Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

In 2017, after a meeting with then president-elect Mr. Trump in New York, Mr. Kennedy Jr. announced that he had been asked to chair a commission to review vaccine safety. The move alarmed doctors, epidemiologists and public health experts, who pointed out that Mr. Trump had previously raised concerns that vaccines cause autism.

Even though the commission never materialized, to Mr. Kennedy Jr.’s bitter disappointment, the fact that the meeting took place at all signals how closely conspiracy theories and misinformation have been interwoven in everyday politics.

“To some extent, conspiracy theories rule the day,” Prof. Offit told us.

President Donald Trump lost the presidential election 10 days ago. Since then, he's done next to nothing -- at least publicly -- to suggest he plans to continue doing the job in any serious manner through January 20.

President Donald Trump lost the presidential election 10 days ago. Since then, he's done next to nothing -- at least publicly -- to suggest he plans to continue doing the job in any serious manner through January 20.

it's been two weeks since the President last took any questions from the reporters who cover him.

Later, Mr. Trump also refused to say he would abide by the results of the election and declined to tell his supporters to stay calm and avoid civil unrest.

His mocking of Mr. Biden’s decision to regularly wear a mask — which health officials have recommended — underscored his rejection of science when it suits his political purposes.

Shouting, interruptions and often incoherent cross talk filled the air as Mr. Trump purposefully and repeatedly heckled and blurted over his rival and the moderator alike in a 90-minute melee that showcased the president’s sense of urgency to upend a race in which polls show him trailing.

The impact on the race of the messy affair — given that 90 percent of voters say they are already decided — is an open question.

He bulldozed Mr. Biden and the moderator, Chris Wallace, throughout the evening. But his goal, other than making for a convoluted contest, was less clear. Mr. Trump seemed principally focused on undercutting and disorienting Mr. Biden, rather than on presenting an agenda or a vision for a second term in the White House.

The West, according to an account beloved by Catholics, rose out of a providential encounter between reason and revelation in antiquity. Though occasioned by conquest, the encounter yielded an authentic synthesis: between a Greek rationality in search of the deepest origin of reality and a Jewish God professed to be just that, the very ground of being (cf. Ex 3:14). Later, that same God identified himself even more starkly and intimately with reason (cf. Jn 1:1).

Tragically, the story goes on, this synthesis eventually lost its supremacy in the West, owing foremost to opponents inside the Church determined to distill a “purer” faith, unmottled by “worldly” philosophy. The result was a stingy account of reason that excluded things divine and paved the way for a narrowly scientistic rationality

Today, we are the victims of this dis-integration, a process of Christian de-Hellenization centuries in the making.

megadeath is not the only thing that makes the Doomsday Machine petrifying. The real terror is in its autonomy, this idea that it would be programmed to detect a series of environmental inputs, then to act, without human interference. “There is no chance of human intervention, control, and final decision,” wrote the military strategist Herman Kahn in his 1960 book, On Thermonuclear War, which laid out the hypothetical for a Doomsday Machine. The concept was to render nuclear war unwinnable, and therefore unthinkable.

No machine should be that powerful by itself—but no one person should be either.

so far, somewhat miraculously, we have figured out how to live with the bomb. Now we need to learn how to survive the social web.

“Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America,” David Hackett Fischer’s classic history of British migration to colonial America, which was published in 1989 and explained these phenomena with a clarity that seems even more stunning today. The divide between maskers and anti-maskers, vaxxers and anti-vaxxers is as old as Plymouth Rock. It is deeper than politics; it is cultural.

The Appalachian hill country and much of the Deep South were settled by a wild caste of emigrants from the borderlands of Scotland and England. They brought their clannish, violent, independent culture, which had evolved over seven centuries of border warfare.

The spirit of the Scots-Irish borderlanders could also be seen in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol; their ancestors staged the Whiskey Rebellion against the U.S. Constitution.

the whistle-blower was citing the company’s own research, which among other things found that, based on surveys, “Thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse,”

What exactly are we talking about here? Say you’re a 13-year-old girl who is beginning to feel anxious about your appearance, who has followed some diet influencers online. Instagram’s algorithm might suggest more extreme dieting accounts with names such as “Eternally starved,” “I have to be thin” and “I want to be perfect.”

n an interview with “60 Minutes,” Ms. Haugen called this “tragic.” “As these young women begin to consume this eating disorder content, they get more and more depressed,” she said. “It actually makes them use the app more. And so they end up in this feedback cycle where they hate their bodies more and more.”

these tradeoffs get to the heart of Facebook’s problem and the heart of what the site is. The harm is inherent to Facebook’s business model. When you find ways to reduce harm they’re almost always at the expense of engagement metrics the maximization of which are the goal of basically everything Facebook does. The comparison may be a loaded or contentious one. But it is a bit like the Tobacco companies. The product is the problem, not how it’s used or abused. It’s the product. That’s a challenging place for a company to be.

Facebook now makes up a very big part of the whole global information ecosystem. In many countries around the world Facebook for all intents and purposes is the Internet. The weather patterns of information as we might call them are heavily shaped by Facebook’s algorithms and the various tweaks and adjustments it makes to them in different countries. Facebook may not create the misinformation or hate speech or hyper-nationalist frenzies but its algorithms help drive them.

the guiding light for those algorithms is first to maximize engagement.

Beginning back in 2016, just as I was beginning to be shocked and angry at Trump’s relentless rise, I made a very conscious change in my social media and reading habits. I intentionally tried to follow and read roughly equal numbers of thoughtful people on the left and the right. 

Note I said “thoughtful.” I try to follow the best of both sides. And it was a transformative experience. Time and again, I’d see different people write compellingly about different outrages, and the stories and takes were all true. The injustices they described were all real. 

Let’s take these two truths, for example. My good friends (and former colleagues) at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education have compiled a sobering list of 471 scholars who’ve faced threats of termination since 2015. 

Twice in an interview, McChrystal raised fears of existential threats—from a new pandemic, and in comparing the proliferation of social-media influence to the unchecked spread of nuclear weapons.

He also believes the United States needs to take its relationship with China more seriously. U.S. ambiguity over Taiwan is becoming increasingly problematic, he says. 

MarketWatch: You’ve advised state governments on the pandemic. What lessons can we take away from America’s federal response to Covid-19? 

In the mid 20th century conservatives were at war with people of color. Poor Whites were let into the conservative tent to help exclude and attack non-Caucasians. 

In the late 20th century and now conservatives will accept Blacks, Jews, Latinos, or anyone who hates liberals. The way "liberal" is understood is not the individual freedoms types but anyone who supports civil rights, human rights, animal rights, social welfare programs, the environment, or any form of inclusive rights-based and rule of law beliefs based on generosity and compassion. Conservatives have never followed the Prince of Peace but some form of Machine Gun Jesus. 

The Clash of Civilizations is not between Islam and Christianity (Trump's embrace of Saudi Arabia shows this) but between selfish, greedy, brutal authoritarians and conscientious, generous, fair, and compassionate liberals. Hatred versus kindness is the eternal struggle. 

as the Presidential campaign exposed increasingly toxic divisions in America, Antonio García Martínez, a forty-year-old former Facebook product manager living in San Francisco, bought five wooded acres on an island in the Pacific Northwest and brought in generators, solar panels, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. “When society loses a healthy founding myth, it descends into chaos,” he told me. The author of “Chaos Monkeys,” an acerbic Silicon Valley memoir, García Martínez wanted a refuge that would be far from cities but not entirely isolated. “All these dudes think that one guy alone could somehow withstand the roving mob,” he said. “No, you’re going to need to form a local militia. You just need so many things to actually ride out the apocalypse.” Once he started telling peers in the Bay Area about his “little island project,” they came “out of the woodwork” to describe their own preparations, he said. “I think people who are particularly attuned to the levers by which society actually works understand that we are skating on really thin cultural ice right now.”

In private Facebook groups, wealthy survivalists swap tips on gas masks, bunkers, and locations safe from the effects of climate change. One member, the head of an investment firm, told me, “I keep a helicopter gassed up all the time, and I have an underground bunker with an air-filtration system.” He said that his preparations probably put him at the “extreme” end among his peers. But he added, “A lot of my friends do the guns and the motorcycles and the gold coins. That’s not too rare anymore.”

Tim Chang, a forty-four-year-old managing director at Mayfield Fund, a venture-capital firm, told me, “There’s a bunch of us in the Valley. We meet up and have these financial-hacking dinners and talk about backup plans people are doing. It runs the gamut from a lot of people stocking up on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, to figuring out how to get second passports if they need it, to having vacation homes in other countries that could be escape havens.” He said, “I’ll be candid: I’m stockpiling now on real estate to generate passive income but also to have havens to go to.” He and his wife, who is in technology, keep a set of bags packed for themselves and their four-year-old daughter. He told me, “I kind of have this terror scenario: ‘Oh, my God, if there is a civil war or a giant earthquake that cleaves off part of California, we want to be ready.’ ”

American history is driven by periodic moments of moral convulsion

Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington noticed that these convulsions seem to hit the United States every 60 years or so: the Revolutionary period of the 1760s and ’70s; the Jacksonian uprising of the 1820s and ’30s; the Progressive Era, which began in the 1890s; and the social-protest movements of the 1960s and early ’70s

A highly moralistic generation appears on the scene. It uses new modes of communication to seize control of the national conversation. Groups formerly outside of power rise up and take over the system. These are moments of agitation and excitement, frenzy and accusation, mobilization and passion.