#litany against discourse posting

[theindefinitearticle]

The shadows of great and terrible d20 discourse are passing beneath me but luckily under airitime law they cannot touch me

[not-terezi-pyrope]

So, are we reaching the point in the AI discourse yet when it is acceptable to point out that these kinds of posts are insane hysteria, or am I still meant to pretend that this is a reasonable reaction to ML/AI advances in polite company?

"A lich reanimating the corpse of humanity" "the most harmful thing to the human species besides climate change" this is deranged. Why are people incapable of having actual discussions about AI/how to handle automation and not talking about the former like they're reading a litany against Satan incarnate?

[adhdo5]

I am NOT starting this day auspiciously

[surpriserose]

I cant find my dune litany against discourse post but im feeling it rn

[sputnikaguya]

Into the psyche of Toshio Matsumoto

One of the most seminal Japanese visual artists of the 20th century, Toshio Matsumoto(1932-2017), pioneered the 60s avant-garde experimental filmmaking and multimedia. Matsumoto’s wild and visionary work went on to heavily influence Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange”. Subversive and radical in his approach- he presented a body of work that, infused with surrealist strategies, made a discordance not only artistically groundbreaking but politically charged. 

Shortly after graduating, Matsumoto worked on his first short called Ginrin (1955), an experimental PR film. Ginrin was made at Shin-Riken Film Company, in collaboration with the members of Jikken Kōbō, an artist group of the post-war collective, consisting of composers and artists like Shozo Kitadai and Katsushiru Yamaguchi, who would later work on the Godzilla series. 

A contemporary to the post-war creative elements of Japan like Shuji Terayama and Yukio Mishima, Matsumoto's work remains strikingly relevant to this day. Ahead of his time, Matsumoto’s avant-garde collides tradition with pop culture. In an interview with Tate, he alludes to pop culture’s stimulatory effect on him, “At the time, we understood pop art as a new movement which was represented by artists such as Warhol, Lichtenstein, or Wesselmann. There were discussions about the boundaries between pop art and concept art or kitsch; however, I have never heard of any other term being used.” 

His 1973 short film, Mona Lisa, fuses those boundaries by deriving direct references from Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol. Using the mass famous mysterious image of the inner subjective life of Mona Lisa, Matsumoto experiments with a litany of colors, evocative and bright, constantly changing, applied to Mona Lisa- the sole still element of the film. 

Matsumoto developed in the 1960s, what he called ‘neo-documentarism’, a documentary type that was rejecting its traditional objective nature for one and confronting the subjectivities of an echoed, internal life. Made around the same time as Chris Marker’s La Jetee- a monumental feat in changing the course of cinema from being a medium of moving images to stillness- a sci-fi tale in a series of images; Matsumoto’s The Song of Stone (1963) too, weaves an abstract collection of still images into an experimental epiphany. 

The idea of stonecutters carving into stone,  breathing life into the inanimate- juxtaposed against the stillness of the images, almost as still as its stony subject, pushes the boundaries of the film as a medium. Strikingly sublime, The Song of Stone attempts at changing the discourse of how cinema can be perceived. 

This exploration of mediums to convey a euphoric and provocative stream of ideology is important to Matsumoto’s art. Featured on Tate, MoMA, New York, and London, his art paves the way to the frenetic psychedelia that he endorsed, amidst the still objectivity that life offers. Responsive to the unconventional and unspoken, his films always narrate a structurally adventurous tale. In his most famous film Bara no Soretsu (Funeral Parade of Roses), Matsumoto retells the myth of Oedipus featuring a transvestite trying to move up their way through the euphoric nightlife of Tokyo hostess clubs. 

In art exhibitions of Hong Kong's Everything Visible is Empty, and the Japanese Expanded Cinema Revisited at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, he presented a dynamic hyper-sensory stream of projections culminating his electric video synthesizer pieces like Metastasis (1971) and Mona Lisa (1973) with a post-war culture that stands in direct contrast with them. Matsumoto’s key works such as Atman (1975), Engram (1987), Phantom (1975) is an examination of his psyche, that reaches far beyond the realm of normality and offers captivating chaos. 

Toshio Matsumoto experimented in an array of genres ranging from iconography and architecture to political undertones in pop culture. Aiming at creating more than flicker films, his robust immersive work with a distinct sound influenced forever the normal sense of psychosomatic rigidity.

[arcticdementor]

The massacres at three massage parlors in the Atlanta area this week, leaving eight human beings dead, others injured, and their families scarred, were horrifying. Read this deeply moving story about the son of one of the women killed to remind yourself of this. It’s brutal. The grief will spread and resonate some more.

But this story has also been deeply instructive about our national discourse and the state of the American mainstream and elite media. This story’s coverage is proof, it seems to me, that American journalists have officially abandoned the habit of attempting any kind of “objectivity” in reporting these stories. We are now in the enlightened social justice world of “moral clarity” and “narrative-shaping.”

…

We should not take the killer’s confession as definitive, of course. But we can probe it — and indeed, his story is backed up by acquaintances and friends and family. The New York Times originally ran one piece reporting this out. The Washington Post also followed up, with one piece citing contemporaneous evidence of the man’s “religious mania” and sexual compulsion. It appears that the man frequented at least two of the spas he attacked. He chose the spas, his ex roommates said, because he thought they were safer than other ways to get easy sex. Just this morning, the NYT ran a second piece which confirms that the killer had indeed been in rehab for sexual impulses, was a religious fanatic, and his next target was going to be “a business tied to the pornography industry.”

We have yet to find any credible evidence of anti-Asian hatred or bigotry in this man’s history. Maybe we will. We can’t rule it out. But we do know that his roommates say they once asked him if he picked the spas for sex because the women were Asian. And they say he denied it, saying he thought those spas were just the safest way to have quick sex. That needs to be checked out more. But the only piece of evidence about possible anti-Asian bias points away, not toward it.

And yet. Well, you know what’s coming. Accompanying one original piece on the known facts, the NYT ran nine — nine! — separate stories about the incident as part of the narrative that this was an anti-Asian hate crime, fueled by white supremacy and/or misogyny. Not to be outdone, the WaPo ran sixteen separate stories on the incident as an anti-Asian white supremacist hate crime. Sixteen! One story for the facts; sixteen stories on how critical race theory would interpret the event regardless of the facts. For good measure, one of their columnists denounced reporting of law enforcement’s version of events in the newspaper, because it distracted attention from the “real” motives. Today, the NYT ran yet another full-on critical theory piece disguised as news on how these murders are proof of structural racism and sexism — because some activists say they are.

…

And on and on. It was almost as if they had a pre-existing script to read, whatever the facts of the case! Nikole Hannah-Jones, the most powerful journalist at the New York Times, took to Twitter in the early morning of March 17 to pronounce: “Last night’s shooting and the appalling rise in anti-Asian violence stem from a sick society where nationalism has been stoked and normalized.” Ibram Kendi tweeted: “Locking arms with Asian Americans facing this lethal wave of anti-Asian terror. Their struggle is my struggle. Our struggle is against racism and White Supremacist domestic terror.”

When the cops reported the killer’s actual confession, left-Twitter went nuts. One gender studies professor recited the litany: “The refusal to name anti-Asianess [sic], racism, white supremacy, misogyny, or class in this is whiteness doing what it always does around justifying its death-dealing … To ignore the deeply racist and misogynistic history of hypersexualization of Asian women in this ‘explication’ from law enforcement of what emboldened this killer is also a willful erasure.”

In The Root, the real reason for the murders was detailed: “White supremacy is a virus that, like other viruses, will not die until there are no bodies left for it to infect. Which means the only way to stop it is to locate it, isolate it, extract it, and kill it.”

Trevor Noah insisted that the killer’s confession was self-evidently false: “You killed six Asian people. Specifically, you went there. Your murders speak louder than your words. What makes it even more painful is that we saw it coming. We see these things happening. People have been warning, people in the Asian communities have been tweeting, they’ve been saying, ‘Please help us. We’re getting punched in the street. We’re getting slurs written on our doors.’” Noah knew the killer’s motive more surely than the killer himself.

None of them mentioned that he killed two white people as well — a weird thing for a white supremacist to do — and injured a Latino. None pointed out that the connection between the spas was that the killer had visited them. None explained why, if he were associating Asian people with Covid19, he would nonetheless expose himself to the virus by having sex with them, or regard these spas as “safer” than other ways to have quick sex.

They didn’t because, in their worldview, they didn’t need to. What you see here is social justice ideology insisting, as Dean Baquet temporarily explained, that intent doesn’t matter. What matters is impact. The individual killer is in some ways irrelevant. His intentions are not material. He is merely a vehicle for the structural oppressive forces critical theorists believe in. And this “story” is what the media elites decided to concentrate on: the thing that, so far as we know, didn’t happen.

…

But notice how CRT operates. The only evidence it needs it already has. Check out the identity of the victim or victims, check out the identity of the culprit, and it’s all you need to know. If the victims are white, they don’t really count. Everything in America is driven by white supremacist hate of some sort or other. You can jam any fact, any phenomenon, into this rubric in order to explain it.

The only complexity the CRT crowd will admit is multiple, “intersectional” forms of oppression: so this case is about misogyny and white supremacy. The one thing they cannot see are unique individual human beings, driven by a vast range of human emotions, committing crimes with distinctive psychological profiles, from a variety of motives, including prejudices, but far, far more complicated than that.

There’s a reason for this shift. Treating the individual as unique, granting him or her rights, defending the presumption of innocence, relying on provable, objective evidence: these core liberal principles are precisely what critical theory aims to deconstruct. And the elite media is in the vanguard of this war on liberalism.

…

The more Asian-Americans succeed, the deeper the envy and hostility that can be directed toward them. The National Crime Victimization Survey notes that “the rate of violent crime committed against Asians increased from 8.2 to 16.2 per 1000 persons age 12 or older from 2015 to 2018.” Hate crimes? “Hate crime incidents against Asian Americans had an annual rate of increase of approximately 12% from 2012 to 2014. Although there was a temporary decrease from 2014 to 2015, anti-Asian bias crimes had increased again from 2015 to 2018.”

Asians are different from other groups in this respect. “Comparing with Black and Hispanic victims, Asian Americans have relatively higher chance to be victimized by non-White offenders (25.5% vs. 1.0% for African Americans and 18.9% for Hispanics). … Asian Americans have higher risk to be persecuted by strangers … are less likely to be offended in their residence … and are more likely to be targeted at school/college.” Of those committing violence against Asians, you discover that 24 percent such attacks are committed by whites; 24 percent are committed by fellow Asians; 7 percent by Hispanics; and 27.5 percent by African-Americans. Do the Kendi math, and you can see why Kendi’s “White Supremacist domestic terror” is not that useful a term for describing anti-Asian violence.

But what about hate crimes specifically? In general, the group disproportionately most likely to commit hate crimes in the US are African-Americans. At 13 percent of the population, African Americans commit 23.9 percent of hate crimes. But hate specifically against Asian-Americans in the era of Trump and Covid? Solid numbers are not yet available for 2020, which is the year that matters here. There’s data, from 1994 to 2014, that finds little racial skew among those committing anti-Asian hate crimes. Hostility comes from every other community pretty equally.

The best data I’ve found for 2020, the salient period for this discussion, are provisional data on complaints and arrests for hate crimes against Asians in New York City, one of two cities which seem to have been most affected. They record 20 such arrests in 2020. Of those 20 offenders, 11 were African-American, two Black-Hispanic, two white, and five white Hispanics. Of the black offenders, a majority were women. The bulk happened last March, and they petered out soon after. If you drill down on some recent incidents in the news in California, and get past the media gloss to the actual mugshots, you also find as many black as white offenders.

…

The media is supposed to subject easy, convenient rush-to-judgment narratives to ruthless empirical testing. Now, for purely ideological reasons, they are rushing to promote ready-made narratives, which actually point away from the empirical facts. To run sixteen separate pieces on anti-Asian white supremacist misogynist hate based on one possibly completely unrelated incident is not journalism. It’s fanning irrational fear in the cause of ideological indoctrination. And it appears to be where all elite media is headed.

[bartsugsy]

anyway here’s my opinion on litetally everything. no one asked but i still answered bc i’m bored:

me and kate @snowbasttien rewatched wedding - present last weekend and had a great time, it was great, would encourage everyone to rewatch and bask in robron going on some insane emotional journeys and being in love - on rewatch we both agreed that the story felt pretty balanced to us, likely because we didn’t have to deal with the hiatuses in between, but i suppose that differs person to person

but it reminded me how much good potential the ellis/billy stuff has when it’s interweaved with robron and that’s exciting

i’m enjoying it sm rip

re yesterday’s ep:

robert has this big habit of trying to play god with the people around him in order to get his way. it’s not a good thing and there’s a reason why aaron would be pissed about it. they’re married, yes, but robert once again took the decision to act on something affecting aaron without talking to aaron first

although frankly he wasn’t even that mad and f r a n k l y it was 90% foreplay prove me wrong

aaron inviting ellis to move in on the cheap just to spite his husband (but in a sexy way)? iconic

foreplay at its finest

they boned about that later that night

aaron spent a solid 2 hours telling rob he might not ever get to touch his dick again

rob: :(

aaron, already pouncing on robert: fine ily

circling back to robert’s literal god complex

rmr when robert destroyed gordon’s letter and aaron was so upset, because rob made a decision for aaron that honestly was aaron’s to make. rob thought he was doing the right thing but mostly he was just taking aaron’s agency away.

which is exactly what he’s doing here. aaron is telling robert he’s fine and is going to work on finding a way to accept billy living in the village and even if that’s a fucking bold faced lie, it’s still not robert’s place to take aaron’s decision out of his hands

and again, i feel monumentally bad for robert, because aaron historically has had issues with not talking about his feelings - and this has almost always led to aaron doing something dangerously reckless, or making horrible choices. like, i too would be concerned and want to encourage him to open up more.

but maybe instead encouraging therapy would be a better way to go lmao

rather than just deciding to slap a “quick fix” on the problem (that relies on people acting the way you want them to) (oh robert) (a little puppet master boy) (he just loves aaron and wants to protect him :( my sons)

so anyways i feel bad for them both

and i don’t think aaron is quite as a ok as he keeps saying lmao

maybe he’ll be fine forever

maybe i’ll just write some fic about it

that i will never finish

maybe productivity will take over my body we don’t know

maybe aaron will flip and do something terrible who knows

also i mentioned this earlier but so rarely do i feel compelled to root for robert’s schemes to actually work bc it’s much funnier to watch him scramble around for increasingly insane solutions

but graham.... bleh

like i genuinely think if joe was here rather than replacement-joe i might at least enjoy the home farm scenes slightly more bc all i can think at the moment is

how much of a 180 graham’s character took as soon as joe left lmao

it’s so silly and inconsistent and i don’t care enough about graham to fix it with meta lol

robert is a moron but no one can say he’s not pretty fuckin tough to go up against when he wants to be

he used homophobia accusations to get off of a murder charge he’s a fuckin icon

graham doesn’t know him though so maybe he doesn’t really know this

idk i guess i support robert crushing graham to pieces, joe rolling over in his grave and graham being so embarrassed that he disappears forever

bye g-dog

it’s much more fun to watch robert go up against people i care about lmao

where’s lachlan

having said this, i would be down with watching things get worse for robert before ultimately getting better? depends on how long they wanna string this out for i guess?

i’ve just realised how long this post is but i have MORE THINGS TO SAY

i think people were talking yesterday about how aaron isn’t contributing to the surrogacy fund and bc i missed the discourse i didn’t get to put my opinion forward on that

which is that one might assume that if you’re discussing a big and costly life decision, the natural reaction a couple might have would be to sit down, make a little savings plan, talk finances etc

aaron got as far as “it’s expensive” and robert was immediately like FEAR NOT MY LOVE I AM GOING TO GET US MONEY VIA CRIME

to which aaron was like sigh this is the man i have married

yes it is aaron you knew this about him going in

rob was determined and aaron does trust robert, for whatever reason, so he’s letting rob do this shit (on the caveat that aaron gets veto power on the stunts robert wants to pull)

i don’t really think that aaron contributing via crime makes sense for the character - yes he’s a dodgy little shit but historically, aaron committing crime has always been tied to aaron having some sort of breakdown lmao. he’s done a lot of work to like... not do that lmao. he’s morally grey in a different (and lesser) way than robert and always has been since day one. i just... idk i suppose i don’t understand the need for him to be an entirely different character lmao. i like that he’s marginally objectively better as a person than robert - but still not quite good enough that he actively opposes robert doing crime things

it’s an interesting point of growth in their relationship since 2016 when aaron really was just

not ok with any of rob’s litany of insnae schemes lmao at any point lmao

which resulted in a lot of break ups lolol

now they’re so much more comfortable in their relationship and in each other and aksjskjdjdjd beautiful it’s beautiful

no one even tried 2 divorce the other 😭 2016 ROBRON ARE SHAKING

THEY COULD NEVER

but honestly i just don’t see where robert gave aaron space to contribute outside of doing crime which aaron isn’t running to do

thankfully

particularly given how boldly arrogant and poorly hidden robert and nicola’s plans were lmao

that shit isn’t aaron’s forte anyway is it

he’s more about

stealing things

except he gets caught doing that a lot lmao

maybe he shouldn’t crime

having said this i love that he’s getting involved this week now that things have gotten to a point of genuine crisis

that’s when i think it makes sense for him to join in

or like... minor things, reluctantly and out of love for robbo

not because he just enjoys fucking people over when he sees the opportunity to lmao

i’m into it

this post is so long and i’m not even sorry

i have more feelings but i’m gonna stop here

in conclusion the secret to a long relationship is inviting ur sister in law’s boyfriend to live next door and pay cheap rent just to make ur husband mad as sexy foreplay

tyfyt

[stoweboyd]

An End To Predictions, A Call For Revolution

I think it is very hard to make predictions about 2019 because there are so many wildcards. Or, as Buckminster Fuller said,

We have a hard time getting out of the way of something we can’t see coming.

Instead of specific predictions -- like Trump being impeached and convicted, or Google buying Slack -- I will discuss a few trends, more generally.

I have left aside the churning whirlwind of technological advance, such as the rise of AI, and the host of technologies that form what many are calling the fourth industrial revolution. Those are creating a foundational acceleration underlying the world's economies, a disruptive and destabilizing force, acting like a current in deep seas. If you are sailing in the same direction as the current, it is a great help, but if you seek to head a different way the current will slow and deflect your efforts. Most importantly, the current is outside of our control: we have to fight it, sail with it, or stay on land.

Polarization and Populism

There is a deep cultural movement that is leading to tectonic shifts across society, manifesting itself in polarization and populism, on the historic right and left. So across the world we are witnessing the rise of populists, like the far right parties in Europe and Trump's rise in the US, but at the same time we are experiencing a transition away from conventional left-of-center parties contending with conventional right-of-center parties, as demonstrated by the rise of Macron's En Marche in France, and the the surge of interest in social democratic ideas in the US Democratic party, as typified by Bernie Sanders and Alex Ocasio-Cortez.

One way to think of this is a growing disillusionment with the left-versus-right polarity of the post-WWII era, and a shift to an up-versus-down dynamic, where the poor, working class, and middle class -- the precariat -- realize that the game is rigged by the elite against the interests of everyone else.

Far-right politicians will attempt to leverage fear of immigrants and xenophobia to back away from liberal immigration laws and international treaties that regulate the international movement of people. Brexit is in part motivated by these desires, and if Brexit is concluded it will be an outgrowth more of anti-immigrant culltural bias than supposed desires for economic sovereignty and self-determination.

In the US, metropolitan elites continue to think that the 'left-behinds' in flyover county are misguided bumpkins voting against their own best interests, rather than seeing that the neoliberal flat-world free trade regime of the past 30 years played havoc with the heartland's economic health and future, and neither the GOP or the Democrats really paid much attention. Witness Hilary skipping the rust belt states in the final months of the 2016 election, and what that led to.

These are global trends, but they will manifest differently across the world, and in distinctly local fashion in different locales.

I believe Macron has lost his way, and since he has no deep party system to help him he will fail to make the changes that he believed he had a mandate to do. Instead, it turns out that only the metropolitan elite and business sector is with him. Will a reformulated socialist party regain control, or will the far right inherit the ashes of his term? Will a socialist populism arise from the Yellow Vests, or is a far-right populism the likely outcome? Make your bets.

In the US, the GOP is facing the defection of suburban white women and large numbers of college-educated men: are there enough far-right and disenfranchised left-behind Republicans to continue as a meaningful party, once the dust cloud around Trump settles? I don't think so. (Note: Trump will either resign, be impeached and convicted, or wither in madness: he can't possibly be reelected.)

Also note that the separatist movement in Catalonia is a manifestation of populism -- in this case the desire of people living in Catalonia (principally Catalans) to be able to secede from Spain. Their motives are many: desire for economic and legal controls, desire for independence from Spain (a historically fraught reltaionship), and relief from paying more taxes to Spain than they get in return. Does Spain have the right to deny them their right to self-government, simply because they were annexed a long, long time ago? We'll see.

Capitalism and Gigantism

A second deep cultural movement is playing out in the West: a growing distrust of unfettered capitalism and the economic inequality it has engendered over the past 30 years, along with concern with the most obvious economic manifestation of today's capitalism: the rise of gigantic monopolistic corporations, like the tech giants and major multinationals in finance, manufacturing, media, agriculture, pharma and health care, and other industries.

This slops into the growing concerns about climate and ecological change, but is principally grounded in the precarity built into modern economic life: the broken social contract in the relationship between worker and employer, and the disinterest in modern governments to close the gap through either regulation of employers or through taxation and redistribution of wealth.

Note: I think of climate change as being critically important -- another area of broken promises by governments -- but it has to be an aspect of resolution of other issues, principally unfettered capitalism. Regulation, trade agreements, and taxation are all needed here, and immediately. We can't confront 'climate change' without embracing a litany of economic actions, all at once. Yes, I know: we only have a decade.

I expect that a discussion of new laws and regulations will be prominent in 2019, such as the national movements for higher minimum wages, medicare for all, portable benefits for freelancers and contract employees, prohibitions against anti-union tactics, and the banning of forced arbitration for employees in many instances, such as sexual harassment cases.

The surge of unionism in media is one example of counter-capitalist collective action, and I expect it will spread into many other 'white collar' and 'no collar' jobs, as the tide turns toward regulation of business instead of self-regulation.

As just one manifestation, consider the fall from grace of Facebook in 2018, as a consequence of its exploitation of data arising from its services. But this controversy is actually about the duopoly of ad revenues it shares with Google, which is a story of gigantism and the lack of regulatory oversight by the world's governments.

We should anticipate a forceful swinging of the pendulum in the opposite direction, which could even lead to the breakup of large corporations -- like Google, Amazon, Microsoft and counterparts in other non-tech sectors -- into smaller, more focused companies with the intent of decreasing their power, their amassing of capital, and opening the playing field to smaller competitors. Note that in the very near term acquisitions by the giants leading to market consolidation in many industries may continue at the blinding pace we're seen in recent years, but in a year or two -- if regulatory opposition to bigness becomes entrenched as I believe it may -- we may see a major decline in such acquisitions. So predicting the acquisition of Slack by one of the internet giants might make sense now, but may be blocked in 2020.

Moving from 'Normal' Organizations to 'Revolutionary' Organizations

The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge. | Steven Hawking

Hawking sets context for what I have been calling a 'movement' since 2005 or so, the movement to drive a transition from 'normal' industrial-era organizations that are role-centered, closed, slow-and-tight, hierarchical, and backwards-focused to 'revolutionary' post-industrial-era organizations that are human-centered, open, fast-and-loose, heterarchical, and forwards-focused. Like other movements, this work revolution is defined by the dynamics of opposing forces. On one side, we have those who explicitly or implicitly uphold the principles and cultural foundations of 'normalcy', and who actively or passive-aggressively oppose those, on the other side, who advocate revolutionary change in work culture, practices, and values.

I've picked the terms 'normal' and 'revolutionary' with intention. Specifically, I have borrowed them from Thomas Kuhn's central arguments in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a work that laid out the analogous dynamics in scientific revolutions.

Kuhn argued that there is a cyclic form to science, where the work of a generation of scientist in any given field establishes a paradigm around which research and discourse are centered, like Newtonian physics. It started with various incoherent notions of motion (the pre-paradigm phase), but the central premises of gravity, and Newton's laws of motion led to the development of a second phase, where 'normal' science began, and the dominant paradigm structured the science for a considerable period of time, establishing consensus on terminology, methods, and the sorts of experiments that might lead to increased insights1.

Over time, normal science may lead to anomalies in findings -- unexpected results from experiments, questions that can't be answered -- and these can lead to questioning the old paradigm as its weaknesses are apparent. This can lead to crisis, and that can spark a paradigm shift, like quantum physics as an alternative to Newton's.

The crisis and the shift are not necessarily smooth, and there is often active disagreement and contention between the advocates of the previous, 'normal' paradigm, and the revolutionaries pushing for the new paradigm. This can lead to breaks in the scientific discipline, with huge controversies and great antagonism, since the reputations and livelihoods of the scientists are at stake.

At some point, the crisis ends, usually as a result of the establishment of a new paradigm, which eventually becomes 'normal' mainstream science, with new methods, terminology, and established approaches for experimentation.

We are at a time of such a crisis, although it's not in the traditional realm of science, per se. The crisis is in the world of business, and it is really predicated on scientific revolutions in several areas that impinge on business, namely cognitive science, behavioral economics, social psychology, and related fields. (And in the background behind the soft incursion of these revelatory social science findings, we can feel the looming hard technologies of the fourth industrial revolution.)

In the past few decades enormous advances have been made in our understanding of how people perceive the world and their relationships to others, how we reason (or don't), how people 'make decisions', how productive teams 'work', and how cultural norms impact our behavior. However, very little of this science has reached the C-suite. Consider, as only one example, the persistent problems related to diversity and the foundational issues of cognitive bias. However, few in leadership are educated in these issues, and no coherent new paradigm of organizational theory and practice has yet fully emerged.

At present, we are left with the strange dichotomy of entrepreneurial capitalism -- with capital growth and shareholder value as the highest aims -- and the independent considerations of making the world a better place, making the workplace more equitable, just, and less precarious, and attempting to construct the world of work so that people can achieve greater autonomy, meaning, and purpose in their lives, and not just a paycheck. These cross forces define a growing area of tension in the discourse about the future of work, the transformation of the 21st century business, and how to balance the desires of the many sorts of people holding stakes in these companies.

At the same time, we see growing interest in the principle that a revolution is business operations is needed to confront and overcome a long list of 'anomalies' in business and the economic sphere. The combination of increased economic pressures in a sped-up, global marketplace and the desire for greater stability and purpose for everyone at work leads to some broad trends that could stand as a proxy for the 'revolution' in organizational theory and practice:

Human-centered not role-centered. We lose a great deal when we limit people to only thinking about or acting on a limited set of activities in business. A machine press operator can have a brilliant insight that saves the copy millions, and a field sales lead can come back from a meeting with a customer suggestion for a breakthrough new product. But not if they are punished for stepping outside the painted lines on the floor. People can be larger than their job descriptions, if we let them.

Open not closed models of thinking and operations. This means a 'yes, and' mindset, where we consider alternatives rather than rejecting them because they are novel. This means activity rooting out systemic anti-creative and anti-curiosity patterns in business dogma. It means embracing Von Foester's Empirical Imperative: Always act to increase the set of possibilities.

Fast-and-loose not slow-and-tight operations. Agile, flexible, and adaptive methods of organizing, cooperating, and leading are needed. A less bureaucratic management style would increase innovation, and lead to building business operations around experiments rather than only well-established processes.

Heterarchical not hierarchical operations. The bronze age rule of kings, supposedly selected by the gods and legitimized by their personal charisma has led to terrible results, with narcissistic sociopaths all too often calling the shots. The occasional Steve Jobs or Yves Chouinard does not disprove the problems inherent to top-down-only organizations, especially in a time of great change and uncertainty. Organizational structure is another means to the ends that companies are created to effect, and serves as a powerful barrier to change when treated as sacred and inviolable.

Forward-focused, not tradition-bound. We need to adopt a new paradigm for business, one that explicitly breaks with a great deal of what passes for conventional wisdom, organized around new science, new forms of social connection, and leveraging the possibilities in the points made above. And science is not standing still, so we must incorporate new understanding into our work and the operations of business.

This is predicated upon stating -- explicitly -- that a revolution is necessary, and that a long list of practices and principles will need to be identified as problematic and rooted out. This is exactly what I founded Work Futures to do, as a research and educational institute, and in 2019 I intend to push hard to advance that agenda.

This revolution has started, but the we are in the early days of what will eventually -- decades from now, perhaps -- be a wholesale recasting of business. But the world of work cannot be changed independently of the larger world. It is one part of a larger set of changes that envelope and animate it.

The larger societal and economic trends touched on in the previous sections -- Polarization and Populism, Capitalism and Gigantism, and the Fourth Industrial Revolution -- are imparting enormous stress on the human sphere. And, as a result, it is very hard to predict what will happen in 2019. However, I believe that by 2023 a great deal of the revolution -- this transition from the 'normal' to a 'revolutionary' form of business -- will have become more clear, as the new paradigm becomes more well-defined, and as the larger world shifts to internalize new approaches to the tectonic forces at work, at all scales.

I reposted the fourth section of this essay as a piece all by itself: Moving from 'Normal' Organizations to 'Revolutionary' Organizations.

Paraphrased from Wikipedia. ↩︎

[prettycottonmouthlamia]

Also while I'm here on the soap box for a moment I've seen a couple of posts to this effect but I want to push back against this idea that a lot of the bad discourse on Tumblr left with the porn ban. First of all...no, it really did not. The same shitty dynamics that existed before still exist now. Second, it creates this tacit endorsement of the porn ban as a good thing, when in reality it was an incredibly harmful decision (still waiting on that reversal staff!) that had some unintended positive consequences.

By that I mean, it drove a lot of the anti-sex, anti-porn people off the platform. Which sounds a bit bizarre, but I've seen a lot less of those kind of people on Tumblr and a lot MORE of those people on Twitter than I did in the past, and I think that's for a few reasons.

There's no porn on the platform anymore. I think a big part of what drives these people is a sort of Christian repulsion and attraction towards sex. They don't want it discussed, they don't want porn, but at the same time, for most people, sex is a part of their lives almost inextricably. They still consume sex, sexuality, and pornography, and they need to repent for it, so it becomes important to crusade against it. This loses its meaning once the deed is actually done. Now there is no more porn, but this also means that they have lost a huge amount of their actual drive for pursuing it, and honestly, these kind of people are probably really boring and not great to actually conversate with. This creates a need to continue chasing discourse, and this drives people towards Twitter. Twitter not only still allows porn, so they can feel that bit of smug superiority talking about human anatomy they learned in middle school, but also has a literal litany of people who will just fucking argue with you. It's a gold mine for discourse. You can say that dressing barefoot for your partner is unconsensual kink for everyone else and people will batter down the doors to fight you. Probably the most importantly...Twitter has no real incentive to get rid of porn. Porn is really good for driving engagement and Twitter is all about those engage of ments. It might eventually because the tech world is full of wannabe moralists like Jobs but for now it looks mostly safe. This means that the discourse will never stop. The crusade never has to end. TL;DR: Removing porn created a really hollow experience for the people who were anti-sex and driving a not-insignificant amount of the garbage discourse on this website. They left because of it.

[storm-of-feathers]

Wait was there a post I missed?

Anyway the answer to what would I do if Alex Storm-of-Feathers got cancelled would be make a “I should have left you on that street corner where I found you… but I didn’t” memes except instead of “left” it’s “blocked” and instead of “street corner” it’s “JC MPreg Post”.

Seriously, if someone where to try and cancel Alex (again) I wouldn’t give a shit because they seem to be a decent person who’s self aware enough to recognize The Bad Takes and what issues one actually needs to prioritize to leave this world better than we entered it. Random discourse isn’t fucking meaningful to people starving because of wage theft, or suffering from inequitable pay due to systemic racism or any other litany of far more pressing issues.

All you’re doing is harassing a person online because you’re either not willing or able to get your head out of the echo chamber you’ve stuck it in, or trying to make yourself feel like you’re doing good (you’re not) by performing actions that make you feel like you have the moral high ground (you don’t).

Maybe centuries from now (or hopefully decades) when we’ve found long term solutions to major problems fandom discourse might actually be our biggest issue. That world is a goddamn utopia. For now stick to your increasingly detached from reality echo chamber where fictional characters in a niche interest are what causes global warming, suffering under systemic prejudices, or whatever the fuck tries to cripple the human condition next.

Quit fucking harassing normal people on the internet the only cause you’re championing is acts of intentional cruelty against others.

DAWN IT WAS FOR AN ASK GAME I AM GOING TO FUCKING CRY THIS IS SO SO SO SO SO SWEET I LOVE THIS SO MUCH I LOVE THIS AAAAAAAAAAAAA I AM GOING TO CRY

[vinayv224]

Trump’s executive order on social media is legally unenforceable, experts say

President Trump announcing his executive order on social media in the oval office on Thursday | Photo by Doug Mills-Pool/Getty Images

Legal experts say the executive order is largely toothless — but it could set a symbolic precedent about government censorship of the internet

Despite President Donald Trump’s threats that Republicans might shut down social media companies in retaliation for fact-checking his tweets, the executive order he signed on Thursday unsurprisingly doesn’t come anywhere close. Even in the order’s more limited scope, legal experts say it will be difficult to enforce.

Trump’s new order aims to limit social media companies’ legal protections if they don’t adhere to unspecified standards of neutrality. It comes just two days after Twitter fact-checked two of his tweets that made misleading claims about voting by mail in the 2020 elections.

“Twitter is completely stifling FREE SPEECH, and I, as President, will not allow it to happen!” Trump tweeted on Tuesday. On Wednesday, Trump followed up by threatening to “strongly regulate social media companies” or close them down altogether, and cautioned that a “big action” is coming.

The order calls for limiting protections that a law called Section 230 offers tech companies like Twitter, Facebook, and Google by not holding them responsible for what users post on their platforms. (Recode’s Sara Morrison explains everything you need to know about Section 230 here.) To do this, the order tasks regulators at the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission to create new rules that could pull back some of those protections, potentially opening them up to a litany of lawsuits for libel, defamation, and other complaints.

“Currently, social media giants like Twitter receive an unprecedented liability shield based on the theory that they are a neutral platform, which they are not,” Trump said in the Oval Office on Thursday. “We are fed up with it. It is unfair, and it’s been very unfair.”

The order specifically mentions Twitter six times — more often than its bigger and arguably more influential competitors Facebook and YouTube.

It argues that companies like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube “are engaging in selective censorship that is harming our national discourse” that allegedly favors certain political viewpoints over others. Some conservatives have long argued — without real evidence — that social media platforms are biased against their politics.

Critics — including reportedly, some of Trump’s most conservative advisors — have warned the order could set a dangerous and unconstitutional precedent that the President can use executive powers to effectively censor companies for political reasons. Many legal experts say the order is largely toothless and will be challenged in court.

“The most obvious thing I would say about this order is that it’s not enforceable — it’s kind of a piece of political theater,” Kate Klonick, a professor of internet law at St. John’s University told Recode (Klonick was speaking about a draft of the order which was similar to what ended up being signed on Thursday).

Still, the order is being viewed as a symbolic threat to social media companies, particularly as they continue to grapple with moderating contentious speech.

Conservatives accusing the social media companies of liberal bias point to times when these platforms have banned conservative figures, such as far-right commentator Alex Jones and right-wing activist Laura Loome, after they repeatedly violated the sites’ harassment policies.

Many liberals, meanwhile, have argued that these platforms aren’t doing nearly enough to moderate the conspiracy theories, hoaxes, and politically misleading content shared on their sites — such as President Trump’s Facebook ads that purported to be links to the US census but instead directed people to a survey for his reelection campaign. After Recode and others reported on the misleading ads, Facebook eventually took them down.

Another unintended side-effect of Trump’s executive order could impact his own tweets: Tech companies might become “more aggressive about policing messages that press the boundaries,” as The New York Times reported, to protect themselves from being sued without the protection of Section 230.

“This is a hopeless quagmire to enter,” Former FTC chairman Bill Kovacic, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, told Recode. Kovavic said the order presents immediate legal challenges, and that the bipartisan FTC and FCC will likely be hesitant to enforce this. “There should be conservatives objecting too, because what happens if a future President who’s a Democrat gets tired of listening to Fox — or can’t stand the National Review anymore?”

The FCC and the FTC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

As I previously explained, aside from getting the FTC and FCC onboard, Trump also has serious challenges ahead in trying to enforce this order, primarily because it arguably violates the First Amendment.

[T]he First Amendment does not limit Twitter, Facebook, Google, or any social media platform. It limits the government, not private companies, from infringing on people’s freedom to say what they please. That means you can’t go to jail for, say, blogging unfounded conspiracy theories about the Illuminati, but you can get kicked off a social network — just like you could get fired from your job for lying or for saying something racist to a colleague.

Ironically, it’s actually Trump — not Twitter — who is wading into unconstitutional territory here. If Trump were to try to shut down social media companies in retaliation for Twitter’s fact-check of his tweets, that would be a clear violation of the First Amendment. It would be sure to invite a fierce legal challenge and would signal an alarming attempt by the president of the United States to wield his executive power against one of the most fundamental rights in this country.

Trump can, however, try to get legislation passed that would selectively cull tech companies’ legal protections unless they follow certain standards of neutrality, and his executive order tasks the Attorney General to draft a proposal for such a law. But Democrats — some of whom have also been pushing for reform to Section 230, though not in the way Trump is suggesting — would need to also get on board in order to tally enough votes to pass the legislation through the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives.

In the meantime, the big question is what happens next for social media companies. Will they start to roll back the new policies they’ve incrementally put in place around policing hate speech, harmful posts, and misleading information?

“I don’t think [social media companies] will change their content moderation policies overnight. It really depends how the public reaction to executive order is,” said Klonick. Twitter and other companies could “play a little bit of chicken,” to see if people pursue legal action against them — or they could try to seek a court injunction to stop enforcement of the order.

Twitter declined to comment and Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

from Vox - All https://ift.tt/2ZKWekv from Blogger https://ift.tt/36JkyVp via IFTTT

[pamphletstoinspire]

Catholic Physics - Reflections of a Catholic Scientist - Part 50

Story with images:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/catholic-physics-reflections-scientist-part-50-harold-baines/?published=t

The Theology of Science - fiction: IV. End -Times

Armageddon in Revelation, from "Israel my Beloved" website

"Because SF primarily deals with the future, it must inevitably deal with the end of the world, and thus SF overlaps more closely with apocalyptic literature than with any other type of religious writing... [and] focuses on eschatology -- ideas about 'the last days', the end of the world as we know it and the dawning of a radically new era." Gabriel McKee, The Gospel According to Science Fiction

In this post, the fourth of the series, I'm going to focus on works for which the religious attitudes of two SF authors cover the range from atheist to true believer.  And as the quote above suggests, we're talking about end-times -- the Apocalypse, Armageddon, the Ball is Over.  For the SF author, this can mean the end of the world -- earth -- the end of the Universe, or the end of everything (from Creatio ex nihilo to Annihilatio ad nihilum).

There are a host of stories dealing with end - times, ranging from post atomic - war destruction of civilization, destruction of earth by collision with asteroids, alien take-overs of the world, or the final end of the Universe.  Rather than giving a catalog of these, I'm going to discuss two classics that span religious attitudes, from atheist to Catholic faithful. Surveys of SF apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic works are given in the References*.

END TIMES WITHOUT GOD - "CHILDHOOD'S END"

An Overlord, from Infinispace.net

Childhood's End, the classic by Arthur C. Clarke, is a story about a benevolent take over of earth by aliens ("the Overlords") who look like the common image of the devil - horns, wings, tail and all that. The Overlords institute a benevolent dictatorship, eliminating nuclear fission and other explosive missiles, want and crime. “Utopia was here at last: its novelty had not yet been assailed by the supreme enemy of all Utopias — boredom.”

However, it was not to give mankind Utopia that the Overlords came to Earth.  Rather, they were acting as nannies for a new humankind, and to prevent mankind from destroying itself until that new man emerged. That new, improved species was to be derived from the children of the generation visited by the Overlords. They would be endowed with supernatural psychic powers, and after developing these powers during a maturation period on earth, would join with the Supermind that had desired this change.  They would leave earth in a pillar of fire and as they left, destroy their birthplace:

“There was nothing left of Earth. They had leeched away the last atoms of its substance. It had nourished them, through the fierce moments of their inconceivable metamorphosis, as the food stored in a grain of wheat feeds the infant plant while it climbs towards the Sun.” Childhood's End.

Now, there is nothing of God in this, unless you equate the Supermind, which is composed of the composite minds of many species. to God. The origin and precise nature of the Supermind is not discussed in the story, but then of course if it is a supermind, what can our poor intelligence make of it.  Clarke's bias against theism is revealed early on in the book by the remarks of one of his characters:

“Science is the only religion of mankind.”   and

“Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the nonexistence of Zeus or Thor, but they have few followers now.” Childhood's End

Given Clarke's proposal that psychic powers, supermind and all such stuff, constitute the next step in evolution, one wonders how seriously to take the dicta in the quotes above.  Much more faith is required to believe in supernatural psychic powers than to believe in God and His only begotten Son.  But, as G.K. Chesterton aptly put it:

"It’s the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense." G.K. Chesterton, Fr. Brown in The Oracle of the Dog

and

"You hard - shelled materialists were all balanced on the very edge of belief — of belief in almost anything."G.K. Chesterton, Fr. Brown in The Miracle of Moon Crescent

(Those are the quotes that gave rise to the saying, attributed to Chesterton by mistake:

"When a man stops believing in God he doesn’t then believe in nothing, he believes anything." American Chesterton Society.)

Now it seems in the critique above, I have given short shrift to "Childhood's End".  That was not my intention.  Fifty-five years ago when I first read it, I was moved.  Today on re-reading it (after my conversion) I find it unsatisfying and shallow as an aid to appreciate the meaning of end-times.

ATOMIC WAR, APOCALYPSE AND THE CHURCH -- "A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ"

First Edition Dust Jacket, by George Sottung

Beloved of both SF fans and non-SF fans, is the classic "A Canticle for Leibowitz", a book which has sold over a million copies and is still in print.

Preparing for this post, I reread it; the message of the book is still fresh and moving.  Rather than summarize the plot (go to the link above for that), I want to expound on that message. (Better yet, read the free pdf download of the book, or buy it -- you'll want to reread it.)

The story takes places in three historical periods:

Fiat Homo (Let there be Man): The first period is in the 26th century, several hundred years after the "Flame Deluge", an atomic war that destroys civilization and engenders a host of monstrous mutant births. The populace, calling themselves "Simpletons", have risen up against the establishment -- killing scientists, academics, government officials -- and against the learning that led to this catastrophe.  Books are burnt, technological devices destroyed in the rage of the survivors.  An order of monks had been founded some years earlier by a Jewish convert to Catholicism, Leibowitz, who had been an atomic weapons scientist.  The special mission of the monks was to save the remnants of learning; each monk is to be a "booklegger", carrying books in a bindle - stiff to a place of safety.  Leibowitz himself was martyred, burnt with his books.

Fiat Lux (Let there be Light): The second period is 500 years later.  The rebirth of science takes place, partially in the Abbey of St. Leibowitz (he has been canonized by the Pope in New Rome).  A monk of the Leibowitzian order invents a human - powered dynamo to power an arc light, illustrating the new theories of a theoretical genius, a royal bastard (the kingdom is Texarkana).   Tensions between the Church and the state rise again, as in the past.

Fiat Voluntas Tua (Thy Will be Done): The third period is some 600 years later.  Science and technology have risen again: atomic weapons, interstellar travel (with a few colonies), computers, automated roads are here, to the consternation of the Abbot of the St. Leibowitz monastery. State and Church have reached an accommodation, much as today--most of the populace are unbelievers or Catholic in name only.  There is tension between the two superpowers, the Asian Coalition and the Atlantic Confederacy.  The tension grows into an atomic war; even greater destruction is wrought than in the preceding flame deluge, but a contingent of the Order of St. Leibowitz carries civilization and the Church to the stars, to the new colonies.

All the above is bare bones, dry as dust, and conveys little of the power and beauty of the book. I'm going to try to do that with some selected quotes and context. (For a fuller exposition of the plot, again, please refer to the linked article.)

Fiat Homo: Brother Francis falls into the uncovered remains of a fallout shelter, containing relics of Saint Leibowitz, is terrified and prays a litany for salvation from the Flame Deluge:

"A spiritu fomicationis,

Domine, hibera nos.

From the lightning and the tempest,

O Lord, deliver us.

From the scourge of the earthquake,

O Lord, deliver us.

From plague, famine, and war,

O Lord, deliver us.

"From the place of ground zero,

O Lord, deliver us.

From the rain of the cobalt,

O Lord, deliver us.

From the rain of the strontium,

O Lord, deliver us.

From the fall of the cesium,

O Lord, deliver us.

"From the curse of the Fallout,

O Lord, deliver us.

From the begetting of monsters,

O Lord, deliver us.

From the curse of the Misborn,

O Lord, deliver us.

A morte perpetua,

Domine, libera nos.

"Peccatores,

te rogamus, audi nos.

That thou wouldst spare us,

we beseech thee, hear us.

That thou wouldst pardon us,

we beseech thee, hear us.

That thou wouldst bring us truly to penance,

te rogamus, audi nos." p. 16 (Bantam Edition).

Fiat Lux Brother Kornhoer has invented a dynamo and electric arc lamp, amazing the great scientist Thon Taddeo (repeat of Galileo or Newton?) who has come to investigate the Leibowitz memorabilia.  A discourse on scientific achievements of the past and the preservation of knowledge by the Church follows.

"Now a Dark Age seemed to be passing. For twelve centuries, a small flameof knowledge had been kept smoldering in the monasteries; only now were there minds ready to be kindled. Long ago, during the last age of reason, certain proud thinkers had claimed that valid knowledge was indestructible--that ideas were deathless and truth immortal. But that was true only in the subtlest sense, the abbot thought, and not superficially true at all. There was objective meaning in the world, to be sure: the nonmoral logos or design of the Creator; but such meanings were God's and not Man's, until they found an imperfect incarnation, a dark reflection, within the mind and speech and culture of a given human society, which might ascribe values to the meanings so that they became valid in a human sense within the culture. For Man was a culture-bearer as well as a soul-bearer, but his cultures were not immortal and they could die with a race or an age, and then human reflections of meaning and human portrayals of truth receded, and truth and meaning resided, unseen, only in the objective logos of Nature and the ineffable Logos of God. [emphasis added] Truth could be crucified; but soon, perhaps, a resurrection." p. 133, ibid.

And so the age of science begins again and again, the Church is the wet - nurse of the new "logos of nature".

Fiat Voluntas Tua The Church has had an interstellar vehicle of its own ready for missionary work to the interstellar colonies and, with nuclear annihilation threatening within a short time, decides to send two Bishops and a group from the Leibowitz Abbey-priests, brothers, sisters, civilians and children - to the Centauran colony. (The Bishops are sent to maintain apostolic succession.) The Abbot, Fr. Zerchi, speaks to the group:'

" 'You will be years in space. The ship will be your monastery. After the patriarchal see is established at the Centaurus Colony, you will establish there a mother house of the Visitationist Friars of the Order of Saint Leibowitz of Tycho. But the ship will remain in your hands, and the Memorabilia. If civilization, or a vestige of it, can maintain itself on Centaurus, you will send missions to the other colony worlds, and perhaps eventually to the colonies of their colonies. Wherever Man goes, you and your successors will go. And with you, the records and remembrances of four thousand years and more. Some of you, or those to come after you, will be mendicants and wanderers, teaching the chronicles of Earth and the canticles of the Crucified to the peoples and the cultures that may grow out of the colony groups. For some may forget. Some may be lost for a time from the Faith. Teach them, and receive into the Order those among them who are called. Pass on to them the continuity. Be for Man the memory of Earth and Origin. Remember this Earth. Never forget her, bu t-- never come back.' Zerchi's voice went hoarse and low. 'If you ever come back, you might meet the Archangel at the east end of Earth, guarding her passes with a sword of flame. I feel it. Space is your home hereafter. It's a lonelier desert than ours. God bless you, and pray for us.' " p. 269, ibid.

Brother Joshua, after much soul-searching decided to accept the invitation to be the Abbott for the Visitationist Friars and be ordained a priest.  He climbs into the spaceship as nuclear bombs are falling to the east, slaps his sandals together, shaking the dust from them [see Matt 10:14] and whispers "sic transit gloria mundi" .

I wish that the sequel, the story of the interstellar mission, had been written...and, were I thirty years younger, I would try to do so myself.

REFERENCES

Wikipedia article on SF Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic SF

The Gospel according to Science Fiction (Chapter 10, "The Last Days [and After]). Gabriel McKee.

*One very fine apocalyptic SF novel by Nancy Kress, "After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall", was published after these references; it deals with destruction of civilization by aliens and the attempted recovery.

From a series of articles written by: Bob Kurland - a Catholic Scientist

[morganbelarus]

The Punishing Ecstasy of Being a Reddit Moderator

These are the rules: Users of /r/aww aren’t allowed to post about dogs that are dying, or sick, or just back from the vet. No posts about cats just adopted off the street; no bird-with-an-injured-beak stories. Cheerful descriptions of animals, however, are very much on point. Accompanying an image of a huge dog in a car’s passenger seat: “This is Ben. He has a beard. And he is human sized. We get fun looks in traffic.” Next to an image of a cat under elaborate blankets: “Our cat is obsessed with blanket forts, so we made him this.”

These standards of adorable positivity are important to me, because I’m one of the moderators of /r/aww, the cute animal subreddit. In case that seems trivial, allow me to remind you of how powerful pet memes are online: As of this writing, the page has 19 million subscribers, and it’s growing fast. Across the other subreddits that I moderate—/r/pokemon, home to a litany of imagined monsters; /r/Party­Parrot, home to dancing birds—I oversee a couple million more subscribers. My job is to make and enforce rules for all of them.

Before these, I watched over other subreddits: /r/food, /r/Poetry, /r/LifeProTips, and dozens more. I got my first Reddit mod job, overseeing /r/pokemon, in 2014, when I was a senior in college. The volunteers put out a call for people to join their ranks, and I applied, writing that I wanted to bulk up on meaningful hobbies before I joined the world of full-time work. A week later, I was taken in.

Arielle Pardes

The Inside Story of Reddit's Redesign

Virginia Heffernan

Our Best Hope for Civil Discourse Online Is on … Reddit

Brian Barrett

For Russia, Unraveling US Democracy Was Just Another Day Job

There are fewer than 500 paid employees at Reddit, but tens of thousands of us volunteer moderators, for 14 billion pageviews a month. (Advance Publications, which owns WIRED’s publisher, Condé Nast, is a Reddit shareholder.) My peers and I see every post and comment that comes in, one by one. We check every one against each subreddit’s rules. Our rules.

At /r/aww, people don’t always submit pictures of kittens and puppies. Sometimes they post gore porn, or threats to find me and hurt me. My rules are both obvious (kittens are great; no gore porn, no threats) and designed to prevent misuse of the platform (no social media links or handles, and no spamming). At /r/pokemon, I block pictures of, say, caterpillars, because those aren’t Pokémon, are they? No, no, they aren’t.

/r/aww is the 10th largest subreddit. Every one of the 19 million people there is pseudonymous, and many abuse their relative anonymity. But there are also of course the good users, our singing birds. Like /u/Shitty_watercolour, a user who paints scenes that come up in the comments and then posts them. Or /u/Poem_for_your_sprog, the user who appears without warning and replies to posts exclusively in verse.

Once, on /r/AskReddit, someone invited health inspectors to describe the worst violations they’d ever seen. A user named /u/Chamale responded with a story. “My stepdad used to be a baker,” Chamale began. The stepdad’s bakery was an authentic re-creation of an 18th-­century French fortress, and one day a health inspector came by; she was initially wary of the stonework walls and the doorless entryways, but the stepfather was able to convince her that these 18th-­century touches took nothing away from his commitment to the highest health standards. Then, as the inspector was ending her visit, she walked into a doorless building attached to the bakery. There stood an escaped cow licking all of the bread loaves.

Soon, this reply came from /u/Poem_for_your_sprog:

My name is Cow,

and wen its nite,

or wen the moon

is shiyning brite,

and all the men

haf gon to bed –

i stay up late.

i lik the bred.

Reddit has been called a lot of things: a “vast underbelly,” a “cesspool,” “proudly untamed.” And it is complicated. But it’s the good parts that I’m here to protect.

Sometimes that means fighting zombies. Across Reddit, unused accounts pile up, the ghostly remains of a million people who have just tried out the site for a day and then given it up. What you have to look out for is when these older accounts, long since dead and forgotten, suddenly come to life—because they can be dangerous.

One night I came across a post submitted by a user named /u/Magnolia­Quezada. The title of the post was “I miss you so much,” and it consisted of a picture of two dogs, a husky and a yellow Lab, hugging over a fence. At first glance, the author seemed like a normal redditor. The account had been created 11 months earlier, a modestly respectable duration. Every account has a badge that shows its age, and older accounts are rarer and better established. Someone who’s been around is seen as one of us. Because /u/MagnoliaQuezada was many months old, it was able to bypass our subreddit’s homegrown spam filters, living and digital. But on closer inspection, it hadn’t posted a single thing. And now, having seemingly come back to life, it had shown up in my queue.

I could see that /u/MagnoliaQuezada’s user history was blank. And I could see that the hugging-dogs image was kind of blurry. That’s because it had been uploaded and shared and redownloaded so many times. Image quality goes down when photographs are compressed and recompressed by websites as they circulate online. The image had been stolen.

I checked the comments on the post. There was just one, from none other than /u/MagnoliaQuezada:

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Gibberish, perhaps the result of a malfunctioning bot or someone just typing anything to see whether their comments were automatically filtered by our moderation bots. I was now confident I was dealing with a scammer.

From dawn to dusk, scammers—be they bots, trolls, or propagandists—scour the internet searching for pictures or memes that have gone viral in the past: comfort foods, videos of things falling over, puppies. Often puppies. (Cats are also popular tools for the undead, but there are so many cats on the web that it’s tough to know which cats will attract eyeballs.) By sharing puppies, they hope that you will appreciate them, upvote them, and share them, and in so doing lend the zombie account the further appearance of credibility. It’s hard to go wrong with dogs hugging over a fence. It’s tough to accuse someone of being a foreign agent for showing you a pic of a six-week-old Labradoodle.

Had the post gained traction, it would have elevated the user—or bot—behind /u/MagnoliaQuezada, bringing him or her (or it) closer to the 19 million eyes on /r/aww. And that could have made it easier for MagnoliaQuezada to share less obviously lovable things, like links to websites where its owners could say or do whatever they wanted. The corpse might have thrived as a spammer.

But it didn’t, because shortly after its resurrection, /u/MagnoliaQuezada had the misfortune to run into me. I banned her/him/it, muting her/his/its voice. For my 19 million aww subscribers, /u/Magnolia­Quezada never existed. It’s not enough to take away a zombie’s privileges, to warn it to play nice. It’s a zombie. Kill it.

The undead hordes of unused accounts grow larger by the day as Reddit pushes upward toward 400 million active monthly users. Sure, these dormant accounts might be reanimated by their owners—or they might be bought on the gray market on sites like playerup.com or epicnpc.com. Accounts might be hawked as “very active, verified, 25k+ post karma, 225k+ comment karma, 7 gold, natural name, organic only.” A four-year-old account with a few thousand points (or karma, as redditors call it—a score accrued when other people like your posts) can run you hundreds of dollars. You can find YouTube videos telling you how to get started.

I don’t know who /u/MagnoliaQuezada really was, but if I had to guess, I’d say he/she/it was an account farmer—someone trying to gain traction so they could sell the user name. Revisiting the account later, I saw that the posts I’d removed had also been deleted by the owner, erasing the evidence, leaving MQ ready to attempt another fresh start. It’ll have to be on another subreddit, though; with the account quietly banned, no more of its posts will show up on /r/aww.

I ban or mark as spam dozens of these accounts a month, and I’m far from the most active moderator on Reddit. But our queues fill up fast, and sometimes we need to sleep. So zombies probably sneak through as often as we catch them. I’m limited because I go after them account by account, manually noting and checking behavior. Though Reddit supports us and gives us tools to work with, /r/aww’s line of defense mainly comes down to 20 human moderators and three bots. We all do this, pouring in our time, and still things slip by us. One of my co-moderators—I’ll call him Elliot—wanted to do better.

By sharing popular photos of, say, dogs hugging over a fence, scammers hope that you will appreciate them, upvote them, and share them, and in so doing lend their zombie account further appearance of credibility.

Oranit Kittragul

One day last March, Elliot was reading a 2015 article from The Guardian about two former employees of an unnamed “troll enterprise” in Saint Petersburg, Russia—the now-famous Internet Research Agency. Elliot is in his mid-thirties, an engineer. He was intrigued by the article’s descriptions of the trolls’ strategies. They’d work in groups to support each other by commenting on and voting for one another’s posts, to simulate popularity in a way that looked real.

It was clever stuff. But to Elliot, a four-year veteran Reddit moderator, it wasn’t that clever. One thing that caught his eye in the Guardian article was a detail buried in the 12th paragraph: “The trolls worked in teams of three. The first one would leave a complaint about some problem or other, or simply post a link, then the other two would wade in.” To Elliot, that seemed trackable.

Laptop balanced on the arm of the living room couch, he went to work on a script that would look for groups of users who followed each other around the site and interacted frequently. To find them, his basic script scraped through all the public posts on any page, made a list of people who often replied to one another, and spit the list out into a spreadsheet. The program wasn’t all that sophisticated. He didn’t really even expect it to work. But then it flashed to life, and at once, Elliot’s spreadsheet filled with hundreds of hits. Too many hits. He checked the first result: users arguing about aerosol chemicals in the /r/news subreddit.

The accounts were indeed replying to each other in multiple threads, but they might just be friends—false positives. So Elliot started scanning through his results manually, looking for things that more clearly set off his moderator alarm bells. He looked for anything that seemed Russia-­related: discussions of the Syrian civil war, Donald Trump, MAGA, cuck, Hillary Clinton, Pizzagate, Benghazi. For hours, he worked through the list at home and at his office. Finally he had a short list: 46 accounts, all of them behaving in ways the Guardian article described.

Elliot was a big deal on Reddit. I brag about my subscriber numbers, but his dwarfed mine. Across his subreddits lived nearly 100 million users, and that kind of power comes with perks—important people listen. Elliot sent CEO Steve Huffman a chat message with his short list, along with a question: Do I have something here?

Huffman forwarded Elliot’s list to other staffers. Soon, Elliot was in an email chain with several of them, and he sent links to dozens of suspicious accounts. The excitement Elliot felt at this moment, the nervous anticipation, is something I envy. To a volunteer mod, the chance to catch the enemy in its tracks is a high we’re all chasing. We sort through queues of posts, hundreds at a time, getting trolled and insulted and shat on by the internet—for one moment like this one.

Elliot got a reply the next day.

“We appreciate your perspective on this!” wrote Michael Gardner, a Reddit data scientist. “Overall, the activity from these accounts looks like normal activity by frequent commenters.”

Elliot hadn’t found any Russians, in other words, nor any spammers or bots, according to headquarters. But Elliot wasn’t deterred. He kept looking. This time, he changed his methods, looking at one specific subreddit: /r/The_Donald, infamous home of posts such as “THIS IS ON YOU CUCK SCHUMER AND BITCH PELOSI,” with a link to a Breitbart news article about the failed Republican health care bill. Elliot makes no bones about why he went after /r/The_Donald looking for bots: He suspected that if there was Russian activity anywhere, it would be there.

This time, Elliot used his code to track users who shared suspicious domain names on the site, rather than user interaction patterns. Quickly, he found one such domain: geotus.army, which was apparently only ever shared on /r/The_Donald. Clicking it, he found it redirected to usa­really.com, a known Russian propaganda site. Elliot checked the user histories of the people sharing the suspicious links. Beyond spreading the links, they were largely inactive. Zombielike.

Elliot was powerful, but he was limited to acting on the subreddits he controlled. He wanted these accounts banned sitewide, so he took this new information to the staff as well, who said they’d look into it.

A few days later, he still hadn’t heard from corporate whether they were planning to take action. And this time he felt sure he had found something—something that needed to be made known. Because it didn’t seem like the company was doing anything, he wrote up a public post with links to all of the accounts he’d found. He hit publish right before leaving for the gym, on the morning of September 20, 2018.

Twenty minutes later, when Elliot arrived for his workout, he set down his things and checked his phone. There were 127 messages waiting for him. Over the next few days, Newsweek wrote about his findings. NBC interviewed him. Reddit banned the domains he’d found, along with a number of the accounts sharing them. He’d actually uncovered an effort to share concealed links to disinformation on the site. And I am still, at minimum, crazy jealous and crazy proud. Because a volunteer did this.

Stories like Elliot’s aren’t common for Reddit mods, but they aren’t unheard of either. Elliot himself cites the influence of several other moderators who uncovered Iranian propaganda on the site, as well as the guidance of spam-hunting expert mods who got him interested in this specific kind of tracking to begin with.

Which is to say: If we sometimes rise to the occasion of, say, fighting propaganda, it’s because we’re drawing from a deep camaraderie that has developed over thousands of more mundane interactions.

There are plenty of people who think redditors, gamers, internet denizens are people who live in basements. Socially isolated heaps. I am a university lecturer. One of my closest mod friends, /u/mockturne, holds a senior position at a major chain restaurant company. He’s also among the cleverest people I know. We argue about which foods are the best. He is always wrong. I am always wrong. We argue over who is more wrong. He ranks sour cream above fruit and says alligator is the best meat.

We go at this for hours. Others join in: They are programmers and engineers for design firms, graduate students studying business, government employees in the UK, parents home from work at night, college kids in their dorms taking a break from Spanish homework, railroad workers laid up with broken legs, waiters and writers and clerks and cooks. Two of my Reddit friends fell in love. My girlfriend and her dad now play video­games with Mockturne, from half a nation away. It often feels as if we can read a digital room better than most people can read a physical one. How do you think we convince redditors to let us run giant forums?

To establish our rules, moderators have staged pure democratic votes, building websites to host them and bots to count the tallies. We build tools for each other that track rule breakers across the site, leaving notes for one another to rely on. Some of the top mods review more than 10,000 things a month, and apologize when they have to take time off to do their IRL jobs. We learn from each other together; we master it together.

At Reddit, all of the volunteers, certainly in the thousands, are trusted with freedom to do as we like with our sections of the site. We appreciate this. I appreciate this. But that isn’t why I spend 20 hours a week arguing with people on the internet and banning trolls. I do that because it’s satisfying to chase and destroy the zombies, and to do it alongside people I trust. It’s fulfilling to be needed and to be skilled. We don’t own the site, but we consider its spaces ours.

Among the 127 messages Elliot received when he shared his post about the Russian domains were notes from supporters, swarming his Reddit inbox and private chats, thanking him. But also messages from trolls, death threats. For 12 hours after Elliot went public, the threats kept coming. Upward of 50 of them rolled in by day’s end. What felt worse: The Reddit staff chastised him too. “This just makes it much more difficult,” CEO Huffman wrote to him, arguing that Elliot’s decision to go public got in the way of the staff’s investigation into the problem.

As much as we love our volunteer work, Reddit moderators do leave when the work becomes work, when it stops being fun. For Elliot, that time had arrived. That night, he deleted his near-dozen accounts. He passed one of his moderating jobs to another mod. He told us, in back-channel chats, that he was leaving. He also deleted his public posts about his findings. He left one final comment on his way out.

“The admins put forth a genuine effort regarding the domains I alerted them to,” he wrote. “They’re just not very good at it if a dummy like me using publicly available data can find it before them.”

I’d characterize it another way. It isn’t that the Reddit staff are bad at their jobs or not trying. (The company says it was already in the midst of a deeper investigation into Russian misinformation.) It’s that volunteerism on the web, built around a community of enthusiastic people, is powerful. Elliot was good at his job. Some tech giants pay for this work, building content moderation teams numbering in the thousands. On Reddit, we are close-knit and virtually anonymous.

I think about the cliché “You couldn’t pay me to do that.” For 20 or so hours a week, the line feels apt. You couldn’t pay me to mod reddit.com. Imagine that job: 9 to 5 every day behind a screen, weeding out trolls, totally anonymous yet more vulnerable by the hour for every new racist or sexist you ban. No, I insist on doing it for free.

Robert Peck (@RobertHPeck) teaches rhetoric at the University of Iowa. He’s working on a book about online moderation in the age of fake news.

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[brajeshupadhyay]

You may not have noticed, what with America’s COVID-19 deaths passing the 100,000 mark and cities in an uproar coast-to-coast over police tactics against black residents, but President Trump last week staged a completely fictional attack on Twitter and other online services. The fiction was embodied in an executive order Trump signed on May 28, purportedly aimed at “preventing online censorship.” The order targets Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which dramatically changed the environment for online services hosting user-provided content. Section 230, which has been consistently misunderstood by its critics across the political spectrum, allows online services to host potentially objectionable, even defamatory user-posted content without becoming liable to legal action themselves, while also giving them the discretion to moderate that content as they wish. We have to let go of some Platonic ideal of content moderation…. You’re always going to cheese off somebody. Eric Goldman, Santa Clara University “The section’s most fundamental concept is that we want internet companies to manage user content, and not be liable for whatever they miss,” says Eric Goldman, an expert in the law at Santa Clara University Law School. “The fear was that if they were liable for whatever they missed, they wouldn’t even try.” The tech community has long treated Section 230 as “the most important law on the Internet.” As my colleague Sam Dean reports, the title of a book on the section by Jeff Kosseff, a cyberlaw expert at the U.S. Naval Academy, labels its text “the twenty-six words that created the internet.” But the law also has come under concerted attack by plaintiffs who keep looking for loopholes and judges who open them, all aimed at scrubbing distasteful material from the Web. Trump’s executive order is a typical attack on Section 230, launched by someone acting out a personal grievance. It’s so sloppily drafted that it would accomplish nothing resembling the prevention of “online censorship,” would be almost certainly unconstitutional if it did, and was basically a reflexive reaction to one offense: Twitter’s unprecedented designation of Trump tweets as the embodiment of lies requiring corrections. Twitter tagged the May 27 tweets, which asserted that mail-in ballots would lead to a “rigged election,” with a note directing users to fact-checked information refuting the assertion. Trump issued his executive order the very next day. Twitter went even further a day later, when it placed a blocking message over a Trump tweet implying that participants in protests over the killing of George Floyd, a black man who apparently died in the custody of Minneapolis police, should be shot if they were looting. The message required users to click separately to view the tweet. The executive order bears all the hallmarks of a Trump tantrum, including the lack of a mechanism to turn it into action. It begins with a Frank Costanza-like litany of personal grievances. “Online platforms are engaging in selective censorship that is harming our national discourse,” the order reads, specifically calling out Twitter: “Twitter now selectively decides to place a warning label on certain tweets in a manner that clearly reflects political bias… Twitter seems never to have placed such a label on another politician’s tweet.” (Trump means any politician other than himself.) We added a label to two @realDonaldTrump Tweets about California’s vote-by-mail plans as part of our efforts to enforce our civic integrity policy. We believe those Tweets could confuse voters about what they need to do to receive a ballot and participate in the election process. — Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) May 28, 2020 The order calls on the Federal Communications Commission to “clarify” the scope of 230’s immunity from liability, even though that latitude is quite clear in the language of the law. The text makes it clear that the immunity is very broad indeed. It allows online services to restrict access to content that they consider to be “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing or otherwise objectionable.” The catchall language of “otherwise objectionable,” Goldman says, “makes you wonder exactly what wouldn’t have been included in Congress’s expectations, since they gave such a broad-based mandate to services.” The 230 exemption has been relied on by countless services that allow users to post statements or other content on their sites — newspapers hosting reader comments, merchants posting consumer reviews, expert and amateur forums of every description. Nevertheless, efforts to place limits of the 230 exemption are legion. In one closely followed California case, a San Francisco personal injury lawyer persuaded a state judge to order the consumer review site Yelp to remove an ex-client’s criticism of her performance after the lawyer won a defamation lawsuit against the client. Yelp refused, noting that it hadn’t been named as a defendant in the defamation lawsuit and arguing that it was immune from liability for the client’s posts under Section 230. The California Supreme Court found in Yelp’s favor, and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to take up the issue, ending the case against Yelp. (The defamation judgment against the client remained in effect.) Congress tried to carve out an exception to Section 230 protection aimed at online sites that purportedly facilitated sex trafficking. The so-called Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, or FOSTA, which passed overwhelmingly and was signed into law by Trump in 2018, made online services liable for ads ostensibly promoting prostitution, consensual or otherwise. But FOSTA has failed to achieve its goals. Law enforcement officials have said it has made it harder for them to root out sex trafficking, because it drove perpetrators further underground, and interfered with posts aimed at warning consensual sex workers away from dangerous situations or clients. This Tweet violates our policies regarding the glorification of violence based on the historical context of the last line, its connection to violence, and the risk it could inspire similar actions today. https://t.co/sl4wupRfNH — Twitter Comms (@TwitterComms) May 29, 2020 In Congress, attacks on Section 230 or services that rely on its terms are bipartisan. For years, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has been asserting that under Section 230, online services that remove conservative-leaning contents lose their status as “neutral public forums” and therefore their immunity. Those services “should be considered to be a ‘publisher or speaker’ of user content if they pick and choose what gets published or spoken,” Cruz wrote in 2018. (His target then was Facebook, which he complained had been “censoring or suppressing conservative speech for years.”) Cruz’s take was wrong and in any event unenforceable, since any content moderation whatsoever entails picking and choosing what to allow online. Cruz is a graduate of Harvard Law School, so it’s reasonable to assume that he knows he’s wrong, and just as reasonable to conclude that he’s merely preaching to an ideologically conservative choir . But an attack on 230 has also come from Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), who in 2018 proposed a sheaf of regulations on social media aimed at stemming the tide of disinformation, including faked photos and videos, posted online. Warner advocated making online services liable for defamation and other civil torts if they posted “deep fake” or other manipulated audio or visual content. But he acknowledged in his position paper that distinguishing between “true disinformation and legitimate satire.” He also recognized that “reforms to Section 230 are bound to elicit vigorous opposition, including from digital liberties groups and online technology providers.” The best approach to Section 230 is to leave it alone, but manage our expectations of what it can achieve. For the most part, legitimate online services find it in their best interest to combat material widely judged to be socially unacceptable —hate speech, racism and sexism, and trolling. But the debate on the margins is always going to be contentious. “We’re never going to be happy with internet companies’ content moderation efforts,” says Goldman. “You can’t ask whether one company’s doing it right and another’s doing it wrong. They’re all ‘doing it wrong,’ because none of them are doing it the way I personally want them to do it. Your standards may differ from mine, at which point there’s no pleasing everybody.” Online services will always be vulnerable to attacks like Cruz’s or, indeed, Trump’s. The goal of his executive order was to pump up the image of online services into behemoths that have taken over the public debate space for their own purposes, assuming “unchecked power to censor, restrict, edit, shape, hide, alter virtually any form of communication between private citizens and large public audiences,” as he put it in remarks during the executive order signing ceremony. In his mind, that made them legitimate targets for regulation. Trump’s audience, of course, wasn’t ordinary citizens who feel their access to information or right to post their content online was being trampled, but his political base, which imagines that its megaphone is being taken away. The biggest joke during the signing ceremony was Trump’s assertion that “if [Twitter] were able to be legally shut down, I would do it. I think I’d be hurting it very badly if we didn’t use it anymore.” As the prominent internet rights lawyer Mike Godwin observed in response, “Seriously? Who on earth believes that Donald J. Trump could make himself live another week in the White House — much less serve another term — without his daily dose of Twitter psychodrama?” In truth, Trump was just trying to work the referees — hoping that his rhetoric alone will discourage Twitter from further interfering with his tweets. That seems to be working with Facebook, which thus far has announced a hands-off policy on political posting, no matter how noxious or mendacious. Even Facebook executives, as it happens, have been discontented by the hands-off policy adopted by CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Arguments that private companies such as Twitter or Facebook are infringing on constitutional free speech rights are misguided, since constitutional protections for free speech apply to official government infringements, not those of private actors. In the private sphere, the diversity of approaches to content moderation may be society’s safety valve. “We have to let go of some Platonic ideal of content moderation, that if internet companies just invested enough time and money, they’d come up with something that would make everyone happy,” Goldman told me. “That outcome does not exist. You’re always going to cheese off somebody.” window.fbAsyncInit = function() { FB.init({ appId : '119932621434123', xfbml : true, version : 'v2.9' }); }; (function(d, s, id){ var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) {return;} js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = "https://ift.tt/1sGOfhN"; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs); }(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk')); The post Hiltzik: Trump’s fake attack on Twitter appeared first on Sansaar Times.

http://sansaartimes.blogspot.com/2020/06/hiltzik-trumps-fake-attack-on-twitter.html

[newsfundastuff]

Eric Garner. Sandra Bland. Philando Castile. Alton Sterling. Michael Brown. Their names, and those of far too many other unarmed African-Americans killed by police (or in their custody) have become a grim litany etched in the memories of a whole generation of Americans. And now, George Floyd, who was violently detained for a “forgery in progress” on Monday by as many as four Minneapolis police officers, including one with a knee pressing his neck into the ground, has become yet another casualty of excessive force.Floyd’s death stands apart because his death represents perhaps the most high profile case of this nature to occur during Trump’s presidency. His predecessor, Barack Obama was routinely confronted with these kinds of tragedies. And as the first black president and a progressive, he was not only expected to weigh in on them, but was practically required to by his base and the media establishment. Minneapolis Man: Cop Who Kneeled on George Floyd ‘Tried to Kill Me’ in 2008Nearly every time one of these high-profile cases occurred, the president stepped up to offer compassion and in some cases, express his disgust. And while his legislative remedies to address the problem were largely stymied, at the very least Obama was able effectively to commiserate with the portion of the public that was outraged; and shine a spotlight on the issue of racially biased policing.No one expects Donald Trump to similarly elevate the discourse on this subject. On Wednesday, in his first remarks on the case, he conceded that Floyd’s death was “very sad,” but offered no other thoughts other than promising that the FBI and Justice Department will look into the case.On Twitter, where Trump is more freewheeling and candid (for better or worse), he praised local law enforcement, offered condolences to Floyd’s family and promised that “justice will be served” without elaborating on what that would mean, or for who.We can only hope that the president doesn’t try to assert himself too much further in the fallout of the Floyd case; given his history on issues of race, he would likely only add insult to fatal injury.Early Friday morning, hours after this article first posted, Trump bore that prediction out: Of course, Trump bears no direct responsibility for Floyd’s death, but the president’s embrace of racist language, ideas and policies has heightened the perception in this country that black life is expendable.In the past, it has been politically expedient for Trump to defend all police no matter what, and to abuse anyone who deigns to criticize them. During the 2016 campaign, he cast blanket aspersions on all Black Lives Matter activists, claiming they’re only “looking for trouble” and even worse, blaming them for instigating the deaths of police officers, all while waxing nostalgic about the “good old days” where protesters could be beaten with impunity. As president, he has shown far more anger at African-American NFL athletes who silently protest police brutality than, say, a foreign government his own intelligence agencies believe brutally slaughtered a U.S.-based journalist.Even setting issues of race and policing aside, it is not in Trump’s nature to show empathy as we have seen in his response to the pandemic that has claimed 100,000 American lives. As the U.S. crosses this horrendous milestone, he’s spent the better part of a week tweeting juvenile insults about his enemies, indulging in conspiracy theories and threatening the very social media platform on which he spends much of his time.Meanwhile, the president has proven time and again for over 40 years, that he will never acknowledge the existence (let alone comprehend the nuances) of institutional racism or admit how he has benefited from it, as he would say, tremendously. Instead he’s whined that ‘an educated black” stands a better chance of benefiting from the American dream than he does.If anything, Trump staying relatively silent would be a relief coming from a man who instinctively gravitates to the people causing black pain rather than those trying to alleviate it. If in the wake of Floyd’s death, people start to point the finger at Trump’s rhetoric endorsing “tough” police tactics, he and many of his supporters will defensively seek excuses for the Minneapolis police. They will insist that we don’t know what occurred prior to the video — as if any action by a single, unarmed suspect could justify his fate. They will say that people looting a Target is somehow more heinous than an officer of the law suffocating a man with his knee. Others will, with a straight face, suggest that Floyd couldn’t be suffocating if he was able to articulate it — the same inhumane reaction that was repeated endlessly after the killing of Eric Garner. They perceive an alternative universe where speaking out against police brutality somehow is responsible for inspiring more of it, and where the real victims are cops who are subjected to unreasonable accountability for their actions.People in this universe, and particularly people of color, are keenly aware of a very different status quo, where heroic people on their phones are seemingly the only thing that stands between many of us and the truth and where the president openly encourages police to rough up suspects without fear of reprisal.They know they are not safe on the street, in a store, or even in their own home. You can add bird-watching to that litany. This same week,another racially fraught viral video out of New York City caused a sensation, but, gratefully, not a death. In the clip, a white woman named Amy Cooper, after being asked by a bird-watching black man to put her dog on a leash (a regulation in Central Park), calls the police to falsely claim “an African-Ammerican man” was threatening her life.The most chilling thing about the video is seeing Cooper, who is not an actress, perform faux trauma to a 911 operator with such instinctual ease.The video footage exposed Cooper as a liar and cost her job (and her dog, that she manhandled terribly throughout the clip). Is this a happy ending? Well, not for any viewer of color who still has to live every day with the existential fear that the black man who filmed her must have felt — that a trigger-happy policeman might have responded to her call for help. Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

https://ift.tt/2MfzzVq

[richmeganews]

Fake News Is Endangering India’s Election

N

EW DELHI—In the days following a suicide bombing against Indian security forces in Kashmir this year, a message began circulating in WhatsApp groups across the country. It claimed that a leader of the Congress Party, the national opposition, had promised a large sum of money to the attacker’s family, and to free other “terrorists” and “stone pelters” from prison, if the state voted for Congress in upcoming parliamentary elections.

The message was posted to dozens of WhatsApp groups that appeared to promote Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party, and seemed aimed at painting the BJP’s main national challenger as being soft on militancy in Kashmir, which remains contested between India and Pakistan, just as the two countries seemed to be on the brink of war.

The claim, however, was fake. No member of Congress, at either a national or a state level, had made any such statement. Yet delivered in the run-up to the election, and having spread with remarkable speed, that message offered a window into a worsening problem here.

India is facing information wars of an unprecedented nature and scale. Indians are bombarded with fake news and divisive propaganda on a near-constant basis from a wide range of sources, from television news to global platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp. But unlike in the United States, where the focus has been on foreign-backed misinformation campaigns shaping elections and public discourse, the fake news circulating here isn’t manufactured abroad.

[Read: India’s lynching epidemic and the problem with blaming tech]

Many of India’s misinformation campaigns are developed and run by political parties with nationwide cyberarmies; they target not only political opponents, but also religious minorities and dissenting individuals, with propaganda rooted in domestic divisions and prejudices. The consequences of such targeted misinformation are extreme, from death threats to actual murders—in the past year, more than two dozen people have been lynched by mobs spurred by nothing more than rumors sent over WhatsApp.

Elections beginning this month will stoke those tensions, and containing fake news will be one of India’s biggest challenges. It won’t be easy.

T

raditional media continue to be the dominant source of information for Indians. Among those aged 15 to 34, 57 percent watch TV news a few days a week, 53 percent read newspapers at the same frequency, and about 18 percent consume their news on the internet, according to a 2016 study by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, a think tank based in New Delhi.

But social media is playing a growing role. As many as 230 million Indians use WhatsApp, making the country the messaging platform’s biggest market. One-sixth of them are members of chat groups started by political parties, according to another CSDS study. These groups, ostensibly used to organize rallies, recruit volunteers, or disseminate campaign news, are capped at 256 members. In 2018, “horrified by terrible acts of violence,” WhatsApp limited the number of people that messages could be forwarded to in India from 256 users to five, and made it harder to forward images, audio clips, and videos. (Some of these restrictions have since been rolled out worldwide.)

These restrictions are, however, somewhat countered by forming many more groups, which is largely what has happened. A WhatsApp spokesperson said in an emailed response to our questions that the company bans accounts “engaging in bulk or automated messaging” and encourages users to report groups for “a range of potential issues.”

Many political groups use WhatsApp to distribute pure propaganda. Consider the description of BJP Cyber Army 400+, a WhatsApp group whose five administrators include Amit Malviya, the head of the BJP’s information-technology division: “This Group is Nationalists Group With Hindu Warriors Working To Save Nation From Break India forces Led politically by congress, communist And religiously by Islam and Christianity [sic].”

Modi has campaigned on promoting good governance, but Hindu-Muslim polarization is also central to the BJP’s election strategy. The party’s messaging aims to consolidate the support of Hindus, who make up 80 percent of India’s electorate, by presenting opposition parties as pro-Muslim. For example, in the southern state of Telangana, several pro-BJP groups picked parts of Congress’s manifesto that promised government benefits to Muslims, such as free electricity to mosques and scholarships for Muslim students, and presented them as the party’s exclusive offerings. Such efforts are widespread. Based on research published in the Hindustan Times, eight of the 10 most shared misleading images in pro-BJP WhatsApp groups ahead of last year’s state elections were about the Telangana manifesto, and the claims that Congress favored only Muslims.

Though other parties use similar tactics, the BJP has built the largest social-media system. Malviya, who did not respond to requests for comment for this story, has said that about 1.2 million volunteers will help run the party’s social-media campaign for the national elections. In Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, the BJP’s IT department has a six-tier hierarchical structure covering the capital city of Lucknow down to the most remote village. At what is known as the booth level, the last point of contact with voters, each party worker has been directed to create a WhatsApp group with at least 50 users, Brajesh Mani Mishra, the 39-year-old in charge of the party’s media and IT division in Gorakhpur, in Uttar Pradesh, told us.

A woman downloads Narendra Modi's smartphone app. (Manish Swarup / AP)

The strategy extends beyond WhatsApp. Another BJP staffer in Gorakhpur, Nitin Sonkar, told us how he was charged with, among other things, promoting downloads of Modi’s own smartphone app, known as NaMo. The app—which came preloaded in free Android phones distributed by at least two BJP-led state governments and in low-cost phones sold by Reliance Jio, a domestic cellphone operator—has been installed by more than 10 million people. It is used to promote the prime minister, and has a built-in social network with Twitter-like features. But it, too, is vulnerable to misinformation.

[Read: Disinformation is spreading on WhatsApp in India—and it’s getting dangerous]

For instance, after February’s Kashmir attack, a promoted post on the app suggested that Pakistan’s prime minister, Imran Khan, was crying on television after receiving a warning from  the “56-inch,” a reference to a boast of Modi’s regarding the size of his chest, an apparent effort to show his strength. The claim about Khan, however, was wrong; he had not cried. This wasn’t a one-off case, either. The app’s news feed promotes posts from repeat fake-news offenders, and users aren’t given the option to unfollow these accounts.

The BJP’s IT department has previously said it is aware of the problem. Malviya has previously admitted to us that there is “some scope for misinformation” on the app, adding that “content moderation is managed by volunteers” and “multiple posts have been taken down.” Still, the party’s ground staff has been tasked with increasing the NaMo app’s use, Mishra said. “Even if five people at every booth install the NaMo app,” he told us, “Modi will be PM for the next 25 years.”

T

he BJP is not the only political player whose supporters are manipulating facts. In November 2016, Abhishek Mishra was detained in the central state of Madhya Pradesh for posting derogatory content on social media about Madhya Pradesh’s former chief minister. Mishra, who is reportedly close to Congress leaders, published fabricated stories, including claims that the governor of India’s central bank had called Modi the most corrupt prime minister in India’s modern history, and that the head of a policing body had declared Modi to be “useless.”

Then, in January, police in New Delhi arrested him based on a woman’s complaint that he had posted “inflammatory” content online. Since his release from police custody, his website, Viral in India, has been shut down, but Mishra reportedly receives police protection in Madhya Pradesh, where a Congress government is in power. He now runs Viral in India as a Facebook page, where he has upwards of 1 million followers and posts and shares anti-BJP updates, some of which appear, again, to be fake. Mishra did not respond to a request for comment.

Other hyper-partisan political pages and groups have similarly sprouted up on Facebook, which has 270 million users in India. Another Facebook page, The India Eye, for example, has more than 2 million followers, but at least six of the 20 most shared posts on its Facebook page from September to November 2018 were misleading or inaccurate. One post, which was shared more than 19,000 times, claims that Sonia Gandhi, the ex-president of Congress and the wife of a former prime minister, is the fourth-richest woman in the world, which is not true. Completing the circle of misinformation, The India Eye is also a promoted account on the NaMo app.

Facebook and WhatsApp are not the only social networks where this battle is playing out. Smaller platforms such as ShareChat, which has 40 million monthly active users, and Helo, which has about 25 million, operate in 14 Indian languages and target first-time internet users. Both are rife with a litany of false claims and misinformation.

In response to our questions, Facebook pointed us to a press release from the Internet and Mobile Association of India, detailing how it was one of several social-media platforms, along with ShareChat, to adopt a voluntary code of ethics for the election. NaMo did not respond to a request for comment, but WhatsApp (which is owned by Facebook), ShareChat and Helo offered statements,  largely echoing one another: They take misinformation seriously, remove posts on a regular basis, and use artificial-intelligence tools as well as large content-moderation teams. ShareChat and Helo also said they had partnered with fact-checking organizations to combat fake news.

While Indians are receiving a greater portion of their daily news from Facebook, WhatsApp, and other social-media platforms, misleading stories that bear the stamp of a traditional news outlet still travel most widely. Doctored newspaper clippings and manipulated television-news screengrabs were among the most shared items in political WhatsApp groups ahead of last year’s state elections.

An Indian man reads a newspaper with a full-page ad from WhatsApp meant to counter misinformation on the platform. (Prakash Singh / AFP / Getty)

More difficult to police, however, are the many mainstream news channels that are openly partisan.

[Read: Ending the India-Pakistan crisis requires a courageous Narendra Modi]

Throughout its 14 years on air, Sudarshan News’s 200-member national team has focused on issues of Hindu interest through its straight-talking, campaign-driven programs, such as its Save the Cow movement. This included purported exposés of New Delhi restaurants that serve beef (a practice that is illegal in the Indian capital), castigations of state governments for not sufficiently policing slaughterhouses, and proposals that the cow, a holy animal in Hinduism, be officially made “mother of the nation,” with killing of the animal punishable by death. As part of that campaign, the channel’s owner and public face, Suresh Chavhanke, urged his audience to act. “At a time like this, cow servants like us will have to take the threatening form of cow protectors,” he said.

“People are ready to kill and die in order to save cows,” Chavhanke told us. “I agree that it’s constitutionally wrong, but it is a part of our tradition.”

Sudarshan News has listed three priorities it will push for in the next government: a Hindu temple on the site where a Mughal-era mosque was razed by Hindu nationalists in 1992; modifications to the history curriculum in Indian textbooks to glorify the country’s Hindu past; and a bill to control India’s population.  

The third of those demands is a euphemism for a public campaign against what Sudarshan News has said is the rising population of Muslims in India. This is, however, fearmongering. Though Muslims currently have a higher fertility rate than Hindus nationwide, they are still outnumbered by followers of India’s majority religion. Chavhanke, who was arrested in April 2017 in Uttar Pradesh to prevent him from visiting a town where there had been Hindu-Muslim clashes, says he is secular and not against Islam. His channel, however, is legitimized by politicians, including ministers in the BJP national government and leaders of the Congress Party, who appear on his shows and give him interviews.

The case of Sudarshan News also spotlights the growing links between political parties, traditional news sources, and social-media networks.

A recent message in BJP Cyber Army 400+, the WhatsApp group with BJP staffers as administrators, reminded its members that they “have the right to vote,” before continuing: “We should not vote for any candidate who follows Leftist ideology. They care more about preserving their Muslim vote bank than they care about Hindus, such as the Congress.” The message concluded by listing YouTube channels that Hindus should subscribe to “in order to save their existence.” One is Sudarshan News.

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