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Tell the Truth About Bernie's Health Care Stand | Bill Moyers - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...ruth-about-bern_b_8994980.html Sanders Health US Election Policy
shared by maddieireland334 on 17 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • They sent Hillary and Bill Clinton's daughter Chelsea out on behalf of her mother to bash Senator Bernie Sanders on the issue of health care.
  • But when it's the first time (as this was for Clinton the younger), the surrogate should be sure whereof she speaks, and had better stick to talking about her candidate, not the opponent
  • Unfortunately, Chelsea Clinton misrepresented Senator Sanders' position, and her premiere performance on the stump backfired, producing a flood of political donations to Sanders.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • "Senator Sanders wants to dismantle Obamacare, dismantle the [Children's Health Insurance Program], dismantle Medicare, and dismantle private insurance."
  • As Karen Tumulty noted in The Washington Post, Bernie Sanders has long been a champion of a single-payer health care system as the only way to assure that all Americans receive medical coverage.
  • This was Sanders' position as far back as 1993 when newly-elected President Bill Clinton put First Lady Hillary Clinton in charge of reforming our disheveled and unjust health care system.
  • During that 1993 quest for a health care plan, Secretary Clinton sent Sanders an autographed picture of the two of them, wishing him the best and thanking the senator "for your commitment to real health care access for all Americans."
  • All these years later, Sanders is still fighting the battle for single-payer, Medicare-like coverage for all, even as fellow Democrats capitulated to the siren songs of the health and insurance industries.
  • And look at former presidential candidate and single-payer advocate Howard Dean, Bernie's fellow Vermonter, who went on MSNBC this week and said that the Sanders plan "would in fact undo people's health care... That is something people should be concerned about."
  • As president of the Clinton Foundation, the richly endowed philanthropy that has become the family's private station for public causes, Chelsea Clinton must know this.
  • . But why would any of the family, their campaign team, advisors and supporters assume that the public would accept such a wild and irresponsible distortion?
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Rural Oregon's Lost Prosperity Gives Standoff a Distressed Backdrop - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...off-a-distressed-backdrop.html new york times US economics
shared by johnsonma23 on 18 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Rural Oregon’s LostProsperity Gives Standoffa Distressed Backdrop
  • a lifelong resident who has lost his job twice and has filed for bankruptcy once, said that was not the case anymore. He now works for the state as a prison guard, a job he said he hated.
  • “You do what you have to do to stay alive,”
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  • Times were once very good out here on the high desert of east-central Oregon, and a place like Burns — remote and obscure until a group of armed protesters took over a nearby federal wildlife sanctuary early this month
  • These days, cities like Portland, Salt Lake City and Boise, Idaho, are gobbling up more of the jobs than ever, especially the good ones.
  • Half the jobs in Oregon, for example, are now clustered in just three counties in and around Portland, according to a study by Headwaters Economics, a nonprofit research group in Bozeman, Mont
  • So the population grows ever older, poorer and less educated, and opportunities continue to dry up: The county has 10 percent fewer jobs than it did in 1979, according to state figures.
  • The pattern of poverty has shifted nationally as we
  • poverty rates fell or remained stable across the Northeast, South and Midwest — but rose significantly across the West, a Pew Research Center study said in 2014
  • What happened was a steep downturn, especially in the timber industry, which has all but disappeared
  • Changes in the wood industry were clearly also having an effect over those years, with more wood buyers shopping in Canada and more mills becoming automated, but many people here also said they thought the United States Forest Service
  • . Comparatively speaking, there are now much higher numbers of people in their prime working-age years whose incomes are below the federal poverty measure for a family.
  • But the role of government in what happened here is also more nuanced and complex than the black-hat-white-hat imagery presented by Mr. Bundy and his companions.
  • Government paychecks, like the one Mr. Ward earns at his job at the prison, have helped keep Harney County afloat as private jobs have declined
  • People like the Wards said that when environmental groups filed lawsuits and applied pressure at the State Capitol in Salem or in Washington, D.C.,
  • Some residents and local officials say they believe the history and relationship between the people and the government is being distorted by the protesters,
  • “People feel powerless,” said State Representative Cliff Bentz, a Republican whose district covers much of eastern Oregon, includ Harney County. “As the rural areas grow more and more poor and urban areas grow more and more wealthy, there’s a shift in power.”
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Americans Believe in Climate Change, But Not Climate Action - 0 views

nymag.com/...ge-but-not-climate-action.html climate change cognitive heuristics bias belief politics crisis culture
shared by Javier E on 15 Dec 18 - No Cached
  • Last month, scientists warned that we had only about 12 years to cut global emissions in half and that doing so would require a worldwide mobilization on the scale of that for World War II.
  • perhaps it should not be surprising that, even in many of the world’s most progressive places, even in the moment of acknowledged environmental crisis, a sort of climate NIMBYism prevails. The cost of inaction is sort of unthinkable — annual deadly heat waves and widespread famine, tens of millions of climate refugees, global coastal flooding, and disasters that will cost double the world’s present-day wealth. And so we choose, most of the time, not to think about it
  • This is denial, too, whatever you check on a survey about whether you “believe” the climate is changing.
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  • hard-core, bought-and-paid-for denialism is pernicious for many reasons — in fact, it may help explain why so few Americans believe “most scientists think global warming is happening.” According to the most recent Yale Climate Opinion Survey, just 49 percent do.
  • what is perhaps most remarkable about that same study is that many more Americans believe climate change is happening than believe scientists believe it: 70 percent say global warming is real, and ongoing, versus just 14 percent who say it isn’t.
  • One way of looking at that data is to say that we are, despite what we hear in the media, overwhelmingly a nation of climate-change believers, not deniers — and, in fact, a nation genuinely concerned about it
  • “denial is mostly a distraction at this point.” (“Those still unconvinced mostly cannot or do not want to be convinced,” he added, meaning, “It’s time to stop framing persuasion as the primary task here.”)
  • Another is that even those of us who believe in warming, and believe it is a problem, do not believe enough in it
  • the rest of us are only moderately worried, perhaps in part because we imagine the worst impacts of climate change will hit elsewhere. Forty-one percent of Americans believe climate change “will harm me personally” — actually quite a high number, in absolute terms, but considerably lower than the 62 percent who believe it will harm those in the developing world or the 70 percent who believe it will harm future generations
  • What are those coping mechanisms? Why can’t we see the threat right in front of us?
  • It’s fucking scary. For years now, researchers have known that “unrealistic optimism is a pervasive human trait,” one that, whatever you know about how social-media addicts get used to bad news, leads us to discount scary information and embrace the sunnier stuff
  • the generation of economists and behavioral psychologists who’ve spent the last few decades enumerating all of our cognitive biases have compiled a whole literature of problems with how we process the world, almost every single example of which distorts and distends our perception of a changing climate, typically by making us discount the threat.
  • anchoring, which explains how we build mental models around as few as one or two initial examples, no matter how unrepresentative — in the case of global warming, the world we know today, which is reassuringly temperate
  • the ambiguity effect, which suggests that most people are so uncomfortable contemplating uncertainty they will accept lesser outcomes in a bargain to avoid dealing with it
  • In theory, with climate, uncertainty should be an argument for action — much of the ambiguity arises from the range of possible human inputs, a quite concrete prompt we choose to process instead as a riddle, which discourages us
  • anthropocentric thinking, by which we build our view of the universe outward from our own experience, a reflexive tendency that some especially ruthless environmentalists have derided as “human supremacy” and that surely shapes our ability to apprehend genuinely existential threats to the species — a shortcoming that many climate scientists have mocked. “The planet will survive,” they say. “It’s the humans that may not.”
  • Among the most destructive effects that appear later in the library are these:
  • the bystander effect, or our tendency to wait for others to act rather than acting ourselves;
  • confirmation bias, by which we seek evidence for what we already understand to be true rather than endure the cognitive pain of reconceptualizing our world
  • the default effect, or tendency to choose the present option over alternatives, which is related to the status quo bias, or preference for things as they are, however bad that is
  • the endowment effect, or the instinct to demand more to give up something we have — more than we actually value it (or had paid to acquire or establish it)
  • We have an illusion of control, the behavioral economists tell us, and also suffer from overconfidence. We can’t see anything but through cataracts of self-deception.
  • Already, Yale says, 70 percent of Americans believe “environmental protection is more important than economic growth.” Nudging that number up to 75 percent isn’t the important thing; what’s important is getting those 70 percent to feel their conviction fiercely, to elevate action on climate change to a first-order political priority by speaking loudly about it and to disempower, however we can, those forces conspiring to silence us.
  • Even the ones in our own heads.
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The Moral Peril of Weighing Trump's Actions One by One - 0 views

www.weeklystandard.com/...the-moral-ledger morality gop trump support partisan Politics crisis
shared by Javier E on 24 Jul 18 - No Cached
  • In recent months, a consensus has emerged among the conservative dissidents of the Trump era: We’ll continue to oppose the president when his policies and practices are counter to our principles, they say, but also be sure to publicly give credit whenever he stakes out an agreeable position on any issue that matters
  • During the campaign, obdurate opposition served the purpose of challenging his candidacy and elevating his competitors, but now, with Trump sitting in the Oval Office, the thinking goes, it smacks of sour grapes—and, given that he does do things with which we agree, it amounts to cutting off our noses to spite our faces. So, serve as the loyal opposition as necessary but join the cause when possible.
  • And with each casual lie, crude insult, attack on the media, slight of the intelligence community, and example of grotesque servility to Russia’s dictator, it increasingly appears morally misguided.
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  • It is a coherent approach. It is the pragmatic one. But it is unsatisfying and unsettling
  • The first problem with itemizing and compartmentalizing is that actions can’t be treated as discrete. In politics, they are the direct result of a system’s arrangements and a leader’s philosophy
  • the making-the-trains-run-on-time argument. But time judges unkindly those who cheered the timely trains. Some of history’s most ghastly arrangements have been defended by relentlessly pointing to some number of their benefits and turning a blind eye to their costs
  • In other words, we have to be mindful of a position’s pedigree and its role in a broader program.
  • If President Trump has a modus operandi, it is the control, manipulation, and distortion of information: hiding his tax returns, meeting with Putin alone, firing the FBI director investigating him, lying habitually, undermining the media, pitting staff against each other. We are being purposely obtuse if we don’t assess his executive actions in this context
  • Almost every leader in history has had some redeeming characteristic or some defensible initiative.
  • They reflect the larger enterprise. We deceive ourselves by separating quiet streets from the oppressive police state that brought them about
  • This does more than debase debate, it does long-term harm: It serves as a conscience-protecting strategy exactly when our consciences shouldn’t be protected.
  • questions about duty and justice may not be well served by creating a list of positive and negative effects.
  • On virtually any matter, we can populate the positive side. Stealing stimulates a rush of adrenaline, makes you look tough, and provides some immediate profit. The danger lies in falsely equating the value of the ticks in both columns. Obviously, items carry vastly different weights
  • Worse, the line separating the columns artificially quarantines the negatives. It treats as separable the indivisble effects of an activity. In actuality, a sound moral system would recognize that some negatives infect all associated positives
  • It is shrewd for a bad actor to ask that we detach his various choices from one another and focus on the positives of each. We needn’t, and shouldn’t, acquiesce.
  • Even a strictly utilitarian approach to Trump demands that we do more than note the existence of different entries; we also have to tally them up, to have an accounting. That means we need to evaluate the positives in light of the negatives.
  • The nature of the four-year term allows us a delay in the reckoning. And the nature of our polarized, binary parties encourages us to avoid any accounting detrimental to our team. The itemize-and-compartmentalize approach focuses our attention on the entries, not the balance
  • The problem in the case of the Trump administration is that its moral debits are skyrocketing. Material and irreparable harm is being done to our nation, our institutions, and our norms, as well as to conservatism and the Republican party.
  • But even the ledger approach has two major flaws: one related to the past, the other to the future. Both are traditionally addressed by elements of the conservative disposition
  • The first problem is that in assessing the effects of immorality, it is impossible in real time to account for costs
  • Whether lying or embezzlement, infidelity or illicit drug use, hiding income or abusing welfare programs, social offenses can seem utterly inconsequential in the immediate term. It can even be difficult to imagine how they could prove corrosive to society at large.
  • It is precisely because we know the long-term dangers of certain categories of behavior but lack the capacity to quantify or explain them that we have social rules against things like mendacity, lassitude, and lasciviousness and in favor of selflessness, judiciousness, and initiative.
  • It is no coincidence that such rules are consonant with the instructions of our faith traditions
  • they tell us the exact same things in the exact same way: Follow these rules of behavior, even if they seem quaint or troublesome, because they reflect the wisdom of authorities that you cannot subject to cross-examination—countless previous generations or the Almighty.
  • norms are our community’s load-bearing walls. Undermine them too often, and the edifice will collapse.
  • The second flaw of the moral ledger is that it appears perfectly designed, at least during the Trump era, to facilitate our slowly succumbing to temptation
  • we’re consigned to making a series of episodic mini-assessments. We might celebrate a positive and then balance it against a recent negative.
  • Like the frog that steadily acclimates to—but ultimately dies from—water rising to a boil, we can be oblivious to the gradual escalation of costs.
  • So long as short-term rationalizations are possible, decline can proceed unabated and largely unnoticed. This is why But Gorsuch is so insidious. It is the pro that excused so many cons: the growing attacks on the media, the callous border policy, the belittling of the intelligence community.
  • given the enormity of the stakes, placing a gold star on the president’s occasional successful assignment is unwarranted and unwise. The road to Hell is paved with a piecemeal, situational approach to morality.
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James Madison's Mob-Rule Fears Have Been Realized - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...568351 democracy government Founding history
shared by Javier E on 17 Sep 18 - No Cached
  • To prevent factions from distorting public policy and threatening liberty, Madison resolved to exclude the people from a direct role in government. “A pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction,” Madison wrote in “Federalist No. 10.”
  • The Framers designed the American constitutional system not as a direct democracy but as a representative republic, where enlightened delegates of the people would serve the public good. They also built into the Constitution a series of cooling mechanisms intended to inhibit the formulation of passionate factions, to ensure that reasonable majorities would prevail.
  • Madison, however, thought Plato’s small-republic thesis was wrong. He believed that the ease of communication in small republics was precisely what had allowed hastily formed majorities to oppress minorities. “Extend the sphere” of a territory, Madison wrote, “and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other.” Madison predicted that America’s vast geography and large population would prevent passionate mobs from mobilizing. Their dangerous energy would burn out before it could inflame others.
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  • Madison’s worst fears of mob rule have been realized—and the cooling mechanisms he designed to slow down the formation of impetuous majorities have broken.
  • We are living, in short, in a Madisonian nightmare. How did we get here, and how can we escape?
  • During the election of 1912, the progressive populists Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson insisted that the president derived his authority directly from the people. Since then, the office has moved in precisely the direction the Founders had hoped to avoid: Presidents now make emotional appeals, communicate directly with voters, and pander to the mob.
  • Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms have accelerated public discourse to warp speed, creating virtual versions of the mob. Inflammatory posts based on passion travel farther and faster than arguments based on reason. Rather than encouraging deliberation, mass media undermine it by creating bubbles and echo chambers in which citizens see only those opinions they already embrace.
  • The polarization of Congress, reflecting an electorate that has not been this divided since about the time of the Civil War, has led to ideological warfare between parties that directly channels the passions of their most extreme constituents and donors—precisely the type of factionalism the Founders abhorred.
  • Whatever benefits the parties offered in the 19th and early 20th centuries, however, have long since disappeared. The moderating effects of parties were undermined by a series of populist reforms, including the direct election of senators, the popular-ballot initiative, and direct primaries in presidential elections, which became widespread in the 1970s.
  • As the historian Sean Wilentz has noted, the great movements for constitutional and social change in the 19th century—from the abolition of slavery to the Progressive movement—were the product of strong and diverse political parties.
  • The Founders’ greatest failure of imagination was in not anticipating the rise of mass political parties. The first parties played an unexpected cooling function, uniting diverse economic and regional interests through shared constitutional visions
  • More recently, geographical and political self-sorting has produced voters and representatives who are willing to support the party line at all costs. After the Republicans took both chambers of Congress in 1994, the House of Representatives, under Speaker Newt Gingrich, adjusted its rules to enforce party discipline, taking power away from committee chairs and making it easier for leadership to push bills into law with little debate or support from across the aisle.
  • The rise of what the presidential historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. called the “imperial presidency” has unbalanced the equilibrium among the three branches. Modern presidents rule by executive order rather than consulting with Congress. They direct a massive administrative state, with jurisdiction over everything from environmental policy to the regulation of the airwaves.
  • The passions, hyper-partisanship, and split-second decision making that Madison feared from large, concentrated groups meeting face-to-face have proved to be even more dangerous from exponentially larger, dispersed groups that meet online.
  • some promising, if modest, fixes are on the horizon. Nathaniel Persily, a professor at Stanford Law School who leads an independent commission that will examine the impact of Facebook on democracy, notes one step the company has taken to address the problem of “clickbait,” which lures users with sensational headlines. Articles that persuade many users to click previously appeared high on Facebook’s News Feed. The company now prioritizes those articles users have actually taken the time to read.
  • “The democratic character of the internet is itself posing a threat to democracy, and there’s no clear solution to the problem,” Persily told me. “Censorship, delay, demotion of information online, deterrence, and dilution of bad content—all pose classic free-speech problems, and everyone should be concerned at every step of the government regulatory parade.”
  • At the moment, the combination of low voter turnout and ideological extremism has tended to favor very liberal or very conservative candidates in primaries. Thanks to safe districts created by geographic self-sorting and partisan gerrymandering, many of these extremists go on to win the general election. Today, all congressional Republicans fall to the right of the most conservative Democrat, and all congressional Democrats fall to the left of the most liberal Republican. In the 1960s, at times, 50 percent of the lawmakers overlapped ideologically.
  • The best way of promoting a return to Madisonian principles, however, may be one Madison himself identified: constitutional education. In recent years, calls for more civic education have become something of a national refrain. But the Framers themselves believed that the fate of the republic depended on an educated citizenry. Drawing again on his studies of ancient republics, which taught that broad education of citizens was the best security against “crafty and dangerous encroachments on the public liberty,” Madison insisted that the rich should subsidize the education of the poor.
  • The civics half of the educational equation is crucial. Recent studies have suggested that higher education can polarize citizens rather than ensuring the rule of reason: Highly educated liberals become more liberal, and highly educated conservatives more conservative
  • Today, passion has gotten the better of us. The preservation of the republic urgently requires imparting constitutional principles to a new generation and reviving Madisonian reason in an impetuous world.
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May's desperate pitch for cross-party unity is a leap into the dark | Rafael Behr | Opi... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...theresa-may-labour-brexit brexit tories
shared by Javier E on 02 Apr 19 - No Cached
  • The specific challenge that posed for Northern Ireland was identified and baked into the commission’s negotiating mandate in May 2017. But in February 2019 Dominic Raab, a man who briefly led Brexit negotiations, and fancies himself as a potential prime minister, admitted he had not read the Good Friday agreement. It is only 35 pages long.
  • The prospect of Britain ending up in a customs union with the EU has been at the forefront of Brexit argument for nearly two years. On Monday around 50 Tory MPs attended a training seminar organised by colleagues on what a customs union is and how it works. At least they were curious. Breathtaking, wilful ignorance of facts has been a routine feature of the debate
  • Last week Boris Johnson told Telegraph readers that May should “drop the deal” and, in the next line, that she should “extend the implementation period to the end of 2021”. The implementation period is part of the deal. Drop one and you lose the other. Johnson is not stupid, but he has affected stupidity for so long that the difference no longer matters.
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  • a large minority still want to saddle up unicorns and ride back to lost terrain. They cry “WTO transition”, “Malthouse compromise”, “Brady amendment” as if these were negotiable concepts and not exotic acts in the clammy circus tent of Eurosceptic imagination.
  • Another frustration is that British politicians are incapable of telling their voters the truth about difficult trade-offs. Some officials and leaders think the value of EU partnership will only be grasped once the benefits of membership are lost and the task in hand is buying them back
  • Continental leaders thought the pragmatic diplomat they dealt with in Brussels was the real Britain and the spittle-spraying nationalist was a stock character, strutting the repertory stage. It turns out to be the other way around. Or rather, the Conservative party has strapped the grimacing mask so tightly to its face that it is no longer a mask. Those are now the distorted features we show to the world.
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House-hunting in Silicon Valley: tech's newly rich fuel a spectacle of excess | US news... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...valley-tech-wealth-real-estate silicon valley real estate culture
shared by Javier E on 28 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • The culture they created has “distortions that are very analogous to the industrial revolution,” said Cary McClelland, author of the new book Silicon City: San Francisco in the Long Shadow of the Valley. The Zuckerbergs and Musks are today’s Carnegies and Rockefellers. And the low-wage drivers at Lyft and Uber are the factory workers “who worked unprotected, from dawn to dusk
  • Half the world’s tech billionaires live in Silicon Valley
  • “This area may have the greatest concentration of wealth in human history,” said Lenny Siegel, the former mayor of Mountain View, whose house is valued at $2.5m. He purchased it 40 years ago for $112,000.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • There is no longer any room for teachers, medical technicians, firefighters or construction workers, who may drive two or more hours and sleep in their cars for an hour before work to avoid longer commutes.
  • Gardeners, cleaning people, babysitters and dog walkers cram into small apartments, sometimes 12 in two bedrooms, according to Marroquin.
  • In East Palo Alto, once a low-income community where many people of color lived, the median price of homes is $953,000. The school district has reported that more than half of its students are homeless, and some teachers commute more than two hours each way because they cannot find affordable local housing.
  • illionaires of Silicon Valley play real-life monopoly, buying up houses on their blocks and down the street for family, staff, art collections, or to hold political and philanthropic events.
  • Zuckerberg’s people, for instance, knocked on doors in his neighborhood and offered “well over the fair market value of the house, some would argue at double the value”, said Repka of DeLeon Reality, which did over $800m in sales last year. “He did it as a privacy buffer around his house.”
  • When the former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer throws a party at her Palo Alto house for hundreds of guests, residents brace for the delivery trucks, caterers, decorators, electricians, and valets. At Mayer’s annual Christmas party, a generator the size of a shipping container buzzes for days to maintain her ice skating rink.
  • For the vast majority of the workforce, “single-family homes have become untouchable”, said the prominent urban planner Peter Calthorpe, who grew up in Palo Alto.
  • “What’s this going to mean for future communities, if only totally affluent, young people can afford to move in?”
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How North Korean Propaganda Depicts And Distorts America - 0 views

all-that-is-interesting.com/...2 northkorea propaganda crisis
shared by fischerry on 21 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • They call it the Fatherland Liberation War. We call it the Korean War. (It’s easy to forget that the names of wars are merely decided by people, and not always agreed upon.) And while they celebrate July 27 as the Day of Victory in the Great Fatherland Liberation War (and built the Victorious War Museum), the war, for North Korea, is not truly over.
  • The official hymn to North Korean leader Kim Jong-un–each leader has gotten one–is called “Onwards Toward The Final Victory.” “Final victory” and “final confrontation” are oft-used phrases in North Korean state rhetoric
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When bias beats logic: why the US can't have a reasoned gun debate | US news | The Guar... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...us-gun-control-debate-bias guns debate culture crisis politics nuance discourse polarization logic bias
shared by Javier E on 08 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Jon Stokes, a writer and software developer, said he is frustrated after each mass shooting by “the sentiment among very smart people, who are used to detail and nuance and doing a lot of research, that this is cut and dried, this is black and white”.
  • Stokes has lived on both sides of America’s gun culture war, growing up in rural Louisiana, where he got his first gun at age nine, and later studying at Harvard and the University of Chicago, where he adopted some of a big-city resident’s skepticism about guns. He’s written articles about the gun geek culture behind the popularity of the AR-15, why he owns a military-style rifle, and why gun owners are so skeptical of tech-enhanced “smart guns”.
  • Even to suggest that the debate is more complicated – that learning something about guns, by taking a course on how to safely carry a concealed weapon, or learning how to fire a gun, might shift their perspective on whichever solution they have just heard about on TV – “just upsets them, and they basically say you’re trying to obscure the issue”.
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  • In early 2013, a few months after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school, a Yale psychologist created an experiment to test how political bias affects our reasoning skills. Dan Kahan was attempting to understand why public debates over social problems remain deadlocked, even when good scientific evidence is available. He decided to test a question about gun control.
  • Then Kahan ran the same test again. This time, instead of evaluating skin cream trials, participants were asked to evaluate whether a law banning citizens from carrying concealed firearms in public made crime go up or down. The result: when liberals and conservatives were confronted with a set of results that contradicted their political assumptions, the smartest people were barely more likely to arrive at the correct answer than the people with no math skills at all. Political bias had erased the advantages of stronger reasoning skills.
  • The reason that measurable facts were sidelined in political debates was not that people have poor reasoning skills, Kahan concluded. Presented with a conflict between holding to their beliefs or finding the correct answer to a problem, people simply went with their tribe.
  • It wasa reasonable strategy on the individual level – and a “disastrous” one for tackling social change, he concluded.
  • But the biggest distortion in the gun control debate is the dramatic empathy gap between different kinds of victims. It’s striking how puritanical the American imagination is, how narrow its range of sympathy. Mass shootings, in which the perpetrator kills complete strangers at random in a public place, prompt an outpouring of grief for the innocent lives lost. These shootings are undoubtedly horrifying, but they account for a tiny percentage of America’s overall gun deaths each year.
  • The roughly 60 gun suicides each day, the 19 black men and boys lost each day to homicide, do not inspire the same reaction, even though they represent the majority of gun violence victims. Yet there are meaningful measures which could save lives here – targeted inventions by frontline workers in neighborhoods where the gun homicide rate is 400 times higher than other developed countries, awareness campaigns to help gun owners in rural states learn about how to identify suicide risk and intervene with friends in trouble.
  • When it comes to suicide, “there is so much shame about that conversation … and where there is shame there is also denial,”
  • When young men of color are killed, “you have disdain and aggression,” fueled by the type of white supremacist argument which equates blackness with criminality.
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The Churchill row is part of the glib approach to history that gave us Brexit | Simon J... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-history-brexit-john-mcdonnell history culture lessons blame judge moral judgment
shared by Javier E on 15 Feb 19 - No Cached
  • As history is raided, indeed raped, by identitarians and populists, glib judgments on the past become fodder for every tribal grievance.
  • I have come away from working on a history of Europe convinced that it is senseless to pass moral judgment on men and women of past times and past cultures.
  • Fake history may be a clever way to engage the empathy of the young with otherwise difficult material. But if the purpose of history is to offer lessons for the future, distorting it is fraught with danger.
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  • The current cult of identity politics is to rifle through the past careers of great men and women, not to ascertain accuracy but to sort them into friends or foes.
  • The idea of history as composed of heroes and villains is infantile. Inside every hero lurks an opposite. The best answer to a stupid question is no answer
  • Awarding long-dead people berths in some transient heaven or hell is merely to conscript them to some current grievance.
  • I am convinced a historic British aversion to the Germans, rehearsed annually on Remembrance Day and in movies and bestseller lists, underpins much current Brexit sentiment. So does ancient antagonism towards the French.
  • Fake history is worse than no history. It is better to forget than partially to remember. We should live for today and move on.
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The Making of the Fox News White House | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...ng-of-the-fox-news-white-house fox news trump propaganda culture politics
shared by Javier E on 05 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • Fox—which, as the most watched cable news network, generates about $2.7 billion a year for its parent company, 21st Century Fox—acts as a force multiplier for Trump, solidifying his hold over the Republican Party and intensifying his support. “Fox is not just taking the temperature of the base—it’s raising the temperature,” she says. “It’s a radicalization model.”
  • The White House and Fox interact so seamlessly that it can be hard to determine, during a particular news cycle, which one is following the other’s lead. All day long, Trump retweets claims made on the network; his press secretary, Sarah Sanders, has largely stopped holding press conferences, but she has made some thirty appearances on such shows as “Fox & Friends” and “Hannity.” Trump, Hemmer says, has “almost become a programmer.”
  • Bill Kristol, who was a paid contributor to Fox News until 2012 and is a prominent Never Trumper, said of the network, “It’s changed a lot. Before, it was conservative, but it wasn’t crazy. Now it’s just propaganda.”
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  • Joe Peyronnin, a professor of journalism at N.Y.U., was an early president of Fox News, in the mid-nineties. “I’ve never seen anything like it before,” he says of Fox. “It’s as if the President had his own press organization. It’s not healthy.”
  • Kristol contends that Shine’s White House appointment is a scandal. “It’s been wildly under-covered,” he said. “It’s astounding that Shine—the guy who covered up Ailes’s horrible behavior—is the deputy chief of staff!”
  • Jennifer Rubin, another conservative Never Trumper, used to appear on the network, but wouldn’t do so now. “Fox was begun as a good-faith effort to counter bias, but it’s morphed into something that is not even news,” she says. “It’s simply a mouthpiece for the President, repeating what the President says, no matter how false or contradictory.
  • Sean Hannity has told colleagues that he speaks to the President virtually every night, after his show ends, at 10 P.M. According to the Washington Post, White House advisers have taken to calling Hannity the Shadow Chief of Staff. A Republican political expert who has a paid contract with Fox News told me that Hannity has essentially become a “West Wing adviser,” attributing this development, in part, to the “utter breakdown of any normal decision-making in the White House.” The expert added, “The place has gone off the rails. There is no ordinary policy-development system.” As a result, he said, Fox’s on-air personalities “are filling the vacuum.”
  • Trump has told confidants that he has ranked the loyalty of many reporters, on a scale of 1 to 10. Bret Baier, Fox News’ chief political anchor, is a 6; Hannity a solid 10. Steve Doocy, the co-host of “Fox & Friends,” is so adoring that Trump gives him a 12.
  • Kushner now has an almost filial status with Murdoch, who turns eighty-eight this month, and numerous sources told me that they communicate frequently. “Like, every day,” one said.
  • Ailes told Murdoch, “Trump gets great ratings, but if you’re not careful he’s going to end up totally controlling Fox News.”
  • In private, Murdoch regarded Trump with disdain, seeing him as a real-estate huckster and a shady casino operator. But, for all their differences, the two men had key traits in common. They both inherited and expanded family enterprises—an Australian newspaper; an outer-borough New York City real-estate firm—but felt looked down upon by people who were richer and closer to the centers of power.
  • both men have tapped into anti-élitist resentment to connect with the public and to increase their fortunes. Trump and Murdoch also share a transactional approach to politics, devoid of almost any ideology besides self-interest.
  • In 1994, Murdoch laid out an audacious plan to Reed Hundt, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission under President Bill Clinton
  • Murdoch led him outside to take in the glittering view of the Los Angeles Basin, and confided that he planned to launch a radical new television network. Unlike the three established networks, which vied for the same centrist viewers, his creation would follow the unapologetically lowbrow model of the tabloids that he published in Australia and England, and appeal to a narrow audience that would be entirely his. His core viewers, he said, would be football fans; with this aim in mind, he had just bought the rights to broadcast N.F.L. games. Hundt told me, “What he was really saying was that he was going after a working-class audience. He was going to carve out a base—what would become the Trump base.
  • he had entered our country and was saying, ‘I’m going to break up the three-party oligopoly that has governed the most important medium of communication for politics and policy in this country since the Second World War.’ It was like a scene from ‘Faust.’ What came to mind was Mephistopheles.”
  • “Fox’s great insight wasn’t necessarily that there was a great desire for a conservative point of view.” More erudite conservatives, he says, such as William F. Buckley, Jr., and Bill Kristol, couldn’t have succeeded as Fox has. Levin observes, “The genius was seeing that there’s an attraction to fear-based, anger-based politics that has to do with class and race.”
  • In 1996, Murdoch hired Roger Ailes to create a conservative TV news outlet. Ailes, who died in 2017, was a master of attack politics and wedge issues, having been a media consultant on several of America’s dirtiest and most divisive campaigns, including those of Richard Nixon. Ailes invented programming, Levin argues, “that confirmed all your worst instincts—Fox News’ fundamental business model is driving fear.
  • As Hundt sees it, “Murdoch didn’t invent Trump, but he invented the audience. Murdoch was going to make a Trump exist. Then Trump comes along, sees all these people, and says, ‘I’ll be the ringmaster in your circus!’ ”
  • Until then, the network had largely mocked birtherism as a conspiracy theory. O’Reilly called its promoters “unhinged,” and Glenn Beck, who at the time also hosted a Fox show, called them “idiots.” But Trump gave birtherism national exposure, and, in a sign of things to come, Hannity fanned the flames. Hannity began saying that, although he thought that Obama had been born in the United States, the circumstances surrounding his birth certificate were “odd.”
  • In certain instances, however, Fox executives enforced journalistic limits.
  • Such niceties no longer apply. In November, Hannity joined Trump onstage at a climactic rally for the midterm elections. Afterward, Fox issued a limp statement saying that it didn’t “condone any talent participating in campaign events” and that the “unfortunate distraction” had “been addressed.”
  • For all of Ailes’s faults, Van Susteren argues, he exerted a modicum of restraint. She believes that he would have insisted on at least some distance from President Trump, if only to preserve the appearance of journalistic respectability embodied in the motto Ailes devised for Fox: “Fair and Balanced.
  • Fox News was hardly fair and balanced under his leadership. Gabriel Sherman, in his biography, “The Loudest Voice in the Room,” reports that Ailes was so obsessed with bringing down Obama in 2012 that he declared to colleagues, “I want to elect the next President.”
  • Don’t kid yourself about his support for immigration,” she said of Murdoch. “Rupert is first about the bottom line. They’re all going out to play to their crowd, whether it’s Fox or MSNBC.” (After leaving Fox, Van Susteren was for a short time a host on MSNBC.) Fox’s mile-by-mile coverage of the so-called “migrant caravan” was an enormous hit: ratings in October, 2018, exceeded those of October, 2016—the height of the Presidential campaign.
  • Ailes and Trump were friendly. “They spoke all the time,” a former Fox executive says. They had lunch shortly before Trump announced his candidacy, and Ailes gave Trump political tips during the primaries. Ken LaCorte contends that Ailes took note of “Trump’s crazy behavior”; but Trump’s growing political strength was also obvious. According to the former Fox executive, Trump made Ailes “nervous”: “He thought Trump was a wild card. Someone Ailes could not bully or intimidate.”
  • in 2016 that the network’s executives “made a business decision” to give on-air stars “slack” to choose their candidates. Hannity was an early Trump supporter; O’Reilly was neutral; Megyn Kelly remained skeptical
  • Kelly kept pressing Trump: “You once told a contestant on ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees. Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect President?” But he’d already won over Republican viewers. (Fox received a flood of e-mails, almost all of them anti-Kelly.) The showdown helped shape Trump’s image as shamelessly unsinkable.
  • Fox, however, may have given Trump a little help. A pair of Fox insiders and a source close to Trump believe that Ailes informed the Trump campaign about Kelly’s question. Two of those sources say that they know of the tipoff from a purported eyewitness. In addition, a former Trump campaign aide says that a Fox contact gave him advance notice of a different debate question, which asked the candidates whether they would support the Republican nominee, regardless of who won. The former aide says that the heads-up was passed on to Trump, who was the only candidate who said that he wouldn’t automatically support the Party’s nominee—a position that burnished his image as an outsider.
  • Ailes, meanwhile, joined Trump’s debate team, further erasing the line between Fox and conservative politicians. Ailes also began developing a plan to go into business with Trump. The Sunday before the election, Ailes called Steve Bannon, Trump’s campaign chairman, and said that he’d been talking with Trump about launching Trump TV, a nationalist competitor to Fox. Ailes was so excited that he was willing to forfeit his severance payment from Fox, which was attached to a non-compete agreement. He asked Bannon to join the venture and to start planning it as soon as Trump lost the election.
  • Any hopes that Fox would clean house after Ailes’s departure vanished on August 12, 2016, when Fox named two Ailes loyalists as co-presidents: Jack Abernethy, an executive who managed Fox’s local stations, and Bill Shine. The opinion side of Fox News, which Shine had run, had won out, as had his friend Sean Hannity.
  • For years, Ailes had been the focus of liberal complaints, and so when Fox pushed him out many people thought that the channel would change. They were right. The problem, Fox’s critics say, is that it’s become a platform for Trump’s authoritarianism. “I know Roger Ailes was reviled,” Charlie Black, the lobbyist, said. “But he did produce debates of both sides. Now Fox is just Trump, Trump, Trump.” Murdoch may find this development untroubling: in 1995, he told this magazine, “The truth is—and we Americans don’t like to admit it—that authoritarian societies can work.
  • News of Trump’s payoffs to silence Daniels, and Cohen’s criminal attempts to conceal them as legal fees, remained unknown to the public until the Wall Street Journal broke the story, a year after Trump became President.
  • Murdoch “was gone a lot,” adding, “He’s old. He likes the idea that he’s running it, but the lunatics took over the asylum.”
  • Falzone’s story didn’t run—it kept being passed off from one editor to the next. After getting one noncommittal answer after another from her editors, Falzone at last heard from LaCorte, who was then the head of FoxNews.com. Falzone told colleagues that LaCorte said to her, “Good reporting, kiddo. But Rupert wants Donald Trump to win. So just let it go.” LaCorte denies telling Falzone this, but one of Falzone’s colleagues confirms having heard her account at the time.
  • ” The celebrity opinion-show hosts who drive the ratings became unbridled and unopposed. Hannity, as the network’s highest-rated and highest-paid star, was especially empowered—and, with him, so was Trump.
  • Richie told me, “Fox News was culpable. I voted for Trump, and I like Fox, but they did their own ‘catch and kill’ on the story to protect him.” He said that he’d worked closely with Falzone on the article, and that “she did her homework—she had it.” He says he warned her that Fox would never run it, but “when they killed it she was devastated.” Richie believes that the story “would have swayed the election.
  • Shine became “an expert in collecting and enforcing soft power,” adding, “He was responsible for on-air contributors to programs, so ultimately you were auditioning for Bill Shine. He was the one who would give you the lucrative contract. He controlled the narrative that way.
  • some people at Fox called him Bill the Butler, because he was so subservient to Ailes. A former Fox co-host says, “He’s perfect for the White House job. He’s a yes-man.” Another Fox alumnus said, “His only talent was following orders, sucking up to power, and covering up for people.”
  • Ailes and a small group kept a close eye on internal talent. “We had a file on pretty much everyone,” the former Fox executive said, adding that Ailes talked about “putting hits” in the media on anyone who “got out of line.”
  • If a woman complained about being sexually harassed, he said, Shine or other supervisors intimidated her into silence, reduced her air time, or discontinued her contract. The former executive recalls, “Shine would talk to the woman with a velvet glove, saying, ‘Don’t worry about it’—and, if that didn’t work, he’d warn her it would ruin her career.”
  • Judd Burstein, an attorney whose client was interviewed by prosecutors, told me, “I don’t think someone can be a serial sexual abuser in a large organization without enablers like Shine.”
  • Two months after Shine left Fox, Hannity became a matchmaker, arranging a dinner with the President at the White House, attended by himself, Shine, and Scaramucci, at that time Trump’s communications director. Hannity proposed Shine as a top communications official, or even as a deputy chief of staff. A year later, Shine was both.
  • Murdoch appears to have been wise in securing a rapprochement. Telecommunications is a highly regulated industry, and under Trump the government has consistently furthered Murdoch’s business interests, to the detriment of his rivals. Hundt, the former F.C.C. chairman, told me that “there have been three moves that have taken place in the regulatory and antitrust world” involving telecommunications “that are extremely unusual, and the only way to explain them is that they’re pro-Fox, pro-Fox, and pro-Fox.”
  • Last June, after only six months of deliberation, the Trump Administration approved Fox’s bid to sell most of its entertainment assets to Disney, for seventy-one billion dollars. The Murdoch family will receive more than two billion dollars in the deal, and will become a major stockholder in the combined company
  • In July, the F.C.C. blocked Sinclair Broadcast Group, a conservative rival to Fox, from combining with the Tribune Media Company. The F.C.C. argued that the deal would violate limits on the number of TV stations one entity can own, upending Sinclair’s hope of becoming the next Fox.
  • The Justice Department, meanwhile, went to court in an effort to stop A. T. & T.’s acquisition of Time Warner, which owns CNN
  • “There may be innocent explanations.” But, he adds, “Trump famously said you’re going to get sick and tired of winning, and that may not be true for the rest of America, but it sure is true of Murdoch.” He says of Murdoch, “He’s an incredibly cunning political player. He leaves no fingerprints. He’s been in the game of influencing government behavior to his benefit longer than most of us have been alive.”
  • Ann Coulter, who has been feuding with Trump over his immigration policy, said that the President told her that “Murdoch calls me every day.” She recalled that, “back when Trump was still speaking to me,” she complained to him that Fox was no longer inviting her to appear. She said that Trump told her, “Do you want me to call Murdoch and tell him to put you on?” Coulter accepted Trump’s offer. He may have called Hannity, not Murdoch, she says, but in any case she was invited back on Fox “within twelve hours.”
  • “Fox’s most important role since the election has been to keep Trump supporters in line.” The network has provided a non-stop counternarrative in which the only collusion is between Hillary Clinton and Russia; Robert Mueller, the special counsel, is perpetrating a “coup” by the “deep state”; Trump and his associates aren’t corrupt, but America’s law-enforcement officials and courts are; illegal immigration isn’t at a fifteen-year low, it’s “an invasion”; and news organizations that offer different perspectives are “enemies of the American people.”
  • Benkler’s assessment is based on an analysis of millions of American news stories that he and two co-authors, Robert Faris and Hal Roberts, undertook for their 2018 book, “Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation and Radicalization in American Politics.” Benkler told me that he and his co-authors had expected to find “symmetric polarization” in the left-leaning and the right-leaning media outlets. Instead, they discovered that the two poles of America’s media ecosystem function very differently. “It’s not the right versus the left,” Benkler says. “It’s the right versus the rest.”
  • Most American news outlets try to adhere to facts. When something proves erroneous, they run corrections, or, as Benkler and his co-authors write, “they check each other.” Far-left Web sites post as many bogus stories as far-right ones do, but mainstream and liberal news organizations tend to ignore suspiciously extreme material.
  • Conservative media outlets, however, focus more intently on confirming their audience’s biases, and are much more susceptible to disinformation, propaganda, and outright falsehoods (as judged by neutral fact-checking organizations such as PolitiFact). Case studies conducted by the authors show that lies and distortions on the right spread easily from extremist Web sites to mass-media outlets such as Fox, and only occasionally get corrected
  • Sometimes such pushback has a salutary effect. Recently, Chris Wallace told Sarah Sanders that her claim that “nearly four thousand known or suspected terrorists come into our country illegally” every year was wildly inaccurate. Showing Fox’s clout, the White House has dropped the talking point.
  • Unlike Glenn Beck, Hannity has been allowed to spew baseless conspiracy theories with impunity. For more than a year, Hannity and other hosts spread the lie that the hacking of Democratic Party e-mails during the 2016 campaign was an inside job. Hannity claimed that the hacking had been committed not by Russian cyber-warfare agents, as the U.S. intelligence community concluded, but by a Democratic staffer named Seth Rich, who had been murdered by unknown assailants on a D.C. street. Benkler and his co-authors studied Fox’s coverage, and found that not only did the channel give the Seth Rich lie a national platform; it also used the conspiracy story as a distraction, deploying it as a competing narrative when developments in Mueller’s investigation showed Trump in a bad light. In 2017, after Rich’s parents demanded an apology and advertisers began shunning the network, Fox finally ran a retraction, and Hannity dropped the story.
  • By then, Fox hosts had begun pushing a different conspiracy: the “Uranium One” story, which Hannity called “the biggest scandal ever involving Russia.” On an October, 2017, broadcast, Hannity claimed that Hillary Clinton, when she was Secretary of State, had given “to Vladimir Putin and Russia twenty per cent of America’s uranium, which is the foundational material to make nuclear weapons.” Ostensibly, the deal was in exchange for giant payments to the Clinton Foundation. Hannity also claimed that “the corrupt, lying mainstream media” was withholding this “bombshell” from Americans, because it was “complicit” in a “huge coverup.”
  • other reporting had poked holes in it, revealing that multiple government agencies had approved the deal, and that the quantity of uranium was insignificant. Yet Fox kept flogging it as the real national-security scandal involving Russia.
  • Alisyn Camerota was a co-host on “Fox & Friends” for years before joining CNN, in 2014
  •  ‘Fox & Friends’ was a fun show, but it was not a news show,” she says. “It regularly broke the rules of journalism. It was basically Roger’s id on TV. He’d wake up in the morning with some bee in his bonnet, spout it off to Bill Shine, and Shine would tell us to put it on TV.” She says that the show’s producers would “cull far-right, crackpot Web sites” for content, and adds, “Never did I hear anyone worry about getting a second source. The single phrase I heard over and over was ‘This is going to outrage the audience!’ You inflame the viewers so that no one will turn away. Those were the standards.”
  • Fox co-host Kimberly Guilfoyle often prepared for “The Five” by relying on information provided to her by an avid fan: a viewer from Georgia named David Townsend, who had no affiliation either with Fox News or with journalism.
  • Aki Peritz, a former C.I.A. analyst who is an adjunct professor at American University, has written that Fox News has become an inviting target for foreign spy agencies, because “it’s what the President sees.
  • a source who spoke to me about Guilfoyle and Townsend says, “It’s even worse than a conspiracy of the dark Web, or something trying to manipulate Fox. It was just a guy in his underwear in Georgia who had influence over Fox News! And Fox News influences the President!”
  • Judging from the timing of Trump’s tweets, Gertz believes that the President records “Fox & Friends” and views it from the beginning, often with a slight delay. As Trump watches, he frequently posts about points that he agrees with. Since August, 2018, Media Matters has tallied more than two hundred instances of Trump disseminating Fox News items to his fifty-eight million Twitter followers. “Trump serves as a carnival barker for Fox,” Levin says, giving invaluable promotional help to the channel.
  • Fox hosts sometimes reverse their opinions in order to toe the Trump line: Hannity, who in the Obama era called negotiations with North Korea “disturbing,” now calls such efforts a “huge foreign-policy win.” But Gertz has come to believe that Fox drives Trump more than Trump drives Fo
  • White House aides confirm that Trump has repeatedly walked away from compromises at the last moment because Fox hosts and guests opposed the deals.
  • According to a Senate staffer, one high-profile Republican senator claims that his preferred way of getting the President’s ear is by going on Fox. He calls a friendly host and offers to appear on the air; usually, before he’s taken his makeup off in the greenroom Trump is calling him
  • Fox hosts played a key part in driving Trump’s recent shutdown of the government and his declaration of a national emergency on the southern border. Hannity and Dobbs urged Trump nightly on their shows to make these moves; according to press reports, they also advised Trump personally to do so.
  • For the next thirty-five days, Hannity and the other Fox hosts kept cheering Trump on, even as polls showed that the American public was increasingly opposed to the shutdown. Oliver Darcy, of CNN, says that Democrats, rather than negotiating with Trump, “might as well call Sean Hannity and get him on the phone,” adding, “It seems we sort of elected Sean Hannity when we elected Trump.”
  • “The President’s world view is being specifically shaped by what he sees on Fox News, but Fox’s goals are ratings and money, which they get by maximizing rage. It’s not a message that is going to serve the rest of the country.
  • Trump and Fox are employing the same risky model: inflaming the base and intensifying its support, rather than building a broader coalition. Narrowcasting may generate billions of dollars for a cable channel, but as a governing strategy it inevitably alienates the majority. The problem for Trump, as one former Fox host puts it, is that “he can’t afford to lose Fox, because it’s all he’s got.”
  • Similarly, Fox has a financial incentive to make Trump look good. Cable ratings at both Fox and MSNBC dip when the news is bad for their audience’s side. Van Susteren likens the phenomenon to audiences turning away when their sports team is losing
  • A source close to Trump says that the President has been complaining that Shine hasn’t been aggressive enough. Late last year, Trump told the source, “Shine promised me my press coverage would get better, but it’s gotten worse.” The source says, “Trump thought he was getting Roger Ailes but instead he got Roger Ailes’s gofer.”
  • Shine has practically ended White House press briefings. Trump prefers to be his own spokesman. “He always thought he did it the best,” a former senior White House official says. “But the problem is that you lose deniability. It’s become a trapeze act with no net, 24/7. The shutdown messaging was a crisis. There was no exit strategy.”
  • “It was always clear that this wasn’t just another news organization,” Rosenberg told me. “But when Ailes departed, and Trump was elected, the network changed. They became more combative, and started treating me like an enemy, not an opponent.” With Shine joining Trump at the White House, he said, “it’s as if the on-air talent at Fox now have two masters—the White House and the audience.” In his view, the network has grown so allied with the White House in the demonization of Trump’s critics that “Fox is no longer conservative—it’s anti-democratic.”
  • For two years, the network has been priming its viewers to respond with extraordinary anger should the country’s law-enforcement authorities close in on the President. According to Media Matters, in the first year after Mueller was appointed Hannity alone aired four hundred and eighty-six segments attacking the federal criminal investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election; thirty-eight per cent of those segments claimed that law-enforcement officials had broken the law.
  • Hannity has spoken of “a coup,” and a guest on Laura Ingraham’s program, the lawyer Joseph diGenova, declared, “It’s going to be total war. And, as I say to my friends, I do two things—I vote and I buy guns.”
  • “In a hypothetical world without Fox News, if President Trump were to be hit hard by the Mueller report, it would be the end of him. But, with Fox News covering his back with the Republican base, he has a fighting chance, because he has something no other President in American history has ever had at his disposal—a servile propaganda operation.”
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For Two Months, I Got My News From Print Newspapers. Here's What I Learned. - The New Y... - 0 views

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  • In January, after the breaking-newsiest year in recent memory, I decided to travel back in time. I turned off my digital news notifications, unplugged from Twitter and other social networks, and subscribed to home delivery of three print newspapers — The Times, The Wall Street Journal and my local paper, The San Francisco Chronicle — plus a weekly newsmagazine, The Economist.
  • I have spent most days since then getting the news mainly from print, though my self-imposed asceticism allowed for podcasts, email newsletters and long-form nonfiction (books and magazine articles). Basically, I was trying to slow-jam the news — I still wanted to be informed, but was looking to formats that prized depth and accuracy over speed.
  • It has been life changing. Turning off the buzzing breaking-news machine I carry in my pocket was like unshackling myself from a monster who had me on speed dial, always ready to break into my day with half-baked bulleti
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  • Most of all, I realized my personal role as a consumer of news in our broken digital news environment.
  • And I’m embarrassed about how much free time I have — in two months, I managed to read half a dozen books, took up pottery and (I think) became a more attentive husband and father.
  • Now I am not just less anxious and less addicted to the news, I am more widely informed
  • We have spent much of the past few years discovering that the digitization of news is ruining how we collectively process information. Technology allows us to burrow into echo chambers, exacerbating misinformation and polarization and softening up society for propaganda.
  • With artificial intelligence making audio and video as easy to fake as text, we’re entering a hall-of-mirrors dystopia, what some are calling an “information apocaly
  • the experiment taught me several lessons about the pitfalls of digital news and how to avoid them.
  • I distilled those lessons into three short instructions, the way the writer Michael Pollan once boiled down nutrition advice: Get news. Not too quickly. Avoid social.
  • The Times has about 3.6 million paying subscribers, but about three-quarters of them pay for just the digital version. During the 2016 election, fewer than 3 percent of Americans cited print as their most important source of campaign news; for people under 30, print was their least important source.
  • What do you get for all that dough? News. That sounds obvious until you try it — and you realize how much of what you get online isn’t quite news, and more like a never-ending stream of commentary, one that does more to distort your understanding of the world than illuminate it.
  • On social networks, every news story comes to you predigested. People don’t just post stories — they post their takes on stories, often quoting key parts of a story to underscore how it proves them right, so readers are never required to delve into the story to come up with their own view.
  • the prominence of commentary over news online and on cable news feels backward, and dangerously so. It is exactly our fealty to the crowd — to what other people are saying about the news, rather than the news itself — that makes us susceptible to misinformation.
  • Real life is slow; it takes professionals time to figure out what happened, and how it fits into context. Technology is fast. Smartphones and social networks are giving us facts about the news much faster than we can make sense of them, letting speculation and misinformation fill the gap.
  • I was getting news a day old, but in the delay between when the news happened and when it showed up on my front door, hundreds of experienced professionals had done the hard work for me.
  • I was left with the simple, disconnected and ritualistic experience of reading the news, mostly free from the cognitive load of wondering whether the thing I was reading was possibly a blatant lie.
  • One weird aspect of the past few years is how a “tornado of news-making has scrambled Americans’ grasp of time and memory,” as my colleague Matt Flegenheimer put it last year. By providing a daily digest of the news, the newspaper alleviates this sense. Sure, there’s still a lot of news — but when you read it once a day, the world feels contained and comprehensible
  • What’s important is choosing a medium that highlights deep stories over quickly breaking ones.
  • And, more important, you can turn off news notifications. They distract and feed into a constant sense of fragmentary paranoia about the world
  • Avoid social.This is the most important rule of all. After reading newspapers for a few weeks, I began to see it wasn’t newspapers that were so great, but social media that was so bad.
  • The built-in incentives on Twitter and Facebook reward speed over depth, hot takes over facts and seasoned propagandists over well-meaning analyzers of news.
  • for goodness’ sake, please stop getting your news mainly from Twitter and Facebook. In the long run, you and everyone else will be better off.
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The Suffocation of Democracy | by Christopher R. Browning | The New York Review of Books - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 05 Oct 18 - No Cached
  • In the 1920s, the US pursued isolationism in foreign policy and rejected participation in international organizations like the League of Nations. America First was America alone, except for financial agreements like the Dawes and Young Plans aimed at ensuring that our “free-loading” former allies could pay back their war loans. At the same time, high tariffs crippled international trade, making the repayment of those loans especially difficult. The country witnessed an increase in income disparity and a concentration of wealth at the top, and both Congress and the courts eschewed regulations to protect against the self-inflicted calamities of free enterprise run amok. The government also adopted a highly restrictionist immigration policy aimed at preserving the hegemony of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants against an influx of Catholic and Jewish immigrants. (Various measures barring Asian immigration had already been implemented between 1882 and 1917.) These policies left the country unable to respond constructively to either the Great Depression or the rise of fascism, the growing threat to peace, and the refugee crisis of the 1930s.
  • Today, President Trump seems intent on withdrawing the US from the entire post–World War II structure of interlocking diplomatic, military, and economic agreements and organizations that have preserved peace, stability, and prosperity since 1945.
  • Paul von Hindenburg, elected president of Germany in 1925, was endowed by the Weimar Constitution with various emergency powers to defend German democracy should it be in dire peril. Instead of defending it, Hindenburg became its gravedigger, using these powers first to destroy democratic norms and then to ally with the Nazis to replace parliamentary government with authoritarian rule. Hindenburg began using his emergency powers in 1930, appointing a sequence of chancellors who ruled by decree rather than through parliamentary majorities, which had become increasingly impossible to obtain as a result of the Great Depression and the hyperpolarization of German politics.
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  • Thinking that they could ultimately control Hitler while enjoying the benefits of his popular support, the conservatives were initially gratified by the fulfillment of their agenda: intensified rearmament, the outlawing of the Communist Party, the suspension first of freedom of speech, the press, and assembly and then of parliamentary government itself, a purge of the civil service, and the abolition of independent labor unions. Needless to say, the Nazis then proceeded far beyond the goals they shared with their conservative allies, who were powerless to hinder them in any significant way.
  • If the US has someone whom historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell. He stoked the hyperpolarization of American politics to make the Obama presidency as dysfunctional and paralyzed as he possibly could. As with parliamentary gridlock in Weimar, congressional gridlock in the US has diminished respect for democratic norms, allowing McConnell to trample them even more. Nowhere is this vicious circle clearer than in the obliteration of traditional precedents concerning judicial appointments. Systematic obstruction of nominations in Obama’s first term provoked Democrats to scrap the filibuster for all but Supreme Court nominations. Then McConnell’s unprecedented blocking of the Merrick Garland nomination required him in turn to scrap the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations in order to complete the “steal” of Antonin Scalia’s seat and confirm Neil Gorsuch. The extreme politicization of the judicial nomination process is once again on display in the current Kavanaugh hearings.
  • Like Hitler’s conservative allies, McConnell and the Republicans have prided themselves on the early returns on their investment in Trump. The combination of Trump’s abasement before Putin in Helsinki, the shameful separation of families at the border in complete disregard of US asylum law (to say nothing of basic humanitarian principles and the GOP’s relentless claim to be the defender of “family values”), and most recently Michael Cohen’s implication of Trump in criminal violations of campaign finance laws has not shaken the fealty of the Republican old guard, so there is little indication that even an explosive and incriminating report from Special Counsel Robert Mueller will rupture the alliance.
  • Republicans begin with a systemic advantage in electing senators and representatives, because the Democratic Party’s constituency has become heavily concentrated in big states and big cities. By my calculation every currently serving Democratic senator represents roughly 3.65 million people; every Republican roughly 2.51 million. Put another way, the fifty senators from the twenty-five least populous states—twenty-nine of them Republicans—represent just over 16 percent of the American population, and thirty-four Republican senators—enough to block conviction on impeachment charges—represent states with a total of 21 percent of the American population. With gerrymandering and voter suppression enhancing even more the systemic Republican advantage, it is estimated that the Democrats will have to win by 7 to 11 points (a margin only obtainable in rare “wave” elections) in the 2018 elections to achieve even the narrowest of majorities in the House of Representatives
  • In France the prospect of a Popular Front victory and a new government headed by—horror of horrors—a Socialist and Jew, Léon Blum, led many on the right to proclaim, “Better Hitler than Blum.” Better the victory of Frenchmen emulating the Nazi dictator and traditional national enemy across the Rhine than preserving French democracy at home and French independence abroad under a Jewish Socialist.
  • The fascist movements of that time prided themselves on being overtly antidemocratic, and those that came to power in Italy and Germany boasted that their regimes were totalitarian. The most original revelation of the current wave of authoritarians is that the construction of overtly antidemocratic dictatorships aspiring to totalitarianism is unnecessary for holding power
  • the most apt designation of this new authoritarianism is the insidious term “illiberal democracy.” Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Putin in Russia, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary have all discovered that opposition parties can be left in existence and elections can be held in order to provide a fig leaf of democratic legitimacy, while in reality elections pose scant challenge to their power. Truly dangerous opposition leaders are neutralized or eliminated one way or another.
  • Total control of the press and other media is likewise unnecessary, since a flood of managed and fake news so pollutes the flow of information that facts and truth become irrelevant as shapers of public opinion. Once-independent judiciaries are gradually dismantled through selective purging and the appointment of politically reliable loyalists. Crony capitalism opens the way to a symbiosis of corruption and self-enrichment between political and business leaders. Xenophobic nationalism (and in many cases explicitly anti-immigrant white nationalism) as well as the prioritization of “law and order” over individual rights are also crucial to these regimes in mobilizing the popular support of their bases and stigmatizing their enemies.
  • Both Mussolini and Hitler came to power in no small part because the fascist-conservative alliances on the right faced division and disarray on the left. The Catholic parties (Popolari in Italy, Zentrum in Germany), liberal moderates, Social Democrats, and Communists did not cooperate effectively in defense of democracy.
  • In the five presidential elections of the twenty-first century, Democrats have won the popular vote four times. Two of these four (2000 and 2016) nonetheless produced Republican presidents, since the Electoral College reflects the same weighting toward small, more often Republican states as the Senate. Given the Supreme Court’s undermining of central provisions of the Voting Rights Act (Shelby County v. Holder), its refusal to take up current flagrant gerrymandering cases (Gill v. Whitford for Wisconsin; Benisek v. Lamone for Maryland), and its recent approval of the Ohio law purging its voting rolls (Husted v. Randolph Institute), it must be feared that the Court will in the future open the floodgates for even more egregious gerrymandering and voter suppression.
  • The unprecedented flow of dark money into closely contested campaigns has distorted the electoral process even further. The Supreme Court decision declaring corporations to be people and money to be free speech (Citizens United v. FEC) in particular has greatly enhanced the ability of corporations and wealthy individuals to influence American politics
  • To consolidate his dictatorship, Hitler had to abolish the independent unions in Germany in a single blow. Trump faces no such problem. In the first three postwar decades, workers and management effectively shared the increased wealth produced by the growth in productivity. Since the 1970s that social contract has collapsed, union membership and influence have declined, wage growth has stagnated, and inequality in wealth has grown sharply. Governor Scott Walker’s triumph over public sector unions in Wisconsin and the recent Supreme Court decision striking down mandatory public sector union dues (Janus v. AFSCME) simply accelerate a process long underway.
  • Alongside the erosion of an independent judiciary as a check on executive power, other hallmarks of illiberal democracy are the neutralization of a free press and the steady diminution of basic human rights
  • In Trump’s presidency, those functions have effectively been privatized in the form of Fox News and Sean Hannity. Fox faithfully trumpets the “alternative facts” of the Trump version of events, and in turn Trump frequently finds inspiration for his tweets and fantasy-filled statements from his daily monitoring of Fox commentators and his late-night phone calls with Hannity. The result is the creation of a “Trump bubble” for his base to inhabit that is unrecognizable to viewers of PBS, CNN, and MSNBC and readers of The Washington Post and The New York Times. The highly critical free media not only provide no effective check on Trump’s ability to be a serial liar without political penalty; on the contrary, they provide yet another enemy around which to mobilize the grievances and resentments of his base. A free press does not have to be repressed when it can be rendered irrelevant and even exploited for political gain.
  • the curtailment of many rights and protections Americans now enjoy is likely. Presumably marriage equality will survive, given the sea change in American public opinion on that issue. But the right of businesses and individuals to discriminate against gays is likely to be broadly protected as a “sincerely held religious belief.” Chief Justice John Roberts’s favorite target, affirmative action, is likely to disappear under his slogan that to end racial discrimination, one must end all forms of racial discrimination. And a woman’s right to abortion will probably disappear in red states, either through an outright overturning of Roe v. Wade or more likely through narrower rulings that fail to find any “undue burden” in draconian restrictions that in practice make abortion unavailable. And equal protection of voting rights is likely to be eroded in red states through ever more insidiously designed voter suppression laws and gerrymandering once the Supreme Court makes clear that it will not intervene to curb such measures
  • No matter how and when the Trump presidency ends, the specter of illiberalism will continue to haunt American politics. A highly politicized judiciary will remain, in which close Supreme Court decisions will be viewed by many as of dubious legitimacy, and future judicial appointments will be fiercely contested. The racial division, cultural conflict, and political polarization Trump has encouraged and intensified will be difficult to heal. Gerrymandering, voter suppression, and uncontrolled campaign spending will continue to result in elections skewed in an unrepresentative and undemocratic direction. Growing income disparity will be extremely difficult to halt, much less reverse.
  • Finally, within several decades after Trump’s presidency has ended, the looming effects of ecological disaster due to human-caused climate change—which Trump not only denies but is doing so much to accelerate—will be inescapable. Desertification of continental interiors, flooding of populous coastal areas, and increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, with concomitant shortages of fresh water and food, will set in motion both population flight and conflicts over scarce resources that dwarf the current fate of Central Africa and Syria. No wall will be high enough to shelter the US from these events. Trump is not Hitler and Trumpism is not Nazism, but regardless of how the Trump presidency concludes, this is a story unlikely to have a happy ending.
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Steven Pinker Thinks the Future Is Looking Bright - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ven-pinker-future-science.html future progress enlightenment science
shared by Javier E on 22 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • What’s behind all this good news?The most overarching explanation would be that the Enlightenment worked. The idea that if we — we being humanity — set ourselves the goal of improving well-being, if we try to figure out how the world works using reason and science, every once in a while we can succeed.
  • You have argued that there is such a thing as human nature. Do you think we can transcend it?Part of human nature allows us to control the other part of our human nature. Even though humans tend to be unreasonable, it can’t be the case that we’re incapable of reason — otherwise, you’d never be able to make the argument that we’re being unreasonable. Even if we tend to backslide to irrationality, that doesn’t mean we should indulge that when we are deliberating how to run a society.
  • I was surprised by how much interest there’s been from centrist politicians, who are desperate for a coherent narrative to defend centrist liberalism, cosmopolitanism, open society, from the threats both by populists and by the hard left. I think there is a hunger for a coherent worldview that isn’t just the status quo, the un-Trumpism. We can do better than that. We ought to use reason and science to enhance human well-being.
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  • The value of science is not the value of a bunch of people who call themselves scientists. It’s the concept. It’s also the value of science that tells us when there’s been a failure of reasoning, that identifies the biases and distortions and also points the way to overcome them.
  • So, we need institutions like government to keep us acting rationally?None of us is anywhere close to perfect. Scientists themselves are not terribly, not completely rational. We can set up institutions that result in greater rationality than any of us is capable of individually, like peer review, like free speech, like a free press, like empirical testing — norms and institutions that make us collectively more rational than any of us is individually.
  • Why do you think people continue to hold on to demonstrably unscientific beliefs?It looks like the biggest reason is not because they don’t know the science, but because of their political ideology. The reason that people deny human-made climate change is not that they’re ignorant of climate science, but because they’re on the political right. Conversely, people who accept human-made climate change don’t necessarily understand what’s causing it
  • My own view of the world was radically altered when I looked at data instead of headlines.If history is about all the wars, all the disasters, you’re missing all this incremental improvement that can only be ascertained through data
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Why the Announcement of a Looming White Minority Makes Demographers Nervous - The New Y... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...icans-minority-population.html white whitelash census population history
shared by Javier E on 23 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • Jennifer Richeson, a social psychologist at Yale University, spotted the risk immediately. As an analyst of group behavior, she knew that group size was a marker of dominance and that a group getting smaller could feel threatened. At first she thought the topic of a declining white majority was too obvious to study.
  • Their findings, first published in 2014, showed that white Americans who were randomly assigned to read about the racial shift were more likely to report negative feelings toward racial minorities than those who were not. They were also more likely to support restrictive immigration policies and to say that whites would likely lose status and face discrimination in the future.
  • “It was like, ‘Oh wow, these nerdy projections are scaring the hell out of people,” she said.
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  • Beyond concerns about the data’s repercussions, some researchers are also questioning whether the Census Bureau’s projections provide a true picture. At issue, they say, is whom the government counts as white
  • In the Census Bureau’s projections, people of mixed race or ethnicity have been counted mostly as minority, demographers say. This has had the effect of understating the size of the white population, they say, because many Americans with one white parent may identify as white or partly white. On their census forms, Americans can choose more than one race and whether they are of Hispanic origin.
  • Among Asians and Hispanics, more than a quarter marry outside their race, according to the Pew Research Center. For American-born Asians, the share is nearly double that. It means that mixed-race people may be a small group now — around 7 percent of the population, according to Pew — but will steadily grow. Are those children white? Are they minority? Are they both? What about the grandchildren?
  • “The question really for us as a society is there are all these people who look white, act white, marry white and live white, so what does white even mean anymore?” Dr. Waters said. “We are in a really interesting time, an indeterminate time, when we are not policing the boundary very strongly.”
  • Dr. Myers watched as progressives, envisioning political power, became enamored with the idea of a coming white minority. He said it was hard to interest them in his work on ways to make the change seem less threatening to fearful white Americans — for instance by emphasizing the good that could come from immigration.
  • Dr. Myers and a colleague later found that presenting the data differently could produce a much less anxious reaction. In work published this spring, they found that the negative effects that came from reading about a white decline were largely erased when the same people read about how the white category was in fact getting bigger by absorbing multiracial young people through intermarriage.
  • Race is difficult to count because, unlike income or employment, it is a social category that shifts with changes in culture, immigration, and ideas about genetics. So who counts as white has changed over time. In the 1910s and 1920s, the last time immigrants were such a large share of the American population, there were furious arguments over how to categorize newcomers from Europe.
  • But eventually, the immigrants from eastern and southern Europe came to be considered white.That is because race is about power, not biology, said Charles King, a political science professor at Georgetown University
  • “The closer you get to social power, the closer you get to whiteness,” said Dr. King, author of a coming book on Franz Boas, the early 20th-century anthropologist who argued against theories of racial difference. The one group that was never allowed to cross the line into whiteness was African-Americans
  • the Census Bureau’s projections seemed stuck in an outdated classification system. The bureau assigns a nonwhite label to most people who are reported as having both white and minority ancestry, he said. He likened this to the one-drop rule, a 19th-century system of racial classification in which having even one African ancestor meant you were black
  • “The census data is distorting the on-the-ground realities of ethnicity and race,” Dr. Alba said. “There might never be a majority-minority society; it’s unclear.
  • “Irrespective of the year, or the turning point, the message needs to come out about what the actual facts are,” Mr. Frey said. “We are becoming a much more racially diverse society among our young generation.”
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Spain's far-right Vox party shot from social media into parliament overnight. How? - Wa... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-into-parliament-overnight-how Vox Spain far right politics history culture polarization backlash
shared by Javier E on 05 May 19 - No Cached
  • Whereas successful political movements used to have a single ideology, they can now combine several. Think about how record companies put together new pop bands: They do market research, they pick the kinds of faces that match, and then they market the band by advertising it to the most favorable demographic. New political parties can now operate like that: You can bundle together issues, repackage them and then market them, using exactly the same kind of targeted messaging — based on exactly the same kind of market research — that you know has worked in other places.
  • Opposition to Catalan and Basque separatism; opposition to feminism and same-sex marriage; opposition to immigration, especially by Muslims; anger at corruption; boredom with mainstream politics; a handful of issues, such as hunting and gun ownership, that some people care a lot about and others don’t know exist; plus a streak of libertarianism, a talent for mockery and a whiff of nostalgia
  • All of these are the ingredients that have gone into the creation of Vox.
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  • The important relationships between Vox and the European far right, as well as the American alt-right, are happening elsewhere.
  • there have been multiple contacts between Vox and the other far-right parties of Europe. In 2017, Abascal met Marine Le Pen, the French far-right leader, as Vox’s Twitter account recorded; on the eve of the election, he tweeted his thanks to Matteo Salvini, the Italian far-right leader, for his support. Abascal and Espinosa both went to Warsaw recently to meet the leaders of the nativist, anti-pluralist Polish ruling party, and Espinosa showed up at the Conservative Political Action Conference in the D.C. area, as well.
  • these are issues that belong to the realm of identity politics, not economics. Espinosa characterized all of them as arguments with “the left
  • the nationalist parties, rooted in their own particular histories, are often in conflict with one another almost by definition.
  • The European far right has now found a set of issues it can unite around. Opposition to immigration, especially Muslim immigration, is one of them; promotion of a socially conservative worldview is another.
  • dislike of same-sex civil unions or African taxi drivers is something that even Austrians and Italians who disagree about the location of their border can share.
  • Alto Data Analytics. Alto, which specializes in applying artificial intelligence to the analysis of public data, such as that found on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and other public sources, recently produced some elegant, colored network maps of the Spanish online conversation, with the goal of identifying disinformation campaigns seeking to distort digital conversations
  • three outlying, polarized conversations — “echo chambers,” whose members are mostly talking and listening only to one another: the Catalan secessionist conversation, the far-left conversation and the Vox conversation. 
  • the largest number of “abnormal, high-activity users” — bots, or else real people who post constantly and probably professionally — were also found within these three communities, especially the Vox community, which accounted for more than half of them
  • uncovered a network of nearly 3,000 “abnormal, high-activity users” that had pumped out nearly 4½ million pro-Vox and anti-Islamic messages on Twitter in the past year
  • For the past couple of years, it has focused on immigration scare stories, gradually increasing their emotional intensity
  • all of it aligns with messages being put out by Vox.
  • a week before Spain’s polling day, the network was tweeting images of what its members described as a riot in a “Muslim neighborhood in France.” In fact, the clip showed a scene from recent anti-government riots in Algeria.
  • Vox supporters, especially the “abnormal, high-activity users,” are very likely to post and tweet content and material from a very particular groups of sources: a set of conspiratorial websites, mostly set up at least a year ago, sometimes run by a single person, which post large quantities of highly partisan articles and headlines.
  • he Alto team had found exactly the same kinds of websites in Italy and Brazil, in the months before those countries’ elections in 2018
  • the websites began putting out partisan material — in Italy, about immigration; in Brazil, about corruption and feminism — during the year before the vote.
  • they served to feed and amplify partisan themes even before they were really part of mainstream politics.
  • In Spain, there are a half-dozen such sites, some quite professional and some clearly amateu
  • One of the more obscure sites has exactly the same style and layout as a pro-Bolsonaro Brazilian site, almost as though both had been designed by the same person
  • The owner of digitalSevilla — according to El Pais, a 24-year-old with no journalism experience — is producing headlines that compare the Andalusian socialist party leader to “the evil lady in Game of Thrones” and, at times, has had more readership than established newspapers
  • They function not unlike Infowars, Breitbart, the infamous partisan sites that operated from Macedonia during the U.S. presidential campaign
  • all of which produced hypercharged, conspiratorial, partisan news and outraged headlines that could then be pumped into hypercharged, conspiratorial echo chambers.
  • he Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration. Though the pact received relatively little mainstream media attention, in the lead-up to that gathering, and in its wake, Alto found nearly 50,000 Twitter users tweeting conspiracy theories about the pact
  • Much like the Spanish network that promotes Vox, these users were promoting material from extremist and conspiratorial websites, using identical images, linking and retweeting one another across borders.
  • A similar international network went into high gear after the fire at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue tracked thousands of posts from people claiming to have seen Muslims “celebrating” the fire, as well as from people posting rumors and pictures that purported to prove there had been arson
  • These same kinds of memes and images then rippled through Vox’s WhatsApp and Telegram fan groups. These included, for example, an English-language meme showing Paris “before Macron,” with Notre Dame burning, and “after Macron” with a mosque in its place, as well as a news video, which, in fact, had been made about another incident, talking about arrests and gas bombs found in a nearby car. It was a perfect example of the alt-right, the far right and Vox all messaging the same thing, at the same time, in multiple languages, attempting to create the same emotions across Europe, North America and beyond.
  • CitizenGo is part of a larger network of European organizations dedicated to what they call “restoring the natural order”: rolling back gay rights, restricting abortion and contraception, promoting an explicitly Christian agenda. They put together mailing lists and keep in touch with their supporters; the organization claims to reach 9 million people.
  • OpenDemocracy has additionally identified a dozen other U.S.-based organizations that now fund or assist conservative activists in Europe
  • she now runs into CitizenGo, and its language, around the world. Among other things, it has popularized the expression “gender ideology” — a term the Christian right invented, and that has come to describe a whole group of issues, from domestic violence laws to gay rights — in Africa and Latin America, as well as Europe.
  • In Spain, CitizenGo has made itself famous by painting buses with provocative slogans — one carried the hashtag #feminazis and an image of Adolf Hitler wearing lipstick — and driving them around Spanish cities.
  • It’s a pattern we know from U.S. politics. Just as it is possible in the United States to support super PACs that then pay for advertising around issues linked to particular candidates, so is it now possible for Americans, Russians or the Princess von Thurn und Taxis to donate to CitizenGo — and, thus, to support Vox.
  • as most Europeans probably don’t realize — outsiders who want to fund the European far right have been able to do so for some time. OpenDemocracy’s most recent report quotes Arsuaga, the head of CitizenGo, advising a reporter that money given to his group could “indirectly” support Vox, since “we actually currently totally align.”
  • “Make Spain Great Again,” he explained, “was a kind of provocation. . . . It was just intended to make the left a little bit more angry.”
  • The number of actual Spanish Muslims is relatively low — most immigration to Spain is from Latin America — and the number of actual U.S. Muslims is, relatively, even lower. But the idea that Christian civilization needs to redefine itself against the Islamic enemy has, of course, a special historic echo in Spain
  • “We are entering into a period of time when politics is becoming something different, politics is warfare by another means — we don’t want to be killed, we have to survive. . . . I think politics now is winner-takes-all. This is not just a phenomenon in Spain.
  • As Aznar, the former prime minister, said, the party is a “consequence,” though it is not only a consequence of Catalan separatism. It’s also a consequence of Trumpism, of the conspiracy websites, of the international alt-right/far-right online campaign, and especially of a social conservative backlash that has been building across the continent for years.
  • The nationalists, the anti-globalists, the people who are skeptical of international laws and international organizations — they, too, now work together, across borders, for common causes. They share the same contacts. They tap money from the same funders. They are learning from one another’s mistakes, copying one another’s language. And, together, they think they will eventually win.
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Are Defenses of Free Speech Just Coded Arguments for Innate Differences? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...558971 US crisis trump culture
shared by malonema1 on 01 May 18 - No Cached
  • What attributes define intellectuals on the right and left in the strange era of Donald Trump? That’s the question Paul Krugman raised in a column attempting to explain ideological imbalance among commentators at elite U.S. media organizations. While his account betrayed dubious assumptions about civil society and the value of opinion journalism, it sparked illuminating responses.
  • Again, the survey isn’t a perfect proxy for the opinions of right-leaning intellectuals, but it strongly suggests that there is nothing close to consensus on the right as to whether or not racially disparate outcomes are due to innate group differences. What’s more, while Charles Murray and others have emphasized IQ as a key factor that explains both interracial and intraracial disparities, my impression is that theirs is far from the leading narrative on the right.
  • Even on transgender issues, where Republicans seem most united in public opinion polls, 19 percent say that whether a person is a man or a woman can be different from their sex at birth. Nothing close to consensus exists on this basket of issues.
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  • Three claims most struck me:One of the right’s consensus positions is that innate differences explain and justify the persistence of traditional gender roles. Another consensus position is that racial outcomes are due to “group differences” that are likely innate. One-hundred percent of the free-speech debate is a proxy for people on the right to covertly say that races and sexes are inherently different without fear of censure.
  • A third story covered the Fresno State professor criticized for insulting Barbara Bush upon her death. A fourth reported on a Breitbart reporter who was suspended from Twitter for declaring that 100 percent of transgender people are “mental patients.” A fifth notes that the U.K. now ranks embarrassingly low on the Press Freedom Index. A sixth notes that a British man was fined in court for teaching his dog to do a Nazi salute––he says that he did it as a joke in order to annoy his girlfriend. A seventh praised Kanye West for ostensibly winning a victory for free speech. Those are the first articles that I pulled up, not a random sample, but they illustrate that the site’s coverage of free speech includes many controversies that, boiled down, have nothing to do with “the right to say races and sexes are inherently different without fear of censure,” along with some that do.
  • He concludes his Twitter essay, “The age of Trump is one of racial and gender animus. Trump’s divisiveness and hate have infected every corner of our intellectual landscape, poisoned every discussion.” With his last sentence I concur: “American intellectual life is just one more thing that won’t be healthy again until Trump is gone.”
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Trump: Unfit to Command - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...558074 trump command
shared by Javier E on 16 Apr 18 - No Cached
  • “You don’t go to war with the commander-in-chief you want. You go to war with the commander-in-chief you have.”
  • Yet if any other aspect of U.S. military power were in the same damaged condition as the supreme executive authority, responsible people would pause at going to war at all. If the aircraft were inoperable, the warships unseaworthy, or the troops disaffected—wise decision-makers would refrain from deploying them.
  • All those instruments are in good condition, fortunately. But the person in charge is not. His severe personal legal jeopardy dominates his thoughts and deranges his behavior. That’s a strategic fact at least as real and important as the need to uphold the taboo against chemical weapons.
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  • That same caution should operate with Trump, even if you might otherwise approve any particular decision that emerges from his administration.
  • Even if he’s offering to take you to church, you don’t get into a car with a drunken driver.
  • This president is not in command of himself. He’s obsessed with his own problems. He seethes with rage and resentment for all the world to view—and those emotions are visibly distorting his decision-making.
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Tech Billionaires Want to Destroy the Universe - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...503963 artificial simulation gnostic history
shared by Javier E on 14 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • “Many people in Silicon Valley have become obsessed with the simulation hypothesis, the argument that what we experience as reality is in fact fabricated in a computer; two tech billionaires have gone so far as to secretly engage scientists to work on breaking us out of the simulation.”
  • Ignore for a moment any objections you might have to the simulation hypothesis, and everything impractical about the idea that we could somehow break out of reality, and think about what these people are trying to do.
  • The two billionaires (Elon Musk is a prime suspect) are convinced that they’ll emerge out of this drab illusion into a more shining reality, lit by a brighter and more beautiful star. But for the rest of us the experience would be very different—you lose your home, you lose your family, you lose your life and your body and everything around you
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  • Every summer we watch dozens of villains plotting to blow up the entire universe, but the motivations are always hazy. Why, exactly, does the baddie want to destroy everything again? Now we know.
  • It’s not just Elon Musk, who stated that ‘there’s a one in a billion chance we’re living in base reality,’ who believes this—in an extraordinary piece of hedge-betting, the Bank of America has judiciously announced that the probability that waking life is just an illusion is, oh, about fifty-fifty
  • Tech products no longer feel like something offered to the public, but something imposed: The great visionary looks at the way everyone is doing something, and decides, single-handedly, to change it.
  • once social reality is the exclusive property of a few geegaw-tinkerers, why shouldn’t physical reality be next? With Google’s Calico seeking hedge-fund investment for human immortality and the Transformative Technology Lab hoping to externalize human consciousness, the tech industry is moving into territory once cordoned off for the occult. Why shouldn’t the fate of the entire cosmos be in the hands of programmers hiding from the California sun, to keep or destroy as they wish?
  • Unsurprisingly, nobody bothered to ask us whether we want the end of the world or not; they’re just setting about trying to do it. Silicon Valley works by solving problems that hadn’t heretofore existed; its culture is pathologically fixated on the notion of ‘disruption.’
  • Its real antecedents are the Gnostics, an early Christian sect who believed that the physical universe was the creation of the demiurge, Samael or Ialdaboath, sometimes figured as a snake with the head of a lion, a blind and stupid god who creates his false world in imperfect imitation of the real Creator. This world is a distorted mirror, an image; in other words, a kind of software.
  • Kabbalist mysticists, Descartes with his deceiving demon, and Zhuangzi in his butterfly dream have all questioned the reality of their sense-experiences, but this isn’t a private, solipsistic hallucination; in the simulation hypothesis, reality is a prison for all of us
  • there’s always been the lingering suspicion that our reality is somehow unreal—it’s just that what we once thought about in terms of dreams and magic, cosmic minds or whispering devils, is now expressed through boring old computers, that piece of clunky hardware that waits predatory on your desk every morning to code the finest details of your life.
  • The Gnostics were often accused by other early Christians of Satanism, and they might have had a point: Many identified the jealous, petty, prurient God of the Old Testament with the Demiurge, while sects such as the Ophites revered the serpent in the Garden of Eden as the first to offer knowledge to humanity, freeing them from their first cage
  • In his book, Baudrillard also talks about virtual realities and deceptive images, but his point isn’t that they have clouded our perception of the reality beyond. The present system of social images is so vast and all-encompassing that it’s produced a total reality for itself; it only lies when it has us thinking that there’s something else behind the façade. Baudrillard, always something of an overgrown child, loved to refer to Disneyland: As he pointed out, it’s in no way a fake—when you leave its gates, you return to an America that’s just one giant Disneyland, a copy without an original, from coast to coast
  • ‘The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none.
  • Digital and cinematic media actively construct our experience of reality. The world of film stars and theme parks, social media and supermarket shelves designed to look like something out of an old-time grocery—this is the one we live in. Our Silicon Valley Satanists have made a very questionable assumption: What if there’s nowhere to break out into?
  • the virtual is also real. Why is a universe composed of software necessarily any less real than one composed of matter? Computer simulation is of course only a metaphor, a new-ish way of describing what was once expressed in oneiric or theological terms. They can’t really mean that our universe was built in something similar to the machine you’re using to read these words right now;
  • simulation is a process independent of whatever divine or technological apparatus is used to achieve it. The real argument is that, by some unknown mechanism, what we see is only a function of what really exists. But we’ve known since Kant that our sense-perception can never give us a full account of the material world; all this can be said of any conceivable reality
  • Outside the simulation hypothesis there are scientists who propose that our universe is a single black hole, with what we perceive as matter being a hologram emerging from a two-dimensional ring of information along its event horizon; there are mathematical Platonists who, following Max Tegmark, consider the world to be a set of abstract mathematical objects, of which physical objects are a crude epiphenomenon. If matter doesn’t ‘really’ exist, there’s no need for anything to be rooted anywhere; we might live suspended in a looping chain of simulations and appearances that coils back on itself and never has to touch the ground
  • Elon Musk and his co-religionists aren’t actually blinded by artifice; they’re fixated on a strange and outdated notion that somewhere, there has to be a concrete reality—they’ve just decided that it’s not this one
  • What’s far more worrying is the fact that the people who want to destroy the only world we really have are also the people increasingly in charge of it.
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In 'Hitler,' an Ascent From 'Dunderhead' to Demagogue - The New York Times - 0 views

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  • Mr. Ullrich offers a fascinating Shakespearean parable about how the confluence of circumstance, chance, a ruthless individual and the willful blindness of others can transform a country — and, in Hitler’s case, lead to an unimaginable nightmare for the world.
  • Mr. Ullrich underscores Hitler’s shrewdness as a politician — with a “keen eye for the strengths and weaknesses of other people” and an ability to “instantaneously analyze and exploit situations.”
  • Hitler “was so thoroughly untruthful that he could no longer recognize the difference between lies and truth” and editors of one edition of “Mein Kampf” described it as a “swamp of lies, distortions, innuendoes, half-truths and real facts.”
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  • Hitler was known, among colleagues, for a “bottomless mendacity” that would later be magnified by a slick propaganda machine that used the latest technology
  • Hitler adapted the content of his speeches to suit the tastes of his lower-middle-class, nationalist-conservative, ethnic-chauvinist and anti-Semitic listeners,”
  • He peppered his speeches with coarse phrases and put-downs of hecklers. Even as he fomented chaos by playing to crowds’ fears and resentments, he offered himself as the visionary leader who could restore law and order.
  • Hitler increasingly presented himself in messianic terms, promising “to lead Germany to a new era of national greatness,” though he was typically vague about his actual plans.
  • reading his speeches in retrospect, “it seems amazing that he attracted larger and larger audiences” with “repeated mantralike phrases” consisting largely of “accusations, vows of revenge and promises for the future.”
  • But Hitler virtually wrote the modern playbook on demagoguery, arguing in “Mein Kampf” that propaganda must appeal to the emotions — not the reasoning powers — of the crowd. Its “purely intellectual level,” Hitler said, “will have to be that of the lowest mental common denominator among the public it is desired to reach.”
  • Because the understanding of the masses “is feeble,” he went on, effective propaganda needed to be boiled down to a few slogans that should be “persistently repeated until the very last individual has come to grasp the idea that has been put forward.”
  • Hitler’s rise was not inevitable, in Mr. Ullrich’s opinion. There were numerous points at which his ascent might have been derailed, he contends; even as late as January 1933, “it would have been eminently possible to prevent his nomination as Reich chancellor.”
  • He benefited from a “constellation of crises that he was able to exploit cleverly and unscrupulously” — in addition to economic woes and unemployment, there was an “erosion of the political center” and a growing resentment of the elites
  • The unwillingness of Germany’s political parties to compromise had contributed to a perception of government dysfunction
  • Hitler’s ascension was aided and abetted by the naïveté of domestic adversaries who failed to appreciate his ruthlessness and tenacity, and by foreign statesmen who believed they could control his aggression
  • Early on, revulsion at Hitler’s style and appearance, Mr. Ullrich writes, led some critics to underestimate the man and his popularity, while others dismissed him as a celebrity, a repellent but fascinating “evening’s entertainment.”
  • Hitler had a dark, Darwinian view of the world. And he would not only become
  • also the avatar of what Thomas Mann identified as a turning away from reason and the fundamental principles of a civil society — namely, “liberty, equality, education, optimism and belief in progress.”
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