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"The principle that government officials should be accountable for their violations of the Constitution is not a partisan issue. It's an American one," Boston University law professor Jack Beermann said in an interview with CNN. "Conservatives are just as concerned with abuse of government power as liberals are. And you combine that with what seems to be a rash of police misconduct in recent years and you can get a pretty strong coalition."
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"There's an incredible urgency as communities across the country seek accountability for police violence against individuals of color in particularly, to open up the courts, claim a constitutional violation and make sure officers aren't provided a get-out-of-court-free card when they violate people's rights,"
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"We are in the midst of a crisis of accountability in law enforcement,
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As George Floyd's death tragically illustrates, for many people in this country, our culture of near-zero accountability for law enforcement is not an abstract public-policy concern, but a matter of life and death.
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"At its heart, qualified immunity protects police officers' split second decisions ... courts must afford them a measure of deference in their on-the-scene assessments about the application of force to subdue a fleeing or resisting suspect,"
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"Abandoning qualified immunity ... would leave hundreds of thousands of law enforcement officers exposed to potential liability, likely second guessing themselves in situations where a hesitation to act could mean the difference between life and death," the lawyers said in court papers.
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Our case presents some of the problems with qualified immunity very starkly," said Michelman, lead counsel representing Baxter in the case. "Everyone should know, and everyone does know, that putting your hands up is a universal symbol of surrender and it is completely out of bounds to attack somebody who has surrendered."
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"These cases very frequently arrive from police use of force in particular circumstances," Hughes said. "When an individual or his or her estate alleges that a police officer used excessive force the officer will invariably raise a qualified immunity defense."
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The Universe as an Infinite Storm of Beauty: John Muir on the Transcendent Interconnect... - 0 views
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“I… a universe of atoms… an atom in the universe,” the Nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynman wrote in his lovely prose poem about evolution. “The fact that we are connected through space and time,” evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis observed of the interconnectedness of the universe, “shows that life is a unitary phenomenon, no matter how we express that fact.”
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shared by krystalxu on 08 Oct 17
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Decision Making: Why do we make the wrong choices although we are aware of the right on... - 0 views
www.quora.com/we-are-aware-of-the-right-ones
decision making psychology knowledge choice brain science
shared by krystalxu on 08 Oct 17
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you blame yourself for not opting for 7 (which was available to you) forgetting that you would not have known that at time of buying the ticket.
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Unknown Variables
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two possibilities based on the information available.
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your estimation was not proven to be correct because the price fell as there were more people who were willing to sell than to buy.
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It is wrong to blame yourself for something which you were not capable of knowing at the time of making decisions.
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Competitive Atmosphere
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We win or lose not only on the basis of how good or bad we performed but also how good or bad our competitors performed.
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t is futile to blame yourself or the organization in case your expectations are not fulfilled.
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Compatibility Issues
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Hasty Decisions
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We often take decisions based on impulse rather than careful analysis of the pros and cons of taking decisions.
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you may have to repent in leisure.
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You can avoid much failure if you decide after due analysis and due consideration.
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Choosing Soft Options
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There is no inherent reason why medicines should taste horrible — but effective ones usually do. Similarly, there is no inherent reason why decisions should be distasteful — but most effective ones are.”
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you are sure to pay the price later for buying immediate peace.
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Why Americans turn to conspiracy theories - The Washington Post - 0 views
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As the impeachment inquiry heats up, members of Congress and the media are left with the difficult job of untangling the conspiracy theory that seems to have driven the president’s actions in Ukraine: a wild tale of a missing computer server whisked off to Eastern Europe for nefarious, if never entirely clear, purposes, and something involving Joe Biden, his son Hunter and, for good measure, China, too.
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Seeing the full ideological array of conspiratorial thinking and understanding its deep history are essential to understanding how paranoid thinking about Russian conspiracies, which so troubled the McCarthyites in the 1950s and 1960s, could jump from right to left in the wake of the 2016 election.
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Republican fears of power’s expansionist tendencies spurred the revolutionary generation to regard British taxation after 1763 as not simply a deviation from prior norms, but as the first step on a swift descent toward political enslavement. American revolutionaries were not simply whiny about taxes; they were paranoid.
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Did Federalists just use the specter of the Illuminati to tar their rivals? Or did they mean it? Did the Jeffersonians really think the Federalists were conspiring to bring back monarchy as they alleged? Or were they just trying to win elections? The answer depends on who and when, but it’s safe to say that some did believe these theories.
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Conspiracy theory after theory, Americans cast a paranoid eye on their partisan opponents throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the phrase “conspiracy theory” first appeared in the early 20th century United States, in the context of political histories of the 19th century.
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Democrats’ anxieties about Russian conspiracies to interfere in the 2016 campaign cannot be extricated from this historical context of paranoia just because they have a significant basis in fact. As Joseph Heller wrote, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you.”
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The republican political theory underlying the American paranoid style had its origin in the writings of opposition politicians in 18th-century Britain. Since then, conspiratorial thinking, has remained most attractive to opposition parties seeking to discredit their establishment rivals. This is the nature of Trump’s criticism of Democratic investigations of Russian conspiracies to hack the 2016 campaign. They’re just whining because they lost, Trump has said repeatedly.
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If Trump’s embrace of the Ukraine conspiracy doesn’t sink his political future by leading to impeachment, it may nonetheless signal that his political future is bleak.
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The Cancel Culture Checklist - Persuasion - 0 views
www.persuasion.community/...e-cancel-culture-checklist-c63
psychology bias language social media cancel culture criticism
shared by Javier E on 28 Aug 20
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a third of Americans say that they are personally worried about losing their jobs or missing out on career opportunities if they express their real political opinions.
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Cancel culture now poses a real threat to intellectual freedom in the United States.
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Americans in all walks of life have been publicly shamed, pressured into ritualistic apologies or summarily fired
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But critics of the critics of cancel culture make a powerful retort. Accusing others of canceling can, they claim, be a way to stigmatize legitimate criticism. As Hannah Giorgis writes in the Atlantic, “critical tweets are not censorship.”
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So what, exactly, does a cancellation consist of? And how does it differ from the exercise of free speech and robust critical debate?
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At a conceptual level, the difference is clear. Criticism marshals evidence and arguments in a rational effort to persuade.
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Canceling, by contrast, seeks to organize and manipulate the social or media environment in order to isolate, deplatform or intimidate ideological opponents
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its intent—or at least its predictable outcome—is to coerce conformity and reduce the scope for forms of criticism that are not sanctioned by the prevailing consensus of some local majority.
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In practice, however, telling canceling apart from criticism can be difficult because both take the form of criticizing others.
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The more signs you see, the more certain you can be that you are looking at a cancel campaign.
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A better approach might therefore be diagnostic. Like the symptoms of cancer, the hallmarks of a cancellation are many. Though not all instances involve every single characteristic, they all involve some of its key attribute
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Six warning signs make up my personal checklist for cancel culture.
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Punitiveness
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A critical culture seeks to correct rather than punish. In science, the penalty for being wrong is not that you lose your job or your friends. Normally, the only penalty is that you lose the argument
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Canceling, by contrast, seeks to punish rather than correct—and often for a single misstep rather than a long track record of failure
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Deplatforming
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A critical culture tolerates dissent rather than silencing it. It understands that dissent can seem obnoxious, harmful, hateful and, yes, unsafe.
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Canceling, by contrast, seeks to shut up and shout down its targets. Cancelers often define the mere act of disagreeing with them as a threat to their safety or even an act of violence
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Organization
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Critical culture relies on persuasion. The way to win an argument is to convince others that you are right.
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By contrast, it’s common to see cancelers organize hundreds of petition-signers or thousands of social media users to dig up and prosecute an indictment.
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Secondary Boycotts
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With its commitments to exploring a wide range of ideas and correcting rather than coercing the errant, a critical culture sees no value in instilling a climate of fear
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But instilling fear is what canceling is all about. By choosing targets unpredictably (almost anything can trigger a campaign), providing no safe harbors (even conformists can get hit), and implicitly threatening anyone who sides with those who are targeted, canceling sends the message: “you could be next.”
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Moral Grandstanding
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Precisely because speech can be hurtful, critical culture discourages extreme rhetoric. It encourages people to listen to each other, to use evidence and argumentation, to behave reasonably and to avoid personal attacks.
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Cancel culture is much more invested in what philosophers Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke call “moral grandstanding”: the display of moral outrage to impress one’s peer group, dominate others, or both
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Truthiness
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Concern for accuracy is the north star of a critical culture. Not everyone gets every fact right, nor do people always agree on what is true; and yet people in a critical culture try to present their own and others’ viewpoints honestly and accurately.
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canceling is not about seeking truth or persuading others; it is a form of information warfare, in which truthiness suffices if it serves the cause.
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Those are my six warning signs. If you spot one or two, you should fear that a canceling may be happening; if you see five or six, you can be sure.
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Though our critics like to claim that those of us who worry about cancel culture just don’t like being criticized on the internet, cancel culture is all too real. And though it may at times bear a superficial resemblance to critical culture, the two are diametrically opposed—and not so very difficult to tell apart.
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Opinion | You Are the Object of Facebook's Secret Extraction Operation - The New York T... - 0 views
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Facebook is not just any corporation. It reached trillion-dollar status in a single decade by applying the logic of what I call surveillance capitalism — an economic system built on the secret extraction and manipulation of human data
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Facebook and other leading surveillance capitalist corporations now control information flows and communication infrastructures across the world.
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These infrastructures are critical to the possibility of a democratic society, yet our democracies have allowed these companies to own, operate and mediate our information spaces unconstrained by public law.
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The result has been a hidden revolution in how information is produced, circulated and acted upon
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The world’s liberal democracies now confront a tragedy of the “un-commons.” Information spaces that people assume to be public are strictly ruled by private commercial interests for maximum profit.
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The internet as a self-regulating market has been revealed as a failed experiment. Surveillance capitalism leaves a trail of social wreckage in its wake: the wholesale destruction of privacy, the intensification of social inequality, the poisoning of social discourse with defactualized information, the demolition of social norms and the weakening of democratic institutions.
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These social harms are not random. They are tightly coupled effects of evolving economic operations. Each harm paves the way for the next and is dependent on what went before.
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There is no way to escape the machine systems that surveil u
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All roads to economic and social participation now lead through surveillance capitalism’s profit-maximizing institutional terrain, a condition that has intensified during nearly two years of global plague.
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Will Facebook’s digital violence finally trigger our commitment to take back the “un-commons”?
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Will we confront the fundamental but long ignored questions of an information civilization: How should we organize and govern the information and communication spaces of the digital century in ways that sustain and advance democratic values and principles?
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Mark Zuckerberg’s start-up did not invent surveillance capitalism. Google did that. In 2000, when only 25 percent of the world’s information was stored digitally, Google was a tiny start-up with a great search product but little revenue.
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By 2001, in the teeth of the dot-com bust, Google’s leaders found their breakthrough in a series of inventions that would transform advertising. Their team learned how to combine massive data flows of personal information with advanced computational analyses to predict where an ad should be placed for maximum “click through.”
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Google’s scientists learned how to extract predictive metadata from this “data exhaust” and use it to analyze likely patterns of future behavior.
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Prediction was the first imperative that determined the second imperative: extraction.
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Lucrative predictions required flows of human data at unimaginable scale. Users did not suspect that their data was secretly hunted and captured from every corner of the internet and, later, from apps, smartphones, devices, cameras and sensors
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User ignorance was understood as crucial to success. Each new product was a means to more “engagement,” a euphemism used to conceal illicit extraction operations.
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When asked “What is Google?” the co-founder Larry Page laid it out in 2001,
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“Storage is cheap. Cameras are cheap. People will generate enormous amounts of data,” Mr. Page said. “Everything you’ve ever heard or seen or experienced will become searchable. Your whole life will be searchable.”
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Instead of selling search to users, Google survived by turning its search engine into a sophisticated surveillance medium for seizing human data
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Company executives worked to keep these economic operations secret, hidden from users, lawmakers, and competitors. Mr. Page opposed anything that might “stir the privacy pot and endanger our ability to gather data,” Mr. Edwards wrote.
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As recently as 2017, Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, acknowledged the role of Google’s algorithmic ranking operations in spreading corrupt information. “There is a line that we can’t really get across,” he said. “It is very difficult for us to understand truth.” A company with a mission to organize and make accessible all the world’s information using the most sophisticated machine systems cannot discern corrupt information.
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This is the economic context in which disinformation wins
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In March 2008, Mr. Zuckerberg hired Google’s head of global online advertising, Sheryl Sandberg, as his second in command. Ms. Sandberg had joined Google in 2001 and was a key player in the surveillance capitalism revolution. She led the build-out of Google’s advertising engine, AdWords, and its AdSense program, which together accounted for most of the company’s $16.6 billion in revenue in 2007.
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A Google multimillionaire by the time she met Mr. Zuckerberg, Ms. Sandberg had a canny appreciation of Facebook’s immense opportunities for extraction of rich predictive data. “We have better information than anyone else. We know gender, age, location, and it’s real data as opposed to the stuff other people infer,” Ms. Sandberg explained
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The company had “better data” and “real data” because it had a front-row seat to what Mr. Page had called “your whole life.”
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Facebook paved the way for surveillance economics with new privacy policies in late 2009. The Electronic Frontier Foundation warned that new “Everyone” settings eliminated options to restrict the visibility of personal data, instead treating it as publicly available information.
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Mr. Zuckerberg “just went for it” because there were no laws to stop him from joining Google in the wholesale destruction of privacy. If lawmakers wanted to sanction him as a ruthless profit-maximizer willing to use his social network against society, then 2009 to 2010 would have been a good opportunity.
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Facebook was the first follower, but not the last. Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple are private surveillance empires, each with distinct business models.
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In 2021 these five U.S. tech giants represent five of the six largest publicly traded companies by market capitalization in the world.
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As we move into the third decade of the 21st century, surveillance capitalism is the dominant economic institution of our time. In the absence of countervailing law, this system successfully mediates nearly every aspect of human engagement with digital information
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Today all apps and software, no matter how benign they appear, are designed to maximize data collection.
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Historically, great concentrations of corporate power were associated with economic harms. But when human data are the raw material and predictions of human behavior are the product, then the harms are social rather than economic
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The difficulty is that these novel harms are typically understood as separate, even unrelated, problems, which makes them impossible to solve. Instead, each new stage of harm creates the conditions for the next stage.
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Fifty years ago the conservative economist Milton Friedman exhorted American executives, “There is one and only one social responsibility of business — to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game.” Even this radical doctrine did not reckon with the possibility of no rules.
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With privacy out of the way, ill-gotten human data are concentrated within private corporations, where they are claimed as corporate assets to be deployed at will.
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The sheer size of this knowledge gap is conveyed in a leaked 2018 Facebook document, which described its artificial intelligence hub, ingesting trillions of behavioral data points every day and producing six million behavioral predictions each second.
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Next, these human data are weaponized as targeting algorithms, engineered to maximize extraction and aimed back at their unsuspecting human sources to increase engagement
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Targeting mechanisms change real life, sometimes with grave consequences. For example, the Facebook Files depict Mr. Zuckerberg using his algorithms to reinforce or disrupt the behavior of billions of people. Anger is rewarded or ignored. News stories become more trustworthy or unhinged. Publishers prosper or wither. Political discourse turns uglier or more moderate. People live or die.
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Occasionally the fog clears to reveal the ultimate harm: the growing power of tech giants willing to use their control over critical information infrastructure to compete with democratically elected lawmakers for societal dominance.
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when it comes to the triumph of surveillance capitalism’s revolution, it is the lawmakers of every liberal democracy, especially in the United States, who bear the greatest burden of responsibility. They allowed private capital to rule our information spaces during two decades of spectacular growth, with no laws to stop it.
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All of it begins with extraction. An economic order founded on the secret massive-scale extraction of human data assumes the destruction of privacy as a nonnegotiable condition of its business operations.
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We can’t fix all our problems at once, but we won’t fix any of them, ever, unless we reclaim the sanctity of information integrity and trustworthy communications
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The abdication of our information and communication spaces to surveillance capitalism has become the meta-crisis of every republic, because it obstructs solutions to all other crises.
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Neither Google, nor Facebook, nor any other corporate actor in this new economic order set out to destroy society, any more than the fossil fuel industry set out to destroy the earth.
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like global warming, the tech giants and their fellow travelers have been willing to treat their destructive effects on people and society as collateral damage — the unfortunate but unavoidable byproduct of perfectly legal economic operations that have produced some of the wealthiest and most powerful corporations in the history of capitalism.
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Where does that leave us?
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Democracy is the only countervailing institutional order with the legitimate authority and power to change our course. If the ideal of human self-governance is to survive the digital century, then all solutions point to one solution: a democratic counterrevolution.
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instead of the usual laundry lists of remedies, lawmakers need to proceed with a clear grasp of the adversary: a single hierarchy of economic causes and their social harms.
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We can’t rid ourselves of later-stage social harms unless we outlaw their foundational economic causes
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This means we move beyond the current focus on downstream issues such as content moderation and policing illegal content. Such “remedies” only treat the symptoms without challenging the illegitimacy of the human data extraction that funds private control over society’s information spaces
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Similarly, structural solutions like “breaking up” the tech giants may be valuable in some cases, but they will not affect the underlying economic operations of surveillance capitalism.
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Instead, discussions about regulating big tech should focus on the bedrock of surveillance economics: the secret extraction of human data from realms of life once called “private.
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No secret extraction means no illegitimate concentrations of knowledge about people. No concentrations of knowledge means no targeting algorithms. No targeting means that corporations can no longer control and curate information flows and social speech or shape human behavior to favor their interests
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the sober truth is that we need lawmakers ready to engage in a once-a-century exploration of far more basic questions:
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How should we structure and govern information, connection and communication in a democratic digital century?
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What new charters of rights, legislative frameworks and institutions are required to ensure that data collection and use serve the genuine needs of individuals and society?
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What measures will protect citizens from unaccountable power over information, whether it is wielded by private companies or governments?
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The corporation that is Facebook may change its name or its leaders, but it will not voluntarily change its economics.
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Law professor Kim Wehle's latest book is 'How To Think Like a Lawyer - and Why' : NPR - 0 views
www.npr.org/...to-think-like-a-lawyer-and-why
critical thinking legal education learning knowledge research psychology bias civic
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a five-step process she calls the BICAT method - BICAT.
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KIM WEHLE: B is to break a problem down into smaller pieces
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I is to identify our values. A lot of people think lawyers are really about winning all the time. But the law is based on a value system. And I suggest that people be very deliberate about what matters to them with whatever decision there is
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C is to collect a lot of information. Thirty years ago, the challenge was finding information in a card catalog at the library. Now it's, how do we separate the good stuff from the bad stuff?
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A is to analyze both sides. Lawyers have to turn the coin over and exhaust counterarguments or we'll lose in court.
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So lawyers are trained to look for the gray areas, to look for the questions are not the answers. And if we kind of orient our thinking that way, I think we're less likely to shut down competing points of view.
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My argument in the book is, we can feel good about a decision even if we don't get everything that we want. We have to make compromises.
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I tell my students, you'll get through the bar. The key is to look for questions and not answers. If you could answer every legal question with a Wikipedia search, there would be no reason to hire lawyers.
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Lawyers are hired because there are arguments on both sides, you know? Every Supreme Court decision that is split 6-3, 5-4, that means there were really strong arguments on both sides.
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T is, tolerate the fact that you won't get everything you want every time
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So we have to be very careful about the source of what you're getting, OK? Is this source neutral? Is this source really care about facts and not so much about an agenda?
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Step 3, the collecting information piece. I think it's a new skill for all of us that we are overloaded with information into our phones. We have algorithms that somebody else developed that tailor the information that comes into our phones based on what the computer thinks we already believe
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No. 2 - this is the beauty of social media and the internet - you can pull original sources. We can click on the indictment. Click on the new bill that has been proposed in the United States Congress.
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then the book explains ways that you can then sort through that information for yourself. Skills are empowering.
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Maybe as a replacement for sort of being empowered by being part of a team - a red team versus a blue team - that's been corrosive, I think, in American politics and American society. But arming ourselves with good facts, that leads to self-determination.
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MARTINEZ: Now, you've written two other books - "How To Read The Constitution" and "What You Need To Know About Voting" - along with this one, "How To Think Like A Lawyer - And Why.
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It kind of makes me think, Kim, that you feel that Americans might be lacking a basic level of civics education or understanding. So what is lacking when it comes to teaching civics or in civics discourse today?
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studies have shown that around a third of Americans can't name the three branches of government. But if we don't understand our government, we don't know how to hold our government accountable
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Democracies can't stay open if we've got elected leaders that are caring more about entrenching their own power and misinformation than actually preserving democracy by the people. I think that's No. 1.
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No. 2 has to do with a value system. We talk about American values - reward for hard work, integrity, honesty. The same value system should apply to who we hire for government positions. And I think Americans have lost that.
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in my own life, I'm very careful about who gets to be part of the inner circle because I have a strong value system. Bring that same sense to bear at the voting booth. Don't vote for red versus blue. Vote for people that live your value system
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just like the Ukrainians are fighting for their children's democracy, we need to do that as well. And we do that through informing ourselves with good information, tolerating competing points of view and voting - voting, voting, voting - to hold elected leaders accountable if they cross boundaries that matter to us in our own lives.