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Javier E

What To Make Of Ferguson? Ctd « The Dish - 0 views

dish.andrewsullivan.com/...what-to-make-of-ferguson-ctd

race racism police brutality polarization

shared by Javier E on 26 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • How can you say Wilson had “no need” to shoot Brown that many times? The reason law enforcement went to high-capacity handguns and dumped the six shooters is because of the ability of people to withstand multiple gunshot wounds and continue fighting (or shooting.) The catalyst for this approach was the 1986 Miami shooting in which to FBI officers were killed AFTER they had shot two bank robbers multiple times. The robbers eventually died of their wounds, but in the meantime, they kept firing and killed the agents. Officer Wilson adhered to his training: shoot until the suspect is on the ground.
  • Mike Brown is to the Left what Benghazi is to the Right. Preconceptions are everything. Facts don’t matter. Logic doesn’t matter. There’s a narrative of racist-white-cop-kills-harmless-black-kid, and no matter what uncomfortable fact intrudes, like that so many “witnesses” admitted they didn’t actually see what they told the media they saw, the narrative must go on. Because racism.
  • Balko’s article makes clear that this is not an environment where the police are protecting and serving but instead harassing and self-serving. I am in no way justifying assailing a police officer (or anyone for that matter), verbally or physically, but you are not a young Black man living in what is still ostensibly the South and facing harassment for just being. I challenge you to invite Black males to tell you their stories of police harassment. How many times they have been detained, cuffed, kicked and threatened with death because they fit a profile, looked suspicious or were just somewhere some cop didn’t think they belonged? Yes, this is in America.
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  • I agree entirely that this should have gone to trial and realize that, statistically, nearly everything reviewed by a grand jury does. I agree that the fact Wilson will never even face charges is a mark of shame on the legal system. But I don’t get the sense that the people who are furious about this, whatever their race, are clamoring for a trial they’ll never see; it seems to me they’re clamoring for a conviction they feel they’ve been cheated out of.
  • Maybe lethal force wasn’t necessary, but science has proven that Brown turned and moved back toward Wilson (at least 20 feet) and was not shot from behind. There was undeniably an altercation at/inside the police cruiser. Does the fact that one man is alive and one is dead skew the way those facts are interpreted? Absolutely. But there exist certain physical certainties that strongly suggest this was not cold-blooded murder.
  • there is an interminable, sometimes slight, sometimes massive burden that comes with Blackness that you seem wholly oblivious to. That 12 year old that was shot in Cleveland was sitting on a swing playing with a fake gun. Two things happened due purely to his Blackness: police were called and he was murdered. Full stop. The Black man shot in the stairwell of his building in NYC for just existing while Black because a cop got scared. And that’s just since Monday.
  • Clive Bundy assails and threatens federal officers and gets invited on Fox News. Eric Frein plans and carries out an attack on state trooper barracks, killing one and seriously wounding another – again brought in alive. Ted Nugent scares the shit out of me with his racism, misogyny, anti-government and gun-humping ways, but yet he’s a hero to many White people and no one seems to have shot him yet either. White people have feared, reviled and vilified Blackness since they first laid eyes upon us. The codification and justification of our enslavement, disenfranchisement and murder is beyond primordial; it is part and parcel of what has made America and the Western world. Ferguson is just another eruption in this racist legacy and reality.
  • on of your readers claimed that, at most, Brown was guilty of petit theft, which is a misdemeanor. This is incorrect. Brown not only stole from the convenience store, he assaulted the business owner who tried to stop him from stealing. This assault escalated Brown’s theft to a strong-arm robbery, which is a second-degree felony in the State of Missouri. And it was Brown’s commission of this felony that began the chain of events that led to his death. He had nobody but himself to blame for that – not Officer Wilson, not the prosecutor, and not racism.
qkirkpatrick

Refugee crisis: Human traffickers 'netted up to £4bn last year' | Europe | News | The Independent - 0 views

www.independent.co.uk/...to-4bn-last-year-a6816861.html

refugee europe Crisis politics culture

shared by qkirkpatrick on 17 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Human smugglers made a record profit last year of between $3bn and $6bn (£2bn-£4bn) by exploiting the misery of refugees – which means governments must up their game or risk further growth of this ruthless industry, the head of Europol has told The Independent on Sunday. 
  • “We also know that, on average, each migrant is paying between $3,000 and $6,000 to a criminal facilitator for their journey. So you do the simple math, and you’re up to a turnover in 2015 of between $3bn- $6bn.
  • A person fleeing their home will pay different smuggling gangs at different points throughout their journey. A Syrian may have to pay to leave their country without detection by the security forces, then buy fake documents in Turkey, before purchasing their perilous passage on a rubber dingy or boat launched into the waves, towards Greece. 
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • “If the funds in national budgets and the European budget aren’t enough, let’s agree, for example, to raise a levy on every litre of gasoline,” Mr Schäuble told the daily newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung. “Why not agree this at the European level if the task is so urgent?”
Javier E

Opinion | Climate Denial Was the Crucible for Trumpism - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...climate-denial-trump-gop.html

climate change denial corruption moral decline culture politics

shared by Javier E on 04 Dec 18 - No Cached
  • Many observers seem baffled by Republican fealty to Donald Trump — the party’s willingness to back him on all fronts, even after severe defeats in the midterm elections. What kind of party would show such support for a leader who is not only evidently corrupt and seemingly in the pocket of foreign dictators, but also routinely denies facts and tries to criminalize anyone who points them out?
  • The answer is, the kind of the party that, long before Trump came on the scene, committed itself to denying the facts on climate change and criminalizing the scientists reporting those facts.
  • The G.O.P. wasn’t always an anti-environment, anti-science party. George H.W. Bush introduced the cap-and-trade program that largely controlled the problem of acid rain. As late as 2008, John McCain called for a similar program to limit emissions of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • But McCain’s party was already well along in the process of becoming what it is today — a party that is not only completely dominated by climate deniers, but is hostile to science in general, that demonizes and tries to destroy scientists who challenge its dogma.
  • Oh, and what is supposed to be motivating the thousands of scientists perpetrating this hoax?
  • Take Trump’s dismissal of all negative information about his actions and their consequences as either fake news invented by hostile media or the products of a sinister “deep state.” That kind of conspiracy theorizing has long been standard practice among climate deniers, who began calling the evidence for global warming — evidence that has convinced 97 percent of climate scientists — a “gigantic hoax” 15 years ago.
  • What was the evidence for this vast conspiracy? A lot of it rested on, you guessed it, hacked emails.
  • In fact, when you review the history of Republican climate denial, it looks a lot like Trumpism. Climate denial, you might say, was the crucible in which the essential elements of Trumpism were formed.
  • The truth is that most prominent climate deniers are basically paid to take that position, receiving large amounts of money from fossil-fuel companies.
  • But after the release of the recent National Climate Assessment detailing the damage we can expect from global warming, a parade of Republicans went on TV to declare that scientists were only saying these things “for the money.”
  • climate scientists have faced harassment and threats, up to and including death threats, for years. And they’ve also faced efforts by politicians to, in effect, criminalize their work
  • There are three important morals to this story.
  • First, if we fail to meet the challenge of climate change, with catastrophic results — which seems all too likely — it won’t be the result of an innocent failure to understand what was at stake. It will, instead, be a disaster brought on by corruption, willful ignorance, conspiracy theorizing and intimidation.
  • Second, that corruption isn’t a problem of “politicians” or the “political system.” It’s specifically a problem of the Republican Party
  • Third, we can now see climate denial as part of a broader moral rot. Donald Trump isn’t an aberration, he’s the culmination of where his party has been going for years. You could say that Trumpism is just the application of the depravity of climate denial to every aspect of politics.
  • And there’s no end to the depravity in sight.
Javier E

Opinion | Trump Will Have Blood on His Hands - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-fake-news-enemy.html

incitement conspiracy theory journalism

shared by Javier E on 04 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • What can’t be ignored is presidential behavior that might best be described as incitement. Maybe Trump supposes that the worst he’s doing is inciting the people who come to his rallies to give reporters like CNN’s Jim Acosta the finger. And maybe he thinks that most journalists, with their relentless hostility to his personality and policies, richly deserve public scorn.
  • for every 1,000 or so Trump supporters whose contempt for the press rises only as far as their middle fingers, a few will be people like my caller. Of that few, how many are ready to take the next fatal step? In the age of the active shooter, the number isn’t zero
  • Donald Trump’s more sophisticated defenders have long since mastered the art of pretending that the only thing that matters with his presidency is what it does, not what he says. But not all of the president’s defenders are quite as sophisticated. Some of them didn’t get the memo about taking Trump seriously but not literally. A few hear the phrase “enemy of the people” and are prepared to take the words to their logical conclusion.
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  • Is my caller one of them? I can’t say. But what should be clear is this: We are approaching a day when blood on the newsroom floor will be blood on the president’s hands.
malonema1

The Jewish forgers who outwitted the Nazis - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...orgers-who-outwitted-the-nazis

US politics Trump Obama

shared by malonema1 on 25 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • The Jewish forgers who outwitted the Nazis
  • Now 91 years old, David tells Witness about his wartime exploits and his part in one of the largest rescue operations organised by Jews during the Holocaust.
  • Congressional Republicans have announced parallel inquiries into a uranium deal under President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton's emails.One committee will investigate how the Obama administration approved a 2010 acquisition that gave Russia control of 20% of the US uranium supply. Two other panels will scrutinise the FBI decision not to charge Mrs Clinton over her private email server.Democrats pilloried the inquiries as "a massive diversion".
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  • President Trump has sought to draw attention to the story, tweeting last week: "Uranium deal to Russia, with Clinton help and Obama Administration knowledge, is the biggest story that Fake Media doesn't want to follow!"
Javier E

Opinion | Abolish Billionaires - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...abolish-billionaires-tax.html

politics rich billionaire tax culture

shared by Javier E on 25 Feb 19 - No Cached
  • “Some ideas about how to make the world better require careful, nuanced thinking about how best to balance competing interests,” he began. “Others don’t: Billionaires are bad. We should presumptively get rid of billionaires. All of them.”
  • A billion dollars is wildly more than anyone needs, even accounting for life’s most excessive lavishes. It’s far more than anyone might reasonably claim to deserve, however much he believes he has contributed to society.
  • At some level of extreme wealth, money inevitably corrupts. On the left and the right, it buys political power, it silences dissent, it serves primarily to perpetuate ever-greater wealth, often unrelated to any reciprocal social good. For Mr. Scocca, that level is self-evidently somewhere around one billion dollars; beyond that, you’re irredeemable.
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  • the idea has since become something like mainline thought on the progressive left.
  • banishing billionaires — seeking to cut their economic power, working to reduce their political power and attempting to question their social status — is a pithy, perfectly encapsulated vision for surviving the digital future.
  • It could mean preventing people from keeping more than a billion in booty, but more likely it would mean higher marginal taxes on income, wealth and estates for billionaires and people on the way to becoming billionaires.
  • More important, aiming to abolish billionaires would involve reshaping the structure of the digital economy so that it produces a more equitable ratio of superrich to the rest of us.
  • Software, by its very nature, drives concentrations of wealth. Through network effects, in which the very popularity of a service ensures that it keeps getting more popular, and unprecedented economies of scale — in which Amazon can make Alexa once and have it work everywhere, for everyone — tech instills a winner-take-all dynamic across much of the economy.
  • We’re already seeing these effects now. A few superstar corporations, many in tech, account for the bulk of American corporate profits, while most of the share of economic growth since the 1970s has gone to a small number of the country’s richest people.
  • Artificial intelligence is creating prosperous new industries that don’t employ very many workers; left unchecked, technology is creating a world where a few billionaires control an unprecedented share of global wealth
  • whether it was possible to be a good billionaire, I called up two experts.The first was Peter Singer, the Princeton moral philosopher
  • I’ve witnessed a generation of striving entrepreneurs join the three-comma club and instantly transform into superheroes of the global order, celebrated from the Bay Area to Beijing for what’s taken to be their obvious and irrefutable wisdom about anything and everything.
  • For at least 20 years, we’ve been in a devastating national love affair with billionaires — a dalliance that the tech industry has championed
  • Mr. Gates and Mr. Buffett, who have pledged to give away the bulk of their wealth to philanthropy, would not earn Mr. Singer’s scorn
  • of the 2,200 or so billionaires in the world — about 500 of whom are American — fewer than 200 have signed the Giving Pledge created by Bill and Melinda Gates and Mr. Buffett.
  • As the writer Anand Giridharadas has argued, many billionaires approach philanthropy as a kind of branding exercise to maintain a system in which they get to keep their billions.
  • When a billionaire commits to putting money into politic
  • you should see the plan for what it is: an effort to gain some leverage over the political system, a scheme to short-circuit the revolution and blunt the advancing pitchforks.
  • if we tolerate the supposedly “good” billionaires in politics, we inevitably leave open the door for the bad ones. And the bad ones will overrun us
  • When American capitalism sends us its billionaires, it’s not sending its best. It’s sending us people who have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with them. They’re bringing inequality. They’re bringing injustice. They’re buying politicians.
anonymous

North Korea and the Brazil passports: Why were they used by the Kims? - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-asia-43242596

politics US northkorea

shared by anonymous on 12 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • Fresh evidence emerged this week that the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, and his father and predecessor Kim Jong-il, obtained fraudulent Brazilian passports in the 1990s.
  • These copies may not constitute conclusive proof, but it's not the first time Brazilian passports have been linked to the Kim family.In 2011, Japanese media quoted officials as saying Kim Jong-un and his brother Jong-chul had entered the country to visit Tokyo Disneyland on Brazilian documents as far back as 1991.Jong-un's older half-brother, Kim Jong-nam, is said to have fallen out of favour with their father in 2001 after he was caught trying to sneak into Japan using a false Dominican passport - apparently also on his way to Disneyland.
  • In the post-Cold War world of diplomacy, North Korea's friends were dwindling in number, making its passport of limited use. Its secretive first family would also probably have preferred to remain under the radar.
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  • Back in the 1990s, though, it was a different story. The Brazilian government itself concedes that before it introduced a raft of security features in 2006, the "Brazilian passport was one of the most commonly faked".
  • Links - both economic and co-operative - were forged between North Korea and the then-Czechoslovakia during the period of frantic growth and rebuilding in North Korea following the devastating 1950-53 Korean War.
oliviaodon

From Trump's Twitter Feed to Dictators' Mouths - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...548414

shared by oliviaodon on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • Donald Trump has assailed the media many times since he became president in January.
  • Criticism of the media isn’t new—nor is criticism of the media by an American president.
Javier E

Why Michael Savage Is Blasting Hannity and the Right-Wing Media on the Virus - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-savage-trump-coronavirus.html

right-wing media virus pandemic response

shared by Javier E on 17 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • Mr. Savage has attacked the credibility of the conservative media, accused its biggest stars of being too rote and unthinking in their defense of the president, and demanded that they be held accountable for misleading millions of Americans.
  • “We’re living in a terrible time in America where truth has died,” Mr. Savage, who was one of the first conservative media stars to urge Mr. Trump to run for president, told his audience. “This is crazy,” he added, pointing to the way the president’s defenders always accuse the left of spreading “fake news.”
  • His contempt for hosts like Mr. Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, whose top-rated radio shows draw more than 30 million listeners each week, is especially searing. He mocks them as “Dr. Hannity” and “Rush Limbaugh, M.D., Ph.D.,” belittles their lack of education compared with his, and berates people who took their claims seriously.
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  • “How can we not let our side be called on the carpet when they lie to the people?
  • “Do you understand the danger you’re in by listening to these people and just following them blindly over a cliff?” he implored his audience.
  • she sees him taking on responsibility for waking people up to what parts of American conservatism, especially in the media, have become. “This culty hero worship of the uneducated, it’s very depressing,” she said. “It makes me ashamed to be a conservative,” she added, before stopping herself. “I don’t want to identify with the conservative movement anymore.”
  • “In a way, he inoculates Trump from criticism by saying it’s not necessarily Trump that has bad instincts — it’s that he’s been misinformed,” Ms. Hemmer said. She added that Mr. Savage was still a lot like other hosts in that “they are all trying to find ways to protect Donald Trump, they just disagree about the method to do that.”
  • “My career will be defined by how I’ve treated you, my audience, during this epidemic.”“We’re at war with an invisible enemy,” he said. “And we’re not going to win this war by attacking each other. We’re not going to win this war by lying to the people.”
bluekoenig

The Tawana Brawley Case | Retro Report | The New York Times - YouTube - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch

politics US history culture retro report retro report new york times

shared by bluekoenig on 29 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • bluekoenig on 29 Jan 20
     
    In 1988, sixteen-year-old Tawana Brawley was found wrapped in a plastic bag with signs of being raped and sodomized. She accused a police officer in the area for her rape and multiple civil rights activists including Rev. Al Sharpton came to her side to support her case and portray it as a racial crime. The case turned out to be fake setup and many false reports and accusations arose against the police in the area. Ultimately, the accusations went too far and those entirely uninvolved were accused of heinous crimes. The biggest victim of the case was the family of the police officer she accused of raping her, Harry Christ, who killed himself briefly after her attack. Brawley and the civil rights activists who were with her were charged with defamation of some of the people they accused and all parties have yet to explain themselves in full.
Javier E

Trump and the Pandemic - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...p-and-the-pandemic-11583783174

trump pandemic responses crisis politics

shared by Javier E on 06 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • If the epidemic follows the course medical experts believe to be largely inevitable, both the disease and its economic consequences will be immune to Mr. Trump’s standard tactics. He can’t spin them away, divert public attention by creating another drama, or blame them on President Obama.
  • Many of the key points in Mr. Trump’s case for re-election are also at risk. A recession would deprive him of the argument that, whatever you think of his character, he puts money in your pocket.
  • A pandemic also undercuts his contention that a “wrecking ball” presidency is needed to destroy a rotten establishment.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Mr. Trump’s improvisational and chaotic approach to governance, rooted in his reliance on intuition and impulse as well as his use of conflict as a management method, will combine with the deep lack of trust between political and career officials across the government to produce highly public missteps and policy errors.
  • The president’s basic political method is theatrical. Many Americans have come to believe that what happens in Washington is mostly fake news, more like professional wrestling than a serious ideological and political struggle with major consequences for their lives.
  • The president is an extraordinary political talent and has some advantages that shouldn’t be discounted. Unconstrained as he is by worries about debt and deficits, he can propose massive relief packages.
  • He approaches politics as entertainment and has repeatedly foiled opponents by turning potentially disastrous developments—impeachment, for example—into thrilling new episodes of “The Trump Show.” But a pandemic will affect voters more than scandals and pratfalls in the faraway capital
  • The incompetence of China’s early responses to the disease gives Mr. Trump a convenient scapegoat and will reinforce public doubts about globalization.
  • The shortcomings of national health systems in Italy, France, Britain and elsewhere will at least partly blunt attempts to blame a U.S. epidemic on the absence of such a system here.
  • Despite all that, the coronavirus, if it continues on its present course, will soon become the most powerful adversary the Trump administration has yet faced
knudsenlu

Can Germany Fix Facebook? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...543258

germany facebook lies

shared by knudsenlu on 02 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • goal was to satirize Facebook’s cryptic regulations, which have made the company a target of vehement public criticism in a society historically suspicious of censorship in all forms.
  • To say Facebook has an image problem in Germany, where it has 28 million users, is a staggering understatement. Germans tend to view it as a phenomenon that drives people apart instead of bringing them “closer together,” as Facebook’s mission statement suggests, by facilitating the spread of hate speech, misinformation, and fake news in the process.
  • Facebook played a role in delivering the far-right Alternative for Germany Party (AfD) to the best performance of a far-right nationalist party since the Third Reich.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • “Facebook Law,” allows the government to fine social-media platforms with more than 2 million registered users in Germany—a club that includes giants like Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and Reddit—up to 50 million euros for leaving “manifestly unlawful” posts up for more than 24 hours. Unlawful content is defined as anything that violates Germany’s Criminal Code, which bans incitement to hatred, incitement to crime, the spread of symbols belonging to unconstitutional groups, and more.
  • Unlike in the United States, freedom of speech is “not the most important civil right” in Germany
  • The invocation of human dignity carries immense moral force, and parallels the language of the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights.
  • Instead, Article One of Germany’s postwar constitution instructs, “Human dignity shall be inviolable.” This notion “means you are not allowed to claim false things about me, because it hurts my dignity,” Beckedahl said. “You are not allowed to tell anyone in public lies about me, or I can take you to court.”
  • Malicious misinformation “is even more dangerous than hatred or incitement,”
  • Like Künast, Jun has been assiduously collecting and reporting instances of pro-Nazi language and other forms of hate speech on Facebook since 2015, logging them methodically in a Dropbox folder and Excel spreadsheet that he’s eager to share with inquiring journalists. Images from the internet of beheadings, murders, Nazi salutes, and racist slurs abound. His aim in collecting this wealth of abhorrent material is simple: to underscore the chasm separating Germany’s constitution, which bans the dissemination of material documenting “cruel or otherwise inhuman acts of violence” and incitement to hatred, and the permissive culture of the internet. The result, Jun said, is that Germans—and most Facebook users around the world—are living a kind of double life, subject to two very different legal and moral codes.
  • In response to what he saw as Facebook’s negligence on this score, Jun took a different approach, targeting individual managers at the company for perpetuating, or even encouraging, hateful behavior. “If a manager of a company has positive knowledge about a concrete crime, and he doesn’t do anything about it, then he will have personal liability for that crime,” he explained. In other words: If he could prove that Facebook employees were aware of hate speech on the network and did not take the posts down, they could be found guilty of a crime in a German court. (The law is usually applied to copyright infringements, and whether it will work in a criminal case against a social-media platform remains an open question.)
Javier E

Where in the World Can We Find Hope? - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...he-world-can-we-find-hope.html

tribe deliberation culture politics discourse community policy

shared by Javier E on 27 Aug 17 - No Cached
  • Yet if we can’t trust ordinary citizens to identify fake news in their Facebook feed, why should we value their judgment on health care or climate change?
  • “The typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field,” the economist Joseph A. Schumpeter wrote. “He becomes a primitive again.” Was Schumpeter onto something?
  • Naturally, “it comes to seem that the essential quality of the public is volatile emotionality,” he said: Schumpeter’s “primitive” voter.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • The typical town hall meeting “happens when something’s gone wrong, or a decision has been made, and an elected official is trying to explain it,”
  • “This is dressed up as an opportunity to have your say.
  • We try to subdue tension and emotion by giving a rational, technocratic account of the decision. Then what we do — least helpfully — is ask people to do the very thing we know most people are petrified of, and that’s stand in front of a room of strangers and speak at an open mike.”
  • olicy makers’ anxieties about consulting the public are understandable — because they go about consultation in the wrong way.
  • Instead, Mr. MacLeod’s company sends out invitations to randomly selected households and then draws names to assemble a representative panel of volunteers. They meet with experts and policy makers for several weekends to study an open policy question. Eventually the panels issue nuanced recommendations on matters ranging from hospital budgets to mass transit.
  • The great promise of a well-designed deliberative process may not always be better policy, but its potential to change the participants themselves. It can teach people to be better citizens by entrusting them with responsibility and pushing them to talk — and listen — to people who look and think differently.
  • The democratic process should civilize us all. “The basis of democratic citizenship is putting yourself in someone else’s shoes. This is democracy as empathy,
  • The most dangerous threat posed by President Trump and his European allies does not lie in any single executive order or diplomatic crisis, but in their barren and cynical view of community. Sometimes I still worry that they are right: Maybe our prejudices and tribes are our most essential features, never to change.
  • We have no choice but to hope that they are wrong.
Javier E

Facebook Can't Be Fixed. - NewCo Shift - 0 views

shift.newco.co/sing-model-stupid-b843cd7edbe9

facebook business model advertising Crisis culture

shared by Javier E on 08 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • the only way to “fix” Facebook is to utterly rethink its advertising model. It’s this model which has created nearly all the toxic externalities Zuckerberg is worried about: It’s the honeypot which drives the economics of spambots and fake news, it’s the at-scale algorithmic enabler which attracts information warriors from competing nation states, and it’s the reason the platform has become a dopamine-driven engagement trap where time is often not well spent.
  • Zuckerberg does the equivalent of dropping corporate acid and realizes the only way to fix Facebook is to make a massive, systemic change.
  • He orders his team to redesign the entire Facebook product suite around a new True North: No longer will his company be driven by engagement and data collection, but rather by whether or not individual users report that they are happier after using the service.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • shift from an audience model (deep data, specific to each individual) to a contextual model (not buying people, but buying the context in which those people are engaging). And given that most of an individual’s context on Facebook has to do with engaging with friends and family, well, ad inventory plunges.
Javier E

In Minnesota, a G.O.P. Lawmaker's Death Brings Home the Reality of Covid - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...relph-covid-minnesota.html

harm principle morality pandemic responsibility liberty

shared by Javier E on 18 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • while Republicans insist that their freedom was at issue in refusing to wear masks or enforce mandates, such events and the death of Mr. Relph raise urgent questions as to where individual “freedom” ends and where responsibility to others begins in a pandemic during which breathing shared air can be fatal.
  • “It’s ironic that Senator Gazelka, as majority leader, was always the person most outspoken in opposing the governor’s emergency order and would state to us over and over again that Minnesotans would do the responsible thing,” said Richard Cohen, a Democrat who retired from the Legislature last month. “And now it is alleged that because of a caucus event, where apparently many people were not wearing masks, a caucus member became ill and then passed away.”
  • An owner of the catering hall, John Schiltz, said that his servers had worn masks and gloves throughout that evening, and that none had later tested positive. Although masks were offered to guests, state guidelines at the time allowed them to be removed at tables.Mr. Schiltz said the dinner was the only event any group had booked at his venue in November before he had to close on Nov. 20.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Pressed about the dinner in a radio interview in late November, Mr. Gazelka, 61, who is reported to be considering a run for governor, said he had no regrets.
  • “The idea that everyone can just be trusted rings a little hollow with the knowledge” that Republicans did not tell Democrats of the positive cases before the special session, Ms. Kent said in an interview last week.
  • He continued through the year to argue that mask mandates or limits on restaurants and bars were not needed because Minnesotans could be trusted to make responsible choices, and that the harmful effects on schools, the economy and people’s mental health outweighed the value of restrictions.
  • Holding the celebratory dinner wasn’t the only point of contention.Afterward, Republicans alerted their own caucus about the virus outbreak, but not Democrats. They instructed Republican staff members not to go to the Capitol for a special session of the Legislature on Nov. 12 — but did not inform Democrats, who were livid after learning of the positive cases from news reports.
  • “There was a lot of food and a lot of beverage, and when you’re at an activity when the food and beverage is there, that’s when you don’t have your mask,” he said. “I don’t regret that we had the celebration. The Republican majority was the No. 1 target to switch from Republican to Democrat.”
  • She described the working environment of the Senate as poisoned by Republicans’ disregard for masks. Most refuse to wear them on the Senate floor, she said. One Republican senator, she recounted, broke into fake coughing while waiting for an elevator in a cramped vestibule with Democratic colleagues.
  • After learning of the outbreak from Republican leaders, Mr. Relph, who did not have any symptoms, went for a coronavirus test, his daughter said. It came back positive.
  • “None of us can be sure he got sick at that party, but it’s really, really likely,” Dana Relph said. “There wasn’t any other place he would have gotten it.”
  • As one of the Senate’s oldest members, Mr. Relph was one of the few Republicans known for regularly wearing a face covering. He had an underlying condition, mild asthma, his daughter said.
  • As a lab technician for 3M, Ms. Relph tests industrial masks. “The fact that people deny the science behind masks makes me even angrier,” she said. She recalled that a Senate colleague of her father’s had stopped by her family’s house, without a mask, while her father was in the hospital. “Point blank, he said, ‘I don’t think this is as serious as they’re telling us it is,’” Ms. Relph said. “My dad was dying. These are people that think they’re good, kind, compassionate people, and yet they don’t act that way.”
  • Last week, as the Legislature returned for its 2021 session, senators held a moment of silence for Mr. Relph. Mr. Gazelka called him “a great senator, a true friend.”
  • The majority leader also led his party in blocking a Democratic proposal to require masks in public areas of the Capitol, flouting a statewide mask mandate, imposed by the governor, in indoor settings. (The Legislature is not subject to the governor’s orders.) Republicans questioned the effectiveness of masks. But Mr. Gazelka did include language in a resolution “strongly encouraging” mask wearing.
  • Ms. Kent, the Democratic leader, said that she had noticed lately that Mr. Gazelka was always wearing a mask himself in the Capitol, where before he had not worn one. Besides Mr. Relph’s death, Mr. Gazelka’s mother-in-law died in December after contracting Covid-19.
cartergramiak

Opinion | Marjorie Taylor Greene Knows Exactly What She's Doing - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...e-taylor-greene-extremism.html

history pandemic gop trump

shared by cartergramiak on 05 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • Marjorie Taylor Greene is the QAnon congresswoman, a far-right influencer and gun fanatic who dabbles in anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim bigotry. She endorsed violence against congressional leaders, claimed that the Parkland and Sandy Hook shootings were faked and once shared an anti-refugee video in which a Holocaust denier says that “Zionist supremacists have schemed to promote immigration and miscegenation.”
  • She showed a little contrition on Wednesday with a qualified apology to her Republican colleagues. For this, she received a standing ovation. On Thursday, after an afternoon of deliberation, the House of Representatives voted to strip Greene of her committee assignments. Or rather, Democrats voted to strip her of her committee assignments. All but 11 Republicans voted in her favor.
  • The hard right wasn’t at the front of the charge, but it wasn’t purged either. Instead, it served as part of the mass base of activists and voters who propelled conservative leaders to prominence and conservative politicians to victory.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • What’s distinctive right now isn’t the fact that someone like Greene exists but that no one has emerged to play the role of Buckley. A longtime Republican leader like Mitch McConnell can try — he denounced Greene’s “loony lies and conspiracy theories” as a “cancer” on the party — but after he served four years as an ally to Donald Trump, his words aren’t worth much.
  • Those once-porous borders, in other words, now appear to be nonexistent, and there’s no one in the Republican Party or its intellectual orbit to police the extreme right. Representative Greene is the first QAnon member of Congress, but she won’t be the last and she may not even ultimately be the worst.
nrashkind

Trump hits Bloomberg for critique of gun-toting Texas church hero - 0 views

nypost.com/...f-gun-toting-texas-church-hero

trump bloomberg

shared by nrashkind on 20 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • President Trump on Sunday took a potshot at Michael Bloomberg over the former New York mayor and presidential candidate’s remarks about a gun-toting Texas churchgoer who killed a would-be mass-shooter.
  • “Now Mini Mike Bloomberg is critical of Jack Wilson, who saved perhaps hundreds of people in a Church because he was carrying a gu
  • “Jack quickly killed the shooter, who was beginning a rampage,”
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Keith Thomas Kinnunen, a 43-year-old “transient” with a criminal record, fatally shot two people inside the packed house of worship, but was quickly shot dead in turn by Wilson
  • Wilson, 71, was hailed as a hero after neutralizing a shotgun-wielding man who opened fire last month in the middle of services at the West Freeway Church of Christ outside Forth Worth.
  • “His ads are Fake, just like him!”
  • While many praised Wilson — a former FBI agent turned volunteer security guard — for his likely life-saving actions, Bloomberg earlier this month said that heroism should be left to the professionals.
  • “You just do not want the average citizen carrying a gun in a crowded place,”
  • Bloomberg, a well-known gun-control advocate and founder of the Everytown for Gun Safety nonprofit.
  • Bloomberg, the 77-year-old former three-term New York mayor, announced in November that he is self-financing a White House run.
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