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fapangel · 7 years

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Will BMD ever be robust enough to start breaking out nukes again? Maybe not city-busters, but tactical "fuck this troop concentration in particular" level.

BMD is actually more important in terms of tactical or operational level weapons these days, and that’s because the risk of tactical or operational nuclear weapon employment has greatly risen.

I’ve talked before about how Russia has been openly threatening to use tac-nukes to counter defeat in a purely conventional force-on-force fight, what they asininely call “de-escalatory strikes.” And I quote: “We have corrected the conditions for use of nuclear weapons to resist aggression with conventional forces not only in large-scale wars, but also in regional or even a local one.”

This threat is absolutely credible, because neither America nor Russia would commit suicide by launching all-out nuclear war against each other for the sake of defending or conquering some small Baltic countries, and they both know it. The tac-nuke use planned for the Soviet invasion of Europe that’d kick off WWIII would’ve been part-and-parcel of a likely simultaneous strategic exchange as well. The global power balance and calculus has changed massively since then - Russia isn’t trying to conquer the world anymore, but trying to conquer back its former sprawling empire. Therefore, the combat will take place on land that’s neither America, nor Russia’s, and occupied by neither of their citizens. Therefore Russia will have nothing to lose and everything to gain by instigating tac-nuke strikes. They believe that America is weak, and will crumble at this terrifying escalation. They think wrong, of course, which is why any war in Europe bears the real possibility of a tac-nuke exchange that will kill hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of civilians in Eastern Europe.

For all the focus on it recently, the Ground-Based Defense system in Ft. Greely, Alaska, capable of defending the entire US mainland against full-range ICBMs, was and is mainly focused on North Korea. Bush Jr. ordered rushed deployment of successive marks of missiles into those silos before they were even tested, and Obama - who foolishly cancelled development of the program - very quietly re-started it a few years later. These things illustrate just how long the United States has seen the current crisis with North Korea coming. GMD is too immature and certainly not deployed in enough quantity to even blunt a full-out Russian or Chinese counter-value attack; which is why the traditional worries relating to BMD destabilizing MAD don’t apply. The GMD systems aren’t a methodological advance of technology meant to fundamentally change the global power balance - they’re a rush to head off the North Koreans from gaining a power that will fundamentally change the global power balance!

Ballistic missiles are accurate enough now to pose a high threat with just conventional munitions, and indeed both Russia and China have invested heavily in them as an asymmetric weapon against American conventional power. And this is why the missile defense site in Romania and the one under construction in Poland, and the THAAD system in South Korea - both of which are intended to destroy SRBMs/IRBMs, not ICBMs - draw so much more ire from both China and Russia. They directly inhibit their conventional warmaking ability, and nobody likes that, especially when they’re trying to threaten and control neighboring countries near their own borders.

I can’t speak to the future of anti-ballistic missile defense on a strategic scale - but on the tactical scale we’ve seen that the technology, after many decades of development, is now quite mature. SRBMs/IRBMs can be reliably intercepted now. It’s mainly a matter of continuing development and massive - but feasible - infrastructure investment to make it feasible on a strategic scale against ICBMs. There’s many possible countermeasures that the attacking weapons can employ, but the counter-countermeasure technology has never been as advanced as it is now, nor possessed of such fearsome integrated computational ability. All the potential consequences of effective ABM systems were explored in detail during the Reagan era and the many arguments stirred up by the Strategic Defense Initiative, but they’re all out of context now - the Cold War is over, and Cold War II, a conflict different in a great many ways, is now upon us.

I hardly feel qualified to explore the potential futures that lie ahead of us, but I can tell you that it often looks like our choices will be between “bad” now and “worse” later - which means that even if we have the courage and fortitude to combat these evils so our children won’t have to, it will mean our generation will once again be a generation of soldiers... and survivors.

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architectnews · 3 years

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Archiol’s 2021 Render challenge

Archiol’s 2021 Render challenge, Architecture Competition, Design Contest

Archiol’s 2021 Render challenge Competition

6 June 2021

Archiol Render Challenge Competition Winners

Archiol’s Render Challenge Winners Announced!

Presentation skills are just as important as designing; one of the best mediums to present your architectural designs is through rendering. Architectural rendering aims to create life-like experiences of the buildings before they are built. Rendering aids the designer to convey ideas, an image that represents the designers’ imagination most realistically.

Archiol’s 2021 Render Challenge received 113 entries, scroll down to see the finest of architectural graphics from participants from all over the world.

• First Prize Winner_ Jiaman Xu, Ruiheng Zeng & Xiaoxin Wang (China)

• Second Prize Winner_ Antonella Marzi, Chiara Marzi & Marta Dituri (Italy)

• Third Prize Winner_ MiroslavNaskov (UK)

• Honorable Mention_ Niu Yifan (China)

• Honorable Mention_ ZHIXIANG XIA (China)

• Honorable Mention_ Tim CheC (US)

Archiol Render Challenge Winners in Detail

First Prize Winner_ JIAMAN XU, RUIHENG ZENG & XIAOXIN WANG

Forest fires have always been a desperate topic. In the case of severe forest fires, it is difficult to protect the lives of animals. The Amazon rainforest in 2019 and the Australian forest fires in 2020 caused devastating damage. Countless wild animals died in the fire or were displaced, causing people’s attention. It is precise because of these facts that the rescue of wild animals in fires needs to be widely recognized, and we need to provide them with a temporary shelter.

The refuge site is in New South Wales, Australia, which is hot and less rainy, which is one of the places prone to forest fires. When a fire occurs, the building uses the collected water to spray water through a spray device to form a low-temperature environment and attract animals to take refuge.

In order for our animal shelter to be self-sufficient to the greatest extent possible without human intervention, the operation of the building depends entirely on natural forces. According to realistic theories such as energy conversion, we set up rainwater and fog collection devices to solve the water problem of the building. The fog is converted into water and rainwater is collected to the water storage device at the bottom of the building, which can provide a continuous supply of the ecological environment inside the building. Provide water resources.

The refuge restores the original living environment of Australian animals as much as possible and ensures internal ecological diversity. In order to reduce the damage to the natural ecological environment, we spiral up the ecological layer to reduce the footprint of the building and recreate different ecological environments on the spirally rising ramps and natural environments that can provide sufficient refuge space for animals. Including the basic natural environment such as pools, swamps, grasslands, woods, etc., so that it is divided on each layer but connected to each other.

For example, kangaroos like to run in the bushes, koalas will sleep on eucalyptus trees, wild dogs are used to hunting in the desert, platypuses usually hide in caves by the water, and ostriches with strong adaptability are suitable for most environments, such as open plains, forests or the desert doesn’t matter to them.

After the fire, the forest is slowly recovering, and the animals can return to the natural environment and rebuild their homes. Of course, the animals can continue to stay inside the building, and the food chain can maintain the relative balance of the ecological layer. Animals can enter and leave the building at any time to increase the sense of familiarity and belonging. Perhaps more lives can be saved the next time a fire occurs.

Second Prize Winner_ Antonella Marzi, Chiara Marzi & Marta Dituri

ICE TOWERS “A powerful and evocative gesture, a reinterpretation of the monument in a modern key.” Our concept design is stemming from abstract ideas and shapes in inhospitable environments that become an architectural project. The site context aims to stimulate people’s thoughts on the consequences of human intervention in the living environment and adaptation to architecture.

Two crystalline monoliths emerge in the Arctic landscape. The building’s volume explores the sense as an ice sculpture on the rocks, by means of materials, textures, and colors. As generated by tectonic forces, they guard and conceal an entire underground world. The towers rise from a submerged area, bursting through the surface, which integrating into the landscape – between the cliff and ocean waves.

Third Prize Winner_ MiroslavNaskov

The Forest House, nestled in the serene verdure of the Northern Italian countryside provides its visitors a unique experience. It is nonconformist yet resonates with the rawness of the nature around it.

The stilted housegives one the feeling of being lifted and placed in Nature’s lap, capturing breath taking views of the lush green clad mountains as well as the calm lake set between them. The fluid design and soft volumes of the space add to the tranquillity of the space. The transparency provides panoramic views, inviting nature to become part of the space. Blurring the boundary between the interior and the exterior, the house and nature are in perfect symphony with each other.

The structure uses prefabricated 3D Printed structural elements. This not only eases the process of fabrication and significantly reduces cost but also has least impact on the natural environment. Bespoke furniture designed for the space uses a similar language in design and materiality providing a wholesome yet luxurious experience in all.

Honorable Mention_ Niu Yifan

The globalized new coronavirus epidemic has thrown architectural problems with meaningful thinking to architects. Now in the post-epidemic era, how should architects rethink and define the contemporary attributes of physical public spaces? How to tap and strengthen the quality and value that cannot be replaced by virtual space, and make a targeted response in the design?

My work intends to show the current social situation in a warmer and more hopeful post-epidemic era. Through the architectural vision of the post-epidemic era. I designed a city with extremely prosperous traffic, because traffic is a prerequisite for urban development.

I also designed a public transportation transfer station that can be rotated to facilitate the transfer and transfer of people. This rotation takes five minutes. When the turntable returns to its original position, the station will welcome the next wave of people, and people will meet in this regular and random space. The transmission lasts ten minutes. Then continue to spin for the next five minutes.

This work shows the sense of science and technology that people yearn for in the post-epidemic era and the warm connection between human. The sun shines into your sight through the movable buildings built under traffic, and everything is under the radiation of the sun, with a sense of post-modernity and technology. Everything is very peaceful and full of hope, expressing the prosperous industrial and social development after the epidemic.

Honorable Mention_ ZHIXIANG XIA

The image indicate an architecture which is driven by our minds. I’m always thinking about creating an architecture embodying our souls. The main structure of the architecture can grow and expand as our mind keeps developing. From bottom to top, every part of the structure shows the different stages of our mind, which in the image I visualize it by the people’s activities.

And the connectivity is infinite and continuous; everything is intertwined and bounded together with an invisible force which can be described as the inner inspiration of every thought. Finally, architecture becomes an extension of our minds and it fully shows our inner space.

Honorable Mention_ Tim CheC

The distance between Mars and the Earth is approximately 225 million kilometers, making it the closest “livable” planet to the Earth. Whether the movie” The Martian”, the landing news of the NASA’s “Perseverance”, or even the “SpaceX” company founded by Elon Musk, they all showed us the mysterious appearance of Mars. I am the person who love future technologies and science fiction pretty much. I can’t help but think, when I am 50 years old, will I be able to live on Mars at that time?

In this artwork, I tried to imagine what it might look like when people live on Mars in the future. I took Transit-Oriented-Development (TOD ) as my main concept. The various facilities are connected by channels. The center of the facilities is a big rocket, which will carry the residents transport between different planets.

The main residential facility large greenhouse buildings, which are filled with plants and oxygen. It creates a suitable space for people to live in. On the outer side, there are some Industrial facilities which can mine buried ice and create energy for residents to use.

Is it possible to build a self-sufficient city on Mars? How does it feel like when living on Mars? Are there other planets that can be explored by humans besides Mars? I am curious and excited in the technology and lifestyle of future. I hope through this artwork, everyone can share their imagination about the future living lifestyle.

Shortlisted Entries

• Reality is merely an illusion _ Aditya Bhole

• Echoes of Nirvana_ Chang Wu

• In the middle of Mediterranean sea_ Patricija Gjugjaj

• Parallel 2077_ Lingfang Shao

• House on a Pavilion _ Tanvi Daga

• What is a vertical city _Xinyu Li

• _ Davide Cannone & Ilaria Impagnatiello

• The Blurred Forest _ HAOXIAN CAI

• Residential Energy Gathering Ring _ Wenqi Fan

• Non-To-Scale Megastructures: Where Man Meets the Machine _ Mohamad Alamin Younis

• Gaotai Residential _Bó Hú & Yixuan Yang

• “parts of a whole”_ Lingjing Shi

• A roundabout near the entrance of a small city_ Ioulianos Angelos Karantzios

• _ Shreyash Gupta

• _ Florian Mladek

Archiol Render Challenge Competition Jury

Competition Jury:

• Randy Sovich, AIA Randy M. Sovich, AIA, is co-editor of T3XTURE, an international architectural and design publication exploring texture, ornament, and pattern in a new architecture. He is the founding principal of R. M. Sovich Architecture, Inc., a socially-conscious practice located in Baltimore, Maryland, creating nurturing places for communities, the disenfranchised, and vulnerable populations.

• Nicole Cullinan Nicole Cullinan is an Australian born European writer who has an established career in the architecture and arts industry. Sheenjoys the privilege of working with a number of prominent creatives, discovering what it is that makes their work unique. With a passion for place making and the built environment. She is a published academic author and an alumnus of The University of Melbourne.

With a side hustle in photography, her images have been featured on the National Gallery of Victoria and Heide Museum of Modern Art websites and socials. Recently she exhibited as part of the Photo 2021 collaboration with French artist JR at Federation Square. She believes the architects work can be more than what the eye can see; ‘allegoria dei sensi’. A trinity of function, form and feeling.

• Igor Neminov Igor is an Art Director at Shimahara Visual, based in Los Angeles and has produced an innumerable amount of marketing and competition images for a some of LA’s award winning Architecture firms, which includes Morphosis, P-A-T-T-E-R-N-S, Tom Wiscombe and Frank Gehry Architects. Igor is an award winning artist with over 10 years of professional design experience. He is also a gifted leader who is able to raise the artistic bar of everyone around him.

Organiser: Artuminate: https://ift.tt/3fYIb2H Winners Announcement: https://ift.tt/3uXtrp2

Previously on e-architect:

post updated 29 Apr 2021

Archiol Render Challenge Competition

Due to some technical issues in the initial registration period the organisers were asked to extend the registration dates of the Render Challenge Competition which was announced earlier.

Extended timeline is as follows:

Registration Deadline: 5th May 2021

Submission Deadline: 7th May 2021

Result Announcement: 5th June 2021

All deadlines are 11:59 PM UTC (Coordinated Universal Time).

8 Mar 2021

Archiol’s 2021 – Render challenge Contest

Introduction Presentation skills are just as important as designing; one of the best mediums to present your architectural designs is through rendering. Architectural rendering aims to create life-like experiences of the buildings before they are built.

Rendering aids the designer to convey his or her ideas, an image that represents the designers’ imagination most realistically.

Competition Brief Create one rendered architectural graphic design that says it all. As this competition aims at exploring and understanding rendering (a medium of conveying designs) to an unimaginable extent, so you are free to choose the type, location, scale. The Rendering can be hand-drawn or digital.

Specific Requirements: A single rendered Image A description of not more than 500 words (100 words minimum)

Awards Interview Interview of the all the winners ( top 3 + honourable mentions) Photos, articles and news will be published on our platform

Publication All the winning entries will be published on our platform.

Certificate: Top 3 entries will receive certificates All our winners will receive e certificate. All the participants will receive a participation certificate.

Important dates and judgement criteria Registration deadline: 28th April 2021 Submission deadline: 30th April 2021 Result announcement: 31st May 2021

After completing the checkout, you will automatically receive a confirmation e-mail. If you can’t find the e-mail in your inbox, please check your spam folder.

Fees A standard registration fees of ₹1200

Jury To be announced

For more details please visit our website archiol.com Competition link: archiol.com/archiol-competitions/render_challenge_2021

Subscribe to our news letters for regular updates. Learn more on: https://ift.tt/3ry2lUE Facebook: https://ift.tt/3chsWim Instagram: https://ift.tt/38kbAzQ https://ift.tt/3qzNQOR Pinterest: https://ift.tt/3l1U8p5

Archiol’s 2021 – Render challenge images / information received 080321

Korea Architecture Competitions

Recent Korean architecture contests on e-architect:

3rd Generation New Towns in Korea Design Contest 3rd Generation New Towns in Korea Architecture Competition

Main Library Gwangju Design Contest Main Library Gwangju Competition

South Korea Architectural Designs

South Korean Architecture Designs – architectural selection below:

Hankook Technoplex, Pangyo, outskirts of Seoul Design: Foster + Partners photo : TIME OF BLUE Hankook Technoplex Pangyo Top-level executives are co-located with their teams on different levels, which promotes interaction between the key members, and enables a more fluid flow of information within the company.

Amorepacific Head Office, Yongsan-gu, Seoul Design: David Chipperfield Architects photograph © Noshe Amorepacific Headquarters in Seoul This new rectilinear building is located between the site of a spacious public park currently under development, and a business district of high-rise towers.

Architectural Competitions

Current / Recent architectural contests on e-architect:

Bcome 2020 Competition

2020 Bcome International Ideas Competition

2A Continental Architectural Awards 2020 2A Continental Architectural Awards 2020

Re-imagining Stations Competition Network Rail Re-imagining Stations Competition

London Architectural Competitions

24H Architecture Competition

Flexible Housing Competition for Great Places Lakes & Dales Partnership

Architecture Competition

Comments / photos for Archiol’s 2021 – Render challenge page welcome

The post Archiol’s 2021 Render challenge appeared first on e-architect.

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kintsugi-sheep · 4 years

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2020.12.13: The Beginning and Writing

Alright, so what went on this week?

I feel like I'm getting better at writing more frequently. The frequency being the issue first, the editing and grammar being the secondary issue. My diction's a little smaller than I'd like it to be, so I'll be sure to catch up on some reading by the time my vacation comes around.

I've noticed a lot of the prompts that I pull from Reddit tend to be written in the first person. I understand the function, as it allows a reader to become fully immersed in exactly what a character is thinking and feeling in any given moment, but I find that it more often than not covers up my poor grammatical skills.

Also, trying to get these all done in one run-through, without going back to edit or reformat between posting sites, is pretty cringe-inducing. There's nothing like writing an actually decent story, only to realize that the site you posted it to reformatted the entire thing so that all of the text is in one big block.

When I get to coding, I should be sure to look for any issue like this on the site.

I also learned how transparent it is when you slack off. One day this past week I wasn't feeling my writing and I can tell the people that did read it weren't feeling it either. I have to stay focused, not so much motivated. Sitting around waiting for motivation has done nothing but cause me trouble and shape me into a procrastinator.

That being said, I do have to keep my desire to leave at the forefront of my mind.

It's a strange feeling I get when I think about my family. Maybe I listened to too much Bush-era American rock music, but I'm tired of my hometown.

For a number of reasons.

But, when it comes to my family, I just get the sinking feeling that they're fine with everything around them being less than ideal. That they'll complain about something someone else needs to do for them rather than take the time to look inward. They aren't so unreasonable as to thrust all of their issues onto strangers or things like that. You could compare their grievances to things like, "This person who's job it is to do this things isn't doing this thing specifically how I want it to be done."

Whereas I'm trying to shift my response to be, "Can I do this thing? No? Screw it then."

As such, I'm actively no longer complaining.

No asking if someone else can turn the music down because I have work in the morning. No explaining why breeding the dog is a terrible, terrible idea. No asking why every room in the house smells like weed. Just me, focusing on getting out so I don't have to concern myself with these issues.

Because of all the people here, I'm the only one who seems to have an issue with any of this.

I've spent the last three years rooming with a friend in a shared apartment and did nothing but goof off because I had my friend around.

And this is the result of that goofing off. Back in my childhood home, typing away at a computer at night following a day of working. My job may be better than it was when I was at my lowest point in 2015-16, but I can't let my contentment with my job lead me to more complacency with my future.

I need to work harder.

I get this sinking feeling in my stomach whenever I think about what I should be doing. In the context of this, so many things cross my mind.

"It's getting late. Aren't you going to write 750 words today?"

"That last writing prompt bombed pretty hard, so why not take a day off?"

"It's Sunday. Are you going to post another one of those blogs on the internet?"

"No one's going to read it, you know?"

"You quit before and you'll quit again. How long do you think you can keep this up?"

"Your writing is terrible. Third-person, first-person, blog, it's all trash that's going to be ignored."

"Is this title/phrase/sentence just you trying to be baity? Do you think that's going to give you clicks?"

"Who do you really think is going to read this? You post in the dead of night and work all day, idiot."

"No one likes social media. Do something else."

"Magic the Gathering has better stories than you do."

"Critical Role has better stories than you do."

"The SCP Foundation has better stories than you do."

"All of your favorite mangaka have better stories than you do."

"You ever think that now that they're remaking Shaman King, that niche thing that you thought only you still cared about and had an opinion on will suddenly become mainstream, gain all the acclaim it deserves, and your take on the story will be drowned out by a plethora of actually competent reviewers who actually chose to go to school for things like English and Literature and Journalism?"

"I know that going to school again would damn you in the future, but don't you think it'd at least be a little better than trying to become known through scratch?"

"Trick question; you'll fail either way."

"You really padded this out didn't you? It may just end up getting bunched up on DeviantArt again though."

A friend of mine asked me a few months ago if writing was my passion. And I told her yes.

But, I don't know if that's true.

I love making up stories. The first story I ever created was spawned from a terrible, terrible drawing.

My friend Emmanuel had broken his arm riding his bike, so I drew a hero called 'Kast Man, King of the Kanyon'; the words were spelled with Ks because it was the early 2000s and there was nothing a K or Z couldn't sell. The drawing was exactly what you'd expect of a six-year-old who liked Dragon Ball Z. The guy was overly-buff in an non-biologically acceptable way, had upright, spiky hair, a monkey's tail, and no ears because he was facing forwards and you couldn't see ears from the front I decided.

From this one-off drawing, I began visualizing a theme song that was just the hero's name and title followed by the occasional "Ooooh"; as you would expect from a six-year-old who liked Sonic the Hedgehog.

I got into the habit of taking aspects from all the different media I consumed, mostly animated, and marrying them into one, jumbled mess of a story. This also led to me talking to myself. I didn't know why, but I just really needed to talk to myself and narrate this story happening in my head.

We used to keep a lot of rubber bands around the house for reasons I don't know and my imagination would be most active when I was playing with one. I frequently snapped them on my wrists, chewed on them, stretched them, broke them, and slept with them. When I accidently flung one in the midst of play, it was like watching television and having the power cut out. I'd just stop abruptly and frantically try to look for it. And, if I couldn't find it, I'd get a tight feeling in my chest and resign myself to sleep, unable to see the conclusion of my story until I picked up another rubber band.

This habit really freaked out the people who lived with me; mom, grandmother, uncle, and brother. To this day none of them realize what was going on.

The habit eventually switched to pencils, which I thankfully didn't sleep with, until it reached the point where I didn't need a tool of any sort at all.

This is where things got out of hand. You know how when you were younger and you saw an action movie, you'd have all this energy and just move your body in all these bizarre ways because it felt good? Like you could take on the world?

That was the next step throughout middle school.

And throughout high school.

And throughout college.

And throughout my return home.

And throughout living with my roommates.

We called it "pacing" in my house hold. Though, more often than not, if featured punching, jogging, skipping, jumping, and lots of talking to myself. I'd been caught multiple times by relatives and friends, none understanding what was going on.

Imagine getting caught masturbating, but having someone walk in every other day and everyone hearing you do it everyday.

I really toned it down while living with my roommates and now I'll just take a break to walk the floor, legitimately pacing this time, and get my thoughts together. The talking-to-myself hasn't stopped though.

It feels a little nice to explain this somewhere, even if no one but me will ever see it.

So, pulling it back to my friend's question about writing being my passion. I don't think it is.

Storytelling is my passion. I can pitch ideas, share events, or retell things I've heard, read, or seen with ease and confidence. The part wherein I have to sit down and write is the frustration, exhausting part. But, it gives me a sense of accomplishment when I'm done.

So I don't think writing is my passion. Storytelling is my passion, writing is my purpose and the medium through which I am most effectively able to share my stories.

And given how fulfilled I feel when I'm completed, and on the occasion that someone does respond to something I've written, I consider what I'm doing worthwhile. I just have to get focused on the act of doing rather than the end result.

That's what I need to do.

#writer #author #writerblr #blog #confession

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elizabethleslie7654 · 7 years

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How the GOP Establishment Created the Alt-Right and How Democrats are Supplying its 2nd Wave

check out this awesome jewelry I got hot with free shipping

If we go back in time, not far mind you, just barely over one decade ago, we see a political landscape that looks almost nothing like the one we have today. It is unbelievable how rapidly everything changed in such a short period of time. The date was May 3, 2007 – the site was Simi, California. As springtime was warming and fading into the start of summer, the first debate between the Republican 2008 primary field was set to kick off at the Reagan library. In retrospect this seems like a quaint time and a calm before the storm. George W. Bush was a beleaguered president who had not won the promised quick and total victory in Iraq, still had a giant blackeye from the botched response to Hurricane Katrina, and was about to cap his second term under the greatest financial disaster since the Great Depression. Even by that point in 2007, Bush had few fans or even defenders left; wisely no one seated in his White House admin was going to enter the race. This left an entirely wide open field of candidates for the GOP, yet very few were willing to counter signal Bush no matter how unpopular he was. It was an odd deference to what no one wanted to (yet) confess was a failed and disastrous presidency.

To set the stage, Q-1 home sales were down, there were murmurs that some of the financial houses were over-leveraged, some were saying there was a “housing bubble,” but the DJIA was still trading very high, and the economy was still in great shape a year and a half from the November 2008 casting of ballots. The slate of debate topics from that night are pretty laughable now given the benefit of hindsight and seeing what we now know would become the decade of pure, non-stop pozzing. Everyone and everything seems so naïve and doe-eyed from that 2007-2008 period. This was a kinder, gentler time, way before Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman threw down at a Florida apartment complex, before tranny bathrooms, before BLM riots, there were not yet facebook background filters to virtue signal, this was still prior to frequent broad daylight executions of policemen in ambushes, no widespread opioid epidemic yet, no bake the gay wedding cake or else, and way before the third world crime and rape invasion of Europe unleashed by the Syrian “Civil” War. The main issues that night were figuring out how to exit Iraq and how to prevent another 9/11 style attack at home, everything else seemed pretty stable domestically, hardly worthy of presidential debate questions.

There was no housing collapse yet, which means there was no financial crisis yet, ergo no recession yet. Which means that there was no Obama yet. Which means there was no “tea party” yet. Identity politics were in their infancy and had not yet been fully and tactically deployed against the right wing, who in the name of respectability, refused to use the same tool. All of these things we are now familiar with were absent then but would come in rapid succession, acting as the gasoline that changed how Americans do politics by fire in the decade that followed.

Each of the candidates represented a faction of what broadly comes together to form the Republican/conservative brand. Mike Huckabee and Fred Thompson were the aww shucks, Southern candidates with deep accents and evangelical gestures. McCain and Romney were the GOP establishment choices, only needing to see which of the two emerged from the pageantry of early primaries before big pocket donors would know who to throw all support behind. Ron Paul’s paleo conservative, non-interventionism was preferred by the most optimistic and youngest Republicans but virtually no one else within the party. Giuliani was actually the front runner initially, running solely on the fading momentum of appealing to 9/11 themed patriotism and anti-terrorism. Tancredo and Hunter were basically single issue candidates who ironically ran on a border wall and aggressive deportation strategies, which while popular positions, could not catapult them out of the basement of the candidate field. The candidates pretty much spent an hour and a half discussing the theoretical destruction of Israel at any moment from the hands of an Iranian nuke, and creationism. Weird, I can’t imagine how they lost that election!

It was extremely apparent to anyone paying any attention that all of the energy and enthusiasm of those under 30 were breaking along lines of race and sex. The grassroots fundraising and activism was occurring almost exclusively in these age brackets. Young white men were overwhelmingly interested in Ron Paul, while young white women and non-whites of “all genders” were interested in Obama. There was virtually no interest whatsoever in the establishment candidates of either party from the young voters, a trend that repeated in 2012, and that then violently exploded in 2016. The major difference between the two parties in 2008 is that the Democrats allowed their activists, idealists, and optimists to decide who represented them – the GOP told theirs to shut up and get out.

The true power brokers and deep State did not feel threatened by anything Obama was offering, so he was never attacked. They sensed something threatening with Ron Paul though, so he was attacked. What were the primary differences?

A Ron Paul presidency would not have involved itself in Syria, would have jailed rather than bailed out the banks who defrauded the American public, would not have passed the insurance lobby subsidy called Obamacare, and would have ended the tribal collection of tribute sent back via “foreign aid” to Israel. Because of these things, all efforts were made to marginalize and drive Paul out of the primaries, the only problem is he kept getting donations and his activists did not get discouraged. As the rest of the GOP field folded with no ability to support themselves, Paul remained in the race, State after State, and continued to gather double digit vote percentages, yet he still was not asked many questions in the debates even as the field thinned down to 4, then 3, then finally 2 – only Ron Paul and John McCain. It was that important for the party machinery to prevent his counter-narrative message from being heard, especially by conservative audiences who were carefully managed and corralled by Conservative(INC). It was so obvious and so painful that the fix was in for those of us that were hardcore Paul backers. When the same thing happened in the 2012 primary, the repeating of the process removed the final fantasy that we would ever calmly steer the ship away from the rocks.

If you ever wonder: “What ever happened to all of those Ron Paul supporters? There used to be so many of them, so vocal, so active online – but I never see them anymore.” That guy that you remember who used to share 20 links a day about Ron Paul and campaign for liberty, but now never speaks about politics on facebook anymore — Do you ACTUALLY think he really just stopped caring about stuff? … care to guess WHERE he ended up when he was denied the opportunity to merely be “a moderate Republican?”

What the GOP establishment did in the handling of Ron Paul will eventually be looked back at as one of the biggest, high time preference, blunders of all time. For many of us, as young and engaged idealists, this was our first introduction to “the JQ” and the first time we had seen “ZOG” in action. This was a sweet old man who wanted sensible non-intervention, but even that was too much of a threat to the

Likud wing of the GOP. It is honestly as simple as that. Instead of giving passionate young men a place at the table within the party that is normatively attractive to them, they told these White millennials/late X’ers they were not welcome in the GOP … because they didn’t, as a priority, sufficiently value Israel’s interests. Perhaps that is why only a few short years later that there was an audience receptive to a candidate promising a radically different set of priorities that placed, dare we say, America first.

Ten years ago, the GOP establishment could have kept these young white libertarian men under the Aegis of Conservative(INC) by simply letting them be just one more new addition to a family filled with other quirky, mostly harmless, focused issues client groups who reliably vote Republican. They made similar compromises with evangelicals and hardcore NRA types. Instead, they acted like White Boomers raised in a high trust society and suckled on controlled media narrative would live forever. They mortgaged the future by ignoring the impassioned youth, and they lost the election anyways … TWICE.

Who do you think inherits the GOP as those boomers begin passing away? The same young men they denied political voice, and trust me, those young White men remember precisely WHO denied them and WHY. These are men raised in the internet age, not an era with three major networks pushing the same message and directing a binary and easily manipulated form of consensus. These are men who were forced to interact with the realities of race daily and intimately in a way that boomers never did, and who, because of those experiences, cannot be swayed by the same priestly class or hear the appeals to the superstitions of a different, and more gullible generation.

These are also the men who saw upfront and firsthand an almost exclusively Jewish neo-conservative set of keepers guarding the gates and preventing their access to participating in representative political life. And this experience will stick with them forever.

After having been told (and shown) that they were not welcome by the inner machinery that runs the Republican party, these libertarians began doing serious soul searching by reevaluatng every single one of their fundamental premises. Dispossessed and forsaken, these young men became what the French call in politics, “Les Enfants Terribles,” – the bad children.

All the while, the left hammered away with pozz, combined with racial flashpoints and fractures sprouting up like fountains for the next 8 years. It was in this incubating climate that what would begin calling itself the “alt-right” emerged from the womb as the unwanted offspring of the two parents responsible for forming them, and towards whom these “enfants terribles” held only contempt, even as their existence was only possible from the role each progenitor played in the procreation – George Bush (pure ZOG foreign policy, population replacement immigration, predatory capitalism) and Barack Obama (non-stop pozz, cultural Marxism, and anti-white domestic policies.)

Since there was no political inroad to a major party, there was also no longer any need to revere the sacred bulls and golden calf of society either, chiefly the taboo discussions of unaccountable Jewish power and racial group differences. Whereas we, like all respectable people, had broken out in uncomfortable sweats and promptly run as far and fast away as possible from those subjects, these two things were now on the table to finally examine honestly — to address humorously, irreverently, and without abandon. Is there any point to being politically correct when you are actively denied political access? It is not as though such an action will preserve a respectable political station. And let’s face it, is there any humor more exciting and more fun than the most transgressive and taboo? Is there any reaction more comical than that of the self-righteous, shaming zealot, reeling from shocked sensibilities and wounded by affronts to a morality they feel the need to puritanically enforce upon an unsaved society?

Like a doctor inducing labor, the GOP establishment had effectively forced these men, suddenly, painfully, and before they were ready, out of the safe and polite world to stand on their own. Perhaps that is why these fellows place such little value in taking safe and polite positions now… We had watched FOOTLOOSE and decided being Kevin Bacon was way cooler than being John Lithgow. Church ladies exist. They have pink hair, septum piercings, and like a Pentecostal in rapture, “literally shaking,” cannot deal with someone having a different moral axis. Their Jehovah’s Witness tier reactions will never not be funny to trigger.

It was a very strange thing. All of these men were having simultaneous and similar evolutions. It was a true phenomenon to see identical organic spontaneous responses to the exact same stimuli, at the exact same time, coast to coast, across populations that had never met one another. These atomized individuals soon discovered that none of them was transforming in this way alone. They were organically having the same mutation — they then found one another, and began forming communities and networks. Troll armies on Twitter.

So why were we all libertarians?

One of the oldest jokes and outside criticisms of libertarianism was that it appealed (even more so than the Republican party) to almost exclusively Whites (90%+) and males (98%+.) Is it possible that we subconsciously saw that political philosophy as a roundabout path towards representing the group interests neither major party would, we the “collection of individuals” who “just all happened to be” from identical backgrounds – young, high IQ, white men – the demographic primarily being targeted, squeezed, and replaced in the increasingly anti-white political system?

As it turns out most of our instincts were pretty good in the things we opposed. We already had all of the correct enemies. Libertarianism offered us a way to address them without going to the core of the issue nor offending society’s shibboleths directly. The system also tolerated us in that space as an escape valve since it offered only minimal threat to ZOG while also being fully compatible with all of society’s foundational myths of race. On the flip side, every time laboratory libertarianism had to interact with the harsh realities of race and group differences, it failed to deliver, and was therefore exposed as fantasy thinking, at least under the current racial composition of the United States. Libertarianism had to evolve, or rather its adherents did, particularly in the face of the increasingly racially defined identity politics. For most of us, we discarded it when it demonstrated its uselessness on the identity driven 21st century field of battle. We would not fight second generation warfare with first generation tactics. … Those kinds of bloodbaths and slaughters are for baby boomers and conservatives, duh.

As “libertarians” we thought we wanted a strict non-interventionist foreign policy, but what we really wanted was not having foreign powers, in direct violation of our own interests, dictating how we behaved internationally. We were against “the domestic police state” and “the prison industrial complex,” but realized that to the degree that those things exist, their construction as institutions was a response to the sheer volume and statistical frequency of crime created by the non-whites living among us. These kinds of violent institutions with aggressive posturing struggle to justify themselves in societies and municipalities without large numbers of black and brown people. That very same system that “imprisons people of color” also prevents Whites from escaping their presence. Our sentence is a ball and chain, overseen by a man with a gun, ensuring that the White and non-white are forever tethered to each other, no matter how much both dislike the arrangement.

We were against “high taxes” and “welfare” not because it distorted market values of labor and encouraged malinvestment, or whatever other highfalutin arguments we used to give, but because deep down we understood that those systems take from the productive and give to the non-productive. This again, had crystal clear “color coding” regarding which groups of people performed which function. The “surveillance and anti-privacy” laws that we hated, were the acts of a schizophrenic State having a completely illogical Visa and immigration system that refused to account for race, culture, and identity as conditions for entry, and rather than address those foolish policies, that State asked us to become less free and more scrutinized. We were being denied a high trust, high productivity society, and our liberties were disappearing under the weight of our increasing “56%” flavor of non-whiteness, that none of us had ever been asked if we consented to.

We could go on and on, but essentially all of the libertarian positions were a proxy for the various battlefronts of diversity eroding livable societies. Libertarianism was the White man’s negotiating tactic to secure minor concessions in an exchange for a general surrender. The death of libertarianism was this portion the body politic finally succumbing to the mental exhaustion of constantly denying race, so they simply stopped doing the thing that wore them out. Libertarians were the first to tap out, but they will not be the last. One by one, the rest of the electorate will also lose its devotion and stamina against the strains of diversity. We just got there first.

Jettisoning that deadweight had its own energizing effect. Enter Donald Trump … and the emergence of the frenetic “alt-right” as a legitimate constituency with the ability to sway close elections in swing States, no longer wasting energy on lies and wishful thinking – by 2015, these libertarians had recuperated and gathered, free to battle under a different and more genuine flag. They had officially arrived as an actual political force – a “basket of deplorables.”

Can Democrats learn anything from this?

Without giving away the game, it may be too late since everything is already in motion. The same way that the machinery in the GOP actively denied a political home to passionate, high IQ, high agency white men in 2008 and 2012 — the Democrats repeat performed from this script upon their passionate, high IQ, high agency white men in 2016. It was nearly a perfect copy pasta with Bernie Sanders, only more transparently and aggressively, with actual underhanded things done by the victorious, cheating candidate, and against a more broadly popular candidate with even wider support within the party. Will they make the same mistake and do this again in 2020? Are they willing to permanently chase out all straight White men from their midst? Are they willing to donate what would combine to form a monopoly of highly intelligent, highly creative minds to the alt-right … a group more than happy to welcome them in crafting a third position of politics?

There were several flashpoints in the election that made it quite clear how the Democrats would deal with White men first, and White women eventually. The first instance was when several black women grabbed the microphone on the stage in Seattle, chided the crowd under racial language, and pushed Bernie to the back.

The second was when globalist Sarah Silverman and fellow sexual predator and globalist Al Franken stood on the stage at the DNC and associated support for Bernie Sanders as akin to having an STD. They then promptly told Whites (because let’s face it, that’s who Sanders constituency is) to shut up, get in line, and cheer the candidate who manipulated the primary process to deny them political will – literally cheer your replacement, weakened position, and lack of a future – or leave. Will these Whites take them up on the offer?

The only available role for a White man in this party from this point forward is as a disliked and barely tolerated auxillary working in the baggage train. Sure, you can participate, but only if you remain silent and do not pursue leadership roles. How long do you think exceptionally bright, fiery, passionate, left wing White men with good ideas and true leadership qualities are going to be okay with that arrangement? Especially as the party doubles down on poor strategies that lose elections? Where there is no coherent ideologically left wing platform, because identity is more important to the “coalition of the ascendant” — a group whose appetite must constantly be sated with red meat — than economic fundamentals? Are these intelligent white guys really going to sit back and say nothing? Or do you think they will pursue another option?

If you don’t think there are millions more White males, this time on the left instead of the right, reevaluating their political positions as a result of their disenfranchisement, you don’t understand politics at all. The same way that the libertarians had to concede that their idealism could not work because of diversity, the Bernie bros. will learn that their idealism is destined for failure for the same reasons too. The alt-right doesn’t have to do a damn thing but sit back, watch, wait, and find room for these White men and give them voice and leadership after they have had enough with the Democrat party, who doesn’t want their talents anyway.

The Democrat party is so racially charged as a starting point on every issue that Universalist policies are seen as awful by the “coalition of the ascendant.” Free college education for all? Free healthcare for all? Guaranteed living wage for all? NOPE. The fracture point is the phrase “for all.” The racial spoils system has been nurtured so long and so aggressively by Democrats to bribe non-Whites that the idea of these constituencies sharing with Whites under a “for all” arrangement is a complete non-starter. There is absolutely no enthusiasm from people of color to contribute towards a colorblind society that would still disproportionately benefit Whites, the numerical majority. White Millenials will eventually discover that they are not seen as “allies” only competitors for the distribution of the spoils. The non-Whites do not see you as a teammate, they see you as a speedbump to run over along the way to controlling a political party that works solely for their interests. As we see more “browning of America” this political State of mind will increase, not decrease. Ironically, this is how politics works in shithole countries too … weird right? It is almost as if societies take upon the traits of their component parts.

There will be no socialism and shared progressive safety net without a White supermajority, “an Ethnostate” if you will. People of color controlling elections will happen within the Democrat party well before it is able to branch out into the larger political landscape. The few remaining Whites within the Democrat party will recognize this when they are eventually no longer able to seat candidates in party primaries, a point which may have already occurred. There are certainly some States, and countless cities and counties where this is already the reality. People of color as voting blocs have demonstrated no interest in gay and transgender issues, GMO food, global warming and environment, nor anything else urbanite, white, and hipster. City dwelling liberal Whites will not remain in a party where those things have zero traction or priority. They will want to go somewhere else.

Perhaps they will find a home with the hip and rebellious group that the GOP assures everyone “are not even conservatives….” Many have already made the jump.

Their establishment is effectively chasing these left wing White men into a harsh and painful birth, where they will have no choice but to become honest about race, just as ours did to us. The alt-right is waiting to work with them, our brothers, to come up with the solutions that modernity and the future will require. We are glad to welcome you. I suppose that this entire process was inevitable and the politics of the 20th century can fade permanently, giving way to what will be the inevitable politics of the 21st — identity …. blood and soil … whether we will or will not be replaced …

Welcome to the fight fellas! – Gwoobus Harmon

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garancefranke-ruta · 7 years

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Too close for comfort: How social media changed how we talk to (and about) each other in America

Illustration by Yahoo News; source images: Getty Images, Gordon Donovan/Yahoo News

WASHINGTON — “We cannot afford to be so politically correct anymore,” Donald J. Trump thundered at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.

“Here, at our convention, there will be no lies. We will honor the American people with the truth, and nothing else.”

Though fact checkers disagreed with his assessment that it was a lie-free convention, Trump’s from-the-podium denunciations of political correctness during the campaign resonated loudly. “I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct. I’ve been challenged by so many people, and I don’t frankly have time for total political correctness. And to be honest with you, this country doesn’t have time, either,” Trump told Megyn Kelly at the Fox News debate in response to questions about his offensive comments about women. He would later dismiss his shockingly crude comments to Access Hollywood host Billy Bush as “locker room talk.” As former White House adviser Steve Bannon recently told Charlie Rose on “60 Minutes,” “People didn’t care. They knew Donald Trump was just doing locker room talk with a guy. And they dismissed it. It had no lasting impact on the campaign.”

Offensive speech, true speech, politically correct speech – America has for the past two years been having a national debate about what the appropriate boundaries of public discourse ought to be. At the heart of this conflict is not just the question of who says what about whom, and how frankly, but a fundamental transformation in the technologies of speech over the past decade that has changed how the conversation itself is conducted. These changes have decreased perceived freedom of speech at the same time that they have magnified once marginal positions to create a novel public speech environment that can seem at once stiflingly conformist and shockingly extreme. And in the process of carving new public squares out of the once private realm of social ties, the new social technologies have made politicians of us all, subject to the same strictures on speech that formerly only truly public figures had to be concerned with.

“Our community is evolving from its origin connecting us with family and friends to now becoming a source of news and public discourse as well,” noted Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in his lengthy February letter to the public.

“Big tech’s incursion into public/civic life,” Slate tech columnist Will Oremus has called it and similar efforts from other major firms.

Social media has, by design, fundamentally reshaped how we have conversations with each other, moving casual speech from the auditory ether to the realm of the written. And it has vastly expanded the audience for conversations that used to happen in small communities of relatively similar people, replacing them with one-to-many interactions with people who potentially have a wide array of views, and weak or even no direct personal ties.

From secret Facebook groups to support Hillary Clinton to Twitter pile-ons to the Alt Right’s provocative “free speech” tours at college campuses, we now are living in a world transformed by a massive decline in undocumented and uncontested speech — for most of human history, the very cornerstone of how we existed in society.

* * *

The transformation has been astonishingly swift. 79 percent of online American adults used Facebook in 2016, according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center right after the election, and 24 percent used Twitter. Overall 86 percent of American adults use the internet, meaning that 68 percent of American adults were on Facebook in 2016 – and 76 percent of those checked in daily. Twitter users skewed younger and better educated than Facebook ones overall.

Just eight years ago, these social networks were so far from dominant that Pew didn’t even mention Facebook in its post-election analysis of how voters got their information, lumping everything digital into a single “internet” category. But we can get some sense of what’s changed from their early 2009 observation, “Usage of social networking sites has nearly quadrupled over the past four years—from fewer than one in ten online adults in early 2005 to more than one in three today.” And most of that would have been Facebook, as by 2010, only 6 percent of the adult population, or 8 percent of the adult online population, was using Twitter.

Illustration by Yahoo News: source images: Getty Images, Gordon Donovan/Yahoo News

While for early adopters it may feel like the social networks have been with us since the mid-2000s, in point of fact they were not very well-developed or widely used when Obama was elected president.

Overall, only “55 percent of all American adults went online during the 2008 election season to get news or information about the campaign, to communicate with others about politics, or to contribute to the online debate,” Pew found. By 2014, the average Facebook user had 338 friends and cited “sharing with many people at once” as the top reason for using the network and the numbers using Facebook was on track to surpass the one-time all digital category. Importantly, Pew found as early as 2008, “those who are most information hungry are the most likely to browse sites that match their views.”

That observation was at the heart of a slew of articles and books dating back to technology columnist Farhad Manjoo’s oft-overlooked but analytically important 2008 book True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society, which located the new success of campaigns of what we would today call fake news — like the 2004 Swift Boat attacks on Sen. John Kerry — in the ability of partisan actors to manipulate the newly fragmented and increasingly digital media ecosystem.

“In the last few years, pollsters and political researchers have begun to document a fundamental shift in the way Americans are thinking about the news,” Manjoo argued, in words as timely today as their were more than nine years ago. “No longer are we merely holding opinions different from one another; we’re also holding different facts. Increasingly our arguments aren’t over what we should be doing…but instead over what is happening.” The new fights would be over “competing visions of reality,” he predicted, correctly.

MoveOn cofounder Eli Pariser continued the argument in his 2011 book The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think, blaming personalization as well as fragmentation for the failure of the digital utopian dream.

“For a time, it seemed that the Internet was going to entirely redemocratize society,” Pariser wrote. “Bloggers and citizen journalists would single-handedly rebuild the public media. Politicians would be able to run only with a broad base of support from small, everyday donors. Local governments would become more transparent and accountable to their citizens. And yet the era of civic connection I dreamed about hasn’t come. Democracy requires citizens to see things from another’s point of view, but instead we’re more and more enclosed in our own bubbles. Democracy requires a reliance on shared facts; instead we’re being offered parallel but separate universes.”

“Left to their own devices, personal information filters are a kind of autopropaganda, indoctrinating us with our own ideas, amplifying our desire for things that are familiar and leaving us oblivious to the dangers lurking in the dark territory of the unknown,” he warned.

At the same time our speech is more public and potentially contestable than ever before, we are increasingly cocooned in digital media worlds that reflect and reinforce our own views. And we increasingly live in physically atomized and homogenized communities that reflect our own values back to us, as Bill Bishop so well documented in 2004’s The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart.

These dynamics work in dark synergy to amp up political polarization. Also contributing to the divisions are two political cycles’ worth of gerrymandering that have led to a congressional map where seats often are more vigorously contested from the intra-party extremes in primary cycles than by opponents across the aisle.

We are surrounded by a world that reflects us online, except that our once private speech utterances now increasingly take place in micro-publics, where we are forced to patrol the boundaries of our filter bubbles, defriending and muting and blocking those who intrude upon or take exception to our worldviews.

***

The effort and drama involved in defending what is said online — the ever-present tension between competing world views and different speech communities that are now endlessly visible to each other — at once drives people away from the new public squares and radicalizes those who witness the fights within it.

There have been many famous cases of individuals driven from the most public of the new digital public squares, Twitter. Ghostbusters actress Leslie Jones left Twitter after becoming the target of a broad harassment campaign, though she later returned to using the service. “Twitter, for the past five years, has been a machine where I put in unpaid work and tension headaches come out,” wrote author Lindy West in January, explaining why she was leaving the site. In return for what she shares with the world, “I am micromanaged in real time by strangers; neo-Nazis mine my personal life for vulnerabilities to exploit; and men enjoy unfettered, direct access to my brain so they can inform me, for the thousandth time, that they would gladly rape me if I weren’t so fat.”

Her real reason for leaving, “wasn’t the trolls themselves … it was the global repercussions of Twitter’s refusal to stop them,” she wrote, in words that take on additional weight after Charlottesville:

The white supremacist, anti-feminist, isolationist, transphobic “alt-right” movement has been beta-testing its propaganda and intimidation machine on marginalised Twitter communities for years now – how much hate speech will bystanders ignore? When will Twitter intervene and start protecting its users? – and discovered, to its leering delight, that the limit did not exist. No one cared. Twitter abuse was a grand-scale normalisation project, disseminating libel and disinformation, muddying long-held cultural givens such as “racism is bad” and “sexual assault is bad” and “lying is bad” and “authoritarianism is bad”, and ultimately greasing the wheels for Donald Trump’s ascendance to the US presidency. Twitter executives did nothing.

Meanwhile Jason Kessler, the organizer of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, has cited the public vilification of publicist Justine Sacco over an offensive tweet about AIDS and Africa as a turning point in his own political evolution. “It was an awkward joke; an attempt to be edgy in the hands of an amateur comedienne that fell flat. But it whipped up the social justice hate mob into a frenzy,” he wrote in 2016.

Complaints and asides about our new digital speech communities are a daily part of living in them. “Every time I get off Facebook I feel like I need to decontaminate. That site is toxic,” wrote Jordan Uhl, one of the organizers of June’s March for Truth on Trump’s Russia ties, on Friday. “I wanted to write about [Hillary Clinton] and engage rigorously with her ideas far more than I did. But I didn’t. In part, I did not have the energy to deal with the inevitable backlash, from corners right and left,” writer Roxanne Gay admitted in the New York Times. One of the largest Facebook groups of Clinton supporters was a secret (or open secret) group because women wanted a place to express their views without being pounced on for holding them. “As much as possible,” group founder Libby

Chamberlain told the Washington Post, “it removes the risk that they’re going to be attacked for their views.” “It’s become a thing now, where I see one of my peers tell their story, then get dogpiled by 22yr olds for furthering problematic narratives,” wrote David Wynne about his generation of queer men, who experienced a different world than do young gay and lesbians today. Lesbian author and filmmaker Sarah Schulman went so far as to write a book, Confict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility and the Duty of Repair, to take on the contemporary culture of “overreaction to difference.” “The mere fact of the other person’s difference is misrepresented as an assault that then justifies our cruelty,” she charges in it.

As Facebook and other tech companies come under increasing scrutiny for their lack of oversight of the public commons they have created, and the space they’ve allowed to trolls, bots, and foreign agents with disruptive intent, it’s worth also considering the role they’ve played in creating an environment seen as stifling the speech of both liberals and conservatives.

For good and for ill, we now live in an environment of highly contested speech, where more people than ever before in human history can see and publicly react to the different views around them.

****

In many ways, the underlying dynamics cannot solely to be laid at the feet of the tech companies. Benjamin Barber argued in his seminal 1992 Atlantic magazine article Jihad vs. McWorld, later a book of the same name, that the rise of global culture fueled the rise of defensive tribalism and fundamentalism as traditionally isolated communities were forced to defend their old ways and cultural identities in the face of a homogenizing media onslaught.

Just beyond the horizon of current events lie two possible political futures—both bleak, neither democratic. The first is a retribalization of large swaths of humankind by war and bloodshed: a threatened Lebanonization of national states in which culture is pitted against culture, people against people, tribe against tribe—a Jihad in the name of a hundred narrowly conceived faiths against every kind of interdependence, every kind of artificial social cooperation and civic mutuality. The second is being borne in on us by the onrush of economic and ecological forces that demand integration and uniformity and that mesmerize the world with fast music, fast computers, and fast food—with MTV, Macintosh, and McDonald’s, pressing nations into one commercially homogenous global network: one McWorld tied together by technology, ecology, communications, and commerce. The planet is falling precipitantly apart AND coming reluctantly together at the very same moment.

Barber was writing in a world dominated by television, but the echoes of his argument hang over the debate about today’s digital world.

“Progress now requires humanity coming together not just as cities or nations, but also as a global community,” wrote Zuckerberg in his letter. “This is especially important right now. Facebook stands for bringing us closer together and building a global community.”

Barber’s broad theory was the opposite of the technocratic utopianism of Zuckerberg and other digital leaders. Proximity and visibility can increase conflict, as old ways of living feel themselves to be under assault and people dig in to defend their views. Globalism gives birth to reaction, the vision of a world community leading to a hardening of the lines around those viewpoints that the broader global community cannot or will not absorb. In a diverse world, as in a diverse nation, there will be competing visions of the best life and deep disagreements about who should wield power.

“Rhetorically, the tech companies gesture toward individuality — to the empowerment of the ‘user’—but their worldview rolls over it,” argues Franklin Foer in his just-released book, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech, a deep look at the changes wrought by the foursome Europeans call GAFA: Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon. These big tech companies “are shredding the principles that protect individuality,” he argues. “Their devices and sites have collapsed privacy; they disrespect the value of authorship…they hope to automate the choices, both large and small, that we make through the day.”

They believe “we’re fundamentally social beings, born to collective existence” but in fact they are an example of the twinning of “monopoly and conformism,” actors that marry corporate “concentration” and intellectual “homogenization” into a powerful new threat to the very idea of individuality.

Facebook itself is grappling, more than a decade after its founding, with some of these issues. As individuals feel themselves to be threatened by being thrust into direct, seemly intimate conversations with those they disagree with, the divides between them often only harden and they seek out communities of agreement.

“Research shows that some of the most obvious ideas, like showing people an article from the opposite perspective, actually deepen polarization by framing other perspectives as foreign,” Zuckerberg noted in his February letter.

“Research suggests the best solutions for improving discourse may come from getting to know each other as whole people instead of just opinions — something Facebook may be uniquely suited to do. If we connect with people about what we have in common — sports teams, TV shows, interests — it is easier to have dialogue about what we disagree on.” Facebook would be rolling out tools and a new focus on “safe” and “meaningful” groups to built these alternative communities.

The big question is if it’s ever going to be possible for this kind of reconciliation and shared understanding to happen online, thanks to the inherent dynamics of the medium he helped create.

* * *

It can be harder to see other people as real in a world that is all-too-often virtual, where people are performing for an audience, where there are grave questions about whether the communities we are partaking of are real, and where people routinely say things to each other with a vehemence and passion that’s as much a factor of the distance between them as their actual intentions.

But the past year has also seen some astonishing examples of the collapse of seemingly hardened online identities in the face of physical reality and real human society, governed by actual laws. And the law takes comments made online seriously, even when those who make them insist they are merely performing in character before their micro-publics.

In Charlottesville, a young white man ripped off his Vanguard America White shirt when confronted by a crowd. “I’m not really white power, man, I just did it for the fun,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

What happened? A reporter asked him. “Scared the shit out of me,” he replied.

He was there because “it’s kind of a fun idea,” he later explained. “Just being able to say ‘white power,’ you know?”

So-called “crying Nazi” Christopher Cantwell made the sort of threats in a crowd he had made online as the manager of what he told a judge was “a racist podcast,” and now sits in a Virginia jail, bail having been denied as he awaits trial on charges of pepper-spraying someone during the melee in Charlottesville. His lawyer sought to play down his aggressive and racist statements at the rally as the performances of a shock jock, although the crimes he is charged with seem consistent with those sentiments.

“Pizzagate” gunman Edgar Maddison Welch pled guilty to assault with a dangerous weapon and transporting a firearm over state lines after firing an AR-15 in a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant that had become a magnet for bizarre online conspiracy theories. He was sentenced to four years in jail.

And most recently, former hedge fund manager Martin Shkreli had his bail revoked by a judge for posting a comment to his 70,000 Facebook followers offering a $5,000 reward to anyone who could snatch a strand of Hillary Clinton’s hair during her book tour.

“The fact that he continues to remain unaware of the inappropriateness of his actions or words demonstrates to me that he may be creating ongoing risk to the community,” said U.S. District Judge Kiyo Matsumoto, explaining the decision to hold Shkreli.

“This is a solicitation of assault. That is not protected by the First Amendment.”

And yet it – and the defense of those actions — is the sort of thing we see online all the time: the idea that what he was doing lay somewhere between joking and trolling. “He did not intended to cause harm,” Shkreli’s attorney Benjamin Brafman said. “Being inappropriate does not make you a danger to the community.”

The judge disagreed. But ultimately the legal system cannot be the forum for adjudicating speech in the public square; it has an interest only insofar as other criminal accusations have become part of the picture.

Will efforts by the digital companies themselves be the solution? In the wake of the Charlottesville march, many internet providers have sought to shut down radical forums and cease to give platforms to white supremacist groups for online organizing.

This may force those groups to use older tools to organize and spread their message.

But “no-platforming” steps by the big companies also reinforce the message that fuels grievance from extremists, and raises concerns that the big tech companies, having created new public squares, are now taking on a role stifling of speech in the name of politics.

And so the free speech fights roll on, gathering in-real-life opposition as they go. Digital provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, banned from Twitter, and other Alt Right figures are headed back to Berkeley, California, next weekend, where they will surely be met by angry Antifa protestors and students who object to their presence. And where we will see again what these online fights look like when made flesh.

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