2019 so far

[ekauqodielak]

A new survey shows what really interests 'pro-lifers': controlling women

Jill Filipovic • Thu 22 Aug 2019 06.00 EDT

According to their own survey responses, anti-abortion voters are hostile to gender equality in practically every aspect

‘On every question, anti-abortion voters were significantly more hostile to gender equity than pro-choice voters.’
Photograph: James Gourley/Getty Images

According to self-identified “pro-life” advocates, the fundamental divide between those who want to outlaw abortion and those who want to keep it legal comes down to one question: when does life begin? Anti-abortion advocacy pushes the view that life begins at conception; the name of their movement carefully centers the conceit that opposition to abortion rights is simply about wanting to save human lives.

A new poll shows that’s a lie. The “pro-life” movement is fundamentally about misogyny.

A Supermajority/PerryUndem survey released this week divides respondents by their position on abortion, and then tracks their answers to 10 questions on gender equality more generally. On every question, anti-abortion voters were significantly more hostile to gender equity than pro-choice voters.

Do men make better political leaders than women? More than half of anti-abortion voters agreed. Do you want there to be equal numbers of men and women in positions of power in America? Fewer than half of abortion opponents said yes – compared with 80% of pro-choicers, who said they want women to share in power equally.

Anti-abortion voters don’t like the #MeToo movement. They don’t think the lack of women in positions of power impacts women’s equality. They don’t think access to birth control impacts women’s equality. They don’t think the way women are treated in society is an important issue in the 2020 election.

In other words, they don’t believe sexism is a problem, and they’re hostile to women’s rights. Pro-lifers are sexists in denial – yes, the women too.

In the aftermath of the 2016 election, mostly white pundits wondered if Donald Trump’s white male base was motivated by “economic anxiety”. We heard this over and over: Trump voters aren’t the racist deplorables the liberal media (of which those same pundits were a part) makes them out to be. They’re decent people who have been hurt by free trade agreements, increasing Chinese economic dominance, the decimation of unions, a thinning social safety net, and stagnating wages. (Why those same people would then turn around and vote for a party that kills unions, tears up the safety net and blocks minimum wage raises while cutting taxes for CEOs went unexplained.)

Then came the social scientists – and whaddaya know? Trump voters weren’t motivated by economic anxiety as much as fear of “cultural displacement”. White Christian men (and many of their wives) were so used to their cultural, political and economic dominance that they perceived the ascension of other groups as a threat.

To put it in more straightforward terms, they were racist (and sexist), and saw in Trump a kindred spirit who would work for their interests – their primary interest being a symbolic reassertion of their cultural dominance. Trump’s continued appeals to his racist base, coupled with his efforts to help the rich and screw the working class, have only confirmed this conclusion: his base still cheers him on, economic anxiety be damned.

The American anti-abortion movement invented this kind of political gaslighting. The Catholic church, an unabashedly misogynist institution that to this day refuses to allow women into positions of power, had long opposed abortion (but not for all that long – until about 150 years ago, the Catholic view was that abortion was permissible through the first few months of pregnancy).

But evangelicals didn’t seem to think much about abortion until an earlier pet issue, racial segregation, began to fall out of favor. Around the same time, women’s social roles were rapidly changing. The birth control pill brought with it an avalanche of opportunities and freedoms, and women, finally fully able to have sex for fun and prevent pregnancy, took full advantage. The ability to delay a pregnancy – and later, the ability to legally end one – meant that women didn’t have to choose between romance and ambition (and it meant women could be choosier about romance, making a more considered decision about who and whether to marry).

This undermined the whole rightwing Christian project, which was, and remains, thoroughly invested in a nuclear family with a father at the head. And indeed, rightwing arguments against abortion used to invoke conservative gender tropes much more often – that abortion undermined the traditional family, for example.

Those arguments began to fall out of favor in a more feminist world, so the anti-abortion movement pivoted towards “life”. It was convenient: erase the pregnant woman and focus on the fetus. Defending life, abortion opponents have long claimed, has absolutely nothing to do with opposing rights for women.

Except, of course, that it does. Abortion rights advocates have spent decades pointing out that these self-styled pro-lifers don’t seem to care much about “life” once a baby is born. They want to cut aid to needy children and healthcare to poor mothers and pregnant women. They oppose contraception and sex education – the most effective ways to reduce the abortion rate. Many of them continue to support a president who separates small children from their parents and keeps them in squalid cages. “Life,” it seems, has precious little to do with being “pro-life”.

This survey is another example of how abortion opposition is tied up in a whole knot of misogyny.

Women, according to more than three-quarters of anti-abortion survey respondents, “are too easily offended”. More than 70% of “pro-lifers” in the survey agree that women interpret innocent remarks or acts as being sexist – women, in other words, are a touch hysterical and perhaps not to be trusted. While 82% of pro-choice respondents said that the country would be better off with more women in political office, just 34% of abortion opponents agreed.

It’s not about “life”. It’s about the fact that abortion is inexorably tied to women’s freedoms and female power. If women can’t decide for themselves when and whether to have children – if having sex can mean being forced into motherhood – women also won’t be able to decide our own futures. We know that being forced to continue a pregnancy makes women more likely to remain in poverty. It makes women more likely to remain in abusive relationships. It hurts their children. It makes women more likely to die.

If you don’t want women to be equal, a great way to force that ideal is to strip women of our rights to our own bodies and reproductive decisions. And the goal of abortion opponents is clear: they do not want women to be equal players in society.

Thanks to the glut of data on what actually motivates Trump voters, you don’t hear the “economic anxiety” argument made much any more – it’s usually referenced derisively. It’s time to give the claim of being “pro-life” the same treatment.

Why Planned Parenthood was right to refuse federal funding

Moira Donegan • Thu 22 Aug 2019 06.00 EDT

The Trump administration put Planned Parenthood in an untenable position – and the organization made the moral choice to walk away

‘Title X clinics served 4 million patients in 2017, 40% of them through Planned Parenthood.
In many rural areas, Planned Parenthood is the only Title X provider.’
Photograph: Jeff Roberson/AP

The Trump administration expanded its assault on women’s rights this week, engineering the loss of birth control and other reproductive healthcare coverage for millions of low income women.

On Monday, the administration’s Title X gag rule went into effect, barring any provider who performs abortions or even provides referrals for them from receiving federal money from the Title X program, which funds birth control, cancer screenings, STD tests and other services for patients, many of whom make too much money to qualify for Medicaid coverage but too little to afford their own healthcare.

The gag rule would functionally require dishonesty from medical personnel at participating institutions, who would be forbidden from discussing abortion as a viable and available option for pregnant patients.

Though the move from the administration has been tied up in the courts for months, it was permitted to go into effect on Monday, prompting Planned Parenthood to withdraw from the Title X program and lose one of its most robust sources of funding. Title X clinics served 4 million patients in 2017, 40% of them through Planned Parenthood. They will lose their clinics. In many rural areas, Planned Parenthood is the only Title X provider. Patients there will lose their care. As is always the case with state-imposed cruelty, the change will disproportionately hurt young women and women of color.

When it was still functioning, Title X was an unmitigated success, filling a large gap in the healthcare system, catching cancers in their early and least threatening phases, and preventing thousands of unplanned pregnancies each year – 822,000 in 2015 alone, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

Title X saved the federal government a tremendous amount of money, which you would think would please fiscally conservative Republicans, and it prevented hundreds of thousands of abortions, which you would think would please the religious conservatives who claim that abortion is an unparalleled evil. But these constituencies were not pleased with the program, because their aims have never been to balance the budget or to prevent abortions. Their aims have always been to restrict women’s freedoms, and to inflict as much suffering as possible.

In addition to withdrawing essential birth control, cancer, and STD screenings and ensuring that many people will become painfully and preventably sick, the Title X gag rule seems engineered to drive a wedge into the reproductive rights movement, forcing providers to choose between providing health care to Title X patients or providing abortions and information about abortions to everyone. It’s a move designed to force Planned Parenthood and other organizations to play by conservatives’ moral rules, engaging in a false and hateful rhetoric that positions patients who do not need abortions against those who do, and implying that one group is morally superior to the other.

Sadly, there are those in the reproductive rights movement who seem willing to take the bait. The women’s rights group NARAL drew criticism last month after an internal email was sent instructing staff and volunteers to back away from the group’s abortion rights messaging. “Do not say/write ‘Abortion should be/is safe and legal,’” the email read. “Do not say/write ‘Abortion is healthcare.’ Do not say/write ‘Abortion is normal.’ Do not say/write ‘Abortion rights are human rights.’”

The email, sent by NARAL deputy field director Travis Ballie, was not concerned with the fact that all of these forbidden statements are true: abortion is healthcare; abortion is normal; abortion rights are human rights; abortion is safe; and abortion is, for the time being, legal. Women’s rights are one of the rapidly multiplying areas of American public life in which stating fact has become an unacceptably controversial act, and it seems that some organizations that are nominally dedicated to reproductive freedom would rather avoid offense than stand up for women’s dignity.

A similar conflict arose at Planned Parenthood this summer, when its president, Leana Wen, came into conflict with staff over the organization’s strong political stance. Wen wrote in an op-ed that she wanted to be a medical provider, not a political activist. It was a cowardly stance – ultimately uninterested in giving patients the advocacy they needed and too willing to capitulate to the demands of bad actors who want to inflict harm. To be a reproductive healthcare provider in the United States is to be a political activist, and Wen and her allies were naïve to think that they could choose.

It is to the organization’s credit that Planned Parenthood was unwilling to tolerate this stance from their leadership, and pushed Wen out in July. It is to their credit, too, that they exited the Title X program rather than complying with a rule that would require them to lie to and stigmatize the patients they are obligated to care for.

The Trump administration responded to Planned Parenthood’s exit with sneering glee, attempting to blame the healthcare provider for the restrictions on care that it was imposing. You can practically hear HHS officials giggling in their statement to news organizations: “Some grantees are now blaming the government for their own actions – having chosen to accept the grant while failing to comply with the regulations that accompany it – and they are abandoning their obligations to serve their patients under the program.”

This effort by the Trump administration to blame Planned Parenthood for the same loss of healthcare coverage that the administration engineered has echoes of a schoolyard bully, his hand clenched around a little girl’s wrist, forcing her to slap her own face. “Stop hitting yourself,” the HHS officials can almost be heard taunting. “Stop hitting yourself.”

The way to deal with bullies is not to give them what they want, not to surrender to their terms, not to negotiate, and not to slink whimpering into submission. The way to deal with bullies is to fight back. Planned Parenthood has refused to cede the principle that patients deserve a full range of care, that medical providers should not have to lie to the people they serve, and that women must be free. These principles are increasingly under assault and increasingly maligned. We are lucky that Planned Parenthood has chosen to stand up for them anyway.

Can we stop, yet, with the absurd fiction that any person or group who/that actively sabotages women's access to healthcare, specifically, reproductive healthcare, gives a flying fuck about sex trafficking victims? 

[ekauqodielak]

Let's see, what new abuses of decency, diplomacy and democracy have been inflicted upon humanity under the watch of the "very stable genius", "Chosen One" and "King of Israel":

Unsealed Filings Detail Felix Sater’s Work As An Intelligence Asset, With Significant Gaps

…Sater, a former associate of President Donald Trump and longtime confidential source for the Justice Department, describes himself as a Zelig-like figure who had historical ties to both the president and to members of Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel team. His name appeared more than 100 times in the Mueller report, mostly surrounding his involvement in the failed project to bring a Trump Tower to Moscow.…

Felix also provided information to both U.S. and Russian authorities concerning Russian organized crime. He provided a significant amount of historical data about the Russian mafia in the U.S. and abroad, including which Russian oligarchs had ties to organized crime figures and what their business interests were in the U.S. He also explained to the FBI how the Russian mafia in the U.S. used accident insurance scams to generate revenue.…

He told The Intercept that much of the redacted material concerns two investigations where he helped the FBI in an operation against “Russian hackers who attacked U.S. financial institutions” in Cyprus and Turkey.…

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Russian Troll Farm Tries Again To Sue Facebook, Despite Having Its Original Complaint Dismissed On 230 Grounds

Last month we wrote about how Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act did exactly what it was supposed to do in protecting Facebook from a bogus lawsuit from a Russian news trolling operation, called Federal Agency of News (FAN). Facebook had kicked FAN off its platform soon after the 2016 election, when it realized it was a Russian operation spewing nonsense, often targeting people voting in the 2016 US election. FAN somehow found US lawyers from a previously reputable firm to represent them in this quixotic attempt to sue Facebook. The whole thing flopped, of course, because Facebook is free to kick whomever it wants off its platform, including Russian trolls seeking to spread fake news to influence an election.…

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‘You Cannot Forbid Love’: A Kremlin Critic’s Struggle

Lyubov Sobol has been an anti-corruption activist for years. Now, she is trying to win a seat on Moscow’s city council.

…“The fate of our city and perhaps our country is being decided here and now,” Sobol told a gathering of supporters several days into her strike. “If they steal our chance at this election, they will steal all other elections; they will steal the city,” she said in a quivering voice. “They will steal our future.”

How the authorities respond in the coming weeks will illustrate how far Vladimir Putin’s government is prepared to go to quell dissent, and what steps it may take in the run-up to the next presidential election, in 2024, when the constitution bars the Russian leader from seeking a fifth term. Will he find a way to stay in power, or exert control behind the scenes? Beyond that more political issue, Sobol’s story presents an almost philosophical dilemma. Is it worth it to try, despite all odds? To speak, rather than stay silent? When one can do little in the face of a forbidding system, should one still try? And at what cost?…

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The Trump Administration Asked The Supreme Court To Legalize Firing Workers Simply For Being Gay

The Trump administration took its hardest line yet to legalize anti-gay discrimination on Friday when it asked the Supreme Court to declare that federal law allows private companies to fire workers based only on their sexual orientation.

An amicus brief filed by the Justice Department weighed in on two cases involving gay workers and what is meant by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bans discrimination "because of sex.” The administration argued courts nationwide should stop reading the civil rights law to protect gay, lesbian, and bisexual workers from bias because it was not originally intended to do so.

That view conflicts with some lower court rulings that found targeting someone for their sexual orientation is an illegal form of both sex discrimination and sex stereotyping under Title VII. Those courts have found, to illustrate the point, that a gay man wouldn't be targeted if he were instead a woman dating a man; thus he faced discrimination because of his sex.…

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A Tennessee Republican Accused of Sexual Misconduct With Underage Girls Just Said He Isn’t Running Again

Tennessee state Rep. David Byrd, who has been accused of sexual misconduct by three women who were underage at the time, quietly told his Republican colleagues in the state House that he would not seek reelection next year due to the controversy. In his comments, made during a closed-door caucus meeting, he also reportedly insisted he would not be stepping down.…he “has not exactly denied the allegations against him; rather, he emphasizes repeatedly that they are from more than 30 years ago.”…He criticized Enough is Enough, a political action committee that formed in 2018 that has focused its attention on Byrd this year, and the “liberal media.”…

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After Life of Incalculable Harm, Billionaire Climate Denialist and Right-Wing Villain David Koch Dead at 79

Koch was a controversial figure. His vast fortune—made in large part through fossil fuel extraction and manufacturing, though the company has interests in nearly everything—made him and his brother Charles two of the richest people in the world. The brothers spent at least $100 million since the 1970s promoting right-wing causes, and David ran for vice president as a member of the Libertarian Party in 1980.

One of the causes Koch dumped his fortune into promoting was climate crisis denialism.

By making vast sums of money from destroying the planet and then fighting against efforts to stem the flow of the crisis, tweeted Native American activist Tara Houska, Koch was a double damage denialist.

"Let's not forget the massive network of oil pipelines, refineries, and fossil fuel expansion projects that David Koch was directly responsible for," said Houska. "He funded climate deniers while he contributed to climate change, in the range of a 300 million ton carbon footprint annually."…

"He deployed his stupendous fortune funding climate denial in the years when the science was clear and there was still time to avert catastrophic warming," said Kaufman. "He died as fires raged from the Amazon to the Arctic."…

"Climate change is a form of violence that will largely affect people with little power to address it or relatively little role in creating it," wrote Kahn. "Death is an escape hatch for David Koch while the rest of us are left scrambling for the emergency brake before we go over the cliff."…

"People will try to be nice and note David Koch opposed the war on drugs/militarism," Johnson tweeted, "but the money he gave opposing these twin evils was trivial compared to the funds he gave supporting candidates that backed the war on drugs/militarism and the related ideology of starving poor people."…

"The Kochs were not happy with everything Donald Trump did, but that is a low standard for anyone walking the planet—and anyway, they loved his tax plan," wrote Mirkinson.…

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GOP Lobbyists Help Brazil Recruit U.S. Companies To Exploit The Amazon

This summer, fires are being used to clear wide swaths of the Amazon at an unprecedented rate. One-fifth of the Amazon has already been destroyed in the past 50 years; further industrialization of the rainforest risks destroying another fifth, a loss that would be catastrophic for the global ecosystem.

The disaster is widely blamed on interests seeking to clear the world’s largest rainforest for cattle ranching, mining, and export-focused agribusiness. Documents reveal that those interests are being pushed in the U.S. by Republican lobbyists, friendly with President Donald Trump’s administration, who entered into talks with the Brazilian government to promote corporate investment in the Amazon.…

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Phytoplankton Population Drops 40 Percent Since 1950

The microscopic plants that form the foundation of the ocean's food web are declining, reports a study published July 29 in Nature. The tiny organisms, known as phytoplankton, also gobble up carbon dioxide to produce half the world's oxygen output—equaling that of trees and plants on land. But their numbers have dwindled since the dawn of the 20th century, with unknown consequences for ocean ecosystems and the planet's carbon cycle.…

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Emails Show Monsanto Orchestrated GOP Effort To Intimidate Cancer Researchers

In 2015, the World Health Organization’s cancer research arm, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, classified glyphosate, an active ingredient in the herbicide Roundup, as a “probable carcinogen,” setting off a global debate about the world’s most popular weedkiller.

Over the last four years, Republicans in Congress have excoriated and pushed to defund the IARC, casting their defense of the chemical as a quest on behalf of small American farmers. Rep. Frank Lucas, R-Okla., has written that his outrage over the cancer research is on behalf of the “farmers and food manufacturers who rely on traditional farming methods to produce the food that fuels America — and the world.”

But according to a recent trove of documents, the ongoing political assault on the IARC has been scripted in part by Monsanto, the St. Louis-based chemical and seed conglomerate that produces Roundup and Roundup-resistant crops.

Roundup has been cash cow for the company since the 1970s, fueling billions of dollars in annual profits. Its use has skyrocketed in recent decades since the company developed genetically modified corn and other crops that are resistant to it; it is now the world’s leading herbicide.

A growing number of individuals say that Monsanto failed to warn consumers of the dangers of using Roundup and had marketed the chemical spray as harmless to humans, while internally recommending that its own employees use gloves and protective gear. Critics say that the Roundup formula used in the U.S. also contains a surfactant that makes the herbicide far more toxic than the variation of the spray sold in the European market.…

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Trump Melts Down After Fed Chair Critiques His Trade Policy

Trump says the Fed chair he appointed is as big a threat as China.…

In November 2017, President Donald Trump — who campaigned on a promise to appoint “only the best and most serious people” — appointed Jerome Powell to be chair of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors. On Friday, he accused Powell of being possibly a bigger “enemy” of the American people than even the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China.…

But now that Trump’s trade war with China and his not-very-stimulative 2017 Trump tax cuts for the rich and corporations have brought the nation to the precipice of a Trump recession, Trump is seeking to convince Americans that the buck stops everywhere but his own desk.…

Powell said Friday that the president’s trade war was harming the nation’s economy and that there were limits to how much he could mitigate that with monetary policy.…

Without acknowledging that he himself selected Powell for the job, Trump smeared him on Twitter as an enemy of the American people — his standard playbook for anyone who does not give him his way.…

In Trump’s initial attempt to insult Powell, he misspelled his own Fed chair’s name as “Powel.” He later deleted that tweet and corrected it.

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After Trump Broke His Promise To Eliminate The National Debt, Gop Senators Say ‘Next Term’

Candidate Donald Trump made a lot of unrealistic promises. His oft repeated and now abandoned mantra that Mexico would entirely fund a massive border wall across the nation’s entire southern border is the best known, but he also made numerous lofty promises to magically eliminate the $19 trillion national debt and to get rid of the budget deficit almost immediately.…

The national debt is now more than $22.5 trillion, several trillion higher than when Trump took office. Trump has claimed to have the “greatest economy in the history of our country,” but thanks to a massive tax cut for corporations and the wealthiest Americans, the annual budget deficit is about to exceed $1 trillion for the first time ever (even without purchasing Greenland) years before analysts expected.…

Trump recently signed a budget deal — agreed to by the GOP-controlled Senate — that further increased spending, despite his campaign promise to freeze the budget and despite promising last year that he would “never sign another bill” with big spending increases again. Should the widely-predicted economic downturn happen, that would mean even less revenue, which would make spending cuts even more difficult.…

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The New American Homeless

…If the term “working homeless” has not yet entered our national vocabulary, there is reason to expect that it soon will. Hidden within the world of homelessness has always been a subset of individuals, usually single parents, with jobs; what’s different now is the sheer extent of this phenomenon. For a widening swath of the nearly seven million American workers living below the poverty line, a combination of skyrocketing rents, stagnant wages, and a lack of tenant protections has proved all but insurmountable. Theirs, increasingly, is the face of homelessness in the United States: people whose paychecks are no longer enough to keep a roof over their heads.
…

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Trump Brags About Indefinite Child Detention Because He’s Bringing Families Together

Just hours after his administration put forth a new rule to keep immigrant children detained indefinitely, President Donald Trump insisted that he was the one bringing immigrant families together. He left out the part about them being together in cages.

“If you remember, President Obama had separation,” Trump insisted to reporters on the South Lawn Wednesday. “I’m the one who brought them together. This new rule would do even more to bring them together. But it was President Obama that had the separation.”

Later, a reporter tried to question Trump directly about the “unlimited detention of migrant minors” his administration now supports. Trump doubled down: “I am the one that kept the families together. You remember that right? Just remember I said it,” he insisted. His new policy, he explained, “will make it almost impossible for people to come into our country illegally.”

…It was the Trump administration that started the cruel “zero tolerance” policy of family separation, releasing the children as required but keeping the parents detained. In too many cases, these children became lost in the bureaucracy.

Trump’s new policy would detain the children with their parents, which would hypothetically circumvent the Flores decision and allow those children to stay locked up indefinitely.

The Trump administration previously argued in court that while they are detained, children do not deserve soap or toothbrushes, and now it expects to be trusted to house these children even longer. Yes, Trump will be bringing families together, but only to be left to rot in dismal facilities.

The important context in Trump’s comments is his admission that the point of this latest cruelty is to act as a deterrent to immigration.…

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This Is What a World Without American Leadership Looks Like

The escalating feud between U.S. allies Japan and South Korea is what happens when the president ignores his responsibilities.…

“How many things do I have to get involved in?” he asked last month, in a tone of exasperation, when he first heard requests to help quell the tensions. The implication was that he didn’t much want to get involved in this one. And so the tensions spiraled.…

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[ekauqodielak]

Misinformation Has Created a New World Disorder

Our willingness to share content without thinking is exploited to spread disinformation

Claire Wardle • Scientific American • September 2019 Issue

Credit: Wesley Allsbrook

As someone who studies the impact of misinformation on society, I often wish the young entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley who enabled communication at speed had been forced to run a 9/11 scenario with their technologies before they deployed them commercially.

One of the most iconic images from that day shows a large clustering of New Yorkers staring upward. The power of the photograph is that we know the horror they're witnessing. It is easy to imagine that, today, almost everyone in that scene would be holding a smartphone. Some would be filming their observations and posting them to Twitter and Facebook. Powered by social media, rumors and misinformation would be rampant. Hate-filled posts aimed at the Muslim community would proliferate, the speculation and outrage boosted by algorithms responding to unprecedented levels of shares, comments and likes. Foreign agents of disinformation would amplify the division, driving wedges between communities and sowing chaos. Meanwhile those stranded on the tops of the towers would be livestreaming their final moments.

Stress testing technology in the context of the worst moments in history might have illuminated what social scientists and propagandists have long known: that humans are wired to respond to emotional triggers and share misinformation if it reinforces existing beliefs and prejudices. Instead designers of the social platforms fervently believed that connection would drive tolerance and counteract hate. They failed to see how technology would not change who we are fundamentally—it could only map onto existing human characteristics.

Online misinformation has been around since the mid-1990s. But in 2016 several events made it broadly clear that darker forces had emerged: automation, microtargeting and coordination were fueling information campaigns designed to manipulate public opinion at scale. Journalists in the Philippines started raising flags as Rodrigo Duterte rose to power, buoyed by intensive Facebook activity. This was followed by unexpected results in the Brexit referendum in June and then the U.S. presidential election in November—all of which sparked researchers to systematically investigate the ways in which information was being used as a weapon.

During the past three years the discussion around the causes of our polluted information ecosystem has focused almost entirely on actions taken (or not taken) by the technology companies. But this fixation is too simplistic. A complex web of societal shifts is making people more susceptible to misinformation and conspiracy. Trust in institutions is falling because of political and economic upheaval, most notably through ever widening income inequality. The effects of climate change are becoming more pronounced. Global migration trends spark concern that communities will change irrevocably. The rise of automation makes people fear for their jobs and their privacy.

Bad actors who want to deepen existing tensions understand these societal trends, designing content that they hope will so anger or excite targeted users that the audience will become the messenger. The goal is that users will use their own social capital to reinforce and give credibility to that original message.

Most of this content is designed not to persuade people in any particular direction but to cause confusion, to overwhelm and to undermine trust in democratic institutions from the electoral system to journalism. And although much is being made about preparing the U.S. electorate for the 2020 election, misleading and conspiratorial content did not begin with the 2016 presidential race, and it will not end after this one. As tools designed to manipulate and amplify content become cheaper and more accessible, it will be even easier to weaponize users as unwitting agents of disinformation.

Credit: Jen Christiansen; Source: Information Disorder: Toward an Interdisciplinary Framework for Research and Policymaking, by Claire Wardle and Hossein Derakhshan. Council of Europe, October 2017

Weaponizing context

Generally, the language used to discuss the misinformation problem is too simplistic. Effective research and interventions require clear definitions, yet many people use the problematic phrase “fake news.” Used by politicians around the world to attack a free press, the term is dangerous. Recent research shows that audiences increasingly connect it with the mainstream media. It is often used as a catchall to describe things that are not the same, including lies, rumors, hoaxes, misinformation, conspiracies and propaganda, but it also papers over nuance and complexity. Much of this content does not even masquerade as news—it appears as memes, videos and social posts on Facebook and Instagram.

In February 2017 I created seven types of “information disorder” in an attempt to emphasize the spectrum of content being used to pollute the information ecosystem. They included, among others, satire, which is not intended to cause harm but still has the potential to fool; fabricated content, which is 100 percent false and designed to deceive and do harm; and false context, which is when genuine content is shared with false contextual information. Later that year technology journalist Hossein Derakhshan and I published a report that mapped out the differentiations among disinformation, misinformation and malinformation.

Purveyors of disinformation—content that is intentionally false and designed to cause harm—are motivated by three distinct goals: to make money; to have political influence, either foreign or domestic; and to cause trouble for the sake of it.

Those who spread misinformation—false content shared by a person who does not realize it is false or misleading—are driven by sociopsychological factors. People are performing their identities on social platforms to feel connected to others, whether the “others” are a political party, parents who do not vaccinate their children, activists who are concerned about climate change, or those who belong to a certain religion, race or ethnic group. Crucially, disinformation can turn into misinformation when people share disinformation without realizing it is false.

We added the term “malinformation” to describe genuine information that is shared with an intent to cause harm. An example of this is when Russian agents hacked into e-mails from the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign and leaked certain details to the public to damage reputations.

Having monitored misinformation in eight elections around the world since 2016, I have observed a shift in tactics and techniques. The most effective disinformation has always been that which has a kernel of truth to it, and indeed most of the content being disseminated now is not fake—it is misleading. Instead of wholly fabricated stories, influence agents are reframing genuine content and using hyperbolic headlines. The strategy involves connecting genuine content with polarizing topics or people. Because bad actors are always one step (or many steps) ahead of platform moderation, they are relabeling emotive disinformation as satire so that it will not get picked up by fact-checking processes. In these efforts, context, rather than content, is being weaponized. The result is intentional chaos.

Take, for example, the edited video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that circulated this past May. It was a genuine video, but an agent of disinformation slowed down the video and then posted that clip to make it seem that Pelosi was slurring her words. Just as intended, some viewers immediately began speculating that Pelosi was drunk, and the video spread on social media. Then the mainstream media picked it up, which undoubtedly made many more people aware of the video than would have originally encountered it.

Research has found that traditionally reporting on misleading content can potentially cause more harm. Our brains are wired to rely on heuristics, or mental shortcuts, to help us judge credibility. As a result, repetition and familiarity are two of the most effective mechanisms for ingraining misleading narratives, even when viewers have received contextual information explaining why they should know a narrative is not true.

Bad actors know this: In 2018 media scholar Whitney Phillips published a report for the Data & Society Research Institute that explores how those attempting to push false and misleading narratives use techniques to encourage reporters to cover their narratives. Yet another recent report from the Institute for the Future found that only 15 percent of U.S. journalists had been trained in how to report on misinformation more responsibly. A central challenge now for reporters and fact checkers—and anyone with substantial reach, such as politicians and influencers—is how to untangle and debunk falsehoods such as the Pelosi video without giving the initial piece of content more oxygen.

Memes: A misinformation powerhouse

In January 2017 the NPR radio show This American Life interviewed a handful of Trump supporters at one of his inaugural events called the DeploraBall. These people had been heavily involved in using social media to advocate for the president. Of Trump's surprising ascendance, one of the interviewees explained: “We memed him into power.... We directed the culture.”

The word “meme” was first used by theorist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, to describe “a unit of cultural transmission or a unit of imitation,” an idea, behavior or style that spreads quickly throughout a culture. During the past several decades the word has been appropriated to describe a type of online content that is usually visual and takes on a particular aesthetic design, combining colorful, striking images with block text. It often refers to other cultural and media events, sometimes explicitly but mostly implicitly.

This characteristic of implicit logic—a nod and wink to shared knowledge about an event or person—is what makes memes impactful. Enthymemes are rhetorical devices where the argument is made through the absence of the premise or conclusion. Often key references (a recent news event, a statement by a political figure, an advertising campaign or a wider cultural trend) are not spelled out, forcing the viewer to connect the dots. This extra work required of the viewer is a persuasive technique because it pulls an individual into the feeling of being connected to others. If the meme is poking fun or invoking outrage at the expense of another group, those associations are reinforced even further.

The seemingly playful nature of these visual formats means that memes have not been acknowledged by much of the research and policy community as influential vehicles for disinformation, conspiracy or hate. Yet the most effective misinformation is that which will be shared, and memes tend to be much more shareable than text. The entire narrative is visible in your feed; there is no need to click on a link. A 2019 book by An Xiao Mina, Memes to Movements, outlines how memes are changing social protests and power dynamics, but this type of serious examination is relatively rare.

Indeed, of the Russian-created posts and ads on Facebook related to the 2016 election, many were memes. They focused on polarizing candidates such as Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump and on polarizing policies such as gun rights and immigration. Russian efforts often targeted groups based on race or religion, such as Black Lives Matter or Evangelical Christians. When the Facebook archive of Russian-generated memes was released, some of the commentary at the time centered on the lack of sophistication of the memes and their impact. But research has shown that when people are fearful, oversimplified narratives, conspiratorial explanation, and messages that demonize others become far more effective. These memes did just enough to drive people to click the share button.

Technology platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest play a significant role in encouraging this human behavior because they are designed to be performative in nature. Slowing down to check whether content is true before sharing it is far less compelling than reinforcing to your “audience” on these platforms that you love or hate a certain policy. The business model for so many of these platforms is attached to this identity performance because it encourages you to spend more time on their sites.

Researchers are now building monitoring technologies to track memes across different social platforms. But they can investigate only what they can access, and the data from visual posts on many social platforms are not made available to researchers. Additionally, techniques for studying text such as natural-language processing are far more advanced than techniques for studying images or videos. That means the research behind solutions being rolled out is disproportionately skewed toward text-based tweets, Web sites or articles published via URLs and fact-checking of claims by politicians in speeches.

Although plenty of blame has been placed on the technology companies—and for legitimate reasons— they are also products of the commercial context in which they operate. No algorithmic tweak, update to the platforms' content-moderation guidelines or regulatory fine will alone improve our information ecosystem at the level required.

Participating in the solution

In a healthy information commons, people would still be free to express what they want—but information that is designed to mislead, incite hatred, reinforce tribalism or cause physical harm would not be amplified by algorithms. That means it would not be allowed to trend on Twitter or in the YouTube content recommender. Nor would it be chosen to appear in Facebook feeds, Reddit searches or top Google results.

Until this amplification problem is resolved, it is precisely our willingness to share without thinking that agents of disinformation will use as a weapon. Hence, a disordered information environment requires that every person recognize how he or she, too, can become a vector in the information wars and develop a set of skills to navigate communication online as well as offline.

Currently conversations about public awareness are often focused on media literacy and often with a paternalistic framing that the public simply needs to be taught how to be smarter consumers of information. Instead online users would be better taught to develop cognitive “muscles” in emotional skepticism and trained to withstand the onslaught of content designed to trigger base fears and prejudices.

Credit: Jen Christiansen; Source: Information Disorder: Toward an Interdisciplinary Framework for Research and Policymaking, by Claire Wardle and Hossein Derakhshan. Council of Europe, October 2017

Anyone who uses Web sites that facilitate social interaction would do well to learn how they work—and especially how algorithms determine what users see by “prioritiz[ing] posts that spark conversations and meaningful interactions between people,” in the case of a January 2018 Facebook update about its rankings. I would also recommend that everyone try to buy an advertisement on Facebook at least once. The process of setting up a campaign helps to drive understanding of the granularity of information available. You can choose to target a subcategory of people as specific as women, aged between 32 and 42, who live in the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina, have preschoolers, have a graduate degree, are Jewish and like Kamala Harris. The company even permits you to test these ads in environments that allow you to fail privately. These “dark ads” let organizations target posts at certain people, but they do not sit on that organization's main page. This makes it difficult for researchers or journalists to track what posts are being targeted at different groups of people, which is particularly concerning during elections.

Facebook events are another conduit for manipulation. One of the most alarming examples of foreign interference in a U.S. election was a protest that took place in Houston, Tex., yet was entirely orchestrated by trolls based in Russia. They had set up two Facebook pages that looked authentically American. One was named “Heart of Texas” and supported secession; it created an “event” for May 21, 2016, labeled “Stop Islamification of Texas.” The other page, “United Muslims of America,” advertised its own protest, entitled “Save Islamic Knowledge,” for the exact same time and location. The result was that two groups of people came out to protest each other, while the real creators of the protest celebrated the success at amplifying existing tensions in Houston.

Another popular tactic of disinformation agents is dubbed “astroturfing.” The term was initially connected to people who wrote fake reviews for products online or tried to make it appear that a fan community was larger than it really was. Now automated campaigns use bots or the sophisticated coordination of passionate supporters and paid trolls, or a combination of both, to make it appear that a person or policy has considerable grassroots support. By making certain hashtags trend on Twitter, they hope that particular messaging will get picked up by the professional media and direct the amplification to bully specific people or organizations into silence.

Understanding how each one of us is subject to such campaigns—and might unwittingly participate in them—is a crucial first step to fighting back against those who seek to upend a sense of shared reality. Perhaps most important, though, accepting how vulnerable our society is to manufactured amplification needs to be done sensibly and calmly. Fearmongering will only fuel more conspiracy and continue to drive down trust in quality-information sources and institutions of democracy. There are no permanent solutions to weaponized narratives. Instead we need to adapt to this new normal. Just as putting on sunscreen was a habit that society developed over time and then adjusted as additional scientific research became available, building resiliency against a disordered information environment needs to be thought about in the same vein.

[ekauqodielak]

How a Literary Prank Convinced Germany That ‘Hansel and Gretel’ Was Real

A 1963 book purported to prove that the siblings were murderous bakers.

Jordan Todorov • July 03, 2019

Was Katharina Schraderin, “the baker witch," killed for her gingerbread recipe? Hans Traxler

Few fairy tales are as popular and beloved as the Brothers Grimm’s “Hansel and Gretel.” First published in 1812, the tale has been interpreted, revised, and parodied in myriad ways through the years. So one can imagine the furor in 1963 when a German writer claimed to have uncovered the real story behind the fairy tale.

According to Die Wahrheit über Hänsel und Gretel (The Truth About Hansel and Gretel), the two siblings were, in fact, adult brother and sister bakers, living in Germany during the mid-17th century. They murdered the witch, an ingenious confectioner in her own right, to steal her secret recipe for lebkuchen, a gingerbread-like traditional treat. The book published a facsimile of the recipe in question, as well as sensational photos of archeological evidence.

The fatal gingerbread recipe. Hans Traxler

The Truth About Hansel and Gretel caused an uproar. The media picked up the story and turned it into national news. “Book of the week? No, it’s the book of the year, and maybe the century!” proclaimed the West German tabloid Abendzeitung in November 1963. The state-owned East German Berliner Zeitung came out with the headline “Hansel and Gretel—a duo of murderers?” and asked whether this could be “a criminal case from the early capitalist era.” The news spread like wildfire not only in Germany, but abroad too. Foreign publishers, smelling a profit, began negotiating for the translation rights. School groups, some from neighboring Denmark, traveled to the Spessart woods in the states of Bavaria and Hesse to see the newly discovered foundations of the witch’s house.

As intriguing as The Truth About Hansel and Gretel might sound, however, none of it proved to be true. In fact, the book turned out to be a literary forgery concocted by Hans Traxler, a German children’s book writer and cartoonist, known for his sardonic sense of humor. “1963 marked the 100th anniversary of Jacob Grimm’s death,” says the now 90-year-old Traxler, who lives in Frankfurt, Germany. “So it was natural to dig into [the] Brothers Grimm treasure chest of fairy tales, and pick their most famous one, ‘Hansel and Gretel.’”

A charred (fake) piece of gingerbread found in the foundations of the witch’s house. Hans Traxler

According to Dr. Claudia Schwabe, a fairy-tale researcher at Utah State University, the hoax was “one of the bigger ones out there, one that was done at a very sophisticated level, fooling even a lot of academics and scholars in the field.” In early 1963, Traxler read C. W. Ceram’s Gods, Graves, and Scholars: The Story of Archaeology. Published in 1949, it ignited a passion for archaeology in the imagination of the post-war world. Inspired, Traxler wrote the first draft of his own book in about a week. Then, he spent a few days on additional research at the Brothers Grimm Museum in Kassel, Germany. The museum’s director, Dr. Ludwig Denecke, kept bringing library carts with history literature to Traxler, completely oblivious to his true intentions.

 

Hans Traxler says he wrote The Truth About Hansel and Gretel for his own amusement. Britta Frenz/Caricatura Museum Frankfurt

Traxler’s fictional protagonist, Georg Ossegg, was a teacher and an amateur archeologist. Like the famous German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, who searched for the city of Troy in an effort to prove the historical accuracy of Homer’s Iliad, Ossegg was obsessed with finding the witch’s house from “Hansel and Gretel.”

In January 1945, Traxler wrote, Ossegg evacuated together with his students to the small village of Steinau an der Straße in the German state of Hesse. There, Ossegg met a local farmer who referred to the nearby Spessart woods as the Hexenwald, or “witch’s forest,” and whose grandfather had allegedly seen a witch’s house inside. Ossegg wanted to investigate further, but with World War II over, he returned to his hometown of Prague.

Hans Traxler, with brush in hand, poses as Georg Ossegg. Hans Traxler

In 1962, Ossegg moved to the Spessart woods once more and renewed his investigation. This time, he decided to read the text of “Hansel and Gretel” as a factual report. He set out to find the clearing where the children were abandoned by their parents. He did this by filling an eight-year-old boy’s pockets with pebbles and having him walk into the woods, dropping them along the way. (In the fairy tale, Hansel dropped pebbles to find his way back out of the forest.) But no clearing was found. When Ossegg repeated the experiment himself, he found himself in a meadow. Based on the results of the experiment, Ossegg concluded that Hansel and Gretel weren’t children, but rather adults.

Next, Ossegg decided to locate the house of the witch. After two month’s search, he found the ruins of the witch’s house and the well-preserved foundations of four baking ovens. Inside one of them, he discovered a partially charred female skeleton. Ossegg also searched for the little stable where Hansel was imprisoned by the witch, but didn’t find it. He found door hinges from the witch’s house, though, and one was forcefully broken. So Ossegg concluded that Hansel and Gretel broke into the house of the witch, killed her, and tried to burn her body.

 

The partially charred remains of the witch proved that Hansel and Gretel first killed the witch and then tried to burn her body. Hans Traxler

Ossegg made his most important discovery near one of the walls of the house, where he unearthed a small tin box which contained charred lebkuchen, a bunch of baking tools, and a crumpled piece of paper, which turned out to be a recipe for lebkuchen.

Ossegg then did some linguistic analysis of the witch’s dialogue in the Grimm’s tale, and discovered that her dialect was typical for Wernigerode, a town in the state of Saxony-Anhalt. He dug into the local archives and found the so-called Wernigerode Manuscript, a parchment-bound volume describing the 1647 trial of one Katharina Schraderin, “the baker witch.”

 

The witch’s burned baking tools came from the doll kitchen of Traxler’s daughter. He had to replace them later. Hans Traxler

Schraderin had invented her famous gingerbread while working in the kitchen of Quedlinburg Abbey. Another baker, named Hans Metzler, tried to marry Schraderin in order to get the recipe, but she turned him down. The rejected Metzler in turn accused Schraderin of witchcraft. After being acquitted, Schraderin fled to the woods and built a small house there. But Metzler, accompanied by his younger sister Grete, tracked Schraderin down and killed her. The siblings looked for the secret gingerbread recipe but found only a couple of lebkuchen. Metzler took them with him and tried to bake his own. He was later tried for murder, but acquitted after the judge believed his story about the cannibalistic witch. He then moved to Nuremberg, where he popularized the city’s famous lebkuchen.

Of course, none of it was true. But the 120-page book contained more than 40 photos, drawings, and models, which made the convoluted tale look quite convincing. Traxler himself posed for Ossegg, clad in a Colombo-like raincoat, a leather hat, sunglasses, fake beard, and mustache. “Photographer Peter von Tresckow and I had so much fun taking those photos that sometimes we would find ourselves lying on the ground laughing,” Traxler recalls.

Hans Traxler poses as Georg Ossegg in the ruins of the witch’s house. Hans Traxler

Traxler admits that falsifying the so-called Wernigerode manuscript took some serious effort, but he got in the right mood by reading the 17th-century German author Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen. “Apparently, I wrote the text of the Wernigerode manuscript so well that not a single journalist or reader ever doubted it. I’m a bit proud of that today,” he says.

The truth about Hans Traxler’s literary trick came out in early 1964. (One tip-off was that Traxler copied Schraderin’s lebkuchen recipe from a Dr. Oetker cookbook.) But some people refused to accept that the book was an elaborate hoax. In the months following the publication, the publisher’s office received thousands of letters from readers demanding to know the truth: so many that they had to employ three people to answer them. Traxler and his accomplices were delighted at the reactions, but not everyone was amused. According to Der Spiegel, one indignant reader filed a complaint of fraud. The police interrogated Traxler, but didn’t press charges.

The ‘radiocarbon dating equipment’ used for studying the gingerbread was a lasagna pan, a TV cable, a few spice jars, and a microscope. Hans Traxler

Reprinted numerous times over the years, The Truth About Hansel and Gretel has sold hundreds of thousands of copies. In 1987, it spawned a film adaptation of the same name, starring French actor Jean-Pierre Léaud as Georg Ossegg and West Berlin singer, performer, and club owner Romy Haag as the witch. While The Truth About Hansel and Gretel is still celebrated for mimicking the intellectual fashions of its time, some people still take Traxler’s tale as truth. According to Schwabe, the fervent reaction to the book says a lot. “People just love a good story,” she says. “Any discovery that promises to reveal a hidden truth or secret or mystery is enticing.”

[ekauqodielak]

Dementia-meets-Disclosure or Terminal Foot In Mouth Disease?

Crazy Uncle Joe Strikes Again: Presidential Hopeful Biden Asks Crowd About Obama’s ‘Assassination’

….While on the campaign trail Friday, presidential hopeful Joe Biden came out of his face with an audacious thought.

The 76-year-old former Veep to Forever President Barack Hussein Obama pondered the thought: “What if Barack Obama had been assassinated during his presidential campaign in 2008?

“Imagine what would have happened if, God forbid, Barack Obama had been assassinated after becoming the de facto nominee?” Biden asked to a crowd at a Hanover, N.H., stop on Friday.

Surely, the thought has crossed many minds over the past decade or so. But old Joe brought it right out to the forefront.

“What would have happened in America?” he furthered.

Recalling the tumultuous political era of 1968 when two of his so-called political heroes, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy, were killed within weeks of another, Biden said those events made things change for him.…

[lucy]

http://instagr.am/p/B1eLMimnZQt

I've got my feet in the clouds, got my head (hands)  on the ground

www.doyouyoga.com/the-holistic-benefits-of-yoga-handstand-51172/

gnosticwarrior.com/inverted-pentagram.html

lol
🧘‍♀️

[IWILL]

lol
😎

www.etymonline.com/word/*sol-?ref=etymonline_crossreference

[B]

Epstein and the World Wide Pedophile Club We Call Government
youtu.be/jwoZd8g7NOU



thecrowhouse
Published on Aug 23, 2019

"Max Igan - Surviving the Matrix - Episode 389 - American Voice Radio, August 23, 2019 -"

----------------

also posted here:
sageofquayblog.blogspot.com/2019/08/max-igan-epstein-and-world-wide.html?spref=fb&fbclid=IwAR12pz0Sebk1N70X-eWRHNFK_LVzwVsedfkw0RbUV8KrDMDlZ5bSwp9OgXs

"Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth" ~ Mahatma Gandhi

[B]

8.23] Overstock CEO - David Koch Dies - CNN Hires McCabe - Amazon Forest Fires
www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZZGyHrnsQM
-------------------------------------

Destroying the Illusion
Streamed live on Aug 23, 2019

[ekauqodielak]

Fake News Website Created To Test Donald Trump Supporters' Gullibility - Reveals They Will Believe Anything
 
James McDaniel's website claimed Barack Obama was plotting a coup from a secret bunker and Hillary Clinton was a child-sacrificing maniac. The site got more than one million views within two weeks, and hundreds of thousands of likes and shares

Adam Lusher • Friday 10 March 2017 17:50


An American started a fake news website to see how ridiculous a story had to be before Donald Trump supporters realised it was untrue – and ended up concluding that some of them would believe absolutely anything.

Despite aiming to write stories no-one would believe, James McDaniel found Trump supporters who believed that Barack Obama had been plotting a coup from a secret bunker near the White House, and that the British singer Adele had demanded he be jailed for such treachery.

They believed that Obama had tweeted “Trump must be removed as president by any means necessary”, and when one commenter, ‘Truthseeker’, dared suggest the story ‘Obama ran paedophile ring out of White House’ might possibly be fake, he was told: “Really “Truthseeker” if you had ANY clue of the truth, you’d KNOW that Wikileaks hasn’t published ONE thing that has been false. So please use your own mind. Stop listening to MSM [mainstream media] and realize what the TRUTH really is.”

Another commenter, ‘Mary’, said caustically: “Truthseeker? Really … but the truth is bothering you?”

She then – apparently without irony – posted a link to the now notorious ‘Pizzagate’ fake news story, about an alleged a Democratic child sex ring in a Washington pizza parlour, which had prompted one credulous reader to walk into the restaurant with a semi-automatic rifle and open fire.

Mr McDaniel, 28, who is based in Costa Rica and works for an American nutrition company, said that within two weeks of him starting his website undergroundnewsreport.com, it had received more than one million visitors, and hundreds and thousands of likes and shares on Facebook.

He followed ‘Obama ran paedophile ring out of White House’ with a fake story about Wikileaks publishing an email in which Hillary Clinton supposedly urged the then president to restrict his child abuse to ‘the pizza arrangement’.

Despite the obvious reference to Pizzagate, Trump supporters responded by urging Julian Assange to reveal all his Clinton information immediately - because otherwise Democrats might distract the American people with “fake news”.

“This piece by piece,” commented one reader “Gave them time to regroup and start with the Russian fake news about hacking the Election.”

Mr McDaniel said his foray into fake news only made him $615 (£505), which he planned to donate to the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee.

He decided to come clean after seeing the furious, unquestioning reaction when he falsely alleged that actress Whoopi Goldberg had said Carryn Owens, the widow of a dead US serviceman, had been “just looking for attention” when she attended Donald Trump’s speech to Congress.

His confession came in the form of a story published on his website under the headline: “Breaking: Satire makes fools of gullible Trump supporters.”

“When I started this site,” he wrote, “I had no idea that the stories would garner this much attention.

“While writing them, I was aiming for stories that no one would believe, but rather would be satirical in an age where disinformation is so prevalent.

“Just for fun, I decided to post some of the stories in Trump fan groups on Facebook to see the reactions.

“To my surprise, the Trump masses embraced my stories as fact, almost universally. It seemed that there wasn’t anything I could write that was too wild or outrageous to be believed by this particular audience.

“If I wrote about CNN being fake news and connected to ISIS, readers would agree wholeheartedly with my fabricated article. If I wrote about a black liberal or Obama supposedly saying something controversial, the response was unbridled racism and hatred. When I wrote about Hillary Clinton’s new emails that proved she was a child sacrificing maniac, people screamed for her head.”

Writing after Mr Trump has himself accused mainstream media outlets including CNN of being “fake news” and “enemies of the people”, Mr McDaniel added: “It’s truly a frightening time when a group of people screaming, “FAKE NEWS!” at the top of their lungs, live, eat and sleep falsehoods.”

He has now added an update to all other items on his site, linking to his confession and advising: “Anyone who believes this story or any other story on this website needs to read this post.”

[ekauqodielak]

Right-Wing America is Too Gullible for the Internet

Yesterday, by way of Twitter, I came across this Facebook post. It still hasn’t been removed, and I doubt it will be, but here’s a screenshot for posterity:

In this picture, you can see Seattle Seahawks defensive end Michael Bennett burning an American flag in an NFL locker room while his teammates and coach look on in excitement. It’s an outrageous image, playing into the right-wing fantasy that professional football players who kneel to protest racial violence are America-hating, troop-despising, flag-defiling domestic terrorists.

To anyone with a handful of functioning brain cells, it’s also a clear fake.

Now, full disclosure: I’m not an expert in Photoshop or any other photo editing software. I cannot simply look at this photo and tell that it’s a phony. Someone with a better eye and more experience could probably analyze the shadows and declare it illegitimate on the spot. Or maybe they immediately noticed the lack of smoke, or the fact that there are no sprinklers going off, or whatever. Not me. To my untrained eye, it looks like Michael Bennett is holding a burning American flag.

Instead of deduction bolstered by forensic digital analysis, I rejected the picture as fake using an old-fashioned technique I like to call “not being a complete and utter dupe.” The idea of an NFL player actually committing this act, while his teammates and coach go apeshit in the background, is just too stupid for me to entertain. And I’m no brain genius—I’m just an ordinary human being with a functioning BS detector. Thus armed, I can conclude without hesitation that this incident, plainly, would never happen. Even if a player had the idea to burn a flag, and even if he then executed this idea—both extremely unlikely—there’s no way in hell he’d ever have the support of the entire locker room. He’d probably be tackled and detained before he could even kindle a flame.

To believe this photo, in my opinion, you would have to be extremely gullible, and your brain would have to be warped by years of conservative propaganda that created a picture in your mind of the “liberal” or “black” enemy as an unrecognizable and exaggerated figure—a symbol of evil, divorced from the human experience, capable of any outrage. You would have to lead an extremely sheltered existence, ignorant of other perspectives, and wake up each morning with an abject terror of people different from you. It reminds me of how the Soviets convinced their citizens during the Cold War that America was a hellscape littered with gangsters where everybody was afraid to walk the streets—a person who believes in this photo has been totally deluded by a persistent and persuasive culture war. At least they had an excuse—they were under the thumb of tyrants, deprived of the truth about western culture. What’s ours?

Before we go on, let’s tidy up loose ends—the original photo is from 2015, and shows Bennett dancing with his teammates after a Seahawks win:

My friend who showed me the tweet above had an interesting take—he thinks that until Facebook has enough employees to police this kind of content, the whole company should shut down. When you consider that the entire platform was flooded with Russia-backed propaganda in the lead-up to the election, it's hard to argue with him. Some of the ad buys were particularly nefarious, like the one invoking Black Lives Matter to scare the hell out of white people in targeted geographic areas. There seems to be no limit to the manipulation actors both foreign and domestic are capable of pulling off in the service of a political agenda.

I have a slightly different take. I recently spent months reporting a story showing how the agents of big oil companies use fake Facebook videos and ads to turn local residents against pipeline protesters. If there was one mistake I made in writing that story, it was downplaying the impact this had in those communities. To me, the videos looked amateurish and obviously fake, and I wrote that their influence would be limited. Afterward, I was contacted by a resident from a small town involved in the pipeline wars who told me I was wrong. In fact, he said, the videos had been incredibly divisive at the local level—particularly to those who weren't Internet-savvy, including many seniors.

Now, remember that story, and take a look at the top reply to the flag-burning Facebook post. You can see it in the first image above, but I'll reproduce it here:

You may be a bad man on the football field…but burning the Flag that I shed my blood to honor would be just cause to whack you upside your ignorant disrespectful head….that isn't a threat…burn it in my presence and it is a promise. 70 year old 100% Disabled Veteran…US ARMY RETIRED…..service to My Country…something you jackleg wouldn't know anything about….

Now, that person could be an actor posing as a 70-year-old veteran, but I have no particular reason to doubt him, and a cursory glance at his profile seems to back him up. His comment has received 653 reactions as of this writing, almost all of them positive, along with several replies thanking him for his service and expressing anger at the flag-burning football players.

The next most-liked comment is this:

This is what happens when people idolize a bunch of supposed hero's instead of giving back to the true Americans that are willing to die to defend our country. Boycott now.

Finally, by the third top comment, we find an Internet sleuth debunking the whole thing:

If you zoom in you can tell it's photoshopped. No smoke is also a tale tale sign it's fake! Vets for Trump, I'd expect higher standards than this BS!

Number four, though, is another doozy, coded in loosely veiled racism and utterly shocked that the responsible white man in the photo didn't put a stop to this:

That doesn't surprise me that Sherman is sitting on the side laughing but really surprises me that Pete Carroll is sitting there and enjoying this s* that's going on what a f** traitor to our country I never like the piece of s* when he was in the NFL the first time he failed and went back to the college stayed in there for a couple years and then they let him back in the NFL just goes to show you what kind of Standards the NFL really has what a POS

I could go on—the vast majority of the responders are deeply upset at the photo, and the general reaction to those who show that the picture is a fake tend toward the “ignore and stay angry” side of the spectrum.

Which leads me to my conclusion—yes, conservative media is manipulative to a disgraceful degree, going past the centrist, pro-corporate bias of the liberal media into outright, intentional deception. Yes, Russian propaganda is incredibly dark in the way it targets our basest impulses, and the domestic, Breitbart-y stuff is no different. All of it should be illegal, and perhaps Facebook should be shut down until it can manage this stuff.

But—I'm sorry, I can't get past this—this stuff is not very sophisticated. It boggles my mind that there are so many people on the American right who get fooled. I understand that many of them are older, and not as familiar with the byzantine pathways of the Internet, and hence more prone to gullibility. Even so, it feels like a baseline amount of common sense would be a good defense against this kind of thing. I keep going back to this tweet:

Now, I don’t mean to claim that conservatives are the only gullible ones on the digital landscape. It happens to the left, too—I had the benefit of reading the infamous Rolling Stone UVa rape story a few days after it was exposed as a lie, and as I read, I was shocked that anybody had ever believed it. The narrative reminded me of the Satanic panic videos I’d watched in college psychology classes, where the details are so outlandishly grotesque, and so widespread, and so divorced from the ugly reality of child abuse or sexual assault on college campuses that they can’t be anything but an invention. I don’t mean to pat myself on the back—maybe if I’d read it beforehand, I would have believed it too, since it conforms more to my ideology. But before it was exposed, when anyone had the audacity to question the story, there were liberal writers like Jezebel’s Anna Merlan on hand to batter them with invective.

Point being, the left has its blind spots as well. But examples like that one don’t come close to the widespread delusion and gullibility of the right. Where fiascoes like the Rolling Stone story produce temporary and embarrassing lapses (with real accountability and consequences), what’s happening on the right appears more and more like a widespread, bone-deep disease. And while someone like Merlan, I believe, had good intentions—justice for rape victims drove her to ignore the questionable fabric of a single story, for which she later apologized with total sincerity—the motivations of the conservative mob align more with agendas limited to hatred, anger, and fear.

I’ve asked myself the same question for months now: “How is it possible for this many people to be this stupid?” And then I wonder—do they even want to know the truth? Look at these four responses from that same Facebook post, each coming after another user points out that it’s a fake:

1. “You act as if they WOULDN’T do this.”

2. “Fake or not. When they take a knee it’s same difference. Its an insult to American veteran’s and the man and women who pledged allegiance to the flag. Want to protest then take it to the streets.”

3. “Exactly that’s what I’m saying it may be fake but if it wasn’t they would still would do it”

4. “Doesn’t matter if this is a fake photo, this is what they are doing without actually burning the flag.”

While the entire thread made me angry, these posts were the most frustrating by far. This mindset gets into something deeper, and scarier, than mere gullibility—perhaps what they want, after all, is a mere outlet for their anger, which obeys no rational process. If that’s the case, truth has ceased to matter to them, and the brainwashing they’ve experienced at the hands of conservative media is complete. If we have so many people who are so thoroughly bamboozled, and who, even when confronted with reality, revert to a defensive “I’m right even when I’m wrong” stance, then what chance does truth have?

There’s an army of right-wingers in this country who essentially become unthinking ideological drones—easily fooled, easily used. They employ embarrassing logic, they’re gullible, and they frankly don’t care when they’re wrong. It’s a cancer in our political psyche, and it’s exacerbated by the flattening, relativistic presence of the Internet. We are in deep, deep trouble.

[ekauqodielak]

Why Conservatives Are More Likely Than Liberals To Believe False Information About Threats

After an electoral season that blurred the line between fact and fantasy, a team of UCLA researchers is offering new evidence to support a controversial proposition: that when it comes to telling the difference between truth and fiction, not all potential voters see it the same way.

When “alternative facts” allege some kind of danger, people whose political beliefs are more conservative are more likely than those who lean liberal to embrace them, says the team’s soon-to-be-published study.

Conservatives’ vulnerability to accepting untruths didn’t apply equally to all false claims: When lies suggested dangerous or apocalyptic outcomes, more conservative participants were more likely to believe them than when the lie suggested a possible benefit.

Participants whose views fell further left could be plenty credulous. But they were no more likely to buy a scary falsehood than they were to buy one with a positive outcome.

In short, conservatives are more likely to drop their guard against lies when they perceive the possible consequences as being dark. Liberals, less so.

The new findings are especially timely, coming in the wake of a presidential election tainted by so-called fake news and in which unfounded assertions by Donald Trump gained many adherents.

Slated for publication in the journal Psychological Science, the new study offers insight into why many Americans embraced fabricated stories about Hillary Clinton that often made outlandish allegations of criminal behavior. And it may shed light on why so many believed a candidate’s assertions that were both grim and demonstrably false.

Finally, the results offer an explanation for why these false claims were more readily embraced by people who endorse conservative political causes than by those whose views are traditionally liberal.

“There are a lot of citizens who are especially vigilant about potential threats but not especially motivated or prepared to process information in a critical, systematic manner,” said John Jost, co-director of New York University’s Center for Social and Political Behavior. For years, Jost said, those Americans “have been presented with terrifying messages that are short on reason and openly contemptuous of scholarly and scientific standards of evidence.”

Jost, who was not involved with the latest research, said the new findings suggest that when dark claims and apocalyptic visions swirl, many of these anxious voters will cast skepticism aside and selectively embrace fearful claims, regardless of whether they’re true. The result may tilt elections toward politicians who stoke those fears.

“We may be witnessing a perfect storm,” Jost said.

The preliminary study, led by UCLA anthropologist Daniel M.T. Fessler, is the first to explore credulity as a function of ideological belief. The pool of participants was not strictly representative of the U.S. electorate, and some of the findings were weakened when the researchers removed questions pertaining to terrorism.

Moreover, some argue that it is not ideological belief but feeling beaten that makes people more credulous. When parties are thrown out of power, or have been out of office for long periods, their adherents are naturally drawn to believe awful things of the other party, says Joseph Uscinski, a political scientist at the University of Miami.

Until the new findings have been replicated under the changed circumstances of a Republican victory, said Uscinski, they should be greeted with caution.

But the new results are in line with a picture of partisan differences emerging from an upstart corner of the social sciences. In a wide range of studies, anthropologists, social psychologists and political scientists have found that self-avowed liberals and people who call themselves conservatives simply think differently.

All people range across a spectrum of personality traits and thinking styles. But when compared with liberals, conservatives show a lower tolerance for risk and have a greater need for closure and certainty, on average.

Wired up to monitors that measure physiological changes, people who are more conservative respond to threatening stimuli with more pronounced changes than do their peers on the other end of the political spectrum: On average, their hearts race more, their breathing becomes more shallow and their palms get clammier.

Fessler started with a much more universal finding from evolutionary anthropology: When confronted with danger, humans are more likely to pay attention to the experience and commit it to memory than when they’re presented with cues that are neutral or pleasant.

Called the “negativity bias,” this inclination to give special weight to negative experiences has been powerfully protective, scientists believe. After all, failing to give such hazards their due could result in death, and humans who took a laid-back approach to such dangers were more likely to be purged from the gene pool.

As a result, a tendency to pay more attention to negative experiences — and even to scary warnings from others — is seen pretty much across the board.

Even so, Fessler reasoned, some people may weight incoming negative information more heavily than others. Given the growing body of evidence for ideological differences in thinking styles, he and his team wondered whether conservatives and liberals would be differently inclined to believe assertions, including false assertions, when they warned of potential hazards.

In two experiments conducted in September 2016, Fessler’s team recruited 948 American adults on websites designed to query subjects for research studies. To place each participant on the American political spectrum, the researchers asked for his or her views on a list of policies that generally divide conservatives from liberals. Then the study authors asked subjects to rate how strongly they believed or disbelieved 16 assertions.

“Some” but not all of those statements were true, the researchers told participants. In fact, 14 of the 16 were false.

While six of the assertions dealt with outcomes that were generally positive (“People who own cats live longer than people who don’t”), 10 made claims about potential hazards. Some of these outcomes were pretty serious: One stated that terrorist incidents in the U.S. have increased since 9/11 (not true in September 2016). Others declared that an intoxicated passenger could open an aircraft door while in flight (not true), that kale typically contains high levels of toxic heavy metals (not true), and that thieves could read encoded personal information from hotel keycards (not true).

Plenty of people were taken in by lies about both hazards and benefits. And across the political spectrum, participants were more likely to believe scary pronouncements and a little less likely to believe cheery ones.

But when a bogus claim raised a prospective danger, the more heavily a subject leaned toward policies linked to conservatism, the more likely his or her skepticism fell aside. Meanwhile, the more heavily a subject leaned toward positions associated with liberalism, the more evenly skeptical he or she was toward claims cheery and scary.

The differences were not stark. But statistically, credulity toward dark assertions tracked with a subject’s position on the political spectrum.

Using a statistical measure that gauges how widely subjects were scattered across the political spectrum, the researchers reckoned that for each tick rightward, the average subject grew 2% less skeptical of statements when they warned of bad outcomes than when they promised good ones.

That effect is pretty subtle. But spread over an electorate of 231 million eligible voters, the inclination of some to more readily accept scary lies could make the purveyors of frightening falsehoods a more powerful force.

Fessler said his team’s findings may help explain a curious phenomenon reported by those who fabricated fake news for profit: that stories aimed at liberal audiences were less likely to go viral than stories designed to draw in conservatives.

He also said the results might help explain why social conservatives were so inclined to support Trump.

When his team subdivided conservatives into three groups, he found that the trend toward dark belief was greatest in those who defined their conservatism largely in social and cultural terms. Among those whose conservatism was largely rooted in fiscal policy, the selective credulity toward scary assertions was not evident.

The upshot, Fessler said, is that Americans across the political spectrum need a steady diet of truth. Since apocalyptic claims will always get a little more credence, they had better be factual.

“You might be able to change people’s minds about issues, but you can’t change their stable ways of responding to the world,” said Fessler, who will try to replicate his findings with a Republican in the White House.

[ekauqodielak]

Why Are Conservatives More Susceptible to Believing Lies?

An interplay between how all humans think and how conservatives tend to act might actually explain a lot about our current moment.

Photo illustration by Natalie Matthews-Ramo. Photos by FoxNews and FoxNews.com.

Many conservatives have a loose relationship with facts. The right-wing denial of what most people think of as accepted reality starts with political issues: As recently as 2016, 45 percent of Republicans still believed that the Affordable Care Act included “death panels” (it doesn’t). A 2015 poll found that 54 percent of GOP primary voters believed then-President Obama to be a Muslim (…he isn’t).

Then there are the false beliefs about generally accepted science. Only 25 percent of self-proclaimed Trump voters agree that climate change is caused by human activities. Only 43 percent of Republicans overall believe that humans have evolved over time.

And then it gets really crazy. Almost 1 in 6 Trump voters, while simultaneously viewing photographs of the crowds at the 2016 inauguration of Donald Trump and at the 2012 inauguration of Barack Obama, insisted that the former were larger. Sixty-six percent of self-described “very conservative” Americans seriously believe that “Muslims are covertly implementing Sharia law in American courts.” Forty-six percent of Trump voters polled just after the 2016 election either thought that Hillary Clinton was connected to a child sex trafficking ring run out of the basement of a pizzeria in Washington, D.C., or weren’t sure if it was true.

If “truth” is judged on the basis of Enlightenment ideas of reason and more or less objective “evidence,” many of the substantive positions common on the right seem to border on delusional. The left is certainly not immune to credulity (most commonly about the safety of vaccines, GMO foods, and fracking), but the right seems to specialize in it. “Misinformation is currently predominantly a pathology of the right,” concluded a team of scholars from the Harvard Kennedy School and Northeastern University at a February 2017 conference. A BuzzFeed analysis found that three main hyperconservative Facebook pages were roughly twice as likely as three leading ultraliberal Facebook pages to publish fake or misleading information.

Why are conservatives so susceptible to misinformation? The right wing’s disregard for facts and reasoning is not a matter of stupidity or lack of education. College-educated Republicans are actually more likely than less-educated Republicans to have believed that Barack Obama was a Muslim and that “death panels” were part of the ACA. And for political conservatives, but not for liberals, greater knowledge of science and math is associated with a greater likelihood of dismissing what almost all scientists believe about the human causation of global warming.

It’s also not just misinformation gained from too many hours listening to Fox News, either, because correcting the falsehoods doesn’t change their opinions. For example, nine months following the release of President Obama’s long-form birth certificate, the percentage of Republicans who believed that he was not American-born was actually higher than before the release. Similarly, during the 2012 presidential campaign, Democrats corrected their previous overestimates of the unemployment rate after the Bureau of Labor Statistics released the actual data. Republicans’ overestimated even more than before.

Part of the problem is widespread suspicion of facts—any facts. Both mistrust of scientists and other “experts” and mistrust of the mass media that reports what scientists and experts believe have increased among conservatives (but not among liberals) since the early ’80s. The mistrust has in part, at least, been deliberately inculcated. The fossil fuel industry publicizes studies to confuse the climate change debate; Big Pharma hides unfavorable information on drug safety and efficacy; and many schools in conservative areas teach students that evolution is “just a theory.” The public is understandably confused about both the findings and methods of science. “Fake news” deliberately created for political or economic gain and Donald Trump’s claims that media sites that disagree with him are “fake news” add to the mistrust.

But, the gullibility of many on the right seems to have deeper roots even than this. That may be because at the most basic level, conservatives and liberals seem to hold different beliefs about what constitutes “truth.” Finding facts and pursuing evidence and trusting science is part of liberal ideology itself. For many conservatives, faith and intuition and trust in revealed truth appear as equally valid sources of truth.

To understand how these differences manifest and what we might do about them, it helps to understand how all humans reason and rationalize: In other words, let’s take a detour into psychology. Freud distinguished between “errors” on the one hand, “illusions” and “delusions” on the other. Errors, he argued, simply reflect lack of knowledge or poor logic; Aristotle’s belief that vermin form out of dung was an error. But illusions and delusions are based on conscious or unconscious wishes; Columbus’s belief that he had found a new route to the Indies was a delusion based on his wish that he had done so.

Although Freud is out of favor with many contemporary psychologists, modern cognitive psychology suggests that he was on the right track. The tenacity of many of the right’s beliefs in the face of evidence, rational arguments, and common sense suggest that these beliefs are not merely alternate interpretations of facts but are instead illusions rooted in unconscious wishes.

This is a very human thing to do. As popular writers such as Daniel Kahneman, Cass Sunstein, and Richard Thaler have pointed out, we often use shortcuts when we reason, shortcuts that enable us to make decisions quickly and with little expenditure of mental energy. But they also often lead us astray—we underestimate the risks of events that unfold slowly and whose consequences are felt only over the long term (think global warming) and overestimate the likelihood of events that unfold rapidly and have immediate consequences (think terrorist attacks).

Our reasoning is also influenced (motivated, psychologists would say) by our emotions and instincts. This manifests in all kinds of ways: We need to maintain a positive self-image, to stave off anxiety and guilt, and to preserve social relationships. We also seek to maintain consistency in our beliefs, meaning that when people simultaneously hold two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values, one or the other must go. And so we pay more attention and give more credence to information and assertions that confirm what we already believe: Liberals enthusiastically recount even the most tenuous circumstantial evidence of Trump campaign collusion with the Russians, and dyed-in-the-wool Trump supporters happily believe that the crowd really was bigger at his candidate’s inauguration.

These limits to “objective” reasoning apply to everyone, of course—left and right. Why is it that conservatives have taken the lead in falling off the deep edge?

The answer, I think, lies in the interaction between reasoning processes and personality. It’s each person’s particular motivations and particular psychological makeup that affects how they search for information, what information they pay attention to, how they assess the accuracy and meaning of the information, what information they retain, and what conclusions they draw. But conservatives and liberals typically differ in their particular psychological makeups. And if you add up all of these particular differences, you get two groups that are systematically motivated to believe different things.

Psychologists have repeatedly reported that self-described conservatives tend to place a higher value than those to their left on deference to tradition and authority. They are more likely to value stability, conformity, and order, and have more difficulty tolerating novelty and ambiguity and uncertainty. They are more sensitive than liberals to information suggesting the possibility of danger than to information suggesting benefits. And they are more moralistic and more likely to repress unconscious drives towards unconventional sexuality.

Fairness and kindness place lower on the list of moral priorities for conservatives than for liberals. Conservatives show a stronger preference for higher status groups, are more accepting of inequality and injustice, and are less empathic (at least towards those outside their immediate family). As one Tea Party member told University of California sociologist Arlie Hochschild, “People think we are not good people if we don’t feel sorry for blacks and immigrants and Syrian refugees. But I am a good person and I don’t feel sorry for them.”

Baptist minister and former Republican congressman J.C. Watts put it succinctly. Campaigning for Sen. Rand Paul in Iowa in 2015 he observed, “The difference between Republicans and Democrats is that Republicans believe people are fundamentally bad, while Democrats see people as fundamentally good.”

These conservative traits lead directly to conservative views on many issues, just as liberal traits tend to lead to liberal views on many issues. But when you consider how these conservative traits and these conservative views interact with commonly shared patterns of motivated reasoning, it becomes clearer why conservatives may be more likely to run into errors in reasoning and into difficulty judging accurately what is true and what is false.

It’s not just that Trump is “their” president, so they want to defend him. Conservatives’ greater acceptance of hierarchy and trust in authority may lead to greater faith that what the president says must be true, even when the “facts” would seem to indicate otherwise. The New York Times cataloged no less than 117 clearly false statements proclaimed publicly by Trump in the first six months of his presidency, with no evident loss in his supporters’ faith in him. In the same way, greater faith in the legitimacy of the decisions of corporate CEOs may strengthen the tendency to deny evidence that there are any potential benefits from regulation of industry.

Similarly, greater valuation of stability, greater sensitivity to the possibility of danger, and greater difficulty tolerating difference and change lead to greater anxiety about social change and so support greater credulity with respect to lurid tales of the dangers posed by immigrants. And higher levels of repression and greater adherence to tradition and traditional sources of moral judgment increase the credibility of claims that gay marriage is a threat to the “traditional” family.

Conservatives are also less introspective, less attentive to their inner feelings, and less likely to override their “gut” reactions and engage in further reflection to find a correct answer. As a result, they may be more likely to rely on error-prone cognitive shortcuts, less aware of their own unconscious biases, and less likely to respond to factual corrections to previously held beliefs.

The differences in how conservatives and liberals process information are augmented by an asymmetry in group psychological processes. Yes, we all seek to keep our social environment stable and predictable. Beliefs that might threaten relationships with family, neighbors, and friends (e.g., for a fundamentalist evangelical to believe that humans are the result of Darwinian evolution or for a coal miner to believe that climate change is real and human-made) must be ignored or denied, at peril of disrupting the relationships. But among all Americans, the intensity of social networks has declined in recent years. Church attendance and union membership, participation in community organizations, and direct political involvement have flagged. Conservatives come disproportionately from rural areas and small towns, where social networks remain smaller, but denser and more homogeneous than in the big cities that liberals dominate. As a result, the opinions of family, friends, and community may be more potent in conservative hotbeds than in the more anonymous big cities where Democrats dominate.

The lack of shared reality between left and right in America today has contributed greatly to our current political polarization. Despite occasional left forays into reality denial, conservatives are far more likely to accept misinformation and outright lies. Deliberate campaigns of misinformation and conservative preferences for information that fits in with their pre-existing ideology provide only a partial explanation. Faulty reasoning and judgment, rooted in the interactions between modes of reasoning and judgment shared by all with the specific personality patterns found disproportionately among conservatives may also play a central role.

[ekauqodielak]

Acosta Is Gone As Trump Retreats Again

 

Labor Secretary Alex Acosta in 2018 in Washington. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

Secretary of Labor Alexander Acosta and President Trump bowed to reality, the reality that retaining the man who cut a secret plea deal with a “monster” (as Republicans described him) sex offender was untenable. Acosta, as many anticipated after his heartless, soulless and entirely disingenuous news conference, stepped down Friday (or was pushed out).

This is a frequent pattern for Trump: A scandal-plagued Cabinet member or White House staffer comes under fire (e.g. Tom Price, Scott Pruitt, Ryan Zinke, Rob Porter). Trump insists the real victim is the accused, who is a “great guy” and doing “a great job.” Republicans mumble, fidget and insist there is nothing to see here, while Democrats lace into the malefactor and Trump. Democrats stress the spinelessness of Republicans who enable a president whose natural affinity is with those accused of corruption, self-dealing and abusive conduct. Trump blames the press, insisting the coverage is “fake news.” Then Trump dumps the guy, leaving the Republicans who insisted there was never any problem looking like spineless sycophants. Rinse, repeat.

Alexander Acosta resigned as labor secretary on July 12, saying he didn't think it was "fair" for Trump's Labor Department to "have Epstein as the focus." 

In this case, the retreat comes the day after an even more humiliating walk-back on the attempt to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census, which crushed the dreams of right-wing activists who actually believed Trump could jigger the census in Republicans’ favor.

“Top figures in the conservative legal community are stunned and depressed by President Trump’s cave in his fight for a citizenship question on the 2020 Census,” Axios reported. “Sources say Leonard Leo and other Federalist Society stalwarts were shocked and floored by how weak the decision was. ‘What was the dance … all about if this was going to be the end result?’ a conservative leader asked.” Imagine being so gullible as to think the president believes in any principle and so intellectually blinded as to think Trump’s outrageous positions are going to past muster. If conservatives are still shocked when Trump betrays them and kicks their heroes to the curb, they must not have been paying attention — or, more likely, must be so intellectually and morally corrupted that they can no longer tell what is going to pass muster outside the Trump cult.

Meanwhile, the right-wing state media over at Fox News, which initially ran to the defense of whomever Trump was defending, is left with two options: ignore the results or whine about the big, bad media that apparently has more power over Trump than his defenders do.

Both Acosta and the census issue suggest the merits are rarely at issue with Trump. He’s generally motivated by two things: inherent sympathy for men accused of mistreating women or other vulnerable people (make your own psychological evaluation) and the desire to inflame his base. The latter is achieved by appealing to their sense that women are aggressors, out to destroy the lives of men (especially white men), and that they are all victims of media elites who insist that men be held accountable for their conduct.

Trump is the most powerful man on the planet, a billionaire (we are told) or at least millionaire and head of a major national party. He’s tough, a winner, a dealmaker — and weirdly is always a victim like his poor bedraggled advisers. Trump is both the perpetual victor and victim, which for any rational person would be ludicrous. Alas, we left rationality behind a long time ago.

All of the wailing and rending of garments on the right, however, should not obscure the truth in these incidents: When Trump and his accomplices’ base mendacity is laid bare, the American people (even some of his supporters) cannot stomach it. The lesson therefore is simple: Expose, accuse, hammer and demand accountability. It doesn’t always work, but it does now and then. When it does, truth, decency and our democratic system are vindicated.

[lucy]

Aug 24, 2019 14:16:52 GMT -5 lucy said:

http://instagr.am/p/B1eLMimnZQt

I've got my feet in the clouds, got my head (hands)  on the ground

www.doyouyoga.com/the-holistic-benefits-of-yoga-handstand-51172/

gnosticwarrior.com/inverted-pentagram.html

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en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baphomet


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😎

[ekauqodielak]

The Federal Election Commission Is About to Partially Shut Down

As of September, the government’s election watchdog won’t be watching.

AP Photo/Timothy D. Easley

For years, the Federal Election Commission has been barely functional. But at the end of this month—as the 2020 campaign heats up and unprecedented amounts of money flow to candidates for national office—much of the agency’s work will shut down entirely. There will be no new fundraising rules, no punishments for rule-breakers, no decisions about the outcomes of investigations, no advisory opinions issued to candidates who want to know if a specific campaign finance practice is illegal.

That’s because in order to do any of that, the FEC needs a quorum of four of the six members that, by law, make up the commission. As of September, three of those positions will be vacant. Two seats have been unoccupied for months (since 2017 and 2018, respectively). On Monday morning, one of the remaining Republican commissioners announced his resignation as of the end of the month. There’s little indication that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) will move the fill the empty seats anytime soon.

The lights at FEC headquarters won’t literally go out—campaigns and political committees will still have to file fundraising reports, and the commission’s staff will still post that information information online. But the commission’s leadership will be unable to take any formal actions. New rules will be frozen. Campaigns and political committees will be unable to get advice from commissioners on how to apply rules. And much of the FEC’s oversight activity will grind to a halt. When commission staff conduct investigations of possible violations, it requires votes from the commissioners for any action to be taken on the outcome of those investigations. Similarly, for fines to be imposed on rule breakers, it requires a vote.

Monday’s resignation of Republican commissioner Matthew Petersen leaves one Democrat, one Republican and one independent commissioner. And the timing couldn’t be worse: The 2020 election is predicted to be the most expensive election in history, and a raft of unresolved questions are facing the FEC when it comes to how to enforce rules to keep foreign influence out of American democracy. Rick Hasen, a prominent election law and campaign finance attorney and professor at the University of California-Irvine, said that without a quorum, any chance of the FEC being able to respond to the threat of outside interference is gone.

“With foreign governments and others potentially looking to interfere in the 2020 elections, it is essential we have a working FEC with a full complement of commissioners,” Hasen said. “Even if the Democrats and Republicans on the commissioners would deadlock on ordinary enforcement matters, there is at least a chance they could come together in an emergency to help ensure the integrity of the 2020 campaign.”

At the most recent FEC meeting last week, commissioners punted—for the fourth meeting in a row—on the question of how to attach the same kind of disclosures that appear in television political ads to digital political ads. The commission’s lone remaining Democrat, Ellen Weintraub pressed the other three members to address the issue and complained that she hadn’t been able to get any response from Petersen’s staff.

“I can’t say that I have anything new,” Petersen told Weintraub. “I don’t have a lot to add other than that this particular time I have not been able to develop the formulation I think will bring us to consensus. I wish I had more to say but that is about the extent of it right now.”

Any further discussion on how to increase the transparency of internet ads—on which campaigns are expected to spend as much as $1.2 billion this cycle—was tabled. Thanks to Petersen’s resignation, the tabling will continue for the foreseeable future. Commission members are appointed by the president, and although Trump has made one nomination to the commission since his inauguration, the Senate has not scheduled any confirmation hearings.

Weintraub released a statement Monday afternoon attempting to put an upbeat spin on the news that the commission no longer has a quorum. The agency will continue to take complaints and investigate them, she noted, even if no official action can be taken on the results of those investigations. And, the continued collection of campaign finance reports will still allow the public to monitor money flowing into races.

“I will continue to remain vigilant to all threats to the integrity of our elections—and Americans’ faith in them,” Weintraub said. “But we do need to have a functioning quorum on this Commission.”

[ekauqodielak]

The President Spent the G-7 Summit Retweeting Conspiracy Theories

Donald Trump at the G-7 summit in Biarritz, France, on Sunday.

Jeff J. Mitchell—Pool/Getty Images

Over the weekend and on Monday, President Donald Trump was in France for the G-7 summit, at which he was supposed to be doing things such as keeping the world economy from crashing and going to meetings about subjects like climate change.

Mostly, though, the president appeared to be self-soothing online. In one four-hour stretch on Sunday, Trump did nine consecutive reposts of tweets from the right-wing group Judicial Watch, in reverse chronological order, as if he were working his way through the feed to make himself feel better. The topics he shared included a conspiracy theory about Rep. Ilhan Omar’s personal life and various paranoid claims about the deep state, one of which featured a video involving, yes, Hillary Clinton’s emails.

What about summit business? On the economic front, Trump told reporters that his aides had been in touch with representatives of the Chinese government about working out a trade deal after the market-assaulting Friday tweet meltdown in which he’d spontaneously announced new tariffs and demanded that U.S. companies stop doing business in the country. According to the Associated Press, the president specifically said that his trade negotiation team had conducted two “very good calls” with the Chinese on Sunday. China, however, had a different take:

So that’s going well. As for climate change, Trump not only missed the meeting but didn’t even know he had missed it. The Guardian:

Trump was later asked by reporters covering a meeting with the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, whether he had attended the climate session. He replied: “We’re having it in a little while.” He did not appear to hear when a reporter told him it had just taken place.

On the ball. Good.

Meanwhile, his Twitter feed testifies to what the president has been paying attention to in France. The Judicial Watch fixation was part of a Sunday/Monday spree—again, while he was supposed to be at a series of huge meetings—during which he posted or retweeted others’ posts 46 times. Some of these were pro forma PR messages that were probably put up by his staff, but others were vintage The President Is Mad at the Television material, like this zombie complaint about how well the press treated Clinton in 2016, this denial of the very plausible Axios report that he wants to drop a nuclear bomb on a hurricane, and this Obviously Fabricated Anecdote:

Yeah, that sounds like something Shinzo Abe would say.

[ekauqodielak]

Trump is lobbying hard to bring Russia back to the G8

And he's trying to blame Obama for Russia's annexation of Crimea.

(Photo credit: Michael Kappeler/picture alliance via Getty Images)

President Donald Trump on Monday doubled down on his effort to bring Russia back into the G7.

Speaking from the annual G7 summit in Biarritz, France, Trump said he supported Russia’s return to what was previously the G8, even though many other members of the group were critical of the idea. Russia itself has also said it does not want to return.

Trump had apparently been lobbying to bring Russia back throughout the weekend, leading to what The Guardian reported were “heated exchanges” with other world leaders. Only outgoing Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte supported his idea.

Russia was suspended from the group five years ago for annexing Crimea from the Ukraine, a situation that has not yet been resolved. Most of the other leaders condition Russia’s return on its agreement to implement the Minsk-2 agreements and restore control of the Donbass region to Ukraine.

During a press conference Monday, however, Trump continued to claim that the annexation — and Russia’s subsequent removal from the G8 — was all somehow President Barack Obama’s fault.

“President Obama was not happy this happened because it was embarrassing to him,” Trump claimed. “Right? [The annexation of Crimea] was very embarrassing to him, and he wanted Russia to be out of what was called the G8. That was his determination. He was outsmarted by Putin. President Putin outsmarted President Obama.”

Even after a reporter confronted Trump on that lie, stating that Russia’s expulsion had been the result of its own actions and was agreed upon by the remaining G7, the president doubled down. “President Obama was helping Ukraine. Crimea was annexed during his term,” Trump insisted. “It could’ve been stopped with the right — whatever.”

Later, another reporter pressed Trump on the fact that Russia had indicated just a few hours earlier that it didn’t want to return to the economic group. His reaction was to simply assert that the country would come back if invited.

“I know one thing. If they were invited back, they would be there and if not, that’s okay too,” Trump said.

The president described Russia as an asset and suggested that “it would be easier if they were in the room” during multilateral discussions.

Trump’s pleas on Russia’ behalf, which first began at last year’s summit, serve to assist both himself and and Russia. As The Moscow Times’ Vladimir Frolov noted, the charade actually distracts from Trump’s performance at the summit, which according to most reports was erratic.

But the gesture also helps Russia. The more Trump haggles over what it would take to bring Russia back, the lower the expectations will be regarding Russia’s handling of the situation in the Ukraine. And Putin will not be giving up Crimea under any circumstances.

“For Russia…what really counts is the ‘talk about reinstating Russia to the G7, not the actual re-entry to the club,” Frolov wrote. “This discussion benefits Moscow as it eliminates the stigma of denial and isolation from the west caused by Russia’s actions in Ukraine in 2014. It also increases Western pressure on Ukraine to accept Russia’s conditions and creates leverage for Moscow on a host of other issues.”

[Jai Guru Deva]

Aug 24, 2019 14:16:52 GMT -5 lucy said:

http://instagr.am/p/B1eLMimnZQt

I've got my feet in the clouds, got my head (hands)  on the ground

www.doyouyoga.com/the-holistic-benefits-of-yoga-handstand-51172/

gnosticwarrior.com/inverted-pentagram.html

lol
🧘‍♀️

I see 6 toes on each foot! How many do you see? 😉

[B]

[Jai Guru Deva]

Aug 26, 2019 20:59:51 GMT -5 B said:

Good luck with that one, America starts her downfall now. Trump's time in office will be cut short. Things are going to change. Life as we know it will never be the same. Repent for the Day of the Lord is at hand!

[B]

Pink Floyd HD Run Like Hell 1994 Concert Earls Court London
www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dB6MQlFLu8



You better make your face up in your favourite disguise
With your button down lips and your roller blind eyes
With your empty smile and your hungry heart
Feel the bile rising from your guilty past
With your nerves in tatters as the cockleshell shatters
And the hammers batter down your door
You better run

And as we wind on down the road
Our shadows taller than our soul
There walks a lady we all know
Who shines white light and wants to show
How everything still turns to gold
And if you listen very hard
The tune will come to you at last
When all are one and one is all
To be a rock and not to roll

[michelle]

Aug 26, 2019 23:14:24 GMT -5 B said:

Pink Floyd HD Run Like Hell 1994 Concert Earls Court London
www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dB6MQlFLu8



You better make your face up in your favourite disguise
With your button down lips and your roller blind eyes
With your empty smile and your hungry heart
Feel the bile rising from your guilty past
With your nerves in tatters as the cockleshell shatters
And the hammers batter down your door
You better run

And as we wind on down the road
Our shadows taller than our soul
There walks a lady we all know
Who shines white light and wants to show
How everything still turns to gold
And if you listen very hard
The tune will come to you at last
When all are one and one is all
To be a rock and not to roll

Looks like 'cult of the Sun', our Sun has exploded and we have to run for Orion or Sirius. We had Drunvalo teacher who
was advocating this idea.

[IWILL]

Aug 26, 2019 20:57:18 GMT -5 Jai Guru Deva said:

Aug 24, 2019 14:16:52 GMT -5 lucy said:

http://instagr.am/p/B1eLMimnZQt

I've got my feet in the clouds, got my head (hands)  on the ground

www.doyouyoga.com/the-holistic-benefits-of-yoga-handstand-51172/

gnosticwarrior.com/inverted-pentagram.html

lol
🧘‍♀️

I see 6 toes on each foot! How many do you see? 😉

55

lol
😎

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baphomet

What properly was the sign of the Baffomet, 'figura Baffometi,' which was depicted on the breast of the bust representing the Creator, cannot be exactly determined ... I believe it to have been the Pythagorean pentagon (Fünfeck) of health and prosperity: ... It is well known how holy this figure was considered, and that the Gnostics had much in common with the Pythagoreans. From the prayers which the soul shall recite, according to the diagram of the Ophite-worshippers, when they on their return to God are stopped by the Archons, and their purity has to be examined, it appears that these serpent-worshippers believed they must produce a token that they had been clean on earth. I believe that this token was also the holy pentagon, the sign of their initiation (τελειας βαφης μετεος).

[iameye]

Happy Labor Day weekend!


keep it holy!

lol
😎

www.abarim-publications.com/Meaning/Sabaoth.html