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Javier E

Exclusive: Trump Media saved in 2022 by Russian-American under criminal investigation |... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...dia-es-family-trust-2022-loans

trump financing russia

shared by Javier E on 03 Apr 24 - No Cached
  • The concern surrounding the loans to Trump Media is that ES Family Trust may have been used to complete a transaction that Paxum itself could not.
  • Paxum Bank does not offer loans in the US as it lacks a US banking license and is not regulated by the FDIC. Postolnikov appears to have used the trust to loan money to help save Trump Media – and the Truth Social platform – because his bank itself could not furnish the loan.
  • Postolnikov, the nephew of Aleksandr Smirnov, an ally of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has not been charged with a crime. In response to an email to Postolnikov seeking comment, a lawyer in Dominica representing Paxum Bank warned of legal action for reporting the contents of the leaked documents.
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  • Postolnikov has been under increasing scrutiny in the criminal investigation into the Trump Media merger. Most recently, he has been listed on search warrant affidavits alongside several associates – one of whom was indicted last month for money laundering on top of earlier insider-trading charges.
  • Trump Media then received the loans from ES Family Trust: $2m on 23 December 2021, and $6m on 17 February 2022.
  • Part of the problem was that Trump Media struggled to get financing because traditional banks were reluctant to lend millions to Trump’s social media company in the wake of the January 6 Capitol attack, Wilkerson said.Trump Media eventually found some lenders, including ES Family Trust, but the sequence of events was curious.
  • S Family Trust was established on 18 May 2021, its creation papers show. Postolnikov’s “user” access to the account was “verified” on 30 November 2021 by a Paxum Bank manager in Dominica. The trust was funded for the first time on 2 December 2021
  • In late 2021, Trump Media was facing financial trouble after the original planned merger with Digital World was delayed indefinitely when the Securities and Exchange Commission opened an investigation into the merger, Trump Media’s since-ousted co-founder-turned-whistleblower Will Wilkerson recounted in an interview.
  • Oddly, the notes were never signed. But the investment in Trump Media proved to be huge: while precise figures can only be known by Trump Media, ES Family Trust’s stake in Trump Media is worth between $20m and $40m even after the sharp decline of the company’s share price in the wake of a poor earnings report
  • The loans came in the form of convertible promissory notes, meaning ES Family Trust would gain a major stake in Trump Media because it was offering the money in exchange for Trump Media agreeing to convert the loan principal into “shares of Company Stock”.
  • The ES Family Trust account also appears to have benefited Postolnikov personally. As the criminal investigation into the Trump Media deal intensified towards the end of last year, the trust recorded several transfers to Postolnikov with the subject line “Partial Loan Return”.In total, the documents showed that the trust transferred $4.8m to Postolnikov’s account, although $3m was inexplicably “reversed”.
  • The reason for the trust’s creation remains unknown. Aside from the money that went to Trump Media, the trust’s statements show the trust has directly invested money with only two other companies: $10.8m to Eleven Ventures LLC, a venture capital firm, and $1m to Wedbush Securities, a wealth management firm.
  • The creation papers also contained something notable: a declaration that, if the original trustee – a Paxum employee named Angel Pacheco – stepped down from the role, his successor would be a certain individual named Michael Shvartsman.
  • Last month, federal prosecutors charged Michael Shvartsman, a close associate of Postolnikov, with money laundering in a superseding indictment after previously charging him and two others in July with insider-trading Digital World shares. Shvartsman and his co-defendants pleaded not guilty.
  • nformant for the DHS, court filings show: in one March 2023 meeting with the informant and an associate, Shvartsman mentioned a friend who owned a bank in Dominica and made bridge loans to Trump Media.
  • “[Shvartsman’s associate] told the [confidential informant] that he does not think the SEC would be able to go after [Shvartsman] for his part in the investment but mentioned that [Shvartsman] essentially provided ‘bridge financing’ for the firm behind the Truth Social media platform,” it said.
  • The investigation into potential money laundering appears to have started after Wilkerson’s lawyers Phil Brewster, Stephen Bell and Patrick Mincey alerted the US attorney’s office in the southern district of New York to the ES Family Trust loans in October 2022.
  • Months later, in June 2023, the FBI expanded its investigation to work jointly with the Department of Homeland Security’s El Dorado taskforce, which specializes in money laundering, and its Illicit Proceeds and Foreign Corruption group, which targets corrupt foreign officials who use US entities to launder illicit funds.
Javier E

Opinion | Social Media Makes Teens Unhappy. It's Time to Stop the Algorithm. - The New ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...algorithms-kids-discovery.html

social media teens children algorithm culture policy US

shared by Javier E on 18 Jul 23 - No Cached
  • As our children’s free time and imaginations become more and more tightly fused to the social media they consume, we need to understand that unregulated access to the internet comes at a cost. Something similar is happening for adults, too. With the advent of A.I., a spiritual loss awaits us as we outsource countless human rituals — exploration and trial and error — to machines. But it isn’t too late to change this story.
  • There are numerous problems with children and adolescents using social media, from mental health deterioration to dangerous and age-inappropriate content
  • the high schoolers with whom I met alerted me to an even more insidious result of minors’ growing addiction to social media: the death of exploration, trial and error and discovery. Algorithmic recommendations now do the work of discovering and pursuing interests, finding community and learning about the world
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  • Kids today are, simply put, not learning how to be curious, critical adults — and they don’t seem to know what they’ve lost.
  • These high school students had become reliant, maybe even dependent, on social media companies’ algorithms.
  • Their dependence on technology sounds familiar to most of us. So many of us can barely remember when we didn’t have Amazon to fall back on when we needed a last-minute gift or when we waited by the radio for our favorite songs to play. Today, information, entertainment and connection are delivered to us on a conveyor belt, with less effort and exploration required of us than ever before.
  • What the kids I spoke to did not know is that these algorithms have been designed in a way that inevitably makes — and keeps — users unhappy.
  • A report by the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate found that users could be served content related to suicide less than three minutes after downloading TikTok. Five minutes after that, they could come across a community promoting eating disorder content. Instagram is awash with soft-core pornography, offering a gateway to hard-core material on other sites (which are often equally lax about age verification). And all over social media are highly curated and filtered fake lives, breeding a sense of envy and inadequacy inside the developing brains of teenagers.
  • Social media companies know that content that generates negative feelings holds our attention longer than that which makes us feel good.
  • If you are a teenager feeling bad about yourself, your social media feed will typically keep delivering you videos and pictures that are likely to exacerbate negative feelings.
  • It is not a coincidence that teenage rates of sadness and suicide increased just as algorithmically driven social media content took over children’s and adolescents’ lives.
  • The role that social media has played in the declining mental health of teens also gives us a preview of what is coming for adults, with the quickening deployment of artificial intelligence and machine learning in our own lives. The psychological impact of the coming transition of thousands of everyday basic human tasks to machines will make the effect of social media look like child’s play.
Javier E

Jonathan Haidt on the 'National Crisis' of Gen Z - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...lity-gap-childhood-11672401345

social media psychology research education crisis culture Gen Z mental health defense creativity

shared by Javier E on 03 Jan 23 - No Cached
  • he has in mind the younger cohort, Generation Z, usually defined as those born between 1997 and 2012. “When you look at Americans born after 1995,” Mr. Haidt says, “what you find is that they have extraordinarily high rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, suicide and fragility.” There has “never been a generation this depressed, anxious and fragile.”
  • He attributes this to the combination of social media and a culture that emphasizes victimhood
  • Social media is Mr. Haidt’s present obsession. He’s working on two books that address its harmful impact on American society: “Kids in Space: Why Teen Mental Health Is Collapsing” and “Life After Babel: Adapting to a World We Can No Longer Share.
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  • What happened in 2012, when the oldest Gen-Z babies were in their middle teens? That was the year Facebook acquired Instagram and young people flocked to the latter site. It was also “the beginning of the selfie era.”
  • Mr. Haidt’s research, confirmed by that of others, shows that depression rates started to rise “all of a sudden” around 2013, “especially for teen girls,” but “it’s only Gen Z, not the older generations.” If you’d stopped collecting data in 2011, he says, you’d see little change from previous years. “By 2015 it’s an epidemic.” (His data are available in an open-source document.)
  • Mr. Haidt imagines “literally launching our children into outer space” and letting their bodies grow there: “They would come out deformed and broken. Their limbs wouldn’t be right. You can’t physically grow up in outer space. Human bodies can’t do that.” Yet “we basically do that to them socially. We launched them into outer space around the year 2012,” he says, “and then we expect that they will grow up normally without having normal human experiences.”
  • Social media and selfies hit a generation that had led an overprotected childhood, in which the age at which children were allowed outside on their own by parents had risen from the norm of previous generations, 7 or 8, to between 10 and 12.
  • That meant the first social-media generation was one of “weakened kids” who “hadn’t practiced the skills of adulthood in a low-stakes environment” with other children. They were deprived of “the normal toughening, the normal strengthening, the normal anti-fragility.
  • Now, their childhood “is largely just through the phone. They no longer even hang out together.” Teenagers even drive less than earlier generations did.
  • Mr. Haidt especially worries about girls. By 2020 more than 25% of female teenagers had “a major depression.” The comparable number for boys was just under 9%.
  • The comparable numbers for millennials at the same age registered at half the Gen-Z rate: about 13% for girls and 5% for boys. “Kids are on their devices all the time,”
  • Most girls, by contrast, are drawn to “visual platforms,” Instagram and TikTok in particular. “Those are about display and performance. You post your perfect life, and then you flip through the photos of other girls who have a more perfect life, and you feel depressed.
  • He calls this phenomenon “compare and despair” and says: “It seems social because you’re communicating with people. But it’s performative. You don’t actually get social relationships. You get weak, fake social links.”
  • Mr. Haidt says he has no antipathy toward the young, and he calls millennials “amazing.”
  • To illustrate his point about Gen Z, Mr. Haidt challenges people to name young people today who are “really changing the world, who are doing big things that have an impact beyond their closed ecosystem.”
  • He can think of only two, neither of them American: Greta Thunberg, 19, the Swedish climate militant, and Malala Yousafzai, 25, the Pakistani advocate for female education
  • I’m predicting that they will be less effective, less impactful, than previous generations.” Why? “You should always keep your eye on whether people are in ‘discover mode’ or ‘defend mode.’ ” In the former mode, you seize opportunities to be creative. In the latter, “you’re not creative, you’re not future-thinking, you’re focused on threats in the present.”
  • University students who matriculated starting in 2014 or so have arrived on campus in defend mode: “Here they are in the safest, most welcoming, most inclusive, most antiracist places on the planet, but many of them were acting like they were entering some sort of dystopian, threatening, immoral world.”
  • 56% of liberal women 18 to 29 responded affirmatively to the question: Has a doctor or other healthcare provider ever told you that you have a mental health condition? “Some of that,” Mr. Haidt says, “has to be just self-presentational,” meaning imagined.
  • This new ideology . . . valorizes victimhood. And if your sub-community motivates you to say you have an anxiety disorder, how is this going to affect you for the rest of your life?” He answers his own question: “You’re not going to take chances, you’re going to ask for accommodations, you’re going to play it safe, you’re not going to swing for the fences, you’re not going to start your own company.”
  • Whereas millennial women are doing well, “Gen-Z women, because they’re so anxious, are going to be less successful than Gen-Z men—and that’s saying a lot, because Gen-Z men are messed up, too.”
  • The problem, he says, is distinct to the U.S. and other English-speaking developed countries: “You don’t find it as much in Europe, and hardly at all in Asia.” Ideas that are “nurtured around American issues of race and gender spread instantly to the U.K. and Canada. But they don’t necessarily spread to France and Germany, China and Japan.”
  • something I hear from a lot of managers, that it’s very difficult to supervise their Gen-Z employees, that it’s very difficult to give them feedback.” That makes it hard for them to advance professionally by learning to do their jobs better.
  • “this could severely damage American capitalism.” When managers are “afraid to speak up honestly because they’ll be shamed on Twitter or Slack, then that organization becomes stupid.” Mr. Haidt says he’s “seen a lot of this, beginning in American universities in 2015. They all got stupid in the same way. They all implemented policies that backfire.”
  • Mr. Haidt, who describes himself as “a classical liberal like John Stuart Mill,” also laments the impact of social media on political discourse
  • “Social media is incompatible with liberal democracy because it has moved conversation, and interaction, into the center of the Colosseum. We’re not there to talk to each other. We’re there to perform” before spectators who “want blood.”
  • Is there a solution? “I’d raise the age of Internet adulthood to 16,” he says—“and enforce it.”
  • By contrast, “life went onto phone-based apps 10 years ago, and the protections we have for children are zero, absolutely zero.” The damage to Generation Z from social media “so vastly exceeds the damage from Covid that we’re going to have to act.”
  • Gen Z, he says, “is not in denial. They recognize that this app-based life is really bad for them.” He reports that they wish they had childhoods more like those of their parents, in which they could play outside and have adventur
Javier E

Opinion | It's Time to Break Up Facebook - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...ughes-facebook-zuckerberg.html

facebook monopoly social media antitrust politics policy

shared by Javier E on 09 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • For many people today, it’s hard to imagine government doing much of anything right, let alone breaking up a company like Facebook. This isn’t by coincidence.
  • Starting in the 1970s, a small but dedicated group of economists, lawyers and policymakers sowed the seeds of our cynicism. Over the next 40 years, they financed a network of think tanks, journals, social clubs, academic centers and media outlets to teach an emerging generation that private interests should take precedence over public ones
  • Their gospel was simple: “Free” markets are dynamic and productive, while government is bureaucratic and ineffective. By the mid-1980s, they had largely managed to relegate energetic antitrust enforcement to the history books.
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  • This shift, combined with business-friendly tax and regulatory policy, ushered in a period of mergers and acquisitions that created megacorporations
  • In the past 20 years, more than 75 percent of American industries, from airlines to pharmaceuticals, have experienced increased concentration, and the average size of public companies has tripled. The results are a decline in entrepreneurship, stalled productivity growth, and higher prices and fewer choices for consumers.
  • Because Facebook so dominates social networking, it faces no market-based accountability. This means that every time Facebook messes up, we repeat an exhausting pattern: first outrage, then disappointment and, finally, resignation.
  • Over a decade later, Facebook has earned the prize of domination. It is worth half a trillion dollars and commands, by my estimate, more than 80 percent of the world’s social networking revenue. It is a powerful monopoly, eclipsing all of its rivals and erasing competition from the social networking category.
  • Facebook’s monopoly is also visible in its usage statistics. About 70 percent of American adults use social media, and a vast majority are on Facebook products
  • Over two-thirds use the core site, a third use Instagram, and a fifth use WhatsApp.
  • As a result of all this, would-be competitors can’t raise the money to take on Facebook. Investors realize that if a company gets traction, Facebook will copy its innovations, shut it down or acquire it for a relatively modest sum
  • Facebook’s dominance is not an accident of history. The company’s strategy was to beat every competitor in plain view, and regulators and the government tacitly — and at times explicitly — approved
  • The F.T.C.’s biggest mistake was to allow Facebook to acquire Instagram and WhatsApp. In 2012, the newer platforms were nipping at Facebook’s heels because they had been built for the smartphone, where Facebook was still struggling to gain traction. Mark responded by buying them, and the F.T.C. approved.
  • Neither Instagram nor WhatsApp had any meaningful revenue, but both were incredibly popular. The Instagram acquisition guaranteed Facebook would preserve its dominance in photo networking, and WhatsApp gave it a new entry into mobile real-time messaging.
  • When it hasn’t acquired its way to dominance, Facebook has used its monopoly position to shut out competing companies or has copied their technology.
  • In 2014, the rules favored curiosity-inducing “clickbait” headlines. In 2016, they enabled the spread of fringe political views and fake news, which made it easier for Russian actors to manipulate the American electorate.
  • As markets become more concentrated, the number of new start-up businesses declines. This holds true in other high-tech areas dominated by single companies, like search (controlled by Google) and e-commerce (taken over by Amazon)
  • I don’t blame Mark for his quest for domination. He has demonstrated nothing more nefarious than the virtuous hustle of a talented entrepreneur
  • It’s on our government to ensure that we never lose the magic of the invisible hand. How did we allow this to happen
  • a narrow reliance on whether or not consumers have experienced price gouging fails to take into account the full cost of market domination
  • It doesn’t recognize that we also want markets to be competitive to encourage innovation and to hold power in check. And it is out of step with the history of antitrust law. Two of the last major antitrust suits, against AT&T and IBM in the 1980s, were grounded in the argument that they had used their size to stifle innovation and crush competition.
  • It is a disservice to the laws and their intent to retain such a laserlike focus on price effects as the measure of all that antitrust was meant to do.”
  • Facebook is the perfect case on which to reverse course, precisely because Facebook makes its money from targeted advertising, meaning users do not pay to use the service. But it is not actually free, and it certainly isn’t harmless.
  • We pay for Facebook with our data and our attention, and by either measure it doesn’t come cheap.
  • The choice is mine, but it doesn’t feel like a choice. Facebook seeps into every corner of our lives to capture as much of our attention and data as possible and, without any alternative, we make the trade.
  • The vibrant marketplace that once drove Facebook and other social media companies to compete to come up with better products has virtually disappeared. This means there’s less chance of start-ups developing healthier, less exploitative social media platforms. It also means less accountability on issues like privacy.
  • The most problematic aspect of Facebook’s power is Mark’s unilateral control over speech. There is no precedent for his ability to monitor, organize and even censor the conversations of two billion people.
  • Facebook engineers write algorithms that select which users’ comments or experiences end up displayed in the News Feeds of friends and family. These rules are proprietary and so complex that many Facebook employees themselves don’t understand them.
  • What started out as lighthearted entertainment has become the primary way that people of all ages communicate online.
  • In January 2018, Mark announced that the algorithms would favor non-news content shared by friends and news from “trustworthy” sources, which his engineers interpreted — to the confusion of many — as a boost for anything in the category of “politics, crime, tragedy.”
  • As if Facebook’s opaque algorithms weren’t enough, last year we learned that Facebook executives had permanently deleted their own messages from the platform, erasing them from the inboxes of recipients; the justification was corporate security concerns.
  • No one at Facebook headquarters is choosing what single news story everyone in America wakes up to, of course. But they do decide whether it will be an article from a reputable outlet or a clip from “The Daily Show,” a photo from a friend’s wedding or an incendiary call to kill others.
  • Mark knows that this is too much power and is pursuing a twofold strategy to mitigate it. He is pivoting Facebook’s focus toward encouraging more private, encrypted messaging that Facebook’s employees can’t see, let alone control
  • Second, he is hoping for friendly oversight from regulators and other industry executives.
  • In an op-ed essay in The Washington Post in March, he wrote, “Lawmakers often tell me we have too much power over speech, and I agree.” And he went even further than before, calling for more government regulation — not just on speech, but also on privacy and interoperability, the ability of consumers to seamlessly leave one network and transfer their profiles, friend connections, photos and other data to another.
  • I don’t think these proposals were made in bad faith. But I do think they’re an attempt to head off the argument that regulators need to go further and break up the company. Facebook isn’t afraid of a few more rules. It’s afraid of an antitrust case and of the kind of accountability that real government oversight would bring.
  • We don’t expect calcified rules or voluntary commissions to work to regulate drug companies, health care companies, car manufacturers or credit card providers. Agencies oversee these industries to ensure that the private market works for the public good. In these cases, we all understand that government isn’t an external force meddling in an organic market; it’s what makes a dynamic and fair market possible in the first place. This should be just as true for social networking as it is for air travel or pharmaceuticals.
  • Just breaking up Facebook is not enough. We need a new agency, empowered by Congress to regulate tech companies. Its first mandate should be to protect privacy.
  • First, Facebook should be separated into multiple companies. The F.T.C., in conjunction with the Justice Department, should enforce antitrust laws by undoing the Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions and banning future acquisitions for several years.
  • How would a breakup work? Facebook would have a brief period to spin off the Instagram and WhatsApp businesses, and the three would become distinct companies, most likely publicly traded.
  • Facebook is indeed more valuable when there are more people on it: There are more connections for a user to make and more content to be shared. But the cost of entering the social network business is not that high. And unlike with pipes and electricity, there is no good argument that the country benefits from having only one dominant social networking company.
  • others worry that the breakup of Facebook or other American tech companies could be a national security problem. Because advancements in artificial intelligence require immense amounts of data and computing power, only large companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon can afford these investments, they say. If American companies become smaller, the Chinese will outpace us.
  • The American government needs to do two things: break up Facebook’s monopoly and regulate the company to make it more accountable to the American people.
  • But the biggest winners would be the American people. Imagine a competitive market in which they could choose among one network that offered higher privacy standards, another that cost a fee to join but had little advertising and another that would allow users to customize and tweak their feeds as they saw fit
  • The cost of breaking up Facebook would be next to zero for the government, and lots of people stand to gain economically. A ban on short-term acquisitions would ensure that competitors, and the investors who take a bet on them, would have the space to flourish. Digital advertisers would suddenly have multiple companies vying for their dollars.
  • The Europeans have made headway on privacy with the General Data Protection Regulation, a law that guarantees users a minimal level of protection. A landmark privacy bill in the United States should specify exactly what control Americans have over their digital information, require clearer disclosure to users and provide enough flexibility to the agency to exercise effective oversight over time
  • The agency should also be charged with guaranteeing basic interoperability across platforms.
  • Finally, the agency should create guidelines for acceptable speech on social media
  • We will have to create similar standards that tech companies can use. These standards should of course be subject to the review of the courts, just as any other limits on speech are. But there is no constitutional right to harass others or live-stream violence.
  • These are difficult challenges. I worry that government regulators will not be able to keep up with the pace of digital innovation
  • I worry that more competition in social networking might lead to a conservative Facebook and a liberal one, or that newer social networks might be less secure if government regulation is weak
  • Professor Wu has written that this “policeman at the elbow” led IBM to steer clear “of anything close to anticompetitive conduct, for fear of adding to the case against it.”
  • Finally, an aggressive case against Facebook would persuade other behemoths like Google and Amazon to think twice about stifling competition in their own sectors, out of fear that they could be next.
  • The alternative is bleak. If we do not take action, Facebook’s monopoly will become even more entrenched. With much of the world’s personal communications in hand, it can mine that data for patterns and trends, giving it an advantage over competitors for decades to come.
  • This movement of public servants, scholars and activists deserves our support. Mark Zuckerberg cannot fix Facebook, but our government can.
katyshannon

E.P.A. Broke Law With Social Media Push for Water Rule, Auditor Finds - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-water-rule-auditor-finds.html

water social media push law rule lobbying auditor new york times epa clean obama politics US

shared by katyshannon on 15 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • WASHINGTON — The Environmental Protection Agency engaged in “covert propaganda” and violated federal law when it blitzed social media to urge the public to back an Obama administration rule intended to better protect the nation’s streams and surface waters, congressional auditors have concluded. From Our Advertisers .story-link { position: relative; display: block; text-decoration: none; padding: 6px 0; min-height: 65px; min-width: 300px; } .story-link:hover { background-color: #eeeeec; } .story-kicker, .story-heading, .summary { margin: 0; padding: 0; } .thumb { position: absolute; left: 0; top: 6px; } .thumb-hover, .story-link:hover .thumb-main { display: none } .thumb-main, .story-link:hover .thumb-hover { display: block } .story-body { padding-left: 75px; font-family: 'Source Sans Pro', sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px; font-weight: 400; color: #000; } .story-body .story-kicker { font-family: 'nyt-franklin', arial, helvetica, sans-serif; text-transform: uppercase; font-size: 11px; line-height: 11px; font-weight: 400; color: #5caaf3; } .story-heading { font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px; font-weight: 700; padding: 5px 0 0; } Bill &amp; Melinda Gates Foundation Changing Charity Younger donors are finding new ways to give. <noscript class=&quot;MOAT-nytdfp348531439194?moatClientLevel1=31074278&amp;amp;moatClientLevel2=343740158&amp;amp;moatClientLevel3=58584518&amp;amp;moatClientLevel4=94015704638&amp;amp;moatClientSlicer1=28390358&amp;amp;moatClientSlicer2=30706478&amp;amp;zMoatPR=n
  • The ruling by the Government Accountability Office, which opened its investigation after a report on the agency’s practices in The New York Times, drew a bright line for federal agencies experimenting with social media about the perils of going too far to push a cause. Federal laws prohibit agencies from engaging in lobbying and propaganda.
  • An E.P.A. official on Tuesday disputed the finding. “We use social media tools just like all organizations to stay connected and inform people across the country about our activities,” Liz Purchia, an agency spokeswoman, said in a statement. “At no point did the E.P.A. encourage the public to contact Congress or any state legislature.”
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  • But the legal opinion emerged just as Republican leaders moved to block the so-called Waters of the United States clean-water rule through an amendment to the enormous spending bill expected to pass in Congress this week. While the G.A.O.’s findings are unlikely to lead to civil or criminal penalties, they do offer Republicans a cudgel for this week’s showdown.
  • The E.P.A. rolled out a social media campaign on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and even on more innovative tools such as Thunderclap, to counter opposition to its water rule, which effectively restricts how land near certain surface waters can be used. The agency said the rule would prevent pollution in drinking water sources. Farmers, business groups and Republicans have called the rule a flagrant case of government overreach.
  • The publicity campaign was part of a broader effort by the Obama administration to counter critics of its policies through social media tools, communicating directly with Americans and bypassing traditional news organizations.
  • At the White House, top aides to President Obama have formed the Office of Digital Strategy, which promotes his agenda on Twitter, Facebook, Medium and other social sites. Shailagh Murray, a senior adviser to the president, is charged in part with expanding Mr. Obama’s presence in that online world.
  • White House officials declined to say if they think Mr. Reynolds or other agency officials did anything wrong.
  • Federal agencies are allowed to promote their own policies, but are not allowed to engage in propaganda, defined as covert activity intended to influence the American public. They also are not allowed to use federal resources to conduct so-called grass-roots lobbying — urging the American public to contact Congress to take a certain kind of action on pending legislation.
  • As it promoted the Waters of the United States rule, also known as the Clean Water Rule, the E.P.A. violated both of those prohibitions, a 26-page legal opinion signed by Susan A. Poling, the general counsel to the G.A.O., concluded in an investigation requested by the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.
malonema1

Trump walks back sanctions against Russia, contradicting Nikki Haley - TODAY.com - 0 views

www.today.com/...ting-nikki-haley-1212661827918

trump politics US

shared by malonema1 on 01 May 18 - No Cached
  • Trump walks back sanctions against Russia, contradicting Nikki Haley
  • President Trump is walking back plans to impose new economic sanctions against Russia announced Sunday by U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley. 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  • Amid the historic developments formally ending the Korean War, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has promised to close down a nuclear test site in May. 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  • ...1 more annotation...
  • North Korea to close down nuclear test site in May
Javier E

A Handful of Accounts Create Most of What We See on Social Media - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...e-see-on-social-media-bdafa8f3

social media TV model media concentration

shared by Javier E on 18 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • Social media is turning into old-fashioned network television.
  • A handful of accounts create most of the content that we see. Everyone else? They play the role of the audience, which is there to mostly amplify and applaud
  • The personal tidbits that people used to share on social media have been relegated to private group chats and their equivalent.
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • The transformation of social media into mass media is largely because the rise of TikTok has demonstrated to every social-media company on the planet that people still really like things that can re-create the experience of TV
  • Advertisers also like things that function like TV, of course—after all, people are never more suggestible than when lulled into a sort of anesthetized mindlessness.
  • In this future, people who are good at making content with high production values will thrive, as audiences and tech company algorithms gravitate toward more professional content.
  • On these formerly-social platforms, whether content is coming from creators with better equipment and more skills, or Hollywood studios testing the waters, hardly matters. In the end, it will all look remarkably similar to the consumer.
  • It will look
  • like flipping through cable channels does, only our thumb on the remote has been replaced by our thumb on the screen of our phone, swiping from one TikTok, YouTube Short, or Instagram Reel to the next.
  • A telling indicator is the rise of a new kind of entertainment professional—the “creator.”
  • A creator is anyone who records or makes something that can go viral on the internet
  • TikTok is now more popular than Netflix among consumers younger than 35,
  • While YouTube and TikTok have always been about video, just about every other social-media platform that wants to keep people engaged is emphasizing it more than ever, so that’s what creators have to make,
  • His agency gets involved with creators and musicians at the earliest stages of their careers, helping them plan content, update their style, understand what the algorithms of different platforms demand, and connecting them with potentially lucrative brand deals
  • . Even more telling: In first place is YouTube, the original online TV analog.
  • Where attention flows, money—and content—must also. In 2023 brands will spend an estimated $6 billion on marketing through influencers—a subspecies of creators
  • Globally, the total addressable market for this kind of marketing is currently $250 billion
  • Then there is a new generation of shows that are going straight to TikTok, bypassing even streaming services
  • In the wake of the success of YouTube and TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and even LinkedIn are all pushing more and more content made by professionals into our feeds,
  • In order to quantify how TikTok has mastered the art of discerning our interests and feeding us the most compelling possible content, Faltesek, of Oregon State University, conducted a two-year project to study exactly what kind of content TikTok pushes
  • With a team of students, he created dozens of fresh TikTok user accounts that didn’t like or interact with content in any way—they just let the algorithm play one video after another.
  • At the end of this exhaustive process of gathering data on TikTok’s algorithm, the conclusion became obvious, says Faltesek. “TikTok is television. It flips channels like TV, it provides a flow like TV.”
  • By this logic, Instagram’s move to copy TikTok, which is in turn encroaching on the turf of YouTube by allowing longer videos, and the increasing dominance of professional content on all three, means they’re all turning into TV. Even Threads, the new offering from Facebook parent company Meta, is fast becoming a broadcast medium for news, as Twitter was before it.
  • In every case, the structure of social networks has become one in which a handful of accounts create most of the content that others see, and the role of everyone else on the network is, primarily, to amplify and consume that content,
  • Some, like Magana, believe we’ll eventually see an ever more complete blending of what were once “social” platforms with the traditional television networks and even film studios.&nbsp;&nbsp;
  • aren’t convinced they’ll eat the rest of the entertainment industry. “It’s hard to say this kind of short-form video will be the only kind of TV,” she reflects. “A long time ago, the internet became the new thing, but we still have the other forms on television, and scripted streaming shows. It’s almost like this is just another avenue for that—of watching shows and movies on your phone.”
Javier E

The Israel-Hamas War Shows Just How Broken Social Media Has Become - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...675614

social media media disinformation news crisis information culture

shared by Javier E on 14 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • major social platforms have grown less and less relevant in the past year. In response, some users have left for smaller competitors such as Bluesky or Mastodon. Some have simply left. The internet has never felt more dense, yet there seem to be fewer reliable avenues to find a signal in all the noise. One-stop information destinations such as Facebook or Twitter are a thing of the past. The global town square—once the aspirational destination that social-media platforms would offer to all of us—lies in ruins, its architecture choked by the vines and tangled vegetation of a wild informational jungle
  • Musk has turned X into a deepfake version of Twitter—a facsimile of the once-useful social network, altered just enough so as to be disorienting, even terrifying.
  • At the same time, Facebook’s user base began to erode, and the company’s transparency reports revealed that the most popular content circulating on the platform was little more than viral garbage—a vast wasteland of CBD promotional content and foreign tabloid clickbait.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • What’s left, across all platforms, is fragmented. News and punditry are everywhere online, but audiences are siloed; podcasts are more popular than ever, and millions of younger people online have turned to influencers and creators on Instagram and especially TikTok as trusted sources of news.
  • Social media, especially Twitter, has sometimes been an incredible news-gathering tool; it has also been terrible and inefficient, a game of do your own research that involves batting away bullshit and parsing half truths, hyperbole, outright lies, and invaluable context from experts on the fly. Social media’s greatest strength is thus its original sin: These sites are excellent at making you feel connected and informed, frequently at the expense of actually being informed.
  • At the center of these pleas for a Twitter alternative is a feeling that a fundamental promise has been broken. In exchange for our time, our data, and even our well-being, we uploaded our most important conversations onto platforms designed for viral advertising—all under the implicit understanding that social media could provide an unparalleled window to the world.
  • What comes next is impossible to anticipate, but it’s worth considering the possibility that the centrality of social media as we’ve known it for the past 15 years has come to an end—that this particular window to the world is being slammed shut.
Javier E

'Childhood has been rewired': Professor Jonathan Haidt on how smartphones are damaging ... - 0 views

www.spectator.co.uk/...ones-are-damaging-a-generation

social media smartphone kids suicide mental health psychology culture crisis policy

shared by Javier E on 04 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • Something strange is happening with teenagers’ mental health. In Britain, the US, Australia and beyond, the same trend can be seen: around the middle of the last decade, the number of young people with anxiety, depression and even suicidal tendancies started to rise sharpl
  • He is working on a book, due out next year, and is ready to share his thesis.
  • his message is quite horrifying.
  • ...31 more annotations...
  • He argues that the tools of social media are just too sharp for young minds. On digital platforms teens parade themselves, often to an audience of strangers, and this is leading to addiction, paranoia and despair
  • For girls, the effect is especially acute. ‘What we’re seeing is a very sharp, sudden change in girls’ mental health all around the Anglosphere and the Nordic countries,’ he says. A big change was evident from 2013, when physical friendship groups started to be supplanted by smartphones and online chat. ‘But you cannot grow up in networks. You have to grow up in communities.’
  • The first is that they are fragile and can be harmed by speech and words.
  • But if you’re a secular liberal girl, you’re probably more than twice as likely to have a mental health problem.’
  • a University of Michigan survey into ‘self-derogation’ – i.e., how likely teenagers are to say they are ‘no good’ or ‘can’t do anything right’. Figures had been stable for years but started rising sharply ten years ago – except for among boys who identified as conservative and said that religion was important to them.
  • irls simply use social media more. But Professor Haidt also thinks they are more likely to buy into what he calls the ‘three great untruths’ of social media
  • boys who have religion in their lives seem to be less susceptible. ‘If you’re a kid who’s a religious conservative, on average, your mental health is not really much worse than it was ten years ago
  • Next, that their emotions, and especially their anxieties, are reliable guides to reality.
  • And finally, that society is one big battle between victims and oppressors. All this, he says, is the subtext to social media discourse.
  • ‘It’s what I’ve been calling the phone-based child,’
  • So we had playdates in childhood, up until around 2010.’ In Britain, he says, the number of children who went on real-life playdates then fell sharply.
  • Social media is a bit of a misnomer, he says. It’s no longer about connecting people, but ‘performing on a platform’. Perhaps this is fine for grown-ups, but not for children, ‘where they can say things in public, including to strangers, and then be publicly shamed by potentially millions of people
  • Children should not be on social networks. They should be playing in person. Social media platforms should never be accessed by children until they’re 18. It’s just insane that we let kids do these things.’
  • I ask if he thinks all platforms are equally dangerous
  • if you get your news from social media (which many people do – in the UK, Instagram has overtaken all newspapers as a news source), this can change your view of the world, especially as the algorithms tend to promote the most provocative views.
  • ‘TikTok is probably the worst for their intellectual development. I think it literally reduces their ability to focus on anything while stuffing them with little bits of stuff that was selected by an algorithm for emotional arousal. Not for truth.’
  • If asked to choose whether they side more with Israel or Hamas, ‘the great majority of Americans side with Israel, except for Gen Z, which is split 50-50’,
  • ‘There was a Twitter thread recently showing how if you look at what people are saying on TikTok, you can understand why
  • TikTok and Twitter are incredibly dangerous for our democracy. I’d say they’re incompatible with the kind of liberal democracy that we’ve developed over the last few hundred years.’
  • Might it just be the case, I ask, that there’s less of a stigma around mental health now, so teenagers are far more likely to admit that they have problems?
  • why is it, then, that right around 2013 all these girls suddenly start checking into psychiatric inpatient units? Or suicide – they’re making many more suicide attempts. The level of self-harm goes up by 200 or 300 per cent, especially for the younger girls aged ten to 14
  • we see very much the same curves, at the same time, for behaviour. Suicide, certainly, is not a self-report variable. This is real. This is the biggest mental health crisis in all of known history for kids.’
  • he increased number of suicides since 2010 is so large that I suspect this is among the largest public health threats to children since the major diseases were wiped out
  • His third rule: no phones in schools.
  • What should parents do? They know that if they try to remove their teenager’s smartphone, their child will accuse them of destroying his or her social life. ‘That’s a perfect statement of what we call a collective action problem,’
  • ‘Any one person doing the right thing is in big trouble. But why do we ever let our kids on social media? It’s only down to the dynamic you just said.’ New norms are needed, he says. And his book will suggest four.
  • Rule one, he says: no smartphones before the age of 14.
  • ‘Give them a flip phone. Millennials had flip phones. They texted each other
  • Rule two: no social media before 16
  • In Britain, suicide rates started rising in 2014, up about 20 per cent for boys (to 420 a year) and 60 per cent for girls (to 160 a year).
  • finally: more unsupervised play. ‘Both of our countries freaked out in the 1990s, locked up our kids because we lost trust in each other. We thought everyone was a child molester or a rapist.’ Children and teens could do with six or seven hours each day out of contact with their parents, he argues. Keeping them inside risks more harm than the outside world would pose.
Javier E

Can Social Networks Do Better? We Don't Know Because They Haven't Tried - Talking Point... - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...know-because-they-havent-tried

social media networks internet media externality economic

shared by Javier E on 18 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • it’s not fair to say it’s Facebook or a Facebook problem. Facebook is just the latest media and communications medium. We hardly blame the technology of the book for spreading anti-Semitism via the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion
  • But of course, it’s not that simple. Social media platforms have distinct features that earlier communications media did not. The interactive nature of the media, the collection of data which is then run through algorithms and artificial intelligence creates something different.
  • All social media platforms are engineered with two basic goals: maximize the time you spend on the platform and make advertising as effective and thus as lucrative as possible. This means that social media can never be simply a common carrier, a distribution technology that has no substantial influence over the nature of the communication that travels over it.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • it’s a substantial difference which deprives social media platforms of the kind of hands-off logic that would make it ridiculous to say phones are bad or the phone company is responsible if planning for a mass murder was carried out over the phone.
  • the Internet doesn’t ‘do’ anything more than make the distribution of information more efficient and radically lower the formal, informal and financial barriers to entry that used to stand in the way of various marginalized ideas.
  • Social media can never plead innocence like this because the platforms are designed to addict you and convince you of things.
  • If the question is: what can social media platforms do to protect against government-backed subversion campaigns like the one we saw in the 2016 campaign the best answer is, we don’t know. And we don’t know for a simple reason: they haven’t tried.
  • The point is straightforward: the mass collection of data, harnessed to modern computing power and the chance to amass unimaginable wealth has spurred vast technological innovation.
brookegoodman

Tulsi Gabbard, running for president, won't seek re-election to Congress - 0 views

www.nbcnews.com/...on-t-seek-re-election-n1071756

politics us

shared by brookegoodman on 25 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard said Thursday that she will not run for re-election for her U.S. representative seat, saying she wants to focus on trying to secure her party’s nomination to challenge President Donald Trump.
  • "I believe that I can best serve the people of Hawaii and our country as your president and commander-in-chief,"
  • An Iowa Democratic caucus poll out this week put Gabbard at 3 percent, with former Vice President Joe Biden, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg in the top three spots.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Clinton did not mention Gabbard by name but said she believes one candidate is "the favorite of the Russians."
  • Clinton was referring to the GOP grooming Gabbard, not Russians.
  • Gabbard reacted by tweeting that Clinton is “the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that sickened the Democratic Party for so long."
  • Trump attacked Clinton for the suggestion earlier this week, and said Clinton and other Democrats claim everyone opposed to them is a Russian agent.
  • ratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard said Thursday that she will not run for re-election for her U.S. representative seat, saying she wants to focus on trying to secure her party’s nomination to challenge President Donald Trump.Gabbard, who represents Hawaii, made the announcement in a video and email to supporters."I believe that I can best serve the people of Hawaii and our country as your president and commander-in-chief," Gabbard said in the video.Let our news meet your inbox. The news and stories that matters, delivered weekday mornings.Sign UpThis site is protected by recaptcha&nbsp;Privacy Policy&nbsp;|&nbsp;Terms of Service She also expressed gratitude to the people of Hawaii for her nearly seven years in Congress.In January, Hawaii state Sen. Kai Kahele, a Democrat, said he would run for Gabbard's seat, NBC affiliate KHNL of Honolulu reported.An Iowa Democratic caucus poll out this week put Gabbard at 3 percent, with former Vice President Joe Biden, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg in the top three spots.She is in a crowded field of Democrats seeking the nomination to run for president. Another candidate, U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio, ended his long-shot presidential campaign Thursday.RecommendedvideovideoMcConnell: If the House impeaches Trump, Senate will hold trial 'until we finish'2020 Election2020 ElectionTim Ryan drops out of presidential raceHillary Clinton recently suggested that she believed Republicans were grooming one of the Democrats for a third-party candidacy. Clinton did not mention Gabbard by name but said she believes one candidate is "the favorite of the Russians."
Javier E

Generation Z's 7 Lessons for Surviving in Our Tech-Obsessed World - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...ech-obsessed-world-11548478811

Generation Z tech social media smartphone culture

shared by Javier E on 27 Jan 19 - No Cached
  • They’ve been called plurals, post-millennials, even iGen. The way they’re most likely to describe themselves is Generation Z
  • From their early teen years, their world has been defined by social media and mobile devices.
  • I’ve attempted to glean what (generally) distinguishes this group from (most of) their slightly older peers.
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • 1. Gen Z doesn’t distinguish between online and IRL
  • for my generation, interacting digitally is still ‘in real life.’”
  • Ms. Sharp says that psychologically, she’s half present in real life and half present on Instagram, Twitter and other social channels where she connects directly with her friends and fans. “I count my followers as being a really impactful force in my life
  • 2. Privacy online? LOL
  • For the most part, members of Gen Z expect that everything they ever type into a keyboard or capture with a camera is forever and could easily end up all over the internet. Many feel that, at any point in their lives, they could be judged by their most impulsive posts, so they can never let down their guard.
  • Real-life conversations and phone calls have become the only way to convey thoughts in a way that’s truly privat
  • 3. Facebook is out, Instagram is in
  • “Facebook for my generation solely exists so that other generations can see that I’m still alive,”
  • For them, Instagram is the new Facebook—the first place they share by default. On Instagram, everyone’s a content creator, says Ms. Havighorst, which means almost everything they put up is a deliberate act of personal branding
  • 4. Social media is how they stay informed
  • In a focus group that included 20 members of her generation from across the U.S., she found their news consumption was almost entirely driven by social media. They weren’t seeking out the news, only happening on it, and they read a lot of headlines.
  • The same culture of influencers that guides their consumer tastes shapes what information they consume and how they stay informed. In politics, for example, those who get this succeed disproportionately with this generation, whether it’s Donald Trump or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
  • 5. Video is important, but it isn’t everything
  • This generation is definitely more visually oriented, says Drake Rehfeld, a 21-year-old former Snapchat engineer who founded a startup that serves influencers. It’s a natural consequence of their having more access to devices that can display, record and edit images and video than any generation before, he adds.
  • that doesn’t mean they don’t also like to read. According to Pew, Gen Z is likely to become the best-educated generation ever.
  • Some members of Gen Z are left feeling the media is obsessed with the negative impacts of tech and doesn’t talk enough about how it empowers their generation.
  • Whether it’s helping them stay connected with friends when their helicopter parents won’t let them out of the house, says Ms. Havighorst, or find people who share similar interests, says Ms. Sharp, the mobile internet is a powerful force for making this generation aware of the breadth of experiences of their peers.
  • 7. But they’re still susceptible to tech addiction and burnout Still, members of this generation are acutely aware that this level of engagement isn’t always sustainable. Some take breaks from social media, others wonder how it’s changing their brains. They also report having trouble knowing where the line between healthy and unhealthy use should be.
  • her subjects reported occasional compulsive use of their mobile devices, no matter their age. They were most likely to get sucked into social media and casual games, even though they found them the least satisfying.
  • “I definitely think we all know that we’re addicted to our phones and social media,” says Ms. Baker. “But I also think we’ve just come to terms with it, and we think, that’s just what it is to be a person now.”
Javier E

El juego del poder | www.inmediaciones.org - 0 views

inmediaciones.org/el-juego-del-poder

bolivia politics history crisis economics

shared by Javier E on 17 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • El MAS en su emergencia en el escenario político es la condensación de lo nacional popular que el ciclo neoliberal, con sus luces y sombras, había marginado y excluido. Su fuerza sale de la Bolivia profunda, que no tiene tradición democrática y que como toda expresión popular tiene la confrontación y la pelea como método de lucha.
  • Esta visión se refuerza porque su núcleo duro viene de la lucha sindical campesina. Y de la aparición de El Alto como factor de decisión política. El MAS se convierte en el catalizador de las fuerzas que vencen al neoliberalismo, no por la fuerza de las urnas sino en las calles y encarna la posibilidad de instaurar un ciclo político distinto al neoliberalismo, que en ese momento, es lo que la gran mayoría de la sociedad boliviana reclama.
  • El discurso democrático es solo un medio para lograr su objetivo. Y las mayorías nacionales así lo entienden y le dan todo el respaldo para que tenga la hegemonía política y así, desarrolle su proyecto
  • ...139 more annotations...
  • A eso se suma un factor importante: su caudillo y parte de la dirigencia del proyecto masista, vienen de la marginalidad social (a diferencia de los conductores políticos de la revolución nacional del 52 que eran parte de una clase media intelectual), que se han abierto a empellones un espacio político y no entienden otro modo de hacer política que no sea confrontando y doblegando al adversario.
  • le preguntó a Evo Morales por qué confrontaba tanto, la repuesta de Evo fue categórica: “mira dónde he llegado confrontando”.&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp; La hegemonía y la confrontación son parte de la esencia y están en medula espinal del masismo.
  • El MAS se identifica mejor con la postulación de Abimael Guzmán de que “al margen del poder todo es ilusión” O con el planteamiento de Carlos Mariátegui que afirma: “La primera tarea del revolucionario es tomar el poder, la segunda, no dejarlo jamás”:
  • El MNR después del triunfo de la revolución del 9 de abril fue implacable con sus detractores, no dudó en crear campos de concentración y violar derechos humanos. Paz Estenssoro hizo suyo aquel dicho popular que dice: “que para hacer una torta hay que romper muchos huevos” y no le tembló la mano a la hora de ser duro.
  • Lo propio ocurre el año 2006 cuando el MAS captura el poder. Solo podía instalar el “proceso de cambio” desde la óptica del hegemonismo político y la confrontación.
  • La Asamblea Constituyente que motivó el cambio de la Constitución Política, la nacionalización de los hidrocarburos, el control por parte del Estado de empresas como YPFB, Entel y otras, el nacimiento del Estado Plurinacional en vez de la República, el empoderamiento de sectores indígenas, el ingreso de sectores sociales al manejo del aparato del Estado, eran imposibles de lograr si un MAS hegemónico y confrontacional.
  • Es cierto que lo hegemónico y confrontacional trae aparejado el abuso, el atropello, la violación a derechos humanos y otras consecuencias que van contra la esencia de la democracia occidental. Pero al MAS no le interesa eso, porque no se identifica con la democracia occidental.
  • En nuestro país, la revolución nacional de 1952 fue hegemónica y confrontacional. Es imposible pensar la implementación de la Nacionalización de las minas, la Reforma Agraria, la Reforma Educativa, el Voto Universal y todas las medidas de la Revolución Nacional sin un partido hegemónico, como era en ese momento era el MNR y sin una confrontación abierta con todos los exponentes y defensores del Estado Minero-Feudal pre 52.
  • Solo el cambio de correlación de fuerzas y de realidad social y económica harán que el MAS tenga otra actitud.
  • Puede ceder espacios al adversario cuando éstos se someten o son funcionales. También respeta al rival cuando tiene fuerza propia, pero trabaja para debilitarlo y arrinconarlo.
  • Por eso causa hilaridad cuando la oposición le reclama al MAS conductas democráticas occidentales.
  • El MAS entrará en un escenario democrático cuando su subsistencia política dependa de ser parte de una democracia de pactos. Tal como lo entendió el MNR el año 1985 cuando supo que ya no era hegemónico y su única forma de gobernar era en con pactos y alianzas. Igual ocurrió con Banzer que entendió que en democracia no podía gobernar sin acuerdos políticos, como lo hizo cuando fue dictador y su poder se basaba en las bayonetas.
  • desde caída de Evo Morales y del retorno al poder de del MAS de la mano de Luis Arce y David Choquehuanca sea han y se están desarrollando una serie de contradicciones dentro del bloque nacional-popular.
  • La primera constatación que el triunfo de Arce y Choquehuanca establece es que el bloque nacional popular distingue claramente lo que es el denominado “proceso de cambio” y el rol dentro el mismo de Evo Morales.
  • Está claro que para la mayoría de las bases de lo nacional- popular el proceso de cambio se encuentra encima de Evo Morales.
  • En todo caso, las fricciones, divisiones o desgajes del bloque nacional –popular no van a reforzar a tiendas políticas que estén en una visión “neoliberal” o forman parte de lo que las bases populares denominen la derecha. Se quedan dentro la narrativa popular- nacional y dentro el movimiento del “proceso de cambio.”
  • Durante la campaña electoral presidencial es donde se consolida el hecho de que MAS puede hacer política y ganar sin Evo La campaña también sirve para la irrupción de lideratos como Eva Copa, Choquehuanca, Andrónico y el propio Lucho Arce.
  • Ya en los últimos años del gobierno de Evo se desataron fuertes críticas al entorno del entonces presidente y a la forma vertical del manejo del instrumento político que hacía Morales.
  • A esto se suma, el rechazo que tiene en la actualidad la figura de Evo Morales en sectores de clase media, no solo en el sector profesional o en sus capas altas, sino en gente de clase media que sigue viendo con simpatía y es querendona del “proceso de cambio”. Y que reconoce que el mismo obtuvo resultados positivos para el país.
  • La elección subnacional confirmó el rechazo a Evo sobre todo en la mayoría de las ciudades capitales. La cosa se agrava cuando fuerzas políticas como Jallalla y MTS son los verdugos electorales del MAS, derrotándolo en lugares importantes y estratégicos.
  • Este cuadro interno del bloque de la Nacional- Popular, en concordancia con el resultado electoral de las últimas elecciones de gobernaciones y alcaldías han motivado que el masismo se lance a ejecutar y tomar la iniciativa bajo la siguiente estrategia: Introdujo en el ajedrez político el tema de convalidar la tesis del “golpe de Estado” para desarrollar los siguientes puntos:
  • a) El enemigo común
  • La explicación es muy simple, a todos los adscritos a la narrativa nacional-popular les conviene que se aniquile o cuando menos se arrincone a la oposición que dice representar “la modernidad y el neoliberalismo” para que la definición política y sobre todo el futuro de la misma se desarrolle dentro sus filas.
  • Una vez conseguido el objetivo de lograr la unidad contra el enemigo común se produce el segundo paso:
  • b) El escarmiento, la amenaza y el aislamiento
  • nmediatamente el MAS comienza con el escarmiento, metiendo a la cárcel a la ex presidenta, a sus ministros, a militares y policías. Se trata de una medida de fuerza donde el partido de gobierno demuestra no tener piedad con sus adversarios. Con la detención de la ex presidenta y sus colaboradores se busca demostrar la ilegitimidad e ilegalidad del régimen de Jeanine Añez, pero ante todo establecer que es un acto de “justicia” y reivindicación con la ciudad de El Alto por los hechos de Senkata, que quiere transmitir el mensaje que ya nadie podrá atacar impunemente a los habitantes de la principal ciudad Aymara del país, porque ellos son los únicos dueños de su territorio.
  • Sobre estos dos movimientos de ajedrez que el MAS realizó: el primero la táctica del enemigo a común y segundo la política del escarmiento, la amenaza y el aislamiento, el MAS trabaja la posibilidad de tres desemboques que son los siguientes:
  • La amenaza es contra los demás jefes políticos que tienen que saber que sobre ellos está la espada de Damocles, que en cualquier momento pueden ser judicializados e ir presos.
  • El aislamiento es dirigido: aislar y dividir a las autoridades electas para que por su cuenta busquen salvar sus espacios de poder ya sea sometiéndose o negociando con el poder central.
  • Pero el aislamiento está focalizado contra Camacho para aislarlo del resto del país y debilitarlo poco a poco. Lo sugestivo es que, globalmente, estas acciones han funcionado.
  • Nadie se ha roto las vestiduras por el apresamiento de la ex presidenta y sus colaboradores, la indignación que causó el hecho fue muy focalizada en ciertos sectores sociales y una lluvia de tres días. Esto debido al poco peso y representatividad que tiene la expresidenta Añez en la sociedad boliviana.
  • Respecto a los militares presos, pasa lo mismo, ya ni siquiera en su institución generan solidaridad de cuerpo, porque hoy en la cabeza de los militares bolivianos está la preocupación de ascender al grado superior y terminar la carrera militar con una buena jubilación que defender a un camarada caído. En la policía sucede lo mismo
  • Es evidente que la presión internacional juega su rol, pero gobiernos de corte hegemónico y confrontacional, siempre ignoran esta presión, incluso actúan contra ella.
  • El apresamiento de militares y policías es el decirles a ambos que el poder civil y constitucional está encima y quien se atreva a violar tal situación, solo tendrá como destino la cárcel. Con ello se quiere desechar cualquier intento de subversión y de amotinamiento en el futuro.
  • 1.- El retorno al poder del “comandante” Evo Morales
  • Se trata de una línea política de los sectores duros del Evismo, que quieren el retorno inmediato de Evo al poder porque, según ellos, fue derrocado por un “golpe de Estado” después, desde su visión, de haber “ganado” la elección del 2019. Y por lo tanto se le debería devolver el poder.
  • Este ha sido y es la razón primaria de imponer en el escenario político la temática del “golpe de Estado”.
  • Evidentemente, tal estrategia del sector duro solo podrá ser victoriosa en un escenario ya no de confrontación, sino de enfrentamiento entre bolivianos. Pero los duros del Evismo creen que ese el mejor camino porque así se adelantaría la eliminación de los adversarios del “proceso de cambio” y de Evo, asegurando el poder para el próximo decenio.
  • Objetivamente no hay condiciones para que esta línea política, llamada por propios y extraños la vía venezolana, pueda tener éxito. Pero a veces el fanatismo y la violencia consiguen objetivos que la racionalidad se niega admitir.
  • Sin embargo, hay factores subjetivos que quieren que se desarrolle la vía denominada Venezuela.
  • Para nadie es un secreto que la obsesión que tiene por el poder Evo Morales es casi patológica. Para él es un difícil imaginar una vida fuera de la presidencia.
  • Otro factor es su círculo íntimo que saben que no volverán a gozar las mieles del poder que durante 14 años disfrutaron si Evo no vuelve a la casa grande del pueblo, porque las propias bases sociales del “proceso de cambio “los ha vetado.
  • los cocaleros del Chapare que tienen interés políticos y económicos casados con el Evismo.
  • Todo eso hace que dentro el MAS haya una tendencia que quiere el inmediato retorno de su “Comandante” Evo a la casa grande del pueblo.
  • 2.- Recomposición del cuadro político vía adelanto de elecciones. –
  • Otra de las estrategias que está puesta en el ajedrez político es hacer que haya un desemboque político que termine en el adelantamiento de elecciones. Hecho que, según los promotores de este planteamiento, abriría el camino del retorno de Evo Morales al poder.
  • La ruta a seguir para lograr tal objetivo parece muy simple y posible de lograr. Se requiere promover una cadena de renuncias en el poder ejecutivo, que comience con la renuncia del presidente, continúe con la de David Choquehuanca y termine en con la asunción de Andrónico a la presidencia, quien por constitución tendría que convocar a nuevos comicios electorales, donde Evo ya pueda candidatear.
  • hay aspectos más profundos que ponen trabas a esta estrategia, veamos lo más importante:
  • En primera instancia, no se puede asegurar que Evo sea el candidato de unidad del bloque nacional-popular. Lo más probable es que la emergencia aymara y generacional del bloque nacional-popular se exprese en una formula distinta cuya cabeza no sea Evo Morales, lo que adelantaría la competencia interna por el liderato.
  • Un segundo aspecto es que en las actuales condiciones una victoria electoral de Evo está en duda. Indudablemente éste es el peor momento electoral de Evo Morales, porque tiene una fuerte ruptura con sectores de la clase media. No se puede afirmar que ese quiebre de Evo con la clase media sea irreversible, pero hoy por hoy es muy fuerte.
  • 3.- Arce, factor de equilibrio coyuntural
  • Una tercera posibilidad de llegada de la última arremetida política&nbsp;&nbsp;del MAS es buscar fortalecer la actual presidencia de Luis Arce, sacándola de parsimonia y lentitud.
  • En esta coyuntura el MAS tendría que cerrar filas en torno al gobierno para encarar con cierta coherencia el tema económico, la pandemia y la cuestión política.
  • Con un bloque nacional- popular unido Luis Arce puede viabilizar en la sociedad un plan de medidas económicas para lograr la reactivación de la economía y controlar el desarrollo de la pandemia.
  • Pero la más importante es que, en la interna del bloque nacional-popular, el presidente Arce, en este momento, es un factor equilibrio y unidad de las diferentes visiones e intereses que tienen todas las corrientes que se encuentran disputando el liderato y la conducción de la misma.
  • Por ello, sin tener claros patrocinadores puede ser la tendencia que se acabe de imponer.
  • Pero lo que debe quedar claro es que en ningún escenario los actores de lo nacional –popular buscan acuerdo o concertación con las fuerzas que son del polo político denominado neoliberal y anti masista. Sino todos coinciden en someterlos o arrinconarlos.
  • El triste vía crucis de la oposición
  • ¿En qué momento las cúpulas de los partidos que fueron actores del ciclo neoliberal entre 1895-2006 perdieron el rumbo para ser abatidos y derrotados por las masas populares que rescataban el discurso de la nacional-popular? ¿Qué les paso? ¿Qué errores cometieron? ¿Qué fue lo que no entendieron?
  • Veamos algunos factores que explican y ayudan a comprender tal situación:
  • a) Perder el poder y perder la oposición
  • Uno de los síntomas más fuertes de la crisis del ciclo neoliberal se develó el 26 de junio del 2002, cuatro días antes de la elección presidencial, el entonces embajador de EEUU en Bolivia, Rocha, lanzó una amenaza en el Chapare, con Tuto Quiroga al lado (Tuto entonces presidente de Bolivia) advirtiendo que el mercado del gas a California estaba abierto a una Bolivia que salga del circuito coca-cocaína. En una clara intromisión, el entonces embajador norteamericano en Bolivia pedía que los bolivianos abrieran los ojos, pensaran en sus hijos y nietos y no votaran por Evo Morales, pero como sucede en estos casos el efecto fue un bumerang.
  • Pero lo más trágico vino después, cuando todas las tendencias políticas importantes del ciclo neoliberal entraron en bloque al gobierno de Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada.
  • Durante el tiempo que duró el ciclo neoliberal, el sistema político controló ambos espacios y aún cuando eran parte de una misma visión “neoliberal y de modernización”, tenían percepciones y matices diferentes. Y aun cuando eran rivales políticos, en algunos casos profundamente antagónicos, crearon un mecanismo de alternancia política donde los roles se intercambian.
  • Entonces, se tenía la sensación de una democracia moderna y estable, con alternancia. Pero, el error de ingresar todos al último gobierno de Goni demostró que el “sistema de partidos” era tan frágil como una cáscara de huevo.
  • Indudablemente, no se puede negar el aporte de los lideres del ciclo “neoliberal”. Sin el coraje y la valentía de Siles Suazo, no se habría reconquistado la democracia. Sin el 21060 de Víctor Paz no se habría estabilizado la economía nacional. Sin la conversión democrática de Banzer no se habría desterrado el golpismo como opción. Sin la participación popular de Goni no se habría fortalecido el poder de los municipios. Sin los acuerdos políticos que promovió y se firmó en la presidencia de Jaime Paz no se habría afianzado la democracia boliviana. También en la gestión de Paz Zamora se encontró el pozo San Alberto, Reserva gasífera sobre la cual se ha sustentando económicamente el “proceso de cambio”.
  • Pero todos estos aciertos no los exime de no haber entendido lo principal: la irrupción de la Bolivia profunda, que no sólo quería inclusión social, sino ser el sujeto histórico que cumpliera su rol protagónico. Es decir, lo nacional-popular quería ser el actor de su propio destino.
  • Carlos escribió un libro titulado “Presidencia Sitiada”, libro donde evalúa su presidencia y narra todas las presiones que tuvo que encarar su paso por el gobierno desde diferentes frentes que hicieron de su presidencia sea una presidencia “sitiada”. Pero si alguien conspiró contra la gestión de Carlos Mesa, fue el propio Carlos Mesa. Indeciso y vacilante, nunca le dio un rumbo a su gobierno. Se negó a gobernar con la coalición parlamentaria que había armado Goni. No aprobó la ley de hidrocarburos, ni se atrevió a nacionalizar los mismos, cuando tal exigencia ya era una demanda nacional.
  • Lo evidente es que el gobierno de Carlos Mesa cerró el ciclo neoliberal en Bolivia. Mesa se encargó de sepultarlo y de empedrar el camino del ascenso de Evo Morales.
  • Pero los desaciertos continuaron. Tuto Quiroga, por decisión propia, liquidó ADN. El MNR se despedazó con la caída de Goni. En el la MIR, la cúpula máxima se negó a viabilizar la candidatura presidencial Hormando Vaca, en un momento en que Hormando Vaca era la mayor referencia política de Santa Cruz y que el dirigente cruceño se perfilaba como un factor de recambio y oxigenación del mirismo.
  • la persistencia de los “segundones” en la vitrina de política solo es la tranca que atrasa la conformación de una opción que, desde la visión “neoliberal moderna”, tenga posibilidad de generar una política renovada que dispute el poder. Y no es que un cambio generacional de actores políticos resuelva el tema de un día a otro, pero es el primer paso que inevitablemente se debe seguir. El país demanda la instauración de un nuevo ciclo político con nuevos protagonistas.
  • Jeaninne: cuando las ambiciones matan
  • hay responsables detrás las sombras del encarcelamiento de Añez. Son todos aquellos que aprovechando de su ingenuidad y poca formación política la utilizaron.
  • la presidencia Añez se perdió en su laberinto, cuando si hubiese cumplido con el objetivo para el cual fue elegida, habría tenido una gestión decorosa y salido de palacio por la puerta grande.
  • a la ex mandataria la mató políticamente su propia ambición.
  • Oposición con complejo y sin discurso ideológico-político
  • Pero el más grande error de la actual oposición es no haber asimilado, que el proceso cambio, fue una transformación que cambió la realidad del país y los dejó sin discurso político. Ante esta realidad les vino un complejo:
  • Tienen miedo decir que son neoliberales, que proponen la economía de libre mercado y que están contra el “populismo”.
  • No saben qué hacer ante la emergencia indígena, quechua y aymara.
  • No han diseñado en 14 años de Masismo una propuesta alternativa.
  • Lo demostraron cuando se instauró el gobierno de transición, sin saber qué hacer, solo pavimentaron el retorno del MAS.
  • no tienen estrategia para tomar el poder, ni siquiera para derrotar a lo que denominan autoritarismo.
  • Incapaces de crear una opción política solida que canalice el voto del eje anti masista, a la hora de verdad se fragmentan y optan por la vía del sálvese quien pueda, negociando cada quien por su cuenta.
  • La economía, la madre del cordero
  • Todos vuelcan los ojos sobre la economía y dicen que al estamos entrando en el periodo de las vacas flacas, que el actual gobierno ya no dispone ni dispondrá de recursos financieros para derrochar y que el país entrará en una crisis económica que será su tumba porque se sumará la crisis de salud y otros temas.
  • Prefiero explicarlo en términos más sencillos.
  • El país está en este momento en la necesidad de conseguir dinero “cash” para reactivar su economía y no comerse sus reservas En tanto consigue dinero se deberá, como en cualquier hogar, amarrarse el cinturón y tomar algunas medidas de acuerdo a una escala de prioridades, buscando cubrir el bienestar de cada uno de sus miembros.
  • No se puede realizar una adecuada política económica si no se consideran las variables de orden social.
  • Me preguntarán: ¿cómo lo hicieron antes?
  • La respuesta es muy simple, lo hicieron en un escenario político de reflujo del movimiento popular y por la fuerza, como lo hizo Banzer en el año 1972 que era una dictadura militar que había derrotado el 21 de agosto de 1971 al gobierno de Torres y al movimiento popular. Lo hizo Víctor Paz con el 21060, a partir de una fuerte coalición política con la ADN, movilizando al ejercito, pero sobre la derrota política y social de lo nacional-popular expresado en la UDP.
  • Pero hoy es diferente, hay un empoderamiento de los sectores marginados del país que ni siquiera a Evo Morales le permitieron devaluar la moneda.
  • Lo mismo sucede con la idea de liberarizar la economía, porque simplemente la actual Constitución ha blindado el manejo de los recursos naturales y que las empresas estratégicas sean solo de carácter estatal. Esto conspira contra la atracción libre de capitales a nuestra economía.
  • Esto lleva a que el actual gobierno, por su legalidad y legitimidad política, es el que tiene más posibilidades que cualquier opositor de encarar la crisis. Esto debido a que es la única fuerza política que puede lograr un consenso social y político
  • Lo triste de la oposición es que no solo no tiene propuesta económica, sino que carece de credibilidad en los grandes sectores sociales que opinan que no pueden conducir con éxito una crisis económica.
  • Por ello, jugar a la crisis económica es dar un salto al vacío. Desear que la crisis económica derroque al MAS es una estupidez, porque no sólo arrastrará al MAS, sino a toda la oposición y creará un caos nacional de imprevisibles consecuencias.
  • Por ello, nadie quiere que se agrave la crisis económica.
  • Por ello, es que todos pondrán su esfuerzo para que eso no ocurra.
  • De ahí que la economía es la madre del cordero que como siempre, será el escenario sobre el cual se desarrollarán las distintas estrategias políticas.
  • A manera de conclusión.
  • 1.-Lo primero que observo es que la sociedad en general está demandando la conformación de un nuevo ciclo político, con nuevos actores. Este es un fenómeno común tanto dentro del campo nacional-popular (la izquierda) como al interior de quienes se afilian en el campo neoliberal moderno (derecha).
  • La diferencia está que en el campo nacional-popular este fenómeno se está generando desde las bases, con gran ímpetu democrático. Mientras que en la vereda del campo neoliberal y anti -masista es más el reclamo espontáneo des sus militantes y simpatizantes &nbsp;Y esto tiene una explicación, el campo nacional tuvo y todavía tiene un partido político de expansión nacional, como es el MAS
  • Mientras que las fuerzas anti-mas nunca lograron estructurar un partido de alcance nacional. Sus expresiones políticas como sus lideratos siempre han sido regionales o expresiones de ciertos segmentos específicos.
  • No pudieron generar un verdadero movimiento nacional que tengan una solida expresión partidaria, esta ausencia es su gran debilidad. Por eso no es locura, ni irracionalidad que algunos miembros de esta tendencia hagan vigilia en la puerta de cuarteles y pidan que los militares tomen el poder. Es simplemente la constatación de que no confían en .Y no los ven con la suficiente fuerzas para derrotar al masismo democráticamente en una elección presidencial, y ante esa evidencia prefieren el retorno al poder de los militares.
  • Pero lo más grave de esta conducción, que son remanentes del viejo sistema político, aprovecharon la rebelión de las pititas y se pusieron en la ola política, instaurando y siendo parte de manera directa o indirecta del gobierno de Jeanine, hicieron tan mal cosas que de un plumazo los barrió el bloque nacional-popular. Por ello, quien más renovación política necesita es el campo “neoliberal-moderno”.
  • 2.-La renovación requiere política, requiere la jubilación de todos los actores del viejo sistema político y esto llega también a Evo Morales.
  • Esta situación creará un conflicto en el campo-nacional-popular porque Evo no cederá espacio, dará pelea y buscará la forma de volver a ser la cabeza del eje nacional-popular. Pero a diferencia de coyunturas pasadas, Evo ya tiene interpelación y rivales que le quieren disputar la conducción y el liderato del proceso de cambio.
  • 3.-Considero que, en las actuales condiciones el nuevo liderato de lo “neoliberal –moderno” debe tener las siguientes características:
  • A.-) Tiene que ser un liderato transversal que tenga aceptación en clases sociales y regiones
  • B.-) Tiene que saber a lo que se enfrenta, por ejemplo, cuando se habla de autoritarismo tiene que saber de dónde proviene y cuáles las causas de ese autoritarismo.
  • Desde mi punto de vista hay dos tipos de autoritarismo, el que emerge de la acción militar o golpista, a los que es fácil enfrentarlos porque tienen la ola social en contra. Y hay autoritarismos que emergen con base social y apoyo popular porque encarnan las aspiraciones de las mayorías nacionales y, generalmente, las identifican con un caudillo.
  • Lo que quiero significar es que para vencer el “autoritarismo “del MAS hay que vencer las causas que lo generaron.&nbsp; En otras palabras, hay que derrotar el racismo, la exclusión social, el regionalismo, etc. En resumen, todo lo que la democracia de pactos no encaró y dio origen al masismo.
  • C.-) Tiene que tener una propuesta clara que pueda demostrar a los sectores populares afines a lo nacional-popular, que el camino del libre mercado, de la inversión privada, la concertación, la democracia de pactos etc., les dará mejores días que el camino del Estatismo.
  • 4.- En el campo nacional –popular se está produciendo la emergencia de una línea Aymara, que quiere ponerse a la cabeza del proceso de cambio, porque cree que ha llegado su momento. Y que seguramente dará una fuerte pelea interna. Dirigentes como Eva Copa, David Choquehuanca, el propio Patzi y Santos Quispe son expresión de ello.
  • Muchos pueden pensar que ahí empieza un periodo de división, pero en mi criterio eso es hilar muy fino y no entender que los aymaras y quechuas se han dado cuenta que en su unidad está su fuerza y que incluso con variantes ideológicas dentro de ellos pueden gobernar el país por muchos años
  • Ya es muy difícil pensar, por no decir imposible, que los Aymaras y Quechuas voten para presidente por un “blanquito” clasemediero con aires de aristócrata
  • Pero hay algo más, los aymaras y quechuas no sólo quieren conducir el proceso de cambio y el poder, quieren tener el control territorial del país.
  • Y han iniciado su larga marcha, para decirlo en palabras de Mao, sobre las tierras bajas Ya tienen una gran presencia en Pando y Beni y una creciente presencia en Santa Cruz.
  • Se estima que el 2035 el 45% de la población boliviana vivirá en Santa Cruz y de ese 45% la mitad será colla o de ascendencia colla. Y es un proceso que parece irreversible, fruto del desarrollo antropológico y sociológico del país.
  • Por otro lado, desde la visión Aymara y Quechua solo cuando ellos tengan el control total de nuestro territorio se podrá construir una identidad nacional
  • 5.- Sin embargo, todo el desarrollo del tema va e irá de modo paralelo al tema económico. La economía marcará el ritmo de la política. Regulará las marchas y contramarchas de las intenciones políticas de uno lado y del otro.
  • Por otro lado, los recién electos gobernadores y alcaldes están desesperadamente buscando tener relación con el gobierno para viabilizar su gestión y contar para ello con recursos económicos.
  • Ente sentido, resulta infantil y de poca creatividad decir que el presidente Arce es un vulgar títere de Evo, quienes han estado en los altos niveles del aparato del Estado, saben que el presidente tiene el poder del bolígrafo.
  • Que Evo tiene influencia en el actual gobierno es natural, es el líder y el caudillo del partido de gobierno. Pero de ahí a afirmar que tiene el mismo poder que cuando era presidente es absurdo.
  • Arias, Fernández, Copa, Manfred, Camacho y todas las demás autoridades electas en la subnacionales están obligadas a sentarse a negociar con el gobierno para tener recursos financieros en su gestión. Una gestión sin plata acaba en corto tiempo siendo cuestionada. Por eso, a nadie con poder local o regional le conviene que la crisis económica se agrave.
  • Mucho más a lideratos como el de Eva Copa o Fernando Camacho que son lideratos emergentes que desean tener proyección nacional.
  • Del triunfalismo al pánico
  • Los resultados de la última contienda electoral sub-nacional dibujarán un cuadro político interesante que todavía motiva una serie de lecturas e interpretaciones
  • Si bien es cierto que, con respecto a las últimas elecciones nacionales y subnacionales, en las que el MAS participó, su votación bajó considerablemente, no es menos cierto que el MAS es la primera y única fuerza política organizada con presencia nacional a lo largo y ancho del país.
  • Su victoria en más de 240 municipios y el hecho de que casi en todos los lugares donde hubo elecciones subnacionales si no ganó obtuvo el segundo lugar. Sumado al hecho que, aún cuando, no se comparta con sus ideas, es un partido que tiene un proyecto político, una realidad que trae como consecuencia un equilibrio en la balanza electoral.
  • Después de la euforia comenzó a imperar la sensatez Emergieron voces contrarias al núcleo duro antimasista. Eva Copa fue la primera en señalar que agradecía a Evo por darle la oportunidad de hacer política destacaba su adhesión a la narrativa nacional –popular y al denominado “proceso de cambio” y reiteraba que jamás pactaría con la derecha.
  • El propio Camacho planteó estar dispuesto a trabajar con todos en función del desarrollo de Santa Cruz y del país.
  • Todo estaba muy claro: la oposición reconocía el poder y la autoridad del gobierno central, a cambio que éste también reconociera y respetará los espacios de poder regional que los adversarios del MAS habían logrado a través del voto popular conseguido en las urnas.
  • Se podía prever, en ese contexto, que estaban sentadas las bases para generar un acuerdo político de concertación y convivencia. Acuerdo político del que estarían excluidos figuras como Doria Medina, Tuto Quiroga, Rubén Costas, Luis Revilla, Jeanine Añez y el propio Carlos Mesa no solo por su baja incidencia en la sociedad boliviana, sino porque padecen de Covid político y se encuentran en terapia intensiva entre la muerte o la sobrevivencia política.
  • in embargo, sorprendentemente, el MAS patea el tablero.&nbsp;&nbsp;
  • De manera inesperada introduce en el escenario político el tema del “golpe de Estado” y ordena el apresamiento de ex ministros de Estado y de la ex presidenta Jeanine Añez, desatando así una artillería de procesos y acusaciones judiciales contra la oposición por conspiración y sedición, debido a su supuesta participación en el “golpe” que habría derrocado a Evo Morales. En ese momento, sectores de oposición pasan del triunfalismo al pánico.
  • Pero ¿por qué el MAS reaccionó así? Cabe preguntarse ¿Lo hizo por debilidad? ¿Cometió un error político? ¿Quiso mostrar su musculatura social y política? O ¿es una jugada política planificada?
  • Estas interrogantes trataremos de responder.
  • Desde nuestra óptica, el accionar del MAS tiene dos vertientes: la primera de concepción político-ideológica y la segunda de estrategia política que tiene que ver más que ver con lo que se denomina la real política
  • Cuando el poder se entiende como la hegemonía y la confrontación
Javier E

Tech is killing childhood - Salon.com - 0 views

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youth media tech childhood development social moral

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  • For all the good they can find there, other influences, from screen games and commercial pop-ups to YouTube, social media, and online erotica, introduce them to images and information they are not developmentally equipped to understand. The combination of their innate eagerness to mimic what’s cool, and the R- to X-rated quality of the cool they see, has collapsed childhood to the point that we see second-graders mimicking sexy teens and fourth-graders hanging out with online “friends” and gamers far older and more worldly. Life for six- to ten-year-olds has taken on a pseudosophisticated zeitgeist far beyond the normal developmental readiness of the age.
  • inwardly, many children experience a suffocating squeeze on developmental growth that is essential for these early school years.
  • At a developmental time when children need to be learning how to effectively interact directly, the tech-mediated environment is not an adequate substitute for the human one.
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  • No matter how fierce play may look on the playground or in the social scrimmage of the school day, the more grueling competition is the one your child faces each day to measure up in her peer group. At around age eight, children start to compare themselves to each other in more competitive ways.
  • media and much of life online introduce an adult context for a child’s self-assessment. The behaviors they see there that set the bar for cool, cute, bold, and daring come from the wrong age and life stage. The mix suddenly includes adolescents and adults, media coverage of fame-addled celebrities and jaded politicians, teen magazines, and Victoria’s Secret at the mall and in the mail.
  • As the inner critic grows, parents become indispensable as the voice of the inner ally, the voice that helps balance a child’
  • innermost sense of himself
  • Day by day, kids need time to process their experiences intellectually and emotionally, to integrate new information with their existing body of knowledge and experience. They need time to consolidate it all so that it has meaning and relevance for them. Ideally, they do that with their parents and in the context of family and community.
  • Kids don’t get home from school anymore; they bring school—and an even larger online community—home with them.
  • t in the ways that matter most, speed derails the natural pace of development. Pressure to grow up faster or exposing children to content or influences beyond their developmental ken does not make them smarter or savvier sooner. Instead, it fast-forwards them past critical steps in the developmental process.
  • Developmentally, this is the time children need parents and teachers to help them learn to tame impulsivity—learning to wait their turn, not cut in line, not call out in a class discussion—and for developing the capacity to feel happy and alone, connected to oneself and empathetic toward others.
  • With nature pressing for human interaction and a child’s world of possibility expanding in the new school environment, to trade it all for screen time is a terrible waste of a child’s early school years.
  • Some things in life you just have to do in order to learn, and do a lot of to grow adept at it. Like learning to ride a bike, developing these inner qualities of character and contemplation calls for real-life practice. In the absence of that immersion-style learning, time on screens can undermine a child’s development of these important social skills and the capacity to feel empathy
  • Emotional and social development, like cognitive development, can benefit from “judicious use” of tech
  • “But if it is used in a nonjudicious fashion, it will shape the brain in what I think will actually be a negative way,”
  • “the problem is that judicious thinking is among the frontal-lobe skills that are still developing way past the teenage years. In the meantime, the pull of technology is capturing kids at an ever earlier age, when they are not generally able to step back and decide what’s appropriate or necessary, or how much is too much.”
  • in school, they take their cues from the crowd-sourced conversations they hear among friends and on social media. For girls, even seven-year-olds on the school playground, sexy is the new cute. Thin is still in, but for ever younger girls. In a study of the effects of media images on gender perceptions, one study reported that by age three, children view fatness negatively, and free online computer games for girls trend toward fashion, beauty, and dress-up games, reinforcing messages that your body is your most important asset.
  • prior to Britney Spears, most girls had ten years of running around, riding their bikes, and experiencing their bodies as a source of energy, movement, confidence, and skills. That was before children’s fashions included thong panties for kindergarten girls, stylish bras for girls not much older, lipstick or lip gloss as a top accessory for nearly half of six-to nine-year- old girls, and “Future Pimp” T-shirts for schoolboys.
  • Boys, too, are under pressure. They must measure up to the super-masculine ideal of the day, portrayed and defined by more graphic, sadistic, and sexual violence than the superheroes of yesterday. Homophobia and the slurs used to express it remain a common part of boy culture, but now at an earlier age, as does a derogatory view of all things female and an increasingly sexualized attitude toward girls.
  • Children do best when they are free and flexible to try on and cross over the gender codes—girls who skateboard and play ice hockey, boys who draw or dance, boys and girls who enjoy each other without “dating” overtones.
  • TV viewing helped white boys feel better about themselves, and left white girls, black girls, and black boys feeling worse. White boys saw male media comparisons as having it good: “positions of power, prestigious jobs, high education, glamorous houses, a beautiful wife” all easily attained, as if prepackaged. Girls and women saw female media comparisons in more simplistic and limited roles, “focused on the success they have because of how they look, not what they do, what they think or how they got there.” Black boys also saw their media comparisons in the negative, limited roles of “criminals, hoodlums and buffoons, with no other future options.”
  • there is “a clear link between media violence exposure and aggression” as well as to other damaging consequences including eating disorders, poor body image, and unhealthy practices in an effort to achieve idealized appearances. “Failure to live up to the specific media stereotypes for one’s sex is a blow to a person’s sense of social desirability,”
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Opinion | Transcript: Ezra Klein Interviews Brandon Terry - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-interviews-brandon-terry.html

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  • BRANDON TERRY: Well, there’s this puzzle when we think about somebody like Martin Luther King Jr. And it’s that on the one hand, we have a national holiday devoted to him, an imposing monument on the hallowed space of the National Mall; he’s invoked in all manner of political speeches from across the political spectrum, probably the most famous African American of the 20th century.
  • But at the same time, if you ask even really well-educated people, they often don’t know that he’d written five major books, that he’s a systematic theologian with sustained interest in political philosophy who’s written lots and lots of things, incisive things, on some of the most pressing political and ethical matters.
  • King wants to say something different, I think. He wants to say that we are both of these things. We are a society with what he called the congenital deformity of racism — that it’s shot through many of our deepest institutions and structural arrangements, and because it has not been redressed on the scale that it would have to be to achieve true justice, it festers. It’s a rot. It’s a challenge that every generation is called on to pick up and try to do better than their forebears.
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  • I’ve described it as a romantic narrative, one that’s about unities in the process of becoming, a calling together of Americans to transcend racial division and come together in a unifying way, a more perfect union, as a transcendence of essential American goodness over transitory American evils.
  • when we tell the story that way, unfortunately, not only is it mythic, but it trains us to treat King as the kind of person who’s not doing any original political thinking. What he’s doing is calling us to be true to who we always already were
  • And when you treat him like that, the thing that becomes most interesting about him is not his thought. It’s not the way he challenged us to think about violence. It’s not the way he challenges us to think about segregation, both de facto and de jure. It’s not how he challenges us to think about economic justice.
  • The thing that’s interesting about him starts to be his rhetoric or his tactics, the way in which he pushes people or frames arguments to call us to be true to who we always already were. That’s a real problem because it evades the most incisive, challenging and generative contributions that his public philosophy makes for our era.
  • it gets conscripted into a story that’s ultimately affirming about the adequacy of our constitutional order, the trajectory of our institutions, the essential goodness of our national character. You often hear politicians use this rhetoric of, this is not who we are.
  • it’s partly related to how we tell the story of the civil rights movement and particularly, how we tell King’s role in the civil rights movement.
  • There’s a way in which the philosophy of nonviolence gets painted, even in King’s time, as a kind of extreme, purist pacifism. And part of that is the connection with Gandhi, although I think it’s a radical misunderstanding of Gandhi, as well.
  • it’s a way of imagining the commitment to nonviolence as related to passivity, as related to the performance of suffering for pity. These are things that King never endures. For him, the idea of passive resistance was a misnomer. He helped coin the phrase “direct action” — he and other members of the civil-rights generation — that nonviolence is aggressive.
  • It’s an aggressive attack on injustice, an aggressive form of noncooperation with domination. It’s about trying to wedge yourself into the machinery of domination, to prevent its adequate functioning, to try to force or coerce your fellow citizens to stop and take stock of what kind of injustices are being unfurled in their name.
  • And it does so on the presumption that politics involves coercion, especially for King, who had a pretty tragic sense of human nature, that politics is going to involve confrontation with great evil, that it’s not a Pollyannaish view about what we’re all capable of if we just turn our eye toward God in the right way.
  • We’re owe it to them to live with evil. And we always are going to be called to confront it. We just need to do it in ways that won’t unleash a further chain of social evil and bitterness and revenge and retaliation. And King thought nonviolence was the only weapon that could cut and heal at the same time.
  • So when you hear King talk about love, when you hear King talk about nonviolence, these things actually require not just an enormous discipline around the acceptance of suffering, as if it’s some kind of passive practice, but they require really creative, dedicated thinking around how exactly to push and prod your neighbors into addressing the forms of injustice that structure the polity and how to do it in a way that doesn’t leave a perpetual midnight of bitterness when the conflict is done.
  • He says that the really interesting question, however, is how to organize a sustained, successful challenge to structural injustice. And for King, that requires something that blends militant resistance and a higher-order ethical practice that can point the way toward peaceful reconciliation over the long term.
  • Gandhi has this line where he says, if you can’t practice nonviolence, it quote, “retaliation or resistance unto death is the second best, though a long way off from the first. Cowardice is impotence, worse than violence.” So this idea that if you can’t be nonviolent, it’s better to be violent than to be a coward, doing nothing — I think gets at something important. Can you help unpack that?
  • to raise the question of strategy, as if we can evaluate means without some kind of ethical reflection or without some kind of underlying ethical commitments, for King, is already a confusion. He thinks that the ends are prefigured in any means.
  • Gandhi, in “Hind Swaraj,” has this great passage where he talks about how could come to acquire a piece of property. You could buy it. You could steal it. You could kill somebody in pursuit of it. You could ask for it as a gift.At the end of the day, you still have the same property. But the thing, itself, has changed. In one scenario, it’s a piece of stolen property. It’s a theft. In another, it’s a gift, which is different than something you’ve purchased.
  • So in the course of acquiring the thing, even though the thing is the same, the means have transformed it in a really, really important way. And King wants to say something similar — that in all political practice, the ends are prefigured in the means
  • nonviolence has to be — if it’s going to be true nonviolence for King — informed by a philosophy of love that really wants and desires and wills goodwill for the enemy at present and is committed, at the fundamental level, to going on together in peace, going on together, sharing the polity in perpetuity.
  • I think for King, imperative to nonviolent resistance turns, in large part, on the question of your own dignity and self-respect. So it is a justice question. He’s concerned with structural justice as a matter of the kinds of arrangements that prevail in the larger American society. That’s obviously true.
  • So there’s the person or group you’re in conversation or conflict with. I’m a liberal, and I’m arguing with a conservative. And I think that’s the most common target to think about: How do I beat or convince this person or group on the other side?
  • Then there’s the broader community polity — the voters, of the country, people who are bystanders, maybe interested, maybe not, but a broader community that is in some way watching or can be brought in to watch. And then there’s you, the person taking the action, and how it affects you and your group to take a particular action.
  • something that seems present in King’s thought is much, much, much, much more concern and focus than I think most political thinkers have today on how political action affects you, the person taking it, and affects the broader community that might be watching it
  • — that ends up with you being turned away from the good and toward things like hatred, resentment, violence, which he thinks, ultimately, will corrode your soul and take you further away from flourishing.
  • But he’s also concerned with how you relate to your own sense of equality, equal standing, worth, as he would say, somebodiness, we might say dignity — he also says that a lot — and that for King, to acquiesce in the face of oppression and domination, without protest, is to abdicate your own self-respect and dignity.
  • for him, dignity also required a certain kind of excellence of character, a certain kind of comportment and practice toward others.
  • So it is about trying to defend your dignity, defend yourself respect against insult and humiliation, oppression. But it’s also about doing so in a way that doesn’t degrade your character in the long term, that doesn’t cause you to end up being turned away from the good, which, again, for him, is going to be a religiously-inflected category
  • When you think about somebody’s political philosophy or their theory of political action, you can maybe think of there being a couple agents they’re thinking about.
  • It has fallen out of favor to say that there are certain ways of acting, politically, that are better and worse, from a virtue perspective, because it often is seen not as really a question of you and your relationship to some baseline or ideal but is some kind of concession you’re making to people who don’t deserve
  • I am a person who believes those questions are still legitimate, that they can’t all be reduced to strategy or will to power or psychic drives. I think that there’s something like an ethical life that requires us to argue about it and requires us to think really hard about how we discipline ourselves to achieve it.
  • Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, wrote a phenomenal book, many years ago, called “Righteous Discontent.” And that’s what introduces the phrase, “the politics of respectability.” It’s a study of turn of the century Black Baptist women and their organizing efforts through the church.
  • It’s this idea that, in confronting a system of social stigma, the response that you need to have to it is to try to adjust your behavior, comportment, your self fashioning, in line with the dominant norms so that you can, over time, undermine the stigma and become a full participant in society.
  • there are all sorts of questions, legitimate questions, that are raised against that. Are we losing something valuable about alternative forms of life, about alternative cultural practices, when we take the existing, dominant norms as unassailable or something to aspire to?
  • what’s really fascinating is that he talks a lot about how he sympathizes with all those criticisms. He agrees with them
  • here’s the other part of Evelyn Higginbotham’s formulation — there’s a deeper question, one with thousands of years of moral reflection built up into it, which is about virtue ethics — that there are some things that people are appealing to you about that aren’t about their effect in the polity that aren’t about trying to manipulate white, racial attitudes. They’re about your own flourishing and character. They’re deep questions about how to live a good life, how to achieve excellence and the crafting of your soul.
  • as King would say, our reason sometimes can become subordinate to our passions. It can just be a legitimizing power or rationalizing power to the point where we lose track of what we really want to achieve, the kind of character we really want to have.
  • And for King, many of the appeals he made in that vocabulary are really about that. They’re really about virtue. They’re really about what hatred does to your life, what anger does to your life, what violence does to your life
  • there is a question for him, at the core of his life, which is, what makes this worth doing? That’s a virtue question. It’s not just a strategic or tactical one, in the narrow sense.
  • he describes nonviolence, I think really importantly, as also being about a nonviolence of spirit.
  • the example that he often gives is about humiliation — that there’s a way in which the desire to humiliate others, to diminish their status in front of other people for your own pleasure, the desire to subject them to standards of evaluation that they probably themselves don’t hold or don’t understand, in order to enable mockery. There’s a way in which, if we’re reflexive about where that desire comes from, we will find that it comes from a place that’s irrational, indefensible and, likely, cruel, and that if we were to imagine a way of life built around those feelings, those desires, those practices, it would be one that would make it really hard for us to have healthy social ties, stable institutions, flourishing social relationships.
  • So part of what he’s up to is asking us, at all times, to be self-reflexive about the desires and needs and fantasies that drive us in politics
  • the concession.
  • So what nonviolence does is, it builds in a check on those kinds of rationalizations, those kinds of emotional drives, by teaching us to avoid forms of humiliation and forms of physical violence that make it hard to come back from. So that’s the first point.
  • The second point — and it goes more to your sense of revenge and retaliation — is again, forcing us to acknowledge the legitimacy of anger.
  • He uses the phrase, “legitimate anger” in the late ’60s — but to be reflective about it and understand that, even in a case where someone kills a loved one of yours, revenge, violence, retaliation, that doesn’t bring back the loved one that you’ve lost.
  • The only thing that can do that is a kind of forward-looking, constructive practice of politics and social ethics.
  • so what he’s trying to do is raise the question of, can we channel our legitimate rage, our legitimate anger, into a practice that allows us to maintain our self respect?
  • here’s this man who is both making this public argument and trying to get people to follow him in it and put themselves at risk over it, and is also living it himself, and talks about this unbelievably difficult thing, which is not feel righteous anger, but to not feel hatred, to internally reflect the world you want externally.
  • he does falter. He does fail. And I think when we read biographies of King, when you read the last parts of David Garrow’s biography, when you read Cornel West’s essay, from “To Shape a New World,” which talks a lot about the despair at the end of King’s life, if you watch HBO’S great documentary, “King in the Wilderness,” you see a person faltering and failing under the pressure.
  • He’s not able, for example, to bring himself to a kind of reconciliation with Malcolm X
  • How imaginable is King’s philosophy, is this practice, without his deep Christianity, without a belief in redemption, in salvation, in the possibility of a next life?
  • I think King, himself, thinks that the practice of nonviolent politics does the kind of work that you’re describing. And I think he would be worried about the fact that, in our time, so much of these questions about the management of emotion, the building of character, has become a privatized practice.
  • So I think he does think that that’s one way that this really does happen. And we have lots of evidence from the Civil Rights Movement, personal testimony, and personal reflection, where this seems to be the case.
  • the last thing I’ll say is that in order to do that work, in order to do some of the work you’re describing, he also is building an alternative community
  • So one way that I read that famous final speech, “I’ve seen the promised land” — there’s obviously a prophetic reading of it, but there’s also one where he’s describing the prefiguration of the promised land in the kind of politics and social life he’s participated in over his career, that the promised land is seen in the union politics in Memphis, it’s seen in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, gathering to do Mississippi Freedom Summer. It’s seen in the people walking for 350-plus days in Montgomery, Alabama, and banding together to help each other out, that is the promised land.
  • And when you are in a community that’s constantly talking with each other and lifting each other up and engaging in practices like song, prayer, other communal rituals, to try to affirm this alternative set of ethical and political commitments against the whole rest of the culture, that’s the only way it can be done, is that you have to have an alternative form of social life that can sustain you in that work. The private practice isn’t going to do it.
  • When you look at the principles of nonviolence on Stanford’s King Institute, I think a bunch of them would be familiar to people. You can resist evil without resorting to violence. You seek to win the friendship and understanding of the opponent, not to humiliate.
  • He thinks that we learn a lot about how to love other people by confronting them in public, by forcing ourselves into uncomfortable situations where we have to endure the look of the other, back and forth, where we train ourselves to extend these interactions of contentious politics until they can alter or change the people that we’ve put our bodies in close contact with on the field of politics.
  • I go back to the sermon he gave — and it’s collected in “Strength to Love,” and it’s called shattered dreams — where he confronts a problem that is all over the Black tradition, which is that the struggle we’re engaged in has gone on, in some form or another, for hundreds of years. At the moments of its greatest promise, you can look over the course of history and see, just years later, we find ourselves in situations that are unimaginably awful.
  • King is not naive. He’s a student of history. He’s somebody who asks himself hard questions like this. And he gives two different kinds of answers. And one is the answer that you’ve mentioned here, which is a theological answer. It’s conventional theodicy story, that look, at the end of the day, God is at work in the world. And God is on the side of justice.
  • There’s another way that he goes at it, however. And for me, I read it as rooted in a different kind of project, one that combines what used to be called philosophical anthropology, which is just a way of saying philosophical reflections on what kind of beings we are. It’s rooted in that, and it’s rooted in politics. And I think those things can find lots of overlapping consensus from people outside of the Christian tradition.
  • What you have to be committed to, in the last instance, is that evil is not the totality of who we are as persons, that people have the capacity, emotionally and rationally, to reflect on their life plans, their practices, their commitments, and change them, maybe not all of them, maybe not all at once, but that those things can be changed, and that politics is really a field where contingency is the key word, that although there are structural constraints and everything can’t be done at every moment, that the unprecedented, the new, the unexpected, happens in this realm.
  • And the only way that we can confirm that nothing new will happen, that oppression will last forever, that the future bears no hope, is if we don’t act. That’s the only way we can confirm that it’s true for all time, is by failing to act in pursuit of justice.
  • that’s King’s view, I think. And to me, that’s the persuasive one, that in our action, we might be able to see some measure of justice from a complicated, complex swirl of contingencies, and to move the ball forward — we will inevitably fail — but to look back on that failure with maturity and try to do better the next time.
  • How do you think about the question of the weaponization of nonviolence and then the applicability of its principles to the powerful and to what they might, we might, the state might learn from it.
  • there were many people — Harold Cruse famously wrote this, but others even closer to King — who said, you’re not the leader of Vietnam. You’re the leader of the African American civil rights movement. You should not speak out on this war because you’ll lose your relationship with Johnson.
  • King says that the people who are advising him in this way, they just don’t know him, his commitment or his calling. They don’t understand that if he’s going to raise his voice against violence in Watts or Detroit, that he’s got to raise it against what he called, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” his own government.
  • for him, the question was really one about militarism and the way that gets imagined as this hardheaded, realistic, hyper-rational response to international disputes and social problems abroad, when in actuality, if we take stock of what he called the casualties of war, the spiritual ones and the material ones, we would realize that most of the violence we engage in at the foreign-policy level is counterproductive. It’s created more problems and more harms than it ever has seemed to solve.
  • This is one of the powerful interventions that you see in Lionel McPherson’s essay, in “To Shape a New World.” It’s just this idea that this is about hardheaded realism is mythic. King says it’s about an immature image that we are nurturing for ourselves, that we’re trying to shore up this idea of ourselves as some kind of crusading hero or all-powerful world power, while not taking stock of all of the things about our freedoms, about our way of life, about our connectedness as a society, about our social divisions, that war has exacerbated, not to mention the violence that’s prosecuted abroad.
  • And he says similar things about domestic policy, the ways in which our politics toward poor families, single-parent households, is punitive for reasons that aren’t justified, that our response to what he calls “the derivative crimes of the ghetto” are wildly out of proportion and unjust compared to how we treat the systematic crimes of exploitation, segregation, disenfranchisement, that structure much of ghetto life.
  • So I’m in total agreement with Coates on that question
  • it just seems — I don’t want to call it axiomatic, but a repeated d that the more willing you become to use violence as a state, the more it corrupts you, and the more violent you become as a state, and to some degree, the more violent the people you are policing, the people you are occupying, become.
  • I’m not a pacifist. I don’t believe you can fully eradicate violence. But we don’t weigh how violent we make others, in our actions, very well, and then how violent we become in response, how much we enter into that escalatory dynamic.
  • But then the other thing is this question of this broader community, of changing hearts, of changing minds, of acting upon people, not through punishment, but through our belief that they can alter. And I’d be curious to hear you reflect on that question of community a little bit, because I think one of the central debates of our time is who’s actually in the community.
  • What would it mean to have a bit more of King’s view, of trying to create community at the center of what the state is attempting to do, as it fashions and helps govern the country?
  • BRANDON TERRY: So one underappreciated feature from King’s famous Riverside Church speech against Vietnam, is he goes on this whole riff about America lacking maturity. And it’s a weird thing to have in a foreign-policy speech. You’re used to — you’re a policy person. You don’t usually hear the word “maturity” bandied about in these kinds of debates.
  • But what he’s getting at is that something really tightly linked to violence, that violence always exceeds the original justification you have for it. It’s not precise. It’s not able to be easily targeted, as we think. It spirals out. It produces retaliation. And then we retaliate again.
  • And all the while, it’s expanding its justifications to the point of absurdity. And King describes that as adding cynicism to the process of death. And he says that maturity is one of the only ways out here, that the maturity to be able to stand up and say, we were wrong, we want to make amends, we want to repair evils committed in our name, those are questions that are essentially nonstarters in American politics right now, certainly about foreign policy, but even in some places in domestic policy.
  • that feature of King’s thinking is something that I always want to draw attention to because I think it’s something we ignore. So that’s the first point I want to make.
  • The second thing — and this is also really deeply-seeded in that Vietnam speech — one of the reasons that people hated it so much — he was attacked in The New York Times, basically every editorial page in the country — one of the reasons people hated that speech so much is that he spent so much time expressing solidarity and sympathy with Ho Chi Minh and the North Vietnamese forces.
  • How could you express sympathy or some kind of solidarity with the enemy? And it’s very instructive, how King went about it. He wasn’t one of these people — you’ve seen these images of people waving the North Vietnamese flag at counterculture protests. It wasn’t like that.
  • It was him really spending a lot of time meditating on the reasons why we had ended up in this conflict, narrating the whole history of our failure to support Ho Chi Minh and the struggle against French colonialism, against Chinese colonialism, and how that had led to the situation we were in by 1967. King is narrating this history. He’s also trying to get people to think about what it must feel like to be on the ground in Vietnam and witness these bombings, witnessed this imposition of terror.
  • And he’s doing that because at bottom, he’s inspired by a vision really rooted in a parable the Good Samaritan, from the Bible, that everyone is our neighbor, that there are no sectional loyalties that should eviscerate our moral obligations to others, our obligation to show them respect, to go on in community with them, and that most of what goes on in foreign policy and particularly war making, is a bad-faith evasion of the fact that we’re all interconnected.
  • he understood that there’s a fundamental interconnectedness amongst humanity at the ethical level and at the material, structural level, and that war making is an evasion of that fact. We’re going to have to live together. So the chief question that should organize it is, how can we do so in peace?
  • He has a line where he says, quote, “the dignity of the individual will flourish when the decisions concerning his life are in his own hands, when he has the assurance that his income is stable and certain and when he knows that he has a means to seek self-improvement. Personal conflicts between husband, wife and children will diminish when the unjust measurement of human worth, on a scale of dollars, is eliminated.” Tell me a bit about the spiritual and psychological dimensions of King’s economic philosophy and organizing.
  • BRANDON TERRY: Well, for King, the question of poverty and the question of economic inequality are both questions of dignity and democracy, and the questions of dignity because when you live without the adequate means to really enjoy the fair value of your basic rights, when you live in a society — and this is a really important point for King — when you live in a society of profound affluence, like the United States, and you live in severe poverty, it expresses a kind of contempt from your fellow citizens about your standing as an equal member of the polity.
  • So separate from the plain, material fact of hunger or health care, there’s this additional spiritual concern with the way in which living with nothing, living on a lonely island amidst an ocean of prosperity, as he would put it, diminishes your dignity.
  • then another piece — this is bridging of the dignity and democracy question — is that when people don’t have a say in the core, vital interest of their life, when they have no decision-making power over the processes which determine how their life is going to go, that too is a diminishment of their dignity. And King, who was operating in a long tradition of social democracy, wants to expand democratic practices to the broader economic realm.
  • Without expanding democracy into that economic realm, for King, we’re both making a mockery of democracy and we’re diminishing the dignity of citizens who live in search of a real standing as free and equal.
  • as somebody who spends a lot of my time in debates about economic policy, I think it is fair to say that the ends of economics are taken as the economy, typically. People hopefully shouldn’t starve. But a lot of debates about what we should do, even for the poor, become these recursive, well, how can they better participate in the economy and how are they going to be able to invest in themselves and how they’ll be economic opportunity for their children.
  • And the idea that the economy is subservient to the community, that the point of the economy is the community, that it should be measured— our policy should be measured by what they do for democratic participation, for the dignity of individuals, is pretty lost. If anything, I see it more now, on the post-liberal right, as people call it, than I even do among mainline Democrats.
  • it has fallen out of favor as a way to frame and think about these conversations.
  • BRANDON TERRY: Yeah, I think it’s rooted in some really complicated things. I think there’s a kind of liberal anxiety about speaking forthrightly about the fact that living in areas of severe, concentrated disadvantage and racial segregation that we call ghettos, diminishes the dignity of the people who live there.
  • That feels uncomfortable for people to say forthrightly, in the way that King would.
  • so we try to get around it by speaking about opportunity and the wealth gap and unemployment statistics. But really what people are feeling is an existential assault on dignity.
  • one way to read that book is to say that she’s telling a tragic story about the loss of a particular ideal that guided great society politics. And that’s the principle of maximum feasible participation.
  • That was a really social-democratic idea, this idea that, well, we need to empower all sorts of people to participate in policy making and democratic deliberation, and that part of where people will find self-respect and dignity is through engagement in politics and their community
  • I think it gets to something that is very present, towards the end of King’s life, which is his sense that there is something important for the civil rights movement in the labor movement. And unions, on some level, they are mechanisms of democracy. One of the most important functions they have is workplace democracy
  • King is, in this tradition, in many ways inspired by a mentor of his. And one of the most important figures in American history but one of the most severely neglected was A. Philip Randolph, the great labor leader, former organizer of the Pullman Porters, the architect of both the March on Washington that gets canceled, which was going to target the Roosevelt administration during World War II, and the 1963 famous March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
  • they’ve got a certain set of commitments. So one is the idea that because most African Americans are working class or poor, anything that advances the interests of working-class people and their ability to exercise democratic control over the economy is going to advance the interests of African Americans.
  • for King labor unions are also, as you described, important laboratories of democracy. So they’re one of the few places where people from all walks of life can get together, deliberate about strategy, deliberate about social ends, social goods, put money behind things that they value, that aren’t only their own material interest.
  • today, of course, there’s this ongoing — always is this ongoing argument — of should you have race-based politics or is that unusable, doesn’t work, creates too much backlash? Or you should have class-based politics that are looking for commonalities, and because you’ve had so much economic disadvantage for Black Americans, that’ll work through the mechanism of class just fine.
  • BRANDON TERRY: So King often invokes the philosopher Hegel, because he’s constantly describing his mode of thinking as a dialectical one, where he’s trying to reconcile seeming opposites and produce a new synthesis, which helps you transcend certain intractable problems.
  • Now as a reading of Hegel, that has much to be desired. But as a description of Martin Luther King’s thought, I think that’s always a good way to understand what he’s up to. And so I think what he’s always trying to do is transcend that opposition.
  • there’s a way in which we sometimes will say class-based politics works to lift African Americans because they’re disproportionately poor. And what’s tricky about that is that it doesn’t really theorize what to do about the African American middle class and the African American elite.
  • So a thing that King was thinking a lot about when he wrote “Stride Toward Freedom” and the Montgomery bus boycott, is there are areas where racial solidarity is going to be really effective and probably indispensable.
  • where questions of anti-Black racism emerge, where questions of racial humiliation, stigma that really affects the larger group, things that all Black people feel vulnerable to, those are going to be areas — like the segregation laws on the buses — those are going to be areas where you actually can generate a lot of racial solidarity and do a lot of important work with it, especially as a defensive posture.
  • When you start to get into questions of political economy, however, you have to be careful because the appeal of racial solidarity can actually obscure the fact that Black people don’t all share the same material interest in lots of ways.
  • King’s primary principle always is, is that he’s dedicated to the group that William Julius Wilson called the truly disadvantaged, the least of these, that at the end of the day, he’s going to give everything to the people who are in the most desperate situation, the poor. And that’s going to guide his politics.
  • where that is enabled by a race-based solidarity, so in questions of policing, perhaps, or questions of social stigma and media discourse, that’s where he’ll turn. But in other cases, I think he’d really be trying to experiment with a form of politics that empowers the poor to take leadership on their ow
  • How does being more aware of the distinctions he drew and the decisions he made help you look at some of the paths we should be walking down today and are not, in these conversations, or are walking down and shouldn’t be?
  • n order for us to understand why so many African Americans are located in the realm of the most disadvantaged, in the strata of the most disadvantaged, you have to understand the history of racial domination in this country. You have to understand the persistence of racial discrimination, especially in labor markets. And you have to understand the ways that racial ideology allows us to obscure the nature of our economy.
  • So the most classic example is that structural unemployment gets reframed, in part by racism, as questions of laziness or pathology or criminality instead of as a feature of the economy as such. So King always talks about the critique of racism as part of the diagnosis of the disease in order to cure it.
  • So even in the privileging the least well off and being concerned with poor people of all races, he wants to say that the critique of racism helps us see through the kinds of blindnesses that obscure the nature of our economy and the commonalities across race and the things that we need to address the questions of economic justice precisely
  • The second thing is that, in his critique of Black power, one of the things he says is that he worries that Black power gives priority to the question of race in a way that confuses our analysis of social reality. So what does he mean by that?
  • if you think that all Black disadvantage is primarily about anti-Black racism, you can start to miss the fact that there are broader economic dislocations that need to be addressed, that there are structural features of the American constitutional order, the ways in which municipal boundaries are structured, ways that funding decisions are made, that aren’t primarily driven by racial animus, that need to be addressed.
  • You can lose sight of those things and start to think that the real battle is in something like a totality of anti-Black racial ideology that can be battled in Hollywood movies and comic books and school curricula and legislation and political rhetoric
  • it’s not to say that those things don’t exist. It’s just to say that there’s a confusion about what’s going to make the biggest impact in improving the life circumstances of the least well off.
  • King really calls us to constantly be very precise about what the causal mechanisms are for Black disadvantage and to not be confused by the fact that there’s discrimination and injustice and cruelty in these other realms but which might not have as much causal impact as some of these other things.
  • King was very adamant that Black pride, that a concern with representation, that thinking in expansive ways about how do you affirm the somebodiness of Black youth, that those things are really, really important and that they’re not to be dismissed.
  • So it is a question of justice if people in Hollywood just constantly demean or diminish the talent of nonwhite actors. That is a question of justice. It’s just that we have to be honest about what the import of those struggles will be for the broader group. And the only way we can do that is by being attentive to the class differences within the group.
  • there’s a way in which — and King diagnoses this very incisively — there’s a way in which some genres of Black nationalism are so pessimistic about the possibility for multiracial democracy in the United States, for any kind of Black flourishing in the United States that they essentially foreclose real interest in political organizing and social movements
  • But the energy they still managed to generate — the outrage, the sentiment, the sociality — they find their outlet, instead, in a practice of humiliation, counter humiliation. So that there may not be hope that we can actually change the country, but at the very least, we can enjoy a feeling of retaliation, a kind of self-respecting sense of resistance, by engaging in a practice of trying to humiliate our opponents in the public spher
  • there’s a titillation to that. There’s a catharsis in watching someone — at that point, it would have been called stick it to whitey. Now it would be stick it to the libs or own the libs.
  • this is a significant amount of people that could cause real damage in the places where they don’t face many countervailing forms of power. And they can exercise a much more toxic impact on the broader state of American politics in a time where the media environment is way more fragmented
  • I see those elements. And I think that we need more people operating, in the kind of mode that King did, in his critique of Black power, to try to turn people away from their understandable feelings of hostility and resentment, toward more productive forms of political engagement.
  • the word, “emotion,” which is a neglected part of politics, maybe of King’s thought in particular is that he understood — I think he understood part of the goal of politics and political action as creating a particular structure of political emotion.
  • , what structure of emotion, of political emotion, we’re actually living in.
  • BRANDON TERRY: My mentor and friend, Karuna Mantena, at Columbia, political theorist, a brilliant political theorist working on a book on Gandhi — I learned this from her, thinking a lot about how nonviolence is a kind of realism, in part because it doesn’t engage in of fiction that politics is operating on, in the model of rational discussion. It takes very, very, very seriously the problem of emotion.
  • for King, thinking about the history of racial oppression in America, they’re key emotions that you have to think about. One of the most important ones is fear
  • If that fear is a longstanding, deeply-structuring feature of American culture and political life, if it’s something that animates our comedy movies, our stand-up routines, our political discourse, you can’t operate as if it’s not there. You have to do things that will somehow disarm, disrupt, dispel those fears, in order to make progress on the political questions you want to pursue. That was one of King’s deepest, deepest commitments.
  • He’s thinking a lot about anger, which we’ve talked at great length about. And one of the disappointments I’ve had with radical politics in the present, as sympathetic as I am to most of the aims, is that I just don’t think the emotion question has been adequately considered
  • people often defend their politics as like, King was unpopular. And the things we’re saying are unpopular. So we’re operating in that tradition.
  • it’s not enough to just say, I’ve started a conversation, I’ve provoked something toxic in the culture. He’s not trying to do that, necessarily. He’s trying to elicit reactions that bring forward certain emotions but not let those emotions unravel the society itself. He’s trying to channel them into other forms of political affect that are much more congenial to reconciliation and justice.
  • what we’ve unfortunately ended up with is that the sophistication of mobilization strategists, the depth of the polarization, has made anger the principal affect of American politics at this moment.
  • a King-inspired political philosophy, both at the state level and the activist level, has to do, is think about how do we transform the recalcitrant nature of today’s political anger and channel it into forms of constructive politics that might point toward a more just future and that might dissolve the forms of anger that are illegitimate and ill founded, in part, by doing the kind of work sometimes described as a moral jujitsu, turning those affects against themselves, in part, to try to transform them into something different.
  • maybe it’ll be easier to use myself as an example, here.
  • When I started out in blogging and political writing and journalism, particularly blogging, I think I thought a lot about politics in terms of winning and losing, and in my corner of it, winning and losing intellectually, that I was involved in political arguments, and arguments could be won or lost in front of some kind of audience.
  • One is having been in a lot of arguments. And I think I’m a reasonably good arguer. And so I’ve done, by my own likes, well, and then noticed it didn’t have it all the effect I wanted it to have, which is, if anything, it usually — if you really beat somebody in an argument and they feel humiliated, they go further into views they already held
  • And two things have begun to corrode, for me, that sense
  • so you lose by winning.
  • then the second is, particularly in the Trump era, the sense that if you met something awful with an equal and opposite energetic force, that in some weird way, you just added energy to what was now an awful system and conversation.
  • What do you do to not create a sense that this is a right conversation to be having? And I don’t the answers to it. And I’m not saying like I’ve ascended to some higher plane and don’t argue or any of that. I have all the same intuitions and senses I’ve always had.
  • that’s why I find King so interesting and challenging in this way, because it’s just really, really, really different to ask the question, how do I reshape the emotional politics and the emotional structure of myself, of the people I’m in conflict with and then of the people who are bystanders or watchers of that conflict, for the better
  • It’s just a really different goal to be targeting, and just unimaginably harder than, can I come up with an argument that I think is a winning argument.
  • I think you see it — when he’s assassinated, the leading figures of the Black-Power generation, they’re heartbroken. They mourn his loss. They grieve for him, in part because — and you can read any of these memoirs, particularly Stokely Carmichael’s — they felt like he never — that even when he disagreed with them, he loved them, and not just because they were friendly, but because he loved in the sense that he always invoked, of agape love, that he wanted goodwill for them, and that his arguments weren’t from a place of trying to humiliate them or embarrass them or expose them as ridiculous.
  • He wanted to affirm their right to make the arguments they were making, to affirm their intelligence and judgment and to enter into their mind, to try to reconstruct a position with sympathy, but then show why it falls short for the sake of goals that he was forthright about, about justice, about reconciliation, about love
  • we are in a moment of extraordinary cynicism. And cynicism can take advantage of your intellectual honesty, your practice of agape love. But I think that’s in the short term.
  • In my better moments, I’m of the view that the only way to start to turn the tide against the cynicism that has so corroded and corrupted our political culture is to try to have these demonstrations of humility and authenticity that cause us to put ourselves at some risk, the way that King did
  • So always our final question: What are three books you would recommend to the audience? And if I can put one spin on that, you mentioned the many books King wrote. If people want to start with one thing he actually wrote to read, one book, which one should they start with?
  • I think you get the best sense of his mature thought from his 1967 book, “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community,” which is still our question. So I would definitely recommend that. I also really love “A Trumpet of Conscience,” his Canadian Broadcasting Corporation lectures that were published posthumously.
  • I really strongly recommend Peniel Joseph’s, “The Sword and the Shield.” It’s a dual biography of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. I reviewed it for The New York Review of Books and think really highly of it. It’s a great meditation on the ways they influenced each other. And it gives you a good sense of the broader intellectual milieu of the period.
  • I also really like Jeanne Theoharis’s “A More Beautiful and Terrible History.” I think for people coming to the study of the civil rights movement for the first time are kind of curious about why some of the things that I’ve said don’t sound familiar to them. She writes, in a really accessible and intelligent way, about some of the myths, that structure, how that history is taught and popularly conveyed. We have a lot of agreements there.
  • And then a where do we go from here question, I want to recommend my colleague, Tommie Shelby’s book, “Dark Ghettos,” which is a King-inspired philosophical reflection on the deep structure of ghetto poverty and what it requires of us, as a society, to do to redress it. It’s a book that’s very demanding on how far we’ve fallen short and questions of justice that pertain to the kind of neighborhoods that we grew up in and around.
sgardner35

ISIS getting social media megaphone (Opinion) - CNN.com - 0 views

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

shared by sgardner35 on 18 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Earlier this month, ISIS posted a video of its horrific burning of a captured Jordanian pilot. Unfortunately, this was not the first time ISIS has used Twitter, an American social media company, to broadcast its barbaric acts to the world. In August, when ISIS released the gruesome beheading of American journalist James Foley, it also used social media. In fact, ISIS has been using Twitter for years.
  • Nor is ISIS the only terrorist group on Twitter.
  • The group has two official accounts on Twitter.
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  • . It's with this reality in mind that on January 27, my subcommittee held a hearing on terrorists' use of social media. At those hearings, experts detailed how terrorist use of social media platforms has long been a problem.
  • The first -- and easiest to set aside -- is the claim that if the U.S. government were to shut down terrorists' social media accounts, these measures would be violating terrorists' free speech rights.
  • The second argument is that terrorists' use of social media provides the intelligence community with information that they would not otherwise be able to acquire. But while terrorists may slip up from time to time, they are also aware that by its very nature, social media is about sharing, which means what they say can easily become widely shared
  • Section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act states that it is unlawful to provide a designated foreign terrorist organization with "material support or resources," including "any property, tangible or intangible, or services."
  • It is mindboggling to think that those who behead and burn others alive are able to use our own companies against us to further their cause. But that is exactly what is occurring. American newspapers would have never allowed the Nazis to place an ad for recruitment during World War II. Designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations should not be allowed to use private American companies to reach billions of people with their violent propaganda in an instant, all for free.
Javier E

How Social Media Silences Debate - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ial-media-silences-debate.html

discourse polarization social media conformity social media censorship cancel culture

shared by Javier E on 03 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • Social media, like Twitter and Facebook, has the effect of tamping down diversity of opinion and stifling debate about public affairs. It makes people less likely to voice opinions, particularly when they think their views differ from those of their friends, according to a report published Tuesday by researchers at Pew Research Center and Rutgers University.
  • The researchers also found that those who use social media regularly are more reluctant to express dissenting views in the offline world.
  • The Internet, it seems, is contributing to the polarization of America, as people surround themselves with people who think like them and hesitate to say anything different. Internet companies magnify the effect, by tweaking their algorithms to show us more content from people who are similar to us.
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  • the Internet has deepened that divide. It makes it easy for people to read only news and opinions from people they agree with. In many cases, people don’t even make that choice for themselves. Last week, Twitter said it would begin showing people tweets even from people they don’t follow if enough other people they follow favorite them.
  • Humans are acutely attuned to the approval of others, constantly reading cues to judge whether people agree with them, the researchers said. Active social media users get many more of these cues — like status updates, news stories people choose to share and photos of how they spend their days — and so they become less likely to speak up.
  • The study also found that for all the discussion of social media becoming the place where people find and discuss news, most people said they got information about the N.S.A. revelations from TV and radio, while Facebook and Twitter were the least likely to be news sources.
Javier E

Inside Facebook's (Totally Insane, Unintentionally Gigantic, Hyperpartisan) Political-M... - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...n-political-media-machine.html

facebook politics crisis culture media

shared by Javier E on 24 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • According to the company, its site is used by more than 200 million people in the United States each month, out of a total population of 320 million. A 2016 Pew study found that 44 percent of Americans read or watch news on Facebook.
  • we can know, based on these facts alone, that Facebook is hosting a huge portion of the political conversation in America.
  • Using a tool called CrowdTangle, which tracks engagement for Facebook pages across the network, you can see which pages are most shared, liked and commented on, and which pages dominate the conversation around election topics.
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  • Individually, these pages have meaningful audiences, but cumulatively, their audience is gigantic: tens of millions of people. On Facebook, they rival the reach of their better-funded counterparts in the political media, whether corporate giants like CNN or The New York Times, or openly ideological web operations like Breitbart or Mic.
  • these new publishers are happy to live inside the world that Facebook has created. Their pages are accommodated but not actively courted by the company and are not a major part of its public messaging about media. But they are, perhaps, the purest expression of Facebook’s design and of the incentives coded into its algorithm — a system that has already reshaped the web and has now inherited, for better or for worse, a great deal of America’s political discourse.
  • In 2010, Facebook released widgets that publishers could embed on their sites, reminding readers to share, and these tools were widely deployed. By late 2012, when Facebook passed a billion users, referrals from the social network were sending visitors to publishers’ websites at rates sometimes comparable to Google, the web’s previous de facto distribution hub. Publishers took note of what worked on Facebook and adjusted accordingly.
  • While web publishers have struggled to figure out how to take advantage of Facebook’s audience, these pages have thrived. Unburdened of any allegiance to old forms of news media and the practice, or performance, of any sort of ideological balance, native Facebook page publishers have a freedom that more traditional publishers don’t: to engage with Facebook purely on its terms.
  • Rafael Rivero is an acquaintance of Provost’s who, with his twin brother, Omar, runs a page called Occupy Democrats, which passed three million followers in June. This accelerating growth is attributed by Rivero, and by nearly every left-leaning page operator I spoke with, not just to interest in the election but especially to one campaign in particular: “Bernie Sanders is the Facebook candidate,
  • Now that the nomination contest is over, Rivero has turned to making anti-Trump content. A post from earlier this month got straight to the point: “Donald Trump is unqualified, unstable and unfit to lead. Share if you agree!” More than 40,000 people did.“It’s like a meme war,” Rivero says, “and politics is being won and lost on social media.”
  • truly Facebook-native political pages have begun to create and refine a new approach to political news: cherry-picking and reconstituting the most effective tactics and tropes from activism, advocacy and journalism into a potent new mixture. This strange new class of media organization slots seamlessly into the news feed and is especially notable in what it asks, or doesn’t ask, of its readers. The point is not to get them to click on more stories or to engage further with a brand. The point is to get them to share the post that’s right in front of them. Everything else is secondary.
  • The flood of visitors aligned with two core goals of most media companies: to reach people and to make money. But as Facebook’s growth continued, its influence was intensified by broader trends in internet use, primarily the use of smartphones, on which Facebook became more deeply enmeshed with users’ daily routines. Soon, it became clear that Facebook wasn’t just a source of readership; it was, increasingly, where readers lived.
  • For media companies, the ability to reach an audience is fundamentally altered, made greater in some ways and in others more challenging. For a dedicated Facebook user, a vast array of sources, spanning multiple media and industries, is now processed through the same interface and sorting mechanism, alongside updates from friends, family, brands and celebrities.
  • All have eventually run up against the same reality: A company that can claim nearly every internet-using adult as a user is less a partner than a context — a self-contained marketplace to which you have been granted access but which functions according to rules and incentives that you cannot control.
  • It is a framework built around personal connections and sharing, where value is both expressed and conferred through the concept of engagement. Of course, engagement, in one form or another, is what media businesses have always sought, and provocation has always sold news. But now the incentives are literalized in buttons and written into software.
  • Each day, according to Facebook’s analytics, posts from the Make America Great page are seen by 600,000 to 1.7 million people. In July, articles posted to the page, which has about 450,000 followers, were shared, commented on or liked more than four million times, edging out, for example, the Facebook page of USA Today
  • Nicoloff’s business model is not dissimilar from the way most publishers use Facebook: build a big following, post links to articles on an outside website covered in ads and then hope the math works out in your favor. For many, it doesn’t: Content is expensive, traffic is unpredictable and website ads are both cheap and alienating to readers.
  • In July, visitors arriving to Nicoloff’s website produced a little more than $30,000 in revenue. His costs, he said, total around $8,000, partly split between website hosting fees and advertising buys on Facebook itself.
  • of course, there’s the content, which, at a few dozen posts a day, Nicoloff is far too busy to produce himself. “I have two people in the Philippines who post for me,” Nicoloff said, “a husband-and-wife combo.” From 9 a.m. Eastern time to midnight, the contractors scour the internet for viral political stories, many explicitly pro-Trump. If something seems to be going viral elsewhere, it is copied to their site and promoted with an urgent headline.
  • In the end, Nicoloff takes home what he jokingly described as a “doctor’s salary” — in a good month, more than $20,000.
  • In their angry, cascading comment threads, Make America Great’s followers express no such ambivalence. Nearly every page operator I spoke to was astonished by the tone their commenters took, comparing them to things like torch-wielding mobs and sharks in a feeding frenzy
  • A dozen or so of the sites are published in-house, but posts from the company’s small team of writers are free to be shared among the entire network. The deal for a would-be Liberty Alliance member is this: You bring the name and the audience, and the company will build you a prefab site, furnish it with ads, help you fill it with content and keep a cut of the revenue. Coca told me the company brought in $12 million in revenue last year.
  • Because the pages are run independently, the editorial product is varied. But it is almost universally tuned to the cadences and styles that seem to work best on partisan Facebook. It also tracks closely to conservative Facebook media’s big narratives, which, in turn, track with the Trump campaign’s messaging: Hillary Clinton is a crook and possibly mentally unfit; ISIS is winning; Black Lives Matter is the real racist movement; Donald Trump alone can save us; the system — all of it — is rigged.
  • It’s an environment that’s at best indifferent and at worst hostile to traditional media brands; but for this new breed of page operator, it’s mostly upside. In front of largely hidden and utterly sympathetic audiences, incredible narratives can take shape, before emerging, mostly formed, into the national discourse.
  • How much of what happens on the platform is a reflection of a political mood and widely held beliefs, simply captured in a new medium, and how much of it might be created, or intensified, by the environment it provides? What is Facebook doing to our politics?
  • for the page operators, the question is irrelevant to the task at hand. Facebook’s primacy is a foregone conclusion, and the question of Facebook’s relationship to political discourse is absurd — they’re one and the same. As Rafael Rivero put it to me, “Facebook is where it’s all happening.”
Javier E

No, America is Not Experiencing a Version of China's Cultural Revolution - by Nicholas ... - 0 views

grossman.arcdigital.media/...-america-is-not-experiencing-a

Cultural Revolution woke liberalism free speech Culture politics

shared by Javier E on 06 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • The first institution Maoists captured was not the academy, it was the state. The seeds of the Cultural Revolution were not in the academy, but in the perceived weakness of the communist party in China, and Mao’s position within the party, after the failures of the Great Leap Forward. Maoists took over the state first, and 17 years later launched a campaign to force cultural change in the academy and elsewhere.
  • Cultural power, and related concepts like “privilege,” aren’t nothing, but they’re vaguer and less impactful than the state, which can credibility threaten, authorize, excuse, and utilize force.
  • State-backed violence made the Cultural Revolution, and if you think the social justice movement is similar, you misunderstand it.
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  • Terrorism, public health, and police violence are all life-and-death issues, and all involve the state, so they’re more consequential than the criticism, shunning, and loss of professional opportunities associated with cancel culture. But that doesn’t mean the latter isn’t a problem.
  • We can, and should, care about more than one thing at a time, and many things that aren’t the worst problem deserve attention.
  • Nevertheless, it’s important to assess problems accurately.
  • Michael Hobbes calls all this worrying about wokeness a “moral panic.” That’s a term some use online to wave away serious concerns, but Hobbes uses it the way sociologist Stanley Cohen did in the 1970s, as a phenomenon where something becomes “defined as a threat to societal values and interests” based on media accounts that “exaggerate the seriousness, extent, typicality and/or inevitability of harm.”
  • The point here is not that stranger abductions never happened, but that they didn’t happen nearly as much as the media, concerned parents, and lawmakers thought. And because stranger kidnappings were not a national crisis, but treated as one, the “solution” made things worse.
  • Along similar lines, Hobbes argues that anti-woke alarm-bell-ringing relies on a relatively small number of oft-repeated anecdotes. Some don’t stand up to scrutiny, and some of those that do are low-stakes. The resulting moral panic fuels, among other things, a wave of red state legislation aimed at banning “critical race theory” that uses vague language and effectively cracks down on teaching about racism in American history.
  • For that, we should look to data, and here again the problem looks smaller than anti-woke liberals make it out to be
  • In the universe of cancel culture cases, I find more incidents concerning than Hobbes and fewer concerning than Young, but “this one incident wasn’t actually bad” vs. “yes it really was” doesn’t answer the question about size and scope. It doesn’t tell us what, if anything, society should do about it.
  • In Liberal Currents, Adam Gurri cites the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which documented 426 “targeting incidents involving scholars at public and private American institutions of higher education” since 2015 and 492 “disinvitation attempts” since 1998
  • The organization Canceled People lists 217 cases of “cancellation” since 1991, while the National Association of Scholars (NAS) lists 194 cancellations in academia since 2004 (plus two in the 20th century).
  • Based on these numbers, Gurri concludes, “If any other problem in social life was occurring at this frequency and at this scale, we would consider it effectively solved.”
  • There are nearly 4,000 colleges and universities in the United States. U.S. News’ 2021 rankings of the best schools lists 1,452. Using that smaller number and NAS’s figure of 194 academic cancellations since 2004, the chance of a college or university experiencing a cancellation in a given year is less than 0.8 percent.
  • There are some concerning cases in the NAS database too, in which professors were fired for actions that should be covered under a basic principle of academic freedom — for example, reading aloud a Mark Twain passage that included a racial slur, even after giving students advance notice — so this isn’t a total non-issue. But the number of low stakes and relatively unobjectionable cases means the risk is lower than 0.8 percent (and it’s even lower than that, since NAS includes Canada and my denominator is ranked schools in the United States).
  • Similarly, FIRE classifies about 30 percent of the attempted disinvitations in its database as from the right. About 60 percent are from the left — the other 10 percent N/A — so if you want to argue that the left does this more, you’ve got some evidence. But still, the number of cases from the left is lower than the total. And more than half of FIRE’s attempted disinvitations did not result in anyone getting disinvited.
  • Using U.S. News’ ranked schools as the denominator, the chance of left-wing protestors trying to get a speaker disinvited at a college or university in a given year is about 0.5 percent. The chance of an actual disinvitation is less than 0.25 percent. And that’s in the entire school. To put this in perspective, my political science department alone hosts speakers most weeks of the semester.
  • Two things jump out here:
  • Bari Weiss and Anne Applebaum both cite a Cato study purporting to show this effect:
  • even if we assume these databases capture a fraction of actual instances — which would be surprising, given the media attention on this topic, but even so — the data does not show an illiberal left-wing movement in control of academia.
  • The number agreeing that the political climate prevents them from saying things they believe ranges from 42% to 77%, which is high across political views. That suggests self-censorship is, to a significant degree, a factor of the political, cultural, and technological environment, rather than caused by any particular ideology.
  • Conservatives report self-censoring more than liberals do.
  • The same study shows that the biggest increase in self-censorship from 2017 to 2020 was among strong liberals (+12), while strong conservatives increased the least (+1).
  • If this data told a story of ascendent Maoists suppressing conservative speech, it would probably be the opposite, with the left becoming more confident of expressing their views — on race, gender, etc. — while the right becomes disproportionately more fearful. Culture warriors fixate on wokeness, but when asked about the political climate, many Americans likely thought about Trumpism
  • Nevertheless, this data does show conservatives are more likely to say the political climate prevents them from expressing their beliefs. But what it doesn’t show is which beliefs or why.
  • Self-censoring can be a problem, but also not. The adage “do not discuss politics or religion in general company” goes back to at least 1879. If someone today is too scared to say “Robin DiAngelo’s conception of ‘white fragility’ does not stand up to logical scrutiny,” that’s bad. If they’re too scared to shout racial slurs at minorities, that isn’t. A lot depends on the content of the speech.
  • When I was a teenager in the 1990s, anti-gay slurs were common insults among boys, and tough-guy talk in movies. Now it’s a lot less common, one of the things pushed out of polite society, like the n-word, Holocaust denial, and sexual harassment. I think that’s a positive.
  • Another problem with the anti-woke interpretation of the Cato study is media constantly tells conservatives they’re under dire threat.
  • Fox News, including Tucker Carlson (the most-watched show on basic cable), Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino (frequently among the most-shared on Facebook), and other right-wing outlets devote tons of coverage to cancel culture, riling up conservatives with hyperbolic claims that people are coming for them
  • Anti-woke liberals in prestigious mainstream outlets tell them it’s the Cultural Revolution
  • Then a survey asks if the political climate prevents them from saying what they believe, and, primed by media, they say yes.
  • With so many writers on the anti-woke beat, it’s not especially plausible that we’re missing many cases of transgender servers getting people canceled for using the wrong pronoun in coffee shops to the point that everyone who isn’t fully comfortable with the terminology should live in fear. By overstating the threat of cancellation and the power of woke activists, anti-woke liberals are chilling speech they aim to protect.
  • a requirement to both-sides the Holocaust is a plausible read of the legal text. It’s an unsurprising result of empowering the state to suppress ideas in an environment with bad faith culture warriors, such as Chris Rufo and James Lindsay, advocating state censorship and deliberately stoking panic to get it.
  • Texas, Florida, and other states trying to suppress unwanted ideas in both K-12 and higher ed isn’t the Cultural Revolution either — no state-sanctioned mass violence here — but it’s coming from government, making it a bigger threat to speech and academic freedom.
  • To put this in perspective, antiracist guru Ibram X. Kendi has called for an “anti-racist Constitutional amendment,” which would “make unconstitutional racial inequity over a certain threshold, as well as racist ideas by public officials,” and establish a Department of Anti-Racism to enforce it. It’s a terrible proposal that would repeal the First Amendment and get the state heavily involved in policing speech (which, even if well-intentioned, comes with serious risks of abuse).
  • It also doesn’t stand the slightest chance of happening.
  • It’s fair to characterize this article as anti-anti-woke. And I usually don’t like anti-anti- arguments, especially anti-anti-Trump (because it’s effectively pro). But in this case I’m doing it because I reject the binary.
  • American politics is often binary.
  • Culture is not. It’s an ever-changing mishmash, with a large variety of influential participants
  • There have been unmistakable changes in American culture — Western culture, really — regarding race and gender, but there are way more than two sides to that. You don’t have to be woke or anti-woke. It’s not a political campaign or a war. You can think all sorts of things, mixing and matching from these ideas and others.
  • I won’t say “this is trivial” nor “this stuff is great,” because I don’t think either. At least not if “this” means uncompromising Maoists seeking domination.
  • I think that’s bad, but it’s not especially common. It’s not fiction — I’m online a lot, I have feet in both media and academia, I’ve seen it too — but, importantly, it’s not in control
  • I think government censorship is inherently more concerning than private censorship, and that we can’t sufficiently counter the push for state idea-suppression without countering the overstated fears that rationalize it.
  • I think a lot of the private censorship problem can be addressed by executives and administrators — the ones who actually have power over businesses and universities — showing a bit of spine. Don’t fold at the first sign of protest. Take some time to look into it yourself, and make a judgment call on whether discipline is merited and necessary. Often, the activist mob will move on in a few days anyway.
  • I think that, with so much of the conversation focusing on extremes, people often miss when administrators do this.
  • I think violence is physical, and that while speech can be quite harmful, it’s better to think of these two things as categorically different than to insist harmful speech is literally violence.
  • at a baseline, treating people as equals means respecting who they say they are. The vast majority are not edge cases like a competitive athlete, but regular people trying to live their lives. Let them use the bathroom in peace.
  • I think the argument that racism and other forms of bigotry operate at a systemic or institutional, in addition to individual, level is insightful, intuitive, and empirically supported. We can improve people’s lives by taking that into account when crafting laws, policies, and practices.
  • I think identity and societal structures shape people’s lives (whether they want it to or not) but they’re far from the only factors. Treating them as the only, or even predominant, factor essentializes more than it empowers.
  • I think transgender and non-binary people have a convincing case for equality. I don’t think that points to clear answers on every question—what’s the point of gender segregated sports?
  • I think free association is an essential value too. Which inherently includes the right of disassociation.
  • I think these situations often fall into a gray area, and businesses should be able to make their own judgment calls about personnel, since companies have a reasonable interest in protecting their brand.
  • I think free speech is an essential value, not just at the legal level, but culturally as well. I think people who would scrap it, from crusading antiracists to social conservatives pining for Viktor Orban’s Hungary, have a naively utopian sense of how that would go (both in general and for them specifically). Getting the state involved in speech suppression is a bad idea.
  • I think America’s founding was a big step forward for government and individual liberty, and early America was a deeply racist, bigoted place that needed Amendments (13-15; 19), Civil Rights Acts, and landmark court cases to become a liberal democracy. I don’t think it’s hard to hold both of those in your head at the same time.
  • I think students learning the unvarnished truth about America’s racist past is good, and that teaching students they are personally responsible for the sins of the past is not.
  • I think synthesis of these cultural forces is both desirable and possible. Way more people think both that bigotry is bad and individual freedom is good than online arguments lead you to believe.
  • I don’t think the sides are as far apart as they think.
  • I think we should disaggregate cancel culture and left-wing identity politics. Cancellation should be understood as an internet phenomenon.
  • If it ever was just something the left does, it isn’t anymore.
  • I think a lot of us could agree that social media mobbing and professional media attention on minor incidents is wrong, especially as part of a campaign to get someone fired. In general, disproportionally severe social and professional sanctions is a problem, no matter the alleged cause.
  • I think most anti-woke liberals really do want to defend free speech and academic freedom. But I don’t think their panic-stoking hyperbole is helping.
Javier E

The first social media suicide | News | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...the-first-social-media-suicide

social media suicide youth france crisis despair

shared by Javier E on 29 Aug 17 - No Cached
  • Océane was oppressed by the trite and uncaring relations she observed between human beings. She poured scorn on the empty flirtation of social media, their desperate popularity theatre. She had no interest in the artificial animation of alcohol or drugs (though she constantly smoked cigarettes). The dulled existence of the Parisian suburbs, where no one seemed able to engage with anything consequential, depressed her (on the wall behind her as she made her last speech hung a poster with the words NEW YORK PARIS LONDON HONG KONG).
  • For a generation so fully embedded in social media, celebrity was not remote or atypical. It was latent in everyone. Schoolgirls debated with each other how they would deal with its burdens – paparazzi, extreme wealth, film-star boyfriends – when they grew up
  • . Social media, after all, supplied a publicity machinery with a reach and power previously available only to truly famous people, and now the condition of the celebrity was everyone’s condition. Suddenly everyone was broadcasting their life to the world, and measuring their worth on the basis of the libidinal pulses that came back – as only celebrities had before. Suddenly, the celebrity’s grief over privacy was everyone’s, and everyone was afflicted by her insecurity: do people realise there’s nothing behind it all except my own frail and disappointing humanity?
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  • Océane’s death was also intended as a kind of detonation, which would “take out” others apart from herself. On their side, the perpetrators of the Paris attacks were also, let us not forget, bent on their own destruction: they, too, were suicidal. All these people were young, and nearly all of them had grown up in the racialised ghettos of Paris and Brussels. All of them felt some kind of despair about the reality they lived in Europe, and all of them, crucially, decided that the only significant asset they had, in their negotiation with it, was their own existence.
  • If mid-20th-century western societies achieved a startling level of consensus, it was due to their extraordinary expansion of the share in the social surplus – to which the destruction (by war) of previous wealth concentrations, and the transformation of “labour” into “jobs”, were essential
  • Today, as western societies reverse those advances and drift back towards 19th-century arrangements, it should not be surprising that the malaise of that era is returning, too. This malaise is felt most keenly by the young, who have seen nothing during their lifetimes save the progressive re-exclusion of the majority from society’s wealth, and who embark on adulthood with very little hope that they will be able to “make it” as their parents and grandparents did. They have a strong sense, in fact, that now-ageing generations have taken everything for themselves, bequeathing to the young nothing but the burden of their own sins.
  • Malaise takes on particularly acute forms in the Parisian suburbs, where work has been informalised and automated almost into nothing; in the most depressed areas, a quarter of young women and nearly half of young men are without jobs. But there too, unemployment is only a symptom of the wider casting-out from French society, whose would-be universalism disguises one of the most consolidated power systems in the western world
  • militant Islam is spreading among French youth not just through the radicalisation of Muslims, but also through the conversion of non-Muslims, who wish for themselves the activist power it supplies
  • It was not, in other words, that they were Muslim, and therefore they wanted to destroy reality and themselves; it was rather that they wanted to destroy reality and themselves – and to rediscover, in the process, some kind of chivalry and nobility – and therefore they embraced the trenchant power of radical Islam.
  • There are many moments in history when young people have dreamed of glamorous self-destruction rather than embarking, drearily, on adulthood. But those who actually die are the exceptions. Far greater numbers are touched by the same current of despair, but are nevertheless held back from the ultimate act by life’s natural defences. These survivors are not left unscathed, however. They live astride the line between life and death, harbouring a kind of sentimental envy for those who have gone.
  • I saw traits in her common to a lot of people these days – and possibly to myself, even if they are most pronounced in the young: she was subdued, serious, intermittently funny, distracted by constant electronic tics, slightly unavailable to herself. In so many respects, Océane seemed entirely normal, and I sensed that her online exploit, too, would become more customary over time.
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